Fallout Equestria

Chapter 8.

Blood.

It washed around my hooves, splashed against my legs, carried by the river that was Mane Street.

I was standing in the middle of the river, and it was full of corpses.

"How many ponies have you slaughtered?" asked Velvet Remedy's voice accusingly. "It sure didn't take you long to become a mass murderer, did it, Littlepip?"

"v-Velvet?" I looked for her in the storm and blackness. Instead, my eyes found only the bullet-savaged wall of the sheriff's office. Crude spray paint covered it shouting blasphemies. Raiders had been here. Their sickening hoofwork, sadistic mutilations, on display for every pony to see. I watched as the pony torso that dangled from the ceiling inside, its limbs hacked off and coat shaved to the skin, heave against its chains and fall to the floor with a meaty thud.

I tried to scream as it began to crawl towards me!

With a wet rending, the splayed body on the wall, its flesh flayed back to show off its ribs and rotting organs, ripped itself free and sloughed towards me, splashing in the water.

I tried to back away, only to find my hooves mired in the muddy street! The crimson ichor in the water coated my PipBuck and sunk into my coat around my legs. "Calamity! Velvet? Help me!" I screamed, but my voice carried no sound.

A silent sprite-bot watched, doing nothing, as the lower half of a slaver pony joined the things that crept maliciously towards me, a long rope of intestine dragging out behind it.

*** *** ***

I awoke, my heart thudding hard and my body covered in cold sweat, to the sound and shake of the train. I was weak, but warm and less achy than I had any right to be. I was laying in one of the beds on the train's passenger car, a blanket over me. Beside me, Velvet Remedy was waving her horn tenderly over my recently crippled leg. To my amazement, my leg felt mended, if deeply itchy.

I tried to shake the specter of my nightmare. This was not the first sleeping terror that my experiences outside had spawned, but this had been the most deeply unpleasant. The incorporation of my companions, or lack of them, somehow made this dream far, far worse.

Velvet Remedy! The last I had seen her, she was fallen in a pool of her own blood, having saved nearly half a dozen foals...

My ears perked at the sounds around me; looking over my shoulder, I saw the colts and fillies from the sheriff's cells taking up much of the passenger car. They looked weary and beaten; two of them were fast asleep, but one had enough cheer to look at me and grin. "That was awesome!" The colt waved his hoof slowly through the air then stamped it down with a clop.

I gave him a weak smile, my heart finally beginning to calm. Calamity turned from staring out a window to welcome me back to the land of the living.

"We're... okay?" I was hesitant, half-fearing that this was just another dream waiting to become a nightmare. Velvet Remedy nodded reassuringly.

"The slaves?"

"In the caboose," Velvet said softly. Less softly, "This train only has the one passenger car, and I felt the foals needed the space more dearly. So it was either the caboose or strapping them to a flatcar."

Speaking as though I would have suggested something awful was not, I decided, one of her more endearing personality traits.

Suddenly, I remembered my original plan, and the locked pens that the ponies captives had been caged in. "But the locks...?" I knew Calamity could not have picked them, and I couldn't imagine Velvet Remedy, in her own youth, having plied that skill.