“Thank you, man,” Pax said. “For coming to get me. For everything.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, seriously. Thank you. You’ve always been—you and Jo—you were the only people I …” His voice trailed off.
“It’s okay,” Deke said. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“I was inside his head, Deke.”
“Whose head?”
“At the church. I was next to him in the water, and I saw what he saw. He was hallucinating about the church, the way it used to be. I could see it.”
“You were doing some hallucinating yourself, P.K.”
“I don’t regret it happening, though. Okay, the hangover is hell, but I’m glad it happened.” He rolled his neck to look up at the man. “My father loves me, Deke.”
“Of course he does. He’s your father.” A strange thing for him to say, Pax thought, considering what an asshole Deke’s father had been.
“You don’t understand,” Pax said. “I know he does. I could feel it. I felt what he felt.”
“You’re still high,” Deke said. “Just a second.” He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a cell phone pinched between thumb and index finger. It was a bulky, old-fashioned thing that looked tiny in his hands. He held it in front of him, not even trying to fit it to his ear. “This is Deke.”
A deep argo voice buzzed from the phone’s speakers. “Deke, this is Amos. I think we’ve got some tourists over at the Whitehall place. I just saw someone pull in. Nobody from around here.”
“You sure it’s not the police?” Deke asked.
“It ain’t that kind of car,” the voice said.
Deke looked over at Pax. “You got a minute for a detour?”
“My day is wide open,” Pax said.
Chapter 9
DEKE DIDN’T TURN on a siren or flip on a light, but the drivers in town seemed to recognize that he was on business and stayed out of his way. Once Deke cleared the curve at the elementary school and turned onto Creek Road he hit the gas. Mount Clyburn rose up ahead, shrouded in mist. They seemed to be driving straight into it.
“So you’re chief of what, exactly?” Pax said.
“Pardon?”
Pax raised his voice over the wind. “Police? Fire? The Cherokee tribe?”
Deke shrugged. “It’s just a nickname.”
“Right.”
“I helped set up the VFD, the volunteer fire department. Plus I do other, uh, community stuff. Keeping the peace.”
“You mean cop stuff.”
“County cops don’t like to patrol here. People don’t like the cops much either. They need somebody local to step in and help out sometimes.”
At least that explained the police scanner. “So do you get paid for this?”
Deke laughed. “It’s more of a barter system.”
“Sure. Chickens, goats, that kind of thing. Do you have a gun?”
“Hell no.”
“Deke, it’s Tennessee! Every hillbilly out here has a gun.”
“That’s a stereotype, man.” Pax laughed, and after a few beats, Deke said, “But yeah, everybody’s got a shotgun in the closet, and that’s why I make sure everybody knows I don’t carry. You see a twelve-foot mother walking up to your house it’s bad enough, but carrying a shotgun to boot? Last thing I need is some drunk chub so shit-scared he has to shoot me. Any more questions?”
“Yeah,” Pax said. “What do you do in this thing when it rains?”
“Rain is not allowed to enter this vehicle. I’m the fucking Chief.”
They reached Jo’s house and turned onto the steep, curved drive. Deke parked in front of the house. Tucked around the side of the house, as if trying to hide, was the back end of a light blue Prius.
“Amos was right,” Pax said. As if he had any idea who Amos was besides a voice on the phone. “The cops would never drive a hybrid.”
Deke stepped out of the Jeep and said, “Why don’t you stay here a second while I talk to these folks.”
He walked toward the car in the slumped stroll of the argos, long arms swinging slowly. He bent to look inside the back window of the vehicle, then stepped around the corner of the house and out of sight.
Pax looked up. The oak loomed over the house.
He unbuckled his seat belt and stepped down out of the Jeep, his knees a bit wobbly. Of course tourists would come here, he thought. In your tour of Monster Town, why not visit the place where the tragic blank girl lived, the tree where she died? He took a few steps toward the side of the house and then the front door banged open.
