Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

Chapter Eight: Leibowitz’s Song

        Through the deafening, thundering, scalding abyss I scrambled, blinded by the impenetrable flash fog that had descended upon us. It was so thick, it was impossible to tell that there had ever even been a storm at all. The only thing keeping me tied to the world was Rayleigh’s hoof, now nothing more to me than a faint sense of inertia in the chaos.

        We ran without direction. “Away from the fire,” she’d said.

        I didn’t know how long we had been running. The midnight sun made time meaningless. My lower lip carried a thick wad of mud from all the times I had stumbled, and I judged our progress by the changes in flavor from bitter to rancid that came with each new fall.

But at some point our pace slowed, and the pounding of my heart became the loudest noise, and I finally noticed something else.

Bog smell.

In every direction there was only flat, solid-green land, extending until the flat, solid-gray fog swallowed it. Filled with moss, this place was the wasteland in its truest form.

We kept walking. We said nothing. Rayleigh walked with me and frowned into space, and Romeo hung back behind us the whole time. How far we got, if we weren’t just going in circles, was impossible to tell. The bogs here extended forever.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

I was sure I was going to get hoof rot.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

Squish, squish, squish.

Squishsquishsquishsquish— splat.

        I looked down and found my hooves in the mud furrow of a trail.

        Clear hoofprints punched through the still-living moss. The ruts were sharp, made by wagon wheel and not by the macerating grind of the usual halftracks that traveled these parts. A red plastic cup jutted from the mud.

        “Red cup! Red cup! Red rum, red cup!” I bounced in circles around it. “We should mark down where we are and where these tracks are going, it could be a clue.”

        “Just how do you plan to do that?” said Rayleigh.

        “With Actaeon—”

Without Actaeon’s weight it was like floating. I bounced reflexively. But it was a sad bounce, a heartbreaking bounce heavy with loneliness and grief.

        “Well, it’s still a road. It’ll go somewhere. I guess,” I said. “We’ll probably run into peat harvesters eventually. Next pony I run into, I’ll ask them.”

        We plodded along the road through the haze and the soggy flatland. It was green and really boring. The only thing we encountered was a pool of water. I ordered us all to take a bath in it, to wash off any contamination and fallout from the storm. It could have been contaminated too, but I had to make a judgement call. Being a leader isn’t always easy. Responsibility is a tough job.

_____

        At last, the mud road merged into a larger route. We arrived at the crossing just as a half-track truck trundled along at the intersection. I ran ahead to catch up to the driver.

        “Hey!” I said. “Hey! Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey—”

        I slipped and landed in the mud. I picked myself back up and ran alongside the driver’s cab.

        “Hey! Hey! Hey!” I said. “Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!”

        “Huh?” the driver said. “You wanna buy a carpet? I ain’t selling—”

        “Hey!”

        “Yeah?”

        “Can you give me a ride?”

        He slammed on the brakes. The cab door swung open.

        “Get in,” he said.

        The motor puttered down, and I stood outside as we waited for Rayleigh and Romeo to catch up. The driver glared at me and did a little waiting dance in his seat. “I said get in.”

The cabin and truckbed were made of rough-and-ready wood, overkill-sturdy in its craftwork and coated in a simple primer of milk paint. The truck’s precious mechanical parts were lovingly shrouded in a thick layer of dully shining homebrew cosmoline. Way more than necessary, and keeping the grit-magnet anti-corrosive grease on the moving parts was doing more harm than good, but it likely made the driver feel better about himself.

The truck was a Diesel aftermarket refit of a wartime gem powered machine. I could tell from the noise and the barbecue smell. Diesel, like gems and all the other fuels, had been developed to save us from the grip of coal and bring us back from the brink of disaster, and like all of them it only came to fruition long past the point where it mattered. But the machines themselves outlived, more or less, the society they were meant to save.

Prominent empty fixtures marked where the characteristic massive gill-like conveyant flues of the gem powered engine once stood. It almost certainly hadn’t been the first refit cycle in the vehicle’s lifetime, and it wouldn’t be the last, not until the music stopped and the chairs ran out.

