Thankfully, Cooper had led me in a relatively straight line from the medical station to the meadow, and the few twists we’d taken hadn’t been enough to take us away from the general direction of the road. After what felt like an eternity, I stumbled out of the trees and onto the hard-packed dirt. The brilliantly manmade form of Riley’s SUV gleamed in the afternoon sun about twenty yards away. Twenty short yards, after what I’d just been through. I walked toward it as fast as I could with Cooper still weighing me down, and let out a sigh of relief when I saw the medical station exactly as we’d left it, down to the closed and locked front door.
“Sorry about this, buddy,” I said, and lowered Cooper until he was halfway on the hood, allowing me to rummage through his pockets. He kept trying to slide off my shoulders, forcing me to hoist him up again. I nearly dropped him twice. I was starting to be afraid that I wouldn’t have the strength to catch him when the third time inevitably came, and then my fingers hit the rounded outline of his key ring, and I stopped worrying about silly little things like gravity. Playtime was over. It was time for me to really get to work.
After carrying Cooper through a forest and searching him for keys without dropping him on his head, balancing him on my shoulder while I unlocked the door was practically child’s play. Jett immediately stuck her head outside, giving one of those shrill, piercing barks of hers as she took in the muddy, aconite-and-blood-covered outlines of her master and me. It must have been very confusing for her, because she barked one more time before retreating to her corner and sitting back down.
“Good call,” I said, and carried Cooper inside.
The operating table was covered in the supplies I needed to save our lives. Pushing them onto the floor would be stupid to the point of becoming suicidal. Instead, I dumped Cooper in the station’s one small chair before heading to the cabinet where I’d spotted the emergency first aid kits. I couldn’t give him back the blood he’d lost. I could at least try to keep him from losing too much more.
Jett whined. I looked up, trying to sound sympathetic as I said, “I know, girl. It’ll be okay, you’ll see. I’ll fix your human.”
Assuming anything could fix her human. I might be able to keep him from dying before Riley and Shelby got back, but so what? Was it really fair of me to make that decision for him? We’d been bitten.
There it was, bald and bloody as the handprints I was leaving on the walls: we’d been bitten, both of us, by a werewolf. Possibly two werewolves, if the other one had survived even after we’d poured so many bullets into it that it should have qualified as a lead hazard. We’d been unconscious and covered in werewolf saliva for an unknown period of time, and since we had open wounds, our chances of contracting lycanthropy were even higher than usual, and that meant—
No. That meant I had to do my job, and if Cooper wanted to hate me for saving him, that was a problem for later. I still took a few seconds to look around, searching for a phone. I needed to warn Shelby about the werewolves, assuming she hadn’t been attacked already.
I couldn’t think about that. She could take care of herself, and I needed to focus on the situation at hand. Besides, there was no wall phone. I didn’t have an Australian SIM card for my cellphone yet, and a quick check of Cooper’s pockets showed that his phone had been lost somewhere between the meadow and the medical station. I didn’t have time to go out looking for it.
Grabbing the first aid kit from its place on the wall, I moved to kneel in front of Cooper. “Again, I’m really sorry about this,” I said. “I didn’t want us to be traumatic injury buddies until much later.”
There was a good pair of scissors in the kit. I carefully worked the blades around the cuff of his shirt and began cutting.
It takes a certain amount of skill to cut the clothing off a living person without hurting them: you’re basically using conjoined knives right next to their skin. I focused past the pain in my own arm, forcing myself to move nice and slow as I stripped Cooper’s upper body one piece of fabric at a time. The more I cut away, the more of his injuries were revealed. I knew from the way my own injuries pulled and ached that the werewolf had bitten down hard on my arm, but that was where it had stopped; for whatever reason, it hadn’t decided to continue working until it ripped me open.
It hadn’t been that kind to Cooper.
