Chaos. That was the only word they could use to describe what ensued.

Something big and heavy came down on Apple Bloom right after the explosion, and on top of the shrieks of protest from her ribs and the air leaving her lungs by force, she felt a sickening pop on her shoulder. The weight lifted just as fast as it came, but its presence had already taken its toll. The injured filly, out of breath to so much as squeak in the intense pain she felt, could only watch as a hideously asymmetric mutant staggered after hitting the wall far at the back of the alley.

Ellis knew how lucky he was to have been merely clipped at the elbow by the rushing charger’s attack, a contact that ended up in an ugly but ultimately ignorable scraped patch of skin on his forearm. On reflex born out of pure and simple necessity, he grabbed his rifle off the ground and whirled around, poised to shoot the offending former human clad in a tattered CEDA hazmat suit, who now jogged back their way with a humongous arm raised to strike. Its stance dropped with an inarticulate groan, along with its entire body, when three 7.62 NATO ball rounds sailed into its comparatively fragile torso.

Coach and Rochelle weren’t as lucky. The chubby teacher was clocked on the side, almost as hard as Nick, and sent reeling to meet the brick wall back first. As he stumbled drunkenly forwards, his shotgun escaped his fingers. The reporter, for her part, received an enlarged knuckle to her injured ribs, dropping her almost instantly. The pain that was already there flared up over the numbing effects of the adrenaline, something her scream, muffled to their ringing ears as it may have been, made rather obvious.

The septet’s youngest human didn’t know who to tend to first. If he went for Coach, he might have his help with the others, but Nick had passed out and Ro had already been smacked once; they might need attention sooner. He knew he had to choose, and soon.

Instead of fretting over the decision and getting nowhere, Ellis took a deep breath and made his move, hoping it was the best choice.

For Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle, the only two that get away intact, everything happened too fast to account for anything. They opened their eyes just in time to see Ellis kill the charger, the rest of their group scattered like ragdolls… including a close friend. “Apple Bloom!” they shouted in unison, blazing over to her side.

The filly was stuck between gasping and crying as she lay on her side, nursing an extended foreleg. Scootaloo went to nuzzle her. “Apple Bloom, what happened?” When she received no direct answer, she started to really worry. “Oh no, this is bad!”

“What do we do?!” Sweetie Belle squeaked.

“God damn it…” they heard from above. One look up revealed Coach slouched over them. The man proceeded to bend down in a slow, laborious effort, and picked up the hurt filly, passing his palms under her and hoisting her up, cradling the pony much like a newborn. Once she was snug against his chest, he moved his gaze to the other two. “You girls okay?”

Both nodded, able to hear clearly by now.

“Thank the Lord for small miracles,” he sighed. “Alright, follow me. We can’t stop now.”

“Is she gonna be okay?” Scootaloo asked uncharacteristically timidly, her eyes fixed on Apple Bloom’s semiconscious form. She’d been hurt by these things already; she knew where her friend was coming from.

Coach took a deep breath, but didn’t answer. She could only hope his grimace was from his own pain.

The group dynamics had changed completely. Now a limping Rochelle was on the lead, carrying Nick’s AK, followed by Ellis, who slowly walked forwards, heavily burdened by the unconscious man he held in a fireman’s carry. Following him were the two standing Crusaders and finally Coach, who had carefully maneuvered Apple Bloom’s small shape to rest on his left arm so he could pull the M9 pistol off his hip holster with his right hand. With two men out of the fight and one unable to reload his gun if it ran empty, it was a weak formation, and they all knew it, even the fillies.

“Knights of Columbus, this is bullshit… This is not happening…” Rochelle mumbled to herself as she went.

“C’mon, girl, keep it together,” Coach answered as reassuringly as he could. “We gon’ make it to that safe house, and we’ll get right.”

She felt tempted to whirl back and tell him he wasn’t the one who had taken two smacks from two brick shithouses on the exact same spot of his body, but refrained from doing it. She knew that, while she was busy venting her own aches away, he was doing one of their most crucial jobs – keeping the mood positive. Instead, she kept her eyes on the surroundings, extra wary for any opportunists as she led the team out the alleyway and around the circle of slaughter on the grassy patch the pipe bomb had landed.

