Pocket Apocalypse

by Seanan McGuire

  “Werewolf sheep?” asked one of the Thirty-Sixers, looking confused. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

  “They were sheep that had been infected, so they turned into wolves,” said Raina. “How does that not make sense?”

  “What kind of wolf bites sheep and doesn’t eat them?” demanded the Thirty-Sixer. “Wolves kill sheep. Everyone knows that. They don’t just have a nibble and trot away.”

  I blinked.

  “We don’t know what werewolves do,” snapped Raina. “Maybe the werewolf wasn’t hungry. Maybe it hated farmers. Maybe it just didn’t like the taste of mutton. You can’t look at wolf behavior and apply it wholesale to something that isn’t actually a wolf.” Jett made a small buffing sound, as if to support her new mistress’ point.

  “One sheep maybe, but how many are you saying attacked you?” The Thirty-Sixer folded her arms, and I suddenly realized why I recognized her: she was the model from before, her face now scrubbed clean of makeup to reveal a spotty olive complexion, complete with bags under her eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose. It was like Verity always said—the best disguise a woman had was makeup, well-applied, and removed when necessary. “I don’t think it makes sense.”

  “It does, actually.” I pushed my way between Shelby and Raina. Shelby still hadn’t put her shirt back on. For once, I didn’t allow that to distract me as I focused on the woman with the folded arms. “What’s your name?”

  She blinked at me, looking taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I asked your name. You were at the quarantine house earlier, telling me off for having been bitten, and now you’re here, stirring everyone up again. I like a little dissent, but you seem very focused on causing it. Now, what’s your name?”

  The woman scowled. “Chloe,” she said. “Chloe Bryant. If you think I like dissent, you must love it. You’re causing it everywhere you go.”

  “It’s a gift,” I said. “Look: we have established that whoever sent the Tanners—and me—to that meadow was trying to set a trap. They wanted us to be hurt, even killed. Werewolves are only bestial when transformed. Even if a wolf-form lycanthrope would be more inclined to shred sheep than infect them, that doesn’t mean our werewolf couldn’t have gone there while he or she was human, and injected the sheep with saliva, or bled into their open mouths, or something.” The more I thought about it, the more sense injections made. Lycanthropy is hard to catch. A syringe and a supply of infected blood or saliva would increase the odds of a successful infection—and even then, our plotting werewolf could easily have injected the entire flock, only to get the six that had attacked us.

  Or maybe only to get one: the old ram that had been the first to change forms. He could easily have turned the other five members of his flock without even intending to, nipping at them during ordinary sheep things, or spraying them with saliva during his first partial transformations. Maybe our werewolf had only needed to infect a single animal in order to turn the herd . . . and maybe that had been the plan.

  “The Covenant boy is right, but that’s not the whole of it,” said Riley. “The sheep had been turned before he or Shelby even got to Australia. Somebody’s been planning this for a while. Somebody wants to change the way things work around here. Is it you, Chloe?”

  Chloe glared at him. “I want to change the way we do things,” she snapped. “I’ve never made any bones about that. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to use werewolves to do my dirty work, you bastard.” She spun on her heel and stalked away, elbowing and shoving her way through the crowd.

  Her exit seemed to take the last of the steam out of our burgeoning mob. The muttering increased, but the tension and potential violence was gone, replaced by a group of confused and even frightened people who didn’t know quite what they were supposed to do.

  Riley continued to eye them angrily. “So? Who said that we were dead? Speak up, I’m waiting.”

  “Everybody,” said a man, stumbling forward. “I don’t remember who said it first. It was just everywhere all of a sudden.”

  Great: a whisper game. The man didn’t seem to be lying. He met Riley’s eyes anxiously, searching for approval, before he melted back into the crowd.

  These people were still too worked up to tell us anything useful. They needed to feel like normalcy was returning. That, at least, was something I had a reasonable amount of experience with, thanks to working with school groups back at the zoo. I turned to Charlotte, lowering my voice, and asked, “Is there any way we can move people inside?”

  “I think I can manage,” she said, before turning back to the crowd, cupping her hands around her mouth, and shouting, “Tea, coffee, and Tim Tams in the main hall in ten minutes! Anyone who wants to come in and help me brew things gets first crack at the goodies!” Then she strode forward, heading toward the house without a second glance. The muttering increased again, but dropped in volume as what looked like half the crowd peeled off to follow her.

  “Clever boy.” Shelby kissed me on the cheek before pulling her shirt back on over her head, tugging it into place.

  “I try.” I looked to Riley. “Who is in charge of the central stock? I’d like to talk to them.”

  “I can do you one better,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Shelby.

  “Gabby and I will help Mum with the coffee and see if we can’t find out who started the rumors,” said Raina quickly. “Not trying to ditch you, Shelly, but if Dad’s going to kill your boyfriend, I’d rather not be there to witness it.”

  “Thanks,” said Shelby dryly.

  “No worries,” said Raina, and trotted off after Charlotte, Jett tagging at her heels and Gabby following at a somewhat more subdued pace, shaking her head and looking wearily up at the sky.

  “This way,” said Riley.

  We followed him.

