The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 16

RHONDA MAPES STOOD in the center of a bull’ s-eye. She looked around at the circle of people nearest her—politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, police, and military personnel (almost all of them men, twenty-first century be damned)—then lifted her head to take in the entire crowd.

The emergency meeting of the Switchcreek Town Council had swelled to include over twenty invited participants and more than two hundred spectators and media people. She’d expected a crowd, which is why she’d decided to hold the meeting in the elementary school gym. The folding chairs were set in concentric rings: leaders on the inside, flunkies behind them, and everyone else filling in back to the walls.

A more honest layout, Rhonda thought, would have placed the federal muckety-mucks in the outermost ring, all the better to corral the state functionaries, who were in turn trying to curb the county yokels, who only wanted to keep the freaks from Switchcreek in line. Rhonda, of course, would have been exactly where she stood now; smack dab in the center of everything. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

She smiled her grandmother smile. “Let me start,” she said, “by thanking you all for coming out here tonight.”

Tom Garvin, the regional director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, opened his mouth to speak and Rhonda said, “Before we introduce our guests, we’d like to open this meeting with a word of prayer—for the people of Babahoyo. Reverend Hooke, would you lead us?”

Dr. Ellis Markle, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked exasperated for a moment, then quickly assumed a pious expression. Rhonda thought of him as the man from COPTER. He led a division of the CDC called the Coordinating Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, but after watching him land his helicopter in the middle of town it was impossible to keep the correct acronym in her head.

Neither Garvin nor Ellis had wanted a joint meeting, let alone this public spectacle. The TEMA crew had wanted to talk privately with the CDC people, but Rhonda had arranged for a meeting between the town council and the CDC before Markle had touched down. The state officials had no choice but to insert themselves into the meeting. Then, somehow, half the town and all the news crews had learned of the summit and demanded to attend.

The Reverend Hooke prayed on in her loud, bell-like voice, earnest as all hell, and Rhonda surveyed the room under half-closed lids. All the clades were in attendance. A large contingent of blanks—most of them white-scarf girls—filled several rows on one side. A dozen argos loomed at the back of the room. And almost thirty charlies had scattered themselves around the room as she’d directed.

Only a few skips, though. Mr. Sparks sat in the first row, nervously paging through the minutes from the previous meeting. Paxton Martin was hunched over in the third row next to a couple of blank girls—they had to be Jo Lynn’s twins—and an outsider she didn’t recognize, a young man with a ridiculous hairdo like a black paintbrush.

Hooke ended her prayer with something in Spanish. That was a nice touch, Rhonda thought. She hadn’t even known Elsa spoke Spanish. Then the reverend resumed her seat in the first row with her fellow council members, Mr. Sparks and Deke.

Rhonda reminded everyone that this was a council meeting and not a press conference; the media people would have to ask their questions later. Then she began to introduce their guests, starting with the lowliest of them, the county commissioner.

Nothing meaningful was said for the next hour. The officials took turns offering their support for the people of Switchcreek, without ever specifying why the people of Switchcreek needed any.

Rhonda noticed Deke leaning back to hear something Dr. Fraelich was whispering to him. The two of them had been talking earnestly before the meeting—and she had an idea what about. The doctor had nearly jumped out of her skin when Rhonda glided up and said hello. Rhonda had asked her if she could stay a little while after the meeting, and of course she’d agreed—as she’d better, after all the work Rhonda had done to keep her clinic funded.

The audience was bored, and even the newspeople were growing restless. It wasn’t until the Man from COPTER said that a CDC field team would be going door-to-door with a survey that the crowd seemed to wake up. Someone from the crowd asked what kind of survey, and Markle then introduced the field team leader, a man named Eric Preisswerk who looked much too young to have both an MD and a PhD in molecular epidemiology. Nice shoes, though. They looked Italian.

“It will take only a few minutes to answer the questions,” Preisswerk said. “But we hope it will help us determine if there’s any relationship between what’s happening in Babahoyo and what happened in Switchcreek.” Copies of the survey were being passed through the room. Rhonda had already seen it. One of the first questions was, “Have you traveled to South America in the last ten years?”

A voice in the back of the room called out, “Are you saying TDS is contagious?”

