Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (34 page)

“And I hope never to be,” Basil said. “I brought your boat.”

“Thank you.” Shelby swiped a hand across her eyes and turned to me. “You should probably stay out here. The boat’s only built for three. We used to have to play ferry to get all four of us over.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll keep watch for more werewolves.” I didn’t want to let Shelby and Raina go to the playhouse without me, but I knew that neither of them would stand for being left behind, and if anything would convince Gabby to come out and let us help her, it was the presence of her sisters.

Raina seemed to sense my reluctance. She paused as she walked toward the water, long enough to touch my arm and murmur, “Thank you.” Then she was joining Shelby in the boat, and the two of them were producing oars from the bottom of the vessel and rowing away, leaving me and Basil standing on the shore. Jett sat down on the bank nearby, whining as she watched her mistress row away.

Basil looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything. Shelby and Raina reached the tree that housed their rickety hideaway. They tied the boat in place and got out, swarming up the boards that had been nailed to the tree trunk like gravity and the Tanner sisters were not well-acquainted.

Basil snorted. “When we first put those boards up for the girls, they used to fall off every time they tried to climb,” he said. “I was forever catching them before they could hit the water.”

“Oh?” I asked, neutrally.

“Yeah. This water’s no good for humans to be splashing around in. You people take sick so easy, there’s no point in making it any harder on you, is there?” He crossed his arms, forcing a few drops of water out of the moss that covered him. It dripped back into the swamp at his feet. “I always caught them. Put them back in the tree. They just needed to learn how to climb on their own.”

“It sounds like you did a lot for them. Thank you. I’d be sad if Shelby had drowned before I got to meet her.”

“I’d say you would be. Fiancé, huh? I don’t suppose I’ll be getting an invitation to the wedding.” It was impossible to ignore the bitter note in the yowie’s voice. He’d been so important to the Tanners when they were children, and Shelby had never thought to mention him to me, because she’d never really considered him a person.

Wait. “I thought Shelby and her family weren’t from around here,” I said. “How did you know them when they were kids?”

“They came here for training, Society business, all that,” said Basil. “I only saw them once or twice a year most of the time, but that was more than enough for me. They were always smiles and laughter when they were little. Makes me want to go find a nice girl and have some kids of my own, you know? And don’t think I didn’t notice you dodging the question.”

Shelby and Raina had vanished inside the playhouse. I watched the side of the building, searching for any hint of what was going on in there. “I wasn’t dodging it, I just don’t know yet,” I said. “We only got engaged a day ago, and I need to talk to my family, find out where the wedding is even going to happen . . . if we get married in Australia, you’re more than welcome to attend. Given how little her parents seem to like me, I’m expecting we’ll get married in the United States, or maybe on a ship in international waters where no one can say we’re starting things off by favoring one side of the family over the other.”

Basil laughed. “Oh, you humans. You sure do know how to muck things up, don’t you?”

“We’re pretty good at it,” I admitted. Something banged inside the playhouse, causing bits of sawdust to detach from the bottom and drift down to the swamp. I tensed. “Did you see that?”

“They’re just slamming around. They do that.” For all his calm words, Basil kept a tight eye on the tree. “What’s going on, anyway?”

If the Tanners hadn’t told the local wadjet community about the werewolves, I doubted they’d told the yowie either—and Basil weighed four hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. The idea of something that large catching lycanthropy was enough to make my blood run cold. “Have you ever heard of werewolves?”

“Oh, that lot? Nasty bunch. They tried to bite me a few days ago. I drowned three in the swamp before they realized it was a bad idea.” Basil sounded utterly calm.

I blinked at him, mentally adding “drowning” to the list of things that would kill a werewolf, rather than just inconveniencing them for a little while. “You do realize they’re contagious, yes? If they’d bitten you, you could have turned into one of them.” Yowie are mammals. Big, intimidating mammals.

“Oh, yeah?” Basil shrugged. “No one told me that. Besides, it’s not like they managed to break the skin.”

