Bonus Chapter: A Simple Story About Killing Ponies

Manehattan: five years before The Prankster's release...

This story begins at a Celestial Church of Harmony in Manehattan.

Can you believe that?—a church of all places. Not a dive bar, or a cathouse, or a squalid motel, or a barren street corner that’s lit up by one lonely lamp post. Not a place that smells like urine or poverty or corruption and makes you wrinkle your nose when you walk by.

No. Not a place like that. A church. A humble place of worship, all white walls, stone steps and a steeple that needles high into the night and looks misplaced in this city of demons and fiends. Every time I see it standing there, proud as sin and so pleased with itself, I wonder how it got there. How it arrived at the border-street that separates downtown from midtown, only three subway stops from a drug den I raided not even two weeks ago.

So the story begins at a church, and it features a rag-tag gaggle of corrupt cops. One of those cops is me. Berry Punch. MPD. SWAT. Little purple Berry Punch, who used to wear her badge like a second cutie mark. Who drinks on the job and carries a whisky flask in a pouch on her tactical vest. Whose face is bruise-colored and always sporting at least one square bandage over a bruised cheek, like a patch sewn into torn jeans.

That’s me. Little purple Berry Punch. The mare who lives in an empty whisky bottle and is one herself. Who sleeps on her side to avoid drowning and wakes up in strange places.

The mare who is drunk now—intoxicated in the back of a police van with four pony-shaped blurs that must be my fellow officers. They are hazy outlines sitting upright on two rows of benches—vague shapes made of silence and body armor and boots designed for chasing and stomping. Four blue silhouettes shrouded in dreary night time mystery—and the diver makes five, and I make six, and together we make one. One lynch mob, stalking through the frozen night with animal cunning.

Tonight we are stalking a predator. The worst kind of predator. The kind that smiles. Lures. Feeds on innocence. Cute, rosy-kneed innocence that is helpless against forehooves that reach out from black alcoves and touch and touch and touch…

Picture him for a moment, Manehattan’s worst kind of predator. Don’t hold the image for too long, or its foulness will make you crawl into a tub of soapy water and scrub and scrub and scrub until the skin peels off your bones. Until you are exposed muscle and sinew sitting in a bowl of red water, sure that you will never feel clean again.

But don’t run from the image, either. Don’t cower. He is proof of the depravity of the modern condition, and you need to see him.

Take a breath. Relax. Focus. Now tell me, can you see his face? His slight grin as he opens his refrigerator in the morning and finds just enough milk for one more bowl of cereal. His frown as he reads the paper and learns that his favorite baseball team has lost another game.

He looks like your brother, doesn’t he? Or like your roommate at university, the one who collected odd-looking paperweights and laughed aloud while listening to his favorite radio show. He looks like you. He looks like me too, and that’s the problem. That’s why it’s so important that you see him.

And not just see him, either, but hear him as well. Hear his voice that is creamy and whispering empty promises in little ears. Claiming that it won’t hurt. That it will feel good. That it will only take a minute. Can you see him now? If you could, you would understand we ride under the black sky. Because we must. Because we are officers of the law, and the law’s justice is not for the worst kind of predators.

But never mind us. Never mind the lynch mob, the predator, and especially me. The story isn’t about me, I’m just the pony telling it. Just little purple Berry Punch: the drunken SWAT officer dozing in the backseat of a van as it rumbles by a church...

"Have a gander at that, would ya?” The driver’s country twang pinches my ear, rousing me from mys stupor. The van lolls to a stop. There are no windows in the back, so I can't ‘have a gander’ at whatever the driver wants us to see.

Curious, I sidle up into the passenger seat and look out the window. One of the female officers follows me. She stands in the nook between the driver and passenger seats, her head tilted as she stares out the window as well.

The driver is furious; I can almost hear how hard his knees are coiling around the steering wheel. He is furious, and so is the mare in the nook, but I hardly feel a thing as I watch the drama unfold across the street.

I watch an earth mare in a parka shove a unicorn stallion into the doors of the church’s entrance. The stallion is old and wearing a black cloak, a white collar. The mare is young and holding a bat between her teeth. A priest and a street tough. One victim. One victimizer. Predictable stock characters in any Manehattan drama.

The priest raises a foreleg to shield his face. The bat clubs his temple. He sinks to the floor, cowering.

