Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  “Please.” The croakiness of her own voice startled her. She struggled to make herself heard above the sound of water pushing from a hose. “I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know who you are or even where I am. Let me go and no one will ever know.”

  The crude bath stopped abruptly, then she heard footsteps walking away along with a sound she identified immediately as that of the hose being dragged.

  “Please,” she repeated. It was better to be calm, but she couldn’t stop her voice as it rose, climbing toward a shriek. “You have to—”

  Her begging cut off as her wet hair was grabbed and her head was forced back. Before she could say anything else, the hydration tube was shoved back into her open mouth. She forced it out with her tongue and slammed her teeth together, thinking it was too bad she hadn’t been able to bite down on a finger or two in the process. Now there were two hands on her, but desperation had given her strength and she twisted her head back and forth, fighting the fist gripping her hair and the other hand trying to pry open her lips. Once, no, twice, she snapped at flesh and almost got it, like some kind of zombie prisoner. When the hand holding her hair let go, she thought she might be heading toward freedom.

  Until she felt a pinprick in the side of her neck and everything sparkled away into blackness.

  * * *

  The days rolled past, they had to, even though she couldn’t really tell one from another. There was daytime and blazing heat, nighttime and cold, the sort of chill that’s born of fever and delirium. In between was a lot of unconsciousness, where she knew she’d been drugged but didn’t know what was being done to her while she was out. Hot, cold, but not much sensation beyond that except a strange sort of tickling that pulled across the tender surfaces of her body. Sometimes it came with tiny pinches or scrapes, almost like something was trying to get underneath her skin. Not digging too deeply, just sort of…skimming.

  Once or twice she woke to find something thick and sweet coming up the hydration tube when she sucked on it, a liquid she could only compare to a warm milkshake. She took it in because her body wanted it, even though she’d rather not, even though she would rather simply die.

  She tried to imagine rescue, the sudden intrusion of sirens into the non-stop birdsong and buzz of insects that was her daily soundtrack, the blaze of light that would coat her pupils when the blindfold was removed. In her darkest hours, she sees herself like this for the rest of her life, a time period that stretches incomprehensibly before the thin sheet of her mental sanity.

  * * *

  When the girl nearly succeeded in biting me, I started drugging her until she slept most of the time. I hadn’t wanted to, but ultimately I realized that was less cruel than what she was enduring. The process was working and the hours I spent with her were relaxing and fulfilling in a way that nothing else in my life could be, but it was taking longer than I’d expected—the effort to productivity ratio was poor, indeed. I wanted more from her, but it seemed clear she’d given all that she could. She could no longer recover quickly enough to start the cycle again, and it had never been my intent to torture her. I just wasn’t that kind of person.

  * * *

  She heard the footsteps and vaguely felt the ropes around her loosen and fall away, but she was too heavily sedated to care anymore. In the movies, the prisoner might hold the pills in his or her cheek, then spit them out and get away. In her reality, there is no escape from the kidnapper’s hypodermic. The blindfold was still on as her hands were retied behind her back. She was lifted and carried, then placed in what could only be the trunk of a car. Her head lolled and she thought it might be a good thing that she was high. The material over her eyes slipped just enough on one side for her to glimpse the skin across the top of her right breast. It was a suppurating mass of raw, burned patches that dribbled liquid where fresh blisters had been broken and peeled away. Right now, though, she didn’t feel a thing.

  Her abductor gave her one last dose to ensure she stayed cooperative as she was wrapped in an old sheet.

  * * *

  Working carefully, I laid the last piece of skin, still faintly moist and delicate, across the bottom of the thin wire frame. I’ve been working my way around for quite some time, and this last layer, the newest, is gray-white above where it joins the older, yellow-tinted ones below it. In only a few days the latest additions will be as dried and discolored as the other layers. Hanging at just the right height above my reading chair, the lampshade was small and very fragile. So many years in the making, yet so much more to go before it’s finished.

