Death Cultivator Read online

  I hesitated on the threshold. It felt like something awful was waiting just outside the shuttle’s gaping mouth for me, like once I stepped out there, I’d never be able to get back home to Gramps.

  I turned to the bulldog. “Is there like a passenger manifest? I’m really not supposed to be here. I promise.”

  He pulled back the hammer on his MegaBlaster and pointed the business end right between my eyes.

  I stuck my hands up and kept walking.

  The heat hit me like a fist. Immediately, sweat started running down my back. A hot breeze blew through, gluing my shirt and red sand to my sweaty skin. I squinted against the sandblasting and the murderous sunlight.

  There were two suns hanging in the sky. A huge white fiery one that looked close enough to touch, and a distant pale blue one. And when I turned around, there was another sun, a weird black one with an orangey-magenta corona, just barely sticking up over the horizon.

  No freaking wonder it was so hot.

  Flat, red dirt stretched out for miles in every direction, broken up by nothing but silvery heat distortions and mirages of dancing water. Not a tree or hill in sight. The only shade was cast by the shuttle we’d just climbed out of.

  And when I say shuttle, I mean spaceship. Not like NASA, but like a little Twinkie-shaped thing all scuffed and patched and sitting on six pairs of legs tipped with wheels.

  All around the shuttle, the aliens—or criminals, I guess, depending on who you asked—were tapping these huge watches on their arms with screens the size of a smartphone.

  “This ain’t none of the usual dropoffs,” a squid alien said to the shuttle driver. “Where we at, boss?”

  “They’re having some weather down in the southern hemisphere,” the bulldog grunted. He let his MegaBlaster dangle from its strap, one hand stabilizing it while he pulled a red cigarette out of his duster with his other hand. He didn’t light the cigarette, but the end started smoking as soon as he took the first puff. “Had to fly around. This is the only raincheck point the Confederated Planetary Authority has listed for this side of Van Diemann. New Iron Hills should be about fifty miles east, across the Rust Flats. There’s a closer settlement in the opposite direction, on the other side of the Shut-Ins, but you’d break your neck getting to it.”

  “Cain’t be much,” the squid said, holding one of his tentacles up in front of his folded face. He poked at a watch the size of a paperback book. “It don’t even show up on the map.”

  “Not worth the risk,” the zebra lady said. She flipped her cape of rubbery white head skin over her shoulder and turned the way the bulldog had said was east. “New Iron Hills is the best bet.” She smirked from me to the redheaded guy with the prosthetic leg. “If you can survive the radiation, neh?”

  “Worry about yourself, Pilonian,” the redhead snapped at her. “Humans can survive anything.”

  That set off just about everybody within hearing distance. Whoops and gurgles and snorts of laughter, along with a round of insistence that “every human squishes if you squeeze ’em hard enough” and “don’t start with that meat roach nonsense here, boy.”

  The guy with the elf ears and slanted cat-eyes stepped up toe-to-toe with the redhead. I wasn’t tall, five-seven when I stood up straight, and at sixteen I still had my fingers crossed for another growth spurt. The redhead had to be close to six foot, but this elf was a head and shoulders taller than him.

  “I know your face, human,” the elf said. “You’re a Thompson. From Qaspar-7.”

  The redhead’s hands balled into fists, and he stood up taller, facing the elf down. “You musta worked for me ma, then, along with everyone else on that planet. How’d ya like it, groveling to one of the humans who sent you pointy-eared ponsers running?”

  The elf’s eyes narrowed.

  “You didn’t send us anywhere, roach,” the elf growled, bumping chests with him. “Your elders tried, but all they managed in the end was to lose the war, the system, and the respect of every planet in the Confederation.”

  “The Confederation proper screwed us. Too much Ylef money coming in to do right. No way you trash coulda beat us fair.” He shoved the elf.

  The elf jumped at the redhead.

  This fight was a lot faster and bloodier than the ones in the movies. The elf hooked a big right at the redhead, his long arm glowing with blue light. The redhead’s upper body caught fire—literally, it whooshed up like a gas-soaked brush pile—and he slammed out a flaming red block followed by a kick to the elf’s gut with his prosthetic. When the elf doubled over, the redhead rocked him back with a burning uppercut to the jaw.

