Hype Waltz
Editors/Co-Authors:
Jed R
Wait here please
Don't tell me things are under control please
When I know you know what it is that awaits me
And I know you know what it's gonna do to me
Fuck you start talkingI thought about
Thinking of the truth
Then I got a little angry and I chipped a tooth
perhaps if I brushed my mind more often
Then it wouldn't get darker and it wouldn't soften
Biting Elbows, Hype Waltz
“You know… I was really getting used to the quiet life.”
Vash The Stampede, Trigun.
Subjects Johnny C Philip Heald and Fiddlesticks Apple, a New Hampshire native and Apple Family member. Both were present at the Alaska Incident. Investigations still underway.
Interviewer: “Hello again.”
Johnny C: “It’s nice to see you again. Glad it’s under better circumstances.”
Fiddlesticks: “You darn right! No totem-proles, no newfoals, just free coffee and an interview. Ah, so very relaxin’...”
Interviewer: “Well, thank you, Fiddlesticks. Sorry for blowing off your interview. There was an emergency with, uh… a certain crystal pony’s psychologist. Sort of.”
Fiddlesticks: “Oh! Is ae doing alright?”
Interviewer: “At this point, I’m more worried about aer psychologist. But ae’s doing well.
Johnny C and Fiddlesticks breathe sighs of relief
Fiddlesticks: “Poor Chalcedony. Been through too much, that one.”
Johnny C: “Honestly, I feel more sorry for aer. What with being-”
Interviewer: “Look, we all know about that. Now, I understand you two were with Yael two weeks ago. During the HLF purge. You were also present for the attack on Defiance.”
Johnny C: “Yessir. Nice family outing with my cuz. Cept for the Battle of Montreal."
Fiddlesticks: “Absofrigginlutely. If not for Kraber, if not for...”
Interviewer: “It was a horrible time. I also understand that you were part of a team which, counting Kraber, are responsible for most of our breakthroughs on totem-proles. Twice over. And might I congratulate you on the Alaska Incident? Thank you so much again for the… item… that you retrieved from Alaska.”
Johnny C “You mean the totem prole?”
Interviewer: “Certainly, but I also mean the other one. Object E12-18-1”
Fiddlesticks: “Shame, too, that thing was really warm.”
Interviewer: “It certainly is. It’ll be very useful, I promise.”
Fiddlesticks: “Can’t rightly imagine how. It was nothin’. Jest doin’ a job for an ol’ friend.”
Johnny C: “Well, much as getting an Ulfberht then a Leshiy, killing newfoals, and resurrecting a steam engine is just a job. Hell, I just did what I was asked. Even gave the Ulfberht over to Simo.”
Interviewer: “You used a sword?!”
Johnny C: “I prefer hatchets and trench knives. No, an Ulfberht is a .338 rifle. Damn good gun in the wilds, especially with a Trackingpoint scope, but I like the Leshiy more.”
Interviewer: “I see. There is a project I have in mind, however, and I need your input.”
Fiddlesticks: “Ah ain’t a scientist, doubt I could help that much. You should prob’ly ask Heliotrope ‘r somepony like that. Tartarus, Ah’m a fiddler, hunter and… a-gri-cul-tural con-sul-tant. Not a tech expert.”
Johnny C: “I can’t even use a DVD player.”
Fiddlesticks: “But then, Ah can’t either. How do y’all use so many tiny buttons! The ones on that touchscreen’re smaller ‘n you’re finger!”
Johnny C: “Lots of trial and error. And, uh… a flip phone might be better.”
Fiddlesticks: “Could be. Ah do have good dexterity thanks t’the fiddlin’...”
Interviewer: “Do you two have any attention span at all?”
Johnny C: “I get bored easily.”
Fiddlesticks: “What he said.”
Interviewer: “Please. For a minute. I just need to understand your experience. And I’ll take your advice about seeing Heliotrope.”
Fiddlesticks: “Mind if Ah ask what this is fer?”
Interviewer: “A project I have planned for Barrierfall.”
Johnny C: “Could this project… stop it? Make sure we’re at least less fucked? Let me keep my life, or what’s left of it? Or left of everyone else’s?”
Interviewer: “Probably.”
Fiddlesticks: “Then we can help. What is this about?”
Interviewer: “There’s two things I need to know. First… I need you explain what happened to Spurred Weld. Second, I need you to explain Gestalt and the Hotline. I need to know the capabilities of totem-proles as best I can,”
(Fiddlesticks and Johnny C look at each other.)
Fiddlesticks: “That’s a hell of a story. But alright - see, Spurred Weld had a devil of a time keepin’ th’ train t’gether. We’d been going hours, th’ train kept juddering.”
Johnny C: “Hope I never have to see a unicorn keep a train together and steaming on green wood again.”
Fiddlesticks: “Hell of a thing!”
Johnny C: “Thanks for the mocha, by the way. You make damned good pick-me-ups.”
Fiddlesticks: “Thanks!”
Johnny C: “Good thing I had the night vision scope…”
Interviewer: “Oh God dammit!”
Johnny C: “Right. We’d decided to rest, and I was keeping watch on top of the old boxcar we’d taken to house the totem-prole, but there were still ponified miners, workers, and royal guard on our tail. Probably following the track. We’d gotten onto trackage that was actually maintained, and we were heading for civilization. Amaruq had a GPS out, and was radioing the railroad, saying we were on the tracks-”
Fiddlesticks: “Got so many weird looks when we came into the station. Ah mean, here’s that train station in the middle of Alaska, when suddenly, we all rush outta boxcar, and we start trying to call the nearest PHL, Amaruq has that 10-gauge out while he’s guarding the boxcar, Vera has her Leshiy aimed at one guy with the HLF jacket-”
Interviewer: “Vera? You mean Lov-”
Fiddlesticks: “Vera Low. There’s a steam locomotive taking up one platform right in front a diesel loco and people are missing the train, and you, Nny, y’ were practically screaming bloody murder into a cell phone…”
Johnny C: “What a clusterfuck. We… lost some friends that day. Still, hard not to smile - glad we both got through it.”
Interviewer: “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
Fiddlesticks: “Just saying. It looked weird to everyone else in Alaska. Sandalwood took over the train, by the way… she was kinda busy.”
Johnny C “Anyway, Spurred Weld got a well-needed break, he’s sleeping in the boxcar under some blankets that we found, when suddenly, he starts screaming.”
Fiddlesticks: “Yeah. He’s swatting at his body, ramming his skull into th’ floor of the traincar, screamin’ ‘Get it off! GET IT OFF!’ So I dumped snow on his balls.”
Interviewer: “Why would you do this?”
Fiddlesticks: “You’d snap out of a psychotic break if you got snow on your balls, wouldn’t ya?”
Interviewer: “...I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Fiddlesticks: “Anyway, somethin’ bout the totem-prole got in his skull when he was sleepin’. Said he felt like he was bein’ eaten by crystal-”
Interviewer: “I see. He managed to… connect to the network somehow?”
Fiddlesticks: “If ya want t’put it that way… suppose so, yes.”
Johnny C: “Wait, son of a bitch! Don’t you remember that recording that sounded like a man getting messily disembowelled by an animatronic bear?!”
Fiddlesticks: “That one sounded more like an animatronic rabbit to me.”
Interviewer: “What are you two on about? How can you even-”
Johnny C: “Now that you mention it, Fiddly, it did sound more like a rabbit. Or a purple sociopath…”
Fiddlesticks: “Purple socio… SON OF A FUCKIN WHORE! Weld musta been remembering somepony else’s memories! That sound! Those things we saw on the Fillydelphia!”
Johnny C: “...Oh dear God in heaven.”
TAPE CORRUPTED
Kraber Francis
Kraber lay on the corrugated metal roof of Aegis’ house, staring through a pair of binoculars awkwardly trying to avoid the metallic arms (was that the word?) that would affix them to a harness on the massive stallion’s barrel.
He could see the vehicles - they were all so poorly maintained that they were no doubt HLF. Thrown together awkwardly with spare parts, with guns and spikes protruding from their frames. Graffiti, vaguely tribal slogans in various languages.
They looked to be heading straight towards Littleton’s main street.
“Fok,” he said, surprised at the quiet in his own voice. ‘They found me.’
He considered that, and shrugged. No, probably not - they were heading away from the Neighborhood. That wouldn’t make sense.
‘But what if they do find me?’
Well, whatever happened, it couldn’t end well. The HLF didn’t have much patience for defectors, or anyone that tried to stop them from… from whatever they had planned.
And suddenly Kraber was somewhere very much like here. A town in in the West, not too far from Reavers. He’d been with some Menschabwehrfraktion detachment along with Lovikov and Helmetag - old Helmetag, the man who used to run them.
They’d been hokken fonger. The old saying was that an army traveled on its stomach, and they simply couldn’t move on it. So they’d moved into a dorpie essentially taken over by HLF and far enough from anything major that it could simply fall off the map one day and nobody would notice. Really, the town that seemed to mostly coast by on inertia. He remembered the way the civvies had just scuttled across streets as gun barrels tracked them. The way one of them had been shot for, to put it lightly, stupid fokkin’ kak.
He couldn’t remember what it was, but they could’ve been shot for anything. Nobody had batted an eye. He hadn’t, either.
Kraber wished he could say that he’d left because of that. Instead, he’d just gotten bored and wandered off, then convinced the Reavers to employ him.
‘Why do I keep doing the right thing for the worst fokkin’ reasons?’ he wondered.
He also remembered the look of terror on that person’s face before the shotgun’s barrel came up to their eye, and finally understood.
‘So here’s why he was afraid the way he was,’ Kraber thought. ‘Here’s some people acting like they’re fokkin’ obligated your gratitude, like they-
He froze.
Somebody was up there.
‘I fokkin’ knew it.
Through his scope, he could see a man in odd armor, staring down the oddly advanced scope of a bolt-action rifle. It looked like a Mauser.
‘They’re on to me!
Wait. No. That was a Reaver, he was sure of it. Some guy with… with… fok it, he couldn’t remember who. And furthermore, the Reaver wasn’t aiming at him - he was staring down at the HLF. Kraber just happened to be in his scope’s field of vision.
‘So a Reaver, a sociopath, and a bunch of HLF walk into a town full of ponies…’
It was like a lightbulb went off in his head, and like he knew gravity pushed down, Aegis was the best stallion he’d ever known, and water was wet, he knew that this would not end well.
‘This is so going to get ugly.’
So, flashing the Reaver a quick middle finger, he crawled off the roof, swinging himself through an open window.
???
Kraber saw him.
The rugged HLF man stared down at the movement below, at Kraber flipping him off and clambering into the building’s windows.
