Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  I looked up at the lip of the hole. “But what if—”

  “The hooligans will hold the line,” Proboscis snapped. “That’s what they’re here for.”

  He was right. The sound of fighting was dying down. There were a couple more pings from what I assumed was Warcry’s metal leg, and a snapping sound like a branch breaking, then the low rumble of conversation.

  “See?” Proboscis raised the tiny eyebrows over his huge eyes at me.

  I looked at the cat. He was grinning down at his work, licking his feline chops.

  “Yeah,” I said, glaring at the cat’s back. “My bad.”

  I went back to work, chipping off pieces of white jade.

  “Very funny, Mr. Fluffers,” I sneered under my breath.

  He snickered. “Every word is true, or I’m the son of a dog.”

  “Right.”

  The snake-haired lady looked over the top of the pit and yelled down, “Send one of the indentures to search the corpses.”

  Proboscis turned to me. “You’re so interested in ferals, human, why don’t you go?”

  Looting Ferals

  THE CORPSES OF THE ferals were scattered in a wide circle around the little hillside where we were digging. The hooligans had torn them apart—in the case of a couple, literally.

  The first one I came to had had its head ripped off. That lay a few yards away from the body, staring off into space with oozing, milky eyes. The flesh hung off its bones in ragged green curtains, but because it had been an alien to start with, I wasn’t sure whether the green coloring was normal or if it had come from the fallout poisons the cat had mentioned.

  It definitely stank like it had been dead a while.

  I looked at Ripper. The snake-haired lady had sent him with me while I checked the ferals for anything useful, not to make sure I didn’t get killed if more came, but to “make sure the indenture doesn’t try to sneak anything into his pockets.”

  Ripper crossed his huge, ’roided-out arms and nodded at the feral.

  “Hop to it,” he said.

  I took a deep breath through my mouth and held it. Swallowing the Universe was going to have to wait until I couldn’t taste the nasty body juice in the air. I reached into the pocket on the feral’s faded, threadbare pants and started fishing around.

  Its greasy hand grabbed me around the wrist.

  I freaked out and scrambled backward, twisting my arm out of its grasp.

  Ripper doubled over laughing. “It’s dead, stupid. That’s just leftover impulses in its muscles.”

  Its hand flopped down like a dead fish on its stomach and grabbed the loose skin there. I scrubbed my wrist on my jeans, trying to wipe the corpse grease off.

  “Sometime before the night sun rises,” Ripper said impatiently.

  “You want it done faster, you’ve got two hands,” I said.

  “I ain’t smearing that poisoned blood all over my hands.”

  I forced myself to breathe, crawled back over to the body, and counted to eight in my head, then made myself shove my hand down in the thing’s pocket again.

  Nothing but sand and body juice. The other pocket had a coin like the ones Kest had gotten from the bank, except this one was smeared with body grease. I was going to have some stuff to message her about later. We could compare which kind of body was grosser to loot.

  The corpse didn’t grab me again while I searched, but its fingers and legs twitched a couple times, and the muscles I bumped tensed and relaxed creepily.

  “Take off its HUD,” Ripper said. “Somebody’ll pay something for it.”

  When I peeled it off the thing’s arm, a good deal of the flesh peeled away with it, and I cringed. I remembered reading something about Chernobyl and how too much radiation poisoning made people’s hair and fingernails and teeth fall out and their skin slough off. I looked over my shoulder at the decapitated head. Looked like it only had about six teeth altogether. No eyelashes or hair.

  “Am I going to die from touching this stuff?”

  “Stop whining and gather that loot up. We’ve got seventeen more of these goo-bags to search.”

  I stuck out the meaty HUD to Ripper. He skittered back a couple steps.

  “Pretty light on your feet for such a big guy,” I muttered.

  He threw me a leather satchel. “Stuff it up your cloaca, meat bag.”

  Once the first corpse was sufficiently looted, we moved on to the next feral. Its spine had been snapped in half, but its head was still trying to bite. It didn’t matter that I was nowhere close to its mouth, its teeth kept chomping.

