Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) (17 page)

“Oliver
Jones,” the lizard man said, a forked tongue darting out from between his
teeth. “My mistress is eager to meet you.”

The
sight of the forked tongue was too much for Oliver. He didn’t want to. He tried
to stop it. But despite himself, he began to laugh.

Chapter 18

Oliver
realized two things almost immediately. The first was that he was laughing at
what was essentially a monster bent on murdering him. That couldn’t be
especially wise. The second was that he didn’t recognize his own laugh anymore.
The sound coming out of his mouth was high-pitched and had an element of
hysteria in it that he’d never heard before. This was what laughter in an
asylum must sound like, he thought. It was the laughter of a madman.

“Oh my
god,” Oliver managed to say. He was nearly out of breath and had leaned forward
to rest his hands on his knees. 

The
lizard man tilted his head curiously. “What is it?”

“Captain
Kirk called,” Oliver said. “He wants his diamonds back.” Then he was laughing
again.

The
Kalatari’s expression darkened. He looked accusingly at the flight attendant.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Why is he laughing?”

The
other man shrugged. “Shock?” he suggested. Oliver heard the jet’s engines
beginning to spin up and the plane lurched forward. He nearly had himself under
control when something else caught his eye and he began to laugh again.

“Look at
you,” he said, pointing down. “You’re wearing shoes!” Oliver turned to the
flight attendant. “Look at his little shoes!” he said.

The
Kalatari looked down at his own feet in confusion. “They’re Ferragamo,” he
said.

“Is there
a section at Macy’s for lizards?” 

“He’s
addled,” the Kalatari said with a disgusted expression. “
This
is the
Destroyer?”

“Perhaps
the Matriarch was wrong,” said the flight attendant.

The
lizard man’s hand disappeared into his jacket and emerged an instant later in a
flicking motion. Oliver gasped. A short knife was now embedded firmly in the
flight attendant’s throat. The other man made a strangled sound as blood
spurted from his wound, and then he collapsed to the floor.

“The
Matriarch is never wrong,” the Kalatari told Oliver, who found he had suddenly
recovered from his unwelcome fit of laughter.

Oliver
hadn’t noticed the jet’s rapidly increasing acceleration, and he stumbled a
step forward as they lifted off. He braced himself on one of the seats.
“Careful,” the lizard man said. “Sit down.”

Oliver
sat. “Put this on,” the lizard man said, handing him a zip tie. “Around your
wrists. Fasten it tightly.”

Oliver
looked around the jet’s interior. “Where would I really run to?” he asked the
Kalatari.  “We’re in the air.”

“My
orders are to bring you in alive. I don’t want you panicking and trying to
fight me. You might get hurt by accident.”

Oliver
looped the zip tie around his wrists and pulled it shut with his teeth. “If I
haven’t panicked yet, I don’t think I’m going to start now,” he noted.

The
lizard man tugged at Oliver’s wrists to make sure he was bound securely. “You
never know,” he said. Then went up the aisle to where the flight attendant had
fallen. He knelt down and pulled at his knife until it came free. The Kalatari
sniffed the other man’s blood on the blade the way some people sniffed at wine,
then licked the blood off of it. Oliver shuddered. That
was
kind of
disgusting, but hardly enough to make him panic after what he’d seen in the
past two days.

Then the
lizard man raised the knife and drove it deep into the other man’s abdomen.
Oliver winced at the sight. “I think you got him,” he said to the Kalatari.

The
lizard man was making a sawing motion with the knife, opening a long wound.
“He’s still warm.”

“So?”

The
lizard man dug his claws savagely into the wound and rooted around for a moment,
emerging with the flight attendant’s liver. “Some things should be eaten warm,”
he said.

Oliver
suppressed the urge to throw up as the lizard took a bite out of the liver and
chewed it. “An alcoholic,” the lizard said thoughtfully. “Makes the liver a bit
of an acquired taste, but I don’t mind.”  He rose and took the seat across the
aisle from Oliver, still munching on the liver. “Feel like panicking yet?” he
asked.

“I’m
okay,” Oliver lied.

The
lizard man shrugged. “If you say so.”

