The Dead City

Part 4: DERP

Something cold, very cold, is pressing into my back. Everypony is frozen stiff by the voice. Very, very slowly, I turn around.

Standing behind me is the oddest pegasus I’ve ever seen in my life. She is gray-coated with a bleach-blonde mane, and her eyes are pointed in different directions. Her cutie mark is an array of bubbles, she is carrying a speargun, and she has the widest and most sincere grin on her face. She looks as though she is overjoyed to see us, even though she holds us at gunpoint.

“So…no on the muffins?” she asks, grinning impossibly wider. “That’s okay, I guess. I’d like a muffin or two, haven’t had muffins in a long time, not since Ponyville…hey! I know you!”

She points to Fluttershy and immediately pounces on her. Rocky looks ready to gore the pegasus, but I stop him with a shake of my head, because she is merely hugging Fluttershy.

“Oh my goodness! Is that you, Derpy?” Fluttershy asks in disbelief.

“It’s me, Fluttershy! Remember Derpy?”

“I do, Derpy, I do,” Fluttershy answers. She turns her attention to the rest of us. “Everypony, this is Derpy Hooves. She’s a friend from Ponyville.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! Things have been boring, real boring. This hotel doesn’t have any bananas!”

Her eyes spin in a nauseating way as she says this.

“But Fluttershy, wowie! YAHOOOO!” She zooms around the room, knocking over everything that hasn’t already been destroyed. I give a small nod to Rocky, who calmly snatches the gray pegasus out of the air.

“Awww,” she moans as she returns to earth. “That’s okay. So, fluttery Fluttershy who are these guys?”

“This is Shining Armor, Derpy.”

The pegasus inspects me, sniffs me, and looks me straight in the eye. “Not very shiny for a pony named Shiny Armor.”

“That’s Shining Armor.”

“And these are Lakota and Rocky.”

“Hiya! Oooh, are you a minotaur? I’ve only seen a minotaur once…or maybe twice…it was that Iron Will and his twin, Iron Will…or were they the same?”

She observes our bewildered looks. Her wings sag and she looks sad. “I’m sorry. I’m not a very clever pony.”

“That’s not true, Derpy!” Fluttershy says, comforting her friend. “You’re very clever! You’re clever enough to have gotten through all this!”

Derpy begins to cry. “But…so many others, Fluttershy…Bonbon…Octavia…that one pony whose head looked like a broken cantaloupe…”

“Oh my,” Fluttershy says simply. I come over to her as Rocky and Lakota begin to inspect the hotel.

"Don’t be upset. We’ll find your friends.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t get it, mister…I killed them.”

Suddenly the room is very small. Lakota and Rocky overhear and return to my side, and I find myself gazing into the boggled eyes of a murderer.

“You what?”

“Well, I didn’t really kill them. But they tried to hurt me!”

“How’d they hurt you, Derpy?” Fluttershy says soothingly and obliviously.

The pegasus sniffles. “Well, Lyra and Bonbon were with Octavia and me on a little tour around Manehattan. You know, for the royal wedding between Shining Armor and Princess Canedance.”

I look at Fluttershy disbelievingly, but she scolds me with her eyes.

“Then…dark…oh, it was dark…” Derpy continues. “Ponies started getting sick. Whenever the other pegasi would fly out, that thing in the water would get them. It always does. There’s only one pony I know who escaped it.”

“Who?” Lakota asks, suddenly interested.

Derpy stares at her, eyes full of tears. “Me.”

“Huh?!”

She nods. “A nice pegasus…I can’t even remember his name…he helped me out when Octavia went missing. Lyra and Bonbon couldn’t fly, so they had to wait in our hotel for the help to arrive. When the nice pegasus man flew me across…that thing got him. Me, too. I went underwater in the West River and I saw it.”

Suddenly I am all ears. “You saw the thing in the river? What did it look like?”

Fluttershy again looks at me scathingly, but Derpy answers. “Like a giant burnt muffin with hundreds of tiny bananas on top. It had worms coming out of its head, and…a mouth. A really, really, really big mouth. It was dark and I couldn’t see well, but that was what I saw.”

