The Devil's Alphabet (26 page)

Pax looked up at Rhonda. Her expression was strangely sad.

“Travis?” Clete called in a strangled voice. He bolted for the door. “Travis!” He shouldered Doreen aside and ran through the doorway—and vanished.

Pax had seen nothing but a blur moving in from the right, and then Clete was knocked out of the frame, gone as if he’d been snipped from a film.

Doreen screamed and ran out of the room. Pax followed.

Clete was on his back, Everett on top of him, one hand braced against Clete’s neck, the other clenched into a fist. He struck Clete once, twice. A white tooth shot out of the boy’s mouth like a spitball.

“Paxton!” someone shouted. Barron, tied to his chair twenty feet away, nodded fiercely at the floor. Clete’s pistol lay almost at the guard’s feet. Pax ran for it, moving awkwardly with his arms tied in front of him. He bent to scoop it up and then suddenly he was knocked sideways. He crashed into an end table, fell onto his side. His ribs, still sore from the beating weeks ago, erupted into fresh fire.

Doreen had tackled him. She grabbed the pistol, jumped up, and swung it toward him.

Pax scrambled to his feet. He seemed to hear the gunshot a moment after he ducked. He didn’t know where the bullet went, didn’t know if he was hit.

There was nowhere to hide. Nothing in the lobby but two chairs, a couch, a few potted plants.

Doreen fired again. Pax ran pell-mell for the double doors that led to the patient rooms, wild with the need to escape. The thirty feet to the doors seemed to stretch to the length of a football field. Finally he banged through the doors, and then he was falling against the second set of doors and onto the floor beyond. He hit with his forearms in front of him and pain shot through his elbows.

His father’s room was just ahead, the first door on the right. Pax tried to push himself to his feet, but his arms wouldn’t work. He got his knees under him, then stood and stumbled forward. He dropped his bound arms like a club onto the door’s handle and pushed it open with his shoulder.

His father was sitting up in bed, staring at the television.

Pax pushed the door closed and then leaned against it. “Dad.” His father glanced at him, frowning, and then looked back at the TV. A female announcer said something about a state of emergency.

“Dad
. We have to block the door.”

Over the noise of the TV he thought he heard the sound of another gunshot, but from this distance, through so many doors, he couldn’t be sure.

“Dad! I need you to listen to me.”

His father slowly shook his head. “It’s happening again,” he said.

The handle rattled, and then the door opened a few inches and bumped against the back of the dresser drawer. “It’s okay Paxton,” Aunt Rhonda said, sounding exasperated. “It’s safe to come out now.”

It took him a minute to shove the furniture out of the way. Rhonda came into the room with a paper mask held over her nose. The cuff of her sleeve was stained with dark blood. Her hair was in disarray.

“We aren’t dead, in case you were wondering,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Are
they
?” Pax asked.

“They ought to be.”

“I think you should see what’s on the news,” he said.

He moved out of the way so Rhonda could see the screen. His father said, “It’s bigger this time. A whole city.”

“What’s bigger?” Rhonda asked.

“The Changes,” Pax said.

A
TRIO OF
beta girls stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, pinned in place by cameras and lights and microphones. One of them answered a question while the other two looked on. They didn’t seem to want to speak to the reporters, but they didn’t move away either. They may have been blanks, but they were also teenage Americans; they didn’t know how to say no to television.

Pax stepped off the sidewalk to avoid the clump of media people surrounding them. He’d tried to drive to the clinic, but the downtown streets were packed. He’d been forced to park down on Bank Street, a quarter mile from the center of town. News vans, television trucks, and rental cars lined the street ahead of him; strange faces crowded the sidewalks. All this, just to cover the “local angle.”

Before the Changes, the world had never heard of Switchcreek, Tennessee. And until yesterday, not many more had ever heard of Babahoyo, Ecuador. Now they were sister cities, united in disaster, death, and acts of God. Sodom and Gomorrah separated by two thousand miles and thirteen years.

