I looked out the window early one morning to see them, two brightly coloured pegasi, trotting down the cracked asphalt as bold as could be, their robotic joints moving almost smoothly enough that they could be real.
“Hey!” called one, as she spotted me. “Wanna be friends, kid? We came all the way to the outer realm to meet some humans!”
“Rainbow Dash!” chided the yellow one, in a softer voice. “We need to be gentle with them. You can’t just yell up at their windows.”
“Well, sorry, Flutterbore,” snapped the first one. “I’m just trying to be friendly!”
I slammed the window shut and drew the curtains.
In a shaking voice, I told Uncle George what had happened, and he sighed, his dry, nut-brown skin moving like paper over his thin bones. “It’s time you got out of here, Lozen,” he said in that croaky old voice as he folded his morning newspaper — well over eight months out of date — and set it on the table. “Things are getting too dangerous here.”
I glanced nervously at Dad “I…we can’t leave you, Uncle George.” I didn’t want to be alone. First Nana, then Mom. My friends. Now Uncle George too? Where would it end?
Uncle George laughed and shook his head, and later that day Dad and I loaded up some rucksacks and we moved on again. We pushed George’s rickety wheelchair a few miles down the road, following his directions and trying to ignore his gasps of pain. Uncle George hated when people noticed. We made a right and found ourselves on an overgrown dirt track that led deep into the uninhabited prairie, and finally, to a ramshackle old hunting cabin that belonged to a now-dead friend of George. Another new home.
The cabin was basic, but there was a creek nearby, and we made do. The trip hit Uncle George hard, and he was never as mobile as he had been before, but we were…coping.
Right up until Dad got sick.
That was the first time it sank in that things had gotten bad. Past the point of no return bad. Dad was doubled over in bed, collapsed from the pain in his stomach, and I asked why we weren’t taking him to hospital. Pretty stupid of me, given that we were living in the wilderness to hide from a pair of robotic pegasi, but it just…it was an instinctive reaction. To assume that deep down, things were the same as they always had been.
Uncle George gave me a funny look. “The county hospital shut down last year, Lozen.”
Weird, isn’t it? How the world can end before you even notice.
We did what we could, but Uncle George didn’t have any friends who were doctors. [12] Our tribe didn’t have a medicine woman like Strongheart’s did. We barely even had a tribe anymore. I sat up with Dad most nights, watching him toss and turn and sob with the pain. I sobbed with him, and wished I could be like the real Lozen. If I had been able to see the future like she had, this would never have happened. I would have found a way to stop it.
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[12] We never even managed to diagnose him. At one point I headed back to town, dodging friendly ponies all the way, went all the way to the library on the one public bus that still ran, and I used one of the computers to search his symptoms. Even though the computer was smothered in Hofvarpnir Studios logos. Even though the search engine had a small, smiling Celestia as the interface.
I found nothing. Just a confusing jumble of illnesses with long latin names.
I left as ignorant as I had entered.
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Uncle George started to make vague plans for a trip to the pharmacy in the city, the big one that might have the drugs we needed — but the car had broken down for the last time, and Dad needed round-the-clock nursing.
Then our last electric generator gave out, and Dad lay dying in the dark.