The hospital was dark and cold. Lights flickered, on and off, on and off. Shadows gave way to brilliant gleaming clarity — white and sterile no longer, the floor streaked with red. Humped shapes here and there, too organic and too lumpy to be medical equipment. All was silent. Not one of the shapes moved.
And then in the distance there came the deep bass rumble of a voice, raised in song. Off-key, out of tune and strangely childlike for such a voice — but singing nonetheless, with the sound of genuine joy.
“I love my Mommy, and my Mommy loves me.” The cadence of the song rose and fell like a nursery rhyme. “Butterscotch and bubblegum, Lil’ Cheese and Pinkie.”
Heavy hooves thudded on the floor, squeaking as they slid through the grime and the liquid that flashed red as the lights illuminated and sank back into dark purple as they surrendered once more.
“We spent all day together, just my Mommy and me too.”
And now, for the first time, there was a noise. A thin rattle of breath as one of those strange lumpy shapes stirred. Eyes fluttered open, wide and white with terror.
The tramping of the hooves grew louder. The singer was nearing. “We’d party and laugh and bake, and every day was brand new.”
The pony on the ground gave a thin whine of what might have been fear through a jaw that hung shattered and limp from his face. He wore a coat that had once been white, and the remains of a stethoscope dangled from one torn ear.
“Mommy went into the hospital, and Mommy never came OUT.” The voice rose into a pained shout on the final word, and the heavy breathing of the singer caught in his chest.
The doctor whimpered, and one broken foreleg reached out to scrape, trembling and futile, at the floor of the corridor. The long-buried instincts of a prey animal, still trying to flee when all flight was impossible.
“I miss Mommy a whole lot, it makes me want to shout—” and then, suddenly, the singing stopped.
Shivering so hard that fresh blood oozed from his wounds, the doctor peered upwards with his one good eye — and met the burning green eyes of his tormentor.
“Hello,” said the gigantic stallion. “Have you seen my Mommy?”
The doctor gave a strangled gasp. Something that might have been an attempt at speech.
“Her name’s Pinkie Pie,” said the murderer helpfully. “She’s pink and fluffy and bouncy all over. She looks kind of like me, but much bigger.”
The doctor’s eye widened slightly; it was difficult to imagine anything bigger than this hulking monstrosity.
“Because I’m only seven,” the monster said, cheerfully, in the deep voice of a stallion that had grown up all the way and then kept going, just for good measure. “I’m only seven and Mommy will be back soon to have bath time and bubbles.”
The pony on the ground tried to speak, tried to plead for mercy, for a quick death, for anything — but all that came out was a garbled hnnngh.
The bloodstained stallion regarded him critically. “Mommy says it’s important to enunciate, you know,” he commented. “But it’s fine. I don’t think she’s here anyway. And you wouldn’t tell me even if she was, would you? You doctors are all the same.”
His eyes narrowed, and the doctor croaked out one last unintelligible something — before one of those great hooves, heavy as a snowplough, came down squarely on his head.
Lil’ Cheese stood over the mangled remains of his last victim, gore staining his legs up to the knee, and smiled.
“Mommy isn’t here,” he said softly, his voice a growl deep in his chest. “Mommy isn’t in this hospital.”
There was a long pause, and he looked down at the dead doctor, as though expecting him to answer.
“I’ll try the next one,” Lil’ cheese said at last. “Maybe Mommy will be there.”
“Everyone stay frosty.” Police Chief Nightingale’s voice was tight as it crackled over the radio. “We don’t know what exit he’s gonna take, and we need to keep this perimeter tight.”
Pudding shifted her hooves against the rough asphalt of the hospital parking lot and wished, for the first time in her life, that she was one of the armed response unit. When she had been a cadet choosing her route through the force, all she had wanted to do was deescalate. To find calm resolutions, to end things without the loss of life. ‘Hostage Negotiator’ had been a title she had been proud to earn.
But then again, there was nothing like a good hard gun between your teeth when you were facing a psycho with the pulling power of a freight train and a body count higher than the number of candies in the pick’n’mix candy bag in her car.
Pudding was good at what she did, she knew that. Thirty-one successfully resolved hostage situations, and only two failures that ended in a fatality. She was one of the best at what she did, an up-and-comer in the force, and her growing reputation meant that she was always getting called in to shit unfolding all over the country.
