Wrath of the Lamb
A story of clipped wings and broken spirits, a casualty of the wasteland.
"Urgh..."
The red pony was lain out on the asphalt, his vision blurry and spinning. It was so dark, he couldn't have made out his surroundings if he had full faculties anyway. But what he couldn't see was the least of his worries right now. His body was in bad shape. He knew it, he had a lot of experiences where he felt the way he did, flat down on the ground.
He felt horrible, emotionally and physically. He was pained by dull aches throbbing at his sides and across his limbs. His back especially complained, crying out for a relief that the colt was too beaten and exhausted to pursue. His throat hurt from yelling and his mind swam in a groggy brew within his skull that may or may not be the product of severe internal bleeding.
All that the young pony could be certain of -if he could be certain of anything in his state- was the fact he was being left alone for the time being. They weren't beating him senseless with their hooves, some of which were tipped with steel. But, when all things were considered, did they even have to?
The pony wheezed and heaved. Bones were broken; be it his ribs or legs he didn't know. He was barely conscious and the agony was blending together into a general numbness anyway, it didn't matter much as to the specifics of these things. He continued to lay there, orange eyes not even half open, watching the world swaying around him. Side to side... wobbling uneasiness...
He groaned, gagged and spilled whatever was left in his stomach. The tortured colt didn't lurch or anything, he simply vomited and the bile mixed with the pool of other bodily fluids he was currently soaking in. Other ingredients in this vile mixture were blood, sweat and tears. Mostly blood, though. Many cuts were welts by now, the pony's red fur horrendously torn apart. Tufts of his pelt were in the puddle.
It was horrid... but yet another chapter in the sad, sad life of Falcon Wing.
He lay his head down with his mouth hanging open slightly. His labored breaths were loud and desperate, as if he had a collapsed lung. Given the brutality he was shown, it was more than likely that was indeed the case. His eyelids fluttered and his distorted vision warped the shadows, the darkness swirling into itself hypnotically. He indulged in the failure of his own mind, gradually losing himself to the entrancing shapes that were surreal and otherworldly for they were his escape from the Hell that he found himself in.
To think, he was fleeing from persecution only to stumble across something much worse. That might have crossed his mind before, when the savages unleashed their aggression onto him, their hooves thudding against his hide, himself rolled into a defensive ball beneath their assault, enduring the ensuing pain as he had done many times before in the clouds above. The only difference now was: before he had the privilege of looking past his attackers to the sun or stars depending on what time of day it happened to be. Now... now all that he had to look at was the rippling darkness spawned from the very clouds he and the rest of his kind made home. He flew through the white expanse and saw it darken into a sickly gray-green, then confronted the dark abyss beyond.
And what horror awaited him in the darkness. They overtook him swiftly and without struggle, be it the surprise or the conditioning the pegasus was given to such circumstances. Perhaps it was the lack of resistance that had him hanging on by the last threads of his life, rather than being killed outright by the dark shapes amidst the ruins of a time long passed.
Perhaps this was nothing to them but sport.
He groaned again as he heard the voices around him. He heard the voices, but didn't listen to what was being spoken. It made his head pound to even try. The muddled voices echoed around him, incomprehensible, gibberish wafting around him as blissful relief loomed, all but a few minutes away.
All the suffering will just... fade away...
"I said drink up, damn it!" the harsh voice of a stallion roared, holding the limp body of the red pegasus with one of his forelegs. The pony readjusted their grip, propping up Falcon's head -which hung idly off to the side before- upright.
"Hose him off! Wash the stink off of him!" the stallion called out to others in the shadows, and with rapturous laughter and maddened cackling the dark figures gathered around, a few of them having speaking metal pales in their mouths. Bucketful after bucketful of water drenched the pegasus, the freezing shock bringing him back to painful lucidity if only for a minute. Maybe less than that, even.
Falcon wheezed, trembling in the grasp of the dark shape that vaguely resembled a large pony, his silhouette alone showing how largely built the stallion was. Likewise, his shape was broken by other additions, armor decorated with things that the shadows were kind enough to hide.
"Feeling a bit under the weather, eh?" The stallion started to laugh, their foul breath mixing with the musky odor wafting off of him. "Don't worry about that at all, meat." He raised something up, a very rounded bottle, almost spherical with a short tube at the top.
"This'll fix you right up!"
And then the stallion shoved the lip of the vial into the pony's mouth, forcing his head back. Blindsided, the pegasus gulped down the contents of the bottle and in just seconds it was emptied. When it was pulled away from his lips, Falcon Wing gasped and coughed, much to his anguish as his chest and mid-torso protested.
"There there, you'll be fine in a few hours." The stallion looked at the empty bottle. "I think I'll hang onto this... might be useful in carving you up later..." With some throaty laughter, the stallion smashed the vial against the road, shards and flakes of glass flying out from the impact. He then held the jagged ring of glass that remained in his grasp.
"Yeah... I'll have some fun with this. Get well soon, meat. Don't want you dying so soon!"
"N-... No please... just... just end it... please..." Falcon pleaded weakly. This earned him a kick to the face, driving his head painfully into the pavement. There was no reply to his pleas for release, though the pony only motioned for one of his associates to approach.
"Teach the little shit a lesson he won't soon forget. Go ahead, put that axe of yours to good work Splinter!"
Falcon heard a grunt, then felt his legs pulled out from under him. He was surrounded by several more dark shapes, four of which pinned his legs down. The colt's eyes widened.
"Wait! Wait no, please!" he exclaimed in terror. "I'm sorry! For whatever it is I di-" He yowled as he felt the first swing came down on his left wing, near the base. Tears streamed down the colt's dirtied cheeks.
Another thud, and the wing hung awkwardly off of the colt's side. Fresh blood trickled from it. Another thud, this time punctuated by the crack of bone. Falcon wriggled and squirmed, choking on his own distress.
Without delay, the axehead came down on the base of his right wing, striking true. Another cry from the red pony and the wing was bent unnaturally. The axe fell again and again, mangling the wing more and more with each impact before severing it completely, leaving the stumps as a reminder of what used to be part of the pony.
Falcon whimpered, the fresh agony running across the entirety of his body. His breaths were ragged and tears dripped off of his snout. There was no longer any pressure on his legs, the band of raiders taking a step back to admire their work. Though not held down, Falcon had no desire to get up. He lost his wings -what made him a pegasus- chopped right off. Even if he wanted to back home to his stronghold, he couldn't. He was stranded with these... monsters in pony form.
It only worsened his despair. He wanted to die, plain and simple. He had been humiliated and bullied before... but this crushed his will to live. There was no point in enduring the suffering that was life, he was sure of it then. The only truth in the world, revealed by unbearable bouts of pain. A pain that was most notable inside of him, as his wounds started to mend, the health potion given to him working almost immediately. Bones were gradually resetting themselves beneath his flesh, making him writhe. The cuts in his skin pulled together and the sensation of them sealing made Falcon Wing feel as if his red coat had been set alight.
He wouldn't have put such a thing behind the group who did this to him.
"What are we gonna call him?" he heard a mare ask somewhere interspersed in the crowd of shadows.
"How about Stumpy!?" another stallion replied. "Ey, Stumpy! Welcome to Ponyville, faggot!"
Falcon yelled out after being struck hard with something metal and heavy: a lead pipe.
"Quit it, fuckhead!" someone else in the crowd shouted. "We just gave him a fucking potion, give him some time to fix up before breaking him again!"
"Speaking of fixing," another pony chimed in from behind the red colt. Their voice was extremely close, and before Falcon knew it he felt the most terrible sting to add to the sensation of burning. "we can't have our past fun getting in the way of more fun!"
By the end of it all, Falcon Wing had gone silent, his throat hurt like everywhere else on his body, voice strained to its limit. He was never very vocal. For his torture to be the one moment in his life where he spoke out the most said a lot about him.
He felt two forceful nudges in his side. "Get up, get moving." the first stallion commanded. When Falcon's unsteady legs were too slow for his liking, the raider hit him and hit him hard, sending the colt sprawling across the asphalt. "I said get up, dumbass!"
Falcon got up shakily and continued to stagger about, his body trembling.
"Start... walking," the stallion growled.
Falcon hung his head and slowly went on his way down the street. He was surrounded on either side by the shells of what used to be buildings, windows shattered and dirty, walls crumbling, paint peeling. Faded posters were plastered all over the place, barely legible in the darkness. Rubble and debris formed large hills that blocked off parts of the street, wagons were overturned and strewn about. Streetlights either littered the roads or plunged their way into the walls of buildings.
It was a sight common in post-apocalyptic Equestria. For Falcon, it was an obstacle course for him to navigate. Why? Sick thrills, most likely. A way to prolong the game he had unwillingly become a part of. It was after climbing over one of these hills of rubble that Falcon Wing's dwindling energy finally ran out.
“So this is how it ends. Can’t exactly say it was a good trot but… considering the state of everything else, I really shouldn’t have expected any better…” he muttered weakly at the base of the mound. His legs gave out from beneath him and he went down like a sack of lead.
***
A Turn for the Worse
The path not meant to be taken.
With a sharp breath and a jolt, Falcon woke. He felt a sharp pain at his midsection and he glanced down to see what it was that caused it. He was tied up by a makeshift fastening of plastic and rubber, keeping him sitting up on his haunches with his back to a streetlight, one of few that were still standing in the street he now found himself in. He looked over himself to glean what kind of state he was in after his ordeal not so long ago. His body was still very sore, but in surprisingly better shape than it was before. His wounds had mostly closed and some of his fur was growing back already, though in small patches. He was filthy, but still cleaner than he was laying out in the road. Blackened blood clung to his pelt, mane and tail in streaks, but most of the other excrement had been washed away when the water was thrown on him.
He let out a strained breath and leaned his head back against the cool metal of the lamp post. He looked up to the discolored sky and saw that the clouds were being illuminated, the sun rising behind the rolling screen. The result was a filter that cast a gray-green glow on the desolate landscape and dour ruins. It made him want to fall unconscious again. At least then he wouldn't have to face this and what had been done to him. He let his head hang, wanting to cry but finding himself incapable of shedding more tears.
It was probably for the best, though. He heard chattering and managed to make out a few distinct statements. He even recognized a few voices.
"I think Stumpy's wakin' up!"
"S'bout fuckin' time!"
Falcon Wing glowered, but otherwise remained still and silent. As broken as he was, he had no way of defying his captors outright. If they so wished, they could have done anything they wanted with him and he couldn't fight back. The fact he was unconscious was the only reason his torture had ceased; after all, there was no fun in torture if the victim was comatose, so that was his avenue of resistance: pretending to be asleep. He closed his eyes, knowing as long as he was quiet and immobile, he might as well have been invisible to the raiders.
That fact only made him crave death even more. If he was dead, he wouldn't need to pretend, would he? If he was dead, he wouldn't feel this underlying anxiety that any mistake on his part -a twitch of a tail, a flick of an ear, a sneeze- would renew the cycle of suffering he had come to know so well, would he?
If only death came easy to those without will or reason to live. It was into the realm of the morbid where Falcon's mind went where wakefulness was but a curse to him. He recalled the words of the books he'd read. Literature which captured suffering in any form was rare in the Enclave archives where Falcon frequented, but when he found them he related to the authors, ponies who lived centuries ago. Ponies he would never meet.
He took refuge in their word play, reciting phrases that stuck with him like prayers. No one phrase resonated stronger with him than: "The lamb who shies away from the herd need not fear the wolf, for it knows a terror greater in the form of their flock."
Though he was only pretending at one point, the red colt did eventually doze off again, falling into a lethargic state from lack of nourishment. Any food he ate had been decisively scattered across the pavement elsewhere hours prior which left him quite lacking in energy. Though the savages were willing to stop his bleeding, they did not show any indication of wanting to feed their captive. They went about their business in an open camp of sorts, traveling in between buildings on either side of the street, chatting and being vulgar as savages did. None of them paid the red colt any mind for the longest while.
That is, until the large stallion decided to drop by.
Falcon's eyes flew open as he felt his head being jerked upwards. He stared into brown eyes that looked upon him like a predator's, a malevolent glint in them. A wicked smile was spread across the raider's face. "Had a nice nap, Stumpy?"
Falcon said nothing. He only stared back with eyes wide with fear, wondering what would be worse: the torture or their punishment for his apparent deception. The raider only patted him on the head. "You know, you're kinda cute when you look like this. How'd you like to be my little bitch?"
Falcon's stomach turned, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything to the beast of a stallion. He was unnaturally muscular, a tan pelt underneath a black coating of padded leather armor. Straps crisscrossed over his body and limbs to keep the whole outfit on him and in the light of the day, Falcon saw all the obscenities that the raider wore as ornaments: broken bones interlaced with the padding, equine teeth displayed on a crude necklace, the bleached skulls of other ponies worn as spaulders.
The stallion drank in the obvious fear and disgust of the colt, their sick smile widening further. "Don't worry Stumpy, you'll learn to enjoy it." The raider leaned in close and snarled "Or else."
"Go ahead and kill me," Falcon choked out. "save yourself the time and trouble..."
"Oh no, no, no!" the stallion replied. "Things are never fun if they are so easy!" He reached behind him with a foreleg and pulled out the broken health potion vial, poking Falcon Wing in the chest with the jagged end. He didn't do it with enough force to puncture flesh, only to cause great discomfort and instill fear.
"You remember this? Of course you do... I always keep my promises." The stallion chuckled, returned the glass to their saddlebag and then pulled out another object Falcon presumed he was supposed to remember: the pipe.
"Borrowed this from Bone Breaker -fitting name, right?- I think it'll be fun for me to give it a bit of a go myself!" Falcon grunted as he felt the rusted end of the pipe thrusted into his abdomen, dull aches spreading out from the impact. His breathing turned into huffing and the raider was apparently pleased by the response.
"Oh yeah, I like you. You don't need to worry about anything, Stumpy, none of these other fuckers are going to lay a hoof on you! Your ass is all mine-!"
"Oh shit, Shifty!" a voice in the distance called out to the musclebound raider. "We're under atta-!" A roar tore through the air, and a pony at the end of the street fell with a scarlet mist lingering over their body for a few split-seconds.
"Fuck!" the raider named Shifty hissed under their breath. By now the others in the camp were scrambling about, those not armed with melee weapons scrambling for guns to return fire. In this time, several more raiders crumpled to the ground, gushing blood onto the sidewalks and road.
Shifty gave Falcon one last look before he ran off to deal with the issue. It was a strange look, as if the stallion were still trying to intimidate him, but a twinge of fear was present in his own features. And it was that twinge of fear that Falcon would remember, just like he would remember the glass and the pipe.
