“So, what's the quest?”

I returned to the apartment from my last minute pass through the Seadlle markets to find Windfall planted nearly up against the radio, listening to the deep reverberating bass of DJ PON3 as he conducted one of his many daily news updates. Unsurprisingly, the subject was once more the deeds of his favorite mare: Mare-do-Well.

“Celebrations in the streets of Arbu today, courtesy of our oh-so-gallant Mare-do-Well. For those ponies who aren't in the know, Arbu recently came under attack by raiders flying Red-Eye's banner. It looked like the small town was about to go the way of Fillidelphia; that is until the mare with a special hatred for slavers came to their rescue. That mare of miracles single-hoofedly took on a small army and came out on top, breaking the siege.

“This DJ wishes to extend his personal thanks to the Mare-do-Well, for all of the righteous good she's doing in the Wasteland. If you're listening, Mare-do-Well; why don't you drop on by Tenpony Tower? I'll have my assistant arrange for an interview so that you can broadcast your message out across the whole Wasteland. Because, apparently, some ponies haven't gotten your memo: slavery in the Equestrian Wasteland is at an end.

“And now, a little Flank Sinatra, to south your savage souls...”

The Manehattan radio host's words faded out, usurped by the deep lilting baritone of a long dead singer from Equestria's past. I stepped over and flicked the radio off, which rewarded me with a frown from Windfall. But, at least I now had the young filly's attention.

“Did you finish packing?” I inquired of the filly, casting an eye towards her saddlebags. To the pegasus' credit, I saw nothing of the supplies I'd laid out for her to stow, and the leather containers at least appeared to be filled to capacity. Windfall nodded, “one week of granola? Four days of water? Three healing potions? Six magazines of ammunition? Blanket?” as I listed off every item that I'd set aside for her to carry on our trip, the filly confirmed that she'd put it into her bags or affixed it to her barding. Similarly, I was mentally tallying my own carried stores.

When I'd exhausted the list, and Windfall had confirmed the presence of every item, I instructed her to pick up her bags, “the sooner we leave, the more distance we can cover before nightfall,” the distance to our destination would have taken me the better part of four days on my own; with a filly in tow, I was anticipating another two days each way, at least.

“Why are we going to, uh...where are we going again?” Windfall inquired as she tightened the straps on her bags.

“Stable 108,” I reminded her, opening the door to allow her outside. I closed and locked it behind us. Not that I'd opted to leave much of our property behind. The pony we were renting from had been paid through the end of the month, and we should be back long before then; assuming we survived. However, I wasn't entirely convinced that he wouldn't just give the two of us up for dead in a week and give the place over to somepony else in our absence.

“Why are we going there?”

“Because according to Ten Penny's logs,” I informed her, “that stable was another failure. It's pretty close, so I'm thinking we can check it out and see if there's any worthwhile salvage.”

Prospecting in a stable probably wasn't any less risky than scouring the Ruins for valuable materials, but the salvage was more likely to be valuable. Even in the stables that failed, there was usually a lot of Old World tech that survived. Circuit boards, rare ammunition calibers, hard to manufacture weapons; dredging up the right stable could set a pony for life. Of course, with the chance of great reward, came the chance of lethal risk. Stables were dangerous; especially the 'dead' ones. Psychotic ponies, vicious critters, magical radiation; there'd be nothing easy about this.

Of course, there had been nothing easy about our time in the Ruins either. It felt like every time we set our hooves outside the gate, disaster was waiting in the wings for us. Gang ambushes, deranged robots; something invariably went wrong. I figured that if I was going to tempt fate, I'd at least try to see a decent reward for it.

Windfall fell into step beside me as we headed for the city's main gate. Seaddle was bustling with activity at this hour. The markets were humming with activity, ponies were chatting at cafes and haggling over wares. Soldiers, both in and out of uniform, trotted along the road those on duty often escorting those not back to their barracks after having been a little too liberal with the Wild Pegasus.

Ponies being flanked by the local militia were a common sight. The guards were always arresting a pony for some infraction or another. Petty theft, tax dodging; Seaddle had a lot of laws, which meant that there were a lot of options that the uniformed soldiers of the city had at their disposal if they felt like making your day a little more difficult. Having a lot to lose from even a casual questioning from the guard, I was extremely mindful about avoiding eye contact when they walked by.

Today though, a pair of guards managed to catch my attention. Or rather, the pony that they were flanking did. A blue unicorn mare with pale yellow eyes was walking in between two uniformed earth ponies. Around her neck, I saw that Vision was wearing a collar. Not the explosive variety that I'd become used to seeing on ponies out in the Wasteland. This one was actually rather familiar. Adz had been carrying a similar collar in his bags.

I soon realized, as they neared, that the collar I had wasn't merely similar to the one that Vision was wearing. It was identical! Down to the polished jet stud in the front. I also noticed that the unicorn's steps were far more unsure that I'd ever seen them. Even blind though she was, I'd never seen the unicorn mistep of hesitate with her hooves before. I'd watched her navigate a crowded bar room with ease. Now though, she faltered nearly every other step, stubbing her hooves almost constantly.

Her horn wasn't glowing; not even faintly. What was up with that?

Part of me wanted to stop the group and ask them what was going on; but I quickly decided that it wasn't worth antagonizing the guardponies with her. If they were in a fowl mood, they might bring me in too for 'interfering' or something. Too much of a risk just to satisfy my curiosity. Best to just keep walking, it was none of my business anyway what was going on with Vision.

Windfall, on the other hoof, felt no such inclination, “Hi, Miss Vision!” the filly called out, waving her hoof.

Horseapples.

This, of course, got the blue mare's attention, and she whipped her head in our direction. Sort of. She was at least staring towards our side of the street. Vision drew to a sudden halt, drawing annoyed glares from her chaperones, “Windfall?” her expression instantly shifted from morose to hopeful, “Jackboot? Are you there too?”

Well, no help for it now, “hey, Vision,” I replied reluctantly, “I see you're busy. Bye,” I put a hoof around Windfall's shoulder and tried to get us back on our way. Whatever this was, I wanted no part of it.

“Wait, please help me!” Vision pleaded in strained tones. It looked like she was about to run to me, but the guards with her grabbed the mare before she got more than a step. Vision whimpered and looked to her guards, “no, you don't understand, he knows me! He'll give me a place to stay!”

“What?” I asked, confused. She had a place to stay, I'd been there. What was all this about? And how had I managed to get roped into it?

One of the guards looked at me severely, “is that true? You know this mare?”

Oh, how I wanted to lie. No, officer, never seen this crazy bitch before a day in my life. But, thanks to Windfall, it was pretty obvious that I did know her. Hopefully, I wasn't about to get dragged into whatever she'd done wrong. If Vision tried to, then I'd cut any deal the guards offered. I'd rat her out for murder. I didn't know who's, but I was sure that some buck somewhere had died; and I was prepared to swear to Celestia that I'd seen her do it myself if it got me off whatever hook that mare was trying to hang me on.

“We've met before, yes,” I responded cautiously, “why? What'd she do?”

The other guard answered, “several ponies reported this mare sleeping on the street the last two nights. We're bringing her in for vagrancy. Unless,” the guard went on, “you're willing to put her up?”

Be ki—

Oh fuck no! That damn yellow pegasus could cram her kindness up her ass! 'Be kind'? Be fucking 'kind'?! I'd let Vision cheat me out of what she'd promised to pay me. I'd given her the gift of sight through that memory orb I'd just let her have for free. I'd killed the buck who'd been hounding her ever since she escaped from him. I had shown this mare more kindness than I'd ever shown any pony in my entire life! And now this cunt of a psychoses was expecting me to give Vision a warm bed to sleep on for who knew how long? I bet I wasn't even going to be allowed to fuck her either, was I?

I could feel the pegasus mare wince under my mental onslaught. I could sense the very idea of extorting sex for room and board making the pony in my head uneasy. I didn't think so. My 'kindness' had its limits; and Vision had exhausted them a long time ago. It wasn't my fault she'd gotten herself in the trouble with the law. Nor was it my responsibility to bail her out of it. She was a grown mare for Celestia's sake!

“Sorry,” I answered, leveling my stern gaze at the mare, “I'm afraid not. I already have my hooves full taking care of my filly. I can't look after a blind mare too,” Vision's face fell into a look of despair. For a moment, I thought she was about to continue to beg for my help; but I guess that something in my tone had suggested that the effort would be wasted.

“But-” Windfall began. A fierce glare from me silenced her though.

“We don't have the room, anyway,” I went on, glaring at the filly until I was certain she'd hold her tongue. Though, something told me that she'd want to continue this conversation later. Fine, as long as it waited until we were outside the city's gates.

“Alright then,” the guard shoved Vision roughly, prompting her to continue walking in the direction they had been, “no more detours, got it?” he hissed at the mare.

“Wait!” Windfall called out after them. Oh for the love of Celestia! It was all I could do not to outright strike the filly. There, satisfied? My act of kindness for the day: not beating the snot out of Windfall for disobeying me. For some reason, the yellow pegasus didn't seem to be all that mollified, “what's going to happen to Miss Vision?”

“The punishment for vagrancy is a five hundred bit fine. She'll be put into indenture until she pays it off,” one of the guards answered, “about six months or so.”

I nabbed the filly by the nape of her neck and roughly dragged her back in the direction we'd been heading. I bid the guards a good day with a grin, and when they were back on their merry way, reeled on Windfall, “don't you ever do that again!” I hissed at the filly in a low growl, “you see guards, you leave 'em be, got it?!” the filly recoiled in shock, her eyes growing wide at the sight of m obvious ire, “they're looking for any excuse to drag anypony away to jail. Do. Not. Talk. To. Them.

“Ever.”

“But-”

“No 'buts',” I cut her off, “you saw them, arresting Vision for vagrancy? Do you even know what vagrancy is?”

“No,” she admitted sounding nervous.

