Chapter 4
Starlight Glimmer shivered and her breath fogged. The air temperature had dropped at least fifty degrees in the last few minutes.
Something crunched behind her.
She turned and grimaced, eyes widening, tears welling, and took a half-step backward.
Three ponies were approaching her. Two unicorns and one pegasus.
They stank of putrefaction and corruption.
Their breath did not steam in the frigid night.
Their irises glowed, each lit by a distinct inner eldritch fire.
Their fangs dripped ichor.
Fangs?
Ichor?
Their manes and tails were gone, shed long ago in their coffins.
She recognized the pegasus as being the same color—dark orange—as old Mr. Plant Pots, the greenhouse keeper.
Mr. Pots had died of a coronary last year, mom straddling his belly, performing desperate chest compressions, his elderly ribs cracking like dry branches; Starlight, dragged out of bed at three in the morning on a school night, standing to the side of the gurney in mom’s clinic, performing muzzle-to-muzzle resuscitation in concert with mom’s cardiac massage.
Mr. Pots was dead. Starlight had given his dead lips muzzle-to-muzzle resuscitation with her own lips and felt how cold and dead they were.
And yet he was staring at her, unblinking, panting through his fanged maw.
“Oh, Celestia, what did I do?”
Yelling, she said, “Mr. Pots, it’s me, Starlight! You... you liked me! You gave me a rosemary plant for my birthday when I was learning to cook!”
Mr. Pots, once a next-door neighbor, had always been a close family friend, and he knew all about mom’s miscarriages. Mom always took Starlight’s birthday seriously, a true celebration of life, and Mr. Pots had always given Starlight thoughtful gifts to help mom celebrate. Mom also always celebrated the anniversary of the day eight-month-old infant Starlight left neonatal intensive care and came home, and Mr. Pots had always given Starlight a tiny gift on those days, too.
Mr. Pots ran his tongue over his pointy fangs, and the unicorn next to him hissed in a snake-like fashion. The second unicorn bowed down and looked up at her, panting hard. It gurgled things that weren’t words.
Starlight took another step backwards and then—Crack!—teleported to the top of the town wall, to look down on the graveyard. She missed her mark by six inches, overbalanced, forehooves off the edge, and grabbed herself with levitation to avoid an impaling twenty-foot fall onto the pointed finials of the wrought-iron fence. She shook her head as it swam, dizzy from the vodka and two missing pints of blood.
Grandma Firestar heaved herself out of the ground, shook herself, and her back left leg fell off at the flank with a black flash of magic, the shiny glint of her artificial hip’s metal ball-joint bright in the moonlight. Grandma’s horn glowed, and she levitated up her torso to balance the missing leg. Only two or three strands of gray hair remained in her mane.
Starlight cocked her head and flipped her tail, thinking, planning, scheming.
Usually Starlight just went with her gut. Impulsive action without conscious thought usually gives us peak Starlight. This time, however, her gut had nothing but butterflies and acid and some vodka.
The book cackled again. That’s not Mr. Pots, and that’s not grandma! Once a pony’s gone to the other side, they’re there forever. All you’ve done is open up a doorway for hell-beasts to grab onto their abandoned mortal vessels.
Starlight screamed at the book, “You... you... I’ll get back to you!”
Remember when I took you into todash, between dimensions? These are the same demons of primordial chaos. You’re the one who let them loose into the material world, don’t be mad at me. I’m just a key, you turned the lock. Who’s to blame, really?
Starlight stomped and yelled, “Grandma! You get back in that grave right now, missy!”
The creatures all looked up at her and hissed. There were more than a dozen of them.
Mr. Pots flapped toward her, but hunks of rotten meat and ragged feathers fell off his wing bones, and he face-planted into the grass of the graveyard.
Zombie-Mr.-Pots looked up at her and snarled, shuffling his skeletonized wings angrily.
The creatures began to wander, randomly, but they kept looking up at her and licking their fangs.
