Author's Note

One thing I want to mention quick: Since this is a humanized version, the only thing MLP-related here will, obviously, be the characters and some of the towns, such as Ponyville and Canterlot. Cities like Manehattan and Fillydelphia, however, will be changed to the real life counterparts. Equestria will instead be the United States. This prevents any bothersome difficulty trying to ponify the names of other countries.

That's all. I'll probably make a title sequence for this story. I love doing that kind of thing, you know.

Easy Pickings (Prologue)

When people think of the word 'zombie'...what exactly do they think of at that moment?

Do they think about somebody walking mindlessly along the dreary road, texting on their phone? Or do they think about the fresh or rotten cadaver that was once a living human as it now chases the living to feast on their flesh?

It was no doubt that the zombie craze was a popular topic among the entertainment industry. With every year came a new zombie game, film, or television show, or even a song or band mentioning the very word. It was thanks to the zombie that people had jobs, careers, and lives.

But it was also thanks to the zombie that those very things were stripped away in an instant.

When The Fall, as the term was coined, happened six months ago, nobody expected it or knew about it until they were dead or dying themselves. The first ever footage that kickstarted The Fall was uploaded to the internet on April 7, showing leaked footage from a helicopter. A man dug his teeth into a coroner's jugular and killed him in a matter of moments. The man just minutes before the footage started rolling robbed a convenience store and was shot dead after intimidating officers. It left many wondering why he chose to use his teeth and not his own gun.

Officers once again shot the crook, only this time he didn't go down until they shot him in the head. Soon after, the presumed-dead coroner rose from the ground and ran towards the officers, attempting to attack them in the same manner, ending with the same outcome. The span between the footage beginning and the coroner being shot dead: Just two minutes.

Immediately, people assumed this was either fake or part of a movie. But there was no notice of a film shooting in the city of Los Pegasus at the time of that incident. The same day the footage was leaked online, news reporters posted the name and the mugshot of the robber, 38 year old Lucky Gambit. He had been charged with seven accounts of assault and two accounts of attempted murder in the past decade alone; prior to the shooting, he had been on the run after raping and murdering his girlfriend. It quickly debunked all rumors that he was an actor.

As for the coroner, he was 49 year old Swift Chaser. After the shooting, his wife told reporters that he was "the kindest, gentlest man you would've ever met. He couldn't hurt a fly." And yet, everyone wondered why he tried to kill police officers. Doctors were even more perplexed as to how the man was able to get up at all after having his jugular ripped out.

The footage became popular all over mainstream media, to the point where even family-friendly talk shows were talking about it. Kids in school started spreading rumors about it and making zombie jokes. #LPZombie became the running trend online for several days as the rumors grew.

And as the rumors grew, so did the amount of similar videos across the country. The next video was from Manhattan's Central Park. A man had tackled a woman to the ground, killed her with nothing more than his bare hands and teeth, and proceeded to eat her, or so did eyewitnesses say. By the time the police arrived to the scene, with body cams to show it all, the woman tried to kill them too. Both were shot dead and they claimed drugs may have been involved.

Then there was another case in Philadelphia. Then three cases in Trottingham. Then twelve cases in Chicago.

In a matter of days, the cases grew, and soon enough, it wasn't just two, three, or four cities. It was practically every city in the entire nation of the United States. And it continued to rise.

But the public was hardly focused on it, at least not as much as the latest media gossip or the "new, strange flu" that had been going around. People joked about the end times being upon them. Some were more serious than others, and others convinced those people that everything would be fine.

Two weeks after #LPZombie, a cult of three-hundred people committed suicide in a town up in the mountains. They claimed also that the end times were upon humankind, and "death is the only way out." They died by poisoning their own drinks. With a single swig, they were gone in minutes.

That same cult rose soon after and slaughtered the town in a matter of hours. Whoever survived described it as nothing more than "hell on Earth." The entire event became the focus of social media for several days. #PrayForDodge plastered itself on every website. People were calling it "The Dodge Massacre."

People leaked photos and footage from survivors onto streaming sites. Every supposedly-dead cult member exhibited the same exact thing that the #LPZombie did, that the coroner did - that the two attackers in Manhattan did.

