Shortly after liftoff, Tyler sat down across from him in one of the jet’s lounge chairs. They’d taken the firm’s private plane to the assignment. It was an impressive piece of machinery, resembling the Concorde, but it was a good size smaller. It could also do Mach 3 if needed, and had enough hidden weaponry to take out a small squadron of fighter jets if it ever came to that. They’d had to hire a new pilot to work on a contract basis; neither Oliver nor Tyler could fly, and their last pilot…was a point of contention. The new pilot, Daniel Vega, had debts and an alcohol problem that made him unemployable. He kept his head down and didn’t ask questions, which was exactly the way Artemis liked it.
“You okay, buddy?” Tyler asked. He’d changed into a new set of clothes and looked no worse for the wear. He carried a Dagwood-sized sandwich he’d made for himself in the lounge. Tyler always seemed to be hungry. He said it was because of his werewolf metabolism, but Oliver had noticed he ate a great deal whether he had shifted into his other form recently or not.
“Just tired,” Oliver said. “Long day.”
“The arm’s not bothering you, is it? You couldn’t still be sick?” Tyler looked worried. He could be a bit of a mother hen at times.
“No.” Oliver shook his head. “I’ve been tired for a while. Of all this.”
Jeffrey emerged from the back of the plane and hopped onto Oliver’s lap. “How you doing, boss?”
Oliver scratched the cat behind the ears. “Don’t worry about it. You did good today.” Jeffrey purred enthusiastically.
“You did,” Tyler agreed. He took a large bite of his sandwich. “That was a real mess back there.”
“You think?” Oliver sighed. “We were ten seconds from being zombie food. Poor Mike was zombie food.”
“Yeah.” Tyler looked at his sandwich, hesitated for a moment, and then took another bite.
“He wasn’t cut out to be in the field,” Oliver continued. “He never should have been in that situation. If Artemis hadn’t told him to back us up, he’d still be alive.”
“And we might be dead,” Tyler said. “He didn’t know much about shooting, but at least he gave the zombies another target for a while.”
“If only we knew someone who was really good with guns,” Jeffrey said. “Somebody who never missed. Somebody who wasn’t afraid of anything and never ran away.”
“Be quiet,” Oliver said.
“But we do know someone like that,” the cat pointed out. “Hey, can you guys guess who I’m talking about? Even you two dummies should be able to figure it out.”
Oliver didn’t need to guess. Jeffrey was talking about Sally Rain, the former third member of their field team. She was, in words Oliver had used to plead her case to Artemis, “an absolute badass” that they “absolutely needed” on their side. And that had been true, but several months ago Sally had stolen a time machine from the Vault in a ham-handed effort to correct a mistake she’d made years earlier. The resultant chaos had led to the destruction of one world and brought Earth to the brink of calamity. Once the timeline had been restored and the damage reversed, Artemis had banished Sally to a place Oliver knew only as the “Island.” He knew next to nothing about the place, other than that it was a prison of sorts. According to Artemis, Sally was perfectly safe and comfortable there, but she would never be allowed to leave. It was too dangerous to have her around. Oliver hadn’t forgiven Artemis, and their relationship had been strained ever since.
Tyler caught Oliver’s scowl. “We don’t need to talk about that,” he said. “I didn’t like it any more than you guys, but Artemis made the call. She’s the boss.” He shook his head. “I’m surprised she didn’t make it earlier, honestly. Sally was never the same after we came over from her dimension. I mean, the first time. Before any of that time travel crap.”
“Parallel Earths freak me out,” Jeffrey said.
“It wasn’t bad,” Oliver said. “Except for the war with the cyborgs, I guess. That wasn’t great.”
“They did some nice things with roast goat on the other side,” Tyler said. “I miss that.”
Jeffrey looked at each of them in turn. “You guys are straight-up bozos.”
Oliver scratched the cat. “But you’re not, are you? How did you learn to read that language on the scroll, anyway? It couldn’t have been something you picked up reading Wikipedia. I’ve never even heard of Dionic.”
“You’d know better than me,” Jeffrey said. “You’re the one that made me like this.”
That was true. Jeffrey had been an ordinary stray cat before he’d met Oliver. That had been before Oliver had discovered he had the ability to, in extreme situations, manipulate reality. He still didn’t have an explanation for how it worked, and while he’d been practicing, he couldn’t do anything particularly interesting with it. In one of the power’s first accidental manifestations, though, he’d given Jeffrey the ability to speak.
“I still don’t understand how that worked,” Oliver said. “Not really. Or how it made you understand so many things. I remember you said before it was like you read the entire encyclopedia all at once.”
“I guess it was like you read all the encyclopedias,” Tyler suggested.
“Maybe,” Jeffrey said. “I couldn’t understand all of what I was saying, but I knew how the words were supposed to sound.”
“What parts did you understand?” Oliver asked.
“It was something about unclean forces being driven into a well. Or maybe just a deep hole with liquid in there. I don’t know why you’d want to put zombies in a well. You wouldn’t be able to drink the water after that.”
“Good point,” Oliver said.
Jeffrey rolled onto his back. “Rub my belly.”
