Crystal Apocalypse: Redux

by leeroy_gIBZ

2: There are no tacos

“For the last time, I admire your enthusiasm and all, but there are no more stupid tacos!”

“Buuuuuut you promised. You said we could check out the food court, Sour. You said there might be tacos there.”

Sour Sweet stopped her walk to shut her eyes and breathed deeply as she pinched the bridge of her nose with the hand not gripping her makeshift spear tightly. Beside her, Sonata Dusk pouted with arms crossed and lips pursed, a pair of camping hatchets strapped to her side and a kitchen’s worth of knives sheathed around her lithe frame.

The two survivors were scavengers and part of a camp some two dozen miles down the main highway. With rucksacks sagging with canned food and bottled water and thrifted knickknacks of varying degrees of uselessness, the two girls were on their way home from another successful sortie into the burned-out ruins of Canterlot City.

And Sonata would not shut up.

“I know I said that, Sonata, but that also means that there might not be tacos left! Come on, I know you’re smart so think about it, what kind of moron would fuck around baking tacos in a food court where people like us would go to steal food?”

Sonata turned to glare out over the scrubland that sprawled out down to a distant beach. “Technically,” she insisted, “we’re scavenging. To steal it, somebody alive would need to own it. So, we aren’t stealing anything really.”

“Technically, I don’t care. Let’s just keep walking, okay? Maybe if you ask Sugar Belle nicely again, she’ll bake you some once we get back?”

The baker’s name had Sonata perk up an inch.

“You think so?” she asked.

“Of course, Sonata. She’s probably forgotten how much you nag her about it in the week we’ve been away from home.”

“Seriously?”

“I mean, it is possible. It’s just as possible as finding fresh tacos in an abandoned shopping mall though.”

“You’re like Aria, you know? Except even meaner because she doesn’t pretend to be nice to people first. Sour,” she pointed at the redhead, “I don’t like you very much.”

Sour smiled to reveal a row of chipped teeth and chapped lips. “The feeling’s mutual!” she said, her voice as sweet as the stench of rotting fruit. “Now get walking.”

The white-brown sand dunes and dirt-grey patches of fallow fields never held a high population. Now, what little habitation they once fostered had become the torched skeletons of ruined farmhouses,the bare fields of looted farmlands and the picked-clean corpses of the farmers who died protecting what little was left after their crops began to fail and the riots broke out.

As she walked down the charcoal-dark stretch of tarmac, Sour wished that Cadance had partnered her with somebody else. At this point in time, when not even the blistering midday sun could make her feel warm again, she would take anyone else. Even the useless Sunny Flare was not an emotional vampire who was too oblivious to even realize how much she sucked the life out of everything she did.

She was just a loser these days.

Maybe that was why the dean-turned-camp-leader had appointed Sonata Dusk a scavenger, so that those watching the wounded and patrolling the perimeter and farming what little food would grow out here could do so without slipping into depression and missing a stitch or overlooking a scout or accidentally treading on a sapling?

Or maybe Sour was overthinking this.

After all, Sonata wished merely to sink her teeth into a tortilla shell stuffed with grilled chicken and guacamole and salsa and just a hint of chipotle pepper. She wished to do that and also find out where Adagio was right now and hit her in the face with her axe until she didn’t have a face anymore.

Simple wishes for a simple girl.

Against all odds, her childish frown soon lifted into her usual carefree grin and she skipped down the road and every clack of her heels was another nail driven into her partner’s skull.

Sour grimaced and her cracked nails gnawed into the fibreglass of the pole with a carving knife strapped to it, that which comprised her spear. Her teeth ground against eachother and, without the refreshment of water to smooth their grating journey, the noise produced nearly managed to drown out Sonata’s inane humming.

Nearly.

Notes and lines burst through like soldiers through a breached wall every so often and they did so with just enough unpredictability to derail whatever Sour’s train of thought happened to be at the time. After her fifth daydream of the day was snapped apart by that aggravating tune, Sour picked up her pace a few steps. Now there was enough distance between the pair to let the desert’s wind blow away any tunes the former Siren tried, and failed, to sing.

And so, the two girls walked in relative silence and their footsteps echoed through the empty plains. Or, rather, Sour’s did. Nearly an hour had gone by before her lifted spirits almost began to long for something to be angry at.

Her head spun around like a whip crack. A few hundred yards down the road, the girl spotted her partner standing at attention with a pair of binoculars pressed to a set of eyes that looked perpetually on the verge of tears, joyous or otherwise, despite the desiccating dryness that plagued them. Sour hissed in a breath and turned to collect her and the steel toes of her boots stamped loudly against the dusty road as she marched over to her scatter-brained partner.

