In the Garden of Rusting Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  IN THE GARDEN OF RUSTING GODS © 2019 by Patrick Freivald

  Cover artwork & design by Dean Samed; interior artwork by Greg Chapman; interior design by Michael Bailey; individual works © 2019 by Patrick Freivald, unless stated below

  “Forward Base Fourteen” appeared in Never Fear by 13Thirty Books © 2015; “The Star” appeared in Never Fear – The Tarot: Do You Really Want to Know? by 13Thirty Books © 2016; “Trophy Hunt” appeared in Demonic Visions 6 © 2015; “A Taste for Life” appeared at FlashFictionOnline.com © 2009; “Twelve Kilos” appeared in Qualia Nous by Written Backwards © 2014; “Foam Ride” appeared in Yesterday You Said Tomorrow by Burnt Offerings Books © 2014; “Shorted” appeared in Never Fear – The Apocalypse: The End Is Near by 13Thirty Books © 2017; “Snapshot” appeared in Blood and Roses by Scarlet River Press © 2013; “Trigger Warning” appeared in Demonic Visions 4 © (2015); “Splinter” appeared in SQ Magazine © 2016; “Earl Pruitt’s Smoker” appeared in Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders by Crystal Lake Publishing © 2017; “Taps” appeared in Never Fear by 13Thirty Books © 2015

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording, broadcast or live performance, or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without permission, except for the inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. This collection is a work of fiction. All characters, products, corporations, institutions, and/or entities of any kind in this book are either products of the author’s twisted imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without intent to describe actual characteristics.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FROM ROBOTS TO BEES TO BEAUTY

  IN THE GARDEN OF RUSTING GODS

  FORWARD BASE FOURTEEN

  THE STAR

  WELL WORN

  TROPHY HUNT

  THE EXTERMINATION BUSINESS

  A TASTE FOR LIFE

  TWELVE KILOS

  FOAM RIDE

  SHORTED

  SNAPSHOT

  TRIGGER WARNING

  SPLINTER

  EARL PRUITT’S SMOKER

  A CREATIVE URGE

  TAPS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER TITLES BY PATRICK FREIVALD

  FROM ROBOTS TO BEES TO BEAUTY

  AN INTRODUCTION BY WESTON OCHSE

  When I was asked by Patrick to write the introduction for him for his collection In the Garden of Rusting Gods, I wasn’t sure how to respond. So, I thought of my first collection which had an intro from Joe Lansdale and went back and read it. I noted that half of the introduction was about the worry he had that he wouldn’t like my work (he did). Another part of it was that he thought that maybe he’d written enough introductions to pay back those who had helped him as he became the writer he is today.

  In Joe’s own words: This is not because I think I am above it, but due to the fact that I have now been writing and selling for near on forty years, and have been a full time writer for soon to be thirty years, and I’m feeling a little short on time in the extra time department. I have tried to read new writers and have tried to encourage them, and I don’t think that will cease until I am in the grave, or burned to ashes and distributed under a rose bush for dogs and insects to crap on.

  I have two responses to that.

  Knowing Patrick’s need to get things absolutely right—I’m sure that’s the science teacher in him—I was less worried about Patrick’s writing than Joe was about mine. In fact, I was curious. I’d read some of Patrick’s work, but not a lot. But what I’d read until this point had been solid—even good.

  Also, although I’ve had more than thirty books professionally published, I have yet to believe I’m done paying back. I’m sure no Joe Lansdale and will never be. I’m satisfied to be Weston Ochse, with all that entails. So, every year, I occasionally write an introduction for an author who I absolutely believe in and who I know will blow your mind. Because after all, now my words are tied inexorably to his, as is my reputation.

  I’ve always found Patrick’s personal life interesting, both in my social networking interactions and in person. Although he’s not exactly Leon Battista Alberti, he seems to be on that glide path. Who is that, you ask? Alberti was a polymath or Renaissance Man. He was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer. It was also legend that he could jump over a man standing still. True, men were shorter in those days, but still that’s #impressive.

