The Devil's Alphabet (20 page)

He slid to a stop after ten or twelve feet. He pressed his face into the grass and lay there, breathing.

Then he saw the lights.

Fuck, he thought. Fuckity fuck fuck.

A pair of headlights snaked up the drive. The lights disappeared for a moment behind the bulk of the hill, then reappeared, higher and closer. The underside of the car glowed neon green, and he could hear the thump of bass from its stereo.

The car stopped not quite up the hill. A spotlight switched on from the passenger side, and the light illuminated his Ford Tempo. After a few seconds the glowing car rolled forward and he lost sight of it again.

Pax rose to hands and knees and started crawling to his left, toward the driveway. A minute later he could see the glowing car again, stopped in front of the gate. The stereo had switched off. The spotlight played over the grass near the wall. Pax dropped low and began crawling backward. If he could drop down about fifty yards he could cut across to his car and get the hell out of here.

The light suddenly hit him in the face. Voices burst out in laughter.

“Hey there, Cuz!” someone called.

The slope here was less extreme. He got to his feet, wincing into the light. He made his way back to the gate, supporting himself with one hand against the wall. His elbow still buzzed with pain.

Two chub boys stood in front of a metallic green Toyota Camry. Two chub girls in the backseat laughed nervously.

“Hi, Clete,” Pax said. He couldn’t remember the name of the younger boy, the one holding the spotlight. Something like “Elvis,” or maybe he thought that just because of the sideburns.

“What the hell you doing out here?” Clete asked. “You’re liable to get shot, sneaking around in the dark.”

“People might think you’re a pervert,” the other one said.
Travis
, that was his name.

Pax reached the edge of the driveway. His hands were shaking, and he felt ready to throw up. The girls in the backseat stared at him. The red-haired one was Doreen, the nurse who’d washed him at the clinic.

“I’m just going to go home,” Pax said. From this close, the boys smelled of vintage, but vintage with a strange tang to it—nothing like his father’s scent.

Clete said, “That’s good. That’s why they called us, to take you home. Before they shot your ass.”

Travis aimed that light into his face. “It’s kind of a last-chance taxi service.”

Pax said, “Look, my car’s right down there. I’ll drive home, and you can tell Rhonda that I’ll—”

The punch seemed to come out of nowhere. Pax hit the ground. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. His nose burned.

“I have to ask you,” Clete said. He picked up Pax under his arms and lifted him easily. Pax’s knees threatened to give out, but Clete steadied him. “What the hell was your plan? Carry your six-hundred-pound daddy down the hill by yourself?”

“Clete, listen …” Pax said.

“No, push him down the driveway in his hospital bed,” Travis said, laughing. “Get up to like sixty mile an hour, until he hits that first curve, then
air
borne!”

“UFO!” Clete said. “Unidentified Fat Object.”

Inside the car the chub girls whooped with laughter.

Pax gripped Clete’s forearms. “I know people in Chicago.
This is an incredible drug. You help me get him out, and I can help you, help you sell it.”

“Really?” Clete said. “This stuff really got to you, huh?”

“UFO,” Travis said, still laughing. “You kill me, man.”

Clete said, “I gotta admit, your daddy makes some of the finest vintage I ever smelled. I’d love to try some on Doreen.”

“Rhonda doesn’t have to keep all this to herself,” Pax said. “You could sell it.”

Clete nodded. “I hear you, Cuz, I hear you. But right now?” He shrugged. “Right now I got to beat the living shit out of you.”

D
EKE KNOCKED ON
the back door of the clinic, waited half a minute, knocked again. The door opened and he said, “Hey, Marla.”

“We’re closed on Sundays,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“I saw your car,” he said.

He stooped to get under the doorway, then followed Marla to her office. “So did you look at them?” he asked.

She sat at her desk and opened one of the drawers. She took out the plastic bag he’d given her when he picked up Paxton. “There’s nothing here I didn’t prescribe for her,” she said. “None of them have been switched.”

“I had to check,” he said. He’d pulled the bottles from Jo Lynn’s medicine cabinet the first day he’d searched her house. The dates on the bottles were months old, and most of them were more than half-full. “It didn’t look like she was using them anyway.”

“That’s because they weren’t working. She kept getting resistant to them. Betas have an amazing immune system.”

“So if she wasn’t taking antidepressants, was she still depressed?”

“I don’t think so,” Marla said. “She got over that too. She seemed fine whenever I talked to her.”

Deke sighed. “Yeah. Me too.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed her two folded pieces of paper. “I want you to read something.” He sat down on the floor, which put him at eye level with her.

She unfolded the pages, then read the top of the first page. “Who are these people?”

“Brother Bewlay’s a screen name Jo was using,” he said. “Weygand is some guy she met online.” Marla looked surprised. “They wrote to each other for almost a year.”

“She never told me that,” Marla said.

Deke frowned. “I was hoping she had.”

When Marla finished reading she said, “How did you get this?”

