Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

Donna came out of a back room and looked at Paxton. “What happened?”

“Is the guest room made up yet?” Deke asked. “He needs to lay down.”

At the end of a hallway was a room painted bright orange and white-University of Tennessee colors. The bed filled up most of the space. Twelve feet long and eight feet wide, practically a playing field in its own right, covered by a UT Volunteers bedspread. He couldn’t guess where they’d gotten a mattress for it.

“Go Vols,” Pax said. It was the first thing he’d been able to say aloud since leaving his father’s. “My dad…,” he said.

“Your dad’s going to be fine. Just lay down, P.K. If you need to throw up, there’s a bathroom next door.”

Deke left the door ajar when he stepped out. Pax lay on his back and breathed deep. The ceiling fan hung high, high above him, the blades turning slowly.

The blades slowed, came to a stop. Then the room began to turn.

He gripped the bed and closed his eyes.

The day the Changes started, they were riding Pax’s fire-engine red Yamaha four-wheeler, ripping up and down the gullies behind Deke’s place. It was the second week of July, a few weeks after Paxton’s fourteenth birthday, 90 or 95 degrees. They didn’t hear the siren until Pax shut off the engine to give Deke a turn. It didn’t sound like a cop car or a fire truck. Had to be an ambulance, though ambulances didn’t come up to Switchcreek much. Deke, scrawnier and a head shorter than Paxton, hopped on the back of the ATV and put his arms around P.K.’s waist.

When they reached the road Deke hopped off to listen-that way!-and they drove a quarter mile until they saw the ambulance parked in the driveway and two EMTs walking up the steps to the house. Jo Lynn’s house.

Pax didn’t remember getting off the ATV, or walking into the house. He didn’t remember seeing another car in the driveway, though his dad’s Crown Vic must have been there, because his mother was in the living room, her arms around Jo Lynn’s shoulders. Jo had called her right after she dialed 911.

The EMTs were in the back bedroom, where Jo’s mother lay. Agatha Whitehall had run a fever for days, Pax learned later. Jo Lynn hadn’t been home that week, hadn’t even known her mother was sick; Agatha and Jo hadn’t gotten along for years, and lately Jo lived mostly at Paxton’s house. It was only because she’d gone home to retrieve more clothes that she found Agatha screaming. Her head was going to explode, Agatha said. Her bones were on fire.

When they wheeled her body into the living room, Paxton’s mother turned Jo’s face away and pressed the girl to her, smoothing her hair and shushing her. She was the only one who could hold Jo like that.

The sheet didn’t quite cover Agatha. She lay on her side, legs bent, white knees poking out. As they wheeled her to the doorway one of the EMTs leaned across her body to lift her knees out of the way while his partner backed the gurney out. The wheels dropped onto the second step with a clank, and the sheet slipped from her face.

Agatha hadn’t been a beautiful woman. Too much like a naked bird: wiry body, hawk nose, a pinched, smoker’s mouth. Now her skin was salt white, the new skull and jaw stretched into a permanent scream. Blood soaked her nightgown where the growth of the new bones had outpaced her skin.

The first wave of transformations and near-transformations would follow the course Agatha had set. First fever, then the parched skin like dried clay. After a couple days the bones would begin to stretch and rearrange, the body churning all available fat and protein into new growth, sometimes two inches a day. They’d call it Argillaceous Osteoblastoma, but that designation would be made obsolete a couple weeks later when the beta transformations began. In late August the symptoms would morph again, and all the victims would be charlies.

Argos, betas, charlies. Those names hadn’t been in use yet, of course. Only at the end of the summer, after the Changes halted as suddenly as they began, would the scientists and newspeople settle on Transcription Divergence Syndrome. TDS-A, then B and C.

The EMTs tugged the sheet back over Agatha’s face and carried her to the ambulance. Deke and Pax were too stunned to talk. “Shee-it,” Deke whispered.

In a week the same change would be coming for him.

“I got hit by this wave of, of emotion,” Pax said. He sat across from Deke at his kitchen table, elevated on a barstool they probably kept around just for visitors his size. “I looked at my father and I just felt…”

What? Love, or something like it. Connection. The eggshell had cracked open, and for a moment everything had run together; he’d forgotten who was Paxton and who was Harlan. The feeling was exhilarating and suffocating at once. A child’s emotion: love indistinguishable from total immersion.

Pax shook his head, laughed to cover his embarrassment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was very weird.” He rolled a near-empty Coke bottle between his hands. He’d slept for nearly four hours and woken up thirsty. Even now he was still deeply freaked out.

“I’m so sorry,” Deke said.

Pax smiled. “You can stop saying that now.”

“Your daddy’s stuff must be pretty strong,” Donna said. She stood at the counter, chopping green onions and red peppers and scraping them into a huge stainless steel bowl. “It hit you pretty hard.”

Pax laughed. He couldn’t help it. She was chopping vegetables and talking about this… stuff that was oozing out of his father’s body as if it were no stronger than an extra-strong shot of whiskey.

“So this has happened before, then?” Pax asked. “Not just with my dad?”

“It happens with all of the charlie men,” Deke said. “The old ones, anyway. There’s only about twelve of them in town. But your dad, I’d been told he was dry. He hadn’t… produced like that before.”

“Produced,” Pax said flatly. She wants to milk me like a cow . “Produce what?”

Deke shrugged. “Nobody knows what it is,” he said.

Donna said, “The charlies call it the vintage. Usually only the younger charlie boys handle the old men, they don’t seem to be as affected.”

“Though even they use gloves when they’re siphoning,” Deke said. “Good thing you didn’t swallow any. Usually a touch doesn’t do much. When I got some on me-”

“Wait a minute,” Pax said.

“-I just got a little nauseous. But your daddy’s stuff really knocked you on your ass.”

“Wait-they’re sucking this stuff out of him?” He didn’t try to hide his disgust. He looked from Deke to Donna, then back to Deke. “You’re shitting me.”

Deke looked uncomfortable. “The old men can’t carry the vintage around with them,” he said. “Makes ’ em crazy. You got to get it out of their bodies or they, I don’t know, overdose on it.”

Pax shook his head. “So the boys take it. And then what do they do with it?”

Deke looked at Donna. She shrugged.

“What, damn it?” Pax said.

Deke said, “It’s some sex thing. Rhonda sells it to the chub boys. And the chub boys take it because they think the stuff has some effect on the girls.”

“You’re shitting me,” Pax said again.

Deke started to smile, but then seemed to recognize that Pax was starting to panic. “I don’t know. Rhonda’s probably selling ’em a bill of goods. Does it matter? Let ’em do what they want-it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“Not you, maybe. Me, I got knocked on my ass. I could have overdosed. You didn’t even call Nine-one-one, you called them, those chub boys.”

“Come on, Pax,” Deke said. “They know how to handle it. Call the paramedics, they’d try to check your dad into a hospital.” He turned over one big palm. “It’s clade business. A charlie thing.”