by Stone, J.
“Kill me,” she whimpered, looking up at the man with Newton’s bright, blue eyes.
Biting his lip and briefly considering the situation, the man ultimately took the blade and slashed toward the intruder’s neck. Before the blade could meet skin, however, Fiona reacquired control of her body and grabbed the man’s forearm.
She cocked her head to the side and said, “Nuh-uh-uh. I didn’t say, Fiona says! You lose!”
Fiona twisted the man’s wrist, violently breaking the bones in his arm and causing him to drop the knife. She let go of him, as he screamed and fell to the floor of his home.
“What should we play next, mister?” she asked.
The man whimpered in a ball on the floor, ignoring her question.
“I know!” she exclaimed. “Hide and seek! You hide, and I’ll find you!”
The man failed to respond, so she knelt down close to his face, and continued, “You’ve got thirty seconds to hide. I think you should use them.”
He began to stand despite the pain surging through his arm. Fiona turned her back to him and put her head against the door leading out of the house. She began counting aloud, while he whimpered and slogged away from her.
Once her counting had reached thirty, Fiona turned to find the room void of his presence and his incessant whimpering. She smiled and began skipping through the room in search of him.
The first room she entered was the kitchen with a small adjoining dining room. Fiona looked patiently around the room, searching through cabinets, looking under the table, and opening the pantry door.
“Hmm, not in the kitchen,” she stated aloud.
Next up on her search was the bathroom. She entered the dark room to find an empty tub, a small sink, and a closed window. There was no sign of her quarry in that room either.
“Not in the bathroom,” she announced. “Maybe the bedroom?”
She casually wandered forward into a bedroom. Fiona dropped to the ground looking under the bed, but found nothing. She opened a series of drawers, much too small for anyone to hide inside. All the windows were properly closed, so she decided he had not left out of one. Then she spotted a closed door, likely leading into a closet.
Excited by the prospect of finding him, Fiona eagerly approached the door and swung it open. Inside the man cowered in the corner with a large shotgun aimed up at her.
“There you are!” she exclaimed.
She held her left hand out to reach him, incidentally covering the barrel of the gun, just as he fired. Blood, pulp, and bone fragments were scattered about the room in an onslaught of the gore that was formerly her hand.
“That would probably hurt if I still had any sensation,” she noted calmly.
The man in the closet was too horrified by her lack of pain to get up or reload the gun. Fiona smiled at him and, with her other hand, pulled him from his hiding location.
“I win again!” she declared.
She lunged toward him and energetically bit into his neck. He cried out in pain, but the pressure on his windpipe silenced him. Instead, a series of gurgling noises were all that came out of him. She noted that his flavor had a distinct metallic hint to his blood.
Fiona dropped the man to the ground and stated, “You taste great!”
Standing there in the dark of the house with his blood dripping from her mouth, and her own dripping out from her arm, Fiona inherited the man’s memories and knowledge. He stood, as she immersed herself in his mind.
Benjamin Nettles. He was a mechanic that worked in the factory she had followed him from. He was employed by a man named Samuel Stilts repairing a skyship named the Dreadnought Prime. Another man from Cultwick City had taken Benjamin’s wife and child in an attempt to encourage them to take the job and get it finished quickly.
Fiona looked down at the bloody stump at the end of her arm and decided that something should probably be done about it. She reached into the ever-increasing depths of her mind to find the knowledge on how to build a mechanical arm. Using both Benjamin and Erynn’s experience with chromesmithing, she came up with a design for the device.
There weren’t enough parts in his home, but the factory where Benjamin worked would have more than enough to create such a contraption. With her new pet following along behind her, Fiona left the home and traveled back to the factory, where she had originally found him.
Fiona gave back the keys to Benjamin, and he unlocked and opened the door for her, prompting Fiona to say, “Why thank you, Benjamin! Such manners!”
