The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  Weygand said, “You see what she’s doing?” Pax thought, Running for office? But Weygand didn’t wait for an answer. “At the same time that she says she’s supporting the Ecuadorians, she’s saying, They aren’t us. We are Americans, we are Christians. They’re just brown people who live far away and happen to have the same disease. She might as well be raising money for earthquake victims.”

  “I bet they’d rather have had an earthquake,” Pax said. The death toll had stalled at 6,500, but only because the Ecuadorian government had clamped down on reporters. Babahoyo had been quarantined “for their protection and ours.” Rhonda announced that one of the first tasks of her charity would be to send volunteers to the city—and some of those volunteers would be Switchcreek citizens, led by the mayor herself.

  “I’ll say this,” Weygand said. “She moves fast.”

  Nothing sexual had happened with Weygand; they never even touched each other after that moment Thursday afternoon. By the time Weygand came home from Rhonda’s press conference Paxton was asleep on the couch, and when he awoke Weygand was in the kitchen burning soy burgers and the attraction Pax had felt had vanished. For perhaps an hour he’d been someone Pax desired, someone he understood—and then he wasn’t.

  The next day Weygand helped Pax work on the yard. Pax kept trying to apologize and Weygand repeatedly told him not to worry about it. Pax wanted to explain that he wasn’t like one of those gay-for-a-day frat-party lesbians—he’d slept with a couple of men. A few women too. And it wasn’t the vintage that made him suddenly want Weygand—or not just the vintage. He’d been this way since leaving Switchcreek. Most of the time he wasn’t attracted to anyone at all, and then he was—for a few hours. His desire for whatever body ended up next to him never seemed to last longer than it took him to put on his pants.

  Women thought he was gay. Men thought he was straight but playing tourist. And Pax thought he was … waiting. The last time he’d felt anything real—the last time he felt real—was with Jo and Deke. The three of them had been perfect together, a completed circuit. Everything since had been pantomime.

  On Sunday afternoon Weygand told him that he was driving back home in the morning—friends in Amnesty International were organizing a group to drive into Ecuador from Colombia and record what was happening inside the city. Pax thought he was crazy; he could end up in a South American jail. Weygand shrugged it off. “What about this laptop thing? Are we going to do this or not?”

  Paxton had no phone number for the twins, and he didn’t even know where they lived inside the sprawl of trailers at the Co-op. Nothing to do for it but go over there and ask. “How about you drive?” Pax said.

  The gates to the Co-op—the Whitmer farm’s old iron cattle gates—were closed. Two teenage girls in white scarves, perhaps a few years older than Rainy and Sandra, sat on the other side in lawn chairs.

  “Everybody’s getting paranoid in this town,” Pax said to Weygand, and got out of the car.

  The girls looked at him but didn’t get up. A small black music player rested on one of their laps, and they were sharing a single red headphone cord, one earbud apiece.

  “Hi, girls,” he said. “I’m looking for Sandra and Lorraine—the Whitehall twins?” Stupid: of course they had to know who Sandra and Rainy were.

  “Nobody told us you were coming,” one of them said.

  “I didn’t know I needed reservations.” He smiled. They watched him with small tight mouths. “So. Can I come in?”

  The girls looked at each other. One of them pulled the bud from her ear and walked off toward the center of the compound. She could at least run, Pax thought. The remaining girl inserted the other earpiece and immediately lost interest in him.

  Pax looked at Weygand through the windshield, shrugged.

  He rested his forearms on the top of a gate and looked up at Mount Clyburn. It was the first week of October, but the afternoon sunlight was still summer-strong. It wouldn’t be long until the leaves began to turn, crowning the mountain, then seeping down in a months-long wave until the valley was drenched in color. He’d forgotten how long spring and fall were in Tennessee—in Chicago those seasons went by in a blink, just a couple weeks to toggle the thermometer between Too Damn Cold and Too Damn Hot. Why in the world had he stayed up there? When he turned eighteen he could have moved south, could have moved anywhere. For some reason he’d made the choice binary—Chicago or Switchcreek.