He like that look on another pony. He liked that look especially on Shifty. A pony like him deserved to look like that. More importantly than that, however, Falcon Wing wanted to be the reason they looked like that. How fitting would it be for him, the lamb, to strike out at the wolves that made him so miserable? The wolves that broke him down and had him begging for death? That one look... that one mixed expression... that was what reinvigorated the red colt and amidst the chaos he took the opportunity to escape.
Like a rabid animal, Falcon raised the haphazardly made rope to his mouth and gnawed on it until it whittled away, paying no mind to the awful taste it left on his tongue. It broke and he sprung to his hooves, seeing flashes of light further down the street but hearing thuds as bullets slammed into brick and ear-ringing clangs when they hit metal.
He darted away into a nearby alley, hearing a shrill voice but not paying attention to the words being hurled by it. He only heard the enormous boom and felt a rush of heat after he had entered the alley. Some kind of explosive had gone off! Several more of these ensued, devouring the sounds of gunshots until one especially large explosion made the general vicinity of it quake and crumble. Windows that weren't broken already shattered in crescendo, walls collapsed, fires gripped the street and smoke rose to meet the cloud cover.
Falcon ducked down on the far side of a dumpster, panting. He covered his ears with his hooves to drown out the firefight. He didn't want to risk charging out of the other side of the alley and being gunned down by any one of the attacking raiders, and even if he were to run, in his current condition he wouldn't make it far at all. So he hid beside the dumpster, hearing cries of war and screams of pain alike as the two groups clashed and destroyed nearly everything around them.
It wasn't long until the sounds died down, leaving only the faint crackling of flames and the smell of burning in the air. To Falcon, it was a harrowing eternity, but one he endured unscathed. He checked his bare flank and frowned. "What, no cutie mark for hiding from a bunch of murderous bastards?"
Falcon Wing cautiously peeked out of the alley, the end of which had been absolutely demolished by the conflict. The two buildings which formed it had been literally halved, making a gigantic pile of rubble by themselves. Combined with the other buildings that poured debris into the street, the whole area was almost inaccessible. Buried in the rubble were bodies, mangled limbs sticking out and staining the jagged chunks of concrete and splintered wood red.
"Ugh, nasty..." Falcon muttered, though at the back of his mind he thought "They all had this coming."
He dared to climb over the hill, hopping from platforms created by concrete slabs resting mostly flatly on less safe, sharpened piles of debris. After a few hops, he was back on street level, where small cracks in the concrete and asphalt had been enlarged into trenches, ditches and craters in the onslaught. Falcon had never seen anything like it and on some level, he was morbidly impressed with how much destruction could be wreaked in a set time frame. He frowned at the realization of this, somewhat disturbed and concerned, but mostly dismissive. He was a colt who was used to living in the Enclave! Everything was orderly and structured in the stronghold! This... this was unreal! He had just witnessed a skirmish unfold while he was a prisoner in a raider camp!
That made it okay... didn't it?
Falcon's ears twitched at a deathly rasping that vaguely sounded like speech. "S-..Stumpy... St- Stumpy..."
Falcon slowly approached the source of the sound, finding Shifty lain out on his back in a pile of concrete and rebar. His armor had been pierced in many placed and blood was streaming out of them. The small bones that he elected to have decorate his outfit had been reduced to dust, the teeth shattered and the skulls cracked. His face was more beaten and bruised than Falcon's own.
"Stumpy... I... I didn't think y-"
A fleshy thud marked when Falcon struck the raider, a swing of a front hoof right into Shifty's jaw. He was weak, hungry and tired in addition to being frail and weak to begin with, but that didn't matter to him right now.
"Stump-!"
Another swing. Another hit. Blood flew out of Shifty's mouth that time. His head rolled about, dazed, and Falcon spotted something that caught his eye. Resting beside Shifty was that other raider's lead pipe. Falcon reached out and lifted it up, wielding it like a bat. It was heavier than he expected but it wasn't long until he was holding it properly to support it.
When Shifty regained composure, his eyes widened. He said weakly, "Stumpy, what are y-"
But Falcon had begun to laugh. It was low at first, like a childish giggle. It swiftly escalated to something more as he drank in Shifty's fear. At the end of his despicable, the raider was showing fear. Fear to a colt he and his gang of brutes had mistreated for the sake of their own amusement. Falcon Wing's eyes glinted with malice as he saw in Shifty every single pegasus that tormented him in the sky and every single raider that was a part of his suffering the night before.
"Who is... the bitch now...?"
"Stumpy, no!" Shifty shouted hoarsely, but it was too late.
Falcon brought the pipe down on Shifty's head again and again like how Splinter brought his axe down on his wings, thud after thud having a deep metallic twang as a retort as the impact reverberated. Falcon continued to bat Shifty's corpse with it long after his head was flattened into the pile he was half-buried in, his tears returning though his lips were curled into a deranged smile.
When he left that decimated area of Ponyville, the colt had a light covering of leather armor on him. The full sets were too large for him, so he took bits and pieces from the various corpses littering the place and devised a basic padding for his torso and legs. He took care to provide his wing stumps with extra protection, for they were still raw injuries in spite of the flesh regrowing over them and thus made them especially vulnerable.
He had a saddlebag hanging off of his left side, also taken from a body. A quick inspection of its contents revealed that it had some food inside -some of which Falcon Wing consumed readily. Long lasting potato chips from the pre-war era... preservatives ahoy!- and also a few bottle caps inside, much to Falcon's confusion.
"... Why bottle caps, of all things!?"
Last but not least, however, was a weapon, a simple 10 mm pistol that looked like it was in pretty bad shape. It was scratched up and had a few dents in the handle. There was plenty of ammo for it in the bag though, so Falcon kept it with him in a holster on his hip. He knew he needed some kind of firearm after what he'd just seen.
But for less justifiable reasons: he liked the feeling having a gun gave him. Being a colt out in the wasteland wasn't so scary if he had a gun. That alone would make ponies think twice about messing with him, even if he didn't have any experience with a gun. He wanted to change that, though.
He fancied having the tables turned, for once.
***
The Road Ahead
Falling while standing firmly on the ground.
When the clouds parted momentarily, pillars of golden light extended from the heavens and reached down to the wasteland. The gray-green gloom was dispelled then and Falcon Wing saw streaks of sunlight passing through the buildings to his right. The sunlight shone through holes in roofs and went through the windows, casting strange shadows across the street. From the angle, the red colt deduced that it was roughly early afternoon. That left just a few hours before the night fell and all light disappeared from this accursed land.
"First thing's first," Falcon murmured to himself as he walked through the barren street, "find something that is better to eat than two hundred year old potato chips. Barring that, find some place to spend the night..."
After a short while more of walking through the streets of Ponyville, Falcon came across an especially large wagon cutting across the road at a diagonal. A short span of the back end was against the curb of the sidewalk. Its blue coating of paint was aged, dirty and all but sheared off of the lower half of the vehicle, leaving orange-brown rusted, dented sheets of metal. Humming thoughtfully to himself, Falcon walked around it to get a better look. His thinking was that there could be something of use inside these scattered husks, assuming they hadn't been cleared out over the years by other ponies.
He came to the door and pressed a hoof against it experimentally. He didn't see any signs of foul play, but he didn't rule out the possibility that if there were supplies in the wagon, then there was the off chance someone else had put them there. And if the wagon was someone's storage unit, common sense dictates that they would want to protect it from wayward colts with empty stomachs and no home.
Falcon pulled the two doors apart, the hinges squeaking in protest. The colt winced and hesitated, but after realizing that he hadn't triggered some horrible trap after a few seconds, he continued into the large transport wagon, climbing up a small set of stairs into it. He looked to his left and through the broken windshield at the harness where a pony would have been strapped into to pull the whole thing, said harness being bent and worn down by time. He looked to his right at the rows of seats, the cushions ripped and torn and stained. There was an odd smell in the air, a stale scent despite the airflow inside the steel wagon being more than ample, what with the broken windows and all.
Falcon Wing frowned slightly. The doors were locked but the carriage was as empty as the bare and broken shells of houses lining the streets. Maybe he could spend the night inside, if nothing else... no, he saw something that showed that the wagon was not empty. Tucked away in a shadow, Falcon saw the reason the interior smelled... off. Skeletons of ponies in their rotted clothing were piled at the base of the seats. Some skeletons were still on the seats where ponies died still sitting, collapsing into heaps. The red colt gagged and looked away.
"There goes... that idea..." he murmured to himself. Not even a full day and the pegasus was being confronted with death left, right and center. He'd even killed someone himself out of pure hate...
"He deserved it," Falcon reminded himself as he went down the stairs and hopped out on to the sidewalk. "He deserved it."
He went wandering again, noting that the clouds were rolling in to patch up the breaks in the cover. He knew it was the Grand Pegasus Enclave's doing, of course. His parents used to be involved in repair duty in addition to their other assignments... back when they were still alive. He was told they died during a ground operation somewhere out in the wastes, but not where. He was told the surface was a forbidding place, and that he should never leave the safety of the sky.
Falcon looked around at the ruins and sighed. Maybe he should have heeded the warnings and surrendered to the young Enclave imitates. What they would have done to him would have paled in comparison to what he'd been through... at least, he hoped so.
Even if they fractured a few bones and left him bleeding, he would have found his way back to his doctor, Patchenfix and he'd be made all better again. He could've gone on with his life still having his wings... maybe one day stop being bullied and join the ranks of the other pegasi in the stronghold. Maybe he would have gotten an important job and -assuming a mare would give him the time of day- have foals of his own to raise and love and make sure they wouldn't go through any of the things he'd gone through...
Falcon wiped a foreleg over his snout to clear his eyes of the tears that were coming again. Before long the golden light had been snuffed out, and the wasteland gloom reigned supreme once more, opposed by the sunlight no longer. "Damn it," he thought, scolding himself. "I've got better things to do than cry about home and pipe dreams..."
He sniffled and hardened his expression. He had to focus on the important things now. He couldn't think about the stronghold; if he was ever found he'd be called a Dashite -a traitor to the Enclave- and branded. In such a scenario, he needn't worry about not having a cutie mark yet.
Furthermore, he was always treated as an outcast by his fellow foals, and merely tolerated by most of the adults he knew. The only ones he had much attachment to were his foster parents and doctor Patchenfix... but they wouldn't risk their standing with the Enclave to come look for him unless given specific instructions to do so, which was unlikely. On the other hoof, there was always the chance that they would've been better off without him anyway...
The pegasus colt shook his head. "I don't need the strongholds... I'll be fine by myself. I've been alone for so long already, how is this any different?" He gave himself the answer: he wasn't walking through streets of clouds. He was walking across the hard pavement on the surface, surrounded by the ruins of a post-war Equestria.
He carried on, his head dropping as he walked in the shadows of the past. His stomach rumbled. His body ached for a place to lie down and rest. He desperately needed something to feel good about to offset this general melancholy he found himself consumed by. He couldn't help thinking though, that there wasn't anything to be happy about. Not anything to be happy about in the wasteland, not much to be happy about as a wingless pegasus, orphan and pariah.
"That's not true." He looked to his gun in its holster. It was a small comfort... but it was his only comfort. That made it much, much bigger. Then there was the faint sound he heard in the distance, his ears swiveling and his head perking up. It sounded like... music?
Falcon Wing carefully pursued the noise, slinking through the streets and staying behind walls of brick and using scattered wagons as cover. He took a look out from the corner of one wagon -sparing a second or two to survey what it had to offer aside from dead bodies and fraying seats and striking out again- and glimpsed the source of the music, a strangely upbeat polka tune drifting through the still air from an airborne robot.
It was a gray sphere with many antennas poking from it in every which way, two sets of light blue wings that might that sent it bobbing about as it flew and a grill wrapping across the front portion of it.
"I'm pretty sure I've read about those things... er... S- Spr... Sprite-bot...?"
He saw the robot halt in the air, hover and slowly turn around, as if it were scanning the area. It "looked" past the red pegasus and kept turning before stopping abruptly. The joyous tune continued to play as the Sprite-bot sent thin rays of red magic into a building opposite Falcon's location. The young colt heard a few panicked screams then saw a raider rush out of their hiding place with a small caliber pistol in their mouth, returning aggression as they dashed toward the bot. Falcon Wing pulled back, bracing against the wagon.
The robot's beam seared the flesh of the raider where it hit, glowing flakes of dead flesh and burned fur trailing the pony as they went. The many popping retorts of the gun echoed off the walls of nearby structures and Falcon covered his ears, waiting for the outburst of gunplay to end.
Loud bangs punctuated the hits the raider scored on the bot, three in rapid succession were followed immediately by an eruption of sparks and smoke from the drone. It dropped to the ground and bounced a few times, and Falcon peered out again to see if things had truly settled down.
Settled down... was a subjective term. The bot was down and not incinerating parts of ponies anymore, but the raider was stomping down on the robot cackling madly. Their eyes were wide and wild, their grin was the same.
"... So is this normal raider behavior or...?" Falcon pondered, unsettled by the raider's behavior. He wondered how he could approach the situation. He could approach and hope, by means of his makeshift armor, the raider would accept him as one of their own without attacking him... or put them down while they were unaware of his presence and not deal with their apparent insanity. That... or he could walk the other way and try to find what he needed somewhere else.
The uncontrolled laughter and banging as the raider attempted to flatten the Sprite-bot echoed like the the gunshots in the street. It continued as such for several more moments before Falcon made a decision.
"I need the practice, and this fucker is clearly out of their damn mind!" he thought as he went to draw the worn pistol. It was only after he had his mouth on the handle did it occur to him that someone else's mouth was slobbering all over it. He might have liked the inherent power that a gun gave him, but that just repulsed him.
"... So this is what they mean when they say beggars can't be choosers," the colt mumbled through it before pulling it out in full and lining up the barrel with the oblivious raider. His heart started to race and his breath quickened as the implications of this made themselves known to him. He was going to shoot somepony for target practice!
"But they're a raider. And they're insane. It doesn't matter if they die. If anything, they'd just end up killing me..."
Falcon turned his head slightly, just enough to look out of his peripherals and see the street leading away from this place but not enough to have the raider slip away from his sights. He thought for a while more, then reaffirmed his aim.
"I need the practice"
With that, Falcon steadied his breath, concentrated, then sent the first shot flying down the barrel. He was aiming for the raider's head. He missed horribly, the bullet tearing into their shoulder instead.
