Skin on My Skin Read Online Free

The Stones, but I’d take Hank. At least it wasn’t that jazz shit dad listened to in the containment.  
    I wondered what it might be like to actually hear someone else in the dark, though, someone right here in the room with me. Maybe listen to a heartbeat, the slow breathing of night rest. Maybe even snoring. I’d listened to dad do it for so many years in the containment bubbles that I almost missed it now. The penthouse was deathly quiet, like a funeral home, but I was used to it by now. You had to be or you were going to go bat shit crazy. I slid out of bed and winced at feet on cold floor. The entire apartment was cool and, standing naked, I shivered. I had heaters galore, but heaters would mean running the generators or using the batteries, which would make light and sound. Light and sound, at night, might bring someone to investigate the top floor of the Landry Building. Someone investigating the top floor would find me and my stash and that never ended well. Human contact was a thing of the past. People were to be avoided, at best, and at worst, destroyed before they destroyed you. People would hunt you out, if they got half a chance. It was the same reason I was going to the ceiling high windows with a black magic marker. Someone, out there, was going to make a mistake, and I’d be all over it when they did. It’s just a stash, bro. It’s nothing personal.  
    Besides the walled in community in Central Park known as Fortress, New York was dark. And I don’t mean dimly lit. I mean the sort of dark where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The sort of dark where a pinprick of light in distance lights stands out like a burning sun. Fortress’ lighting reminded me of Christmas when I was a kid, back when dad would stand on the very top of the wavering ladder, just to get the lights in the right spot around the house. The people in Fortress liked to think they’d stopped the Preacher’s Plague, but anyone with any sense knew better. They had power, water, and solid containment systems that allowed them to pretend human contact wouldn’t make their guts explode, but it was a lie. Fortress, like the rest of us trying to eek by in the heart of the dead city, was just delaying the inevitable. We were all going to die and, one day, the rats and squirrels and dogs would inherit the whole rotting mess.
    Still, Fortress had its perks, which were, namely, Club Flesh. A naked woman behind a hermitically sealed glass wall dancing for decade old cans of food was still a naked woman. I’d wander by there, later in the day, if I managed to find anything worth trading. Trading with Fortress was the one of the reasons that I was up before dawn every morning, scanning the horizon, looking for better stuff to steal.
    Most pre-dawn mornings were a wash. Like me, other survivors weren’t going to advertise their locations with glaring neon signs. You didn’t survive fifteen years after the Preacher’s Plague by putting an x on the map. You hid, you hid well, and you took what you could get. If that meant taking from another scavenger, then so be it. We were the last generation of man. Rules were for the generations that went before us. We don’t have any. Most mornings the only lights I saw were Fortress or the occasional fire started by lightning or the hundreds of other ways fires started in a dying city. There were rare cases of someone getting careless, though, and that’s why you kept looking.  
    I was lucky, this morning.  
    The tiny pinprick of light was at least twenty blocks away and I gazed at it through binoculars just to make sure it wasn’t a trick of my early morning, waking eyes. The light held, though, as I stared, and it seemed right. It wasn’t a fire, not a candle. It was definitely artificial. It was in the top floor of a moderately sized apartment building. It could be that someone, like me, had chosen the highest spot they could for their hiding spot. Or it could be a new place