Dead by Sunset

Warm, wet dirt presses into the back of my head, and everything hurts. That doesn't really seem fair since I’m supposed to be dead, right?

Right?!

I was ready! I let go! I was… I was ready to let it all go and to finally get some peace and quiet in a world that I’d managed to teach to hate me no matter what I did. I just wanted it to be over!

I clench my eyes shut as tears push their way past my eyelids as I curl up on the ground. I just wanted it all to be over. I know I’ve done so many wrong things but… can’t I be owed just a little bit of peace?

The peace of my own death, if nothing else?

Apparently not, or apparently death sucks way more than I had been led to believe. I push away the tears before they overwhelm me. I have a feeling if I start crying I’m not going to stop for a good while and, whether or not I’m dead, I clearly still have a corporeal body of some flavor so that means I need to get up and—

Pain slashes into my brain like a lightning bolt the moment I move my head, leaving me gasping for air.

Okay, so that’s not happening. I try rolling over instead, heaving myself to the side only to stop as something sharp jabs in my stomach, reminding me that I’m still holding onto my Journal.

Right, well, if that’s here then... that’s a plus, I guess? Now for the real sixty billion bit question:

‘Where in Tartarus am I?’

Balancing on my knees and one hand, with the other hand keeping my Journal close, I try to get my bearings. All around me are stalks of rotting corn, and the air is filled with the stench of a sodden farm; that unique odor of manure, unwashed animals, rotten vegetable matter, and... something else too, some kind of thick and coppery stink.

Slowly, I stagger to my feet and the pain in my head fades back to a dull roar as I find my footing. It’s terribly quiet and there’s something in the air… something that’s setting my teeth on edge. My vision swims again and I step backward, trying to get myself situated, and I very nearly trip on something protruding from the ground.

“Ah!” I wince at how loud my voice sounds in the silence out here as I look down.

A root is sticking out of the muddy ground, and I follow it with my gaze to its source, and the further I go the more I wish I hadn’t.

My jaw hangs slack and for a second my brain grinds its gears trying to comprehend exactly what I'm looking at, because however obvious it is, it's not something I can just wrap my brain around.

It's a tree, sure, that's the easy part. The rest of it isn’t so easy.

The corpses of massive swine hang gutted from the bare, dead branches, dripping gobs of viscous, rotting blood onto the ground making the source of the stink all-too-clear. Slaughtered animals would be one thing but what I really can’t tear my eyes away from is what’s strung up against the trunk of the tree.

A human, or at least what's left of it. Flayed and brutalized beyond anything I can imagine. Chunks of meat hang raggedly from its fractured rib cage, and every bit of it that's still there screams that it died in agony. All I can manage is a small choking sound in the back of my throat. I want to scream I want to—

The air is split by a scream that, surprisingly, doesn't belong to me.

I spin around, searching for the source. Another voice means another person which means I'm not alone in this nightmare horror-show.

Gripping my Journal hard, I take a guess at the direction the scream came from and sprint away from the gory tree. The muck and soil suck at the soles of my shoes as I run, it’s noisy and disgusting but I can’t afford to be slow. If someone is in trouble I want to help them. Just because I was abandoned…

Nope, not going there yet. Not now, and maybe not ever. C’mon repression, kick in, I’ve got more important things to do.

Another scream echoes from close by, so I stop running at the edge of the corn and drop to a crouch, peeking out from between the stalks and scanning for the… the...

“What the fuck.”

Once upon a time, I believed in monsters. When I was a little filly I would hide under my covers at the orphanage as the sisters told us scary stories on Nightmare Night. When I got older, I realised that monsters weren’t really real, and that it was just a word for something we didn’t understand.

Now… Now I remember why I used to believe in monsters.

It’s like a human but only in the broadest and crudest strokes. It must clear seven feet tall, but its body is lopsided and almost… melted. Its left arm is muscular but twisted and stretched while its face is a mangy waxen mess held together by surgical sutures and crude stitching. Two sharp, feral eyes peer out of the folds of mutant flesh and on its belt is a crude, heavy hammer stained with what can only be blood. Its twisted arm is gripping a brutal chainsaw, the teeth of which are clogged with what looks like bits of gristle, bone, and hair.