“She slept outside. That's it. That was all she did, and she got arrested for it. What do you think they'd do to somepony who bothered them with too many questions?” That at least seemed to take the last of the back-talk out the filly. She was much more willing to heed my nudges towards the gates. She only looked back towards the blue mare being escorted out of sight three more times before Vision left our view.

I managed to only look back once. Five hundred bits for being homeless? That seemed a might steep. Heck, to hear that vagrancy was any sort of crime at all was more than a little surprising. You certainly wouldn't see security ponies back east concerning themselves with where anypony slept, so long as it wasn't in the bed of the security pony themselves at any rate.

Why not simply throw them out if the city's leaders didn't like ponies sleeping on their precious sidewalks? Levying a fine seemed ridiculous. If they had bits, they wouldn't be homeless! That the punishment in lieu of paying the fine was indenture wasn't lost on me though. I knew that word. From back east. I'd heard a Society pony once use it to describe their serfs: 'indentured servants'. Given the way Society ponies treated their second-class citizen workforce, I'd taken it to be fancy-speak for 'slave'.

Odd to then see that sort of practice in a place where Luna herself had ordered slavery to be abolished by royal decree. Must be some nuance that I wasn't catching. Sounded temporary to hear the guard talk about it. Six months, he'd said? Then what? Put Vision back out the street no better off than she was before? Pick her up a couple days later when she was still sleeping outside?

Quite the racket.

I wonder what sort of work they lined up for blind unicorn mares...

Probably not the same kind of work that I'd lined up for the two of us, I wagered.

Speaking of, “so, what do you know about stables?”

The filly frowned, “you said that some ponies hid there after The War. Other than that, only what I've heard on those recordings from the pipbuck,” she admitted. That wouldn't be much then. Ten Penny had been very light on the details of what they'd encountered in the sites that they had visited. Given his intended audience, I imagine that he had simply assumed that anypony listening would be familiar with what he was talking about when he mentioned stables and talismans. Admittedly, I was a little hazy on a lot of what he was talking about too some of the time.

I did know what a stable was though, “stables were shelters, right. Sometimes hundreds of ponies lived in them for decades. A lot of them opened a long time ago, some of them are still closed today. And, a few,” a lot by some counts, actually, “went wrong. Nopony knows why. Nothing's perfect, I guess. But, what that means is that there are stables out there with a lot of valuable stuff inside. We're going to 108 in order to see what we can find, and hopefully make a lot of bits,” it had been some time since we'd had a big payoff, and funds were getting tight.

“Don't let your guard down though,” I cautioned, “even 'dead' stables can be dangerous. Automated defenses, critters, Celestia knows what could still be in there that's waiting for a chance to kill an unwary prospector.”

“Then why are we going all the way out there?” Windfall grimaced, “there're plenty of things that try to kill us in the ruins; and we don't need to trot halfway across Equestria to get there.”

The filly's bit of cynical humor actually got me to chuckle. She'd grow up to be a sensible mare yet, “because I'm hoping that it's not all that dangerous. Ten Penny and his crew made it in and out alive, after all. We might even walk away with one heck of a payday too.”

The filly was quiet for a moment, “is Vision going to be okay?”

“She's a grown mare,” I frowned, not keen on dwelling on the subject of the mare any longer, “she'll be just fine.”

The two of us stood before the foreboding maw of the cave which the Old World contraption on my left foreleg insisted would take us to the entrance of Stable 108. I hated caves. Nothing good ever came from them. Radscorpions, Diamond Dogs, Timberwolves. Something always seemed to be waiting in caves for unwary ponies to wander in and get eaten. According to the audio logs on the pipbuck, it had been about six weeks since Ten Penny and his expedition went through this same cavern.

Six weeks was more than enough time for something to move in that hadn't been there before.

Only the fact that the pipbuck wasn't displaying any red blips in front of my eyes at the moment was keeping me from turning the pair of us around and heading back for Seaddle. Still, I had yet to put this pipbuck through any serious testing; and I didn't know how it determined what to display as red blips. I didn't even knew if it could detect all possible threats. If it only detected living things, would it know to show a hostile robopony as a red blip? I'd had yet to run into a robot while wearing this thing, after all.

'Caution' was the watchword of the day. I drew my weapon, “pistol out,” I muttered to Windfall in a low voice around the weapon's grip, “keep alert, stay close, and no sounds.”

I looked back and saw the pegasus filly nod, taking her own smaller firearm into her mouth and setting a good grip on the weapon. She stepped closer to my side, and the two of us ventured forth into the cave. A few steps in, and I reached out to tap one of the buttons on the pipbuck with my hoof. A pale white light burnt to life, illuminating the path ahead of us. Another of the device's useful little functions that I'd stumbled upon by accident; and was nearly blinded by in the process...

I was going to get around to learning about this damn thing, I really was!

Halfway in, we still hadn't happened across any critters; but we did find a slew of bones. Not any fresh ones, fortunately. These were old. Very old, judging by the way most of them were dressed. A lot of pre-war clothing; though I bet that the styles had been pretty contemporary at the time these ponies had died. Some of the corpses were huddled in small groups. Larger skeletons curled up around smaller ones. Parents comforting their foals; much like those orphans at the shelter.

Windfall didn't seem to be be put off much by the sight of so many skeletons. I suppose that was a good sign.

By some miracle of Celestia, we encountered nothing in the cave, and soon found ourselves standing before the massive cog-shaped opening of the stable proper. Ten Penny and his team hadn't bothered to close it behind them; and why should they have? It was just an empty stable that had held nothing they needed. I stepped through the opening. Windfall was close on my heels.

These places weren't anything quite new to me. I'd been in one before. Granted, not for very long though. The filly with me however, had eyes as wide as dinner plates. Everything that she was seeing now was completely new to her. Her head craned around, looking at her surroundings in awe. The pistol even nearly dropped from her slack jaw before she regained her composure.

“Focus,” I cautioned her, “these places can be dangerous,” on that note, I peered intently at where blips tended to appear on the pipbuck's overlay. Clear so far.

Next I sat down for a moment and tapped my way through the menus until I came to the stored maps. Ten Penny had been wearing this while he'd explored the stable; and it had retained the map of the facility that he'd downloaded from a terminal in here. Which was helpful, since I understood very little about how computers worked.

“What are we looking for?” Windfall asked quietly.

“Weapons,” I replied, “this stable would have had an armory. Hopefully they left something behind,” there was a war on, after all. Guns were at a premium in Seaddle, and most of those that were for sale had been used and abused for centuries. Any weapons we found here, so long as they'd been properly stored, would be in relatively pristine condition. None of the rust or built up carbon that plagued so many of the firearms currently in circulation across the Wasteland. Anything serviceable we found here would fetch a good price.

I scoured the map on the screen of my pipbuck. Fortunately, it looked like the security station was kept on the upper level. Made sense. If the stable ever came under attack, you'd want its defenders to be between the inhabitants and the doors. It didn't look to be too far out of the way either. Just the other side of a large atrium. My head rose up from the screen and I performed one final check for blips. Nothing. For now.

Once I got an idea of our intended course, I flicked through to the list of recordings that had been left on the pipbuck. A dutiful chronicler, Ten Penny had of course recorded a report on his team's findings in this stable. I'd listened to it a couple of times already, but I was going to play it once more to reassure myself that there wasn't anything I was forgetting to look out for in here.

“Survey Log, entry nine,” the now familiar voice of the engineer pony droned on, sounding tired, “still no luck. We'd held out hopes for Stable 108. The main door had still been closed, and the place looked to be in good repair. Deserted though, as best we can determine. Some sort of emergency protocol is in effect too; only a couple of doors are operational.

“We made our way to the maintenance level, and that's where we hit a snag. Different contractor. The talisman's here aren't compatible with our own stable's systems. I thought about bringing a couple back anyway, thinking we might be able to find a way to jury rig them or something, but Sun Spot insists that it isn't that simple. Something about magical frequencies and energy resonance oscillations. I didn't catch all of it, but I'll defer to our resident unicorn's expertise when it comes to dealing with magic and talismans.

“So, on to the next stable on our list. Stable 148.”

The recording uttered an audible click and went silent. So, lot's of locked doors, no monsters worth mentioning, and a lot of intact equipment. That boded pretty well for this trip, for the most part. No specific mention of the armory, but if so much of the rest of the stable had been left intact...

I stood up and trotted through the open door. There were still working lights in this place. Little red panels mounted in the ceiling and spaced out quite far apart. Presumably, these weren't what would have kept the stable illuminated during normal operation. Some sort of measure to conserve power? Ten Penny had mentioned emergency conditions, this might have been what he was talking about. Might be related to what had prompted whoever had once lived here to leave.

We passed through the small chamber which housed the machinery responsible for moving the massive steel cog that protected the stable, and found ourselves looking out over a vast open gallery. Benches surrounded a patch of dirt. Several tables ringed with chairs were scattered throughout the room. It resembled some of the rotted parks that dotted the surface. A common area, I supposed, where the inhabitants could congregate and convince themselves that they weren't rapped inside of a glorified bean can for the rest of their lives.

The two of us were standing on a walkway that encircled the large chamber. To the left, I could see a rusty set of stairs leading down to the next level. I also spied a door down there at the other end of the atrium with a discolored sign posted next to it reading: 'SECURITY'. The door was open.

I indicated for Windfall to follow me, and the two of us made our way carefully down the protesting set of stairs. The creaking metal echoed through the empty room, seeming to grow steadily louder with each reverberation. Halfway down, I stopped and winced, waiting until the noise had died down. If there were any critters lurking about in these corridors, they knew that we were here now. Best make this visit quick.

The security office wasn't very big. I don't really know what I was expecting, but I guess that it really shouldn't have been much. Maybe there had been a few hundred ponies living here, which would have represented a a lot of potential victims for an individual like myself. On the other hoof, where would I have been able to go if I'd gotten caught? Couldn't exactly skip town if things got hot. Would have been good motivation for staying in line I guess. A place like this probably didn't need a huge guard force, compared to what cities top-side employed. A half dozen lockers, a small holding cell, and a couple of desks with computer terminals on them was all that seemed to constitute the security office of this stable.

