The Rot and Ruin We Leave Behind

Chapters

Prologue: Dead Pony Walking
Chapter Five: Bad Dream
Chapter One: Spill the Tea
Chapter Two: Murphy's Law
Chapter Three: Shadow
Chapter Four: Red On You
Chapter Six: Let It All Burn
Chapter Seven: Collapse
Chapter Eight: Don't Go Out Alone
Chapter Nine: Mercy

Prologue: Dead Pony Walking

Author's Note

Disclaimer: I don’t own My Little Pony. Like, at all. It and all its respectable characters are © to Hasbro. However, all writing contents and semi-plots and original characters here are © to me; unless it is stated otherwise. All shows/ books/ video games/ songs that arementioned in this chapter are all © to their respective owners, I do not own them.

Summary: It began with two bodies, and then suddenly many more came to follow. I was there to witness the beginning of the end, where the dead won’t rest, driven by the urge to devour the living. But we can’t give up because the truth is all that matters. I am begging you…rise up before it’s too late.

Notes: I can’t seem to stop suffering from brain rot. And I watched an autopsy documentary of horses for this! I just had to jump feet first into the MLP!Infection AU fandom because reasons.

Prologue: Dead Pony Walking

The Rot and Ruin We Leave Behind

Prologue:

Dead Pony Walking

Tell me doctor, can you fix my brain?
'Cause everyone says I'm insane
Help me loosen this ball and chain
There's no use talking, I'm a dead man walking

I was thirsty and I wanted more
Then she burned me with the Rebels' soul
Tried to wall me in, I should have known
There's no use talking, I'm a dead man walking

-“Dead Man Walking” by City Wolf

Where do I even start? Any place seems as good as any.

It had started out like any other day. The weather was clearing up, thanks to the Pegasi and their scheduled weather rotations. The rains from the last few days that had kept most ponies cozy and sheltered in-home were finally gone, leaving behind only shallow puddles in their wake. They’d be gone by the afternoon, but the miniature ponds and lakes were an afterthought at best to most going about their day. The only time these watery obstacles were paid any mind was when somepony would have to halt themselves and alter their path before continuing their way.

Chores and errands and meet-ups were now on everypony’s minds. They had all felt the need to shake off the last dregs of cabin fever that had a hold on them. Young colts and fillies were finally freed from the confines of their homes and families. They were more than happy to charge headlong onto the streets of Ponyville to meet up with their friends.

Who could blame their euphoria of freedom after days of confinement? Certainly not their parents.

Everything seemed fine. That’s how it always starts, though—doesn’t it? Right before disaster strikes, and shatters that warm feeling of security and normalcy. No matter how big or small that change may turn out to be, it will always affect somepony., Especially those leveled at Ground Zero, right in the path of the ripples.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Where was I? Ah, yes.

Blue skies. Shining sun. Carefree ponies.

Idyllic. Picturesque. Unprepared for what was to come.

I, sadly, was not one of those ponies, enjoying the bountiful weather. I was buried deep in the earth, trotting between my necropsy tables, the storage fridges, the shelves or cabinets that held the tools or materials I needed to perform my work.

The air inside was much cooler, especially this deep in the ground. I shudder to think what the hot sun beaming down on my fellow ponies above ground would do to the bodies I have here in my morgue. And I knew exactly how it could, too. I don’t mind the cold that much, and my morgue was set at the perfect temperature to ensure that bodies don’t continue the course of rot. It didn’t completely eliminate the decay and merely delayed those effects, but at the very least I could work in relatively calm and peace and without hurry.

I was busy sewing up the body of an elderly pony, my necropsy having been completed.

Cause of death: terminal cancer. The metastasized tumors all along her pancreas were what had done her in, right along with multiple organ failure to cinch it all together. The deceased had come in the night before, right as I was getting ready to close up shop and head home. But when Sheriff Dust Cloud sticks a hoof in the door, there’s little you can do to delay the inevitable. Plus, leaving the local authorities with nowhere to properly store a body is simply irresponsible.

When you’re the town’s only coroner, medical examiner, mortician, and funeral home director all rolled into one, work tends to pile up fast. I used to have an assistant to help with the workload—but that had been in the bigger cities I worked in previously. I was also not the only one doing all the jobs that several ponies should be doing when I worked there. Sadly, when I moved out here to the more rural countryside, I’ve come to find that not a lot of ponies from smaller Podunk towns can stomach the job for very long.

I once had a young stallion boasting about how he’d replace me in no time once he hit his stride. He went on and on that my lovely little funeral parlour and morgue would no longer be called something so unpleasant as ‘Death Dealer’s’. Personally, I feel it’s apt. I deal with death so that others do not have to.

Once he came inside my morgue, however…let’s just say his tune had changed when he had come face-to-face with his first real body. And by that, I mean that he had promptly ran out of my necropsy room puking up his morning meal within ten seconds flat. Ironically, it had been a rather gruesome display that had come in the night before, so I couldn’t completely fault him on his reaction.

(A simple home accident had been the cause of death: the deceased had fallen, cracked his head on his coffee table which resulted in an intracranial hematoma that led to a brain herniation. Due to him having been knocked unconscious and unable to seek medical attention, the combined buildup of blood in the skull plus the increased pressure from that led to his expiration. His visiting family had found him, nearly a week later. A number of critters had gotten into his home and gnawed away at the delicacy of ruinous and rotten flesh. The family ended up going with cremation and the service had been much smaller and easier that way. Even with my magic, I had my limits in how I can clean and pretty up a body that badly desiccated.)

My would-be helper did not deign to return to my place of business that day, or ever again. When I notice him in public, he makes it a habit to pretend not to notice me. A personal best, if I do say so myself. No one has topped that record yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

It’s the little things like that that brighten up my day.

I know what many ponies must think of me and my work. They see what I do as macabre, grotesque, unnatural.

Ponies don’t like to think about death and dying. They have the luxury to judge and jabber away while they dance around the subject or avoid it in its entirety. Even as a hypothetical, conversation revolving around the subject is enough to pucker lips shut and for gazes to pointedly look away, and for the participants to quickly find another topic to discuss.

It isn’t until death is staring them straight in the muzzle that they are forced to reconcile and have the hard talk that most pretend doesn’t exist.

I digress on the matter.

It was a bright and sunny day, unblemished, when the dead came knocking on my morgue’s door again. The body in question being escorted to my humble establishment by Sheriff Dust Cloud and his deputies turned out to be two bodies.

I was still buried under all my gear, gloved hooves still bearing stagnant blood and viscera that was more tacky sludge than liquid. The elderly pony would still need to be outwardly prepared for any funeral rites, but my examinations had come to an end. I had my report to finish, and shortly after that, I could carry on with the family and getting them settled for funeral services later in the week.

So much to do, and not enough time in the day to do it.

My horn glowed as I sighed and stripped using my magic, leaving the elderly pony alone on the metal slab for a moment as I buzzed the good Sheriff in through the front doors. When I was working downstairs, I locked my doors up to make sure no one comes in and vandalizes my casket display room. It took exactly one time for that to happen, resulting in me upgrading my security processes for my business.

I turned off the soft music I had playing, the speakers falling silent as I continued stripping of my gear.

Half a minute later, the Sheriff was bustling the morgue doors open, barking orders to his deputies. I was already slinging my completed patient back onto the sliding slab where I stored all bodies, in whatever stage of progress they were in. I currently had two others, not including the elderly pony. They were supposed to be on my roster today, but Sheriff Dust Cloud had insisted I do the necropsy on the old lady first.

I finished stripping myself of my scrubs and with hardly a thought, jerked my head in the direction of the disposal hamper. The soiled clothing neatly crumpled inside, and the lid clamped shut without fanfare.

“You’re busting my haunches here, Sheriff. First the old lady, now these two?”

I was annoyed. No…no wait. I wasn’t annoyed. I was aggravated. I was already behind schedule. I had two families hounding me, demanding answers on when they could arrange to say goodbye to their loved ones before committing them into the earth’s embrace for their final resting place. I was busy surmising that I would have another late night when I noticed something.

The two deputies that Sheriff Dust Cloud had brought along…they weren’t as chatty as they usually were. There were no little friendly quips of banter, no awkward or corny jokes to be had. They were stiff, jittery. Spooked.

It immediately set me on edge as I watched them bring the two body bags inside and lay them on two of the three slabs I had. The Sheriff crowded me as I moved to unzip one of them. He immediately stopped me with a hoof to my shoulder and a shake of his head.

“Not that one, not yet. This one, right here. I want to know about this one first.”

I tilted my head to peer up at the Sheriff, frowning deeply. “A body’s a body. What difference does it make which one I start on first?”

I have seen homicides and suicides. I’ve seen accidental deaths and purposeful ones. I have been present to many a crime scene to exam a body where it had been found when foul play was suspected. Murder and mayhem and cover-ups, wild animal attacks, natural disasters, and more. I have even once had to deal with a serial killer out in Manehatten once. That had been quite the thrill…in hindsight. Suffice to say, I have seen a plethora of ways one can meet their end. What was more to add to the list?

And yet, what came out of Sheriff Dust Cloud’s mouth still found a way to shock me.

“I want this one examined first because he had his mouth clamped around that one’sthroatwhen we got on scene.”

When it came to death, there were hardly any surprises. Sometimes, it was difficult to suss out a direct cause, but it was only a matter of time. I always found my answers. All it took was a keen eye and some good old fashioned detective work.

I went through the motions. The deputies stood about in my morgue by the door, looking quite uncomfortable as I began to prepare myself and the bodies. I redressed in fresh scrubs from head to hoof, a face shield dropping into place last as I went to unzip the first body. Sheriff Dust Cloud was busy jiggling a hoof up and down on the flooring and I shot him a look.

He stopped, and it was peacefully quiet for about a minute as the zipper ran down the track to unveil the gruesome mess beneath. The tapping noise resumed shortly after I peeled back the body bag’s cover.

“I’m capable of handling this myself, if you’d be so kind as to leave and let me work.”

Sheriff Dust Cloud said nothing, and instead only grunted back.

It wasn’t just his deputies that were so wound up, I noticed. The Sheriff was also on edge.

“Just get this hurried along, will you? I want to know what…this thing…is.”

My brow furrowed at his choice of words and instead of pressing the matter, I instead decided to see it for myself.

The pony in question that lay on my slab was young, male, Earth Pony. Roughly in his early twenties. Coat, a rusty golden colour, with a deep black mane and tail. Some of the feathering along his fetlocks were tinged with black as well, as though they’d been lightly toasted from a distance. Cutie Mark: three reeds in what I could only assume sticking out of water. He would have made somepony a handsome partner…if it wasn’t for the deeply emaciated state of his entire body.

His eyes were sunken in deep in the sockets, and his lips peeled up so high and tight, his teeth and gums were exposed. I found bits of raw flesh and fur caught between his teeth and inside his mouth (presumably from the other victim). I found he had large chunks of his own flesh missing along his body to reveal parts of the ribcage, as if they had been torn violently from him by...something. I made note to come back to that and moved on. Blood was crusting around his mouth, muzzle, neck, and chest. He was missing huge patches of his own fur; I would have chalked it up to mange, but without definitive testing, I couldn’t conclusively say. Speculation had its merits, but only the truth was what mattered.

Buck Doe’s skin was stretched so tightly over his body, I could see nearly all the contours of his bones beneath. Muscle mass was greatly diminished, leading to the severely emaciated frame, likely due to starvation, and I could also definitively say he was suffering from severe malnutrition on top of that. Whatever he had been through, I could ascertain that it must have been hell. When I asked for an estimated time of death, they had declared the second body dead on arrival, between the hours of 0700 and 0800.

The Sheriff stiffly told me to keep going.

Miffed, I did as he asked, but not before putting a big question mark under Buck Doe’s name and beside the “ETD” marker beneath that.

I returned to Buck Doe’s side and began my examinations of the lacerations that decorated his flanks, his shoulders, his neck. Small twigs and brambles were tangled in his mane, mud staining his legs. Wherever he’d been, personal hygiene hadn’t been possible. I took swabs of all particulates I could find, and after meticulously labeling each of them, I set them aside. I would have to send them off to the lab out in Manehatten. I had little lab equipment here and could only run basic testing, including any magical tests I could conduct. Anything more advanced, I was out of luck. I would run what I could here, but the rest I could only assume would need those higher grade testing.

I hypothesized on the nature of all wounds I was finding and marked each one accordingly in my paperwork and on the whiteboard, so that the law ponies could keep following along.

I also narrated all of this aloud, both for the Sheriff and deputies’ sake, as well as for recording purposes. I always have an audio recorder and a video camera set up in my morgue. Once I had scrubbed in, I had turned both on with a flick of my horn. They were both especially helpful when I had to give testimony on any court cases and could show evidence of my findings. My third failsafe was a still camera. I took my time picking over the body and taking photographs as I continued my external investigation. No more music for me today.

At first, I would have chalked up the lacerations most likely due to a predator attack. Some were oozing pus, untreated and swollen from inflammation. Those were also swabbed, tagged, and labeled accordingly. I theorized further on these injuries, but the closer I examined the body, the more my speculations turned away from that. A bite wound on his rear right ankle caught my eye. I moved to inspect it and used my magic to lift it up in the air to get a better angle. Blackened ichor oozed from the site, staining the deceased’s golden fur. I frowned and took another swab, swiping up the viscous material and carefully storing it within a test tube and marked that for further testing. Blood didn’t turn black like this. Not unless it was under certain conditions and even then, it was...more than strange.

And yet, a part of me was tickled, deep down, and this felt…familiar somehow. But the more I tried to dig at it, the more it eluded me and my efforts. I finally decided that now wasn’t the time to pursue that avenue of mysteries. I could look into it later. Currently, I had more important things to complete.

“This bite wound…it doesn’t look like from any Timber Wolves I’ve ever encountered,” I said, musing mostly to myself.

“We’ve already ruled that out,” Sheriff Dust Cloud grunted.

“You don’t get the final say, Sheriff. I do,” I reminded him, shooting the stallion a pointed look. I returned to my task at hand, ignoring the scowl he threw back at me. “The bite radius isn’t from any predator I know of. It’s much too small for a Timber Wolf’s, even a juvenile. It looks like…”

My teeth clacked together as I shut my mouth. My heart fluttered as the realization dawned on me. I craned my neck to look more clearly at the Sheriff. “This looks like a bite wound from…from another pony.”

The expression on the Sheriff darkened. His deputies fidgeted, clearly avoiding my searing gaze.

“Go over what happened with these two, if you can. Please, if you will.”

“Buck Doe over there was found on the edge of the Everfree Forest by a few eyewitnesses. They allege that he was delirious and aggressive. They attempted in helping him, but he expired before he could even be moved off to the clinic, let alone calmed down.” Sheriff Dust Cloud nodded toward the second, unopened body bag. “Mare Doe volunteered to stay with the body until help arrived. That’s when he allegedly got right back up and tore out her throat with his teeth. The eyewitnesses arrived on scene with us to see all that. When we tried prying him off, he attempted to attack us. Took a sharp rock to the dome to put him down.”

“I’m sorry, but could you repeat that; you had to do what?”

I stomped a hoof as I turned to face the three law ponies, taken aback. It was a rare occurrence when our very own Ponyville Sheriff Department resorted to violence to resolve any conflict, let alone end a life. It was rare that they got involved in anything. Over the last few years, our troubles and woes had largely been handled by Princess Twilight Sparkle and her friends. From Discord to Tirek to giant Bugbears and hordes of Changelings, this place had become quite the hub for something I like to call “crazy times”.

The history of Equestria, however, was nothing short on that in all its entirety.

“We…couldn’t restrain him. Not like what we’d usually do when somepony’s getting aggressive. There…there ain’t nothing natural about any of this,” said the roan Unicorn beside Sheriff Dust Cloud. He was new to the department, and I’d only ever exchanged a handful of words with him. I believe his name was Frizzy Pop. He looked entirely too agitated, eyes darting nervously at the Buck Doe on my table. I could see him shaking from across the room where I stood.

Newbies. You sometimes had to chuck them into the deep end and hopefully, they learned to tread water and swim, or else they’d sink. There was hardly any room for an in-between.

I turned back to examine the skull, rotating the head as carefully as I could with my magic. I found the aforementioned blow to the skull. I swept back the mane and frowned as I leaned in closer, seeing that it had pierced through the frontal lobe—

“Don’t get too close!”

I was startled at the sudden shout and turned back to face the Sheriff and his deputies. The pearly-grey Pegasus had her wings flared out, pale emerald eyes wide and fearful. Her name was Far Fetch, if I recalled correctly. That was when I noticed the bloody bandage on her rear leg, just above the fetlock. She was keeping it lifted up off the ground, and I could see the flecks of red staining the white bandage.

Again, I felt that tickle in the back of my mind, that trifling little scratching that would dart away before I could grasp and hold onto it. And, once again, I had to stifle it back.

“I need to continue my inspection, please. Don’t make me kick you all out.”

It was unusual for the Sheriff to be so involved in my examinations like this. When a body was brought to me, it was usually left at that. Law enforcement rarely stayed on the premises during my work. ‘Spooked’ no longer seemed an appropriate term to describe them. ‘Terrified’ was more suitable—like they were staring straight into the maw of a full-grown Ursa Major.

They wanted more. They needed more. And yet they weren’t wholly prepared to face whatever may come their way.

That something began to tug even harder within me, and this time it was telling me that something big and something so very, very wrong was coming.

I could understand Sheriff Dust Cloud’s and his deputies’ nervousness.

However, I had standards and couldn’t afford to continue being distracted.

I eventually managed to herd the three law ponies out of my morgue when they began getting antsy and uppity, and returned to work. It was at times like these that I wished I had an assistant—one who wouldn’t run away and puke their guts out. But I had always made do with the tools I’d had on hand.

When I had worked out in Manehatten, I recall that most of my tools had ended up being literal tools that a construction worker would utilize. There was nothing state-of-the-art for somepony who operated solely on bodies would require to perform their trade in a more civilized manner.

At least here in my own place of business, I could acquire the tools I needed on my own budget, rather than relying on the good fortune of Manehatten’s city budgeting. When it came to the handling of ponies after they expire, it almost felt like a taboo to submit a request for supplies.

The mystery of Buck Doe continued.

Once I had the Sheriff and his two deputies out of my necropsy theatre, I could finally renew my work.

At 1203, I made my first incisions. I had been tempted to do this while the law ponies were still here—but the thought of having even one of them puke in my morgue was somehow more unappealing than the literal blood and guts.

I began to peel back the first few layers of fur and skin, revealing the glistening muscles and ribcage beneath. While the blood seemed to have turned black and tacky, I could still identify the organs and they were where they should be. I did note, however, that the blackened staining had tainted what little musculature structure Buck Doe had left. I worked to remove the ribcage, snapping bones, and setting them aside, and from there I could further my examination of the organs properly. I carefully placed them in separate metal dishes, took samples from each of them for later testing, and continued notating my progress.

From the whiteboard to my pads of paperwork, to my audio recorder to my video camera—everything was being documented. I couldn’t afford to let anything go amiss. This felt much too important to dismiss. I could feel the pressure mounting my backside, the weight of an unknown presence that demanded my full attention. This didn’t feel like a normal necropsy. Nothing about any of this told me it was normal. I still carried on. I had a duty to. No one would believe this unless I did.

I continued to speak, assuring that I wasn’t misheard and tasted each word before speaking. There was a method to my madness, and all these redundancies were necessary.

I finally got to Buck Doe’s heart, carefully excising it from his chest cavity with tailored precision. A warm, cherry-red glow that was my magic encompassed the organ and I allowed myself a few moments of reflection.

How many times have I had the heart of somepony deceased within my grasp? To have it aloft, as though I was on the cusp of reciting a play?

I weighed the organ, keeping to my clinical approach. Once that was complete, I gave it another examination, and upon finding nothing, set it aside in another metal dish. It immediately seemed to collapse in on itself, and that same blackened ichor oozed from the severed arteries. I made note of this to both my audio recording and the camera.

It took me a while longer to complete my necropsy of Buck Doe. I had made sure to document Buck Doe’s Cutie Mark for the Sheriff, although I realized much later on, I hadn’t done the same courtesy for Mare Doe before kicking the law ponies out. I somewhat regret that, but their identities were hardly my scope of focus. How they expired and why was my goal to find out. I did make a note to do so, however, for their own records, when they stopped by next time.

Sheriff Dust Cloud could take it from there when I was done with my work.

