Crystal Apocalypse: Redux

Chapters

1: So I wake up in this car
2: There are no tacos
3: My friends are losers

1: So I wake up in this car

A police cruiser was parked behind an isolated and abandoned roadside diner. Beneath the desert’s scouring wind, the car’s paint had all but peeled away to expose steel that gleamed brightly in the first rays of the dawn sunlight. Within the car were two bodies. One belonged to an unnamed man and the life had been crushed from it by this very car’s wheels. Now blood dried against the tatters of his clothes and crusted against the shivering flesh asleep beside it.

That flesh was of the second body locked within the trunk of the car. It belonged to Sugarcoat, and the girl hesitated to open her eyes. If she opened them, she might see it again. In much the same way, she refused to move anything lest her bare skin brush against the rags and mummified flesh that embraced her in this freezing coffin.

However, she could not stay still eternally, not when her lungs pleaded for air and her mind begged for its own curiosity to be slaked, just as her throat begged the same for her growing thirst. For minutes that felt like years, she struggled to stay silent and was paralyzed by the fear that her captor, Rarity Belle, might still be waiting outside to finish the act she failed to commit the first time around by stuffing her in here.

So, there she stayed, silent and praying for that psychopath to pass her by and leave her be. And stay she did, as the wind wailed outside the car and threw barrages of scraping sand against its door. Albeit weak in the winter dawn, the sun’s light slowly warmed the makeshift coffin until Sugarcoat’s frozen skin unstuck itself from the cold edges of the trunk.

Then the dam burst.

And she gasped in a breath and the air was rough and scouring against her nose and throat. One lone breath was not enough, however, so she began to pant and then, looking by mistake at the mangled remains of the man she lay on top of, she began to hyperventilate. Instinctively, she tried to scramble away and out the trunk and away from the car as if every second she spent near it was a second she spent in the fires of hell and her frozen body would be burned to ash if she spent a single second too long in this evil place.

But try was all she could do. Hammering against the door brought only pain to her fists and screaming for help only brought more of the aching dry desert air into her lungs.

Yet still, she persisted and she kicked and she punched fruitlessly against the reinforced glass and toughened steel of the car as her voice ground itself to nought beneath the weight of her own fear.

Eventually, Sugarcoat collapsed and huddled with her knees pressed beneath her chin by her gooseflesh-riddled arms and she huddled as far away from the corpse as she could, given her current and claustrophobic circumstances.

An hour passed.

All the birds that could be singing now had already been hunted and their raw corpses torn apart by the starved mouths of desperate survivors.

An hour passed and Sugarcoat started to cry.

Normally that was something the stoic and abrasive girl would rather die than be seen doing in the cutthroat halls of her high school. However now she was trapped in a vehicular grave and there was nobody around to see her do it. And she found that it would not matter if people were around to see her do it, as death is not a thing to be brushed with lightly.

“Not now. Not. Now. Not. Now,” she wept.

The man was dead, thus he ignored her. Tears plinked onto the threadbare felt of mat that covered the trunk’s flooring. There were rips in the mat and, from between them, gunmetal grey gleamed menacingly against the dusty black of a spare tire in the dim morning gloom.

At first, Sugarcoat ignored that just as the dead man ignored her because, from between her own fingers, she saw only the haze of nightmares and her own snot and crying. The shotgun kept in the trunk was not visible to her, not when the rusted blood and dried guts of a human, of a dead human person, festered right on top of it.

An hour passed and she kept crying and no birds sang.

Then dread overcame her. It sank into her heart slowly, like a cruise ship sinks into an arctic ocean, and it filled every cell of her body with a horrible nausea. From her face she pried her shivering hands and she stared down at them through cracked glasses that were smudged with mud made from desert dust and the saltwater of her own tears.

Nobody was coming to rescue her.

Rarity hadn’t driven her here to strangle her or to stab her or to shoot her and to stuff her body in the police car so that nobody would ever find it. No. That would be stupid.

Somebody would find this car eventually, right?

No, Rarity must have driven her here to taser her to unconsciousness and then stuff her body in the police car precisely because by the time somebody found it, Sugarcoat would already be dead and Rarity would already be in another state, if not another country halfway across the planet.

Sugarcoat bit back a gasp.

If nothing changed, she was going to be forgotten.

If nothing changed, she was going to starve in here.

If nothing changed, she was going to die!

If she had tears left to weep, she would have wept. However, it was bone dry today and she had been crying for hours and she had drunk nothing since last night and she had drunk cola at that.

Her father was going to kill her.

Dr. Sugarbomb was a man of three things. Formerly being a soldier, he was a man of the utmost punctuality. Currently being a dentist, he was a man of perfect dental hygiene. Eternally being a man cursed with a fuse shorter than a mosquito’s limp dick, he was going to metaphorically kill Sugarcoat when she arrived home late, messy, and with the stink of Pepsi on her breath.

Struck by the absurdity of it all, Sugarcoat began to laugh.

At first, it was a giggle. Then it was a chuckle. And finally, it was full-blown chortling as Sugarcoat’s sanity began to fray just a little more.

It was then that she spotted the shotgun. Or, rather, she felt it. Amidst her laughter, her leg spasmed and her shoe caught against a torn edge of the upholstery. There it was, a solution, half buried beneath the felt and half buried beneath the corpse.

Her first thought was to shoot herself with it and put herself out her misery before hunger forced her to eat the corpse to prolong what pathetic little life she had left.

Then she had a better idea. She had second thoughts. As her hands brushed the corpse’s bloodstained parka in an attempt to pry the Winchester free, Sugarcoat realized that, instead of turning it against herself, she could turn its muzzle against the glass window of the trunk and blast a hole in it large enough to climb out of.

With that done, she could walk out here and get a lift back home and have Rarity arrested for trying to murder her and presumably murdering the man stuffed into the cramped trunk beside her.

Yes. That was a plan.

Hefting the shotgun, she found it surprisingly light in her arms, like it was nothing more than a painted length of wood. Sugarcoat prayed that it was loaded. And then she took aim, positioning herself as far away from the window as possible lest the shatter of shards the gunshot would produce carved a thousand cuts into her flesh.

One deep breath later, ignoring how awful the dry air felt within her lungs, she gingerly pressed the trigger.

Since she was already lying on her back, the recoil did not knock her off her feet and since she was wearing trainers today, the recoil did not knock her socks off either. It did, however, knock the beginnings of another bruise into Sugarcoat’s shoulder.

More importantly though, the deafening blast cleared a whole in the window. Three feet across, it was more than wide enough for one slight teenage girl to slip through. Were it not surrounded on all sides by knife-sharp chunks of broken glass, like the circular, fanged, and gaping maw of giant silver leech, that is.

Sugarcoat took another breath.

Her ears rang like school bells.

“Well,” she panted, “never doing that again.”

She was wrong. But that is another story for another time, another land. [Paper Girl link]

Right now, Sugarcoat tentatively tapped a spike of window glass. Finding that it was sharp like a crocodile’s fangs, she snapped back her hand with a whimper, sucking the drawn blood from the nick on her fingertip. Climbing through a ring of those edges would be murder.

And Sugarcoat did not want to die.

So, she began to look around again. There she saw everything she had seen the first time. Although now, with the tinted window blown out, she could see it a lot better. And what she saw still disgusted her.

Beside her there was, still crumpled, the ruined body of a dead man. To her, he looked almost like some kind of alien jerky sausage because he was mincemeat, dried out by the desert weather, and wrapped in a bulky pine-green parka. Although splattered with grime and gore it was sturdy and punctured by neither the sharp breaks of bone protruding from the man’s flesh nor the wheels of the car that had crushed him that way.

