Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

Chapter Seven: Tunnel Snakes

Searing green light radiated from the thorns of the concrete thicket. It wasn’t fire. It was too bright, too pure. A green sun had been trapped under the earth, and it was now breaking free of its prison. From the cracks in the concrete, tongues of plasma arced into the air.

Refraction from the heat plumes warped the sky into sinuous tendrils. The column of superheated air dragged from its nest a screeching dracula, roasted alive as it tumbled through the cataclysmic sky.

Lightning forked across the roiling, bulbous clouds, themselves glowing from the near-constant discharges hidden within. Heaven’s wrath, brilliant blue lightning, thick as tree trunks, reduced the ground to craters.

I backed up and got ready to turn around. Even though they kicked out Swap Meat, I figured we still had a shot at staying with the Duggles for a bit.

“Too late for you!” Rayleigh shouted. “We need to take cover! There was a trench on that hillside! Take off your saddles and follow me!”

She pointed back to an old, disused turbary some distance away from the highway. Its network of trenches, and the revetment-like mounds of the peat it yielded, were the best we could have hoped for. Romeo dropped his saddle, but I would have none none of it. Abandon Actaeon? Abandon Flitter? I’d rather take my chances with the lightning.

Rayleigh wove through the sky as if dodging invisible arrows. She rolled right, and we ran to the right behind her. A column of lightning vaporized the ground to our left. The heat seared me. The pressure wave knocked me to the ground. But I scrambled back up again. I couldn’t afford to fall behind. Rayleigh’s guidance meant we never came too close to a strike, but it still felt like being crushed in a corridor of lightning.

The trench’s rear lip had just appeared in sight when Rayleigh gasped and pitched up hard into a knife-edged cobra turn. Too hard. She stalled and dropped to the ground on her back. But Romeo was following too close behind her to react in time. He ran forward and into the lightning.

When my eyes recovered, I saw him lay still. But he was lucky. He lay well outside the circle of steaming earth where the lightning had struck. I ran to his side.

He didn’t get up.

Rayleigh glared at us and dove into the trench. She poked her head out to glare at us again before ducking back in.

I checked his breathing, and he was, and that was good. But after that I had no idea what to do.

Then a lightning bolt struck the earth behind me. A wave of steam scalded my back, and as I tumbled onto my face I experienced a moment of clarity.

Priority one was getting the hell out of the open.

I picked him up as gently as I could. I had no idea what his injuries were, and I just prayed he didn’t have a broken spine. I scurried to the trench, straddled it, and, did a sort of backwards chimney-climb slide thing down the mired walls.

I rested for a mud-covered moment, with Romeo on my belly. Black drops of rain, the size of marbles, fell from the sky and cratered the earth.

Rayleigh appeared from the shadows, wearing a look of umbrage, out of a recessed shack.

“Right. Well, get inside,” she said as she held the creaky door open.

The shack was a skeletal and rotten thing. The rain soaked the rough dugout and pooled at the entrance, and we retreated further underground into a wide tunnel. I hoped the door had been enough to keep anything else from trying to take shelter here.

Since everypony in Hörspen did had to practice electrocution first aid weekly, I went with what I knew and assumed I needed to treat Romeo for shock. I laid him down at the end of the tunnel, and I piled up some mud to keep his legs elevated. My blanket was soaked, so to keep him warm I used Actaeon as a space heater and huddled close beside him. His eyes didn’t open, but his breathing was soft and regular.

The rain rattled on the earth above. Softer drops came from the ceiling as the rain percolated through, yet the fraction of a meter of marsh-dirt between us the sky felt like power armor. The acrid, sinister tang of ozone faded, and as the wet smell of peat and mildew hit my nostrils my shuddering body melted into the earth. I lay there, head lolling, with my jaw open.

_____

I jolted up when Romeo shuddered. He wasn’t awake, but his heart raced. It was in the throes of an arrhythmia.

“Hey, so I don’t know what to do here. You said you were a biomedical postdoc, right?” I said.

Rayleigh stood by doorframe and watched the sky. She stood, entranced, chanting words without meaning in a voice without sound. She took her time before getting back to me.

“Yes,” she said, one traipse later.

“So, do you think you can help?”

“Perhaps you have me confused with some other pony?” said the graying purple pegasus.

“You said you were, like, a biomedical postdoc, right? Like, I mean—”

She scowled. “I research the de novo biosynthesis of inosine monophosphate. Unless this has something to do with glutamine five-phosphoribosyl-alpha-pyrophosphate aminotransferase, I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

‘Look at me! I’m Rayleigh! I know words!’ I thought.

“Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you two,”  Rayleigh said. “I’m here for your benefit. You know I don’t have to stay here.” She looked out to the raging sky and stretched her wings.

“Okay, so why don’t just go do that, then?” I said.

She whirled around. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

“I can’t. That’s why I asked you.”