At least a thousand were dead in Babahoyo, and who knew how many more were stricken. The exact numbers varied by news channel, but every hour the estimates climbed.

After Clete’s botched kidnapping yesterday, Pax had sat in his father’s room for most of the afternoon, watching the news. When he went home that night he kept the TV on, unable to look away: the cameras panning over rows of the sick laid out in hospital beds or across the floors of churches and schools; the close-ups of brown faces bleaching to chalk; the repetitive soundtrack of grunts and moans and cries in Spanish. And then, like a bizarre commercial break, a word from our previous victims, the people of Switchcreek. He saw Rhonda interviewed twice, and no one could have guessed that a few hours before she’d been duct taped to her chair and held at gunpoint. Back in the studios, scientists and special correspondents described the nature of TDS, charted its three variants, predicted that the current wave of TDS-A would give way to strains of B and C, and speculated baldly on the disease’s causes and probable vectors of transmission. It was painfully clear that in thirteen years no one had made much progress in understanding the disease.

The cameras always returned as soon as possible to South America, to shots of Ecuadorians twisting in agony as bone and muscle frantically tried to outrace each other. He wondered if they’d call themselves argos or choose a Spanish name.

He reached the clinic, but the front door was locked. He pressed the doorbell, waited. A plaque next to the door declared the building to be
THE PHILIP MAPES MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER
. Philip had been Rhonda’s husband, if he remembered correctly.

After half a minute he pressed the doorbell again just as a shadow moved behind the glass. He stepped back as Dr. Fraelich worked the keys in the lock and pushed the door open a few inches.

“Is this an emergency, Mr. Martin?”

“Why, are you closed?”

“I’m a little short on staff.” She saw something in his face. “What?”

“Is it Doreen? I was hoping you’d heard from her. Or from Rhonda.”

Dr. Fraelich glanced over his shoulder. “You better come in before the reporters notice. They keep asking for interviews.”

She locked the door behind him, then led him down the hallway.

“I saw you on CNN,” Pax said. “All two seconds.”

“I was hoping no one had seen that.”

“I’ve been watching too much TV,” Pax said. “I couldn’t stop watching. All those people …”

“I thought you looked a little shell-shocked.” She pushed open the office door. The room looked as crowded and messy in daylight as it had that night. He sat on the same chair he’d used before. Dr. Fraelich turned off her computer monitor and sat opposite him, her legs crossed. She wore a wrinkled, French-blue shirt and charcoal slacks. Her black shoes were scuffed at the toe.

“It just seems so much worse than what I remember from the Changes,” Pax said. “Our Changes.”

“It’s a lot more people,” she said.

“Yeah, there’s that. But it’s just that this time I know what’s coming, you know?” He’d seen Deke and Jo and his father transform. He’d watched his mother die. In the space of a few months he’d attended the funerals of dozens of friends and relatives.

“So this is bringing it all back to you. The trauma.”

“What? No.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m not saying it
wasn’t terrible. People in Lambert screaming at us, and then when those boys were murdered … but it didn’t wound me for life or anything. I moved on, even if other people couldn’t let it go. A year after it all I’d still catch my cousins looking at me all misty-eyed—oh, the poor boy from Switchcreek.”

“You sound awfully pissed for a guy who’s over it.”

“Well, yeah. It annoyed me. It wasn’t me they should be sorry for—I came through fine. It was like
they
wanted to feel bad. Like all these reporters, glomming onto us. They want somebody to break down on camera.”

“And clearly that won’t be you,” she said.

He looked up. He could never tell when she was being sarcastic.

“So,” she said. “Doreen. She didn’t make another pass at you, did she?”

“Not exactly,” he said. He told her about Doreen and Clete and Travis grabbing him at home, then attempting to kidnap his father and rob Rhonda. When he got to their ten-point plan Dr. Fraelich stood and moved across the room. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, then picked up a pen.

