Skin on My Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

dad just started building the containment unit in our small home. He spent a fortune on duct tape and plastic sheeting, but now I have to give him credit. It worked. He kept me alive for all those years.  
    And then, years later, he tried to kill me. Fuck him.  
    Life, as it often did, found a way to go on. Governments found they could pair women with men, isolate men from each other, and carry on. It was complicated, but it worked. Life slowly began to get going again. The manhunt for the Preacher was the most intense in history and yet, as far as I know, the man was never found. If he ever existed at all. The conspiracy theories abounded right up until the voices on the radio began to die off.  
    People feared the Flesh Plague jumping genders, but the government insisted it wouldn’t. Most, as usual, believed them. Life could continue, everything was under control. The human species was not under imminent threat, babies would still be born. The homosexual communities around the world took the brunt of hostility and anger. People blamed them for the Preacher’s actions instead of blaming the man himself. And his twisted plan worked as he’d planned. Men who were allergic to each other did not hold hands, did not kiss in public. Thirty years of advances in LGBT causes evaporated overnight and the homosexuals who survived went into hiding.  
    My father feared it jumping genders and the thought of it doing so made my mother hysterical. I didn’t know what to think. But dad continued building his containment bubbles in our house. He divided the house into three sections where the three of us could live separately but together. When he emptied his 401K to lay in supplies, my mother threw a fit. But he was a man driven.  
    And it turned out he was right. We’d need that containment.
    The first case of the Preacher’s Plague jumping genders is probably the most remembered. Billions died in the coming months, but no one who lived back then would ever forget the scene of Belinda Smith, pregnant mother of two, screaming in front of a news camera as her body became allergic to the fetus she was carrying. Her belly swelled and her skin boiled, right on national television. The doctors attempted to do an emergency C-Section, but it was too late. By the time they removed the fetus her organs had boiled and her airway had shut down. The event caused the government to step in and take full control of the broadcast media, but it could do little to prevent the flow of information. It was then people understood the calamity of the Preacher’s virus. It would do just as he’d intended and end homosexuality, but it would do so by eliminating the human race.  
    Despite the knowledge that the Preacher’s Plague would kill them if they experienced any human contact, people tried to congregate anyway. Dad said they were angry, as they had a right to be. They couldn’t face their own demise without a fight. So people died, and died as painfully and as hideously as they could. The dead streets of a dead city were covered in the skeletons of the dead. The new greenery poking up through cracks did little to conceal the bleached bones.  
    To the uninitiated it looked like the streets surrounding the Landry building were long abandoned and hadn’t been traveled in years. I knew better and the tracks of not just animals, but other scavengers, were evident to me. I did my best not to add any new ones to the trail.  
    I consulted the digital camera once, to see my notes, and then headed into the city.  

    I couldn’t go far out of sheer, unadulterated fear, though there was nothing to be afraid of. The reasonable side of me understood this and tried to be rational about it. But the paranoid side always won out. I couldn’t stay in the open very long without hiding for a few and catching my breath. It was silly, I knew, but I also knew everyone else was stuck with the same fear. The Preacher’s Plague had made us all introverts on an