Mare Doe was largely intact. Her mint-green fur almost appeared white at certain angles, delicate as ice crystals, while her mane and tail were reminiscent of the deep blue of arctic waters. Her Cutie Mark was a flurry of snowflakes. There was no emaciation, tears, or lacerations to her body. She was as healthy as any pony could be. The only signs of determinable distress that I could find was her throat having been torn out.

Buck Doe had fresh blood and chunks of flesh and fur stuck in his teeth, which tracked with what the law ponies had reported. Mare Doe’s face was locked in an expression of terror and shock. I began my examination for Mare Doe in earnest. I worked through my external inspection, taking note of everything aloud, continuing through my routine.

By 1330, I made my first incisions for Mare Doe. I cracked her ribcage open after splitting her flesh apart and began removing her organs for examination. Buck Doe’s were already in refrigeration, tagged and bagged. I was meticulous and methodical. I had to be. I couldn’t afford mistakes. Once again, I had the feeling that this…this was much too important to allow any room for mistakes.

Perhaps it was my intense focus in dictating my theories for posterity’s sake. Perhaps it was my focus diverted from the body itself and on the menial tasks outside of it. Perhaps I just wasn’t paying enough attention.

Any of these were possible.

I do know that I didn’t notice Mare Doe twitching, not at first. I was carefully marking my whiteboard of Mare Doe’s lacking external and internal injuries, excluding her trachea and esophagus, the muscles and ligaments, the damage done to her vocal cords. Even if she had survived this, the surgeries and recovery would have been immense. Mare Doe had had a small build-up in her heart that alluded to high cholesterol levels, which could lead to a heart attack in the future, nothing a simple change in diet and menial exercise could stave off—but otherwise, she was a picture of health.

It was the thumping noise that drew my attention.

Hoof against metal wasn’t exactly a subtle sound. And Mare Doe was quite clumsy, as though she was a newborn foal attempting to figure out her limbs. Her jaw hinged open, and a wet gargling arose from it, while her torn-out jugular sprayed clotting blood outwards. When I turned to confront the noise, I saw that her eyes were pale and milky, and yet, they were solely focused on me.

My magic sputtered and fizzled out, and my clipboard fell to the ground in shock.

How? How could she see me when it seemed quite clear that her eyes were no longer of use? Perhaps Mare Doe could smell me, sense me, somehow.

Her back legs fumbled uselessly behind her, and they were what tipped her right off of my necropsy table and onto the ground. I winced at the loud and pronounced splattering sound that followed. Her chest cavity sagged, concaving due to the lack of organs inside. I couldn’t help but spare a glance at Buck Doe, wondering if he too would suddenly come to life, but he remained inactive.

Only Mare Doe struggled to move, trying to crawl toward me, tension snapping her jaw open and closed. I stared at her, a mixture of wonder, horror, and morbid fascination overtaking me. Her blood, now cooled after hours of stagnation, oozed like syrup from her neck wound, dribbling over her once pristine-looking mint-green fur. A wheeze struggled out of her, and the corpse continued its struggles to move closer to me. I took a step back and then another, and another. I had to wonder in the midst of all this…how was she able to create noise when her jugular was gaping open and her lungs taken out of her chest?

That feeling of familiarity was sharper this go around, more poignant and insistent.

Why did this feel familiar? I don’t recall anything like this ever happening to me, or to anypony else that I knew. The dead can’t walk. And yet, here I was, staring into the face of a pony who was doing just that.

“Mare…Mare Doe is moving,” I said aloud, continuing my backwards stepping. My magic alit my horn once more, as I used the spell to recall my fallen paperwork and quill. It began scribbling away at my behest. I moved slowly, deliberately. One hoof after the other. I used my magic to disconnect my camera from its tripod and swung it around to face the approaching Mare Doe.

“She was brought in with Buck Doe. Buck Doe was allegedly the cause of death for Mare Doe. Sher—Sheriff Dust Cloud and his deputies brought in both Buck and Mare Doe for examination based on several eyewitnesses on the edge of the Everfree Forest. Eyewitnesses alleged on site to having first encountered Buck Doe when he exited the Everfree Forest, acting delirious and hostile before passing away. I hypothesize he died due to his various infected wounds, starvation, malnutrition, and dehydration—but until further testing, I am not confident in listing any of these as the final cause of death.”

I continued to step backwards, feeling out my path and giving my peripheral a few glances. Otherwise, I kept my gaze locked on Mare Doe. I continued my narration for my audio recorder, my video camera. The scribbling of the quill was working feverishly.

“Mare Doe stayed with Buck Doe after he expired earlier today—that is, between the hours of 0700 and 0800—and shortly after, he allegedly reanimated and tore out Mare Doe’s throat. Sheriff Dust Cloud and his deputies had to resort to a blow to the skull, traumatic penetration of the frontal lobe, just above the orbital wing of the sphenoid. After careful examination, I am confident in attesting that Mare Doe did indeed have her throat torn open by Buck Doe’s mouth, as I’ve visually matched fur fibers trapped in Buck Doe’s teeth to that of Mare Doe. Both ponies arrived in my morgue around 0930.”

I could feel my own throat tightening, even as I spoke. I swallowed past the hard lump and continued speaking. My video camera was still recording. So was my audio recorder. Good. If things did go sideways…at least they’d have proof of my findings.

“I’ve completed my examination of Buck Doe first, and began on Mare Doe roughly two hours or so ago. Vital organs have been extracted, including her lungs and heart. This is…unprecedented, to say the least. Mare Doe is…she is currently crawling after me on the floor. I don’t know her intent, but I can only surmise none of it to be good.

The corpse tried to lift itself up higher, perhaps even to get her rear legs beneath her. It didn’t work, and Mare Doe sprawled along the tiled flooring. Her intestines—still entrenched in Mare Doe’s abdomen—began to slither and slide out of her open cavity.

A part of me was regretting having kicked out the law ponies right about now. Another part was regretting not having hired a suitable assistant. I had to stuff all regrets deep, deep down. I whipped my head toward my tray of tools and focused on the one I wanted: a rather sharp scalpel I was particularly fond of that could slice through just about anything that wasn’t made of bone. I swung it forward, eyes once more locking onto the corpse crawling after me.

Milky eyes watched after me, jaws spasming open and closed, a raspy sound eking out of Mare Doe’s mouth while a mixture of red and blackened blood continued spewing from her gaping throat. Suddenly, my mouth was cotton dry and forming words was a herculean effort, but I finally managed to pull words from the ether.

“Mare…Mare Doe is crawling after me. Her eyes don’t appear to be working, as they’ve become too clouded for functional use, and yet they’re locked onto me. Her intestines are dragging behind her now, and I…she’s…dead. She’s supposed to be dead, and yet…”

How does one explain this without sounding insane? Even with videographic evidence, there will always be a dissenting doubter calling ‘fake’.

Bloody drool dribbled down Mare Doe’s chin as she continued to pull herself after me. Her front hooves were struggling for purchase. Coupling that with her intestines dragging on the ground beneath and behind her, it was most likely the saving grace that kept her from reaching me any quicker.

“Somehow, Mare Doe appears to have reanimated, despite having been dead for several hours and missing several vital organs, per my previous statement. Her only visible wound is that from her throat, where her trachea, esophagus, and a part of her carotid have been violently ripped out. Cause of death appears to be most likely exsanguination. What little blood that has remained in her body has largely turned black and has the consistency of tar or sap.”

I swallowed thickly, as if I could taste that vile black blood in my own mouth. Mare Doe continued to rasp and crawled after me as I looped around my empty table. I could see a few loops of entrails caught on the edge of one table, a bloody slime trail left in her wake. Mare Doe seemed to also have trouble rounding the corners, and perhaps that was a saving grace. It gave me time to think.

“In conclusion, Mare Doe appears driven to come after me.”

Mare Doe was still dead. She was still a corpse. I felt a morbid sense of curiousity seep in through the panic.

“I…I don’t think if I used any sedatives or paralytics, it would have much effect. I cannot, in good faith, attest that Mare Doe is…is alive at all. She appears to be…reanimated, yes. But not alive. Given that, per my earlier statement, I have removed several vital organs, it is absolutely impossible that she’s still among the living.”

If I let her get ahold of me, what would happen, I wonder? Judging by how snappy her jaws were, and how she died, it would not end well for me. Call it a gut feeling or instinct. I wasn’t ready to go that far to find out.

That thought brought me to a standstill. How Mare Doe had died…

I went over the facts. Buck Doe had had his jaws locked around Mare Doe’s throat by the time the Sheriff and his deputies had arrived on site. Before that, Buck Doe had come out of the Everfree Forest, allegedly confused, violent before passing away, most likely due to his various injuries and diminished physical and mental health. And yet, he had seemingly come back to life to tear Mare Doe’s throat out.

It always came back to that. Buck Doe had reanimated after dying.

The slap of Mare Doe’s hooves against the tile floor echoed like cannon fire in the enclosed space. I continued to loop around my necropsy tables, allowing myself some breathing room. I glanced at Buck Doe, still lying on his side, his innards exposed and hollow. It had taken a blow to the skull, to the brain to stop him. A blow to the brain…

I swerved my scalpel once more between myself and Mare Doe. She kept snapping her jaws and continued dragging herself along on her front hooves. The muscles in her exposed throat tightened, relaxed, tightened. She was determined to come to me. I squared myself, head lowering, horn at the ready. I leveled my scalpel more readily, brandishing its blade squarely in the face of Mare Doe. She appeared unbothered by the blade and kept pulling herself forward.

I huffed, nostrils flaring as I uttered a barely audible apology, and with intent in my spell, I slammed the blade through Mare Doe’s skull, right through one of her eye sockets.

For a second time that day, Mare Doe died.

Chapter Five: Bad Dream

Feels like I'm falling
Into a world
Into a world
I can't control

I hear it calling
Down in my soul
Grippin' my bones
It won't let go

Wake me up
Won't you wake me up?
Caught in a bad dream
Caught in a bad dream
Wake me up
I wanna feel the sun
Caught in a bad dream
Caught in a bad dream

“Bad Dream” by Ruelle

It felt like an eternity had passed since I last saw my funeral parlor. I was practically dragging my hooves by the time I was in the homestretch. My humble home was on the second level of my place of work, and it had an attic space where I stored a few knickknacks that I have collected over the years. Things that I assume could qualify as museum-quality, but I had no intention of releasing them. I had fond memories of them, and how they came to be in my possession.

One that I was particularly attached to was that of the skull of a pony from three thousand years ago, having been mummified in such a pristine manner, entirely by the right circumstances of weather and environment rather than by pony-design. I’ve thought about putting some of these things on display, but I certainly know for a fact that many ponies would have found it ghoulish to do so. But as I’ve said, I have fond memories of these things.

I would have been relieved to be both back at work and at home, but I was much too tense and exhausted for that. I stood in the pool of warm, yellow light that lit up my door, glad that the flicking gaslight had kicked in. I had just unlocked my front door with the key and twisted it with my magic when I heard somepony calling my name.

I turned in the caller’s direction, trying to hold back my annoyance. My limited quota for socialization and playing nice with others was quickly running out of fumes to run on. I needed sleep and food, to recharge myself. I was useless to anypony else if I was expected to operate at full capacity but didn’t give myself the required recovery. And judging by the parting of ways I’d had with the townsfolk and the mayor; I was fully expected to continue playing a part in all this. Perhaps being the creepy pony who played with dead things had its advantages in this situation after all.

Not that I had much of a choice. The minute the Sheriff had wheeled in those two bodies into my morgue, I couldn’t have separated myself from this even if I wanted to. I had jumped into the deep end and willingly at that. There was nothing left to do but tread water until the powers that be decided to grant me a ring buoy to cling to.

“Excuse me, Red Rush! Just a minute of your time, ma’am!”

I blinked in surprise. They came closer, into the reaches of my porch light, I saw that it was the Apple siblings. They had been patrons of mine, by a count of three times, if I remembered correctly. The most recent and most crushing of them all to the family had been their matriarch from Sweet Apple Acres, Granny Smith.

I had liked her. She had been one of the few ponies I could stand to be around for longer than five minutes willingly. She had always saved me a jar of zap-apple jam when the harvest season came around. And every time she did, she’d give me a cheeky wink and a smile, and she’d say, “That there’s our bargain! I give you some zap-apple jam, and you keep that ole grim reaper away another year for me!”

I suppose I had failed her, because three years ago, she’d finally passed away. That funeral service had been one of the largest I’d ever hosted since setting up shop in Ponyville. Bigger than the last two I had hosted for the Apple family, for sure. Even the most distantly related family members and friends had come into town. Standing room only, no spare seats to be had and there had been no dry eyes (or noses for that matter) either. The following migraine I had sported directly after on the evening of the service had been equally as large. It had taken me three agonizing days and nights to get rid of it.

But for Granny Smith Apple? It had been worth it.

Big Mac and his younger sister trotted up to me, both sounding winded from having run from one end of town to this one. My funeral parlor was entirely out of their way to get home to Sweet Apple Acres. So why were they here instead of heading home?

I gave them a curt nod each, and closed the door to my work, my home. I could spare a few minutes.

“Big Mac. And, you are…?”

“I’m Apple Bloom. We’ve met, like, a dozen times in the last few years. Don’t you remember?”

I cleared my throat politely and shook my head. “Sorry. I’m not typically great with names.”

“It’s fine, Red Rush. We don’t hold it against you,” said Big Mac, with a nudge to his little sister. She gave him a side-eyed look and stuck her tongue out at him before turning to me again.

“We just wanted to know if you saw Sweetie Belle or Scootaloo, by any chance? Or my big sister, Applejack? They were all teaching up at the school today, and you mentioned at the meeting that they were helping everypony else that evacuated the hospital earlier…”

I vaguely recalled what Applejack looked like. Orange fur, long straw-coloured mane and tail, Stetson hat. Twangy accent, not that dissimilar to Sheriff Dust Cloud’s…or her own siblings, I suppose. The Element of Honesty, and cohort to Princess Twilight Sparkle. I knew of her. I just didn’t know her directly. I’ve also met several dozen Apples in the last few years; it was dizzying to keep up with them, even for those that were residents of Ponyville proper.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember if I’d seen even a glimpse of her when the school faculty had flocked over to assist the evacuated patients. My shoulders sagged, and I finally shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if she was there. I was busy with the Sheriff and Nurse Redheart before I went straight to the town hall meeting.”

I noticed the way Apple Bloom’s face fell…and how her eyes widened when she looked at my hooves. “I-is that…blood?”

I shuffled back a step, looking away. “…it wasn’t a pretty sight inside the hospital. I wouldn’t suggest going there and trying to poke around. It’s sealed with one of my spells, regardless.”

“Like any of us wanna try breakin’ in. Well, what about Scootaloo or-or Sweetie Belle?”

“Apple Bloom, that’s enough. We’ve taken enough of her time, and we gotta get scootin’ home now—”

“How can you not remember anypony’s name or who they are, period? You’ve been here for years! We all know what you do, but you don’t seem to know squat about anypony here in Ponyville!” Apple Bloom shouted and stomped her front hoof. Tears brimmed in her eyes as her lower lip trembled. Big Mac pulled her closer and swung his head across her neck in an embrace.

I looked away, shuffling my weight from one hoof to the next, allowing them this moment to themselves. It was almost a habit to me by now. I may be present, but I was decidedly not a part of a vulnerable, tender moment for grieving or distraught family and friends.

I could understand their frustration. They don’t know what was happening, not to its full extent like I did, and I doubted that Starlight Glimmer was going to be throwing the school’s doors open again tonight. Not with what was happening now. But that meant not getting any information in or out. Not for anyone…except perhaps myself, the mayor, or the Sheriff.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you, Red Rush.”

“It’s…fine. I know you both are worried; you have every right to be. I’ll see if I can get any updates and try to send word into the school tomorrow. But I’d suggest you barricade yourselves in at home tonight, and not let anypony in if they come knocking or even screaming at the door.”

“Right, cuz…they might be bit or undead or something,” Apple Bloom muttered as she and Big Mac pulled away from one another, still appearing crestfallen and miserable. I hesitated, on the verge of fleeing inside and standing dumbstruck on my doorstep. An idea struck me a half-second later and I once again breached the box of pastries from my saddlebag and left it to hover in front of Apple Bloom.

“Here. Take as many as you’d like. I know it’s a poor consolation prize right now, but it’s all I have.”

Apple Bloom’s lips quirked into a half-smile and she made off with three pastries. It didn’t seem to matter how old or young a pony was; sweets seemed to be quite the hit to make anypony smile, even if only for a few seconds. Big Mac shot me a grateful look before herding her away back home.

I couldn’t help but notice how alert he remained, even at a distance. I was glad for it. We’d all need to be on high alert until we could confirm that this nightmare was coming to an end. If it could be ended. I reopened my door and stepped inside, and relief washed over me, seemingly washing away my stress.

Literally, it did just that. I had set up a web of spells across my parlor for my own benefit, tailored and designed by myself. Stress relief when my vitals were low, an extra oomph of energy to keep me going just a little bit longer, a spritz of some other conglomerations for various moods and levels of health. I tugged at each thread of spell that I needed, and the extra rush reinvigorated me as I felt the tendrils settling over me.

It would keep me going just long enough to get some food in me, a shower to clean off the blood, and then to finally make it to bed. I’d have to reset them in the morning, but I was more than willing to do just that if meant going to bed clean, and somewhat physically satiated.

“Mama? Mama!”

“Yes, my little pony?”

“What’s in the forest?”

“Scary creatures. Monsters who would eat you up in one bite.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what they do. They don’t care much for life like we do.”

“But why?”

“Oh, my sweet filly…that’s just how they are. There’s no changing their nature.”

“But Pegasi change the weather. Why can’t we change ani…amin…aminals?”

“Animals aren’t as smart as us pony folk. They’re dim-witted beasts.”

“But Mr. Raccoon is smart! He washes his paws before eating! And-and Miss Hawk, she builds a nest like we make our homes for her babies and Miss Rabbit burrows deep to keep her babies safe and—and—”

“Please don’t start this again, little one! You need to stay away from the forest, it’s much too dangerous! You need to be more like your big sister Horizon Tempest! She’s such a hard worker—”

I awoke with a sharp gasp, the sound of my front door’s alarm ringing in my ears. It sent a jolt of uncharacteristic panic through me as I stumbled out of bed, blankets tangling around my limbs as I struggled to free myself. I’ve never had vandals break into my funeral parlor before, not when I was home or even when I was away—except for the one time. Most residents of Ponyville actively avoided my place, even if they regarded it with mild disdain.

I yanked myself out of bed, rolling straight to my hooves and frantically rushed out of my bedroom, out into the landing and down the stairs. I came to a skidding halt worthy of some goofy cartoon comic in the newspapers when I saw that it was Sheriff Dust Cloud, standing awkwardly in the entrance of my funeral parlor downstairs.

I stared until I finally, fully registered who it was.

We stared at one another for a few strained seconds before he spoke.

“…you left your front door unlocked. Gotta say, not very smart of you, Red Rush. Especially considering what’s been happening as of late.”

I swallowed back a biting remark. Now wasn’t the time to be snippy. He was right, after all.

“I…didn’t realize I’d left things so unsecure.” I couldn’t recall if I had locked my front door or not. I’d been so tired last night…

What a fucking oversight.

I shook my head, my ears flaring back. I needed to catch him up, not linger on my mistakes. “Mayor Mare’s backing us. We’re on lockdown, as far as I’m aware. I’m…not sure how things have gone along since we parted ways last night. What’s going on with the school?”

The Sheriff’s lips quirked into a half-smile. “So far, so good. Got the headmistress and that school counselor up to speed on what we know. Helped them set up their makeshift hospital in some of the classrooms. I think they sent word to Princess Twilight up in Canterlot, but I can’t rightly say for sure.”

I gave him a once-over. He looked a lot cleaner, thankfully. There was less red and gore on him. “How’s the leg?”

“Better, once they made me rest and kick up my hooves. Still limping a bit. I told ‘em bites were a big thing, and they started checking everyone.”

“And did they find anyone with any bites?”

I motioned for him to follow me with a nod of my head, and he dutifully limped along. I led him to the kitchen upstairs.

“Not that I know of, but we got a bunch of the older students helping out with the patients. The docs and nurses took a big hit, thanks to the fiasco in the quarantine wing. Before we all go back there the second go-round, that is.”

I glanced back at the Sheriff, and caught him shaking his head, a sneer pulling at his face.

“We shoulda been quicker.”

