In the Garden of Rusting Gods Read online

  Kate shook her head. “You can’t climb that high. Nobody can.”

  “I’ll need food, heavy clothes, and an oxygen tank. And a bonbon. I won’t have to climb.”

  “The field isn’t reliable. If they detect you—”

  “Then I’m as dead as any airship that leaves the ground, and my children starve with the rest of you come winter. Which is what’s going to happen anyway if I don’t succeed.”

  Jacq locked eyes with Peter.

  “I’m taking the holofield, and I’m going.”

  Peter nodded. “I’ll get a volunteer.”

  ~

  They planted a new garden, six rows of twenty potatoes each, enough to make it believable. They let it grow a month, and then they sabotaged the pump. The gargle of water in the oil drew Seventy-three two days later, but instead of destroying the garden it squatted in the shadows, unmoving. At dawn it moved away, hunting, and returned the following night.

  Kris smiled, and ran a hand across Jacq’s close-cropped scalp.

  “I guess it’s time.”

  “There’s another way.” Jacq put a hand on her shoulder. “There has to be.”

  Someone had to look after her children. Their children, now.

  They entwined fingers, Kris’s dry, papery skin a familiar rasp against her own. And then Kris stood, fastening her tool belt.

  “I’m sorry, love. But you need the distraction.”

  “I didn’t mean for—”

  Kris put a finger to Jacq’s lips.

  Jacq pulled away, tears flooding her eyes. “Then we call it off. Find another god.”

  Her face stung at the sudden slap.

  “Don’t.” Kris held up her hand, ready to strike again. “If it weren’t me, it would be someone else. You can’t prioritize your own—”

  Jacq wrapped her in a hug, squeezing too tight. She kissed her lips, tasted her on her tongue, and despaired. A lifetime of friendship and memories and love and hope cut to ribbons by her own foolish plan. The population had drawn straws, and Kris, her Kris, had come up short.

  “Not you. Anyone but you.”

  Kris popped three pills into her mouth, dry-swallowing the bonbon. The capsules would dissolve in minutes, releasing the broad-based toxin that would destroy her over the course of agonizing hours. She extracted herself from the embrace and walked out.

  “Go,” Peter said. “You’ll have no more than two minutes between consumption and self-destruct.”

  If this works.

  Kris couldn’t die in vain. She couldn’t.

  The world hazed to a dull smear of colors as Jacq triggered the holofield and followed Kris outside. It took two minutes to reach the pump. The god lurked in the shadow of a wrecked crane, its connection to the Worldstream hidden in haze.

  Kris crept to the pump. Her hands, always steady, shook as she removed the bolts to the pump cover, and heaved the metal plate out of the way.

  Always an actress, her Kris, to the final curtain call.

  Seventy-three charged, speakers blaring a mindless, triumphant scream. Louder than life, louder than death. Kris jerked up, her glazed eyes crackled with red as the poison ruptured capillaries and liquefied organs.

  A less desperate god would have seen the signs, would have shied away, let the poisoned meal rot on the ground.

  A less desperate god would find another meal another day.

  A thousand black tendrils snaked out of Seventy-three, finding Kris a split-second before the rest of its hulking body. Her flesh disintegrated as the god landed on top of her, every molecule of moisture leached from her in seconds.

  The triumphant, primal roar became an inhuman, wailing scream. Seventy-three stumbled to one knee, snorted, whipped around. The god screamed again, jerked sideways, flopped to its back. Its arms and legs shuddered as the toxin ravaged the creature within.

  Jacq ran, the holofield smearing the world into a blur, and leapt. The snaking cable pulsed in her hands, a braided amalgam of wires and tubes that served as the god’s link to the Worldstream, a network of gantries that enveloped the earth above the smog, held up by eldritch technologies she didn’t understand. The cable quivered as she climbed, and she hoped the thrashing of the dying god would mask her own exertions, that her proximity to the tube would spare her the fate of everything else that had dared the sky.