  The girl who’d walked off was returning with another beta, a man wearing a baseball cap. Tommy. Sandra and Rainy were nowhere in sight.

  Pax ran a hand across the back of his neck. He and Weygand could leave now, but that would look like they were doing something wrong. Pax waved hello and waited.

  Tommy stopped a few feet from the gate. “What can we do for you, Paxton?”

  “I was worried about Sandra and Rainy,” Pax said.

  Tommy tilted his head. “Why would you be worried?”

  Pax couldn’t read Tommy’s tone. Did he know that the twins had been visiting him?

  “I heard about the stuff in Lambert Friday, at the Wal-Mart. I thought maybe they’d be upset by what was happening.” It sounded lame even to himself. “I can see you guys are taking precautions.”

  “There are hooligans on the road. Knocking down mailboxes, vandalizing. We thought it better to keep an eye out.” Then: “The girls are fine.”

  “That’s great,” Pax said. “Do you think I could see them?”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  Pax looked back at the Prius. “His name’s Andrew. He was a friend of Jo’s.”

  “No he wasn’t,” Tommy said.

  “You didn’t know all her friends, Tommy.” He wasn’t about to tell Tommy anything about Andrew, or about Brother Bewlay and Jo’s online life. “So how about I talk to Rainy and Sandra for a while, and then leave you alone.”

  Tommy stepped forward and put his hands on the gate. The man was trembling—from rage? Something else?

  “The girls are staying home, Paxton. You may be too distracted to notice, but there’s a crisis going on. We’re not going to have them—I’m not going to have them—running around unsupervised, not until it’s safe. But even then, even when this blows over?” He glanced at the two girls sitting a few feet away and lowered his voice. “I can’t believe you have to be told this. They’re twelve-year-old girls, Paxton. You’re a grown man. If you come around looking for them again, or if you ever bring them into your house, I’ll call the police.”

  “What? I’m not—”

  “I don’t know how this works up in Chicago, but here in Tennessee the cops do not tolerate pedophiles.”

  Paxton stepped back, his face hot.

  “Good-bye, Paxton.” Tommy stood with his hands at his sides, unmoving. After a long moment, Paxton turned, got back into the car.

  Tommy was still standing there when the car pulled away.

  Chapter 18

  “WE CANNOT BE late for the appointment,” Donna told him as they stepped down from the Jeep. “The egg-timer is going off.”

  Deke laughed and plucked the plastic sacks from behind the driver’s seat. “They’ll keep warm for a couple more minutes. We’ll just drop this off and leave.”

  The only other cars in the Martin driveway were the Reverend’s old Crown Vic and Paxton’s Tempo—no Prius in sight. He’d heard that Andrew Weygand had left town again, and it looked like he hadn’t come back—yet.

  The house was looking better than it had in several years. The lawn had been cut sometime in the last week, and the tall growth that had been encroaching on the yard had been hacked back several feet. The old swing set had been dismantled and lay in a pile beside the driveway, next to the ancient plaid couch. Deke made a mental note to take care of those for him—Amos could haul them to the dump in the company truck.

  The front door was open. Deke knocked on the frame and leaned in. “P.K.! You up?” It was 9:30 in the morning. He wasn’t sure what kind of hours he was keep
ing.

  Paxton walked into the living room, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. “Hey, Deke. Hey, Donna.”

  He’d lost more weight, and he hadn’t been fat to begin with. At the town meeting a couple weeks ago he’d looked too thin for a skip, but now he was gaunt, his head too big for his neck. If he’d been growing taller at the same time he was thinning out you’d have thought he was turning argo.

  Pax motioned them in. He asked them how they were doing, if they’d like something to drink.

  “We can’t stay,” Donna said. “We’ve got to run to a doctor’s appointment.”

  “We just brought you some chicken and mashed potatoes, some greens,” Deke said. “Donna made too much last night and we thought you might be able to take them off our hands.”