The entire front of his torso was covered in claw marks and scrapes that could have been made by anything, but were likely to have been made by teeth. His right shoulder was a mauled mass that looked almost like hamburger. Images from An American Werewolf in London were all too happy to present themselves to me as I used a piece of peroxide-soaked cotton to wipe away the worst of the mud and aconite pulp before starting to wrap his injuries in gauze.
Even as field dressings went, this wasn’t a good one. The chance of a secondary infection was ridiculously high, and no matter how much gauze I slapped on, I wasn’t going to stop the bleeding completely. It was enough better than nothing that I kept going. Shelby and Riley would come back eventually; they had to, I had the SUV. When they got here, we could move Cooper to a better location, one with more advanced medical facilities. All I had to do was keep him alive until they showed up—and give us both a fighting chance at overcoming the infection.
I stood once the last piece of gauze was taped off and walked back to the operating table, my own blood loss making my head spin. My field bag was there, and the smell of crushed aconite flowers wafted out to greet me, sweet and acrid at the same time. I looked at them, swallowing hard. They were incredibly poisonous even in their untreated form. What I was going to do to them would only concentrate those toxins, making them even worse.
It was the only chance we had. I took a deep breath to steady myself and reached into the bag for the first handful of flowers.
The recipe for lycanthropy-w antiserum is surprisingly close to several of the old folk remedies that were supposed to either kill or cure a newly infected werewolf. As is so often the case, necessity had been the mother of invention, and while we might someday have something synthetic that does the job, for now, we stick with the tried and true.
I fed the aconite leaves in clumps into the small blender I’d packed for the purpose, stuffing it until the lid barely stayed in place. Two quick buzzes on the chop setting gave me a lot of diced vegetation, which I decanted into a larger bowl before stuffing the blender a second time, this time with flowers, which I proceeded to blend into a sort of horrifying aconite smoothie. The air turned sticky-sweet with the smell of crushed flowers. Normally, that would have been upsetting. At the moment, the fact that it was covering the smell of blood was a blessing.
I got down to work.
No matter what changes in my life, science is always there. Science has been the one constant of my existence. I wanted to know why the world worked the way it did before I had sisters, before I had a career in mind, even before I understood that for most kids the bogeyman was a scary story to tell in the dark, not a real thing that might be sleeping under their bed. (I had alienated myself from my elementary school peers very quickly by trying to tell them about my home life. My parents had told me not to, but I had believed, with the blind hopefulness of a child, that my friends would understand when I said things like “Grandpa used to be a bunch of corpses” and “Grandma killed a rock demon once, but we think it was actually a colony organism.” My friends did not understand. My friends did not remain my friends for long.)
Science kept the terror at bay. My mind kept trying to present me with images of the werewolf in the field, the werewolf in the long-ago stable, and I kept shunting them to the side, focusing on science. Science would save me.
Bit by bit and step by step, I extracted the fluid from the aconite leaves, grinding them down and mixing them periodically with the other ingredients that were going into today’s bad idea stew. Once they had been reduced to a dry, fibrous mass, I moved them to a beaker and added w
ater before turning on the Bunsen burner.
It was getting harder and harder to force myself to keep moving, and to keep observing the necessary lab protocols. My own wounds weren’t bleeding anymore, but they needed to be cleaned and treated, and I didn’t have time for that right now. The pain of touching the bite would only slow me down; once I’d been sure I wasn’t going to bleed in my ingredients and potentially contaminate them, I had left it alone. It didn’t feel like the werewolf had severed anything essential. My arm was still working normally, if a little stiffly, and so I just kept going. It was better than the alternatives, none of which I really wanted to consider.
I must have blacked out at some point. I was watching the contents of the beaker bubble and reduce. Then I blinked, and the beaker had gone from two-thirds full to holding little more than two inches of liquid, poisonously dark and glittering slightly from the silver nitrate. It looked disturbingly like the mascara Antimony would put on before one of her roller derby bouts.