Still staring down the scope, he thumbed out a text to Preston: ‘Drop what you're doing and head for Littleton. Either these people have developed consciences or they're going to massively fuck up.”
“You know other HLF say this is why they don't trust us?”
“You know I headbutted the last person who said that?”
“Point.”
Whatever these HLF were doing, the sniper had heard that it seemed genuine. That Asa Bowen really did want out.
Anyway. Yarrow had, for some reason, trusted them. But then, Yarrow was a bit desperate for other HLF to trust nowadays. They hadn't heard from Kevin in weeks, or from any of the other old hands they'd pulled together on the Purity.
“What’s going on?” the sniper asked, peering through his L5 Photonics scope, down at the men and women crowding around this little neighborhood. In fact, crowding most of the town.
“I have friends in the Sons of Macha and Menschabwehrfraktion who says that a huge detachment just up and left them. Keep an eye on them, I don't trust them.”
“Roger.”
Yarrow’s distrust had needed no explanation.
What separated the Reavers from HLF like those three was that the Reavers were full aware they’d ‘elected’ a lunatic to head their operation, and that Yarrow actually had a conscience. Too many HLF, it seemed, considered cruelty a leadership quality.
“Dear Whoever’s Listening,” the sniper whispered. “Let this not get fucked up.”
His prayer would not be answered.
Aegis
“What’s it look like?” Aegis finally asked.
Kraber Francis looked deep in thought, stroking the awkward, uneven stubble of his chin.
“Are they outside?!” Amber Maple whisper-whimpered, backing away behind the great white furry bulk of her father. Rivet hadn’t moved, but he was shaking.
“No,” Francis said. “They’re in main street. But there’s a sniper watching them, and…” he looked down, and there was an indescribable look on his face. Equal parts fear, regret, and anger. “Look. This is going to get ugly. I don’t care how legitimate someone sounds, or if the Reavers pour out of boltholes and intimidate these bastards into submission, this. Will not. End well.”
“Can we take th-” Rivet started.
“Hide somewhere,” Francis interrupted. “Rivet, don’t provoke these people.”
There was a flash of anger on Rivet’s face, and Aegis found himself worried about his son. More than usual, anyway.
“But that’s-” he started.
“Our presence provokes these people,” Amber Maple said simply.
Aegis nodded. ‘That’s exactly right.’
“Aweh,” Francis said, and the odd hints of that absolutely-not-scottsh accent surfaced once more. “Move wrong, breathe wrong, look at them wrong, don’t look at them wrong enough…”
‘There’s something ragged in his voice. Something manic,’ Aegis thought. ‘He’s…’
And suddenly he knew.
‘He’s done this before.’
“I can’t be any more specific. But I pissed the HLF off. I left them during a… delicate time,” Francis said carefully. “Okay, it wasn’t delicate. It was exploding all around us and I wanted to be somewhere else, and as far as anyone knows, I stole a boatload of guns and left people to die. So I’m going to continue being somewhere else. Do you have a panic room somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Aegis said. “Sixstring and I dug a basement just in case.”
Francis blinked. “You never told me about that.”
“Yeah, well,” Aegis said, “I’ve got…. I have some trust issues. With my wife, and...”
He fell silent. Whatever had happened, he obviously didn’t want to talk about it.
“Daaaad,” Amber hissed.
“But Francis is-” Rivet started.
To his surprise, Francis laughed. A smile on his face. “That’s perfectly understandable. I don’t trust me either. Now if anyone asks, I was never here. You’re a single father alone with his ki… with his foals, and that mattress is for Nny.”
He opened a window and crawled through. Something about it looked, to Aegis, almost… predatory. Like one of those wild canines from africa. With the huge, wide, alert ears, and long, thin, lanky legs.
“Goodbye,” he said. “It was a good run, but I have to leave. I’m sorry for everything, but… thanks.”
It couldn’t be, Aegis thought. Something’s not right about him…
Kraber
He was heading into town. He’d kept an eye on timetables, and while he wasn’t exactly sure when a train would come through, he knew one would have to soon. There were plenty of trees lining the streets, enough to obscure him wherever he went.
He was heading down towards town, now. The lights weren’t on, which made this more easy than the times he’d had to sneak through Boston at midnight.
Thank you Lord. he thought, giving a silent prayer for the mere existence of electricity rationing.
It looked like this place had been quiet, once. Residential. The kind of place where people could have quiet lives between tourism seasons.
Not so much, anymore.
Kraber peered out between the trees just outside of a church. Staying in the shadows, he crept down, down towards the river in the middle of the valley. He was about to head down towards main street when-
Someone was ahead of him. The rusty, coppery pipe gun in their hands glinted in the moonlight.
Of fokkin’ course.
The stranger was in the standard HLF uniform. A bastardized hazmat suit, armor with spikes placed on shoulder armor and kneepads.
‘I’m being watched,’ he thought. ‘They’re all here with m-
For a second, he smirked.
They weren’t watching Francis Kraber. He was there. Watching them.
‘Maybe I can kill them,’ he thought. He did have a silenced suppressed pistol.
Then he considered this. The sound, the bloodstains, the question of what to do with the body. No, that wasn’t fokkin’ well worth it.
Still, though. Main street below was crawling with HLF. None of whom looked like they were exactly paragons of sanity or reasonable reactions to-
December 25th, 2022
”Really,” Verity says.
“Ja, and that’s fokkin’ well coming from me,” Kraber answers.
Anyway.
He needed some fokkin’ way around them. It wasn’t like he could just cross the street in plain view...
Aegis
“Into the basement,” Aegis said. He’d strapped on his assault saddle, and was covering the door as his two foals clambered down the stairs. “Now.”
“But dad-” Rivet protested.
‘I really wish we made this thing only accessible to ponies,’ Aegis thought.
“Look, Hauser, Orzala, and Blackpowder live nearby,” Rivet was pleading. “If I can get my assault saddle, maybe I can-”
Aegis stared down at him.
“Amber has one, I can’t-”
“Rivet,” Aegis said. He was not asking. He was not commanding. He was not pleading. “Now.”
Rivet headed downstairs wordlessly.
‘Good’ Aegis thought, and followed them down after closing the door and enveloping the three of them in darkness.
‘Darkness’ might have been underselling it. There weren’t any lights, weren’t any comforts other than a few mats off to the side, and there were no windows. Just a dark room buried under a shipping container. A couple square feet of blackness.
Thankfully, Aegis had night vision goggles. So, crisis sort of averted.
He picked up a walkie-talkie in his mouth, pressing one of the buttons, and pressed it to one ear with a foreleg.
“Nny? Fiddlesticks?” he asked. “How’s it looking out there? Where are you guys?”
Nny’s voice crackled to life over the walkie-talkie. “In the shit, up to here?”
“And?”
“And I told you.”
Fiddlesticks sighed. “We’re over by the baseball diamond. Hiding on one side of a roof.
“How did you-” Rivet started, eagerly. Aegis just put a hoof to his son’s mouth. He looked over to Amber - she looked to be quivering, curling up into a ball in the corner.
She was shaking.
“An excellent question,” Fiddlesticks said. “Serious though, it looks like they… they’re over by the radio station. Looks like they’re setting up broadcast equipment.”
“Huh,” Aegis said. “Of all the things I expected, this was not it.”
“They’re still a lot of men and women with big trucks and guns,” Nny pointed out. “Either way, I’m keeping an eye out.”
“Right,” Aegis said, nodding and clicking off the walkie-talkie. With that out of the way, he walked to the corner where Amber was sitting and held both foals in his huge forelegs.
“Are we going to be okay?” Amber asked.
‘She’s just as afraid as Rivet,’ Aegis thought. ‘Merciful Faust. I hope I did the right thing…’
“Don’t worry,” he said, squeezing them a bit tighter than was necessary. “We’re going to be fine.”
Kraber
Kraber crossed the street in plain view.
Calmly. Purposefully. It was amazing how far that could get him. It was how he’d ended up joining the Reavers. It was how disguising himself as Ivan Bliss had worked. It was how he’d gotten through Portland.
Of course, the fact that there was a large crowd of curious onlookers, assorted rubberneckers, and the sort of people who gawked at crime scenes helped as well. In the midst to all those people, he was just… unimportant.
It was by the time he was on Green Street, in plain view of the covered bridge across the Ammonoosuc River, that the thought occurred.
Voetsek?
What the hell. Why not? It was what he always did. And the Neighborhood would be, as a whole, of better off without him. Find out you got your wife pregnant when she was underage? Disappear into Boston’s night life, ignore classes for a bit. Afraid of balancing life with his job? Throw himself into his job so his family could at least have something like a life. Family got ponified? Leave the realm of the sane, ignore your morals, start killin’ kontgesigs! Can’t deal with the HLF anymore? Leave in the middle of a battle!
‘It is amazing that I haven’t thought more about this glaring character flaw,’ Kraber thought as he made his way through the parking lot.
The covered bridge walkway was just ahead. There’d be a train soon. As for the stuff he buried? Aegis and his foals would probably find it. Probably.
Kraber was not fokkin’ dof. He was aware that his disguise couldn’t last. That there were dark and siff things around New England. That there were plots and strategems just out of notice. Whatever Lovikov was doing with the ‘Hotline’. The rumors - hell, the actual fokkin’ confirmation - of Shieldwall’s presence. Gestalt’s transmissions.
December 25, 2022
”It’s weird to scheme about it,” Kraber says. “But for most of the time I spent in Littleton, I didn’t have any involvement with this kak.”
“Wait, seriously?” Vinyl asks. “But… this is kind of your story. That’s how you explained it to us.”
“And that’s why we’re here,” Heliotrope says. “While Gestalt was doing… uh… Gestalt things-”
Aegis just shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Okay. Long story short, he spent most of the time trying to keep his head down. I don’t know if he totally understood what was happening until-”
“About a week later,” Kraber interrupts.
Aegis blanches. Which is impressive cause he already has paper-colored fur. “...oh.”
“Ja,” Kraber says, looking downcast. He’s silent for a moment. Then: “I… wanted to keep my kop down. And I was happy with that.”
“While also killing a huge amount of PER, recording an ad that would work in Welcome To Night Vale, and trying to make friends with an entire neighborhood,” Yael says, rolling her eyes.
“I didn’t say I was fundi at it,” Kraber says. “Hey. Wait. You luister to Night Vale?”
“With Nny being… Nny… it was kind of unavoidable,” Yael says.
“Aweh. Anyway,” Kraber says. “It’s hard not to lag when I think about it, but… I didn’t know kak. I didn’t have any evidence, but I felt like it was all connected.”
“It was,” Yael says.
