The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 2

THEY WALKED INTO the midday heat, and Pax said, “My car or yours?”

Deke looked down at him.

“Oh. Right.”

Deke led him across the gravel parking lot. One of the satellite trucks had left, and the other had its rear doors open. A young man in a blue suit jacket sat on the back fender, smoking a cigarette. He looked like he was going to ask them something, but a look from Deke made him put the cigarette back in his mouth and glance away.

“I wouldn’t let ’em in the church,” Deke said. For good reason, Pax thought. The media had been no friend to the town. The summer of the outbreak they’d been invaded, squads of masked reporters shoving cameras in their faces. The quarantine had forced the newspeople out, but the phone calls for interviews had kept coming, and the people of Switchcreek could see on TV what the world thought of them. Then came the Lambert riots, and the Stonecipher murders, and the feeding frenzy continued. A few betas had tried to go grocery shopping in Lambert, and the town went nuts. That’s when the drive-bys started, rednecks roaring through Switchcreek to knock down mailboxes and shoot up the stop signs. A barn burned, and the state police finally started patrolling the streets. A few weeks after that, the Stonecipher brothers were found beside the road, shot dead. They were argos, big old boys and a little wild. The killers were never found.

The spotlight eventually moved on to the next hurricane or celebrity overdose, but Pax still saw Switchcreek popping up on TV every once in awhile, mostly for some science or health update. A couple times some website would run rumors about other outbreaks, in other countries, but they were never substantiated. Mostly Switchcreek was ignored. A normal death in the town probably wouldn’t go further than a mention on local news, but a suicide or murder might be worth a few seconds on the cable news networks.

Deke opened the door of a green Jeep Cherokee with the canvas top rolled back. The back bench had been removed, and the front seats had been pushed back and raised. They climbed into the cab. Deke’s long arms and legs easily reached the oversized steering wheel and foot pedals.

Paxton’s legs dangled from the passenger seat. He felt like a kid in a car seat.

Deke followed Piney Road back to the highway, then turned south toward town, driving with one arm resting on the roll bar in front of him. His curved spine gave him the appearance of hunching over the wheel. The car speakers squawked with static, then went silent. Nestled into the dash was an elaborate black receiver.

“CB?” Pax asked.

“Police scanner.”

Pax thought a moment. “You must have been one of the first to hear, then.”

Deke sighed, a slow sound like a freight train coming to rest. “I heard when the dispatcher called for the ambulance, but by then it was way too late.”

“Jesus,” Pax said. “I’m sorry, man.”

They crossed the two-lane bridge and then slowed as they entered downtown. They passed the Gas-n-Go, the Power Rental, the Icee Freeze. Each building looked more run-down than Pax remembered, slope-shouldered and tired. Only the old one-room schoolhouse, which had been falling down when he was a kid, looked like it had been refurbished. The walls wore a fresh coat of red paint, and a new sign out front declared it to be the Switchcreek Welcome Center.

Right. Welcome to Monster Town.

Nobody had figured out what had turned the residents into freaks. Transcription Divergence Syndrome was just a fancy description of the damage, not an explanation. No strange microbe had been found skulking in their bloodstream. The water and air and dirt were radiation free, and no more poisoned with toxins than any other poor mountain town. The most common theory was that it was a new retrovirus, whatever that was, but if there’d been any kind of virus in the air it was gone now.

TDS wasn’t contagious, either. No one who wasn’t living within five miles of downtown that summer had ever caught it, even though during the outbreak victims had been parceled out to a dozen hospitals in Eastern Tennessee. After thirteen months with no new victims it became clear that the quarantine was a waste of money. The national guard pulled out. The government still kept tabs on them, and doctors and reporters still made their own drive-bys, but most of the rest of the country, satisfied that TDS couldn’t happen to them, lost interest in the town.

Pax was surprised, then, to see so many cars in the parking lot of Bugler’s Grocery. A smoked-glass tour bus was disgorging middle-aged people in shorts and shirtsleeves. One of them saw the Jeep and lifted a camera to her face. Deke stared straight ahead as they passed.

