Skin on My Skin by John Burks Page B

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.”
    She was quiet for a moment, lost in solemn reflection, and I didn’t interrupt. I wanted to touch her, to tell her it would be all right, but I was afraid.  
    “I spent the next five years or so living in my father’s basements. I ate what I could, when I could find something. I scavenged around the neighborhood and thought I was doing good at avoiding contact with other people. It wasn’t that at all, though. I was just immune.”
    It wasn’t an unusual story. Anyone who was alive now did what it took to survive and most of us, at least the younger ones at the time, had the benefit of parents who looked a little further down the road. My dad did, but just happened to be a bat shit crazy murderer on top of that. No, that’s not fair. I don’t think he was crazy when the Preacher’s Plague started. I think the Preacher’s Plague drove him crazy.  
    “I didn’t even know I was a Toucher. I didn’t realize that until I ran across a dying man. It was just an accident. He’d survived the plague in a homemade containment unit in his house. It was miles of duct tape and plastic sheeting. I was just scavenging, there, but found him. I… I should have let him die, but he looked so pathetic. I had to help him. Back then, it was just the human thing to do.”
    “You didn’t die,” I answered for her. “Not from being around him.”
    “Nope. That’s me. Jenna Smith, immune to the plague that wiped out ninety-nine percent of humanity. I had no idea, at that point. I don’t really think anyone did. That man knew, though. He was sure I was the key to saving the human race. He took me to Fortress. At the time it was just a bunch of soldiers that had survived the early days. He built it into what it was… keeping me there. He did things to me.”
    I did not interrupt. I was pretty sure of what those things were.
    “Yeah. I spent eight years in Fortress. The man liked to tell people I was his daughter. But fathers don’t do those things to daughters. Not real ones, anyway.”
    She was quiet a long time. I wanted to hear the rest of her story. “And then?”
    “And then that asshole,” she said, nodding to the plastic covered