My alarm woke me up from a short night of slumber. The same nightmare had been bothering me for days now. It kept me from getting sleep and I would see images from the dream all throughout the day.
I'm trapped inside one of the prison cells, staring at the concrete walls. There were eight others there with me; none of them familiar. Their coats were light blue, yellow, pink, purple, orange and white. All of them were without faces, all of them stripped of their wings and horns, all of them bleeding.
They turn their faceless faces and whisper in distorted voices.
"They are lying! Don't listen to them! Help us... Don't listen to them!" Over and over again before their skin peels off and new distorted bodies emerge. Their legs turns into clawed, thorned arms with rotten strips of flesh and skin hanging of their decaying limbs
Each of them stretch out claws and just away parts of me. Muscles, bones, entrails…
And after that I just lay there, as a little, bleeding piece of flesh. Without the ability to defend myself as I hear them eating my flesh.
Slowly, but surely, my whole body is consumed... I feel the blood spilling from my wounds, the intense pain and the fear. The fear of what comes next.
I can see their faces. Large eyes stare at me while they stare down at me, and it seems like they're crying. But it doesn't stop them from eating hungrily.
The walls start to close in on us and even if the monsters try to stop them, they are helpless against the gray walls.
There isn't much to talk about when it comes to these dreams; they've been with me for so long that I don't think too much about them. I obviously wonder and worry about them, but my worries aren't directed at me as much as they are directed at the Bunker and my work effort. Since the dreams wake me up from my sleep, I'm often tired and unfocused. And they were pretty damn busy with hammering the fact that 'We the Bunker needs us at our best and nothing else' and, as my manager so delicately put it 'If you fuck up, you'll be sent out or worse'.
Certainly scared me shitless, but I was a filly back then. Still... I do have a little fear of being called into Nr.3's office for a 'Little talk', which are often followed up by a trip to the generators for some 'Quiet time'.
I swung my hind legs out over the edge of the bed, looking at the clock 6:21... One hour until my shift started... Damn...
Taking a quick shower I gave myself the usual overlook before I took on my uniform. To say I was strongly built would be a huge lie, to say I looked like a big buck would to closer to the truth. Both my mother and my father were quite strongly built and the work I had been assigned to was simple. I pushed minecarts of rocks and ores to the processing facility, and then take the finished metal bars to the different production facilities around the Bunker.
The rest of my twelve hour shift revolved around repeating that process as many times as possible. During my workday I had two breaks, a lunch break and a dinner break, both of which were spent throwing food into my mouth and not talking. None of the other workers would do anything else. If you failed to complete your task you got to talk to Nr.3 and then you got a trip to the generator. End of the story.
Even if it was a horrible system, we needed it. If it wasn't for it, then we would crash and burn. And no one could even consider rebelling against him.
I stepped outside my room and stared looked into Nr.65141's face. His serious, featureless face. Two blue eyes stared into my yellow and his normal, bored voice started talking. "Morning 65135, see you're up early for a change."
No emotion, not at all. He was one of the ponies responsible for making budgets and math stuff. Even if he didn’t have a quite mark, it seemed like this was the thing he was supposed to do. When you think about, no one had his or hers quite mark. You were just good at what you were doing.
We walked down the hallway talking about our plans for the day. Seemed pointless since we went to sleep whenever we were finished with work. But it was almost like some divine creature was forcing us to talk about stupid things that we already knew.
The sheer monotony of the Bunker would probably drive most crazy. White plastic walls with no decoration whatsoever. The doors were nearly the same color, except a shade or two grayer spaced out with ten feet in between. Everything about it oozed of a culture where function trumphed form.
The corridor we were heading down split in three. One hall lead to the mines and the facilities, one to the cafeteria and come to the offices where Nr.3 had his office and all the other smart ponies like 65141 worked. We headed down to the cafeteria and had a quick lunch. The food was the same as ever: Nurture Porridge, which were small, grey chips with different nutritions and water with flavour.
The eclipse-shaped room was about three yards in height, two hundred in width and almost a mile in length. A long line had yet to form, but we had to wait half an hour to get our portions. Three dashes of porridge and a bottle of water for me and two dashes and a bottle of water for 65141.