It took them almost three minutes to cross the interdicted stretch of pavement towards an overturned semi-trailer near the original parking lot for the stores that once existed in front of the alley - a distance of less than fifty meters that would have been covered in forty seconds by a healthy adult -, but when they did and the lead’s head checked to the right, she felt the unbelievable sensation of her lips curling upwards. “Guys, safe house! C’mon!”

“Where?” Sweetie Belle asked curiously from between the woman's legs. Then she saw it too: past a fallen concrete divider, at the foot of the ramp’s pillar, stood the sturdiest door she’d ever seen. “You mean that one?”

“Now that’s… a sight for sore eyes!” Ellis huffed, adjusting his arm around Nick’s leg.

“I guess that's a yes,” the filly deadpanned.

Though at times it felt like the doorway was a mile away and still sprinting off towards the horizon, eventually all of the standing survivors made it past the makeshift cordon and into the maintenance room turned safe haven. Once Coach was past the entrance, Rochelle slammed the door shut and shoved the ever-present metal bar into the attached hooks. Now the place was firmly secured against anything without the mental faculties needed to figure out the simple but effective lock. They could consider themselves safe for a while.

The woman finally lowered her gun to cradle her injured flank, and Ellis gently set Nick down on a pile of rags on the floor. “Man,” Coach muttered as he placed his own charge on a table at a corner near a fixed ladder, “they say that every fight you walk away from is a win…”

Flying in this world was surprisingly hard. The air didn’t obey the aerodynamics she was used to, forcing her to put in a great extra effort to remain aloft, let alone move forwards, and that was when the surprisingly powerful gusts blowing around didn’t send her off course. Not even three minutes in the air, and she was already out of breath, her muscles aching more and more with the inevitable lactic acid buildup.

Celestia knew better than to ignore the alarm her body was blaring and risk falling from the air due to overexertion, and when the first suitable landing spot came into view, she went down and planted her hooves on the floor. She did not expect her legs to falter under her, though, and the spent mare came down on the concrete with a dull ‘thud’.

Though her body was tired, Celestia’s mind was buzzing, having gathered quite a bit of information during her short flight. Her previous encounter with the wounded one down in the tunnels convinced her that she was dealing with a world at least partially populated by an intelligent species of primates, one that, as far as she could see, wasn’t much different from her ponies. That she had emerged in a full-blown city, seemingly the size of Manehattan itself only with somewhat shorter buildings, attested to that.

However, that was where the similarities ended, and where the reasoning behind the warning started to make sense.

The city was devastated. Nearly all visible buildings and houses were badly damaged, on fire, peppered with wide craters, long fissures or missing chunks, some almost to the point of collapse or even past it. The bitter stench of smoke hung thick, even far from the more ravaged spots. The crushing majority of the roads were blocked off with fences, vehicles and whatnot, turning the whole city into a gigantic improvised maze. The amount of trash littered around, adding up to the rubble strewn literally everywhere, gave off the impression that the area was in disrepair even before the buildings started getting destroyed.

Those aspects were not what immediately caught her eye, though: what really did was the populace. The ones wandering the streets were but a shadow of what she figured would be their former selves, all of them sickly-looking – and given that several were vomiting right out in the open, it wasn’t a mere appearance –, some sitting still or slowly milling about, unanimously oblivious to the havoc all around them. Some, she noticed, started fighting against one another for no apparent reason; one simply moved to the other and began hitting it until it fought back. A select few moved with a smidge more conviction to their step, but their even more grossly deformed bodies and feral behavior erased any thoughts of them being healthier than their peers. Some of them were on the ground, lying still, but she couldn’t tell why, mostly because a good deal of those got back up to amble or brawl.

A grim picture painted itself in her mind’s eye. ‘This place seems to have been touched by pestilence incarnate…’ The mere thought of vileness on this level being witnessed by her little ponies, especially the young ones lost here, pained the mare even more than the old thought of Nightmare Moon being an irreversible transformation of Luna’s. To her relief, that had turned out to be a bogus theory. ‘Unlike this… living nightmare,’ she added with a grimace.

