Skin on My Skin

by John Burks

  “This is going to sting, Jacky,” he said, not even acknowledging what had happened out on the porch. I was numb, both from the pain in my arm and what I’d seen.

  “I thought there wasn’t a cure?” I mumbled, staring at the needle. What was he giving me?

  Dad plunged the tip into my arm and I jerked. He held me firm, though. “There isn’t. Not now. Maybe if I’d have had more time… this is all there is and it won’t do anything for your generation. It’s going to help with the pain a little, that’s all. If we live, though…”

  The shot burned, but less so than the reaction when my mother’s hand was on my skin. I didn’t know what he was talking about and could hear his own tears behind the armored visor. Dad shuffled me into my area of the sealed house and that’s where I sat for the next five years.

  I wasn’t sure why I set the little wind up alarm clock every night. Even if the dream didn’t wake me, I’d be up before the sun rose anyway. It didn’t matter if I drank myself silly the night before, or only slept a couple of hours, I’d be up before the sun lit the dead city. Dad set an alarm every day, even throughout those years in containment. Maybe I was trying to be like him, the him before the whole mother killing thing. Whether it had anything to do with him or not, I turned the alarm off before it rang every morning.

  I sat and stretched, listening intently, as my eyes adjusted to the dark. The sounds of my place were regular, like a heartbeat, and I didn’t think anything was out of place. My left hand roamed the scarred section of my right arm where mother had held me all those years ago. It was a bulbous, pitted, and ugly affair, but not the worst Plague Scars I’d ever seen. Years after the incident, Dad said I was lucky to survive the encounter, though he didn’t know why it had mattered. Your mother was right, he said. Why keep this up? I was kidding myself, he’d say. Some of the monsters I’d seen in the city had survived much, much more and wore the scars like a coat of armor. They didn’t even look human anymore and their entire bodies were disfigured. Monsters in the ruins. Different people had varying levels of tolerance to the Preacher’s Plague. Some could stand human contact for few moments without any adverse reaction. Most had just quickly died. They said there were people who weren’t affected at all by the Preacher’s plague. I didn’t actually believe in the Touchers, though. I’d never seen someone completely immune, despite all the time I spent at Club Flesh. I knew that place was as much an illusion as that stupid show I’d been wanting to watch the day my mother died. It was fantasy, nothing more. They said the girls were Touchers, immune, so we’d come back with trade goods, always hoping we might get a piece of that skin. It was all a show. But I wore the scars like a badge of honor. Fuck you, world. I survived your shit. I survived mom trying to kill me. I survived dad going crazy and, much later, trying to kill me. I’m here and you’re not going to do anything about it. Fuck you.

  “Hello? Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?”

  The voice was barely a whisper, hardly discernible through the low garbled background noise. I could tune it in better but I didn’t really want to. The giant ham radio was the only piece of electronics I left on overnight, though I kept the volume nearly muted. It didn’t consume that much power and I was forever hoping to hear a broadcast from somewhere… anywhere but the one I was about to listen to. Maybe the people in the bunkers or subs were still alive, though the President had stopped giving his stupid fireside chats five years before. They were probably dead too, though. Everyone else was. But Radio Guy was a hell of a lot better to listen to than the eternally looped recording of the Preacher. The one asshole on the planet no one wanted to hear from apparently had a nuclear powered transmitter and a billion miles of tape. Maybe he really did have the cure, but I personally hoped the fucker was dead. I wasn’t about to wander around the city to try and track him down and find out. I remembered too many voices disappearing from the radio spectrum after they set out to find the Preacher and his supposed cure. I debated answering Radio Guy, as I always did, but ended up leaving the mike in its place. Security was an issue. I didn’t want to give away my location. It was more than that, though. I was scared to talk to the man.

