I Went Camping Once... It was Awful.

Chapter 1

“It’ll be just like old times, no need to be nervous”.

But Moondancer was nervous. In fact, since receiving the letter from Twilight the day before, Moondancer had been somewhere between apprehensive and hysterical.

“I’ve never even been out of Canterlot before!” She said to herself.

Despite her muttering, the ponies of Canterlot paid no heed to the disheveled unicorn mare as she trotted up the steps of Canterlot’s public library.

“I mean, a whole weekend in the Whitetail Woods, what if it rains?”

“My books and papers will be soaked”!

“How will I study”!?

All these questions and more tumbled through Moondancer’s head as she made her way past ponies reading quietly at desks or looking among the shelves for books.

Being the frequent visitor that she was though, Moondancer knew exactly which isle to search.

“Let’s see”. She mused.

Gardening…

Wildlife…

Outdoors…

“Here we go”… Camping.

After using her magic to levitate every book in the section, Moondancer trotted over to an empty desk with her prize.

When Twilight Sparkle had returned to Canterlot to make amends for her sudden departure and for blowing off her friends, Moondancer couldn’t have cared less.

While the others had brushed it of like it was nothing, Moondancer had been determined to give Twilight the cold shoulder.

In the end though, Twilight brought together all the ponies who cared for Moondancer and with the help of Ponyville’s local party pony re-created the party which Twilight had missed.

It was then that Moondancer finally accepted Twilight’s apology and learned to believe in friendship again.

Afterwards, Twilight always made time to stop by whenever she was in Canterlot.

Even if was just for a doughnut and a quick chat, Twilight Sparkle made sure there was time for all her Canterlot friends.

“Even the Princess of Friendship can learn new things on the subject”. Moondancer thought with a smile.

The smile quickly vanished though as she turned to the situation at hoof.

For some time, Twilight had been talking about having all her Canterlot friends come down to Ponyville and now it seemed she had found the time.

“But why can’t we just go to Twilight’s castle library and read or something”? Moondancer though in frustration.

The way Twilight had put it in her letter, camping was supposed to be a fun filled team-building experience for all involved that would bring them all closer together as friends.

The way Moondancer saw it however, was much less optimistic.

A whole weekend that could be spent studying would be wasted out in the boonies. She’d be facing two days’ worth of sweltering heat and cold bug-bitten nights with only a flimsy canvas tent between her and the elements.

Just the thought of it made her shudder.

Suddenly, a high pitched mare’s voice cut though the gloom of Moondancer’s thoughts.

“Hey, Moondancer”! See, I told you we’d find her here”!

Moondancer’s smile returned as she looked up to see her three friends approaching her table and fought the instinctual urge to shush Minuette.

The library’s other patrons however had no such reservations and a resounding chorus of shushes was enough to reduce Minuette’s massive grin to a sheepish smile.

The three mares where Moondancer’s best friends. After Moondancer had accepted Twilight’s apology at the party, Twilight had assured her that even though she couldn’t always be around when needed, Minuette, Twinkleshine, and Lemonhearts would.

After a round of whispered greetings, Minuette spoke first.

“When we got Twilight’s letter, we went by your place to see if you’d got it too”.

“But you weren’t there”. Twinkleshine said. “So we”. Minuette cut her off

“But I was like, girls, we know our Moondancer, and where is the one place we can be guaranteed to find her eventually if she’s not home”?

“The li”. Lemonhearts started but got no farther.

“The library”! Minuette practically shouted, earning her another round of shushing from the patrons and her friends.

Moondancer just smiled, shook her head, and using a spell that Twilight had taught her, cast a bubble of silence around her friends and the table she was at.

“Well I’m glad to see you three here, but what else brings you in search of me besides Twilight’s letter”? She asked.

“That’s just it” Minuette exclaimed as she caught sight of the pile of books on Moondancer’s table. "We wanted to see if you knew anything more about camping than we did since you read a ton, though by the looks of it, I guess that’s not the case".

“I’ve never been camping in my life” Moondancer said with a bit of a blush as she adjusted her glasses with her magic. “I’m hoping one of these books will tell me how to survive this coming weekend”!

“Well I went camping once, it was awful”! Twinkleshine said.

“It was just a one night stay on the other side of Canterlot Mountain for a school astronomy trip".

"But the weather teams must have forgot to post their report in the paper because a huge storm rolled in and we all got soaked, much less saw any stars".

“That sure boosted my morale” Moondancer rolled her eyes and gave a sarcastic smile.

“That just sounds like bad luck Twinkleshine, I mean, that was just one time.” Lemonhearts retorted.

"I’ve been on a couple of camping trips with Lyra and Sweet-err-I mean Bonbon in the past and we’ve had like the best time ever".

“I’ve personally never been camping”. Minuette said with a grin. “But Twilight makes it sound like so much fun!

“Tell ya what Moondancer, we’ve all had different experiences”! Twinkleshine said. “Let’s see what those books of yours have to say before you make up your mind”.

"Really"? Moondancer gaped, you’d do that?

“Of course”. Lemonhearts replied with a smile. “What are friends for”?

The mares divided the books into four stacks and each took her respected stack to one of the nearby tables for evaluation.

Over the next hour, one of them would call out some fact or interesting tidbit they had gleamed from the pages before them which would then be added the growing list of study notes on Moondancer’s desk.

At one point, Minuette piped up from her seat while pointing excitedly at the page before her with a hoof.

“Hey guys look, it’s just like Twilight said”! “According to The Filly Scouts Handbook: (Camping is a fun filled teambuilding experience for all involved that brings ponies closer together as friends.)”

“Well if a book as official sounding as that says so”, Minuette continued. “Then Twilight must know what she’s talking about!”

“Or she could have just done some research of her own”. Moondancer snickered.

The mares shared a giggle before returning to the task at hoof.

As the day wore on, one after the other, the friends exhausted their stack of literature until only Moondancer who had taken the largest stack had anything left.

Moondancer picked up the last book on her desk with her magic and immediately felt an odd aura surrounding it.

This in itself wasn’t odd seeing as many of the older books and scrolls in the Canterlot Library had a wear and tear spell on them.

The book was small and rather thin, your typical looking guidebook with a drab green cover and a title that read “The Unturned Survival Guide” in block-y, stencil like script.

Unturned?

Unturned into what exactly? Moondancer frowned at the odd little book.

A cursory inspection of the cover and first page quickly revealed that there was no author, instead a frowning pixelated face the same color as the cover adorned the first page.

The second page contained a map of what appeared to be an island with little yellow and orange lines, "roads"? She wondered; snaking across it and what Moondancer assumed where towns and buildings along its length.

The third page was a table of contents which looked much more promising.

As Moondancer skimmed down the list her eyes lit up. She’d hit the jackpot!

There was everything from how to make a fire and cook on it, to how to build a shelter.

There was even a chapter on how to build makeshift weapons though Celestia knows why a pony would need one unless they planned on camping in the Everfree or the Badlands.

Moondancer settled back on her chair with her new-found treasure trove of outdoor survival knowledge and flipped to the first page under the subtitle: Crafting

She was going to need a bigger note taking page.

But just as she was about to reach into her saddlebags for more paper, she remembered something Twilight had taught her during one of her latest visits.

Haycart’s studying method.

It was a spell that actually allowed a pony to enter a book and absorb massive amounts of information in a matter of minutes.

Moondancer’s optimism deflated somewhat when she remembered that even though Twilight was a princess, she could only hold the spell for a matter of minutes.

“What chance does a normal unicorn like me have of even casting the spell”? Moondancer mused.

A burst of giggles caused her to look up.

Minuette and Twinkleshine where on the verge of hysterics as Lemonhearts recounted a story from the latest Grand Galloping Gala which she had helped plan.

“And then Pinkie’s sister was like, you’re the most basic of jokes”!

Minuette and Twinkleshine lost it and burst into laughter while Lemonhearts grinned at the memory.
Moondancer waited till their giggles subsided before calling her friends over.

So we use this spell you learned from Twilight to go into the book and memorize all the juicy info it has? Minuette summarized. “Count me in”!

“I’m game” was Lemonheart’s reply.

Twinkleshine hesitated for a moment as she flipped through The Unturned Survival Guide.

“I have to agree with you Moondancer, it is an odd little book”. She said. “But the amount of useful information it has would be more than worth the effort, let’s do it”!

Moondancer placed the book in the middle of the desk then arranged her three friends around the table so there was one mare to each side.

“In order for this spell to work for all of us, we need to combine our magic so I can channel it into the book”.

“If any of you feel you can’t take the strain”, Moondancer cautioned. “Say so immediately so I can cut the spell and avoid an overload”.

Each mare nodded in agreement before Moondancer cast the spell.

The pale yellow magic aura of Minuette mixed with the sky blue of Twinkleshine and the deep pink of Lemonhearts before all three auras merged in one swirling ribbon of light and color around the book on the table.

Then Moondancer’s own pale pink magic entered the fray and joined the magic into one thick band of pure energy which spiraled up from the table before turning and plunging straight down into the center of the open book.

For a moment, everything went dark.

Then like an unfolding parchment, the inside of the book opened up before their eyes.

Moondancer looked around and found her friends looking back, or rather, she saw their images penned in living ink.

“This is so cool”! Minuette squealed as she examined a hoof.

The other mares paid her no heed though as their attention was all drawn upwards.

Like clouds floating across a parchment colored sky, lines of text drifted above the four mares while images and diagrams hung in between them like massive kites.

Beyond the literary skyscape, the friends could see the inside of the library. Nearby shelves, and even the tops of other ponies heads who were reading at nearby tables.

Just then, Moondancer spotted a piece of text and its corresponding image above her.

Though just as she began to wonder how in Equestria she was going to reach it, the text suddenly it came swooping down to her.

In a 3D image so realistic she felt like it was there, the image of a campfire and the directions of how to make one hovered before Moondancer’s eyes.

5 logs = 1 Campfire

“It’s like you just… think about what you want and it comes to you”. She breathed in amazement.

The other mares quickly began pulling down string of text and images of their own to analyze.

Twinkleshine and Minuette where sifting through a whole paragraph on how to build a shelter with various images of what appeared to be construction blueprints hovering around them.

Lemonhearts had also pulled down a lengthy paragraph with the title: Weapons, and was giving one of the blueprints an odd look.

“Hey Moondancer”. She called. “Have you ever heard of a rifle”?

Turning away from her campfire blurb, Moondancer consulted the blueprint which Lemonhearts had sent her way.

It looked like a combination of an strangely shaped wooden staff that was thicker at one end and a metal tube held together with tape and rope. Its description blurb stated that it was a makeshift rife that fired rifle clips.

As soon as she read rifle clips, another section of text shot down from above along with directions on how to make rifle clips and refilling them with something called civilian ammo.

“Fired, as in a projectile”?

Moondancer had never heard of a weapon like this before, why would anypony need such a thing?

Even if they were in the most untamed parts of Equestria, it might be useful, but the only ponies who went there were royal guards on patrol with magic to complement their swords, spears, and bows.

Even though she was still apprehensive about camping, she knew the Whitetail Woods where not dangerous and she certainly wouldn’t need anything like this.

It didn’t even look like something anypony besides a unicorn could use when she looked at it in more detail. The small lever on the underside of the odd weapon which Moondancer assumed was how it was fired looked too small for a hoof.

“Maybe it’s a gryphon weapon”. She said as she sent the blueprint back to Lemonhearts.

It bothered Moondancer immensely that she couldn’t identify the weapon seeing as she had studied the very limited defensive and even the almost nonexistent offensive history of Equestria and had never come across a mention of anything like it. She mentally marked it down as review material for when they left the book.

Moondancer turned back to her campfire blurb only to find that it had drifted away on the light breeze that was tugging at her mane.

“Wait, since when was there a breeze in a book”?

“Uh, guys”!? Minuette sounded scared.

The other mares looked up from their reading material and followed her gaze upwards.

The lines of text and their corresponding images were now scrolling across the page and onto the next one before disappearing over the edge.

“What’s happening”? Twinkleshine shouted.

“Shouted”? Thought Moondancer. “When did the breeze become a gale”?!

“I don’t know”! Moondancer yelled back while trying to keep the panic out of her voice with little success. She noticed that since the text was being pulled to the right across the pages from their point of view, whatever was the cause of change was at the front of the book.

The text was now racing by so fast the words had become a blur and the wind was shrieking across the page, the mares where struggling just to stay upright.

“We should go”! One of them yelled, Moondancer couldn’t tell who but couldn’t have agreed more.

Just as she made ready to cast the return spell, the gale became a hurricane and the four mares where swept of their hooves and sent tumbling across the page.

Everything became a blur as they were swept head over hooves from page to page. Moondancer watched an inky blur she assumed was one of her friends go careening past with a trailing scream that was barely audible over the howl of the storm that carried them.

Suddenly they were on page two and the blues, browns, and greens of the map went spinning past in a kaleidoscope of colors. Colors that seemed the get more vibrant to Moondancer even in her panicked and disoriented state.

Then they were on page one.

Moondancer had been screaming since her hooves had left a solid surface but she only became aware of the fact at that moment.

She screamed louder.

The strange pixelated face on the first page had become a nightmare. Its eyes now glowed a fierce, hellish red and the vacant frown it had before was now a raging whirlpool of blinding red and white light. The odd aura she had felt before was stronger than ever.

And they were being pulled towards it.

Moondancer’s mind reeled, this couldn’t be happening. She had done exactly as Twilight showed her, and if she had messed up, then she deserved to face the consequences alone.

She caught sight of Twinkleshine trying to reach for Lemonhearts outstretched hoof only to tumble out of sight as the force of the gale increased again, drawing them ever closer to the demon maw.

Using her magic, Moondancer groped about the maelstrom trying to pull her friends closer, but each time she found one of them, the gale tore them away in a new direction.

Moondancer began to sob as the impending reality of their doom landed on her chest.

They were all going to die thanks to her.

Lemonhearts words hung over Moondancer like an anvil.

“What are friends for”?

“I don’t know”! Moondancer screamed at the face from Tartarus that was drawing them in. “I can’t even help the ones I’m about to lose”!

“Some friend I am”.

Then the hellish light consumed her.

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Chapter 2

A cool, gentle breeze whistled softly around the lighthouse at Cape Rock while crickets and other night creatures began their serenade.

The last vestiges of pink, evening light had just sunk beneath the horizon as night spread its tranquil blanket across Prince Edward Island.

A pale, full moon rose from the sea, its soft light shining down on abandoned roadways and through the gaping windows of empty houses of Stratford.

On a night like this, one would think there’d be people out and about for a night on the town, or in their yards having cookouts after watching the sunset.

But the grills were cold, and the streets where silent

Aside from nature’s melody, none of the sounds that often accompanied humanity could be heard.

There were no car horns, or the sound of feet on the pavement, or dogs barking.

But most unusual of all, was the total lack of human voices.

Well, there were “voices”.

Low growls and moans occasionally drifted up from the dark streets and buildings.

To anyone accustomed to the hustle and bustle of humanity, the total lack of suburban ambiance would come as an eerie silence.

A silence that was about to be shattered.

Two things happened one after another.

First, if you were to stand at the top of the Cape Rock lighthouse and look south across bay, you would see brief flash of light followed by a staccato crack that rolled across the bay like distant thunder.

Before it could finish rumbling across the bay, the thunder was joined by dozens of smaller, sharp pops and staccato chatters, each accompanied by their own brief flashes of light.

Second, If you were still at the top of the lighthouse, you would be blinded by a tremendous flash of red and white light and deafened by a terrific thunderclap accompanied by a shrieking gale.

Like a spiral shaped tear in the very fabric of reality, a whirlpool of hellish light had opened in the air beside the lighthouse, spewing strange, otherworldly energies into the world below.

Then just as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone.

If you were to look out across the bay again, you would notice the cracks, pops, and flashes had ceased.

Even the crickets had stopped their serenade.

But it wasn’t silent.

The soft, cool breeze remained, and being carried along with the breeze as it swept through Stratford, around the lighthouse, and out to sea, was a truly haunting chorus.

An unholy melody of lifeless moans and growls that rose into the night above the shuffling of rotting limbs.

It was the breeze that woke her

Moondancer slowly opened her eyes as it ruffled her mane and tugged at her coat.

For a moment she was totally lost, unsure of whether she was awake or in a dream.

Then it all came crashing back:

Twilight's invitation,

Her trip the the library,

Using Haycart's method to to transport herself and her friends inside that strange little book,

and the hellish whirlpool of light that had swallowed them.

"My friends"! Moondancer's mind began to race as panic and guilt began to bubble in her chest, "Oh what have I done"!?

Scrambling to her hooves, Moondancer barely manged a step before she collapsed face first into the loose sand with a muffled "whumph"!

"Wait, sand"? Moondancer thought as she spat out some of the offending grains.

As she dusted the remaining grit from her muzzle and favorite sweater, Moondancer became aware of the sound of waves lapping against the shore.

"OK" She thought, "Sand everywhere, the sound of waves and water, therefore I must be at a beach".

"Huh, I've never been to a beach before, today is just full of firsts isn't it"? Moondancer followed up bitterly as her eyes began to tear up.

"Though first time letting down my friends and possibly getting them hurt or worse definitely takes the cake".

Readjusting her glasses and wiping away the tears on the sleeve of her sweater, she took in the scenery around her with a heavy heart.

She was indeed sitting on a steep, rock-strewn beach about halfway up the shore from the water.

Above her, a tall, candle-like structure was framed against a star strewn night sky with a full moon rising in the east like a silver bit.

To her right was open ocean as the beach curved back towards the tall structure, and to her left was a similar story except for a spit of land in the distance across the water.

From the moment she face-planted in the sand, a small part of Moondancer's research oriented mind had been crunching the numbers and now that she was getting a good look at her surroundings, The million dollar question or rather, questions, came racing to the forefront.

"Why am I on a beach"?

"Where are my friends"?

"If that book had a portal spell of some kind on it, am I still in Equestria"?

"If it was a portal then shouldn't my friends have arrived with me"?

"What's that weird moaning sound"?

Moondancer would have gone on like this for some time, her mind analyzing and adding to an ever growing list of questions to answer when a movement on the shoreline above caught her eye.

A stooped, bipedal figure was silhouetted against the faint starlight next to the tall building.

While it vaguely resembled a minotaur with its bipedal stance, the similarities ended there.

Its' overall stature too small, being only about a head and a half taller than herself and it had no horns.

The creature's overall shape was oddly geometric and it was draped in tattered clothes.

But what really got to Moondancer was it's eyes.

The two glowing dots of primal red light that seemed to to stare into her very soul as the creature began to amble down the beach towards her.

Something deep in Moondancer's gut twinged uneasily as the creature closed the distance.

The way it's horrible, glowing eyes stayed locked on hers as it stumbled through the sand with it's arms raised and clawing the air.

Or the harsh, predatory, growls it made as it drew ever closer.

Then the smell hit her.

A wave of nausea swelled in Moondancer's stomach as she staggered backwards to the water's edge, the sickly aroma of rotten, diseased flesh assaulting her nostrils.

Any doubt she had about the horrid creature's intentions vanished as her ears flattened, pupils dilated, and gut instinct took over.

Moondancer bolted.

Sand flew as she galloped full tilt around the creature and up the hill towards the tall structure.

The creature turned in pursuit, letting out another angry snarl as Moondancer hurdled a fence at the top of the beach and made it to a doorway in the base of what she vaguely recognized to be a lighthouse.

"This must all be a really bad dream, " Moondancer thought, her mind grasping at straws while as she frantically searched the lighthouse's small interior for a place to hide. "Come on girl, time to wake up"!

There was a bed on the right, a small desk on the left, and a ladder on the far wall that stretched up into the darkness above.

"I just fell asleep while reading again and I'll wake up in the library any second now"!

Strewn across the bed was a tattered looking assortment of clothes and sitting in the corner of the desk was an old roll of tape.

A menacing growl from outside sent chills down her spine a Moondancer realized there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to go except up the ladder and into the darkness above.

But just as she put her hoof on the first rung of the ladder, a dull gleam caught her eye from beneath.

Lying at the foot of the ladder and partially covered by a layer of dust and dirt was a machete.

Moondancer glanced frantically between the blade and the ladder, her mind a sea of indecision.

The ladder meant safety from the terrible creature outside, but if it could climb, said safety would be short-lived and she would be trapped at the top of the lighthouse with nowhere to go.

On the other hoof, the machete was the tool of adventurers, slashing their way though the jungle like Daring Do.

Moondancer had spent her entire life in Canterlot and hadn't wielded anything more threatening than a hoof-ball bat.

"I was terrible at hoof-ball" Moondancer thought, with a small, sad chuckle. "But my friends didn't give up on me, even when I shut them out".

Another growl from outside galvanized her into action.

"My friends never gave up on me". Moondancer pushed her glasses up before gripping the machete's handle in her light pink magical aura and turned to face the doorway with a determined light in her eyes.

"And by Celestia's name, I'm not giving up on them either"!

Moondancer charged from the lighthouse, yelling at the top of her lungs with machete held before her like a lance as she turned to face the beast from Tartarus.

"Stay back, I'm not afraid of you"! Moondancer shouted at the monster at it shuffled towards her, terrible eyes aglow.

The creature snarled in response, and swiped at her with the flat, prism-like appendages at the end of it's arms.

Suddenly, there was another sharp growl from behind.

Moondancer screamed as searing pain shot up her right hind leg.

Another creature had crawled up from behind and bitten Moondancer just above the hoof.

Acting out of pure, adrenaline driven reflex, she swung the machete around and buried it in the creature's back before stumbling away.

A spray of gore flew up from the blade's impact with the creature and splattered across Moondancer as she hobbled towards the boundary fence above the beach, a trail of blood, slick and black in moonlight marking her progress.

Each step sent a terrible spike of agony driving up her leg, but the growls from behind drove her onwards.

Then she was at the fence.

"I tried"! Moondancer sobbed, "Oh Celestia I tried to be brave"!

Unable to climb the fence with her wound, and with the two ghouls closing in, Moondancer turned to face what would surely be her doom.

Suddenly, the lead ghoul pitched forward as something came whistling faintly out of the gloom to embed itself in the foul creature's square skull.