Sugarcoat gave a tug on the mat and noticed with a sigh that it was affixed to the car’s body by a seam leading to the vehicle’s backseats and that said seam led up to an impenetrable steel mesh between the trunk and the rest of the car. And the mat would have been perfect to lay over the hole in the window too, if not for its unhelpful position.

What to do?

A ray of sunlight glinted on a sliver of glass. It was about knife-sized and, since one edge of it had been attached to the window’s frame, it could be held safely at an angle.

The girl picked it up and marvelled at how the cracks lacing its length shone like gemstone stars. Again, she glanced over at the seam. Now it could be cut away and finally she could escape and hitchhike home.

Hopefully her father would be mad at Rarity and not at her.

Pressing the makeshift knife against the felt fabric was easy and soon it slid through the thread like it was a blue-tinted hand through grey muddy water. For some seconds she devoted her care to this, unwilling to make any mistakes lest the fragile knife fracture apart and leave her stranded again.

Five inches away from freedom, her hand halted. There started the man’s body, with a lake-sized bloodstain against the backs of the seats and atop the flooring.

To escape, she would need to touch him. Again.

Sugarcoat was surprised to find out that she would rather not die than do that. So, she did, gingerly tugging the corpse away from its resting place and laying him against the edge of the trunk and immediately brushing the grime on her hands off on a section of the flooring.

Kneeling down more than she already was, given the low ceiling of the trunk, gave her just enough space to work with.

And a heart-drumming moment later, the mat came loose with a tear more satisfying than any full meal or hot bath or anything else Sugarcoat planned to have once she got home.

It was then thrown over the window with a faint crunch and Sugarcoat hit the dirt a second later with a far louder thump.

After pushing herself to her feet, she stretched in the chill morning air. It was wintrier than she had ever remembered it being. The presence of the sea and the forests so close by should render Canterlot’s wilderness far warmer than this, Sugarcoat noted as she started down the cracked road.

Only a few steps down the winding length of ink-black tar and tawny white sand, Sugarcoat stopped. Again, she went still. It wasn’t the quietness that bothered her. She liked the quiet of calm spaces and early mornings.

But this quiet, this was not that tranquility.

This was the other type of quiet, a silence bursting at the welds with dread and terror. This was a quiet of fearful running and lurking predators.

And for that kind of quiet, Sugarcoat decided that being out here in the open, unarmed and afraid and wearing those ridiculously revealing clothes Sour Sweet had bought for her as a joke “if she ever decided to crawl out of her hole and live a little”, was likely a really bad idea.

Her legs were heavy like granite pillars. Her breathing was soft like a beaten mouse’s. Her body was unwilling to turn itself around, no matter how many times her mind commanded it. It was possessed by fear and she stayed bolted in place on the pothole-ridden tarmac as the fiery sun drifted listlessly by.

A minute passed.

All the clouds that could be drifting overhead right now had already rained their last and their waters had been eagerly lapped up by the starved mouths of desperate survivors while their hands made war for the remaining dregs.

A minute passed and Sugarcoat’s shoulders began to roast in the searchlight-strong light.

She sighed again, out all the air she had been holding captive within her burning lungs.

Rarity was long gone, wasn’t she?

Still, Sugarcoat had been wrong before.

She had been wrong about wearing these stupid clothes.

She had been wrong about going to that pointless party.

She had been wrong about trusting that evil bitch to drive her home.

With a groan, she spun on her heels and started back to the car. There, over the now-harmless broken window, she leaned in and retrieved the shotgun and the usable shard of glass. The latter she jabbed point downwards through a belt loop at the side of her hip. The former she carefully placed down beside the car’s bumper, resting its barrel in a dent. To her, it was to be treated like some magical artefact. In the right hands, it could be useful, an instrument of destruction for the wicked. In the wrong hands, it could only be an instrument of disaster.

Knowing her own instrumental talent about ended the second she stepped out of her garage and away from the beloved dirt bike she’d spent five years’ worth of allowance repairing from a junkyard scrapheap to a genuine work of mechanical artistry, Sugarcoat stared down at her own hands.

Both were calloused. One was still bleeding from a nick on her index finger. Below the nick and now wreathed in blood, like the liquid was just ruby ornamentation, was a ring. After the Friendship Games, at more Cadance’s behest than her own, Sunny Flare had made all the Shadowbolts one of them.

A friendship ring.

A set of rings for people who should have become friends.

But then Twilight transferred schools, and Lemon decided to put more time into her band and Indigo started taking her racing more seriously and, soon, only three of the once six still spoke with any frequency at all outside the classroom.

And Sugarcoat only tolerated Sour Sweet because Sunny liked her for reasons that Sugarcoat knew existed but never really understood past a shared affinity for fashion.

As far as she herself could tell, that girl did not need friends. Not now. What Sour Sweet needed most was a psychologist and possibly a good slap upside the head the next time she insulted Sugarcoat’s life choices.

Still, Sunny liked the outfit…

Pushing those memories from her mind, Sugarcoat clenched her fist. The blood squelched into her palm. She winced.

“I can do this,” she attempted to assure herself, “Rarity isn’t here. She’s gone back to messing around with Twilight by now. Probably. However, on the off chance she hasn’t gone to do that, she is definitely not hiding behind that rock waiting to taser me again.”

Before checking the rock, however, Sugarcoat picked up the shotgun. Unknowing whether hers were the right hands for it or not, she decreed that at least disaster ended badly for everyone involved and not just her, like the rest of her day had been going.

A second passed.

All the self-proclaimed fashionistas extraordinaire that could be hiding behind the rock right now had already moved on to more terrible things and their lips lecherously kissed the starved mouths of desperate survivors while their hands made love to their gaunt frames and their minds plotted new schemes and machinations.

A second passed and Sugarcoat sighed with relief and then winced and clasped herself as the wind’s howl scoured her bare arms and most of her legs with gravelly sand.

That sensation, like sandpaper against her raw skin, she had felt before while walking on a Dominican beach. It had preceded a hurricane.

Thanks to her father’s quick thinking, her family had survived unscathed. However, the same could not be said for their hotel room, and the holiday was cut brutally short two days in, the non-refundable damages setting back the progress on her dirt bike by a few months.

Gritting her teeth, Sugarcoat forced her legs to walk over to the car again and she forced her arms to reach into it and she forced her eyes not to look away as she pried the parka off the man’s corpse.

It came free like a plaster from an infected wound.

Sugarcoat shook it a few times, slapping the filthy fabric against the sandblasted rusty steel side of the car to dislodge from it all the… stuff that had gotten stuck within it.

Then she slipped it on, stuffed the shotgun into one of its deep pockets, put the shard of glass in the other one, after wrapping it in a length of torn mat, and she turned again to the road.

One minute and one second passed.

The corpse might have been disgusting but it was dead. It was harmless. The desert was the opposite.

Sugarcoat started down the road after that, in the direction of the skeletal skyscrapers barely peeking over the shadowed horizon, and a smile spread itself like silver-bracered jelly across her weary face.

“I did it,” she sighed with relief. “I’m not dead. I escaped.”

And she was correct.

Coming across the skeletonized corpse, its blackened strands of stringy flesh and shredded ribbons of torn clothing still hanging from its outstretched bones, Sugarcoat realized that she might not be so correct about being alive for much longer.

Tracing the path of the dead woman’s fingers with tear-laden eyes, Sugarcoat found that it crossed from the cracked chunks of broken road and onto the baby powder of the outskirt’s sand. Then she traced upwards and saw a billboard.

