Second Skin

I’d never been so humiliated in my life.

From the moment I got on that bus to the moment I got beat up in the shower room.

My life was pain. Suffering.

Humiliation.

I didn’t even get to think about my pain long before I was forced to empty myself. Violently.

It took forever to stop being sick. Gagging up what I didn’t have left to gag up.

My throat hurt. My back hurt.

After the heaving stopped, an orderly came in and cleaned my every orifice.

My ever. Fucking. Orifice.

I was then shoved into this pod shower.

Hard.

Barbarella came back in to do it.

I didn’t dare resist. She gave me plenty.

She grabbed my little neck like a handle and shoved me inside to bash against the back wall, sealing me into the frosted glass tube.

My already irritated skin. My old bruises. My new bruises.

My sense of failing self-esteem and the disgusting miasma of my bleak future because of my poor choices hovered over my head heavy.

And warm water fell over my head.

Thank God.

It hid my tears. Quietly sobbing like a wet cat in the rain.

I stood in that shower, my shoulders shaking quietly. Afraid to let that big bitch hear me cry.

God I fucked up my whole life…

I could have done anything else. Not a single day of it had gone well.

I hadn’t made a single good choice in my life and now…?

All out of choices.

I knew what the rest of my life would look like.

I thought.

Until that black spittle flung into my stomach from one of those oddly shaped jets.

I lifted my hands, reaching into the goop on my stomach and pulling at it.

It stretched.

Sticky… like black pizza cheese.

“What the…?”

Then another clump of it spewed out and hit my back.

That’s when I remembered that black shrink wrapped package.

Barbarella came in with it in my basket.

She and an orderly fed it into that clam shell shaped loading box beside the shower.

I thought it was clothes in that sealed, shrink wrapped pack.

A clump splattered onto my thigh and by then I realized what it was.

Because it started expanding.

Like black, bubbly foam.

“Oh… Oh my god… Oh m- SOMEBODY!” I screamed. “SOMEBODY!”

I pounded on the glass. The black goo didn’t stick to it.

It stuck to me.

It spread.

“Jesus— God.. Oh m—ah— gh!” It crawled up my arm. Over my thighs… spreading.

I shoved my hands down, trying to shove it down my legs but it spread up my wrists. Up my thighs to…

“No, no—“ it spread over entire body, smoothly encasing me as I writhed about, feeling it, pulling at it… failing.

My hands squeaked and squawked against the rubbery material. It’s smooth, shining surface soon encasing me from neck to feet. Sealing me into it.

I panted, feeling my stomach expand and contract in the material. Feeling every inch of me like I was being touched. Everywhere. All at once.

Like a constant, inescapable, uncomfortable pressure.

It squeezed my already tight body into an even leaner effigy of what it thought I should be.

My ideal. Most efficient. Most easily monitored self.

And then I felt heat on either side of my neck.

“Nn…?” My head tilted like a puppy.

Then it got hot. Like HOT-hot.

“A-aah! AAHHH!” I screamed at the sudden piercing pain.

Two small radiating dots of heat lit to life suddenly on either side of my neck.

Then the pain was gone.

I blinked.

“Warden. A.I. Monitoring system. Online.”

I heard the voice in my head.

“Who?”

“Please choose your voice preference.” The one speaking was robotic. Cold. Almost malevolent.

“Not that one… wh— where are you coming from?”

The voice was male then. Pushy.

“Inside of your head, stupid.”

“Not that one.” I shook my head, my blue eyes knocking around with confusion. “Are you in my head?”

“Yeah… I’m in your head.” She said.

“That— that’s better. Okay. Uh… hi… I’m-…”

“Cabriella Ulga Spencer. Cuss. I know.”

“Cuss. Yeah. Only my family ever called me that… I was a fallout baby. They’re gone now.”

“I’ know. I’m sorry to hear about your losses.”

“We weren’t there when it happened… Niles, I mean. But we were near enough for the rest.”

The shower door swung open and Officer Huxtable had me by the hair again.

I groaned in pain as she hauled me out, shoving me towards the door she’d come from.

“On the double.”

“Fine!” I shot back. She backhanded the taste out of my mouth, sprawling me over the medical table before I fell to the floor.

“Watch those lips before you get ‘em fucked,” She said, her lip curled like she meant it.

I stared up at her, my freckled face beaming red from the way she had abused it. I sniffed, fighting tears and got myself up off of the floor, feeling my throbbing face.

“Fuck…” I cursed, wiping the blood from my lip she’d reopened.

I was almost astonished at her cruelty a she shoved me through that door.

But what stuck with me the most was that this was only day one.

Of the rest of my life.

Almost nobody got out of this place…

Least not alive.

It was almost comforting in a sick kinda way…

I spent my whole life wondering when it was gonna happen.

How bad it would be.

If I’d end up a zombie.

Now I know.

I was living the rest of my worthless life.