The
plane had leveled off. “How did you find me?” Oliver asked. “The credit cards?
Was that it?”

“No,”
the lizard man said thoughtfully. “Although that would have worked as well. We
simply followed your friends back there. When they got on this plane, we
weren’t far behind. And then they were nice enough to go pick you up for us, so
we decided we’d just wait here for them.”

“Oh.”
Oliver thought about it for a moment. “That sounds incredibly easy, actually.”

“It
was.”

“So
where are we going?” Oliver asked.

“San
Francisco,” the Kalatari said. “I will deliver you to my Matriarch at our
temple there, and she will deal with you.”

“Deal
with?” Oliver asked.

“Kill
and eat, I expect.”

That
sounded less than ideal, Oliver thought. But as much as he hadn’t wanted to be
captured, maybe he could bring something good out of this moment. He finally
had a chance to explain the situation to the people who had actually been
pursuing him. “Look,” he began. “This has all been some kind of mistake. I had
never heard of you people until a few days ago. I would never even have
imagined you existed. I can’t possibly be this ‘Destroyer’ of yours. I’m just
someone who works in an office and eats microwave dinners.”

“Really?”
the lizard man asked. He shrugged. “Okay, I’ll just let you go.”

“You
will?”

“Of
course not. By Vashka, you really are addled.”

“I’m not
addled.” Oliver shrugged. “Or maybe I am. I’m not convinced this isn’t all some
kind of delusion. Maybe I was hit by a car crossing the street and I have a
brain injury.”

“That I
could believe,” the Kalatari said.

“If I
could talk to your matriarch, I’m sure I could clear all this up.”

“Perhaps
you could,” the lizard man said. “I admit it is hard to see you as the
destroyer of my race. You seem too inept to tie your own shoelaces.”

“So you
think she’ll let me go?”

The
lizard man shook his head. “You will have the opportunity to speak. The
Matriarch will expect you to beg. You might convince her you are not the person
she is seeking.”

“But
that would mean she was wro…” Oliver stopped, not wanting to take a knife in
the throat.

“The
mistake would have been mine,” the Kalatari explained, “in bringing her the
wrong person. In which case I would die for my error, and you would die because
my people will be needing a snack.”

“Oh,”
said Oliver. Maybe no good was going to come out of his capture after all.

The
cockpit door opened and the heavyset man emerged, starting violently at the
sight of the eviscerated flight attendant. He looked at Oliver accusingly, but
the Kalatari held up the half-eaten liver for him to see. The man looked as if
he wanted to say something, but merely bowed his head.

“What is
it?” the lizard man asked.

“Chief
Minister, we will land in five and a half hours.”

“Thank
you. That will be all.”

The
other man glanced at Oliver again, then went back into the cockpit. Oliver
heard the door latch behind him.

What had
he said? “You’re Chief Minister?” Oliver asked.

“Oh,”
the lizard man said. “I had meant to introduce myself earlier, but you were
being an idiot. I am Orris Rin, Chief Minister to the Matriarch of the
Kalatari. Nice to meet you.” He took another bite of the liver.

“Any
relation to Sathis Rin?” Oliver asked, remembering the heart Mr. Teasdale had
presented him with earlier.

“My
hatch-brother. Chief Minister until just recently.” The lizard’s brow arched
curiously. “You knew him?”

“No, not
really,” Oliver said. Sally had taken Sathis Rin’s heart along with her,
thinking Artemis might have some use for it. He didn’t see the need to share
that fact with his captor.

The
Kalatari finished eating the flight attendant’s liver and belched softly,
covering his mouth.  “Excuse me,” he said.  He glanced curiously at Oliver.
“Why aren’t you afraid?”

“Pardon?”

“Why
aren’t you afraid? You just saw me eat a human liver. You just saw
me
,
for that matter. And I am about to deliver you to my mistress, who will
certainly kill you. Why don’t you cry? Why don’t you beg? I thought perhaps you
were too stupid to understand your situation, like one of your docile cows
walking into the slaughterhouse, but that clearly isn’t the case.”

