Pocket Apocalypse
Page 11
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“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.
Sometimes it seems like a lot of the big choices in life are.
The gate crew called for people who needed extra time down the aisle to line up at the door. Shelby stood, stretching so that her shirt rode up about an inch above the waistband of her jeans, revealing a stripe of tanned skin. The absence of a knife tucked into her belt was almost jarring. Travel was something that I never seemed to get used to, no matter how much I did it.
“Come on, lazybones, up you get,” said Shelby, offering me her hands. I took them, letting her tug me to my feet. “You can sit for the next fourteen hours, a’right?”
“I can’t wait,” I said dryly.
My suitcase cheered again when I picked it up. I sighed, and followed Shelby to the line.
Airplanes: essentially buses that fly, and hence have the potential to drop out of the sky at any moment, spreading your insides—which will no doubt become your outsides sometime during the collision—across whatever you happen to have been flying over. Since we were flying mostly over ocean, I was sure the sharks would appreciate our sacrifice.
Shelby was in the aisle seat, having claimed that her smaller bladder and shorter legs made it hers by divine right. That left me with the window, which showed an unrelentingly blue ocean scrolling out as far as the eye could see beneath our plane. There were occasional smatterings of cloud, but for the most part the weather was staying good and the skies were staying clear. The edge of the horizon was brighter than anything else; the sun would be down soon, and I would have nothing to look at but the books I’d brought to read during the flight. Well, and Shelby, but she’d been sleeping since about ten minutes after takeoff—just long enough to finish her complimentary glass of business class champagne, kiss me on the cheek, and turn on her iPod.
Most of business class was asleep, in fact, having been lulled into unconsciousness by the combination of soft seats, free booze, and marginally reduced cabin pressure, which was like traveling from sea level to the Rocky Mountains without any of the normal transitions in between. It made people sleepy and a little sick to their stomachs, which most of them were treating with, yes, more alcohol. The mice were probably having a full-on bacchanal in the overhead compartment, but between the snoring and the roar of the engines, no one would be able to tell.
I sighed and reached up to turn on my reading light. We had a long way to go before we got to Australia. I might as well get a little work done.
There are very few cryptozoologist’s guides to Australia—or at least, there are very few guides available to non-Australians. I assumed the Thirty-Sixers would have plenty, since they’d been studying their home continent since before their official inception as a group, and no organization larger than three or four people can survive for long on nothing but oral traditions. I was hoping to come home from my visit with some of those guides to add to the family collection. In the meantime, I had to make do with Grandpa Thomas’ guide to the cryptozoological flora and fauna of Australia and New Zealand, which Dad had sent via overnight mail when I called to tell him that I was going home with Shelby. The book had been written before Grandpa Thomas met Grandma Alice, so it was almost certainly out of date. It was also the best resource I had.
I leaned back in my seat and opened the guide to the chapter on drop bears, which included some sketches that made me want to ask the pilot to turn the plane around. Give me a nice normal waheela or wendigo any day: drop bears were freaky.
(Yes, “give me a nice normal thing that I can find where I come from” is a statement drenched in colonialism and privilege: it supposes that the ecosystem that the speaker comes from is normal, and all other ecosystems are somehow weird or flawed. At the same time, Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.)
According to the guide, where we were going we would be contending with drop bears, bunyips, Queensland tigers, and other lovely, predatory things that I wasn’t used to seeing on a regular basis. There were also species of coatl, although Grandpa didn’t call them that, and garrinna, the marsupial equivalent of the miniature griffin. That was nice. I was already missing Crow more than a little.
I turned the page, and kept reading.
My grandfather—Thomas Price, the man who gave my family its name, along with the recessive genes that somehow resulted in my youngest sister being almost six inches taller than any of the other women in our family, and don’t think that hasn’t caused its share of resentment—was originally from England, but traveled a lot before settling down in Buckley Township, Michigan, where he married my grandmother and was eventually sucked into a dimensional portal leading to who-knows-where. (Grandma Alice is still looking for him, and continues to insist that he’s not dead, even though it’s been more than sixty years. Hope springs eternal, I guess, and is rarely questioned when it’s harbored by a woman whose idea of “Hello” sometimes involves frag grenades.)
