"Well, if I received a message from NEXT TUESDAY MORNING being sent from the Canterlot Archives," Twilight said to nopony in particular, "then I'm pretty much guaranteed to be there by then. If the fictional laws of time are anything to go by, at least."
Whether she understood why or not, she had time to find her surviving friends. She would probably need help on this journey, after all.
She tried to cast the recurring image of Rarity's bloody corpse out of her mind as she evaluated the locations of her friends' houses. The closest one to the Carousel Boutique was Pinkie Pie's. She stared at the bleak ghost town in front of her. She took a deep breath and began trotting off to Sugar Cube Corner, a sweet shop that served as Pinkie Pie's version of the Carousel Boutique. Her mind strayed to a past topic.
"Time travel is confusing."
The magenta-eyed pegasus with the short rainbow mane, coat as blue as the sky above her, flew toward Ponyville. She had been doing disaster-prevention-type stuff in Baltimare when the Daily Equestrian reported that a sizable explosion had occurred in front of the Ponyville library and emergency calls were flooding in by the dozens. The trusted news publication also reported that a strange black mist was covering Ponyville and spreading outward, Canterlot was being evacuated, and hazmat officers were organizing a magical shield to isolate and quarantine the Canterlot/Ponyville area. Then they had blamed it on the zebras.
She had dropped everything she was doing and was presently flying toward an impending pink dome encasing the capitol of Equestria, the agrestic village of Ponyville, and her five best friends.
She didn't know what kind of sight she was to be greeted with. Damaged bodies in the streets, a town full of innocents dying of some awful disease. As she saw the dome isolating Ponyville and Canterlot from the rest of Equestria, she started worrying it was the latter.
She flew up to a modular gateway area set up near the edge of the magical force field on a road that led into the closed-off zone, where hazmat ponies wearing yellow quarantine suits were gathered. They were playing rock-paper-scissors to see which three out of the six of them would go into the closed-off zone first.
Rainbow Dash landed next to them. "Yo, guys! I have some stuff on the other side of this barrier that I need and friends I need to take outside, so, uh, yeah, if you could just let me in I'll only be a minute, I swear."
"Miss, we have strict orders to not allow anypony but ourselves and those authorized like us to come in or out of the infected zone. We're gonna have to ask you to leave, it's far too dangerous for anypony without proper protection to be anywhere near here."
Using her razor-sharp wit, she decided to convince them to let her in. "What if I was authorized?"
"If you were an authorized member of the Equestrian Hazmat Force and had proper protective wear like us, then you would be one of the ponies that our higher-ups could allow in and out of the infected zone. But you aren't authorized, so you really must leave."
"My friends are in there!"
"Lots of ponies' friends are in there," the hazmat said grimly. "Including mine." He began walking toward her and urging her to leave as politely as he could while still being a deep-voiced G-man in a scary-looking quarantine suit.
Rainbow Dash then got a brilliant idea. She struck a pose and emulated her femme friend Rarity as best as she could. She had seen Rarity use this strategy several times before, so she hoped the stallions would fall for her "bad girl" image. "Oh, but if you let me in," she said as she walked up to the stallion hidden under a yellow rubber suit, "that would simply be... awesome." She ignored the fact that she couldn't come up with anything better than "awesome" as she nestled her head against the hazmat's. "I don't know how I could ever repay you. I would do anything." She made sure to let the last word roll off of her tongue in a hoarse whisper.
"Nice try."
"Wh-what?"
"It's going to take a lot more than seduction to get any of us to let you in there. Perhaps you don't realize just how dangerous it is! Trust me, I'm not letting you into the infected zone, and it's for your own good."
Rainbow Dash instantly gave up trying to play seductive temptress. It worked for Daring-Do that one time! she thought to herself, remembering the escapades of her favorite fictional treasure hunter.
