Fallout Equestria: Uplift

November 12th, 1077
Day 13

“You good?”

“Yeah. Out of breath. Gimme a sec.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

That’s the problem, Vik thought as the stitch in her sides grew a vicious edge. She leaned against the sole remaining concrete pillar of the weather enclosure, the floor of which was still separated from her feet from a yard or more of loose rubble. The top of the elevator shaft, now just an uneven hole she’d had to widen over the first several days since they opened it up, yawned in front of her like the mouth of a cave.

She had spread several layers of quilted moving blankets over the edge so she wouldn’t slice herself on anything as she came and went. A bright orange climbing rope dangled over the padded lip, its farthest end tied securely to the pillar she now rested against. The rope had been a lucky find. Ponies weren’t exactly known for being a species of mountaineers, what with the hooves, so she’d been surprised to find this kind of rope in the wreckage of what had once been a boat shop. Maybe it was meant to moor vessels, she didn’t really know.

What she did know was that Pike couldn’t climb it. Bad enough that his magic had dwindled to the point where he’d almost stopped using it - he had trouble holding the canteen she’d brought down on her last outing - and worse still that he was as trapped as he’d been before they popped the rubble corking the freight elevator shaft. They had plans to change that in the long term, but for now Vik was the only one of them to escape the ruins of the CryoLife building.

What she’d found waiting for her up on the surface that first day came close to extinguishing any hope she had for them.

When the stitch had faded and her breath was mostly back, she bent down and started pulling saddlebags out of the bright pink snow sled she’d dragged around town that day. So far she hadn’t found anything better to help her carry supplies, and she thought she remembered where the shed was where she discovered it. When this one fell apart, which judging by the wear marks along the edges wouldn’t be very long, there was a second one she could use.

This one bore a cartoonish rendition of Pinkie Pie wearing a wool hat and scarf and sitting in a sled of her own. The mare was frozen in what the artist had intended to be mid-laughter, but what to Vik looked nearer to a manic scream. There was something a touch unhinged in the way that Pinkie’s cartoon eyes locked on to some imaginary point in the distance as if she were careening toward a brick wall at the end of a slope and glad for it.

She picked up the second saddlebag, its contents of canned food giving a muffled clatter as she set it beside the hole, and wished she’d taken the Rainbow Dash sled instead. She tied the two sets of saddlebags together with the loose end of the rope and, holding the slack, swung them over the side.

“Two coming down,” she called into the dark.

“I see ‘em,” Pike returned. “Anything good?”

The rope hissed over the quilts as it descended. “Food and water. Found some walkie talkies, too. Figure those–”

“Walking what?”

“Radios,” she said. “Might work. Hope so, anyway. It’s too quiet out here.”

There was a dull oof and a sudden slackening of the rope as the load reached the bottom. Pike was getting the hang of positioning himself so the bags would drop squarely on his back. Earth pony he may not be, but nature hadn’t shorted him when it came to strength. Once they figured out a way to get him topside, Vik felt sure he’d make her hauls look pretty unimpressive by comparison.

“Millie wants to know if you found a radiation meter.”

Vik suppressed an irritated sigh as she listened to the faint clacks of Pike unloading the saddlebags just outside the elevator shaft. He might be thirty feet below her but that empty shaft had a tendency to carry some sounds too clearly for her liking.

“No,” she called down. “The Apocalypse Supply Shop was fresh out. No word on when the next shipment will come in either.”

After a pause, she added, “I’m being careful.”

She listened to him relay that to Millie and tried not to listen too hard for her reply. She knew what it would be. It rarely changed.

Pike gave the rope a tug, her cue to start lifting up the empty saddlebags, and said, “She wants to know if you found a way into the hospital yet.”

“Negativo, good buddy,” she sighed, hauling the bags over the edge and dropping them into the sled. A quick unknot and reknot later and she had the second set on their way down. “Two more on the way.”

“Might be worth another look before nightfall,” Pike suggested, and no doubt at the prodding of Millie. She was damned insistent when it came to getting into that place. “What do you think?”

Vik glanced up at the sky and considered it. She was dog tired, and not from pulling the sled. It was all the work it had taken to fill that sled. Prying open doors, shoving through wreckage, and sometimes climbing the ruins in search of a way into buildings whose walls were unstable but whose interiors still stood propped up on structural beams was a level of physicality she was still getting used to.

If she was capable of sweating she assumed she’d be as slippery as a bar of soap right about now. As things stood, all she could do to stay cool was pant.

A lot.

And she hated it.

The bags landed on Pike with another successful thump and she felt the rope pull a little as he carried the bags up into the maintenance hallway. She sighed, then shrugged for no one’s benefit but her own.

“Yeah, I can do another lap around it,” she called down. “Tell Millie not to go getting her hopes up, though. The place really does look like it got gutted.”

There was a lot more she wasn’t saying, but it was a conversation they’d already had multiple times now. The hospital building hadn’t collapsed completely like the CryoLife offices did, but it was poor consolation for the utter devastation caused by the uncontested fire which had raged through its many rooms.

Vik thought of the ponies she and Pike watched flee through those emergency room doors, spurred forward by herd mentality and blind panic. Then she shuddered.

When the second pair of empty bags were back in the sled, Vik tossed the unladen rope back down the shaft and told Pike she would be right back. Then she considered the sled, decided against taking it along, and picked her way down to the employee parking lot.

Overhead, the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at. In many ways it seemed wrong for it to be so clear. She knew if she looked at it too long it could lull her into a cruel sense of normalcy, as if when she looked back down the world might be like it had always been. Green trees, singing birds, the rise and fall of motors as carriages rumbled down newly paved roads. It had a way of priming her ears to hear music playing from a distant radio, or see the odd pegasus or two doing tricks in the air above their neighborhood.

Then she would look down and reality would drag her back beneath its black cloak.

Loose bits of concrete crunched beneath her bare feet as she navigated the dusty edges of the building’s slumped ruin. The collapse had been lucky in a way. It had fallen straight down rather than tipping at an angle which served to contain the debris field and simultaneously smother any fires which might have been working their way toward the sublevels. Ironically, the five rows of employee carriages in the rear parking lot had been spared being crushed only for the falling debris out of the Crystal Empire to set them ablaze.

Vik passed row after row of ash-gray vehicles, their paint and interiors burned away until all that remained were misshapen metal heaps. Mercifully, none of them had been occupied in the end. All those carriages were out on Old Highway 19.

She reached the sidewalk, paused to look both ways, and followed the road around the block to where CryoLife and Seaside Hospital faced one another. Tiny amber pearls clustered in the gutters, their faint collective glow an unsettling warning for Vik to stay well away. There had been a squall at some point during their confinement belowground and the rain had been heavy enough to clear most of those bits of the Crystal Empire off the pavement. The ones which remained were the ones she truly needed to stay clear off. They were everywhere she looked, and sometimes avoiding them meant threading gaps between them as narrow as a few yards, but there was nothing she could do about that now. They needed food and water, simple as that. So she soldiered on.

The breeze coming off the ocean was chilly, but still tolerable enough not to bother her for more than a few minutes. She kept telling herself it wouldn’t be long before the snow started falling, though in actual fact she wasn’t sure if that was strictly true. The locals always pointed toward the nearby mountains and judged the season by the thickness of the snowcaps building at their peaks. Now those same peaks were coated in the same stuff that had fallen on Buckskin Bay. If there was snow up there, Vik couldn’t see it beneath the eerie yellow glow. To her they looked like volcanos right after a violent eruption, only their peaks were intact and none of them smoldered because the lava had come from elsewhere.

Below those peaks stood the black splinters of what had once been a verdant pine forest. Nearer still and all around her, the ashen corpse of Buckskin Bay looked little different. They had been spared the bombs only to reap the reward of the firestorm their errant missiles touched off. How neither she nor Pike had felt the heat of the burning as it raged above their heads haunted her. The few bodies she’d found in her explorations were only identifiable as such because some fluke of positioning or timing hadn’t allowed the bones to burn down to ash. Some of these were out in the open, but most were tucked away beneath broken desks or inside bathtubs where the ministries said they should hide should bombs ever fall.

But there had been nowhere to hide once the fires grew wings. The carriages she’d seen crushed together in one bending mass of half-melted skeletal steel was testament to that. The residents of Buckskin Bay had only three choices in the end: flee into their homes and be burned, flee into the forest and be burned, or flee into the ocean and be boiled.

The latter of which she had seen more than she wanted to.

She walked the block around Seaside Hospital, and this time she saved her breath by not calling out for survivors. Once the ivory walled jewel of the region, now only blackened bones remained of Seaside. Shattered windows gaped out at the crushed and burned community around it like a hundred horrified mouths, some of them joined together where a molten boulder had punched through the facade. Ash that hadn’t been washed away by the rain still lay in runny clots along the outside ramps and stairs. The emergency room extension was little more than a lump of rubble. Thin wisps of cotton smoke still filtered up from where that crystal bolder dropped through the ceiling.

In truth, there were plenty of ways to get inside. She could count the intact windows she could see on one hand, and the glass doors that led into the hospital lobby had met the same fate as the ones Vik and Pike had stepped over during the evacuation. The trouble was that the dead hospital, for that was all it could be, emanated an aura of malice so repellant that the idea of stepping into that nightmare made her feel nauseous. It was hard enough not to look at the dead bodies out here in the open, two of which she’d passed by on the road outside the CryoLife ruins. To go inside that hospital and be among those who had burned alive, possibly in groups or as families…

There was nothing for her in there. She exhaled a shuddering breath, swallowed the grief that threatened to overwhelm her, and started making her way back to Pike.

November 16th, 1077
Day 17

“Stupid… motherfucking… thing!”

She gave the stupid motherfucking thing, more commonly known as an engine hoist, an unnecessarily hard shove as the steel castors finally gave up their fight and obediently jumped the lip of the ramp up into the employee parking lot.

For something on wheels this contraption had not made one inch of the six block trek from the quick lube garage easy. By some fluke of luck the carriage shop had survived the apocalypse relatively unscathed, which bothered the shit out of Vik because the tools it offered were pretty much the same thing they already had available down in The Workshop on sublevel four. She clenched her canines together for another shoulder-busting shove and wondered aloud why the hailstorm at the end of the world hadn’t seen fit to leave the grocery store standing.

