by J. Stone
“Where do I find him?” Erynn asked.
Ichabod grimaced and replied, “I can get you his address if you like, but there is more. Earlier tonight, Director Sloan tried to hold a banquet to celebrate his recent marriage to a woman by the name of Isabelle. Though Director Sloan has tried to pass her off as a legacy aristocrat, my contact had never heard of her. I couldn’t even find her maiden name. The evening ended abruptly with Director Sloan suggesting that his wife was feeling ill and Operative Deckland was seen carrying her out.”
“You think that all has something to do with Pearl?” Erynn inquired of the investigator.
“I don’t have enough information to say for certain,” he replied.
“Get me the address,” she said.
“Neko, if you would, please look up the address for Erynn,” Ichabod requested. Turning his attention back to Erynn, he asked, “Were you able to repair Reco?”
She handed him the diagnostic printout and answered, “He looks good. I left him on your office desk.”
As Ichabod was quickly looking over the autonomous owl’s output, Neko returned with a scrap of paper.
She gave the paper to Erynn and explained, “He lives up north, just at the edge of the city.”
“I would rede you take caution during your search in that district,” Ichabod added. “I’ve heard some chatter that they’ve added extra security there.”
“I’ll be alright,” Erynn said. “I’ve got a way to get past them.”
“Good luck to you, Ryn,” Neko said. “I hope you find who you’re looking for.”
Erynn smiled and replied, “Thank you, both of you.”
Adorning the respirator and spectacles, she shoved the piece of paper into her pocket, and exited Ichabod’s building, heading north through the city. When she had first arrived back in Cultwick, she was quite surprised to see her face plastered on so many buildings, light poles, and bulletin boards, but within the short time she had been there, Erynn noticed that she saw herself less and less. Instead, Fiona’s picture was suddenly dominating the wanted posters and warnings throughout the city, claiming she was ‘The carrier.’
“They certainly like to hand out their titles,” Erynn commented to herself.
Over the loudspeakers, there was periodically talk of what Fiona had been up to, and even though she had consciously decided not to use her connection to the maniac, Erynn somehow still knew what Fiona had been doing. After the attack on Empress Arkmast and the assault on the Center for Empirical Research, Fiona had garnered a significant amount of attention from the Cultwick Empire.
She allowed her mind to wander toward that of Fiona, but she halted and found herself sobered and focused when she laid her eyes on the barricade between her and Owen’s home. The entire length of the street was blocked to both foot and automobile traffic, with each subjecting travelers to inspections and interrogation by a group of Cultwick soldiers. A barrier stretched across the sidewalk on one side of the street all the way to the other. Several corpsmen manned the station, administering a blood test to those that wanted to pass through.
Through a quick and unintentional delve into the hive mind of Fiona; Erynn confirmed that all the other streets to the north were also blocked. If she wanted to get to Owen’s home, she would have no choice but to pass through one of the checkpoints. She was unsure how long the injection Olivia gave her would really last, but she decided that her only hope of passing through undetected would be for a trace of that serum to still be in her system. With a deep breath, Erynn took a step forward and approached the checkpoint.
“Ma’am,” the guard greeted her. “Please place your hand over the scanner, so we can allow you to pass through.”
Erynn complied, doing as the corpsman instructed her, and she watched the output on the screen. She silently prayed that the results would again be negative on the offender’s list, and after the machine made a loud breathing noise, that word finally illuminated the screen.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the guard said, ushering her forward.
The noise of the machine died down, and Erynn walked past the corpsman breathing a sigh of relief. It was short lived, however, as the machine powered up again and triggered a howling siren. The cocking of all the guards’ guns quickly followed the whining noise.
“Halt!” one of the corpsmen called out to her.
Knowing she had no chance of defeating all the guards by herself with just one loaded pistol, Erynn complied with his instructions and raised her hands. He approached her cautiously and moved to her front, still pointing his rifle at her. The corpsman slowly reached out toward her face and pulled off the respirator and spectacles.
Looking to his other men, the corpsman said, “Tell them we found the heretic, Erynn Clover.”
Chapter 26. Fiona and the Collection
Fleeing the center, Fiona made a call to her pets and sisters scattered throughout the city. Racing behind her was the somehow empowered corpsman, Silas Skinner, with another syringe of the soapy white substance that had separated Gemma from her pets. Fiona knew that if she were injected with that needle, she would lose all of her new family.
Emerging from the sewer grates and manholes along the street came a slew of slow moving pets, which she aimed at Silas. He found them little more than a distracting nuisance, as he plowed through them, dismembering and tearing their bodies to scraps with a terrible ferocity. Newton’s prophecy, however had prepared Fiona for Silas, and she moved with purpose.
She ran down a long corridor, and as soon as he turned the corner, Robert Lawless, Silas’ former team member, fired a shot from his sniper rifle. The infected corpsman was perched atop the building Fiona ran towards, giving him a perfect view of Silas below. The bullet plunged into and out of Silas’ midsection, but it didn’t slow him down. Lawless fired several more shots, but they might as well have missed for all the good they did. Silas grabbed a pole that was sticking out of the ground. He pulled it out, cement and all, from the street and hurled it toward Lawless. The projectile pierced the wall he hid behind and impaled him as well.
