> Fallout Equestria: And Hell Followed With Him
>  by focait
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter One: Departure
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	The bombs came, like I knew they would.

I was ready. I’d been ready for years, at that point.

Even when Viridian left, took the kids, and told me to rot in Tartarus, I was ready. She’d never seemed to grasp what kind of danger we were in from those striped bastards.

Just meant I had four times as much supplies to myself when it happened, like I knew it would. Could have lasted four times as long.

I spent so damn long underground. I’m not sure how long exactly, though. Despite all my careful planning, there was one thing I forgot: a good supply of calendars. It was easy enough keeping track the first few years, but eventually, I just stopped bothering. Foolish of me, but I was going through a “phase” at that point.

I think the hardest part of those early years after the world ended was hearing my neighbors pound on the door to my shelter. They knew what I had done, and they had mocked me for it before. Called me crazy. I didn’t shut them out for spite, though. (Except Bells, that rotten cunt). If I had opened that door to them, I would have been risking everything I had spent so long and so much preparing.

Come to think of it, it did hurt a little when I left. Seeing those two little radiation suits folded up in the locker next to mine. Seeing the big one hurt, too. A lot more than I had been expecting it to.

I didn't want to leave, but I knew I had to eventually. I’d spent all the years I was in there training; keeping my body, my mind, and especially my aim at their peak. I did end up leaving earlier than I had planned, though. It was my own damn fault for messing with the water talisman. With so little to do and nopony to talk to I just made up things for myself to do, and it ended up biting me in the ass. Foolish, foolish, foolish.

As was reported by the sensors I had so carefully set out long ago — the ones that hadn’t failed over the years, but that’s why I installed several — the radiation levels outside my little bunker were not non-existent, but they were survivable. But it would still have been foolish to leave my shelter without a radsuit. Surely, not everywhere I would need to venture could be so lucky.

"Lucky". A poor choice of words, now that I think about it.

So after an indeterminate number of years — it must have been quite a few as my mane’d started to grey at the ends, much to my chagrin — I  decided I'd abandoned my shelter, and enter into the world I’d left behind. I had a fantastic lunch: grilled daisy steaks and gravy over instant mashed potatoes, served with the finest, freshest fruit juice I had. Whichever fruit that may have been is a mystery, as the can didn’t say. Only the best for my last meal in the bunker. 

I would say I wasn’t ready for the world I met when I finally opened the door, but I was. I’d been ready for it quite a while.

According to the clock that I’d so lovingly and painstakingly repaired, I left at about one in the afternoon. But though it was mid-day when I departed, the sky was dark: overcast with murky-looking clouds in constant motion. Like a storm had been brewing all the years I was in the bunker, and was festering in a rotten sky the entire time.

Of course, it was a struggle opening the door to begin with, as there were quite a few corpses piled against it. I imagined it might’ve stank something fierce were it not for my gas mask. I recognized all the bodies, too: the neighbors that had come to my bunker's entrance for help. I felt a slight pang of regret, but it was their own damn fault for not being prepared.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. The foals couldn’t’ve done anything for themselves.

Aside from my deceased neighbors, the neighborhood was surprisingly empty. Far from untouched, of course. The houses looked quite thoroughly looted — windows smashed, front doors bucked off their frames. Including mine, but, they’d have found very little. Maybe a few cans of pet food that I hadn’t bothered to throw out when Viridian took the dog, too.

I hadn’t expected much, and I was certainly no stranger to solitude, having spent the last however many years alone in a bunker built for four. I was somewhat disappointed that there was nopony in sight, but not surprised. I supposed it was just as well, for there was no guarantee that any of my neighbors would be quite as friendly as they had been when I last saw them. Or that Bells hadn’t done Equestria a favor and died in a ditch during the end of the world.

But I digress. I had a job to do: find either a new water talisman, or a new supply of water that could last me some time.

As well as, I suppose, see what became of my foals and Viridian.

Of my goals, however, the former was the most pressing. Of course, it was entirely unlikely I would find a new water talisman. It had cost a fortune to get one in the first place, and that was before the world ended. It seemed I had been the only one wise enough to build a shelter (those Stable-Tec conponies aside!), but perhaps somepony else had thought enough to stock their home with supplies. Even then, were it to fall to the worst case scenario, I had a rather hefty stock of water purification supplies that could filter potable water out of my own piss.

