• Published 9th Jul 2015
  • 2,335 Views, 528 Comments

M.F.D. - kudzuhaiku



Fires, friendship, and fun. Join the Manehattan Fire Department today.

  • ...
18
 528
 2,335

Chapter 18

The blackened body unnerved Holly, but she remained resolute. She wasn’t in the mood to walk away from a job not finished. She began looking around the office, trying to take in every detail, and trying not to look at the burnt body on the floor.

There was a desk, burnt. A bookshelf, burnt. There was a large metal cabinet, also burnt. The doors were warped from the heat. Holly pulled them open and peered inside, using the light from Knock Knock’s horn to see. The cabinet was filled with papers. Some of the papers were singed.

The office was unremarkable except for the body on the floor. More police officers had arrived and powerful lanterns were being brought back to the offices. The moving, bobbing lights caused the shadows to dance about, making everything eerie. Holly stepped through a door that connected two offices together and into the next office.

It was burned as well. There were two desks in this office, one of the desks had a fan on it. There was nothing along the back wall. No cabinets, no shelves, no nothing. Holly looked at the wall, noticing how much larger the room was than the office next door, but she didn’t think it was because of the lack of furniture.

“Knocker, come here,” Holly said, her voice somewhat reedy and fearful sounding.

Hearing Holly call for him, Knock Knock stepped through the door. He looked around, shining his horn light on everything, including Holly. She looked spooked, but she also looked determined. Once more, he admired her pluck. She was a worthy student.

“This wall… something seems off. This office is larger than the one next door. And I don’t think it’s the furniture.” Holly looked at Knock Knock with wide eyes, her pupils enlarged to see in the dim light. She watched as Knock Knock studied the room, looking around, and then she watched him back out of the room and stand in the next room over.

“I think you’re right.”

Hearing these words made Holly smile and made her fear subside a little. She stepped into the next room and stood beside her friend and teacher. She watched as he looked around at the shelves, tugged at the book shelf, and then, he gave a tug on the metal cabinet with his telekinesis. There was a screech.

One of the officers looked up as the metal cabinet was dragged away from the wall, revealing a door behind it. The door looked solid, sturdy, and reinforced. There were three deadbolts on the door, each with their own keyhole. Knock Knock sighed.

“If I had a pry bar, I bet I could get that open,” Holly said.

“You’d need a battering ram to get that door down.” The police officer shook his head. “We’ll have to call in our locksmith. That door ain’t opening.”

“Officer, do you have a pry bar?” Knock Knock asked.

“What, do you actually think she can get that door open?” The officer’s voice sounded incredulous. “That door is a fortress… it’s designed to keep ponies out.”

“The door is pretty solid, but you know what, I don’t need a pry bar. I’ve changed my mind,” Holly said in a low voice.

“Eh, Holly, light duty—” Knock Knock started to say, but it was too late. Holly, standing on her hind legs, wobbling only slightly, hefted up a desk, lifting it up and swinging it around. She slammed the desk into the wall next to the door and there was a terrific crash as most of the desk shattered into little pieces.

The grey cinder blocks of the wall were also damaged. Several of them had cracked and some pieces crumbled away. Knock Knock looked over at the officer, whose jaw was now hanging open. Several other officers were also staring.

“You know Holly, Officewrecker doesn’t have the same ring,” Knock Knock said in a dry voice. “Hang on ya crazy broad, let me go get you one of those big heavy sewing machines so you can work your mayhem.”

“Why, thank you, Knocker, you know just what a mare wants… a sewing machine… so I can smash stuff with it.” Holly smiling now, watched as the officers loaded up the blackened corpse on a stretcher. She felt bad, sad even, but no longer scared. She had stuff to smash.

When Knock Knock returned with a sewing machine, Holly hefted it a few times to get a feel for it. It was metal, heavy, solid, and had a good feel to it. It weighed about a hundred pounds or so.

Stepping back, Holly lifted the sewing machine over her head, lunged forwards, and brought it down in an overhead chop. A huge chunk of the wall crumbled and fell away. Holly smashed the wall again, and again, banging away at the weak bits, until a hole was formed in the cinderblocks. It felt good being destructive. She smashed the wall over and over until there was a hole large enough for a pony to crawl through.

Knock Knock shone his light in the hole. There were stairs leading down. The mustachioed unicorn lifted his head and looked at the officer that had doubted Holly. “Wanna come down with us, Officer…”

“Cornflower,” the officer replied. “Officer Cornflower. And yeah, I’ll go down first. We don’t know what’s down there, just so long as she’s behind me and has my back.”

“Holly, look after the nice officer… we do try to cooperate with the nice ponies in blue,” Knock Knock said to Holly as she tossed the sewing machine aside and dropped down on all fours.


The stairs were narrow and creaky, and Holly could feel her coat rubbing up against the wall on either side of her. Officer Cornflower, a pegasus, had a lantern around his neck, and behind her, Knock Knock had his spotlight.

At the bottom of the narrow stairs was a small room, the walls were cinderblocks, and the walls themselves were slick with mildew. The room smelled bad. Officer Cornflower gagged a few times and fanned his wings about.

There was a door in the far wall. Holly noted that it had no deadbolts. The room she stood in had filing cabinets, a desk, and several lockboxes were stacked against the wall. She saw something on the desk, lifted her hoof, and pointed. “Hey, what are those books on the desk?”

