Pocket Apocalypse Read online

  “We’re still working on finding the means by which the original werewolf entered the country. Since we don’t know the identity of our patient zero, it’s been slow going. We have people at the airports and the cruise ship landings, checking manifests, looking for anything out of order. Hopefully we’ll have a breakthrough soon, and can isolate our original carrier, which will help us figure out who else may have been exposed. It’d be faster if we had a virologist—I’ll be sure to order one from the next catalog that comes along.”

  Some people laughed nervously. I didn’t. I was doing the math in my head.

  Four members of the Society had been bitten. Fifteen members of the general populace had been bitten. What about kangaroos? What about sheep? What about the cryptid population of the area? If it was mammalian, it was at risk . . . and just like that, I realized what had been bothering me about the crowd. The people here were black, white, Asian, Indian, and Pacific Islander; they were men and women, young and old; there was even one man about my age in a wheelchair, with the defined upper body of a weightlifter and the scowl of an angry Norse God. And they all had one thing in common.

  They were all human.

  Trying not to look like I was ignoring Riley, who was now talking about population density in the Queensland area, I leaned toward Shelby and murmured, “Does the Thirty-Six Society have any cryptids in its active membership?”

  “What? No.” She was startled enough that she forgot to lower her voice. Several people turned toward us and glared, including her mother. Shelby grimaced, mouthing, “Sorry,” before whispering, “No, we’re all human. We don’t have that many cryptids living in Australia. Not of the sort that would be interested in conservation activities, I mean. Plenty of bunyip and the like, but bunyip aren’t big into doing their civic duty, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed grimly. Twisting back around to face Riley, I raised my hand.

  “—which is why it’s essential that we—yeah?” Riley stopped mid-sentence, frowning at the unthinkable sight of someone not holding their questions until the end. He recovered quickly, sliding smoothly into a new phrase. “Everyone, if you weren’t already aware, we have a distinguished visitor from the United States with us tonight. My daughter, Shelby Tanner, who will one day be taking my place at this podium, has brought her associate Dr. Alexander Price, of the ex-Covenant Prices, to advise us on our werewolf issues.” He stressed the word “Covenant” a little harder than I liked.

  “He can advise himself back onto the plane!” someone shouted. Laughter followed. I managed not to cringe. That, right there, was why I didn’t like the word “Covenant” being bandied around like it was somehow relevant to who I was and the choices I’d made with my life.

  Instead of rising to the bait, I swallowed my pride and stood, keeping my hands in view the whole time. I already knew the crowd was armed. There was no point in antagonizing them. “Mr. Tanner, you seem to be laboring under some misconceptions about the lycanthropy-w virus, which is the cause of, ah, werewolfism.”

  “Am I, now?” Riley turned to the crowd and rolled his eyes. More laughter—but this wasn’t as universal, I noted. Whatever was causing him to showboat against me, he had his supporters. I’d expected that. At the same time, these people were conservationists, if not scientists. They understood that sometimes you needed to listen to your visiting experts, even if you didn’t want them there. “You going to come up here and school me on virology, then? I didn’t know you were an epidemiologist.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m a cryptozoologist, which includes the study of some cryptid-specific diseases, and viruses, like the lycanthropy family, which don’t behave in a manner consistent with current scientific thinking. I can’t tell you how to make a vaccine or an anti-serum for most things. I can’t tell you how lycanthropy works, or why it does the things it does. I can tell you how to deal with it.”

  Riley frowned. There was something in his eyes that I didn’t like: something that warned me I was on the verge of making an enemy I couldn’t afford. Not now, when I was on his home ground, and not ever, if I was intending to continue associating with his daughter. “So you think we’re doing this wrong? Please, come up here and enlighten us.”

  “Thank you, sir, I would be delighted to do just that,” I said, and stood. If he was going to offer me the podium, I was going to take it. Accepting his implicit challenge might make him my enemy, but I didn’t have a choice. Saving these people from what could end very, very badly was more important than what I did or didn’t want on a personal level.

  “You sure, son?” he asked, voice suddenly low and dangerous. I was being offered one last warning, and it couldn’t have been clearer if it had been surrounded by flashing lights and caution tape. I was challenging his authority. I could never take it away from him—I was a stranger, I was a foreigner, and most damning of all, I was a Price—but I could dent it enough to open that door for someone else. But again, I didn’t have a choice. He had created this situation to force me to prove myself, and unfortunately for both of us, I couldn’t afford to avoid this confrontation. There was just too much at stake.

  “I suppose I am, sir,” I said.

  Riley frowned. Then, slowly, he smiled. “I guess you’ve got some balls on you after all. Everyone, let’s give a warm Thirty-Six Society welcome to Dr. Alexander Price.” He stepped away from the microphone.

  The applause that followed me to the podium was grudging, but it was there, and that was more than I’d expected. I cleared my throat and leaned into the microphone. “I usually go by ‘Alex,’” I said.

  You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed.

