Fallout Equestria: Airborne

Chapter 3: When Bullets Fly

Crazed laughter carried over our prone bodies while we wormed our way up to the door. As we set up tactical positions on each side of the door, Jester peeked over the windowsill and mouthed, "three". I assumed that meant there were three of them in there and not that we were storming the fort in three seconds, but you know what they say about assuming (ass, you, and Ming). Three seconds passed and we were still loading up and getting ready to make a move, so my instincts were as sharp as I believed. Jester was still making hoof signs at me, but at this point I had used up all my bilingual-ness and just nodded along.

He met my eyes and raised his hoof, and I shifted my weight expectantly. Dropping it, he rounded the corner through the doorway, silenced pistol coughing as we sprinted in. The first raider's head exploded into a bright red and pink streak on the wall behind him, splashing onto my cot. I grimaced (I mean, the head exploding I could deal with, but damnit that was my bed). I came in low and hot, shotgun scanning the room for the other two raiders. A flash of brown raced into the back room as my shotgun roared, peppering his hide and leaving pellet holes in the doorway. The third levitated the battered dinner table between us and barricaded himself into Jester's room, giggling to himself the whole way. Great, a psychotic unicorn. That's going to work well for us.

Jester pointed me towards the buck I had wounded as he stalked over to his room, horn flaring with golden light.

He spoke in a heavy whisper as I passed him. "I'm going to pour everything I have at the table and pull it away from that lunatic. I usually keep enough firepower in my room to bring down the house and half the forest with it. Finish off that raider you shot and get your ass back over here before this asshole finds my stash."

I hadn't seen the raider carrying anything when he jumped into the room, but I wasn't sure he didn't have some sort of weapon I missed, or had found something in the room. I flew around the corner and zeroed in on the dark mass huddled in the corner, hoof tightening on the trigger.

He was... crying. Not loudly or wildly, but tears were streaking the dirt on his face as he held a hoof to his stomach, blood gurgling out of his wounds. Wet, green eyes stared at the floor as he cringed further into the corner away from me. The shotgun started shaking in my hooves, but I kept it locked on his face.

"Please..." he croaked, "I don't wanna die..."

I'll be honest. I've killed before. Back at Adams Apple, I've gunned down zebras on the ground without a second thought. I've bombed huts, attacked families, you name it, I've done it. But never have I stood face to face with another and killed in cold blood. I didn't know if I could start now.

"Collateral!" Jester screamed across the room. Celestia damn it all. He was barely a buck. He couldn't be much older than I was (well, take off the two hundred years). He wasn't even armed. But he'd probably bleed out anyway if I didn't shoot him, meaning killing him would be the merciful thing to do. He met my eyes and read the conclusion I had arrived at as I cocked the hammer back. He lowered his head once more, eyes closed, and started shaking.

BLAM

I found Jester in a tug-of-war with the psycho unicorn, peals of laughter rippling through the magical fields around the table as it wobbled in the air. He wasn't able to float the pistol around the table far enough to get a clear shot, and the raider had more than enough power to keep the table from moving away.

"Hngh... Collateral, I need your help, damn it all," he grunted, the strain of trying to counteract the unicorn's magic showing on his face. "I can't get a shot."

I flew over to the table, planted my front hooves, and bucked it as hard as I could. The table gave maybe a foot, and then immediately slammed back into the doorway. Damn. And ow. I raised the shotgun to start blasting my way through.

"Collateral, no!"

I stared questioningly at Jester. "And why the hell not?"

"It's my only damn table," he said.

I scowled at him. "Seriously?"

If looks could kill. Fine then, plan B. "How are we going to move it? That crazy son of bitch is too strong for either of us."

"If I had already figured that out, I'd've done it already," he snarled. "Why don't you do the thinking for a change?"

We were still having a go at it when a small, metal apple bounced out from behind the table. Without turning from Jester, I kicked the apple out the already broken window.

"Fine, how about you pull as hard as you can, I'll buck the table at the same time, and we'll wedge one of the chairs between the door frame and the table?

He wasn't even paying attention to me; instead he watched the metal apple soar out the window. He turned back to me with an incredulous look on his face.

"What?" I asked as I turned to grab a chair.

A large concussion blast shook the front wall and I nearly fell flat on my face. That metal thing was a grenade?!

The table wavered for a split second, giving me the chance to jam the back of the chair in the opening provided. With a mighty heave, I mashed in the chair as Jester's horn flared brighter, and together the table slid away from the doorway and stayed away.

