The Devil's Alphabet

twelve, the sound of rain thundering against the tin roof of his mamaw’s house.

He sat up-too fast. After a minute the dizziness passed and he put his feet down on cool linoleum. He shuffled to the wall and flipped on the light. The sandwich and cookie were nowhere to be seen. It was disconcerting to think that people had been coming in and out of the room as he slept.

He opened the door, and the hallway was dark except for a faraway wedge of light-a room with a light on, the door ajar. “Hello?” he called. “Is there a doctor in the house?”

No one answered. He turned back to his room and started looking through the cabinets. Finally he found his clothes, neatly folded on a shelf. His shirt and underwear smelled faintly of bleach. He slowly pulled on his jeans, using a hand against the counter to keep his balance. He left the smock thing on, deciding that the dork poncho look was acceptable under the circumstances.

He padded back into the hallway. Halfway to the lit room he noticed that the dark space to his left was a bathroom. He went in, closed the door behind him. The sound of his piss hitting the bowl seemed obnoxiously loud. On the wall was a poster, “Four Facts on Transcription Divergence Syndrome.” The target audience seemed to be frightened people who didn’t live in Switchcreek. The four facts amounted to: You can’t catch it, It only happened once, You can’t catch it, and it won’t happen again… probably.

Did we mention that you can’t catch it?

Except that was a lie-you could catch it, but only from your parents. TDS permanently rewrote your DNA, and children born to the changed were as fucked up as their parents. More, evidently-those second-generation beta children looked more alien than Jo ever had. The world was only going to get stranger.

He switched off the bathroom light and went into the hallway. Instead of returning to his room he walked toward the wedge of light. “Hel-loo,” he said again.

He knocked once on the door, pushing it open farther, and stepped inside. There was no one in the room. The desk nearest him was stacked high with multicolored paper and brown accordion folders. Opposite was another desk with an open laptop upon it, the screen showing some kind of application.

He picked up one of the packets lying on the desk. The top page was titled “IRB Human Subjects Consent Form,” with a much-photocopied logo of the University of Tennessee in the corner. Under “Project Description” it said, “The effects of diet upon blood glucose and protein production in subjects with TDS-C.” He flipped through the pages in the packet. They were all identical except for the names of the participants and their signatures. He saw a name he recognized: Cletus Pritchard, the young cuz who’d been watching his father’s house. Was this the research project Rhonda was using the vintage for? He looked at pages on the tops of the other piles, but he didn’t start going through stacks. He didn’t want to make it obvious he’d been rummaging around. He set the packet down where he’d found it. The walls were lined with filing cabinets. The drawers were all closed, but there were short stacks of files on top of each of them. The office of an organized person whose control had begun to slip.

He sat on one of the cheap task chairs, strangely winded. He should probably go back to his room and try to sleep again.

The laptop screen showed an overcrowded data-entry form, full of tabs and drop-down lists. It looked like some kind of billing or insurance program. The currently selected patient was “Hooke, Elsa L.” Reverend Hooke, he wondered, or a relative? Before he could lean closer the screen blanked; a moment later a blue cube appeared and began to bounce around the edges.

That’s weird, he thought. Why would the screen saver come on in the middle of the night? He tapped the space bar and the form came back.

Somewhere in the building a door clanked open. Pax jerked upright, turned toward the door. Well shit, he thought. Hard clacking steps came down the hallway. Pax moved toward the door, stepped back. He put his hands by his sides. Act natural, he thought.

Dr. Fraelich walked into the room, her eyes down as she tucked something into her pants pocket.

“Hi there,” Pax said.

The woman seemed to leap without leaving her feet. Her hands went up and she grunted like she’d been punched. “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was just, I had to pee-”

“What are you doing in my office?”

“I saw the light on. I called out; I didn’t think anybody was here.”

She looked around at the papers on the desk, the screen of the laptop. “Have you been looking at my files? These are confidential.”

“No! I mean, yes, I saw them, but I wasn’t reading them.”

She pushed past him and snapped down the lid of the laptop. “You need to go back to your room, Mr. Martin. Obviously you’re feeling better.”

“Hey, have you been smoking?” he asked.

She stared at him. Her hair was down around her shoulders, and she seemed younger, less imposing. It was that Sexy Librarian trick women could do. He wasn’t attracted to her-he wasn’t attracted to most women, or most men either-but he could see now how someone could be. Theoretical sex appeal.

He said, “I haven’t smoked in eighteen months, but I could really use one right now.”

“I’m not giving a patient under my care a cigarette.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“Out, Mr. Martin.”

“Wait, what are you doing here so late? It’s like, what, two in the morning?”

She looked at her watch. “Three-thirty. I’m working.”

“You’re here to watch me?”

“That’s part of it. But I often do paperwork at night. I don’t need much sleep.”

“I guess not.” He was conscious of his dork smock, his bare feet, his greasy hair. He nodded at the stacks on top of the cabinets. “You want me to help? I could file those. No, probably not. Confidentiality.”

“Why are you still here?”

“I don’t think the dopamine crash has happened yet. I’m achy, but mentally I’m kind of wired. Maybe this is what it feels like right before you slide off the cliff.”

“I should have left you tied up,” Dr. Fraelich said. She sat at the desk and began moving stacks of paper to the side of the desk farthest from him.

He sat down on a chair. “So all these forms, you’re kind of in charge of these research studies?”

“I’m just the field administrator. I help them collect their data.”

“I kind of expected more scientists to be living in town,” he said. “When I was a kid, right after the Changes, there were doctors and scientists all over the place.”

“You don’t need to live in Chernobyl to study radiation poisoning,” she said.

“Is that what you think? It was radiation?”

“That was a metaphor, Mr. Martin.”

“Please stop calling me that. It’s Pax. And you are?”

“Dr. Fraelich.”

He laughed, hurting his throat. “You know, you’re not very warm for a doctor.”

“Have you met any doctors?”

He laughed again, and she looked away. Had he gotten her to smile? Not quite. But he’d come close.

“Okay, so what caused it?” Pax asked. “The Changes. I’m a little out of touch with the latest theories.”

“You all are,” she said. In the newly cleared space in front of her she rolled a pen under her palm. “The people in Switchcreek seem so incurious about what happened. I just don’t understand it. You’re in the middle of one of the great scientific mysteries of the century and all of you act as if the Changes were, I don’t know, a hurricane or something. Bad weather. An act of God.”

“What are we supposed to do? We’re not scientists,” he said. “And they couldn’t tell us how it happened anyway. Sure looked like an act of God. So we just went on with our lives.”

“You don’t have to be scientists to show some interest,” she said. “TDS is a completely new class of disease-a cancer that’s not just trying to replicate its own cells, but hijack the transcription process to rewrite an entire genome, while keeping the host alive. Not just alive, but healthy. Hox genes start spitting out new instructions,