Pocket Apocalypse Read online

  —Martin Baker

  The secret meeting room of an isolated house in Queensland, Australia, preparing for the inevitable disaster

  THE CROWD DISPERSED QUICKLY after the questions and answers were done. Many of the people who left had the air of soldiers who’d just been told that Godzilla was making a beeline for the neighborhood where they lived: calm, determined, and following a well-established evacuation plan. Only a few looked like they were on the verge of panic. That was a good sign. The more people who stayed calm, the more people we’d be able to count on when things got bad. Well. When things got worse.

  A man I didn’t know accompanied Riley back to our table. The newcomer was almost as tall as Riley, slim where the other man was muscular, with sandy-blond hair and the seemingly universal Australian tan. He looked like he was about my father’s age.

  “Price,” said Riley. I sat up straighter, adjusting my glasses with one hand and trying to look like I hadn’t just been calculating how many graves a group this size could fill. “I want you to meet Cooper. He handles security in this state.”

  Which meant this probably wasn’t Shelby’s original part of Australia, since otherwise the Tanners would have been handling security. I filed the information away as I stood and offered Cooper my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “And you as well. Big fan of your grandfather’s work.” Cooper’s grip was firm without being crushing. He pumped twice before letting me go. “Sorry to hear you’d been through all that with the werewolves in America, but I have to admit, I’m glad to hear you’ve actually seen action of some sort. Book learning isn’t the sort of thing that keeps you alive in a place like this.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about the Australian wildlife,” I said. “I’m almost glad to be here to help with something I have experience with—although I do wish it had been the manticores Shelby mentioned to me once, and not werewolves. Lycanthropy is nothing to mess around with.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Cooper agreed. He frowned, the expression pulling canyons into his weathered skin. “You mentioned a treatment for people who’d been bitten. What’s that about?”

  “Silver and wolf’s bane—aconite—have historically been used as effective weapons against werewolves. Interestingly, we think this application was inspired by the use of lunar caustic, also known as silver nitrate, in the treatment of early rabies cases, when physicians would apply heated rods to cauterize—”

  Shelby rose, putting her hand on my upper arm in a gesture that was simultaneously soothing and possessive. “Alex, sweetie, as fascinating as the whole history of lycanthropy is, how about we table it for now and start in with how you’re going to save all our lives, yeah?”

  “Ah, sorry,” I said, glancing her way. Her eyes were narrowed, and her attention was fixed on Cooper as tightly as a snake would fixate on a mouse. I looked back to Cooper. “Occupational hazard. Also, I find science less upsetting than thinking about how bad the situation could get.”

  “Well, this situation is fair distressing, so I can’t say I blame you for that,” said Cooper. “Shelby. You’re looking lovely, as always.”

  “Cooper,” said Shelby, in a flat tone. “Nice to see you showed up. Missed you at Jack’s funeral.”

  Cooper looked uncomfortable. I just loved walking into interpersonal situations I knew nothing about. I wondered whether this was how Shelby felt when dealing with my family. Probably.

  “Finish explaining your treatment, Price,” said Riley.

  “Yes, right,” I said, grateful for the save. “Silver nitrate, applied to properly cleaned and sterilized wounds, can act as a crude antibiotic and a good way to reduce the live viral agents in the area. Wolf’s bane, also known as aconite, has a negative effect on the health of the virus. We’re still trying to figure out why. Not that it matters much. If it works, it works.” I’d seen pictures of viral cultures that had been treated with pure aconite. They were blasted wastelands of broken cells, post-apocalyptic and incapable of supporting life. A dose that undiluted would kill a human, of course, although I’d heard rumors of cryptozoologists in Africa who had treated an infected elephant with a massive injection of crushed aconite flowers. The elephant had lived, and hadn’t become a werewolf. So that was something.

  “So you just feed a person silver and toxic flowers?”

