Chapter Nineteen
One can draw strength from their emotions, but it is meaningless without self-control. Control marks the difference between righteous retaliation and ravenous rage.
The compound was just that: a compound, with a wall of metal sheets, concrete blocks, wood… any Wasteland junk that could have been fastened together with magic and ingenuity to make a respectable barrier, complete with a watch tower that was an old sky chariot embedded in the side of an overlooking building, supported by other bits of scrap. A genuine Wasteland fortress. One that had fallen.
“It needed a dumpster,” Falcon thought jokingly, though it was biting humor, dark humor. He was still very much angry, and the gray clouds had brightened up into orange and red as the sun set unseen in the west. The bright colors seemed to emulate the burning he felt in his soul and he wanted to act on it; to rush into the compound and give every rotten pony in there what they wanted: a furious young colt with a gun that had reached his limit and was ready to bring a reckoning like no other.
Alana put a hoof on his shoulder and Falcon Wing was roped from his daydream of violence. Her face was sullen. Realizing that he was standing in a combat stance with his coat bristling, the red colt quickly came to his senses.
This was not the first time something like this had happened in the last hours of daylight. Before, Falcon Wing had fallen back into lapses of inattentiveness, wrapped in his thoughts and blocking out Alana as she spoke to him. It happened numerous times before she became frustrated with the red pony and ceased. In the silence, the drive to act only swelled and became more evident in how the wingless pegasus carried himself.
“Please, Falcon Wing, I know you’re upset but you have to try to focus on something else. I can’t have you be blinded by your anger when we do this!” Alana implored. The two had taken shelter in a building just a few blocks away from the wall half the factory’s height. Alana was sitting in the shadows before she approached him, but Falcon Wing seemed drawn to the broken windows, orange eyes reflecting the scarlet clouds, bathing in the warmer light of the sunset.
His response to the caramel mare was infuriatingly simple.
“I’m angry?” the young colt asked. Being the victim most of his life, he wasn’t used to feeling the way he did; the urge to hurt and break, to do to others what had been done to him, to repay the Wasteland for throwing his attempts at goodness in his face.
“Yes. Yes you are, and it will be the death of you if you don’t snap out of it,” the caramel colored mare admonished him.
His experiences in the Wasteland all came rushing at him. The unimaginable fear he felt as he was ambushed by figures in the dark, the nerve rending pain as they cleaved his wings off. The shock when he saw how sick raiders can be. So many soul wrenching sights and encounters –- the look Fogchaser had on her face when her heart gave out -- it was impossible for him to calm down. His body trembled but it was no the prelude to him crying as it had been before. He was fighting himself, willing himself to stay still.
Caught up in his own inner conflict, eyes still directed to the burning skies, he was unaware that Alana had circled around him. Without warning, she pounced onto him.
The two tumbled into the darkness, Alana ending up pinning the red colt under her, staring intently into his face. Now she was angry. Her tears flowed down the side of her face through an emerald glare. Falcon returned the look, confused and caught off guard. It was as if the two had fallen into a cycle of perpetual tension where they pissed each other off exponentially.
Falcon Wing ended the emotional staring contest, turning his head and looking off to the side. Wall, chipping white paint and a picture frame lying face down, concealing broken glass no doubt. The most interesting of sights, surely.
“Get off of me,” Falcon said with what might have been a snarl, paused, then added “… please.”
“My mother walked this road and paid for it with her life,” Alana began to say. Falcon’s eyes widened. He did not like where this conversation was going. “Off, off, please get off!” he exclaimed, refusing to look her in the eyes.
“Her heart was weak yet it was what led her in this world, always reacting to her feelings instead of thinking things through. It’s why the mere thought of her daughter being a raider did what it did; she assumed the worst without any rational thought,” Alana continued with a level voice, even as Falcon laid stricken by the tear drops landing on his cheeks. Tears that were not his.
“So you can have your anger but I’ll be damned by Celestia herself if I allow you to get yourself hurt because you were too hell-bent to think of your own wellbeing. More so if I allow you to become no better than a raider when you lose yourself to it,” she finished forebodingly, leaning close to say the last part directly into his ears, so that he could not drown her out in his thoughts.
With that, she eased herself off of him and walked back to the aged wooden bench behind a counter, laying herself down on top of it. Falcon did not get up from the floor, staring blankly at that wall with its chipping paint.