More blows follow. The tough drops her bat to speak. Words are exchanged: pleas from the priest, curses from the tough. Insults rain down on the priest. Blows again—brick-heavy stomps that pummel and thump. Then more words, terse and biting. Then a wad of spit that lands on the priest’s face.

Another stomp. Another. Less movement from the priest. Blood now. Blood from his nose. His mouth. Blood stains on the sealed doors. On the tough’s hooves. The sleeves of her parka…

And then the tough is trotting away from a pile of torn skin and broken bones. She canters off on anxious legs, taking the stone steps two at time, her unzipped parka fluttering from the speed of her descent.

It happens fast and slow. Fast enough that it ends before we can stop it—before we can even leave the van—but slow enough for every detail to burrow between the creases of our brains.

The driver starts to open his door, furious, but stops when the mare’s hoof falls on his shoulder. You remember the mare between the seats, right? Sorry, but I’m afraid there aren’t any names in this story. You’ll have to pay close attention, okay.

“Wait,” the mare whispers.

“We done waited too long already,” snaps the driver.

The three of us watch the tough climb into a topless stagecoach parked at on the curb. The drunken haze behind my eyes distorts the wagon’s features. They distort the tough as well. She looks ghoulish in her open parka, a big-city ghost seated atop her Flying Dutchmare.

The wagon pulls away from the curb, and so does the van. We follow the wagon. We follow because the mare between the seats has just finished relaying the drama to the others, and their blood is turning volcanic. Because they are much drunker than I am. Not with booze that numbs the passion of a pony’s spirit, but with power and petty indignation that supercharges it.

We wear badges, you see. Badges that validate our rage and justify our whims. Can you see us? Huddled in a van and armed for war. Seething and shaking in our body armor as we pretend to care about the sanctity of religion, of anything. A priest was assaulted tonight—and look how angry we are! Can you hear us mumbling curses under our breath? Can you hear our bombastic declarations of war? Our promises to ‘bash that bitches skull in’, to ‘teach her a lesson’, to ‘make an example’ of her.

And all this fury after we sat in the van, and watched, and didn’t raise a hoof to serve or protect the priest. The battered stallion of the cloth who is lying alone in the cold and likely staring up, straight up at the moon and stars, wondering where his goddess is. Well we were just across the street. Six of us. Six guardian angels that sat and watched, and now follow, because vengeance is more exhilarating than justice.

We follow the taxi to a squalid neighborhood nestled near the northernmost edge of Manehattan’s lower eastside. Shadowbolt territory. A neighborhood made of streets cracked by poverty and neglect. Of houses that squat miles apart, as if fearing contact. A neighborhood that doesn’t wake until noon and stays up well past four in the morning. That is awake now. Watching us, I’m sure.

We stalk quietly, always at a safe distance. The driver has done this sort of thing before. I watch him from the passenger seat with eyes made nebulous by booze and long hours of wakefulness. His face is long and scrunched with anger. He has defined, angular features, and a muzzle that pulls into a cone shape where his nose ends. A shape that makes me think of bullets or missile warheads.

His horn is short and lacks the signature spiral of most unicorn horns. It seems like an afterthought, his horn; like Celestia was making an earth pony and changed her mind at last moment.

“Ah’m in charge of this here operation,” he says to the mare still standing between the seats. She smirks at his use of the word ‘operation’, as if we were on some official mission. “What Ah say goes from here on out. What was y’all thinkin’ lettin’ her get back to her wagon like ya did? What if we’d a lost her?”

“Let me ask you something,” the mare responds. “Do you want to catch her out on the street while she’s alert? Expecting it?” She leans in close and ropes a foreleg around the driver’s neck, grinning with serpent lips. “Or do you want to catch her in her home? Her bed? Under her blankets where she thinks she's safe.”

“But the priest… We just left him there on the sidewalk. What if he was—”

“He was probably already dead,” she interrupts. “You saw what she did to him. A Fucking priest, for Cadenza’s sake! Beat him to death right outside a church, then climbed in her wagon and rolled away like nothing happened. In our city! In your city! Are you just gonna to let that slide?”

“But…” he tries to hide the tremor in his voice. “…What about the—”

“The kiddy fucker,” she growls. “He’ll get his soon enough. But first we gotta handle this priest-bashing bitch. Come on, kid, pony up! This whole thing was your idea in the first place, remember?”

There’s a tremor in her voice too. The others don’t hear it; they’re too busy lapping up her every word like a pack of thirsty dogs with their muzzles shoved in water dishes. But I hear it clear as day, even through the fog in my head that keeps me nice and numb.

