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Anasazi Skin

by

Matt Wallace

The first chemical rains fell in carpet-thick sheets a million different sickly swamp colors. It fell over the equator, over the Tropic of Cancer, moving and swelling and moving and swelling. Sacks of sludge dropped like bombs, potent enough in their acidity to dissolve the top floors of brick buildings. In Brazil a little boy felt his mother’s flesh run over him like sour molasses as the woman curled herself around her son, pressing the boy protectively against the womb that could no longer keep him safe. In dozens of countries the young and the old died. The rest who were caught out in the rain watched their skin bubble and then shed itself in foaming, necrotic strips.

Soon they were stacking oxygen tanks high and tight and renting them at monthly rates. Soon the sidewalks and parks were filled with mummies wrapped in manuka-honeyed anti-burn bandages. Soon the chemically flayed outnumbered the smooth and unspoiled two-to-one.

It was an accident. Just an accident, the spokesman for Nevaeh-Vas Eco Technologies claimed at the first of many press conferences. Nevaeh-Vas, the corporation contracted to repair Earth’s depleted ozone layer. Nevaeh-Vas, who stabbed the heavens with God’s own syringe and injected a chemical curse that rotted the clouds.

Nevaeh-Vas, who murdered an industry and ecology with one mortal stroke and gave rise to what would replace both.

The first vellumists set up shop in the barrens, the neo-ghettos. They hocked cheap skin graphs and snake oil balms. They were con men and frauds and capitalists in the purest sense. But the market truly exploded with the introduction of full skin transplants. Unlike internal organs, young, healthy, unmarred flesh was not to be taken naturall, and thus skin harvesting was never legalized. As the market grew forces ensured it never would be, either.

The purveyors became the new loan sharks, the new mafia, the new government. Healthy skin became the new currency.

The people paid, and kept paying until their money ran out and their time ran out with it. They wanted back what they’d lost. They wanted, above all things, to live and touch and feel naturally, even if it meant dying in the most unnatural way possible when they could no longer afford their new flesh.

Even if it meant living and touching and feeling what they loved for only a little while.

#

He kissed every square inch of her skin that morning, christening, anointing, memorizing the firmed-cream and unripened curve topography of her naked body. He suckled each of her toes the way ancient Romans savored the eyes of nightingales. He spent minutes stretched by pleasured perception licking the ripened texture of the tattoo inked beneath the epidermis of her right calf. He loved the bruise-and-blood-colored image of the stars there more than any van Gogh oil-on-canvas. It was the birthmark she should have been born with.

“Maybe I should peel it off,” Talya said as Saint’s tongue, as rough as sponge and as yielding as wet silk, sent electric love notes to her brain. “Just take a kitchen knife and peel it right off. Frame it. Give it to my sister to put on their mantel.”

“Don’t talk like that. Not now.”

“They’ll wash it out when they’re curing the flesh. So they can recycle it. That’s what they do.”

She didn’t sound frightened, or even worried, only cynical and sure and accepting.

“I’ll never let that happen,” Saint spoke out of instinct. And then, with more thought, “We will never let that happen.”

“We can’t stop it.”

“Yes we can.”

“They’re coming.”

“Let them come.”

“They’ll make one of us watch while the other . . .”

“They’re not washing away our stars.”

“I don’t want it to be you. That has to watch.”

“They’re not taking our skin.”

“What if they do?”

Saint looked up at her in that moment, the flame-colored copper whiskers of his beard tickling her knee.

“Then we’ll press what’s left together,” he’d finally said. “The stuff that’s warm and wet and raw, and just kind of meld into one body. And if we die that way, at least we’ll be closer than any two people ever have been or ever will be. How does that sound?”

“Like a wholly lovely and romantic delusion. Like a lie”

“I never lie to you.”

“Then why have you been kissing me goodbye for the last hour?”

Saint rose up then, kneeling above her in the bed they shared. Talya was struck by the realization that nothing could bring him to his knees, not the wars he’d fought, not the wounds he’d suffered, not the world that cared about neither. Nothing could bring Saint to his knees except a commanding look from her. So many times he’d genuflected before her, filled with piety and reverence and total submission as he worshiped her body.

And now Saint leaned back on those knees and stretched tall, and yes, his chest was a shield, and yes, his shoulders were knotted and broad enough to bear Atlas’ weight, and yes, his hands were stronger than any Talya ever felt on her body and she knew the edges and tips and knuckles of his fingers could bring death and had and were ready to deal it out again the moment anyone threatened her.

And yes, she could see in his eyes Saint thought that it would be enough.

And yes, that’s why he’d lose.

“Have I ever not been able to protect you?” he asked her.

Talya shook her head, raising her right leg and pressing a delicate foot against that chest that seemed as though it might stop a bullet from reaching his heart. She pointed toes that had been broken a dozen times over on the hardwood stages of some of the most prestigious ballet theaters in the world, back when the world had time for such things. And for a moment it distracted Saint, and for a moment she thought he’d smile, wanted him to smile, and for a moment she was sorry she’d spoken at all and taken their last moments away.

“Let them come,” he said again, this time with such finality in his voice that Talya almost believed.

Almost.

#

The slashers came the next morning. A de-gloving battalion swept the barrens in titanium carapaces, moving door-to-door like the tenth plague of Egypt. They hauled two industrial sleds in their wake. One housed the meat, the congealed mass of dozens of de-gloved bodies. The other was their skin bin, Satan’s laundry basket full to the brim with repossessed Human hides, all more or less intact with the exception of a machine-perfect slit up their backs.

