The Slow Mutants
01
Run

Thanks to Jed R and Crow T R0bot for editing and prereading. You da best, guys.

Remember those? Nobody seems to, now. They’re all just the lobotomized, smiling drones that ask how fast you want their running start to be if you ask them to jump off a cliff. No, I’m from before that. I’m one of the newfoals you could talk to and think “Hey, that’s actually a person!”

I should, by all logic, be one of those smiling idiots. And I’m not that, either. Instead, I’m drawing in short, ragged breaths as I hide in the basement of the old tumbledown house, surrounded by papers covered in wobbly, unsteady hornwriting, magazine articles, lighter fluid, molotov cocktails, and my supply of mane and fur dye. I’m keeping that at least until I learn a spell that can change colors. There’s aar few clothes that fit me. I swear to…

‘Born in 199… and then, apparently, I have forgotten the exact year. It’s not that I don’t know how old I am, (at least, I think it’s not!) it’s just that the human calendar seems to slip out of my mind whenever I think about it too hard.

Sure, I can tell myself I remember all of it, but who am I fooling? I look them over, and shove the more irreplaceable ones into my saddlebags. Like the old cutout of the Birmingham Mail:

No time to read it. I shove it in my saddlebag, and as I look around I feel as if my head should be bumping against the ceiling. It’s not. Some part of me remembers how big I used be and rebels at the size of my hideaway in the collapsed house. It’s small even for a pony. I think, back before I changed, I had claustrophobia. And every alarm is going off in my head. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe I’m convincing myself that they are.

I drench myself in water. I wash out the dye. And now to decide on a new color to take. A new life. A new disguise. Ideally, I’d have some kind of spell to change my fur, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ll have to decide on a new cutie mark.

When it’s mostly gone, I find a bottle of cheap alcohol and grab it in a thaumic field. It’s not perfect. It shudders and wobbles like it’s being held by an old man with Parkinson’s. The bottle of rotgut isn’t what I’d prefer for this job, but it it’s just flammable enough to work.

“Well,” I say, ready to cast a small flame spell. “I’d say it was fun while it lasted, except… it wasn’t.”

I don’t want to set it all on fire, but I’ve learned the hard way what happens if I don’t. A newfoal carrying that much information on who they used to be is suspicious to everyone. Which leads to people finding out I’m a newfoal. Which leads to the thought ‘maybe she’s immune...’

Which never ends well. Trust me. The slightest hint that someone could be unscathed by the Potion (which I am not) will drive virtually anyone insane. Opaline… oh, poor Opaline.

Like I said. Everyone thinks of newfoals as these barely-functional, smiley morons. But before that, there were the Slow Newfoals. Newfoals like…

Here’s how it worked. Someone would take the Potion back in 2016 or 17. Before the Purple Spring. And for awhile, they’d be fine.

And then they’d… change. They’d forget little things. Change their name. Everything would fade out of their mind, until you got the smiling, braindead little abominations that relentlessly hated any hint of who they used to be.

We all thought it was curable, even as PER and others claimed this was just their natural state, that they were just that happy to be ponies.

And then the Purple Spring. People started getting potioned - and then, they’d immediately do a complete 180. People that had been against ponification suddenly turned rabid. Ready to destroy anything that felt too human.

And all around, newfoals that’d had the Potion back when it was first introduced… newfoals that you’d think were mostly fine… weren’t. They were falling apart, mentally. Losing everything that made them individuals, day after day. Some killed themselves.

Except apparently I missed that part. So here I am, almost no compulsion to follow the Solar Empire. For now, anyway.

Days of thinking “am I going to turn into one of them?” turned into weeks. Then months. Then years. Then waking up one day in 2021 and thinking one day ‘OH FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, JUST GET ON WITH IT!’

Then here I am in 2022, in Washington State. Halfway around the world from Birmingham. Barely any mental degeneration, mostly in my right mind.

I’ve spent ten months here, now. The longest I’ve stayed in any one place, I remember feeling… well, not quite happy. But I remember feeling secure, if that makes sense. As secure as I can without being sure that the core of my very self is falling away and I’m becoming one of those smiling idiots.