Hörspen was a colossal monument to the fact that building just about anything was a nightmare when you couldn’t rely on your supply of doo-dads, you didn’t have the thingy you needed to make the widgets to make the doo-dad, and you had an ambiguity in the thingy maker schematic that only the pony who designed the damn thing and died fifty years ago could explain.

Backyard furnaces could pump out products for a season or two, but it was just better to just scavenge for parts and cannibalize old stuff than to try to make anything without the all the infrastructure to back it up. All the clever cannibalisms and duck tape solutions in the world could only take you so far, but it kept us all from wearing mohawks and football gear.

        “Hey, are those collectables?” said the driver, startling me from my road warrior fantasy.

…with an axe! I thought.

        He peered down at my Gyrobowls.

        “Yeah?” I said.

        “My kid loves those! You get them dolls for your little sister, eh?”

        “Yeah, no. They were shiny so I grabbed them”

        “Gimme one, and you can come along.”

        “No way! Hey, I thought—”

        He took the truck out of park.

        “Do you want a Rarity?” I said.

        “Nah. Already got one.”

Crap, I thought.

        “But, hey! Is that an Applejack?” he said.

        “Yeah? Uh, you want it?” I said.

        “Everypony loves Applejack.”

        “Yeah, sure. Okay.” I dropped the plastic Applejack on the dash. What a relief!

        When my friend and Rayleigh showed up, he said to us, “Alright, y’all can get in back. Just don’t touch the carpets.”

        Rayleigh sprawled out in a corner of the truckbed. She spread her wings to soak up the shrouded sun of the muggy summer’s day and took a nap. Romeo kept quiet, leaning over the railing to watch the scenery. I got comfy between two rolled up carpets by a dilapidated rattan cage with a lizard in it.

        “‘sup?” said the lizard in the cage.

        “Not much, you?” I said.

        “Not much. Chillin’.”

        “Cool.”

_____

        “…then I hear the best thing to do is feed the bodies to sports,” said the driver through the back window. “They say it’s best to chop ‘em up into six pieces, but they’ll eat it whole just fine. ‘strue they do it fastest if you slice it up like noodles first, mind you. What you ain’t got to do is starve ‘em, that’s just cruel, and it doesn’t even matter at that…”

        Nopony else in the truck bothered talking. Rayleigh was asleep, and Romeo just kept staring out into the bog. The  driver's story at least staved off awkward silence for a few hours.

“…and then I say to him, ‘Well, it don’t matter now, ‘cause that’s what I’m feeding you. Now it’s a hard pill to swallow, sure, but I don’t give a rat’s ass ‘cause this is how it is.’ Now around this time my daughter gets back, and sweet little filly she is…”

Every so often we passed by the rusted, gutted hull of a stranded boat. At first they were abandoned husks sitting askew and slightly sunken in the flatland, but, as the driver rambled on, the boats gradually began sporting light fixtures, window covers, and patios. Grass became more common, and the truck climbed its way out of the bog and into a sparsely wooded valley. The truck had left the bog, but the bog smell hadn't left the truck.

        “…so don’t ever get too comfortable ‘bout any family with too many sports. And not just for that reason, too! Eh-heh-heh…”

        The woods gave way to farmland, and and we came within sight of a village. He stopped a good distance ahead of the gates, far enough so that you couldn’t pick out ponies with the naked eye.

        “Last stop, Ole Valley-O!” said the driver. He got out to make sure none of us were hiding behind the carpets.

        “Hey, thanks, dude. So which way’s Hörspen?” I said.

        “Hörspen? Huh, um, I think it’s that way.” He pointed back to the bog. “Welp, have a good life.” The lizard blew a kiss.

        “Ooh! Oh, did you see any ponies at that spot with the road where you picked us up?” I said.

I watched him get back in the truck and continue on his way through the village.

        “Hey!” I said. “Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!”

        He kept going, and he, along with the bog smell, disappeared into the hills.

        I turned around, and Romeo and Rayleigh were looking at me.

        “Well how was I supposed to know he was headed in the wrong direction? And so what, you forgot, too!” I said. “Learn some personal responsibility, ponies!”

