Bodacious Creed: a Steampunk Zombie Western (The Adventures of Bodacious Creed Book 1)

by Jonathan Fesmire

  The sedative dart whistled from her weapon and the groundskeeper dropped, the drug working so quickly he had no time to reach for the needle in his chest.

  Though Anna had learned to shoot, practicing with targets, she had never hit a person before. After several long breaths, she went to the man and removed the dart. It had worked perfectly, embedding itself in his chest, which tripped the wires that depressed the plunger.

  Back at Creed’s grave, the round metal of Zero’s head peeked out from the ground. Then up came the coffin, tilted, but soon resting beside the hole.

  As Zero filled in the grave, Anna decided to bring the steely dogs with them. The groundskeeper had not seen what Anna's trio had done. If they were taking the body, why not the broken automatons as well? The type of damage might point to Zero. Morgan’s Automatons kept exact sales records, which would lead Miles Morgan himself to Anna.

  Zero helped the humans over the fence, and as they unhitched their mounts, the automaton brought the coffin. A few minutes later, it returned with one broken dog wrapped under each arm. They draped the canine models, one each, behind their saddles and used spare rope to tie them in place. Then, with Zero running beside them carrying the coffin, they traveled as fast as their horses would take them back into town.

  CHAPTER NINE

  During the ride to Amber Doves, Zero kept its quiet mode on, though Anna knew they had best turn it off as soon as they arrived home or the internal device that kept it running could overheat. At the back of her bordello, Anna unlocked the door and stepped in first.

  Hattie often played trail tunes during the day. Tonight, it was Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries ringing from the piano.

  “Miss Boyd, is that you?” came her voice, her tune stopped in mid-chord. Anna rushed to unlock her bedroom door, kicked the back door shut, and stepped in. She took off her hat, underneath which her hair was done up tightly, and looked out just as Hattie got to the entrance to the hall, making sure to keep her vaquero clothing hidden.

  “I'm fine, Hattie. How are things?”

  “Just fine,” Hattie said. “Can't sleep either?”

  “I will soon. Good night.”

  Hattie raised her eyebrows, perhaps because Anna usually had her hair down at night, but she went back to the piano and started the piece from the beginning. Anna opened the back door and motioned for Zero and Jonny to shush. Jonny stepped into the bedroom as Zero carried in the coffin.

  The automaton set it on the floor as Jonny took his own keys out of a pouch. He pushed aside a throw rug, and flipped open a nearly invisible panel, two inches square, revealing a keyhole. As Zero entered with the mechanical dogs under its arms, Jonny unlocked the trapdoor.

  It popped open and Jonny lifted it all the way, revealing a staircase. Ambient light shined up from the basement. From Anna's room, it looked as though the illumination had no source, but in the laboratory, two dozen Tesla bulbs shined from around the walls with another dozen in the basement ceiling.

  Jonny went in first, then Zero carried down first the coffin, then automatons. Anna went down last, closing the trapdoor above.

  To their left, the laboratory stretched to the front of the building. To the right sat a forge capable of reaching temperatures much higher than at other blacksmithing businesses in Santa Cruz. It was enclosed in its own room with vents in the ceiling to send the smoke through pipes in the floor and out the chimney in the saloon. It was one reason that, regardless of the weather, Anna always had a fire going in the hearth, in the dining room area behind the stage. Most people wouldn’t know the difference between wood smoke and blacksmithing smoke.

  Of course, if not for enhanced sound protection throughout the room, johns and girls alike would hear Zero pounding metal at odd times during the day and night. With Morgan's assistance, Anna had planned the lab and the reconstruction of The House of Amber Doves months before she bought the place.

  The room was stocked with two operating tables, working tables, desks, book cases, cabinets, and a small rolling cart, all in their place and ready for use. Casings, gears, energy converters, healing units, and more covered one working table.

  Zero set the casket beside an operating table. Anna had designed these herself after healing Jonny’s skull many months before. She knew her future experiments might require them.

