Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

Rainy took the screwdriver out of his hand and put it on the table. “Maybe you should try doing it without the vintage.”

She regarded him with that preternatural blank calm. After a moment he said, “You know, you’re pretty clever for a twelve-year-old.”

“You don’t know many twelve-year-olds.”

“Seriously, you’re the smartest kid I’ve ever met. You remind me so much of your mom.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “Tommy says that all the time.”

“Okay…” he said. Who wouldn’t want to be Jo Lynn Whitehall? Pax certainly did. Maybe they didn’t like it because of the way Tommy said it. “You know,” Pax said, “You haven’t told me yet why you and Sandra ran away from him.”

She wouldn’t look at him. She went to the sink, picked up a cloth towel.

“Rainy, did he hurt you? Or Sandra?”

“Tommy wouldn’t hurt us,” she said. “Not like that.” She rubbed the cloth along the edge of the counter. “He wants to take us away. Out of Switchcreek.”

“Ah,” Pax said.

She turned to face him. “You knew?”

“Tommy came looking for you tonight,” Pax said. “He said some things.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“It’s an empty threat, Rainy. Tommy can’t leave Switchcreek-soldiers are guarding all the roads.”

“No, there’s a plan,” she said. “A plan to sneak us out. A couple of the white-scarf girls told us. People in the Co-op are working on it.”

“What? Why? Why would they let him take you?”

Rainy looked away. “We told you-we’re special.”

“Yeah, the natural-born thing. But there are other natural-borns, aren’t there? Why you two?”

She shrugged. “Because we’re the first, I guess.”

“Rainy, this doesn’t make any sense. If you’re that special, they wouldn’t just let Tommy run off with you, they’d protect you.”

“They think that’s what they’re doing.”

“This is bullshit,” Pax said. He got up from the table. “When was this supposed to happen?”

“In the morning.”

“What?”

“That’s why we left tonight. We can’t trust Tommy, or the reverend.”

“Wait a minute. How are they going to get you out? There are checkpoints, helicopters-”

“I don’t know, they didn’t tell us that!”

Jesus, he thought. Tommy was going to get them killed like Deke and Donna.

“All right, listen,” Pax said. “I’ll go to the Co-op, I’ll talk to the reverend-”

“No! You can’t talk to her!”

“I’ll tell her that if Tommy tries to kidnap you that I’ll tell the Guard.”

“But she’s a part of this! You can’t trust her, Paxton.”

“I’m not talking about trusting her-I’ll be informing her. She won’t be able to do anything to you, and Tommy won’t be able to do anything to you. I promise.”

She regarded him warily-or what he took for wariness.

“I promise,” he said again.

“Look, there’s nothing we can do till morning. We’ll worry about all that stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile…” He picked up the remaining can of compressed air and put it in front of her. “Why don’t we take another crack at this?”

Rainy fell asleep at the table with her head resting on her forearm. They’d made no progress on getting past the log-in screen. Weygand’s hacker scheme had given them nothing but cold hands. They’d spent an hour trying every password they could think of-“sandra,” “rainy,” “lorraine,” “switchcreek,” “bowie,” “changes,” then birthdays and favorite places-and then when Rainy put her head down he went on trying the names of flowers and the names of authors on her bookshelf. Uppercase, lowercase, title case. Nothing worked, but at least the laptop refrained from locking him out.

The tube of vintage, melted now, seemed to burn in his pocket.

“Let’s go, Rainy.” She startled when he touched her arm. He helped her to her feet, then ushered her through the dark to her bedroom. He circled his arms around her thighs and hoisted her to the top bunk.

“Paxton,” she said from the dark.

“Yeah, hon?”

She was silent for a long time.

“Are you crying, Rainy?”

She sighed. “No. I have trouble crying.”

“Me too.”

“I sure want to, though.”

Another long moment passed, and then she said, “My mom did some bad things.”

Rainy couldn’t use the A-word more than once, it seemed.

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Pax said. “Some things aren’t black and white. Your mom wasn’t against children-she wasn’t against you. She just believed that a woman has a right to choose when-”

“She killed her baby, Paxton. My little sister.”

“Oh, hon,” he said sadly. Rainy was the stronger of the two sisters, but this had obviously been eating at her, too. “Your mom wasn’t a bad person. It’s just that some people believe that a fetus isn’t…” Isn’t what? He wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. “Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand.”

“She talked about giving all the girls pills. She said they ought to put it in the water.”

“She didn’t mean that.”

“Mom didn’t say anything she didn’t mean. Everyone knew that.”

“Okay, you may be right on that one.” He put a hand through the rails and squeezed her calf. “But those girls at the Co-op, they’re getting pregnant without having a choice. Your mom wanted to protect them.”

“No, she wanted her choice. The white-scarf girls want their babies, Paxton.”

“But they’re just girls. They’re not old enough to make that decision. And when they do get pregnant, of course they want to keep the babies. It’s hormones, it’s-”

“It’s not just hormones!”

“Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. But someday you’ll understand that even good people can do things that seem wrong. Bad things. Sometimes they have to.”

“She was going to keep doing them, Paxton. She was going to keep killing the children. Mom and the reverend.”

“Rainy, no. I don’t know what you heard, or thought you heard-”

“I can prove it.” She started to climb out of the bed. “It’s in my backpack.”

“Hold on, what’s in your backpack?”

“Just get it.”

He went out of the room, found the big nylon bag in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room.

Rainy searched through it for a few moments, unzipping pockets, then said, “Here.” She pressed something into his hand. “Reverend Hooke gave these to my mom.”

It was a pill bottle. It was too dark to make out the label. “What is this, Rainy?”

“Mifeprex is what it says on the label,” the girl said. “Mom called it something with a number. It’s an abortion pill.”

He blinked. “RU-486?”

“That’s it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. After a moment Rainy said, “I heard Mom talking to Hooke on the phone about it. She asked the reverend for them.”

“Maybe you misunderstood what-”

“I’m not stupid, Paxton.”

“But who were they for?” He still didn’t believe that she’d heard correctly. “One of the white-scarf girls?” Or Jo, he thought, though he didn’t say that aloud.

After a moment of silence Rainy said, “I didn’t hear who it was for.”

“Okay, when was this? How long ago?”

“Paxton, it was the night she died.”

“What?”

“She called the reverend after we went to bed that night.”

Pax pressed his forehead against the wooden frame. “Did you tell anyone this?” he asked. “The police, or Deke?”

“We were too scared. If Mom and the reverend were doing this, then who knows-”