The Devil's Alphabet

soda from Clete’s van. A big plastic bag in the corner held the garbage.

Doreen Stillwater sat on the floor on a rolled-out sleeping bag looking as miserable as a wet dog, an image aided by the six feet of heavy-gauge chain that connected her left ankle to the frame of the old couch. The girl perked up when she saw Deke. “Chief! Thank God! You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing to us!”

“Give it a rest, Doreen,” Everett said.

Deke squatted on his haunches to get a closer look at Doreen’s face. Her cheeks were streaked with mascara, but the girl was unbruised.

“Fortunately for her,” Rhonda said, “she gave up without a fight.”

Doreen gripped Deke’s hand. “They’re keeping us prisoner, Chief, and they won’t let me see Clete!” Her voice had risen into a whine. “He’s right down the hallway, and they won’t even let me talk to him! This is illegal, Chief.”

“I swear,” Everett said quietly. “I’m just gonna shoot myself.”

Deke extracted his hand. He looked at Rhonda. “And Travis?”

“He’s dead!” Doreen said. “Everett shot him!”

Deke grimaced. “Jesus, Rhonda-”

“It happened during the robbery,” Rhonda said.

Deke turned to Everett. “Is this true? You shot him?”

Everett moved his fingers in a suggestion of an apology: What can you do?

“Pure self-defense,” Rhonda said. “It was Travis’ own gun.”

For half a minute or more Deke didn’t seem to know where to look. Then he said, “Show me Clete.”

“Take me with you!” Doreen cried.

Rhonda led him back to the bedroom where they’d found Willie Flint. The room smelled dank and animal-like, though it was the merest echo of the stink of ten years ago.

Clete was laid out on one of the double beds, both wrists chained to the bed frame. The boy’s head, which had always been large, seemed twice its normal size. Purple bruises had inflated his cheeks so that his eyes were almost shut. His bloody T-shirt was pasted to his chest. His mouth hung open, issuing a gargled wheeze with each breath.

“Most of that blood was from his nose and mouth,” Rhonda explained.

Deke stared at her. “Oh, that’s okay then,” he said.

“And don’t worry, he’s not sleeping all the time. He can walk, when he’s motivated. Everett wakes him to pee and drink. He’s not too good with solids, right now, but he’ll get there.”

Deke was silent for a long moment. He was bent under the ceiling like an adult in a child’s playhouse. Rhonda thought, for perhaps the thousandth time, that that had to be mighty tiring.

“Damn it, Rhonda, you should have just called the police.” Deke had dropped his voice, but in this tiny house it would be impossible not to hear that low rumble. “Even with Travis, it’s an open-and-shut case. They broke in, Everett defended you.”

“I wasn’t worried about winning a trial, for goodness’ sake. I didn’t want what a trial would bring-all the attention on our clade, what we were trying to do at the Home, and Clete talking about his wild theories. We can’t have the whole world thinking our seniors are manufacturing some kind of supernarcotic. Harlan and the others would be marked men, Deke. Marked.”

“But it’s not a narcotic,” Deke said, a question in his voice.

“Not for skips-except maybe for Paxton Martin. Who knows what’s going on with that boy.”

“Either way, you can’t just-” His head bumped the ceiling. “Let’s talk outside,” he said.

As they passed through the front room Doreen got to her feet. “Chief? Chief?” She stepped around Everett and tried to grab the argo’s arm; the chain drew taut and the couch scraped against the floor. “You’re not going to leave us here? Is Clete all right? What are they doing to him?”

Rhonda shut the door behind them. Deke straightened slowly, like a bear rising up on its hind legs. Law, Rhonda thought, an argo would be a scary thing to meet in the dark. And for good reason. She considered herself lucky to have seen early on what one of them-even the most conscientious of them-could do when he lost control. She never forgot it for a second.

After that night at Willie Flint’s, Deke had made self-control his religion, but he was struggling against the design of his own body, and he could never win every battle. Chub boys like Clete and Travis juiced themselves up and went barking after trouble. But for argos, violence was the natural result of their existence in the world. They were shaped for it, like an axe blade, or a jagged slope. Throw yourself against one and you could no more blame the argo for hurting you than blame a mountain.

“What are you going to do, Rhonda?” Deke asked. He loomed over her in the dark. “You can’t just keep them here.”

“Not forever,” Rhonda said. “I just need a couple weeks.”

“What, until the newspeople clear out?”

“It has nothing to do with the new Changes,” she said. “I need to wean them. From each other.”

There was a long pause. Rhonda was annoyed that she couldn’t make out his face.

“How about you explain that,” he said evenly.

“I’m cutting Clete off from the vintage. I’ll tell him that if he stays on good behavior there’s a chance for him to get back on the dole. But that ain’t going to happen.”

“That’s it? That’s your punishment?”

“Well, then we kill him.” She held up a hand before he could respond. “A joke, Deke, just a joke.” Only barely, she thought. She’d indulged a number of daydreams about burying the boy back in the woods next to Travis and Donald Flint. But it was just too risky. Travis’ disappearance was going to be hard enough to explain, and that boy didn’t have hardly any people left. Clete, though, was related to half the town. She still might have managed it if the relations had been all charlies, but a good number were argos and blanks. Too risky. Especially with every reporter in east Tennessee camped out on her doorstep thanks to the Ecuador outbreak.

“Trust me,” she told Deke. “Clete’s going to think that going cold turkey is worse than death. His muscles’ll go soft, the girls will stop paying attention to him. He’ll be neutered. Doreen’ll be off-limits to him, though it won’t be long before she won’t want to have anything to do with him.

“She’s going on probation, too. I haven’t decided how long yet-our clade can’t afford to have a girl out of commission forever-but I’m thinking a year. At least six months. Then I’ll match her to a boy that I pick out.”

A long stretch of silence. Deke finally said, “I didn’t know it worked like that. That you got to just… pick. Decide who falls in love with whom.”

“Well, somebody’s got to,” she said. She saw him frown; her eyes were adjusting to the dark. “What, you don’t approve?”

“It don’t seem right.”

Rhonda almost laughed. “You want them to pick? Those teenagers? Think about when you were their age, Deke. How much control did you have over your hormones? Your brain wasn’t picking out the best of all possible mates. You were taking orders from the lieutenant governor.”

“Works out just fine most of the time,” Deke said.

“Most? Hon, you have not been paying attention. It’s a roll of the dice out there. You and Donna may have struck the vein, and God bless you, but for most of the sorry people in this world sex hits them like a blindside tackle when they’re sixteen and the next thing they know they’re pregnant, raising babies, and waking up to five thousand mornings of cold coffee. I’d sooner let a monkey pick my husband than the girl I was at sixteen. The Indians have the right idea-not the casino Indians, the call-center Indians-let the parents arrange things. You can always grow to love someone, or at least tolerate them, if they’re a good match. And I make sure they’re a good match. You wait a couple years then look at the charlie divorce rate and tell me if I wasn’t right.”

“You already matched Doreen and Clete,” he said.

“That was too good. I thought she’d give him some ambition, I didn’t know she was some low-rent Lady Macbeth.”

Deke tilted his head.