"MOTHER OF FUCK!" the raider exclaimed. Their voice revealed the pony to be a stallion of a decent age. He fell onto his back and grasped at the bullet wound, laughing all the while. "That really smarts!"
Falcon Wing frowned and raised a brow. Part of him wondered how could anyone laugh at being shot. Another wondered how he could have missed so drastically, after making such an effort to keep the barrel trained on the side of the pony's skull. He pushed the intruding thoughts away and redoubled his efforts. He lined up the barrel, closed an eye then fired again.
The twang of a ricochet was audible as the bullet visibly deflected off a streetlamp several feet away from the downed raider.
"... Oh, for fuck's sake!"
"You ain't shit!" the raider called out to him. "Lemme show you the proper way to pip somepony, fucker!" The stallion rolled over and scooped up their own pistol in their mouth. Falcon hunkered down behind the wagon as they fired a shot, the bullet slamming into it with a dull thud. "Get fucked!"
Falcon popped out for an instant and fired. The raider howled with another confirmed hit, but one that wasn't fatal as he only continued to laugh. "How much shots do you have left, fuckass!?"
The colt put the gun in his hooves and checked the magazine three more shots left. He slid the clip back into the pistol and put the handle back in his mouth. He inched out from behind cover, aimed and sent off another round.
This one hit true, the raider's eccentric fit coming to an abrupt end with a spray of blood.
"You're welcome, asshole," Falcon muttered.
He put his gun away and hastily made his way over to the dead pony. He wasted no time in going through pockets and compartments, finding three health potions and what looked to be a reusable applicator; a syringe, but one wrapped up in tape and connected by thin plastic tubes to some storage unit. Falcon knew them by their intended use in doctor Patchenfix's operating station. Connecting the applicator's presence to the pony's strange behavior was not hard, and neither was concluding that the pony had been on a drug trip.
"Strong stuff," Falcon commented offhoofedly. He cocked his head, debating if it would be worth it to try it himself but deciding to stay away from it, lest he ended up in the same position the raider was in now.
Falcon then ventured into the building the raider had come from, once again suspicious of traps but discovering that the place was clear. What he did find however, was where the raider was holed up. He had a bedroll, a few shelves with pistols and ammo on them among other things and a fridge in the lobby of the decrepit building, the paint on the walls chipping. The floors had been covered in a huge mural of graffiti, something Falcon Wing attributed to the raider's drug usage.
"Really strong stuff."
The pegasus took off his saddlebag and rested them beside the bedroll, then he eased himself onto it, sighing.
"Food and a place to spend the night, check and check."
***
Monsters in the Making
Of dreams and weaponry.
Darkness did not fall over Equestria when dusk came around. It was a phantom taking a leisurely stroll, the sickly clouds fading to black as it spread over the land. Textures and colors turned into outlines and silhouettes. Familiar shapes were changed into things that would have kept a foal up at night.
Falcon Wing was no foal, but he was uneasy when nightfall came. He could have looked out of the lobby and past the wagon not long ago, seeing the street stretch on for many blocks. Now he could barely make out what was merely a few feet away from him. The darkness was almost choking with how absolute it was.
Falcon shifted about on the bedroll, tired but too agitated to get to sleep. His ears twitched at the noises he heard, roughly half he was sure were actual happenings, the rest ghosts created by his own mind. Eventually he gave up on going to sleep entirely and stood up. He carefully approached the entrance to the building and looked up at the sky, seeing nothing but imagining a break appearing in the clouds. And shining down from this break would be the moon, endowing the land in silver light and shunning the tyrant shadows.
He could imagine the lining beyond the cloud cover, the moon and the stars that traveled with it as bright as ever. He shook his head and did his best to cast those images away.
“I thought I got over this already. I’ve got bigger things to worry about than it being too dark outside…”
The pegasus turned his gaze to the black shapes he could barely make out and thought, “Like what’s IN the darkness”
He swallowed hard and backpedaled away from the street. He sat on the bedroll and huddled down. Other bands of raiders roving the streets at night were Falcon Wing’s primary concern. He pulled his gun out at dedicated himself to silent vigil.
He wouldn’t be blindsided. He would gun down the first thing he saw moving. Nopony would take Falcon Wing prisoner again-
The pegasus colt sprung up, breathing hard. His eyes shot from left to right as he drew rapid breaths, heart pounding in his chest. He was still alone and it was still very dark.
“A nightmare,” he whispered to himself. “just a… just a nightmare….”
He laid back down. Then it hit him. “…A nightmare!?” he said quietly, though sharply.
He put a hoof to his forehead. He couldn’t believe he fell asleep! The last thing he remembered was being in the cusp of his anxiousness and the next thing he knew, he was dreaming of ponies made of shadows gliding across the ground, an aura of smoke trailing them. The aura flickered like black flames as they pursued and ultimately overtook him.
He drew a ragged breath, relieved that it was only a bad dream he was having and that he wasn’t happened upon by any stragglers in the night. He felt around for his gun, his hoof touching its handle within seconds. It had fallen onto the bedroll after he fell asleep, apparently.
Falcon put a hoof on his face at that. He didn’t know how likely it was for it to have gone off unintentionally, but the fact a loaded and primed weapon was just inches away from him as he slept was an alarming revelation to the wingless pegasus.
Fortunately, its barrel was facing away from him, so in the case of it actually misfiring in a similar situation, the only harm that would befall the colt was irreversible ear damage.
Falcon disengaged the gun and put it back in its holster before curling up on the bed again, staring toward the lobby window. Again, he kept watch for as long as his drained body would allow before he drifted back to sleep. From there, he wriggled and grimaced as his nightmares played out before him.
There was no street, no buildings, no rubble and debris. There was only a field of dark mist and the shadowy figures moving through it. Falcon darted through the smoke, carving a trail through the fog which then rolled back in around him, as if he were running through a fluid. The vapors wafted around him and he heard disembodied laughter echoing around him from both mares and stallions. The colt ran until his wouldn’t permit him anymore and the fog billowed up around him when he dropped to the ground.
The shadows approached him, slowly emerging from the barrier of gray. They stalked towards their victim like wolves devoid of features. All except one, that is; one that was splashed in a glowing red. Blood. Shifty.
They converged on him, the blackness devouring him like a ravenous beast and that was when Falcon woke again. He scowled when he realized his cheeks were once again wet. “I’m not afraid of them anymore!” he berated himself in a forceful whisper. “I have a gun..!”
He frowned then. There was no debating the fact he was a poor shot. Either his aim needed serious improvement, or the pistol was so banged up that its fire spread was too wide to get a decent hit on a reliable basis.
“… A gun that I can’t seem to hit what I want it to, but a gun all the same!”
He inhaled deeply and thought, “I’ll have to look into that.”
He then resumed his watch. Exhaustion took him after another stretch of time and Falcon dozed off, though this time he remained asleep longer than before. He squirmed in his sleep until the shadows crept away from the wasteland and the blackened clouds turned gray with the post-apocalyptic dawn.
When Falcon’s eyes flew open again, it came to his great relief that the night had passed without incident, disregarding the nightmares which plagued him. He stretched out his stiff body and winced at the lingering pains that protested, most of it concentrated around his back.
“That’s gonna take a few more days, I think…” he mumbled, reaching over his shoulder and rubbing the best of his neck. He then yawned and took his saddlebag from the side of the bedroll.
He walked over to the fridge against the wall across from it and swung open the door. He laid the bag down on the floor and started to clear the fridge out, sweeping a foreleg across the trays and sending boxes and containers of foods into the bag. Falcon didn’t have to worry about them perishing as the fridge didn’t have power to begin with, and he already knew the shelf-life of these extremely long lasting products from his sampling of potato chips earlier.
He reached into the racks inside the door of the fridge and pulled out a few bottles of what a flashy label identified the contents as being “Sparkle Cola”. Falcon cocked his head as he held one up to his face. His orange eyes peered into the orange beverage and after a moment he decided to have a taste. He twisted off the cap and took a swig, humming thoughtfully as he examined the taste.
“Mm, carrot flavored. I can pretend it’s good for my eyes!”
Falcon reattached the cap and bagged the bottles. He put the bag back on his side and headed over to the shelves where a few 10 mm pistols were laid along with clips of ammo. The pistols varied slightly in between model, some of them looking bulkier than others but Falcon could visibly tell they shared parts. He tapped his chin thoughtfully.
He read a few articles on weapon types and maintenance in the Enclave archives and frequently saw soldiers tending to their magical energy rifles out in their training barracks when he poked around the stronghold -whenever he had the opportunity to do so without being hassled by other fillies and colts- so the thought occurred to him: instead of just swapping out guns, why didn’t he try his hoof at making one.
He narrowed his eyes and hummed. He recalled the Sprite-bot’s beam weapon, and wondered if he could somehow repurpose it. A devious smirk crept across Falcon’s muzzle. “Aw yeah! Nopony would mess with me if I’ve got lasers on my side!” he said a little too loudly. He put his hooves on his lips and looked around to make sure he hadn’t brought a whole gang of raiders down on him.
Falcon Wing sighed a sigh of relief and scurried across the lobby. He was outside for seconds at most as he retrieved the battered, blood splattered robot and he brought it back to the shelves as silently as he could. Loose parts clanged around inside the metal shell and each small sound seemed to be amplified by the spacious room, as if the building itself were conspiring to compromise the wingless pegasus’ position.
“Right then, time to work!”
Falcon put his gun down in front of him, pulled down a similar looking model from the shelf and started to inspect the individual pieces he would use to replace the damaged ones. He then got to work dismantling the Sprite-bot’s casing, having to pry it apart by hoof to get at the components he needed: the ray gun assembly. It was during this course of action he realized he’d need more than scrap parts and a bit of know-how to make his idea a reality.
“I’m gonna need some tools, aren’t I?” he muttered himself.
So he spent the next few minutes rummaging through the room, wondering where a drug addict raider would put their home improvement equipment. As it turns out, said drug addict kept a rusty toolbox on top of a leaning wardrobe in a small bathroom a few rooms over from the main lobby area. The wardrobe was bracing against the wall over a dirty bathtub.
“By Celestia’s tail, how strong were those damn drugs!?” Falcon asked himself. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out the oversize syringe. “I mean, seriously? And why is there a wardrobe in a bathroom anyway!?”
He shoved the syringe back into the bag and took the toolbox. When he was back in the lobby, Falcon Wing set it down underneath the shelf and flipped the top of the container open. He sifted through what he had available to him: a roll of heavy duty tape, glue, flashlight, hammer, general purpose screwdriver, spark battery and a switchblade.
The spark battery was in some kind of recharging apparatus, coiling wires connected to one end of the metal block, the other end inside the holding assembly and there was a squeeze-lever on the side with a arching in between the angle it created. A gauge was in a yellowed glass bubble, showing that the overall charge on the battery was zero.
“Well, this is interesting,” Falcon commented before he got to work. He put the screwdriver to good use, taking apart the pistol casing and replacing the damaged parts on his own. He took apart the barrel and firing mechanisms and replaced it with the beam weapon, the magical energy projector being very rounded up until the tapered point, where three red rings wrapped around the end.
Once that was finished, he took apart the magazine chamber and experimentally slid the spark battery into it, his eyes lighting up when he found that it fit quite snugly. From there, it was a matter of attaching wires to their right places, which Falcon accomplished with the screwdriver and sparing drops of glue.
When everything was set up, Falcon rebuilt the barrel of the pistol around the energy projector and then attached the flashlight to the gun with generous applications of construction tape. He fed a wire from the flashlight to the battery, the end of which stuck out from underneath the barrel where the clip would have.
“There… almost… finished…” the colt muttered, bracing himself for the moment of truth. He put the bottom of the battery in the recharging unit and then started to squeeze the lever, eyes on the gauge. To his enormous relief and joy, a tiny arrow started to jitter back and forth underneath the glass and after a few pumps, the spark battery was completely recharged.
Falcon grinned, bagged the contents of the toolbox and then took his newly built gun in his mouth. He ran over to the lobby entrance and fired at the light bulb in the streetlamp across the way. With an energetic buzz, a thin ray of red light lanced the bulb and made it shatter instantaneously, sparks jumping and glass raining to the street.
Falcon Wing jumped with glee. “I did it! Those other trainees could go eat shit!”
Smugly, he holstered his laser pistol and said to himself, “I think I’ll name it the…” He put a hoof to his chin and rolled his eyes ponderingly. “The Perforator!” he said excitedly shortly after. “Boring holes into anyone and anything I’ve got a problem with!”
He took a look at his flank and some of his excitement died down when he saw that he still didn't have his cutie mark. He just built himself a laser weapon out of a conventional firearm, some scrap and some off-hoof knowledge he had from his extensive time in the archives! "What the hell will it take, damn it!?" Falcon mumbled, but didn't let his frustration kill his good mood. He had a gun, and a damn good one at that.
***
Confrontational
Validation through violence.
After gathering his things, the red pegasus set off into the gray gloom that morning with high spirits and a new sensation of self-worth. How could he not be happy? Not only did he have his gun to ward off the wastes, it was a gun he made by himself! To him it was vindication; his extensive reading and individual studies were going to find their use in the thicket of lawlessness and depravity whereas they were discouraged and shunned by his peers in the stronghold. The smirk on Falcon’s snout and his slightly narrowed eyes showed just how smug he was when he thought about the other pegasi.
“I bet they think they killed me that night,” he thought as he walked down the ruined street with no particular destination in mind. “Oh how wrong they are. Shame they won’t be joining me here… I’d love to introduce them to the Perforator!”
The sentiment made the red colt snicker, as if he were merely being a mischievous little foal. Not many foals could claim they had laser weapons as part of their blissful games, however. Fewer still could confess to wanting to turn them on their fellow ponies. But Falcon Wing was no foal –nor was he any ordinary pony- that much was clear.
When he came across a long passenger wagon that was knocked onto its side at the curb of a sidewalk, Falcon upped his pace to a sprint and jumped up onto it. He peered through the broken window frame and looked for anything that might’ve been of use to him. After seeing nothing especially noteworthy at first glance, the pegasus was moments away from moving on and continuing his wandering through the remains of Ponyville.
But then his eye caught the faint flickering yellow light at the front of the wagon. Falcon Wing raised a brow questioningly and walked across the transport to its doors. It was a struggle to pry the doors apart, the red pony grunting and gritting his teeth, his forelegs trembling as the hinges resisted his efforts. With a drawn out squeak, the doors opened finally and Falcon sat on his haunches to catch his breath again.
