Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

by J. Stone

  Germ escorted Rowland to a nearby cot that Germ had set up weeks earlier and that the professor had largely ignored during his time there. He vainly struggled, as the rat laid him down in the bed and pulled the covers up over his chest.

  “Get your rest, sir,” Germ said. “We’ll all still be here tomorrow. We can figure it all out then.”

  Chapter 7. Ryn and the Turret

  Erynn walked to her hotel room after a long day of working on building the last turret guarding Pendulum Falls. She had spent the last couple of days with Emma, preparing the turrets to be ready for the inevitable conflict with the Cultwick Corps. They had set up a total of three of the weapons based on the map that Germ found of their attack plan.

  Though Morrissey’s design had allowed the turrets to be mounted on vehicles and therefore mobile, Erynn had a separate plan. She built the cannons to be excessively powerful, as she believed all chromesmith inventions should be. This power, however, was at the cost of not only their mobility but also predictability. Erynn believed that this increased power would be worth the tradeoff.

  One turret was placed at the top of the iconic Pendulum Falls waterfall located at the northern edge of the city, allowing it to overlook the city and giving a distinct vantage point to see any incoming attacks from the east. The next was set up near Samuel’s factory, just east of town. The final turret was built on the southern perimeter, protecting any attacks from that direction.

  Erynn and Emma had tested the powerful weapons once they had been constructed, and they proved to be devastating to whatever they met. The rebels believed that whenever the corps attacked, these weapons would give them the advantage in the fight.

  During her time building these machines, Erynn had not experienced any of the symptoms from the genotoxin. The treatment that Rowland had concocted for her had managed to suppress all of its effects, but he had kept warning her that it would only be temporary.

  She intended to take advantage of whatever time it gave her, though. Maynard and Hirim kept her busy with other work for the Chromework Confederacy as well. If she wasn’t working on the turrets, she was meeting with the two rebels to discuss their ongoing plans for the effort. Aside from Pendulum Falls, they had attracted the attention of some of the worse off towns – Chrome City, Minsterdale, and Breywood had all expressed a limited level of interest in joining the confederacy. They were, however, waiting to see the reaction of the Cultwick Empire and how the rebels withstood it.

  Arriving at the hotel door, she found Tern standing outside her room. Upon seeing Erynn, he greeted her, “Good evening, debugger. Would you like to upgrade my security--?”

  “Later,” Erynn interrupted, entering the hotel room.

  Tern made a sound not unlike a sigh and settled himself outside the door, as she closed it shut. Erynn dropped her bag of tools just inside the room and placed her hat, necklace, and the things in her pockets on a stand. Pearl was sitting on a stool in the corner splattering paints onto a canvas.

  She turned when Erynn entered and simply said, “I’m rememberin’.”

  Erynn looked up at Pearl, whose hands and splotches of her face were caked in dried paints, and she asked, “Remembering what?”

  “Me, kitten,” Pearl replied. “I have vague memories of my family… my friends… my childhood.”

  “That’s great,” Erynn said. “I guess Max’s serum is working.”

  “Yeah,” Pearl answered, putting the brush down on the easel lip. “I’ve been paintin’ all day.” She smiled and indicated to her side, where four canvases leaned against the wall and were drying. Pointing first to the one furthest away she identified them, “I think this one is my dad. That one, my mom. And two sisters,” she said, pointing to the last two portraits.

  “What’s the one, you’re working on now?” Erynn asked.

  The smile on Pearl’s face disappeared, and she answered, “I don’t really know, but I get angry when I try to picture him. I’m still tryin’ to remember.”

  “Well, if you remember your family, you should be able to find them, right?” Erynn suggested.

  “I’m not sure,” Pearl replied. “I can’t seem to remember what happened to them, or why they haven’t come lookin’ for me.

  “You’ll get there,” Erynn said consolingly.

  Pearl nodded with a frown and said, “Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to.”

  She turned back to her canvas, while Erynn went to their bathroom and turned on the bathwater. She plugged the drain, allowing the warm water to pool in the tub. Erynn stripped off her several layers of clothes before dipping her toes into the water to test it. She turned the handle on the faucet to warm the water a bit more and then slowly sunk her body into the waters.

