Pocket Apocalypse
Page 64
“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.
“Gotcha,” I said. I pulled a box of bullets out of the middle stack and straightened, opening it. The top layer was normal, lead bullets in simple brass casings. I picked them up, revealing a second layer where the casings gleamed dull silver, like dimes that had transferred hands too many times. Scraping my thumbnail against these bullets didn’t bring up any scraps of foil; they were the real deal. I tilted the box toward Shelby and Riley, showing them what I’d found.
“No one saw anyone carrying out a bunch of stolen silver bullets because they didn’t carry them out,” I said. “They just moved things around to make sure no one would realize what had happened.”
“They mixed the bullets, too,” said Shelby, looking horrified. “Oh, God, we’re going to have to do a complete inventory.”
“Do you keep medications down here? Herbal supplies? Antivenin?” The looks of increasing despair on both Shelby and Riley’s faces were enough to tell me that I was on the right track. I resisted the urge to groan as I made the box of silver bullets disappear into my pocket. We were going to have plenty of evidence of what had happened here, and I was raised never to pass up an opportunity to reload—especially given the number of my silver bullets Shelby had used out in the meadow. “I don’t recommend using anything down here until it’s been thoroughly looked over. We don’t know what our antagonist’s goals are, and that makes this whole room potentially dangerous.”
“They tried to kill us,” said Riley.
“I noticed,” I shot back. “The question is, were they trying to kill you, and your family, or are they planning to take out the entire Society like that? If I were the werewolf—”
“Oh, good, this is exactly the sort of thing you should be saying to my father who doesn’t like you,” muttered Shelby.
I ignored her. This wasn’t the time to be worrying about Riley’s desire to introduce me to a shallow unmarked grave. He would have plenty of time to plot my death, but only if we survived the next few days. I started again: “If I were the werewolf, I’d be looking to take out the people I was sure would fight my authority, and then I’d start trying to infect the rest. Imagine what a thinking werewolf could do with the resources of the Thirty-Six Society at his or her disposal. Since the local cryptids don’t really know you, they wouldn’t notice the change. Not until your people came for them in their beds.”
“Why would my people do that?” asked Riley. “Even if they’d been turned into werewolves, they’d still know that the policy regarding monsters is hands-off and eyes away.”
“Because infected humans are monsters, plain and simple,” I said. “They kill without remorse when they’re transformed, and without consideration for how it may look on the global stage. And most sapient cryptids hate lycanthropes for that reason, so you can bet they’ll talk if the werewolf outbreak here becomes bad enough—which means the Covenant will hear about it, and they will step in. They’ll have to. They’re murderous bastards who overstep their mission statement on a regular basis, but they’re good at what they do. Saving Australia from lycanthropy would fit the bill.”
“How would the Covenant even find out? We’re isolated here. Besides, why would the Covenant listen to anything a bunch of monsters had to say? And that’s assuming they have a line on rumors coming off this continent to begin with.” Riley shook his head. “I think you’re borrowing trouble.”
I took a deep breath, trying to find something—anything—else that I could say.
It wasn’t there. “My sister is marrying a man who used to belong to the Covenant of St. George. I bet he still knows how to get hold of his former coworkers. If I die here, that will be a tragedy, but it’s not going to cause my family to take any permanent steps. If the entire Thirty-Six Society goes radio silent, at the same time that the local cryptids begin reporting an out-of-control mob of werewolves rampaging across the continent . . .” I let my voice trail off, trusting Riley and Shelby both to be smart enough to understand what I wasn’t saying.
Shelby’s look of slow dismay told me that she understood. I focused on Riley. Instead of opening up in comprehension, his face shut down, becoming so smooth and expressionless that I could no longer guess at what he might be thinking.
“It would be a bloodbath,” he said, voice gone hollow. “They’d have no one to stop them. They could cleanse this continent the way they wanted to a hundred and fifty years ago. You have to contact your family. You have to tell them not to contact the Covenant. I was a fool to think we could trust you, even for a few minutes. You should never have been allowed out of the airport.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t do that.” Quickly, before Riley’s mood could turn murderous, I explained, “If the werewolves overrun the Society, they’ll overrun the continent. They’ll kill everyone. Maybe that would be considered an acceptable loss by some people—we have a lot of humans, and we only have one Australia—but werewolves are human when untransformed. They’d get on planes. They’d get on cruise ships. They’d spread. Australia would become an unending plague pit spreading destruction and despair across the world. The ecosystem would be devastated by the introduction of that many apex predators, and more, the Covenant would still get involved. It would just happen later, after the veil of secrecy that keeps their business from the eyes of the world was shattered.” It was hard to force the words out. I felt like a traitor. And everything I was saying was the truth.
