The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 15

A TRIO OF beta girls stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, pinned in place by cameras and lights and microphones. One of them answered a question while the other two looked on. They didn’t seem to want to speak to the reporters, but they didn’t move away either. They may have been blanks, but they were also teenage Americans; they didn’t know how to say no to television.

Pax stepped off the sidewalk to avoid the clump of media people surrounding them. He’d tried to drive to the clinic, but the downtown streets were packed. He’d been forced to park down on Bank Street, a quarter mile from the center of town. News vans, television trucks, and rental cars lined the street ahead of him; strange faces crowded the sidewalks. All this, just to cover the “local angle.”

Before the Changes, the world had never heard of Switchcreek, Tennessee. And until yesterday, not many more had ever heard of Babahoyo, Ecuador. Now they were sister cities, united in disaster, death, and acts of God. Sodom and Gomorrah separated by two thousand miles and thirteen years.

At least a thousand were dead in Babahoyo, and who knew how many more were stricken. The exact numbers varied by news channel, but every hour the estimates climbed.

After Clete’s botched kidnapping yesterday, Pax had sat in his father’s room for most of the afternoon, watching the news. When he went home that night he kept the TV on, unable to look away: the cameras panning over rows of the sick laid out in hospital beds or across the floors of churches and schools; the close-ups of brown faces bleaching to chalk; the repetitive soundtrack of grunts and moans and cries in Spanish. And then, like a bizarre commercial break, a word from our previous victims, the people of Switchcreek. He saw Rhonda interviewed twice, and no one could have guessed that a few hours before she’d been duct taped to her chair and held at gunpoint. Back in the studios, scientists and special correspondents described the nature of TDS, charted its three variants, predicted that the current wave of TDS-A would give way to strains of B and C, and speculated baldly on the disease’s causes and probable vectors of transmission. It was painfully clear that in thirteen years no one had made much progress in understanding the disease.

The cameras always returned as soon as possible to South America, to shots of Ecuadorians twisting in agony as bone and muscle frantically tried to outrace each other. He wondered if they’d call themselves argos or choose a Spanish name.

He reached the clinic, but the front door was locked. He pressed the doorbell, waited. A plaque next to the door declared the building to be THE PHILIP MAPES MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER. Philip had been Rhonda’s husband, if he remembered correctly.

After half a minute he pressed the doorbell again just as a shadow moved behind the glass. He stepped back as Dr. Fraelich worked the keys in the lock and pushed the door open a few inches.

“Is this an emergency, Mr. Martin?”

“Why, are you closed?”

“I’m a little short on staff.” She saw something in his face. “What?”

“Is it Doreen? I was hoping you’d heard from her. Or from Rhonda.”

Dr. Fraelich glanced over his shoulder. “You better come in before the reporters notice. They keep asking for interviews.”

She locked the door behind him, then led him down the hallway.

“I saw you on CNN,” Pax said. “All two seconds.”

“I was hoping no one had seen that.”

“I’ve been watching too much TV,” Pax said. “I couldn’t stop watching. All those people …”

“I thought you looked a little shell-shocked.” She pushed open the office door. The room looked as crowded and messy in daylight as it had that night. He sat on the same chair he’d used before. Dr. Fraelich turned off her computer monitor and sat opposite him, her legs crossed. She wore a wrinkled, French-blue shirt and charcoal slacks. Her black shoes were scuffed at the toe.

“It just seems so much worse than what I remember from the Changes,” Pax said. “Our Changes.”

“It’s a lot more people,” she said.

“Yeah, there’s that. But it’s just that this time I know what’s coming, you know?” He’d seen Deke and Jo and his father transform. He’d watched his mother die. In the space of a few months he’d attended the funerals of dozens of friends and relatives.

“So this is bringing it all back to you. The trauma.”

“What? No.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m not saying it wasn’t terrible. People in Lambert screaming at us, and then when those boys were murdered … but it didn’t wound me for life or anything. I moved on, even if other people couldn’t let it go. A year after it all I’d still catch my cousins looking at me all misty-eyed—oh, the poor boy from Switchcreek.”

“You sound awfully pissed for a guy who’s over it.”

“Well, yeah. It annoyed me. It wasn’t me they should be sorry for—I came through fine. It was like they wanted to feel bad. Like all these reporters, glomming onto us. They want somebody to break down on camera.”

“And clearly that won’t be you,” she said.