As she looked up to the firmament in an attempt to soothe her distress, something on the horizon caught her eye: a cluster of black specks, far away but approaching very quickly. Celestia didn’t know what to expect from something flying at that speed in a location as brutally dilapidated as this one, so she decided to play it safe; scampering to her feet, she galloped towards a door on the opposite end of the rooftop. It didn’t budge when she pushed against it; instead, the doorknob rattled. She hurriedly pushed the handle down with a hoof, and the door gladly swung open.

The princess had barely cantered halfway inside when a shockwave from behind sent her to the floor on her side, her ears ringing from an ear-splitting blast. Another sound just as loud followed, and a dusty bit of ceiling plaster fell on her head.

“Hey there, can ya hear me? I need y’all to open your eyes, alright?”

Still sniffling, Apple Bloom complied. Her pained gaze added up to her trembling frame and hitched breathing, twisting Coach’s heart even further than it already was. At the same time that he worried he might aggravate the little thing’s condition, compassion practically forced him to do at least something to help her. ‘She’s just a kid, man.’

“How is she?” the unicorn asked, prodding his leg with a small hoof. “Is she gonna be okay?”

He craned his gaze down at her and her winged friend, both of whom were all but nipping at his pants legs. “Look, kids, I gotta run a check-up on her, but I can’t do it with y’all talkin’ and distractin' me.” One look around spotted a viable diversion messing with a bottle of painkillers. “Look over there: Rochelle’s sitting right there, all alone. Why don’t you go make her some company while your friend and I ain’t around?”

Reluctantly, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle nodded and left the large man in favor of the survivor they’d been pointed to. “Hi, miss Rochelle,” the unicorn filly said quietly.

Rochelle took a deep swig of lukewarm water from a dusty plastic bottle. “Hi there,” she replied as she screwed the cap back on and set the bottle down, her voice hoarse and a little strained.

“We were told to stay here with you,” Scootaloo added awkwardly, “while mister Coach treats Apple Bloom.”

The woman’s eyes gaze set upon the frame of the bulky health teacher speaking to the filly on the table in hushed, comforting whispers. “She’s in good hands,” she smiled, looking back down. “Anyway, it looks like I’m in a bit of a disadvantage name-wise. What are you called, sweeties?”

“Hey, I’m not ‘sweetie’! I’m Scootaloo!” the pegasus protested, jabbing a hoof at her friend. “She is Sweetie!”

“I think that was a figure of speech, Scootaloo,” the white pony explained. Her head moved to face the human. “My name’s actually Sweetie Belle.”

The pills Rochelle had taken with the water started to work their magic, and added to how these two behaved exactly like human children, despite everything, the mildly sedated reporter felt a long-absent sense of normalcy. “Well then, hello, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle,” she said with a gentle smile. “Who’s your friend?”

Right then, there was a sickening pop and a muffled scream from Coach’s direction. “APPLE BLOOM!” the two ponies shouted in unison, abandoning Rochelle’s side to hurry to the impromptu operating table, Scootaloo following close behind Sweetie Belle with a slight limp. However, instead of hearing more screams and the evil laughter of a tormenting jerk, when they got close, their ears caught quiet whimpering and soothing whispers.

“Shh, shh, there, worst is done, kid...” Coach said quietly, scratching behind his patent's ear with one hand, keeping the other firmly in place over the shoulder he had just set in place. He stole a quick glance at the joint, and couldn't help but think to himself, 'Please tell me I did this right and didn't screw her up more...'

“The hell was that, man?” a southern voice asked. Ellis had stopped his treatment of Nick in favor of staring, perplexed, at his other male companion.

“She had a dislocated shoulder,” was the answer.

“Ow,” Ellis cringed in sympathy, turning back to his own patient. “Reminds me of when Keith had the idea of base jumpin' off the railroad bridge. He was meanin' to use one of those big-ass weather balloons for a parachute, but when we were fillin' it, it popped, so he had to cut a square off it an' tie the tips with some braided string. An' it was goin' real smooth, too, least until–“

“Nngh...”

“Nick!” the accented boy exclaimed in surprised joy. “Yer awake!”

