The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  “You need to eat more than us,” Rainy said. Then: “They’re not beta enough. Older women, like Mom and the reverend, they’re tainted.”

  He made a questioning noise and tried to swallow the cracker.

  “You know …” Sandra said.

  “You mean sex?” Pax asked.

  “Sex with men,” Sandra said.

  Rainy shook her head. “The white-scarf girls think it’s something special that they went through the Changes before they went through puberty,” she said. “Like a hat’ll make them closer to natural-born.”

  “Like us,” Sandra said.

  “Right,” Pax said. “You don’t need no stinkin’ hat.”

  “We’re the first natural-borns,” Sandra said. “The white-scarf girls practically worship us.”

  “And hate us even more,” Rainy said.

  He found bowls in the cupboards and rinsed them out. At least the water was on. And the electricity. “Hey,” he said. “Did your mom own this place or rent it?” Somebody had to be paying the utilities. The twins looked more blank than usual. “Never mind.” He doled out the soup, and the girls made him clean and fill a bowl for himself.

  After awhile he said, “So these scarf girls, why don’t they like you?”

  “I said hate,” Rainy said. Then she shrugged. “They hated Mom, and we sort of inherited it.”

  “But why? What did she do to them?”

  Sandra looked at Rainy. Rainy said nothing.

  “Girls, come on,” Pax said. “I know she left the Co-op for some reason. You told me that she argued with lots of people.”

  “Mom had an abortion,” Rainy said.

  “Rainy!” Sandra shouted.

  “He should’ve already known that,” Rainy said to her.

  Pax looked at the table for a time. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have known that.” Jesus, why hadn’t he come back sooner? Why hadn’t he reached out to Jo? He’d left her to raise the girls alone, but he’d told himself she was better off without him. She was the self-assured one, and she had Deke. Hell, she had an entire clade to help her raise the girls and look out for her. He hadn’t suspected for a moment that pregnancies would keep coming, or that her people would turn on her.

  “So,” Pax said. “They exiled her.”

  “You don’t know how our clade feels about … that,” Rainy said. “The white-scarf girls were outraged. They threatened her. And the doctor too. They burned things on Dr. Fraelich’s lawn. We had to leave.”

  “Without Tommy,” Pax pointed out. Did he threaten her too?”

  Generations of grandchildren stretching out in an unbroken line, Tommy had said. More real than you are.

  “He would never hurt Mom,” Sandra said.

  Pax said, “You told me they argued all the time. He must have been furious that she’d had an abortion.”

  “Stop saying that word!” Sandra said. “Stop talking about it!” She pushed away from the table and stumbled as she got up. Rainy leaped up to catch her and Sandra shoved her away and ran from the room, blanket trailing like a cape.

  Rainy looked at him, her face unreadable, then walked after her sister, calling softly, “Sandra, Sandra, come on now, sweetie …”

  A half hour later he knocked softly and went inside the girls’ bedroom. The room was dark, but he made out Sandra’s nightgown-clad shape on the lower bunk, and Rainy sitting on the floor beside her, one hand on her sister’s back.

  Pax crouched down. “Already asleep?” he whispered.

  “She’s been tired lately,” Rainy said. “It’s the stress.” She sounded so adult.

  He nodded. “Say, how would you like to help me with something?”

  She followed him out of the room and closed the door carefully behind her. In the kitchen she saw the laptop open on the table, the bumper sticker on the lid upside down now. Christian Fish looked the same flipped or not, but poor Darwin Fish seemed to be on its back with its legs in the air.

  “You looked in our backpacks,” Rainy said angrily.

  “I picked it up and it was heavy—”

  “You looked in our backpacks!”

  He opened his mouth, shut it. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Rainy blinked at him. “Well, we did bring it for you.”

  “And you haven’t gotten past the password yet,” Pax said.

  “No, but the hacker guy already left town, didn’t he?”

  “He left me instructions. And tools.” He showed the things that Weygand had left for him: two cans of compressed air, a Phillips screwdriver, a four-gigabyte thumb drive, and a sheet of notebook paper with six numbered steps—and several asterisks.

  Rainy looked at the laptop. “Show me.”

  Weygand had explained the procedure several times, and Pax was reasonably sure about the details. He handed Rainy the Phillips screwdriver, and she set about opening the bottom panel of the laptop that allowed access to the RAM cards.

  Pax read over the instructions again. “Okay, stand by with the compressed air.”

  He took out the laptop’s battery, plugged in the power cord, and turned on the laptop. At the log-in screen he typed a series of random characters—anything would do, Weygand had said, because regardless of what was typed the operating system would retrieve the encrypted password off the hard drive, unencrypt it, and hold it in memory so that it could be compared to the typed characters. The clear text password only existed in RAM, never on the hard drive where hacking software could get at it. If the log-in succeeded, or if the computer was turned off, the clear text would be instantly erased.

  The key to the whole process, Weygand said, was redefining instantly.

  The screen came back with an incorrect password warning. “Ready?” Pax asked. He tilted up the laptop to expose the open compartment on the bottom. “Go.”

  Rainy blasted the opening with the compressed air. After ten seconds she switched hands. “It’s cold,” she said.