My attention was focused on the lockers. I instructed Windfall to keep a lockout at the door in case something wandered into the atrium, while I began searching. Empty. With each bare locker, my hope of a rich haul waned a little more. Of course they were going to be empty. The lack of corpses inside the stable should have been a glaring indicator. We may not have gone very deep into this place, we'd really only just scratched the surface, but I'd seen what a truly 'failed' stable looked like. This place may be empty, but it was beginning to look like it had been more of an orderly evacuation than a true disaster.

Honestly, that was starting to gnaw at the back of my mind a little bit. This...wasn't right.

Ten Penny hadn't mentioned anything about raiding the armory, and even if they had taken the opportunity to replenish arms and armor, the amount of equipment here should have been more than three ponies could use practically. They certainly hadn't shown much interest in bartering, judging from the audio logs I'd heard. Hard to blame them. Considering that the few examples of Wasteland inhabitants that they had met until this point had been White Hooves or raiders, I doubt that they wanted to get very close to the locals.

So, if they hadn't taken the weapons, and the door had been sealed when Ten Penny arrived, then it must have been the stable's inhabitants that took the weapons. Presumably because they were all evacuating the stable for some reason. 'Emergency measures' might have had something to do with why they might have left. Which, made a lot of sense. Something went wrong, so they evacuated, and they took the weapons and armor with them for protection.

This begged the question: what had gone wrong? And, why bother to close up the stable when they left? My eyes wandered to the terminals nearby. Their green glowing screens testified to their operational status. Maybe I'd find some explanations on them. Might even find a way to open the locked doors that Ten Penny had mentioned. It was possible that there was still something worth looting in this place.

I sat myself down behind one of the terminals and immediately frowned. The screen was displaying a message that I had seen more than a few times out in the Wasteland. Whomever had tried to use this thing last, and unlock its secrets, had failed. The system was locked, and nopony short of a digital savant was going to be able to do anything about it. I was not such a pony, so this computer was instantly a lost cause.

The other computer was working just fine. Its security measures had even been conveniently circumvented prior to our arrival. I cast a glance at Windfall to make certain that the pegasus filly was still attending to her assigned task. Contented, I tapped at the keyboard with careful strokes. I didn't know a lot when it came to these things, only a little bit more than I knew about pipbucks really; but I had had a lot more opportunities to play with these things than the rare contraption on my foreleg. I could at least manage to navigate a directory and seek out files.

This terminal had once belonged to one, 'Deputy Cauliflower'. A lot of logs were on this system. Not much that was of any use to us. Arrest records, crime reports, resident complaints, useless drivel. Then I found some personal commentaries. Not a whole lot to pique my interest there either. Until I got to some of the later entries...

'I don't know how comfortable I am about this,' one of the entries read, dated two days before the final entry on the system, 'we can't just assume that all of them are going to go crazy. I mean, like, six of them have in the past couple months, but those could just be isolated incidents, right? Not my call to make though. The Overmare says we need to lock them up for the good of everypony. That's almost a third of the stable's population though. We won't be able to maintain it with so many under lockdown. As much power as that many dampening fields will take, we couldn't run most of the systems anyway. I don't want to leave, but it's not my call to make.'

Well, that was promising, I thought to myself with a visible grimace. Residents were going crazy, so they locked them up, and then they left because that had basically sabotaged the stable somehow. Well, that would mean that the rooms that were locked should still have some valuables in them, right? I just had to find some way to open those doors. The next entry gave me a little clue about how to do that, thankfully. Cauliflower wasn't the sort of pony who knew all the ins and outs of what they'd had to do to lock down such a large portion of the stable, but he had mentioned that it took a lot of power. The maintenance level might be a good place to look for a way to end it.

I pushed back from the terminal and headed for the exit, collecting Windfall on the way, “no luck here. We're going to try to see what we can do about opening the locked doors and loot those rooms,” the filly nodded and fell into step behind me.

The pipbuck's contained map indicated that maintenance was two more levels down. Along the way, I tried a couple closed doors, even though I knew what what would happen. Or rather, what wouldn't happen. Sure enough, nothing I did prompted them to so much as budge.

One level down, I was made to pause when my pipbuck began doing something new: it started ticking.

I glanced down at it with a panicked expression. In my experience, ticking was rarely a good thing. As I did so, a glowing red indicator waxed into visibility before my eyes in the upper right corner of my vision. A radiation indicator. Anypony who spent a week in the Wasteland knew about the magical radiation that poisoned most of the surface, and the sorts of things that it could do to a pony who allowed themselves to spend too long around its sources. I entertained the notion of calling off the expedition if it was going to require us to travel through something like this. Then I hesitated, noting that the levels being reported to me through the pipbuck were extremely low. Low enough that unless the two of us planned on living down here, we shouldn't have much to worry about. Ten Penny and his crew certainly hadn't been swayed by it. It wasn't like we'd planned on lingering anyway.

Windfall was looking at me with concerned, wondering about the audible ticking and my sudden halt, “it's nothing serious,” I assured her. Did she know about radiation? I'd ask her about it later. No reason to stress her out with things like that right now, “let's keep moving.”

I glanced down at the map on the Old World device wrapped around my fetlock periodically, checking our route. These stables were like mazes. Unless you'd grown up here, there were a dozen different ways that you could end up accidentally double-backing on yourself and get hopelessly lost. It wasn't like there were directories or floor layouts posted every few intersections. Then again, I guess it wasn't so bad if every resident had a pipbuck like I did. I idly wondered if the pipbuck's map feature had been added after these places were designed to keep the inhabitants from becoming lost, or if the architects had put no thought into making these places easily navigable because they'd known everypony would have a map on their wrist...

“Um, Jackboot?” the filly behind me asked.

I glanced over my shoulder, noticing that the filly had stopped advancing. I frowned, “what? I told you, the clicking isn't important,” we were almost at the stairs leading down to the maintenance level, and I really didn't feel like entertaining many delays.

“It's not that,” the pegasus said, “it's just...there's a sign over here that says a clinic is nearby.”

“And?” any medical facility in this stable would either be cleared out like the armory had been, or sealed up tight like half the doors were. Either way, it wasn't going to serve our purposes here.

“Well, when I was getting cleaned up at the hospital, I overheard one of the nurses talking,” the filly explained, sounding more confident in herself, “she was telling somepony about a batch of bad spark-batteries, and how they broke a bunch of the computers that they used to store important stuff. She was especially worried about them not having teaching material anymore. She also mentioned that they no longer had any more digital copies of...Bay's Anatomy? She sounded really upset.

“Would a place like this have those things in the clinic?”

I stared at the filly for a moment. That...was actually really useful information to know. If Seaddle's hospital was in dire need of medical texts and other reference material for treatments, then we were in a position to make a lot of money. A stable was exactly the sort of place that would have that information. With no access to the outside world after the main entrance sealed closed, places like this needed to be self-sufficient; which meant being able to handle every conceivable medical emergency that might arise. Since most stables were intended to last for multiple generations, they'd also possess a database that could be used to train new doctors and nurses as well. While the residents might have cleaned out the physical supplies when they left, there'd have been no reason for them to delete any educational material stored on their terminals.

“Yeah,” I responded, “it would. Where's this sign at?”

A short walk and two turns later, and the stable's convenient signage put the two of us right in front of the clinic's doors. The clinic's open doors, mercifully. Though, there didn't seem to be all that much left of it.

Three beds that appeared to be bolted to the floor remained, but their linens had been stripped. The tables and cupboards around them were bare of whatever supplies they had at one time held. The larger supply cabinets were likewise empty of bandages and medicines. Given the state of the stable's armory, I had pretty much anticipated this. Hopefully, the doctors and nurses had not cleaned out their computer system's this thoroughly. There had been information on the security station's terminals, and there would be nothing to gain by erasing whatever data these computers held. So long as the doctors here had not simply been spiteful bastards...

I sat myself behind the reception desk and began to peck at the keyboard with my usual hesitant jabs. A frown creased my lips. Most of the files on this computer were locked behind passwords. Something about 'patient privacy requirements' or some such. Guess I could understand that. I bet most of the ponies in Flank wouldn't have appreciated the resident doctor there blabbing about which stallion and mare had stuff growing betwixt their nethers. Fortunately, none of that information was what I was keen on acquiring.

“Did your dad teach you to use these things?” Windfall asked from beside me.

I couldn't hold back the snort at the image that question conjured in my mind. Steel Bit operating something as technical as an Old World terminal. As if. Shit, most White Hooves had little time for the more advanced technology that littered the Wasteland's ruins. Our ancestor's priorities had been finding enough food, potable water, and Rad-X to survive the balefire fallout. Terminals rarely offered access to any of those things. After a while, technology simply ceased to become a part of our lives.

We ignored it for the most part. Destroyed it when we were feeling spiteful, but generally let it be and went about our lives. So, yeah, nopony in the White Hooves had ever talked to me about operating ancient computer consoles.

“Taught myself,” I said, still browsing the contents of the terminal, “you run into these all the time in the Wasteland. Started pecking at the keyboards of some of them, seeing what worked and what didn't. Turns out that a lot of the time, they'll help you out. Guess even ponies that used them all the time weren't experts.”

“What do you mean?” the pegasus filly asked, propping her hooves up on the desk and leaning in for a better look at the screen.

I glanced at the filly, and then at the clinic's open doorway. I should have her watching the hall for signs of trouble. Not here pestering me with questions. I frowned. The pipbuck was insisting that the two of us were the only ponies in the stable. Not so much as a single rad-roach was anywhere near us. I still only had a vague idea of the range of this thing though, and I couldn't know if there were still parts of this stable that held dangers that were beyond that range. The possibility was still there that something could sneak up behind us and ruin what had so far been a low-lethality trip.