  * * *

  I propped the girl beneath a tree in a parking lot I’d never been to before, then drove away. My route was fast and anonymous, down a country road that’s not used much and where I could see any traffic both coming and going. When the road was empty in both directions, I pulled over and removed the magnetized cover on my license plate. I slipped it beneath the mat on the driver’s side floor. Climbing back into the driver’s seat, I shrugged out of the gray hoodie, then tugged off the fake mustache and the piece of clear plastic on my left hand on which I’d drawn a sort of maritime star tattoo. All of that went into a brown paper shopping bag, one that had no store logo on it, so that if I found myself in a spot where I had to dump it, there was nothing to trace back to me. I shook out my hair and let the blonde curls fall naturally across my shoulders, then quickly dabbed some pink gloss on my lips.

  A moment later, I was back on the highway. I’d give it a couple of weeks, then get back to my project.

  “It’s time to get a new one.”

  Yvonne Navarro lives in southern Arizona where, until recently, she worked in one of those super-secret squirrel buildings on historic Fort Huachuca. She is the author of twenty-two published novels and well over a hundred short stories, plus numerous non-fiction articles and two editions of a reference dictionary. Her writing has won the Bram Stoker Award® plus a number of other writing awards. She also draws and paints, and once sold a canvas print of a zombie painting.

  She is married to author Weston Ochse and dotes on their blind Great Dane, Ghoulie, and a talking, people-loving parakeet named BirdZilla.

  From Reggie Parks’s back porch, the day looked like a painting of autumn. The chilly air was misty-gray with the smoke of neighborhood chimneys, the azure sky bright through the skeletal tree branches to which a few desperate leaves still clung. The ground was dappled with the bright oranges and muted yellows that had fallen from the two maples, the elm and the royal empress. Children’s laughter came from the backyard on Reggie’s right, and to the left, smoke rose from the other side of the tall, slatted chain-link fence where, he guessed, Ollie Dumont was burning leaves in his backyard.

  Reggie had always hated that ugly fence—it was old and more slats broke away every year, giving him the creepy impression of a long row of big jagged teeth along one side of the yard—but he could say nothing about it because it was Ollie’s fence. He knew it would be a waste of time to bring it up with the Ollie. He would chuckle and say, “Sure, I’ll get to work on replacing that fence, uh, let’s see—” take a look at his watch, then say, “How about the day after my funeral? That work for you?” and chuckle again.

  Ollie was a cranky old fart. He was a Vietnam vet and a retired carpenter, and he was married to June, one of the sweetest women Reggie had ever known, right up there with his own mother. Silver-haired and apple-cheeked, she looked like a grandmother who had just stepped off of a Norman Rockwell canvas. They had four children and enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to make their house sound like a bus station every year at Christmas time.

  Reggie was willing to cut Ollie some slack because he was about seventy, give or take a couple of years—he refused to tell anyone his true age—and Reggie, who would turn fifty-one in January and already suffered from more aches and pains than he’d ever experienced in his life, found that he had a lot more respect for old people than he’d had in his giddy, invincible youth. By seventy—or what
ever age he was—Ollie had plenty of reasons to be cranky, whatever they might be. Even so, he could be a genuine pain in the ass.

  Reggie and Kimberly had lived next door to the Dumonts for twenty years. Ollie had always been loud, irascible and opinionated, but age, while dulling and dimming so much of him, only magnified some of Ollie’s worst traits. All of his filters, the functionality of which had long been in question, were collapsing, and he said whatever popped into his head, and if he was angry, he said it very loudly. June, being the human equivalent of a batch of sugar cookies fresh out of the oven that she was, took his shouting in stride. More than a few times, while Ollie bellowed on about something, June had turned to Reggie and silently rolled her eyes.

