The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  “She’s going on probation, too. I haven’t decided how long yet—our clade can’t afford to have a girl out of commission forever—but I’m thinking a year. At least six months. Then I’ll match her to a boy that I pick out.”

  A long stretch of silence. Deke finally said, “I didn’t know it worked like that. That you got to just … pick. Decide who falls in love with whom.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to,” she said. She saw him frown; her eyes were adjusting to the dark. “What, you don’t approve?”

  “It don’t seem right.”

  Rhonda almost laughed. “You want them to pick? Those teenagers? Think about when you were their age, Deke. How much control did you have over your hormones? Your brain wasn’t picking out the best of all possible mates. You were taking orders from the lieutenant governor.”

  “Works out just fine most of the time,” Deke said.

  “Most? Hon, you have not been paying attention. It’s a roll of the dice out there. You and Donna may have struck the vein, and God bless you, but for most of the sorry people in this world sex hits them like a blindside tackle when they’re sixteen and the next thing they know they’re pregnant, raising babies, and waking up to five thousand mornings of cold coffee. I’d sooner let a monkey pick my husband than the girl I was at sixteen. The Indians have the right idea—not the casino Indians, the call-center Indians—let the parents arrange things. You can always grow to love someone, or at least tolerate them, if they’re a good match. And I make sure they’re a good match. You wait a couple years then look at the charlie divorce rate and tell me if I wasn’t right.”

  “You already matched Doreen and Clete,” he said.

  “That was too good. I thought she’d give him some ambition, I didn’t know she was some low-rent Lady Macbeth.”

  Deke tilted his head.

  “Shakespeare, hon. Read a book.”

  Deke lifted his hands in surrender. He stepped up into the Jeep and dropped down into the driver’s seat; the car rocked on its suspension. “I’ll be checking on them,” he said.

  “I’m sure Everett and Barron would appreciate the company.”

  “I’m serious, Rhonda. I won’t sit by if there’re any more disappearances.” He put the Jeep in gear. “Good luck with the kickoff tomorrow.”

  She watched the taillights slide and wink through the trees until they disappeared.

  Well, that went better than expected, Rhonda thought. He hadn’t even given back the check.

  Chapter 17

  PAXTON WAS MET at the front gate by a shotgun and a scowl. The chub—a middle-aged man whom Paxton recognized from the Tuesday-morning payday crowd—told him to drop the newspapers, turn around, and put his hands on the hood.

  Pax didn’t argue. He leaned against his car, the sheet metal already hot from the morning sun, and tried not to think of the gun in the man’s hand. God, he was sick of guns.

  The gate squealed open behind him. “Pull up your shirt.” Pax hitched up his T-shirt, and a rough hand quickly patted him down: armpits, waist, legs, and ankles. The chub was more fat than muscle, but still looked capable of pinching off Paxton’s head with one hand.

  “You don’t have to worry about him,” another voice said.

  Pax turned around. Barron, the Home’s regular security guard, stepped out and touched him on the shoulder. “How you doing, son?” he asked. The man’s uniform was slept-in. His round face sagged from fatigue. It looked like he hadn’t shaved since Clete had tied him up two days before.

  “I’m just coming to check on my dad,” Pax said.

  “Best thing,” Barron said. “Get back to normal as soon as you can.”

  “Right,” Pax said. “Normal.” He picked up the newspapers and followed Barron to the front door. The chub with the shotgun stayed outside.

  Barron shuffled toward his desk without saying another word. Two other chub men filled a couch in the lobby, looking somber. One of the men nodded at him, but Pax had never seen either of them around the Home; Rhonda had been calling in the reserves. They were older men, perhaps the same age as Harlan, both of them bald and huge, just sets of dark eyes and mouths embedded in massive round bodies like fleshy snowmen. One step from becoming producers themselves.

  No one had brought Harlan out to the lobby, and it didn’t look like anyone was about to. Pax walked back through the sets of double doors.

  His father’s door was open. Harlan lay on the bed, half sitting up, eyes on the TV. The size of him came as a shock, every time. The white sheet covering his body made him into a landscape, an arctic mountain range.