On the one hoof, this is the middle of nowhere, which is why I picked this place to hide. On the other, Quincy, Washington is the middle of bucking nowhere, which means I’m not exactly spoiled for escape routes.

I weigh my options. I could try and run out of town as fast as I could, and find a sympathetic hitchhiker. Which is roughly as likely as learning to teleport and making my way to Seattle, then becoming human again. In other words, both are freaking impossible.

The best option is to take the train out. I don’t have the timetable, but freight trains run through here fairly regularly. I have no idea how to get into one of the cars, but it’s not like I have another option.

Before I light it all up, I read over the scrawls of paper I’ve used to wallpaper the hideaway. They have to go. I don’t know what’ll happen if they read these, if they find out I’m here, but I’ve been burned (ha!) too many times to get curious.

Whatever happens tonight, I’m going out remembering who I used to be. I don’t know if it helps to remember. However, I also don’t know if it doesn’t help.

“Your… my name is-” I start I draw in a sharp intake of breath as I realize, for a short few seconds, I can’t remember my name.

I shake my head. No, Dew Glow was my alias while I worked here. That’s not what I meant to say. Like hay it is… no, that’s not what I wanted to say! Something more like… like buck… Tartarus… like Discord’s horns…

My mind runs through an encyclopedia of more equine phrases, and I feel sweat drenching my fur as I realize I can’t remember the things I used to say.

My mind catches a blank. But whatever my name is, that can’t be it! I recite everything I remember about myself. I go over any memories I can. My fifth birthday. The big mutt of a dog with some Newfoundland in it that I got when I was eleven. The toe I was missing. The time I was thrown - like, actually bodily thrown - out of class. The time I asked for pie for my birthday, not cake.

“My name is Hope!” I exclaim. “It’s sappy as he…. ck, but thankfully, it works for a pony and human name.”

With that, the floodgates open and I think back to the day I took the Ponification Potion. Or, more specifically, the Slow Potion. It all started back in…

“There has to be something!” my mother pleaded. “Drugs, therapies, anything! Some Armacham tech, we’ll take anything at this point!”

“There’s one thing,” I rasped. It hurts to talk. It’s like I’ve had to drag the words uphill on a chain, and my voice is ragged and whispery. I don’t have much time left. It feels like by speaking, I’ve shaved off most of my lifespan.

“Hope,” my father said. “We don’t know what it does to people. If you’re sure-”

“But she’s right,” my mother said. “It’s the only thing. And if it’s this advanced…”

I realize, all of a sudden, that I can’t quite remember their faces. It’s like I can only see them out of the corner of my eye, but when I focus too hard the details slip away.

“I can’t pretend I like this,” the doctor said, “but… I’m with your father. We don’t know the effects. We don’t know… God, I don’t know jack shit about it!”

I can actually remember the doctor’s face better than my parents. His pale brown-blond, graying, immaculate beard. His pale blue eyes. The half-moon spectacles. And how fucked up is that?

“My daughter will die if we don’t try anything else,” my mother said. “And she’ll die in-”

To this day, I don’t know if he’d done that for his own benefit or mine. Misguided though he might have been. Mom was right, though. I would die in agony without the potion.

The kind of cancer some people get forms hard masses. The kind that I have will turn my stomach into a… well. If they try to draw blood, they won’t just take out blood. They’ll draw out a lumpy, sickly-colored mass in the needle, too.

A former combat engineer in the Crystal War, a pale white earth pony with a cutie mark of several wooden shields. I can’t quite believe it, but his name was Shieldwall. Yes, that Shieldwall.

Must’ve taken guts to tell a girl with cancer that she should die. But he said he was worried. He said he wasn’t sure how safe it was - that it needed much more testing, much more surety, before it could be said to be anything resembling a real solution.

And for a second, as I remember all this, I feel almost human again. I feel a sense of rightness in my body I haven't felt for longer than I can remember, and I feel whole.

The flames are just at the edge of the room. And for a moment, I think about not moving. I think about just letting the flames consume me.