And on that billboard was an advertisement for brandy and cokes: Buy One Bottle of Viceroy and Get a Free Gallon of Vanilla Coke Today! While stocks last at your local Barnyard Bargains or any other participating store.

But the rampant consumerism was not what terrified the girl. That merely irked her. It was what was spray-painted atop that advertisement that sent shivers back into her spine and the grit into her clattering teeth.

Atop the billboard, in black paint sprayed by a clumsy hand, was a sign: A shaky outline skeletal three-peaked crown atop cursive script for the letters “S.L.”

Beneath that image and into the canvas of the billboard itself were carved the words, “SOMBRA’S LEGION.”

Glancing back down at the burnt-to-death corpse of the unlucky victim, Sugarcoat hissed in a breath and drew out from her parka the shotgun and she held it close as she walked, looking feverishly from side to side, any noise enough to snap her, and the gun, around to its creator. And disaster would follow.

But there was no noise apart from the gale’s screech and the tip tap of her footsteps against the neglected highway.

Not in the apocalypse anyhow…

2: There are no tacos

“For the last time, I admire your enthusiasm and all, but there are no more stupid tacos!”

“Buuuuuut you promised. You said we could check out the food court, Sour. You said there might be tacos there.”

Sour Sweet stopped her walk to shut her eyes and breathed deeply as she pinched the bridge of her nose with the hand not gripping her makeshift spear tightly. Beside her, Sonata Dusk pouted with arms crossed and lips pursed, a pair of camping hatchets strapped to her side and a kitchen’s worth of knives sheathed around her lithe frame.

The two survivors were scavengers and part of a camp some two dozen miles down the main highway. With rucksacks sagging with canned food and bottled water and thrifted knickknacks of varying degrees of uselessness, the two girls were on their way home from another successful sortie into the burned-out ruins of Canterlot City.

And Sonata would not shut up.

“I know I said that, Sonata, but that also means that there might not be tacos left! Come on, I know you’re smart so think about it, what kind of moron would fuck around baking tacos in a food court where people like us would go to steal food?”

Sonata turned to glare out over the scrubland that sprawled out down to a distant beach. “Technically,” she insisted, “we’re scavenging. To steal it, somebody alive would need to own it. So, we aren’t stealing anything really.”

“Technically, I don’t care. Let’s just keep walking, okay? Maybe if you ask Sugar Belle nicely again, she’ll bake you some once we get back?”

The baker’s name had Sonata perk up an inch.

“You think so?” she asked.

“Of course, Sonata. She’s probably forgotten how much you nag her about it in the week we’ve been away from home.”

“Seriously?”

“I mean, it is possible. It’s just as possible as finding fresh tacos in an abandoned shopping mall though.”

“You’re like Aria, you know? Except even meaner because she doesn’t pretend to be nice to people first. Sour,” she pointed at the redhead, “I don’t like you very much.”

Sour smiled to reveal a row of chipped teeth and chapped lips. “The feeling’s mutual!” she said, her voice as sweet as the stench of rotting fruit. “Now get walking.”

The white-brown sand dunes and dirt-grey patches of fallow fields never held a high population. Now, what little habitation they once fostered had become the torched skeletons of ruined farmhouses,the bare fields of looted farmlands and the picked-clean corpses of the farmers who died protecting what little was left after their crops began to fail and the riots broke out.

As she walked down the charcoal-dark stretch of tarmac, Sour wished that Cadance had partnered her with somebody else. At this point in time, when not even the blistering midday sun could make her feel warm again, she would take anyone else. Even the useless Sunny Flare was not an emotional vampire who was too oblivious to even realize how much she sucked the life out of everything she did.

She was just a loser these days.

Maybe that was why the dean-turned-camp-leader had appointed Sonata Dusk a scavenger, so that those watching the wounded and patrolling the perimeter and farming what little food would grow out here could do so without slipping into depression and missing a stitch or overlooking a scout or accidentally treading on a sapling?

Or maybe Sour was overthinking this.

After all, Sonata wished merely to sink her teeth into a tortilla shell stuffed with grilled chicken and guacamole and salsa and just a hint of chipotle pepper. She wished to do that and also find out where Adagio was right now and hit her in the face with her axe until she didn’t have a face anymore.

Simple wishes for a simple girl.

Against all odds, her childish frown soon lifted into her usual carefree grin and she skipped down the road and every clack of her heels was another nail driven into her partner’s skull.

Sour grimaced and her cracked nails gnawed into the fibreglass of the pole with a carving knife strapped to it, that which comprised her spear. Her teeth ground against eachother and, without the refreshment of water to smooth their grating journey, the noise produced nearly managed to drown out Sonata’s inane humming.

Nearly.

Notes and lines burst through like soldiers through a breached wall every so often and they did so with just enough unpredictability to derail whatever Sour’s train of thought happened to be at the time. After her fifth daydream of the day was snapped apart by that aggravating tune, Sour picked up her pace a few steps. Now there was enough distance between the pair to let the desert’s wind blow away any tunes the former Siren tried, and failed, to sing.

And so, the two girls walked in relative silence and their footsteps echoed through the empty plains. Or, rather, Sour’s did. Nearly an hour had gone by before her lifted spirits almost began to long for something to be angry at.

Her head spun around like a whip crack. A few hundred yards down the road, the girl spotted her partner standing at attention with a pair of binoculars pressed to a set of eyes that looked perpetually on the verge of tears, joyous or otherwise, despite the desiccating dryness that plagued them. Sour hissed in a breath and turned to collect her and the steel toes of her boots stamped loudly against the dusty road as she marched over to her scatter-brained partner.

But she was not loud enough.

Not loud enough to snap her out of her stare.

Not loud enough to alert her to the figure approaching from behind who brandished a wicked blood stained dagger in one hand and a loaded lever action in the other.

Not nearly enough.

“Sonata! Turn around, you moron!” Sour screamed.

Normally supple and graceful beyond what any human could be expected to be now, Sonata suddenly went stiff. The binoculars slid from her grasp. They cracked against a rock and a lens shattered in the same second within which Sonata twirled around to pin a pair of blades at the hitchhiker’s throat.

A shard of glass and a shotgun joined the broken binoculars on the ground as Sugarcoat raised a quivering pair of parka-sleeved arms up to the scorching sun above.

“Who are you and what have you done with Aria Blaze?” Sonata threatened, each word heavy with anger that was rehearsed daily yet spontaneous every time.

Sugarcoat gulped down the lump in her throat.

The response did not satisfy. It never did.

Thus, the rusted axe heads were pressed another few hairs into her neck and Sugarcoat’s eyes were now wider than satellite dishes with fright. Blood began to trickle from her broken skin for the second time today. Fresh and warm and bright crimson, it slithered down the rusty red gunk on the Siren’s weapons like the sweat down Sugarcoat’s back.

“Well, Pigtails? You know, right? And I know you know and you know that I know you know. So, cough it up,” Sonata demanded, before grinning hungrily, “Ideally, like, before I turn you into firewood, please?”

She only shivered and found even that to be a bad idea. Every minute shift of her skin and twitch in her flesh brought her head millimetres closer to rolling off her shoulders.

And Sugarcoat did not want to die.

Not now.

“I don’t know,” she insisted, “the same things that you don’t know. I just don’t know who you’re talking about!”

Sonata never expected that reply. “Huh,” she said, withdrawing her axes, resting her chin on one hand as her other twirled its weapon in a rough circle.

