“But I called shotgun,” Pax said.
Everett didn’t bother to answer.
Pax opened the rear door to a cloud of lilac perfume. He got inside and reluctantly closed the door. “Hi, Aunt Rhonda.”
The mayor sat in the front passenger seat. “It’s not polite to keep a lady waiting,” she said.
“Sorry about that. My dad always says that I’d be late for my own funeral.”
She turned and eyed him critically. “I trust Reverend Martin is comfortable? Or is there some other custom treatment we can provide for him—a daily foot massage maybe?”
“He’s happy,” Pax said. “As happy as he can be.”
They drove the western loop into town, over the single-lane bridge, past Jo’s house.
Rhonda handed him a large manila envelope. “This is the address of the house we rented in Vermont, the keys, and receipts. There’s a credit card and some cash in there to get you started—oh, and the prepaid phone. Use that instead of your own cell when you call Everett—and you only call Everett, never me, understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She gave him more instructions—most of which she’d told him multiple times before.
“What about the other address?” Pax asked.
“We’ll talk about that later, once you get out of detention in Louisville.”
“No, we’ll talk about it now. That was part of my price.”
Everett gazed at him through the rearview mirror. Pax ignored him. “You know I don’t have the files on me, right? My father doesn’t have them either. A friend of mine outside of Switchcreek has everything—”
“Liar,” Everett said.
“—and he’ll release them if he doesn’t hear from me on a regular basis.” Actually, he and Andrew Weygand had never worked out a schedule. He hoped that if Everett killed him, Weygand would find out about it eventually. But then what? Even if he died he wasn’t sure he wanted Rhonda indicted. She was the only person holding the town together. It was the threat he needed, not the execution. “In fact, there’s one or two things I did not give you a copy of.”
“That’s it,” Everett said, and hit the brakes. The car skewed and shuddered to a stop. “I’m coming back there.” He opened the door and hopped out. Pax pushed to the far side of the seat and pulled on the handle—it was locked.
“Everett! Settle down, both of you!” Rhonda said. “Paxton’s just trying out his big-boy muscles, aren’t you, Paxton?” She looked at him over the seat back, seeming genuinely amused. “I tell you, for a second it was like having Jo Lynn back again.”
She handed him an index card. “I’d appreciate it if you memorized that and then, I don’t know, eat it, burn it, whatever you’d do in that spy movie running in your head. And Everett, for goodness’ sake, get back in here and close the door before you freeze me to death.”
The government car was waiting for him at the Cherokee Hotel, a young soldier already at the wheel. Pax tried to show him the paperwork Dr. Fraelich had worked so hard on, but the boy waved him off. “They’ll do all that at the checkpoint,” he said. His voice was muffled by the mask. Pax wondered if he would keep it on all the way to Louisville.
Aunt Rhonda took Paxton’s hand. “You make sure you keep eating,” she said. “You’re still scrawny as a barn cat.”
Pax climbed into the backseat, and the soldier wheeled the car around. In a block they turned left onto the highway. They crossed the bridge, and then they were over the creek and outside of town. Piney Road went by on their left; then they passed the gravel cutoff that led to the hill behind the graveyard. In only a few minutes they were approaching the north gate, slowing as they passed two towering alabaster crosses that had been planted beside the highway.
Pax had missed the march—he’d sat in the clearing on Mount Clyburn for hours that morning—and in the weeks since he hadn’t driven any farther north than Piney Road.
Pax realized the driver was saying something.
“We need your medical papers now.” Another masked soldier was waiting outside the car. “And your driver’s license.”
“Right, right.” He rolled down his window and handed the papers and the license to the man—woman?—behind the face mask. “Just a second,” Pax said. He got out of the car, started walking back up the road toward the crosses. The driver yelled something at his back.
The crosses were tall as argos, twelve feet high, and white as their skin. They leaned slightly in to each other, their arms almost touching.
