The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  He could have come back here and started cleaning last night after supper at Deke’s. Instead he’d driven up to the Lambert Motel 6. Deke and Donna had tried to get him to stay with them, but the vintage was still in his system and the oversized bed in the giant house was a little too Alice in Wonderland. He felt like he was overdosing on strangeness.

  That night he sat on the polyester bedspread in his underwear, eating CiCi’s pizza and flipping through channels. For dessert he smoked a joint while he watched a South Park rerun. Around ten he called in to work and told the night manager he couldn’t make it back to the restaurant by Monday. The manager started to be a dick about it, as usual, but quickly backed off when Pax told him his father was sick. Pax must have sounded genuinely upset.

  He said he didn’t know how long it would take to get someone to take care of his father. Which was true, as far as it went.

  Nobody at work knew he was from Switchcreek. None of his friends either. They knew he was from down south, but so far he’d never felt the need to open up a conversation—or shut one down—with Hey, you know that biological catastrophe thirteen years ago? That was my hometown!

  It helped that nobody he knew in Chicago talked about the Changes, or had even seen a Switchcreeker in person. All the years Pax lived in Chicago the only Changed he’d seen was an argo boy on a talk show. He’d heard there was a beta in L.A. who ran some kind of fetish website, but he’d never looked it up. His people stayed home, or they became professional freaks. Only the unchanged, like Pax, had the option of passing in the outside world. Pax could slip back to his life in the city any time he wanted to. Any time.

  He heard a faint thump from outside—the chub’s car door shutting? He hurried into the living room, and stopped short before reaching the door.

  His father’s body had swelled. His stomach had pushed open the robe, and his face and neck had ballooned. His snoring had stopped, but his eyes were still closed and his breathing was coming heavy.

  “Dad?” He went to his side, touched his shoulder. “Dad!”

  His father’s eyes slowly opened. His pupils were dilated. “Lorraine. Lorraine was here.”

  “Mom’s not here, Dad. You were dreaming.”

  His eyes seemed to focus on Pax’s face, then his head fell back in surprise. “Paxton? Is that really you?” He smiled. “The prodigal returns.”

  Shit, Pax thought.

  “You mother was just here,” he said. “Or maybe that was yesterday.”

  The blisters had erupted again. They were everywhere on his skin, all sizes, weeping and shiny. His father reached for him and Paxton stepped back. He remembered that electric rush of emotion that had struck him, left him lying stupid in the grass.

  He heard voices and went to the door. Through the diamond-shaped window he saw another car in the driveway—one of those new Cadillacs with a snout like a bulldog—and Aunt Rhonda waddling toward the house in her blazing pink pantsuit. Close behind came three chub boys: Clete, who was carrying a Styrofoam cooler; the one with the diamond earring and a head like a bowling ball who seemed to be Aunt Rhonda’s personal bodyguard; and another muscled boy he didn’t recognize who swung a duffel bag in his hand.

  Paxton locked the door and stepped to the side, out of the view of the window. Even though he was expecting it, the knock made him flinch.

  “Reverend Martin?” Rhonda called. “Paxton?”

  He backed away from the door—he didn’t want his voice to sound too close—and called back, “This isn’t a good time, Aunt Rhonda.”

  “Don’t let her in!” his father bellowed.

  One of the men laughed, but was quickly cut off. Rhonda said, “Paxton, honey, I’m here to help. Boys, go back to the cars and sit awhile. Paxton and I need to talk.”

  Pax risked a glance out the window; the chub boys were walking back to the driveway, talking among themselves.

  In a lower voice Rhonda said, “Paxton, open the door and let me explain what all’s going on.”

  Pax glanced at his father. He was staring at his knees, shaking his head back and forth. Pax unlocked the door and slowly opened it. “I think we should talk outside,” he said, and pulled the door closed behind him. The chubs glanced back but kept walking.

  “How’s the reverend doing?” Rhonda said. She looked like the Man in the Moon in drag: tiny blue-shadowed eyes and tiny red lips in the middle of a huge round face.