I also needed a companion that was capable of pulling their own weight. Better in the long run if I taught the filly what I knew of these computers sooner, rather than later.

So, I scooted over a little and let Windfall get a better view of the screen that I was looking at, “see here? This is a list of the files in this directory. Some of them are also directories themselves that contain even more files,” I looked over and saw that the filly's face was a little scrunched up. As little as I knew about these computers, she knew what I did the first time I ever saw one. Time to get really basic, I guess.

“Directories are like boxes,” I explained, pantomiming with my hooves, “the files are the things in the box. Ammo, food, junk, you know,” the filly nodded, “sometimes the boxes have smaller boxes in them that also have things.”

“Like a box with a bag of bits in it. The bits are in the bag, and that bag is in the box,” Windfall supplied by way of analogy.

“Exactly,” she wasn't a moron, this filly, “you can see on the screen now are a list of the directories, the boxes, that I'm looking at. I got this list by typing out: D. I. R. and then pressing this button over here,” I did so again, and the list of words that had already been on my screen refreshed, “now, in order to look at what these are, you type out the name and press that same button,” I demonstrated with the item at the top of the list, 'REFERENCE MATERIALS', and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

“Here we go,” I mumbled to myself. I opened the new directory that I had found, which was identified as, 'MEDICAL TEXTS'. A long list of files spilled down the screen. Near the top of that list was even a file marked, 'Bay's Anatomy'. These were the files that the Seaddle doctors needed. My eyes widened. There were really that many books about medicine? How long did it take to explain, 'keep blood inside the body'? Doctors. Long-winded busybodies that took forever to tell you something simple.

“Well, I found what we're looking for,” I scratched my chin, looking from the computer screen to the rest of the room, “now how do I get it back to Seaddle?”

Admittedly, I'd never had to really take much information off of an Old World terminal before. They usually just unlocked doors, or had a meaningless message from two centuries ago that might be good for a chuckle. I'd never actually needed to get my hooves on anything inside of them. Which posed an interesting barrier at the moment.

“Can you use that?” Windfall piped up.

I glanced down, and saw that the filly was pointing at the pipbuck on my arm. My eyes narrowed at the device. There shouldn't be a reason that I couldn't use the pipbuck. Hypothetically. The computer was Old World tech, the machine on my fetlock was Old World tech. Match made in heaven, right? And yet, this really offered me no clear solution to my problem. I knew less about pipbucks than I did regular terminals. Let alone how to get them talking to one-another.

A shrug passed through my shoulders, “don't know how,” I started pecking at the few buttons on my pipbuck, “yet.”

Minutes passed as I explored the little computer on my arm, finding all sorts of new menus and options that I'd never seen before. This 'SATS' thing looked interesting. I'd have to try that sometime. So, at least my efforts weren't a complete waste of time, even if I wasn't any closer to finding out what I wanted to know how to do. I did, however, become more and more aware of the pegasus filly staring at me.

It wasn't like there was much else for her to do. She knew less about the pipbuck and its mysterious functions than I did. Didn't mean that she couldn't still do something more productive with the time we had though, “why don't you go ahead and practice exploring the directories. If it asks you for a password or something, just hit that key there to back out to where you were and try another one. Whatever you do, don't try to guess the passwords. It'll lock out the whole computer if you get it wrong too many times,” another lesson learned the hard way.

While I worked, Windfall climbed up into the seat in front of the desk and started to hesitantly tap at the keyboard with slow, deliberate, strokes. Her first minute was mostly spent accessing and backing out of various files and directories. Once she'd built up a little more confidence, she proceeded to explore the system more thoroughly, while I performed a similar operation on the pipbuck.

This thing had a radio of its own? That was nifty.

My concentration was interrupted by the filly stumbling onto an audio file that one of the terminal's previous operators had left. I frowned at the distraction, but said nothing. I was the one that had told her to root around in the system, after all.

A tired sounding mare's voice crackled out through the speakers, “Stable Physician's report, date...you know what? Who cares. It's not like anypony's ever going to read these damn things now. It's just a damn habit at this point. Plus, I need to say how I feel out loud before it drives me mad.

“I don't like this. It's wrong. All of it. We should be trying to help the Afflicted, not locking them away like this! For Celestia's sake, they've been here since the beginning. They're family!” a heavy sigh escaped her lips, “but it's not my call to make. The Overmare has spoken, and enough of the section supervisors support her that nothing I say or do will change a damn thing.

“I've uploaded the relevant information to the pipbucks of the staff I'm allowed to bring with me. The ones that are Afflicted...well, they'll never know what happened, I guess. Some of them will be smart enough to figure out what's going on eventually, I suppose. I can only hope that they understand why we did it, and that they can find it in their hearts to forgive us.

“I certainly can't forgive myself.

“Suture, signing off. Forever.”

I was staring at the computer intently now. What was that she had said? The mare in that recording had uploaded something to a bunch of pipbucks? The terminal could do that? I quite unceremoniously nudged Windfall out of the way, ignoring her surprised outburst. I quickly navigated my way back to the medical texts that I'd found earlier and look at the keyboard, contemplating my options.

There wasn't exactly a button that was labeled, 'upload these files to Jackboot's pipbuck', but some combination of words had to accomplish a similar task, right? I tried out a few seemingly plausible commands, and received an equal number of familiar errors that criticized my 'syntax', whatever that was. How were these computers supposed to know whether or not I'd paid my taxes?

“Aha!” I exclaimed, triumphantly as I finally stumbled upon a command that took me to a screen that looked like it was on my way to my intended goal. 'UL' looked to have been the correct combination of letters. Now I just needed to make sense of this long list of options. Rows upon rows of letters and numbers. Hundreds of them. Most were prefixed by the word, 'terminal', and were often followed by some sort of brief description of the option, like 'Maintenance Chief' or 'Overmare'. I didn't want to send this information to another termianl in the stable. Where was the option for pipbucks...there it was, further down.

There were a lot of options here too. Additional strings of letters and numbers, all followed by names. Every pipbuck started with the same four digits though: 'S108'. Meaning 'Stable 108', I presumed. Then, at the bottom, I spied a listing that was different from all the others. It began with a 'S137' prefix. I recalled that was the number on the jumpsuit of the pony I'd taken the device from. Ten Penny's stable.

Then I froze. After an additional string of letters and numbers that I guess were some way of further identifying the pipbuck, there was a name. There was a name after every pipbuck entry on this list. The owner of said pipbuck. Made sense. What didn't make sense was the name that followed the entry for the pipbuck that I was wearing. This pipbuck contained Ten Penny's personal logs. I had pried it from what I believed to be his own corpse. It stood to reason that the name that I would see at the end of the entry would be his own.

Instead, the name presented to me was, 'JACKBOOT'.

How did it know that? How could it know that? Knowing nothing about the way a device functioned presented a pony with some scary revelations sometimes.

I shook of the mild shock of discovering that the machine on my leg knew more about me than I thought I had ever told it, and selected my pipbuck as the desired destination of the upload. I saw a percentage indicator pop up on the terminal's screen. A second later, words and numbers sprang up before my own eyes, courtesy of the pipbuck.

>>RECEIVING FILES: …/REFERENCE MATERIALS/...

>>...50%

>>...TRANSFER COMPLETE.

Then the words disappeared and my pipbuck issued a short beep. I glanced down at it, and saw that the screen was showing me an identical page to that which I had seen on the terminal not too long ago. I had the medical texts. A smile touched my lips. We were done here. There was nothing to stop the two of us from heading out the way that we had come and making out way back to Seaddle.

Windfall said that the hospital there was eager to get there hooves on the exact sort of files that I had just found, and I was pretty sure that I could demand a pretty steep price for this information if it was as rare as I suspected. More than enough to have made this trip worthwhile.

I looked around, my eyes watching the direction indicator at the bottom of my field of vision where the blips tended to appear. The two of us were still very much alone here. The open rooms were stripped of valuables. Even the clinic's shelves were empty. I had to wonder though, was the same true of all the doors that had been locked?

The logs of both the security pony and the clinic's doctor suggested that ponies had been sealed away inside those rooms. Locked up because they'd gone crazy. Might have been some sort of sickness, or just ponies not reacting well to being sealed away in a tin can for the rest of their lives. In any case, their rooms would still be full of personal affects and potentially valuable artifacts. Each of the bodies would at least have a pipbuck that I couple scavenge and sell off in Seaddle...

I glanced at the radiation level that my pipbuck was detecting. It was still very low. Might not be a good idea to move in here, but a couple more hours poking around and looting shouldn't be too hard on us.

“We're good here,” I told Windfall, “let's keep going.”

The filly nodded and followed me back out into the corridor. My eyes once more returned to the map contained on my pipbuck. The maintenance level was still another level down. I'll admit, I wasn't entirely certain how I was going to be able to open all of the doors from there. Hopefully, a solution would present itself when the time came. Or, I could simply shoot up a bunch of important looking pieces of equipment until something happened.

The radiation levels got increasingly higher the closer we got to the next flight of stairs that lead down. They weren't necessarily dangerous yet, but I decided that I wasn't to spend very long tackling the issue of ending the lockdown. Five or ten minutes, and then we were leaving.

The two of us paused outside of an open doorway. Above it, a sign was mounted into the ceiling that read, 'REACTOR CONTROL'. The pipbuck was also ticking the fastest it had since it had started. Great, the power source of this stable was busted or something, and leaking radiation into the stable. Must have worn down while the caretakers were away. We definitely weren't lingering here.

“Come on,” I urged the filly to follow me, which she did, her eyes darting occasionally to my much noisier fetlock device. She was obviously nervous, but she followed me nonetheless. A good sign.

Within, I spied a tangle of thick wires and leads that I very much doubted had been part of this room's original design. They ran directly from the reactor's casing to a selection of breakers. I stepped up closer to them and saw that the label indicated that these panels controlled the flow of power to something called a 'magic sump', whatever that meant. It had to be part of the modifications that the logs mentioned though. They had insisted that larger than usual amounts of energy had been needed, and these breakers were certainly getting a lot more energy than they should have.