The thought was funnier than it should have been. That realization sobered me instantly. I was going into shock—if I wasn’t there already—and I needed to move.
We didn’t have a blast cooler, and we didn’t have time to wait for the stuff to cool naturally. Cooper still wasn’t awake. I poured the thick, viscous liquid into a waiting tray, creating as much surface area as possible, and added the final, most dangerous ingredient: mercury, which dripped silver and deadly into the mass, glimmering on the surface until I stirred it into the rest. I kept stirring for a minute and a half, timing myself on the wall clock, trying to ensure that everything was evenly mixed. Mercury’s tendency to clump meant that using the blender wasn’t a good idea, and was part of why we had to make such small batches, and use them so quickly. Not only would the aconite begin to lose its efficacy, and not only would the rabies treatments become gradually denatured by the things around them, but the mercury would pull away, forming clots of deadly toxins that weren’t counterbalanced by the other deadly toxins the treatment was supposed to contain.
Jett watched me with narrow, wary eyes as I measured out a quarter teaspoon of sludge and shambled toward her unconscious owner. “You’re pretty lucky, you know,” I said to Cooper. “Most people pass out from the shock of this stuff, assuming it doesn’t make their hearts stop—which it doesn’t always, but this is Australia. You might have extra strong aconite here or something, and I haven’t been able to test it. Your mouth is going to go numb. You may have long-lasting nerve damage on your tongue, although that’s a relatively rare side effect. You will probably experience dizziness, unconsciousness, nausea, blurred vision, and either constipation, diarrhea, or both. Also you may turn into a werewolf anyway, and I am so sorry to do this to you without your consent, but with the amount of blood you’ve lost, it’s going to be a while before you wake up, even with proper medical care, and this stuff really needs to be administered as soon after the bite as possible.”
Cooper didn’t wake up. I glanced to the door, wishing Shelby and Riley would appear and save me from needing to make this decision on my own. I felt like I was doing the right thing, but how could I be sure? How much of my motivation was based on the need to see someone else ingest the stuff before I risked myself?
Shelby and Riley didn’t appear. I turned back to Cooper. “I guess this is it,” I said, and raised the spoon. My hand was shaking. I raised my other hand to steady it, and missed my wrist twice before I realized what was happening.
I had waited too long.
Maybe I hadn’t been bleeding the whole time, but I had still lost a lot of blood in that meadow, and had suffered a severe enough injury that I should have been seeking medical treatment immediately, not playing chemist in a one-room hideaway in the middle of nowhere. The last of my reserves had been spent on making the treatment that I was even now failing to administer.
I almost felt grateful as my knees buckled and, for the second time in less than three hours, I plunged into unconsciousness.
This was getting to be a habit.
Jett’s barking pulled me back into the world of the living. I had fallen on my injured arm, and as soon as I became aware of myself again, the pain took care of the rest, rocketing me straight from the pleasant fields of dreamland and into the cruel realities of Australia. I struggled to sit up, managing only to lift my head enough to see Jett standing in the open doorway—oh, God, I’d left the door open, I’d been so distracted by pain and the need to get the tincture mixed that I’d left the door open—barking her head off. There was a new urgency in those high-pitched yelps, lending them a weight that they had previously lacked. This wasn’t barking for the sake of barking. Her person was in trouble, and to a dog, that meant everything.
Cooper was still propped in the chair. The spilled tincture had left a dark splotch on his shirt. He didn’t appear to have moved, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I didn’t think he was breathing. I gave up the fight to sit and put my head back on the floor, closing my eyes and waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Giving up seemed strangely easy, like this was the way things were always intended to be for me. I would die here, and that would be the end of it. The mice would find their own way home. Poor mice. I would be one more death they’d have to remember for the rest of their lives, and for all the lives that came after. Knowing that I was going to break the colony’s heart hurt, but what choice did I have? I was done.