  “Not too good,” Pax said.

  “Is he bloated?” she asked. “Talking to himself, hallucinating?”

  “Something like that. Well, all of that, actually.” She pursed her lips understandingly, and he said, “I know that you’ve been, uh, siphoning him.”

  She nodded, waiting.

  “He says you’re milking him like a cow.”

  She smiled wryly. “That sounds like your daddy.” She nodded toward the window. “Has he told you why we’re doing it? Or is he too far gone to say?”

  “He said I should ask you.”

  “Well, that’s good advice, at least. Here’s what’s happening right now—he’s got a drugstore-worth of chemicals running through his system. If we don’t drain the vintage out of him he’s going to be high as a kite, and who knows when he’ll come down. Let my boys extract it now, Paxton. You can watch if you want. But then you and I need to have that talk you promised me. Now that your father’s producing, you need to understand what your responsibilities are.”

  “Get off my property!” his father yelled.

  “Is it painful?” Pax said. “The process, I mean.”

  She patted his arm. “Maybe to watch, honey. But it don’t hurt them none.” She gestured to the chubs, and they started walking back. “It’ll be good for you to be here, though,” she said. “Your dad can be kinda feisty.”

  ———

  Rhonda stood well back from the old man and issued instructions to the boys. Everett, the serious boy with the shaved head and earring, sat on one side of Harlan, then hooked a foot around his ankle to hold down his legs and grabbed an arm. Clete took the other side. The third chub, a younger kid named Travis who had thick black hair and Elvis sideburns, worked the needle. Pax crouched near his father’s knees, talking in a low voice through the paper breathing mask Rhonda had given him. His father could not be soothed. He struggled and shouted, but Rhonda’s boys couldn’t be budged, and in a few minutes his father was exhausted.

  “Like trying to shave a cat,” Clete said, and Travis laughed.

  “Shave a cat,” Travis said.

  Aunt Rhonda excused herself. “Best not for me to get too close,” she said, and went outside.

  The boys started with the insides of his father’s forearms. Travis would swipe the surface of a sac with iodine, then slide in the needle. Pax winced every time, his stomach turning. But his father didn’t seem to feel the needle; they might as well have been poking at Ziploc bags. After his arms they opened his robe and lifted his T-shirt to siphon the larger sacs on his belly and chest. They ignored the smaller blisters and pimples.

  When the syringe filled, Travis placed it in the Styrofoam cooler, then picked up a new needle and syringe from a box on the floor.

  The siphoning seemed to go on and on, but when Pax checked his watch only fifteen minutes had passed. A sour odor filled his nostrils. He felt queasy, and sweat painted his neck.

  At some point his father passed out or simply fell asleep; his head lolled to the side and he began to breathe deeply. The robe had fallen open, and Pax was alarmed to see that an erection tented his boxer shorts.

  Pax pushed the robe over it and Clete laughed. “Happens every time,” he said. “This stuff’s better than Viagra.”

  “Cut it out,” Everett said sternly. It was the first time Pax had heard him speak. Now that Everett didn’t need to restrain Harlan, he could help siphon. He started using a second needle, and the extraction proceeded faster. A few minutes later they had only his father’s back to do. They tilted Harlan forward and sideways, then pushed u
p his robe to his shoulders. Pax held his father’s head against him, patting with his gloved hand the black-and-gray hair he’d been cutting two hours ago. He could not get used to the size of his father, his helplessness, the zoological strangeness of his body.

  The boys began to pack up their supplies. Pax pushed his father back into a sitting position and straightened his robe. Then he followed the boys outside.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rhonda asked him.

  Pax stared at her.

  She laughed heartily. “You held it together better than I thought you would. Most skips couldn’t do it—certainly not a man. It’s women who change the diapers and take care of the old people in this world. Most men don’t have the stomach for it.” She held open a plastic garbage bag and he tossed in his mask and gloves. “Do this every day and you’ll get used to it.”

  Pax exhaled heavily. “Every day this has to happen?”

