Pocket Apocalypse Read online

Sitting in an animal rescue van, driving down the back roads of Queensland, Australia

  THE VAN THE SOCIETY used for transporting injured wildlife around Queensland was big enough to have been a perfect base for a roving serial killer: much like the SUV, and like Riley himself, it seemed to have been designed to take up as much space as humanly possible while still being considered a “normal” example of the breed. A wire screen separated the front seat from the back. Charlotte and Gabby rode up front. Shelby and I rode in the back, seated on foldout benches on either side of the van.

  “Thanks for leaving the cages home, Mum,” Shelby said, her hands resting on her knees and her eyes remaining fixed on me. “It would have been awkward back here if we’d been crammed between enclosures.”

  “We could have just put your boyfriend into one,” said Gabby. “Solve a bunch of problems in one go.”

  “I’d rather avoid cages as long as possible, if it’s all right by you,” I said. I could envision far too many of them in my future. We’d be putting me in one—or at least in a small locked room—as soon as we made it back to the house. After some brief discussion, we had mutually agreed to wait to deliver the antiserum until I was secure, since there was a chance it would cause convulsions. Better that we do something like that in a setting we could control.

  “Alex,” said Shelby softly.

  I mustered a wan smile. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. None of this is all right. How have you even lived this long?” She looked suddenly angry, her sorrow transmuting into rage. “There’s a cockatrice, you look at it. There’s a werewolf, you get bitten by it. Did you ever meet a monster you didn’t want to turn into? It’s hard on the heart, Alex. It’s just . . . it’s so damn hard on the heart.”

  “Not just yours.” I leaned my head back against the van wall, staring up at the ceiling. Riley and Raina were back at the medical station, disinfecting everything and wiping away all the signs of what had happened there. Including Cooper. “Did Cooper . . . did he have family?”

  “No, thankfully,” said Charlotte. “We’ll have a private service, but we’re not going to be explaining his body to anyone who would ask unfortunate questions. People disappear in Australia every day.”

  “People disappear all over the world every day,” Shelby corrected. “It’s not just here. It’s sad, though. He was always sweet to me, in his own way.”

  “Every death is sad.” I was so tired. My arm still ached, despite its swaddling layers of gauze and cuckoo blood. I closed my eyes.

  “Alex, try to stay awake, all right? We’ll be able to set you up a blood transfusion once we get back to the house.” Shelby sounded concerned.

  I frowned, not opening my eyes. “I haven’t lost that much blood. And if you have the equipment to perform a blood transfusion at the house, why did we have to go to the middle of nowhere for me to break out the chemistry set? There was nothing at that medical station that I didn’t have with me or couldn’t have scavenged from a working kitchen.”

  “Dad doesn’t trust you,” said Gabby.

  “Gabby!” said Charlotte.

  “What? It’s true, Mum, he doesn’t. Shelly came home with a boy who was half Covenant and half the monsters that killed Jack, of course Dad doesn’t trust him. He might as well have been completely covered in little mustaches he could twirl. So that’s why, Alex.” From the way her voice shifted, Gabby had twisted to look at me. I kept my eyes closed. “He didn’t want you mixing up chemicals in the house when there was a chance you were up to no good. Then Cooper went and got killed, and you didn’t, and now I don’t think he knows what to think about you. Might be an improvement, really, as long as you don’t turn into a werewolf.”

  “I’m going to hold you underwater in the next billabong we find,” said Shelby, a low, dangerous note in her voice. “I’m going to hold you underwater until the kicking stops.”

  “You can give it a try,” said Gabby. “I’ll let you.”

  “It’s all right, Shelby,” I said, allowing myself a hint of a smile. “At least she’s being honest.” Honesty was the best policy. It was what I planned to use with the mice. They needed to know what had happened to me, so that they’d be able to explain it to my parents if they had to go home without me.

