Pocket Apocalypse

by Seanan McGuire

  She had every right to be. Sarah was a cuckoo—a member of a species of math-obsessed telepathic predators. And cuckoos loved numbers. Arithmetic and higher mathematics were all the same to them: as long as numbers were involved, they were happy, and since a happy cuckoo was a cuckoo who might not be trying to kill you, we encouraged their mathematical pursuits whenever possible.

  And then there was Sarah.

  It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d been with my sister in Manhattan. Some bad things happened, and Sarah had to choose between using her telepathy in a way she’d never tried to use it before, or letting Verity die—and confirming the ongoing existence of our family to the Covenant of St. George at the same time. She made the choice that would save my sister, and by extension, save us all.

  Sarah had always been taught not to use her powers to intentionally change people’s minds. That day, she broke every rule she’d worked so hard to learn, and she rewrote the memories of the Covenant team that was holding Verity. It worked, but it hurt her, in ways that we still didn’t fully understand, and might never be able to make sense of, since “telepath physiology” isn’t a course offering at most medical schools.

  For a while, we’d been afraid Sarah would never be herself again. That fear had been gradually put to rest as she recovered. She was putting herself back together a little bit at a time, struggling to extract sanity from the jaws of severe neurological dysfunction. At her worst, she hadn’t even been able to remember her primes. To have her doing calculus again was a blessing.

  “Mom’s in the kitchen making dinner, and Dad’s upstairs making himself scarce,” said Sarah, as Crow launched himself from my shoulder and flapped up the stairs to my room. She paused, squinting, and her eyes took on the white-filmed look that meant she was stretching just the barest tendril of telepathy in my direction. “You . . . want to talk to us about koalas?”

  “Close,” I said. “I want to talk to everyone about Australia.” When Sarah had first come home from New York, we’d all worn anti-telepathy charms all the time, to lessen the risk that she would slip and hurt somebody, or herself. Now only Shelby still routinely wore a charm, which made sense. She wasn’t family.

  The kitchen smelled of tuna fish and cream of mushroom soup, a classic piece of Americana that was rendered only a little incongruous by the fact that it was being baked by my Grandma Angela, the second cuckoo in the family. She looked up when she heard the kitchen door swing open, flashing me a bright smile.

  “Welcome home, Alex,” she said. “Dinner should be ready in about twenty minutes. Tuna casserole, sweet rolls, and spaghetti sauce with ginger.”

  Cuckoos have a weird obsession with tomatoes and tomato byproducts. The human members of the family have learned to live with it. “Sounds good. Um, I need to talk to you and Grandpa about something. Do you want to do it before or after we eat? Shelby has to feed the tigers tonight, so she’s going to be home late.”

  “Before sounds good,” rumbled a deep, almost rocky voice. I turned to see the hulking, scarred form of my grandfather filling the doorway, a friendly smile on his terrible face. “What’s on your mind, Alex?”

  I took a deep breath. “Shelby wants me to go to Australia with her. There’s a lycanthropy-w outbreak, and no one there knows how to deal with it.”

  “They don’t have lycanthropy in Australia, do they?” asked Grandpa, his smile melting into a frown.

  “No,” I said. “None of the common forms, and none of the exotic ones either. It’s one of the only horrible things in the world that Australia didn’t get as part of the starter package. That means they’ve never handled an outbreak before, and from what Shelby said, I think they’re pretty scared.”

  “They should be,” said Grandma grimly. “But Alex . . . you’re human, honey. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Sarah and Grandma Angela had more in common with parasitic wasps than they did with humans, at least on a cellular level. Grandpa Martin had been human once—had been several humans once—but he’d become basically immune to all known diseases following his death and resurrections, since nothing could figure out how to infect him. Of the four people in the kitchen, I was the only one with the potential to be infected or killed by lycanthropy-w.

  Which naturally meant I was the one planning to head for the site of the outbreak. “No,” I said. I didn’t bother to keep the quaver out of my voice. “But it’s the only idea we have. The Thirty-Sixers need help.”

