Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

The light suddenly hit him in the face. Voices burst out in laughter.

“Hey there, Cuz!” someone called.

The slope here was less extreme. He got to his feet, wincing into the light. He made his way back to the gate, supporting himself with one hand against the wall. His elbow still buzzed with pain.

Two chub boys stood in front of a metallic green Toyota Camry. Two chub girls in the backseat laughed nervously.

“Hi, Clete,” Pax said. He couldn’t remember the name of the younger boy, the one holding the spotlight. Something like “Elvis,” or maybe he thought that just because of the sideburns.

“What the hell you doing out here?” Clete asked. “You’re liable to get shot, sneaking around in the dark.”

“People might think you’re a pervert,” the other one said. Travis , that was his name.

Pax reached the edge of the driveway. His hands were shaking, and he felt ready to throw up. The girls in the backseat stared at him. The red-haired one was Doreen, the nurse who’d washed him at the clinic.

“I’m just going to go home,” Pax said. From this close, the boys smelled of vintage, but vintage with a strange tang to it-nothing like his father’s scent.

Clete said, “That’s good. That’s why they called us, to take you home. Before they shot your ass.”

Travis aimed that light into his face. “It’s kind of a last-chance taxi service.”

Pax said, “Look, my car’s right down there. I’ll drive home, and you can tell Rhonda that I’ll-”

The punch seemed to come out of nowhere. Pax hit the ground. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. His nose burned.

“I have to ask you,” Clete said. He picked up Pax under his arms and lifted him easily. Pax’s knees threatened to give out, but Clete steadied him. “What the hell was your plan? Carry your six-hundred-pound daddy down the hill by yourself?”

“Clete, listen…” Pax said.

“No, push him down the driveway in his hospital bed,” Travis said, laughing. “Get up to like sixty mile an hour, until he hits that first curve, then air borne!”

“UFO!” Clete said. “Unidentified Fat Object.”

Inside the car the chub girls whooped with laughter.

Pax gripped Clete’s forearms. “I know people in Chicago. This is an incredible drug. You help me get him out, and I can help you, help you sell it.”

“Really?” Clete said. “This stuff really got to you, huh?”

“UFO,” Travis said, still laughing. “You kill me, man.”

Clete said, “I gotta admit, your daddy makes some of the finest vintage I ever smelled. I’d love to try some on Doreen.”

“Rhonda doesn’t have to keep all this to herself,” Pax said. “You could sell it.”

Clete nodded. “I hear you, Cuz, I hear you. But right now?” He shrugged. “Right now I got to beat the living shit out of you.”

DEKE KNOCKED ON the back door of the clinic, waited half a minute, knocked again. The door opened and he said, “Hey, Marla.”

“We’re closed on Sundays,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“I saw your car,” he said.

He stooped to get under the doorway, then followed Marla to her office. “So did you look at them?” he asked.

She sat at her desk and opened one of the drawers. She took out the plastic bag he’d given her when he picked up Paxton. “There’s nothing here I didn’t prescribe for her,” she said. “None of them have been switched.”

“I had to check,” he said. He’d pulled the bottles from Jo Lynn’s medicine cabinet the first day he’d searched her house. The dates on the bottles were months old, and most of them were more than half-full. “It didn’t look like she was using them anyway.”

“That’s because they weren’t working. She kept getting resistant to them. Betas have an amazing immune system.”

“So if she wasn’t taking antidepressants, was she still depressed?”

“I don’t think so,” Marla said. “She got over that too. She seemed fine whenever I talked to her.”

Deke sighed. “Yeah. Me too.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed her two folded pieces of paper. “I want you to read something.” He sat down on the floor, which put him at eye level with her.

She unfolded the pages, then read the top of the first page. “Who are these people?”

“Brother Bewlay’s a screen name Jo was using,” he said. “Weygand is some guy she met online.” Marla looked surprised. “They wrote to each other for almost a year.”

“She never told me that,” Marla said.

Deke frowned. “I was hoping she had.”

TO: aweygand

Sorry, Andy, I don’t think you understand at all the mindset required for an asexual baby-making machine. Whether they’ve been genetically engineered this way or evolved to it, the beta is built for one purpose-breed at all costs. Asex makes things simple, but it strips away all the behavioral baggage that goes along with sexual selection. The only thing left is getting pregnant and taking care of the children. It’s monomania. It’s leaping over the rocks to lay your eggs and die.

In that kind of brain, the eggs are everything. Beta women who even considered abortions would be considered deviants, the worst kind of criminal. Young beta girls who went through the Changes before puberty would be the most militant about this, I suspect. The beta body is the one they’ve grown into, the only sexual body they’ve known. I wouldn’t be surprised if beta women who weren’t “orthodox” enough would be killed to protect the purity of the race. Watch CNN for the first stoning in Switchcreek.

– bb

TO: brotherbewlay

› The beta body is the only one they’ve known.

You keep coming back to this biological determinism stuff. These are sweeping generalizations based on what hormones you THINK are brainwashing them. Based on what evidence? Opposition to abortion is a moral position, not a mood disorder.

– Andy

TO: brotherbewlay

One more thing. Aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs?

– Andy

TO: aweygand

› Opposition to abortion is a moral position.

It’s a moral issue _because_ it’s a biological issue. The intellect’s riding bareback on a brain hardwired to ensure our survival on the planet, and the poor thing thinks that it’s the one doing the steering. Think about it. The brain makes up its mind on moral issues immediately-It’s the intellect that has to go through contortions to reconcile emotional certainty with a philosophical position.

Here’s a morality test: which is more wrong, swatting an insect or clubbing a baby seal?

Human babies are the most successful manipulators of all-those big eyes, that layer of baby fat, that truckload of opiates they trigger in the lactating mother. You have to read Natalie Angier-it’s vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she didn’t choose, because evolution throws every trick at its disposal at the woman. Now think of those 13/14 year old beta girls, getting pregnant through no action of their own, raped by their own biology. What choice did they have? The only sane thing to do is put them on birth control automatically, age 10 on. Then let them choose to go OFF it-when they’re 16 at least. Maybe make them pass a test. A license to breed.

› And say, aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs? Exactly. If that doesn’t keep you up at night, Andy, I don’t know what will.

– bb

When Marla finished reading she said, “How did you get this?”

He told her about Weygand driving down and breaking into Jo’s house. He left out the part about smashing Weygand’s windshield and threatening the man. “Most of it’s trading conspiracy theories about the Changes,” he said. “But this stuff about the young beta women…”