There was a long crash of static. “—sure there isn’t enough power for me to receive. But I’ll keep looking for fuel cells, maybe figure out how to make one.
“I don’t have any way of keeping track of the date. But I’ll be back here, St. Theresa’s Pediatrics Hospital in Plant City, Florida, at every full moon, about midnight, to broadcast and try to receive an answer.
“Things must be tough up there, too… if you’re there at all. If the plague got carried up I guess I’m wasting my time. But I hope, Marianne, you made it okay and got to marry Daniel. It seems like another life, a lifetime ago, when you were—” Static took over and when it quieted there was no more transmission.
Charlie’s Will 
He turned off the radio transmitter and stared at his large hands. Maybe he shouldn’t have said midnight. That meant either traveling at night or holing up in this hospital for hours. The place was a boneyard. But he remembered his police radio used to receive best at night. He picked up his full saddlebags and his scattergun and followed a large cockroach down the hospital corridor to the fire stairs. Funny how you changed. One time, he would have chased the cockroach down and crushed it. Today he was obscurely glad that something else in the hospital was alive. Maybe it was affecting his brain, the growth hormone. It was affecting his hands and feet and other joints, aching like arthritis. He would treat himself to more aspirin, first stop.
On the ground floor he retrieved his wagon from its closet hiding place and put the saddlebags on top of the canvas bag that held his various possessions. He rolled the wagon out and wired it to the back fender of his bicycle, unlocked the bicycle and pedaled away, in search of customers.
The town was pretty well deserted, as all towns were once the shelves had been emptied. There was usually someone to trade with, some group of scavengers willing to dig deeper than the last group. But the house he’d stopped at a month earlier was deserted now. He pedaled on for an hour, quartering the downtown area, and had just about decided to break into his emergency rations when he finally heard voices. He turned down an alley and saw a group of little girls playing a complicated hopping game. They were singing badly:Mary was a virgin but she had a baby boy.Jesus died upon the cross to give us peace and joy.Charlie had a vision but they put him out of sight.Helter-Skelter saved us from a hundred years of night.Death is the Redeemer; only death can make you well—
They stopped singing when they heard him rattling up the alleyway. One ran away but the other four stood and stared at him.
“I need food and water. Where is your family?” One girl, then all of them, pointed in the direction the other was running. He walked his bike slowly after her, scattergun pointed forward. The girls resumed their game, finished the rhyme:Life on Earth is nothing more than twenty years of hell.
She ran through an open door, yelling for her daddy. He leaned on his bike and waited, gun casually aimed at the door.
A rifle barrel pointed at him from a dark window. “Whaddayawant?”
“I’m Healer.”
“We heard about you.”
“So I want to trade. Is there anybody in your family needs healing?”
“A woman. What you need?”
“A fully charged fuel cell.”
“No got.”
“Food and water, then.”
“We got some of that. You come in but leave the gun outside.”
“Piss on that. She goes where I go.” And the two concealed pistols and the boot knife and the spraystick.
There was some muted conversation inside. “All right But you know we got you covered all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He locked the bike and gathered the saddlebags and the canvas bag in his left arm. On the way to the door he passed a garbage pile. On top of the pile was a teenaged girl only a few hours dead, head crushed and body covered with purple bruises. He thought she had been disemboweled but saw that it was a placenta, partially expelled, and what was left of an infant.
“Monster birth?” he said, passing through the door.
“No eyes,” said the man with the rifle.
“Should have let the woman live.”
“It was her second. Family rules. The first was twins with just one head between them.”
He stood just inside, getting used to the dim light “How long have you had this rule?”
“It’s a rule. It’s signtific.”
“Sure it is. What about the father?”
He shrugged. “That’s all of us. We just take turns.”
“Sounds scientific. Where’s the sick woman?”
They led him into a dark bedroom. It stank. He could barely make out a small form on the double bed, twitching and moaning incoherently. He went to the window and slid the knob to unpolarize it, flooding the room with sunlight. The girl cried out.
“The light hurts her eyes,” the leader said. The girl was twelve or thirteen, breasts juvenile. She was about six months pregnant. All she wore was a pair of filthy bandages wrapped around her upper thighs.
“Boil some water.”
“You want some coffee?”
“For washing. Boil a big pot.” The girl was flushed, her skin hot and dry. She had four degrees of fever. He gave her some children’s aspirin dissolved in water. The leader came back, with most of the others crowding around the door.
They had to hold her down while he cut away the bandages. She was a mess. “How long has she been sick?”
“She got a rash last week. It’s only been bad for couple of days.” He’d never seen anything quite like it. On the inside of both thighs, from the crotch down about fifteen centimeters, was a growth of gray fungus. The flesh under the fungus was angry red and discharging pus. There were three prominent syphilis chancres on the lips of her vagina, which was probably associated, since the fungus was spreading up over the pubic mound.
“She gonna die?”
“Charlie knows when,” Healer said with only a little sarcasm.
“Charlie’s will,” the others muttered in ragged chorus.
He poured hydrogen peroxide on the infected areas and they foamed impressively. He rinsed with water from his canteen and applied the peroxide again, then rinsed again and patted the mess dry with a clean gauze pad. He turned her over and shot her full of wide-spectrum antibiotics.
“Here is what you do. Take this filthy sheet and burn it. Keep something clean under her. Don’t bandage it; let it breathe. Make her drink a lot of water. Anybody who touches her wash up afterwards with hot water and soap. Can you remember that?”
The leader nodded. “If she does die, you bury her. Or at least take the body far away. Don’t just chuck it out the door like that other one—and bury it too. You can get real sick, having dead people around.”
“We was going to. Two guys’re still out hunting, they gotta get their throws in. For luck.”
“Yeah, luck. I suppose all of you have syphilis, don’t you?” They looked at him blankly. He pointed to the chancres. “Sores like this.”
“’Course we get them, all the grownups,” the leader said.
“Except for Jimmy,” a girl said, and giggled. “He’s got hair but all he does is pull himself.”
“Jimmy’s scared to fight me,” the leader said proudly. “You don’t fight, you don’t fuck. That’s signtific. Natural selection.”
“Where did you get all this ‘scientific’ shit?”
“Old Tony taught us. He lived to be twenty-one, he could read really good.”