"David, will you check to see if the truck will start?" Gary asked, and then with a sly smirk he continued, "And then when you inevitably discover that it does not, we'll go ask the Claytons next door if we can borrow Chocolate and Peanuts."

An odd truth has persisted for hundreds, if not thousands of years: well-loved horses, particularly when children are involved, will have endearingly stupid names. The Clayton family, indeed, had grandkids who adored horses. So, their first horse was named Socks and their second was Chocolate, and you don't need three guesses as to what those two looked like. Their third horse, though, was named Peanuts. Not Peanut, that would be almost traditional; no, she was named Peanuts, plural.

While the Clayton house was technically next door, this wasn't the city. The house was a quarter mile away from Gary's cabin. Communication was therefore somewhat limited; they didn't really know what they'd find when they got there.

David knocked on the door, but the Claytons were apparently weathering the apocalypse elsewhere. He wandered around to the stables just in time to see Gary jogging over having at last finished packing his equipment. For a wizard, Gary was pretty damn athletic. Not athletic in any unqualified sense, nothing like David. Rather, Gary was athletic for a man who looked like Gary. In other words, Gary just ran a lot.

David informed him that the Clayton family was away, but Gary gave a dismissive wave and a grunt and then pushed open the side door of the stables.

"Melissa said we were free to take the horses out if we ever needed to, as long as we put them away properly," he explained as David followed him inside.

The relentlessly rural smell of hay and manure had been strong throughout the property, but the inside of the barn hit David with waves both of enthralling nostalgia and half forgotten fear. The building was steeped in the feel and scent of leather and sweat and straw and old wood. He stood in the doorway for a second just looking stunned and stupid as it all assaulted his memory. Spending days on horseback used to be a big part of his adventuring life, and while the majority of the experiences were beautiful, a few of them were terrifying. It was odd how it seemed to only take a handful of terror-inducing events to overshadow entire weeks or months of happiness.

Entirely oblivious to his reaction, Gary began calling the horses over using a metal container he had filled with oats, and asked David to help. "Can you get the saddles, please? We're taking Chocolate and Peanuts."

David shook himself and found the riding tack on the far side of the barn. He assumed that each saddle probably "belonged" to a specific horse, but he had no idea which ones to take. At first glance, they all looked more or less the same except for the one which stood out like a polished black diamond amidst three pitiful imposters.

"Does it matter which saddles we use?"

"Hmpf," Gary grunted, "just don't touch the nice one or Samantha will probably kill you in your sleep."

"Samantha? Samantha who?"

"Oh? Am I really just as easy to forget as that, Davey?" came a familiar voice, dripping with mock offense.

"Wait, Samantha Denton? What are you doing here?" David asked, looking around and seeing nobody.

"Lunch."

Following the sound, he looked up just in time to see an apple core hit him square on the nose. She was sitting on one of the rafters well above their heads with her feet braced against the beam in front of her. Her eyes went wide, sparkling with amusement, and she put a hand to her mouth to stifle the snorting giggle that she failed to suppress.

"Ohmygod, I'm so sorry," she said, still laughing, clearly not sorry at all.

"Ow. I thought you moved to California or something." said David, cleaning bits of apple out of his eyes.

She pulled her feet back to her chest, and then like a coiled spring she vaulted into the air and landed in front of them, her feet sending puffs of dust into the air. Samantha was five-foot-nothing on her tippy toes but was built like a gymnast: she was small, but she was powerful. Her hair, tied up in a ponytail, was naturally dark but now a bit sun-bleached from months spent outdoors. She was dressed for working the stables: jeans, gloves, work boots, the whole "comfy-dirty" aesthetic.

"Well, I missed you too!" she laughed, squeezing him by the arm like embracing an old friend.

"You clearly didn't."

"I really am sorry about that."

"It's... fine. Why were you eating lunch up there, anyway?"

"Because I can," Samantha smirked. She fished out another apple from somewhere on her person and, standing inches away from David, took a huge juicy bite and grinned with impish delight. David stood frozen, stunned by the sudden "Samantha-ness" of the whole exchange, which apparently pleased her even more. She spun on her heels and sashayed and over to a huge, black horse and proffered the rest of the apple. The horse took it in a single bite.

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"Anyway," she said, "California's too expensive. I've been staying here with Dale and Melissa for half a year now. Where have you been?"

I..." David stammered, caught off-guard, "I don't know; I never left. I've been down in the city, I suppose. I just haven't spent much time up here at the cabin recently."

"Hold on," Gary interrupted, "we're in a bit of a rush. Samantha, Evelyn went down to Cedartop about an hour ago and we think she needs help getting back. Cars don't work anymore, phones don't work, everything's broken. We want to borrow the horses to go find her. Can you help us get these two saddled up?"

"Love to," Samantha bubbled, "want me to come with?"

"If you've got nothing more important going on, we'd love the help," Gary said.

"How do you plan to bring her back?" Samantha asked. "Should I saddle Socks, too?"

