Skin on My Skin by John Burks Page 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.