He looked up. He could never tell when she was being sarcastic.

“So,” she said. “Doreen. She didn’t make another pass at you, did she?”

“Not exactly,” he said. He told her about Doreen and Clete and Travis grabbing him at home, then attempting to kidnap his father and rob Rhonda. When he got to their ten-point plan Dr. Fraelich stood and moved across the room. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, then picked up a pen.

“Rhonda wouldn’t let that happen,” she said.

“Everett—her driver, bodyguard, whatever he is—stopped them,” Pax said. “Then we were interrupted by the news about Ecuador.”

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Doreen and them? I don’t know. I stayed in my father’s room. Rhonda left to go downtown. When I finally went home, the lobby was cleaned up, there was nobody there but the security guard, Barron.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“I was a little freaked out. I thought … I don’t know what I thought.” Pax breathed in, then exhaled shakily. “I was hoping you’d heard from Doreen.”

“Damn it.” She went to her desk, took out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m going outside for a minute.”

He followed her out and she didn’t object. They walked around to the side of the building, where a plastic patio table and a couple of chairs were hidden from the highway by a row of bushes. She didn’t sit down. She reached into her pocket and came up with a book of matches. He liked that she carried matches. The smokers he knew—and in the restaurant business, that was pretty much everybody—only used lighters.

“You think she killed them?” he said.

“No,” she said. Then, “Probably not.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You think she could do it. Kill someone.”

“We’re all capable of killing, Paxton.” She lit the cigarette, then waved out the match and flicked it into a small garbage can. “Did you tell the Chief about this?”

“No, I just …” Why hadn’t he called Deke? He should have at least called him. But there was something shameful in having to run to him for protection yet again. Deke, somebody hurt me! Beat them up now!

Pax shook his head. “I don’t know. Like I said, I was freaked out.”

He tried to decide if he cared if Rhonda had murdered them. Didn’t they deserve it? The three chubs had abducted him, tried to kidnap his father, and held them all at gunpoint. If they’d succeeded in getting Pax and his father to St. Louis it probably would have been only a matter of time until the idiots killed them both—through incompetence if nothing else.

“Explain something to me,” Pax said. He sat on one of the chairs and looked up at her. “The male charlies are the ones who are tolerant of it. It’s the women who go crazy for it, right? But Rhonda gives it to the males, like payment. She calls it the bonus. Why not just sell it to the girls?”

“It’s complicated, Paxton.”

“Humor me.”

Dr. Fraelich inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke. “Have you ever been in love?”

He blinked. “Probably not.”

“Not even with Jo?”

“I—I don’t know. We were kids. What do you know about me and Jo?”

“How about your parents? You must have loved them when you were small. All children do.”

“Sure.”

“And they loved you. Why? They had no choice. Especially your mother. When she was in labor, a part of her brain was flooded with chemicals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. The same flood occurred every time she nursed you. Other parts of her brain—the areas responsible for cravings, goal-oriented behavior, ecstasy—were also swamped in dopamine. Over time—”

“What does this have to do with the chubs?”

“Chubs is crude, Paxton. Pay attention. Over time, that association—baby equals pleasure—becomes burned into the brain. There are a couple of structures on each side of the brain called the caudate nuclei, each about the size of a cocktail shrimp. That’s where behaviors get turned into habits, and skills become things that are second nature, not even conscious. With each little hit of baby-ecstasy the brain makes that bond a little more permanent. Your mother’s brain rewired itself to love you—you, specifically. She became addicted. That’s what bonding is, Paxton. Evolution’s chemical cocktail to make mothers obsessively care for the bundle of next year’s genes.”

“All right, fine,” he said. “So the vintage contains—what? Dopamine? The oxytocin stuff?”

“Not that we’ve found so far. Mostly it’s water and blood and dead cells. But there are also long chains of amino acids we’ve never seen before, and some of those are probably psychotropic. Judging from the way charlie males act, I’d bet money on it.” She shook her head. “We do know that the vintage does something to them. The serum triggers production of testosterone and adrenaline and all kinds of byproducts, including carrier compounds similar to MHC. It’s those carriers the charlie women pick up on—and what triggers the bonding cascade. It’s not a general aphrodisiac; they bond to that particular male. They feel empathy for him, like they’re one person.”

“Mirror neurons,” Pax said. At her look he said, “Doreen mentioned them.”

“When, during the kidnapping?”

“I didn’t know what she was talking about, though.”

