Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

by J. Stone

  Looking up the stairs and into the office, Pearl saw Owen standing there with a rifle. A smile spread across his face, as he took in the sight. Taking the steps down very slowly, Owen began, “You know, you have been nothing but trouble.”

  Pearl struggled to get out from under Deckland, but her strength was nearly tapped. She squirmed out somewhat, but not enough by the time Owen arrived at the bottom steps.

  He placed his foot on Deckland’s back, further preventing her from freeing herself. “You had to make things so difficult,” he continued. “I was never anything but nice to you, but you wouldn’t even give me the slightest thanks. I could’ve given you anything you wanted.”

  “What I wanted,” she groaned from beneath the corpse, “was to be left alone.”

  “Perhaps, neither of us were fated to get what it is we want,” Owen replied. “Then again, you’re in no position to deny me now.” He stepped off Deckland’s body and pointed the rifle at her face. “Get up.”

  With great effort, she managed to slide out from under Deckland’s corpse and stand.

  “Up the stairs,” he ordered with a nod.

  Gritting her teeth and looking at him from the corner of her eyes, she eventually complied. He followed her up to the office, with the gun pointed at her back the whole time.

  “Now what?” she demanded.

  “We never properly consummated our marriage,” he explained. “I think we’re overdue for a visit to the master bedroom.”

  “I’m not yer damn wife,” she replied. “Ya disgust me.”

  “No matter,” he replied with a sneer. “Now walk.”

  With no plan or method of protecting herself, Pearl felt compelled to do as he instructed. A deepening pit in her stomach, she walked the halls, eventually entering the master bedroom. The room was gaudily decorated, covered with garish gold designs etched into red walls. The floors were a hard wood paneling and the wooden furniture in the room seemed to have been built to match. She turned back to face Owen, once she arrived at the foot of the bed that was covered with a crimson comforter, and she awaited his next instruction.

  Owen walked to a phonograph situated at the edge of the room, where he picked up the needle and lowered it on the record already in place. Music began to play through the attached brass bell, filling the room with a melancholy melody.

  Raising the gun at her again, Owen ordered, “Take off your clothes.”

  “I’d rather ya shot me,” Pearl replied.

  “Maybe later,” Owen said. “For now, though, I think I’ll just take what’s rightfully mine.”

  “I’m not yers,” she spat through her teeth.

  He cocked the hammer of the rifle and said nothing. Reluctantly, she slowly began taking off her brown, hooded jacket. Behind Owen, however, Pearl caught sight of a horrible creature. A dead and decaying body crept toward his back with its arms outstretched. Skin hung loosely from its crooked frame and dirt crumbled to the floor, as it staggered forward.

  Pearl attempted to distract Owen from seeing the creature by untying her dark green corset and letting it fall to her feet. Her fingers slid underneath the bottom hem of her shirt, but she stopped as the creature approached Owen’s back.

  “I didn’t say to stop,” he said. “We’re just about to get to the good part.”

  “Fer once,” she replied with a grin, “we agree.”

  The infected creature bit into the soft flesh at Owen’s neck. Reactively, he pulled the trigger of the rifle, firing off a blast toward Pearl’s feet and causing her to jump to the side. The creature knocked Owen to the ground, as it began devouring him. He screamed and reached for the rifle, but it was just out of his grasp.

  Pearl watched intently as Owen’s eyes met hers and then slowly faded. Realizing the creature could still pose her a threat, she moved forward to retrieve the rifle. Picking it up, she aimed it at the dead creature and blasted it in the face. When it collapsed on the ground, she dropped the rifle to the floor. Looking down to see she still had the wedding band on her finger, Pearl tugged it off and threw it down at Owen’s corpse. She then picked up her corset, loosely tying it back in place and, turning around, she picked up her jacket as well and slung her arms through its sleeves.

  A growl echoed from behind her, and when she turned, she caught sight of Owen standing back up. The same infected look that the dead creature had worn was now spread across his face as well. The rifle she dropped was at his feet, and as Owen walked toward her, he stepped on it, preventing her from getting to the weapon.

