Dear Diary,

Today was a big day. After waking up and having a delicious breakfast of snack cakes (because fuck healthy eating), we set off.

“So how are we gonna find that Stable-Tec office in this jungle?” Asked Grapevine as we departed the cottage. “This place has, I don’t know how many suburbs, an’ if it’s in the downtown, then...”

“Then we’re fucked,” interjected Dmitry. “You heard what Katrina said about the city center. If the office just happens to be there, then there’s no point in trying.”

“Well, it’s not,” I said, digging out a tiny booklet from my saddlebags. “I put this in here and almost forgot about it until a few days ago. Look what it says.”

I showed them the ‘Welcome to Your New Home’ booklet that the Stable officials gave out when we first entered. I think most ponies recycled theirs since pretty much all of the information it contained was stuff they had already told us, but I had kept mine since I rarely throw things like that away. On the inside back cover it had what we desperately needed right now:

Have any issues with your stable that your overmare can’t solve?

Call 1-800-STABLES or Visit our us at:

Cascadia Province Satellite Office

20078 SW Greenspan Rd. Suite 262

Tigertown, CS 33734

Our trusted customer service is open 24/7, regardless of rain, snow, sleet, or radiation!

“Well, whadaya know, Tigertown!” Exclaimed Grapevine. “Don’t they have like, a mall there or somethin’?”

“Swishington Square?” I asked. “Yes, they have that there, but there’s not going to be anything in it. Everything useful is has got to be looted by now.”

“I know, but I just want to visit it,” said Grapevine. “Just one more time, you know, for old times’ sake.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “We can visit Swishington Square Mall, but then we have to get going. It could be anywhere in Tigertown, and I’d like to find it as soon as possible.”

We stuck to the highway because it would provide a clear and direct route to where we were going. Since speed wasn’t a factor, it would have been shorter just to take the side streets, but we didn’t know what lay ahead of us. There was also the possibility of getting ambushed in those narrow streets by survivors desperate for supplies. After all, our jumpsuits and pipbucks brazenly advertised that we were from a Stable, and likely carried fresh supplies.

Although I didn’t think of that part later. Mostly what was on my mind when we left was the fact that I didn’t know this part of the city that well. Or at all, really. My family lived further west, and so I never got many chances to visit this part of town. Our pipbucks didn’t really help with navigation that much, given that their ‘map’ feature only seemed to map the areas we’ve already explored. Everything else is totally blank except for a little marker far off in the distance in the general direction of Tigertown.

As much as it infuriates me, I’m beginning to think that this thing is a lot more intelligent than I give it credit for. Somehow it knows exactly where we’re going, it can count and alphabetize everything in my saddlebags, and seemingly create new place names at random. The thought of a pipbuck being alive scares me, especially since it’s attached to my leg and all. I it were to become self-aware, who knows what it could be capable of?

At Grapevine’s urging, we took a short break from our trek to loot an abandoned shopping center. We didn’t find much-- just a few .45’s and .32’s from a few corpses. It looked like they had been trying to defend themselves against some bandits. Sadly, the robbers won since they were all dead and didn’t have any useful supplies left. It looked like this had happened rather recently, since there were flies buzzing around and… walking all over their… eww.

“Is it just me, or are these flies a bit bigger than usual?” asked Dmitri as he observed the bugs on the corpses.

“You’d know better than any of us,” said Grapevine as she rummaged through some empty boxes.

“Uhh… didn’t you tell us you once worked in agriculture?” asked Dmitri.

“Yes. Viticulture specifically, ” she replied, “But ah ain’t our resident entomologist.”

That remark stung Dmitri fairly hard.

“We’re not bugs, you dipshit,” he rebuked.

“Really?” she asked. “‘Cause ya kinda look like one.”

“Guys, stop it,” I hissed.

“Looks aren’t everything,” Dmitri said bitterly. “Everypony knows that… except for dumb hicks like you.”

“Well, ah know ah’m a hick, and proud of it,” spat Grapevine, “But ah ain’t dumb!”