She took a step back from the edge, and she felt a hoof slide off the far edge of town wall. She drew the hoof back and stood still.
Black magic swirled around her. She felt it, like fog condensing on her coat. Less than two dozen unicorns alive, of all of Equestria’s tens of millions, could have felt that magical field—but this is Starlight we’re talking about. She had more magic in her left hoof than five thousand regular unicorns had in their entire bodies.
The magic swirled in eddies between her and the creatures. She and they were tied together. She knew that even with her eyes closed, she would be able to point to every one of them—and they to her. It was like standing in a rushing stream and feeling the direction the current flowed.
They love you, baby! howled the book. Go meet your adoring fans!
Starlight charged her horn, leaned forward, and blasted a beam of power at Mr. Pots.
His body blew apart with a massive puff of putrefying meat.
Starlight grinned and blew on her horn through pursed lips, belief in her magical infallibility reconfirmed.
Over about two minutes, the gruesome bits of Mr. Pots’s body slithered toward each other and reassembled.
Starlight ground her teeth, thinking.
“STARLIGHT!!! WHAT IN THE IMMORTAL FEATHERING HOLY HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!”
Looking down, Starlight saw mom standing on the inside of the town wall, looking back up at her. “Mom, run! I was trying to get you Sunrise back and instead I raised the dead! More'n a dozen!”
Mom’s face turned pale and she plopped down on her rump. “What?”
One of the creatures, an earth pony she didn’t recognize, had squeezed through a gap in the wrought iron fence that surrounded the graveyard, and was staggering toward the hole in the town wall. It raised its nose and sniffed.
“Mom! Run!”
“Not without my baby!”
Starlight focused on the shovel and teleported it to herself. She grabbed its handle under her left foreleg and teleported herself to just inside the opening in the town wall, levitating up the shovel vertically, en garde.
(Dad had once tried to teach her swordplay, but she showed no interest, and he dropped the lessons after en garde. She suddenly regretted that decision, for some reason.)
Rogue magic bled off her horn in turquoise sparks. She levitated the shovel in jerky figure-eights, waiting.
“Starlight!” mom said, trotting up next to her. “Please tell me you didn’t— gaaah!” Mom slumped down to her knees and gasped in pain as a cramp cut across her. “Tell me you’re joking!”
The earth pony zombie wandered in through the opening in the town wall. The alarm didn’t sound and the lighting spell stored in the bricks didn’t fire—no surprise, because the magic was calibrated for coyotes, not the animated dead.
An oversight, to be sure. Starlight would address that at the next town council meeting. She'd been looking for a project for Civics class. Nopony else in town had the magic to recalibrate the tripwire-spells, and this would save them from spending taxpayer bits on an itinerant wizard.
Mom saw the creature and made a soft mewling sound, like a starving kitten whining to suckle.
Starlight teleported—Crack!—appearing just to the side of the beast, and slashed down with the shovel: once, twice, three times, at the base of its neck, each hit sounding unlike anything she had heard before (although her dad, the decorated ex-Guard trooper, would have recognized it as the sound dull swords make when they hack flesh and bone).
“Get! Back! Dead!” she shouted as she slashed down with the shovel.
With the third hack, the creature’s head popped off and rolled. She lit an induction spell, and her turquoise aura surrounded the shovel blade, and the steel heated to white-hot almost instantly, the metal creaking and popping as it expanded. She smelled the wood handle smoldering. Just as the zombie’s body bowed down to touch the severed head to the stump, she slapped the white-hot flat of the blade to the stump.
The smell of flash-fried carrion surrounded her.
Starlight puked. Instantly, violently. (Ponies are vegetarians, after all.)
The hot iron charred the stump, cauterized it, and the body staggered two steps and fell, dead again.
Maybe dead again, Starlight thought, puking more, this time onto her own front hooves. The heat of her stomach acid burned her forelegs and hooves after the frigid cold of the spell-thickened air.