"THUNK"

Moondancer could only stare in shock as the hellish light in it's eyes died and the monster fell face-first into the grass with a sickening splat, an arrow protruding from the back of its head.

Then two sharp cracks echoed though the air and the second ghoul, which she realized to her horror still had the machete lodged in it's back, was knocked sideways as it's head exploded.

blood and bits of brain matter was splattered across the lighthouse lawn as a third figure appeared.

"Are you ok"? It called out.

As the shock of her sudden rescue wore of, Moondancer felt her last bit of remaining resolve melt at the sound of a friendly stallion's voice.

"Oh thank Celestia"! Moondancer called back, "These two terrible creature's attacked me and"...

The figure jogging towards her wasn't a pony.

It's body was shaped like the ghoul's, a collection of rectangular prisms for a body and a cube shaped head. The only difference was a single, bright, unblinking eye set in it's forehead instead of two glowing red ones.

"I guess you came to investigate the flash as well huh"? The creature said as it closed the distance between them.

"But it's the full moon, what where we thinking"!? It continued. "And that big thunderclap that went with the flash, it's drawing every zombie in Stratford up to the lighthouse. "Let me get you patched up and then we need to vamoose"!

With a protesting squelch, Moondancer yanked the machete from the monster's corpse and leveled it at the newcomer.

"What are you"! She demanded, trying hard to to keep her voice from shaking. She could now see that the bright eye on the creature's forehead was actually some kind of headlamp.

"Hey relax"! the newcomer exclaimed upon seeing the leveled weapon. "I just saved your skin, you could at least be a little"...

The rest of his rebuttal died in his throat as he got a proper look at Moondancer and the apparently hovering machete.

"What the heck are you"?

"The feeling is mutual, but I asked first". Moondancer retorted defensively.

"I'm a human, a man." The creature stated, though more to himself than to her as he rubbed his forehead with a block-y appendage.

"Whelp, I'm hallucinating", the human mumbled.

"jade berries must have an extra delayed effect when crushed because I could swear that you look like some kind of talking horse wielding a floating machete".

Moondancer was taken aback, both by the human's response as well as the fact that she had never heard of a human before, even with all her years of research.

This, coupled with the unfamiliar surroundings and recent traumatic events was the final nail in the coffin for her hope of still being somewhere in Equestria.

Realizing that the human was still staring at her. Moondancer quickly formulated a reply. "No you're not hallucinating, though I'm actually a unicorn".

"And I'm holding the machete with my magic, I mean, how else would I hold it, with my mouth"?

The human stared at her dumbfounded for a moment before replying.

"Alright"

"Wait what"? Now it was Moondancer's turn to be dumbfounded.

Tightening her magical grip on the machete, Moondancer voiced her concern.

"You think that I'm some kind of bad fruit induced hallucination and you're totally ok with that"?

The human was quiet for a moment longer before sighing heavily and giving a broken chuckle.

"When the dead won't stay dead, when your fellow man wont think twice about killing you over the last can of cola or the helmet on your head, and when you finally think you've found a reason to go on living only for it to get torn away from you, when that's the kind of life you live, a talking unicorn who can levitate objects with magic doesn't sound all that crazy now does it"?

"Who am I kidding, it sounds ridiculous"! He murmured under his breath. "But speaking of the dead"...

Moondancer was still trying to process his response when five more red eyed monsters, "zombies" the human had called them, crested the hill and began ambling towards them with savage snarls and groans. Two of them where faster than the rest, crawling forward on all fours like demented spiders with the sole intent of tearing man and pony to pieces.

"I'm probably going to regret this later when I get back home, turn to talk to you, realize I just wasted a perfectly good bandage on a hallucination". The creature stated as he turned back to face Moondancer. "But you said you where hurt, so let's get you patched up and outa here". "By the way, my name's Andrew, what's yours Ms. Unicorn Hallucination"?

In the bright light of the human's headlamp, Moondancer's wound looked even worse than it felt. The blood had yet to fully clot and gleamed dark red as it oozed down into the grass while staining her tan coat a rust color as it dried. "It's Moondancer" she replied with a grimace at the sight of the bite. To which the human snorted with amusement. "I'm hallucinating about a unicorn and her name is Moondancer, seems legit."

While she was reluctant to let Andrew touch her, the five approaching ghouls overrode Moondancer's conservative nature as the human seemingly produced a bandage from thin air and kneeled down to begin warping it around the bite on her leg.

However, the spider-like zombies had outpaced their fellows and where closing rapidly.

"Can you finish wrapping the bandage with your magic or something"? Andrew asked hurriedly and without waiting for a response, stood and turned on his heel at the same time while drawing a strange r shaped object from his waist.

As Moondancer fixed the end of the bandage in place, she watched the human take aim at the lead spider zombie with the device.

Suddenly there was a brief flash and a sharp crack, the same noise that had accompanied the timely demise of her second assailant.

The zombie crumpled, performing a somersault, it's block-y limbs flailing comically before lying still with a hole through it's skull.

Readjusting his aim, Andrew repeated the process and the second spider zombie met a similar fate.

One by one, he dropped the others like sacks of grain, all but the last.

When he took aim at the last remaining zombie there was only a small click from the device in his hands.

Cursing under his breath, Andrew turned back to Moondancer, tucking the device back into his belt. "Time to go, can you walk, or should I say trot"?

Moondancer slowly eased her weight back onto her injured hind-leg and found that the pain had been reduced to a dull throb with a slight burning sensation.

"i think I'll manage". She replied.

"Good" Andrew replied as he puled the arrow from the first zombie's head. "Don't worry about any burning or tingling you feel", I've got a vaccine back home that'll take care of the infection.

"But first we gotta get there".

A thousand and one questions buzzed around Moondancer's head, as Andrew led her down the hill from the lighthouse towards the northern shore where the beach leveled out. But before she could voice even one, the whole lot of them stuck in her throat as she beheld a scene from a nightmare.

Behind them was a river of glowing red eyes, each pair like some terrible jack-o-lantern floating in night. Stretching from the lighthouse on the hill to the town that was just barely visible behind a screen of trees at the bottom. Carried on the breeze was their hellish melody as they ambled towards the lighthouse, searching aimlessly for their prey.

Wrenching her eyes away from the sight, Moondancer broke into an awkward gallop despite her injury, desperate to regain the safety of the beam of cast by Andrew's headlamp.

Then human and pony where splashing into the surf, the headlamp illuminating a small, black watercraft that seemed to Moondancer like a cross between a bulky rowboat and a scooter bobbing gently on the waves.

Andrew pulled a red container from again; seemingly nowhere and opened a small hatch in the back of the vessel and emptying the container's contents into the hatch before straddling the vehicle and offering Moondancer a hand.

Once she was aboard, Andrew straddled the vehicle and it roared to life beneath them.

"The waves aren't to high, but I still want you to hold on tight" Andrew instructed. "Wouldn't want you falling in with your wound".

Andrew's headlamp illuminated the water ahead as he kept lookout for rocks and sandbars while Moondancer sat behind him with her hooves clasped awkwardly around his rectangular waist.

Despite the beehive of questions that Moondancer was desperate to unleash and the jolting ride across the waves, the shock of what had happened finally began to catch up with her and she could feel her eyelids drooping.

Just before she dozed off though. One of the more pressing questions bubbled its way to the surface.

"Where are we"!? Moondancer had to practically shout over the roar of the watercraft while gesturing to the land that was sliding by on on her left."What is this place called"!?

Andrew glanced back over his shoulder at the mare and grinned.

"Shouldn't you know already, i mean if you're my hallucination and everything"?

"Well what if I'm real and you're the hallucination"? Moondancer shot back.

Andrew laughed then. A brittle bark that was almost lost to the sound of the engine as he gestured to the land and surrounding water.

"Well then Moondancer, Welcome to Prince Edward Island, or as the locals used to call it, PEI".

Where the difference between what is real and what isn't becomes clear real quick.

Grilled Cheese

View Online

Chapter 3

The moon was hanging low in the sky and a faint tinge of pink dawn was already gracing the horizon when the black jet-ski and its two weary passengers nosed into the hidden waters of a small sea cave on the southern end of Prince Edward Island.

Andrew killed the engine and let the watercraft drift up to a rickety dock protruding from the rocky shore of the sea cave, his thoughts focused solely on the soft cot and warm stove that awaited him after the cold, wet, and bumpy, ride along the coast. It had been a warm winter by Canadian standards, but winter was still winter.

Something slumped forward in the back seat as he stood up to dismount, causing Andrew to recall his odd companion.

He tried to recall the details of his strange encounter with the unicorn, but the waves of exhaustion that seemed to sweep over him in time with the ones lapping at the dock supports where eating away at what little cognitive ability remained.

“Eh, sleep first, questions later”. Andrew mumbled to himself with a yawn as he put his hands underneath the forelegs of the sleeping unicorn mare and hoisted her from the jet-ski.

Straining under her weight, Andrew carried Moondancer along the dock towards the small cabin at the end like a child, with one hand supporting her back and the other hand under her rump to keep her from sliding out to his grasp.

He pushed the cabin’s door open with his foot, turned right, and then deposited Moondancer on the cot in the back.

In the light of his headlamp, Andrew got his first good look at the unicorn.

She had a soft tan coat that accentuated a three tone mane and tail of red, purple, and violet and said mane was done up with a little pink hair-tie. On her flank was what looked like a tattoo of three stars surrounding a crescent moon and resting crookedly on her muzzle was a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.

Her barrel rose and fell beneath a well worn looking black sweater with each quiet snore.

She actually looked kinda cute.

Still convinced that he was on a serious berry trip, Andrew shook his head as he removed Moondancer's glasses and placed them on the bed next to her.

"You've been on your own for far too long". He thought with a sigh.

Next, Andrew turned to a small electric stove in the corner across from the bed and fumbled with the dial to get it going.

Nothing happened.

Cursing under his breath, Andrew turned and went out back to check the generator.

A few kicks later, the generator coughed and fired up, filling the sea cave with it's hum.

Finally, Andrew went back inside and rummaged around a nearby crate till he came up with a tattered green sleeping bag, which he spread out on the floor next to the cot.

He was asleep before his head hit the fabric.

For the second time time in so many hours, Moondancer awoke in an unfamiliar place.

This time around though, she was greeted by a gentle warmth and a comforting hum instead of cold night air and ravenous monsters.

As she stretched out her hooves, she bumped her glasses and quickly caught them with her magic before putting them on with a yawn.

Moondancer opened her eyes and found herself staring up at the wooden ceiling of a small and cramped, but nevertheless homely cabin.

At the foot of her cot was a planter with an assortment of veggies growing in the moist soil, behind her was a stack of crates with various odds and ends poking out of them, and to her right was a large bookshelf tucked in-between the stack of crates and the door-frame. To the left of the door was another crate and a refrigerator. A small stove that was giving of the warmth she felt sat at the far end of the cabin between the wall and an open, metal-shuttered window that looked out onto the ocean.

Moondancer slowly eased herself of the cot and tested her injured leg.

It was still sore and sporting a bandage while the tingling sensation had spread to the rest of her leg, though just as she wondered whether that was bad or not, she spotted an orange bottle of pills and a note sitting on top the crate near the door.

"Morning, If you're reading this, then I guess you're real and I really did rescue an honest to goodness unicorn last night". "Whatever the case, these pills are a powerful antibiotic that should get rid of the infection from your bite". "I went out to check the rain barrels and I'll be back soon". Andrew.
P.S, there's juice in the fridge to swallow the pills with.

Grabbing the bottle with her magic, Moondancer tugged open the fridge and was greeted by a cloud of cold, fishy-smelling air.

There where around a dozen fish fillets in the fridge along with several veggies, blocks of cheese, and assorted drinks.

Moondancer gagged. She had read about the griffon fish markets before but had never had the pleasure of visiting and now she could only imagine what their un-refrigerated, open air environment would smell like.

She quickly snagged an apple juice box with her magic and shut the fridge.

Andrew was an omnivore, that much Moondancer knew, but to what extent?

"I guess we'll just wait and see" she thought with a small amount of trepidation.

Moondancer spotted something she hadn't noticed earlier as she downed the pills and sipped the apple juice.

Resting on a wall rack above the cot was a rifle.

It looked different from the makeshift rifle that Lemonhearts had shown to her in the book back before everything had gone so horribly wrong.

It was thinner for one and the barrel was a silvery grey instead of black, plus it had what looked like a little telescope of the same color mounted on top.

At the thought of her friends though, Moondancer could feel the hot tears brimming and her throat choking up, but if they where still alive, wherever they where, then crying wasn't going to help.

She resolved to ask Andrew for any help that he could offer when he returned and went to lift the rifle from the rack with her magic.

Any closer inspection of the weapon was forestalled however as the sound of someone treading water reached her ears.

Moondancer pushed the metal door open with a hoof and set the empty juice box on the crate before heading outside. She received a bit of a shock when she realized that the cabin was inside a cave who's walls she hadn't been able to see from the window.

A short jetty ran from the door of the hut and out into the water with Andrew's jet-ski bobbing gently on the swells at the end.

The only way in or out of the cave was by water, and hence the sound Moondancer heard was indeed someone swimming from the cave entrance up to the dock.

Andrew pulled himself from the water and on to the dock with a look of genuine surprise on his face and a pair of green canteens slung over his shoulder.

"Well would you look at this, Ms. Unicorn Hallucination is up and about already"! "Did you sleep well"?

When Andrew saved her at the lighthouse, he had simply been a dark figure in the night with a glowing headlamp.

Now in the daylight that poured through the cave entrance, Moondancer could get a proper look at her rescuer.

She was so taken aback however, that all she could manage in response was an absent, "Fine, thanks".

Andrew the human was the strangest creature she had ever seen.

His entire body was a rich brown in color and seemed to be composed of flexible rectangular prisms that bent and contorted as he moved his block-y limbs.

He only had a small clump of black hair, or what Moondancer assumed to be hair on his head and as far as she could tell, Andrew was completely naked except for a pair of green cargo shorts around his waist.

His arms ended in stumps like primitive hooves that while they lacked a prehensile appendage of any kind could still grip the canteens he was carrying with ease.

His face was the only thing that was familiar, two deep brown eyes, a nose, and a mouth that now bore a quizzical frown at Moondancer's stare.

"You ok there"? Andrew asked

"How can you...Why is your...What!? Moondancer stuttered as her mind, educated as it was, tried and failed to make sense of Andrew's mind-bending anatomy.

"I can see you might have a few questions" Said Andrew to which Moondancer could only nod.

"Well as you said last night, the feeling is mutual", Andrew said with a grin, "but let me get changed and then we can talk while I cook up some breakfast, that sound good"?

At the mention of breakfast, Moondancer's stomach let out a loud gurgle that widened Andrew's grin and for the first time since her arrival in this strange, new world, Moondancer smiled.

"Breakfast sounds gr..." Moondancer started as she trotted alongside Andrew to the door when she suddenly remembered what she had found in the fridge.

"Do you eat ponies Andrew"? Moondancer said as she dropped back and adopted a defensive stance.

Andrew had been halfway through the door of the cottage when she asked and he turned back to look at her with a reassuring smile.

"No I don't, and humans may be omnivores but we would never eat anything sentient.

"(although with things the way they are nowadays, I'm not so sure)" He though morbidly.

Andrew needed to broach his next point carefully, but he knew that the issue would crop up eventually so better now than later.

"We do hunt". He continued and at this Moondancer visibly stiffened. "I don't personally, but humans in general would never harm another sentient being, especially one as mythical as you.

Moondancer gave Andrew a confused look."Mythical"?

"Unicorns are creatures of legend in our world, featured in fairy tails and fantasy stories". Andrew replied. "That's why I thought you weren't real last night and I'm still having a hard time believing my eyes.

Despite his words, Moondancer still hung back outside the door and voiced one of the major questions that had been literally biting at her since her arrival.

"What about those red-eyed monsters last night? Moondancer asked with a bit of fear at the memory."They looked an awful lot like humans".

As they conversed, Andrew had changed out his cargo shorts and was now fully garbed in a pair of hiking boots, cargo pants, a black parka, and was sporting a red bandanna around his neck.

Realizing that Moondancer wasn't coming in till she was satisfied, Andrew pulled a frying pan from the crate near the door and placed it on the stove top before heading back outside with a sigh.

"They used to be"... Andrew began. "Those...those "things" out there where all once human".

"But not anymore, all that's left are emotionless, empty husks with a singular, primal motive".

"Kill"

Moondancer stared at Andrew's face, his block-y features contorted by memories of fear and loss.

"They're dead". Andrew continued, "gone for the eternal sleep and yet somehow a walking nightmare".

"I've heard a few different names for them since the world went to hell about six months ago".

"Walkers, biters, growlers, zeds"...

"I just call them zombies, the living dead".

Moondancer stood shocked in front of the door, still trying to wrap her head around the gruesome information Andrew had just imparted.

It would explain the horrible odor of rot and decay that Moondancer had smelled when she encountered that first zombie the night before. It's body was decaying and yet something was still keeping it "alive".

Equestrian sci-fi and fantasy writers would occasionally make a novel or comic featuring the living dead, but it was magically, and even more importantly to her, scientifically impossible for something to be both alive and dead at the same time.

"How did"... Moondancer began but Andrew cut her off.

"I don't know"..., "and I doubt there where many who did and are still around to to tell the tale".

"Of course there where the rumors". Andrew said wistfully.

"Aliens from outer space, A bio-weapons project gone wrong". Andrew shook his head. "Like something out of a B rated sci-fi horror flick".

Andrew suddenly perked up and his smile returned as he suddenly switched the topic. "hey how does grilled cheese sound to you"?

"Whaa..."? Moondancer blinked incredulously. After all that doom and gloom Andrew was thinking of food?

Moondancer's stomach however was in full agreement with Andrew and let out another growl to voice its consent.

"Sounds good to me". Moondancer said with a resigned smile before trotting through the door behind Andrew.

As Andrew put the sandwiches together and got them grilling on the stove, Moondancer began browsing the titles on bookshelf by the door.

"The Language of Literature, grades 6-8" Moondancer read aloud.

"Ah yes, not sure why I still have that". Andrew responded over the sizzling of melting cheese and oil. "It's not like the schools will be re-opening any time soon.

At the mention of academics, Moondancer's interest was piqued.

"You where a student"?

"Yup", Andrew replied as he flipped the sandwiches over. I was working towards my teaching degree at UBC in Vancouver after majoring in English and creative writing". "I took an internship here on PEI at Stratford Middle School at the start of last year's fall semester as an assistant teacher for Language Arts".

"I'd only been on the job for about two weeks before all hell broke lose".

"First social media exploded with wild rumors and horror stories about some kind of epidemic in the north western United States".

" Then the government began issuing warnings over the T.V and radio to stay home and limit your contact with others".

"Then there where the refugees, only a trickle at first and then a veritable flood as states and provinces where overrun".

"Even the great military might of the U.S couldn't stop them all. Airports and harbors where like petri-dishes spreading the infection across the globe at an unstoppable rate. Couple that with the fact that when you got infected it took about two days to fully turn and It was no wonder so many infected got into the safe zones.

"Safe-zones like PEI".

At that, Andrew fell silent as he turned off the stove and flipped the two sandwiches onto a plate.

Moondancer had listened to Andrew's tale with a slowly sickening heart. An unknown epidemic had swept throughout his world and had turned life into a living nightmare for survivors, but it wasn't just for humanity that she was distraught.

If she was here, then odds where that her three friends where also somewhere out there and she could only imagine what they must be going through if last night and what Andrew had told her now was any indication.

What where the chances that they would meet a human like Andrew?

What if they had arrived like she had,

Cold

Alone

Afraid

and instead of a friendly human coming to their rescue, they where met by a swarm of red-eyed zombies?

They might not have even made it through the night.

The thought proved to much for her to bear, and a chocked sob escaped her throat.

"It's all my fault" she sobbed into her hooves, oh girls, what have I done"!

For a moment, Andrew stood there awkwardly with a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches in one hand and a unicorn mare sobbing her heart out on the floor.

Mythical creature or not, she was in need of comfort and Andrew's social graces though rusty after months of solitude finally kicked in.

Setting the plate on the bed, he sat down on the floor next to Moondancer and put one of his block-y arms around her shoulders.

"I'm so sorry Moondancer, I've lost people close to me as well".

"My mother returned home to Jamaica when she retired from the medical field and last I heard, the island became a refugee center and was subsequently overrun".

"My father loved his job at Scorpion Seven Bio Solutions to much to retire. Last I heard, he was in Washington State working on a big project of some kind along with my younger brother who was in high-school". "Seattle fell before Christmas".

"I tried calling them but all the the lines where always busy, then the power stations began to shut down and without electricity, all phones and their corresponding cell services where dead within a week".

"All the airports where closed and the roads where jammed, I couldn't do a thing".

"By the time I plucked up the courage to try and leave on foot, it was too late. The Canadian army blew up Confederation Bridge in an attempt to stem the tide, and every boat on the island had either already left, was out of gas, or had gone to the bottom".

"I felt awful, I hadn't been able to save my family or even say goodbye".

"But if there is one thing I can take away from it all is that my family's values live on in me.

"My mother always told me to always stay positive, no matter what the weather. if I didn't, I probably wouldn't have lasted so long on my own".

"My father always told me to never give up, and despite all this god-forsaken world has to offer I haven't stop trying yet.

As Andrew spoke, Moondancer's sobs had lessened until it was just the occasional sniffle.

When she looked up from her hooves, Moondancer found Andrew giving her a hopeful smile.

"Lets try taking my parent's advice shall we"? Andrew said. "Stay positive and never give up hope,"! "Who knows, there is always a chance that your friends and even my family may still be alive".

Faced with his optimism, Moondancer couldn't help but return Andrew's smile as he pulled her into a side hug before standing up.

"How about we eat on the dock"? Andrew suggested as he picked up the plate of sandwiches and offered Moondancer a hand. "and maybe you can tell me a little more about yourself so we can start figuring out how to find your friends".

"Equestria sounds fascinating"! Said Andrew as he and Moondancer finished of their grilled cheese. "But let's get what happened just prior to your arrival here straight".

"You and your friends Twinkleshine, Lemonhearts, and Moondancer, all used a spell to transport yourselves into a book called the Unturned Survival Guide and then the book sent you here"?