“And whatever the fok happened,” Kraber continues. “I wanted to voetsek. Before it got any more befok. “
“Oh no, the slang,” Vinyl groans. “It’s back! With a vengeance!”
“I’ve been talking in Scots accent for too long, this is fokkin’ kwaai!” Kraber crows. “I’d figured it was for the best that I left. I was scheming...” He pauses to think. “I don’t fokkin’ know where I’d end up. Maybe Boston, hopefully as far away as possible.”
“But you didn’t,” Aegis says.
And you think on that. No, he totally didn’t.
Aegis
Aegis could hear it all in that dark night, as he cringed deep in the recesses of the house. The place actually did have a basement. A hidey-hole under the stairs. But for some reason…
Something hadn’t made him feel right letting Francis know. For all his good qualities, something was wrong with Francis. Something… under him. Like a black oil slick, threatening to ooze out from underneath.
But he kept it under lock and key. Still, for all he’d proved himself, Aegis felt he had the right to a secret or three.
“-Things are dangerous out here,” Aegis could hear someone calling. Loud. Assertive. It was crackling over the radio upstairs, from down in town over what was almost certainly a set of speakers.
The voice of someone who wasn’t just used to being obeyed, the voice of someone who took it as an absolute certainty.
Not unlike Shieldwall, actually.
Please don’t be Shieldwall, Aegis thought, hooves clasped around his foals. He wasn’t sure if he was praying or not.
“WE ARE NOT HERE TO HARM YOU!” a woman called. Their voice was a broad Maine drawl, the kind Nny would say sounded almost Southern. “My name is Asa Bowen - and I have taken the brave men and women of both the Menschabwehrfraktion and Sons of Macha here, to Littleton. We have taken control of this town’s radio station. All above-board. All legal. I know how it sounds.”
Aegis rolled his eyes in the dark. He’d heard the woman on HLF pirate radio now and then, short snippets.
Asa Bowen. One of the Sons Of Macha, and aligning herself with Menschabwehrfraktion - the people that’d caused untold amounts of suffering in the last month of so. Neither of whom truly filled him with confidence.
“We may be the HLF,” Bowen said, “But we are here to-”
Kraber
He was crouched down low to the walls of the bridge so that nobody could see him. There was a train coming, wasn’t there?
“What, you’re here to fokkin’ press all the ponies and innocents up the gat and throw them out a fokking window?” Kraber asked under his breath, as he moved towards the train station. The lights were on. It was so close! So close he could almost touch it. What the Voice from outside had really said was the word ‘help’. As in: We are here to bring aid of some kind, along with protection.
In Kraber’s experience, what this meant in HLF terms involved killing ponies, scaling valuables and food from houses, and maybe sticking around if there was a PER attack, or PHL were nearby. It’d worked out west, in towns belonging to antigovernment types.
And then, of course, civilians would die. Collateral, of course. But that was the price of fokkin’ safety, wasn’t it? Death is better than fokkin’ ponification, so if we kill you, we’re still doing you a kindness? Was that how it worked? Was that how it fokkin’ worked? What a fokkin’ piece of shit I am, Kraber thought. I’m not thinking this cause it’s the worst-case scenario. I’m thinking this because…
Because it’s what I won’t do.
Not. Fokkin’ ever. Again.
He could imagine himself taking out a knife, shoving it into one of those fokkin throats, and twisting…
Or maybe my own, he thought. They’re probably better off without me. Happier, too, I could just-
He abruptly remembered that ice cream existed.
Fok it, nevermind. But there were more people in the woods, he thought. No. Too risky. He thought. Ah, fok, why’d I even come out here? They’re trigger-happy, they’re…
He squinted into the darkness.
...bung.
There was something taut and rigid in the HLF he saw, their faces lit by flashlights duct-taped and railed to their battle-scarred weaponry. They were scared, anyone could see that.
But they’re usually too fokkin’ dof to let ourselves be scared, Kraber thought. What has us… has them like that?
No. He killed them, as much as he’d enjoy it, it wouldn’t end well. It was for the best to just stay put.
“-Things are going to get far worse in the coming weeks,” Kraber heard a woman call out over the radio. He recognized the voice. “You know it, I know it, that’s just common sense. The PER attacks we’ve been stopping - you can even have our method of finding and stopping them, if…”
There was a strange quiet hanging over the NEIGHborhood.
Kraber didn’t know what it all meant. Knew that he shouldn’t suspect a connection to all the other weird kak going around, cause there was no fokkin’ proof.
But everything was telling him: Leave.
He heard the train coming. It looked like a passenger one this time.
Guess I could’ve done better at keeping my eye on the timetables…
Any minute it would stop here. Any minute he’d crawl into one of the cars, hide inside, and act as if he’d always been there.
"...If you let us stay,” Bowen said, audibly defeated.
‘What the fok?’ Kraber thought as he waited inside the station, reading a book. Nobody questioned it.
But then: These were Sons of Macha, and Menschabwehrfraktion. Saying they wanted to be allowed to stay.
“I know. But I’ve heard whisperings of something big. An Imperial attack,” Bowen said.
There was a shiver in her voice. Something was…. Something wasn’t right. She seemed genuinely afraid. Everyone else had noticed, and the room seemed to have fragmented into countless little discussions he had no chance of following.
“I know, we tell ourselves rumors about that all the time. They’ll come any minute now… Stuff like that. But knowing what I’ve seen, I don’t know how long they’ll be rumors. I also know that I want Lovikov as the first responder the way we want potion in our rations,” Bowen said.
Which was to say, not at all.
Smart of the pony residents to be hiding. If he was here, well. He knew exactly what he’d do.
‘Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I need to get those claymore mines and a Fostech,’ Kraber thought. ‘This was a terrible fokkin’ decision! What did I-’
Aegis
Aegis had long since learned to think of HLF as stupid. Able to be killed without much fanfare, like the Remnant Fleet forces in Titanfall 2. A vague annoyance that both factions mopped up, and absolutely impossible to reason with them. Stupid to the point of almost fearlessness.
Right?
And yet all indications were that something scared them.
What the hell could do that?! he thought.
“I always thought we could deal with people like Leonid Lovikov,” Bowen said. “Sure. Leave it to people like Yarrow, the PHL. But I’m beginning to think we can’t. He has a vision. Or…”
There was silence.
“Or he just doesn’t have a vision, falls down, barrels into somebody and destroys part of the room, and tells everyone, himself included, that it was part of the plan. This is not the man you want reacting to a possible Imperial attack. We were told that Defiance is safe, but I believe we will all be better off here. Away from Lovikov’s dream of the future, or what little we have left…”
Kraber
“...of the present,” Bowen said. “Sorry. Rambling. The point is, I’m not close enough to Lovikov’s inner circle of psychos to guess, but the implication I had… is that something big is coming. That the PER and possibly even the forces of the Solar Empire themselves are going to directly reshape the landscape. I don’t know if that’s what’ll happen, but Lovikov believes it will, so to Defiance it’s almost the same thing. I don’t know if the gluesticks have anything evil planned...”
Kraber considered the sheer fokkin’ absurdity of that sentence. ‘Oh, weird alien horses with giant eyes, that could be aaklig! Fok, my life is weird.’
“What in the fuck is this?” asked an earth pony mare with identical half-moon scars in her blue-gray fur at her flanks instead of a cutie mark. Kraber vaguely recognized her as coming back from Aegis’ trips to various farms.
‘Oh fok. Somebody must have cut them off…’
She looked like she’d packed in a hurry - several oversized suitcases sat nearby, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a year.
“But you absolutely do not want a man like Leonid Lovikov talking about direct action, talking like he knows better,” Bowen continued. “I might as well just sell all New England to the Empire. It’d be quicker and more merciful than what Lovikov would do.”
Kraber considered this assertion. This… was not unlike Lovikov. ‘Why did I ever follow that fokkin’ kontgesig? Right, because he wasn’t my friend, just…’
He thought on it.
‘A fokkin’ enabler. I need to put varknaaiers like that behind me. Put good ponies like Aegis in front of me.’
“What the fok,” Kraber agreed as he and the cut-flank mare listened to the words coming from the speaker overhead. “What the fok indeed.”
“Lovikov’s dream of the future,” Bowen said, “Is madness. He wants the HLF to have weaponry on par with the PHL, and be unafraid to use it. He believes that there will be an Imperial attack, and that he can seize control of the PHL’s laboratories. That he can carve out his own little fiefdom with their tech. That his own arrogant amorality could win the war, like his desire to wear a jacket made of cutie marks is a strength. In a sane, world, he’ll fail. But this isn’t a sane world, and for all he’s said… I believe him about the imperial attack. I believe that there will be chaos. And I believe him when he says the Hotline is real. Because I have heard it.”
The train’s whistle sounded as it rolled towards the station. It looked like an odd assortment of locomotives - one oil-burning steam locomotive, one diesel, and some passenger cars.
“Koebaai,” Kraber said, nodding slowly. “See you later, my bru. Cheers.”
He wasn’t sure if he meant Nny, Fiddlesticks, Aegis, his foals, even Yael and Heliotrope, Sixstring, all the friends he’d made.
‘Linda’s going to be fokkin’ woedend when I don’t show up,’ Kraber thought as he walked to the ticket office. The line was short.
‘It was so easy to leave,’ he thought.
And so with that in mind, Kraber left.
He headed for the railroad line that passed through Littleton and jumped aboard a freight car, heading west. He hitchhiked across the country, meeting a lot of wacky and zany side characters. Breaking up inexplicable phenomena, like a cult in a sewer somewhere that brainwashed human and pony alike into compliance. Gambling, whoring, debauching himself across the states until finally getting shot by PHL or bounty hunters in a no-name town.
Aegis
Rivet gasped, and Aegis held his son in tighter as if that could stifle the sound. Were those… footsteps?! Growing ever-closer?!
He held his foals ever-tighter in his forelegs.
“I have heard the voice. Lovikov said it was the voice of god, and it spoke to me,” Bowen said. “Even those like you must consider that a gift from God, and I did. For a time.. It told us where to find PER, and smash the glowing spikes that PER carry. And when we did so, it was pleased. Thanks to that…“
“Angel?” someone suggested from the crowd.
“I’m not calling it that, Rumlind. Whatever that… thing is, it’s no angel. Thanks to that thing, Lovikov can get anyone on his side with a quick word. Same with the Sons of Macha, the ones who thought that they needed to protect a synagogue and found that you did it themselves. We are all that’s left of either. Lovikov took us to a cabin in the woods, an ancient place, and the voice of our friends and family, people we lost… they spoke to us from beyond ponification. They told us so many things...”
