Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

by J. Stone

  Fiona and her sister, Hazel sat atop the ledge of the front entrance watching the congregation enter the church. Hazel Weaver was an accomplished performer in her father’s traveling show, Weaver’s Circus. She was a skilled escapologist and performed amazing feats in which she unshackled herself from chains and handcuffs and freed herself from cages, straitjackets, and other perilous restraints.

  Given her talent, the staff at Bedlam Asylum had found great difficulty in containing Hazel within their walls. During her short time being held there, the escapologist attempted to free herself from the hospital numerous times. Eventually, the staff was forced to drug her to the point of oblivion.

  Several high-ranking members of the Church of Biosynthesis had admitted her, so the medical staff had no qualms about taking her in. The priests claimed that Hazel was a troubled soul that had wandered into the church in need of help, and they even had her admitted under a false name. Fiona knew, however, with Hazel’s side of the story that the Lord Reverend, Hugh Blackmoore, had found her attempting to steal from his private safe. Outside of her time in the traveling circus, Hazel stole from the wealthier members of society in order to keep the circus afloat. Fiona saw it fitting that Hazel be the one to help her break into the Anointed Temple, kill the lord reverend, and allow Fiona to absorb the blood from the church archives.

  Hazel’s natural ability to escape any constrictions fueled the gift Fiona gave her. She was now able to instantly teleport herself, objects, and others from one point to another. Fiona was quite excited to see how this power would play out in the confines of the temple. Once the congregation had entered for the morning service and closed their doors, Hazel teleported Fiona down to the entrance, where they joined the worshipers inside.

  Behind a podium, Blackmoore addressed his congregation. The Lord Reverend was a very old man that hobbled across the stage in what looked to be extreme discomfort. He wore a dark blue robe with a white sash around his shoulders. The robe draped all the way down to the floor, completely concealing his body’s features. Atop his head, Blackmoore wore a matching blue hat that flattened on top in the shape of a pentagon. A long, wiry, white beard covered his wrinkled, pale face and fell to his chest.

  “God put these aberrations in our fair city to test our resolve!” he told them. “This carrier plague is his way of warning us that if we do not change our sinful ways, we will burn in the fiery inferno. And to those infected with the plague, they have simply been tested and found wanting.”

  Fiona interrupted the orating lord reverend, “Citizens of Cultwick and advocates of Biosynthesis! Allow me to introduce my dear friend, Hazel! She brings forth your test for you! Pray that you succeed!”

  Without delay, Hazel began teleporting around the room taking large chunks out of people and infecting them with the carrier plague. Within a matter of minutes, the entire room aside from Blackmoore was a part of Fiona’s amalgamation. Hazel then reappeared directly in front of him and walked threateningly toward him with a wide grin matching Fiona’s glee.

  “What have you done to my congregation?” Blackmoore asked her, backing up.

  “They’re my congregation now,” Hazel retorted, lunging at the holy man.

  Blackmoore, however, wasn’t a defenseless old man. Holding his hands up toward the descending woman, Blackmoore shot out from the sleeves of his robes a deluge of tentacles that attempted to worm their way around Hazel’s body, threatening to tear her to pieces. Rather than squirm in vain, the escapologist simply vanished, reappearing at his feet. She swung her foot around, clipping the back of his legs and knocking him to the ground, causing him to smack the back of his head on the stage.

  Hazel teleported away from him again, while Blackmoore stood and looked around for her. She reappeared behind him and stared into the back of his skull. He must have felt her presence, because he turned and slammed down his tentacles into the base of the stage, penetrating the wood. Writhing and undulating, his tentacles were released deeper and deeper into the stage, and they eventually burst upward from beneath it.

  The tentacles swiped at Hazel, as she flipped backward like a gymnast, dodging the attacks.

  “Can’t catch me!” she exclaimed in mid flip.

