Cutie Mark Crusaders: Survivors

The perplexed disbelief written all over the phrase prompted Apple Bloom to lift her hoof up and off her eye, and she eyed the quartet warily. The one that Scootaloo had followed extended a hand to them, and she retreated further into the corner. However, before it could advance, he was stopped by the oldest one, and retreated to simple observation.

Now that they had effectively established a silent limit to interactions, the small pony took a closer look at the unanimously perplexed ‘creatures’. The final member of the group scratched his chin in thought, as if in realization, and she could swear she heard a ‘CLICK’ as his eyes softened. For some reason, it reminded her of Cheerilee, a feeling that brought her some comfort. They didn’t look hungry or evil, so she felt safe to nudge the other two. “Girls…” While Scootaloo was busy trembling and facing the wall, Sweetie Belle risked a peek at her, and the yellow filly pointed a hoof at the creatures, then stood up and took one careful step closer. “… Hi?” she offered, rubbing one foreleg with the other.

“… have I just heard this thing talk?”

Apple Bloom flinched at the derision. “Hey, we ain’t no things!”

“Nick, take it easy. I got this,” the eldest said. Nick made a face. “If you wanna know, I heard it too.” He turned to Apple Bloom, and somewhat hesitantly, said, “Hello?”

The fear that gripped her heart waned further into slightly awed confusion. “What are you? I ain’t never seen anything like you before…”

He knew that look. He’d seen it multiple times as a teacher on the faces of newcomers, the ones in trouble, and even his own boys right before a big game. These creatures, whatever they were, were as intelligent, and just as scared, confused and lost as any human child.

A deep part of Coach’s mind was screaming in confusion and frustration at him, but he ignored it along with the sad feeling his memories as a teacher brought – those weren’t times that would come back anyhow. “I never seen your kind either, young’un. And ya know what, I dunno where you’re from, but I don’t think it’s from ‘round here. Unless you happen to be from New Orleans…”

The chalk-white little pony looked confused, and he couldn’t help but chuckle. They were kids alright. “’New Oarleens’? Is that near Trottingham or something?”

“Ahem, Coach?” Rochelle interrupted.

“What?”

She held a finger up.

The ponies quieted down as well, and he understood why she had called him. It was far away, but the sound of heavy coughing that they knew very well could only mean trouble. Snapped out of the moment, he looked back at the small creatures before him. “Listen, I got no idea what you are, but this ain’t no safe place. You better come with us.”

“Why? Is… is there something out there?”

Nick huffed in exasperation. “Just about forty-nine outta fifty of this city that got turned to zombies. And Coach, if we don't get moving, we're gonna end up joining them.”

At that, even the orange one, who was tucked in tight behind her companions, turned to the survivors, all three with fear evident in their eyes. “Z-zom-zo-zombies?” they stammered in unison.

Coach pinched the bridge of his nose. “Damn it, Nick!”

The man just shrugged. “Don’t ask me to say I’m sorry, ‘cause I’m not. We’re in zombie territory. I don’t know about you anymore, but my priority is to stay alive.”

The overweight team leader opened his mouth to reprimand him, but at that exact moment, a sonic boom cut through the air, and next thing he knew, Rochelle was running out the door after a shape the color of damascus.

“RAINBOW DASH!”

Young minds tend to focus on the most unusual things, and Scootaloo, whose mind practically orbited around her idol, could be expected by whoever knew her well to rush out of wherever she was to see the rainbow-maned pegasus train or exhibit a stunt. Which was exactly what she did when she heard the same zipping noise that had awakened her and her friends, not thinking straight enough through the fright to remember the sounds of the explosions from before. The only thought driving her was something along the lines of ‘Rainbow Dash is here, Rainbow Dash won’t let the zombies get me, Rainbow Dash will take me away from those weird giants!’

The only survivor who had an actual working reaction was Rochelle, who had stood back during the humans’ contact with the three fillies, watching out for the source of the worrying wheezes. “Damn it! Wait!” she shouted, running after the filly.

The small pony practically rolled down the steps beyond the door she exited through, looking up feverishly at the sky. However, the only sign that anything had happened was a very un-Rainbow Dash-like trail of white smoke on the air high above.

Another unpleasant surprise was a lanky-looking creature looking over at her from a roof on the other side of the street. The small glance she sent its way didn’t notice the absurd number of unnatural tentacles sprouting out of its upper body, because at that moment it screeched a shrill, angry note, and something wrapped quickly and tightly around her body.

With a loud, panicked scream, she was hoisted up, the smoker’s long tongue squeezing the air out of her lungs, effectively silencing her. Blood pumped in her eardrums, but even through it she could hear an agitated cacophony of yells and growls quickly approaching, and her panic increased.