“My sentiments exactly, Sheriff.” I paused as we passed into the kitchen. I motioned him to take a seat, if he wanted, and I turned to the task of making coffee. Once the brewer was set, I settled at the kitchen island across from the Sheriff. “Did you see anything on your way here?”

“No, thank the Princesses. It’s all quiet out there for the time being. I’m hoping if we keep things locked down like this, maybe we’ll be safe. Maybe this could blow over and things can get back to normal.”

“Normal? Sheriff, take a look around. What had happened at the hospital last night, all day yesterday…nothing about that was normal. And a lockdown might not be a complete problem-fixing failsafe. It’s a band aid on a sucking chest wound. We need to take more action!”

He huffed back, narrowing his eyes at me. “And how would you go about that, Red? You keep on harpin’ this concept of ‘we’. Enlighten me. ‘Cuz all I been hearing from you is talk, talk, talk. How would you fix this?”

“Reaching out to the princess, for one. Or all of them. There could be cases in the Crystal Kingdom, and we’d never know it, given how far out they are from Canterlot and the rest of us.”

“I already told you, Headmistress Starlight’s reached out—”

“You just said a few minutes ago you didn’t know for sure,” I countered, my irritation rising. Ugh, I needed more caffeine in me to tackle this. The Sheriff looked at me with reproach, his muzzle curdling into a sour grimace.

“I’m not exactly in cahoots with the princess’s inner circle, I don’t get regular updates, so sorry to disappoint.” The Sheriff replied flatly. His gaze shifted away from me for a split second to something behind me. “Coffee’s ready, Red Rush.”

I got up and pivoted towards the counter, my jaw clenched and body stiff. Mugs clattered down and out of the cabinets with a sweep of my magic, ceramic clinking harder than necessary on the black quartz countertops. I had remodeled my kitchen a few years back. I think the one who helped me with choosing those countertops was that hyper Sugarcube Corner pink pony’s sister. Maude Pie.

I’d been hesitant at first with them, seeing just how glitzy they looked, but their durability has remained topnotch over the last few years. I liked Maude. She was a straight-to-the-point pony, and didn’t jump around, sucking up all my social and emotional batteries until I was left with nothing for myself. But with Maude, we had business to conduct—I was a customer, she the consultant, and at the end of the day, we shook hooves, and that business came to its conclusion.

It was the easiest part of the renovation of my kitchen.

None of that mattered right now. My counters couldn’t fix this looming problem.

The mugs of coffee I had fixed for myself and the Sheriff shivered midair and my magic failed. It wasn’t that my spell had weakened, no.

A shudder wracked and overtook me when I heard it, and my concentration had faltered as a result. The ceramic made me jump as it shattered on hardwood flooring, and I stared down at the coffee-covered broken shards that lay at my hooves. I brought my gaze to bear on Sheriff Dust Cloud, but he too, seemed stricken by that same something. His ears were pricked, head turned away from me, brows furrowed in concentration.

At first, I had thought it was a figment of my imagination. But the sound came again: a high, reedy little scream that came from tiny or distant lungs.

Sheriff Dust Cloud’s head snapped toward me to meet my startled gaze, his nostrils flaring. It confirmed to me that it hadn’t been my imagination. He had heard it too. We abandoned the refuge of my kitchen and the mess I’d left behind, hooves thundering against the worn steps down to the first floor. He burst through the front door first with his shoulder. I was right on his heels.

The first thing that hit me was the acrid stench of smoke. It was flooding the street, furling against the levies of homes and shops as we had rushed straight into it before we realized what it was. I lost sight of the Sheriff as a particularly dark plume ringed with embers and sparks engulfed us both.

Another scream sounded off, but I couldn’t place its direction. I could feel the heat of the fire, though, wherever it was. It was so unbearably hot and close, and with all the smoke, it’s as if I was choking on the very air itself. I struggled to cover my snout and breathe past it at the same time. My eyes watered, blurring my vision as I lurched forward, hoping I didn’t run into a building…or something much worse than that.

“Red! Red Rush! Where are you?!”

I could hear it now; the roar of a fire, and the Sheriff bellowing over it. One of the shops or houses—maybe even several at once—were aflame. More voices were joining the first one that had drawn out the Sheriff and I outside. I stumbled over my own hooves, hacking uncontrollably, eyes prickling with tears as the unbearable stench of the smoke overwhelmed me. Through my watering eyes, I saw a blissful reprieve in the wall of smokey blackness that surrounded me, and I lunged for it.

The sight of faded blue shifting and the vague contours of buildings ahead of me became clearer as I charged towards it. The moment I cleared the majority of the smoke and sparks, I came to a grinding halt. My breath came in ragged gasps, my throat raw and stinging as fresh air comingled with the smoke that clung to my insides.

A young filly stood only a few meters from me, a deep and beautiful coat of ombre-gold and her mane and tail a faded wine colour, like that of an especially peaceful sunset on the horizon. I stared at her, frozen in place. The drumming of my heart grew louder and I took a hesitant forward, strangely drawn to her. I had never seen her before in Ponyville—not to my recollection, at any rate—and yet, I felt a strong pull towards her. She was so young, so strong-looking—it made me suddenly and oddly envious. Her golden eyes locked with mine and I stepped closer, the taste of a name just out of reach of my tongue as I opened my mouth to call to her—

My trance was brusquely broken by the plaintive cries of my name from the Sheriff. I craned my neck to peer behind me, and saw him stumbling out from the roiling billows of smoke that I had only just cleared, a hoof over his snout. He coughed violently, his eyes squeezed shut and leaking unwilling tears down his cheeks.

“R-Red Rush! What’s going on?! We gotta move it!” He hacked out, and I hesitated, torn from assisting him to joining the strange little filly just beyond the veil of smoke and in the fresh air. I stole a quick look back to where she had been, and was stunned when there was no pony else at the end of the street. A part of me wanted to gallop off to find her. She was so young, and she was caught in all of this disaster—I don’t know her at all and yet at the same time, I felt like I knew who she was. Her name…I felt like I knew that too, and it was just out of reach. But if I concentrated hard enough, I could practically grasp it—

The moment passed and it was all gone, just as suddenly as it struck me. An uneasiness settled in the pit of my gut like a hot ember, scorching everything it touched. I backed up and startled when I bumped into the Sheriff. He pushed me forward with his shoulder, urging me on.

“Half the buildings on this street are on fire, we gotta go!”

“Where’s the fire brigade? Don’t you usually coordinate with them?”

“Halfa them ended up in the hospital transporting the victims after that train wreck yesterday at the station,” said the Sheriff, his face pulling into a grimace. “I don’t think any of them made it out before you locked it down.”

Damn it. I shot a glance back behind me, my heart rising in my throat at the sight of the street engulfed in flames and dark plumes of heavy smoke.

It was worse than I had originally imagined. Why hadn’t the Sheriff noticed this before arriving at my place? Surely, the fire hadn’t started so quickly or ended up this badly in such a short amount of time. Not unless some pony had been playing a very risky game with fire magic…or perhaps pissing off a dragon. Those were just a few of the logical conclusions I could think of.

I craned my head back around just as a store front burst apart with a roar of flames and broken crash of glass. The Sheriff came to a hard halt a few feet ahead of me. He snapped his head to the side, eyes squeezing shut to protect himself. I did the same, skidding to a stop, gritting my teeth, eyes closing.

Something slammed into my side, hurtling me into the side of the building. My eyes flew open as a pained grunt and the air from my lungs escaped me. The source of my troubles was another pony, and with it came a maw full of teeth, bloodied froth snapping with frenzied determination to sink into my flesh. The faint aroma of decay was mixing nauseously with the acrid fire smoke.

The noxious scent of the dead, in all its varieties and levels of rot has hardly ever bothered me. After all, I’ve worked with the dead on a daily basis for years. What did bother me, however, was the dead rising to terrorize the living. I’m not fond of something that should stay down on my morgue slab getting back up and trying to eat me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that.

The dead pony I was barely holding at bay with my hooves kept snapping its jaws at me, bloody drool and froth dribbling past their teeth. Milky, glazed over eyes stared me down. Could it even see me, I wondered. Did it still have its other sensory faculties? How could it know where I was if its ocular sensory was completely useless?

That’s when I noticed it. Their coat and flesh was stretched so tightly across its body, there was hardly much left to the imagination with just how emaciated this undead vessel really was. What fur was left—and by extension, the bare flesh beneath—was a rich golden-yellow colour, not unlike…

Not unlike wheat.

Wait…wait, Deputy Frizzy Pop…he’d mentioned one of the missing ponies, just a day or so ago. A missing friend to my Buck Doe.

The name finally, agonizingly, and belatedly, clicked in my head.

Golden Wheat. One of the missing camping friends of River Reed. My Buck Doe, sitting in my morgue right now.

His friends have finally come back to roost, for better or for worst. This wasn’t their home, true…but it was now their killing ground.

My legs weakened as the realization struck me. Golden Wheat’s jaws snapped closer as I stared blankly at their body. It wasn’t really Golden Wheat. Just like Far Fetch wasn’t really herself last night when she had ripped Frizzy Pop’s throat out. None of these ponies were themselves once they expired. It was simply the disease, the virus, piloting their bodies as their own. The being they once were no longer existed when this sickness killed them off and took over their bodies.

“RED RUSH!”

The Sheriff’s voice broke my trance and in a sudden flash, his hooves filled my vision, slamming Golden Wheat’s snapping jaws out of my immediate gaze. Haltingly, I jerked my head in the direction of the golden Earth pony’s direction, my ears ringing. I watched as the undead pony scrabbled unceremoniously to its hooves so determinedly.

Why? Why was this…familiar? I’ve never seen this before. And yet…and yet, I have.

My chest constricted and tightened further until the Sheriff was practically bellowing in my ear.

All sound seemed to rush back into me all at once, a cacophony of words and roars and screams and crackling and ringing crashing together. Sheriff Dust Cloud’s face swam into view, his mouth moving, his words finally registering:

“RUN.”

That’s all we could do.

Run.

That’s what we all do when we’re stuck in a bad dream, after all, isn’t it? We run away from the scary monsters in our heads. And that seemed to be a valid enough strategy in the waking world. So, I did just that: I ran, chasing after the Sheriff.

What else could I do but run?

Chapter One: Spill the Tea

Author's Note

Notes: I have to disclose that I love the Newsflesh series by Mira Grant (what if zombies, but we can still function day-to-day). I also love the creativity of the MLP!Infection AU community. It’s just so damn creative and wild! I’m torn between “cool factor” and “pseudo-realism factor”. I hope that I can tiptoe along the lines of both in this story

Chapter One: Spill the Tea

“You tell the truth as you see it, and you let the people decide whether to believe you. That’s responsible reporting. That’s playing fair. Didn’t your parents teach you anything?”
-Stacy Mason, “Feed” by Mira Grant

“What in the names of the Princesses happened in here?”

I had a fairly good idea what my humble morgue must look like to the Sheriff and his deputies. Blood smeared everywhere; trails of gore and gristle wherever the eye could see on the floors, the sides of cabinets. I was busy toweling down the mess. It was rather reminiscent of a crime scene instead of my clean, clinical and tidy workspace. I kept this place as clean as possible.

When you know what I do about dead bodies, you’d be turned into a clean freak too.

I spared Sheriff Dust Cloud a glance over my shoulder.

I didn’t know where to start. How to start. How could I choose? I finally decided the blunt way was…not necessarily the best route, but it was the better place to start. Lying seemed ineffectual at this stage.

“Mare Doe woke up.” A beat passed. “After I had opened her up and took out most of her organs.”

The silence behind me was damning.

“What in the hell are you talking about, Red Rush?”

Red Rush. My name was an oxymoron. While I was red in coat, mane, and tail I was hardly ever in any type of rush. I liked to take my time, to see every side of a problem before seeing or giving a feasible solution. I wasn’t exactly slow, but I also wasn’t sprinting off everywhere. There were enough show ponies that could vie for the title of “Fastest and Most Obnoxious”.

I dropped the towel I’d been wiping the floors with into a hazard bag and sealed it. I motioned toward my video camera with my head. Sheriff Dust Cloud wordlessly went to it, and so did his deputy—the roan Unicorn, Frizzy Pop. He was on the new side of things. I didn’t catch any glimpses of Far Fetch, as I had turned away to continue my cleaning efforts.

A moment later, the sound of my recorded voice filled the empty spaces of the room. I continued cleaning. I had my own series of questions but first, the law ponies needed to see what had happened to Mare Doe. I needed them to see the truth that I had come across.

It didn’t take them long to see her reanimate on the screen, to flop off my necropsy table, rasping hungrily after me as I narrated what was happening. I winced as I heard myself repeating the same phrase in various ways, but it all came back to the one thing: Mare Doe was both alive and dead all at once.

The law ponies turned to me once the video ended minutes later, barely a moment after I had stabbed Mare Doe with my scalpel and had recovered my composure. I tossed another soiled towel into a hazard bag and sealed that up. The plastic melted cleanly together, and it had nothing to do with my magic. It was triple sealed, and it would have taken a massive physical effort to break apart by force, never mind magically. It was then that I did notice that Far Fetch wasn’t with the Sheriff. It hadn’t just been my overlooking her. My brow wrinkled in puzzlement, but before I could ask, Sheriff Dust Cloud interjected, as though reading the question on my face.

“Her leg wouldn’t stop bleeding. She went through three sets of bandages before I sent her off to the hospital to get it looked at, more proper-like.” He tried to maintain steady eye contact with me but faltered instead and turned away from me.

Instead, he settled his attention on the two bodies still out on display on my tables: Buck Doe, still completely and utterly dead. And Mare Doe, recently dead, for a second time in the same day.

“What in the name of Celestia is this?”

I swallowed against the hard and heavy lump in my throat.

“I…I don’t know.” I hated not knowing. I wanted to know more, I needed to. How else were ponies and other creatures supposed to protect themselves if they remained ignorant to this…whatever this was?

I circled back around the two tables, around the two bodies, still trying to puzzle out more clues, more answers.

“Have you figured out the identities of Buck or Mare Doe?”

“H-his name is—w-was—River Reed. He went missing about three weeks ago on a camping trip with two friends. We found him, o-obviously—but the other two, Rain Dance and Golden Wheat, they’re still officially missing. A family member of River Reed was the one who reported their being missing. They all came from a small village about fifty miles north from here, give or take.”

The Sheriff nodded along as his deputy spoke, faces set in that mixture of grim acceptance. I could practically hear him grinding his back teeth. Back and forth, back and forth. Grind, grind, grind.

“And Mare Doe?” I pressed, sparing the mutilated body a glance. She sported a new wound, which I had diligently notated in my report. Trauma to the occipital cavity with a No. 24 scalpel blade. An excellent dissection blade that could fulfill both fine work due to its pointed tip, while also sporting a broad blade for the larger and more difficult tasks. I made sure to annotate in the margins that it had been necessary, as Mare Doe had decided to get up off my table and saw that I apparently looked like a lovely snack to chew on.

“She was visiting a friend here in Ponyville, also from another town—a little smaller than Ponyville—and this one’s about thirty or so miles northwest of here. Can’t recall her name right now—”

The Sheriff interjected quickly with a grunt. “Ice Prancer. That’s who our Mare Doe is. So far, no reports of illness like this showing up in either village…”

I waited as politely as I could before clearing my throat.

“I feel a ‘but’ coming along,” I finally drawled out with a frown. The tension lingered before Sheriff Dust Cloud sighed heavily.

“But…there’s been…rumours.”

I raised a brow, momentarily abandoning my cleaning duties to give the law ponies my full attention.

“Go on then. Don’t leave me in suspense. Spill the tea.”

The two law ponies exchanged hesitant looks with one another. Sheriff Dust Cloud licked his lips, as though he was trying to get some particularly bad taste out of his mouth.

“There’s…there have been similar cases popping up in other parts of Equestria. Similar encounters, eyewitness accounts, patterns of attacks. When we went back to the station, we interviewed today’s eyewitnesses further and they…they’ve recounted their own instances that they’ve either seen themselves or…others have told them about.”

Sheriff Dust Cloud shuffled nervously on the spot, face still set in that grimace of his.

“…does the Mayor know about any of this yet?”

The words came out before I even registered them. The pair across from me exchanged looks with one another.

“We haven’t briefed her yet, no.”

“You might want to consider doing so, and the sooner you do, the better.” I paused, glancing toward the cabinet where my fresh, clean towels were. With a small burst of magic, I pulled one out, and once more set to cleaning up. I’d have to dump a ton of cleaning chemicals to finish off this job and then wipe all that up too.

“You said two other ponies have gone missing along with Buck Doe—and that similar cases under near identical circumstances have occurred across Equestria. I need those case files. This is…this isn’t normal, it’s something pathological that needs support, study, isolation from the general populace.”

“Now hold on, I can’t just—”

I turned toward the Sheriff, my voice and words turning sharp as steel.

“If this—whatever “this” is—turns out to a plague or an illness, if this is spreading—I need more data. I need to find the link between every case. The more I…the more we have, the better we can prepare ourselves and combat whatever this is. And we need to inform the Mayor. We cannot afford to keep her in the dark. We’ll need her support in all of this as well.”

“What about every other pony—er, creature? We can’t just…not tell them, right? They might get caught in the crossfire! We’ve got a whole school of kids here in Ponyville!”

Sheriff Dust Cloud shook his head at Frizzy Pop. “And we can’t afford a panic. If that happens, it would make things even worse. We’d never get control of that buckin’ bronco once we set it loose.”

“But Sheriff, I—” Frizzy Pop began to protest, but was silenced by the smack of the Sheriff’s hoof and the glower painted on his face. The Sheriff’s nostrils flared, and Frizzy Pop promptly curled away from him, ears pinned to his head and resignation simmering off of him. I could barely hear him say the words, “Yes, sir.”

Sheriff Dust Cloud held fast for a few lingering moments longer, then turned his attention back to me. I had made considerable progress in my efforts to clean my place of work. I was especially careful to not have direct contact with what could possibly be biological contaminants. The blood, the gristle, the gore—there was something here, something that I was missing in between it all.

Was this airborne? Or was it spores or pollen from an unknown plant that these ponies have come across somehow? Was it an infectious disease or virus? Or was it a bloodborne pathogen of some kind? Were mucus membranes a source of infection that we’d have to worry about? Was there a viral amplification that triggered some biological switch from dormant to active within us? Was it a prion disease, or something akin to rabies? Rabies couldn’t affect ponies…not yet. What if it was some mutated iteration of Chronic Wasting Disease that had somehow managed to figure out our biology? The leap from deer to pony seemed…negligible at best. Or was it a parasite that I had somehow missed, something that was too small to see by the naked eye and needed further investigation? What was the duration of incubation?

So many questions. Not enough answers. I wished I had caved and sprung for the advanced lab equipment I could have had in my own establishment—but that required a series of permits, and much jumping-through-hoops-on-fire kinds of red tape to upgrade Death Dealer’s biosafety levels. Despite my accreditations I don’t think I could have cleared the first levels needed to meet the security clearances when it came biosafety. Biocontainment precautions had evolved in the past decade or two. And the truth of the matter was that much larger facilities were more capable and cleared to isolate dangerous biological agents in their laboratories than I could ever hope to achieve. It didn’t help that I was the lone proprietor and worker involved. No assistants, no other staff to be had.

And isolation was the most restrictive level of biocontainment procedures. Ponyville was anything but isolated these days. Too many factors could lead to disaster and violate the procedures to ensure biosafety. And it wasn’t just naturally occurring diseases that we had to account for. There were magical diseases out there as well.

Death Dealer’s was not equipped for such a biological event. I couldn’t guarantee a full seal of safety. I operated primarily as a funeral home and mortician’s parlour. The rest of my services were additional benefits for the local community and law enforcement, more than anything.

That didn’t mean I was ready to roll over and give up.

I once more found myself at a yawning chasm of mysteries and something was tugging me ever closer to the answer, beyond the edge. Like it was just out of sight, out of reach and all I had to do to get to the truth, the heart of the matter, was to fall in. But at what cost, what sacrifice, would I have to make to find those answers?

I should have known better then. But clarity is all too damning when it’s in hindsight, isn’t it?

Mayor Mare…smiled.

I wasn’t encouraged by the bold move. Beside me stood Sheriff Dust Cloud and Deputy Frizzy Pop. She looked over the reports written by both the Sheriff and myself. She shuffled through them with careful deliberation. I almost felt myself begin twitching in impatience.

Perhaps I really did fit my name, in some small way.