"More or less". Moondancer replied. "Though I sensed that the book had an odd magic aura about it when I first picked it up, but nothing of the strength that would be required for an inter-dimensional portal spell".

"hmm, well I can't claim to know much about magic". Andrew mused. "You said it takes a lot of power to create a portal spell right"?

Moondancer furrowed her eyebrows as she did the calculations in her head.

"If the Equestrian measurement for energy is roughly the same as the human one you described to me, I'd say the magical energy needed is equivalent to about 1.21 gigawatts, why"?

"Well the whole reason I was at the lighthouse last night was because of a bright flash and a loud bang". Andrew replied. " I was on my way back from a gas run in Stratford when it happened and I thought lightning had struck the lighthouse or a bomb had gone off".

"Wait, did you say 1.21 gigawatts"?

"Yes, around about that". Moondancer replied. "Why are you laughing"?

"Oh no reason". Said Andrew between chuckles. "Looks like Doc was right after all".

"Anyway, getting back on track, I'm almost certain it was a portal spell that brought you here as the amount of energy needed to create a portal would have had to dissipate somehow, hence the explosion".

"But how could somepony hide a spell that powerful"? Moondancer protested.

"I'm not sure". Andrew replied as he stood up and took the empty plate back inside. "But now that that we know that you most likely arrived in this world flash-bang style, I think I might have a lead on where your friends are".

"What, how"!? " Cried Moondancer excitedly as she trotted back into the cabin where Andrew was now rummaging around around one of the crates behind the cot..

Andrew found what he was looking for and pulled one blue and one red vest out of the crate as he replied. "Well you see last night, I wasn't looking at the lighthouse when I was high-tailing it out of Stratford". "I was looking out to sea and thus I saw both the reflection of what must have been your portal at the lighthouse, and a fainter reflection from behind the hills to the east.

It only took Moondancer a few seconds to realize what Andrew's chance observation meant.

"There was another portal"! Moondancer cried happily as her heart leaped with sudden hope.

Andrew smiled at her as he put on the blue vest and zipped it up before pulling various items from the crates and putting them in the vest pockets or loading them into an open red day-pack at his feet. "that's what I hope is the case".

"How do I get there"? Moondancer asked impatiently. "Every second that we waste could be a second to late"!

"I understand how you feel Moondancer, believe me I do". Andrew replied with compassion. " however, you can't just go charging out there with no weapons or armor, you would be of no help to anyone dead".

She knew he was right, but that didn't stop Moondancer from fidgeting as Andrew tried to fit the red vest over her frame and old black sweater.

"What's this vest for again"? Moondancer asked.

"Protection." Andrew replied. "Against zombies, and to a greater extent, bullets".

"I'm not the only one still clinging to life around here, there are others, some of which have more firepower and a meaner disposition than I that would take pot-shots if they got the chance".

"I'd rather be safe than sorry".

Moondancer looked at the rifle that hung above the cot and imagined what it would be like to be hit with a bullet.

Despite the discomfort of wearing armor made for the oddly geometric humans, the gruesome description that Andrew had provided of what a bullet did to your insides was enough to make Moondancer want to never take it off.

Andrew then zipped up the red day-pack and put it on his back before turning to face Moondancer and producing a map of the PEI from thin air.

"How do you do that"? Moondancer asked incredulously. "You said humans didn't have magic".

"Well not magic like yours", Andrew replied. "I wouldn't even go so far as to call this magic, but more of a weird phenomena".

"Somehow, all the survivors I've talked to in the past few months including myself have the ability to pull whatever items we want from our pockets or bags without opening them".

"No one knows why or how it happened though most think it has to do with radiation or something like that, but it sure comes in handy when you are in a bit of a jam and want something without having to reach for it".

With the appearing items "trick" explained, Andrew then spread the map on the floor of the cot and gave Moondancer her second aerial look at PEI.

"I've seen this map before"! Moondancer exclaimed. "it was in The Unturned Survival Guide"!

"Now that's odd". Andrew said while scratching his head. "Why would an Equestrian book have a map of Prince Edward Island"?

"Though I guess it might have something to do with why the portal sent you here".

Moondancer shrugged and wondered the same as Andrew took a stick in his right appendage and pointed out where he estimated the second portal would have been.

"Right here, just outside Summerside military base on the north-western side of the map and just to the north of Confederation Bridge".

"We're here, underneath this hill on the southern end of PEI".

"It's quite a hike so we'll leave now, however we won't want to go near the town of Alberton or the base until nightfall because they're bound to be popular areas for other survivors scavenging for supplies".

"We'll take the jet-ski around the far side of Holman isle and do a bit of scavenging ourselves to see if we can find you a gun". "When the sun sets, then we'll set of for Summerside".

Moondancer nodded in agreement. "You know this place better than I do".

With that, the map disappeared back into wherever Andrew kept it as he reached up and took the rifle down from its wall rack.

Pulling back the bolt, he checked that it was loaded and that the safety was on

Slinging the weapon over his shoulder, he opened the door for Moondancer and the pair headed down the dock to the jet-ski.

Like the time before, Moondancer sat behind Andrew with her hooves clasped around his oddly shaped waist and as he gunned the engine, he turned to look over his shoulder at Moondancer with a determined light in his eyes.

"Let's go find your friends"!

The afternoon sun shone down on the cold waters of PEI as the black jet-ski and its two passengers motored out of the sea cave and turned west towards Holman Isle.

Death Rides a Pretty Pink and White Unicorn

View Online

Chapter 4

The night air above Summerside Military Base shimmered as a massive portal shrieked into existence, spewing arcs of magical, otherworldly energy onto the concrete below.

Dozens of zombies that had the misfortune of being directly beneath the portal or became attracted to its howl from nearby were instantly vaporized by a blast of magical lightning as a small, equine figure fell flailing and screaming from the vortex and face-planted in a pile of singed clothing.

Twinkleshine awoke to the dying light of the portal, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. The smell of burning fabric and melted Kevlar pricked her nostrils as she pushed herself up, body bruised and head spinning.

“Celestia save me” … Twinkleshine thought groggily as she made it to her hooves.

As her mind began to clear, the events that led up to her rather ungraceful landing began to swirl up from the depths.

Each memory was like a far-flung puzzle piece that had to be pulled from the deep and re-oriented before being added to the big picture.

As the picture grew clearer and clearer, however, Twinkleshine liked what she saw less and less.

The strange guidebook in the Canterlot Library.

Moondancer’s spell.

That horrible glowing maw.

Twinkleshine’s stomach churned. Something had gone horribly wrong with Moondancer’s spell and now she was…

“Where am I”?

She tried to bury her rising anxiety as she forced her disoriented brain into gear and looked around.

A brilliant full moon shone down on the surrounding land, illuminating rolling green hills studded with trees that formed a bowl around where she now stood.

Closer in, tall gray walls stood between her and the inviting hills, creating what Twinkleshine figured was some kind of compound.

To her left and right where several low buildings. The two on her right reminded Twinkleshine of the Royal Guard Barracks outside Canterlot and if this was a similar place, then the two buildings on her left could well be the armories.

In each of the four corners was what looked like a silvery-grey watchtower.

“So a Royal Guard outpost then”? She mused. “Why would that strange little book send me here”?

"and where are the others"? she wondered.

Twinkleshine had heard of things like this before. Gag books with a spell on them that would teleport the reader to some pre-set location or even into the story itself. They were popular as prank items for surprise birthdays and the like.

In fact, there was a store in Canterlot that sold comic books like that. Perhaps one of their gag books had ended up in the library somehow.

“But why a guard outpost”? Twinkleshine wondered.

Without any answers, she returned to looking around for any clues to why, and more importantly it occurred to her, where.

At the far end of the compound, a tunnel led underneath the hills and out beyond them to where Twinkleshine could make out just a hint of water flickering in the moonlight.

Behind her, there was a gaping hole in the gray wall where a large tracked vehicle that reminded Twinkleshine of a construction crane had presumably smashed through before rolling on its side.

Between Twinkleshine and the strange vehicle, however, a massive figure stood with its back to her.

It was the same size, if not slightly larger than a Minotaur and it certainly had a similar albeit somewhat blockier shape and build.

Twinkleshine considered calling out to it but a nagging feeling in the back of her mind made her hesitate.

She was about to approach the creature instead when she noticed nearly a dozen smaller creatures with similar Minotaur-like builds standing around the bigger one.

Of those, nearly half were facing her and for the first time, Twinkleshine became keenly aware of two things.

One, over the sound of crickets and the soft breeze that ruffled her coat, a chorus of low, eerie moans and snarls were emanating from not just the creatures behind her, but from all around the compound.

And second, the eyes of every creature facing Twinkleshine glowed a terrible, maleficent red.

One creature in particular, seemed to be staring straight at her from the far side of barracks, its horrid eyes boring into Twinkleshine’s as her blood ran cold with a rising sense of terror.

Surrounding her, all over the compound and dotting the hills that had once seemed so peaceful, twin pinpricks of evil red light seemed to stare back in a way that was both listless and somehow predatory all at once.

The anxiety that Twinkleshine had buried deep within turned to outright terror and came racing up to her throat as she stumbled back with a choked whimper of fear only to trip on the tatted remnants of a charred uniform.

There was a harsh growl from behind.

Twinkleshine’s blood froze and with and an overwhelming sense of dread, she slowly turned to look through the dark, gaping doorway of the nearest armory.

Out of the murky gloom, a pair of terrible, red globes glared back at her.

With a strangled cry, Twinkleshine spun and tried to gallop away from the horror in the dark.

Instead, she tripped again with her legs thoroughly tangled in the charred uniform.

Heart hammering in her ears, she finally freed herself from the offending garment with a frantic kick as the creature emerged from the armory.

Its eyes ablaze, the creature clawed its way towards Twinkleshine and as she stood frozen in morbid fascination.

The creature wasn’t a minotaur. In fact, Twinkleshine realized, whatever it had been, it wasn’t one anymore.

Zombies were a thing of sci-fi horror and Twinkleshine wasn’t a fan of either genre.

Unfortunately for Twinkleshine, her friend Minuette adored both.

Many a sleepover with the girls had seen Twinkleshine cowering under the blankets while Minuette told tales of ghouls, ghosts, and zombies.
Zombies…

The red eyed creature before Twinkleshine couldn’t be anything else.

It’s terrible growls and moans, the rotting flesh poking out from holes in its tattered uniform and hanging from its blocky yet emancipated frame, its movements, jerky and listless yet driven by a singular hunger for flesh.

But this one wasn’t tucked away in whatever part of Minuette’s mind it was that held her grizzly stories.

This one was here and now.

Twinkleshine’s pupils dilated to pinpricks as she shrieked in terror at the realization, just as she remembered how in all of Minuette’s stories that the screaming pony was always the dead pony.

Her scream became a choked gurgle as she backpedaled away from the crawler, wishing to Celestia that she could take it back.

But the damage was done.

Twinkleshine felt what little hope she had wither and die as all around her, a chorus of menacing growls and moans answered her cry.

Like ants to a dead animal, dozens of terrible red eyes began to close in around her.

With her heart in her throat and her mind descended into a haze of panic, Twinkleshine had a moment of clarity.

When Minuette finished one of her stories, she would sometimes end by saying; “You don’t have to be the fastest galloper, you just have to be faster than the other pony”.

And gallop Twinkleshine did, faster than she had ever gone before.

The walls of the compound became a blur as her vision narrowed to focus solely on the tunnel at the far end, beyond which the moonlight glinted invitingly off the water beyond.

If she could just make it to the water, all would be well.

“Can zombies swim”? Twinkleshine banished the thought before it could cement itself and galloped even faster.

She would look for a landmark, and if need be, flat out gallop all the way to Canterlot.

Then she was at the gate and there was a guttural snarl to her left.

A zombie on all fours lunged at her, and with an agility that surprised her even under the circumstances, Twinkleshine spun on her forelegs and bucked it in the head.

The zombie’s head exploded on contact with her hooves with a sickening squelch before the rest of the body dropped like a sack of rocks.

Her stomach churned at the feel of zombie brains coating her hind legs, but she was so close.

A sudden burst of confidence came to her at the sight of one of her demons splattered across the concrete.

“I might just make it”! Twinkleshine thought as the moonlight beckoned from the end of the tunnel like a ray of hope.

Suddenly, there was a piercing growl from directly in front of her and Twinkleshine stumbled back just as a zombie materialized out of thin air to swipe just inches from her muzzle with its flat, blocky, appendages.

“What in Tartarus”!? Twinkleshine yelped at the zombie that had appeared before her in as much indignation as fright.

“Zombies don’t have magic”! She whimpered at the Flanker as it vanished and came at her again with only an ethereal purple outline, blazing eyes, and moaning cry to betray its presence.

Whatever confidence she had gained melted away at this new threat and with more zombies closing from the front and rear as well as from both flanks along the outside of the wall, her only choice was to turn and run right back into the compound.

Twinkleshine was trapped, the zombies had encircled her and now the only way to go was into a corner beneath one of the metal watchtowers.

Exhausted, she bolted to the ladder and began hauling herself up with muscles that now felt like lead as the adrenaline from her dash to the gate drained away and the all-consuming panic returned.

The growls of her assailants gave Twinkleshine the strength to haul herself over the lip of the hatch and into the tower before collapsing in a heap.

There was nowhere left to go.

Suddenly, she heard a sharp click, like a heavy latch opening and closing and when Twinkleshine looked up she was blinded by a hard, white light.

Life had been going rather well for Sergeant Jack Winds, Or as well as one’s life could be going during a zombie apocalypse.

His zombie-proof elevated bridge between Summerside military base and the nearest town had been coming along nicely, He had secured more ammunition from the base’s armory, and on his way back from the bridge project, he had found some wild berries to compliment his MRE lunch.

But then he had to go and push his luck.

In an effort to further deprive the Beret Gang of whatever hardware was left at Summerside, Jack had gone back to the armory to check some of the unopened storage lockers in the back.

The Beret gang was a mixed group of convicts and Canadian army deserters who had taken over O’Leary prison in the chaos of the outbreak.

Their territory stretched all the way from the lighthouse at Cape Rock to the southern outskirts of Alberton and they backed up their claim with the firepower of Summerside’s looted arsenal.

Bullets, however, are a finite resource.

In the Beret Gang’s attempts to wrest control of PEI’s eastern side from rival gangs, they were in constant need of more ammunition. Thus they kept coming back to Summerside to scrounge for whatever they had missed the last time.

Though on his part, Jack did not make things easy for them.

As a proud member of the Canadian military (and to his knowledge last surviving member and ergo highest ranking officer) of the 37th Royal Canadian Engineers Regiment, it was up to him to defend what was left.

A Claymore behind the door frame here, a landmine or two in front of the boom gate there, retreat to a safe distance, and watch the fireworks.

But the Beret Gang was getting tired of losing limbs and they were starting to play it safer.

Jack had been halfway between the barracks and the armory when the sniper spotted him.

He had been moving slowly as to avoid attracting the zombies still scattered around the base and had been caught out in the open when the first shot rang out.

The powerful, high-caliber round had smashed into the upper left half of his Kevlar vest, driving the wind from his lungs before plowing into his shoulder blade.

His first thought was pain, blinding, excruciating, all-consuming pain.

So was the second.

His third thought, however, was centered more on the sincere wish to never experience such a feeling again.

In accordance with that thought, Jack had hauled ass back towards the watchtower with his bridge, clutching his now useless left arm with his right and zig-zagging all the way in order to throw off the sniper’s aim.

So yes, life had been going rather well for Sergeant Jack Winds, up until he found himself trapped in a guard tower without even a rag to stop the bleeding and a great, gaping divide smashed in his escape bridge.

It would seem that the Beret Gang had finally decided to put him down for good.

What irked Jack the most, however, wasn’t the fact that he had been shot. He had come to terms with the harsh reality of the apocalypse a long time ago.

It was the simple fact that thanks to his good mood from lunch, he had overlooked the importance of returning to his base and restocking on supplies before heading out again.

Supplies like bandages, or extra food or that matter.

Jack could just see the camouflaged roof of his homestead above the hills and gave a sad chuckle.

"so close and yet so far away".

How long Jack lay there in the tower he couldn’t say.

It had been just after lunch when things went pear shaped and shortly after discovering the Beret Gang’s “modifications” to his bridge, Jack had passed out from the pain.

When he came to, the full moon was high in the sky and he felt drained, both mentally and physically.

Not only had he had nothing to eat or drink since lunch, but he was still losing blood.

Jack watched his life bloom in rust colored shades from his shattered shoulder and ooze down his vest to pool on the hard metal floor.

“So this is it then”? He mused with a sudden sense of sadness at the finality.

“I’m going to die”.

“Not by zombies, succumbing to the infection after a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds”.

“Nor even by an enemy bullet”.

“But by my own momentary flippancy”.

With a weary smile, Jack took in the beauty of the night sky for what he figured was the last time before closing his eyes.

Suddenly, a blood curdling half scream, half whinny pierced the darkness.

For a moment, Jack almost believed it was Death on his pale horse before he shifted and the stabbing pain in his shoulder brought him jolting back to the land of the living.

Propping himself up on his good arm, Jack could just make out what was happening in the darkness beyond the tower windows.

The undead were in the midst of their full moon craze as they chased a shadowy figure towards the front gates.

After a scuffle near the tunnel, the commotion grew in volume as whoever was being pursued turned and made a b-line for his tower.

“Got to hand it hand it to the Beret Gang”, Jack thought with a sigh. “They never leave a job unfinished”.

“Though they must think I’m dead of they sent a new, unarmed recruit”.

Cursing under his breath with each movement, Jack managed to pull his Mapplestrike assault rifle from the Alice pack leaning against the wall beside him with only his right arm.

“Let’s prove them wrong”. He thought grimly.

The shadowy figure hauled itself over the lip of the hatch and collapsed as Jack gripped the gun barrel between his legs, pulled the charging handle and activated the tactical light before propping the gun up on his kneecap.

“Let a guy die in peace will you”…

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire, ” Thought a resigned and utterly spent Twinkleshine.

“I don't even know what happened to my friends”.

"I didn't even get to say goodbye"...

The undead remains of the Canadian army swarmed beneath the tower, their growls and moans filling the night as Twinkleshine screwed her eyes shut, tears of fear and remorse streaming down her cheeks.

She covered her head with her hooves against the piercing light and waited for the end.

It never came.

Twinkleshine slowly uncovered her head and cracked an eyelid in anticipation of the glaring light.

What she saw instead caused her to open both eyes wide with fright.

Sitting slumped against the wall of the tower was what at first glance appeared to be another zombie.

It was bleeding heavily from its blocky left shoulder and wore a slack-jawed if somewhat stupefied expression that was partially hidden by a full beard and mustache.

his eyes weren’t glowing, though, and his skin though pale, still retained some color.

“Zombies were once living creatures”, a small part of Twinkleshine’s mind provided.

“This must be what all those monsters outside once looked like”.

Indeed the creature before her was similarly clad. he was wearing the same green military fatigues and sported a thick Kevlar vest like its undead counterparts still howling away beneath them.

The only discrepancy was that instead of a green military helmet, the creature wore what appeared to be a yellow construction helmet.

Another Minuette horror fact occurred to Twinkleshine which brought the fear that her momentary curiosity pushed aside racing back.

“Zombies are created when they bite a living creature or become infected”.

Looking back at the wound on the creature’s shoulder, Twinkleshine felt her stomach churn.

Whatever this minotaur-esque creature was, it didn’t have long.

And when that happened, neither would she.

Jack stared uncomprehendingly at the impossible creature before him.

The army had trained him to be ready for anything come hell or high water.

But what the tactical light on his gun illuminated was not in any training manual.

In fact, he suspected it wouldn’t be in any book that wasn’t in the section for ages six and under.

Lying on the floor in the beam of the tactical light was a unicorn.

Not just any unicorn thought, a gleaming white creature with a bubblegum pink mane, brilliant sky blue eyes, and pearly white horn protruding from its forehead.

It struck Jack as odd that the unicorn didn’t quite conform to equine proportions.

Though to be fair they were a creature of legend and fairy tales so how should anyone know what one really looked like?

The most noticeable feature besides the horn was the eyes.

Proportionally to the rest of its body, the unicorn’s eyes were massive, and the depth they held was uncannily human. They stared at Jack with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

Jack stared back for a moment more before the absurdity of the situation hit him.

It started as a small chuckle in his stomach that by the time it had worked its way up to his throat was a fully fledged guffaw.

"Death rides a pretty pink Unicorn!" Jack laughed, as he addressed the unicorn through tears of mirth, "Have you come to take me to cotton candy hell"?

Twinkleshine wasn't sure what to make of the minotaur-esque creature. All she could tell was that judging by the tone of its voice and facial hair that it was male. The Creature's laughing and what had it said about Death and Unicorns had put her on edge again, but she could see how every movement he made was jarring the wound and causing him the grimace through his mirth.

"Are you ok?" she inquired but of instinct before realizing what a silly question that was.

For a moment Jack could have sworn the Unicorn had just asked whether he was ok or not.

This sent another wave of mirth washing over him and another series of jarring stabs down from his wounded shoulder.

"I've been SHOT!" he replied between breaths. "Do I look ok"?

"Shot?" Twinkleshine asked, "like by a weapon of some kind?"

"Yes a weapon, and a big one at that"! Jack replied before a sudden thought struck him.

"does Death's unicorn have a name?" He wondered aloud.

There was a moment of silence before the Unicorn answered in a small,frightened, feminine voice.

"Twinkleshine".

Jack was silent for a moment longer before he burst out laughing a third time, the sound of his mirth aggravating the swarm of undead beneath the tower to no end.

"It's too much," Jack thought as tears ran down his cheeks. "The pale horse of Death is actually a little pink and white Unicorn mare named Twinkleshine"!?

"I guess since we're doing this, I should introduce myself". Jack thought as he shook his head in mirth.

"Sergent Jack Winds aka Stormy, 37th Royal Canadian Engineers, reporting for death"!

"Who would have thought dying was going to be this entertaining?"

Despite Jack's confusing laughter and the rather awkward situation on a whole, Twinkleshine felt a small wave of relief wash over her. he was injured but hadn't been bitten.

