Chapter 15
15
It was never a good day when one of her subordinates had the gall to drop by her little squalid house in the residential quarter of town.
And the unlucky bastard knew it, too—he was already sweating enough to turn his mane slightly damp, and he had a very difficult time looking her in the eye.
“This had better be good, Corporal,” Colada heard her slightly gruff voice demand politely, yet in that special, reserved angry tone that contained only a smidgen of her true displeasure. “You’re breaking rule number four.”
His eyes widened into saucer plates, the irises even shrinking a little even though the amount of light hitting them had not changed. “….t-that was…today? Oh shit…”
“Sometime this afternoon would be great, unless you like the sound of Private Rivet.”
Corporal Rivet’s fear could not have gotten any worse than it already was, and yet she began to notice a slight tremble of his tail as he composed himself (and his message) before speaking. “Y-your presence is….required, at your office, ma’am.”
“Required, Corporal?” she snarled back. “On my kids’ birthday? The day that I endured nine and a half hours of pure hell giving birth to them in the first place? That aforementioned rule number four of Major Berry Colada’s garrison that states that all troopers get their loved ones’ birthdays off, no exceptions, no paperwork fights, and not one godsdamned interruption? I am required to report to my office on my kids’ fifth birthday, which we are enjoying very thoroughly I might add?”
Rivet’s face, amazingly, did not change or falter, but only because she had already stricken him with mortal terror. “….y-yes, ma’am.”
“By who, Corporal?”
“…one of the Board, ma’am. Sandy Shades.”
Outwardly, she allowed no visible change of her body language—inwardly, her fury at having her precious time with her family disturbed was being redirected from the Corporal to the Board member who had clearly chosen the absolute worst time possible to do a follow-up on that incident with Gus’s caravan almost five weeks ago. She wasn’t quite sure what the penalty was for murdering one of the Merchant Union’s nine regulatory Board members. It’d been roughly fifteen years since the last time anypony tried….
“Report back ahead of me, inform Shades I will be there shortly,” she snapped off briskly. “Hell, I might even catch you at the door on your way out. Dismissed.”
His right foreleg snapped across his torso at an upward angle, tapped his left shoulder, and then he was simply gone. She had to blink twice before she could accept that she was now staring at empty space where a terrified, trembling stallion had been only moments earlier, though the dust cloud streaking off in the distance to her right helped too.
If only she could have been as lucky herself….
She felt her left ear droop down as she trudged back into the house, turned left after crossing into the living room and popping back into her dining room—
—the father of her children was the first to see her…and the first to realize the day wasn’t going to go quite as planned. “...ahhh, crap,” the bluish-green coated stallion sighed sadly, even as the kids stopped chomping at their birthday meal—an exceptionally rare and baked cake, with actual frosting to boot. “Floppy ear is never good news…”
Her daughter licked off a smudge of frosting from her nose with a simple flick of her tongue, perhaps hoping the taste would make her feel slightly better at what was about to be said. Even at five years old, both kids had already come to learn what it meant to have a Union officer for a mother. “….ya gotta go, Mommy?”
Major Berry Colada, battle-scarred veteran of the Unification War and the heroine of the Battle of Riversong Ridge, never, ever failed to cry a little when her little girl’s voice sounded like she’d just kicked her puppy. “….I’m sorry honey,” she tried to say in apology, her own voice matching her daughter’s tone. “Just for a little bit.”
“But why can’t you stay? Aren’t you everypony’s boss here?”
“I am,” she said. “But I have bosses too, and one of them wants to see me. I’ll make it as quick as I can, and then I’m coming right back, okay?”
“Your mom’s not gonna let some jerk take her away for long, not on your birthday,” her other significant other butted in, her voice somewhat stronger and harsher than the others. “She’ll be back. With his butt on a plate, if she feels like it.”
“What did I tell you about inciting violence at the dinner table?” Colada shot back, turning her gaze to the bright blue earth pony mare that sat at the other end of the table, the forward half of her orange-tipped yellow mane split into several separate braids.
“To wait for an opening and exploit it,” the mare sassed in reply, her gaze turning to the two children as they deftly hopped off their chairs to latch onto their mother’s legs in a death hug. “Go on, take care of this fool quick and come back here. I found an intact deck of cards last week and it’s been a long time since we got to play blackjack and poker. Even got some fuel for the kerosene lamp, with the storm coming in it’ll be like a campout indoors.”
“Speaking of which, I should make sure the windows are batted down tight, see to the roof,” the stallion mumbled before taking another bite out of his share of the cake. “You kids let go of your mom, she can’t make her boss go away if you keep anchoring her down.”
“Think that was the point,” Colada surmised as she gently shook her forelegs to encourage the children to free themselves from her. “Go on, get off. I’ll be back soon, I promise. Okay?”
Her children’s near-simultaneous “Okay” was almost comical. There were times when the two seemed to be able to read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences, an antic which drove her mad to no end (and to their eternal amusement). With a quick parting nuzzle to her forelegs, her kids forced themselves to return to their seats at the table, allowing Colada to depart her house in relative peace and without the haunting cries of two heart-broken children following in her wake.
It was a rare thing to be able to disappoint them so graciously.
The ten minute walk to the garrison HQ gave her enough time to find her anger once more, and true to her word wound up crossing paths with Corporal Rivet on her way through the front door. She gave the sergeant at the receptionist desk only a passing nod as his right foreleg shot over his torso in a quick salute before returning to his desk work, and her hooves thundered up the stairs to the second floor with the fury that had made her so infamous in the corps.
Fury that, unfortunately, did not seem to work many favors for her when it came to dealing with the Union’s political leadership.
Sandy Shades, a young-looking, sand-shaded stallion with pale blonde mane and tail, was sitting upright in the sofa in front of her desk and at apt attention as she swung her office door open with a flash of magic. “….you look ready to murder me where I sit, Major.”
“Can you give me an extremely compelling reason why I shouldn’t?” she fired back with a sharp edge as she shut the door behind her.
“I read quite a tale recently,” Shades countered smoothly, as though her entirely serious threat had come across to him as “You asked to see me, sir?”. “Twenty-four troopers KIA, ransacked resupply caravans, raiders running amok along the highway to Trotpeka…even a little tidbit about Julaya and a bounty hunter you sent after her. Your monthly report was quite intriguing.”
…shiiiiit, Colada’s harsh mind cursed silently. They actually read it… “Must be, if you remember enough of it to summarize it.”
“Anything you’d care to share with me on the subject, then?”
….what the hell is this paper-pusher after? Nobody in the trade guilds has ever been interested in any of the reports I send back, ever.“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific about what you’re looking for. I’ve never had the displeasure of having a Board member take a personal interest in what goes on in my garrison. You’re usually happy enough that we keep the highways clean of raider filth.”
“Well, there is this little incident with Gus’s caravan that has Life Tap rather unhappy with you,” the sandy—and very certainly shady—stallion said. “Apparently you killed two of his crew, severely wounded a third when they attempted to collect a pair of runaways you’d caught a couple of days before.”
“Attempted to collect without first clearing it through me,” she added sharply, lightly stomping her way around the sofa to take a seat at her desk. If she was going to be grilled over a monthly report, she would do so sitting from her official seat of authority and power (and where she’d stashed her .45 the other day), to remind this Board member that he was dealing with a major in the trooper corps and not some half-starving female yearling looking to get a kosher job by sucking up to him. “And proceeding to order me around as if I worked for them in the process. That is not how the agreement works. This is the second time this year I’ve had to remind these assholes of that, and there will not be a third. The next caravan that steps out of line, I will wipe out to the last mare and stallion.”
“Major, you’re going to have to re-think your approach on this subject,” Shades said with a subtle hint of disapproval. “The guilds are not the mare-beating savages they were two generations ago.”
“Don’t think Life Tap’s guild got that memo. If anything, they’re the one guild holding back all the trade opportunities with the west. Independent slavers keep risking their necks across the valley, and the Runners keep sending them back in pieces, if they send anything at all. And we all know they’re only going out there to cash in on Tap’s standing bounty for any captures they can bring back.”
“Nopony has ever proven that such a bounty exists, and Life Tap also operates the largest of the five guilds and has a presence in nearly every settlement in our territory,” he returned evenly. Colada was starting to think he was somewhat more involved with the slaver guilds than he was his own trading company. “His caravans alone number a quarter of the trooper corps, he can do some very serious damage if he decides the Union is just getting in his way. A position you make easier to take when you shoot up his caravans simply for speaking to you out of turn.”
“My attempts to keep the agreement in force are not why the guilds are getting antsy and turning this whole shit system upside down. They’ve been trying to screw us in the ass ever since we helped them crush the underground. I told you morons that helping with perimeter control in that fiasco was going to cost you. They’re ingrained into our economy even deeper now than they were before the war, and if I’m hearing things right at least one guild has tried to petition for a seat on the Board.”
“….Searchlight did make such a request at the beginning of the year,” Shades sighed, his body finally beginning to show a slight sign of exhaustion over the subject. “As a “non-voting” member. An…observer, if you will, but also as the slaver guilds’ official representative to the Board.”
Colada’s heart started skipping random beats, seizing at her chest and robbing her lungs of air. Searchlight’s guild was generally seen as the “nicest”, considering it tended towards medical and technical training of its captures and even allowed them the opportunity to work for their freedom. But her guild also had the largest centralized collection of MEWs in the prairie—some very serious firepower she could put to devastating use if she put enough thought as to where to make her move. Enough to destroy them as an effective stabilizing force, even.
And if she was petitioning for a more active role in Union politics….
“….you can’t give any of them that, not even Searchlight,” she said softly. “Hell, if she had the gall to ask in the first place, it’s a very troubling sign. She has the firepower to make things very difficult for us if she decides to make use of it against us.”
“….you’re not the first officer to make that observation. But there are larger concerns at work here. The guilds are getting larger, more powerful, and like it or not, they are providing a business and service. And the Merchant Union is, at the end of it, a business alliance and we are using a great deal of their services to keep our farms running and our three factories in some manner of operating condition. They are arguing for the same rights and privileges as the rest of our affiliated companies and businesses, and to not have the troopers shoot up their workers and impair their business.”
“Their “business” is in trading around ponies, zebras, and the occasional weakling griffon like chairs and office desks! The Runners still won’t talk to us as long as even one of the guilds operates with our sanction!”
“The Runners don’t rule their side of the prairie. They’re just mercenaries, like all the other mercs and bounty hunters we’ve ever dealt with. We’re looking into making inroads with the western towns even as you and I sit here arguing about current events.”
Colada felt her lungs burst out into a short fit of hysterical laughter, which she quickly brought under control and ended with a mild chuckle. “….you look like you’ve spent most of your life behind Stifla’s defensive perimeter, so let me explain something to you,” she started gently. “I have dealt with almost every major merc band in the prairie, from both the east and the west for the three weeks that we managed to push a company across the valley for a raid mission during the war. Not a damn one of them would last a week against even a pair of Runner scouts in a serious fight. They turned the whole east side of the prairie into a war zone and fought five entire companies of troopers to a stalemate at Basin Ridge. We suspect they only had sixty fighters to match our thousand and we only counted thirty-seven bodies on-site during clean-up. Even now there’s a dozen of them roaming about our towns and roads, slaying raiders and bandits by the dozens and making us look like amateurs. Most of them are better shots than our best designated sharpshooters, and they thrive and survive in places we won’t send a platoon into without a supply chain to back them up. They’ve done all of this with only scavenged weapons and munitions and no known access to any significant pre-War arms stockpiles. We’re barely managing to hold our side of the prairie together and we’re sitting on an old world military base and two Stables feeding us technology like newborn foals on their mother’s teats.”
“And now we get to the true purpose for my visit,” Sandy Shades said with a coy smile. “You needn’t worry about Life Tap, the vast majority of the Board tends to side with you on such matters. Your report also stated that the runaways arrived in the company of a…Stable pony? Sling Shot, of the one-one-five? Along with her poisoned child?”
That cold, twisted part of her gut grew larger, and more painful. She’d regretted putting that in her report the instant the ink fell on the paper, and now it was starting to make her outright sick. She was lucky she’d been able to delay its journey to Stifla as long as she’d had. “….that’s right.”
“And that she possessed information that led you to Julaya’s location, after which you contracted her for a hit in exchange for protection from Gus’s caravan?”
“….not in that specific language. She wanted the runaways to come with her, which was impossible without a significant amount of caps. I told her she could take her case up with the caravan master if she brought back proof of Julaya’s death, which I suspect she knew wasn’t going to work out in the first place, but she went anyway. Brought back the bitch’s katana and two wagons worth of combat spoils. She used the caps to buy the freedom of her runaways….something I’ve never seen or heard anybody ever doing, most of the freed slaves worked their way to it through Searchlight’s guild. I sent 2nd Platoon out to confirm the battle, and they reported back one collapsed building that had been standing the last time we checked the place out, as well as twelve dead bodies, all stripped bare of gear and weaponry. They also found evidence that she had help from two Runners, but none of the bodies were Julaya. Haven’t seen or heard anything on her in the last five weeks. The stable pony never specifically confirmed that she killed her, only that she’d taken care of the problem and that I wouldn’t see her again. I suspect she made a deal with the zebra to let her go in exchange for the location of the caps stockpile.”
“So she essentially conned you out of not only Julaya’s ill-gotten gains, but in actuality helped one of our most wanted bandits and murderers escape Union territory….and you didn’t kill her for it?”
Inwardly, Colada was starting to sweat a little herself—she was beginning to understand how her subordinates must have felt when they were forced to report unpleasant things to her, like failure, or unwanted visitors like Sands. She was starting to pray, very hard, that she would still be able to go home to her family after this conversation was over. “….in all honesty, she never actually agreed to kill her, or to do anything that I wanted. The only answer she gave was that she wanted her gear back if she was going to go out there. I took my chances, and I lost out.”
“Then the material risks, and consequences, of your gamble is yours and yours alone. I am not here to rub salt in the wound. I am here to ask where this Sling Shot is now. As I recall, the last one-one-fiver to pass through this area shot her way through the first checkpoint towards Trotpeka five years ago, and one of your troopers chose to sleep with her instead of arresting her.”
“Lucky Strike paid for that with his career and I’m still tracking down that addict’s foals five years later,” she hissed back angrily. “Bastard put enough of my fighting force out of action through sheer pregnancy rate that I’m convinced he’s got thirty-plus other kids out there.”
“Yes, well, the Board is putting an end to your inquiries on that matter. The ten you’ve identified outside your garrison thus far are as much as the Civil Support Corps is willing to tolerate. We cannot drain our coffers of caps to take care of the foals of a singular trooper who couldn’t keep his pride tucked in. Any other claimants that come forward will have to support themselves. As for the Stable pony that pulled one over you….where is she now? Your report indicated she was being quartered here for her protection after her deal with Gus’s caravan. I would very much like to question her about her stable’s current status. One of those two Stables you mentioned is not expected to last another decade and the Stifla Stable alone is no longer enough to sustain what little technology we can get to work. The Union is the first real stabilizing force the Prairie has had since the megaspell event and we cannot afford to see it weakened. We need to find another Stable.”
“Then you should have gotten here a little sooner. She left two days ago, with her kid and the freed slaves after they got their freedom marks. They’re at Trotpeka by now, or very close to it.”
Shades pleasant demeanor and calm stare changed almost immediately. “…wait, you just let her leave? Without so much as a question about her Stable?!”
“I had nothing to hold her on and she’s more than willing to shoot her way out of forced confinement, so yes, I let her leave peacefully,” she replied to his furious outburst. “By her account and her daughter’s their stable is gone anyway. Radroach outbreak, around the same time that our farms were hit by a swarm themselves. Supposedly there was a failure with their main power and they were the only two that managed to escape before the stable sealed itself up and shut down. If anypony was still alive down there after that, they didn’t live very long.”
“We’d like to find out the truth for ourselves,” Shades sneered. “Fortunately, I anticipated this outcome and had the foresight to draft a detention warrant before setting out. I’ll have it delivered to your operations officer shortly. As you no longer have Sling Shot at your garrison you are hereby directed to deliver the warrant to Colonel Granger at Trotpeka. She’ll likely be long gone by the time the warrant arrives, but his troops can be on alert for her should she return to the city.”
“Your delivery will have to wait until after the storm passes. In case you haven’t noticed, those black clouds gathering to our west tend to spit lightning at us and this particular storm could put out thirty-mph winds. Nobody in town’s leaving until it blows over. That includes you.”
“Surely your troopers can handle a little rain, Major—”
“My troopers are not going to risk their lives to deliver a sheet of paper for an objective you have already admitted is unlikely to be achieved immediately. You said it yourself, she’ll probably be long gone by the time the warrant gets there, so it can wait. Trotpeka’s not going anywhere.”
“….fine,” Shades grumbled reluctantly as his body began to slide off of the sofa. “One more thing, Major…if you expect to make Colonel yourself someday, you may want to consider giving the guilds a little more leeway in the future. Like it or not, they are becoming a more integral part of Union business. The times are changing, and you will be left behind if you can’t adapt.”
Colada had to bite her tongue to keep her retort to herself—it was often wiser to let a Board member depart with the “last word” on visits like this, to give them the illusion that they sufficiently impressed upon the officer in question the seriousness of their intentions. And she would rather let them believe they had intimidated her than give them cause to schedule further visits that might see her career derailed or worse.
If anything, all these visits did was compel her to paint targets on the backs of their skulls in preparation for the day when the Union finally rotted itself out from its association with the slavers.