Of course, it still tasted faintly of piss, thus why I chose to venture forth into what was left of Equestria now that the stripes had torn her apart. It weren’t as though I was getting any younger in there, either.

I had never been a fan of crowds, but the utter emptiness of the streets was jarring, to say the least. Rotting corpses still remained, though, they didn’t seem as decomposed as one might expect somepony fortunate enough to die early to be. Likely some kind of voodoo magic kept their bodies somewhat preserved, I posited to myself. I doubted that the local housemares took the time after the bombs fell to don their favorite sunday dresses.

Viridian said when she left that she was taking the kids back to her parents’. That was a long way from here, and might not even still exist. Could have been wiped off the map, for all I knew. They could have moved somewhere else before the bombs dropped. They could have done a lot of things, not that it mattered. Or hell, maybe it did. I supposed I’d find out when I arrived.

I continued down the road toward the hill at the far, far end of the street. The corpses and occasional abandoned wagon aside, they were oddly clean, relatively speaking. They looked like they hadn’t been maintained in the last damn half-century, but that wasn’t entirely the apocalypse’s fault. The war effort this, the war effort that, dragging kids off to fight some hex-slinging mudstripes in straw huts half the world away apparently cost so damn much they couldn’t spare a few bits to fill a pothole here or there. Or there, or there, or there, or damn well anywhere. Nearly didn’t get the bunker finished because the materials had so much damn trouble making it here in the first place. But I did, and now here I was, instead of in some sun-forsaken ministry-of-bullshit-hoo-hah office burnt to cinders like the rest of the world. So, I supposed, the local zoning board and I were even.

And now here I was, on top of my little slice of the world. Old friends and I used to ride down this hill on damn well whatever we could slap some wheels on, ages ago. Still have a decades-old scar or two to show for it.

I could see for miles. But only a few. A nasty, tumultuous fog had fallen over the far edges of town. Green and rumbling, like the sky above couldn’t hold all the thunder it was brewing and the clouds were falling to earth. I could see Canterlot from my vantage atop the hill as well, or rather, I saw the strange pink cloud swallowing whole the city and mountainside it was built upon. It held a curious sort of beauty to it, as ominous as it was.

It struck me how desolate the small suburban sprawl I lived in had become. I saw not a thing move in what of the town had not been fallen upon by the green fog. The land was almost completely silent, save for the low rumbling of thunder from the sky, and the winds that tore through the broken windows and walls of the houses around me. It had never been a particularly busy township, but to see nothing, hear nothing, and know that I had been the only one of over fifty thousand to survive was a sobering experience. And though I had known I would likely be in solitude when I departed my bunker, until that moment when I stopped to truly take in my surroundings the sheer amount of nothing those filthy animals had reduced us to hadn’t yet the chance to fully bear down upon me.

It was a hollow feeling, but if I were to say I shed tears over their loss I would be lying. The rest of the population had been afforded the same chance to prepare for this that I was, and only I had acted. It was the sweat of my brow that saved me, as the sweat of theirs could have saved them. Still, though, I wasn’t so cold (as Viridian had once accused me of being) that I didn’t feel a little bit of remorse. No matter how unprepared they may have been, it was still those mudcrawling stripes in the zebra empire who dropped the bombs that killed them.

My visual reconnaissance concluded, I descended the steep hill and ventured further into the heart of town, wary of the fog swallowing up the north end. I had no desire to enter that cloud, no matter how well-suited my radiation suit could have been for the task. As I made my way down, it dawned on me that I might have actually been a bit too well-armed, considering the utter lack of activity I’d observed. I was considering turning back to the bunker and leaving my rifle, but hindsight is 20/20 and I’d already climbed up and down the damn hill once. My joints were by no means eager to do it again if I didn’t need to.

The deeper forward I progressed, the more numerous the corpses became. Some of them I recognised, if not by face then by cutie mark. Again, whatever twisted curses the zebras imbued their weapons with must have done something to preserve the bodies. Or some of them, at least. Every now and then I’d come across a husk that more resembled a skeleton than a body, barren of fur, their skin raw and flayed. At first, it seemed a horrible way to die, until around the fifth such corpse I passed that I noticed they held something else in common: All of them had been shot, bludgeoned, or stabbed. Out of mercy, I had supposed. I couldn’t imagine living like that.

