My Undead Pony

It took several minutes of groggily staring at the underside of the table for Pyroclastic Pele to remember where she was and some of how she’d gotten there. With a deep moan, the pegasus rolled over and got her hooves beneath her. She stood up slowly, fearing the world would swirl away from her if she wasn’t careful. She hauled herself onto a chair and discovered she was sitting opposite the unconscious form of Rum Runner. She tried to remember how their negotiations had worked out.

“I see one of you is awake,” Gale commented. The griffin tavern-keeper was diligently wiping up the counter. Pele noticed most of the rest of the tavern had been tidied up aside from the areas occupied by sleeping ponies. “Don’t get your tail in a twist. You haven’t been out long,” Gale assured Pele when her golden eyes betrayed her alarm. “It’s quite early, actually. You may want to get some actual sleep in your room.”

“Anything I can do to help?” Pele asked. She rubbed her temple with a hoof. A headache was quickly setting in.

“That’s how I know you folks aren’t from around here,” chortled Gale. “Thank you for that sweet offer, but I’m just about set. I’ve seen much worse, believe you me.”

Pele nodded, regretted nodding, and headed for the stairs. She paused to look back at Gale. “Have you seen the rest of my group, by any chance?”

“Your banjo-playing friend and the gangly unicorn went to their rooms some time ago. They’re the only ones I’ve seen for a while,” Gale answered. His long, feathery brows drew together. “I hope the others haven’t wandered off somewhere dangerous. I didn’t think about it until now.”

“Hempy and Cheer are probably around here somewhere. They can take care of themselves. Usually. But maybe I should wait downstairs for a while.”

“Do as you like. I’ll get you some water.”

Pele wandered back to the table she’d slept beneath and remounted her seat. Her hoof traced the whorls of the antique wood as she looked Rum Runner over. He drooled into his tricorne hat and Pele began wondering if she’d made a good choice in skipper.

“Here you go.” Gale placed a glass of water on the table. “He’s quite a character, isn’t he? I’m surprised you got him talking like that. He usually keeps up his façade when he comes into town.”

“I feel like I’m being talked about.”

The griffin and the pegasus both turned toward Rum Runner. The pirate captain lifted his head and rolled it back as though it were too heavy for his neck. He straightened out to look back at Gale and Pele. He narrowed his eyes, smacked his lips, and said, “Hey, it’s the filly with the pet zombie.” He shifted his attention to the griffin and narrowed his eyes even further until they were mere slits. “Morning, Gale.”

“I’ll bring you some water as well,” Gale offered, leaving the ponies to chat in private for a few minutes.

“Kind of a bold thing to say,” Pele said with a slanted smile.

“You said it first. I remember you trying to charter my ship so I could take you and your buddies across the Kelpie Sea. Everything else is a little hazy. I think we hit it off when you managed to one-up all my recollections of daring maritime misadventures.”

“I recall how many of your stories seemed like avoidable accidents turned dramatic.”

“What can I say? I’m always on the lookout for a situation that could entail adventure. Also, speak for yourself.”

“Taking on a zombie passenger sounds like something that could entail adventure.”

“I think I agreed with you on that last night.”

“Not before you told me I had to pass your ‘character analysis’ whatever.”

“Right, right,” Rum Runner said, looking up to the ceiling as he pictured the scene. “I tend to do that. You can learn a lot about a pony from making small talk.”

“You started the small talk with a philosophical debate. What kind of pirate are you?”

“Hey, don’t judge me on that. You were the one who said she’d push the fat pony off the bridge to stop the train from killing the workers.”

“If you think about it numerically, it makes sense.”

“You still pushed a pony in front of a train.”

“In theory.”

“The point is, you lost the philosophy section. Next came… uh…”

“Drugs. As in, we debated drugs.”

Gale unobtrusively passed Rum Runner a glass of water and retreated to the bar.

“So. Agreement there. I think the next involved your lack of appreciation for anti-humor.”

“In other words, I failed that one too.” Pele casually inspected her hoof.

“Only because you don’t understand it.”

“No. I understand it.”

A pause.