I spent a generous number of seconds examining the panels, and the switches built into them. It couldn't be as easy as...could it? I mean, I guess it wasn't like the ponies that they had locked up would be able to do anything from inside their rooms, right? Why make this whole complicated mess even more complicated with all sorts of security measures and locks?

Besides, what was the worst that could happen?

My hoof went out, and I very delicately flipped the first switch on the row of breakers.

…

Nothing exploded. That was a good sign. I hadn't been electrocuted either. That was a better sign.

I guess it really was going to be this easy. I proceeded to toggle every other breaker on the panel. When I was done with them, I went and flipped every other switch I could find that looked like it had been fed an improvised connection from the reactor. After nearly two dozen thrown switches, I heard the telltale hiss of an opening stable door coming from off to my left.

Success! I had ended the lockout and doors were opening. A satisfied grin plastered on my face, I looked over at the newly opened portal, ready to claim my hard earned salvage.

Then my blood ran cold. There were blips in front of my eyes. There were a lot of blips in front of my eyes. There were a lot of red blips in front of my eyes. I couldn't even hope to count them all. I was like there was a single solid red bar where, only moments before, only Windfall's single yellow tick had been.

“Horseapples...” I deadpanned.

“What's wrong?” the pegasus filly's voice cracked. She'd heard the tone of my voice, and instantly knew that something was very wrong. Her head went for her pistol, and she faced the way I was looking. She had a good head on her shoulders, had to give her credit for that. Her immediate reaction was a lot better than mine was, which was to stand their gawking at the symbols that only I could see like an idiot.

Oh, how I wished these pipbucks gave you more information about threats than just a simple blip. How far away were they? How many walls and doors separated me from them? What kind of threats were they? Were these all just a bunch of rad-roaches, or a swarm of those alicorns that I'd heard about from around Maripony?

It was only a couple more seconds before I received my first inclination about the threat that the pair of us now faced.

“You two have screwed yourselves pretty good, sorry to say.”

Windfall was now cowering beneath me, her pistol clattering in her teeth. My own weapon was drawn now as well, pointed at the door that had opened just moments ago. The words were those of another stallion, but there was a...tinge...to them. One that I had encountered on a couple of very specific occasions. Around Meatlocker mostly.

We were in the presence of a ghoul pony.

As if on cue, the speaker stepped into the doorway. My suspicions were immediately confirmed as my eyes landed on the withered and dried up face of the stallion that presented himself to us. His mane was little more than a few stray wisps of white hair. His eyes were milky blue. The pony was attired in a gray set of coveralls adorned with pockets. On the collar, the number '108' was embroidered in faded yellow.

He didn't charge or attack us. He wasn't one of the feral ones. That much I had known since the moment I'd heard him speak. The crazy ghouls out in the Wasteland didn't bother with anything a pointless as talking. They just screamed and charged at you with the heedless determination of a crazy pony intent of ripping you to pieces no matter the threat to itself. It was terrifying, don't get me wrong, but they at least never seemed to recognize when you were about to blow them away with some carefully lined up head-shots.

This stallion though, he wasn't charging. He merely stood in the open doorway, looking at the filly and I with a sorrowful expression.

“Don't be afraid,” her urged, raising a hoof in a calming fashion, “I won't hurt you,” the yellow blip that was overlaid where the ghoul pony stood was all the confirmation that I needed for his declaration. This thing had never been wrong before. Didn't mean that his disposition wouldn't change though, “but they might,” he pointed towards the exit.

My eyes darted that way for a brief moment, once more taking in the staggering number of red blips. Then my attention returned to the withered stallion, “what's going on?” I demanded around the grip of my pistol, “why am I suddenly seeing a whole mess of blips? They weren't there a minute ago!”

The ghoul nodded, “no, I imagine they weren't,” he pointed at the breaker panels, “magic sump. It makes it so that spells don't work in areas under lockdown. That includes a pipbuck's E.F.S.”

“E.F.What?”

“Eyes Forward...” the stallion began, and then frowned. He pointed at my foreleg, “you mean you've got a pipbuck and you don't know about the E.F.S?”

I shrugged, “I found it.”

“E.F.S.” the ghoul explained with a roll of his milky eyes, “Eyes Forward Sparkle. It's what lets you see all those blips and stuff. It detects threats, tracks location markers, and shows you other relevant information. But yeah, it don't work past rooms that are locked down. No magic does. Wouldn't be much use to lock a door if a unicorn can just teleport out, would it?”

I guessed that it wouldn't at that. But wait...if I was seeing blips now that the lockdown was over, and the stable ponies had initiated the lockdown to trap certain residents a hundred years ago, then that had to mean, “they're all feral ghouls...”

Fuck. Me.

That screen on the terminal for the upload...the list of pipbucks. That hadn't been a list of pipbucks in the computer's files; that had been a listing of all the pipbucks within range. Within the stable. That list had been hundreds of names long!

I had just let hundreds of feral ghouls out of their cages...

The stallion in the coveralls quirked an eyebrow, “what do you mean, 'feral ghouls'?” he asked. Then his eyes widened, “you mean, you've seen ponies like me?”

“Of course I have, you're all over the fucking Wasteland,” I said dismissively. I was barely even paying attention to the ghoul anymore. He was a sane one, not a threat like the others. My eyes went back to the breaker panels. If flipping those one way had ended the lockdown, then putting them back would start it back up again, right?

I sprinted for the panels and hastily put all of the switches back the way that I had found them. My eyes scanned the room once more. The blips were still there. The door that the ghoul pony was standing in was still open. The lockdown hadn't resumed. I flipped the switched back and forth one more time. Nothing. I tried reversing the order I had used to turn everything off. Still nothing.

“You're wasting your time,” the other stallion informed me, “It's not enough to reset the power. A lockdown can only be initiated from the Overmare's office...on the top level. And even then, you need her authorization code.”

Maybe I could leave Windfall here while I try to sneak up to the top level. With the pipbuck's warnings, I could probably avoid any encounters with the stable's inhabitants. Even if some of them had wandered out the now open doors, most of them would probably have stayed right where they were. They'd stayed put for a century; why not another ten minutes? Yeah, sneaking up there could work. Find the Overmare's office, restart the lockdown.

“Do you know the code?”

“'Course I don't know the code,” the ghoul scoffed, “do I look like a mare to you?”

Horseapples!

“Now what was that you said about ponies like me in this 'Wasteland'?” the stallion demanded, steeping further out of the door.

“You mean ghouls?” I said distractedly, as I tried to come up with other escape options that didn't involve fighting a couple hundred ghoul ponies. I didn't even have that many bullets! “they're all over the Wasteland. Ponies that survived the war, but the radiation did stuff to them. Most of them are crazy. Attack anypony they see on sight. Anypony that ain't a ghoul anyway...

My eyes darted to the stallion in front of us. The ghoul stallion. They wouldn't attack him on sight. Not that him getting to the Overmare's office would do any good. He'd already said that he didn't know the code to lock all the doors again. That plan was still out of the running, but it did get me thinking: why didn't ghouls attack other ghouls? It's not like they needed to consume living flesh or anything like that. What was it?

While I was wracking my brain over the issue, the ghoul stallion was starting to pace back and forth near the door he'd emerged from. All the while, he was mumbling to himself, “Afflicted...outside the stable. They were already outside the stable! But...so everything we did was for nothing...”

His rambling was getting progressively louder and more frantic. It was starting to disrupt my thinking. I flashed him a glower as hint for the stallion to shut it, but he wasn't looking at me. He was pacing even faster now, staring at the floor, “No no no nonono...it couldn't have been for nothing! We...we did it to protect the outside world from the Afflicted,” his voice took on a tone that set the hairs at the base of my neck rigid, “we trapped ourselves in here...for nothing...for...nothing.

“It can't be true,” the stallion's face shifted, suddenly, his expression becoming a rather unsettling flavor of placid. His distant pale blue eyes fell on Windfall and I, “it's not true. You're lying to me.”

Oh, this was going to go in a bad way. I set the grip of the pistol firm in my mouth and gently nudged Windfall further back behind me, “easy there, buddy,” I said is a low voice. I was pretty sure I knew what was going to go down here, and in any other place I might have just as soon skipped at and put this pony down with a couple to the brain pan. But this wasn't just anywhere. This was the bottom level of a stable filled with a whole heard of crazed feral ghouls that had spent the last century of their miserable lives locked in tiny little rooms.

A loud noise to get their attention was the last thing that I needed right now. Which meant that I had to give talking this stallion down a genuine try here.

Just for the record, you little pegasus bitch in my head, I'm not trying to do this non-violent-like to 'be kind'; I just don't want to be torn apart by ghoul ponies.

The coverall-clad ghoul took a couple of slow steps towards us, his face still placid and stoic, “it was all my idea, you see. Some of us were starting to lose our minds. Nopony is meant to live forever, and we'd already had to live through the death of the Princesses. The death of Equestria.”

I kept our distance from him, taking a step back for every one that he advanced, “just, take it easy...”

“Some wanted to leave the stable,” the ghoul continued, “but I knew we couldn't. We were dangerous. Crazed immortals wandering the world? What if any of us ran across survivors? Or other stables? We couldn't leave. We were too dangerous.”

I felt my flank bump up against the far wall. We were trapped now, and the ghoul continued his slow advance, “don't make me do it,” I warned him. Don't make me alert those feral monsters to our presence...

His eyes wandered to the reactor as words continued to flow from his mouth, “the casing was too thin, you see. The radiation...it trickled into the lower levels. Made a lot of us...like this. Even if all the Afflicted did leave, more would just eventually be created as the leak got worse. The healthy ponies had to be the ones that went,” his eyes locked on the pair of us once more, “so I devised the plan. Lock us away. Make this place into our tomb. Our assylum. Protect the outside world from our insanity.