But she was not loud enough.

Not loud enough to snap her out of her stare.

Not loud enough to alert her to the figure approaching from behind who brandished a wicked blood stained dagger in one hand and a loaded lever action in the other.

Not nearly enough.

“Sonata! Turn around, you moron!” Sour screamed.

Normally supple and graceful beyond what any human could be expected to be now, Sonata suddenly went stiff. The binoculars slid from her grasp. They cracked against a rock and a lens shattered in the same second within which Sonata twirled around to pin a pair of blades at the hitchhiker’s throat.

A shard of glass and a shotgun joined the broken binoculars on the ground as Sugarcoat raised a quivering pair of parka-sleeved arms up to the scorching sun above.

“Who are you and what have you done with Aria Blaze?” Sonata threatened, each word heavy with anger that was rehearsed daily yet spontaneous every time.

Sugarcoat gulped down the lump in her throat.

The response did not satisfy. It never did.

Thus, the rusted axe heads were pressed another few hairs into her neck and Sugarcoat’s eyes were now wider than satellite dishes with fright. Blood began to trickle from her broken skin for the second time today. Fresh and warm and bright crimson, it slithered down the rusty red gunk on the Siren’s weapons like the sweat down Sugarcoat’s back.

“Well, Pigtails? You know, right? And I know you know and you know that I know you know. So, cough it up,” Sonata demanded, before grinning hungrily, “Ideally, like, before I turn you into firewood, please?”

She only shivered and found even that to be a bad idea. Every minute shift of her skin and twitch in her flesh brought her head millimetres closer to rolling off her shoulders.

And Sugarcoat did not want to die.

Not now.

“I don’t know,” she insisted, “the same things that you don’t know. I just don’t know who you’re talking about!”

Sonata never expected that reply. “Huh,” she said, withdrawing her axes, resting her chin on one hand as her other twirled its weapon in a rough circle.

She peered at Sugarcoat. Her hair hanging in grimy tangles around her shoulders, face and hands smeared with coffin mud brewed from saltwater tears and rusty gore, jacket hanging off her like a crocodile-green funeral shroud, she looked like she crawled out of an open grave.

That was incorrect because Sugarcoat jumped out.

The next time, however, she would actually crawl.

But Sonata had no possible way of predicting that. Instead, she narrowed her eyes down from rounded walnuts to almond slivers as she glared at the lost girl.

“Are you sure?” she asked, enunciating each word like a lyric to a magic spell.

“Yes! I have no idea who Aria even is, let alone why you think I killed her,” Sugarcoat replied.

“Then… like, I haven’t seen you around before and I think I’ve met pretty much everyone who I don’t wanna kill so… who are you again?”

“Sugarcoat,” said Sour Sweet, planting her spear in a crack in the ground, resting on it lightly as she caught her breath. It curved like a drawn-out longbow as she pressed her weight onto it. It curved like the bow currently slung across her back.

“No, silly,” Sonata turned to her partner, “you’re Sour Sweet, the world’s biggest meanie. I’m asking who this one is.”

“She’s right, actually. My name is Sugarcoat. I escaped from a police car a few miles up the road. I’m trying to get back to the city so I can find my parents. And, seeing as neither of you want to kill me now, could I borrow a phone to call whoever picks up first, either them or the police?”

Sour looked at her old acquaintance. As did Sonata. Not being a chameleon, the white-haired girl was incapable of staring both of them down at once and, as such, she decided to focus her gaze on Sour.

A Mexican standoff ensued, with confused and nervous laughter being the bullets awaiting a hammer’s fall.

She looked like a mess, Sugarcoat noted. In fact, she looked even worse than she herself did today, with yellow skin that was now more jaundiced than saffron and cut and slashed through by multiple scars and stitches. Her teeth were filthy and her mismatched and dust-browned clothes looked more like a mummy’s rags than anything the well-off teen would normally ever choose to wear.

But surviving the apocalypse is the opposite of normal living.

And normal was also not the way the survivor’s eyes twitched and her knotted cherry-red ponytail flicked and lashed in wind that had turned to blow in the opposite direction.

Sonata, meanwhile, grinned. Her hair had always done that and she chalked it up to the upsides of being a vampire seahorse from another dimension.

“I get it!” she announced and pointed at Sugarcoat, “you’re some kind of zombie clown!”