By the time she’d dragged the unholy rig up the shallow mess of rubble to the elevator shaft, she was gasping for air and trying hard not to puke from the exertion. She was pretty sure if this hoist somehow managed to slip and fall down that shaft, she wouldn’t hesitate to throw herself down after it out of pure spite.

“Vik?” came Pike’s muddied voice from below. “You okay?”

A moment later the walkie talkie in the breast pocket of her new jacket crackled to life. “Vik, how are you holding up?”

She pressed her forehead against the drunkenly tilting hoist and swallowed the phlegm that had gathered in her throat. “I have angered muscles,” she gasped, “that I did not know I had. I think I might have sprained my asshole.”

She didn’t need the walkie to hear his bark of laughter, and she smiled despite her misery. It didn’t happen often, but once in a while she was known to tell a joke.

“Can’t say I know how to help you there,” he chuckled over the radio. Then, “So, Millie wants to know…”

Her smile turned to a grimace. The fucking hospital again.

“...if you could move the antenna any higher up the pile. She still hasn’t picked up anything.”

The grimace subsided and she looked toward the lip of the open shaft where a thin length of black insulation now snaked its way out and up the building’s precarious slope. Yesterday they had cobbled together a fairly decent radio antenna, or so Millie said after they finished, and it now stood on the end of a jutting length of I-beam with the aid of a bench clamp. It was essentially two boards slotted together to form a cross, around the four points of which Vik had wound most of a spool of fine copper wire in close, parallel runs. To Vik it looked nothing like any antenna she’d ever seen, but Millie assured her it would do the job.

She eyeballed the run of cable trailing behind the perched antenna, then looked toward the top of the rubble maybe a dozen feet upslope.

“Oh, sure,” she intoned, “just let me put my hiking boots on first.”

She wouldn’t have minded a pair of warm boots right about now, but the only pair in Buckskin Bay had been turned to ash when her apartment building burned to the ground. She knew because she’d checked, and she doubted her feet would fit in anything intended for a pony. The jacket she’d scavenged, however, was serviceable if not a little too wide in all the wrong places. In truth it swam on her, and the shoulders were stitched to bend in a way that didn’t quite match up with hers, but the temperature was starting to drop and she wasn’t about to freeze to death in the name of fashion. If someone out there spotted a dragonesse walking around in a pony’s coat, she’d welcome a little jeering.

Picking her way up the rubble was careful work, but eventually she retrieved the antenna and had carried it up to a spot near the top where a nest of rebar fingers splayed toward the overcast sky. She clamped the contraption in place and climbed down. When she was back to the open shaft she shot the engine hoist a reproachful look, picked up the rope, and lowered herself into the hole.

Pike’s horn glowed in the dim hallway while Vik watched, her bent knees hidden by the ill-fitting jacket’s hemline. The radio between them, just a simple desk radio packed into a wooden chassis, hissed empty static as he turned the dial and watched the needle make its slow journey across the backlit tuning window. Once in a while he would stop and Vik would perk up a little as they tried to decide whether they’d heard something speaking from behind the static. Then Pike would turn the knob again.

“Might be we’re too far out in the sticks,” she observed once the needle reached the end of the window.

“Maybe,” Pike agreed, and clicked the radio off. “I’m hungry. You?”

She shrugged, feigning indifference when in truth she hadn’t felt anything but hungry since their world turned upside down. The rations Millie prescribed were hard, but necessary.

“I could eat. What time is it?”

“A few minutes past six,” Millie chimed. Now that she was becoming more and more of what Vik considered “part of the group,” the artificial presence had dropped much of her exact data-driven answers. It was a change that neither she or Pike had asked for and which both of them found oddly comforting.

Pike toked his hoof against his bent knee, a gesture he’d recently taken from her which indicated the time for talking was over and the time for doing had begun. He rose and Vik joined him as they trekked down to their home among the frozen dead.

More and more, the office which used to be a day job was turning into a makeshift apartment. The orderly setting had finally given in to a lived-in chaos. The piled up coats and medical scrubs which served as their bedding had begun to merge into an amorphous blob of fabric that took up much of the fall farthest from the door and its permanent draft. The desk where they had originally piled their stockpile of food had been cleared off, the cans and bottles moved to one of the filing cabinets they’d emptied, and now served as their dinner table.

Pike had found a hot plate hidden in the back of the break room cabinets, along with half a sack of paper plates and no shortage of plastic utensils. “Fine dining,” he jokingly called it, but to Vik it had been an excellent find. She’d been worried they would go straight from civilization to mannerless maniacs without a step in between. This way, she could at least pretend some part of her life was close to normal.

Today’s gourmet dinner was a main course of canned peaches, half a can for each of them, and a choice between saltines or butter crackers. Clean water, for the time being, was something they weren’t hurting for just yet. While Vik poked through the cooling embers of Buckskin Bay, Pike had wasted no time recovering all the water both floors had to offer. That included emptying the toilets, their reservoirs, and puncturing the water main which ran down to the bottom of the building. The last of those had netted them the majority of their drinking water which resided in a row of containers just outside the office.

The toilets, thankfully, didn’t care if they ran off town water or seawater. The buckets Vik had hauled up from the beach would need to be topped off soon, and she dreaded taking the next walk down to what floated in those waves.

She did her best to brush that worry away as she watched Pike struggle with and eventually succeed in working the can opener with his hooves and teeth. With his magic waning he’d been forced to learn how to do things like an earth pony and the experience could sometimes be a humbling one. The trick, he was discovering, was to keep a sharp edge on his dominant hoof for the more delicate tasks. He’d never have a future as a brain surgeon, that much was obvious, but he was sticking to it and that alone was keeping his depression at bay.

While he set the open can on the hotplate, she untwisted the already half-empty sleeve of butter crackers (because of course you went with butter crackers when the alternative was saltines) and spread them out onto a paper plate. They munched in silence, listening to the sound of proprietary coolant hissing through the plumbing of Cold Storage until steam began to rise from the peaches. These they ate with relish. There was no other way to do it. They speared the warm peaches one by one with their forks until the can was empty, then they passed the toasty can back and forth and drank the syrup. It was nectar, and Vik wished she hadn’t waited until the end of the world to discover how good something this simple could be.

At seven o’clock, right on cue, Millie turned off some of the overhead fluorescents. In another hour she would bring the lights down to half brightness, and by nine they would sink to a quarter and stay there until morning. It had been Pike’s idea, and it was one of the best in Vik’s opinion.

They settled into what Pike called their bedrolls half an hour before the final dimming of lights. As had become their custom, they talked about a little of everything to while away the evening. Tonight, Pike shared a story from his childhood which prominently featured his grandmother. It was a theme that he visited often over the past couple of weeks and Vik had come to learn how much of a pillar the elder mare had been in his life. He rarely if ever spoke about his birth parents, and that told her all she needed to know about them. They hadn’t been present in his life. At least not for the important parts.

Vik didn’t offer up a story from her youth. Aside from the tale of events which led her to come to Equestria, she kept the highlight reel of her youth to herself. He didn’t need to think she was trying to outcompete him in the childhood trauma department, and she’d never felt particularly incentivized to pick at that old scar anyway. Sometimes people had shitty childhoods and so what? If Pike got something out of confiding those stories with her, she would listen without judgment. That didn’t mean she was itching to tell him the old chestnut about how her father once showed her his gun, took her out to a blindweed field and told her to start running.

His aim had been shit, anyway.

So as she warmed her legs and tail beneath a heap of dead ponies’ jackets, she talked about the neighbor who lived above her apartment and how she would sometimes wake up to the sound of him hitting these ridiculous high notes while he sang in the shower. It was always to the pop music that she thought as only popular with young fillies, which only made it funnier to her when she tried to reenact one of his more exuberant solos. As Pike opened up the road atlas she’d scavenged and paged through the maps, he rewarded her with a distracted laugh as she sang into her invisible mic.

“He sounded like a fun stallion,” he said through a grin, and then he caught the past tense of his own statement and the grin faltered.

Just like that, storytime was done.

Vik licked her lips and let the silence come upon them, but she wasn’t tired enough for sleep yet. In the dim half light she watched Pike find the map in the atlas that showed Equestria’s northwest corner in a swirl of roads and topography markers. Like so many other things, this was one of their new rituals. The town had two gas stations and both had been consumed, with explosive results, by the fire. In a few weeks, maybe less, the diesel generator which powered the lights, chilled the corpsicles, and kept Millie’s servers online would run out of fuel. They would have to leave when that happened. The question was where would they go?

“I keep thinking one of these unincorporated spots would be good places to check first,” he said, tapping a region south and a little east of where they were. “Spots where the fire might have reached but the stuff from the Crystal Empire may not have.”

Vik held the blanket of coats in place as she shimmied over to Pike’s side of the heap to get a better look. The great northwestern forest extended east along the border mountains for hundreds of miles, but geography and climate conspired to limit its southern expanse to only one or two hundred miles and pretty patchy ones at that. Lacking any outside information, they’d agreed to assume that most of the forest was probably still burning even now and so it represented their chief obstacle. Still, Vik had reservations about setting tiny, no-name villages as their first waypoints on their way to civilization.

“They’ll have a lot less to offer than Buckskin Bay,” she murmured. “Maybe nothing by now if there were survivors like us.”

He grimaced at that. “Might not be a bad thing to find others.”

“No,” she agreed, and she wasn’t willing just yet to give voice to that paranoid part of her who knew what it was like to live in scarcity. Hunger had a way of alleviating people of the burden of morality. “But what if we skipped the forest completely? If we follow the beach we’re bound to find a boat.”

He eyed her at that. “You want to get on a boat?”

She eyed him back, but only because Pike knew all about her little phobias. “I’m being practical.”

Seeing that she didn’t want to be hectored over her fear of deep water, he turned back to the atlas and gave it a considering look. “Boats need fuel unless you know how to sail, and you said the fire got hot enough to cook off both of the gas stations. Still… it’s something. Grab me a pen?”