  Jonny placed the various parts on the cart and rolled it to where they planned to work. Anna touched his hand and said, “The horses are still out back.” Jonny went upstairs, and she knew he would bring Espiritu and Cyclone back to Smullen’s.

  Anna looked at Zero and at the machinery and medical tools her lover had assembled and allowed herself a shallow grin. In all, Miles Morgan and his businesses had done well by her. Before she had even become a prostitute, she had learned something incredible, a discovery that would lead, in years hence, to Anna Lynn Creed being known as the Mother of Automatons.

  In eighteen sixty-nine, Anna had grown desperate to escape her uncle and aunt and to make a life of her own. She knew it would be especially difficult as a woman, just sixteen years old. In October, she did the only thing she could think of: she cut her hair short, strapped down her breasts, and wore men’s clothes.

  As she traveled through the American prairies, mountains, and woods, she helped with repairs in various settlements, even improving on designs by companies like Morgan’s Mechanicals. At times she wondered, if she could make those machines better, might Miles Morgan himself want to hire her?

  Anna did her best to save the money she earned and began making her way to the West Coast. She knew that Morgan’s Mechanicals had factories in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, and learned that his primary home was in the southernmost city. So, she made Santa Cruz her destination.

  In her reading, she learned about the luminiferous ether, a substance that scientists believed filled space and permeated all things. What was the ether exactly? Anna thought it might be something fed by stars, and for Earth, that of course meant the sun. Yet no evidence showed it ever reacted with anything material. Studying the pure math alone, she thought it had to exist.

  On her final train to Santa Cruz, she worked out a formula that, she hoped, would let her tap the ether as a power source. This involved an alloy made of magnetized iron, mercury, and lead.

  Once in Santa Cruz, she wrote out instructions for how a blacksmith could blend the metals. It would require little mercury, so she bought a few thermometers at Cooper Brothers Mercantile. On Pacific Avenue, she found a blacksmith willing to try creating her alloy, though he doubted it would work.

  When she returned the next day, he gave her a rod about three inches long and a quarter inch in diameter. He tapped it against a post and it hummed, a sound Anna would become familiar with in the following weeks and months.

  “Not sure what it's good for besides that, but it's yours,” the blacksmith said.

  Anna tied wires around the rod, and with a small wooden box as casing, connected those to a few gears. To her delight, the gears moved, but only a quarter turn about every eight hours. What use would Morgan have for that? She feared that without more to offer, Morgan would pay her a pittance and develop the concept himself.

  At last, Anna’s money ran out. In Santa Cruz, a city with about fifteen men for every woman, men held most of the jobs. Those who had families had to provide for their wives and children, and those who didn’t often supported family members across the country. Anna’s best, perhaps only, option was to become a prostitute, commonly referred to as a soiled dove.

  She visited the two city brothels, having a drink at each. Plowshares was small but looked comfortable. However, the owners, Edward and Nancy Hartgraul, seemed surly, the girls, sad.

  The House of Amber Doves had the look of a clean, thriving business. She paid one dove, Karla, for an hour of her time and they talked about life there. Anna met with the owner, Margarita Fullerton, and took her first john to bed that evening.

  Sex with strange men started out uncomfortable, but even
tually, Anna learned that most were simply lonely. It had to be tough for them, living on the frontier, where they greatly outnumbered women. Much of the time, she enjoyed the male affection.

  She shared a room with a young lady about her age named Maybelle Templeton, and they became fast friends. While Maybelle found Anna’s tinkering silly, she kept it secret, as Anna had asked her to.

  After her third anniversary as a parlor girl, Anna had created a small steam engine that used far less coal and water and generated more power than anything its size should, simply by mastering the use of ether rods. A lawyer named Arlo Douds, one of her regular clients, helped her procure a patent just before The California Technological Rights Act passed.

  On May thirtieth, eighteen seventy-three, Anna and Douds brought the invention to Miles Morgan at the Santa Cruz offices of Morgan’s Mechanicals.