It wasn’t to Scootaloo’s knowledge that her loud, high-pitched voice had worked against her, grabbing the ear of every former human in the vicinity.

The filly squirmed madly in a losing battle, barely able to think with her head increasingly clouded by the dangerous blend of fear and suffocation. Then, the pressure around her eased up enough for her to take a labored breath, some of her senses returning, and she vaguely saw one of the beings from before struggling heavily with the tentacle, her left arm wrapped firmly around it right above the pony’s own body, the other frantically reaching for something on her belt.

Rochelle fumbled with the machete, struggling to get it out of its improvised scabbard, but the tension of fighting the infected’s pull jerked her to one side, knocking the blade out of her hand and to the pavement. “Damn it!” Her hand flew straight for the pistol, and she aimed up at the mutant, her arm unsteady from the effort. Her finger pulled the trigger of the Glock four times, the last shot drilling through the Smoker’s knee and robbing it of its balance. It fell with an uncharacteristic screech from the top of the building, hitting the ground in a burst of spores and a wheezing groan.

Scootaloo’s world was filled with air and a terrible dust of an acrid stench clung to all of her face’s cavities as soon as the tongue relented its pressure on her barrel. She coughed repeatedly, her savior doing the same as she waved her hand in front of her face. Unable to fight with her eyes clouded over and her breath constantly interrupted, Rochelle, clutching the young pegasus, ran blindly into the protective circle quickly formed by the three men of her ensemble as they stood by the door.

The two slumped down inside the building for Scootaloo didn’t know how long, trying to purge their airways as the filly cried her fear away. The cockatrice they had encountered in the Everfree Forest hadn’t been nearly as scary as being choked by that monster – she really felt like she was going to die at that moment, and her ribs, still aching quite a bit, didn’t allow her to forget it even by a second.

The magenta-maned child pony never noticed the company of her two friends, who tried to comfort her as best as they could while timidly watching the rest of the quartet retreat behind the doorway.

“Here they come!” Ellis warned, and surely enough, an infected sprinted through the door – and straight into the trio’s sights. One shotgun shell and several bullets later, it could barely be recognized as more than a pair of legs attached to a chunk of badly butchered meat. More of its kin flooded in, reaching for their human enemies in a blind rage, but only achieving their own death, their bloody carcasses on the ground being stepped on as more came from behind.

Nick let off a particularly long burst from his AKM at the crowd, not bothering to aim much given the short distance from the targets. Coach pumped and fired his shotgun like a robot, fiercely shoving any stragglers back with his weapon, shoulders and legs. Ellis had dropped his scoped rifle in favor of a pistol and a frying pan, shooting and bludgeoning in a hyped up frenzy, using both the kitchen instrument and the bottom of the gun’s grip. All three effectively boxed the invaders in, mowing them down from all sides – the infected that evaded Coach’s cone of fire had to face off against Ellis’ savage blows and bullets, even as the ones right behind were decimated by Nick’s sprays. They didn’t come out unscathed, though: no more than thirty seconds into the fray, already Ellis sported a bruised cheek, Nick had a coat sleeve almost ripped off and his arm was marred by nail scratches, and Coach was flexing his sore jaw, nursing a lucky arm swing from an infected that got too close.

Each zombie fell in a tangle of limbs, the others behind them, in their berserk mindsets, trampling the fallen ones, living or not, only to be shredded as the barrels turned their ways. The process repeated itself, over and over, as the smell of sulfur and copper hung increasingly heavy in the air. The floor became covered in so much blood it wasn’t even red any longer; it had become an almost pitch black surface with hints of crimson where it wasn’t as deeply coated. The walls suffered a similar fate, though less intense and brighter in its splotches of the macabre paint.

The entire episode was watched in a slack-jawed sense of morbid fascination and fear by Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. The mix of terror and awe was overwhelming, mind-numbing like the end of a sugar rush. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t look away.

As quickly as it had started, it was over. The swarm had been beaten down, and the only sounds to be heard were the panting of the spent humans and Scootaloo’s weak coughs.

After a quick check for any remaining infected, the humans regrouped in the table hall, reloading and administering treatment to their wounds. “Water, please,” Rochelle wheezed. “I think I dropped my canteen…”

Soon, Scootaloo felt a gentle hand rubbing water on her face and pouring it into her mouth, washing away the caking of tears and soot that hurt her senses. She blinked her eyes open, finally able to see right again. “You saved me,” she said between sniffles, hugging her hero tightly with her little forelegs. “What was…” she shuddered, “… that?”

“That,” Coach explained as he filled his shotgun’s magazine, “was a smoker.” His voice became stern. “It’s just one of the reasons we don’t go runnin’ off alone. Why the hell’d you even do that?”

