Starbucks
Admiral Biscuit
The last vestiges of the storm still hung over Amarillo, highlighted in the setting sun. The occasional flashes of lightning that tore across the sky were reflected in both the wet pavement and the rearview mirrors of the dirty white Econoline.
Dusty was keeping his speed down, not only due to the slick pavement, but also the busted side window. That might have been caused by hail, or it might have been caused by storm-driven debris. He’d heard it happen, but hadn’t seen the cause—he'd been on the radio coordinating the tornado team.
Said team was currently sacked out in the back of the van, most of them unconcerned about the extra wind. In fact, Prism Glider approved of it; he had his forehooves up on the sill and his head partway out into the slipstream.
Nothing in the rear of the van would get damaged by the last traces of rain; the equipment and the pegasi who carried it were both weather-resistant.
A glance in the rearview mirror showed half the team dozing. He could hear Lofty and Paradise discussing the storm, while Velvet Light was grooming Merry May.
Dusty covered a yawn. He could do with a nap himself. It was a shame none of the ponies could drive.
Who would be best at it? Not Velvet Light, she was accident-prone. She’d been the one to find out which bandages in the first aid kit would stick to fur, and which ones wouldn’t.
Electric Blue had a history of losing equipment, Skydancer liked drinking too much, and Rocky Storm alternated between being weirdly fascinated with human tech, or scared of it. The only ones that were responsible, at least in a human sense, were Lofty and Medley. They were the leaders, the ones who assigned equipment packs, and the ones that made sure that everyone was up and ready to go in the morning—and that everyone returned from the storm.
He yawned again, and picked up a Love’s cup from the morning. It was empty.
If they hadn’t blown out of the van, there might be some more coffee left in a box in the back—it would be cold, but better than nothing. “Hey, Lofty, there any coffee back there?”
“Uh, hold on.” Even over the noise of the tires and the wind blowing through the van, he could hear her hooves as she moved around. She was one of the few ponies on the team who insisted on wearing shoes. “Sorry, Dusty, it’s all gone.”
“That’s okay.”
“It would have been cold anyway.”
“Yeah.” Dusty reached over for the radio, then hesitated. “You mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Sure.”
One thing that he and the ponies could agree on: 80s power ballads were the best. He’d requisitioned funds to buy an iPod and filled it with the songs of their choosing.
There weren’t many pony songs commercially-available, although he had managed to find a downloadable collection of Countess Coloratura’s greatest hits. Even if he couldn’t understand the lyrics, he could groove to the music.
He zoned out to the music, the sameness of the highway, and the now-familiar after-action conversation among the ponies. They’d given a short report after coming down off patrol, clear and concise like Dr. Tetsuya preferred, and they’d stripped off their equipment and turned over the flash drives and SD cards before getting into the van.
That was when the real action started, the pony debrief. They’d switch back and forth between English and pony, discussing what they’d done and what could have been done better, not unlike the debriefs he’d had when he was a more active chaser and less of a bus driver.
It was a different kind of thrill now. He still had to get in front of the storm, they still ran multiple routes in the hopes of good coverage. Sometimes Paradise copiloted; she was good at reading maps.
They had different ways of reading storms than he did. They weren’t always right—in fact, at first they’d been terrible—but as they’d gotten used to how weather worked on Earth, their predictions were eerily accurate as soon as they got into the air and felt the winds and currents, saw the storms for themselves. Lofty in particular had also gotten good at interpreting the raw radar returns.
It had been a multi-state tour; they’d intercepted a promising storm in New Mexico and followed it up into Colorado and then into Kansas, then backtracked through Oklahoma as a second storm popped up west of Boise City, that one part of a long front that had hail and torrential rains and tornadoes. They’d chased that one back into Texas, heading south to stay ahead of the diagonal front and give them the best chance of catching a tornado as it formed.
The gamble had paid off; they’d caught one just outside of Hartley, and the pegasi had chased it almost to Dumas.
