The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 22

PAX CAME DOWN out of the trees at the western edge of a fog-wreathed field. In the distance, the orange, quavering sun struggled to rise over blue hills. The clouds glowed a score of shades between blue and violet.

A few hundred yards away were the first of the mobile homes that made up the improvised neighborhood of the Coop. He’d come in behind them, their white backs and small windows all alike. No one moved between the buildings. He aimed for the nearest trailer and set off across the field.

The frost-rimed grasses burned silver; they wet his shins and crunched beneath his shoes. So beautiful. He wondered if he would have noticed any of this if he hadn’t been riding a wave of chemicals.

He passed between two trailers on the outermost row and stopped. No one was outside. He thought about knocking at one of the trailers at random.

He walked on until he reached the innermost row of homes that faced the main drive. To his right was the big sheet-metal building at the center of the compound. As good a place to start as any.

Before he reached the building a door opened at a trailer in front of him and he heard the squall of a baby. A tall, older beta woman stepped out, holding a tiny child whose smooth, ruby head gleamed like a marble. The woman had taken two steps down from the front porch before she noticed him.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for Reverend Hooke.”

She stared at him. He wondered if he’d known this woman before the Changes. Maybe she’d gone to his church. Maybe she’d been a friend of his mother’s.

She nodded in the direction Pax had been walking. “Elsa is two down,” she said.

“Thank you,” Pax said. “Good luck calming her down.” The baby’s cry sounded no different from that of any human baby.

He climbed the short steps to the reverend’s trailer and knocked. He put his hands in his pockets, huffed steam. The woman with the baby paced along the drive, not bothering to hide that she was studying him. He knocked again.

The door opened, and a beta woman dressed in a bathrobe looked down at him. The size of her belly, even through the robe, was apparent.

“Paxton?” the reverend said.

He looked up, embarrassed. “You know, I’d noticed at the town meeting and at the funeral that you were dressing differently, that you seemed … bigger. But I never took the next logical step.”

“You’re a man.”

“I suppose that’s why,” he said. “Or maybe it’s just me. I miss a lot of things.”

“Why are you here, Paxton? It’s awfully early.”

“I came to tell you that you can’t take the girls away. Sandra and Rainy.”

“How did you—?” She stopped, looked around, and saw the woman with the baby staring at them.

Pax said, “And I also came to tell you I know where you were the night Jo died.” The reverend’s face was as still as any beta’s, but he could feel the woman’s alarm. He said, “Do you want to do this out here?”

She pushed the door wider. “Come inside,” she said. “It’s cold.”

She walked across the small living room with a slight hitch in her step. Maybe the pregnancy was hurting her. Or maybe the limp had always been there and he’d never noticed.

She eased herself into a chair, and he sat down opposite her. After a moment she said, “I’ve seen you like this before, Paxton.”

Right, the night his father baptized him. Rebaptized him. “I apologize,” Pax said. “I took an awful lot of vintage a while ago.”

“You were with the girls?” Her anger was clear. “Where? At your house? Tommy’s been looking all over for them.”

“They’re safe,” he said. “I found them in the woods outside Jo Lynn’s house. They ran away because Tommy was going to kidnap them.”

The reverend made a disgusted noise. “He’s not kidnapping them. Did the girls say that?”

“They don’t know what he’s doing. All they know is that Tommy’s going to—”

“This is not Tommy’s idea, Paxton. It’s something we all agreed to—Rhonda, Deke, and I. Rhonda called it genocide insurance.”

“Genocide? What are you talking about?”

She sighed. “We’re smuggling members of our clades out of Switchcreek, just in case the government tries to …” She made a vague gesture. “… take measures against us.”

“You think the army’s going to kill you all?”

“We all thought Rhonda was being paranoid when she raised the idea years ago. We never thought—I never thought—there’d be another quarantine, and even if there was, I didn’t think we’d be threatened with that. But after Deke was killed …” She exhaled heavily. “We can’t take the chance. We can’t let the government make us disappear. If something happens at Switchcreek, the clades need to survive. So we have to get a few of us out. The first group will have two families from our clade, a handful of charlies, and two argo couples.”

