Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“No, that would be Rhonda,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“Heh.” But the doctor wasn’t joking. And then he realized that he wasn’t joking either. Rhonda ran all the tribes. She’d jerked him around like a puppet.

“The point is,” the doctor said, “nobody knows what’s going on with the vintage. As they say in the journals, further research is required.”

“Rhonda told me once that that’s what they were doing with the vintage. Research. For a cure.”

“Really,” Dr. Fraelich said.

“Yeah. Only during the robbery, Rhonda said that only the stupid people believed that.”

After a moment he looked up. “You could say, ‘Oh no you’re not stupid, Paxton.’”

“I could.”

“Come on, what’s so unbelievable about looking for a cure?”

“Nothing. Plenty of people are. But they’re not using the vintage to do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

She inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke through her nose. “That’s part of the deal, Paxton. We’re keeping the vintage out of the literature, out of the media. Vintage chemicals show up in charlie bloodwork-no way to hide that-but no one but me is studying the vintage itself. And no one outside of Switchcreek even knows that men secrete the stuff, or that it’s extracted.”

“Why would you keep that secret?”

“Think about it, Paxton. Let’s say it’s a new narcotic. A wonder drug. How long do you think it would be before there was a bounty on every male charlie? If the government didn’t grab the men, then it would be some pharmaceutical company. Or God help us, drug dealers.”

“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” he said.

“Tell me how I’m wrong.”

After perhaps half a minute he said, “This deal. This is something between you and Rhonda?”

“By necessity,” she said.

“Okay, you have the monopoly-you’re the only one studying this stuff. So do you know what it does to non-charlies? Skips, argos, outsiders…”

“You?”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Except for you, the vintage does hardly anything to non-charlies. A mild rush.” She tapped ashes into the can. “But you took an extreme dose. When you swam in it you became sensitized.”

“No, it happened earlier. The baptism may have sped me along, but even before that night the tiniest touch of the stuff got me high.” He’d been primed for it, like a twelve-year-old with alcoholic genes waiting for his first sip of Southern Comfort.

It’s not Harlan that’s different. It’s Paxton .

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I can look at your blood-work again, but I doubt I’d see anything. Trust me, the non-changed just don’t react like you do.”

“So how’s she doing it, then?” Pax asked.

Dr. Fraelich cocked an eyebrow.

“Aunt Rhonda,” he said. “If she’s not making money from pharmaceutical companies, and if she’s not selling the vintage to outsiders, and there aren’t enough charlies to make a living off of, then where’s she getting her money?”

Dr. Fraelich looked out over the bushes at the highway. Pax stepped closer. “Listen,” he said. “I think Jo found out something about her. Figured out what she’s up to. Something bad enough to make Rhonda stop her.”

The doctor shook her head. “Watch yourself, Paxton.”

“You’re afraid of her,” he said, surprised.

“You may have grown up here, Paxton, but you don’t understand a thing.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“Forget about Rhonda. Jo made enemies more dangerous than her. There are fanatics in her own clade who’d-Jesus, what now?”

She was looking over his shoulder. He turned as a white sedan and a white SUV pulled into the parking lot. The vehicles stopped, blocking in a row of cars. A young man about Paxton’s age popped out of the sedan.

“Oh, of course,” Dr. Fraelich said. She dropped the cigarette and tamped it out with her shoe.

The man quickly strode toward them, smiling. He wore an untucked linen shirt, khaki pants, and strappy, open-toed leather shoes that were a cross between sandals and slippers. “Marla,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

He gripped the doctor in a vigorous two-handed shake, then spun to face Paxton and offered his hand. “Eric Preisswerk, from the CDC down in Atlanta.” His accent was standard TV American with a European vowel or two thrown in. Up close he didn’t look quite so young; Pax put him at thirty-five, thirty-six. He was short and athletically trim, humming with positive energy. The kind of guy who’d kick your ass in racquetball and then insist you’d almost beaten him.

“Paxton Martin,” Pax said, but the man’s attention was already back on Dr. Fraelich.

“It looks like we get to work together sooner than we expected,” Preisswerk said to her. The doctor frowned and the man said, “You got the message that we were coming, didn’t you?”

“I got it,” the doctor said. “I just didn’t know why. Shouldn’t you be in South America? There’s nothing going on here.”

“Another team is going into Ecuador, once it gets permission. Meanwhile, they want my team to search for any likely vectors.” He glanced behind him. Five more people had exited the vehicles, and one of them was handing out laptop cases and small bags from the back of the SUV. Preisswerk turned back to them and dropped his voice. “Between you, me, and the lamppost, this is probably a waste of time.”

Pax thought, And that would make me the lamppost.

Dr. Fraelich said, “You’re still on the quantum teleportation theory, then.”

“Is there any other vector that makes sense? But what can we do? We have to cover the bases.”

“All right. I can set you up in one of the examination rooms.” She walked to the back door and unlocked it. Pax stood back as Preisswerk and his crew filed in with their bags.

Dr. Fraelich started to close the door and Paxton put out a hand. “I have to ask you for a favor.”

“I’m a little busy, Paxton.”

“It’s not about Jo and Rhonda, it’s about-listen, it won’t take ten minutes. Just a quick swab on the inside of my cheek-that’s how they do it on TV, right? Then mail off my DNA to some lab.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s something Rhonda said. About me.” The doctor looked at him impatiently. “See, when I was a kid I used to think about other clades. You know, more than just the three? That there could be other clades we didn’t know about-because on the outside they looked completely normal, but on the inside they’d be different.”

“Different.”

“Not different organs or anything-physically they’d seem perfectly normal. But psychologically, I don’t know, they’d have a different brain chemistry, maybe. A different way of thinking.”

It explained everything, he thought. Why he felt like such an alien in his own skin. Why he’d gone his entire life without feeling connected to anyone but Jo and Deke.

“You’re not a new clade, Paxton.”

“Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all it takes.”

“And a thousand dollars and thirty days to get the results,” she said. “All right, fine. Come back tomorrow, if I haven’t been pushed out of my own clinic. And please, leave the police work to the Chief.”

Pax knew it was past time to talk to Deke but didn’t know what he would say, so he decided to walk to the man’s house-slowly. He found himself cutting through Old Soldier Park and wondering how long it had been since he’d seen the place.

Old Soldier had been a giant elm that the original settlers of Switchcreek had somehow forgotten to chop down. The job fell to their descendants, who were forced into surgical action by the epidemic of Dutch elm disease that swept through the Smokies in the thirties. In apology they polished the stump and put up a plaque. Once when he and Jo were ten or eleven she’d hopped on the broad stump and said, Vote for me, citizens! Pax had smiled, not getting the joke. She’d rapped her knuckles against his forehead, one of her most annoying habits. Figure it out, knucklehead. When he told his parents what she’d said they both laughed, so he adopted the joke as his own even though it would be several years until he learned what a stump speech was.