Jack's introduction also confirmed Twinkleshine's hunch that the compound of horrors around them was or at least had once been a military base. Though her hope's of being near Canterlot or even in Equestria anymore were beginning to slip. She had never seen a creature like Jack before nor did she have any idea what a Canadian was.

"Perhaps that's what kind of creature Jack is". Twinkleshine mused.

Meanwhile, Jack's fit of mirth had re-opened the gaping wound on his shoulder and his blood was once more pooling on the tower floor.

The blood loss was starting to get to him.

"Listen," Jack slurred to Twinkleshine as he began to see double." Are we going soon, cause I'm not feeling too hot and I'm ready to get this over with."

Twinkleshine still couldn't quite figure out what the Jack was talking about. Where did he want to go, why was she so funny to him? None of it made sense.

The one thing she did understand, however, was that he was dying.

Casting aside any remaining shreds of reservation, Twinkleshine got up and trotted over to Jack who was now slumping back against the wall and murmuring to himself in a semi-conscious state.

"How can I help"? Twinkleshine said while giving him the most comforting look she could.

She knew a bit of first aid and failing that, she would make Jack as comfortable as she could, keep an eye on him, and hopefully, by the morning the nightmare howling away beneath the tower would have vanished with the sun's first rays.

Or even better yet, this whole ordeal would turn out to be a dream and she would wake up in Canterlot Libray, surrounded by her friends.

As she approached to get a closer look at Jack's shoulder, however, something he was mumbling caught her attention.

"Medkit was right there"...

"Stupid, stupid, stupid"...

"should have been paying attention"...

"So close and yet so far"...

The words "medkit" and "close" sparked a sudden hope in Twinkleshine.

If there where medical supplies nearby, perhaps she could save Jack.

A quick inspection of the tower and the heavy alicepack leaning against the wall yielded no sign of any medical supplies and with that, Twinkleshine's hope died faster than Jack was.

Beneath the tower, the moans of dozens of undead soldiers reminded her that even if all the medical supplies in Equestria where just below her, there would have been no way to reach them without being torn to pieces.

Twinkleshine felt her heart sink.

She had looked at Jack's shoulder, the wound was unlike anything she had ever seen or heard of before, even in her friend Minuette's most grisly horror stories and it made her stomach churn.

It looked like Jack's shoulder had been stabbed clean through with a spike. From the front, all Twinkleshine could see was a remarkably neat hole. But when Twinkleshine eased Jack forward with her magic and looked at the wound from the back, it looked like the spike had exploded on its way out.

What Jack really needed was a professional doctor, not her.

"But I'm the only one here aren't I" Twinkleshine sighed as the hopelessness of the situation settled in.

"If only my friends were here, Moondancer would have known what bones were damaged and where to start". Twinkleshine thought with wistful remorse.

"Lemon hearts always had a knack for dealing with stressful situations, and Minuette at least can handle blood better than I can".

Looking up at Jack once more, Twinkleshine suddenly realized the Sergent had stopped mumbling and was now deathly pale in the white light cast by the little flashlight on his oddly shaped weapon.

With a surge of panic, Twinkleshine leaped to her hooves and shook Jack's good shoulder.

"C'mon, stay with me!" she pleaded.

The thought of being left alone in this strange and frightening place had suddenly become more than she could bare.

For a moment there was no response.

Then Jack groaned and turned face Twinkleshine with a quizzical expression.

"You still here," He asked before chuckling softly. "Is there a queue at the pearly gates or something?"

"You said something about a medkit," she questioned gently. "Can you tell me where it is?"

For a moment, Jack's seemed to lose focus before slowly re-surfacing and replying.

"Oh yeah, tons of medical supplies, in my little hideout just over the hill, that's what makes it so funny you see."

Jack coughed, his throat dry with dehydration before continuing.

"I was feeling a bit too confident today and forgot that I'm just flesh and blood."

"Well old Jack rolled the dice and now he is paying the price". He finished before sitting back again with a sigh. "Wake me up when it's my turn for judgment".

"I'm so tired".

Twinkleshine shook Jack again and with a sudden surge of courage that she would later attribute to tempory insanity, She looked Jack in the eye and said,

"Where is your hideout?"

Jack barely seemed to hear Twinkleshine as he gestured out the window towards the hills before his head slumped forward and he fell still.

For a moment, Twinkleshine thought she had lost him, then she noticed the slight rising and falling of his chest.

It was now or never.

It seemed like a millennium had passed since Twinkleshine and her friends had used Haycart's method to enter the Unturned Survival Guide. While some of the more vivid events like her friends disappearing into a red, glowing demon maw would be forever etched into her mind, one memory rose up from the depths as Twinkleshine wondered how she was going to get out of the tower and past the hordes below.

Lemonhearts had been looking at a section labeled weapons and while Twinkleshine had been looking through the "how to build a shelter chapter" with Minuette, Twinkleshine could remember Lemonhearts and Moondancer being interested in something called a Makeshift Rifle.

Lying on the floor where Jack had dropped it, was the strange gray and black weapon he had leveled at Twinkleshine when she had first crawled through the hatch.

While it looked different to the image she had seen of the makeshift rifle, the overall shaped and the way Jack had held it convinced Twinkleshine of its purpose as a projectile weapon.

Carefully picking up the rifle with her magic, Twinkleshine pointed the barrel out the hatch in the floor at the cluster of red eyes beneath her and began fiddling with the small catch on the side.

The latch suddenly clicked and the curved gray box on the underside of the rifle nearly fell into the horde of zombies bellow as Twinkleshine caught it with her magic.

The box was thin and as far as she could tell, filled from top to bottom with golden colored darts.

It dawned on Twinkleshine as she levitated the box back into the tower with a sigh of relief that one of these darts going at sufficient speeds would more than likely cause a wound like the one Jack had if it where to hit somepony.

Grunting in frustration, she managed to put the box back in its slot with another small click.

Twinkleshine then found a trigger behind the gray box, but pulling it did nothing.

The last remaining lever Twinkleshine hadn't tried was a handle sticking out from the side.

When she pulled it back, there was heavy and somehow satisfying click.

While she wasn't exactly sure what she had just done, something instinctual told Twinkleshine that the weapon was ready.

Aiming down into the sea of glowing red eyes, she pulled the trigger.

The rifle leaped in her magical grip as it spewed fire into the zombie horde bellow with a cacophonous roar.

Twinkleshine was in such a shock that she didn't let go of the trigger until well after the night had fallen silent.

Her ears rang from the reports as she looked over the lip of the hatch and was greeted by a scene from Tartarus.

Dozens of corpses lay strewn beneath the tower, their forms twisted and distorted by the terrible weapon in Twinkleshine's magical grip.

Levitating herself down from the tower, Twinkleshine landed amidst the corpses with a sense awe and sheer terror.

"What in Celestia's name would Equestria need something like this for?" Twinkleshine thought incredulously.

"If this got into the wrong hooves"...

For a moment, the zombie corpses surrounding Twinkleshine morphed into those of ponies, covered with blood and gaping wounds.

With a horrified whimper, Twinkleshine dropped the rifle like like it was a venomous snake and dry heaved onto the tarmac.

That was the final straw.

This world of horrors that Twinkleshine had found herself in could not be Equestria.

She had had her doubts since she arrived, but the tool of death that lay before her hooves could not exist in the land she called home.

A deep guttural growl caused Twinkleshine to look up sharply as the massive form of the Minotaur sized zombie she had seen earlier came lumbering around the corner.

It was even bigger and more terrifying up close.

At nearly three times Twinkleshine's height, the monster towered above her as it approached, it glowing red eye's boring into hers.

Suddenly, it stopped about twenty meters away and reached down with it's rotting yet massive, blocky biceps to pull a chunk of tarmac out of the ground.

Twinkleshine had never prided herself in lightning fast reflexes, but tonight was proving to be a night for firsts.

She darted forward as the mega zombie hurled its bolder at the spot where she had been moments before.

The boulder bounced across the concrete and plowed into a burning zombie that had just come stumbling around the corner from behind before crashing into one of the tower supports.

the burning zombie went up in a whoosh of flame that cast the Mega in a sickly orange glow a Twinkleshine charged it down.

Just before she would have collided with the Mega's legs, Twinkleshine spun to the left, dodged around him, leaped over the boom gate at the front of the compound, and galloped full tilt into the beckoning green hills.

Finally free of the compound of horrors, Twinkleshine felt her heart soar as she pounded up the grassy slope and around the compound with the faint, pinkish glow of sunrise starting to show in the east.

Her eyes roved back and forth along the ridgeline, looking for anything that resembled a shelter of some kind.

As she galloped along the ridge, Twinkleshine passed under a wooden sky-bridge that at first seemed to be connected to the very watchtower where she had been trapped with Jack

As she went past,however, she realized that a good ten meters of so of the bridge closest to the watchtower had been destroyed.

Distracted as she was by the bridge, Twinkleshine almost missed what she was looking for, covered in ghillie netting and just below the ridgeline, Jack's shelter turned out to be a low and inconspicuous log cabin nestled in among the trees.

When she reached the door, Twinkleshine found it was locked.

This development stymied her for all of several seconds before she remembered that every second she wasted could be a second too late for Jack.

She turned her back to the door and then proceeded to buck it off its hinges.

Inside, Twinkleshine was greeted with a cozy setup that was completely lost upon her as she made a beeline for a stack of crates at the back of the cabin.

She levitated the lid of the first crate and was greeted by the sight of a red box with a white cross in the middle.

Grabbing the medkit in her magic, Twinkleshine stopped only to grab the blood bag that she had spotted underneath the medkit before galloping back out the door.

Instead of heading back the way she came, however, Twinkleshine took the ramp that led up onto the wooden sky-bridge she had seen earlier.

From the top she could see that to her left the bridge crossed the hills and stopped near a town in the distance.

To her right, the bridge made a b-line for the watchtower with only a mere thirty-meter gap between her and Jack.

She cantered up to the edge of the gap and levitated the medkit and blood bag through the tower windows before trotting back a good twenty meters.

With a deep breath, Twinkleshine galloped as fast as she could towards the gap and leaped into the air.

The Ground loomed nearly two dozen meters below her as Twinkleshine caught herself with her magic and levitated herself the rest of the distance.

Landing on the remains of the platform outside the tower, Twinkleshine took a moment to catch her breath before crawling through the tower window.

Jack had been drifting in and out of consciousness since Twinkleshine had left.

The roar of the Maplestrike had awoken him briefly, but between then and the present all he remembered were vague memories of the tower's dim interior and Death's Pretty Pink and White Unicorn.

Then the sun rose.

In all of it's warm, comforting glory, the sun crested the ridge that surrounded Summerside Military Base and bathed the compound in golden light.

As the moon vanished, so did the menacing red eyes as the full moon madness left the Undead hordes across PEI.

The whole island seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as a light breeze wafted through the tower window and tousled Jack's hair.

Suddenly there was a noise outside as a medkit and a blood bag came floating through the window and landed beside him.

These were followed by a gleaming white Unicorn with a pink mane and tail who came clambering through the window several moments later.

Jack stared uncomprehendingly at Twinkleshine as he watched her open the medkit and remove a bandage which she began to wrap around his shattered shoulder.

When she finished, Twinkleshine levitated the blood bag up to eye level.

As Twinkleshine consulted the picture instructions on the back of the blood bag, It dawned on Jack for the first time that Twinkleshine was levitating an object and that the same glow that surrounded the object also surrounded her horn.

Jack considered himself to be a man of science and prided himself in being able to explain, for example, why things went boom the way they did.

Twinkleshine's magic, however, seemed to take pleasure in mocking any scientific explanation that Jack knew.

So instead, he decided to try and go back to sleep as Twinkleshine finally figured out how the blood bag worked and got all the tubes connected in the right place.

Twinkleshine carefully inserted the needle into what she hoped was the main artery in Jack's blocky right arm before going to rummage around in Jack's alicepack for some tape she had seen earlier.

Upon finding the tape, Twinkleshine levitated the blood bag up to the ceiling of the watchtower and tapped the top end in place so gravity could do its work.

With that done, Twinkleshine felt a great wave of exhaustion wash over her.

"I did it". She thought sleepily. "I fought off the zombie hordes and saved somepony from becoming one".

"I think I'm getting the hang of this survival stuff." she said to herself with a yawn before curling up next to Jack and promptly falling asleep with Jack's alicepack as a pillow.

As Jack dosed off, the last thing he noticed were three sky blue stars on Twinkleshine's flank that seemed to be part of her coat. But the levitating thing was already too much for his exhausted mind to handle and he decided to save it for when he reached the afterlife.

Fortunately for Jack, his final journey was cut short by the bandage on his shoulder and the blood pumping through his veins from the blood bag.

Instead, he fell into a deep sleep, his dreams filled with the Grim Reaper and his pretty pink and white Unicorn coming to take him to cotton candy hell.

You're a What!?

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Chapter 5

As the undead plague spread and society collapsed, those with the will to do whatever it took survive became the new leaders of a rapidly crumbling world.

These people gathered others to their side and together, they stood against the undead hordes, eking out a living on the scraps of society.

With the world in such a state, however, even basic resources began to dwindle until only those with the skills to produce their own or the bravery to head into the infested towns and cities had any hope of sustaining themselves or their followers.

Or, they could take it from others.

On PEI, there were two such groups that fell into the latter category, the “Berets” and the “Switchblades”.

The Berets were a group of ex-cons and Canadian military remnants. They maintained a loose control over everything north of Alberton from their base of operations in the old O’Leary Prison. Believing in the old mantra that only the strongest and fiercest survive, these hardened thugs, murderers, and soldiers turned thugs and murderers had become even more feared by the islands remaining inhabitants than the zombies.

The Switchblades, on the other hand, had originally begun as a group of civilians surviving on PEI’s South side that became fed up with the constant harassment and eventually outright attacks against them by the Beret gang. However, as they broadcasted their plight across the airwaves in hope that some military or law enforcement might yet remain that could come to their aid, a rather mysterious force known simply as “The Coalition” answered their cries and transformed the Switchblades into a heavily armed paramilitary force.

As often as weather conditions and fuel shortages would allow, this Coalition would send their transport planes to air-drop weapons and supplies to the shattered remains of society all across the northern hemisphere.

The logic of what followed was infantile. The Beret Gang wanted what the Switchblades had, and what they had, was a new airdrop, smack dab in the middle of the overgrown wheat field at Fernwood Farm.

The Switchblades had sent a squad to secure the airdrop, regardless of the full moon, and they had almost succeeded.

As they crossed the road between the hills and the field, there was a flash of light and a sharp report from the neighboring Wiltshire farm, followed by a tremendous explosion that scattered the Switchblade squad like ninepins.

The Beret gang had brought a tank.

As the full moon bathed Prince Edward Island in its soft, sinister light, four portals exploded into existence across the small northern isle.

One opened near the lighthouse, and another opened above the military base.

The last two, however, opened right next to each other above the tall, golden, wheat fields of what had once been known locally as Fernwood Farm, proud growers of the best wheat on the island.

In more recent times, however, the farm was better known for being a zombie infested shadow of agricultural success, and a prime location to loot for post-apocalyptic treasures like seeds and fertilizer.

Currently, it was the site of a raging battle.

Jenna Henriquez cleaved the head of a red-eyed crawler zombie in two with her machete before dashing for cover behind a hay bale to reload her Bulldog submachinegun.

To her left, a fellow Switchblade named Darold took aim at the Beret Gang’s tank on the road above the farm with an RPG.

With a fiery whoosh, the rocket raced into the night, right as a burst of automatic fire came scything out of the wheat and cut him down.

Jenna didn't know him all that well, and the past few months hadn’t spared her innocence to all things bloody and violent.

However, the rush of grief, anger, and fear at seeing someone she knew gunned down was as strong as ever.

She didn't like the feeling, but it was how she knew she was still human.

Suddenly, just as Jenna poked her head around the hay bale in an attempt to reach her fallen comrade, there was a tremendous explosion of red and white light accompanied by the sound of a howling gale.

Temporarily blinded, Jenna thought that her RPG wielding comrade must have hit the tank’s ammunition rack.

Then, she looked up.

A great whirlpool of light and energy hung in the air directly above the airdrop that they had been sent to secure.

All around her, the battle was coming to a disoriented halt as the combatants of both sides lost their night vision. For those wearing NVG’s, the effect was even worse, becoming completely blinded as the view through their goggles became a solid green or white glare.

As Jenna squinted at the blazing anomaly, two flailing shapes fell from its center and landed on top of the airdrop crate.

If you asked anypony that knew her, they would tell you that Minuette was a generally cheerful pony. Even when under stress, Minuette would always try to find a way to liven up the situation, a trait she said, that tended to rub off on any pony that spent any significant amount of time around Pinkie Pie.

At the moment, however, Minuette was finding it very difficult to maintain her optimism.

Things had been going so well.

What had begun as a fun trip to the library to look for Moondancer and to learn about camping had gone rather pear-shaped.

Either something had gone horribly wrong with Moondancer’s Haycart’s Spell, or there was more to that odd little book then any of them could have imagined.

Now she was falling, quite fast she realized, and she screaming at the top of her lungs.

All around her, the terrible light that had swallowed her and her friends swirled and shrieked.

Fear for her friends, for herself, and of the unknown seemed to drown out every happy thought she tried to muster.

“Help”! She cried out, in what sounded to her like a pitifully small voice, hoping against hope that somepony, anypony, would answer.

“Minuette”!? “A voice yelled back. “Is that you”!?

Her heart leaped, there, spiraling towards her through the hellish light was Lemon Hearts.

Lemon Hearts, the calm, steadfast, if at one time clumsy mare had become one of the most careful and attentive ponies Minuette knew.

Angling her body so she could match her fall to Minuette’s, Lemon Hearts, pulled alongside with the precision of a military paratrooper.

“Are you ok”? She shouted over the rushing air.

“Minuette grinned through tears of joy in response and tried flipping herself to match Lemon Hart’s posture.

Instead, she began to tumble even faster before Lemonhearts grabbed Minuette with her magic and righted her.

“Spread your legs out” Lemon Hearts commanded. “It will create more air resistance and steady your fall”.

Minuette copied her friend as they plunged through the seemingly endless swirling light storm.

Suddenly, the light began to dim. As the two mares watched, the walls of energy were replaced by a brilliant night sky graced by a glorious full moon.

Then they looked down and saw the ground rushing up to meet them.

Lemon Hearts looked at Minuette and saw much the same fear she felt.

For her, however, it wasn’t just a fear of death, but a fear of things left unsaid.

“Minuette”! Lemonhearts shouted. “I need to tell you something”!

“My real name isn’t Lemon Hearts, its Golden Hearts, Special Agent Golden Hearts”!

“You're a what”!? Minuette looked at the mare she thought she knew in confusion, their imminent date with the ground almost forgotten.

“There’s so much I wish I could have shared with you”! Golden Hearts said with tears in her eyes. “But Celestia had me swear an oath of sec-oof”!

The two mares crashed into to rope webbing of the airdrop crate and lay stunned as the portal dissipated above their heads.

Across the field, an ex-con turned Beret Gang Lieutenant; Jason Malarkey rubbed the flashing lights from his eyes and tried to take stock of the situation.

Both sides had stopped firing thanks to whatever had caused that blinding light.

To his left and rear, the tank that the gang had painstakingly maintained since the apocalypse began was out of action.

The Switchblade RPG had, of all things, hit the open commander’s hatch and sent a hail of deadly shrapnel right into the fighting compartment.

As the acting commander of this little operation gone fubar, Malarkey knew that he needed to salvage the situation quick.

“Hey, hey Jackson”! Malarkey barked at the man to his left who was still rubbing the stars from his eyes.

“Quit rubbing your eyes like a baby and go check on Atchison and his boys in the tank”!

“What, so I can get cut down like Haddix”!? Travis Jackson, once a fellow inmate of Malarkey’s, shot back as he glanced at one of their number lying in a bloody sprawl at the edge of the wheat field. “You saw that blast, Atchison bought the farm”!

“Just go”! Malarkey hissed. “Do it quickly before those Switchblades in the field start seeing straight enough to shoot”!

As Jackson scrambled away almost on all fours, Malarkey turned to the man on his right while reloading his Empire submachine gun he had taken from a fallen Switchblade.

“Cover me, Zimmer”. He said as he cocked the weapon. “I’m going for the airdrop”.

Gunther Zimmer, once an elite sniper in the Canadian army and covered from head to toe in a Ghillie suit, simply grunted in response and adjusted the 8x scope on his Timberwolf.

As he army crawled down the embankment and into the wheat, Malarkey cursed their misfortune and started thinking how he was going to explain this mess to the Boss.

“There had better be some damn good equipment in this drop”.

Jenna knew the basics of first aid, but Darold, her comrade, and the one who had disabled the Beret’s tank with his RPG needed professional help.

He had taken two hits, one in the shoulder and another in the chest.

The one in the shoulder had passed clean through, but the other had lodged inside him somewhere above his heart.

All Jenna could do was bandage Darold’s shoulder and apply pressure to the blood-soaked dressing on his chest. The contents of the Med Kit were invaluable, however, that bullet needed to come out.

“J-Jenna” Darold whispered hoarsely. “You’ve done all you can for me, secure the airdrop and see if anyone else made it”.

“Don’t let my sacrifice be in vain, our people need those weapons”!

“Don’t talk like that”. “Jenna muttered as she picked up her Bulldog and scanned the surrounding wheat.

“I’m gonna get you back to Doc. Martine and she’ll patch you up to fight another day”.

Jenna peaked around the hay bale again at the airdrop crate.

To the left in the direction of the road, a trail of the tall wheat stalks moved against the light breeze that swirled across the field.

“Someone’s making a move for the drop” Jenna whispered. “We should go while they’re distract… ed”.

Darold wasn’t moving.

“C’mon, stay with me”! Jenna cried hints of panic in her voice as she shook Darold’s good shoulder.

Darold’s cracked an eyelid and gave Jenna a weak grin. “I’m still here”.

“That’s it”. Jenna replied with a sigh of relief. “This is gonna hurt, but were leaving.” “Screw the airdrop”!

As Malarkey closed in on the airdrop, he spotted movement atop the crate.