Kraber
That didn’t happen. None of the things he described to himself happened, on account of the fact that he was still in the station, still buying a ticket.
“I really want to believe it, you know,” Bowen said, and fell silent.
‘I wonder if she’s high?’ Kraber thought. But that thought dissipated when he considered the HLF that’d followed him. No way in hell that this many people would follow a woman who was high off her ass. Probably.
In spite of every instinct screaming in protest, he couldn’t run away.
‘What the fok am I doing?’
The last times he’d run away from stuff like this, there’d been a promise of something beyond. When he’d thrown himself into theater, he’d at least known he was going to enjoy it. Sure, he was overworked, but at least it was fun. When he’d thrown himself into work, at least he was providing. When he decided to kill every pony in sight, at least he could tell himself lie to himself and say they all deserved to die.
This time?
‘So what the fok do I do? Keep lying to myself? Bury more shit till I get gunned down like a dog in the street? It’s only a matter of time till someone finds me. There’s just… no point to so many fokkin’ things anymore. I’m fokked both ways, but at least if I’m here I’m among friends. There’s just…
There’s no fokkin’ point to running anymore. There is, really, maybe I should, but… but what’s left if I do? I fokkin’ well like my quiet life.’
The train’s brakes squealed in protest as it came towards the station.
‘I am just not feeling it,’ Kraber thought. ‘Look, what am I even supposed to do if I leave? Let my friends die? I should hide, ja, but…
“Sir?”
“Aweh?” Kraber asked, reaching to his hip for his wallet.
“The train to White River Junction,” the man behind the counter asked. “Are you leaving?”
The man behind the ticket counter looked… overstretched, as best Kraber could put it. Skin stretched taut, glistening with sweat. Glasses fogged over, slightly.
“Are you leaving?” he repeated, shaking like a leaf. “The HLF in town, the broadcasts… a lot of people are heading to greener pastures.”
It was then that Bowen’s words came back into life. “Not even that whatever Lovikov has found can tell me what Ross would’ve said. Not even that with all the things I’ve done, he’d still love me and tell me so. I want to believe the Hotline is fake! I really do!”
Kraber paused for a moment. Thought about where he’d go. About how he’d end up when he left these people that actually cared about him.
‘This is the worthwhile thing I get out of running,’ Kraber thought. ‘There’s… there’s nothing afterwards. Besides, I like Aegis. I like his foals. I like my fokkin’ quiet life.’
“Nooit,” he said, turning around. “Honestly, I’m just here to hide out.”
“Our basement,” the man behind the counter said.
Kraber raised an eyebrow. “Aweh?”
“It would be so much easier to believe that Lovikov only believes what he’d like to. That he moves the goalposts, changes the story so it was always his plan and he always knew what to do.”
‘That does totally sound like Lovikov, Kraber thought to himself.
“A lot of people had the same thought,” the man said. “There’s a secret exit somewhere too. Just in case of… you know. Barrierfall.”
“If this is how we act in peacetime,” Kraber sighed, “I don’t want to think about how that’ll go.”
“Honestly, I’m happier not thinking about it,” the man behind the counter said. “We’ll explode that bridge when we come to it.”
“You think that’s healthy?” Kraber asked.
“Personally?” asked the cut-flank mare with the suitcases. “No. Either you let these things keep you down until it’s too late, or… or you deal with them.” She looked at her flanks. “Ain’t easy.”
“But I don’t think that’s exactly what happened here,” Bowen said.
Kraber’s blood froze. “That’s good advice,” he told the mare. “By the way, where’s that basement? I… think I’m backing up the line. I... ”
He looked frantically from the ticket counter to an open doorway.
“You… kind of are,” the man behind the ticket counter said. “Anyway-” he pointed to one doorway. “There’s a staircase we covered up with a utility closet. Besides, a new customer is coming in.”
“I think that’s what Lovikov still is, but this gift, this thing… it’s the future, and it’s in the hands of a man with an astonishing capacity for self-delusion, rationalization, and cruelty,” Bowen said.
‘Okay, that is definitely Lovikov, Kraber thought, heading for the door the man had pointed towards. He was opening the door when it happened.
He couldn’t say what “it” was. Only that abruptly, the room had frozen. He should have kept going. Should have headed for the door. Should have just kept calm, personable, as he walked to their bolthole.
Probably should have stayed in Aegis’ basement.
‘The fok’s everyone looking at?’ he wondered as the room went silent. He heard the suitcase mare whimpering slightly.
And turned to see...
FOK!
Two HLF soldiers, barely more than children, stood nearby. One was female, holding an old pump shotgun. The other was male, holding a homemade assault rifle at the hip with homemade glowsights. It looked like it had been made from pipe and bits of airsoft gun. Whatever Bowen was saying seemed to melt away as Kraber saw them. It sounded like the buzz of electrical equipment, unimportant and faraway.
And it was currently being held in the direction of the mare with the suitcase.
‘...Fok. Don’t escalate this...
In truth, he didn’t really care about them, and wouldn’t lose much sleep if he shot them. But something in the pit of his stomach told him that shooting them would send the situation over the edge.
“Goddamn gluestick,” sneered the man - the boy - with the pipe gun.
”I won’t pretend we’re PHL material. Just let us stay the night. Let us stay here just a moment, let us… let us talk to them. Human to human. Human to pony, even,” Bowen said.
The mare with half moon scars on her flanks stood defiant.
“Keith,” the girl with the shotgun pleaded, “Don’t shoot her!”
“Or fucking what?” sneered the boy with the pipe gun. “You going horsefucker, Andy?”
”Lovikov… the divide he’ll create between armed and not, the things he’ll overturn… now isn’t the time for petty fighting, and I’m sorry to whoever listen that I didn’t think of it like that.”
“No,” the girl with the shotgun said. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit about her. Bowen, those Reavers… they said to avoid needless de-”
There was silence. Kraber desperately tried to be as unnoticeable as possible and fit through the doorway.
She was looking directly at him. He could feel it.
“Who’s that by the door?” asked the girl with the shotgun.
Kraber kept moving towards the door. The boy with the pipegun was already turning towards him.
Fokdammit.This is gonna get ugly, Kraber thought. I whip out a pistol, the .45 or the .44, and fokkin bliksem him.
But the surprising thing was that he didn’t really want to. They were scared, he thought. They’re…
“I’m not doing any harm,” Kraber said. Something about those words didn’t feel right. “I just want out.”
“An honest person wouldn’t have anything to hide,” said the girl with the shotgun.
“Oh, because the whole complete honesty thing is working out so well for you here,” Kraber heard himself say, and turned around to look at her. “If anything, you’re being too honest. You’re honest that you’re being a militia, so you roll into town with a metric fokton of guns. Your leader sounds like she’s having a panic attack. I’ll admit, she’s right about Lovikov, but have some damn subtlety.”
The room was silent.
‘There. I’ve shocked them enough I can leave. This is almost as good as that time I got out of a hostage situation by begging people to shoot me! Maybe I should’ve been more insistent,’ Kraber thought. “Now,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to hide out somewhere.”
“So are you hiding people we’d object to?” asked the boy with the pipe gun. Kraber looked at her. She was definitely scared - like everyone in the HLF here - but she looked oddly angry.
“There’s ponies here, so… yes?” Kraber asked.
The girl tensed. So did the boy with the pipe gun.
“When you’re done with whatever you’re doing,” Kraber said, “Give this kak up. You’re letting yourselves be monsters in the HLF. It didn’t make me happy, it didn’t bring my family back. You should…”
And then he realized. He didn’t know. He didn’t know how to describe it. But anything had to be better than being bossies and evil.
“Do something that helps other people out,” he said lamely. “Being HLF the way I was doesn’t help anyone. I work in a restaurant, I helped build houses...”
“You left us to die in Portland, you son of a bitch!” the boy with the pipegun yelled. “How dare you talk down to us like this?!”
“What are you talking about?” Kraber asked. “Left you to... “
“When the hostage situation failed,” the boy with the pipe gun said, “Someone left us to die on that rig. We had a boat. An escape route if things went south. And they did.”
“Norton,” the girl said, “Stop, just… just stop… please, he just wants out…”
“If you hadn’t left us to die, we might’ve had a chance! Lovikov might not have engaged the weapons! Carter might’ve come back, even, and then we’d have had a chance! Lovikov might not have talked to that… that goddamn thing!” Norton yelled. “It’s just more ponies trying to control us. And Lovikov’s entranced by it - he’s going crazy, and it’s all. Your. Fault. For making him so desperate. This is all on your head! You signed our death warrants, you son of a bitch!”
“Now… walk away,” the girl said.
“But he left us to die, Katie!” Norton said.
“He’s not worth it,” ‘Katie’ said. “We’ve got more important things.”
“When we’re done, the first thing we’ll do is to tell everyone you were here,” Norton said. “And tell them exactly why Portland is your fault. You bloodthirsty psycho-”
The most sensible and rational decision probably would have been to let the girl play peacemaker, or even give it a shot. Listen to Norton. To just leave and accept it, even if Kraber knew it was bullshit.
Unfortunately, this was Kraber. ‘Sensible and rational decision’ could rarely be connected with him except in the most unlikeliest of circumstances, so:
“THE FOK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!” Kraber roared. “My fokkin’ fault?! What about the kontgesigs that thought these were good ideas? Lovikov is armor surrounding an uncontrolled id, Carter just wants everything in sight dead because he’s worse at handling grief than me, and we killed innocents by the truckload! I may be controlled by my worst fokkin’ impulses, but… but I fokkin’ well do something about it! That mission on the Sorghum was doomed from the fokkin’ start! We’re kontgesigs, one and fokkin’ all!”
“Fucking look at yourself! Does… does anyone know who this is?!” Norton yelled looked around the room. “This is-”
They know who I am! ...Shit, I should’ve listened.
“Come on,” Kraber interrupted, his voice - his real voice, not the awful fokkin’ Scots accent he’d been using - sounding oddly strained. “There’s no need for-”
I have made a terrible mistake.
Kraber moved before he realized what was happening. Norton fired, one round carving through one side of his head. Kraber roared not in pain, but more from surprise than anything.
“JOU FOKKIN’ KONTGESIG!” he yelled, and fired the .44 Ruger.
The .44 pow’rball round, its point hollowed out then filled with a ball-bearing, made and custom-loaded at the end of a long day, did not simply punch through Norton’s skull. It exploded it.
Kraber cackled madly as the back of the kid’s skull exploded outward, brains and bone splattering against the walls and ceiling. A few scattered stumps of viscera were all that remained above his lower jaw.
“NORTON!” the girl screamed, only for the cut-flank mare to yell out a battle cry, jump like a horse over a hurdle, and drive one hoof into her face.