The man in question waved a hand blindly, raising the other to cradle his head. “Stop screaming, Ellis! Damn it...” He grunted once, working his fingers over his temple. “What the hell was that back there?”

“That's your sense of acoustics coming to bite us in the ass,” Rochelle answered, already crouched over him.

“Should've known...” The man in white set the free hand on the ground and tried to push himself up, but quickly abandoned that idea. “Whoa, shit, dizzy spell... Damn does my head hurt.”

“Nuh-uh, you stay right where yer at,” Ellis admonished, holding him down by the shoulder.

“Okay, mom.” Nick rolled his eyes at a slight angle, enough to show his annoyance without worsening his migraine. “What shit fell on my plate?”

“Stampedin' charger,” Coach said simply. The two conscious fillies turned back to him, having forgotten about him and Apple Bloom in the distraction of Nick's awakening, and saw him biting down on a length of silvery tape and taking it down to the table, likely towards their fellow Crusader. “Alright, that should do it,” he said after giving the loose end of the tape a few taps to glue it in place. “How you holdin’ up, shorty?”

“… bit better now,” answered a tremulous voice. “Thanks, mistah.”

The man smiled warmly. “That ain’t nuthin’. Now I’m gonna need you to stand: think ya can do it?”

Seconds passed before a mussed up mop of red hair poked out from the edge of the table, followed by two amber eyes, and finally the rest of Apple Bloom’s head. She wore a grimace that showed the aches wracking her little body, but it faded to a happy grin when she looked down and saw her closest friends up and running much better than she herself was. “Hey girls!”

Seeing Scootaloo's and Sweetie Belle's elated faces at her appearance prompted the junior farmer to go and join them, but she was stopped by a hand grabbing her from below just as she was preparing to leap off the table. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you crazy?!” admonished Coach. “I just fixed y'all up, kid, the least you can do is not waste my work!”

Caught red-handed, the filly grinned sheepishly.

Nick snorted from where he was, but said nothing else about the matter. Instead, he turned to Ellis. “How long was I out?”

“Not too long, five minutes at most,” Rochelle answered, moving to shove the painkillers back inside the medical pack. She reconsidered. “Want some?”

“I'll pass,” he grunted. “I've felt worse after booze benders.” He hadn't, really, but he just knew that any sort of anesthesic would drop him faster than a puppet with cut strings. He idly eyed Coach setting a now partially-silver Apple Bloom to the floor, and muttered a few quiet words to himself, two of which sounded a lot like 'carousel decorations'.

“Hey!” Scootaloo exclaimed, offended by what she heard. “What do you have against us anyway, dude?”

Nick fixed her an icy glare. "You three are trouble, that's what I have against you." He brought a hand up and extended one finger. “For one, you yourself brought zombie city on our tails when you ran off screaming like a loon. Two,” his middle finger went up, “you're moochers. I don't care what you are, you're gonna jeopardize our safety, and unless you things eat grass, our food supplies too.”

Had the mention of eating grass been at any other time, the Crusaders would have made fake gagging motions to show their disgust: the word 'grass' was only one letter apart from 'gross' for a reason. But the way that was said, and by whom it was said, gave them pause.

“Oh, right, they go after noise, right?” Sweetie Belle said timidly.

“Wait, whaddya mean 'gepardizing yer food'?” Apple Bloom piped in. “Stop usin' those complicated words to make us feel dumb!”

“Jeopardizing means compromising, doing bad things to something.” All eyes turned to Sweetie Belle, who shrank slightly. “What? Rarity loves that word!”

Meanwhile, Scootaloo returned to fuming in guilt. The others hadn't zipped away screaming, which meant the blame was entirely on her withers. “Sorry for giving you guys in hot water...”

“It's okay, shorty, you didn't know any better,” Coach said placidly. He made it a point to stare at Nick as he said that. “'sides, they were gonna come for us sooner or later. You just got it started when we were in a good position where nobody would get hurt bad.” He looked down at the filly. “Don’t y’all feel guilty, got that?”

She gave a feeble nod, smiling faintly. “Okay then.” Then she blinked. “But there's one thing bugging me... Why are your zombies so fast? Aren't they supposed to be all slow and rotten and moany?”

