The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  Paxton stopped struggling. “What are you talking about?”

  The reverend appeared between them. “Stop it. Both of you.” She was dressed now in a skirt and long blouse. She turned to a pair of older beta women. “Sandra and Rainy are at Jo’s house. Please take some people with you to go pick them up.”

  The charlie boy released his grip; Paxton was no longer fighting him anyway. The reverend watched his face, waiting to see if he finally understood.

  He’d been so blind. The way Sandra had been covering herself with the blanket, the way that for all the time he’d known her she’d worn nothing but loose dresses to Rainy’s tomboy clothes. The way she’d hugged him so carefully last night, touching only shoulders and arms. She couldn’t have been as far along as the reverend, but she’d carefully concealed her shape from him. Rainy and Sandra had conspired to hide it.

  So blind.

  They didn’t try to stop him from leaving. He walked between the rows of trailers, across the field. When he reached the tree line he looked back and saw Tommy’s Bronco and another car rolling out the front gate. There was no way he could beat them to Jo’s house, no way he could warn the girls. He wasn’t sure that he would’ve warned them if he could. Tommy was right: Their clade could protect them, and he couldn’t.

  He walked into the shadow of the trees and started up the mountain.

  The vintage was already dissipating from his bloodstream. A few months ago a dose of the size he’d taken would have knocked him unconscious. In August, a single taste of it had put him on the ground and left him gawking as if God were going to reach down and shake hands.

  After fifteen minutes he reached the clearing. Sunlight splintered through the trees.

  The bench was empty. Jo was long gone, evaporated with the vintage.

  He walked across the long grass, then stopped. A figure stepped out of the trees ahead of him.

  He took a step back. “There are people looking for you,” he said.

  “We heard the cars coming up the drive,” Rainy said. “We ran.” Sandra stepped out of the trees behind her, the blanket still around her shoulders.

  Sandra glanced at Rainy nervously.

  “You really are pregnant?” Pax asked.

  “We wanted to tell you,” Sandra said.

  Rainy said, “We kept thinking you’d notice.”

  Sandra let the blanket slip to the ground. The bulge beneath her dress was hardly noticeable, but then she ran a hand down her front, smoothing out the fabric, showing the swell of her belly.

  “I’m only a few months along,” she said. “But I can feel her growing, every day. There may even be twins. Oh Paxton, my daughters are going to be the first children of the new generation. Do you want to feel them?”

  Sandra took a step forward and he jerked back. Rainy watched him, her arms at her sides. He’d seen her use those arms to haul herself through the trees like a chimp, or carry him like a child. They could cinch shut a windpipe like a noose.

  He said, “The pills weren’t for your mother.” He already knew the answer. He’d known it as soon as he heard that Sandra was pregnant. As soon as the reverend had looked at him, he’d understood what had happened that night—in this very spot.

  “No,” Rainy said.

  “The night she found out—”

  “She was going to kill the baby,” Rainy said. “Sandra’s daughter. Her own granddaughter.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t understand a person who would do that. Someone had to stop her.”

  “But Rainy, she was your mother.”

  “I know who she was.”

  “Jesus, Rainy …”

  “Don’t look at her like that!” Sandra said. Pax had never heard her speak so sharply. The girl stepped between Paxton and her sister. “You don’t know how torn up she’s been. She doesn’t feel good about what she had to do. But you said last night that sometimes good people have to do bad things.”

  “You were awake,” Pax said.

  “Mom wasn’t going to stop,” Sandra said. “You know how she was. Once she’d made up her mind, she wouldn’t quit. We couldn’t go to the Co-op, not with Hooke helping her. Rainy did what she had to do. She was protecting me. Protecting us.”

  “Sandra, I know how it must feel to—”

  “No you don’t,” Sandra said. “You’re not a beta. You don’t get to judge.”

  They heard voices calling up the mountain. High tenors—beta voices. Rainy tensed as if she were about to run.

