Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn

Chapter 3 - Dust and Echoes

Chapter 3

Dust and Echoes

"Soon it'll be over

Soon we'll be waking

Waking to a summer day."

I woke up screaming.

Forelegs pinned me to the cold metal frame of a rusty hospital gurney. I thrashed against their limbs, swatting them away and kicking my legs at the shadows that loomed over me.

"Get away you, psychos! GET THE FUCK AWAY!" I howled, batting away their invading limbs.

"FUCK YOU!" I lashed out with my hindlegs. My hooves connected with someone's face. He stumbled away from me and disappeared from the tunnels of my hazy eyes. "Leave me alone! LEAVE ME ALONE!"

"Hold him still!" a mare shouted.

Hooves grabbed my forelegs. They wrenched them away from me and slammed them against the gurney. Hard.

"No ... NO!"

They were going to rip me limb from limb. They were going to tear my legs from my shoulders.

I writhed like a cornered, netted animal, screaming my throat bloody and raw.

One of my hooves tore free.

"NOOO!" I wrenched a pony on top of me. We rolled off the edge of the gurney. A mare with pink eyes screamed as I sent her crashing into the cold, concrete floor.

I didn't care. I dragged my forehooves to her throat and squeezed. She kicked under me, suffocating.

"I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!"

Something metal cracked against my skull. I keeled over, blacking out for a second.

"Hold him - hold him down!"

I waited for the touch of a cold blade to slice through my bare flesh. I waited for the ripping, the tearing – but they never came.

They yanked my mouth open instead.

With my limbs pinned to the ground, I could do nothing as I felt the familiar taste of health potion dribble down my lips and wash down my throat. My head was spinning too much to care who was administering it.

I held out my limbs in feeble resistance. And for good measure, they cracked me across the skull again.

My consciousness left the building before I could scream.

*

My mummified body lay shivering on an itchy cot with a mildew-stained blanket pulled up to my neck. My limbs were splayed out underneath the blanket, and one of my legs hung limply from the edge of the bed.

I was alive. But I sure as hell didn't feel like it. The flesh under my coat was bruised black and blue. My head throbbed as if I was beaten with a metal bar.

'Wait,' I thought, distantly.

If I remembered correctly ... I was.

I groaned, tucking in my battered legs to my chest. My weary, bloodshot eyes swiveled sluggishly around the room. A gas lamp glowed dimly on a shabby bedside table to my right, its faint light hardly illuminating the room from end to end. Around me was a patchwork of corrugated scrap metal bolted together to hold the makeshift ceiling aloft. Outside, I could hear the moaning wind as it dragged its frozen hooves across the walls, trying to penetrate the walls of that metal hovel.