•••
“Right there, I can see a hook!” Paradise pointed a hoof out the window, but she hadn’t had to; Dusty saw it too.
He slammed on the brakes and slid the van along the shoulder. Paradise jumped out the window—and the dome light came on as someone in the back threw open the side door. A flock of pegasi flew out, forming up in the air, and he heard Lofty call for clearance in her radio as they took to the sky.
He grabbed the mic on his radio and reported back to Bill and Jo—they had their own equipment to deploy.
The weather radio started toning out, and as a curtain of rain drenched the van, he used his cell phone to report a forming tornado.
It hadn’t touched the ground yet when it passed over the van, a few hundred yards north. Dusty ran around to shut the side door and then got into the driver’s seat and gave chase, blasting along whatever road he could find that was headed in the right direction.
Sometimes they had enough time for a proper setup, and he’d stay where he stopped until the team came back. Other times he’d follow along—Lofty or Medley could radio him directly when it was time for them to come down, and he’d let them know where the van was.
He drove as much by instinct as by sight; the downpour was faster than the wipers could keep up with.
•••
A sign caught his eye, and he checked his mirrors and then merged over a lane. “Hey, any of you ever had Starbucks?”
“Starbucks?”
“Is that the siren-coffee?”
“I think she’s a mermare . . . mergirl . . . mermaid.” That was Rocky Storm.
“I don’t know what she is,” Dusty admitted. He didn’t pay that much attention to corporate logos. “But I know they’ve got great coffee. If you’ve never tried it, you ought to.”
“Does it come in boxes?”
“Do your ears perk whenever coffee’s mentioned?” Dewdrop normally slept whenever the van was in motion, and from what he’d overheard, didn’t like to get up unless somebody pushed him out of bed or lured him with coffee.
“Maybe. I like coffee.”
Dewdrop didn’t wear shoes, and Dusty didn’t realize he’d gotten up and headed forward until his head appeared between the front seats. He set a hoof on the doghouse, then hopped up onto the passenger seat.
“You’re not going to get it just because you’re sitting in the front,” Dusty advised.
Dewdrop’s ears fell.
“That sounded mean, sorry.” Dusty flicked the turn signal stalk and started slowing for the exit ramp. “Everybody’s gonna get some, if they want.” He reached over and ran his hand through Dewdrop’s mane. “Hey, you ever thought about driving a van?”
•••
While the ponies all had their favorite morning foods from Love's and Dunkin’ Donuts, their preferred Taco Bell menu items or agreed-upon pizza toppings from whichever chain was convenient, the vast number of choices that every new-to-them restaurant offered inevitably led to discussion and debate, tying up the line.
Instead of unloading the van and marching in en masse, Dusty stopped in the parking lot and let the ponies look through the Starbucks app on his phone. That would give them all the time they wanted to pick something to drink without tying up the line, inside or out.
The ponies were hit-or-miss when it came to technology. Touchscreens weren’t pony-friendly, although they’d discovered they could use them by booping them with their noses. Dusty opened up his laptop and found Starbucks’ webpage, then let Lofty take charge from there.
At first, he thought it might take them forever to figure out what they wanted. For the most part—Whizzer was a pony after his own heart, and liked his coffee black. He was uninterested in Frappuccinos or anything else fancy.
The rest of them had Lofty scrambling back and forth across the various menu pages while they tried to decide what they’d like the best. Or coordinate their ordering so they could share—that was one thing he’d noticed about the ponies. They’d often order a wide variety of different dishes at restaurants and then share them. At their usual stops, each member of the team had settled on their personal favorites, but whenever they were somewhere new, they’d often pick and choose to get the biggest variety of food possible.
“Can we get food, too?” Flanking Line asked. “Or instead of coffee?”
“Don’t you like coffee?”
She shook her head. “The menu says they have sandwiches.”
It was all going on the business credit card, so he could certainly afford to be magnanimous. “Sure, why not?”