Usually I would get five dashes, but was scheduled for a visit to one of the Bunker's headshrinkers that day because of my nightmares.
Every day was calculated in advance with ninety nine percent accuracy. It had to be, we all knew of what would happen if it failed. Before we were assigned work, that means before the age of four, we are treated to a few years of education where we learnt about why we had to live in the Bunker and what would happen if we failed to maintain order.
We were told, as foal, that if we failed we would all die.
And now it seemed that my sanity had gone to shit. Recurring nightmares was after all not that common nor was it a sign that you were in perfect working order.
When I looked up from my pleasantly warm, yet boring, breakfast I noticed something; the room was still not even half filled! There were thirty five thousand who were supposed to work this morning shift yet there was only around ten thousand that sat by the long benches, bent over their food and their minds totally oblivious to what was going on.
“65141? Why are so many missing?” I asked the accountant pony who was looking at me questioning.
“Many are still asleep, you really aren’t paying attention are you?” I stared at him without a single clue of what was going on and it had to be showing. “Must be the dreams… Good thing you’re going to the doctor.”
I nodded and he moved his attention back to his food, almost slavishly, and ignored me during the rest of the breakfast. That moment I got to add another feeling to my emotional repertoar: alienation.
I felt like I didn’t belong there, like a thousands eyes looked at me wishing that I wasn’t there. It was not a feeling I like and right before I left it was replaced by a soothing calm. One would think that it would be welcomed, but no. Instead it felt cold and fake. Alienation had been strange and hard to put my hoof on at first yet, yet this was strange on an entirely new level.
I finished before 65141 and walked along the hallway leading to the offices. Even if I had never been down here before the route was laid clear in my mind: down the corridor and the fifth door to the right. I didn’t need directions of any sort. Nor did I need to look for signs, because there weren’t any, it was just rows upon rows of the same featureless doors.
Inside the doctor, an old buck with thick glasses in front of his eyes, sat by a chair behind a metal desk. The smooth white surfaces had disappeared in favor of white shelves filled with books of all sorts. A metal bench was placed in the back right hoof corner. Two chairs of the same sort as the one the doctor was sitting in stood in front of his desk.
The room was not an inviting place to be, as it had been before during all the normal evaluations I had encountered, but did instead feel fake. Voices in my head told me to turn away, to run and hide. It became harder and harder to breathe as I looked at the walls, my inner struggle causing me to stand still.
A voice woke me up, sending me back into the cold calm I had felt in the cafeteria. “Would you like to sit down 65135?”
I nodded, walked across the room and sat down on one of the metal chairs. I was tense and looked around me cautiously, the feeling that the voices had left still lingering inside my head.
Must have looked stupid to see me like that, a huge mare trying to look as small as possible from what? Fear was a nearly unused feeling the Bunker, only a few had ever experienced it, like me for instance.
“So, what problems would you like to talk about?” He asked in a pleasant tone, even if it made me feel even less comfortable. He was short, with a compact buck with a white mane and a brown coat. His face was filled with wrinkles. Two sunken eyes looked out at the world with a feel of tiredness to them.
His entire appearance gave me the impression that someone had tried to copy an old buck’s way of being. Both the give in his steps and his slow movements seemed rehearsed. The feelings of insecurity came back and as they and the cold sense of calm fought against one another I tried to make myself even smaller.
“Are you okay? Would you like something to drink?”
I am calm, fully and totally… That was a lie, but I shook my head and breathed heavily.
When I looked at him I saw that he was uncomfortable which was far from as cool and collected as he had been when I first came in.
“I’m fine thank you.”
He smiled a fake smile which quivered while an inner struggle appeared to go on inside his head.
After shaking it off and going back to his seemingly faked self. “Good, good… So what seems to be the problem?”
“Well,” I began slowly, fighting my still raising panic and even if I had gotten somewhat of a control of myself I was still about to try to run away. “I’ve had bad dreams every night for a long time, and it’s kinda making me scared… I dunno why I have’em and that’s making me even more scared.”
“Hm?” He said and dotted down a note on a clipboard on his desk and asked. “So, what is this recurring dream you keep having?”
I told him every part of the dream, every bloody detail. About the deformed creatures eating me, their haunting screams, they eating me and finally the walls crushing us… Even as I speak about I think I can feel their sharp claws clawing away at my limbs. Every signal of pain seems real for a minute and my legs tremble and lose all power.