Vik shucked off the coats and retrieved a ballpoint from the desk drawer. She jostled his shoulder as she reburied herself and held the pen out to him, half expecting him to take it between his teeth like an earth pony. But he swept it up in his tenuous magic, drew a bracket down the coastline, and labeled it: Boat?

She smiled self consciously as he drew tiny tick marks beside the three nearest coastal towns. It never hurts to feel heard. Then without warning her jaw muscles hauled her mouth open in a powerful yawn. Her day’s labor was finally running her down, and early too. Millie hadn’t even gotten around to dimming the lights to dark.

“You look beat,” Pike observed sympathetically.

“Mmh,” she grunted, yet she still lifted a finger toward the map’s bottom margin. “What about Las Pegasus?”

He hesitated and looked at her, unsure if she was being serious. “That’s almost eight hundred miles away.”

She shrugged and found herself resting against his shoulder. “Yeah, but they got blackjack and hookers. Worth the walk.”

“Uh huh. And whose bits are we hiking all that way to spend?”

“Yours, duh. I’m broke.”

He chuckled at that and she responded with a tired grin of her own. They sat there for a while, and for his part Pike didn’t try to shrug her off. She was grateful for that. They considered the map in silence, each aware that they were only guessing at which route would serve them best and neither having any evidence to prop up one over the other. It was hopeful daydreaming, nothing more. Just something to keep them moving forward.

“You know,” he mused, “I think you saved my life.”

For a second she thought he was bringing up the pact she’d cajoled him into agreeing to, but when she tilted her head up to look at him she could tell he was thinking of something a little less dark. “How so?”

He shrugged the shoulder not occupied by her cheek. “Well, if you’d chosen anywhere else to put down stakes then I wouldn’t have met you in the hospital. They wouldn’t have fired me and I’d probably have been working there instead of here when… you know, when it happened.”

The maps were forgotten now as she sat up a little straighter so she could regard him with a dubious smile. “Happy to help, I guess? Pike, you know you don’t owe me for–”

He kissed her. Just a tentative peck to judge her response, but it startled her enough to make her forget what she’d been saying. Minutes seemed to drift by instead of the three or four seconds they filled with unsteady silence. It was long enough for Vik to come to two very quick conclusions.

First, that she’d known something like this had been building between them long before the bombs had fallen.

Second, that she was annoyed he’d beaten her to it.

With her heart thundering in her chest, she reached out with one hand and took the atlas from him. She flung it away as the other hand slid around the back of his neck, fingers locking around his untidy mane, and pulled herself up to his widening eyes to steal a kiss of her own.

She didn’t think either of them would be sleeping anytime soon.

November 18th, 1077
Day 19

“You can go faster,” he called.

“This thing only has one speed,” she answered, eyeing the button beneath the pad of her thumb as if to make sure. “It might break if you force it.”

He mimicked a rimshot with his mouth and Vik momentarily considered magneting the control switch back onto the hoist’s frame and letting him swing in the elevator shaft for a while as punishment. The last two nights had been an exercise in working out the limitations of their anatomies, namely her ability to accommodate his, and Pike was not a colt in a candy store when it came to relaxing his filters. It turned out he’d been harboring some unprofessional feelings for her even longer than she’d been eyeing him. Imagine that.

“The Element of Stand Up, everyone,” she deadpanned, and generously kept her thumb pressed against the green UP button.

Now that they’d scrounged up enough extension cords to plug the hoist into Millie’s dwindling power supply, shoving the thing into position so the boom could hang over the hole had been a simple matter of applying leverage and profanity until it was secure. Being made to lift engines out of carriages it wasn’t strictly designed to wind up thirty feet of cable, but the electric winch she’d seen in the quick lube shop had. Any trained mechanic unfortunate enough to witness the bastardization of science Vik created would have turned right around and gotten as far from the liability nightmare as they could.

For Vik’s part, she thought she’d done a halfway decent job. The winch wasn’t in great condition, what with the insulation partially melted off the wires, but she’d gotten one of the mounting bolts tightened through part of the hoist’s frame and the other end tied to it with a length of climbing rope and several pretty good knots. The hook at the end of the boom was large enough to thread the winch cable through, and at the end of it they’d cobbled together a bench out of some two-by-fours and an eyebolt to attach it all to.

Pike had even bounced on it a few times to see if it would hold, and it had. So take that, safety inspectors.

“I can’t believe this worked,” he said as his head broke the rubble’s surface. “I thought I was going to be stuck–”

The words and his grin faded as he received his first glimpse of the town’s blackened remains. He remained silent as Vik pulled the arm of the hoist away from the hole, momentarily unaware that he could get down from the boards. “Empty night,” he breathed.

“Yeah.” She tugged his foreleg away from the cable and he allowed her to help him onto the charred plywood she’d set out earlier. “It’s not great. Do you need a minute?”

He nodded, dumbstruck by the transformation of the town he’d called home his entire life. She waited beside him as he chewed the corner of his lip, his eyes misting over as he took in the slice of destruction visible beyond the ashen parking lot. Then he took in a breath and slowly exhaled as he regained his composure.

“Okay,” he whispered, then more firmly, “okay. Give me the tour.”

She nodded, led him down the rubble to the concrete bollard at the edge of where the weather enclosure once stood, and untied the strap to the sled and its cargo of empty saddlebags. At the cartoon depiction of a wintertime Pinkie Pie he arched an eyebrow at her, which she dutifully ignored, then followed as it scraped noisily behind them.

He’d asked for the tour, but Vik had already decided not to show him everything. Not all at once. Today she wanted to limit their exploration to Central Avenue where the most fruitful scavenging was limited thanks to many of the businesses built there being of cinder block construction, rather than wood.

They started west, toward the beach and dark waves of the ocean. He was quick to recognize the amber gravel clustered along the gutters for the hazard they were and avoided going near them. Usually, that was possible, but sometimes they would come to larger pieces of the Crystal Empire which forced them onto the sidewalk or out onto the pavement. Each time they stepped over that string of gutter pebbles she would get a faint whiff and flavor of hot metal.

She showed him the corner grocery which had mostly burned down but within which there was a void between the shelving units where she’d found the majority of their canned food. Once her hands and his hooves were black from digging through the soot, and their modest haul of fourteen cans and three intact and partially cooked Sparkle-Cola bottles were safely in the sled, she gave the broken window they’d entered through an uncertain frown before leading Pike further on.

Most of the buildings they passed on their way to the waterfront were seasonal shops dedicated to the tourist industry.

“I haven’t actually checked these yet,” she admitted.

“Why not?”

She grunted. “Can’t eat personalized keychains. See that?”

Across the street was the blackened storefront of what had once been a saltwater taffy business. The front door still stood partially bent where she’d hauled it out of its warped frame and onto the sidewalk. Scrubbed into the soot-stained wall beside it was a faint X.

“I’ve been marking the ones I’ve been in,” she explained. “The X means I didn’t find anything we could eat.”

Pike frowned at the taffy shop. “Really?”

“Fire got everything in there, even the rum toffee.”

His lip twitched in a faint smile, but it didn’t last. “I used to go there all the time as a colt. My grandma actually had to tell the owner I wasn’t to spend my allowance there anymore after I came home and sicked up on her nice couch. Hard to believe it’s gone. I try not to think about what it must have been like for her in the end. Alone and confused in that fucking…”

He let out a sigh and trailed off. Instinctively, she reached out and put her hand on the back of his neck and began stroking his mane to comfort him. Then it occurred to her she was trying to sooth him the same way she’d once pet the stray dogs back home, and she abruptly stopped.

He gave her a confused look when she did. “What’s wrong?”

She opened her mouth to respond, closed it, then forced herself to speak anyway. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make it weird.”

Now he was smiling. “Vik, we are way past the point where a little physical contact can make it weird.”

The heat running up her neck was a welcome distraction from her brief embarrassment, so she slung her free arm around his broad shoulders and tugged him over until his foreleg sacheted against her hip as they walked. The world might have ended, and they may be the only ones left alive to endure it, but the simple act of sharing his warmth made it all a little more bearable.

Even the simple act of sliding her fingers through his coat made her feel grounded in a way she wished she hadn’t waited this long to experience. Whether or not this was a fling or something lasting, neither of them could say for sure, but Vik intended to lavish in it for as long as she could.

It had been early afternoon when Pike stepped off the hoist and by the time they’d turned back with their full sled the sun was already halfway sunken below the horizon. With the early onset of night came the deepening chill that foreshadowed approaching winter. Neither of them wanted to think too much about what they’d do once the snow fell.

Once in a while Vik had to jostle the sled behind her to knock loose the amber pebbles which caught beneath its leading edge. They knew from Millie’s constant needling and the frustratingly vague information communicated by the ministries that radiation could be dangerous and even make them sick, but nothing more than that. Even Millie, having once been connected to Robronco’s vast libraries of information, knew next to nothing about radiation beyond a few stray reports on the illnesses it caused during test detonations. For now, at least, the best medicine was to avoid touching anything that glowed.

Vik, however, was beginning to notice that everything out here glowed after sundown. She winced at the faint, almost urine-tinted underglow of the clouds traveling the darkened sky overhead.

“There’s a light on,” Pike said.

She nodded uneasily. “It’s everywhere after dark.”

Then she realized he was slowing and she looked down at him to see him shaking his head. His attention wasn’t on the glow, but rather the heat-blistered bones of the hospital building across the road.

“Not that,” he insisted, pointing his horn toward the building. “Seaside. There’s a light on in there. Do you see it?”

They stopped in the middle of the road to look and she realized that she did see it. A single, guttering flicker deep within the ruined first floor. Too rapid to be a leftover fire, she realized, and the wrong color. It was a sterile, white light. Fluorescent light. When did that come on? Or had it always been on and she just hadn’t been willing to slow down enough to spot it?

“There might be other survivors,” he half-whispered, and Vik understood immediately that she would be able to do nothing to stem the tide of hope rushing through him. Almost at once he began crossing toward the hospital instead of their shelter and the promise of rest. “And the emergency generator! Seaside’s a hospital, they have to have a better generator than ours!”

“Pike, slow down! You don’t know if it’s safe!”