Pax stared at Deke. “Oh my God, were those tourists?”

Deke looked at him, a half smile on his lips. “We get a bunch every weekend,” he said. “Not so much since the anniversary.” The ten-year anniversary of the Changes had been three years ago. Pax had avoided watching any of the specials.

Deke stopped at the traffic light, even though it was yellow and there were no other cars at the intersection. On the corner was a new building, a gray brick one-story with white columns holding up the entrance roof. It looked like a library.

“Oh my God,” Deke said with a weird nasal whine, and then laughed.

“What?”

Deke shook his head, laughing.

“What, damn it?”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like a Yankee now.”

“Hey, get beat up a few times in a Yankee high school and you drop that southern accent pretty quick.”

Deke’s short laugh was like the beat of a bass drum. Pax flashed on an image of them lying on the floor of Jo’s living room. God they’d spent so many hours hanging out there during the quarantine. The beery, happy SOS meetings.

The light turned green. Deke turned right on Bank Street. He nodded toward the new building. “The free clinic,” he said. “And worth every penny. All you have to do is keep filling out their surveys.”

“Sounds familiar.” In the early days of the Changes, they’d all been poked, prodded, and interrogated on a daily basis. Even after Pax left Switchcreek he’d get fat envelopes in the mail requesting him to be in this or that study. He never followed up. He moved out of his cousins’ house in the Chicago suburbs when he was eighteen, then kept moving through a series of apartments around the seedier parts of downtown, and somewhere along the way the scientists lost his scent.

The clinic was the only evidence he could see of the disaster relief money that had been supposed to rain down on Switchcreek after the quarantine lifted. When Paxton left town they were talking about new schools, scholarships, compensation for every family that had lost someone in the Changes. But now the place looked more run-down than when he’d left.

Pax said, “So what do people do for a living around here?”

Deke laughed shortly. “Most of the town’s on welfare. Not much work for anybody since the economy tanked, but for us …” He shook his head. “We’ve got a hell of a preexisting condition. Even the service jobs with no insurance, nobody wants us serving burgers or talking to the customers.”

Deke drove back behind the elementary school, which looked about the same as when Pax and Deke and Jo had gone there. In the blacktop recess area one of the basketball hoops was bent almost straight down, and the other was missing. Argo kids had to be hell on hoops.

Deke said, “So what do you do for a living? You work in some restaurant?”

“Not some restaurant. The number three Mexican restaurant chain in Chicago, not counting Chi-Chi’s and Taco Bell.”

“Really.”

“Really.” Pax shrugged. “It’s not a career or anything.” No shit, he thought. There were two types of people in the restaurant biz: temps and lifers. The lifers were alcoholics with hefty pot habits. He’d always thought he was a temp—marking time until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life—until he woke up one morning with his fourth hangover of the week and realized he owed his dealer $300.

“You got a girlfriend up there? An ex-wife? I don’t see a ring on your finger.”

“I’m not exactly husband material,” Pax said. “Or boyfriend material. Actually, I’m not even sure I’m material.”

At Creek Road they turned left, taking them higher, up along the side of Mount Clyburn. The mountain marked the edge of the state. Walk up into those trees and you wouldn’t start back down until you were in South Carolina.

“I like Donna,” Pax said. “You two seem happy.”

“I got lucky.” Deke slowed the car, swung onto a gravel driveway. “Jo moved out this way a couple years ago.” He followed the driveway up in a steep S. After two curves and a couple hundred yards the driveway leveled out at a patch of ground dug into the side of the mountain.

The house was a simple wood bungalow that could have been built at any time in the last seventy years. The front door of the house was closed, and drapes covered the windows.

When Pax was a boy, well before the Changes, the house had been a run-down rental inhabited by a succession of nearly identical poor white families: rarely seen except for their dogs forever trotting into traffic. Jo, however, had fixed the place up as well as could be expected. The canary paint and green trim looked only a couple years old. There were flowerbeds along the front and a pair of dogwood trees at each corner.