Preisswerk held up his hands. “There’s been no evidence of that. All we’re trying to figure out—”

“What about quantum teleportation?”

This came from one of the Whitehall girls sitting next to Paxton. “Are you looking into how TDS could be transmitted that way?”

Preisswerk laughed in surprise. To an outsider the beta girl must have looked about nine years old. “Okay, that’s … Wow. What is your name?”

The girl stood up, slipped off her large backpack, and handed it to Paxton. Paxton had an odd look on his face—surprised but somehow proud. “Lorraine Whitehall,” the girl said.

Preisswerk said, “Well, Lorraine, you sound like a very intelligent girl. I know you may have heard people talking about quantum this or that on TV, but that’s just a guess—we really don’t have the evidence to say that. We’re not sure if teleportation of quantum states is even possible on a molecular scale, but much less responsible for TDS.”

Lorraine said, “The Oxford group did room-temperature teleportation with a complex molecule last year.”

“Yes, but—are you reading physics journals, too?”

“The articles are on the Internet,” she said.

Preisswerk laughed again. “Okay, that experiment was in laboratory conditions,” he said. “Those fifty atoms were carefully isolated. That’s a long way from showing that teleportation can occur inside an organic system.”

Mr. Sparks said, “This is getting completely out of hand. We haven’t even approved the minutes from the last meeting.”

A low voice from the back said, “What are you talking about—Star Trek? Somebody teleported the disease to us?”

Lorraine stepped up onto her chair and turned to find the person who’d spoken, a young argo man. “Quantum teleportation doesn’t teleport bodies or things, just information,” she said. “But lots of stuff in our bodies happens at the subatomic level—breathing, thinking, making DNA. TDS could be like a computer virus that tells our bodies to replicate DNA differently.” Somebody said something Rhonda didn’t catch, and Lorraine said, “I’m not making it up—lots of scientists think so.”

“So TDS can be contagious?” the argo asked.

“Of course it is,” someone said in a loud voice. “We caught it, didn’t we?”

Paxton held up a hand to Lorraine, but the girl jumped down on her own.

Rhonda caught the eye of Chelsea Wilson, a charlie woman in her forties who was sitting in the third row. Chelsea lifted her hand and said, “Is there going to be a quarantine?”

Preisswerk looked at his boss. The Man from COPTER stood, started to speak.

“Louder!” someone shouted.

“I said, there are no current plans for quarantine.”

The room erupted in shouts and questions. Rhonda glanced at Deke. He was staring at the floor, frowning. She’d told him what the government people would say.

Rhonda stood and called for quiet. When she had the room back under control she said, “Dr. Markle, almost everybody in this room lived through the quarantine, and in the end there turned out to be no reason for it. I think the question they’re asking, what we’re all asking, is not whether you have plans for a quarantine, but whether you will guarantee that there won’t be one.”

He seemed to flinch at the word “guarantee.” “Mayor, I already said that there are no plans whatsoever for, for any kind of detention.”

Rhonda touched his arm. “Just say, ‘I promise, there will be no quarantine. Period.’”

He blinked at her.

“That’s all you’ve got to say.”

Markle addressed the crowd. “Let me assure you,” he said. And then louder, “I promise, there are no plans that I know of for any—”

He never finished the sentence. The charlies in the audience had jumped to their feet, followed by a few betas, everyone shouting and talking. Markle didn’t understand who he was talking to. These people had been quarantined before, and after the quarantine they saw their neighbors riot just because they wanted to go to the damn supermarket. They’d seen dead boys by the side of the road, and one of their girls raped, and the feds and the police hadn’t done a damn thing for them. They could smell weasel words at a hundred yards. Now they were sure the government was coming for them.

Deke and the Reverend Hooke rose to stand next to Rhonda. The reverend leaned close to her and said, “I hope you’re happy.”

Damn straight, she was happy. Her people were waking up.

It was nearly midnight before Rhonda shook the hand of the last visiting official, soothed the last constituent, begged off from the last reporter, and finally made her way down the hall to the teachers’ lounge. Deke sat on the floor with his arms around his knees. The Reverend Hooke and Dr. Fraelich sat at the largest table, holding Styrofoam coffee cups. The reverend, despite her masklike face, exuded impatience. Dr. Fraelich, looking more flushed than usual, had picked apart the rim of her cup and made a tiny snowdrift beside it.

