Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  So, I went through the elephant form with Tony piece by piece, trying not to stomp—sound carries like crazy in a trailer house—and then did it on my own for a while. When I got tired of that, I switched over to YouTube and practiced some muay thai kick-elbow combos.

  Why the heck hadn’t I used any of those on Blaise?

  That was an easy one. Because I was busy getting my butt kicked. I’d never been in a fight before, and even though I’d known it was coming ever since third period, Blaise had caught me off guard. The instructors on YouTube were always saying that you couldn’t prepare for an ambush, but I’d always sort of figured I would do better in a real fight than I had.

  While I watched the rest of the movie, I got the stick bundle from behind the couch and started scrubbing it up and down my shins. The first time I’d done that over the summer, it made my shins bleed. But the skin there was definitely toughening up. Or at least I was killing all the nerve endings. And the bone had gotten a lot knobbier underneath, like it was growing stronger.

  I was about to shove the bundle back behind the couch and get ready for bed when I heard glass breaking out in the kitchen.

  Fight in the Kitchen

  MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that Gramps had gotten up and fallen in the kitchen while I wasn’t paying attention, but even the lightest step in the trailer is loud enough to hear in another room. Besides, if he’d gotten up, he would’ve asked me if I’d got my lessons done before I started “all that silly hiyah stuff.”

  I knew that it couldn’t be him, but I still dropped the sticks and ran into the kitchen anyway, expecting to see the old man on the floor surrounded by the shards of a broken drinking glass. I had nightmares about that sometimes, that he’d slip and get hurt while I was at school and couldn’t help him.

  When I rounded the corner into the kitchen, though, Gramps wasn’t there. A skinny guy with one of those shop flashlights in his mouth was pawing through our drawers like he expected to find something besides silverware and old mouse crap. He kept rolling his shoulders like he was trying to get something off them and blinking all crazy.

  I swallowed, my heart racing. A freaking meth head. In our junky double-wide, trying to steal our stupid Walmart forks.

  “Hey!” I’d wanted it to sound like I was yelling at the guy, defending the place, but my voice cracked.

  The tweaker froze. Slow, slower than anything, he turned his face toward me. His flashlight shined in my eyes.

  I slapped at the light switch, and the overhead bulbs flooded the kitchen.

  “I’ll call the cops.” I was trying to sound confident, but my voice was too shaky to pull it off. “I will.”

  He blinked his bloodshot eyes and looked from me to the broken window.

  Then he grabbed the paring knife out of the drawer.

  I stuck my hands up. They were shaking.

  “The emergency money’s in that matchbox on the fridge,” I said, pointing. “Take it.”

  I felt like a total wuss, giving up like that. I should’ve thrown a chair at the tweaker and run after my phone in the living room, but if I wasn’t fast enough, this guy could legit stab me. Who would take care of Gramps if I got killed trying to keep some meth head from stealing a couple twenties and some change?

  The guy looked at the fridge, pupils bouncing around so bad I don’t know how he saw anything. I think he was going to take the money and go. It really looked like he was.

  Until—

  “Grady?”

  My stomach dropped through the bottom of my feet when I heard Gramps shuffling down the hallway.

  “You talking to somebody?” Gramps stopped suddenly. “Oh.”

  The tweaker’s jerky pupils shot over my shoulder toward the back bedroom, and his teeth bared in a snarl.

  “Listen, you just get the hell out of here!” Gramps yelled it like he was half his age and ready to knock this guy into next Tuesday. “Get gone!”

  The tweaker’s eyes got real wide, then he broke into a run. Zero to sixty, in a dead sprint for Gramps. I jumped on the guy. I didn’t decide to. Just, when I saw him running at my grandpa with the knife, I was suddenly whaling on him, grabbing at his shirt with one hand and throwing punches with the other. Somehow we got tangled up with one of the chairs and hit the floor. We must’ve ripped a bunch of the mail off the table, too, because I felt envelopes sticking to me. I couldn’t get the knife away from him, and my fingers got all cut up, but I finally locked my hands around his wrist and held on for all I was worth. Not that easy, considering my hands were slick with blood.