He merely made a series of grunting noises before closing the door back behind them. Fiona and Benjamin strolled through the factory halls until they stopped off at a small room with an assortment of mechanical parts.
“Find me the parts I’ll need, Benjamin,” she ordered happily.
Fiona found a workbench among the chaotic debris of the room and cleared an area to labor on the device. Apathetically Benjamin brought her parts of metal that she began to cobble together into a larger device. She continued her work for several hours, while the device slowly began to take form as a mechanical hand. Fiona drew on the expertise of Erynn especially as her experience constructing her own pet, Tern, was immeasurably useful.
Once the device was ready, Fiona violently jammed her creation into her stump of an arm. She proceeded to fuse together the mechanical parts with her muscles, tendons, and bone until she and the device were one. Strands of tattered red cloth from the lab coat hung over the mechanical arm, partially concealing it from view.
Having accomplished her short-term goal of rebuilding a hand, Fiona dismissed her pet. He staggered away from her, heading off toward some unnamed location. She, meanwhile, wandered the factory hallways looking for a large hangar.
She roamed the halls whistling a repeated tune that apparently drew more attention than she would have expected. A man turned a corner to find Fiona skipping down the hallway. He was a young man that carried with him a broom and dustpan. His clothes looked quite poor and his appearance was exceedingly unkempt.
“What are you--” he interrupted himself after paying more attention to her disfigurement and degree of bloodiness. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, this?” she asked holding up her mechanical arm. Bits of the torn cloth from the lab coat fell downward, as she lifted the hand, revealing where the flesh monstrously met metal. “I guess I played too rough with my previous playmate... Would you like to play with me?”
“Maybe you should go to see the doctor,” the man suggested beginning to slowly back away from her.
“It’s playtime or nothing!’ she explained loudly.
Confused and somewhat scared, the man said, “I’ll just go get a doctor then. How about that?” Before waiting for her response, however, the young man began to flee away from her.
“Oooh,” she exclaimed. “A game of tag! That’ll be fun!”
She covered her face with her hands and began counting backward from ten. As she approached the lower numbers, she peeked between her fingers playfully. Once she reached one, Fiona raced off after her playmate.
Her superior speed allowed her to catch back up to him particularly easily. Rather than play with him any further, she leaped onto his back and plunged his head violently into the factory floor. While he was unconscious, Fiona devoured his flesh, ripping and tearing at his back. The young man had a much sweeter flavor than anyone she had already tasted. When he returned from death as her pet, she stood up, allowing him to stand as well.
She knew him to be Malcolm Connor. He wasn’t a mechanic as Benjamin was. Instead, Malcolm had been hired to clean up the factory during the nights, while the workers were away. She noted that he had spent this evening with a small pebble lodged inside his boot but had neglected to remove it. She gleaned very little from him that she found interesting and simply dismissed him.
Having finished her brief game, Fiona continued on her task of finding the hangar in the factory. After winding down several more hallways, she accomplishe
d her goal. Inside she located a large skyship - the Dreadnought Prime that Benjamin and many of the other factory workers had been repairing under duress. She climbed the stairs beside the vessel, making her way onto its deck.
“The jewel in the west,” she declared, stepping on board the ship. “I’ve finally found you. My ruby of the skies…”
Fiona descended down through the decks of the skyship, until she found a hallway with a series of closed doors. Fiona slowly walked down the hallway, stopping to place her hand, palm first, to the doors. As she did, she closed her eyes and paused momentarily. She continued this pattern, until she reached a door marked 3E.
When she held her hand to this door, she felt her body warm to its touch. A smile crept across her face, as Fiona opened the door to reveal a bed, small dresser, and nightstand. She approached the nightstand and pulled Erynn’s necklace off from around her neck. She placed it carefully on the stand next to the bed and left the room, closing the door behind her.
She proceeded down another flight of stairs, until she found a dark and isolated room at the end of a hall. The inside was mostly unoccupied except for a clutter of crates, which Fiona believed to be perfect for her purposes. She hunkered down behind the boxes and prepared herself to fall asleep.