The thing is so imposing I almost miss what it’s carrying in its other arm; a young man with bright green hair, a red shirt, and brown cargo pants is struggling feebly in the monster’s grip, but the thing is so cartoonishly massive compared to the guy's smaller frame that all he can do is wriggle in its grip.

I stay crouched and quiet as the thing moves by. It has a weird, loping gait that’s almost graceful. No motion is wasted and it covers more ground than I would expect of something that looks so ungainly, and as it passes me by I turn to watch as it approaches something extruding from the ground.

What in Tartarus is that? It almost looks like a… a hook.

It’s a giant Sun-damned butcher’s hook. I don't need to be a seer to know what that monster's intention is vis a vis the hook and his struggling victim is.

In one fluid, gut-wrenching movement, the twisted creature swings its chainsaw down to a carabiner on its belt, then brings its huge, melted arm up to grip its struggling victim before heaving him up and slamming him down onto the hook with a wet, meaty, shunk that turns my stomach.

Even knowing what was about to happen, my jaw still drops open and I feel a scream work its way up my throat. I'm about to let it out by pure instinct, and earn the monster’s attention in the process, when a strong hand sweeps around my face to seal my mouth shut. I struggle for a moment but whoever it is has a grip like steel and pulls me away from the horrific scene.

My captor tosses me sprawling onto the damp ground, and I cough as I scramble around, looking for whoever it was that probably just saved my life.

Crouching low and holding a raised finger to her lips is a powerfully built young woman. Her face is twisted by a scar that runs the length of her right cheek in a crescent moon, from the corner of her mouth and up across her eye. The damage gives her a kind of permanent sneer that's half-eclipsed by her short, ragged red mohawk. The sides of her head are shaved and adorned with tattoos that even I recognise as gang marks, and they stretch down her neck and across her broad, muscular shoulders to vanish beneath what looks like a surplus military vest, and her trousers and boots are the same, surplus fatigues and heavy, worn steel-toes.

She raises a hand in a 'stop' motion in front of me before putting a single finger to her lips.

“Don’t move and don’t speak,” she whispers in an accented voice so low that I have to lean forward to catch her words. “It will hear you. Don’t let its stature fool you, it’s faster and sharper than it looks.”

I nod. I’m willing to take that advice as read given that I just watched that thing cold murder a guy with a butcher’s hook stuck to a lamppost.

She turns away from me and scowls in the direction of the hook.

“Dammit Spruce, I told you not to go for the basement box. Idiota," she mutters before gesturing sharply at me. "Come on bacon-head, follow closely.”

Okay. Hold up.

Bacon-head?!

Red and gold. Not bacon. Red and friggin gold. I follow her anyway though because, yeah, Butcherhook McChainsawface is presumably still tooling around this haunted-ass cornfield and this girl seems like she knows what’s going on. You don’t survive being a homeless teen girl in a cold city like Canterlot for long without figuring out who knows what and how to learn that stuff yourself, so I'm willing to endure some jabs as tuition.

“Where are we going?” I ask, trying to keep as quiet as possible.

“The generator,” she responds, gesturing out across the cornfield. “See the tall, metal towers with the high-powered lights rising out of the fog? They’re connected to generators. Getting them repaired and running opens the Exit Gates. Once we're through them and past the terminus, the Killer can't follow us. Killer can never leave their Trial.”

“Cool, so we just gas it up and go?” I whisper back.

She shakes her head. “No, there will be seven of them and the exit gates at the edges of the grounds need at least five running to power the system. We’ve got two of them going already but then Spruce got greedy.”

I let the knowledge that we need to get three more of them up and running in the dark, with a chainsaw-clad murder-hobo stalking the area sink in.

This does not feel good.

“Here, take this,” she shoves a torch into my hand. “If you see it try to shine the light in its eyes. The Killers live in the darkness of the fog, so bright light pains them.”

A weapon, then. I feel my first real surge of gratitude towards her. I mean, yeah, she definitely kept me from being butcher bait a second ago but now I have a way to defend myself... not well, mind you, but at least it’s something.

“Thanks, I owe you,” I say, testing the heft of it. It might make a decent bludgeon, too, if the battery runs out.

“De nada, just keep an eye out.”

We reach the generator and it doesn’t take a skilled mechanic to tell it’s in bad shape; the frame is busted up, with pieces hanging off in some places and loose wiring sticking out.