“Don’t,” the mare said.
Kraber looked on approvingly at the spatter of blood. It felt fokkin’ lekker to be back in the saddle, the wood grips of the .44 in his hand fitting as if he was born to it. The way that this fokkin’ kontgesig was dead and he was alive, the rush of adrenaline.
…I feel like I’m forgetting something, Kraber thought. Oh. Fok. My head is bleeding. Better find a bandage. Probably should have remembered that.
The girl stared up at him, whimpering. “What have you done?”
“This wasn’t my fokkin’ fault,” Kraber said, grunting in annoyance. Why’d his own blood have to get everywhere? Gaaaawd, it was so fokkin’ annoying. Head wounds always bled so much, then they got in your eyes. He reached into the bag he kept on his back. “He provoked me.”
“You could’ve done something!” the girl protested. “He was just scared, you don’t know what it’s like to hear the voices of your loved ones telling you things…”
Of course I fokkin’ do! Kraber thought. I feel like I’m still forgetting something…
“If this goes to hell, it’s on your head!” the girl yelled.
“Seeing as Norton doesn’t have much left of one?” Kraber asked.
“You could have walked away, you bastard!” the girl yelled. “You could’ve walked away!”
Then, as he heard Bowen say the Hotline might or might not be the voice of God:
Right… I shot someone near HLF. This is gonna suck.’
Aegis
They heard two bangs in rapid succession. Then another.
Aegis held his foals together.
“...Francis?” Amber whispered. “Are you okay?”
???
The sniper abruptly shut down as soon as he heard the shots.
…Ohhhhh shiiiiiiiiiit.
An automatic weapon. Then a heavy revolver. Somebody had been shooting. Who would-
Kraber!
That wasn’t supposed to happen! That wasn’t him, that sure as hell wasn’t anyone from the neighborhood below. No doubt about it, that was someone nearby, but… he didn’t see other snipers. He didn’t see anyone in the crowd of humans below aiming a rifle.
Preston, the sniper texted frantically, Get here 10 minutes ago. They’re about to get real ugly.
Not that it would matter. He couldn’t do anything, but Asa had assembled this crowd, right? They were good people. Surely they’d prevail, surely she’d-
Johnny C
One moment, Nny and Fiddlesticks been hiding on a rooftop, watching Bowen give her speech. Hearing it over the radio. With Fiddlesticks. The Leshiy had been hanging over his shoulder.
Thankfully, none of the HLF had been looking even vaguely in their general direction. Fiddlesticks hadn’t spooled up the minigun yet.
All of a sudden, there was a series of gunshots. The patter-patter of automatic weapons, then the THOOM of a heavy revolver.
“What the hell?!” Bowen yelled from atop the truck.
Nny made a vague sort of motion. He was about to head towards Bowen when Fiddlesticks gently pushed him down with one foreleg. What were they supposed to do?
Of course, within a second it turned out that she didn’t need to warn him.
BOOM
Fragments of pavement sprayed upwards, immediately behind the curious onlookers and HLF. Nny and Fiddlesticks couldn’t make out everything being said, but it was obvious they were panicking.
“Who the hell shot at-”
“Which one of you-?!
“We shouldn’t have-”
The bystanders screamed and scattered, rushing for anywhere that conceivably provide shelter. One woman pulled a hammer out of a bag, smashed the window of the Cardsharp Pub, and jumped through the jagged plate-glass hole.
Linda’s going to be so pissed, Nny thought.
“Well we’ve gotta do something!” Nny said to nobody in particular. Before his eyes, and Fiddlesticks’ eyes, Bowen was running towards the radio station. Hoping it’d provide cover. There was a group of HLF standing by, far too close for comfort.
“-Shooting at us!”
“-damn pony-pounders!”
“A BUNCH OF PIGS!” someone screamed, throwing a bottle at one HLF man in homemade armor. He staggered, the bottle falling to the ground unbroken. He reached for a rifle on his back.
“We have,” Nny said, “to do something!”
He was almost pleading at this point. Fiddlesticks gently held a foreleg to his back to hold him down, but he ignored it. Before Fiddlesticks could say anything, he’d thrown himself through a nearby window, rushing down to the street.
Everything moved so slow as the two of them rushed for the street. But then, they couldn’t have been walking, they had to have been running.
“Can you even play peacemaker?” Fiddlesticks asked as they rushed down a hallway leading to the main drag.
Nny answered by running faster.
“Nny?!” Fiddlesticks pleaded.
“I don’t know who else will,” Nny panted. “So I will.”
He and Fiddlesticks skidded onto the street. Fiddlesticks’ mouth trigger was hanging below her mouth, and Nny’s weaponry was all holstered. He held both arms outward in a concilatory posture, like he was talking to a large dog.
“Well? Help each other!” Bowen was yelling. “I’ve had enough of giving into fear. This is exactly what they want! What people like Lovikov, the Empire, Shieldwall thrive on! The more scared you are, the more uninhibited you are, that’s more power to them!”
She sounded almost like she was crying.
“These bastards, we-”
Then the front half of Bowen’s head erupted into blood. Bits of blood, brain, and bone fragment sprayed the road, and she collapsed against a truck, the top half of her head destroyed.
She didn’t have time to scream. But everyone else on the street did. The onlookers. The HLF nearby. For a second, everything stopped. Everything fell silent. At best, HLF and Littleton citizens stared at each other uneasily. At worst, they were holding weapons to each other, filtering to the sides of the street.
“Look,” said a blond man who looked for all the world like a potion-amputee going by the metal leg that looked to have been made from pipes and a crowbar. “She wanted us to have peace, so… come on, we can’t just fall into the stuff we ran away from…”
And then Nny heard it. Someone screaming at the top of their lungs:
“MURDER! THEY SHOT BOWEN! WE COME TO THEM AND THEY REPAY US LIKE THIS?! KILL THE HORSEFUCKERS AND GELDOS! NO QUARTER!”
It was a man in a gas mask, their skin horribly scarred and burnt underneath. They’d pulled up the mask so Nny could see their mouth. Something about it looked… familiar...
Oh, Nny thought. Moliere Bernhardt. That guy on the wanted poster. The HLF man who hides in the underground. Wait. Why haven’t I heard of him before? Did someone change the timeline and accidentally him into reality?
“TURN OVER A NEW LEAF, BOWEN SAYS,” Bernhardt said. “TRUST THEM, SHE SAYS. IF THIS IS HOW WE’RE REWARDED FOR OUR EFFORTS, THEN-”
Okay, focus, Nny. What would Cousin Yael do?! Nny thought frantically. Shoot somebody? No, that doesn’t work. Interpretive dance? ...No. I need a damn drink? DAMMIT THAT’S WHAT I’D DO!
So he took in a deep breath, and projected his voice. He wasn’t yelling, just talking really loudly.
“There’s no need for any of this!” he said. He wasn’t used to being commanding.
And all eyes turned to him and Fiddlesticks.
“Look,” Nny said, his voice loud enough he couldn’t quite believe it was his. “She wanted peace. She wanted away from Lovikov. I understand that, the bastard shot my dog. And that’s probably the least awful thing I saw him do. I don’t like him any more than most of you do-”
He was doing his best to talk them down, trying to disarm them.
“I SAW YOU ON THE ROOF, HORSEFUCKER!” Bernhardt yelled. “THIS IS WHAT THE PHL WANT, EVERYONE! THEY WANT US DIVIDED! THEY WANT US TO DEVOUR OURSELVES, SO THEIR PONY MASTERS CAN TAKE CONTROL! WE WATCHED THIS GREAT PEACEMAKER DIE, AND HERE IS A MAN WITH A PONY AT HIS SIDE TELLING US WHAT TO DO? A MAN WHO LEFT AN IED IN ONE OF OUR TRUCKS?!”
‘Oh,’ Nny thought distantly. ‘So that’s where I left it. Wait a damn minute, this doesn’t make sense, they’re...’
“Bowen was here because she wanted to keep from doing stupid, hateful things,” Nny said, desperately trying to sound calm. “You’re here because on some level, you didn’t want to keep doing them.”
“What’s stupider,” Bernhardt said, “Was trusting you! If the smart thing is trying to work with stupid civvies who shoot us, who let horsefuckers keep guns trained on us… let ponies walk about in town freely…. Then I WANT NO DAMN PART IN THIS!”
‘That makes no damn sense,’ Nny thought. Then he realized: ‘It doesn’t have to make sense. These are scared people who look at Fiddlesticks and think she’s the enemy, and here’s…
“AND I THINK,” Bernhardt boomed over every radio, “THAT WE’VE HAD ENOUGH OF HORSEFUCKERS TELLING US WHAT TO DO. STARTING WITH YOU, JOHN HEALD.”
...here’s me with a tiny yellow pony, reasoning with easily frightened and violent militiamen. Well shit, Nny thought, right before they opened fire on him.
He grabbed Fiddlesticks by the neck, gargantuan saddle gun and all, and rushed for an alleyway. Even on his best days in the gym, the weight would’ve been daunting. But it was either ‘refuse to pick her up’ or ‘die,’ which sort of threw off any reading on Nny’s physical strength.
“KILL THEM!”
“MOTHERFUCKER-” Fiddlesticks swore as Nny hurtled towards an alleyway, taking her with him.
Aegis
“MURDER!”
Aegis held his foals tighter, forehooves meeting.
“THEY SHOT BOWEN! KILL THE HORSEFUCKERS AND GELDOS! NO QUARTER! NO QUARTER!” someone screamed at the top of their lungs.
???
Well, that didn’t work, the sniper thought distantly, before realizing just what had happened. There was an HLF man with a gun, firing at the crowd, screaming madly. That was another HLF fighter, taking cover, firing at them with a goddamn belt-fed.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be!
Kraber
The entire population of the station stared at him in horror as gunfire erupted, amplified by the speakers.
I have to leave. I have to get the fok out of here! I can’t deal with all of this responsibility, all the…
His heart just wasn’t in it. First, he needed to make sure that Aegis’ his family was safe. And that the HLF nearby were as fokkin’ far from safe as you could get. Then kill every HLF man here! And then when he was done, maybe find a bandage.
Huh. I guess I have my fokkin’ priorities straight.
The sounds of gunfire roared through Littleton.
Before Kraber knew what he was doing, he was rushing out the doorway towards the bridge. He could see HLF running away, towards the east. One of them caught his eye, though.
Who was that?
There was a strange man running along with them, not quite keeping pace. His face was hidden by a gas mask. Kraber could see scarring on it, just under the flaps of the mask. It wasn’t burn scars, though - it looked like someone had taken the worst knife possible and worked them over until they stopped moving. And there was a pistol in one of his hands...