A huge oak rose up behind the house, its full limbs spread protectively over the roof.

“Coming?” Deke said.

Pax looked away from the tree. “Sure. Yeah.”

They walked around the side of the house. The backyard was just a strip of land before the wave of the mountain. The oak stood sentry between the house and the start of the forest.

The branch where she’d hung herself was very high, about fifteen feet in the air. The rope had been there a long time, its loops deeply incised into the bark. The stub end was frayed where they’d cut her down.

“Jesus,” Pax said. He tried to imagine the strength of will it would take to hang yourself.

“The girls found her that morning,” Deke said. “They called nine-one-one.”

“That’s awful.” Pax breathed deep and looked away. A dozen feet from the tree lay the truck tire that had been the swing. “Was she upset about something? Was she depressed?”

“She’s had a tough couple years,” Deke said.

“So tough Jo couldn’t handle it?”

Deke worked his lips. “I don’t know, P.K. She was taking some medication for depression, but that was months ago. She had an operation. Hysterectomy. Dr. Fraelich—she works at the clinic—said it’s normal to experience mood shifts after something like that.”

“Normal for who?”

Deke nodded, conceding the point. Who knew what was normal for a beta?

Pax stepped toward the tree. He ran his hand across the rough bark. After a time he said, “My last night in town, we had a big fight.”

Behind him, Deke said nothing.

“She told me I didn’t have to leave. She said I didn’t have to listen to my dad, I could live with her.”

“The Reverend Martin would have liked that,” Deke said.

“She was never afraid of him like I was. She said I was being a coward. I was abandoning the baby.”

“Well, they weren’t yours. Or mine.”

“But we didn’t know that at the time.”

“Pax …”

“It was a test. You stayed. I ran.”

“Pax, come on. Look at me.”

Pax turned. Deke had squatted down so that they were eye level. “You were a kid,” he said. “We were all kids. None of us knew anything.”

It was true they were ignorant. They didn’t know that the baby she was carrying was actually two girls. They didn’t know that betas didn’t need anyone else to make a baby, that fetuses simply arrived, like new symptoms. The scientists wouldn’t figure that out for a couple years after Pax left town.

But Pax knew one thing, even then. Jo was right. He was a coward.

Pax walked back toward the house, turned, and looked up at the branch, the rope. “You don’t think she did this to herself,” he said.

After a moment, Deke said, “No.”

“Then who?”

Deke shook his head. “Nobody knows. Maybe it was outsiders. People from Lambert.” He didn’t sound like he believed it. The riots were over ten years ago.

“Outsiders who knew her well enough to hate her specifically?” Pax asked.

“They don’t have to know us to hate us. They just have to look at us.”

“What about Tommy?”

Deke looked back at him, frowning. “What about him?”

“What is he? Rhonda said he was a husband, but not a husband. Were they married?”

“They had an arrangement. For the kids.” He breathed out. “It’s a beta thing.”

“Did they get along?”

“Tommy didn’t live with them anymore,” Deke said. He rose up to full height. “Not since Jo moved out here.” He looked down and saw Paxton’s look. “There was some trouble with the Co-op,” he said. “With the other betas. You know how Jo could be. She was stubborn. So she left or they kicked her out, depending who you ask. Tommy stayed with the Co-op, and Jo moved here with the girls.”

“Are they investigating him?”

“Jesus, Pax, they’re not investigating anybody that I know of. Listen, I’m going to a meeting with the sheriff and the DA on Monday. If you’re still here then I’ll be sure to tell you what they say.”

Ah. There it was. Deke finally taking a poke at him.

“I can’t stay,” Pax said. “I’ve got to be back to work by Monday. In fact, I should probably drive back tonight.”

“Tonight.”

“Tomorrow morning at the latest. If you could drive me back to my car—”

“You’re not going to go see your dad?”