  “I know you guys are out there,” Radio Guy said. “I know there are more people alive than just me. Shit man, even it’s just you guys in the subs. I know you’re still down there after all these years, uninfected. You have to be. Those fucking reactors last forever, right? Why can’t you just answer me?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure about the reactors on the subs. I knew they’d been around just a few years back, though. I saw one in the harbor. Guy was just sitting on the deck staring at the Statue of Liberty like it was a day in the park, back before the Preacher and his Plague. I watched him the entire day, ‘till the sun went down. The next morning, the sub was just gone. Maybe it was still down there, on the bottom, rusting away. Maybe the guy was on a beach in Florida.

  I’d taken to calling the guy Radio Guy, just because he was one of the last few on the air. Maybe he’d seen the sub too. I was sure he was in the city. He talked about things like the new World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. He was a New Yorker and I knew he had to be close. His transmission was too powerful. He always started like this, half fanatical, whiney and weird, like hundreds of other voices in the either I’d heard over the years. Sadly, most of those were gone, leaving me alone in a dead city with Radio Guy.

  Oh, I could talk to someone at Club Flesh. For the right price I could do more, though I’d never scored a haul big enough to actually be let into the back. I’d heard the other guys talk about the full body condoms and even some claiming to have been with real, honest to god, Touchers. You could talk to the other scavengers in the club if you didn’t mind listening to them as they jerked off on the other side of containment walls. The radio was different, though. It was more personal. Those were real people on the other side of the ether, not strippers working for fifteen year old cans of beenie weenies behind hermitically sealed glass walls. The radio was… it was as personal as someone after the Preacher’s Plague would get. So many people dying alone… I should have thrown the damn thing out the window years ago. But I hadn’t and was left with Radio Guy.

  “I… I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I’m so sick of being alone. I haven’t talked to anyone in… shit. I don’t know how long. Please why can’t you just answer me?” There was a long pause, but his mike was still on. I hear the unmistakable sound of a shot gun’s slide being racked. “I’m going to do it this time. I swear to god I am. I’m going to eat this barrel and pull the fucking trigger. What is the point of surviving all this if there isn’t even anyone to talk to?”

  He hadn’t done it yet. I half wished he would. There wouldn’t be any reason to keep the radio going if he did. I’d be done, finally and absolutely alone.

  I’d thought of suicide, but fuck you, Jack Wyatt Sr, I’m still alive and there isn’t anything you can do about it now. Killing myself would be proving my father right. It would be giving up and I wasn’t going to give up if for no other reason than to spite the memory of my father. I could talk to Radio Guy. I could be that friend over the radio who Radio Guy is looking for. But I’m scared to talk to him. Partly because of my fear of being found by other scavengers, but mostly because I was afraid that if I talked to him once, I’d never be able to stop. Talking to each other, like that, gave a false sense of hope. Two people would plan to survive and, in this situation, there was no hope of that. Even if I lived to see a ripe old age of a million years old, the human race was dead. If I wasn’t trying to spite my dead father, I’d probably eat a shotgun shell too. I’d seen the same thing with my father in the beginning. He liked to talk about a plan… a way out of this mess, even though he knew better. He knew there was a way and was always telling me the cure was in me, like I was some sort of new wave messiah. I took it as some metaphysical bullshit. He was full of that, towards the end. The crazy old bastard had plenty of hope, in the beginning. He had hope and hope was a
stupid thing to have at the end of the world. Hope didn’t put food in your belly. Hope didn’t continue the human race. If I talked to Radio Guy I might have hope, and I hope I didn’t need. It was distracting.

  I wanted to pick up the mike, but I didn’t. Couldn’t afford to, really. It was hard enough talking to myself. I waited to hear if there was a shotgun blast or not. I wasn’t going to be taken by surprise again. Minutes passed with nothing but his breathing in the background and low-level static.

  “Fuck you, you fucking fucks,” Radio Guy finally spat. “I know you want me to do it. I know you want me to kill myself. You’d probably get some sort of fucking sick fun out of it, right? Well, no. Fuck you. Have some Hank Williams instead.”

  I heard the unmistakable sound of a record needle hitting vinyl and then the twangs of Hank Williams filled the airwave. It was the same every morning with Radio Guy. The only thing that changed was his choice of music. He’d let one side of the record play and then the broadcast would end.