  “They’re not going to harm you or your baby,” Pax said. “That’s the last thing they’d do.” He nodded toward the voices. “Tommy will protect you. And the reverend—that’s over now. I don’t think she understood who the pills were for.”

  Rainy looked down the slope, then at Paxton. “We wanted you to know,” she said. “We wanted you to understand. Then maybe—”

  “Maybe we could stay with you,” Sandra said. “You do kinda need us, Paxton.”

  The voices grew louder. “You should go,” Pax said. “You’re worrying them.”

  Sandra rushed to him. She threw her arms around him, pressed her belly into his. He tried to step away, but she hugged him harder. Finally he touched the top of her smooth head.

  Rainy said, “Good-bye, Pax.”

  “Take care of each other,” he said.

  Sandra released him. Rainy put the blanket over her shoulders.

  He watched them until they vanished into the trees. He turned away, but then his knees felt weak, so he sat down there in the wet grass. He looked at nothing for a long time, as the sun tracked across the blue roof of the clearing.

  Chapter 23

  HE’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN the ramp.

  When the van arrived, Paxton was on his stomach in the front yard, drilling through the two-by-fours into the cement foundation of the house while Amos and Paul, two argos from Alpha Furniture, held the frame steady. He’d called them yesterday in a panic. They’d built the ramp in an afternoon and delivered it this morning.

  Pax got up from the cold ground, shook the dirt from the front of his jacket. It was just under forty degrees, which in Chicago would have been balmy for a December day, but here in Switchcreek felt bitterly cold. The argos stooped with their nail guns to fasten the plywood to the frame.

  Dr. Fraelich had gotten out of the van, and the side door was open. His father sat in his enormous wheelchair, looking down sternly while two charlie men fussed with the chair and the winch. Finally Barron got the electric motor started, and Mr. Teestall, Paxton’s old shop teacher, held the chair while it descended.

  Pax said, “How you doing, Dad?”

  “I told them, I can walk.”

  “Let’s not risk it right now,” Dr. Fraelich said.

  “Rhonda would kill us if you broke something,” Barron added.

  The metal plates touched the ground. Mr. Teestall leaned into the chair and got it rolling across the yard. Barron eyed the ramp. “Will that hold him?”

  Amos, the one-armed argo, said, “Of course it will. Both of us jumped on it in the shop.”

  “I’m going to have a concrete ramp installed eventually,” Pax said.

  They got Harlan through the door and across the living room. Pax had pulled up all the carpets and refinished the floors, which made the rolling a lot easier. Pax stayed back as Mr. Teestall helped Harlan move from the wheelchair to the new couch. Another Alpha creation: normal-looking on the outside, but with industrial-strength springs and a steel undercarriage cross-braced like a suspension bridge. The thing squeaked loudly as his father settled into it. He shifted his weight and it squeaked again.

  “That’s going to drive me crazy,” Harlan said.

  “I’ll oil it before I go,” Pax said.

  “Just leave that to me,” Mr. Teestall said.

  Pax helped Barron ferry in supplies from the van—bandages, creams, extraction packs, cleaning solution—as well as his father’s clothes and two boxes of Mr. Teestall’s personal items. They finish
ed just as Dr. Fraelich concluded her checkup of Harlan.

  “You can fasten your shirt now, Mr. Martin,” she said, and peeled one of the latex gloves from her hands. “As near as I can tell, you’re as fit as anyone of your age, sex, and clade.”

  “That’s an awful lot of conditions,” Harlan said.

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  Pax walked the doctor out to the van, and they waited as Barron tried to cajole the winch into lifting the platform back into place.

  “Your paperwork is all signed?” the doctor asked Paxton.

  “It’s in my suitcase.” He’d been officially cleared of atypical plasmids. He’d still be required to spend two weeks in a facility in Kentucky, isolated from anyone with TDS. But after that, he’d be free to roam the world.

  “Let me know if you run into any problems,” she said.

  “Sure, sure.”