A white man in a T-shirt and cargo shorts burst through the doorway and leaped off the steps. He landed awkwardly, and a palm-sized chunk of silver flew out of his hand and landed in the grass. He looked up at Pax with a shocked expression, then sprang to his feet and ran pell-mell for the Toyota.
Pax looked back at the house, expecting Deke to come charging out the door, but the big man was nowhere to be seen. “Deke?” Pax called. “You okay?”
The Prius backed up, then swung around so that the nose was pointing at the Jeep. Pax thought about stepping into its path, then thought better of it. He moved to the driver’s side of the Jeep, leaned over the door, and pressed on the horn.
The Prius lurched forward, passed the Jeep, and headed down to the driveway. Pax looked back at the house just as Deke rounded the corner. He was bent over, legs and long arms churning, running like a huge gorilla. The motion looked much more natural than his usual gait. Graceful. Right.
“Car!” Pax said, and pointed down the road. A stupid gesture; Deke could see the car as easily as he could. The Prius slid around the first curve, spitting gravel.
Deke jerked left and launched himself down the hill, into the trees, on a path that cut through the S of the road like the slash in a dollar sign.
Pax had never seen anyone move so fast.
He opened the Jeep door with some vague idea of following, but then looked down at the pedals six feet from the driver’s seat and realized—or rather, remembered again—that he’d never be able to drive this thing. Plus, Deke had taken the keys. Maybe he should chase them down the gravel driveway? Before he could make up his mind he heard the shattering of glass and the scrape of tires locking up on loose gravel.
A minute later Deke appeared, walking upright back up the hill with the man slung over one shoulder like a deer carcass.
“He’s not dead, is he?” Pax asked.
“You’re hurting me!” the man said.
Deke strode up to the house, dropped the man onto his feet. “Inside,” Deke ordered him, argo voice set to Full Rumble.
Pax started to follow, then turned back to the yard. He looked around for a minute, then found the thing the man had dropped—a camera. By the time Pax got into the house the man was sitting on a couch, looking sour. Deke sat across from him, crouching to fit under the low ceiling.
The atmosphere was close, hotter than outside. And even without Deke’s huge body the room would have felt small. Bookshelves of varying heights lined the walls like battlements. Crowded into the center of the room were the couch and an easy chair in matching brown and blue plaid, worn but not worn out. Along one wall, a plank spanned two bookshelves, forming a long homemade desk. Three wooden chairs, a different colored pillow tied to each seat, were lined up along the desk. He pictured Jo and the two girls sitting in a row, doing homework.
“You smashed in my window,” the man said. He was a little younger than Pax, with a head shaped like a candy corn: a brush of bleached hair, a broad forehead, and cheekbones that narrowed to an elfin chin, a dark soul patch under his lower lip like the dot in an exclamation mark. Something about the hair and the deliberate counter-culture look said that he came from money.
“Next time you’ll stop,” Deke said. “Now, empty your pockets.”
“I didn’t steal anything!” he said. “I’m a journalist.”
“Really,” Pax said. He swung the camera on its nylon
lanyard. “For who?”
The man didn’t answer. Deke grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Pax said, “I think you should answer our questions.”
“Fuck you,” the man said.
Deke grabbed him by his face, his fist completely engulfing his head, and the man screamed into it. Deke’s face was rigid with anger. His white arm trembled, as if he were on the verge of cracking his skull like an egg.
“Deke! Shit, Deke!”
Deke held the man for several seconds. Then the trembling stopped, and Deke released him. He felt to the floor, gasping.
“Your pockets,” Deke said.
According to his driver’s license he was Andrew Weygand, twenty-three years old, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and an organ donor. He said he ran a website called TheOpenSwitch.com. “TOS does investigative articles, opinion pieces—”
“Jesus, he’s a blogger,” Pax said. “Arrest him, Deke.”
“You’re a cop?” the man said. Pax couldn’t tell if he was alarmed or relieved.
“He’s the fucking Chief,” Pax said. Deke sighed.
The man said, “I didn’t even break in, you know. The back door was open.”
