Daryl Gregory: The Devil's Alphabet

TDS wasn’t contagious, either. No one who wasn’t living within five miles of downtown that summer had ever caught it, even though during the outbreak victims had been parceled out to a dozen hospitals in Eastern Tennessee. After thirteen months with no new victims it became clear that the quarantine was a waste of money. The national guard pulled out. The government still kept tabs on them, and doctors and reporters still made their own drive-bys, but most of the rest of the country, satisfied that TDS couldn’t happen to them , lost interest in the town.

Pax was surprised, then, to see so many cars in the parking lot of Bugler’s Grocery. A smoked-glass tour bus was disgorging middle-aged people in shorts and shirtsleeves. One of them saw the Jeep and lifted a camera to her face. Deke stared straight ahead as they passed.

Pax stared at Deke. “Oh my God, were those tourists ?”

Deke looked at him, a half smile on his lips. “We get a bunch every weekend,” he said. “Not so much since the anniversary.” The ten-year anniversary of the Changes had been three years ago. Pax had avoided watching any of the specials.

Deke stopped at the traffic light, even though it was yellow and there were no other cars at the intersection. On the corner was a new building, a gray brick one-story with white columns holding up the entrance roof. It looked like a library.

“Oh my God,” Deke said with a weird nasal whine, and then laughed.

“What?”

Deke shook his head, laughing.

“What, damn it?”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like a Yankee now.”

“Hey, get beat up a few times in a Yankee high school and you drop that southern accent pretty quick.”

Deke’s short laugh was like the beat of a bass drum. Pax flashed on an image of them lying on the floor of Jo’s living room. God they’d spent so many hours hanging out there during the quarantine. The beery, happy SOS meetings.

The light turned green. Deke turned right on Bank Street. He nodded toward the new building. “The free clinic,” he said. “And worth every penny. All you have to do is keep filling out their surveys.”

“Sounds familiar.” In the early days of the Changes, they’d all been poked, prodded, and interrogated on a daily basis. Even after Pax left Switchcreek he’d get fat envelopes in the mail requesting him to be in this or that study. He never followed up. He moved out of his cousins’ house in the Chicago suburbs when he was eighteen, then kept moving through a series of apartments around the seedier parts of downtown, and somewhere along the way the scientists lost his scent.

The clinic was the only evidence he could see of the disaster relief money that had been supposed to rain down on Switchcreek after the quarantine lifted. When Paxton left town they were talking about new schools, scholarships, compensation for every family that had lost someone in the Changes. But now the place looked more run-down than when he’d left.

Pax said, “So what do people do for a living around here?”

Deke laughed shortly. “Most of the town’s on welfare. Not much work for anybody since the economy tanked, but for us…” He shook his head. “We’ve got a hell of a preexisting condition. Even the service jobs with no insurance, nobody wants us serving burgers or talking to the customers.”

Deke drove back behind the elementary school, which looked about the same as when Pax and Deke and Jo had gone there. In the blacktop recess area one of the basketball hoops was bent almost straight down, and the other was missing. Argo kids had to be hell on hoops.

Deke said, “So what do you do for a living? You work in some restaurant?”

“Not some restaurant. The number three Mexican restaurant chain in Chicago, not counting Chi-Chi’s and Taco Bell.”

“Really.”

“Really.” Pax shrugged. “It’s not a career or anything.” No shit, he thought. There were two types of people in the restaurant biz: temps and lifers. The lifers were alcoholics with hefty pot habits. He’d always thought he was a temp-marking time until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life-until he woke up one morning with his fourth hangover of the week and realized he owed his dealer $300.

“You got a girlfriend up there? An ex-wife? I don’t see a ring on your finger.”

“I’m not exactly husband material,” Pax said. “Or boyfriend material. Actually, I’m not even sure I’m material.”

At Creek Road they turned left, taking them higher, up along the side of Mount Clyburn. The mountain marked the edge of the state. Walk up into those trees and you wouldn’t start back down until you were in South Carolina.

“I like Donna,” Pax said. “You two seem happy.”

“I got lucky.” Deke slowed the car, swung onto a gravel driveway. “Jo moved out this way a couple years ago.” He followed the driveway up in a steep S. After two curves and a couple hundred yards the driveway leveled out at a patch of ground dug into the side of the mountain.

The house was a simple wood bungalow that could have been built at any time in the last seventy years. The front door of the house was closed, and drapes covered the windows.

When Pax was a boy, well before the Changes, the house had been a run-down rental inhabited by a succession of nearly identical poor white families: rarely seen except for their dogs forever trotting into traffic. Jo, however, had fixed the place up as well as could be expected. The canary paint and green trim looked only a couple years old. There were flowerbeds along the front and a pair of dogwood trees at each corner.

A huge oak rose up behind the house, its full limbs spread protectively over the roof.

“Coming?” Deke said.

Pax looked away from the tree. “Sure. Yeah.”

They walked around the side of the house. The backyard was just a strip of land before the wave of the mountain. The oak stood sentry between the house and the start of the forest.

The branch where she’d hung herself was very high, about fifteen feet in the air. The rope had been there a long time, its loops deeply incised into the bark. The stub end was frayed where they’d cut her down.

“Jesus,” Pax said. He tried to imagine the strength of will it would take to hang yourself.

“The girls found her that morning,” Deke said. “They called nine-one-one.”

“That’s awful.” Pax breathed deep and looked away. A dozen feet from the tree lay the truck tire that had been the swing. “Was she upset about something? Was she depressed?”

“She’s had a tough couple years,” Deke said.

“So tough Jo couldn’t handle it?”

Deke worked his lips. “I don’t know, P.K. She was taking some medication for depression, but that was months ago. She had an operation. Hysterectomy. Dr. Fraelich-she works at the clinic-said it’s normal to experience mood shifts after something like that.”

“Normal for who?”

Deke nodded, conceding the point. Who knew what was normal for a beta?

Pax stepped toward the tree. He ran his hand across the rough bark. After a time he said, “My last night in town, we had a big fight.”

Behind him, Deke said nothing.

“She told me I didn’t have to leave. She said I didn’t have to listen to my dad, I could live with her.”

“The Reverend Martin would have liked that,” Deke said.

“She was never afraid of him like I was. She said I was being a coward. I was abandoning the baby.”

“Well, they weren’t yours. Or mine.”

“But we didn’t know that at the time.”

“Pax…”

“It was a test. You stayed. I ran.”

“Pax, come on. Look at me.”

Pax turned. Deke had squatted down so that they were eye level. “You were a kid,” he said. “We were all kids. None of us knew anything.”