In a fit of frustration she snatched her holstered .45 from her desk drawer and slung it across her barrel as she stomped out of her office, and made it to the bottom of the stairs in the lobby just as Sandy Shades’ tail was slipping through the front door and back out into the streets.
The sergeant at the desk did not even bother to ask what had gotten her so visibly upset—the fact that he could tell it at a glance was enough information. “Orders, ma’am?”
“Keep as discreet an eye on him as possible until he’s out of town,” she heard herself growling harshly, her eyes locked on the door and briefly pondering if a .45 slug would still be able to punch through his skull after going through an inch of aged oak. “Send word to Lt. Breeze to report to my office at 0900 tomorrow, and to have a rifle squad in his platoon ready to move by then. First Sergeant Wayward should have a warrant in his possession within the hour, make sure it reaches my desk before Lt. Breeze’s arrival.”
She heard a pencil drop onto the desk as the sergeant released it from his magic, gathering up his 5mm carbine and gear belt from the floor beside him. “Wilco. This have anything to do with the stable pony?”
“Sergeant, you know damn well by this point in your life that anything involving a stable pony is bad news for everyone involved.”
--------------------------------------
“Hit me.”
“Tempting,” he mumbled quietly, just loud enough for the baby to hear it over the soft tap of a seven of spades making contact with the hardwood floor.
Only in games of chance did he have a shot at making her make angry faces more than once. Her electric blue eyes shot wide at the sight of the seven, then immediately began glaring at it as though it had gravely insulted her. “…crud,” she snarled at the card, flipping her one face-down card to reveal a seven of hearts alongside the ten of clubs. “Was hoping for a four…”
“I was hoping to see that look on your face,” he grinned madly, drawing the cards on the floor back into the deck and shuffling it in just about every way he could imagine. “See? One of us always gets what we’re looking for.”
“….just deal,” she spat gloomily.
“You suck at blackjack,” he replied cheerily (it wasn’t hard when he had that disappointed face of hers to inspire him). “Best out of thirty?”
“Max, bite him.”
A soft, ominous growl from the corner of the room revealed his mistake for the life-altering event it would be if he continued to aggravate the baby filly before him. “Straight up poker it is!” he agreed to her unaired request, and promptly began dealing out their cards.
“On second thought, keep napping, boy.”
The growl turned into a contented grunt, and the mutt was silent once more.
“…all this noise and your mom is still asleep.”
Elly’s head finally turned away from the card games they’d been playing since breakfast, staring at her mom’s napping spot at the far end of the room. A pile of surprisingly comfortable wool blankets had been bundled up underneath her sleeping bag to serve as either a mattress or a moat, considering that she’d thrown a few blankets out around her in the process of creating her sleeping space. Two more blankets, folded up, served as pillows, and seemed to be functioning well enough in that capacity that the mare had not moved one inch since she’d bedded down for the morning.
“…let her,” Elly sighed, turning her eyes back to her hand of five cards and bringing them up for her perusal. “She kept watch for a long time, conked right out the second we started waking up. She could be like that until late afternoon.”
His own hand of five cards wasn’t all that promising—a pair of fours, one nine of hearts, a seven of aces, and a five of spades…. “Coulda been in Trotpeka by now—”
Two of Elly’s cards promptly floated away from her, set off to the side face down. “As tired as mom was? She’d never have made it like that, we’d still be walking.”
He discarded everything except the pair of fours, and new cards began to float off of the top of the deck—one to him, then one to the baby, until they both had a full hand again—
Fffuuu….nothing, he hissed at his poor luck. A six of spades, a two of hearts, and an ace of spades. “….at least we’d be moving. Spent most of my time with you guys sitting in hotel rooms, and when we do take to the road we end up in deep shit halfway through the trip to the next town. This time we’ve managed to not get shot at or ambushed and I’d like to get to Trotpeka before that happens.”
Something about what he said seemed to rub her the wrong way, because she suddenly slapped her hand down onto the floor, face up. “Two pair, threes and sixes.”
“…..lousy stinkin’ pair of fours,” he grumbled, dropping his hand to the floor and letting the cards scatter apart.
“…this is a lot more fun with more than two people,” Elly sighed, her growing boredom with the card games beginning to show on her slightly sleepy face. “Uggh, where’s a library when you need o—”
Elly’s lame bitching over a library stuffed with dusty books was gleefully cut short when the door to the office creaked open, and Mom hurriedly raced through the doorway, her eyes quickly scouring over the four corners of the room—
“…oh, gods, no,” Mom cried in slight despair, her quick trot turning into a slow one as she drew near Sling Shot and her fort of wool blankets. “Why does she have to look so damn cute when she’s sleeping…”
Elly laughed quietly at his mom’s coming misfortune, but he just groaned inside. Her infatuation with Sling was starting to get a little more….obvious, and open, when the two of them were around their moms than he was comfortable with. If they thought Elly’s constant badgering about the birds and the bees was annoying before, it’d only get worse when she started catching on to what was going on with Mom….
Elly was right about one thing, though. This would be funny.
“Sling, get up, they’re here,” Mom said at first as she came to a stop at the wool blanket fort, thinking her voice alone would rouse the stable mare from her slumber.
Sling Shot did not budge even an inch.
Mom’s face began to grow dismal as the reality of her task set in. “….oh, what th…please, get up.”
Again, Sling Shot simply continued sleeping, as if nopony else in the room even existed.
Now Mom started getting physical. She put her forehooves to Sling’s body and started to shake her vigorously, her voice growing angrier and harsher. “By the…get up you lazy foal!! Up!!”
The combination of foreign hooves jolting her body and a harsh, yelling voice was just enough to break dreamland’s hold over Sling. The stable mare began to moan as she attempted to burrow herself deeper into her sleeping bag and the wool blankets she’d draped over her head. “….don’t wanna…go away…”
“I’ve heard that before,” Elly snickered aloud. “Like, a thousand times.”
Mom wasn’t paying much mind to either of them with her attention so focused on Sling, so Elly got away with that little snarky comment. “G...g-go….by the Sisters you’re the one who wanted to wait here until they showed up, so you’re getting your lazy ass out of that…that childish moat of yours, and you’re going to meet them with a fragging smile!!”
Sling’s slurred, soft voice barely rose above her blankets. “….don feel like it…”
Mom’s patience with the whole thing had finally run out, and in a flash of magic had grabbed hold of Sling to literally drag her out of her sleeping bag. “Get. Up! Now!!”
Sling’s counterspell, signified only by a brief, but brilliantly intense flash of blue light, broke Mom’s hold over her, and actually knocked her off of her hooves a bit. “….go ‘way….”
Oh, wow, this is actually hilarious, BJ laughed inside. He’d never seen an adult act so…childish about trying to stay in bed. Granted, Sling had a good reason to want to stay, she’d been awake for like, twenty-seven hours or so over the last day and a half….but still! The way Elly told it sometimes, this wasn’t a new thing either. Apparently the filly had struggled with this very thing a great many mornings for as long as she could remember. He hadn’t believed her earlier, simply because for as long as he’d known her Sling had usually been one of the first of them to be awake every morning. But looking at the scene playing out before him, he was beginning to wonder if that had merely been because Sling had never slept on anything resembling a comfortable bed outside her stable until today. He soon found himself laughing out loud despite his efforts to stay quiet.
Elly, on the other hand, was practically roaring and tapping the floor with a forehoof.
With magical efforts clearly not working out, Mom went back to physical means to rouse the lazing stable pony out of her sleeping bag. She grabbed hold of the mare’s head and began to pull her out as quickly and as harshly as she could manage. “Get the EFF out of there this instant you pudgy mule of a pony—”
A second lash of Sling’s magic pushed Mom away from her, gently and quickly, and before Mom could begin to recover Sling had scooted herself back inside her sleeping bag, zipped it shut, and once more buried her head underneath one of the blankets she’d thrown over herself. “I like it heeerrreee ….”
Elly’s body began to roll and tumble as she lost control of her lungs in her furious laughter, a foreleg reaching over her face to brush away the tears that were no doubt coming out of her eyes right then.
Mom’s face had, by then, become livid with frustration and disbelief that a mare of Sling’s age could be so childishly stubborn about getting out of bed when she was told to. “….oh, my gods, I’m going to kill you,” she seethed through her teeth, stomping forward and wrapping Sling up in another spell, this one fueled by both mana and sheer rage. “Get your lazy ass out of your cocoon and wake up!!”
Mom’s spell had begun to pull at the sleeping bag, turning it around a hundred and eighty degrees as she began to drag the stable pony inside it by the hindquarters, but Mom’s spell had only managed to get her quarry a couple of feet across the ground before Sling’s forehooves shot out of the bag and began to pull herself and the sleeping bag back towards the pile of wool blankets she’d bedded down on, simultaneously breaking Mom’s spell with yet another effortless counterspell burst and even knocking her off balance briefly. “Nuuuuuuuu….”
By that point, BJ’s face was starting to get soaked with tears, he was laughing so hard. Even through his own laughter, however, he could hear Elly’s breath coming in short, loud gasps, mixed with a choking laugh or chuckle, as she struggled to breathe properly in spite of her great amusement.
Mom was the only one who wasn’t amused. In fact, she seemed almost….
….pissed.
Mom stomped back to the stubborn, overgrown foal that was supposed to be Sling Shot, lowered her head onto the mare’s ear, and began whispering into it softly—
—roughly four seconds later, Sling Shot was suddenly a brand-new pony. Whatever it was that was whispered into her slumbering state of mind, it terrified her to such an extent that her body began to explode in a flurry of motion and activity, jolting upright within her sleeping bag and simultaneously hitting Mom in the face with her head—
“Allrightallright I’mupImupImup—”
“Owww, FU—my frickin’ face—”
Sling wasn’t listening or looking—in fact, she was so desperate to get away from Kite that she failed to escape her sleeping bag spectacularly, only managing to get half of her body out of it before she either tripped herself up or got her rear legs tangled up in something and fell back onto the floor with a hard THUMP!, and after that resorted to using her forelegs to try and pull herself out—
“I’mupI’mmoving don’t do that thing you said you’d do I’m upupup—”
Mom continued to writhe and squirm on the floor beside the pile of blankets, cursing and swearing beneath her breath as she rode out the pain flooding her face—
Sling finally managed to stumble out of her sleeping bag after having pulled it off of her blanket pile with her, and in a flash of her magic had pulled the door open and began to stumble outside in a panicked, ungainly dash to escape whatever it was that Mom had threatened to do—
“ImupImupI’mgoing—”
Something about the word “going” triggered the baby into getting up herself, though with her breath coming in short gaps amid her hysterical laughter it was hard to see how she was doing it. She continued to laugh and howl mercilessly as she followed her mom out the door, though once through the doorway she took a hard right instead of following the mare in her panicked escape attempt, and when BJ spotted a small pouch slung across her body, he figured out her desire to leave and gave neither stable pony another thought.
Not when Mom could still amuse him with her suffering for another few moments.
Chuckling and snorting as he went, he found a way up to his hooves and slowly trotted up to her, watching as she rolled upright and nursed her sore face with a foreleg. “So what’d you tell her?” he laughed.
“I told her that if she didn’t get her lazy ass out of her little wool fort I’d start kissing her in front of Elly,” Mom hissed in pain, her left eye clinching shut as a particularly painful throb seemingly reached back into her head. “Ooooooosssshiiiit that was a mistake….”
“Make it again sometime, that was funny as hell!” he snickered back. “Elly was laughin’ so hard I think she had to take a piss!”
“BJ!” Mom yelled sharply with a touch of displeasure. “A little restraint with your foul mouth would be appreciated!!”
“Hey, I ain’t sayin’ anything I didn’t learn from you.”
That always seemed to shut her up about his language, she never seemed that restrained with her words around him. “….I guess not…”
With that potential threat to his food supply taken care of (he hated military MREs), he contented himself with packing up the remainder of their stuff, starting with the wool blankets in the corner where Sling had been trying to sleep. “At least we know why she bought so many of these things now.”
“I knew I should have talked her out of it,” Mom groaned, still rubbing at her face. “The way her eyes lit up when that merchant rolled into town last week with ‘em, I just knew it was going to bring trouble.”
He had the first of eight or nine blankets folded up in no time, and well on the way to adding two more to the pile. “So you aren’t thankful your girl crush got you a couple of ‘em? Hell, I love the two she gave me.”
“....that obvious now, is it?”
“Mom, you make it any more obvious and Elly will catch on,” he shot back. “And that girl is dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to stuff like that. Don’t mess her brain up any.”
He’d meant that to try and get Mom to behave herself a little, but it backfired on him almost immediately—kinda like how half his jokes and comments wound up working to the baby’s advantage. “What’s this? My boy is taking a liking to a filly he keeps calling a baby?”
The teasing, playful tone of her voice unsettled him with its unspoken insinuations. “Hey, it ain’t like that!” he snapped defensively. “It--…well, it’s….kinda….kindaaaaaaah shhhhiiiit why’d you go make me think about it?!”
“Because until now I had no clue you regarded her as anything more than a brain to play word games off of,” Mom’s voice announced ominously as she rose to her hooves and began to close in on him. “….at least it’s a platonic interest, for the moment.”
“…whazzat mean?”
The third blanket joined the top of the growing pile before Mom answered. “It means non-romantic.”
Mom’s ever thoughtful illumination of the increasingly confusing cloud his thoughts were becoming was welcomed with a silent thanks, though he made the mistake of showing it openly. “…whew…”
“….so you were worried it was the other thing?”
Shit, he cringed openly, gathering a fourth blanket onto the pile and folding up a fifth one…and watching as Mom added a blanket to the pile herself. “…it’s not like I got the experience to know any different. Part of me didn’t even believe it could happen willingly. Most of what I seen of relationships, was usually our masters…or what others would…do, with you….”
“That’s not our life anymore,” Mom said softly, a touch of joyousness coloring her voice. “We don’t have to worry about being beaten or abused by sick assholes with no concept of compassion or love. We’re free because somepony, for once in my sad, shitty life, cared enough to do whatever she could think of to get us out of that…that mess of an existence. I don’t have nightmares of you getting sucked up into the darkest corners of this wasteland and twisted into another raider, I don’t worry about some lust-crazed sicko taking me in front of you and making you watch—”
He wished she hadn’t brought that up—just mentioning it brought back too many horrid images and screams he couldn’t describe, and didn’t want to. Even back then, young as he was, he’d known it was wrong, but over the years he’d heard it happen enough that it started to get…normal….
“….so what is our life, then? Some stable pony bought our freedom so she could be our new master in everything but name?”
Mom stopped messing with the three remaining blankets on the floor, suddenly stricken with what looked like a dawning realization of…of whatever it was she was thinking….
“….you and I both know Sling isn’t like that,” Mom said quietly. “Even if she doesn’t have any clue what it’s like to have friends. She didn’t seem to have but one or two in her entire life and they all died in her Stable. And I told her two months ago that I wanted her to take me home, back where I was growing up. She knows we’re not traveling with her forever.”
“Even if it feels like it,” he mumbled under his breath, but Mom’s keen ears picked it up regardless.
“…I…I haven’t really told her yet, but…I’m kinda afraid that when we part company, we won’t see them again…and I don’t want to let go of them anymore. Elly’s too sweet and kind to be in this wasteland and I just get this urge to squirrel her away in a corner and keep her away from all the horrors out here so she doesn’t change….”
He thought it odd that she mentioned the baby first, but then, he had an idea of what Mom thought of Sling anyway. “And Sling?”
Mom’s voice grew strained and hinged on the edge of frustration. “…dammit, it doesn’t make any sense because she’s too damn wound up to open up to anypony. All I know is that she’s into guns and magic, she’d fall apart in a week without Elly in her life, she looks at everypony like a target to kill if they get too close, she keeps biting off more trouble than she can handle….”
“And tends to kill people that piss her off,” he added snidely, though it was also a rather truthful observation.
And Mom did not challenge it in the slightest. “….and damn it all she’s done all of…this, for us,” she cried softly. “Got us away from Saurus…though Elly had to talk her into that one…kept us safe, tried to get us out of here…found a way to get us free when it looked like we were going back to the pens….godsdammit I want her and it makes no sense at all. I want her, in every sense. I’m scared to let her keep her promise.”
By that point all of the blankets had been collected, folded up, and piled up into a neat stack, and BJ’s attention turned to the small pile of gear stuffed in the corner of the room. Mostly Sling’s stuff—her travelling saddle with its enchanted, bottomless saddlebags, her guns, a black sword scabbard with a katana in it whose existence she wouldn’t explain, and Elly’s travelling saddle. He also found it more than odd that of all the guns Sling had on her, he had never once seen her use that massive revolver she kept tucked to her side, but ammo for it was supposed to be pretty rare. A shame Colada wouldn’t let them keep any of the rifles they’d looted over the last few weeks…
“….did you ever have a plan for what we’d do if we were ever made free?”
“…not a good one,” Mom sighed fearfully. “The only skill I have worth trading is medical care and that’s hard enough given how rare it is to find decent medical supplies and instruments. But I’d rather try my luck at that than make a living letting stallions have their way with me. It’s a miracle that I’ve stayed clean this long given how…often I was made to….”service”, past masters. To say nothing of the times when their friends and cronies would just….”
He purposefully cut in before Mom could go on—lately it was starting to get harder and harder to hear her mention it, and he couldn’t fathom why. “...do you think you could settle anywhere, like you want to?”
No, scratch that. It was getting harder to hear Mom talk about these stable ponies, because now it was all she could do to keep from crying as she contemplated their near future. “….dammit, it wasn’t supposed to go this way….just take us over the valley, back home, drop us off and go on their merry and now I don’t wanna leave ‘em….”