  Ripper stomped on its face until the head was just a greasy smear in the dirt, then waved an arm at the twitching corpse like he was letting me in to an all-you-can-eat buffet. I got in there and started looting.

  The scavenge on the corpses was minimal. A few coins, a used Spirit stone, a piece of wood with some script on it, kind of like the remote for my tattoo. The HUDs were going to bring in the most money, because they all had one, except for the feral that didn’t have any hands to strap a HUD onto.

  In fact, a lot of the ferals were missing parts. Most of them had bites out of their faces and shoulders and arms. Fingers had been chewed down to the bone, and on ones that had had ears before, there were just holes in the head with ragged, black-blood-caked wounds. One feral had a pair of leg bones sticking out of a tattered pant leg. Looked like it’d been stumping around on that thing for a while; the ends were worn down and muddy.

  Everything valuable went into the satchel, presumably slowly poisoning me. I wanted to take a minute to look up how to protect against radiation, but Ripper didn’t want to wait around.

  “Think of it like getting extra juice for your HUD,” Ripper sneered. “They run on rads leeched from your tissues.”

  “How’s yours running? Need a power-up?”

  He didn’t think that was funny.

  Our last stop was at the top of a hill behind the dig site, where four ferals had been killed all together. Ripper wouldn’t get close to it.

  “You go ahead,” he said.

  I squinted at the corpses, trying to see wavy radiation lines or something.

  “Extra super radiation poisoning?” I asked him.

  “Well, if it was gonna be anywhere, it’d be in a school of the bastards, wouldn’t it?” He crossed his arms defensively. “Besides, bodies pile, on death’s smile, lie right down, and stay a while.”

  I snorted. “What is that, a nursery rhyme? Real spooky.”

  “Get over there before I bite your face off.”

  I rolled my eyes and climbed up the hill toward the bodies. The place where they’d fallen was part of this complex of hills all sort of dying into each other and backed by this bigger, rockier one. And the ferals weren’t actually in one big pile. Two of them were on top of one another, and the other two were off to either side.

  Down at the bottom of the hill, Ripper was staring up at me with a combination plate of disgust and curiosity on his face, almost like he was waiting for one of the corpses to jump up and bite me in half.

  Pretty ironic on a guy who looked like Jaws’s long-lost brother.

  It was nice to think that he might be more scared of them than I was, so I acted like the corpses didn’t bother me at all and went straight to the first one to start looting. There was nothing in its pockets, and its HUD screen was cracked like mine, but I threw it in the bag anyway. The second feral had what looked like a slowly dissolving pack of chewing gum and an unused Spirit stone.

  For about half a second, I thought about touching the white stone to my OSS tattoo and absorbing the Spirit. Every little bit I could get my hands on would help, especially with the stupid amount I was supposed to repay the Bailiff if I wanted to eat tonight.

  Then I caught sight of Ripper up on his toes trying to see what I had in my hand.

  I held it up. “Spirit stone and gum or something.”

  He nodded, still eyeing me, and I dumped them both into the bag. Odds
were good I’d get in worse trouble for trying to steal OSS loot from right under their noses than for missing my Spirit quota. I stripped off the corpse’s HUD and went for the pair of corpses piled on top of each other.

  The ground dropped out from under my feet. I had just enough time to suck in a shocked lungful of sand before I dropped down into darkness with my leg twisted underneath me. My ankle popped, and pain flared down into my foot. I jumped off that leg onto my butt and grabbed my ankle, hissing through my teeth.

  Overhead, one of the feral’s arms hung down the hole I’d fallen through, and rays of blue-white light shined in. I could hear Ripper up there yelling.

  “I’m all right!” I yelled back. “I just twisted my ankle!”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Ripper? There’s a hole down here. I fell through into a cave or something. Can you throw down a rope?”

  Nothing but the echo of my own voice.

  I looked around.

