The Light Despondent

by Doctor Fluffy

Nowhere To Run

If you'd been there, you could see a Human Liberation Front ‘checkpoint’ in Northern New Hampshire, not too far away from a certain settlement established by that same group of ‘liberators’, a troupe so inadequate at their self-proclaimed purpose that most people see them as a heavily-armed, psychotic joke with a bark somewhat stronger than their bite.

At that moment, the fools were about to do something incredibly stupid. They were begging for an excuse to shoot something. So the same as usual.

The checkpoint halted a short convoy of six cars on the Berlin Road, next to the Androscoggin River. Pallid mist rose from the gurgling river, and it lent terrifying atmosphere as torches swept across windows and windscreens. The headlights cut through the fog too, revealing militiamen armed with patchwork weaponry thrown together from whatever is to hand and store bought firearms, both in huge, ridiculous calibers.

Four HLF soldiers, three men and a woman, are running ‘customs checks’, words which in this context have no meaning. Really, it's apocalyptic banditry with a fancy name and delusions of grandeur.

The adults are trembling with doubt as the militants approach; if they’re lucky, the HLF might just rob them of everything else. Alternatively, they might kick them out into the dark, so that the cars can be stripped down to parts.

The worst case scenarios end with their skeletons left to rot in the woods, riddled with bullet holes. Cars or people, which is more valuable tonight?

The HLF ‘revolutionaries’, these thugsthugs carrying over-calibered frankenguns and homebrewed pipe bomb launchers. One of the men and women stalking alongside the cars, shining their torches in through the windows. Whether they have motives and drives, whether or not they’re just looking for an excuse to commit violence, or if they have any nobler intentions, perhaps of hunting some of the doubly-damned PER for (hopefully) slow, excruciating extermination... doesn't matter.

What matters is someone is cringing in an open car trunk. Standing over it, a man with booze and other drugs on his breath held a heavy revolver in one hand, the trunk in another. His finger was on the trigger. He stared, nigh-immobile.

Imagine he's staring at you.

Imagine that you are one of the two unicorns curled up in the trunk, petrified as the HLF man holds the gun to your muzzle. By human standards, it is a massive weapon.

To your young eyes, its yawning barrel fills the world.

You are the smaller of the two ponies, a little filly named Dancing Day. You received your cutie mark not long after leaving Equestria, during a trip to France, and had felt something ‘odd’ as you stood atop the now-atomized Eiffel Tower, dancing in the wind.

They said the blessing of a cutie-mark felt like a tingle on the flank, but you had felt something more like a wave...as if an old and ancient forest had stirred under a spring sun, and you were among the first flowers to bloom.

You’d felt it through your hooves, in the air around you, in the riveted iron of Gustav Eiffel’s masterpiece. You had felt the magic of an entire world wake up, touch your soul, and smilingly brush the fur on your flank into an image that reflected the truth of your identity..

It had been a slow and sluggish process, but it had happened. You were, in fact, one of the first ponies to receive a cutie-mark not from Equus’s stagnating, overstretched and eggshell-thin magic field, (second magical renaissance? Bullshit!) but from the old and dormant power of Earth.

Which makes you, in some deep and profoundly fundamental way, as much a child of this world as of the rock on which you were born.

But the HLF man standing over right now cares not for any of that. He is tall and somewhat thin, lean and muscled, with a well-travelled body. His armor, if you can call it that, looks to be pieced together from surplus military equipment, though you can see stolen metal beneath the fabric. The barding had been thrown together, and held in place with ropes and strips of plastic almost as thick as a human's thumb, patched in places with duct tape. His beard was wild and unkempt, sticking out in all directions. His teeth and breath were rotten, every exhalation reeking of tobacco, poorly homebrewed alcohol, and hand-rolled cigarettes. His restless eyes, the color of maple syrup, darted from side to side. They were hardened, predatory, peeking out over dark bags that marked him as tired, restless.

Imagine that you quailed. Shivered a little. Old herd instincts - as you are now a pony - tell you that a hunter with eyes like that is more likely to kill you out of sheer madness than a need to feed. He just seems too tired to give a damn whether you live or die, the picture of the average ‘kill-em-all’ HLF man, a demon that could've very well been summoned through some sort of diabolic ritual to create the vilest, most sociopathic, kill-crazy sonovabitch imaginable.

Rather incongruously, a medical bag hangs from one of his shoulder.

In your fearful hyper-awareness, you notice another strange detail about him. On his back is what is unmistakably a pony-modified weapon, a mechanical death-toy painted up with magical runes, strange wires and bits attached.

‘How?!’ you ask yourself. ‘How did he get this?!’

Imagine that, in some strange way, you feel sorry for him. For despite what he is about to do, you can see the genuine pain in his eyes, and understand it. HLF members are just men and women, like any other, good and bad as they come. More bad than most, true... But some...some have lost so much that there is nothing left in them. A lot of them are just dyed-in-the-wool psycho, where rage and madness have flooded in to fill the husk life has left behind. Imagine that you've seen some refugees like that in the PHL, working with your mother. Ponies and humans that have no homes, no families, and no history to go back to. Cut adrift. With no shred of identity left to cling onto, they tended to grab hold of the first thing that came to hand.

An individual...a cause...a gun. And they never let go, clinging on with a death-grip.

Something of that is in this man, at the roots of his insanity. And so…even as he is about to kill you, you cannot help but pity him for what made him into such a monster.

You inch closer to your mother, who lies beside you, one hoof laid protectively over your body.

She was terrified, and yet she returns the HLF man’s maddened gaze with defiance. There’s a soft glow to her horn, a shimmer as she readies to fight. You were trembling, wishing you could be as strong as Mommy.

No! It cannot end like this! Not when the two of you escaped from Equestria just as they were closing the borders, not after having been displaced from home after home. No, after having survived this long, it CANNOT END LIKE THIS.