“If you see someone laughing and you smile even though you don’t know what’s funny, those are mirror neurons firing. If someone yawns and you yawn, or you see someone get kicked in the balls and you wince—see, I just talked about it and you made a face.”

“I’m not seeing what this has to do with my father or the other old men. If this stuff is such a love potion, why aren’t the young, uh, charlie boys producing it themselves?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it’s too expensive for young males to both create it and do everything else they have to do. Maybe it’s a way for the older men to keep control of the tribe. In the animal kingdom this happens all the time—alpha males and alpha females control reproduction in the group, either through intimidation or chemical means. Elder bull elephants keep the young males in line by suppressing the youngster’s musth.”

“Must?”

“With an ‘h’ at the end. It’s a period where the males go a bit crazy from horniness, rage. When older males are around, however, they don’t go into it.” She seemed to find the look on his face humorous. “Just watch the Discovery Channel for a couple days.”

“I don’t think I can buy the idea of my father as a bull elephant,” he said. “Okay, maybe he’s as big as one, but he’s sure not in charge of the tribe.”

“No, that would be Rhonda,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“Heh.” But the doctor wasn’t joking. And then he realized that he wasn’t joking either. Rhonda ran all the tribes. She’d jerked him around like a puppet.

“The point is,” the doctor said, “nobody knows what’s going on with the vintage. As they say in the journals, further research is required.”

“Rhonda told me once that that’s what they were doing with the vintage. Research. For a cure.”

“Really,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“Yeah. Only during the robbery, Rhonda said that only the stupid people believed that.”

After a moment he looked up. “You could say, ‘Oh no you’re not stupid, Paxton.’”

“I could.”

“Come on, what’s so unbelievable about looking for a cure?”

“Nothing. Plenty of people are. But they’re not using the vintage to do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

She inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke through her nose. “That’s part of the deal, Paxton. We’re keeping the vintage out of the literature, out of the media. Vintage chemicals show up in charlie bloodwork—no way to hide that—but no one but me is studying the vintage itself. And no one outside of Switchcreek even knows that men secrete the stuff, or that it’s extracted.”

“Why would you keep that secret?”

“Think about it, Paxton. Let’s say it’s a new narcotic. A wonder drug. How long do you think it would be before there was a bounty on every male charlie? If the government didn’t grab the men, then it would be some pharmaceutical company. Or God help us, drug dealers.”

“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” he said.

“Tell me how I’m wrong.”

After perhaps half a minute he said, “This deal. This is something between you and Rhonda?”

“By necessity,” she said.

“Okay, you have the monopoly—you’re the only one studying this stuff. So do you know what it does to non-charlies? Skips, argos, outsiders …”

“You?”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Except for you, the vintage does hardly anything to non-charlies. A mild rush.” She tapped ashes into the can. “But you took an extreme dose. When you swam in it you became sensitized.”

“No, it happened earlier. The baptism may have sped me along, but even before that night the tiniest touch of the stuff got me high.” He’d been primed for it, like a twelve-year-old with alcoholic genes waiting for his first sip of Southern Comfort.

It’s not Harlan that’s different. It’s Paxton.

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I can look at your blood-work again, but I doubt I’d see anything. Trust me, the non-changed just don’t react like you do.”

“So how’s she doing it, then?” Pax asked.

Dr. Fraelich cocked an eyebrow.

“Aunt Rhonda,” he said. “If she’s not making money from pharmaceutical companies, and if she’s not selling the vintage to outsiders, and there aren’t enough charlies to make a living off of, then where’s she getting her money?”

Dr. Fraelich looked out over the bushes at the highway. Pax stepped closer. “Listen,” he said. “I think Jo found out something about her. Figured out what she’s up to. Something bad enough to make Rhonda stop her.”

The doctor shook her head. “Watch yourself, Paxton.”

“You’re afraid of her,” he said, surprised.

“You may have grown up here, Paxton, but you don’t understand a thing.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“Forget about Rhonda. Jo made enemies more dangerous than her. There are fanatics in her own clade who’d—Jesus, what now?”

She was looking over his shoulder. He turned as a white sedan and a white SUV pulled into the parking lot. The vehicles stopped, blocking in a row of cars. A young man about Paxton’s age popped out of the sedan.

“Oh, of course,” Dr. Fraelich said. She dropped the cigarette and tamped it out with her shoe.