They considered their options, but ultimately the fact that they didn't know where to find Evelyn was the deciding factor. Leading an extra horse without a rider would make the search unnecessarily complicated, and what they needed right now was speed. Evelyn would ride back with Samantha: the girls were both pretty light, and Samantha's horse, Apollo, was the strongest of the four by far.

Samantha was an old pro at this and managed to get all three horses ready to ride in less time than it would have taken the guys to saddle just one. They rode out at a fast trot, finally able to just sit back and let the horses do the work.

The main road twisted and turned to follow the contour of the mountainside in a way that played nice with cars and trucks. Horses had no such restrictions, and the trio took the more direct path, following a well-worn trail through the wilderness that bypassed several miles of road.

The forest in this part of the world always reminded David of the fantasy stories he loved as a kid. Apparently these woods had even been the inspiration for one or two of them. Gigantic red cedar trees grew thick all around; all of them one, two, or even three hundred feet tall. Some were choked in vines, others played host to lichen that looked like strange stone mushrooms. The terrain constantly rose and fell in all directions, meaning line of sight was limited to maybe a hundred feet. This made it easy to get lost, but it also made spotting interesting wildlife up close a lot more likely. That was why David had his eyes peeled watching the forest around them as they rode on. He didn't want to miss anything interesting.

"Shhh," Samantha shushed the group even though nobody had been talking. She silently commanded her horse to stop and pointed off to the left, toward a fallen tree.

"You don't see that every day," she whispered. Apparently she's been on the lookout as well. "Should we be worried?"

It took David a little while to figure out what she had spotted, but in the middle distance disguised nearly perfectly in a fallen tree was an adult mountain lion.

"I've never seen one in person in the wild," David spoke quietly, "but no, we should be safe enough. We're on horseback, which makes us look a lot bigger and scarier, and we're in a group as well. Altogether our chances of getting attacked like this are practically zero. But you wouldn't want to go walking out here alone in the dark, obviously."

David never saw any movement, but the animal was now completely gone. They were masters of stealth, and he'd just as likely never see one again. The thought made him wish that Evelyn had been around to see as well. Thinking about Evelyn out there alone and on foot made David feel suddenly a bit anxious, and the group hurried on their way.

About ten minutes into the ride, the trio left the trail and got back onto the main road. Rounding a bend in the road, they finally got their first good look at the city down below.

Samantha gasped, and the whole group fell silent. "How is that even possible?" she said under her breath.

Black and gray smoke rose from hundreds of structure fires within the city. It didn't seem that any of the individual fires were related, but to have so many at once couldn't have been a coincidence.

"This is unreal," David said, scanning the horizon for some clue to explain what they saw, "How could just a power outage have--"

A sudden flash on the horizon lit up the daylight sky for a moment as some far away building south of the city instantly became a gigantic plume of smoke, debris, and flame. From the center of the devastation which moments ago had been a large industrial complex, a massive shockwave radiated outward, demolishing and toppling everything in its path. At the same time, a second, much less conspicuous wave raced across the ground many times faster. It was easy to miss, not an expanding bubble of destruction but just a momentary shimmer in the dust and leaves. It reached the riders in only a few seconds.

Booooom.

The sound rumbled through the earth like distant thunder, spooking the horses a bit, but nothing more. Meanwhile, the trio solemnly watched the larger shockwave continue to tear up buildings, topple vegetation, and blow out windows as the wavefront hit the city. The aftermath of the expanding wave was no longer like the devastation closer to ground zero, but it remained nevertheless a complication that the city was in no position to handle.

As the shockwave grew nearer, David hopped down off his horse, grabbed hold of his and Gary's bridle, and muttered, "cover your ears."

Gary did exactly that, while Samantha went wide eyed and instead leaned forward to cover Apollo's ears, shrugging her shoulders to protect her own as much as possible.

BAM!

This time the sound of the explosion was an ear-splitting, headache-inducing blast that left the horses jumping in alarm and the three humans reeling with disorientation. The blast was no longer as destructive as it has been down in the city, but damn was it loud.

"What the hell was that about?!" Samantha shouted at the world general. "Why did it blow up twice? Whose idea was this bullshit? Aaargh!" She was twisting her fingers in her ears as if to clean something out of them, while at the same time trying to calm her horse. It took a few more seconds of recovery for someone to respond.

"The first wave simply traveled through the ground, my dear," explained Gary, "the second was the real shock wave, if that isn't obvious now. I can only guess at what happened, but it appears that the Westhill Chemical Plant no longer exists. As for why, your guess is as good as mine. I'm just glad it was as far outside the city as it was."

Even here, so many miles away from the explosion, the blast shook branches out of the trees and kicked up dust and small rocks. It left the city, the roads, and all the places in between looking almost like some sort of post-apocalyptic scene. Which, given the timing, it technically was.

"If Evelyn didn't need our help before," David observed, "She probably does now. We should hurry."