  After a moment she said, “So.”

  He looked at her.

  She pitched her voice so that Barron couldn’t hear it. “How the hell did you do it?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You not only got Aunt Rhonda to agree to home care, but pay for it too. Not to mention biweekly visits from yours truly.”

  “You’re not going to like it,” he said.

  “Indulge me.”

  “I traded for it,” he said. He shrugged. “I gave Rhonda a gigabyte or two of data, and she gave my father the only thing he wanted—to be back in his own house.” He smiled at her expression. “I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

  “You found Jo’s laptop.” He didn’t deny it. “And then you just gave it to her?”

  “Well, I did keep copies—I’m not a complete idiot.” The doctor still looked shocked. “Listen, I know why Jo never pulled the trigger on Rhonda. Your name’s on half the documents.”

  The doctor flushed—it was astounding to watch the blood rush so quickly to infuse her pale skin. “I didn’t know what she was doing!” she said. “Ninety percent of what I signed I thought that—” She stopped abruptly as Barron shut the van door and turned to them.

  “Ready to go?” Barron asked. He saw that something unpleasant was going on.

  “Just a second,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Really.”

  Barron nodded, then walked around to the other side of the van.

  Pax said, “It’s okay. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do—everybody does business with Rhonda. Even Jo. She wasn’t about to ruin your career by publishing that stuff. She was your friend.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, hopefully. Unless I’m forced to, and even then … I’m not sure. I’ll let Rhonda worry about that.”

  “And me.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I really am. But this is the only shot I had to make Harlan happy. What choice did I have? He’s my father.”

  “So you’re doing this out of love,” she said skeptically.

  “Or something like it.”

  Barron had started the van. Pax followed her to the passenger door, and she said, “Oh, almost forgot.” She reached in and handed him a manila folder. “Your DNA sample was already stored in Atlanta—everybody in Switchcreek was sampled during the Changes. I asked a friend of mine to run it through some tests.”

  “I thought all your friends there were fired.”

  “Resigned. And I still have a few left there. A couple, anyway.”

  He opened the folder. There were several pages. The first listed many long words he couldn’t pronounce, and many long numbers he didn’t understand the significance of.

  He took a breath. “So, am I …?”

  “Bad news,” Dr. Fraelich said. “For the gene sequences studied, and for the range of proteins sampled, your genetic material falls within the statistical range of only one known clade.”

  He stared at her.

  “My condolences, Paxton. You’re human.”

  He didn’t trust himself to spend the night in the same house as his father. After supper with Harlan and Mr. Teestall he used some of his precious allotment of gasoline to drive up to Jo’s house. The doors were still unlocked, the interior undisturbed. Even the heat was on. Among other things he’d learned from Jo’s files was the fact that Rhonda had quietly purchased this house and many of the others left empty after the Changes. The banks had foreclosed and she’d bought them for a song. Disturbing, but not illegal—unlike many of the frankly criminal things he’d found in the files. And in a way, the real estate finagling spoke well of Rhonda. She was betting on the future of Switchcreek when almost nobody else was.

  He walked around the house, looking at the things the girls had left behind, the books on Jo’s shelves. He opened the Dawkins book, the thick beige one on evolution: The Ancestor’s Tale. Jo had been looking for some trace of herself in the diagrams, some branch that ended in the betas and her daughters.

  But the betas and argos and charlies weren’t here. They were intrusions, pages torn from some other book and stuffed between the covers of this world. This was his family tree. It should have been reassuring, to be so well documented, to have a map that told him where he’d come from, with a big red dot for You Are Here.

  The tree explained nothing. For years he’d been hoping for a different answer. A diagnosis that would tell him why he felt like an alien in his own skin, an outsider, an imposter. But he’d been skipped again.

  He put the book back and turned to leave. Then he noticed the glint of something between the seat cushions of the couch. It was a vial he’d emptied here two months ago. His hand was inches from it when he realized what he was doing and yelled, “Fuck!”