“How the heck did you escape?” Rocky inquires, crossing his arms and snorting softly.

“I flapped my wings over and over really hard until I was out of the water. Before I knew what was going on, I was back in front of the hotel. But by then…”

She does not go on. She seems devastated. I place my hoof as comfortingly as I can on her wing. “What happened, Derpy?”

The pegasus tears up again. “The hotel was on fire. It still is. I checked. The tenth floor hasn’t stopped burning in over a month. I don’t know what’s causing it. And…Lyra and Bonbon are on the third floor.”

“What? But I thought you said you killed them!”

“Mister Shiny Armor, even I know you can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

My spine tingles. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the skeleton ponies, Shiny Armor. I’ve seen the shadows with the apple eyes.”

“Apple eyes…you mean the Corrupt? You’ve seen a Corrupt?”

She nods, and I turn to Fluttershy. “See, they are real.”

She looks uncertain, and Derpy continues. “But Lyra and Bonbon…at least Bonbon…are different. I only saw Bonbon, not Lyra. Lyra could be anywhere. But Bonbon was…was…dead.”

What an anticlimax. “Dead?”

“Yeah, dead. But moving.”

Everypony gasps. Rocky takes a step forward. “So she was a bonewalker?”

Derpy shakes her head, and we gasp again.

“I knew it was Bonbon by her mane, but…oh…she was different. Blood in her mouth…very red eyes…her skin falling off in places…it was horrible…”

She breaks down. Fluttershy does her best to soothe her. Lakota gets my attention.

“I’ve heard about that, from scavengers over in the Broncs. I think that’s an incomplete bonewalker.”

“What?”

“Incomplete bonewalker. You know, like skeletony but not completely.”

“No, I get that, but…what?”

She sighs. “Zombies, Shining Armor. She’s talking about zombies.”

My eyes grow wide. My heart freezes. My hooves tingle in time with my spine. I collapse into an overstuffed, moth-eaten armchair.

Zombies. Not zombies. Please, anything but zombies.

Bonewalkers I could handle. You could only see their bones.

But fleshy, oozing, necrotic, rotten, smelly, hungry, animalistic, disgusting zombies?

“Oh, buck.”

Derpy stops crying for a moment. “There’s no need for that kind of language, Mister Shiny.”

I sit in the chair for several minutes as Rocky and Lakota talk in low voices. We cannot go back outside. The door is blocked with rubble. Our only way out is up.

But the tenth floor is on fire. Everlasting fire, by the sound of it. It’s a Class-III illegal item in Equestria, punishable by up to twenty years in prison for possession alone. True to its name, it never went out.

And then there were zombies.

Perfect.

“Derpy, where’d you get that speargun?”

She stops crying for a moment and looks at me. “I, uhh…uhhm…I don’t remember.”

I am just about to lose my temper when Lakota takes over, sensing my plan. “Do you know how to use that thing, Derpy?”

"Yep!"

“Alright. We have to get up to the roof. How many floors are there?”

“I think fourteen. We were on the eighth floor. If Lyra’s still…still alive, she’ll probably be there. Can you help my friend?”

“I promise you, Derpy, if we find your friend alive we’ll take her with us. You, too.”

“You mean it?” Her face lights up and she reassumes her impossible grin.

Lakota nods.

“And will I get my muffins?”

“Derpy, if we make it out of this, I’ll get you a mountain of muffins, all for you!”

“REALLY?!”

“Really.”

Derpy jumps up and hugs Lakota tightly, then bounds toward the stairs.

“You promise me if we find Lyra we’ll take her? And the muffins?”

Lakota smiles once more, but there is something different about her grin; it seems forced, insincere, and for the first time since meeting her I detect another side of Lakota, a darker side that I am all-too-familiar with…

But it is gone in an instant, so fast that I doubt I even saw it. Trick of the light, no doubt.

Fluttershy picks herself up and allows Rocky to place her on his shoulder as they approach the doorway. Lakota preps her crossbow, then gives me a very definitive look. I know what that look means.

Neither one of us want to tell Derpy Hooves what would happen if we found her friends dead…or worse.