“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.
Sometimes it seems like a lot of the big choices in life are.
The gate crew called for people who needed extra time down the aisle to line up at the door. Shelby stood, stretching so that her shirt rode up about an inch above the waistband of her jeans, revealing a stripe of tanned skin. The absence of a knife tucked into her belt was almost jarring. Travel was something that I never seemed to get used to, no matter how much I did it.
“Come on, lazybones, up you get,” said Shelby, offering me her hands. I took them, letting her tug me to my feet. “You can sit for the next fourteen hours, a’right?”
“I can’t wait,” I said dryly.
My suitcase cheered again when I picked it up. I sighed, and followed Shelby to the line.
Airplanes: essentially buses that fly, and hence have the potential to drop out of the sky at any moment, spreading your insides—which will no doubt become your outsides sometime during the collision—across whatever you happen to have been flying over. Since we were flying mostly over ocean, I was sure the sharks would appreciate our sacrifice.
Shelby was in the aisle seat, having claimed that her smaller bladder and shorter legs made it hers by divine right. That left me with the window, which showed an unrelentingly blue ocean scrolling out as far as the eye could see beneath our plane. There were occasional smatterings of cloud, but for the most part the weather was staying good and the skies were staying clear. The edge of the horizon was brighter than anything else; the sun would be down soon, and I would have nothing to look at but the books I’d brought to read during the flight. Well, and Shelby, but she’d been sleeping since about ten minutes after takeoff—just long enough to finish her complimentary glass of business class champagne, kiss me on the cheek, and turn on her iPod.
Most of business class was asleep, in fact, having been lulled into unconsciousness by the combination of soft seats, free booze, and marginally reduced cabin pressure, which was like traveling from sea level to the Rocky Mountains without any of the normal transitions in between. It made people sleepy and a little sick to their stomachs, which most of them were treating with, yes, more alcohol. The mice were probably having a full-on bacchanal in the overhead compartment, but between the snoring and the roar of the engines, no one would be able to tell.
I sighed and reached up to turn on my reading light. We had a long way to go before we got to Australia. I might as well get a little work done.
There are very few cryptozoologist’s guides to Australia—or at least, there are very few guides available to non-Australians. I assumed the Thirty-Sixers would have plenty, since they’d been studying their home continent since before their official inception as a group, and no organization larger than three or four people can survive for long on nothing but oral traditions. I was hoping to come home from my visit with some of those guides to add to the family collection. In the meantime, I had to make do with Grandpa Thomas’ guide to the cryptozoological flora and fauna of Australia and New Zealand, which Dad had sent via overnight mail when I called to tell him that I was going home with Shelby. The book had been written before Grandpa Thomas met Grandma Alice, so it was almost certainly out of date. It was also the best resource I had.
I leaned back in my seat and opened the guide to the chapter on drop bears, which included some sketches that made me want to ask the pilot to turn the plane around. Give me a nice normal waheela or wendigo any day: drop bears were freaky.
(Yes, “give me a nice normal thing that I can find where I come from” is a statement drenched in colonialism and privilege: it supposes that the ecosystem that the speaker comes from is normal, and all other ecosystems are somehow weird or flawed. At the same time, Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.)
According to the guide, where we were going we would be contending with drop bears, bunyips, Queensland tigers, and other lovely, predatory things that I wasn’t used to seeing on a regular basis. There were also species of coatl, although Grandpa didn’t call them that, and garrinna, the marsupial equivalent of the miniature griffin. That was nice. I was already missing Crow more than a little.
I turned the page, and kept reading.
My grandfather—Thomas Price, the man who gave my family its name, along with the recessive genes that somehow resulted in my youngest sister being almost six inches taller than any of the other women in our family, and don’t think that hasn’t caused its share of resentment—was originally from England, but traveled a lot before settling down in Buckley Township, Michigan, where he married my grandmother and was eventually sucked into a dimensional portal leading to who-knows-where. (Grandma Alice is still looking for him, and continues to insist that he’s not dead, even though it’s been more than sixty years. Hope springs eternal, I guess, and is rarely questioned when it’s harbored by a woman whose idea of “Hello” sometimes involves frag grenades.)