The driver swallows hard and nods his agreement.

“That’s the way,” she says, triumph in her voice. Then she turns to me and says, “Berry, your flask?” her voice quivering from shot nerves.

I pull the flask from its hiding place in my vest and pass it to the mare. She takes a big gulp, thanks me, then passes it back. I take a gulp myself, plunging deeper into the fog.

The wagon rumbles into a cul-de-sac and parks in front of a house reminiscent of the shacks and shanties that line the streets of Discord’s Kitchen. A porch light reveals a fraction of the paint-peeled walls. There’s a broken window on one side of the house; I can barely see it as we pull up to the curb in silence, parking a good ways away from the house and the tough’s wagon.

The tough climbs off her ride and strolls up to the harnessed pony who pulled her all this way, a pegasus mare with yellow eyes that stare in two directions at once. A Tongueless.

“She’s a Bolt,” I hear myself say, the words breaking through the fog. “Maybe we should let her walk.”

“You saw what she did to that priest,” says the driver, his tone quaking with uncertainty. “And she’ll keep pulling shit like that—her and every lowlife like her—unless…” He swallows hard. Takes a breath. Finds his nerve. “…Unless we make them stop.”

The tough pets the Tongueless, trots up the paved walkway, then disappears into the house, leaving the pegasus mare harnessed to the wagon.

The Tongueless lies down on the sidewalk, tired, her body shivering. I watch her, and for the first time tonight I feel something. A twinge of remorse reaches me through the apathetic haze between my ears, and just like that a bit of the fog in my head lifts. Suddenly I have enough indignation pushing against my ribs to justify what the six of us are about to do.

We sit in the van for three hours, until we’re sure the tough is cozy in her bed.

It’s late when I finally step onto the sidewalk and crash face-first into a wall of frigid November air. I take a breath that stings on the way down my throat. Snow flurries overhead, tracing graceful acres and pasting itself to everything it can: fences, rooftops, treetops, parked wagons, paved walkways, porch steps, streetlights… It crunches under my boots, leaving imprints on the sidewalk.

A deep breath inflates my lungs, and the world makes more sense than it did earlier tonight. The others move to surround the house. I trot up to the Tongueless and rest a hoof on her mane, taking care not to wake her. She’s curled up in a tight ball, shivering. Why leave her out in the cold? It’d be so easy to let her sleep inside. She doesn’t need a bed or blankets, just a roof, four walls and a stretch of warm carpet. It would be easy, no trouble at all for the tough, so why make her sleep out here in the snow? Why this cruelty?

I march back to the van grab a jacket with word SWAT written in white letters across the back. Then I march back to the wagon and drape the jacket over the mare’s shivering body. She stirs, but doesn’t wake. Doesn’t shiver any less, either.

“What are you doing, Berry?” calls the driver, his voice hushed as he waves for me to hurry up.

I pull the flask from my vest and finish what’s left. Because I want to be numb for what happens next. Because the shivering Tongueless with the ash grey coat made me feel something tonight—something strong—and I don’t want to feel anything ever again.

Feelings only complicate things, and, you see, this really is just a very simple story. I’ve done my best to beautify it with ribbons of creative imagery. To decorate it with pretty bows made of metaphors and unconventional sentence structures. With lines that stretch on and on, and are serpentine, and bubble over with ‘ands’ and commas and semicolons and dashes, because there is always just a tiny bit more to say. Lines that stumble clumsy and ramble and remind us that there is no place for precision in the city of Manehattan.

But don’t think too hard about any of that. It really is a very simple story. There’s nothing special about it. But then… I guess that’s really for you to work out on your own.

We leave our firearms in the van. The six of us take only our body armor and our batons—because tonight we are teaching this city’s scum a lesson, and certain lessons need to be blunt and painful, or they won’t stick.

The driver orders us to circle the house and prepare to breach. Two at the front door. Two at the back. One at the living room window, and me at the bedroom window. There might be others in the house, so we try to be careful, or at least not too rash. I’m glad to be by the bedroom window. I just hope it’s the right one.

“On mah mark…” says the driver, speaking slow, his voice crackling through the radio transceiver strapped to my chest.

“Buck yeah! Let’s tear this bitch a new asshole!” says another voice.

“Right, lovelies. We gonna mash her up proper then,” says another, cocky, careless, no trace of worry at all.

“Break her in two—” says another.

