The late evening sun shined brightly down upon the golden orange sands of the the San-Palomino Desert, an empty abyss of tan stretching out endlessly through the irradiated Wasteland. The heavy metallic clanking and thumping of my power armor echoed through the empty desert around me as I made my way along the old E-15 heading towards what used to be Las Pegasus. Or New Pegasus as I heard it being referred to in recent decades by the poor saps having to be born into this hell hole. Endless sand surrounding the narrow strip of broken and decaying asphalt on all sides for as far as the eye could see...the same boring, dull experience as the last hundred miles had been. In times as chaotic and depraved as ours, if there was one certainty that one could always rely on, it was the simple truth that the desert just fucking sucks. One mile a hundred when the sun was right overhead like a damned Overseer coming down to flay your skin red and raw with its ‘benevolent’ light.

It had been years since I had been out this way; leaving my old roost in the far South about fifty years ago to go join up with the fractured and relatively hostile remnants of the Steel Rangers. At one time they were the Pre-War superheroes of the trenches, plains and mountains alike. The legends of their deeds during the Zebra-Equestrian War, true and untrue, were relatively common knowledge on the outside it seemed. You couldn’t go anywhere in abandoned necropolises without seeing dozens of Steel Ranger emblazoned government propaganda posters on the crumbling building walls. After all...in the shithole we call the present, the only comforting direction for anyone to look towards was backwards. I wondered if ponies really believed what was depicted in the posters and billboards of the old world. The Steel Rangers of today certainly seemed to in their own twisted way...

Bunch of stuck up, borderline eugenically asshats is what they had become; more worried about stealing every lick of tech they could find to better their army. If petty theft wasn’t enough to tarnish their legendary image, then there was their utter disdain towards anyone who wasn't a member in their Order. I hated the gaudy speeches of, 'We're here to save the Wastes and protect its inhabitants!’ only then to turn around and burn a settlement to the ground. All because the town merchant wouldn't give you his energy weapon of which he was considered to be unworthy to own. It went without saying that I didn’t recognize the Corps I had left behind when that god awful cog door #39 rolled shut.

That’s really the reason I had decided in the end to leave that bastardized tech cult in the East and make my way back to my old stomping grounds on the Westcoast. New Pegasus offered endless possibilities for making decent caps if the traveling merchants I had met on the way were to be at all believed. Who knew? I could maybe see about signing onto a merc crew in need of some good feathered muscle. On second thought...nah. They could shove it too. Their money wasn’t gonna be worth helping them peddle drugs to the locals or killing off other drug bosses just so I can have their cronies on my tail. And, knowing the Stirrup in general, I’d probably be sent to kill some poor sap that couldn’t pay back a debt because the casino sucked every cap outta his last paycheck. I suppose that was another certainty to be found in New Pegasus...the people in charge might change but the casinos are always happy to milk your wallet dry. Ponies, Griffins, Dragons; hell anyone with half a brain still in their fucking skull love to think they’re above being dairy producers like the Brahmin we all like to heard and milk. Heh...I guess anyone can be a sucker if you dazzle them with enough flashing lights, heavy liquor and a cute ass or two. Don’t matter which gender but that was a definite requirement. The world’s already ended so who was to say which ass got the shaft? Long as it's good...who really cares right?

After about another ten minutes of pondering on what I was actually going to do, the open road finally started to give way to the crumbling remains of countless rows of buildings that stood outside the gates of New Pegasus. The bright neon sign that was cobbled out of the old Pre-War welcome sign and some other scrounge up neon letters shone brightly overhead while a few heads and a pair of rifle barrels peeked out over the top. The guard had been doubled since the last time I had visited...but, it was nice to know I could at least relax a bit from the overexposure of traveling alone on the open road. After all, the San Palomino area was known for its constantly rotating rogues gallery of drugged out Raider gangs terrorizing the local scrub farmers just trying to grow something in all this sandy bullshit. No matter how scary each might be, each inevitably was destroyed or ran outta town by one or more of the infamous west coast bounty hunters or merc groups that abounded the area. There was good money to be had out west if you had the gear and no regard for small scale skirmishes or massive cullings on a regular basis.

“Welcome to New Pegasus huh?” I muttered to myself as I passed under the more than ironic sign. “Last time I was here, some drunk gambler tried to get frisky with me. Yeah, very welcoming..."