The humans eyed each other. "They're... not that kind of zombie," Rochelle explained. "They're all alive, in a weird way."

"Good thing, too, we had to run through a graveyard right before we met you girls," Ellis chirped in. "Imagine if they were real zombies... it'd be like death for sure."

"I've never heard of living zombies..." Sweetie Belle remarked, confused. "Don't they have to be undead to be zombies?"

"Beats me," Nick said with finality, carefully standing back up, breathing deep to ignore the aches. "Just like how long we have before the turbine jockeys burn the bridge down, and I'm not betting on anything above five minutes." The way he loomed over the Crusaders made them take an unconscious step back with folded ears.

"What exactly are you implying, Nick?" Rochelle, who had stood up herself, asked knowingly. "Are you gonna say we have to pack light to get there before the deadline?"

The man snorted. "We've had that discussion before and you two made your point, we're not getting rid of anyone or anything today." He looked back down. "But you three are gonna pay us back."

"But we don't have bits," Sweetie Belle pointed out. "We left our coin pouches at home, we weren't planning to have to pay for things..."

As soon as she mentioned coin pouches, Nick realized they were talking about money. For the sake of his own string-thin patience, he decided to ignore the other details. "Like we have anywhere to spend cash on. I meant you're pulling your own weight. For one, your eyes are huge and your ears are even bigger. You're gonna spot for us."

"Oh," the filly nodded. "We can do that, right guys?"

Her friends both nodded. "Sure we can!" Apple Bloom said happily.

"What do we have to look out for?" asked Scootaloo. She was eager to make up to them for saving her, it was the least she could do.

"Well, Nick, color me surprised," Coach grinned. "You're being reasonable for once!"

"Yeah, yeah, 'see the silver lining' and all that crap," the man responded, brushing off the teasing. "Wait, where did Ellis go?"

A 'clunk-clunk' noise came from above, and Scootaloo was the first to put herself to work as assigned. "There's something up there."

"HEY GUYS!" the missing survivor called from above, climbing down the ladder on the wall. "Ah went for a look, an' we can get on street level from a door up there. Ain't no zombies around that Ah could see, so we're good."

The supersonic boom of the fighter jets came up seconds after Ellis had finished. "Well shit, souds like a 'hurry up' to me," Rochelle observed, and no one disagreed. "Everyone ready? Then let's go, we've got an evac to catch."

Calling it a door would be quite an understatement – what stood before Celestia was a behemoth of thick metal plates welded together, attached to the wall by hinges so huge, they did not obey any architectural proportions she knew of. Right in its middle, a large window had been left open, criss-crossed by steel bars spaced far enough apart that she could slide her foreleg through without problems.

Though unusual in its properties, it had a purpose that did not escape her eye. ‘The entrance to a safe haven.’

Beyond the room she occupied – a stairway landing cut off from the lower levels by various pieces of heavy furniture clogging the passage –, a reasonable number of shamblers, as Celestia had decided to call the strangely irrational primates, lazed about. The smaller distance between the alicorn and them allowed her to notice details she hadn’t been able to before. For one, they had a particularly unpleasant smell, a mixture of vomit, old sweat and… She covered her nose. ‘Hurricane’s helmet, is this refuse?’

Any thoughts on how any sapient creature could forgo as basic a self-preservation instinct as personal hygiene were immediately lost on the alicorn as some passed under a still-working lamp further back, and her observation could actually be made with her eyes. Alongside the mottled, dusty skin that indicated constant exposure to the elements, all of them had thick streaks of blood originating from their mouths and running down their chins – ‘A widespread case of hematemesis?’ –, and the vast majority sported a good amount of dark bruises, open cuts, jagged scratches and bite marks, among other injuries, in various places of their bodies. One of them, seemingly a male, was missing an arm – and if the irregular aspect of the remaining flesh and bone were any indication, it had been torn off with extreme force. She quickly turned away, trying desperately not to retch.