“Sometimes, the answers aren’t laid out in front of you. Don’t you know that?”

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

“Am I?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” I said.

“I asked first.”

“No, you didn’t. I did. And that doesn’t even—this is dumb, I give up.”

“Do you always give up at the first sign of resistance?” she said.

“Whatever.”

She closed in on me. “Do you run away because you hate thinking?”

“You know, if you’re trying to use the Socratic method to look deep and shit, you’re doing a really bad job of it. If that’s all you can do, then please, by all means, go ahead and leave,” I said.

I put my ear to Romeo’s chest. His heart hadn’t slowed, but it was beating regularly. For a moment she looked like she was going to say something, but she just threw her wings up in a huff and turned to look at the tunnel wall.

“You’ve done all you can,” she said at last.

_____

It didn’t look like any of us were going anywhere soon. I resigned myself, and, like so many other ponies in times of adversity, I took solace in the pages of the Lunar Auroch bible.

Song of Spiders 9

1 And so i all the spiders ran through Equestria.

And all the ponies were scared ii and ran into house.

But except for one pony,

who stood in the street and angry!

2 And she said, “Stop spiders!” iii

And they stopped.

3 And a big brown spider iv jumped off of her head.

And her head was gray and her coat was gray too,

and her hair was straight.

And the spider v was brown and big,

and made angry click.

i. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

ii. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

v. See ii.

Such poetry, I thought. I wonder if there’s—

Romeo woke with a wheeze. I leapt to his side as he sat up. He looked around, slowly digesting the situation. He chewed on his lip for a moment. He didn’t look confused, rather it was like he was looking for the witty thing to say.

“Not the best place to wake up, is it?” I said.

“Yeah, the humidity’s doing awful things to your hair,” he said.

That’s the zinger I was hoping for, I thought. My optimism was short lived. He started to slump down, and I helped lower him to a more stable posture.

“We need to get out of here… right… now,” said Romeo as he fell back asleep. “Five minutes….”

“Bad idea,” Rayleigh said.

“Uh, no, it’s a really good idea.” I pointed at the fire. “There’s probably stuff in that stuff.”

“No, it’s a bad idea.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“I already told you it was a bad idea.”

Well, that had me convinced. I started packing up. As soon as Romeo could stand we were going back to Gobbler’s Knob.

“You can risk going sterile in twenty years, or you can risk dying in a lightning storm today. Weigh your options.”

She had a point. But I had a Actaeon.

“Aight, well. If I’m gonna weigh my options, I need a full picture.” I went over to Romeo and swapped the computer box with my now dry blanket to keep him warm.  After pulling the sensor modules loose, I scooted Actaeon’s scopes up up into line-of-sight of the fireball.

Rayleigh watched me until she decided she knew what I was doing.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Do you think spectroscopy is point and shoot?”

“We’re not doing a research experiment,” I said, as I shoved laminated checklist cards upright into the mud in front of me. “It’ll be good enough.”

Rayleigh sighed. “I can’t stop you,” she said, with a resigned shrug.

I went through the checklist of threats. “Ionizing radiation looks fine, we’re not getting a dose—”

“I have no way of checking your results. Unless you actually find anything notable, I don’t care,” Rayleigh said.

She still peeked over my shoulder. I believed her when she said she didn’t care about my results, but she couldn’t hide that she was interested in the way I was collecting the information. She looked pleased, or, at the least, not angered.

“Do you mind?” I said. “I’m trying to do some ‘brating here.” I tapped the flickering phosphorescent viewfinder for emphasis, and I tried to ignore her as she loomed over me.

_____

The light was like the lanterns of passing cars. Every time a beam broke through, a concrete column collapsed upon it, sealing it. Flash, then dark. Flash, then dark. The compound struggled, mortally wounded, determined to hold on to its charge against the overwhelming siege from within.

My computer beeped when it finished up the last survey. The beep became a low rattle when the speaker unseated itself and lodged itself in the fan guard. I told myself I’d fish it out later, as soon as I plugged the monitor back in. The brown screen warmed up and greeted me with exactly what I didn’t want to see.

“Alright, you wanted bad news? I got bad news.” I said.

I showed her the chromatogram. “Check this shit out.”

“What’s this supposed to mean?” she said.

“Look at the figure legend.”

“All it says is, ‘Figure One. Check this shit out.’”

“Oh. That’s the template. My bad.” I scribbled down an actual legend on scratch paper. “Well okay, if those markers are breaking, then the energy released as they reanneal is gonna fry us. We need to leave ASAP.”

“Those markers aren’t indicating breakage.”

“Look, lady, the ECS CAS Databook says that zero bands on MspI marker fragments means reannealing. There’s the CAS databook and you, and I’m going with CAS.”

“Then CAS is wrong.”

“Right…”

She slapped me hard in the face.

