The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  Clete said, “Hey, Aunt Rhonda.”

  “Y’all here a bit early this morning,” she said.

  “You always say, on time is late, early is on time,” Clete said, smiling.

  “Too bad you only remember that on payday,” Rhonda said. “Y’all sit down and wait your turn.”

  Rhonda plucked a paper surgical mask from the dispenser on the wall and walked toward the men’s wing. She could faintly hear Harlan’s caterwauling, and as she pushed through the second set of doors he let loose with a particularly full-throated shout.

  “Goodness gracious,” she said to herself. She had no use for crying and tears, not anymore. She’d buried her husband when she was forty-six, and oh, she’d bawled for weeks. But then came the Changes, and by the time her body finished blowing up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon all those tears dried up.

  (Almost all. Ten years ago she’d walked into Willie Flint’s cabin and the sight of the man had hit her like a punch to the stomach. She’d burst into tears, but only for a moment—the final spurt before that faucet sealed shut for good.)

  The charlie men—the old ones, anyway—were just the opposite. Tough old coots, who before the Changes wouldn’t have yelped if they’d grabbed the wrong end of a chainsaw, suddenly got as touchy as babies. You couldn’t even frown without them taking offense. And when the vintage was flowing they just went out of their heads, laughing, crying, seeing things—and trying to hump anything that moved.

  As she reached Harlan’s door she heard the reverend shouting something about “bread and stone.” More preaching, then. He’d been at it nearly nonstop.

  Old chub men went crazy when the vintage hit them hard, but Harlan had it worse than she’d ever seen. He was crying out and talking to people when they’d picked him up at the church last night—it had taken Everett and Travis and Clete to pull the old man out of the water and get him into the van—and he’d kept making noise all night and into the morning. Rhonda kept her distance from him and let the boys handle him, of course. Harlan was throwing off vintage like a water sprinkler, and while the boys had a natural tolerance, Charlie women had to be careful. A couple years ago she’d embarrassed herself terribly when she caught a splash off of Mr. Lukens. Everett had stopped her before she climbed on top of the man, thank the Lord, but she’d already started rubbing against the old chub’s legs and—well, she wouldn’t let that happen again.

  Rhonda pushed open the door, and the smell of the stale vintage hit her through the mask. She didn’t step any closer.

  Travis put down some electronic gadget he’d been thumbing and popped to his feet.

  “It don’t sound like he’s having any trouble breathing,” Aunt Rhonda said.

  “He was gasping,” the boy said. “Now he’s doing the preaching thing again.”

  Harlan lay on the queen-sized hospital bed, straining against the wide black Velcro bands they’d put across his chest, waist, and legs. He was sweating and red faced, his eyes wide and roaming the room. “Every good tree,” he said. “Every good tree brings forth good fruit. And every corrupt tree …”

  “I told you, you have to talk to him. Have you been talking to him?”

  “I tried,” the boy said. “It just seems to make him madder. He sure don’t like those straps.”

  The boy looked like he could handle Harlan if the old man broke free—Travis was built like a clenched fist, all muscle and bone. He’d been a preschooler during the Changes, and at seventeen he was already broader and more muscular than Everett. That’s how it went with the charlie boys; the younger they were when they caught TDS, the bigger those muscles. The second-generation charlies—the natural-born boys who were under twelve and looked like butterballs now—would probably be five-foot Schwarzeneggers by puberty.

  And when they got old as Harlan? Maybe they’d go fat again and start producing. Or maybe they’d turn into something different altogether. Nobody knew what the course of life would be for a natural-born charlie. They were in uncharted territory.

  Rhonda put her hands on her hips. “Is he making any more sense? Does he know where he is?”

  “I don’t think so,” Travis said. “It’s all Bible stuff, mostly. Sometimes he calls me Paxton.” He laughed. “Or Lorraine. Which I guess is his wife?”

  “She died in the Changes,” Rhonda said, and her tone snapped the smile off the boy’s face. “As for Paxton, well …” The last time she’d seen him, he was pale, wet, and unconscious, and Deke was carrying him off to Dr. Fraelich’s clinic.

  Rhonda risked coming another foot into the room. “Harlan!” she said sternly. “Pastor Martin!”