He told her about Weygand driving down and breaking into Jo’s house. He left out the part about smashing Weygand’s windshield and threatening the man. “Most of it’s trading conspiracy theories about the Changes,” he said. “But this stuff about the young beta women …”

“The white-scarf girls, obviously. She’s making it sound all hypothetical, but it’s them. Weygand seems clueless. Did he even know that
she
was a beta?”

“He said he suspected it,” Deke said. “Though he didn’t know until after the funeral.”

“So they weren’t
that
close,” Marla said.

Deke almost smiled. “No, not that close.” Donna had told him that Marla was in love with Jo Lynn, and he hadn’t believed it, until now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone fell in love with Jo.

Deke said, “So the white-scarf girls, the talk about stoning. I can’t tell if Jo was really afraid of them, or—”

“Not afraid,” Marla said. “She just knew what they were capable of.”

“Are you talking about the effigy?” Deke asked. “Come on, Marla. A fire’s one thing, but murder—”

“You don’t think they wanted me dead?” Marla said. “They tried to torch my house while I was asleep.”

He felt his phone vibrate in his pants pocket but ignored it. Had to be Rhonda again. She’d called him twice already this morning.

“They’re kids,” Deke said. “They got carried away. They weren’t trying to burn down the house.” A straw figure—dressed in a white doctor’s coat with a wooden knife taped to its hand—had been lit and thrown against the wall of Marla’s house. The flames had scorched the paint, little more, before Deke and some of the boys arrived to put the fire out. After Marla threatened to bring in the police, three teenage beta girls, white scarves in place, presented themselves to the reverend. The reverend promised to punish them, and Deke talked Marla into not pressing charges. She’d held that against him ever since.

“It’s one step from bombing a clinic, Deke. You don’t understand these girls. They’re different.”

“Because they don’t have sex? Do you believe this separate species stuff too—the teleportation stuff, the parallel universes, all that?”

“It’s one theory.”

“Jo’s theory,” he said. “That she got from real scientists, right?”

“Yes, there are reputable people who think quantum calculation could explain what happened,” Marla said. “Most of the evidence is circumstantial, though. Statistical. TDS changed the chromosome so completely that they say it’s impossible to see how the new order could arise from the old. It’s like running a dictionary through a leaf shredder and spraying out Hamlet on your front lawn.”

“You’re talking about introns.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading up.”

“I got it from Weygand. Didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Introns are the part of DNA that don’t code for proteins. Because they’re not needed, they can mutate faster than other parts of the DNA where a change in the protein could kill the creature. You can look at intron sequences within proteins to tell small differences between related species, like the differences between humans and chimps. Both may produce the same hemoglobin protein, and their DNA is mostly the same, but the introns are very different. Between the clades, we’ve found differences in every protein sequence we’ve looked at: hemoglobin chains, cytochromes, histones …”

“Really,” Deke said. She wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t heard the smile in his voice.

“So while the sequences are a mystery, there’s no need to invoke quantum weirdness. Most people are looking for a
more realistic, testable mechanism that would cause those changes—a retrovirus, maybe, something small we’ve overlooked. My bet is that it’ll be a variant of something we already know about, maybe a bacterial plasmid we’ve been carrying around dormant for thousands of years—something that’s been unable till now to inject its own set of genetic instructions. See, plasmids can’t usually get out of the cell they’re trapped in, so they require—why are you laughing?”

Deke shook his head, still smiling. “This is what I felt like when I talked to Jo. You guys are just—” He fanned the top of his head. “Whoosh.” He got to his feet.

“You asked,” she said.

Not for all that, he thought, but let it pass.

Marla handed back the bag of bottles and the papers. “How’s Donna doing?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” he said. Then shrugged. “The waiting is hard.”

“Jo Lynn was right about one thing,” Marla said. “Asexual reproduction would be a lot simpler.”

“Amen,” he said.

Rhonda’s Cadillac was parked in front of his shop. He sighed heavily, then pulled in beside the car.

Rhonda stepped out from the passenger side. Everett, behind the wheel, lifted a hand in hello. “I didn’t see you in church,” Rhonda said. “Donna said you were working. I called, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

“I was doing some errands,” Deke said. He unlocked the bay door and pushed it open. “Come on inside.”

He flipped on the main lights and led Rhonda across the
shop floor toward his plastic-draped office area. He planned to put up real walls, but he’d hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Rhonda stopped at the first row of pews. “When you get these done you’ll have no excuse for backsliding,” she said. She rubbed the glossy back of one of the finished pews. “You do beautiful work, Deke. All your boys do.” She looked up at him. “Do you know who the Shakers were?”

“Like Shaker furniture?”

“Your work reminds me of theirs. Do you know why there aren’t any Shakers anymore?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know they were gone.”

“They didn’t believe in sex,” she said. “Not just premarital sex—any kind. That was kind of shortsighted, don’t you think? And they weren’t much good at evangelizing either. So when they started to get old and die off, that was it for the whole religion.” She smiled. “Left behind some beautiful furniture, though.”