My Undead Pony

With Splicer safely secured in the garden room by the bent door and several reinforcing boxes of junk, Hempy, Blue, Cheer, and Pele convened in an unnecessary huddle. Pele had collected herself enough to convey her story in her usual calm manner. Her audience was captivated by her narrative, which she delivered as cleanly as any rehearsed report.

“It was no surprise that our library didn’t have much in the way of articles relating to studies on the afflicted, so I traveled to some of the neighboring towns last night in search of recent research. I flew to Manesfield, thinking it was sure to have something. There’s a good laboratory there, and I wondered if they’d been conducting their own studies. I knew something was wrong when I saw the peach glow on the horizon. It was more than city lamps, I was sure of that much right away. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around such an extensive catastrophe. The whole city was on fire. The smoke nearly choked me out from a mile away. I helped control the flames with the other Pegasus ponies, draining every cloud we could get our hooves on over the city. The situation seemed to be under control when I left, but there was a lot of damage. When the papers get here, I’m sure we’ll learn the full extent of things. Both the laboratory and the library were reduced to little more than ashes and charred bricks. I had even been hoping we could deliver Splicer to that lab so more precise research could be done with her. Maybe a cure. No chance of that now. We’d have to go all the way to Canterlot. I’m starting to think that’s our best option, since keeping her here doesn’t make much sense. There’s nothing we can do with her since we’ve missed the transformation process.”

“I’d think a place like Canterlot wouldn’t have much trouble acquiring the infected.  And that’s assuming Canterlot hasn’t fallen. Four months without word from them. Not even papers,” Blue reminded Pele in her warmly accented tones.

“Some of the ponies in Manesfield heard that the dragons had abandoned the city in favor of the mountains when the disease broke out,” Pele answered. It was up to the city’s dragons to deliver Equestria’s newspapers via their magic flames. “With the dragons gone, the papers would have to be manually delivered. Maybe Canterlot’s on lock-down and won’t risk ponies going in or out while the plague’s so hot.”

“We can only know for sure if we go there,” Cheer suggested.

“Trek across Equestria, dragging along a zombie, on the off-chance Canterlot will let us in if it hasn’t become overrun by the undead? Pass,” said Hempy. He squared up his shoulders stubbornly.

“If your herbs are as effective as you say against Splicer, we also have to consider how important that could be to the rest of Equestria. That’s the sort of discovery everypony’s desperate for,” Pele said.

“Sure was a big night for fires,” Cheer commented absently.

“That’s assuming the plants will keep affecting Splicer. We don’t know if this is something that she’ll get used to,” Blue said as she chewed her lip in thought.

“Then we should take both the plants and her to Canterlot. Fast,” Pele announced.

“What was that about fires?” Hempy asked Cheer, who stared off into a corner of the room. Pele and Bluegrass turned their attentions to the yellow and magenta pony. After a few moments, Cheer noticed their collective gazes and self-consciously scraped her hoof across the floor, cutting through a layer of dust.

“Oh. I guess I didn’t mention that before,” she said with a sheepish grin. “I went to supervise the burn crew last night. The meadow’s taken care of, no worries there. Thing is, I found something weird on the far side of the field. I thought maybe some of the crew had found something interesting and trampled a path into the woods, but when I looked closer, I saw the hoofprints were going the wrong way. It was a path into the meadow. I thought that was odd and I really wanted to know where the prints had come from, so I followed them into the woods for, I don’t know, two miles. I was going to turn back earlier, but I kept smelling ashes, which was also funny, since the wind was coming from ahead of me. I found this big clearing that was blackened by old fire. I thought maybe I’d managed to circle around to our meadow again, but this place looked like it had been burned down a while before. The ashes were cool, but there were a few embers left. And there were all these pieces of bamboo sticking up everywhere.”

“Bamboo? I think you saw some saplings or something. It was dark,” Pele said.

“No, it was bamboo,” Cheer retorted with a mildly peeved expression. “I know bamboo when I see it. It hadn’t been growing there. It was just pieces of bamboo sticking up in little clumps. Most of it had been burned, but a few pieces were still there. Tied together.”

“What do you mean?” questioned Blue when Cheer seemed to get distracted by a spider crawling down the basement’s drain.

“I mean, I thought maybe there had been huts out there. Like the bamboo were the skeletons of little houses or tents. It was hard to tell, considering how burnt they were.”

“You’re only just now telling us about this whole incinerated village?” Hempy said incredulously.

“I don’t know if it was a village. I don’t know what it was. But I think that’s where the zombies came from last night. Maybe it was a village that no one had seen before. Maybe they all got hit and transformed and came toward where they smelled meat. I thought maybe they accidentally burned down their homes at first, but as I think about it, the fire looked like it had been pretty controlled. There was enough breeze to carry flames into the trees, so why wasn’t there an all-out forest fire?” said Cheer.

The boxes against the door to the garden jolted. Splicer had snapped out of her weed-induced trance and resumed her hunger-induced one.

“There’s definitely something fishy going on here, but now’s not the time to work everything out. If we’re going to go, we’ve got to do it soon,” Blue whispered. The others nodded in agreement.

“Right. Let’s gather what we need for a trip to Canterlot. I think I know somepony who can help,” said Pele, and everypony took note.