Pax opened his mouth, closed it. “Listen, my dad doesn’t want to see me.”

“You need to see him,” Deke said. “He’s not doing so well. The charlies—the old men anyway—things get worse as they get older.”

He had no clue what Deke was talking about. There weren’t any old charlie men when Pax left town; his father was one of the oldest who came through TDS-C alive, and he’d only been fifty.

Deke said, “I don’t think your dad’s leaving the house much.”

“Deke, he hasn’t called me or wrote me in twelve years.” Pax didn’t mention that he hadn’t tried either.

Deke put his big hand on Paxton’s shoulder. “Then you’re about due.”

They left Jo Lynn’s house, heading west until the road angled north and crossed the creek at the single-lane bridge. Some of the graffiti on the cement walls had been there since Pax was a kid. Deke turned onto Piney Road. They’d almost made a complete circle since leaving the church.

The house where Paxton grew up was a little three-bedroom ranch surrounded by trees. Paxton’s father’s car, a Ford Crown Victoria that was fifteen years old before Pax even left town, was parked in front in its usual spot. It looked like it hadn’t moved in years. The tires looked low, and leaves were shellacked to the body and windows by sap and dirt.

Deke pulled up behind the Crown Vic and stopped, shut off the engine.

Pax made no move to get out. His ears felt warm in the sudden lack of wind.

The picture window drapes were closed. The white siding had grayed, begun to flake. The screen door hung open, but the wooden front door was closed. The grass on the lawn stood a foot tall, the tips sprouting seed.

Deke said, “Some ladies from the church bring food by, but he throws them out before they can do anything else for him.”

“Really?” Pax couldn’t picture his father being rude to church folk, especially women.

“And Rhonda’s got some chub boys who come by every once in awhile. Mow the lawn, check in on him.”

“Chub boys?”

“Charlies. ‘Chub’ is just …” He shrugged.

“I get it,” Pax said. And thought, I bet you don’t call them that to their faces. “Anyway, it looks like they haven’t been around for a while.”

Pax climbed out of the Jeep. He stood there, holding on to the door, looking at the house.

“You want me to go in with you?” Deke said.

“No, no, you don’t have to do that.”

Pax walked across the lawn to the front porch and knocked. He was eye level with the small, diamond-shaped window set in the door. After a minute he cupped his eyes and peered through the smudged glass. He could make out a patch of familiar wall, then nothing but shadows. He tried the doorknob—locked—and knocked again, louder.

Something glinted in the grass beside the cement step. He crouched to pick it up: a syringe and needle, the tube empty. What the hell? He stood to show it to Deke. The man’s head stuck up over the Jeep’s roll bars like a giraffe’s. He squinted to see what it was, then shrugged.

Pax had no idea what that shrug meant. He set the syringe on the porch where he could find it later.

He walked around the corner of the house, stepping carefully through the high grass, wary of hidden needles. The side window for his parents’ bedroom was filled by a silent air conditioner; the glazed bathroom window next to it was closed and dark.

Behind the house, the backyard had shrunk from the advancement of the brush line. The rusting frame of his old swing set leaned out of the shrubs. Farther back, the low, cinderblock well house—made obsolete by the sewer and water lines added in the ’80s—sat almost buried in the undergrowth like a Civil War fortification.

The door to the back porch was unlocked. Pax went through it, to the kitchen door. He knocked once and turned the knob. The door swung open with a squeak.

“Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Dad.” The air smelled sickly sweet and fungal, a jungle smell. “It’s Paxton,” he added stupidly. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a TV.

The kitchen was as he remembered it, though dirtier than his mother would ever have allowed. Dirtier even than his father had kept it when it was just him and Paxton living here during the year of the quarantine. The garbage can overflowed with paper and scraps. Dishes sat in the sink. In the center of the breakfast table was a white ceramic casserole dish, the aluminum foil peeled back. From somewhere near the front of the house came the low murmur of television voices.

Pax made his way through the dining room, dusty and preserved as an unvisited exhibit, to the living room, where he found his father.

