Skin on My Skin

by John Burks

  I shrugged it off. I’ve spent years by myself never saying a word. You don’t survive this long after it all went to shit without figuring out the whole lonely issue. I can’t actually imagine touching a woman. Well, I can. Seriously. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about it. I think most young men did. But it’s just a dream. Because there is a cure for horny people and, after the apocalypse. There’s lots and lots of porn available. Lot’s is an understatement, in this sense. Sometimes I’m surprised at the sheer amount of it out there under beds, on old computers… in the back of closets. I can visualize what it’s like to touch someone, but I can’t really feel it. The last time a woman touched me, I just nearly died. Then she got a bullet through the head for the effort. Even if I could be with a woman, I probably wouldn’t be able to get my mother’s bloody face out of my mind.

  Thanks dad. Fuck you, merry Christmas. All that.

  Still, there’s that itch that’s always gnawing at the back of my mind. The human body isn’t wired to be alone forever, isn’t set up to spend eternity not touching another human being. Though I’ve never actually been with a woman, I know I need to be. There’s something in my core that screams for it. I’m sure it has something to do with continuing the human race, and what not, but I don’t feel it that way. I need to feel a woman’s touch and all I have is porn.

  But I have a lot of porn. More than I’ll ever actually watch. But you don’t actually watch porn, do you? You just fast forward to the good spots. I’ll spend an hour looking for something that takes five seconds to get off too. Porn, sweet porn.

  No porn for me today, though. There was a light. Something was happening over there. I’m going to go find out what it is. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

  I finish breakfast and put on dad’s biohazard suit. The seals are worn and the armor chipped and faded, but the old suit still works well. I pack new filters and get ready for the drop, not that you could ever actually be ready for the drop.

  The penthouse is served by two elevators. There is the freight elevator at the back of the building, which I’d left intact and only operated under the noisy cover of thunderstorms. It was currently parked at the third floor and loaded with dirt and canned food I meant to haul up the next time a storm rolled through town. The primary elevator was private and, before I crashed it into the ground level, very ornate. I didn’t use it and I didn’t want anyone prowling around the bottom stories of my building getting any ideas about using it either. I’d also gone through great lengths to sabotage the stairwells leading up into the building, doing my best to make it look natural. New York was, after all, falling apart. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to find ruined flights of stairs and blown out chunks of walls. So far it had been more than enough to deter interest in the upper floors of my building and I hoped to keep it that way.

  I’d designed my own ride for the primary elevator shaft. It was really just a big electric motor fixed to wheels around the primary cable. There was a small platform I stood on with a set of handlebars from an old bicycle to hold onto. The motor was more than enough to winch me from the first floor to the top along with the weight of my suit and some supplies. If I found anything bigger it would have to go in the freight elevator and wait for the first good thunderstorm. The little platform would take the better part of half an hour to crawl to the top floor. The trip down was much quicker.

  Abandoned vehicles in New York were even more common than plasma televisions. And typically each vehicle had at least four sets of brake pads. I’d been through a hundred so far.

  My suit ready, supplies loaded, rifle slung, I stepped out onto the platform, and as always, felt a little silly swaying a hundred floors above a crashed elevator in a dark shaft. I took a deep breath and gripped my brake handle. I unlocked the platform and began easing down the line.

  Any number of things could go wrong with my ad hoc contraption. The brake pads could fail. The locking mechanism could catch, catapulting me from the little platform where I’d plummet a hundred floors to my death. And who would know, if that happened, that I had died? Maybe in a thousand years, some alien archeologist prowling around the ruins of New York would find my skeleton inside the smashed bio-suit and wonder how I’d met my end. No doubt they’d think it was human sacrifice. It was always human sacrifice, right? I laughed at the thought. The ancient Aztec gods atop the Landry Building, sending hapless sacrifices to their death a hundred floors below… it would make for a great documentary.

  The platform eased down the dark shaft and I gradually let off the brakes a bit more, picking up speed. If I was going to go out, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory. I had no idea how much speed I picked up, but I’d painted the area around the twenty-fifth floor bright red to remind me to start putting on the brakes again. By the time I got to the fifth floor, I was back to going at a crawl. I stopped above the crashed remains of the elevator on the ground level and stepped off the platform. I had a remote for the rig on the wall hidden behind rubble and I used it to send the platform back up to the fifth floor. It would be waiting there for me when I got back to make the slow climb back to the penthouse. You just couldn’t be too careful.

  The apartment building’s lobby looked just like I’d left it. Dust and years’ worth of garbage had blown in through the busted glass in the front doors covering the floor. I was content no one had stepped through the mess and carefully made my way around the edge.

  And just like that, I was out in the daylight, ready to see the sights of New York City.

