Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (31 page)

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “We know the disease makes them short-tempered and angry, and we know they want to spread their infection—that’s one of the major goals of
any
disease, and the various strains of lycanthropy are no different. But I think we can safely say, looking at what the werewolves here in Australia have been doing, that they’re not just dumb animals. They’re still capable of at least some degree of planning and tactical thinking while they’re in their lupine forms.”

“I’d guess the initial confusion probably lasts for two transformation cycles, maybe three,” said Helen.

“That would account for eighty percent of the people infected with lycanthropy. Most werewolves don’t make it past their first full cycle, much less two more,” I said grimly. “We kill them when they’re at their most bestial, and we never realize they could remember how to think. We’ve been winnowing out the most primitive werewolves from outbreak after outbreak, for centuries. How long had the outbreak been going on before we got here?”

“At least a month,” said Shelby slowly. “We don’t know when it started. It’s not like the werewolves sent a card to let anyone know that they’d arrived in Australia.”

A slow, sick certainty was beginning to gather in the pit of my stomach, too concentrated—too
right
—to be ignored. “The infection had time to become established, even if it didn’t have time to spread very far,” I said. “Members of the Society are trained to deal with various types of bite. You told me so yourself. What happens if someone gets bitten by something they don’t believe is venomous?”

“Flush the wound, monitor it for signs of infection,” said Shelby. “Most wouldn’t even seek medical care. That’s a silly thing to involve anyone else over.”

“Which means a member of the Society could easily have been bitten and infected before anyone even knew that was a risk. Werewolves are infectious even when not transformed. Whoever it was treated their own wound and didn’t tell anyone, because who wants to report being nipped by a sheep or a collie when they have bigger things to worry about?” The more I talked, the more reasonable this all felt, like this was exactly what had happened. It made sense; it matched up with all the facts we had. “Then, when their twenty-eight-day incubation was up . . .”

“If they were on patrol, they might not have been near anyone when they turned,” said Shelby. “There’s a lot of unpopulated land in Australia. If something got into the sheep, everyone would assume it was a dingo or a wild dog. Nobody jumps straight to ‘werewolf.’ That would just be silly.”

“So our werewolf turned for the first time where there was no one around to hurt, woke up the next morning and . . . what? Just decided to keep it a secret?” I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course it doesn’t make sense to you, Alex. You were raised to think of monsters as if they were people,” said Shelby, sounding frustrated. She glanced to Helen. “Sorry. No offense meant.”

“Offense taken,” said Helen, in unknowing echo of myself right after the incident in the sheep meadow. It would have been amusing under other circumstances. In the moment, it was just one more layer of tension on what was already an unbearable mound of discomfort and dismay. “I am not a monster. I am not a mammal, and maybe that’s a problem for some people, but it doesn’t make me a
monster
.”

“I know,” said Shelby. “I’m sorry, I’m a little stressed right now. Things aren’t coming out like I mean them. I know you’re not a monster. I’ve met your cousin, and her daughter, and they’re very nice people. I’ve even met her husband, and while it’s a little harder for me to think of him as a person—what with him being a giant snake and all—he was perfectly pleasant and didn’t pump me full of hemolytic venom even a little bit. But I was raised with the word ‘monster’ on heavy rotation, and it’s difficult to just cut it from my vocabulary overnight.”

“Try,” suggested Helen pleasantly.

“I will,” said Shelby. She looked back to me. “If you got bit and turned into a werewolf, you’d go to your family, right? Tell them ‘we have a problem,’ and set up some sort of containment plan, something to keep you safe. They’d still look at you as if you were a person, because you’d still
be
a person to them. Your essential personhood isn’t tied up in what species you are.”

“But it doesn’t work that way here,” I said. More pieces were falling into place. “Someone gets bitten, not knowing they’ve been exposed to lycanthropy-w, transforms for the first time under conditions that don’t lead to any homicides, turns back, and says ‘well, I’m still the same person. I can’t let those assholes back at home put a silver bullet in my head just because I went and caught a therianthropic cold.’”

“Lycanthropy acts on the brain the same way rabies does,” said Helen. “They’d become paranoid, suspicious, violent, all without losing their original intelligence.”

“All while surrounded by people who throw around the word ‘monster’ like it isn’t a racial slur,” I said. “That’s basically a recipe for convincing a werewolf not to turn him or herself in.”

“I’ll take it one step worse for you,” said Charlotte, emerging from the quarantine house. It wasn’t clear how long she’d been standing inside and listening to our conversation. Long enough, judging by the pinched expression on her face. “If
I
were bitten by a werewolf, and
I
wanted to be able to keep myself safe from the people who’d been my allies, I’d start recruiting. After all, I’d know the selling points of the infection—all assuming I’d need them. Once someone’s been bitten, they’re probably a lot more willing to listen to a sales pitch that doesn’t end in a shallow grave.”

Graves. I stiffened, looking from Charlotte to Shelby and back again before I asked the question that was going to make me the least popular person on the porch—and that included Helen, who was still viewed as less than a person by most of the Society. “What did we do with Cooper’s body?”

Charlotte stared at me, an expression of dawning horror on her face. “This way,” she said, and started for the steps. The rest of us followed her, again, including Helen. Under the circumstances, she may have thought that staying with the group was the best way to stay alive. Honestly, I couldn’t have advised her one way or another.

Given everything else the Thirty-Six Society had on the property, I had halfway been expecting them to have a proper morgue, complete with stainless steel storage drawers for the bodies of their fallen comrades and a convenient drain in the middle of the floor. It was almost a relief when Charlotte led our makeshift posse to a tin storage shed that looked like it had been purchased from a mail order catalog.