“No,” Oliver said. “You bite me every time. I’m not falling for that again.”
“Rub my belly!”
“I said no.”
Jeffrey glared at him. “There’s something else I don’t understand,” Tyler said.
Oliver held the arm that had been bitten earlier up. “Let me guess. This?”
“Yeah.”
Oliver rubbed the spot where the bite had been. There wasn’t even any redness now. He doubted even a doctor would be able to tell anything had happened earlier. “Chalk it up to one more thing I don’t understand.”
“You don’t seem surprised, though.”
“The boss is tough,” Jeffrey said. “He doesn’t have time for any zombie bites.”
“It’s not toughness,” Oliver said. He sat back in his chair and watched Tyler for a moment, debating with himself whether to proceed. “When we first met, you remember I told you one of John Blackwell’s vampire servants tried to turn me.” On the day he’d met Tyler, Oliver had been on the run from an assassin who’d been hired to kill him. Sally Rain had hidden him in a house belonging to John Blackwell, a famous hedge fund manager who also happened to be the head of one of the most powerful vampire families on the West Coast. While he was there he’d been bitten, and even made to drink the blood of a vampire. He didn’t much care to think about that night.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “You told us it didn’t work. You didn’t even have a mark on your neck a few hours later. We couldn’t explain it, at the time.”
“That wasn’t the only time it happened,” Oliver said. “Remember in the other timeline, when you sent Maria to rescue me from the cyborgs?” Maria was Blackwell’s attaché, and possibly lover. Oliver wasn’t sure about that last part. “She bit me when the cyborgs were running experiments. I drank her blood, too.”
Tyler’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know that. You never told us.”
“No. We were kind of busy at the time. But the important thing is she did, and I did. The cyborgs had run out of things to do to me. They wanted to know if I could be turned.”
“But you didn’t turn,” Tyler said. “We’d have spotted that pretty quickly.”
“No. It happened the same way as at Blackwell’s house. I got sick to my stomach and threw up the
blood. And then the blood…it caught fire. It burned up.”
Tyler’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t mention the fire part before.”
“Well, that’s what happened. It was just like with my arm today. Whatever was in there, it got burned out.”
Jeffrey spent a moment inspecting Oliver’s arm. “So you can’t be zombified, and you can’t be vampi…is vampified a word?”
“No,” Oliver said. “I don’t think zombified is a word, either.”
“Oh.”
“That’s amazing,” Tyler said. “It must be related to that thing you can do. Or do sometimes, anyway. When you change the way things are. You must be able to do it on a subconscious level, too. Maybe it’s that you don’t want to change, so…you change the fact that you’re changing?” He frowned. “I don’t think I said that right.”
“Look at the big brain on the dog,” Jeffrey said.
“Shut up.”
“You might be right,” Oliver said. There was more to the story, though, but Oliver didn’t feel like getting into it any more deeply. Chantal, the vampire who had bitten him back at Blackwell’s house, had told him his blood tasted strange. Maria had said the same thing. She’d actually gotten drunk off of it. And she’d told him she didn’t think he was a human. Not exactly.
Oliver was beginning to believe the same thing. There were too many things that were strange about him. It was weird enough that he could give a cat the ability to speak, or fix something that was broken with his mind. You could explain that away with magic. But the fact that his body didn’t react to things the way they should was another matter. He’d healed a zombie bite. He’d incinerated vampire blood. Back when he’d been a prisoner of the cyborgs, they’d injected him with nanobots in an attempt to convert him into one of them. The cyborg scientist who had been studying him told him his blood had heated up to such a temperature that the nanobots were incinerated. All through that process, Oliver had never felt more than slightly warm. He didn’t know what to make of any of that.
“Enough of this talk,” Jeffrey said. He rolled onto his back again. “Rub my belly.”
“For the last time,” Oliver said, “I’m not going to…”
“Rub my belly!”
Oliver sighed. Maybe this time would be different? He relented and scratched the cat’s belly. Jeffrey purred contentedly for fifteen seconds, and then sank his teeth into the skin between Oliver’s thumb and forefinger. Oliver shook his head. Some things never changed.
Chapter 3
They landed at a private airport just south of San Francisco before long. With the change in time zones, it was still a few hours before sunset. The day had been overcast here, with a hint of rain in the air. Oliver hoped it would rain. It would match his mood. He couldn’t remember being in a funk that had lasted this long before.
Daniel Vega set about cleaning and locking the plane down. He’d be on his way after that, disappearing until the next time one of them called him. Oliver wasn’t entirely sure the man really understood who they were or what kind of work they did. It didn’t particularly matter to him whether Vega knew or not. People knew what they needed to know. Sometimes it was better that way. As that thought crossed his mind, he realized it was just the kind of thing Artemis would say. He scowled.
“You good?” Tyler asked.
“Yeah. Just thinking about something.”
“Okay.” Tyler nodded. “You coming back to the office? Artemis will still be there. She’s going to want a report.”
“Go give her a report, then,” Oliver said. “I’ll be in tomorrow if she wants to talk to me.”
Tyler gave him a worried look. “I wish you two would stop fighting. It puts me in a bad spot.”
