Chapter 2: The Coming Events

I knew exactly what I was supposed to do - tell Mac about the woman and have her eliminated.

It was so simple, and yet I kept my mouth shut. She was a Wastelander. She could tell people where she had seen us, compromising the entire security of Bunker 108.

And there lay this man from Bunker 114 on the ground before us, stabbed. She might have been the one to do it.

Yes I didn't say a word. Feeling like an idiot, I just stared out at that giant red rock as the evening's shadows stretched. By now, the woman had long disappeared. I was beginning to wonder if she had been there at all. I could only remember her face, pretty, even with the distance, framed by short, purple hair. For some reason, that made it more difficult. Deep down, I knew she was human, like me. Who was I to kill her, even if she had attempted the same with this man from 144?

Mac's voice snapped me back to attention.

"Alpha Patrol to Base - do you have a copy, over?"

"Base to Alpha Patrol, what is your status, over?"

"We found a man, stabbed several times in the back. He's unconscious, but there's a pulse. I think he is from that other Bunker, over."

The handheld radio went quiet. I took my attention of the boulder, and looked at the man.

"If he's from Bunker 144, what's he doing out here?" I asked.

Mac didn't answer as I thought over the possibilities. If he was here, it had to be for a very important reason. Did "CSO" Shining know he was coming?

The radio crackled to life.

"Alpha Patrol, what is your location, over?"

"Two miles onto the long route. Do you want us to extract to base, over?"

"Negative on that for now. Give a description of the man, over."

"Male. Age: 35-45 years. Ethnicity: White. Short of stature, black hair. He carries nothing - no ID, no gun, no pack. Celestia knows how he made it this far." Mac sighed. "He may have been attacked and robbed. There are three deep stab wounds in the back - ne on the lower right side of the back, and two more to the left of the spine. There's blood and dark pus oozing through his clothes, over."

The wind blew cold and dry, covering the man's pale face in a thin layer of red dust. The sun-glow faded behind hazy clouds above the distance red mountains. Night had come. It was high time to get back.

"Alpha Patrol," a voice said, icy and clear. It was CSO Shining. "We're sending a team to extract the man to base. Remain where you are, and keep an eye out for hostiles. There may be Raiders in the area. Do you copy, over?"

"Copy that," Mac said.

"Good. Over and out."

Apparently, Shining hadn't known about this. I looked at the spot where I had seen the woman. With the settling of the sun, the boulder was left shrouded in shadow. The woman, if she had even been there, was long gone by now. Whether right or wrong, the sick feeling in my gut wouldn't go away.

The cold wind never abated, blowing on my already numb face, stinging me with particles of sand, cracking my lips dry. At long last, flashlights crested the rise behind us. Voices signaled the arrival of reinforcements.

Four men approached, their faces lost to darkness.

"Where is he?" asked the one in charge, whose voice I didn't recognize.

"Down here," Mac said.

Two men pointed their guns into the darkness. Everyone else, myself included, lifted the body, one person to a limb. Together, we lugged the man back to base.

Mac explained everything on the way, but I kept silent. I was thinking of the woman. They asked me several questions about what had happened. I answered in monosyllables, echoing everything Mac had already said. There was no use in telling them about the woman now. If I did, at best I would be severely disciplined for not speaking up earlier. At worst - well, I didn't want to think about that. Now that I was sixteen, I could be tried as an adult, and the holding cells in the Officers' Wing were mighty small.

I felt relieved when we finally reached the vaulted door of Bunker 108. The outside of the door, though metallic, was the same dull brown as the terrain. Unless you were right on it, it was almost indistinguishable from the mountainside. A small camera was hidden in the rock to the right of the door, allowing the Officer on duty to see anyone coming.

The door was opened from the inside, revealing an Officer. The Officer's eyes widened as he watched us pass the Bunker's threshold into the rock tunnel. After we had passed through, he hurriedly shut the door and twisted its lock wheel behind us.

We were safe.