  Pax’s smile looked a little forced. “You didn’t have to do that. I’ve got plenty of food.”

  “Not my food,” Donna said. “Why don’t I just put it in the fridge, then?”

  Deke started to hand her the sack and Paxton quickly said, “I’ll do it.” He took it from Deke’s hand. “Are you sure I can’t get you a Coke or something?” He walked back into the kitchen.

  Donna looked at Deke, reminding him that the clock was running. She was ovulating, and the doctors at UT were waiting with syringes to suck the eggs out of her. They’d agreed to try an expensive procedure that did something to the egg walls before they introduced Deke’s boys to the mix. The words “sperm” and “permeability” were used so often that Deke started calling the procedure “that spermability thing.”

  Pax said, “I’m out of Coke, but I’ve got, uh, water.”

  “No thanks,” Deke called. He walked through the living room—it was surprisingly clean—and stooped to get through the kitchen door.

  Paxton closed the freezer door, then the fridge door. “So. Nothing serious I hope,” he said.

  “The doctor?” Deke said. “Naw, just fertility stuff.” He squatted and was still taller than Paxton. “So I heard that that Weygand guy was hanging around a couple weeks ago.”

  “He left to try to sneak into Ecuador.” Pax shrugged. “I haven’t heard from him since. He’s either in by now or dead.” Two weeks after the second outbreak, the Babahoyo quarantine was still in full effect. Nobody knew how many were dead in the country, how many had been transformed. Rhonda’s Helping Hands campaign had raised close to two million dollars even though it wasn’t the only relief fund going. No relief trip had been scheduled yet—she hadn’t gotten permission from either government to send a group of volunteers to the city.

  Donna made a sound from the living room. Deke glanced back, then said, “Listen, I wanted to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I talked to Rhonda about what happened with Clete and them—what they did to you, how they tried to take your father.”

  “That didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Yes, it did. I should have seen it coming. I was supposed to be watching out for you and I—”

  “Watching out for me. Really.” A tight smile. “Oh, but that’s right, you’re the Chief. That’s your job.”

  “This is not about my job.”

  “You’re the Chief, you’re on the town council, all the argos look up to you … You and the Reverend and Rhonda run everything.”

  “Come on, P.K. …”

  “Help me out here. How’s Rhonda doing it, Deke? Where’s she getting all this money? What is she doing with the vintage? Rhonda told me the smart people figure it out on their own. Now, I’m not that smart, but you’re the Chief; you must have worked it out by now.”

  “Now you’re just being an idiot,” Deke said. He sighed. “Rhonda was talking about Jo, P.K. She was the smart one.”

  Pax waited. After a moment Deke said, “Rhonda’s been skimming the accounts. The TEMA grants, the school funds, especially the medical grants. Jo told me about it. She said she had proof. Copies of the grant forms, bank statements, e-mails. After she died I looked in the house for documents like that but didn’t find anything. I was hoping it was on her laptop.”

  “Jesus, man, you knew all this, and you kept working with Rhonda?”

  “I told you, I didn’t have the proof. But even if I did—listen, even Jo wasn’t ready to take action against her. What Rhonda’s doing is illegal, but it may not be bad for the town.”

  “That’s crazy. If she’s stealing—”

  “Pax, Switchcreek’s just a small town, and the clades could be wiped out at any time. Somebody’s got to do what it takes to guard the future.”

  “You took her money,” Pax said.

  “What?”

  “Hey, that one stung,” Paxton said. “She paid you off, didn’t she? You work for her. So how much is she paying you?”

  Deke lifted his hand and Paxton flinched.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m not going to hit you,” Deke said. “I love you, man, but do you know how hard it is not to whack you upside the head when you say shit like that?”

  “How you boys doing?” Donna said.