And suddenly, impossibly, it didn't.

He saw you embracing mommy, he saw you wondering what had made him this way, and something flashed across his face. His eyes water. He was remembering something. Slowly, quietly, he did something to the back of his pistol which, in a flash of understanding, you knew to be called a ‘revolver’.

It clicked, you flinched… and he lowered it. Placed it in the... Sheath? Is that what it’s called?

And then he closes the trunk on the two of you, one finger held to his mouth in the gesture you know to be a plea for silence.

“Everything seems to be in order,” he said to your ride’s driver, a nice lady called Kiki. You cannot see what happened, but when she recounts his words to her, you can see it in your minds eye. You heard his voice there, through the metal lid of the trunk, and it just sounded...flat, somehow. Neither sad, nor drained of emotion, just hollow, as if in realization of a terrible all-consuming void growing within oneself.

You looked back at your mother frantically, at the dying flickers of light on her horn. Did she use her talents….get in his head? Was that her psychomancy, or some kind of mnemosurgery?

And as she looked back to you, clearly as surprised as you, so shocked that horror is the only emotion she seems able to show on her face, you understand: He did this on his own.

And you ask yourself: Why?

As does your mother.

As does Kiki.

It is hard to imagine Kiki’s position in those terrible moments. Trembling at gunpoint in the driver’s seat, hands on the dashboard, but with a subcompact pistol, holstered to the underside of the steering column. If she went for it, surprise would probably give her the time to get one shot off, maybe two. And then every rifle outside would turn on her and riddle her with more holes than a colander. It would be a massacre.

But they’d do just the same once they discovered the ponies...die now, and take a few bastards in the process, or die in less than a minute and accomplish nothing.

You can’t imagine the stress of that. And you certainly can’t imagine Kiki’s silent, mental scream of anguish as the madman opened the trunk, and easily popped the false bottom, revealing the cargo - you and your mother.

She will tell you later that she her right hand had slowly inched down the dashboard towards the concealed pistol, ready to rip it out of the holster, slip the safety and slide her finger in behind the trigger-guard, all in one fluid movement. One squeeze on the trigger to let slip the dogs of war…

...and then, death. Her only option would have been to squeeze off as many shots as possible, floor the gas pedal and attempt to break through the ‘check point’s’ barrier across the road. Her one ace in the hole was the chance that you and your mother might pull some miracle out of your plot-holes.

And so she’d waited, on that knife-edge between planning and action, waiting for the turning-point, ready for man investigating the trunk to jump back at the sight of two unicorns and scream ‘ALARM!’

She was not ready for him to step up to the drivers-side window and gruffly wave her one with his gun.

“Everything seems to be in order, right away…” he barked. “I’m sure your cargo will find a willing fence in Colebrook.”

He looked as if he was ready to throw up all over the ground, cheeks and forehead ashen behind the unkept mass of his beard. In fact, you will later learn that later that night he did indeed void his stomach contents into the river.

But there and then, there had been a stunned pause. And then Kiki nodded, fingertips brushing the gun as she reached to turn the ignition key. A look passed between them that might have been gratitude on her parts, or wariness. And then they had been in motion, peeling off into the distance at over eighty miles per hour, because moose, black bears, wolves,or coyotes be damned, Kiki was getting out of there....

Nothing was sacred to the HLF where ponies were concerned. They were the enemy, the oppressing army. Their soldiers, the Schutzstaffel. Their ‘civilians’, a blight to be eradicated, branch and root, along with any race-traitors who dare collaborate with these invaders.

So why, in this moment, had this man let those three go? As he watches the car disappear between the trees, he wondered the exact same thing.

It's a safe bet he's just as confused as you.

The man - whose name was Viktor Marius Kraber - was sat, or tired (in his native Afrikaans) and looking forward to some quality time with a bottle of rotgut. Home-brewed hooch among the HLF tasted like paint thinner, with lying labels slapped on...but he didn't care, he needs a fokking drink.

And as realization dawns in his mind, Kraber wished that someone would just lambast him for a moment of weakness. Then he didn't wish for it. Then he did.

...that filly had pitied me, he thought. Why?

Somehow, despite the situation, she’d found it in her to pity him.

He was used to anger. And even fear. Heck, he loved fear, loves to inflict it and feel it, for it sharpens his senses as much as it cripples his foes. It was part of why he tried so much to comport himself according to pop-culture’s image of the amoral, downright psychotic Afrikaner. Save for the racism…at least against other humans, anyway. If if anyone doubted that, well, his wife had been black.

‘Oh, Kate…’

Oh yes, our man loved to terrify the PER and their goddamn Quislings, loves to play the part of a South African sociopath. It comes naturally, of course, but he likes putting in the extra effort. And it’s gotten so many delightful results. Rage, confusion, hurt and terror had all been cast upon him. The screams of those PER as he came down on them and… disassembled them. Limb by limb, muscle by muscle. Sometimes alphabetically. ‘A’ is for ‘Amygdala’.

But never, never before had he gotten pity.

And, in that moment, staring down into the open trunk, he had felt an accusatory stare blazing back at him. Not from the fearful, if defiant mother, the one with the butt-mark of the telescope, but…

‘Katie... my treasure. You'd hate me. ...And Peter and Anka would too…’

Maybe, in the near future, he will reinterpret that moment as the ghosts of his lost family looming over him in judgment, rather than just a vague feeling of what would they do in his place, but a sense of disappointment was apparent.

He had pressed the barrel of the revolver to the pony spawnling, and saw his own wife and children staring back at him.

He’d practically been paralyzed in their glare. He tried to yell, tried to pull the trigger, to consign the two hoenderpoes back to the depths of rancid memory.

He failed.

Staring into those condemning faces, gazing upon that pleading, pitying filly, he had uncocked and holstered the revolver, and stepped back.

He’d let them go.

Anka loved them, the man thinks, an unbidden recollection. She had loved the natural ponies...and their foals too.

