“Momma always said you catch more flies with honey, and she caught a lot with her honey. Day and night they’d come callin’ on her and she never turned any of ‘em away. Most of the colts passin’ though were nice enough; sometimes they’d give me a little somethin’ nice: bit a candy, nice ribbon, some paper I could mark on. She had her fair share of bad ones, and worse ones if you can imagine. The bad ones didn’t do much other than beat on her good, sometimes they’d come after me but she’d put a stop to that pretty quickly. The worse ones…well she couldn’t stop ‘em from doing anything. I never blamed her though; I learned early it was somethin’ that need doin’. We were poor, hungry, and in the middle of fucking nowhere thanks to Pa.
I know most people are surprised when I mentioned him. I guess I got this “just momma and me” air about me and I get it; a girl in my profession don’t come from normal and I met quite a few ponies same as me without their poppa’s, momma’s too. But no, I got ‘em both still, if things are the same since I left. Though, just cuz they stuck around don’t mean they’re any good. Ya should have good idea of what Ma was like and Pa, well he’s just a fool.
He’s an earth pony see and not just an earth pony. He’s everythin’ earth pony. I never cared to learn where it all started for him, but he’s obsessed with what he’d call his “heritage”. He’d got in his head the notion that earth ponies are supposed to be one with the earth or workin’ with it or somethin’. I’d never really listened to him, the short of it is he thinks we’re supposed to be farmers.
Now, anything with two eyes and a brain between ‘em knows ain’t nothin’ growin’ now-a-days save what’ll kill ya. “Slow or quick, only death comes from the ground.” That’s what I’d tell him every time he’d try and shove some root or leaf down my throat. He always got this sad shock in his eyes when I’d say that, like I’d just shattered somethin’ precious. Goodness, what am I doin’. Here I am spilling my guts to you without any introduction. I’m Black Widow, and you are?”
The black, unicorn mare leaned in close to the earth pony with which she had been musing with. He was a grey stallion with black speckles covering his body, though now they were barely visible under the mess of blood he was covered in. He felt the damp warmth of her breath on his face and she stared at him waiting for him to respond. He would test Black Widow’s patience.
“Grey…” he said.
“Just Grey?” she asked.
The stallion’s mind was barely holding onto the present. It was still in the recent past where he and his friends had been drinking, playing games, and enjoying the mares they’d brought in from their most recent raid. Bile and Blight, the ravager twins, had reached that perfect balance between tipsy and black out drunk which always lead to their bursting into a bawdy duet. Their songs could make even the boss blush. It was quite an accomplishment considering his particular tastes. There was a lottery for boss clean up duty that Grey often “won”. The first time he couldn’t hold it together and he puked on the only part of the floor that hadn’t been stained by some kind of bodily fluid. Blight gave him shit for weeks. Though, like a lot things, he got used to it eventually. He even started to look forward to it as it gave him a chance to share a few words with the boss which sometimes lead to a favor now and again. He’d been enjoying one such favor just moments ago. He’d been experimenting, trying to figure out why the boss got just a rush out of cutting on little foals the way he did. He’d been given a cute little thing with green eyes, a pink tail, and the most adorable little cutie mark of a ladybug. He remembered trying to figure why he remembered what a lady bug was given that the only bugs he’d ever saw were radroaches. He had a hazy memory, more like a feeling really, of a children’s book he’d taken off of something when an explosion of pain washed over him from the back of his head followed by an encroaching darkness. When he’d awoken he was face down in a deep pool of blood, facing the bashed in face of Bile while a black mare started talking about her mother.
“Grey Steel” he elaborated. Grey’s mind still wandering.
“Oh bullshit, I’ve met and killed a lot of raiders in my day and I ain’t never met one with such a plain name as Grey Steel.” Black Widow turned away from Grey and started moving some of the corpses around her. Grey could see her cutie mark, a red hourglass. He wondered she got her name before or after it showed up.
