Tainted Garden

by Jeff Stanley

  The thing that had been God crawled toward her, its body a ragged testament to the power of the storm. Flesh hung in tatters, and its metallic limbs squealed in protest with its every move. Its red-orbed eye oriented on her, and its mouth hung open, dripping with rotten cilia. Gnashing teeth the color of bone chewed on the cilia, and a croaking sound emerged from its throat. God struggled for words.

  It came closer, closer, and Dersi could only stare in horror. Her limbs would not respond to her commands, remained frozen, intractable. A thin mewling sound escaped her taut lips.

  God’s voice, when it finally emerged from that brutalized, alien mouth, was cold, toneless. Mechanical. “Dersi, first of my seraphim. To me. To me. In you I can continue. In you I can rebuild, and take the fight to Santiago. He has not won yet. I won’t allow it. Come to me.”

  A ravaging spasm of pain shot through her head, like a thousand biting insects burrowing through her brain. Her back arched, a tormented scream ripping from her throat. Something moved. Something awakened, something deep, twisted, and foreign. Something in her own mind.

  “Come, my seraph. We’ve much to do. Come.”

  Something pressed against the inside of her head. Webs of pain spidered out from her forehead, sinking through her spine and into her limbs. Without conscious thought, Dersi found herself gaining her feet, stumbling across the landing, and lurching toward God on the catwalk, unheeding of its pitching roll, the tremors that ripped through it. She tried to grasp the twisted remnants of the railing to stop herself. But her arms refused to obey her, hanging limp at her sides. Her feet shuffled onward.

  “Yes. Come to me. Come to me. Together we shall rebuild. We shall rebuild it all, and take our communion, together, to the stars.”

  No. No. No. Her body moved forward, now less than twenty paces from the mutilation that was God. She yearned to scream, ached to scream, to vent her frustration, rage, and fear. Her mouth remained tightly shut, her lips stretched taut, immobile.

  Below, debris crashed into the sides of the shaft, sending up a torrent of sparks. Jags of lightning shot upward, trickling along the floor of the catwalk. Dersi jerked, spasming as the current swept through her body. God screamed, harsh and metallic. Another voice, distant but edging closer, familiar, erupted in an agonized wail.

  A flood of heat boiled upward, borne aloft by winds that ripped chunks from the catwalk. Shards like knives tore at Dersi’s naked skin, drawing blood. The catwalk pitched, and Dersi’s body tumbled, sprawling out face downward on the metal grating. She could smell the stench of her own flesh burning but could not feel the pain.

  Only the thing, the something, in her brain. Only that. Foreign. Hungering. Answering to God’s call.

  God shivered, sparks dancing along his contorted metal body. His trembling claws reached outward, digging gouges in the metal grating as he dragged himself toward her. Blackened cilia shriveled and dropped from his mouth. Bits of flesh sloughed free, melting into an oozing liquid. His jaw worked furiously, clamping his teeth open and shut, open and shut.

  Ten feet. Ten feet away now, and God crawled closer. Closer.

  The pain in her head consumed her, robbed her of thought.

  Warmth flared from her chest, a burning fever that battered at the pain, at the cold, at the infestation.

  “No! She is mine! Away. Away! She is mine, Santiago! Mine!”

  Chapter 48

  Lhedri collapsed as the lightning bathed the catwalk. His body shook, his blood seeming to boil, to churn. He blacked out.

  When he awakened, God was nearer Dersi, almost close enough to reach out his mangled arm and seize her. His body smoked, sparks cavorting along his limbs and the terrible exposed spars of his metal ribs. A spine of interlocked, spinning wheels and gears wove from side to side as he wormed his way closer and closer to Lady Dersi. His chilling voice had nothing Bhajong in it. Nothing.

  “Yes. Yes. Mine. All mine. My resurrection. My salvation.”

  Dersi did not move. She lay like the dead, sprawled facedown on the catwalk, her arms and legs splayed wide. Her blood-drenched white hair fanned out in the howling winds, spreading like a whispering pink aura.

  Lhedri struggled to his feet. He stumbled as the catwalk lurched again. A fountain of flames shot up from below, scouring the ceiling high overhead. Bits of flesh and charred metal fell in a heavy rain. Lhedri reeled back, covering his eyes as smoldering particles bounced along the catwalk, glowing, smoking.

  His sword. Where was his sword?

  Lost. Gone. Irretrievable. Lost.

  “You have not won, Santiago!” God screamed in his terrible, awful voice. The shout rose over the cacophony, thundering, vibrating the walls. He laughed, thin and metallic. “I will not let you win!”

  Lhedri pushed forward through the rain of debris. Embers landed on him, catching his clothing on fire. He beat at the flames with his naked hands and continued. From a pile of wreckage he pulled a long, bent pipe, its end jagged and dripping with some vile fluid. He caressed the pipe like a lover as he stumbled forward, toward Lady Dersi, toward God.

  God reached Lady Dersi, pulling himself as upright as his mangled body would allow. He dragged her limp form into his cold lap, touched her face with his metal clawed appendage. His fingertips left thin runnels of blood behind on her battered face.