I was nearing the end of the street, a T-junction clogged with the burnt wreckage of wagons, when I saw a corpse. Unlike the dozens of others I had passed, this one looked fresh, much to my surprise. It seemed I had been mistaken in my assumption that I was the only one to survive, though, I still had no doubt that I was the one most prepared. When I leaned in to take a closer look, I realised I had once known him. He was considerably older than the last I had seen him but cutie marks don’t change — it was Jack, one of the local mechanics’ sons, the namesake tool branding his flank visible through a sizeable tear in his overalls. There was a mangled tire iron lying discarded on the ground beside him, stained with what appeared to be blood and what I assumed to be kind of fluorescent paint.

I was mistaken, as I very soon found out.

I didn’t hear or see it come upon me, but rather, the increasingly rapid staccato of crackles from my geiger counter warned me of its approach.

It was hideous. It looked like those strange corpses I had come across on the street earlier, but covered in patches that gave off a sickly, radioactive green glow like the stuff spattering the tire iron. It was wearing the tatters of what appeared to be a military uniform, though the fabric had worn so thin I could see its wretched flesh glowing beneath what of it remained.

Reacting on instinct alone, I raised my rifle and shot it in the chest. And shot it again, and then a third time in its ugly, lopsided head for good measure, and it fell to the street, still glowing heinously. I approached it, the barrel trained on the ugly beast just in case. 
I had never seen something so disgusting. It had to have been a creation of the zebras, some grotesque facsimile of a pony sent to wipe out whatever life in Equestria their balefire didn’t touch.

Unfortunately for me, this particular monstrosity wasn’t quite dead yet. As I stood over it, it came very much back to life, and before I could put a few more rounds into it, it did something I hadn’t expected in the slightest.

It exploded.

In a shockwave of twisted, sickeningly green magic, I was launched backwards, my geiger counter practically screaming in panic as I was thrown over the husk of a bombed-out wagon. And, dazed as I was, the monster seemed unphased by its violent outburst, clumsily clambering back up from the ground. I slid off the wagon, stumbling onto my hooves. I noticed the thing wasn’t bleeding anymore from the holes I had punched in it, and just as I freed my backup pistol from its holster on my leg the thing pounced at me with far more vigor than I thought possible of a creature that looked so decayed. My gun clattered to the pavement and I was carried a few feet back from it with the ghoulish creature still atop of me. It started clubbing at me mercilessly with its mangled hooves, but I’d survived the damned apocalypse, I wasn’t going to let it this beast do me in. With all the strength in me, I headbutted it as hard as I could. My horn lodged in its cheek, just beneath the eye socket and the hole I’d shot in its face. It felt absolutely disgusting. Like I was headfucking a slab of rotten meat.

It hissed impotently, its assault growing weaker as it slid further onto my horn, until I was eye-to-wretchedly-decayed-jaw with the now-deceased ghoul. I mustered up just enough strength to push it off my horn, and I was going to take a moment to catch my breath when my ears finally stopped ringing enough that I could once more hear my geiger counter crackling in panic. I shoved myself away, letting loose enough curses to peel whatever paint was left on the walls.

I felt terrible. I pawed at my radiation suit’s hood, then at my gas mask, desperately trying to undo the straps, and once I had enough slack to lift it off my face I vomited. Violently. And then, once the first wave of nausea had passed, I promptly threw up again as the smell of rotting gore filled my nostrils. The lunch I had so thoroughly enjoyed a few hours ago didn’t taste nearly as good when it came back out as waves of bile dripping from my mouth and nostrils. I felt like I was dying, and it only got worse as the rush of combat wore off.

After what felt like hours of wallowing in my own puke, the situation started to really dawn on me as I gasped for breath on the pavement. I was wearing the heaviest commercially-available radiation suit that still let you walk under your own damn power and whatever hellish magic that demonic spawn had let loose had torn right through it. I had put three military-grade rifle rounds into it and it shrugged them off like they were nothing despite looking like it was held together by the little skin it had left alone. What the hell did those zebras do?