“Well now you have.” He said. Grey started to move his leg to rub the sore spot on the back of his head but it had fallen asleep. The most he could do was lift it a few inches off the ground. He tried to move out of the filth he was lying in, but the rest of his body reacted the same way as his leg. The best he could do was push himself to a sitting position, but even then he had to prop himself against the wall behind him if he wanted to stay up. His mane, floppy and wet with Bile, dangled in long clumps that stuck uncomfortably to his face. He tried blowing them to a more comfortable position but he couldn’t must enough wind. He tried shaking his head, but it just made him dizzy. He scrapped his face across the wall in some desperate hope of getting his mane out of his eyes with little success and was left to wonder just how hard this mare had hit him.
“You got a smart mouth for a dead man.” She snapped back.
Her words were the pieces that finally brought Grey into reality. He tried again to stand but his limbs still didn’t respond. He scanned the room, trying to find something: a weapon, an opening, anything that could help him escape his situation. Yet he only found his fellow raiders scattered in pieces around the room. The poker table where he’d won and lost countless bottle caps and bottle of booze had been blasted in half. One half had been flung clear across the room where it had stood, now partially covered by a pile of corpses he couldn’t identify. The other half was overturned facing the front door, it too having been blasted open. The table half was covered with blood trails oozing out of a head of a massive corpse that had been impaled on its jagged edges. He recognized the corpse as Hefty, their heavy arms expert. He was a loud shit and enjoyed his job a little too much, but he was useful for the raids that required a lot of wet work. He always galloped into a fight screaming and cackling at the top of his lungs. Grey had mostly feared him. But now, he had sharp bits of wood protruding through his nose, cheeks, and left eye and a look of abject fear on his face and he just looked pathetic. Then he realized that she had done this. All the death and chaos that surrounded him was somehow her doing. Fear, and with it adrenaline, now coursed through his veins.
He moved his gaze away from Hefty to the bar which was now had a pony rammed head first into the base and another decapitated and splayed out on the bar itself surrounded by pools of alcohol and shattered glass. Like most of the ponies spread throughout the room, the pony sticking out of the bar had been too abused to be recognizable to Grey, but he did recognize the pony on the bar as Blight, his rotting corpse cutie mark made painfully visible.
Fear was quickly turning into panic as Grey took in the scene before him. The dirt and grime of daily life, now entwined with blood and innards, now formed piles of glossy mush that collected on floor, walls, and remaining bits of furniture. What wasn’t left standing was broken and scattered about, the card table being one of the few things left that still resembled what it had been. The air now had a thick, sickly sweet quality to it that reminded Grey of the last time Hefty had cut someone in half with his minigun. It had been a Tuesday.
“This ain’t me.” Black Widow said.
“What?” Grey’s throat had become dry making the words hard to get out.
“You got that “what she gonna do to me” face. I seen it a thousand times so don’t go denyin’ it.” Black was now positioning the corpses around her into more humiliating positions. She casually waved a hoof around her. “You see all this mess and ya start to think, “if she can do all this, what she gonna do to me?” Well I’ll tell ya I didn’t do all this. Well, I did but not like ya think. I like my work clean ‘n simple, couple of well placed canisters of poison gas can do a job better and just as easily as a whole mess a gun slingers. Shit, I was surprised I needed to blast the door in. Most ponies forget these pre-war buildings got holes in some of the damnedest places. You boys made me work for this one, take some pride in that. Sadly, my clients generally expect a massacre so I do what I can for them. I guess what I’m sayin’ is ain’t nothin’ gonna happen to you that ain’t already happened.” Black reached into her saddle bag and pulled out a camera and started taking pictures.
“Now, where did I leave off? Talked about momma, moved to pa…damn, where was I?” Black moved around the room getting pictures from a variety of angles. “I’ll just skip to my first kill.”
“B?” said a voice coming from the hall outside the blasted door. The voice sounded young yet deep enough to be a colt, probably around the same age as that foal with the ladybug cutie mark.