  While I wrestled with the guy, he started making these wheezing and whimpering noises. His struggles were getting weaker. You always hear about how strong druggies can be, but I think he was wearing down.

  “Hold on, Grady. I’m calling 911. Hold on.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the tweaker to look back at Gramps, but he sounded scared. Oh God, what if all this craziness gave him a heart attack? What if we got this tweaker out of here and my grandpa still died? I had to stop this guy now, so I could make sure Gramps was all right.

  I slammed my forehead into the tweaker’s nose. He dropped back on the crackling linoleum, and finally, finally, I twisted the knife out of his hand. I threw it back toward Gramps’s feet. The tweaker stopped moving, but I didn’t let go.

  Then Gramps was dragging me away from the guy, and tears were dripping out of his blue eyes. They felt hot when they hit my face.

  “A-are you ok-k-kay?” My teeth were chattering. And I was freezing. Maybe that was the adrenaline wearing off?

  “Grady?” Gramps smoothed a warm, rough hand across my forehead and through my hair. His face blurred, but I could see his shoulders jerk in a big sob. “Buddy boy?”

  I couldn’t stop shivering. I tried to tell him I was fine and to watch out for that guy because I didn’t know if he was actually knocked out or just kind of dazed, but my face was starting to go numb. I couldn’t move my lips. It felt like everything inside my chest was freezing solid.

  Gramps pulled me into his lap and hugged my head.

  Red and blue lights flashed through the kitchen windows, but I didn’t hear any sirens. I couldn’t hear anything.

  A beautiful woman with long white hair and skin so pale it made the lightbulbs in our kitchen look dim was standing right behind Gramps, staring down at me.

  A little bit at a time, black crept in from the sides of my vision. Then everything was gone.

  You’re Dead

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES again, all I could see was stars. Galaxies and galaxies of stars all around me.

  “Gramps?” I looked around. The only person there was that beautiful woman from the kitchen. Her skin seemed to glow against the blackness of the sky surrounding us. I took a step toward her, but I didn’t get any closer. “Where’s my grandpa? Is he all right?”

  She didn’t answer me. “You’ll be Hank O’Grady, twenty-nine years of age, career criminal...”

  “Hang on, that’s not my name. My name’s Hake, Grady Hake, and I’m sixteen, not twenty-nine. And my grandpa’s name is Carl Hake. Is he all right?”

  “I wasn’t assigned to a Carl Hake.” She shook her head, that mass of white hair sliding over her shoulders. “I was sent for Hank O’Grady, human, multiple counts of murder and theft. You.”

  “But that’s not me,” I said. “I’m Hake, not Hank. And I’ve never committed any crimes. I mean, I speed sometimes, but that’s not even close to murder.”

  A file appeared in her pale hand. She flipped it open and started scanning the pages inside.

  “Is that about the guy you were looking for?” I reached for the file, but apparently it was farther away than it looked, because I couldn’t stretch far enough to touch it. “There’s got to be a picture or something in there that’ll prove I’m not him. I’ve never even drank or smoked pot. The worst I’ve ever done is mouth off to somebody. And they usually deserved it. I know that’s not an excuse, but...”

  I saw
the exact moment she found the picture. Her silvery eyes flew open wide, and she looked from the file to me and back.

  I relaxed. This was going to be okay. Now that the mistake was established, we could fix it.

  A slice of light appeared to my left, like a door opening, and a guy with the same pale glowing skin and white hair stuck his head in.

  “Everything all right in there, Reaper Eleven?”

  “Of course,” she said, slapping the file closed. “Just another routine reap.”

  “Wait, what about—” I started.

  The guy nodded at her. “Carry on.”

  Then the door closed.

  I turned back to her. “Why didn’t you tell him about the mistake?”