  At the rear of the long backyard was an eight-foot tall fence that Reggie had installed shortly after they moved in, and on the other side, a deep, dense grove of oak trees separated it from a large complex of storage rentals. That same fence continued up the other side of the backyard and nearly all the way to the front of the house before it ended at a gate. On the other side of the fence, the Goldman children and some of their friends were on the large trampoline, and, from the sound of their laughter and shrieks, were having a grand time. That was fine with Reggie. It was a nice sound and usually cheered him up.

  When he and Kimberly moved in, that house had been occupied by Morris and Felicia Goldman and their three children. Morris owned a small jewelry store in the mall at the time, but in fifteen years he had a chain of stores that was so successful, he and Tonya decided to move to Palm Springs. Their oldest son Aaron, his wife Sarah, and their three children, soon to be four, now lived in the house. They were not exactly standoffish, but neither did they encourage interaction. They exchanged smiles and greetings, but little more.

  Reggie’s right hand clutched the handle of a rake as he went down the steps and onto the back lawn. It was a bigger yard than he and Kimberly needed now that the kids were out of the house, but it got a lot of use when they visited.

  Through slats in the chain-link fence, Reggie saw movement and the orange flash of flames in milky smoke. He recognized Ollie’s hooded green raincoat.

  “Hey, Ollie!” he called. “Nice day.”

  Movement continued over there for a moment, then he saw the olive green of the coat move across the gaps in the slatted fence and go into the house through the back door.

  Maybe Ollie was simply too preoccupied with burning leaves to notice anything else. Deciding to count his blessings, Reggie started raking, and a couple of minutes later he began whistling a tune. Something by Elton John, a song from early in his career, but Reggie couldn’t remember the title or the lyric, only the tune. Something from the old days, when he and Kimberly were in high school.

  Why do we call them the “old days?” he wondered. The days aren’t old. The person remembering them is old!

  His whistling was interrupted by a couple of loud, barked laughs at his own little joke. He stopped raking and looked at the back door, then at the kitchen window. No sign of Kimberly. He wanted to share that thought with someone, mostly because if he didn’t say it out loud, he was afraid it would dissolve in his head like an Alka-Seltzer tablet.

  He muttered the thought to himself a few times under his breath as he continued raking.

  The kids playing on the trampoline went on laughing and squealing. When he looked in that direction, Reggie saw them bob into view above the fence as they bounced.

  He recited that thought a few more times. It might be useful at parties. Of course, he and Kimberly seldom went to parties anymore, mostly because so few people they knew threw them. With such a bad economy, terrorists blowing things up all over the world and just about everything in civilization seemingly failing or collapsing, nobody, as of late, was in a celebratory mood.

  Reggie made a mental note to suggest to Kimberly that they throw a little party, have some friends over, maybe brighten everybody’s mood a little. Soon, before he forgot his joke.

  He heard a sound from Ollie’s backyard, stopped raking, and turned to the fence. More movement flashed beyond those open slots and more smoke rose in a column from Ollie’s yard.

  Bending down slightly, he peered through one of the slots. Ollie was hunched over and appeared to be fussing with his fire, grumbling to himself.

  Reggie went back to his raking.

  He often marveled at June’s ability to maintain such a sunny disposition after living with Ollie for so long. Most women would have left him decades ago, and some would have killed him in his sleep. He complained about everything and argued almost every point. And he never stopped nagging June, blaming her for petty little mishaps, criticizing her every action and comment, and he was always telling jokes at her expense, making cracks about the miseries of married life like a sitcom husband.

  “You just wait,” he sometimes said, pointing a knobby finger at Reggie. “When you get to be my age, you’ll realize one day that I was right.”

  Ollie’s crankiness could be quite funny and charming in small doses, but it quickly became annoying and tedious. Every year, he complained that their Christmas tree wasn’t good enough, even though he’d picked it out. Every summer was too hot, every winter was too cold and nothing was as it should be, as far as Ollie was concerned. And yet, June always had a ready smile, a pleasant word, a moment to chat, and never seemed to be darkened by bad moods or periods of frustration. She remained bright and unchanging, never giving the impression of a woman trapped in a miserable marriage to a human wart.

