Skin on My Skin (10 page)

The bulge thudded harder. I wanted to. I didn’t care about the blood or bruises. I could touch her and it wouldn’t kill me. It was… it was almost too much to believe. An honest to god Toucher… I went back in the room and stared at her emaciated body.
 

“Go on. Touch me again. You liked that, didn’t you? The feel of skin on my skin? How long has it been since you touched someone?”

It was the night I’d shot my father, but there was no need in telling her that. There was no need in telling her anything. I reached out with trembling hand to touch her side, once more. I ran my hand upwards, towards her mutilated breast, holding my breath and waiting for… I don’t know what I was waiting for.
 

“You’ll let me out of here, right?” she asked softly. “I just want to leave this damn city.”

I nodded my head in absent-minded agreement. I didn’t have to let her go. I could just move in the place and keep her there just like he had. But her willing… there was something about her eagerness to please me. Even though I knew it was just a desperate response to a desperate situation, I couldn’t help but think she really wanted me. Her skin, despite the grime and abrasions, was smooth under my touch. My cock was painfully hard beneath my suit.
 

“Take the suit off, baby. Come up here by my hand. I’ll help you. You are going to let me go, right?”

“Sure,” I said, though I didn’t really have any idea. What if I did let her go? What would happen to her? Did I want to give up what she represented? I felt like shit for even thinking it, but there was no way around it. The Preacher’s Plague had turned us all into monsters.
 

I moved closer to her hand and, with the chains and all, she began working loose my groin piece. My cock sprung out as soon as the metal plate slipped away. She smiled… it was fake, obviously, but it was a smile, and that fake smiled did something inside me. It melted me, turning me to mush. And then she touched me there. The touch was fire and I exploded right there, in a second. It took less time than seeing that stripper my first time at Club Flesh. I looked away, embarrassed.
 

“My,” she said mockingly. “You’d been holding that for a while.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, her tone changing, serious. “Just get me out of here. Let me go, man. Let me go and I’ll make it… I’ll make it more special next time.”

I took a deep breath, trying to push down my embarrassment. “You don’t know where the seals are?”

“The bag he came back with is right there. He didn’t empty it. He didn’t bring anything else with him.”

I nodded and went to the bag. She didn’t like that.
 

“I thought you were going to let me out of here?”

“In a second.” The words tasted like poison on my tongue. I could also hear the disgust in her sigh.
 

The bag was full of dented and rusted cans of food. There was a six-pack of Budweiser, a roll of paper towels. No seals. Had the scarred scavenger not been the one to steal my seals? Could there be someone else? The seals weren’t there. Maybe he hadn’t been the guy. There was nothing left to do but let her go.
 

“Where are the keys?” I asked with a sigh. I didn’t know what else to do.

“They are hanging right there,” she said, pointing to a space just above the door. I pulled the keys down from the small hook and went to her left side, unfastening the restraint at her wrist. I moved around the bed and freed her other wrist. She sat up, rubbing her blood crusted, bruised arms.
 

“Thank you,” she whispered solemnly and it was the first honest thing I’d heard from her. Relief spaced across her face and she smiled at me, also honestly. “I can’t tell you how good it feels just to sit up.”

There was no shame in her nakedness. She did not try to cover herself from my sight. She moved like one who’d never feared the Preacher’s Plague and I wondered if she ever had. What circumstances had left her immune and how had she survived all these years? There was more to her story than my clumsy fumbling.
 

“My name is Jenna,” she said softly. “Who are you?”

The skin around my neck bristled and I looked down at my hands. Blisters were forming, boiling up from beneath the skin. My skin pulsed and, suddenly, it was very hard to breathe.
 

“I thought you were a Toucher…” I screamed in horror. I’d gotten too close to her. I’d touched her. She was a fake, a lie, just like the strippers at Club Flesh. I wanted to lash out at her, but she stared past me, eyes wide, mouth agape.
 

“You’re so fucking dead,” I heard from the apartment’s doorway. I turned just in time to duck the first punch as the man I was sure I’d just watched die swung for me.
 