  “That’s the point. Keep going.” Weygand had said that information in RAM didn’t disappear for twenty or thirty milliseconds—and if the RAM card was immediately chilled, the information could persist for up to a minute.

  When the can started to sputter he yanked out the power cord and the screen went black. “Here we go,” Pax said. He grabbed the thumb drive, fumbled it into one of the laptop’s USB ports, and plugged in the machine.

  The screen remained black.

  “What’s supposed to happen?” Rainy asked.

  Pax picked up the instruction sheet. “It’s supposed to boot from the USB drive. There’s some kind of hacker operating system that’s supposed to load and go looking through RAM for the password.”

  “It’s not even blinking,” Rainy said.

  “I can see that.”

  How much time had passed, thirty seconds? Maybe the USB port was dead. He looked at the side of the laptop and saw there was another port next to the first.

  Another ten seconds passed. Fifteen. He yanked out the thumb drive and unplugged the laptop. Then he put the drive into the second port and plugged it in again.

  “Should you have done that?” Rainy said.

  “I have no idea.”

  The screen flashed, and the Macintosh loading screen appeared. In a few seconds the log-in dialog box appeared.

  “Shit.”

  “It’s okay, Paxton,” Rainy said, and patted his hand. Her fingers were cold.

  “It was probably working in the first port! I should have tested this first. All right, we’re going to try this again.” He picked up the instruction sheet and started reading through the steps yet again.

  “Tommy says you’re a junkie,” Rainy said.

  He jerked his head up. “What?” He could feel the heat in his cheeks. “That’s crazy, hon. Do you even know what a junkie is?”

  “We know about the vintage. We’ve taken care of you while you were on it.”

  “I don’t think you understand—”

 
“We’re worried about you, Paxton. Both of us are. We want you to stop hurting yourself.”

  He put down the paper. “I’m working on it,” he said. He smiled. “The problem is, I’m a better person when I take vintage than when I don’t.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s true, hon. I just, uh, feel more.” He picked up the screwdriver, ran his thumb along the metal. “It’s hard to explain, but I get this feeling of, I guess, connection.” He laughed. “Honestly, sometimes I lose track of where I stop and other people begin. Even people I have trouble relating to, on the vintage I can talk to them.” Even dead people, he thought. His conversation with his mother had been better than any he’d had with her while she was living. “I can just … love them.”

  Rainy took the screwdriver out of his hand and put it on the table. “Maybe you should try doing it without the vintage.”

  She regarded him with that preternatural blank calm. After a moment he said, “You know, you’re pretty clever for a twelve-year-old.”

  “You don’t know many twelve-year-olds.”

  “Seriously, you’re the smartest kid I’ve ever met. You remind me so much of your mom.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “Tommy says that all the time.”

  “Okay …” he said. Who wouldn’t want to be Jo Lynn Whitehall? Pax certainly did. Maybe they didn’t like it because of the way Tommy said it. “You know,” Pax said, “You haven’t told me yet why you and Sandra ran away from him.”

  She wouldn’t look at him. She went to the sink, picked up a cloth towel.

  “Rainy, did he hurt you? Or Sandra?”

  “Tommy wouldn’t hurt us,” she said. “Not like that.” She rubbed the cloth along the edge of the counter. “He wants to take us away. Out of Switchcreek.”

  “Ah,” Pax said.

  She turned to face him. “You knew?”

  “Tommy came looking for you tonight,” Pax said. “He said some things.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “It’s an empty threat, Rainy. Tommy can’t leave Switchcreek—soldiers are guarding all the roads.”

  “No, there’s a plan,” she said. “A plan to sneak us out. A couple of the white-scarf girls told us. People in the Co-op are working on it.”

  “What? Why? Why would they let him take you?”

  Rainy looked away. “We told you—we’re special.”

  “Yeah, the natural-born thing. But there are other natural-borns, aren’t there? Why you two?”

  She shrugged. “Because we’re the first, I guess.”

  “Rainy, this doesn’t make any sense. If you’re that special, they wouldn’t just let Tommy run off with you, they’d protect you.”

  “They think that’s what they’re doing.”

  “This is bullshit,” Pax said. He got up from the table. “When was this supposed to happen?”

  “In the morning.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why we left tonight. We can’t trust Tommy, or the reverend.”

  “Wait a minute. How are they going to get you out? There are checkpoints, helicopters—”

  “I don’t know, they didn’t tell us that!”

  Jesus, he thought. Tommy was going to get them killed like Deke and Donna.

  “All right, listen,” Pax said. “I’ll go to the Co-op, I’ll talk to the reverend—”

  “No! You can’t talk to her!”

  “I’ll tell her that if Tommy tries to kidnap you that I’ll tell the Guard.”

  “But she’s a part of this! You can’t trust her, Paxton.”

  “I’m not talking about trusting her—I’ll be informing her. She won’t be able to do anything to you, and Tommy won’t be able to do anything to you. I promise.”

  She regarded him warily—or what he took for wariness.

  “I promise,” he said again.

  “Look, there’s nothing we can do till morning. We’ll worry about all that stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile …” He picked up the remaining can of compressed air and put it in front of her. “Why don’t we take another crack at this?”

