Skin on My Skin

by John Burks

  After all, just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you.

  I sat for a while, watching and listening through the suit’s shitty microphones. I should do something about them. Was the graffiti artist still around, waiting for me? Did he want the shitty old bio-suit? I could find gold bullion easier in the city than I could parts for the old monstrosity. The suits had mostly disappeared in the first days of the Preacher’s Plague, the rich and connected scooping them up for their families. I’ll never forget watching, on television, as the President was hustled out of the White House in a suit very similar to the one I wore now. Fortress had parts for them, but I’d never found anything worth trading to the enclave in Central Park that would be worth what the suits were.

  I started to move when I heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps over the crackle of the suit’s mike. It wasn’t the careful footsteps of someone trying to hide in the ruins. It was the thundering crash of someone who just didn’t care, walking so loudly that the sounds were unmistakable over the suit’s microphones. I froze in place, though I wanted to bolt. I trusted the suit’s seals, even after all these years, but there was still that small boy locked inside me, petrified of getting near another living human. I was locked in the chair, listening intently.

  The beast finally ambled into view and I sighed with relief. Not that the giant bear wandering down the middle of the garbage and debris-strewn street wasn’t a danger to me, it just wasn’t the sort of danger I was petrified of. I relaxed and watched as the bear wandered down the road, never once looking at me, and wondered if its lair was somewhere near. I thought I remembered, from the Nature Channel, that they didn’t tend to wander far from home.

  I could only think one thing as I watched the majestic creature ambling down the street, sniffing for food in the refuse. Meat… sweet, succulent, meat. It had been so long since I’d had any sort of fresh meat. Don’t get me wrong. Vienna sausages and deviled ham aren’t the world’s worst canned food, but it didn’t compare to meat. Even bear meat would be something worth having, at this point.

  I raised the rifle slowly and carefully, sighting in on the creature’s head. It wasn’t really fair, for the beast. It had survived the fall of man and was now, for all intents and purposes, king of the urban jungle. Damn shame, I thought, as I pulled the trigger.

  The beast dropped where it stood, dead as the bullet pierced its brain. I drug it into the coffee shop, intent on taking a large cut of meat when I came back through later in the afternoon.

  Hopefully there would be something in the survivor’s lair I was hunting to go along with bear steaks.

  I meandered through the dead city, the only real hurry the overwhelming urge to get out of the open, sticking to the shadows as much as a guy in a military issue bio-suit could, and trying to balance the underlying panic of being in the open with the need to go forwards. It was beyond tough. I was sure that, any moment, someone would leap from the shadows, the suit’s seals would fail, and my internal organs would boil inside me as the Preacher’s Plague ravaged my body. It was silly, I know. Any other scavenger out there would be trying to avoid me as much as I was them. We’d all seen the Preacher’s Plague in action. It didn’t matter, though. I panicked more with every step. It was excruciating. The suit’s external microphone just barely worked and I stopped every ten steps or so to take a good look around me. It was a hard way to walk across a ruined city, but it was the only way I knew how.

  It took more than five hours for me to make my way through the skeletons and rust to the building I was sure was where the light had come from. I had to keep consulting the old smart phone, judging the distance from the Landry Building from the street up as opposed to the penthouse down. Still, I had a pretty good idea of what the building looked like by zooming in on the picture. When I finally made it there, I was confident I’d found the right building. The lack of footprints and apparent occupation through dust in the lobby simply sealed the deal for me. It was too clean, too untouched. The scavenger who lived there was extra careful, which was almost a no-brainer. I was the same. This scavenger had made a mistake, though, in the early morning hours, and despite the panic at the prospect of being out in the open, that mistake had drawn me from my own lair.