  The biomechanical toxin would spread through Seventy-three, cannibalizing the nanites in its blood and reproducing at an exponential rate. Fatal in hours to humans, it incapacitated a god in seconds. No one knew how long it took to kill them. On the few occasions a god fell for a bonbon, they’d self-destructed in minutes, their cable retracting through the smog.

  Twin shockwaves buffeted Jacq as she pulled herself higher. She tangled her wrists through the cables before the concussive blow knocked her upward, away from the mushroom cloud that had reduced Seventy-three to ash and molten slag. Dangling, out of breath despite the oxygen tank, Jacq held on for life as the severed cable recoiled, carrying her into the sky.

  The cable pulsed and shifted, contracting and rising ever upward. The gray-brown earth disappeared under a red-brown haze. A freezing wind tore at her clothes. She kept her breath steady, conserving oxygen, as the cable reeled her ever higher. A nervous knot in her gut blossomed over time from anxiety and grief to a great gnawing hunger, and still she rose.

  Frost formed on her breath. The haze shrouding the world lightened to white-blue. An orange sphere blazed on the horizon, untouched by the corrupt miasma that smothered the world below. Ice glazed her goggles, blurring her view of the stars, pinpricks of light she’d only ever seen on video.

  The Worldstream loomed above her, a giant, black lattice that encased the Earth ten thousand meters up, home to the gods. Enormous, spider-like constructs of plastic and metal scuttled on the underside. From each a tendril descended into the polluted atmosphere below, thousands of filaments connecting the Worldstream to the earth, just like the one on which she ascended.

  Thousands of spider-things, not hundreds, each managing a cable that she presumed attached to a god. Four touched down in the ancient remains of Western New York, where over centuries the bedraggled survivors of mankind had managed to kill perhaps a dozen.

  As she neared the top, she unclipped her harness from the cable, checked the holofield, and tensed. The spider-thing fed the cable into a dark hole, a continuous unweaving, a web in reverse. She leapt, hoisting herself through a gap in the lattice. The thing paid her no mind.

  The holofield flickered, and through the light she took in the Worldstream.

  Countless black spires clawed thousands of meters toward the stars, jagged needles under a dull white haze. Beneath them lay a junkyard, an endless expanse of defunct machinery where nothing grew, nothing moved. No insects fluttered in the thin air, no animals rummaged in the bitter cold. No Xanadu, no lush Eden from which the gods subjugated the worms beneath. Only death, despair, a garden of rust.

  Even shielded from the shrieking wind, her body shuddered at the bone-jarring intensity of the cold.

  She crept through the wreckage. The debris was human: hydraulic pistons and steel gears gummed to immobility, cracked rubber hoses bleached gray, scraps of broken chain link sagging between tarnished aluminum poles. Were it not for the honeycomb of massive holes leading to a fatal drop through the smog, it could be home.

  Despite the oxygen tank, nausea stabbed her gut, something more than hunger. Her legs grew weak, her arms heavy, even as her toes and fingers ached with the biting, bitter cold. Perhaps the gods’ realm was poison to mankind, a corruption so complete that nothing could live there.

  For hours she shuffled through the endless boneyard, weakness leaching into every nerve, until at last a soft light drew her attention.

  Taking shelter behind a giant crane, she peeked. A two-meter fence ringed an enormous, barren ya
rd littered with shattered skeletons, white and brown bones frosted over from the extreme cold.

  On the field of bones, men and women huddled near massive electric heaters, their only shelter a steel obelisk studded with small, pointed protrusions, streaked with rust. Their naked, sunburned bodies were mottled with crusted filth, their tight, frail skin exposing frail ribs. Cautious, uncertain, she waited, watching, trying to ignore her pulsing head.

  A man approached a woman, pushed her down to all fours, and rutted with her. Both wore looks of bored disinterest. None of the others paid attention. None spoke.

  A few minutes later, the same man approached the obelisk, put his mouth to a stud and suckled, grunting in rhythmic satisfaction. When he pulled back, a dribble of algal green spurted from the nipple, soaking his beard and splattering across his feet. He stepped away and sat near the blowers, staring out at nothing as they cast warm air overtop his lean body.