  “Not quite. We make a tincture of ground silver, aconite, ketamine, mercury, and rabies vaccine, which can be given to the afflicted person at any point prior to their first transformation—so within twenty-eight days of exposure, although earlier is always better. The treatment involves four doses in total, given at two-day intervals. It’s . . . well, ‘toxic’ doesn’t really cover it. It’s incredibly poisonous, and difficult to make. If you get the proportions even slightly off, you run the risk of cardiac arrest or simple overdose.”

  “But it works,” pressed Cooper.

  “It can work,” I said. “Part of the problem is that we don’t have a good way of knowing whether someone has been infected before we start treatment. Only one person in five will actually be infected. That’s a lot of false negatives. Out of the people who have received this treatment and lived, all but one have turned out just fine.” I didn’t mention the people who had died. That would just complicate things.

  “And that one?” pressed Riley.

  “Werewolf,” I said. “Maybe the treatment doesn’t work at all. Maybe he was the only one who was actually infected—even with the size of our sample pool, the inability to test for preexisting infection means we don’t know. But all the lab work supports this as a prophylactic treatment, and it’s better than sitting back doing nothing. Before you ask, no, we don’t have a test that tells us which way it’s going to go before people either cross the finish line into safety or transform into giant wolf-monsters and start trying to eat their former friends and loved ones. You roll the dice and you get what you get.”

  “Did you bring the materials you’d need for this treatment?” asked Cooper, sounding anxious. I thought about the members of the Society who’d been bitten and were now under quarantine, waiting to see whether they would live or die. A treatment—even one that stood a chance of killing them—would probably be the most welcome thing in the world.

  I nodded. “I did. It’s part of why Shelby arranged for us to be extracted from the airport. It’s hard to explain to the nice customs agents why you’re flying with a mason jar full of mercury and a bunch of dried aconite flowers. Fresh would be better, of course, but aconite doesn’t grow on this continent.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Cooper. I blinked at him. He shrugged. “Some idiots decided to import their pretty flower gardens from England during colonization. We’ve got an issue with endemic invasive aconite plants. Most of the time we root them up and burn them to keep them from spreading further, but if you need fresh flowers, we’ll get you fresh flowers.”

  “It’s spring; they may not be blooming yet,” I said. “Leaves and roots will do just as well, especially if there’s a chemistry set around here that I can use.”

  “They’ll be blooming,” said Cooper. “Don’t know how they behave in their home ecosystem, but here, they’re damn near unstoppable.”

  “There’s a medical station nearby,” said Riley. “It’s meant for wildlife triage and emergency care, and we basically control it. You can use that. I figure the equipment used to make snake antivenin should be good enough for you to cook up your ‘tincture.’”

  “It should be, yes,” I said, trying to project a level of confidence that I didn’t feel. My mother was the medic: she was the one who brewed the tinctures and mashed up the ingredients for the poultices. I was better with her sort of work than either of my sisters, and could generally be counted on to mix a simple remedy, but making enough anti-lycanthropy treatment for a continent was well beyond my skills, especially given the toxicity of the ingredients i
n question. I was going to have to be more careful than I’d ever been before, or I was going to get somebody killed.

  Then again, that sentence could describe this entire trip. No one wanted me here but Shelby, and yet I was the only one with a working treatment for lycanthropy, which made me at least partially responsible for the lives of everyone around me. Most of them already didn’t trust me as far as they could throw me. Oh, this was going to be great fun.

  “Good. Now go get some sleep.” Riley seemed to be looking at Shelby rather than me as he continued, “We’re going to have one hell of a day tomorrow. It’d be best if everyone was rested and ready.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” said Shelby. She took her hand off my arm as she stepped toward him, and he hugged her, and I had never felt more like an outsider in my life. These people were depending on me. That didn’t mean I felt like they wanted me here.

  “Come on, fancy-pants.” Raina was suddenly at my elbow, taking up the place Shelby had occupied only a moment before. “Let me get you back to your room.”