“But that’s suicide—the roads are blocked, there are soldiers everywhere—”

“This plan existed well before the quarantine, Paxton. They’ll be hiking out of Switchcreek to a rendezvous several miles away. At that point they’ll be met by six vehicles, and they’ll scatter—every car in a different direction.”

“That’s crazy! What if a helicopter—”

“We have it covered, Paxton. The National Guard will be busy with the march.”

Before he could reply a little bald girl walked into the room, face scrunched against the light. She was three or four, dressed in green footy pajamas.

“Go back to bed, pumpkin, it’s not time for breakfast yet.”

“I’m not tired,” the girl said, and started to climb into her mother’s lap. Then she saw Pax. “Who’s that?”

“I’m Paxton,” he said. Then to the reverend he said, “Your youngest?”

“Not anymore,” she said, and pushed up from the chair and took the girl’s hand. “How about some Cheerios and bananas?” She led her into the kitchen.

Pax leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He was still cold, but at least his hands weren’t shaking. Yet. He could feel the vintage buzzing in his veins, adding meaning and import to everything he saw and heard. In the kitchen the reverend murmured to her daughter and he could feel her love for the girl in each note of her voice. And when the reverend returned to the room a few minutes later he felt the air shimmer with trepidation, wariness. The woman didn’t know what Pax would say next, and Pax didn’t know either.

Then he said, “It must have been a shock when you learned you were pregnant again.”

“Pregnancy is always difficult.” She stood with one hand gripping the back of her chair. “That girl in there nearly killed me—cardiomyopathy. I couldn’t walk for a month after the birth.”

“What did they say would happen if you got pregnant again?”

She was silent for a moment. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said. “Especially about betas. I decided to take the risk.”

“Decided?” he asked. “I thought you couldn’t choose when to get pregnant?”

She didn’t answer. Pax said, “But I suppose you could choose to not be pregnant.” He reached into his pocket and took out the orange pill bottle. “No one would blame you if you considered other options.” He showed her the label. “These have your name on them.”

The reverend froze. After a moment she said, “Where did you get that?”

He rubbed a thumb across the dried mud on its side.

“I said, where did you get that?”

“I found it at Jo’s house,” he said. Not quite lying.

“I never took those pills.”

“I guessed that,” Pax said. The woman looked at least six months pregnant—bigger than Jo had been when he left. “But you thought about it.”

“Yes, I thought about it.” Her voice was almost a hiss. “But that was a moment of weakness. Fear. Once the baby started to grow …” She slowly shook her head. One hand rested on her stomach. “It became obvious how wrong I’d been. Crystal clear.”

“The hormones kicked in,” Pax said. He tried to remember what the doctor had told him. “Oxytocin, other opiates. There are chemicals that are released during pregnancy that—”

“This has nothing to do with drugs, it’s about right and wrong. I was weak. The younger girls, they have moral clarity. I’m not so lucky. I was a human long before I was a beta. I wavered.”

“The pills couldn’t have been so evil if you were willing to give them to Jo,” he said. “She knew you had them, and she called you the night she died. She asked you to meet her up at that clearing between her house and yours.”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you. Not here.”

“Yes,” Pax said, “you are.”

The woman did not move or change expression, but her anger rolled toward him like heat.

Pax had grown up thinking of empathy as the most Christian of feelings—loving your neighbor as yourself, indistinguishable from yourself. But it was only information, to be used or not used, for good or ill. He felt the reverend’s rage and hurt, and the knowledge drew a target around her heart. As he spoke he knew exactly where his words would strike, and how deep.

“You were handing out abortion pills, Reverend,” he said. “Tell me what happened, before I have to ask every blank in this trailer park about you and Jo Lynn.”

She stared at him.

“All right, fine.” He stood. “I’ll check back with you later.”