  I crept carefully around in the lobby but I knew my suit was anything but stealthy. I could only hope that the scavenger was out exactly what I was. I half wondered if I’d seen the man at Club Flesh in the hermitically sealed booths around the dance floor. Not that I’d have recognized him, but I might see something on his suit. A dent here, a streak of blood there… there were other things than facial features to recognize someone by. I might have sat right next to him, a sealed wall dividing us, and not even known it. It wasn’t that I felt bad for invading another scavenger’s territory. There wasn’t anything to feel bad about, in that. The game was to see who was going to live the longest, now. I half wondered what if the last guy on the planet was going to realize he was alone. It was even stranger to think that. One of us, one of the people alive right now, would eventually be the last human being on the planet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that guy, but I also wasn’t quite ready to give up trying.

  The scavenger obviously had a stealthy way up to the twentieth floor, where I judged the light came from, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to search it out. If he was out hunting, I only had so much time to find his stash. The suit was only going to slow me down, at that point. It was loud and bulky and never designed for any sort of stealth work.

  It had to go.

  Taking the suit off any place but my own happy little sealed penthouse was the apex of something I didn’t want to do. Who wanted to take off the only thing that might stop them from succumbing to the plague in public? It was the height of insanity. If he was in his hideout, and out of his own suit, there was nothing stopping both of us from reacting to each other by the Preacher’s Plague coursing through our veins. It was damned stupid of me and I was only doing it because it had been so long since I’d scored anything worth trading to Fortress. I wasn’t going to get back into Club Flesh with old magazines and MP3 players. I needed something big.

  It was as stupid a thing as I’d ever planned, but I wasn’t going to make twenty flights of stairs with it on, nor was I going to be very quiet about it. If I wanted to at least check out his stash I was going to have to shed the suit.

  I found a little office just off the main lobby that looked like it might have belonged to the building administrator back when there were such things as building administrators. The little office had been thoroughly looted. Desk drawers were dumped out and the file cabinets had been tipped over. The scavengers hadn’t messed with the pictures pinned to the corkboard, though, and I pulled the picture of a man, his wife, and their small son, enjoying a day on the beach. I stared at it a long time, wondering if any of them were still alive. Had the father tried to kill everyone in the family as he slowly succumbed to insanity? Holding the picture was wrong and suddenly I felt as if I’d disturbed a grave. I carefully repined the picture and hoped whatever gods watched over the dead would forgive me.

  The suit wasn’t easy to come out of and it took me the better part of half an hour to do so. I stood there, in nothing but shorts and my Introverts United t-shirt, hoping whatever the light represented on the twentieth floor was worth the effort.

  Worth the fear…

  It's Just a Stash, Bro

  The most direct way to the twentieth floor was the stairwell, though I knew that if there really was a treasure trove above, the stairwell would probably be as heavily defended as my own. I suspected there’d be booby traps and the like. Maybe sections of it would be gone. I just knew I’d have to be careful. I began climbing slowly, listening intently, and trying to be quiet. I was sure that anyone in the building could hear my heart thundering in my chest. I was drenched with perspiration and, again, wondered why I didn’t just leave the city. There had to be something better than this. Wha
t kind of life was I leaving where the most exciting and terrifying part of my day was the prospect of stealing someone else’s looted stuff?

  I turned on my small LED flashlight, another sure way of giving myself away, and started up the pitch black stairwell. The stairs were blocked at the second floor with busted up furniture. A wall of metal legged chairs reached to the ceiling, intertwined with each other and tied with electrical wire. Rusted iron spikes jutted out at angles meant to rend flesh, and I wondered what happened to the art of subtlety. Anyone scavenging in the building would know, right off the bat, that someone wanted to keep them out. Unlike my own blockades, the creator of this one made no effort to disguise what it was. I stared at it for a long time before beginning my climb, looking for a way through. The entire structure was solid and I wondered how much time he’d actually spent building it.

  What did we really have but time? We were all just sitting around, putting off the death the rest of the world had already enjoyed. What else where you going to do with all that time but build fortresses for yourself to hopefully push off that death just a little longer? What else where we going to do with all that time besides try to keep the ghosts at bay?

