Experiment

Terri's face swam before me dizzily as I fought to focus on her, to concentrate on what she was saying. Her hand was grasping mine very tightly. I remember the tale-tell yellow hue of the whites of her eyes, but I found it easier to focus on her heart-shaped locket dangling from her emaciated neck, swinging back and forth in hypnotic rhythm right in front of my eyes as she leaned over me.

It was the last time I saw her alive. The horror in her voice is easy to recall, for she made no attempt to hide her fear and anguish. “They're DEAD, Niki”

“Yeah, Terri, people are dying”

“No!” The horror in her voice barely penetrated the fog in my mind.

My kid sister was the last in the family to be struck by that terrible plague. Despite her age, she nursed the rest of us: Mom, Dad, the two brothers . . . me. But she was sick, too, just still able to move around, scavenge food and medical supplies from the quickly exhausted and dying resources of the city. In fact, she had been out that morning, trying to find more stimulant to keep us all awake. It was sleep that we all feared the most.

She was sobbing hysterically, but she could not cry, her sick body was no longer capable of producing tears. Her dry, wracking sobs shook her frail form so badly that her hand slipped involuntarily from my weak grasp.

“They're DEAD!” she repeated hysterically.

I remember pushing myself weakly up to sit propped against the smooth plasment surface of the wall in the entryway to Dad's study. I was lying where I had collapsed three days before, unable to move anymore, and Terri could not move me to a better place, she just wasn't strong enough.

I tried to make sense of her words. “Who, Terri?”

“Everyone” was her sobbed answer, and she buried her face against my chest, begging to be stroked and comforted. I reached for her head, but a handful of her bright, curly red hair came away in my hand. I touched her on the shoulder instead, afraid she would fall apart in my arms.

“You must be mistaken, Terri.” The words were an automatic reassurance, not anything I really meant to bring comfort.

“No,” she moaned.

She pushed away from me so that she could look me straight in the eye. Her face was withered and dry, even her lips were a dry yellow. It sickened me, but I knew I looked no better, perhaps even worse. “They're ALL dead, and not just dead, but DEAD!”

She obviously didn’t have the words to describe her horror, and I didn't have the presence of mind to make sense of her tone of voice. My attention wavered from her face and to her locket and then to my hand, the one Terry had been gripping so tightly just a short time before. There was no skin on it at all, and I puzzled over the lack of pain.

“Niki, don't you understand,” she shouted in my face.

And then she slapped me.

I'm not even sure I felt the impact of her hand, but she backed away from me quickly afterward, holding her hand and staring at me with a terrible expression on her face.

“I'm sorry, Niki, I'm so sorry.” The words came out of her in a tortured moan, and before I could say anything in response, she staggered to her feet and stumbled away. I don't even remember the sound of her dry sobs fading into silence, she was just gone.

My ten-year old sister was right, though. Everyone was dead, and it hadn't been a pleasant death. Terri didn't die of the plague, one of the few like me who would have survived . . . if they hadn't taken their own lives.

I found her body in the kitchen. She had sliced herself up with a knife.

I might have committed suicide, too, but for some reason, I’m not able to dredge up enough horror. None of it matters enough to warrant so much effort.

It's no wonder that Terri was so horrified after she slapped me because she must have taken half the skin off my face with her blow. When I started moving around again about a day after that final visit, I discovered that my skin had no intention of staying on me. As I moved about painfully at a crawl—I couldn't manage anything as dignified as a walk—my dry skin just peeled right off my legs. Huge pieces would flake off whenever I touched something, and wherever my clothes remained, the skin rubbed away with the slightest touch of the fabric.

I remember sitting in the upstairs hallway, staring dumbly at my shedding body, at the detail of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bone that were revealed by the ghastly molt. It didn't bother me in the least bit. There was no pain, no horror . . . just a strange hollowness and a complete uncomprehending awe.

I don't know how I manage to still be alive. Without my protective layer of skin, I should be suffering from massive infection, serious fluctuations in body temperature. Heck, I should have bled to death days ago, yet there is no blood.

Nobody else lost their skin. I found my parents' corpses long before I stumbled on Terri's. Their skin had cracked open, but wherever it had opened there was deep infection that was too dry to ooze. My brothers were the same way, and the house was beginning to stink of rotting bodies. The smell was enough to drive me downstairs, where I found my kid sister's body, and then straight out to the street.

Should it disturb me that I lost all kinship with the bodies of my family—that I felt no obligation to dispose of them properly? They weren’t people who I knew anymore . . . just a horrid stench that I needed to get away from.

But there was no escape from it because the whole city stank. There were bodies in the houses, bodies in the streets, bodies dangling by the neck from streetlamps where they'd hung themselves, bodies lying broken on the sidewalks where they'd landed when they'd jumped off the higher buildings. I stumbled through it all, not in the least bit horrified, only desperate to elude the smell.

It took several days for me to make the gruesome journey through the city into the less populated countryside. Nothing moved in that entire metropolis. It seemed that even the carrion creatures could not bear the horror and the stink.

In my mind, voices I could not understand crooned to me with every step, but I never saw anything to make those voices real. I didn't really care to understand them, only interpret them into amusing dialogs between my wits and the conscience I seem to have left behind in that distant hallway in my family’s home.

I vaguely remember sitting on a fence on the outskirts of the suburbs, humming tunelessly to myself while I followed a meaningless debate in an unknown language within my head.

It may sound like I am crazy, but I can guarantee that I am in complete control of myself. I remember everything vividly, even the dreams that invade my fitful slumbers whenever I chance to sleep.

Ah yes, my dreams. Set in terrific detail and making horrendous sense, they put direction to my feet and motivation to my limping stride. They aimed me at the mountains only a quick day's journey to the east from the city by hovercar. They drove me on with their meaningless detail until I became obsessed with breaking the incomprehensible code.

Yesterday, I reached the mountains, climbing them until my legs gave out, and I collapsed in complete exhaustion. But maybe I've come far enough. Last night, they came to me, the objects of my dreams, the voices in my head. I think I understand what was meaningless before.

They were strange creatures with strange habits that might have never made sense to the old me. They told me they were sorry, but they did not sound apologetic. They told me they made mistakes, but they did not say what they were. They gave me excuses about duty, intentions, and other responsibilities, but they did not seem overwhelmed with guilt. Their experiments had gone so horribly wrong, yet like me, they didn’t seem to really care.

I think I may have laughed at them. I know I wasn't afraid. Whatever it was they expected me to do—whether it was to accept their ineffectual apology or rail insane accusations at them—I wasn't going to do it. So, they left unsatisfied, and I remained alone on the mountain watching the sun set on an empty world.

Lately, I've become fascinated with little things: like the beating of my heart and how my lungs expand when I breath. I've been watching my muscles when I move. Do you know how fascinating the give and take of muscle-controlled movement is? I feel exhilarated, invincible, and I know nothing can hurt me anymore.

Tonight, I think perhaps I'll see if I can still make myself bleed . . . that ought to be a truly wondrous experiment.