The Devil's Alphabet

Pax walked the doctor out to the van, and they waited as Barron tried to cajole the winch into lifting the platform back into place.

“Your paperwork is all signed?” the doctor asked Paxton.

“It’s in my suitcase.” He’d been officially cleared of atypical plasmids. He’d still be required to spend two weeks in a facility in Kentucky, isolated from anyone with TDS. But after that, he’d be free to roam the world.

“Let me know if you run into any problems,” she said.

“Sure, sure.”

After a moment she said, “So.”

He looked at her.

She pitched her voice so that Barron couldn’t hear it. “How the hell did you do it?”

“Hmm?”

“You not only got Aunt Rhonda to agree to home care, but pay for it too. Not to mention biweekly visits from yours truly.”

“You’re not going to like it,” he said.

“Indulge me.”

“I traded for it,” he said. He shrugged. “I gave Rhonda a gigabyte or two of data, and she gave my father the only thing he wanted-to be back in his own house.” He smiled at her expression. “I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

“You found Jo’s laptop.” He didn’t deny it. “And then you just gave it to her?”

“Well, I did keep copies-I’m not a complete idiot.” The doctor still looked shocked. “Listen, I know why Jo never pulled the trigger on Rhonda. Your name’s on half the documents.”

The doctor flushed-it was astounding to watch the blood rush so quickly to infuse her pale skin. “I didn’t know what she was doing!” she said. “Ninety percent of what I signed I thought that-” She stopped abruptly as Barron shut the van door and turned to them.

“Ready to go?” Barron asked. He saw that something unpleasant was going on.

“Just a second,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Really.”

Barron nodded, then walked around to the other side of the van.

Pax said, “It’s okay. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do-everybody does business with Rhonda. Even Jo. She wasn’t about to ruin your career by publishing that stuff. She was your friend.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing, hopefully. Unless I’m forced to, and even then… I’m not sure. I’ll let Rhonda worry about that.”

“And me.”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am. But this is the only shot I had to make Harlan happy. What choice did I have? He’s my father.”

“So you’re doing this out of love,” she said skeptically.

“Or something like it.”

Barron had started the van. Pax followed her to the passenger door, and she said, “Oh, almost forgot.” She reached in and handed him a manila folder. “Your DNA sample was already stored in Atlanta-everybody in Switchcreek was sampled during the Changes. I asked a friend of mine to run it through some tests.”

“I thought all your friends there were fired.”

“Resigned. And I still have a few left there. A couple, anyway.”

He opened the folder. There were several pages. The first listed many long words he couldn’t pronounce, and many long numbers he didn’t understand the significance of.

He took a breath. “So, am I…?”

“Bad news,” Dr. Fraelich said. “For the gene sequences studied, and for the range of proteins sampled, your genetic material falls within the statistical range of only one known clade.”

He stared at her.

“My condolences, Paxton. You’re human.”

He didn’t trust himself to spend the night in the same house as his father. After supper with Harlan and Mr. Teestall he used some of his precious allotment of gasoline to drive up to Jo’s house. The doors were still unlocked, the interior undisturbed. Even the heat was on. Among other things he’d learned from Jo’s files was the fact that Rhonda had quietly purchased this house and many of the others left empty after the Changes. The banks had foreclosed and she’d bought them for a song. Disturbing, but not illegal-unlike many of the frankly criminal things he’d found in the files. And in a way, the real estate finagling spoke well of Rhonda. She was betting on the future of Switchcreek when almost nobody else was.

He walked around the house, looking at the things the girls had left behind, the books on Jo’s shelves. He opened the Dawkins book, the thick beige one on evolution: The Ancestor’s Tale. Jo had been looking for some trace of herself in the diagrams, some branch that ended in the betas and her daughters.

But the betas and argos and charlies weren’t here. They were intrusions, pages torn from some other book and stuffed between the covers of this world. This was his family tree. It should have been reassuring, to be so well documented, to have a map that told him where he’d come from, with a big red dot for You Are Here.

The tree explained nothing. For years he’d been hoping for a different answer. A diagnosis that would tell him why he felt like an alien in his own skin, an outsider, an imposter. But he’d been skipped again.

He put the book back and turned to leave. Then he noticed the glint of something between the seat cushions of the couch. It was a vial he’d emptied here two months ago. His hand was inches from it when he realized what he was doing and yelled, “Fuck!”

He went to the kitchen, found a dish towel, and wrapped up the vial without touching it. Then he went to the back porch and smashed the plastic with his heel. Risking a final touch he picked up the towel and threw it like a football into the backyard among the roots of the oak tree.

He shut the door-and immediately got an image of himself sneaking out here in the middle of the night, rooting through the grass for the towel, pressing it to his face…

It took another five minutes to find the gas can for Jo’s lawnmower. He soaked a rag and set the towel on fire. He stood back from the smoke and thought, Jesus, I got to get out of this town.

He walked back to Jo’s bedroom and lay on the bed. He stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then he grew cold, so he pulled back the dusty covers and climbed inside.

I’m sorry, Jo, he thought. They killed you and I didn’t tell a soul.

Even now he couldn’t hate the girls. He just wanted to know that they were all right. Safe. Happy.

“Shit,” he said. I think I fell in love with them, Jo.

He lay in the bed, feeling like a spy in her house-a foreign agent in deep cover. If this is what it’s like to be human, he thought, no wonder the world is so fucked up.

A night in his own house had not made Reverend Martin any happier. The new bed was too stiff, the couch too big, the new paint too sloppily applied. He despised the weakness of Mr. Teestall’s coffee.

“I’ll talk to him about it,” Pax told his father. “I’ll be checking in every day.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Then most days,” Pax said. “Every day I possibly can.” He showed Harlan again how to use the contacts list in the cell phone he’d purchased. It was a model the argos favored for its oversized buttons-good for fat charlie fingers as well. Pax had also tried to teach his father texting but had quickly given up. “And you can call me any time you want.”

Harlan poked at the phone, put it down. “Rhonda won’t be happy with my decreased output.”

“Well, she’ll have to live with that,” Pax said. And so will you, Pax thought. Harlan was happier when he was producing than when he wasn’t. They hoped the phone calls would trigger some production. Their theory was that there should be nothing magical about Pax’s physical presence; it was the feeling of closeness that started the cascade. That was the theory, anyway.

Pax said, “And after the quarantine is over I’ll be able to visit in person.”

He saw motion outside the window and looked out. Aunt Rhonda’s Cadillac was pulling into the driveway.

“Okay,” Pax said. “My ride is here.”

His father looked up at him. “This new job. It can’t wait till after Christmas?”