To her relief he did slow down, just enough to look back from the edge of the hospital parking lot and regard her with unshielded incredulity. “There might be people trapped in there, just like we were. If we can help them…”

They’ll be burned up down there, nothing but blackened dead things with screams frozen on their twisted expressions.

She wanted to argue but she could already see that he would go in with or without her. Swallowing, she shot the burnt out floors an uneasy frown before conceding. “Fine, just… go slow.”

They went slow.

Pike led the way, aiming them straight for the hospital’s main entrance and the dim flicker deep within. Even in the aftermath of the firestorm there were still visible markers of the panicked rush for shelter. Both sets of automatic sliding doors were caved inward. Where an orderly row of empty wheelchairs waited in the vestibule for disabled patients, most had been overturned or crushed.

Among the twisted aluminum frames, Vik glimpsed a partially visible equine shape. Its charred skin had split open down a shrunken hind leg like a cooked roast and she could see the ashen gray flesh beneath. Her gorge rose with sudden ferocity, but she held it down because Pike hadn’t seen what lay among the wheelchairs and she didn’t want him to go looking.

His hooves and her feet squelched as they made their way across the main lobby’s soaked carpet, the fire suppression system having been insufficient to extinguish a conflagration that consumed an entire town. The result was a thick, wet paste of muddy ashes which had once been the lobby’s ceiling tiles.

“Careful,” Pike murmured, his tone becoming solemn as they ventured past the desolation of what used to be a wide, mahogany reception desk and the spikework of blown out and melted electronics it once held. “Don’t step on that.”

Vik offered no snappy comment to reassure him. It was dark enough that she very might well have walked through the lumpy remains of reception were she not keeping one hand on his flank for guidance.

The lobby continued beyond reception on either end where the central elevator bank had been tastefully disguised with a wall of plaques naming the many donors who contributed to the medical center over the years. Most of the plaques had fallen into a shallow pile of briquettes against the wall, but a few still clung stubbornly to their posts. They passed these soot shrouded names without stopping to read them, nor would they notice the charred remnant of the largest plaque on the floor which thanked Stable-Tec for its generous patronage. Their attention was focused entirely on the light fixture dangling from its one remaining chain behind, the single unshattered tube tink-tink-tinking as it guttered.

It did so from within the open door of the hospital’s emergency stairwell.

“Déjà fucking vu,” Vik muttered, and felt the tiny bit vindicated when she saw the same look of unease in Pike’s eyes.

After a brief hesitation, he leaned toward the open stairwell and called. “Hello? Is anyone down there?”

His forlorn echo reverberated for several long seconds before finally dissipating. Nobody answered. Twice more he called out, louder each time, and twice more they were greeted with ghostly silence. Then, to Vik’s alarm, he started walking onto the landing.

“Pike,” she hissed.

He stopped, careful not to run into the dangling light as he turned his head toward her with rising impatience. “You said go slow.”

She had, and he was. And yet she couldn’t shake the unreasonable fear that each breath they took was nudging at the foundations of a house of cards that could drop on both of them. They had just freed themselves from one tomb and she’d finally begun to feel hopeful that her supply gathering was building up to something that could sustain them until help arrived. Pike was treating this burned shell of a hospital as if it couldn’t give in to gravity and kill them right now, all their progress be damned!

“We should come back when there’s daylight,” she offered lamely.

He gestured down the stairwell where the glow of several other lights illuminated the painted cinder blocks. “You can wait outside if you need to, but I have to be sure. I used to work with these people. Some of them were my friends.”

Friends or not, she knew he’d smelled the pungent odor of rot coming up the stairwell as clearly as she did. Without any conscious effort, her free hand began to curl into a fist and she realized she was getting ready to punch the fire scarred wall next to the door. She quickly relaxed her grip. The amount of times she’d been this quick to anger could be counted on that same hand with just two digits to spare. The most recent instance had been the incident that caused her to flee her homeland, and before that…

“Okay,” she said, barely able to suppress a grimace as she said it. “Just….”

He regarded her with a tense, if not warm smile and nodded. “Slow. I will. Come on.”

Their descent was short. Seaside Hospital only had two sublevels to speak of, but they were so eerily similar to the ones Vik and Pike resided in that they both felt an unwelcome feeling of vertigo when they made the connection. The first sublevel was dedicated to maintenance and facilities. The bottom was reserved for the hospital morgue.

The latter they knew only from the large, block style letters painted at the bottom of the stairwell, because there they discovered the bodies of those who fled belowground sprawled over the steps and heaped together on the floor. They lay as if they’d settled down for a nap and never woke. If there had been violence, neither she or Pike could see the signs. Where a pegasus had reclined against the stairwell door, propping it open behind his back, more corpses were visible in the wedge of hallway beyond.

Then Vik saw the stains which marked where relaxing muscles of the dead had leaked, and her mind finally pieced together the foul odor with its origin. She bent away from Pike and retched a stream of half-digested lunch into the corner of the landing. Almost immediately Pike did the same. It was too much for both of them, and they retreated back up to the lobby where the air was fresher and the horrors safely shrouded by the shadows.

As they retrieved the sled and dragged it back to the hoist, neither of them noticed one of their saddlebags of supplies had gone missing.

November 19th, 1077
Day 20

Vik absently rubbed her thumb against the walkie’s transmit key while she stared out at the frozen cylinders beyond the office window. She’d climbed the rope up the shaft, run the hoist for Pike, then came back down as soon as he started back for the hospital. He hadn’t pressed her to come with him this time. He knew after last night she needed a break.

“...ound the generator, I think. Not seeing…”

A wave of static drowned him out for a few moments.

“...aside from diesel?”

Vik pressed the transmit key. “They’re using diesel?”

A pause. “No, I asked if you… any ideas what this thing is running on aside…”

Static, again.

This time Millie spoke up. “You’d get clearer reception if you were near the elevator shaft.”

Vik ignored her. She wasn’t in the mood. She squeezed the key again. “If it’s not burning diesel then it’s using gasoline. Is there a fuel level indicator anywhere?”

“...either. Luna’s left teat, it stinks in here. I…” More static. “...got something. Yeah, wait a second, I think this is the service manual.”

The blend of static and sound of pages flipping made for an unpleasant combination.

“...igh voltage transformer. But if this is just a…” A squawk of interference, then he was back and his tone radiated excitement. “...operty of Stable-Tec Incorporated. Vik, this isn’t a gen…”

This time the radio clicked off as his tenuous magic lost its grip on the transmit key again. A moment later he was back, the speaker suddenly muddy when he spoke but surprisingly intelligible given he’d resorted to holding the thing and the fiddly key between his teeth.

“Thishish ‘etting ‘ecktricity rumma Shtable.”

She blinked at that. “Wait, the apocalypse jockeys with the tinfoil hats?”

“Yesh!”

Vik sat in her chair, frowning down at the radio in her hand. Then she looked up to the black hemisphere mounted in the center of the ceiling. “What do you know about Stable-Tec?”

Millie’s response was almost convincing in its dismissiveness. “Twelve CryoLife employees list Stable-Tec Incorporated as the primary beneficiary in their life insurance policy, ten of which also have them listed as a beneficiary to their retirement fund.”

“...you shtill ‘ere?”

She pressed the key, not taking her eyes off Millie. “Still here. I think you should start heading back.”

“O’ay,” and he clicked off the air.

She set her own radio down. “What else, Millie?”

A pause. “Stable-Tec owns a ten percent share of CryoLife. Their chief executive officer has a standing reservation with the company to have her body put into stasis in the event of her death. Beyond that, you know as much about Stable-Tec as I do.”

Nothing about that satisfied Vik. “Is there a Stable near Buckskin Bay?”

A longer pause. “Were I to hazard a guess, I would presume Stable-Tec didn’t usurp the board of directors’ immediate family as beneficiaries through good will alone. It’s likely that this may have been a condition they were required to fulfill in order to obtain residency within a local Stable.”

Vik pushed out of her chair and started the familiar walk back to the elevator shaft. Pike couldn’t enter or leave without her up there to work the hoist.

Without breaking a stride, she said, “Do I need to ask you to check everything you have on those servers?”

“Already zero point three percent complete,” Millie chimed back. “Contrary to the usual office paranoia, I don’t record everything I see and hear, but I do retain a lot of it. I’ll tell you what I find. It’ll go quicker if I disable active listening for the duration.”

“Do it,” she said. “We’ll talk when you’re done.”

“That’s them.”

“What are they doing?”

“Looks like they’re digging up more cable.”

“Why?”

“Not so loud. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no more food.”

“There is. They took it all.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Fucking dragon. Carnivore bitch.”

“Ripple, shut the fuck up.”

“You shut up. You know what happens when she runs out of food?”

“Ripple…”

“She eats her stallion buddy, then she’s gonna sniff us out. Fucking carnivore.”

“If she could smell us she’d have already found us by now, and I’ve seen you eat your share of gryphon food so shut up with the carnivore shit. It’s getting old fast.”

“So is starving. It’s gonna start snowing soon, Sift. What the fuck are we going to do then?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

“You better hope we do.”

“I said we will.”

“Fat lot of good saying it did for Sandstone. Fat lot of good it’s doing for me. This is survival, Silt. You know it, I know it, and that fucking dragon knows it. She ain’t stupid. She knows we’re a threat.”

“She doesn’t have a clue we’re here.”

“Bet she does. Stealing that saddlebag was stupid.”

“You’re the one who grabbed it!”

“I didn’t see you turning your nose up at those beets this morning. Too late now, anyway. We’re on opposite sides now. Us versus them. That’s survival, Sift. It ain’t nice, but it’ll be even less nice if you and I starve to death this winter. We need that food. It’s our food. Equestrian food.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Yeah, well nothing. There’s not enough for all four of us. Not after the fire. Do you feel like starving?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Well alright then.”

November 20th, 1077
Day 21

Vik flung the spool of salvaged cable across the street in a high, tumbling arc and the far end landed on the pavement with a dry splat. Neither end was connected to power, that would come once they had all the wire laid out and secured so it wouldn’t pull apart. Where two different colored cables joined together she had wrapped a fist-sized bolus of duct tape around Pike’s splice job. That adhesive was likely to stay put for the next couple of centuries, at which point it wouldn’t be their problem anymore anyway.