  She managed to cross the stage in such a way that his tentacles were wormed around a series of pipes, nearly tying his tendrils together. Hazel took advantage of his self-imposed restraints and teleported above him, crashing down onto his head. As he was pushed backward, she vanished and reappeared behind his feet, knocking him off balance. With another teleport, Hazel kicked him forward, and he slammed downward into the wood of the stage, causing another small hole in its surface. A bit of blood pooled behind his head, leaking slowly into the cracks of the broken stage, while the tentacles retracted back inside his sleeves.

  At the center of the stage, behind where Blackmoore had been orating, Hazel spotted a small room known as the synthesis box. It was a private room, where the church’s practitioners would go to receive their holy blessings from the lord. It was a simple red box with gaudy gold trim lining its edges.

  Hazel grabbed the dazed Blackmoore and threw him inside the synthesis box. The infected woman slammed the door shut and then vanished once again. When she reappeared on the stage a few moments later, she was wearing an entirely new set of clothes.

  They were similar to what she wore in her father’s circus when she performed her acts of illusion. Over her dark, black hair was a limp, black steeple hat that curled down to one side. Stretching from nearly her shoulders down to her wrists were a pair of light and dark green striped arm stockings. Her chest was bare aside from a tight black corset tied with golden-colored lace. Around her waist was a short, green skirt with a white frilled hem. Black stockings covered her legs down to a pair of thin, knee-high boots with sharp, pointy toes and a thick heel.

  She turned and faced the crowd, announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen! Prepare your minds for a spectacular magical feat! The Lord Reverend, Hugh Blackmoore, has graciously volunteered to assist."

  Fiona, along with the entire infected congregation, took notice of Hazel and her performance, sitting in the rows of blood-spattered pews.

  “I love magic tricks!” Fiona announced, clapping her hands together happily.

  Hazel continued, "For my first and only trick of the evening, I present the Impaling Box! I have with me--" She vanished and reappeared with a long metal pole, presenting it to the audience with a certain flair. "--one of the impaling poles that I shall use! Is there an audience member willing to inspect this object?"

  Immediately, Fiona's hand shot up, and she uncomfortably squirmed in her chair, as Hazel's eyes scoured her audience. After teasing that she didn’t see Fiona, Hazel pointed to her, motioning her to the stage. “You!” she shouted. “Come inspect his for me.”

  Fiona rushed on stage, clapping her hands together excitedly, as she went.

  "Here you are, madam," Hazel said, handing the pole to Fiona. "Please confirm that this is an ordinary pole with no tricks or gimmicks."

  Fiona inspected the pole for a moment, flipping it over in her hands and holding it to her face, and then nodded, handing it back to Hazel said, "Looks good to me!"

  "Thank you, madam," Hazel said. Fiona took her seat, while Hazel walked the pipe toward the box in which Blackmoore was. Using her teleportation abilities, Hazel instantly moved the pipe so that it skewered the box. A scream erupted from within the box, prompting the audience of stupefied pets and Fiona to gasp in unison.

  "Not to worry folks!" Hazel reassured them. "I am, after all a professional!"

  Hazel again vanished, returning with another long pipe. She briefly showed it to the audience before vanishing it like the other, causing it to reappear piercing through the box. She repeated this several more times, until the box looked like a pincushion for the jutting metal poles.

  "Now!" she announced. "The real trick - to safely remove the pipes and ensure the good Lord Reverend is indeed unharmed!"

 
With the explanation, Hazel began to do just that. Rather than teleport the pipes out like she had put them in, she simply pulled out the poles and tossed them to the side of the stage. Each pipe was covered in blood and as she removed them, they littered the stage with the dripping red liquid. She finally walked around to the front of the box and swung the door open with a theatrical flourish.

  Rather than an impressed awe, Hazel's ears were met with a horrified gasp. She slowly peeked around the side of the door and looked inside to see that Blackmoore had been impaled by the dozen or so pipes. Blood was splattered throughout the inside of the box, and Blackmoore had an anguish-filled face expressed across his face.