  With the little bit of illumination coming through the hole above, I could see that this cave went farther back into the hill. The light dropped off pretty fast, and just past it was the kind of advanced darkness that you only see in endless nightmare voids.

  There was a pair of eyes shining at me.

  “Ripper!” I yelled so hard my voice cracked. The shout echoed back to me about a dozen times.

  The eyes didn’t move or blink. They were right at my head-height while I was sitting, so maybe they were some kind of animal? Something the size of a big dog.

  I flung my arms at them and yelled, “Go! Get out of here!”

  The eyes didn’t even flinch.

  My forearm started burning. The tattoo had turned bright red, working on healing my sprained ankle.

  I pushed up until I got my good leg under me, then I stood on it, just barely letting the sprained foot touch down. Pain flared up the leg. That was not going to bear weight for a good while.

  There was nothing down there to use as a weapon but rocks from previous cave-ins. I grabbed one the size of a pool ball and cocked it back, ready to launch.

  The eyes were still in the exact same place.

  I hobbled forward, my free hand on the wall of the cave.

  No reaction from the eyes.

  I passed under the hole, temporarily blocking the rays of blue-white sunlight from outside.

  You know how sometimes when there’s light shining into a dark space, you can’t see anything but what the light touches until you block some of the glare? When my body blocked the light from outside, I finally got a look at the creature the eyes were attached to.

  And all the rest of the creatures back there with it.

  Mummies. At least fifty of them, probably more, all huddled back in that passageway. Some were sitting, others were sprawled on the floor or curled up in fetal positions, and one really fat one was slumped forward with his chin on his chest. Kids were curled up in parents’ laps, adults clutched each other or babies, one even had a little thing that might’ve been a tiny dog or a huge rat cradled in its arms.

  All of them except one were seated facing away from me, staring into the blackness of the shaft like they were waiting for something. Only a baby, hanging over what I guessed was its mom’s shoulder, was looking my direction. His open eyes caught the glare of sunlight and shined as if the desiccation process had turned his corneas to glass.

  I shivered and hobbled forward a few more paces. When I got closer, I could see the glassy parts of the baby’s eyes were just shiny crusts, like a solidified bubble. There was nothing behind the shiny crust but empty eye socket.

  Why were they down here? I looked down the blackness of the passageway in front of them. Had they all been looking that way because something had been chasing them, or was this some kind of mass human sacrifice?

  “Yo, indenture!” Proboscis’s high-pitched tooting voice made my heart stop. “You still alive down there?”

  I swallowed.

  “Yeah,” I called back. “Just a sprained ankle. I’m fine.”

  “Well, don’t expect it to get you out of work. You’ve got healing script in your OSS tat just like everybody else.”

  A knotted rope dropped down.

  I limped over. “I can’t climb up. My ankle’s still healing.”

  Proboscis sighed so loud that I could hear him down there.

  “Just grab on,” he called.

  I wrapped it around my forearm. “Ready.”

  Dust and dirt skittered down as he dragged me up. When I got back out in the brilliant light of day, another indentured servant was going through the pockets of the two ferals I hadn’t searched yet. The OSS wasn’t going to miss out on any loot on my account.

  “What was it,” Proboscis asked me, “an old mine shaft or something?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him, but stopped myself at the last second. I could give the mysterious mass grave up to the OSS, who had so far all been a bunch of dicks...

  ...or I could bring Kest and Rali back here with me later.

  “Nah, I think it’s a karst,” I said. At Proboscis’s blank look, I explained, “There probably used to be water running through here, hollowing out some of the rock. Might be hollow spots all over this area.”

  “Great,” Proboscis muttered. “Plenty of spaces for ferals to hide. Did you at least manage to bring the loot satchel up with you, or are you going back in the hole?”

  I held up the bag.

  “Take it to Bera,” he said, waving a hand toward the snake-lady on the hill. “As soon as your ankle can bear weight, grab a crate and start hauling Spirit jade. I want that whole vein back to Muta’i before night sun high.”