  The near-blisteringly warm water soothed her tired muscles, as she closed her eyes and tried to relax after the long day of work. The water rose enough, allowing her to partially dip her head under the surface and cover her ears. The sounds of rushing water were muted and the world momentarily slipped away from her mind. She stretched out her feet, turned off the faucet with her toes, and closed her eyes.

  Sinking into the waters of the bath, her mind began to wander. Thoughts of Cultwick permeated her mind. Thoughts of traveling through the meandering paths of the sewers beneath the dark structures of the city. She viewed them from a perspective she had not witnessed prior. It was as though she were crawling on the concrete floor of the black, dank tunnels.

  Eventually she realized that that was exactly what she was doing. She was a rat in the sewer, and it was more than a simple thought. Erynn was seeing through the eyes of a specific rodent, and in front of the rat, with the aid of light piercing down through a grate, she could see the familiar and unwelcome face of Fiona Newton.

  Fiona had haunted her dreams as of late, but she knew that they were not merely nightmares - she was witnessing the world from Fiona’s perspective. Her assault on Bedlam Asylum, the spread of her infection to a squad of corpsmen, and the preparations she made on the empire - Erynn saw all of it via her connection to the mad woman.

  Fiona turned to face the rat and eyed it strangely. Cocking her head to the side and smiling she said, “Rynny-Poo! I see you! Now, listen close, cause they’re coming for you! Don’t you worry, though. I’ll be there soon too!”

  A cacophonous explosion thundered, and Erynn bolted up from the cooling waters of her bath. “My life has become nothing but a series of inconvenient distractions...” she muttered to herself. She knew that the empire had arrived in Pendulum Falls, and that it was time for them to defend themselves.

  Erynn jumped from the tub, drying herself with a towel and getting dressed again. With her hair still drenched and dripping, she entered her room, where Pearl was already loading shells into her shotgun.

  “They’ve got no sense of timing,” Erynn told Pearl, while she grabbed her pistol and belt, slinging them around her waist.

  “Only a matter of time, I guess,” Pearl responded.

  Erynn picked up her hat, necklace, and the rifle that was leaning against the wall and walked outside, where Tern was awaiting her command. She strapped the rifle over her shoulder, and looked through a compartment at the automaton’s back. Retrieving one of his punch cards, she shut the door and inserted the card into his chest, pulling a lever on his back. Tern slunk down, as his system rebooted.

  Standing upright, Tern began to speak while she put on her hat and necklace, “Processing… Objectives… Defend Pendulum Falls… Eliminate Cultwick Corps threat from Pendulum Falls… Processing… Protect the Debugger… Processing… Protect Debugger’s Human Connections…”

  “Resources… Processing… Seven-hundred fifty-three armed Chromework Confederates… Processing… Three defense turrets… Processing… Dreadnought Prime Skyship…

  “Calculating Probability of Successful Completion of Objectives… Processing… Processing… 48.234%...”

  “Always the pessimist,” she stated, as Pearl exited the hotel room to join them
. “They’ll be expecting us at the eastern turret. We should hurry.”

  The sounds of gunfire permeated the mechanical town, as they ran through the streets. Above them, several skyships were darting through the sky, dropping bombs or firing bullets at a rapid rate. Civilians ran opposite Erynn, attempting to escape the danger of the battle. The blast of one of the skyship bombs had caused a fire to spread through a series of buildings they passed, and people were desperately trying to extinguish the flames overtaking their homes.

  Erynn, Pearl, and Tern, however, continued on to the turret at the eastern edge of town. The turret was a mounded structure with a large cannon emerging from one side. The entire structure was roughly the size of a small home, and the rebels had built a protective wall at its sides, where they had taken up arms and were firing on the incoming corpsmen. A shaved headed confederate wearing dark leathers, Jonathon Coulter, was operating the weapon from inside the structure, but Erynn and Pearl were supposed to be there to aid him.

