The Equestrian Hitcher

The Equestrian Hitcher

Chapter 1:

Might be drugs

My grandfather owned a horse ranch in the 1930s. My father inherited it from him, and I'd spent a great deal of my formative years around horses; even managed a few medals in 4H and junior rodeo. I was not unfamiliar with the mannerisms and needs of those majestic creatures.

And all of that information helped me in no way as I tried to calm the pony in front of me. Strange quirk of evolution that allowed them to diverge from horses like that, but I supposed humans and primates were no different so long ago.

And for some strange reason the ponies couldn't get enough of Texas.

I tried to stifle a sigh--it wouldn't do me any good to further agitate the unicorn. I'd seen what they could do when they put their minds to it, and I had no desire to be on the receiving end of that again: thirty-six hours as a tree is thirty-five hours too long.

I looked up at the pony on the other side of my desk, sitting in one of my office chairs, the door behind her closed to keep the noise from the rest of the office from drowning her out.

To say nothing about keeping her concerns private. Or at least private until they needed not to be.

"Ma'am, they are not running a horn harvesting ring out of the house across the street from your apartment. Horn harvesting has been illegal since the sixteen hundreds," the sigh slipped out and I put an elbow on my desk and rested my head against my hand, "If it'll make you feel better, I'll go and investigate it personally."

'Probably a drug house,' I thought, but kept it to myself.

'Why did it have to be at my desk? Rangers do not investigate this kind of thing... Damn ponies.' I thought with less venom than I'd wanted. Whenever the ponies got involved, they always sent it to us. Higher ups wanted to prevent an incident that might draw the attention of the Equine leadership.

War with Texas? Maybe not, but the Equine leadership wasn't as naive as the average pony, It wouldn't be something great in any case. Thoughts went to a loss of the earth-pony agriculture necessary to keep the food supply up.

"Oh would you? That would be wonderful. I've just been so scared, what with all the strange comings and goings, griffons, canids... you know it used to be such a lovely ne-eighborhood!" the mint green unicorn said.

The whinny, that never got old. I couldn't keep the smile off my face. "Well don't you worry about it at all, ma'am. The Texas Rangers are the best of the best. I won't let you down. Now, for the paperwork, your name was..."

"My name is Spearmint. Officer..." she probed.

"Detective Victoria Jensen," I replied, "Let's just finish up a few things here and I'll head right over there and check this out for you, alright?"

"That would be just lovely, Detective Jensen."

~~

Driving always gave me a chance to think. No distractions from the office, no distractions from the job. It was me, four hundred horsepower, and the wide open road. And traffic. Endless. Traffic. It was a Friday, and like every Friday traffic was abysmal. Four thirty and everybody loses their mind, as if being in a hurry would get them home faster; they just made it worse.

I was tempted for a moment to turn the lights on and drive up the shoulder, but I quashed that tiny voice immediately. This part of I-20 was notoriously poorly kept, and I could see the broken glass and tire debris littering up the shoulder from the left lane. No, I'd rather not pop the tires on a government owned vehicle.

The US-175 exit finally came up on the right and I signaled my way over. If there's one good thing about a police marked vehicle, it's that people will get out of your way. On the one hand, I felt bad that my mere presence intimidated people like that... but on the other hand, if it works, why knock it?

As I came down the ramp off the exit I spotted a flock of pegasi flying alongside the road and was immediately jealous. Of course they wouldn't be hindered by slow traffic... but then I guess I didn't have to wear myself out flapping for seventy miles either.

In the next lane over, a Miata with the top down caught my eye; or rather, the brightly colored hair trailing out of the driver's seat and into the wind. The second thing that caught my eye was the turquoise glow coming from the driver's forehead.

I'm not racist, I'm really not. I'm not a traffic cop either, but rules are rules, and the law is most definitely the law, so I accelerated and came alongside the little red coupe and it was exactly as I'd thought. Unicorn driving with magic. Now, let me clarify; Unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth ponies all have the same equal protection under the law, they have all the same rights as any other sentient but there are limits.

One of those limits is that the steering wheel must be gripped with hand, hoof, claw, or other. Magic, however, is not an allowed means of maintaining control of the vehicle. I came up on the right side of the car and rolled down my window. "Yo," I said conversationally.