•••
He was paralleling the tornado on a farmer’s two-track, praying that it went all the way through, and that there wasn’t a farm implement just sitting there in his way. Lofty had radioed in when they were on station, and he hadn’t heard any communication from them since. Not surprising, but it always worried him.
The van would offer some protection if things went wrong. Probably not enough; he knew stormchasers that had been killed when a tornado flung their car. He thought he was behind it now, but couldn’t tell for sure.
Dusty let his foot off the gas as the rear of the van slewed on a soft spot, then he was back on the chase, debris peppering the side of the Econoline and rain drumming down on the roof.
He bombed across a whoopsie, slamming down hard enough to bottom the suspension, and then he was off again, branches slapping against the sideview mirror as he got it back under control.
What was it like up there? He’d seen the GoPro footage and heard them describe it, but that wasn’t the same as being in it. If it was this wild on the ground, what was it like up in the sky? What were they facing? Dusty glanced over at the almost-silent radio—it popped every time there was lightning, but that was it.
The access road made a ninety-degree turn, and it came upon him almost too fast to stop. He skidded the van around the corner and floored it again, fishtailing along the two-track.
•••
‘Why not?’ led to a five minute delay as they went through the various food options. It would have been longer, but the menu only listed thirteen different sandwiches and protein boxes, which simplified their sharing options.
“Aren’t turkeys birds?”
“I think so.” Lofty turned to Dusty, who nodded.
“What about chickpeas, are those baby chickens?”
“No, chickpeas are just beans.”
The pegasi liked bacon and fish, were sometimes okay with beef and pork, and would not eat chicken or turkeys. He assumed it was solidarity with flying creatures, but had never asked.
He’d seen a couple of them fishing on their days off. Rather than use poles or nets, they’d just drop into the water and sometimes come up with a fish, which usually got eaten raw. Stormbreaker knew how to cook them, and had been king of the barbeque grill on one of their days off—they’d loaded up all the equipment into the Econoline and set up on the shores of Stagg Lake.
“Okay,” Lofty said, “we know what we want, do you want to write it all down or do you want me to talk into the order-box?”
“It’s probably easier if I write it down.” Shouting individual orders from the back hadn’t worked out all that well. Having Lofty or one of the other ponies in the front relaying orders up front worked better, and there had even been one awkward time when he’d had Rocky Storm sitting on his lap, leaning out the window and trying to order.
A gust through the van reminded him that the middle window on the left was broken. “Or I can pull forward and one of you can give the order through that window.”
“Is that allowed?” Stormbreaker asked.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”
“Who gets to order?”
Dusty turned to face the back. “Whoever can say frappuccino the best.” Or worst, it didn’t really matter to him, and it might be funny if they pronounced it wrong every time.
•••
The winner of the competition was Electric Blue, who did manage to pronounce it almost correctly. Dusty looped around the parking lot and got into line while the ponies reviewed their choices. He reminded them that he wanted a Venti Pike Place Roast, and she mis-pronounced Venti.
The Starbucks baristas were going to have a fun time.
Dusty tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and pulled ahead—he was three cars back from the drive-thru box. Drive-thrus were an old experience for him, but for the ponies they were still new and exciting, and sometimes confusing. A couple of them had tried drive-thrus without the car, swooping down and ordering from the box, with mixed results. Stormbreaker had been told that he had to be in a car to get food from the drive-thru.
Lofty had used the government-provided team cell phone to download the Taco Bell app and order from that for pickup. To the store’s credit, they’d brought her food out when she landed in the appointed parking spot, and the next slow day, she’d gotten food for the whole team and flown back with full saddlebags.
He moved up a spot as the lead car advanced to the pickup window. Nobody on the team really liked the government oversight, although he had to admit it was necessary and if it hadn’t been for NOAA’s demand to see if the ponies could really do what they said they could do, he wouldn’t have had this opportunity. He’d have been chasing storms the old-fashioned way, which he did miss, but seeing the team go into full professional mode, seeing them take flight into the teeth of a storm, that was a worthwhile trade.