Right now, there was some prudence to rush. If this was an epidemic ready to spring loose, we had to act fast and get ahead of it. We couldn’t dither. The itch of urgency kept scratching beneath my fur, digging under my flesh. I—we—needed to make swift and decisive actions. I hated bureaucracy at times, and this moment counted under that tally list too.

Judging by the impatient flicks of Sheriff Dust Cloud’s ears and tail, and the tension in his jaw muscles, he too was feeling the tick of impatience riling him up. At least I wasn’t alone, which assured me. We were thankfully on the same page.

Mayor Mare placed the stack of paperwork onto her desk and then tapped her hoof on its surface, drawing our attention back to her. Her eyes were closed behind her bifocals and she took in a deep breath.

“What your reports here are saying…we’re dealing with a potential…disease or virus of some kind? But you can’t definitively say what it is?”

Sheriff Dust Cloud cast a sidelong glance at me. It was a prompt and I stepped forward. From my saddlebag, I pulled my video camera with my magic and brought it forward. Mayor Mare reached for it with her hooves and once I was sure she had hold of it, I released the hold on my spell.

“There’s more,” I told her, and the mayor carefully popped the screen open. The sound of my voice on the device sounded so tinny and small in her office, not at all repeating the same effect within my morgue. I glanced at the Sheriff and frowned. I leaned closer to him and he dipped his head toward me.

“Do you think she’ll listen?”

“Hard to say.”

That was all he left me with. It was frustrating, to say the least. Frizzy Pop was jittering beside the Sheriff, back hoof tapping rapidly on the decorative rug that covered a large swathe of the mayor’s office flooring.

If Mayor Mare wouldn’t take us seriously, then how could we expect anypony else to do so? A figure of authority in the community was our best bet to take charge of the threat looming over us. If she didn’t, then we would be dooming all ponies and other creatures in our own town to death.

The minutes passed in agonizing sluggishness. The sound of Mare Doe—Ice Prancer—snarling after me while I spoke on the video camera made my ears flare back against my head. I actually glanced behind me, to make sure we weren’t vulnerable and were still blissfully alone in the room and that the door was closed tight.

Mayor Mare’s assistant was drawn to the hubbub and placed herself over the mayor’s shoulder to watch as well. She gasped at some point—I’m not sure which—and whimpered. Mayor Mare’s amused expression dropped considerably as the video played out.

I couldn’t help but cycle through even more inquiries on the matter at hand. How could we effectively quarantine Ponyville, and in turn, the rest of Equestria to ensure the transmission of disease was lessened and more controlled? Was this disease—virus, pathogen, parasite, whatever it was—transmissible to other creatures, such as the dragons, changelings, or yaks? Could other animals be carriers, like those in the care of…what was that nervous Pegasus’s name? Butterfly? She was one of Princess Twilight’s friends, and she dealt with animals. That’s all I recalled at the moment.

Would we have to close off borders, put a chokehold on supply logistics and travel, put in place quarantine efforts for the town, other cities, on the ponies themselves? What were our most viable options to combat this unknown disease?

If this had been a missive of some kind of flu spreading like wildfire throughout our territories, I could say I would have felt more than confident I could draw up a feasible plan in response, if there’s not one in place already (and I know there was one). If this were Pony Pox, perhaps it’d be a little more complex, but I still had high hopes in us coming out on top. But this—whatever it was—I was in the dark. As much as I had been putting off admitting it, I was afraid that this job was much too much for any one pony or any other creature. It needed more than one set of eyes on the matter, more than one set of hooves to sift through all the data.

I just hoped in other parts of Equestria, our brightest minds weren’t overlooking this bad miracle as something else that was more manageable. That they wouldn’t mistake it for something else, or worse, resort to hiding it. If they were, then I feared for this kingdom, more than anything. And I feared that Princess Twilight Sparkle may not have the time, resources, and information to assist in combatting whatever this disease may herald.

If the dead can now walk and we continued to do nothing, we might as well lay down and wait for the dead to bring us into their violent horde—either to be consumed or to become them, either fate seemed cruel.

I parted ways with Sheriff Dust Cloud and Deputy Frizzy Pop once our meeting with Mayor Mare was over. Her first plan that we all seemed to agree with was to call a mandatory emergency town meeting later tonight. The law ponies were heading back to the hospital to check on Far Fetch. I needed to get back to my morgue. Back to the bodies.

But I also needed…advice. There was one pony with whom I could trust this information with and confide in outside of Ponyville.

I stopped to grab a few pastries and coffee from Sugarcube Corner, as I hadn’t eaten in the last day and a half, and I was running on fumes. The moment I stepped inside, I had to dodge the Cake twins as one went running underfoot and the other began making loops in the air above. Mr. Cake apologized profusely as he tried rushing to catch them both. Mrs. Cake rung me out and she smiled ruefully at me in embarrassment.

“I am so sorry about this, dear. They’re usually…well, better behaved than this.”

I nodded and gave a polite smile., feigning understanding for the sake of social niceties. I wasn’t exactly the life of a party in social standings, but I could pass through smoothly enough. I liked the Cakes. They were more or less reasonable ponies, and I enjoyed their baked goods.

“It’s fine. Children have more energy, especially after being cooped up for so many days.”

Mrs. Cake seemed to deflate in relief as I handed her my bits and I took my purchased goods.

I was frankly glad that I was dealing with the Cakes instead of that other pony that worked there. What was her name, again? Pinkie something. I didn’t keep track of names if I had to. All I remembered was her damnable cycle of never-ending energy and just being around her exhausted me.

When I stepped outside sipping my coffee, it was still bright, chipper, sunny.

All I could feel was dark clouds crowding in on my peripheral, foreboding and flashing with lightning, booming with thunder. A storm was coming, and I could only hope that we could survive it.

“Doctor Stone, it’s so good to hear your voice again,” I said warmly into my phone receiver, and I actually meant it. Doctor Feather Stone had been my mentor and one of my favourite professors while I was pursuing my doctorate. He had been one of my forensics instructors and was quite possibly the reason I even found a career that I felt fit me best.

“My, my, my! If it isn’t Doctor Red Rush, my favourite student!” He replied, sounding amused. He was rather good at that, sounding professionally amused. His warm and genial tone and good humour coupled with his hours-long lectures was perhaps one of the very things that kept his class attendance numbers consistently high every semester. He could make the processes of prion diseases and their relation in epidemiology sound as exciting and electrifying as a Wonder Bolts show. It certainly didn’t hurt he was a rather handsome stallion either, which did attract the mares.

It was almost a shame that he was married to another handsome stallion. Almost.

His husband, Toffee Cream, made the most delightful almond torte and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I was almost jealous. Again, almost.

“To what do I owe the pleasure? It’s rare enough that I get a letter from you, never mind an actual phone call!”

I wish that I could find it in me to delve into idle chitchat, but this wasn’t the time to waste, well…time.

“It’s mainly business, I’m afraid.”

“Is yours…struggling?” Concern was bleeding into his voice now, his previous jovial inflection drying up instantly.

“Far from it, actually. I’ve done surprisingly well out here in Ponyville, but it’s something…” I didn’t know how to continue. Not without presenting the facts, the truth. “I…need advice. And information—and I need you to bear with me, because what I’m about to tell you, it’s…not exactly classified. Not yet—and I know it will sound illogical and frankly insane at first. But please…try to keep an open mind and wait until I’m done.”

He hummed for a moment, and I heard a shuffle on the other end before he huffed quietly and asked for me to continue.

So, I told him what had happened. I told him about Buck and Mare Doe, about the circumstances that led up to them both ending in my morgue. About how after I had completed most of my necropsy on Mare Doe, she reanimated. How she crawled after me with half her organs missing, and the rest trailing along the floor from the slit I’d made in her belly. I told him how I’d figured out that a direct strike to the skull, into the brain, was the way to end them. Or at least that was my hypothesis.

Buck Doe only went down when the Sheriff and his deputies had done it, and I had tested that very method on Mare Doe. It was not enough data to say conclusively that this was the right and more permanent method, but it’s a good starting point.

It had worked, so I felt confident that it was a feasible method.

When I fell silent, I waited for Doctor Stone to say something, anything. I could hear something else in the background—sheafs of paper rustling, most likely. He was probably grading papers for his students. Then there came a soft huff of breath.

“How…how many, again? How many…infected?”

Infected. That was a viable word for…whatever this was.

“Just the two here in Ponyville. The ones that I worked on today, they had been delivered to my morgue. Sheriff and his deputies said two others were missing. Buck Doe had been with them for a camping trip a few weeks back, but they haven’t found the other two, as far as I know. Mare Doe came from a different village entirely. She had been in town, visiting her friends. When I spoke to the Sheriff not too long ago after, he alluded to rumours of similar cases. They’re collecting what files they can and will drop off any other cases later today or early tomorrow. Right now, they’re checking up on another deputy. She was bitten—”

Doctor Stone interrupted me, all traces of humour gone, and only urgency remained. “She was bit?!”

I hesitated, taken aback. I’d never heard him speak like this. Desperate, strained. Scared.

“…yes. By Buck Doe, when they tried restraining him at first—”

Once more, Doctor Stone interjected, and I felt my throat tighten in response, my stomach dropping away, like it had been yanked out of me.

“How long ago?”

“I…it was between 0700 and 0800 this morning.” I responded. I pulled my coffee cup closer and took a long gulp, but it didn’t feel like it was enough. My throat was still dry as a desert, and just as scratchy and uncomfortable. I felt like a student again, fumbling for the right way to ask questions so I could seek the right answers. “What is this, Doctor Stone? I don’t have a full lab to analyze everything and I—”

“Stop.”

I did just that. I stopped, waited, collecting my thoughts.

“It appears to be…something infectious. Viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic, we’re not sure of right now. Each are not ideal, given their different methods of infection and different avenues of treatment—if any exists.” I started out slowly. Doctor Stone hummed softly, and I took that as encouragement to continue. “There is a common vector of transmission. It seems…linked to when a pony expires, but I—”

“Stop,” he said once again. “Think. What did Buck Doe and Mare Doe have in common?”

“I…I don’t…”

“You do know. Think.”

Think. Think, think, think. It was his way of pushing his students. He didn’t want to give them the answers, of course. He wanted them to find them, because those answers were staring them in the face.

I thought over both my necropsy procedures, and I struggled to find the commonality, the correlation between the two cases.

Buck Doe: Starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, severe emaciation as a result of those, heavy loss of muscle mass, various lacerations. Possible case of mange. Infection due to untreated wounds, like the bite on one of his ankles, the blackened blood that was essentially molasses in his veins at this point.

Mare Doe: Healthy and whole, minus the slight coronary build-up, and the bite wounds that had ripped out her throat—

I stopped myself short upon my reviews of both victims to Doctor Stone.

“How many cases in Manehatten?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m sure plenty of potential cases have been buried so far, but the ones I’ve managed to get my hooves on…at least a dozen, two at the very most.”

My jaw clenched at that new information. My chest twisted into knots as I continued to connect the dots. What was the connection?

I was struck a second time. Buck Doe and Mare Doe—River Reed and Ice Prancer—both sported bite wounds.

“Bites,” I said hoarsely. “It spreads through…bites.”

“And learning has occurred.” Doctor Stone declared in approval, warmth and pride seeping into his voice. Old habits died hard. “Vector-borne transmission spreads through blood, salivary glands, mucosal discharge. Bites seem to be the more prominent manner in spreading to other potential carriers, due to their highly aggressive nature. That and…their propensity in attempting to devour their victims.”

I shuddered, recalling how Mare Doe had done just that with me earlier today. The way her jaws snapped open and close, as if in anticipation to chew and rip and swallow my flesh.

“Doctor Stone…what is this? And—and if Buck Doe was bitten…who bit him?”

That scared me the most as the realization hit me full force like slamming into a brick wall. Buck Doe was not Patient Zero. Someone else must be, but the question still remained: who was it, and where were they now? Put down, like Sheriff Dust Cloud had to do with Buck Doe? Or were they elsewhere in Equestria, spreading this disease to others?

So many questions, it left my head reeling.

My former professor was quiet for a while. I sipped away at my coffee until it was empty. Dejected, I tossed the paper cup away into the garbage. Tea had never really been my thing. I needed something caffeinated and high doses of it.

“We’re not sure,” he finally answered. “We’re still trying to figure out what it is, exactly. Nothing magical about it, thank the Princesses or we’d be in deeper trouble. But it also seems like it can’t be treated or cured by magic either.”

“And by ‘we’ do you mean…?”

More shuffling from the other end. More papers, most likely. I dreaded the answer.

“Toffee and I have been diving into this more readily than some of our colleagues here in Manehatten. Got some others down in Fillydelphia, Cloudsdale—hell, we even have at least one or two contacts out in the Crystal Empire and Canterlot looking into this.”

I closed my eyes, teeth clenched together. I suddenly felt dizzy, and I needed a moment to steady myself. A breath hissed out of me. I was torn between wanting to warn them to flee for safety and to beg for them to stay and provide more information, disseminate it to every corner of Equestria, and even further than that, as quickly and efficiently as they could. We needed to get the bottom of this, if we were to save our home, and the inhabitants that lived here. We needed to find the truth of it all.

“I…how big is this?”

“Big. Bigger than most are willing to admit. I’m sure there are more than what’s being officially documented and reported. Isolated incidents so far, but it’s only a matter of time. The infected will slip through the cracks, they’re doing it already, clearly. It’s going to break out, and when it does—not if—it’s going to explode and propagate faster than we can counter it, if it hasn’t already.”

I only realized just how little I was in all of this. Equestria was sick. It was only going to get sicker, and its immune system wasn’t recognizing the threat for what it truly was. If we didn’t act now, it would be too late by the time we did do something. I took a deep breath before speaking again.

“What can I do to help?”

Chapter Two: Murphy's Law

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

-Murphy’s First Law

I was still reeling from all that Doctor Stone had relayed to me. What had happened today wasn’t just an isolated incident. Other places in Equestria—from Fillydelphia to Las Pegasus—were cropping up more and more cases of the dead rising up to attack and devour the living. So far, it’s been dusted up and thrown under the rug—but how many ponies and potentially other creatures within our borders—were being bitten in the process? How many have slunk home, to hearth and family and friends, to nurse their wounds? How many were succumbing to their seemingly innocuous bites, dying from the disease, and then rising up to further spread it?

How many more were ignoring this rising epidemic, pretending that it was completely handled? Just how many would die before the powers that be were willing to admit this will become a full-blown pandemic if they continued to do nothing beyond covering it up until it was too late?

I found myself rushing to the hospital, where I knew Far Fetch was—running towards the danger, a potential hot spot and ground zero for an infectious break out. Statistically speaking, any disease was more liable to spread like wildfire in any medical setting. Where else would ponies go to try and get help? But I had to try and isolate this, cut off the head of the snake, as it were, to protect as many ponies as possible.

The building was still intact as I approached. A nurse was strolling outside, pushing a patient in a wheelchair out front. My chest swelled and tightened as I breathed hard while I passed through the doors, eyes darting around the lobby entrance. I wasn’t used to running. I’d forgotten how it felt.

There were ponies sitting in the waiting area, some wearing masks, others nursing injured front or back limbs or bellies. I couldn’t help but sweep my eyes over each and every one of them, looking for anything resembling a bite wound. Any bandages, any signs of blood or mangy coats of fur.

I made a beeline for the front desk. The nurse on duty was taken aback by my haggard appearance as I fought for my words between pants.

“Ma’am—oh. Doctor Red Rush. This is…unexpected. Is-is everything all right? Do you need any help?”

“I—I need to—”

I inhaled deeply and held my breath for several seconds, then let it out slowly.

“I need to know where Deputy Far Fetch is. She was at my place earlier—”

“Oh! Well, you actually just missed Sheriff Dust Cloud—”

“No. No, I need to see Far Fetch. I…I have something for her.” I thought quickly and then remembered the pastries in my saddlebag, untouched, uneaten. I used my magic to recall the box of pastries and winced at the state of them upon opening it, looking rather squashed and poorly. The nurse politely cleared her throat.

“She’s…in room 3B, on the third floor. Visiting hours end in about an hour. Do you need any directions?”

I shook my head, returning the pastries into my saddlebag. I trotted away from the desk and hurried along to the staircase. My muscles sang with strain and effort as I climbed all three flights to the third floor and was grateful that Far Fetch’s room wasn’t far from the stairwell.

Her door was ajar, and I hesitated entering. I could hear the click-clack-clop of ponies’ hooves making contact with the ground, voices rising and falling quietly in the distance. I flicked my ears forward, struggling to hear within Far Fetch’s room. I could hear an EKG machine beeping inside, and the tinny sounds of a radio playing, but nothing else. I nudged the door open with a hoof and peeked inside.

Far Fetch was lying on the lone hospital bed, dressed in a typical hospital gown. The gloss of her feathers and fur had dulled considerably since this morning. Now there was only the shine of sweat covering her. Her fur was looking faded and…it was presenting similarly to mange. Patches were missing entirely, revealing the bare epidermis beneath, which wasn’t looking much better than her fur. It was mottled and sickly, while her mane and tail hung limp and damp with sweat.

Far Fetch’s eyes were screwed shut, jaw clenched in a grimace, and I could just barely make out a soft, pained groaning now that I was closer. She was curled up tightly beneath the hospital blanket that covered her, but she had parts of it bunched between her rear legs to act as a cushion. I noticed the leg that had been bitten was outside the blanket and wrapped tightly with a new bandage. It was already stained red with her blood and…and with black too. Blackening blood that was turning to ooze within her veins and seeping from her wound.

Far Fetch’s Cutie Mark—a boomerang and a pair of leeks on either side of it—looked oddly faded as well.

Just like Buck and Mare Doe’s had been.

“Deputy?” I called out cautiously as I entered her suite.

She didn’t move.

I cleared my throat and tried again more loudly.

That garnered a reaction. Far Fetch cracked an eye open. I could immediately see that her pupils were completely blown out. I could barely make out the hazel irises at all, they were nothing but a mere sliver of a ring bordering the pupil.

“Wh-who…who is that?”

“It’s Red Rush. I wanted to come and check on you.” A beat. “Would you…like a pastry? Fresh from Sugarcube Corner.”

Far Fetch groaned and swung a wing over her face, shielding herself from the lights, the world, me.

“No,” she whined, her voice a few octaves higher than usual. “S’too bright and my leg is killing me. C-could you…turn off the lights, please?”

I glanced at the wall and found the switch. A nod of the head and I snapped it down with my magic. The room went dark with a little click. Far Fetch sighed in relief, and her entire body seemed to relax.

“Thank you.”

I glanced at the medical chart clipped to the end of her bed and I lifted it up to my face, the glow of my magic encasing it as I read the doctor’s shorthand notes. I frowned the more I read. I checked the monitors Far Fetch was attached to, and the IV bags of fluids. Saline, antibiotics, a mild sedative for pain. It clearly wasn’t working. I adjusted that to compensate Far Fetch’s apparent pain, hoping to give her some relief. The nurses have already changed her bandages at least three times since her admission earlier this afternoon. Just a few short hours. This disease, this rot, was fast working. It was probably banking on spreading once its host expires—an unusual method, as most epidemical viruses typically prefer their hosts alive just long enough in order to spread and propagate before the host could expire.

“What’re you doing here, Red Rush? You’re supposed to be back at your place, working on those bodies. The Sheriff—”

“I’ve already spoken with the Sheriff, Far Fetch. I updated him on the bodies and of my findings. We’ve also spoken with Mayor Mare on the matter and hope to have a more solid plan going forward tonight at the emergency town meeting she’s having. When I heard that you were here, I thought I’d pop by and check up on you.”

“You don’t do ‘pop by’ visits.”

Even when she was in the throes of this mysterious illness, Far Fetch was still biting in her remark. I felt no ill will in her words this time around, however. I sighed as I set the medical chart back down and slowly approached the Pegasus’s side, glancing at her leg.

“What has the doctor said about this?”

“Why are you really here?”

There was a slip of exhaustion in her voice now. She seemed to sag in on herself, sinking into the mattress. She shuffled one of her wings out from under the blanket and draped it over herself, and that too slumped once it settled.

“I…” I hesitated, trying to find the right words. It took me a few moments to weigh my options. “I believe…you’re infected. With what the two ponies you brought in to my morgue have. You were bitten…and there seems to be a correlation between the two. That’s my working theory. I spoke with a colleague of mine, and he seems to concur with my findings, based on his own…encounters.”

