Pocket Apocalypse
Page 34

Cooper had thawed still further since we got out into the woods, although he had become even less conversational, choosing instead to focus on what was happening around us. I wanted to pepper him with a constant stream of questions, asking him to identify every bird and flower. I kept my mouth shut and stuck close behind, choosing to show restraint. When Shelby and her father returned from their patrol, they would find the tinctures mixed and my skin fully intact.
I was feeling so pious about my commitment to safety that the end of the trees caught me by surprise. One moment we were walking through a thick stand of healthy eucalyptus, and the next, we were stepping out into a shallow bowl of a meadow, thick with deep purple aconite flowers. A flat sheet of water stretched out on the other side of the meadow, studded with dead trees and delicate water weeds and something that looked like a log, but which I suspected of being a sleeping crocodile. There was a stand of tall, thin-trunked trees growing straight out of the watery area, so densely pressed together that anything inside their little copse was completely hidden.
“Is that . . . ?” I asked, pointing at the “log” in question.
Cooper followed the angle of my finger. Then, much to my surprise, he grinned. “You have an excellent eye for an American,” he said. “That’s a croc, all right. Looks like a pretty small one, too. Why, did you want to go for some authentic Australian crocodile wrestling while you were here?”
I eyed him sidelong. “You know, that’s the same tone Shelby uses when she’s talking about playing up the ‘Crocodile Hunter’ routine for the people at our zoo. I think I’ll pass.”
“And here I was looking forward to giving you back to them without a foot.” He paused for a beat before saying, “It’s not a crocodile. We don’t get them this far south. Not every Australian log is going to be a crocodile.” Cooper gestured to the flowers. “Is this what you needed?”
“Yes.” I produced the gloves from my pocket and pulled them on. “I don’t know what’s around here that might try to eat us, apart from the bunyip. Can you keep watch while I gather flowers?”
“Already on it,” said Cooper.
That seemed to be his final word on the subject, and so I turned my attention to what needed doing: picking wildflowers. Dangerous, invasive, incredibly toxic wildflowers that doubtless felt right at home in Australia, the continent where everything could kill you. It seemed almost like an oversight on the part of Nature that aconite wasn’t native. They probably had something worse. Maybe a cousin of the vegetable lamb that had fangs and venom sacs instead of blunt herbivore’s teeth . . .
I pulled aconite plants up by their roots as I contemplated Australia’s potential for deadly vegetation, pausing to shake the worst of the dirt and bugs off each handful before shoving it into my bag. The flowers would retain their potency for three to five days. We could gather more after that, if we needed them. That was the nice thing about invasive plants: since they grew like weeds, there was a virtually inexhaustible supply. Even wilted, these would be a hundred times more effective than my dried flowers. They would—
The sound of a low growl coming from the direction of the pond brought my head up, fingers tightening on my handful of aconite stems. “Cooper?” I had to fight to keep the quaver out of my voice. “Is that what a bunyip sounds like?”
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted him to say yes or no, but I knew I didn’t want the answer that I got: “I don’t know what that is,” he said, stepping closer to me. He was suddenly holding a pistol; he must have produced it from inside his lambskin coat, but he’d moved fast enough that I hadn’t seen him draw. “I’ve never heard that before. Do you have enough damn weeds?”
“I do.” I stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Cooper took a step backward, toward me, his gun still aimed at the water. There was a momentary silence, like the world was holding its breath.
The werewolf burst out of the trees that were growing in the pond. It was fully transformed, maybe two hundred pounds of hair and muscle and hatred, and it was coming straight toward us.
Cooper shouted something. I heard his gun go off three times. Everything seemed to slow down, the way it does when everything is going wrong. I dropped the bag of aconite, pulling the pistol from my belt and taking careful aim on the charging beast. I should have woken up earlier. I might have remembered to swap my bullets for silver rounds, I thought, and then, Too late now, and then the shot was perfect, the shot was as close to ideal as you could get outside the range, and I was pulling the trigger with frantic speed, trying to cluster my bullets on the center of the werewolf’s forehead.
Silver does the best job of killing werewolves. It does something we don’t fully understand to their central nervous systems, disrupting the connection between the therianthropic virus that gives them the power to shapeshift and the body’s normal, static state. Lead doesn’t come with any such bonuses. But if you hit anything hard enough, fast enough, it’s going to fall down.
That’s what happened with our werewolf. Cooper poured bullets into it, and so did I, and midway across the meadow it collapsed, yelping as it fell. I took a step closer, just to adjust my aim, and kept firing until the magazine clicked empty. When that happened, I opened the chamber, coolly reloaded, and then resumed firing.
“Son, I think it’s dead,” said Cooper, between shots.
I fired one more bullet into the werewolf’s head. “Any werewolf that can still be identified via dental records isn’t dead enough for me,” I said.
“You really hate the bastards, don’t you?” He sounded remarkably unshaken for a man who’d just been attacked by a werewolf in an open field. I frowned as I turned to face him. He’d been the one to tell me about the aconite. He’d known I wouldn’t be able to resist getting access to fresher flowers. What if this had been a trap?
Looking at his face removed any doubt. He was pale and shaking, with white patches beneath his eyes that spoke of ensuing shock. “Yes, I hate them,” I said, moving to pick up my bag. “I was raised never to hate anything, because everything has a purpose, but there’s no purpose to waheela rabies getting into the human population like this. It was just a shitty spillover event, and we’re going to be dealing with it forever. I hate them so much. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that I hate more.”