Skort, Kraber thought, which in his native tongue meant ‘be careful.’ Or possibly ‘something is wrong here.’
But before he could consider it, gunfire rang out. Kraber slid behind a nearby car, only exposing the slightest fraction of his face from behind the rear bumper.
Evidently, this was still too much face. An HLF man with an M16 turned toward him, panicked, and Kraber fired a short four-round burst out Sylvia’s ACR, nailing him through the throat.
Yet another HLF man aimed an assault rifle at Kraber.
Kraber bared his teeth, smiling, and turned, ready to fire off another unsteady burst through the man’s head. “COME ON, JOU FOKKIN KONTGESIG!” he yelled, and fired…
...in the moment immediately before a storm of bullets simply disassembled the HLF man, chopping each limb apart with an absolute lack of precision.
Kraber looked in the direction the shots had come from, and saw Nny and Fiddlesticks. Nny carried that weird Russian-Belgian Leshiy assault rifle, and Fiddlesticks had a saddle minigun.
“Thanks,” Kraber said, nodding to them. Things seemed to be calm - relatively calm, anyway.
“Don’t mention it,” Fiddlesticks said. “What were you doing out here, anyway?”
Kraber didn’t answer. It looked like he’d been where Bowen had been speaking. Where she’d set up shop. He could see her body lying against a pickup truck. ‘I think I remember her from Agua Caliente,’ he thought.
It’d been a very, very small amount of HLF that the PHL trusted to help out in Agua Caliente. Or maybe ‘trust’ wasn’t the right word. Kraber vaguely remembered her from both her wanted poster and that that fokking town. She hadn’t been even close to caring about ponies, but she’d come nonetheless. Hadn’t liked to see him, but she’d seemed....
Actually, she had really hated him.
‘So I guess that this attempt here makes her… a correct ou? Fok weet,’ Kraber thought. And here she was. A woman of average height, shot in the head with powder bur-’
Suddenly, the firefight, the destruction of the place that’d been his hometown for quite some time, the threats to his friends? Those seemed moderately less interesting.
He looked down at Bowen’s body, lying against the truck. The way the back of her head looked…
‘Powder burns?’ Kraber thought. Some of the classes he’d taken in college in Boston had sort of lapsed into mentioning ballistics. They’d mentioned that up to contact range, you might find powder burns from the propellant.
‘That can’t be good…’
“Frank?” Fiddlesticks asked. “What are you doing?”
“Looking over Bowen’s body,” Kraber said. “I just… I have a really bad feeling about why she was shot.”
“So… you didn’t have anything to do with this,” Nny said, sighing in relief.
“Why in the fok would I - okay, nevermind. I was in the forest, trying to run away,” Kraber said. “I didn’t leave these people on the fokkin’ best terms. If they found me here, they’d kill me! Hell, one of them fokkin’ well tried!”
He tapped the bloody bandage on his head.
“Why were you trying to run away?” Nny asked, holding the rifle a little too close to Kraber’s chest.
“Because these people are better off without me and I wanted to be anywhere else,” Kraber said. “I have done bad things to people. And if the HLF find out that I stopped doing bad things, they will do worse fokkin’ ka - things to me.”
Fiddlesticks’ eyes narrowed. “What, do you have some kinda bad shit quota?”
“Well-” Kraber started.
BRAKKA-BRAKKA-BRAKKA
“TAKE COVER!” Nny yelled, and slid behind someones car. Some mechanism on Fiddlesticks’ saddle minigun unfolded, and she rested her minigun on a concrete barrier.
“KILL THE HORSEFUCKERS!” one HLF man was shrieking. He was surrounded by men and women in patchwork armor, with bare shoulders for the summer heat.
Fokkin’ kontgesigs! Kraber thought. The old, familiar rage took him in its hold, and he rushed around the back of one of the brick buildings of downtown Littleton.
“Where’d he go?!” Kraber heard someone yell. Nny, Fiddlesticks, or the HLF. He didn’t know. Didn’t care.
Kraber hung close to the wall, Sylvia’s ACR ready. He took a left, slinking through a narrow alleyway between two houses, crouching low to the ground. When he reached the end of the alleyway, he saw the HLF. They’d taken cover behind some bullet-pocked cars. American cars. Old models. He held his back to the wall as he bent slightly, resting the rifle’s stock against his shoulder.
Kraber aimed in one man’s general direction, pulled the trigger, and let loose two rounds.
They didn’t just punch through the HLF man’s upper left arm. They exploded it. Blood spurted out of the stump, and they fell to the ground, gasping.
“TIME FOR SOME FOKKIN’ DISARMAMENT!” Kraber cackled, and opened fire.
The AR roared in short, controlled bursts of anywhere from two to five rounds, chattering madly. Spent casings rained from the ejection port as he pressed the trigger, aiming for arms, upper bodies, necks, and faces.
He could see Nny and Fiddlesticks blazing away at the HLF - who were backing up against someone’s house, caught on two sides by the sustained fire.
He heard screaming to his right - just down the street. Where the NEIGHborhood faded into Littleton proper. There was a house there, burning. An HLF truck, covered in homemade armor, parked nearby.
Kraber looked out and saw a few ponies and humans rushing out of the house, screaming madly. Slightly singed by the blaze.
For all of 10 seconds anyway, as a jet of flame spurted out of an HLF fighter’s weapon. Incinerating the humans and ponies that had called that place their home.
“That’s a fokkin’ flamethrower!” Kraber yelled.
???
“What the hell?!” the hidden sniper spat. This was… this was insane. They were… that…
No wonder he hadn’t felt right alongside O’Donnell’s Sons of Macha and these Menschabwehrfraktion. Even when they made a show of turning over a new leaf, even within minutes of Bowen’s speech, they were going to use a flamethrower on a civilian outpost…
What the shit was with the HLF in New Hampshire?! Attacking an oil rig and turning it into a massacre of the city on the coast, believing that they were getting messages from the afterlife, or an angel or whatever?
Which wouldn’t be as disturbing if they weren’t right too much of the time, the man thought. For a second, he remembered how Kraber had been with those ponies earlier. Crazy enough to make Kraber, of all people, be civil to ponies. Here I was thinking only Yorke managed to provoke that.
He made minute adjustments to the scope, staring down at a man with a homemade grenade launcher.
"I am human," he whispered like a reflexive prayer, and he fired.
The man's head exploded in a happy shower of blood, and the sniper grinned.
Fight the good fight the right way, or feel the hammer, you shits, he thought, lining up another shot.
Kraber
They were actually going to... They were going to...
Fok it!
Kraber rushed up to a shipping container, jumping on what looked to be a dumpster or trash barrel, and hoisting himself up onto the roof. Using one windowsill as a foothold, he jumped up even further, lifting himself up another container.
He was two stories up now. Not much for cover up here, but with luck the element of surprise would help.
Steady, steady… he told himself, trying to distance himself from the chaos all around him.
And then he saw an HLF man shooting a fleeing earth pony. Ten rounds. Back of the neck. There wasn’t much left.
Kraber didn’t actually care that much. But for a moment, he felt something. He felt like that pony very well could have been Aegis. He felt what Aegis told him about being disaffected, lost, and losing everything to come here.
And he remembered how helpless he’d felt after Reaper had just about crippled him. And he thought about how fokkin’ awful it would’ve been if he’d come all that way and died in that fokkin’ hospital.
He felt fokkin’ woedend.
“Ah, fok it,” he heard himself say. He felt himself smiling as he aimed in the general direction of the HLF man with the flamethrower below, and fired on full auto.
One lucky shot punched through one pipe bomb...
Kaboom.
"It's only a flesh wound!" Kraber laughed, shooting into the screaming, flaming HLF down below. There was a man nearby, armed with some M16. Oh, he looked pissed! He was turning for Kraber, then-
Kaboom again! His head was splattered all over the pavement.
Kraber made a quick, not-entirely-serious prayer of thanks to God for the sniper that was helping him.
"Get that fucking horsefucker!" someone screamed.
“FOKKIN’ TRY IT!” Kraber laughed again. Time to chuck, then! He slid off the roof of the shipping container, driving both boots onto an HLF man’s collarbones. He crumpled to the ground, screaming, and Kraber stomped down on his throat.
And he could hear ponies huddling inside the house. They didn’t know he’d crushed the shoulders of the man guarding the back entrance- Oh, FOK!
He could see seven HLF with an assortment of Kalashnikovs walking into the house from the front. Could see several ponies descending the stairs, heading towards him.
There was no time. He whipped his revolver free, and fired.
BANG
One HLF woman’s skull splashed out all over the room, blood spattering against the ceiling. The others braced themselves, looked for cover, but by that time it was too late.
Kraber remembered how his father had taught him to shoot, held the revolver in front of his face with both hands on the tape-wrapped wooden grip, one eye tracking the HLF through the sights, and fired. A man with a sleeveless tac-vest staggered backwards like a drunk ballerina, his arm lazily spiralling through the air.
It was like everything was going in slow motion. Before any of the HLF could find cover, he’d gunned down the remaining five with the rest of his revolver’s cylinder.
He reloaded as he strode into the house.
“YOU’RE DEAD, KONTGESIGS!” he roared, slinging the ACR over his shoulder and picking up a dropped Kalashnikov.
“It’s Francis!” one of the ponies yelled. “Oh, thank God!”
Kraber nodded taking cover behind a large pickup truck and firing two rounds from his new Kalashnikov, probably an AKM. Ugly thing. 7.62x39, judging by the kick. No-frills.
One more HLF man dropped.
“I CAN SEE THE FOKKIN ‘LIBERATION’S’ GOING WELL, YA BASTARDS!” Kraber laughed.
Perfect for the job at hand. He missed using AKMs. The kick was bad, but he remembered them from his childhood, from shooting them with his dad.
He nestled into a familiar rhythm, firing short bursts toward the heads of various HLF, filtering down the street from various HLF roadsters, massive, kitbashed cars with rams and turrets mounted onboard. “HOW MANY OF YOU FOKKIN BAWBAGS ARE THERE?!”
Another sniper round punched through a man, just as he was about to get the drop on Kraber. He thanked his friend the sniper for that one.
And then he saw it, in front of a massive HLF roadster that looked like a bastardized pickup truck. A man with an M249 was standing guard.
Perfect
The 5.56 rounds exploded through the house, right above his head, and Kraber aimed his AK, ready to fire…
Only to see the man simply fall apart, blood streaming from between his armor. He clutched his throat, falling to the ground.
As did the woman next to him.
"What the fok?" Kraber whispered. The sniper? No, couldn’t be, unless his gun shot knives…
???
It wasn’t, and it didn’t.