  The big businessman looked exactly like his pictures, rotund, with close-cropped, graying black hair and a bushy, peppery beard. He wore a low top hat and black suit.

  When Anna demonstrated her engine, Morgan looked stunned, but when he asked how it worked, Douds insisted that Morgan write her a partnership contract. The men talked over the specifics with Anna frequently interjecting. Her invention would revolutionize most of his machines, and soon she would become rich.

  “I want to keep my involvement a secret,” Anna said.

  Morgan patted his belly and asked, “Why?”

  “There are people I can better help that way.”

  Two days later, Anna and Douds returned, read over the contract, and then Morgan and Anna signed it.

  Morgan launched into his questions about the engine, fascinated with the ether and how Anna had learned to harness it.

  Late into the evening, Morgan floored her with a new question. “What are your thoughts on mechanical intelligence?”

  Anna returned to The House of Amber Doves, where Margarita Fullerton greeted her with anger and reprimands. Why was Anna spending so much time away from the brothel? She had a job to do!

  So, Anna reached into a pouch and paid Fullerton one hundred dollars. As the madam looked in surprise at the coins, Anna ended her employment at the brothel. She had to think of a story, and out came the lie that people in Santa Cruz would believe for years.

  “My uncle passed away recently. I inherited his fortune. I have a lot to do, and that includes going back to Virginia to make funeral arrangements.” Anna thanked Fullerton for the job, hugged her, then said goodbye to the other women. An hour later, she rode to Morgan’s mansion.

  That night she moved in with Morgan, his wife, and his daughter, her only job to work on designs for larger steam power generators.

  Anna liked her suite and enjoyed getting to know Morgan’s pleasant family. She soon noticed how Morgan’s daughter, Lucy, at times stared at her in rapture, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips, her eyes distant. More than once Anna caught the young woman looking through her keyhole. Anna's mind was so much on this new business venture that it took several times before she started hanging a cloth over the door handle while she undressed. Eventually, Lucy asked Anna if she could learn about her inventions, and Anna allowed her to help.

  Using the ether alloy, Anna created circuitry that could solve complex mathematical problems. Combined with machinery, she made automatons capable of performing a variety of tasks, and Lucy became adept at putting the parts together. Morgan’s Mechanicals began manufacturing automatons in the forms of humans and canines. Every day, Anna had new ideas for improving what she had already invented.

  Only a year after Anna had moved to the mansion, Morgan opened a new branch of his company called Morgan's Automatons and began to sell what the public would soon dub “steelies.”

  About a year and three months later, after making numerous improvements to existing products and her own inventions, Anna told Morgan that she felt drawn back to society.

  “It's the women I used to work with. I've done well for myself. I need to help them. Don't worry, I'll still work for you. I'll need my own laboratory.”

  Rather than lose her entirely, Morgan agreed. On August first, eighteen seventy-five, Anna entered the House of Amber Doves at eight in the morning. Fullerton was yelling at one of the girls but looked stunned when she saw Anna.

  By noon, the twenty-three-year-old inventor had offered Fullerton enough money to retire on, and then some, for the bordello. They signed the paperwork, and Anna owned The House of Amber Doves outright.

  On August tenth, Anna put each of the doves up in a fine hotel on Ocean Street, where they stayed until major construction, provided in part by Morgan's Automatons, concluded four months later. On December eighth, The House of Amber Doves reopened to a throng of eager men. Now three stories high, with a fancy room for each girl, business boomed.

  On Christmas, Miles Morgan arrived and personally presented Anna with two automatons, which Anna named Lucky and Dixie. To keep it secret from the rest of town, they had already placed Zero in the basement laboratory.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Anna sat on the floor of her lab and traced a finger along the swirling pattern carved into the side of her father’s cherry wood coffin. Four brass hooks kept it shut. She closed her eyes before flipping each, then opened the lid.

  Her father was laid out in a crisp new U.S. marshal’s uniform, the slate blue shirt buttoned to the collar, black trousers over darker boots. Anna steeled her nerves and had a good look at his face for the first time in sixteen years. Thanks to the healing unit in his chest, the bullet tear across his cheek had scarred over. With his eyes closed, he appeared at peace.