  Deke hadn’t realized she’d come to the kitchen door. He rose partway out of his crouch and put his hand against the ceiling. “We better get going,” he said. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  Donna waited until they’d left the Martin driveway before she said, “You don’t work for her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Deke said. “Who paid for this doctor appointment?”

  “That money belongs to the clades—all the clades. You’ve always done the right thing by your people and by your friends. God knows Paxton should know that. And can I say one more time? I do not get you two.”

  “He’s my friend, Donna.”

  “Even when he talks to you like that?”

  “That’s just the vintage. Or the lack of it.” He shrugged. “What can I say? He’s always going to be my friend. There’s no choice in it.” His friend was the P.K. he’d grown up with. That part of him still had to be in there somewhere—some essential piece that couldn’t be changed by drugs or time. “He has a good soul,” Deke said.

  Donna made a sound and Deke said, “You don’t believe in the soul?”

  “Honey, I believe in you and me. Everything else—”

  Her words were drowned out by the roar of a helicopter. For a few seconds he’d been hearing the chop of helicopter blades, but as they reached the intersection of Piney Road and the highway a dark green helicopter thundered out over the treetops from the northwest and passed over them, heading toward town. A second helicopter flying at the same low altitude followed a few seconds later.

  The new curse of Switchcreek: air traffic. The FEMA people had flown in and out several times in the first days of the Ecuador outbreak, and the news choppers from Knoxville had been constantly doing flybys. But these helicopters looked military.

  “Any lower I’d have a haircut,” Donna said.

  Deke turned north onto the highway, but a minute later he had to brake to a stop behind a blue station wagon he recognized. Ahead of the wagon, a green National Guard truck was parked astride both lanes of the highway, its rear wheels almost in the ditch. Maybe they were just trying to turn the thing around and had gotten hung up. Or maybe not.

  Deke turned off the Jeep and got out. “Why don’t you wait here,” he told Donna. She didn’t bother to reply; she stepped out and walked with him toward the truck. When they reached the station wagon Deke ducked down to see the woman behind the wheel.

  “Howdy, Mrs. Jarpe.”

  “Oh, hello, Chief.” She was a chub woman in her sixties. Before the Changes she’d been the best piano player in town and maybe still was; he hadn’t heard her play in years. “They just pulled over in front of me and stopped. I’ve been sitting here and the truck hasn’t moved.”

  Deke exchanged a look with Donna, then said to Mrs. Jarpe, “Maybe you should turn around and head back to town.”

  “What? I’ll do no such thing. Just tell them to clear the road, Chief.”


  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He strolled toward the truck. In the cab were two soldiers masked like motocross riders in goggles and plastic breathers that covered their noses and mouths. From the other side of the truck came the sound of a man barking instructions.

  Deke waved to the men in the truck. “Y’all need some help?”

  The driver held up a hand. Deke and Donna stopped. Three other masked soldiers came around the hood of the truck with automatic rifles in their hands.

  “Whoa now,” Deke said, and put on a smile. “What’s going on, gentlemen?”

  “Go back to your car, sir,” one of them said. He sounded young, like a teenager. He nodded at Donna. “Ma’am. Return to town and you’ll be—”

  “Excuse me?” Donna said.

  “We have a doctor’s appointment in Knoxville,” Deke said.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the kid said. “There’s a quarantine for the Switchcreek area now in effect. If you go home and turn on your radio you’ll hear complete information on the situation.”

  Donna stepped forward. “Quarantine? Why? We’re not contagious.”

  “Ma’am, there’s a quarantine in effect for—”

  “Hell, we’ve been here for thirteen years as a tourist attraction,” Donna said. “You’re telling us that now we’re contagious?”

  Deke put a hand on Donna’s shoulder and she knocked it away. “Explain to me,” Donna said to the soldier. She stepped forward and the men’s guns swung toward her like compass needles. “Come on, explain to me how it is that we’re suddenly contagious. It’s been two weeks since Babahoyo. We’ve had every news reporter on the planet walking around down here. Telemundo sent a reporter. Are they under quarantine, too?”