With a loud bang I fall to the floor. A cracking noise sounds through my ears and my muzzle hits the floor and a small trail of blood starts to seep from it, turning the floor’s perfect, white surface red.
“Oh Celestia! Are you alright?” The doctor shouts and gets me up. He fetches a handkerchief and holds it to my bleeding nose. “Is your head okay? Your muzzle?”
“Yeah,” I say blushing, “I’d say my pride is worse for wear…”
He smiles, this time slightly less fake before it goes cold and fake again. “Should be continue later after your nose is fixed or?”
I shake my head, the bleeding is starting to stop and I sit back into the chair. Everything seems fuzzy and the fake sense of calm fails to overcome the once again raising panic.
“Anything more that’s been happening lately?”
“Well, I have been feeling, like, panicky today. It feels like there’s always someone who watches me and wants to hurt me. It feels really stupid to say, but it’s also almost like something is forcing me to be calm. Or trying. And it’s making me scared.”
“And I also feel like I shouldn’t be here. Like somepony is staring at me, wanting me to disappear.”
He nodded, wrote another line on his clipboard and pushed a button of his desk. “And for how long have these dreams been with you?”
“For a long time, long enough that I stopped to think about them.”
He looked surprised, once again a fake expression was what adored his face. “Then why didn’t you come to me before? Wouldn’t a long term nightmare be something you’d check out at the first chance?”
There was a long silence as I thought about it. Unease once again interfering with my thoughts. “Well yeah, but I shrugged it off thinking I would take care of it myself. But after a while I got less and less good rest so I started to worry about the work I could do. We do live to serve the Bunker, am I right?”
“We do, we certainly do. You said that you feel scared, have you felt that before?” He wrote lines on his clipboard for everything I said.
“Only as a filly, but that was only a times. I can’t remember when.”
We continued to talk until he touched a button on his desk I hadn’t seen and asked. “27146? It’s Doc-6 here, could I give a message.”
A metallic voice came from a invisible speaker. “Yes.”
“I have diagnose on 65135. She’ll be there at Number 3’s office in five. Seems to be as we feared, it’s a P-1.”
“Goodbye 65135, I did enjoy our little chat. Sorry it couldn’t last longer. And that it was no the stranger side of the spectrum. Head over to Number 3’s office after this, you two have some matters to settle, I know that you two have had a slightly edged tone, but to try to act somewhat mature.”
We said our goodbye’s and I left for the office at the centre of it all. Number 3’s office. It would seem logical that Number 1 and Number 2’s offices would be at the centre, but that was not the fact. No one in the history of the Bunker had seen those two. Every connection with the authority stopped with Number 3.
As the white hallways went past me, I was far from happy. More afraid and confused. Everything that had happened over the last hours was just out there. Different.
I entered the door to Number 3’s office as I had been commanded and stood still inside. The walls were covered in maps and such. The old, musty paper strips contrasted grately against the sterile, white walls. By the desk in the middle of the room sat an old mare, not as old as the doctor, but way older than me. And smaller. Wouldn’t be a surprise if I could crush her entire body without even trying. Her fragile form was dressed in the usual high ranked gear. A military uniform with stars and stripes by the shoulders.
“There you are. Just sit down for a bit while we talk. I do want my guests to be comfortable.” She ruffled a few of the many papers that laid scattered about her desk and organised them as I sat down. “Now. Doc-6 said that he thinks he had found out what’s wrong with you and that it is something we have named P-1. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head and she continued. “P is the short version of a long medical name and the 1 is the type. It really means that you are unfit to be here anymore.” That hit me like a hammer to the face and I stared at her, not saying anything. “You seem to be paranoid and can’t trust your fellow citizens. Since you say that sleep deprivation has gone out over your work it seems that it’s just a question of time before you get real problems from it. And all this stems from P-1. Which we cannot treat.”
Nothing was said. No words could even begin to describe how I felt. Without a home, I would be without a home… All because of some dreams! Tears rolled down my muzzle and I cried into my hooves. My breath was ragged and quick. That was when it happened. The fake calmness lost all chance of winning and I was struck by my sorrow and panic.