Apparently this isn’t unusual, though, because my new guide immediately goes to work putting it back together by sliding bits and pieces back into place, then pulling out batches of wiring and tying them off. I sit and watch her quick, sure movements for a few seconds, there’s something fascinating about watching someone who knows what they’re doing work with their hands. It’s mesmerizing enough that I almost forget I’m supposed to keep watch. I turn back and keep my head on a swivel.

Idiot, idiot. What would’ve happened if that mange-ridden psychopath had walked up while you were ogling? Dumbass.

Another scream splits the air, this one loud and feminine. I start to stand up and move but my guide's hand shoots out to grip my wrist as if she knows exactly what's going through my head.

“Don’t, that’s Star, and she’s doing it on purpose to keep Billy’s attention. She’s slippery and smart, I’ll know if she’s really in trouble, so sit. Do you know anything about generators?”

I turn back to her, letting the rock in my stomach settle. I hear ‘Billy’ rev his chainsaw in the distance getting the crows shrieking and cawing at the sudden noise.

At least that lets me know that he isn’t close by.

“Uh, yeah, before it bricked completely I had one in the train station I was… uh… squatting in. It got me through a rough winter before it died but it took a little love and a lot of percussive maintenance.”

Her mouth turns up in a grim smile that's cocked endearingly sideways by her scar. “Good, get to work on the other side while Star gives us some breathing room.”

I defer to her expertise. If she says we’re ‘safe’ then I'll go with that, I can only assume she'd know better than me.

A quick once-over shows me at least a few things I can easily fix. For one, the exhaust manifold is not even really connected anymore, it's hanging off of the main body by a couple of screws, so I set the torch down and start muscling it back into place.

I wince at every sound, and for a moment I'm forced to lament how fixing a generator is not a quiet process. Fortunately ‘Star’ has kept her scream game on point which seems to be serving as an adequate mask for our work. With that cover, I risk the noise of shouldering the manifold back into position, then start working on the coolant system. It’s crude but that’s good. Crude means mechanical engineering and mechanical engineering means it’s relatively simple to get it back in one—SHIT!

My shoe slipped. My stupid shoe slipped in the mud putting my angle off as I knock a cooling pipe the wrong way, clanging it hard against part of the chugging starter and sending a surge through the whole damn thing. It lets off a loud, blinding POP, staggering the pair of us back. I rub at my eyes and shake my singed fingers out. I can’t even see properly before my extra-toasty hand is grabbed by my guide and we’re off running.

“Vamos! Billy’s not going to ignore that,” she hisses.

I nod, angry at myself and at the mud and my shoes and everything else. It was stupid and it was my fault.

“Sorry, sorry, I slipped and—”

A finger presses against my lips again as she pulls us into cover behind some hay bales.

“Don’t apologize, just do better next time,” She answers evenly. I’m surprised at her calm tone, I probably wouldn’t have been as forgiving in her place.

We lean against the bale, catching our breath as we wait for ‘Billy’ to lose interest. He doesn’t seem to be coming this way, but we aren’t gonna break cover and give him a show just in case.

“What’s your name, by the way?” I ask, leaning in close to her to keep my voice as low as possible. “I’m Sunset Shimmer.”

“Tempest,” she responds. “Tempest Shadow.”

It fits her. Imposing, certain, and powerful, she moves like she avoids murderous psychopaths for a living. Who knows, maybe she does. I don’t even know how I got here but I have a feeling I’d be properly borked if I hadn’t run across this girl. Or, if she hadn’t run across me, I guess.

“How did you get here?” I ask as Tempest peeks around the bale to scan the area.

“We’ll swap life stories once we’re at the campfire,” Tempest answers cooly. “Until then, keep quiet.”

That’s a fair point. I nod and move along with her as she slips out from behind a bale of hay towards another stack near a run-down shack. We’re moving for almost a full minute, sidling around hay and rotting corn, passing four or five of those gut-wrenching hooks, until we come to a rusting collection of free-standing wooden walls.

I scan the area but don’t see any of the towers that would suggest a generator nearby. At least, nowhere close. I tap Tempest’s shoulder and give her a questioning look, but she just shakes her head and holds her right hand up, making a short chopping motion towards the corner we’re crouched at. I peek around and quickly stifle a gasp.

Mere meters away is Spruce, hanging from the hook.

