Nine Lives by Sinvisigoth
You know, this whole kidnapping deal is totally underrated. For starters, you get to sleep for hours at a time without having to do any chores. You never have to cook because your food is brought to you. You don't have to make awkward conversation with a bunch of dumbasses due to the gag in your mouth. And it's the best way I ever found to give up smoking; seriously, I've been two days without a ciggie now and all the time I'm spending trying to keep the circulation going in my arms is totally distracting me from my lack of nicotine.
Before you get the impression that my captors are brutes for gagging me, I should point out that it is somewhat my fault. I was, while somewhat anxious at the suddenness of my abduction, for the most part excited by this turn of events. Yes, I may end up with my severed head resembling the dessert from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but would that really be worse than another morning dragging my ass to a job that I hated? I was supervisor to only one person, the entire department being made up of only the two of us, but she regularly forced me to entertain thoughts of how best to force my head into the paper shredder, so what's the difference? Decapitation by the hand of seasoned warriors had to be less painful, I told myself, and tidier. All of these thoughts going round and round in my head had put me a kind of happy go lucky, screw it all, why not have some fun mood.
Under normal circumstances, I have a very pleasant singing voice; my best friend once told me that if I was in a room with the world's twenty best singers, I would not be the worst singer in the room. And I love him beyond words for that, the most beautiful truth anyone has ever told me. These circumstances not being normal by any standard, I chose to torture my kidnappers with Blue Grass sung in the voice of Daffy Duck…mostly to the tune of It's a Small World After All. They showed their great appreciation by silencing me with what looked like a pygmy's jock strap. Feeling around with my tongue, I had to admit that pygmies had a raw deal when it came to stereotypes; there was serious room in this thing.
Two days earlier.
I hadn't slept in my bed for months, the sofa serving this purpose admirably and with far greater comfort. This was not laziness or some form of perversion. My problem was greed. A lot of people sell out by 'owning up' to having an addictive personality (everyone seems to love a recovering problematic these days). Dude, it's greed, pure and simple. Mine was for being awake and I spent as many of the twenty four hours in this manner as was possible, and then ended them on the sofa with a couple of films and a cat with a very fat butt. Falling asleep like that, my mind blurring the realms of reality and fantasy, snuggled under the softest blanket with the cutest companion…it was heaven. The nights I fell asleep to Disney, unfortunately, gave me nightmares beyond comparison and very soon Finding Nemo and Madagascar found their way onto ebay. Have you ever been chased through a forest by a large orange fish wielding a chainsaw made of seaweed? Then don't question, just accept.
I wish I could tell you that it had been my own keen senses that had alerted me to the fact that something was amiss. I can't. Ol' Boris Fat Butt sitting on my head and hissing like a fire extinguisher on heat was my first clue. Being levitated five feet off the sofa by the large hand around my neck was the second. As the darkness crept into my vision, my last thought was something about chilli chicken tortillas. My first thought on waking up, while you would have thought it would have been 'Ow', was a momentary streak of panic aimed at Fat Butt. I say momentary because it rapidly became clear that the weight on my chest was not an instrument of death or torture but my lovely, big assed boy. He poked me in the nose.
Mum, there's no food.
"Hmmph?" asked several parts of my anatomy. "Where are we, babe?"
Somewhere they don't serve dinner. Whatcha gonna do about it?
"Uh. How about you do something about the ropes and I'll look for some?" I said hopefully.
If the people who wrote dictionaries were honest, they'd have a picture of a cat next to the word 'scornful'. I looked away from his withering stare, contrite in my failure as universal provider and tried to ignore the fact that my own grumbling innards were in wholehearted agreement with him. For his part, he decided to take matters into his own hands and walked off, his high noon tail demonstrating his disappointment with an eloquent yet silent 'fuck you.'
The closest I could figure, we were in some kind of engine room; the smell bore this theory out, as did the machinery, large in both proportion and noise pollution. After a few minutes I heard Boris scrabbling about in excitement behind a large pipe. Boris being Boris, this could mean anything from Ooh, food! to Hey mum, look, I've got a tail! I figured out which as a large beetle sped out from under a bulkhead, its freakish carapace glistening in the amber light as it thundered across the floor towards my helpless face.
At the last second a couple hundredweight of hungry feline pounced between my aggressor and I. A swift patpat and it bumbled off in another direction. More patpat and it started running in frantic circles.