“I am truly sorry,” no she wasn’t! She had the same fake aura around her as the doctor had and it was starting to piss me off! But it also started to creep me out. A period of silence followed while I cried.
“W-what will happen to me now?” My voice was shaking and my breathing came in shorter and shorter breaths.
“As I said you will have to leave the Bunker and head out into the wasteland. After that, I don’t know. All I can do is give you some pieces of advice. Get weapons, provisions and water. And, most importantly, find friends. I don’t know more than that, no one has been outside the doors in a few hundred years so all our knowledge is based on normal survival tactics. A lot has changed since before we got here.” She spoke without any real emotions in her voice.
“This was only meant as a means to let you know what is going to happen, so now we’re just waiting for two from the medical staff to take some safety measures before you have to leave.” I looked up at her with a questioning facial expression.
“Safety measures? Wh-what does that mean?”
“You’ll see later. I really don’t know what they’re going to do, but it is important that it’s done. Just a shame that it has to.” At that point two medical ponies followed by two large guard ponies entered the door. One of the medical ponies pushed a wheelchair in front of herself. “Well, that was nicely timed. Now, 65135, goodbye. Your services have been appreciated and necessary for the life here in the Bunker.”
I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder and everything blacked out. The lights contorted and turned into darkness.
oooOOOooo
My eyes opened as I adjusted to sudden light. There was a sharp pain in the back of my neck and every fiber of my body burned. Lights rushed past me and the sounds of ponies shouting sounded through the air. The feeling of tightly bound leather straps pressed my limbs to the chair and my head to the head rest.
Two guards ran beside me in the chair I was bound to and they were the ponies shouting. Around us several others were rushing back and forth. Heavy clouds of confusion crushed what was left of my understanding and I watched as the images grew blurry. The lights contorted once again, but they stayed that way. Burning my eyes and making blink. Tears formed in my eyes and sharp daggers of pain emerged in my head.
While I had some control over my body, it disappeared quickly and I lost control over both my muscles. They screamed in pain as they tore against the tight restraints. My head slammed back and forth against the headrest and a stream of blood had soon began to pour from the back of my head. They stopped and I think I felt a needle being jabbed into my neck.
Nothing changed and my muscles still revolted against me and the injection did nothing. Even more of my bodily control disappeared. The feeling of something coming up my throat appeared and I only managed to gag once before I vomited.
Somepony held me still while I was given a new injection. A large thumping pain emerged in my forehead by the violent thrashing stopped apart for a painful twitch every few odd minutes.
My wheelchair was pushed onto a large platform which raised upwards towards the opened roof, transporting me and three guards away from the room. The platform exited the room below and was encased in the darkness of the unlit elevator shaft. And for a few precious seconds, who I have later regretted not taking comfort in, silence reigned. The only sounds were the hydraulics, who only gave a low hiss, and my own breaths.
Light entered the shaft as a pair of overhead doors opened, letting in the ever present white light of the Bunkers halls. But along with the familiarity of the unrelenting white light came something else that fed my panic. A stench of old and unfiltered air. The sickly smell of decay and dust ran rampant and made all the four of us gag.
After a while we got up to the final floor and we advanced down the short corridor towards a large metal door. Two of them manned two turrets pointed towards the door, one of them opened the door with a multi colored control panel mounted to the other side of the door.
The door opened with a soft his and I was pushed forwards onto a conveyor belt before the door closed behind me. Even more old, decay-filled air made me gag and through the faint light coming from some exposed electronics I could see the outline of the opposite door.
The seconds ticked by as I neared the door. Every waking moment was filled with pain as the tranquilizer lost it’s effect and my body started to revolt. Muscles tensed, ready for another violent assault.
With yet another hiss the door opened. More decay-filled air came into my lungs and the straps that held me back was released from some electronic clamps mounted to the wheelchair and I stumbled out of the door. I looked over the gray and green plain in front of me as an eerie clarity dawned upon me.
That was the moment in time where the last bits of control left me and my body acquired a mind of it’s own and only fragmented pictures still linger in conscious mind. Me walking down a hill, looking at ruined bits of civilization, sinking my hooves into the body of a wounded pony I happened to pass. Blood gushing from the open wounds as bones and armor cracked under the force of each buck...
And then darkness…
