Skin on My Skin (2 page)

A kid got to know his father’s voice. You knew when you were in trouble, knew when dad was annoyed. Right then I knew my father didn’t think the Preacher’s Plague would burn itself out. Right then dad was tired, so very tired.
 

“You want me to go in there, by myself? Without my Jacky? I will not. You will not keep me from my son. This was not supposed to happen.”

Before dad had left the last time, he’d built the containment areas in our little house with sheet plastic, duct tape, and air ducts. He’d told mom, then, it was just for an emergency. She’d been mad, then, about him draining their savings in order to buy the materials. Who knew a roll of duct tape would go for so much? Just in case the Preacher’s Plague did jump genders, dad said seriously. Three sections, one for each of us. My arm burned hotter where mom touched me and I cried out in pain, looking down as the skin blistered and spread out from underneath her grip. I could feel my entire body swelling and it was getting harder to breathe. Later I knew that was from my throat closing, the devious little virus working its magic, but right then all I wanted to do was run away.

“Helen,” my father said calmly. “Look at what you’re doing to him. You’re going to kill both of you if you don’t let him go and get away from him. Please hon, I’m begging you.”

“Why didn’t you fix this? This is not what you told me would happen!” my mother screamed hysterically. “Why can’t you just cure it? You have to have a cure. That’s what they’re saying on the news shows. They say the Preacher wouldn’t have done this without a cure. How come you haven’t cured this?”

Hand burned, mother screamed. My parents often fought, but this was bordering on chaos. I tried to pull away but mom had death lock on my arm.
 

“It can’t be cured, Helen. It’s over. We’re done. We tried. Everyone is going home to try to stick it out with their families. Maybe some of us will survive, but it won’t be enough to rebuild. Only one in a thousand are immune and the couple we’ve found are useless for developing a cure. There won’t be enough who are immune to… carry on. The human race… if this doesn’t burn itself out we are finished. Our entire species. We can’t reproduce anymore, Helen. Jacky is the last generation. We need to hunker down and enjoy what time we have left.”

“Through the plastic? What kind of life is that? Watching as my son dies and I can’t even touch him…”

“It is what it is, Helen,” my father said, and even through the suit speakers I could hear the sadness in his voice. He was defeated. “It’s all we have left.”

“No,” my mother screamed. “We are not dying in there like rats in your lab. I won’t do it. This is not what you told me would happen when I agreed to all this…” she said again, angrily.
 

I collapsed, right then, gasping for air. My mother held on anyway, trying to pull me back up like a child throwing a fit.
 

“Let him go, Helen. Let the boy go. You’re killing him.”

I screamed and tried to pull away from my mother. The gravity trick wasn’t working. My lungs felt like I was trying to breathe liquid fire. My heart was racing and my arm was on fire. It swelled to a couple times its normal size and I was sure it was going to pop like the sausages dad used to cook on the grill. My mother would not let me go, though, would not release her death grip on my arm.
 

“I will not let my son go. If the Preacher’s Plague is going to kill everyone I’d rather die than have our family live through that. I’d rather us die together, as a family.”

“Please, Helen. Just let him go and then we can talk about it,” My father begged.

“No. Take the suit off. If it’s over, I want it to be over now. Come with us, please.”

Even though I was eight, and even through the pain, I began to understand something, right then. That’s why many of the people were congregating together despite the certain death it meant. People would rather die than go on in the new world that was being born as the old burned.
 

“Are you sure about that? You’d rather die than get into containment?”

“Yes,” my mother insisted in that tone that said the argument was over. She was having none of it.
 

“I’m sorry, Helen.”

My vision blurred with blood but I didn’t have any trouble seeing my father raise the rifle. I didn’t have any problem hearing the gunshot split the otherwise quiet day.
 
It was much louder than the one I’d just heard on television. I felt my mother fall to the porch, dead, her burning grip on my arm finally released. There was little relief, however.
 

Her face was covered in the same blisters my arm was, her entire body puffy and swollen. The bullet had entered her head just between her eyes and she stared up, lifeless.
 

My father pulled me away from her, into the house, and shut the door behind us. He fumbled with a syringe in his big, armor-gloved hand.
 

“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.