Now he was at a loss as to what he could say or do to snap her out of this funk she’d talked herself into. He was never good at this mushy feeling stuff…but then, all he’d known before was a slave’s existence. Even if all of his old masters and their friends and “cronies” tended to just use Mom however they wanted, they were decent enough to him….mostly. There was one or two that were…not no nice, but the funny thing about those types of masters was that they eventually ended up pissing off someone who had absolutely no problem with wasting them on the spot for their transgressions, and so his and Mom’s time under the ownership of those not-so-nice masters was rather short. Terrifying, but short.
And the longer he thought about it, the less he seemed to like the idea of leaving the relatively safe company of an angry, well-armed Stable mare and her baby filly. Sling wasn’t like any of the others—she didn’t hit him, or Mom, she had no taste for mares and she let him bug Elly for amusement, whereas past masters had forbidden any contact with their kids on pain of extreme suffering and torture. With Sling and Elly, he didn’t feel like a servant or the pony equivalent of a dog.
He felt like a person. And he’d never known how badly he’d been treated until these two Stable ponies came into his life and showed him what it was like to live among normal ponies. To be looked at like he mattered to them, even if Sling herself tried to keep her distance from him and let Mom be the one to deal with him. To be able to talk to another filly around his age and not get yelled at or beat up for even being in the same room with them under adult supervision. To have that filly constantly badger him and tickle his mind with word games that drove both their moms nuts. To feel like he mattered in some way to someone other than Mom.
Sling might’ve been more of a closed book than anything, but Elly…Elly cared. Not just for him and Mom, but for anypony, even raiders and thieves. She felt bad when Sling had to kill somepony and she wasn’t even the one pulling the trigger. He couldn’t fathom why or how she could feel any compassion for ponies who routinely robbed, violated, and murdered their way through daily survival, but she did….and godsdamn it all if she wasn’t just as effective with her words as Sling was with a gun. She’d talked them past ponies that Sling would’ve killed if given another moment to figure out how, she practically cried at all the dead bodies around them when they shot up that gang of robbers disguised as Union troopers even after shooting at them, she cried for her mom who had to go and kill them….
And somehow, without him ever seeing it coming….it somehow became exceptionally important to him that she not change one bit. That she did not get hurt, or used in the way that ponies used to use his mom. That she stayed the same, no matter what she saw or had to do, because if she changed any….
….she might end up like her mom.
“….m-maybe…maybe we should stick with ‘em, then,” he found himself muttering to his mom’s ears. “You keep sayin’ how great it is to be free. To have these damn blue marks on our necks tellin’ the slavers we’re off-limits, that we can do whatever now. Who said you had to stick to what you made Sling agree to, then? If you wanna change yer mind, who’s stoppin’ ya now? We’re….we’re free now, remember?”
A quiet, subdued sniffle from Mom’s nose betrayed her lingering terror of even such a simple choice as that. “….I know…and it’s starting to scare the shit out of me.”
--------------------------------------
The stark, unfiltered terror of having to explain to her little girl why two mares would kiss in that funny way was a much, much worse wake-up call than those stupid battered sauce pans that El-Tee always banged next to her head. She would never, ever curse those things quite as badly as she’d had in the past, ever again (though she’d still ground the filly for it regardless).
Kite’s method of rousing her from her slumber tended to give far more witnesses cause to laugh at her, after all.
She had only stumbled through the door for a couple of seconds, begging out loud that Kite didn’t have to go and kiss her in front of El-Tee, that she was up and she was moving and going out, when she spotted a Brahmin-drawn wagon pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the highway rest station they had holed up in for the night, heard a bellowing laughter out in that general direction, and saw that Ada had practically collapsed onto the broken asphalt, unable to contain her amusement at her misfortune, and realized that the damn griffons had probably heard what had been happening in that little maintenance shed even from where they’d stopped.
Even Leon couldn’t help but laugh derisively at her as she stalked closer towards the griffons. “Not a morning pony, I see,” he chuckled, a talon wrapped over the top of his beak in some lame attempt to control himself.
“Bite me,” she growled back angrily, a flush of shame flooding her cheeks. “The note Colada gave me before we left mentioned you had something to show me. What is it?”
“In a minute,” Leon snickered. “….still not over “childish moat”.”
The mere mention of her pile of freshly woven, real wool blankets courtesy of a caravan merchant with access to a rare flock of normal, untainted sheep in the west brought back a very strong desire to simply tell these griffons to kiss her ass and go back to sleep in her little wool nest. “….you heard everything in there, didn’t you?”
A devious mirth of laughter escaped the griffon’s throat before he could choke it back, though he offered no apologies for it. “Almost everything. I’d love to hear what she did to get you up and moving so quick when all that screaming and cussing failed.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten to hear anything if you two hadn’t wanted us to wait for you out here, so what is it that you want?” she hissed back with an exceptionally strong emphasis on impending violence coming their way.
Leon, at last, began to realize that she was not quite as amused with her situation as they were, and with a harsh, guttural choke of air to clear his lungs, began to dial back his chuckling. “Ummm…h-hey, Ada, cut it out, we just got put on a time schedule and after what she did to Saurus I’m not that anxious to get on her bad side.”
Ada, despite her best attempts, was having a much harder time killing her laughter—she wound up pulling herself up on her feet by latching onto the edge of the wagon and hefting herself up and over the edge just so she could look the pony in the eye without falling over. “Hehahah…sure thing, dude, just….just gimme a minute—”
Sling could feel a very slight surge of magic begin to hasten its flow through her horn, and the last of Leon’s mirth died in the face of a slightly shimmering spell field forming before her. “Now, Ada,” his stern tone rebuked. “By Luna’s teats I’d have thought you’d take this trip more seriously given what your own brother did to you. Straighten up.”
The spell field broke apart harmlessly, her hold on the mana jolted by the unmistakable implication in his words. In turn, Ada’s laughter quickly faded away, and in-between eye blinks she seemed to change entirely. A dip of her boonie hat covered most of her face, which had shifted into a sullen, downcast mask, and in the next moment she was sliding off edge of the wagon and walking away from the wagon entirely like a scolded child.
Not the reaction Leon had been going for—his face grimaced briefly when he saw the crestfallen griffon’s shoulders slumping slightly as she put some distance between herself and the wagon. “…aaah, shit, that was not what I was going for….”
“Then don’t ever mention that again,” Sling warned softly. “Thought you’d have known better.”
“….that makes two of us. Did your crazy plan work?”
“Yes,” she replied after a moment’s lingering gaze over the wagon and its covered contents…though by the shape of what lay beneath the canvas cover, she was beginning to see what it was that had Ada less playful than usual. “…might have made things worse for me, though. Kite’s got it bad for me now and she can barely contain it in the kids’ presence. She’s trying to keep her distance, but when it’s just us it can get….awkward. Don’t know how much longer I can put up with it….”
“…well, you took a lot of risk getting her and her kid out of a slave’s life. Not many souls out here that’ll stick out for runaways. For sure none of them would have the balls to go as far as you have. You’ve got a hell of a balancing act to work with now, so try not to screw it up.”
“…what about your end of the plan?”
“They made it across,” he confirmed nonchalantly. “Julie wasn’t happy about having to give up her sword. She doesn’t think Colada’s gonna buy the fact that you killed her.”
“And she’s right,” Sling sighed, taking a seat on her hindquarters for a brief rest. “Colada never outright said it to my face, but a week after I paid the slavers off she called me to her office and gave me Julie’s sword back. Said it was my trophy to use or return as I pleased, special emphasis on return. I don’t think she meant herself, either. Didn’t say anything else about it the rest of the time I spent there.”
“….if she let you go despite suspecting otherwise, I’d leave it that way,” he counseled strongly. “You’ll have enough problems as it is if the Union decides they want to find a way into the one-one-five. Best to get over the valley while you can.”
“I’m trying to, believe me,” she grumbled in frustration. “And we’ll get back on our way as soon as you tell me why you wanted us to stop here for a day.”
Leon’s reply was simply to reach into the wagon and pull back on the canvas cover, revealing the cargo ben—
….no, not cargo, as she’d vainly hoped despite her suspicions.
A body.
A broken, blood-stained body of a rather large, gray-feathered griffon she recognized quite well despite meeting only three times in her life….
“Just thought you’d want some proof that he wouldn’t be a problem anymore,” Leon’s voice said grimly. “He never was able to dig himself out from under that building you brought down on him. Probably died within a coupla days. We aren’t real sure because we dug him out six days after the fight, after we’d made sure Julie and her girl got over the valley. He’d been dead at least two days, maybe more. Only piece of his gear that came out in decent shape was his nine-mil pistol, which Ada’s keeping since it was a gift from their dad, long before he went crazy.”
She barely acknowledged his voice, though her ears were well-tuned to the words being spoken to her. Her eyes had latched onto this crushed body, still mostly covered, and in particular on the blood-stained face, and the left eye that appeared to have been burst inside the eye socket….
….and her brain had begun to latch onto the possibility that he had likely still been alive, slowly bleeding out less than a quarter-mile away, pinned and crushed by tons of concrete, steel, and plaster, while she slept soundly and semi-comfortably in the depths of the town hall with a smile on her face at the thought of having finally killed him….
She promptly turned and trotted away from the wagon before she could burn any more details into her memory. But she was fairly certain she would be haunted by the image of his blood-stained, dead face and its destroyed eyeball for the rest of her natural days.
Leon’s voice gave her the impression that he seemed to understand her reaction better than she did. “….he was dead whether he got helped out or not,” he sighed. “Injuries were way too severe for the few healing potions we had on-site. Couldn’t have moved him out without killing him, not the way we found him. And if you think he was only threatening to do nasty things to your kid to scare you, ask Ada what he did to a couple of fillies nine months back. I still get nightmares about it myself. We’d have popped him in the head the moment we got enough of the rubble off of him to get a clean shot.”
“—ybe that little shit of a filly instead—”
Saurus’s harsh, furious voice faded out of her mind with a hard blink, and she was back to staring at the cracked asphalt beneath her forehooves, and the tendrils of shriveled prairie grass that had attempted to make a home in-between the cracks. “….I’m trying to believe I wouldn’t have done the same thing….and I’m not sure I do….”
An ugly, tense silence began to permeate the air between them, and Leon quickly sought to move the conversation on before it could dominate their psyches. “...there was a reward bounty on him,” Leon said. “Best bounty we’ve ever put on a target, given what he did to earn it.”
Sling felt a slight bubbling of bile build up in her throat, which she choked back with a gulp. “You can keep it.”
“It’s a gun set,” Leon went on quickly. “Rifle, pistol, ammo, spare mags and parts…and the training to use the rifle to the best of its capabilities. That 5.56-mil revolver’s cute and useful up close, but you’re gonna need a much better long-range response than a 12-guage pump and slug rounds if you’re going to insist on picking fights with half the wasteland.”
That surge of bile began to die down as her mind latched onto the words “rifle” and “pistols”. Caps she could turn down…but a weapon, particularly one she needed…. “….what kind of rifle are we talking about….”
“A good one, 5.56mm, with semi-automatic and full-auto fire modes,” Leon clarified. “Pistol’s a .45, built from scratch. Rifle’s a Runner secret we’d like to leave a secret as long as we can, but we can explain more once we go to pick it up.”
“That’s not much of an explanation on the rifle, I know a half dozen models that fit that short description.”
“I’m being vague because I’m not even supposed to be mentioning it. Trust me, it’s a good one.”
“….I guess I’ll have to,” she sighed sadly. Having chased off lingering horrors and quelled her unsettling stomach, she was stricken with a sudden urge to put her mind and body to work before she could get enough time to think again. “How far are we traveling together?”
“We’re not, at the moment,” Leon clarified. “We still need to get back to Maize. Those mercs Saurus hired, your little girl convinced them to turn on him, and that helped turn the odds against him enough that he bailed out, but not before Ada and I killed a few of them. They’re pretty sore at us for it, so we’ve been doing some jobs for them here and there to make up for it. We need to get back and pay them off.”
She silently thanked the departed Sisters for her night light’s exceptional empathy. “Then how will we find you once we cross the valley? Kite doesn’t remember much of the west anymore, beyond a few settlements here and there.”
“There’s a town to the northwest of the bridge crossing, roughly fifteen miles’ distance,” he answered, mercifully tossing the canvas cover back over the body and shielding her from its dead glare. “Find an inn called Last Stand, run by an earth pony. Tell him we sent you and he won’t give you any shit. We’ll catch up with you there, escort you the rest of the way. You’ll be there a few days, so be ready to earn your keep if you’re running low on caps.”
--------------------------------------
If one could believe the old stories of the First Ones, Trotpeka was the jewel city of the Prairie.
Established in the twilight century of Princess Celestia’s rule, the humble riverside town had grown into one of only two mega-sized metropolitan areas in the plains by the time Princess Luna had ascended to the position of regent ruler of Equestria. The rapid industrialization and modernization that followed Luna’s ascension transformed the commercial center of the Prairie into its heart and core. Skyscrapers and office buildings in the commercial district almost matched the majesty of steel and glass that dominated Manehatten, Baltimare, and Fillydelphia. Self-contained and self-sustaining neighborhoods the size of most of the prairie’s farm towns dotted the residential districts with lush, green yards, small forested parks, and unobstructed views of Celestia’s sun and Luna’s moon. The neighborhoods came complete with schools, medical clinics, and small family owned businesses, making it possible for a family to live in Trotpeka without ever visiting the more congested commercial shopping districts, if they so desired. The industrial districts of the city were among the most advanced in the entire region, inclined more towards research and development of advanced tech than smelly, smog-pumping manufacturing factories and processes, though time and war desperation would eventually see a few such facilities erected for the production of munitions, weapons, and even tracked and wheeled war vehicles. At its peak, the city claimed a population of over 170,000, with close to 200,000 if one included the various farm towns and communities that surrounded the city on both sides of the Serenity river.
Some distance to the north was the sole pegasus cloud city in the prairie, Serenity. Responsible for supplying the weather teams and managing the prairie’s seasons, Serenity held an important enough place in the region’s happenings that the pegasi got to name the river beneath them after their city. Serenity’s reputation for peace and quiet was such that even at the height of the war with the zebra lands and their allies, it had managed to avoid becoming embroiled in the manufacture and maintenance of Equestria’s cloudships, though a small airfleet and skydock were installed as a defensive measure nonetheless. The distance was great enough from Trotpeka that one couldn’t see Serenity from the ground, but in the days of Equestria That Was the two were often no more than half a day’s travel away from each other via sky wagon.
And then the war ended.
The First Ones who fled to the stable never knew how badly the prairie had been devastated. They only knew that megaspells had begun flying across the skies, like comets of brilliant rainbow colors peeled away from each other, and that mushroom clouds that could be seen dozens of miles away began dotting the horizons around their towns not long after. That the wastelands were not flooded with life-killing radiation nearly two centuries later was a mystery to the wastelanders that came after, though here and there were said to be pockets of it that would poison a soul exposed to it. Sticking to the roads seemed to keep travelers safe from the risks of radiation poisoning. Some surmised that the majority of it had been blown away in the years after the blasts by the weather that had raged out of control.
The same could not be said of Trotpeka. Its commercial district, a maze of concrete and steel skyscrapers, had been gutted and eroded by the detonation of a megaspell in the city’s northern industrial district and the continual passage of weather across nearly two hundred years with nopony to maintain and upkeep the properties. Even at a distance from the city, one could tell that a part of it had been erased from the face of the earth, a massive crater where factories and tech centers had once toiled endlessly in support of the war effort—perhaps the reason why this part of the city was targeted for oblivion. The blast itself damaged the entirety of the city to varying degrees—the edge of the commercial district, closest to the industry sector, was little more than twisted I-beams and “naked” buildings stripped clean of glass and most of their outer walls. The further away from the blast itself, the less severe the damage. The blast point itself was still lethal, even today—supposedly the Union occasionally tested the radiation by scaring an animal into the ruins, usually a goat or a brahmin, and then retrieving it a day or two later with the use of heavily-shielded “dive teams” loaded down in radiation-resistant suits, laced with anti-radiation chems, and even the use of a shielded wheeled vehicle that had managed to survive the war and the long decades of time afterward. The animal was almost always found dead of radiation poisoning, or close enough to it that it was left where it was found so that it could finish dying on its own. Only radroaches and mutant reptilians the wasteland referred to as “geckos” seemed to thrive in the crater and the ruins immediately surrounding it.
The residential sectors had been subjected to an entirely different devastation—desperation. In the decades before the Union’s arrival, what was left of Trotpeka was home to a struggling community surrounded by gangs, raiders, and free-roaming mercenaries that had origins in the neighborhood’s immediate life after the blasts. Some merc bands traced their origins back to local police department precincts, while the more savage raiders and gangs seemed to have had ancestors that had once been prison inmates or frequent “visitors” in the city’s justice systems. The community was descended down from the combined residents of the various neighborhoods who survived the end of the world and banded together in the most intact suburbs among the throng of dozens that had once existed.
The Union changed all that, a year at a time. Fifteen years after establishing a trade route to the city ruins, they now had effective control of the prairie’s jewel city and the largest, most secure bridge across the dried-out river valley. The gangs were a shell of their former selves, reduced to a straggling few that refused to abandon the murderous lifestyle that had seen them slaughtered by the trooper corps. Most of the merc bands dispersed or became “contracted” to one of the Union’s many trade guilds and caravans. And the community of survivors flourished under the blanket of protection and security offered by armed troopers. Trotpeka today was the “entry point” to the west, and vice versa—wastelanders and traders from both sides of the valley crossed here to reach the other side, or to set up shop in the city to offer their wares to visitors passing through. Efforts to repair and re-start the one factory that wasn’t radiation-tainted had been ongoing for at least the last four years, and the talk among the Union was that it might reach operating status by the end of the year, adding a fourth factory to their production capabilities. There was even a series of working medical clinics up and running throughout the commercial and residential districts.