“Teach her a lesson—” Another.

“Make an example…”

The last voice is mine. It’s almost a whisper as it flits through the receiver.

The driver gives the order to breach. I back up to get a running start, sprint, then hurl myself through the bedroom window—because that little trick never fails to scare the piss out of the bad guys.

I land on all fours, the thud of my boots accompanied by the tinkle of falling glass shards. The bedroom is dark, but I hear the mare give a loud start. She jerks upright on the bed, and her lavender eyes latch onto me. Tiny specks in the darkness. I latch onto them as well. Hold them fast.

Then I charge. Leap. My neck twists in mid-flight, and the baton in my mouth swings forward, catching the tough on the ear. She tumbles off the mattress, knocking her head against the nightstand beside her bed.

I land on the bed, then quickly hop down to the floor. I rear up on my back legs and move to stomp her with both front hooves, but her back leg swings out in a tight arc and sweeps my boots.

Sharp pain lances through my fetlocks, and the room tilts sideways as I fall. When I hit the ground, she pounces on my chest and her jaws snap around my ear. I cry out. We tussle on the floor. I drop my baton. She mounts me, postures up and drops a thunderbolt left that turns my nose to pulp. Blood sputters. Another blow lands on my jaw. Spots flicker behind my eyes. Another hits my cheek. The room spins.

I can’t see or hear anything—there are lights where my eyes should be and my head is ringing—but instinct has my upper body twisting as I throw a wild hook from off my back. My hoof blunts a patch of soft underbelly, and the tough gurgles and spits something warm and sticky on my face. It drips into my open mouth, its flavor like a sloppy kiss.

With a grunt, I buck my hips and shuck her off my lap. I scramble up to my back legs and launch a straight right aimed at her muzzle. To my surprise, she bounces to her back legs and catches my airborne foreleg with both of hers. Then her body pivots, her hips twist, her knees bend—and suddenly I’m sailing through the air and crashing into a dresser.

I’ll be damned. The bitch can fight.

Just as I find my hooves, the tough picks up my baton and rushes me. She closes, clubs me across the mouth. I stumble back into the dresser, hooves scrambling to find balance, and somehow manage to block the second strike with a raised foreleg. Then I time her third swing perfectly, catching one end of the baton in my mouth.

We fight over the weapon like dogs fighting over a bone, snarling and tugging as we try to jerk it free of the other’s grasp. It’s a give and take tussle, more a test of will than muscle.

I’m wondering where the others are when suddenly the tough trips over her own hooves and drags me down with her. Our heads knock against the fallen dresser, and the batons pops out from between our clenched teeth. It rolls across the room.

We stay on the ground for almost a full minute. Breathing heavy. Assessing our wounds. Watching each other in the dark.

Then we stand up, slowly. I take off my bulletproof vest and toss it the floor. It’s heavy. Slowing me down.

A scream echoing from another room grabs the tough’s attention. Her eyes leave mine, flicking over my shoulder at the door behind me. She inches toward me. I rise to my hind legs. Raise my fores. She does the same.

Now pay close attention to this next part. I don’t simply want you to see it. I want you feel it. To experience it.

I want you to feel the bone-jarring rattle that shakes all the way down to my boots as a right hook sinks into my side. The whiplash of her head snapping back under the force of my counter uppercut.

I want you to hear the faint tap, tap of hooves shuffling on carpet. The shotgun crack of punishing strikes finding their marks—of hooves and knees and skulls speaking in tongues to each other.

I want you to taste the rust-flavored droplets wetting the tough’s bottom lip. To smell the trickle of vomit that spews from me after a kick finds my gut and reminds me how drunk I am.

I want you to see the left cross that catches my temple; my shoulder that drives her body into a wall; our hind legs that are weary and slowly becoming gelatinous.

A headbutt.

A bite.

A kick.

A tackle.

A slam.

A dance, you see.

With last drop of energy she can muster, the tough rams me, slamming both of us into the door. We drop to the floor, exhausted. Before either of us can scramble up, the door swings open and a baton comes down on the back of the mare’s neck. She flops down on her belly, defenseless against the second blow that strikes the crown of her head.

Then she lies still.

I breathe a sigh of relief, glad it’s finally over.

“Up you go.” Rough hooves grab my shoulders and stand me upright. The driver’s hooves. He looks me up and down. “Ponyfeathers,” he laughs. “Gave ya a fight, did she?”