“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.
“Gotcha,” I said. I pulled a box of bullets out of the middle stack and straightened, opening it. The top layer was normal, lead bullets in simple brass casings. I picked them up, revealing a second layer where the casings gleamed dull silver, like dimes that had transferred hands too many times. Scraping my thumbnail against these bullets didn’t bring up any scraps of foil; they were the real deal. I tilted the box toward Shelby and Riley, showing them what I’d found.
“No one saw anyone carrying out a bunch of stolen silver bullets because they didn’t carry them out,” I said. “They just moved things around to make sure no one would realize what had happened.”
“They mixed the bullets, too,” said Shelby, looking horrified. “Oh, God, we’re going to have to do a complete inventory.”
“Do you keep medications down here? Herbal supplies? Antivenin?” The looks of increasing despair on both Shelby and Riley’s faces were enough to tell me that I was on the right track. I resisted the urge to groan as I made the box of silver bullets disappear into my pocket. We were going to have plenty of evidence of what had happened here, and I was raised never to pass up an opportunity to reload—especially given the number of my silver bullets Shelby had used out in the meadow. “I don’t recommend using anything down here until it’s been thoroughly looked over. We don’t know what our antagonist’s goals are, and that makes this whole room potentially dangerous.”
“They tried to kill us,” said Riley.
“I noticed,” I shot back. “The question is, were they trying to kill you, and your family, or are they planning to take out the entire Society like that? If I were the werewolf—”
“Oh, good, this is exactly the sort of thing you should be saying to my father who doesn’t like you,” muttered Shelby.
I ignored her. This wasn’t the time to be worrying about Riley’s desire to introduce me to a shallow unmarked grave. He would have plenty of time to plot my death, but only if we survived the next few days. I started again: “If I were the werewolf, I’d be looking to take out the people I was sure would fight my authority, and then I’d start trying to infect the rest. Imagine what a thinking werewolf could do with the resources of the Thirty-Six Society at his or her disposal. Since the local cryptids don’t really know you, they wouldn’t notice the change. Not until your people came for them in their beds.”
“Why would my people do that?” asked Riley. “Even if they’d been turned into werewolves, they’d still know that the policy regarding monsters is hands-off and eyes away.”
“Because infected humans are monsters, plain and simple,” I said. “They kill without remorse when they’re transformed, and without consideration for how it may look on the global stage. And most sapient cryptids hate lycanthropes for that reason, so you can bet they’ll talk if the werewolf outbreak here becomes bad enough—which means the Covenant will hear about it, and they will step in. They’ll have to. They’re murderous bastards who overstep their mission statement on a regular basis, but they’re good at what they do. Saving Australia from lycanthropy would fit the bill.”
“How would the Covenant even find out? We’re isolated here. Besides, why would the Covenant listen to anything a bunch of monsters had to say? And that’s assuming they have a line on rumors coming off this continent to begin with.” Riley shook his head. “I think you’re borrowing trouble.”
I took a deep breath, trying to find something—anything—else that I could say.
It wasn’t there. “My sister is marrying a man who used to belong to the Covenant of St. George. I bet he still knows how to get hold of his former coworkers. If I die here, that will be a tragedy, but it’s not going to cause my family to take any permanent steps. If the entire Thirty-Six Society goes radio silent, at the same time that the local cryptids begin reporting an out-of-control mob of werewolves rampaging across the continent . . .” I let my voice trail off, trusting Riley and Shelby both to be smart enough to understand what I wasn’t saying.
Shelby’s look of slow dismay told me that she understood. I focused on Riley. Instead of opening up in comprehension, his face shut down, becoming so smooth and expressionless that I could no longer guess at what he might be thinking.
“It would be a bloodbath,” he said, voice gone hollow. “They’d have no one to stop them. They could cleanse this continent the way they wanted to a hundred and fifty years ago. You have to contact your family. You have to tell them not to contact the Covenant. I was a fool to think we could trust you, even for a few minutes. You should never have been allowed out of the airport.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t do that.” Quickly, before Riley’s mood could turn murderous, I explained, “If the werewolves overrun the Society, they’ll overrun the continent. They’ll kill everyone. Maybe that would be considered an acceptable loss by some people—we have a lot of humans, and we only have one Australia—but werewolves are human when untransformed. They’d get on planes. They’d get on cruise ships. They’d spread. Australia would become an unending plague pit spreading destruction and despair across the world. The ecosystem would be devastated by the introduction of that many apex predators, and more, the Covenant would still get involved. It would just happen later, after the veil of secrecy that keeps their business from the eyes of the world was shattered.” It was hard to force the words out. I felt like a traitor. And everything I was saying was the truth.
