//------------------------------// // Burn My Shadow / Nightmare // Story: The Light Despondent // by Doctor Fluffy //------------------------------// In the city that pretends not to sleep I've been having maddening dreams And I certainly hope that they weren't of the prophetic kind 'Cause my mind ain't ready for the apocalypse Biting Elbows, 'The Present' It was towards sixteen hundred hours that he came back to Defiance, to the smells of body odor, roasting fish, meat of uncertain provenance, and the ever-present camp stew. Scharnhost, when he wasn’t felling foe and foal with ‘The Lumberjack’, was a surprisingly good cook, and always had something simmering away, ready for anyone to take a bowl of. Viktor did so, and with his stew in hand, he staggered onwards into the camp, further up the proverbial river, boats against the current, deeper into the heart of darkness. He was welcomed with all kinds of stories in the languages of dead nations. A group of children, wearing rags and holding looted, near-destroyed toys, all of them armed, wearing kalashnikovs, bullpups, and bullpup kalashnikovs on their backs. Behind them followed Mariesa, a woman everyone simply called ‘mother mary’. Kraber idly wondered how many of those kids knew or could remember anything before the War. He understood the need for child soldiers, yes, but he always felt uneasy at the sight of it. None of them, he thought, desperately trying not to convince himself that Peter and Anka might still be alive- dead they’re dead you killed them you kontgesig you horrible father you kiddie rapist -would be able to live a normal life after all this. If any of them could go back. If there would be anything left at the end of it all. A kid… deserved a chance to be a kid. These children wouldn’t have that. Thanks to Burakgazi, his lover from way back when, Kraber’s turkish was passable, so he could understand yet another rendition of the story of Old Skinner, some lone HLF man who’d allegedly accomplished feats that were downright impossible. “They say he took potion to the face and lived - ordered someone to cut off half his cheek with a knife. They say he once took a PHL outpost by himself. They say he wears a coat of pony leather, the cutie marks all facing outwards… and I know a friend, right? Says he saw him...” More mutterings. “I heard he can command any HLF brigade he sees fit...” Other stories. More myths. Ever-greater fables spun from lies and half-truths. “I say we get rid of Kraber’s gun,” said one African man, a newcomer from one of the cities on the Gold Coast, before realizing, rather abruptly, that Kraber could understand him. “It’s PHL. It’s magic,” he continued defensively, struggling to meet Kraber’s gaze. “We can’t trust it.” “You fokking want it then?” Kraber asked, raising the LMG, pointing it in his direction, eyebrows narrowed. “Go ahead. Take it, kontgesig.” The man held up his hands, backing away slowly. “Yeah, that’s what I fokking thought,” Kraber said. Fokking vultures.... couldn’t see a good thing if it cock-slapped them in the face. (And Kraber does, in fact, later realize the hypocrisy, the absurdity of this sentence as he tells you this story, groaning.) He hears so many stories as he walks through the shanty-town, stew in hand. But one caught his ear, most of all. “So,” said one man, this one American. Probably had never seen the Barrier. “I’ve been talking to Farnowitz. He’s out in the woods by the Balsams-has a job there. Says he saw four ponies up there in Colebrook, sharing a room in some B&B, with two humans…” Kraber knew the name Farnowitz, and struggled to put a face to it. At least he remembered a twitching, nervous man with green eyes, a huge widows peak, and stringy blond hair. The two of them occasionally met whenever Kraber was deputised to run up to a drop-point near Colebrook, to trade supplies with individuals sympathetic to the Cause. Farnowitz was one of those sympathisers: he was nice enough, and he knew guns, but… being honest, he was something of a moegoe. Not enough of a believer to join them in Hooverville-Defiance, too set in his ways to leave his hometown, not good for espionage. Die man is te flou. Still, HLF life wasn’t for everyone. “Disgusting, I bet they were fucking each other last night,” said the American’s friend, a kid. “Wouldn’t surprise me,” the first guy said. “We probably just missed them at one of the checkpoints!” For emphasis, he slapped himself on the forehead. “Farnowitz remember the humans with them?” the second man asked. “He said… a woman with hair dyed about five colors, and a short man with a pompadour, an assault rifle, and a revolver. The ponies, though… one of the mares had a telescope mark, another had a mark that looked like ballet shoes. ” Kraber froze, ever so slightly, feeling conflicted. ’The filly and the mare from last night.’ Did he feel glad they were alright? Angry that they’d lived? “So these guys were PHL?” the second man asked. “God DAMMIT! How’d we let something like that slip through their territory?” PHL. He’d… he’d let PHL survive. The HLF’s sworn enemies. The horsefuckers. Thousands of obscenities directed at them, for merely collaborating with the monsters that had killed his family, rushed through his head. ’At least nobody’s going to get ponified, anyway…’, he told himself. At least he could tell himself that. “I say we roll into Colebrook and kill ‘em all,” the first man said. “I think that’s a befok idea," Kraber put in, to everyone's surprise, not least his own. "What'd you say, horsef-" the second man said, raising a fist before turning and realizing just who he'd disagreed with. “I said that's a terrible idea," Kraber said. "I know what you said," the first man said. Many of them had gotten used to Kraber's use of South African slang. Besides, 'befok' was easily translated. "You going horsefucker, friend?" “I have to repeat myself?" Kraber asked. "Think about it. Who the fok cares about Colebrook? It's the ass end of nowhere." "...the hell are you getting at?" "I'm saying it takes a lot of effort to move Defiance," Kraber said, studiously not thinking about how he'd be caught if that happened, and fearfully wondering what else Farnowitz might have seen or heard in Colebrook. "We do something that blatant, we fok ourselves over and paint a big neon sign on us. And why waste all that energy targeting four ponies, instead of something like an enemy base? Where’s the sense in that?” He wasn’t worried about his reputation, but instead his life. If anyone learned just who had let those ponies go...well it wouldn’t be good. “No. You have to think bigger,” he continued. “You think big…. you can kill a whole lot more of them than just four, with the right mindset.” He headed back to his tent, striding through Defiance to make his way to his bunker. ‘The right mindset?’ What a joke. As it happened, Defiance wasn’t intended to be permanent, despite the fact that many of the more solid structures used the old logging camp as foundations. But 'Intended' was the key word - you could move it, but the camp had just sprawled so much that at this point it almost seemed to have put down roots. Calling it a ‘city’ would have been a misnomer, but it was the largest gathering of HLF in the eastern U.S. It was a destination, dammit. Sometimes other HLF brigades, traveling in while disguised as civilian backpackers or refugees, stumbled in, pitched their tents and Defiance grew just a little bit more. There were plenty of disgrunted people ready to join ‘The Cause’ after all, and government forces and local police couldn’t keep track of them all. The result was an anthill of tents, shacks, dugouts and huts, sprawling across almost a square mile. The encampment was also a damned weapon museum’s worth of firearms. While many of them of the more ‘regular’ fighters favored guns chambered for absurd, enormous rounds like .50 Beowulf, or rechambered shotguns, those were in low supply and parceled out to members with seniority. As well as the lottery of firearms brought in by new arrivals, there were a lot of homebrewed weapons, as well as various others stolen from everywhere in Europe and all over eastern America-the HLF was desperate for anything that would fire. If someone was unlucky enough to get a .22LR or some other gun incredibly unsuited to newfoal killing, they were advised to take something from the corpse of one of their compatriots. Besides… even as Kraber hated Defiance and the way its ugliness was imposed on the forest all around, he liked what it stood for. You couldn’t trust government these days, and you couldn’t trust any organizations that had thrown their lot in with the ponies. There were a few countries that had done the right thing and joined with the HLF, but they were either absorbed by the Barrier, or taken over. So, if your government was corrupt, a pawn of the enemy, and you were fighting against them from the wilderness, that meant… That made you a partisan, didn’t it? “Stop lying to yourself”, crooned the newfoal corpse in his voice, which now trotted beside him, trailing maggots and blood. “After what you went through today, do you still believe that?” Did he? Kraber had been raised on stories from his great-grandmother about partisans in Poland, fighting with anything they could find that would fire, managing to take out tanks with grenades dropped down the hatches of tanks…. a stolen MG42, cutting apart Nazis in the forests. Old dugouts and crappy machine pistols made from scrapmetal, whatever could be found. Those stories had been just as much a part of his growth as boerewors, rock lobster, hoernerpastei, ice cream, pear pie, mom’s chocolate pepper cookies, and malva pudding. ...He’d been a skraal kid. But almost everywhere, he saw something reminding him of those stories. He had a stolen MG2019 that looked a lot like an MG42, just like grandma. He saw dugouts-again, just like those stories. “And what became of them after the war, those Polish Partisans? There’s a reason they call those men ‘cursed soldiers’” “That’s not the same - they still beat the Nazis…” he said under his breath. Nobody paid him any mind - first, he was Viktor Fokking Marius Kraber. Second, it was fairly common to have him mutter things under his breath. “And ended up fighting Stalin’s occupational government...they had allies to help fight the obvious enemy, but then had to go it alone against the bigger bear...and they died.” It was true of course. The last of the ‘cursed soldiers’ was killed in 1963, eighteen years after the official cease of hostilities. And all their efforts had been for naught - only the collapse of the bloated Soviet giant had brought about Polish independence. Was that the Human Liberation Front’s fate, crushed underfoot while trying to take on every other faction at once, under-armed, outmoded, starving, left behind by the advance of war? He’d seen PHL weaponry on TV, and he’d