When he crawled into our camp two years after the dust settled, emaciated and covered with wounds, the old man couldn't talk. We started calling him Charlie after one of our elders said he resembled somebody named Charlton Heston. The name stuck. The healers tended to his injuries and the keepers fattened him up with tinned food and apples, but he didn't regain the ability to communicate, not even with a pen and paper. The healers said he probably lost his mind because of something that happened to him after everything ended.

Once he was back on his feet, the keepers moved him into a vacant hut. Every morning he staggered out the door, lurched across the camp, and dropped into a rickety lawn chair at the edge of a grove. He ate whatever anyone brought him, disappeared into the bushes to do his business, and sputtered when the cleaners dumped buckets of lukewarm dishwater over him. His dull eyes wandered if anyone spoke to him. His wild, gray-streaked hair and shaggy beard were a source of fascination to everyone.

The healers tried medications recovered by the gatherers during their forays, but nothing improved his condition and one pill made him so agitated that he paced beneath his tree for two days straight. An older boy told me he was a zombie, so I kept my distance, afraid his body parts were going to start falling off at any minute.

For seven years, he never uttered a sound. Whatever horrors he had experienced were locked inside his head. As I got older, I stopped being scared of him and he became part of the background. Preacher sometimes thought to mention him in his prayers.

Little Rosie—the youngest member of our clan—was the first to hear Charlie speak. She was playing near the edge of the grove, paying no more attention to him than to one of the apple trees, when a loud voice erupted behind her. She dropped her tattered rag doll and fled to the place where most of the keepers were attending to the daily chores.

"Charlie scared me," Rosie said.

"There, there," one woman said. "He won't hurt you." She looked up. "It's probably his hair. It startles me when I see it sometime, too."

"Scared me," Rosie insisted, her eyes wide. "His voice was so loud."

That made everyone stop what they were doing and pay attention.

"But Rosie," the woman said, "Charlie can't talk."

"Did too," she said, sticking out her lower lip. "Told me to send some elders."

The keeper repeated Rosie's message to the senior elder. A man and a woman were sent to investigate. When they returned, they reported that Charlie had ordered the elders to gather before him for an important announcement the next morning at twenty minutes after ten. He said nothing else and didn't react to their questions.

"He looked as surprised to be speaking as we were to hear him," the male elder said.

"His lips barely moved," the woman added.

"Probably atrophied from disuse," a healer suggested.

"Important announcement?" another elder asked. "From where?"

Preacher opened his mouth as if to respond, but seemed to reconsider. I don't think many people believed in God after what happened. We gathered before Preacher on Sunday mornings simply because we needed a quiet hour together each week.

So far as we knew, no one in the immense, desolate world outside our camp was making announcements, either. If there were other clans like ours, we had no contact with them. An elder tested our battery radio three times a week, but picked up nothing but static. Only the gatherers ventured from the enclave, foraging for food and supplies we couldn't get from the nearby town, but they didn't encounter anyone in their travels. If not for the occasional straggler wandering into our camp, we would have believed we were the only survivors.

I was old enough to remember the before times, when we had cars, microwaves, internet and hair, though it seemed like a dream or something from one of the picture books we discarded after Rosie outgrew them. No other children were coming behind her to read them, another side effect of the cataclysm, the healers said, along with our hair loss. Mankind's days were numbered and my generation would be the last, though no one said that out loud.

After school, between grinding wheat and hauling water from the spring, I eavesdropped on members of the clan discussing Charlie's pronouncement. In a few years the elders would consider me mature enough to take on other responsibilities, but for now my chores were menial. Adults didn't pay much attention to us kids as long as we didn't cause trouble, so I learned to finish my tasks quickly and disappear before a keeper gave me something else to do.

I once asked Teacher why we had so many rules. Do this, Hank. When you're done, do that. Without assigned tasks, he said, no one would gather food or keep the eternal fire burning or fix things when they broke. If everyone had jobs to do, we could all be healthy and happy. When he glanced out the window, I realized he was looking at Charlie, as if he exemplified what would happen to us if our society lost its structure. Then I asked him what he would do when there was no one left to teach and he changed the subject.

Though the elders had declared the nearby town off-limits to all but the gatherers, I often snuck through the shattered streets and into the ruins of the library. I devoured the books I brought back when I was supposed to be working, teaching myself about the way things worked in the days of electricity, computers and science. Teacher told me he didn't bother with that stuff because the age of technology had passed. He concentrated on subjects that increased our chances of survival.

Books were also my escape. I might never get to leave our camp, so I floated down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck and traveled to Mars—a bright red dot in the sky I learned to identify—with Ray Bradbury. I stood in King Arthur's court, fought vampires with Van Helsing and solved crimes with the Sherlock Holmes.

The morning after he spoke the first time, Charlie lumbered through the camp as if no one existed, per usual. Everyone watched. The keepers who brought him breakfast lingered in case there would be a response, but the old man with the wild hair and crazy eyes simply scooped food from the plate and crammed it into his mouth.

Later, Historian emerged from her house holding a pocket watch, which she used to confirm the time on the clock next to the calendar in the glass case outside her front door. We need to know our place in the universe, she often said. Tracking the hours, seasons and years helped. How could we record our history if we didn't know when things happened? She was the only person I knew who seemed to believe we would have a history, and someone to interpret it.

The elders gathered in front of the glass case. One looked to the sky as if to confirm the clock's reading. With everyone's attention focused on our leaders and on Charlie, I had no trouble slipping away to the bushes at the edge of the grove, where I would be close to whatever was about to happen. From my pocket, I withdrew a small watch I had earlier synchronized with Historian's clock.