This thing is really dumb. a bemused face all but rolled its eyes at me before continuing the hunt. But crunchy. he added a few seconds later with his mouth full.
You want me to find you some? I heard loads of these little bastards back there.
"Thanks, I uh, think I'll pass." I managed weakly.
He shrugged as best he could and sauntered off. A small pause and he turned to face me again.
Uh…Mum? Thundered?
I think he got the gist of my glare and sauntered with a little more speed behind one of the machines in search of more critters.
This point, to my mind, would have been the perfect moment to pass out and get a little shuteye. Unfortunately, it was also the moment my captors chose to make an appearance. The introduction into my sphere of vision of three seven foot tall creatures wearing armour and carrying a variety of very pointy things turned out to be the real point at which it was most prudent to lose consciousness.
I think they may have been offended by this as a swift spate of poking brought me back to the place my addled brain had tried so desperately to escape. Looking from them to the machinery and back again gave me the first inkling that we may not be on a boat. They, for the most part, seemed to be arguing among themselves. About what I did not know but the added insult of being ignored on top of being kidnapped was too much.
"Hey assholes!"
As attention getting goes that one worked a treat. As bad ideas went it was way up there with Britney Spears and putting E numbers in foods destined for five year olds that already had more energy than a nuclear power plant. My mind could have wandered off at this point to explore the advantages of plugging children into turbines as a cheap energy alternative but I was strong and remained single-mindedly focussed on being utterly petrified.
"Ooh, hey! Enough with the poking!" Pretty dumb to imagine that the pointy thingies did not serve any real purpose.
A particularly hard poke from one of them elicited a high squeak from me and all of a sudden there was one pissed off cat standing between me and them. And this is where my ego took the real bashing. Me they ignore and poke. Fat Butt they back away from. Although, in my defence, he had more pointy bits than they did and was advancing on them quicker than I could have shuffled.
As far as I could gather from his quick glance, his take on things was that yes, I might be a pain in the ass but I was his pain in the ass and he would deal with me in his own way goddamnit. The three creatures (I am so in denial over using the word 'aliens' at this point) quickly found that their size was a disadvantage when dealing with a hacked off furball. He was quicker, more agile, and bloody difficult to hit with large weapons at close range. He shimmied up one of them and had a good go at tearing something off, resulting in some very satisfying shrieks. Leaping to another he managed to part a large dreadlock from its owner and then shot down the other one, shredding parts of its anatomy as he went. He sat down in front of them with his prize under one foot. And this is where they made the biggest mistake of all. Poking his human was enough to get him angry enough to attack, trying to take away his string sent him over the edge.
The creature whose dreadlock it was stooped down to take it back and nearly lost a finger. You know that noise that cats make, that awful, awful sound halfway between a scream and a groan way down in their throats? Boris seemed to be making that with his whole body. His ears were so flat against his head they disappeared and he turned side on and rigid to make himself look bigger. Another attempt by the creature to retrieve his missing lock met with a vicious ball of fury wrapped around his wrist that he could not dislodge no matter what he did.
Watching a seven foot monster running around the room like a little girl and squeaking like a mouse was funny enough to make me burst anyway. The added factor that I really had to pee just gave the experience a whole added dimension. I think going from terror to rolling around in fits if laughter is now officially my new favourite emotion. For his part, Fat Butt was so damn pleased with himself he didn't know what to do other than drop to the ground and drag his hard won new toy into a corner. He saucily sashayed back to the creatures and sat down in front of them with all the insolence he could muster. The wounded party had had enough and lowered himself to roar in the face of my brave boy. As proud parent moments go there'd been none better than this so far. Boris simply sneezed in boredom, turned tail…and squirted.
The term 'marked man' had taken on new meaning. The creature's partners took turns sniffing him and then fell to the ground howling with laughter…or what I assumed was laughter. In any case, they looked like they were having as much trouble containing their bladders as I was.
As the offended one took off through a hatchway and the other two clumsily tried to regain their dignity and get up off the ground, Boris brought his string over to show me.
"That's great string, babe. You've earned it, you can keep it."
Thanks. He beamed. And Mum? That was fun.
I swear the little bugger winked at me.
Chapter Two on the way.
Do not criticise the humble peanut for its
inability to fly, for even the Golden Eagle in
its feathered majesty is not nearly so salty.