The pegasus shrank noticeably. “I thought I had heard Rainbow Dash outside…”

The aged man twisted an eyebrow, but decided not to ask. This kid looked like she’d learned her lesson already, and now wasn’t exactly the time for questions. “Anyway, we gotta get movin’. That sure got some attention we really don’t need. You okay to go, Ro?”

The human female gave her companion a thumbs up, getting up from her seat. She didn’t want to make the scared little pony clinging so tightly to her let go, so she hooked an arm under her like one would a small child, and lifted her to look over her shoulder, a gesture Scootaloo gladly complied to.

Nearby, Ellis was bent down, trying to rouse the other two fillies to their senses. “Hey, hey, it passed. It’s all fine now.” He tried to ruffle their manes, but they flinched away right after contact. The carnage had left them with a clouded mind, barely able to mend two thoughts together. Beside Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle seemed even more shocked, apathetically gazing forwards with lusterless eyes.

The young mechanic sighed. “These things were zombies. Y’know zombies, don’t ya? They don’t think, they can’t feel, they only eat an’ kill. And it was them or us.” He tried to touch the duo again, with just as little success. “Look, we ain't got time to explain right now, but we can sit ‘n talk about it when we’re in a safe place, ‘kay? Ah promise ya.” After a second of thought, he added, “Ah can carry you if ya want.”

Not fully convinced, the two reluctantly allowed the young man to pick them up. Everything was quiet, not even the wind making a single noise, as if the gruesome show from minutes earlier had shocked the entire world into silence.

As Twilight scoured the most minimalistic details in Body Flicker’s Advanced Studies on Matter Displacement, with her assistant sitting by her and diligently annotating every word of the resume she dictated to him, Celestia fiddled with a set of blocks and cubes. The toys were frequently used by younger unicorn foals to train their initial magic powers, and this specific set was a gift that her student’s parents had given her when she had departed to study under the alicorn’s tutelage. To most, it would look like the Princess’ day off… were she in Canterlot and not sporting a scowl laden with concentration as she stared at the pieces.

‘Okay, once again…’ she thought, focusing. One of the blocks zipped past her head, coming to a stop embedded halfway into the tree-building’s wooden wall, right alongside a good number of similar dents in the natural structure. ‘… ponyfeathers.’ “Twilight, have you found anything interesting yet?” she asked, trying to get her mind off her current predicament.

A sigh from the young mare dropped her heart onto her stomach once again. “Nothing that we don’t know already, Princess,” Twilight said sadly. “How much mana to use, how to focus the spell, picking a destination…” she rubbed her head with a hoof, “but there’s nothing about tracking somepony else’s destination here.”

Dejected, she watched the elusive shimmering pool on the floor – liquid mana, a leftover found after particularly intense magical flares, as Celestia had explained –, tumble over itself, its surface ebbing and flowing. “Are you sure you can’t just sense where it took them to, Princess?”

“Twilight Sparkle, will I really have to repeat myself?” Celestia asked in a mildly annoyed tone. “I do not wish to attempt any fine-tuned magic until I have my powers back under control.”

Spike quietly turned away on his seat, writing implements under claws crossed over his lap, while Twilight, who had taken a step back, looked down at the floor, almost in tears, her ears pressed extremely tightly against her head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Celestia could hear the shattering in her chest by the end of Twilight's whimper, uttered so quietly it could pass off as background noise by somepony not paying attention. ‘I really have to keep my stress in check.’ As intelligent as Twilight Sparkle was, it was easy to forget she was very high strung and emotionally fragile, especially so when her teacher was involved.

She couldn’t withhold a sigh as she approached the cowed unicorn and nuzzled her scalp. “I’m sorry, my dear. I am as frustrated as you, believe me, but you know well that we cannot step farther than our legs allow us. For now, there’s very little we can do but study this phenomenon while we can’t act on it.”

“I understand, Princess,” Twilight said with the beginnings of a timid smile. “We need to have patience.”

Spike hated this kind of moment. It was rare for Celestia to chastise Twilight in any way, but seeing the two fight stung nonetheless. Were it not for the fact that neither of the ponies could write at all with their uncontrolled magic and an admitted difficulty of writing with their mouths, he would have excused himself, but as it was, he had to limit himself to watching the pool of mana on the floor. In fact, the way the essence slowly waved and spiraled unto itself was strangely soothing, and as the dragon watched, he lost track of time until a muzzle nudged the side of his head. “Spike?” Twilight asked, and he was thankful that she had returned to her normal tone.

He shook his head. “Sorry, I think I zoned out.”

“Well, playtime’s over! Ready to take notes?”

And with that, he was back to annotating her resume about translocation, the distraction seeping away from his mind.