His mind raced. It was just his luck that the full moon was now shrouded in clouds because, in the murky gloom, he couldn’t tell friend from foe.

At this point, things couldn’t get much worse. The last thing he needed was a friendly fire incident on top of losing Atchison and his tank crew.

“Screw it” Malarkey muttered. “I’ll just give them a heads up”.

He pulled a flashbang from his belt and tossed the grenade up onto the crate.

“Flash out”! He shouted, before going prone and shielding his eyes.

Recovering from their fall, Minuette and Golden Hearts where just getting to their hooves when there was a shout from the wheat field and a small, cylindrical object sailed out of the gloom and landed on the crate between them.

“Wait, so the Lemon Hearts I knew and loved was just a cover”!? Minuette said as she rose shakily to her hooves, a look of confusion and a bit of betrayal on her face.

“Yes and no”. Golden Hearts replied unhappily as she pushed herself up. “Oh Tartarus, you’re my friend, you deserve to know-“.

Golden Hearts turned pale as her raspberry eyes settled on the grenade.

“What is tha- “? Minuette began but was stopped mid-sentence as a bolt of Golden Heart’s magic blasted her off the crate.

The flashbang detonated, once again bathing Fenwood Farm in a blinding light.

Like all of Celestia’s secret agents, Golden Hearts was trained in the use and evasion of numerous weapons, including magical stun grenades which, fortunately for her, looked uncannily similar to human flashbangs.

Unfortunately, in saving her friend, Golden Hearts caught the full blast of the grenade.

Ears ringing and blinded, she stumbled backward of the airdrop crate and fell into the field.

Minuette, launched in the opposite direction had closed her eyes by reflex as Golden Heart’s magical bolt knocked the wind from her lungs, thus sparing her from the blinding light, but not the noise.

She crashed into the wheat; dazed, half deaf, and now separated from the only friend she had in this strange, dark place.

"Though who's to say her friendship wasn't just a cover too"? Minuette thought sadly. "She may never have truly been my friend to begin with".

Staggering to her hooves, Minuette began to stumble away from the crate, confused and disheartened.

Suddenly she tripped on something lying among the wheat and face planted in the dirt.

Pushing herself up again, Minuette looked back at the offending object and felt her heart stop.

A pale, bloody face with no mouth stared listlessly back.

Despite the rational part of her brain screaming for a hasty retreat, a morbid fascination that allowed Minuette to enjoy even the most grisly of horror shows that would have her friends cowering under the blankets took over.

Closer inspection of the face revealed that its mouth was hidden behind a black bandana, and the head was attached to a body which she had tripped over.

Minuette had never seen a head like it before.

It was flat, almost cuboid in shape and there was no muzzle to speak of, just a small nose jutting out from smooth, mostly hairless skin.

Whatever it was though, it was certainly dead. There was a rather neat hole in the creature’s neck and the ground beneath it gleamed faintly in the starlight with congealing blood

As she stared, however, the corpse began to twitch and its dead eyes began to glow a hellish red.

It was at this point that the rational part of Minuette’s mind drew the line.

She had seen enough horror movies to know where this was going.

Whatever the creature had been, it wasn’t one any longer. It was a shell, a zombie.

Minuette began to back away as the corpse re-animated.

Suddenly, there were three quick, short reports from behind and the zombie’s head exploded.

Jenna cursed as she put down her former gang member turned zombie.

The hardest part about a zombie apocalypse was that while the living still saw their loved ones, the dead saw their next meal.

Jenna had seen so many go out that way when things took a turn for the worst. Families and friends would refuse to abandon their injured kin, only to get mauled and turned as their loved ones re-animated.

As Jenna turned away, the moon came out from behind the clouds and bathed the wheat field in its soft, sinister light.

It also revealed the blue unicorn standing just a few feet in front of her.

Jenna froze mid-turn and nearly dropped her gun in shock.

Standing still as a post, she watched as the Unicorn slowly turned around to look at her.

Jenna blinked, stared, then closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them, the Unicorn was still there.

Growing up, Jenna had always wanted a pet Unicorn. When she got old enough to understand that they didn’t exist, she had begged her parents for a pony.

She’d never gotten her wish, though deep down Jenna still loved equines and fantasised that out there, somewhere, unicorns did indeed exist.

She never expected to be proven right.

Least of all now, after the world had basically gone to hell in a handbasket.

Jenna slowly slung her Bulldog submachinegun over her shoulder, fearful that any sudden movement would cause the Unicorn to vanish in a puff of magic and slowly reached out to touch it in a final test of disbelief.

Minuette stared at the creature before her as it slowly reached out.

Questions buzzed through Minuette’s head like a swarm of bees as various self-preservation alarm bells clanged in her subconscious.

While the creature before Minuette had a face similar to the now truly dead corpse lying behind her, this creature’s eyes were alert and wide with disbelief and curiosity.

Once again her curiosity got the better of her as Minuette stayed stock still, wondering what the creature would do as she watched its appendage draw closer and closer to her muzzle.

Jenna gently booped the Unicorn, which from the long, two-tone mane and eyelashes, she guessed was a female.

She felt the warmth of the Unicorn’s breath on her hand before drawing back sharply, the last of her doubts blown out of the water.

“She’s real”!?

The boop seemed to break the spell though as the Unicorn snorted and blinked.

Then it spoke.

“Your hoof smells like blood,” Minuette said, are you hurt?

Jenna nearly fainted.

“It's not a hoof, it's a hand". Jenna replied reflexively before looking up sharply and exclaiming. "Holy crap, you speak English”!?

Jenna gaped at Minuette who in turn cocked her head in confusion.

“No, you’re speaking Equestrian”. Minuette replied. “What is English”?

“It’s the language that I-and-you-just-…” Jenna gestured helplessly for a few seconds before falling into a dumbfounded silence.

The two starred at each other for several awkward seconds before Jenna tried again.

“Uh, well, er…my name is Jenna”. the creature said. “and you are…”?

“Minuette” the unicorn replied. “Um, what exactly are you”?

“I’m a human”. Jenna replied with no less confusion than before.

“Oh, and no I’m not hurt”. Jenna continued as she realized her hands were covered in dry blood.

“The blood’s not mine, it’s…Darold’s”!

Jenna panicked as she remembered her fallen comrade and realized that every second she stood talking was another second of Darold’s life bleeding away.

“Can you help me, Minuette was it”!?

“Um, sure”. Minuette replied, the worry in Jenna’s voice making her worried as well.

Jenna turned and quickly led Minuette behind the hay bale where Darold lay.

“I don’t know where you came from, how you can speak English, or if I’m just having one hell of a vivid dream.” Jenna began. “However, unicorns have been said to possess a kind of magic, and if you have any at all, is there a way you could use it to help my friend”?

Minuette looked down at Darold. His breathing was ragged and his eyes were closed. The dressing across the wound in his chest was soaked with blood.

Minuette knew some basic healing spells for cuts and scrapes, but she was no doctor.

This human, Darold, as Jenna had called him, needed help that was beyond her.

“I’m sorry”. Minuette said as she looked up with an apologetic expression, and she truly was. Most ponies and it seemed these humans too thought that all unicorns could use their magic to do everything.

In reality, a unicorn’s magical proficiency depended on both their aptitudes for different types of magic and their skill sets.

Minuette shook her head. “He needs to get to a hospital; I can gallop to Canterlot Central and bring…”

The series of events that led up her sitting in a wheat field with a pair of humans hit Minuette like a ton of bricks.

That portal, the zombie, humans…

She wasn’t in Equestria anymore.

“Um, hello”? Jenna waved a hand in front of Minuette “You ok there”?

Minuette was not ok; in fact, she was on the verge of a panic attack.

She was in a strange new world, with zombies, separated from her friends, and unlike the horror movies she was so fond of, this was one hundred percent real.

She felt her heartbeat quicken and her breathing became fast and frantic.

Jenna watched with growing concern as Minuette’s ears flattened, her pupils dilated, and a terrified whinny began to emanate from somewhere in her throat.

Suddenly, the darkness that was descending on Minuette from all sides lifted as a strange and wonderful sensation cut through her fear.

While she had never been able to own a horse or pony, young Jenna had still become something of an equine expert by reading every book on the subject she could get her hands on.

Drawing on what she had read all those years ago about equine care, Jenna had reached over and began rubbing Minuette’s neck beneath her mane.

The unicorn mare melted, all of Minuette’s fears vanishing like smoke at the magical feeling.

When Jenna stopped, it almost made Minuette cry.

“What…was…that”!? She gasped.

“Just something I learned a long time ago”. Jenna said with a small smile before turning serious again.

“If your magic can’t help Darold, then could you at least help me get him back to our base”?

“We have a doctor there”.

Minuette was still recovering from the massage but at the mention of Darold’s condition, her fears began to return.

“No”! Minuette told herself, “I will not give in”! "What would Pinkie Pie do"?

"Smile silly"! Came a high pitched voice in Minuette's head. "Oh, and never give up"!

"Right"! Minuette said to herself. "Put on a brave face and just keep trotting"!

“I will help save this human’s life, I will find my friends, and I will get back to Equestria”!

Minuette turned to Darold and fired up her horn for a simple levitation spell.

“Point the way”! Minuette replied with a newly determined glint in her eyes as she carefully levitated the injured man to head height.

Jenna found herself staring dumbfounded again, this time at Darold who was now floating four feet off the ground surrounded by the sparkly golden sheen of Minuette’s magic.

If someone had told her a year ago that one day she would meet a magical, talking unicorn during the zombie apocalypse, Jenna would have told them to get their head checked. Five months ago, even as the zombie outbreak began to spread out of control, she still would have just laughed.

“Good thing I’m not a betting woman”. Jenna thought with a small chuckle as she led Minuette with Darold in tow out of the wheat field and southeast across the road in the direction of the Switchblade base on Outons Isle.

"Point for you, Universe. looks like you finally put the last scraps of logic out to pasture".

For the first time that night, things were starting to look up for Jason Malarkey and his motley crew, or what was left of them at any rate.

Out of a squad of six counting the tank crew, four had survived.

Atchison, a veteran of the Canadian Armor Corps had indeed bought the farm when the RPG hit the open commander’s hatch just above his head. However, his driver, a young man named Otis Hale had survived.

Without Atchison however, the Leopard 2 tank; brought back from Afghanistan at the start of the undead outbreak, was next to useless for the foreseeable future as no one else knew how to operate it.

However, what the surviving Beret’s found in the air-drop crate almost made up for the loss.

A Hell’s Fury Minigun.

There was even a spare drum for it, along with several other weapons including a Scalar Carbine and a Devil’s Bane Shotgun.

To say the boys were elated would be an understatement.

As Malarkey hefted the Hell’s Fury and drank in the awesome feeling of raw stopping power he now held, Travis Jackson alternated between admiring his new scalar and stashing away the extra Ranger Magazines from the drop in a Spec Ops Rucksack while whistling a cheery, nameless tune.

Gunther Zimmer leaned against the crate, munching on some russet berries he found near the road and loading a brand new Determinator Shotgun Revolver.

Otis was busy blasting red-eyed zombies over at the nearby farmhouse with the Devil’s Bane, each shot accompanied by shouts of “Come and get some, and eat lead”!

“The Boss will be happy with some more ammo for his Augewehr”. Jackson said with a grin as he squeezed the last Banana Magazine into the rucksack and hoisted it up onto his shoulder.

Malarkey returned the grin. “The way he treats that gun of his, the boss will be more than happy”.

Zimmer gave an amused snort and Malarkey rounded on him.

“Like you’re any better”! Malarkey laughed. “You practically sleep with your rifle”!

Gunther Zimmer was a man of few words and fewer smiles. He was quick and decisive however and had the reflexes and eyesight of a hawk. On the occasions that he did speak, however, it was often to make a point.

“Sleeping with a gun is what saved my life back when things started going to hell, and the better a man knows his weapon, the more effective he can be with it”.

As Zimmer finished speaking, he looked over at the farmhouse and watched as Otis fired off his last shotgun shell at a Spitter.

In the months following the outbreak, some of the zombies began to mutate. The first mutations to appear were Flamers, burning zombies that went up in a fiery explosion when killed.

Then there were Flankers, zombies that turned nearly invisible when aggroed and as their name implied, would try to outflank their prey.

Finally, there were Spitters, the latest in the undead mutation process which could spit glowing blue acid at a target up to twenty meters away. This ranged attack meant that unless you could sneak up behind a Spitter, the best way to deal with them was a shot to the head from twenty plus meters.

What Otis didn’t know, was that the maximum effective range on his new Devils Bane Shotgun was only fifteen meters.

Baffled as to why the shot hadn’t pulverized the target, Otis pulled the trigger again and was rewarded with a hollow click as the Spitter turned and vomited a stream of acid at him.

Otis turned and panicked, running into the wheat field as the red-eyed Spitter began to pursue.

Malarkey and Jackson started laughing as they watched Otis run, yelling for him to turn around and stab the Spitter before it could spit again.

As Otis reached the crate, however, he came skidding to a halt, his eyes wide in disbelief.

Lying in the shadow of the back side of the crate was a bright yellow Unicorn.

Seeing Otis apparently freeze up, Zimmer drew his Determinator, gauged the range, and blew the Spitter’s head off at 25 meters.

“See”? Zimmer said to the still laughing Malarkey and Jackson as they walked over to Otis. “Know your weapon, and it will serve you well”.

When Otis didn’t respond to their jeers, both Malarkey and Jackson followed his line of sight and their expressions of amusement froze.

For several moments, the four men stood in a semi-circle around the side of the airdrop crate and stared at the unconscious Golden Hearts, watching her side rise and fall with each breath.

Jackson was the first to break the silence.

“What the hell…”!? He began. “You guys are seeing a bright yellow unicorn too, right”?

“Oh, I see it”. Malarkey said. “But the real question is who the hell spiked our canteens”?

As the others stared, Otis kneeled down and moved closer, reaching out to touch it.

At 20 years old, Otis was the youngest member of the Beret Gang. He grew up on a farm with horses on the mainland and had been taking courses at a local community college when the apocalypse began.

His experience operating and repairing heavy farm equipment like tractors and combines made him valuable to the late Atchison who had needed a driver for the Leopard tank that at least understood a thing or two about oversize vehicles.

Now, however, he recalled his days in the stables as he ran a hand through the Unicorn’s bright coat.

“It’s a she, a mare, or at least I think so”. Otis said as he stroked her cerulean mane. “Though not like any mare I’ve ever seen”.

“I’ll say”. Malarkey muttered as he rubbed his eyes, hoping that the next time he opened them the colorful Unicorn would have vanished. “It hurts just to look at her”.

Zimmer produced a flashlight and shone it on the mare, lighting her up so Otis could get a better look.

“Sheesh, now it’s even worse”! Malarkey groaned as he shielded his eyes. “Can you imagine looking at her on a sunny day”?

“You could see her from the Moon”. Jackson said with an amused whistle. “Look at the size of her eyes”! Jackson continued as Otis opened one of the mare’s eyelids, revealing a beautiful raspberry colored iris.

“That’s definitely not normal”.

“Do you think it’s a mutation”? “Otis asked as he examined what appeared to be a tattoo of two blue hearts and one green on the mare’s flank.

“Why the hell not”? Malarkey said with a yawn as he looked up at the slowly brightening sky. “With the way the world is going, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest”.

Suddenly, Jackson, who had turned away to dump out his canteen raised his weapon.

“Hey guys, sorry to interrupt this episode of petting zoo; tripping balls edition, but we have company”!

All the commotion from earlier had drawn the remaining zombies in the area to the wheat field and with their senses heightened by the full moon, they were quickly closing in.

“Time to go”! Malarkey said as he shouldered his own Alicepack. “We may have lost our gunner, but the tank can still move. At least we can ride back to the beach in style”.

Jackson was already halfway to the tank when he turned around with an exasperated sigh.

“Oh for the love of…Leave it, Otis, there’s something called the circle of life”!

Otis ignored Jackson as he struggled to drag the Unicorn mare through the wheat field.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he was trying to save her, but something told him that she was more to this colorful equine than they knew.

Suddenly, Zimmer was beside Otis and between the two of them, they managed to lift the still unconscious Golden Hearts and carried her to the tank.

Jackson just shook his head as he helped them secure the mare to the top of the supply crates behind the turret with some rope.

Otis climbed through the driver’s hatch as Malarkey settled in the commander’s cupola with the Hell’s Fury at the ready.

Then Jackson and Zimmer jumped on and they were off, crushing the zombies to their rear as Otis reversed, turned the tank around, and sent them rumbling north down the road towards Alberton.

As the full moon sank and the horizon turned from blue to pink, Malarkey leaned back in the open cupola and let the cool morning air wash away all the stress of the past several hours.

His mission had been a success. Sacrifices had been made, but he was returning with more than half of his men and had the spoils of battle to back him up.

Glancing around the hatch, Malarkey looked back at the unconscious yellow Unicorn strapped to the supply crates and shook his head.

He’d let the Boss deal with this one.

Tell Me a Story.

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Chapter 6

For the second time in her life, Lemon Hearts, aka Special Agent Golden Hearts to a select few, felt like she had hit rock bottom.

The first time had been when she'd gotten her head stuck in an Erlenmeyer flask during a lab in grade school, and to this day, anypony that had borne witness to that little incident would almost always bring it up for a moment of humor at her expense.

The second time was when she woke up in a dark, stinking jail cell, in the lower bunk of an old, bare-bones bunk bed with a foreleg handcuffed to the frame.

As memories of what happened after Moondancer’s spell backfired began to surface, Lemon Hearts began to wish that she could re-live her embarrassing flask incident, if only to get her friends back.

“Her friends”, she thought forlornly, if she could truly call them that anymore.

Ponies that she trusted in, depended on, kept secrets for, and had been lying too ever since they graduated from Celestia’s school for Gifted Unicorns.

Closing her eyes again, Lemon Hearts rested her head against the cool metal of the bedframe, trying to hold back tears as she recalled her last words to Minuette before the Flashbang went off.

She had wanted to tell her friends the truth for so long, but it was forbidden for operatives to reveal their identities except in an emergency.

Of course, when one finds themselves in a life-threatening situation, it is usually far too late to say all that needs to be said.

A single tear slipped down her fuzzy yellow cheek.

It hadn’t been easy all those years.

After the flak incident, Lemonhearts had not only been determined to show everypony that she wasn’t clumsy, but that she could be the most careful and concise pony there ever was.

Twilight Sparkle may have been Celestia’s top student that year, but the Princess of the Sun saw great potential in each and every one of her students.

Lemonhearts had been thrilled when she became an official organizer for royal events like the Gala and therefore other big events around Canterlot due to her reputation.

Then one day, Celestia drew her aside and explained the real reason why Lemonhearts had been chosen as the official organizer.

All throughout Equestria, Ponies from every race and trot of life were leading double lives.

In the past, both Celestia and Luna had been questioned more than once about the small size of their Royal Guard, and Celestia’s response had always been something along the lines of “well we’re Alicorns, we can handle ourselves”. Luna had been more open to bolstering the numbers, particularly in the night guard, but even she had to admit that, between Celestia and herself, as well as the Elements of Harmony incarnate, there wasn’t much of a point.

After being laid low by Discord, Chrysalis, and most recently Tirek however, Both Princesses had admitted that greater security measures might be in order.

Thus, The Civilian Operations Agency or COA was born.

Ordinary Ponies, leading seemingly ordinary lives and receiving paychecks from a supposedly civil service oriented agency.

Ponies ready to answer the call should the Princesses, Twilight and her Ponyville friends, or the Royal Guard were otherwise inconvenienced.

In other words, as her fellow agent; Bonbon aka Sweetie Drops had put it, they were the last resort.

Regardless of their status, Members of the COA were trained hard, knowing that they could be called into action at any moment, to deal with any situation under the sun.

Well, most situations.

Being sucked through a portal in a book, getting knocked out, and waking up in jail without any idea of how, why, and where could be considered stretching things a bit.

“Good thing I’m used to getting out of tight situations….”, Lemon Hearts thought before grimacing at the potential flask pun.

Drying her eyes on her foreleg, Lemon Hearts took stock of the situation with newfound determination as her training began to kick in.

If she was going to make things right with her friends or escape this jail cell, crying wasn’t going to help.

Across from the bunk bed, the barred cell door opened onto a dimly lit hallway with another jail cell opposite hers.

In terms of the cell itself, calling it sparse would have been generous.

Besides the rickety bunk bed, there was nothing else in the room except for a pile of newspapers in the far corner and a few scribbles of graffiti on the walls.

In the faint dawn light that filtered through the small barred window above the bunk bed, she could make out a string of tally marks covering the wall closest to her face.

There were just over 24 little groups of 5, over 4 months’ worth of little scratches on the cold, concrete wall.

Lemon Hearts had no intention of hanging around for nearly as long, though it crossed her mind that she had no idea whether this was the morning after she’d been knocked out, or if she had slept through an entire day and night.

As she checked herself over, she almost laughed with joy.

Aside from being a little sore from her rough landing after falling off the crate and sleeping on the pitifully thin mattress, she was fit as ever.

What had made her so happy however was that her captors, whoever they were, had neglected to suppress her magic.

Firing up her horn, Lemon Hearts jiggled the cuffs that held her with glee.

No magical suppression spell, not even a crude magical suppression ring.

She would be out of this cell in moments.

While she was no locksmith, unlocking the simple lock on the cuffs was something that all magical COA operatives were trained to handle, and after a few minutes of teasing the tumblers around, the cuffs popped opened with a soft clink.

Climbing slowly from the bed, she laid the cuffs on the edge and trotted carefully over to the cell door, wincing at each clop from her hooves on the concrete floor.

The door lock was more complex than the cuffs, but that wasn’t an issue.

She peered left and right down the hallway, looking for the rack of keys that seemed to always be within reach of escapist shenanigans.

There wasn’t a key in sight.

Like her cell, the hallway was frustratingly bare. A torch burned weakly at either end of the hall and an empty chair sat next to the railing of a stairwell.

“Ok”, Lemon Hearts thought, her resolve undiminished. “Just a minor setback, “I’ll just wait for somepony to come and-“.

Something yawned and rolled over in the top bunk, shifting the rickety frame.