I rolled off my side after spitting out the last remains of watery vomit I had left in me. My horn ached and burnt; there was no way I was casting any spells for now. I dug out a RadAway from the survival kit on my side with my hooves and forced it down. The draft’s ‘orange’ (whoever brewed these damn meds had clearly never tasted such a thing) flavor flooded my mouth as the potion purged the radiation from my system. I preferred the taste of bile, but it was better than having my flesh torn from my body by whatever dark magic that thing had unleashed into me.

I took out my canteen and guzzled down the purified water inside, and wolfed down a few crackers from the kit before re-securing my mask and hood. It was tempting to dump the rest of my canteen over my head to get the beast’s glowing ichor off of me, but the whole point of leaving in the first place was to find water. It’d’ve been foolish of me to waste what little I had. 

I would have been content to lay there on my belly for the rest of my damn life but there was no telling if more of those things would come. I got a grip on the nearby wagon, creakily pulling myself back onto my hooves. My legs felt like I’d never used them before, my poor joints wobbling like jello. I shambled over to where my rifle lay on the ground a few yards away, picking it up and dragging it by the sling with me. After then retrieving my pistol, I leaned against a carriage for support and clumsily reloaded my rifle. I was starting to regret my choice to leave my bunker, even temporarily as was the case. Spending a few more years underground drinking my own filtered piss didn’t seem like such a terrible idea if more of those monstrosities wandered the streets, but I wouldn’t be so easily deterred. I was a stubborn old fucker.

I am a stubborn old fucker.



> Chapter Two: Intermission
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