“I know it’s been a little awkward.”
“It’s more than awkward. Look, I owe you my life, Oliver. But I owe her my life, too. A couple times over.”
“I wasn’t asking you to take sides.”
“I am, though,” Jeffrey said. He’d taken a spot on the tarmac next to Oliver’s feet.
Tyler stared at the cat. “You’ve taken a side?”
“I’m with the boss,” Jeffrey said. “He feeds me and keeps my litter box clean. Mostly, anyway.” He glanced up at Oliver. “You could do better with the litter box, you know. Maybe you could start changing it every time I use it.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Oliver said.
“You flush the toilet every time you use that,” the cat pointed out. “I don’t see how it’s different.”
“It’s very different,” Oliver said. “Be quiet or I’ll start making you use the backyard.”
“You be quiet or I’ll start using your pillow.”
Tyler shook his head. “I’m not getting into this. I’m going to head in. I’ll give Artemis the report. I don’t know what I’m going to tell her about Mike, though.”
“Tell her we didn’t have the right people for the job,” Oliver said, “and ask her whose fault that was.”
Tyler winced. “I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
“I know,” Oliver said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure I’ll have the chance to tell her myself.”
Oliver and Jeffrey made the short walk to his car, a Ford Taurus he’d bought two months ago. He liked it because it was so common a model nobody ever looked at it twice. If he’d shown anyone what was under the hood it definitely would have gotten a second look. Seven wasn’t just good with computers; he was good with pretty much any technology. He’d torn out the factory engine and installed a new one he’d built himself, telling Oliver it would be good for car chases. Oliver didn’t plan on being in any car chases. To be fair, though, he hadn’t planned on any of the things that had happened to him in the last year. Whether it was traveling to a parallel Earth, mediating a conflict between two vampire families, or this morning’s zombie extermination, he’d learned the only thing he could really expect in life was the unexpected. There had been a time in his life, back when he’d worked as a stock analyst, that he’d dreamed about getting out of the dull routine that defined his day-to-day existence. When he remembered that life now it was as if he was recalling someone else’s memories. He’d wanted some excitement. Some adventure. He’d gotten far more than he’d ever bargained for.
“Well?” Jeffrey asked him. Oliver looked up. They were nearly to an on-ramp. He’d been lost in thought and hadn’t even noticed.
“What?”
“This whole time I’ve been telling you what I want for dinner. I guess I’ll have to start again, because you obviously weren’t listening to me.”
“Sorry,” Oliver said. “I was miles away.”
Jeffrey let out an exasperated sigh. “The dog is right, you know.”
Oliver stared at him. “You just admitted Tyler is right about something? That has to be a first.” He paused. “What is he right about?”
“We need to get you a girlfriend.”
“Tyler said that?”
“Yeah. Who would have thought that stupid dog would have a good idea? It’s against the natural order of things.”
Oliver hadn’t realized Tyler and Jeffrey had been talking behind his back. Given that Jeffrey tended to either mock or avoid Tyler, he wondered when they’d found the time. “A girlfriend? You haven’t been a big fan of the idea,” he said. “You haven’t wanted people in the house at all. I had to figure out how to fix the kitchen faucet myself because you whined about having a plumber come over.”
“It would be a pain in the ass for me,” the cat said. “I’d have to sit around going meow and doing whatever stupid things she’d expect, but you really need…” he eyed Oliver conspiratorially. “You know. You need some quality time.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Oliver said.
“You need some…special attention.”
“I knew what you were talking about the first time.”
“You need someone to take you to outer space.”
“I… Oliver paused. “I don
’t think I know that one.”
Jeffrey cocked his head. “I thought I heard that somewhere before,” he said. “You need to go to the moon? Is that it?”
“I think you mean I need someone to take me to Heaven.”
“That’s it!” Jeffrey said.
“Thanks, but…”
“You need to get laid,” Jeffrey said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Oliver said. “I told you I knew what you were talking about already.”
“I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t being too ambiguous,” Jeffrey said.
“You weren’t being at all ambiguous.”
Oliver took the turnoff for Skyline Drive and headed into San Francisco from the west side. It was the best way to avoid traffic, and the drive up the coast was always nice. His house in the Outer Sunset district was only about ten blocks from the Pacific. The neighborhood was quiet, which he liked. Once you went east of 19th Avenue the city got denser and louder. Oliver’s life had been very loud for the last year or so. His house was a refuge from all of that, and that was how he wanted it to stay.
Jeffrey insisted they make a stop at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant to pick up noodle soup. The cat typically had a great deal of trouble eating noodles, but that never stopped him from trying. He also never failed to make a huge mess. Then he’d switch to his regular cat food, which had to be freshly poured from the bags Oliver bought it in. If the food in his bowl had been sitting there longer than he deemed acceptable he’d knock the bowl over in protest. He also demanded his water be changed every few hours. If Oliver complained, the cat would insist that he’d been left with a stress disorder from his time living as a stray, never knowing where his next meal would come from. Even though Oliver had heard that story a dozen times or more, the cat always managed to guilt trip him into doing whatever he wanted.
Interesting People (Interesting Times #3) Page 3