Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“I know, Dad,” Pax said. He leaned forward but did not touch him. That was still against the rules.

When the extraction began Pax would watch the serum color the body of the syringe, and then he would catch himself watching and look away.

“Oh law,” Rhonda would say when Travis delivered the syringes. “He’s like Old Faithful.”

Pax took his payment on Tuesday mornings with the rest of the employees. The chub boys started rolling in around 9:30, then sat around talking and looking at their hands until the clock struck 11:00 and Rhonda opened her office door.

Pax kept his distance, trying to hang back until the rest of them had been paid, but Clete went out of his way to get next to Pax, hugging him, slapping his back, punching his shoulder. “Looking a little rough this morning, Paxton,” he’d say. “Can’t wait to get that shot of ol’ Grandad, huh?”

Each time Pax resolved not to flinch, to give nothing away. Weeks after the beating both men’s bruises had faded, but Pax was still aching: the ribs along his right side still grated like a tire rubbing at a sharp fender; the headaches still woke him at night. So he smiled tightly and said nothing, waiting for Clete to become distracted by another conversation, or for Rhonda to tell them to line up.

The chubs were anxious to receive their checks and the little frozen vials they called the bonus, but their need seemed less immediate than Paxton’s. To hear the younger chubs talk, it wasn’t about getting high themselves, it was about impressing women and partying. “But you skips, man,” Clete said, circling an arm around Paxton’s neck. “You freak for it like the ladies, don’t you?”

Pax smiled his fuck-you smile.

The twins had become disappointed in him. He hadn’t been able to get past the computer’s log-in screen, and hadn’t even tried to find someone who could. “Never mind,” Rainy said, and the laptop vanished from his house.

They didn’t like how long he slept in the afternoons; they didn’t like how little he ate. They disapproved of his long, stringy hair, the way he’d go days without shaving.

“You’re starting to stink,” Sandra said.

“It’s September,” Pax said. “Don’t you have school?”

“They’re not teaching anything that’s important,” Rainy said. “Our mother taught us biology, evolution, physics. Quantum physics.”

“Little Miss Einstein,” Pax said, but his tone was light.

“That’s Rainy,” Sandra said.

He lay on the couch, eyes half-closed, on the verge of bursting into tears or laughter. After a visit to his father he rewarded himself with a dab of the vintage, just enough to move himself a few inches out of his body, but even with that small amount it was all too easy to let his emotions run away with him. He knew Rainy and Sandra weren’t his daughters-weren’t related to him at all-but when they fussed over him and complained and told him their stories he saw right past their masklike faces, right into their wounded hearts. He knew how they yearned for Jo Lynn, and he began to understand how Jo must have ached for them. When they ran their smooth hands over his rough cheeks, tut-tutting at his lack of hygiene, he felt himself losing track of where he ended and the world began. He was both a man stretched out on the couch and a little bald girl regarding him with narrowed eyes.

“So tell me,” he said. “If the argos and betas and charlies are alternate forms of humanity, where are the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals?”

“Tals,” Rainy said. “Not thals.”

“Whatever.” He scratched under his T-shirt. “My point is, if apes are our nearest cousins, where are the grunting, hairy clades? Where are the cavemen?”

The girls looked down at him, then burst into laughter.

The nights he took the vintage the house became alive with ghosts. He heard them clinking coffee cups, talking in low adult voices, assembling Christmas bicycles. He drifted asleep to the sound of “I’ll Fly Away” sung slow in two-part harmony.

The headaches persisted. One night he woke curled up and shivering under the open window. Summer had ended while he’d slept, and chill autumn air had refrigerated the room. He shuffled in the dark to the bathroom, not willing to wake up completely. He peed, swallowed a few ibuprofen, went back into the hallway.

Light silvered the edge of the door to his old bedroom.

He watched the light for a long time, listening. Then he went to the door and touched it lightly. It glided silently away from his fingertips.

His mother lay on the big hospital bed the government people had delivered. The guest bedroom was too small for it, the master bedroom too full of furniture. Paxton’s room was just right .

She looked tiny in it, a shrunken ancient or a newborn. Her skin, blotchy with stains like coffee, seemed too tight for her. Nothing remained of her hair but a few wispy patches.

“My son, my son,” she said. The fingers of her right hand lifted from the bed, summoning him forward. She smiled up at him. “Still handsome.”

She wore the lightest of nightgowns; anything heavier caused her terrible pain. He sat on the floor and carefully put his hand in hers. Her palm was velvety, but her fingers were rough and chapped, as if her body couldn’t decide which direction it wanted to go.

“How is Jo?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. He didn’t want to tell her. She loved Jo like a daughter.

“And Deke?”

“Still growing,” Paxton said.

“Good.”

A minute passed. Then she said, “When you were born the nurse put you in my arms and… oh my.” She smiled through cracked lips. “The future just rolled open. Years and years. And I could see you, all grown up. Just like this. And I thought, I will know this little man the rest of my life.”

“Yeah?” She’d told him this story before. He used to ask her to tell it.

“The first and only time in my life that happened. Don’t tell your father.” She smiled again and closed her eyes. Minutes passed, but he knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. He shifted his weight and she said apologetically, “You can go.”

“No, I wasn’t-”

“It’s okay, Paxton.” She opened her eyes again. “I don’t mind that you don’t like to come in here. I’m not too pretty. And you were just a boy. You’d already seen more than your share.”

He shrugged. “Now that I’m here…”

“Off to bed,” she said. “You need your sleep.”

“In a little bit,” he said.

He was still talking to her near dawn when a thick arm fastened around his neck and a voice spoke into his ear. “Hate to interrupt your conversation, Cuz.” The arm yanked him to his feet and dragged him backward out of the room. A moment later he was dumped to the floor. Three chubs loomed over him like planets: Clete, Travis, and the redheaded chub girl from the clinic-Doreen. She wore a pink hoodie open over a black tank top that exposed sweeping vistas of cleavage.

Clete stood with his hands on his hips, a black pistol tucked ostentatiously into his waistband. Travis held a big roll of silver duct tape.

“Just in case you were wondering,” Clete said. “This is not a hallucination.”

THE VINTAGE WORE off but the headache did not.

They’d taped his wrists and ankles and then tossed him onto a mattress in the back of a rusting, orange-brown Ford Econoline van with bare metal walls and no side windows. Clete hadn’t driven far-ten miles at most-and as the sun came up he pulled into the woods, backed the van around, and then parked with the nose pointed downhill. Clete and Doreen sat up front with Travis squatting between them on a stack of three cases of aluminum cans, one Mountain Dew, two Bud Light. Along one side of the cabin were Wal-Mart bags and cardboard boxes full of supplies a teenager would buy for an all-night kegger: bags of Cheetos and Cool Ranch Doritos, a four-pack of Red Bull, a pack of Fig Newtons, paper plates, a box of plastic utensils. It was only when he realized that one of the bags held a jumbo pack of adult diapers that he guessed what the chubs were going to do.