Far Fetch didn’t speak at first. I cleared my throat and stepped closer, eyeing the bandage on her leg. The stained mess was a little bigger now.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” she said tiredly. “It won’t stop hurting.”

I used my magic to undo the bandage, pausing whenever Far Fetch hissed or groaned in pain. I peeled the layers apart and bit back my own hiss of surprise at the mess that laid beneath the soiled bandages. The immediate surrounding tissue that circled the bite was swollen and inflamed, already turning black from necrosis. I could smell the rot from where I stood.

“I’m not a doctor but even I know that isn’t good, is it?”

I shook my head and my eyes met hers. “I’m going to lose this leg, aren’t I? Or is it worse than that?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know. You might have stood a chance if you had cut it off sooner, to fight whatever this is, but…”

“Then I’m a dead mare walking, aren’t I? Same as those two ponies we brought to you.” She shifted on the bed. “Do you know how to stop it?”

“Traumatic brain injury. Whatever this disease is, it’s making the dead come back. Bites are confirmed to spread it, and there are other vectors of infection, most likely from any bodily fluid that comes into contact with you, such as saliva in the bite wounds or their blood coming into contact with any open wound you sustain or if you ingest it, somehow. But once you go for the head, it seems to stop them permanently. That Mare Doe, I had taken out nearly all her organs when she tried coming after me. I had to use one of my scalpels to put her down.”

In fact, I hadn’t left Death Dealers without it. It was in my saddlebag currently. It was small, but it would have to be mighty for me.

“This sounds like something straight out from a horror movie.”

I nodded in agreement. I began looking around the room, opening cabinet doors and drawers, until I found what I was looking for. More bandages, tape, saline flush. I returned to Far Fetch’s side and began cleaning her wound. I went slow and with care. Despite her reported pain, she hardy flinched as I worked.

“You’ll need to be quarantined, to keep everyone safe. Once I finish this up, I’ll find your doctor. Maybe we can fix this, maybe—maybe we can amputate. Maybe it’s not too late.”

“Red Rush—”

“We can contain this, but we have to move fast—”

“Red, stop.” Far Fetch spat, and I clamped my mouth shut. “I’m a dead mare walking. And we both know that you’re not the kind of pony that runs on ‘maybes’. You deal with facts, same as me. I’m a danger to others. That’s a fact.”

“But I…” I stopped myself before she could and shook my head. Far Fetch and I weren’t close, but I would admit, I’ve developed a bit of a liking to the Pegasus from the last year or so working with her. She didn’t hesitate in her line of work. I admired her drive, her dedication to keeping Ponyville and its citizens safe whenever and wherever they could. The Princess and her friends couldn’t be in multiple places at once, after all. Somepony else had to pick up the slack.

I dipped my head, closing my eyes. “You’re right. I’ll get Doctor Greymare in here and we’ll go from there. Just…don’t die just yet. Do you understand me?”

Far Fetch gave me a little wave with her hoof and a short laugh that I knew must’ve hurt to make, but she still tried, nonetheless. “I make no promises. But I’ll try.”

“Doctor Greymare! Doctor—excuse me, sorry—Doctor Greymare!”

I weaved between two nurses hurrying to one of their patients’ rooms, and I could hear someone yelling for a crash cart. I shouted again. This time he heard me and stopped long enough so that I could catch up.

“Who is—ah. It’s only you, Doctor Red Rush. I’m very sorry, but I’m too busy, we just had an influx of ponies hit us, and we’re stretched thin as it is, so if you’ll excuse me—”

I ignored the way he called me ‘doctor’. I worked with the dead, not the living, but I still held a doctorate. I had to in my line of work. I also know that some ponies don’t see it as the same thing, since I didn’t save lives like medical doctors did. I merely dissected what was left of them.

“I need you to wait a moment, I have to speak to you on an urgent matter about Far Fetch,” I said as I panted and took notice of the hallway. I found myself heading towards the emergency treatment wing, and there were more ponies now, more than I would have liked. I heard the passing comment as they passed me by about “some sick pony” from a train that had just pulled into Ponyville’s station whilst attacking others. My blood turned to ice as I found myself distracted to hear them confirm what I was dreading.

“He looked so ill; I can’t believe he wasn’t wearing a mask or anything! Whatever he’s got, I’m scared that I have it now too; he nearly tore my ear off with his teeth! HIS. TEETH. Who does that?!”

In my lapsing attention, I had lost track of Doctor Greymare. He seemed to have continued on his way as I was now noticing the blood and bandages, the chunks of flesh torn out of some ponies. The influx of patients that was beginning to fill emergency treatment wing of the hospital, and I was at the heart of things. I’d just stepped into the belly of the rotten beast.

A crowded train, limited space, panicking ponies—it spelled out the best recipe for the worst disaster. I found Doctor Greymare again, this time directing several nurses and a few of the junior doctors to the more critical patients. He caught sight of me, and he scowled.

“I find it incredibly ghoulish that you’re prowling through my hospital, coming after my patients before it’s even their time! Don’t you have anything better to do, hmm? Don’t you already have a dead body to play with?”

I ignored his barbed words. Sniping back at him wasn’t important. What was happening all around us, on the other hand…that was.

“How many of these ponies were bitten?!” I demanded, and that pulled him up short at first. He looked me over the rims of his glasses, brow furrowing in puzzlement.

“How did you…?”

“The incident that led to Far Fetch being bitten—these ponies that were bitten—” I hesitated, then pulled out my video camera from my saddlebag and floated it over to Doctor Greymare. He caught it in his own magic and pulled it closer to him. “Just watch—Sheriff Dust Cloud brought me two bodies this morning. I had gotten more than halfway done in my necropsy of a Mare Doe, who was bitten by the Buck Doe they’d brought in with her—and she came back to life, after I had taken out half her organs.”

I watched as his expression faded from mild annoyance to shock and horror as he watched the screen. When his gaze met mine once more, I could see he understood what I was trying to tell him. He swept his eyes over the ward, at the bustling arrival of ponies—most, if not all, were sporting a bite wound or injury of some sort—in a new terrifying light.

“If what you’re saying is true, if what you’re showing me is true, then…then these ponies…they’re all infected from their bites wounds. From the pony that…”

I nodded. “Mayor Mare is holding an emergency town hall meeting tonight, but we need to quarantine these ponies first and we have to do it now. Any pony that was bled on or bitten—it doesn’t matter—if we don’t contain this now, they’ll die, then they’ll get back up, and they’ll come after us.”

There was a reason that ponies listened to me when I spoke on certain specialized topics. Why they believed me. I’m not one for playing pranks on others. I don’t lie or conflate matters. I don’t participate in tricks and pranks. And I am especially not the type of pony to trip others up when it came to safety protocols.

Just a few years ago, I was the one who identified a debilitating spread of necrotizing fasciitis at the hospital. Not as quickly or widely spread as this new rot seemed to be, but enough that it drove the doctors mad trying to figure out what was happening to newly admitted patients who were pockmarked with holes in their bodies. When I say that my word has weight, I don’t exaggerate. I don’t cry “Timber Wolf” at the drop of the hat.

It was why Doctor Greymare believed me when I raised the alarm now just as he did back then. It was why Mayor Mare understood my urgency on this rapidly rising issue the same as before. It was why Sheriff Dust Cloud trusted me on my word alone, because the weight of my findings outweighed the doubt. And I typically came with receipts to back my findings.

The ponies we were attempting to herd into quarantine on the other side of the third floor did not believe, understand, or trust this. They dug in their hooves. They demanded answers. They refused to obey. They were panicked and worried, and that was a breeding ground for hysteria and disaster.

Doctor Greymare, Nurse Redheart, and several other nurses and physicians were trying to placate the patients who had been bitten in the train debacle. The more critical patients were in surgery and would have to be moved to quarantine for recovery. I could understand their reluctance. They were scared. They wanted to go home. They were on the verge of panicking. It was beginning to turn into bedlam, if it hasn’t already.

There weren’t enough rooms, and some patients were being treated in the hallways if they couldn’t be inside the quarantine wing itself, and that wasn’t helping the situation at all. It was a safety risk that even I couldn’t overcome, no matter how I pleaded to get them all inside. All I could do at this point was to do what I could, try to send those who hadn’t been bitten or bled on away. They were walking, talking contaminators that posed even more risks if dismissed too quickly.

I was right there in the thick of it, helping the doctors and nurses in trying to move the patients. It wasn’t something I had planned on, but the hospital staff were shorthanded, and I only stayed out of obligation to see this through. I may not work with live patients, but I was familiar enough that I could be welcomed into the fold. “Every little bit helps, and you’re as good a helping hoof we can ask for at the moment,” Doctor Greymare had told me.

And yet I felt lost in trying to speak with the patients. I didn’t want to deceive them. The truth was more important than a white lie to make them feel better—and yet I understood that the lie would be of more comfort to their fragile peace of mind.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I was busy treating a young mare with severe bruising from the initial stampede that had occurred from the sick pony that had started all this. I went over her history as thoroughly and quickly as I could, checking her over to ensure that she only had just the bruising. I was satisfied and relieved to find no bite marks, no signs of blood. I told her she was cleared to leave and attached a hospital band—a bright, eye-searing orange—that confirmed her as “safe”. I sent her on her way, glad that I could release even just one pony. She was only one less body to account for, one less pony to worry about. Those with white bands were marked as “potential carrier” if they showed signs of lacerations, blood, and other vectors of possible infection. Black bands were marked as “confirmed” for any bites or open wounds that may have been bled or drooled on.

The din in the hallway hadn’t lessened by very much. If anything, I could have sworn it was getting louder, which wasn’t serving me or the headache I could feel coming on, very well. I was used to the relative quietness of my morgue. When I turned to view the crowd of bodies pressing against one another, trying to move back or forth, seemed endless. I knew there were many more inside the quarantine wing itself. The protests hadn’t quieted down much, either.

A sudden crack of thunder suddenly boomed in the air all around us, startling everypony into blissful silence. Heads turned to find Sheriff Dust Cloud at the back of the pack in the crowded hallway. Deputy Frizzy Pop stood at his side, his horn aglow. A thunder spell to quiet the masses. I would have applauded the creativity, but now wasn’t exactly the time.

“Now that’s enough, damn it! Shut your traps and open your ears! Listen to the doctors! This is for your own safety! Y’all might be sick and we need to find out who is who!”

He gave pause when he noticed me in the thick of it. He gave a jerk of his head, indicating for me to come along. I faltered, looking at all the faces that stood between myself and the law ponies. All the blood and bandages, the distress they all seemed to share as one hive mind.

I began moving at the Sheriff’s second prompt. The crowd parted around me, some glowering at my passing, others simply watching with a mixture of fear and apprehension. Once I reached them, the two law ponies flanked me. I cast one last look on the ward, at the patients, at the medical health care workers.

“Had a feeling you’d be here,” the Sheriff said, drawing my attention. I began stripping of my PPE and flung it into the nearest disposal bin once I was free.

“I was checking on Far Fetch when I heard about what happened at the train station, when they started admitting ponies to the emergency treatment wing,” I admitted. “Far Fetch doesn’t have long. If we had amputated her leg immediately, she might have stood a chance—”

“You don’t know for sure if that’d work or not.” Sheriff Dust Cloud pointed out gruffly. Far Fetch was right about me. I just can’t work with ‘maybes’ all that well. It was false hope that shouldn’t be given out so carelessly.

“No. You’re right. I don’t know that, but it’d give us a clearer and more definitive avenue of information to work with. But whatever this disease is, it works fast, if we’re to judge the time it’s taken to put Far Fetch out of commission. We’re racing against a series of ticking time bombs that is potentially in all those ponies back there.”

That made Sheriff Dust Cloud’s expression darken, and he growled low under his breath. I could practically hear him grinding his teeth. Deputy Frizzy Pop shuddered on the other side of me. We passed through a few doors and hallways, and I recognized that we were heading back towards Far Fetch’s room. She still needed to be quarantined too. I can’t believe I let myself forget that. It was why I had come here in the first place, why I had gone in search for Doctor Greymare in the first place!

“Should we really be leaving them behind, sir? What if the physicians n-need help?”

“Are you volunteering to go back?”

“W-What? No! But I just…I don’t—it doesn’t sit right, with all that’s happening, and I just don’t know what else we could be doing to help—and I-I just—!”

The deputy ground to halt and started breathing hard and erratically, eyes bugging out and looking ready to burst into tears. He started nervously jiggling a front hoof, ears pinned against his head. The Sheriff and I stopped as well. I watched him and I realized just how young he really was. Barely older than a colt.

“Deputy, I need you to calm down. Panicking like this ain’t helping nopony.”

Deputy Frizzy Pop sniffled, and squeezed his eyes shut as he nodded sharply. “I-I know. S-sorry, sir.”

We continued on our way to Far Fetch’s room. The rest of the hallways were deafening in their ambient silence. There was only a skeleton crew of one at the nurse’s station we passed before we could see the door to Room 3B.

A shiver rolled down my spine, and I was the first to stop short. I was the first to notice what was up ahead.

“Stop. Stop, don’t move any closer. Sheriff!” My throat tightened, and my voice cut out, strained and hoarse.

Thankfully, the pair seemed to have heard me and they too halted. They turned to look at me, but my focus was on what was just ahead of them, trailing into the room besides Far Fetch’s. I could hear something that wasn’t familiar to the hospital ambience. I moved slowly, careful to not let my hooves clack so noisily on the linoleum flooring. I motioned for the two law ponies to step aside, and they followed my lead.

I crept toward the amorphous shape that stained the floors, my heart thrumming against the backs of my ribs in a rapid staccato rhythm. I could smell the rot the closer I got. The curtain was blocking part of the open door, but I could something moving in the sliver of space that wasn’t covered.

Quiet as a mouse, I had my magic peel the curtain back. Slowly, slowly.

I saw tails first, then hind hooves, a puddle of something trailing from out of the room and under the bodies within. A familiar bandaged leg, stained completely black now, the fur a faded and unkempt pearly-grey with large patches that seemed to have fallen off at random. Someone else’s hooves now, fur pale lilac in colour. Feathers, a hospital gown slipping off the one on top.

And then there was nothing but red, red, RED.

It was everywhere, staining everything. On the floors, the bed, the medical equipment, on the messily tossed hospital blankets and on some of the machines, even a jagged line of what I knew to be an arterial blood spray that painted the walls and part of the ceiling.

I could see everything now.

Far Fetch, hunched over another pony, wings limply dangling down her sides. Her head dipped down and I could hear the squelch of flesh being peeled and torn and chewed. Far Fetch was growling, gnawing away at what was left of her neighbor’s chest cavity. Rib bones jutted upwards like spires, split apart and reaching for the sky. The other pony’s blood was bright as rubies in some patches, mottling to an unsavory burgundy or dull brick or old rust in others. If I tilted my head just enough, I could even catch glimpses of the lilac pony’s face. Blood seeped into the fur along her lips and muzzle, eyes wide and glassy and staring into nothing, the grimace of terror contorting her frozen face.

“What is it? Red Rush, what is—oh. Oh, no—no, no, NO! What’s she doing?! Far Fetch!”

I was startled from my frozen statuesque position, and everything else came back into perspective. I jerked my head to find Deputy Frizzy Pop standing close, much too close.

Far Fetch—what was left of her, could we even say it was her anymore?—lifted her head and turned her face towards us. Her corneas were clouded over, just like Mare Doe’s had been. Her bloodied lips pulled back into a snarl and unsteadily, she got up to her hooves.

She was not as clumsy as Mare Doe. She staggered, yes—but she had more ambulatory control. Far Fetch lurched, teeth flashing with bits of gristle stuck between them and a low moan rose up from her throat. Her wings twitched and spasmed, but they were otherwise useless, it seemed. She couldn’t fly, or at least, that’s what I hoped to be true.

If the dead could fly or use magic like they could when they were still alive, then we as the living would be completely fucked.

“What’s wrong with her, why’s she eating that other pony?!”

I began backing away, and my hind hoof struck the deputy. Contact with him jumpstarted something in me and I whirled, heaving my shoulder into his chest. I shoved at him, pushing him back. I was arguably smaller, but I had more momentum in the moment, and he went stumbling. “Move! Get back! Get away from her or you’ll end up in her mouth too!”

The deputy dug his hooves in, head shaking back and forth as he stared, wide-eyed and terrified, at the thing that was once his fellow law pony. He nearly tripped over his own legs until I deemed us far away enough. Far Fetch hissed as she stumbled out of the other pony’s hospital room. We reached the Sheriff and we backed away together, the click of our hooves sounding off like cannon fire.

I found myself morbidly entranced by the sight of what used to be Far Fetch. Another one to study. I pulled out my video camera from my saddlebags, and began to record as it floated between myself and Far Fetch.

“Deputy Far Fetch seems to have expired; I estimate time of death at perhaps an hour ago, at the most. The pupils are already presenting with no reaction to the light and are beginning to grow milky in appearance. Her wound, the left hind leg, was from a bite that was sustained nearly twelve hours ago between the hours of 0700 and 0800—”

“Red Rush, what in Celestia’s name do you think you’re doing?! Get behind us!”

“We need this information!” I shouted vehemently back over my shoulder. The Pegasus lunged, lost her footing, and unsteadily gained it back. Her wings, thankfully, helped in no way. If anything, they were a hindrance. Her hind hooves stomped on the longer flight feathers as they dragged on the floor and trailed underneath her, tugging them out as the rest of her body was propelled forward.

“You’re going to get yourself killed!” Sheriff Dust Cloud barked from behind me.

“F-Far Fetch—she can’t be dead. We just saw her a few hours ago, sh-she shouldn’t—she’s supposed to get better. That’s why we came here!”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the deputy inching closer, body shaking. The nurse manning the nurse’s station shrieked somewhere behind me, perhaps coming to see what all the fuss was about.

“What is wrong with that pony?!” I heard her cry. Too terrified to get close enough. Good. That fear was good for her. It might keep her alive longer.

I ignored them all and continued talking, my voice rising in pitch so it could be heard by my camera.

“Deputy Far Fetch is steadier on her limbs than Mare Doe was, likely due to my necropsy proceedings for Mare Doe, although Far Fetch’s wings seem to be ultimately useless. She appears just as driven as Mare Doe, however, to come after me—us. Anything alive. She was devouring another pony, but when presented with a fresh meal, she abandoned her first. Hypothesis: the other pony she killed may also rise but due to the mangled state Far Fetch left them in, they too will struggle with ambulatory movement.”

I didn’t see him step forward. I’d allowed myself to be solely focused by what was in front of me, that I hadn’t noticed him beside me.

Deputy Frizzy Pop, still trembling, stepped toward Far Fetch. I could see the trail his tears had left on the fur of his face, while still shaking his head. The Sheriff barked at him to get back as well. I could hear the crack in his voice. He wasn’t just angry. He was scared.

“Sh-she’s just sick, she’s sick and she needs help! Why isn’t anypony helping her?!”

He flinched away when his former partner got too close.

“Get back here, deputy! That’s an order!”

“Deputy, he’s right, you need to get away from her, she’s not Far Fetch anymore, she’s not safe!” I said, joining in on the pleading. I tried to recall him with my magic, but he countered my spell with his own. I recoiled at the backlash with a hiss, white and painful stars dancing across my vision, like I had been physically hit. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes.

When it did, I was horrified to see he was closer to Far Fetch than moments ago.

“Why?! Why can’t help her?! Can’t we just tie her down, and find a way to fix this?”

“Deputy, she’s dead. It’s not Far Fetch anymore! Step away, please, before she—!”

My warning came a second too late. His attention hadn’t been on her, and that’s when she sprang for a second try at a new meal. Far Fetch’s bloody mouth found another mouthful of flesh to fill it. Deputy Frizzy Pop’s eyes bulged. He struggled, pulling his body one way, and Far Fetch another. It only made the damage worse. She’d taken a sizable chunk of his shoulder with her, and he screamed as he scrabbled and fell on his side. He kicked his legs in a panic, trying to pull himself back up.

I tried to step in, but the Sheriff was suddenly there, herding me away with his head and neck. All I could do was watch as Far Fetch swallowed her pound of flesh and leapt at the deputy to sink her teeth into his throat. His scream cut off suddenly and I was pushed around a corner and ended up on my rump, leaning against the counter by the nurse’s station. The nurse was sobbing on the other side, having ducked down herself behind her desk.

The sound around me seemed to fade and I recalled my camera back to my side, ending the recording. I hit the rewind. Stop. Play. Watched the event again. And again. And again.