With a jarring clang that rang through the silent building, the cuffs slid off the lower bunk, hitting the metal frame like a bell as they swung back and forth.

She froze, eyes closed in a painful wince as the sound carried.

There were heavy steps from the stairwell. “Wish granted”, She thought with no small amount of irony.

She wasn’t alone in the cell, but meeting her bunkmate could wait. She quickly returned to the bed and picked up the cuffs in her magic.

Adjusting them to look like they were closed, Lemon Hearts pretended to sleep, closed her eyes to mere slivers, and waited.

Otis Hale gave a weary yawn as he hauled himself up the stairs.

After returning from the airdrop retrieval, he’d drawn the short straw for “dawn patrol” guard duty.

This meant that after a fitful two hours of sleep, he had to get up, check the perimeter defenses, and check in on the prisoners.

The smelly, stuffy interior of the prison, however, made checking the perimeter in the cool morning air actually a bit of a respite.

As for checking on the prisoners, currently, there were only 2, and one of them was of great personal interest to Otis:
The bright yellow Unicorn they found the night before, and thanks to his insistence, which they had brought back to base.

As he reached the cell, he peered through the gloom between the bars.

The unicorn lay sleeping on the bunk where he and Gunther had deposited her, her side rising and falling slightly with each breath.

Otis watched her for a moment, his tired brain running through the same litany of questions he had no answer for.

“What is she, some strange mutation or a true bonafide Unicorn?”

“Where did she come from?”

“Why is she so colorful?”

He shook his head. “Short of her walking up and telling us herself, we’ll likely never know”.

“Imagine that, a talking Unicorn” Otis thought to himself with a chuckle as he shifted his gaze to the top bunk where a dark, rumpled figure lay with his back to the wall. “That’d really be something”.

“What do you think?” Otis said, addressing the still figure on the top bunk, “Think your new cellmate’s the real deal”?

Fishing around in his pocket, he pulled out an old grape juice box, a carrot, and a squashed, moldy ham and cheese sandwich in saran wrap and set them on the floor inside the bars.

The silent, supposedly sleeping prisoner made no response, and Otis hadn’t really expected a reply.

The man on the top bunk had been a “guest” of the Beret Gang for months now, and the only reason they kept him alive was that the Boss had some kind of beef with him.

It wouldn’t have surprised Otis at all if the cell’s human occupant thought the Unicorn on the bunk beneath him was just some kind of stir crazy hallucination.

To be fair, Otis still wasn’t entirely sure himself.

Turning away, he shuffled over to the lone chair next to the stairwell and sat down, the keys for the cell doors jangling on his belt.

The Boss had been happy about their haul from the airdrop, but the loss of Atchison and Haddix meant they were down 2 able bodies.

Everyone was going to have put in some extra effort until they could find some new, desperate survivors willing to ditch their morals and join the cause.

Just like Otis and the others, the Boss had been thrown for a loop when they showed him the Unicorn, though his bafflement quickly turned to amusement when he announced that since Otis had found her, Otis would care for her.

That had got everyone laughing when he turned to the others and said, “My parents would’ve never gotten me a pony, and yet here I am being such a nice guy!”

“People out there may think I’m a monster, but never let it be said I don’t take care of my boys!”

Otis groaned as he leaned back and closed his eyes. He was never gonna live that one down.

The guys still saw him as a kid, and now that he was the resident caretaker for their Unicorn “guest”, he doubted the guys would ever see him as anything else, a kid with potential, yes, but a kid nonetheless.

Maybe it was because some of the things that the Boss and the men like Jason Malarkey and Travis Jackson did really shook Otis.

Survivor camps raided and the occupants massacred if they put up any resistance.

Forcing young men and women at gunpoint to either join the Gang or fulfill more personal demands.

Things that, despite his best efforts to drown out the screams and cries, still made his subconscious writhe in discomfort as he helped them do it, and all the while telling himself that at the end of the day, it was either him or them.

When the Beret Gang found him, Otis had been on the run.

Having crossed Confederation Bridge in search of safety like so many others, he’d become trapped when the Army destroyed the bridge in a last-ditch attempt to stop the hordes coming from the mainland.

Lost, afraid, and desperate, Otis realized that the only way he or anyone was going to survive this mess was if they banded together and were willing to make tough choices.

He figured that at some point, however, people would draw a line and at the very least, basic human decency would prevail.

When he shared this sentiment with Sergeant Atchison however, the Serge had grinned and ruffled his hair before replying. “See”? “This is why we call you a kid, you’re too naïve for your own good”!

Now Atchison was dead, his shrapnel mutilated corpse buried hastily by the roadside near Fenwood Farm, and Otis wondered as he began to drift off that if being a kid meant that you remembered your human side, maybe it wasn’t so bad to be a kid after all.

Back in the cell, Lemon Hearts dropped her sleeping façade and cracked open an eyelid with a confused smile.

She’d seen the keys on Otis’s belt and now that he was sitting just meters away, once he fell asleep, the keys would as be good as hers.

What had her confused was that in the dim light, she couldn’t tell exactly what her captor was.

He, she judged the guard must be a male from the tone of voice as he spoke, looked like a Minotaur.

However, the proportions weren’t right and parts of the guard’s body had seemed almost cuboid in shape.

Whatever the case, Lemon Hearts decided, the first step towards finding out the where’s, why’s, and how’s was to get out of jail.

“Where in Equestria did that portal send us”? Lemon Hearts wondered as she filled away her captor’s strange anatomy for later investigation.

“When Minuette and I arrived, Moondancer and Twinkleshine where nowhere to be seen, are they nearby, did they end up somewhere else entirely”?

At this point, it dawned on her that she might not even be in Equestria anymore, but in some other kingdom entirely.

“Relationships between Equestria and the Minotaurs are at an all-time high though.”, She thought. “So why would my guard be a Minotaur?

She felt her stomach twinge uneasily. Had her secret identity been discovered somehow?

Had some enemy of Equestria placed a portal spell in that odd little book as a way to trap her?

“Is this all my fault”? She thought bitterly, tears threatening to return as the realization took hold.

“Some agent I turned out to be, I couldn’t even see the danger I put my friends in by simply being around them.”

Suddenly, the rickety bunk bed shuddered as Lemon Heart’s unknown cellmate stirred above her and a pair of lanky legs swung over the side.

She watched in tense fascination, ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger.

The dangling legs were followed by the rest of the body as her cellmate jumped from the top bunk and landed on the concrete with silent, cat-like grace.

Well, her cellmate certainly wasn’t a Minotaur.

Lemon Heart’s watched as her cellmate padded silently over to the door, bent over to pick up the food Otis had left and then froze as he turned back to the bunk and saw her.

The Creature standing before her had the same basic biped shape as a Minotaur, but any similarity ended there.

He, Lemon Hearts guessed it was a male by the rather dashing mustache he sported, was skinny with malnourishment and fatigue.

In fact, the mustache seemed to the only part of this creature that received any care.

He had a serious case of bed head with his short, dirty blonde hair mashed down on one side and sticking up on the other.

The rest of his body, at least the exposed parts she could see, was practically hairless

The Creature wore a rumpled dark gray uniform, a pair of faded patches that read JTF2 adorning each shoulder.

As she met his grayish blue eyes, however, she saw a strength that his body did not convey.

After several moments of awkward silence, the Creature blinked once and then slowly turned so he sank to the ground with his back to the concrete wall.

“I’ve finally lost it”! He whispered to himself with a slightly cultured accent.

“There’s a Unicorn in my cell”! He continued in hushed tones as he turned to look at Lemon Hearts again.

The Creature chuckled quietly and shook his head as he tried and failed to come to terms with the apparent loss of his sanity.

“Hello there”! He said with a sudden grin as he addressed her.

Lemon Hearts, still on alert, reacted instinctively to the greeting with a cautious one of her own as her brain tried desperately to come up with a plan.

“Um…hi…”?

The Creature’s grin got wider. “It can talk to”!?

“Tell me, how deep did my subconscious have to dig to find you?”

Lemon Hearts cocked an eyebrow in confusion before she realized that now was as good a time as any to start getting her questions answered.

“Uh, I don’t think you had to dig at all, because I’m quite real, and I'm a she, not an It.” She answered in a soft voice to avoid alerting their guard, “but what, if I may ask, are you?”

The creature looked baffled for a moment, scratching his head before replying.

“Huh, you don’t know who I am?”

“Then again” he mumbled to himself, “I wasn’t aware that there was a little yellow and blue Unicorn somewhere in my head so, go figure.”

His smile returned and he held out a blocky hand for Lemon Hearts to shake.

“Charles Xavier, former Canadian Special Operations, Joint Task Force 2, and you Miss?”

Lemon Hearts balked at his words, any confusion as to why Charles thought she should know him wiped away as the second part of his introduction registered.

“Did he just say Special Operations?”

She’d never heard of Canadians, nor seen a creature like Charles Xavier before, but if these Canadians had an agency similar to Equestria’s COA, and both of their nations shared a common enemy in their captor….

“To Tartarus with it”! She decided. “I need to find out what’s going on, and if that means taking risks then so be it”.

Slowly removing the cuffs again with her magic, an act which made Charles's grin even wider, Lemon Hearts reached out, unsure of how to meet Charles’s blocky hand with her hoof.

In the end, she didn’t have to worry as Charles took her hoof in his hand and gave it a shake.

“Special Agent Golden Hearts of Equestria’s Civilian Operations Agency”, she said with a bit of an awkward smile at his strange greeting, “Pleased to meet a fellow operative!”

Charles’s gave a small chuckle under his breath, “Equestria?”, “Civilian Operations Agency?” Where was his stir crazy mind pulling these named from?

His grin faltered slightly however as he felt her hoof.

He hadn’t been quite sure what would happen when he touched the Unicorn, but he wasn’t quite prepared to feel the physical texture and weight of what was undoubtedly a real hoof.

Letting go, Charles slowly sat back against the cold, hard wall of the cell and examined his hand before looking up at Golden Hearts.

She stared back, a mix of wary concern and confusion written across her features.

“Um, no offense but, I’ve never seen a creature like you before.” , Lemon Hearts began again, “What are you?”

Charles’s smile had all but disappeared by this point. In its place, incredulous confusion and disbelief played across the man’s face.

“You’re real!?” He breathed.

Charles continued to stare at Lemon Hearts for several more seconds before realizing that the now very real Unicorn sitting before him had asked a question.

“Oh…ah…I’m a human…” He replied in wonder, the surrealism of the situation still weighing heavily on his mind.

“Pleased to meet you too Miss....Golden Hearts was it?”

“Yes…although….” Lemon Hearts hesitated.

There were many strange creatures that inhabited both Equestria and the lands beyond. She’d never heard of humans.

“What if this is some new, undiscovered race?” “What if they are planning to invade”? “What if…”

“No!” Lemon Hearts thought angrily. “No more secrets!”, “Charles is my only ally here, and we need to trust one another if we are going to escape”.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“My real name is Lemon Hearts.”

“Huh,” Charles said as his eyes roved over her and took in her colors. “It’s a fitting name, I like it.”

She gave him a small smile of gratitude as Charles began to unwrap the sandwich.

“So,” He asked. “Equestria huh?”, “Where on Earth is that?”

Now Lemon Hearts found her fears of being somewhere truly foreign retuning. Who hadn’t heard of Equestria?

Then again she realized, she’d never heard of Humans before either.

A terrible thought occurred to her.

“Could the portal have sent us to another world?”

Now that the thought was there, it quickly took root and began to stifle all her other thoughts in a growing wave of fear.

“Stay calm…” She told herself, “Remember your training and keep your cool."

“It’s south of Yakyakistan and north of the Badlands, ruled by their Majesties, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna…”

Charles looked both amused and bewildered.

“Yakyakistan!?” he chuckled as he took a bite of the old sandwich and grimaced. “Is that like a country for only Yaks or something”?

“There are a number of countries ending in Stan” he continued, but Yakyakistan is not one of them.

“And Princesses?”, “There weren’t that many monarchies left before everything went pear-shaped and I don’t recall either of those two., or a nation of pastel unicorns for that matter.”

Lemon Hearts felt her heart sink, the last shreds of hope for her being anywhere close to home where being torn away one by one.

“So where are we then?” she said in reluctant defeat.

Charles pulled a particularly moldy piece of bread from the sandwich and tossed it away before looking up at the distraught Lemon Hearts.

“You really have no idea?”

She shook her head slowly. “No, all I remember from last night or maybe the night before is falling from a portal in the sky with my friend Minuette”.

‘We landed in a wheat field, and then there was some kind of flash grenade.

“I tried to save Minuette but I got knocked out when the flash blinded me and I fell.”

Lemon Hearts could feel her throat getting tight with emotion and the hot tears pricking at the edge of her vision.

“Now I’m in a jail cell talking to you, and I have no Idea whether my friends are ok, where the portal sent us, what’s going on, or why!”

She closed her eyes and tried to compose herself, giving a small chuckle as she did so.

“Look at me, about to bawl like a filly!”, “and I call myself an agent!”

Drying her eyes again, Lemon Heart looked up and found Charles offering her the Carrot that Otis had left at the cell door.

She took it in her magic with a smile and bit off the end with a small crunch, savoring the little taste it had as she realized how hungry she was.

“Thanks.” She mumbled through the mouthful.

“It’s alright”, Charles replied. “If your Civilian Operation Agency is anything like JTF2 was, then we both know a bit about being thrown in the deep end”.

“When you feel out of your depth, a little encouragement, whether it be comfort food or kind words can go a long way.”

Lemon Heats smiled and nodded in agreement as she took another bite and swallowed. “Let’s start by finding our way back to shallow waters then shall we?”

Charles grinned and then grimaced again at the rancid sandwich.

“Sounds like a plan.” He said as he gave up and tossed the moldy remains into the corner.

“Ok, so first question Charles.” began Lemon Hearts, “where are we?”

“Well, we’re in a jail cell on the second floor of O-Leary Prison, on the prison’s namesake island”.

“Beyond that”, Charles continued, “We are in a little bay surrounded on three sides by Prince Edward Island or PEI”.

“Even further out is the Canadian mainland is to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean is to our east”.

None of the names sounded familiar to Lemon Hearts, and with a heavy heart, she accepted the reality that she, and likely her friends wherever they were, had been sent by the portal to a completely different world.

“Alright”, she said as she finished the carrot with another satisfying crunch. “I know where I am, but what about when?”

“Well I heard Malarkey and his boys bring you in last night, or maybe it was early this morning,” Charles said, pulling the little straw from the back of the juice box and discarding the wrapper.

“I woke up when they brought you to the cell, but I was so tired that I pretty much fell right back to sleep, hence my surprise at seeing you now.”

“Well that answers how long I’ve been here; it’s only been a few hours.” Lemon Hearts thought with a bit of relief. “But who’s Malarkey, is that our guard?”

“Nah, that’s just some kid named Otis,” Charles said as he leaned forward and looked through the bars to check that the guard in question was now asleep.

“The gang picked him up a few months back, and I’ve been in here longer than he’s been with them.”

“We’re prisoners of a Gang?”, Lemon Hearts asked with concern.

“Oh right”, Charles said, facepalming before trailing off. “You’re completely new here and when they brought you in, you were unconscious…”

“Wait, besides the wheat field last night, the inside of this cell, and what I’ve told you thus far, you know nothing else about the human world or the state it’s currently in?”

Lemon Hearts shook her head and Charles sighed.

“Well, I suppose it’s best to start from the beginning, but it’s going to take a while, it’s quite the tale.”

Lemon Hearts looked up as the rising sun’s rays streamed through the small, barred window and lit up the cell.

Even if they got the keys, Charles had said they were on an island.

There would be no escaping in broad daylight. Their captors would be waking up soon if they weren’t already.

Even Otis, still snoozing in his chair down the hall after an early rise, would wake up eventually and then there was no telling what would happen.

She needed to find out all that she could.

Charles took a sip of grape juice as Lemon Hearts got as comfortable as she could on the thin mattress.

“Tell me a story.” She said with a resigned smile.

“Six months ago”, Charles began. “Life as we humans knew it was turned on its head.”

“I was a sniper, and a member of Canada’s Joint Task Force Two, aka JTF Two, an elite special operations force of the Canadian Military.”

“Sniper?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“You know, a sniper rifle…?” Charles replied.

It seemed like an eternity ago, but Lemon Hearts suddenly recalled the memory of a page she had read in the Unturned Survival Guide.

It had mentioned something about rifles, but after all that had happened since then, she couldn’t recall more than a few images.

She shook her head. “Equestria doesn’t have rifles, but I do remember reading about them.”

Charles cocked an eyebrow and took another sip of juice as Lemon Hearts gestured for him to continue.

“I know it’s confusing, but finish your story, and then I’ll tell you mine.”

Charles shrugged and carried on.

“Anyway, I served in Afghanistan in the War on Terror, and then again in the Iraqi Civil War.”

“During my second deployment, a fellow comrade of mine made history with the longest confirmed kill, dropping a hostile from over two miles away.”

“We were the best of the best.”

“But after what happened six months ago…” Charles trailed off.

Lemon Hearts listened intently, biting back questions about countries and conflicts she’d never heard of before and wondered where Charles was going with the story.

“He’d been an elite soldier, so what happened six months ago that landed him in jail, and why does he keep referring to JTF2 in the past tense?” She wondered.

“I don’t know exactly how it all went down”, He continued. “In fact, what I'm about to tell you is just based on rumors."

"But regardless, no one was prepared for what happened next.”

“It started with a huge, multinational corporation called Big J.”, I’m guessing you’ve never heard of them either?”

Lemon Hearts shook her head.

“Well, I guess that proves you’re from another world”, he said with a soft chuckle. “Big J was so big, they were set to rival ole Mickey Dee’s”.

“They had their tentacles in practically every industry from oil to farming, but fast food was their big money maker.”

“They had joints popping up all across the globe from Seattle to Moscow”.

“So what happened?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“Well like all global enterprises, Big J was always on the lookout for ways to cut costs and boost consumption.”

“That sounds familiar.” Lemon Hearts replied with an ironic smile as she recalled a certain Super-Cider-Squeezy 6000 incident.

Charles grinned as he offered the rest of the juice box to Lemon Hearts. “Some things never change, no matter what universe you’re from.”

“Anyways, Big J decided to cut a deal with another big corporation called Scorpion Seven Bio Solutions, a shady organization that wasn’t afraid to get their hands dirty because they had government backing in both the United States and Canada.”

“Big J asked Scorpion to develop a number of genetically modified or GMO crops that would not only grow faster and bear more fruit but could addict those who ate them to the taste.”

Lemon Heart’s eyes widened. “That must have taken some serious magic.”

“No magic”, Charles replied, “Just a very comprehensive understanding of biology.”

A funny look crossed the man’s face.

“That glowy thing you did with your horn earlier, when you levitated the cuffs and I assume when you unlocked them beforehand….that was magic?”

“Yeah?”, Lemonhearts said slowly, “What, is there no magic in the human world?”

“Afraid not, well not like that, human magic is based on illusions and mind tricks, we can’t make stuff levitate without magnets or hidden strings.”

‘Like you said though, You’ll tell me your story next.”, Charles finished as he tried to put aside the concept of actual magic on top of an actual Unicorn so he could continue his story, “.

“So this Scorpion Seven Bio Solutions group?”, Lemon Hearts prompted. “What happened to the products they were developing for Big J?”

“And what does a former Special Ops soldier like you have to do with food?”

Charles gave a loaded sigh; “I come in during the aftermath.”

“I said that Scorpion Seven was a shady corporation right?”

Lemon Hearts nodded.

“Well, they weren’t just working on Big J’s GMO food. They had a contract with both the American and Canadian military for weapons development, and they had several contracts with various pharmaceutical companies as well for the development of new medicines.”

“All these products needed testing, and in the case of the medicines and GMO’s, they needed to be tested on living organisms.”

Lemon Hearts felt a little twinge of fear. “What kind of organisms?”

Charles gave a bitter chuckle, “Humans.”

“Scorpion Seven was already under investigation for unethical practices, and when the Canadian government finally caught wind of what was happening right under their noses, they cut all ties with Scorpion.”

“There used to be a facility right here on PEI, but when the government told them to take a hike, Scorpion razed the lab to the ground and built a farm over it, all in an effort to hide what they were up to.”

“The Americans were too invested in whatever weapons project Scorpion was working on in Seattle for them to completely cut them off.”

“But when one of Scorpion’s scientists grew a conscience and leaked some information about Big J’s involvement in testing these new products to the press, the government froze Big J’s assets and American Special Forces descended on the labs in Seattle”.

“And the Americans?”, Lemon Hearts asked, her unease growing, “What did they find in the labs?”

Charles looked up at her.

“They found an abomination beyond words...”

“They had started a zombie apocalypse.”

Lemon Hearts wasn’t sure she’d heard Charles correctly and blinked several times in confusion.

“They did what!?” Lemon Heart’s exclaimed before remembering the guard Otis outside the cell and covering her mouth with her hooves.

“Scorpion Seven created a formula for Big J that when consumed, did indeed make the test subject addicted, but to human flesh rather than burgers and fries.” Charles summarized.

“And Big J had been using its millions of customers as unwitting test subjects…

He shrugged. "Or who knows, I could be completely wrong and it's all thanks to some weird, glowing rock from outer space.”

Lemon Hearts felt a sinking feeling in her gut.

She still had no clue where Minuette was, or any of her friends for that matter, and now she was being told that the outside world was infested with zombies?

“Zombies?”, She said, more to herself than Charles. “Of all things…”

“Out of anywhere that portal magic is capable of sending a pony; it had to be a universe with zombies…”

A sudden, terrible thought occurred to her.

By separating herself from Minuette, she could have effectively signed Minuette's death sentence.

Lemon Hearts may have been a prisoner, but at least there wasn’t anything trying to eat her.

Only Celestia knew what the other mares were facing out there, if they were even still alive.

Charles watched as Lemon Hearts seemed to deflate and a look of dejection came across her face.

He recognized that look.

He’d seen it countless times since the zombie plague began to spread across the globe, on the faces of parents, spouses, and children as their world collapsed and their loved ones became monsters.

He needed to distract her.

“I lost a lot of friends too, but there’s always hope.” He piped up suddenly; causing Lemon Hearts to look up sharply.