She peered at Sugarcoat. Her hair hanging in grimy tangles around her shoulders, face and hands smeared with coffin mud brewed from saltwater tears and rusty gore, jacket hanging off her like a crocodile-green funeral shroud, she looked like she crawled out of an open grave.

That was incorrect because Sugarcoat jumped out.

The next time, however, she would actually crawl.

But Sonata had no possible way of predicting that. Instead, she narrowed her eyes down from rounded walnuts to almond slivers as she glared at the lost girl.

“Are you sure?” she asked, enunciating each word like a lyric to a magic spell.

“Yes! I have no idea who Aria even is, let alone why you think I killed her,” Sugarcoat replied.

“Then… like, I haven’t seen you around before and I think I’ve met pretty much everyone who I don’t wanna kill so… who are you again?”

“Sugarcoat,” said Sour Sweet, planting her spear in a crack in the ground, resting on it lightly as she caught her breath. It curved like a drawn-out longbow as she pressed her weight onto it. It curved like the bow currently slung across her back.

“No, silly,” Sonata turned to her partner, “you’re Sour Sweet, the world’s biggest meanie. I’m asking who this one is.”

“She’s right, actually. My name is Sugarcoat. I escaped from a police car a few miles up the road. I’m trying to get back to the city so I can find my parents. And, seeing as neither of you want to kill me now, could I borrow a phone to call whoever picks up first, either them or the police?”

Sour looked at her old acquaintance. As did Sonata. Not being a chameleon, the white-haired girl was incapable of staring both of them down at once and, as such, she decided to focus her gaze on Sour.

A Mexican standoff ensued, with confused and nervous laughter being the bullets awaiting a hammer’s fall.

She looked like a mess, Sugarcoat noted. In fact, she looked even worse than she herself did today, with yellow skin that was now more jaundiced than saffron and cut and slashed through by multiple scars and stitches. Her teeth were filthy and her mismatched and dust-browned clothes looked more like a mummy’s rags than anything the well-off teen would normally ever choose to wear.

But surviving the apocalypse is the opposite of normal living.

And normal was also not the way the survivor’s eyes twitched and her knotted cherry-red ponytail flicked and lashed in wind that had turned to blow in the opposite direction.

Sonata, meanwhile, grinned. Her hair had always done that and she chalked it up to the upsides of being a vampire seahorse from another dimension.

“I get it!” she announced and pointed at Sugarcoat, “you’re some kind of zombie clown!”

“No?” Sugarcoat blinked a few times. “I’m not a comedian and I’m certainly not dead and I definitely don’t want to be either. So, can you tell me what’s happening here. Why are you… dressed like that, Sour Sweet?”

“Well, for starters, our dear friend Sunny isn’t dead. But she really sucks at repairing clothes! Also, I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you and all, but there isn’t any cell reception and there hasn’t been since the world ended and there aren’t any more cops either!”

“And there also aren’t any tacos,” Sonata added in a tone graver than the coffin Sugarcoat had just escaped.

In response, Sugarcoat blinked again. Them being miraculously intact, she then took off her glasses and considered wiping them on the collar of her parka. Squinting at the parka, she considered against it and brushed their dust off of them and onto the red cotton fabric of her crop top instead. Then she put her glasses back on and stared at the two survivors.

“What.” Sugarcoat proceeded to say.

“Duh,” said Sonata like this was the most obvious concept in the history of ever, which it was not, “like, the Apocalypse. The Reckoning. The Big End of All Things. You know, the bit that happens so that we can all be here now and have this really weird conversation. That end of the world.”

“What?”

Sour sighed. “I’m super surprised you’re having trouble with this one, Sugarcoat but I’m also surprised you were living under a rock for the past three years!”

“What!”

This was going to be a painfully long day, Sour discovered as her hand clenched the spear again. “Civilization collapsed three years ago. Loads of people died. Nukes were dropped. Plagues happened. How did you miss all that?”

Looking around, suddenly the ruined pylons and sacked homesteads and crashed cars she passed made sense. The graffiti she saw was crystal clear now. As was the corpse stretched out below it.

She felt something crack like a diamond would if bashed against a brick wall of unwavering and nightmarish understanding. The world she saw slipped up as her eyes rolled back in her skull, slipping further away into black as her aching legs gave out beneath her.

Sugarcoat fainted.

“Well isn’t that lovely,” Sour sneered, “our reunion gets cut short by you up and dying on us!”

Sonata checked her pulse, running her webbed fingers over the unconscious girl’s neck and ignoring the bloody gills she had carved into it minutes before. Up she looked and she grinned earnestly at her partner.

“Well?” Sour asked, “Is she just taking a nap or do we have to lug her good-for-nothing corpse back home too?”

“Nah, she’ll be fine. Probably. Probably lost, like, a few brain cells bashing her head on the ground but yeah, Sugar’s gonna be okay,” Sonata replied.

“I guess brain damage can’t be that bad then, she always was too smart for her own good anyway,” Sour grumbled as her mind wandered back to the multiple times her acquaintance had been shoved into a locker or half-drowned in a toilet or just beaten up for saying the right thing to the wrong person.

Sour smiled and, for the first time in five days, she was not being sarcastic.

“Soooo, like, we gonna pick her up or what?” Sonata asked.

“If she’s okay, she’ll get up on her own, right?”

“Yeah, but she might not get up before the trucks pulp her.”

“What trucks?”

“Those trucks!” Sonata grinned, pointing out into the distance where a convoy of black-painting vehicles rumbled down the path the pair had walked down a day earlier. “What do you think I was looking at earlier, dummy?”

Gulping, Sour turned to Sugarcoat and knelt down to grasp her hands. Sonata did the same for her feet and soon the trio was safely out of view behind a jut of sandstone rock.

After that, Sour rushed back to collect the binoculars. While doing so, she spotted Sugarcoat’s gun and grabbed that too.

Not all surviving people were content to scavenge the ruins of their former homes and workplaces and very lives in search of meagre rations and workable supplies. Some turned to banditry instead, among far darker pursuits.

Although she preferred to stick to the bow and arrow that had won her the State Archery Championship three years in a row, even she recognized the use of a working firearm, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

But it was not always useful enough.

Not useful enough to weigh her down every day.

Not useful enough to be worth carrying when it only had seven shots to shoot and there were eight bandits intent on tearing apart your entire family that needed shooting.

Not nearly enough.

But Sour took it and the knife anyway and she hurried back to where Sonata and Sugarcoat were hidden and she found the former splashing priceless water on the latter’s face.

It turned out that the gun had more uses than the freckled girl thought after a single second of her observing Sonata’s fecklessness. For instance, the butt of a Winchester makes an excellent club.

“What the heck was that for, you big bully?” Sonata screeched, clasping the bruise on her arm, “That really hurt!”

Sour ignored her, instead walking over to the discarded bottle beside her and crouching to pick it up. Raising it to the light, she found with a frustrated groan that only a third of its precious albeit muddy liquid remained.

“Sonata, I know it was really nice of you to try wake our friend up,” Sour said, her saccharine voice dripping with rage, “but can you do it without wasting the water I had to kill a guy to get? Please?”

The former siren’s shoulders sank beneath her patched and torn coat. Away she sniffed her brewing tears. “I was just trying to help you out,” she whined.

“Who is helping who here?” Sugarcoat asked, sitting up, rubbing the back of her skull.

“Oh good, you’re alive! Now are you going to ask any more stupid questions, Sugarcoat?”

“I don’t plan on it, no. But I would still actually appreciate one of you telling me how the world happened to end in the span of the day I was locked in a police car’s trunk.”

