Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

by J. Stone

  “You’re all mine!” Fiona cackled from beneath Cultwick’s streets.

  The group near the factory that she had sent to find more bodies for her use returned in time to find Silas and the remains of his team approaching. She attempted a stealthier approach the second time, allowing her to acquire another of his team, Donald Dooley. Two of the pets waited behind a building and lunged out after the corpsmen.

  “Help!” Dooley shouted as the two pets overwhelmed him.

  Silas and his team peppered the infected with bullets, but it was too late for Dooley, Fiona had already taken control. Dooley was the small team’s heavy weapons expert, and with his inclusion, Fiona felt a growing taste for weaponry. He was extremely physically fit, and she found that he thought of little aside from making himself into a living weapon. She was eager to bring in more of Silas’ team, thinking of no more than completing her collection.

  “Two of five!” she cheered.

  “Leave him,” Silas ordered cocking his head to the side and popping his neck. “We can’t linger here.”

  From Bishop’s eyes, Fiona witnessed Silas again abandon his comrade and continue with the mission. They killed several of the rebels during their assault into the factory, and Bishop made sure to convert any that were already dead.

  “No reason to let them go to waste,” Fiona conceded.

  After Silas had gone, Fiona instructed Dooley to rise and join the others. Bishop, Dooley, and the infected rebels followed Silas’ team through the factory, while Ethan had increased his infection numbers to thirty-four. Checking on Thaddeus’ progress, Fiona discerned that he had penetrated the makeshift medical wing inside the skyship factory. Fiona recognized Rowland and Germ, but they were too busy tending to the wounded to notice the walking corpse that entered the room.

  Thaddeus found the bodies of the rebels that Rowland and his medical team had been unable to save and began converting them. The chaos in the room managed to hide his acts, as the infection spread through the dead in the room.

  In the sky above, Hillary continued dancing from ship to ship and taking them down, crashing the vessels to the battle below for Fiona’s minions to clean up. Only two skyships remained, and Hillary found herself enjoying the destruction, despite her lack of control over her actions. After being abandoned for that many years, Hillary found that all she had left to feel for people was an unbridled rage.

  Inside the factory, Silas and the remaining members of his team had made their way to the skyship, and Lawless stayed on the ground to open the roof. After he finished, twisting the rotating wheel and completely separating the roof, the corpsman turned around to find Bishop and Dooley standing behind him.

  “Alonzo? Donald?” he asked in confusion.

  Lawless was lunged upon by both his comrades, and his memories were brought into Fiona’s mind. Robert Lawless was a decorated sniper that had served in the Ankalaran conquests, taking out high value government officials. After the war, he took on small jobs to assassinate political dissidents and persons of interest to the Cultwick Council.

  The swarm that Thaddeus had created from the dead in Rowland’s medical center entered the room, ascending the skyship and knocking the final member of Silas’ team off the skyship, Larry Priest. The vessel’s ignition, however, was started up, shaking the ship, and it began to leave the factory floor.

  Bishop, Dooley, and Lawless surrounded Priest and incorporated him into the ever-burgeoning mind. Larry Priest was a very dark-skinned man from Targeaux, whose name had been changed from his birth name long before. Though he was born within Targeaux’s borders, a group of slavers working for Cultwick abducted him when he was just a child. He was purchased by the corps and brought up from childhood to be a soldier, and he had not disappointed. Together, all four of Silas’ team watched, as the Dreadnought Prime left the factory through the open roof. With nothing left for them to do, Fiona sent them back out to the battle, to continue collecting other corpsmen.

  On board the skyship, Thaddeus and the dead rebels he had collected descended the bowels of the ship in search of Silas. Though their numbers were great, the corpsman, Silas Skinner, proved a capable warrior. One by one, he dispatched her pets, as he moved through the vessel. Thaddeus ultimately found Silas in the bottom depths of the ship, releasing bombs from the cargo hold.