Another explosion rocked the immediate surroundings, causing the building tremble under Celestia’s hooves and the lamps to flicker menacingly. To her surprise, the seemingly absentminded shamblers all ran out of the corridor and its surroundings, grunting and yelling incoherently. A few seconds later, a sharp crack, which the princess knew by instinct would be eardrum-tearing were she not indoors, filled the air. ‘Wait, I recognize this noise… A sonic boom?!’ There was in fact something, whether a contraption or a creature, that could surpass the speed of sound, right there in the world she was in. And Celestia was not exactly sure she wanted to meet whatever it was.

Another thought ran through her head: ‘know your foe’. If just to know what to avoid, she had to know what it was.

Carefully, she ascended the two flights of stairs, her bare hooves barely making a sound on the dusty granite floor, and peered out the door to the roof. She didn’t like what she saw. The farthest side of the building’s top had been obliterated; in its place there was only a crater, its edges smoldering both from whatever explosive had destroyed the area and the wooden beams making up the building’s structure. Slowly, Celestia re-entered the stairwell and closed the door with a quiet ‘click’. ‘I will definitely have to be careful,’ she thought to herself.

A few seconds later, she was once again in her safe haven, with her eyes closed in thought. ‘I need a plan of action.’ Just running out the door as she was at the moment was most likely a move that would get her roasted, if the behavior of the shamblers, the general state of the city and the explosions were any indication. Setting her body down on a part of the floor that was covered in cardboard sheets and a bedsheet – she had to admit it made for a surprisingly comfortable bedding –, she concentrated on organizing her ideas.

The first priority was, naturally, survival – she wasn’t going to accomplish anything if she was dead.

Secondly, she had to find the fillies. She banished the grim thought of their deaths out of her head; there had to be hope. The syphon line was her main motivation, as they were the only thing that could plausibly be attached to the other end... and dead ponies don't consume or transmit magic; even passive users like earth ponies or pegasi had their active circulation and application. She ignored the fact that it was a gamble, telling herself that it was as good a gamble as any, and it paid to be optimistic.

And thirdly, she had to secure them all a way back to Equestria. However she was going to manage that was a bridge she would cross when she got there.

Next, she listed her available resources. Her body, flight capabilities aside, seemed normal. Her magic, from what she had tried, was acting inefficient and warped to the point of being dangerous to use. However, she could still feel the tug, so maybe magic could work if the spell was self-cast…

She focused on herself, trying to feel her own magical matrix. Much as she had hoped, her perception spread from the pith of her horn to her head, and down her neck and to her body. To her intrigue, the syphon effect was a little stronger. It still wasn’t nearly enough for her to think of it as a cause of concern, which she was glad for, and it gave her a waypoint to follow. She got up on her hooves, filing it all in her mental archives.

The room, though small, was surprisingly packed with all sorts of items, some unpleasant like the foul-smelling clothes left at one corner, others intriguing like the hollow metal sticks filled with brass-colored tubes like the one she had tried her magic on before, though these had a tip made of a similar material on them; a tin can on a battered wooden table held a significant amount of these spikes of sorts, of varying shapes and sizes. Celestia decided to leave them be.

Another finding was a shaft made of polished wood and dark metal, apparently made of a number of moving parts. One of its sides had a sort of alphanumerical code that the princess failed to comprehend.

Searching a cardboard box yielded a much more recognizable item, a blue satchel with a red cross on it. ‘A first aid kit!’ It quickly found its way around Celestia’s neck, hanging by a small strap. ‘Not the most comfortable fit, but I think it would be too much to ask for saddlebags…’ Further rummaging only produced a flashlight much too large and clunky to carry without a proper bag, which she left alone. The opened cans and cartons in a pile at the farthest corner offered nothing useful enough to take, as did the drawers of the desk on the barricade.

Taking a deep breath, the alicorn steeled her nerves and put her hoof under the metal bar holding the door closed, ready to lift it off the improvised lock. Lingering wouldn’t solve any of her problems, and she knew it.

Much to Nick's pleasant surprise, their tagalongs could climb ladders, with the obvious exception of Apple Bloom, whom Coach volunteered to carry after a small dose of Rochelle's ibuprofen.

The outside of the safe rom's upper level was dominated by huge concrete dividers on the left side. A blue semi had crashed hard enough against one of the dividers to move it a fair distance, but didn't knock it down. Fences on the right had the usual 'aggravate the military and you're dead' warnings tied on them.

