The Devil's Alphabet

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 finished 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.

“But I called shotgun,” Pax said.

Everett didn’t bother to answer.

Pax opened the rear door to a cloud of lilac perfume. He got inside and reluctantly closed the door. “Hi, Aunt Rhonda.”

The mayor sat in the front passenger seat. “It’s not polite to keep a lady waiting,” she said.

“Sorry about that. My dad always says that I’d be late for my own funeral.”

She turned and eyed him critically. “I trust Reverend Martin is comfortable? Or is there some other custom treatment we can provide for him—a daily foot massage maybe?”

“He’s happy,” Pax said. “As happy as he can be.”

They drove the western loop into town, over the single-lane bridge, past Jo’s house.

Rhonda handed him a large manila envelope. “This is the address of the house we rented in Vermont, the keys, and receipts. There’s a credit card and some cash in there to get you started—oh, and the prepaid phone. Use that instead of your own cell when you call Everett—and you only call Everett, never me, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She gave him more instructions—most of which she’d told him multiple times before.

“What about the other address?” Pax asked.

“We’ll talk about that later, once you get out of detention in Louisville.”

“No, we’ll talk about it now. That was part of my price.”

Everett gazed at him through the rearview mirror. Pax ignored him. “You know I don’t have the files on me, right? My father doesn’t have them either. A friend of mine outside of Switchcreek has everything—”

“Liar,” Everett said.

“—and he’ll release them if he doesn’t hear from me on a regular basis.” Actually, he and Andrew Weygand had never worked out a schedule. He hoped that if Everett killed him, Weygand would find out about it eventually. But then what? Even if he died he wasn’t sure he wanted Rhonda indicted. She was the only person holding the town together. It was the threat he needed, not the execution. “In fact, there’s one or two things I did not give you a copy of.”

“That’s it,” Everett said, and hit the brakes. The car skewed and shuddered to a stop. “I’m coming back there.” He opened the door and hopped out. Pax pushed to the far side of the seat and pulled on the handle—it was locked.

“Everett! Settle down, both of you!” Rhonda said. “Paxton’s just trying out his big-boy muscles, aren’t you, Paxton?” She looked at him over the seat back, seeming genuinely amused. “I tell you, for a second it was like having Jo Lynn back again.”

She handed him an index card. “I’d appreciate it if you memorized that and then, I don’t know, eat it, burn it, whatever you’d do in that spy movie running in your head. And Everett, for goodness’ sake, get back in here and close the door before you freeze me to death.”

The government car was waiting for him at the Cherokee Hotel, a young soldier already at the wheel. Pax tried to show him the paperwork Dr. Fraelich had worked so hard on, but the boy waved him off. “They’ll do all that at the checkpoint,” he said. His voice was muffled by the mask. Pax wondered if he would keep it on all the way to Louisville.

Aunt Rhonda took Paxton’s hand. “You make sure you keep eating,” she said. “You’re still scrawny as a barn cat.”

Pax climbed into the backseat, and the soldier wheeled the car around. In a block they turned left onto the highway. They crossed the bridge, and then they were over the creek and outside of town. Piney Road went by on their left; then they passed the gravel cutoff that led to the hill behind the graveyard. In only a few minutes they were approaching the north gate, slowing as they passed two towering alabaster crosses that had been planted beside the highway.

Pax had missed the march—he’d sat in the clearing on Mount Clyburn for hours that morning—and in the weeks since he hadn’t driven any farther north than Piney Road.

Pax realized the driver was saying something.

“We need your medical papers now.” Another masked soldier was waiting outside the car. “And your driver’s license.”

“Right, right.” He rolled down his window and handed the papers and the license to the man—woman?—behind the face mask. “Just a second,” Pax said. He got out of the car, started walking back up the road toward the crosses. The driver yelled something at his back.

The crosses were tall as argos, twelve feet high, and white as their skin. They leaned slightly in to each other, their arms almost touching.

He reached out to one of them, pressed his fingers against the rough wood.

The soldier grabbed Paxton’s arm—Pax hadn’t realized he was holding on to the post. “Dude, what’s the matter with you?” the man said.

“Jesus,” another one said. “He’s bawling like a baby.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Pax said. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. His legs had gone weak. He gripped the wooden post in a fierce hug.

“Are you sure you should be traveling?” the driver asked him.

“No. Yeah. I mean, I’m fine.” He made his arms release the cross, then wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.

“Get back in the car, sir,” one of the soldiers said.

They guided him to the backseat, slammed the door. “I’m not usually like this,” Pax said.