He realizes right then and there that he had, in all likelihood, killed some of his daughter’s pony friends on his first rampage.

‘No! They were… they were ponies’, he tells himself, trying to encapsulate every old loss and slight within that word.

It felt like a lie, sackcloth in his mouth.

“Kraber!” another man, Lovikov, calls out, striding over with a heavy Kalashnikov rechambered for .50 Beowulf, with an HLF pipebomb launcher (This one’s Russian, so it’s called a Medved, not a Gut-Puncher) in hand. The first spits of rain hissed on the hot barrel.

In his reprieve, Kraber had missed the sound of the assault rifle firing. He glanced leadenly between the bloodstains splattered over the inside of another car’s windows, and a bag of plunder in Lovikov’s free hand.

“You’ll never guess what I found in this car!” the Russian partisan enthuses, hefting the bag. “Actual goddamn cinnamon! I haven’t had cinnamon in forever! Okhu el! Back in the Suhoputnye voyska, we never had hauls like this!”

“Find any ponies?” Kraber asked unsteadily.

“Nah,” Lovikov shrugged, completely unconcerned with the car he’s just perforated with .50 cal rounds. “Shame, isn’t it?”

That’s Lovikov in a nutshell, a zealot in the guise of a man, an oldschool Stalinist zampolit brought back from the hells of history - he’s said time and time again that he doesn’t consider anyone outside the HLF to be human. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and the true dialectic demands they be removed from the problem. That kind of fanaticism makes him an effective soldier, enough that he’s caught the eyes of Galt’s Thenardier Guards before, but Lovikov’s always turned down an invitation to transfer out of the Menschabwehrfaktion, claiming he’s needed to keep the unit ideologically pure.

“Still, I’m happy about what we got,” Lovikov continues, rooting through the bag.

In a way, Kraber feels the same way. They do need supplies, children are starving in Defiance after all…

...kids who have never been children and may never be again, who hate ponies with all their hearts. War orphans blessed with all the bounty of a war of attrition: Kalashnikovs and bullpups and Sten guns and a laundry list of homebrewed weaponry (oh my!). Some of them...the ones who listen to Lovikov and Viktor’s rants, want to head off to the nearest town and ‘bring the rain’ upon the traitors and horsefuckers. None of them would ever consider seeking shelter with someone outside the HLF.

‘If Peter and Anka had lived, would I have done the same to them? Turned them into raging little beasts...’ It tears at his heart to see the children so.

He tried to fight back the seeds of doubt, suddenly fearful of the children he has been systematically forging into soldiers.

But it’s the only way to victory, a part of him insists, what until recently he had thought of as the better part of him. The rest of America has thrown itself to the ponypounders, and some of the more paranoid HLF members, the survivalists who have been anticipating various armageddons for decades, keep voicing their fears of the potential consequences. Like many over-armed Americans, they’ve imagined up any number of paranoid scenarios to fuel their malice...

“....taking over America….fascism...peak oil…” some of them like Birch or Oakes mutter, invoking magical shibboleths and bywords that represent countless fears. “...in league with the United Nations...anti-America, anti-Christ...FEMA camps...traitor in the White House...death tribunals...Illuminati pony overlords…”

Some point to more concrete fears. Just look at what Yael Ze’ev is doing up in Quebec, with the tacit agreement of her superiors. It’s a military coup, with ‘that damn Yiddish dyke’ playing the role of some Great Uniter...when she’s blatantly another wartime dictator, carrying out the damn Zionic protocols…

“It won’t be long until she comes for us…” they whisper. “Before she comes for the good Christians...all these damn foreigners, they’re all Muslim terrorists, her fucking footsoldiers. We’ve gotta kill em’ all before she slaughters us all in a real Holocaust…”

That’s usually the point where Kraber lost his temper and kicked the bastards spewing anti-semitic and islamophobic tripe in the face. Bigotry against other humans is not to be tolerated, (Unless they’re PER, cause who cares about those fokking kontgesigs?) not now...not when they need to pull together to win: win hearts and minds to the Front, win this war.

They have to do this. They have to protect mankind from the scourge of Equestria, from all enemies foreign and domestic, whether they like it or not.

Because heroes do what’s right. It’s the only way to fight.

Right?

The rest of the cars, evidently judged to be ‘safe’, sped off into the distance. Undoubtedly, they’d call 911 as soon as they come back into the range of the dwindling cellphone networks, but the cops up here won’t come looking for either the checkpoint, or Defiance. They wouldn’t dare. And neither, claims Lovikov, would the PHL. The Front is too smart for them.

(Kraber will later be of the opinion that is ‘fokking bullshit’, and that ‘the Front’ were merely beneath notice until their antics forced everybody else’s hand.)

And so, with that said, Kraber, Lovikov, and the remainder of today’s attack on the PER dismantle the checkpoint and the blood-stained car. Once stripped of tyres, brakes, battery and engine, and the sump drained of all the useful oil, they shove over the shoulder of the highway. Lovikov smiles at the site of the wreck, whose dead owner is still buckled in, plunging and tumbling down the slope into the Androscoggin.

And then they loaded the gains into a pair of old, camo-painted pickups, cross the river at an old rickety bridge only hunters would use, and set off into the hinterlands.

Deeper into the forest, bumping and juddering on the old logging road, silent trees flashing by as the pickups penetrate their ancient fastness. The abandoned trail gets narrower and rougher, overgrowth pressing in so close that the rear view mirrors scrape against tangled branches.

When at last they stop, the troops first take up defensive positions to confirm they were not followed. After Kraber has motioned ‘all clear’, they silently retrieve tarpaulins from the hollowed-out corpse of a felled tree, and throw it over the vehicles to shroud them from aerial view.

Then, on foot through the forest, Lovikov at point and Kraber guarding the fear. Fingers are on safeties as they tread softly on the undergrowth, a slightest ‘crack’ of a twig, cause for concern. At least, they make it to their camp.