He reached out to one of them, pressed his fingers against the rough wood.
The soldier grabbed Paxton’s arm—Pax hadn’t realized he was holding on to the post. “Dude, what’s the matter with you?” the man said.
“Jesus,” another one said. “He’s bawling like a baby.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Pax said. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. His legs had gone weak. He gripped the wooden post in a fierce hug.
“Are you sure you should be traveling?” the driver asked him.
“No. Yeah. I mean, I’m fine.” He made his arms release the cross, then wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.
“Get back in the car, sir,” one of the soldiers said.
They guided him to the backseat, slammed the door. “I’m not usually like this,” Pax said.
“Just don’t do that again, okay?” the driver said. The striped crossbars were raised, and the driver hit the gas. Pax fell back against the seat, and the car carried him north.
He’d lived through twelve Chicago winters, but he’d never experienced anything like South Dakota in February. The road crossed an endless blank plain. Thuggish winds kept nudging his rental car onto the shoulder, and even with the heat on full blast, tendrils of intense cold swirled around his feet, licked at him from every seam of the car’s interior. He drove hunched over the wheel, squinting through the crusted windshield, muscles tensed. The road revealed itself a few yards at a time through curtains of blowing snow.
He didn’t believe the GPS when it told him he’d arrived. He saw no house, no farm, only white on white in every direction. He was a southern boy at heart, and couldn’t shake the conviction that if he left the car he’d be carried away across the fields. Next June the final drift would melt to reveal his perfectly preserved corpse.
He zipped his ski jacket up to his chin and pulled on his gloves. The car door squealed as he forced it open, then cold slapped him across the face and he gasped. He walked to the front of the car and turned in place, eyes wide for lights and shapes against the twilight. Nothing.
He started to get back in the car, then had another thought. After all, it was a rental. He climbed up on the hood of the car on all fours, and then carefully stood. The sheet metal plonked beneath his boots.
A hundred yards off to his right he saw a stand of trees, the roofline of a house, and the suggestion of an off-white stripe running from the trees to intersect the road. He hopped back in the car.
The stripe turned out to be a driveway, or at least a path through the snow. He rolled past the ring of trees that guarded the house and then braked to a stop. The house was a long, one-story ranch with a marshmallow cap of snow. A low garage or workshop squatted off to the side.
Standing in front of the house was a bulky figure holding a shotgun across his or her chest.
He stepped out of the car. “Hello?” he called. “I’m looking for the DuChamp house.” He walked closer, his hands away from his body—not stick-’ em-up high, but enough to show respect for the gun. “My name is Paxton Martin.”
The figure came closer. It was an unchanged woman, as far as he could tell, heavily bundled against the cold. “I’m Elly,” she said. He’d talked to her on the phone. She was Mr. DuChamp’s sister, and she’d moved out of Switchcreek years before the Changes. “Come on in, Paxton.”
He jogged back to the car, switched it off, and picked up the nylon duffel from the b
ack seat. A minute later she led him into the house to a mudroom stacked with coats. She held the shotgun and showed him where to hang his jacket and set his hiking boots. “They’re in the family room,” she said, and nodded toward a doorway.
He went down a short hallway and entered a large, open room. Couches and armchairs faced a huge stone fireplace.
Three faces gazed at him. If he’d never lived in Switchcreek, they might have looked identical.
Rainy jumped from her chair, took a few steps, and stopped. Sandra didn’t get up from her place on the couch, but Tommy rose to his feet and stood next to Rainy.
“Merry Christmas,” Pax said.
They stared at him. Then Rainy said, “Paxton, it’s January.”
He looked down at the duffel. “Well, I guess I could take these back.” He set down the bag and held out his hand to Tommy. “Thanks for letting me come into your home, Tommy. I know that every visitor is a risk.”
Tommy hesitated, and shook his hand. “You’ll learn that when you set up your own house,” he said. “But some visitors are worth it.”