She cocked her head, moving her horn to catch the magic on the wind. One of the magical eddies was gone, severed. She couldn’t count the exact number, couldn’t verify the book's statement of seventeen, but: one less, definitely.
Starlight heaved again, not quite puking, and spit to clear her mouth of the taste.
Mom, who performed literally all of Sire’s Hollow’s autopsies, wound debridements, and gangrenous limb amputations, simply sniffed, wrinkled her nose, and then switched to breathing through her mouth. “What. Did. You. Do. Foal?”
“The book—it tricked me.”
“We burned that book!”
“All we did was hurt its feelings. It tricked me, for revenge.”
“Well, it did a good job, Starlight! You’re dead! You’re my little miracle and I love you and you’re my only foal I’ll ever have and what will I tell your dad and you’re going to get the gallows! You’re dead, Starlight! We’ve... we’ve got to cover this up!”
Starlight dropped her induction spell and the shovel cooled, white-orange-red-black. The heat radiating off it chapped her lips and dried her eyes. The steel snapped and popped, and mill scale flaked off of it.
“Mom! Can we worry about that after the zombies are dead again? Get outta here, run, mom. This is my problem and you don’t have the magic. I can do this.”
“I cannot believe we’re having this conversation. And I smell alcohol on your breath.”
“Mom, get out of here! I’ll... Celestia, I don’t know what I’ll do, but mom—I’m dead already, so you get out of here. Dad needs you alive to get him through my... my trial... and... ex... ex... execution......... ohhhh, mom, what have I done?”
Mom and Starlight moved to hug, but another one of the creatures wandered in through the gap in the wall. Starlight levitated the shovel up and slammed it down at the base of the zombie’s neck.
The shovel’s head shattered, falling apart into flakes of iron oxide. Starlight was smart, one-in-one-hundred-million brilliant, but she was no trained metallurgist, and when she had heated the shovel white-hot, the cheap carbon steel burned to flaky oxide in the air. Stainless steel, it wasn’t.
“Uh-oh,” Starlight said.
The zombie turned and hissed at the levitating handle. Its eyes focused on the magical aura surrounding it, then turned to look at Starlight.
It appeared to be, to have been, a unicorn mare. It licked its lips and panted at Starlight and mom, Its eyes pointing different directions and swimming around in their sockets. Ichor glistened on its fangs in the moonlight.
It took a step toward them.
Starlight sidestepped left, away from mom.
The creature turned to track Starlight. “See? Mom, they want me. I’m going to lead them away.”
“Starlight! Are you crazy?”
"Yes, I am crazy, mom! If you’d put me on lithium and antipsychotics none—"
“Now?!? This old debate, now?”
The zombie focused both eyes on Starlight and charged. Starlight levitated the jagged remains of the shovel head into its rump, staggering it, slicing rotten tendons, making it faceplant, and then—Crack!—Starlight teleported the ten feet to mom, hugged her, and—Crack!—teleported with mom to the top of the town wall. Starlight let go of mom.
"Starlight, don’t you dare leave me—"
Crack! Starlight was gone again, teleporting down to a point just behind the unicorn mare zombie. She levitated the wooden handle up and rapped the zombie between the ears, getting its attention.
It staggered around and hissed.
Starlight hit it over the head again, hit it hard, cracking its skull case, exposing rotten brains, and leaving its horn flopping over its right ear, held by a few scraps of sinew.
Taking off at a trot, Starlight fled out the gap in the town wall, into the moonlit grass that surrounded the town, to a point just outside the wrought iron fence that surrounded the graveyard.
Beautiful moonlight radiated down, the breeze tickled her mane and tail, and she smelled a combination of pine, wildflowers, her own vomit, and rotten meat.
The mare-zombie with the cracked skull followed, hoofsteps even more staggering than before.
“C’mon, you dead jerks! I know you want me!” She levitated the wooden shovel handle from one to the next, whacking each zombie in turn between the eyes or on the horn, to get their attention.
