Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

He reached Deke’s house on Creek Road, stepped up onto the front step, and rang the bell. It had been over a month since the last time he’d been here, sweating and desperate, yet the door seemed even taller now. He felt like a little kid asking if the big boy could come out and play.

He rang the bell again. He never would have walked up to Deke’s front door when they were kids. Deke had lived with his father in a run-down trailer out near Two Hills. His father was a barker, a bully-a small man who liked to clomp out of his trailer with a baseball bat and yell at the black kids just to see them wet their pants. Mostly the kids just wanted to look at the bird-houses-a dozen or so hand-built boxes perched on poles around the yard. Deke had hammered together the first of them when he was in fifth grade, and each year the models were more elaborate, more detailed, more refined: log cabins, Gatlinburg-like chalets, multitier apartments… Paxton’s favorite was the scarecrow that housed birds in its wooden head.

The disparity between the birds’ accommodations and the humans’ became a little embarrassing. Maybe that’s why Deke’s father kept scaring the kids off. He died in the Changes, but Pax couldn’t recall whether it had been during the A, B, or C waves. Neither could he remember Deke ever talking about his father’s death. Was Deke at his bedside when it happened? Off with Jo and him? Pax had never asked. And why was that? Was he that much of a self-absorbed asshole that he couldn’t ask how Deke’s father died?

No one answered the bell. He thought of leaving a note taped to the door: Dear Deke, Rhonda may have killed some people. Call me .

He decided to take a different route back to his car, walking along Creek Road to the highway to get an alternate angle on the media circus. The sidewalk in front of the Bugler’s was completely blocked off; a row of TV reporters were lined up side by side, either talking into their own cameras or marking time until they went on. Half a block farther on at the salon, an argo woman and a chub woman in identical dresses had been cornered by what looked like at least two competing news crews. No one stopped Pax for an interview or even looked twice at him: the benefit of not looking like a local.

Pax turned the corner at Bank Street, stopped, and looked back at the car he’d just walked past. A light blue Prius. The windshield was unbroken, but that could easily have been replaced by now. The driver was inside, his head bent over something in his lap.

Pax walked around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was down. “I thought Deke kicked you of town,” he said.

Andrew Weygand jerked his head up, his fingers still on the laptop keyboard.

“Easy,” Pax said. “I’m just messing with you.”

“I have every right to be here,” he said.

“That’s right, you’re a journalist.” Pax thought he kept the sarcasm from his voice but wasn’t sure if he succeeded entirely. “I’m Paxton, by the way. I don’t think I introduced myself last time.”

Weygand hesitated, then shook Paxton’s hand. In the month since Pax had seen him the man’s bleached hair had transformed to deep black with yellow tips, but the soul patch still clung to the underside of his lip like mold. The back of his car was a mess. Filling the seat was an unrolled sleeping bag, a pillow, and two blue plastic coolers. The floorboards were crowded with white plastic grocery bags.

“Are you living in this thing?” Pax asked.

“Temporarily,” he said. “Turns out there’s not a free hotel room between here to Knoxville.”

“I’m surprised you’re not in Ecuador.”

“They’re not issuing visas,” Weygand said. “Total blackout except for a few of the mainstream press-typical old media hegemony.” He glanced at the side-view mirror. “So, your friend Deke…”

“I’m looking for him, actually,” Pax said.

“It’s not, uh, totally necessary that you tell him you saw me, right?”

Pax shrugged and smiled. “Probably not.”

“I’m just here for a night, maybe two. There’s a town hall meeting at the elementary school tonight. I just want to interview some of the state and federal people who are coming, maybe get an interview with Mayor Mapes, then I’m gone again, I swear.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. He hadn’t heard of any town meeting. How many government agencies were rolling into town? “So what about the Brother Bewlay thing? Are you still hunting him down?”

“I didn’t get much further after the last time I saw you,” Weygand said. “Why don’t you ask Deke? He’s got all the emails. If Jo Whitehall was-what?”

“Nothing, I just…” Pax rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “Listen, I’ve got a couple extra beds in my house, if you want to crash there after the meeting.”

“I’m fine, dude, thanks,” Weygand said.

“No, really. Jo Lynn was a good friend of mine, and you were her friend, too, even if you didn’t know it was her.” He smiled. “Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I have a kind of tech support problem. You good at computers?”

Weygand looked down at the laptop screen. “I know my way around.” He closed the lid and set the computer on the passenger seat. “What kind of problem?”

“I need to break into a password-protected laptop. A Mac.”

Weygand laughed. “But not your Mac, right? No thanks, man, I don’t-” Weygand stopped smiling, getting it.

“Yeah, we found it,” Pax said. “But Jo locked it. I think it could tell us-” He almost said, Tell us who killed her , but he knew it would make him sound crazy. “-Well, a lot. Think you can do it?”

“How about right now?” Weygand said. “I just need to stop by the store and-”

“I don’t have it with me,” Pax said. “Tonight, after the meeting.” He’d have to track down the twins, get them to retrieve the laptop from wherever they’d hidden it and bring it to his house.

“I’ll get the supplies,” Weygand said. He pushed the Power button on the dash and the Prius hummed awake. “Where can I get a couple big cans of compressed air?”

RHONDA MAPES STOOD in the center of a bull’ s-eye. She looked around at the circle of people nearest her-politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, police, and military personnel (almost all of them men, twenty-first century be damned)-then lifted her head to take in the entire crowd.

The emergency meeting of the Switchcreek Town Council had swelled to include over twenty invited participants and more than two hundred spectators and media people. She’d expected a crowd, which is why she’d decided to hold the meeting in the elementary school gym. The folding chairs were set in concentric rings: leaders on the inside, flunkies behind them, and everyone else filling in back to the walls.

A more honest layout, Rhonda thought, would have placed the federal muckety-mucks in the outermost ring, all the better to corral the state functionaries, who were in turn trying to curb the county yokels, who only wanted to keep the freaks from Switchcreek in line. Rhonda, of course, would have been exactly where she stood now; smack dab in the center of everything. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

She smiled her grandmother smile. “Let me start,” she said, “by thanking you all for coming out here tonight.”

Tom Garvin, the regional director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, opened his mouth to speak and Rhonda said, “Before we introduce our guests, we’d like to open this meeting with a word of prayer-for the people of Babahoyo. Reverend Hooke, would you lead us?”

Dr. Ellis Markle, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked exasperated for a moment, then quickly assumed a pious expression. Rhonda thought of him as the man from COPTER. He led a division of the CDC called the Coordinating Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, but after watching him land his helicopter in the middle of town it was impossible to keep the correct acronym in her head.