Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

by J. Stone

  Germ, meanwhile, still wore similar clothing to what he had worn, while working for Rowland as his butler - a matching black vest, pants, and coat over a clean white shirt. His fur, however, had been steadily growing darker and had turned from a lighter grey to a much darker version that he thought made him look dirtier. Germ didn’t appreciate the change. He wriggled his rat toes into the cold, wet snow beneath his paws and adjusted the monocle resting on his snout. He then raised his nose to the air and sniffed in his surroundings, his whiskers shifting back and forth, as he did.

  “I’ve never smelled anything quite so lush… so fresh,” he commented.

  “Yeah,” Olivia noted. “The northern cities are a whole different world when compared to the western frontier or Cultwick.” After a brief pause, she continued, “Let’s go check out the corpsmen’s warehouse.”

  The northern city of Tybury was surrounded by thick forests of pine trees and green open fields. It was an environment that was completely different from any place the rat had been to. The fort and its connected warehouse sat at the center of the town along with a handful of other buildings, surrounded by a plethora of farmsteads. It made him want to continue to travel and experience what the world had to offer.

  “Isn’t this place going to be locked down and under heavy security, ma’am?” Germ inquired, refocusing his mind on their goal.

  “You would certainly think so, wouldn’t you?” she said. “But, no. I’ve been smuggling things out of this place for a couple years now, and they never really bother to protect things like they should.”

  The walls of the fort were painted a cream color, while the roofs were a bright red. Rows of windows lined the building, and it turned and formed a ‘U’ shape. The smuggler led the rat to a pair of wide double doors located along one of the two top sections of the ‘U’ building.

  A simple lock sealed the wooden doors shut. Olivia pulled from her pocket a thin pick and stuck it into the bottom of the lock. After a few deliberate twists of the pick and nudges into the keyhole, she had popped the lock from the latch and was sliding open the double doors leading into the warehouse.

  The hallways were barren and most of the lights hanging from the ceiling had been powered off. Lining the walls up to the high ceiling were cages containing various crates with a large Cultwick seal branded into them. Latching the doors shut, however, was a lock that appeared to be much more sophisticated than the last they had encountered.

  “Hmm,” Olivia said, as she inspected the lock. “They’ve upgraded their security. It’s biometric. We’ll need a corpsman’s gene sample to get this open.”

  Germ groaned and asked, “And how are we supposed to get that, ma’am?”

  “Don’t despair, my little rat friend,” she replied. “There is always a way. Come. Let’s look around a bit more.”

  They continued walking through the building, taking note of all the different crates, as they went. The warehouse was a huge, sprawling series of interconnected corridors stretching out in all directions. They reached an intersection, and Germ again raised his snout and took in a whiff.

  “You got something?” Olivia asked.

  “I smell a corpsman, Madam Nightingale,” he answered.

  “See?” she said. “The universe has presented us with a path.”

  “Perhaps, ma’am,” Germ replied. “We still have to find a way to get a gene sample without him capturing or killing us though.”

  “Go along with whatever may happen,” she instructed. “Let your mind be free and stay centered in the moment. In the end, we will get what we need. It is simply a matter of following the chain of events that lay before us.”

  Germ frowned, but nodded anyway. He had found that Olivia often talked in what he saw as frustrating riddles. So far, however, she had not led him wrong.

  “Now,” she continued. “Follow that nose of yours, and let’s find our corpsman.”

  “Right, Madam Nightingale,” he said.

  He sniffed at the air, finding the greasy smell of the corpsman and followed its trail. He could tell the man had been drinking heavily for some time, but not beer or whiskey. It was something sweeter that suggested it was a wine - red, from his guess. The scent led him to an office setting where the corpsman was seated at a small, wooden table.

  The man’s back was to them, as they peered into the room from the hallway. He picked up a nearly empty bottle of the Tybury Cardinal, taking a huge gulp of the wine.

  Olivia pulled Germ back from the doorway and whispered to him, “Another solution presents itself. We just need to wait until he passes out, and then take the sample.”