She looked through the pink barrier and saw a perfectly intact village, completely devoid of residents. The only moving thing she could see was a news paper tumbling across an empty street. She lowered her head and stared at the grass below. "Okay, if I have to leave, I just want to give you guys some advice."
The yellow-clad G-man stallion asked, "What's that?"
"One of my friends said that she'd gotten a message from the future. She said something bad was gonna happen. And I guess it did."
The stallion was unmoved as he escorted Rainbow Dash away from the quarantined zone. "We're trying to find a way to fix it. That's why we're here."
"I know, but... if you come across a purple unicorn by the name of Twilight Sparkle... and she's still alive... get her to safety and... and I think she might have some useful information that I don't. That you don't."
"We'll see what we can do."
Rainbow Dash flew away slowly without another word. She began thinking of other possible routes into the "infected zone". She also thought that Twilight and Rarity, and all the rest of her friends were probably dead. Or past the point of no rescue.
Twilight had seen a couple of the possessed on her way to Sugar Cube Corner, but fortunately had avoided fights with any of them. She thought she had seen some ponies she knew, but she couldn't be certain.
She saw an arrow-shaped sign with crudely scrawled words that said "GO THIS WAY" written in a red liquid. Twilight worriedly put her hoof to the text, then let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. It was only paint.
The wooden fixture pointed in the direction she was going. She smiled for the first time since Ponyville had become a zombified waste.
The smile quickly faded as the thought that maybe Pinkie Pie had turned into a possessed one and could still write legibly entered her head.
She hoped that wasn't the case as she continued down the road, pausing only to allow stray news papers to blow by dramatically.
The road to Sugar Cube Corner was only interrupted by crawling news papers. As the sweet shop itself came into view, Twilight saw another arrow sign saying "GO THIS WAY" and pointing to her destination. As she walked to Pinkie Pie's - hopefully not former - house, she passed another sign that pointed down a street off to the side, saying "DON'T GO THIS WAY". Twilight looked to where the sign indicated and noticed the Ponyville Police Station at the far side of the dead-end street.
She trotted nonchalantly up to another sign, pointing at the the door to Sugar Cube Corner and reading "GO IN THIS BUILDING". She was just about to when the door opened by itself and three of the possessed shuffled out of the shop.
The black-eyed ponies began running up to Twilight as she madly looked about for something to smack them with. She remembered reading in a book that zombies could only be killed by wounding the head. Then she remembered that that book was fictional, and that these weren't zombies anyway. They just had sunken eyes and possessed minimal mental capacity and fed off of the flesh of non-possessed ponies and weren't the most coordinated creatures in the world and occasionally made freaky growling noises. But they weren't zombies, nosiree.
Twilight dove behind a wooden crate, though she probably could've just galloped there. She found a crowbar wedged in between two planks that made up the box and began to try to pull it out as the not-zombies grew nearer.
Twilight desperately tried to dig the crowbar out of its position as the not-zombies slowly ambled toward her. The not-zombies seemed to be moving awfully slow for creatures who had already demonstrated that they could be surprisingly fast. In fact, if Twilight hadn't known any better, she would've thought they were moving slower and slower as they grew nearer and nearer, almost as if they were intentionally trying to build suspense.
Fortunately, this gave Twilight enough time to pry the crowbar out of its predicament and swing ferociously at the nearest Zeno's Not-Zombie. Its disgustingly normal blood lightly streaked drops of red onto the ground, the crowbar, and Twilight as it fell to the ground in a heap.
The purple unicorn with the train wreck of a mane looked at her hoofwork and winced. On the outside, these horrid creatures didn't look like flesh-eating demon spawn at all. In fact, with their eyes closed (or from behind), they looked just like ordinary ponies. Survivors. A drop of blood fell from her crowbar.
One of the possessed rose its head to bite at Twilight's throat, but she would have none of it. She violently thrusted the crowbar upside its jaw and injured it. She was about to aim for the eye, the horrible, nightmarish eye, of the last one when a popping sound cracked through the air and Twilight was lightly sprayed with blood.