I can disobey. I can remember my old name. I can - most of the time - keep going, act indistinguishable from any of the pony refugees this country lets in its borders, I can fight the Solar Empire. But whatever it is that keeps me going, keeps me me isn’t likely to last. One day I’m going to stop, and then I won’t be Hope anymore. I’ll just be another Newfoal that gets used as cannon fodder or experiment fodder.

Or - and this terrifies me - maybe I won’t. If I’ve been going five years, ponified in body but not in mind, what will the Solar Empire do to me? Disassemble me molecule by molecule? What will the PHL do to me? HLF? PER? EHS, even?

It’s the middle of the night, so nobody’s out in the fields. The wheat is just high enough to keep me mostly concealed, and I softly trot through the swaying golden stalks.

“Now, Dew Glow,” Bryan Emslie said. “You know that you’ve been a great asset here.” He was smiling, making such an effort to look positive that he had to be on the verge of telling me something truly horrible.

I wanted to throw myself out the window, pack up my stuff, and never set hoof in this town again. Whenever an employer said something like that, reminding me of my positives with the implication they were about to say something in spite of them, it was never a good sign.

I didn’t want to run. That would be just proving them right. Besides, maybe he was telling me to stop taking sick days, or to get more sleep. Whatever he was going to say couldn’t be too ba-

“Your Equus Refugee Code is…” Emslie said. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s irregularities with it.”

“W-what?” I stammered. I stood, shaking on all four legs. I wished to heaven that I was shaking on two, but no such luck. “Th-that… that has to be a mistake. I’m sure it’s-”

“Even if I checked, I still wouldn’t find it,” Emslie said. The smile on his face had mutated into what could have been a smirk or sadness. “For starters, the real ‘Dew Glow’ died in a PER attack. You know, Dewy, a lot of things have never quite added up about you. The way you work for a farm when you could easily earn more with the PHL. The way none of the workers have ever seen you loosen up.”

“I don’t like drinking!” I protested. And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how absolutely flat that sounded.

“My sister doesn’t either,” Emslie said, his expression changing to something that was neither a frown nor a smile. “And she’s still a party animal. There’s a lot to admire there, am I right?”

“It’s almost as if,” Emslie said, “You’re hiding something. What with the falsified identity...”

I have all kinds of visions replaying in my head of how that moment should have gone. Emslie should have done something like pumping his grandfather’s old trenchgun. He should have revealed armed guards behind the door. He should have started ranting and raving at me. He should’ve revealed he was one of the alphabet assholes from an organization like the PHL, PHH, EHS, HLF.

“I just want to know, before we take you in,” Emslie said, “What’s going on.”

There’s men and women with guns, everywhere. Even a purplish-pink earth pony who’s staring at me with a judgmental look on her face.

“Knew there was somethin’ off about you,” she says, in an accent that sounds American but not quite. A little more twangy.

I’ll just end up like Opaline. Torn apart by an angry mob, traumatized from the evacuation of Sicily, caught belowdecks in a repurposed container ship. They caught wind that she was a newfoal that wasn’t a barely functional moron. As best I can tell, they started at thinking “THE CURE IS IN HER BLOOD!” and lost the thread by the time they were on top of her.

“You let me die, Hope,” I can almost - no, not almost - hear her saying. I can hear her voice echoing.

Instead, I panic. Years of instincts flare up, and the desire to flee is utterly overpowering. I think about being somewhere else, I think about being out of the building, and I see blue...

I don’t know how I managed it. Few ponies have ever given me proper instruction on magic, but I’m not going to question this.

Except, I shouldn’t have listened, because he wouldn’t have believed me. He wouldn’t have trusted me.

I’ve worked this whole thing out in my head. There’s a train full of lumber that heads down south. Off to supply more wood for prefab houses. What I’m thinking is…

That I won’t take that one. Everyone’s expecting me to take it. Instead, I’m going to find a passenger train and get as far from here as possible. Payment or not. It’s at the other end of town, but I can make it. Probably.

I think back to the crude map of the town that I’d drawn. Included are my guesses as to what territory belongs to who. I know there’s PER not too far from here, so there’s a big question mark. Most of the town is marked as HLF territory, with Emslie’s farm and a nearby house listed as PHL territory.

