Chuck E Cheese pony my beloved

A noise Tex couldn’t describe startled him out of his dream. He glanced blearily at his dog, Lady, at the foot of his bed, already alert with her ears perked in whatever direction the sound must’ve come from. He didn’t worry much in that moment, but then it sounded again; Impossibly loud, vibrating his furniture and even knocking over the photo of his ma and pa he kept on his nightstand. Something like a scream. That worried him.

He remembered Star Hopper and ripped off his blankets in a panic.

She’d come to him that evening, asking to spend the night stargazing in his barn. She was the closest thing he had to a neighbor out here, living just past the treeline out behind his wheat field in a shotgun shack she’d painted with constellations. Star Hopper was quiet, a little odd if you asked the folks in town, but she was polite to him and always had something interesting to say about the night sky. He accepted her request no problem, only on the condition that she come inside first for supper and take his extra blankets out with her. Figuring she’d be fine out there with his spare space heater and a lantern keeping her warm up in his hayloft, Tex had gone off to bed unconcerned.

Now he rushed downstairs with Lady on his heel until she stumbled, howling at the third blare of that godawful sound. He commanded her to stay for her own good and kept on after fishing a flashlight out of a kitchen drawer, his own ears ringing terribly.

Dark clouds were the first thing he saw upon leaping down the porch steps. He tried for hope, that Star Hopper was long gone and disappointed at the weather back in her own home and that whatever the racket had been was something mundane and harmless. Maybe a hog had gotten itself stuck between fence posts again. A silly thought but it shifted his mind away from darker routes on his way to the barn.

It stopped helping once he found the pigs screaming and scrabbling away from a flayed sow in the center of the barn, the dirt floor sodden with her blood.

It looked like a dissection, her skin cleanly split from snout to tail and laid out like ironed coveralls. Her organs had been arranged in a circle around the steaming, bleached skeleton, organized by size. Her eyes looked into his from where they lay at her feet.

The noise split the air again, this time accompanied by a flash of acid green light. There was no time to react to the madness in front of him; something was in the wheat field and whatever it was had already taken a life.

By the time Tex had arrived at the source of the light it had died down enough that he could blink away the spots in his eyes. He pushed through the stalks with no plan, no thought of what to expect once he reached the epicenter. He had the flashlight creaking between his grit teeth and nothing else.

The wheat thinned as he came closer, broken and felled. A green horn slipped through tall grain and the rest of the world stopped.

The more of Star Hopper appeared between stalks the less he wished she would. Something was unnatural about the way she moved, the slow, mechanically even glide of her hooves against the soil, the bulk of unfamiliar muscles under the translucent sheen of her skin. When her moon-wide, unblinking eyes finally appeared Tex realized that this wasn’t his friend. He never liked when him and Star Hopper were young and the other foals in school called her wrong or strange but whatever was wearing her face couldn’t be described any other way. He smelled blood. He was too far from the barn for it to be the sow’s.

“I saw such beautiful things tonight, Tex.” The voice, so nearly Star Hopper’s, startled Tex into dropping his flashlight. “I ought to head back now. Thank you for your generosity.”