Applebloom surveyed the scenery from above on Coach's back, paying grim attention to the small fly-ridden pile of corpses in front of what remained of the semi. A small crackle turned her ear to the right, and her face followed suit.

"Rescue 7, this is Papa Gator, over."

"This is Rescue 7, over."

Everyone's attention, not just hers, were drawn to a body laying against the fence in front of a power box, a walkie-talkie in his hand. "Hey, these are soldiers!" Nick exclaimed, picking the radio up. "Uuuum, hello? Papa Gator, Rescue 7, anyone there?"

"Rescue 7!" said the alarmed voice of Papa Gator. "That's coming from the bridge! Bridge, who is this?"

Nick was quick to respond. "My name's Nick. There's seven of us on the..." he checked the morning sun's rays beaming from the opposite side of the river, "... on the west end of the bridge."

"Copy that, Nick. Are all of you immune?"

"Papa Gator, we are NOT infected!" he made a point to emphasize. They'd not come this far to die now just because some bastards with stripes decided that they were the same as the mealy-mouthed bastards that they were sick of fighting.

The next two words chilled his soul. "Negative, Nick. ARE YOU IMMUNE?" A second later, Papa Gator explained further, "Have you encountered the infected?"

Rochelle mouthed 'understatement of the year', and Coach chuckled. The Crusaders stared at them, then at each other, feeling mildly lost.

"Yeah, you could say that," Nick affirmed.

About five seconds passed before Papa Gator came back on. When he did, the message wasn't intended for them. "Rescue 7, are you equipped for carriers? Over."

"Affirmative, Papa Gator, over," Rescue 7 said without a hint of trepidation. Nick was relieved; at least they weren't going to be seen as target practice to be lined up against a wall or locked on by fighter jet sighting systems right away.

"Roger, Rescue 7. Nick, listen closely: Rescue 7 is the evac on the east end, at the helipad on the naval base. He's the last one, we've pulled out of that sector. You've got ten minutes to get to him. Are you near the west checkpoint?"

"You mean the fenced passage next to where the bridge rises, with all the signs? Yeah, we're there."

"Check for a power box on one of the bridge's pillars. It should have a red light. Turn that on, and the bridge will lower."

Scootaloo saw Rochelle, who was already close to said box, turn a large red switch on the top. The red LED turned green, and with a mighty hydraulic roar, the bridge started its descent. The woman gave a thumbs up to Nick.

"We've got it, it's coming down."

"Remember, guys, ten minutes," warned the more laid-back voice of Rescue 7. "I'll be warming the rotors while you don't get here, but if you don't get to the chopper in ten minutes, you're on your own."

"We've got that, we'll be there," Nick answered.

"There are no infected on the bridge as far as the buzzards can tell, so you're lucky," said Papa Gator. "God be with you. Over and out."

"You heard the men, let's get across this and we're home free!" Coach yelled.

"Oh shit yeah! Shit! YEAH!" At least Ellis was motivated.

"Get ready to run!" Rochelle warned. "This whole bridge is almost half a mile long, we're gonna have to book it to get there on time!"

The span reached its lower level with a powerful rattle, and the gap covers extended. As soon as they hit the ground, the humans darted away startlingly fast, and Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle ran after them, giving all they had in their little legs to try and catch up.

The beige walls dully reflected the light of her horn as she slowly trod through the empty hallway. The flickering lights of the fluorescent lamps above, pulsing between weak and imperceptible, made for an ominous atmosphere, pregnant with anticipation.

'Or maybe that's merely the knots in my stomach,' Celestia mused idly. She passed yet another bend in the hallway, and was rewarded with a larger door than the usual wooden ones that led to offices and rooms she didn't bother to look into after a frustratingly fruitless round of scouring for useful objects. The image of an extinguisher above the lever gave her an idea of what to expect, and the thickness of the door as it swung open confirmed it: it was a fire door, covering a stairway.

Carefully, Celestia climbed down the dangerously steep staircase, until an unpleasant sight caught her eye: the ceiling of the fourth floor had caved in, leaving several large pieces of wood and mortar blocking her path. 'It cannot ever be easy, can it?'