  As her peripheral vision darkened, Anna realized she was staring at him without breathing. She inhaled, smelling just a hint of decomposing flesh. The body showed no bloating. The healing unit in Creed’s chest, it seemed, had helped. Anna turned her attention to the furrow across his cheek. With him fully dressed, he had no other visible wounds.

  Anna brushed her fingers against his face and beard. His skin had a roughness one would expect from a man of fifty.

  “Zero, Jonny, place him on the operating table.” Anna stood. The automaton lifted Creed from the shoulders, and Jonny lifted from the legs. They placed him on the table while Anna checked dials and switches. “Now, please put the coffin up there.” She pointed to a pair of deep cabinets that stood against the wall, side-by-side. Zero lifted the box, hefted it over its head, and slid it on top of them.

  After the incident that cost Jonny the ability to speak, Anna had spent a month designing both operating tables. At its head, about two feet deep, was a semi-circular section that they could detach from the main table and roll away. Jonny would lie there, head within the arch, its wires connected into the small unit behind his ear.

  The rest of the table had twelve ether generators attached, six per side. These went to wired, leather bindings she could strap over a patient’s feet, legs, arms, hands, torso, and neck. She had hoped the table would give Jonny’s body a strong enough boost to also heal his brain. However, when turned on, he had writhed in pain, so early on she stopped using them.

  Creed was the patient now. Anna freed the leather straps.

  For the first time, she noticed his hands, red and rough with burns. Witnesses said he had gone into the post and pulled Bennett Nelsen free. Anna suspected the burns had looked worse when he died, as the unit in his chest would somewhat restore his skin.

  Jonny and Anna removed Creed’s clothes, scrubbed their hands in the bathroom upstairs, wiped them down with vodka, and set to work. She found a circular scar on his left shoulder. She felt it, pressing hard. It seemed that Crowder must have pried out the bullet.

  Together, the couple removed and cleaned the unit they had placed in his chest. Anna had an idea for creating a mechanical heart, but first, they had to enliven his body.

  Anna and Jonny spent hours making a healing unit for Creed’s brain, and Zero used a drill within its hand to screw it to Creed’s skull. Blood trickled from the connec
tion points.

  The original alloy Anna had devised gave increased power to steam engines and helped steely circuitry. After purchasing The House of Amber Doves, she had formulated a modified alloy that, when close to damaged tissue, healed it. That’s what powered her healing units.

  Anna checked the clock on the far wall, one far more utilitarian than the clock in the saloon. It was just after three in the afternoon. Her knees nearly gave in. She and Jonny had worked all night and day with no break and hadn’t slept for more than thirty hours. Jonny had gone upstairs several times, presumably to urinate, and she finally felt the hunger in her belly and the pressure in her bladder.

  The work they had done couldn’t have waited. Anna placed her hand on the first switch at the side of the operating arch, the one that plugged into Creed’s head unit, and said, “Zero, Jonny, strap him down.” Her assistants did so with the leather belts and made them tight. Anna flipped the switch.

  “Good,” Anna said, glad to be nearly finished. “Now, the master for the rest.”

  Anna could turn the belts on individually or all at once. To keep the healing even, she pushed up the main lever.

  Creed's body jerked hard against the restraints, rested briefly, then jerked again, and again. Jonny looked at Anna with wide eyes, but she shook her head. Heart pounding, she forced herself to wait it out. After a good minute, she reached for the lever, but the spasms slowed. Twenty seconds later, Creed lay still.

  The ether generators in the table hummed. Small muscle spasms continued under Creed’s skin, but nothing like the apparent seizure.

  “Little different for an entire body, isn’t it?” The healing unit they had put in his chest had kept Creed from decomposing. The shock treatment she had just administered, she believed, was necessary to bring full vitality back to a human body.

  She took Creed’s hand and a wave of sleepiness hit her. The time had come to rest.