Next thing we knew, the table flew back at us, having been released from the red unicorn's magic. He sauntered out, floating three more apple-grenades over his head. One of his eyelids was twitching manically, and his face was set in a stretched, crazed smile. His pupils were constricted to twin pin-points. A fleeting memory came back to me, one from the stories I had read about a purple unicorn who couldn't find a problem to fix and slowly went insane. His ears flapped, as if shaking off flies.

"Well hello, my little ponies," said the unicorn. He had a high-pitched, nasally voice that set my teeth on edge. I scrambled around the fallen chair and kept the shotgun leveled at him, but Jester raised his hoof again and stopped me with a sideways glance. The floating pistol set itself beside Jester as he spoke back to the unicorn.

"Aright, you've got us dead to rights. What do you want?"

"Want?" the unicorn said. He giggled again, the grenades swaying drunkenly in the air. I stood stock-still, trying to blend into the background while praying the grenade pins stayed set. "What do I want? I want your warm blood on my body, I want to bathe in it, I want to eat your still-beating heart from the inside out!"

He cocked his head to one side and started convulsing with laughter. Oh, Celestia. His coat wasn't red. It was... completely drenched in blood. Old blood, new blood. Clots and fissures decorated his coat, popping and scratching with every movement he made. I was fighting a losing battle to keep my last meal down.

While I was battling with the dry heaves, several things happened at once: the unicorn pulled the pins from the grenades and threw them to the corners of the room we were in, Jester's knife shattered through the window in his room, propelled by his magic, and buried itself at the base of the unicorn's neck, protruding from his throat and cutting off his insane laughter, and I dropped the shotgun and jumped to intercept the path of the first grenade.

I knew from munitions training that grenades generally have a 4-5 second fuse, though I had never seen grenades like this before and had no clue just how long its fuse ran (I should've counted during the first one, damnit!). I managed to get my hooves on the grenade, fumbled it once, and heaved it out the door. Jester had already corralled the second with his magic in mid-air and directed it outside. The third, however, had rolled behind the fridge. I leaped on my stomach and stretched my hooves as far as I could while Jester tried to lift the fridge with his magic, but after the gators and the raiders, he was running on empty and couldn't get it off the ground.

Time slowed down while I wondered how it would feel to have my face blown off. The raider's body collapsed in on itself, his blood slowly pooling around my outstretched hindlegs. I was barely touching the grenade but couldn't find enough purchase to roll it my way. Jester was galloping at the fridge, but he wasn't going to make it in time to pull it away from the wall. So I went the other way instead. With a massive stretch, I shoved the grenade to the far corner of the cabin, scrambled to my hooves, grabbed Jester in mid-stride, and dove into Jester's room, slamming the door and flipping his mattress over us for extra cover.

Nothing happened. Of all the goddamn fucking stupid pieces of bullshi-

BOOM

Ringing. Something was ringing right in my ears and something heavy was laying on my body. I opened my eyes to a spinning room. Celestia, somebody please slow the room down, I want to get off.

Jester lay on top of me, knocked senseless, and his mattress on top of him. I shoved him off and rolled right-side up, waiting for the room to decide which way was up and down. I might've finally thrown up.

"Jester?" I could've sworn I said his name out loud, but all I could hear was that Celestia-forsaken ringing. "Hey. Buddy. You ok?"

He stirred and opened his eyes, staring at the ceiling. A rush of relief coincided with the ebbing of the ringing, and I wobbled over to him, helping him sit up and take stock. Other than a nosebleed and possibly a mild concussion, he seemed none the worse for wear.

I wish I could've said the same for his room. Somepony, who will remain nameless, had blown a huge hole in the corner of his room. I could see the splattered remains of the first raider on the opposite wall. I could also see the Whitetail Woods through the same hole.

"Ah," I said.

"Fuck," said Jester.

He was still having trouble getting to his hooves, but after crawling to the footlocker at the foot of his bed and scrounging up and downing a healing potion, he managed to shake off the vertigo and stand beside me staring out the wall.

"Well... it was the best idea I had at the time," I explained.

He threw me a sideways glance. "I take it back, let me do all the thinking from here on out."

I helped him set his mattress back on the metal bed stand and started shoving the larger chunks of debris out the hole in the wall. He went through his footlockers and dressers, making a mental checklist of what was still around and growling when he found something missing.

With a wooden slam that made me jump, Jester closed the last dresser and turned to me. "Four grenades, two healing potions, and a pack of cigarettes are missing. I'm sure the potions and the cigarettes are somewhere in the rubble, though. All things considered, that wasn't as bad as I expected."