  Harlan gave no indication that he heard her. “Is not the life more than meat?” he said. “Is the body more than raiment?” His voice was scratchy, but still strong. These backwoods preachers didn’t tire easily; she’d seen Harlan do week-long revivals, bringing the fire and brimstone two hours a night.

  “Time for you to wake up now, Pastor. You can’t be carrying on like this all day.” He kept babbling, his eyes focused on nothing. Rhonda stepped back and said to Travis, “Are you sure he’s not producing?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t think so?”

  “I mean, no ma’am. I check him every hour, but I haven’t found any new blisters, and there’s nothing coming through the cream.” After they’d gotten him into the Home last night the boys had plastered his blisters with antibiotic cream—standard procedure. “I guess he’s still drunk on the dose from last night.”

  “I suppose,” Rhonda said. Harlan had produced more vintage in a burst than any charlie she’d ever seen. A regular Texas gusher. It made sense that he’d need time to recover and recharge. She had to admit she wanted him back online and producing steadily.

  “Just keep talking to him,” Rhonda said. “I want someone here when he comes to. He ain’t going to be happy.”

  “Uh, when’s that going to be, you think?”

  Rhonda let her voice go sweet. “You getting tired sitting here, honey? You need to go home for a while, maybe stretch out on the couch?”

  The boy brightened. “That’d be great, Aunt Rhonda. I could sure—”

  “Sit down, Travis.” God Almighty the boy was dim.

  She went to the door and the boy said, “Uh, ma’am? It’s payday, right? I was wondering …”

  She turned to face him, raised an eyebrow.

  The boy said. “I was just wondering about the bonus …”

  “Not until you’re eighteen,” Rhonda said. “Until then, no bonus. You just sit here and call me when he starts producing. Oh, and hon? If I see that game thing in your hand again while you’re on the clock, I’ll have Everett break it over your big chub head.”

  She threw the mask in the garbage and stalked back to the lobby. More of her employees had arrived. They were all looking at her, eyes like hungry orphans. “All right,” she said. “Line up.”

  They queued up outside her office. She sat at her desk, signing and tearing out the checks one by one. Everett stood beside her, handing out the bonus, the small black plastic baggies from the cooler.

  Clete tucked his check into his back pocket without looking at it, but he opened his bag right there and took out the little plastic vial. The frozen vintage occupied only the bottom two centimeters of the container. “Is that it?” he said.

  Rhonda’s hand froze in midsignature. “Excuse me?”

  Clete said, “This is less than last time. At least tell me it’s from Harlan. I saw what that stuff did to Paxton.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Rhonda said. “That’s the Reverend Martin to you.”

  “Come on, Aunt Rhonda.” He looked at Everett. “You were there. Am I right?”

  Everett said nothing.

  “I’m just saying,” Clete said. “If this is all we’re getting, at least share the good stuff while it’s fresh. Another few drops of Elwyn or Old Bob ain’t going to do me much good.”

&nb
sp; Everett placed a hand on Clete’s shoulder. “Say one more word,” Everett said quietly. “Go ahead. One more.”

  Clete pushed his hand away and backed up. “I was just asking, Everett. Jesus, relax already.”

  “Take your bonus and get out of here,” Rhonda said. She looked around at the other men. “This ain’t Hardee’s drive-thru. There are no choices, no specials, no family value packs, and nobody gets more than their fair share. Any of you have a problem with that?”

  Clete looked sour but didn’t speak. The others behind him in the line studied their hands or looked away.

  When the last of the men had taken his check and bag and made his way out to the parking lot, Everett shook his head, smiling, and said, “Hardee’s. Heh.”

  “Can you believe that?” Rhonda said, but she was smiling too, now. She pushed back in her chair and stood. “All righty. After you get the cooler away, let’s go see the Reverend Hooke. Maybe we’ll be able to settle our bet.”

  “You think so?” Everett asked.

  “You never know,” Rhonda said.

  Everett asked her if she wanted to take the long way through town. Rhonda said that sounded like a good idea and rolled down her window. He always knew when she was in a mood to greet her people.