Black let out a small sigh and turned to face Grey. “I’ll just be a minute.” She made her way through the viscera to the door. She leaned her head through the hole her blast had left in the door and started talking to whoever it was in the hall. This is it; this was the opening Grey was waiting for. His legs still weren’t responding the way they needed to, but he needed to move. If he could get to the bar then all this would be over.
“Sparks I’m still working, you know the rules. Shit boy what happened to yer face?” Black Widow said
“That foal happened.” The colt replied.
There were two things on Grey’s mind, panic and the mental image of the sawed off shotgun that was hanging under the bar counter. With every splat he made when his hoof hit the copious amounts blood around him his heart stopped, wondering if Black and the foal had heard him. He kept his head low and his breathing shallow but sometimes a grunt would escape him as he dragged himself over the corpses in his way. The only thing that was keeping him going was the knowledge that there was a loaded weapon waiting for him.
“Ha, and boy she got you good. That is gonna swell up somethin’ fierce.”
“Would you not touch it please, I’m fine. I just need a sedative to calm her down.”
Blood was getting everywhere. It was seeping into his mane making him squish with even the tiniest movement. It had long since been spilled turning it into a frigid sludge that Grey now had to pull himself through. The air felt heavy and damp in his mouth and he his face was low enough that his breathing would suck up little droplets of the crimson pools around him, leaving behind splashes of copper taste. His legs had given out and now he was dragging himself inch by inch with any part of his body that would listen to him. It didn’t matter though; he was almost to that shotgun, almost to his way out.
“She don’t need more drugs to calm down. You try talkin’ to her?” Black asked.
“I did! I asked her name and what her ladydbug cutie mark meant but she just started crying.” Sparks snapped back.
“And then you thought it’d be a good idea to touch her?” Black asked, laughing a little.
“She was bleeding all over the cart. I told her what I was trying to help her but the second I touched her she bucked me in the face. Just give me something to knock her out so I can make sure she doesn't bleed out before we get her back.”
“Oh don’t be so dramatic, she’s not that hurt.”
Grey was almost there. He’d made it behind the counter and could see the shotgun hanging on the rack just inches above him. He tried to pick himself up but his body refused to listen. His legs felt like dead sacks at his sides and it took a great deal of energy just to keep his head off the floor. He burned with rage as he put everything he had into pushing himself off the ground. His legs strained and shook violently under his weight and yet he still did not reach the shotgun. Desperation took hold; he stretched out his tongue, moving him closer and closer to his survival. He was only centimeters away when everything gave out. His legs caved under him, sliding across the floor, all in opposite directions. There was a loud thud mixed with a thick splash as his head came down hard on the wooden floor slamming his teeth onto his tongue. He let out a yelp of pain.
“What the fuck did you do to me!” He screamed
“Damn it B you left one alive?” The colt sounded more angry than scared.
“Ah hell. Sparks get back to the cart, I got this.” Black said.
“The job was to wipe out the gang not play with them.” The colt responded.
“Go. Now.” Black snapped back.
“Then hurry up OK? I don’t want to get my face beaten in just so you can get your jollies.”
“I said go!” There was a soft slap and the colt’s voice suddenly took on a great sense of urgency.
“Alright, alright I’m going you sick freak.” Grey heard the soft patter of the colt’s hooves fade away as Black’s steadily come closer until they were right behind to him.
“You’re one tenacious bastard you know that?” Black grabbed Grey by the scruff of his neck. It worried him that he felt no pain, just the pressure of Black’s teeth on his neck. She tossed him against the wall and positioned him where he was steady with his back against the wall. He was just a little below Black’s eye level. She went back to the bar and grabbed one
of the few undamaged bottles on the back counter, opened it and took a swig which she promptly spat out.
“You taste nasty you know that.” Black made her way back to Grey bottle in hoof. She sat down in front of him so they were eye to eye.
