Dust in Darkness - A Collection of Short Stories from Horror and GrimDark Sci-fi Author

Dust in Darkness

A Short Story Collection

The Early Works

EDDIE PATIN

Copyright

DUST IN DARKNESS

In Darkness of the Mountain’s Night

Out of Paradise

Reclaiming the Maze

Hijacked on Naos 5

Copyright © 2017, Lost Woods Publishing LLC

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Published in the United States of America by Lost Woods Publishing LLC, 2017

Table of Contents

Dust in Darkness

Copyright

Table of Contents

Book Introduction by Eddie Patin

Book 1: In Darkness of the Mountain’s Night A Hunter’s Tale

Darkness - ONE

Darkness - TWO

Darkness - THREE

Darkness - FOUR

Darkness - FIVE

Book 2: Out of Paradise

Paradise - ONE

Paradise - TWO

Paradise - THREE

Paradise - FOUR

Paradise - FIVE

Paradise - SIX

Paradise - SEVEN

Paradise - EIGHT

Book 3: Reclaiming the Maze

Maze - ONE

Maze -  TWO

Maze - THREE

Maze - FOUR

Book 4: Hijacked on Naos 5 The Chronicles of Alex Varia

Hijacked - ONE

Hijacked - TWO

Hijacked - THREE

Hijacked - FOUR

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About Eddie Patin

More Books from Eddie Patin

Enjoy this Excerpt from Portal Zero

Enjoy this Excerpt from The Wyvern in the Wilderlands

A Message from the Publisher

Book Introduction by Eddie Patin

ENJOY THIS BONUS COLLECTION of some of the older fiction stories written by Eddie Patin, back before he began his professional author career!

Ten years before his debut with the Apocalypse Gate Horror Grimdark series and other books published as a professional author, Eddie Patin wrote a mixed variety of dark fantasy, contemporary horror, and experimental sci-fi. These are some of his more polished stories, gathering Dust in Darkness:

Book 1 - In Darkness of the Mountain's Night - A Hunter's Tale

Dark Werewolf Hunting Fantasy Horror

Book 2 - Out of Paradise

A Short Story of Zombie Medieval Fantasy Fiction from the Tropics

Book 3 - Reclaiming the Maze

A Short Fantasy Story about a Minotaur, from the MONSTER's Point of View

Book 4 - Hijacked on Naos 5 - The Chronicles of Alex Varia

Grimdark Science Fiction Short Story and the First Story of Scout Cpl Alex Varia

If you'd like to know more about Patin's titles, upcoming books, or would like to join his mailing list, go to EddiePatin.com to learn more. Want some free stories? Join the fiction mailing list!

Eddie Patin here. This is a special treat for my readers—some of my old stuff from back before I decided to become a professional author. Most of these stories were written around 2005, back when I was serving tables at a restaurant in Las Vegas, NV, and I was writing short stories alongside working on my ‘great epic fantasy trilogy’ that (almost) every author works on for a while before they start looking at things seriously, haha.

So, I won’t say that this stuff sucks. Far from it. I still like these old stories, and I’ve heard them complimented by many readers. That said, they’re old, and they’re from before I started taking my licks in the publishing world and seriously starting to polish my work. So yeah—they might be a little unpolished. And there might be too many italics here and there, or amateurish punctuation!! Buy hey—if this bookstore is listening to my instructions, then this book should be free, and these stories are here for your enjoyment.

I’ll include a quick word at the beginning of each story about when I wrote it and what I was thinking, but that’ll be the limit of my boring commentary.

Have fun, and enjoy the free read...

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Now on to the book...

Book 1:

In Darkness of the Mountain’s Night

A Hunter’s Tale

DARK WEREWOLF HUNTING Fantasy Horror

"Great story! Really interesting twist, and a very realistic feel of being away from civilization on a frigid mountain."

During an extraordinarily cold week of Elk season, high in the mountains, amidst weekend warriors bedecked in blaze orange and corrupt rangers looking for revenue, Brett and Jon find that there are more beasts than Elk in the high mountains, and more types of game than those listed on the books...

Enjoy this dark short story from Eddie Patin about a monster deep in the wilderness of the highland country, and the havoc it wreaks on hunting season.

"I love the atmosphere in this short story! It's a breath of (cold) fresh air getting back to the dark and scary aspects of werewolves in this time of teeny-bopper monster romance! Home run."

Notes from the Author – Dec 29th 2017

This is a contemporary horror inspired by my first trip elk hunting up at high elevations in Colorado in late October. It was very cold, and the hunting trip was actually pretty disappointing, because the elk were very far up the mountain, and there were hunters everywhere, lol. But while I was out there, sitting in a frozen bog, listening to the crisp silence and fantasizing about huge elk wandering out of the dark timber in front of me, I started fantasizing about werewolves, too, and wrote this later. This story was written in November of 2009.

Darkness - ONE

THERE WAS A BODY LYING face down in the glade.

As I stumbled forward, my bare feet slick with mud and plunging through the icy water of the marsh, I could see the hunter’s shoulder raised in the air in a hunch, the bones beneath his body curled tight in death and his legs sprawled in the mushy sod. Through the bleak grass, grey in the crisp air of early November, the blaze orange of his vest was a burning flame in a dreary landscape.

The ball of my left foot slipped between two strange clumps of the uneven ground, and slipped into the cold water again. I was down on a knee before I caught my balance, reeling from side to side to keep from falling headlong into the papery blades of grass.

No bugs. Too cold for bugs.

What in the hell was going on? What was I doing here?