_____

        The upside to getting stuck in Fumbuck was their respect for guest friendship. Village ponies always took you in for the night. They had to. It could turn out I was actually Zeus in disguise, and if that happened I’d smite them for refusing to honor guest friendship.

        A farmer ran up to meet us on the road. He was orange. After inviting us to spend the night and telling us how glad he was to meet us, Orange Pony said, “Now, if you all have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.”

Finally I’m getting some answers! I thought. He started saying something but I got distracted looking at him and zoned out. They’re so dirty.

Dirty as he was, Orange Pony had a delightfully rustic hat. I wanted one.

        Not just for the style, but also because I had run out of sunblock, and UV still gets through the clouds. It turned out letting the birds fly burned up the ozone layer too, and it turned out that we kinda needed that.

Sunblock, all day, every day. Everypony always made fun of me because I wore it in winter, and I always told them it was because I didn’t want to get cancer.

        That was a lie.

        I didn’t care about cancer. I just didn’t want wrinkles. Spending time around Rayleigh was motivation enough. Though, I had to give the old mare some credit. I was surprised didn’t have, like, a million cataracts.

        He noticed me ogling his hat. He just straight-up tossed it to me.

        “Everypony’s gotta have a hat!” he said. “We’re all in this together! Say, where you from, pilgrim? Pat’s Club?”

        “No, uh, Hörspen,” I said.

        His eyes narrowed. “Give it back.”

        “No! My hat!”

        He growled, but his anger diffused when he realized he could extort me. “Gimme your briefcase, and I’ll let you keep it.”

        “Dude, don’t be a dick! There’s nothing inside.”

        “I don’t care what’s inside, you can keep that for all I care. Just give me the damn briefcase.”

        He was being a dick, but I was too tired and sore to deal with his dickness.

        I had to weigh my options. I really wanted that hat, but the briefcase was my best bet for convincing Hotel. This would be my only chance to keep him from bringing out the Wheel like last time.

I am so unlucky, I thought.

        But then my luck improved.

        Some incriminating documents had gotten fused to the inside lining of the briefcase. They were stuck pretty tight, but I was sure if I just applied a little finesse I could pull them out. I would get to keep the hat and the evidence too!

        I yanked and tugged, and half the thing came loose between the plies of paper. I chewed on a ragged scrap, and the rest of the document was an illegible fuzzy white patch on the inside of the briefcase.

        Luck hated me, and even worse it was a tease about it too. It was the briefcase or the hat, and I made the logical choice.

_____

Hat on head, I explored the village. Rayleigh and Romeo had gone along with Orange Dick to take a tour, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that dick any more than I needed to. They had said to come meet them at the “Boat House” when it was dinner time.

They were all boat houses. I wandered down a semi-straight row of homes made of fiberglass yacht hulls, which had been turned upside down and propped up on wattle-and-daub walls.

Up the lane, two stunted, shaggy colts chased a stunted, shaggy filly down the gravel path. She was a dingy green thing aged beyond her years, and her mangy body was covered in matted tufts of fluff. Her eyes were full of unthinking, primordial terror. She carried a dead rabbit in her mouth. It was nearly as big as she was.

        Their own long fur dragging in the mud, the two ran after her. They shouted, “Giz’z’un! Giz’z’un! K’mah!” as they tried to herd her into a corner.

        I shoved the tiny things back for funsies. It gave the little filly enough time to struggle through a gate and lock it behind her. They two colts howled and vented sub-verbal frustrations as the filly devoured the dead rabbit raw in front of them.

        A mare stomped up to me, but she hesitated before speaking. Her belly was full, but her body was too wiry for it to be either pudge or the distended belly of starvation. “Don’t torture the sports, you ass,” she said, and she bolted into her house and bolted the door.

        “Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. All I did was push em. Sorry, I guess.”

        Behind me the colts had finally gotten the rotten wood gate down, and they charged into the alleyway. Over the clattering and crunch sound of the wood, the three screeched over the rabbit.

        “Look out! Look out! Ghosts! Monsters! Fallout!” somepony behind me shouted.