  Riley led us around the house to a door I hadn’t seen before, set flush with the foundation and accessible only by descending three shallow stone steps. “We used to have flooding issues here, before we got the drainage systems up to date,” he said, producing a key from his pocket and unlocking the door. “Probably would have again if there were a really major storm.”

  “You could hire a siren to waterproof the place,” I suggested. “They can’t work miracles, but they’re good at convincing basements not to flood and houses not to float away.” They were also good at luring men—mostly men; some sirens lured women, and that was okay, too, except for the part where it wasn’t okay at all—to watery graves. I figured that part probably didn’t need to enter our discussion of do-it-yourself home improvement.

  “You really do like turning to monsters to solve your problems, don’t you?” asked Riley. He opened the door, revealing the barren hallway on the other side. He stormed inside, leaving me standing with Shelby on the steps.

  “I’m really starting to understand why you nearly shot my cousin in the chest,” I said.

  “Things here aren’t like they are in America,” said Shelby, almost apologetically. She followed her father inside. “If it’s any consolation, you’ve convinced me to appreciate monsters for what they are.”

  “I honestly don’t know whether that helps,” I said. “Should I shut the door?”

  “Nah. It stays open when there’s someone in here. Tells people to shout before they come stomping around the corner, reduces the odds of anybody getting stabbed without a good reason.”

  “What a lovely way of doing things,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough that Riley wouldn’t hear me. “Do you get a lot of accidental stabbings around here?”

  “Not as many as we did before we started leaving the door open,” said Shelby, and followed her father down the hall. After a pause to absorb this information, I went after her.

  The hallway leading to the central stock was as clean and generic as the
rest of the house, if not more. No effort had been made to pretend that this was a place where people lived: the walls were barren, the carpet was industrial gray hardpack of the sort usually found in auto shops and hospital waiting rooms, and the air smelled faintly of gun oil. It was a sweet, indelible scent that seemed to have been worked all the way down into the walls, becoming a permanent part of the house. From cleaning out ammo dumps and helping my grandmother—Alice, the dimension-hopping one with the grenades—reorganize her stockpiles, I knew that it would take more than just soap and elbow grease to wipe that scent away. They could sell the house, and three families later, people would still be asking about that funny metallic scent in the basement.

  I caught up with Riley and Shelby in short order. They were waiting for me in front of a large door with reinforced hinges. “The frame was built by one of our folks who used to rob banks for fun, before he decided to go straight and start working with the conservation movement,” said Riley, without preamble. “The hinges are designed to be impossible to remove without damaging them, and there are patterns on the metal that couldn’t be replicated without contacting the man who did the initial install. Anyone who opened this door did it with a key.”

  “Or was the man who did the initial install,” I said, more out of reflex than because I thought it was an important concern. We already knew that whoever was trying to feed us to werewolves was working with, and hence a part of, the Thirty-Six Society. Since I was the only nonmember on the premises, and the only person not allowed to have a key, their security was a nice afterthought, but not anything that would actually keep our adversary—whoever it was—away from the bullets.

  Riley snorted. “Have to throw aspersions wherever you can, don’t you, Covenant boy?”

  “Since you’ve started calling me ‘Covenant boy’ when I have never belonged to the Covenant of St. George, and am definitely of legal age, I don’t think I’m the only one casting aspersions,” I said. “We already know that whoever swapped out the silver bullets for painted lead ones is a part of the Society. Which means the only reason I can think of for you to be bragging about your security is because you don’t want me to think I can just waltz in here and start shopping for a new set of throwing knives. I’ll stop being a suspicious bastard if you will.”

  “Which means you’re not going to stop, because Daddy’s been a suspicious bastard since he was born,” said Shelby. She turned to her father. “Alex isn’t going to steal from us, all right? He has plenty of weapons of his own. Lots of nice sharp things he can stab people with if they annoy him. Lots of nice sharp things I can borrow, since we’re getting married and that means I have a common-law claim to his knives. Now can we please get on with opening the door?”

  Riley scowled—more at me than at Shelby—and produced a keychain from his pocket. It bristled with keys, flashlights, tape measures, and all the other pieces of detritus that tended to build up on a keychain that was used regularly. My father’s keychain was quite similar. I swallowed the urge to smile. Riley probably wouldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to cause any more trouble.

  And then he unlocked and opened the door to the central store, and I stopped thinking of anything beyond gazing in impressed delight at the room—or rooms, really—on the other side.

  “All right,” I said. “This is excellent.” The way the Tanners had been describing their storeroom had led me to picture a really big closet, impractical as that would have been for supplying the entire Thirty-Six Society with ammunition, weapons, and the other assorted pieces of gear they needed to do their jobs. I’d been off by a factor of at least ten. The room on the other side of the door looked like it took up most of the footprint of the house, an impression that was reinforced by the large support beams that appeared every eight feet or so, lending strength to the foundation. The space between those beams was packed solid with shelves. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, switching on as we moved into the room.

  “Motion detectors,” said Riley proudly. “They make sure we’re not drawing too heavily on the local grid, and also prevent someone from forgetting to turn off the light when they just swung through to grab a fresh spool of fishing wire.”