“No?” Sugarcoat blinked a few times. “I’m not a comedian and I’m certainly not dead and I definitely don’t want to be either. So, can you tell me what’s happening here. Why are you… dressed like that, Sour Sweet?”

“Well, for starters, our dear friend Sunny isn’t dead. But she really sucks at repairing clothes! Also, I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you and all, but there isn’t any cell reception and there hasn’t been since the world ended and there aren’t any more cops either!”

“And there also aren’t any tacos,” Sonata added in a tone graver than the coffin Sugarcoat had just escaped.

In response, Sugarcoat blinked again. Them being miraculously intact, she then took off her glasses and considered wiping them on the collar of her parka. Squinting at the parka, she considered against it and brushed their dust off of them and onto the red cotton fabric of her crop top instead. Then she put her glasses back on and stared at the two survivors.

“What.” Sugarcoat proceeded to say.

“Duh,” said Sonata like this was the most obvious concept in the history of ever, which it was not, “like, the Apocalypse. The Reckoning. The Big End of All Things. You know, the bit that happens so that we can all be here now and have this really weird conversation. That end of the world.”

“What?”

Sour sighed. “I’m super surprised you’re having trouble with this one, Sugarcoat but I’m also surprised you were living under a rock for the past three years!”

“What!”

This was going to be a painfully long day, Sour discovered as her hand clenched the spear again. “Civilization collapsed three years ago. Loads of people died. Nukes were dropped. Plagues happened. How did you miss all that?”

Looking around, suddenly the ruined pylons and sacked homesteads and crashed cars she passed made sense. The graffiti she saw was crystal clear now. As was the corpse stretched out below it.

She felt something crack like a diamond would if bashed against a brick wall of unwavering and nightmarish understanding. The world she saw slipped up as her eyes rolled back in her skull, slipping further away into black as her aching legs gave out beneath her.

Sugarcoat fainted.

“Well isn’t that lovely,” Sour sneered, “our reunion gets cut short by you up and dying on us!”

Sonata checked her pulse, running her webbed fingers over the unconscious girl’s neck and ignoring the bloody gills she had carved into it minutes before. Up she looked and she grinned earnestly at her partner.

“Well?” Sour asked, “Is she just taking a nap or do we have to lug her good-for-nothing corpse back home too?”

“Nah, she’ll be fine. Probably. Probably lost, like, a few brain cells bashing her head on the ground but yeah, Sugar’s gonna be okay,” Sonata replied.

“I guess brain damage can’t be that bad then, she always was too smart for her own good anyway,” Sour grumbled as her mind wandered back to the multiple times her acquaintance had been shoved into a locker or half-drowned in a toilet or just beaten up for saying the right thing to the wrong person.

Sour smiled and, for the first time in five days, she was not being sarcastic.

“Soooo, like, we gonna pick her up or what?” Sonata asked.

“If she’s okay, she’ll get up on her own, right?”

“Yeah, but she might not get up before the trucks pulp her.”

“What trucks?”

“Those trucks!” Sonata grinned, pointing out into the distance where a convoy of black-painting vehicles rumbled down the path the pair had walked down a day earlier. “What do you think I was looking at earlier, dummy?”

Gulping, Sour turned to Sugarcoat and knelt down to grasp her hands. Sonata did the same for her feet and soon the trio was safely out of view behind a jut of sandstone rock.

After that, Sour rushed back to collect the binoculars. While doing so, she spotted Sugarcoat’s gun and grabbed that too.

Not all surviving people were content to scavenge the ruins of their former homes and workplaces and very lives in search of meagre rations and workable supplies. Some turned to banditry instead, among far darker pursuits.

Although she preferred to stick to the bow and arrow that had won her the State Archery Championship three years in a row, even she recognized the use of a working firearm, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

But it was not always useful enough.

Not useful enough to weigh her down every day.

Not useful enough to be worth carrying when it only had seven shots to shoot and there were eight bandits intent on tearing apart your entire family that needed shooting.

Not nearly enough.

But Sour took it and the knife anyway and she hurried back to where Sonata and Sugarcoat were hidden and she found the former splashing priceless water on the latter’s face.

It turned out that the gun had more uses than the freckled girl thought after a single second of her observing Sonata’s fecklessness. For instance, the butt of a Winchester makes an excellent club.

“What the heck was that for, you big bully?” Sonata screeched, clasping the bruise on her arm, “That really hurt!”

Sour ignored her, instead walking over to the discarded bottle beside her and crouching to pick it up. Raising it to the light, she found with a frustrated groan that only a third of its precious albeit muddy liquid remained.