Helen was less reassured. “You keep dead bodies in
here?
” she demanded, gesturing to the shed doors with a sweep of one hand. “Actual dead humans? The sort you’re not intending to eat later?”

“See, things like that are why some people have a less than positive view of nonhumans,” said Shelby. Helen glared at her. Shelby shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

“We can’t afford the sort of refrigeration units that would keep bodies better preserved, and it’s not like we ever keep them for long anyway,” said Charlotte, undoing the padlock on the door. “As soon as we’re sure the coast is clear, we’ll take him out into the nearest billabong and feed him to the crocs.” She was clearly hoping the body was still there. I shared the sentiment.

“What about his family?” Helen sounded scandalized.

“Cooper didn’t have any family left, and if he had, they would have been allowed to come with us for the feeding.” Charlotte swung the doors open. I tensed, waiting for the smell of rotting flesh to come wafting out. It didn’t. Human bodies decay fast when they’re actually dead. The absence of the stench was . . . well, it wasn’t a good thing.

Charlotte took a step forward, squinting into the gloom. Then she stopped, and sighed, and said, “The rest of you ought to come and take a look at this. I think we have a problem.”

“That’s good,” I muttered. “We needed a problem tonight. Everything was going far too smoothly, so it’s obvious that we were people in need of a problem.” I stepped up behind her.

Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise when I saw the hole that had been ripped in the shed’s rear wall. Whatever had made the opening had peeled the tin back like they were opening a can of sardines. I frowned at the jagged tears in the metal and stepped inside, ignoring the vague protests and exclamations of distress from my companions. The danger was past. Our werewolf had long since fled for more welcoming climes.

“Didn’t any of you think to check for a
pulse?
” asked Helen. “I’d have thought that was basic logic.”

“I checked,” I said. “But I was bleeding out at the time. Did anyone else check?”

“Riley did,” said Charlotte. She hesitated before adding, “Through gloves and a plastic sheet. We were taking precautions against infection, and you’d already said that he was dead.”

“Again, bleeding out at the time,” I said, turning back to face them. “There’s no tearing from the outside. Cooper must have woken up once he’d recovered from his blood loss—and that’s a good trick, really, I would have thought the amount of blood he’d lost would keep him out of commission for at least a little bit longer, even if it didn’t kill him—and then torn his way out, rather than risking being caught here. Is there any way to unlock the door from the inside?”

“Why in the world would there be? No one ever gets stuck in there,” said Charlotte. She sounded affronted, like I had just accused her of locking her children in the shed. That hadn’t been my intention, but this didn’t seem like the time or the place to get embroiled into another “what I actually meant was . . .” conversation. Speaking a common language didn’t do much good when there were cultural and societal gulfs between you. “The door is always locked from the outside.”

“Right. Then he would have had to tear his way out, even if he was trying not to be noticed.” I snapped my fingers. “The ruckus when we got back from the meadow run. Everyone was there, ready and eager to accuse us of things, and it made so much noise that a little tin being torn on an isolated part of the property wouldn’t even have been noticed. We know he has at least one accomplice. They could have whipped everyone into a frenzy.”

Shelby leveled a flat look on me, eyebrows raised. I blinked.

“What?” I asked.

“If he had an accomplice capable of getting everyone all worked up and mad, why not ask that same accomplice to open the padlock from the outside?” she asked. “Much easier. No need to rend metal for no good reason, less chance that someone’s going to take a wrong turn and see the great gaping hole you’ve ripped in things.”

“Yeah, but this was a fair scare, wasn’t it?” asked Helen. We all turned to look at her. She shrugged. “I’m just saying. You open a door you thought was safely keeping things inside, and what you find is that a dead man has come back to life and ripped his way out through a wall. So now he’s terrifying.”

“And terrifying men are usually men you don’t want to mess around with,” I said, nodding. “Cooper knew that if we figured him out, we’d be coming here to confirm it—if he was just gone, what good would that do him? He’d be passing up a chance to scare the pants off us.”

“We might have thought something stole his body to eat, and given him a little more time to get away,” Shelby said.

Charlotte snorted. “Cooper? Nah. If he was going to do something like this, he’d do it as flashy as possible. He liked to come off quiet and then surprise everyone. That’s the sort of fellow he was.” Her face fell. “Is. And now he’s a werewolf. Has he been a werewolf this whole time?”

“He was probably infected before you had any idea there was a risk. Now, he has control over his transformations,” I said. “He’s been a werewolf for at least three months, maybe longer. I’d say that he’s been recruiting people from within the Society to help him out, based on what we’ve seen so far.”

“Oh, my God.” Charlotte put a hand over her mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“I think I’m going to go back to the house and get the mice,” I said. I shook my head. “We have to check everyone for infection. Anyone here could be a werewolf.”

“Anyone except me,” said Helen. “It’s been lovely seeing you all, but I think I’m going to get the fuck out of here before something rips my head off. Please be sure to call if anything else that might kill us all fetches up, all right? A little advance warning would be
wonderful
.”

“I’ll make sure someone calls you,” I said.

Helen nodded before turning and walking, with admirable briskness, back toward the road. I would have been uncomfortable about letting her go off alone, if not for two things: out of all of us, she had the least to fear from a rogue werewolf, and any werewolf had quite a bit to fear from
her
. Wadjet venom could rival taipan for strength, and at her age and general level of physical fitness, she was generating more than enough to kill anything that decided to cross her. It wasn’t a solution to everything, as the wadjet of the world learned when the Covenant first entered India with guns in hand, but it would be enough to get her safely to the car.