“So, you see, you must be lying,” an edge began to creep into the ghoul's voice once more. I placed my tongue against the trigger of the weapon in my mouth, “because, if you're telling the truth,” his teeth began to grind together as he spoke. His expression was no longer impassive, an crease was starting to furrow his brow, “then I subjected myself, and two hundred and thirty-seven other ponies—my friends—to a century of inhumane torture...”

I could feel Windfall quivering beneath me. My back was literally against the wall. This ghoul might be talking, but he was as whacked as any feral; he just didn't realize it yet. He was going to kill us in an attempt to satisfy his delusion. I had to take action. I had to protect the two of us.

The moment I did that though, I would doom us.

The next words out of the ghoul pony's mouth came out as little more than a growl, “it was not in VAIN!”

He lunged.

Windfall screamed.

My weapon fired.

I flinched as a mist of blood and brains speckled my face. The stench was...potent, to say the least. I hated dealing with ghoul ponies. Even the sane and coherent ones still reeked of rot and decay. Even ghoulified, there was no way that flesh that had been around for two centuries wasn't going to stink.

I snorted and wiped away the gore. I was going to need a bath when we got back to Seaddle or I'd smell like a corpse for weeks.

…

Oh, sweet Celestia, that was it, wasn't it? My eyes darted from my blood-smeared hoof to the ghoul pony's corpse. Smell. That was how feral ghouls recognized their own!

An idea too shape in my head. Windfall probably wasn't going to like it—hell, I didn't like it—but I imagined that she'd like getting ripped apart and eaten even less. I holstered the pistol and drew my knife. This was going to be messy.

From behind me, I could hear Windfall's reviled shriek as she saw me start to cut into the body of the ancient stable pony, “what are you doing?! Stop it!” The filly even went so far as to lunge at me and try to pull me away from the rotted corpse.

I swiped her away deftly with a swing of my hoof and reeled on her, “I'm saving our lives!” I shot back at the filly around the gory hilt of the knife in my mouth, “we need to get out of here now, and there are a couple hundred ghouls between us and the exit. They'll tear us to pieces if they see us. Unless,” I amended with a fierce glare at the little pegasus, “they think that we're ghouls too.

“That means we need to smell like them,” I hoped, “which means...” wow, this plan was not sounded quite so appealing now that I was about to say the details out loud, “we need to cover ourselves with this guys...everything...”

I don't know what the name of the expression was when a pony's face moved past 'utterly horrified', but that was the look on Windfall's face at this precise moment. Adding to the horror, and as if to emphasize our plight, the echos of a piercing roar filtered down through the entrance to the reactor chamber. Both of our heads darted in that direction.

The gunshot. They'd heard it, and were probably even now wandering in the direction that they'd heard it come from. Even if the whole lot of them weren't completely feral by now, they'd certainly be pretty pissed off about having been betrayed by their friends and neighbors; left to rot in this tomb of a stable.

My gaze went back to the filly, who was now curled up against the nearby wall with the tiny pistol back in her mouth. Her eyes were locked onto the doorway leading to the upper levels of the stable, “hey,” I waved my hoof to get her attention, “hey!” the filly's eyes were upon me now, wide with terror. I couldn't afford to have her lock up now.

Maybe you could use her as a peace offering?

Shut up, Whiplash!

“Look,” I began, forcing myself to ease my own tensions as well. I had a plan. It might even work. So what if it wasn't the most palatable solution to our current predicament? All that mattered was that it was going to give the two of us a much better chance of getting out of here than trying to run and gun it. I needed to get Windfall on board with it too though, “I know you're scared, I am too. This ain't exactly how I planned for things to go. But we have a chance to get out of here in one piece.

“You just have to trust me, and do what I tell you. Like you promised you would, remember?” the filly swallowed, but made no other movements for a moment. Then she offered a short nod, “good. Holster the pistol. If we fire a weapon, we're fucked,” the pegasus complied, though it was obvious that she was loath to disarm herself.

I turned my attention back to the corpse. I'd disemboweled ponies before, but never to this extent or quite so deliberately. It was one thing to open up a pony's belly in combat. This felt more like dressing a fucking kill. I paused briefly in my dissection.

...this was what raiders back east did to ponies they got their hooves on.

Finally gone all the way off that deep end, brother dear? Full on Hoofington raider? Only one way to be sure: take a nibble.

I shut my eyes and shook the voice from my head. I wasn't doing this because I thought it was fun, damn it! This was just what I had to do to survive. It wasn't the same. I wasn't that fucking crazy.

Yet...

I resumed my work, carving out swaths of the ghoul pony's hide. I could hear Windfall trying to suppress her whimpers as I skinned him. When the deed was done, and the body of the stallion on the floor existed in several flayed pieces, I moved on to the next step of the plan.

New barding. I was going to by a whole new set of barding after this. If for no other reason than because I was certain the smell would simply never come out, no matter what I did to it. Soaking this stuff in turpentine for a month wouldn't do any good, I was sure of it.

I knelt down in the pool of viscera that I'd created, and took a deep breath to steel myself. Really, this was not all that different from what I'd done as a White Hoof, I told myself. The white paint that we wore on our legs and faces wasn't really paint, after all. It was a paste that was created using the ground up bones of ponies that the tribe had killed. So, in that respect, I'd covered myself in the remnants of dead ponies hundreds of times.

True, none of those experiences had created such a pungent odor, and I doubted any of the bodies had been quite this fresh—err, rotted, I guess—but the net effect was the same, right?

I'm not sure if I was actually making myself feel any better about this...

Another, louder, roar echoed through the stable. This one was answered by other, more distant, screeches. Right, impeding doom. I'd angst about all of this later.

Committed, I took a deep breath, managing not to gag on the stench, and rolled through the pile of entrails. Ewe...I think one of them squirted something on me. Please tell me that wasn't the bladder...though piss would probably have been the least objectionable fluid on me at the moment. I stood up, wincing as I felt bits of...stuff sliding slowly down my legs. If I didn't look at it, I probably wouldn't throw up.

Judging from the sounds coming from behind me, and the arrival of a familiar acrid odor in the air, I judged that Windfall's intestinal fortitude had not been quite so strong as my own.

The finishing touches were a couple swaths of the leathery flesh of the ghoul pony thrown across my back. The worst part about that was the need to pick up those pieces with my mouth. I just wanted to rip out my tongue and burn it. Nothing else was going to get rid of that taste...

I turned to face the pitiful looking pegasus panting over a puddle of her own vomit. This was going to get worse for her before it got any better, “you ready?” she winced, dry heaved a couple more times, and then nodded. I reached down into the pile of rotted organs with my hoof and drew up a scoop of them. I carefully smeared it across her shoulders and rubbed what I could down her back. The pegasus trembled and whimpered under my touch. Her eyes remained closed.

Again and again I applied pieces of the ghoul to her, covering her barding and letting it dribble down her legs. Windfall especially did not appreciate the need to rub globs of ghoul into her mane and tail, let alone covering her wings. A swath of skin across her own back, and the deed was done.

“Alright,” I sighed, not relishing the final phase of this plan, “stay close to me. Keep your eyes on the floor, and for the love of Celestia, don't say a single damn word. Not gasps, no screams, no crying. You make a sound and the two of us die, got it?”

The filly swallowed and nodded. She spit up just a little bit more and was about to wipe her mouth when she stopped herself just shy of touching her defiled hoof to her face. She took a deep breath and met my gaze once more.

I had never seen Windfall look so defeated since the day she'd gotten her cutie mark. At least she'd resigned herself to the plan finally.

Crushing the spirits of little fillies across the Wasteland, one depraved act at a time...

If I ever found a way to get rid of that mare...

I trudged towards the exit, Windfall close behind me. At the bottom of the stairs leading to the second level, I came to a halt. There, at the top, was our first test of this plan of mine. A ghoul pony mare wearing a tattered stable jumpsuit was standing at the upper landing, looking right at the pair of us. Celestia, I sincerely hoped that I'd guessed right and that they did rely on smell to distinguish between what they would and would not attack. It was a good sign that she wasn't charging us at this exact moment, at least.

With a brief glance back at Windfall to ensure that she was still following, I began to slowly ascend the stairs. The ghoul watched us approach in silence. No screeches, no roars, and most importantly: no trying to eat us. When I reached the upper landing on the second level of the stable, I was close enough to the mare that I could have reached out and booped her on the nose if I'd been so inclined. I did not, of course. The ghoul pony merely watched the two of us pass and then she herself trudged down the stairs.

I hoped that being feral meant that she wasn't intelligent enough to piece together what had gone down in the reactor chamber. My pace increased slightly just in case.

The halls of the stable were crawling with ghouls now. Each of them would look at us as we passed, but none made any move to so much as touch us. When I felt that none of them were staring at us too closely, I would spare a glance at the map on my pipbuck to confirm that we were still going the right direction. We ended up having to double-back once or twice, but we didn't end up getting too lost. Though there was the odd occasion where we needed to seek an alternate route in order to get around a particularly thick gaggle of ghouls. I was very loath to risk coming into physical contact with them.

Every once in a while, I checked to make certain that the filly was still following in my wake. Her head stayed down the entire time, her eyes locked on the floor just behind my hind hooves. Back the way that we had come, I could spot a thin trail of blood and tissue that was periodically dropping from our bodies. I hoped that wasn't a bad sign...

We somehow reached the upper level of the stable without being pounced upon and ripped to pieces by a pack of hungry feral ghoul ponies. I counted that as a point in favor of the plan so far. In fact, I was ready to proclaim the plan a complete success when I saw that we were once again walking along a very familiar corridor. At the end of this hallway would be the atrium, and the staircase leading to the exit. In five more minutes, we would be home free!

I abruptly felt myself slammed into from the side. Though the blow had not been particularly powerful, the unexpected nature of it was enough to knock me off of my hooves and onto the floor. I heard Windfall's sharp intake of breath as she saw me go down. I froze. Had we been discovered? Nopony was roaring at us, and I didn't hear the sound of thundering hooves galloping through the stable corridors in our direction.