“Sonata, I know it was really nice of you to try wake our friend up,” Sour said, her saccharine voice dripping with rage, “but can you do it without wasting the water I had to kill a guy to get? Please?”

The former siren’s shoulders sank beneath her patched and torn coat. Away she sniffed her brewing tears. “I was just trying to help you out,” she whined.

“Who is helping who here?” Sugarcoat asked, sitting up, rubbing the back of her skull.

“Oh good, you’re alive! Now are you going to ask any more stupid questions, Sugarcoat?”

“I don’t plan on it, no. But I would still actually appreciate one of you telling me how the world happened to end in the span of the day I was locked in a police car’s trunk.”

“Why were you locked in that? Did you piss of a cop? I did that once and he arrested me for miscegenation,” Sonata said, “Man, South Africa was insane during the 70s. Now was that the 1870s or the 1970s? I forget.”

“Rarity did it,” Sugarcoat explained.

Sour choked on the dregs of the water before bursting into a hacking cough and splattering her drink across Sugarcoat’s confused face.

With an already-filthy sleeve, she wiped the spit off and then she repeated her explanation, “Rarity did it. She tricked me into getting into a car with her and then she drove here, showed me the corpse stuffed into the cruiser and then tasered me and stuffed me in the trunk on top of him.”

“The heck did you do to make one of Sombra’s generals so mad with you? Did you, like, look at her funny?” Sonata asked, “Piss in her cereal maybe? Call her dress stupid?”

“Sombra’s general?” Sugarcoat asked, before turning to Sour, “Sombra, our gym coach? He has an army now?”

Sour shrugged nervously. “Yes, that Sombra totally has an army that regularly kidnaps and eats people, Sugarcoat. Whose cars do you think we’re hiding from?”

A minute passed. Sugarcoat retrieved her shotgun. Sonata started humming. Sour stared furiously at the fellow Shadowbolt. In response, Sugarcoat nervously zipped up her parka before clearing some of the sand out of her parched throat with a cough.

“And this army would be what, a legion?”

Sonata nodded, “Sure is, Sugar.”

“Please don’t call me that. Anyway, Rarity Belle is a general in this army he raised in the day I was locked in a car? And, during that time, the world also ended and nearly everyone… died?” Sugarcoat asked, her regular dismissive glare and dull monotone rapidly shifting into a confused grimace and a tone that shook like an earthquake.

Sugarcoat did not want to die.

And the existence of an army of cannibalistic bandits who seemed to have the only working vehicles she’d seen thus far was probably going to make staying alive difficult.

“Yup!” Sonata nodded, “Except, like, it was three years. Not a day. I would be super impressed if he did that all in one day.”

“Three years. I spent three years in a car? How have I not starved to death by now then?”

Sour shrugged. “Eh, because magic?”

“Magic isn’t real,” Sugarcoat said reflexively.

Both of the other girls stared at her. Sonata spoke first, “Sugar, I’m a siren. Or at least, I was. Before I… uh… tasted the rainbow. And no, that’s not a euphemism. Unfortunately. I got zapped with real-life magic. It really stings, you know.”

“And, Sugarcoat, you do remember the Friendship Games, right? We nearly fell through the universe and Twilight Sparkle of all people turned into a monster!”

Sugarcoat had tried to forget that. She failed to do so. And then, as the convoy of mismatched and jury-rigged vehicles rumbled by with grey-uniformed hooligans hanging from the sides, brandishing rifles and swords, spears and crossbows, nets and slingshots, and cheering war-cries and promising atrocities, the teenager moaned in despair.

Sonata patted her on the back and was deeply surprised to find the grey girl didn’t slap her hand away. “Sorry you had to find out like this,” she said.

“This is all a nightmare,” Sugarcoat muttered as she curled into the foetal position and stared down at her feet.

“Again, super sorry but this is real life, not just fantasy. Getting trapped in a dream once, I’d know.” Sonata then twirled a lock of her ponytail, “Or was it a landslide? Might’ve been a landslide actually. Whole break from reality and all.”

Sugarcoat sniffed a little.

“So, like, the best advice I can really give is just to keep your head up. Stuff will be crazy for a while but that’s okay. Don’t give up, and keep walking. Find something new you like doing and do that. That’s what my sisters and I did after we got exiled. And let me tell you, at least the people now still look like people for you! They sure didn’t for us,” Sonata continued.

“Alright?” Sugarcoat sighed.

“That’s the spirit, now get your butt off the ground because we’ve gotta warn the camp!” Sour ordered, hopping to her feet the second the last truck had passed her.