  “If you want to keep him healthy.” She gave him an appraising look. “Now I didn’t come out here just for your father’s treatment, though I was glad I could help. I came to show you someplace where there’s a different way of doing this.”

  “I don’t know,” Pax said, glancing back at the house. Everett stepped out carrying the cooler.

  “Don’t you worry,” Rhonda said. “We’ll have you back in no time. Your daddy’s going to be sleeping for a while.”

  Chapter 4

  THE INSIDE OF the Cadillac smelled like a tub full of lilac petals—Rhonda distilled.

  Pax rode in the back alone, while Rhonda sat up front in the passenger seat next to Everett. “My next project is to build our own high school,” Rhonda said. Only the top of her hair-sprayed head was visible. “You know they wouldn’t let Everett play on the football team at the county school? Can’t pass the physical, they said, because he’s morbidly obese. Obese! Not for a charlie, I said. Not for one of our people. They won’t let the argo boys play either, especially not basketball. Lord, they’re deathly afraid of argos playing basketball. Not that they’re any good at it—they got hands like concrete. And nobody wants to even shower with the beta boys. Tell me that’s not discrimination.”

  “That’s discrimination,” Pax said.

  “You bet it is. We’re going to sue their hind ends off, then use it to pay for the stadium. Everett here can be our coach.” Pax could see the side of his face. The man shook his head, smiling shyly. It was the first time Pax had seen him break his frown.

  They skirted the edge of town, taking Roberts Road under the eastern face of Mount Clyburn. The fields of the Whitmer farm opened up to their right, and a new white fence sprang up and raced alongside the road, pickets blurring. As they approached the entrance to the farm, he saw that they’d turned the place into a trailer park. Fourteen or fifteen mobile homes surrounded what looked like a white-painted warehouse, a cheap sheet-metal building with a low, flat roof. The Whitmers’ ancient barn still stood in the distance, but the old farmhouse was gone. Beta children played between the trailers, and a few of the taller girls wore those white scarves on their heads.

  Aunt Rhonda rolled down the window and waved at two beta women inside the fence who were unloading bags of insulation from the bed of a pickup. They wore nothing on their smooth heads, and one of them carried a toddler in a pack on her back. The women returned the wave without smiling, but maybe that was a beta thing.

  “Those blanks are breeding like rabbits,” Rhonda said, and rolled up the window.

  Blanks. Another slang term. Every clade had to be put in their place, he thought. “Was that the Co-op?” he said.

  “Jo Lynn started that after you left,” Rhonda said. “Not her best idea.”

  “Jo did? But she was living on her own,” Pax said.

  “Just the past couple years, hon. She started the farm back in, oh, a year after you left, I guess. Several families moved in with her. She tried to call it a commune at first, but people didn’t like the sound of that. Anyway, more and more of them started moving out there. There’s quite a few blanks still living around town in their old houses, trying to keep their old families together. But I think deep down the betas like living close, sharing the babies.”

  “But Jo, did she leave, or was she kicked out?”

  Rhonda laughed. “A little of both.”

  “How so?”

  “Jo was all for planned motherhood. That didn’t sit too well with the younger girls. Every single one of them wants to be the Virgin Mary, even if they’re fourteen. Especially if they’re fourteen. And then when Jo—well, I don’t need to talk about that.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of rumors. Nobody needs to tell you how people talk.”

  Pax sat back, his face burning as if he’d been slapped. Nobody forgets anything in your hometown, he thought. Ten years wasn’t enough. Twenty. He’d die an old man and they’d still say, You heard why his daddy ran him out of town, didn’t you?

  Rhonda leaned over and looked between the seats at him, raising her eyebrows. “Paxton, you’re a grown man now. You know how small-minded people can be. Jo Lynn never was shy about sharing her opinion, and what’s more, she was ready to do more than just talk about it—she was going to take action. A lot of the sisters, especially the young ones—well, they thought she was the devil herself.”

