Skin on My Skin

by John Burks

  The girl sounded so strong and I wondered where that strength came from. It was a stark contrast to the crying, pleading girl who’d been tied to the bed. I had no idea how someone so beaten down could be so brave. Maybe it was because she knew she couldn’t die from the Preacher’s Plague.

  “I can’t stay here,” I finally told her. “I need to get back to my place and figure out what I’m going to do about my suit seals.”

  She looked at me, a hint of that desperation leaving. “I can’t make it out there on my own, right now. I’m too weak.”

  I was split. I didn’t know what to do. “Do you want to come to my place?”

  She nodded in considered agreement.

  “I sure as hell don’t want to stay here.”

  Streets of Sunlight

  We stayed at Big Woody's apartment another day despite Jenna’s desire to leave as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame her, but I had to eat and I hadn’t slept, besides being blacked out a couple of hours, in over a day. I was in no shape to navigate the ruins in the company of what would be, if anyone saw her, a walking target. I was starving and so was she. We just couldn’t leave, right then. So I ate. At least the crazy fucker had plenty to eat. I tore the place apart looking for seals that just weren’t there. Woody hadn’t taken the seals. Someone else had. That same someone who’d painted the Preacher logo where I’d see it. I searched some more, bordering on passing out from sheer exhaustion.

  And then I slept.

  It was strange sleeping outside of armor, free of containment barriers, near another human. I lay with my eyes shut and listened to her breath for a long time. I thought, before I drifted off, that I could hear Jenna’s heartbeat.

  I dreamt that night, but not of the day my father had gunned down my mother. Instead I dreamed of the day I’d returned the favor.

  For years my father had bordered in a state somewhere between rational thought and outright insanity. There was never any way to predict how he’d wake. There was never any way to guess what demented scheme he would torture me with. That morning, he was particularly sullen.

  “Come here, boy,” he’d said. “Come here and let me see your wounds.”

  The wounds inflicted on my arm, created by my mother’s panicked grasp, had long healed into horrible looking scars. Five years was a long time for a flesh wound, yet not nearly long enough hide the memory of the day. Even then, after five long years in the containment, I dreamed of that day.

  “They’re fine,” I said, not bothering to look up and make eye contact with him. “They’ve been fine forever.”

  We never quite got over the whole he killed my mother thing. It had put a dark tone on the entire surviving the apocalypse thing.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you boy,” he said and I knew, at that point, that I had to or face whatever punishment my father had plotted for me.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Show me your arm,” he demanded, standing by the transparent wall that separated the living room.

  I finally turned and looked at him. He was standing there, naked save for a gun belt wrapped around his waist. He looked angry and even angrier as I approached the wall.

  “I did all this for you,” he told me softly. “Every bit of it. I started this for you… to save you. And then I saved you from your mother and the mess out there. I couldn’t stop it and… this isn’t what I planned. I didn’t plan on your mother dying. But she’s probably better off, right? Better off dead than living like this.”

  “I don’t know, dad.” I didn’t want to talk to him. I sure didn’t want to talk to him about mom. After five years in containment with him I preferred the days he didn’t talk at all. The days he spent gone, scavenging for supplies, were even better.

  “I was wrong about it, Jacky. I thought maybe it might die out, or that your children might save us, but there is no saving us. There is no one for you to have children with. There is no getting around the fact that we’re done. Why keep on living like this if we’re done? Why suffer? I made a mistake.”

  “I’m sorry, dad.” I didn’t really know what else to say. I had no idea how to answer his ranting.

  “Put your arm in the box,” he commanded, pointing to the tray that we could safely pass materials between the two containment areas with. “I want to look at your wounds.”

  “Dad, they’re healed. They’ve been healed for a long time.” Something odd was going on. He had an even crazier look on his face than usual.

  “Just do it, Jack. Do it right now.”

  He never called me Jack unless punishment was to follow. I did as I was told and the second my arm broke the plane of the other side, his side, I felt my skin begin to burn. My father grabbed that arm, clamping down on it at exactly the same point my mother had. I screamed out at the sudden pain as the Preacher’s Plague began to explode outward, turning my skin to ash.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, Jack. I’m sorry I did any of this. This world is dead. There is no reason for us to go on anymore. We’re all dead.” It was then I saw the knife in his hand and watched, wide-eyed, as the blade pierced the containment barrier above my hand. With each inch of it sticking through I felt the burning inside me strengthen. “I… I made a mistake, Jacky. I thought I was doing the world a favor. I could have stopped this, but I didn’t. We don’t deserve to go on, Jack. The human race deserves this fate and we can’t go on.”

  He meant to kill me, to kill us. He meant to tear down the containment and expose us to the Preacher’s Plague. I pulled back, screaming, but his grip was too strong. I struggled, kicked, but he just wouldn’t let go. His face began to swell like a fat sausage on heat and his eyes narrowed.

  “I love you, Jacky,” he gurgled as his throat began to shut down. “I’m so sorry I did this to you and your mother.”

