Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (25 page)

“I wasn’t sure whether that meant you were borrowing one of her guns, or whether you had one of your own,” she said, not missing a beat. “Sometimes Gabby forgets to pack a pistol when she doesn’t really want to be coming along on a hunt.”

“Mum!” protested Gabby.

“It’s true,” said Charlotte. She turned to survey the flock, and the rest of her family. Riley was moving Raina and Shelby into position on the far side of the massed sheep. Either there wasn’t a sheepdog working the field, or the Tanners were a familiar enough sight that the dog wasn’t going on alert. Jett was a black speck bouncing along at Raina’s heels. “Looks like we’re good to move. Are you both clear on your orders?”

“Yes,” said Gabby.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Charlotte. “Move out.” She started loping down the side of the hill, moving with a speed and grace that spoke of absolute familiarity with the terrain. The sun, having dipped down to taste the horizon and found it good, was now descending almost as fast as Charlotte Tanner, dropping the visibility on the field more with every second. I exchanged a glance with Gabby. Then, without another word spoken, the two of us took off after Charlotte.

Gabby, like her mother, was graceful and gliding on the uneven ground, even though she never quite approached Charlotte’s speed. Charlotte ran like a six year old, or an Olympian in training, and somehow managed to do both at the same time: every leap was perfectly planned and executed, every step found solid ground. I, on the other hand, fumbled along behind them like the tourist I was. The quality of the soil was unfamiliar to me, turning every footfall into something potentially treacherous. Only the mild but constant fear of the things that lurked among the Australian underbrush kept me from taking a header into the grass.

It says something when you’re more afraid of falling down and maybe meeting a spider than you are of breaking an ankle, providing that broken ankle doesn’t dump you on your ass.

The sheep were agitated when we reached the bottom of the ridge. They danced from one foot to another, heads up, ears flat, bleating into the twilight. Riley was a hulking shape on the other side of the flock, and I allowed myself a moment to wonder whether he might not be the problem. Sheep may be stupid, but they can sense hostility, and Riley had hostility to spare.

Then one of the rams reared up onto its hind legs, gave a low, bleating moan, like an animal in excruciating pain, and turned inside out.

“Oh,
fuck
,” I said, and started shooting.

The most common comparison for the lycanthropy family of viruses is rabies. They cause a lot of similar symptoms in the people they infect, which is why we go back to rabies again and again when talking about anyone infected with lycanthropy. The uninformed might even start to think that a werewolf was just a person with a bad case of rabies, someone who turned almost animalistic in their rages. There’s a reason we explain it like that. It’s easier on everyone if we never couch things in more honest terms.

The ram—a big boy, maybe three hundred pounds of mutton on the hoof—shrieked as its skin warped and twisted, woolly coat being expelled from the skin with a speed that left it raw and bleeding, hence the appearance of having been turned inside out. The bones were distending and transforming so fast that I could hear them crackle and snap inside its body. Its flesh was changing too, shifting composition from marbled, fatty softness to rock-hard, combat-ready muscle. The ram bellowed again as our bullets bit into its midsection. This time, it sounded less like a bleat, and more like a howl of protest against the world. How
dare
this reality exist? How
dare
we shoot at the ram, which was meant to be king of the newly born night?

I stopped firing wildly, forcing myself to take a breath and steady my hands. Then, barely pausing to aim, I raised my gun again and fired at the werewolf, which showed virtually no signs of its ovine origins.

A hole appeared at the center of its face. It blinked yellow, lupine eyes dumbly, a bit of its original sheepish dullness creeping back in before those eyes went completely blank, and the werewolf collapsed. The untransformed members of the flock scattered, bleating. I let out a slow breath.

“All right,” I began. “That takes care of—”

Something screamed. I turned, as did the Tanners. Five more of the sheep had stopped in their tracks—four ewes, and a second, juvenile ram—and were staring at us with yellowing eyes.

“Well, fuck,” I said, shoulders slumping as my brief-lived hope died. “There’s more than one.”

Of the six werewolves among the flock, the old ram had been infected the longest: that was the only explanation for why he’d transformed so quickly, and so completely. The five that were now advancing toward us, stiff-legged and snarling, were still essentially sheep. Their eyes were yellow, and one of the ewes was starting to shed her fleece in huge, bloody clumps, but they still looked like barnyard animals, more suited to a petting zoo than to a horror movie. I took advantage of their slow approach, checking to see how many bullets I had left. Two more. It had taken four, plus however many the Tanners used, to take down a single werewolf that wasn’t yet prepared to attack.

“Riley?” I began reloading as quickly as I could, jamming the bullets into place with my thumb. I had half a box of replacement ammunition with me. That didn’t feel like it was going to be enough. “Was there a plan here, apart from ‘let’s all go to the meadow and get turned into confetti by the sheep’?”

“These weren’t here yesterday—they’ve got the wrong markings. This is a different flock of sheep,” he said. I heard the click of his own chamber being slotted back into place. “Someone’s setting us up.”

“Oh, that’s splendid.” I aimed, fired, and sent the smallest of the ewes sprawling. In the aftermath of my shot, two more guns went off. I wasn’t sure who they belonged to, but I was sure there was something wrong: while a bloody patch blossomed on the shoulder of the lead ewe, she didn’t fall. She didn’t even stagger.

As she approached, her skull began to warp and twist into a new shape, canine teeth pushing their way through her jaw and piercing her lower lip. She snarled, saliva dripping all around that newly terrible maw.

A sudden, horrifying comprehension seized me. I put the safety back on my pistol, flipped it around, and offered the butt to Shelby. “Trade me guns.”

“What?” She stared at me like I was saying something completely unreasonable. She wasn’t too far off with that.