But this one felt different somehow. Pudding was…well, she wasn’t scared. But she wasn’t not scared, either. And in a job like hers, fear was something that you learned to put away real early on. She’d thought she was past it.
“Can I wait in the car, please?” whispered a voice from beside her.
Pudding didn’t even bother to turn her head. “No. Need you here.”
Not that having him here was her call. Civvies had no place in an active crisis like this one. They had no idea how many ponies were still alive in there — if there even were any hostages left for her to help. And the idea that this old stallion was somehow going to do more for their cause than she was, with all her training — it rankled.
“It’s just…it’s cold out here,” said the old man in a quavering voice. “I’ve got arthritis, you know.”
“Look, Mr. Sandwich,” Pudding said flatly, still not moving her eyes from the double doors in front of her. “You’re here for one reason and one reason only. You managed to talk your son down after his last break-out. You helped them get him back into custody. The chief thinks you can do it again, but you’re not going to be able to help us if you’re in the car, are you?”
Cheese Sandwich gulped. “But I’ve not seen Cheesey in ten years. I don’t know if he’ll listen to me any more.”
Flicking her tail in annoyance, Pudding shrugged him off. “You’re going to have to try your best.”
“But I—”
“—Quiet,” Pudding hissed. “This isn’t helpful.”
Cheese Sandwich lapsed into merciful silence, and the wait resumed.
The hospital loomed in the distance, a dark and gloomy spectre. No longer a place of healing — now only a place of death.
“I’ve got a visual!” someone shouted over comms, and Pudding nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Where?” demanded the Chief.
“East side exit.”
Shit, was the only thought that rose to the surface of Pudding’s mind. That’s where we are.
Then the doors flew open, both of them at once, with enough force to make them ricochet off the walls and slam inwards again. They collided hard with the face of the beast emerging from within, but he seemed hardly to notice the blow. He just kept walking, placing one gigantic hoof before the other. Only a few hints of yellow showed beneath the slick, shining red, and his fluffy pink mane was matted with it as well.
Pudding felt herself pale as she took in his sheer size. He's built like more like an elephant than an earth pony.
The radio crackled. "Shit," said Tombo, one of the new recruits — Pudding thought he was the one with the fancy hair that constantly stank of shampoo. "Forget Lil' Cheese, he's the biggest fucking Cheese I've ever seen."
"Shut it, Cadet," snapped the chief, and Tombo fell silent.
Pudding glanced at Cheese Sandwich, trying to gauge how he was taking the appearance of his son, and he gave her a very wobbly smile.
"I have some horse ancestry on my mother's size. Recessive gene, I guess."
"Right," said Pudding, miserably. Because of course the mind of Equestria's most notorious murderer was housed within the body of a pony with the muscle mass of a silverback gorilla.
Lil' Cheese strode forward and then halted, taking in the sight of the police ponies arrayed in their loose circle around the hospital. Spotlights and guns alike were trained on him, and he glared out, half-blinded by the the brightness and clearly not best pleased by it.
"You guys again," he boomed, and his voice was as deep as a bison's. "You never play nice."
There was something on his back, something lumpy — and as Pudding squinted at it, she saw it move.
Her heart lurched, and she scrambled for her receiver. "Chief, Chief, stand them down! He's got a hostage. There's a pony on his back!"
There was a pause, and for one horrible second Pudding thought they would shoot anyway -- but finally the chief gave the order, and the weapons were marginally lowered. Pudding's heart was thumping in her chest, but she felt slightly more in control. She was in charge of this situation now, not the chief. She was trained for this, and right now her one and only objective was to get that pony, whoever they might be, out of this — alive.
"What should I do?" asked Cheese Sandwich, helplessly, and Pudding heard the pain in his voice, raw and bloody as his son's hooves.
But she had no time to coddle the feelings of a broken old stallion. Time was ticking, and there were lives on the line. "Stay back and stay quiet," she said shortly. "You're our wildcard and we don't know how he'll react. You only say anything if I give you the all-clear, got it?"
Without waiting for an answer, she reached for the megaphone that hung around her neck and flipped the on switch.
Time to go to work.
"Hi there, Lil' Cheese."
His unseeing glare snapped in her direction, green eyes wide and bloodshot, and she had to make a conscious effort not to flinch.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
Good, that was good. He was engaging.