As he surveyed the area to make sure the commotion hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention, he hoped what he had come across was worth the hassle. After his short break, Falcon Wing dropped down into the wagon, standing on the stairs in a way not intended by the designers. He held onto discolored railings as he stepped down from the stairs, dropping down to what would have been the opposite wall from the door.
Falcon found it was somewhat disorienting to have what was normally the floor be anywhere other than below his hooves. He grunted softly as he hoisted himself up to the forward section of the wagon, where he came to a large blocky terminal with several buttons and flickering lights. The fact the instrument panel was still somewhat functional after decades of disrepair was a testament to how well it was put together.
“Well this is interesting…” Falcon Wing murmured to himself as he studied the terminal intently. He wondered what he could glean from it and after a short while of prodding at the machinery with a hoof, he found something of note.
Falcon cocked his head at it and said, “Huh, a radio in a transport wagon. Go figure.”
The radio was a rectangular metal block with bronze edges, stylized dials and a display was that somewhat obscured by the dust and grime clinging onto the casing. It had lights that were flickering, so Falcon Wing assumed that it was potentially still in working condition.
He reached into his saddlebag, pulled out his screwdriver and tackled the task of removing the radio from the terminal in one piece. That wasn’t too hard as he soon found out when he had the radio hanging out of the terminal by a few frayed wires. Falcon put the screws in his bag and used the screwdriver as a lever to pop the thing the wires were connected to out of place.
That thing was a spark battery. Falcon glued it to the top of the radio then attached the charging unit to it, pumping it up until the radio’s lights stopped blinking. Taking the steady shine the bulbs gave off as a sign that the battery was fully charged, the pegasus colt went on to fiddle with the dials to see if the radio still worked as it should. He found the volume controls first, which made it easy to manage the static the radio spewed when he started searching for channels.
He kept turning the dial and received only garbled, crackling gibberish. “Damn,” Falcon muttered. “either the radio’s busted after all, or there aren’t any working stations in range. Maybe if I make an antenna… I wonder if I’d catch any stronghold broadcasts.”
His expression blanked when he recalled that the Sprite-bot was playing music. When he was stripping it down for parts, he didn’t come across any playback equipment, as he would have expected to find if the songs it was playing were recordings installed on board.
“… So the radio is broken-“
He turned the dial one last time and almost on cue, the static abruptly turned into a melody constructed from the tunes of many instruments, a deep bass and trumpet being most prominent. Falcon blinked a few times.
“-or not…”
Falcon smiled and shut the radio off, but not before hearing some words from a deep voiced stallion that started to speak at the song’s end. He put it in his bag and climbed out of the wagon, his spirits climbing still. He had a respectable weapon and now he had something to fill the empty silence whenever he was in the mood to hear some music. It would surely beat listening to dry, howling winds that swept through the barren town and the occasional gunshot.
“Gunshots…” Falcon said under his breath.
His good mood turned sour almost instantly. While others would have done what they could to head away from the sound of guns being fired, Falcon gritted his teeth and started to stalk towards the sound of the conflict. He went through a bombed-out building that had all its walls leveled, leaving only the bare frame standing. Afterwards, he entered the building standing behind it. The structure was mostly intact, so Falcon Wing went through the backdoor, said door being broken in half and loosely hanging off its hinges.
He walked through a dusty interior that was sparse, looted ages ago and left to the elements. The air was stale, but Falcon didn’t remain inside long enough for it to become a major displeasure. He was out of the front door in under a minute, said door laid flat on the floor before the stoop leading down to the sidewalk.
From there, he jogged down the street, ears swiveling about as the crack of rifles and pop of pistols rode the wind. Before long, the sounds were almost deafening, so Falcon knew he had found what he was looking for. He slunk along close to the ground, moving across yards with brown, dead lawns designated by crooked picket fences. He peeked out from behind corners as he neared the firefight, taking great care to not get hit by stray bullets. That wasn’t to say there weren’t any close calls, though.
Falcon Wing scoffed when splinters exploded out of the wall he was looking out from behind and growled softly, “How wasteful, imprecise and inconsiderate!”
He pulled out the Perforator and thought, “I’ll show them a thing or two about shooting straight!”
The red colt moved out from his cover, darting across the open until he had his back against a dingy mailbox. He looked over it and saw the ponies taking cover inside a house across the street, their black armor decorated by their atrocious acts. Fresh pinks and red showed that their newest additions were acquired not too long ago. Falcon Wing wondered if that could have been his fate after his captors had their fun with him. He bared his teeth, his blood boiling at the thought.
The raiders were firing at another band of savages further down the block through window frames and breaks in the walls, the muzzle flash of their guns lighting up the shadows for a few seconds at a time. In that span, Falcon saw the expressions of madness they wore on their faces, as if the whole experience was a thrill to them. He imagined how they would change once he struck, and he smirked wickedly.
“The tables have turned…”
Falcon let the beams of scarlet fly, the lines of red light accompanied by droning buzzing and zaps. He heard the raiders shriek and bark when the rays made contact, glowing dust leaping off of their bodies with each hit. Seeing them squirm and scramble about in the dilapidated house was comedy to the young pony, who dared not laugh unless he wanted his aim to suffer.
One raider on the uppermost floor in particular gave him great amounts of amusement. He shot the pony through one of the windows facing the street and the panicked raider bucked and reared with a cry. Without warning, a crack sounded off from down the block and a spray of blood gushed into the air from the raider’s neck, their head all but decapitated by the bullet. The body swayed and jerked with the head dangling by a flap of skin, doing one final dance before toppling over. It was a gruesome end that Falcon derived much humor from.
The others in the house wised up to the colt’s antics and turned their guns on him. He dove out from behind the mailbox as the bullets went whizzing by and he dashed toward the house it stood in front of. He threw himself at the door, bashing his shoulder into it and subsequently tumbling into the foyer. He scooted over to the side so that he was behind the wall. Bullets tore through, dust and fragments raining down onto his fur.
Amidst the booms rifle-shot, he heard shouts of pain. Falcon knew then that in focusing on him, the raiders left themselves vulnerable to their enemies and they were paying dearly for it, their numbers dwindling. He frowned at that. “It’s far less poetic if they just end up killing each other like animals!”
Falcon fired through the doorway at the house across the street. He saw a reddish-orange flash and an eruption of similarly glowing powder inside, one raider’s left foreleg simply falling off from their body and dissolving into embers. The pony let out a horrified scream and toppled over before awkwardly crawling away, heading deeper into the house.
Falcon locked his aim on the hapless raider and pulled the trigger, expecting that musical buzz. What he got instead was a beep and twittering when the Perforator failed to get the shot off. He cursed mentally and pulled back, bracing against the wall as the battle raged outside. He held the laser gun in his hooves, tilting it to and fro, looking over the parts.
“What’s wrong with it!?”
It didn’t look damaged and everything was where it was supposed to be. Nothing fell apart with use, so Falcon was at a loss to that end. He reached into his bag and pulled out the charger. Upon attaching it to the gun’s battery, he saw that it had been depleted rather quickly.
“That last shot must’ve taken a lot of juice… noted” he thought as he pumped the lever and brought the battery’s charge to full again. With the Perforator at full power again, Falcon Wing rejoined the engagement, looking out from the doorway and firing at the first raider he saw, glowing specks sheared from their hide before splatters of blood marked the entrance of a bullet. The pony dropped immediately, contorting around the impact.
The red pegasus growled irritably. There was no fun to be had if they died so quickly! “It’ll be their turn, soon enough…” he mused casually as he lined up his sights with one more raider, this one being the last in the house. With intense concentration, Falcon leveled the Perforator with the savage’s head and fired, the ray striking like lightning. He could have sworn he saw a glow in the pony’s eyes as the beam burned into the skull, the pony freezing in place for a moment. The eyes rolled back, the tongue hung out of the side of the mouth and then the raider fell into a heap on the floor.
The colt started to giggle. They looked so stupid when they die!
Falcon then rushed out to meet the other raiders, spotting their saddles with an assortment of guns strapped on either side of each of them with triggers rigged up to various mechanisms; from levers in the mouth to tethers on the legs. To his surprise, none of them had their weapons primed. Furthermore, they were approaching him calmly and in formation, the bulk of the party falling behind a grizzled looking mare with a Mohawk. Her mane was naturally comprised of many colors, but they had long since become dull and drab to look at from all the stains and grime. Her armor was decorated with equine bones and jewelry, as if she were some kind of raider royalty.
“Nice shooting there, kid. Nice gun too,” she said to him with a confidence Falcon thought was unfitting for the situation. He assumed the barding he wore made her assume he was one of them, an illusion cemented when he helped attack their enemy. As such, he didn’t say anything. He only eyed the group as they fanned out around him in a semicircle. They were all scarred and battered, their manes and tails torn apart from what was sure to be many battles in their lifetime. A few stallions in the group shared the unnatural muscular Shifty had, some of them sporting torn pelts which revealed their deep tissue, pulsating grossly.
“Well, kid? You stupid or what?” the leader of the group spat, irritated; she was clearly used to things moving according to her preference. When she spoke, she expected a reply. Falcon didn’t give her one though. He only stared her in the eye, a hateful glare offset by a smirk.
Without warning, he raised his aim and sent searing volleys into the group, his joy on the borderline of being crazed.
***
Aftermath
Exercises in cruelty.
Falcon trembled, the Perforator clattering in his jaws. There were numerous gashes and grazes over his body where his armor did not cover. The upper portion of his left foreleg was bleeding profusely where a slug tore right through it and embedded in the road some distance behind him. He was lucky to not be hit directly, though. Many close calls -one shot going as far as taking off a part of his ear- but nothing that lodged itself in his body or punctured anything vital. So Falcon was left standing in the middle of the street, his hide being stained red once again by the thin film of blood than dripped from his recently sustained wounds.
Lain out before him were the raiders, specks of glowing dust, ash and smoke rising from the holes burned into their bodies. Their expressions were all vacant, staring off into the perpetually cloudy skies, mouths agape. The leader in particular was a grim sight to behold; her head resting on the ground in such a way that her snout pointed straight up and her misty eyes seemed as if they saw past the gray-green barrier. Her head was several feet away from her body, the flesh on her neck seared away and turned black, a faint pinkish light still emanating from the charred fur.
The red pegasus holstered the Perforator and panned his eyes over the group, taking in the details of his work through half-closed eyes. The ponies fell, twisting and contorting with each blast that burrowed into their skin. Dim imprints of magical energy were like signatures inscribed into the corpses, even in those of the obscenely hulky stallions. In spite of the stinging pain he felt from his scrapes and cuts, in spite of the blood he felt creeping along his pelt and dripping to the ground, Falcon laughed. It was quiet at first, but it grew in volume before long. His voice rebounded off the morose ruins, a shockingly cheery sound unfitting in such a setting.
“Dead!” he shouted. “All dead! A colt killed all you!”
Falcon’s eyes widened as he broke into even more laughter. He fell onto his haunches when he became short of breath and heaved; small giggles and chortles interspersed between labored breaths. He looked at the decorated and beheaded corpse of the leader and said with much glee, “I’m not stupid! You’re just DEAD!”
The red colt winced at the painful reminder his shoulder gave him that brought him back to his senses. The matter of his wounds became the most pressing thing to deal with then. He gingerly got back on his hooves and began the process of sifting through what the raiders had on them, in hopes of finding some medical supplies. Most of the raiders only carried their rundown weapons and the complimentary ammo for them with little else aside from the barding they wore. The leader’s saddlebags on the other hoof might as well have been a treasure trove.
From her bags, Falcon pulled out rolls of bandages and healing potions strung into packs of six. He took as much as he could carry and left the majority of the group’s stash where it was, the ammo and weaponry that was practically falling apart regardless. There were also syringes and bottles filled with all sorts of strange fluids which Falcon Wing dismissed after making an educated guess as to what they were: drugs. It was apparently a widespread phenomenon when raiders were concerned.
Falcon thought as he bandaged himself up, “They get hopped up on their little concoctions and they go about making ponies’ lives miserable!” He scoffed and shook his head. “The nerve! It’s a good thing then I’m here; someone has to repay the favor!”
He grinned. “’He who even the worst of Equestria fear to cross’… I like the sound of that-“
His ears flicked at a sound from behind, a dull thump. Falcon spun around to face it, alert and focused, drawing the laser pistol in the process with one swift motion. What he saw was a pony in black barding lying on the pavement just outside of the house the other raiders were in. Falcon watched as the grizzled pony struggled upright, shakily rising up on their hooves. One of their legs was missing, leaving only a horrific, burned stump that sported welts and boils where fur gave way to raw, cauterized skin.
Falcon saw how the pony’s face changed when it looked at him, an expression that conveyed both contempt and fear all at once. His grin returned onto his muzzle as he then watched the raider hobble away, walking as fast as they could have managed with only three legs. Falcon saw the desperation in their movements and started to chuckle, how they wobbled and staggered. He started trotting after the raider, emphasizing the sound of his hooves against the sidewalk. He kept a steady distance of a few yards between him and the pony, making a game out of its frantic gambit of escape and relishing in the terror it were undoubtedly feeling.
“Another one that deserves it!”
The raider swung around a corner, bracing against the brick wall of the nearly flattened building that stood there momentarily. There, he saw Falcon turn, his legs rising high with each exaggerated step. With heavy panting, the raider pressed on with Falcon in mock-pursuit. He was practically skipping along, grinning malevolently with a gun in his mouth.
The raider’s jaw dropped when the route it went down became impassible, debris spilling over the road and forming a hill they were in no position to climb. The pony swallowed hard and turned around to face Falcon Wing, who was stalking ever closer with a look of sadistic delight in his orange eyes.
The raider backed away and Falcon inched forwards, chuckling darkly to see just how the pony would react. He noted how -despite the hard expression the raider wore on their face- the raider trembled, to his great merriment. The was a certain irony in watching a savage devolve into a defenseless foal in the face of a danger even greater than they; and Falcon thoroughly enjoyed being said danger.
"The lamb who shies away from the herd need not fear the wolf, for it knows a terror greater in the form of their flock," he thought. “Then may the wrath of the lamb make it feared by both flock and wolf.”
The raider’s back pressed against the wall of concrete that blocked the rest of the way. The pony’s eyes widened in shock and horror and they crumpled to the ground in the face of what was certain death. Falcon held the Perforator leveled with their head and savored the moment before he executed the scum in grand fashion. He pulled the trigger and…
The electronic tone sounded. The spark battery was out of power.