  “We make little shopping trips constantly,” added Shelby, walking past me to examine a shelf loaded down with nets of various sizes. All of them were carefully organized, and matched up with helpful labels identifying their weight, manufacturing material, and any special features. “If you’re passing through Melbourne, you buy a few bales of chicken wire, or some fishhooks, or a bunch of dried meat and bottled water. Then it all gets funneled to the various stores around the continent. That way nobody ever has to buy so much that it sets up a red flag in some government computer somewhere.”

  “It’s uneven, of course,” said Riley. “When our girls were younger, Lottie and I could barely afford to contribute enough to pay back what we’d taken, much less help build against the future. As they got older, and we got more free income, we’ve increased our contributions. To each according to his or her need.”

  “I’ve been sending money home,” said Shelby. She sounded distracted. It wasn’t hard to see why: this place was like a cryptozoologist super store. I found myself taking internal notes to share with my family when I got home. There was a lot here that we could learn from, when it came to organizing and preparing ourselves for any disaster the world happened to throw our way.

  “The specialized ammunition is this way.” Riley started down one of the aisles, clearly expecting me and Shelby to follow. We did, past rows of knives, hanging racks of khakis and bulletproof vests, and into a square-shaped construction of shelves loaded down with ammo boxes. Again, the omnipresent labels made it clear what each of them contained. The shelf labeled “silver” was conspicuously denuded, with only about twenty boxes of ammo remaining, spread out across a variety of calibers.

  “May I?” I asked, indicating the shelf.

  Riley nodded, not saying a word. I took that for consent, and reached for the first box that came to hand. The label identified its contents as .9-millimeter, and the weight of it supported that; it was heavy enough to have contained silver bullets, and it rattled appropriately when I hefted it in my hand.

  I opened the lid. I looked at the bullets. I scraped one of them gingerly with the edge of my thumbnail. And then I shook my head in disgust, replacing the box on the shelf. “Painted,” I said. “We’d need to do chemical composition tests to be sure, but I’m willing to say that I don’t think there’s a speck of real silver in that box. Your bullets are gone.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Riley demanded. “They weigh the same. They shoot the same.”

  “Yes, but you don’t usually wrap real silver bullets in embossing foil,” I said. “They’re fakes.”

  Silver bullets are expensive as all hell, in part because their manufacture is so difficult. They can’t be pure silver: the metal’s too soft, and it would warp inside the barrel of the gun, either causing a dangerous misfire or resulting in a slug too twisted to have any real force behind it. Bullet makers who want to work with silver need to find the exact right balance of alloys, silver, and lead to come up with something that will be effective against the sort of things you hunt with silver—lycanthropes, for instance—but will still work in a standard gun. Even a “pure” silver bullet will generally be at least half lead by weight. That means you can’t tell them apart just by lifting the ammo box.

  Just by lifting the ammo box . . . I turned a thoughtful eye on the other shelves. “Someone who stole this much silver ammo would have trouble carrying it out without being seen, even under this sort of security setup,” I said thoughtfully. “How much stock do your people put in the labels?”

  “When I was seven, I got into the stores and swapped a bunch of twine weights around. I thought they looked better that way,” said Shelby. “I was grounded for a week without desserts.”

  “
We take our organizational system very seriously,” said Riley. “Why?”

  “Because if I were planning to try sabotaging you, I’d need a heat source—maybe some sort of portable lamp, you can buy them at most camping goods stores—and a bunch of silver foil.” I turned my eye toward the other shelves, looking for anything that seemed out of place. All the little cardboard boxes were neatly labeled with the caliber of the bullets they contained, stacked in even towers and pushed back until they formed level planes. It was a good system. It would make it easier to put things away; no wasted space, no mess, no inefficiency. And nothing to betray someone who really understood how it was supposed to work. Anyone who had been involved in the restocking process would know how to move things, how to conceal them . . . how to hide whatever they’d purloined in plain sight.

  “What’s the most common caliber among the Thirty-Six Society?” I asked.

  “We use .300 for most of our hunting rifles,” said Riley. “It works on kangaroos and emu, and they’re the things we’re most likely to feel all right about shooting if we have to. Plus they’re delicious. I won’t pretend that’s not a factor.”

  “Good to know,” I said, still scanning the shelves. “How common is .45?” That was the caliber I habitually carried for city work. I’d be able to tell if anything major had been done to the bullets without more than a cursory inspection.

  “Not terribly. Too big to be good for a small carry weapon, too small to take out a charging buck that wants to see your intestines on the ground.”

  “Okay.” I crouched down and began moving boxes of bullets aside on the shelf labeled LEAD—.45. Riley made a noise of protest. Shelby shushed him.

  The first two layers of boxes looked like they belonged there. I pushed them aside, continuing to dig. The third layer . . . the boxes there looked ever so slightly newer than the ones in front of them, like they had spent less time on the shelves. That should have meant they’d be at the front, unless someone came down here and rotated the contents of the shelves on a regular basis—and if they did that, then there shouldn’t have been older boxes visible to the back when I pushed another column aside, releasing the dry, dusty smell of aging cardboard.