“Please,” she said. “Keep your voice down. My other daughters are sleeping.”

After half a minute she said, “She called me asking for the pills. She couldn’t come here, obviously, and I couldn’t just drive out of the Co-op in the middle of the night—too many people would see and ask questions. So I agreed to meet her on the mountain. We’d met in that spot before, when … when Jo helped me think about my options when I became pregnant again.”

“But I thought you were the one who ran her out of the Co-op.”

“Jo’s excommunication wasn’t my doing,” the reverend said. “I tried to keep the peace, but the white-scarf girls—”

“Right. I know how hard it is to hold on to a congregation.”

“You can’t begin to know until you’ve stood in the pulpit yourself,” she said. “But Jo understood my position here, with the younger girls. We always understood each other. Even when we didn’t agree, we were friends.” She saw his look. “I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

“All right. So you went up there to help your friend. You gave her the pills. Then what?”

“Then nothing. I walked back home.”

“That’s it? You trotted up there and then right back down—and then a few hours later she was dead.”

“It wasn’t until the next morning I heard that she’d hung herself. I was shocked. She was upset that night, but she wasn’t … I guess I didn’t realize how distraught she was.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

The reverend looked away. “No.” Then she shook her head. “But I didn’t ask. I’d been in the same situation. I hugged her, and we went our separate ways. That was the last time I saw her.”

The woman was telling the truth, yet there was something measured in her words that made him think she was hiding something. What, he had no idea.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about seeing her that night, Reverend? Deke didn’t mention it. And I’m sure you didn’t tell the police.”

“You don’t know what some of these girls are like,” the reverend said. “How judgmental, how certain they are.”

“Because they’re pure,” Pax said. “And you’re tainted.” The reverend opened her mouth slightly, which Pax took to express outright shock. “I’ve been talking to Rainy and Sandra,” he explained.

“You have no idea,” the Reverend said. “If they knew I’d helped Jo—that I’d considered such a thing myself—they’d never trust me again.” In the kitchen, a thunk as the girl dropped a bowl or something as big. The reverend didn’t get up.

“One of them followed you up the mountain,” Pax said. “Tommy. Or one of the white-scarf girls. Maybe several of them.”

She shook her head. “No. Absolutely not. None of the girls—”

Outside, a car horn beeped twice.

“Somebody followed you,” Pax said. “Somebody close enough to you to find out your secret. They knew you were seeing her, and then they followed you up the mountain and saw you hand over the pills.”

“No.”

“And after you left, they killed her.”

The reverend stood up, went to the window. She pushed aside the drapes, let them fall back. “They’re here,” she said. He didn’t know who she was referring to. “I have to get ready now.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who followed you.”

She turned to him. “No one followed me, Paxton. I went down the mountain the same way I went up, and no one was on the path.”

“They hid from you,” he said. “They hid in the trees—it’s easy for them.” Sandra and Rainy could swing through trees like monkeys.

“No one followed me. Now please—get out of my house.”

Two beta girls about Rainy and Sandra’s height came into the room. They eyed Paxton. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, girls. He’s leaving now.” She marched from the room. A moment later the bedroom door slammed.

Pax sat in the chair, waiting. The two girls stared at him. The littlest girl came out of the kitchen to stare as well. Her pajamas were wet where she’d dropped her cereal.

He didn’t like the way they looked at him. Or maybe he didn’t like what he must look like in their eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

The oldest girl walked forward. She was a thin beta with speckled skin like an otter’s. She seized his wrist. Her grip was gorilla strong and surprisingly painful.

He said, “Listen—”

She jerked him out of the chair. Then she fastened her other hand around the back of his neck and with absurd ease steered him to the front door. The other older girl ran ahead of them and opened the front door.

Outside, a dozen girls in white scarves looked up at him.

———

The reverend’s daughter released him. Pax didn’t move from the porch. His right hand trembled and he gripped the white railing as if it were a weapon.