  He drove like a skilled accompanist. Without her saying a word he knew when to slow down so she could wave and say hello, when to roll past the people she wanted to avoid, and when to pull over. They saw the Robinson twins—one sister an argo and the other a charlie, walking down the sidewalk in matching yellow dresses like two sides of a funhouse mirror—and rolled on by. (You didn’t start a conversation with the twins unless you had nowhere to go and packed a lunch.) A few charlie teenagers were hanging around the Icee Freeze, and Rhonda called them by name, letting them know that she was watching them even if nobody else was. She couldn’t do the same for the beta children, though; when she passed a covey of young blank girls coming out of the Bugler’s she just said, “How you doing, girls?” and moved on. Blanks all looked alike to her, but the young ones had even started dressing alike with those long skirts and white scarves.

  At the north end of town Everett circled back south by going down Main, gliding past the old wooden houses that used to be at the center of town before the highway went through in the fifties. She exchanged greetings with half a dozen people, the car moving slower than a parade float.

  Rhonda looked over at Everett and said, “What are you grinning at?”

  “This always cheers you up,” he said.

  “It’s just part of the job,” she said. But it was true; she got a lift from being with her people. And she had a knack for working with folks, a gift she hadn’t fully employed until after the Changes. “Now pull over at Mr. Sparks’. We need to chat.”

  Mr. Sparks, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and dress pants despite the heat, slowly pushed a wheelbarrow heaped with mulch across his lawn. Everett stopped the car and the old man came over, smiling. The Changes had skipped him, and at eighty-two he looked as fit as ever. “Goodness gracious, Mr. Sparks,” Rhonda said. “You make me tired the way you work.”

  “Oh, it’s not working that makes me tired.”

  “Well, you better keep your shirt on, or you’ll have young girls swooning around you.”

  He laughed, a dry chuckle. The talk turned to clips of Roy Downer’s press conference that had been shown on the local news last night. “It’s a relief to hear that there was no evidence of foul play,” he said. “Not to say suicide isn’t a terrible thing …”

  “I know just what you mean,” Rhonda said. “You don’t have to explain to me.” They talked for a few more minutes, Mr. Sparks trying repeatedly to get them to come inside for some coffee cake, but Rhonda begged off. “I better not keep you. I’ll see you at the next council meeting, all right?”

  “I’ve already drawn up the agenda,” he said. “We’ve got to take care of the sewer issue first thing. I don’t see why we need brand-new sewers. We need thoughtful—”

  “Thoughtful progress,” Rhonda said, nodding. “I agree one hundred percent, Mr. Sparks. Let’s get all that straightened out, and I’ve got a couple other things to bring up, too.”

  He frowned. “I’ve already printed up the agenda.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing big! Just brainstorming. Not agenda-worthy at all. I’ll see you next week then?”

  Everett eased the car away from the curb. “I thought we needed the new sewers for the school,” he said.

  “We do,” Rhonda said. “So I’ll give up on digging up Main Street, which I never wanted anyway.”

  Everett laughed. “That’s thoughtful, all right.”

  “Come on now. Let’s go see the Reverend Hooke.”

  So many details, Rhonda thought. Nobody would believe how much work it was just to keep everything in this town running. But somebody had to take charge, and it might as well be her. Nobody else understood how vulnerable they were. They’d been lucky so far. Even with the riots, the killing of the Stonecipher boys, the Manus rape, the prejudice—they’d gotten off lightly. In those early days of the Changes, everyone thought TDS was just an awful disease that turned out to not be contagious. Fear gradually turned to pity, then indifference.

  It would all have been different if the quarantine had still been on when Jo Lynn had her girls and the other clades started to breed. With the birth of those children—natural-borns who so clearly were healthy and more purely of their clade—the people of Switchcreek were transformed from mere victims to competitors. They could make their own kind. They could multiply. The quarantine might still be in place.

  Rhonda knew that the government was still watching them, and the scientists were still trying to figure out if TDS was a danger. As for the rest of the world, the multitude of unchanged civilians, their apathy about Switchcreek could turn the moment they felt threatened.

