Chapter Two

Body and Soul

When Princess Celestia was told I was given a disembodied death threat from someone who called me a traitor, she assumed that one of Nightmare Moon’s more fanatical followers might be to blame. Since Twilight Sparkle was the most qualified of the Mane Six to investigate this mystery, she arrived at the dance-hall an hour after the concert.

It chilled me to think that there were still Nightmare Moon followers that could track me down and threaten to end my life, but it didn’t completely surprise me. After all, my career largely consisted of cleaning up the mess the world leaves behind. Ponies have always possessed a limitless capacity for violence and madness. One cannot help but be a bit jaded by all the bloodshed.

Twilight Sparkle was slowly casting a purple-tinged spell over Vinyl’s equipment. After every inch was examined, Twilight sighed and shut her magic off.

“I’m sorry, guys,” said Twilight. “But I can’t find any trace of a ghost in the speakers or anywhere else. If it really was a spirit that threatened Equus, I can’t be sure.”

“What if the voice was a remote radio transmission?” I asked Vinyl, who still pored over her equipment. “Is it possible your speakers got hacked into that way?”

Vinyl shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way. My music is played from a closed circuit. If my stuff was on a wireless network, then maybe the creep who threatened you could have hacked in. But I can’t figure this out.”

Octavia was examining her cello. “One thing I’m curious about. Who would want to hurt you, Equus?”

“It can’t be my dad,” I said. “He’s on the moon. Nightmare Moon had thousands of followers, but they’re still in the land of the dead. They need her to bring them back to Equestria.”

Twilight paced up and down the stage. “Maybe someone else figured out how to raise the dead? No, not even Celestia could do that. Oh, my. This is going to take a while to figure out. Equus? Maybe you should stay in the castle for the time being.”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life fearing the dead, Twilight. I fought my dad, I can fight whatever comes next.”

Vinyl walked over to me and looked me in the eyes. “If you need help, any kind of help at all, give me a shout, okay? Us marshmallows have to stick together.”

It had been ages since anypony called me that. She still had a sense of humor, even in this strange time. No wonder Octavia loved her. Who didn’t need a companion who could lighten the heaviest of moods?

“I will, Vinyl. Thanks.”

As I walked out of the dance-hall, Twilight trotted up beside me. “If you do have any more problems like this, tell me first, okay?”

“Sure. I’ll be at work if you find out anything.”

I sighed as I walked back to town. Life never stays quiet for long. Neither, it seemed, do the dead.

My morgue assistant Flashbulb met me outside the hospital. The red pony’s ears were flat as he said, “We got a bad one, Morty.”

“We never get good bodies, Flashy. Who is it?”

“He’s one of Applejack’s relatives, I suspect. He has an apple cutie mark.”

I followed him to the morgue as I asked, “It’s not Big Mac, is it?”

Flashy shook his head. “No, thank goodness. He’s not from around here, but his body was found near city hall about an hour ago.”

I tried to guess who that might have been. Applejack recently showed me a few of her family photo albums. They were all thicker than Manehattan phone books. The Apple family sure loved planting their seeds. So to speak.

When I saw the body on the examination table, I knew A.J. was going to be livid when she found out who had died. I could tell just by the brown vest and Stetson hat that it was her cousin from Appleoosa. Braeburn.

A thin trickle of blood had dried over both his closed eyes. There was a large knife handle sticking out of his left ear, so the how of his death was obvious. The why would be harder to discover. It always was, in my experience.

“Well, Flashy. Let’s get suited up.”

As I slipped on my hoof-gloves and apron, I was mulling over something that bugged me. Why wasn’t there more blood on his body? His body looked fresh, so he wasn’t drained of blood and then dumped.

I pondered this as Flashbulb and I wheeled him over to the X-ray machine. When the pictures were taken, Flashy took the film to be developed.

It would be a few minutes before he came back, so I set up the numerous cutting tools for Braeburn’s autopsy. Bone-saws, tile-hammer and chisel for his skull, scalpels and the like.

When I put down the last knife, I turned to look at Braeburn.

His eyes were open.

And glaring at me.

Before I could react, His rear legs kicked me away from the table. As I slid across the tile floor, I banged my head on a gurney.

Braeburn jumped off the table and landed on all fours, knocking over the autopsy tools with a sharp clatter.

He picked up a scalpel in one hoof, got up on his rear legs and walked towards me, grinning.

Dizzy with pain, I tried to get up, but my sudden headache made the room tilt slantwise.

“Flashy!” I yelled. “Help me!”

“No one can help you, traitor,” said Braeburn, as he swung the scalpel down.

A chair smashed into his face, knocking him flat on his back.

Braeburn growled and flung the chair aside as Flashbulb leaped onto him, hooves swinging.

I could hear a few meaty-sounding punches as the room got more horizontal for me. I spotted the tile-hammer and grabbed it.

Ducking away from another one of Braeburn’s kicks, I swung the hammer onto his skull. It sounded like I just bashed a ceramic bowl, not flesh and bone.

Braeburn hissed with pain. For a split second, I saw fangs in his gritted teeth.

Flashbulb had landed a few painful looking groin kicks to the apparently-undead cow-pony. My hammer connected a few more times on Braeburn’s head as he struggled to get on his feet.

Braeburn hollered, “You’ll never stop us, Equus Mortis!”

My hammer slammed into his skull once more, making Braeburn’s eyes waver in two directions. He flickered for a second, like a damaged movie clip.

“Who are you, bastard!” yelled Flashbulb.

Braeburn slid onto the floor as he gave up the fight. He grinned, staring at me.

“We are the Vengeful. He’s going to skin you alive, Mortis.”