“So, cards on the table. I got hired to kill your little raider gang because you attacked the wrong town. Turns out you left behind quite a few bottle caps which they were happy to hand over to me. So, I poised you, like yer buddies here,” Black pointed to the corpses around her and took another drink which she swallowed this time. “’Cept I obviously gave you somethin’ different. I’m certain you’ve noticed yer legs haven’t been working like they should. That’s cuz, they’re shut down. The poison stops the yer head from being able to talk to the rest of ya one bit at a time. Once it hits yer lungs you’ll stop breathin’ pass out and then it’ll be over.” She took another drink. “Damn, that’s good. You should thank my Pa you ain’t feelin’ nothin’ right now. With all his years of growin’ he never did get anything to come out of the ground that didn’t want to kill ya. Ma and I learned that the hard way most times. The most he ever did was make something nasty a little more or a little less worse. I guess I can’t complain though, without him I’d haven’t the damndest clue about poisons.” She took another drink.
“You’re probably wonderin’ why you’re gettin’ special treatment.” She said
It had never crossed Grey’s mind until she mentioned it.
“It’s nothing personal this is just somethin’ I do. You heard my youngin outside, Sparks? It wasn’t that long ago that I scooped him up. I found him wandrin’ the badlands by himself, just a scraggly bunch of skin and bones. Don’t know what made me want to keep him around, could be a mare thing, motherly instincts and such. Regardless, now we’re stuck with each other. Crazy enough, he’s been more useful to me than any one might have expected. He’s smart, scary smart. He just takes to old tech like its breathin’. He fixed this old camera up for me,” Black pulled the camera out from her bag and waved it in front of Grey. “which has done wonders for my business. I had many a disappointed client before this thing. And he’s got this little computer with he carries around that does, well I don’t rightly know what it does but shit if hasn’t saved our asses more than once.” Black chuckled to herself as her mind wandered back to those times, but her smile faded away eventually. She looked right at Grey, a deep sadness on her face.
This job, killin’ ponies, it takes something out of ya. Bad ponies, good ponies it doesn’t matter; killin’ for bottle caps puts a black on the soul that don’t wash out.” Black took another drink.
“I had a friend once, said he could help me. He claimed to be a doctor, not a regular doctor but a soul doctor. “Too many ponies just know how to fix other ponies, not help them heal”. He was always spoutin’ gibberish like that. One thing he always kept tryin’ to get me to do was talk. Talk, talk, talk that’s all he wanted to do. Didn’t matter what it was, he just wanted me sayin’ somethin’ at him. I made the mistake of tellin’ him about the black once and he damn near exploded with excitement. He said, “Talking about the pain is sometimes the only way it’ll go away.” I thought it was just more of his nonsense and I kept that black to myself, lettin’ it grow and fester.”
“After he died, things got worse, a lot worse. I stopped carin’ ‘bout everythin’. I started taking jobs I didn’t think I’d come back from. I pretty much stopped eatin’. Come to think of it, I don’t think I spoke more than two words to anyone before I found Sparks. Maybe he reminded me of my friend. Anyway, I realized quick that if I was gonna keep him alive I needed to be less…broken. I never forgot what my friend said about talkin’ but without him I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. So, I’ve had to make do.” Black brought the bottle up to Grey’s mouth and poured him some of the alcohol. Grey promptly spat it back in her face. She paused, looked around for a clean bit of cloth off of one of the nearby bodies and cleaned her face. She chuckled to herself as she wiped the booze away.
“Ya know, my friend got killed by one of your ilk so this jobs been just a whole mess of healin’ for me. Which is why you ain’t spendin’ your last few minutes screamin’ like you’re blood has turned to fire.” Black looked directly into Grey’s eyes. “But that can change.”
After a short pause, Black slapped her thigh. “Right, you ain’t got much time left and I still got work to finish so let’s kill two birds shall we?” She stood up, picked up her camera and went back to taking pictures of the carnage. “If I recall I was gonna tell you about my first kill. Incidentally it’s also how I got my cutie mark. I know that spoils the story a little bit but I think the story makes more sense if you know that goin’ in.
It was then that Grey realized it was getting much harder to breathe.