The way I heard it, he’d come from a solidly HLF farming family that’d been willing to pass out guns and fortify the town during the Three Weeks of Blood, when the riots from bigger cities like Seattle or Vancouver threatened to spill out into the countryside Though Emslie had gone against it, accepting a generous subsidy from the PHL to employ earth pony workers, much to the shock of his family.

But, I think, as I trot towards the edge of the town, Guess that’s over now.

And then the fields just stop. I see what might have once been a suburb, but now doesn’t look so rosy and kind. Cheap plastic toys lay strewn all over the lawns. One of them had a porch that looked like it’d been added on after the fact, before the War when people still had enough money for that sort of thing.

I’ve actually been to one of these houses. The family was nice, and they made good curry. But on the moment, I can see the mother standing outside, a worried look on her face.

And in front of her is an HLF woman. It looks like one of Emslie’s sisters. A little heavyset, dark curly hair, pale, blue-eyed. Kinda like him, just moderately less stocky.

She’s got a black assault rifle, too. It’s a little longer than a military carbine. Which is rarely, if ever a good sign. I’m not completely sure of what HLF will do to me if they find me, and I don’t want to know.

Despite myself, I can still hear the woman with the gun, talking to the owner of the house. And I can see children poking their heads out from behind the doorframe, just behind the woman.

“-don’t know what she’s up to, but Bryan went over her records. Found some irregularities,” says the woman with the rifle.

“I’ve met Dew Glow,” says the woman at the door. Her name is Annamarie. “She always seemed nice enough! Is she-?”

“Her Equus Refugee Code doesn’t exist,” says the woman with the rifle. “I don’t think you need to worry for her. I think you should start worrying about what she’ll do.”

“I mean, we suspect her of being PER. At the very least, she hasn’t been above-board about her identity.”

I promise, I’m not PER. I’m not a potioner. Technically. But there it is - one of Emslie’s sisters saying outright that she believes there was a PER agent in town. If Emslie calling me to his office was not a sign I should leave as soon as possible, this was akin to Celestia-

NO NO NO, DARN IT NO! Not Celestia. NEVER HER! It is, I tell myself, nothing like that monster! It is more akin to God Himself stepping down from the heavens, and saying “Lo, Hope, You Must Get-eth out of this place.”

And then I feel something. A few years ago, I would have said it was coming from my gut. But the first thing that comes to mind is that I suddenly realize this, and I attribute the sensation to my horn:

‘Whatever sense of balance this town had is going to Tartarus in a handbasket. Leave now.

I think about that and head for the railroad station. I’ve been practicing invisibility spells, so I think I can make it work.

I want to run there as fast as possible. But I can’t, because that would be too suspicious. I also want to hide behind everything I can. Melt into the shadows. But that would be a death sentence if somebody found me.

Even in a town that has an… appreciable population of pony laborers, people still get jittery when they see a pony doing something even vaguely suspicious. Which can be anything from… well, hiding in the shadows, to looking too confident, to breathing suspiciously. Or just being there.

It’s like I’m spreading the news behind me, like the wake of a speedboat. The closer I get to the railyard in the middle of town, the more chaotic the town seems to be. I hear something like this refrain as I make my way to the station, passing house after house.

‘There is a suspicious pony in town. We’re going to find her and teach her what happens when you...

Of course, nobody has an answer for what I actually did. All they need to know is that there’s a pony - which, I guess, is me - and she is Suspicious. Some are saying I’m some kind of PHL plant come to… subvert things? And others are saying:

“She’s PER. Has to be. Why would there be a PHL spy in a town with this kind of presence? For all we know she could be potioning the drinking water!”

I duck into an alleyway between two houses, rushing into overgrown, weed-filled lot. There’d be enough space for a house in the lot, but nobody seems to use it.

“SHE WENT THIS WAY!” I hear someone yell, and then I suddenly know beyond a doubt that there is a man with a gun nearby.

A big rusting car that looks like it could be sixty or seventy years old stands on cinderblocks instead of wheels - it looks as if the owner hasn’t used it for anything, hasn’t donated it to the scrapmetal drives, and hasn’t done anything but let it moulder.