The pony in the car looked over at me. The steering wheel was firmly gripped in her magic, and her hooves were laying across the armrests. "Yeah?" she asked.

I pointed a finger up at the light bar on the roof of my truck and tapped my fingers deliberately on the steering wheel, "forgetting something?"

The pony looked at me with a blank look for a moment before it clicked, and her hooves darted to the steering wheel, her magic fading out. At least she had the good graces to look embarrassed about it.

I smiled a half smile and pulled away. If there was one thing above all else about ponies that I fully appreciated in my career in law enforcement, it’s that almost none of them are assholes. There were exceptions of course, but by and large if a pony told you something, they were telling it straight. It made my job easier if nothing else.

It was the exceptions to the rule that usually ended up ruining my day.

I pulled off onto the exit ramp for TX-34 and took a left. Traffic had thinned out appreciably. I looked down at the address that Spearmint had given me, which shouldn't be more than a mile up the road. She'd likely already be home; Unicorn teleportation is another one of those things I was jealous of.

I pulled the truck up in front of a single story house. The address matched exactly. I sighed as I shut off the engine and opened the door. It had been over an hour of driving through Dallas traffic just to get onto the highway, and another thirty minutes to get to Kaufman. I should have asked where exactly it was the little mare lived before I volunteered for the trip.

"Well, time for the magics..." I muttered under my breath as I pulled the Resistol hat over my head. ‘Dress western’ they said, ‘dress code’ they said. Fine: brown canvas duster, boots, jeans, hat. Thank heavens above it was December: might not have been able to drink water fast enough to stave off dehydration, otherwise.

What most people don't understand is that Texas in fact only has two seasons: 'Warm' and 'Blast Furnace.' In this case, being December, it was actually a rather tolerable fifty-five degrees. I chuckled inwardly--most of the state would probably bring out the zero-zone overalls for that kind of weather.

No use delaying it. I walked up the sidewalk to the front door of the beige house, rang the doorbell, and waited. I could hear movement inside. I leaned to the side and looked through the glass next to the door. Nothing.

"Hey, Texas Ranger, anybody home?" I announced. Sometimes, in these towns outside of Dallas, you'd have people who didn't want to answer the door. Different reasons each time: some didn't like solicitors, some feared robbery. Some were even afraid of the poli--

"Help!" I heard a young female voice scream from inside, just as a flash of light came through the windows. My gun was in my hand in an instant, as I slammed my shoulder into the door and knocked it open: the dry-rotted wooden door frame didn't stand a chance.

"Dispatch, need backup on sixteen hundred block of South Washington," I whispered into my radio before turning it off. I didn't need an untimely reply giving away my position at an inopportune time.

Maybe I'd been watching too many movies.

That flash of light though, that had to be a unicorn. I did not want to get involved in shooting a pony, even if it was justified. The red tape never ever ends on that kind of thing.

I scanned the entryway with my pistol in hand, a Springfield 1911A1. I was a traditionalist, what can I say? The entry was clear, and there was a light in a room down the hall. I advanced quickly and stepped into the doorway, gun at the ready and...

The room was empty. Not entirely empty, there was a table covered in syringes, various bottles of unknown origin. A cauldron was boiling in the corner, but there wasn't a living soul in the room. The air was full of a pink haze, and candles were burning. 'What the hell happened in here?'

"Hello?" I asked loudly, "I heard a screa--" and I was hit from behind and sent flying into the table. I felt the prick of a needle as I landed on a pile of syringes, a detached part of my mind wondered if I was going to catch pony-AIDS. The burning sensation that followed told me that whatever it was that was in them had been injected.

As I turned around sluggishly, the pink mist in the room seemed like it was flowing into my body. Must be drugs. Definitely drugs in those needles. A fuzzy black unicorn was staring me down from the doorway, and there was a sickly green glow about him. My mind went to the pony legends about changelings and their feeding habits.

A being that subsisted on stealing love? Only a pony could think up something like that, let alone believe it.

Wait, he wasn't fuzzy, my vision was fuzzy. Not a good sign--at this rate I doubted I'd spend much longer with a useful level of consciousness. I raised my pistol and fired. The first shot missed, he blocked the second, third, fourth. I fired a fifth shot and it got through and skipped across his shoulder.