  My parents. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I knew what I was going to say to my parents. If I called and told them I’d been bitten, there was every chance they’d be on the next plane to Australia, and it wasn’t like they could do anything to help me fight off the infection. Nothing could do that. If they came here, they’d be putting themselves into the line of fire, and they would make it harder for me to do what I might need to do. Could they stand by and watch while I put a gun against my head?

  No. They couldn’t, and they wouldn’t. No matter how often they had said that our jobs—our lives—could be deadly, they wouldn’t be able to accept that my infection meant that I was genuinely lost to them. “I can’t tell them,” I said.

  Shelby sighed. The sound was soft and still in the enclosed van, filled with a deep and unquestioning sadness. “I know you can’t,” she said.

  “What’s that?” asked Charlotte.

  “Alex can’t call his parents,” Shelby said. “They’d want to come here, and that wouldn’t work out well for anybody.”

  “You got all that from ‘I can’t tell them’?” asked Gabby.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with his family lately,” said Shelby. “I’m starting to figure out how they think.”

  “That’s what worries me,” said Charlotte.

  The van rattled down the back roads between the medical station and the safe house at what felt like unsafe speeds, especially given my current position in the back, surrounded by unsecured animal rescue supplies. I kept my eyes closed for the rest of the drive, trying to think about anything other than the aching throb in my shoulder, and the tiny psychosomatic fire ants scurrying in my blood. You can’t feel lycanthropy taking hold, any more than you can feel rabies, but in that moment, I would have sworn I could trace the path of the infection as it radiated out from my shoulder and sought new homes in the tissue of my nervous system, spinal cord, and worst of all, brain.

  I was sunk in my own depressed contemplation when the van finally jerked to a halt. One of the front doors slammed almost before we had stopped moving, and then the back of the van was flung open, sending light flooding into the previously dark space. Even through my closed eyelids, it was enough to make me shy away and raise an arm to shade my face—and then, because the mammalian state comes with some weird instinctual responses, I cracked my eyes open enough to see what was going on.

  Gabby was standing in front of the open van doors with a gun in her hands, the muzzle trained on me. Her stance wasn’t as good as it could have been; her feet were too close together, and the placement of her hands wasn’t giving her any defense against the recoil. She’d be lucky if she didn’t break a wrist if she had to fire. Of course, at her current range, I’d be lucky if she didn’t put a bullet through my heart and solve the whole “I can’t tell my parents I’ve been bitten by a werewolf” problem sooner rather than later.

  “Please undo your belt and come with me,” she said, before adding, “Sorry about this, Alex. It’s basic quarantine procedure.”

  “I know about quarantine,” I said, keeping my movements slow as I slid to my feet. The van was almost tall enough for me to straighten up inside. Only half-stooped, I walked toward the exit. Shelby remained behind me, not saying a word either to defend me or to support her sister. She’d been put into an awkward position, and I felt bad for her—or as bad for her as I could muster, given my own situation.

  “It’s a nice room,” said Gabby. “You barely notice the bars on the windows.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “Look, I’m going to need someone with me when I take the antiserum. It can cause heart failure a
nd convulsions.”

  Gabby looked alarmed. “Well, none of us is going to do it. Not if we can’t know for sure that you’re not contagious.”

  I decided against trying to explain the difference between “contagious” and “infectious.” Besides, I wasn’t either. “I won’t be able to pass the virus for twenty-eight days.”

  “We only have your word for that! We can’t risk it.”

  Shelby would do it. Happily. And it would just cause more problems with her family, which was the last thing I wanted to do right now. I swallowed the urge to sigh. “Fine. Is there a local gorgon or wadjet community you can call? Maybe they can send a doctor.”

  “There aren’t any gorgons in Australia,” said Gabby, looking at me blankly. “I don’t even know what a whatsit is.”

  I was going to die because the locals had shrugged off their Covenant influences enough to protect things that didn’t look human, but not enough to work with things that did. “Hang on,” I said. I twisted to look over my shoulder at Shelby. “Get my phone. Find the number for the Sarpas. Call Kumari, and tell her what’s going on. Tell her I need a nonmammalian doctor within the next two hours, and tell her . . .” I took a deep breath. “Tell her I’ll guarantee Chandi access to her fiancé every day for a month after I get home, if she does this for me.”