“Why were you locked in that? Did you piss of a cop? I did that once and he arrested me for miscegenation,” Sonata said, “Man, South Africa was insane during the 70s. Now was that the 1870s or the 1970s? I forget.”

“Rarity did it,” Sugarcoat explained.

Sour choked on the dregs of the water before bursting into a hacking cough and splattering her drink across Sugarcoat’s confused face.

With an already-filthy sleeve, she wiped the spit off and then she repeated her explanation, “Rarity did it. She tricked me into getting into a car with her and then she drove here, showed me the corpse stuffed into the cruiser and then tasered me and stuffed me in the trunk on top of him.”

“The heck did you do to make one of Sombra’s generals so mad with you? Did you, like, look at her funny?” Sonata asked, “Piss in her cereal maybe? Call her dress stupid?”

“Sombra’s general?” Sugarcoat asked, before turning to Sour, “Sombra, our gym coach? He has an army now?”

Sour shrugged nervously. “Yes, that Sombra totally has an army that regularly kidnaps and eats people, Sugarcoat. Whose cars do you think we’re hiding from?”

A minute passed. Sugarcoat retrieved her shotgun. Sonata started humming. Sour stared furiously at the fellow Shadowbolt. In response, Sugarcoat nervously zipped up her parka before clearing some of the sand out of her parched throat with a cough.

“And this army would be what, a legion?”

Sonata nodded, “Sure is, Sugar.”

“Please don’t call me that. Anyway, Rarity Belle is a general in this army he raised in the day I was locked in a car? And, during that time, the world also ended and nearly everyone… died?” Sugarcoat asked, her regular dismissive glare and dull monotone rapidly shifting into a confused grimace and a tone that shook like an earthquake.

Sugarcoat did not want to die.

And the existence of an army of cannibalistic bandits who seemed to have the only working vehicles she’d seen thus far was probably going to make staying alive difficult.

“Yup!” Sonata nodded, “Except, like, it was three years. Not a day. I would be super impressed if he did that all in one day.”

“Three years. I spent three years in a car? How have I not starved to death by now then?”

Sour shrugged. “Eh, because magic?”

“Magic isn’t real,” Sugarcoat said reflexively.

Both of the other girls stared at her. Sonata spoke first, “Sugar, I’m a siren. Or at least, I was. Before I… uh… tasted the rainbow. And no, that’s not a euphemism. Unfortunately. I got zapped with real-life magic. It really stings, you know.”

“And, Sugarcoat, you do remember the Friendship Games, right? We nearly fell through the universe and Twilight Sparkle of all people turned into a monster!”

Sugarcoat had tried to forget that. She failed to do so. And then, as the convoy of mismatched and jury-rigged vehicles rumbled by with grey-uniformed hooligans hanging from the sides, brandishing rifles and swords, spears and crossbows, nets and slingshots, and cheering war-cries and promising atrocities, the teenager moaned in despair.

Sonata patted her on the back and was deeply surprised to find the grey girl didn’t slap her hand away. “Sorry you had to find out like this,” she said.

“This is all a nightmare,” Sugarcoat muttered as she curled into the foetal position and stared down at her feet.

“Again, super sorry but this is real life, not just fantasy. Getting trapped in a dream once, I’d know.” Sonata then twirled a lock of her ponytail, “Or was it a landslide? Might’ve been a landslide actually. Whole break from reality and all.”

Sugarcoat sniffed a little.

“So, like, the best advice I can really give is just to keep your head up. Stuff will be crazy for a while but that’s okay. Don’t give up, and keep walking. Find something new you like doing and do that. That’s what my sisters and I did after we got exiled. And let me tell you, at least the people now still look like people for you! They sure didn’t for us,” Sonata continued.

“Alright?” Sugarcoat sighed.

“That’s the spirit, now get your butt off the ground because we’ve gotta warn the camp!” Sour ordered, hopping to her feet the second the last truck had passed her.

“What?” Sugarcoat asked, “Warn who?”

“The camp, Sugar. The people we, like, live and sleep and eat with. Because, just between you and me,” Sonata then whispered, “I don’t think Sombra’s Legion is exactly visiting because they like the scenery.”

“Namely because the scenery sucks,” Sour said as she rummaged in her bags for something useful.

“Use this,” Sugarcoat mumbled a minute later and she handed her former classmate the shard of glass she took from the car, “You can reflect light off it like a mirror to send a signal to your people. That is, if you can see them from here. It might let them know before those trucks arrive and give them some more time to prepare for a fight. I think.”

Sour raised the glass to the sky and angled it so that it reflected a sunray down onto a nearby chunk of sandstone. She smiled before taking the binoculars and starting off for a nearby hill.

As her partner did so, Sonata turned to Sugarcoat. “Wow, that was some real quick thinking there, Sugar.”

“Don’t call me that,” Sugarcoat replied, “And I’ve got no idea whether or not that’ll even help. I just read it in a book once.”

Sonata shrugged. After looking around for a second or two and spotting that Sour was far out of earshot by now, she slipped a pair of cans out of a canvas pocket of her rucksack. One of the beers she tossed to Sugarcoat who fumbled the catch and dropped the can. The other she cracked open and took a long sip from before turning back to the girl.

“What?” she asked, “Not thirsty?”

“No, I am,” Sugarcoat replied as she handed the can back, shivering as her hand brushed against the siren’s, “but I don’t drink and you shouldn’t either if water’s so scarce now. It’ll only make you more dehydrated.”

In response, Sonata stretched out against a rock and laid her head atop it like it was a duck-down pillow. “Like, did you read that in a book too?” she grinned.

“I read it in The Koran, actually. That wasn’t the reason dictated in it, but it makes sense given the Quraish’s circumstances as nomads in the Arabian Desert at the time,” Sugarcoat responded, a hint of her usual monotone creeping back into her otherwise shaken voice.

“Nifty,” Sonata replied.

“I’ve always been good at memorizing things and turning them into advice. Not that people always took that advice well, but I at least tried to be helpful. It’s better than standing by and expecting somebody else to fix everything.”

“Yeah,” the former siren took another sip of the stout, “that’s a really good distraction actually, helping others. But that’s life, you know. You just try to ignore the nasty stuff and, like, sometimes you do.”

“That means sometimes you don’t. What if Sour can’t get a message to her people in time? What then?”

“Then I’ll live like I lived for a thousand years, silly. Just one foot in front of the other, just one day at a time. No worries, no problems, no obligations past my own sisters. You should try it sometime, Sugar. Lighten up a bit.”

“You just told me my parents are dead.”

“Nuh-uh. I implied that. I got no clue what happened to them or who they even are.”

“That doesn’t make it any better and you shouldn’t say that it does. I’m still stuck in this nightmare even if they’re okay but now I’m worried about them getting hurt,” Sugarcoat replied.

And with that she exhaled a long breath and turned to stare out into the desert. The rolling sands reminded her of a bowl of flour with grains of it being blown up and around by some invisible giant’s mouth. A single human spot grew in size on the horizon, like a chunk of dried honey in the mix, and soon Sour had returned to the pair and she was panting slightly and glaring furiously.

“Those,” Sour growled, “were the reinforcements.”

Sonata dropped her beer and the dark liquid quickly disappeared, half soaking into the bone-dry dust and half evaporating into the dust-dry air.

“That’s… not good,” she understated.

“This is bad,” Sugarcoat agreed, “Really. Really bad.”

“Yeah, it certainly isn’t sunshine and rainbows. Namely because it’s an army of cannibal shitheads attacking our town!”