Pax walked a few steps toward the couch where Sandra lay. “How are you doing, sweetie?” he asked.
She looked up at him. The contentment on her face was unmistakable.
“Do you want to see him?” she asked.
He kneeled in front of her. She shifted the bundle in her arms, and pulled back a blanket. He was sleeping, mouth open and eyes closed. His skin was the color of merlot.
“Oh,” Pax said. His eyes burned, and he blinked hard. “He’s beautiful.”
“Isn’t he?” Sandra said.
Rainy came up behind Pax and put a hand on his shoulder. “His name’s Joseph,” she said. “We’re calling him Joe.”
“I heard.” He looked up at her, then back at Tommy. “I guess you all had to scramble to come up with a boy’s name.”
Tommy said, “We certainly didn’t have a list ready.”
“What do you think it means, Paxton?” Rainy asked. “Will all of them from this generation be boys, or is he a fluke, or …?”
“I don’t know,” Pax said. He couldn’t see how a generation of males made much sense from an evolutionary point of view—but right now he didn’t give a damn about the evolutionary point of view. All he knew was that the Changes weren’t over—that they’d never be over. “Every generation is a mystery,” he said.
He reached out and touched the boy’s cheek. Joseph’s lips closed, then opened with a faint smack. “I’m pretty sure, though, that a boy this beautiful is not a mistake.”
Read on for an excerpt from Pandemonium
by Daryl Gregory
Available from Del Rey
“DEL!”
Lew, My Very Bigger Brother, bellowing from the other end of the atrium. His wife, Amra, shook her head in mock embarrassment. This was part of their shtick: Lew was loud and embarrassing, Amra was socially appropriate.
Lew met me halfway across the floor and grabbed me in a hug, his gut hitting me like a basketball. He’d always been bigger than me, but now he was six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What took you so long? The board said your flight got in an hour ago.” His beard was bushier than when I’d last seen him a year and a half ago, but it had still failed to colonize the barren patches between ear and chin.
“Sorry about that—something about four bags of heroin up my ass. Hey, Amra.”
“Hello, Del.”
I hugged her briefly. She smelled good as always. She’d cut her long, shiny black hair into something short and professional.
Lew grabbed the strap from my shoulder and tried to take it from me. “I got it,” I said.
“Come on, you look like you haven’t slept in a week.” He yanked it from me. “Shit, this is heavy. How many more bags do you got?”
“That’s it.”
“What are you, a fuckin’ hobo? Okay, we have to take a shuttle to the parking garage. Follow me.” He charged ahead with the duffel on his back.
“Did you hear there was a demon in the airport?” Amra said.
“I was there. They wouldn’t let us out of the terminal until he was gone. So what happened to the Cher hair?”
“Oh …” She made a gesture like shooing a fly. “Too much. You saw it? Which one was it—not the Kamikaze?” The news tracked them by name, like hurricanes. Most people went their whole lives without seeing one in person. I’d seen five—six, counting today’s. I’m lucky that way.
“The Painter, I think. At least, it was making a picture.”
Lew glanced back, gave Amra a look. He wanted her to stop talking about it. “Probably a faker,” Lew said. “There’s a possession conference going on downtown next week. The town’ll be full of posers.”
“I don’t think this guy was faking,” I said. That mad grin. That wink. “Afterward he was just crushed. Totally confused.”
“I wonder if he even knows how to draw,” Amra said.
The tram dropped us at a far parking lot, and then we shivered in the wind while Lew unlocked the car and loaded my duffel into the tiny trunk.