The day preceding those events had been fine. Better than fine.

Better than the rest of the world, wracked desperate resistance in cities across the globe, and planes struggling against pegasi and Equestrian zeps. Civilians, human and pony alike, trying to outrun the Barrier on foot or hoof or on overcrowded trains. Trying, and often failing. Perhaps you remember the evacuation of Lagos? Or Rebecca Kleiner taking back the Philippines, destroying the PER and newfoals wherever needed. Maybe you are thinking of the Battle of the Thunderchild, and Ambassador (or Ambadassador, as some PHL members joke) Lyra Heartstrings’ heroic last stand and death. The famous train guarded by the Dragons of the East, going through HLF-PER warzones unsafe for anyone?

But none of that's important right now. Let's say you're here in the White Mountains and Great North Woods. Just imagine life here. Imagine living, knowing all of these events have happened. Imagine that it is the height of summer, and desperately trying not to think about the impending apocalypse. It is not necessarily the end of the world, but you can see it from here. Everyone wants to just unwind: Stop by somewhere for some ice-cream to slake the heat. Northland Dairy in Berlin, or maybe Ben & Jerry’s or 18•C in North Conway. To name a few.

And then you’d go spend the evening playing videogames with your pals. Isn't there a new pony Tenno in Warframe? Digital Extremes is nothing if not accommodating. But then, there’s a war being fought. The rivers are being dammed for hydroelectric power and drinking water, the woods are being felled for lumber. Total war. And yet despite that, even though everyone’s scared and some know that after this year they probably won’t ever be going skiing up again at the Balsams Wilderness, Wildcat Mountain, or anywhere else around there, fuck it, it’s still summer, and they’re going to have fun.

Boys and girls, colts and fillies play outside in the unswept streets, and teenagers do what they will even between firearms training sessions that aren’t quite compulsory. People that still have the money to go backpacking up here hike around the woods, and take in the sights.

Even the heritage railroads are still in business. Though officially tourist services have been suspended ‘for the duration’, the Mount Washington Cog Railway has had a new lease of life supplying the new observatories, radar suite, satellite and weather stations hurriedly erected at the summit of its titular peak, ever since a full mile of the highway was washed out and deemed not worth the expense of repair.

Likewise, over at Crawford Notch, the Conway Scenic Railroad is rolling freight trains for the first time in nearly forty years, bringing down the deforested bounty of Coos County for the war effort. It’s thankfully not clear cut anymore, but it would be a conservationist’s nightmare any other time.

And with diesel fuel in short supply, both railroads had been turning to their carefully husbanded steamers to keep things running. The Conway Scenic’s old 7470, a steam-powered Canadian expatriate, is out and about on the lumber trains. Even her shedmate, 501, a relic nobody thought would ever steam again, is fresh out of overhaul, and is sprinting up and down the yard in North Conway to run her bearings in. Families have brought their kids out in droves to watch the old lady come back to life, and they’re howling in praise as she makes pass after roaring pass, whistle blowing and exhaust blasting high into the sky.

Someone rustled up a few barbeques and what started as a casual ‘mosey down to the railroad’ had turned into a summer party. There'd even been a few ponies joining in the spontaneous steam-rally, and one red stallion with a pompadour and electric guitar is taking favourites from the swelling audience. Lucky for him and his kin, most of the food being grilled and seared here today is vegetarian, though not so much in deference to equine diets as to the simple fact that meat is increasingly hard to come by these days.

It’d been a grand party. A man named Johnny C. Heald, who we’ve already met, and will see again later, is present as well, sketching the crowds gathered around the living, breathing machine. At some point today he’ll run into a woman named Falyn, and will buy her a beer. She’s a little uncertain of his equine friends, but seems nice enough. He’ll meet her later in Littleton.

The rest of the town seemed just as alive. A perfect summer’s day.

The line's chief engineer had blown a whistle for the uninvited crowd’s attention. Not only was 501 running sweet as a nut, but she needed a challenge to really get back into her stride. Smiling, he pointed across the yard to where the Conway Scenic’s few remaining passenger cars had been kicked back into a siding to rot, and suggested that a few hundred human beings might be as good a test of her strength as any.

The cheers and mad dash to find a seat hide the dark truth. Old 501 had been put back into service not for pleasure, but for war. To haul supplies down for processing, to carry munitions to the growing stockpiles at the Mount Washington Training Grounds…

...and if the Barrier couldn't be stopped, to run away with evacuees in tow, on the reasoning that there aren’t enough roads around here to avoid zombie-apocalyptic level traffic jams. Maybe the same cars currently packed with laughing, shouting, terrified men, women, children and ponies will be used in those doomsday trains. They looked like they were happy, but a close look to videos and photographs and uploads to facebook and imgur and flickr would show grins that seem a little too forced, screams of joy that look a shade too much like terror, open-mouthed glee that could, if you look at it right, look like tearless bawling.

Oh yes, a perfect summer’s day.

Jack Weiss

It's perfect in part because of the people who guard the area. People whose solemn duty is to watch for people like Kraber, or PER, or any other threat that plans on taking advantage of the people of all these mountain towns.

One such example being Jack.

Jack’s a local philanthropist, a solidly built, shaggy-haired pillar of the community and good candidate for local small-time politics, famous for running grass-root fundraisers to support local refugees, and scrap-and-material drives to support the PHL and their affiliates. He’s just on the far side of the big four-oh, a veteran of the early war with half a face like molten wax (thanks to a Royal Guardspony’s spell), and he rests after travelling every back road on his ATV, thanks to a back injury that never healed right. Though he’s hoping some of the new magical treatments can help with that. He doesn’t want to get back in the game, but nobody here has a choice, so he might as well.