At ten o'clock, the elders formed a solemn procession to the edge of the woods where Charlie sat gazing into the distance. It was the same, aimless stare he always had, but today the elders looked in that direction as if they expected to see something.

Charlie ignored them. Shortly after they congregated around him, he struggled to his feet and shambled into the bushes a few feet from where I was hiding. Even I knew what he was doing, but an elder followed him all the same, averting his eyes when Charlie pulled down his pants and crouched. I put my hand over my mouth to avoid betraying my presence.

He returned to his seat with five minutes to spare. At precisely twenty minutes after ten according to my watch, a voice said, "The sun will go dark in thirty minutes. Come back at this time tomorrow for another announcement."

The elders, most of them still looking off into the distance, turned at the sound of his voice. As before, Charlie's lips barely moved. He rested one hand on his chin, giving him a pensive look. Then he farted. I covered my mouth again to keep from giggling.

The senior elder asked Charlie to repeat his message, but the old man ignored him. Another put his hand on Charlie's shoulder and shook him gently, but that had no effect either.

"Is it the end of times?" I heard one of them ask.

"We'll find out in thirty minutes," another said.

"What should we tell the others?"

"Look," one of the women said. She pointed at the sky. Something had nibbled away the sun's eastern perimeter.

"It's only an eclipse." The man's shoulders relaxed.

"But how could he know? Right down to the exact minute."

"It's a sign. We will discuss this later. Now, we must prepare the clan. The last thing we need is for everyone to go blind."

The elders hurried to the camp and called a meeting. I crawled from my hiding place after they left and listened as they warned people to avoid looking at the sun.

"Charlie will make another announcement tomorrow," the head elder told the assembly.

Whispers of Charlie's name echoed through the crowd. The man we had ignored for years was now the focus of everyone's attention. "It's his hair," I heard a woman say, and those around her nodded.

I watched the moon march across the face of the sun through a piece of smoked glass. The shard came from a basement window in the library and the soot from the eternal fire that burned in the center of town. By early afternoon, the sky was back to normal and members of the clan had returned to their appointed tasks.

The elders met that afternoon and again that evening. The other members of the clan were curious about what they were discussing, but there were no general assemblies that day. Historian told us to be patient, because they wouldn't have any new information until the next morning.

That night, I had trouble sleeping, so I crept out of the hut where I stayed with the other boys who no longer needed an adult to tend to them while they slept. Rosie was just about the only child remaining in the camp. The rest of us were turning into young men and women, though not fast enough for my liking.

For the rest of the night, I sat beside the eternal fire. After breakfast, I snuck back to the hedges near Charlie. The elders arrived early, standing in respectful silence before the old man, awaiting his pronouncement.

I stared at my watch until the big hand reached the four and the second hand crossed the twelve. At that exact moment, Charlie's announcement was delivered. "The hut where the tools are stored will burn tonight."

The second hand swept across the face of my watch. No one said anything for nearly a full minute.

"How can he possibly know that? The eclipse is one thing—"

"It's some kind of trick—"

"We better move the tools just in case—"

If the rest of the clan had been here to witness our sage elders all talking at the same time, their confidence in our elected leaders might have taken a serious blow.

Charlie only stared his thousand-mile stare.

The senior elder cleared his throat. After a moment, the others fell quiet. "Is Charlie capable of planning something like this?"

"The healers say he's a walking vegetable. Has been for years."

"How does he even know what time it is?"

"We've never seen him do anything."

"Still has all his hair though. That must mean something."

Round and round they went. I stayed in the bushes until they returned to the enclave for lunch. When the others gathered, the senior elder extended his arms, palms facing outward, and told everyone to remain calm. What Charlie said made no sense, but as a precaution they would remove anything valuable from the shed and post a guard out front.

The shed burst into flames at just after three in the morning. I was sitting beside the eternal flame when I noticed an orange glow through one of the windows. The sentry raised the alarm, but by the time a bucket brigade was organized, the shed was reduced to smoldering embers. As such things go, it was no great loss. The work of a day to replace.

The next day, Charlie told the elders that a keeper would fall sick that afternoon. Right on schedule, one of the men started complaining of stomach pains. The healers could find no cause for his illness. For a while they were sure he was going to die. They made him comfortable in the infirmary until he recovered a few days later.

Charlie started making suggestions about how the clan should operate. Because of his prescience, the elders rarely questioned the wisdom of what he said—they simply obeyed. Every now and then he threw in another prediction to remind everyone he knew things they didn't or couldn't. His edicts were issued at the same time each morning, with me hiding in the bushes a few feet away.

That was how—with Charlie's unwitting help—I became a secret elder in our clan.

Libraries are wonderful places, with books on every subject imaginable. Figuring out when an eclipse would occur with the help of Historian's detailed calendar and compulsive timekeeping, learning how to use chemicals to start a fire remotely and how to extract mild poisons from one of the plants that grew wild near the camp—-those were all child's play.

Learning how to become a ventriloquist, now that took some time.

The End

Bev Vincent's first book, The Road to the Dark Tower, an authorized companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, was published in 2004 and nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and the author of nearly fifty short stories, including recent appearances in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Apex Digest, The Blue Religion edited by Michael Connelly, Doctor Who: Destination Prague and the Bram Stoker Award winning anthology From the Borderlands. His full publishing credits are available at www.bevvincent.com.

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