  Before she needed to find a way to defend herself, however, a young woman with ruby red hair entered the room, carrying a shotgun, and pointed it at the creature. Pearl jumped to the side, allowing the woman to fire the shot. With the blast, Owen’s head exploded all over the walls of the bedroom.

  Pearl sat, leaning against the wall, trying to understand why the woman looked so familiar to her. The redhead looked at Pearl with a bit of confusion but also a great deal of fondness.

  “I remember yer face,” Pearl told her.

  “You damn well better,” the woman replied.

  “Ryn?” Pearl asked tentatively.

  Smiling, Erynn said, “Hey, you.” She kneeled down with Pearl and ran her hand through her hair. “What’d they do to you, Pearl?”

  “That one,” she said nodding her head at Owen, “tried to trick me into thinkin’ I was his wife. They cut open my head.”

  “I certainly don’t need to worry about feeling bad for shooting him then,” she replied. “You remember the truth now?”

  “Mostly,” Pearl answered. “Thanks to this.” She held her arm up, pointing out the bracelet hanging around her wrist. “Ya came fer me...”

  “Of course I came for you, Pearl,” Erynn said with a smile. “Also, you better go ahead and call me kitten, before I start to worry about you.”

  Pearl reached out, pulling her in close and hugging her tightly. A tear streaked down her cheek, and she whispered into Erynn’s ear, “It’s good to see ya, kitten.”

  After a few moments, the pair stood, and Erynn pointed out, “I’m afraid any more of a reunion will have to wait. The city’s gone crazy out there, and we need to get back to the Halcyon, so we can all get out of here.”

  Pearl nodded and said, “I don’t wanna spend a minute more than I hafta here. Where’d yer lot park that thing?” Pearl asked.

  “Olivia managed to set it down in this guy’s backyard,” Erynn replied.

  Together, they left out the back door to a night seemingly absent of stars or a moon. Fires littered the landscape of the city and screams had replaced the comforting silence of the dark. In the distance, Pearl could see where the skyship had landed, and they both hurried toward it at its sight.

  When they arrived, Olivia swung the door open for them and allowed them inside. Without saying anything, she went back to the cockpit and started up the engines. Erynn ushered Pearl inside, and then stepped in as well, shutting the door behind her.

  Erynn looked back at Pearl and said, “Germ wasn’t feeling well. I need to go check on him.”

  Erynn and Pearl both went backward toward the passenger room, where they found Rowland seated on the floor, but there was no sign of Germ, but his clothes and belongings were strewn out on one of the cushions. Tears rushed down the professor’s face, as he looked up at the pair.

  “Max?” Ryn asked. “Where’s Germ?”

  “It was the only way to save him,” Rowland blubbered, looking down at a silver thermos in his hands. “He was dying.”

  “You swore you’d never use it again,” she replied. “You don’t even know how it works, Max.”

  “I don’t understand,” Pearl said. “What happened? Where’s Germ?”

  Sighing despondently, Erynn explained, “Max trapped Germ in a pocket universe.”

  Chapter 36. Fiona and the Isolation

  Fiona lunged off the roof of the building, tears beginning to stream down her face, as she fell. With a cacophonous
thud, she landed on a nearby roof, shattering the ceiling, and falling through to the top floor of an office building. Immediately, she spotted a young woman who had been hiding from all the carnage and chaos outside.

  The woman gasped when she saw that Fiona had seen her, and she began to flee. Fiona raced after her, quickly making her way to the woman, and she pinned her to the wall with her only remaining hand wrapped around the woman’s neck.

  “I’ll just have to make more,” Fiona told herself.

  Fiona raised the woman up from the floor, so that she was held up only by Fiona’s hand. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, but she said nothing as she wept. With a sudden jerk, Fiona twisted the woman’s neck, breaking it and killing her instantly. Allowing her body to fall to the floor, Fiona kneeled down and began ravenously eating her flesh. Minutes passed and she gained nothing from her meal. No memories. No thoughts. Fiona heard nothing. She backed up, collapsing in a heap, while the blood dripped from her mouth onto the thin carpet flooring.