“I know it sounds awfully idealistic”, Charles began.

“Yeah it does, Captain Cliché.” Lemon Hearts interjected with a small snort of amusement and a smirk.

Charles smiled. “It’s working.” he thought.

She finished the juice box and set it down at the foot of the bunk with her magic.

“I know what you’re up too by the way.”

Charles was taken aback for a second before regaining his composure.

“Up to, whatever do you mean?”

“You’re trying to distract me from the situation at hand” She replied. “We may be from different universes, but it would seem that the training required to be a special anything for the government requires a number of the same skills.”

“Ponies panic rather easily and COA operatives are trained extensively in mitigating the panic of others as well as dealing with their own.”

Lemon Hearts took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh.

“I’m not doing a very good job though.” She said with a small, sad smile.

Charles returned the smile and scratched his head. “It happens to the best of us.”

Regaining her composure, and bolstered by Charles’s kind gesture, she asked the final question.

“Why?”

“If your world is swarming with zombies, why would our captors lock us up?”

“Wouldn’t a soldier be more useful actually serving?”

Charles leaned back against the wall and stretched out his legs before answering.

“I wouldn’t serve the Beret Gang, that’s the name of our captors, in a million years.”

“The leader of the Beret Gang is a man by the name of Mason Lowitz, a former JTF2 operative.”

“And at one time, I would have called him a friend…”

“Mason and I were deployed to PEI when the outbreak reached Canada.”

“Our mission was to help the local army garrison establish the island as a safe zone.”

“But at the time, few knew the true extent to which the outbreak had spread, and most, including myself, had no idea it was caused by a formula in Big J’s food.”

“I would find that out in the days following the Army’s destruction of Confederation Bridge from officers and government officials, all of us trapped on the island and with the situation deteriorating by the hour.

“Anyways, Mason and I were being sent all across the island to secure various locations by what was left of the chain of command on orders that became less and less frequent.”

“Thanks to the two Big J establishments on PEI, the zombies were already inside the supposed safe zones and people that had eaten the affected food turned within a matter of hours, sometimes right in the middle of other survivors.”

“Then there was an airliner, it must have been on autopilot when its crew turned and the plane crashed on the final approach to Belfast”.

“When firefighters and police, already stretched thin by outbreaks popping up all over the place, raced to the burning wreckage to try and help the survivors, they were met with zombies wreathed in flames.”

“With the runway blocked, and a massive outbreak at the harbor in Alberton, all potential escape routes where sealed.”

“We, along with the remainder of PEI’s living population and several thousand refugees were trapped with the undead.”

Lemon Hearts leaned forward slightly in suspense.

“As the situation worsened and we stopped receiving orders altogether, Mason and I tried to do all we could to help the remaining survivors.”

“However, after some thugs robbed the group we were with, something in Mason snapped.”

“We’d heard about the armed groups roving the island that were preying on survivors, and every time one of the civilians in our group did something unsafe or slowed us down, Mason would joke that we would be better off with one of the roving bands.”

“After the raid, however, he decided that if we couldn’t beat the bandit’s we would join them.”

“Though”, Charles said with a sigh. “He was too far gone and took it one step further”.

“Mason gathered the few like-minded men and women from our group; a few of them soldiers, most of them just rough and tumble civilians who were fed up with being prey, and attacked this very prison.”

“At first it seemed like we were facing a bunch of ex-cons, but after breaching the defenses and fighting our way inside, we found the families.”

“There were women and children, civilians that had fled to the safety of the prison island and offered their services to the convicts in return for protection.”

“Yes, the convicts had attacked us, but they had done it to support those in their care.”

Charles rubbed his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut as painful memories began to surface.

“None of that mattered to Mason.”

“He slaughtered the convicts, and then he went after the civilians…”

Lemon Hearts eyes widened first with fear and then narrowed with disbelief and anger as, after a long pause, Charles told her about that fateful night.”

5 months prior.

Harsh laughter and screams of pain and terror filled the night air above O Leary Prison.

“Please!” A man shouted. “We weren’t the ones who attacked y-!”

A burst of gunfire drowned him out, and a child began to wail.

One of the guard towers was ablaze, flames devouring its wooden frame and casting a sickly glow over the prison courtyard.

The bodies of dozens of the prison’s ex-con defenders were strewn about the blood-soaked lawn, some beginning to twitch and growl as they re-animated.

However, a pair of militia troops patrolling the grounds quickly put an end to any new zombie with a round through the skull.

Inside the prison, the heavy steel door that had once barricaded the entrance had been blasted off its hinges.

Standing atop the fallen door, clad in full black Spec Ops gear with his face hidden behind a gas mask, and looking for all the world like the grim reaper himself, was Mason Lowitz

Though one couldn’t see it behind the mask, he wore a malicious grin of satisfaction as he watched his militia troops storm the building, tearing through supplies, beating men with their rifle butts, and dragging women and children from their beds.

He strode forward, looking on with perverse excitement as some of his men cornered a young woman trying to defend herself with a golf club.

One of the men stepped forward and tried to disarm her.

She smashed the club down on his helmet, inflicting no damage but causing him to stumble back, accompanied by the jeers of his comrades.

As the woman swung the club around, daring them to try again, another group of Mason’s militia dragged a girl, kicking and screaming from one of the cells where she’d been hiding.

“No, let her go!” The woman shouted as she saw the girl, attempting to push past the encircling militiamen.

As she did, one of the militiamen took advantage of the woman’s distraction and slammed the butt of his rifle into her back.

She cried out in pain as Mason climbed the stairs to the prison’s second floor, whistling a merry tune as he did.

At the top of the stairs, Charles Xavier was waiting with an expression of appalled concern.

“Is the second floor secure?” Mason asked.

“What are you doing!?” Charles responded in disbelief. “Call the men off!”

“Is the second floor secure?” Mason asked again.

“Yes, it’s secure!” Charles spat back. “They’re all noncombatants!”

Mason gave a hollow laugh behind his mask and pushed past Charles. “Charles my friend, times have changed.”

“It’s them or us.”

“In this new age, wouldn’t you rather be near the top of the pecking order?”

Suddenly, there was a commotion from the stairs and the woman with the golf club emerged from the stairwell with the little girl in her arms and several militiamen in pursuit.

Mason turned around slowly and took off the mask, revealing his predatory grin beneath cold blue eyes.

“Quite the persistent one isn’t she, eh Charles?”

He began to advance on the pair and drew a military knife from his belt.

“It’s ones like her that really need to be taught who’s boss!”

“Stop!”, Charles commanded as he drew his sidearm, a nine-millimeter Avenger pistol, and placed himself between the woman and his former comrade.

“This has gone too far Mason; these people have done nothing to hurt us!”

As Charles stared him down, a bemused look came over Mason’s face.

After a pause of several seconds, he began to chuckle and then laugh.

It was a harsh, mocking, merciless laugh that caused Charles and the Civilians behind him to shudder slightly.

Mason put the knife back in its sheath.

“So it’s come to this now has it, still clinging to a state of mind and honor that died when this mess began?”

“The days of being the hero are over Charles.”, Mason’s voice took on a deadly edge as, unnoticed by Charles, one of the militiamen who had followed the woman raised his rifle and came up behind him.

“I suggest you step aside.” Mason said coldly as he drew his own sidearm, a Desert Falcon, and inspected it.”

Charles stood his ground and remained silent, the motto of JTF2, a motto that he’d sworn to uphold: Facta Non Verba (Deeds, Not Words), reverberating through his head.

“Huh, pity.”, Mason sighed and gestured to the Militiaman behind Charles with his pistol.

Charles realized what was about to happen and started to turn.

The woman shouted a warning, but it was to no avail.

The heavy butt of a Maplestrike assault rifle smashed into the back of his head and when he awoke, head throbbing, he found himself locked in a cell.

“And the rest”, Charles said as he looked up at Lemon Hearts, “is history.”

Silence fell over them as Lemon Hearts digested her companion’s story, a sea of emotions boiling within her.

Finally, she looked up at the former JTF2 operative and smiled.

“I like your motto, deeds not words was it?”

“Yeah”, Charles said with a sad smile, “a lot of good it did me”.

“You stood by your beliefs.” Lemon Hearts replied. “You let your actions speak louder than any of Mason’s words.”

“Mason may have won the battle, but he didn’t win the moral war.”

Charles sighed, drew his knees up to his chest, and rested a hand on his forehead.

“Mason was right about one thing.”

“The values of old probably have died out by now.”

“I can imagine that out there,” Charles gestured to the barred window, “with supplies dwindling and people getting more and more desperate, basic human compassion is probably in very short supply.”

Lemon Hearts felt another pang of fear for her friends, hoping against hope that wherever they were, that they were alright.

If she was ever going to escape in order to find them though, she would need Charles’s help.

Memories of the past and thoughts of an uncertain future clouded the man’s face.

She needed to distract him.

“Hey”, she piped up, “It's my turn to tell you a story!”

Charles looked up. “I guess so.”

He slowly began to smile. “Wait, I see what you did there!”

Lemon Hearts grinned.

“Like I said, we aren’t all that different you and I.”

As the sun rose higher in the sky, bathing PEI in it’s warm, late spring light, Lemon Hearts told Charles the story of how she came to be in the human world.

“It’s quite the tale.” She said.

“No worries” replied Charles with a smile as he got comfortable again.

“We have all day.”

Lemon Hearts took a moment to gather her thoughts and then dove in.

“So there was this book, called The Unturned Survival Guide…”

Come and Find Me

View Online

Chapter 7

After one of the strangest and definitely the scariest night of her life, Twinkleshine had fallen into a deep sleep next to her strange new human companion, Jack.

As the sun continued to rise and the morning got underway, she began to twitch as a dream took hold of her exhausted mind.

“Wha-where am I?” Twinkleshine mumbled.

Surrounded on all sides by a pitch-black void, she began to panic before realizing that she was standing on something solid.

Whatever that something was, however, she couldn’t see it, though she could see herself, which, in itself was odd as there was no source of light that she could see.

“It’s almost like the light is coming from me…” She thought.

Suddenly, the light went out, but she wasn’t in the dark.

In the distance, there was a faint, red glow.

She began to trot cautiously towards it, blinking as she tried to make sense of what it was.

The texture beneath her hooves began to change as she did so, going from smooth to rough.

Firing up her horn, the pale blue light of her magic lit up the surrounding area and the darkness grudgingly receded.

Her little light revealed that she was in some kind of tunnel, cold concrete walls arching up from the floor to meet high above her head.

As she was looking up, she missed the railway tracks that began abruptly just a few feet away and stubbed her hoof.

“What now!?”, Twinkleshine thought grumpily as she recovered from her stumble and rubbed her hoof.

There was a pair of them, side by side so trains could go either way, rails gleaming faintly in the glow of her magic and stretching into the darkness towards the red glow.

Suddenly, there was a faint, ghostly whisper that swept down the tunnel like a draft.

Twinkleshine’s ears perked up, straining to make sense of the voice that seemed to swirl out of the darkness from every direction.

“Come and Find Me….”

“Ok, this is getting weirder and weirder.” She thought with growing trepidation as she picked up the pace and started to follow the tracks towards the glow.

Then she reached the source.

“What in Equestria…,” Twinkleshine said under her breath as she beheld the strange symbol floating in the darkness before her.

Then the voice came again, this time louder and somehow more urgent.

“Come and Find Me!”

“Who are you?” Twinkleshine whispered back, eyes following the strange, arcane curves and shapes of the symbol.

There was no answer.

Then the symbol vanished and Twinkleshine was left alone in the tunnel with the light of her horn.

“Well, that was kind of anticlim-”

An unseen force gripped the mare and smashed her sideways into the tunnel wall, but instead of the crunch of breaking bones and pain she was expecting, Twinkleshine found herself in a small side cavern.

She was so shocked, she forgot to scream. However, as she registered what lay before her, the scream died in her throat.

A big, angry-looking red and black crystal sat embedded in the floor a few meters from her hooves at the back of the cavern.

On the ledges beside and behind it, over a dozen candles glowed faintly, their light outmatched by that of the crystal.

As for the crystal itself, the red and black patterns on its surface were constantly morphing and sliding about, creating a strange, almost hypnotic effect.

Then the voice came again.

“Anastasia…”

And with that, the cavern and the strange crystal vanished like the symbol, once again leaving Twinkleshine in the dark.

“Wait!” she cried, firing up her magic again.

“Is that your name, who are you, where are you!?”

Again there was no answer.

In fact, when Twinkleshine began to look around frantically, she realized that she was no longer in the cavern or the tunnel with the railway tracks.

She was once again, standing on seemingly nothing, and surrounded on all sides by the pitch-black void.

But she wasn’t alone.

There was a deep, blood-curdling growl from behind followed by a blast of foul air that reeked of death.

Twinkleshine’s coat prickled with an electric fear as he slowly turned her head, dreading what she would see.

A pair of burning red eyes glared back at her from out of the gloom.

She shrieked.

Then the monster opened its terrible, glowing maw and lunged.

Twelve hours prior, Sergeant Jack Winds had been sure he was at death’s door.

He’d accepted his fate and was ready to meet his maker.

Then a little pink and white unicorn had popped into his life and things took a turn for the bizarre.

But now, as he awoke, sore and stiff with the morning sun warming his face through the Watchtower windows, he couldn’t help but smile.

“What a sight.” He thought with a sigh, gazing out at a little slice of green hillside framed by a brilliant morning sky.

He began to hum the first few bars of Edvard Grieg’s Morning Mood as he shifted his gaze inside.

The blood bag that saved his life hung empty from the ceiling, its contents having kept him alive through the night.

His gun was nowhere to be seen and the contents of his Alicepack were scattered about the Watchtower floor.

However, any further interest in these discoveries came to an abrupt halt as his eyes fell on the sleeping Unicorn curled up next to him.

“Huh”

“If I’m still alive, why is the little pastel Horse of Death still here?”

Jack began to replay the events of the previous night in his mind, and after a few moments, his brain offered up the only logical conclusions there were.

Either A, he was hallucinating something fierce.

Or B, the Unicorn was real.

“Only one way to find out.”, he thought.

Removing the needle of the blood bag from his arm, Jack slowly reached out and touched the Twinkleshine’s foreleg.

He felt the blood drain from his face.

“She’s real.”

Jack moved his hand up to touch her horn, his mind awash with incredulous disbelief.

That’s when Twinkleshine’s eyes flew open and she began to scream.

Jack, acting more on reflex than anything else, began shouting as well and sharply withdrew his hand in shock.

This went on for several seconds before Twinkleshine’s scream died to a bewildered whimper.

”It was all a dream…” She breathed.

She rubbed her eyes and caught her breath, relief flooding her body.

When she yawned and looked back up, she found a wide-eyed Jack staring back.

She gave him a sheepish grin.

“Heh, good morning…sorry about that.”

Jack’s jaw fell.

“Uhh… mornin….”

Memories of the previous night began to assert themselves as the two sized each other up in the morning light.

“Y-your real!?” He stuttered in disbelief.

Twinkleshine slowly pushed herself to her hooves, wincing as her sore muscles made their presence known after a night on the hard metal floor.

“It would appear so.” She grimaced, “I sure do feel real.”

“So that thing you did last night, or was it this morning, with your horn?” Jack asked hoarsely and coughed. “Gosh darn, I could do with a drink.” “That thing you did where your horn glowed, and stuff began floating around…was that magic?”

She gave Jack a quizzical look, momentarily forgetting that she wasn’t in Equestria anymore. “Yes…What else would it be?” “All unicorns can do magic.”

Jack returned the look. “I’m both unsurprised and confused.” “You make it sound like it’s something that everyone should know, and yet aside from most 6-year-old girls, a lot of people don’t believe in unicorns or magic, much less than the former can perform the latter.

Twinkleshine rubbed her eyes with a hoof and sighed. “Riiight, this isn’t Equestria…” Suddenly she stood up, eyes wide and moved over to one of the windows. “Where are we!?”

“Uh…” Jack Scratched his head, unsure of where to begin. “Summerside Military Base…On Prince Edward Island?”

Twinkleshine shook her head and continued to look out the window, searching for anything familiar.

“Canada…?”

With another sigh, she drew back from the window and sat with a look of resignation. “None of those places sound familiar, though I surmised as much after last night’s nightmare…”

Jack looked thoughtful for a moment, then his eyes went wide. “So, you’re saying you aren’t from this world?”

She shook her head. “No, there was this portal spell in a book that my friend Moondanc-”

Jack’s stomach gave a massive growl, to which Twinkleshine’s responded with a sympathetic growl of its own, startling the mare into an embarrassed silence.

For a moment, neither spoke as a blush slowly rose on the mare’s cheeks and Jack tried not to laugh.

Losing the battle, Jack broke into hearty guffaws and slapped his knee with his good arm. “I think our stomachs have the right idea, breakfast, or I guess brunch at this hour first, and backstories later!”

Twinkleshine joined Jack in his merriment, the stress, and strain of the previous night slowly beginning to melt away with their laughter filling the bright morning.

Suddenly, an angry snarl from below brought them jolting back to reality.

Jack slowly pushed himself to his feet with a grimace and shuffled over to the hatch in the watchtower floor. Down below, a zombie in a shredded Canadian army uniform, combat vest, and helmet staggered around the ladder and clawed at the rungs.

“Can’t let a pair of souls enjoy a good laugh huh?” Jack shook his head and looked around the tower from something before looking over at Twinkleshine, who was starting to look a little queasy as memories from the previous night began to surface.

“Hey, have you seen my Maplestrike?”

Twinkleshine looked around at the various items scattered around the tower from her frantic search for medical supplies the night before. “Erm no, maybe?” “What is a Maplestrike?”

“Ah, right!” “Other world and all that…” He looked around the tower again, noting the scattered supplies, mostly two by fours, boxes of nails, and rolls of tape, for the first time and moving to gather them up.

“It’s a gun, an assault rifle.” He replied, to which Twinkleshine simply cocked her head. Jack stopped for a moment and tried to figure out how to describe it to someone who had never heard of a gun before. “A weapon that shoots little golden darts…?”

Recognition kindled in Twinkleshine’s eyes, yet her expression was stricken. “It’s down there.” She said, pointing to the hatch with her hoof.

After placing the items that he had gathered up back into his Alicepack, Jack returned to hatch. Lying on the tarmac a few feet from the ladder was the assault rifle, and all around it, a dozen zombie corpses were dissolving in the sunlight, leaving the tarmac stained with dried blood.

He whistled appreciatively before turning to Twinkleshine. Did you do that!?

She nodded slowly, looking like she was on the verge of tears.

Noticing her distress, Jack knelt down in front of her and held out a blocky hand. “I never properly thanked you for fetching me those meds, and if what I can see from here is any indication, it wasn’t easy.

“I know they’re already dead!” She blurted. “But, that thing…that weapon you call a Maplestrike, it…it…decimated them! “All I could think of afterward was what would happen if somepony evil got their hooves on one and used it against the living…”

Jack gave a long, sad sigh. “And just like that Twinkleshine, you have discovered one of the greatest pre-apocalypse conundrums of my world.” “With great power comes great responsibility, and yet there are those who would use that power for evil. That’s one of the reasons I became a soldier. To protect people from those who would abuse their power and threaten the peace, even now, when the dead walk and humanity needs to stand together more than ever.”

“Well, there’s something our worlds have in common,” Twinkleshine said quietly. “That saying about power, I’ve heard it many times, and for all it’s good uses, magic can be used for just as many if not more horrible things.”

Jack hesitated for a second before placing a hand on her withers. “Well that’s why we have to set an example, isn’t it?” “I mean, you had no idea who or what I was when you found me. “You could have chosen to let me die of my wounds, or heck, most of the folks around here would have sped up the process with a bullet and taken my gear.” “Instead you used the weapon’s power to fight off the undead and saved me in the process.”

Twinkleshine closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath as she composed herself. “Thanks, Jack…I’m just glad I’m not alone.”

Jack smiled and stood. “So am I.” “Now, how about we blow this popsicle stand and head over to my homestead for a bite to eat?”

“Sounds like a plan” Twinkleshine replied with a small smile of our own. “Though how are we going to get past him?” She looked out the hatch at the zombie still clawing at the ladder.

“Easy, I still have my trusty Avenger,” Jack replied pulling an r-shaped device from a holster on his side that Twinkleshine hadn’t noticed before. Jack then produced a black cylinder from thin air and began screwing it onto the end of the device.

“Blinking in surprise, Twinkleshine figured she must still be somewhat sleep deprived and dismissed the anomaly.“Is that another weapon?” “It doesn’t look like the Maplestrike, which you said was an assault rifle right?”

“Correct” Jack affirmed. “This, however, is a pistol. It’s a gun as well, though it isn’t as powerful as an assault rifle and has a shorter range.”

Realizing that he would probably have to explain further, Jack finished screwing on the cylinder and held out the weapon for Twinkleshine to inspect.

“This tube I just attached is called a suppressor, and as the name implies. It silences the loud bang that guns make when fired.

“Where’s the box with the little golden darts?” Twinkleshine asked.

“Right here,” Jack replied, pushing a lever on the side and causing the magazine to drop out of the grip into his palm. “The box is called a magazine or mag for short and the darts are called bullets.”

Twinkleshine nodded in understanding and thought back to her own fumbling experience with the Maplestrike. “There was this lever on the side of the assault rifle that I pulled before I could start shooting, does the Avenger not have one?”

Jack reloaded the magazine and the then switching the gun to his other hand, pulled back on the top of the weapon, causing the top to slide back until it clicked. He then let it spring forward with a clack. The sound caused Twinkleshine’s ears to perk up in understanding.

“Wait…” A look of fear mixed with relief came over her as she remembered her first encounter with Jack. “I heard that noise when I first climbed into the tower and you were pointing the Maplestrike at me, I could have died right then and there!”

“Ah, sorry about that, I thought you were someone or more appropriately, something else.” “One of the many things you learn in the army, however, is trigger discipline.” “You’re never supposed to open fire unless you positively id your target.”

With a relieved smile and a shake of her head, Twinkleshine gathered up the rest of the items scattered around the floor with her magic as Jack looked on in wonder. “Then boy am I glad your training paid off.”

Jack barely nodded in agreement as he continued to stare at the levitating supplies.