  I preferred when he played The Stones, but I’d take Hank. At least it wasn’t that jazz shit dad listened to in the containment.

  I wondered what it might be like to actually hear someone else in the dark, though, someone right here in the room with me. Maybe listen to a heartbeat, the slow breathing of night rest. Maybe even snoring. I’d listened to dad do it for so many years in the containment bubbles that I almost missed it now. The penthouse was deathly quiet, like a funeral home, but I was used to it by now. You had to be or you were going to go bat shit crazy. I slid out of bed and winced at feet on cold floor. The entire apartment was cool and, standing naked, I shivered. I had heaters galore, but heaters would mean running the generators or using the batteries, which would make light and sound. Light and sound, at night, might bring someone to investigate the top floor of the Landry Building. Someone investigating the top floor would find me and my stash and that never ended well. Human contact was a thing of the past. People were to be avoided, at best, and at worst, destroyed before they destroyed you. People would hunt you out, if they got half a chance. It was the same reason I was going to the ceiling high windows with a black magic marker. Someone, out there, was going to make a mistake, and I’d be all over it when they did. It’s just a stash, bro. It’s nothing personal.

  Besides the walled in community in Central Park known as Fortress, New York was dark. And I don’t mean dimly lit. I mean the sort of dark where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The sort of dark where a pinprick of light in distance lights stands out like a burning sun. Fortress’ lighting reminded me of Christmas when I was a kid, back when dad would stand on the very top of the wavering ladder, just to get the lights in the right spot around the house. The people in Fortress liked to think they’d stopped the Preacher’s Plague, but anyone with any sense knew better. They had power, water, and solid containment systems that allowed them to pretend human contact wouldn’t make their guts explode, but it was a lie. Fortress, like the rest of us trying to eek by in the heart of the dead city, was just delaying the inevitable. We were all going to die and, one day, the rats and squirrels and dogs would inherit the whole rotting mess.

  Still, Fortress had its perks, which were, namely, Club Flesh. A naked woman behind a hermitically sealed glass wall dancing for decade old cans of food was still a naked woman. I’d wander by there, later in the day, if I managed to find anything worth trading. Trading with Fortress was the one of the reasons that I was up before dawn every morning, scanning the horizon, looking for better stuff to steal.

  Most pre-dawn mornings were a wash. Like me, other survivors weren’t going to advertise their locations with glaring neon signs. You didn’t survive fifteen years after the Preacher’s Plague by putting an x on the map. You hid, you hid well, and you took what you could get. If that meant taking from another scavenger, then so be it. We were the last generation of man. Rules were for the generations that went before us. We don’t have any. Most mornings the only lights I saw were Fortress or the occasional fire started by lightning or the hundreds of other ways fires started in a dying city. There were rare cases of someone getting careless, though, and that’s why you kept looking.

  I was lucky, this morning.

  The tiny pinprick of light was at least twenty blocks away and I gazed at it through binoculars just to make sure it wasn’t a trick of my early morning, waking eyes. The light held, though, as I stared, and it seemed right. It wasn’t a fire, not a candle. It was definitely artificial. It was in the top floor of a moderately sized apartment building. It could be that someone, like me, had chosen the highest spot they could for their hiding spot. Or it could be a new place they’d found to loot and were exploring it now. Fifteen years after the Preacher’s Plague began the easy spots had been picked clean. But there was still plenty of loot in the old city and the tiny spot of light was like an x on an old pirate map. I circled where the spot showed up on the window with the magic marker and drew a couple of reference lines. I watched the speck of light as the sun came up, trying to make sure I knew exactly where it was. I used a digital camera, after that, to take several pictures of my notes and drawings on the window so I’d have them with me later.

  Scavenging stuff that had already been scavenged was way easier than trying to find it on your own. It was a way of life in the ruins.

