“It’s quiet,” observed Sandbar suspiciously, looking around the empty streets of Vanhoover. “Too quiet.”
“Well…yeah,” replied Drafty, puzzled by his pointing out the obvious. “The ghouls are all keeping out of the light, and any survivors left are in hiding.” She remembered that very well from when she and her friends had been hunkered down after the floodwaters had receded. Going out in the daytime had been less dangerous than at night, but it was by no means safe. That’s why I made sure to fly whenever I went out, rather than walk, she remembered, glancing at Turbo. But if what he said was right, then I was just making myself obvious to all of the ghouls that were lurking in the area. The thought was an uncomfortable one; she and the others had endured more than a few nighttime attacks by ghouls, to the point where they’d barricaded themselves in a second-floor apartment after trapping the entire ground floor. The idea that they’d been so consistently targeted because she’d lured them there with her flying left her feeling self-conscious and guilty.
C. Shells rolled her eyes, oblivious to Drafty’s distress. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just saying that because he thinks it sounds cool.”
“Well it does,” protested Sandbar. “Honestly, we’re on an adventure! You guys should get into the spirit a little more.”
“Spoken like somepony that wasn't here while this city was falling apart,” replied Cloudbank distractedly, the bulk of her attention being focused on looking around. “Living through that was an adventure too, and I’d be just as happy never to get back into that particular spirit ever again.”
“Will you all please shut up?” murmured Turbo. “Bad enough we had to come back here at all, but your yapping is going to bring every ghoul in the city down on us!”
Everypony quieted down at that, trotting in silence. Even so, their passage through the city wasn’t silent; the soft clopping of their hooves on the road echoed loudly in their ears, and even their breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the silent city. They continued forward like that for several minutes, Drafty leading the way, before C. Shells spoke up softly. “I know it’s a little late to ask this, but where exactly are we headed?”
“The bank closest to the camp is Vanhoover Community Financial,” replied Drafty. She smiled faintly at the name, remembering a time before the city went completely to pieces. “We always just called it Big Banks, which I thought was strange when I was a filly since it was only a three-story building. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was actually ‘Big Banks’,’ with an apostrophe at the end of it, because that was the name of the original owner.”
“Who was Piggy’s great-grandstallion,” muttered Cloudbank, remembering the way the fat little pony had bragged about that when Drafty was hitting him up for information.
Turbo’s eyebrows went up at that. “We’re going to be knocking over Piggy’s family’s bank?” He’d known that Piggy’s family was in charge of the town’s financial institutions, but somehow he hadn’t made the connection that their current mission was going to impact his companion so directly.
Cloudbank shot him a wary look. “Is that a problem?”
“Are you kidding?” scoffed Turbo quietly. “We had to put up with that oversized creampuff’s inflated ego every day. As far as I’m concerned, this is quite literally payback.” Despite his words, Turbo’s smirk wasn’t malicious. Piggy’s completely baseless sense of self-importance had been somewhat annoying to deal with, but prolonged exposure had made it seem more humorous than irritating, to the point where his antic insistence that he was the leader of their group had turned him into something of a mascot. Though I suppose Granola Bar would say something different, he silently conceded.
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to be making a contribution to everypony’s welfare,” snickered Drafty. Her mirth settled down as she looked around again, pointing to a nearby building. “Okay, that’s the theater, so we should only be nine or ten blocks away!”
“We’re lucky the bank is so close to the edge of town,” mused C. Shells.
Drafty shook her head. “It’s not luck. Big Banks’ was deliberately placed at the northeast edge of town in order to be closer to ponies coming in from the farmlands to the north. They’d sell their produce and have a lot of bits that they wouldn’t want to haul all the way back home, so it was safer and easier for them to just deposit them here. That way, whenever they needed to come into town for something, they could just withdraw the money right here.” As unpleasant as Piggy had been to deal with, he was a font of information about his family’s business.
“Huh. That’s pretty smart,” admitted Sandbar.
Drafty nodded, leading them around a corner as they walked. “Yeah, it basically made-, uh-oh.” She came to a halt as she finished rounding the corner, everypony else coming to a stop as well as they beheld the scene ahead of them.
Despite the fact that they were walking down a main thoroughfare, the way ahead was completely impassable due to a large swath of debris clogging the road. Old boxes, busted cabinets, broken bottles, dented cans, bent chairs, overturned carts, ruined books, and other unidentifiable junk formed a barrier that stretched across the street. “Oh, this is not good,” muttered Cloudbank as she surveyed the pile of garbage critically.
“Why?” asked Drafty. “This is a little inconvenient, but we have three pegasi and two earth ponies.” She pointed at C. Shells and Sandbar. “Absolute worst case scenario, it’ll take us two trips to carry both of them across. We’ll have to fly, but as long as we stay close to the ground it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact…” She paused to peer at the garbage pile again, smiling. “I think there are some carts in there! If we can find one that’s not broken and fish it out, we’ll be all set!"
But C. Shells had started shaking her head before Drafty finished speaking. “That’s fine for getting past this now, but what about when we come back? Can the three of you pick up a cart that’s been loaded down with bits and fly it over all this?” Her tone of voice made it clear that she already knew the answer, and Drafty didn’t try to contradict her. “We’re going to need to come back a different way.”