  Erynn handed her rifle to Tern, who took the weapon and set up along the wall with the rebels. Pearl walked inside the building and leaned her shotgun against the interior, curved walls of the turret, while Erynn picked up a crate of ammunition, bringing it in and sitting it on a table next to Jonathon.

  “Almost empty!” he shouted over the deafening clamor of the turret’s gunfire.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she replied, loading the chained bullets into a compartment at the side of the gun.

  Pearl picked up another crate, carrying it over to the table as well. The gun, however, began to smoke, and the shots of the weapon became less frequent. Erynn, closing her eyes, listened intently to the sounds of the gears and parts of the gun.

  “Uh, Ryn?” Jonathon asked uncertainly.

  “I can fix that!” she declared, lifting a trap door leading into a cellar of machine components.

  As she opened the door, a blast of smoke billowed out from the basement room, covering her face in a layer of soot. Coughing, she waved the fumes out from in front of her face, and walked to a closet inside the confines of the turret. She pulled the goggles from the brim of her hat, placing them over her eyes and picked up a respirator from a shelf, which she strapped over her mouth. She also picked up a set of tools from the closet before descending into the blackened machine room.

  Erynn quickly moved through the smoky and warm darkness of the basement, passing by giant, spinning cogs - their teeth interlocking with other metal contraptions and allowing the weapon to function. She followed an aberrant banging noise at the back of the room, where she found that one of the gears was colliding with a jutting frame.

  The frame had come unbolted from a cylindrical cooling unit, spilling forth a pool of water. She braced her shoulder against the thin, metal frame, and jammed the sheet back to the tube. The gear stopped slamming into the loose frame, and the rate of fire resumed its pace. She bolted the frame back in place and returned to the main room of the turret. The temperature of the room also slowly began to cool, as the coolant continued to do its job.

  Ascending back to the ground level of the turret and dropping the respirator down to around her neck, Erynn saw Pearl continuing to load the chains of bullets into the side of the gun and Jonathon firing them as fast as she could load them. She decided to check on Tern and see how the battle was going. She left the safety of the encased turret to find Tern where she had left him. He fired off a shot, as she closed the door after her and knelt down behind the wall.

  “How’s it going, Tern?” she inquired.

  “Debugger,” he began, “I have deleted one hundred forty seven corpsmen, twelve halftracks, zero tanks, and zero skyships. Ammunition is running low.”

  “Still think we’re doomed?” she asked with a light grin.

  “Affirmative, debugger,” he replied. “I estimate there are ten thousand corpsmen, three hundred halftracks, fifty tanks, and ten skyships remaining. The Chromework Confederacy is outnumbered significantly.”

  “Such a pess…” she began, before she leaned up to peek over the wall. Looking down over the field beneath her, she saw a group of corpsmen larger than she could have previously imagined. They were racing toward the city, guns firing in the distance, followed by thunderous explosions nearby. She peered out in a semi-circular sweep at the landscape. Men dotted the horizon in all directions, and she began to fear that Tern might have been correct in his calculations.

  From inside the turret Erynn heard a ricocheting, metallic sound followed by a shrill scream. The turret also ceased firing, and she ran inside to see what had happened. She found Jonathon on the ground, blood gushing from the side of his neck. Pearl knelt beside him, holding a rag to his neck, attempting to stop the blood flow.

  “What happened?” Erynn asked.

  “I think one of the bullets misfired,” Pearl explained. “Something grazed his neck. I gotta get him back to the doc, before he bleeds out.”

  Erynn went back outside to see which of the rebels were positioned there. Spotting one she knew, she called out to him, “Alan! Give us a hand.”

  “What is it?” he yelled back, still firing from the wall.

  “Just come here!” she responded.

  The rebel looked up from his rifle and then ran to the turret, ducking below the wall as he went. Alan had shaggy brown hair and an unkempt beard covering his face. He wore a dark grey shirt, black vest, and dirty blue jeans. Draping from one side of his vest, he had a shiny metal chain connected to his pocket watch. Erynn guided Alan to the scene inside the turret, where Jonathon was trying to stand with Pearl’s help.