The man quickly strode toward them, smiling. He wore an untucked linen shirt, khaki pants, and strappy, open-toed leather shoes that were a cross between sandals and slippers. “Marla,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

He gripped the doctor in a vigorous two-handed shake, then spun to face Paxton and offered his hand. “Eric Preisswerk, from the CDC down in Atlanta.” His accent was standard TV American with a European vowel or two thrown in. Up close he didn’t look quite so young; Pax put him at thirty-five, thirty-six. He was short and athletically trim, humming with positive energy. The kind of guy who’d kick your ass in racquetball and then insist you’d almost beaten him.

“Paxton Martin,” Pax said, but the man’s attention was already back on Dr. Fraelich.

“It looks like we get to work together sooner than we expected,” Preisswerk said to her. The doctor frowned and the man said, “You got the message that we were coming, didn’t you?”

“I got it,” the doctor said. “I just didn’t know why. Shouldn’t you be in South America? There’s nothing going on here.”

“Another team is going into Ecuador, once it gets permission. Meanwhile, they want my team to search for any likely vectors.” He glanced behind him. Five more people had exited the vehicles, and one of them was handing out laptop cases and small bags from the back of the SUV. Preisswerk turned back to them and dropped his voice. “Between you, me, and the lamppost, this is probably a waste of time.”

Pax thought, And that would make me the lamppost.

Dr. Fraelich said, “You’re still on the quantum teleportation theory, then.”

“Is there any other vector that makes sense? But what can we do? We have to cover the bases.”

“All right. I can set you up in one of the examination rooms.” She walked to the back door and unlocked it. Pax stood back as Preisswerk and his crew filed in with their bags.

Dr. Fraelich started to close the door and Paxton put out a hand. “I have to ask you for a favor.”

“I’m a little busy, Paxton.”

“It’s not about Jo and Rhonda, it’s about—listen, it won’t take ten minutes. Just a quick swab on the inside of my cheek—that’s how they do it on TV, right? Then mail off my DNA to some lab.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s something Rhonda said. About me.” The doctor looked at him impatiently. “See, when I was a kid I used to think about other clades. You know, more than just the three? That there could be other clades we didn’t know about—because on the outside they looked completely normal, but on the inside they’d be different.”

“Different.”

“Not different organs or anything—physically they’d seem perfectly normal. But psychologically, I don’t know, they’d have a different brain chemistry, maybe. A different way of thinking.”

It explained everything, he thought. Why he felt like such an alien in his own skin. Why he’d gone his entire life without feeling connected to anyone but Jo and Deke.

“You’re not a new clade, Paxton.”

“Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all it takes.”

“And a thousand dollars and thirty days to get the results,” she said. “All right, fine. Come back tomorrow, if I haven’t been pushed out of my own clinic. And please, leave the police work to the Chief.”

———

Pax knew it was past time to talk to Deke but didn’t know what he would say, so he decided to walk to the man’s house—slowly. He found himself cutting through Old Soldier Park and wondering how long it had been since he’d seen the place.

Old Soldier had been a giant elm that the original settlers of Switchcreek had somehow forgotten to chop down. The job fell to their descendants, who were forced into surgical action by the epidemic of Dutch elm disease that swept through the Smokies in the thirties. In apology they polished the stump and put up a plaque. Once when he and Jo were ten or eleven she’d hopped on the broad stump and said, Vote for me, citizens! Pax had smiled, not getting the joke. She’d rapped her knuckles against his forehead, one of her most annoying habits. Figure it out, knucklehead. When he told his parents what she’d said they both laughed, so he adopted the joke as his own even though it would be several years until he learned what a stump speech was.

He reached Deke’s house on Creek Road, stepped up onto the front step, and rang the bell. It had been over a month since the last time he’d been here, sweating and desperate, yet the door seemed even taller now. He felt like a little kid asking if the big boy could come out and play.

He rang the bell again. He never would have walked up to Deke’s front door when they were kids. Deke had lived with his father in a run-down trailer out near Two Hills. His father was a barker, a bully—a small man who liked to clomp out of his trailer with a baseball bat and yell at the black kids just to see them wet their pants. Mostly the kids just wanted to look at the bird-houses—a dozen or so hand-built boxes perched on poles around the yard. Deke had hammered together the first of them when he was in fifth grade, and each year the models were more elaborate, more detailed, more refined: log cabins, Gatlinburg-like chalets, multitier apartments … Paxton’s favorite was the scarecrow that housed birds in its wooden head.

