Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

Jo squatted over his legs and with both hands peeled the waistband over his rigid cock. “There we go,” she said.

Pax felt flushed with embarrassment and excitement. If she touched him he would explode.

“Your turn, Jo,” Deke said.

She seemed not to hear him. She was looking at their bodies, but seemed not to see them.

“Jo?” Pax said.

“You got nothing to worry about from us,” Deke said.

She pushed her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and stepped out of them. Her crotch was a smooth mound, her cleft like the jot of a pencil. Everywhere she was hairless as clay, her skin dark as raspberry syrup.

“Nothing to see here, people,” she said. Her tone was light, but her voice trembled.

“Shush,” Deke said, and held up a hand. Pax shifted over, and Jo lowered herself to lie between them.

He woke to his father calling his name. Pax’s eyes opened to slits against the light. His father was looming over him, his shadowed face haloed by the overhead light. It was his father as he was before the Changes: the white shirt, the black pompadour.

“Wake up, now,” his father said sternly, in that voice that could rattle the back pews. He leaned down, abruptly becoming a fat old man in a robe. A chub. “We don’t have much time.”

Pax pulled himself upright, and the picture frame fell from his chest to his lap. It was deep in the night, 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. He’d passed out on the bed fully dressed, still wearing his shoes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve only got a little while ’til I’m mad as a hatter again,” his father said. Then, “Why aren’t you in your bedroom?”

Pax ignored the question, and his father turned and shuffled through the guest room door.

Pax rubbed a hand across his face. He felt shaky, unbalanced. He picked up the picture Tommy had given him and put it on the bookshelf next to the bed. This guest room had doubled as his mother’s library. She’d been a voracious reader: mysteries, romances, true crime, anything she could get her hands on. During the Changes, when she was burning up from fever, she’d made him read to her.

Pax got to his feet. The vintage still fizzed in his bloodstream. The room quivered with a strangeness that coyly refused to reveal itself, as if each book and article of furniture had been replaced by a subtly imperfect copy.

He found his father in the kitchen, trying to open a can of Campbell’s soup, the manual can opener almost lost in his huge hands.

“Here…,” Pax said, and reached to take the can from him.

“I got it,” his father said. Pax sat at the table. Eventually his father did manage to peel the lid away. He dumped the soup into a pot on the stove and stood there stirring with his back to the room.

“I suppose Rhonda took you to see her place yesterday,” his father said.

Pax was surprised he remembered her visit. “It was nice. Homey. Very clean.”

His father grunted. “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

“I never said that,” Pax said, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. He didn’t know if it was fatigue or the vintage, but his emotions kept teeter-tottering between anger and grief.

His father said, “I do things the way I want, when I want. I’m not going to go to her little… pet shop . All this-” He made a gesture that could have meant anything. “All this bother, I’m not usually like this. I manage just fine. God always provides a way.”

“If this is providing, then you must have really pissed him off.”

His father half turned. “Watch it, boy.”

“Not just you, the whole town,” Pax went on. “The Changes? Now that was Old Testament-quality smiting.”

“Not everything’s a punishment, Paxton. There are trials in life. Tests that teach us something.”

“Oh, got it,” Pax said. “The Job thing. God makes you into a monster, takes away your church, kills your wife-”

His father swung toward him. “Shut your mouth!”

Pax remained stock-still. He and his father locked eyes, but only for a moment. Pax looked away first, shook his head.

His father turned back to the stove.

Pax quickly pressed tears from his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He breathed deep, trying to master his emotions.

After a couple minutes his father brought the pot to the table. He set it on a hot pad and picked up a spoon. Pax raised an eyebrow.

His father looked up. “I can do this because it’s my house.”

“Yeah. If Mom could see you she’d kill you.”

“Trust me, she’s watching.”

Pax couldn’t watch, though-Harlan was practically inhaling the soup. He looked away, but still had to listen to him. After a few minutes, Paxton said, “You remember your first sermon after they reopened the church?” Even though the town was in quarantine, the churches and schools had been shut down for several months for fear of spreading TDS to the remaining townspeople who were unaffected. When his father was finally allowed to hold a service, the pews were almost empty and the cemetery almost full. “You preached on the plagues of Egypt.”

“Exodus twelve thirty,” his father said. “‘For there was not a house where there was not one dead.’”

“Jo said you had it wrong,” Pax said. “It wasn’t the plague story we were in, it was the Tower of Babel.”

His father wiped at his mouth, made a questioning sound.

“I don’t remember exactly how she put it,” Pax said. “Something about humans growing too proud again. If a multitude of languages didn’t teach us anything, then maybe a multitude of bodies would.”

His father grunted, then scraped the last of the soup from the pot. Pax rose and carried it to the sink.

“So what’s it going to be, then?” his father said. “Are you going to fight me on this?”

“I can’t take care of you,” Pax said tiredly. “I have my job, my-”

“I’m not asking you to take care of me!”

“You can’t do it yourself, Dad. And at Rhonda’s place you’d have your own room, home-cooked meals. They have big-screen TVs even. It’s chub paradise.”

“Don’t be funny with me. You’re doing this out of spite, Paxton. You’re still angry.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not angry about anything. I’m trying to help you.”

His father made a derisive sound. “I raised you. I know when you’re lying.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Pax said.

He stalked back to the guest bedroom. In the morning he’d talk to Rhonda, and by noon he’d be gone. He pulled back the bedclothes, unlidding the dank odor of mildew, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

His father’s shape filled the doorway and Pax dropped his hands.

“She’s selling the stuff,” his father said. “To the young chubs, and anybody else they can sell it to. They get high off it.”

“No she’s not.” Then: “How would you know anyway?”

“People talk. They come visit, say things. What else could she be doing with it?”

“Research,” Pax said. “Scientists are using it to search for a cure for… what happened to you. What’s happening to you.”

His father snorted. “What scientists? Where?”

“It’s a full research program, Dad. The government’s involved.” Actually, she hadn’t mentioned the government, but they’d have to get involved if the academics found a cure. No pharmaceutical company would bother to manufacture a drug good for only a few hundred hillbillies in east Tennessee.

“She told you that?” his father asked.

“You can ask her yourself in the morning-she’s coming by to get the papers. Try to be decent.”

Pax lay on the bed, trying to ignore the noise from the living room. His father had turned the TV on again. Finally Pax sat up, pulled out the stack of papers from beneath the bed, and found a pen on one of the shelves.