A police cruiser was parked behind an isolated and abandoned roadside diner. Beneath the desert’s scouring wind, the car’s paint had all but peeled away to expose steel that gleamed brightly in the first rays of the dawn sunlight. Within the car were two bodies. One belonged to an unnamed man and the life had been crushed from it by this very car’s wheels. Now blood dried against the tatters of his clothes and crusted against the shivering flesh asleep beside it.
That flesh was of the second body locked within the trunk of the car. It belonged to Sugarcoat, and the girl hesitated to open her eyes. If she opened them, she might see it again. In much the same way, she refused to move anything lest her bare skin brush against the rags and mummified flesh that embraced her in this freezing coffin.
However, she could not stay still eternally, not when her lungs pleaded for air and her mind begged for its own curiosity to be slaked, just as her throat begged the same for her growing thirst. For minutes that felt like years, she struggled to stay silent and was paralyzed by the fear that her captor, Rarity Belle, might still be waiting outside to finish the act she failed to commit the first time around by stuffing her in here.
So, there she stayed, silent and praying for that psychopath to pass her by and leave her be. And stay she did, as the wind wailed outside the car and threw barrages of scraping sand against its door. Albeit weak in the winter dawn, the sun’s light slowly warmed the makeshift coffin until Sugarcoat’s frozen skin unstuck itself from the cold edges of the trunk.
Then the dam burst.
And she gasped in a breath and the air was rough and scouring against her nose and throat. One lone breath was not enough, however, so she began to pant and then, looking by mistake at the mangled remains of the man she lay on top of, she began to hyperventilate. Instinctively, she tried to scramble away and out the trunk and away from the car as if every second she spent near it was a second she spent in the fires of hell and her frozen body would be burned to ash if she spent a single second too long in this evil place.
But try was all she could do. Hammering against the door brought only pain to her fists and screaming for help only brought more of the aching dry desert air into her lungs.
Yet still, she persisted and she kicked and she punched fruitlessly against the reinforced glass and toughened steel of the car as her voice ground itself to nought beneath the weight of her own fear.
Eventually, Sugarcoat collapsed and huddled with her knees pressed beneath her chin by her gooseflesh-riddled arms and she huddled as far away from the corpse as she could, given her current and claustrophobic circumstances.
An hour passed.
All the birds that could be singing now had already been hunted and their raw corpses torn apart by the starved mouths of desperate survivors.
An hour passed and Sugarcoat started to cry.
Normally that was something the stoic and abrasive girl would rather die than be seen doing in the cutthroat halls of her high school. However now she was trapped in a vehicular grave and there was nobody around to see her do it. And she found that it would not matter if people were around to see her do it, as death is not a thing to be brushed with lightly.
“Not now. Not. Now. Not. Now,” she wept.
The man was dead, thus he ignored her. Tears plinked onto the threadbare felt of mat that covered the trunk’s flooring. There were rips in the mat and, from between them, gunmetal grey gleamed menacingly against the dusty black of a spare tire in the dim morning gloom.
At first, Sugarcoat ignored that just as the dead man ignored her because, from between her own fingers, she saw only the haze of nightmares and her own snot and crying. The shotgun kept in the trunk was not visible to her, not when the rusted blood and dried guts of a human, of a dead human person, festered right on top of it.
An hour passed and she kept crying and no birds sang.
Then dread overcame her. It sank into her heart slowly, like a cruise ship sinks into an arctic ocean, and it filled every cell of her body with a horrible nausea. From her face she pried her shivering hands and she stared down at them through cracked glasses that were smudged with mud made from desert dust and the saltwater of her own tears.
Nobody was coming to rescue her.
Rarity hadn’t driven her here to strangle her or to stab her or to shoot her and to stuff her body in the police car so that nobody would ever find it. No. That would be stupid.
Somebody would find this car eventually, right?
No, Rarity must have driven her here to taser her to unconsciousness and then stuff her body in the police car precisely because by the time somebody found it, Sugarcoat would already be dead and Rarity would already be in another state, if not another country halfway across the planet.