The city had been their goal for what seemed like years. Delays and circumstances had turned what was supposed to be a two-week journey into a three-month sludge—some were by choice, others by necessity, and still other delays were imposed upon them. But the city remained their ultimate destination. The gateway to the other side, to something…better. Better, at least, in the sense that slavers were not running around looking for fresh “product” to add to their pens; they held no illusion that life would be any easier aside from that little detail. But she couldn’t help but stare out behind her, at the rotted out office buildings and the constant, depressing blanket of gray cloud cover that cast a continual shadow upon the world, and feel….disappointed.
After everything they’d gone through to get here, she hadn’t expected it to turn into a barrier against further progress.
“…why is the bridge closed?” she asked of the gray skies above her.
One of the four troopers standing guard at the large central bridge over the river—the one that had broken the news that their journey had just hit another travel snag—answered her plea as though she’d said it to his face. “Some slaves got loose from their handlers overnight. Guilds get pissy if we don’t at least block major exits while they search ‘em out.”
“You just let them run through unchecked?”
“….between you and me, most of the Union brass don’t have Colada’s balls,” the trooper said quietly after a quick scan around him, probably to make sure there weren’t any officers or sergeants within earshot. “She’d have wiped them out already if they’d tried this in her garrison, but Colonel Granger’s more worried about his standing with the Board than with keeping the guilds in line. Hell, way I hear it from most of the squads past Galesville, the guilds actually have some of the checkpoints on their payroll to suck up a few souls passing by them now and then. We’ve definitely noticed an uptick in the number of slaves in their pens these last coupla months, on account of a lot of squads getting pulled off patrol to put down that radroach infestation that popped up near Stifla…what, two and a half months back? Three?”
My gods, has it really only been that long since the stable died behind me….
“Not an encouraging sign,” she muttered.
“But one most of the brass don’t want to bother looking into. Got enough to deal with just putting down raiders and cleaning the highways of all the mutant wildlife crawling around. Colada’s about the only one in this part of Union territory that’s keeping the guilds in line, even given her quirks.”
“Quirks?”
“Quirks like being married to a stallion and a mare, at the same time, and going so far as to live with both of them in the same house with the two kids she had with her husband. Or letting her entire garrison get it on with anybody they like, regardless of rank, so long as it doesn’t disrupt operations or unit cohesion, or end up with unplanned foals. Pays extra for troopers that put in the time and work to make expert on their rifle skills and stick with it. Even puts her company’s financial resources on tap for anybody in need of a few extra caps for food or medical care. Naturally, that means her company’s backing trade guilds need to work extra hard to make sure they’re pulling in the profit to support that kind of generosity.”
Sling’s brain went into a short circuit trying to comprehend the idea of having two simultaneous spouses of opposite genders, and after a few fruitless seconds abandoned it altogether. “….Colada is many things, but the five weeks I spent as her “guest” in her garrison did not give me the impression that generous was one of them.”
“She’s generous to those it matters being generous to,” the trooper said with a small—but noticeable—smile. “You say you were her “guest” for five weeks. It have anything do with those blue marks on your companions’ necks?”
Sling stole a quick glance at Kite, roughly thirty feet behind her, and at that yin-yang neon blue mark on the right side of her neck. The right half was a much brighter shade of blue than the left half, but its appearance was unmistakable for anything else but what it was professed to be—the almost non-existent freedom mark of a freed slave.
“….that rare, are they?”
“Maybe a hundred in the entire prairie, but those are the first two I know of that were outright bought out of it,” the trooper beamed back. “Heard some scuttlebutt through the slave caravans ‘bout a couple of slaves getting bought free a few weeks back, figured if it was gonna happen anywhere it’d be in Colada’s garrison. The guilds want so much for a buyout that nobody ever considers it, so I already have a rough estimate of what it cost you to pull that off. She wouldn’t have let any of you out of town until that was done and settled. If anything, the fact that she kept you in her garrison at all tells me that she considers you a pony worth sticking her neck out for.”
I can’t be worth that much trouble if she’s telling her bosses where I came from. “That’s still not going to get me past you.”
“Nice try, though. Stick around a few days, the bridge will open up again eventually. Enough inns and bars looking for business that you can probably get a decent group discount if you pay up ahead of time. Just don’t go near the north side or the red district on the southwest corner of the main trade quarter. Red district has most of the vice, and that’s where we have the most problems.”
She didn’t bother saying any sort of a good-bye—a simple wave of a forehoof was enough for this trooper to signify that she was done wasting her time and his with conversation, and her brief trek back to the others was met with growing looks of disappointment and despair.
“…the bridge is locked down, isn’t it?” Kite grumbled, her eyes furrowing in annoyed disbelief. “Would be just about our type of luck….”
“Locked down, and not opening up to anybody, even traders,” she spat back. “Some slaves got free last night, and the guilds are looking for them.”
Kite’s jaw mouthed off a silent, foul curse as a forehoof stomped at the ground in frustration. “…damn it, what does it take to get away from these people? It’s like the wasteland is actively conspiring to keep us on this side of the valley—”
Light Tail’s voice quipped in with unsettling, disturbing thoughts that reminded her of how glad she was that the child could be more perceptive than her mother. “….the bridge is closed? The one bridge we need to cross to leave…is closed? Not even a day before we get here? Am I the only one that finds that too funny to be a coincidence?”
It took only a couple of seconds for Sling to see the potential for trouble—it had happened before, after all. “That is awfully convenient….but Saurus is dead. Leon showed me the body himself, in that wagon they dragged along. And even if that slave master I paid off for Kite and Beige suspects that I knew they were runaways, it wouldn’t make any sense to try anything now. He landed a fortune in caps for his guild, and these two got their freedom marks. If they tried anything against any of us now it’d put them in deep trouble with the Union.”
“We’re right here, you know,” BJ interrupted, a slight bitterness slipping into his tone. “And I don’t see how the bridge being closed would lead us into another trap. We can just hang out at another inn, like we always do, wait ‘till it’s open again.”
“Sitting still in one place would mean that anybody looking for us wouldn’t have a hard time of it,” Sling replied, thoroughly rejecting the idea of another few days cooped up inside a hotel room. She was tired of rock-hard beds and patchy blankets, she was tired of sniffing ages of dust that never seemed to get swept up, but most of all….she was afraid that if they stayed in one place too long now, Kite would lose her self-control and try something funny again….
….and by all the fortunes of the wastes, Kite also seemed to be the best bet for finding another way through the valley.
After a thorough visual scan of the streets around them to ensure that there was no one else within earshot of their voices, she began peppering the grape-coated mare with questions that would ultimately set them on a path to the other side of the valley. “….Kite, when you came here with the underground, where did you stop?”
She kept her head craned around to the side, to gauge the mare’s reaction, and the way her ears drooped down made her feel slightly guilty about putting her on the spot like that. “….t-the red light district, southwest corner of the trade quarter….too risky to have the stop close to the valley, would’ve been too obvious.”
So that’s one stop we’re definitely not making today. “Did any of the souls that ran the stop there ever talk about how they got anyone over the valley?”
Now Kite’s head began to turn away from her, as if making sure there wasn’t anybody listening in on them herself…or maybe she simply preferred to cross the valley via the safest method, and Sling couldn’t blame her for that. “….n-not to me, directly….but now and then I’d hear one of them talk about it. There was a smaller bridge in the old residential neighborhoods back then that was still standing, but it was in pretty bad shape. Couldn’t get a caravan across, had to go through on hoof. About three months before the war with the Runners ended it finally got too dangerous to use, and the trooper corps took over their end of the bridge. The stop only made two more runs over the valley after that…something about a….a river port, on the edge of the commercial district, that was spread out over the valley and used some connecting bridges to ferry traffic from one side to the other. They weren’t too fond of that one either.”
“Why not?”
“…the ghouls,” she answered fearfully.
“Ada mentioned those once, when we first met her,” Light Tail’s voice broke in. “Said they used to be ponies, but they ain’t anymore and went cannibal, right?”
“….something like that,” Kite confirmed. “They…they look like the walking dead. I don’t know a whole lot about them, the few sane ones tend to keep to themselves in their own district here. It’s the ones that lost their minds that scare us. Ada wasn’t exaggerating about them, ain’t anything left of them up there. They just roam the valley around the city, killing and eating any living thing they catch, and it’s…it’s ugly. Never know when a horde will be coming through either, they’re pretty quiet ‘till they see something to eat. To this day they haven’t found a way up the riverbed, they aren’t smart enough to climb up the valley. Only lucky break the prairie got out of those bastards, otherwise they’d have eaten everypony in Trotpeka decades ago.”
“Any chance of finding any of the guys that ran the stop here so we can ask them about that last bridge?”
“It’s been seven years, they could be anywhere,” Kite cried softly, though whether the fear was from talking about the underground or the ghouls was anypony’s guess. “We broke up and scattered into the winds, remember? Safest thing we could do.”
Sling’s gut began to turn and twist inside, fearful of leading any of them—least of all El-Tee—into a part of town with absolutely no knowledge or information about what they were to look for. It seemed simple enough—a river port complex spanning the width of the river itself, but that would mean it would’ve been located in the irradiated industrial district, or very close to it. And if Kite and Ada weren't exaggerating about how dangerous these “ghouls” were, any trip through there could turn south exceptionally quick….
…but she wasn’t about to take any of them, especially the kids, to a part of town openly known to house most of the whores, drugs, and booze that the tortured souls of the wastes drowned themselves in to escape their pain…
…and then it dawned on her, ever so slowly, that a part of her still considered Kite and BJ to be runaways and not the free ponies she kept trying to treat them as…
If they were going to go much further as a group, it was long past time for the group as a whole to start deciding things.
“….so we have a coupla of choices,” she said softly. “Stay in town, wait out the lockdown, or find another way over the valley….”
BJ did not wait for any type of discussion to start—he simply leapt onto the path he found to be the easiest to take. “So let’s just find another inn to laze around in, like we always seem to,” he mumbled bitterly.
“Except that I’m afraid that the Union’s going to start looking for me, specifically, in order to find a way into my old stable,” she said back gently. “I know Colada took her time sending her report out, but a stable pony doesn’t exactly crawl out into the wasteland all that often.”
“But yer stable’s dead, ain’t it?”
“That’s what Mom and I keep sayin’,” El-Tee answered the question for her. “That don’t mean they won’t try, if they really want to. Even a dead stable can still be pretty valuable, if it’s intact. All sorts of stuff inside, guns, bullets, fresh untainted material like raw metal and things like that.”
“So what do they need either of you for then? They already know where the damn thing is, ain’t like it’s moved any in the last coupla hundred years.”
“They don’t have a way in,” Sling replied. “The stable door can take a megaspell blast at point-blank, and our particular door was laced with enchantments that keep a unicorn’s magic from even affecting it. Seeing as how only two or three souls in all of ponykind’s history had the power to move anything that heavy through telekinesis, that would leave any group wanting inside with only one option—the door console. Without the password or a working PipBuck, even that would be worthless to you.”
BJ’s brain did not take very long to figure things out from there. “….and you, for sure, have at least one of those…..”
“I get the impression that a full-functional PipBuck is a rare thing to even see, much less find,” she confirmed grimly. “So yes, a wandering stable pony with a working unit would be a very valuable….find, for anybody looking to crack a Stable open. Colada delayed her report as long as she could, but she couldn’t hide something that important coming through her garrison. If the Union leadership doesn’t know I exist yet, they will very shortly and I’d like to leave as soon as possible before they ramp up a search effort that makes hiding you two from them seem like a child’s game.”
“…they’d only be looking for us,” El-Tee squeaked next, her coming words filling her with a slight, creeping terror at the implications. “….you two could probably get across whenever you wanted, if it came to it—”
“It’s not coming to that,” Kite blurted in a sudden burst of tortured emotions. “We got this far together, we can make it further.”
That got Sling’s attention far better than getting gutshot did. She actually had to stop and make sure it was Kite’s voice she’d heard breaking like that….
…and so did the kids….
….and yes, that had indeed been Kite’s words. Her face cracked, briefly, but when she looked in her eyes, Sling thought she could see a hint of terror at the thought of leaving out on her own to save herself…
….or maybe she’s not entirely sure what to do with her life, now that it’s hers again…
El-Tee, perhaps uncomfortable with the awkward silence that was beginning to form between them, sought to steer them back onto their original topic—their next move. “….well, whatever we do, we need to do it soon. Stay put, or find a way over, and we got a lead on the second option we oughta check out, at least.”
“And the second we find it yer gonna insist on goin’ through with it,” BJ shot back, a slight accusing tone to his words. “We’re fine, we ain’t runaways no more. I don’t even get why you think anybody’d go to the trouble to get the main bridge shut down just to hold us up, Saurus ain’t alive anymore. I do not wanna go anywhere near the valley where ghouls might be waiting for a snack!”
“What about the slavers that almost took you and Kite away, when Mom came and gave them all those caps?” the little filly said next. “Their leader knew you two were runaways…that we knew it. He might have cared more about the caps in the end, but the guys you say the major shot up or killed? You think they’re gonna forget that, or let their reputation suffer for it? They killed a lot of people to keep their sick slavery going, and they don’t seem like the type to let things go so easy. I can see them pulling this stunt to make us sit still long enough to come after us.”
It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds’ thought to realize that El-Tee was probably far more accurate and correct than any of them wanted to admit. How this filly, this child, could come to conclusions that adults should have arrived at a lot sooner baffled her to this day, but there was a terrifying clarity to her logic.
Because if she were in their horseshoes, if she were that nasty minded, she was certain she’d be doing exactly what the filly was suggesting was possible.
“….buck me, Mom, why does that sound like she’s right?” BJ whispered with a deathly hoarse.
“…because they’ve done it before,” Kite cried in soft terror. “We need to leave Trotpeka. Today.”
--------------------------------------
She wanted to be wrong. So very, horribly wrong. That a pony couldn’t be that…that angry, that they were willing to engineer (or outright fabricate) a “slave escape” and shut down a town’s exits simply to trap the souls they were hoping to murder.
And then she’d remember that wagon full of ponies, glimpses of whom she’d caught through the tears in the fabric covering the wagon, as it passed by her, and seeing nothing but defeat and hopelessness in their eyes as it rolled out of the major’s town. And she would remember that anypony who thought subjecting another soul to a life like that was okay, was not exactly a nice or stable person to start with.
She’d watched Mom kill raiders—literally blew one’s head up with that big gun of hers, a sight she found more haunting than the fact that Mom had killed. She’d watched her kill bandits and guns for hire, and saw how she seemed so much more…okay with it the more she did it. Like she could live with slaying another pony. And maybe she could, given that she hadn’t shot anybody who wasn’t trying to kill or enslave them. She was pretty sure Mom would have no trouble with taking a slaver’s life, and she was hoping she would never have to see that, because she was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t be so gentle about it (at least, as gentle as one could get with shooting or stabbing somepony).
The scariest part of that thought, though…was that she wasn’t sure she would feel bad about a few slavers getting killed. And the first time she’d pondered that horrifying thought last week, she’d barfed up breakfast and nearly messed herself, making it the bathroom by the barest of margins. She was lucky she’d been alone at the time, or she’d have never heard the end of it from the others.
So she wanted to be wrong. She wanted her all-too-real scenario to turn out to be worrying over nothing, and that the four of them would just scoot on down this river port’s bridges and be on their merry way, laughing at how silly she was to be suggesting that the slavers were looking to murder them all despite giving them a fortune in caps to let Kite and BJ go free. She wanted to spend the rest of her life not seeing how truly angry Mom could get with somepony, and watching her tear them apart like those bugs she hated so much.
And most of all, she wanted to be home, in the stable, laughing and playing with Emmy and Jam again and worrying about nothing more than homework and how long they’d get to play in an afternoon. She missed their company. Their voices. Their gleeful, careless laughs. She did her best not to think about them too much, and BJ was amusing enough that it wasn’t that hard. But on days like today, when she was faced with the reality of where she was standing and walking right then….she would remember. And then it took every bit of will (and a couple of cold, wet noses poking her along) to keep herself moving without breaking into a crying fit.
Days like today, were always the hardest.
And so she took to the best relief she could find.
“…h-hey, Beige, what’s yer name?” she said quietly, starting with the first question of the day she always asked him for these last two months.
He never answered in the same way twice. “I am Pale Death, come to deliver you into Tartarus,” was today’s sarcastic reply.
“…no, seriously, what does BJ stand for?”
“…oh, that name,” he snipped back playfully. “….nah, not for girl’s ears. Even I don’t like it. Why would I tell you?”
“’Cause I asked? I mean, you know my name.”
“And it fits oh so very well with you,” he laughed, his eyes stealing a look at her namesake. “Seriously, if you swish that tail enough it turns into a light show and blinds the crap out of me. It’s kinda awesome, that bright streak even matches your eye color. As names go, you got a real fitting one.”
She didn’t know why, but hearing him say something like that about her made her blush a little. It was a rare enough thing for him to compliment anybody to start with. “Eeech…I dunno, I kinda wish Mom coulda been more original….”
“What, you don’t like Light Tail?”