  It took only a few minutes to get to the Co-op. As they drove through the gates of the old Whitmer farm, beta children scattered out of their way like chickens. “Good Lord, there’s more of ’em every time we visit,” Rhonda said, and Everett grunted in agreement. Two hundred or so betas lived in the Co-op. Half of them were under the age of thirteen, and the other half were pregnant—at least that’s what it seemed like.

  The white nursery building sat at the center of the field with almost twenty mobile homes huddled around it. The trailers had been bought used, and looked it. The oldest ones were peeling paint, but even the newer, vinyl-covered homes were dented and scuffed with red clay, like shoes that had been worn hard.

  Rhonda got out of the car and frowned as the muggy air enveloped her. She said to a group of girls, “Anybody seen Pastor Elsa?”

  A pair of them—twins, probably, since so many beta kids came in sets, but who could tell?—ran off toward the nursery. Rhonda told Everett to wait at the car and started walking in that direction. Slowly. She wore a Talbot’s silk sleeveless blouse and a $300 Liberty Jacquard linen jacket she’d ordered special from Ann Taylor, and she’d be damned if she sweated moons into the pits of that beautiful suit.

  The spaces between the trailers were littered with bicycles, toys faded by the sun, and plastic Little Tykes furniture. The muggy air was made hotter by the back-blast of rumbling air conditioners poking out of the trailer windows. Most of the adults seemed to be inside, but a pair of white-scarf girls sat in the shade of an awning, snapping beans. Their bellies under their light cotton dresses looked equally round, as if they were racing each other to the first contraction. Rhonda didn’t recognize them, so she nodded at them and they said hello.

  When Rhonda was still a dozen yards from the nursery the building door opened and the reverend came out, wiping her hands on her skirt. She quickly hugged Rhonda. A stranger would be unable to see it, but Rhonda could tell the woman was flustered.

  “Everything all right, Elsa?”

  “As right as we can expect,” the reverend said. “Better than we hoped. Come on down to my place; I’ve
got some sweet tea.” She led Rhonda past the nursery toward the outer circle of mobile homes, walking with that uneven gait of hers, as if she carried a stone in her shoe.

  In the open space beyond the trailers was a makeshift playground wilting in the sun: a couple of knock-kneed swing sets, a trampoline listing on uneven legs, an aboveground pool sagging around the rim. It was too hot to touch metal, though; the dozen kids in the playground were all in the pool or running around the edge of it, through the water-slicked grass, naked as dolphins.

  The gardens started out past the barn. The patches of tomatoes and corn and green beans were big enough to feed a few families but small enough to be tended by hand. A male beta wearing a baseball cap was bent over a row of beans, a blue plastic bucket over one arm. Tommy? Impossible to tell at this distance.

  “I saw a bunch of your girls down at the Bugler’s today,” Rhonda said.

  “Which ones?” the Reverend asked.

  “Can you tell them apart?”

  “Of course I can. What kind of question is that?”

  “Well it would sure help the rest of us if you had them wear name tags or something. Maybe numbers on their backs—you could sell scorecards as a fundraiser.”

  The reverend was standing on her front step, and she gave Rhonda a look as she opened the door. “Mayor, that’s the kind of redneck talk I expect out of your boys.”

  Rhonda huffed up the stairs and followed her into the trailer. The air was chilly but stale; perspiration prickled the wispy hairs of her neck. The half-sized living room was as spare and tidy as a ship’s cabin: one couch, one chair, and between them a glass-topped coffee table like a display coffin. The only loose item in the room was a red leather family Bible set on a white doily at the center of the table.

  “Girls?” the reverend called. To Rhonda she said, “Rest your feet a minute,” and then she left the room through a curtained doorway. “Girls, I need you to go play somewhere else for a while.”

  Rhonda eyed the skinny legs of the chair and chose the couch.

  Once Elsa had been married, to a man who had a good job at the Alcoa plant, and she’d lived in a handsome brick ranch up above the highway. When she first moved to the Co-op she jammed the contents of that house into the trailer, turning the living room into something between a furniture showroom and a self-storage unit. But then the babies started to arrive, crowding out her old life. Elsa gave away her extra sofa and armchairs to needier beta families, sold her cherry entertainment center and the upright piano at the flea market in Lambert. She put a Sheetrock wall down the middle of the room to make an extra bedroom.