  "Whoops," Hazel declared. "I rename this trick, ‘The Holy Man!’"

  The crowd of infected dead stood with Fiona and applauded Hazel's act. Hazel took a series of bows at each side of the stage and a final one in the center before descending the stairs and joining the others. Despite being under Fiona’s control, Hazel felt a great sense of pleasure and satisfaction in seeing the agent of her incarceration bloodied inside that box.

  With the lord reverend out of her way, Fiona left the pews and exited down a long spiral staircase. At the bottom, she was met with bookshelves upon bookshelves filled with small glass vials of blood. At random, she picked one out, pulled off the small stopper, and downed the entire bottle.

  Fiona was quick to discover the blood belonged to Victor Caffrey, a scientist working in the Center for Empirical Research. Councilor Crowley had put his team to work to find a gas based means to destroy any of the feral infected once Fiona was given the soapy-white serum that Silas had attempted to inject her with. So far, their efforts had been futile. Fiona took control of him regardless, causing him to attack and infect his fellow scientists.

  Next up was Gene Mathers, an aristocrat cowering in his basement with his family. Fiona's reign of terror had reduced many of the prominent members of Cultwick to quivering cowards, she found. She instructed him, too, to infect his family. He first bit his wife, causing his three little children to flee up the stairs and out into the havoc-filled streets. Fiona issued him an order to hunt each one down, not resting until his job was complete.

  Drinking a third vial gave her control over the mind of Tabitha Clarke, a bureaucrat who worked on the lower floors of the Sovereign Tower. Her job consisted of ensuring the general education of the children of Cultwick and even the other cities within the empire contained a heavy dose of the zealotry of the Church of Biosynthesis. If teachers in the public education system didn’t commit enough time to these lessons, their jobs may have been forfeit, their salary withheld, or they may have even wound up in the lottery program. Tabitha, however, wasn’t currently at work. She was at home alone. The woman had never married, so Fiona was at a loss for what errand to send her on. One of Tabitha's many cats happened to scurry past her vision, catching Fiona's eye. She didn’t yet have a cat in her hive mind, Fiona realized, so she instructed Tabitha to include them for fun.

  Returning her focus to the archive room, Fiona decided that this method would take far too long. To hurry things along, Fiona located a large, glass jug and began going along the bookshelf, pouring the contents of the smaller vials into her larger one. Eventually managing to fill the jug with the blood of nearly all the archives, Fiona raised the glass jug, placing it to her reddened lips, and began devouring the blood of Cultwick.

  After gulping almost all of the blood, she lowered the glass and announced, “My tummy hurts.”

  A legion of minds, with infinite possibilities of thoughts inundated her head, causing her to drop the bowl, shattering it on the floor, and fall to her knees. The broken shards of glass pierced the skin of her knees, but she was too distracted to notice. Her mind throbbed and ached like it had never before. A nauseous feeling overwhelmed her, and eventually Fiona had to lurch out a bloody vomit on the archive floor.

  "That feels better," she noted, wiping her mouth.

  The thoughts and minds continued to swirl around in her own, giving a host of new information and insight. She located the scientist responsible for curing the sweeper bot plague preparing to carve into the skull of a familiar looking woman. She was inside a dismembered body in a dark, cold room, as it began to stitch itself back together. In a graveyard at the center of town, she found that she had raised the recently deceased, as they clawed out from their tombs to the freedom above.

  Perhaps one of the biggest acquisitions was that of Council Leader Desmond Crowley. Though it had been Dr. Norton that injected her, it was Crowley and his agenda of keeping the plague cure a secret that created the environment in which she was tortuously experimented on. She found him sitting atop the garden-like landscape known as the Oasis on the Terrace. In front of him was Erynn Clover, and she instantly knew that it was time she paid Erynn a visit. They had not seen each other, face to face, since Fiona saved her on the train, when she had promised to rid the world of people like Crowley. Along with all of her remaining sisters and pets and those gained from the archive blood, Fiona left the Anointed Temple, heading straight for the garden.