“I thought they’d never leave,” Rhonda said by way of apology. She assessed the structural integrity of one of the thin plastic chairs, chose a marginally newer one next to it, and gingerly sat. “I suppose the doctor told y’all that I’d invited her to sit in on our conversation.”

“Is Mr. Sparks not coming?” Dr. Fraelich asked.

“Oh, this isn’t a town council meeting, hon,” Rhonda said.

The doctor smiled tightly. “The inner circle, then? The Star Chamber?”

“Call it the executive board,” the Reverend said.

The doctor glanced at Deke. “I didn’t know the town had one,” she said.

Rhonda chuckled. “Neither does Mr. Sparks. Don’t tell him, it’ll hurt his feelings.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. You speak their language, Doctor, and you’ve already had a run-in with the field team. What do you think they’re planning?”

“Run-in?” Deke asked.

“This morning, Eric Preisswerk and his team came to my office and started going through my records,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Everything they could get their hands on, paper or electronic.”

“That can’t be legal,” the reverend said. “Those are private medical records.”

“I don’t think they’re worried about lawsuits at the moment,” Rhonda said. To the doctor she said, “So will they find a link?”

The doctor shook her head. “I can’t believe they’d find something new. For thirteen years we’ve looked at all the usual causes and vectors—viral, bacteriological, toxicological—and come up with nothing.”

“So why is Preisswerk doing it?”

“I’ve known Eric for several years. He’s got to look for a standard link because that’s his job, but what he’s really working on is the quantum transmission theory.”

“This teleportation stuff?” Deke said. “But he was putting Rainy down about it.”

“Eric was being cautious because he was in public.”

“And because his boss was right there,” Rhonda said.

The doctor picked up the coffee cup again and pinched off a bit of Styrofoam. “Eric told me the CDC is taking the theory more seriously now. Ecuador is making them take it seriously.”

“So is TDS contagious or not?” the reverend asked. “If they think we can spread it, then they’re going to crack down.”

“It’s not that simple,” Dr. Fraelich said. “If the theory’s correct, and I don’t believe it is, then TDS is transmittable, but not in the way we normally think. Instead it’s—well, it’s too complicated to explain.”

“I think you better try,” Rhonda said.

“Tell them what you told me, Marla,” Deke said. “About quantum calculation, parallel universes.”

Dr. Fraelich exchanged a look with Deke—the doctor wasn’t enjoying this. She exhaled heavily. “Imagine that next to our universe there are millions of other universes. Trillions. Now imagine that in just one of them, some bacteria or virus figures out how to transmit its genetic instructions to the universe next door.”

“How?” the reverend asked.

“If a cell is isolated from measuring events, then—never mind, let’s just say it’s theoretically possible. The point is, the probability of that happening is very, very low, almost impossible, but not quite. Given enough alternate universes, it’s practically inevitable that one of them learns the trick.” Everyone regarded her blankly. The doctor smiled in frustration. “Okay, think of how land animals that evolved in one place end up on other continents, like new world monkeys migrating from Africa to South America. It’s too far for them to swim, obviously. But say a hurricane picks up a tree on the shore where a couple of monkeys are hanging on, and the tree gets blown into the right current, and somehow the monkeys run aground on an island before they die of starvation or thirst. Then a thousand years later it happens again, to their descendants, and they get blown to the next island, and the next. Eventually we get marmosets in South America.”

“Come on now,” the reverend said. “A hurricane, a tree, and not one but two monkeys …”

“Adam and Eve,” Deke said, a smile in his voice.

“Or just one pregnant female monkey,” Rhonda said.

“And then it happens again and again?” the reverend said.

“But that chain of events only has to happen once,” the doctor said. “Once in ten million years. We know it happened, or something equally improbable, because the monkeys weren’t there forty million years ago, and then they were.

