Skin on My Skin (9 page)

I heard the Plexiglas on the other side of the barrier separating me and the ongoing drama crash inward and then saw him step through, holding the woman up by one arm. She convulsed beneath his grip, her entire body reverberating with pain and agony. Shoots of blisters and burns snaked down her arm, across her shriveled breasts, and then down her abdomen. Her body began to swell as the Preacher’s Plague boiled her internal organs. The big man folded her over on the stage, ass up, and then knelt behind her.
 

His skin began to ripple and I was frozen in place, watching the same event we’d all seen play out over and over again back when there were still news broadcasts. His scars shivered with new blisters and I watched, mesmerized, as his penis swelled with infection. He entered the woman roughly, pushing violently into her rear. She trembled and shook, but in the span of a few short seconds her body had given into the Preacher’s Plague. She died as he took her and he howled in delight as his own body, albeit slower, reacted the same.
 

The DJ finally took notice but instead of doing something about it, he fled the booth. I heard as other customers fled their booths, retreating into the tunnels and donning their own suits. I should have retreated at that point. I should have run away. But I couldn’t help watching as the man raped the stripper, dying in the process. His body burned and the blisters popped, showering the bar with infected mucus, only to be replaced by new blisters. He howled like a madman, screaming both in pain and pleasure.
 

“I’m the king, you fucking bitches,” Big Woody screamed. “I am the mother fucking king of the world.”

The woman’s body popped first, exploding into a pool of burning guts on the bar floor. The man, with only the remains of her body in his hand to thrust against, kept pumping until his own body gave out on him. He didn’t react as violently to the Preacher’s Plague as the stripper had, but he collapsed into the remains of her body nevertheless, his body still.

The overhead lights came on with a brightness that temporary blinded me. As my vision cleared and I looked across the bloody scene, I couldn’t help but notice the emblem of the Preacher painted on the opposite wall, just below the DJ’s window. I felt my own skin began to boil through the seal free gaps in my suit and then I noticed the huge crack running down the length of the Plexiglas wall in front of me. I was too close to the man, too close to the remains of the stripper.
 

It was then that it finally occurred to me run away.
 

I stumbled out of Club Flesh through the chaos of soldiers and other customers, suddenly surrounded by more people than I’d been around in one place since my last day of school nearly sixteen years before. I couldn’t breathe, panic gripping me, both from the scene I’d just witnessed and the proximity of the nearby people. The only thing I could hope, at that point, was that their suits were not missing any seals and, despite my own defective suit, I’d be safe. I fled out the gate as sirens wailed throughout Fortress. Other scavengers fled along side of me and, in my state, I didn’t think about security or hiding my tracks.
 

I just ran.
 

The suit clanged along, the missing seals making the metal plates rub on each other. It wasn’t quiet and I didn’t care. I had no idea where I was going, no idea what I was doing. I guess I was lucky that none of the other scavengers followed me. I’m sure they were just as panicked as I was. I heard a couple of gunshots and that just made me push on, running until I was sure my lungs were about to burst.
 

The sun was just starting to peek over the eastern horizon when I finally convinced myself to stop running. I collapsed against a brick wall in the street, breathless and shaking. The fear was exhausting, sapping me of the energy to go any further. If another scavenger had found me, at that moment, they were welcome to the useless suit and whatever other useless trinkets I was carrying. On top of the fear, I was starving and thirsty. It had been a solid twenty-four hours since I’d eaten or had anything meaningful to drink. My hands shook inside the suit. My skin was clammy with heat exhaustion.
 

It was only after a couple of minutes of forced, calm breathing that I was able to think about the situation realistically. I’d just watched the guy who I suspected of stealing my suit seals die. Not only were my seals probably still in his apartment, the woman was there as well. I could, at the very least, free her. That would be the hero thing to do, the thing the good guys did in the movies.
 