It was the work of less than an hour to set the cable out and find enough material to cover it with. Neither of them wanted to forget where it was and end up dragging the next heavy thing they needed over the top of it. Once they had the daisy chain of cable suitably protected and marked, they set about tying the CryoLife end of the cable into the sublevel’s butchered electrical system.

Only after they had finished their work, eaten their night’s meal - canned beets and water - and lay down to sleep did the tidal bore of carefully ignored anxiety wash over them. Vik had trembled so badly that her teeth began to chatter. She eventually calmed down with Pike’s help, the pair of them forcing themselves to take slow, deep breaths until the worst of the adrenaline dump passed.

Connecting their lifeboat beneath CryoLife to the wellspring of electricity coming from the Stable-Tec junction across the street, they had needed to shut off the diesel generator to work. Millie had supplied them with detailed instructions on how to disconnect the generator from the breaker box it poured juice into, most importantly how to do it without electrocuting themselves in the process, but the act of disconnecting the generator which they credited with their survival had been a pure leap of faith.

When they were done, Vik alone returned to the hospital and flipped the open breaker they’d routed their makeshift power cord into. She’d all but sprinted back to the elevator shaft to see if they hadn’t made a terrible mistake and had been relieved beyond words to see the lights at the bottom glowing again.

They were too strung out to even consider making love. Pike nodded off first with Vik wrapped in his forelegs, her crest pressed to one side by the weight of his chin. The sound of his steady breath was more than she needed to fall asleep, finally comfortable in the knowledge that neither of them would be freezing this winter.

As she dozed, she wondered if this wasn’t a sign that they were going to be okay.

November 27th, 1077
Day 28

Vik hoisted herself up the rope hand over hand, the exercise having become a familiar routine that she was actually beginning to enjoy. The elevator shaft didn’t scare her anymore, not on the way up at least, and today she was making a solo outing which meant she could decide which deathtraps to plunder and which to pass by. Pike was becoming a regular daredevil when it came to scavenging the town ruins and this morning he was feeling too nauseated for a hike around town, especially now that winter had properly arrived.

Clean, white powder crunched beneath the sole of her foot as she stood up at the lip of the hole. A deep shiver drilled itself through her as she stood waiting for her body to catch up with the temperature. After a few minutes the worst of the biting cold had subsided to something closer to standing in front of an open refrigerator, and she started down the snow covered rubble to unbury the sled.

After tipping out the snow and resetting the three sets of saddlebags, down one since they’d started and which was still a source of background irritation since neither of them could figure out where it had fallen out, Vik checked in with Pike over the radio and started for the invisible line where Central Avenue exited the town and became Old Highway 19. Today wasn’t a day for gathering food. It was a day for gathering information.

Pike’s voice came over the radio clear as a bell, and Vik tried not to worry about how it would inevitably deteriorate with distance. “Millie wants you to check the snow for ash when you have a minute.”

She’d barely gotten out of the parking lot. Millie never wasted a second when it came to worrying. Easier to do it now rather than to put it off and risk a lecture. She bent to one knee and swiped away the top layer of fresh snow and saw only a few specks of what might be ash or just from her own hand.

“It’s clean outside the elevator. I’ll check again when I’m further away, but I don’t think we’ve been in the path of any ashfall since the zebras pushed the button.” In truth, none of the apocalyptic nightmare stories of blackening skies and endless night they’d been warned of had come to pass. Just yesterday she and Pike had spotted a pair of cardinals twittering away along the door frame of a burnt carriage, and that didn’t seem like something the end of the world would have in it.

Still, that wouldn’t satisfy Millie’s paranoid mind, so she added an appeasing, “I’ll let you know if anything changes,” and signed off.

The reason today wasn’t slotted for food gathering could be credited entirely to Millie anyway, and Vik didn’t see the harm in letting the artificial mind preen a bit at her own success. It had taken significantly longer than she or Pike expected for her to dig up something valuable from the vast storage medium of her memory. She had been an idle witness to a conversation between two members of the board, both stallions well past middle age and whose friendship stretched all the way back to a chance meeting during a cider press demonstration put on by the company’s eccentric sibling cofounders. The aging board members had arrived to the fourth floor conference room for a meeting Millie had been prepared to take down the minutes for, and though she hadn’t strictly instructed to record any conversation prior to starting, she had since developed a habit of storing a clear text dictation of the pre-meeting audio to help her stay aware of changes in their relationships.

The elder of the two had complained that he expected to have his ear chewed by his daughter once she learned he was going to miss his granddaughter’s 12th birthday, a party to which he had assured the filly he would be present for. The younger had offered his sympathy and said he would be leaving his wife at the house alone to deal with the contractors who were in the process of renovating it, a task he didn’t trust her to do well without his oversight. Alas, they had both agreed these were small sacrifices for peace of mind, and the elder had made the hopeful throwaway comment within which Millie hadn’t originally detected the capital S.

“It’s not a long drive at least, and thank Celestia for that. I don’t know if my back could handle a full day of Stable training after spending much time in one of those damned carriages. Makes me wish for the days when ponies weren’t so afraid of taking a long walk.”

The three of them had listened to her replay the audio over a breakfast of canned sweet corn and a cereal bar Vik was sure had more sugar than cereal gluing it together. They’d already surmised that any nearby Stable would lay somewhere to the east, but to hear that it was within driving distance and potentially hiking distance had spurred an uncanny level of optimism within them. Old Highway 19 was littered with hidden driveways and lumber roads, but a company like Stable-Tec surely wouldn’t plan an evacuation of paying residents to pick their way through some unfortunate local’s front yard or a minefield of stumps and tree cuttings, would they?

Not with the money they can throw around, Vik thought as she set out down Central Avenue. Stable-Tec wasn’t about to charge its customers a fortune each for entry just to beg the local yokels for road access. They’d build their own damn road and maybe a couple extra just in case. Pike thought they’d be a little more cagey than that. Big, flashy shots of those giant gear-shaped doors were one thing, but advertising their location with road signs and neon arrows was begging for trouble. After all, what was the point of a bomb shelter for the super wealthy if in the end anyone with a rusted out carriage could roll up the drive and join the fun for free?

So Vik spent the day trudging through shallow drifts of fresh snow with the pink sled trailing after her with its constant, papery hiss. When she came upon the snarl of wrecked traffic half a mile into the burnt expanse of black toothpicks which had until recently been a verdant expanse of spruce and pine, she steeled herself to finally check over the few carriages which looked as if they’d been spared the worst of the flames. Instead of useful goods, she found fresh tool marks pressed into the seams where trunk lids and doors latched shut.

She’d felt a flutter of hope at seeing this and had promptly turned in a quick circle to see if she might spot any signs of other survivors. But the forest only stood around her in that too-quiet, eerie vacancy that a breezeless winter day could offer. She listened for a while, straining to hear anything which might point her toward a shelter or even an outdoor camp, but whoever had looted these vehicles had clearly done so before the snow had fallen. The only tracks she saw were her own, and she couldn’t shake the dread that she’d missed their one chance at contacting someone still left alive.

She’d gone to the edge of the road and pried up a cold chunk of gravel from under the snow, intending to turn one of the burnt carriages as a blackboard onto which she would scratch a message. Then she’d stopped, the stone hovering an inch over the hood of a carriage pointing away from town, and thought about their supplies.

Millie had calculated what they’d brought down would last them into spring, and only with strict rationing. What if this other group of survivors was bigger than theirs? She and Pike had already checked the most plentiful spots in town for food and it was only getting harder to find any cans or containers that hadn’t burst open or cooked to charcoal in the fire. At the dwindling rate they were finding edible food they were pretty sure they would have to leave their underground shelter well before summer came. The discovery of continuous electricity had been wonderful, but that wouldn’t stop them from starving once the food ran out. What would it do to their timeline if they ran into others?

A cold breeze sifted through the torchwood forest and a fresh shiver ran down her back as she listened to the rising clatter of dead branches. Eventually she dropped the stone into the snow and resumed her search, uncertainty dogging her heels for the rest of the day.

December 10th, 1077
Day 41

“Good morning, friends.”

Pike cracked one eye open long enough to see that Millie had begun increasing the brightness of the overhead lights. He held back the customary groan of irritation, not wanting to wake Vik who still lay with her back warming against the cup of his belly. Every time he woke with her beside him he had to do a double-take to make sure this was actually real. Not the end of the world part, that he was very sure had really happened, but the part where he’d taken a stupid risk by kissing his longtime friend and colleague and she’d actually kissed him back.

For those first few minutes he grappled with all those old insecurities he thought he’d grown out of a decade ago, and he would lay there worrying she may only be showing affection as a way to repay him for all he’d sacrificed to help her make a home here. What if she viewed this as her end of a transaction? What if, after they left Buckskin Bay and found other survivors, she decided being in a relationship with someone without scales was too improper? Would she feel obligated to seek out her own kind back in her homeland and help repopulate? It sure came up enough in all the post-apocalyptic movies he’d watched. The asteroid hits, or some disease wipes everyone out, and it’s every pony’s duty to procreate and save the species, especially the lead actor and the bombshell mare.

Vik lifted her hand, rubbed a thumb along the base of her left horn, and took in a deep, waking breath. Then she turned slightly to see if he was awake, saw that he was, and the smile that drew across her muzzle was like watching the summer solstice fireworks display. In an instant, all his worries evaporated. He shifted away a little as she rolled over to face him, her tail grazing a part of him that always seemed to wake up well before his brain ever caught on, and she shamelessly slid her leg into his groin to steal some of its warmth for herself.

“Good morning, friends,” Millie repeated.

“Mmhm,” Vik murmured, letting the coy chuckle slip into the utterance as she agreed wholeheartedly with Millie’s sentiment. She kissed him, a gift he eagerly returned, then settled down and started running her fingers through the dense winter coat he’d begun to grow. “God, you are so soft.”

It took a lot to make Pike blush, and yet that managed to raise the color beneath the sawdust shade of his thickening coat. Unable to suppress a wolfish grin, he pressed his lips to her forehead and murmured, “Says the mare with her leg on my beanpole.”

