“Trust me,” she told Deke. “Clete’s going to think that going cold turkey is worse than death. His muscles’ll go soft, the girls will stop paying attention to him. He’ll be neutered. Doreen’ll be off-limits to him, though it won’t be long before she won’t want to have anything to do with him.
“She’s going on probation, too. I haven’t decided how long yet—our clade can’t afford to have a girl out of commission forever—but I’m thinking a year. At least six months. Then I’ll match her to a boy that I pick out.”
A long stretch of silence. Deke finally said, “I didn’t know it worked like that. That you got to just … pick. Decide who falls in love with whom.”
“Well, somebody’s got to,” she said. She saw him frown; her eyes were adjusting to the dark. “What, you don’t approve?”
“It don’t seem right.”
Rhonda almost laughed. “You want them to pick? Those teenagers? Think about when you were their age, Deke. How much control did you have over your hormones? Your brain wasn’t picking out the best of all possible mates. You were taking orders from the lieutenant governor.”
“Works out just fine most of the time,” Deke said.
“Most? Hon, you have not been paying attention. It’s a roll of the dice out there. You and Donna may have struck the vein, and God bless you, but for most of the sorry people in this world sex hits them like a blindside tackle when they’re sixteen and the next thing they know they’re pregnant, raising babies, and waking up to five thousand mornings of cold coffee. I’d sooner let a monkey pick my husband than the girl I was at sixteen. The Indians have the right idea—not the casino Indians, the call-center Indians—let the parents arrange things. You can always grow to love someone, or at least tolerate them, if they’re a good match. And I make sure they’re a good match. You wait a couple years then look at the charlie divorce rate and tell me if I wasn’t right.”
“You already matched Doreen and Clete,” he said.
“That was too good. I thought she’d give him some ambition, I didn’t know she was some low-rent Lady Macbeth.”
Deke tilted his head.
“Shakespeare, hon. Read a book.”
Deke lifted his hands in surrender. He stepped up into the Jeep and dropped down into the driver’s seat; the car rocked on its suspension. “I’ll be checking on them,” he said.
“I’m sure Everett and Barron would appreciate the company.”
“I’m serious, Rhonda. I won’t sit by if there’re any more disappearances.” He put the Jeep in gear. “Good luck with the kickoff tomorrow.”
She watched the taillights slide and wink through the trees until they disappeared.
Well, that went better than expected, Rhonda thought. He hadn’t even given back the check.
Chapter 17
PAXTON WAS MET at the front gate by a shotgun and a scowl. The chub—a middle-aged man whom Paxton recognized from the Tuesday-morning payday crowd—told him to drop the newspapers, turn around, and put his hands on the hood.
Pax didn’t argue. He leaned against his car, the sheet metal already hot from the morning sun, and tried not to think of the gun in the man’s hand. God, he was sick of guns.
The gate squealed open behind him. “Pull up your shirt.” Pax hitched up his T-shirt, and a rough hand quickly patted him down: armpits, waist, legs, and ankles. The chub was more fat than muscle, but still looked capable of pinching off Paxton’s head with one hand.
“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.”