But the movies were from a world that was long dead and there wasn’t any such thing as a hero, anymore. As loath as I was to admit it, I wanted more from the woman than I was willing to admit. I needed something from her that I couldn’t get from a movie or a book, something I couldn’t trade for at Club Flesh. I sadly admitted to myself that rescuing her was more than some lofty act of kindness. I need from her what the scarred psychopath had taken from her. Desire turned to resolve and I got to my feet, knees weak beneath me. I wasn’t just exhausted, I was scared to death of what I was considering.
 

It didn’t matter, I told myself. The apartment where I’d left the woman was only a few blocks to my east. I could be there in an hour and then work out the details of what I was exactly going to do. Besides, maybe Big Woody had left my seals there after he’d taken them.
 

Sex and seals. Welcome to life after the Preacher’s Plague.

I didn’t bother chucking the suit. I had no plans on going through the barrier on the second floor naked and scared. Instead I began tearing into it, ignoring my hunger and exhaustion, renewed with a vigor born of knowing that Big Woody wouldn’t be waiting for me at the top. Honestly, at that point, I was half delirious anyway. My vision swooned and my blood pounded in my veins. I was running on fumes and the stacked chairs and barricade blocking me from heading upstairs was just an outlet for pent up aggression.
 

There was another outlet, up there, but I was trying not to think about her too much, right then.

It took about an hour to clear the path through the barricade, another half hour for me to make it up the stairs to where the door to Apartment 2014 still stood wide open. I stopped and removed my helmet, not trusting the suit’s microphones to hear the nuances of danger that might be waiting in the apartment. There was no reason to burst in willy nilly. Other scavengers could be there already, the woman could be loose and armed with the assortment of weaponry I’d seen earlier… there were all sorts of things that could go wrong. I didn’t hear anything, though, not even the woman crying. I stepped into the open door, and then eased to the bedroom door.

“Hello?” I whispered, barely audible. I half hoped no one answered.
 

The woman was still there, but she was not moving.
 

“Crap,” I whispered, sure she was dead.
 

I’d waited too long. I hadn’t rescued her from the crazy fucker in the beginning when I’d had the opportunity. A hundred things I could have done differently ran through my mind. I’d squandered the one opportunity I might ever have to touch an actual woman, who wasn’t my mother and wouldn’t explode at my touch, because I was full of fear and doubt. I had no reason to be. I’d survived my father; I’d survived the Preacher’s Plague. I was a warrior. I stared at her nude body solemnly, like at my Uncle Frank’s funeral back when I was a kid. The beast had done a number on her already battered body. She had fresh scabs across her emaciated belly where it looked like he’d whipped her with something. One of her nipples was… it was just gone. The guy had actually bitten it off, leaving gaping teeth marks and scabbed over blood. Her eyes were swollen shut, puffy and black.
 

Beyond the bruises and blood I saw where she could have been pretty once. Maybe not in this life, maybe not since the Preacher’s Plague, but a long time before. Her black hair was probably vibrant, once, and she probably hadn’t looked like she just walked out of a starving tribe in Africa. That was silly, I thought. She had to have been about the same age I was. She would have been a child before the plague, a child just like I’d been. We all had to grow up sometime in the last fifteen years and it wasn’t as easy for everyone. The Preacher had done that to an entire generation. He’d taken everything we would ever have hoped to become.
 

I removed my gauntlets slowly, carefully and quietly setting them on the floor near the bed. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a funeral home. I reached out tentatively towards her abdomen, unsure of what to expect.
 

Her skin, despite the bruising and malnutrition, was soft and supple, and reminded me of my mother’s touch, back before her touch became deadly. I felt upwards, towards the ruined breast, feelings of fear and trepidation mixed with eager anticipation coursing through me. It was creepy to touch a corpse, but at the same time it was the only time I could remember touching a girl besides my mother. She wasn’t cold, as I’d imagined a corpse would be.
 

“You came back.”

I jumped backwards, nearly tripping over my own feet. I was pretty sure my heart stopped for a moment and I’d died. She was alive.
 

“I can’t believe you actually came back.”

“I am back,” I agreed, finding it hard to talk to the woman. For the second time in a day I was shocked at the sound of my own voice.
 