  “Help Pearl get Jonathon back to the factory,” Erynn instructed him. “Get him to Max. And Alan, don’t you dare let anything happen to Pearl.”

  Alan nodded, putting Jonathon’s arm around his shoulder. “You got it,” he said. “I’ll take care of ‘em both.”

  “I appreciate the concern,” Pearl said to Erynn. “But I’ll be fine.”

  “You better be,” she replied.

  Pearl and Alan escorted Jonathon out of the turret and down the steps. Erynn, meanwhile, inspected the turret’s firing mechanism to find the belt of bullets had become dislodged, causing the misfire. She flipped open the case, carefully reloaded the belt, and adjusted the intake system. To prevent it from coming loose again, she tightened the belts path by placing an additional grip, holding it in place. Closing the case shut again, she fired off a test round successfully.

  Erynn looked through the gun’s sights to find a target. She spotted one of the slow-moving tanks. Mounted on its back was the smaller and mobile version of the turret they found in schematic form in Markus Morrissey’s safe deposit box. She surmised that it was much less powerful than her version, but she had to take it down regardless. She fired off several rounds into it, which tore through the metal as if it were nothing but paper. The tank exploded, launching shrapnel around in various directions and smashing into a nearby halftrack, destroying it as well.

  “Damn,” she said, leaning back and slapping the barrel of the gun. “At least this thing’s quality isn’t a concern.”

  Above her, however, she heard a loud whistling sound that she recognized to be a falling bomb from a skyship.

  “Rusty cogs...” she muttered under her breath.

  She ducked down just before the shell landed next to the turret. Her ears rang and smoke filled the turret room. When she awoke, Erynn found that a piece of the turret’s wall had landed on her leg, pinning her to the floor. She slowly slid backward, causing the metal to scrape against her leg and open a gash and preventing her from moving any further. Nearby, however, she found a metal rod and wedged it under the sheeting, allowing her to finally escape its grasp.

  Crawling to the turret’s exit, she pulled back the door to reveal a smoking crater not far in the distance. The explosion had knocked back the rebels lining the wall next to the turret, and there was no movement from any of the scattered bodies on the ground. As her hearing came back, however, sh
e began to hear a whirring noise that she immediately recognized.

  She managed to get to her feet and hobbled to where she had last seen Tern. He was beginning to move the rubble off himself when she made her way to him.

  Spotting her, he said, “Updating Resource List… Processing… Dreadnought Prime Skyship Deleted from Resource List… Processing… Debugger’s Rifle Deleted from Resource List…”

  “Wait, what?” she asked.

  “Concerning which Resource List Deletion?” he inquired.

  “Both!” she answered.

  Tern stood from the rubble and explained, “Resource List Item One: The Dreadnought Prime Skyship dropped a series of bombs on Pendulum Falls and was being piloted toward Cultwick.”

  Erynn looked past the turret to confirm the sight of the bright red skyship in the distance.

  Tern continued, “Resource List Item Two: The Debugger’s Rifle was broken during the aforementioned bombardment.”

  Before she could ask any more of him, a series of shots were fired at them. In the distance, she spotted a small unit of corpsmen closing in on their location. Tern moved himself in front of Erynn and escorted her inside the turret. The automaton slammed the door shut behind them, and Erynn crumpled to the floor of the room. Gunfire ricocheted off the outside of the turret, as the group of corpsmen assaulted the broken structure.

  “This is probably not the best time,” she began with a grimace, “but I think the genotoxin treatment just wore off.”

  Chapter 8. Pearl and the Mercenary

  Pearl and Alan carried Jonathon through the flame-lit streets of Pendulum Falls. The sounds of gunfire, screams, explosions, and fire crackling permeated the night. Snow had even begun to fall, starting to cover the fallen bodies and broken rubble.

  Her hands were covered in the rebel’s warm, sticky blood and the metallic smell pervaded her nose. He had passed out several minutes prior, at which point she and Alan were forced to drag him. She finally spotted Samuel’s factory just in front of them, and many of the rebels were frantically running both toward and away from the building when they arrived.