  “It’s not fair!” she shouted, spitting out chunks of un-chewed flesh, and slammed her fist into the floor. “I don’t want to be alone!”

  She curled into a ball and wept, as she had not done since her early days of incarceration at Bedlam Asylum. After living there for a couple weeks, Fiona met a young boy named, Duncan Acre. She fondly recalled his shaggy brown hair and freckled face. The two spent a great deal of time together, to the bereft of the psychiatric staff, but this admonishment only brought the pair closer together.

  Fiona felt for the first time in her life to actually care for another person, and she believed that she was in love with Duncan. One night, the pair successfully snuck off to spend the evening together. In the coming weeks, it became apparent that Fiona was with child. Though both Fiona and Duncan saw this as a positive occurrence, Dr. Magpie didn’t share that opinion. She refused to allow Fiona to keep the child.

  Against Fiona’s will, Dr. Magpie scheduled an operation to have the child aborted. The potential parents were devastated by their loss, and while he became despondent, she became violently aggressive. It wasn’t long before Duncan managed to find a sharp enough implement to shred the skin and veins of his wrists, taking his life. Fiona boiled over with an uncontrollable rage, and she was ultimately shipped off to the Center for Empirical Research after Magpie decided she could do nothing to help her.

  Fiona recovered from the memory, clutching at her belly like it was a severed phantom limb. She suddenly had an overwhelming urge to find Duncan’s grave and say the goodbye she was never allowed to utter. Fiona jumped back out through the hole in the roof and began her journey toward Bedlam Asylum.

  Stopping on a government constructed housing building; Fiona paused to take in the sight of the Asylum from a distance. Inside, she could see candlelights flickering and people still seeking help from the hospital staff, likely from her attacks. The chaos of the city was oddly absent in this section of town, but Fiona didn’t linger on that fact.

  Fiona jumped from the roof, landing on the soft snow and crunching it under foot. Slowly and with a certain sense of trepidation, Fiona entered the graveyard behind the asylum, walking past rows of stone grave markers. The majority of tombstones were plain and inscribed only with the name and dates of the person they marked. There were rows upon rows of nearly anonymous graves littering a dark and depressing mound of earth. Eventually, Fiona found the grave belonging to Duncan, and she fell to her knees, at its sight.

  She began to wonder what her life could have turned into if Magpie had not stolen the only two people she loved. The thoughts were short-lived, however, when she felt the prick of a dart land in her neck. Fiona grabbed at it, pulling it out, but it was too late. The injection had already entered her bloodstream, and she collapsed on the snowy grave.

  While she was unconscious, her duality was expressed quite literally in her mind. Fiona was represented by herself as the young girl she had been when she allowed her brother to be run over by the train. She wore a tiny child’s straitjacket that was covered in blood spatter, and she looked nearly as wild and feral as the pets she had infected. Fiona flailed around in her straitjacket, struggling to free herself from its restraint.

  Newton, meanwhile, was given the body of the young woman that had fallen in love with Duncan and who had lost her unborn baby in the psychiatric hospital. Her face was clean, her hair was neat and straight, falling down to her shoulders, and she wore a pretty yellow sundress. Her hand was whole and flesh, and there was no sign of blood anywhere on her.

  Their environment was a hodgepodge of the places their lives had taken them. Bedlam, the center, the railroad, her childhood home, the high school dance, and the Oasis on the Terrace where she lost her pets and sisters. An empty white space filled the voids between the set pieces of her life.

  Fiona, in an irascible state, looked around at their surroundings and demanded, “What’s going on?”

  “I brought you here,” Newton explained calmly, folding her hands behind her back. “I thought it was time the two of us talked face to face.”

  “I don’t like it,” the little girl cried out. “I want to go back out there, Newton!” She stomped her bare foot along with the demand, like the child she was.

  “Not until you understand,” she replied. “You need to accept that today is the last day of our life.”

  “No!” Fiona screamed. “I have more to do! You don’t know everything!”

