The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  He reached Deke’s house on Creek Road, stepped up onto the front step, and rang the bell. It had been over a month since the last time he’d been here, sweating and desperate, yet the door seemed even taller now. He felt like a little kid asking if the big boy could come out and play.

  He rang the bell again. He never would have walked up to Deke’s front door when they were kids. Deke had lived with his father in a run-down trailer out near Two Hills. His father was a barker, a bully—a small man who liked to clomp out of his trailer with a baseball bat and yell at the black kids just to see them wet their pants. Mostly the kids just wanted to look at the bird-houses—a dozen or so hand-built boxes perched on poles around the yard. Deke had hammered together the first of them when he was in fifth grade, and each year the models were more elaborate, more detailed, more refined: log cabins, Gatlinburg-like chalets, multitier apartments … Paxton’s favorite was the scarecrow that housed birds in its wooden head.

  The disparity between the birds’ accommodations and the humans’ became a little embarrassing. Maybe that’s why Deke’s father kept scaring the kids off. He died in the Changes, but Pax couldn’t recall whether it had been during the A, B, or C waves. Neither could he remember Deke ever talking about his father’s death. Was Deke at his bedside when it happened? Off with Jo and him? Pax had never asked. And why was that? Was he that much of a self-absorbed asshole that he couldn’t ask how Deke’s father died?

  No one answered the bell. He thought of leaving a note taped to the door: Dear Deke, Rhonda may have killed some people. Call me.

  He decided to take a different route back to his car, walking along Creek Road to the highway to get an alternate angle on the media circus. The sidewalk in front of the Bugler’s was completely blocked off; a row of TV reporters were lined up side by side, either talking into their own cameras or marking time until they went on. Half a block farther on at the salon, an argo woman and a chub woman in identical dresses had been cornered by what looked like at least two competing news crews. No one stopped Pax for an interview or even looked twice at him: the benefit of not looking like a local.

  Pax turned the corner at Bank Street, stopped, and looked back at the car he’d just walked past. A light blue Prius. The windshield was unbroken, but that could easily have been replaced by now. The driver was inside, his head bent over something in his lap.

  Pax walked around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was down. “I thought Deke kicked you of town,” he said.

  Andrew Weygand jerked his head up, his fingers still on the laptop keyboard.

  “Easy,” Pax said. “I’m just messing with you.”

  “I have every right to be here,” he said.

  “That’s right, you’re a journalist.” Pax thought he kept the sarcasm from his voice but wasn’t sure if he succeeded entirely. “I’m Paxton, by the way. I don’t think I introduced myself last time.”

  Weygand hesitated, then shook Paxton’s hand. In the month since Pax had seen him the man’s bleached hair had transformed to deep black with yellow tips, but the soul patch still clung to the underside of his lip like mold. The back of his car was a mess. Filling the seat was an unrolled sleeping bag, a pillow, and two blue plastic coolers. The floorboards were crowded with white plastic grocery bags.

  “Are you living in this thing?” Pax asked.

  “Temporarily,” he said. “Turns out there’s not a free hotel room between here to Knoxville.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not in Ecuador.”

  “They’re not issuing visas,” Weygand said. “Total blackout except for a few of the mainstream press—typical old media hegemony.” He glanced at the side-view mirror. “So, your friend Deke …”

  “I’m looking for him, actually,” Pax said.

  “It’s not, uh, totally necessary that you tell him you saw me, right?”

  Pax shrugged and smiled. “Probably not.”

  “I’m just here for a night, maybe two. There’s a town hall meeting at the elementary school tonight. I just want to interview some of the state and federal people who are coming, maybe get an interview with Mayor Mapes, then I’m gone again, I swear.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. He hadn’t heard of any town meeting. How many government agencies were rolling into town? “So what about the Brother Bewlay thing? Are you still hunting him down?”

  “I didn’t get much further after the last time I saw you,” Weygand said. “Why don’t you ask Deke? He’s got all the emails. If Jo Whitehall was—what?”

  “Nothing, I just …” Pax rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “Listen, I’ve got a couple extra beds in my house, if you want to crash there after the meeting.”

  “I’m fine, dude, thanks,” Weygand said.

  “No, really. Jo Lynn was a good friend of mine, and you were her friend, too, even if you didn’t know it was her.” He smiled. “Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I have a kind of tech support problem. You good at computers?”

  Weygand looked down at the laptop screen. “I know my way around.” He closed the lid and set the computer on the passenger seat. “What kind of problem?”

  “I need to break into a password-protected laptop. A Mac.”

  Weygand laughed. “But not your Mac, right? No thanks, man, I don’t—” Weygand stopped smiling, getting it.

  “Yeah, we found it,” Pax said. “But Jo locked it. I think it could tell us—” He almost said, Tell us who killed her, but he knew it would make him sound crazy. “—Well, a lot. Think you can do it?”

  “How about right now?” Weygand said. “I just need to stop by the store and—”

  “I don’t have it with me,” Pax said. “Tonight, after the meeting.” He’d have to track down the twins, get them to retrieve the laptop from wherever they’d hidden it and bring it to his house.