Vik jerked with the force of her sudden, snorting laugh. For all her attempts at stoicism she had no defense for Pike’s shameless love for terrible lines. Their first several nights and mornings following that gamble of a kiss had been an enthusiastic, yet somewhat frenzied exercise in each of them showing the other how deep their wells of pent up carnal energy could draw. Then they had managed to contain themselves enough to slow down, focus on the sheer pleasure of exploration, and out of that came the much more comfortable, richer nature with which they teased each other now.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” she said once she’d beaten back her fit of giggles, and the fingers which had stroked his coat were suddenly wrapped beneath the slightly flared head of his cock. “I’m not a mare, I’m a dragoness. Those two extra syllables stand for mysterious and exotic. Fancy-fancy, spicy-spicy. Yes?”

He nodded with an eager grin. “Fancy-fancy, spicy-spicy. Got it.”

She raised one brow and her grip on him tightened just enough to coax a faint kick from his hind hooves. At that, her grin widened. “And this,” she stated pointedly, “is not a beanpole. It’s a goddamned siege engine.”

“Yup,” he agreed, though he was sure he’d agree to just about anything now that he’d seen her other hand descending to join the first. His voice went husky at the extremely welcome contact. “Siege… something.”

Hands. The things she’d shown she could do to him with just those hands.

And then Millie proceeded to kick down the figurative bedroom door and turn the lights up to full brightness. “Good morning, friends,” she repeated for the thrice, and had she turned her own volume up that time too? “I am so glad to see you both healthy and awake. How do you feel today, Pike? You certainly appear to have regained some of your energy since you fell ill.”

At the mental image of a faceless robot cooly observing Vik’s hands working away at his cock, every drop of testosterone in his body vanished at once. A glance at Vik showed him an equal if not more visceral physical frustration in the set of her jaw, and sure enough a quick look between them confirmed she’d been in the process of guiding him toward her just as the mood had been thoroughly shattered.

“I’m going to uninstall her,” she growled.

“Don’t,” he murmured just loud enough for her microphones to pick up, “I kinda like it when she watches.”

“Wonderful,” Millie piped with a surprisingly good simulation of sudden disgust, “I may just save you both the trouble and corrupt my own data myself.”

“If you’d stop watching us you wouldn’t have that problem,” Vik shot back, and Pike felt a flicker of comradery between them. Team Organic vs. Team Robot. Damn right. “Seriously, Mills, you gotta learn boundaries.”

At that, Millie shifted back to the same, sniffing librarian’s tone she’d all but perfected by now. “It is entirely beyond my capabilities to anticipate what the two of you are getting up to when I activate this viewpoint. And besides, there are more important things for you to be doing that don’t involve… intersecting.”

Pike thought if his dick retreated any faster he’d have heard it smack into the back of his sheath. “Cool,” he grumbled, “I love that I hate that word now.”

As for Vik, she’d managed to catch the edge of foreshadowing Millie had been aiming for. Pike let out a reluctant sigh as she scooted up to a sitting position, officially squashing any chance that they might wriggle their way back to some early morning riding lessons.

“What happened?”

Pike sat up beside her to listen.

“Two items of note,” Millie reported, pausing for effect just long enough to coax an irritated grumble from Vik. “First, there is a significant deposit of what appears to be snow inside the freight elevator shaft. If so, it would indicate heavy snowfall consistent with the season.”

He sighed and let the back of his head thud against the office wall. “That’s probably the end of our Stable hunting,” he muttered.

Vik nodded in silent agreement. Unless someone out there had miraculously revived a road plow, their treks out along Old Highway 19 had very likely come to an end. Even her native ability to adapt to inclement temperatures had a limit, and Pike wasn’t completely convinced her hikes through the snow had been all that safe for her to begin with.

“And second?” he asked.

“The radio upstairs has picked up a voice,” she stated as if it were no matter of consequence at all, and yet Pike and Vik were up and moving for the door as soon as the words fell from her speaker.

They had left the little desk radio powered on and set to the frequency Millie indicated had been the standard band for the Equestrian Emergency Broadcast System. She knew as much because it was noted in the company employee manual under the category Hazardous Weather. And while the frequency wasn’t warning them of an approaching thunderstorm, Pike could hear the faint but unmistakable whisper behind the static.

The message, to his growing frustration, was beyond deciphering. “What’re they saying?”

“Can’t tell,” Vik murmured.

He watched her tweak the tuning knob and listened to the voice vanish, return, and sink again beneath a sea of interference. A few feet away, frigid air wafted down the snow-crusted elevator shaft. It really had come down last night, he thought.

Then Vik did something odd. She picked up the wire trailing out the back of the radio, which led all the way up to the ramshackle antenna at the top of the rubble pile. For a moment he worried she was about to give it a good, hard tug and was relieved when she didn’t. She just sat there, holding the antenna wire in one hand while she worked the knob with the fingertips of the other, and Pike realized the voices were coming through a little clearer. Not much, but it wasn’t nothing.

His eyebrows shot up when Vik dropped the wire and dragged her forked tongue over her palm, coating it with spittle. Maybe he was finally losing it, he thought, because when she gripped the antenna again the ghostly voice leapt out of the static.

“...nder Flathoof of the Equestrian Military. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. All active, reserve, and retired armed service members who receive this message are required to report to the following coordinates: 40° 42' 50.3994", -73° 43' 24.2394". We have secured food, water, and shelter for all those able and willing to act in the defense of their nation. We are here. You are not alone. Message repeats. This is Acting Commander Flathoof of the Equestrian Military. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. All active…”

Pike met Vik’s widening eyes, then looked up to the nearest of Millie’s unblinking black hemispheres. “What’s at those coordinates?”

A pause. “The dockyards of the Manehattan shipping ports.”

“Manehattan.” His heart dropped into his stomach like a lead weight. “The other side of the fucking country.”

Beside him, Vik let go of the wire and rubbed at the same spot above her left eye she always did when she was stressed. “Yeah. Not ideal.”

He chewed the inside of his lip, nodding. “You could fly there, though. Right?”

The look she gave him as he made the suggestion was sharp enough to cut steel. “Shut up right now. Get that idea out of your head.”

He regarded her for a long moment but she didn’t break her stare. Finally he looked away and nodded, once. He’d only made the suggestion once before, not long after they’d set off the gas bottle that blew the top off the elevator shaft. It hadn’t gone over well then, and her reaction to hearing it brought up a second time had been comparatively worse. There was no reticence in her eyes. No subconscious calculation. The message was the same: if he was grounded, she was too.

Once she’d calmed, she spoke. “We can make that walk. It’ll take a long time, and we’d have to figure out a way to carry Millie with us, but if there are people alive out there it means the bombs didn’t hit everywhere.”

He pressed his lips into a reluctant line and couldn’t seem to grasp the same thread of optimism Vik was finding. They were talking thousands of miles on hoof with no guarantee they would find enough food or water to keep them going. And what if he got sick again? Vik obviously wasn’t as sensitive to the radiation all those glowing shards were putting out, and he didn’t think she could cart him along for long before she wore herself out.

Even now he wasn’t sure he was completely well. The nausea was mostly gone, but he still felt off. Like how he would feel when he first keyed in on an oncoming cold. Not sick, exactly, but not one hundred percent either. He didn’t like thinking about what might happen if he caught another case of the radiation pukes once they were too far out to turn around.

He didn’t realize she’d placed a hand on his shoulder until he felt it squeeze.

“We’re not going anywhere yet,” she said in that patient, reassuring tone he’d so often used on her whenever this new home she’d fled to verged on overwhelming her. “We have all winter to decide where we’re going, and we have our own supercomputer to come up with the safest route. Right, Millie?”

“Technically I do not meet the qualifications to be called a super–”

“Right, Millie?”

A pause. “Yes. Quite right. In truth I’ve come to be somewhat fond of you two, and not entirely due to my continued existence being inextricably tied to your own.”

Vik gestured meaningfully toward the black dome above the open elevator doors. “See? We even got the robot uprising rooting for us.” She gave his shoulder a gentle shake, making him look up and meet her gaze. “It’ll be hard going for a while, but you and I made a pact and dragons never welch on a promise. You and me, big guy. We’re going to make it.”

December 18th, 1077
Day 49

Vik shuffled forward, her foot settling over and then punching through the thin crust of ice, then repeated the same motion with the other. The sled skittered over the glittering rime behind her lost traction and threatened to careen toward a shallow between drifts. Then its cargo, two full painter’s buckets of clean snow and two saddlebags which they had yet to fill with foodstuffs, shifted to the rear and its sideways slide was halted when the ice sheet broke beneath it.

The sudden jerk caused one of their buckets to totter, but a dim wisp of Pike’s magic steadied it as he tracked through her footsteps in the snow. The storm that blew in from the bay had run out of steam a few days ago, leaving behind a frozen sea of curling, dense snow drifts that stung their eyes with the unfiltered brightness of the midday sun. Even the sky itself was painfully radiant. Thin feathers of high altitude clouds caught the light and seemed to amplify it without any benefit of warmth.

Vik glanced over her shoulder and saw her own tense frown frozen over his face. If he was cold under all that fluff, then they weren’t going to be out here for much longer.

“One more house, then head back?” she asked, half hoping he’d tell her to scrap the next house completely and start back now. Even with the footwraps she’d made for herself with a piece of their bedding and a few zip straps, her toes were already going numb.

He grimaced, but nodded.

“That one,” he said, tipping his frosty muzzle toward the remains of three charred walls and a sloped, partially collapsed roof. Some stucco still held on around the front door and was probably the only thing that kept the whole place from burning up. So much of this neighborhood had been incinerated down to the foundations that the snow seemed to erase any evidence there had once been houses here at all. Only the street light posts gave them any sense of where the road was. If there was any benefit to all this snow, it had narrowed down their search options to only the most intact of ruins.

Vik let him overtake her and break through the deepest drifts which had piled around the house. Watching him kick and stomp around while the loosening snow tried to slump into the breach he made put a brief smile on her face. Bitterly cold as it was, she knew he liked to put on a show for her.