“Daddy’s home,” Big Woody growled. “And horny as all get out.”

The monster swung at me again and I backed up, nearly tripping over my own feet. My exposed skin began to tingle and I felt the blisters rising and bursting. Coming here was a mistake, I knew, and it would be probably be the last of many I’d made in the day.
 

“What are you doing here, punk? Why are you following me? What the fuck are you doing in my place?”
 

The beast didn’t seem to care that his already horribly mangled skin, skin so torn from the Preacher’s Plague that it was hard to still recognize him as a man, was burning. He’d ignored the multiple bullet wounds and moved like a monster possessed. He looked like an ogre, or a troll from some fantasy movie before it all burned down. But he didn’t react like everyone else. His organs obviously weren’t shutting down and his throat wasn’t closing. He moved with the strength of a bull and a speed that was frightening. This distortion of his tattoos, through the plague scars, painted a swath of mixed up and crazy symbols across his chest. His muscles bulged even beneath his scars and I could see murder in his eyes.

I stumbled over the piles of crap in the room, falling onto my back. I hit the old wooden floor with a metallic thump, roaches scattering away from around me.

“Who the fuck are you to come into my home and fuck with my bitch?” the scarred man demanded. “You fucked her, didn’t you? You fucked my girl,” Big Woody screamed. “God damn, I can’t believe you fucked my girl.”

I was chocking as our pheromones mixed, igniting the Preacher’s Plague in our blood. I couldn’t move and my vision faded. I saw him as a monstrous blur. Despite the pain I couldn’t believe he was still moving. He must have a hell of a tolerance to the Plague.

“I can’t believe you did me this way, baby,” Big Woody said to Jenna. “After all I’ve done for you…”
 

The man sounded like a morose redneck lover from an old daytime talk show. I couldn’t see what happened to the woman and I only regretted not freeing her earlier. Seals… If I only had the damn seals this might be going better.

“Where are seals?” I croaked, half delusional.
 

“What fucking seals? There aren’t any fucking seals. What the fuck are you talking about?”

He staggered a bit, coming towards me, and I could see the plague finally kicking in inside his body. He had a hell of an immunity to it, though, and his strength, even through the internal fires, was amazing. He picked up a case of MREs and hurled them at me. The box slammed into my head and I bordered on passing out.
 

“Hey, fuck head,” the woman, Jenna I seemed to remember her saying her name was just before the man burst into the room, stood somewhere off to my right, free of her chains. “Remember me?”

“Jenna, baby. Don’t do me this way. You know I love you sweet heart. Why you gotta do this to me?”

“Don’t baby me,” the woman said. “You worthless, subhuman piece of shit.”

“But after all I’ve done for you…”
 

I heard the gunshot and then my vision faded to black. Fever raced through my body but I felt so very cold. I was sure I was taking my last few breaths as I staggered off into the void.
 

The last thing I remember thinking was, well shit, dad. I guess you were right.

I don’t have any idea how long I was out and I was more than a little surprised to wake up at all. I woke up slowly, in a fog, every ounce of my body screaming in pain. My joints were all on fire and my skin felt as if someone had taken sandpaper to it. But I’d survived the close encounter with the other man and that was something, something unexpected if nothing else.
 

“So, reckon you’re going to live or what?” Jenna asked me. “I wasn’t sure there for a bit. You got it pretty bad and it was a little bit before I could get the asshole’s body covered.”

I warily cracked one eye lid and immediately groaned at the realization that, not only was I still in the man’s apartment, I was in the bed where he’d kept Jenna for who knows how long. The sheet was gone, though, and she’d wrapped the bed in the same plastic sheeting she’d used on Big Woody.
 

“You killed him,” I said. It wasn’t a question and I didn’t need her justification. It was just a simple observation.
 

“You’re damned straight I killed him. You don’t have any idea how long he’s had me here or what he’s done to me.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, coming to my elbows. Big Woody's body was covered where he dropped in the floor. Her quickly doing that, wrapping his body in plastic, was the only thing that had saved my life. Another few minutes, even with his corpse, and my body would have burned from the inside out. I owed her my life and it was an odd feeling.
 