Her thoughts of home, and Emmy and Jam, faded quickly, uplifted ironically by the company of a colt that seemed to spend most of his day dead to the world around him. An irony in itself, as most of the world pretty much was dead, if these crumbling city ruins were any clue. “I didn’t say that, I just…c’mon, Light Tail? Anybody that so much as looks at my tail gets the joke right off.”
“But it ain’t a joke. I mean it, it just fits. I mean, look at my mom. Kite? She looks nothing like one, she’s just lucky her cutie mark matches.”
“Wonder what it means. Haven’t seen her try to fly one.”
“Ask her sometime, she’ll probably tell ya. If she feels like it.”
Her brief, joyous mood began to dampen once more. You’ve asked that before and didn’t get an answer…
“At least tell me what yours means.”
“In how many different languages do I need to tell you “no” in? ‘Cause I only know one.”
“…three?”
“I’ll work on it. In the meantime, no! Nada, zippo, zilch, zero!”
She let her breath come out in a heavy sigh. “Look, if you don’t tell me yer name I’m gonna have to make one up.”
This actually got a short chuckle out of the boring-faced colt….and a surprising answer. “Fine, then.”
Her ear flicked as she cocked her head in his direction. “Wha…wait, what?”
“I said ‘fine, then’. Make one up. No name you come up can be worse than what I got stuck with, trust me.”
She stopped cold in her tracks, and felt Mona’s coat brush against her side as the mutt came to a stop beside her. “….where’s Beige, you deceivin’, low-down dirty….deceiver?!”
“He has gone to find himself,” the colt droned back, still trotting forward and leaving her behind in his wake. “If he should get back before he returns, please keep him here.”
She couldn’t help but snicker through her nose at that. “Mona, quick, stop him—”
And before she knew it, the now-Light-Tail sized husky pup eagerly darted forward and attempted to pin the colt to the ground, only to have the slippery bugger begin hopping forward to escape her. “Hey, what’s this, he came back,” he laughed, even going so far as to hop backwards as the pup leapt forward. “Why’s the dog chasing me—”
“Mona, heel—”
Mona looked a little conflicted, perhaps having expected a little playtime, but she settled down quickly nonetheless and came back to her side with a soft howl. They were doing that a lot more lately. More howling than barking. And the sheer variety of howls, the tones and volumes, the moods….it was starting to match the more adult, wolfish-like appearance they were growing into. These guys were going to be bigger than her in no time at all, and they’d still be growing for months afterward. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be happy or terrified of that concept, so she just went back to bugging BJ.
“Okay, so now that we got Beige back we gotta find a name for him since he won’t give it,” she giggled, her brain already dreaming up several with which to torment him. “There’s the old favorite Butter Jelly—”
BJ stopped hopping around and slowed down his pace until he was back at her side again. “Better not.”
“Next candidate would be Burnt Juice—”
“I think I’ll leave the story on that one a mystery.”
She snorted through her nose, the mere mention of the name being just enough to jog the memory into focus. “It was some cranberry juice I tried to make once, and POOMF! Went up in some crazy flambé, think I used something flammable in the mix.”
His short laugh rumbled through her chest. “Oh crap, you try to cook?”
“I got good at it…eventually. Fact is, I did the cooking in the stable ‘cause Mom never really cared for it. She’s not bad at it, she just don’t like doin’ it and found it easier to just let me have the kitchen.”
“Oh wow, a grown mare having her meals prepared by a mere ten-year-old filly!”
That one seemed to reach Kite and Mom, and she could see Mom wilting lightly under Kite’s curious and sly glare. “Ten and a half! ….or is it ten and three quarters now…anyways, next name in the round robin, Buttfire Juke—”
“Okay, I take it back, you can do worse—”
She went on with her tirade, catching a sideways glance from Mom and Kite in the process (but for the moment neither of them yelled “Shut up!”). “How ‘bout Blazing Junipers—”
“…better than what I thought it was gonna be when I heard ‘Blazing’—”
“Burning Junkpile?”
“….Mom, can I tell her my name?”
“No!!” came Kite’s instant and exasperated refusal.
The next name to come out of her mouth almost ended the short game before she was ready for it. “Baffled Junebug!”
“Mooooooomm—”
“Nooo!!!” Kite screamed back, and that was when Mom’s gaze went from disinterested to…displeased, and she started to turn around.
“Light Tail—” Mom began to say in that low, threatening tone seemingly shared by all moms and dads, that little warning that was meant to say ‘You’re treading on real thin ice, buddy!’.
Panicking a little (and not wanting to find out what punishment she could get that would be worse than living in the wastes or having to eat military MRE’s for a day), El-Tee’s eyes quickly swept over BJ, hoping that a quick visual scan of him would trigger a name that would get her out of this mess she’d just dug for herself—
—noticed that his bluish-coat seemed to match up well with the duller, darker shade of blue of his short mane and lengthy tail—
“….Blue Jay?”
The name popped out before she knew it was in her head—alongside a brief, fleeting photo of a long-extinct (she assumed, anyway) blue jay and its distinctive blue feathers—but once uttered, found that it seemed….ironic, paradoxically. Blue jays were supposed to be pretty noisy and aggressive, more than willing to mob and chase hawks, owls, and the occasional pony that wandered into its territory. BJ, despite the blue coat and mane that reminded her of the bird at a glance, was neither of these things…and yet she found the name fitting.
This was all, naturally, beyond the colt’s understanding. “….what’s a blue jay?” his confused face asked when he ran the words through his brain and came up with nothing.
She laughed, giggled, and even hopped up and spun around in a circle, briefly pleased to have tripped him up on something today. “It was a noisy, aggressive bird that would chase hawks and owls! And ponies, if they felt like it. You’re like, super-quiet and passive and tend to sleep and rest in the corner of a room! Yeah, you’re Blue Jay now!”
His look of confusion remained, eyeing her over as though she’d lost her marbles, and then looked back at his mom. “….I’d like to reconsider the Junebug thing—“
“Blue Jay sounds….nice,” Kite’s voice sighed wistfully, her aggravated features having melted into a slight visage of…happiness? Gratitude? It was hard to say exactly what she seemed to be feeling, but at least she wasn’t mad anymore. “….hell of a lot better than the real name you got. Blue Jay it is.”
And then Kite’s head turned back around, looking ahead once more, and her posture and body language seemed to perk up a little, like she found the whole thing….uplifting. Even Mom seemed….pleased, if nothing else.
“…that is nice,” Mom murmured quietly at last, returning to her previous spot just ahead of Kite, with Max staying right behind her the entire time. “Make it last by being quieter, would you?”
…well, at least she wasn’t going to be gagging down a military ration for dinner! She’d call this one a win! She was happy now, Kite was happier, and BJ was now Blue Jay and looked like he’d just lost ten straight rounds of blackjack against her!
“….know this,” BJ promised in an evil, dark voice. “You are doomed. You must sleep sometime. And I know where you sleep. And when you do, vengeance will be mine.”
“You know where I’m gonna sleep tonight?!” she squealed in fake glee. “Oh where doth we settle this fine night, little colt? A cave of rock and moss, or a squalid diner covered in a thick layer of rust and dirt and—“
“Ohhh, godsdammit,” BJ’s voice moaned in despair, his head hanging low briefly. “It’s like an MRE stuck in my ears I can’t get it out—“
“Quiet,” Mom commanded sharply and loudly, forcing the group to a halt as she summarily planted herself firmly still and stared out ahead of her. “I think we found it.”
“It”, when Light Tail shut herself up and squeezed past Mom and Kite’s legs to see for herself, was a rather sorry looking thing. The river port looked no better off than most of the other buildings she’d seen in the wastes—the place was crumbling, ruined, with parts of it scattered across the streets and things like that. The tattered, twisted remains of a chain-link fence had been weathered and worn down to a few rust-covered poles and slabs of fencing sticking out like…like broken bones, ugh. She didn’t know why she thought of it that way.
The most important part—the bridges and walkways connecting each half of the port to the other—was the most depressing. There had indeed been several at one point, but most of them had fallen apart and plummeted to the bottom of the dried-up riverbed long ago. Only three were left intact, and one had enough chunks of it missing anyways that it would probably meet the same fate in a couple of years or less. A second bridge was missing most of its roofing, but what little she could see of it suggested that its flooring was more or less stable and safe. A singular walkway spanning the width of the riverbed stuck out through its lack of guard railing and protective roofing, and it looked like it twisted and titled to the left or right at a couple of points. Not much, but enough to be a problem for two growing puppies.
And through it all, Mom’s eyes kept themselves glued to the little green screen of her PipBuck, her magic working the dials and switches on the thing for reasons understood only by her….
“Closer to the blast crater than I’d like,” she said, her voice slightly shaken. “PipBuck’s not picking up rads where we’re standing, but I can see a few skyscrapers from here that looked like they got hit by the blast two centuries ago. Could be pockets of intense radiation scattered all through here.”
“Never heard of that being a problem with…those guys,” Kite’s voice consoled gently, initially confusing the filly with ‘those guys’ until she realized the mare was probably trying to avoid openly saying anything about the underground. It was a big enough risk to have even mentioned it earlier…. “…but they didn’t have any fancy stable-tec attached to their legs either. You should take point. If you come close to a radiation pocket you’ll get advance warning before it gets too bad. We won’t.”
Mom’s mouth uttered a curse beneath her breath, though to El-Tee’s eyes it looked like that f-word that nobody would explain to her. “…I hit one bad enough, we’re turning back. Don’t have much rad-away to spare. Walk where I walk, don’t stray off, and don’t rush ahead of me until I know it’s safe. That means the pups too.”
“Great,” BJ spat in disgust. “So the mutts relieve themselves in our path instead of beside it?”
“They’ll stay behind us,” El-Tee sputtered the moment BJ aired that unpleasant thought, her magic tugging on Max briefly as she clicked her tongue three times in rapid succession—BJ’s taught signal that the pups were to come to the one signaling them (provided they liked that person enough). And they took to it quickly. She’d hardly felt her tongue pull off the roof of her mouth on the third click when Max turned around and promptly walked back to her, joining his sister behind her.
“That also means no exploring on your own,” Mom finished sternly, and extra loudly to make sure she heard it. “Stay close, stay quiet. This is not a game, our lives depend on it.”
With a nervous gulp, she shut herself up and followed in Mom and Kite’s wake, with BJ in front of her and the pups trailing behind her with a simple “Follow” command. The eerie, tense silence of the dead, decaying city around them only further underscored the seriousness of the moment.
The bits of skeletons and pony bones that had yet to erode away in the streets and sidewalks probably helped too.
--------------------------------------
This was the first enemy she couldn’t kill with a bullet to the head, and it was scaring her half to death.
Radiation was often referred to as the Phantom Death, because that’s what it was. It had no taste, no smell. No way to feel it seeping into the flesh and bone, no way to even see it through advanced imaging and vision methods, mechanical or magical. Without a working rad detector, there was no way to know where it was or how much of it one had been exposed to until it was too late. And even with a detector, in the modern age that was the wasteland there was no way to defeat it, dilute it, or move it once it had settled into an area to live out its ridiculous half-life often measured in decades or centuries. If it was there, then it was there and one either bit the bullet (and a Rad-X) and walked through it, or found another way around it.
Her mind continually assaulted her with memories of the First Ones’ journals and memoirs as they crept closer to the river port’s perimeter, marked by the tattered remnants of an old fence. Some of the First Ones had been soldiers, combat medics, or engineers in the Equestrian military, and had enough first-hoof experience with radiation and its dangers to fill in the blanks those dry textbooks and encyclopedias left out. Even a hundred rad count exposure dose was enough to induce nausea and vomiting—higher counts turned one’s bodily functions into uncontrollable rivers of discharge. A rad count of four hundred was lethal half the time—600 and higher was guaranteed death, and it was never pretty. Apart from the combined uncontrolled nausea, vomiting, and the runs, one could expect their mane and tail to fall apart, their coat to lose swaths of hairs, their skin to blister and boil, and even flash burns to appear. In the case of the skin and flesh damage, one could expect great amounts of pain in the process.
In short, it was probably an act of mercy to outright kill an irradiated soul with a rad count in the 600 range. Most victims in the 400 range, in the age of the wasteland, would probably argue that they warranted a mercy kill themselves, and she wouldn’t argue with it. Even a minor exposure of 25 rads was enough to affect the body in noticeable ways.
That they weren’t already laced with enough radiation to kill them inside of two days was a miracle in of itself—the blast crater in Trotpeka’s industrial sector was only four miles from the river port, and this was supposedly the point at which the Union’s dive teams would launch their experiments and suit up for animal retrieval afterward. And with only limited amounts of Rad-Away and no doses of Rad-X to pop in advance, any encounter with radiation would effectively kill their sojourn into the river port. If El-Tee was right about those slavers (and she hoped she wasn’t), that would leave them sitting ducks waiting to be eaten.
She could only recall a couple of other moments in her life when she was this terrified inside—once, five years ago, locked away inside an armory she couldn’t get into while radroaches shrieked and banged on vent coverings and doors. And then again when she was running down a tunnel to a long-deserted stable, with fire-breathing ants close behind. How she wasn’t showing it in her legs, or involuntarily pissing all over herself, she would never know.
Regardless, she kept one eye glued to the upper right corner of her vision, where her E.F.S. would helpfully (or maliciously, depending on one’s view) display whether her immediate environment was laced with life-threatening radiation levels to the point where it would register on a per-minute/second scale. Anything that even registered and couldn’t be bypassed within twenty seconds would end their expedition. She hoped the river port’s buildings would have kept out all the hard stuff in the blast and the decades afterward.
Her tender, almost hesitant steps beyond the fence gave her hope to continue when she failed to hear that scratchy, clicking sound that was the PipBuck’s rad counter going off. Each step she took that didn’t register rads was a small victory….up to and including what looked like the door into the river port’s administration and office building, which they were now drawing close to.
And when her magic slowly twisted the doorknob to test the lock, the knob crunched and clanked open, likely tearing it up in the process, and allowed the door to creak open and invite the whole lot of them into its dim, dank depths, as if openly mocking them with the possibility of death by invisible particles of radioactive matter.
It took all of her willpower to lead them inside, ignoring the faint, taunting images of Kite or herself lying in a pool of…messes….dying…..ever so slowly and horribly….
…oh shit, maybe BJ’s right this time….
“….well, it’s okay so far,” Kite’s voice heaved softly in nervous despair. “Even got some lighting in here. Not much, but…if it has that much, then the Union probably uses it from time to time.”
As her eyes adjusted to the diminished light of the half-dozen overhead lights that still worked, somehow, she found it difficult to believe that anypony would find any use for a place in such rough shape. They were inside the front lobby—not much aside from a reception desk and an open doorway that had once been home to a pair of glass security doors, but which had shattered ages ago. All that was left of their existence was a dented door handle and a few shards of glass. Place looked like nobody had bothered to repaint it or repair it in two centuries, the ceiling was falling apart and leaving big gaping holes in the roof.
In fact, it was so quiet that she didn’t hear another word from any of them until they’d navigated their way through the office building and into the warehouse area proper through a connecting corridor a few minutes later. The warehouse racks, probably once stuffed full of goods and supplies, had been picked clean of anything useful over the decades and now revealed only skeletal-looking towers of dark-green painted steel and rusted-out, rotted lift machines scattered throughout the warehouse floor. Many other racks, however, had succumbed to fatigue and age and fallen apart, creating piles of dangerous debris that now lay between them and the other side of the warehouse. Not even a trace of any wooden pallets remained. The remaining empty racks that still stood stretched for several hundred feet all the way to their right, where she could make out the small shack at the end of the building that she guessed was the warehouse receiving office.
And still, not a hint of radiation lingering about, waiting for a pony to stumble upon it and silently claim their life. No red hash marks angrily dancing about the compass bar of her E.F.S., no alien sounds in the immediate environment that didn’t belong…not that she’d be able to tell what kind of sounds a dead, abandoned warehouse was supposed to have. She wasn’t hearing any skittering or bugs screeching, at least. That was usually a good sign.
Usually.
Still, she took the lead, gingerly hoofing up and over any obstacles that could be climbed over, or shoving it aside in a fit of telekinesis if she didn’t feel like messing with it. With every crash of metal she created, she’d sit still for a few seconds, sweeping her head in a slow scan of the warehouse to see if her noisy antics had aroused any mutant lifeforms from a deep slumber. One would have thought the first coupla of times would be enough, but then, El-Tee had to bang sauce pans against her head to get her to wake up most mornings….
…well, at least the wasteland had that much over her old stable life. It was a miracle she hadn’t developed a bad case of tinnitus from it. As it was, she’d notice now and then, once every few weeks, that she would get this ringing tone in her ears for about ten to fifteen minutes before it gradually faded out. She noticed it enough over the last couple of years that she perfected her hearing protection spell so that she could simply cast it with almost no conscious thought. She’d been working on a duration component that would allow it to last several hours so that she could cast it before bed and not risk having her ears damaged further by those damned sauce pans. She’d also considered just telling the filly to stop that nonsense….but now that she was wandering about the surface surrounded by slavers, thieves, murderers, rapists, and irradiated, mutant insect and animal life capable of tearing ponies apart limb from limb, she’d put that part of her magical research on hold for fear that she might miss the noises these new dangers would make sneaking up on her in her sleep…
So maybe Kite’s method is the preferable one, after all. Bleh.