“We could just use the side streets,” ventured Sandbar, waving a hoof at the various intersections around them. “They should be plenty wide enough to fit a cart through, and we’d only have to go a few blocks out of our way.”
“That’s a bad idea,” replied Turbo immediately. “The narrower the streets get less light and have less room to maneuver. Going that way is just asking for ghouls to ambush us. We should stick to the main roads, even if we have to take some extra time and go around.”
Cloudbank frowned. “If we take too much time, then Sonata’s enchantments will wear off, and we’ll be weakened.” She didn’t look away from the massive pile or garbage as she spoke, trying to figure out if it had occurred naturally in the wake of the flooding, or if it had been deliberately constructed. The former was entirely plausible; if the debris had been swept along when the water engulfed the city, it wasn’t unbelievable that some of it had gotten caught on something, catching more trash until it had clogged the entire street. But if this was made deliberately…
Drafty seemed to share her thoughts. “Could this have been put here on purpose?”
“You think the ghouls did this?” asked C. Shells, looking around suspiciously.
“Them, or maybe some other survivors.” Drafty’s eyes scanned the windows – many of them broken or boarded up – of the nearby buildings. “We built a barricade when we were hiding too.”
“It doesn’t matter.” There was an undercurrent of anxiety in Turbo’s voice, his words coming out harshly. “It’s here, and we’ve got to figure out how to deal with it. Standing around and talking about it isn’t doing anything except wasting time and making us a target. We need to decide on a plan and execute it!”
“I agree.” Cloudbank turned to face the others. “We’ll go with Drafty’s idea for now. The three of us,” she indicated herself, Drafty, and Turbo, “will carry C. Shells and Sandbar across. Then we’ll try and retrieve one of the carts in there and take it with us. We’ll figure out what to do about the return trip once we’ve loaded it up.” Nopony objected to her decision, and Cloudbank nodded, unable to help but feel slightly pleased about that. So far so good. If we’re lucky this will be the only obstacle we have to overcome. It took barely a minute to ferry the two earth ponies over the pile of garbage, after which point Drafty and Turbo went to work trying to extricate one of the carts that was entangled in the mess. Cloudbank stayed with C. Shells and Sandbar on the far side of the pile, keeping a lookout.
Holding Severance, Cloudbank quietly whispered to it. “Do you see anyone?” Although the scythe had no eyes or ears or any other obvious way of observing the world around it, it quite clearly had some method of perceiving its environment. Given the potential for danger all around them, she had every intention of making use of that…if the scythe cooperated. Cloudbank was very aware that it wouldn’t help a wielder that it felt was dependent on it, having demonstrated that amply when it had done nothing to prevent the kraken from making her stab Drafty. If it decided that her question now qualified as being dependent…
She let out a relieved breath as Severance answered her query in the negative. She was about to follow up by asking how reliable its senses were – she had no idea if the weapon could see through walls or otherwise exceed the awareness of an ordinary pony – but before she could there was a loud crash as a wooden bookshelf fell over, dislodged by the cart Turbo and Drafty were lifting. The pegasi both winced, and Turbo shot Drafty a dirty look. “You were supposed to catch that before it fell!”
“I didn’t have a chance! You were lifting the cart too fast!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Cloudbank stomped a hoof, certain that if the ghouls hadn’t been aware of them before, they were now. “Just hurry up and get that over here!”
A moment later, the cart was placed onto the ground for their inspection. It was the basic two-wheeled variety, having a relatively small bed set above the axis and a harness allowing it to be pulled along by a single pony. Even better, it turned out to be almost completely intact, the only problem being several of the spokes in the left wheel being cracked. “It’ll have to do,” announced Cloudbank, before pointing at Sandbar. “You’re in charge of the cart. Just remember that it’ll be a lot heavier after we load it up.”
Sandbar smirked. “Don’t worry about that. One of my jobs on our ship was weighing the anchor. A small cart like this won’t be a problem.” He was already moving as he spoke, strapping himself into the harness. After he did he reared up on his back legs for a moment, bucking his fore-hooves in a gesture of readiness. “Okay, time to plunder us a bank and get some booty!”
C. Shells muttered several very choice words about her subordinate’s attitude as they got underway.
A few minutes later they stood in front of the bank. As Drafty had said, it was a three-story building, one that might have looked almost homey if it had been in better condition. As it was, the lower part of the exterior was stained and grimy from the flooding, and a few of the windows were broken. Letters proclaiming the building’s name had been affixed to the outer wall, but several of them were missing, turning the title into gibberish. Trash littered the front entrance, and the front doors were sagging in place, the bottom hinges having come off the wall.
“This is going to be the hard part,” declared Turbo as he looked at the building critically. “Inside it’s going to be cramped and dark, perfect for ghouls to ambush us.” He threw a sidelong glance at the others. “We need to stick together and be extremely careful. Just one bite from those things, or a single scratch, can paralyze you, and you won’t be able to yell for help as they drag you away and devour you alive.”
“We get it,” replied C. Shells anxiously. Despite everything she’d been through, she couldn’t help but feel unnerved by what Turbo was saying. Trying to push that feeling away, she looked at Drafty. “Any idea where we should start?”
The other mare nodded. “According to what Piggy told me, we’ll want to head to the vault.”
“And where’s that?” asked Sandbar.
Drafty’s face was grim as she replied. “The basement.”