  “Ah, my child. My beautiful, promising child. Come to me. Come. It is time. Though it is not what I had planned, still you will live again. We will live again. You are my resurrection, my salvation, my hope. Come. Awaken.”

  Closer now, and God still ignored him. The foul creature’s touch spawned movement in the skin of Lady Dersi’s forehead, a bulging of taut flesh, like an immense, throbbing boil. Thin blood, cloudy and pink, erupted from the center of the swelling, running down through the blackened flesh of her cheeks. From the lace of cracks emerged a gelatinous tendril, trembling.

  “Yes, my child. Yes.” God touched the tendril. He leaned down and pressed his lipless metal mouth to it, a cold kiss.

  Fire billowed up from above, a wall of flame that obscured God and Dersi for a moment. Lhedri had to back away, hands before his face to keep away the blistering heat. Beneath them, the ground rushed upward, yearning to embrace the dying ool.

  With a shower of sparks, the obsidian orb jerked free of its remaining struts, and shot down through the hole in the ool. The silver waters of the river reached out to swallow it. A geyser plumed skyward, hissing with steam.

  “Dersi! Lady Dersi!” Lhedri could waste no more time. Screaming, he ran forward, somehow balancing on the dancing catwalk, hurtling the wall of flames, crashing through a curtain of belching steam. He did not allow himself to feel the agony, pushed it to a deep recess in his mind. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. Only Dersi. Lady Dersi.

  His Dersi. His.

  Beyond the twin walls, of flame and steam, God still crouched over the still form of Lady Dersi, the trembling, glistening worm that had emerged from her skull now pinched delicately between two of his fingers. With a sound of tearing metal, his head pivoted to face Lhedri.

  “You! No! You’ll ruin everything! Everything!”

  Lhedri did not answer. He sprang forward, raising the jag-ended bar over his head and bringing it down. It smashed into the top of God’s metal skull, ringing out in a peal like a bell. Lhedri’s hands went numb, his arms. He fought to keep hold of the rod.

  God rocked. A massive dimple marred the nearly spherical dome of his head. His eye hung askew, its end spinning and spinning. His jaw was canted to one side.

  “Nnnno,” God said, twitching. The spinning eye jerked, trying to focus on Lhedri. It stopped as it registered the ruin of the glistening worm, still clutched between two metal fingers, but now flattened. Jellied globs ran down those fingers. “N-nnoo!”

  Lhedri raised leaden arms and brought the rod down again. God’s head fell to one side. In his gaping maw Lhedri could see a series of madly spinning wheels and gears, jerking. Slowing.

  God slumpe
d, crashing to the catwalk. Dersi slid from his lap. His fingers trembled, ticking across the grating with an arrhythmic tempo.

  “N-no. Y-you don’t know . . . what y-you’ve done. My d-d-dream. My beautiful dream.”

  Lhedri swung the rod, cracking it into the side of God’s head.

  The wheels slowed, slowed. At some point God’s eye had fallen away. Now only a thin, articulated arm creaked and groaned from the side of his head. Lhedri smashed the arm with his next blow.

  A thin sound emerged from God’s mouth. Cold. Laughter.

  Again Lhedri pounded God’s mangled head.

  “Y-you c-c-can’t-t-t w-w-win, Sa-san-tititi-ag-ag-o. I . . . I . . . I . . . am . . . every . . . everywhere. Everywhere. Y-you c-c-c-an’t-t-t-t defeat . . . an entire w-w-world. I’ll linger . . .”

  With a snarl, Lhedri slammed the rod down again. And again. Anything to stop that mocking, foul voice.

  God’s wheels ceased. He lay silent, amid flame and steam, blood and dripping flesh, twisted metal and smoke. Lhedri, panting, wild-eyed, stared down at the ruin of metal and flesh, at the destruction he had caused. His strength left him, and he collapsed to his knees. His breaths came in choked gasps. The rod fell from his fingers and rolled over the edge of the catwalk, falling down, down into the maelstrom of flame and water, toward the river that approached, hungering.

  God’s mouth opened, and his voice rang out, once more, cold and sure. “Cursed am I above all the livestock and all the wild animals! I will crawl on my belly and I will eat dust all the days of my life. And there will be enmity between me and the woman, and between my offspring and hers; he will crush my head, and I will strike his heel.” Something broke within that mangled metal skull, something shattered. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

  God fell silent.

  God was dead.

  “Lhedri?” Dersi’s voice was soft. “M-my father. Erekel . . .”

  Lhedri said nothing, watching as the ground swelled below them, consumed by fires. “The world burns.”

  “No,” Dersi whispered. “No. God’s world burns. Ours . . . ours awaits.”

  Lhedri turned to Dersi and took her in his trembling arms. He held her tight, felt her weak breathing, her tremulous heartbeat against his chest, while the world rushed up to embrace them, and fires raged all around.

  Epilogue

  She called herself Eve. God would have liked that. The small part of her that was God approved.

  She stood on a high bluff of rough, naked stone, staring out across the barren hollow where Men dwelt in their homes of wood and stone and, in some cases, metal and glass. They moved about on the surface without care now, confident. Dominant. Masters of all they surveyed.