A dozen yards away, four argos were stepping down out of open-topped pickups. At the end of the drive three other vehicles were coming through the front gate: a couple of sedans followed by a red-and-white four-wheel drive—Tommy Shields’ Bronco.

The entire community seemed to have woken up since he’d gone inside the reverend’s trailer. Beta women and a few men lined the drive, children running between them or holding on to arms or sleeping on shoulders. The older girls, the whitescarf girls, had gathered around the reverend’s trailer as if they’d been preparing to storm it. Maybe they had been.

One of the argos was the young man who worked in Deke’s shop—Gary? Jerry? He and the young argo woman he’d arrived with lifted enormous aluminum-frame backpacks from the bed of their truck. The argo man saw Pax and frowned, confused to see him there.

Pax looked down at the white-scarf girls. They ranged in age from perhaps fifteen years old to twenty. None of them stood much taller than Rainy and Sandra; any one of them could snap his arm.

“Which one of you?” Pax asked. “Which one of you killed her?”

They returned his gaze with eyes like black stones. He realized that he couldn’t read their faces as he had the reverend’s. These girls were opaque to him, inscrutable as fish.

“No takers?” Pax asked.

Tommy Shields had noticed him. A beta girl was touching his arm, pointing back at Pax. Tommy began to jog toward him.

Pax walked down the steps, and the white-scarf girls moved out of his way and fell in behind him. Tommy was running now, yelling for them to hold him. Pax strode toward him.

A young charlie couple got out of their car halfway between them. They looked at Tommy, then at Paxton. “What are you doing here, man?” the charlie man said. Pax had seen him at a few of Rhonda’s paydays. He was dark haired and blockish, the girl round and pale: Mr. Square and Miss Circle, escaping together.

“Where are they?” Tommy said. “Where are the girls?”

The distance closed to a few feet—and Pax launched himself at the man. Tommy threw up his arms, but Pax tackled him and they both went down, tumbling across the sharp gravel. They clawed at each other, kicking and throwing elbows and spitting like children throwing a tantrum. Ridiculous, Pax thought, even as he surrendered to the emotion of it. Tommy hated him, he hated Tommy—it was so simple. A feedback loop of empathy.

Pax lost track of whose limbs were whose. They rolled, smacked against the wheel of a pickup. People around them shouted.

Someone gripped him by the leg and dragged him backward. Hands peeled Pax and Tommy from each other and hauled them upright. The charlie man held Paxton, and an argo had fastened a long arm around Tommy. Pax, chest heaving, tasted blood in his mouth and smiled like a madman. Tommy bled too, but not badly. All that scrabbling and they’d only scratched each other.

“Y’all fight like girls,” said the charlie holding him.

“He knows where they are,” Tommy said. “Sandra and Rainy. He’s trying to hide them so that they can’t go with us.”

The argo looked at him. “Is that so?” he said in his low voice. They were surrounded by betas—white-scarf girls, young children, a smattering of males—and the charlies and argos who’d driven here for the start of the exodus.

“The girls are safe,” Pax said.

“You can’t protect them,” Tommy said. “You can’t even take care of them! What are you going to do with a girl in Sandra’s condition? What would you do to her?”

Paxton stopped struggling. “What are you talking about?”

The reverend appeared between them. “Stop it. Both of you.” She was dressed now in a skirt and long blouse. She turned to a pair of older beta women. “Sandra and Rainy are at Jo’s house. Please take some people with you to go pick them up.”

The charlie boy released his grip; Paxton was no longer fighting him anyway. The reverend watched his face, waiting to see if he finally understood.

He’d been so blind. The way Sandra had been covering herself with the blanket, the way that for all the time he’d known her she’d worn nothing but loose dresses to Rainy’s tomboy clothes. The way she’d hugged him so carefully last night, touching only shoulders and arms. She couldn’t have been as far along as the reverend, but she’d carefully concealed her shape from him. Rainy and Sandra had conspired to hide it.

So blind.

