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

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