  I didn’t have a good reason to argue, and so I just nodded, and turned away from my girlfriend and her father (and her father’s friend), and let Raina lead me away.

  The mice were waiting on the bed when I got back to the guest room. They gave a muffled cheer at the sight of me stepping through the door, waving leaves and scraps of snakeskin and something that looked like one of Shelby’s hair ties in the air in place of pennants. I rubbed my face with one hand. In my family, you learn to deal with the mice early. There is no alternative. That didn’t mean I was in the mood for their inevitable celebration.

  “I have a headache,” I informed them. “Can we please keep the shouting and cheering to a minimum until I’ve managed to sleep off the existential terror of this continent?”

  “We have added a new Occasion to the calendar,” squeaked the junior priest in charge of the congregation. “We will spend this night in Solemn Contemplation, and there will be little shouting, or cheering, or speaking.”

  “Cool, thanks.” I paused. “What’s the new occasion?”

  “We will celebrate Crossing the Sea, and Arriving in Australia, and Killing a Very Large Snake,” said the priest solemnly.

  Given the size of the mice and the fact that there were only six of them, the “very large snake” could have been the size of my shoelace. But they weren’t demanding food, and they had a tendency to eat their kills. I decided it was better not to ask.

  “Great.” I began removing my weapons, stacking them with brisk efficiency on the bedside table. A thought struck me. “I don’t know if anyone apart from Shelby has a pet with them. Please don’t eat anything that looks like it could be a domestic companion. And try not to eat any of the parrots, either. I don’t know what’s endangered around here.” We normally took a live-and-let-live approach to Aeslin predation—anything they killed was probably trying to kill them first. At the same time, they weren’t native to the Australian continent. The last thing I needed was to try explaining to the Thirty-Sixers why I’d allowed my traveling cryptid circus to eat the last living member of some ultra-rare species of macaw.

  The mice looked disappointed by my edict, ears dropping and tails wrapping tighter around their legs. The reason why was revealed a few seconds later, when the priest in charge asked hesitantly, “May we still gather feathers and bits of shell? There is so much new color here, and the livery of the faith grows faded over time . . .”

  Aeslin mouse fashion tended to demonstrate an aesthetic of “we found it, and we found a way to stick it together, and now it looks awesome.” They’d been known to steal ribbons, hair ties, scraps of fabric, and of course, feathers. Crow alone was responsible for the production of several feather cloaks every time he molted. “You can gather anything you find and wish to use for your purposes, providing you don’t distress the birds in the process,” I said. “Fair?”

  “HAIL!” declared the mice, and scampered down the side of the bed, no doubt to start moving the feathers they’d already collected to whatever hidey-hole they were planning to use during our stay. I smiled after them, pulled my shirt off over my head, and collapsed onto the bed. I rolled over only long enough to put my glasses down next to my pistol, where both would be easily within reach.

  Sleep came fast, which was a mercy, given the events of the evening; the change of time zones was hitting me harder than I’d expected. Wakefulness came even faster, when I felt someone slide into the bed beside me. I snapped instantly alert, thrusting my hand toward the bedside table, and the waiting protection of my pistol.

  A hand caught my wrist, fingers tightening enough to let me feel the familiar shape of them. “It’s me,” Shelby said. “Alex, it’s me. Calm down.”

  “Shelby?” The question came out louder than I intended, powered by both adrenaline and relief. I hadn’t realized I was sleeping so deeply. I should have snapped awake as soon as she opened the bedroom door, and the fact that I hadn’t was a worrisome failure on my part.

  “In the flesh.” She pressed herself against me, looping one ankle over mine, as if to hold me on the bed. I outweighed her by enough that it was a futile gesture; I could have had us both on the floor in seconds, if I’d needed to. And somehow, that made it okay. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Had to wait for everyone to be asleep enough not to catch me sneaking out.”