“Who did that?!” the sniper wondered, staring through the scope. “What di-”
He abruptly realized he’d been answering his own question. A thought struck. Those wounds… He’d been cut apart. By something he couldn’t see... Oh, fuck me with a rusty poker, he thought, and toggled through settings on the scope. Finally - thermal imaging.
There was a shape dashing to and fro, chopping HLF apart, slicing through them. Something suspiciously small, the size of a very large dog, but slimmer, with wings… A pony, then. An invisible pegasus.
Heliotrope.
Yael’s favorite little friend, assassin, right-hand or right-hoof mare. And she was here. WHAT WAS WITH THIS TOWN?!
Still, he wouldn’t fire on her, unlike some. Nevermind the ration bounty, or the fuel bounty, or the ammunition bounty some HLF had put out on her, she was here, cutting up bad rubbish. 'Sides, he didn't need an ammunition bounty for some shitty gun that looked like a Vox Populi reject from Bioshock, or the various Khyber Pass copies that had fallen into his unit’s hands. This old Mauser had served him well. Besides, he had an L5 Photonics scope. Some PHL couldn’t even afford that. And hell, if he really wanted he could have traded her in for an ASP Rifle - not that anyone he knew used ASPs all that much. Things were shite.
"This is the judgement of the righteous," the sniper murmured, popping the last round of this clip into another man. He sighed, before beginning to reload.
He heard movement around him, and he growled, his hand moving to his shotgun.
"Where's that fucking sniper?" someone was hissing. "It's bad enough our people are being torn up without…"
The sniper stood, taking a sip from the flask at his belt before smiling. A moment later, two HLF showed up, their shitty rifles making the sniper feel like he was packing overkill. Then again, in this case, Kraber's old sentiment about there being no such thing, only “dead” and “reload”, came to mind as appropriate.
They looked at him for a moment in his full Kevlar bodysuit, HLF printed on it with his name right below it, and frowned. The sniper found himself almost pitying them - they were both young. Impressionable, maybe. He knew the type. Hotheaded, bold, likely hadn’t been in a serious action since the Three Weeks if at all, a nobody before the war and so hyped up on baseless macho overconfidence as to be halfway convinced they were potion-immune.
Unless they found their way into the right crowd, they either turned into something really terrible or went nowhere at all. Both had happened here.
"Hey," one of them said. "I know you - you're with that guy, the one who…"
"Yeah," the sniper said, cutting him off. "I am."
He suddenly found himself hoping he wouldn’t have to kill them himself. C'mon, walk off like good little toddlers, leave this mess to the big boys…
"Thought you guys were off somewhere else?" the other said.
"We aren't now," the sniper said. "We've come here - and we're going to put the HLF right."
"'Right'?" the first boy said. "But there's nothing wrong with…"
“Of course you’d think that,” the sniper said. "But trust me boys, there is. You'd be better rethinking your attitudes now, maybe coming with me."
"Like fuck," the first boy said, sneering. "Lovikov mentioned you. You guys are all…"
His eyes trailed down, noticing the discarded sniper rifle. His eyes widened.
"Oh shit, you're the-!" he managed to get out, before the sniper brought his SHO Series-3 shotgun up as he ran and fired, blasting him backwards. The other man moved to fire, but the sniper smacked him across the face, growling.
"You know what makes me really sick?" he asked the boy, kneeling down by the stunned HLF soldier with an almost pitying expression on his face. "I have a lot of friends who gave their lives for our cause. A lot. And even more that were ponified. They were HLF, they were human, and they were a hundred times better than you could ever dream of being. And you know what’ll happen to HLF like them when the books get written, when the evening news rolls? They’ll be written as you, and considering you planned on attacking a refugee camp with humans and a traumatized war criminal, I think that’s a worse fate for them than ponification. They gave their blood, and you and that little shitstain Lovikov have made it so that they’ll be forgotten or worse.”
The boy tried moving, and the sniper punched him in the face.
“I think that's shit,” the sniper said. “I think we deserve better - so how's about this? I'm gonna leave a message for Yael Ze'ev and her invisible flying friend, a message to remind the world that we're not all mediocre scum like you… and you're gonna help me send it. Don't have the equipment for a blood-eagle, but this’ll do nicely."
He brought out his combat knife, cut the front of the boy’s shoddy 'uniform' open. He struggled a bit, but the sniper just punched him again.
“My name’s John Idle,” he said. “I’m HLF. I’m human. I fight the good fight.”
And John Idle began to carve. There were screams, but a bit of gratuitous punching made them go away.
“Make sure to pay postage, by the way,” Idle said, drawing a long gash across his ribcage. "And sorry about the crap handwriting - broke my pinky in 21, never quite been the same since…"
Heliotrope
As far as Heliotrope could tell, the fighting seemed to be dying down, in part because someone - likely Francis - had killed most of them. Most of the HLF seemed to be retreating at the moment for some reason.
“What the fuck is going on?!” Heliotrope yelled at nobody in particular, coming out from invisibility. The not-quite-scotsman that called himself Francis was standing nearby, staring at a dead woman.
“Far as I can tell,” Kraber Francis said, “Someone shot that Bowen women, and they went mad.”
“Can’t say she didn’t get what was coming to her, but-” Heliotrope started.
“No,” Kraber Francis said, staring at the body, with an odd unsatisfied gleam in his eyes. “She didn’t, as far as I can tell. They came to Littleton for help, then someone shot her, and… wait.”
His eyes widened. “That ain’t good.”
‘What’s he thinking about?’ Heliotrope wondered.
“She was shot at contact range,” he said finally. “I took forensics classes once, I know damn well what that looks like. There’s powder burns on her head, and, and Heliotrope, something’s not-”
And there was a scream.
Heliotrope couldn’t say how she knew, how she picked it out, but she could. She’d never heard Aegis’ foals scream like that, but something about the tone of voice made it stand out in the chaos.
“NO!” Francis roared.
“That sounds like....” Heliotrope went cold even under all her fur. ‘Like Aegis. Or his foals.’
“I know who it sounds like,” Francis said, and rushed for the house that he and Aegis shared, Heliotrope close behind.
Aegis
Meanwhile, Aegis was cowering in his house’s basement, clutching his two foals.
For absolutely no reason at all, he thought about how Francis had said he could build claymores. “No, not the sword. Give me a laser pointer or two, and…” at which point, he’d listed a few ingredients for explosives. One of them was fertilizer, apparently.
Not for the first time, he wondered just what his maybe-Scottish friend did.
‘You shouldn’t trust him,’ Fiddlesticks had said. Privately. While Francis was off at work. ‘He is lying about something. I don’t know what. I don’t know what, but he’s too unverifiable. Too evasive.
Aegis believed it at this moment. He was still wishing that he’d taken up Francis’ offers to build explosives.
He heard footsteps upstairs.
“Daddy?” Amber asked. “Are we going to be okay?”
“Yes,” Aegis lied.
He was trying not to shake. Trying not to let the fear get to him. He was failing miserably.
“Daddy will beat them up,” Rivet said. He wore the brightest damn smile.
‘Daddy might not’ Aegis thought, and that terrified him.
There was the sound of something breaking. Something shattering.
“Damn gluestick has a fancy TV and gaming equipment,” he heard someone say. “Actual new games, even! On CD! How’d he even get those?”
There was the sound of something breaking.
“Damn!” Rivet said.
“Something’s down there!” Aegis heard someone yell.
‘Ah, fuck.’ Aegis thought.
He’d swear for the years to come that it happened at a snail’s pace. That he could count every breath the HLF made as they headed into the basement. Of course, he would also swear that it happened faster than he could process and before he knew it, he was on the floor with blood issuing from one eye.
He hurt. Everywhere.
“He’s a big one then, isn’t he?” one of them sneered. He would’ve been a handsome human before the war, but years of trauma had taken their toll. Burns, dirt, grime, all of that looked to have morphed him somehow.
“GET IM!” one woman screamed, and the hate in her eyes made Aegis suddenly feel very cold inside.
He’d never be able to explain it. Why these men and women, armed with rifles that could drop him from 300 meters away, had decided not to shoot him. Maybe it was some combination of stimuli that’d lead to a physical attack over a simple shooting. Maybe they just hated them. Maybe they needed a ransom.
What he’d always be able to explain was the agony as they jammed the butts of the rifles down on him. The terrible scream he’d heard that could’ve been his, Amber’s, or Rivet’s. Rivet bucking one of them in the knee, and the high-pitched cry of agony as a rifle with a wooden stock came down on Rivet’s snout...
Maybe it was Aegis. Maybe it was Rivet.
Not like any of them could tell later.
???Idle
He looked down at his work, and wondered if the boy was still alive.
‘What a goddamn mess,’ Idle thought as he wrung his hands. He could see the two of them, Kraber and Heliotrope, rushing for somepony’s house.
He thumbed out another text.
Preston. Can you be here 15 minutes ago?
The reply came quickly: Last time, it was 10 minutes ago. How bad could it have-
Everything has gone wrong, Idle typed back. Everything. I can... He stopped typing.
He could see a motley few HLF with two squirming foals in their arms rushing towards a truck. Along with HLF escorting humans and ponies alike from the human-pony neighborhood into various vehicles.
They’re taking prisoners, Idle finished. Humans and ponies. I don’t know where this goes, but it can’t be good.
Aegis
When he came to, staggering to all four hooves, he felt a great sense of emptiness.
Something was missing.
“THEY TOOK MY FOALS!” he screamed. Louder than he’d let himself for awhile. He’d seen Amber and Rivet in the arms of those bastards, being carried the way a human might with a small dog.
He’d seen Rivet kicking, screaming, one hoof to his bloody snout.
He picked himself up off the floor, staggering up the stairs.
And, for no reason at all, he thought back to the day Francis came.
‘He’s part of this,’ Aegis thought. ‘I know I’ve seen his wanted poster before! Damn…. Who was he?’
As he dragged himself upwards, he knew. ‘Francis is part of this. He has to be. There’s something about him that needs to be stopped, something that-’
This train of thought abruptly derailed when he saw Francis hiding behind a bullet-pocked car. Someone being chopped apart by what could only be Heliotrope, judging by the blood spraying from knife wounds with no observable source.
Aegis wouldn’t have been able to get to the assault saddle. Would’ve wasted too much time by reversing.
So he did the only thing that made sense.
Kraber
They were at the house now.
The old tire swing where Kraber remembered pushing Rivet was hanging on one rope. The windows were broken. It looked like some of Aegis’ stuff had been stolen.
Kraber only vaguely noticed this. He had more important things to deal with at the moment.