Officer Cornflower went over and began to examine the objects on the desk. His eyes narrowed, the pegasus looked angry, and his feathers fluffed as the hairs on his back bristled. “These are passports. There’s several passports here just laying on the desk.”

“I don’t understand. Somepony explain to me what is going on, please?” Holly looked at the officer and then at the unicorn standing beside her.

“Without a passport, an immigrant or a visitor can’t do much. For a number of sweatshops just like this one, they help get a labourer into the country and then they take their passport and refuse to give it back until some cooked up debt is paid off. For many, who are desperate and don’t know how our immigration system works, they panic. They think that if they seek help, they’ll be deported or worse, arrested and thrown in prison. So they work,” Cornflower said, trying to fill Holly in on the situation faced by so many.

“That’s horrible! That… that makes me want to kick somepony!” Holly yelled.

“Eh, I’d be looking at something else if that happened. I wouldn’t see a damn thing.” Cornflower stepped away from the desk. “All these lockboxes. I bet we’ll find passports and random trinkets, sentimental stuff being held hostage.”

“What ponies are this bad?” Holly asked.

“The sorts that burn down buildings… usually with ponies inside of them,” Knock Knock replied in a soft whisper that somehow filled the small room with sibilant sound.

“I want to find these heels… and I want to see them punished.” Holly, who had run a whole gamut of emotions, from curiousity, to fear, to overcoming her fear and finding her groove once more, was now furious. She stood there, letting out little snorts, one hoof pawing at the rough stone floor.

“Do you mean that?” Knock Knock asked.

“YES!” Holly’s voice caused both Cornflower’s and Knock Knock’s ears to pin back from the force of her voice in the small room.

Cornflower began pulling open the desk drawers and rummaging through them. He found notebooks, bits of paper, a few bits, a pack of chewing gum, there was a stuffed toy in the bottom drawer, and an endless amount of clutter that might have something useful buried within it.

While he sorted through that, Holly went to the door and pulled it open. A dark hallway loomed before her, and she felt Knock Knock brush up against her side and she peered ahead. There was a door on each side, then, a little further down, there was another set of doors on each side, and at the end of the hall there was another lone door.

Holly went down the hall, came to the first door, opened it, and found an empty room. This room was dry, free of mold, and had a few wooden pallets on the floor. She backed out, glanced at her unicorn companion, and tried the other door on the other side of the hallway. This room was empty, save for a canvas saddlebag on the floor in the corner, which was empty.

“Hey you guys,” Cornflower said. “I found something!”

“What’s that?” Knock Knock replied.

“A note!” Cornflower sounded excited. “We’ve moved the goods to second location. Please take care of the union organiser Seabright in whatever way you see fit. I think Mister Farthing’s goons will hit us soon. Be ready, he’s the sort that will do something drastic.”

“You think the stiff upstairs is Seabright?” Knock Knock asked as he stepped back into the first room. He watched the pegasus shrug with his wings.

“Goods… I wonder what the goods were. Could be anything. This city has cancer in the form of every dirty vice you could think of.” Cornflower’s face darkened. “Probably drugs or questionable alchemical ingredients.”

“I need some light,” Holly said from the hallway where she stood in the near darkness.

“Right, sorry.” Knock Knock turned around and went to Holly so he could light her way.

The second and third storeroom were both empty, with nothing in them. Each room was dry, made for storing stuff and keeping the mold away. Holly opened up the final door at the end of the hallway. This room was not empty.

Inside, there was something that appeared to be some kind of printing press. The room reeked of ink. There were several lockboxes, still closed, a map on the wall, with several marks on different locations, there was a small, square table stuffed into the corner, and one lunchbox, empty.

“They’s making more than sewn goods here, that’s for sure.” Knock Knock peered around the room. “What in Equestria would they need a printing press for?”

“Nefarious purposes, that’s what,” Cornflower replied as he crammed into the room with Holly and Knock Knock. “Forged documents, fake stocks, fake bonds, fake banknotes, look at this thing… this ain’t no common printing press. It’s gotta weigh a ton and there is no way to move something this big and this heavy out of this secret basement. I bet our goods were some kind printed goods maybe. Who knows?”

“So we have a sweatshop upstairs, what might be a dead union organiser, a printing press, a secret basement, evidence of criminal activity in the form of transported goods, but we don’t know what those are for sure, a few empty storerooms, a whole bunch of passports, and we haven’t even investigated the building to find the source of the fire yet,” Holly said, summarising her day so far.

“I think we’ve found all we’re gonna find down here. We should start looking upstairs and see what we can find.” Knock Knock took one final glance around the printing press room, but saw nothing important.

“When this is done, how’s abouts we all go out for lunch together?” Cornflower asked.

“Well, Knocker did promise me coffee,” Holly replied.

“I did.” Knock Knock nodded. “This is going to be a long day though. A nice lunch might be in order. What did you have in mind, Officer Cornflower?”

Cornflower, now leading the way down the hall, said to his companions, “I knows a great sammich place… they have grilled mushrooms and this brown sauce on the special, it’s to die for.”

“Hey, that sounds good, that has my vote!” Holly said as she pushed past Knock Knock to hurry out of the room and down the hall.

“Hey, wait for me!” Knock Knock followed after Holly, his spotlight bouncing from his quick steps.

Author's Note:

I didn't realise that this part of the story would be so involved. I'll try to get out another update in a few days.