Up ahead was the half impoverished, half decent enough settlement that formed a massive ring around the Stirrup called Freeside. Formed from the bombed out husk of the Las Pegasus suburbs, the living conditions varied from rubble and tents all the way up to decent apartment buildings the closer to the Stirrup you got. Living closer to the relative safety that was the high walls surrounding the Stirrup itself came at a cost though and that income has to come from somewhere. People with at least half a conscience turned to trade, manual labor and mercenary work while the not so conscience-driven found themselves a gun and got what they wanted from there. Freeside was like a cat...perpetually bouncing between calm and civilized and on the brink of absolute chaos. At the very least...it had been some time since I had been in an urban combat scenario so a fight would not be unwelcome.

God the place reeked even through my helmets’ filters. Hanging subtly on every breath was the stench of booze, puke, piss and trash like the toxic gasses of the War. I guess the locals still didn't mind even fifty years later as they seemed content with just sitting around outside in the open under the sun. Civilization hasn’t changed one bit as far as the poor were concerned. Everywhere I looked were figures sitting or standing amidst the rubble of Las Pegasus’ past, the black smoke of trash can fires mixing with the hazy golden mist of the local street favorite pastime. Red Berryl...guaranteed to make the world around you turn just a bit more friendly looking and life worth living for those who had nothing else.

As I trotted briskly towards the large neon signs denoting the gate to the Stirrup proper, I could hear the distant ring of gunshots on the next block over, barely four or five buildings down the street. Three crisp cracks like a whip echoing between the brick buildings followed by the miserable howling of the poor stallion on the receiving end. Ering on the side of not my problem, I chose not to investigate the shots and instead stopped my way through the pony-sized doorway to what looked like a decent enough hotel. After a long two day journey by paw, even a pile of hay would work for me. The interior was actually far nicer than the exterior let on with a stage off to side and a few scantily clad mares dancing their goods off in front of a crowd of rowdy, drunken males all hollering and cat calling loudly enough to drown out the girl’s music. Heh...it was safe to assume that this hotel provided a bit more than your basic room service, not an uncommon occurrence out here. Would be interesting having it so readily available again…

Turning my eyes from the dancers I went over to the bar. The bartender was surprisingly a female, a good looking creamy orange colored Unicorn wearing a simple beige skirt and blouse with a small name tag I couldn’t read from afar, even with my four-or-five-foot height advantage. Easily glancing over her head I could tell they were gonna need a few kegs more at the rate the crowd behind me was chugging it down. Drunks had definitely gotten worse it felt...words turned to violence a hell of a lot faster now and revolvers weren’t the only thing with hair triggers.

"Well, well, well! Not often Ah get tah see one of yew Iron Giants in mah establishment. ‘Specially ah big ol’ Griffin one at that." The mare purred in a very sultry southern accent, batting her big yellow eyes at me though there was a slight trepidation at the sight of my armor. “Welcome to The SugarApple doll, name’s Rose Lead if ya can’t see mah tag here! What can ah get ya darlin’? Or maybe ya lookin’ for some of our here fine n’ dandy gals?’

“Not lookin for love ma'am, only a room for the night.'' I replied through the headset lining the inside of my helmet, my voice coming through slightly tinny and monotone.

“Mmmm you sure hun? Hmmm...well Ah guess Ah can oblige then. Rooms are thirty caps for th’ night hun, all in advance. Ah’m sure ya understand. Come by on th’ regular tho’ an Ah can take ya at yer word then.”

I nodded in silent acknowledgement and reached towards my waist for the large repurposed leather saddle bags to pull out my hefty sack of caps before setting it on the counter with a soft clatter. Thirty caps was hella cheap compared to most inns on the East side. If the innkeeper charged you fifty caps, you were getting the absolute bottom of the barrel cumstain rustbucket shithole of a room. Anything even remotely passing for decent accommodations would cost ya a hefty two-hundred, three to four hundred for a place with a working toilet and/or bathtub. Then again the thriving local economy of the New Pegasus area easily dwarfed the skimpy GDP of anything East of Canterlot. Hmph...what a fucking racket…

“You guys are cheaper out here compared to places like Manehattan.” I commented as I counted out and paid thirty caps plus an extra ten for her troubles. “Thirty caps is a halfway decent meal back East.”