        The three stunted ponies froze as their pupils flooded. One of the colts tumbled over onto his back. He lay perfectly still, legs locked, like an upturned stool. The other two ran screeching in circles. They collided, but they didn’t react. They just kept trying to run in place, grinding against each other, screaming all the while, until they finally became exhausted and slid, asleep, into a puddle.

        Shouting again, an elderly little pony stumbled out of the house connected to the alleyway. He had a little nub of a horn on each temple, and he stepped gingerly on gnarled, cloven hooves. He looked like the Krampus.

        “You look like the Krampus. Are you the Krampus?” I said.

        “It’s June,” he said, snarling.

        I shrugged. “Krampus gotta go somewhere.”

        His eyes narrowed as he glared, not at me, but just kinda in the direction of the area around me. His eyes had gone cloudy, and his shaggy agouti-speckled fur was turning that same milky gray.

        “Yeah, I’m ‘Krampus,’” he said. “Just Krampus. Not a Krampus, not the Krampus. Krampus. You found me, you happy? You want a photo? I’m all out, sorry. The rest of your village will just have to come out and see me here, I guess. Oh. Wait. NO!”

        And as fast as he could, Krampus hobbled back into his into his house. Spurts of stuttering, sparking magic slammed the door extra hard. All five other ponies around me went inside and just stayed in their houses after that, so I kicked rocks around until it was dinner time.

_____

        The Boat House was a peat-insulated timber lodge. Its doors and hatches had all been taken off to let the summer light in, but we had to be very careful stepping up onto the raised floor. The other ponies made sidelong glances at Romeo and me and warned us not to disturb the circle of chalk that had been laid around the lodge’s foundation.

On the steps, I tried to get Rayleigh to take the threat of radiation exposure seriously.

        “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

        “Our bone marrow could be melting right now. It tends to do that, you know. The skeleton is the most fragile part of the body, it breaks all the time,” I said.

        “Does it matter? Do you really think we could get treatment in time? Would a treatment even exist? Let us assume the worst then. What can be done? Come, ‘Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.’”

        “Huh. Well, um, you’re awfully cavalier about this.”

“‘Audaces Fortuna iuvat.’ It isn’t true, but you can hate yourself when you fail to live up to it.” She laughed and clapped as she thought up something she thought was clever. “Ces chevaux courent cavalièrement à Calvaire!”

        “I really hate how you expect me to know what you mean by that.”

        “Who says I do? Who said I knew what I meant by that?”

Not this shit again, I thought, and I went inside to get a bowl of a waterier, dirtier version of Hörspen porridge from a vat labeled “Kommie.” If I was to die, I wasn’t going to die hungry.

        Romeo spent the better part of an hour getting laughed out of the social cliques in the lodge, but he eventually managed to make some friends by joining in in their folk dances.

No matter what culture, no matter what place, there is the universal language of folk dance. It is a stupid language, I thought, smirking a little as I watched the flapping.

        In the corner, where it managed to be dark in the open air, Rayleigh orbited the bar. You’d think she was the type to linger on a beer for hours and think her Byronic thoughts in pensive silence. But no, she was just pounding it.

        Every time the bartender filled her stein she would down it within seconds. He eventually gave up and just got her a bigger one.

        Either the beer was close to water or her frail little body just didn’t care.

        Rayleigh caught me staring.

        “I dunno, I guess I just imagined you as straightedge,” I said.

        “Self-contradictory? Probably,” she said. “If you pointed a gun at my head I’d cry and beg for my life, too. And, of course, I have my petty joys.”

        She smiled. “But, on the other hoof, this beer is shit. Nepenthe couldn’t salvage it.” The skin around her graying mouth sagged and folded under the strain. And in moments, it was bottoms up again.

        The lodge got together to sing, and everypony lined up for a group dance. Romeo had become the guest of honor, and now nopony even seemed to remember hating him.

        A filly, anxious to beat her competition, darted to his side. She was young, and the brief contacts of the contra-dance were still illicit and exotic to her. That real pang of loss in her eyes when they switched to their neighbors spoke of innocent, idle fantasy. Twirling and giggling as she flowed through the dance line. She was at last returned to her partner, and she drew herself around him possessively. Their hooves touched and she was sent flying through safety, freedom, and intimacy in three-beat transit. She had the thrilling privilege of dancing with the stranger, and she was proud.