  I waited until I was facing away from him to let the smile out. A trip carrying Spirit stone back to town would give me plenty of time to message Kest.

  Sneaking into a Mass Grave

  “DID YOU TRY CULTIVATING there?” Kest asked as we climbed the first of the low hills near the dig site that evening. “Underground with a bunch of untouched corpses, surrounded by corpses on top of the ground—the Mortal Spirit should be extra concentrated.”

  “I didn’t think about it,” I said.

  “A mass, unmarked grave,” Rali said. “Did it look like they’d been killed and tossed down the hole?”

  I shook my head. “They were just sitting there. Like maybe they went in to wait and then just sort of...died.”

  The black lace in Rali’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Ominous. This might turn into a haunted adventure.”

  Already the shadows were elongating and turning that weird orangey-magenta color. I’d spent the whole afternoon hauling rocks before Proboscis and the snake-haired lady had finally cut the whole crew loose for the day. Muta’i hadn’t had anything else for me to do when I checked in, so I’d bolted over to Kest and Rali’s, and we’d taken off into the wilderness.

  When we got there, the dig site was deserted. I retraced the feral corpses to the hill cluster I’d fallen through.

  Kest turned on the wristlight of her HUD and checked the cavern.

  “Not too deep,” she said.

  “About twenty feet and a sprained ankle.” I twisted my wrist around, inspecting the Winchester. Turned out I had a light, too, in almost the same place. I clicked it on and off a couple times.

  “If you know Swallowing the Universe, you should try it now,” Rali told me, breathing a little hard from the climb up the hillside. “And keep doing it while we’re down there.”

  Kest looked at him. “I thought you hated those corporate-invented exercises.”

  “I do,” he said, leaning on his walking stick. “They’re soulless and mass-produced, and they don’t take into account the individual. But they’re also easier for a beginner like Hake to do while he’s walking around. Plus, since he already knows about it, I won’t have to waste breath explaining. You guys might not’ve noticed this because I look so fit, but I just hauled twice either of your weight up that hill.”

  “A Bud
dha bod,” I said.

  “What’s a Buddha bod?”

  “Where I’m from, Buddha’s an immortal who really liked good food. He didn’t have your full, luscious mane, though.” I nodded at Rali’s long hair.

  Rali flipped it over his shoulder. “One does what one can.”

  One at a time, we climbed down on Kest’s smallest scavenging ladder, our wristlights bouncing around inside the cave.

  I half expected the mummies to be gone, maybe discovered by Proboscis while I was hauling rock, but they were all still huddled down there. The baby’s eyes glinted when my light shined across them.

  “So, what do you guys think?” I asked once we were all on solid ground again.

  Kest eyed the walls of the cave. “Looks like an old mine shaft. The timbers haven’t rotted, so the humidity and organisms must be keeping to a minimum down here, which the desiccation of the remains supports.” She took a step toward the mummies. “Wonder what they were mining...”

  “Wait,” Rali said.

  She froze. “What?”

  I looked around for some kind of monster or Indiana Jones–style trap.

  But Rali got down on his knees facing the mummies and bowed his face to the cave floor, his black hair hanging in a curtain around his head.

  “Thank you for allowing us into your final resting place, honored ancestors,” he said in a low voice. “Please excuse our trespass. We mean no disrespect.”

  “You never do that when I’m scavenging in the Shut-Ins,” Kest muttered, crossing her arms.

  Rali got back to his feet and dusted his knees and face off. “It’s mostly criminals and gangsters in the Shut-Ins. These people don’t feel like either.”

  “Can you feel that with Spirit?” I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t bother,” Kest said, crouching beside the mother with the baby. “He won’t explain. He thinks it’s cool to act mysterious.”

  “You can’t quantify hunches,” Rali said.

  “I can.” Kest pointed at the mom’s silky gold-and-blue robe. “This style of robes. I’ll have to research how to tell if they’re authentic, but they look like something from the Colonization Era.”