Sonata picked up the can and held it with both hands. Despite the heat, their bluish tint seemed more from frostbite than natural genetics. She took another sip before crumpling up the finished can and throwing it at a nearby boulder.

“What do we do, Sour?” she then asked.

“What can we do?” Sugarcoat added.

“Nothing. Not this far away unless we want them to jack us too. We’re fucked,” Sour declared, collapsing down beside the other two girls and returning Sugarcoat’s knife to her.

That she took and she stared into the spiderweb cracks that ran through it. Each of them made a little reflection of her face and none of them were smiling.

“One day at a time,” Sonata mumbled, her eyes screwed shut.

“Just hope Shining Armor and the rest of the fighters can win this one,” Sour added, “because it’d really suck if we all died.”

3: My friends are losers

For hours the trio walked. Sour had recalled passing an abandoned filling station on her way to the city and, since it was out of the way of the path Sombra’s Legion took, she decided that it would make for serviceable shelter that night.

Mostly Sonata talked. Both of the former Shadowbolts were too drained emotionally to mutter any responses to the other survivor’s rambling and so they walked, dumbstruck and staring with wide eyes and breathing with shallow breaths as one foot stepped in front of the other.

Sugarcoat had trouble believing it. Only now, in the relative tranquillity of the march did she realize how bad things actually were. This was not a holiday. This was not a dream. This was reality now and was a nightmare.

There was no returning home because, judging from the way people lived now, her home had been burnt to the ground. There was no relaxing bath and cup of tea either. Water seemed to be too rare to waste on such luxuries, if the smell of her newfound companions was anything to go by. And there were not even going to be any breaks either. That Sour had decreed. It was too dangerous to stop and rest beside the road while bandits prowled the land.

And so Sugarcoat trudged along. Exhausted on all levels, it took what little strength she had left to simply will her legs to move. She was too empty to cry anymore and thinking of the shattered skyscrapers on the city’s skyline merely filled her with dread. They looked like coal-black vultures busy picking at the bones of everyone who lay within their broken limits.

Sugarcoat would rather be empty of tears than full to bursting with paralyzing fear and regret and confusion.

Eventually, Sour stopped. As did Sugarcoat, who was all too relieved to finally stop moving. All parts of her hurt and parts of her she that she did not know could hurt, ached.

Sonata, oblivious, was yanked back into reality by Sour’s fist clamping itself on the scruff of her collar and tugging sharply.

“Ack!” she gurgled as the cloth cut into her neck. “Ouch!” she then yelped as her footing lost itself atop the grey road’s gravel and she thumped to the ground.

“If you haven’t noticed Sonata, you nearly missed the turn off! We’d have to circle and fetch your idiotic ass then and to be perfectly honest, I’d rather not stick my neck for you because some crazed fuck might try and hack it off.”

“Yeah, but still, you meanie,” Sonata whined as she climbed to her feet, rubbing her butt in pain, “you could’ve just told me.”

“She’s right, Sour,” Sugarcoat added, “that was pretty cruel.”

“Oh, so now you’ve come to moralize at me, Sugarcoat? When you’ve seen your entire family die before your eyes, feel free to continue that lecture!” then Sour smiled and she did so like she was a chimp psyching itself up for a war, “But since you got lucky enough to forget the end of the world, kindly shut up and let me do my job, please?”

Sugarcoat stood her ground. This was the apocalypse but it did not have to be a violent hell populated by berserk assholes. She crossed her arms and stared at Sour. “You’ll catch more flies with honey, you know.”

“Like you’d know about honey. Didn’t Lemon burst into tears after you insulted her singing?”

“There’s a difference between being honest and being cruel. Nobody should have to deal with cruelty. Everyone should be able to deal with honesty.”

“That’s super cute and all, girls, but I think Sour’s right. We probably should get going,” Sonata said, pointing back up the hillside they had spent the last hour hiking down. There was another truck rumbling down it, complete with raiders clinging to the side like embittered Cossack raiders to their horses. Only Cossacks sometimes took mercy on their victims.

Sombra’s Legion did not take mercy. They took prisoners.

Sugarcoat gulped. Sour winced and she winced again upon seeing the man trussed to the undercarriage of the semi like a keelhauled pirate. Sonata grabbed both girls and shoved them behind a boulder.

The solitary reinforcement growled passed the girls. Although it had seen better days, better years for that matter, and what visible metal there was seemed to be mostly rust. It still intimidated the trio with its whimpering prisoners, hooting riders, and wicked sigils and insignias engraved into its side. Heavy, and carrying a shipping container on its flatbed, it shook the loose stones and dust from the road and those gave a new percussive dimension to the explicit war songs sung by the legionnaires piloting it.

It left a trail of unease in its wake. Sour hopped up first and immediately started back down the offramp towards the gas station. The others quickly followed, with Sugarcoat sparing one last glance down at the war machine.

They arrived at the dilapidated station two hours later. By then, the sun had set and the way was illuminated by the dim torch Sour held in her shaking hand. Only then did Sugarcoat feel truly grateful that she’d stolen the parka. Without it, the cold would quickly remove all differences between her and the mummified skeleton she just passed.

Again, the grisly sight brought bile to her throat. However, this time, she avoided retching. Having eaten nothing the whole day and having drunk nothing but a few bitter sips of polluted water, she had nothing to actually expel.

Sonata still sang, but now she did so in hushed tones and her lyrics grew softer and softer as the shadows around grew taller and hungrier. Her hands stayed clasped at her sides, at the handles of her axes while her eyes stayed large and constantly darted about the desert road.

Only Sour remained stable and, even then, she felt colder than ice in the chill night. And that ice was beginning to crack.

But then they arrived at the filling station. It hulked a mammoth’s half-eaten shadow around the rest of the landscape and its sharp form, like an overturned and rectangular black baseball cap, stuck out from the surrounding soft sand and weathered stones.

“Finally,” Sour sighed, her shoulders drooping.

“Did you forget where it was?” Sugarcoat asked.

“No, Sugarcoat, of course not. It just took ages to get here and I’m happy I can finally eat and shit and sleep without some psycho trying to knife me. That’s why I said what I did,” Sour replied, swinging around her torch like a battle axe.

“Well then, let’s eat, girls!” Sonata cheered, skipping towards the shelter. Once there, she began to loot the remains of the convenience store. Although long-since deprived of any edible stock, the neglected building had ample wrappers to kindle. Adding a few chunks of barbeque charcoal from her rucksack to the pile of garbage and placing it all within a stray hubcap, Sonata soon had a campfire crackling.

Once the fire both lit and warmed the wintry surroundings back into something habitable, Sour shut off her torch and started over to it, shrugging off her rucksack and taking a seat on the patched and worn canvas bag.

Lacking a rucksack of her own, Sugarcoat tugged over a nearby jerry can and rested on that.

Dinner was two cans of tinned ravioli. Sonata split hers with Sugarcoat, who said grace before eating it. Both of the other girls glared at her. She finished the prayer quietly and quickly and then set about eating the rapidly-congealing pasta and avoiding conversation with Sour while Sonata took watch.

Unsurprisingly, the no-name brand ready-to-eat meal tasted awful. The tomato sauce could have been red paint and the globs of toxic orange pasta floating within it were no better. While the vile sauce was scalding her tongue, the ice-hard and stone-cold meat within the pasta envelopes nearly cracked her teeth. Still, Sugarcoat could not help but shovel down the meal and only stopped when her borrowed fork scraped against the bottom of the can.