Fiona closed her eyes and softly whispered to herself, “Good night... sleep tight... wake up bright... in the morning light... to do what’s right... with all your might.”
Chapter 17. Vincent the Bank Robber
Vincent walked down the alleyway between the Red Eye Saloon and the general store, where several Cultwick Corps halftracks sat. He pulled a pouch of tobacco out from his shirt’s pocket along with some papers and began rolling a cigarette. He stopped next to one of the vehicles, where he finished rolling the tobacco. He lit the cigarette and released a puff of smoke, rolling out from his mouth.
Vincent placed the pouch and papers back into his pocket and then grabbed two explosives from inside a container hanging at his waist. He knelt down feigning to adjust his boot, but instead stuck the explosives to the tracks of two separate vehicles.
He looked back behind him to ensure no one had seen anything and moved onto another set of halftracks. There he once again stuck the devices to the tracks of the vehicles. Vincent finished his cigarette in the alley before walking back to the side of the bank where the professor, Hirim, and Ruben waited for him.
“Is it done?” Hirim asked.
“They won’t know what hit ‘em,” Vincent responded. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Vincent pulled the rifle from Polly, who he had hitched alongside the building. The bounty hunter took from his belt several bullets and loaded them into his rifle. He checked the barrel of his pistol as well and nodded to the others that he was ready.
“Remember,” Hirim said to the others. “I don’t want any civilian deaths. We don’t want to give the confederacy a bad reputation. We’re supposed to be better than the empire.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vincent said. “I won’t kill anyone that isn’t asking for it.”
Hirim glared at him and then said, “If you want to continue getting your plague treatment, you’ll make sure you don’t.”
Vincent didn’t say anything, but instead smiled derisively at the old rebel. He then pulled his handkerchief up from around his neck, partially concealing his face. Ruben and Hirim followed suit and the four men made their way toward the bank entrance.
The bounty hunter opened the door and then shot his pistol directly up into the air. “This is a stick up!” he yelled.
Rowland ran to a nearby window, while Hirim, Ruben, and Vincent dealt with the crowd of people.
“Everybody down,” Vincent shouted, again firing the pistol into the air.
The two security corpsmen made themselves visible, so Vincent holstered his pistol and slung the rifle around from his back. He quickly took aim, as they began to draw their weapons. He fired off two shots nearly instantaneously, hitting both guards in the skull. They fell to the wooden floor with a sickly splat, and the room briefly became hushed.
“Everybody does as we say, and nobody else gets hurt,” Vincent said, breaking the silence.
Hirim went around the counter to where the tellers were already facing down on the ground. “Did one of you go and press one of these buttons?” he asked feeling under the counter and pressing the button himself.
No one responded to him, as they all had their heads firmly planted to the floor in fear. Hirim walked back around to where Vincent continued watching the crowd, while Rowland watched the second story window in the Callahan’s house.
After passing one of the men on the floor, Hirim told the others, “It’s locked down.”
Rowland heard this news and marked the window he was standing in front of with a vertical red mark.
“Good,” Vincent said. “Now it’s just up to--Look out!”
The man at Hirim’s feet stood up and grabbed him by the neck, pointing a revolver at his temple.
“You all place your weapons on the floor and put your hands in the air,” the man said.
Partially ignoring the threat, Vincent said, “That jackass Benedict didn’t say squat about this. Who the hell are you?”
“Plainclothes security,” the man said. “Guess it’s not your lucky day.”
“I don’t have luck, guy,” Vincent responded. “Least not the good kind.”
Ruben tried to go around to the other side of the man, but the guard simply fired upon him. Ruben fell to the ground, dead before he landed.
“Stay back or things are going to get worse,” the guard said. “Now, like I said - put the weapons down.”
“Can’t say I like that plan much, buddy,” Vincent answered.
“You don’t have to like it - you just have to do it!” the guard shouted.