“Rhonda wouldn’t let that happen,” she said.

“Everett—her driver, bodyguard, whatever he is—stopped them,” Pax said. “Then we were interrupted by the news about Ecuador.”

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Doreen and them? I don’t know. I stayed in my father’s room. Rhonda left to go downtown. When I finally went home, the lobby was cleaned up, there was nobody there but the security guard, Barron.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“I was a little freaked out. I thought … I don’t know what
I thought.” Pax breathed in, then exhaled shakily. “I was hoping you’d heard from Doreen.”

“Damn it.” She went to her desk, took out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m going outside for a minute.”

He followed her out and she didn’t object. They walked around to the side of the building, where a plastic patio table and a couple of chairs were hidden from the highway by a row of bushes. She didn’t sit down. She reached into her pocket and came up with a book of matches. He liked that she carried matches. The smokers he knew—and in the restaurant business, that was pretty much everybody—only used lighters.

“You think she killed them?” he said.

“No,” she said. Then, “Probably not.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You think she could do it. Kill someone.”

“We’re all capable of killing, Paxton.” She lit the cigarette, then waved out the match and flicked it into a small garbage can. “Did you tell the Chief about this?”

“No, I just …” Why hadn’t he called Deke? He should have at least called him. But there was something shameful in having to run to him for protection yet again.
Deke, somebody hurt me! Beat them up now!

Pax shook his head. “I don’t know. Like I said, I was freaked out.”

He tried to decide if he cared if Rhonda had murdered them. Didn’t they deserve it? The three chubs had abducted him, tried to kidnap his father, and held them all at gunpoint. If they’d succeeded in getting Pax and his father to St. Louis it probably would have been only a matter of time until the idiots killed them both—through incompetence if nothing else.

“Explain something to me,” Pax said. He sat on one of the chairs and looked up at her. “The male charlies are the ones
who are tolerant of it. It’s the women who go crazy for it, right? But Rhonda gives it to the males, like payment. She calls it the bonus. Why not just sell it to the girls?”

“It’s complicated, Paxton.”

“Humor me.”

Dr. Fraelich inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke. “Have you ever been in love?”

He blinked. “Probably not.”

“Not even with Jo?”

“I—I don’t know. We were kids. What do you know about me and Jo?”

“How about your parents? You must have loved them when you were small. All children do.”

“Sure.”

“And they loved you. Why? They had no choice. Especially your mother. When she was in labor, a part of her brain was flooded with chemicals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. The same flood occurred every time she nursed you. Other parts of her brain—the areas responsible for cravings, goal-oriented behavior, ecstasy—were also swamped in dopamine. Over time—”

“What does this have to do with the chubs?”

“Chubs
is crude, Paxton. Pay attention. Over time, that association—baby equals pleasure—becomes burned into the brain. There are a couple of structures on each side of the brain called the caudate nuclei, each about the size of a cocktail shrimp. That’s where behaviors get turned into habits, and skills become things that are second nature, not even conscious. With each little hit of baby-ecstasy the brain makes that bond a little more permanent. Your mother’s brain rewired itself to love you—you, specifically. She became addicted. That’s what
bonding is, Paxton. Evolution’s chemical cocktail to make mothers obsessively care for the bundle of next year’s genes.”

“All right, fine,” he said. “So the vintage contains—what? Dopamine? The oxytocin stuff?”

“Not that we’ve found so far. Mostly it’s water and blood and dead cells. But there are also long chains of amino acids we’ve never seen before, and some of those are probably psychotropic. Judging from the way charlie males act, I’d bet money on it.” She shook her head. “We do know that the vintage does something to them. The serum triggers production of testosterone and adrenaline and all kinds of byproducts, including carrier compounds similar to MHC. It’s those carriers the charlie women pick up on—and what triggers the bonding cascade. It’s not a general aphrodisiac; they bond to that particular male. They feel empathy for him, like they’re one person.”