“Honest to goodness magic made by an honest to goodness unicorn…now I’ve seen it all.” He shook his head as Twinkleshine deposited the last of the supplies in Jack’s Alicepack and extinguished the ethereal fire around her horn. “Thought nothing could get crazier than the dead returning to life and society going belly up.” “Guess I was wrong.”

He chuckled in amazement, then zipped up the bag and hefted it up, grunting in pain as he tried to slide the strap over his injured shoulder.

“Oh no you don’t,” Twinkleshine said as she watched him struggle, enveloping the bulging backpack with her magic. “I’ll carry this, you just worry about getting us back your hideout in one piece.”

“Heh, thanks… It’s probably not a good idea to put too much weight on my shoulder just yet.”

“You think!?” She replied in jest, eyeing her medical handiwork a breathing a small sigh of relief that the bandage was still clean and that the wound seemed to have closed.

An incredulous look crossed her face as she realized that despite the grievous wound undeath, the bandage was still pristine. “How fast do you humans heal!?”

“Heh, it’s kind of strange actually,” Jack said as he walked over to the hatch, flicked the safety off on the Avenger pistol, and took aim at the zombie below. “I’ll explain along the way.”

Jack pulled the trigger, and true to his words, instead of the cacophonous roar of the Maplestrike that Twinkleshine was still half expecting, there was only a pair of sharp pops as Jack dropped the undead soldier with two shots through the top of the helmet.

Holstering the pistol, Jack climbed down the ladder, still wincing slightly as he moved his injured arm. Once on the ground, he unholstered the weapon again and did a quick visual sweep before going to pick up the Maplestrike.

Twinkleshine followed, levitating the Alicepack above her as she descended. Once on the tarmac, she was surprised to find that all of the zombie corpses from the night before has disappeared. All that remained where the rust-colored blood stains and even those seemed to be shrinking before her very eyes.

Looking to Jack for an explanation, she once again found him performing something that, for someone who claimed to have never believed in magic, seemed a bit strange.

Jack had produced another two items from seemingly nowhere. One she recognized as another mag for the Maplestrike, but the other was a little black oblong that he was affixing to the barrel. One the oblong was attached, he removed the empty mag and replaced it with a new one. The real kicker though came when the empty mag in his hand suddenly vanished.

“What in Celestia’s…Jack, I thought there was no magic in this world of yours!”

“Well, that’s just it, there wasn’t,” Jack replied as he checked the rifle sights. He flicked a little switch on the oblong and a little red dot appeared on the wooden palisade he was aiming at as he continued.

Shortly after the zombie outbreak began, people began exhibiting strange powers, one of which is the ability to store and retrieve things telekinetically.

“Telekinetically?” Twinkleshine repeated. “But not like my horn where I can lift stuff?”

“No…how to explain?” Jack mused as he began to walk towards the gate with the puzzled Twinkleshine in tow.

“It’s like we could see the insides of our pockets, bags, closets, any kind of storage, you name it, in our minds.” “I was carrying the extra magazine for the Maplestrike and the tactical laser in my pocket, so I thought about them and the act of moving them to my hand and, well, hey presto!

“It also works for stuff like the rifle, here, watch this.”

Twinkleshine’s eyes widened as the Maplestrike vanished from Jack’s hands and reappeared slung over his shoulder by its carry strap. It then disappeared from his back and reappeared in his hands.

“Magic or not,” he finished. “It’s a pretty useful trick, especially nowadays.”

“I’ll say,” Twinkleshine said and nodded in agreement as they reached the gate, a pair of zombies, one on all fours, barring the way.

Jack took aim at the sprinter zombie with the assault rifle and then thought better of it, instead unholstering the silenced Avenger pistol and offering it to Twinkleshine.

“Wait, why me!?” She whispered worriedly so as not to draw the attention of the undead.

Jack frowned. “Well, if you want to survive long enough to find a way back to wherever you come from, you had best learn to defend yourself.” “It’s ok, the gun won't bite.”

With no small amount of trepidation, Twinkleshine set down the Alicepack and enveloped the pistol in her magic.

“See?” “There ya go,” Jack said reassuringly as he knelt down next to Twinkleshine. “Now look down the sights and put that sprinter zombie’s head between the two glowing pips of the back sight and square in the middle of the front sight.”

Twinkleshine brought the pistol up to eye level and followed Jack’s instructions as she took aim, her breath quickening with nerves.

“Calm down,” Jack said, placing his hand on her withers and finding the unicorn mare shaking slightly. “You’ve got this.” “Breath in, breath out, breath in, take the shot, breath out.”

Steeling her nerves and burying the fear from the night before, Twinkleshine took a shuddering breath, breathed out with more confidence, then breathed in steadily and squeezed the trigger with her magic.

The sharp pop sounded like thunder in her ears as the Avenger jumped in her magical grip, yet as the sprinter zombie jolted back and collapsed, the nine-millimeter round to the head felling it like a sack of grain, the other zombie nearby didn’t even flinch.

“Oh!” she let out a small squeak of wonder “That wasn’t that bad…”

“See, what did I tell you?” Jack said with a proud smile. “Now go for the other one.”

“Ok!” Twinkleshine replied, breathless with sudden elation at her success.

She took aim at the seemingly average undead walker, but in her excitement, she pulled the trigger as she breathed out, and the shot fell low, striking the walker in the upper chest where it’s vest absorbed much of the shot’s power.

With a flash of ethereal purple energy and a savage growl, the flanker zombie revealed its nearly invisible evolved form and stumbled towards them.

Twinkleshine’s ears flattened as she remembered her first encounter with a flanker and she took a step back in fear.

“It’s ok Twinkleshine, I’ve got this one,” Jack said as he stood and raised the Maplestrike.

“No, I can handle it!” Twinkleshine said, sudden confidence surging through her as she remembered how she’d bucked the crawler in the head during her nighttime medicine run. “I remember you!” she shouted at the flanker as it came around the boom gate, it’s shadow against the concrete wall giving away its position.

She took aim again and pulled the trigger three times as fast as she could, firing into what she hoped was the center of mass. All three shots hit home, and the final round brought the flanker down in a spray of blood and ethereal purple energy.

“Not today bub!” She crowed victoriously, rearing up and punching the air with a hoof in excitement.

Jack laughed and looked at her in wonder. “Well that was fast, and here I was thinking you didn’t have it in you.”

“Ah it was nothing!” she boasted as she waved the gun around. “I just need a little encouragement!”

“Now, who’s next!?”

“Whoa, slow down there!” Jack said stepping back as the Twinkleshine swung the weapon around. “Rule number one of gun safety, never point a live firearm anywhere except the target!” “I don’t fancy getting shot again!”

“Oops, heh sorry!” She replied sheepishly as she lowered the pistol and pointed it away from Jack. “I got kinda carried away.”

Jack shook his head. “It’s an awesome feeling, isn’t it? Knowing that you can stop these undead horrors in their tracks? But you have to be careful.” “See that little switch the side of the gun?

Twinkleshine nodded as she inspected the pistol. “There’s a little lever at the back and a small round button in the handle.” “Which one are you talking about?”

“The little leaver” Jack replied, that’s the safety. “push it up so that you don’t accidentally shoot me or yourself.”

“Heh, that sounds like a good idea.” She said, still embarrassed. “What’s the other button for?”

“That’s the mag release.” Jack explained, each magazine holds thirteen bullets and when you’ve used them up, you push this button to remove the empty magazine.”

“So that means I have eight bullets left, right?” Twinkleshine asked. ‘I fired one at the first zombie and four at that strange one with the invisibility spell.”

“That you do,” Jack said with another proud smile. “It’s good that you are keeping track of your rounds because it could make all the difference when you decide whether to wade into the fight or find somewhere to hide and reload." As he said this, he produced another two Avenger mags from his mental inventory and handed them to Twinkleshine.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” “This world has become a dangerous and unfriendly place since the start of the outbreak, and in case I’m not around to help you, I am entrusting you with this power.”

Twinkleshine looked wide-eyed at Jack. “But, are you sure that you won’t nee-?“

“Keep it,” Jack said, cutting her off. “I’ve got other weapons back at my hideout and I’ll teach you how to care for yours when we get there.” His neglected stomach growled again in protest and poked it with a finger. “Oh, pipe down you!”

“Ok, I’ll teach you about weapon maintenance after lunch,” Jack said with a resigned smile as Twinkleshine giggled.

Taking the combat vest from the fallen sprinter zombie, Jack dusted it off and adjusted the straps, so it would fit over Twinkleshine’s frame. “There ya go!” He said as he stood back and looked her over. “Your first bit of hard-earned battle loot!”

Twinkleshine shifted a bit, wishing for a bit more padding but loving the sheer number of pockets she now had at her disposal.

She placed the spare Avenger mags in one of the front pockets and was about to place the pistol in the built-in holster when a strange feeling came over her and a faint, transparent diagram popped up before her surprised eyes.

The two magazines that she had just placed in a front pocket appeared in the top two slots on the left-hand side of the diagram and in a big slot near the bottom, she could see the Avenger.

“This must be what Jack was talking about!?” She thought excitedly. “But…If I can do it…does it mean that this world is magical or…?” She shook her head and the diagram disappeared. “This is definitely a question for Moondancer, I’ll have to ask her when…”

Twinkleshine’s heart sank. “If…I ever see her again.” “Oh, Celestia I hope the others are ok, wherever they are!”

“You ok there?” Jack’s voice cut through Twinkleshine’s darkening train of thought. “You were looking kinda lost there for a moment.”

“I was just thinking about my friends…” She said quietly, her eyes downcast. “I don’t know where they are, whether the ended up in this world or whether they’re still back home in Equestria. “I’m just worried is all.”

Jack looked thoughtful for a moment then gave her a reassuring smile. “Well, tomorrow I need to make a supply run into Alberton, it’s a town just to the south of here.” “There are a few people I know holed up in the area that might have seen your friends.” “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do what I can to help you find them and or return home to them.

“Oh, thank you, Jack!” She gushed as she holstered the pistol. “I mean, we just met, and you’ve already done more than enough by giving me the gun but-.“

“No buts,” Jack said, shaking his head. “You’re the only reason I’m still alive and you braved a full moon to make it happen.” “I’ll help you with whatever you need.” “I said it before and I’ll say it again. This world has become a dangerous and unfriendly place.” ‘However, with someone to watch you back, life becomes just a little bit easier.”

Twinkleshine trotted up to Jack and hugged him in gratitude, surprising the man and causing him to stand there awkwardly for a few moments before squeezing her back and breaking the embrace.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve hugged, heck, even shook hands with another living soul.” He thought. “I’d forgotten what it felt like.”

This time, Twinkleshine’s stomach growled and she giggled. “Weren’t we supposed to be heading to lunch?”

Jack laughed and shouldered the Alicepack as they walked out of the gate. “Yes, we were, but we keep getting sidetracked.”

Twinkleshine looked incredulously at the bulging backpack on Jack’s shoulders and gave a small nicker of dismay. “Your wound-!”

“Is healed!” Jack finished. “That’s the other strange thing that’s been happening since the outbreak began.” “Wounds that used to take days or even months to heal are now gone in a matter of hours, and unless one of your vital organs is seriously damaged or you start bleeding out, you’re are almost always guaranteed to recover.” “Sure, you’d be in a rather cruddy condition, but you won’t be knocking at the pearly gates.

“You were bleeding out.” Twinkleshine stated, “Remembering his sticky black blood pooling on the watchtower floor with a shudder.”

“Yup,” Jack said. “I wasn’t hit in any of the vital areas, but I probably had less than an hour left before I bled white when you found me.”

“Sickness can also still kill you if you are not careful and a zombie bite will turn you into one if left untreated,” He continued. “You can also still die of hunger or thirst, but otherwise, yeah, humans got a lot tougher to kill. “I like to think that it’s some kind of freak evolution that was spurred on by the onset of the apocalypse, but I really have no idea.”

Twinkleshine still looked confused, but after a moment just shook her head and grimaced at the grisly possibilities. “Fair enough.” She conceded. “New world, new rules.”

As they walked into the hills in the direction of Jack’s hideout and his broken bridge, she glanced back at the base with its thick grey walls, and tall metal watchtowers, a zombie-infested symbol of a dangerous new world. Then she looked up at the darkening clouds slowly scudding across the deep blue sky.

“We should pick up the pace” Jack called over his shoulder as he followed her gaze. “It looks like it might rain soon.”

Cantering to beside her newfound friend, Twinkleshine made a silent resolution to her friends as they passed beneath the shattered wooden span and into the trees.

“This may be a new world, but as long as the sky stays blue and rain falls from the clouds, I will do everything in my power to find you.”

She glanced up at Jack and gave him a smile which he returned.

“And I’m not alone.”

Bonus, old 2.0 version

View Online

2.0

I found this in an old folder and thought I could find a better place for it.

So this is a scene that I envisioned for Among the Unturned way back during Unturned 2.0 between the protagonists and a gang of bandits.

By now, so much has changed and it has been awesome to watch as the game, and my writing develops over time.

As of 7/8/17, Unturned is now out of early access. Huzzah!

“Landmines”, Andrew pointed to a small green object about the shape and size of a Frisbee with a red button in the center lying in the middle of the road.
As he patted Twinkleshine’s haunches and whispered a quick prayer for the deceased, Andrew sighed, “With any luck, they didn’t know what hit them.”

Twinkleshine felt her stomach churn at the grisly scene before her,
The driver of the truck (what was left of him) was still strapped in his seat and nothing more than charred skeleton from the fire that must have consumed the vehicle.

But the other, oh Celestia, the other one... a leg here, an arm over there …

Suddenly Andrew froze.

“What’s wrong?” Twinkleshine said, startled at her companion’s sudden unease.

Andrew’s eyes swept the ridge down the road near Fenwood farm for what he hoped he hadn’t seen.
The brief flash of sunlight reflecting off a glass lens.
…
With sickening sense of dread Andrew rounded on Twinkleshine and hissed, “Get behind the truck now!”
“Wait wh...?” Twinkleshine started, but Andrew cut her off and shoved her forward. “Just g-!“
CRACK!
Where she’d been standing a moment before, a geyser of dust erupted from the road as Twinkleshine began a mad gallop for the overturned truck.
“Move girl, move!” Andrew yelled as he sprinted to join her.
Together they dove into the cover of the truck’s cargo bed as a second shot ricocheted of the tail gate and buzzed angrily off into the trees.

“Dammit!” Andrew swore as he fixed his unicorn companion with an angry glare. “Don’t EVER hesitate like that again!” Andrew snapped.
Stuttering under Andrew’s thunderous gaze Twinkleshine felt any excuses she had die in her throat. “I…I…I didn’t mean”!

“If I hadn’t pushed you, you’d be stone dead!”

Tears began to well in Twinkleshine’s eyes as the sheer terror of being shot at wore off and she realized just how close she had been to joining the two landmine victims in the dirt.
“I’m sorry!” She sobbed, “I…I…sob...I should have listened… me and my stupid questions almost got us both killed!”
With that she broke down and cried bitterly into her hooves

“So naïve”, Andrew muttered under his breath, “Still so much to learn.”
Andrew felt like a total asshole for making her cry, but she needed to learn and fast.
Out here on PEI the teacher didn't allow re-takes, and even a small mistake could get you killed.

He turned away with a tired sigh and unslung his Usbekanov and checked the clip, it was half full.
Knowing that returning to the homestead was out of the question with bandits so close by, he un-slung his alice-pack and took stock of the supplies they had left.

An empty canteen
3 bandages
2 pieces of corn
1 jerry can full of gasoline
1 blowtorch
4 bottles of purification tablets
1 machete
8 buckshot shells
6 slug shells
A Novuh shotgun
And the Usbekanov

It would have to do.

Andrew began to plan their escape but his concentration was upset by the heartbreaking sound Twinkleshine’s uncontrolled tears.

He then forced himself to look over at the despondent unicorn, her frame still wracked by sobs of guilt and her once white coat matted with itchy brown dirt stains and stinging red scratches.

Andrew could no longer bear her cries as his heart softened at the sound of Twinkleshine’s genuine sorrow.
As he moved closer to comfort her, he removed his helmet to scratch his head and his eyes settled on Twinkleshine’s horn.

Suddenly an idea came to him as he looked between her horn and his helmet. It would be risky, but if there was any hope of escape, they’d have work together to pull it off.

Twinkleshine was startled when a calloused but gentle hand began to caress her mane.
Lifting her tear-stained face, she looked up to find that Andrew had scooted over and was now smiling down at her.

“You’re not mad”? She said, her voice choked with emotion.

“I was”, Andrew sighed. “But there’s nothing quite like nearly getting your head blown off to teach you a lesson, and I couldn’t bear seeing you so down and out when this is just as much my fault as yours”.

Twinkleshine looked down in confusion and guilt, “I’m the one who hesitated, how’s any of what happened your fault”? She asked.

“The moment we saw the wrecked truck and the bodies, I should have had us go straight back to Holman isle to wait until nightfall”, Andrew responded. “Instead I tricked myself into thinking that whoever did this would be long gone”.

“I’m such an idiot”, Andrew deadpanned as he subconsciously scratched the scar on his arm,

“I of all people should know that bandits always leave a rear guard to ambush anyone who tries to scavenge what they didn’t take”.
Cleaning the last few tears from Twinkleshine’s face with the hood of her ghille suit, Andrew responded with a grin. “And besides, you’re too cute to stay mad at for long”!

With an embarrassed snort and a slight blush, Twinkleshine got up and wrapped her hooves around Andrew’s neck in a warm embrace as the sun began to sink below the trees to west.

“Cuteness aside”, Andrew thought “You taught me how to have fun again and showed me that there’s more to life than hiding”.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you”…

So Andrew did all he could do, he began to stroke Twinkleshine’s mane once more and smiled as she nuzzled his neck…

The moment was short lived however, Andrew knew they were not out of danger yet, in fact, far from it.
The sniper could already have run for his friends and the whole gang of bloodthirsty bandits could be closing in.
Wishing he didn’t have to, he broke the embrace and began to outline his plan to Twinkleshine.

“There are timberwolves here”!? Twinkleshine’s pupils shrank and her ears drooped as she asked.

Andrew remembered the conversation they had back at the homestead when Twinkleshine had told him about Equestria and how she could sometimes hear magical wooden creatures called Timberwolves howling at night.

He shook his head and responded wistfully, “I wish it was a wooden wolf; that would probably easier deal with”. “Out here, when someone says Timberwolf, they’re talking about a rare; military grade sniper rifle with deadly accuracy”. “It’s got a one of a kind report and our friend on the ridge has definitely got one”.

“That’s why we need to find out if that sniper is still up there, otherwise we could be nailed the moment we leave cover”.

“Any hope of getting away alive hinges on us taking him out”.

Twinkleshine shuddered at some grisly thought and nodded in agreement before asking, “And what if he isn’t up there”?

Andrew responded as he checked the sights of his x7 scope one more time.
“If he isn’t there, then chances are he’s coming back with his buddies. That means we’ve gota run like heck for Alberton and hope they won’t search hard with all the zombies around”.

Andrew made one final check of his equipment before looking Twinkleshine in the eye and giving a grim smile.
“You ready”? He asked.

Holding Andrew’s green army helmet in her sky-blue magical grip, Twinkleshine lifted it to a point just below the rim of the truck’s cargo bed.

Swallowing her fear and calling on her hidden reserves of courage she managed a weak smile in return.

“Ready”. She said.

Crouched at the tailgate of the overturned truck, Andrew held his Usbekanov at the ready.

“Go ahead”, he whispered.

Up on the ridge adjacent to Fenwood farm, two pairs of eyes watched the wreck of the yellow pickup truck with keen interest, one through the x20 scope of his rifle, and the other through a pair of binoculars that had once belonged to the driver of said pickup.

“Are you sure”? The one with binoculars, his voice skeptical, asked the sniper. “This wasn’t just one of your berry induced hallucinations”?

“Sure as heck boss”, the sniper responded. “Couldn’t miss it, pink mane, white coat, funny mark on its butt”…

“And yet you did miss it”, the boss deadpanned.

At this the sniper sneered darkly, Well that stupid survivor pushed it right before I fired an-

“Well it’s a good thing your aim is as bad as your excuses!” “I said I wanted the pony ALIVE you imbecile”!

The sniper opened his mouth to try and explain away his latest blunder but was quickly cut off.

“Shut It”! The boss hissed, I see something!

Eager to redeem himself, the sniper quickly sighted up the wrecked truck and spotted the top of Andrew’s green army helmet peeking over the edge of the cargo bed.

“I’ve got you now you little piece of $@#%”……

CRACK!

The helmet was blown from Twinkleshine’s magical grip with an earsplitting clang and was sent spinning through the dirt, but Andrew was moving before it had even hit the ground.

In one smooth motion, He rolled out from behind the truck and brought his assault rifle to bear, sighting up the ridge where he had seen the reflection from the sniper’s scope earlier.

Andrew fired two, quick, three round bursts that where two seconds apart to allow himself time to correct for recoil before scrambling back behind cover.

A distant yelp of pain from the ridge brought a grim smile of satisfaction to his face as he, urging Twinkleshine ahead of him, broke from cover and darted for the tree line on the far side of the road towards Alberton.

Back on the ridge, the sniper bound his boss’s shoulder in bandages and led him up over the peak and down towards Charlottetown where the rest of their gang could be seen lounging around their vehicles.

The boss had a temper to begin with and pain only seemed to increase it as he vented his anger at the unlucky sniper.

“You didn’t re-locate”!!?? “You &%$#%&@ idiot”! The boss roared. No wonder that stupid survivor knew where to shoot! “It’s a shame the bullet found me instead of you, it would have made my job easier”!

With that said he pulled the sniper close and with his good arm yanked a desert falcon from his holster and shot the sniper in the shoulder blade.

“Fairs fair don’t ya think”? The boss said, his voice cold and deadly.

He then continued down the hill alone muttering to himself as the sniper’s screams of pain faded behind him.

You can run little pony, yes you and your plucky little friend, run all you want, but you can’t hide from me.

And when I find you I will make you watch as I spill your little protector’s guts in the dirt, and then you my little pony, will lead me to the way out of this zombie infested nightmare.