Skin on My Skin Read Online Free PDF

just like that, I was out in the daylight, ready to see the sights of New York City.  
    I stood there a long time, fighting down the panic that built the moment I saw open sky without the benefit of protective walls. There weren’t any people out there, none that I was likely to run into, anyway. I wasn’t going to be igniting the Preacher’s Plague coursing through my blood from the wind and garbage blowing through the city. I had on an armored bio-suit that, as old as it was, still did the trick. The seals sealed. It didn’t matter. As I looked out on the open city all I could see were old video broadcasts of rioting people’s skin burning, their organs boiling, and then them dying badly. I wanted nothing more than to go back inside, making the half-hour long trip back up to the Penthouse and bury my head under the pillow. This, for me, was worse than the monster in the closet, worse than dad on the other side of the containment wall.  
    This was reality, and reality blew chunks.  
    I took a deep breath and took a step. Time to go.  

New York, New York

    There are two New York’s. There is the New York I remember from before the Preacher’s Plague, the New York of my childhood. It was a vast, vibrant city filled to overflowing with sweet, glorious people. Cars pushed endlessly down the streets, stinking up the air with their putrid exhaust fumes. Street side vendors sold food and ice cream… man I miss hot dogs. The sounds… sometimes I dream of the sounds of the old city, the people laughing, or screaming. The police sirens, the clanging of construction equipment… it was all gone now.  
    That New York is gone, nothing but a fantasy. Sometimes I think it was a figment of my imagination, a dream of an eight-year-old kid who didn’t know any better. Maybe we’d always lived under the shadow of the Preacher’s Plague. The other New York, the real New York, is dead and empty. The skeletons might be whispering to each other, but if they were, I couldn’t hear it.  
    There is no end to the bleach white bones that fill the streets. I still don’t understand why people who knew what the Preacher’s Plague was capable of met in the streets to have their internal organs cooked and their bodies explode like fat little sausages on an old barbecue pit. Why did you continue to be around other people if doing so would kill you? Though I lived through the opening years of the Plague, I was a kid. I wanted to watch Space Force Alpha . But in the years since I’ve read everything I could get my hands on from that time. The Preacher’s forces released the Plague in twenty-five cities across the globe as he took to the airwaves, pirating every major television broadcast service around the world, to announce his deadly intent. His genetically engineered virus made men allergic to each other. It was a simple, yet devious way to deal with his pet hatred, homosexuality. With this simple solution, the Preacher said, homosexuality would die in a single generation. Men would no longer be able to touch men and soon, he’d said, all the queers would go the way of the dodo bird. Man would be allergic to man, and painfully so. The queers would become be extinct, he’d said, fulfilling god’s will. When that day finally came and all the fags were gone, he promised to release the cure. Simple.
    The Preacher’s virus did not work out as he’d planned, though. Contact between human males wasn’t just painful, it was deadly. If two infected men simply stood near each other for long enough, their bodies would begin to break down and their organs boil. Society quickly shut down. Men quit going to work. Garbage did not get picked up, food did not get transported, and power plants shut down for lack of maintenance workers. People panicked, stores were looted, and the world ground to a halt. Fathers could not hold their male babies. Brothers could not hug. Male acquaintances could not shake hands. I remember those early days, when