He was tired, and his back was aching again, so at the moment, he was atop a building in Gorham, holding an Ohio Ordinance HCAR, or Heavy Combat Assault Rifle. Essentially a modernized and lightened Browning Automatic Rifle. He'd added a PHL repeating flare launcher, a useful aftermarket mod much prized by the PHL’s scouting forces all over the world.

Lying on his stomach to ease his back, he sips coffee black as a hole and, through the gunsight, searches for suspicious lights in the dark. Down on the railroad the 0-6-0 steamer, 7531, hustles past with a load of logs from up past the Notch. He waited for the steam to clear, and scanned again for any abnormal activity. For now at least, he didn't see any.

Yet.

Jack’s a family man. He loves his four children dearly, even the little orphaned earth pony colt he has adopted, and he considers the Moroccan refugees in his house to be something close to family...maybe distant relatives who he’s still getting to know. He wouldn’t say he loves them, as of yet...but he will be damned (as will they, he supposes) if the Solar Empire takes them. There is no pay for the job of hosting the displaced however, but thankfully he doesn’t have to worry too much about finances with his own small pot of cash. The past few months, he’s practically given up on doing any business, and instead forsook his job to instead patrol the town and surrounding county. It has, admittedly, run those same cash reserves down a bit, yet the people of Gorham and the surrounding communities have been kind enough to donate meals, and necessities to him and his fellow watchmen…many of whom were already homeless, with nowhere to go. Now at least they have a purpose, and some standing. For they’re providing a necessary service, guarding against roving bandits or potential newfoal outbreaks, as well as assisting the overburdened police in keeping the peace.

There’s some irony in the fact that some of his duly sworn-in ‘special constables’, who the good folk of Gorham might not have spared a glance for as they begged for change and slept under cardboard boxes, now receive grateful nods and tipped hats as they walk the streets. They’re eating a damn sight better too.

In his house, the colt Jack considers his youngest son pretends to sleep under the covers, sharing it with his adoptive brother Sam. They’re reading comic books together, shining a flashlight and resting against a large stuffed dog from FAO Schwarz named Patrick. The colt, whose name is Roma Tomato, would have a place to sleep, but there’s not enough space in Sam’s room for another bed, and the Moroccan family already slept down in the living room, with battered and well-used kalashnikovs kept within close reach as they prayed daily towards the fallen Mecca. The couch was taken, as was the basement.

Not far away, another watcher, a hungry woman named Sarah Callista Ruyter, comes to the Saalt pub in Gorham. Officially, she’s involved in ‘fugitive recovery’, but everyone knows she’s a bounty hunter, looking for HLF or PER members with big enough prices on their heads.

Another place, another person. Deep in the woods, near the route of the old Boston and Maine railroad, broods a man named Burt Der Gransvoort. He watches as a diesel engine and several empty passenger cars (double-decker. Huh.) slide by on the line. For evac, no doubt. He was thankful that the old railroad’s been reinstated, though he wishes that had come back under better circumstances.

Burt was armed with an FN Leshiy battle rifle. The weapon was mostly Belgian, developed by remnants of Fabrique Nationale de Herstal alongside the Russian government-in-exile. Essentially it's’ an adaptation of the old NATO FAL, modified with ambidextrous controls, blowback shifted pulse and hyperburst, and enchanted for increased reliability and some limited self-repair. Damn thing even cleans itself - it is designed for extended trips out into the wild, and bringing back a lot of prey. It can also be rechambered with new barrels in different calibers like the old Remington ACR, with the addition of new magwells - Johnny C has sprung for the version that comes in 5.56, .308, and .50 Beowulf.

It’s also equipped with a repeating flare launcher, the same one Jack has mounted on his HCAR. Officially, the flare launcher is to be used solely as a signalling device, but Burt has used it in combat plenty of times. He’s one of many PHL-allied forest scouts roving the Great North Woods. He is using his Leshiy much like the Russian scouts it was designed to be wielded by, though he’s glad to be here in New England and not flushing out some accursed enemy holdout in Siberia or the rockies, or up north in Canada.

Elsewhere, along the ridgeline, troops, cops, militiamen and Jack’s ‘specials’ stand their posts on recently constructed watchtowers, armed with sniper rifles, shotguns and various models of Personal Defence Weapons, just waiting for any sign of a flare. Then they’ll swarm, converging on it in a pincer of steel and nitrocellulose.

These are interesting times indeed, peopled by interesting folks.

Jack's reason for being out there on watch simple: At night, nobody makes as much of a pretense of covering their fear. In the various hunting cabins and small times scattered across the wooded hills, there are people that live a nightmare as they pretend to sleep. Guns are hoarded, cleaned, and disassembled. Bullets are handloaded. Homemade HLF ‘panzerfausts’ are hammered together, and emergency kits for Barrierfall are being packed.

For all the fun these people are having as they snatch a ride behind 501, despite all the chaotic joy, it’s the last gasp and everyone knows it.

They know all too well that soon, the Barrier shall come for them, as much as they futilely pray that it won’t. Houses of worship are full to the brim for fear of two things: Death, which is preferable, and Ponification.

Some sleep alongside guard dogs or firearms, while others are checking the streets below their windows in the fear that their town may have been suddenly invested by the PER. Some are expatriates of Africa or Europe, even Greenland and Iceland, funneled into this region because living space is at a premium these days.

Some patrol the streets in hair-trigger militias, armed with firearms dating anywhere from America’s old west to the conflicts of the most recent decade. They are scared as well, knowing that they will likely be the first to become newfoals, and sometimes that fear can take control.

More than one innocent has died in these parts, either caught ‘acting suspicious’ or by unintentionally startling some poor schmuck with a gun and more frayed nerves than common sense. God help you if you’re a pony out on your own with no-one to vouch for you, especially on nights when really bad news comes through. In fact, when Iceland fell, when the Thunderchild sank, there was a bonafide pogrom in the next town over. And here in North Conway, on the night one brave mare quoted Charlie Chaplin and went to her death, a stallion came within an inch of being gelded.