  There was a nasty crunch as the elf went down. I’d been too caught up in watching the punches to realize it, but the redhead had been standing on the elf’s foot the whole time, pinning him in place. One more solid shot to the chin knocked the elf out cold.

  Nobody seemed too shocked. For the most part, the aliens who hadn’t left yet were just messing around on their big watches, not paying attention.

  The big slug, though, was like, “I got all of that! This is so going on FightScreen.”

  “Good,” the redhead snarled. “I want the Big Five to know Warcry Thompson is here and ready for recruitment by the time I get to New Iron Hills.”

  “You should not go to New Iron Hills, human,” said the zebra lady, nodding down at the elf guy. “’Less you want to fight many more Ylef.”

  The redhead—Warcry—wiped some blood off his knuckles onto his shirt. “Maybe I do.”

  “Are you that Warcry Thompson?” the slug asked, raising one eyestalk higher than the other. “Two-time Intergalactic Fighting League Under-18 Champ?”

  “Forget the IFL,” the squid guy gurgled, pointing a tentacle at Warcry. “You’re Emmie the Annihilator Thompson’s son. She’s a legend on Guvo. Her and the Meat Roaches led the first human uprising in the system. They held off the Ylefs for six weeks straight with nothing but a dozen stolen gunships.”

  Warcry rolled his eyes. “Sure, and she’s a saint for it.”

  Whatever the squid said back was drowned out by this loud, skirling whine cutting across the Rust Flats. Red dust billowed up behind a tiny silvery fleck in the distance that became an enormous rusty chopper-style motorcycle with tractor-tire-sized wheels.

  The chopper skidded to a stop, throwing up a lungful of sand and dust, making everybody yell with irritation. Except the slug. He slithered over to the chopper and climbed on behind a shark guy. The shark revved it up, and they were gone in another ear-busting, sand-throwing second.

  Pretty soon, the air was full of whines and whooshes and zooming sounds. Transportation arriving to pick up the waiting aliens one by one.

  I frowned.

  “Do I need to call somebody?” I asked the zebra lady. “I don’t have one of those watch things. I’m not from this—” I tried to think of the right word. “—galaxy, universe, anything. I’m not from here.”

  She grinned, showing big flat teeth that looked like they should be chewing grass.

  “We already in one of the Five,” she said. “You a member of the Big Five, human?”

  “Is the Big Five a gang? I’m not in a gang, I—”

  “Hmm, complicated.” She sucked her big teeth. “You die ’less you get in a gang.” Then she looked me up and down. “But maybe I help you.”

  “How?”

  “I bring you with me to Jianjiao sect. Get you bed, food, clean, safe. Sounds good, neh?”

  I might’ve been in a different galaxy, but I wasn’t stupid.

  “In return for what?”

  She turned her eyes up like she was thinking about it, but you could tell it was just an act. She already knew what she was going to say. This wasn’t her first rodeo.

  “Only one year,” she said.

  “One year of what?”

  “You serve me for one year.”

  My face twisted up. “Screw that!”

  “One year, it isn’t so much on Van Diemann. Your sentence is h
ow long?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not a criminal. I’m not joining a gang.”

  She shrugged. “If you change your mind, you find me in New Iron Hills.”

  Then she took off running east. After she got a few yards away, her arms stretched out until they were as long as her legs, and she dropped to all fours and galloped away.

  Freaky. Even compared to everything else I’d seen in the last twenty-four hours.

  The Shut-Ins

  I LOOKED AROUND AND realized it was just me, the shuttle-driving bulldog, and the unconscious elf left. The rest of the aliens were gone, picked up by their gangs or running for a city. Warcry, the only other human I’d seen so far, had taken off, too. Probably just as well. Based on the circumstances of our meeting, it didn’t seem like we were going to become best buds anytime soon.

  “Got a plan?” the bulldog guy asked.