  Silas pushed a crate of explosives to the edge of the opening, when Thaddeus lurched at the corpsmen. Silas dodged the attack, unsheathing a knife and pinning Thaddeus’ body to the crate. With the dead mayor’s body still attached to the crate, Silas pushed the explosives off the ship and down to Pendulum Falls below.

  Ethan, meanwhile, had continued with his goal of assembling an army of pets for Fiona. They were up to one-hundred seventy eight strong. He heard gunfire down one of the streets, and looking, saw Pearl running from a group of corpsmen.

  “Ryn would be ever so cross if she died,” Fiona noted.

  She sent Ethan and a small contingent of his soldiers to follow the corpsmen after Pearl. After a series of winding alleys, Ethan’s group located the corpsmen firing upon Pearl. She had climbed a ladder on a building, and they had managed to knock her back on top of another building. Ethan’s team assaulted the corpsmen that had chased Pearl, bringing them into the fold. Once they were acquired and Pearl was safe, Fiona sent those pets back into the fray.

  Fiona realized she had only one last chance to complete her elite corpsmen set that she wanted so desperately. She located Hillary crashing the last of the empire skyships and gave her an order.

  “Go to the Dreadnought!” she shouted. “I want Silas! He’s mine, and I want him!”

  Hillary nodded silently and abandoned the crashing skyship, levitating herself toward the Dreadnought. The ship was moving quickly, but she caught up to it, before it reached its incredible maximum speed. Hillary landed with a loud thud on the deck and made her way down into the ship. When she arrived in the cockpit, Hillary found Silas nursing a few wounds he had sustained.

  “You killed my pets!” Fiona forced Hillary to shout at the corpsman.

  “What are you things?” Silas demanded, standing from his seat, pulling his pistol, and aiming it at Hillary.

  “We’re Fiona!” Hillary screamed.

  Before he could fire, however, Hillary used her power to toss the weapon aside. She then pulled a metal rod from the wall of the ship, releasing a shower of sparks behind her, and hurled it toward Silas’s neck. He maneuvered somewhat out of its trajectory, but it still managed to hit him in the collar.

  “Argh,” he cried out, as he was tossed backward into the wall and pinned there by the force.

  Hillary adopted a swagger reserved for that of Fiona and walked playfully toward what she saw as her new toy. “You’ve been a very bad boy, Mr. Skinner,” Fiona had Hillary tell him.

  “I’m going to kill you!” Silas shouted through his pain.

  She watched him try to pry out the bar like a child might watch a fly whose wings had been torn off. “I’ve got the rest of your team,” she informed Silas. “With you, I’ll have the complete set!”

  “Then come here and take me,” he taunted her.

  Hillary’s mouth opened wide, and she made a guttural hissing sound. She lunged toward the trapped corpsmen, but he braced his body’s weight on the pipe suspending him, lifted his legs and wrapped them around Hillary’s waist. With all his effort, he tugged her forward, causing her open mouth to wrap around the bloodied beam, and it exploded out the back of her skull in a gory red mess. Fiona’s connection to Hillary quickly dimmed, and she lost sight of Silas and the Dreadnought.

  In the dark of the sewers, she whispered to herself, “This isn’t over, Mr. Skinner.”

  Chapter 10. Rowland and the Corpse

  The chaos of the previous night had ended, and the rebels were recuperating and trying to piece everything back together. Rowland had not slept at all throughout the night, as there were far too many injured that needed his attention. Germ, however, had dozed
off just before the sun came up, and the professor had let him sleep, recognizing that his rat friend may have been feeling ill.

  At one point during the night, Erynn had been brought in along with the wounded, though Rowland thankfully noted that she had not been shot or otherwise injured during the battle. Instead, it appeared that her symptoms from the genotoxin had returned and overwhelmed her. He gave her another batch of the treatment, but she was still exhausted from the ordeal and had not awoken.

  The lack of Pearl, when Erynn was brought in did bring him pause though. He asked around about the young woman, but none of the rebels seemed to know where she was, and the men that had brought her in said that she was alone aside from Tern when they found her. Her automaton had somehow been disabled during the battle, and a cursory inspection showed an electronic dart of some sort jammed into his circuits. Though the device had been removed, Tern remained offline.