  “Perhaps, Madam Nightingale,” Germ replied. “Though the bottle looked nearly empty to me. What if it runs out before he does?”

  “Guess we just need to get more for him to drink,” she answered. “Stay here and watch him. I’ll go find another bottle.”

  Germ complied, staying at the doorway and keeping an eye on the corpsman. After a few minutes passed, Olivia returned with a bottle a little over halfway full.

  “He do anything?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Germ replied. “He just sat there and drank. Not much of a guard frankly.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now just tell me when he leaves, so I can replace his bottle.”

  “What if that’s not enough, ma’am?” Germ asked.

  “Then we’ll get another bottle,” she answered. “They have tons of the stuff in here.”

  “But I was thinking, ma’am,” he began. “I have been having trouble sleeping lately, so Master Rowland gave me something to help. What if we slip some of this stuff into the wine?”

  “I like the way you think, Germ,” she replied, pulling the cork out of the bottle.

  Germ pulled a small, sealed vial of a dark blue liquid from his pocket and twisted off the lid. She held the bottle up for him, while the rat poured the contents of his sleeping tonic into the bottle. With his vial empty, he slid the vial back into his pocket and leaned his head back in the room, just as the guard stood from his seat. The rat recoiled slightly, but the corpsman went in the other direction. He pushed through a door labeled, ‘Men,’ which Germ assumed was the bathroom.

  “He’s gone, ma’am,” he said to Olivia. “Went to the restroom, I believe.”

  “Great,” she replied. “Back in a sec.”

  She quietly entered the room with the bottle of wine and approached the table the guard had sat at. The smuggler switched out the nearly empty bottle for her half full bottle and exited the room. She snuck back out before the guard returned to find his bottle had more in it than he had left it, but he didn’t seem to question it for long. He sat back down and continued sipping the wine straight from the bottle.

  It was only a matter of minutes before Germ heard a soft thud from the office room. Leaning in, he saw the corpsman’s head resting on the table, and he could hear him loudly snoring in his sleep.

  “Looks like he’s out, ma’am,” he told Olivia, leaning back away from the room.

  She stood, entered the room, and approached the corpsman. She kneeled down to his eye level, ensuring he was actually asleep and nodded to Germ. The rat also entered the room and picked up an empty glass and a sharp letter opener from a nearby desk. Olivia pulled off the corpsman’s left glove, and Germ pricked one of the guard’s exposed fingers, letting the blood drip into the cup.

  “This should get us in, Germ,” Olivia stated.

  “Let’s hurry, ma’am,” Germ replied. “The sooner we get in, the sooner we can get out of here.”

  “Right,” she said, but as she turned and looked at a nearby table, she seemed distracted from their objective. “Look,” she continued, walking away from Germ and the guard.

  Germ allowed the last little bit to dribble into the cup and then joined Olivia at the next table. Looking down, he could see an aerial view of the city of Pendulum Falls. There were drawings of arrows pointing into the city from various directions and placeholders fo
r what he assumed were units of corpsmen.

  “It’s an attack plan,” she explained.

  “We should take it then, Madam Nightingale,” he replied. “Show it to Hirim.”

  “Mmm, no,” she responded. “Then they’d know we saw it and change their plans. You have your journal on you?”

  “Always, ma’am,” he answered.

  “Draw it, and we’ll show that to Hirim instead,” she suggested.

  Germ nodded, pulling out his small, bound journal, his quill, and a slender vial of black ink. He uncorked the vial, dabbed the quill into the ink, and began drawing the map as it was presented on the table. After several minutes, he believed he had captured the brunt of the empire’s attack plan, and showed it to Olivia for approval.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Good work, Germ.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Germ replied humbly.

  He stowed his journal and writing implements back in his pockets, and they returned to the locked cage containing the Cultwick crates. Germ poured the collected blood sample into the device at the door’s handle. They watched, as a red bulb inside the contraption dimmed, a green one lit up, and the door unlatched. Germ swung open the door, while Olivia saw something and walked away from the cage.