Thank God arrests were made and convictions sought with a vengeance. They’re doing their best to do right by Lyra up here - well, everyone but those HLF that keep to themselves outside of the towns. For now at least, New Hampshire has not descended into the hell of Asia or South America, and it doesn’t even vaguely resemble the quasi-civil-war in other parts of the country.

Yeah, for now… but the rot of fear is coming. Already the first ‘popular front’, a ‘PHL in all but name’ gang from down south calling itself the Appalachia Security Force is holding town-hall meetings and recruitment rallies, alongside the PHL-affiliated Barrier Evacuation Engineer Corps which is maintaining railroads and refurbishing old rolling stock found derelict into passenger cars.

But they’re all still people. Fearful, angry people who tremble and jump at shadows, nervous wrecks drifting to both extremes, and who do this because they have the greatest thing of all to lose: everything. Their homes, their families, and themselves.

Johnny C Nny
Colebrook, NH

Johnny C - Nny to his friends, a local hero due to his actions in Alaska - had collapsed against one the chairs in this Colebrook bar.

He meant to scrounge up a bed for the night, and with some luck a bit of breakfast in the morning. Then he’d carry on north, and cross the border into Quebec. He had the kind of stocky build that comes from being naturally short, the kind of frame that people can’t tell is flab or muscle. After a long day, his hair forms itself into something approximating a pompadour. Right now he’s tired from a long day’s hike, and his nomadic lifestyle seems set to continue for some time, given the nature of his mission from the PHL, to root out possible enemy hideouts, and liaise with the local forest scouts, a lot of which were friends and ski buddies of his before the War. And he's supposed to help move a friend up to Quebec.

There’s two ponies travelling with him. One is a mare named Fiddlesticks Apple, one of Nny's fellow heroes from Alaska. One of very, very few survivors. By sheer coincidence, both she and Johnny hailed from longstanding dynasties of apple farmers. Though the Heald family’s land doesn’t produce much in the way of fruit anymore, it was one of those funny bonding moments that had left the two of them in stitches of laughter, having just outrun a HLF mob, back before the war. For the record, they were two against four, and Fiddlesticks managed to get in a truly ball-busting kick on one of their attackers, right around the same time Johnny managed to bag one with a lucky shot. She’s hated the HLF ever since.

The other pony's name is Aegis. You may have met him already.

‘A man, a mare and a stallion walk into a bar together…’

The reaction they get is mixed, in fact Fiddlesticks is just finished telling one man exactly what she thinks of his suggestion to ‘go back to Equestria’. From the stunned look on his face and the way he’s clutching at a battered old Windham Weaponry AR, the old coot probably didn’t expect the sturdy mare with the dainty mane to quite have such a command of ‘good ol’ redneck cussin’.

“...would no more crawl back to Equestria than you would go crawlin’ back in betwixt yer’ mamma’s ugly ol’ drumsticks, dipshit!”

In fact Fiddlesticks’ elegantly filthy little diatribe casts a pall of silence over the entire establishment for a few seconds. Then some of the rowdier patrons cheer the mare with raucous energy, quickly offering up a round of drinks to the three strangers. Before long, Fiddlesticks is happily playing guest musician to the band, fiddling along next to a good-looking blond man who bears a passing resemblance to a strategically shaved bear. He is singing rowdily in Quebecois French, and to his surprise Fiddlesticks joins in with a few choice lines of Equestrian Fancee. Also known as Prench.

She can thank her lately lamented cousin Octavia for her familiarity with foreign languages.

Now, the pub? That’s an interesting sort of place. A fine establishment no doubt, christened with the good name of the Dancing Bear.

It’s a damn sight more interesting than Johnny C would have ever expected of Colebrook, New Hampshire. Back before the war, a friend of his that was also named John, a principal down in Manchester, had said there was absolutely nothing up here. But now? More languages are spoken in New England than Old England had dialects, entire cultures have been mashed and folded onto one another. It’s a melting-pot comparable to New York or Shanghai at the dawn of the twentieth century, right down to the chronic overpopulation. And yet the necessity of simply enduring until tomorrow brought about a sort of blanket identity. Shortage of meat has brought about greater experimentation with vegetarian dishes, culinary lessons drawn from other countries and cultures. The same principles are being applied everywhere where peoples have been brought together by the war.

You can see these effects at work in the Dancing Bear. Fiddlestick’s temporary bandmates are playing an eclectic mix of instruments, including a set of bagpipes, a Japanese shakuhachi flute and...oddly enough, a musical saw. The drinks behind the bar are a shooting gallery of homebrewed spirits fashioned up in the likeness of famous national drinks, bottled and canned in whatever containers are to hand. There are even drinks by HLF brewers who have gone legitimate, such as John Peters (you know, the brewer) who made some booze from his crops of pears and apples. There’s a still whistling away in one corner and a coffee machine fashioned up from an old vertical steam boiler.

And the people. Oh brave new world, that has such creatures in it. Mos Eisley spaceport could not have conjured such a mix of soldiers, privateers, freebooters, prostitutes, thieves and heroes. And this isn’t even a big city. Remember, this is Colebrook, New Hampshire. Pre-war population, 2321 (give or take a few).

There are even, and Johnny C cannot exactly get over this, bounty hunters present, a motley group bartering ‘marks’ with each other based on skill and inclination. Armed to the teeth, ready to bring in anyone for which the money is being floated. HLF, PER… and all that lies in between.

‘The scum floats to the top as well as the cream,’ he thinks to himself, and for a moment entertains notions of himself as a warrior-poet, a battle philosopher…

Yeah, no. As if to underline that notion, he downs a shot of vodka ‘ice water’, and then bangs on the bar with the empty glass. Warrior-artist? Maybe. Warrior-writer? Maybe. Philosophy and poetry? Terrible at it.

“Another!”