And there I stood, holding myself up by the door of a carriage, my radsuit and mask glowing faintly with the splatter of the creature’s ghastly ichor and every inch of my body aching in pain from the beating I’d just taken. I’d also broken the seal on my survival kit and used one of my RadAway doses far earlier than I had planned to. But, despite all that, I wasn’t coughing up blood nor was fur peeling off my skin. My ribs all felt intact, though my chest still dully ached.
I was sore as hell, but I needed to keep moving. There were three places I’d likely find a new water talisman: The fire department, the police station, and the hospital. The military base on the outskirts of town was also a possibility, but considering that the glowing monstrosity I had just killed was wearing a uniform I was in no hurry to drop on by. Just one of these things was enough; I couldn’t imagine fighting an entire damn platoon of them.
There was still the very real possibility that none of these places had a functioning talisman. I very much hoped it wouldn’t come to that; I’m a bit of a snob about not dying of dehydration or radiation poisoning, as likely would be the case once I ran out of purification supplies.
As it stood, I was limping my way to the fire station and police department, which were located conveniently close to each other in the center of town. The medical center was farther north; having been built far later. That is to say, it was right smack in the middle of the storm swallowing up that end of town.
It was still strange to see the streets so empty, but I couldn’t afford to spend any time taking in the sights. I had already been snuck up on once, I couldn’t let that happen again, and especially while too frazzled to conjure up a basic telekinetic spell.
I should have turned back and waited until I was well enough to hold a damn rifle again. But I was impatient. And foolish. I didn’t even wait for night. Could have done some spooky, sneaky special-ops bullshit, or at least have had a ribcage that didn’t ache a little when I breathed in too hard.
But, again. Hindsight is 20/20 and I figured if the gunfire hadn’t drawn attention already it never would.
If only.
I’d made it another few blocks, before I came upon the remains of a long-abandoned checkpoint. It was an interesting hodge-podge of military and local police; with both police road barriers and military wagons clogging up the road.
And corpses, of course. Much more decomposed than those I’d seen on the road; these ponies had died after the world came to a screeching halt. Some of them were naught but collections of bones wrapped in the remains of uniforms.
There were a few tattered, bullet-ridden green canvas tents put up in a nearby shopping plaza’s carriage lot, and the pavement was littered with spent brass. I didn’t have to imagine what exactly they were spent on, but that didn’t explain why they would have seemingly turned on each other.
I had taken a moment to check to see if any of the helmets on the bodies would fit me, as of all the gear I had been able to legally (or otherwise) acquire, a military-grade combat helmet I could put my horn through was not one of them.
Something was wrong, though. There were a lot of bodies, but some of them were a lot fresher than the others. They stood out against the ragged skeletons littering the encampment the longer I looked.
I was so preoccupied with this new development that I almost missed the soft, rifle-shaped glow in the second floor of the building across the street.
However, even if I hadn’t seen it, the earsplitting crack of said rifle and the spray of concrete rubble the resulting impact threw against me a split-second later certainly would have gotten my attention.
I launched myself into cover behind a nearby police barricade, hearing the loud report of a bolt being cycled. The bastard had the high ground, and with my magic still frazzled I couldn’t return fire without exposing myself.
Another shot rang out, pinging off the barrier and shattering one of the few windows on the street that wasn’t already broken. I’d’ve been very content to sit there until my horn un-frazzled, but if my gunfire had attracted this wonderful new friend’s attention, there was no doubt he was attracting even more. But even if he was the only other survivor in all of Equestria, I didn’t have all the time in the world for him to run out of lead to sling at me.
I decided I had places to be and this kid didn’t seem to know how to aim. If I made a break for it, from barricade to barricade, I should have been fine.
He’d chosen a particularly cover-heavy spot to set up a nest, but maybe he was relying on the promise of supplies in the checkpoint’s ruins to bring fools like me into his line of fire. Still, though, I had plenty of options to maneuver.
I dashed out from behind the barricade, and made it about five feet away from it before I found out that kid was a better shot than I thought. I heard the thunderous boom of the sniper’s rifle and felt my side split open at the same time. One of the lenses in my mask cracked as I hit the pavement.
“H-huaah-...” A groan of pain dribbled past my lips. The first “words” I’d spoken since… I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d spoken, actually.
I wasn’t still getting shot at. The kid must have been waiting for me to bleed out. I’ll admit, I was waiting for the same thing until I realised why I wasn’t dead yet.
He must have shattered the healing potion in my side bag. I couldn’t explain why my insides weren’t mush, but that at least explained why my radsuit didn’t have a blood-filled potbelly to it. I was alive, but I wouldn’t be for long if that kid with the rifle came down to check on me.
The healing potion kept most of my insides inside, but they weren’t going to stay that way if the sniper took a second shot. I slowed my twitching; I wasn’t getting anywhere fast with a bullet in my side. My best chance was to lure him down to me.
A good plan, as it turned out, as I soon heard his hooves on the pavement as he approached. I couldn’t see him from my lowly vantage on the cracked pavement, but sure enough I could hear him standing beside me, breathing heavily.
He rolled me over, thankfully not turning me by my fresh wound. I recognised him, easily. He was definitely no kid. Ages ago he was a schoolteacher. Barely looked older than the foals he was teaching, but now he looked like he’d been through the wringer. Not as aged as my curmudgeonly old ass, but he was still no spring hare. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in years. His face was gaunt, cheeks shallow and his limbs gangly. I couldn’t remember his name, though. I only saw him when I picked up the kids from school.
I kept still as I could. I felt him opening my bag, starting to rummage through it. Heard him sigh, probably because he found the healing potion he put a hole through. I was doing pretty well playing dead, until his hoof prodded the wound in my side.
“H-hrhh..!” I couldn’t stop myself from gasping in pain. All the self-control I had so carefully cultivated over the years couldn’t stop a bullet hole from hurting to high hell.
He tried to put another one in me, but without a perch to steady himself he had no chance to bring the rifle to bear. I swung my hindleg, knocking his free foreleg off the ground and sending him chin-first to the road he was standing on. Heard his jaw crack on the pavement, a pained groan creak out of his lips, his rifle clatter to the asphalt. Just like that, I was upon him.
The throbbing pain in my side barely registered as I wrapped a leg around his neck and pulled him back into my lap. There’s a big difference between a training dummy and a real, live, screaming pony but I had adrenaline and the stubborn will of an old stallion coursing through me. He beat his hooves at the leg wrapped around his throat, but the aforementioned rush and the thick radsuit I was wearing softened his blows. His impending brain-death from oxygen starvation probably helped, too. I could feel him growing weaker, more desperate with every blow. He was on the side of my mask with the busted lens, so I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him struggling to breathe.
His death throes finally crawled to a stop. I sharply twisted my forelegs, and heard bone crunch muffledly against me. The closest I’d been to another living pony in Celestia-knows-how-many years, and it took me not even five minutes to crush the life out of him.
It wasn’t any different than putting down that glowing abomination, was it? Nothing and nopony wants to die, and I couldn’t let myself feel bad for killing a pony who’d so recently tried to do the same to me. He wouldn’t have felt bad for killing me, would he?
I let the poor sap go, then crumpled back against the pavement with his limp body on top of me. I held my side and let myself have a good, long, loud swear. I could almost feel the slug dug into my ribs. There was no way I could have gotten that out there and then, not without magic, but eventually I’d groaned and screamed enough pain out of my system that I could sit back up, at the very least.
My mask’s left lens was cracked. I couldn’t see shit out of it, and I’d need somewhere out of the way to take the time to repair it. Now exposed to the musty air of the new world, I picked up the rifle that had so recently ripped and, as fate would have it, healed a hole in my side. It was an old and beat up thing, but then, I guess its late owner and I were, too. Who was I to judge?
I didn’t have any use for it, but I wasn’t about to leave it behind for someone else to find and shoot me in the ass with it, either. I ripped out the bolt and threw it down a storm drain. It was mildly surprising to hear a splash at the bottom, but I supposed you couldn’t have a storm like the one I’d seen without any rain.
I’d covered a lot of ground toward the center of town before I needed to stop again. Had carved a path through another few desolate, empty blocks when the pain started to really kick in. The storm was approaching too, but the burning in my side was the more pressing issue. I dragged my rickety old ass into a furniture wholesaler that still had its faded Nightmare Night decor hanging between the broken windows and the plywood backing them.
It was dark inside, much of the light coming from cracks and holes in the boards covering the windows… As well as patches of small mushrooms that were growing in the corners of the faux-rooms showcasing the wares for sale. They gave off a similar pale-green glow to the monster blood spattering my suit, albeit much brighter. My rad counter hadn’t seemed to find anything amiss about them, though, despite the soft glow they gave off, and it hadn’t steered me wrong yet.
I stalked through the store. It didn’t seem likely I’d have company, but better safe than sorry, even moreso then when I needed the peace and quiet to focus on tending my wound. Thankfully, as it was I was alone once more.
I stripped down. I felt almost furless without the radsuit on, but it was relieving, too, to not have it suckered to me with sweat. I was drenched in perspiration and a surprisingly small amount of blood. I probably stank like hell, too.
After wiping the dust off one of the mirrors strewn about the store I could see the damage. Sure enough, there was a lumpy, raw patch of scar tissue on my side where I got nicked. Didn’t seem large enough for a rifle round, but a bullet’s a bullet and fuck me if it didn’t burn like a real bastard.
I’d had enough time to clear my head and properly maintain a spell. Played around with a set of dusty old vases on an even dustier coffee table to make sure. Real quaint. There sure as hell wasn’t any room for novelty stuff like this in the bunker.
I swept all the dust off the table and set my medical supplies down on it. Luckily for me, only the potion was damaged — the rest of my provisions were pristine.
I bit down hard on a piece of broken picture frame. It was time to get the lead out, so to speak.