Someone hooked their leg around mine and hauled me back up. Sheriff Dust Cloud was glowering at me, but I had a feeling he wasn’t actually angry with me.

“What in the hell did I just watch?”

I swallowed, suddenly tasting bile at the back of my throat.

“Murphy’s First Law in action, Sheriff.” I said at last, finding my voice again. He stared flintily at me. “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

That’s when we heard the screams. This time, they were coming from the way we had just left. Back from the quarantine wing full of ponies.

Chapter Three: Shadow

One foot in the ground, one foot in the grave

Don’t you dare make a sound

Shhh! Hear you from a mile away

Run from the town

All you need is your name

And the sweat on your brow

And the blood running through your veins

Don’t think twice

(You’ll be dead in a second)

Turn your eyes

(From your hands to the heavens)

Kill your pride

(Turn your fear into a weapon)

And don’t you forget it

Don’t you let them take control

Don’t let them break your soul

It’s not the devil at your door

It’s just your shadow on the floor

-“Shadow” by Livingston

The Sheriff and I double-timed it back toward the quarantine wing of the hospital. Our venture deeper into the hospital, however, was rife with fleeing ponies. Some ponies were sticking their heads out of their rooms, wide-eyed and curious to see what the commotion was going on about. There were nurses and doctors alike, hurrying to usher them out to safety. I noticed that a number of patients were being rushed away on wheeled beds and wheelchairs, with some still attached to IV banana bags and poles. I stopped several times, trying to answer some of those who begged for answers, but the Sheriff kept hedging me along. I also worried that some of them were the infected we were worrying about.

I tried to tell him, tried to warn him—what if any of those patients, those ponies, were bitten? What if we were letting them, the potentially infected, go free? It would only mean this disease would spread, that we were letting them fall through the cracks.

“We gotta get to the quarantine wing, leave ‘em!” Sheriff Dust Cloud shouted over his shoulder. I don’t know if he noticed, but I could hear that country twang seeping into his words more clearly now than usual. He worked hard to keep it buried, so ponies wouldn’t see him as some kind of country bumpkin. So that they’d take him seriously.

I took him seriously, no matter how he sounded. His actions meant more to me than just his accent.

I don’t think I ever told him that. A part of me wishes I had, before all this.

We were a hallway away from the quarantine ward when we stumbled across the first body. Judging from the hip bones, I deduced that it was a young filly, barely out of grade school. I hated it when I had to work on a child in my morgue. Taken from their life all too soon, the potential they could have reached, the lives they could have led. Gone, snuffed out, like a candle’s flame against a Windigo’s howling wintry breath.

Their graves ended up being much too small when it came down to it.

I didn’t think this one would wake up and attempt to come back to life. Her body had been torn in twain, patches of flesh and strands of muscle still clinging to the white of her bones. Parts of her were everywhere, scattered across the hall, as though she had been ripped apart by several assailants—and I was more than comfortable deducing that. The bloodied hoofprints that led down the way had just come from told me as much. We must have missed the infected by a hair. Or perhaps through a nearby stairwell.

So much blood, too much blood, painted the walls, the floors, even the ceiling in some spurts. Was that really how much one little pony could hold in their bodies? I already knew the answer to that, but I tried to not think about it.

I startled at a deflated squeak under hoof and backtracked.

A little teddy bear with a missing eye lay in a thick puddle of blood, most of its faux fur sticky with it. Everything inside me twisted and knotted, at the absolute wrongness of all of this. Gingerly, I lifted it up in the air with my magic, and I could just barely make my reflection out in its shiny black buttoned eye. Or rather, I could only make out my muzzle in it; bright red fur and a scarred up muzzle, with mismatched eyes. One gold, the other silver.

Regretfully, I put the plush toy back down, besides the leftover carnage of the mare’s ribs.

Another all-too-small grave to bury the dead—the actual dead, the ones who wouldn’t get up and come after the living.

I dug into my reserves, steeling myself for what was to come. I needed to be clinical, not emotional.

Sheriff Dust Cloud pulled me along, and we moved more quietly. We could hear the growls of the dead stirring in rooms just outside the quarantine wing. I knew the longer fur of my withers was bristling, sirens rattling about inside my head, that I was willingly walking into an unknown precedent of danger. I felt a moment of my resolve wavering as I looked Sheriff Dust Cloud in the eye.

“What now?”

“We seal them in. If all of them haven’t breached the quarantine like these have, we close as many as we can inside. We owe it to those who can still make it out unscathed.”

I nodded and slowly, I used my magic to close and lock all the doors in the rooms we came across. Whether they contained the dead or not, I didn’t want to take any chances. I also marked them with a quill and inkwell from my saddlebags. I always kept a set on hand.

‘Dead Inside Don’t Open’

The doors of the quarantine wing loomed as we came closer. Blood spattered the ground, the walls, in varying shades of red. Rust and brick, burgundy and ruby. Some looked almost as dark as black in the light. Bits of fur, mane, tail scattered in pieces. Chunks of flesh or ropes of entrails lying in bloodied puddles. I even spied the lone bits of brain lobes or half-eaten organs, broken bones, even a single eyeball staring endlessly up at the ceiling, the eyestalk freshly ripped from whatever socket it had once belonged to.

I briefly wondered what happened to the bodies that all these pieces of ponies they belonged to, if they had been devoured as completely as that little filly had been—but I quickly reminded myself that this wasn’t normal. None of this was normal. Ponies weren’t meant to come back to life, and neither were they supposed to be feasting on the flesh of others.

They likely got up and walked away, to find more ponies to eat. To infect. To spread this disease. That’s how it worked, wasn’t it? In nearly all cases of epidemiology, whatever the case may be—virus, parasite, bacteria—the goal of such infectious things was to invade a new host and to spread themselves as far and as fast as possible, to increase their numbers.

The doors seemed larger than normal as we were faced with them up close. There were no windows, thankfully; opaque or otherwise. It made it easier to avoid piecing together the carnage within. Or maybe it was worse, because I could picture exactly the type of slaughter and more that was within the quarantine wing. Between the two of us, I was more than sure that I have handled more bodies at a myriad of crime scenes than Sheriff Dust Cloud ever has.

I don’t recall there ever being a murder in Ponyville, current or past. One of the bigger cities, on the other hand…Ponykind wasn’t a stranger to foul play. It was easier to sow dissidence and deceit in a place like Fillydelphia than it was in Ponyville. This wasn’t a dismissive way of saying that there haven’t been smaller kinds of crimes here in the small town—but we’ve had our past trials and tribulations to overcome. It’s just most of it has been due to villainous magically-ladened characters, like Queen Chrysalis or Tirek, not a pony smashing another pony’s head in with a baseball bat or somepony being shoved down a flight of stairs.

“We need something strong. Got any chains in those saddlebags of yours?” Sheriff Dust Cloud remarked, eyeing them with a hint of hope. I sighed and shook my head.

“But I can certainly conjure up some,” I replied and with a tilt of my head, magic encompassed my horn once more and chains rattled to life from my conjuration spell, floating before us. I manipulated them to wrap around the door handles and locked them up tight with a padlock. Even if my stomach is stronger than the average pony’s for such carnage…there were just some things that even I didn’t want to see. And there were some things in this world that you can’t unsee once you do.

We moved quicker on our way out. I was beginning to wish I had kept my PPE on. All this blood and viscera, it was more than likely contaminated with the infection. The feathers on my fetlocks were getting gunked up, much to my chagrin.

So long as I didn’t have any open wounds, I kept telling myself I would be fine, and yet…

The likelihood of that remaining the same was angling for a nosedive.

It was almost eerie how decidedly quiet it was inside the hospital. That didn’t last long. We turned the corner, coming into the homestretch and found ourselves facing a feeding frenzy of more than just one dead pony. Four of them were clustered over a body, and I could still hear them weakly asking for help. I sucked in a breath between clenched teeth as we backpedaled just in time. One of those heads came up to peer back at where we’d been. They were missing half of their face, exposed muscle and teeth glinting in the hospital lighting, peeking out of the gore.

“Sheriff, I hope you have some kind of weapon on you,” I said in a hushed tone.

He shook his head, face pinched in a grimace. “Never saw the need to. Not here in Ponyville. Starting to regret that decision.”

I shook my head and reached into my bag, magic effortlessly lifting my favourite scalpel into the air. A flustered look briefly flashed across Sheriff Dust Cloud’s face.

“Do you just carry those things around with you on the regular?”

“Only when I think I have to fight off the dead,” I replied glibly. I peered around the corner and with a nod of my head, I willed my blade to swing forward, and it went at an angle, slamming into the closest one’s head. It went in clean and came out covered in black ooze and clotted red blood. The other three ponies didn’t seem to notice that one of their own had fallen. I repeated the same thing with the second, and then the third.

This was a mercy that they needed. A mercy I would give them.

The fourth finally seemed to notice something was off and turned to face us. Bits of flesh were stuck between his teeth, and he still had a mouthful, but it plopped out when he unhinged his jaw and moaned. That’s when I noticed my blade wasn’t moving the way I wanted it to. It was stuck in the third pony’s skull.

The fourth one staggered upright and started shambling towards us. An entire swathe of his shoulders was missing and his shoulder blade worked up and down as he walked. I could see he was also missing an eye now. It was the same colour as the one from back by the quarantine wing.

“Anytime now, Red Rush!”

“It’s stuck!”

“Aw, hellfire—!”

The Sheriff charged, even when I called out for him not to. The fourth pony lurched after him unsteadily. I almost cried out when he turned his back toward the dead pony, but realized an instant later what he was really doing. Sheriff Dust Cloud timed it perfectly; he leaned forward and struck out with his hind legs. The force of the kick and the way the pony’s head snapped back was rather beautiful. The cracking of hooves against skull, even more so. A perfect strike.

The Sheriff didn’t waste time. He bucked again, this time sending the pony flying with another sickening crunch. They slammed to the floor, and immediately began trying to get up again. They didn’t get the chance to. The law pony whirled around and reared up, then crashed his front hooves atop the pony’s skull. It caved in the first blow, but it wasn’t enough. I watched as he did it a second and a third time. The fourth time around, the pony didn’t get up. His skull was flattened to sharp jagged points, chunks of brain seeping out at the edges, a mixture of red blood and blackened ooze smattering the floor. I couldn’t even recognize them anymore.

Sheriff Dust Cloud panted heavily, scowling down at the mess he’d made. I was mute on the matter. I stared at him, an inkling of new respect rising in me for the law pony. He caught me looking at him and trotted over. “You okay, Red Rush?”

“Y-yes. I’m sorry. I couldn’t…get it out in time. Did you hurt yourself in anyway, puncture anything—”

“I’m fine, Red. I didn’t hurt nothing,” he huffed back, but he did offer a tired smile of reassurance. I simply nodded in return and turned my head to peer at the pony that my scalpel was still stuck in. After a few more tugs with my magic, I finally managed to wrench it out. I frowned at the poorly state of it. The blade was bent at an angle, and I softly groaned.

Sheriff Dust Cloud hummed softly under his breath. “Looks like you’re gonna need a new one of those.”

“It’s not meant for bone,” I said dejectedly, and gently set it aside on the nurse’s station desk. It was only then that I noticed we were back by Far Fetch’s room when I saw the room numbers. Both Deputy Far Fetch and Deputy Frizzy Pop were nowhere to be seen. No doubt, they’ve shambled off, looking for new meals and potential victims to spread this…this rot.

That’s when the fire hydrant caught my eye, and right next to it…

“Bingo,” I said, and I made my way toward it.

“Red, what’re you—oh. I suppose that’ll do it. Here, let me use it—”

“You’ll end up using your mouth more than your hooves if you do,” I snapped back. “And if you end up ingesting something, even a drop of blood, it’ll be enough to infect you. I don’t have that problem with my magic.”

I pulled out the axe with a levitation spell and brought it to my side. I scanned the hallway, making sure that I was safe before returning to the Sheriff’s side. I didn’t need to be jumped by surprise by a hidden dead pony. The Sheriff was suddenly more interested on the bits of gore and tacky blood stuck to his hooves and fetlocks.

“Erm…is this bad for me, then?”

“All of this is bad for all of us,” I said, even as I scanned his limbs. “But as long as you don’t have an open wound of any sort, you can wash that off and be fine. The sooner you do it, the better though.”

“Noted. Now c’mon. We need to find my deputies.”

“Wait. What? We need to get out of here, we need to seal up this place!”

That surprised me, pulling me up short. I turned to face Sheriff Dust Cloud, ears pinning against my head.

“Those two ponies were under my watch when they went down. I owe it to them to make sure they don’t hurt anypony else. It’s what they would have wanted.”

“And everypony else?”

Sheriff Dust Cloud didn’t answer, but he didn’t to. The melancholy expression on his face was answer enough.

“I understand if you want to leave, Red Rush. I won’t stop you. But I’m not leaving without…”

I looked away, sensing that this wasn’t a moment I should be sharing with him. Instead, I allowed my attention to drift to the bodies that lay scattered in the hallway. I puzzled over them, recalling that some of the ponies, based on their Cutie Marks, were citizens of Ponyville. Their names, however, did not ring any bells. I politely cleared my throat, and jutted my head in their direction.

“Do you…know who they were?”

“You’d think you’d know the ponies here better’n me since you’ve lived here longer.”

“I work odd hours. And I’ve spent more time with the dead than I have with the living.”

“You run a funeral home. Don’t that come with the whole public-facing glad-hooving?”

“I also work as the resident medical examiner, mortician, and coroner. And it’s not just Ponyville I cater to, it’s also Cloudsdale and even Canterlot, when theirs aren’t available. I’m doing the job of at least five other ponies, and I don’t exactly have very many repeat customers or willing enough volunteers to step up and help me. Other ponies try to avoid the topic of death, never mind a career involving it, in case you’ve missed the memo.”

“Fair enough, I suppose,” the Sheriff replied dryly. He turned his attention back to the bodies. “I knew ‘em. That…that one right there, that’s Davenport. He ran Quills and Sofas.”

He nodded to another. “Junebug. She loved her flowers. And that one over there, I think that’s…Caramel. Decent at making candied treats.”

Sheriff Dust Cloud looked at the one he had crushed the skull of. He shook his head and sighed. “Clover Leaf. He ran a pretty nice little herbal shop.”

I could hear the trace of regret in his voice. He really did know these ponies better than I did. A small flush of shame washed through me. I only knew them by their coats and manes and even sometimes, their Cutie Marks. I never really knew their names, because one day, they could end up on my slabs and under my scalpels and eventually, in one of my coffins. It had seemed unnecessary to bother trying, at the time.

Now I couldn’t even give them proper rites.

The one that the four fallen ponies had been eating suddenly stirred. Weakly, they began rolling to their side. Whatever innards that hadn’t been devoured slid out from the hole that had been violently torn open down her middle. Shakily, the pony tried to stand up, but their hind legs kept getting tangled in the loops of exiting intestines.

The Sheriff joined me at my side, and together we watched as this dead pony began trying its hardest to come after us. Between the tangled hind limbs to the slippery bloody floor catching its front hooves, it was a rather pathetic display of desperation. All the while, she continued to gnash her jaws, teeth clacking together as they made contact.

“And her?”

“…Sea Mist. She only just moved here, but she made some beautiful sea glass jewelry. Ain’t right what’s happened here. To her. To anypony.”

“Nothing about this is right. Or natural. Which was why I was wanting more information earlier. Every little bit helps.”

He raised a brow. I avoided his eyes as I leveled the fire axe. The crawling pony—Sea Mist—must have once been a beautiful mare. Her coat was a deep, rich blue while her mane was still a pleasing and soft seafoam colour. Despite the damage that had been done to her body, I could see the architecture of her form and piece together what lay beneath the ruins of butchery.

I can’t recall if I had ever seen her before, even once, but given her newness…probably not. It was just as the Sheriff said: it wasn’t right what’s been happening.

I took a step back alongside the Sheriff as Sea Mist inched closer. I lifted the axe up higher and let gravity do the rest instead of my magic. The blade slammed home, burying itself deep in her skull. She instantly dropped with a raspy wheeze; her glassy eyes focused on us in their last moments of their second life.

We followed the trails of bloodied hoofprints and rivulets that had fallen from open wounds that stuck to the hospital flooring. There seemed to be one direction they all were aiming for: down and out. We managed to make it down to the second floor through the stairwell and were set to descend to the ground floor when the door to the second story stairwell burst open. I screamed and raised the fire axe with my magic, ready to slam it home, but the Sheriff yelled at me to stop.

I panted, axe raised high in the air, ready to strike—

But it wasn’t the dead that came through the door. It was the living—two, in fact.

“We’re alive! We’re alive!”

The Sheriff crowded in beside me, eyes narrowed in suspicion before he nudged me in the shoulder.

“Don’t. They’re good to go.”

“Were you bitten?” I asked, ignoring his verbal clearance. I still kept the axe raised, caution overriding everything else.

“Ha! Like any dead pony can snap their jaws on the great and powerful—!”

“This isn’t the time, Trixie! And to answer your question, what does being bitten have anything to do with—”

“I said, were. You. Bitten?!”

I recognized the pair of mares in front of me, unfortunately. Starlight Glimmer and her obnoxious associate, Trixie. They ran that magic school that had once been headed by Princess Twilight Sparkle and her friends.

The thought of her made me wonder: did she even know what was happening right now, at this very moment? That the dead were coming back to life and eating her subjects? That it was happening elsewhere, all over her kingdom? Or were ponies too afraid to open their mouths and send word to the princess, for fear of sounding mad?

“We weren’t bitten, but those ponies tried their hardest, I’m sure,” Starlight answered quickly before the other mare could. “What is wrong with them? We came here to check on one of our students, but we haven’t found her yet because all hell’s broken loose here!”

The Sheriff grunted and nudged me again. “This is your area of expertise, not mine.”

I shot him an annoyed look, but I sighed understandingly and turned back to the two mares. “We need to keep moving. Were you being followed by those dead ponies?”

“’Dead’ is one way of describing them,” Trixie muttered with a shiver. I couldn’t but notice the flecks of blood staining her uniform. What was she again, at the school? A therapist? I shudder to think of her giving advice to young and impressionable students. Her massive ego preceded the mare herself.

“That’s because they are dead.” I scowled back. She narrowed her eyes at me, looking me up and down. A spark of recognition went off in her moments later.

“Wait. Wait, I know you. I recognize you now! You’re the creepy pony that runs that weird shop…something with ‘Dead’ in the name?”

“’Death Dealers’,” I corrected her. “It’s a funeral home, a morgue, and preparatory facility for law-assistance medical examinations, necropsies, and the respectful preparation of friends or family for their last funeral rites.”

Trixie shuddered, tilting her head in a manner that seemed like she was looking down her nose at me. A rather gallant effort on her part, as I was taller than her. “Yeah. That. Starlight, we need to get back to looking for Curry Twist, she has to be around here somewhere.”

Trixie made to move toward the stairs that led up to the third floor. The Sheriff stepped in before I did, shaking his head.

“Everyone’s dead up there. There’s nothing left.”

“What? It’s the only floor we haven’t checked! Out of the way—”

I blocked her. I had an unusual build for a Unicorn, I’ve been told. I’m bulky enough to be mistaken for an Earth pony, if no one noticed the horn. Trixie scowled back up at me, eyes narrowed.

“We just came from up there. There’s nothing but the dead on the third floor.” I emphasized, before a thought occurred to me. I twitched my ears, hesitating. “Was this pony traveling on the train?”

Starlight Glimmer blinked at me, and I could see the inklings of dismay beginning to crease at the edges of her expression. “Y-Yes. She was. She had an escort, her cousin Brownie Mint.”

“…did she have a teddy bear with one eye?”

The Unicorn gasped softly and she closed her eyes. “Please. Don’t. Don’t tell me…”

“I’m sorry. We found her remains in the quarantine wing.” I said bluntly, glancing at Sheriff Dust Cloud. He sighed and nodded when Starlight and Trixie looked to him.

“Please tell me she’s wrong, Sheriff.”

“…Red Rush ain’t, I’m afraid. She’s good at her job. There were a lot of ponies up there…and a whole lot of remains. But there was only one little filly we found, and there was that little stuffed toy nearby.”

I ducked my gaze from the pair of Unicorns, politely allowing them a moment to process the news, even if only for a few seconds. I looked to the Sheriff and wasn’t surprised to see a somber expression on his face. I’m sure he was filled with guilt at not being able to save everyone. I began to feel the dregs of regret tugging at me as well. If I had been faster, if I had detected this threat sooner…

How many would have been spared a merciless death? How many would still be alive and safe? How many more were at risk?