Dusk had fallen when Falcon Wing scraped himself off from the ground, walked the few feet to where Alana laid and then sat on his haunches. He hung his head, looking apologetic though he doubted the caramel mare could see the regret in his expression.
He wanted to say something to her, something to convey just how truly awful he felt for everything, from ignoring her to forcing her to say the things she had. He felt like a monster for even thinking the things he had.
“What if I really did half of those things!?” he thought, horrified of himself. He stood at the edge of madness. He had peered into phoenix fire within him and was nearly scalded. That… that was the start of the long fall, wasn’t it? The threshold before that abysmal pit that the Wasteland pulled a pony into, an unimaginably long plummet that stripped every virtue from a pony’s soul.
He shuddered, a myriad of thoughts and feelings about himself clouding his mind. All of them were not good. The sobbing started again. Alana watched bearing a pained expression, but did not intervene. It was something that needed to happen, and so she let it. Despite her sadness, she smiled a small smile. The Falcon Wing she knew had returned.
Cautiously, the two ponies made their move on the compound. Alana had an easier time moving in the darkness, -– seriously did everyone have better night eyes than Falcon Wing? -- with the hooded colt following close behind.
This changed once they had infiltrated the settlement however -- if one could call walking through the opened gate infiltrating -- and stayed true to their roles. Alana was cover fire with her rifle, Falcon was to find and free the captives. That objective was not too hard to complete; the residents of the compound were loaded up on a large passenger wagon in plain sight just over 30 feet away. A burly earth pony was already strapped in, ready to pull.
“Perfect timing,” the two ponies thought simultaneously.
The slaver guards had left their posts, anticipating their departure from the compound not too long from now. They were loading up crates of supplies, no doubt plundered from the compound, stolen from those they had captured. Falcon felt the simmering beneath his coat, but focused on his objective. It was a kill or be killed world, but that didn’t mean he had to make the first strike.
He observed his surroundings to formulate a specific plan of attack.
The compound’s wall blocked off a large part of the city with two gates, a forward and back entrance, allowing ponies to pass to and fro down the street bisecting the settlement. Their homes had been the buildings encompassed by the enclosure, using the rooms available like small apartments. There were street lights that didn’t shine anymore lining the “main street.”
Alana had the home field advantage. She had disappeared into the darkness to a spot that would undoubtedly give the mare ample coverage of the area. Falcon assumed the watch tower would have been said spot, but a quick look at the testament to Wasteland engineering confirmed that she was not there.
The hooded pony slunk up close to the cart, slowly, methodically, careful where he put his hooves. The slavers were none the wiser. Arrogance. Self-assurance. Both would be their downfall. They numbered only five, excluding the one strapped into the cart. As far as Falcon was concerned, he was a noncombatant.
They had gathered off to one side of the cart while Falcon Wing made his way to the other, the ponies inside also oblivious to his presence. They were herded into a large rusted cage with half a barrel fastened to the reddish bars, the dried up remains of old “food” encrusted the insides. The ponies of various colors were all given rags to wear, their new uniforms for wherever their destination was. The clothes of their enforced toil.
Falcon Wing scowled and crawled under the wagon. Not if he could help it. He put his head under his overcoat, reached into one of his bags and pulled out the combat knife in his mouth. He used the blade as a screw driver, carefully prying the bolts securing the wagon’s rear right wheel axle. He did not remove them completely, just enough so that the wheel would be extremely unstable when it started moving. He gave the left wheel the same treatment then scurried out from under the cart. He put the knife back in his bag then put his little plan in motion.
He crept up behind the burly pony, making sure he was unseen until the last moment. He turned around and swung his rear hooves up into where it would hurt the most.
The muscular stallion cried out in pain. Falcon scampered off, the sounds of his hoofs clopping against asphalt getting the attention of the slavers. “What the hell!?” one of them shouted. “Fuck it, get on the wagon and let’s get the fuck outa here!” another replied. They jumped up onto the side of the wagon, grappling onto the cage for support. “Start fucking movin’ moving, Dust Cloud!” the same slaver barked at the pained stallion.
Fighting against the pain, the pony started his gallop only to have the wagon sway and wiggle out of control behind him, the rear wheels sliding off and rolling wayward. The wagon came down hard, the cage rattled, the prisoners cried out in surprise. The slavers jumped off of their crippled ride and went to draw their firearms on Falcon Wing.
The crack of the rifle rang out in the night. Six shots fired from the roof of a nearby building. Each shot met their mark.