  “In this case, I do,” Newton said. “I’ve been putting these particular dominoes in order ever since you escaped from your cell.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fiona demanded.

  “If I’d allowed you to run amok, you really would have destroyed this world,” Newton replied. “I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t have lived with myself. I’m certainly not strong enough to stop you out there, so instead I led you down a trail that would end here.

  “I convinced you to go back to Bedlam, knowing you would infect the patients there, turning them into what you called ‘sisters.’ I needed one of them for my plan to work, so I took Francesca Frazer as my own. Her gift was invisibility, and it allowed me to be anywhere in the city that I needed her to be, and she was able to conceal herself from you.”

  “If you only needed Francesca, why did you wait until after I infected Dr. Magpie to reveal your prophecy?” Fiona asked.

  “She wasn’t a part of my plan,” Newton admitted. “I simply wanted to see her suffer for what she did to Duncan and our baby.”

  “See!” Fiona yelled. “We’re not so different, you and I!”

  “Perhaps,” Newton replied. “After I acquired Francesca, I had to make sure Ryn both survived and came to Cultwick.”

  “Rynny?” Fiona asked.

  “That’s right,” Newton answered. “Her connection to us would be necessary to stop you. While you attacked Pendulum Falls, absorbing the corpsmen, I sent Francesca to protect Ryn. While there, I also gave her the knowledge on how to tap into our mind’s network, showing her that she would need to go to the city to find Pearl.

  “After I moved Ryn into place, I needed to ensure that the same set of scientists that created us could reverse it. When you attacked the empress, you left the bodies of your pets for them to experiment on. This would lead them to creating the serum that you were injected with.”

  “It stole all my pets!” Fiona shouted, still trying to worm her way out of the straitjacket. “You took them from me! Festus and Hazel and Ellen and Gretchen and all the others! You took them!”

  “I did, but we’re not there yet,” Newton replied. “When Ryn arrived in the city, she needed to be protected. While you busied yourself with infecting more and more of the empire, you neglected the woman you swore to protect. They sent an assassin after her, and it was I that had to keep her safe. You didn’t even notice when I sent wave after wave of your pets to their deaths at his hands.

  “While she fought off the assassin, you returned to your birthplace, the
Center for Empirical Research. You hand delivered Gemma to the scientists, giving them the perfect test subject for their serum. As you recall, it proved quite successful, as I knew it would.”

  “You took Gemma from me!” Fiona yelled, lunging at her older self.

  Newton vanished and reappeared behind the young girl. Fiona landed and looked ferociously around for Newton. When she relocated her, Fiona again attempted to attack her other half, but again Newton shifted out of the way of the attack.

  “I told you, Fiona,” Newton said calmly. “I’m stronger here.”

  “You can’t stay in here forever!” Fiona shouted.

  “You’re right,” Newton agreed. “So let’s continue. Though I did save Ryn from the assassin, I ultimately needed her to return to the empire, so at a barricade I had Francesca spill some of her own blood in the genesampler, alerting the guards to an infection. Naturally, they arrested Ryn, where she would meet with the councilor, Desmond Crowley. The two of them came to an agreement to end us - the enemy of their enemy.”

  “But Ryn wasn’t my enemy!” Fiona shouted.

  “Of course she was,” Newton said. “The two of you were always opposed. She strove for harmony, where you saw only destruction, chaos, and death. It was a matter of time before you turned on her, so she chose to strike first.

  “With Ryn captured, I was free to focus on you. While you fought off the augmented corpsman, Silas Skinner, I sent Francesca to the Cultwick Chronicle. She told them our story, and they printed it all, including what happened with Duncan. I made sure an advance copy went to Viola Arkmast, the woman who will soon end this.”

  “The empress’ daughter?” the child Fiona asked. “What does she have to do with anything?”

  “Never undervalue the thirst for power,” Newton explained. “She wants us out of the way more than anyone. You gave her what she wanted when you infected her mother, and I gave her what she needed with the story. A little push was all she needed to set up an ambush at the graveyard. She’s currently having us transported back to the Sovereign Tower, where she will execute us. For good.”