Pocket Apocalypse

by Seanan McGuire

  Werewolves would unmake you, and make you over again in their own image. It was the ultimate loss of self, and the thought made my blood go cold.

  Shelby looked at me anxiously. “So you’ll come? You’ll come to Australia?”

  “Shelby, I don’t think—”

  “Because it’s my family, you see, and they’re in danger. It’s not like we can evacuate the continent, and I’m not going to say ‘sorry, you’re on your own’ when they’re calling me for help. But I don’t want to go alone, Alex. Please don’t make me go alone.”

  She looked at me pleadingly. I looked back, every inch of me screaming that this was a terrible idea. Then I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to nod.

  “We’ll need to set it up with zoo management. After that, I’ll have to make some calls. We’re going to want people in customs who can look the other way about our bags, and we’re going to want them on both ends.” Neither of us liked to travel unarmed. More importantly, there’s no vaccine for lycanthropy-w, and I wasn’t going into a known outbreak without the herbal and chemical remedies that we knew could make a difference in preventing infection. Australia had good reasons for their strict bans on carrying fruit and dairy products into the country. We were going to have to find a way around them, at least where powdered aconite and dried mistletoe berries were concerned. Better safe than sorry, especially in a situation like this.

  “I can handle the Australian end if you can manage the US end,” Shelby said.

  “As long as we fly out of New York, I can manage things here,” I said. “Verity made a lot of contacts in the area who will help us out.”

  “You still haven’t said. Does this mean you’ll come?”

  Maybe she was like me: maybe she needed to hear the words. I nodded again, this time slowly, as if my head had become too heavy to hold upright. “It means I think I have to.”

  Werewolves both do and don’t exist. They’re one of the great conundrums of the cryptid world, and one of the greatest failures of the Covenant of St. George, which may have—accidentally—created them.

  There was a time when the world’s therianthrope populations had their own ways of handling sickness. Infected individuals would retreat to caves or deep forests, where the majority of them would die without passing their infection along. The viruses that make up the lycanthropy family may be closely related to rabies, but they had to sacrifice some flexibility in exchange for the traits that enabled them to infect shapeshifters: they’re even harder to catch than rabies itself. Most often, the outbreak would claim one or two victims and then burn out, a victim of its own deadly nature.

  The Covenant changed all that when they showed up and started hunting cryptids, like the therianthropes, into extinction. A sick therianthrope looked like an easy target; more and more, they found themselves followed into the places where they tried to hide. Maybe that would have been all right, if we’d been talking about a pox or a flu—the sick therianthrope could have used the Covenant teams as a means of suicide, convincing them that there were no other therianthropes in the area. And maybe the ones who weren’t already sick enough to have become irrational chose that method of death. Sadly, more had reached the stage where they bit and scratched at everything that moved. Some members of the Covenant were exposed to the virus. Most of the time that came to nothing. Jumping between species isn’t easy.

  But it only had to happen once.

  No one knows the name of the first werewolf, or how they reacted when they felt themselves getting sick. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they raged. Maybe they hid their infection out of fear that the Covenant that had sheltered them would now turn against them and put them to death for having become one of the monsters they were intended to fight. Whatever they did, they did it long enough for lycanthropy-w to finish rewiring their bodies and rewriting their minds, until the day came that they changed forms for the first time, and all hell broke loose.

  There’s no such thing as a “good” werewolf. A werewolf in their original form is completely hidden, undetectable among a normal population; they can go anywhere, move freely without being detected. A werewolf in the grip of the change is a killing machine, designed for nothing more than feeding itself and spreading the virus that controls it. They feel very little pain, and absolutely no remorse. Stories of people successfully begging werewolves not to kill their own spouses or children are generally regarded as just that—stories, with no facts behind them. Werewolves kill. That’s all.

  Even Australia, with its own share of dangerous beasts and dangerous people, wasn’t equipped to handle an outbreak of lycanthropy. No one ever was.

  Shelby had been living with me since her apartment burned down, which made it easy to coordinate trip planning. We’d driven separate cars to the zoo—we didn’t keep identical hours, thanks to the largely public-facing nature of her work, and the largely private nature of mine—but we could meet back up at the house after work to plan further for the trip. She gave me a distracted kiss before she left to do the afternoon big cat show, leaving me alone with my thoughts—and with Crow, who cawed after her in a way that was practically guaranteed to attract attention.

  “What am I going to do with you, huh?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and looking at him. “I can’t take you to Australia. There’s lying to customs to save my own skin and then there’s importing non-native wildlife because I want to. One of them is practical. The other is sort of a dick move.” Crow probably wouldn’t enjoy riding in the hold of the plane, either. We’d reach Brisbane and find that every suitcase on the plane had been mysteriously broken into and ransacked for treats.

  Crow churred and began preening one wing.

  “I guess I can ask Sarah to keep an eye on you. You like Sarah, don’t you?”

  Crow ignored me.