  His guilt at not being able to cure the Preacher’s Plague had finally driven him over the deep end. It was a long time coming. I didn’t know what to do. I was just a teenage boy who’d been locked in a house with his deranged father. He slit the plastic all the way down and slowly began to pull me through. He meant to hug me.

  “I love you, Jacky.”

  I didn’t pull the gun from his gun belt on purpose. I didn’t even realize I’d done it. I pushed the gun up into his gut and pulled the trigger three times. His eyes went wide and he stumbled backwards, finally letting go of my arm. I shot him again and again, until the magazine was empty. I pulled the plastic together and ran duct tape down it as he’d drilled me time and time again.

  An hour later I was a small boy in a big bio-suit on the run in New York City.

  I must have stirred in my sleep because she woke me up with a gentle shake to the shoulder that nearly sent me screaming out of the room.

  “I’m sorry…” she whispered. “You were having a bad dream.”

  Sweat poured off my face and I trembled, both from the dream and the unexpected touch. “It’s okay.”

  “What was the dream about?”

  “Why does it matter?” I asked, still uncomfortable with talking about my own situation. I didn’t know how much I wanted to tell her, if anything at all.

  “It doesn’t. I was just curious. The sun is up. Maybe we ought to get going.”

  Getting going without the suit seals was as bad as walking out in normal clothes, as she was. We didn’t have much choice, though. She didn’t want to stay in his apartment and I didn’t blame her. The corpse lay there, wrapped in plastic, laughing at us. Woody was what was left of the world. The crazed had inherited the place and those few of us that still had any sort of rational thought - we were the outsiders. I half thought I should join the man in his cravings. At least he’d died happy.

  “Yeah, we should.”

  It had taken me the better part of a whole panic filled day just to make it to the apartment in the first place. I couldn’t imagine how long it was going to take with me being petrified by not having the seals. Not to mention trying to corral my crazy compa
nion.

  “You ready?” she asked, looking at the open doorway hesitantly.

  I shrugged, putting on the last bit of the bio-armor despite its abject uselessness. “Sure. You… you haven’t been out much, have you?”

  “Between being a prisoner in Fortress and a prisoner in here, no.”

  I shrugged. “Well, welcome to New York, I guess.”

  I felt, rather than saw, her reaction as we stepped out on the rubble-strewn street in the full heat of the afternoon sun.

  It wasn’t altogether different than my own every time I left my penthouse.

  “We can go back inside and wait till dark,” I told her softly. “It’s easier at night. You can’t see how open everything is at night.”

  Jenna was quiet for a while, staring out at the sky.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen the sun?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe back in Fortress? They didn’t let us out much. Maybe even before that. That day they drug us out of the shelter. It’s all sort of jumbled together.”

  Her skin was even paler in the full light of the sun. She looked so pathetic, standing there barefoot in Woody’s baggy clothes, like she might just blow away at any moment. I sensed a fire in her, though, a fire that years of captivity had done little to extinguish.

  “We can go back in,” I repeated. “It’s way easier at night. I promise.”

  “Why did you come here?” she asked, changing the subject. “Why did you come during the day?”

  “People scavenge during the day. I didn’t think there would be anyone there.”

  “But how did you know it was there in the first place?”

  “There was a light I saw from my place. It wasn’t much. Just enough.”

  “He was an idiot. I’m surprised someone hadn’t come before. You were coming to rob him.”

  She was using words from a dead world. They just didn’t apply anymore. The things Woody had accumulated came from that dead world were fair game to anyone who could take them. It was the same with my stuff. It wasn’t anything personal. People were just surviving the best they could.

  “We should either get going or go back inside,” I told her. That same fear she felt was only exacerbated in me. I wanted to hurry back to my own home, the one place in the city I’d feel safe without the seals.

  “I’m not going back up there,” she said with as much determination as I’d heard from her. “I’m fine. Which way?”

  I nodded and hefted the bag of supplies we’d taken from Woody’s on my shoulder. The extra ammunition weighed more than the rifle I’d taken, but I was sure Jenna was going to be more of a problem for me. The moment someone saw her, and someone would see her, I’d either have to give her up or fight to keep her. Despite knowing a bit more about her, I still had that fantasy in the back of my mind. I pointed off to the west and we headed out.

  After a block I wished she’d have found some sort of coverings for her feet. Woody’s boots were never going to fit her, but towels and duct tape or something. Inside that block her feet were bleeding not just from the miles of broken glass and rusted metal, but from just being so delicate. She had no callouses on her feet and, if I understood her story correctly, she hadn’t even been out of that bed in years. I was surprised she could walk at all.

  Two blocks in she was breathing heavy and I felt eyes staring at me from every direction. Stop it. I was just being paranoid. But that didn’t mean someone wasn’t out to get me. There was still the graffiti artist out there somewhere.

  “You need a break?” I asked, hoping she’d want to if for no other reason than to get off the street and push my own fear down a bit.

  “No,” she said, trailing blood down the dust-covered sidewalk behind her. “I’ll be fine.”