The Reverend Harlan Martin had a firm idea of what a pastor should look like, and it began with the hair. Each morning after his shower, he’d carefully comb back the wet strands from his forehead and spray everything down with his wife’s Alberto VO 5, clouding the bathroom. Sunday required extra coats, enough hairspray to preserve his appearance through a fire-and-brimstone sermon, a potluck dinner, a visitation or two, and an evening service. His Sunday hair was as shiny and durable as a Greek helmet.

As a child, Pax loved when the hair was down, as when his father slept late and came to the breakfast table unshowered, pushing the long bangs out of his face like a disheveled Elvis. Like now.

His father sat sprawled on the couch, head back and mouth open, eyes closed. His dark hair, longer than Pax had ever seen it, hung along the sides of his wide face to his jaw.

“Dad?” Pax said. The atmosphere in the room was hot and unbearably humid, despite the ceiling fan turning above, the air heavy with a strange odor like rotting fruit. He took a step forward. “Dad?”

His body spread across most of the three cushions. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe half closed over a white T-shirt, and black socks stretched over broad feet. His face was deeply cratered, the skin flaking and loose.

His father’s chest moved. A whistling wheeze escaped his mouth.

Okay, Pax thought. Alive, then.

The coffee table and chairs had been pushed to the walls, leaving a wide space with a clear view of the television’s flickering screen. The television abruptly became louder—an ad—and Pax flicked off the set.

His father suddenly lifted his head, turned to glare at Pax. His eyes were glassy, the lids crusted with sleep matter.

“Out,” his father said, his voice garbled by phlegm. He coughed, and raised a wide hand to his mouth. The arm was as pockmarked as his face. He pointed past Paxton’s shoulder. “Out of my house!” He still had it: the Preacher Voice.

“Dad, it’s me, Paxton.” He crouched down next to his father, and winced at the smell of him. He couldn’t tell if the man was delirious or simply confused by sleep. Did charlie men grow demented early? “It’s your son.”

The huge man blinked at him. “Paxton?” he said warily. Then: “It’s you.”

Pax gripped his father’s hand. “How you doing, Dad?”

“My prodigal son,” his father said.

“The only kind you’ve got.” Pax tried to let go, but his father squeezed harder.

“Who called you? Rhonda?”

“I came for the funeral, Dad. Jo Lynn’s funeral.” Pax extricated his hand and stood. He was surprised to feel something oily on his palm, and rubbed his hand dry on the back of his pants. “You mind if I open some windows?”

“She wants me. Wants to milk me like a cow. You can’t be here.”

Pax unlocked the front door and pulled it open. Deke stood by the Jeep, elbows resting on the roll bar, smoking a cigar that looked as small as a cigarette in his big fingers. He turned at the sound of the door, and Pax held up a hand to tell him everything was okay.

Though of course everything was not okay.

His father’s body, huge as it was, looked like a bag to hold an even larger man. The skin hung loose at his neck and cheeks, and now beads of sweat appeared along his brow.

“You’ve got to leave,” his father said, but his tone was no longer firm.

Pax wondered how long it had been since his father last ate. Could he even move? Pax pulled open the big front drapes and fought down a wave of dizziness. The air in the room was too close, too fetid. The sickly sweet odor had blossomed, become suffocating.

His father’s face shone with sweat, as if breaking a fever. A water blister had appeared on his cheek, as large as a walnut, the skin so tight it was almost translucent. Pax stared at it in horror.

“Oh,” his father said softly. “Oh, Lord.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“You took me by surprise,” he said. He looked up, smiled faintly. His eyes were wet. Two more blisters had appeared at his neck. They seemed to expand as Pax watched. “You better leave now.”

Pax turned toward the door, lost his balance, and caught himself. At the front door he braced himself against the frame, and the wood seemed hot under his right hand.

“Deke!” Pax called. Deke and the Jeep swam in and out of focus. “Call Nine-one-one!”