  I stood there a long time, fighting down the panic that built the moment I saw open sky without the benefit of protective walls. There weren’t any people out there, none that I was likely to run into, anyway. I wasn’t going to be igniting the Preacher’s Plague coursing through my blood from the wind and garbage blowing through the city. I had on an armored bio-suit that, as old as it was, still did the trick. The seals sealed. It didn’t matter. As I looked out on the open city all I could see were old video broadcasts of rioting people’s skin burning, their organs boiling, and then them dying badly. I wanted nothing more than to go back inside, making the half-hour long trip back up to the Penthouse and bury my head under the pillow. This, for me, was worse than the monster in the closet, worse than dad on the other side of the containment wall.

  This was reality, and reality blew chunks.

  I took a deep breath and took a step. Time to go.

  New York, New York

  There are two New York’s. There is the New York I remember from before the Preacher’s Plague, the New York of my childhood. It was a vast, vibrant city filled to overflowing with sweet, glorious people. Cars pushed endlessly down the streets, stinking up the air with their putrid exhaust fumes. Street side vendors sold food and ice cream… man I miss hot dogs. The sounds… sometimes I dream of the sounds of the old city, the people laughing, or screaming. The police sirens, the clanging of construction equipment… it was all gone now.

  That New York is gone, nothing but a fantasy. Sometimes I think it was a figment of my imagination, a dream of an eight-year-old kid who didn’t know any better. Maybe we’d always lived under the shadow of the Preacher’s Plague. The other New York, the real New York, is dead and empty. The skeletons might be whispering to each other, but if they were, I couldn’t hear it.

  There is no end to the bleach white bones that fill the streets. I still don’t understand why people who knew what the Preacher’s Plague was capable of met in the streets to have their internal organs cooked and their bodies explode like fat little sausages on an old barbecue pit. Why did you continue to be around other people if doing so would kill you? Though I lived through the opening years of the Plague, I was a kid. I wanted to watch Space Force Alpha. But in the years since I’ve read everything I could get my hands on from that time. The Preacher’s forces released the Plague in twenty-five cities across the globe as he took to the airwaves, pirating every major television broadcast service around the world
, to announce his deadly intent. His genetically engineered virus made men allergic to each other. It was a simple, yet devious way to deal with his pet hatred, homosexuality. With this simple solution, the Preacher said, homosexuality would die in a single generation. Men would no longer be able to touch men and soon, he’d said, all the queers would go the way of the dodo bird. Man would be allergic to man, and painfully so. The queers would become be extinct, he’d said, fulfilling god’s will. When that day finally came and all the fags were gone, he promised to release the cure. Simple.

  The Preacher’s virus did not work out as he’d planned, though. Contact between human males wasn’t just painful, it was deadly. If two infected men simply stood near each other for long enough, their bodies would begin to break down and their organs boil. Society quickly shut down. Men quit going to work. Garbage did not get picked up, food did not get transported, and power plants shut down for lack of maintenance workers. People panicked, stores were looted, and the world ground to a halt. Fathers could not hold their male babies. Brothers could not hug. Male acquaintances could not shake hands. I remember those early days, when dad just started building the containment unit in our small home. He spent a fortune on duct tape and plastic sheeting, but now I have to give him credit. It worked. He kept me alive for all those years.

  And then, years later, he tried to kill me. Fuck him.

  Life, as it often did, found a way to go on. Governments found they could pair women with men, isolate men from each other, and carry on. It was complicated, but it worked. Life slowly began to get going again. The manhunt for the Preacher was the most intense in history and yet, as far as I know, the man was never found. If he ever existed at all. The conspiracy theories abounded right up until the voices on the radio began to die off.

  People feared the Flesh Plague jumping genders, but the government insisted it wouldn’t. Most, as usual, believed them. Life could continue, everything was under control. The human species was not under imminent threat, babies would still be born. The homosexual communities around the world took the brunt of hostility and anger. People blamed them for the Preacher’s actions instead of blaming the man himself. And his twisted plan worked as he’d planned. Men who were allergic to each other did not hold hands, did not kiss in public. Thirty years of advances in LGBT causes evaporated overnight and the homosexuals who survived went into hiding.

  My father feared it jumping genders and the thought of it doing so made my mother hysterical. I didn’t know what to think. But dad continued building his containment bubbles in our house. He divided the house into three sections where the three of us could live separately but together. When he emptied his 401K to lay in supplies, my mother threw a fit. But he was a man driven.

  And it turned out he was right. We’d need that containment.

  The first case of the Preacher’s Plague jumping genders is probably the most remembered. Billions died in the coming months, but no one who lived back then would ever forget the scene of Belinda Smith, pregnant mother of two, screaming in front of a news camera as her body became allergic to the fetus she was carrying. Her belly swelled and her skin boiled, right on national television. The doctors attempted to do an emergency C-Section, but it was too late. By the time they removed the fetus her organs had boiled and her airway had shut down. The event caused the government to step in and take full control of the broadcast media, but it could do little to prevent the flow of information. It was then people understood the calamity of the Preacher’s virus. It would do just as he’d intended and end homosexuality, but it would do so by eliminating the human race.