Something rustled in the trees behind us. The sound was followed, an instant later, by the long, low rumble of a lupine growl. Jett was behind me like a shot, pressed against my legs and whimpering. I went stiff, feeling my blood chill in my veins. “Well, it looks like they’re back for another try,” I said. “Don’t let them bite you.”
And please, Shelby, stay in the playhouse,
I thought, wishing more than I had ever wished before that I had Sarah along to play telepathic relay and keep everyone informed as to what was going on.
Take your time with your sisters, and don’t come out.

I’m not a telepath, and Sarah was on another continent; Shelby wasn’t going to hear me pleading with her. That thought all too firmly in mind, I turned to face whatever was coming out of the wood.

“Most people would very much like to believe that humans invented the ambush. It makes them feel like we’re special. Smart. Try telling that to the trapdoor spider, to the octopus, or to the wolf. They’ll be delighted to hear how special you are, as they’re draining the marrow from your bones.”

—Jonathan Healy

Standing on the bank of a swamp in Queensland, Australia, probably about to be attacked by werewolves

E
VERYTHING WAS ABSOLUT
ELY STILL.
Nothing rustled; nothing moved; no birds sang. The growling from the trees had stopped, however temporarily, and it was almost possible to convince myself that I’d imagined it. I might have made that fatal error, if it hadn’t been for Jett hiding behind my legs and Basil standing at the edge of the water. He’d heard the growling, too, and he looked as uneasy as I felt.

“You sure that was your wolves?” he asked. “Maybe we scared them away.”

As he spoke his final word, the woods exploded.

Three wolves bounded into the open, all of them displaying the foaming drool that would increase their odds of successfully infecting us with a single bite. I didn’t know how much of that was intentional—but if all our theorizing about intelligent werewolves was accurate, and not just paranoid delusion, they might be working themselves into a froth on purpose. If you can’t beat them, recruit them. Once we were infected, we’d probably be a lot less enthusiastic about the idea of killing all werewolves.

I pulled the gun from my belt and clicked off the safety, but kept it low, pointed at the ground rather than at any of the approaching wolves. They were eating up ground, their legs churning as they flung themselves toward us. I still had a few seconds. “If you stop where you are, I will not shoot you!” I shouted.

They didn’t stop. “They’re not stopping,” observed Basil.

“I noticed!” I raised my gun and fired once into the ground a foot or so ahead of the lead wolf. That got its attention, even though words hadn’t been able to do the trick. It yelped and scrambled away from the impact site, almost falling over in its hurry to retreat. The other two wolves dug their paws into the ground, bleeding off speed at an impressive clip, and pulled back into an uneasy circling motion. The lead wolf drew back its lips and snarled at us. Saliva dripped from its jowls, pooling on the ground in foamy puddles.

“They stopped,” said Basil.

I risked a sidelong glance in his direction. “Are you always this fond of stating the obvious, or am I just the lucky recipient of your sarcasm?”

“Bit of both,” said Basil.

“Right.” I refocused my attention on the wolves. “I’m going to lower the gun now. I’m not going to put it away, but I’m going to lower it, and if you don’t make any threatening moves, I won’t either.”

The wolves didn’t do anything but continue to pace and circle. I took that as at least something of a good sign. Taking a long, slow breath, I lowered the gun.

“I know you can hear me, and I’m hoping you can understand me,” I said. I was unable to prevent myself from speaking slowly and clearly, like I was trying to make myself heard and understood by a quarry golem. (They don’t have ears, and mostly function through lip reading, sign language, and throwing things. It works out reasonably well for them. Being ten feet tall probably doesn’t hurt matters.) “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m hoping you don’t actually want to hurt me. Please. Can you shift back to human? I need to talk to you. This will be an easier conversation if you can talk back.”

“So talk.”

The disappearance of Cooper’s body had been enough to convince me—mostly—that he was one of the werewolves, if not the source and patient zero for this particular outbreak. But there had still been a small amount of doubt, a small chance that I was wrong. The sound of his voice put any lingering questions to rest.

He walked calmly out of the woods into the open, still dressed in the bloody remains of the clothes he’d been wearing when we were attacked. He’d had plenty of opportunities to change since then, if he’d been able to reconvene with his werewolf buddies. He was making a point, and I didn’t like it.