“You’re insane.” I remember Viridian told me.
“You’re pouring every last bit we have into that stupid bunker! You’re spending every waking hour building it! You don’t even know if you’re going to need it! You’ve just let the Ministry’s stupid propaganda brainwash you!” She was livid. I’d just signed for the water talisman.
“Are you even listening to me?! What the hell happened to you? To us? To this family?! Do you even care anymore?!”
“I do care. That’s why I’m doing this.”
“No, you’ve gone mad! That’s why you’re doing this.”
I let out a sigh. “Viridia-”
“No, don’t you ‘Viridian’ me!” She put her hooves on my chest and shoved me back from the porch. “This is the last straw. I’m taking the kids and I’m leaving. If you try to stop me, I’m calling the police. I know what you have in that damn, stupid bunker of yours, I’m sure they’ll be very interested to hear about all those guns. Those guns — Would you really do it? Kill another pony? Teach our kids how to shoot, how to kill other ponies? You’re utterly, utterly insane. If by some small, no, some gigantic, stinking miracle, you regain your senses and turn that stupid bunker into a wine cellar or something, the kids and I’ll be at my parents’, and maybe we’ll talk.“ And she slammed the door in my face.
Fifteen minutes later, a taxi arrived. Soon, the rest of my family filed out the front door with their luggage. Every single one of our children looked confused. Worried. She filed them into the wagon.
“You can’t do this. They’re my children too!” But there wasn’t much point arguing with her.
“Are they? What the hell kind of father are you to them, now? You don’t even know where they are, what they’re doing because you’re six feet underground every waking hour of the day!”
After she loaded all the luggage into the yellow carriage’s trunk, she turned back to me. “I’m going to file for divorce. I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re not the stallion I married. You’re something else, somepony else entirely. You’re a complete lunatic, who’s spent his life savings, who threw away his perfectly happy life to dig himself a hole in the ground in his backyard to die in, and if the last few months are any indication you’re going to keep digging that sun-forsaken hole until you keel over dead!”
And that damn water talisman didn’t even last.