"My name's Pudding," she said, her voice as relaxed and calm as if they were old friends. "And I just want to talk."
His scowl deepened. "No, you want to ground me again. Shut me up in my room forever and ever. That's all you blue guys ever want."
Pudding had talked down gunmen, bombers, a crazed teacher who had held a knife to her student's throat — but none of that had been quite as disturbing as hearing a fully grown pony speaking with the words of a little colt.
"We...we don't want to ground you," she said slowly, trying to get into his frame of mind. "But you've been a little bit... naughty, right? You've hurt a lot of ponies in there."
At the word naughty, Lil' Cheese bared his teeth and snarled like an animal. "I'm not naughty! I'm Mommy's good little boy! It's not my fault they're all hiding Mommy from me! They won't tell me where she is!”
He was stamping his hooves and tossing his head, and the wounded pony on his back was being jolted violently from side to side. He was getting volatile — Pudding had definitely picked the wrong word.
"I want to help you find your Mommy," she interjected as soon as he drew a breath. "I know you're trying to be good."
Lil' Cheese subsided, but the gaze he levelled on the blinding lights of the perimeter was still suspicious.
"And it would help me to know you're a...a good boy, if you put that pony down, and let us, uh, fix his boo-boo." She felt ridiculous, but if this was what it took, she'd do it.
Lil' Cheese gave a dismissive snort. "Oh, don't worry about him. He's fine. I think he's faking. Look, I'll wake him up."
With a jerk of his hindquarters, he tipped the hostage onto the ground — face first, Pudding noticed with a wince — and kicked him in the stomach until he moaned and stirred.
"Don't do that, Lil’ Cheese,” Pudding said hastily. “He’s waking up, you don’t need to kick him.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” retorted Lil’ Cheese. “Only my Mommy gets to do that.”
Her eyes on the dazed pony on the ground, Pudding did her best to backtrack. “Of course; it was just a — a friendly suggestion.”
Lil’ Cheese gave the pony — he was wearing the blue scrubs of an orderly — another savage kick. “Wakey wakey.”
The orderly coughed up blood, and Pudding swung frantically to Cheese Sandwich. She’d done what limited background research she could on the way over; she’d read the file. She knew this guy was obsessed with his mother, Pinkie Pie. She knew he’d regressed and never gotten over it. The number of homicides ascribed to him was almost in the triple digits. She knew all the facts that the force had on him, but it wasn’t enough. She needed to know what made this freak tick if she was going to save that pony and anyone else left inside.
“Tell me about your kid,” she said to Cheese Sandwich in an undertone, away from the megaphone. “He thinks he’s what, seven?”
“He was eight when his mom died,” Cheese Sandwich answered.
“What did you do when he was eight and he was misbehaving?”
Cheese Sandwich blanched. “I don’t — I’m not sure. I had this factory, and I…Pinkie did a lot of the stuff with him.”
Pudding shook her head. “What did he like to do, then? What were his hobbies?”
“He liked baking, I suppose. Pinkie was always baking with him.”
“Can you think of anything else? Anything I could use to reason with him.”
Before Cheese Sandwich could answer, Lil’ Cheese moved again. With a swing of his mighty neck, he heaved the injured pony up onto his back again, ignoring his agonised sobs.
“I’m going to write in my dream journal about the dream I had last night.” To the orderly on his back, he added, “You’re my dream journal today.”
“Right,” answered the orderly weakly. His voice was rasping, and he broke off to cough wetly. Pudding felt a corresponding tightness in her own chest; something was seriously wrong with his lungs, and she didn’t have much time. “Dream journal. You got it.”
“So I’m gonna say words about my dream,” Lil’ Cheese explained. “You say ‘em back, so I can be sure you wrote them down right.”
The orderly looked with wide eyes at Pudding, and Pudding nodded at him, fighting the feeling of growing helplessness. It felt so wrong to just say play along to a pony scared for his life, but what choice did they have here?
“Bubbles,” rumbled Lil’ Cheese.
“Bubbles,” echoed the orderly.
“Have you got a shot?” whispered Chief Nightingale over the radio.
“Mommy.”
“M-mommy.”
“Negative, Chief,” the sniper team responded. “The hostage is covering most of the target’s vitals. Can’t do it without serious damage to the hostage.”