  Food.

  Jacq crept toward the fence. Ten feet from it, the sickly reek of body odor, shit and rot stopped her. Fumbling for the switch on her belt, she clicked it down. The holofield fizzled, and Jacq put her finger to her lips.

  A woman saw her first, eyes wide.

  Jacq nodded and spoke in a calm, controlled tone. “Hello.”

  The woman snarled, baring brown teeth. A man bellowed. The rest joined him, hooting in agitated, wordless excitement.

  Jacq raised a hand. “Do you speak English? Parlez-vous français? ”

  A man marched forward, grabbed his crotch and shouted, tugging. Another shoved him out of the way and did the same. A brawl broke out. The first man laid into the second with his fists and feet, an artless, brutal beating that stopped when the second man fell into the fence.

  A snap. Blinding light.

  A mass of smoking meat littered the ground where the man had fallen, his body shattered and cooked by the electrical discharge. The fingers of his hand and severed wrist tangled in the fence, sizzling in a cloud of greasy smoke. The captives hooted and scrambled for the mess, shoving fistfuls of red into their mouths before retreating to the heaters.

  Jacq backpedaled beneath the crane. Gorge rose in her throat and she choked back prickling, burning bile. Hands shaking, she re-activated the holofield.

  She pulled a tracker from her pocket, ancient technology from before the gods.

  She wrote a note, fifteen simple words, and signed it: “There is food here. I’ll find how to get it. Give my children my love.”

  She rolled it, tucked it into the ring Kris had given her, and snapped the tracker to the steel band. It activated with a beep.

  A short toss through the lattice and it disappeared into the smog.

  The Worldstream shuddered beneath her feet.

  A woman squealed in panic.

  The captives scrambled to hide behind the obelisk, pushing and shoving to get in the back.

  Another shudder, another cry.

  A young man, no more than sixteen, stumbled from the crowd, helped forward by a shove.

  A god came into view, cable trailing not upward but to a spider-thing behind it. Two more gods followed, their cables braided with the first.

  She’d never seen more than one at a time, or witnessed a god with self-control. Yet these gods circled the pen as the captives cowered. At last the gods stopped. A black, snake-like tentacle rose from one’s carapace.

  The boy closed his eyes.

  A thin trickle of piss leaked down his leg.

  The filaments shot between the fence wires and into the boy, invading every cell, sucking out each molecule of water, every speck of nutrient. As the god fed, its cable pulsed into the spider-thing. The other two sighed, their contentment broadcast by speakers on their massive helmets.

  They left the corpse, disintegrating skin over white bone already frosting over in the extreme cold, and trundled away. Jacq waited a minute, then lurched to her feet.

  The world spun. She steadied herself, took a few deep breaths, and followed.

  The gods passed another pen, then another, the same god feeding at each one. By the time the sun broke over the horizon, Jacq lost count of the number of corrals, but the legions of starving human cattle dwarfed the population surviving on the earth’s surface.

  Near midday, the gods approached an enormous hall of ribbed beams leading into the base of a spire.

  Their chests split open, and Jacq suppressed a gasp. Folding outward, the carapaces revealed humanoid shapes, small and wiry and black. Shaking hands reached up to pull away metal carapaces.

  Form-fitting helmets peeled off to reveal shriveled, liver-spotted faces under matted white hair. First, a woman—not a god at all, but human—spoke, her dialect similar to that spoken on ancient vids.

  “Not sure what the commotion was about, but a good feeding, anyway.”

  The two men, both as bald and liver-spotted as she, nodded. One clapped her shoulder with a hydraulic whine, a mechanical imitation of Kris and Jacq after a successful mission.

  “Skinnier every month, but still invigorating. I could go for a few more to be honest, dear.”

  She had eaten, but the man had found the meal delicious. A dark hope wriggled into Jacq’s heart.

  The other man replied.

  “Couldn’t we just have a few more?”

  The woman shook her head. “No.”