  “I’ll do you one better,” said Shelby. “I’ll also tell her that if you don’t make it home, Chandi gets her time anyway. I have the pull at the zoo to make it happen. Especially if I’m grieving.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and turned back to Gabby, who was watching this exchange with a nonplussed expression on her face. “All right. Take me to the oubliette.”

  “It’s not an oubliette,” she said. “There’s cable. Now march.”

  I marched.

  It was becoming more and more apparent that I didn’t know how large the Thirty-Six Society compound was, and just as apparent that they weren’t going to make it easy for me to learn. Gabby marched me down a pleasant brick path until it tapered out, becoming a somewhat less pleasant dirt path that wound through another patch of thickly packed eucalyptus trees. Something whistled high overhead, and was answered by Flora’s shrill, territorial shriek.

  “Can I get a guide to the local birds?” I asked. “Since there’s a window and all, it might be interesting to learn which call belongs to which thing I’ve never seen before.”

  “I’ll tell Mum,” said Gabby. “Please keep walking.”

  “If Shelby can’t reach my contact, we’re going to need to figure something out about my medical care, you know.”

  “We need to make sure it’s safe before we do anything. We’ve been quarantining people, but we haven’t been poking at them.” Again, she sounded apologetic, and again, that didn’t change anything. This was hard for her. I understood that. Anything that involved marching a visiting cryptozoologist to your secret isolation shed was going to be difficult. That didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult for me, too.

  We stepped out of the trees and onto the calm green oasis of a lawn, dotted here and there with flowers I didn’t recognize. There was a small two-story house there, complete with tiny porch and even tinier chimney rising from the roof. The door was ajar, and someone was waiting for us just inside. I glanced back at Gabby, who shook her head and gestured me forward with her gun. Her finger was resting on the trigger, I noticed: she was more than prepared to shoot me if she felt that it was necessary. She hadn’t been keeping her finger on the trigger when Shelby was in eyesight.

  “So I guess he’s with us,” I said, and kept walking.

  The figure in the hall turned out to be another man I recognized from the previous night’s dinner. He was of apparently Filipino descent, with long black hair tied into a ponytail and a scruff of a goatee covering his chin. He was also holding a gun large enough to make Gabby’s look like a bad joke. I nodded to him. He frowned at me, his eyes focusing on my gauze-encrusted shoulder.

  “Is this the one who was exposed?” he asked, looking back to Gabby for confirmation.

  She nodded. “One bite. It’s been thoroughly cleaned out, but . . .”

  “You and I both know that doesn’t mean anything,” he said, and turned back to me. “My name is Angelo Magdael. I will have the extreme pleasure of being your jailer for the next twenty-eight days. If you have any weapons on you, please surrender them now.”

  I’d been waiting for this, which meant I’d had plenty of time to consider my reply. “No,” I said, as politely as I could manage under the circumstances. “I appreciate your reasons for asking, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse.”

  Angelo blinked. So did Gabby. Gabby—possibly because she had grown up with two sisters arguing with her over everything under the sun—recovered first, demanding, “Why not? I’m holding a gun, you know.”

  “Yes, and so is he, and neither of you has a proper grip,” I said. “You shouldn’t keep your finger on the trigger while you walk, either. I understand the necessity of keeping control of the situation, but I’m not going to run, and even if I’ve been infected, I won’t be able to infect anyone else for twenty-eight days. We have a window. As for why I won’t give you my weapons, I’m a Price. We never give away our weapons.”

  “Gun,” repeated Gabby, like it made all the difference in the world.