Keeping a hand against the wall to steady himself, he made his way back to the couch. Stains the color of pink lemonade had appeared on his father’s T-shirt.

His father looked up at him with half-closed eyes. “Paxton Abel Martin.” He said the name with a slow drawl, almost singing it, in a voice Pax hadn’t heard in a long time. He had a sudden memory of being carried up the church stairs in the dark—he must have been four or five—held close in his father’s arms.

Pax kneeled in front of him. The rich, fruity smell enveloped him. Pax gently pushed the robe farther open and began to lift the T-shirt. Blisters had erupted over the skin of his belly: tiny pimples; white-capped pebbles; glossy, egg-sized sacs. The largest pouches wept pink-tinged serum.

“Oh Jesus, Dad.” Pax bunched the edge of the T-shirt and tried to cover one of the open sores, but the oily liquid soaked through and slicked his fingers. “Dad, we’ve got to get you—get…”

His fingers burned, but not painfully. He looked at his hand, rubbed the substance between his fingers. Slowly his gaze turned to his father, and their eyes locked.

There you are, Pax thought. There, waiting underneath the sagging flesh, the mounds of pitted and pocked skin: the man who had carried him up the stairs. Relief flooded through him. What if they’d been lost forever? Pax and his bloated father were here, in this stinking room, and they were also Harlan Martin and his four-year-old son, climbing out of the church basement after a long Sunday-night service. He felt himself being carried, and at the same time felt the weight of the boy in his arms.

And then Pax was off his feet, an arm across his chest hauling him backward, heels dragging. Big hands carried him through the door and dumped him on the lawn.

“Don’t touch your mouth,” Deke said. “Or your eyes.”

Pax raised his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m not—” He tried to sit up, but the world slipped sideways, and he fell back again into the long grass. “Shit.”

“Just lay there,” Deke said.

Through half-lidded eyes he stared at a crack in the sky. He slowly fanned his arms and legs, making angels in the grass.

———

Sometime later he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel, the slam of car doors. Huge figures hove into his peripheral vision: two young men in tank tops, arms like cartoon bodybuilders. Chub boys. One of them looked at him and shook his head, frowning. Pax saw the little diamond in his ear and remembered him from the church basement. The other one, younger with blond spiky hair, snapped the wrist of his latex glove and said, “Gotta use protection, son.” He laughed.

Deke’s voice rumbled like distant thunder—Pax couldn’t turn the sound into words—and one of the charlies answered respectfully, “Sorry, Chief.”

A minute passed, maybe longer, and then a hand reached down out of the sky and hoisted Paxton upright. Deke. The big man helped him to the Jeep and set him down in the passenger seat. Pax just managed to stay upright as Deke turned the vehicle around and got them back on the highway. The air felt good on his face.

“Sorry, man,” Deke said. “I thought he was dry. Rhonda told me he was dry.”

Dry? Pax didn’t know what he meant. He wanted to ask why the chub boys had come, and what they were doing to his father, what the fuck was happening—but the questions failed to arrive at his lips. His thoughts refused to stay in order. He bounced along silently as Deke drove back into town, past the Gas-n-Go and the First Baptist Church, onto High Street where a row of houses overlooked the creek. When he was a kid, the only people who’d lived down here were the rich folks.

Deke parked in front of a two-story house, brick on the bottom and wood siding on top, a traditional ranch with the roof raised ten feet.

“Can you walk?” Deke said.

Pax slowly opened the door and thought, Can I walk? He put a foot down on the cement driveway. He hadn’t noticed before how all the driveways up north were paved with asphalt, but down here they were all cement.

“P.K., you want me to help?”

Pax lifted a hand and stepped down. When the surface refrained from tilting beneath his feet he followed Deke up to a tall, narrow door. Inside, the living room was as airy as a church sanctuary. Light poured through the row of new, high windows that had been set above the old walls. The furniture was all polished oak, all argo-sized.

Donna came out of a back room and looked at Paxton. “What happened?”

“Is the guest room made up yet?” Deke asked. “He needs to lay down.”