  Patrick is also impressive. Although he claims that he does everything because he is an ‘ADD-riddled workaholic,’ his output and contributions to the world, much of it unseen, could be described as Albertiesque. Patrick is an author, a beekeeper, a robotics coach, a teacher of physics, robotics, and American Sign Language, and also makes blistering hot saucy things with enough Scovilles to melt passing comets. He is not a one-trick pony, nor is he capable of being so. Patrick is a constantly moving target of intensity and output.

  When asked about his writing inspirations, he said they range from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Niven / Pournelle / Barnes to NK Jemisin to Jonathan Mayberry to Dan Abnett and RA Salvatore and Kate Elliott. I find this an interesting literary swathe, but it explains how different the stories are in this collection. In fact, his stories are as diverse as they are interesting.

  Perhaps the brightest of them all is the opening story, In the Garden of Rusting Gods. Not only is it critically well-written with his constantly musculating verbs, but what an incredibly inspired world he created. I can’t help but believe that his descriptions were elevated by his personal knowledge of science. As sometimes happens, an author will create something so deep and multilayered that it could easily surpass being a story and become a full-fledged novel. I seriously hope that in the coming years I can return to the Garden of Rusting Gods and adventure for a much longer period of time. What he’s done to our world is most terrible in invention, yet thought-provoking in how terrible it is.

  Patrick also created an honest-to-God American detective story right out of Micky Spillane or Dashiell Hammett. Then there’s a science fiction story that turns out to be a zombie story. Several intriguing ghost stories. And of course, there’s a story about a beekeeper, but even that one has a precious twist.

  Some of Patrick’s writing stuck with me. In “A Creative Urge,” he offers us sentences like this:

  And yet, a knife of familiarity stabbed behind her eye at the twisted lines and unnerving curves that had once been her Tessie’s limbs. A body couldn’t lie like that, not in a Euclidean world, not in a universe where colors were merely spectral frequencies interpreted by primates who’d outgrown the jungle, where shapes defined a three-dimensional space of real things.

  And this: Between-creatures carried their shadows with them as they slinked from building to building, watched her approach with chittering anticipation.

  And even this:

  And the moon, her moon, never moved, never once yielded its place in the sky. Yellow paint dripped from it to spatter across the gantries and bridges and towers of the silent city, Tess’s broken light swallowed by the darkness that could not be satiated even as it dripped across Cassie’s bridges and staircases, even as it dribbled into the dark, hungry seas that surrounded the impossible city. But still the moon dripped, and never did its paint-light wane.

  The ability of Patrick to go from the graphic gore of a warzone to the beauty of this writing shows a writer flexing his muscles, ones that have been worked, and worked, until he is a li
terary athlete, perhaps like Leon Battista Alberti, ready to jump over a standing man, or at the very least entertain and inspire his readers.

  I’m not going to spoil what is going to be a grand adventure.

  In the end, these stories are for you, not for me. I’ve just been asked to introduce them and the author Patrick Freivald.

  So, go forth, turn the page, or swipe to the left, however you are reading this.

  I shall fade into the background, a mere Shakespearian moment, me in the spotlight as I introduce who you have come to see.

  Fade to black.

  Light is now on him.

  Ready. Set. Go.

  IN THE GARDEN OF RUSTING GODS

  Jaqueline eased her finger off the trigger as the god lumbered past the burned-out bus. Its hydraulic carapace whined with every shuddering step. The cable connecting it to the Worldstream snaked up to disappear into muddied air choked with the dying breaths of countless internal combustion engines. Massive metal claws lifted the rusted-out body of an ancient passenger car, and squeezed. It crumbled to pieces under its own weight to reveal nothing but shattered asphalt beneath. The behemoth lowed, long and sad, hungry.