Fiona continued running, until she got to another alleyway. At the end of the path stood Donald Dooley, the heavy weapons expert of Silas’ team. Fiona had allowed Dooley to acquire an arsenal of weaponry from the city, and Silas seemed to be the perfect target. Strapped to Dooley’s back was a huge metal pack with chained bullets leading into a long tubular gun that the infected corpsman held upright toward Silas.
Fiona ducked into an adjacent building, ordering, “Cut him in half!”
Dooley unleashed an onslaught of bullets, as the gun rotated around at an incredible pace. Silas ducked behind a large trash receptacle, while the bullets littered the alleyway. The bloodthirsty corpsman took a brief pause before pushing the heavy bin toward Dooley. The receptacle moved with such velocity that it smashed into Dooley, crushing him and his weapon against the wall. A vertical streak of blood splattered upward on the brick wall at his back.
Silas followed Fiona into the abandoned office building only to find that she had already exited out the other side. She waved to him and stuck out her tongue, taunting him and encouraging him to follow her through the building. His rage blinded him to all the explosives that Alonzo Bishop had planted on the first floor of the building.
Once Silas was halfway through the building, Fiona had Bishop yell, “You go boom!” Bishop flicked the switch, blowing up the building, himself included. Fiona stood there, watching the blaze, certain in her defeat of the corpsman. Instead, Silas emerged triumphantly, pieces of his clothing still burning.
“No way!” Fiona shouted. “You’re cheating!”
“You die today, Fiona,” he replied, kneeling and picking up some snow, which he used to put out the last bits of fire on his uniform.
Behind Fiona, Larry Priest had arrived, and she ordered him to finish off Silas. Priest held two swords and was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Silas cocked his head to the side, making a loud popping noise
before twisting his head in the opposite direction, doing it again. He then crunched his knuckles, one hand at a time and swung them out at his side. Loose and limber, Silas charged his former comrade with his clawed hands extended out to his side. Priest swung his swords at Silas, but the enraged corpsman dodged the blows with ease and grabbed Priest’s wrist. He then placed his heavy boot on Priest’s chest and pulled his arms, wrenching them from their sockets. Priest’s body slumped down with a muted expression across his pale face, while Silas used one of the swords to decapitate the infected man before him.
“My collection! You meany! You killed your old team!” Fiona shouted in admonishment. “How will you live with yourself?”
“They were already dead,” he said. “And you’ll be joining them.”
She attempted to reach out to more of her pets, but there were none nearby. “Uhhh... ohhh...” she said with a high-pitched tone.
Knowing he was too fast to run from, Fiona chose to scale a nearby building. She jumped toward the building, latching on with her mechanical hand and then began climbing. Her increased strength and dexterity from Dr. Norton’s injections allowed her to easily reach the top of the tall building. To her frustration, however, she found that Silas also had the capacity to quickly climb the side of the structure.
With a disgruntled huff, she stomped her bare foot on the hard surface of the roof and looked around for where to go next. In the distance and through the falling snow, she spotted a glimmering bowled surface jutting from the top of another building. It seemed as good a destination as any other she could have picked, so she ran in that direction. Easily jumping from roof to roof, Fiona quickly made her way across the Cultwick landscape and toward the glass dome.
When she arrived, Silas was very close behind her, so she slid upward and over the top of the surface of the snow and ice-glazed glass. Silas, too, landed on the dome, and when he did, Fiona smashed her hand down and through the glass. The dome shattered, with both Fiona and Silas falling through to the room below.
Snow and glass rained down on a group of people that had been listening and dancing to a live band. The room was mostly darkened but was illuminated with sparse and strangely colored electric lights. Above a bar at one side of the room, the words, ‘Gyros Club,’ were lit in the neon glowing lights, while posters of prior band engagements and paintings and photography by local artists covered the walls. With Fiona and Silas crashing into the nightclub, the band abruptly quit playing, and the people stopped what they had been doing.
Silas stood first and began to make his way toward Fiona, but before he went far, a strange sensation filled the room. Suddenly, everything smelled sweeter; the room was brighter; and in general, everything seemed better. Not even Silas or Fiona was immune to this strange feeling. Before long, however, things began to shift and change.
Looking around the room, Fiona could see people’s physical appearance actually altering. Glancing down, she saw that her clothes were different, even her mechanical hand was once again flesh and bone. The only person that remained the same was Silas, and he looked around the room with a great confusion. Fiona happened to look up through the broken glass she had crashed, where she saw one of her sisters, Gretchen Reynolds.
Gretchen had an uncannily similar appearance to Fiona herself. Her hair was a messy pile hanging over and concealing much of her face, though Gretchen’s hair was auburn with a slight hint of red to it. She also held herself in something of a hunched position most of the time, more like a lurking wild beast than an upright human being.
After she was freed from Bedlam Asylum, Gretchen quickly abandoned the clothing she had been forced to wear in favor of items of her own choosing. As she had killed and infected the citizens of Cultwick, she created a hodgepodge outfit from their clothing. She took from a young girl a pair of bright yellow, rubbery snow boots. From an older woman, she stole a skirt with red roses on black fabric, which ended, just below her knees, leaving a gap of skin between it and the boots. Lastly, from a young man, she took a hooded, hunter green, zipped up jacket and wore nothing underneath it.