I shuffled on the spot, the itch to get going rising to a crescendo beneath my burning muscles and sweat-laced fur and skin. We couldn’t stay here for much longer, as I could hear the faint screams from somewhere else in the hospital rising to greet us. More victims turning into potential infectious carriers.

“Ladies, I know this isn’t ideal, but we need to leave. Now. This entire hospital is compromised and it needs to be sealed before any of the infected leave. If that happens…”

“Then…the rest of Ponyville will turn into this pony-eating-pony nightmare?” Trixie remarked in a hushed tone, her earlier bravado coming to an uncharacteristic silence. I nodded, hoping that my face was solemn enough to get my point across.

“And here I was hoping this was just another elaborate series of pranks that Rainbow Dash or Pinkie Pie had going on. Who knew I’d be hoping for more cupcake zombies again?” Starlight chuckled nervously, but I could hear the strain and sorrow lacing the edges of her words.

Zombies? I thought, and I vaguely recalled the event that Starlight referred to, from years ago. It had been a town-wide event, or so I had come to find out. I hadn’t been there to witness it. If I recalled correctly, I’d been attending a seminar in new embalming and restorative art techniques in Vanhoover that week. But the word ‘zombie’ jumped out at me. It seemed apt, if I recalled what it meant correctly: A corpse rising from the grave, revived and shambling about in the world of the living.

Again, I felt that irritating sense of familiarity that this all rang just beneath the surface, just out of reach.

“That’s…one way of describing what these ponies are,” I said carefully with a thoughtful nod. I motioned to the Sheriff. “I think we might need to split ways from here. You find your deputies. Ladies, you should leave as soon as you can; the sooner, the better.”

“But wait, what about you?”

“I need to seal up this place. We can’t afford to have any infected leave.”

“And if they have?” Trixie demanded. I took a measured breath before answering her.

“That is a bridge I’ll have to cross if I come to it.” I said, brushing past them for the last flight of stairs that led to the ground floor.

“Wait, you can’t do this on your own! And what about those who aren’t infected? They need to be able to evacuate as well!” Starlight exclaimed as she trotted after me. I glanced at her over my shoulder.

“You have an entire school full of young ponies and other creatures to take care of. You need to prioritize their safety first. I can handle the hospital. Besides…I’m the creepy pony that deals with the dead on the regular. Who else can do this without losing their lunch or their nerve?”

To their credit, both mares appeared contrite at my response. The Sheriff blustered, stepping in to intervene between Starlight and myself.

“Red Rush’s right. Even if she is being a horse’s ass about it,” he said, a hint of a smirk tugging a corner of his lips and a brow raised in humour. It faded quickly when he turned back to Starlight. “Go take care of those young’uns. Both of y’all. And if one of you can make it to that town meeting, I would suggest you do. We’ll meet you there.”

The pair exchanged uneasy glances, but they nodded and hurried on ahead of me. I waited until I heard the echo of their hoofbeats faded and the slam of the stairwell door finalized their exit. I turned to the Sheriff.

“I’m giving you twenty minutes. Evacuate who you can as fast as you can and find your deputies and…give them mercy. If you’re not out by then, I’m sealing the hospital.”

I paused, then floated the fire axe over to him and he caught the handle in his mouth. He dropped it into the crook of his leg forelimb. The Sheriff nodded, his face set grimly as he pushed on to the second floor. “See you on the other side, Red Rush.”

Chapter Four: Red On You

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Chapter Six: Let It All Burn

Author's Note

Disclaimer: I don’t own My Little Pony. Like, at all. It and all its respectable characters are © to Hasbro. However, all writing contents and semi-plots and original characters here are © to me; unless it is stated otherwise. All shows/ books/ video games/ songs that are mentioned in this chapter are all © to their respective owners, I do not own them.

Notes: Somehow, I managed to dictate this chapter almost in one entire go with nothing but a quill and inkwell and pad of paper. My hands are stained with India ink, and I find it hilarious. Is it cheesy to admit I like writing with a quill?

Chapter Six: Let It All Burn

Well I don’t think how you could save this
It didn’t come as a surprise
You hide in shadows like you’re famous
But you made your bed and now its time to lie

And I, I’m gonna make it hurt
When I, when I take my turn
Gonna let it all burn
Until there’s nothing left

Let it all burn
Until the bitter end
Let it all burn

You’ve past the point of no return
As ashes fall on tortured earth
Don’t look back there’s nowhere left to turn

You crossed the line, wrote your curse
The match has struck your sentence served
And no white flag will change my final word
I’m gonna let it all burn

- “Let It All Burn” by Graffiti Ghosts

I have never considered myself the kind of mare who would cry “Timber Wolf” just for the sake of it. Most of Ponyville knew this to be a fact, especially those who have had to arrange last rites with me for their passed-on loved ones.

I don’t much care for pranks. Even the pink party pony from Sugarcube Corner, who had a fondness for pranks, seemed to gloss over my existence. For whatever reasons they were, I was certainly grateful that I wasn’t included in them. Messing with the creepy pony who plays with dead things seemed to give me exclusion rights that I massively enjoyed.

But at this moment in time?

I truly, whole-heartedly pined for this—all of this—to be some kind of elaborate practical joke, with myself and the Sheriff as the unwitting victims. I would gladly accept being the butt of a joke if it meant all of this could end.

I would take anything over this nightmare. I would have given anything to get the images I’ve seen so far out of my head. I would have given anything to have Deputies Far Fetch and Frizzy Pop back. Even I had my limits, despite the kinds of carnage I’ve seen in the past due to my work.

But my reputation nor my exclusion rights to pranks being overridden could not be the saving grace, not today.

An entire block of homes and businesses.

That’s how much was on fire, by the time Sheriff Dust Cloud and I could get a scope of the damage. An entire block’s worth of properties that could comfortably fit within Manehatten with room to spare was up in flames. Ponyville wasn’t exactly the tiny hamlet it used to be, but it wasn’t exactly that large. This was a major loss for far too many ponies.

By the time we met within the center of activity, I was instantly struck with how Discord was probably crowing with delight at the unfettered chaos this was producing.

I saw families desperately fleeing their burning businesses and homes—or both. Much like myself, many Ponyville residents had their businesses and their homes self-contained in a single building. They lived above, and worked below.

I saw ponies, swathed in rippling cloaks of pure flame and plumes of smoke lurching, lunging, stumbling about clumsily, erratically. Some were screaming for their lives and for the pain to end, but I couldn’t quite tell which were still alive, or if they were the walking dead. A living body and a fresh corpse both subjected to a pyre burned and smelled the same.

It was like traipsing through hell itself, if such a place existed beyond the grave. I hoped not. Seeing a pale imitation up close and personal…I shudder to think of something even worse than this.

All I could hear was the rage of the fire all around me at first. Rapidly, that changed and now, now, I could hear the shrill screams of the living—the ones not on fire—as they fled in terror. What’s worse is that I could also hear the slack-jawed moans of the undead, drawing ever closer. I almost stopped in my tracks when three of the dead, all of them aflame, converged on a terrified stallion who had broken away from the crowd. Sheriff Dust Cloud rammed his shoulder into me, urging me onwards and I turned away too late.

They had begun eating, and those screams…they were entirely too short, cut off by a bloody maw tearing the stallion’s throat out as the flames began to catch on his fur, mane, and tail. I don’t know if I’ll ever get those horrible screams out of my head for as long as I live, for however long I get live.

The air itself was absolutely choked with smoke and free-flying embers and sparks, no matter how far we fled. I struggled to draw breath, my chest seizing from the encompassing heat. Everything felt like it had been turned topsy-turvy and upside down. I struggled to make heads or tails of where, exactly, we all were. A burning stall, completely engulfed by an inferno, it’s brightly glowing wood spilling across the dirt road and in a shower of embers.

The Sheriff was just ahead of me when the mess blockaded us. He reared up instantly, pivoting on his heels toward another direction. He shouted at the other pony folk, urging them to follow him. I followed close on his heels, panic clawing at my insides like a rabid critter trying to tear its way to freedom.

I saw the maw full of blood-coated teeth lunging for the Sheriff before he did.

I reacted out of pure instinct, twisting my body around mid-sprint so that I could kick out my hind hooves at the glassy-eyed assailant. My hooves crashed into their jaw, and I could feel the jarring crack as the jaw dislocated from my strike. I peered over my shoulder long enough to see the craned neck, broken jaw—and the bites.

Whoever this pony was, they were covered in bites, and they were oozing that thick, black slurry that had once been blood. So many chunks had been torn from their body—mare or stallion or undecided, I couldn’t honestly tell what they once might have been, only what they were now. I could see the taut snapping of untouched muscle fibers; the pearly glimmer of bone; stringy, torn shreds of what used to be muscle and nerves and skin, wagging freely where they ought not be. Bloody spittle flew in an arc as that head snapped back into place with a sickening crunch, their focus now on me.

Those glassy, clouded eyes turned and locked onto me, staring sightlessly and yet…

Even now, I could feel the tiptoeing of my curiousity rising at the clumsy lurch in my direction.

If the ocular organs no longer functioned, then how—HOW—could they track their prey…us? This inquiry was but a drop in the proverbial bucket, one question out of dozens, hundreds, thousands—

Sheriff Dust Cloud drove his shoulder square into me, and he began to bellow.

“EVERYONE, HEAD TO THE SCHOOL! MOVE IT, PONIES, MOVE IT! DON’T LET THEM BITE YOU! RUN! RUN LIKE HELL!”

My chest burned with exertion. Already, I could feel my energy wavering, the adrenaline that had been coursing through me moments ago waning. I galloped after the Sheriff, suddenly within a throng of several ponies, panic-stricken and desperate for the same thing: safety.

It was then that I recognized where I was. We were right in the heart of Ponyville’s market. And it was also at the same time that I realized just how fucked we were.

The fire…it was all around us now, all encompassing. It had leapt from building to building faster than we could outrun the flames.

If I didn’t know any better—and I hoped that I was right in doubting it—I would have fallen for the age-old excuse that this had been by design, by Discord himself.

I held no lost love for the chaotic trickster. He had defiled the dead when he first escaped his stone prison, turned them into grotesque playthings no better than puppets on imaginary strings. In some ancient pony cultures, such disrespect toward those who have passed on, to defile their eternal rest, one would become a pariah in their community. They held no titles, no dignities, they were no longer figures to be acknowledged or respected. To sully the dead was the gravest offense in these ancient societies. For someone who did not wield the same magics and wiles as Discord, such an exile would have been torturous to them.

However, the rational part of my mind countered the idea that this fire was not of Discord’s making. No. He wanted to create chaos that could entertain him, like cotton-candy clouds that rained chocolate milk or checkered roads made of linoleum and covered in suds of soap one could skate on like on ice.

Dousing all of Ponyville in flames did not seem to fit his M.O. Besides, all I had to do was look at the materials that most buildings in Ponyville were made of.

Wood.

Oh yes, there were structures of stone and glass in Ponyville as well, even with the whimsy of straw and mortar here and there.

But wood? Oh, it was a favourite meal for fire. And even the smallest flame could catch, if the conditions were right. Wood snapped and crackled and smelled so pleasant while the fire ate at its fibrous flesh.

And right now? Right now, we were hemmed in by homes and shops, most of which were consisted of wood. Fire could burn down almost anything. Even stone and glass could bend and melt to its voracious appetite, if it got hot enough.

Yes. Just about anything could burn.

That’s what I was thinking when I saw our only escape route, the one that the Sheriff had been leading us towards, collapsed quite literally right before our very eyes. Sheriff Dust Cloud reared up as another shower of sparks danced into the air, rising above the titanic wooden beams from collapsed buildings spilling over one another. Right where we had been gunning for, hoping to pass through into safety.

The press of bodies jostled around me. Some ponies were crying, others shouting out in pain as the sparks landed on their coats of fur and the coals burned right through to their sensitive skin beneath. The clop-clop-clopping of their hooves danced on the road in a thunderous cacophony that competed with the fire’s roaring. The panic was near-instantaneous in its transmission. Even I felt it threatening to consume me. Fear was one hell of a stimulant, and even I wasn’t above admitting as such.

I was in an uncontrollable environment outside my morgue. I couldn’t just call it a day, slide a drawer back into place, and choose to pick up where I left off at a time of my choosing.

The real world was full of unknown variables. Sometimes, there was only chaos that not even Discord could replicate that occurred so organically in everyday life.

It’s no damned wonder I rarely ventured out from Death Dealer’s.

The epiphany and understanding of it in that moment left an especially sour taste in my mouth. I actively avoided the draconequus as much as I could, and if he ever found out about my enlightenment on the matter, I doubt I’d ever live it down. Especially after all the fuss I had made about his first impressions upon my morgue the day he broke out from his stone prison. It was incredibly safe to say I was not a fan on him, and I never will be.

But at this moment, I’m not sure what was scarier: that he’s completely forgotten about me and my outrage from years ago, or that I was unequivocally on his radar and that he was only biding his time with me. I’m also not sure which I would have preferred. I did know one thing, however: as meddlesome as he was, Discord’s dancing dead hadn’t tried to devour the living.

The screams of the ponies around me brought me back to the harrowing present. It could have been any number of things that set them off. The fire, the impending and painful death, the encroaching living dead shuffling ever closer to us.

The Sheriff was already trying to rally the gathered crowd, clomping in a snug circle around us, like he was herding sheep and not other ponies. But I understood what he was doing all too well. He was trying to rally their courage, and to keep them from bolting like mindless lemmings heading for cliffsides.

“Form a circle, everyone! Get tight, get together, no gaps! HERE THEY COME! GET READY TO FIGHT! BUCK ‘EM, KICK ‘EM, HIT ‘EM ‘TIL THEY DON’T GET UP! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The press of bodies squeezed around me and I squirmed in discomfort as flanks and shoulders jostled me about. It was worse when they slammed into my saddlebags, causing them to dig even deeper into my sides. I didn’t like being within this tide of bodies, but I liked the idea of being devoured while I was still alive even less.

I managed to wriggle my way out to the perimeter and saw the horrifying silhouettes of burning bodies lurching in the fires themselves. The awful reek of blistering flesh, bubbling fat, and burnt fur and manes and tails soon overpowered the more pleasing scent of burning wood. I wanted to gag, to puke.

It was rare that such a putrid stench could turn my stomach like this, but…maybe it wasn’t that, not entirely. No, I think it was the knowing of what will come to pass if we failed, if we fell to these creatures and became part of their legion that made me sick.

The horror of it all came crashing down on me as I gazed at the charred and blackened coats that clung to the walking corpses, having replaced their fur and scorched away their features. In some instances, I could see the bones in their skulls through the seared mess. Most of them had their eyes running down from their gaping eye sockets, like runny eggs. The viscous fluid that had once been part of their ocular structure sizzled in the heat. If they made a sound, any at all anymore, I could not hear it over the panic-stricken crowd I was trapped in.

If I lost my footing, and if I went down, I doubted anyone would lend me a helping hoof back up and would instead trample over me until I was either dead, or until the walking dead got ahold of me and devoured me alive, all while smelling vaguely of woodsmoke and cooking flesh.

My chest constricted at the thought. I know my pulse was quickening, my cleared mind coming to an end. The air was suffocating. It wasn’t just the decaying perfume of burning bodies, no. It was also the thick smoke from the blazing, raging conflagration that trapped us so.

That was another thing about fire: it didn’t need just food to thrive. It needed heat, and above all, it needed air. It needed the same air that we, as ponies (and by proxy most other species that lived above water) breathed to live.

It was almost funny, how a destructive force of nature was just as reliant upon the same bare necessities as us pony folk, even if only in paralleled concept rather than in identical practice.

Almost.

It wasn’t funny now, where I and many others were penned in like we were, suffocating and trapped inside a literal cage, its bars made of wreathed flames and cinders. I was already slick with sweat.

Hot. It was so hot. It felt like I was burning—I was burning—!

Hot embers had landed along my backside, eating away at the blanket that sat beneath my saddlebags, and burned through the ridge of fur that traced my spine. I couldn’t move to buck, to roll around to try and dislodge the painful nuggets of white-hot material. It was scraping under my fur, eating away at the exposed and raw skin beneath, one torturous layer at a time. As if that weren’t enough, a skull-splitting pain, sharp and piercing, began to engulf my skull, right at the base of my horn. It was a wonder I was still upright on my hooves. It had struck me so hard and so fast. My entire body seized up. I didn’t collapse, if only thanks to the crowd that I was surrounded by. It did little assuage the dread that continued growing inside me like a cancer. I was gritting my teeth so tightly, my jaw locked tight with tension, I thought I would break it from the sheer force.

Panic continued to run its course—wails, cries, screams—ponies’ voices overlapping one another like a constant death knell—

Too. Fucking. HOT—I’m burning, I’m burning up—can’t any pony help me?!

I could hear the Sheriff, like he was roaring just to be heard, and the desperation in his voice, begging for us to stand together to try and fight against the tide of the living dead bearing down on us—

The press of bodies unexpectedly no longer concerned me. An abrupt yet welcome sense of calm consumed me. The heat under my skin dissipated, a soothing balm sliding into its place. My head was not a beacon of agony as it had been moments ago. A pulse of magic that couldn’t be my own began to tickle along my spine, across my withers and flanks. It wasn’t something that could be traced by ears or eyes, but I could feel the threads coiling around me, almost reverently as the tightness in my body relaxed into its embrace. The damning heat of the inferno was but a fanciful tickle now. The foul encroachment of the undead that was bearing down on us—on me—was negligible at best. The conflagration that had kept us prisoners was suddenly bearing down on them, holding them at bay. No corpse could pass the line of fire.

Those that had already done so, the thoroughly burnt ones that were closing in on us…it was strange, like they were being pulled backwards, pulled away from the tightly packed circle of living bodies, dragged so unceremoniously away as they snapped their jaws uselessly, empty sockets seemingly locked on their prey.

Our impending last stand was no longer necessary. Not if our enemy was being restrained. No longer concerned or focused on a fight, the only thought that passed through my mind as the serenity overtook me was, ‘clear the way’. The hungry lapping tongues of flames that had previously obstructed our escape route unexpectedly parted, creating an arched chasm in which we could safely pass through.

The ponies around me paid no thought to the abrupt miracle. They didn’t question it. As soon as they saw the way was clear, they booked it, racing to freedom and to safety, crowing all the way in triumph and relief. The seconds ticked by as the others fled. A heaviness grew in the pit of my chest. The magic thread that held me fast was beginning to falter, and with it, my will to stay upright. I swayed unsteadily, my vision growing fuzzy and black along the edges.

Sheriff Dust Cloud was urging everyone to run, to head for the school. When it seemed they had all passed through the fiery arch, he turned to me—

—and the pain returned, tenfold. It was as though a giant boulder had dropped upon my skull, right between my eyes. It seared, white stars dancing across my vision and I gasped, driven to my knees. I almost retched right then and there. The Sheriff was at my side, forcing me back to my hooves, guiding me as best he could. I gagged as the noxious stench of burnt dead flesh invaded my nostrils. We passed through the arch, and we were engulfed in the inferno’s belly.

“C’mon, Red! Almost there, don’t bail on me now!”

I did as I was bid, for as long as I possibly could—until I simply couldn’t. The blaze around us began to collapse, the last pinpricks of magic snapping completely. I gasped at the startling severance, mourning the security it had brought me. A moan rose in my throat, a piteous sound that I, at any other time, would have felt immense embarrassment at having uttered.

My vision continued to diminish, and the sound of the Sheriff’s voice was all too distant now. Even the press of his body against mine was barely noticeable. I should have been gravely mortified at the pitiful state I was in. I should have been trying harder. I should have done a lot of things different.

That was the fleeting last thought I had before the darkness took me and my legs gave out beneath me.

Chapter Seven: Collapse

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Chapter Eight: Don't Go Out Alone

Author's Note

Disclaimer: I don’t own My Little Pony. Like, at all. It and all its respectable characters are © to Hasbro. However, all writing contents and semi-plots and original characters here are © to me; unless it is stated otherwise. All shows/ books/ video games/ songs that are mentioned in this chapter are all © to their respective owners, I do not own them.

Summary: It began with two bodies, and then suddenly many more came to follow. I was there to witness the beginning of the end, where the dead won’t rest, driven by the urge to devour the living. This rot is spreading faster than we could have anticipated. But we can’t give up because the truth of our new world is all that matters. I am begging you…rise up and survive before it’s too late.