She sighed, and headed to the fire door next to the collapsed passage. It offered surprisingly heavy resistance, and the princess had to resort to standing on her hind legs and use her forelegs and shoulder to muscle it open, trying to resist the foul smell that seeped through the gap between it and the frame without holding her breath. As the movable barrier very slowly budged under the alicorn’s force, a grating sound of something being dragged coming from behind it, it became clear to her why it was so hard to open: someone had blocked the door with a weighty metal desk, which slid noisily out of the way with her final heave.

Finally, there was enough room for Celestia to squeeze through, and she entered the new room. It was much different from what she had expected; unlike the small, cramped hallways with entrances to offices the mare was used to from her experiences on the floors above, this was a very large room, about half the size of Canterlot Castle’s main hall, if her mental measurements were correct. She stepped in, carefully checking the barely lit surroundings. The chamber hadn't escaped whatever had happened to the city untouched, as the general disarray and malfunctioning lighting showed, but it was empty as far as the light spell could reach and her ears could pick up over the faint sound of a ventilation fan somewhere nearby.

The promise of relative safety did not convince Celestia to dawdle, and she quickly contoured the room. Here and there the occasional corpse caught her eye, and she noted with morbid interest that the vast majority sported at least one round perforation in their torso. Some of them had them in their heads, though, and she could spare no more than a cursory glance at the bloody messes signaling the exit wounds of whatever had pierced them without feeling even sicker than the odor of the room already made her. The lower floor held little promise of an exit; the only clear way the royal pony could see was a metal staircase near her. Careful so her hooves didn't clash too loudly against the metal, Celestia climbed. 'I hope I'm not walking in circles here.'

As the final steps were left behind, a moderate-sized landing came to view. It was made as if to overlook the lower collective office, however it puzzled Celestia that the large table near the fencing around the edge was turned away from the lower floor, instead staring at several pieces of equipment and a booth. All curiosity seeped out of her mind at the sight of another shambler lying limp on top of the frame of the booth's broken glass window, its blood marking streaks down the wall. A door to the left, marked with a large, red-illuminated sign spelling 'EXIT', accompanied by another sign, this one green and showing a minimalistic caricature of a biped going through a frame, with an arrow above it. Thankfully, this one was unblocked, and she went through with no problems.

Suddenly, she was thrown off her feet by a concussive blast of air caused by an explosion mere meters into the hallway ahead of her. The glass on the windows exploded, and the shards joined the wood splinters and concrete chips in raining down on her body. Her ringing ears did not register the sound of the sonic boom that followed, and Celestia felt so sick she couldn't hold it in anymore: staggering unsteadily to her hooves, the disoriented mare leaned against the edge of the nearest window and expelled all of her stomach's contents down onto whatever lay below. Her dazed brain barely recognized the movement of a bridge far away coming down with a heavy pneumatic groan, and her hazy eyes took a considerable amount of time to register the fire escape staircase right in front of her, leading to the ground level.

Author's Note

Happy 2015, everyone!

This is actually the very first fanfic that I wrote and was content with, after a few tentative throwaways in other fandoms. It first came onto fanfiction.net in January 2012 under the handle of REV6Pilot, and was last really messed with in the 14th of October on that same year. Quite a while, isn't it? Yeah, for all this time, I've been giving it a facelift one little bit per time I could sit down and write, and now I've decided to transplant it over here for several reasons - let's face it, getting recognition in that arthritic dinosaur that is FanFiction is next to impossible, let alone receive valuable feedback in a way as fluid as we have over here with our comments sections. Hell, even editing there is a pain.

Now, I want to address the unspoken issue that, while this beginning is looking a bit similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Multiversal Leak, the two stories are NOT going to be parallels. Each will deal with different themes in different ways, with different outcomes.

With all that good fluff said... don't expect this story to get updated often or soon. The time I took to reform this and get it up to snuff with my standards really pooped me out, and I don't want to write more of it right now. Instead, I'm plannning to get more of Waking Up for the Equestrian Dream out for you dear fellows to read, so be on the lookout for that. I'm gonna do my best to make this summer vacation count!