Tyler
had asked something similar earlier, Oliver remembered. He still wasn’t sure of
the answer.  Oliver shrugged. “I was at first, when this started,” he said. “I
think.”
Had
he been frightened? He wasn’t so sure now. He had
reacted
,
of course, but now he couldn’t remember if he had felt real fear.

“And
now?”

“Now it
just seems normal,” Oliver said. “It’s almost like…like I expected all of
this.”

The
Kalatari considered that. “Interesting,” he said.  “You must watch a lot of
television.”

“Too
much, I guess.”

“It was
funny, by the way. Earlier.”

“What?”

“The
Gorn reference. Kirk wants his diamonds back. Funny. Not hilarious, but funny.”

“Oh. You
didn’t think it was mean?”

“Not
really. The Gorn would have torn Kirk apart, of course, but it was only a
television show.”

“Yeah.”

“Making
fun of my shoes was mean.”

“Oh.
Well, sorry about that.”

“Forget
it. I am going to be eating you later, after all.”  The lizard man shrugged. 
“You should get some rest, Mr. Jones. We will be landing before you know it.”

“Yeah,”
Oliver said. He sighed. And then this would all be over. He would be dead in a
few short hours.

But he
still wasn’t afraid, he noticed. 

Why
wasn’t he afraid?

Chapter 19

Oliver
woke up as the jet began its descent. He was more than a little surprised that
he had somehow dozed off, given the precarious circumstances he had found
himself in. Events of the past few days must have taken a toll on him, he
thought. He had been drugged into unconsciousness twice within the span of a
few hours. That had to have been rough on his system. Even now he felt nauseous
again, and for a moment he could hear the sound of rushing water in his ears.
What was causing that sound? Every time he heard it something bizarre seemed to
happen.

He
looked around.  Nothing bizarre was happening at the moment, aside from the
fact that he had been kidnapped by a talking lizard man and was being flown to
his almost certain death. Aside from
that
, everything was normal. It was
interesting how quickly one’s perspective on normalcy could change, he thought.

Orris
Rin was still seated next to him, but now he was munching on what looked to
Oliver like the remains of a kidney. “We’ll be landing soon,” the lizard man
said.

Oliver
peered out of the window. He could make out a city through the clouds below,
but it wasn’t one he recognized.  “That isn’t San Francisco.”

“Change
of plans,” the lizard man said. “Your friends beat us to San Francisco.”

That was
impossible, Oliver thought. How could they have possibly found another plane
that quickly? And then they’d managed to not only catch up to them, but pass
them in the air and land first? He frowned. Tyler had said they had connections
everywhere, but such speeds would have required military cooperation. Had Tyler
and Sally gotten their hands on an Air Force jet?

“Why are
you so important to them?” the Kalatari asked. 

“I don’t
know,” Oliver said truthfully. “I think Artemis likes me because…well, because
I’m a curiosity to her. She doesn’t know what to make of me, so she wants to
keep me alive until she figures it out.” That sounded about right. He’d only met
the odd little girl once. She certainly wasn’t helping him out of some kind of
affection.

“That
makes you either very lucky, or very unlucky,” the lizard man noted.

“Story
of my life,” Oliver said.

The
plane banked sharply. Orris Rin frowned. “Wait here.” He went into the cockpit
and Oliver could hear raised voices. Then the lizard man returned to his seat,
his expression dark. That could only have been bad news, Oliver knew.

“What
happened?” Oliver asked.

“Shut up,”
the lizard man said. He leaned over and tugged at the zip tie still fastened
around Oliver’s wrists, but found it secure.

“I
haven’t gone anywhere,” Oliver said. “Nowhere to go. What’s going on?”

The
Kalatari stared sullenly out the window. “Sally Rain attacked our temple.”

“Oh?”
Had Tyler been with her? What was going on? “Is she all right?” Oliver asked.
The lizard man turned to glare at him. “Sorry,” Oliver said. “I mean, are your
people all right?”

“They
are not,” Orris Rin said. “She killed a dozen of my brothers and burned our
temple to the ground.”

“Wow.”
Oliver didn’t know the woman very well, but he had to admit that sounded like
something she would do.