She stared down. There was barely a third left. Better than nothing? Worse than nearly anything else. While Sour was content to ignore her and scribble down the day’s shortcomings in her journal, Sugarcoat stood up and followed to where Sonata sat on a ledge and swung her legs slowly over the concrete cliff-face that separated the station from an eight foot drop down to the desert below.

“I brought you the rest of the food,” Sugarcoat said, handing her the can.

“Keep it,” Sonata muttered, “you need it more than I do.”

“Are you sure? I’ve eaten regularly the last few years. I think, anyway. Magical interference notwithstanding. You, however, look like a skeleton and I think I’ve seen enough of those for one day,” she replied, setting the tin down next to her.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re lying. I saw how eager you were to eat earlier.”

“I changed my mind, okay?” Sonata shot back, “I can take care of myself, Aria.”

Sugarcoat started. Sonata cut her off. “I mean, Sugarcoat. I can take care of myself, Sugarcoat. Don’t worry about me, alright? I’ve always been okay.”

“I’m trying to be generous. But if you insist, I’ll finish it,” Sugarcoat said, picking up the can and taking another bite of the ravioli. To prove she was enjoying it, which she wasn’t, she smiled. Sonata turned to staring out and back into her own memories.

Her own regrets.

Sugarcoat returned to the filling station and ate the remains of the food. There she found Sour setting down two bedrolls.

“What was that you were writing earlier, poetry?” Sugarcoat guessed as Sour coerced a sleeping bag out of its position strapped to the underside of her rucksack.

“Oh, how kind of you take an interest in my life. I don’t appreciate it and its none of your business,” she hissed.

“Fine. I guess wanting to have a conversation with somebody who didn’t hate my guts or mistake me for her dead sister was too much to ask, after all.”

“Considering I already fed you and stopped Sonata trying to kill you, yeah. Yes, it is. Now either help or get out of my way.”

“What can I do to help then? I’d rather be useful at least, especially if you’re kind enough to share your supplies.”

Sour looked up, grinning. “Aww, how considerate. You can be useful by staying out of my way and thinking up an idea of how to kill an entire army, since thinking’s all you’re good for anyway.”

Sugarcoat tried to respond but found that the words required to do so either had died along with the rest of her life or would need her to lie.

“Exactly. Like. That,” Sour sneered.

“Who hurt you?”

“Fuck off, Sugar.”

Again, Sugarcoat held her ground. If being an idiot willing to take somebody, namely Rarity, at face value had gotten her into this situation, perhaps not being an idiot and digging deeper into somebody’s, namely Sour Sweet’s, story might get her out of it?

“I’m honestly asking here. I know we’ve never gotten along that well but I’d like to start and I’d like to actually make a difference. And that’s not going to happen if you want to treat me like I’m not even here. So, I’m asking, why are you doing this? Who hurt you?” she repeated.

Sour stood up. Her hands were stiff and they itched to slap those stupid glasses off her old classmate’s stony face. But then she realized something. Sugarcoat was a creature of logic. And nothing shorted out logic better than incomprehensible emotions, genuine or faked.

“Santa Claus did.”

“Santa Claus? You know he isn’t act-”

“Goodnight, Sugarcoat. Sleep well.”

Sugarcoat did not sleep well that night. Nobody did. She shifted back and forth uncomfortably in the sleeping bag Sour had loaned her. The chill bit at her skin and the grimy fabric of the blankets scratched it raw. Her head throbbed from her earlier fall and so did her arm from firing the shotgun.

A mosquito landed on her exposed hand. Frowning, she took a minute to muster the strength to brush it away. Anticipating the swipe, the bug flew off to bother one of her companions instead. Just as mosquitos whined in her ears so did questions buzz in her mind.

Turning over, she again spotted the campfire crackling a few yards away. Against the midnight-black canvas of the desert evening, the flames glowed brightly and lit up just enough of the world to let Sugarcoat despair at what she saw.

Although it was blurry until she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and put on her glasses, the husk of the gas station was still the most unwelcoming sight the girl had ever seen. Graffiti coated all available surfaces. Others were unavailable because they had been desecrated in different ways and had names and swears carved into them or were burned to charcoal and scorched brick or were smashed to rubble and swamped with beachside sand blown in from the poisoned shores by a scouring wind’s howl.

She rolled over again and stared out the doorway of the convenience store she and Sonata rested in. Outside, Sour Sweet paced back and forth in a relentless patrol, first around the sputtering stack of flaming cardboard and then around the station itself, bow in hand and the cracked binoculars swinging from a makeshift string lanyard around her neck.

She sighed.

Why did this have to happen to her?

Why did this have to happen today?

Why did this have to happen at all?

Another sigh. Sugarcoat gave up on getting any sleep. The second she closed her eyes her mind would flood with images of the dead corpses she saw and with such twisted and broken things polluting her imagination it became no mystery as to why even the dismal decay of the world around her was preferable to entering another layer of nightmares.

Beside her, and laid out across the doorway of the store with her loose hair pooling like indigo crude oil dangerously close the fire, Sonata snored.

She snored loudly, but so did Sugarcoat’s mother. The guttural breathing was a sound that reminded the sleepless girl of poutine. Just like the Canadian delicacy was vile and poisonous, so was the jarring noise of another’s snoring. But if tolerating it is the only choice available if one wants to be fed, or rested, it becomes a choice one begrudgingly learns to take.

A minute passed.

Sugarcoat continued to stare resting her chin on her hands out at the barren wilderness beyond the relative haven of the dilapidated station. Her eyelids weighed tons but the fear of a reunion with death gave her the strength to lift them back up every time she was forced to blink.

A minute passed and Sour walked by.

In promising to take first watch that evening, she had found an excuse to avoid any more awkward conversation with her old classmate. Sour had found an excuse not to list out the names of those mutually known to the two. The names of those she had seen torn to pieces by those who had been corrupted by the grim circumstances the world had sunk to.

She had found an excuse to avoid giving the reasons why she had, for the five years that they’d known each-other, never really been sincere about anything.

Sugarcoat’s gaze wandered around the store. There was nothing on the shelves except litter and filth. A drinks fridge against a wall had been tugged down and now glass glinted in a corona around the broken appliance like a lake of knives. In the opposite corner, the till had been ransacked and pennies lay scattered about the dusty floor tiles. Some lay wedged in cracks vertically like miniature sunrises, promising only another day of blistering warmth and choking drought.

Again, she sighed and she longed for the comfort of her own bed, a hundred miles away and locked behind the security gate of an otherwise unremarkable suburban home. Probably, anyhow. At least, it should be. Nowadays though, should seemed to mean nothing at all.

Her stomach growled from emptiness. One can of ravioli did not the day’s three square meals make. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh in the cold. Her eyes brewed more tears that felt like ice against her cheeks and those tears pattered the sleeping bag’s ragged fabric like hailstones.

A minute passed and Sour walked by and Sonata snored like she had a warthog up her nose.

Every time she did it spiked another prick of irritation into Sugarcoat’s brain. It could be lived with certainly but, then again, despite spending two weeks at that Newfoundland summer camp she had never learned to enjoy poutine either. But that was not what worried her. Sleeping in the same room as somebody else was merely annoying.

Sonata breathed in and breathed out and muttered indecipherable lyrics all the while. And in doing so, she always inched closer and closer to the burning stack of paper stuffed inside the rusted hubcap.

Sugarcoat stared at her. Sour ignored her and kept up her patrol. If Sombra’s Legion was in this area to stay, if they had claimed her home as part of their ever-growing empire, if they were willing to kill or worse at a moment’s notice, then caution needed to be advised.