He helped me push a large piece of metal that I couldn't move on my own out the hole in the wall. It looked suspiciously like the stove top, and Jester looked none too happy about that. We worked our way into the main room, cleaning as best we could. I found my shotgun underneath the fridge, which had toppled over from the explosion but miraculously chugged back to life when we plugged it in. The stove was nowhere to be found (or, technically, was everywhere to be found) which earned a scowl from Jester. The table and three of the chairs survived, as did my cot, though it had tipped over. Thankfully it seemed like the grenades had a relatively small blast radius, and soon enough we had the main room more or less in shape.

I was heading out the door to grab our meat and bags when a cough sounded from the back room. Jester went rigid. He pulled his knife from the sheath with his mouth and glared at me as he tip-hoofed over to the doorway.

"Wait, Jester wait!" I sprinted over to him and bit his tail right before he could dive into the room.

"Heef aat aarmd. Heef hur. On't thab im." I strained against his pull as his eyes glinted murderously at me. He yanked as hard as he could, dragging my hooves over the wooden floor. His tail slipped another couple inches; I was losing him.

Celestia forgive me for my moment of desperation: I punched him right in his little Jester. Not hard, mind you, but enough to take the fight out of him. It was all I could think to do - he was much stronger than me, and the green and gold hairs of his tail were slipping out of my mouth. He fell to his side with a wheeze and dropped the knife.

I galloped over to the bleeding buck and stood over him, wood chips and dirt still drifting down on me from the hole in the ceiling I made with the shotgun (I decided not to shoot the raider earlier. So sue me). The buck still shook, probably as much from blood loss and shock as from fear.

I turned and faced Jester, who lay grimacing and wheezing on the ground. "Look man, I'm sorry about that but you gave me no choice. This buck isn't armed and he's grievously wounded. I didn't kill him because he hadn't done anything to us worth killing over."

Jester took a couple deep breaths and got back to his hooves, staring daggers at me. He bent over to pick up his knife and walked over to me until he was inches from my face.

"Move," he said around the knife, his tone neutral, calm, and scaring the hell out of me.

"Goddamnit Jester, no," I said. "Look at him! Is he any threat to us? There's no reason we have to kill him. The other ones were dangerous but he's not."

He sheathed the knife so he could talk clearly and moved even closer to me. "I will say this one more time. Move." The unnerving calmness in his voice continued.

"No. If you are going to kill this buck, you're going to have to get through me." I stuck my chin out and locked my hooves, a slight tremor in my jaw the only tell that I was terrified out of my fucking mind.

Jester exploded. "He's a fucking raider, Collateral! You don't know shit about what these guys do, how they fucking torture and rape ponies. Fillies! They rape and fucking murder fillies!! You think this sick piece of shit deserves to draw another fucking breath?!" Jester was close enough that his spit was hitting me in the face. "They go around and tear ponies apart, chaining their bodies to the ceilings and walls. Some of these fuckers even EAT other ponies. And now you, some pansy-ass nancy mare without a fucking clue about who these assholes are, you're going to protect one of them?! Who the fuck do you think you are?!"

At some point I had started crying. "I won't move. He's done nothing to us and I won't allow you to kill him. I have no doubt in my mind that if you wanted to get through me to kill him, I wouldn't be able to stop you, but you WILL have to go through me." I reared and stamped my hooves to drive home my point. "He doesn't deserve death."

Jester tried to pull my shotgun from under my hooves with his magic, but his horn had had enough at last, the magical overglow sputtering and dying. He shook with fury, and I was shocked to see his eyes glisten. Finally, he slumped, shoulders sagging.

"You have no idea what they've done to me. You have no idea what they've taken from me. I never want another pony to face what I've been through." He turned and slowly walked out the door. "He's your responsibility. If I ever see him again, I will skin him alive while you watch."

I watched him walk into his room and shut the door, which promptly fell off its hinges again with a crash, earning a loud expletive from Jester. I turned back to the buck, whose eyes slid in and out of focus as he slumped lower and lower in the corner. Before, when we had cleaned up the main room, I had found both missing healing potions and had set them on the table. Though I was sure Jester would have an aneurysm, I grabbed both up and sat the buck up, slowly pouring them into his mouth while he reflexively swallowed.