As he nurses his second drink - vaguely irritated he can't feel anything - he eyes the bounty hunters over the top of the glass. Some that, from their bearing, clearly lean more towards the HLF’s side of the political spectrum, are giving Aegis a little more attention than he would like. Johnny raises an eyebrow eases back his coat, giving half the bar, bounty hunters included, a glimpse of his personal sidearm, a top-break .44 magnum with a twenty-gauge barrel.

Aegis shifts as well, and the dagger strapped to his haunch glints subtly in the light.

Neither of them could probably take the bounty hunters, even working together, but the demonstration serves as a reminder that they are armed, and willing to fight. As if weighing in on their side, the barkeep, a surprisingly slight man with signs of radiation poisoning from back in DC with a mighty scar cutting back right across his forehead, bangs a sign hanging prominently over the drinks rack with the elongated barrel of a decade-old Fostech Origin shotgun.

RIOTERS WILL BE SHOT

And under that, in spray paint and stencil, it reads:

This is your only warning.

With his other hand, the proprietor holds up the gun’s drum magazine, bringing it dangerously close to the mag well. He opens up with that thing, there's gonna be some serious shit.

The bounty hunters get the message, and go back to looking at ‘wanted’-writs. Aegis, his personal liberty reaffirmed, sidles up a little closer to inspect them for himself. One of the posters, he realizes, depicts a newfoal. It sits between a PER woman with a face that looks like it was subject to some fiery industrial accident, and a HLF man that looks for all the world like Sharlto Copley.

Pfft. Yeah right. No way that HLF sonovabitch has that kind of cash, Aegis thought. And right now, Mike Carter’s in prison, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bastard.

But at that moment, seeing that newfoal’s picture, Aegis had a moment’s epiphany. Back in Equestria, in the old days when all he had to back up his fears was a vague sense of paranoia, newfoals were a minority. Small, but possessed of a fervor comparable to religious converts. Aegis and his foals, Amber Maple and Rivet (who were down in Littleton with Blossomforth at the moment, working at the grist mill) had done their level-headed best to ignore those creatures, and the empty-eyed worshipful gazes they cast upon everything. But then it had been too much to ignore… especially with Woven Sugar’s growing, almost fetishistic love for them, her uncharacteristic swell of equine pride as any hints of xenophilia in her shriveled and died.

At the time, there weren’t that many newfoals, so it was not too difficult to ‘miss’ them in crowds, and on the street.

But now?

Back in Equestria natural-borns with cutie marks were the minority. Free thought was dying out in Equestria, unless newfoals can give birth to ponies which are not zombified. A nation without free thought… it scares the horseapples-no, the shit out of him.

He likes human curses more.

‘Heh,’ he thinks, ‘Equestria’s population has increased by over a billion in less than six years. That’s going to hit Hoofington like a buck to the face. Eeeyup. And Woven Sugar said Earth was the real hell, that Equestria was a paradise worth keeping clean. Bet she's doing wonderfully in her paradise new, her little zombieland with some newfoal fucktoy.’

Across from the bar is a big old Cathode Ray TV scavenged from somewhere, bulky and decades outdated, and yet so much more advanced than the technology of Aegis’ home. It’s broadcasting footage of some PHL troops. From their green lyre patches, they’re associated with Nny's cousin Yael Ze'ev’s forces, smoking out some nondescript town. The banner bar says that they’re in Quebec, trying to break a HLF pocket that's taken the place for themselves. It’s impossible to hear audio over the roar of the crowd, but someone’s turned on the old ‘teletext’ feature.

...officially, this is an act of mutiny. Many of these troops are not under the official command of Lieutenant Ze’ev, and our PHL liaison has refused to pass comment....

Yes indeed, but we can assume many of the more hawkish observers, both near and far, support what the Israeli soldier is doing...even if she’s wasting ammo and supplies that could be used elsewhere...even if she’s reinterpreted the PHL’s creed primarily as a mandate against the HLF.

That’s the way of war. People cry out for action, but can’t agree on what is the right action to take. And with the drawback to the continental Americas, all of the major factions suddenly have a lot of personnel loaded for bear and waiting, just waiting, for the Barrier. This… For America, this is the last gasp of pre-Barrier life, even though it’s a poor facsimile, like a grade school play at a cash-poor school (Like most schools nowadays, actually) aping a Broadway musical with costumes that have been used in almost every play the last couple years.

No wonder some of the troops are trying to be the tail that wags the dog. Johnny C remembers some of the things Yael said - he agreed with her that the HLF were out of control and they'd be a pain in the ass.

The news footage is shaky, taken from a news chopper (armed, most likely) hovering high above the town. Yael, prominent from her tall, thin build and position at the front, is crouched behind the scorched wreck of a car, toting a heavy rocket launcher. Johnny C, a gun-nut if there ever was one, watches with interest as she spins out from cover, aims, and fires in one fluid action. Judging from the backblast, her weapon is something like a Russian Pozhar. He can also see a full-auto grenade launcher that spits out cluster-bomb like projectiles designed to burst over the enemy. A handy, hand-held force multiplier.

‘Yeah’, he confirms to himself as an entire swathe of street explodes into dust and smoke. ‘Definitely Rainmakers’.

Then he sits up in shock. Onscreen, atop the rooftop behind Yael, a HLF soldier with a cheap submachinegun is clambering into view, a knife clenched in his teeth. The camera jolts, presumably because the cameraman is himself shouting a warning…

...and then the human abruptly loses his head, a purple-pink pegasus flickering into frame, saddle-mounted rifle smoking.

‘So that’d be Heliotrope there’, Johnny muttered.

One of the tanks Yael has brought to help open up a beachhead swiveled its turret toward a building, and fired.

‘It’s too close to - wait. It’s a damn flamethrower tank!’

The wooden building into which the tank had just fired burst into flames, crumbling as men, women, and children in battered tac-vests of stolen kevlar and hammered metal ran out.