“Right.”
Weygand said he was looking for someone called Brother Bewlay. Pax glanced at Deke—he couldn’t tell if Deke recognized the name.
“It’s the screen name for a guy who posted to the blog a lot,” Weygand said. “TOS is supposed to be just about the Switchcreek Event, but it gets pretty tangential—government conspiracies, fringe science, political activism, you name it—all the usual nut-job issues, right? I let anyone comment as long as they don’t get abusive. Brother Bewlay, though, was one of the serious posters. He knew his facts. Personally, I suspected pretty early that he was from Switchcreek. He never said so, probably because no one would believe him. Anybody can say they went through the Changes, right? But Bewlay—sometimes he said stuff that seemed so insightful and weird that it had to be true.” Pax looked up questioningly, and Weygand said, “Like how betas weren’t really male or female, they were a new, third sex. He won a lot of converts. Of course, some people thought he was a total bullshitter, and there were plenty of flame wars, but—hey, careful with that?”
Pax looked up from the camera screen. He’d sat on one of the wooden chairs and started clicking backward through the recent shots in the machine’s memory. The first thirty pictures were of the inside of the house, five or six per room, as if Weygand was going to make a virtual tour of the place.
“Never mind the camera,” Deke said.
“Is he okay?” Weygand asked. “He looks like he’s going to pass out.”
“I’ve had a tough week,” Pax said.
“Get to Switchcreek,” Deke said to the man. “What you’re doing here.”
Weygand took a breath, his eyes still on the camera in Paxton’s hands. “About a week and a half ago Bewlay went offline, no explanation. It’s usually not a big deal, right? And we were all so busy talking about the suicide in Switchcreek that nobody noticed for a while. I finally emailed him—we’d had a lot of personal conversations outside the blog—and when I didn’t get an answer after a few days I thought, oh shit. Now I never do this—I believe in privacy, right? But I pulled the server logs and did a lookup on his address. The IP was definitely coming from the Lambert area. I decided I had to find out if he—if she was him.”
“How would you know?” Deke asked. “If Bewlay didn’t tell you anything about himself—”
“Her computer,” Weygand said. “If some of Bewlay’s files are on there, then that’s that, right? But even if I couldn’t get onto the computer, I thought maybe there’d be something in the house that he mentioned in one of his messages. Like—okay, look at this book I found.”
Weygand popped up and went to the bookshelf. “This Richard Dawkins’ book, The Ancestor’s Tale? Bewlay quoted from it, more than once.”
Pax took the book from his hand. It was a thick, beige paperback with a heavily creased spine. The book flopped open in his hand to a chapter headed “The Gibbon’s Tale.” Under a complicated diagram Jo or someone had written in the margins, “Missing branches—clade tree unrooted?”
“Anybody could have read this,” Pax said, though he’d never heard of the book. The others on the shelf were heavy on medicine—a Physicians’ Desk Reference, The Handbook for Genetic Diseases and Disorders, Modern Obstetrics—but there were an equal number of books on physics, quantum mechanics, and evolution. The Dawkins guy had his own shelf.
Weygand reached for another book. “Okay, look! This physics book by David Deutsch? Bewlay talked about it and I went out and read it myself. Bewlay was the first person on the boards to find scientists who were applying quantum computation and quantum evolution theories to explain the Changes. He even started posting articles from the physics journals.”
Weygand looked from Pax to Deke, excited now. “See, Bewlay’s big thing was that the Switchcreek clades weren’t diseased, they weren’t damaged humans—they were alternate humans, with genetic information ported in from a parallel universe. Quantum teleportation, man.”
Deke stared at him. “What?”
“Look, it’s not that crazy. Do you guys know about the intron mutation counts?”
Deke looked at Pax. “Paxton, what was I just saying about that in the car?”
“I think you said they were undersold and overhyped. Or the other way around.”
Weygand’s smile was half-lit—he couldn’t tell if they were playing with him. “Okay, everybody knows that TDS screwed with the DNA of people who caught the disease, but nobody suspected that the number of changes would increase with second-generation children, the ones born with TDS. Introns are these parts of the DNA that change faster than other parts.”