  Right. “I’m glad to be here, to assist you with this situation. Lycanthropy-w is a nasty virus. It’s similar to rabies in that there’s no cure. There are some treatments that can be effective if delivered immediately after someone is bitten.”

  Crickets. I cleared my throat and continued, “Since all known treatments can be fatal, they aren’t typically delivered unless the individual in question is willing to provide informed consent.” Which left the civilians out. It’s hard to consent to something you don’t believe in. “On the plus side, since they’re made of things that are poisonous to werewolves, they can also be used to coat bladed weapons in the absence of bullets.”

  Riley folded his arms. His smile was long gone, like it had never been there at all. I couldn’t tell if he was mercurial as hell, or if he just hated me on general principle. Either way, what fun. “You must think we don’t know how to read a book here in Australia. We got all that out of the reference materials, and you’re not telling us anything we don’t know.”

  “How old are your reference materials?”

  He blinked and unfolded his arms, looking nonplussed for the first time. “We copied most of them from your grandfather. He was kind enough to give us access to his books while he was here.”

  “With all due respect, sir, our understanding of lycanthropy has evolved in the last fifty years—much like the virus itself.” No one laughed. Not quite no one: I heard a snort of amusement from the table Shelby shared with her mother and sisters, and glanced over to see Raina, hand over her mouth, shaking her head.

  That was somewhat encouraging. I turned back to Riley Tanner, addressing him as much as I was the rest of the room, and said, “We have contacts at the CDC and within the World Health Organization, therianthropes who have gone into the biological sciences to learn more about themselves and the dangers their people face. They’ve done extensive research into the disease, and they’ve confirmed something we suspected but didn’t know when my grandfather came through here: like rabies, lycanthropy-w is a spillover disease. It’s cross-infectious in all known mammals. It can survive in the absence of human or therianthrope hosts, because it goes into dogs, into sheep, even into rabbits or housecats. Whatever can be exposed can be infected.”

 
Riley’s face grew stony. “We already knew that: Shelby told us. Does that mean all those things can turn into wolves?”

  “Only the ones that are big enough. Most will still begin to transform, and die in the process—they need a certain body mass to successfully make the transition from one species to another—but when you factor in the fact that scavengers, most of which are large enough to survive the transformation, can be infected from eating the bodies of animals that have died in the transformation process, you’re looking at ecological devastation.”

  Riley stared at me. Finally, he asked, “My daughter says that we can trust you, but is there any proof of this, apart from what a bunch of nonhuman science wonks told you?”

  “I’ve seen the histology reports. I’ve seen the field reports. And yes, I’ve seen the reality of their work. An individual infected with lycanthropy-w got into a stable and bit several horses before he was taken down. The people who dealt with that incident were monster hunters, not cryptozoologists, in it for the thrill and the possibility of a payout down the road. They told one of the local breeding stations about their kill. They didn’t mention the horses.”

  It had been my first encounter with lycanthropy-w outside of a book. Books were safe, for the most part. They didn’t try to kill you. Even the scariest books didn’t leave you with years of nightmares, and a bone-deep desire never to go anywhere near another lycanthrope.

  Yet here I was. I shook myself out of the memory, and turned away from Riley, facing the room as I said, “Five horses were bitten. One became infected. That horse transformed for the first time twenty-eight days after the original werewolf was killed. There was no one on-site. The family who owned the farm had no reason to be on guard. They didn’t know werewolves were real; they thought something had escaped from a local zoo or traveling circus and made a mess on their property, only to be recovered by its handlers. Examination of their personal effects after the fact made it clear that they were looking for the farm or zoo in question. They were planning to bring charges.”

  Four people had lived in that house: a young couple and their two children, ages nine and five. None of them had survived the night. That may have been a blessing. All four had been bitten several times before the horse ripped their throats open. Infection wouldn’t have been a guarantee, but it had been likely. Each bite increased the likelihood of infection, since each additional fluid transfer was a whole new roll of the dice. No werewolf was a thinking creature while fully transformed—species of origin didn’t matter—but there was something especially brutal about attacks initiated by werewolves that had never been sapient to begin with. It’s like werewolves that were originally intelligent retain just enough self-control to make a difference.

  Not enough of a difference.

  Everyone was staring at me. I realized with a sickening lurch that I had been standing there for almost a minute, lost in my recollection of that terrible, long ago scene. The younger of the two children had been virtually in pieces. What was left of the body had been recognizable only through the process of elimination: we’d already found everyone else who was likely to have been inside.

  I shook my head to clear the cobwebs away. It failed to dislodge the memory. Now that it had been summoned from the dark place where I usually kept it confined, it was intending to make me recall every drop of blood and every tattered piece of flesh. “The, ah, remains of the homeowners and their children were so thoroughly mangled that we initially thought that one of them had been infected during the earlier outbreak. Werewolves will begin to experience transformation seizures after roughly twenty-eight days, but may not be capable of full transformation for as much as six months. Those that are . . . we can’t tell what species a fully transformed werewolf was before it was infected. We only confirmed that the horse had been responsible for their deaths after a full autopsy, which showed that the werewolf had still possessed partially herbivorous dentition.” Molars didn’t transform as thoroughly as canines and incisors. No one knew why.