My eyes flew to the direction that the impact had come from, my sheathed knife coming close to my mouth in case I would need to draw it to fend off an unexpected attacker. I found myself looking up into the face of a rather rotund ghoul stallion with pale green eyes. He was looking down at me with a blank expression.

An accident then. I hadn't been paying attention to the intersecting hallways, and so I had managed to simply collide with one of the ghouls. Our cover wasn't blown. I swallowed back the worry that had been building in my throat and rolled back up onto my feet.

The swaths of ghoul flesh that had been laying across my back remained on the floor. I stared down at them, contemplating if I should pick them back up and sling them over my barding once more. My eyes shifted between the flesh on the floor and the fat ghoul standing just a couple feet away from me. Would doing that draw attention? We were so close to the exit now, was it worth taking the risk?

I saw the ghoul's nostril's flare and heard him take a couple of deep sniffs. His eyes seemed to be peering more intently at me.

Horseapples...

We were so close. I forgot about the flayed flesh on the floor and resumed walking at a slightly increased rate of speed. The pegasus filly increased her own speed to keep up with me. The fat ghoul stallion trudged behind us, following.

Horseapples!

The atrium was in sight now. All we had to do was get up the stairs and leave. Our 'disguises' would last long enough to get us that far, right?

From behind us, came a deafening howl. The sort of sound I had heard only a sparse few months ago at that old mill.

Horseapples!

Well, new plan time! Looks like the two of us would need to, “run!”

I sidestepped a little to let the filly get in front of me. Not out of any sense of chivalry, mind you, it was simply necessary so that I had a clear field of fire at that broad ghoul stallion that was screaming behind us and alerting the rest of the stable to our presence. A few quick squeezes of the trigger, and the stable pony went down in a mercifully silent heap. I then bolted in the direction of the atrium, my weapon snapping off shots as other ghouls poked their heads into view to check on what the noise was about. Windfall was doing the same with her own smaller caliber weapon. The hits that she scored with her tinier bullets didn't do nearly to same amount of lethal damage to their torsos that my bullets did, but they did send a few ghouls crumpling to the ground when she caught them in the elbows and shoulders.

Part of me wondered how many of those crippling shots were intentional. Her aim had been gradually improving, after all.

The two of us made our desperate run for the atrium. Eventually, my pistol's magazine ran dry. I briefly considered pausing in order to reload, but then thought better of it. Besides, the quarters we were fighting in at the moment were even a little too tight for pistols. I holstered the spent weapon and drew out my combat knife. It was still covered in the blood of the ghoul pony that I'd dismembered . Little matter, it was about to get covered in a whole lot more.

At an intersection about forty feet from the atrium, I found myself having to draw up short as a ghoul whipped around in front of me. I wasted little time and quickly whipped my head back and forth, slashing at the feral monster with vicious cuts. The stable pony screamed and went down. I had little time to relish the victory though, as another ghoul that had come from the other direction slammed into me. The blow pinned me to the wall, and it was all that I could do to fend off the pony's napping jaws as its fetid maw snapped at my face.

The gnashing teeth roared at me, spraying me with flecks of bile. Then a trio of bullets smacked into the side of its face. The ghoul hesitated for a brief moment, stunned, as did I. Then two more bullets sheared off the front of the ghoul's skull and most of its left eye. The corpse collapsed into a heap in front of me. I looked to my right and saw Windfall standing further down the corridor, her smoking pistol gripped tight in her teeth.

I regained my composure and galloped towards her, “ease up on your grip,” I scolded the filly in a tone that was perhaps more than a little out of place, given our current circumstances, “you're going to crack a tooth!” the pegasus quirked an eyebrow and then broke into a run beside me, “and reload during lulls like this! That way you don't run out of bullets when you need them the most,” it may not have been an ideal time to lecture the filly on the finer points of engaging in running gun battles, but I was not entirely certain that I'd get the chance to teach her anything else ever again. There were still a lot of ghouls between us and the stable door if those milling blips were to be believed.

Windfall took my advice and ejected the magazine of her small pistol, fumbling for a replacement with her right wing. I heard the sound of hoofsteps clambering behind us, and I spun around to face our attacker. A ghoul was charging right at me. I bent me left leg, lowing myself a split second before he was upon me and then heaved my shoulder up into its chest. The ghoul was slammed against the stable wall, issuing a piercing wail of what I hoped was pain. I jabbed it in the chest a few times with my knife until the wailing ceased and the pony went limp. Just as a second ghoul ran up to attack me as well.

A third ran right on by, heading right for Windfall. The filly was still in the middle of reloading her weapon, and didn't notice the assailant running right for her. I through up my forelegs to fend off the ghoul engaged with me and spat the knife out of my mouth, “Windy! Behind y-!” a sharp blow to my head cut my warning short. I snarled up at the ghoul attacking me and reared up on my hind legs, letting a flurry of strikes lash out at him with my forehooves. Each blow forced the ghoul to stumble back. I aimed the fifth attack at the right shoulder, sending the pony to the ground. A powerful double strike with both hooves caved in the skull and ended the feral beast's life.

My head whipped around, looking for Windfall. Would I be too late to save her?

I was just in time to watch the filly go airborne. Well, not truly airborne like a proper pegasus. The filly had glanced back over her shoulder at my warning in time to see her peril and leaped up into the air at the last moment as the galloping ghoul dove for her. The pegasus' wings buzzed furiously, keeping her aloft for a few precious seconds as the ghoul skidded along the floor under her. I looked on as Windfall then landed on the ghoul's back. She proceeded to pound at the back of the prone ghoul's head with her tiny hooves while her wing worked frantically to fully seat the fresh magazine into her pistol.

Her strikes didn't have the power behind them to do any real damage to the grown mare that she was beating on, but they seemed to at least be disorienting the ghoul long enough to ready her weapon. The magazine finally locked into place with a faint click, and Windfall poured almost a half dozen bullets into the back of the ghoul's skull. It ceased moving after that.

Well. Never mind then. Kid saved herself. I resumed sprinting towards the atrium, the filly just ahead of me.

We might actually get out of here alive!

One of these days, I was just going to stop having those sorts of thoughts. They were proving to be very hazardous to my health.

A truly massive ghoul loomed into few just inside the entrance to the atrium. He took up almost the entire width of the doorway. What the hell had this ghoul been eating before the radiation got him? He looked like the poster-foal for Buck! Actually, forget that, Buck would probably have taken away from this pony's bulk, he was that massive. I let my pace slack off, buying myself more time to come up with a way to get past this monstrosity. My pistol was still dry, and I was loath to take the time to reload it. My knife was...fuck, I'd left it behind. Hoof-to-hoof with this thing was going to suck...

Did I have time to pop a tablet of Buck? Or, more practically, a whole bottle of it? Did I have any more Stampede?

It was then that I realized that Windfall was not dropped off in her stride with me. In fact, she was running ahead at an even faster pace! Was the filly insane? She had to be able to see the same ghoul that I was, didn't she?

Horseapples.

The muscle-bound ghoul pony roared at the pair of us with a volume that was loud enough to shake the very floor of the stable. Yet still Windfall sprinted directly at him. If nothing else, maybe she would at least distract him long enough while he was killing her for me to get a couple good hits in.

Seemingly heedless of the large stallion that dwarfed her to an absurd degree, the little pegasus filly maintained her headlong charge. The ghoul seemed to greatly appreciate that Windfall was going to deliver herself right to him, and opened his mouth wide in anticipation, coking his head back in preparation to snap her up when she got close enough. I winced, not relishing what I was about to see happen.

I saw the filly running right at him, not even firing her weapon. I saw the ghoul's wide open maw dart down with terrifying speed.

What I didn't see was the little pegasus end up as a morsel of ghoul chow.

At the last second, Windfall's tiny wings flipped out and buzzed with the speed of a bloatsprite's. The result was a burst of extra speed that the ghoul had not anticipated, leaving his jaws to clamp down around nothing but air. It turned out though that this maneuver was not just a quick little dart in order to allow just herself to escape past the ghoulish obstacle. This was part of a carefully planned attack that the filly had devised all on her own.

Once past the threatening biting part of the ghoul, the filly rolled onto her back, her wings still beating furiously, and opened finally fire. Her tongue squeezed the trigger as quickly as she couple manage, pumping round after round into the underside of the massive stallion. A trio of her final shots were aimed at his right foreleg. Two of the shots hit, shredding the joint into a glob of rotted meat and splintered bone. Then Windfall was out in the atrium and past the most visible threat.

Now, I guess, it was my turn.

Fortunately, the filly had left me with a very exploitable opening. The ghoul was roaring with what I imagined to be equal parts frustration, pain, and humiliation at having been so thoroughly outdone by a tiny little filly with a pistil that would have only annoyed a radscorpion. His eyes soon fell on me though, and I could see in them a desire to reap vengeance for the insult he had just suffered.

He was about to be disappointed a second time.

I leaped forward and used the momentum of my run to roll onto my back, bringing my hind quarters in close. As I came out of the roll, I threw everything I had into my rear hooves. Both of them lashed out at the ghoul's left shoulder, carrying the force of my full weight and high speed.

It wasn't a perfect hit, I'll admit that. I'd misjudged the distance I would travel in that roll and had waited too long to make it. Though I succeeded in the sense that I both heard and felt the ghoul's shoulder crumble into a fine powder beneath his dried out flesh and muscle, I also felt something give way in my own left knee. The howl of agony from the ghoul made the pain that I felt worth it though. With both of his front legs out of commission, he couldn't stop himself from collapsing forward onto his face. This left me all the room that I needed to right myself and clamber over his body.

I was able to tell right away though that I was not going to relish putting any weight on my hind leg for a good week or so. But, at least both myself and Windfall had made it into the atrium. No time for celebrations quite yet though. We still had to get out of the stable. Judging from the sounds of screeches and screams coming from other connecting corridors, that wasn't going to get easy any time soon. In fact, ghoul ponies were already pouring in from all directions.

