Pocket Apocalypse

by Seanan McGuire

  “Gotcha,” I said. I pulled a box of bullets out of the middle stack and straightened, opening it. The top layer was normal, lead bullets in simple brass casings. I picked them up, revealing a second layer where the casings gleamed dull silver, like dimes that had transferred hands too many times. Scraping my thumbnail against these bullets didn’t bring up any scraps of foil; they were the real deal. I tilted the box toward Shelby and Riley, showing them what I’d found.

  “No one saw anyone carrying out a bunch of stolen silver bullets because they didn’t carry them out,” I said. “They just moved things around to make sure no one would realize what had happened.”

  “They mixed the bullets, too,” said Shelby, looking horrified. “Oh, God, we’re going to have to do a complete inventory.”

  “Do you keep medications down here? Herbal supplies? Antivenin?” The looks of increasing despair on both Shelby and Riley’s faces were enough to tell me that I was on the right track. I resisted the urge to groan as I made the box of silver bullets disappear into my pocket. We were going to have plenty of evidence of what had happened here, and I was raised never to pass up an opportunity to reload—especially given the number of my silver bullets Shelby had used out in the meadow. “I don’t recommend using anything down here until it’s been thoroughly looked over. We don’t know what our antagonist’s goals are, and that makes this whole room potentially dangerous.”

  “They tried to kill us,” said Riley.

  “I noticed,” I shot back. “The question is, were they trying to kill you, and your family, or are they planning to take out the entire Society like that? If I were the werewolf—”

  “Oh, good, this is exactly the sort of thing you should be saying to my father who doesn’t like you,” muttered Shelby.

  I ignored her. This wasn’t the time to be worrying about Riley’s desire to introduce me to a shallow unmarked grave. He would have plenty of time to plot my death, but only if we survived the next few days. I started again: “If I were the werewolf, I’d be looking to take out the people I was sure would fight my authority, and then I’d start trying to infect the rest. Imagine what a thinking werewolf could do with the resources of the Thirty-Six Society at his or her disposal. Since the local cryptids don’t really know you, they wouldn’t notice the change. Not until your people came for them in their beds.”

  “Why would my people do that?” asked Riley. “Even if they’d been turned into werewolves, they’d still know that the policy regarding monsters is hands-off and eyes away.”

  “Because infected humans are monsters, plain and simple,” I said. “They kill without remorse when they’re transformed, and without consideration for how it may look on the global stage. And most sapient cryptids hate lycanthropes for that reason, so you can bet they’ll talk if the werewolf outbreak here becomes bad enough—which means the Covenant will hear about it, and they will step in. They’ll have to. They’re murderous bastards who overstep their mission statement on a regular basis, but they’re good at what they do. Saving Australia from lycanthropy would fit the bill.”

  “How would the Covenant even find out? We’re isolated here. Besides, why would the Covenant listen to anything a bunch of monsters had to say? And that’s assuming they have a line on rumors coming off this continent to begin with.” Riley shook his head. “I think you’re borrowing trouble.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to find something—anything—else that I could say.

  It wasn’t there. “My sister is marrying a man who used to belong to the Covenant of St. George. I bet he still knows how to get hold of his former coworkers. If I die here, that will be a tragedy, but it’s not going to cause my family to take any permanent steps. If the entire Thirty-Six Society goes radio silent, at the same time that the local cryptids begin reporting an out-of-control mob of werewolves rampaging across the continent . . .” I let my voice trail off, trusting Riley and Shelby both to be smart enough to understand what I wasn’t saying.

  Shelby’s look of slow dismay told me that she understood. I focused on Riley. Instead of opening up in comprehension, his face shut down, becoming so smooth and expressionless that I could no longer guess at what he might be thinking.

  “It would be a bloodbath,” he said, voice gone hollow. “They’d have no one to stop them. They could cleanse this continent the way they wanted to a hundred and fifty years ago. You have to contact your family. You have to tell them not to contact the Covenant. I was a fool to think we could trust you, even for a few minutes. You should never have been allowed out of the airport.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t do that.” Quickly, before Riley’s mood could turn murderous, I explained, “If the werewolves overrun the Society, they’ll overrun the continent. They’ll kill everyone. Maybe that would be considered an acceptable loss by some people—we have a lot of humans, and we only have one Australia—but werewolves are human when untransformed. They’d get on planes. They’d get on cruise ships. They’d spread. Australia would become an unending plague pit spreading destruction and despair across the world. The ecosystem would be devastated by the introduction of that many apex predators, and more, the Covenant would still get involved. It would just happen later, after the veil of secrecy that keeps their business from the eyes of the world was shattered.” It was hard to force the words out. I felt like a traitor. And everything I was saying was the truth.

  Shelby put a hand on her father’s arm. “They used to work in the open, Daddy. They used to go wherever they wanted, killing whoever they wanted, because all they had to do was point a finger and say ‘monster’ if they wanted to be believed. If we let the werewolves have Australia, the Covenant will get all that power back again. Do you want to be responsible for that?”