“Or what?” Vincent asked. “You going to shoot him? Can’t say I’m bothered too much by that, frankly.”
“Fantastic,” Hirim said sarcastically.
“You don’t care if I shoot your buddy here?” the man asked pressing the gun harder against Hirim’s temple.
“That guy is not my buddy,” Vincent assured the guard. “He put me up to this whole thing. I’m just the patsy, man. Hell, I’ll help you shoot him.” Vincent raised his pistol toward the pair.
“Hold it!” the guard shouted, turning to aim the gun at Vincent.
While the man repositioned the gun, Vincent fired a shot, hitting the guard in the hand. The guard’s gun triggered a shot as well, but the weapon immediately fell to the floor, and the bullet simply lodged in the floorboards of the bank. Hirim took this opportunity to escape the man’s grasp and knocked him over the head with the butt of his gun.
The man fell to the floor with a thud, and Hirim retrieved the guard’s gun, holstering it in his belt. “‘I’ll help you shoot him?’” Hirim asked turning to the bounty hunter.
“What?” Vincent said defensively. “I didn’t. You’re welcome.”
“I think you would’ve done it,” Hirim continued. “You’ve got no loyalties, do you?”
“Well that’s not true,” Vincent said before thinking a moment. “I’m quite fond of my horse.”
Hirim approached Ruben, inspecting his body, while Vincent approached the guard and simply aimed his gun at the man’s skull and pulled the trigger. Before Hirim could come say anything else, however, they heard loud metallic banging sounds coming from somewhere beneath the building. It wasn’t long before the noises ceased and the room fell silent again.
“What the hell was that?” Hirim asked.
“No idea,” Vincent said, genuinely surprised by the interruption.
“Whatever it was,” Rowland said turning away from the window, “I’m sure Ryn can deal with it.”
It was a few minutes later before Rowland spoke up again, “Gentlemen. It would seem we have caught the attention of the Cultwick Corps. They are surrounding the building from the looks of things.”
As the
corpsmen assembled outside, the professor crouched below the pane instead of standing in front of it. It appeared that he was still able to see up at the Callahan house though.
“They finish up in the vault yet, old man?” Vincent asked.
“No, it’s still green,” Rowland responded.
Vincent made his way to the window and crouched just enough to look out at the police force assembling outside the bank. From down the street he could see the halftracks driving toward them. He pulled a device from his belt and flicked the switch.
A soft explosion could be heard in the distance as the tracks in the vehicles were shredded by debris. The halftracks were forced to stop, and Vincent could see that the men inside had been somewhat injured. Smoke billowed out from the top of the vehicles’ engines, as the corpsmen wandered away disoriented from the blast.
A small team of men from outside the bank went to assist the corpsmen that had been in the vehicles. Only about a dozen corpsmen remained stationed outside the bank, and they had a plan for dealing with the rest. They would, however, have to wait until Erynn had finished in the vault below.
One of the corpsmen had acquired a bullhorn and tried to talk to them, “We have the bank surrounded! Place your weapons on the ground and place your hands on your heads! Slowly exit the building and you will not be fired upon!”
Vincent simply responded by yelling, “No!” He then turned to Rowland and asked, “Anything, old man?”
“Still green,” he answered.
“There’s no reason this can’t come to a peaceful resolution,” the corpsman outside continued. “Is anyone inside injured?”
“Injured? No. Dead? Yeah!” Vincent shouted out the window.
The corpsman in charge outside huddled up with some of the other men and began discussing what they were going to do. Vincent, meanwhile, rolled another cigarette. He slowly smoked it, lifting the bandana enough to get the cigarette to his mouth. He released puffs of smoke and occasionally looked over to Rowland to see if he had received the signal yet. After he finished the cigarette, Vincent pulled his flask from the inside of his duster pocket and took a swig. Hirim was still roaming through the crowd of people huddled on the ground ensuring they stayed calm and stationary.