“Guys!” I tried to interject.

“Really?” asked Dmitri. “‘Cause you kinda sound like you are.”

“Guys!”

“You think yer so tough, eh?” asked Grapevine. “Well, let’s see how you--”

I took out my pistol and fired a shot at the ceiling.

“Stop it. Stop it right now!” I yelled. “You, go sit in that corner over there. And you, go sit in that corner over there. I want both of you to stay in your corners for five minutes with no talking!”

When we got back on the road, I ordered Grapevine to the front of the pack and Dmitry to the back of it, while I stayed in the middle and kept them apart. I didn’t do it to punish either of them… well, maybe a little bit. But I really just wanted them to shut up about the whole ‘changeling-bug’ thing. If those two want to continue following me, then I don’t want to hear any more of that speciesist bickering, even if it was the mud pony who started it.

We walked in silence for a while, traveling along the highway’s citybound lanes. This highway and the streets around it, completely devoid of life and littered with abandoned cars-- it all had this great big empty feeling, as if we had entered a void. And in this void, little could be heard aside from the whistling of the wind and the sound of our hoofsteps. The breeze was sharp and chilly. The ground still had quite a bit of snow on it, but not as much as when we were up in the mountains. In fact, I was certain it was getting warmer, as if the weather of the few days before that was just a cold spell. Much of the snow had begun melting into slush, and much of the slush had begun melting into water, although it wasn’t melting as fast as it could have because the clouds still hadn’t cleared from the sky.

We came across a larger group of corpses lying on the ground near some parked cars. They were obviously dead, and had been for quite some time-- their bodies were already in the process of decomposing, which may have been stopped during the latest snowfall. With the weather warming up, they would start decomposing again, the remains of their flesh eaten away by bugs and bacteria for weeks on end until they were just piles of bones. I stood over the corpses for a little while and studied them, contemplating mortality or something deep like that, and Grapevine found a stick and began prodding them.

“Look at this,” she called to us, and Dmitry and I came over to look. She had found one particular corpse that, when she prodded the muscles in the abdomen, its leg twitched.

“Muscle reflexes,” I said. “Nice. But… how are they still moving?”

“Why, electrical impulses, of course,” she replied, still gleefully poking it.

“I know that,” I said. “But how can there still be any electricity inside something that’s this dead?”

“I dunno,” she said. “Magic, I guess. Hey, maybe we can make it dance.”

She began poking vigorously, but it stopped moving altogether. She stopped and a grimace appeared on her face. However, it didn’t stay there for long because then one of its legs began moving.

“Is it working?” asked Dmitry. “Is it really going to dance for us?”

“I hope so,” said Grapevine. “It seems to be getting up.”

By now all of the corpse’s legs were moving, and indeed it seemed like it was trying to get itself upright. When it was finally standing up straight, it turned to look for us, and I found its lifeless face unnerving as it seemed to stare at us.

“Gwwwaaaaauuuuggghhhhh!!!!” It said, opening its mouth wide open to reveal a mangled tongue and the yellowest teeth I have ever seen in my life.

“Ooh, it talks!” said Grapevine, excitedly. Meanwhile Dmitry was slowly inching backward.

“Uhh… I think you should get away from that thing,” he said. “I don’t think it’s friendly.”

“Shucks, it’s totally friendly!” she said. “See?”

It reached out its hoof and smacked away Grapevine’s stick, then began groaning some more as it shuffled towards her. Some liquid from its mouth-- either water from the frost or saliva if it still had any-- sprayed everywhere, including on Grapevine’s face, although she didn’t seem at all perturbed by that. Then some more of the bodies began trying to get up while the first one slowly made its way towards us. By now we were all scared, and had realized exactly what these things were:

Zombies.

“RRRRRUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!” I cried, and all three of us broke into a sprint. Meanwhile, the other zombies had also begun sprinting, effectively giving chase.

“Ah didn’t know zombies could run that fast!” Grapevine cried.

“I didn’t know they could run at all!” I replied.