  In the course of the evening’s events, there had also been a strange happening. Some of the rebels that had suffered injuries succumbed to their wounds and were placed in a secluded area of the makeshift hospital. Rowland wasn’t sure when it had happened, but they had all gone missing during the night. Several of the bodies were ultimately found in the factory, suffering more injuries and having a strange appearance to them.

  The hangar the Dreadnought Prime had been stored in was where the bodies had been found, but the ship itself had been stolen, and there was evidence of a struggle in that room. Scattered blood and some bodies were all that had been left in its absence. He had asked the rebels to bring him several of the bodies for examination, but Rowland had not yet made time to inspect them.

  Having finished patching up one of the rebels and sending him on his way, Rowland found himself with a brief respite. Pulling a syringe of biojunk from his lab coat pocket, he injected himself in the left arm as had become his usual custom. A flutter of vivid colors flashed over his eyes, and he felt an intense heat permeating through his body. A shiver rushed up his spine, and his teeth chattered from the effects of the drugs.

  Rejuvenated, Rowland moved to the table where one of the infected bodies laid. Its eyes were fully dilated, and he felt as though he were looking into the dark voids of space. The skin, alternately, had turned milky white allowing dark blue veins to be seen through the nearly transparent flesh. The professor flipped the body on its side and stuck a long metal tube into the corpse’s rectum. Pulling the device out, he read the temperature of the body and noted that it was still quite warm - warmer than it should have been after being dead that long.

  He flipped the body over again, so that it was lying on its back. Investigating its wounds, Rowland noted several different possible causes of death. The most obvious was a knife wound in the side of its head, but it had also been shot several times in the chest. The chest wounds appeared normal, given the circumstances, but the knife wound at the side of the head was quite strange. There was very little blood spatter from the wound, indicating that it had been caused by a postmortem attack. Why, though, the professor thought, would he have been stabbed in the head after being shot in the heart?

  Rowland picked up a scalpel from a nearby table and sliced open the man’s chest. Peeling back the layer of flesh, unleashed a horrid stench beyond that of simple death. The organs had begun to rapidly decay and were covered with a gooey, black, tar-like substance. He picked up a swab and a cylindrical, glass tube and, rubbing the tip against one of the organs, he extracted some of the sludge and placed in into the vial.

  It was then that Hirim joined the professor in his medical room. “You got some of these in here too?” he asked.

  Intrigued, the professor looked up and inquired, “There are more?”

  “Yeah, they’re littering the streets of Pendulum Falls,” he answered. “Anything you can tell about ‘em?”

  “They appear to be infected with something. With this,” he said, holding the vial up for Hirim to see.

  Grimacing, Hirim asked, “And just what is that stuff?”

  “I cannot be sure, yet, but I would not recommend ingesting it,” he explained.

  “Can’t say I had any intention,” Hirim said. “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “I have not had time to properly examine it,” Rowland replied.

  From behind them came a familiar groan, and the professor looked back to see Erynn sitting upright on her cot. Rowland placed the vial down on the table along with his instruments and went to inspect his sickly ward.

  “How are you feeling, my dear?” he queried.

  “What happened?” she asked, with one eye closed and rubbing the side of her head.

  “I was rather hoping you would tell me,” he replied. “What is the last thing you remember?”

  Erynn narrowed her eyes and thought a moment before answering, “I was in the turret with Tern. Somebody saved me…”

  Hirim approached her as well and asked, “One of the rebels?”

  Looking to the floor, she quickly responded, “No… It wasn’t any of us. It was someone else…” She looked up with a serious expression covering her face and continued, “Fiona. It was Fiona.”

  “That psychopath?” Rowland asked. “Why would she be here?”

  “She wasn’t,” Erynn answered.

  “What do you mean?” Hirim inquired. “She’d have to be here to have saved you.”