“And then we just drank,” Rum Runner said. Both ponies looked around the tavern at the other passed out customers.

“I don’t remember the score on that one,” Pele admitted. “Let’s call it a ‘pass’ though. Did I make it through your analysis?”

Rum Runner lifted his hoof to make a declaration but was stopped from doing so as the dingy tavern windows shattered inward and a large stone clunked and rolled across the floor. Pele and Rum Runner jumped from their seats, threw each other the same wary look, and ran out into the morning light.

“That’s one of them! The one with the braids!” somepony shouted while Pele struggled to adjust to the brightness. Through her hangover haze she could make out a crowd of surly ponies in the cobbled street. Most were large, disgruntled stallions that had likely spent more time on the sea than on the shore. They pawed the ground and flared their nostrils in anger and, perhaps, some amount of fear. Only then did she notice the red and gold wagon parked in the center of the group.

“Cheer Chime!” Pele yelped. She ran a few feet forward before the menacing glare of a deep purple pegasus with a knife in his jaws halted her hasty charge. “What’s going on here? What did you do to my friends?”

Cheer lifted her head and noticed Pele for the first time. She smiled lopsidedly, clearly in a daze worse than Pele’s. “Good morning, Pele! Look! I got a black eye! How adventurey is that?” She tilted her head to show off her shiner, seemingly unaware of the sorry state of the rest of her. Her battered body was harnessed to the wagon, which she’d apparently pulled to the scene. Several ponies guarded her and pushed her back into place when she wobbled.

“We caught this filly leaving this wagon last night. We have reason to believe something fishy is going on here, and are ready to burn your wagon if somepony doesn’t start telling the truth around here!” The pony who’d made the threat approached Pele with heavy, intimidating steps. He was tall and as dark red as dying sunlight on the night before a storm. Pele couldn’t help but think of the “red sky at morning, sailors take warning” rhyme.

“You didn’t answer my questions. What’s going on? What happened to Cheer?”

“She was impeding our investigation of your wagon,” spat the red stallion.

“What are you, the sheriff?”

“That’s exactly who I am,” replied the stallion. His fierce blue eyes locked with Pele’s. “Sheriff Brine’s my name.”

Pele craned her neck around him and called to Cheer. “How did you let these chumps do this to you?” she demanded.

“I was swordless and drunk. Plus more and more kept coming after me after I clocked the first few.”  Cheer stated the last bit with obvious pride. Pele gave her an incredulous, yet somehow approving, look.

“There’ve been reports of strange noises coming from your wagon. A lot of us suspect you’ve got something unsavory locked in there, considering the locked windows and moaning.”  Brine lowered his voice. “Some ponies think you’ve got an infected pony in there. We can’t risk that. If we have to burn down your property, we will. Please don’t make this more difficult.”

“After you beat up my friend? I will make this as difficult as possible,” Pele hissed.

“She attacked first,” Brine defensively retorted.

“Yeah, after creepy stallions tailed and interrogated her, I bet.”

“This is a very serious matter, and you will treat it as such,” Brine growled, drawing even closer. “This would have been much simpler if your friend hadn’t swallowed the keys.”

Pele blinked in surprise and looked back to Cheer. “But there were so many,” she said in a disbelieving tone.

“I know.” Cheer’s face suddenly took on a very haunted quality.

Pele cringed and glanced at Brine, who was holding back a grimace. “Why don’t you let me take my friend and my wagon and we’ll leave? Our personal property is none of your business.”

“A potential contaminant in our town is absolutely our business. We’ve been clear of that unmentionable plague so far, and we mean to keep it that way. Now, enough stalling. You’ve had plenty of chances to get out of this mess. I can only assume you’ve got an infected pony in there. We can’t take the risk of letting you take that wagon anywhere else.” Brine turned to the rest of the group, which had expanded as curiosity overtook more and more townsponies. “Light it up!”

“No!” Cheer wailed as realization swept through her scattered mind. She struggled and bucked against the strong sailors who pried her from the harness. Several ponies began dousing the beautiful wagon with some sort of nose-stinging alcohol. Others pulled matchbooks from their vests, ready to strike. “Pele, stop them! Come on!”

