Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (knowledgeable books to read .txt) 📗

Everybody else, eyes peeled for more.”

Running feet pounded the hillside, and I saw the snake-haired lady and a couple of the other hooligans shift positions around the hole. I craned my neck, trying to see over the edge.

“Mind your work and the hooligans’ll mind theirs,” Proboscis said, shoving me back toward the jade vein.

That sounded an awful lot like The Spirit stone’s more important than you. I squeezed the handle of my pickaxe harder and went back to hacking away at the rock. I couldn’t keep from looking over my shoulder, though. Especially when I heard the grunting and growling getting closer.

“That’s half a day’s pay, New Meat,” the snake-haired lady yelled at Warcry. “If I have to come over there, it’s half a week’s. Kill it and move on to the next.”

Between swings, I glanced over at the cat guy working next to me.

“What are ferals?”

“Mindless things that were once prisoners, now twisted by fallout poisons in the deepest parts of the wastes,” he said, flicking a bit of dirt away from one ear. “They hunger for unspoiled meat.” He looked up at me with his slitted pupils and smirked. “Unspoiled meat like us.”

Up top, it sounded like a street fight. The smack of fists on meat, growling, yelling, and even some metal and wood banging together. I recognized the baseball bat ring of Warcry’s prosthetic.

“Eyes on your work,” snapped Proboscis.

I chipped off another piece of white stone and waited to be overrun by some kind of rotting zombie monster from a post-apocalyptic video game.

“They smell us,” the cat guy said as he worked his pick. “We send their mouths watering like the finest foods in all of the universe. And when they get to us, they do not kill. They eat alive what they want now, then take the rest back to their hovels to feed on a little at a time.”

I tried to pretend like he wasn’t freaking me out, but I must’ve broadcasted it somehow because the cat grinned and kept talking.

“I once met a prisoner of the ferals who escaped. Human, like you. He had no meat on his arm between the hand and shoulder, and his belly was eaten to the organs. His mind was so broken from his captivity that he nibbled off bits of his own rotting hand-flesh.” The cat chuckled like that was funny. “He would eat nothing else.”

Someone out on the hillside screamed, and there was this tearing sound that might’ve been a throat being ripped out with mutant zombie teeth.

It might’ve been a lot of other things, too, but as amped up as my nerves were getting from listening to the cat’s stories, all I could imagine was somebody’s throat.

Beside me, the cat’s eyes glinted. “One less hooligan watching our backs.”

I tried to swallow, but my throat was too dry. I suddenly had to pee super bad.

Oh crap, was that sound something chewing?

A hand thumped me in the back of the head. My heart tried to rip out of my chest and run for it.

“Dig!” Proboscis shouted. “Stop again and I’ll chop off your arms and throw them to the ferals myself. Not like you’re using them.”

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