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// Prologue 
// Story: Zombies to Ponies in Ten Seconds Flat 
// by 8r0ny 
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The zombie apocalypse.  It may sound strange but I always hoped it would happen in my lifetime.  I could be a bad ass and kill shit like a boss...but it didn’t quite work out like I planned.  My friends from high school and I were always close and before shit hit the fan we would talk online and game together almost every night.  Once news of a zombie outbreak leaked they instantly came to me because of my "extensive zombie knowledge".  Or so I would like to say, I was really just well equipped and in a prime location.  My family always used to say, “If you’re prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you’re prepared for anything.”  My house was far from civilization and close to the water, so it was pretty nice for a while.  We would do supply runs in my lifted  Jeep Cherokee that, years before the outbreak, I had decked out with ‘Zombie Outbreak Response Vehicle’ decals, never imagining it would ever see the splatter of Zombies as I plowed them over.  I had a large custom sub enclosure I built that did a great job of luring zombies away when they got too close to our base of operations.  The 'Zombeep' as I called it was stocked with weapons, some food, and a med kit for our runs into town.  My Jeep is awesome, but I’ll move on.

    About a year after the outbreak we were running dangerously low on supplies, so we packed what we could into a few cars and made a last ditch effort to find other survivors.  We figured we would go to where I went to college because of it's location in the mountains.  As well as I knew others that lived up there that I was sure had survived like we had.  The trip was long and it really showed us how bad a state the world was in.  Over eighty percent of the worlds population were either dead or zombies, entire cities had been destroyed, towns were barren and thoroughly looted, bodies both dead and alive were littered everywhere.  It was a nightmare.  Yet, when we came upon my college town it seemed relatively untouched compared to the cities we had seen.

    We did some exploring and came across what I thought was a hoard of zombies.  Luckily, I was wrong and it was, in fact, a group of survivors.  I stopped and got out to greet them, both sides uneasy at first until I found a few faces I recognized.  I had my group join me and we explained our situation of how we were looking for other survivors.  You know, just like anyone else would in this situation.  They told me we needed to prove our worth if we were to be allowed to join them.  Well for myself, Nyjill, and Matthew, we were good at surviving and gathering supplies.  That's quite the skill to boast in a situation like this.  As for my other friends, well they were pretty smart.  Camden worked for NASA before the outbreak and Cody was a programmer and engineer for a government contractor.  Not the best skills to have when the enemy can be distracted by a thrown stick but it impressed the group nonetheless.  Apparently the group we met were scouting for miscellaneous parts needed at The Lab.  The Lab was a large complex built into the side of a mountain.  And where there is a lab, there are scientists.  That explains why they let our group in.  So we made our way to The Lab with newfound hope in our chests. 






After six months of living in the fortified lab, a lot had changed.  Most of my friends did their science thing while I worked with security, which  was pretty awesome.  I wasn't the only one on security, but I did work my way up to the top.  That’s right, the head honcho, at twenty-four years old.  The security team consisted of eight guys and three girls.  We were charged to protect the facility’s front entrance, which happens to be the only one since it was built into a mountain.  It wasn’t too difficult, we would lure zombies close, shoot them in the head with our crossbows, retrieve the bolt, burn the body and all the while avoid death.  We had to use crossbows because a gunshot would echo for miles and attract every zombie in the area.  That would be bad.

   Anyhow, while this was going down out front, in the lab there is a team of twenty-three scientists, engineers, and geniuses working on a secret project.  Half the people in The Lab were working on the secret project but they still kept the rest of us in the dark for whatever reason.  Camden and Cody, the two technological prodigies that wowed the group with their science knowledge, are now some of the top workers on said project.  Nick, or Nyjil, as I call him, is in the same boat as me.  He’s smart, but not nearly as smart as Camden and Cody, so he proves himself instead as being one of the top scouts in the scouting team.  Matthew helps out with the lab and secret project when he’s needed, but is usually working as the head of scouting.  He organizes missions, keeps track of inventory, and so on.  The scouting team goes out to get parts needed for the secret project, and also food or weapons if they run across any.  Their group is the smallest, only consisting of seven people total.  That leaves the last two people of the group, Zoe, who is Cody’s girlfriend, and Meredith, or Mistress, as my group calls her.  They do whatever they can to help.  So now that y'all have some background, today is the day the smarties show us what exactly their secret project is all about.  We’ve all been called into a meeting, as you’d expect before something as crazy as this.