  “Reapers never take the wrong soul,” she said. “We’re very careful.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “You listen to me, you little—” She stopped for a second and smoothed out her face into something serene and beautiful again. “You are dead. You’ve been reaped from your body on Terra—”

  “But I shouldn’t be dead,” I insisted. “Where’s God? He’s your boss, right? He can fix this.”

  She blinked. “He’s...out of the office.”

  “When will He be back?” I asked. “I’ll wait.”

  Her eyes were narrow shards of mirror in her face.

  “You are dead,” she said, enunciating each syllable. “You can’t go back to where you came from.”

  “But my grandpa...” I shook my head viciously. “I’m not dead. You screwed up. I’m not this Hank O’Grady guy. That was probably the tweaker with the knife who you were supposed to take. Grady Hake is my name. I’m a high school sophomore, not a criminal. You made a mistake.”

  Her full white lips pressed into a thin line, and her nostrils flared.

  “Reapers,” she growled, “do not. Make. Mistakes.”

  Then with a flick of her wrist, she threw me through the void of stars into nothingness.

  Transportation

  I DIDN’T FEEL MYSELF land. One second I was falling through stars, the next I was motionless in empty blackness.

  A metal baseball bat hit me in the gut. I folded over, clutching my stomach.

  “I said you’re in me spot, grav,” someone snarled. He sounded Irish or maybe some kind of English. “Move yer bleedin’ carcass!”

  I opened my eyes just in time to see a boot swinging at me. I curled up and took the kick on the shoulder. It made that same metallic clunk as the hit to my stomach had, and pain spread through my back. Weirdly, that was the only part of me that hurt. Not the cuts from the paring knife, not the bruises and scrapes from my fight with Blaise. Those were all gone.

  “Geez, dude.” I winced, climbing to my knees. “What’s your leg made of, metal?”

  The dude in question was a kid my age, tall and wiry, with a nose that looked like it’d been broken more than once and a cauliflower ear. One of those gingers where at first glance you can’t tell whether he’s got light brown hair or dirty orange. You don’t see many redheads who look like they could beat the tar out of somebody, but this one did. He grabbed the cuff of his pants and pulled it up, revealing a lower leg made out of dingy greenish metal with grungy brass-looking circuitry running through it.

  “Yeah, it is metal,” he growled. “Need it upside yer head, do ya?”

  Movement behind him caught my eye. We weren’t alone.

  Aliens. Everywhere. This whole metal room was full of them. A guy with pointed elf ears and cat eyes was talking to a chick with zebra stripes and this rubbery white-and-black curtain hanging around her shoulders instead of hair. A mostly human torso and head hopped across the floor on what looked like a pogo stick.

  I swallowed hard. “At least you’ve got more legs than that guy.”

  The redhead grabbed me by the back of the neck and hurled me across the floor. I tumbled into something squishy. It gave me a slimy shove, and I rolled over to look up at this enormous slug thing.

  “Get off, human scum,” it gurgled.

  I realized with a shock that it wasn’t speaking English. I could understand whatever language it was speaking, but at the same time, I could tell that it was something I’d never heard before.

  To my left, a wall opened up with a whooshing sound. A humanoid bulldog guy stepped into the room, wearing a long brown duster with a tin star pinned to the chest and waving what looked like a metal MegaBlaster on steroids. Wherever it pointed, aliens ducked and scrambled to get out of its way.

  “We’re breaking Van Diemann’s atmosphere,” he announced in this growling cowboy voice. “Grab a seat and strap in if you want to survive the landing.”

  He slammed one long-nailed paw-hand down on a big red button on the wall. Panels opened, and seats unfolded from the walls and floor. Then he disappeared back through the door, and it whooshed closed again.

  All hell broke loose. Everybody scrambled for seats like this was a life-or-death game of musical chairs. I tried to get into the closest one, but the zebra lady elbowed me out of the way and took it. Once I finally did climb into a seat, that pogo-stick torso threw me out. I hit my head on something hard. That stunned me for a few seconds.