  “I’ll get the supplies,” Weygand said. He pushed the Power button on the dash and the Prius hummed awake. “Where can I get a couple big cans of compressed air?”

  Chapter 16

  RHONDA MAPES STOOD in the center of a bull’ s-eye. She looked around at the circle of people nearest her—politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, police, and military personnel (almost all of them men, twenty-first century be damned)—then lifted her head to take in the entire crowd.

  The emergency meeting of the Switchcreek Town Council had swelled to include over twenty invited participants and more than two hundred spectators and media people. She’d expected a crowd, which is why she’d decided to hold the meeting in the elementary school gym. The folding chairs were set in concentric rings: leaders on the inside, flunkies behind them, and everyone else filling in back to the walls.

  A more honest layout, Rhonda thought, would have placed the federal muckety-mucks in the outermost ring, all the better to corral the state functionaries, who were in turn trying to curb the county yokels, who only wanted to keep the freaks from Switchcreek in line. Rhonda, of course, would have been exactly where she stood now; smack dab in the center of everything. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  She smiled her grandmother smile. “Let me start,” she said, “by thanking you all for coming out here tonight.”

  Tom Garvin, the regional director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, opened his mouth to speak and Rhonda said, “Before we introduce our guests, we’d like to open this meeting with a word of prayer—for the people of Babahoyo. Reverend Hooke, would you lead us?”

  Dr. Ellis Markle, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked exasperated for a moment, then quickly assumed a pious expression. Rhonda thought of him as the man from COPTER. He led a division of the CDC called the Coordinating Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, but after watching him land his helicopter in the middle of town it was impossible to keep the correct acronym in her head.

  Neither Garvin nor Ellis had wanted a joint meeting, let alone this public spectacle. The TEMA crew had wanted to talk privately
with the CDC people, but Rhonda had arranged for a meeting between the town council and the CDC before Markle had touched down. The state officials had no choice but to insert themselves into the meeting. Then, somehow, half the town and all the news crews had learned of the summit and demanded to attend.

  The Reverend Hooke prayed on in her loud, bell-like voice, earnest as all hell, and Rhonda surveyed the room under half-closed lids. All the clades were in attendance. A large contingent of blanks—most of them white-scarf girls—filled several rows on one side. A dozen argos loomed at the back of the room. And almost thirty charlies had scattered themselves around the room as she’d directed.

  Only a few skips, though. Mr. Sparks sat in the first row, nervously paging through the minutes from the previous meeting. Paxton Martin was hunched over in the third row next to a couple of blank girls—they had to be Jo Lynn’s twins—and an outsider she didn’t recognize, a young man with a ridiculous hairdo like a black paintbrush.

  Hooke ended her prayer with something in Spanish. That was a nice touch, Rhonda thought. She hadn’t even known Elsa spoke Spanish. Then the reverend resumed her seat in the first row with her fellow council members, Mr. Sparks and Deke.

  Rhonda reminded everyone that this was a council meeting and not a press conference; the media people would have to ask their questions later. Then she began to introduce their guests, starting with the lowliest of them, the county commissioner.

  Nothing meaningful was said for the next hour. The officials took turns offering their support for the people of Switchcreek, without ever specifying why the people of Switchcreek needed any.

  Rhonda noticed Deke leaning back to hear something Dr. Fraelich was whispering to him. The two of them had been talking earnestly before the meeting—and she had an idea what about. The doctor had nearly jumped out of her skin when Rhonda glided up and said hello. Rhonda had asked her if she could stay a little while after the meeting, and of course she’d agreed—as she’d better, after all the work Rhonda had done to keep her clinic funded.

  The audience was bored, and even the newspeople were growing restless. It wasn’t until the Man from COPTER said that a CDC field team would be going door-to-door with a survey that the crowd seemed to wake up. Someone from the crowd asked what kind of survey, and Markle then introduced the field team leader, a man named Eric Preisswerk who looked much too young to have both an MD and a PhD in molecular epidemiology. Nice shoes, though. They looked Italian.

  “It will take only a few minutes to answer the questions,” Preisswerk said. “But we hope it will help us determine if there’s any relationship between what’s happening in Babahoyo and what happened in Switchcreek.” Copies of the survey were being passed through the room. Rhonda had already seen it. One of the first questions was, “Have you traveled to South America in the last ten years?”

  A voice in the back of the room called out, “Are you saying TDS is contagious?”

  Preisswerk held up his hands. “There’s been no evidence of that. All we’re trying to figure out—”

  “What about quantum teleportation?”

  This came from one of the Whitehall girls sitting next to Paxton. “Are you looking into how TDS could be transmitted that way?”

  Preisswerk laughed in surprise. To an outsider the beta girl must have looked about nine years old. “Okay, that’s … Wow. What is your name?”

  The girl stood up, slipped off her large backpack, and handed it to Paxton. Paxton had an odd look on his face—surprised but somehow proud. “Lorraine Whitehall,” the girl said.

  Preisswerk said, “Well, Lorraine, you sound like a very intelligent girl. I know you may have heard people talking about quantum this or that on TV, but that’s just a guess—we really don’t have the evidence to say that. We’re not sure if teleportation of quantum states is even possible on a molecular scale, but much less responsible for TDS.”