  “Maybe they can find someone in their own organization who can figure this out,” said Grandma. “Let them do what they’ve always done, and handle this themselves.”

  “Shelby helped me when Lloyd was using that cockatrice to turn people to stone,” I said quietly. Grandma didn’t flinch or look ashamed. I hadn’t been expecting her to. No matter how human she seemed and how normally she often behaved, she was never going to prioritize the lives of humans she didn’t know above the people she considered her family.

  Maybe she wasn’t so strange in that regard.

  “Yes, and we were very grateful,” said Grandpa, before either Grandma or Sarah could say something they’d regret. “And yes, I know she was at just as much risk of being turned to stone as you were. Don’t think we don’t all appreciate what she did for you. But, Alex . . .”

  “I love her.” It was a small, simple admission, and it still burned, because it shouldn’t have been necessary: the fact that the Thirty-Six Society needed help should have been enough. I’d never lived in a world without the specter of the Covenant of St. George hanging over us, but I couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been for them, the various cryptological societies wouldn’t have been so reluctant to help each other. Philanthropy was so much easier when there wasn’t a multinational organization of fanatics waiting to slaughter you if you dared to show your face. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever been able to say that about—the only one who isn’t family. She’s one of my best friends. She needs me. Her family needs me. How can I look her in the eye and tell her I won’t help her family after she helped mine?”

  “Besides, if Alex goes to help Shelby with the werewolves in Australia, he can meet her family, and maybe they’ll approve of him.” Sarah’s suggestion was calmly made, and so lucid that the rest of us turned and stared at her. She shrugged. “You were thinking it pretty loudly, Alex. I couldn’t not see.”

  “It’s not that I mind you reading my mind,” I said. “It’s that you sounded so together. You’re really getting better, aren’t you?”

  Sarah’s smile widened. “No thanks to you, Mr. Thinks-too-loud. I should have made you ship me home to Artie. At least he thinks about soothing things.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smothering the urge to smirk. My cousin Artie’s crush on Sarah was public knowledge: everyone knew about it except for Sarah herself, who seemed to think that the rest of us were delusional when we thought about how cute they were together. Verity and I had indulged in more than a little private betting over how long it would be before she caught on to the fact that the cousin she was hopelessly enamored with was equally enamored of her. So far, neither of us was winning. “So I should take my loud thoughts to Australia, huh?”

  “Yes.” She turned to her parents. “Alex is going to go. I can hear it. He didn’t come to ask for permission—he’s a grownup. He came to ask for support. We owe him that. Don’t we? He always supports us.”

  Grandma sighed. “You’re right, honey. Alex, I’m sorry. You know we’re only worried about you, right? Lycanthropy is nothing to play around with.”

  “I know, Grandma, and I’m scared out of my mind,” I said. Like rabies, lycanthropy—all the known varieties, from the common –w (for “wolf”) all the way to the rarer –b (for “bear”) and –r (for “rhino”)—was incurable after the infection reached a certain point. It was just that for lycanthropy, “a certain point” meant “transforming into a giant
wolf-beast.” There was no vaccine, and the treatments intended to prevent a bite from progressing to an infection were potentially fatal. Smart cryptozoologists avoided outbreaks whenever possible, sending in nonmammalian allies to clean it out.

  It was sort of funny. Here I was, standing in my kitchen with two nonmammalian allies and one mammalian ally who couldn’t be infected, and I couldn’t take any of them with me to Australia. Sarah wasn’t fit to fly, Grandpa couldn’t risk a TSA scanner, and Grandma . . . well, Grandma would be fine, but the Thirty-Sixers might shoot her on sight. They’d had a cuckoo infestation a few years previous. Now they habitually wore anti-telepathy charms that would interfere with her natural camouflage field, and were inclined to shoot on sight. If I went, I was going alone.

  Except for Shelby, of course. Dangerous as the proposed expedition was, I had to admit that I didn’t mind the idea of an international flight pressed up next to her.