It was new, a bulbous silver Audi that looked futuristic and fast. I thought of my own car, crumpled like a beer can, and tried not to be jealous. The Audi was too small for Lew anyway. He enveloped the steering wheel, elbows out, like he was steering with his stomach. His seat was pushed all the way back, so I sat behind Amra. Lew flew down 294, swearing at drivers and juking between lanes. I should have been used to Lew’s driving by then, but the speed and erratic turns had me gripping the back of Amra’s seat. I grew up in the suburbs, but every time I came back to Chicago I experienced traffic shock. We were forty minutes from downtown, and there were four crammed lanes on each side of the road, and everyone moving at 70 mph. It was worse than Denver.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?” Lew asked. “You don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t send flowers …”
“We missed you at Christmas,” Amra said.
“See, Lew? From Amra, that actually means she missed me at Christmas. From you or Mom that would have meant ‘How could you have let us down like that?’”
“Then she said it wrong.”
They’d only been married for a year and a half, but they’d been dating on and off—mostly on—since college. “So when are you guys going to settle down and make Mom some multiracial grandbabies? The Cyclops has gotta be demanding a little baby action.”
Amra groaned. “Do you have to call her that? And you’re changing the subject.”
“Yeah,” Lew said. “Back to your faults as a son and brother. What have you been up to?”
“Well, that’s a funny story.”
Lew glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Amra turned in her seat to face me, frowning in concern.
“Jeez, guys.” I forced a smile. “Can you at least let me segue into this?”
“What is it?” Amra said.
“It’s not a big deal. I had a car accident in November, went through a guardrail in the snow, and then—”
Lew snorted in surprise. “Were you drunk?”
“Fuck you. The road was icy, and I just hit the curve too fast and lost control. I went through the rail, and then the car started flipping.” My gut tightened, remembering that jolt. My vision had gone dark as I struck the rail, and I’d felt myself pitching forward, as if I were being sucked into a black well. “I ended up at the bottom of a ravine, upside down, and I couldn’t get my seatbelt undone.” I left out the caved-in roof, the icy water running through the car, my blind panic. “I just hung there until the cops got me out.”
“Weren’t you hurt?” Amra asked.
I shrugged. “My arms were scraped up, and my back was killing me, but that turned out to be just a pulled muscle. They kept me in the hospital for a day, and then they let me go. And afterward … well, all in all I was pretty lucky.”
“Lucky?” Lew said. “Why do people say that? You get a tumor, and i
f it turns out that you can operate on it, people say, gee, that was lucky. No, lucky is not getting cancer. Lucky is not getting cancer, then finding ten bucks in your shoe.”
“Are you done?” Amra said.
“He totaled his car. He’s not that lucky.”
Amra shook her head. “You were about to say something else, Del. What happened after the accident?”
“Yeah, afterward.” I suddenly regretted bringing it up. I’d thought I could practice on Lew and Amra, get ready for the main event with Mom. Amra looked at me expectantly.
“After the accident, I had some, well, complications, and I needed to go to a different kind of hospital.”
Amra frowned in concern. Lew said, “Holy shit, you mean like One-Flew-Over different?”
Amra shushed him. “Are you okay?” The tiny cabin and the high seat between us made the space simultaneously intimate and insulating.
“I’m fine. Everything worked out.”
“Fine, he says. Holy shit. Does Mom know? No, of course not, she would have told me. She would have told me, wouldn’t she? Holy shit.” He swept down on the rear end of a truck, and for the first time in the trip he slowed down rather than change lanes. “So what were you in for? Did you check yourself in, or did they commit you? Does Mom know?”
“I’ll tell her tonight. It’s not a big deal.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Amra said. “But you should feel free to talk about this. It’s not a stigma.”
“Come on, it’s sort of a stigma,” Lew said.
I nodded. “There are a lot of crazy people in there.”
Amra turned back around. “I’m trying to talk seriously. This is important.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
Lew laughed. “Every time you say that it gets more convincing.” He gunned the engine, swung around a station wagon, and swerved back right across two lanes, just in time to catch our exit. I braced myself against the door as we swooped into the hard curve of the off ramp.
“So what was it?” Lew asked. He glanced left and merged onto the street. “Thought you were Napoleon? Seeing pink elephants?”
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