By the time anyone started piecing together any information, it made no difference.

Three weeks after #LPZombie, people tried to leave the United States in mass flocks. At that same time, rumors spread that the attacks and the recent flu outbreak were connected. As a result, flights leaving the country were grounded. Also around the same time, videos emerged of similar attacks supposedly occurring in Saudi Arabia, Germany, and China; the list was higher. Many countries denied any situation related to what was happening here, leading many to believe it was just the United States.

The same week, riots broke out in multiple cities. Some suspected it was police brutality or other political tensions, with Russia being the sole blame. When the riots only grew and showed no sign of dimming, people started to panic. Many tried to leave the cities, only to gridlock the highways and leave hundreds trapped on the roads or forced to walk. In a matter of hours in just a single day, a riot in a city like New York grew from a couple of city blocks to multiple blocks. In just two days, the riots in Los Pegasus covered the whole city. People still tried to figure everything out.

But by then, it was too late.

The police were deployed when the initial riots broke out, only to be knocked down and killed by proclaimed rioters. When they fell, the military was deployed across the nation, and martial law was declared by the president to ensure the situation would be controlled by week's end. It would only get worse.

ApocalypseInAmerica started to trend, more so than #Apocalypse. While more people with every passing day becoming more paranoid, and the claims that the attackers were dead only began to climb, the nation grew more divided as it was paralyzed.

On the first day of the fourth week after #LPZombie, a doctor from Detrot leaked his own recorded footage of an autopsy to the internet. He was a famous doctor, a familiar face.

And on that day, he proved they were dead.

Behind him was a body of a recently deceased patient, arms and legs bound. He grabbed a knife and cut off the patient's head. The body stopped. The head didn't. He showed it all, not at all afraid to. He apologized to his family, to mankind, and then ended the video. When the military found him, he was one of them, bitten prior to the footage.

There was mass panic on the streets, even in cities and towns not yet affected by the outbreak. Dead people coming back to life seemed crazy. And yet it was happening right in their own country.

They were right in the middle of it.

People tried to leave the nation by flying out, even though flights had been grounded for over a week. Some tried to hijack planes, only to be shot dead by the soldiers guarding them. What happened afterwards was either riots, protests, or stampedes.

It left them vulnerable to the infected, as they were simply called.

In a matter of days to hours, entire cities became warzones, with pieces of buildings scattered along the streets and fire in every direction. Everybody was either a mix of the living or the dead. The military set up quarantine zones wherever they could. Half of them fell from a stampede of decaying flesh or too many sick admissions. In the end, many of the people who went in seeking refuge had their lives ended with a bullet between the eyes by the people meant to protect them.

If you lived out in the countryside, you could see the billowing smoke from a city 50 miles away.

When the fourth week came to an end, the power died, many of the power plants across the country no longer functioning and abandoned by their workers. Everyone called it The Roll, essentially the rolling blackout that spread across the nation in a matter of a single day. One by one, radios stopped working, the lights flickered and went out, and the televisions no longer broadcast the same thing.

It gave the dead a higher advantage.

By the start of the fifth week, most of America was gone. America as a nation no longer existed. Of the nearly 400 million, 50 million were still alive. Two weeks prior, the United Nations was relocated to France. It was a unanimous vote to deliver aid by the air. For the first few days, crates of supplies were dropped over the major cities in hopes that people would still be alive. Nobody would be able to reach them, and those that tried were killed, and the drops were relocated to empty fields, visible to anybody.

Contact was one way. Anyone still alive in America could hear the outside world - but the outside world couldn't hear America.

When week five ended, there were reports of infection in China, and America was tuned out for good.

***

That was six months ago. Nobody knows if the world still exists anymore. The borders to Canada and Mexico still seal us off, and every person who ever went off to see never came back. But even without other countries, without aid - we still were able to get off easy.

While many shops were picked clean, others were full of food and water that could last anybody for years, and this is only the non-perishable foods. It was practically easy pickings for us. We had enough food to last us for a long time.

And then one day, our stories finally began.