Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“You don’t have to worry about him,” another voice said.

Pax turned around. Barron, the Home’s regular security guard, stepped out and touched him on the shoulder. “How you doing, son?” he asked. The man’s uniform was slept-in. His round face sagged from fatigue. It looked like he hadn’t shaved since Clete had tied him up two days before.

“I’m just coming to check on my dad,” Pax said.

“Best thing,” Barron said. “Get back to normal as soon as you can.”

“Right,” Pax said. “Normal.” He picked up the newspapers and followed Barron to the front door. The chub with the shotgun stayed outside.

Barron shuffled toward his desk without saying another word. Two other chub men filled a couch in the lobby, looking somber. One of the men nodded at him, but Pax had never seen either of them around the Home; Rhonda had been calling in the reserves. They were older men, perhaps the same age as Harlan, both of them bald and huge, just sets of dark eyes and mouths embedded in massive round bodies like fleshy snowmen. One step from becoming producers themselves.

No one had brought Harlan out to the lobby, and it didn’t look like anyone was about to. Pax walked back through the sets of double doors.

His father’s door was open. Harlan lay on the bed, half sitting up, eyes on the TV. The size of him came as a shock, every time. The white sheet covering his body made him into a landscape, an arctic mountain range.

“He returns,” his father said without looking away from the television.

“I’m sorry it took so long to get here,” Pax said-an apology that covered both his late arrival this morning and his absence the day before. “It’s still a madhouse downtown.”

His father was uninterested in the papers and wanted nothing to do with the news channels-he’d seen enough of Ecuador, he said. He was watching mole rats instead. Green-tinged night-vision cameras somehow followed the whiskered, bucktoothed things through the tunnels. When the show ended, his father made no move to change the channel or look away from the screen. The next program was about the hunt for giant squids.

Pax glanced at the clock on the wall. Half past nine. Too soon to rush off-he’d just gotten here. He’d give his father another half hour, then get back to the house, where Andrew Weygand and the twins would be waiting for him.

He flipped through the newspapers. USA Today and both of the local papers were full of the Changes. The government of Ecuador had declared a state of emergency and sealed the borders to the Los Rios province, even as it refused to admit that the epidemic was indeed TDS. The pictures, though, made it clear that the argo strain was at work. If the disease followed the same course, the B strain would strike in a week or two, and then the C. The estimated death toll had already reached 5,000. By contrast, Switchcreek had lost only 378 the entire summer of the Changes, but that was almost a third of the population. Babahoyo contained 90,000 people. If the ratio held…

“Dad.” Harlan didn’t move his eyes from the TV. “Dad.”

Harlan’s great head turned. Pax said, “Thirty thousand people could be dead before the end of the month.”

“Tell me that isn’t His judgment,” his father said.

Pax thought, Judgment of what-being poor? Living on the equator? But then a voice said, “Dr. Fraelich says it’s all just chance.”

Aunt Rhonda stood in the doorway holding a paper mask to her face, somehow making the pose seem less like a woman warding off germs than a courtesan flirting at a masquerade. She wore a salmon-pink blouse, a tailored midnight-blue jacket, and a matching knee-length skirt. On her lapel were an American flag pin and a loop of green ribbon. “Haven’t you heard? We’re surrounded by bunches and bunches of other universes. She says it was inevitable that a virus eventually learned to jump over.”

Harlan grunted. “Maybe somebody should ask the doctor who created those universes.”

“I’m sure she’d have an answer,” Rhonda said.

“Ask her this, then,” Harlan said. “In an infinite number of universes, wouldn’t one of them have to give rise to an all-knowing, all-powerful God? Once he exists anywhere, he exists everywhere-the alpha and the omega.”

Rhonda laughed. “Reverend, you could save the devil if you could get him to visit.”

“Getting him to stop by is never the problem, Rhonda-it’s getting him to leave. But you know that.”

Pax sat back, listening to them bat words back and forth. They’d known each other for how long, thirty-five years? Forty? Even enemies had to derive pleasure from such a long relationship.

“And how are you doing, Paxton?” Rhonda asked a few minutes later. Before he could answer she said, “What did you think of the council meeting last night?”

“I’m just glad they’re not going to put us in quarantine.”

A penciled eyebrow arched above the paper mask. “I’m not so sure about us, but you don’t have to worry,” Rhonda said. “I’m sure they’ll declare all you nice normal people clean and free. You can leave any time you like.”

Harlan grunted.

Pax didn’t look at him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Oh, I know, hon,” she said, and conspicuously checked a diamond-studded watch. “Well, I’ve got to run. I hope you’ll be watching the news-I’ve got a major press conference this afternoon. Oh, I almost forgot…” She gestured to someone in the hall, then moved aside to let in one of the chubs from the lobby. “You know Lawrence Teestall, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” Pax said, trying to mask his shock. Mr. Teestall had been his junior-high shop teacher. Back then he’d been a short, skinny man with a Brillo pad of bright orange hair. Pax hadn’t recognized him at all in the lobby; all resemblance to his old teacher had been buried under an avalanche of fat.

Rhonda said, “Could you just take a few minutes to teach him how to do an extraction? He’s good with his hands, I’m sure he’ll pick it up in a snap.”

“But I don’t-”

“Come now, how many times have you watched? Lawrence, just don’t let Paxton get sloppy and work bare-handed-the vintage hits him harder than most folks. And don’t forget to turn on the news at two. I’d pick channel ten-they’ve got that nice Asian girl.”

Pax needn’t have rushed home-the twins hadn’t arrived yet. Weygand was pacing around the room with his shirt off and his cargo shorts hanging low on his hips, talking to himself. No, not to himself-he turned, and Pax saw that he wore a tiny earpiece and microphone.

Pax went into the bathroom and closed the door. He pulled the latex gloves from the pocket where he’d stuffed them after the extraction, then turned them in his hands until he found a discoloration in one of them, and touched his tongue to that spot. Just a taste, nothing to incapacitate him. He needed to stay awake today. Then he carefully folded the gloves and tucked them back into his pocket.

When Pax returned to the living room Weygand had stopped talking and sat bent over his laptop. He had the gaunt face and the thin arms of a runner, so that he looked skinnier the more clothes he wore; with his shirt off the muscles of his chest and back were more apparent, as clearly delineated as a Renaissance Jesus stretched on a cross.

Weygand looked up from the screen. “You okay?”

“Was that the twins on the phone?” Pax asked.

“No, that was a guy I know who blogs about DHS. Homeland Security. Besides, the girls don’t have my number, do they?”

“Oh, right.”

Last night after the town meeting Paxton had tried to get time alone with Rainy and Sandra, but Tommy had hovered a few feet from them the entire time. His smooth face betrayed nothing to Paxton, but his body language spoke volumes. The blank man was still jealous of Paxton, still nervous that his place as stepfather would be usurped. No wonder the girls kept their visits to Paxton’s house secret from him. Fortunately Rainy understood that Pax wanted to tell them something; she engaged Tommy in a conversation and in the break Pax managed to tell Sandra to come to his house at 10:00 a.m. with the laptop.