“Now imagine what you could do with trillions of universes and millions of years. Just once, one virus has to figure out how to get to the next universe. Once that happens, the viruses ripple across many universes. The way quantum mechanics works, you’ll have a nearly infinite number of universes in which this has happened, and a nearly infinite number where this has never happened. We just happened to be in the haves.”

“I don’t believe this,” the reverend said. “That all this could happen by chance.”

The doctor bristled. “I’m not going to argue with you about whether this is an act of God.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” the reverend said.

Rhonda rapped the table with the underside of one of her rings. “Ladies. It doesn’t matter whether God did it, or a virus, or quantum Santa Claus.”

“Of course it matters!” the reverend exclaimed.

“Elsa, hear me out. It doesn’t matter what we think, it only matters what the government thinks, and what the public thinks. Because that’s what’s going to decide whether they quarantine us again.” She looked around the table. “You saw what I saw. Doctor, your friend Preisswerk bailed out when he was asked about the quarantine. Obviously they’ve talked about it. And if public opinion turns, then sooner or later they’ll have to isolate us. That’s what I’d do in their shoes.”

The reverend made a disgusted noise. “Of course you would.”

“Yes I would. Elsa, the only reason they dropped the quarantine last time is because it stopped spreading, and because the babies hadn’t started arriving. Now it’s started again, and they know those people will start breeding too. We’re not disease victims anymore, we’re a race—three races—and from another universe, of all things.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the reverend said. “We are not aliens.”

“Of course not,” Rhonda said, and thought, Of course we are. “But think of this from the government’s point of view. Even if a quarantine won’t protect a single citizen, the public will demand that we be locked up. They’re already nervous—did you see that interview with those yahoos in Knoxville? They’ve already started talking about ‘those people’ in Switchcreek. Pretty soon they’ll be running to Wal-Mart for pitchforks and torches.”

“We’ve gone down this road before,” the reverend said. “Putting a fence around us didn’t make any difference last time, and it won’t this time. The government has to make it clear that it’s not contagious. We are not a risk.”

Dr. Fraelich shook her head. “You’re not listening to me. It may not be contagious in the usual sense, but it’s still transmittable. Look, imagine all the universes lined up in parallel lines.” She set out her hands, palms apart. “The virus travels from one universe to the next one. Nothing would stop the virus from crossing back into our universe from a different point. We have to assume that we are infecting nearby universes. The more of those we infect, the more likely that the infection spreads back to us.”

“If this quantum theory is true,” Deke said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” Rhonda said again. “If the government thinks it’s true, or if they feel they have to act like it’s true, then they’re going to try to fence us in. Our job is to figure out how to stop that from happening.”

Neither the reverend nor Deke had an answer for that. After several moments passed in silence, Rhonda stood and addressed Dr. Fraelich. “Well, we’ve got a lot to ponder. Thank you for offering us your opinion, Doctor. If you get any more information out of those CDC folks, of course we’d want to know right away.”

The doctor seemed surprised that she was being pushed out. Surely she didn’t think she was being invited into the Executive Council? For one, she didn’t have the genes for it.

“What are you going to do?” Dr. Fraelich asked.

Take out genocide insurance, Rhonda thought. She smiled and opened the door for the doctor. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

“Your problem,” Rhonda told Deke after the meeting had adjourned and the reverend had left the building, “is that you don’t believe in the future.”

They were walking through the school, shutting doors and turning out lights behind them. Rhonda had asked him to give her a ride home because Everett had the Cadillac.

Deke looked perplexed, not sure if he should laugh. “Of course I do.”

“You don’t, not really. Without children, you’ve got nothing to pin your future to. You’re practically sleepwalking through these meetings. You’re disengaged, Deke, and we can’t afford that. All the clades have to pull together if we’re going to make this work.”

It had taken another half hour after Dr. Fraelich had left the meeting for Rhonda to lay out her plans. She didn’t mention that she’d already starting implementing them. The shell of the website had already been created, though it wasn’t online yet; the toll-free numbers had been ordered; and her lawyer in Knoxville had set the 501(c)(3) paperwork in motion.

As she’d expected, the reverend quibbled with details, even though—no, because—she saw no other choices. She had the most people to consider, Elsa said, and so many of her clade were children. Deke had said very little, but when he finally said, “Okay,” it was like the strike of a gavel. The reverend gave her consent and quickly left.