  Raising her eyes from the rifle scope, Jacq took in the devastated city, blackened shards of buildings clawing every horizon. Grit peppered her goggles, and memories of ash tickled her lungs through the ancient rebreather.

  “It’s going to hear the pumps.” Ben’s murmur, muffled by his gas , barely carried over the driving wind.

  “Then it’ll hear us.” She patted the rifle. “Get ready.”

  “On my mark.”

  Kristen triggered the holofield, the last functioning technology that could camouflage their electromagnetic signatures from a god. When it worked. She vanished into a shimmering haze almost indistinguishable from the surrounding air.

  The god slumped, a deliberate act for powered armor, a projection of grief that sparked the smallest hope in Jacq’s heart that their years of reign might end, that someday children might garden in the sunlight above-ground, no longer hunted, free from the insatiable thirst of mechanical giants. She suppressed the glimmer with a deep breath and looked again through the scope.

  Black polycarbonate hid the god’s face, but thick nanofiber couldn’t hide the extreme leanness of the creature housed within, or the shake in its spindly hands. Those palsied hands told Jacq all she needed to know; this god had foraged too long without feeding, and its desperation would make it predictable.

  They’d buried the water pumps and set them to leak, the audio signature measured at negative ten decibels at ground level. Reclaimed water trickled out at regular intervals, quiet enough to hide from most gods at ten meters.

  But this god straddled the garden. Too close, too risky.

  Her finger slid onto the trigger, cold metal slick with machine oil.

  “On my mark,” Kris said. “Now!”

  “Run,” Jacq whispered.

  Kris ran. The flicker of indistinct light caused the god to turn in her direction, sensors scanning for life.

  “It’s too close,” Ben said. “You shouldn’t—”

  “Run, damn you.”

  “But Jacq—”

  She fired.

  Recoil turned her shoulder as the drillslug screamed from her rifle, the projectile’s sixteen-thousand hertz whine drowning out the hum as the capacitors propelled it down quadrails at thirty gees. It hit the god’s Higgs dampener with a blinding flash, microlegs flailing in a vain attempt to burrow into matter it hadn’t reached.

  The god reared in rage as the wriggling munition fell to the ground.

  Ben ran.

  The god advanced through the rubble, picking up speed with every step. It leapt a rotting pickup, arms spread to expose an array of empty microlaunchers. The ground shuddered as it landed.

  Behind her, Ben screamed.

  Don’t look back.

  A huge metal claw grazed the sniper’s nest, and pebbles skittered down the slope to clatter against her helmet.

  Ben faltered. Ten meters from the tube. Sixteen from the god.

  He wasn’t going to make it. Instead he stopped, fumbled for the death in his pocket. Too late.

  Jacq closed her eyes and tried not to listen as his scream became a shriek. A pump chugged, and wet slurping overwhelmed Ben’s agonized sobs. She didn’t need to see the tangle of nanotubes writhing into his skin, didn’t want to watch the light die from his eyes as the moisture and nutrients left his body. A sigh as the body hit the ground, light as a feather, not enough left to fertilize the garden.

  Another sigh, contentment personified, blasted through the god’s speakers.

  It chuckled, sensors strangling data from the environment. Another step, almost a stumble, straight at Jacq. Adrenaline flooded her brain, bringing each slow, steady breath that much closer to a pant. Stopping, it sniffed the air, carbon dioxide sensors looking for telltale spikes that her rebreather hid, just as the scorched ground muffled her heat signature.

  She held her breath. The slightest noise would kill her.

  Her lungs burned. She struggled not to suck in precious oxygen. She wondered if her life, Ben’s life, would buy the garden another day, buy her children another winter.

  Gasping in a breath, Jacq rolled to her feet and ran. A high trill accompanied the movement, a drillslug impacting the Higgs dampener from off to the right. Two more followed it, and the distracted god’s roar buffeted Jacq toward the escape tube.

