Dead Mares Walking

I'm not a villain.

I promise you, I am not a villain.

There were twelve orders. Twelve! And I'm only one mare, y'know, even if I am the best cook in the whole of Equestria. And if one order asks for extra nuts, and the other asks for no nuts, how is it my fault if I mix them up? Especially since that mare from the apple farm came and scolded me for not adding enough sugar to the apple pies I was supposed to be baking with her "ahpples". I was under pressure! Everypony was expecting perfection, and the one mistake I made had to be the deadly one.

...okay, there was more than one mistake. Maybe I'm not the best cook in Equestria. Even if my cutie mark is, y'know, an oven. Maybe it means I'll crash and burn. I did get it after ruining a soufflé, after all.

But anyway. A mare went to hospital because apparently her body didn't like nuts or something. I'm not a doctor, but I hear some ponies have issues with certain foods. And then she went and died. Of course. Just my luck. So then some pegasi knocked on my door, asked me a few questions, and I answered them well enough. Told the truth. And they laughed at me, threw me to the ground, slapped some hoofcuffs onto me and took me away.

I am a very tolerant mare, but damn, that was rude of them.

So a couple of months go by, sitting in a boring old cell waiting for trial. The food there was bland and tasteless. I guess they didn't want me to enjoy myself after what I'd done. I couldn't afford bail. Sugarcube Corner had only needed a renovation just last month, and all that Pinkie left behind went straight into upgrading the kitchen just a year before. In hindsight, I should've pocketed some of her estate. It's not like anypony would've noticed.

But anyway, I go to the courtroom, the judge yells something about negligence that I didn't quite pay attention to, and then here I am now, in the back of an old police car with a half-tuned radio, with this smug, dark brown stallion with a badly kept black mane in the front occasionally looking in the rear-view mirror and chuckling at me.

"Mareslaughter, eh?" He spoke for the first time since we departed.

"Yeah." I replied quickly and briefly. I didn't particularly want to talk to this stallion.

He chuckled again. "I don't believe ya."

I pondered this for a moment. Was he trying to get a reaction out of me? I decided to ignore the comment.

"Very hard to accidentally give somepony extra nuts when they asked for none, y'know."

"There was another order with extra nuts. I mixed them up." I glared at the stallion. I was found innocent of murder, I shouldn't need to prove myself to this bastard.

"Thought you were s'posed to be the best around. Heard ya learned from Pinkie herself."

I shivered a little at the name of my old carer. Even a year on, I guess in a way I still can't believe she's gone. Diabetes is a terrible thing...

Snapping back to reality, I replied to the driver. "Yeah... I did. Guess I didn't learn enough, did I?"

"Sure didn't, if you's telling the truth 'bout this whole thing."

A few more minutes went by, and we turned onto a wide stretch of road a few miles long. After this, I'd be at the station, and the only nature I'd see would be a few trees over the top of a thick, tall brick wall. I decided to look out the window at the forest surrounding the road. It's unusually quiet for such a beautiful summer day. Usually the skies would be full of birds, and their absence unsettled me.

"I'm not a villain." I said to him, breaking the silence.

"Even if ya did do it intentionally, villain would be t' wrong word." He paused for a second, and turned the radio off. Thank fuck. That thing was getting on my nerves. "Y'heard of the Manehatten Marechopper?" He asked.

I nodded. Everyone had. She'd killed, like, thirty mares or something before being apprehended! All by beheading. Total psycho apparently.

"She's a villain." He chuckled again. He seemed to like chuckling. "She'll be remembered. You won't. You've just fucked yer life up for nothin'."

I chose to ignore that comment. He turned his head and looked at me while continuing to drive.

"Now, ah'm not sayin' you shoulda..." he begun, but my eyes drifted over to the windshield.

And that's when I see it.

A mare! A mare with half her fur torn off, flesh exposed and eyes as blank as a sheet of printer paper! In front of the car! Stumbling desperately toward us!

"LOOK OUT!" I cried out, waving my hoof toward the front of the car vaguely. The stallion quickly turned back to look at the road. Seeing what I saw, he panicked. Now, clearly he was an unexperienced driver, tired, or too startled to think properly, because he veered right, straight off the road, and down into a ditch. The car flipped over onto it's hood, and I blacked out a few seconds after impact.

The first thing you're supposed to notice upon waking up after a head injury is the headache. The horrible headache. But no, the first thing I noticed was my forehooves. My green fur had been stained red by something. I assumed it was blood. And when I looked up, I confirmed that I had assumed correctly.

I wasn't in the car. I was in a barn of some sort, with machines around me. Farming equipment. Except that directly above me, pinned to the ceiling by a pitchfork, was the stallion who'd been driving me. His head was not attached to his body, and there was a pool of blood directly below his neck, which was still dripping.

My hooves had been in the pool of blood. I hadn't even noticed.

The smell was rancid. The smell was probably worse than the sight. I don't know how long it had been since the crash, but it was certainly long enough for the corpse above me to decompose.

I backed away from the pool of blood and frantically searched for any source of light better than the dim candle that currently illuminated the room. I needed to find out what the hell was going on.

I had three questions.

1) Where am I?

2) Why is the driver who was taking me to prison impaled above my head without a head of his own?

3) Why am I still alive and apparently uninjured, except for the obvious headache?

While pondering these questions, I found a small flashlight. I eagerly levitated it, the green glow of my horn illuminating my darker green mane. Apparently it was magically powered, so with a bit of effort, I finally managed to get it to power up. The light was a lot brighter than expected, and I was temporarily blinded. I blinked a few times, eyes adjusting to the sudden light, and looked around at my surroundings a little more. Seeing a door, I tried to open it. Locked. Of course. And this is when I made my first mistake.

"HELLO?! ANYPONY THERE?!"