learned in Agua Caliente that his MG2019 was only a prototype. That PHL R&D never slept, and soon this weapon, such an asset to him and the HLF, would be obsolete. Along with him. And everyone else here. Oh, God. What’ll happen to us at Barrierfall? What’ll we be after a solid year of things getting worse? But even through those doubts, those memories that plagued him… he couldn’t deny he was just like those heroes from his childhood stories. He was a partisan! He was like one of the ZOB members! No matter how bad it got, that gave him strength as well as doubt. And, far from going it alone, just look at the numbers they’d mustered just in Defiance. And there were plenty more brothers and sisters hidden away up here in New Hampshire. A mistake that most people outside the HLF made was to assume they were one single monolithic group. If they were, they could have killed off those goddamn horsefuckers and showed humanity how to really fight the ponies. And they still could, right? All it would take was something to unify the movement. Something, someone... (Later, when he tells this story, he’ll facepalms and sigh "Fok was I thinking?" The sad truth of the matter, he realizes, is that the HLF was not a threat. Rather, they were beneath notice. What with the end of the world and all.) In terms of total force strength, there was actually... well, nobody was sure how many units were there. The remnants of the Menschabwehrfraktion were there, as were several others. There were two American units that made up most of the population, a lot of them ex-military, with quality equipment that a quartermaster had conveniently ‘misplaced’. However, there were remnants of numerous HLF units still in action across the world, some of which were even Swiss veterans from the very first days of the Barrier’s expansion. Though the next day would be an interesting day. A meeting was scheduled with representatives from the Thenardier Guards. Kraber’s unit, or rather the agglomeration of units that called Defiance home, were decently famous, mostly thanks to him, but the Thenardiers were leagues and miles above them. Apparently, this involved a very big plan. Finding his tent, he waited, hoping that tomorrow would quell his doubts. He tried his bowl of stew. It had gone cold. “For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.” What surprised far too many HLF members was that Kraber was, in fact, an educated man. So many people built him up as the ultimate psychopath, but… he was happy enough sitting in his tent, reading China Mieville, Irvine Welsh, Jeff Vandermeer, or Joseph Conrad. He would get a lot of weird reactions for that. Of course he read. Why wouldn’t he? At the moment, he was reading Railsea. He had meant to reread Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but something about the notoriously grim tale of a journey up the River Congo had alienated and terrified him as a boy, and still did. And so he found himself engaged in Railsea. It was a silly plot, (some part of him inwardly giggled at his usage of the pony word for ‘flank’) about a world spanned with an ocean of rails, but he couldn’t help but read. Heh… That Apt Ohm. That had been really hard to get the first time he read the book. Not for the first time, passing mentions of steam locomotives in Mieville’s fictional port of Manihiki, he found himself wondering about evacuation time. About winter. While he’d likely be overcome with rage soon enough, he did there weren’t that many routes around here. And the Barrier would likely force everyone into chokepoints through areas such as… say, Crawford Notch. Which meant traffic. Congested roads, busy highways turned into parking lots, full of people trying to get and outrun the Barrier. He’d seen it before. So, that left trains, then. Maybe steam locomotives? He knew they were rebuilding some of the old lines up here to assist in the evac. If the Barrier hadn’t stopped by- “How are you going to stop the Barrier?” Kate asked, speaking from the mouth of his imagined newfoal. He tried to ignore it, instead running his finger along the text to narrow his focus. “Viktor? Answer me. What can this mob do to stop the Barrier?” As much as he wished otherwise, those words stimulated thoughts, dark thoughts that he did not want to unearth from the grave he had buried them deep within. "Well..." he replied at last, struggling. “Clearly, there’ll be a… a...” "Viktor… I'm not sure if there’s any plan for the Barrier. If you want to help people survive, maybe…you could work on the railroad. Do something to make sure people escape. You don’t have to kill them." “I have to stay hidden!” Kraber argued. “And if I'm near one pony, one of those fokking invaders that destroyed our home - then they’ll kill me. Ponify me! They can’t be trusted!" "Then why did you let those two live?" ‘Kate’ asked. He missed talking to her like this, even if he was imagining it. But she raised a good point. Why hadn't he killed them? He should have just- And once again that wave of unwanted emotions broke upon him. Fok. He didn’t need this shit. Kate was dead! But that voice was so close to him that it could have been right next to his ear. His finger was on the trigger before he was even aware he was touching his revolver’s grip. He thumbed back the hammer, walking out of his tent, curious. The dead newfoal had vanished, and with it the voice of his wife. Not entirely ready to accept that he was losing his mind he stalked all around the perimeter of the tent, staring out through the woods. Had… had Kate asked him that? Somehow spoken to him. No, impossible - she was hundreds of miles and an entire universe away. Practically braindead! But that didn’t mean that the possibility didn’t have merit. This was, after all, a world that now had magic in it...and her question nagged at him. How could the Barrier be stopped? Honestly he didn’t know. The Front would all talk about a miracle, or ‘finding a way’, but none of them seemed to know if that miracle was some kind of nuclear warhead or God Himself smiting the Barrier. None of them seemed to have a plan beyond ‘kill every geldo in sight.’ The ponies wouldn't be a threat without that goddamn Barrier, and yet his attention was always on the continued reduction of the enemy’s numbers. He'd honestly never thought about the giant pink elephant looming over the horizon, except as something to run away from… Run away...as he always had. Ran away from the Barrier, from his past, from his doubts and now from this all-important question: was he in this just for the killing, for the thrill of revenge? Had there ever been any deeper or nobler motive behind every time he had squeezed a trigger? He didn’t know. He didn’t think anyone in the Front did. It was all ‘find a way,’ or ‘kill as many ponies as possible’. There was some faint notion that the Barrier was tied to Celestia, so that killing her would collapse it. But how the fok were they supposed to kill Celestia, assuming she even left Canterlot? And if she did, how would he ever get close enough to shoot her? He’d need a Big Fokking Gun to damage her, and somehow he felt like everything here was inadequate. Maybe a .50 BMG, maybe a 20mm... Nukes? Yeah, maybe. But how would they even get nukes? And he’d made a point of watching the Reykjavik footage released by the PHL, where the bitch’s lunar sibling had shot herself in the head. Princess Luna had been drained of her power, and yet a .45 ACP round didn’t even penetrate deeper than her skin. Would an atomic blast have even give her a tan? And Celestia stood on a plinth compared to her sister, or so it was said. If they couldn’t kill Celestia or bring down the Barrier, humanity was doomed. But in Kraber’s darker moments he honestly felt like the HLF would be forced into the Pacific before they could even get Celestia to bat an eye at them. It was galling, as if she found them beneath her attention. How dare she! How dare they! Being a partisan was about doing the right thing. It was about saving lives. So how the fok would Kraber do that? It was just as he realized this, swilling in impotent rage, that Captain Lovikov came by, a .50 Beowulf rifle in hand. Almost instinctually, Kraber brought the revolver up at the sudden new target, before forcing his hand to lower back to his side. What kind of impression had he just given, standing her in the open woods, pacing in circles with a gun in his hand? “Kraber...Viktor,” Lovikov said, sitting down on a rock and gesturing for the Afrikaaner to do the same. “There’s some concerns circulating amongst Command. Concerns, that you might have certain… sympathies.” “Whatever the fok’s given them that idea?” Kraber asked, spitting on the ground. He did not sit. Lovikov had one hand on his Lolife. His hand was twitching. “Your little sojourn on the lake today has confirmed the fact that you’re...politically unreliable…” ‘They had me followed!?’ “Oh, fok you,” Kraber said, right to Lovikov’s face, grip tightening on his own revolver. “Now. If you’re going to shoot me, I deserve to know why.” “You defended ponies,” Lovikov said, far too certain, far too calm. “Not only that, but there’s been…mutterings, in Colebrook.” “Yeah, I heard about Farnowtiz’s scuttlebut. What of it?” “There’s more sympathetic eyes in Colebrook than just Farnowitz…” Lovikov said slowly, with forced calm. “We have ears too, and they tell us that some very interesting stories were being told in the Dancing Bear last night...it won’t be long before those stories percolate through into the general populace of Defiance.” Neither man moved or spoke for a while, simply eyeing the other up. Aside from the distant mutters of the camp, all was silent save for the rustle of the trees. “That woman you let through last night was PHL…” Lovikov said at last. There was no hint of question about it. “She had two ponies with her, and now they’ve hooked up with two more kickstands and a horsefucker.” The Russian licked his lips. “You’re going to have to make up for that, Viktor...we all have our ‘wobbles’, but when one of our best and most celebrated players falls like you have…” Both of them slowly slid their attention to Kraber’s gun. “What,” he sneered. “Do you expect me to fokkin’ ‘do the honorable thing’ and shoot myself?” Lovikov’s hand twitched across his pistol’s handle. “In so many words. How you go about it is your choice, but if you don’t, then one of us will do it for you. And then you’ll be celebrated for all time as a hero, a champion of mankind. You’ll have a legacy, status, and repuation…” “And the only cost is my life?” Kraber sneered. “Yes.” Lovikov responded with equal malice. “It’s only your status that has kept Command from ordering me to organise six men and take you behind the chemical shed to be shot.” “And I bet you had the grave and the bag of quicklime ready too. What a fokkin’ privledge!” “The Front is stronger than one man, Viktor…” Lovikov