Plus, he still got his chance to get close; he got to race into the weather and got to watch it roll over. He got to see plenty of tornadoes up close, close enough to have lost a window in the last storm.
He also had the blessing of the Feds, which might come in handy the next time he got pulled over for speeding.
•••
“Tornado’s broken up,” Lofty reported.
“Ten-four.” Dusty slowed down and guided the van onto the shoulder. He’d white-knuckled a stretch of US 87, getting ahead of the tornado just before it crossed over the road, and then cut down Buddy Kline Road just in time to see the dissipating tornado cross in front of him.
For the first time, he also noticed that the side window was gone.
“I think you’re ahead of me.” He was currently stuck going south until he found an east-west road or a wide enough spot to turn around. “I saw signs for a town to the east, do you see it?
There was a pause, and then Lofty came back. “Yeah, it’s about a mile in front of us, there’s a row of grain silos on the main road just west of town with a big parking lot if you want to meet us there.”
“On it.” Dusty put the mic back on its hook and turned into a wide spot, watching his mirror as he backed up.
By the time he got to Remington Seeds, the winds had dropped off but the rain was still coming down. Stormbreaker and Flanking Line were already on the ground, while Velvet Light and Skydancer circled above.
He radioed back to Bill and Jo, letting them know that he was picking up the team, and arranging a meetup to exchange data.
•••
Dusty checked his mirrors and backed out of the spot. He’d taken the opportunity to get his wallet out of his back pocket—it was nearly impossible to remove it while he was driving or stopped, and had more than once done the awkward lean-over while holding up traffic in the McQueue.
Dusty cut across the proper drive-through entrance. There wasn’t any traffic so it wasn’t that big of a deal.
He rounded the corner and came up against the tail of a Lincoln SUV. If they caught a glimpse of him in their rearview mirror, what would they think of his Econoline, muddy and scratched and dented and with a blown-out window on the left side?
Their car had probably been sitting in the garage to keep it safe from the storm, while he’d been right out there in front of it. He’d been on the side of the road, holding a door open against the wind as the tornado patrol disembarked.
The dashboard had hash marks on it, drawn with Sharpie, chronicling the number of windshield replacements. They moved where the storms did, it was a cost of doing business. As was the coffee. If tomorrow was a clear day, the van would go to the glass shop again and get a new window fitted; if not, they’d improvise something to cover the hole in the side.
Or maybe not: Electric Blue had already stuck her muzzle out and was peering down the lane, counting the cars until they got to the speaker. She ducked back inside to give her report to the rest of the team.
A Ford Taurus with a frazzled woman in a nice blouse and blazer nosed in behind them, and Dusty watched as she did the mental math of how many seats the van would have. Fourteen—it was the most extended version of the van that Ford offered, although all the rear benches had been taken out.
Of course, that didn’t limit his passenger capacity; ponies sat or stood on the floor.
Had she seen Electric Blue? And if she did, had she recognized her?
Besides YouTube and Vine, the ponies had done their rounds of the news shows, giving interviews and explaining weather phenomena; they’d done a few radio appearances and photoshoots.
Even if she didn’t know that they were the tornado team—or in the words of Zoe, “Big Damn Heroes”—nearly everybody loved ponies.
Apparently not the impatient businesswoman; she was tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and occasionally nosing her car forward as if that would move the line faster. This van had been on the business end of a tornado on multiple occasions; a mass-market sedan was nothing to it.
•••
Electric Blue stuck her nose back out as soon as the van started moving, and he could tell by the droop and perk of her ears as they stopped again—now one and a half car-length short—that she was seriously considering flying out and landing in front of the speaker, especially since the line at the pickup window was such that the Lincoln in front of them couldn’t order.
They could have gone inside, but the ponies wanted their drive-through.
