Free Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman

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 rationswhen 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. Hegave 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.