I don’t know why, but the first thing I notice about him is the baton holstered on his belt. It looks savage. Primitive. In a better world, that terrible club would be the sword of noble knight, never drawn in petty anger, never swung without a just and worthy cause.

I keep my eyes fixed on the club, even as the driver takes the tough’s tail in his mouth and drags her from the bedroom. Even as I limp after him down the hall, through a common room, out the back door. Out into the snow-chill air that pricks at my skin like a hungry mosquito.

And the longer I stare at the club, the more I wish it was sword. Because five years ago I joined the force in hopes of becoming a knight. Because on nights like this one—dark nights when the cold shocks me from my drunken stupor and makes me feel the weight of my badge… On nights like tonight, I remember the Berry Punch of a few years past who left her safe home in Ponyville because she wanted to make a difference. Because harmony had met a quick and brutal end, and the world was going to pieces, and she wanted to pick up the broken bits and glue them back together.

But there are too many broken bits now, flurrying overhead like jagged snowflakes. They fall too fast, too heavy, and they cut the skin on their way down, down, down to meet the sidewalk.

The driver shoves the street tough to the ground. We are standing in her backyard now. The fight has abandoned her body. She sits up on her haunches, her front hooves resting between her thighs like dog paws, her head drooping forward. Beaten down. Defeated.

Blood leaks from her nose, pooling on the snow. For the first time since witnessing her assault on the priest, I notice how young she is. How small. Fragile. I notice her cropped mane and tousled bangs that swoosh to one side in the November breeze. Her dainty shoulders that give me pause and make me wonder how she fought so hard for so long. She’s pretty—or she would be if not for the ugly welts and bruises that add new textures to her skin, especially the skin on her face. She has a face made of braille now. An expression a blind pony could read.

She looks up at the driver and hacks a wad of spit that falls short of his face. It lands on his foreleg instead, earning a hard kick that sends her sprawling in the snow.

“You are... cowardly pigs…” she says with a heavy Stalliongrad accent. Her voice comes out strained. She wipes her nose. Spits. “Attacking a defenseless filly in her bed… and with clubs and greater numbers…” She pauses frequently to suck back labored breaths.

The driver’s front hoof lashes out again, striking her underbelly, making her cough and curl into a ball.

“Is this… making you feel like big stallion?” she continues, forcing the words through a morass of raspy coughs.

The driver stomps her neck, pinning her beneath his hoof. “Did ya feel big while you was kicking the crap out of that old priest?” he says in menacing tone. “He’s dead now ‘cause a you. Well, answer me, ya little shit!”

“That was business.” She glares up at the driver, fearless.

“Well, Ah reckon this here is business too.”

“What you do… you are doing for pleasure…” she scoffs. “Is different… Is like night and day…”

The driver is about to rebuttal with another kick, when the other cops appear in the doorway, dragging two more earth ponies out into the yard. One of their prisoners is an older mare with eyes just like the tough. Blood is dripping from a gash in her shoulder, staining the snow. The other is a stallion who looks nothing like the mares. His broken foreleg flops grotesquely as two cops shove him into the snow. He's barely conscious, mumbling nonsense under his breath. Probably in shock.

“Wait! Stop!” the tough shouts, fighting to worm free of the driver’s hold. “L-leave them alone! They are having nothing to do with this!”

The driver smirks and kneels down close to his victim, their noses nearly touching. “But we found them here at the culprit’s hideout. Ah reckon that makes them accessories to the crime. Ain’t that right, Ms. Punch?”

I sniff and glare down at him, but don’t answer.

“No! They are not knowing about any of this!” she says frantically.

The older mare starts to say something, but a swift blow to the head keeps her quiet.

“Please!” the tough begs. “I am not even wanting to hurt priest. I am Shadowbolt. I am only taking orders. My boss—he is telling me to hurt priest tonight. Is test of loyalty. Like—how are you saying—initiation.”

“That how you sons of mules get your kicks? By beatin’ up some random pony?” The driver gives a nod and one of the cops kicks the older mare in her side. Another stomps the back the back her head.

“Not random!” yells the tough, tears streaking down her face. “Priest is rotten stallion. Is known for all the time raping little foals.”

The driver’s eyes go all wide and stupid when he hears that. I suppose mine do too.

“Is unacceptable in Shadowbolt territory,” she continues, her voice fervent. “My boss—he is sending me to teach priest a lesson tonight. To… how are you saying… make example of him.”

My stomach lurches.