  “Two guns,” I countered. “Also several knives, a garrote, one of my grandfather’s poison rings, and the technique for making werewolf antiserum, which I have memorized and have yet to pass on to any members of your organization. For the moment, you need me. You’re not going to shoot me until the need has passed. Now, I’ve come along with you willingly. I’m letting you put me in quarantine, although I’m going to have a serious talk with your father later about how long I’m willing to stay there. You’re not getting my weapons. That’s where I have to draw the line. Besides, if I’m infected, I reserve the right to fix the problem myself.”

  Angelo and Gabby exchanged a look that I recognized in concept, if not in its exact details. They’d clearly been working with each other for a long time; they’d just as clearly been expecting me to behave according to their script. To be fair, they had probably used that script on all the other people currently in quarantine, and it had no doubt worked every time. Unfortunately for them, those people were members of the Thirty-Six Society. They had a sense of duty to their fellow society members, and to the country of Australia, which would be better off without a bunch of heavily armed werewolves running around the place.

  My sense of duty was to myself, and to Shelby, and to the idea that I was going to find a way to beat this: a way to go home human. And if that couldn’t happen, I needed to be the one who decided when the battle was over. Allowing these people to disarm me, no matter how good their intentions were, was not the way to get what I needed.

  “Mr. Price—” began Angelo.

  “I don’t think you should waste your time, or mine, with this argument,” I said wearily. “Please. I just want to get to whatever room you’re planning to keep me in, and take a nice hot bath while I wait for Shelby to show up with a physician who can take care of my wounds without having a panic attack. I don’t want to stand here and fight with you. You won’t win. We’ll all lose.”

  “This is very irregular,” said Angelo. He gave me a reproving look. “You’re going to get us into trouble.”

  “Just tell Riley I was the one who wouldn’t cooperate. I bet you he’ll have no difficulty believing it.” I paused as something occurred to me. Looking to Gabby, I said, “Do you think you could do me a favor?”

  She blinked. “You’re refusing to follow a simple request, and you want me to do you a favor? Did you hit your head when that werewolf knocked you over?”

  “Asking me to give up my weapons is not a simple request, and you know it,” I said sternly. “I need you to go to the room where my things are, and get
the mice.”

  “Mice?” said Angelo.

  “What?” said Gabby.

  “I need the mice,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I don’t need my clothes or my books—although I’d welcome my books, it’s always good to have something to read while you’re in solitary confinement—but I need the mice. They need to hear what’s happened to me.”

  Gabby nodded, understanding dawning in her eyes. “I’ll ask if they’ll come with me,” she said. “How much do you want me to tell them?”

  “Tell them the God of Scales and Silences needs them to be with him; say that it’s a matter of holy writ,” I said. “They’ll come.”

  “All right,” said Gabby. “He’s all yours, Angelo.” She turned and fled—taking her finger off the trigger of her gun, I noted, as soon as her back was to me. She was more frightened of the lycanthropy-w virus than she wanted to admit, maybe even to herself.

  Angelo was staring at me when I turned back to him, an expression of utter disbelief on his smooth-planed face. “You called yourself a god,” he said. “You’re not really telling me those rumors about you having a colony of Aeslin mice were true?”

  “Not a whole colony,” I said. “Just six. Technically it’s a splinter.”

  “Man, you won’t give up your guns and you travel with a splinter colony of extinct theologians,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe you’ll survive this after all. You’re too damn weird to die of something as plebian as a werewolf bite.”

  “Here’s hoping you’re right,” I said. “Which way to my room?”

  Angelo started a little, seeming to remember his duty. “This way,” he said, and indicated the stairs.

  The décor in this house was as basic and IKEA neutral as it was in the main house, down to the same brightly colored vases lining the stairwell walls. It was like they wanted people to believe that their properties were lived in, but only to a point. There was something faintly off about the whole place, like a showroom that had somehow acquired a whole ancestral home’s-worth of ghosts. A brightly colored rug blunted the edges of the stairs. It was the only thing that showed any signs of wear, with dull and patched spots breaking the lines of the pattern. That was almost soothing. Humans like to know that they live in the places where they exist.