‘Dodge, daddy!’ Peter yelled, his voice echoing in the chaos of Kraber’s mind. There was a man with an AR-15 that would’ve been top-of-the-line years ago, kitted with a bumpfire stock and fancy devices Kraber couldn’t name, opening fire at him. A couple others.
And dodge he did.
Francis Kraber slipped to the side, revolver in his outstretched right hand as he just barely dodged a burst of wild, full-auto fire. It was futile and he knew it, there was only so long before he took a bullet to something important.
Just then, Aegis barreled out the door and rammed his great bulk into the man with the bumpfire stock.
Holy shit he’s strong, Kraber thought as the man with the bumpfire crumbled to the ground screaming. Aegis drove one hoof down on Bumpfire Man’s face.
Kraber fired the revolver, a wild shot just aimed in the general direction of another man with a kalashikov. The magnum punched through his shoulder, staggering him a foot…
Only for Heliotrope to open fire with the stubby little submachineguns in her assault yoke, blasting away at him and chewing up everything above the neck.
Behind him, Kraber could see a man with a Kel-tec KSG shotgun and, a woman with an AR-15. Her mouth had formed into a little ‘o’ at the sight of her friend.
Kraber didn’t waste any time. He fired the .44 again, the round impacting slightly to the left of AR-15 Woman’s nose. Half her skull exploded outwards and she twirled back like a drunk ballerina, her head looking like it’d been chopped apart at a diagonal angle. Some of the teeth on the woman’s lower jaw were exposed to the night air. Open.
AR-15 Woman was dead before she hit the ground, but for the moment she had the kinetic energy and subtlety of a landslide. Taking advantage of the confusion, Heliotrope plowed forward with both forelegs outstretched, and drove her hooves into the KSG man’s gut.
He wheezed, pulling out a knife…
Only for Heliotrope to dodge, and drive her hind legs squarely into his face. He snapped back, stumbled against one of Aegis’ bookshelves, and crumpled the floor.
“You shot,” Kraber said, punctuating the sentence by cocking the revolver. Which didn’t actually do anything, but it sure sounded intimidating. “My friends. I fokkin’ hope you’ve got something to say for yourself, kontgesig.”
Aegis
Two of the people that’d taken his foals lay dead at his door. Their heads hadn’t just been shot, they were gone.
“You shot,” Kraber was saying, aiming his revolver into the KSG man’s face. “My friends. I fokkin’ hope you’ve got something to say for yourself, kontgesig.”
The one with the KSG wasn’t dead yet. But he was screaming like he was nearly there, on account of his destroyed knee, and Francis’ boot to his fingers.
“Ya. That’s what I fokkin’ well thought. I hope you’re fokmotherin’ well proud of yourself, motherfokker,” Francis said, ignoring the man's scream of agony and the minute little cracks as he pressed down his foot. He reached down, picking up the man's stubby little bullpup shotgun.
“No, no, please,” the man stammered. “I… I didn’t even want to be here! I didn’t-”
“Should’ve thought of that earlier,” Francis said. There was something different about his voice. Some hint of an accent that was absolutely not Scottish, and a sense of something breaking. “Now, what did you do to my friend’s foals?”
“We took them,” the man said, “Leverage. We want out of here, but one of you goddamn horsefuckers shot Bowen, and…. And…” tears welled up in the man’s eyes. “Oh God, my hand, you, you don’t understand what a man like Leonid Lovikov is capable of-”
“You mistake ‘understand’ for ‘give a fok.’ Now, fokkin’ specifics, or I find other things to break,” Francis said.
“Truck!” the man exclaimed. “Heading north, towards the border, highway, don’t kill me-!”
“Francis,” Aegis said, “What are you…”
He stopped. The shotgun in his friend’s hand. Francis, covered in blood that absolutely wasn’t his.
It stained his friend’s beard and face, and two pinpricks of solid orange-brown blazed from under his unkempt mane of brown hair. But his face was calm. Deathly, deathly calm. Back at the synagogue, he had… there’d been some hints of this, but Francis’ anger wasn’t hot like he’d been back then. It was cold, with all the great ponderous energy of a slow-moving hurricane and all the warmth of a coming winter storm.
“Hey!” the man yelled up at Francis. “I know you! You’re that fucking jackass that left us to die in Portl-”
Without warning, Francis fired the shotgun one-handed, shredding the man’s face. Blood splattered his knee.
And Aegis felt nothing. Almost satisfied. He wanted to look to Heliotrope, to see if she had some objection to what Francis had done…
There wasn’t one. Just an extraodinary coldness on her face.
“Negotiations,” Francis said, “Have officially broken down.”
“You’ve uh, got something on your pants...” Aegis said weakly.
“Oh, this?” he looked down at the bloodstains. “Don’t worry. It’s not from anyone we like. Now, Aegis?" Francis said, far too calm, a smile on his face, "I know where your foals are. You ready to fok some kak up?”
“I think I am,” Heliotrope said.
“Huh,” Aegis said, curiously unconcerned. “How long have you been here?”
“Awhile. I was following the HLF,” Heliotrope said. “Tracked ‘em here, and then I saw your foals and I had to…”
She looked into Aegis’ eyes, and whatever she saw looked like it chilled her.
“I can get them back,” she said. “You just have to trust me.”
“Wait,” Francis said. “I have a better idea. Heliotrope, what kind of distraction can you make?”
“Pain is distracting,” Heliotrope suggested.
Aegis thought about protesting. Thought about telling Francis and Heliotrope to be reasonable. Then he considered the past ten minutes.
“Fuck it,” he heard himself say. “That works.”
Kraber
Slipping into cover, he fired a stolen Kalashnikov into what few HLF remained. When that ran dry, he switched to the revolver, picking off HLF with headshot after headshot. It was a familiar rhythm. Beside him, Aegis had strapped on a massive assault saddle with two belt-feds, and was blazing away into the HLF in front of them.
“DON’T DROP THE SOAP IN THIS LEAD SHOWER!” Kraber laughed, as Heliotrope flickered in and out of existence, an HLF man clutching a bullet wound or long gash whenever she flickered back into visibility.
Fok, he would not want to fight her. At least he’d known where Reaper was so he could pour bullets into her. Heliotrope, well, she could disappear and shoot him before he ever noticed.
And disappear she did, her suit flashing invisible as she practically bounced across the street, slicing through HLF, hopefully-
Hopefully? Kraber wondered. Huh. Hoping a pony wasn’t getting shot. Well, she’d been nice to him a week earlier.
He switched back to Sylvia’s rifle, firing in bursts, picking up magazines discarded on the ground or stuck to HLF improvised tac-vests, knocking empty mags out with full ones.
“Bliksem!” Kraber yelled. “JOU WANT TO COME INTO MY FOKKIN’ HOUSE AND PLAY?! AWRIGHT, LET’S FOKKIN’ PLAY! I’VE GOT THE BEST TOYS, FOKKIN’ BAWBAGS, SO BEND OVER AND TAKE IT, BITCH! LET’S SEE IF THIS IS FOKKIN’ FUN FOR YOU!”
Kraber could see body parts flying, HLF being beaten with their own guns. Ribbons of blood streamed from their throats and stomachs. Someone was screaming in agony off in the distance.
‘Eish, Heliotrope is really good at distracting them.’
And then, suddenly, it stopped, one woman holding onto something invisible.
Kraber fired his revolver into her face, the .44 round splashing blood and brains everywhere, even on a suspiciously equine-shaped patch of air...
"Scuse me," Kraber said, sliding into the street, in front of a stunned HLF member, manning a machinegun from atop a pickup truck. "Have you seen my heliotrope?"
"Wha-"
Kraber fired the revolver. “Outta my ride!” he yelled, shooting the man in the head, knocking him down to the ground with a crack.
“IT’S THE ASS-CLOWN THAT’S BEEN-” started one man with an old, battered, leather-wrapped rifle.
Ducking behind another car, Kraber fired again, the revolver literally chopping off the unfortunate bastard’s right arm, the gun falling to the ground.
The two remaining HLF in front stared at the man with the revolver and the Kalashnikov striding towards them, and Kraber smiled. “HIT ME! I FOKKING DARE YOU!”
It was at that moment that Heliotrope cut through them both, one man’s head jumping off his shoulders, the other one clutching the bloody stump of his arm… only for Kraber to shoot him in the gut, knocking him over.
Damn this seven-shooter was cool.
“I’m taking this,” Kraber announced, sliding into the driver’s seat.
“I don’t think that’s what ‘distraction’ meant back during basic,” Aegis said, jumping into the bed of the pickup truck, just behind the machinegun.
Heliotrope looked at Aegis quizzically. “Well, they can’t notice us anymore, so I consider them distracted.”
“I knew there was a reason I liked the both of you,” Kraber said, just as Nny and Fiddlesticks rolled up in a motorcycle.
Fiddlesticks had a mingun as she sat in the sidecar. Nny was holding his unfeasibly massive revolver in his right hand, the bike’s handlebars in his left.
“Don’t forget about us two,” someone called over to them. A one-eyed man with a curiously thin leg, and a pony with a guitar case.
Paul and Sixstring.
“You’ve got one eye,” Heliotrope called down to Paul. “Think you can-”
“I know damn well I can,” Paul snapped, climbing up to the back of the truck, pulling Sixstring up behind the gun mount. “Sorry about scraping the paint on this-”
“Reh, fok it,” Kraber sighed, and gunned the engine. “It’s a rental. By the way, Aegis?”
“Yeah?” the huge white stallion asked.
“Anything you want to say, there’s a radio here. Connected to the equipment they used, it sounds like,” Kraber said. “The floor is yours.”
Aegis
Aegis could hear sirens in the distance. Whatever the HLF had been doing, it hadn’t been limited to just the Neighborhood. Some of them sounded like they were coming from downtown (as much as it had a downtown) Littleton.
Francis looked over to him from the driver seat.
“Right then,” Aegis said. “I don’t know what prompted these bastards to come here, or why things went pear-shaped. I don’t know what that bucking shit about what the ‘voice of god’ and this ‘hotline’ were about. But I know we’ve lost people. They took Julie’s husband. They busted up my house. They hurt. My. Foals. And we’re going to show them...”
Aegis wasn’t accustomed to the venom in his voice, and made no effort to dial it back. He welcomed it, even.
Kraber
“...that these bastards fucked with the wrong neighborhood,” Aegis said. “Frank? Gun the engine.”
And so Kraber did, flooring the massive truck and speeding up towards Gorham. But he couldn’t help but think on Bowen’s body. The soot around the back of the head. The bruise, the burns…
Right when she’d been about to do something good, drag HLF down the same path he’d taken, she’d been shot in the head, from behind no less.
Something’s not right here, Kraber thought.