“Nose-boops. Vanilla cupcake. Candycane.”
“Nose-boops…v-vanilla cupcake.”
Lil’ Cheese growled and turned to look at the stallion on his back. “And?”
“Candycane,” whispered the poor orderly, and Pudding’s heart twisted in her chest at the terror in his eyes.
She rounded on Cheese Sandwich again. “There has to be something.”
The older stallion just cowered. “He’s…he’s not my little boy anymore. He’s spent most of his life in jail. I don’t know him!”
“You’re useless,” hissed Pudding, and took a savage pleasure at the hurt in his green eyes, so like his lunatic son’s. It wasn’t very professional of her, but this was a negotiation that was well outside of her normal range. She felt like a little frustration was forgivable.
“Are you still there?” Lil’ Cheese called, glowering into the lights.
Pudding scrambled for her megaphone, fumbled, dropped it, snatched it up again and flipped the switch. “Yes, yes! I’m still here. Don’t do anything hasty!”
“I don’t like to be ignored,” rumbled Lil’ Cheese.
“I wasn’t!” Pudding yelped, wishing that this was just a straightforward bank robbery. You knew where you were with a bank robbery. “I was just thinking of — um — what games you might like to play?”
“I’m not interested in games,” said Lil’ Cheese, his tone scathing. “I’m interested in finding my Mommy.”
“Okay, okay.” Pudding was stalling for time. “I really enjoyed your dream journal, it sounds…like you have some super interesting dreams.”
“Thanks!” chirped Lil’ Cheese. “I’m going to go sleep again, soon, and then tomorrow I’ll try the next hospital. It’ll be different; I can feel it in my heart.”
He was talking about massacring another hospital. Medics and patients alike. Pudding’s gorge rose, the bile sharp and acrid in her throat. He was insane.
Then a hoof tapped her on the shoulder. It was Cheese Sandwich, his hoof extended for the megaphone. “Let me try.”
Convulsively, Pudding tightened her grip on it. “I told you, this is my negotiation, and you can’t talk till I say—”
Cheese Sandwich shook his head flatly. “Let me have the megaphone, young lady.”
And there was such unutterable weariness in his eyes that Pudding’s hoof uncurled almost of its own accord, and then the megaphone was in Cheese Sandwich’s grasp.
“Son,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Daddy.”
Lil’ Cheese froze. Every sinew on his huge frame was suddenly corded with bulging veins; so tense he looked like he might snap. Pudding looked frantically from him to his father — there was a hostage’s life in the balance, and if she could do something now to stop whatever this was from going wrong, it was her duty to—
—But Cheese Sandwich was still talking, his voice low and level.
“I want to talk to you about your mom.”
Lil’ Cheese’s lips moved then, just a fraction. One word slipped between them — Pudding was too far away to hear clearly, but she thought that it might have been Mommy?
“She’s dead,” Cheese Sandwich almost whispered into the megaphone. “She died when you were eight.”
“No,” snarled Lil’ Cheese, and then again, louder. “No, no. Mommy isn’t dead.”
“I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry I never told you.” Cheese Sandwich ran an anguished hoof through his tangled mane. “If I’d told you when she first died, or even a few months after, then probably none of this would have ever happened. You wouldn’t have gone to the hospital every day for two years and gotten all…all weird.”
Pudding’s eyes widened and she mouthed at him, a few months? This kid had gone for years after his mother’s death without any idea she was even dead?
“And then you probably wouldn’t have gone on that murder spree at the Ponyville hospital,” Cheese Sandwich continued, tears his eyes. “Or the Appleoosa hospital. Or Canterlot General. Or the specialist children’s cancer ward at the University of Las Pegasus.”
Pudding side-eyed the old stallion.
“And then you probably wouldn’t have gone to prison, broken out, and murdered all those doctors and patients in all those other hospitals.” Cheese Sandwich wiped his eyes and sniffed loudly. “Or gone to prison again and then killed the prison doctors at your biannual checkup, broken out again and killed more doctors at those other six hospitals, and then gone to prison and broken out again and killed all those other—”
Pudding elbowed him. “—Yes, alright, I think we get the picture.”
“No!” bellowed Lil’ Cheese, with a stomp of his mighty hooves that split the asphalt of the parking lot asunder. “It’s a trick! My Dad isn’t here, and my Mommy isn’t dead, and you’re all just lying lying liars!”
