Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (best books to read .TXT) 📕

she jumped on it and started climbing. It jingled and shook with her every move.

Rali and I skidded to a stop beside it, panting and checking over our shoulders.

“After you,” he said, forcing a shaky smile.

The hiss of thrown sand was getting louder. Closer. Something dark and thin flickered along the waterline. I gulped down air and looked again—I couldn’t help it—but I didn’t see anything.

“Go ahead,” I told Rali. “I’ll hold it off.”

“Don’t even try.” He stepped onto the ladder and hauled himself up. “Just follow me as fast as you can.” He laughed. “Climb over me if you have to.”

Something splashed in the creek, and the air temperature plummeted. Now it sounded like someone was pelting sand at a window, tiny pebbles and particles threatening to crack it.

Kest had made it to the top.

“White sun’s still on the horizon,” she yelled down, leaning over the edge on her stomach. A few rays of pale light silhouetted her from behind. “Once you get up here into the daylight, you should be safe.”

I jumped on the ladder behind Rali and kept exactly one inch from bumping into his butt the whole way up. The flinging sand sounds stopped, but a new one started almost immediately. This one was like the sound you hear inside your head when you scratch your scalp. Kind of bristly.

I had to look back. Just to see.

A spindly leg disappeared under a ledge. The bristling stopped.

“Holy crap.” I looked up at Rali, then back down. “Can you go any faster?”

“I tried to let you go up first,” he panted.

The bristling started up again, all around me this time, and shadows flickered along both sides of me.

“Shut your eyes!” Kest yelled down.

“Yeah, right!” I yelled back, trying to look directly at them. Wherever my eyes went, the sounds from that side stopped, but I wasn’t fast enough to keep them both from moving. “If I can keep watching them—”

“Then they’ll get you from the other direction; those things’re just their shadows!” Kest let out a loud grunt, and when I looked up, she was hauling her brother onto solid ground. “Come on! Just concentrate on climbing. Everything else is a trap.”

Rali pulled himself up over the edge.

I still had five more rungs to go. My arms were shaking, and I felt like I was going to let go or slip, but I kept grabbing for the next one and pulling myself up.

The bristling got louder.

Kest and Rali both leaned over the edge and stretched an arm down to grab me. I wanted to look back so bad, but I was so close. Just three rungs now.

It sounded like the bristling was right in my ear.

Two rungs left.

I felt something graze the left calf of my jeans.

“Jump!” the twins both yelled.

With my legs, I shoved off the rung as hard as I could and grabbed for their hands. I missed Kest, but Rali locked onto my wrist and started pulling. Kest scooted over beside him and grabbed on, too.

I kicked and scraped at the cliff face with my sneakers, breaking off pieces of rock and sending them tumbling back down. I swear I heard some hit a hairy surface close behind me. Then my head popped up over the edge of the cliff and pale gray light hit my face. My chest grated over the uneven lip of rock, then my stomach, and finally with one last heave from the twins, my legs.

Rali and Kest dropped into the sandy red dirt, but I kept moving. I scrambled away from the edge on my hands and knees, then stumbled up to my feet and ran. I didn’t slow down until there was fifty feet between me and that crack in the ground.

Rali dusted himself off. “It’s okay, they don’t come out of the Shut-Ins.”

“I’m good here,” I called back.

Kest stood up and hefted her bag onto her shoulder. “It’s getting late. Time for us to head home.”

Rali nudged her, then jerked his head at me.

“Oh, right.” She turned to me. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

I shook my head. “But if you point me toward town, I can find a place.”

“As much as I admire the self-sufficient sentiment and despise judging someone based on monetary systems,” Rali said, “I have to point out that you’re not going to find a place here unless you’re part of the local gang or have some hidden store of credits that I’m not seeing.”

I tried to think of a way around that, but before I could come up with anything, Kest said, “You’d better stay with us.”

I stuck my hands in my back pockets. I didn’t have any money or anything of value on me. They’d said they weren’t criminals or with one of the gangs, but I still didn’t like the idea of taking something for nothing. Especially from people who had to pull fillings out of dead bodies just to make ends meet.

“Just for tonight,” I said. “I’ll pay you back somehow.”

Rali laughed. “Hospitality is repaid in the acceptance, Hake. Pay up.”

Ghost Town

THE WINDING TRIP ACROSS the top of the Shut-Ins was nerve-wracking. I could feel stuff watching us from below, but I never saw anything directly. The shadows and flickers and weird noises kept up, but eventually I got so tired of trying to keep track of them that I started tuning them out. The twins seemed pretty exhausted, too. We didn’t talk much on the way.

After a while, we left the dark ravines behind and started traveling across flat open ground. A little town full of squared-off false fronts and dusty streets appeared ahead. The shadow of a water tower poked up at the end of town.

“Is this Dust Bowl?” I asked, nodding toward it.

Kest shook her head. “Ghost Town. Dust Bowl’s half a day that way.”

“You guys live in a ghost town?” I asked.

“Nah, Ghost Town’s what everybody calls it,” Rali said. “The original builders were miners from back during the Outer Planet Rush, but they