Damn right you are, I thought.

        “He seems to be doing well,” Rayleigh said.

        We both stood there as the two danced. Rayleigh took unceremonious gulps as she leaned on the bar.

        “So, Charlie, have you noticed that that filly’s a pegasus pony yet?” she said.

        “Yeah, that crossed my mind,” I said.

        She watched as I watched.

        “How much do you know about classical genetics and heredity?” she said.

        “Peas and stuff?”

        “Good enough.”

        She went on in a kinder register than before. “Unicorns can come from earth pony families. Pegasus ponies can come from earth pony families. Yet the genes determining pegasus pony and unicorn heredity are both dominant to the earth pony genes. You see where I’m going with this?”

        “Uh, that you can’t have silent carriers of a dominant gene?”

        “Yes!” For the first time the light in her eyes sparkled and didn’t just burn.

        She struggled to keep her words from racing. “In fact, poly-recessive homozygotes were relatively rare in earth ponies before the war. The more important determiner of pony phenotype is the regulatory mechanism that silences the dominant expression.”

        “I—”

        “At, at, at, ah!” She raised her hoof to silence me.

        “The difference between you and me is not so much that I have pegasus pony genes and you don’t— you could very well have PGNW in you, after all —but rather that my silencing mechanism is broken and isn’t suppressing the genes that we share.

“It’s not enough to merely inherit the unicorn or pegasus pony genes, you also have to inherit a broken silencer too. Typically one does that by having a unicorn or pegasus pony parent, but because of the way silencing genes work, sometimes two poly-heterozygous ‘appendage-positive descendant’ earth ponies can have a child who inherits the broken silencer.

“And rarely, a mutation can cause this too. One might expect that in ‘genetically compromised’ communities they would show up more often. A gene mutates, the silencing mechanism breaks down, and a genetically ‘pegasus’ earth pony gives birth to a foal with wings.”

        “So are there, like, Anti-Enclaves of ground-born nega-pegas?” I said.

“No, I should clarify, this is very rare. Every generation down here without the skyborn pegasus ponies breeds out the requisite genotypes more and more. Her children will be earth ponies. This may very well be the last pegasus foal you’ll ever see. Appreciate it.”

        “Magical. But they think you’re one of them, then?”

        She giggled and shook her head.

        “Also, what’s PGNW?” I said.

        She smiled for real this time. “‘Pony’s Got No Wings.’ It’s the gene that gives you wings. Gene names are like that.”

The ponies of the lodge looked on as she took a deep swig from her stein. Half of them were impressed, and the other half just annoyed that she was hogging all the beer. At last, the bartender lost patience and cut her off.

        “Maybe I’ll tell you about it later,” she said, and she wandered off to socialize.

        Romeo and the pegasus stepped down down from the stage, and the two were mobbed by jocular, congratulatory ponies. Rayleigh made awkward gossip with the old mare’s club, even though she seemed to be the butt of most of their jokes. I put my cool face on and did my best to look uninvested. Avoiding affectation was the surest way to succeed in any social situation.

When the evening wound down, all the drunk ponies gathered together to sing their little anthem.

        “Good times await at the ole gay Boat House!

“‘cause we will all love you even if ye’r a louse!

“Good times await at the ole gay Boat House!

“So don’t be afraid, and don’t be a mouse,

“and follow me to the gay Boat House!”

        It was supposed to be the last song of the night, but it quickly segued into “The Rattlin’ Bog” for another half-hour as the patrons trickled out. Rayleigh among them sang the loudest. The beer had definitely not been watered down.

        That was the Boat House. It was a singing lodge, a Rattlin’ lodge. The lodge was in the bog, that bog around Ole Valley-O. And in that lodge there was a crowd. It was a singing crowd, a Rattlin’ crowd. The crowd was in the lodge, and the lodge was in the bog, that bog around Ole Valley-O.

_____