But it’s perfect. I dash forward, with more speed than I knew was possible, and slide under the rusting metal frame of the ancient vehicle.

I see a PHL man in body armor, assault rifle in hand. He’s got an earth pony named Cinnamon Stick at his side, a mare with red-brown fur, a red mane, and a blaze of white down her face that makes her look almost like she could be from this planet. Though she’s still a pony, I still feel a surge of resentment when I see how almost offensively Earth she looks.

What gives you the damn right?! I scream internally. I was born here and you get to look like you…

“Honestly?” Beckitt says. “No damn idea. But Emslie told us that there’s no Equus Refugee Code for her. Then, of course, she fled the scene. She’s doing something, and she needs custody before...”

I don’t know what will happen if the PHL capture me, but it can’t be good. So now I have two groups of armed bastards ready put a bullet in my skull.

I’m also not entirely sure that, if they discover what I really am, they won’t eat me alive.

Here’s the thing, I might like to help them. I might like to trust them. On paper, the safest option is to turn myself in there. Or so I keep telling myself. Except either a, they’ll shoot me, or b, they’ll run long, painful tests on me. Or c, I’ll give in if they get me. Give in to the near-constant whispering that says to be happy and forget everything else. And then I might…

I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to know who I’ll be, how I’ll think if one day I give up.

“What the hell was that?!” Beckitt asks. I try to keep myself from wincing at the profanity, and mostly succeed.

‘Darn it, I swore like a sailor before I went ponified, and I flinch at ‘hell’? What kind of crud is that?’ I ask myself.

“Someone’s in trouble!” Cinnamon Stick says. She doesn’t waste time, and bolts off in the direction of the scream. Which is, unfortunately, the same direction as the railyard. South.

I stay under the wrecked car (which somebody really should scrap) for awhile longer. Until I’m sure that they’re finally gone.

When they’ve left, I crawl out and make a detour. I’m going to cross the tracks. Get to one of the big shipping depots.

It’s not too important how long I kept going. What’s important is that you know what I saw, when I reached the edge of that neighborhood:

I saw a mob of angry men and women, gathered around a pickup truck under a lamppost. A pony who looked… sort of like me? held on a rope, tied to what looked like a small yoke around her neck. A man with an expression of sheer, raw hatred on his face as he stands in the bed of the truck.

He has an almost immaculately maintained brown goatee, and hair that’s not quite shaven at the sides. I know the man by reputation, from the outskirts of town:

He’d come up here to rural Washington with a group of HLF of his own in ‘21, not long after the death of Algernon Spader, leader of the HLF. But we’ll get to that later. I’m mostly certain that he never got on with Spader, as I’ve been given every indication that he’s the kind of HLF man who isn’t so much regretful of what he’d done to innocent ponies and those who harbored them back during the Three Weeks of Blood, as much as he was regretful that he was caught doing it in the first place.

The screwed up thing is, when I came into town, I actually thought the HLF presence might keep me safe. I thought they’d help.

I’m not totally sure if this makes me wrong or right here. On the one hoof, they’re willing to kill an innocent. On the other, it makes a good distraction.

“You’re a pony!” someone in the crowd yells at the top of her lungs. “THAT’S ENOUGH FOR US!”

She doesn’t have anything to do with this, my mind races. I could save her, if I had enough magic, if I was fast enough, good enough…!

I really should have left for the station at this point. I really should have just ignored what was happening. But it was like my hooves were rooted to the concrete of the sidewalk. I couldn’t not watch what was happening.

“For crimes against our town,” Pratkanis snarls, “For being part of the PER! For being connected to those bastards that’d turn us into mindless little dolls… we sentence you to death!”

“Jesus, Nate,” I hear someone say from the crowd. “Ain’t this a bit far?”

I don’t hear what comes next, because a big, heavy-looking PHL vehicle motors by me. It looks like it can take more than a few rockets and ignore them. Not helping is that I know - from experience, from the last time PER came within spitting distance of town - that the HLF have rocket launchers.

And there’s some other people trailing behind it in trucks with machine-guns awkwardly bolted to the roofs. For a second, I can’t quite tell who’s PHL and who’s not. I can see a pony in the back of one truck - and I cringe against the wall when I see it’s her.