Sugarcoat bit back a gasp.
If nothing changed, she was going to be forgotten.
If nothing changed, she was going to starve in here.
If nothing changed, she was going to die!
If she had tears left to weep, she would have wept. However, it was bone dry today and she had been crying for hours and she had drunk nothing since last night and she had drunk cola at that.
Her father was going to kill her.
Dr. Sugarbomb was a man of three things. Formerly being a soldier, he was a man of the utmost punctuality. Currently being a dentist, he was a man of perfect dental hygiene. Eternally being a man cursed with a fuse shorter than a mosquito’s limp dick, he was going to metaphorically kill Sugarcoat when she arrived home late, messy, and with the stink of Pepsi on her breath.
Struck by the absurdity of it all, Sugarcoat began to laugh.
At first, it was a giggle. Then it was a chuckle. And finally, it was full-blown chortling as Sugarcoat’s sanity began to fray just a little more.
It was then that she spotted the shotgun. Or, rather, she felt it. Amidst her laughter, her leg spasmed and her shoe caught against a torn edge of the upholstery. There it was, a solution, half buried beneath the felt and half buried beneath the corpse.
Her first thought was to shoot herself with it and put herself out her misery before hunger forced her to eat the corpse to prolong what pathetic little life she had left.
Then she had a better idea. She had second thoughts. As her hands brushed the corpse’s bloodstained parka in an attempt to pry the Winchester free, Sugarcoat realized that, instead of turning it against herself, she could turn its muzzle against the glass window of the trunk and blast a hole in it large enough to climb out of.
With that done, she could walk out here and get a lift back home and have Rarity arrested for trying to murder her and presumably murdering the man stuffed into the cramped trunk beside her.
Yes. That was a plan.
Hefting the shotgun, she found it surprisingly light in her arms, like it was nothing more than a painted length of wood. Sugarcoat prayed that it was loaded. And then she took aim, positioning herself as far away from the window as possible lest the shatter of shards the gunshot would produce carved a thousand cuts into her flesh.
One deep breath later, ignoring how awful the dry air felt within her lungs, she gingerly pressed the trigger.
Since she was already lying on her back, the recoil did not knock her off her feet and since she was wearing trainers today, the recoil did not knock her socks off either. It did, however, knock the beginnings of another bruise into Sugarcoat’s shoulder.
More importantly though, the deafening blast cleared a whole in the window. Three feet across, it was more than wide enough for one slight teenage girl to slip through. Were it not surrounded on all sides by knife-sharp chunks of broken glass, like the circular, fanged, and gaping maw of giant silver leech, that is.
Sugarcoat took another breath.
Her ears rang like school bells.
“Well,” she panted, “never doing that again.”
She was wrong. But that is another story for another time, another land. [Paper Girl link]
Right now, Sugarcoat tentatively tapped a spike of window glass. Finding that it was sharp like a crocodile’s fangs, she snapped back her hand with a whimper, sucking the drawn blood from the nick on her fingertip. Climbing through a ring of those edges would be murder.
And Sugarcoat did not want to die.
So, she began to look around again. There she saw everything she had seen the first time. Although now, with the tinted window blown out, she could see it a lot better. And what she saw still disgusted her.
Beside her there was, still crumpled, the ruined body of a dead man. To her, he looked almost like some kind of alien jerky sausage because he was mincemeat, dried out by the desert weather, and wrapped in a bulky pine-green parka. Although splattered with grime and gore it was sturdy and punctured by neither the sharp breaks of bone protruding from the man’s flesh nor the wheels of the car that had crushed him that way.
Sugarcoat gave a tug on the mat and noticed with a sigh that it was affixed to the car’s body by a seam leading to the vehicle’s backseats and that said seam led up to an impenetrable steel mesh between the trunk and the rest of the car. And the mat would have been perfect to lay over the hole in the window too, if not for its unhelpful position.
What to do?
A ray of sunlight glinted on a sliver of glass. It was about knife-sized and, since one edge of it had been attached to the window’s frame, it could be held safely at an angle.