“Well shit,” Falcon Wing mumbled through the handle of the gun. The raider was stunned in place, unsure as to what to make of the situation. The red pegasus holstered the gun once again and without delay, pulled a rusty metal pole from the surrounding piles of rubble with his mouth. He adjusted his hold on it, moving towards the center point to get a better grip, before charging toward the raider, one end of the pole scraping loudly on the sidewalk. Falcon swung the pole into the side of the raider’s head, knocking them down with little trouble at all.
“No, wait!” the raider cried out, holding a hoof out defensively.
Falcon sat on his haunches and held the pole with his front hooves. “You went so long without speaking, I wasn’t expecting you to start now!” he taunted before swinging the pole down over his head, smashing the pony’s leg into the asphalt with a loud crack signaling the breaking of bone. The raider wailed and Falcon shook his head.
“Did the ponies you tortured and murdered cry? If so, then this is pretty fitting punishment, huh!?”
Falcon brought the pole down again, this time hammering the raider’s stump leg and seeing it wriggle in painful spasms. He did this again and again, jerking from side to side as the raider kicked out at him with their remaining limbs. In return, he batted their exposed side until the snapping of the pony’s ribs sounded off one after the other, the savage’s pelt bruising underneath the vulgar barding.
By that point, the pony was lying prone on the floor, wheezing and too exhausted and pained to continue fighting. Falcon Wing glared at the raider, thinking he must’ve looked the same that night. Except whereas he was ambushed in the dark by cowards, he pursued this raider alone, and that made this all the more satisfying.
“I would leave you alive, so that if somepony else found you, you would warn them about me,” Falcon started to say. “But let’s face it, no one you know will find you and anypony else would just kill you where you lay. And that’s no fun for me, so…”
Falcon continued to bat the pony with the pole, the yellow-orange that tinged the gray flaking off with each hard hit and being replaced instead with deep red. The pole thudded against the raider’s hide again and again, their weak cries barely audible after a short while. When the noise and movement finally ceased, the colt let the pole clatter noisily beside the body, where a pool of blood was starting to form, streaming out from the raider’s mouth and nostrils.
Falcon stepped back from the pony, scorn on his face at how the body was bent at all sorts of unnatural angles, skin contouring around shattered bone and the likes. “Well that’s not pretty at all…” he muttered to himself offhoofedly. He started to walk off as he said, “Just something to make the next fucker to come through here think twice and-“
He stopped when he came across a shard of glass at the side of the road. It wasn’t the glass that caught his attention, but what was reflected off of it. Himself, naturally, but also what was on the side of his thigh. He raised a brow, a wry smirk on his muzzle.
“Well, well, well! Took you long enough to appear!” Falcon said with a hint of pride in his voice as he took in the sight of his cutie mark. An ebony broadsword, the blade black as well and pointing downwards, with silver chains wrapping around the hilt and down the blade in a crisscrossing pattern.
“Though I wonder if this means my special talent is beating the shit out of raiders…”
He had a good laugh at that. “That’s one hell of a talent!”
He was about to walk off when he remembered that his gun was still without power. “Jeez,” he said as he fished out the recharging unit and started to attach it to the Perforator. “you get a neat picture on your flank and all of a sudden you’re forgetting to keep your gun in good order!”
He pumped the lever until the gauge read that the battery was back at full charge and put the charger away. He holstered the laser pistol then pulled out a bag of potato chips before turning on the radio. He tuned in mid-song, one where a mare was harmonizing to the sound and rhythm of a myriad of instruments, a piano being the most noticeable in the symphony.
“Today’s been a good day so far,” Falcon Wing mused. He opened the bag and tilted his head back, pouring in a mouthful of chips and munching away on them as he listened to the song. “some good music to go along with it seems just fine.” He started to walk off, once again without a destination, leaving the broken, dead raider behind him. The music echoed off of the walls as he went eating his bag of chips, feeling strangely content in the remains of an ancient town.
***
Encounter
The pawns of chance.
By time Falcon Wing reached a plaza area, he had a predicament on his hooves. The streets that diverged from the central district were all blocked off by mountains of rubble that were almost as tall as the large buildings still standing. Individual bits and pieces of metal rods and blocks of concrete could be discerned from the mass of debris that towered in the ruinous expanse. Without his wings, the way ahead was inaccessible to the pegasus colt.
And to make matters worse, he was all out of potato chips! He peered into the bag with one eye then turned it upside-down, watching the crumbs trickle out like dust. “Argh, for two hundred years, the most that was in this bag was air,” Falcon mumbled to himself before crumpling it up and tossing it aside. It came to a rest in a ditch at the side of the road where other bits of trash collected, empty glass bottles, tin cans and the likes.
Falcon reached into his bag and pulled out the Sparkle Cola he drank from earlier, taking a few conservative swigs of the carrot flavored drink. He wanted it to last a bit longer than the chips had fared, at the very least. He knew he had a lot of the raider’s food store on him, but if each individual package was like the bag of chips then he was in a bit of trouble.
“At this rate, I’ll need to start rationing this stuff, or else I’ll run out pretty damn quickly…” he continued to say as he capped the bottle off and put it back in the bag. “And I can’t really ignore the effects of junk food being my only diet out here…”
He hummed thoughtfully and tapped his hoof against his chin. He panned his gaze across the top of the irregular semicircle of destruction that blocked his way as he contemplated his next course of action. “Nothing to do but try to find something better somewhere, get a place to spend the next night and kill any bastard raider I come across, I guess,” he told himself. Falcon shrugged. The plan kept him alive so far and allowed him the opportunity to dispatch his own brand of sweet justice, so he’d stick to it.
“Easier said than done, but eh.”
He scanned the plaza, looking for anything worth investigating further. It was then that he was struck by what it was he had come across. Before him was a city square surrounded by ancient shops and small structures boarded up and left to rot, long ransacked over the years by survivors of the apocalypse. The place was very eerie when he stopped to think about it. Ignoring the ragtime music playing over his radio, Falcon Wing didn’t hear anything in his immediate area. There were a few gunshots in the far distance, maybe the faintest traces of ponies yelling but that was it. A truly dead zone in a dead town, Falcon Wing frowned. He had a bad feeling about the area and he shut off his music, remembering his first night.
It was quiet then, too. He didn’t know what was lurking out of sight in the darkness of the seemingly abandoned buildings. But that was then. He knew better now. ”May fortune favor the cautious,” he thought as he walked onwards towards the center of the plaza. As he moved in a half crouch, he went on: ”because the fools will just get themselves killed regardless.”
He swallowed hard and pulled out the Perforator, his orange eyes shooting from side to side as he went out into the open, the still air seeming to weigh down on him. There was an unmistakable wrongness that the red pegasus just couldn’t put a hoof on. He mulled over it as he did his familiar routine, looking for things to hide behind while moving. In such an open place like the plaza, however, finding cover was not the easiest thing to do. In fact, out of all the places Falcon had been to, so far the plaza was the most ‘preserved’ area he knew of. The realization of that only unsettled him further. As preposterous as he assured himself it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling the place was a death trap and he was walking right into it.
“Nopony made those buildings fall like that, Falcon,” the colt muttered to himself. “Besides, you’re not even completely boxed in. You’ve got a perfectly clear exit…”
He trailed off.
“… The only exit…”
His heart started thumping in his chest. He wanted to look behind him, but his neck turned stiffly with the mounting anxiety. He felt heat rushing through his body beneath his pelt and he was reminded of something his father told him so very long ago. Something about being the last red phoenix in Equestria… except Falcon was sure this wasn’t the context his father intended, surely.
“Damn it…” the colt growled. “Get your shit together!”
Falcon whipped himself around, the laser pistol primed and ready to fire at the first enemy he saw. He was sure his exit had been cut off by a crafty band of raiders that set up their camp in the choke point. But there was no one there. No raiders, no ambush, nothing.
That did not calm him down. It did the opposite. “… Okay… why the hell aren’t there raiders here!?” his mind screamed. Had he found some place where even the most depraved and savage ponies avoided in their day to day activities of plunder and killing?
Falcon sat down on his haunches and started to breathe deeply. “You’re losing it,” he told himself in a whisper. “Being paranoid and jumpy won’t solve anything. I don’t want to end up like those operatives with stress disorders…”
He winced at the images that flashed before his eyes. They were of uniformed soldiers, the pride of the Grand Pegasus Enclave; returning to the stronghold with wide eyes and trembling bodies. Falcon didn’t know for certain what happened to these few operatives dispatched on their various assignments underneath the cloud cover. What they saw or experienced were things he could only infer from what he had come across himself. But he knew the lasting impact of it all… pegasi so broken that there were special wards in the medical wing of the stronghold dedicated to them. He heard their cries and crazed rambling occasionally when being sent over to Patchenfix.
He shook his head furiously. “I don’t want to end up like that!” The possibility that he would lose his mind down in the wastes renewed his dread, but he was quick to remind himself he wasn’t in any real danger. If anything, he was too busy thinking of the worst possible things that could happen to him that he was making his own damn crisis! He was just in a creepy part of town, nothing to get so worked up over. He took a few more deep breaths before saying, “I should’ve just turned around. Then I wouldn’t have gone through this shit.”
He looked up to the sky and narrowed his eyes. “I guess I still haven’t learned my lesson.” He sighed, hung his head and then got back to his hooves. He started to trot across the concrete square, away from the craggy wall, away from the husks of buildings and away from remains of grandeur. Such things included the decorative metalwork around the stairs leading into Ponyville’s underground. The bronze railings were once topped off with boards that once displayed fine art, but now they were dirty, misshapen and the art shriveled and discolored.
The place was not just creepy. It was depressing. More so than the places where the raiders frequented, even. At least those regions made Falcon Wing feel anger instead of sadness. At least around those places, he could have told himself it was the fault of the raiders that everything was in such horrid condition. It was not so easy to explain away a place that was completely deserted, however.
“Who would have guessed that the logs of the Equestria that used to be would become the greatest tragedy of the modern age?” Falcon chuckled at the morbid thought. “I wonder if anypony else even care, the raiders sure as hell don’t and-“
The colt cursed as he fell over into a mailbox after tripping over a particularly large crack in the pavement. The thing was so brittle that the bump sent it falling over, clattering noisily onto the road and causing discarded cans and bottles to jingle and clink against each other. The sound reverberated around the red pegasus.
Falcon shook his hurt hoof as he chastised himself. “I also didn’t learn to watch where I’m going; fucking brilliant, Falcon!” His ears flicked at the echo he heard, his voice rebounding off of the decimated walls of the surrounding structures. He blinked a few times. “Well that was louder than I intended-“
Falcon bristled at a blood curdling sound, loud rasping snarls that emanated all around him from the darkened ruins. It was a sound unlike anything he heard before, but he knew it to be the sound of feral beasts. That could be the only explanation for the horrendous cacophony that ensued, bestial growls and hissing that echoed all around him in a maddening chorus. The pegasus colt was fully alert and focused as he scoured his surroundings for signs of movement, bracing himself for another battle while he hastily made his way toward the open avenue.
“The one time I’d be glad to be wrong, I’m proven right!”
A series of guttural roars filled the air. From cracks in the walls, broken windows and doorways emerged a sight from beyond the grave. Literally, the living dead poured out in the street in a petrifying pack of rot and decay. They shambled out into the Wasteland gloom with eyes that were clouded and glassy, some staring off in mismatched ways. Their movements were spastic and shaky as they made their slow approach.
“What is this fucking place…!?” Falcon said breathlessly. The former ponies all had wrinkled hides that hugged their bony frames, if they were not peeling off entirely. Some of them lacked entire features, their faces caved in from one side or the other yet they remained in their undeath. A bunch of the zombified ponies grouped up ahead of the red pegasus, obstructing his exit. There were so many of them! Though they were many yards away there was a pungent stench in air, just how many of the undead ponies were concentrated in one place. Falcon gagged and reflexively scurried away from them.
As if provoked by the sudden movement, the zombies charged with surprising speed, their rasping voices coming together in unison as they roared. Falcon’s eyes widened and he turned tail, darting away from the mob without any clear idea of where he could run to.
“The subway!” he thought. He adjusted his heading, mindful of all the cracks and debris scattered across the ground. He hopped over piles of refuse, sidestepped abrupt rises in the pavement and bounded over fallen benches. He heard fleshy collisions behind him where the zombies tripped over for being far less careful than their quarry. He saw bits and pieces and fleshy chunks soaring through the air a few times and he gagged many times. They were falling apart at the seams!
As soon as he reached the stairs surrounded by the brass railing, he started hopping down the steps two at a time. He heard the pounding of undead hooves against the pavement not too far behind him. He reached the bottom of the stairs and rushed into the tunnel, finding to his dismay that the way ahead was blocked off by a wall of sheet metal that was put together in such a way that it was clear it wasn’t a natural occurrence.
Falcon raised a brow and blurted out, “What the actual fuck!?” Confused but not unperturbed, Falcon turned his attention to the metal door at the side of the passage. It was a thick slab of metal with rounded off corners and of a dark gray-blue color. He tried turning the valve-like lock but found that it wouldn’t budge. ”Naturally!”
Falcon stepped back a few times and fired the Perforator into it, the searing energies burrowing into the door, the area around the lock starting to glow a hot orange. With no time to spare, the locking mechanism fizzled away and the colt heard the loud metal thunk of the door’s release.
As the shadows of the zombie ponies spread across the ground at the bottom of the stairs, Falcon ran at the door, spun around on his front hooves and bucked it open. The door groaned as it swung and Falcon sped into the room beyond. He reared up and put all his weight behind it in order to close it, and then went to push a nearby shelf over to barricade it from the zombies. It fell over and everything that sat on it either smashed on the floor or skidded across the metal plating and into the shadows.
From the other side of the door, Falcon Wing heard thuds as the undead fell down the stairs, grunts and snarls and before long, he saw the decayed legs reaching through the hole in it, a black sludge dripping from where the limbs got cut doing so.
“That’s not gonna hold them for long…”
His ears flicked at another sound that gradually became louder. Others were heading over to where he was, but whom? More zombie ponies, called by the sound of their undead brethren? Falcon was horrified at the thought of being trapped on both sides with the ghoulish monsters. He shook his head. “No, damn it! Enough of those thoughts!”
He looked around frantically, trying to formulate his next course of action. The doorway led into what appeared to be a maintenance room, with gray metal walls and bulky machinery built into them. No windows; but what could anypony expect to see if there were any? Instead there were long strips of lights in cages dotting either side of the hallways. In spite of that, the tunnel was pretty dimly lit.
Falcon rushed over to a crevice created by a large computer terminal and tucked himself into it, peering out from its shadow.