  “I’m glad we had this talk. Keep an eye on the office while I’m away, all right?” I rose, finally taking my zoo-issue lab coat off the back of the chair, and walked toward the door. It was time to tell Dee that I was going to be taking a little time off.

  I found her wiping fingerprints off the glass front of Crunchy’s tank. She glanced over when she heard me approach, and asked, “Did you two have another fight? Shelby slouched out of here like she’d just been read the riot act.”

  “No, actually, I agreed to everything she asked me, which is either a sign of true love or proof that I’ve lost my mind,” I said. “I’m going to be heading for the main office first thing tomorrow morning to file the papers for a leave of absence. Shelby and I need to go back to her place and check on her family. Can you keep an eye on my projects while I’m away?” I meant the basilisks, naturally; Dee was immune to their petrifying gaze, and would make a better caretaker for the chicks than anyone else I could have asked.

  She straightened, lowering her washrag. “By her place you mean . . . ?”

  “Australia.”

  Dee dropped the washrag. “Is everything all right?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’ll fill you in before I go, but I wanted to give you as much warning as I could.”

  “Well, when are you leaving?”

  “If Shelby has her way, tomorrow night.” That was for the best, given the circumstances. The longer the outbreak had to burn, the more people it was going to hurt or kill. “We should only be gone for a couple of weeks.”

  Dee frowned. “Are you sure the zoo is going to approve that on such short notice?”

  “I’m not technically an employee: I’m a researcher on loan,” I said. “If they get too picky about the amount of notice, I can always point out that my residency is strictly voluntary on all sides.” It was a bluff that I didn’t want them to call, since I enjoyed my place in the reptile house, but we’d always known that this wasn’t a permanent position. If they asked me not to come back, I could get Dee to relocate the basilisks out to the farming fringe of her home community, and
walk away without worrying about my responsibilities.

  “I’m not sure I like this, Alex,” said Dee.

  “I know I don’t like it,” I said. “I also know it’s necessary, or I wouldn’t be doing it.”

  Dee looked around, making note of the few stragglers still peering at lizards or gazing in awe at snakes as big around as their arms. Her eyes swung back to me. “You’ll tell me what all this is about later, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “We’ll talk before I leave.”

  The rest of the day seemed to fly by. The lull I’d found Dee in when I exited my office only lasted for the amount of time it took us to finish wiping the smudges off Crunchy’s tank. That was when the late afternoon rush of chilled school groups began, packing the reptile house to capacity with shivering bodies and endless questions. All four staffers on duty were kept busy running between enclosures, explaining facts about the reptiles they contained or helping to break up small arguments before they turned into sugar-fueled pushing matches. By the time the loudspeakers announced that the zoo would be closing in twenty minutes, all of us were ready to hand-carry the patrons to the parking lot, put them down, and bid them a firm “go the hell away.”

  “I’m going to sleep for a year,” announced Kim, one of the reptile house’s junior zookeepers. She bent double, resting her palms on the floor and her nose against her knees. “A year. That will miraculously end right before my alarm tomorrow morning.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I agreed. “Nelson, you got everything under control with the caimans?” Nelson was our other junior zookeeper, and it was his turn to feed the long-jawed crocodilians their supper.

  “I’ve got it,” Nelson said.

  “Great. On that note, you are all amazing, and I am going home. Dee, we’ll talk in the morning?”

  “Count on it,” said Dee.

  “Great,” I said again, and turned to walk to my office, where I swapped my lab coat for my wool jacket, grabbed my briefcase, and let Crow out the window with a firm admonition to, “Go to the car, Crow, car.”

  He flapped away into the evening air, wings beating hard, and I just had to hope he was doing as he’d been told. He was pretty good about following orders most of the time—largely because I controlled the food—but he was still half-cat. One day he was going to do whatever he wanted, with no concern for the consequences, and then there would be hell to pay. Maybe it was irresponsible to keep a pet that was basically a ticking time bomb of complications, but I’d had Crow for years, and I was fond of him. Maybe next time I wanted to get a pet, I’d go with something simpler, like a bulldog, or a very small gargoyle.

  Oh, who was I kidding? I’d be first in line at the griffin aviary, waiting for a chick in need of a home.

  I waved to my coworkers as I passed back through the reptile house, and then I was out into the sweet autumnal air of the zoo, which tasted of fallen leaves and bonfires—all the good parts of the fall, with none of the pesky leaf mold and early frost downsides. I love autumn evenings. They’re the one thing about the season that my sisters and I were always able to agree on. (Verity’s passion was Halloween: trick-or-treating and as much candy as she could stuff into her face during the two-day cheat period she allowed herself before she went back on her strict dancer’s diet. Antimony was all about the pumpkin spice. Pumpkin cookies, pumpkin loaf, pumpkin everything. Attempts to make her admit that most of these products contained no pumpkin, and were just a trumped-up delivery mechanism for cinnamon and ginger, were met with violence. Antimony never found a cause she wasn’t willing to die—or better yet, kill—for.)