“Jett, what’re you on about? Why’s the door open?” Shelby sounded innocently curious, like she had no suspicions that things could have gone wrong. “Was it that Alex, hmm? Did he not do the latch? Cooper would do the latch for you, there’s bunyip around these parts, you know.”
More than just bunyip, I thought. I wanted to call out to her. I couldn’t figure out how.
“Shelly, look at this.” Riley. He sounded concerned, unlike his daughter. The reason why was quickly explained as he continued, “There’s blood on the ground here, see? Someone’s been hurt.”
“Oh, God—Alex?” Shelby didn’t hesitate. She shoved past the dog, her footsteps pounding on the thin wooden floor. I heard her gasp. I wanted to roll over and tell her that I was fine, I just needed someone to help me off the floor, but that seemed so hard. I decided to stay where I was instead. Much better. “Alex?!”
I couldn’t ignore the edge of panic in her voice. She wasn’t touching me. That was a good thing. Even upset, she was respecting proper safety procedures. The risk of infection would have been too great, given that I was sprawled in a pool of blood and unidentified black sludge.
Answering her was the only polite thing to do, much as it pained me to even think about moving. I shifted my head enough to free my jaw, and said, muzzily, “’M not dead.”
Under the circumstances, it felt like a speech worthy of Shakespeare.
Shelby must have decided to hell with observing proper procedures, because I heard her step forward, only to stop abruptly. “Daddy, let me go! He’s hurt!”
“Yes, and Cooper’s dead.” Riley’s voice was grim. “Son, you want to go ahead and tell us what happened?”
It was difficult to think, much less follow an unspoken implication. Still, I did my best, and after only a few moments I reached the appropriate conclusion. “I didn’t kill him.” The more I talked, the easier it became. The words were coming back to me, clear and understandable, if a little bit dusty around the edges. “I tried to save him.”
“So what’s this sludge on his shirt? Some sort of toxin?”
Shelby’s father had to be playing stupid to upset me. It was the only thing that made sense. “It’s the toxin you sent us out here to make,” I snapped, turning my head and glaring at him. Half a second later my body realized that I had just forced it to move, and rewarded me with a wave of staggering nausea. I fought through it, keeping my eyes on Riley. He filled the doorway, one massive hand clamped down on Shelby’s upper arm as he forced
her to stay with him. “I spilled the tincture when I was trying to administer it to him.”
“Yeah? You’re sure you didn’t feed him a nice big dose to see what would happen?”
Shelby shook off her father’s hand in a sudden, convulsive motion. He turned to blink at her, apparently as surprised by this as I was. “Stop it!” she said, grabbing a box of plastic gloves off the nearest counter and yanking them on. “Just you stop it! I know you don’t like Alex, and I don’t give a fuck! Look at his arm!” She pointed at me as she dropped the box. I obligingly twisted as much as I could to show him my left arm, and the shredded coat that covered it. “Something bit the ever-loving crap out of him, and now you’re going to stand there accusing him of murder? Really? That’s how you’re going to deal with my bloody fiancé now?”
“Fiancé?” he said. He sounded like he’d been poleaxed. I knew how he felt.
Shelby didn’t dignify his question with a response. She just glared at him and stalked over to where I was sitting, reaching down to offer me her hands. I glanced at them, alarmed. She smiled a little. “No open cuts, I’m wearing gloves, and lycanthropy is hard to catch, you said so yourself,” she said, still holding out her hands. “I’d have to lick you all over to pick up any of the remaining werewolf saliva from your skin. You’ll forgive me if I’m not interested, yeah?”
“Yeah, but you’re still taking a shower after this,” I said, and offered her my right elbow.
With her grasping my arm and me pushing off with my legs, we were able to get me to my feet with a minimum of trouble. The newly awakened pain in my left arm had dropped back down to a dull throb, allowing me to focus on other things. Like Cooper, whose eyes were still closed, but whose chest no longer rose and fell with the labored rhythm of his breath.