She noticed one of the upright wrought-iron fence pickets was loose, barely held onto the horizontal fence rail by a scrim of rust. She crammed the wooden shovel handle in between the picket and the picket next to it and slammed her body against the wood, chest-first, and the four-foot-long iron picket broke free.
She levitated it up, and looked at the decorative finial at the top of the picket.
The finial was pointy, indeed sharp, to keep foals or coyotes from hopping the fence into the graveyard.
She levitated the picket up, brandished it like a stave, pointed it at the book, still open to chapter five next to Sunrise’s coffin, and said, “I’m gonna fry you later, tater.”
May the best magical being wiiiinnnn! You're the most fun I've had in centuries. I'll miss you. Well, no, not really.
All the zombies were staggering toward Starlight, too stupid to account for the fence between her and them. Grandma Firestar was lurching on three legs and levitation.
Planning to lure them into the forest, so the evidence would be easier to conceal, Starlight opened the fence gate and jabbed the shovel handle through it to prop the gate open, to make sure the zombies would have no trouble following her.
Cantering toward the woods, she moved slowly enough to be sure the zombies were keeping up with her. She felt the magical attunement to each of them shifting as they moved relative to each other. She couldn't judge distance, but her direction sense was precise.
And there was one sense ahead of her. She slowed and walked warily.
Just as she reached the edge of the woods, the smell of putrefied flesh washed over her, and the flattened, maggot-encrusted carcass of the coyote bitch slithered out of the shadows and into the moonlight, bones poking through its gray-brown coat, and it growled at her.
Mom watched, horrified, as the pony she loved more than her own life loped away into the woods, followed by fifteen hell-beasts. In the bright moonlight, she could see that damn book lying open next to Sunrise's tiny pink coffin. A coffin she had never expected to see again, since that hideous day thirteen years before.
Mom looked down the twenty foot drop, calculating how to get herself back to ground level in time to help her impulsive idiot-genius-lunatic-lovebug of a daughter. She had once seen Starlight levitate herself, literally flying, but mom lacked that much magical juice, and for the first time in twenty years, regretted being a unicorn instead of a pegasus like her family.
Another cramp, the worst yet, ripped across her back and flanks, mom yelped in pain, and dropped to her belly on the cold masonry of the top of the town wall, and she felt blood beginning to trickle from underneath her tail. Her miscarriage was now starting in earnest.
Mom wrenched herself to her feet and began to stagger along the top of the town wall, toward the narrow access stairway two thousand feet to her south, a quarter of the way around the town.
As the only doctor in the province, she was accustomed to saving lives while she was sick, hurt, pregnant, or in the midst of a miscarriage. Today would be bad—but not her worst night ever.
Two winters back, mom had hiked seven miles in driving snow, suffering frostbite to her face, ears, and legs in the process, to perform an emergency amputation of a crushed forehoof, and afterward, had miscarried at the mining camp, blizzard howling at the windows, alternately checking on her patient and herself.
She had saved dozens of lives while under terrible personal discomfort, over the years.
And Starlight’s life was the most important life in the universe. Mom would be damned before she would let anything stop her from saving her daughter.
Another cramp cut her down again. She crawled on her belly toward the stairs, leaving a thin trail of blood behind her.
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The best ever attack of the Undead that I have ever read.
9482672
Thank you! Deeply, thank you!
I hope the remaining four chapters can live up to your expectations.
BOOMSTICK!
Zombies can't restore severed limbs?
So, the book didn't lie about number of zombies?
9483474
Trust me in this one. I’m pleased people’s noses are twitching on the foreshadowing.
Than
This seems like a bit of an exaggeration.
I'm confused. Wasn't the graveyard a 15 mile run from town, or did Starlight take a 15-mile run and stop at the graveyard on her way back into town?
10712318
^ that
10712318
Oof, fixed! Thanks