Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (2 page)

“Adventure is a tricky beast that will sneak up on you when you least expect it, laying ambushes and forcing you down avenues that you would never have chosen to walk on your own. After a certain point, it’s better just to go along with it. You do see the most interesting things that way.”

—Alexander Healy

An unnamed stretch of marshland near Columbus, Ohio

Now

E
AR
LY FALL HAD TURNED
the leaves on the trees around us into a flaming corona of red, gold, and pale brown. The few remaining patches of green looked almost out of place: their season was over, and they no longer belonged here. Crow seemed to share my feelings. The black-feathered Church Griffin was flying from tree to tree, crashing through the green patches like a self-aiming arrow and sending explosions of foliage to the ground. He cawed with delight every time he slammed into a branch. I had long since given up on worrying about him injuring himself; his head was incredibly hard, and he rarely collided with anything he wasn’t aiming to hit. Of the two of us, he was much less likely to be injured than I was.

“You know, I can stay home if I want to see scrubland and dead leaves,” said Dee. She was struggling to match my trail through the patchy marsh, hampered by her sensible pumps, which weren’t so sensible in her current environment. I was aiming my steps expertly for the patches of solid ground between the puddles and the mud flats. Despite having grown up in the forest not far from here, Dee wasn’t very practiced at walking in swamps. That either showed a great failing or a great advantage in her upbringing.

“Yes, but can you see the screaming yams as they prepare to migrate to land that’s less likely to freeze solid enough to damage their roots?” I kept walking. Dee, on the other hand, stopped dead.

I turned around after a few feet, beaming a sunny smile in her direction. Dee, her eyes narrowed with suspicion behind the smoked yellow lenses of her glasses, did not match the expression.

“What,” she said.

“I told you we were coming out here to witness a migration,” I said.

“Yes, Alex. You said ‘a migration.’ You know what migrates? Things with the capacity for independent movement. You know what doesn’t migrate?
Yams
.” Dee shook her head hard enough that her wig—a sleek blonde beehive—slipped a little. “Yams are plants. I realize there’s some hazing involved in doing this job. I’ve managed to resign myself to the fact that you’re a mammal and hence by definition, insane. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to convince me that we’re out here looking for
yams
that
scream
.”

“And see, that right there is how your colony has been able to exist for decades without discovering the screaming yam for yourselves.” I turned back around and resumed my forward trek. Dee was annoyed enough that she would follow, if only so she didn’t have to stop sniping at me about the yams she was so sure didn’t actually exist. “Anyone who saw them would have kept it to themselves for fear of getting exactly this reaction.”

“Yes, because screaming yams
don’t exist
,” said Dee, catching up to me. “I don’t know what human parents teach their children, but gorgon parents like to stick to things that are real.”

“Like Medusa?”

“Medusa was real,” said Dee. There was a dangerous note in her voice, accompanied by a low hiss from inside her wig.

“Okay, bad example.” It’s never a good idea to drag people’s gods into casual conversation. Medusa was the ur-Gorgon, the one without whom her two equally divine sisters would never—in gorgon cosmology—have been uplifted and allowed to shape their own children from snakes and clay. So maybe she wasn’t a good thing to call fictional. “Look, will you just stick with me and try to keep an open mind?”

Dee rolled her eyes. “You’re paying me double-time for this. Don’t forget to file the paperwork with zoo HR.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said, doing my best to look faintly hurt. “I keep my promises.”

Technically, Dee was my administrative assistant at the West Columbus Zoo, where I was stationed as a visiting researcher from California. I’m not from California, and the zoo had no idea what I was really researching, but I provided enough value that I didn’t feel bad about deceiving them. The denizens of their reptile house had never been healthier, and we hadn’t fed anyone to the alligator snapping turtle in almost a year. I was happy about that. The alligator snapping turtle, maybe not so much.

Crow flashed by overhead with a squirrel clutched in his talons, cawing triumphantly as he passed. I sighed. Church Griffins are basically what you get when Nature decides to Frankenstein a Maine Coon and a raven into one endless source of mischief. Crow was about the size of a corgi, with the predatory appetites of a cat that had somehow been equipped with functional wings. I kept him inside most of the time, both to prevent him from being discovered by people who wouldn’t know what to do with a Church Griffin, and to protect the neighborhood birds, squirrels, frickens, and smaller dogs.

“He’s going to spread that thing’s guts through a mile of treetops,” observed Dee mildly.

“At least it means I won’t have to feed him tonight. Come on: this way looks promising.” Our hike had brought us to one of the more solid patches of marsh. The ground grew firmer under our feet as we continued, finally becoming rich, deep, subriparian loam. A small ring of frilly green plants poked up out of the dirt, each about three inches high. They stood out vividly against the autumnal background. I grinned. “So Dee, you were telling me screaming yams don’t exist.”

“Because they don’t.”

“Says the woman with snakes for hair. Watch and remember how much you have left to learn.” I stooped, picked up a rock, and lobbed it gently underhand into the middle of the circle. It hit with a soft thump.

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then the earth exploded as a dozen screaming yams uprooted themselves and began hopping wildly around, their fibrous mouths gaping open, their characteristic screams echoing through the marsh. They had no legs, and propelled themselves like tiny pogo sticks, their threadlike root systems whipping in the breeze generated by their forward motion.