“I need you to trade me guns.” The werewolves were still stalking toward us, their short sheep’s legs and ongoing transformations slowing them down. That wasn’t going to last much longer. As soon as they were changed enough to break into a proper run, we were going to find ourselves rushed by a small pack of hungry, ruthless predators. The fact that they had started out as herbivores wasn’t going to make any difference. Hell, it might just make them hungrier.

Shelby kept staring at me. I gestured at her with the butt of my pistol, not withdrawing it. If she didn’t make up her mind soon, we were going to be in even more trouble, as I had just effectively removed two of us from the fight. If my left arm had been fully functional . . . but it wasn’t, and introducing throwing knives into a gun fight was just asking for trouble, even if they
were
tipped in silver.

“Oh, you
asshole
,” she finally snarled, and thrust her own pistol at me as she snatched mine out of my hands and unloaded two rounds into the nearest werewolf, sending it sprawling. There was a momentary pause as she stared at the weapon in her hands, stunned by what had just happened. Then she whooped and opened fire again.

Her family did the same, but I was unsurprised when only Shelby’s shots seemed to have any effect. I opened the chamber on her pistol. The bullets inside gleamed in the moonlight with the uniquely heavy shine that one gets from weapons-grade silver. I shook them into my hand, allowing Shelby and the others to keep up the suppressing fire as I scratched at the surface of one bullet with my thumbnail. The dull silver sheen came away easily, revealing cleaner steel underneath.

“Motherfucker,” I swore. “Shelby! Someone switched your bullets!”

“What?” Her gun clicked empty. She glanced at me, and I lobbed the box containing my remaining silver bullets at her underhand. She caught it, beginning to reload even as she asked, “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m the only one here who actually brought silver bullets to the werewolf fight, and you don’t have enough firepower without it! All you’re doing with the lead is slowing them down and pissing them off!” I shoved Shelby’s gun into my coat and pulled out a knife. It was a silly weapon, under the circumstances, but it was better than nothing. Much, much better than nothing.

There were only two werewolves still standing, and their ovine origins were almost completely obscured by the newly lupine lines of their bodies. One of them was still somewhat woolly, with a tail that hung between its legs like a fat white fruit. The other had a more sheep-like skull, but as it was filled with sharp predator’s teeth and covered in thick gray fur, the shape of its skull didn’t matter as much as the thought of what that skull might do.

“Alex?” said Shelby, seeing me measuring the space between myself and the lead werewolf. “Don’t do anything—”

The werewolf leaped. So did I.

Werewolves are, thankfully, creatures of instinct: with the exception of the ones that had attacked me and Cooper near the meadow earlier, I had never heard of a werewolf making a strategy or following a plan once it was transformed.
These
werewolves had begun life as sheep, bred for obedience and stupidity over the course of generations. It was jumping for a man my height, not for a person who was suddenly sliding on his knees under the arc of the werewolf’s trajectory. I jammed my knife upward, turning my face away and screwing my mouth and eyes as tightly closed as I could. It wasn’t squeamishness. I wanted to avoid fluid contact as much as possible.

My knife slammed into the werewolf’s belly just below the rib cage. The creature gave a yelp of strangled pain and kept going, driven forward by its own momentum. A hot rush of stinking blood exploded over my arm, like a water balloon being popped, and the heavy, horrible feeling of the werewolf’s viscera slammed down on me, landing on my head, chest, and shoulders like nothing I had ever experienced before. There was a yelp as the werewolf finally passed fully over me and impacted with the ground.

I didn’t know whether having the majority of its internal organs removed would be enough to kill a leaping werewolf, but I was damn sure that it would slow the bastard down.

The gunfire continued as I lay there in the grass, covered in werewolf offal and stinking of blood. I heard someone scream. I didn’t know who. I didn’t think it was Riley or Shelby, but the other three were still basically indistinguishable to me in their distress: I hadn’t yet had the time to learn what they sounded like when their lives were endangered. Then a foot hit me in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. I made a small noise of protest, without opening my mouth.

“You
asshole!
” Shelby sounded furious. That was good: a furious Shelby was a breathing Shelby. Something soft and clean was dropped on my face. I sat up, scrubbing the worst of the blood away as she continued to rant. “You can’t tell me I’m the only one with a working gun and then—argh, and then
unzip
a fucking werewolf everywhere like you’re some sort of deranged action hero! You could have given me a heart attack!”

She kicked me again, this time in the hip. I finished scrubbing the blood off my mouth, coughed, and asked, “Can you stop kicking me long enough to get the blood out of my eyes? I’m afraid I’ll just grind it in if I try, and I really don’t want to increase the mucus membrane exposure.”

“You’re marrying a man who thinks ‘mucus membrane exposure’ is a thing to say right after you’ve got werewolf liver in your hair,” said Raina sourly. “Oh, yeah, Shelly, you’ve got yourself a winner here. Can I be your maid of honor?”

“Is everyone all right?” I asked. “I missed the end of the fight.” Ignoring Raina seemed like the best approach, under the circumstances.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. “No one was bitten or scratched,” said Riley roughly. “Thanks for the bullets, Price.”

“How did you know?” I heard Shelby kneel beside me. She lifted my glasses off my face. “All right, you don’t have much blood actually on you—good thing you need corrective lenses, or this might be a much bigger problem. Keep your eyes closed, all right?” Something damp touched my eyelid.

Asking what it was seemed like a dangerous course of action, and so I focused on the question at hand. “Too many shots were being fired without any of the wolves going down. If we were all packing silver, that would have been a much shorter fight. Something had to be wrong.”

“So why did
you
still have silver bullets?” demanded Riley. The momentary gratitude I had heard in his voice was gone. That was a disappointment, but not really a surprise.