I had finished my first recon; but for good reason, I didn't feel all that proud.

Lights in the entrance tunnel flashed overhead, illuminating the six of us carrying our burden inside. We left the rocky tunnel and entered the atrium. The receptionist's desk was empty - Aloe had either gone home, or was at the "Caf".

Next to the half circular desk stood my father, Smyth Dragul, waiting with a gurney and a nervous orderly at his side. His disheveled brown hair was streaked with gray, and dark circles underlined his hazel eyes. It looked as if he hadn't slept in days.

He shot me a worried glance as we put the man on the gurney.

"Dad..."

"Not now, son. Go eat. We'll talk later."

My father and the orderly started wheeling the patient toward the medical bay, flanked by the Officers.

My father was always busy. Between his duties as senior doctor and his own pet project of researching the Xenovirus, I could hardly find time with him. He sometimes put in over a hundred hours a week at the lab, all while caring for patients. I didn't see how it was possible.

After handing off my rifle to the quartermaster (a small armory stood near the front desk), I headed to the commons to kill time before dinner. In the corner, several Officers and a few civilian women were watching a movie on the big screen. A couple of kids played Ping-Pong in the corner. I sat in a chair in another corner, and watched some of my classmates play basketball.

In a community of about four hundred people, you knew everyone, and everyone knew you. Not enough to be your friend, per se, but enough to have sense of who you were, who your friends were, and what you were about. It was hard to imagine what life had been like in the cities - like Old Canterlot, where the population had reached into the millions. A world where you didn't know everybody seemed strange and unreal to me. Maybe it had been for them, too. Only the old ones in Bunker 108 remembered them times, and most of them were gone. A lot went crazy, living underground - or so I'd heard. But I'd never heard of anyone born underground who went crazy.

I didn't find Bunker living that bad, especially considering the alternative of living on the surface. I had the archive teaching me, and someday I would be a doctor here, too, like my dad. Maybe even sit on the Citizens' Council like him, though he rarely attended because of his duties.

AS for me, I was no one special - scrawny, quiet, and a little too smart for my own good. That was what my dad said, anyway - that last bit, not the scrawny and quiet thing. My goal: to exist and survive and not get in the way. When you got in the way, other people made trouble for you. There was only one true friend I could claim, and her name was Sweetie Belle. We'd known each other from the cradle, but we'd been growing apart lately. I didn't know whether it was just that we were getting older or something else entirely.

I reached for my sketchbook in my pack. Drawing was one of my ways to blow off steam, and I had a knack for it. As I sat in my chair, I just let the pencil move across the page, not really paying attention to what I was creating. Ten minutes later, without realizing it, I had finished a sketch of the woman I had seen in the Wasteland. Her face was shaded with dusk. She had short, purple hair and fierce eyes. I was amazed by the amount of detail I'd captured; she had been awfully far away.

It was the face of a woman who might have killed. Someone I might have had killed. And now, I was drawing her.

I ripped the sketch out and tore it into pieces. My heart raced for no good reason - as if someone were going to see the sketch and know exactly what had happened. I looked up to see that everyone was leaving the commons, heading for the Caf.

I wondered what was happening in the medical bay - the stabbed man, my father - and even what Chief Security Officer Shining was doing.

But all that would have to wait. I got up and headed for the Caf...

Author's Note

Heyooo everypony how are all ya'll doin today.. welp here it is chapter 2 kinda a lil late but I apologize for that... anyways I have come across something that is not a big issue but I would like to address it... I have noticed thst the downvotes are exceeding the upvotes ... only reason i'am addressing this matter is because it says to me that you fine ponies are not enjoying the story thus far... so my question and favor to ask is ... please go ahead and tell me in the comment section and or PM me on what you would like me to do to make the story better... if the pacing is too slow... needs more dialogue... spelling and or grammatical issues.. go right ahead and tell me.. this is my first story so this is to be expected... but anyways let me know guys what you think so far and anything else BYE
*BroHoof* /)