  Riley turned and looked at her, face still expressionless. Then, calmly, he reached up and removed her hand from his arm, pushing her away before he let go. “I knew when I let you go to America that it would change you,” he said. “I assumed you’d come back a little less angry, a little wiser, a little more ready to accept your responsibilities. I thought, God forgive me, that you’d come home and help heal the wounds Jack left when he was taken from us. But all you’ve done is make things worse for yourself, and for us. You’ve been corrupted. If I can take any consolation from this situation, it’s that your brother didn’t live to see it.”

  He turned away from her, leaving her white-faced and gasping, and fixed his attention on me. “We’ll do a full inventory; we’ll find the missing silver bullets, and we’ll determine how much other damage has been done. I will support whatever you propose for finding the wolves in our flock, and for resolving the threat that they pose. And then I will drive you to the airport myself. You will never come back here. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Good.” He turned and strode away into the maze of shelves, heading for the distant door.

  I slumped, leaning against the nearest shelf. “That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.” The lights came on as he walked, marking out his progress in a brightly lit chain of electrical reactions.

  “You did threaten to call the Covenant on his country,” Shelby said, moving to lean next to me. “You can’t blame a man for being a little shirty when you hold up his worst nightmare like it’s something reasonable to threaten him with. Even if it is something reasonable; even when it’s not a threat.” She sighed deeply. “Alex, what are we going to do?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know.” I watched the lights. “If the werewolves have decided to start some kind of organized attack, we’re in for a world of trouble. You get that, right?”

  “In this particular situation, the world can go hang,” said Shelby. “I’m worried about my country. Don’t get me wrong—if Daddy is serious about manually deporting you, I’ll be coming along, and we’ll settle the ‘where are you kids going to live’ conversation the cheap
and easy way. But Australia will always be my country. I can spend the rest of my life in America. I’m ready to do it, if it means staying with you. That isn’t going to change where I come from.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was watching the lights, which were continuing to blink on as Riley walked across the warehouse-like room.

  Shelby nudged my knee with her own. “That would be a good wedding slash engagement gift, you know. You could play St. Patrick, only do it with werewolves in Australia, instead of snakes in Ireland.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said, and frowned. Something about the lights was bothering me. They were on motion sensors, but the way they were turning on and off . . .

  “What?” Shelby followed my gaze to the lights. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her frown mirror my own. “Well, that’s silly. Something must be wrong in the circuitry again, we haven’t been anywhere near that corner of . . . the room . . .” Her voice trailed off as understanding struck her. It struck me in the same instant, and then the two of us were running after Riley, moving in perfectly matched silence as we raced against those changing lights.

  Riley hadn’t gone anywhere near the far corner of the room, not unless he’d gotten turned around on his way to the door, but that didn’t make any sense, since there was a clear path of lights leading back the way we’d all originally come, marking his progress. No, these lights had another source. Someone else was in the room.

  We ran.

  Twelve

  “Little pitchers have big ears, and sometimes that means they also have big guns. Be careful what you say, when you say it, and know who might be listening.”

  —Alexander Healy

  The underground survivalist stockroom of an isolated house in Queensland, Australia, running like hell

  WHEN I WAS A child, my parents used to put my sisters and me through every kind of drill imaginable. Other kids played games. We prepared for a war everyone prayed we’d never have to fight, but that everyone involved knew wouldn’t show us any mercy if we were unprepared. We learned how to navigate by the stars, by the patterns of moss on trees, and by the calls of certain types of bird. We learned how to lay snares and dig pit traps.

  And of course, we learned how to reload a gun while running full-tilt across a basement full of blind alleys and obstructed views.

  I pulled the box of pilfered silver bullets from my pocket and snapped my pistol’s chamber open, slotting bullets into place as I ran. It was tricky work, but I’d done it before—those drills had been good for something after all—and I only dropped one, despite the pain in my arm. We didn’t stop running to pick it up. Our lives, and Riley’s life, were worth more than a single silver bullet.

  We didn’t dare yell: if Riley was being stalked, but not actually attacked, any noise could make things worse. Not that it made a difference. We had just come around another corner and could finally see the wall when the screaming started. “Daddy!” shrieked Shelby, putting on a burst of speed that would have made any track star proud.

  It was a burst of speed I couldn’t match. I did my best to catch up, putting my head down and running like hell, but the gunshots still beat me. I swung around a set of shelves, making a split-second assessment of the situation. There was Shelby, gun in her hands, standing over her father, who was crumpled on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. He was clutching his left arm; the werewolf in the basement had bitten him in the same place that the one in the woods had bitten me.

  The werewolf itself was about five feet from Shelby, black-furred and red-eyed and gathering itself to spring. Its lips were drawn back, revealing a jaw filled with sharp canine teeth. The drool pooling at the corners of its mouth made my heart skip a beat. Lycanthropy spreads via fluid transfer. A dry bite—like the one I’d been lucky enough to receive—won’t necessarily spread the infection. A good juicy bite, on the other hand . . .