“Where is Big Woody?” she asked, nervously looking around for her captor. “He said he was coming right back so he could…”

She didn’t have to finish the statement. I knew what she meant. I knew what he would have done had he come back, had he lived. As much as I hated to admit it, I wanted the same. The urge was nearly overwhelming. I wanted to touch her again.
 

“I’m sorry,” I managed, and I was. I wasn’t sorry I hadn’t killed the man earlier. That wasn’t my responsibility. He wasn’t my problem. I was my only responsibility and I was full of my own problems. I was sorry for her suffering, though. No one deserved to be treated like that. If you’d lived this long after the Preacher’s Plague, if you’d beat the devil for this long, you just deserved better. Deserved better and actually got better were two entirely different things, though. “He’s dead.”

The woman’s eyes perked up, full of hope. “You killed him?”

“No.”

“Then how the hell would you know?”

“I saw it. I saw him die,” I said and hoped that she wouldn’t have me recount her captor’s gruesome demise. I wasn’t ready to have that image stuck in my mind again so soon.
 

“I don’t believe you. I think you just came back for fuck me. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re just here to put your cock in me. You waited for him to leave and you came back.”

Of course I had thought that. Seals were secondary in my mind, at that point. Staring at her nude body, even as bad a shape it was in, was… something short of exhilarating. I could smell her, past the blood and feces, and I took in her rich, earthy scents. I felt myself hard against the metallic groin portion of my suit and it was not in the least bit comfortable.
 

“No,” I lied. “I didn’t come here just for that.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?”

“My seals,” I said, flexing the arm of the suit where she could see the gap left by the lack of seal. “What did Big Woody do with them?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about any seals. Just let me go. Please. I’ll be out of your hair in no time flat.”

Touching her had left some electric fragment on my skin. It called out to do it again. I resisted. “Please. Tell me what he did with the seals after I left and I’ll unchain you.”
 

I was a mix of differing desperations. On one hand I did want to tend to her. I had this half ass fantasy of rescuing her, taking her back to my place, and having her fall in love with me. Stupid, I know, but rape was a hard thing to consider, not that I hadn’t considered it. I hated to admit that, but it was truth. But the desperation of having what amounted to a worthless suit out and away from my place was even more overpowering. Suit before sex.
 

“I don’t know about your damn seals,” the woman told me. “Even if Big Woody did take them, I can’t see the whole place from here, you know?”

I ignored her. I had to concentrate on one thing at a time. Her mere presence was a distraction and, as I had been since I left my place the previous morning, I was tempted to just run away. The woman screamed at me between her own sobs of desperation and it was damned hard to ignore her. I’d listened to the way she’d sobbed while he was on top of her - the sound was stuck in my head like one of my father’s bad jazz records. I continued ignoring her, rifling through the contents of the hoarder’s survivor den.
 

“I could help you,” the woman offered, stifling back sniffles. “Let me go and I’ll help you find them. Please.”

“I thought you didn’t know where they were?” I asked. It was hard to talk to her, harder still to sound condescending.
 

“I don’t, but I can help. I’ve been here a long time. I… please just let me go. I’m begging you.”

I went back to ignoring her, to ignoring the uncomfortable bulge under my armor. To look at her was to want her, to hear her the same. I rifled through stacks of old clothes, through cases of half eaten MRE containers. I nearly puked when I opened the bathroom. The scavenger hadn’t thrown anything away, ever, including his waist. I hoped my seals weren’t in that mess. If they were, I’d be better off without them.
 

“Come on, man. Let me off this bed. You know how long I’ve been here?”

I could only guess. It had been a long damn time, judging by the dried blood and the stink. It didn’t matter. Seals first, girl second.
 

“I’ll tell you what,” the girl said, desperation evident in her voice. “Come fuck me. Get it over with. I know that’s what you want. You know that’s what you want. I think I can handle it… again.” The doubt in her voice was just barely covered by the desperation. “Have you ever been with a real girl? I’ll make it good for you, sweetie. I’ll get you off and you get me out of here.”