  I began worming my way through the structure. He’d done a good job of building it, but I wasn’t all that big. There were gaps and, as sweaty as I was, I slipped right through them. The barricade was deep and I went through it like an old circus contortionist, bending and flexing, doing my best to avoid all the pointy and rusty objects he’d scattered through the barricade as a deterrent. Six feet in and I was completely surrounded by the barricade like some sort of barbed womb. The going got tougher, the way narrower. My light flickered and I stopped, in a panic. There was no telling how old the light was, or how many times I’d recharged the batteries. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but the timing was horrible. I couldn’t go forward without light and I couldn’t go back. I would be stuck. I stared at the small flickering light for a long time, praying it would catch and hold.

  Praying was funny after the apocalypse. Survivors tended to hate the idea of a god who’d let mankind become allergic to each other. But we weren’t shy about praying when the going got rough.

  The light went out completely and my heart skipped a couple of beats. The best thing that could happen is that I make it out unscratched. Worse, maybe I’d impale myself on some scavenger’s booby traps and bleed out in the dark, alone and afraid.

  I tapped the light against a metal bar a couple times and sighed with relief when the light came back on. It wasn’t much, but it was my little protective cocoon. I don’t know how much longer it took me to crawl through the barricade, but by the time I’d made it to the other side, I only had a few scrapes and cuts. I’d have to tend those carefully when I got home. There weren’t any hospitals to go to tend infections anymore.

  The barrier on the second floor was the only defensive mechanism between the ground floors and the twentieth. The guy was either the bravest survivor I knew or the stupidest. I was hoping for the latter and enjoyed the relatively easy climb up to the nineteenth floor. I stopped there and rested, drinking water in the pitch dark, listening, always listening. In that perfect quiet I heard the moaning. It was quiet, muffled by the concrete and steel in the floor between us, but unmistakable. It wasn’t like a zombie from the movies or my father snoring. It was pained and…

  Female?

  I had no way to be sure, but I was positive it was a woman. It was just one of those gut feelings. I had no idea how many female survivors existed in the city but I didn’t think there were many outside of Club Flesh and Fortress. Women, on their own in the wild of post plague New York, were targets, plain and simple. I was constantly surprised by the ways my fellow survivors found to inflict pain on women despite the limitations placed on us by the Preacher’s Plague. The last time I’d even seen a woman was at Club Flesh, and even with the makeup and glittery bikini, she’d seemed worn and old. That broken down stripper had fueled my fantasies for months after that one night in the club. But I hadn’t seen a woman in the ruins in… as I thought about it, I was sure I hadn’t ever seen a woman on her own in the ruins.

  I should have turned and ran down the flight of stairs. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was all I could think. It was stupid of me to come here in the first place. What the hell did I think I was doing coming up here without my suit? The woman wasn’t in a suit. I wouldn’t have been able to hear her cries if she had been. I should have run, but I didn’t.

  I had to see.

  My heart thudded quicker and I was sure I was going to slip in the sweat that was pouring off my body. A tingly feeling that bordered between fear and the edge of ejaculation raked my spine. I had to see her. If I stayed far enough away, I reasoned, I’d be all right. I’d feel the first signs of the Preacher’s Plague kicking in and run. But I had to know.

  I had to see why the woman was crying.

  I crept up the stairs in the dark, going on my hands and knees, listening as the cries of the woman grew louder. Her constant sobs were occasionally punctuated by bursts of outright anger and I could hear her body jerking against something as she struggled. I heard the creak of bedsprings. Bright light filtered down from the twentieth floor and I knew that’s what I’d seen from my penthouse in the predawn hours. The woman was careless in her preparations and I was surprised she’d lasted this long in the ruins of the old world. It just didn’t seem fathomable that, with her poorly disguised barricades and bad light discipline, that she’d have been able to survive on her own this long. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe that’s what she was crying about. Maybe she’d had someone and, somehow, they’d survived the years together like my father and I had in the separate containment units in our old house. It was how the people of Fortress got by. Maybe they’d survived this long and then she’d lost him.