We ran down an offramp, hoping to find some cover in an abandoned building. To our dismay, most of the doors had either been boarded up or blocked by rubble or large objects, severely limiting our options. Once we were about one block in, I stopped and turned around. The zombies were still chasing us, but we had a sufficient lead that I could use to thin the herd. I took out an assault rifle and loaded a full clip, then fired vigorously. The thing was difficult for my inexperienced self to handle, and much like a firehose in that regard: a giant burst of projectile that knocked me off my balance and ruined whatever aim I had. The result: water (or in this case, bullets,) spilling everywhere. Most of them landed on the ground or lodged into objects, but I did manage to hit all the zombies. They appeared insensitive to pain, falling back only due to the impact of the projectiles, but recovering only a second later. It took almost all of the clip, but eventually I got all of them to fall down. It seemed as though their bodies could only take so many bullets before they were torn apart.

Dmitry and Grapevine stopped running, and the coast was clear… but only for a few seconds. Several of my shots had been enough to pierce the hood of a nearby parked car, which began fuming. Fortunately we were far away enough not to be harmed when it exploded, but the reverberating shockwave from the detonation of its engine seemed to wake up dozens more of these zombies from all around us.

We had to run even further down the road, this time in urgent need of a building to hide in so the zombies couldn’t get us. However, it seemed as though everywhere we went, all of the doors were either barricaded or tightly locked. We ran until we reached the end of the road. There was a cross road, but there were zombies coming in from both sides. It looked like we were going to be trapped by at least a hundred zombies closing in from three sides, and a large building blocking what would have been the fourth.

Suddenly there was a large explosion to our right, followed by some gunfire. I turned and saw a grey donkey wearing a dirty brown trenchcoat and cowboy hat, shooting and kicking down the zombies that occupied that part of the street. Once he killed the last zombie, he looked at us and simply yelled, “This way!” and ran down the street. Given that we still had two streets’ worth of zombies lurching towards us, we had no choice but to follow him.

The stranger led us down the street a little ways, then into an alley when we spotted another group of zombies down the street. I spotted him on top of a building, so we climbed the lowered ladder of one of those metal fire escape thingys on the side of said building, pulling it up again just in time to prevent the zombies from grabbing onto it. Then we climbed the rest of the stairs until we reached the top.

“Thanks for saving us back there,” Dmitry said to the stranger.

“My pleasure,” he replied.

He opened his mouth to say more, but just then a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, followed by rolling thunder. Its light, and the clouds above us as well, looked unusually green.

“Let’s get inside that building over there,” he said. “Quickly!”

He took off running across the rooftops towards one of the taller buildings and we followed. We jumped through a window, one by one, with all of us getting inside just as the first raindrops began to fall. I looked outside as a shower of rain fell from the eerily green sky, along with the fierce howling of wind. A few drops spilled onto me, and I jumped back in shock as I heard what sounded like the clicking of my pipbuck’s radiation counter.

“You’d better stay away from that stuff,” said the stranger as he placed a sheet of metal over the window. “It’s radioactive.”

“I… see...” I said, not really knowing what to think. I mean, I knew that living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland was dangerous, but I never thought that even the rain would be a hazard!

The windows of the room we were in were already boarded up, but the four of us retreated into a windowless room for extra protection as we waited out the storm. This had been a break room inside an office building, although its table and chairs had been removed and replaced with a campfire and several small wooden crates. In one corner, a stained mattress lay among a pile of tiny bones.

“What are you doing here?” asked the mysterious stranger as he threw some leaves into a kettle and put it over the fire. “The city’s not safe anymore. It’s far safer to go back to your stable.”

“Our stable is no longer safe,” explained Dmitry. “A couple of psychopaths inside it attempted a coup. Then they raided the armory and started a race war.”

“Seventy-six, I presume?” he asked. We all nodded.

“I met some travelers from there a few days back,” he said. “They told me the whole story… in gruesome detail.”

He stared right into our eyes as he said ‘in gruesome detail,’ which almost scared the absolute shit out of me. Grapevine was also scared, Dmitry not so much.