The girl picked it up and marvelled at how the cracks lacing its length shone like gemstone stars. Again, she glanced over at the seam. Now it could be cut away and finally she could escape and hitchhike home.
Hopefully her father would be mad at Rarity and not at her.
Pressing the makeshift knife against the felt fabric was easy and soon it slid through the thread like it was a blue-tinted hand through grey muddy water. For some seconds she devoted her care to this, unwilling to make any mistakes lest the fragile knife fracture apart and leave her stranded again.
Five inches away from freedom, her hand halted. There started the man’s body, with a lake-sized bloodstain against the backs of the seats and atop the flooring.
To escape, she would need to touch him. Again.
Sugarcoat was surprised to find out that she would rather not die than do that. So, she did, gingerly tugging the corpse away from its resting place and laying him against the edge of the trunk and immediately brushing the grime on her hands off on a section of the flooring.
Kneeling down more than she already was, given the low ceiling of the trunk, gave her just enough space to work with.
And a heart-drumming moment later, the mat came loose with a tear more satisfying than any full meal or hot bath or anything else Sugarcoat planned to have once she got home.
It was then thrown over the window with a faint crunch and Sugarcoat hit the dirt a second later with a far louder thump.
After pushing herself to her feet, she stretched in the chill morning air. It was wintrier than she had ever remembered it being. The presence of the sea and the forests so close by should render Canterlot’s wilderness far warmer than this, Sugarcoat noted as she started down the cracked road.
Only a few steps down the winding length of ink-black tar and tawny white sand, Sugarcoat stopped. Again, she went still. It wasn’t the quietness that bothered her. She liked the quiet of calm spaces and early mornings.
But this quiet, this was not that tranquility.
This was the other type of quiet, a silence bursting at the welds with dread and terror. This was a quiet of fearful running and lurking predators.
And for that kind of quiet, Sugarcoat decided that being out here in the open, unarmed and afraid and wearing those ridiculously revealing clothes Sour Sweet had bought for her as a joke “if she ever decided to crawl out of her hole and live a little”, was likely a really bad idea.
Her legs were heavy like granite pillars. Her breathing was soft like a beaten mouse’s. Her body was unwilling to turn itself around, no matter how many times her mind commanded it. It was possessed by fear and she stayed bolted in place on the pothole-ridden tarmac as the fiery sun drifted listlessly by.
A minute passed.
All the clouds that could be drifting overhead right now had already rained their last and their waters had been eagerly lapped up by the starved mouths of desperate survivors while their hands made war for the remaining dregs.
A minute passed and Sugarcoat’s shoulders began to roast in the searchlight-strong light.
She sighed again, out all the air she had been holding captive within her burning lungs.
Rarity was long gone, wasn’t she?
Still, Sugarcoat had been wrong before.
She had been wrong about wearing these stupid clothes.
She had been wrong about going to that pointless party.
She had been wrong about trusting that evil bitch to drive her home.
With a groan, she spun on her heels and started back to the car. There, over the now-harmless broken window, she leaned in and retrieved the shotgun and the usable shard of glass. The latter she jabbed point downwards through a belt loop at the side of her hip. The former she carefully placed down beside the car’s bumper, resting its barrel in a dent. To her, it was to be treated like some magical artefact. In the right hands, it could be useful, an instrument of destruction for the wicked. In the wrong hands, it could only be an instrument of disaster.
Knowing her own instrumental talent about ended the second she stepped out of her garage and away from the beloved dirt bike she’d spent five years’ worth of allowance repairing from a junkyard scrapheap to a genuine work of mechanical artistry, Sugarcoat stared down at her own hands.
Both were calloused. One was still bleeding from a nick on her index finger. Below the nick and now wreathed in blood, like the liquid was just ruby ornamentation, was a ring. After the Friendship Games, at more Cadance’s behest than her own, Sunny Flare had made all the Shadowbolts one of them.
A friendship ring.
A set of rings for people who should have become friends.
But then Twilight transferred schools, and Lemon decided to put more time into her band and Indigo started taking her racing more seriously and, soon, only three of the once six still spoke with any frequency at all outside the classroom.