  The dull thud of a rocket launcher sounded from the left. A wall of air rocked her, then the noise hit, a furious blast. Then silence. She dove, and the tube swallowed her.

  ~

  Jacq limped into the control room, helmet under her arm. Kate surveyed the monitors, the cables from her seven cranial jacks hanging in limp tangles. Jacq gave a curt nod in lieu of a salute.

  “Where are we?”

  Kate saluted, fist to her chest, eyes still fixed on the dozens of monitors displaying hijacked feeds and covert video cameras from the greater Rochester boneyard.

  “We lost two, but saved the garden. Call it a win.”

  Jacq’s breath caught in her throat. Ben owned his death—he should have run. Even so, guilt tore through her heart.

  “Two?”

  “Ben and Al. Good men.”

  Alfonso had fired the rocket. He’d saved her life. The god must have seen him before he made it to a tube. A gentle man, grandfatherly at home and clutch on a mission. Her children would cry for him. But Kris had survived.

  “What about the god?”

  “Seventy-three. Last records show him here nine years ago before moving west, before the Cleveland-Buffalo arcology went dark.”

  A colony of two thousand had lived in the ruins of the enormous building that covered what used to be Lake Erie. They’d ceased all radio contact and trade before Jacq had turned twenty. Everyone assumed they were dead.

  Kate tapped the screen. “Frail then. Look at him now.”

  The god stumbled from one pile of detritus to another, rummaging through the remains of buildings before dropping to its knees, head bowed, serrated metal mouth open in a groan.

  “This is before two catches. What about now?”

  “This is live.” Kate’s smile turned vicious. “Seventy-three is dying.”

  A male voice replied, deep and sure. “So are we.”

  Jacq turned and put a fist to her chest. “Peter.”

  Peter returned the gesture. Almost sixty, but still strong and determined.

  “You did good today, Jacq. The god spent so much time chasing us that he lost track of the garden. But it’s not going to be enough. The blight has spread to garden nine, and it’s only a matter of time before it hits the rest. We’re out of fungicide. And time.”

  “UV kills it, right? Can we go deeper? Deep eno
ugh to disguise the heat from the bulbs?”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “You know we can’t. Even if we had enough lights, which we don’t, we don’t have the power to light them. We need food, real food. A lot. We can’t afford another cull.”

  On the monitor, Seventy-three remained on its knees. Jacq poured her hate into the grainy color image. The last cull had taken her children’s father. Crippled by One-ninety-one and unable to work, James had said goodbye to their children, made tearful love to her one last time, and then went to the mulchers with his head held high.

  She couldn’t watch, couldn’t listen, but had helped with the gardening all the same. Respect for the dead held no weight against the value of fertilizer.

  With fewer mouths to feed, the four hundred survivors had lasted the winter. Before the blight hit they’d projected a good enough harvest to survive another without resorting to cannibalism. Now, with the gardens dying, maybe half would see the spring, if fed by the bodies of the dead.

  “That beast.” Jacq nodded at the screen. “He’s slow, and getting slower. After feeding twice, he should be flush with energy, explosive.”

  Kate exchanged a look with Peter. “Of course. And?”

  “And we’re dead unless we find food, and there’s none to find. Not here.”

  “Not anywhere.”

  Kate swept through the feeds, thousands of cameras and insect drones spanning hundreds of miles, from the poisoned shores of Lake Ontario to the hills of what used to be the Finger Lakes before arcologies had sucked them dry. Only five thousand people now lived in an area that had once housed eighty million.

  “How many gods are left? A couple hundred?”

  “Maybe,” Kate said.

  “There aren’t enough hunters down here to satisfy that kind of appetite. We’ve—I’ve—got to go up there.”

  Peter grunted. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.” Jacq tapped the monitor with a fingernail, right above Seventy-three’s enormous head. “If you can distract him, and I can take the holofield, I’ll get to the Worldstream and see what I can bring back. It has to be … something.”