  “He returns,” his father said without looking away from the television.

  “I’m sorry it took so long to get here,” Pax said—an apology that covered both his late arrival this morning and his absence the day before. “It’s still a madhouse downtown.”

  His father was uninterested in the papers and wanted nothing to do with the news channels—he’d seen enough of Ecuador, he said. He was watching mole rats instead. Green-tinged night-vision cameras somehow followed the whiskered, bucktoothed things through the tunnels. When the show ended, his father made no move to change the channel or look away from the screen. The next program was about the hunt for giant squids.

  Pax glanced at the clock on the wall. Half past nine. Too soon to rush off—he’d just gotten here. He’d give his father another half hour, then get back to the house, where Andrew Weygand and the twins would be waiting for him.

  He flipped through the newspapers. USA Today and both of the local papers were full of the Changes. The government of Ecuador had declared a state of emergency and sealed the borders to the Los Rios province, even as it refused to admit that the epidemic was indeed TDS. The pictures, though, made it clear that the argo strain was at work. If the disease followed the same course, the B strain would strike in a week or two, and then the C. The estimated death toll had already reached 5,000. By contrast, Switchcreek had lost only 378 the entire summer of the Changes, but that was almost a third of the population. Babahoyo contained 90,000 people. If the ratio held …

  “Dad.” Harlan didn’t move his eyes from the TV. “Dad.”

  Harlan’s great head turned. Pax said, “Thirty thousand people could be dead before the end of the month.”

  “Tell me that isn’t His judgment,” his father said.

  Pax thought, Judgment of what—being poor? Living on the equator? But then a voice said, “Dr. Fraelich says it’s all just chance.”

  Aunt Rhonda stood in the doorway holding a paper mask to her face, somehow making the pose seem less like a woman warding off germs than a courtesan flirting at a masquerade. She wore a salmon-pink blouse, a tailored midnight-blue jacket, and a matching knee-length skirt. On her lapel were an American flag pin and a loop of green ribbon. “Haven’t you heard? We’re surrounded by bunches and bunches of other universes. She says it was inevitable that a virus eventually learned to jump over.”

  Harlan grunted. “Maybe somebody should ask the doctor who created those universes.”

  “I’m sure she’d have an answer,” Rhonda said.

  “Ask her this, then,” Harlan said. “In an infinite number of universes, wouldn’t one of them have to give rise to an all-knowing, all-powerful God? Once he exists anywhere, he exists everywhere—the alpha and the omega.”

  Rhonda laughed. “Reverend, you could save the devil if you could get him to visit.”

  “Getting him to stop by is never the problem, Rhonda—it’s getting him to leave. But you know that.”

  Pax sat back, listening to them bat words back and forth. They’d known each other for how long, thirty-five years? Forty? Even enemies had to derive pleasure from such a long relationship.

  “And how are you doing, Paxton?” Rhonda asked a few minutes later. Before he could answer she said, “What did you think of the council meeting last night?”

  “I’m just glad they’re not going to put us in quarantine.”

  A p
enciled eyebrow arched above the paper mask. “I’m not so sure about us, but you don’t have to worry,” Rhonda said. “I’m sure they’ll declare all you nice normal people clean and free. You can leave any time you like.”

  Harlan grunted.

  Pax didn’t look at him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  “Oh, I know, hon,” she said, and conspicuously checked a diamond-studded watch. “Well, I’ve got to run. I hope you’ll be watching the news—I’ve got a major press conference this afternoon. Oh, I almost forgot …” She gestured to someone in the hall, then moved aside to let in one of the chubs from the lobby. “You know Lawrence Teestall, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” Pax said, trying to mask his shock. Mr. Teestall had been his junior-high shop teacher. Back then he’d been a short, skinny man with a Brillo pad of bright orange hair. Pax hadn’t recognized him at all in the lobby; all resemblance to his old teacher had been buried under an avalanche of fat.