At the end of a hallway was a room painted bright orange and white—University of Tennessee colors. The bed filled up most of the space. Twelve feet long and eight feet wide, practically a playing field in its own right, covered by a UT Volunteers bedspread. He couldn’t guess where they’d gotten a mattress for it.

“Go Vols,” Pax said. It was the first thing he’d been able to say aloud since leaving his father’s. “My dad …,” he said.

“Your dad’s going to be fine. Just lay down, P.K. If you need to throw up, there’s a bathroom next door.”

Deke left the door ajar when he stepped out. Pax lay on his back and breathed deep. The ceiling fan hung high, high above him, the blades turning slowly.

The blades slowed, came to a stop. Then the room began to turn.

He gripped the bed and closed his eyes.

The day the Changes started, they were riding Pax’s fire-engine red Yamaha four-wheeler, ripping up and down the gullies behind Deke’s place. It was the second week of July, a few weeks after Paxton’s fourteenth birthday, 90 or 95 degrees. They didn’t hear the siren until Pax shut off the engine to give Deke a turn. It didn’t sound like a cop car or a fire truck. Had to be an ambulance, though ambulances didn’t come up to Switchcreek much. Deke, scrawnier and a head shorter than Paxton, hopped on the back of the ATV and put his arms around P.K.’s waist.

When they reached the road Deke hopped off to listen—that way!—and they drove a quarter mile until they saw the ambulance parked in the driveway and two EMTs walking up the steps to the house. Jo Lynn’s house.

Pax didn’t remember getting off the ATV, or walking into the house. He didn’t remember seeing another car in the driveway, though his dad’s Crown Vic must have been there, because his mother was in the living room, her arms around Jo Lynn’s shoulders. Jo had called her right after she dialed 911.

The EMTs were in the back bedroom, where Jo’s mother lay. Agatha Whitehall had run a fever for days, Pax learned later. Jo Lynn hadn’t been home that week, hadn’t even known her mother was sick; Agatha and Jo hadn’t gotten along for years, and lately Jo lived mostly at Paxton’s house. It was only because she’d gone home to retrieve more clothes that she found Agatha screaming. Her head was going to explode, Agatha said. Her bones were on fire.

When they wheeled her body into the living room, Paxton’s mother turned Jo’s face away and pressed the girl to her, smoothing her hair and shushing her. She was the only one who could hold Jo like that.

The sheet didn’t quite cover Agatha. She lay on her side, legs bent, white knees poking out. As they wheeled her to the doorway one of the EMTs leaned across her body to lift her knees out of the way while his partner backed the gurney out. The wheels dropped onto the second step with a clank, and the sheet slipped from her face.

Agatha hadn’t been a beautiful woman. Too much like a naked bird: wiry body, hawk nose, a pinched, smoker’s mouth. Now her skin was salt white, the new skull and jaw stretched into a permanent scream. Blood soaked her nightgown where the growth of the new bones had outpaced her skin.

The first wave of transformations and near-transformations would follow the course Agatha had set. First fever, then the parched skin like dried clay. After a couple days the bones would begin to stretch and rearrange, the body churning all available fat and protein into new growth, sometimes two inches a day. They’d call it Argillaceous Osteoblastoma, but that designation would be made obsolete a couple weeks later when the beta transformations began. In late August the symptoms would morph again, and all the victims would be charlies.

Argos, betas, charlies. Those names hadn’t been in use yet, of course. Only at the end of the summer, after the Changes halted as suddenly as they began, would the scientists and newspeople settle on Transcription Divergence Syndrome. TDS-A, then B and C.

The EMTs tugged the sheet back over Agatha’s face and carried her to the ambulance. Deke and Pax were too stunned to talk. “Shee-it,” Deke whispered.

In a week the same change would be coming for him.