“Aw fuck!” he heard somepony exclaim. “How the hell did this happen!?”
“Looks like some fucker cut through the door!” another pony replied.
“I hope that bastard’s ghoul chow, now!” yet another voice chimed in.
Falcon Wing bared his teeth. Raiders. Of course they wouldn’t be completely absent from this part of Ponyville. No, like the rats they were, they take refuge underground, moving through their little tunnels to and fro and stealing cheese whenever they returned to the surface.
“The fuck do we do about this? What do we tell the others?” the first pony asked.
Falcon stepped out of his hiding place, revealing himself to the group of three. They were startled, but they immediately pulled their guns on him. Their barding was different than his. Brown leather with bits of metal draped on for good measure, creating shoulder and chest plates. They even had crude helmets on made from scrap. Their guns looked just as well, cobbled together and barely holding up.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of the ponies asked him.
Falcon replied, “They call me Ghoul Chow. Nice to meet you.”
The raiders scowled, clearly not appreciating the colt’s humor. They wasted no time in opening fire, their bullets flying, most of them glancing off of the walls with spectacular flashes and sparks whenever they hit machinery. Falcon dove behind the computer again, taking cover and poking his head up to return magical fire, one critical shot slicing one of the trio clean in two. They let out one last pained cry before their halves dropped to the floor amidst glowing dust.
“Rebar!” one of the raiders cried out. “You’ll fucking pay for that you son of a bitch!”
As he recharged this gun, Falcon mused, “The savages display grief for the dead. How so very interesting!”
His hubris was rewarded with a bullet punching through the computer and his barding alike, lodging in his side. Falcon screamed as he felt a rib crack. He fell to the floor, the charging unit sliding out from behind the terminal.
“What is that!?”
“I dunno, go get it, and put a bullet in that fuck’s skull while you’re at it!”
The raider’s hoofsteps neared him and Falcon coughed, fire burning in his eyes as he stared out from behind the computer. As soon as the pony reached for the charger, Falcon sprung out from his cover, staggering and firing wildly. Funnily enough, he hit the raider furthest away more than the one right in front of him most before the Perforator ran out of power again.
Once the laser pistol started beeping, Falcon’s rage and adrenaline had him throttling the pony in front of him onto the floor; its helmet rolling away and his hooves clamping onto the sides of its head. He bashed the raider’s skull against the floor repeatedly, increasing the ferocity of his assault with each slam until blood stained the metal and the pony’s eyes rolled up in their sockets. A few speckles of red were in Falcon’s yellow mane.
Falcon Wing got off of the dead pony, stumbling sidelong a few paces before shakily regaining his balance. With careful steps, he approached the charger and picked it up, putting it in his bag thereafter. He’d deal with the Perforator after he took care of the bullet inside of him.
He put the gun in its holster and staggered across the way to the other raider. The pony was having trouble breathing, numerous holes burned into its chest and neck from when Falcon let his fury take hold. The colt looked disdainfully at the raider and then turned his gaze to the door. The ghouls continued to fight at the door with ravenous determination to get it open. Falcon said to the dying raider: “I think you are more deserving of the name ‘Ghoul Chow’ than me. You and everypony like you.”
He walked away afterwards, heading deeper into the maintenance tunnel until he came across what looked to be a recreation room, for the staff from the before times. It was a pretty plain room, but whereas the rest of the tunnel was defined by its cold walls and blocky machines, this one had a few colorful posters of mares and their corresponding ministries, whatever they were. Falcon didn’t care to investigate. His attention was caught solely by the workbench and cushiony couch at the far end of the room. He staggered over to the work bench and helped himself to a pair of pliers that was resting on top of it. He then set his sights on the couch. It was dusty and stained by all manner of things but it would serve his purposes well enough. By the end of it though, his blood would be the newest addition to the disgusting tapestry.
“For the love of Celestia!” Falcon cried out mentally, tears streaming from his eyes. His barding was on the floor and his bag was on the couch beside him, blood pooling up on his side as he stabbed himself with the pliers, widening the gunshot wound so that he could work better. It was agony, but he knew he needed to get the bullet out of him before he did anything else, something he had learned from his numerous visits to Doctor Patchenfix. He also knew that doing surgery with pliers was an incredibly stupid and risky undertaking that had more potential to do harm than any good.
He was counting on the health potion to come through for him as it had when his wings were cut off. They were healing well enough after just one bottle, so it was worth a shot. But the pain! Falcon Wing bit his lip as the head of the pliers grabbed onto the back of the bullet in his rib. His lip started to bleed as well as he pried the bullet out of him, the tears flowing freely to his whimpers. As soon as the scarlet round was removed, Falcon reached into his bag with one hoof and downed a health potion, while dropping the pliers with the other.
The anguish of his tissue pulling itself back together again was more than he could take then. He slipped away from reality into a sleep that had no clear beginning; just the ending where he came to again, gasping and reaching for his side, finding that the ghastly wound was already scarring up and the bleeding had stopped. He breathed a sigh of relief and proceeded to apply a roll of bandages across his midsection before getting himself back together. His barding was back on and his bag hung off of his side. Inside, the newest addition to his inventory: the pliers.
Because Falcon did not know when they would be of use again. Quite frankly, he didn’t want them to be of use again, period. But as he had learned over his time in the wastes, it was better to be safe than sorry. Or dead. Mostly dead.
He left his impromptu operating room, frowning at the trail of blood spots he left, culminating in the giant red stain on the dusty couch. After a while more of walking down uniform metal hallways, he came to another door with the sign reading, “To Metro Station; Celestia Line” beside it in faded golden lettering. Underneath it, scrawled in paint in the familiar raider style was the word “Necropolis”.
“Huh… fitting name… holy shit, raiders know what necropolis means…” Falcon commented before opening the door.
***
Disillusioned
When it isn't a game anymore.
Falcon Wing stepped out onto worn, burgundy tiles with bits of discolored paper scattered about. The door he came through opened into the upper level of the station which spanned across the train tracks below. Above him was a dirty gray ceiling, the paint cracked and peeling. Off to his right side, Falcon saw two sets of large metal stairs which descended to the lower level. The metro station, or Necropolis as it was apparently known as to the “locals”, was very dimly lit as per the norm. From what the red pegasus could make out in the darkness, the station had an atmosphere of constant disarray. The hanging rectangular lights on the ceiling barely shed any light at all and flickered irregularly, making a buzzing noise every time they did. Some of them hung by only one cable, the block holding the light bulb held at an angle as they dangled in the stale air.
Quite a number of them were suspended over what appeared to be a settlement on the upper level of the subway, the walls made out of thin plywood and scrap, bound together by the same good old wasteland engineering which was responsible for the Perforator: spare parts and tape. Falcon Wing heard murmuring from the other side of the crude fencing and he snuck up to it, crossing the few feet between the fence and the door with large, quiet strides. There, he looked through the large gaps of wood and sheet metal and observed the pack of ponies behind their wall. The ponies with the different style of barding, Falcon Wing paid close attention to the similar details these raiders shared with one another. The color and accessories seemed to denote individual factions, something the red pony found odd.
“Raiders wear uniforms…” he thought. “Kinda like… soldiers…?” He shook his head. These ponies were savages. Soldiers were ponies who were like the proud members of the Grand Pegasus Enclave. His parents were soldiers. His parents weren’t a bunch of primitive colt-torturers that shot each other dead in the streets on a daily basis! What that said about him on the other hoof, he didn’t rightly know just then. But he did not concern himself with it.
He bared his teeth. Savages; nothing more and nothing less, these were ponies that relished violence and wouldn’t think twice about making somepony else’s life a living hell for their own amusement. They weren’t trained and disciplined as soldiers in an army would be. They did not uphold a cause; they only fought for their own selfish reasons.
“The world will be better off without them,” Falcon told himself, his eyes narrowing. He recoiled into the darkness and drew the Perforator, recharging the spark battery and then taking aim at one of the hanging lights. He held his breath, steadied his sights and fired, closing his eyes a split-second before. The red beam burned through the cable and rained down searing glitter onto the brown-barded raiders. The light swung into another and the thud and clang of metal echoed through the tunnels. Several outcries of surprise and expletives ensued, and Falcon used the chaos to make his approach, skirting around the edge of the enclosure and looking for a point of entry.
He found it in the form of a dented metal sheet, the side of a passenger wagon propped up in between a gap in the makeshift fence to make a gate. It had a frame for a window, including a rim of broken, grimy glass for him to look through and see the raiders scrambling for their weapons. They had stands and shelves arranged throughout their compound with all sorts of supplies in plain sight. Boxes of various foodstuffs and ammo were plentiful; Falcon assumed they had grown complacent in their underground fortress. What did they have to fear aside from the very ghouls that were supposed to deter anypony who would pose a threat to them?
”Mistake.” Falcon thought.
He then began to contemplate his next move. They were unsettled and on edge. He doubted he could have picked them off one by one with the laser pistol, the light and sound would give away his position in an instant. After being shot, he dreaded a full on firefight, especially when he did not have much cover to begin with.
“Aw balls,” he thought to himself. “I should have given this a bit more thought…”
Just then, Falcon Wing saw a raider’s head shoot around to face the gate. The colt’s orange eyes widened and he swiftly ducked down, hoping he wasn’t spotted through the window.
“What was that!?” he heard a gruff sounding stallion bark to his peers.
“We don’t fucking know, shithead! That’s what we’re trying to find out!” another pony shot back venomously.
“Not that, dumbass. I think there’s a dead motherfucker outside our front door!”
“Oh son of a bitch!” Falcon scooted across the tiled floor away from the gate, making his way to the nearest patch of darkness to hide in.
The gate went up with rattling chains and banging metal, the noise adding to the mounting tension. The raiders poured out, guns in mouth or mounted on battle saddles. The way they fanned out to cover all angles resonated a sense of professionalism that Falcon was hard pressed to invalidate. He dared not move as he lay on his back, tucked away into the far side of the upper level of the subway.
They moved slowly and deliberately, scouring the area around their settlement. For all the commotion they made moments ago, they were now silent and collected. They were silhouettes on the prowl, and the imagery brought back the unsavory memories of that terrible night. One of the raiders grew closer and closer to the point where it stood over the pegasus colt and he was bathed in the odor that accompanied it. It sickened him, but he did not gag or cough, petrified by his anxiety. Even his breathing stopped, and time seemed to drag on for a few moments.
The raider turned away and started snooping around elsewhere on the platform. Falcon’s eyes trailed after the pony, the young pegasus half-expecting the raider to spin around and empty their gun into him as the punch line to some horrible joke. But no such thing came to pass, and before long the raider disappeared around the corner of the compound, barely visible through the gaps in the wall.
Falcon eased and slowly exhaled. “The flash must’ve thrown off their adjustment to the dark…” He got back to his hooves and kept close to the wall as he walked towards the stairs he saw earlier, reasoning that he could get another angle to work with, the element of surprise and some cover to engage from. He had reached the first of the steps when he heard the gruff voice of the stallion speak.
“Maybe he left already.”
“Maybe you were just seeing things, you dumb fucker.”
“Fuck you, I know what I saw. He got in without us looking, maybe the coward ran already. Go check the tunnels.”
“Rebar, Gresh and Dux will handle him; if there was anyone here at all!”
“He already got past them, somehow. If he did it once, he could do it again, dumb shit.”
Falcon heard the thud that came with the stallion striking the one that spoke back and the sharp cry that followed. “What a lovely duo…” he thought. He crouched and started inching his way back towards the group, recognizing the opportunity to hit them hard and fast and put an end to the standoff.
At the same time, the raider was opening the door to the service tunnel. The door swung open, and the pony’s jaw dropped. “What the actual fu-!”
The ghastly sounds wafted out from the tunnel and Falcon froze for a few seconds. “They got in!” he realized. Their thudding hoofsteps reached his ears, echoing in the subway, metallic thudding en masse. The raider was bowled over by the horde of undead, the zombies of the irradiated wastes pursuing the living in what was supposed to be their personal bastion in the apocalyptic hell.
Falcon sped down the stairs, leaving the screaming raiders to their fate while doing all he could to avoid joining them. He was covering two steps at a time before jumping down from the final few, hitting the concrete base of the subway platform and running down its length. He jumped down onto the track and dashed off into the darkness that was ahead, racing against the hissing and snarling monsters that flooded into the metro. He turned on his flashlight with a flick of his head and shined the beam down the winding tunnel, following the rails; to where he did not know. The possibility that they might have followed the smell of his blood down the maintenance tunnel did not get overlooked in Falcon’s thoughts as he ran.
He didn’t stop running until he reached the next stop. He walked down the last stretch of track panting, feeling a distinct pain in his side where he got shot. It hadn’t fully recovered and he was already exerting himself in ways that he really shouldn’t have been.
“For Celestia’s sake!” he muttered to himself. Falcon turned off the flashlight and holstered his gun before he hoisted himself onto the platform. He sat there, breathing hard and thinking about how close he had gotten to dying. He figured his chances down on the surface weren’t that good to begin with, but it was only a few days and already he had been tortured, dismembered and shot! And that was ignoring his close encounter of the zombie kind.
Falcon lay on his back and closed his eyes, his chest heaving with every strained breath. He could have used a rest after all he had endured thus far. However, fate was not nearly so kind to oblige the needs of individuals.
“Hey, all! Look alive! We’ve got ourselves one suicidal piece of shit in our turf!”
Falcon’s eyes shot open. ”Of-fucking-course!” he thought bitterly. He sucked in a breath and ignored the stabbing pain of protest, rolling onto his hooves and sprinting for dear life along the platform. The gunshots roared, the sound bouncing off every wall, bullets causing chunks of concrete to explode into powder and metal fixtures to dent and spark with high pitched ringing.
He tried to ignore the whizzing that passed him by but he knew he was just inches away from being struck down in his tracks. He had almost made it to the door when the inevitable finally happened and he felt a weight sock him in the thigh, almost knocking him off of his hooves. He cried out, staggered and limped on, grabbing the door handle and pulling on it. It rattled and held firm, locked.
The colt cursed. A bullet slammed into the wall over the door frame and dust rained down into his dirty mane. He didn’t know where the shooters were. He didn’t care. He wanted to get out of this mess as soon as he possibly could. He pulled out the Perforator, shot off the handle and lock and yanked the door open. He hobbled past it and into the metal tunnel, ignoring the pain in his leg as best as he could, trying to focus on making it out alive.