Deke said, “What does this have to do with the children?”
“Okay, with second-generation children there’s, like, a huge difference in the introns—it’s like the kids descended from a completely different species than their parents.”
Pax looked at Deke. Deke shrugged. “So TDS scrambles the introns too.”
Weygand only seemed exasperated by their ignorance. “Not scrambled—different. People with the same type of TDS show the same changes. Betas have intron sequences like other betas, argos look like argos. And betas are as different from argos and charlies as they are from normal—uh, people who don’t have TDS. You see what this means?”
They didn’t see.
Weygand said, “Look, imagine if evolution took a completely different course millions of years ago. Let’s say our ancestors died out, and instead some slightly different cousins took over. Neanderthals, say. If today those cousins dug us up and sucked some of the marrow out of our bones and looked at the DNA, these are the differences they’d expect to find, right? It’s like betas and argos and charlies are visitors from another world, a parallel universe—you’re what humans would have turned into if our ancestors had taken a few left turns two million years ago.”
Deke shifted his weight, leaned forward. Even crouching he loomed over Weygand.
“So,” Pax said. “You’re saying Deke isn’t human.”
Weygand looked up at the huge man, his mouth working. “No! I mean, well, he’s a kind of human.”
The man yelped as Deke placed a huge bony hand on his shoulder.
“You’re going to do something for me,” Deke said. “You’re going to go get the shiny little laptop I saw in your car and you’re going to send me every email that Brother Bewlay sent you.”
“I can’t forward you private email! I’m a journalist!”
“Don’t make me break you,” Deke said.
The rain came down hard, hammering steam from the ground. Pax sat by the front picture window with the side of his head resting against the glass so that he felt it shudder with each gust of wind. Deke looked over Weygand’s shoulder as the man fussed with the silver Apple laptop. Weygand was constantly complaining in a small voice: Deke had n
o right to do this; the inside of Weygand’s car was getting soaked; Jo Lynn wouldn’t appreciate how Deke was treating him. But he did as he was told and answered the big man’s questions. Pax kept being surprised by Deke’s easy authority. When they were kids Deke was a follower, a pup, eager for Paxton’s approval, ready to follow him or Jo wherever they went. Now he was a leader, a goddamn chief. Which one was the true Deke? Did his huge gray frame armor a timid boy, or had the boy always felt like an undiscovered giant?
Or maybe they were both true. Maybe there was nothing essential to a person that could be separated from the muscle and blood and chemicals that motored him around; maybe everything depended on the body, was dictated by it. He thought of Deke charging into the woods, moving like a freight train. Maybe it was the residue of the vintage in his bloodstream, but Pax could imagine himself inside that powerful body, long arms churning, lungs working easily in the humid air.
Pax was jerked awake by a touch. Deke stood over him. “I’m escorting Andrew here to his car and then right out of town.”
“Okay,” Pax said. He leaned back in the chair, his neck aching. Outside, the rain had slacked off. Weygand stood by the door looking petulant. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“I thought you might say that.”
When they’d gone, Pax got up, opened a few of the books on the shelves, put them back. After awhile he went down the carpeted hallway, past the small functional bathroom to the pair of bedrooms. The door to his left was open. Most of the space in the room was taken up by a bunk bed. Two of the walls were painted pale yellow, the other two sea foam, matching the stripes on the comforters on the unmade beds. There were two identical dressers, cheap pine. The drawers were ajar, as if that morning the girls had hopped out of bed and dressed hurriedly, late for the school bus. He felt a vague sense of déjà vu, then realized it must be because he’d just seen all this in Weygand’s camera.
The other bedroom was smaller, and more plain—a beige double bed in a simple wood frame, a low mirrored dresser, plain white walls—as if all the energy for decoration had been spent in the girls’ room. The only color came from the covers of the books stacked up along one wall. A single, curtained window looked out over the backyard.
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