They’re filling up the street, and I realize, all of a sudden - I’m surrounded. I am not getting across that bridge without somebody noticing me. I know it.

I see those two from the field, Beckitt and Cinnamon Stick. I dive behind a trash can, and watch them coming onto the scene.

“Stand down, Pratkanis!” I hear some PHL woman yell. I know, from experience, that her last name is Canterra. She’s in charge of most PHL-run industry in this town, helping earth ponies find work farming. “Stand the fuck down!”

I don’t know what she expects to happen. What, does she think that it won’t be a powderkeg? Does she think that the town isn’t going to eat her alive?

Of course, I don’t care what happens here. There is a loading bay for all the grain, potatoes, and other foods I helped harvest, just across the railroad tracks.

I’m not looking at the confrontation, so I don’t have much idea of what’s going on as I cross the tracks. There’s a light down the tracks, too.

It is at this moment that suddenly I feel a surge of glee at leaving town. Because living in close proximity to someone like Pratkanis was, putting it lightly, a goddamn nightmare. But I had to, darn it. I needed somewhere out of the way with an easy escape route.

I’m almost giddy with the thrill of being across the tracks, almost behind a boxcar now. And it’s just then that I see what that side of the tracks has become.

Pandemonium. I can see Emslie’s sister on the roof of a house, shouting. I can see huge masses of people surrounding Pratkanis’ truck. I can see the police cars, sirens flashing in the night, heading for this.

When PHL, when anyone close to their lines moves even slightly, I can see someone HLF raising a gun at them. I can see a man standing next to Pratkanis, a worried look on his face. He keeps looking to the pony and back, and I can just tell he’s really, really not sure about whether he’s doing the right thing.

I’d say this crowd could be easily sparked into a massacre, but that’s not quite true. It could spark into a massacre if someone looks at it funny.

I make a right, following the tracks towards the west side of town, towards Wenatchee.

It’s just then that suddenly I hear someone yelling, and I start running faster. Whatever these people are about to get themselves into, I want no part of it.

“You IDIOT!” Cinnamon Stick yells, and something about her voice makes them all go quiet behind me “She has a gray coat, Concord Grape there has a purple one! That’s not Dew Glow, ya dumb bastard!”

And it’s difficult to say what I feel next. It’s like, even if I’m still running, the world freezes all around me. Like everyone, especially me, is holding their breath. I can feel so many eyes boring into me.

“THAT IS!” she yells, and I know that she has to be pointing. Right. At. ME!

So I run even faster, right up until the moment I see armed men and women guns running at me. Some of which look to be police. I have no idea where they’ve come from, but all I know is, they’re cutting off my main route out of here.

It’s only a few seconds later that I hear the gunshots. Something chops through my ear, and blood runs down my face, right into an eye.

I throw myself behind a pair of boxcars, panting heavily. I steal a look between two gaps, and I see something terrifying:

HLF and PHL working together. It’s like the previous not-quite-a-riot has been forgotten. Both of them advance towards me, crossing the tracks, guns in hand or jaws over mouth triggers.

I can see someone through the crowd on their cell phone. I can hear the screams:

And though I don’t hear my name, I know they’re coming for me. I know the whole town is going to be baying for blood.

About ten seconds ago, these people were at each other’s throats. And now, I’ve made them work together. Whatever animosity they had before, it’s gone now.

If there's anything that can make people work together, no matter how much they hate each other, it's PER. Even now, even with the HLF falling apart in the wake of Algernon Spader’s death, the mere hint of PER will drive people mad.

I make a left and barrel through a graveyard. There’s something strangely calming about the grass against my hooves, but not about the gravestones.

I can see some more recent ones. Gravestones that conspicuously end in ‘P’ then the year, meaning that this town has lost more than a few people to ponification. Sure, maybe it’s implausible that the town has turned against me so soon, but the gravestones explain everything. These are graves for people who aren’t technically dead, but have become so impossibly different, so hateful, so utterly gone that people have no idea how to process their current state of existence other than ‘gone’.

And yet I’m technically one of them. And I’m not PER. Not a bullet-sponge. Not a lobotomized zombie. How? Why?