•••
Sometimes he thought back to when he first met the ponies. They’d arrived on an executive bus, in the company of a Suburban that was obviously owned by the Feds—the only thing that would have made it look more government would have been a block-printed yellow FBI on the door.
The door had opened and they’d piled out, and he’d seen ponies on TV before and once in person but he didn’t really know them, so he could be excused for feeling—in the moment—like he’d been volunteered to babysit. They had a touristy look in their eyes and a generally cute and innocent countenance. Velvet Light had tripped on the step and stumble-stepped off the bus.
The first few trips into the field to chase rainclouds and mild thunderstorms had felt insulting, like he was being ordered to their level, which he mistakenly believed to be far below his own. He still felt guilty for even thinking those thoughts. Kitted up, they looked like children in costume, until they took to the air.
America was new and different, but the sky was theirs. They knew it, and as he watched them dance in the winds, he knew it too. Battle lines formed and changed with the storm, ponies flew into it and sparked when they landed. Dr. Tetsuya grudgingly agreed to buy a GoPro and the human team watched the footage after the first tornado encounter and after that Dusty was one hundred percent on the ponies’ side. He’d dropped sensors in the path of a tornado before and studied the data but he’d never seen it so directly. It was bad on the ground; it was worse in the air.
He wanted to be up there with them. Seeing it on the ground had nothing to seeing it in the air. They were cute and innocent and stared down the barrel of a tornado like it was beneath them, even as it tossed Velvet Light aside in contempt. He chased the storms and watched and documented what they did; the ponies got up in them and tried to turn them and it felt like it might be Equestrian propaganda or Don Quixote tilting at a windmill except that they did turn the storms. Dr. Tetsuya hedged his thoughts on the matter, but Dusty knew what he saw. The worse the weather, the more they wanted to be up in it, the more they wanted to try and steer it or stop it, and when it was over they’d stagger back into the van, soaked to the bone, their wings twitching from overexertion.
Thus far, nature was still coming out on top more often than not, but they weren’t ready to throw in the towel. No, they’d been in what it had to offer and they’d demanded a rematch, again and again and again and he knew that while nature had a home-team advantage, the pegasi were whittling that down each and every time. Even if Dr. Tetsuya didn’t think so, even if every debrief ended with ‘the data isn’t entirely clear just yet,’ he knew that a dozen plucky pegasi were ready to take on a storm and bend it to their will.
•••
Pulling up to the speaker was second-nature. Pulling beyond it, to where Electric Blue had a good shot at the box required him to override his instincts.
Dusty could see her in the side-view mirror; she had her hooves up on the window frame and her muzzle stuck out the window. Whenever he ordered he always glanced at the menu in case he had a last second change of mind, or if there was a new item he’d been unaware of.
He couldn’t have remembered all their orders, and he was curious to see how she’d manage.
He was also curious to see how the baristas would manage. How far into the order would she get before they started to wonder if it was a full van, or if they were just dealing with somebody who really, really liked coffee?
As the order went on, would one of them stick their head out the drive-thru window to see what was in line? Or did they already have the van on CCTV?
How did they know there was a car at the drive-thru anyway? There had been a few occasions where he’d rolled up and had to wait before someone was ready to take his order.
•••
Electric Blue was flawless when it came to remembering orders. She recited them off with machine-gun precision, her pronunciation questionable but her memory perfect.
She tapped on the windowframe with her hooves, surely some way of marking off what she’d said and what she hadn’t. When she got to the end, the barista read back what she’d ordered, and Dusty zoned out as the list went on—thirteen drinks, thirteen orders of food and a couple of bonus desserts at the end because why not, it wasn't his money.
“Is that all?” People might count on their fingers but of course ponies couldn’t do that—he’d noticed her tapping a hoof on the windowsill; was that their way of counting? Did they remember how many taps they’d made? Wasn’t there a horse back in the day who could do math by tapping his hoof?