After a time, the bullet wounds started to close, and little round pellets pinged to the floor as they were pushed out by the healing magic. His eyes fluttered open and focused on me, going wide when he realized I hadn't killed him. He tried to push away from me but his body hadn't healed enough. His arms slipped feebly off my body.

"Easy, easy," I said. "I'm not hurting you. I'm just..." Hell, I had no idea what I was doing. If Jester was right (and I wasn't ready to doubt him), then this guy was part of the worst monsters I'd encountered in my short time in the wasteland, someone who would have been tried and executed back in war-time Equestria without a second thought. Who was I to be judge, jury, and stay-of-executioner?

I am Collateral Damage, damnit, that's who. I decide what I do, and if I'm not going to kill this asshole, so be it. Jester can go mope on his own time.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He tried to speak, coughed, and tried again. "I'm Lock Nut. Get me get out of here, man. We didn't know. If we knew, we never would have hit this place."

I arched an eyebrow at him. "Didn't know what?"

"This is Jester Hoofbury's place, man. Every raider's ever crossed his path got buried," he said hoarsely, still scrambling to get his hooves underneath him. "Please, let me get out of here. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we would have stayed away. Please."

He was shaking and couldn't keep his balance. Dear Celestia, just who the hell was Jester that he could cause this sort of reaction?

"I'm not going to let him hurt you, Lock Nut. Stay still for a sec and let your body recover." I kept trying to hold him down but it was like trying to wrestle a greased pig. He managed to push me away, but as he stumbled to his hooves, one of his nearly closed wounds ripped open again and he dropped with a cry.

Fresh blood ran down his dingy brown coat. I helped him pull off his muddy armor (and I'm using armor loosely here; he had like maybe one or two joints covered by hard plastic connected to a tiny breastplate. Leather held everything together. Did they raid a belt factory or something?). I'm not a particularly good medical pony by any means, but we still had a little bit of one of the potions left, which I fed to him. As his stomach healed, he lay on his back, too exhausted to move anymore.

I walked to the opposite corner and sat with my back to it, watching Lock Nut as his chest rose and fell.

Jester Hoofbury. He said he was a mercenary, and he said he was good, but the fire in his eyes and the murderous rage he flew into the second he saw any raiders gave me an unpleasant view into what made him tick. I unbelted Magnolia from my back and held her tight, trying to keep away the shakes of being in the crosshairs of Jester's fury yet again. I knew he had been a hair's breadth away from killing me over Lock Nut. I'm not even sure why he didn't.

Good Luna, I had punched him right in a bad area. In a lifetime of idiotic moves, that one was definitely top five. I started going over in my mind all the times I had gotten myself in trouble by acting without thinking when Lock Nut spoke from the floor.

"Why're you here?"

I shook myself out of my memories. "What?"

"Why're you here with him?" he said, too tired to lift his head. "Our clan stays way west of here, but every time any of our raiding parties came into contact with Jester, any pony lucky enough to make it back alive said Jester worked alone. And there weren't many who made it back."

"He..." I had to think for a second to decide just how honest I wanted to be. I settled for simple answers sprinkled with the truth. "He saved me. I owe him so I'm helping him 'til my debt is paid off."

That earned a rusty laugh from him. "Saved? Jester Hoofbury doesn't save. He's one of the deadliest bucks this side of Equestria and only gives a shit about who's paying him. He's the coldest there is, man."

His words opened up the vault of questions in my head I had been struggling to keep closed since I woke up in Jester's shack. Not only had Jester saved me, but he had nursed me back to health and had even spared my life twice, despite me crossing the line multiple times and almost killing him. Why, damnit? What was he looking for from me? What made me so special?

Dark answers came to the forefront, despite me desperately trying to hold them back. He was a ruthless killer. Who's to say he wasn't a filly diddler too, or a rapist? What if he was going to kill me once he got his money, or worse? I'd seen the mad glint in his eyes multiple times now. He always tried to keep his composure but there was a darker pony underneath the surface. How deep did that monstrous well go?

Again, Lock Nut brought me back to the surface. "I ain't never eaten a pony before. I ain't never raped anypony either, no filly or grown pony," he mumbled. "You saved my life so I figured you should at least know that."

Now it was my turn for questions. "Ok then, so why are you a raider? Why the hell did I stick my neck out for you, go against Jester and almost throw my life away for some raider I've never met?" I'll admit, that last question was as much for me as it was for him.

He was silent for a bit. I was about to check if he had passed out when he answered, "It's... one of the only ways to live out here. West of here is nothing, man. A few tiny cities here and there, but they've been ruined by the bombs and time, and then the ocean way out west." He coughed a little. "Jester can say what he wants about the raiders, and he's pretty much right about them, but sometimes you gotta find a way to keep living. There ain't too many options."