“Stairs, let's go!” I urged the filly on towards the nearest spiral staircase that would lead us to the upper level, and the way out of here.

Windfall scampered up them with ease. I was held up briefly a couple times by the need to dislocate the jaws of ghoul ponies that insisted on invading my personal space. Most of the rest of the ghouls seemed to be on the lower levels of the stable at least. Only a dozen or so were in the atrium at the moment, but I imagined that that was subject to change every soon. I could see a rather thick cluster of red blips in the direction that we had just come from. I could also hear the faint chorus of roars as well.

This was bad. Which, I supposed seemed like a very obvious observation to make about the current situation. However, on deeper contemplation, it was even worse than that. There were still over two hundred feral ghouls in this stable. Two hundred ponies hungering for living flesh that could run for years without tiring. Two hundred ponies that we would never be able to kill off or outrun before they finally got to us. We simply didn't have the bullets, and I could feel myself tiring already. There wouldn't be enough Dash or Buck in the world to keep me in a fight like that.

I fended off encroaching ghouls with bucks and hoof-strikes as I backed my way up to the base of the staircase that Windfall had already ascended. I now had myself a funnel, which permitted only one of two ghouls to attack me at any given time. Even like this though, I couldn't hope to kill them all. Heck, I wasn't even killing them now! The same physical characteristics of the stairs that restricted their numbers also limited the sorts of attacks that I could make. I couldn't fight like this without any room to maneuver, not really. All I could really do was get them to stumble back for a moment while I took another step furhter up to the top.

But then what? Fight them at the top of the stairs? I'd have more room, sure, but what if two of them squeezed up at the same time? While I was killing one, I'd be getting attacked by the other, and then while I was killing that one, more would come up the stairs. Eventually I would be swarmed.

I could fight them at the stable door maybe? But that still presented basically the same problem. Maybe if I could close the stable door? The controls couldn't be that hard to figure ou—

The world fell out from under me.

In the course of my planning, I had managed to miss the sound of creaking metal as the ancient rusted staircase that I had been slowly climbing up finally decided to give in to the decay that it had endured for centuries and buckled. It had barely been willing to support my own weight on the way down; the weight of myself and several ghouls had been more than it was willing to tolerate.

“Jackboot!”

I lashed out with my hooves, grasping for something, anything, to stop me from falling down to the waiting hoard of feral ghoul ponies gathering in the atrium below. My left hoof managed to snag part of the staircase that has remained affixed to the upper level of the large chamber. The rest of my body dangled in the air. I wasn't alone either. One of the ghouls that had been on the stairs with me had possessed the reflexes and wherewithal to grab hold of something to stop his falling as well.

That something had been me.

My passenger did not seem content with something so mundane as just dragging me down to my inevitable fall either. No, he was content to carry on as though the both of us were not in this precarious position at all.

I screamed as the ghoul pony's teeth clamped down on my flank. Reflexively, I writhed and kicked at the offending ghoul. It was hard though. With every motion, I could feel my hoof slipping from its precious perch on the upper level. What choice did I have though? I couldn't just wait for that fucking thing to eat me alive!

My eyes narrowed at the ghoul, and I snarled at it through gritted teeth, “I have had...” I raised my other hind leg and aimed a kick at the ghoul's face, striking it square in the forehead. The monster reeled, by remained attached to my leg. I readied a second blow, “enough...” I felt the ghoul's grip slackening with the second kick, “of...ghouls!”

The third kick was enough to completely dislodge the feral pony and send it crashing to the floor below, where it landed atop a few its milling ghoul brethren. My hoof was now only barely maintaining any sort of grip, and I was pretty sure that I'd be following it down at any moment.

“Got you!” a pair of small white hooves latched onto mine, gripping with all the might that their young owner could muster. I looked up to see that Windfall was at the ledge, doing all that she could to pull me up. Her wings thrummed with effort as she used them for added leverage.

It was no use though. She was just a tiny little filly, and I was a grown stallion close to five times her own weight. There was no way in Equestria that she would be able to pull me up on her own. I swung myself up as best I could to get my other hoof some decent purchase in order to help pull myself up, but that proved to be a poor decision. Instead of getting a grip with my right hoof, I succeeded only in losing what remained of the grip with my left. I would have fallen right then and there if Windfall had not been holding onto my arm.

As it was, the filly was nearly pulled over with me. Her rear hooves slid along the steel floor, coming to a halt at the brink of the ledge. Only the furious beating of her wings had kept her from instantly tumbling over with me.

I looked down at the floor below. More ghouls were spilling in by the minute. Soon, they'd have the numbers to climb up on top of themselves and form a convenient little ghoul pyramid to use to get us. My eyes went back to the straining face of the pegasus fighting desperately to pull me up. I could see her hind legs inching further and further over the edge. She was going to end up being pulled over with me any moment.

Be kind...

...Yeah. That little pink-maned pegasus had the right idea. I guess there wasn't any reason that both of us had to die here, “Windy,” I swallowed, not quite believing what I was about to say, “let me go.”

“No!” she screamed through gritted teeth, “I won't!”

“Windy!” I snarled at her. Dammit you stupid little filly, you can't save me this time! Just let me die and get the fuck out of here! “Let. Me. Go. Now!”

“NOOOOO!”

Then her hind legs slipped over the edge, and the two of us were falling.

Damn her...

Or...wait. Correction. We should have been falling. Unless gravity operated under different rules during specific circumstances that I was unaware of, the two of us should have tumbled over that ledge and ended up tangled in the midst of a herd of ghoul ponies that would then proceed to rend us limb from limb in an orgy of blood, gore, and screams.

Instead, we simply hovered above them.

A quick glance up at Windfall was all the explanation that I needed as to how this was accomplished: she was flying. Honestly and truly flying. Not the little slowly descending hovers that I had seen her do a hundred times in the past; this was genuine sustained altitude. Not just sustained either, I soon noticed. We were rising!

It took the filly an obviously great deal of effort to perform this feat, and I was not inclined to disrupt her concentration with either words or even movements. I remained completely silent and as still as I could manage as the little pegasus dragged me up over the lip of the edge and carried my body above solid floor. I was then very unceremoniously dropped onto my hind end at the earliest possible moment. The filly was not far behind me in her own panting collapse, her wings hanging limply at her side.

The howls of the ghouls below reminded me that this was still not a good time for minor celebrations or respites. We needed to take advantage of the lead that we'd achieved ahead of the hoard and make our escape. I scooped the filly up onto my back and started limping as quickly as I could for the exit out of the stable. The sight of the large steel sprocket door was the most beautiful thing that I had seen all day.

I took a brief moment to pause at the control panel nearby and examine it. If there was any way for me to close this thing behind us, that would be ideal...huh. A large lever that had two positions: 'OPEN' and 'CLOSE'. It couldn't possibly be that simple, could it?

Only one way to find out. I pulled the lever to the 'CLOSE' position and waited. A moment of silence, and then the sound of whirring motors and clinking chains as the ancient machinery came to life and the door slowly started rolling across the opening. Well, I'll be fucked; it was that easy!

I limped through the narrowing opening and into the relative safety of the tunnels ahead. No blips of any color were within view ahead of us, so I continued to make my way through the dark tunnel, guided by the light of my pipbuck. Behind me, I heard the steel door clank shut, and the deep sigh of the machinery as it shut itself off once more. I highly doubted that those monsters would be able to figure out the need to operate the controls in order to open that door.

I also pitied any pony that found this stable after us. It would suck to be them...

At the entrance to the cave, I allowed myself to rest, and let Windfall off my back. Her wings were still slack at her side, but the filly wasn't gasping nearly so badly as she had been. I urged her to take a drink of water, while I did the same. I also quaffed a healing potion to help mend my leg. It did a lot to close the wound, but not quite so much to dull the pain. I was going to be limping for a while...again.

When the two of us had sated our thirst and seen to reloading fresh magazines into our weapons in anticipation of the next horror that would inevitably befall us at some point in the future, I took the opportunity to properly chastise the pegasus for her earlier insubordination.

“I told you to let me go,” I reprimanded Windfall, “what you did was stupid. You could have gotten yourself killed.”

The filly looked away, her shoulders drooping, “I know...”

“So then why the hell did you do it?” I asked her, genuinely curious about the answer, “you promised to do whatever I told you to do, and I told you to let me drop. Why didn't you?”

“Because I already lost one family!” the little pegasus snapped at me, tears welling up in her eyes. We stared at each other in silence for a second, then her gaze dropped once more, “I didn't want to lose another...”

Awe, way to go there, Daddy! Whiplash clapped her hooves together with a giddy expression, Ooh! I bet you could even get her to call you 'Daddy' too! If you know what I mean... she then proceeded to demonstrate with a couple of deep evocative moans.

I shut the voice away, fearing that a day might come when I wouldn't be able to.

Family, huh? Is that what she thought the two of us were, a family? That was the lie we told to everypony around, sure. A single father looking after the most precious pony in his life. A noble soul persona to put others at ease. Was Windfall starting to believe that lie too? Or did she just really want to?

On the one hoof, I guess this was a good sign. She considered me to be like her family; which meant something very different to the filly than it did to me. In my experience, 'families' were groups of ponies you shared a blood relation to that were waiting for the right moment to stab you in the back and take all the titles for themselves. For Windfall, family was a group of ponies that you cared deeply about.

That had been the goal, hadn't it? Get this filly to devote herself to me, so that I would never go through with her what I had with my sister, right? Well, here she was, ready to die in order to save me. Mission accomplished, Jackboot. You had your little loyal pegasus pawn ready to do anything and everything you asked her to, and more.

So why did that thought make me feel so...ashamed?

Because you're just one grope away from becoming your father...

Footnote: Level Up!
New Perk Added -- Super Bucker: All melee and hoof attacks have a chance of knocking your opponent down.
Unarmed skill at 50.
Science skill at 25.

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around! You can see what I'M capable of, heh; professional assistance is clearly needed here!