“Oh Ah believe it! Those poor souls ova there don’ see ah solid income. Th’ Wasteland might be fulla shit but if New Pegasus ain’t th’ most profitable locale to set up shop well...then Ah’ll eat mah own tail!” She smiled and walked over to a rack stashed inside a worn down cabinet and grabbed a key, sliding it across the counter towards me. “Room 2A hun. And if yer eva feelin’ lonely tonight, yew know where tah find meh! Enjoy ya stay wit’ us here at th’ SugarApple!”

I gave her a curt nod and set off down a hallway beside the counter, the threadbare and dust soaked carpet doing little to cushion the sound of my armor as I walked. It was odd being in a building, a hotel even, that was so intact and domesticated when most of Equestria looked more or less like the outer edges of Freeside. Curtains, moth eaten and limp with age, still hung over the window at the far end of the hall and sunlight peeked through casting beams of light through the haze of dust being kicked up by the weight of my steps. The numbering system for the hotel seemed a bit fucky to me as by the time I reached room 2A, I was nearly at the end of the goddamn hallway. Either way, the first thing I noticed was that my room was, once upon a time, painted in a dark red wine color matching the sheets on the sadly pony-sized four poster bed. My legs weren’t gonna be resting so easy tonight but it beat the everloving shit outta sleeping out in the open again. Roughing it was in my blood but that never meant I wanted to do it as a profession, let alone a lifestyle. Still...with Equestria as it was, roughing it is relative.

With barely a thought the back of my power armor popped and hissed open like a pneumatic door allowing me to step out and set my paws back on the ground for the first time in...I couldn’t even remember the last time I had the chance. A moment or two after leaving its steely confines, each of the hinged sections of armor hissed closed behind me; a perfect seal against the outside air forming inside. Equestria might have started the War that made the world go to hell but they damn well knew how to build shit to last. With slight hesitation, I looked over at my bed and internally asked myself if I dared sleep on a bed in what was most definitely a brothel. It only took a moment though for the comforting allure of a mattress in a (more or less) secure area to cut my anxieties about cum stains on the sheets to pieces. Since the room thankfully came with a modestly large table, I decided to take the opportunity to open one of the large Kevyarn bags riveted to my armor and pull out some lunch. It wasn’t a feast but a lukewarm Sparkle Cola and a Rice N’ Beans MRE were better than gnawing on Radroach meat like a fucking animal. Life in the Army taught you how to not give a damn about what fuel you put in the tank as long as it kept ya going. Sure they might have been talking about surviving in the wild but...I didn’t think the ruins outside my window were exactly what they had in mind during those survival courses. I mean...of course they had to do some training for surviving Megaspell/Balefire strikes but they had all been woefully whimsical. No one can really prepare for the real thing and survive it...well, that was a different beast altogether. There’s just no fucking accounting for the effects of the Taint Breech and the full might of a global fuck-up like the Great War. You honestly expect me to believe that old Writey McFuckFace when he was writing the EAF Combat and Survival Guide could have possibly hoped to account for shit like Hellhounds, Radwasps, Chimeras and all the other mutated bullshit lurking in the faroff future? Hell the fuck no...I should know. I liked to re-read my copy left over from bootcamp every now and again.

After stuffing the contents of the MRE rather messily down my beak and finishing off my lovely warm Sparkle Cola, I sat back onto my creaking bed and sighed.The two-week journey to reach New Pegasus had been longer than I remembered; then again I wasn’t walking all the way from Manehattan the last time I was here. The ruins seemed to be a bit more cleaned up than I remembered though. Less piles of rubble and some of the crumbliest places seemed to have been knocked down for spare bricks. There was still a lot of old world shit to be found out there, even two hundred something odd years later as long as you knew where to look and/or had the skills to obtain it. The best places were of course former military complexes which thankfully dotted the Equestrian Wasteland like seeds scattered over an empty field on the wind. Old guns, spare parts, high grade ammunition, sometimes even a derelict suit of T-45 if you were lucky but the true costs of time meant you had to dig deep to find stuff worth looting these days. Surface level, easy to reach places had been picked clean several times over in two centuries worth of the same kind of desperate survivors that call the Post-War era their hellhole away from home. Diving deep into the bowels of the old world meant radiation, mutated beasts and Feral Ghouls. Lots and lots of Feral Ghouls…