“What?” Sugarcoat asked, “Warn who?”

“The camp, Sugar. The people we, like, live and sleep and eat with. Because, just between you and me,” Sonata then whispered, “I don’t think Sombra’s Legion is exactly visiting because they like the scenery.”

“Namely because the scenery sucks,” Sour said as she rummaged in her bags for something useful.

“Use this,” Sugarcoat mumbled a minute later and she handed her former classmate the shard of glass she took from the car, “You can reflect light off it like a mirror to send a signal to your people. That is, if you can see them from here. It might let them know before those trucks arrive and give them some more time to prepare for a fight. I think.”

Sour raised the glass to the sky and angled it so that it reflected a sunray down onto a nearby chunk of sandstone. She smiled before taking the binoculars and starting off for a nearby hill.

As her partner did so, Sonata turned to Sugarcoat. “Wow, that was some real quick thinking there, Sugar.”

“Don’t call me that,” Sugarcoat replied, “And I’ve got no idea whether or not that’ll even help. I just read it in a book once.”

Sonata shrugged. After looking around for a second or two and spotting that Sour was far out of earshot by now, she slipped a pair of cans out of a canvas pocket of her rucksack. One of the beers she tossed to Sugarcoat who fumbled the catch and dropped the can. The other she cracked open and took a long sip from before turning back to the girl.

“What?” she asked, “Not thirsty?”

“No, I am,” Sugarcoat replied as she handed the can back, shivering as her hand brushed against the siren’s, “but I don’t drink and you shouldn’t either if water’s so scarce now. It’ll only make you more dehydrated.”

In response, Sonata stretched out against a rock and laid her head atop it like it was a duck-down pillow. “Like, did you read that in a book too?” she grinned.

“I read it in The Koran, actually. That wasn’t the reason dictated in it, but it makes sense given the Quraish’s circumstances as nomads in the Arabian Desert at the time,” Sugarcoat responded, a hint of her usual monotone creeping back into her otherwise shaken voice.

“Nifty,” Sonata replied.

“I’ve always been good at memorizing things and turning them into advice. Not that people always took that advice well, but I at least tried to be helpful. It’s better than standing by and expecting somebody else to fix everything.”

“Yeah,” the former siren took another sip of the stout, “that’s a really good distraction actually, helping others. But that’s life, you know. You just try to ignore the nasty stuff and, like, sometimes you do.”

“That means sometimes you don’t. What if Sour can’t get a message to her people in time? What then?”

“Then I’ll live like I lived for a thousand years, silly. Just one foot in front of the other, just one day at a time. No worries, no problems, no obligations past my own sisters. You should try it sometime, Sugar. Lighten up a bit.”

“You just told me my parents are dead.”

“Nuh-uh. I implied that. I got no clue what happened to them or who they even are.”

“That doesn’t make it any better and you shouldn’t say that it does. I’m still stuck in this nightmare even if they’re okay but now I’m worried about them getting hurt,” Sugarcoat replied.

And with that she exhaled a long breath and turned to stare out into the desert. The rolling sands reminded her of a bowl of flour with grains of it being blown up and around by some invisible giant’s mouth. A single human spot grew in size on the horizon, like a chunk of dried honey in the mix, and soon Sour had returned to the pair and she was panting slightly and glaring furiously.

“Those,” Sour growled, “were the reinforcements.”

Sonata dropped her beer and the dark liquid quickly disappeared, half soaking into the bone-dry dust and half evaporating into the dust-dry air.

“That’s… not good,” she understated.

“This is bad,” Sugarcoat agreed, “Really. Really bad.”

“Yeah, it certainly isn’t sunshine and rainbows. Namely because it’s an army of cannibal shitheads attacking our town!”

Sonata picked up the can and held it with both hands. Despite the heat, their bluish tint seemed more from frostbite than natural genetics. She took another sip before crumpling up the finished can and throwing it at a nearby boulder.

“What do we do, Sour?” she then asked.

“What can we do?” Sugarcoat added.

“Nothing. Not this far away unless we want them to jack us too. We’re fucked,” Sour declared, collapsing down beside the other two girls and returning Sugarcoat’s knife to her.

That she took and she stared into the spiderweb cracks that ran through it. Each of them made a little reflection of her face and none of them were smiling.

“One day at a time,” Sonata mumbled, her eyes screwed shut.

“Just hope Shining Armor and the rest of the fighters can win this one,” Sour added, “because it’d really suck if we all died.”