Cultwick: The Sweeper Bot Plague (16 page)

Chapter 16. Fiona the Stowaway

She perched herself on the roof of a tall building, watching as a group of men exited a factory. Fiona noted one man in particular had an extensive crutch encasing the length of his leg. She wondered what his life story was. Perhaps she would convert and assimilate him if she stumbled upon him again.

The men stopped just outside the doors, as one of them locked the doors behind the group. She knew the
jewel that she searched for was stored somewhere inside the structure. Newton had seen it in one of her visions, and she had been unable to hide it from her.

The men said their goodbyes and parted ways. The
individual with the key walked alone along a stream that flowed through the town. He was an aging man - his hair color beginning to fade from black to gray, and his skin was slowly wrinkling with the onset of time. The man was dressed in cheap and grease-stained clothes and walked with a slight limp. Though it was nothing like the man with the metal leg, she thought. The man made his way into a section of town dabbled with poorly constructed homes, with Fiona following behind, leaping from one building top to the next.

Her
enhanced agility allowed her to sneak quietly atop the rooftops of the taller structures littered throughout the settlement. A soft clang or thud sounded, as she landed atop each building, but none was so cacophonous as to alert her quarry. She smiled at the sheer joy of playing this game of shadows with the unknowing factory worker.

The edge of the city neared, and he had not yet stopped amongst any of the houses. Fiona was forced to abandon the building
roofs, as there were none left for her to conceal herself from him. The man moved out further from the town, until he had completely left the lights of the city. Only the starry night was left to illuminate his way home.

Soon, he arrived at an unlit house beyond the outskirts of the settlement. Skulking along
after him Fiona snuck up until she was right behind him. As he unlocked and opened the door to the home, she wrapped one arm around his neck and the other around his midsection.

Fiona whispered
seductively in his ear, “You’re my plaything now.”

She pushed him inside the dark home, knocking him to the hard, wooden floor
, and she slowly walked inside. Fiona stared forward at him while playfully closing the door with her foot, as he squirmed backward away from her.

“Who...
who are... you?” he asked, as he bumped into a wall. “What... what do you want?”

“We’ll be playing a game of Fiona says...
and I’m the Fiona!” she exclaimed.

“Wha
… what?” he asked, stammering.

“Fiona says to stand up,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Scowling, Fiona repeated loudly, “Fiona says, stand up!”

“Oo... okay,” he said while beginning to stand. His back brushed against the wooden wall, as he raised himself from the floor.

“Good,” she said smiling, “Fiona says, hand her
your keys.”

His hand shaking, the terrified man reached into his pocket and pulled out a
key ring with a dozen or so keys attached. Fiona snatched up the keys happily and dropped them into a pocket in her lab coat.

A slight twinge of pain entered her head, as she said, “Fiona says, get that blade.” She pointed to a kitchen knife that was sitting out on the counter
top.

Cautiously, the man
complied with her order and grabbed the knife. She fell to the ground holding her head in pain, as Newton painfully took control of their shared body.

“Kill me,” she whimpered, looking up at the man with Newton’s bright, blue eyes
.

Biting his lip and briefly considering the situation, the man ultimately took the blade and slashed toward the intruder’s neck. Before the blade could meet skin, however, Fiona
reacquired control of her body and grabbed the man’s forearm.

She cocked her head to the side and said, “Nuh-uh-uh. I didn’t say, Fiona says! You lose!”

Fiona twisted the man’s wrist, violently breaking the bones in his arm and causing him to drop the knife. She let go of him, as he screamed and fell to the floor of his home.

“What should we play next, mister?” she asked.

The man whimpered in a ball on the floor, ignoring her question.

“I know!” she exclaimed. “Hide and seek! You hide, and I’ll find you!”

The man failed to respond, so she knelt down close to his face, and continued, “You’ve got thirty seconds to hide. I think you should use them.”

He
began to stand despite the pain surging through his arm. Fiona turned her back to him and put her head against the door leading out of the house. She began counting aloud, while he whimpered and slogged away from her.

Once her
counting had reached thirty, Fiona turned to find the room void of his presence and his incessant whimpering. She smiled and began skipping through the room in search of him.

The first room she entered was the kitchen with a small adjoining dining room. Fiona looked patiently around the room, searching through cabinets, looking under the table, and opening the pantry door.

“Hmm, not in the kitchen,” she stated aloud.

Next up
on her search was the bathroom. She entered the dark room to find an empty tub, a small sink, and a closed window. There was no sign of her quarry in that room either.

“Not in the bathroom,” she announced. “Maybe the bedroom?”

She casually wandered forward into a bedroom. Fiona dropped to the ground looking under the bed, but found nothing. She opened a series of drawers, much too small for anyone to hide inside. All the windows were properly closed, so she decided he had not left out of one. Then she spotted a closed door, likely leading into a closet.

Excited by the prospect of finding him, Fiona eagerly approached the door and swung it open. Inside the man cowered in the corner with a large shotgun aimed up at her.

“There you are!” she exclaimed.

She held her left hand out to reach him, incidentally covering the barrel of the gun, just as he fired. Blood, pulp, and bone fragments were scattered about the room in an onslaught of the gore that
was formerly her hand.

“That would probably hurt if I still had
any sensation,” she noted calmly.

The man in the closet was too horrified by her lack of pain to get up or reload the gun. Fiona smiled at him and, with her other hand, pulled him from his hiding location.

“I win again!” she declared.

