Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

He turned to the first yellow sticky, and signed. He sat there on the bed until he’d signed and initialed every blank. Then he rolled onto his side, pulled the pillow over his ears, and tried to sleep.

His father had discovered them a year and a half after the Changes, on an April day drowning in cold rain. Jo and Deke had already dropped out of school, and Pax had skipped that morning to join them at Jo’s house for an impromptu meeting of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. He knocked at her door and Jo called out, What’s the password? She’d insisted that their society adopt a password, and a Morse code knock to go with it: three short, three long, three short.

Deke and Jo were already lying in a nest of blankets in the living room, and he’d felt a stab of jealousy. Then they stripped off his clothes and pulled him into their warmth. Although the three of them had stopped having intercourse weeks before, they still fooled around in other ways. Much of the time, however, they did nothing but lie together in a warm bundle. They talked about stopping even this, but the damage had already been done, and they’d been unable or unwilling to break this cocooning habit.

That morning Jo lay between them, Deke with his arm under both their shoulders, Pax with his head and hand against her round, smooth belly. She’d told them that she could feel the child-they didn’t yet know that there were two-rolling and moving. Pax had pressed gently down with his palm, afraid to hurt her or the baby, but so far had felt nothing but yielding flesh and a steady warmth.

Jo was terrified and excited-keyed up in a way she’d never felt before, she said. Paxton was merely terrified. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant; it was that she was the first person with TDS-argo, beta, or charlie-to carry a child. No one could tell them what the child inside Jo would look like, or even whether Jo’s new body could survive a pregnancy. Only Deke seemed calm.

The rain must have masked the sound of Harlan’s car. Pax found out later the school had called home to report his absence, but he never learned how his father knew to come directly to Jo’s house. He walked straight in-no coded knocks, no “S-O-S”-and froze in the doorway. For a moment his expression was quizzical. Only a moment. Harlan Martin was not the behemoth he would become, but the eighteen months since the Changes had doubled him: his weight, his strength, his anger. His father had developed a hair-trigger temper. And why not: His wife was dead, his church was falling apart, and his only son had insisted on defying him, disappointing him, disgracing him.

Pax scrambled to his feet. Harlan strode across the room and grabbed Paxton by both arms, spun and slammed him into the wall, shaking a framed photograph loose from its hook, and pinned him there. Jo screamed and perhaps Deke spoke, but Pax couldn’t remember anything that was said. He only remembered his father’s face, pressed close to his own, twisted by shock, fury, loathing-too many emotions to name.

“My God, Paxton,” his father said, his voice filled with disgust. “What in heaven’s name have you done?”

Paxton had fallen asleep to the sound of the television blaring in the next room, and when he jerked awake sunlight was pouring through the window and the TV still babbled from the living room. It felt like less than a minute had passed, but it must have been hours.

Behind the noise of the TV he heard the telephone ringing.

A few seconds more and the ringing stopped. He didn’t think his father owned an answering machine. He closed his eyes, lay there for a time, and then opened his eyes again. He couldn’t hear his father snoring.

He sat up, found his watch where he’d put it on the floor. Eight-thirty. He pulled on his pants and shirt, walked barefoot out to the living room. The couch was empty. He went to the kitchen, then opened the door to his father’s bedroom, then checked the bathroom.

“Shit,” Pax said aloud. His father was gone.

He went out into the backyard and circled around the house, calling his father’s name. The wet grass washed his feet. Both Pax’s Tempo and his father’s Crown Victoria were still parked in the driveway. The Crown Vic’s driver’s-side door was ajar.

He walked toward the car, a sick feeling in his stomach. He came around the back bumper to see through the open door-and there was no one inside. He started to shut the door, and then saw a set of keys hanging from the ignition.

Pax leaned in, turned the key. The engine didn’t even click. Stone dead. The dome light was off too.

He put the keys in his pocket and slammed the door. He was walking into the house when his cell phone began to vibrate.

It was Deke’s number. Pax flipped open the phone. “Tell me you know where my father is,” Pax said.

“He’s at the church,” Deke answered in that sub-basement voice. “You better hurry.”

“The church? What’s he doing at the church?”

“By the looks of it, getting ready to baptize somebody.”

Pax went into the bathroom, peed. At the sink he splashed his face with tepid water, ran his wet hands through his hair. In the mirror he looked like a wild man. His father’s son, all right.

It almost took him longer to get the Tempo started than to get to the church. It was just two and a half miles away down a twisty and hilly stretch of Piney Road. But his father must have walked there. How could a man who weighed six or seven hundred pounds walk it? Two days ago he could barely get off the couch.

Deke’s open-topped Jeep was in the parking lot, as well as a dark blue Buick. Pax parked, tiredly climbed the steps, and paused with his hand on the door. From inside someone called out, and even without being able to make out the words he recognized his father’s voice-his preaching voice.

The Reverend Harlan Martin was bringing the Word.

Pax pulled open the creaking door and went inside. The vestibule was dim and empty, but the double doors to the sanctuary were propped open. Inside, light shimmered from the yellow-paned windows on the eastern wall, making the tops of the pews gleam.

A broad aisle led down the center of the church to the raised pulpit. Set into the wall behind the pulpit was a recessed archway that contained the baptistry, a cement pool sunk below the floor.

His father stood in the pool, water up to his waist, praying or preaching or both at the same time.

His cheeks shone with tears. One hand gripped the panel of glass that acted as a kind of splash guard for the pool, and the other was raised above his head, fingers spread. He wore a white dress shirt, too tight to be buttoned over his stained T-shirt. His hair had been combed back from his head.

“Forgive us, Lord!” he called, his voice echoing. His eyes were tightly closed, his face anguished. Blisters stretched across his forehead and cheeks, larger than Pax had ever seen them. What he’d taken to be tears could have been oil from ruptured sacs.

His father clenched his raised hand into a fist, opened it again. “Let your mercy come down on us. Forgive us now, our weak flesh, our corruptible hearts…”

Deke and a beta woman in a skirt and loose shirt stood off to the side of the sanctuary, next to the organ, talking in low voices. They saw Pax and waved him forward.

As Pax drew closer to the pulpit he could smell the spicy-sour tang of vintage. His father was still praying- We ask you, Lord, hear us, Lord -eyes shut, hand up like a drowning man. For as long as Pax could remember his father prayed for “we” and “us.” Pleading on behalf of the entire church, or the world.

Deke said, “Paxton, have you met the Reverend Hooke?”

Pax recognized the woman’s clothing, if not her face. She’d worn a shirt and vest like that when she’d led the singing at the funeral. They shook hands, and Pax said, “I’m sorry about this, Reverend. How long has he been in there?”