“I got hit by this wave of, of emotion,” Pax said. He sat across from Deke at his kitchen table, elevated on a barstool they probably kept around just for visitors his size. “I looked at my father and I just felt…”

What? Love, or something like it. Connection. The eggshell had cracked open, and for a moment everything had run together; he’d forgotten who was Paxton and who was Harlan. The feeling was exhilarating and suffocating at once. A child’s emotion: love indistinguishable from total immersion.

Pax shook his head, laughed to cover his embarrassment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was very weird.” He rolled a near-empty Coke bottle between his hands. He’d slept for nearly four hours and woken up thirsty. Even now he was still deeply freaked out.

“I’m so sorry,” Deke said.

Pax smiled. “You can stop saying that now.”

“Your daddy’s stuff must be pretty strong,” Donna said. She stood at the counter, chopping green onions and red peppers and scraping them into a huge stainless steel bowl. “It hit you pretty hard.”

Pax laughed. He couldn’t help it. She was chopping vegetables and talking about this … stuff that was oozing out of his father’s body as if it were no stronger than an extra-strong shot of whiskey.

“So this has happened before, then?” Pax asked. “Not just with my dad?”

“It happens with all of the charlie men,” Deke said. “The old ones, anyway. There’s only about twelve of them in town. But your dad, I’d been told he was dry. He hadn’t … produced like that before.”

“Produced,” Pax said flatly. She wants to milk me like a cow. “Produce what?”

Deke shrugged. “Nobody knows what it is,” he said.

Donna said, “The charlies call it the vintage. Usually only the younger charlie boys handle the old men, they don’t seem to be as affected.”

“Though even they use gloves when they’re siphoning,” Deke said. “Good thing you didn’t swallow any. Usually a touch doesn’t do much. When I got some on me—”

“Wait a minute,” Pax said.

“—I just got a little nauseous. But your daddy’s stuff really knocked you on your ass.”

“Wait—they’re sucking this stuff out of him?” He didn’t try to hide his disgust. He looked from Deke to Donna, then back to Deke. “You’re shitting me.”

Deke looked uncomfortable. “The old men can’t carry the vintage around with them,” he said. “Makes ’em crazy. You got to get it out of their bodies or they, I don’t know, overdose on it.”

Pax shook his head. “So the boys take it. And then what do they do with it?”

Deke looked at Donna. She shrugged.

“What, damn it?” Pax said.

Deke said, “It’s some sex thing. Rhonda sells it to the chub boys. And the chub boys take it because they think the stuff has some effect on the girls.”

“You’re shitting me,” Pax said again.

Deke started to smile, but then seemed to recognize that Pax was starting to panic. “I don’t know. Rhonda’s probably selling ’em a bill of goods. Does it matter? Let ’em do what they want—it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“Not you, maybe. Me, I got knocked on my ass. I could have overdosed. You didn’t even call Nine-one-one, you called them, those chub boys.”

“Come on, Pax,” Deke said. “They know how to handle it. Call the paramedics, they’d try to check your dad into a hospital.” He turned over one big palm. “It’s clade business. A charlie thing.”

“Like hell it is. This is a father thing.”

“And you’re his son, now?”

Pax sat back from the table. He thought about saying, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” But he knew what he meant. Pax hadn’t called his father in years. He hadn’t planned to come back to Switchcreek until the old man’s funeral. He just never planned on the wrong person dying.

Pax stood. “You know better than anyone, Deke. He sent me away.”

“Where are you going?” Deke said.

“Just take me to my car.” He turned toward the door. His head still felt light from the dose, but he could move fine. Mostly fine.

“Come on, P.K.,” Deke said. “You can’t just walk away every time you—”

“Cut this out, both of you!” Donna said.

Pax blinked at her. Deke started to open his mouth and she shushed him.

“We’re all going to sit down and eat dinner,” she said. “Whether you like it or not.”

The two men sat back down. When she turned back to chopping the vegetables, Pax raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t piss off an argo woman holding a knife,” Deke said quietly, but of course his voice carried through the house.

Pax said, “We’re not done talking about this chub thing.”

“Didn’t think so,” Deke said.