It’s time to beg for my life.
“No! Please! I’m too young to be food!”
They are smiling at me, all of them. Their needle-sharp teeth now feel like very much my problem.
“Don’t worry, dear. It’s all over very quickly, and we’ll enjoy you very much.”
That’s about when things get very nasty. I am not going to take my clothes off, but it turns out the ladies also have very long sharp claws and sharp knives and needles and all sorts of things on hand which make my objections pretty much moot. My clothing is removed, and I am scratched and cut in the process. Not too deeply, but enough to give me a terrifying insight into what is about to happen next. In a desperate attempt to escape, I leap into the very large pot of water which has been prepared to cook me. It’s not hot yet, and the old ladies seem to be reluctant to get wet, so we’re at an impasse. An impasse in which they just go ahead and start stoking the wood fires beneath the pot. They’re doing this old school, which means I just passed up a quick and terrifying death for a slow and terrifying one and I’m not sure I made the right choice. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve made a right choice since I started making choices. I used to be one of those people who said they lived to regret nothing. Right now, I regret absolutelyfuckingeverything.
“Ladies, is there any chance we can come to an arrangement where you don’t cook me alive?” I shout the question from the middle of the pot where I am floating and attempting to avoid sharp stakey things which are now being poked at me from the edges.
Meep Meep!
An incongruously cheerful sound interrupts my death.
Apparently, Zed’s ship has a horn, and that’s the sound it makes when he beeps it. He’s suddenly hovering above the pot by about ten feet or so, leaning out the round window and grinning from ear to ear.
“Would you like me to rescue you now?”
Naked and swimming in the increasingly warm water, I am very keen to be rescued.
“PLEASE!”
An attachment extrudes from the bottom of the ship. It’s like a sort of disc thing attached to a vacuum tube.
“No!” The ladies let out a collective lament and initiate procedures to kill me as quickly as possible. A series of knives are hurled at me, along with rocks and I think someone’s knitting. They start to push at the sides of the pot, making me slosh about. I am screaming at the top of my lungs because there’s nothing else for me to do with all my energy
A dozen hungry lady aliens are no match for Zed, though. Somehow, he manages to maneuver that space vacuum right onto my ass. I am sucked up out of the water with a satisfying SCHLOOP then ejected onto the main room’s carpet. I look up at Zed, wet and shivering, and more grateful in this moment than I have ever been in my life, except for maybe the very first time he saved my life.
“Oh my god. Zed. Thank you!”
I know well enough to stay down. He stands over me for a second, then goes to the controls.
“Well, we’ve managed to make enemies,” he says. “Flurbs don’t forget. And they don’t miss meals.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought they looked…”
“See, the smart thing to do when you don’t know is not to act,” he says over his shoulder. “It’s not to get on the first busload of ravenous predators you can find.”
“I know I fucked up, believe me, I know. I owe you…”
My general blathering is interrupted by a grim growl from him. He has set a course for way the fuck away from there, and now he is going to deal with me. I have not entirely forgotten his threat, but I hope he’ll drop it. I am already very sorry.
“And they’ve prepared you for your punishment,” he observes. “Most kind.”
“That wasn’t fair! I had no idea they intended to eat me! And you didn’t tell me what they were. You let them take me off to the cooking pot…” I know I should shut up. I am arguing with him when I want to be apologizing to him.
“I gave you the chance to come with me without punishment, but you thought you knew better. I warned you what would happen if you didn’t obey me.”
“Zed…”
“You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to trust me. But you do have to obey me,” he says.
This is serious now. I have that very uncomfortable feeling that only ever arises when I am in deep trouble. I felt it moments after I crashed my shuttle into that troll planet, and I feel it now. Zed does not find this in any way amusing. At first, he seemed very relaxed about it all, even laughing at me as I swum about in my personal stew pot. Now I’m realizing this was never amusing to him at all. He is pissed the hell off at me for running away and almost getting myself killed. It’s almost as if he cares what happens to me.