  “Wha’ . . .” I was still waking up, and it took a few seconds for the import of her words to hit me. When it did, I tried to push myself away, stopping only when my back thumped against the cool plaster of the wall. “Shelby, you can’t be in here, your father will kill me,” I hissed. “He will kill me, and then he will feed my body to the crocodiles. Crocodiles are very efficient methods of body disposal. Trust me, I’ve done it.”

  “Won’t, shan’t, can’t,” said Shelby, scooting closer, so that I had no way to escape without hurting her. She was wearing a thin shirt and a pair of running shorts. I was wearing nothing. Between us, we had way too little clothing for this conversation to be comfortable, under the circumstances. “I’m a grownup. I’ve been living with you for going on a year now. He knows I haven’t had my own room that whole time—I told Raina, and I know damn well she’s told him by now. That’s the sort of loving sister she is. My father needs to come to terms with the fact that our relationship isn’t as pleasantly chaste as he might like to think it is.”

  “Okay, Shelby, all my ‘your girlfriend is right here’ instincts say to agree with you, and all my ‘you grew up surrounded by women who could kill you in their sleep’ instincts say that your father doesn’t get to control your life, but my ‘let’s try not to die in Australia’ instincts keep reminding me that he’s twice my size. I mean, have you seen the man?”

  “Don’t worry, Alex, if he tries to start trouble with you, I’ll come to your rescue. I’m supposed to be his successor, after all. He listens to me.” Shelby leaned in and kissed me before I could point out the flaws in her logic. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted like beeswax lip balm, and I was kissing her back before I could remind myself what a terrible idea this was.

  Shelby pushed herself closer still, sliding one knee between my legs as she did something clever with her hands that resulted in her shirt being hiked up to her collarbones. Her breasts pressed against my chest, nothing keeping her skin from mine.

  Dim reason told me to make one more effort to keep myself from being murdered by a large Australian cryptozoologist, and was promptly shouted down by my libido, which was much more interested in the present goings-on. I tugged at Shelby’s shirt, and she obliged by leaning back long enough to let me pull it off over her head.

  “I see you’ve got the spirit now,” she said, and then her mouth was back on mine, and there was no more conversation for a while.

  Having sex with Shelby in a house that was, at least nominally, her parents’ was . . . strange at best. We’d been sex
ually active while we’d been living with my grandparents, of course, but neither of them was human, and neither of them cared, providing we used protection and didn’t do anything messy outside of our shared bedroom. The one time I’d tried to bring up the subject with my grandfather, who had at least started out human—before he died and was brought back to life by carelessly applied science—he had laughed in my face. “Alex, your generation didn’t invent sex, and we came to terms with the idea of our descendants getting intimate with other people when your mother called home and told us she was pregnant. We really don’t care.”

  That had been the household policy ever since, and it was a good one. I doubted my parents would be quite as easygoing about premarital relations under their own roof, and I knew Shelby’s parents weren’t as easygoing. And somehow, once we got started, that just made it all the more exciting. Every touch, every kiss, it was all stolen, and we were willing accomplices in the burglary of one another’s bodies.

  Time ceased to matter for a while. When we were finished, lying spent and sweaty on a bed that had seemed too empty before, and now felt perfectly full, Shelby dropped her head into the crook of my shoulder, sighed, and said, “Going to have to do a lot more of that, you know. We both need the stress relief.”

  “What, you don’t find your family relaxing?”

  Shelby snorted. “Do you find your family relaxing?”

  “Point.” I sighed, running my fingers through her hair, and said, “It’s weird. When we got here . . . enough of the tactics you use, enough of the policies and procedures, are like the ones we use at home that I almost fell into the trap of thinking we were the same. That everything the Thirty-Six Society did would make sense to me. I mean, you have two sisters, one of them’s a misanthrope who likes video games, the other one’s in the arts; your mother’s friendly but deadly . . . your father is sort of where the comparison falls down. Mine’s tall, skinny, and academic.”