  Rhonda said, “Could you just take a few minutes to teach him how to do an extraction? He’s good with his hands, I’m sure he’ll pick it up in a snap.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Come now, how many times have you watched? Lawrence, just don’t let Paxton get sloppy and work bare-handed—the vintage hits him harder than most folks. And don’t forget to turn on the news at two. I’d pick channel ten—they’ve got that nice Asian girl.”

  Pax needn’t have rushed home—the twins hadn’t arrived yet. Weygand was pacing around the room with his shirt off and his cargo shorts hanging low on his hips, talking to himself. No, not to himself—he turned, and Pax saw that he wore a tiny earpiece and microphone.

  Pax went into the bathroom and closed the door. He pulled the latex gloves from the pocket where he’d stuffed them after the extraction, then turned them in his hands until he found a discoloration in one of them, and touched his tongue to that spot. Just a taste, nothing to incapacitate him. He needed to stay awake today. Then he carefully folded the gloves and tucked them back into his pocket.

  When Pax returned to the living room Weygand had stopped talking and sat bent over his laptop. He had the gaunt face and the thin arms of a runner, so that he looked skinnier the more clothes he wore; with his shirt off the muscles of his chest and back were more apparent, as clearly delineated as a Renaissance Jesus stretched on a cross.

  Weygand looked up from the screen. “You okay?”

  “Was that the twins on the phone?” Pax asked.

  “No, that was a guy I know who blogs about DHS. Homeland Security. Besides, the girls don’t have my number, do they?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Last night after the town meeting Paxton had tried to get time alone with Rainy and Sandra, but Tommy had hovered a few feet from them the entire time. His smooth face betrayed nothing to Paxton, but his body language spoke volumes. The blank man was still jealous of Paxton, still nervous that his place as stepfather would be usurped. No wonder the girls kept their visits to Paxton’s house secret from him. Fortunately Rainy understood that Pax wanted to tell them something; she engaged Tommy in a conversation and in the break Pax managed to tell Sandra to come to his house at 10:00 a.m. with the laptop.

  It was already 10:30. Weygand paced, fiddled with his laptop, paced some more. He didn’t want to miss Rhonda’s press conference, which he somehow knew all about even though Pax hadn’t mentioned it. Something about a charity, Weygand said.

  Just before noon Pax offered to make Weygand a sandwich. When he brought it out to him Weygand took it one-handed and started to eat, still tapping at the laptop.

  Pax said, “So what did your Homeland Security guy say?”

  “Not much.” Weygand wiped a dot of mayonnaise from his mouth with the back of his hand. “The big question is, what if—hey, is this baloney? I haven’t eaten baloney in … ever.”

  “It’s better fried,” Paxton said.

  “Wow. That’s so authentic. Next you’ll be feeding me possum.”

  “Nobody eats possum anymore,” Pax said. “It’s all possum substitute now. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Possum.”

  Weygand gave him a weird smile. “You know, you’re kinda funny when you’re high.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “What did you do back there?”

  “Aw, just a little white lightnin’,” Pax said with a drawl. When he was out of sight of the living room he’d taken out the gloves again, but the vintage had dried out. He threw them in the garbage, then went to the freezer, where he kept three partly filled vials. He uncapped one of them, scraped a fingernail along the inside, and touched the icy residue to his tongue. The hit had been less than satisfying. Pax said, “You were talking about the big question.”

  Weygand smiled, took another bite of his sandwich. After a moment he said, “The thing they’re all wondering about is, what if it’s not a natural virus? What if it’s been genetically engineered?”

  “Ah. The massive government conspiracy I’ve heard so much about.” It was by far the most popular explanation for the Changes, at least in the early days of the quarantine. Several people in his church had been certain that secular humanist scientists had experimented on them without their knowledge. Second most popular was the cover-up-of-high-tech-accident theory—Switchcreek as a genetic down-winder story.

  “Not our government, man,” Weygand said. “They can’t even keep their top-secret torture prisons out of the news. I’m talking about those other universes. What if the Changes are a deliberate incursion?”

  “The other universe is attacking us? Sure, that makes sense. Every fifteen years they take out some town in the boondocks. In 2030 they’ll finally get the Eskimos.”

  “‘Attack’ is the wrong word. Think immigration. Colonization. They’re trying to cross over.”