Naturally, merely bringing the mare into the front of her thoughts seemed to cause the universe to compel her to speak. “….why don’t we break into that office for lunch?” Kite suggested lightly as they drew near the garage-sized office shack shoved into the farthest corner of the warehouse. “You slept through breakfast and the kids haven’t had a bite in a while…”
Her stomach rumbled and rolled silently, tickling her insides and teasing her brain with a faint suggestion of hunger, and with a simple sigh she changed her course, aiming away from the warehouse exit and towards the front office door. Once inside she began pushing several overturned file cabinets aside to give them some legroom to walk in. It turned out that the office was a two-room structure—a divider wall in the middle separated the office space from the second room, with a door and a wide window sill giving her a good view into it. She could see several round tables in this back room, each with a set of four or five chairs, as well as a dust-covered, brown-colored couch that had probably been a much brighter color in a past life. A quick walk-through with her PipBuck found no trace of radiation to speak of, and with a tap of her right forehoof the others filed into the room behind her, with the kids opting to take up space in the rec room for their lunch.
The pups seemed a little conflicted as to where they wanted to be, looking between the mares and the kids several times before Max decided he wanted to stay near the kids, and Mona opted to stay with the adults and sat down underneath an office desk to patiently await her next meal.
Kite’s body plopped down onto the floor, next to a file cabinet, visibly relieved to be off her hooves for even a few minutes. “Oh sweet Luna, these long walks are getting harder every day,” she sighed happily as her legs were stretched out from beneath her body, and then left splayed out in a limp state out to the sides as she remained in an upright position. “How much further are we going today?”
Sling’s magic absently dug into her saddlebags after snapping her travelling saddle off and setting it on the floor, her mind’s eye being bombarded with faint images of the enchanted bags’ contents as she sorted through them until she came upon her stable ration packs and sucked two of them out into the world. A brief glimmer of purple light radiated out from the open bags as the ration packs emerged from within, and one was tossed over into Kite’s waiting spell field. “Depends on what we find on the other side,” Sling answered. “Leon gave me directions to a town to the northwest but it’s about fifteen miles out from the city, and I’m pretty sure you don’t have another fifteen miles in you today.”
“I most definitely do not,” Kite groaned at the mention of the distance to their next stop, setting the ration down onto the overturned file cabinet and tearing one end of the wrapping off to activate the cooking enchantment. “Wasted too much energy getting your lazy ass awake.”
Sling set her ration down next to Kite’s as she laid down on the other side of the file cabinet. Forelegs out in front of her, her hind legs laid out behind her in an awkward-looking position that only the young could find comfortable. Fortunately for her, she’d yet to grow out of that stage of body flexibility. “I’ve never been much of a morning person…”
“No shit,” Kite growled lightly, quickly dumping the contents of the MRE pack onto the cabinet after carefully sliding the still-cooking meal tray out. “I thought Elly was exaggerating her stories, but I’m beginning to wonder if she was actually trying to sugarcoat her struggles with you.”
“I think my mild tinnitus is thanks to her damned sauce pans,” Sling grumbled, her next foray into her saddlebags producing a 2-quart, squared canteen she’d filled with black unsweet tea the morning they’d left Galesville. With the cold chill enchantment on the canteen cover, it would provide a nice, refreshing and safe drink for lunch…and Kite’s eyes always went glossy whenever the stuff was poured out. “Kinda glad she doesn’t have those stupid things to wake with me anymore, even if your method’s worse.”
The second she set the canteen down alongside a pair of tin drinking cups, Kite’s eyes went from tired and half-lidded to wide awake and fully alert. She’d watched her fill this canteen and knew full well what was in it. “….oh dear gods, tea for a road lunch?”
“You look like you need the caffeine,” she replied, popping the spout cap off and filling the cups to roughly half an inch shy of the brim. “Save the flavored drink packet for your water later.”
Caffeine—or any kind of stimulant—was the last thing on Kite’s mind, however. All she wanted was the taste of the tea itself, and the second she had herself a short sip of it from her cup, her mood seemed to brighten as the liquid flowed its way through her. “Buck me, this stuff is always a treat after a lifetime of just water and flat sodas. Stop spoiling me like this or you’ll never get me off your back.”
“Oh, I will once you get to where you’re going,” Sling laughed quietly, though one ear was keenly tuned to the rec room beyond. She could hear the kids bantering back and forth, but quietly, and a soft tear of MRE wrappings muffled enough of one sentence to make it inaudible—
—and reminded her that Mona was still hiding under the desk behind her, waiting for something to eat. She dug back into her saddlebags for a suitable meal, quickly coming up with some strips of dried jerky meat lightly preserved in salt, and tossed them at the pup—
—Mona’s jaws instantly snapped out and clamped onto a jerky strip before it could touch the ground, and the pup quickly began gnawing and consuming her “catch” with a contented whine. The others would be devoured in due time. Little bastards were getting ravenous in their hunger…
With that issue settled, Sling turned her attention back to her own MRE cooking itself before her, sparing a quick glance at the discarded wrappings still as she sucked them up in a spell field—
Ahhh, a decent one, penne pasta with some basil sauce, coupla hot rolls, so—OH godsdamn hashbrown casserole I love that stuff!
Her eyes flicked back up, almost pulling one of the wrappings up for Kite’s perusal….
….and saw Kite’s eyes growing downcast and sullen despite the cup of tea in her magical grasp.
…..oh, crap….
“….you’re beginning to doubt if you want to part ways,” she murmured softly, her attention rapidly shifting away from the coming meal and onto this increasingly conflicted ex-slave. “…aren’t you?”
Kite’s long, sad sigh all but confirmed the stable pony’s fears. “….I…never actually expected to get this far,” she said quietly, her eyes seemingly drawn to the dark amber liquid that filled her cup. “I certainly never expected anypony to risk everything they had to free me. None of the things that have happened these past three months have been…expected. And here I am, several hundred feet from the unofficial border of Union territory with a freedom mark on my neck, in the company of the mare that freed me, drinking this….this rare and delicious unsweet tea that was probably a common drink in Equestria That Was….I’m close to getting everything I want and I’m not sure I want it anymore….”
Sling barely contained the f-word curse that flowed freely through her mind. “….what did you want, before we met?”
“To live to tomorrow,” Kite answered immediately with a soft howl. “Now I’m measuring my life expectancy in weeks instead of days. Might even get to see if my hometown is still intact.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“The Union barely exists beyond the valley,” Kite answered, her magic playing with her MRE pack’s contents and sorting them out—condiments, what looked like a cherry-flavored power mix for a water canteen, and….a small package of six cheese spread cracker sandwiches? A rather rare treat, actually, she’d only snagged one herself these last three months. “Some of their largest trade companies have a few caravans making rounds on the west side, but that’s about it. And the Runners aren’t nearly as large a group as their wandering scouts might suggest. They can’t be everywhere at once, and a lot of the smaller towns aren’t so lucky as to be able to afford to hire up a town guard. My home was one of those towns…hell, the lack of a guard is why I got caught in a slaver raid to begin with.”
Sling’s magic, having barely dumped her own MRE pack out onto her part of the file cabinet, flickered briefly in surprise. This was the first time she could recall Kite ever mentioning anything about her life before slavery. “…how did that happen?”
“Because like the dumb little fourteen old girl I was I went out at night after my parents told me not to,” Kite cried wistfully, her mess kit floating out next to her meal tray as she peeled the film cover off. “I….I was sneaking out to meet up with a colt who lived on the other end of town and….”
Part of her wanted to laugh at the idea of a teenaged Kite actually chasing boys instead of girls….but the fact that her hormones had landed her into such a hard and abusive life killed any humor in it. “….were you the only one they caught?”
“….no,” Kite murmured sadly, poking a fork into her hashbrown casserole for a bite. “They caught nine others when they charged the south end of town. I was the only kid in the group, they were mainly going after young adults. Eighteen to twenty, one stallion was the oldest at twenty-two. I imagine they only took me ‘cause they didn’t have the heart to kill a kid and didn’t want me getting away to warn the town night watch. They still slaughtered quite a few in their raid before the town could organize enough guns together to sting ‘em. We weren’t all that well armed, mostly pistols and some shotguns. One old coot of a griffon who lived on top of a hill near town had a rifle, he would be the one that’d take care of radscorpions that got close, but…other than that, we were hardly a threat to anybody organized. Once the slavers got over the valley they sold us off to the first guilded caravan they met, Silver Plate’s guild. One of the nicer ones, if you can call a slaver nice. Most of the group got sold off over the next year, but Silver Plate won’t sell kids. Wound up getting “sponsored” to a few masters until I was eighteen.”
“….sponsor?”
“It’s….not quite ownership, but not really free either,” Kite replied between bites. She really liked the casserole. “It’s how most of the guilds condition children they catch or buy. They put the kid with a slave owner, and the “sponsor” pretty much does their best to turn them into controllable slaves, if not obedient ones. Initially it was mostly chore work—clean house, clean what dishes they got, clean brahmin pens…icky job, by the way. When I got switched off to a shopkeeper it was “mind the store”, “count this shit I call my wares”, “stock the shelves”. Not a bad life, that one, actually. Third “sponsor”, she was something else. Loved guns and MEWs, was backed by Searchlight’s guild. She kinda hit on me now and then, but for most of my time with her she never really did anything with it. Probably just trying to encourage me to work harder without using a whip or a cattle prod….it….it kinda worked.”
“Kinda?”
“I was just a scared kid taken away from her home and family by violent people, I took any relief I could get. In some ways you kinda remind me of her, actually….well, aside from the subtle flirting, anyway—”
….oh gods, is that where part of her infatuation is coming from? Sling’s brain mused with a slight tinge of horror. “….Kite, I’m starting to think these slavers did more than just….use you. You’re speaking of these “sponsors” with some degree of fondness.”
“….you’re probably right,” the other mare sighed. With most of her casserole now gone, she turned her attention to the hot rolls, taking out roughly a fourth of one in a single mash of her jaws. “Compared to most of the “masters” I wound up with later, they were actually…decent, especially the gun and MEW nut, Boom Boom.”
Even with her brain trying to come to grips with the possibility that part of Kite’s constant passes were partially a result of teenaged conditioning, she found it impossible to avoid laughing at this third “sponsor’s” name. “Oh no, seriously?”
“Everypony called her Boomer ‘cause they were too scared to say her real name,” Kite’s subdued voice laughed back. “The one soul that dared to spit out “Boom Boom” to her face didn’t like what she did to his gun afterward, but he kinda deserved it the way he treated her. She wasn’t that much older than me by the time I wound up with her. I was seventeen, she was….nineteen? Maybe twenty at most? She never really said. She thought I was older than I really was at first ‘till I told her, and then the flirting kinda dialed back a little. Real genius with MEWs, could get them shooting and running with junk parts if she had to, but she really wanted to get them working like fresh factory units.”
Sling had barely registered her food for most of the conversation—only her first bite of hashbrown casserole finally got through to her taste buds, and she relished each taste afterward, inwardly feeling guilty for not even realizing she’d swallowed most of her penne pasta already. “And yet you say you didn’t learn anything on guns until later?”
“She wouldn’t let me near them,” Kite answered. “She’d just gotten accepted into Searchlight’s guild, she didn’t want to screw that up. Most of the time I just handled her influx of clients and customers. A couple thought I was….available, for other purposes, but she actually shot one of them for trying and scared the other one off before he could finish his request. I asked why later, and she said she’d had to do things like that before she was sixteen just to be able to eat, and that she wasn’t going to put me through anything like that.”
“Unless it was her.”
“….that, happened a week after my eighteenth birthday,” Kite said, her ears flattening with embarrassment, though a small smile still managed to flow into her lips. “She took a day off, kept her shop closed…the day before I was shipped off to Stifla for my first slave auction. It was the strangest thing I’d seen a slave sponsor do, we just….stayed at her house all day. No work, no chores, just…lazing around. I’d thought I was free for a moment, but she made sure I knew different, said that I probably wouldn’t get any days like that day again, and that I should just relax and enjoy it while I could. Everything was….nice, and slow, and lazy….until after dinner. I don’t remember how it started, but…well, our day off ended in the bedroom with some…rigorous exercise. The morning after, when I was picked up by the caravan taking me to the auction block, she kept staring at the wagon train the whole time that I could see her. And I swear that I could see her tearing up a little, just before the wagon started rolling. That….that was probably the only time in my entire life as a slave that I’d been treated like a pony…or see anybody involved with it show any sign of regret...”
“….so, am I a….a substitute, for past memories?” Sling’s mouth uttered before her brain realized it had come to that conclusion.
Kite’s face lost its wistful nostalgia, though the lack of any anger in her body language suggested that she wasn’t in the least bit insulted or infuriated by that accusation. “….I guess it would be naïve to think there’s no connection, even a subtle one, but that’s not really it, mostly. I can’t even explain it to myself, I just…you’ve risked a lot for me and BJ, even if you didn’t really want to at first. Something about you changed after Saurus nearly killed you. You….you actually kinda opened up a little when you told me your real name.”
“….you’d just pulled three bullets out of my guts, no painkillers or anything, and put up with my thrashing and screaming and shitting myself in the process,” Sling’s voice croaked sheepishly, the hot roll in her telekinetic grasp suddenly becoming far too small a thing to be hiding behind. “Pumped your blood into me to keep me going afterward. And the first thing you ask me, after making sure everything else was fine, is my name…and it didn’t seem right to hide something that simple and stupid.”
“I wouldn’t say stupid,” Kite snickered lightly. “Got off easier than Boomer did, as names go. As for your….less closed state of mind….I can’t blame you for not wanting to make any friends so soon after losing your home. And the wasteland is unforgiving. It’ll take your friends before you know it’s happened, and shit on you afterward to make sure you know it….”
“Which brings me back to my original question…what do you plan to do now?”
The last of Kite’s hot roll disappeared into her maw, delaying her ponderous answer until she’d swallowed it. “….I honestly don’t know,” she admitted with a heavy breath. “Best course of action would be to just find a town in need of a soul with medical knowledge and set up a business, considering it’s the only skill I have worth trading in. Part of me wants to stay with you, but that all depends on your plans….”
“….north,” Sling answered. “I want to go north, find out what happened to the Equestria Core, why nopony’s come down here in nearly two centuries. And if I remember right, you said the old mountain pass between here and there was a…no mare’s land?”
Kite’s face darkened quickly. “It’s death,” she warned sharply. “Nopony’s ever come out of it. Nopony even knows how many have gone in, because they never come back out. The two settlements closest to it say they can see dust storms on the horizon, big brown clouds that just blot out everything you can see. Some swear they can hear the wind howling even from several miles away. If anypony could have gotten through it they would have a long time ago. Don’t waste your time.”
“There has to be a way through. Ain’t hard to dress up for foul weather and I still got enough rations to last two months, I can find a way—”
“Don’t,” Kite begged once more, a foreleg shooting out to latch onto one of hers in a pleading touch. “Don’t go. I told you, nopony’s ever come out of there. It’s too dangerous for a grown, fit mare, let alone a kid, you can’t drag Elly in there with you.”
She began to answer back, to try to explain her plans for the future a little further, but a flurry of color at the bottom of her vision distracted her from the task—
—and set her on an entirely new one when her eyes spotted a red hash mark on her compass bar, floating about from the far left and slowly finding its way to the center—
—she promptly pulled away from her lunch and lurched up to the office door, pulling her 10mm and her knife from her travelling saddle crumpled up on the floor—
—she could barely hear Kite’s hooves quickly and quietly shuffling across the floor behind her, moving further into the office, ostensibly to warn the kids, but her eyes were practically laser-focused onto the warehouse as she poked her head around the doorway—
—a black-armored unicorn stallion was traversing the length of the warehouse wall, slowly making his way towards the office, but his eyes were focused on the rows of empty steel in the center of the warehouse and had yet to notice her peering out at him. She couldn’t make out his coat color in the faintly lighted interior, though the brown leather gun belt wrapped around his torso wasn’t hard to find. The red hash mark on her E.F.S. moved in conjunction alongside him, and though no other marks were popping up, she wasn’t convinced he was alone.
It looked like El-Tee was right after all.
She quickly zipped back into the office, watching the hash mark and crouching down as low as she could and hoping, vainly, that he wouldn’t want to waste his time searching the office. It wasn’t long before the sound of his hooves began reaching her ears—
—and the smell of her lunch reaching his nose, apparently, as he began to pick up his walking pace almost immediately. “Sonvabitch they got actual food—”
Sling’s brain screamed and cursed at her stomach for its longing for a meal, though for the moment it seemed his eagerness for a quick snack would work in her favor. He didn’t seem to be considering the possibility that they were still there. Hell, she might even be able to ambush him, silently take him out before he could get a shot off—
—he managed the impressive feat of closing the distance to the door while that thought went through her mind, his voice booming out around the doorway as he drew near—
“All right!” he shouted gleefully, right on the other side of the wall she was hiding behind. “Leftovers that don’t look like a pile of ma—”
His body had barely begun passing through the doorway when her body and magic sprang out, her forelegs grabbing hold of him as she tackled him and sent them both back out of the office, her knife tearing its way into his throat and turned his gleeful shout into a gurgling, blood-choking cry of pain and terror—
She didn’t wait for him to bleed out—she just pushed the knife in as far as she could force it as she pulled his body away from the doorway, to the left and hopefully out of El-Tee’s sight, swore she felt a brief resistance as the blade found bone, and then his brief struggling fit to escape her deadly grasp simply ceased and his body went limp from the neck on down. She let him slide off of his knife as he hit the floor, wiping its blade clean on his exposed foreleg and then quickly pulling the gun belt off of his body before she tossed his dying carcass into the corner, where the warehouse wall met the outside wall of the office shack.
She prayed that Light Tail had not seen any of that. She’d seen her mother kill too much as it was.
