Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1)

by Matthew Storm

  The rest of the trip passed in silence until they reached Pease, which was a small general aviation airport used by tiny propeller-driven planes and small jets. Oliver did spot a large FedEx terminal with larger planes and recalled hearing somewhere that FedEx had the second largest fleet of airplanes in the world. He wondered if that were really true, or where he’d heard it. Perhaps on the Travel Channel.

  Oliver sighed. Had he learned everything he knew from late-night television? If he did live through this, he was definitely going to change his life. Forget taking a cooking class; he’d take ten classes. Maybe he’d get another degree and try to find a job he actually liked. The dull life he’d been living for so long just wouldn’t work for him anymore.

  Tyler directed the taxi driver to a small Learjet parked near a tiny hangar. Oliver wondered what their group’s operating budget was like. This couldn’t have been cheap. “Is this your plane?” he asked.

  “It’s a charter,” Sally said. “We have our own plane, but it’s in the shop.”

  “Oh. Maintenance?”

  “No,” Tyler shook his head, looking at Sally. “Someone crashed it.”

  “Shut up,” Sally grumbled.

  Tyler gave the driver his fare and a very excessive tip. He stretched luxuriously after the cab had driven off. “It’s a clear night,” he said, looking up at the sky. “You guys ready to check out the stars?”

  “Is it a full moon?” Oliver asked. “We could be in some trouble if you wolf out on us up there.”

  Sally laughed as Tyler scowled. “That’s not funny,” he said.

  “You’re all right, Oliver,” Sally admitted. “I’m glad I didn’t shoot you earlier.”

  “Thanks,” Oliver said. “I guess.”

  Tyler looked at Oliver appraisingly. “It’s funny how well you’re taking this, Oliver,” Tyler said.

  “What?”

  “All of this,” Tyler said. “Every crazy thing that has happened to you in the last two days. If you think about it, your whole world has been torn apart.”

  “True,” Sally said.

  “It’s not that I expected you to go catatonic,” Tyler continued, “but I don’t mind telling you, when it was my life being turned upside down, I didn’t do so well.”

  “Yeah, but you were turning into a dog,” Sally grinned. “That would get to anybody.”

  Tyler looked at her for a long moment. “You know something?” he asked, and Oliver could hear emotion in his voice. “It’s really nice to see you smile again.”

  Sally opened her mouth to say something, but shut it again abruptly. She looked away and for the briefest of moments Oliver thought he saw her bottom lip tremble, but then it was gone. “We should go,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tyler nodded.

  There was a removable metal staircase laid out with steps leading up to the jet’s open door. Oliver stepped up first. He had to admit he liked the idea of just flying around for a while. Unless the Kalatari had access to fighter planes or missiles, there was probably no safer place he could be.

  A sharply dressed flight attendant smiled at him as he stepped into the cabin. “Good evening, Mr. Jones,” he said. “Right down there, please.” He motioned to the row of seats behind him. The jet had seating capacity for perhaps ten people, with one seat on each side of a narrow aisle. There was nobody else visible in the plane. Oliver assumed that the pilots must already be in the cockpit. Not a bad setup, he thought. They had brought along a flight attendant? He wondered if they had snacks as well. Oliver had missed out on dinner. Skipping mealtimes seemed to be becoming a habit.

  “Hey, who the hell are you?” he heard Tyler asking behind him. Oliver turned around and saw that the flight attendant was now brandishing two pistols. One was pointed out the door at where Tyler was presumably standing on the stairs, and the other was pointed directly at Oliver himself. “Nobody move,” the flight attendant said.

  The cockpit door swung open and a heavyset man in jeans emerged holding a shotgun. He did not look like a pilot, Oliver observed. The man pointed his weapon out the door. “Get back,” he shouted at Tyler. “Back now!”

  There was some commotion on the stairs that Oliver couldn’t see. The heavyset man lowered his weapon and seized the door handle. He pulled the door shut with a loud grunt. Oliver was trapped inside with them now. His friends wouldn’t be able to do anything to help him.

  “Well done,” said a new voice from just behind Oliver. Oliver turned and was nearly struck mute by what he saw. A man, if that was the right word, stood there, having just emerged from the rear lavatory. He’d probably been hiding back there, Oliver realized. The man was roughly Oliver’s height, and had roughly the same proportions. Two arms. Two legs. One head. But the head was hairless, with leathery, dark green skin covered by small, tightly overlapping scales. He had yellow eyes with black, vertical pupils. The man had no nose, but a rounded muzzle in its place with two vertical slits where nostrils might have been. As he smiled Oliver could see that his mouth was full of small, jagged teeth.

  “Take off,” the lizard man nodded to the man with the shotgun. Oliver watched as the heavyset man disappeared back into the cockpit, shutting the door behind him.

  “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 ord
ers 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 some
thing 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.