The memory hurt, but it was a lot better focusing on that than the pain of extracting a slug without anything to dull the exquisite agony such a procedure entailed.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a whole bullet. It was just a fragment, or at least, that was all I managed to dig out. Explained well enough why it stopped at my ribcage instead of tearing a hole right through me. It still hurt. Luna’s stars, did it hurt, but all that pain was better than having an unaccounted-for lead slug in my side.
I’d lost a fair bit of blood, too. It wasn’t life-threatening, but I definitely wasn’t in any condition to head back out, and I was safe enough there in the wholesaler for now. Judging by all the dust, nopony’d been inside in a long time until I showed up. I doubted I’d have company, and even still I’d barricaded the door anyway.
It sounded like it was raining outside, which was very strange. I hadn’t thought I’d taken that long to stitch myself up; didn’t expect the storm in the middle of town to have moved so fast.
Actually, “raining” isn’t a very accurate description of what I had been hearing. It was like the sky was trying to pound its way inside, tunneling through the roof. With the windows covered in plywood I couldn’t see outside, but if the storm was anywhere near as intense as it sounded I doubted I’d be able to see anything out there anyway.
Water was leaking in from under the front door. The blood dripping from my recently re-plugged wound dripped into the puddle starting to sprawl across the battered hardwood floor. The new red clouds muddying it aside, it looked murky. It was a disgusting pale-green, like the mushrooms sprouting around the store just without the glow.
I had been about to turn around and find somewhere to tuck in for the night when, faintly, through the thunderous sound of the maelstrom outside, I realised there was something else out in the rain. There were a lot of somethings. Like a massive flock of birds was tumbling in the storm; wings frantically flapping, guttural howls and the sounds of meaty impacts. It sounded like something in the storm was alive, and I had a horrible feeling I knew what that something might be.
But I was inside, it was out there, and both of us seemed perfectly content not to upset that status quo. The rain eventually took over once more, as the storm above me grew more intense. I started hearing thunder, too, just as fierce as the downpour it was piercing.
I’d heard enough by then. I picked my gear up off the coffee table I’d left it on and ventured deeper into the store. I found myself a lovely cubicle with no patches of glowing toadstools growing inside and decided that’d be a wonderful place to wait out the storm. The room wasn’t real, but the furniture was, so there was plenty of material to barricade myself in with.
It was a funny situation I was in. I had left my shelter to go build a fort in a ratty old department store. My inner child must have had the time of his life while I was pushing whatever furniture I had the strength in me to move around.
As worryingly intense as the rain was, something to it was calming. Especially as its ferocity drowned out the bizarre and unearthly flapping I’d heard within it earlier. Even the thunder eventually had grown familiar, if unnervingly frequent after a while.
But something was wrong. As quickly as this storm had rolled over, it should’ve left by then, I’d realised.
Through the downpour, I heard hoofsteps above me.
Many, many, many hoofsteps, now accompanied by the frantic flapping of wings. The ceiling above me seemed to groan and bulge at the center of the room that made up the wholesaler, and suddenly I felt very, very small as the muffled cacophony of groaning and hissing grew louder.
I had wondered how such a bustling suburb had become so desolate over the decades without becoming completely leveled by balefire, and now a flock of answers seemed to be perched right above my head.
I quietly geared up as the ceiling curved in more and more. I hadn’t had time to patch up or replace my lens but it seemed there wasn’t going to be any.
There wasn’t anywhere to go. The whole place was one big room and the cubicles didn’t have roofs.
As the ceiling collapsed, a torrent of rain, rubble, and rotting pegasi poured in from above, and all I could do was watch.