I holstered Magnolia again and picked up my shotgun while Lock Nut continued. "I've done some shit I ain't proud of. Sometimes you have to, just to keep other raiders from blasting your head to pieces while your back is turned. I've seen some shit that would turn your grey coat white."

He rolled his head to face me. "Everything Jester said was true. I've seen it all happen way too many times. Some of those things... they stick with you, man. You close your eyes at night and you still hear those fillies screaming as their parents are butchered in front of them, other raiders holding them down to rape them." A tiny shudder ran up his body as he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, the green had hardened to gemstones. "You gotta put your hoof on the line somewhere. I've seen shit way past the line. It may not mean much to you but I ain't passed that line and never will. You cross that line often enough and one day you don't come back. Too many raiders lose their fucking minds, eating ponies, doing that crazy shit."

He looked past me. "I see pieces of Bloodborn on the floor over there. Fuck that crazy asshole, he got what was comin' to him. That's exactly the shit raiders become when they see and do too much one too many times." He shook again. "It's coming for me too, man. Almost every raider turns at some point or other, except for those lucky enough to bite a bullet."

I opened my mouth to respond before he cut me off. "Don't even think about offering for me to join your little group. Being a raider is a tough life, but Jester will skin me alive the second you turn your back. At least being a raider, I might not end up dead or crazy too soon."

I closed my mouth. That was, in fact, exactly what I was going to ask him. I offered him my hoof and helped him up. "You seem... decent enough for a raider. I'm not mad I saved your life. Who knows, maybe someday you can get out of there, start over somewhere new. Build a life so far away from that line that you'd never fall across it."

The briefest glimmer of naked hope flitted across his eyes before they hardened once more. "Yeah, yeah, you nancy mare. Ain't gonna happen in my life time. But... it's a nice dream."

He started to strap his armor back on before he stopped and pulled out a few small items. "Tell you what. You saved my life, the least I can do is teach you a little sum'n to help you out."

He laid down a small box with a lock, a screwdriver, and what looked like some bobby pins. "All across Equestria, you're gonna run into boxes and safes and doors and all kinds of shit that somepony decided to lock up before the bombs drop. Most raiders don't give a fuck about anything they can't open, but I grew up with this box and taught myself how to pick its lock. Shit, now there ain't anybody on this side of the forest who can open a locked box better than me."

He pulled off a leather strap from his barding and tied a single bent bobby pin to his hoof. "Unicorns can use their magic to float these pins into the lock, but we Earth ponies have to make do a little differently. It's tougher, but with practice it becomes as easy as with magic. Easier, I think, because you can feel the tumblers shift with your hoof touching the bobby pin."

He bent over and picked up the screwdriver in his mouth, inserted the pin and the screwdriver into the lock's hole, and slowly started rotating both until with a snap the box popped open. "Hah! Fuckin' easy!" he said. "Here, you try."

There was an open toolbox sitting in the corner of the room. With a bit of digging, I found a small flat-head screwdriver that would work for me. Lock Nut gave me a bobby pin and his leather strap, snapped the box closed, and talked me through picking the lock.

The first bobby pin snapped almost immediately, earning a groan from Lock Nut. "Easy, I said! You gotta be gentle when picking a lock, because once you run out of bobby pins you gonna be shit out of luck out there. Rotate the screwdriver until you feel pressure, and then back off and work on a different tumbler. Don't force that shit!"

He coached me for almost an hour, and finally, three bobby pins and a metric ton of cursing later, the box popped open with another well-oiled snap. I thrust my hoof up in triumph and earned a hoof-bump from Lock Nut.

He was able to walk around with ease now, his wounds almost completely healed up. He gifted me a box of bobby pins (ten in a box!) and made sure I knew to not force a lock (because I could jam it, sealing the locked items away for eternity). I walked him to the door, keeping a wary eye at Jester's room in case of rampaging pony.

"Thanks, nancy pony. I owe you big for keeping me alive back there. Ain't often someone stands up for a raider, but looks like today was my lucky day. I'll do my best to keep any raiders out of this area, as much for their protection as yours."

He offered me his hoof, which I bumped, and then set off at a trot away from the house.

"The name's Collateral, you raider jackass," I yelled after him. "Collateral Damage!"

I heard him laughing until he was out of sight, and then I went to finally collect our bags and radigator meat.