  He went to the kitchen, found a dish towel, and wrapped up the vial without touching it. Then he went to the back porch and smashed the plastic with his heel. Risking a final touch he picked up the towel and threw it like a football into the backyard among the roots of the oak tree.

  He shut the door—and immediately got an image of himself sneaking out here in the middle of the night, rooting through the grass for the towel, pressing it to his face …

  It took another five minutes to find the gas can for Jo’s lawnmower. He soaked a rag and set the towel on fire. He stood back from the smoke and thought, Jesus, I got to get out of this town.

  He walked back to Jo’s bedroom and lay on the bed. He stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then he grew cold, so he pulled back the dusty covers and climbed inside.

  I’m sorry, Jo, he thought. They killed you and I didn’t tell a soul.

  Even now he couldn’t hate the girls. He just wanted to know that they were all right. Safe. Happy.

  “Shit,” he said. I think I fell in love with them, Jo.

  He lay in the bed, feeling like a spy in her house—a foreign agent in deep cover. If this is what it’s like to be human, he thought, no wonder the world is so fucked up.

  A night in his own house had not made Reverend Martin any happier. The new bed was too stiff, the couch too big, the new paint too sloppily applied. He despised the weakness of Mr. Teestall’s coffee.

  “I’ll talk to him about it,” Pax told his father. “I’ll be checking in every day.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  “Then most days,” Pax said. “Every day I possibly can.” He showed Harlan again how to use the contacts list in the cell phone he’d purchased. It was a model the argos favored for its oversized buttons—good for fat charlie fingers as well. Pax had also tried to teach his father texting but had quickly given up. “And you can call me any time you want.”

  Harlan poked at the phone, put it down. “Rhonda won’t be happy with my decreased output.”

  “Well, she’ll have to live with that,” Pax said. And so will you, Pax thought. Harlan was happier when he was producing than when he wasn’t. They hoped the phone calls would trigger some production. Their theory was that there should be nothing magical about Pax’s physical presence; it was the feeling of closeness that started the cascade
. That was the theory, anyway.

  Pax said, “And after the quarantine is over I’ll be able to visit in person.”

  He saw motion outside the window and looked out. Aunt Rhonda’s Cadillac was pulling into the driveway.

  “Okay,” Pax said. “My ride is here.”

  His father looked up at him. “This new job. It can’t wait till after Christmas?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  Harlan grunted. “You promise it’s not doing anything illegal?”

  “Uh, illegal, or immoral?”

  “Paxton Abel …”

  Pax looked out the window. Everett was outside the car now, waiting with arms crossed. “Okay, you think you can keep a secret?”

  His father skewered him with a look. “Don’t get smart, Son.”

  “I’ll be setting up a safe house. They need people they can trust outside of Switchcreek. Rhonda’s organizing another batch of people to leave in February.”

  “You could be arrested.”

  “Or sent back here. Same thing, right?”

  “I’ll start fattening the calf.”

  Pax stood up. He went into the kitchen and shook Mr. Teestall’s hand. “Thanks again, and good luck with him. You know my number. Oh, and here are the keys to the Tempo. Drive it until it runs out of gas.”

  “Good luck yourself,” Mr. Teestall said.

  Outside, a car horn beeped.

  Pax went to the guest room and grabbed his suitcase. When he got back to the living room his father had somehow pushed himself up off the couch. His face had swollen. The pores had begun to glisten.

  Pax shifted his suitcase to his other hand. “I don’t think I should hug you,” he said.

  “Ah,” his father said. He looked down at himself. “‘New wine in old bottles.’”

  “Matthew, uh, nine?”

  His father grunted. “Good boy. Nine-seventeen: ‘The bottles break, and the wine runneth out.’”

  Pax could smell the vintage radiating from him. “Dad, I have to go …”

  “Go, go.” He waved a hand. “Just don’t forget your way back.”

  Everett took his suitcase and put it in the trunk. “Backseat,” he said.