  “You get to tell your parents,” said Grandpa, apparently reading my decision in my face. “I’m not going to be the one who informs your mother that you’re finally running into absolutely certain danger for the fun of it all.”

  “Fair enough,” I agreed. “If I give you a list of the supplies I’m going to need, can you let me know what we have in the house?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m assuming you’re planning to fly out of JFK?”

  “Yeah.” Getting from Ohio to New York would mean hours in the car, but it would also mean going through customs at an airport where we knew people in both the TSA and the international processing side of things. It would have to be timed just right—smuggling the kind of firepower I habitually carry into a large airport hasn’t been easy in more than a decade, and it hadn’t been a cakewalk before that—but we’d done tight connections before, and it would mean I was heading out well-armed and prepared for whatever was coming next.

  Grandma sighed again, even more deeply than before. “Just come home breathing, all right? That’s all I’m asking of you here. Come home.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. I stepped forward and hugged her. Then I hugged Sarah, and Grandpa, and left the kitchen. It was time to call home and let them know what stupid thing I was up to now. On the plus side, “don’t go to Australia” had never been on my mother’s list of standard warnings. On the down side, it was almost certainly going to be there after this.

  Three

  “The trick to doing things people say are impossible is confidence. As long as you seem to know what you’re doing, and never hesitate, you’re very unlikely to face any challenges. People don’t like to break illusions, even when they don’t know that’s what they’re looking at.”

  —Kevin Price

  JFK International Airport, departure terminal, three days later

  SHELBY HAD VANISHED INTO the women’s bathroom again, leaving me to watch the luggage. We were traveling carry-on only, which meant a backpack and a roller bag each, as well as a separate long case for Shelby’s “violin”—an instrument she didn’t play and wasn’t carrying. But the case was treated to show the image of a violin when put through a standard X-ray machine, and she had a letter from the Guild of Musicians guaranteeing her the right to carry it onto the plane, so we hadn’t encountered any issues with the TSA.

  They might have gotten a nasty surprise if they’d decided to open the thing, and we would have probably been arrested on suspicion of terrorism. Luckily, Shelby was bubbly, vivacious, and wearing a low-cut tank top that made it difficult to think straight when I looked directly at her. It had had much the same effect on the TSA agents at the gate. She’d plainly done this sort of thing before.

  I wasn’t nearly as practiced a traveler. Yes, we maintained valid passports at all times, and yes, Verity, Antimony, and I had all celebrated our eighteenth birthdays with randomly booked trips outside of North America—I’d wound up in Finland, and had a lovely time with two huldra girls who thought I was the cutest thing they’d ever kidnapped from a tour group—but that didn’t mean we traveled for fun. Travel was dangerous. Travel meant stepping outside the familiar bolt-holes and cultural rules of the North American cryptid communities and moving into spheres where we didn’t know the lay of the land. The Prices had been members of the Covenant of St. George for generations before my Grandpa Thomas defected to the side of good, as represented by the fantastic rack of my Grandma Alice (this was reported dutifully to each new generation of the family by our living historical record, the Aeslin mice, even when we asked them nicely to please stop). In some parts of the world, the Prices were still members in good standing of the Covenant, which made “Hi, my name’s Alex Price” a much more dangerous sentence to utter out loud.

  Shelby came bounding back down the concourse, throwing herself into the open seat next to me with such violent abandon that I was amazed it didn’t throw up its arms in surrender. “All better,” she informed me, before pressing a noisy kiss to my cheek. Leaving her lips pressed to my cheek she murmured, much more quietly, “No unusual security activity, and most of the crowd’s human so far as I can see. Spotted two bogeys heading on-shift in the caf, and there’s some sort of snake-person waiting for a flight two gates down, but they’re not going to be a problem.” She leaned back in her seat and beamed at me. “Ready to experience the joys of the land down under? I warn you, you might not want to come back.”

  “See, the problem with that sentence is simple: I’ve now been dating you for long enough that I know you don’t talk that way.” I smirked. “You cannot fool me with your stereotypical Australian ways.”