And Sugarcoat only tolerated Sour Sweet because Sunny liked her for reasons that Sugarcoat knew existed but never really understood past a shared affinity for fashion.
As far as she herself could tell, that girl did not need friends. Not now. What Sour Sweet needed most was a psychologist and possibly a good slap upside the head the next time she insulted Sugarcoat’s life choices.
Still, Sunny liked the outfit…
Pushing those memories from her mind, Sugarcoat clenched her fist. The blood squelched into her palm. She winced.
“I can do this,” she attempted to assure herself, “Rarity isn’t here. She’s gone back to messing around with Twilight by now. Probably. However, on the off chance she hasn’t gone to do that, she is definitely not hiding behind that rock waiting to taser me again.”
Before checking the rock, however, Sugarcoat picked up the shotgun. Unknowing whether hers were the right hands for it or not, she decreed that at least disaster ended badly for everyone involved and not just her, like the rest of her day had been going.
A second passed.
All the self-proclaimed fashionistas extraordinaire that could be hiding behind the rock right now had already moved on to more terrible things and their lips lecherously kissed the starved mouths of desperate survivors while their hands made love to their gaunt frames and their minds plotted new schemes and machinations.
A second passed and Sugarcoat sighed with relief and then winced and clasped herself as the wind’s howl scoured her bare arms and most of her legs with gravelly sand.
That sensation, like sandpaper against her raw skin, she had felt before while walking on a Dominican beach. It had preceded a hurricane.
Thanks to her father’s quick thinking, her family had survived unscathed. However, the same could not be said for their hotel room, and the holiday was cut brutally short two days in, the non-refundable damages setting back the progress on her dirt bike by a few months.
Gritting her teeth, Sugarcoat forced her legs to walk over to the car again and she forced her arms to reach into it and she forced her eyes not to look away as she pried the parka off the man’s corpse.
It came free like a plaster from an infected wound.
Sugarcoat shook it a few times, slapping the filthy fabric against the sandblasted rusty steel side of the car to dislodge from it all the… stuff that had gotten stuck within it.
Then she slipped it on, stuffed the shotgun into one of its deep pockets, put the shard of glass in the other one, after wrapping it in a length of torn mat, and she turned again to the road.
One minute and one second passed.
The corpse might have been disgusting but it was dead. It was harmless. The desert was the opposite.
Sugarcoat started down the road after that, in the direction of the skeletal skyscrapers barely peeking over the shadowed horizon, and a smile spread itself like silver-bracered jelly across her weary face.
“I did it,” she sighed with relief. “I’m not dead. I escaped.”
And she was correct.
Coming across the skeletonized corpse, its blackened strands of stringy flesh and shredded ribbons of torn clothing still hanging from its outstretched bones, Sugarcoat realized that she might not be so correct about being alive for much longer.
Tracing the path of the dead woman’s fingers with tear-laden eyes, Sugarcoat found that it crossed from the cracked chunks of broken road and onto the baby powder of the outskirt’s sand. Then she traced upwards and saw a billboard.
And on that billboard was an advertisement for brandy and cokes: Buy One Bottle of Viceroy and Get a Free Gallon of Vanilla Coke Today! While stocks last at your local Barnyard Bargains or any other participating store.
But the rampant consumerism was not what terrified the girl. That merely irked her. It was what was spray-painted atop that advertisement that sent shivers back into her spine and the grit into her clattering teeth.
Atop the billboard, in black paint sprayed by a clumsy hand, was a sign: A shaky outline skeletal three-peaked crown atop cursive script for the letters “S.L.”
Beneath that image and into the canvas of the billboard itself were carved the words, “SOMBRA’S LEGION.”
Glancing back down at the burnt-to-death corpse of the unlucky victim, Sugarcoat hissed in a breath and drew out from her parka the shotgun and she held it close as she walked, looking feverishly from side to side, any noise enough to snap her, and the gun, around to its creator. And disaster would follow.
But there was no noise apart from the gale’s screech and the tip tap of her footsteps against the neglected highway.
Not in the apocalypse anyhow…