Chapter Eight: Don't Go Out Alone

Find the key that knows the lock,
Find the root that knows the rock,
Find the things you’re seeking in the place you fear to look.
Promise me that you’ll take care,
You’ll show caution, you’ll beware.
There are many dangers in the pages of this book.

The broken doors are waiting. You are stronger than you’ve known.
My darling girl, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

“Don’t Go Out Alone” by Simone Kimberley, excerpt of “Parasite” by Mira Grant

I don’t know what I had expected once I stepped into the classroom. Perhaps broken or abused furniture, shattered glass, ripped pages out of books and lesson plans scattered about. Maybe even the devastated remains and arched black stains of inkwells and their contents.

I certainly wasn’t prepared to see an intact room, largely untouched. The desks were still in place. Any books in the room remained on shelves or desktops. Chairs were neatly pushed into place. The chalkboard at the front of the classroom still had a lesson plan drawn upon it, waiting for students to return for their hours of learning.

It took me a moment to find the pony in question that had segregated himself in self-inflicted seclusion.

The stallion in question had pulled two school desks into a corner of the room—the only sign of a disturbance. He slowly peeked over the upturned furniture, one visible bright blue eye round and fearful as he gazed at me.

“G-go away! I’m not coming out, not with those—those things out there!”

I remained where I stood, even when he ducked back down behind his makeshift shelter with a whimper. I dithered for a moment, weighing my options.

I have to approach this clinically, I decided. He was a patient; I was the doctor. Or the closest thing to one that was willing to interact with him.

I moved to the teacher’s desk, situated snugly against the front corner of the room. I lifted my saddlebags and the fire axe off my backside and set them carefully atop the desk. A few scorch marks had burned holes in the blanket that I typically wore as a protective layer against my saddlebags. I silently mourned its tarnished state. It had been a Hearth’s Warming gift from Doctor Stone Feather’s husband, back when I was earning both my doctorates.

Dejectedly, I put it out of my mind. My belongings at this moment weren’t important. They were things, they could be replaced. Lives, in contrast, couldn’t.

I turned my focus towards retrieving a few items from my saddlebags. I pivoted on my heels to face the upturned desks and the pony hiding behind them.

“My name is Doctor Red Rush. I’m here to assess your health. Could you please come out where I can see you?”

“Yo-you’re no doctor! Y-you run that gross death-trap shop with all the dead bodies! How do we know this didn’t happen all because of you?!”

I couldn’t fault him for his conclusion, however implausible it was. Granted, both of the bodies that had come into my morgue were infected, but neither of them had left the premises. I was just a convenient scapegoat to lay blame on, and I couldn’t find it in me to correct him. If this made him feel better…I’d let him get away with it for the time being.

I sighed softly and glanced at the items I had procured and laid out on the desk: a water canteen; the pastries from Sugarcube Corner; a few tools from my morgue. A scalpel hadn’t been the only thing that I’d brought with me a few nights ago to the hospital. None of them, sadly, could be of any use as a weapon.

There were also a few things that I had accidentally nicked from the hospital during my time assisting in the quarantine wing. I’d forgotten about them until now.

“Technically speaking, Sheriff Dust Cloud brought in two bodies that were infected. They were like that before they came to me.”

That didn’t seem to matter to my stubborn patient. He continued to glower at me from behind his shelter, his island of safety and isolation.

“You play with corpses! It’s morbid, it-it-it’s not right! What kind of freak are you?!”

I craned my head to view a head poking up from behind the desk. Scorched cherry red mane, cool grey fur, and a horn atop his head. Unicorn, roughly in his thirties. One of his eyes was buried beneath a mass of burns that covered most of the right side of his face. I wondered if he hadn’t outright lost the eye completely, given the extent of the damage I could see just at a glance. The other eye looked as though several blood vessels had burst inside it, tainting the white sclera with red.

He was in agony. That much I could tell from a glance as well.

“I run a funeral home and mortuary,” I said in a patient tone. “And I also lend my expertise to aid in criminal investigations, such as when the Sheriff comes by with a pony whose death may have occurred due to foul play.”

The stallion shuddered, but he hadn’t disappeared back down behind his makeshift fortress. I returned my attention to everything I’d laid out, and with a small twinge of magic, the top of the pastry box popped up and I gazed at the contents. The pastries within were in mixed stages of…well, they were all smooshed together. Flaky crumbs that weren’t loose were sticking together in odd little shapes thanks to jelly or cream or frosting.

They still looked edible, at the very least. And they didn’t appear too stale. I chose one that was mostly intact and lifted it up with my magic.

“You must be hungry after hiding in here for…what, the last forty-eight hours?”

He continued to stare at me with open and hostile distrust. “How do I know you didn’t poison that so you can just play around with my dead body?”

I could feel the itch of irritation beginning to rise inside of me again. I inhaled slowly, swallowing my frustration back down as best I could and ignore his barbed words. Setting the pastry back into the box, I replaced it with a stethoscope. It felt alien to have it around my neck now as I had three days ago in the hospital. While I did technically hold the title of doctor, in this moment, I still felt like the farthest thing from it. Not unlike a pauper masquerading as something she was not.

“What’s your name?”

“Nuh-uh! Nope! You can’t trick me! Now go away, get out!”

I pivoted in the Unicorn’s direction, glowering at him. “Either you cooperate with me, or I’ll get the Sheriff in here, and I can guarantee that he won’t be as gentle or understanding toward your injuries as I will be.”

I let the threat sink in for a few seconds before I sighed. I was already feeling exhausted. My social batteries weren’t equipped for all this…interaction. Not with the living, in such an unprofessional setting.

“I—I don’t—” he hiccupped. I could detect the wobble in his voice, but I couldn’t discern if it was because of tears that he was holding back, or from the pain of his injuries. Slowly, he stood up, and limped out from the desks, his whole body shaking as he did. To say he looked a mess was an understatement.

His cherry-red mane wasn’t as long as I had originally thought, as most of it had been scorched off. A good swathe of his neck, withers, and flank were covered in massive burns of varying degrees of severity. In some areas, it was superficial at best—the first layers of the epidermis having been burned away, along with the fur on top of that. In other areas, the range of damage was deeper, all the way down to and even past the basal layers of the epidermis.

Then there were several spots of third-degree burns that I could spot on a visual inspection alone. I already had a feeling that eschar formation wasn’t far into his future, and that would either shed on its own, or a debridement would become necessary to help with the healing process. That’s not even bringing to mind that skin grafts would need to be layered down for those deeper wounds. But I had a suspicion that infection was already forming beneath the surface. An ugly set of wounds such as those, sitting about in a non-sterile environment for two days with no treatment, no pain medication, no intravenous fluids, nothing…

It was a recipe for disaster, one that could lead to necrosis, malformed scarring, death. I wanted to move closer, but I was concerned that I’d spook him if I tried.

The Unicorn winced with every limping step he took, and his head hung from sheer exhaustion, face locked in a pained grimace. The skin beneath his uninjured eye looked bruised and heavy from lack of sleep. A few tears leaked from the eye, staining his fur and carving a trail down his cheek. I could sympathize and only imagine just how much pain he must be in. I would ask how he was still alive, but I already know the answer to that. A pony’s body was surprisingly durable and could take quite the punishment, even at the detriment of the pony themselves.

“I-I’m scared. I don’t understand what’s all going on—I-I was in bed, sleeping and…and then next thing I know, I’m h-hearing screaming, and I smelled the smoke and…” He hiccupped a few more times, breathing heavy to try and hold the sobs back. “M-my house—it’s just gone, up in flames and-and then I s-saw ponies ea-eating each other! Tearing each other apart with their mouths, and I just…ran. I ran and I ran and ran and—”

He stumbled and cried out when his legs gave out beneath him. He went crashing to the ground and let out a gut-wrenching scream. I quickly scooped him up him in a thread of magic, and rushed forward to his side. His face curled into a contortion of agony; visible eye tightly squeezed shut. The Unicorn took in sharp gulps of air, which shortly devolved into a fit of tears.

“It hurts! It hurts so much! M-make it stop, please!” He cried in between heaving sobs, his voice cracking every other word. As much as I didn’t like socializing, and especially outside my area of expertise, I wasn’t the kind of mare who couldn’t stand to see others in pain. I carefully, gently, set him down on the ground.

“What’s your name?”

“It…it’s Magnet Bolt.”

“Magnet Bolt. Okay. Let me get see if I can get you some medicine for the pain and a salve for those burns. Is that alright?”

“Please, please! Please, just make it stop!”

I turned on my heel and made for the door and cracked it open just enough to stick my head out. Behind me, his sobs lowered to soft whimpers.

The ponies on the other side stirred at my presence.

“I need anything you have for burns, pain medication, and broad-spectrum antibiotics for infection. He was caught up in the fires from a few days ago, and some of his injuries are deep.”

Doctor Greymare’s expression darkened, and he exchanged a look with Starlight before returning his attention to me.

“How bad is it?”

I explained the extent of his wounds, including my tentative diagnosis based on my initial impressions. He needed treatment and the sooner he got it, the better.

“We need confirmation he wasn’t bit first. I don’t want to waste what little supplies we have.” Doctor Greymare said once I finished, his tone brooking no room for argument.

“He’s locked himself away out of sheer terror and has been suffering this entire time. The only infection he’s guilty of having is one from the untreated open burn wounds he’s sustained and has been stewing in for the last two days!” I replied defensively. “There’s no way I can, in good conscious, allow him to continue suffering like this. I won’t be a part of this anymore if I can damn well help it because you chose to let him die!”

The air was heavy with silence as my words sunk into the space between us all. The steely expression Doctor Greymare held faltered as he continued to stare at me. I don’t much care for shouting, but if the time called for it to get my point across, I’d gladly do so under the right conditions. I was mildly pleased to see the others appeared shocked or alarmed at my raised voice and barbed words.

Especially Sheriff Dust Cloud. It was a rare sight to see the law pony completely and utterly flabbergasted. I know he’s only ever heard me shout at least once, and that had been while I was on the phone, chewing out an inept forensic analyst who had nearly compromised months of hard work I had committed to for a case out in Fillydelphia. He’d nearly cost us the entire case by cluelessly tampering with the evidence, but I had managed to bring us back from the brink, thankfully. My hard work did not end up being dismissed in court, and the right pony had been put away.

The heavy-hanging silence continued to stretch onwards while I kept on glaring.

“Please. He needs something. I’m not saying I won’t conduct a thorough inspection, but I can’t do that if he’s flinching and squirming out of reach from me because he’s in agony.”

This prompted the gathered ponies to mutter amongst themselves. The only one who remained silently stalwart in her posturing was Defense Bit. She offered no words for or against the burned pony in the room behind me. I took a moment to glance back. Magnet Bolt looked my way in such a pitiful display of imploring grimaces. I tried to smile for his reassurance, but I’m not sure if it was successful or if it had morphed into an awkward expression before I turned my attention back to the gathered ensemble.

Doctor Greymare huffed and advanced half a step closer, clearing his throat as he did.

“We can spare just a little bit of pain meds, and some salves for the more severe burns. But we need a thorough examination before we provide him with any further medication or treatment.”

He didn’t look entirely happy with the consensus, but at least he was willing to uphold the verdict. I bit my tongue to keep from arguing. Medical doctors swore an oath to do no harm to other ponies, but I can see the logic in his reasons. If this isolated individual was indeed infected, and he has yet to show symptoms—or was asymptomatic altogether until death and reanimation—then wasting the allocated supplies we had would be less for those who actually needed them and had a higher survival rate.

"Fair enough.” I simply replied, nodding. Before I could say anything else, Doctor Greymare began speaking again, lifting a hoof to push his glasses further back up his muzzle. I glanced back into the room and offered the Unicorn a hopeful smile.

“It’s high time we attended to the other potentially infected individuals we have in quarantine elsewhere.”

I was livid.

No, wait. Scratch that.

I was infuriated.

What should have been standard protocol was now being usurped by blind fear and paranoia. I could understand the inert psychology behind it all, despite my displeasure: the most abhorrent thing has come to life, quite literally, and it came back wrong. The dead were not meant to walk this earth, and yet they do now. The dead should not eat the living, and yet they have and are continuing to do so.

I’ve lost track of the many, many times a pony has become spooked at the mere idea of being alone in the same room as a dead body. Here in the sleepy hamlet that was Ponyville, I could count only less than a dozen times in which a family requested an open casket to be included in their deceased loved one’s funerary rites and services.

Ensuring the deceased looked presentable often went to waste once the casket lid was closed for a final time, never to be opened again and viewed by loved ones before the body’s internment to the earth. But I still put all my effort into my work, regardless of whether it could be admired or not.

The fear of the dead and of the dying was a driving force of nature, whether it was acknowledged or not.

But this same fear has trampled over common decency, as well as standard quarantine and interactive protocols. That was what incensed me the most. We had little to no PPE, limited medical and even magical equipment, skittish medical personnel that mingled with untrained students—literal children—and this did not make for a conducive working environment.

Magnet Bolt’s examination—which had taken an agonizing hour-and-a-half—came back clean. No bites, no signs of the viscous rotten black blood, no loss of what fur he had left due to the putrefaction of the disease. But he did come back as being severely dehydrated, riddled with a different kind of infection brought on by his untreated burn wounds, possible nerve and ligament damage. Of course, there was also the psychological trauma he was bound to have for the rest of his life, even after all the physical wounds have healed. He reluctantly agreed to move back into general population, as it would be easier for him to receive treatment, including pain management. Once he was given more pain medication, and shortly after a salve for all of his burns, his condition seemed to improve, but only time would tell if it would take hold.

The source of my ire came shortly after ensuring my first patient was left in the right hooves, and it was in the form of the prospective infected ponies that had been sequestered into a classroom I hadn’t passed by before. It was a lot closer to the general population of ponies already receiving treatment, ponies that had been checked and dubbed safe.

I didn’t like how close the potentially infected were to these ponies and would have preferred them to be in the classroom my first patient had been in.

I’m not sure how it happened, but it did. Once I had been debriefed on the ponies in quarantine, I was given the lead. I was, admittedly, dumbfounded by the sudden leadership thrust upon my withers.

This was a secondary crux of my ire. I am not a medical pony in the traditional sense. If I had been dealing with actual dead bodies, I wouldn’t take as much issue with the designated position. But these patients were still alive, and I felt woefully unearned in my title bump. I had tried to argue that I was better off consulting rather than leading, and that one of the few doctors we had, including Doctor Greymare, should be leading the charge.

“Why am I the one doing this?”

“You’re the one who sussed this disease out. You’re the one who figured out the vector of transmission. If anything, you’re the resident expert.”

I shook my head, and the clear faceguard snapped down over my snout and made me wince. I raised a hoof and pushed it back up.

“I’ve spoken to at least a few other colleagues who have been aware of this for much longer than I have, experts in their own fields who’ve been tracking this down and trying to figure out more—”

“I don’t see them in the room with us right now. Do you?” Doctor Greymare snapped. He winced as soon as the words left his mouth, and a look of guilt stole across his countenance. He composed himself before he continued. “As far as I’m concerned…and I’m sorry I hadn’t acknowledged this sooner…but you are our current expert. You have a degree in pathology. You have more training, more experience in this particular field. You hit the ground running in trying to get ahead of this, and if you hadn’t, well…”

My words fell on deaf ears, and I was thrust to the head of the herd, so to speak.

The medical pony sighed, shaking his head. “I fear more lives would have been lost at the hospital. More ponies would have been bitten or devoured or ended up infected in some other way by this rot. And until the cavalry arrives, we need all hooves on deck to hold down the fort.”

I frowned at him, studying the stallion before me. He had a rather earnest look of contriteness plastered on his face, one that spoke volumes of his humbling words. He was being honest and straightforward with me, which I appreciated all the more.

It did cool my temper a bit, and I felt less inclined in being snappish at him or anypony else for that matter.

I was given the only full set of PPE gear available, despite the shortage. Doctor Greymare rallied what few hooves that could be spared to follow my direction. The students and teachers alike with the school were to remain outside of the classroom at all times, and to attend to the uninfected patients that were stabilized and assist the remaining medical ponies that weren’t available for my endeavor.

I glanced Starlight’s way, not surprised at all when I saw Trixie at her side. The pair were waiting, watching. There was an anxious energy that seemed to have entangled them both. Trixie’s usual bravado has been uncharacteristically silenced in the gloom of this situation. I was only marginally grateful she has held her tongue with her bragging and boasting.

“Headmistress,” I called, and Starlight perked up. “Has there been any word from Princess Twilight at all?”

I still hadn’t gotten an answer about how bad it was in Canterlot, I realized. If it was as bad as Ponyville, or worse, I highly doubted that we’d be seeing the so-called cavalry anytime soon. We wouldn’t see any medical relief nor have any supplies shipped in, either. If that was the case, we were all on borrowed time and given what the Sheriff had told me of what had gone down at the train station, I wouldn’t want to ride it even if it was still on the rails. It was a hot spot of infectious, biohazardous material, one that needed to be cleansed with either a ton of bleach and antiseptic, or the preferable solution: fire.

Starlight’s shoulders seemed to slump in on themselves and she averted her eyes from mine.

“We…haven’t had a letter from her since our last correspondence the day you all arrived, when the fires had driven every pony here. But it sounds like things are going just as badly in Canterlot as they are here. I don’t want to assume anything without confirmation, but…I think Princess Twilight has sealed the capitol in a shield to keep any infected ponies from slipping through the cracks. I’ll send her another letter and see if we can get more from her. I’ve also got a few contacts around Equestria that I’d like to check in on as well, so I’ll keep you updated.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the Sheriff give a nod of approval toward Starlight. Without much else to discuss, I turned my attention to my assembled team: three nurses, two doctors, and two first-year residents. The nurses looked weathered and weary all at once, while in contrast, the first-year residents were unsure of themselves, eyes wide and round like startled deer. The two doctors were the middling ones; not entirely burnt out, but also not entirely keen on this endeavor.

They were wearing what little PPE gear we had left, and I was mildly satisfied that they were all at least wearing faceguards, had long-sleeved scrubs on, and wore gloves snugly over their hooves. If someone coughed or got blood on them, at the very least it wouldn’t get in their faces.

It was a strange sensation staring over the medical ponies that had been thrust under my leadership. It’s been…quite a few years since I had even one assistant, never mind having seven. It was, I would admit, a bit overwhelming to go from zero support to a sudden network of helping hooves.

According to Doctor Greymare, Sheriff Dust Cloud, and Headmistress Starlight Glimmer, they had all come to agree upon a rotating schedule to have a pony standing guard outside the room that held the quarantined ponies. They were also provided with bare-basic amenities, if they were feasible enough. Food, water, blankets…

Currently, it looked as though another hospital security pony was on the rotation when I and my new entourage pulled up to the door. This pony was a bit pudgier compared to the lean frame that Defense Bit touted, but he was just as bright-eyed and alert as she was. I had no doubt that he could probably take a hit and deal it back out just as hard, if push ever came to shove. Just the kind of muscle we needed in case of any rowdiness.

His hind hooves clicked sharply together as we approached, the fur over his top lip styled into a short yet kempt moustache twitching over his mouth, but I wasn’t quite sure if he was frowning or not.

“Simmer down, Rose Shield. Red here is going in there to reassess the ponies in quarantine.”

The security pony, Rose Shield, eyed me up and down before he gave me a curt nod in understanding. He flicked his short rose-pink tail as he stepped aside, giving me full access to the doorway.

I spun on my heels first and looked over my gathered helping hooves. I raised my voice to be heard over the background ambience and chatter. I went over the most important points, emphasizing the critical nature and situation we were about to step into. We had no clean room, no isolated suits that cycled clean and filtered air into it, no actual lockdown protocols that we could fall back on.

We were going in with little gear, less protections than usual, and we would need to improvise to the best of our abilities. I then asked the Unicorns of the group (two of the nurses, one of the residents, and one of the doctors) if they knew any shield spells.

One nurse and one doctor nodded. The resident made a face as he lifted a hoof up to wobble it in the air, embarrassment lining his face. I sighed.

“Not exactly encouraging in the least,” I muttered under my breath. I then ignited my horn and snapped up a shield around myself and the remaining ponies. The Unicorns were quick to follow my example, their shimmering spell work holding for the time being.

I nodded in approval. It would have to do for now. I swiveled back around, exhaling slowly as I grasped the doorknob in my magic…and pushed the door open.

Chapter Nine: Mercy

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