  “Ah, but can I frighten you with talk of drop bears and bunyip?” Several of the Australians in the waiting area around us chuckled. So did Shelby. I fought the urge to shudder, and settled for glaring at her, which just made her chuckle more.

  “Oh, I can already tell that this trip is going to be fun,” I said, through gritted teeth.

  (To your average tourist in Australia—and, indeed, to your average Australian—the drop bear was a fun campfire story and something to scare kids with. Sadly, the cryptozoological world knows better. Why Australia felt the need to evolve a carnivorous, tree-dwelling marsupial that looks like a koala after it’s been exposed to serious amounts of steroids is anyone’s guess, but I was in no hurry to meet one. A normal koala is perfectly capable of clawing a man’s face off. A drop bear will both claw it off and eat it, which doesn’t strike me as particularly social. As for the bunyip . . . the less said, the better.)

  Shelby twinkled at me. There was no other way to describe her smug, almost catlike smile, or the way she stretched languidly to her full length, defying both the size of her seat and the piles of luggage around her. One foot bumped my rolling suitcase, which gave out a faint cheer. She promptly retracted back into her seat, giving me a wide-eyed look.

  “Sorry,” I said, grimacing. I bent forward, pretending to fuss with my zipper as I pressed my mouth to the small opening in the case’s side and whispered, “Hush. You promised to be quiet until the plane was in the air.” Our seats were in business class. The theory was that the people around us would be so busy either sleeping or drinking as much complimentary booze as they could that they wouldn’t notice the cheering of the Aeslin mice. At least, that was the hope. There were only six mice in my suitcase, chosen by sacred lottery to accompany me. If they got too loud, I’d have to improvise—but it would be better if the improvisation didn’t have to start before we even got on the plane.

  (Aeslin mice: talking, pantheistic rodents that worship my family as gods. They make things like “Thanksgiving,” “laundry day,” and “going to the bathroom” uniquely exciting. Their eidetic memories and endless fascination with everything any member of the family has ever done also makes them incredibly useful. They were living black boxes, like the ones pilots used to record the final details of a crash. If anything happened to me, the Aeslin mice would be able to tell my family. It�
�and I—wouldn’t be forgotten. There was something comforting about that, no matter how obnoxious the mice themselves could sometimes be.)

  Shelby frowned, looking uncertain. “You sure they’ll be able to keep themselves under control long enough for us to clear customs? I don’t want to get arrested for, well, much of anything, really. Getting arrested is at the permanent bottom of my list of things to do.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “They’re good about following the ‘quiet in the bag’ command, as long as they don’t feel like they’ve been forgotten.” Plus I could always repeat the trick I’d used to get them through the TSA checkpoint: they had snuck out of my bag when I put it on the conveyor belt for the X-ray, vanished into the crowd so quickly and stealthily that no one had even realized they were there, and then rejoined me in the men’s bathroom on the other side of security. Smuggling things that could move on their own and follow orders was considerably easier than smuggling boring old contraband materials.

  “If you’re sure,” said Shelby, sounding even more uncertain than she looked. “I do wish we could have left them behind.”

  “It’s against the rules.” I gave my carry-on a glum look. “We need to have them with us at all times in case something, you know, goes wrong. I’m not sure how the mice would get back to the main colony if that happened, but they’re surprisingly clever when matters of their faith are involved. And telling the rest of the family that I was dead would definitely be considered a matter of faith.” Dead, or a werewolf. I was honestly more worried about the latter.

  When I looked back to Shelby, her look of concern was gone, replaced by a deeper look of sorrow. “It’s been hard on you lot, hasn’t it?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “This is just how things have always been.” I was lying, of course. I don’t think anyone who grows up the way I did could be blind enough to think it was normal, or that they weren’t missing out on the things other people got to do. Like going to school under their own name, or traveling without worrying they’d be eaten by the first thing they saw at their destination. I know I’ve never regretted my life. As far as I know, my sisters haven’t regretted theirs either. But we didn’t choose them: we didn’t decide to become what we grew up to be. Those choices were made for us.