“What the fuck—”

“Are you only capable of parroting your ancient factbook? That model for annealment markers was flawed eighty years ago, it should even acknowledge the unexplained discrepancies in the CAS entry. Do you think science has been standing still for eighty years?”

She hit me to let me know that was rhetorical.

“There’s no reannealing,” she said. “The reason there’s a zero band is because the fire isn’t strong enough to break the marker site in the first place.

“And you practically performed the experiment that proved that yourself just now. Examine the chromatograph, draw your own conclusions and test them with other observations to see if it holds up. Be more critical!

“All of the molecules in this category are going to have similar fragment overlaps! If the MspI fragments have reannealed, then all of the other molecules would reanneal, too, and we would see bars on the zero position for every lane on the chromatograph!”

She hit me again.

“Furthermore,” she said, ”you should realize that two-base overhangs aren’t stable enough to anneal at room temperature, let alone in the in furnace of radioactive inferno!”

I checked back and forth between the chromatograph printout and the the CAS entry.

“Shit. You’re right,” I said.

She hit me again.

“Would you stop?!” I said.

She raised her hoof to strike, but I blocked the old mare without much effort.

“I will throw you,” I said. She backed down real fast.

“So we’re safe,” I said.

“No. All we know is that your equipment has yet to detect anything dangerous. Those are not the same things. And what I just said about the markers was on the conceit that your equipment actually works as advertised, which is something we don’t actually know to begin with. All sorts of horrible things could be happening to us that your little junk heap can’t see. To wit, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’”

“I—”

Deep reverberations of a dolorous metallic groan shook me off my feet. It came from the left, the right, all around, and under. The cracking and creaking sounds of wrenching and warping grew louder, came nearer, and shook harder with every passing second, until the ground itself broke into an anguished scream as something gave way deep beneath the earth.

Quick as the flash that came, Rayleigh seized me by the leg and dragged me deeper into the tunnel.

When the mud hissed, Rayleigh hissed, “Wait, wait! Wait till it dies.”

The light cleared, and I climbed up to the baked, crackled mouth of the tunnel. The embers of the dugout burned red and gold. Rayleigh snapped up again to yank me back by the mane. She dug into the dirt as she pressed me into it. Romeo was awake and alert, and he followed Rayleigh’s lead and hunkered down too.

It was the sky’s turn to scream. The whistling of the wind rose to a moan and then to a wail.

“Exhale! Exhale now and—”

And then silence. Things that should have made noise didn’t. A wave of vertigo and nausea hit me as my ears burst into splitting pain. My lungs had been empty, but I felt my breath sucked out of me.

The pain subsided, and the roar returned. Wrenching back-and-forth gusts followed it. The tunnel shook just as much as it had during the earthquake, and the layer of dried mud at its base peeled partially from the earth and swung back and forth like a shutter board in a storm.

The backdraft had brought the smoldering dugout into a brilliant conflagration. Rayleigh and Romeo stood over me to help me up. They were bathed in dancing lights of sickly sweet lime green and tangerine.

The thunderclaps were no longer just from thunder. The lightning no longer wracked the sky alone. The highway crumbled as the magic that had sustained it nearly a century now fueled its destruction. Arcs of energy tore through the highway, and the ground gave way in their wake. The green fire broke loose across the marsh and birthed smaller, natural fires in its wake.

Their silhouettes still visible through the river of fire, the tree-like claws of the compound still fought to contain the infernal core. They lost. The pressure and heat dissolved the bastions like wind on sand. Hotter than any desert, the sand took to the sky, glittering as it transformed into steam jets of liquid glass to join the clouds above.

“Lightning and radiation don’t matter anymore. We’re going now,” Rayleigh said. Romeo nodded. He was standing like a champ.

“Where will we go?” I said.

“Away from the fire,” she said.

“But—”

“You really like being on fire, don’t you?”

I nursed my burns at her burn.

“Is everypony okay?” Romeo said.

“How you doin’, crah?”

“When I die, it won’t be in this cave. Let’s go.”

But somepony wasn’t okay. Actaeon wasn’t.

The love of my life, moon of my moons, lay in scorched and fractured pieces, connected to each other loosely by tangled, fraying wires. As I caressed it that one final time, Actaeon zapped me, as if to say farewell. The shock brought back so many memories, and it would be the last. Choking down sobs, I began to sing.

“Hush now, quiet now

“It’s time to lay your sleepy head

“Hush now, quiet now

“It’s time to go to b—”

“Get going!” Rayleigh kicked Actaeon down into the tunnel. It tumbled down the slope and burst into flames, and then, with a squeal, it exploded. Then it exploded again, and all the stuff that got shot out in the explosion exploded too. The shrapnel pierced the ceiling, and the mud and water that had collected on the surface broke through and buried the tunnel in a cave-in. And then caught fire.

Good night, sweet prince.

_____