  “But mom—” His whine set Jacq’s teeth on edge.

  “You’re seven hundred years old! Stop acting like a child. The hunters are failing their quotas by ninety percent, and get just enough to survive. This isn’t last century—we’re subsidizing them, not the other way around, and it’s ridiculous. A million cattle can’t keep us all fat, not indefinitely. And they’re skinnier every month. Do the math, and quit your whining.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Yes, mother.”

  They walked deeper into the spire, fading into the distance. As the holofield flickered again, Jacq decided against following. Instead she backed out, found shade between the hulking wrecks of two tracked vehicles, and let exhaustion take her.

  ~

  It took her a day to find another spider-thing, and hours of waiting before she could examine a cable up close. As the god hunted on the surface, the spider kept the cable from tangling, moving it on sliding tracks under the Worldstream floor to accommodate the god’s roaming. Those tracks fed into a larger cable, which fed an even larger one. The network snaked back into the city of spires, hundreds of pulsing lines transporting … what?

  She peeled the cladding from one, stripping away insulation with a knife to find copper wire. Others held flexible glass, fiber optics pulsing data at the speed of light. The thickest bled when she cut it, a spurt of hot red fluid that smelled of iron and meat. She pulled out her breather, and tasted the liquid.

  Blood. Fat. Marrow.

  Her mouth watered even as her stomach roiled. She covered the hole with her thumb, cutting off the spurting stream.

  A laugh ruptured the silence: her own. She understood at last why the gods self-destructed when they fell victim to the bonbon. A single biomechanical network, a globe-spanning circulatory system sucking the life from the planet, couldn’t stomach such a nanomechanical threat.

  The ancient vids spoke of invasion, but they never said by whom, or by what. All her life she’d assumed—everyone had assumed—the gods were alien, or extradimensional. Yet she’d climbed to the heavens to find them all too human.

  Greed. Lust. Gluttony.

  A few elevating themselves over billions in desperate squalor, consuming them so they might live for centuries.

  Enough.

  She drank, forcing down the nutrients, suckling at the cable until it stitched itself back together, cut it and drank again. Sated, belly full for the first time in years, she set out toward a mission even more important than food.

 
The cables grew fatter and fatter. She walked for days, toward the tallest of the distant spires. At some point she’d run out of food, then water, the ever-thicker cables resisting her ability to cut them, even with her best knife. Every step took all her effort, though over time her piercing headache faded, replaced by the aching cold. Frigid wind cut through her clothes, and she’d long since lost feeling in her toes. The merciless sun burned exposed skin to blisters, and frost numbed it to an aching nothing. She mumbled through cracked lips; to her absent children and their dead father. To Kris, who had loved her when everything else had withered, whose sacrifice had killed Seventy-three. Her words half-formed in a mouth too dry to speak, and died on the wind.

  The holofield had failed on the third day. She’d let it fall, another piece of garbage on a world buried by it. Her oxygen gave out, and she let that fall, too. The thin air left her light-headed, delirious, counting every step from zero.

  The largest spire stretched into space, black on black, an arrogant defiance of gravity and sense. The cables joined at its base, tens of thousands of them, a snaking mass connected to a bulbous tank the size of a city block. Huge pumps shuddered all around it, transporting precious fluid from and to withered gods all over the planet.

  Jacq searched for a way in. A single steel door stood in the shadows, emblazoned with a peeling painting of a flag. Eighty white stars on blue, with thirteen red and white stripes, it looked regal, proud, significant. Something to adorn the uniforms of heroes. As she turned the wheel on the bulkhead, a klaxon wailed. She ignored the alarm and let the darkness inside swallow her.

  A network of gantries crisscrossed above huge vats, each connected to the next by rust-stained pipes. A single flight of metal stairs, too small for a god, exhausted her, but she made it to the top before falling to her knees. Panting, light-headed, she looked down into an open tank, a red maw of steaming blood and precious fluids.

  She slid shaking fingers into her pocket, pulled out a small bottle. More than Ben had managed before Seventy-three had taken him.