When the slashers hit No. 5 Tau Street they found an empty loft. Two of them lumbered through the doorway in their bulky carapaces, scanning beams blazing the color of blood as they sought laser-scarified flesh, sought the neo-UPC scorched into every suit of skin bought and sold on the market. For long moments there was nothing, then their scanners probed the dark sideways beneath the staircase and klaxons blared. They’d located a sheath of skin whose owner’s payments were past due.

Saint came out of the shadows with three feet of ancient lead pipe in his hands, freshly sawed from the innards of the upstairs wall with a length of bicycle chain. The clear face-shield of the first slashers’ carapace was fashioned to withstand a shotgun blast. Saint shattered it with two swings. He rammed one coarse-cut end of the pipe through the hole and didn’t stop grinding until blood and eyeballs were pouring from the other end. The slasher tried to eject himself from the carapace, but he was too late to save his own life.

Steely prongs immediately closed around his throat from behind as the second slasher forced him over their kitchen table. Serrated jaws cut into Saint’s flesh at the small of his back. A motor whirred as they began eating their way up the epidermis covering his spine, redefining the concept of pain and Saint’s entire perception of reality along with it.

The shears’ whirring motor must have masked the sound of Talya slipping inside the first slasher’s discarded carapace and resealing it. He didn’t hear her taking heavy titanium-encased steps toward him, probably didn’t hear the sister shell’s embedded thermite torch heating up before he felt metal melting through his left kidney.

The claw collaring Saint’s neck sprung wide and the jagged metal mouth eating its way up his back relented. The second slasher, rage and pain permeating his three-inch titanium shell, reeled on Talya with his own suit’s gun ports wide open. He fired a sonic grenade pointblank at her breastplate. The carapace went airborne with Talya inside, completely demolishing the staircase behind her and burying half of the mechanized shell under splintered debris.

The slashers’ carapaces were equipped with emergency release triggers in case of electrical malfunction or injury. It was situated inside the suit so it couldn’t be accessed externally. Saint jammed his fingers in the metal seams of the slashers’ suit at an impossible angle. The titanium muffled the sound of his bones snapping and his knuckles breaking, but Saint felt it, each like a concussive blast against his nerves.

He didn’t feel the deadened tips of his fingers touching the suit’s escape button, didn’t realize he’d tripped it until the back of the carapace opened up and expelled the slasher like the remains of a toxic meal.

The slasher was exposed, frail and clad only in a form-fitted body glove and very, very Human. Saint straightened the unbroken fingers of his other hand and speared the man’s Adam’s apple with their tips, collapsing his larynx. Air stopped moving into his trachea. He lost consciousness four panicked seconds later and died a few moments after that.

Saint slumped to his knees. Talya wriggled from the wreckage of the slasher’s carapace bruise-covered and gashed, crawling to him.

“Baby, no. No,” she pleaded, afraid to touch him, even to stop the bleeding.

“I’m okay,” Saint managed. He was trying to convince himself as much as her.

His back resembled raw meat butchered by an amateur and the blood still flowed. It had to be stemmed immediately.

Several feet away a radiator rose from the cracked wooden planks of the floor like a petrified ribcage. Saint gripped the knob and twisted it clockwise as many times as he could. In less than a minute heat glowed within the antique device, giving it the appearance of a volcanic smile. Saint sat down facing away from the radiator, steeling himself, his conscious mind hurtling down the darkest hole it could create before he pressed his spine against the radiator.

Talya closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out his screaming.

Minutes later they stood on the molten black tar roof of their loft and peered into the narrow street below. They were directly above the caravan of hover sleds. The other slashers were already storming the loft. They only had a few seconds.

Tears danced crystalline in the corners of Talya’s eyes. Saint wiped a few away and suckled his blood-encrusted fingertip, tasting salt and copper.

“I wasn’t lying,” he said.

“You never do.” She smiled, just a little, and it seemed to hurt her in a way not at all physical, but it was enough.

Their hands found each other, fingers lacing greasily as Saint’s blood ran between them.

They plunged.

It was like landing atop a pile of crushed rubber soaked in formaldehyde. The impact took a hard toll on Saint. Talya was quicker to recover, grabbing handfuls of de-gloved epidermi, ignoring her revulsion, ignoring the immediate gag reflex and pulling them over and around her and Saint.

When the slashers spilled back into the street their new quarry was buried beneath half-a-dozen layers of repossessed dermis. The red roving eyes of their scanners flitted up and down the street, then sifted the interior of the sled, blinking against the barcode branded on each flesh suit. This time no klaxons sounded off.

By the time the sleds rolled onward through the thin arteries of the barrens, Talya and Saint had fitted themselves with new flesh tuxedos, wearing the second skins with their repossession-cleared markings snugly about their own. It would be easy enough to slip away once the slashers handed them off to the curers at the reclamation center. They’d make their way to Amsterdam or Chicago or Perth where they could have their skin swapped permanently, where they could keep living and touching and feeling naturally, the way they’d so taken for granted before the coming of fiery rains.

Even if it meant living and touching and feeling what they loved for only a little while.

Matt Wallace is an award winning writer of many things.  His short story collection The Next Fix can be found on Amazon.  For up to date and more in depth Matt Wallace news and information, visit his website at http://matt-wallace.com/

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