Along The Dreary Road

When the world - or rather, America - came to an end, I was in high school. I was the average kid who went to class, did his work, went home, and repeated the very next day. It was everyone's life in that general nutshell that was civilization.

Then one day, as I sat in my room and watched television, there were the big, bold words that filled the news banner, "RIOT IN CANTERLOT, THIRTEEN OTHER CITIES." When I saw that, it had already been a couple of weeks since the 'zombie' incident in Los Pegasus and the massacre in Dodge. I wasn't paranoid. I just simply believed people had been just as crazy as they always had been.

Hours later, while we were all sleeping, my parents and I were shuffled into Canterlot High School in the middle of the night by the military, and just left there with hundreds of other kids and parents. Unbeknownst to us, we were part of the citywide quarantine effort placed by the mayor to combat the illness, while dealing with the riots all at the same time, unconvinced they were connected.

That same week, the military took every adult in the school for a supposed 'health check.' I never saw my mother or father ever again, and neither did any other kid or teenager there. We all assumed they were dead.

I was eighteen at the time, and I had little knowledge of fending for myself. I could take care of myself in a normal situation, but in a situation such as this, protecting myself was something I had to learn quick.

After the adults had gone, whoever were the oldest out of all four hundred kids were chosen to be the leaders by default. That included Big Macintosh, the brother of my friend Applejack. Though he was eighteen as well, he didn't classify as an adult, and was left behind to stay with us. Whoever was a senior along with Mac also governed the group. I was asked to be one of the leaders, but I declined. I had no knowledge of running a community, let alone help it.

Once the city burned itself out and the lights died, we created our own scouting groups to look for supplies; one group looked for tools, the other for weapons, and the rest for food and water. We avoided the inner city because we knew it would be a death trap. When the first airdrop touched down in Canterlot, one group risked it. We found them chewing on the body of a deer a few days later, with their own bellies torn open and their guts following behind them.

A few days after that, a student named Orange Geyser - we always called him Guy - got bit on a scavenging run and succumbed two days later. We did all we could to treat the infection, to save him somehow, but in the end, he didn't make it. We knew by then that bites or scratches would bring anybody back. So we always saved a bullet for the occasion.

And I think that was what caused us to suffer as the time went on. We had too many people to take care of, and half of them were no younger than thirteen or fourteen years old. The youngest was a ten year old girl named Lily. We found her wandering by herself a week after the military pulled out. We took care of her for three months, but in the end, it was the wrong place at the wrong time that got her killed. We all mourned her.

Four months after the collapse, I turned nineteen. We almost didn't celebrate it - I didn't want to celebrate it because we needed the supplies - but my friend Pinkie insisted that we "lift our spirits." So with the generators humming and the music kept at a minimum, they baked me a cake with whatever they could get their hands on, and told me to make a wish.

I only wished I could wake up from the nightmare.

But if I did, I likely would never have met Dash.

I knew who Dash was. One of the more popular girls in Canterlot High, an athletic runner with potential - lots of it. She was slacking off in classes, but always pulled through in the end. It was not long after I met her for the first time at that party that I fell in love with her truly and wanted to know more about her.

She strove to become a member of the Wonderbolts, an athletic group that made trips around the world to compete and win, win, win. It had been her goal since she was a young child.

On the first day of the riots, she was in the middle of the city, initially training at a professional studio to compete with a nearby academy.

It was strange listening to how she described it. One minute she was running laps with music playing on the speakers, with people acting as they always had...

And the very next minute, she was running through the streets as buildings burned and people were being knocked to the ground and eaten alive. She mentioned how she ran for blocks before she was able to catch her breath at all, and even then, she still kept running, just slower. It took her an hour to make it back home, only to see her parents frantically packing their things before she found out what was going on. Plastered on the news: "RIOT IN CANTERLOT, THIRTEEN OTHER CITIES."

Yes, she was in the city at night. She was running in darkness for half the time. She was lucky not to encounter anybody else.

After a while, she stopped talking about the somber parts of her past and wanted to talk about more uplifting topics, and it was then that I started to truly understand who she was.

A week later, I asked her out, and she said yes. That was two months ago.

I was her first.

Two months later, everything quickly fell apart. And it started with a drop.