“Hello, Cooper,” I said, keeping my gun pointed resolutely at the ground. I didn’t want to bait him any more than I had to. “You’re looking a lot less dead than I’d expected, given the way I last saw you. Didn’t know the Society had a ‘resurrection’ policy.”

“Didn’t die,” he said, with a broad shrug. “Lost a lot of blood, which dropped my pulse low enough that you lot didn’t find it. I was hoping that would be the result. I guess I got lucky.”

“I guess I did, too,” I said. “I’m still clean.”

Cooper blinked slowly, looking bewildered. Then he whistled once, short and sharp and shrill. The three werewolves—the
other
three werewolves—stopped circling and prowled over to sit down in front of him, forming a loose, protective semicircle of lupine bodies and narrowed, feral eyes. “What do you mean, clean?”

“I mean the treatment I brought with me kept me from getting sick, Cooper.” There was no point in telling him that the infection hadn’t managed to take hold of me in the first place: letting him think we had a guaranteed cure for lycanthropy could only work in our favor. “I’m not going to transform. I’m not contagious. I’m not
infected
.”

“Then we’ll try again.” Cooper made the statement sound perfectly reasonable, like he was proposing a dinner date. “We’ll try again, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll keep trying until we manage to bring you over to our side. I want you, smart boy. You’re quick, you’re loyal, and you’ve got science in your back pocket. That’s going to come in handy.”

“You really think you’re going to live long enough to benefit? Even if I don’t shoot you, the human body wasn’t designed for shapeshifting. Therianthropes survive their transformations because they’re adapted to them on a cellular level. The disease you have is breaking the laws of nature every time it rewrites you. You know what most werewolves die of?”

“Silver bullets,” said Basil. “Even I know that one.”

Cooper laughed. “I like your friend. He’s gonna be a wolf the size of a pony. That’s going to be something to see, don’t you think?”

“Werewolves die of heart attacks,” I said, refusing to allow myself to be baited. “They die because when they go from biped to quadruped and back again, sometimes their spinal cords restructure the wrong way, and they snap their own necks. They die because their livers explode. Do you understand me yet? Werewolves die because they have a
disease
. You have a
disease
, Cooper, and the fact that you’re spreading it to your own people on purpose—well, that’s sick. No pun intended.”

“They stopped being my people the moment I got bit,” said Cooper calmly. “Ask your friend there how the Thirty-Six Society deals with monsters. Ask your girlfriend. Shelby Tanner was always the worst of a bad lot, even when she was a little girl. Bigots, all of them.”

“I don’t think she’s so bad,” said Basil.

“They’re conservationists,” I said.

“Sure. They conserve. In pens and paddocks and aviaries, they conserve. In zoos and museums and private collections, they conserve. They love their koalas and their kangaroos and all those other nice creatures for the tourists to coo over, but anything that isn’t native—anything that seems like a danger—those things, they’re more than happy to lock away forever.” Cooper shook his head. “They weren’t going to lock me up. I’ve been one of them for too long. I know what their hospitality looks like.”

“So why didn’t you quit?” I asked.

“Didn’t mind it so much when I was on their side of the cage. Things have changed.”

“You still didn’t have to . . .” I trailed off. “Infecting the people you used to work with is wrong. Even if you know they’d treat you like a monster, you shouldn’t have done that. That was what made you a monster. Not the virus. Not the things you did when you were transformed and didn’t understand yourself. The choices you made.”

“Then I’m a monster,” said Cooper calmly. “That gun you’re holding, it has what, six shots in it? There’s four of us. I think I like those odds.”

“Cooper—”

“I like you well enough, Covenant boy, and I know you came a long way to help us. I figure if anyone can find a way for this virus not to kill us all, it’s going to be you—and my people deserve that chance, don’t you think? They deserve a chance at long, healthy, productive lives. We can do better work for this country as monsters than we ever did as men.” Cooper turned, walking back toward the woods. “Get him, boys. Infect, not kill. We need him.”

“Wait!” I cried.