  “Me?” I thought about it a second. “Get out of the sun first, then try to find someplace where I can call the authorities. I wasn’t lying earlier. I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Not really my problem,” he said, taking another puff off that cigarette thing. “But if I was looking for someone with the resources to contact people off-planet, I’d get in with one of the Big Five. They get stuff done, even if it’s not supposed to get done here.” He tapped the cigarette on his big watch, which made the cherry disappear, then he stuck it back in his duster. “For shade, the best you’re going to do is the Shut-Ins. But I wouldn’t be caught down there at night.”

  The elf groaned and sat up, holding his ankle and spitting words I didn’t recognize. They didn’t sound nice.

  He looked up, glared when he saw me, and turned to the bulldog.

  “Where’d the meat roach go?”

  The bulldog nodded east. “New Iron Hills, probably. Seemed pretty keen to get affiliated.”

  “Then I’ll have to get there first.” The elf stood up and took a limping step on his ankle.

  When it folded, I winced through my teeth.

  The elf heard me and grinned in a way that made me want to put the shuttle between us.

  “I’m not as squishy as your people,” he said. Blue light shined through his skin, flowing down his body until it wrapped around his ankle. Stuff crackled and popped inside like bubble wrap as the joint straightened out, then frost formed around it. When it was done, he sneered at me. “That’s why Ylefs didn’t lose the war.”

  It was his tone that got to me. Instead of asking what I really wanted to know—like, how he’d done that magic—what came out was, “Sure. Why bother learning how to fight when you can just fix whatever part of you gets beat up?”

  The bulldog snuffled out what might’ve been a laugh.

  Obviously ticked, the elf stalked toward me, baring teeth that looked like he bleached them once a week. His canines stuck out a little farther than the rest, almost like fangs.

  That move Warcry had pulled shot through my head—throw out one arm to block while firing a roundhouse kick at the gut. I got my fists up.

  When he saw that, the elf stopped and pointed a long-nailed finger at me.

  “If you ever show your face in New Iron Hills, I’ll make sure you don’t survive the night.”

  Then he spun around and ran east, long legs eating up the red ground. As I watched, that blue light came back, enveloping his whole body, and he turned into a blue blur.

  I whistled. “Elves can really move.”

  “It’s pronounced Ylef,” the bulldog said, walking back up the ramp into the shuttle. “And if I were you, I think I’d move the other direction.”

  That would definitely be the smartest thing to do. But sometimes when a jerk threatens you, all you want to do is what they said not to. I watched the elf—or Ylef—turn into a dot of blue light on the horizon, distorted by heat waves.

  “If you head north, you can make it to Dust Bowl in a day or so,” the bulldog said. “Humans can absorb water from the air, right?”

  “What?” I shot him a look. “No.”

  “Huh. That must be Selkens.” He shrugged and flipped up the lever in the shuttle. The ramp started folding up. “Well then, I’d get somewhere with something to drink. Down in the Shut-Ins is your best bet, but I’d get in and out fast. Once the night sun rises, they’ll be crawling with chaos creatures.”

  “Chaos creatures?”

  “Hungry ones,” he said.

  His squashed face disappeared as the ramp closed with a clang and a hiss.

  “Thanks,” I said to the back end of the silver Twinkie. “That doesn’t answer my question at all.”

  The shuttle rumbled and started rolling forward. After about ten yards, it rose into the air like a plane taking off even though it didn’t have any wings.

  Once the shuttle disappeared into the sky, I realized I probably should’ve followed everybody else’s example and picked a direction while the thing was still there. With the wind scouring the dusty ground, pretty soon all the footprints and slug trails and wheel tracks were gone, and there were no landmarks in any direction. Just miles and miles of flat red land and watery mirages as far as the eye could see.

  I turned around in a slow circle. Squinting up at the suns didn’t help. I could tell that they’d moved since we landed, but I couldn’t remember where they were in relation to the towns the bulldog guy had mentioned.

  The black sun was creeping higher on my right. More of its curve had peeked over whichever horizon that was. If I just kept that thing at my right side, maybe I could walk in a straight line. That had to be better than wandering in circles.

  Unless a straight line led me halfway between two amazing cities with food and water and a magic portal back to Missouri.