“None of them could agree on why it happened,” he continued. “One of them thought their leader was a hypnotist. Another thought somepony had released some kind of fear gas into the vents. The third one was a changeling just like you. He swore they were planted there by Stable-Tec to root out the... ‘undesirables.’”

“Shadow Doubt?” asked Dmitry in surprise, then snidely stated. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“Conspiracy theory or not, there’s something fishy about those stables,” the stranger continued. “I had a bad feeling about them from the very beginning, especially those executives. The white one was always way too cheerful about the whole thing; the yellow one too confident in her designs; and the orange one, well, that little filly always acted like she was hiding something.”

“She was,” said Dmitry. “Many things. But let’s talk about you for a minute. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“You never answered my question,” he replied. “But I’ll answer yours.” He leaned back against the wall behind him and clasped his forehooves together as he solemnly told his life story. “My real name is… kinda embarrassing… but ponies call me ‘Gaucho.’ Family moved here when I was nine, parents were looking for work. I would have rather they didn’t, because I had always dreamed of joining the rodeo circuit. Grew up farther north, on the streets, in the barrio, had to look out for myself and my siblings. Then it happened. Fortunately, got to the basement and survived. As food ran short the looting got worse, so we relocated to a refugee camp run by the Ministry of Peace.”

He paused and peeked inside the kettle for a moment, then continued.

“Then, well… it was around the end of December. The Hearth’s Warming Eve betrayal, we call it. The Provincial Guard unit that was stationed there to protect us, they just took all the food they could carry and left. Some of us tried to stop them, I was one of them, but then they took hostages and we had to let them go. Some of the more vocal ones were shot. Then raiders came and attacked the next day and stole the rest. I joined a group that tried to find them, but to no avail. And when I came back… all of my family had been murdered.”

By this point, he was visibly trying to hold back tears. He got out a hoofkerchief and wiped his eyes, and then acted like nothing had happened.

“That was the saddest story ever!” Grapevine sobbed.

“Yeah? Well, that’s life in this wasteland,” he said. “But it isn’t all bad, either. From that day forth, I made a vow to protect the innocent, to provide justice in the absence of the law. I’m no hero, but I did manage to track down those raiders and get my revenge.”

He checked the kettle again, and determined that this time its contents were ready.

“You’ve just got to learn to survive,” he said. “If something bad happens, grieve, but don’t grieve too long or else you’ll never move forward. Now who wants some tea?”

After a hearty meal and some good conversation, the rain finally cleared up. After reassuring us that the rainwater didn’t stay radioactive for long, we headed back down to the street and go our separate ways. The sky was beautiful and there was a small break in the clouds, filling the sky below with a bright golden beam of sunlight and illuminating a green-tinted rainbow in the distance.

“You mentioned some ponies from our stable earlier,” said Dmitry. “Did you see where they went?”

“Of course I did,” said Gaucho. “They went north along 205, towards the airport, but I wouldn’t--”

“We HAVE to go after them!” Grapevine exclaimed.

“Don’t,” warned Gaucho. “It’s too dangerous--”

“Exactly!” Grapevine interrupted. “This city’s crawlin’ with danger! We’ve gotta find ‘em and tell ‘em to go back inside the stable and wait there until we can make things better again!”

“No!” exclaimed Gaucho. “That’s not what I--”

“Of course,” added Dmitry. “They’re our neighbors, after all.”

“C’mon, I know a shortcut!” said Grapevine, and she and Dmitry galloped off.

“Wait! You don’t know what you’re….” Gaucho shouted, but my friends rounded a corner and vanished from sight.

“...Doing...” His ears drooped in disappointment, and then he looked at me. “Ugh, they never listen. You’re not going after them, are you?”

“I have to,” I replied. “Who else will save them from themselves?”

“Not me,” he said. “Look, if you go after them, just be careful because you’re walking right into a sea of zombies, and this time I won’t be there to help you.”