As the tears flowed from his glaring eyes, Falcon snarled through his gun: “I hope those zombies take their time with the bastard who got me…”
For the second time that day, Falcon took the test of resolve and plunged the pliers into the wound, forcefully and messily extracting the bullet and then bandaging up, the white cloth stained a dark crimson almost immediately. He couldn’t risk passing out again, so he decided to save drinking the health potion for when he found a better place to hold out in.
He walked down the tunnel and passed the various rooms and corridors that branched off from it until he found the exit. He unlocked the door and stepped out into the wasteland gloom, after the few hours in the dank underground. Never before did he think he would be happy to see the rolling bleak cover that hung in the sky, highlighting the decayed skyline of war-torn Equestria.
But there he was, at the base of the stairs leading down to the metro tunnels, tears in his eyes. He struggled up the stairs and stood triumphantly at the top, trembling and in anguish. He had survived the trials of the underworld, and he was determined to persevere!
Which was why his expression darkened, becoming one of utter hate and contempt when he laid eyes on the two stallions that were across the street, one of them returning the look with green eyes, his bronze body rippling with powerful muscle. The other regarded him with indifference, his battle saddle pointed right at him, an assault rifle and shotgun at the ready…
***
Broken Swords
The grave dug by one’s rage.
The red pegasus adjusted his stance, raising a foreleg and preparing to find a place to attack from. He was slow to do so, his previous injuries hindering him greatly. Like the crack of a whip, the blue pony reacted with a vengeance. He kicked a hind leg back and the assault rifle came to life with deadly precision. Yellow and orange light billowed from its muzzle as it issued its roar, the bullets flying forth. Several rounds burrowed into Falcon Wing’s body and created a mist of blood that reddened the air around him. His jaws were agape and his eyes were wide when the realization of what happened occurred to him seconds later.
He fell to the pavement, coughing and gasping. His body spasmed with renewed suffering, his legs contracting and extending at random as he heaved. His blood was dark, flowing out of him and across the sidewalk. Even in such a pitiful state, Falcon continued to stare at the two stallions. His hate burned in his eyes, his lips curled back in a feral display of aggression.
“I’ll kill you!” Falcon swore. ”I’ll kill both of you bastards if it is the last thing I’ll do!”
Through sheer will, Falcon reached around his flank for the Perforator. He took its handle in his mouth and pointed its killing end towards the two stallions. He was unsteady and irrational, firing wildly at the ponies. In turn, they spread out from one another, taking cover behind concrete fixtures where plants and flowers used to grow from. A few of the red lasers splintered against the light gray fixtures, blackening the concrete and making it crumble away. Many more soared off a long ways from the intended targets, a glint of scarlet shining off of the walls of the ruined buildings further down the street.
The bronze coated stallion inched out from behind the planter to look at the berserk colt. He had to duck down a few times as the searing energies shot over his blond mane. He looked off to his side and said, “Looks like we’ve got a wild one on our hooves, Steiner.”
Steiner gave the bronze pony an even look from the corner of his eye. “I suppose you do not find it strange that one so young is using a weapon like that?” he asked.
“There’s nothing the raider youth can do to surprise me at this point, buddy.”
Steiner contemplated the response with a thoughtful hum. The two were surprisingly calm in spite of the colt trying to kill them, lost in his fury. “The cutie mark is unusual for a raider, Klaxon,” the blue stallion replied.
“What does it matter? Anypony who puts on that barding knows they are siding with the worst of the worst,” Klaxon said.
The Perforator started beeping. Falcon snarled and dropped it, letting it clatter to the floor where it was stained by his blood. ”I won’t die here! I won’t!” he told himself. “I just started living! I won’t die so soon!”
“He was already wounded by the looks of those bandages. Why did he come out into the open if he had a party of raiders as allies?” Steiner inquired.
“They were cutting their liabilities? He was just stupid?” Klaxon suggested, casting a glance over to the colt. He saw that the red pony was reaching into one of his saddlebags. He braced himself and said to Steiner, “Don’t forget that he was getting ready to attack us. I don’t think it’s just coincidence that he looks and acts like a raider.”
Falcon held the vial to his mouth and tore off the cover. He held it away from his snout a short distance afterwards, taking a few seconds more to weigh the risks of what he was attempting to do. The health potion might have been his last hope for survival, but so many things could have gone wrong. His wounds could heal with the bullets trapped inside him, dooming him to a slow death due to blood poisoning. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, the trauma of the whole ordeal could knock him unconscious again. Unable to fight back, he would be an easy kill. This, among other things made drinking the potion a gambit unlike any other.
”But I have to try. If there is a chance I can get out of this alive, then I have to try!”
He started moving the health potion to his lips when he heard another roar and before he knew it, the glass in his hoof exploded, shards of glass flying in all directions, scoring across his face and neck and spilling the purple elixir that was contained inside. It all happened in slow motion to him, watching the droplets fall with the glinting glass flakes.
“Wow. Nice shot. I’m thinking you could give Alana a run for her caps!” Klaxon said to his comrade.
Steiner watched as the colt’s eyes clouded. The blood that flowed from the scrapes on his cheeks mixed with the tears. A ghost of a frown was on Steiner’s face, the blue stallion fighting to maintain the impassiveness that he approached every situation with. But his red eyes were intense, looking at the colt those few yards away.
“… It was nothing,” he said a few moments too late.
“Oi, he’s just a raider. We’ve done this type of thing how many times now?” Klaxon said, reassuring his friend in his own, strange way. Steiner opened his mouth to reply, but then the bronze stallion added: “Sure, not all of them were kids, but…”
“Thank you, Klaxon. You are an unending supply of morale in times of duress,” Steiner said flatly.
“Oh, you know what I mean!” Klaxon retorted with a wave of his hoof.
Falcon rested his head on the cool pavement. His blood crept across it, following miniscule channels formed by cracks and imperfections, meandering and converging like a river at the leading edge off the pool. Things started to become fuzzy in his sights. The gray of the clouds and the gray of the land was blurring into one, fine details disappearing into his swirling vision.
His breathing was slowing, his shivers and shakes becoming less frequent.
“My gun… couldn’t protect me…” he muttered weakly as his eyelids started to close. “and I… die… a lamb… shunned by his flock… prey to wo-”
And so, his last thought never came to completion. Lying before the subway station, underneath the blotted skies he used to fly through, Falcon Wing came to his end, early in a life of sorrow and abuse. Though the loss of his wings was a catalyst for his underlying fury to break free, the indulgence of his wrath and pursuit of skewed justice ultimately proved to be his downfall.
End
Falcon's Truth
He turned a blind eye to the politics of his past.
It was a cold winter’s day inside the citadel. Snow was already on the ground and the sky was overcast. The tall buildings lining the street splintered the diffused sunlight into individual rays and shadows rolled across the pavement. Despite the cold, the citizens of Hope were a lively bunch. The colts and fillies were dashing around wearing their bundles of layers that made their small bodies look puffy. On more than one occasion, one of them fell over and sent a cloud of flurries into the air, prompting their amused though admittedly stressed parents to excuse themselves from the vendors at their shops to help them back to their hooves. Of course, foals being foals, the process began again with renewed vigor. The ponies didn’t even know each other’s names but they were content with running around on the blanket of snow that gripped the citadel while their parents did their business, blissfully ignoring the myriad of complications the snow had on the community. Things were quiet and slow in the wake of the blizzard. The ponies were mostly concentrating on digging out the roads before things went back to situation normal.
A stranger to the settlement walked down its many streets. A heavy metal case was strapped to her side. A large and thick brown leather coat kept her hide from the chill in the air, the shoulders bearing the indentations where the stars and bars of service were forcefully pried out and discarded. Those epaulets would have gotten her shot long ago if she still wore them proudly. Instead she wore her hood far ahead of her snout and moved with a bowed head. It was fitting that she found this place when it was at its most… lethargic state. The road leading up to its high walls was devoid of traffic and the snow was mostly undisturbed.
Turning the corners of the buried streets, she saw colorful murals emblazoned on the walls of the mostly gray and black buildings that stood after the end. The colors were muted in the winter haze but injected some kind of life into the cold. The power of children, she supposed with a small smile as she went on her way. She asked the rare loner going about their day where she could find the one named Steiner, and his ‘partner’ as she once heard him refer to the stallion on a DJ Pon3 broadcast a great while ago. They graciously pointed her in the direction towards the home deeper into the citadel and she walked on, feeling a pang in her heart with every hoofstep that brought her closer to him.
It was a wild thought. A crazy one even. Maybe she was losing her mind and this whole venture across Equestria was the manifestation of a growing psychosis. Being a doctor, she contemplated such things quite regularly. It felt… right… to do it, at the very least. That even if it were some crazed and desperate grab for something that was not there, the fact that she did it would absolve her of her sins. The effort of carrying her heavy cross and laying it at that house would be enough. She could start again after seeing the end of her journey, be it what she expected to see, or what was the actual reality. What she knew could not just die with her. She was an accessory to many dark and decrepit dealings and the burden on her soul was one she could not stand now that she was free of them. It was time to be good again. It was time to heal again.
She came up to that lone house standing in the open lot. An island in an urban sprawl. It stood alone with the tops of monolithic skyscrapers poking up into the skyline behind its large roof, a tranquil escape from the crowded and packed cityscape a few blocks away. The snow gave it a somber feeling, this forlorn place removed from everything else, but maybe there was peace because of it. He was due for some peace in his life, at the very least. She trod over to the front door, crossing the lot and stepping onto the half-buried porch. She rapped a hoof against the door and waited.
She was startled by the rattling of the garage door opening. It moved aside and made one last loud retort when it stuck in place. Shortly after, a stallion appeared, brown coat, blond mane. His black shirt hardly seemed a fitting thing to wear in the cold. He stood at the threshold to the garage regarding her evenly before finally speaking,
“I haven’t seen you around here before. I haven’t seen you in all of my life, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not mistaken,” she replied with her gentle voice. No, he wouldn’t have seen her at all, really, had things been different… if things were the same as they were before. “I take it you are -- Steiner, was it? -- You are Steiner’s partner?”
“You’re a fan?” Klaxon asked, cocking his head. He took on a contemplative look before stating flatly, “He doesn’t sign autographs.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t,” said the mare. She took a deep breath to steel herself and then said, “In all honesty, I’m not here for either of you.”
Klaxon snorted. “That’s pretty damn honest, miss.”
“Please, pardon me… this is all so odd for me. I have had so much time to prepare and yet, standing here at this moment I find myself grossly vulnerable and downright clueless.”
She stepped anxiously in place and took another deep breath. “Does the Shadow Bane live here?”
Klaxon blinked a few times. Finally, when he got over the bluntness of the question, he responded, “So what was that about being vulnerable and clueless?”
“I know, I know, it’s all insane. I’m just going off of some stretched out hunch I have had for… dearie goodness… months now?” Klaxon watched her pace about on the porch. He rubbed his chin with one brow raised.
“I know that you and Steiner know him. That is a fact.”
“Did you come here because of that DJ Pon3 thing? How far away are you visiting from? That was--”
“A long time ago, yes,” the mare interjected, nodding. She didn’t answer his question. “You and Steiner were around the Ponyville area after the Enclave attack on all of the ground settlements.”
“We were living in the Ponyville area long before any Enclave--” Klaxon gave the stranger on the porch an icy glare.
“Mm,” she hummed at this turn of events, unsurprised. “I’m going to assume that you find an issue with the Shadow Bane being brought up in the same context as the Grand Pegasus Enclave?”
“It is a mistake to assume. Something, something, donkeys come out to party when you assume.” Klaxon snorted, his whole body rippling in a way that was distinctly not a shiver, but his muscles tensing up, preparing for action.
“I’m not here to cause trouble. My life has had enough trouble in it already. I just want to make amends.” The stranger sat on her haunches and sighed. “I come from an Enclave outpost that was once located near the Ponyville area. Skyfort Ursa Major. It was wiped out when the Stable Dweller became the Light Bringer…”
Klaxon glanced down at the snow-covered ground, then to the sky. He exhaled sharply through his nostrils, vapor dispersing in the cold air. “That’s a piece of history I might be oddly familiar with. I take it you Ursa Enclave ponies were involved in attacking here and Ponyville?”
The stranger only nodded. “Please spare me the details,” she all but muttered.
The corner of Klaxon’s mouth twitched. He always imagined an encounter with an Enclave pegasus, a full grown soldier, would be one of vindication and an exercise in his capacity for cruelty. He couldn’t bring himself to deride this one pony, though. He couldn’t torture her with descriptions of how he watched her comrades being riddled with holes, gasping for breath on bloodied asphalt after they fell from the sky. He couldn’t even bring himself to buck her off of his porch.
“Son of a bitch, I’m getting soft,” he growled.
“Pardon?”
“‘Spare you the details’, you weren’t out and about shooting ponies with your fucking… Nova-shit rifles or whatever the fuck they are called?” Klaxon barked at the stranger.
“I was the bastion doctor, not a field operative. I had the option at one point to be a field medic but--” She shook her head. “I don’t have the blood of any ponies you might’ve known on my hooves, if it offers you any consolation. And not all of us wanted to carry out that operation, I overheard the radio chatter. I heard soldiers resisting their orders and then…”
The mare swallowed hard and hung her head. “Maybe the reason the Enclave is so reviled down here is because all the good that was in it got culled.” The words stabbed into her heart and she whimpered as if she had experienced the physical pain of it.
Klaxon cleared his throat. “So you think the Shadow Bane used to live in your neck of the Enclave woods, is that right?”
“I have other reasons for thinking this… reasons that aren’t nearly as concrete… if you can call all I just said concrete. There are rumors told by ponies that involve a pegasus with glowing wings, and you and Steiner. I don’t know what to make of the glowing wings. I just know that you must have met a pony in the area underneath Skyfort Ursa, a pegasus from the Enclave.”
Klaxon eyed the mare critically for a long time, silently considering her. Her words, how she was dressed, how she acted. “Oi,” he said after the extended pause, “tell me the name of this pegasus you think is the Shadow Bane.”
“His name is Falcon Wing, isn’t it?” the mare responded without hesitation. “There are things he needs to know. That’s why I am here. I need to tell him the truth about what happened to his parents.”
Klaxon blinked several times though he kept a stone’s countenance.
“Right this way, lady,” he said to the mare, gesturing to the interior of the garage with a foreleg.
In the lab, Steiner and Falcon did their jobs, indifferent to the snow that currently blocked their ground-view windows. The unicorn in his white coat tended to the chemicals and mixtures that swirled through the tubes and bubbled in the beakers and the pegasus at his terminal eagerly awaited the results so that he could record them. He kept still and silent so as to not disturb Steiner, but Falcon’s eyes were wide as he watched the unicorn float test tubes over cylinders and administer a few drops into them, turning the color of the liquids inside all kinds of hues.