“Hey!” yells a man in a long coat with a hood, almost a cloak. He's got a gas mask hanging awkwardly over a chest plate. He's also got some kind of short Kalashnikov. “Dew Glow, what's-”

“SHE’S PER!” someone screams from behind me, and the man has only a second to throw on his mask and start firing.

I dodge to the right, but the spray of concrete and grass is too close for comfort. Everything's a blur around me, and I can barely think straight. There’s just one impulse ringing out in my mind: Survive.

I know I don't have much longer to live. I also know that I have one option left, the absolute nightmarish one:

DARN! I think as I skid to the right, onto the town’s main street now, just next to some of the bigger businesses. The ones with loading docks. I would have hid in a train car, but I can hear alarms going off all around me. I can see a security guard, or two, or five, or ten, rushing towards me from the properties.

On the one hoof, running through the business district means attention from security guards. On the other hand, crossing the street means heading into a populated residential area.

I can’t think of what to do, so I run southeast, towards a pizza place. It’s not much, but I’m hoping I can find some cover somewhere, or a good enough hiding place. Maybe in a basement somewhere?!

What’ll they do to me? I think as my hooves clatter against the pavement. It would normally be late enough that there aren’t many cars, but this isn’t normal and I can hear engines revving up from nearby.

They’ve got me surrounded. All because I couldn’t find a bolthole near the railroad. All because I didn’t think enough about my escape route. STUPID!

Even as I pelt towards the hotel, and the bullets whistle through the air nearby, and the blood runs down my face, I have to think about that.

The HLF will kill me. The PHL will… well, if they find out I don’t have a cutie mark, they’ll kill me too. Or put me in some lab that tears me apart and puts me back together.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually hoping the HLF get to m-

Pain explodes in my left hind leg, and suddenly coordination is a distant dream from the past. I can feel something wet and sticky just behind one of the joints, and my leg feels like it’s been shoved into a hydraulic press.

I tumble, and I fall onto the concrete, a sprawling ungainly mess. I try to pull myself up on my forelegs. I grit my teeth, wheezing in agony, and for a second I’m standing on three legs. For one glorious second, I put one hoof forward, then another, and I start to run….!

I try to think straight and this is the best I have: I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead-

It’s like my mind is swimming and then drowning. Like I can’t possibly form a coherent thought.

I reach into my reserves of magic, and I imagine myself pushing. Something flickers around me, something that could be a shield, but it’s only there for a few seconds.

I should feel some kind of satisfaction, or peace that it finally ends. That tonight I won’t have to fear waking up as a different pony, waking up feeling like my mind is trapped in thick sludge. That I’ll die as myself.

I think as hard as I can about using the magic, and channel into the horn. I think about my leg. I think about how much I need to escape.

And then I see the truck. It’s an unremarkable rusty model I can’t quite place. For the life of me, I can’t explain how it got there ahead of the angry mob of PHL and HLF.

The truck’s door swings open, and a man runs out. He’s heavyset, not quite fat but nearly there, with a scraggly auburn hair and a beard. He might have been handsome, if not for the slightly scuffed prosthetic nose. Well, that and the fact that his face looks like it’s been thrown in a woodchipper, covered in cuts and what looks like bite marks.

“Get in,” he says, with a warmth that belies his horribly scarred face. “You’re going to be fine, whoever you are.”

And something makes me ready to listen. Probably the knowledge that I’ll die without them. So I let the man pick me up, almost gingerly. I let him carry me into the car, and place me on the car seat.

“Floor it, Aviva!” my rescuer says, and floor it the driver does. We speed out of town faster than a car this unaerodynamic should be able to.

I can’t remember most of what happened the next hour or so. I remember the woman rolling a bandage around my leg. I remember crying, tears rolling through my furry face from the sheer pain of the gunshot wound.

My rescuer had to have seen the mob - human and pony - chasing me. If they were HLF or PHL, there was a good chance they would join in.

So who would be willing to rescue a pony that they knew HLF and PHL would want dead? Who would have the presence of mind to think I-

The Slow Mutants

by Doctor Fluffy

01: Run