The Human Condition

him. He grabbed hold of one of its arms and dragged it over to the diagonally opposite corner of the courtyard to the entrance to the gym building, and roughly planted the body back onto its feet again. Bizarrely ignorant to the fact that it was ablaze, it staggered towards the mass of bodies which silently converged on it.

    Jackson took a deep breath and moved. He ran back to the door he'd just emerged from and waited, wanting to be sure that the decoy had worked before he risked running further from safety and deeper into the bodies. Perfect. It was working like a dream. The entire mass of diseased, decaying flesh was ignoring him and moving towards the bright flames about fifty meters away. Several bodies were burning now. Stupid bloody things, he thought. Relaxing slightly, he crept along the nearest wall towards the entrance to the gym. He tried the door but it wouldn't open. Strange. He looked down at the handle and shook it. Bloody hell, he thought, it had been barred from the inside. There wasn't much left of Dad.

    Skin had punched and kicked and slashed and ripped and pulled and spat at the remains of his father until very little still hung from the wooden climbing frame. There was almost as much rotten flesh on him and on the floor and surrounding walls as there was left on the corpse.

    If the destruction of the teacher's body had been strangely therapeutic, then this was bliss. Using climbing ropes Skin had flogged his father's corpse. He felt no remorse and no pain. Half-drunk and half-stoned, he ripped and tore at the body mercilessly. For a while nothing else mattered. Years of pent up anger and frustration were let loose in the space of a few perfect minutes of revenge. He forgot about the other bodies in the gym. He was so transfixed by the destruction and disintegration of his dead father that he didn't see the fires outside. Suddenly feeling able to do anything again, he turned his attention to Dawn. Once again he dragged her body over the barrier and out into the gym. He grabbed her from behind (it felt good to do this in front of his father) and ran his hands over her flesh. Her skin felt alternately wet and then curiously dry and brittle, but that didn't matter. He gently caressed her still feminine shape as he decided how he would dismember her. In a state of semi-arousal and drink and drug induced euphoria, he didn't hear the glass smash and the gym entrance being forced open.

    `What the hell are you doing, you sick bastard?' Jackson asked as he burst into the blood-soaked gym. He shone a torch at Skin who immediately let go of Dawn's body and pushed it away. Christ, Jackson thought, he'd seen some pretty unpleasant things over the last few weeks, but never anything like this. A stupid little fired-up teenager torturing and molesting the dead. He knew that he'd just done something pretty unpleasant to a dead school boy outside, but that had been different. There had been a reason and a necessity to his actions. What this kid was doing was just sick. Twisted, evil and sick.

    Suddenly ashamed, Skin stood in front of his crucified father, dumbstruck. Behind him the body still moved and twitched continually. Its head lolled heavily from side to side.

    `I...' he began, `I just...'

    Jackson shook his head in disbelief as he shone his torch around the blood-soaked room. He glanced back over his shoulder as the bodies from outside began to drag themselves into the building through the door he'd left hanging open. He'd only intended being inside for a matter of seconds.

    `What the hell have you been doing in here?' Jackson asked again, still not quite able to believe what he was seeing. `Is there something wrong with you? I know what these things are and what they do, but this is wrong. Have some respect...'

    Skin wasn't listening. How dare this man come into his world and start questioning his actions and decisions. Did he know who he was? Did he know how strong he was? Did he know that upstairs he'd got guns and knives and that he'd destroyed huge numbers of corpses over the last few weeks? In Jackson Skin could suddenly see everything that he'd despised about the world before the apocalypse. He saw the authority he'd rebelled against and he saw the common-sense and rule-following that he detested. He couldn't let it go on. This man was a threat to his new found strength, independence and freedom. He had to make a stand or it would all have been for nothing. He grabbed the metal bar he'd used