  I tried to work up some spit so I could get the taste of dust out of my mouth. The water I’d had while I was doing my homework felt a million years away.

  I didn’t have any other ideas, so I made sure the black sun was on my right and started walking. Then on second thought, I sped up to a jog. Unless things were super misnamed here, that black orb was probably the “night sun” that made those hungry chaos things come out, and I didn’t want to be hanging around out here all alone when they did.

  The watery mirages pulled back as I ran, always staying a ways ahead of me. My skin was starting to burn under the white sun, and I was sweating up a river. My shirt and jeans stuck to me in weird and annoying places. The wind didn’t do much to help besides glue more dusty red sand to me.

  Being alone with my thoughts wasn’t a whole lot of fun, either. Gramps probably thought I was dead. I hoped he was all right. My eyes got kind of irritated and wet then, which ended up ticking me off worse because I accidentally rubbed sand in one when I tried to wipe them. I knew from Sunday school and praying and stuff that God and I were tight. If that stupid Reaper had just let me talk to Him, if she hadn’t screwed up in the first place and taken me instead of that methhead, O’Grady or whatever...

  I made it another hundred yards before I came to the first indication that I’d picked the wrong direction.

  The heat distortions and silvery waves pulled back to reveal huge gorges crisscrossing the flat ground in front of me. They stretched off for miles to my left and right, cutting across each other and making red islands out of unconnected rock chimneys.

  I slowed down as I came to the edge of the first one. These had to be the Shut-Ins the bulldog had mentioned. I crept up to the edge and looked down. The bottom of my stomach dropped out, and my head got light.

  Usually, I don’t mind heights, but that was a long way down.

  Below, I could see some twisted white-barked trees that were kind of like evergreens, but wispy instead of needled, and a wide stream of crystal blue-green water like you see in the real deep holes in spring-fed rivers. Flood debris had built up in the nooks and crannies, and huge boulders lined the creek.

  Looking at that water and imagining how cold it was made my throat hurt.

  I’d gone
the wrong way for New Iron Hills, but now that I was thinking straight and not just doing stuff to show that elf jerk, I didn’t want to go there anyway. Not only would he probably be there, but that zebra lady would be, too. The bulldog had said the Shut-Ins were west, so I had some idea of where I was now. I could climb down, grab a drink, then get back out, reorient myself, and try for the town the bulldog had mentioned to the north, Dust Bowl.

  I remembered them talking about another place beyond the Shut-Ins. Everybody had seemed pretty unimpressed with it, but maybe since they were all criminals, that was a good sign for someone who didn’t want to be a criminal. The only downside was I couldn’t see any way to get across the Shut-Ins. There were places off in the distance where islands and highways of red ground stretched out between gorges, but this first gap stretched as far as I could see both ways, and it looked like you could drop my high school in and the building wouldn’t get stuck until about halfway down.

  Dust Bowl, then. After a drink.

  I wandered around until I found a halfway decent path down my side of the shut-in to the bottom. There were a couple places where I had to climb out on those wispy evergreens branches and drop to the next ledge down, but I figured when the time came, I’d be able to get back up.

  When I finally made it down to the water, I was so hot and thirsty that I waded right in. Goosebumps covered my whole body, and I immediately started shivering. I dove under before I could chicken out and screamed at the temperature. The noise bubbled out of my nose and mouth in huge water-air balloons.

  I came up for air, teeth chattering, then slapped my wet hair out of my face. Time for a drink. I put my mouth to the surface and started slurping down ice-cold water.

  I don’t think there are words for how refreshing freezing cold water tastes when you’re dehydrated. It even has a smell, and it’s the same on Van Diemann as it is on Earth—freaking beautiful. I drank so much that it made my stomach hurt, but I didn’t care. It was delicious. And not just because I was thirsty. Water tasted exactly the same as it had at home.

  Saying that, it sounds ridiculous—like, obviously water’s water. But after getting dumped on some unrecognizable world with no one and nothing from home but the clothes on my back, it was so comforting to have one thing that was familiar, even if that one thing was just water.