“It’s clear,” she called out solemnly as she trotted back through the office doorway, returning her knife and pistol to their respective scabbards before she pulled at the pistol in the gun belt—
—came out with a worn, but still serviceable .45 Auto, a light tingle billowing through her horn four times as she tapped her spell field across the inside of the pouch attached to the belt. Scores of scratches and small dings adorned the slide and frame finish, and there was a bit of play in the slide-to-frame fit, but in all honesty she was impressed at the tightness of the fit considering how old the gun was. Small crack in the trigger guard, just ahead of the trigger itself, grips were aged out and looked rather dull….looked like the left side grip panel screws had some rusting on them. One hit of the magazine release sent the seven-round mag flying from the weapon to land in a waiting spell field, though when she began to pull the slide back she found the recoil and mainspring resistance to be rather light. Probably close to the end of their service life, if they weren’t there already. She racked the slide just enough to check the chamber, found a round snugly in place and awaiting its violent destiny with its next target, and slapped it back into battery before replacing the magazine and stuffing the gun back into its holster.
She barely had time to look up into the rec room and toss the gun belt in Kite’s direction when her E.F.S. lit up with more red hash marks in the center. She couldn’t tell if they were in front of her or behind her, but there were more hostiles around her and she was pretty sure they weren’t coming to make sure they got across the bridge okay.
And Kite noticed her eyes flicking down at the bottom of her vision almost immediately. “….more?”
“At least four, possibly six,” she replied, barely registering the weight of her travelling saddle as she strapped back onto her body. “.45 has a full mag plus one in the chamber, I counted at least four more mags in the gun belt pouch. Check the load on the mags and then we need to go. Mona, with me—”
A short, low howl was the only sign of acknowledgement, but nonetheless the filly-sized pup was by her side in less than three seconds….and when she looked back at the desk the mutt had chosen for her temporary shelter, she saw no trace of any of the jerky strips she’d tossed over there.
“Your stomach is like a vacuum cleaner, mutt,” she groaned mostly to herself. She found the pups getting harder and harder to feed to a satisfactory level. She couldn’t really trust the dogs to say when they were full, they’d eat almost anything put in front of them short of military MREs whether they were hungry or not.
…problem for later. Slavers first, then these bottomless stomach pits we call dogs…
Still, she saw no reason not to finish off what was left of her lunch herself, before the pup could slurp it up. She floated her meal tray and cup up to her, quickly swallowing up the remnants of her penne pasta, hashbrowns, and her last hot roll before chasing it down with the tea in roughly three gulps—
“….really?” Kite’s voice admonished her quietly. “Knife a guy to death and then you’re back to eating lunch?”
“It’s either that or leave it behind and waste it,” she replied, tossing the empty tray aside and putting the canteen and drinking cup back in her saddlebags, and then pulling her shotgun out and topping off the magazine tube with three buckshot shells after racking one into the chamber. “…you want yours, or can the mutt have it?”
Kite’s only response was to silently grumble something along the lines of “lazy-ass mare” before diving her head down at her own meal tray, gobbling up what was left as quickly as she could manage and then slurping up the last of her cup of tea before returning the cup to her. “There, it’s gone, can we get the hell out of here now? Kids were done before we were, ravenous little buggers…”
“I heard that,” BJ bit back bitterly as the mares quickly joined their offspring in the rec room, who were patiently awaiting their mothers by the exit door.
“What was that, you wanted a mil-rat for dinner?” Kite hissed back as Sling pushed herself through the door, which led to what appeared to be a wide, open space of concrete loaded with cargo containers on the east side, though most of them had long ago been looted clean. She could see what looked like the actual docks further ahead, roughly half a mile….
….but to their left, a few hundred feet away, was the one safe-looking bridge over the dry riverbed valley they needed to get to—
—and before they could get ten steps in that direction, those red hash marks began moving, and quickly, as black-clad ponies began emerging from behind the cargo containers. Two, then three, then five—
—and the sixth and last pony, bearing pucker-like scars on his legs and with what looked like a cattle prod resting inside a hoof-made scabbard strapped to his withers, baring such a hateful glare at her that she swore he was trying to kill her with looks alone.
“Had you figured right,” the cattle prod stallion growled angrily, stomping forward with a slight limp as his fellow slavers fell in behind him. Most were unicorns sporting 10mm subguns, though there was one earth pony stallion with a rifle in his battle saddle. “Walked right on out here instead of waiting for the main bridge to open up. You were safer in town, whore.”
A surge of anger shot through her blood as she turned her body towards him, the shotgun pointed low towards the ground. “Colada’s the one that shot your legs up, not me,” she yelled back across the asphalt as his group closed in. Still too far for the shotgun, roughly forty yards, but they were trotting quickly. Maybe in another six seconds… “Take your problems up with her.”
“You brought those runaways with you,” he shouted back, his voice rising with every word. “You talked the major into letting you out so you could get to Julaya and get her help in buying them out—”
Sling’s gut grew slightly colder. He wasn’t far from the truth, but the way he was talking he seemed to think that had been her plan the whole time….
“You made a mockery out of me with that shit you pulled!!” he continued his furious tirade. Thirty yards away, and closing fast. Two more seconds. “You are the reason any of that even happened at all!! Give me one very good reason why I shouldn’t cut your guts out in front of your kid and throw the whole lot of you into that valley with the ghouls!!”
The coldness stopped, and vanished, replaced by a red-hot core that quickly engulfed her nerves and settled its furious justice upon this short-tempered stallion and his five unfortunate friends.
Nopony that had threatened her child had lived to carry it out, and she wasn’t about to let that streak be broken now.
“I won’t bother,” a darkness within her promised. “You won’t live that long.”
--------------------------------------
You dumbass sonvabitch, Kite screamed inside the moment that damnable stallion and his cattle prod leveled his angry words at them instead of Sling Shot. He’d gone to all this trouble setting them up for an ambush—an ambush that Elly had seen coming half an hour ago! —because his pride and precious ego had been crushed by one very short-tempered Union major, and he blamed Sling for it?!
She might have let his stupidity and short-sighted temper be had he not gone and threatened Elly’s life after promising a gruesome death to Sling. Of all the things that had been said to that mare’s face, the one thing that seemed to set her off so fast and hard was to threaten Light Tail with rape, torture, or death (or some hideous combination of the three). She could sense the mood change in her the moment the stallion’s threats left his mouth, see her body stiffen with barely suppressed rage at the monster that dared set his sick gaze upon her filly. She swore she could even taste it coming off of her in sharp, heated pulses.
She had never seen these violent mood swings until today (though Elly unfortunately had borne witness to it personally a number of times). Sling had only told her about them, and only after a long night of prodding the stable pony over the dried blood that had marked the light injuries she’d sustained killing Saurus…after a long night of crying and laughing in the most exquisite joy she had ever felt ever since she’d left Boomer’s sponsorship. She did not explain when or why these…these mood changes had started, but Kite suspected that it had a great deal to do with being derided as her stable’s outcast and downtrodden “slut”. And now as she looked upon this mare, saw what looked to be half a life’s worth of resentment, anger, and hatred boiling up to the surface with a threat to the most precious thing in her life, she began to wonder if Sling had already been damaged before she’d ever stepped out of her stable and into the hells of the wastes.
She knew of only one safe place to be to wait out the coming storm of violence, given the complete lack of cover out here. Back in the warehouse, just behind them, through the door they’d just walked out of.
So that’s what she did. She scooped up the kids and dogs, and galloped hard right back inside, out of Sling’s way, so that the stable mare could cut loose on these stupid bastards without worrying about whether anyone important to her would be harmed in the process—
No, scratch that, the slavers weren’t completely stupid. The moment she took the kids and animals with her and began scurrying back inside, somepony started firing, a rapid rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of an automatic weapon chasing her all the way through the doorway—
—her ears were quickly overwhelmed by a muffling of the world, as if a set of giant invisible earplugs had just been shoved in, but even then she could make out this strange sound of what sounded like the very audio spectrum itself being warped and bent—
“What the fu—” was about the only thing any of the slavers outside could say before that very sound erupted into a louder, warped WHOOMP!, and what sounded like….
….a wet…crunch….
And that was when the screaming and the shooting started. Mostly automatics, and more than a few rounds tore their way through the wall and encouraged Kite to put as many desks and file cabinets between her and the kids and the fight as she could manage. But amidst the automatics, Sling’s shotgun was very clearly audible in the singular, overwhelming booms that rang out periodically, alongside the lighter, sharper barks of a 10mm and the distinctive pops of her 5.56mm revolver. And amongst all the sounds….
…the sound of…well, sound, being bent, warped, and shifted in tune with whatever spell or weapon was causing it was unmistakable, and unrelenting. As were the screams.
And it seemed that they were all coming from the slavers. Particularly one scream, that turned into a painful wail as the fight raged on an—
—something slammed into the wall, hard, because it cracked the inside of the wall on impact, and suddenly there was one less screaming voice in the world—
—the door banged open again as she shoved Elly and BJ beneath her, to use herself as a shield, and when she poked her head and .45 up over her crude barricade, she spotted one of the unicorn slavers, light tan coat and yellow mane, partially bathed in blood, his SMG floating about in a frantic pattern as he sought to whack a shell casing out of its ejection port, an—
….and peeing himself all over the floor as he frantically tried to escape the battle outside, and found himself facing down the barrel of a .45 Auto leveled at his head—
“O-o-oh fu—”
Kite, for her part, didn’t hesitate. The moment the crude sights settled on his face and she had a solid focus on the front sight over his head she squeezed the trigger straight back once, and then again almost immediately afterward, just like Sling had taught her so many weeks ago, felt the familiar, harsh thump of the pistol bucking inside her spell field as the bullets tore through his head between his eyes, cutting his shriek off and ending every care he had left in the world. His still-urinating corpse rolled backward, as he’d been trying to backpedal away from her and had actually reared up on his hind legs when she’d fired, then collapsed to the ground and knocked a table over onto its side in the process, and through the open doorway, Kite spotted something bathed in….glowing purplish-blue light, that looked like a pony-shaped object streaking through the air for a brief moment in tune with the explosion of another warped soundwave….or whatever the hell was causing that noise….
…because whatever it was, had the slavers terrified, when only moments before they’d been screaming orders and warnings at each other….and now there seemed to be only two le—
Sling’s shotgun blared again, probably for the….sixth? Seven time? She’d lost count already, but in any case, it signified the end of a slaver’s scream, and their life. Their immediate environment was now down to one terrified, sorry excuse of a pony lifeform….
….and strangely, no further gunfire. As quickly as the fight had started, it had come to a deafening, depilating halt. Maybe….
….ten seconds? Eleven?
Even the kids were at a loss as to what had just happened. One second they were staring at a wall of armor-clad ponies ready to murder them, the next they were being dragged back inside and shoved beneath a terrified mare, and then it was just over? Just like that?
“…h-holy shit,” BJ’s shaky, stunned voice mumbled as he crawled his way out from beneath his mother’s barrel. “Wh…what just happened….”
“I don’t wanna know,” Elly wailed softly, stumbling out back onto her own four legs herself. “I just wanna get out of here….”
“…try not to look at anything too much,” Kite warned the filly as she stood up and began trotting back through the door for a third time, gingerly hopping over the trail and puddle of piss the poor soul she’d shot had left behind. “And watch your step.”
“Jeebus Christine that guy made a mess of himself—” BJ’s voice complained bitterly behind her as she slipped through the door—
—she made it about three or four strides before she came to a halt, her mind stunned at the sight she saw up ahead. Sling Shot stood, barely, on four badly shaking legs, her chest heaving in deep, heavy breaths as though she’d just run for ten minutes straight, her weapons clattering onto the ground as her magic flickered out of existence, along with what looked like a pistol belt she’d been trying to lift off one of her kills….
….splotches of blood, covering her right foreleg, and likely part of her body and face as well. Before her were the remains of three slavers—one was missing a left foreleg and had a bloody, unrecognizable face. The second, further away from her, looked like he’d been drilled in the head and neck multiple times, and smaller bloody dots covered his forelegs.
The third….
….the third, looked like that cattle prod stallion.
Looked like him, anyway. She was going by the size of the corpse rather than his face (seeing as how there wasn’t much left of it), and it looked like his body had literally been ripped apart by whatever he’d been hit with. It also looked like whatever he’d been hit with had pushed him across the asphalt directly into the side of a cargo container, shearing off one of his hind legs in the process and leaving a blood trail that marked his path of involuntary travel. The other hind leg looked like it had been blown off by an explosive device, though she didn’t even hear one going off in the fight and couldn’t explain how the injury could have occurred otherwise. His forelegs looked…well, they weren’t really there anymore, but there was a lot of blood spread across the cargo container, and his head was literally bathed in blood, even down to his widened, dead crimson-coated eyes …..
…behind her, she saw, was the body of a fourth slaver crumpled up against the outside warehouse wall, apparently flung into the building with such force that it shattered his spine and neck, and which was responsible for the new crack on the wall inside. Probably killed him instantly, the way the blood was seeping out of his nose, ears, and….
…hell with it, he was dead. No need to learn how. With the one she’d shot in the office herself, that was five….that left on—
“Mom, left!” BJ’s voice cried out sharply—
—she spun herself and her new .45 about in the colt’s desired direction, spotted a sixth, groaning, panicked slaver, a unicorn mare with a bloodied face and tendrils of purplish blue energy peeling off of her body as she struggled to bring herself upright enough to settle the sights of her SMG on either Sling or herself—
—the .45’s sights swung over the mare’s head before she felt her magic push the trigger back, once, and then again, and then a third time, in roughly a second and a half—
—when she saw the body topple over after the fourth shot, she stopped firing and lowered the pistol….
…no more wounded slaver mare. Just a dead one, now.
Just in time for Sling to start puking her lunch back out. After a fight. Again.
Kite felt her stomach flip about at the sound as she flicked the safety on and darted towards her, her medical eye already pouring over Sling’s body for wounds or signs of internal injury as her magic pulled her away from her mess—
“Can you ever keep your food down when you kill people?” Kite tried to jest, to put the exhausted mare’s mind at ease over what had just happened—
“N-not…not the fight,” Sling gasped, spitting out the taste of her own bile at a feverish pitch as her forelegs tried to reach around her for something. “Not the fight….to….too mu….too much magic, too quick…grrrk oh fu—”
Sling’s body lurched forward, ejecting another portion of previously-devoured meals, and Kite had to smile viciously to keep her own gag reflex in check…or so the old mare’s tale went, anyway. “…at least tell me your bowels still feel fine.”
Sling’s body shook violently as her second wave of intense nausea and exhaustion washed through her, and she stumbled about trying to get away from…that stuff, on the ground. “….for the moment…”
“BJ, try and find some healing potions off the slavers, quick,” she barked loudly. Of the two souls left capable of the task, BJ was the one least likely to be disturbed by the aftermath of Sling’s violence, and the colt gladly removed himself from the vomiting mare to carry out his assigned task. Elly, though….
“….Elly, help your mother with some water, she can’t seem to use her magic just yet—”
She needn’t have bothered with the instructions—she’d barely spoken when she saw a flash of electric blue light surround one of Sling’s water canteens, and she was splashing her mother’s mouth with short streaks of water to wash out her mouth and tongue. “M-momma?” the filly cried, tears welling up in her eyes. “Momma, wh…what’s wro—”
“T-too much magic,” Sling’s voice slurred back, partially gurgled by a mouthful of water which she spat out. “Too much….”
“….so that was magic we heard just now?” Kite’s mouth uttered with a baited breath. “….that…that sound, like the sound barrier being warped like sheet metal?”
“….com-combat spell,” Sling choked in reply. “Mana burst….ju…just…too much. Was surrounded….pissed off…no cover….had to go overboard…..mana flowback, I can’t use my magic…”
Shit! Kite hissed silently. An internal physical injury she could deal with….but matters of magic like this were beyond her…and most other souls in the wastes, for that matter. “….that you know what that is tells me it’s happened to you before.”
“….did it once,” the stable mare’s voice bubbled. “Long time ago….told myself not to do it again, haaaa haaaa haaaooo fat lotta good that promise was….”
“Does it hurt you? Internal bleeding, concussion, anything?”
“…one healing potion….would be nice—”
“One it is!” BJ cut in, his tiny body crashing to a halt into her body and shoving one into her open muzzle, which she took without complaint. Drained the thing in like, four seconds. She seemed to like the strawberry and cherry-flavored potions….
As the potion’s magic began to work its way through Sling’s system, Kite took another hard look around them, specifically at the bodies of Sling’s work…well, most of it, she’d killed two herself. She was hoping some of them would have something like a caps purse, or a weapon that Sling hadn’t busted up or shot, but given what she’d just done caps could have been scattered all over the place like the body parts she’d blown off with gunfire or magic…
….no, no need to loot bodies this time. Just leave.
And through the whole mess, the moment Kite had found and reached Sling, the pups had popped up right beside her, whining and whimpering at the state one of their favorite ponies had just gone into, and refused to move away from her even when Kite tried to push them away. It was both endearingly cute and agonizingly aggravating how attached they could get to any of them when they were hurt or sick.
All of that aggravation vanished, flushed out of her system like a shot of Fixer directly into her bloodstream when she heard a sharp pop! in the background, followed the sound as it turned into a fizzling burn—
—a bright red, hot ball of smoking flame streaked up into the sky from the streets, its glow bathing the immediate area around it and filling her with a sharp, horrific dread.
“….oh shit,” she howled in terror, slightly trembling at what the red flare foretold.
Elly’s eyes, also following the flare, somehow knew that it did not signify good intentions. “….what’s that mean?”