  Chapter 32. Ryn and the Garden

  Erynn stood atop the lush but frozen garden known as the Oasis on the Terrace, where Fiona was supposed to have recently been seen. It was covered in trees, bushes, plants, and if it were spring or summer, Erynn expected it could have been a beautiful location to visit. The snow had temporarily stopped falling, but it still occasionally was shaken off the branches of the trees when they swayed in the wind. Aside from a series of cobbled paths that crisscrossed the roof of the building, the Oasis was completely covered in plants, a stark contrast to the rest of the city.

  Councilor Crowley and a small team of corpsmen had traveled to the Terrace Building in search of Fiona, and their small skyship sat at the edge of the building, crushing a series of bushes under its weight. Despite reports that Fiona was in the garden, however, there was no indication that she was actually there, leading Crowley to become somewhat disagreeable. Erynn would have found this amusing if not for the fact that Fiona’s absence was the only thing keeping her from seeing Pearl again. The sooner she could deal with Fiona and get out of there, the better.

  “What do you mean no one on your team gave me that message?” Crowley demanded.

  “Exactly that, sir,” a corpsman replied. “No one reported seeing the carrier here. In fact, the most recent reports show her attacking the Anointed Temple.”

  “Fine,” Crowley said. “We’ll deal with the conflicting reports later. For now, everyone back on the skyship.”

  “No,” Erynn simply stated, looking past him and using her connection to Fiona.

  “What do you mean no?” Crowley asked arrogantly. “I give the orders. Do you understand that? If you want to make it out of this, you’ll accept that. Now get on board the ship.”

  “No,” Erynn repeated. “This is the place.”

  Crowley, still furious, began to ask, “And what exactly does that--”

  A wave of horror raced across the councilor’s face, and Erynn knew what had happened.

  “Hello, Fiona,” Erynn said, looking into Crowley’s eyes and palming the syringe out of her view.

  “Rynny-Poo!” Crowley exclaimed with Fiona’s voice. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “We’re connected,” Erynn explained. “More and more it seems.”

  “I have felt you peeking around in here a bit,” Crowley said, pointing to his head.

  “Dr. Norton opened the door,” Erynn said. “And after all, a door can be stepped through in either direction.”

  “I think I’ve got just about all the doors in Cultwick,” Crowley replied. “There’s nothing I don’t see!”

  At this mention, Erynn more carefully attempted to conceal the syringe at her back. In addition, she tried to focus her mind on anything other than the needle and her ultimate intentions for it.

  “That’s vaguely horrifying,” Erynn said.

  “Don’t worry, R
ynny,” Fiona said through Crowley. “I’ll use my powers only for good! I promise!”

  “How did you get access to all those people anyway?” Erynn asked. “Especially Crowley here - I know you haven’t been in contact with him.”

  “The church archives!” Crowley exclaimed. “They all stored a sample of their blood there for me. It was awfully convenient! A one-stop shop!”

  “That’s certainly interesting,” Erynn commented. “You mean you don’t need to have any physical contact to infect them?”

  “Nope!” Crowley replied with Fiona’s chipper affectation.

  “Where’d you get the idea?” she asked curiously. “It seems quite clever.”

  A malicious smile crept across the infected councilor’s face, and Fiona had him reply, “A friend told me.”

  “A friend?” Erynn asked. “What use do you have for friends when you can control anyone you meet?”

  “I guess he was just special,” he replied. “Crowley here made him just like eggs and Blakey-Norton made me and you.”

  “Someone at the center?” Erynn inquired.

  Nodding, Crowley replied, “Someone very close indeed.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  Forcing him to hold a single finger to his lips, Fiona made him say, “It’s a secret.”

  “Mmm,” she muttered, giving up the topic. “If you drank all of the archive blood, how much of the city do you have control over now?”