Arrow in one hand, compound in the other, she continued to march around the stretch of battered concrete. Each crackle and hiss of the campfire she herself started was a footstep and a cocked hammer she would need to deal with. Her head spun like a loose nut on a greased bolt.

Maybe she should have called for a new shift by now?

No. Sonata was a moron. She could get distracted with one of her stupid stories or she might trip over her two left feet or she may simply fall asleep without waking Sour for her next shift.

And Sugarcoat was in no condition to do anything right now.

She had barely come to terms with the apocalypse. Forcing her into guard duty while she could barely muster an emotion that was not sorrow would end in disaster.

Preferring to muster a combination of disgust and anger then misery, Sour insisted on trusting only herself. It had kept her alive. It had not kept her brother alive, but he had been weak.

Too weak for this world.

While Sour thought herself to be strong.

Sonata snored again and unconsciously inched ever closer to the fire with Aria’s name on her lips.

Aria had been strong. But Adagio had been smart.

And Sonata thought she was neither of those things.

Sugarcoat reached a hand over and brushed her friend’s face with it. As soon as her fingertips touched the outcast’s freezing flesh, Sonata awoke. Her eyes flew open and she shot up like a firework rocket was lit beneath her pillow.

For a few seconds, she panted. Her chest rose and fell like tidal waves as she scanned the ruins surrounding her. Eventually, her gaze came to rest on Sugarcoat, who lay next to her.

“Why’s it still dark, Sugar?” she whispered.

“It is dark because it’s night time,” Sugarcoat replied, “and don’t call me that. That was my father’s name.”

Sonata giggled. “Phray-sing,” she said in a singsong tone.

“You shouldn’t sleep so close to the fire if you move in your sleep. I don’t think Sour would want me to use the water to put you out.”

She stared behind her, at the fire smoking half a foot away from where her head had been lying atop a bundled-up hoodie. “Don’t be silly, that’s what sand is for.”

Sugarcoat blinked.

“If you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a spade. And you’re in a nylon sleeping bag. You’d be incinerated before you had a chance to put yourself out.”

“Oh yeah. Kinda lucky you saved me now, huh? And since Aria’s…” her chipped grin then melted but, as quickly as it did, it reformed, “I guess I owe you my life now!”

Sugarcoat eased herself up. There was no point in sleeping anymore, not with the talkative Sonata awake and the dawn breaking in tints of slate blue and jaundice gold on the horizon. Out she climbed from the flea-bitten sleeping bag and she stood up, stretching with her hands against the parka’s material above her hips.

“So… don’t ask me to do anything stupid, okay? I mean, this one time I, like, got covered in coal fire and had to fight in this crazy arena with a bunch of other teenagers,” Sonata said, before grimacing for effect.

“That didn’t happen to you. That was the plot of The Hunger Games, Sonata.”

“Oh. I thought it did,” she said, scratching her neck, “but, like, still. Be nice. Siren Code and all.”

“You don’t owe me anything. It was just the right thing to do. Besides, nobody owns you. Except God.”

Sonata huffed and rolled her eyes. “Like I haven’t been stoned to death over that one before.”

“You’ve been stoned… to death?”

“I mean, I once got so stoned I was sick but that was a really different kind of stoning. And, I mean, hasn’t everyone?”

“No,” said Sugarcoat.

Sonata sat up to shrug. “Guess it was just me then. That’s where atheism gets you in this world. That flirting with the Emperor’s wife anyway. Was she his wife? Might’ve been is mother actually. Total hottie either way.”

For once, Sugarcoat had no idea of what to say. “Uh,” she mumbled as her mind tried to conflate Sonata the Immortal Siren with Sonata the Utter Ditz.

“Yeah. It rocked. Well, not really. Kinda… kinda hurt. Luckily I got knocked out soon and Aria fetched me so I could regenerate in peace.”

“… Regenerate?”

“That’s what I said! Back when we were immortal, we meant like properly immortal. So yeah, you can see, right? Why I don’t exactly buy your God being real?”

“He’s not my God. He’s everyone’s God.”

“And when I see this mysterious man, I’ll believe it.”

“Fine then. Go do that. If you excuse me, I’m going to ask Sour what her plan is. Because, if you’ve forgotten which you probably have, your home is being attacked by barbarians,” Sugarcoat said, leaving the store and starting over to where Sour stood and watched the landscape decay.

Out of the cover of the scorched walls and cracked brickwork, the wind slapped Sugarcoat like a sandpaper fist. In response, she flipped up the hood of her parka and steeled her nerves as best she could before walking over to Sour.

The girl stood at the edge of the concrete platform at a crumbled spot inches away from where the establishment gave in to the dust and the dirt yards below. The railing she leaned her elbows on was rusted and creaked beneath the weight.

Sour muttered curses under her breath as she stared out through the binoculars at the flames of war in the distance.

A second passed.

“Bastards. Shitheads. Dickholes. Can’t leave me alone, can you Dusty? Just have to ruin my life.”

A second passed and Sugarcoat tapped the other girl on her shoulder.

Sour yelped in surprise, springing forward and dropping her binoculars. The black plastic clunked against the rusty red railing. Combined with the force Sour jumped at, the fence quickly broke apart, giving way for the scavenger to tumble forward and down to the rocks below.

A second passed and Sugarcoat’s eyes went wide as Sour screamed.

Then she threw out her hand and caught the string of Sour’s bow. The momentum tugged her forward as well but, digging her heels into the ground, she bought Sour enough time to catch her own footing and stumble back from the edge.

As soon as she was on stable ground, she spun to face the other Shadowbolt and smiled like a cat does before it dismembers a mouse. “Why Sugarcoat, how kind of you to let me know you’re awake. Now if only you could do with without trying to kill me!”

Sugarcoat took a step back. Seeing Sour’s eyes twitch and her hands shake towards the bowie knife at her hip didn’t fill her with courage at all.

Quite the opposite in fact.

While Sour thought herself to be brave, Sugarcoat had none of her old classmates delusions.

By then, Sonata had woken up properly and was busy rolling up the two sleeping backs and strapping them back to their respective rucksacks.

Sugarcoat had been brave before. But she wasn’t today.

And Sour drew the knife and stepped forward again and her boots clicked like a rifle’s trigger against the ash-coated smoke grey floor.

Shaking, hyperventilating, Sugarcoat raised her palms in fear.

“I’m sorry!” she insisted.

Sugarcoat did not want to die.

And Sour knew that. Smiling warmly, she sheathed the blade. “Excellent, so be more polite in future! You’re not the only one with problems, you know.”

She knew that all too well.

“I just wanted to know what we’re going to do now. Now that those… people are at your home. Can you please tell me that, where we’re going to go, at least?”

Sour opened her mouth. Then she paused as the wind rattled rough sand against her teeth.

Where could they go?

“Well, I think it might be nice to show you, at least. Show you what you could’ve had. We’ll walk to a ridge overlooking the camp. I want to see what Sombra brought with him. Depending on whether we can take his forces or not, we’ll either go back to the city and spend the rest of our lives fighting over scraps or we’ll die in a pointless battle against overwhelming odds. Got it?” she spat the last words like poison out of her mouth.

Nodding, Sugarcoat sighed, “Got it. When do we leave?”

Like a flipped coin turning up heads, Sour instantly grinned. “Why after breakfast, Sugarcoat,” then her manic grin faded to a sneer, “I hope you like canned beans.”

“I like them better than poutine at least.”

Sour had already walked off and back to the campfire by the time Sugarcoat had finished speaking. There Sonata already sat and fiddled with balancing a pot over the dying fire.

Hopefully this one would end better than the last.