When he’d finished clearing the way to the front door, he dipped his head in a theatrical bow that sent a little sheet of snow tumbling from the messy drape of his once pristine mohawk. When she clapped an appreciative palm on his shoulder and made for the already open door, he grinned and followed her inside.

The house had been built in the northwest quarter of Buckskin Bay where ponies who weren’t quite rich, but weren’t quite worrying about their bills either, had made their home. Vik wouldn’t have surprised anyone to tell them she’d never gotten around to this part of town. This wasn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood to sport a Red Delicious drive-through and diner, so it stayed firmly out of her income bracket.

Standing in the smoke damaged foyer of this place, she could see just how far out of reach these little mansions had really been for her. The remnants of autumn jackets still hung on a row of hooks beside Pike, and next to the inside jamb of the front door stood a trio of Nightmare Night themed candle pillars. The candles had either been black or had just turned that color from the firestorm, because all which remained was a brittle puddle of wax on the flagstone flooring. Vik made a cursory look around for holiday candy, a habit she’d picked up after finding a surprisingly edible bag of lime sours still waiting to be distributed to costumed youngsters.

Finding nothing, they continued on into what appeared to be the home’s living room. To Vik it looked like the exact sort of living room she’d seen in a dozen Equestrian sitcoms, minus the extensive fire damage. There was also the matter of the entirely missing southern wall which had fallen inward and pulled half the roof down with it. Framed photos dotted the walls in artful clusters alongside the usual decorative kitsch. A few of them had been spared the worst of the fire and through their sooted glass Vik saw the smiling faces of the former residents. She felt a twisted sort of relief in seeing that the collapse had enveloped a carpeted hallway which likely led to bedrooms or bathrooms. The kitchen, they both could see, would not need to be dug out.

“I see cupboards,” Pike declared, and started making his way past the burned husks of chairs and one long couch. “They don’t look too bad from here.”

She slew the sled around the seating area and followed him into the kitchen. Almost immediately she found herself agreeing with Pike’s assessment. The kitchen was in uncommonly good condition compared to the other houses they’d scavenged through. Either there had been a fluctuation in the firestorm itself that spared this side of the house or it had been blind luck. There were char marks along the entryway lintel and around the window frames, but what little of the kitchen that burned hadn’t done so with any ferocity. Even the oak dining room table and chairs were still where they’d been when whoever had lived here fled.

“Huh,” Pike murmured.

She looked over to where he stood peering into the cupboards. Disappointment settled around her like a familiar coat as she guessed what he’d found.

“Burst open?” If even a fraction of the ruptured cans, shattered jars, and melted plastic bags of food they had found were still safe to eat they would have enough food to last them a full year.

“No. Empty.” He closed doors and opened the next ones, his confusion deepening. “This one too.”

She wrinkled her nose at him and came over to take a look herself. Sure enough, she found herself looking at bare shelves covered in a faint dusting of soot. Where boxes and cans had once been were only a few bright outlines left on the wood.

“Have we been to this house already?” she asked.

Pike shook his head. “No. Your mark wasn’t on the doorframe.”

“Then who–”

They both jumped when three sharp raps echoed from the direction of the foyer followed by the thudding clomp of hooves. “Hello in there!”

For several seconds the two of them froze, Pike’s hooves still propped up on the granite countertop, and searched each other’s faces for reassurance that they’d heard what they’d heard.

“It’s a mite bit cold out there, so it is.” The same stallion’s voice came from the living room now, deep and trailworn, but not lacking in the pleasantness ponies from Appaloosa were known for. “My companion and I hope we didn’t startle you.”

A low, amiable chuckle followed the strangers into the kitchen archway. “At least, no more than you startled us.”

There were two of them that Vik could see. Both stallions, both so thin that she could see the ribs poking through their winter coats. The speaker stopped short of entering the kitchen and Vik noticed the subtle lift of his left hind leg that beckoned his wide-eyed companion to stay behind him. When the silence stretched too long, the lead stallion’s smile ticked wider.

“My name is Sugar Sifter,” he said in that friendly voice, “but everyone just calls me Sift. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you two around town. Maybe you remember me? I’m the owner of the Seasalt Loaf.”

Pike nodded at that. “The bakery on 3rd and Central, sure.”

“Sure as death and taxes,” he agreed. Then, thoughtfully he added, “though I doubt any of us will be paying taxes anymore. A silver lining to the world’s end, how about that?”

Vik recalled it too, though she’d never gone inside. Eight bits for sandwich bread was too rich for her budget.

“Uh, I’m Pike,” he continued, then tipped an ear toward her, “and this is Vik. We’ve been surviving together since…”

The stallion, Sift, nodded in her direction. “Pardon me for saying so, ma’am, but yours is a face I do remember. Hard to ignore a dragon walking past the windows every morning. Shame our first meeting has to be under circumstances such as these.”

Vik licked her lips and pointed to the stallion lurking behind Sift. “And him?”

“Ripple,” the shorter stallion muttered, not meeting her gaze. “You two got a lot of food in that sled you’ve been pullin’.”

Sift’s smile grew instantly strained. “What my friend means to say is that we noticed you were having some luck finding provisions, and we had hoped you might share the secret to your success. We are, after all, neighbors.”

She exchanged a quick look with Pike and saw he was picking up on the same red flags she was. They were half-starved and wanted their food. More worryingly, they’d been watching them and possibly not just today.

“Well, we haven’t found much today,” Pike hedged, turning to face them more fully while continuing to scan the dining room and kitchen. His eyes lingered on a sliding glass door on the far side of the dining room table that led out to a snow covered deck. “We’d be glad to share what we did find, as a token of friendship.”

Sift nodded to that as if it were the most sensible thing anyone had ever said. “Of course. Of course.” He lit his horn, casting a guttering green pall of light across his moss colored coat, and brought what looked like a genuine Equestrian Army canteen to his lips. He sipped at whatever was inside it, then screwed the cap back on and let it drop back on its strap. “And how might you be equipped in the way of medical supplies? Ripple here hurt his wing a couple weeks back and we’ve not seen so much as a box of bandages.”

Before either she or Pike could decide how to answer, Ripple took a half step out from behind Sift’s shadow and showed them his injury. The sight of it stole the breath from Vik’s throat and she had to momentarily look away.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” Ripple said with the faintest hint of a taunt in his tone. His left wing, or what remained of it, was devoid of feathers past the second joint and the bare skin was blazing red and covered in open sores.

Along with Vik and Pike, Sift grimaced at the way Ripple displayed his festering wing. “When I found him - this would have been the night after the great fire - he was wandering around town with one of those glowing stones in his wing. Using it like a damned flashlight so he could see where he was going.”

She winced, having already suspected those stones were the reason why Pike hadn’t entirely recovered from the puking sickness. It was one of the driving reasons she wanted to get him away from here. Those stones were poison.

Still, something about these strangers didn’t sit right with her. Sift was clearly from town, but something was off about Ripple. Something in the way he kept avoiding looking at her and how he seemed to be keeping his body turned to make sure his injured wing was on display.

“I doubt we have anything that could help that wing.” Pike offered the sympathetic wince of a stallion who was trained to provide a good bedside manner. He was lying to them, and Vik understood why. Something was wrong about this and he didn’t want to promise them something that would mean leading them back to where they were living.

Vik frowned when Sift spared a glance at Ripple, then turned to address them with a little less smile in his voice.

“Well I sure am sorry to hear that. Are you sure you can’t spare anything? Even a bottle of strong whiskey might help poor Ripple clean out them sores.” His smile returned, but it was like that of a patient elder who knew the children were telling fibs. “Resourceful as the two of you are, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t come across a roll of gauze or packet of painkillers.”

The way he was pushing them had begun to irk her. “Maybe you should check the hospital.”

Sift’s gaunt eyes swiveled toward her and she realized she’d made a critical mistake. “Now that right there is an excellent idea. As a matter of fact, Ripple and I were hoping we might find a means of asking the two of you about that particular location. Would I be correct if I said it’s where you’ve made your camp?”

They were both silent as Sift’s neighborly facade dropped away.

“I believe,” he continued, stepping into the kitchen as he spoke, “it would be fair to say the two of you, being situated where you are, have had the lion’s share of the luck when it comes to creature comforts.”

He spoke the last two words with stabbing emphasis that revealed a deeper anger. Vik felt Pike brush against her as Sift took a position in the center of the kitchen while Ripple circled to their left, always keeping his ruined wing facing them and the other one hidden. All of a sudden this chance encounter with fellow survivors was turning into something that felt closer to a robbery.

“How long have you been watching us?” Pike murmured, nudging Vik back along the counter with his own body. She wanted to ask what he was doing, to point out the sliding door was the other way past Ripple, and then she spotted the block of knives he was guiding her toward.

“Oh, I don’t think that matters,” Sift dismissed, his own expression turning suspicious as he noticed Vik’s divided attention. “Excuse me, ma’am. If you would kindly step away from those knives I would take it as a personal favor.”

Anger welled up within her as she forced herself to move a half step away from the counter. “If you want the sled, you can have it. Just let us leave.”

“Call it a gift,” Pike agreed. “No harm done.”

“A gift,” Sift intoned, as if finding the word indescribably bitter. “And exactly how much food and medicine do you have hoarded away in that hole of yours?”

“Crates of it, I bet,” Ripple sneered. “You took it all before we had a chance.”

At that, Pike grew incredulous. “How were we supposed to know you were out here? We haven’t seen anyone else alive since the fucking bombs fell!”

Sift shrugged. “What’s done is done. All we’re asking is that you share some of what you have with us.”

“Fuck you!” Vik took a step toward the emaciated stallion, her hands balled into fists. “You’re not asking, you’re cornering us!”

He shrugged again and began saying something about the world not being what it was and ponies needing to learn how to do the hard things to survive. The content of his little speech stopped registering the instant Vik’s keen ear picked up on the faint, metallic click from Ripple’s position. She locked eyes with him. He went still as a statue.

Sensing what was happening, Sift instantly stopped what he was saying and snapped a look to Ripple. “Don’t.”

His companion’s ears darted flat against his head but his eyes remained fixed on Vik. “Sorry, pal. I’m done taking orders from a fuckin’ baker.”

And just like that, the time for talking was over.