“….it’s a warning,” Kite cried, her heart beating faster with every second. “These guys…they weren’t working alone. Others must be nearby….they were probably waiting for a signal flare from this group when the shooting stopped. The red flare means they suspect trouble and want other groups to get over here and see what happened. They’ll be here any minute—”
“…..and with Sling basically an earth pony now we’re easy targets,” BJ finished unnecessarily. “…oh shit, we’re fu—”
“O-over the bridge,” Sling spat out, though she struggled to get to her hooves even after swallowing the healing potion she’d requested so badly. “G-get over, break it, or…or something….”
“One thing at a time,” Kite cut her off, her magic latching onto Sling’s guns on the ground and quickly floating them over and back into their holsters, along with the pistol belt she’d been trying to loot. Didn’t look like she’d even bothered to reload her 10mm after emptying it, slide was still locked back…. “First we get over, then we worry about not being followed. Can you walk?”
“…not well,” was the painful reply she didn’t want to hear, as she watched the stable pony force herself up on four unstable legs…and then again when her first attempt failed in a crumpling of limbs. “F-f-fu…th-this is worse than last time…..”
She found herself ducking down and rolling her body into Sling’s underside without hesitation, waiting until a pair of forelegs found a solid grasp around her before standing upright again. “Walk as I walk. Try to support some of your weight, you lazy mule.”
“Shut up,” Sling groaned in pain. “Or…or I’ll turn your mane green….and not in the magical way…”
“Cute—”
Another flare roared into the gray skies, turning their banter into a silent plea to some higher power that they would get through the next ten minutes alive. It was slower going than she’d have liked, but she couldn’t think of another way to get Sling across, not with the slavers coming down on them….
….and it got even slower when they reached the foot of the bridge after roughly two minutes, peered down over the edge of the old river peer, and suffered a brief spike of pain in their ears at the horrified shriek that left Elly’s mouth.
One glance over the edge made her forgive the filly’s panic attack.
Amidst the debris and wreckage of boats, sky wagons, and some strange four-wheeled contraptions that looked like they were operated by earth ponies, the slow, shuffling movement of the walking dead abominations that the wasteland came to call “ghouls” sent her heart racing with every slurry of movement she spotted. Five…no, seven…ten….fifteen….
….and as the numbers grew, so did their awareness of potential meals scurrying above them on a decaying bridge. They were….hideous, to look at. Their coats devoid of much of their color, with patches of hair exposing the dried, wrinkled skin beneath….their faces lacking any hint of sanity or personality, only the hungry, cold look of a heartless monster. Those that still had manes had little of them left, and all of them were sporting wounds and torn-open flesh that would have spelled death for a living, normal pony—several were missing eyes, others were missing part of a leg and stumbling on three hooves and a worn, bloody stump, some only had half a jaw, a couple were somehow still moving despite gaping holes in their torsos where their innards would have been….
She couldn’t blame Elly for stepping away from the bridge, suddenly unwilling to press forward despite it being the only direction they could go now.
“O-o-oh L-Luna….n-not that way—”
BJ was not having any of that, though for once he bit back any frustration he might have felt at her sudden change of heart and settled for simply pushing her back into formation with a push of his head. “Just walk forward,” he said with a slight grunt. “Don’t look down, keep your eyes forward. We can’t go back the way we came.”
A third flare whistled into the skies behind them, as if secretly encouraging them to step forward and take their chances dangling over the horde of the damned slowly filling the riverbed beneath them. She was counting over thirty now, and she could spot more of them slowly rising from their restless slumber up and down the riverbed as the deathly moans of their fellow ghouls began to reach them.
“Don’t look down, keep your eyes forward” worked for roughly a minute, at best.
It started with a scream of “Holy shit!!” from behind, no doubt let loose by a soul emerging from the warehouse and into the bloody aftermath of Sling’s rage. She looked back, not intending to shoot, but to see just how many slavers were pouring out of the door—
A break, please, she pleaded to the uncaring, bored gods above as close to a dozen black-armored slavers oozed out onto the pavement of the pier, some of them already taking notice of the two mares and the kids trying to stumble away from the grisly scene. One break today, that’s all I ask…
The uncaring, bored gods, apparently hearing her plea, decided to amuse themselves by answering it in the most literal way possible.
Two of the slavers were apparently armed with rifle-type MEWs, as lances of reddish-pink energy began lashing out at them from the weapons mounted on their battle saddles the moment they turned their bodies towards the bridge. Some of the shots sailed wide overhead….
….but some fell a bit short of their intended target, instead slicing through the aged, fatigued metal bridge as though it were made of paper—
—a sharp snap! and a screech of tortured metal accompanied one laser as it cut into one of the support beams beneath them—
“…shit, kids run—”
The pups immediately took off like little black and white bolts of lightning, with Elly hurriedly chasing after them—
—the bridge behind her cracked and broke apart amidst another flurry of shots, and as she felt her senses titling backward she had just enough time and forethought to toss Sling’s body off of her and onto the grated metal in front of her before a final, ear-splitting crunch of metal signified the collapse of the bridge’s center—
—BJ’s teeth latched onto the end of her tail, sending a sharp hot spike of pain through her spine that reached the back of her brain and caused her to scream briefly, her forelegs struggling to find purchase on her half of the now-broken bridge as the end began to dip dangerously low towards the ground—
—they slipped on an outstretched metal stem, and her heart hung freely inside her ribcage in a brief moment of terror, before Sling’s forelegs lashed out and hooked themselves around her leg joints to try and hoist her up, stopping her fall before it could start—
—but when Kite looked up at the stable pony’s face, she knew that her efforts would not be enough. She had regained enough control of her magic in the last two minutes to at least handle the heft and recoil of a weapon, as a 9mm pistol was hovering out in front of her and popping off slow, aimed shots, but even then she could see the indigo glow of her magic flickering in random spazzes, as if she were rapidly draining herself of even that much control trying to shoot back at the slavers. And Sling looked to be keeping herself anchored to the bridge by hooking her hind legs around a guard rail—she’d tear her leg up if she had to hold onto it for much longer.
And through it all, she could hear the unending, deathly cries of the ghouls below, rising up from the depths of the pre-war wreckage and eagerly awaiting the arrival of fresh meat—
—another shot from Sling’s pilfered 9mm rang out, and she swore she could hear one of the slavers crying out in shock, something to the effect of ‘holy shit she can still hit us from that far off with a pistol’—
“C-climb up,” Sling gasped, the strain of her efforts beginning to manifest in beads of sweat rolling down her face. “…hurry….climb u-up….”
BJ’s weight, hanging off of her tail, began to shift slightly and carefully, his forelegs scratching up past her hindquarters to try and find a good hold from which to begin his ascent—
—another shot from a laser rifle, impossibly loud as though to signify what it had done, suddenly killed the weight pulling on her tail, and even as she threw her gaze downward she knew in her heart what had just been done.
The shot had cut her tail in half, missing her son entirely but still sending him plummeting earthward towards the riverbed….and the horde of ghouls gathering amongst the wreckage several dozen feet away from his landing. And the look of shocked surprise and terror that flashed into his eyes…..
…the look of a soul that had suddenly realized their time in the world was much shorter than they’d thought….his eyes stayed locked on her for the entire drop down to th—
—he impacted with the topside of what looked like a shipping container roughly a second and a half after her tail had been shot in half, mercifully turning his fall into a serious of bumps and collisions with other assorted junk piles until he hit the riverbed, where he began to struggle to his hooves and limp away towards the closest cover he could find—an upside-down city bus roughly the length of two wagons, having likely wound up in the river in the chaos of the Last Day and coming to a rest where it now lay after the pegasi of Serenity had sucked the river dry of all of its water.
A quick flurry of 9mm bullets—three, maybe four, she couldn’t tell for sure—answered the slaver’s laser shot that had sent BJ into the valley of the walking dead, one of the spent casings tapping Kite in the back of the head on its way down and stinging her with a flash of heat—
—the bridge screeched again, apparently not done with its slow, agonizing death, and as Kite’s eyes jerked back up, a jammed 9mm pistol zipped down past her, no longer held in the spell field of an exhausted unicorn mare—
—the aura around Sling’s horn began to flicker violently, struggling to stay in a solid, opaque state for more than a half-second, as she was apparently trying to conjure up the strength to pull her up with telekinesis and failing miserably—
“….Kite…climb up,” Sling gasped, her breath beginning to grow short and heated in her efforts on top of the extreme violence she’d doled out roughly three and a half minutes ago. “…can’t pull you up…hurry…”
The bridge screeched again, slowly, as if taunting them both with the threat of a grisly deathly at the teeth and hooves of hungry ghouls….
…drops of salty water began pelting Kite’s face….and she didn’t think it was sweat…
She couldn’t fathom why, or how, but suddenly it seemed as though time itself was slowing to an infantile crawl. Laser shots broke up the gray skies above, with one or two coming close to hitting Sling’s body, yet the stable pony refused to simply let go and save herself. She was seemingly desperate to try and save both of them…
….and Kite knew in her heart that she couldn’t. And Elly could not be allowed to move on into the wastes alone.
“Please,” Sling gasped again, though her voice choked on tears and pain. “….climb up….not again, can’t l-let this happen again….j-just climb up, please…”
The hungry, eager howls of the ghouls below only made her last words to her even harder.
“….thank you, for trying,” Kite’s voice sobbed, her eyes beginning to swell with salted tears themselves. “….I’m sorry….”
There was a brief moment of recognition in Sling’s eyes, of what was coming, but before she could do anything to try and stop it….
…..Kite pulled her forelegs out, breaking herself free of the stable pony’s grasp, and followed her son all the way down into the riverbed.
She swore the poor stable mare’s horrified scream could have been heard all over the city—
—her body slammed into the same cargo container her son had hit, filling her left shoulder with a sharp ache as she bounced off, rolled over the edge and further down into what looked like the withered husk of a boat hull, and then after that she slid over the side and down onto a….
….onto something. She didn’t care to really eyeball it, and simply hit and finished her descent into the ground, though at a brief glance it looked like one of those “cars”. Everything she’d ever hoped for, had come so close to, was about to die with her….
….but if they lived through this….
….she could at least go out knowing that.
She barely caught the sight of her son’s tail disappearing into that overturned bus, and as she rose to her hooves, her battered, bruised body begging her to stop moving and simply let these ghouls win, she began to poke about her body for the .45 on her gun belt—
—found the pistol on the ground in front of her, and the gun belt itself gone, along with her saddlebags, likely having been torn off somewhere in her fall—
—with a sobbing cry, she scooped the pistol up off the ground and hobbled towards the bus, the cries of the dead becoming a roar as the first of them sighted their prey—
—a long, anticipatory groan drilled into her ears from her left, and a quick glance had her staring at a lone unicorn ghoul, far ahead of its pack, its gender no longer discernable, shuffling towards her quickly with its mouth hung open—
—her .45 plugged it with one slug to the brain, ending the poor thing’s eternal suffering and allowing her to finish her journey to the bus, where she quickly clambered inside and began scooting herself along the ceiling towards the front, where she spotted BJ stuffing himself behind a row of seats that had fallen free from the floorboard above. She didn’t bother to look out the shattered windows.
She knew what was coming.
She found her son shivering and trembling beneath the seat, crammed into the corner as far as he could squeeze himself—
“…Blue Jay, I’m here,” she cried, the cruel irony of Elly’s last gift to them causing a surge of tears to pour out as she laid herself out and hugged him with her right foreleg. “I’m here….”
He didn’t bother to pull himself from her foreleg, but just hugged it back and dried his eyes across it. “….d-did they make it over….”
She briefly considered the truth, that she only knew for sure that one of them did….
“….they made it,” she croaked instead. Which was probably true—without the weight of another mare and a colt on her, Sling could probably pull herself to safety even in her exhausted state, as long as she’d held on to try and save them both….
….tried, and failed…and would now have to hear the horrible sounds to come….
….until the weight of the .45 in her spell field floated up between them, hovering to a stop before BJ’s face, as the wails of the damned began to grow louder and closer, banging their way into the bus….
His hollow, haunted words tore her apart. “….will it hurt?”
Will it hurt, Kite cried to herself, as the muzzle of the pistol brushed against her son’s mane, pushed past it and made brief contact with his skull. Will it hurt when my own mother kills me so I don’t die being ripped apart by ponies that should have died a long time ago….
“….no,” she tried to say. Though what she was certain came out instead was a blurb, bubbling shriek as she pressed the grip safety in and pulled the trigger—
CLICK!
He flinched at the sound, but almost immediately knew what it meant.
….and it scared him into a speechless, stunned state.
Her, too.
She cocked the hammer in a furious fit, tried it again—
…same result. Click, not boom.
She latched onto the slide, ripped it back to chamber the next round as the dud flew out and bounced off of the overturned seat—
—and the slide refused to go back into battery. Locked open, despite three desperate tugs to get it to slam back in place….
…and a tilt of the pistol revealed an empty magazine when she peered down through the ejection port.
The empty pistol fell out of her magic, the heavy thud of its impact echoing deeply into her ears as she looked out at the back end of the bus—
—for once in her life, she suddenly felt the urge to let herself go and dump the contents of her bladder and intestines out of her body as several mutilated, hungry ghouls squeezed through the broken windows and began crawling towards her. In a sudden fit of desperation she latched onto the seat that BJ had hidden himself behind and—
—and seemingly crushed it inward, turning it into a crude shell around her offspring and hoping it would be enough to save him—
--------------------------------------
She could not process it.
Her mind had been sprung from its exhausted, tired haze, desperate to try and save at least one of them, if at all possible. Had been desperate to burn her magic out to pull the mare up with her, failing, and begging her to climb up so that they could search for a way down to the riverbed and tear it apart to get BJ out…
….and then was stunned into a horrified, heartbroken scream when Kite just….
….let go.
She let go.
She just….let go….
“….thank you, for trying.”
She couldn’t process it.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to save them.
She wanted to save somepony important to her besides herself and Light Tail for once in her godsdamned life. Once.
Hoofprint died when she could have saved him. Hacket Wrench was dead because she couldn’t open the sun-damned door to the generator level of her dead stable and got caught up fighting with Cloud Wind….Ballast probably could have been saved from his grievous injury if she hadn’t gotten distracted helping Flashlight save his stupid own stupid ass and then letting Light Tail play with his shell-shocked brain….
….Cloud Wind was gone…..because she didn’t go back for her…..
….and now Kite…..
….and now Kite had just….LET GO.
She let go and there was no way she could get down there fast enough to save anybody, not with the slavers still shooting at her from the other side of the broken bridge….
….she thought she’d finished screaming as she finally pulled herself back up onto somewhat stable, level bridging, crawling onward until she could stand upright and stumble away from the fusillade of fire seemingly chasing her away towards the west half of the prairie….
….the west half that Kite was supposed to be going home to….
A shot from below went almost unnoticed—she glanced down only long enough to confirm, sullenly, that Kite had only shot one of those…things, in her mad dash to find her son and spend her last moments with him…..
….and she prayed she had enough ammo left to spare them the grisly death they were about to suffer….
She tripped over herself as she stumbled off the bridge, onto the other side of the pier, felt her heart and soul breaking at the sight of Light Tail’s face locked onto the space where Kite and BJ had fallen to the ground….
“….we gotta go back,” the filly cried, tears flowing down her face. “….we gotta go back….”
Max and Mona, ever attuned to the emotions of their pony masters, seemed almost as conflicted as she was. She wanted to go back herself, she wanted to tear everything down apart with her bare hooves….
…and she barely had the strength to fire a 9mm, much less escape….
…and when she finally realized that she somehow, even amongst that chaos, still managed to find herself with Kite’s saddlebags, floating beside her in a dying field of magic, she realized that she had just robbed her friend of her only chance for a peaceful death….
With a sobbing cry she’d not known herself capable of making, she hurriedly and clumsily scooped her daughter up onto her back with a roll of her head, struggled to her hooves and began to hobble and stumble away from the slavers and their mad efforts to murder her—
—even in her shocked, deathly still state, Light Tail still had the heart and the will to try the impossible. “N-no, mommy go back, we gotta go back—”
She’d not gotten more than ten tired, clumsy steps forward when the horrors she’d hoped to spare her daughter from began to ring out from the riverbed….
….Kite’s terrified, crying screams as those….things, those evil things, began to tear her apart…..
And every step she took only seemed to make it harder to leave.
“….oh my god go back!!” El-Tee shrieked, her tears and cries deafening her mother to tears herself. “Momma go back!!!”
She went forward instead, barely making it around the corner of another warehouse and into the alley it shared with another building, breaking both of their hearts with her refusal to stumble in any other direction.
It was impossible to tell whose screams would haunt her more. Kite’s, or Light Tail’s…..
“GO BACK!!! MOMMA GO BACK GO BACK—”
—Kite’s screams, at that moment, seemed to grow even louder…and more horrific….she didn’t want to imagine why….
She was crying, loudly and endlessly, the whole way out, Kite’s deathly cries chasing her the entire time and Light Tail’s heartbroken, sorrowful begging making every step all that much harder.
“—GO BACK!!! GO BACK MOMMY PLEASE GO BACK THEY’RE KILLING HER GO BACK!!!”
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Wow I... Wow i didn't see that coming.
Dang.
No good deed goes unpunished, huh?
But on the bright side, BJ finally got his own chance to narrate the chapter! And overall, there was a lot more room for his characterization. The confirmation on Saurus was also welcome, if only to provide real closure for the main characters on the previous arc.
I have both fear and excitement for the next chapter!