“I’ll make sure they’re at least somewhat careful,” I said. “Thank you, by the way, for saving us back there.”

“Don’t mention it,” he replied. “In your travels, keep an eye out for my friends, Vaquero, Huaso, Chalan, Guajiro, Jibaro, Llanero, Chagra, and Charro. We aren’t heroes, but we do what we can.”

I ran a few yards down the street when Gaucho called my name. I stopped and looked at him. He had a faint smile on his face.

“When you’ve reunited your stable friends again,” he began, “If you meet a jenny named ‘Yerba Mate,’ tell her that her little ‘Galleta’ is doing alright.”

I eventually caught up with my friends, and we spent the rest of the day traveling. Along the way we met two groups of scavengers and chatted a little. They echoed the same warning about not going near the airport, which we politely listened to, only to ignore once they were out of our sight.

Traveling became much easier once we reached 205, as it cut a clear path straight through the dense city. The tiny bit of sunlight that managed to break out of the clouds was having an effect on the remaining snow, melting it further and creating large puddles, muddied by all the dust, dirt, and ash that had accumulated in the streets over the past year in the absence of street sweeping and regular vehicle traffic to clear it away. In some places, the road was several inches under slightly irradiated water.

I dashed through these puddles as fast as I could, gripped with fear at the thought of millions of magical radiation particles, the silent, undetectable killers, entering my body. All that civil defense education back in school and the stable had instilled within me a somewhat unreasonable fear that I might stand in a radiation puddle for too long, soaking up rads without realizing until it was too late, simply because these new irradiated puddles felt no different than the pre-war, radiation-free puddles that I used to splash around in when I was younger. My pipbuck’s built-in radiation counter is truly a lifesaver because it tracks every single unit of radiation that enters my body, allowing me to check my dosage without having to carry around a big old Ungulgeiger counter and constantly scan myself with it. Instead, it used modern archanotechnology to cast a passive spell around my entire body, one which I could not hear, see, feel, smell, or…

Wait... undetectable magic particles affecting my body? I’m starting to feel nervous about having this thing bolted to my leg.

But my thoughts quickly turned to the dimming light: it was getting late and we had to find a place to stay for the night. We found a place called the Chestnut Tree Motel at the Spark Street exit. We broke into the main office to raid it for food, but the place was just teeming with these giant cockroaches the size of a hoof! I knew that cockroaches would survive the apocalypse, but I never thought they’d grow so big!

We also investigated an eerie glow coming from the motel manager’s office. It turned out to be a computer, still on after a long abandonment, with screensaver and automatic sleep mode disabled. It was open to a review site, which could only have been accessed before the bombs fell. The manager had apparently been personally replying to every single review that was posted, writing long, apologetic comments that often exceeded the length of the reviews themselves. They were all composed using the same formula, beginning and ending with the same sentences but with slight variations in the body. None of them addressed any specific points brought up in the reviews, instead replying with vague expressions of happiness, gratitude, or sorrow. The comments were written with an extreme degree of manufactured enthusiasm, such that seemed impossible to compose in the small, dimly-lit, windowless room without injecting oneself with drugs, and as if they were written by Pinkie Pie herself (whose portrait indeed sat on the desk). This only made it all the more jarring when I opened the desk drawers and found cyanide pills and a .44 pistol.

We didn’t really find much, since most of the food was spoiled and whoever locked this place up had taken most of the nonperishable stuff. There was a lot of wood furniture, which we easily broke down into firewood. We also erected massive barricades in front of all the stairs to fend off against any zombies and would-be bandits who tried to attack us during the night. Having retreated to one of the second floor rooms (which we unlocked using a key from the front desk), we ate a small dinner of prepackaged food and then went to bed.

Progress to Next Level: 675/1050

Author's Notes:

In case you hadn't noticed, the chapter name is a pun on 'Rio de la Plata,' a river/bay/estuary in Argentina. 'Rio de la Plata' roughly means 'River of the Silver,' while 'Rio a la Plata' means 'River to the Silver.'
There will be more precious metal themed things later on.