We’d come around the long way to approach the post from the other side. I can hear him grunting and struggling. I want to go out, to try and pull him down, but something about Tempest’s wary look and the fact that she hasn’t done that exact thing yet keeps me rooted to the ground.

Finally, I start to lose patience. “What are we waiting for?” I ask softly, gesturing towards the corner. “He’s dying.”

Tempest brings a finger to her lip again, then points around the corner. “Look closer, in the Fog past the hook.”

I peek around again, this time focusing on the dark fields. It would be hard to see even in good light but the combination of dim, diffuse lighting and the fog was making it… wait… I see movement. Just barely, but I see it. Something big, loping, and, more terrifyingly, silent is there just out of easy eyeshot.

It’s a trap.

“Puta,” Tempest swore venomously. “It’s using Spruce as bait.”

I swallow back my revulsion and step back fully into cover before I risked him spotting me any more than I already had. “What do we do?”

Tempest closes her eyes and a cold, grim determination passes over her face.

“We leave him,” she says, and my mouth drops open. “If we’re lucky we can run up another genny and it will draw Billy away from the hook. If we’re not…”

“We can’t just let him bleed out on that fucking hook!” I say in disbelief. I know I don’t know her that well but even after everything that’s happened to me, I can’t imagine being that callous.

The look she gives me puts a chill in my heart.

“Don’t worry, he won’t. Now move, we either distract Billy with a genny and stand a chance of saving Spruce or sit here and let him die for sure.”

We track back around towards our generator, the one I’d botched a couple of minutes ago, and fortunately, it’s still in decent condition.

The fizzle and popping had stopped and Tempest immediately moved back into position, reached arm-deep into the guts of the generator to start fiddling with something. I went back around determined to finish that damn cooling pipe. This time I managed to push it back into place fully.

After a good minute of dedicated repairs, the throaty, palpitating chug of the engine suddenly gives a loud cough, a sputter, and I smile as it finally starts running with a steady thump-thump-thump of cylinders.

“Bien,” Tempest mutters, pulling away from the generator, "that’ll get Billy’s attention and—” A thunderclap drowns out Tempest’s next words and she slackens as her hands grip the railing of the generator hard, and she swears under her breath. “Dammit, I’m sorry Spruce.”

I’m about to ask what she’s talking about when a cold, heavy wind rolls over us coming from the direction of the hook that Billy had hung Spruce from. I turn reflexively to see what was causing it and I immediately feel Tempest’s hand on my shoulder.

She’s looking up.

“Don’t look away, chica, this is what is waiting for all of us, eventually,” Tempest says in a quiet, almost reverent voice.

I follow her gaze up and my jaw drops.

How do I describe it?

A coil of blackness. A storm of despair. A cloud blacker than the spaces between the stars reaches down from the sky, and twined among the rippling clouds are… things. Living, twitching, spindly claws that remind me of nothing so much as the legs of a black widow: long and thin, but needle-sharp and fast as a whip.

Without warning the twisting, asymmetrical claws jab down and I hear a scream. A shriek of mortal horror. Then the claws lift up with a disintegrating body I vaguely recognize as Spruce speared in their grasp. Faint sparks of light and energy flow out of his body and up into the cloud. The legs—or claws—twitch in what I imagine is ecstasy.

I can’t stop shaking. Tempest said he wouldn’t bleed out and she was right. Bleeding out would’ve been a dramatic improvement.

“W-what…” I start to stutter but Tempest grabs me by the hand and lights off with me in tow.

Another cough-and-chug in the distance breaks the tension as another generator goes online.

It must be the other girl, Star. The one who was covering us with her screams and quick feet must have been using Spruce the same way we did. One more generator, then? Yeah, one more. Five generators total and we had run up four, one more and then we could all get out. I swallow the panic-vomit that’s threatening to overwhelm me and pick up the pace, getting alongside Tempest and soon enough a light array tower resolves out of the fog—

—right about the time I hear the roar of a revving chainsaw behind us.

I experience a brief moment of blind terror right before Tempest shoves me to one side while she wildly dives to the other. A second later the huge, twisted monstrosity that murdered Spruce sprints right through the space we’d been in moments ago, his chainsaw swinging back and forth spitting blood and hot oil.

Scrabbling to my feet, I take off in a panic, sparing a quick glance back to spot my pursuer.