I saw his horn charging up with that same sickly green glow. Maybe the ponies were onto something with that legend after all? Either way, whatever he was about to do wouldn't be good. I fired the sixth and seventh shots and there was a bright flash as they collided with his horn. I felt a great pressure as the world slipped away.

~~

'Wake up! Wake up! Wake! Up!' I heard that same voice that was calling for help, but she was... in my head?

I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. Damn it was hot, maybe the duster was overdoing it. I finally opened my eyes, "yeah I'm up..."

I was still in that same room, the difference however was that the room was on fire. I couldn't see the unicorn that had attacked me but I could smell... Oh there he was, a pile of... well it wasn't a pony anymore but it was up against the wall of the room across the hall.

Apparently when you shoot a unicorn in the horn while they are charging up a spell like that they can explode and then catch the building on fire. I filed that under 'stuff that could be useful in the future.'

It would make a good story for entertaining guests regardless.

'Magical backlash probably, you need to get out of here before the house comes down!' that voice screamed in my head again. I had no objections. I grabbed my hat off the floor and pulled the empty syringes out of my arm.

And I ran, out the door and down the hall. I didn't even want to think about what would happen when the fire reached the cauldron in the corner of that room. I was never a huge fan of pony magic, less a fan of their alchemy. There was no way this was going to end clean.

'I'm going to die.'

'No you're not, silly!' the voice said back at me.

I wasn't a user of drugs. I'm not saying that I've never partaken, but that was many miles and years ago. This... whatever it was, reeked of pony influence, pony magic. Never heard of a human drug that gave you voices in your head without driving you absolutely crazy in the process.

With a final dash of speed I crossed the threshold in time to hear a whistling sound behind me.

That was not good, I dove right as the house behind me vaporized in an alchemy fueled explosion. Time seemed to slow as the blast picked me up into the air and spun me end over end. I even had time to see my truck getting extremely close. I was aware that I still held my now-empty pistol in a death grip.

I hit the truck with enough force to cave in the passenger door and it knocked the wind out of me. Should have killed me outright, but I was okay with that not happening immediately. The pressure from the explosion finally let off and I fell to the pavement.

My arm was definitely broken, leg too. I took a breath, ribs went along for that ride as well it seemed. I didn't hate ponies, far from it, but as I looked at the crater where the house used to be, it reaffirmed my belief that getting involved in pony affairs was always a mistake.

Still, better than being dead.

'Silly, I told you that you weren't going to die.'

"Yeah but that should have killed me," I said, deciding to humor the voice in my head. Everything hurt, apparently my brain didn't have the common decency to let me lose consciousness this time.

Nobody could have missed that explosion, I reached for my radio but found that it was shattered on impact with the truck. Lovely, guess it was going to be the hard way then. I reached my good arm up and pulled the door handle and was rewarded with the door popping open. At least I didn't hit it hard enough to make that impossible.

I reached up into the cab and snagged my finger on the cord I was searching for and pulled the handset down. The stretching hurt, breathing hurt. I knew talking wasn't going to be much better.

I keyed the microphone and held it up to my mouth, "Officer down... officer down. Sixteen hundred block, South Washington." I said before releasing the microphone. I sure hoped it was turned on, because I didn't hear anything come back through.

I dropped onto the ground again, I wasn't going to be getting up this time, I decided. The ground was plenty comfortable. I was idly aware of the truck's radio antenna dangling along the side of the fender. That would certainly explain the lack of reply.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up at the sky. So somebody had noticed. Or, I guess the more appropriate word was that somepony had noticed.

'Pegasusususes!' the voice yelled in my head. She wasn't wrong.

I just really hoped that they were paramedics and weren't on the same side as Explodey The Unicorn. On the other hand, maybe it would be easier if they were and just finished me off so I could avoid all the hassle I was going to go through for shooting a pony.

Even if he did deserve it. Besides, It's not like I knew he was going to explode.

There it was, finally. My eyelids were getting heavy, finally. I probably had internal bleeding. At least I didn't have to be awake for it. Maybe when I woke up they would have the drugs out of my system.

'I'm not a drug silly, I'm a pony!'

My last thoughts before I finally slipped from the waking world were of terror that the voice might be right.