She
lunged toward him and energetically bit into his neck. He cried out in pain, but the pressure on his windpipe silenced him. Instead, a series of gurgling noises were all that came out of him. She noted that his flavor had a distinct metallic hint to his blood.

Fiona dropped the man to the ground and stated, “You taste great!”

Standing there in the dark of the house with his blood dripping from her mouth, and her own dripping out from her arm, Fiona inherited the man’s memories and knowledge. He stood, as she immersed herself in his mind.

Benjamin
Nettles. He was a mechanic that worked in the factory she had followed him from. He was employed by a man named Samuel Stilts repairing a skyship named the Dreadnought Prime. Another man from Cultwick City had taken Benjamin’s wife and child in an attempt to encourage them to take the job and get it finished quickly.

Fiona looked down at the bloody stump at
the end of her arm and decided that something should probably be done about it. She reached into the ever-increasing depths of her mind to find the knowledge on how to build a mechanical arm. Using both Benjamin and Erynn’s experience with chromesmithing, she came up with a design for the device.

There
weren’t enough parts in his home, but the factory where Benjamin worked would have more than enough to create such a contraption. With her new pet following along behind her, Fiona left the home and traveled back to the factory, where she had originally found him.

Fiona gave back the keys to
Benjamin, and he unlocked and opened the door for her, prompting Fiona to say, “Why thank you, Benjamin! Such manners!”

He merely made a series of grunting noises before closing the door back behind them. Fiona and
Benjamin strolled through the factory halls until they stopped off at a small room with an assortment of mechanical parts.

“Find me the parts I’ll need, Benjamin,” she ordered happily.

Fiona found a workbench among the chaotic debris of the room and cleared an area to labor on the device. Apathetically Benjamin brought her parts of metal that she began to cobble together into a larger device. She continued her work for several hours, while the device slowly began to take form as a mechanical hand. Fiona drew on the expertise of Erynn especially as her experience constructing her own pet, Tern, was immeasurably useful.

Once the device was ready, Fiona violently jammed her creation into
her stump of an arm. She proceeded to fuse together the mechanical parts with her muscles, tendons, and bone until she and the device were one. Strands of tattered red cloth from the lab coat hung over the mechanical arm, partially concealing it from view.

Having accomplished her
short-term goal of rebuilding a hand, Fiona dismissed her pet. He staggered away from her, heading off toward some unnamed location. She, meanwhile, wandered the factory hallways looking for a large hangar.

She roamed the halls whistling a repeated tune that app
arently drew more attention than she would have expected. A man turned a corner to find Fiona skipping down the hallway. He was a young man that carried with him a broom and dustpan. His clothes looked quite poor and his appearance was exceedingly unkempt.

“What are you--” he interrupted himself after paying more attention to her disfigurement and degree of bloodiness. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, this?” she asked holding up her mechanical arm. Bits of the torn cloth from the lab coat fell downward, as she lifted the hand, revealing where the flesh monstrously met metal. “I guess I played too rough with my previous playmate... Would you like to play with me?”

“Maybe you should go to see the doctor,” the man suggested beginning to slowly back away from her
.

“It’s playtime or nothing!’ she explained loudly.

Confused and somewhat scared, the man said, “I’ll just go get a doctor then. How about that?” Before waiting for her response, however, the young man began to flee away from her.

“Oooh,” she exclaimed. “A game of tag! That’ll be fun!”

She covered her face with her hands and began counting backward from ten. As she approached the lower numbers, she peeked between her fingers playfully. Once she reached one, Fiona raced off after her playmate.

Her superior speed allowed her to catch
back up to him particularly easily. Rather than play with him any further, she leaped onto his back and plunged his head violently into the factory floor. While he was unconscious, Fiona devoured his flesh, ripping and tearing at his back. The young man had a much sweeter flavor than anyone she had already tasted. When he returned from death as her pet, she stood up, allowing him to stand as well.

She knew him to be Malcolm Connor. He
wasn’t a mechanic as Benjamin was. Instead, Malcolm had been hired to clean up the factory during the nights, while the workers were away. She noted that he had spent this evening with a small pebble lodged inside his boot but had neglected to remove it. She gleaned very little from him that she found interesting and simply dismissed him.

Having finished her brief game, Fiona continued on her task of finding the hangar in the factory. After winding down several more hallways,
she accomplished her goal. Inside she located a large skyship - the Dreadnought Prime that Benjamin and many of the other factory workers had been repairing under duress. She climbed the stairs beside the vessel, making her way onto its deck.

“The
jewel in the west,” she declared, stepping on board the ship. “I’ve finally found you. My ruby of the skies…”

Fiona descended down through the
decks of the skyship, until she found a hallway with a series of closed doors. Fiona slowly walked down the hallway, stopping to place her hand, palm first, to the doors. As she did, she closed her eyes and paused momentarily. She continued this pattern, until she reached a door marked 3E.

When she held her hand to this door, she felt her body warm to its touch. A smile crept across her face, as Fiona opened the door to reveal a bed, small dresser, and nightstand. She approached the nightstand and pulled Erynn’s necklace off from around her neck. She placed it carefully on the stand next to
the bed and left the room, closing the door behind her.

She proceeded down another flight of stairs, until she found a dark and isolated room at the end of a hall.
The inside was mostly unoccupied except for a clutter of crates, which Fiona believed to be perfect for her purposes. She hunkered down behind the boxes and prepared herself to fall asleep.