stranger, and I wanted to throw up.
He must have felt the fight leave my body, because he slowly released me. I had no doubt those iron hands could clamp over my arms again at any moment, and I did my best to make my body soft and pliant.
“You do not fool me,” he said in my ear. “I am not going to turn my back on you for a minute.”
“Probably a good idea,” I said out of the stranger’s mouth in the mirror. “I’d run.”
“You would be more likely to disembowel me.”
Startled, I looked up at him. Again, he was totally without affect—I’d picked up that word during one of my lifetimes, but I couldn’t remember where. His eyes were cold, his face blank. He’d said he wasn’t human. Impossible as that was to comprehend, looking into his soulless eyes made it marginally more believable.
“Not likely, unless you’re going to hand me a knife.” I was pleased with the caustic tone I achieved, until his next words hit.
“You wouldn’t need a knife.”
“I think I’ll just stop talking,” I said, feeling ill at the picture his words conjured. That was twice he’d sent me to the edge of nausea. Probably a combination of jet lag and hunger. My brain was still trying to make sense of it all. So he said I hadn’t been out long, yet somehow we’d gotten to Australia. Clearly he was lying, and I must have been unconscious for days. It was no wonder my stomach was in an uproar—I was starving. “Just feed me,” I added, “and I promise I won’t bother you.”
He stared at me, and I thought I could feel his eyes on my throat. He still clasped one of my wrists, but the pain of that manacle-like grasp was nothing compared to the rest of my body, so I’d barely noticed.
Then he nodded. “After you.” And with a none-too-gentle shove, he pushed me out the door.
Yes, it was Australia, or he was going to great lengths for a practical joke. The license plates were different, and the ordinary-looking sedan he pushed me into had the steering wheel on the wrong side. He closed the door and moved around to the driver’s side, not even bothering to see whether I was going to try to run for it. He must have known I was past fighting.
We drove in silence, into the dawning of what was presumably going to be the last day of my life. I leaned back in the seat, watching the landscape whiz by with incurious eyes. We’d been in some kind of port city, but by full daylight we were already past the suburbs and into the countryside. Oddly enough, he’d turned on the radio once we got in the car, and quiet music filled in the blank spaces in my mind. It seemed an anomaly—he was much too cold and empty a person to care about music. I figured that was the least of my worries. I listened to plaintive voices, some familiar, some not, and waited to die.
I must have slept. When I awoke, the sun was blazing brightly overhead and we’d stopped outside a restaurant that seemed to have erupted in the middle of nowhere. I glanced at my nameless companion, wondering if this was one of his creations, but it seemed real enough, and as I followed him out of the car I noticed a sign announcing that they had Foster’s. At that point I was grateful for small favors.
“Nice of you to feed me,” I muttered gracelessly after we’d slid into a booth and my captor rattled off an order to a sullen waitress. “But you might have let me order for myself. The condemned woman should get to choose her last meal.” Though a hot lamb sandwich with gravy and chips wasn’t a bad choice, come to think of it.
“Deal with it.” He’d ordered a veggie burger for himself. So he could kill people but not animals. Great. I sat back in the booth, taking a surreptitious glance around me. He hadn’t used the bathroom since I’d been with him, but sooner or later he’d have to, wouldn’t he? Unless he truly wasn’t human, which I took leave to doubt.
I wondered if I could hot-wire a car. Newer ones might be tricky, but there were enough older cars parked outside the restaurant that I might have some luck, if I could just manage to distract my kidnapper for a short while.
I didn’t know his name. I didn’t want to. For some reason, thinking of him as an abstraction made the situation easier to deal with. If he had a name, like Joe or Tom or Harry, that would make it more real, and as long as it stayed a little otherworldly I could handle it.
When he went to the bathroom I could make a run for it, I thought. I could beg for help from some of the rough-looking customers—surely they’d help a lady in distress. There were two burly ones at the counter, another one toward the back—
“No one will help you.”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what I was thinking. “Why not?”
“Because you cannot get up from that seat. You cannot speak.”
I reached out, planning to either grab it or dump it in his lap, but my hands couldn’t move past the centerline of the table. It was as if there were a Plexiglas sheet between us, thick and hard and invisible. A diet soda had been left at my place, and I found I could reach it. Couldn’t swipe his beer, but in fact I was happier with the Diet Coke.
I waited for him to lift his voodoo spell, but he simply drank his beer, looking out at the dusty landscape, ignoring me. I went from fury to pleading to tears and back again, and it was a waste of time. When my food came I could reach it, but my appetite was gone and I just stared at it.
“I do not care whether you eat or not,” he said, not looking at me. “You have another ten minutes and then we leave.”
I glared at him, a wasted effort. And then I ate, because if there was a chance I could make a run for it, I’d need my strength.
He must have drugged me. That, or hypnotized me. Some way he’d managed to fuck with my mind, convincing me I couldn’t move or speak.
For a last meal, it wasn’t bad. He’d ordered dessert as well, and when the waitress cleared the dishes and brought me a huge slice of coconut cake, my stomach did another leap. I loved coconut cake. How did he know?
