The Devil's Alphabet (3 page)

The girls stared at him.

“I bet they’d like to hear those,” Tommy said. “Come by the Co-op and we can talk about her. Before you leave.”

Pax hesitated. Co-op? “I’d like that,” he said. “I’m not sure if I can, though—I have to see how my father’s doing. But if I can get away …”

Tommy looked at him. “If you can spare the time,” he said in that soft voice. He smiled tightly and turned away. The girls regarded Paxton for a long moment and then followed Tommy across the room.

Pax exhaled heavily. “Man,” he said.

Donna said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s just those girls.” He shook his head. “I know Jo loved them. She did, right?” Before they could answer he said, “Never mind, stupid question. It’s just that I can’t believe she’d leave them.”

There was an awkward silence, and he looked up at the argos. Deke was frowning, and Donna wore a strangely fierce expression.

“She wouldn’t,” Donna said.

He looked from Donna to Deke, back again. He could see it in their faces. “You don’t think she killed herself?”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Deke shook his head. “It’s just a feeling,” he said.

“Show me,” Pax said to him. “Show me where it happened.”

T
HEY 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.”