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t know how, but Fiona can control the dead. They were here - in Pendulum Falls. She attacked the corps, helped us defend the city.”

  “How’s that even possible?” Hirim asked.

  “They experimented on her in the C.E.R.,” Erynn said. “They gave her this ability somehow… And I have limited access to her mind too.”

  “What?” Hirim asked. “What do you mean you have access to her mind?”

  “I only became aware of it recently,” she answered. “And last night was the second time she’s saved me.”

  “Why would this woman help us though?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure she’s helping us, so much, as she’s hurting Cultwick,” Erynn replied. “While I slept, I got a deeper glimpse at her mind. She hates them. Hates them for what they did to her… and for what they did to me. Our connection means something to her, though I’m not sure exactly what.”

  “So, this Fiona person saved you, and then what?” Hirim asked.

  “I’m not sure, it’s still blurry,” she answered. Looking around, she asked, “Where’s Pearl?”

  “No one has seen her in quite some time,” Rowland replied. “She brought an injured rebel to me last night, and then said she was returning to you. She had that rebel with her, though. I am sure she is fine.”

  Erynn closed her eyes and twitched her head to the side. “No…” she began. “Someone took her. A mercenary showed up and took her away.” Erynn tossed off the sheet and stood. “I’ve got to go get her.”

  “You need to get rest, my dear,” Rowland replied. “You are in no condition.”

  Despite his warning, Erynn continued moving through the room, but stopped once she reached the corpse Rowland had been dissecting. “This is one of them,” she said.

  “One of what?” Rowland asked.

  “This is Fiona’s,” she answered. “This is what she does to them. She infects them with something, and then she can control them.”

  “And you can see into the head of something like this?” Hirim asked, picking up the vial of black ooze and eyeing it with disgust.

  “Unfortunately, I can,” she replied. “Although, it’s thanks to that connection that I now know Pearl is being taken to Cultwick.”

  “And what? You intend to just walk back into Cultwick?” Hirim asked. “After what they did to you? You’ll never find her like that.”

  “I have to try,” Erynn responded.

  “You made a commitment to the confederacy,” he replied. “What’s more important? One woman’s life or the freedom of all of Cultwick?”

  Erynn pause
d for a moment, before simply saying, “Pearl.” She then left the hospital hangar, leaving Hirim and Rowland both befuddled.

  Hirim turned to the professor and said, “You’ve got to stop her, doc. She doesn’t have a chance.”

  “Ryn has always been quite stubborn,” Rowland replied. “I would not be able to talk her out of anything, especially after the bond she has developed with Ms. Hicks. They seem quite close.”

  “I’ve got to talk to Reginald about this,” Hirim said, leaving the hangar as well.

  Rowland thought for a moment about what could happen to Erynn if she were to leave. He realized, however, that unless he found a cure for her genotoxin it wouldn’t matter. She would eventually succumb to its effects, and he would lose her all the same. His mind also wandered to Germ’s recent condition and failing health. The professor approached the cot, where Germ was sleeping and shook the rat awake.

  “Could you convince that smuggler of yours to go to Cultwick?” he asked.

  Germ opened his eyes widely, blinking them several times before answering, “What are you talking about, sir?”

  “Cultwick, Germ,” he replied. “Could you convince Olivia to take you there?”

  “I suppose, sir, but why would I want to go there?” Germ asked.

  “To save Ryn’s life,” Rowland replied succinctly.

  “How would that save Madam Clover, sir?” the rat asked, sitting up from the cot.

  “I need a pure strain of the genotoxin, so that I can develop the cure,” he explained. “They are certain to have a sample of it within the Center for Empirical Research. I need you and the smuggler to sneak in and retrieve it.”

  “Surely there is an easier way, sir,” Germ suggested.

  “Ryn has already decided that she must travel to Cultwick to retrieve Ms. Hicks,” Rowland said. “You may as well take her to ensure she arrives there safely.”

  “Madam Hicks is gone?” Germ asked.