  Lorraine said, “The Oxford group did room-temperature teleportation with a complex molecule last year.”

  “Yes, but—are you reading physics journals, too?”

  “The articles are on the Internet,” she said.

  Preisswerk laughed again. “Okay, that experiment was in laboratory conditions,” he said. “Those fifty atoms were carefully isolated. That’s a long way from showing that teleportation can occur inside an organic system.”

  Mr. Sparks said, “This is getting completely out of hand. We haven’t even approved the minutes from the last meeting.”

  A low voice from the back said, “What are you talking about—Star Trek? Somebody teleported the disease to us?”

  Lorraine stepped up onto her chair and turned to find the person who’d spoken, a young argo man. “Quantum teleportation doesn’t teleport bodies or things, just information,” she said. “But lots of stuff in our bodies happens at the subatomic level—breathing, thinking, making DNA. TDS could be like a computer virus that tells our bodies to replicate DNA differently.” Somebody said something Rhonda didn’t catch, and Lorraine said, “I’m not making it up—lots of scientists think so.”

  “So TDS can be contagious?” the argo asked.

  “Of course it is,” someone said in a loud voice. “We caught it, didn’t we?”

  Paxton held up a hand to Lorraine, but the girl jumped down on her own.

  Rhonda caught the eye of Chelsea Wilson, a charlie woman in her forties who was sitting in the third row. Chelsea lifted her hand and said, “Is there going to be a quarantine?”

  Preisswerk looked at his boss. The Man from COPTER stood, started to speak.

  “Louder!” someone shouted.

  “I said, there are no current plans for quarantine.”

  The room erupted in shouts and questions. Rhonda glanced at Deke. He was staring at the floor, frowning. She’d told him what the government people would say.

  Rhonda stood and called for quiet. When she had the room back under control she said, “Dr. Markle, almost everybody in this room lived through the quarantine, and in the end there turned out to be no reason for it. I think the question they’re asking, what we’re all asking, is not whether you have plans for a quarantine, but whether you will guarantee that there won’t be one.”

  He seemed to flinch at the word “guarantee.” “Mayor, I already said that there are no plans whatsoever for, for any kind of detention.”

  Rhonda touched his arm. “Just say, ‘I promise, there will be no quarantine. Period.’”

  He blinked at her.

  “That’s all you’ve got to say.”

  Markle addressed the crowd. “Let me assure you,” he said. And then louder, “I promise, there are no plans that I know of for any—”

  He never finished the sentence. The charlies in the audience had jumped to their feet, followed by a few betas, everyone shouting and talking. Markle didn’t understand who he was talking to. These people had been quarantined before, and after the quarantine they saw their neighbors riot just because they wanted to go to the damn supermarket. They’d seen dead boys by the side of the road, and one of their girls raped, and the feds and the police hadn’t done a damn thing for them. They could smell weasel words at a hundred yards. Now they were sure the government was coming for them.

  Deke and the Reverend Hooke rose to stand next to Rhonda. The reverend leaned close to her and said, “I hope you’re happy.”

  Damn straight, she was happy. Her people were waking up.

  It was nearly midnight before Rhonda shook the hand of the last visiting official, soothed the last constituent, begged off from the last reporter, and finally made her way down the hall to the teachers’ lounge. Deke sat on the floor with his arms around his knees. The Reverend Hooke and Dr. Fraelich sat at the largest table, holding Styrofoam coffee cups. The reverend, despite her masklike face, exuded impatience. Dr. Fraelich, looking more flushed than usual, had picked apart the rim of her cup and made a tiny snowdrift beside it.

  “I thought they’d never leave,” Rhonda said by way of ap
ology. She assessed the structural integrity of one of the thin plastic chairs, chose a marginally newer one next to it, and gingerly sat. “I suppose the doctor told y’all that I’d invited her to sit in on our conversation.”

  “Is Mr. Sparks not coming?” Dr. Fraelich asked.

  “Oh, this isn’t a town council meeting, hon,” Rhonda said.

  The doctor smiled tightly. “The inner circle, then? The Star Chamber?”

  “Call it the executive board,” the Reverend said.

  The doctor glanced at Deke. “I didn’t know the town had one,” she said.

  Rhonda chuckled. “Neither does Mr. Sparks. Don’t tell him, it’ll hurt his feelings.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. You speak their language, Doctor, and you’ve already had a run-in with the field team. What do you think they’re planning?”

  “Run-in?” Deke asked.

  “This morning, Eric Preisswerk and his team came to my office and started going through my records,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Everything they could get their hands on, paper or electronic.”

  “That can’t be legal,” the reverend said. “Those are private medical records.”

  “I don’t think they’re worried about lawsuits at the moment,” Rhonda said. To the doctor she said, “So will they find a link?”

  The doctor shook her head. “I can’t believe they’d find something new. For thirteen years we’ve looked at all the usual causes and vectors—viral, bacteriological, toxicological—and come up with nothing.”

  “So why is Preisswerk doing it?”

  “I’ve known Eric for several years. He’s got to look for a standard link because that’s his job, but what he’s really working on is the quantum transmission theory.”