“I should have killed you too,” she said and although it was hesitantly, I could hear the fire and anger in her voice. “I should have let your ass burn with him.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked, finally looking up at her. She’d cleaned herself off while I was out, and found some gigantically oversized clothes to wear. She had the pants tied up with a rope at the waist as a belt and had cut the sleeves out of the shirt. Her wounds were cleaned and bandaged as if she’d done it in the past, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked even more attractive to me than she had on the bed in the mess and blood. Which was stupid, obviously. I was lying there, hardly recovered from nearly dying for the umpteenth time in a day, and I was still staring at her tits. Those tits had already ruined a good piece of my day.
 

“Honestly? I don’t have the first clue. I should have. You didn’t rape me, though, so that’s a start, right?”

I didn’t tell her I’d considered it. I didn’t tell her I was still considering it. There was more to it, though, and even if she didn’t say it, I knew it. She needed me to get out of there. She was barely in shape to be standing, much less walking across a ruined city. Jenna simply couldn’t do it on her own.
 

“What’s your name?” she asked.

I had to think about that for a moment. In a dead world where you only talked to lonely suicidal maniacs on the radio or bargained with the Banker for an hour of flesh watching, there wasn’t much call to use your name. No one really cared what your name was. You were dead anyway. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had said my name. It was rusty, like the gate in front of our old house. But when it did come, it came like a torrent.
 

“Jacky,” I started, and then regretted giving my childhood nickname. “Jack Watts.”

“Jacky,” she said with a deep, genuine smile. “I like Jacky better.”

“Thank you, Jenna,” I said hesitantly. It was hard to talk to her without thinking of her chained back down and the things Big Woody, her captor, had done to her. “That’s what my mother called me.”

“She go back during the day?”

The day… the euphemism survivors used to describe those weeks and months after the Preacher released his Plague. There was before the day and after the day. We lived in the after, but I knew what she meant.

“Yeah.” I didn’t really want to talk about it. No point in mentioning the whole crazy ass father murdering her part. “She died early on.”

Jenna sat on a chair next to the bed, tucked her knees up under her chin, and stared at the apartment. “It was hard, back then, wasn’t it?”

I was curious about the girl who was a Toucher. “It must have been really hard for you… being a…”

“A Toucher? Yeah. I guess we all have our stories, don’t we?”

“Are you from here? From the city?”

“Born and raised,” she said with a weak smile. “Not all that far from here, actually. I…”

She sounded like she wanted to talk, which was, of course, weird as shit. People didn’t talk after the Preacher’s Plague. Not like this. Not unless you were Radio Guy. But I didn’t have anywhere to be, exactly.
 

“My dads weren’t Touchers.”

“Your dads?” I asked, not getting the plural.

“Yeah, lucky me, right? My two dads. That was a show, once, I heard. The Preacher put that plague out there just for my two dads. I guess he hated them.”

That I couldn’t begin to imagine. I didn’t know any gay people and, as far as I knew, neither did my parents. Gay people didn’t live by us. They had parades in cities across the country and were always filing lawsuits. I didn’t even really understand what homosexuality was until long after the day and then it was mostly from porn. It didn’t make sense to me, but I had the same built in fear of gays that anyone did, at the time. Why we hated them instead of the man who unleashed the plague on the world was still beyond me, but the hate was absolute. Across the world, back then, those gays the Preacher’s Plague didn’t eradicate, men did. Wrongly, they bore the brunt of the public’s anger. I couldn’t imagine being the child of one.

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s not like you’re the Preacher’s son, or anything. You didn’t do this. It was just a hateful ass man who was too smart for his own good. A murderer… nothing else. They didn’t understand… I don’t think any of them did in the beginning. They refused to let each other go. I watched them die and it was the most horrible thing I’ll ever see. We saw it on television, right? But that doesn’t match anything seeing it in real life. My fathers died holding hands. They left me because of that bastard Preacher.”