“Please, son,” cried his father, clutching the megaphone like a drowning pony, “You have to believe me! I never told you the truth before — though I don’t know why, really, I think I just had a lot on at work — but you must believe me now!”
“Liar!” screamed Lil’ Cheese, his deep voice so loud that the ground seemed to shake. Pudding cowered against the ground, her hooves over her ears. “I’m still eight, so Mommy can’t be dead!”
“Son, you’re thirty-seven!”
And Lil’ Cheese gave a scream so anguished that Pudding reached up and snatched the megaphone away from Cheese Sandwich. Hostage negotiation was meant to deescalate, and this situation was getting so volatile that she had no idea what was going to happen next.
Received of his burden, Cheese Sandwich suddenly surged to his hooves, a look of terrible clarity in his eyes. “This is my fault,” he declared. “If I had been a more involved father, Lil’ Cheese wouldn’t be in this state.”
Pudding stared at him. “I mean, you’re not wrong, but I don’t see—”
“—I’m going in.” And before she could stop him, Cheese Sandwich was off, galloping away from her, dodging past the policeponies forming the perimeter, and thundering past the spotlights towards his son.
As he saw a pony approaching, Lil’ Cheese lowered his head like a bull and chuffed air through his nostrils. “I don’t like it when ponies come near me—” he warned, but then he faltered. “Dad?”
His father skidded to a halt in front of him, and there was a long pause. “Son,” said Cheese Sandwich, and the two of them looked into one another’s eyes.
“I thought it was a fake, Dad,” Lil’ Cheese mumbled. “I didn’t think it was really you. It…it seemed like a trick. Like that time they tricked me with M-Mommy’s voice.”
Cheese Sandwich moved a little closer. “I know, Cheesey. I know. That was how they recaptured you the fourth time, right?”
Lil’ Cheese gave a tearful nod.
“I’m sorry, son. It’s really me, and I’m so, so sorry.” Cheese Sandwich opened his forelegs, and then hesitated. “Can I…can I hug you?”
“But…Mommy?”
“I’m sorry, son. But…I’m still here.” Cautiously, Cheese Sandwich took a step closer. “And I still love you. If you put down your…friend, then maybe we can have a hug, and things will seem better.”
For a long moment, Lil’ Cheese regarded his father in silence, his face utterly impassive. But then he shrugged off the orderly, and with a single brutal kick, booted him a clear thirty feet away. Pudding’s radio crackled, and from the periphery of her vision she saw the paramedics making a beeline for him. But her eyes were still on the father and the son, who were moving slowly towards each other.
Slowly, cautiously, Lil’ Cheese opened his own forelegs, and Cheese Sandwich stepped into them. Blind and trusting as a sacrificial lamb. As he went, he turned his head, and Pudding made eye contact with him. Green eyes, pale green just like his son. So similar. So different.
And Cheese Sandwich winked at her, and in one sudden rush of clarity, Pudding understood what he wanted.
Lil’ Cheese’s meaty limbs closed around his father like a vice, and as the sound of Cheese Sandwich’s fragile old vertebrae snapping rang out, Pudding reached for her receiver and whispered three deadly words into it.
Take the shot.
The report of a dozen pistols rang out, and crimson flowers burst into bloom from a dozen angles on both father and son. Cheese Sandwich made no noise — perhaps it was already too late for that — but Lil’ Cheese gasped and gave one single, strangely childlike sob as he crumpled to the ground.
Almost like he was still the eight-year-old he had never grown past.
They lay there together, a broken family reunited by the spreading pool of shining red that ran in both their veins. The emergency response team sprang into motion, paramedics and trauma response teams galloping at full speed for the ravaged hospital, stampeding past the fallen giant and the father who had failed him.
And Pudding slumped down onto the asphalt, utterly spent. The chief was next to her, saying something — well done, Pudding, that was some great work, shame about the civilian, but I think— but she couldn’t keep her focus on the words. They washed over and around her, a river of meaningless sound.
She couldn’t take her eyes from them. The pool of red around them just kept growing and growing, like a tumour.
“You okay, kid?” the chief asked.
And slowly, Pudding shook her head. “I think…I think I might like to switch to a desk job for a while, Chief.”