  We walked on, not talking, her bleeding. I saw danger in every shadow, but the only things I heard were dogs howling in the distance. I was careful to take us as far away as I could from Fortress. Hoping patrols weren’t out looking for Woody. Hours passed and I felt exhaustion creeping up again. What I needed was a hot shower, a good meal, and my own bed. Maybe then I could make a good decision about what to do.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” Jenna finally said.

  “What’s that?”

  “All this. Our city. It all fell apart.”

  “It didn’t fall apart. The Preacher destroyed it,” I told her, not bothering to hide the contempt in my voice.

  “If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Do you remember how many people were in this city before the Preacher’s Plague?”

  “Sure.”

  “There were so many people, all pushing and shoving. The Preacher hated gay people. Fine. There were people that hated blacks, people who hated Hispanics. It didn’t matter. Someone was going to do exactly what the Preacher did at some time. It was just a matter of time.”

  “That doesn’t make murder right. No, not murder. Genocide.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?”

  She finally did take a break four hours into the trip. We sat inside a ruined department store. She even let me wrap the raw, hamburger-like things that were her feet. I had no idea how she continued to walk. We ate MRE packs without heating them up and she stared around the old, ruined store. It had been looted in the early days of the plague. The remains of the worthless suits and dresses were little more than moldy piles on the floor.

  “I think my dads took me shopping here once. We were getting a dress for the sixth-grade dance. I was so excited.”

  She didn’t sound excited.

  “At least the food’s good, right?” she asked, holding up some unidentifiable meat product from her MRE.

  “Seriously?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t get a lot to eat.”

  “Yeah. You look like you could eat.”

  “Do you have something better at your place?”

  “Fresh tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers,” I answered her, thinking of the bear I’d left along the way. “Maybe some fresh meat if we make a bit of a detour on the way.”

  “You have all that?” she asked, incredulous. “Tomatoes? I love tomatoes. Or… I haven’t had one since before everything…”

  “Tomatoes,” I said half-heartedly, anxious to get going again.

  “Well, let’s go see these tomatoes,” she said, painfully coming to her feet. “Thanks for the shoes.”

  We walked on in silence until I finally saw my building. Relief swept through me. We’d made it, no problems. I could see the end of the line. I stopped in my tracks, however, frozen in place.

  “What is it?”

  I didn’t know if I should tell her about the new Preacher logo I was staring at just across from the front door to my building. I decided not to.

  “Nothing, come on. It’s a long way to the top.”

  After the brief detour to the Starbucks to acquire bear steak, we finally made it to the Landry Building a few hours before nightfall. I told her how we would have to get to the top and she wasn’t happy about it.

  “I don’t want to wait here by myself,” she said again, just as adamantly as she had the first half dozen times.

  I ignored her pleas. “There isn’t another way. I’m going to go up it and make sure my place is clear. I’ll send it back down. I won’t be on it, so I’m going to have to use a rope to lower it. It might hit hard.”

  “I don’t want to ride that thing,” she insisted. “Not alone. Scratch that. Not at all. There has to be a better way. The stairs…”

  “I destroyed them years ago,” I said, interrupting. I wasn’t going to tell her about the freight elevator. The skies were clear and even if they were cloudy, I didn’t want to wait around for a rainstorm that might or might not come. It would just be too loud. “This is it.”

  “You’re going to leave me here by myself.”

  The total resolve she’d had in her voice earlier was now tempered with the
desperation she’d had earlier. I sensed the fear, the loneliness inherent in the statement. I felt the same way. I’d gotten used to having her near surprisingly quick, and I didn’t want to give that up. Not yet. But the platform simply wouldn’t haul both of us.

  “I’m going to send it back for you. Just stand on it, here,” I said, showing her, “and pull the lever. It will take a half hour or better to get up there. You have to stand on the platform and hold on.” I thought about that, for a moment. I didn’t want her passing out and plummeting to her death. “I’ll send down some rope to tie yourself on if you get tired. All you have to do is flip this lever, right here,” I told her.

  “You’re not going to leave me?”

  “I came back for you, didn’t I?”

  “That’s because you wanted to fuck me,” she spat back, half mockingly. I’d hoped we’d gotten past that point.

  “And you think, for some reason, that I don’t now?” I said, honestly. We needed to get moving. We were making too much sound and it was echoing through the elevator shaft.

  “Right,” she reluctantly agreed. “So at least an hour before it gets back down here.”

  “Probably less. I’ll let it down quick. Just stay out of the way, okay?”

  “And then thirty minutes or so up.”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if she could see the comforting smile behind the mask. “Thirty minutes or so.” It was more like an hour, but what was another little lie?

  “You have a tomato waiting for me, okay?” she said, touching my shoulder piece and then stepping back out of the elevator shaft. “And that bear steak cooking.”

  I got on the platform and began my trip to the surface.

  Movin' On Up

  The trip up was agonizing.

  First off, it was slow. I needed to do something about that. What if I had to make it to the penthouse in a hurry? Maybe I was just being too impatient. Secondly, I worried about Jenna. The girl could wander off. The more I thought about it, the more I thought she probably would. Why go upstairs with your potential rapist? The more I worried about it, the more I was tempted to sail back down and take her to the freight elevator. Damn the noise. I didn’t want her to leave.