“Okay.” He looked thoughtful, took a sip of wine. “Now is there some way I can catch the acromegaly from you? Like a blood transfusion?”
“No, you have to be born with it. There’s a hormone involved, growth hormone, that might work, but I’ve never found any in hospitals and I wouldn’t know how to make it. I’m not a scientist; I’m not even a doctor. With the radio, maybe I can find something out.”
Tad looked at the door to the kitchen. “Go away, Mark. This is grownup talk.” A young boy was in the doorway, standing on his hands. His hands were like flesh spatulas, no fingers. Instead of legs he had a single limb rising into the air, ending in a flipper. He had a harelip and eyes that were too small and too close together in his egg-shaped head. He mewed something, turned around and padded out.
“Never know how much he understands,” Tad said. “Have you ever seen one like him?”
“Not quite. Most muties do have more than one thing wrong with them, but he’s a regular catalog: harelip, srenomelus, microphthalmia, acrocephalosyndactyly. God knows what else inside. It’s a wonder he survived.”
“Eats like a pig. If you’re not a doctor, how come you know all those names?”
“Found a book on monsters, not that it does any good. The few things that can be fixed, they take surgery. I can stitch up a wound, but that’s about it.”
“Do you think we ought to let them live? Most families don’t, I guess.”
“Hmm.” Jeff drank off his wine and refilled both glasses. “I wouldn’t say this to most people—and you’re not hearing it, right?” Tad nodded. “We should let the muties grow up and mate. Sooner or later a gene might come along that carries immunity to the death, maybe like acromegaly but without the bad side effects.”
“What do you think the death is? Other than Charlie’s blessing.”
“It’s either some kind of biological warfare agent or a common disease that underwent mutation. It might die out or it might last forever. I don’t even know how wide-spread it is, which is another reason for getting the radio working.”
“They’ve got it in Georgia, we know that. Met a guy from Atlanta.”
Jeff nodded. “It’s probably all over. At least all over the East Coast. You’d expect that Florida would have quite a few immigrants, after a winter or two.”
“Maybe they stick to the Atlantic side.”
“It’s pretty well bombed up. I started there, but came inland, looking for farms.”
For a while they sat and traded information about the various places they’d been. Then a little girl, apparently normal, came in and shyly said that dinner was ready.
They ate at two trench tables, one for the adults and one for the children. The food was delicious, chicken stewed with fresh vegetables, but the dinner companions at the other table were not too appetizing. Two had to be fed: one because of phocomelus, seallike flippers instead of arms; one who was microcephalic and totally passive. One who ate quite normally was a girl with beautiful golden curls and a single median eye. The girl with the two-headed baby took a bowl out to Marsha, Tad’s sister, who was guarding the road.
All through dinner, Tad quizzed the “grownups”—the oldest might have been seventeen—about animal husbandry and plant propagation. His parents had accumulated a large library of books on farming and other aspects of survival, but as he’d told Jeff, most of the grownups didn’t read too well, and didn’t much want to learn.
After dinner Jeff vaccinated them, and then found out why they were so clean. On the porch beyond the kitchen, they had a shower room and a family-sized tub. They scrubbed down with soap that smelled slightly of bacon, then rinsed, and the adults slipped into the deliciously hot water while the children played.
“We fill the tank on the roof every morning,” Tad said, pointing to a pump contraption like a bicycle without wheels. “It takes a half-hour of pedaling but it’s worth it. This time of year we wait till noon, or it gets so hot you can hardly stand it.”
Marsha came in and Jeff watched with languid appreciation as she showered. Not beautiful, but she was adult, a rare sight. Solid with muscle, no baby fat, stretch marks from several pregnancies.
She stepped in next to Jeff and put her arm around him, and began talking to Tad. After a while they got out of the bath, letting the children have their turn. Jeff and Marsha dried each other off. Without a spoken word, they gathered up their clothes and weapons and led each other upstairs.
The first time, predictably, was over before it started, but Jeff had good powers of recuperation, and five years of catching up to do. Eventually they did talk.
“I bet you’re like Tad,” she said, playing with his beard. “You don’t believe.”
“I grew up in Taoism,” Jeff said cautiously, “American Taoism. A much more gentle way of looking at things.”
“Oh, Charlie’s way is gentle.” She stretched her body against his side and lay an arm partway across his broad chest. “Men have a hard time understanding, I think. Women are closer to life, so they aren’t so afraid of death.”
“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“’Course not. You’re a man.”
“Charlie was a man.”
“So was Jesus. But they were strange men.”
Jeff smiled in the dark. “At least we can agree on—” He was on the floor and rolling toward his weapons before his brain quite registered what he had heard: through the open window, the unmistakable raow sound of an Uzi meatgrinder, scream, manic submachinegun chatter, the Uzi twice more, a fusillade of rifle and pistol fire, and then silence. Then a solitary pop, one shot from a small-caliber pistol.
From the other side of the room, greased-metal sounds of Marsha putting a cassette in her rifle and cocking it. “Guess they got Larry. Charlie’s will.”
Jeff automatically reached up to cross himself and then checked it. Calf holster in place, he stepped into his pants. He shrugged into the shoulder holster but didn’t bother with a shirt. He found his boots and knife and scattergun and followed her down the stairs. A gong was ringing.
They were the first ones behind the sandbags. He scanned the road and the overgrown pasture, pretty well lit by the moon. Three days till full; in three days he might be talking to Marianne. That was worth fighting for. “You ought to keep the weeds clear’around the perimeter,” he said. “You could have a hundred people crawl up and you wouldn’t see one of them until they started climbing the fence.”
“Then we just watch them fry.” Her voice was calm and happy. His own voice was tight and hoarse. His heart pounded adrenaline, his knees trembled. Palms wet and sphincters twitching. He sat down and put on his boots. If he had to run, how could he get by an electric fence? Steel shutters rattled down over the windows.
“Ever fight before?” she asked.
“Couple of times. And I used to be a cop in New York City.”
“You sound nervous.”
“Out of practice. Does this happen often?”
“Every month or so. But it’s usually dark, shouldn’t be no problem.”
He set both pistols on top of the sandbags and tried to get into a comfortable position, sighting down the scattergun. “You really aren’t afraid to die.”
“No… I’d rather wait for the death, but if Charlie wants me early, that’s His will.”
Tad got into place behind the bunker next to them. He had a heavy rifle with a fat starlight scope. He switched on the scope and looked around. “Nothing yet,” he said conversationally. “Everybody in place?” Somebody to the far left said “one,” and the count went all around the house, ending with eight. “Healer, don’t use that scattergun on the one with our Uzi, or anyone with an automatic weapon. We can’t afford to damage them.” The scattergun fired bursts of tiny metal splinters, propelled by compressednitrogen blasts. It was a good close-range weapon but it did make an awful mess of anything it hit.