He's gone, but I don’t see Tempest either. The generator is nearby, though. I can see the tower so it can’t be more than a half-dozen meters. I can even hear it chugging. Someone must’ve been working on it not long ago. Hell, that ‘Star’ person might be working on it now. I turn to finish the generator, it’s what I have to do to survive. Tempest knows that and…

I hear her scream and every bit of resolve I have to work on that stupid hunk of junk ahead of me vanishes as I wheel around on my heels and sprint toward where I heard Tempest’s voice. She's saved my life more times in the last several minutes than any single person has in my whole life and I'm including Princess Celestia in that.

She had every reason to abandon me to ‘Beats-by-Chainsaw’ and she didn’t, even though I'm complete dead-weight. Instead, she took my hand and tried to teach me to survive. My friends might have abandoned me when I needed them most but I’ll be damned if I do the same thing to someone I owe that much to.

Sunset Shimmer always breaks even.

I burst out of the cornfield in front of complex series of ruined wooden walls that vaguely reminds me of a jungle gym just in time to see Billy bring his hammer down on Tempest while she's vaulting over a collapsed wooden pallet that lay cocked at a forty-five-degree angle between two bales of hay, and I wince at the sickening crack. I pray Tempest lands and keeps running but she hits the ground hard, staggered by the monster’s sharp strike.

As it moves around to her it hefts the hammer lightly into the air before catching it and shaking the blood off almost playfully.

It thinks this is a game.

I grit my teeth as it revs its chainsaw, splits the pallet, and then steps through the mess of splinters to seize Tempest by the scruff of her neck and heft her onto its shoulder.

There's a hook a few meters away and I know what’s coming but more importantly, I know where he’s going, so I slip around him, moving quickly but quietly through the corn along the edge of the beaten path and sidle around the hook. He’s moving towards me, huffing and grunting like a wild beast before stopping at the bloody post and planting his mismatched feet to prepare to heft Tempest’s muscular frame upward and onto the hook.

It puts his face exactly where I knew it would be as I step out and shine the flashlight directly into his eyes.

Billy staggers with loud, gurgling cry and Tempest lets out a wordless shout of shock as she's dropped straight past the hook and onto the ground.

She's only on her knees for a second before she’s up and sprinting away while Billy is rubbing at the blistery, melted flesh of his face trying to get to his eyes. I don’t waste any time. I flick the light off and sprint after Tempest to catch up. She’s got momentum but she’s still stunned and staggering every few steps. I wince at the bloody patch on her skull and try to pretend I can’t see the glint of bone.

“That was stupid, Sunset,” Tempest says as we duck into the corn and get low, moving quietly through the thicket of cover. “You could’ve gotten yourself—” Her words are cut off by the thunderous report of another bank of lights coming on. “—well, never mind, but still. That was a stupid risk.”

I give her a smug smile. “I’m Sunset Shimmer, I don’t take risks, I make plans.”

Before she can respond we hear a loud, harsh electric buzzing noise not far from us. I look up at her and she’s wearing that lopsided grin of hers. From this angle, it’s kinda hot, actually.

“There it is, the exit, come on Shimmer, move!” Tempest crows and takes off.

We sprint, and I try to ignore the stitch in my side as we pound towards the glowing lights of the exit. A jolt of panic spears up my spine as that familiar, horrible revving sound bellows from behind us, but before I can dodge Tempest grabs my hand and smirks at me as she drags me forward so we're sprinting at a brick wall. The chainsaw’s labouring carburetor roars from behind us. I want to move so badly but the look on Tempest’s face keeps me by her side.

As crazy as it sounds… I trust her.

I cotton on to her plan in the breath before we’re about hit the wall.

We split—me diving left and her to the right—letting Billy charge between us to impact the wall hard. His chainsaw grinds into the stone leaving Billy staggering backward while trying to find his footing and recover whatever few wits he has left in that malformed skull of his. He recovers quickly though, hefting his chainsaw and aiming it as we're turning on our heels and running again, crossing past the terminus of the Exit Gate.

His chainsaw roars again, but we're already through, and true to Tempest's words, a wall of thin, black bars, like thorns of dark iron, fire up between us and Billy, stopping his charge cold and staggering him back.

A moment later I’m beside Tempest again, running through the Fog and away from that rotting farm and she’s laughing.

Laughing!

We almost died and she’s laughing!

Only as we're sprinting down into the grass and forest beyond do I realise that I’m laughing too.