The disparity between the birds’ accommodations and the humans’ became a little embarrassing. Maybe that’s why Deke’s father kept scaring the kids off. He died in the Changes, but Pax couldn’t recall whether it had been during the A, B, or C waves. Neither could he remember Deke ever talking about his father’s death. Was Deke at his bedside when it happened? Off with Jo and him? Pax had never asked. And why was that? Was he that much of a self-absorbed asshole that he couldn’t ask how Deke’s father died?

No one answered the bell. He thought of leaving a note taped to the door: Dear Deke, Rhonda may have killed some people. Call me.

He decided to take a different route back to his car, walking along Creek Road to the highway to get an alternate angle on the media circus. The sidewalk in front of the Bugler’s was completely blocked off; a row of TV reporters were lined up side by side, either talking into their own cameras or marking time until they went on. Half a block farther on at the salon, an argo woman and a chub woman in identical dresses had been cornered by what looked like at least two competing news crews. No one stopped Pax for an interview or even looked twice at him: the benefit of not looking like a local.

Pax turned the corner at Bank Street, stopped, and looked back at the car he’d just walked past. A light blue Prius. The windshield was unbroken, but that could easily have been replaced by now. The driver was inside, his head bent over something in his lap.

Pax walked around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was down. “I thought Deke kicked you of town,” he said.

Andrew Weygand jerked his head up, his fingers still on the laptop keyboard.

“Easy,” Pax said. “I’m just messing with you.”

“I have every right to be here,” he said.

“That’s right, you’re a journalist.” Pax thought he kept the sarcasm from his voice but wasn’t sure if he succeeded entirely. “I’m Paxton, by the way. I don’t think I introduced myself last time.”

Weygand hesitated, then shook Paxton’s hand. In the month since Pax had seen him the man’s bleached hair had transformed to deep black with yellow tips, but the soul patch still clung to the underside of his lip like mold. The back of his car was a mess. Filling the seat was an unrolled sleeping bag, a pillow, and two blue plastic coolers. The floorboards were crowded with white plastic grocery bags.

“Are you living in this thing?” Pax asked.

“Temporarily,” he said. “Turns out there’s not a free hotel room between here to Knoxville.”

“I’m surprised you’re not in Ecuador.”

“They’re not issuing visas,” Weygand said. “Total blackout except for a few of the mainstream press—typical old media hegemony.” He glanced at the side-view mirror. “So, your friend Deke …”

“I’m looking for him, actually,” Pax said.

“It’s not, uh, totally necessary that you tell him you saw me, right?”

Pax shrugged and smiled. “Probably not.”

“I’m just here for a night, maybe two. There’s a town hall meeting at the elementary school tonight. I just want to interview some of the state and federal people who are coming, maybe get an interview with Mayor Mapes, then I’m gone again, I swear.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. He hadn’t heard of any town meeting. How many government agencies were rolling into town? “So what about the Brother Bewlay thing? Are you still hunting him down?”

“I didn’t get much further after the last time I saw you,” Weygand said. “Why don’t you ask Deke? He’s got all the emails. If Jo Whitehall was—what?”

“Nothing, I just …” Pax rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “Listen, I’ve got a couple extra beds in my house, if you want to crash there after the meeting.”

“I’m fine, dude, thanks,” Weygand said.

“No, really. Jo Lynn was a good friend of mine, and you were her friend, too, even if you didn’t know it was her.” He smiled. “Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I have a kind of tech support problem. You good at computers?”

Weygand looked down at the laptop screen. “I know my way around.” He closed the lid and set the computer on the passenger seat. “What kind of problem?”

“I need to break into a password-protected laptop. A Mac.”

Weygand laughed. “But not your Mac, right? No thanks, man, I don’t—” Weygand stopped smiling, getting it.

“Yeah, we found it,” Pax said. “But Jo locked it. I think it could tell us—” He almost said, Tell us who killed her, but he knew it would make him sound crazy. “—Well, a lot. Think you can do it?”

“How about right now?” Weygand said. “I just need to stop by the store and—”

“I don’t have it with me,” Pax said. “Tonight, after the meeting.” He’d have to track down the twins, get them to retrieve the laptop from wherever they’d hidden it and bring it to his house.

“I’ll get the supplies,” Weygand said. He pushed the Power button on the dash and the Prius hummed awake. “Where can I get a couple big cans of compressed air?”