  It was easy from there, easy to turn things clinical and abstract: to become, for just a few minutes, the dispassionate scientist that so many people took me for when we first met. I didn’t like giving in to that side of myself, because I could see the warning signs written on the walls of my soul, the ones that said that if I gave in too many times, I would find that the friendly, reasonably compassionate persona I presented to the world was no longer dominant. It would be so easy to not care about the people around me.

  It would hurt less when they died.

  When I stopped speaking, the room was even quieter than it had been before. Some of the people barely seemed to be breathing. They just stared at me, faces tight with worry, eyes narrow with the need to calculate the wisdom of stepping forward to defend the country they loved. Looking at them, I estimated that we’d lose maybe one in five. They would plead some duty that couldn’t be avoided, and they would go home. That was a good thing, oddly enough. It would mean that even if the rest of us died trying to fix this, there would still be people standing, ready to keep the banner of the Thirty-Six Society flying.

  Gabrielle broke the silence. She stood, pushing her chair back with a loud scraping sound, and declared, “I’ve never let anything on this continent push me around—except for my baby sister, so don’t even say it, Raina—and I’m sure as hell not going to start now. You’ve told us how bad this shit is. Pretty sure we already knew it was bad. Now how about you tell us how to get rid of it?”

  “We have to track down all infected individuals, whether they are civilians or part of the Society, and monitor them for twenty-eight days,” I said. “If we cannot successfully monitor those who have been exposed, we need to consider more permanent solutions. Silver bullets work best.” None of the solutions we had would be good ones. I hated to advocate for killing people just because they might get sick, but if it was the only way . . .

  “How are we supposed to find all those people?” asked Riley. “We can’t go door to door looking for people who’ve run afoul of werewolves.”

  “You have to remember that someone who’s been bitten—even someone who’s started to transform—will still seem normal in their original form. They might be irritable or unusually skittish, but they’ll look like anybody else. The same goes for infected animals,” I said. “How you find them will depend on the resources you have available to you. I don’t know the territory or what you have at your disposal. I’d like to sit down with your leadership to discuss it as soon as possible. In the meantime, knowledge is going to matter more in this fight than almost anything else.” Knowledge and silver bullets. “Sir? Thank you for letting me speak.” I stepped aside.

  Riley wasn’t smiling—only a sociopath could have smiled after the speech I’d just given—but he looked marginally less disapproving as he stepped back into place behind the podium. He clapped me on the shoulder with one massive hand, and then I was dismissed; my part in this little drama was complete, at least for the moment.

  I made my way back to the table on legs that felt like they were made half of Jell-O, slumping back into my seat. It seemed natural to fold my arms and put my head down after that, and so I did. Jet lag, speaking in front of an unfriendly audience, and knowing that I was about to face my worst fear were all conspiring to overwhelm me. I wasn’t worried about showing weakness in front of the Australian cryptozoologists. They’d know my weak spots soon enough, and trying to conceal them now would only increase the odds of someone getting hurt.

  A hand rested itself between my shoulder blades. I didn’t need to look up to know that it belonged to Shelby. “You did good,” she murmured. “Dad doesn’t yield to just anybody.”

  “Pretty sure he did it because he thought I’d make myself look bad, but thanks.” I didn’t lift my head. If Riley thought I was being disrespectful, I was sure he’d find a way to tell me about it.

  Shelby left her hand where it was. “
My poor Alex,” she said, and went quiet, listening to her father speak.

  His description of the surrounding area wasn’t making me feel any better about our chances of quickly and easily uprooting the infection, especially in the nonhuman population. There were sheep and kangaroos, wallabies and wombats and koalas, drop bears and bunyip and other things I’d never heard of before and would need to look up later, when I got access to their research materials. All of them were mammals. All of them were capable of carrying lycanthropy-w, and passing it on. Even the smaller mammals, like the possums and garrinna, would need to be tested.

  There’s only one completely reliable way to check for lycanthropy-w, and it’s the same as the old test for rabies. We would have to kill sample members of each population and test their brain tissue and spinal fluid for signs of sickness. Then, after a few weeks had passed, we would have to do it again, and again, until there were no more signs of lycanthropy-w.

  Animal conservation in Australia is extremely important among both cryptid and noncryptid populations, because so many of the creatures native to that continent are both uniquely Australian and deeply endangered. Killing sample members of their populations wouldn’t be like killing a few raccoons or squirrels back home—painful and unpleasant, especially for the raccoons and squirrels, but not an ecological disaster. Killing the things that lived here would leave a lasting ecological impact.

  It couldn’t be helped. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t be hated.

  I left my head down on the table, and listened to Riley Tanner as he calmly, carefully outlined all the ways in which we were about to get completely screwed.

  Six

  “It’s easy to say that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few when no one’s holding a gun to your head.”