  Roberts Road ended at the highway, and Everett turned the car south, away from town. A half mile after the south gate, one of the boundaries during the quarantine, he turned off onto a newly paved road that wound up into the hills. When Pax was a kid there’d been nothing out here but trees and scrub brush.

  Near the top of the hill the driveway was blocked by a black iron gate set into a high stone wall. Everett stopped and spoke into an intercom set on a post a few feet from the gate. “Aunt Rhonda’s here,” the chub boy said.

  “What’s with the high security, Aunt Rhonda?” Pax said. His tone was light, but the fortress set dressing had put him on edge.

  “Can’t be too careful, hon,” Rhonda said.

  The gate swung open. Everett drove up the hill and around a curve, where the drive ended in front of a one-story brick building like an elementary school. White cement columns supported a broad porch and entranceway. The bottoms of the columns were smudged with red clay, but otherwise the place looked almost brand-new.

  They got out of the car, and Everett retrieved the Styrofoam cooler from the Cadillac’s trunk. Pax knew there’d come a point when he’d have to ask Aunt Rhonda what she was going to do with those vials—and then all this polite chitchat would be over.

  A charlie man in a brown security uniform came out of the building to meet them. He was in his forties, looking more fat than muscular. His hairline had retreated to high ground. “How you doing today, Aunt Rhonda?” he said.

  “Just fine, Barron. This is Paxton Martin, the Reverend Martin’s boy.”

  They shook hands and Barron said, “Welcome to the Home.”

  The guard led them up the ramps to the building and opened the door for them. The foyer was tiled in pale green slate, the air glowing with sunlight pouring through a row of high windows. A man older and more immense than Pax’s father napped on a huge, sturdy couch.

  “We have thirteen men living here now,” Rhonda said. “We take care of them because their families just can’t. You’ve seen how hard it is. Come on, I’ll show you around the place.”

  Rhonda led Pax toward a set of double doors. Barron started to follow, but at a look from Rhonda he stopped at the edge of the lobby. Everett had already disappeared in the other direction, carrying the cooler.

  Rhonda pressed a button on the wall, and the doors glided open to reveal a small space before another set of doors. She gestured Pax inside, and when the doors closed behind him, a vent in the ceiling jetted warm air at them. Five seconds later the next set of doors swung open. Pax thought, Air lock?

  The area beyond was a hallway and a row of serious-looking doors. She opened the first of
them and showed him an empty apartment: bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, and kitchenette, all laid out wide for charlie bodies. The tubs and toilets were enormous.

  “You certainly seem to be well equipped,” Pax said. “I suppose that was you who set my father up with that big new toilet?”

  “Hon, fixing up that bathroom was the least we could do. He didn’t want to come live here at the Home, but there are certain needs for people our size. Our old houses just aren’t built for our new bodies.” She laughed and patted one of her big hips.

  She took him to the next apartment. A man sat propped up in a queen-sized hospital bed, watching a game show on a huge flat-screen TV. The room seemed to be at least partly furnished with his own belongings: homemade quilts, lamps that didn’t match, picture frames and knickknacks on the shelves. The man watched the screen intently, his mouth moving as if he was chewing on the inside of his cheek. His exposed skin was splotched with a white substance like dried sunblock.

  “How you doing today, Elwyn?” Aunt Rhonda said, raising her voice over the sound of the TV. Elwyn’s jaw hung slack for a moment, and then he resumed his chewing. He never looked away from the screen.

  “Every room has a big-screen TV and five hundred satellite channels,” Rhonda said. “Our boys like the TV.”

  She showed him two more rooms. Both occupants were about the age of Pax’s father, and they looked much more alert than Elwyn. The men made small talk, and seemed happy enough to see Rhonda. Both were patched by white ointment—jalopies primed for a new paint job.

  Rhonda said, “We’ve got three women who do all the cooking down at a kitchen I set up downtown, and we bring it in fresh every day. Nothing fancy—most of our men like their food home-style. We go through five pans of cornbread every meal.” She glanced up at Pax. “So how’s your father eating these days?”