Lazily laying back against the pillowed headboard, I brought my left arm to my face and rested it on the edge of my beak so I could fuck around with my PipBuck. Despite having the tools to take it off myself, only a fool would leave his PipBuck off his leg for any longer than he or she had to. The Steel Rangers had definitely gotten the better portion of the war budget as we were the only Corps to have received the 3000s as standard-issue personal computing units while every other poor sap was stuck with the smaller or bulkier 2000 and 1000 models or none at all. Optimized for claws rather than hooves, the button interface was smaller allowing for a larger screen to display all the info on yourself you’d ever wanna know. Much as I was dying to know the contents of my saddlebags, I was much more concerned with my map system and what it had to say about the area around me now that I had a chance to look extensively. How the damned things’ auto-mapping function worked was absolutely beyond me but thankfully I never had to explain it to someone else before.

The orange colored display showed a very detailed map of New Pegasus extrapolated from the auto-mapper as well as a private uplink to one of the few orbiting Geographical Identification and Mapping Program satellites still running. GIMP, despite the hilarious name, was as good as having an Eye in the Sky with a semi-live camera feed. As long as it was outdoors, I could see almost everything with live updates every thirty minutes. While the orange display left a lot to be desired when it came to the finer details larger LED screens used by intelligence operatives back at HQ had, I could still glean a lot just by looking over the lay of the land. Zooming out onto the larger area, I was once again struck at the oasis-like look of New Pegasus sitting alone in an expansive desert with black and ruined edges slowly forming into standing buildings with a bright and shiny core. Anything in a thirty-mile radius was going to be bone dry pickings...that was...except for the nearby crater which had contributed to the overall fucking up of the region.

The only place to my knowledge that was still relatively stocked with potential loot worth my while in the area was old Camp Macintosh about twenty miles south of here. As the H.Q of the old Desert Ranger Corps, it was a massive military base that had covered several hundred acres with barracks, armories, research labs and who knew what else. The Zebs had detonated a Balefire Bomb over the site leaving the bulk of the main complex a massive crater. Rumor had it though that the bomb had exposed a massive underground facility built directly beneath the Camp, accessible only to the absolutely insane. If the rumors were true then I might have already stumbled across my first task in my new home. I decided after I slept for a long ass while and ate something filling in the morning, I'd set out to see if the old place still had supplies. Who knew? Maybe with a couple handfuls of Rad-X and the lead-tungsten lining of my power armor I might be able to spend some decent time there exploring around and even come across a neat find. I certainly wouldn’t mind finding one of those Ironshod Firearms BFRs, or Big Fucking Revolver as they were nicknamed. The Desert Rangers had adopted it as the firearm presented to those who had achieved their internal rank of Veteran after serving and surviving at least five years in the Corps and it was a thing to behold. The .45-70 Celestia rounds were a tad smaller than the .454s in my old service revolver but this far out West, I was sure to find a decent amount of the stuff lying around the region that produced it.

Looking over the remains of the Camp, there was certainly merit to the rumors as something ponymade poked out here and there down the crater walls. Something the rumors had failed to mention was the worrying number of red ticks the EFS system had placed around the map like it had thrown a handful of darts. There was only so far I could zoom in with the picture feed but the blobs marked as unfriendlies were big, hunched over and cast large shadows visible even in the blackened earth. Fuckin’ wonderful...the home of the NadPads was now the home of Hellhounds...it was like exchanging a jerk for a total asshole. If there was an underground complex there, that would explain the Hellhounds as they loved them some prebuilt ‘caves’ for them to nest in. And by that metric the presence of the Hellhounds substantiated the rumors of the complex to warrant a serious look at the area. All in all, I knew what I was doing in the morning for damned sure.

With another heavy sigh I stretched a wing across the room and lazily shut the moth-eaten curtains over the late afternoon sun pouring in from outside. The sounds of life in Freeside wafted in through the broken window with a strangely comforting murmur. Were it not for the occasional gunshot, angry shout or rambling chemhead wandering past my window, I might have almost mistook it for civilization. Background noise was at once both comforting and unnerving as it took effort to listen for possible attack. With some effort, I finally managed to put away my curiosity about the morrow and wind myself down enough to slip into a restful slumber.

If you got this far id like to thank you for reading so far. I have some more chapters in the works and will post them as their finalised. Id also like to thank my Co-writer and Editor SynthetaCrete for all her help so far