“Just don’t do that again, okay?” the driver said. The striped crossbars were raised, and the driver hit the gas. Pax fell back against the seat, and the car carried him north.

He’d lived through twelve Chicago winters, but he’d never experienced anything like South Dakota in February. The road crossed an endless blank plain. Thuggish winds kept nudging his rental car onto the shoulder, and even with the heat on full blast, tendrils of intense cold swirled around his feet, licked at him from every seam of the car’s interior. He drove hunched over the wheel, squinting through the crusted windshield, muscles tensed. The road revealed itself a few yards at a time through curtains of blowing snow.

He didn’t believe the GPS when it told him he’d arrived. He saw no house, no farm, only white on white in every direction. He was a southern boy at heart, and couldn’t shake the conviction that if he left the car he’d be carried away across the fields. Next June the final drift would melt to reveal his perfectly preserved corpse.

He zipped his ski jacket up to his chin and pulled on his gloves. The car door squealed as he forced it open, then cold slapped him across the face and he gasped. He walked to the front of the car and turned in place, eyes wide for lights and shapes against the twilight. Nothing.

He started to get back in the car, then had another thought. After all, it was a rental. He climbed up on the hood of the car on all fours, and then carefully stood. The sheet metal plonked beneath his boots.

A hundred yards off to his right he saw a stand of trees, the roofline of a house, and the suggestion of an off-white stripe running from the trees to intersect the road. He hopped back in the car.

The stripe turned out to be a driveway, or at least a path through the snow. He rolled past the ring of trees that guarded the house and then braked to a stop. The house was a long, one-story ranch with a marshmallow cap of snow. A low garage or workshop squatted off to the side.

Standing in front of the house was a bulky figure holding a shotgun across his or her chest.

He stepped out of the car. “Hello?” he called. “I’m looking for the DuChamp house.” He walked closer, his hands away from his body—not stick-’ em-up high, but enough to show respect for the gun. “My name is Paxton Martin.”

The figure came closer. It was an unchanged woman, as far as he could tell, heavily bundled against the cold. “I’m Elly,” she said. He’d talked to her on the phone. She was Mr. DuChamp’s sister, and she’d moved out of Switchcreek years before the Changes. “Come on in, Paxton.”

He jogged back to the car, switched it off, and picked up the nylon duffel from the back seat. A minute later she led him into the house to a mudroom stacked with coats. She held the shotgun and showed him where to hang his jacket and set his hiking boots. “They’re in the family room,” she said, and nodded toward a doorway.

He went down a short hallway and entered a large, open room. Couches and armchairs faced a huge stone fireplace.

Three faces gazed at him. If he’d never lived in Switchcreek, they might have looked identical.

Rainy jumped from her chair, took a few steps, and stopped. Sandra didn’t get up from her place on the couch, but Tommy rose to his feet and stood next to Rainy.

“Merry Christmas,” Pax said.

They stared at him. Then Rainy said, “Paxton, it’s January.”

He looked down at the duffel. “Well, I guess I could take these back.” He set down the bag and held out his hand to Tommy. “Thanks for letting me come into your home, Tommy. I know that every visitor is a risk.”

Tommy hesitated, and shook his hand. “You’ll learn that when you set up your own house,” he said. “But some visitors are worth it.”

Pax walked a few steps toward the couch where Sandra lay. “How are you doing, sweetie?” he asked.

She looked up at him. The contentment on her face was unmistakable.

“Do you want to see him?” she asked.

He kneeled in front of her. She shifted the bundle in her arms, and pulled back a blanket. He was sleeping, mouth open and eyes closed. His skin was the color of merlot.

“Oh,” Pax said. His eyes burned, and he blinked hard. “He’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t he?” Sandra said.

Rainy came up behind Pax and put a hand on his shoulder. “His name’s Joseph,” she said. “We’re calling him Joe.”

“I heard.” He looked up at her, then back at Tommy. “I guess you all had to scramble to come up with a boy’s name.”

Tommy said, “We certainly didn’t have a list ready.”

“What do you think it means, Paxton?” Rainy asked. “Will all of them from this generation be boys, or is he a fluke, or …?”

“I don’t know,” Pax said. He couldn’t see how a generation of males made much sense from an evolutionary point of view—but right now he didn’t give a damn about the evolutionary point of view. All he knew was that the Changes weren’t over—that they’d never be over. “Every generation is a mystery,” he said.

He reached out and touched the boy’s cheek. Joseph’s lips closed, then opened with a faint smack. “I’m pretty sure, though, that a boy this beautiful is not a mistake.”