  Despite the knowledge that the Preacher’s Plague would kill them if they experienced any human contact, people tried to congregate anyway. Dad said they were angry, as they had a right to be. They couldn’t face their own demise without a fight. So people died, and died as painfully and as hideously as they could. The dead streets of a dead city were covered in the skeletons of the dead. The new greenery poking up through cracks did little to conceal the bleached bones.

  To the uninitiated it looked like the streets surrounding the Landry building were long abandoned and hadn’t been traveled in years. I knew better and the tracks of not just animals, but other scavengers, were evident to me. I did my best not to add any new ones to the trail.

  I consulted the digital camera once, to see my notes, and then headed into the city.

  I couldn’t go far out of sheer, unadulterated fear, though there was nothing to be afraid of. The reasonable side of me understood this and tried to be rational about it. But the paranoid side always won out. I couldn’t stay in the open very long without hiding for a few and catching my breath. It was silly, I knew, but I also knew everyone else was stuck with the same fear. The Preacher’s Plague had made us all introverts on an extreme scale. Anyone in the ruins would be trying to get as far away from me as I was them. We’d both be wearing suits. No one wanted to risk contact with each other, even with the suits. The survivors of New York City hadn’t made it this long by taking chances. I had to take a break, though, and get inside. It was just too much to take in.

  There was a Starbucks cafe near the Landry Building that my family always used to stop at when we were in the city shopping with mom. She’d wander across the street to prowl clothing and shoe racks and dad and I would sit in the coffee shop sipping hot drinks and watching people walk up and down the street. I like to think I enjoyed that, the whole people watching thing, though at the time I was probably bored out of my mind. The Starbucks, like the rest of the city, is dead now and the people are all gone. I stop there every time I get the chance anyway.

  I half think I picked the Landry Building to be close to the Starbucks. Stupid, I know, but when you’re shopping for a post-apocalyptic penthouse, what does it really matter?

  The shop was just how I left it last time I came through this way. It’s not like there’s anything worth scavenging in the place anyway. I’m sure the coffee was one of the first things to go, back when it all fell apart. I know I’d scavenged tons of it. I sat at the table dad and I always did, looking out the busted windowpane, and sipping from the canteen through the tube that runs through the bio-suit’s helmet. The rainwater, collected in barrels on the roof of the penthouse, is a far cry from the rich coffees and flavorings dad and I used to drink here before it all went to shit.

  Dad wasn’t a guy to splurge. Starbucks, on the weekends we went shopping with mom, was his splurge. We didn’t have a fancy espresso machine at home and dad bought Folgers’s for the house. But coming here, into the city proper, and sitting at the Starbucks watching as humanity drifted by outside, made me feel like we were rich.

  What a crock, right? Rich. I live in one of the fanciest penthouses in New York and I don’t have a penny to my name. Not that pennies mean anything. The guy that lived there before me had a metric shit ton of pennies to his name. Look what good it did him. I found his and his girlfriend’s skeletons intertwined on the bed, an empty bottle of wine and bottle of pills between them. Fat lot of good money did him. Fat lot of good it did any of them.

  I don’t come here to feel rich. I certainly don’t come to watch people. There aren’t exactly many of those. Honestly, I don’t know why I come here. I don’t ever go back to the old house where Dad and I spent those years in containment. Maybe it has something to do with good memories versus bad. Dad didn’t murder my mother in front of me at Starbucks, so that meant Starbucks was all right.

  But despite the good times my father and I had at this very table, I can’t help but think of the last time I saw him, the time I put five bullets in him. He’s dead, now. I’m sure of it. But I see him around every corner anyway, ready to jump through the delicate plastic wall separating us and grab me by the arm, the same arm my mother had held when he’d shot her. I felt the scarred skin burning even then and saw that crazed look in his eye.

  I like to think he wanted me to shoot him. I like to think he wanted me to end his suffering. Five ye
ars in containment was a long time.

  I sip at the water and watch the garbage blow down the street. Fifteen years after the city, for all intents and purposes, died, garbage was still king. There was no end to it. I think once services began to fail people just started dumping their refuse in the street. I’m very careful about what I do with mine. Hate to get robbed because someone found a freshly opened can of chicken noodle soup on the street in front of the Landry building.

  I sip at the water a little more and try to remember what people on the street looked like. I’m going to have to watch a movie, tonight, with lots of faces in it. Maybe some happy people singing and dancing. Other humans are a blur. After scrunching my eyes and trying to imagine, I fail. All I see are blanks where faces should have been. Screw it. I’ve got stuff to do anyway. I’m about to get up and head towards the light I saw in the morning when something stopped me in my tracks.

  Fresh paint… across the street from me. Fresh paint? No one had painted anything in fifteen years or better and some twat paints that?

  The red spray paint on the sun-faded stonework was a familiar pattern. I’d seen it all over the city starting not long after I finally left my father’s house. There was a plain silhouette of a man in a wide brimmed hat with a beard, looking like some Amish holy man. Underneath it were the words The Preacher Lives.

  I seriously doubted that, but it irritated me to no end that someone would do that in my neighborhood. There was also no small amount of panic and I wondered, for a moment, if the graffiti artist had done it knowing I was nearby.