  Pax laughed. “My dad may be a bull elephant, but he’s still my dad. I find it hard to believe that he’s a colonist from Planet Fat Boy.”

  “Bull elephant?”

  “I meant chub. Charlie. My dad is—” Pax inflated his cheeks, exhaled. “—big.”

  “Oh, shit. I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. “There’s a lot of it going around in this town.” Weygand didn’t seem to know what to say to that. He seemed genuinely sorry. After a moment Pax said, “I think I know what you’re getting at. It’s not my dad, per se.” Per se. This may have been the first time he’d said that aloud. “You mean his DNA.”

  “Exactly,” Weygand said. “Any species that could learn to send its genes across the universes would go a long way to ensuring its own survival. The invaders would soon run into competition, though, because whatever species it colonized would have to figure out how to replicate too, because now it’s competing not only with all the other species on its planet, but with all its alternate selves across the universes.”

  “Arms race,” Pax said, suddenly getting it. Or maybe he wasn’t understanding it on his own, he was … syncing up. Andrew’s thoughts seemed to be spilling into his own. “Argos versus chubs versus blanks.”

  “Yes!” Andrew said. “And them versus us.” He hopped up, excited now. “Think about how weird it is that three distinct species came out of the Changes. It’s almost as if … Okay, say that the argos discovered the trick first. Maybe they even did it by accident. But anyway, they replicate into the universe of the betas. Then the betas figure it out—they engineer the virus to work for them. Now argos and betas are together in one universe, and together they invade the universe of the charlies. And so on and so on, across the universes, until they get to us. We’re at the front wave of a three-part war.”

  “Wow,” Pax said.

  “Yeah, wow.”

  “So this is what your Homeland Security guy thinks? We’re at war?”

  “He’s not in Homeland Security,” Weygand said. “He’s only nineteen. He writes about them.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  For some reason they both laughed. Weygand sat down next to him. “T
his is the crappiest couch in the world,” he said.

  “I should throw it out,” Pax said. Weygand’s arm was a few inches from his own, radiating heat.

  A minute passed, maybe two.

  Weygand said, “So, Paxton. What are you thinking right now?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  Weygand laughed kindly. “Fair enough.” He leaned forward, knees on elbows. Pax regarded the architectural curve of his back, the frets of his spine. “I’ve been down this road before. Listen, why don’t you sober up and we’ll talk some more.”

  Pax lifted his hand, then set it down between Weygand’s shoulder blades. Pax felt both his hand against his skin and the heat against his back; touched and toucher at the same time.

  After a moment Weygand shook his head, laughing to himself. Or maybe laughing at himself. Then he started to get up, and as he rose Paxton’s palm slid down his back, each knuckle of his spine delivering a gentle tap. And then the contact was broken.

  “I’ve got to get downtown,” Weygand said. “Maybe by the time I get back the twins will have shown up.”

  Pax nodded.

  “And get something to eat, okay, Pax?”

  The twins didn’t come all that day, or the next.

  They’d stayed away before, sometimes for days at a time, but this was the first time Paxton had waited for them, worried for them. The atmosphere in town had grown tense over the weekend. Friday afternoon a dozen beta women had driven to the Lambert Super Wal-Mart for their weekly Co-op shopping trip and walked into a line of pro-quarantine protesters. No one was hurt, but there’d been pushing and shoving; the betas had been forced to leave without their groceries. The store manager said that he’d arranged for the food to be delivered to the Co-op, but he’d made it clear to the reporters that he preferred that the Switchcreek people stayed at home until the protests died down.

  Aunt Rhonda kept appearing on his TV screen, pushing for support of her new relief fund: Helping Hands to Babahoyo. She’d announced an 800 number; a software company in Memphis had already put up a supporting website. Three times Pax had seen her give what Weygand started calling the Azzamurkin speech: “As Americans, we’ve always been the first to reach out to those struck down by tragedy. As Americans, we must share the hard-won knowledge we’ve gained about TDS. As Americans …” The flag pin on her lapel and the green ribbon—for the victims in Ecuador, she said—had become permanent accessories.