Rhonda opened her purse and handed him an envelope. He frowned, opened it with his thick fingers, and frowned again at the contents. The check was drawn against the school construction fund and made out to Alpha Furniture Company, for $83,522. Rhonda thought that $22 was a nice touch—specificity made it look less like a payoff.

Deke said, “I don’t think this is the right time to be starting this, do you? The whole point of your plan—”

“Nonsense! We don’t have time not to do it. My only requirement is that you and Donna have to use this money too. After that, start finding other argo couples. Like that boy who works for you, him and his new wife—they have to be thinking of a baby.” They reached the front doors. Rhonda withdrew her big key ring from her purse, inserted the Allen wrench into the side of the door’s push bar. “And by the way? It’s our plan, hon.”

Deke rubbed his thumb across the envelope but still didn’t put it away. “I noticed a few of your people weren’t here tonight,” he said. “Everett, Clete, Travis.”

Rhonda turned the wrench, winching down the bar so that the door would lock behind them when they left. “Everett’s running some errands for me,” she said.

“Really?”

Rhonda looked up, unable to keep a wry smile from her face. “You’ve got your chief face on, Chief.”

“Marla told me what happened at the Home yesterday,” he said. “She got it from Paxton.”

“Don’t you worry, that’s all taken care of now.”

“That,” he said, “is what I’m afraid of.”

She straightened, dropped the key ring back into her purse. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about Clete and Travis. You beat up those two boys yourself just a few weeks ago.”

“Nobody’s seen them for two days. Or Doreen either.”

“Doreen, now that girl’s a piece of work. Doesn’t have the sense that God gave a hamster, and I do believe she was the brains of the outfit.” Rhonda pushed through the door, and the big man stooped to follow.

Deke’s Jeep, parked under a streetlamp, was the only car left in the lot. Not only would she have to somehow climb up into that thing, her hair would be blown to heck. Thank goodness it was the middle of the night.

“Rhonda,” Deke said. His voice had dropped into an Old Testament rumble. “What did you do with them?”

She breathed deep, exhaled. The night air was pleasantly cool and smelled of cut grass.

“Oh, all right,” she said. “I’ll show you on the way home.”

Rather than just telling him where they were going she directed him by rights and lefts into the bottoms west of town. The Jeep rode rough, but she had to admit it was damn handy on these deeply rutted roads; the Caddy had had a much tougher time of it.

When they were a half mile from their destination Deke looked at her. “Willie Flint’s place?”

“It was available,” she said. “And it seemed appropriate.”

“Jesus Christ, Rhonda.”

Rhonda directed Deke to pull in beside her Cadillac, and when he shut off his headlights the night seemed to swoop in to surround them. Not quite pitch-black: Faint yellow light flickered in one of the cabin’s small windows.

“Help me down,” Rhonda said. Deke came around the Jeep—and froze. Rhonda followed his stare. The cabin door was open, and a figure stood in the shadowed doorway with his hand hanging at his side.

“Don’t shoot,” Rhonda said. “It’s me.”

“I was thinking of shooting myself, actually,” Everett said. “Barron was supposed to be here a half hour ago.” He stepped back to let them inside and nodded—warily, Rhonda thought—to the argo. “How you doing, Chief?”

The living room was dimly lit by a battery-run Coleman lantern and two old-fashioned kerosene lamps Rhonda had brought from her house. The old furniture had been pushed back to the walls, leaving the middle clear for a kind of campsite: a plastic cooler, three blue nylon camp chairs, a boom box, and the junk food and cases of beer and 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.

“Shakespeare, hon. Read a book.”

Deke lifted his hands in surrender. He stepped up into the Jeep and dropped down into the driver’s seat; the car rocked on its suspension. “I’ll be checking on them,” he said.

“I’m sure Everett and Barron would appreciate the company.”

“I’m serious, Rhonda. I won’t sit by if there’re any more disappearances.” He put the Jeep in gear. “Good luck with the kickoff tomorrow.”

She watched the taillights slide and wink through the trees until they disappeared.

Well, that went better than expected, Rhonda thought. He hadn’t even given back the check.