Gretchen had grown up in Minsterdale with her parents and younger sister, Megan. There were many stories that Gretchen told of how she came to be in Bedlam, but there were only a handful of concrete facts. A concerned neighbor noted the family’s absence for some time, and upon inspection of their house, found that Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds and even little Megan had been dismembered. Blood coated the walls and floors of their small home, and various body parts were found scattered in every single room. Only Gretchen remained, and she was impoverished, incoherent, and wholly unstable.
Specialists were called in to investigate, but no one could ever discern what actually happened inside that house other than the stories Gretchen told. Some of her tales consisted of a great beast emerging from the ocean near their house and ordering the young girl to kill her family. Other times, a traveling salesman broke in and murdered the family, making Gretchen watch. None of her stories were consistent leading no one to believe any of what she said. Soon after she was found in the house, she was shipped off to Bedlam Asylum. During her time there, Gretchen would frequently tell new and more interesting stories to entertain her fellow patients.
With the gift of Fiona’s blood, Gretchen had developed her own special talent. She could now make others view whatever she wished them to, inducing hallucinations upon them at will, and so she erected a basic defense around Fiona consisting of a normal civilian. All the other people in the room had been given a similar disguise, aside from Silas and one unlucky individual. This person, Gretchen had made to look like Fiona. Silas took the bait and absent-mindedly approached the Fiona doppelganger.
“There you are,” he declared to the clone.
“No!” they shouted back in Fiona’s voice. “What are you doing? Get away from me!”
He ignored their pleas and jabbed the syringe into their neck, causing them to flail in pain. While Silas was indisposed, Gretchen silently dropped down behind the corpsman and ran a blade along his throat. In shock, Silas lurched forward attempting to hold the spilling blood within his neck, while Gretchen allowed the Fiona look-alike to shift back to their actual appearance. Their body had ceased flailing, with the serum apparently killing them. Seeing the scene unfold, the remainder of the club attendees screamed and ran for the exits.
Blood flowed from Silas, and he teetered around the room trying to regain his composure. Ripping a tablecloth from one of the club tables, the corpsman wrapped the sheet around his neck like a tourniquet-scarf. Growling, he jumped through the hole in the ceiling and ran from Fiona and Gretchen.
“Oh, no, you don’t, mister!” she shouted. “You go get him, Gretchen!”
Gretchen nodded and leaped up through the roof following along behind Silas. Gretchen eagerly followed Silas through the dusk city. Though he moved incredibly quickly, the trail wasn’t hard to follow, as droplets of blood littered his path. Fiona slowly followed along as well, but she let Gretchen take the lead. Silas appeared to have made his way to the infamous Hush Street, known for all manner of debauchery including alcohol, biojunk, gambling, and prostitution.
The brightly lit street was covered in the electrified bulbs, so much that despite being evening, it was nearly indiscernible. Many of the buildings along the street towered above the rest of the city, with each being more visually impressive than the previous. The streets, themselves, were littered with paper flyers advertising the women of the brothels, the casino dens, and all manner of illicit drugs or substances. It was commonly known that the law might as well have ended where Hush Street was concerned, as the owners and entrepreneurs of the businesses managed themselves however they felt.
Silas’ trail led to a darkened alleyway away from the bright lights of Hush Street, where Gretchen found Silas gnawing at a woman’s neck and slurping the blood that flowed outward from her. Her body draped limply in his arms, but her eyes stared widely toward Gretchen, as she approached the pair in
the shadows. Gretchen ripped the cloth from around Silas’ neck, spinning him around and making him drop the woman. He began to stand, but Gretchen grabbed him by the chest and pulled him into her, sinking her teeth into the slash along his neck.
Fiona arrived in the alley in time to see Gretchen drop him from her grip and absorb him into their collective. A career corpsman aged past his prime, Silas had agreed to an experimental serum based on Fiona’s own series of injections. The scientists had come up with a concoction to stop her and keep her from playing her games. She wouldn’t allow them to get in her way, and she believed that taking Silas away from them would prevent them from using the treatment on her. No more of their needles would pierce her skin nor any of her sisters.
Inside Silas’ mind, she felt a burning rage, however, that made him different from her, the sisters, or any of her pets. Whatever the serum had done to him, it had set his mind on fire, making both his thoughts and memories harder to discern. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to use him like she had all her other pets.
“I am very cross with you, Mr. Skinner,” she informed him, as he slowly raised himself from the dirty street. “You ruined my chance at having a mint collection of an elite corpsman squad. Plus, I don’t think you can be controlled. I’m afraid we’ll have to put you down. And you know what that means…” She held her mechanical hand up and formed it into the makeshift mouth she had recently become accustomed to. “This looks like a job for Mr. Squeezy!”
Fiona replied back to herself in her robot voice, “Beep! Boop! Beep! Preparing head crunching algorithms! Beep! Boop! Head crunching algorithms initiated! Beep!”