  Looking back, Germ saw Olivia return with a large, motorized dolly. She steered it into the cage, and the rat and the smuggler loaded up as many crates onto the device as they could. They began making trips back and forth between the cage and the Halcyon, and by the time they had finished, the cage was nearly left empty, while the skyship was packed to capacity.

  Germ swung the cage closed and watched as the red bulb re-illuminated. They reached the Halcyon with their final load without any further problems and loaded the skyship’s main cabin with the final few crates. The smuggler returned the dolly to the warehouse, and she closed and locked the door back the way they had found it. The sun was beginning to peek up over the hills to the east, as they finished their goal. The town was beginning to come alive, when they climbed on board, and Germ slid the door to the ship closed.

  Olivia ignited the ship’s engines up again to a roaring, sputtering noise. She slowly backed the skyship from the warehouse wall and began to turn the nose toward the direction they had come from. She shifted the ship’s gears, and it began to slowly proceed forward. Olivia continued pushing the Halcyon forward and soon they were in the air, with Tybury becoming a mere speck in the distance.

  Germ joined Olivia in the cockpit of the skyship, and she told him, “A path always presents itself.”

  “As long as that path leads away from these corpsmen, ma’am,” Germ replied. “I’ll be happy to join you on it.”

  Chapter 5. Vincent and the Bounty

  Leonard Harlow was a former member of a rock blasting team who got in a dispute with a missionary that had been attempting to spread the word of biosynthesis. Witnesses said Harlow quickly became verbally abusive after the missionary sat down at the miner’s table. Harlow picked up a bottle of whiskey, broke it over the missionary's head, and then slit the man’s throat with the jagged edges. Local authorities attempted to restrain the man, but he ultimately fled on a horse that he stole from the local stables.

  It had turned out that the horse belonged to the bounty hunter, Vincent Rourke. Vincent was quite fond of that horse. When he awoke from his whiskey nap and discovered that Polly was missing, Vincent was, to say the least, upset. Always prepared, however, Vincent kept a tracking device located in the saddlebags of his horse. The device synchronized up with the mechanical eye patch he wore over his left eye, allowing him to track the thief and murderer.

  Adjusting the patch to view the tracking information, Vincent discovered that Harlow had not gone very far. According to the device, he was holed up inside an old abandoned mine at the edge of Chrome City's borders.

  Chrome City was founded based on a mine that had been operated by Oscar Graham more than twenty years prior. The center of the town, which had once served as the site of the first mine, was full of bars, inns, scattered housing, and tied together with a dirt-covered road. The mines still in use were all outside the edge of the town and served to further widen the large valley that comprised the city.

  When Vincent arrived at the mine, the sun was just beginning to rise over the black smoke and soot of the city, but he found Polly safely hitched outside the mine.

  "Hey there, girl," he said, rubbing her coat. "Did the dumb man hurt you?"

  Polly seemed pleased to see the bounty hunter, and she whinnied and stamped her hooves at his arrival. Polly was a light brown horse, who held Vincent’s dark brown saddlebags over her broad back. Littering her hair were large white spots, and her mane and tail were colored to match the blotches.

  "You wait here, Polly," he instructed. "I'll head in and get our next meal ticket."

  Vincent pulled an electric-powered light from a pouch on Polly's saddle and then stumbled into the narrow entrance of the dim mine. Flipping on the switch just as he stepped on a metal plate, an explosion erupted directly in front of Vincent, knocking him back and to the ground. The light slipped from his grasp, and its lens cracked and broke on a nearby rock.

  "Ha!" Harlow derisively shouted from further inside the mine. "And consider that just a warning! I got the whole entryway booby-trapped, and it's the only way in. If you really want to get me, you're going to have to go through it all!"

  From the floor of the rocky cave, Vincent could see scattered specks of the mine’s tunnel walls glistening through the smoke of the explosion. The wooden rafters that held the mine in place creaked and bent, as the ground readjusted following the blast. Breathing in the gritty smoke of the blast left Vincent coughing like he had not done, since being cured of the sweeper bot plague weeks earlier. Vincent groaned and coughed up the smoke, as he crawled backward to the light outside the cave.