  The guards had already escorted most of the zoo patrons out. Groundskeepers and zoo employees passed me as I walked toward the gate, on their way to begin what many of them considered their real work. Keeping the public interested in wildlife was all well and good, but these keepers dedicated their lives to the plants and animals in their care. Some of them only left the zoo because their showers at home had better water pressure. I was honored to be part of their society, even if only temporarily and under false pretenses.

  My time at the zoo was winding down. It had been for a while. The basilisks were finally reproducing, and my survey of the cryptid wildlife of the area was nearly complete. Before much longer, it was going to be time for me to pack my things and head off to the next challenge, whatever that might be. Maybe I’d take Verity’s place in Manhattan and spend some time getting to know William, the last of the great dragons.

  (We’d thought dragons were extinct until my sister was nearly sacrificed to him. The species needed help getting reestablished, and I could spend a year or two learning everything there was to know about them. It was tempting.)

  And, of course, there was Shelby to be considered. Our relationship had started as a bit of fun—it was something neither of us expected to last—and turned serious when she learned that I was a Price and I learned that she was a member of the Thirty-Six Society, an organization of Australian cryptozoologists dedicated to protecting their surprisingly delicate, disturbingly dangerous island ecosystem.

  The discovery of how much Shelby and I had in common had deepened our casual little relationship into something that was frighteningly serious, and was going to be incredibly hard to end. I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her . . . but she was only in America to learn about our big carnivores. Once she knew as much as she needed, she’d be taking her education with her back to Australia, where it, and she, could better serve the goals of the Society. And that was the whole problem, because I couldn’t go with her. Not for keeps, anyway. My family needed me here.

  Crow was sitting on the hood of my car when I got there. He was preening his left wing in the purposefully sullen manner that meant he thought I’d taken too long, and had probably been on the verge of coming to look for me. “Thanks for waiting, buddy,” I said, pausing to scratch him behind his feathered “ears” before I unlocked the driver’s-side door.

  He creeled once and was in the air like a shot, flying through the open door and curling up on the passenger seat before I could swing myself into my own spot in the car. “Better?” I asked. He clucked before tucking his head under his wing.

  I chuckled and started the car. Sometimes it’s nice to spend some time with the predictable things.

  Columbus was always beautiful in the fall: I had to give it that, even as my coastal heart wished for the slower, subtler changes of season that we’d had when I was growing up. I drove through the city, admiring the Halloween decorations festooning virtually every storefront and telephone pole I passed, enjoying the brightly colored leaves that were clinging gamely to their trees, not yet clogging the sidewalks and gutters and becoming a public nuisance.

  “It’s spring in Australia, you know,” I informed Crow, who ignored me. “I’ll get to skip all the really unpleasant parts of autumn and go straight to the unpleasant parts of spring.”

  It was a lovely thought. It wasn’t enough to balance out the thought of werewolves.

  I drove on.

  A surprising number of suburban homes are owned by cryptids, who enjoy the proximity to nature—even if it’s in a tightly controlled and regimented form—and the relative privacy compared to the more densely packed urban environments. A lot of homeowner’s associations have cryptids on their boards, helping to set standardized rules that will make individual homes more difficult to target from a distance. “The monsters live in the beige house” isn’t a very helpful description when half the houses in the neighborhood are beige.

  My grandparents are cryptids, and they own their house, and that’s about as far as they’ve managed to get in the “blending in with the neighbors” division. Their house is the only three-story building on the block, towering over its surroundings with the amiable menace of a haunted house from an old Hammer Horror film. The widow’s walk doesn’t help (and no one’s ever been able to
explain why they had it installed); neither does the lightning rod on the highest point of the roof, although at least that has an obvious purpose: they use it to periodically resurrect my grandfather. Add in the eight-foot fence with the spikes on top, and it’s no real wonder that the neighborhood kids never come trick-or-treating. They’re probably afraid we’re going to cook and eat them.

  Both my grandparents’ cars were parked in the driveway. Good: I didn’t want to go over this more than once if I didn’t have to. I pulled in behind Grandma’s sedan and killed my engine, leaning over to retrieve both Crow and my briefcase from the passenger seat before getting out and heading for the front door.

  It was swept open from within before I made it halfway up the walk, revealing the backlit outline of a woman in a knee-length wool skirt, her face obscured by the contrast of light and shadow. Any confusion didn’t last for long, as my cousin Sarah jubilantly declared, “I did calculus today!”

  “That’s fantastic,” I said, stepping onto the porch. Sarah moved aside to let me into the house. She was beaming. I couldn’t blame her. “Did Grandma score your workbook?”

  “I got an eighty percent!” Sarah’s enthusiasm didn’t dim one bit, even though the score was lower than she was getting when she was nine. For her, even an eighty percent on a calculus worksheet was an incredible improvement.

  Sarah was technically my aunt, having been adopted by my grandparents when she was just a kid, but she’d always be “cousin Sarah” to me, and to my siblings. We were just too close in age to think of her as anything else.

  I offered her a smile. “I’m really proud of you.”

  “I’m proud of me, too,” said Sarah.