The PHL fight back, and a slaughter erupts. Johnny’s firmly rooting for his hometeam.

“Go Horsefuckers,” he mutters absently, fumbling for his drink. His fingers brush the empty glass, and he winces, realising he spilled the vodka when he jumped up from the table.

“French country music in New Hampshire,” Aegis said, distracting Johnny C from his reverie. His stomach rumbled. “How about that?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t know,” says Johnny C, thankful for some diversion from that sight. He looks at Aegis.

‘Huge’ seems almost like an understatement when describing this particular Equestrian native. He’s big enough that ‘pony’ doesn’t seem to fully describe him. He seems to suffer from some kind of hypertrophy, being larger than almost any pony but Princess Celestia. Terms more akin to ‘small horse' came to mind, and Johnny C's first words upon seeing him were "Good God they're making them big nowadays! Don't they know there's a gas crunch? Look at the size of you..."

Fiddlesticks had openly gaped at their first meeting, muttering something about how Aegis was ‘a good size up on Big Mac’.... No mean feat, apparently.

Putting it bluntly, Aegis is almost large enough that Johnny C could ride him, though Johnny is admittedly five foot six in platform heels, so that’s not saying much. And he’s old-school PHL, old enough to have known Lyra in the first month of the organisation’s existence, and even survived a car bomb meant to kill the Golden Heart herself.

“Well, it’s pretty weird,” Johnny C said as, for the umphundredth time, he worried about Kiki Palmer, who was supposed to meet them. He phoned Jack Weiss down in Gorham asking after her, and Jack, a man who was honest to a fault, said she left safely, enroute for Colebrook. But dammit, it’s been a long time. And there’s… rumors. He’d always jokingly say “Of course there aren’t any axe murderers up here!” whenever someone worried about him walking out and about at night, but nowadays there’s a lot more to worry about.

And Kiki is overdue. Checking his watch, he saw that it was almost 9:30. She had promised to meet with them here forty-five minutes ago. Trying to stem growing pangs of anxiety he comforted himself with two readily available things: a cup of steaming clam chowder so thick his spoon can stand up in it, and the smile on Fiddlesticks’ face. The yellow earth pony mare with the inky blue mane looks so happy to be playing in this nowhere bar along the Canadian border, with the whole bar clapping and drunkenly singing along with her.

It’s at times like this that, even with an earth pony playing fiddle while he talks to a massive stallion, that Johnny C can almost believe that it’s before the War...

Before New Hampshire had played host to hundreds of thousands of refugees, exposing him, to more languages and cultures than he had known existed...

Before he’d ever felt true hate, let alone the searing fires banked up in his heart towards people like Reitman or the damn Carters.

Before night watches in towns, before armed men and women had been forced to take up nocturnal patrols to protect their homes, families, friends, and livelihoods. Before weapons were openly carried on the streets, or before he’d had to carry a runically enhanced Leshiy rifle in his car at all times.

Back in some unseen halcyon days and weeks after Equestria first manifested, days where ponies were welcomed as visitors, with the promise of mutual learning and understanding lending every second of the day with new prospect, a new vision and hope for the future.

But in the here and now, he claps along to the music and smiles up at Fiddlesticks, who smiles back in return. She’s tapping a hoof on the floor to set a tempo for the band, and the sound of her fiddle is…

Well, he can almost forget.

The settlement Kraber was traveling to was not a proper home by any means. But most of the people inhabiting it have discarded the concept of a fixed home, knowing that the Barrier will come eventually and force them to move.

So they carry home in their hearts, and make do with wherever they can pitch a tent and build a fire. And so for now, this is enough.

Building on the remains of an old lumber camp, it was designed by people such as Kraber, historians of the partisans of World War II and the Cold War. The ‘cursed soldiers’ of Poland and the Japanese holdouts of the Pacific would have felt much at home here. Its infrastructure consists in part of easily disassembled buildings thrown up from readily-available timber, but mostly tents and dugouts. A church consisting of a cross suspended between two trees, a small synagogue some distance away. A buddha that someone took from London sits upon a cairn of stones at the foot of a rocky cliff that shields that side of the camp from the weather. There’s even what some of the brothers referred to as a reliquary, a container holding holy relics stolen before their native shrines could be overwhelmed.

Old mattresses and ugly, rough blankets were held in commune in a larger tent. They are kept dry by the heat from the adjacent foundry, built upon the rough foundations of the old camp sawmill. Here, to the roar of forges and the scream of lathes, the complex’s armorers are hand-making newer, bigger guns. Guns like the Lolife, an ugly pistol with a design somewhere between the Borz and the Mauser Schnellfeuer, are being turned out as quickly as possible.

Not far from the smithies, a snarling diesel generator stands beside the modest command center hut, home of over-annotated maps and wild ideas: who, where and why to strike. The walls are virtually covered in reconnaissance data, collating as best as possible the known movements of all enemy forces.

The hut is buzzing with activity. A few computer screens flicker, while off in one corner is a man with an honest-to-god typewriter, typing out circulars, pasting in photos, making HLF circulars. It’s then sent for duplication in their prized Xerox machine, loaded both with stolen paper and some hand-made stuff pressed from pulped bark. Even if it sometimes jams up the rollers, it’s all towards the goal of ‘Juche’, or self-sustainability. Most of the duplicated circulars will be placed on roadsides in dead drops, for affiliated motorists to pick up and distribute.

Next to the command center is a theater of sorts, an improvised briefing room and communal space, ‘seating’ as many people as can actually pack themselves in. There’s even a projector, allowing them to play movies now and then.

And all around are flags, hung on the sides of rough-cut walls, flying from improvised flagpoles, and even strung between the dripping trees. They are the tattered standards of dead and dying nations, hung in memorial, but the HLF flag takes precedence above all else.

This settlement’s name shall live in infamy for generations to come.

Defiance.