said cooly, and Kraber remembered that he was talking to a zealot with no fear of what lay beyond death. “Kill me and you won’t get half a mile before the men and women you’ve trained in slaughter turn those lessons back on you. So you can either die here and be remembered as a dog, or go out in a blaze of glory.” “Fok jou,” Kraber said, the words far too steady, “I made a mistake. But Command-” (”...Who was command?” you ask. “Bunch of scared moegoe that’ve probably never gotten in a pehrer, enough power to make their own little fiefdoms but not enough sense to do something good,” Kraber answers. “I’ve no idea if Lovikov wasn’t just making shit up.”) “-Command knows me. So blaze of glory it is.” Without answering, Lovikov took his hand off the pistol, and walked away, wordlessly. “We live, as we dream - alone.” In his dreams, Kraber can smell the weed. He’s attending college in America, in Boston, before the war, before candy-colored equines from another universe proved to be the greatest threat to human existence, and he is deeply regretting everything. It's actually back in October. As per fokking usual. He’s regretting the wager he agreed to, the thing he’d suggested for his own bet, and the fact that he’d lost said bet. And so, as a result, he’s stuck wearing a plump chicken costume. Made by taking a white leotard, wearing it over yellow tights, putting some wool batting around the leotard, putting on another white leotard over that, draping it in feather boas, and also wearing a pilot cap with a chicken’s comb sewn on. It’s just… it’s so silly. People are staring, but fok em, he’s gonna try and have fun. Cause what else can he do? And then he sees this black girl… Kate! Oh, it’s Kate! He’s known Kate awhile. This summer, he’d been around her a lot, going to a couple anime conventions. She’d giggled at his cosplay of Sweet JP from Redline, he’d laughed at her jokes, she’d drawn him in to Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls... even showed him some of her comics. Jazmin Carter was a damn master! Something about how a lot of the comics she’d worked on emphasized family… it resonated with him. So many happy memories from that van, driving across states to be among silly people that nonetheless shared the same interests. She’s not gonna laugh at him, is she? He’s had his eye on her awhile, he wants her to like him, and Rick just isn’t all there anymore. “Interesting costume,” Kate says. She’s dressed as a zebra, in a white unitard decorated with black stripes. She has a mohawk, and neck rings made of some faux-gold material. “Oh, it’s…” Viktor pauses. “Huh. Yeah, it is! It’s like, ah, wearing a pillow.” Why are you having such a hard time talking to her? he asks himself. “I like your costume, by the way.” “Really?” she asks. “Thanks! It was either that or one of those ‘sexy’ costumes and...” she looked down. “I hate those.” “Yeah, me too,” Viktor agrees. “You saying that just to agree?” Kate asks. “Nah. They’re just… tasteless,” Viktor says, to Kate’s nodding. “I mean, ‘sexy baby?’ Who does that?!” “That is so messed up,” Kate agrees. “Which is why I like yours! It looks like a girl’s costume, but you, you’re making a statement! You’re making it your own, and you put a lot of work into it…” “I actually lost a bet,” Viktor admits. “Well, wish I’d lost it,” Kate says, “Like I said, it looks comfy… and so much better than my roomie’s selection of halloween costumes. Aaaargh… if I ever get my hands on an assault rifle, like that Steyr AUG I wanted, I’d tear em to bits!” “...your roommate or the costume?” Viktor asks. He doesn’t mind the mention of guns, too much. Over the summer, his American hosts had gotten invited to go shoot some weapons at the range. He’d gotten quite enthusiastic at the prospect, especially when they arrived and seen an AR-15 available for rent at only $20. He'd never shot an AR-15 Ammunition had been $10 a pack, and he’d laughed his ass off at the safety warning on the back of the packaging: may result in exposure to lead. And then, after trying his hand at the shooting butts with the rifle and his host’s Browning 9mm, a random bystander had noticed they were having fun and invited them to shoot a Kalashnikov, only for a bit of a shock as Kraber had been excellent. The kick from that had left some serious bruising on his shoulder, but it turned out he’d been a good shot even after all those years. Yeah, it had been a really fun afternoon. Fun, but not something he'd like to throw himself into. While his father had been military, and he had gotten to shoot old Galils, Mausers, and .45s Viktor personally disliked the idea of a gun-culture like the Americans had. That had been driven home when his hosts had driven him round to the local Cabelas - the sight of an entire wall of firearms in a sports supply shop, with disturbingly enthusiastic sales assistants advising him on what models were best for ‘home defence’, based on penetrative death and stopping power, had left him feeling ill. From what he’d gathered, the gun industry in America ran on paranoia, which was just begging for a disaster. His dad? He'd respected guns. He'd never idealized them or treated them like anything but tools. “...it depends on my mood,” Kate admits. “Andrea’s nice, but she’s just impossible sometimes.” “My sympathies,” Viktor says, wincing. “Believe me, I know bad roommates. Which is why I don’t have one anymore!” “Oh, she’s not-” Kate stops. “Wait. Didn’t