“We have a result for the chroma poultice, Falcon,” Steiner reported without looking away from the chemistry set up. He started belting out the compositional notes and Falcon, with swift hooves, punched in the keys to record the dictation. He had gotten quite skilled at doing so, and being an assistant in general. There were surprisingly few magic related hijinks in recent times, and no explosions of any magnitude to speak of.
“Klaxon, what’s this?” he heard Steiner said and almost typed that into the console. Falcon looked up over the screen and his eyes went wide with shock this time, as opposed to anticipation.
Klaxon had opened the door and stepped aside to let the mare in the brown coat through. She walked down the stairs and stood on the laboratory floor proper with the bronze stallion close behind her. Alana appeared seconds later, scooting through the door and closing it gently. She watched from the top of the stairs, puzzled as to what was going on on this snow-laden day.
“It has been a long time, Falcon Wing. I see you’ve done well in keeping yourself in good health.” The mare noted something odd about the way his cloak fit his body. Something about the way the fabric took to his wings seemed… off. The wrong shape.
“I-- uh… I…” the pegasus stammered. When he reined in control of his words, he deadpanned, “It’s been easy to do that when I don’t have to worry about getting my ass kicked every time I go outside. It’s nice.”
“I can only imagine,” said the mare in the coat. She sat on her haunches and started to unzip and shed her winter wear. She undid the fasteners on the case and let it clatter onto the floor. Underneath the coat, she wore a grayish dress shirt complete with a neatly tucked away black tie. A pen was in the pocket. All the white mare needed were some glasses to complete the look of your everyday doctor figure. Her cutie mark was that of a health potion, the purple elixir inside a rounded vial.
“You’ve grown up into a respectable young stallion. No longer a colt, eh?”
“Patchenfix… I’m so sorry but… I have no words. It’s all a huge shock to me to see you again…” Falcon Wing didn’t know if he wanted to go hug his old doctor or fly up to Alana, take her hoof and run off to some place where he didn’t have to deal with this. The last time he dealt with the ponies he used to know…
“I understand,” she told him with her kind voice, as if she read his mind. “I don’t want to burden you any more than I have to. But I want to tell you the truth. After I tell you the truth, I’ll be gone again from your life. And we will both be free of the torment of our peers.”
“... What the f--” Falcon glanced up to Alana and then, with the smoothness of someone chewing on broken glass, uttered: “--phoenix are you going on about?” It all brought back memories of his last talk with Flint and how well that went. At least she planned on leaving him alone, instead of asking him to mercy-kill her.
“They kept it from you so well, didn’t they? The lies they told you about what happened to your mother and father?”
“Hey lady!” Alana shouted down to Patchenfix. “That’s enough. I’m normally a lot nicer than this but… who do you think you are!? To just show up out of the blue and--”
Falcon raised a hoof to her in a placating gesture. She eased slightly, shifted in place and eyed Patchenfix like a hawk. Or a mother bear watching over her cub, if said bear were on top of a ridge and quite willing to pounce down on the transgressor.
“I already know that what happened to them wasn’t any accident,” Falcon said to his former medic. “If that’s the truth you came here to share then I’m sorry to say some… things… have beaten you the punch.” And how.
Patchenfix raised a brow. “So you know the story about what your mother and father did? Or, what they tried to do? About who they were?”
“I knew them… for as short a time as I had them,” Falcon said, looking away from her. “I don’t want to know why the Enclave turned on them. I don’t want to know why Flint and Erasure pretended to care for me. I don’t want to know just how much of my early life was an illusion you all set up around me, an illusion that the others liked to shatter by beating me and…”
He bared his teeth, glared and turned his fire on the snowy mare. “I am different now! I’m not a damn victim anymore! All that stupid… in-fighting and pettiness… I want to leave that behind me! This--” He raised his forelegs and looked around the basement, at the shelves of books tucked away on one side of the room, at the chemistry set up, at the crates of potion bottles and other equipment. “-- This is my life now! My friends, and my work…!”
“Kid,” he heard Klaxon say. His voice was relaxed and mellow. It almost disturbed him to hear the bronze stallion speak in any way that didn’t have some gruffness in the undertone and inflection. “Remember way back when, before any Enclave, before Hope? Remember the cellar? Remember what you said about getting over your past to move on?”
“I moved on just fine,” Falcon insisted, folding her forelegs.
“Nah, kid. Sounds to me like you were just fine with rejecting it. That’s not gonna do you any good. Trust me, I tried it.”
“Klax…” Falcon sighed. He looked from the bronze stallion to the blue unicorn, who watched everything with a great intensity in his eyes, as if he was fighting a constant battle with himself to stay out of the exchange. From him, the pegasus looked to Alana. She teetered in between jumping to his aid like the hero she was and a confused outsider who didn’t know what anyone was talking about. He could see that she wanted to do something but like Steiner, was doing all she could to control herself.
“Alright,” Falcon conceded, bowing his head. “Let’s hear the truth about my parents. Why did the Enclave mark them for death?”
“Falcon Wing, your father and mother were…”
***
Another bad stormy day in the Equestrian Wasteland. The cloud barrier roiled and churned with the winds but never opened up. It was a dark maelstrom, that blanket over the sky, until there was lightning and thunder. Then the sky was bright for split-seconds at a time. No matter the weather, though, ponies had to work. Their jobs just weren’t things that yielded to whatever mood the world happened to be in two-hundred years after becoming one hell of a burn victim. The sheets of rain fell but the flyers kept flying.
“You know, back when I first did my rounds in stormy weather, I thought my suit was going to bring a lightning bolt on my tail for sure!”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure we all thought that. We can kick clouds all we want until we see some actual action. Then we pray to what fuck-off divinity is out there to get out of it alive.”
“You have such a way with words, Heron.”
“When will you call me by my codename, Sideslip?”
She scoffed. “I always called you by your codename -- up until we got married.”
“You might have married me officially, but we were already married to our missions long before we first met. Diamondback out.”
“Copy that, Diamondback.” He could practically hear her trying not to stick her tongue out.
“Keep it professional, Cottonmouth.”
Sightseer and Razorback. Blue Heron and Gale Sideslip. A duo with bonds forged through military service. Birds of a feather may flock together, but pegasi of a kind leave everypony else behind. And that was certainly true for these two ponies that tore through the violent and turbulent skies on wings sheathed in metal. They rolled, banked, swerved, climbed and dived all while having pleasant small-talk over their suits’ communication systems. They were two of the top operatives in Outpost Ursa’s recon special forces group, a squad known as WARHAWK. They tore across the skies over Ghastly Gorge. Other members of WARHAWK were en route by their command. A group of five, they were headed by Wildcat and Bobcat. Erasure and Flint by any other name.
Diamondback tucked in his wings and dropped out of the sky, doing a roll all throughout the rapid descent before opening them again as he fell into the gorge. He then glided through the canyon, Cottonmouth hot on his tail. Before long, Diamondback flared his wings, killing his forward flight and hovering in place, his partner doing the same.
“This is the place?” she asked as the rain pounded her armor.
“Not quite. I had the foresight to get an actual meeting place inside a cave.”
“I could see you sitting around the rec-room with a bunch of weather forecasts, you know. Making sure you have every tiny detail down.”
“What’s a tactician for?” Diamondback replied, grinning underneath his helmet.
They descended onto an outcropping that led into an alcove at the side of the gorge’s rock walls. It was a vacant quarray eel’s nest, expansive and oddly smooth. Water flowed down the side of the gorge and washed over the hole and platform, showering the two ponies as they walked into shelter.
Cottonmouth put a hoof to the side of her helmet, dialing in her communication frequency to another friend’s and sending a call out. “Hey, Patchenfix. I bet you’re liking your office a lot right about now.”
“If all the data you’re sending me right now is anything to go by then, yes. I very much love my office,” said the medic-mare over the channel.
“It’s all for the best,” Diamondback chimed in. “Is anyone onto us?”
“Nope. No one has a clue about your unauthorized outing. This is such a violation of my permissions. You guys owe me.”
“That we do,” said Cottonmouth. “Anyway, Patches, talk to you later. Closing comms for now and heading into deep cover.”
“Roger.”
Just like that, the link was terminated and the two continued ever further into the nest. On the off chance that the signal was intercepted, it wouldn’t be able to be traced by the Enclave termination squads, but their cover would be irreparably damaged. Patchenfix was running a huge risk in aiding this mission of theirs. Diamondback and Cottonmouth might have had a recourse if they were discovered, but she didn’t. For that bravery, she was a cherished friend, irreplaceable.
The rest of WARHAWK arrived and took up ranks in the cave, standing in a circle with Diamondback and Cottonmouth at the center. Flint, Erasure and the other operatives listened closely as they spoke. They sat on their haunches, their gazes hidden away behind their helmets.
“The Enclave isn’t self-sustaining anymore. In a few years, it’s going to have to make a move to take back the Wasteland. If it isn’t some outside factor, it’ll be internal; we just don’t have the resources to stay above the clouds as a whole.” Diamondback started pacing, head held high as he made his rounds to each soldier present.
“Our missions on the surface have gone from surveillance and assessment of settlements to resource collection and logistics keeping. If that isn’t a sign of our decline, I don’t know what is.” Cottonmouth fell into step with him, and together their brave voices manifested a commanding presence.
“Things are actually getting better on the surface. Damned if we’ll be labeled Dashites, we can be strong with the other Wastelanders. It’ll be a hard fight just to survive at times, but we’ll also be fighting for the right to live. No more regiments. No more sanctions. No more politics to run your life.”
“We are few, but we’re also skilled. Friends, I believe we can spur a movement that can lead to a brighter future for all of us. And when the time comes, we can fight the Enclave when it decides it's right to leave the clouds and do who knows what to the land below. We can help preserve what’s been growing all this time right beneath our noses!”
“Who are we!?” Diamondback said, thrusting a hoof into the air.
“WARHAWKS!” the others proclaimed. Everyone, sans Wildcat and Bobcat, who simply held a foreleg across their chests in what appeared to be some kind of salute. No one thought anything of their hooves pressing against their suits.
They laid the foundations of their dreams in that cave, during that terrible storm. In the cold, damp and dark, they lit the flames of their cause. They pulled themselves together when their meeting concluded, shoving their rebellious plans into the shadows for safekeeping. Then, as the tight-knit unit they were, they took to the black and angry skies. When they reported back to their outpost, skimming over the cloud layer after braving the harrowing lightning and thunder, they used the cover of the chaotic weather to mask their reentry to the skyfort.
It was all for naught. They were discovered hours earlier, before they ever set hoof outside of the bastion, their bold dreams undermined from the outset. The traitors in their midst hid well, snakes in the grass to the snakes themselves. Hidden in plain sight beside them since the very beginning. When the WARHAWK operatives returned home, they were met with rifles and black carapace.
“We’ve delivered the insubordinates with plans of treason, and as promised we have the proof to pass judgement as well,” Bobcat said with a smugness in his voice as he stepped up to the front of the group, facing the guards with their energy weapons without fear. Wildcat came up beside him then whipped herself around to point an armored hoof at the duo. “They were going to turn all of WARHAWK into tools of rebellion against the Grand Pegasus Enclave.”
“You sold us out?” Gale asked, appalled. “We trusted you two… confided in you two… how? And--”
The gradual whir and warble that the guns made as they charged up, coils crackling with green light, made her stop talking in a heartbeat.
“We could have done something good for the future!” one of the others shouted. “Look at what you’ve done! How the hell can you live with yourselves!?”
“We are loyal members of the Enclave. Our service will be rewarded generously. You have forgotten the sovereignty of pegasus superiority, we haven’t!” Erasure shot back.
“Enough of this,” one of the guards growled. “Take them into custody. We’ll let the high order determine what to do with these… vermin.”
The would-be dissenters were marched by the group of officers across the floor made of clouds. They did not resist. They did not speak. One pony out of the group of ambushing guards stayed with Flint and Erasure to retrieve the recorded evidence from their suits. Once the data was transferred, the officer followed the others out of the room, exiting through a hole in the wall which promptly came together behind him, reforming the door.
“I feel so rotten, guys,” Patchenfix spoke up at long last. She had been with the guards the whole time, standing at the rear, hiding. With the pain in her heat, she did not want to be seen by her one-time friends. She sank into the background, silent and unmoving.
“Don’t be,” Erasure said to the doctor, the bravado in her voice giving her an air of authority. “If you hadn’t complied with us, we would have been forced to report your using of the executive channels to stage these… meetings of theirs. It would have dragged you down with them.”
Patchenfix let her head hang as Erasure and Flint walked off, leaving her alone in the room once the cloud door shut. There, she was left to simmer in her own thoughts.
“We have to make this right. We can’t make this right. We have to try to make this right. Falcon…”
“Hey, Falcon Wing. Your mom and I have… we have a special mission to go on. We… we probably won’t --... Falcon. We love you, Falcon. You’re the last red phoenix in Equestria, you know. Heh… I guess that doesn’t mean much coming from me, though, being your father and all and… stay tight, buddy. It’s gonna be a long and hard road from here on out for you, but take your lumps and swing back hard when the time comes.”
“Son, I’m afraid we have some bad news. Your mother and father were deployed and… through unfortunate circumstances they have… uh, son, they have passed on serving our Grand Pegasus Enclave with unwavering honor. Now, now don’t cry son. We have provisions in place for you already to continue your life in the outpost as a normal member of our society. Maybe one day you can be an upstanding officer as they were. Don’t you want to be a WARHAWK? Flint and I will take good care of you and make sure you can be all you can be. Our future WARHAWK, your parents will be so proud.”
***
“Get the hell out of my home,” Falcon snarled.
Patchenfix nodded. “I always imagined it ending like this.”
“Get. The. HELL--”
“Falcon. We’ve got this.” Klaxon put a stern hoof on the doctor’s shoulder. “No more words.”
“Quite,” said Steiner in agreement.
“I have some things of theirs that I saved before they were terminated--”
“I don’t want anything that you can give me,” the pegasus growled as tears welled in his eyes. “I don’t want any damn thing that would not only remind me of ponies betrayed and sentenced to death, but the one who fucking helped betray them as well!”
Patchenfix nodded somberly and obeyed the direction of the two stallions. As she walked up the stairs, Alana gave her a murderous look. “If you ever come around here again--”
“I don’t plan to, miss.”
Doctor Patchenfix was gone from Hope by midday. She left the same way she came, retreading her footsteps in the snow.