The driver steps backwards. Nearly stumbles. He looks to me first, then to his fellow officers, eyes welling up with hurt and uncertainty. He tries to play it cool. Tries to pretend he’s still in control, still in the right, but by now he knows the truth. Or rather, he always knew the truth, and now he has to face it.

He knows that in Manehattan the good guys and the bad guys wear the same colors, and he can’t decide which of us is worse: the rapist of the cloth, or the gang member who is small and pretty and fragile, or the cops with their badges and their manufactured indignation. He doesn’t know who deserves retribution, or who has the right to carry it out. He reaches for his baton but it slips through all the uncertainty and indecision. We all watch it fall the ground, impotent.

We freeze for a long moment. All of us. We listen to the wind howl lonely lupine notes at the moon. We shift in the snow. We stare at each other, searching faces for answers that don’t exist.

And when we find nothing, I pick up the baton myself.

I do it because I’m feeling again, and I don’t want to. Because the driver and the tough and the cops and the priest are making the story too complicated. It’s a simple story, remember? So I pick up the baton, shove the driver aside and bash in the tough’s midsection, breaking ribs. A cry rings out from her throat, loud and sharp, and her body writhes like a dying thing. I hit her again, fracturing one of her back knees with a beauty of a downward swing.

The older earth mare screams for me to stop. She keeps screaming until somepony draws their baton and hits her over the head.

I keep working on the tough, my senses numbing, my eyes growing cold and focused. Eventually the driver finds the nerve to join me. He tramples the poor filly, who is curled into a ball like a hedgehog with no spines, accepting her punishment with hurt sounds and tears that freeze when they touch the snow.

My fellow officers do the same to other two earth ponies. It starts slow. A stomp here. A baton strike there. But as the terrified shrieks drift high into the night, the beating grows fiercer and fiercer. It grows until the cops are practically leaping on their victims’ bodies. Until their eyes bulge and their faces contort with sinister triumph.

Once I start the madness it can’t be stopped—and together we hammer three defenseless souls into the snow, all for the sake of keeping things simple. Because revenge is more exhilarating than justice. Because Manhattan’s worst kind of predator looks just like me, and that is the problem.

I’m so lost in our death dance that I don’t hear the riffle bark. I don’t smell the gunpowder, don’t see the muzzle flash or the smoke that plumes winter-white but is summertime-hot.

But I know the shooter is hidden somewhere off to my right. I know because I am standing over the fallen tough, still stomping her unmoving body, and the driver is standing in front of me, kicking and spewing out fervent laughter—and as I glance up, as our eyes meet for the final time, I see the bullet spiral into his left temple and barrel out the opposite end. I see his body jerk, his head snap to one side… but before either of those things happen, I see his face, frozen in death.

His final moment is strangely terrifying, precisely because there is no terror evident in his features. In his last second alive, pleasure and guilt are at war in his visage, and the result is a placid face that says nothing. An expressionless expression. If anything, he is a little confused—a tiny bit befuddled by the questionable morality of trampling a defenseless pony into the snow—but that is it.

And then he is dead.

And then he is falling.

And then the sky is bustling with pegasi—Shadowbolts—brandishing weapons and filling the air with hateful curses.

And then I am feeling too many things at once. The emotions come too fast. Burn too hot.

And then the Shadowbolts are swooping down—and I am running through the dark house—and two of my fellow cops are dying behind me—and my boots are crunching the snow—and I am leaping into the van—and I am fumbling with the ignition—and I am stomping the gas—and two more cops are screaming for me to stop, to wait, but they are too slow, and I am too scared, and I am already gunning it hard and fast out of the cul-de-sac, out of the neighborhood, out into the open road and away into the night…

And that’s it. That’s how the story ends.

So if you’re waiting for me to tell you the names of the other characters—the tough, the driver, the mare, the priest—then you’ll be waiting for a long time.

And if you’re waiting for me to explain why I decided to finish what the driver couldn’t—why it had to be me who simplified the story—then you haven’t been paying attention.

And if you’re waiting for an epilogue about the priest being identified as the rapist, or a next-day newspaper article about the five young SWAT officers who were slaughtered in known gang territory… well… you aren’t getting that either.

I could explain all of those things, but none of them matter now, do they? They aren’t important. They aren’t the point. You're just over-complicating things—getting hung up on insignificant details.

Because this really is a very straightforward narrative. There’s nothing to it. Nothing at all. It’s simple. Just a simple story about killing ponies.