you try to eat your last one?” “It wasn’t my fault!” Viktor protests. “He was high! I was on PCP! It wasn’t what it looked like! He had mescaline in his balls! It was self defense! He was a fokking kontgesig that said I was pregnant!” Kate stifles a giggle. “Which one?” “...yes,” Viktor says, looking off to the side. “Man, Sheja Rutabiyiro. What a hoerkind. Ek hoop hy breek sy spier van plesier af in 'n goedkoop hoer en sterf van bloed verlies.” “I’mma just assume those were insults,” Kate says. “I mean, he was an asshole, but… What?” “You don’t want to know what I just said,” Viktor says. “You’ll have to teach me some Afrikaans sometime,” she says lightly. “It sounds like a beautiful language.” “You’re right. It is beautiful,” Viktor admits. “Not as beautiful as you though.” It just slips out, the cheesiest come-on possible, and Kate dissolves into laughter. His self-esteem crumbles with every second, until, through her breathless peals, she manages to speak the four most wonderful words possible. “Did you mean that?” And Viktor finds out that he does, and tells her so, a smile on his face. They get to talking, talking moves on to walking together, and suddenly the costume doesn’t feel so bad. Suddenly the two of them are dancing, the woman dressed as the zebra and the man dressed in the… ugh, he can’t say this with a straight face…. chicken costume, which suddenly feels like his best outfit ever. “Aha!” Kate says at one point, a smile on her face, “Got you liking it! Yellow is a good fit for a coward who murders ponies and can’t even realize whAt… he... Is...” Wait, what the fok?! “Kate… what did that have to do with…” his voice trails off. And Viktor comes to the worst realisation possible. ‘Wait, shit, I’m dreaming. Ain’t I?’ And everything crumbles apart and falls to nothing. Having sex in the back of Kate’s old car, the horrible realization afterwards that Viktor is 19… while Kate has only just turned 17. Nearly five months later, near Viktor’s birthday and premature, their children are born. Kind of sickly, both born with autism, but as parents, the two of them love their children. What decent parent wouldn’t? No potion from PER members, no ‘miracle treatments,’ no therapists for autism that just end up treating his kids like they’re retarded (Those kontgesigs! Kraber kicked one of them in the face, which made Peter giggle a little, and then he’d treated him to ice cream) can change that, and Kate and Viktor love them so much. Kraber selfishly wishes that maybe he hadn’t talked to her, maybe he hadn’t lost the bet, maybe he hadn’t gone to Germany or that he’d stayed with Kate’s family. That he’d been anywhere, anywhere at all except… Here. It was Innsbruck again, in Austria. The Three Weeks of Blood have taken their toll, in that sanguine anarchic May of 2019, during the last days of the world as it was. You couldn’t walk a street in almost any city without something violent, some disruption of the peace. Ranging from minor demonstrations to.... Well…this. Ponies, most of them newfoals, lie splattered on the ground. Cars are overturned and wrecked, storefronts are shattered, and the fires are raging. The violence has officially stopped, but things are still not settled. The word on the street is that Equestria has sealed up the Conversion Bureaus and their Consulates...in Innsbruck they were just a day too late. Kraber saw to that. On May 20th he participated in blowing it all to hell, and revelled in it. It was his first action with the HLF, his baptism and launching ceremony. And yet, even as he thumbs the detonator, he and Kate are still in the car, still making love, only for Viktor to suddenly realize Kate is a newfoal unicorn the color of maple leaves in fall. And as she continues to manically bounce on his thrusting crotch, she levitates a bottle of potion to him, her zebra costume discarded like a snake's skin. It is dripping blood, as if someone has meticulously skinned it from her. He reaches for a knife and stabs her, ramming the blade down into her neck and barrel, into her eyes, anything to keep her from ponifying him. But on the tenth or eighteenth stab of the knife into her neck, she is suddenly human again. Blood is gushing from her neck. Viktor tries to stop the bleeding, applying pressure to the wound, but there's far to many cuts to stem, she's losing too much blood... She looks up at him, pleading even as she looks betrayed. He pulls away from her in fear, and topples out of the bloodstained car, weighed down by his clanking HLF military kit. More newfoals are coming. They wear bandoliers of potion, and leading them from the rear is that mank genaaide bergbok Pinkie Pie. He grabs a baseball bat, Kate's baseball bat, and runs out the door. The stolen revolver at his belt is heavy, the MG34 on his back so cumbersome. Newfoals are everywhere. He empties his LMG into them, screaming madly. He’s trying to make his way to cover and reload. If they get a drop of potion on him, or open up his mask, he’s fokked. But when he gets a perfect shot in, a 7.92 round cutting through up to seven unshielded newfoals at once, dozens of maimed human flash into this place, expressions of agony on their faces. They glare at him in accusation, gurgling, hands over the wounds, blood pouring between their fingers. FOK! One pegasus with a cutie mark of a snowflake divebombs Kraber, and he pulls out Kate’s baseball bat and cracks its head, splattering brains and blood all over