After hopping several times around the clearing, they gathered on another patch of clear ground and burrowed back down into the earth with surprising speed, becoming a circle of standing leaves once again.

“Screaming yams,” I said. “If it were spring or summer, they’d have run away from us, but they’re getting ready to hibernate, so they’re counting on confusion to drive us away.”

“Works for me,” said Dee faintly.

I laughed.

Mapient, rodentlike cryptids which present as near-idenams weren’t a normal part of my work environment, they were a great bonus. After three years in Ohio, I was still discovering things about the state and its ecology that could surprise and delight me. That was good, since I’d never expected or planned to stay this long. When I had first come to the West Columbus Zoo to oversee the basilisk breeding program established by my predecessor in the back room of the reptile house—without the knowledge of the zoo administration, of course, since basilisks supposedly didn’t exist—I had thought I’d be there for maybe six months. A year, tops.

That hadn’t exactly worked out as planned. Since my arrival, I had opened diplomatic relations with the local gorgon enclave, nearly been turned to stone, cataloged the native fricken species, nearly been eaten by a lindworm, fed two people to the zoo’s alligator snapping turtle, nearly been killed by a Pliny’s gorgon/Greater gorgon hybrid, and helped my grandparents nurse my cousin Sarah back to something resembling health after she managed to telepathically injure herself saving my sister Verity’s life.

What was sad was that all of this was basically within my job description. I’m a cryptozoologist. As long as I’m working with things that science says don’t exist (including my cousin Sarah), I’m fulfilling my mandate, and serving the cryptid community.

Fortunately for me, there are a lot of ways to serve the cryptid community. Verity is basically a cryptid social worker, with a side order of kicking people’s teeth in when they refuse to acknowledge that “being a good neighbor” doesn’t mean
eating
the neighbors. My mother is a cryptid health professional, and my father is a chronicler and general historian. (My youngest sister, Antimony, is still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. For the moment, it mostly seems to be roller derby, the occasional monster hunting job, and getting pissed at our parents.) I’m a life scientist. My contributions are sometimes medical—when you’re working with a community that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the government, you don’t need to have gone to medical school as much as you need a solid understanding of nonhuman anatomy—but more often strictly scientific. If you need a basilisk bred or a stone spider relocated, I’m your man. And for the moment, I was the man in Ohio.

Dee was uncharacteristically quiet during the drive back to the zoo, sitting in my front passenger seat with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on the road. If not for the low, constant hissing of the snakes concealed inside her wig, I would have wondered whether she’d figured out a way to turn
herself
to stone. (Dee is a Pliny’s gorgon, capable of petrifaction under the right circumstances. They’re immune to their own stony gaze, of course, but the idea of a gorgon looking in their rearview mirror and turning themselves into a statue was amusing enough to be worth considering.)

“Something up?” I asked as I turned off the freeway. Crow churred contentedly from the backseat, his belly full of squirrel and his feathers full of shredded leaves. Since both cats and birds love to self-groom, he was going to have a very satisfying afternoon ahead of him.

“I didn’t think they were real.” Dee’s voice was flat, dull, like she was answering a question during a bad performance review. “You told me they were real, and I thought you were messing with me.”

“Hey, it’s okay. No one knows everything until they learn about it. That’s the whole point of learning things, isn’t it? We go out, we learn, we know more. It’s cool.” I flashed what I hoped would come across as an encouraging smile. “Screaming yams are one of the more outré offerings nature has for us around here. Mobile vegetation is a lot less common than it used to be. It’s not even a Covenant thing, for once—they didn’t hunt the screaming yams into near-extinction, people just paved most of the migration routes. So you have to really know what you’re looking for.”

“I’ve lived here my whole life, Alex,” Dee said. The dullness dropped away, replaced by frustration. “My brother and I grew up on a farm. We should know about every kind of edible plant that grows in this state. We should be cultivating
beds
of those things if they’re as tasty as you say they are. We could be helping them to reestablish a viable population
and
filling our tables at the same time, and instead we’ve been rotating our crops and planting things that aren’t even native. We should have known.
I
should have known.”

“Huh.” I hadn’t considered the possible applications the gorgon community would have for screaming yams. “They’re endangered, but I know of five colonies currently growing in the local forests and marshes. We could transplant one of those to a dedicated bed once the ground freezes. They’ll seed at a rate of about six roots a year, and most of those don’t reach maturity, due to predation from the local animals. If you were willing to commit to only eating half the seedlings, and keeping the rest as, heh, ‘root stock,’ or releasing them back into the wild . . .”

“I’ll consult with our garden planners, but we should be able to do that,” said Dee. “You’ll help me find good, strong roots for the farm?”

“Yeah. I think everyone benefits from that.” Not the yams that would be eaten, not on a micro level, but on a macro level? The arrangement would allow more screaming yams to grow to maturity, and might even give them a chance at surviving for another hundred years. It was a gamble worth taking.

I pulled into my reserved parking space near the zoo gates and stopped the car. “You want to go on ahead?” I asked. “I need to get Crow out of the backseat, and that might take a while.”