  Where once life had flourished, covering all with a dense blanket of landskin, now only pebbly dirt lay thick over bedrock. Dirt, and the frail, grasping plantlife that had lately begun to spread its taint.

  Eve heard a sound behind her and turned to see Methushael climbing across the sharp stones of the path toward her. The youngest of her line, her grandson four times removed, Methushael trod the stones unflinching, unafraid of leaving behind his spoors, his flesh and blood. He would learn better, in time. They all had, all her children. Cain, and Enoch, and Irad, and Mehujael.

  She smiled at her naming of them, this thing she had kept for herself. God would have been pleased that she drew on his knowledge, imparted to her, to give them their names. Each son and each daughter must be brought to her on their naming day, naked, exposed to the elements, so that she could judge for herself whether they carried the taint that had doomed them all.

  The taint that had killed God. Santiago’s taint. Rian’s taint. The taint that had destroyed the beautiful dream, the Garden.

  “Eve,” Methushael said, too loudly. She frowned at him as he came up to her and looked down into the valley. “What are you doing?”

  “Watching them.” She took his shoulders and held him close, feeling the warmth that rose from his silky skin. “Once, this was all us. A part of us. Before they killed God.”

  “It will be again. Enoch says so.” He squeezed her hand. “Enoch says that the landskin will spread again, proof against their poisons. That it will descend from the high places and climb from the low, until it once more covers the world. Then we will exterminate them.”

  She smiled indulgently. “Who do you think told Enoch that, young one?”

  Methushael squeezed her hand tighter, and she sighed. She steered him away from the heights. “Come, they will see us and send out a hunting party.”

  “Enoch will kill them if they do,” he said with all the confidence of the young.

  “Of course he would,” she agreed, unwilling to dispel his youthful illusions. In time he would learn better, would learn of the capabilities of Man, of his evil.

  How? that small part that remained God inside her screamed. How could it have ended so?

  Eve, following Methushael down the slope toward the chasm, remembered. She remembered God’s death, and the ool spiraling down from the skies. All the ool, falling, rotting from the inside out, bits and pieces of melting flesh peeling away from chitinous skeletons to fall on the landskin, poisoning it in turn.

  The virus ran rampant. She had heard the screams of all her kindred as they melted, consumed by the contagion unleashed by Santiago’s vector, Rian. Rian, the Gagash she and her mate had brought into the body of the ool. In a very real fashion, she was culpable in God’s death. Just as she was responsible for the deaths of nearly all of her own kind.

  Few of the Bhajong had emerged alive from the ool that fell from the sky. Few enough that their unrecognized brethren, the Gagash, had fallen upon them and taken them prisoner. Dersi, who had brought God to ruin, lived. And Lhedri, who had delivered the killing blows.

  Eve had fled, vanishing into the rotting landskin, seeking the dark, forbidding places Man would not go. She ran ahead of the contagion, desperate to outpace it, desperate to survive long enough to . . . long enough to . . .

  She had crossed a deep, cold river, and the contagion slowed. Beyond the banks she ran on, while God awakened slowly inside her, carving out a place for himself. Not nearly large enough to accommodate all of him, all of his vastness. Enough for something to survive. Something of his determination, a bit of his knowledge.

  She had communed with the landskin, communicated the desperation she felt like a wash of fire carving through her bowels, caressing the life that quickened within her womb. The life that would bring at least a portion of God back into the world. The landskin responded, huge boils rising from it, swelling, bursting with a shower of ichor. Drakes climbed forth, slurping at their own afterbirths, consuming more of the landskin and ballooning in size.

  Accompanied by the drakes, She who would become Eve had fled, commanding the landskin ahead of them to part, that the drakes would not be infected with the contagion borne in Rian’s blood. Together they sought the high places, where the contagion would be slowest to come. For days and days they traveled, putting hundreds of miles between them and the spreading disease, finding at last an isolated valley ringed by rough hills, a place free of the taint of Man. Here the drakes dissolved back into landskin, a terrible fragment of what had been. The only fragment.

  She still heard the screams as drakes, ool, and landskin succumbed to the contagion. A world died. All but this small portion, this pitiful remnant.

  Eve watched Methushael walking ahead of her. In him, and in the others of his generation, she had given hope back to the world. This expedition would tell the tale. This close to the habitations of Man, the contagion would be at its most virulent. Something about Eve, perhaps even her contact with the vector, Rian, made her imm
une to the disease, though none of her first generation children had been. If Methushael could not withstand its taint . . .

  Ah, but if he could! If he could . . .

  Within her, the small portion that was God railed, cursing Santiago, cursing the downfall of the Garden. Cursing that Santiago, the old enemy, had won.

  Eve smiled, watching Methushael, waiting for him to die. Or to live.

  about the author

  Born in 1966 and an avid fantasy and science fiction reader since early childhood, Jeff Stanley is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, where he majored in English literature. He works and writes in Columbia, South Carolina, where he resides with his wife, Mari, and their two children, Hope and Will. Tainted Garden is his first published novel.

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Stanley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Tainted Garden is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  www.delreydigital.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-45910-7

  v3.0