  That was it. She had to be a broken hearted lover.

  I thought again that I ought to just turn around. The risks I was taking were not worth whatever stash the woman might have on the twentieth floor. It wasn’t worth it to see a woman in the flesh. But that yearning desire kept me crawling forward, despite my reasoning that I ought to abandon this foolishness. The door to the apartment, on the twentieth floor, was wide open and I could hear her sobbing clearly right then. I quickly felt my lower extremities and arms, checking for telltale signs of the Preacher’s Plague burning my skin. I was pretty sure I’d know it when it happened, though I didn’t want to take any more chances than I had to. I hoped I’d have enough notice to run. I edged up to the open door and peaked around.

  The putrid stink hit me first and then I saw the survivor’s lair was a mess. Mess may be an understatement. I mean, my own penthouse was pretty unorganized and cluttered, but this thing was a pigsty. Among the stacked boxes and crates were piles of garbage. Discarded food cans, old cigarette packages, empty whiskey bottles… the woman had done little over the years to clean up after herself. I worried that, in going into the apartment, I might catch some other disease besides the Preacher’s Plague. Still, though, among the debris, were treasures the likes of which I’d never run across in my years of looting the ruins. There were stacks liquor cases, all apparently unopened. Cases of beer and food tins were shoved against one wall. Another wall consisted of racks and racks of various assault rifles and pistols along with containers of ammunition and grenades. Cases of MREs dotted another wall along with cases of toilet paper and napkins. It was pretty much as I’d hoped it would be and then some. The scavenger had accumulated quite the collection of tradable merchandise. The risks were suddenly worth it, despite the woman crying and the dangers those cries represented. I couldn’t see her through the clutter and figured she was in one of the bedrooms off the main living room.

  I took a deep breath and crawled over the threshold of the open door. The floor felt slimy and, again, I wished I’d figured out a way to lug my suit up to the twentieth floor. The dull wood floor creaked with my weight and I heard the shifting of beds
prings. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. The woman had heard me. The sobbing stopped with a sudden intake of air, as if the woman was mortally frightened.

  “Please, mister,” she said softly from the other room. “Just let me go. I won’t tell them where you are or what you’ve done. Please. I won’t even go back to them. I don’t want to go back there.”

  I sat there, for a moment, perplexed. The woman certainly didn’t sound like the owner of the place. She sounded more like a prisoner. At least, from her comments, I knew that the actual owner of the place wasn’t around at the moment.

  “I’m begging you. Just let me go.”

  I crept further into the apartment, still apprehensive. The woman was young, maybe about my own age, and off to the right. I had to see her, see what she looked like and what condition she was in. I was on one hand scared to death that I’d be burnt alive by the Preacher’s Plague. On the other hand I simply had to know what was going on in this odd survivor’s lair. Why would someone keep someone else locked up? The dangers were too high and it didn’t make any sense at all. If you had survived this long, why keep what could kill you nearby? The curiosity weighed more heavily than the fear and I crept to the open bedroom door.

  “Please sir,” the woman begged again. Her voice was broken, defeated. It spoke of years of anguish. “Just let me out of here.”

  I tentatively looked around the open door and saw the massive old iron framed bed. It looked like something out of an old prison movie. At first I just saw the woman’s foot, lashed to the one of the poles. Blood had crusted around the chain restraints and her feet were dark, nearly purple with the lack of blood flow. I knew, right then, that I was too close to her. At any moment the Preacher’s Plague that coursed through my veins was going to light up. My skin would begin to blister and burn. My throat would swell, choking off oxygen to my lungs. My organs would heat steadily, boiling my guts from the inside out until that final moment when my abdomen popped open like a ripe sausage on a hot grill. I was prepared for that, so curious was I to see the woman. But none of that happened, not at all. I didn’t realize it, though, as I made it further into the room and saw her naked body.