  ———

  Rainy fell asleep at the table with her head resting on her forearm. They’d made no progress on getting past the log-in screen. Weygand’s hacker scheme had given them nothing but cold hands. They’d spent an hour trying every password they could think of—“sandra,” “rainy,” “lorraine,” “switchcreek,” “bowie,” “changes,” then birthdays and favorite places—and then when Rainy put her head down he went on trying the names of flowers and the names of authors on her bookshelf. Uppercase, lowercase, title case. Nothing worked, but at least the laptop refrained from locking him out.

  The tube of vintage, melted now, seemed to burn in his pocket.

  “Let’s go, Rainy.” She startled when he touched her arm. He helped her to her feet, then ushered her through the dark to her bedroom. He circled his arms around her thighs and hoisted her to the top bunk.

  “Paxton,” she said from the dark.

  “Yeah, hon?”

  She was silent for a long time.

  “Are you crying, Rainy?”

  She sighed. “No. I have trouble crying.”

  “Me too.”

  “I sure want to, though.”

  Another long moment passed, and then she said, “My mom did some bad things.”

  Rainy couldn’t use the A-word more than once, it seemed.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” Pax said. “Some things aren’t black and white. Your mom wasn’t against children—she wasn’t against you. She just believed that a woman has a right to choose when—”

  “She killed her baby, Paxton. My little sister.”

  “Oh, hon,” he said sadly. Rainy was the stronger of the two sisters, but this had obviously been eating at her, too. “Your mom wasn’t a bad person. It’s just that some people believe that a fetus isn’t …” Isn’t what? He wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. “Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand.”

  “She talked about giving all the girls pills. She said they ought to put it in the water.”

  “She didn’t mean that.”

  “Mom didn’t say anything she didn’t mean. Everyone knew that.”

  “Okay, you may be right on that one.” He put a hand through the rails and squeezed her calf. “But those girls at the Co-op, they’re getting pregnant without having a choice. Your mom wanted to protect them.”

  “No, she wanted her choice. The white-scarf girls want their babies, Paxton.”

  “But they’re just girls. They’re not old enough to make that decision. And when they do get pregnant, of course they want to keep the babies. It’s hormones, it’s—”

  “It’s not just hormones!”

  “Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. But someday you’ll understand that even good people can do things that seem wrong. Bad things. Sometimes they have to.”

  “She was going to keep doing them, Paxton. She was going to keep killing the children. Mom and the reverend.”

  “Rainy, no. I don’t know what you heard, or thought you heard—”

  “I can prove it.” She started to climb out of the bed. “It’s in my backpack.”

  “Hold on, what’s in your backpack?”

  “Just get it.”

  He went out of the room, found the big nylon bag in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room.

  Rainy searched through it for a few moments, unzipping pockets, then said, “Here.” She pressed something into his hand. “Reverend Hooke gave these to my mom.”

  It was a pill bottle. It was too dark to make out the label. “What is this, Rainy?”

  “Mifeprex is what it says on the label,” the girl said. “Mom called it something with a number. It’s an abortion pill.”

  He blinked. “RU-486?”

  “That’s it.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. After a moment Rainy said, “I heard Mom talking to Hoo
ke on the phone about it. She asked the reverend for them.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood what—”

  “I’m not stupid, Paxton.”

  “But who were they for?” He still didn’t believe that she’d heard correctly. “One of the white-scarf girls?” Or Jo, he thought, though he didn’t say that aloud.

  After a moment of silence Rainy said, “I didn’t hear who it was for.”

  “Okay, when was this? How long ago?”

  “Paxton, it was the night she died.”

  “What?”

  “She called the reverend after we went to bed that night.”

  Pax pressed his forehead against the wooden frame. “Did you tell anyone this?” he asked. “The police, or Deke?”

  “We were too scared. If Mom and the reverend were doing this, then who knows—”

  “Jesus, Rainy!” He kept his volume down for Sandra’s sake, but his anger was clear. “You should have told someone.”

  He immediately regretted yelling at her. Of course they’d been afraid. What trusted authority figure would turn out to be the next monster? Baby-killer. The most depraved criminal a beta girl could imagine. No wonder the only people the twins trusted were each other. And maybe—now—Pax.

  “Don’t worry,” Pax said. “I promise to take care of everything. In the morning I’ll … well, we’ll think of something.” He found her face in the dark and kissed her on the smooth top of her head. “The point is, you’re not alone in this anymore. We’re a team, right? A club.”

  Pax had belonged to only one club in his life. As the only remaining member, he granted himself the power to silently induct them on the spot—they’d already met the organization’s membership requirements.

  He closed the bedroom door, thinking, Welcome to the Switchcreek Orphan Society, girls.

  He sat in the book-lined living room with the computer open on his lap, its screen washing his face with cold light. He thought of unwanted pregnancies and chemical abortions, secret passwords and suicide notes, corruption and embezzlement and blackmail. Deke had said Jo had figured out what Rhonda was doing. The proof might be right under his fingertips. He pecked at the keyboard, typing random words into the password box, watching the machine instantly reject each one.