the wood. And, to his horror, there is a human woman on the ground, everything above the bridge of her nose simply pulped into a mass of red. “Eh-haaaah,” she gurgles, trying to look up at him. “Eh-haaaaauuurhhhhh…” she points a finger. He takes the 9mm semiauto pistol at his hip and fires into her skull, maybe as a mercy, maybe just to finish her off, and he sees one of the newfoals practically pounce on her and baste her in potion, watching her scream and scream, thrashing, her eyes growing so wide it looks like they will pop, her smile so wide it looks like it’ll split her face in half- Kraber takes his eyes off her and runs. In the windows facing the street, he sees Pinkie Pie in place of his own reflection, the pink mare weighed down with all his equipment, burdened with his sins… He throws open the door to a shop, finding a storekeeper with a homemade double-barreled shotgun standing next to a mare. The storekeeper is ready to fire at him. Acting on reflex, Kraber swings the bat at the threat, caving in the storekeeper’s head from the side, teeth and spittle flying to one side, a spray of blood from the mouth and nose, one eye about to pop out. In midair, it looks like the storekeeper changes, becoming a pony, and he looks angry, hatefully staring at Kraber, trying his best to damn him with only his eyes. The mare, this one a violet pegasus with gray eyes and a black mane in a bobcut, screams, jumping at Kraber, but he’s faster. He rams his knife into her throat, and puts pressure down on the knife like a pry bar, a quick wet sound as he pulls it out…. Of a rather cute human woman’s throat. Her gray eyes are so sad, her bobcut covered in blood. “No,” Kraber wants to whisper. “NO!” She falls to the floor wordlessly. Kraber, noticing this, takes a shelf and throws it in front of the door to form a barrica- FOK! There’s windows, that won’t work! He rushes out the front door and exits into an hotel corridor. Now he’s running up a flight of stairs, trying to fit the ammo belt into the gun’s feed tray and slam down the cover. A human armed with potion-grenades jumps out, and Kraber switches to his shotgun, firing all four barrels into the the man’s abdomen, practically cutting him in half. There is blood everywhere, eating into the wood like acid. I have burned my tomorrows And I stand inside today At the edge of the future And my dreams all fade away… He runs, careful not to touch the corpse. Running away, always running away, down streets that blend architecture, styles and nationalities flowing like water. Austria to Turkey, all down the Mediterranean to Africa, then over to America, off in the distance.... Desperate to escape, he clambers down a fire escape, into a ship’s hold, finding himself before a burning storefront. A dull purple stallion rushes out, half on fire, and runs up to Kraber. His hooves rap on the riveted metal deck. “Oh thank Celestia! You have to get me out of here! The newfoals, the ponies at the Conversion Bureau, they’ve gone crazy!” he stallion babbles. “They’re trying to ponify everyone, and the HLF are going nuts and-” He looks up into Kraber’s eyes. “Oh Tartarus no.” Kraber smashes Kate’s baseball bat against his head, knocking his snout to the pavement. Then he grabs the stallion by the neck, and throws him into the flames. For a moment, he sees a human face, burning, screaming in agony. Two newfoals, a filly and a foal, dissolve out of from the hull walls and rush at him. Kraber fires his LMG in short controlled bursts like he learned in training, one for each of them. But, when the killing round hits them both… They are Peter and Anka. Light, brownish skin, with Kraber’s not-quite-curly-but-full hair, Peter with his one eye and Anka in that same costume - a horse costume, what are the fokking odds - she had insisted on wearing for her birthday, giant bulletholes through her. “Kill them,” says a voice, and he turns to see a furious young woman. She’s armoured like him, and has a shotgun holstered on her back and an assault rifle in her eyes. “Kill them,” Verity Carter repeats. “They murdered the people we loved…that’s our creed, our mission, you fucking coward. YOU KILL ALL OF THEM!” “I CAN’T!” Kraber yells back. “They’re my family, my children, they’re… I can’t kill… I’m not...” And suddenly Verity is a pony. Dark brown coat, her hazel eyes ringed in blue. “Kill them all! Kill me too!” she roars, vocal cords raw and pained. “Murder everything that ever hurt you, because we’re all just fucking animals. Laugh while you do it, laugh at them like you did for me, you bliksem! Your whole life is one poisoned JOKE!” Anka coughs up blood, and stares up at Kraber. “...Why?” she whispers. “Why?” “...Daddy?” Peter asks, looking up at him. “Why’d you do that? What’s happening?” ‘No,’ Kraber whispers/says/thinks, though he can hear no sound. ‘No… this… I didn’t do this! This hasn’t happened!’ But it will, he realizes. I’ll kill them. I’ll have to kill all of them, and there’s no way I can stop it. He turns to scream at Verity, and finds her tight black ponytail of a mane has exploded into orgasmically pink coils. The warlike mare moans lewdly, and like an elastic band, springs into another new shape, one Viktor knows all too well. “You might as well have killed them,” Pinkie Pie says, a manic gleam in her eyes, like that of a child pulling off the wings of a fly or roasting ants with a magnifying glass just because, like Kraber had always told Peter and Anka not to. “You invited me, didn’t you?” Four newfoals grab Kraber, holding him down. “You wanted me to plan the party, and I did!” Pinkie Pie says, all happy and bubbly, bouncing over to him, that gleam still in her eyes. “Yupperoony, I gave them the best present of all!” “FOKKING KONTGESIG!” Kraber spits, struggling against the newfoals. “LET ME GO, YOU GODDAMNED FOKKING TWO-BIT HARIME NUI RIPOFF! I’LL RIP YOUR EYES OUT AND FEED THEM TO YOU!” “Don’t be like that! Parties are supposed to make you happy, and they’re going to be happy, perfect, pretty little ponies forever!” Pinkie Pie laughs. “Why didn’t you take it?!” “He was helping meeee!” chirps the one newfoal holding down Kraber’s right arm. Kraber recognizes him, somehow, a flicker of self-awareness, something screaming behind those wide glassy orbs fixated on something only newfoals could see. Echoing behind its words is a tortured and distorted howl of misery. “Dietrich,” Kraber whispers. The boy. The boy he’d been helping. The one that had gotten drunk and made him work overtime. Oh God, he’d even failed at that… “Yeah, I’ve talked to your foals, and they’re right, you are a failure!” Pinkie Pie says, so sickly-sweet, like someone that thinks they’re being nice by being cruel, but is just being condescending, made even worse by their obliviousness. “But if you’re a pony, well, you might just be better!” “NO! FOK JOU, MAG DIE DUIWEL JOU HAAL, JOU BLIKSEM! GOTTVERDAMNT… FOK! JY NAAI JOU MA VIR SAKGELD, JOU NAAI!” Kraber screams, and suddenly, impossibly, he throws off the newfoals. He rushes at Pinkie Pie. “SLAAN JOU BINNE JOU MA SE POES, JOU FOKKIN TEEF!” And suddenly, he realizes he’s naked. No clothes, no nothing, no knife. Ah, what the hell. He punches Pinkie Pie right in the face, enjoying the satisfying crack, ready to… To… Oh FOK! Oh God, oh fok, oh no! FOK! There’s… potion. It got on his back there’s no way to get it off- “Just wait, you’ll be happy soon enough-” He screams wordlessly, something that might have made sense in any one of the many languages he knows, and pounds his fists against her face. Over and over, until the fingers meld together and become hooves, even as something keeps on telling him he shouldn’t be doing this, she’s his rightful better, he’d be happier as a pony, no matter what happens, and even as his life flashes by he keeps pounding and pounding with both hooves, roaring and shrieking till his throat bleeds and runs dry, and he wishes that this could all end that he could just-wake… “Hi there!” he squeaks, in a bright, feminine voice. “I’m the Pretty Private, Victory!” He, no, she...what, no! What’s happening to herself? “I’m your toy soldier…” he/she chirps again. “I’m a cutesy killer!” Oh yes...being a ‘pretty private’, whatever that is, enthuses her even more, and intensifies the drive she has to keep punching the face of the disgusting, bearded human male beneath her! This is her creed, so simple and right! Kill and destroy them all! They’re gonna scream, just like she did; open mouth, open heart, blood and noise forever piercing her skull, poisoning her with psychopathic purple liquid. She watched it all, and felt the knife edge split down the middle… She can feel her nethers moistening in glee as she fulfils her purpose. Everything’s clear now, no more doubts, no more pain. She was forged to fight and fuck, to slay and suck! An animal without desires beyond primal rage and lust... And she’s gonna serve her Queen, she’s gonna keep hitting him till she can squish his brains between her hooves- fingers LIKE A FOKKING SAUSAGE! And his identity floods back in…He can’t stop the killing... AND HE DOESN’T FOKKING WANT TO! HE’S GOING TO KEEP PUNCHING THE KAK OUT OF THIS PONY, RIP HER FOKKING THROAT OUT WITH HIS FOKKING TEETH, AND SPLATTER HER ACROSS THE TRACKS OF EXISTENCE! RIP THE PAIN OUT HER THROAT AND SHOVE IT IN HER EYES, BITE OFF HER EARS AND SHOVE THEM UP HER FLANK, RIP OFF HER FOKKING LEGS AND BEAT HER WITH THEM AND STAB HER WITH THE JAGGED SPIKES OF THE RADIUS AND ULNA, THUMBS IN HER EYES AS THEY SCREAM AND AS HE DRIVES THEM UP INTO HER BRAIN! HE’LL LOOK INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS, AND HE’LL EAT IT ALL! FOK THIS FOKKING KONTGESIG FOR ALL THE CRAP SHE’S PULLED, HE’S GONNA RIP OFF HER FOKKING HEAD AND PISS IN HER FOKKING SKULL! HE’S GOING TO MAKE HER REGRET EVERYTHING SHE’S EVER DONE, HE’S GOING TO- -wake up. Wake Up. Kraber gags, coughing, rolling over. He is trembling, cold, drenched in sweat. He clutches the stuffed animals so tightly to his body that his arms ache. His .45 automatic is in one hand, rattling. The safety is still engaged, but there’s probably a round still in the chamber. He is breathing heavily. Thank God. Everything is back to normal, even that dead pony in the corner of his tent- “The buck you looking at?” it asks, unmindful of the bloody hole in its head. Oh, FOK. It's Emil. This is a new one. Kraber draws in a deep breath, shaking his head, trying not to scream. It’s gone. He takes deep breaths. Count to four. Inhale. Count to four. Exhale. Deep breaths. Morning coffee, that’s what he needs. And more HLF rotgut if the stills are back in production. And then a good op. Saving the world. Right? Today was the day they’d be working with the Thenardier Guards. The day they struck a blow against the horsefuckers, and finally accomplished something good… The day on which he had to die...or did he? Was there something else he could choose?