Cooper stopped. The wolves, which had been tensing to spring, froze. If there had been any question remaining as to whether transformed werewolves were fully aware, that moment would have answered it: only thinking creatures would have reacted that way. “What, you willing to come quietly?” asked Cooper, twisting to look over his shoulder at me. “That would be the sensible choice. Much less chance that we’d accidentally damage you. I’d like to take you as intact as possible, since men who’ve just had their arms ripped off always need help in the lab, and that seems like a waste of resources.”

I didn’t shoot him. No one was going to reward me for that, and I would probably regret it later, but in the moment, the fact that I didn’t go ahead and shoot him felt like the most self-control I had ever shown. “Gabrielle Tanner,” I said. “How long ago did you have her bitten?”

“Ah. You found out about that one.” Cooper smiled slow and languid, showing more teeth than he really needed to. “Not that long ago. Did it myself, actually. I picked her up from school. She seemed suspicious. Watching me, yeah? She caught me sneaking off the property when I was supposed to be dead, so I gave her a little nip and pointed out what her family would do to her if they found out. She wasn’t willing to see the sense of my words right away, but she was willing to conceal her condition and my survival, so that’s something, right? Imagine the look on Riley’s face when his precious little girl went for his throat.”

“All I needed to know.” She had been infected within the last forty-eight hours. She hadn’t transformed yet. She could still be saved.

I raised my gun, and had the satisfaction of seeing Cooper’s eyes go wide in his suddenly bloodless face before he threw himself at the trees, and the wolves threw themselves at me.

Then a hand was grabbing the back of my shirt, and Basil’s voice was saying, “Sorry about this, but you seem like a fellow who enjoys air,” and I was flying backward through the air, hauled by that same hand. Jett was in Basil’s other hand, balled up and whimpering. The wolves skidded to a stop at the edge of the water, apparently unwilling to follow Basil into the swamp. They had been Australian naturalists before they became werewolves; they knew better than most what could be lurking in those waters.

The yowie strode through the water, churning it into a froth around his tree trunk-thick legs. Snakes, frogs, and what looked like a small crocodile fled from the disturbance he made—and many of them fled toward the bank, creating a second barrier between us and the werewolves. I hesitated, gun still in my hand. On the one hand, I now knew that werewolves were intelligent creatures, capable of moral decisions and ethical thought. On the other hand, they were disease vectors, and these werewolves were specifically targeting their former friends and companions out of the accurate belief that failure to turn them all would result in a widespread monster hunt.

Too much of my training had been focused on sympathy for every living thing. I was still debating whether or not to pull the trigger when Basil ran into a thick stand of swamp-growing trees and dumped me unceremoniously on a wide branch about eight feet above the surface of the water. He dumped Jett in my lap. She promptly tried to hide her entire head in my crotch. I wasn’t Raina, but I’d do for now.

“Sorry to pull you out of there, but I didn’t really want to dance with the werewolves,” he said. “You all right? I didn’t suffocate you or anything, did I?”

“Not quite.” I rubbed the front of my neck, where the collar of my shirt had dug into the skin, and shook my head. “I need you to go back and get the girls. Please. We can’t leave them there with Cooper in the area, there’s no telling what he’ll do when they go rowing back to shore.”

“In a minute.” Basil crossed his arms, looking at me flatly. “Why weren’t you shooting, huh? I know you humans and your guns. It’s cute, how you’ve made up for a total lack of natural defenses by coming up with a few hundred unnatural ones. You should have been filling that arsehole with bullets the second you figured out he was coming for you and the girls. What gives?”

“I . . . my family believes that everything has a right to live,” I said. “We just try to keep things as fair as possible. To smooth out the edges where we collide with one another.”

“Wow.” Basil shook his head. “I mean, wow. I knew humans were inherently fucked up, and I thought the Thirty-Six Society were top of the heap there. I mean, they can look at folks like me—just folks, yeah? Just trying to get along, maybe have a little fun, maybe find a nice billabong that doesn’t already belong to a bunyip or a croc too big for eating, settle down, have a family—and think that we’re monsters. That’s pretty screwy. But you lot! You look at everything and think ‘that has a right to live, even if it’s going to eat me.’ Screw that. You have a right to defend your species. You have a right to keep breathing. There’s a middle ground between ‘everything’s a monster’ and ‘everything has a right to live except for me.’”