  The whole room shook like a metal johnboat slamming into a speedboat’s wake. The metal grating under my hands and knees was getting hot.

  I part crawled, mostly fell over to the only empty seat beside the pogo-stick torso and wrestled the X-shaped harness on. It took me a minute of looking stupid before I got the buckle to snap together.

  Just in time. I’d thought the place was shaking before, but this was like being inside a can of soda while some douchebag shook it up. My teeth rattled against each other, and my head bumped against the seat back and sides. My vertebrae felt like they were in a never-ending car wreck, smashing together. I heard a snap and thought maybe I’d broken something.

  But it was the pogo guy next to me. His strap either hadn’t buckled or it had come loose, and now he was hanging from the top half by his throat, head rolling around at a weird, floppy angle while his arms hung limp. His neck was broken.

  “Hey!” I yelled, looking toward the closed door the bulldog guy had come through. “Someone! This guy needs help!”

  “Can’t help him where he gone,” the zebra lady yelled at me, and a couple of the aliens near her let out harsh laughter.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my head back against the seat, clutching my harness with both hands and praying it would stay locked.

  Just when I thought my brains were about to fizz over and spew out every hole in my head, the shuddering smoothed out. My teeth stopped banging against each other, and my backbone stopped grinding together. Cautiously, I started to breathe again.

  After a few seconds with nothing more than a gentle vibration humming through the seat, I unclawed my hands from the harness. My palms had rope burns on them from sliding against the straps. I blew on the red marks to cool them down.

  “Have we landed?” somebody asked from the wall behind me.

  The whole room lurched, and there was a huge boom. I grabbed the harness again, not even caring that the edges of the straps were slicing back into the rope burns.

  Something let out a croaking laugh. “Yeah, we landed.”

  It was so still. It felt like when you step off a boat, and the fluid in your eardrums is still sloshing around. You get used to the movement while you’re on board, so you sort of forget about it until you get back on dry land.

  The door whooshed open, and the bulldog guy with the MegaBlaster stepped into the room. He kept the bore of the gun swiveling from alien to alien while he passed between our seats, then flipped open a panel and pulled a lever marked with black and yellow chevrons.

  With a creak and hiss, a grated section of wall at the end of the room swung down like a toy hauler’s ramp. A puff of red dust drifted up, then tumbled away.

  “Welcome to Van Diemann’s Planet, criminals,” the bulldog said. “Get off my transport shuttle.”
>
  Van Diemann’s Planet

  THE HARNESSES ALL RELEASED simultaneously, and the seats folded out from under us and disappeared back into the wall. I spilled onto the floor, and pogo-stick guy’s torso fell across my legs. I let out a not very manly yipe and kicked him off.

  The rest of the aliens walked out of the shuttle and into the brilliant sunlight. Some of the aliens seemed happy to be there, taking deep breaths of the air like they’d been away a long time and missed all that red dust. The rest looked like they were being sent to their deaths.

  “Outta the way,” the redheaded guy with the metal leg growled, shouldering me as he passed.

  I scowled at his back. Was he limping slightly, or did it just seem that way because I knew about his prosthetic? Was it even a prosthetic, or was that just how people were built here? Like cyborgs?

  “Off the shuttle,” the bulldog snapped at me, jerking his flat snout at the dusty alien landscape. “Your sentence awaits.”

  I blinked. “Sentence?”

  “Your time, your punishment, the judgment passed down on you for committing whatever heinous crime you committed on your home planet, for which you will now be paying with a set amount of Universal years here on the prison planet.”

  “But I didn’t commit any—”

  A crackling sound ripped through the air, and something blue streaked over my head. I flinched. A hole the size of a bottlecap melted in the metal wall behind me, and the air filled with the sharp stink of melting plastic.

  “Get off the shuttle of your own volition or I’ll kick your corpse off it,” the bulldog said.

  “Fine. Geez.” I stood up and walked toward the ramp, still listing a little. My inner ear hadn’t adjusted to the stillness yet.