  Once I was pretty sure where the light source had come from, I started my normal morning routine. With the sun rising, it was finally okay to turn on the mass of electronics and electrical devices I’d hauled up into the penthouse since leaving my father’s containment house ten years before. The penthouse was packed with canned goods, bottled water, piles of electronics and stacks of DVD movies. I could probably stay up here for a year straight and not have to scavenge if I wanted to. I didn’t have to leave, but that was boring and reminded me of sitting in my father’s house, once the Preacher’s Plague jumped genders, watching him go insane behind the containment wall.

  I first checked the power levels in my batteries, nodding happily that they were all at one hundred percent. I flipped the master breaker on and watched as the apartment came to life. I had an array of solar panels hidden along the roof that powered the bank of batteries in the guest bedroom. I can tell you from much personal experience that lugging enough batteries and solar panels to the hundredth floor of a derelict apartment complex is no easy task. I think I made a hundred trips over the course of a couple of months before I finally arranged enough juice to power the freight elevator. I have to wait until a storm is passing through the city to run that elevator, though. Wouldn’t want anyone to hear their way into my hiding spot.

  I spent a week figuring out how high I could turn up the stereo and not hear it on any floor but mine. Then I’d rigged a physical stop on the knob so I couldn’t turn it any higher. Some old rock and roll, something my father used to like, blared as I headed out onto the balcony to check my plants. My high-rise garden is arranged to look haphazard, like the many out of control gardens that cover the city. Someone would have to look very closely from a building near me to see the ripe tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers growing in containers. Good dirt had been a bitch to find, dig up, and haul up the freight elevator over the course of several storms. I pulled a couple of tomatoes and cucumbers and proceed to make myself a chunky salad.

  Canned food is not only boring, but getting harder to find after all these years. I’ve had my fair share of ravioli and chicken noodle soup. The fresh vegetables are a pain in the ass to raise this high, but worth it. The one thing I’m going to regret the most, when it runs out, is the sweet, sweet coffee. I have a pile of the little single serve flavored coffees that touch the ceiling, but they are, one day, going to run out. And I don’t think coffee beans are going to grow well in New York.

  Maybe I should leave. Not that I’d go find the Preacher and his supposed cure. Fuck him. But yeah, I could go somewhere else. I think that all the time, but I’ve never lived anywhere else. Besides a trip to Disney La
nd when I was too small to remember well, I’ve never been out of the city. The thought of leaving terrifies me. I know this city and, really, it knows me. We were made for each other.

  I flipped on the massive plasma television in the living room and cranked up the good old Apple TV. Plasma televisions are one thing I don’t think we’ll be running out of any time soon. They are everywhere and, if the weather hasn’t gotten to them through broken windows and busted down doors, they are usually in pretty good shape. The weather is getting to everything, though. It’s amazing what happens to a city when people quit taking care of it. Plasma televisions though… they’re pretty tough. Heavy, but tough.

  I remember the big television we had in our house, the one I wanted to watch Space Force Alpha on the day my dad offed my mother. They quit producing shows then. There were no more rushes to save the universe from evil aliens, no more laser fights. I guess the show’s actors had better things to do. I have every episode that was made of it now, but I can’t watch them. Every time I see them fire a laser I see my father putting a bullet in my mother’s head as her skin bubbled from the Preacher’s Plague.

  I know he had to do in order to save me. I know that as sure as I know the sun is going to rise in the east. She’d gone crazy, just like most everyone else at the time. Who could blame them? The Preacher released his plague on men, supposedly to keep the evil homosexuals from touching each other. It made men allergic to each other to the point that, if they stayed near each other long enough, it would kill them. The evil bastard’s plan worked, for a while. Mankind adjusted and went on. Men no longer worked together, but men and women could coexist. But after the Preacher’s Plague jumped genders, rendering any human contact into a deadly explosive mess, anyone with any sense would have also gone crazy. The human race was done, finished. A pregnant woman would die from the internal contact with her child. A mother holding her frightened son’s arm would kill him. People were deathly allergic to other people. Everyone, back then, knew life was about to get very, very lonely. Mom had gone off the deep end, sure, but I don’t know that my dad had to kill her. I was also pretty sure that, those years later, he didn’t have to try to do the same to me.