“Who is?” I demanded. “Tell me!”

“He’ll make you wish you had died instead of your mother.”

I grabbed Braeburn’s shoulders and squeezed. Why did his fur feel like tile? “Who are you talking about?”

He gurgled as his body began to shimmer like heat-haze. “Go . . . find out. Traitor.”

When Braeburn burst into green flames, we both leapt back.

What remained of him left us stunned. Slumped on the floor, with a bashed-in skull, was the biggest insect I had ever seen. It had a dark grey chitinous shell all over it’s body. The head was the same size of an average pony’s, but with solid green eyes, a dorsal fin and a jagged unicorn-like horn. The legs had more holes in them than a moth-eaten shirt. How did these beasts support their own weight?

The small green translucent wings gave a possible answer. This creature reminded me of a huge wasp or beetle. Green slime oozed out of the hole I made.

As Flashbulb dusted himself off, he asked, “I . . . I have never seen a creature like this before.”

“I don’t believe anyone else has either, Flashy.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sore ribs, but I’ve had worse.” I noticed my left eye-lid was twitching. “I’m feeling really wound up, but that’s probably just adrenaline from the fighting. I wish he . . . it . . . whatever, told me who wanted to skin me.”

“Yeah, that would have been helpful. Unless . . .”

“What?”

“Unless you’re meant to go where ever this bug came from and find out for yourself.”

I scratched my head. “We had better get Twilight in here again. Maybe she can tell us what this is.”

* * *

“I don’t know what this is, Equus,” said Twilight as she lifted the body with her magic. She slowly turned it around, studying every detail. “You say it spoke to you?”

“Yes. It called me a traitor.”

Her ears flattened. “Just like at the dance-hall. Is it possible this . . . insect . . . made the voice in Vinyl Scratch’s speakers?”

I said, “This guy’s voice had a higher pitch.”

“Maybe my history books will shed some light on who the Vengeful are. I think this corpse needs to be sent, discreetly, to the castle labs. The scientists there might be able to tell us how a bug can imitate a pony.”

Flashbulb was rubbing his sore leg. “I almost busted a hoof kicking that creature. He has a tough exoskeleton.”

“Flashy, what do this thing’s X-rays show?”

“Ooh, you have X-rays?” chirped Twilight. “That might help!”

She put the bug down onto an examination table as I flicked on the light-wall. The X-rays revealed a beast with no internal skeleton, but plenty of muscle and shell. The grey lumps in the skull looked similar to a pony’s brain. That might explain the magic use and the ability to speak, but not where it came from.

Twilight asked, “Equus, did you say this thing imitated Applejack’s cousin Braeburn?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It’s just that this insect reminds me of a certain species of desert cave-beetle. There are lots of mountains near Appleoosa with large, deep caves.”

Flashy said, “Plenty of breeding ground for this guy’s family, I bet.”

I sighed. “That still doesn’t explain how a giant homicidal bug knew my name and called me a traitor.”

“I take it your Mortis family history book doesn’t mention talking insects?” she inquired.

“No. Just a blood-thirsty goddess and her loony followers.”

“So this is a previously unknown species!” Twilight declared as she stared at the bug again. “This would be exciting if it wasn’t also scary.”

Flashy said, “Morty, this monster told you to go find out who wants you dead. If you go to Appleoosa, you’ll be walking into a trap.”

Rubbing a hoof through my mane, I replied, “I know, Flashy. But I can’t hide forever. What if another bug comes to town and hurts or even kills somepony else, just to get my attention? I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“I’m just worried about you, Morty. Before you came to town, I had to run everything in this morgue. No one else wanted your job.”

I snorted. “I’m not some filly, you know. I’m not as weak as I used to be.”

Flashbulb looked at me wistfully. “When word got around that I worked in the morgue, some idiot spread the rumor that if I took a picture of someone, that pony would soon die. It took a long time for the ponies in this town to realize that wasn’t true. People aren’t kind. Or terribly bright, it seems.”

I was stunned at this news. “I . . . I didn’t know that. You never told me.”

“Most ponies aren’t that bad, I guess. After all, when you helped defeat Nightmare Moon, people started talking to me more often. If anything happened to you or me, would death become scary to them again?”

“Probably, yeah. But listen, Flashy. I’m not going to Appleoosa alone. If I and the rest of the Mane Six can kick both mad goddesses and mass murderers in the flanks, then giant bugs won’t be a problem.”

Flashy gave me a weak grin as he tried to put on a brave face. His ears began to sag. Bless his heart, I kept forgetting how much he liked my company, even when I wasn’t in the best of moods.

I wasn’t afraid of death. After all, I saw what the edge of it before Rainbow Dash pushed me back into the land of the living. Having an inadequate life was something more worthy of concern.

Flashbulb had the same concern I had. I had been too self-absorbed to notice.

I patted him on the shoulder, hoping that would comfort him. “You won’t be alone for long, Flashy. I’ll come home on all four hooves. Stick a cupcake in my eye and all that.”

His ears lifted a bit. “Thanks, Morty.”

“We morticians have to stick together, right?”

After the bug was wrapped in a sheet and carted away by Royal Guard Pegasi, I left the morgue. Perhaps my family history book would tell me who the Vengeful were.

As I walked home, still feeling energized, I found myself looking at other ponies a little longer than what was polite. Nothing like nearly getting killed by a pony mimic to make you paranoid.

The Vengeful were already getting to me. And I hadn’t even left town yet.

Author's Note

Theme songs for this chapter are "Everypony's Gay For Braeburn (except when he tries to kill you)" (Eskerata remix) by Sim Gretina.

Juuuust kidding. It's actually "Mold" by Aphex Twin