Pele’s wings burst open and she launched into the sky. Several other pegasi took flight in pursuit. With mighty beats of her wings, she evaded the others and tried to form some sort of plan. There was nowhere they could escape to with the wagon intact, and even if there was, there was no way the two of them could outrun a whole town. All she could see was a street filled with ponies in an uproar, a doomed wagon, and a desperately flailing Cheer Chime. She rarely considered situations to be entirely hopeless. There was always a way to turn things in her favor. But as her sharp eyes noticed the flames sparking into existence below her, Pele began to lose faith in her usually remarkable luck.

KRA-KOOOW!

Everypony froze in place, wide-eyed and baffled at the echoing shot. The angry shouts had turned to frightened murmurs as each pony asked his or her neighbor who’d fired the shot. Brine reared up and plunged into the crowd, searching for the weapon.

“Who?” he demanded in a booming voice. Everypony inched away from him as he stomped by. “Speak up! Who fired that gun?”

Another shot caused the crowd to jump in alarm. They looked around frantically, but no pony seemed to know where the noise had come from.

“Somepony had better speak up before I have to-”

“Sure, I’ll speak up.”

The voice resounded from somewhere above, but like the gunfire, the buildings and cobbled street made it impossible to determine its origin. Pele nearly collided with a lamppost as she searched the windows for the speaker. She recognized the calm, lilting accent and smiled. Her luck seemed to be kicking in. A sharp whistle from the tavern drew her attention back to the scene below. Rum Runner had been joined by several crew members. The captain pointed his hoof toward the road leading to the docks. Pele nodded and the pirates galloped away. Rum Runner, rather than following his crew, darted through the chaotic mass of onlookers and harnessed himself to the wagon while everypony else was distracted by the mystery sniper.

“Cheer, climb on,” he instructed the befuddled pony beside him. Once she processed the directions, she clambered up to the seat in the front of the wagon and braced herself expectantly. A faint hint of an adventurous smile returned to her lips.

“Let’s go!”

Pele swooped down, nimbly threading her body into the harness next to Rum Runner. Her wings, reminiscent the hummingbird’s on her flank, pulsed faster than any pegasus wings Rum Runner had ever seen. He was jerked along and found it nearly impossible to match her speed on hoof, but he didn’t have much of a choice. Several townsponies scrambled out of their path as they rattled violently across the cobblestones. Others struck new matches and raced toward them.

An eruption of gunfire, too close for comfort, sent many attackers skittering away before they could ignite the flammable wagon or swing a weapon at Rum Runner or Pele. Cheer jeered rambunctiously from her perch, taunting the furious crowd. Another bullet clipped by her ear, truncating an insulting shout. Several unicorns had finally pulled their own firearms and had their magically-hefted guns trained on the retreating trio. Cheer’s tone instantly changed.

“Faster! Faster! Let’s go!” she howled at the pirate and the pegasus. Bullets struck up sparks from the road around them until they veered onto the planks of the far-too-long dock system. The rhythmic thunder of wheels on warped wood couldn’t overpower Cheer’s yells. The blinding morning sun was made worse by the expanse of choppy water over which it hovered. Suddenly, Cheer wondered whether Pele or Rum Runner could see well enough to keep them all from plummeting into the water.

Out of seemingly nowhere, a great, black shadow sliced into the glaring sun. A prow, and then a towering mast, all sails raised and full-bellied in the building breeze. Cheer’s breath caught in her throat. There was no way this could work. She couldn’t decide whether to shriek in terror or swashbuckling delight. Like swallows from a chimney, a flock of pegasi poured from the ship. Cheer whirled to look behind her. Enemy ponies were quickly closing in on them now that they were out of range of the mystery shooter. They stampeded across the planks, faces contorted in, Cheer acknowledged, somewhat justifiable rage. More bullets blasted into the prettily painted wagon. Cheer ducked and looked forward again just in time to see the end of the dock disappear, replaced by unfriendly waves dozens of feet below.

She closed her eyes and felt the fall begin.