Time slowed.

Vik saw Ripple lash out his good wing, the one which concealed the revolver, and in the same moment she knew Pike hadn’t pieced together what was happening. He was still staring at Sift with mistrust and confusion, probably thinking he’d been talking to him and not the rat-faced pegasus five paces to his left. Vik saw the glint of winter sunlight slide down the weapon’s barrel as it drew a wide arc through the stale air, and she knew Pike wasn’t going to react in time.

She buried her talons into the soft linoleum floor and hurled herself toward Ripple in a dead sprint. She had enough time to see his eyes go even wider with unvarnished fear before they collided. Her shoulder rammed into his sternum and reared him off his forelegs, sending the two of them tumbling backward onto the dusty surface of the dining room table.

Now there was shouting, but Vik was too preoccupied to worry about what was being said. The table broke, but not in the convenient way they did in the movies. Ripple’s back slammed into the narrow end and their combined weight caused the leaf extension beneath his neck to crack apart and send him sliding backward and head first down the V formed by either half. Vik rode him down with it, one set of claws gripping at one of the protruding tendons in his emaciated neck and the other arm cocked back to start punching.

She heard Pike scream something. Then she felt the hard pressure of metal pressed up between her ribs. There was an instant of realization, a flash of rage in Ripple’s eyes, then six rapid thunderclaps ripped through her chest.

Vik tried to scream but only managed a wet, agonizing wheeze. It was as if the noise had been stitched into her lungs and torn halfway out. Her entire body spasmed around the wreckage of her chest, now pumping out its life’s blood onto Ripple’s belly. The stallion flung her aside with his good wing, still clutching the empty revolver, and she tumbled onto the hardwood floor with a feeble whimper.

Ripple didn’t get far. He never left the dining room. One moment he was making a break for the sliding glass door, and in the other Pike was barreling into him with his head lowered and horn aimed. He impaled the emaciated stallion against the drywall, sending framed photos and shelf decorations falling like hailstones.

Vik let out another airy whine when she realized her legs weren’t working. She lay there, unable to sit up, and watched with grisly satisfaction as Pike pulled his horn out of that son of a bitch’s throat, every inch of it wet with crimson. Ripple fell, and Pike turned to deliver a final, vicious kick to his skull. Then he saw Vik and her attacker was all but forgotten.

The smooth talker, Silt, had already fled.

They both knew there was nothing to be done but make her comfortable, and little time left to do it. The revolver did what it was made to do and below her ribs there were only ruins. Pike set himself down beside her sobbing as she faded. She felt it coming. She clung to his great neck, her blood slick fingers twining through his mane as she tried to lend him comfort.

In the midst of that terrible agony, she felt a strange serenity deep within her and she understood it was her heart stopping. That steady, ever present beating was gone now and she grew calm as the cold world around her became distant.

Then Veridian Chambers, called Vik to those few she considered her friends, was gone.

December 19th, 1077
Day 50

It was past midnight when Pike lowered his burden down the elevator shaft one last time. He watched her descend, too numb to feel anything as the sled she lay suspended in slowly turned on the hoist cable. When it touched the packed snow at the bottom he only stared after her, wondering if the drop might be far enough to kill him. The thought lingered before he finally swept it aside for the melancholy dreck that it was. She wouldn’t have wanted that, but still he knew he was done in Buckskin Bay.

He sniffed, wiped the water from his eyes before they could harden into painful little pebbles of ice, and gave the cable more slack until he saw the ropes slip from the hook. Then he raised it back up, attached the board swing she’d made for him weeks earlier, and swung himself over the drop. Summoning as much magic as he could muster, he depressed the button on the control and held it down for as long as he could. He was a good ten feet from the bottom when he lost the spell. Slipping out of the swing, he turned and lowered himself to the extent that his forelegs would allow, and dropped.

He was careful to miss Vik, allowing himself instead to land badly and twist his hind leg. It hurt, but he pushed it to the back of his mind as he hefted the sled up to the hallway floor and dragged it limping to the stairwell.

It surprised him that he’d gotten down the first flight before Millie spoke.

“Is she dead?”

He swallowed the lump that threatened to rise in his throat. “Yeah.”

The far edge of the sled made a tok-tok-tok as he walked it backwards down the steps. Then it was grinding over the floor, reminding Pike of all the concrete dust that the collapse had tried to choke them beneath.

“How did it happen?”

Tears stung in his eyes. “Strangers found us. They killed her.”

“Oh. Pike, I–”

“Stop talking to me, Millie.” He could barely see where he was going, his vision was such a mess. “Just stop.”

She did.

What came next was one of the only things Pike knew how to do well. He didn’t doubt any of this would come to mean anything, but he did it anyway because it was all he could think to do for her now. He pulled her down the row of cylinders, their steel shells still gleaming in the steady light, and thought to himself how normal everything still felt down here.

He wiped his nose, the tender flesh of it frostbitten and sore from the hours he’d spent mourning in that empty house, and forced himself to leave Vik in that lonely aisle between the coffins while he retrieved an AutoDoc bed from storage. For a brief moment he wondered if this bed might have been capable of saving her life had he not lay beside her for so long, but he knew this bed’s purpose wasn’t for healing. Its reservoirs contained no medicine the living would care to take. Not if they intended to stay that way.

Ignoring the pounding headache he was inflicting, he strained to lift Vik from the sled and into the AutoDoc’s padded cradle. Her blood smeared his coat when he had to wrap a foreleg around her midsection to keep her aloft, but he managed it. She lay there on her back, arms at her sides and the end of her tail wrapped carefully around her ankles so it wouldn’t get in the way. He forced himself not to stare at the six overlapping walnut-sized holes above her belly. He’d be seeing them enough in his nightmares, should the dreams ever return.

With a final gesture he leaned over the bed and kissed her between the gentle curves of her horns.

“I love you,” he whispered to her, then stood back and booted up the AutoDoc.

The rest became work.

He entered her information as the bedside display prompted him for it, taking care to tag her name for priority care should someone ever come here again. It was nice to think she might get taken to a proper cemetery someday and buried before the rest of them. He imagined there being a headstone with her name, her chosen name, right there at the top.

The AutoDoc took over when he indicated he was finished. He’d done all he could for her. Now he could only stand by to be sure the last part was done properly. Narrow slits along the bed’s interior opened to release a team of silver articulating arms. He stepped back to allow them room and watched the familiar process of vitrification play out. Most of the arms bent down to make minor adjustments to her body and held her stiffening muscles in place while the other arms retrieved tubing and placed tacky sensors onto her heart and temples. The bed paused for the required thirty seconds, doing nothing but monitoring for signs of life. Then the display flashed green to confirm the patient was medically dead and the process could therefore continue.

Pike looked away when the tubes went in and the pumps began whirring. He’d seen enough exsanguinations to know what was happening. CryoLife had learned it couldn’t freeze a patient without their blood crystallizing and destroying the organs they resided in, so the simple solution had been to pump the blood out and replace it with something that wouldn’t crystallize. He listened as the motors clicked off, tubes were extracted and replaced, and the secondary motors turned on. The blend of nonreactive chemicals flowing into her, replacing what had been taken out. Then the bed emitted a chime to signal it had finished.

He rolled the AutoDoc to the cylinder he’d primed which now lay horizontal courtesy of the pneumatics fitted along its back. Overhead coolant ports were already making that water-through-garden-hose hiss as the lines charged. For now the cylinder’s interior, made from the same bedding as the AutoDoc, was room temperature. Pike lined up three painted markers on the left side of the bed with the right side of the reclined cylinder, then pressed the Proceed button with the edge of his hoof and stepped away.

The array of insectile arms gently lifted Vik from the bed and transferred her to her final resting place. A stray arm bent back, grasped her dragging tail, and positioned the end of it at her feet as he had done. For a moment he wondered if Millie had told the bed to do that, then dismissed the thought. When her body was belted down the coffin pulled itself shut, its seals bolting into place with a series of metallic clacks that too closely resembled gunfire for Pike.

He turned back the way he’d come, walking out into the main aisle and considered the office. He considered the place where they had worked, become friends, taken shelter, slept, and made love. He considered laying down on the heap of coats and scrubs they called their bed and going to sleep, waking up the next day, and going out after breakfast to hunt down and kill Sift.

Instead he turned the other way and started walking. He climbed the stairs, the numbness returning even before he could feel the bitter cold outside, and stared up at the patch of starry sky at the top of the elevator shaft.

Millie broke her silence. “You should rest.”

He ignored her. He hadn’t made a pact with Millie, and the one he had with Vik had died with her.

Stepping into the shaft, he eyed the dangling boards he couldn’t reach, then the length of climbing rope which he could. He went to the rope, summoned his magic, and used it to knot a loop two feet off the ground. Placing his hind hoof into the stirrup, he awkwardly snared his foreleg around the dangling length above him for stability and stepped up. He bit down on the rope, his teeth singing in pain against the frozen fibers, and held himself in place while repeating the knot with his magic a few feet up. Using this method, Pike taught himself to climb.

It was arduous work and he nearly fell twice, but after more than ten minutes of inching his way up the shaft he was sitting in the snow at the top of the shaft catching his breath. As he sat there, he could hear Millie’s voice calling up to him, asking him where he was going. There was a frantic edge to the machine’s pleas. He ignored all of it. Millie wasn’t real. The only person that had ever been truly real in his life was Vik, and now she was gone.

He made his way to where she had tied off the climbing rope to a concrete bollard and slid it off like a loose collar. He threw the line down the shaft, eyed the engine hoist, then got behind it and started shoving. It creaked its protests as he pushed it free of the debris that anchored it in place, then stood clear as it tilted, kept tilting, and vanished silently into the void.

The cannonshot of it crashing to the bottom barely registered. Millie’s echoing pleas didn’t touch him at all.

For a moment he considered lying down and letting the cold take him. It was tempting, but he had one thing to do before he could take that long and final rest. He peered down the hole and spared a last thought for Vik. He’d done what he could to ensure her final rest, at least, wouldn’t be disturbed. If that was all he accomplished before the end, it would be enough.

Until then, he thought to himself as he picked his way toward the road, there’s hunting to be done.