A thimble-sized wound showed where something had perforated the possessed one's head. Another flying pellet whizzed by her head and implanted itself into the chest of the one she had smacked in the jaw.
Twilight looked up at the roof of Sugar Cube Corner and saw nothing. Inspecting the windows of the shop proved fruitless as well.
"Hi, Twilight!" said Pinkie Pie enthusiastically.
Twilight quickly twisted around with a yelp, leaping back and dropping the crowbar. Her poofy-maned friend, coat as pink as the sky above her, had snuck up behind her by defying the laws of physics. She did that sometimes.
Pinkie was wearing a black jumpsuit with a hood, not being worn at that moment. Through the tail hole at the back of the jumpsuit was Pinkie's poofy pink tail, her hair a darker shade of pink than her coat. It bobbed lightly in a wind that Twilight didn't notice, let alone feel.
"Pinkie! You're alive!"
"How many points do I receive!?"
Twilight bear hugged her ditzy, blue-eyed friend like there was no tomorrow, giggling as she did so. Pinkie joined in on the giggling fit for no reason other than to giggle. It was the first time either had done so since Ponyville had become the plagued ghost town it now was.
Twilight released her grip and said, "Pinkie, listen. There's a time travel spell in the Canterlot Archives. We have to go there so I can tell my past self to not be all gung-ho when Cerberus arrives and let Fluttershy do what she was going to do."
"What was she going to do?"
"I... I don't know. But we should at least try it and see what happens." Twilight paused, remembering her unicorn friend's dying wish. "We have to make things right again."
"Okey-dokey-lokey, let's get a move on, then!"
The two of them began trotting toward Canterlot, the Sun beginning to set at their sides. They still had a couple more hours until Ponyville was overcome by a kind of darkness they welcomed.
"Say, Pinkie, how did you survive the black fog... stuff, anyway?"
"I have bunkers stashed all over Ponyville," said the pink one cheerfully. "In case of apocalypse emergency."
"That's... quite lucky of us," Twilight said with a touch of skepticism in her voice. "But, I guess it doesn't really matter how you're still alive. You're alive and I'm not complaining about it."
The not-zombie that Twilight had first hit with the crowbar, not quite dead yet, groggily got back on its hooves and began hobbling toward the two non-possessed ponies from behind.
Suddenly, Pinkie felt an inkling in the back of her head. "Wait! My Pinkie Sense is tingling!" She turned around to find the weak, seriously injured possessed one shuffling ungracefully toward them.
Pinkie grabbed a pistol out of a notch in a nearby tree and threw it to Twilight. "Here, catch!"
Twilight just barely managed to grab it with her magic mid-air. Without thinking, she pointed the weapon at the possessed one and fired, finally killing it for good.
She lowered the gun and was left holding it in front of her, seeming to check if it was, in fact, a gun. It was.
"Pinkie, I have one question regarding what just happened."
"Yes, Twilight?" said Pinkie, trotting to her side.
"How the hay did you just grab a pistol out of nowhere?!"
"Oh, I have guns stashed all over Ponyville. In case of zombie emergency."
The purple pony was positively perplexed. She didn't know how a civilian could possibly acquire a gun in Equestria. They were always restricted to special military units. She had never even seen a gun up until just then, though she'd read plenty of books about them. "Well, that's... convenient."
"That's why I stashed them!" she said with a smile and a twinkle in her eye.
"I mean, it's almost like we're in a really bad fan fiction or something. Heh."
"Hey! I'm the only one who's supposed to break the fourth wall around here!"
...
"What?"
"C'mon, Twilight, twilight's almost here!" She began hopping toward the image of Canterlot on the distant mountainside well away from Ponyville borders.
Twilight looked at the pistol floating in the air in front of her and said to nopony in particular, "I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining," and began to catch up to her new companion to begin their trek to Canterlot, to the place where everything could be fixed.