My skin was numb. I thought for a moment that my knee was a little shredded on the spongy ground, a field of tall grass built on mud and water, sticks, stones, lichen.

Yes. Cut it up a little, but it was too cold to bleed. Yet.

I was naked! Why in the hell was I naked?

My skin felt thick, and I wrapped my hands around my arms and tried to warm up.

A little voice in the back of my mind told me that hypothermia can have some pretty disorienting effects on the mind—I could become forgetful. Delusional. That must be what was going on, because I didn’t remember a damned thing as to how I got here, in the middle of this glade, a dead man up ahead...

The silence of the mountains pressed in on me, the morning too cold for birds, the mist in the air holding the expanse of blue skies outside of my little bubble of existence, nothing to be seen above the stratosphere except around Mt. Everson, where the clouds parted and followed the distant mountain up into the haze.

A man lay on his stomach before me, distorted over an arm bent up under him.

I reached up to touch my cheeks, convinced that the feel of my fingers on my frozen, rubbery skin might bring me back to reality. The hair of my beard bristled and felt like it was not my own.

Walking forward to the body as best I could on the marsh, I stared, held my breath, and waited for a sign that this man was anything but a lump of lifeless matter dressed in camouflage and hunter’s orange.

Crouching down, feeling the grass prick the backs of my thighs, I reached out with a hand that wasn’t mine.

I touched the vest. The man’s side. He seemed real enough. His orange hat was thrown off into the grass before him. The back of his head was full of thin, grey hair, matted in random directions by wearing a hat and going without a shower for the last several days.

This was a real man. I wasn’t imagining. His body was real, under my frozen and tight fingers.

And my fingers were caked with a dark grime.

I pulled my hand back and looked at my fingernails. Black under the normally white and clean edges. Filthier than they’d ever been in my life—like I’d been scratching the residue off of an old car’s oil pan.

Where the hell have I been?

The air ripped through my lungs like a torrent of ice water. A breeze flowing through the valley from the mountain tore at my skin and made me shake like I didn’t know I could.

So cold up here. So cold up here when naked.

I reached out with my grimy hand and grasped the man’s shoulder. As I expected, he was stiff. Frozen. With little effort (I was surprised at how easy it was in my state), I pulled at the corpse and turned him over.

As if in a dream, the lifeless face, shattered and torn, stared back at me with clouded eyes. He was a man of around sixty—that is, not really an old man, but not quite middle aged, either. But his jaw had been torn off, his throat ripped out, and his face lacerated and hanging in cold, leathery flaps. The grass pulled and ripped apart when I turned him over, clinging to frozen chunks and droplets of blood, bright and colorful like red Kool-Aid.

And somehow I noticed his ghastly visage with no more interest or shock than if I were observing the pattern in the bark of a fallen log.

The man’s arm was twisted into a curl in front of his chest, stuck fast by Rigor mortis and the chill of high altitude, but quivered in place as I turned him all the way to his back, the sling of his rifle wrapped around the locked elbow.

With a strength that I wouldn’t have expected in my frozen, dull body, I pulled his hand away from his chest and straightened the arm with a few pops. His rifle was an old, Swiss battle rifle. I unwrapped the sling from the dead, stiff arm, and placed the gun aside.

With fumbling fingers, I unzipped the man’s vest.

Darkness - TWO

SO, THE KID SAID, are you guys hunting tomorrow?

You bet, Jon said, shooting a glance my way. I could tell the tone—that processed friendly-but-not-really-friendly tone that told us he was fishing for suckers that would let him fill his quota and earn him some fees for the county.

My hands were as close to the fire as I could manage without burning them. As cold as it was, the fire didn’t give off much warmth in a campsite with little shelter from the open sky. I could hear a truck passing on the road a ways off while I saw the kid’s wheels turning as he looked us over.

Would you guys mind showing me your permits?

I wanted to decline, since I didn’t actually need to prove myself until I was actually hunting, but these guys had a lot of wiggle room to be real assholes if they wanted to be. There was no reason to piss this kid off—he’d be up here all week.

Jon reached to his back pocket as I pulled open the Velcro pouch on my chest with a muffled rip. The kid watched me first. Producing a folded-up sandwich bag, I smoothed out the plastic with cold fingers, opened the seal, and handed over the perforated blue card.

The kid took my card and scrutinized it, his neutral face flickering in the fire.

Brett? His eyes flashed up to mine. Cross?

Yeah, I said.

You caught a Bull tag, huh? That’s cool.

Yep.

He paused for a moment, then, Do you have your ID?

Jon, who had been holding his hunting license in readiness, lowered his hand to his side and sat back down in his folding chair. His curly, dark hair sprouted from around his fleece cap like black feathers. His pale eyes flashed me the same look he gave me some times at work when ‘one of those kind’ of customers heads our way.

I looked over the kid’s face and wondered if he was going to be a hard-ass. He was young, and he seemed friendly, but that was only how he seemed. Could be hard to tell with these guys. They make the rules to make sure everything stays in balance, but they end up pursuing the rules more to make an income off of the hunters than anything else. At least, that’s the way I’d always thought.

No, I said.

His blonde eyebrows raised. You don’t have your ID?

No, I replied. I don’t have my wallet. I don’t need it.

The kid paused. His eyebrows lowered. Then he handed my hunting license back to me. Okay, he said, then turned and inspected Jon’s card, proffered immediately when the ranger’s attention settled on my friend.

Jon had been going on and on about the rangers earlier today, after we got into another conversation about the over-abundance of rules and regulations. He recited the rules and our rights, and how we didn’t have to show the rangers anything until we were on the hunt, or until we were carrying the elk back to camp and back to the world from which we