  Standing, he picked up his hat and placed it back on his head. Looking down at his shirt and duster, they were peppered with the little chunks of debris from the blast and his skin was covered in the black ash of the explosion.

  Irritated, Vincent began to re-enter the mine, until he realized what Harlow had told him. "You say that's the only way in?" He shouted into the mine.

  "That's right, lawman!" He yelled back. "Ain't no way yer gonna get me!"

  "If it’s the only way in, that also means it’s the only way out, dumbass," Vincent muttered to himself, as he reached into Polly's bag. Inside, he found a couple canisters of a smoke-based grenade.

  "Sure hope you remember where you set up those booby traps!" Vincent shouted, tossing the grenades as deep into the mine, as he could manage. "And I'm sure as shit no lawman, jackass!"

  Vincent then went back to his horse and grabbed the rivet gun that Erynn had built. Next to the cave entrance were several pieces of scrap metal. He picked up several of the bigger sections and stretched them across the gap of the mine entrance, watching the smoke disperse inside the mineshaft. One by one, he quickly riveted the scraps, so that they covered the opening and preventing much smoke from escaping.

  "Hey!" Harlow shouted from within. "What are... you doing..."

  He sputtered the words out, and Vincent could hear a commotion, as he tried to evade the smoke. The bounty hunter, meanwhile, went back to Polly, stowed his weapon, and waited for the inevitable. An explosion boomed from within followed by several other blasts that shook the mountainside. Small chunks of debris smashed against the makeshift wall he had erected and a haze of smoke puffed outward through the cracks separating them.

  Not interested in charging directly into the mine to retrieve his quarry, Vincent sat on a nearby log and pulled out a pouch of tobacco. He carefully rolled a cigarette, while he waited for the smoke to clear. The bounty hunter sat there, smoking his cigarette, as the morning sun fully rose and warmed him from the chilly weather.

  After he finished his cigarette and a sufficient amount of time had passed, Vincent stood from his seat and walked to the entrance. He
found a sturdy pipe lying on the ground and picked it up to pry the metal off the mine entryway. Sliding the pipe between two pieces of the sheet metal, he used the leverage to pop the rivets out of the cave wall. He continued with his efforts, until the entrance had been cleared enough for him to pass through.

  Vincent moved inside the mine despite the fact that it was still quite smoky even considering the delay since the explosions. He reached down to his waist and retrieved his respirator from his belt, placing it over his mouth. Unable to use the flashlight since the first explosion had broken it, he flipped through the settings on his eye patch to find his heat signature feature. Strapping the respirator over his face, Vincent proceeded into the mine and made his way toward the only target showing up in his vision.

  Eventually, he arrived over the body of the thief. Harlow was a very large and exceptionally greasy man though whether it was from the blasts or not, Vincent could not tell. Much of his body was covered with small cuts from the debris and shrapnel, but he didn’t seem to have suffered any major injury. He laid face up on the ground, and his entire belly would expand and shrink with each gasped breath.

  "Hey, slim, looks like you're still alive," Vincent stated. "Good for you."

  Vincent kicked the man with the tip of his boot in attempt to wake him back up. The man writhed somewhat, groaning in pain and discomfort. Vincent retrieved from his belt a pair of restraints and dropped them with a hard thunk on the man's chest.

  "Ugh," Harlow groaned, shifting uncomfortably on the ground.

  "Throw those on, so we can get outta here," Vincent explained.

  Harlow looked up at Vincent, obviously still attempting to get his bearings, and asked, "Thought you said you ain't a lawman."

  "I'm not," he replied. "Now hurry up and put 'em on before I do it for you."

  With the smoke clearing, Harlow looked up and down Vincent, spotting the holstered weapon at his hip and the variety of gear stored in his belt. "Then what are you?" he asked.

  "Bounty hunter, jackass," Vincent explained, his temper rising again.