There was assent from the back and from the driver’s seat—she’d remembered to order his coffee and Ham and Swiss on Baguette. Which he was having second thoughts about: there was no requirement or expectation that Dusty should change his diet for the ponies’ sake, but he’d given up on ordering chicken or turkey whenever he was in their company, pizzas had turned mostly vegetarian with little complaint, and he now knew the entire Taco Bell menu by memory. Better, in fact, than some of Taco Bell’s employees.
Dusty would have pulled forward to allow the impatient businesslady behind him to put in her order, but he couldn’t. A couple yards, not enough to get his tail clear of the speaker.
What would we do if another tornado was spotted right now? The radio screwed down to the dash was silent, but it could go active at any time. They were tired, they had earned their rest and Starbucks.
They got to choose, they weren’t obligated to respond, and of course they’d been in the air for hours already in conditions he couldn’t even properly imagine. They’d flown to exhaustion more than once. A few weeks back during a particularly nasty storm cell, Velvet Light had crash-landed, then demanded to go back up after she’d gotten bandaged and scarfed down a quesadilla. Their work ethic was off the charts, and more than once he’d seen them put in a full day’s work then go back up into the clouds over the hotel, exploring the storm. He turned back to where Electric Blue was still looking out the window, waiting for the food and drinks to arrive, even though they wouldn’t until they pulled ahead to the pickup window.
“How’d you remember all that?”
She shrugged. “I used to work at a restaurant when I was a filly, had to be able to remember what everypony ordered.”
Didn’t you have notepads was still percolating in his mind when he was interrupted by his current front-seat passenger.
“Can I pay?”
Dusty jerked his mind back to the present. Dewdrop had his eyes and ears locked on the wallet sitting on top of the doghouse.
If he actually trusted them to drive, letting Dewdrop switch out would be hilarious. He could hide in the cluster of pegasi in the back—he could even turn the camera on the dash enough to catch Dewdrop and the barista, get her reaction.
Or leave it facing forward, because the actual outcome of letting a pony drive would be crashing into the car in front of them.
Slow speeds, I can just use the brake and idle, and I bet I could reach the pedals from the shotgun seat. He’d driven from the wrong side on a dare before, and it had worked.
Dr. Tetsuya would flay him if he crashed the van, but it would make Dewdrop happy. “Yeah, let’s switch seats.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not? You can even put your ha—hooves on the wheel, but let me drive, okay?”
•••
Use the brake, a hand ready for the steering wheel. Dusty also got out the credit card for Dewdrop, and twisted the forward-facing camera. Ad revenue on pony videos wasn’t enough to hire his own team—yet—but it had already supplanted his income.
To her credit, the barista only hesitated for a moment when she saw Dewdrop sitting in the driver’s seat, his hooves on the wheel, and a credit card in his mouth.
The drinks came in several carriers, and the food in sacks. Dusty shifted the van into park to make sure there were no accidents as he assisted in receiving the coffees and food, then once they’d gotten their whole order and agreed to pause long enough for the barista to take a selfie with Dewdrop, they pulled out of the line and into a parking spot.
Switching drivers was theoretically possible while in motion, but Dusty felt like he’d already pushed his luck enough.
•••
The food was sorted, and the back of the van was full of tired but happy ponies with drinks and food. He was happy as he merged back onto the highway; his coffee was secure in the cupholder and the still-wrapped sandwich sat beside that, just waiting until he’d caught up with the flow of traffic and established himself into a lane.
Author's Note
For now, in lieu of a blog post, here's a link to ponies:
LINKY
One of the things I get to do at my other job is drive the guys around to where they want to go, and I was thinking as I pulled into the drive-through at Biggby Coffee (a local coffee chain) with a fifteen-passenger Econoline, might the next car in line be wondering just how many orders are going to come out of this van?
It's kinda late, but I wanted to give this to y'all as a present on this day, the occasion of my 45th birthday.