  Reggie had quite a pile of leaves growing in the corner where Ollie’s fence met the raised bed where Kimberly tended a vegetable garden every year. It ran along the side of a long storage shed that backed up to Ollie’s fence. Beyond the shed, the lawn went all the way to the back fence, so Reggie had plenty of ground to cover. He’d only just begun, as Karen Carpenter would assure him if she hadn’t starved herself to death.

  Reggie began to whistle “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

  Ollie’s voice rose in a growl. “The hell is that racket?”

  Reggie stopped raking, turned to the fence and called, “Hey, Ollie.”

  “You got a goddamned trained bird over there, or something?”

  He chuckled as he put the rake down on the grass and walked over to the fence. “I was just whistling as I raked the leaves, that’s all.”

  “That’s all? Isn’t that enough? Sounds like more than enough to me. Not enough aspirin in the world to treat the headache that racket will create. You’d have to get a prescription. You hear me? A goddamned prescription!” he shouted.

  In spite of the fact that it was a heartbreakingly beautiful fall day, Ollie sounded even angrier than usual.

  Reggie wanted to say, Who crapped in your oatmeal, Ollie? But he knew that would make the old man’s dark mood even worse. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and put his eye to one of the open slots in the fence.

  Still wearing his hooded raincoat—Why is he wearing a raincoat on such a clear day? Reggie wondered—Ollie was bent over, tossing what looked like small, squat logs onto the pile of leaves.

  “What are you doing, Ollie?”

  He stood and turned toward Reggie. He wore a dark, reddish-brown shirt and dark blue sweat pants under the coat. The raincoat’s hood was up around his head, and the pale features of his face were partially obscured in its dark oval. “What? Doing? Burning leaves. That’s all. Just burning some leaves.”

  The dark pieces of wood were on the ground around Ollie’s feet, on which he wore brown slippers.

  “Are you putting wood on the fire, too?” Reggie asked.

  “What? Just never mind and leave me alone, goddammit!”

  Reggie turned away from the fence and picked up the rake, but he was disturbed. Something wasn’t right. Ollie was wearing a raincoat on a clear day and throwing what looked like firewood on a pile of burning leaves. Still holding the rake, he went back to the fence.

  “You want some help, Ollie?” he asked,
peering through a gap in the slats.

  “Help? Burning leaves? Do I look like I need help? Mind your own business, Parks! You’re too goddamned nosy. Always have been. You want me to come over there and stick my nose in your business? Huh, Parks? That what you want? ‘Cause I’ll do it! See if you like it!”

  “Fine,” Reggie muttered, walking away from the fence. He raked with a little more vigor and speed, angered by the old man’s behavior. Ollie always had a pebble in his shoe about something, but he seemed more on edge than usual. Fine, let him stew in his juices and set his backyard on fire, for all Reggie cared.

  He raked his way across the lawn to the fence bordering the Goldman yard where children still laughed and shrieked and bounced. It seemed to Reggie that it hadn’t been all that long ago when his own backyard was filled with the same sounds, and Kimberly spent her days driving kids around and making sandwiches and cleaning up messes, and he spent his weekends doing things like building a tree house, or a dollhouse, or just playing with the kids. And what weekends they’d been, what wonderful weekends.

  But those days were well behind all of them, and Reggie didn’t mind. He wasn’t the kind of person who spent much time looking backward, pouring over family albums, thinking about the way things used to be. He preferred to enjoy things as they were, and right now things were pretty damned good. He could not think of a single thing to complain about.

  He and Kimberly were healthy, and they were happier than ever. After all three of their children had moved out, they had taken advantage of the empty nest. First of all, they’d had sex in every single room in the house, in broad daylight. Not all in one day, of course, but on their own schedule, which worked out to whenever the hell they felt like it. And as loudly as they wanted. They had also renovated the kids’ old rooms, but as far as Reggie was concerned, sex in any room, whenever they felt like it? That was the pure gold part of the golden years.