  “Shelby! Down!” I shouted. She didn’t turn. She just hit the ground on her elbows, going down hard in the pool of her father’s blood. The werewolf’s head whipped around to face me, lips drawing back even farther, a growl vibrating up from the depths of its chest. I took a deep breath, stabilized my stance, and opened fire.

  My first bullet caught the werewolf in the center of its chest: I had aimed for the point of greatest mass, judging it as the best way to stop the thing before it slammed into Shelby. It howled. I fired twice more, hitting it in the shoulder and the forehead.

  The third shot did it. The werewolf collapsed in a heap, emptying its bladder onto the floor. The smell of hot urine filled the air, overwhelming the smell of blood. That was a good thing, disgusting as it was: it meant the beast was almost certainly dead.

  “Almost” doesn’t count for a damn thing. I strode past Shelby, much as I ached to stop and help her up, and emptied my gun into the werewolf’s head. The body jerked with every bullet, but that was all. It didn’t twitch or try to get up. It was well and truly dead.

  “Daddy!”

  The werewolf was dead, but Riley wasn’t . . . and given the amount of drool the beast had been generating, that might mean we had another werewolf on our hands. I turned, arms hanging loosely at my sides, to see Shelby now huddled against her father’s chest, her arms wrapped tight around him, sobbing. Riley wasn’t holding her. He was just sitting there, a befuddled expression on his face, bleeding on the floor and staring at the crumpled werewolf.

  “Shelby.” She didn’t move. I tried again: “Shelby. I need you.”

  “Is it dead?” Shelby peeled her face away from her father’s shoulder and twisted to follow his gaze to the fallen werewolf. “It’s dead.” The relief in her voice was indescribable, and it made me want to hug her, almost as much as it made me want to get her out of the room. “You killed it. Thank you, Alex. Thank you so much.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” I said grimly. I tilted my head back and checked the ceiling. The lights seemed to be behaving normally now: they were only on in the small slice of room that we occupied. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. This space was massive, and the trouble with motion detectors is that most of them aren’t sensitive enough to pick up on someone who decides to hold perfectly still. Breathing is not going to keep the lights on. I started reloading my gun as I swung my attention back around to Shelby. “I need you to go find your mother and bring her back here. Bring at least two people with guns, and have someone call Dr. Jalali. We’re going to need her.”

  Shelby blinked, relief melting into incomprehension. “Why do we need Dr. Jalali? The werewolf is dead. You killed it.”

  “This isn’t a movie, Shelly,” rumbled Riley. He sat up a little straighter, seeming to snap out of whatever fugue he had fallen into. “Killing the master werewolf doesn’t make everyone it’s bitten go normal again. If it did, we would have wiped them out centuries ago. It’s a virus, and I’ve been bitten.”

  “Dr. Jalali isn’t a mammal, and that means she’ll be able to treat your father without worrying about blood-borne contamination. He’s not infectious yet, but not all the blood is his.” As I spoke the words, I finally saw how much blood was on Shelby’s skin and clothing. She was practically marinating in the stuff, and it was all I could do to hold my position rather than running over and yanking her to her feet, away from her father, away from possible contamination. I resisted. “Shelby, you need to go, and you need to take a thorough shower before you come back here. Please.”

  She would also need to be checked for open wounds, for cuts on her hands and face—what if she’d skinned her palms when she fell? Oh, God, what if she’d hit the floor so hard that she’d broken the skin on her elbows? She’d been kneeling in the pool of blood, and there was no way of telling Riley’s blood from the dead werewolf’s. They could both be infected. I could lose her.

  I’d only been in Australia since yesterday, and was not very impressed with it thus far.

  “Please, Shelly,
” added Riley. “I’ve got Alex to watch over me. He’ll make sure I don’t get eaten by anything else that might be lurking.”

  Shelby looked from him to me, uncertainty plain, before climbing to her feet. She slipped twice in the blood, smearing it across the industrial carpet, and I had to once again fight to keep myself from running to her side. “I will be right back,” she said. “Daddy, don’t you do anything stupid while I’m away. Alex, don’t you let him do anything stupid. I’ll never forgive you if you do.” Then she whirled and ran out of the room, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. They were going to need a full decontamination crew in here, and even then, it might be a good idea to rip up and burn the carpet. There was no telling how long lycanthropy could live in cloth.

  “We need a virologist,” I muttered. “Why didn’t I ask Helen if she could find us a virologist?”

  Riley was scowling at the fallen werewolf. “In the movies they always turn back when they die,” he said. “How are we supposed to know who this fucker was if it doesn’t turn back into a human?”

  “We don’t know that it started off as a human,” I said—although if it hadn’t, that meant someone would have had to let it in, which left us with at least one werewolf unaccounted for. I really, really hoped this one had been human when it started. “I think it’s likely, but it could also have been a large dog, or a kangaroo, or even a sheep. When Helen gets here, after she takes care of you, I’ll see if I can get her to perform a superficial examination. We can at least determine whether the werewolf was male or female, which cuts our potential suspect pool in half. What did Shelby mean by ‘don’t do anything stupid’?”