They didn’t try to stop him from leaving. He walked between the rows of trailers, across the field. When he reached the tree line he looked back and saw Tommy’s Bronco and another car rolling out the front gate. There was no way he could beat them to Jo’s house, no way he could warn the girls. He wasn’t sure that he would’ve warned them if he could. Tommy was right: Their clade could protect them, and he couldn’t.

He walked into the shadow of the trees and started up the mountain.

The vintage was already dissipating from his bloodstream. A few months ago a dose of the size he’d taken would have knocked him unconscious. In August, a single taste of it had put him on the ground and left him gawking as if God were going to reach down and shake hands.

After fifteen minutes he reached the clearing. Sunlight splintered through the trees.

The bench was empty. Jo was long gone, evaporated with the vintage.

He walked across the long grass, then stopped. A figure stepped out of the trees ahead of him.

He took a step back. “There are people looking for you,” he said.

“We heard the cars coming up the drive,” Rainy said. “We ran.” Sandra stepped out of the trees behind her, the blanket still around her shoulders.

Sandra glanced at Rainy nervously.

“You really are pregnant?” Pax asked.

“We wanted to tell you,” Sandra said.

Rainy said, “We kept thinking you’d notice.”

Sandra let the blanket slip to the ground. The bulge beneath her dress was hardly noticeable, but then she ran a hand down her front, smoothing out the fabric, showing the swell of her belly.

“I’m only a few months along,” she said. “But I can feel her growing, every day. There may even be twins. Oh Paxton, my daughters are going to be the first children of the new generation. Do you want to feel them?”

Sandra took a step forward and he jerked back. Rainy watched him, her arms at her sides. He’d seen her use those arms to haul herself through the trees like a chimp, or carry him like a child. They could cinch shut a windpipe like a noose.

He said, “The pills weren’t for your mother.” He already knew the answer. He’d known it as soon as he heard that Sandra was pregnant. As soon as the reverend had looked at him, he’d understood what had happened that night—in this very spot.

“No,” Rainy said.

“The night she found out—”

“She was going to kill the baby,” Rainy said. “Sandra’s daughter. Her own granddaughter.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t understand a person who would do that. Someone had to stop her.”

“But Rainy, she was your mother.”

“I know who she was.”

“Jesus, Rainy …”

“Don’t look at her like that!” Sandra said. Pax had never heard her speak so sharply. The girl stepped between Paxton and her sister. “You don’t know how torn up she’s been. She doesn’t feel good about what she had to do. But you said last night that sometimes good people have to do bad things.”

“You were awake,” Pax said.

“Mom wasn’t going to stop,” Sandra said. “You know how she was. Once she’d made up her mind, she wouldn’t quit. We couldn’t go to the Co-op, not with Hooke helping her. Rainy did what she had to do. She was protecting me. Protecting us.”

“Sandra, I know how it must feel to—”

“No you don’t,” Sandra said. “You’re not a beta. You don’t get to judge.”

They heard voices calling up the mountain. High tenors—beta voices. Rainy tensed as if she were about to run.

“They’re not going to harm you or your baby,” Pax said. “That’s the last thing they’d do.” He nodded toward the voices. “Tommy will protect you. And the reverend—that’s over now. I don’t think she understood who the pills were for.”

Rainy looked down the slope, then at Paxton. “We wanted you to know,” she said. “We wanted you to understand. Then maybe—”

“Maybe we could stay with you,” Sandra said. “You do kinda need us, Paxton.”

The voices grew louder. “You should go,” Pax said. “You’re worrying them.”

Sandra rushed to him. She threw her arms around him, pressed her belly into his. He tried to step away, but she hugged him harder. Finally he touched the top of her smooth head.

Rainy said, “Good-bye, Pax.”

“Take care of each other,” he said.

Sandra released him. Rainy put the blanket over her shoulders.

He watched them until they vanished into the trees. He turned away, but then his knees felt weak, so he sat down there in the wet grass. He looked at nothing for a long time, as the sun tracked across the blue roof of the clearing.