Free Skinned by Robin Wasserman Page B

“An abomination! We shall all be punished for her sins!”
    I cut the link. Opened my eyes. A sallow face stared through the window, mouth open in a silent howl. When he saw me watching he extended his index finger, and his lips shifted, formed an unmistakable word. “You.”
    My father, behind the wheel even though he wasn’t actually using it, pounded a fist against the dash. The horn blared. My mother stroked his arm, more a symbolic attempt to calm him down than anything that actually had a prayer of working. “Biggest mistake they ever made,” he muttered. “Programming these things not to run people down.”
    “Honey…” That was symbolic attempt number two. Except in my mother’s mind, these things actually worked; in the fantasy world she inhabited, her influence soothed the savage beast.
    “I should plow right through you!” he shouted at the windshield. “You want something to protest? I’ll give you something to really protest!”
    They crowded around the car, pressing in tight, although not too tight. The legally required foot of space remained between us and them at all times. They planted themselves in front of the car, behind it, all around it, blocking us in, so we had no choice but to sit there, twenty yards from the entrance to our property, waiting for security to arrive and, in the meantime, reading their signs.
    “I’m sorry, Lee Lee,” my mother said, twisting around in her seat and reaching for me. I pulled away. “I don’t know how they found out you were coming home today.”
    Their signs were hoisted over their shoulders, streaming in red-letter LED across their chests, pulsing on their foreheads. Jamming the network so we couldn’t call in reinforcements.
    GOD MADE MAN. WHO MADE YOU?
    FRANKENSTEIN ALWAYS BURNS
    BREATH, NOT BATTERIES
    “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.”
    My father cursed quietly, then loudly.
    “Just close your eyes,” my mother suggested. “Ignore them.”
    “I am,” I said, eyes open.
    My favorite sign depicted a giant extended middle finger, with a neon caption:
    SKIN THIS !
    It didn’t even make sense. But it got the point across.
    My father fumed. “Goddamned Faithers.”
    “Apparently we’re the damned ones,” I pointed out. “Or I am.”
    “Don’t you listen to them.” My mother flicked her hand across her console and my window darkened, blotting out the signs. But it wasn’t the signs I’d been watching, it was the faces. I’d never seen a Faither, not up close. Before the accident, I hadn’t even seen much of them on the network. But after…Somehow my name had ended up on a Faither hit list. Until I fixed my blockers, they’d flooded my zone with all the same crap about how I was a godless perversion, I was Satan’s work, I didn’t deserve to exist. But I hadn’t expected them to come after me in person.
    Religion went out of style right after the Middle East went out in a blaze of nuclear glory. Not that some people, maybe lots of people, didn’t keep privately believing in some invisible old man who gave them promotions when they were good and syphilis when they were bad. If you had the credit, you could even snag enough drugs for a one-on-one chat. You sometimes heard rumors about people—especially in the cities, where it’s not like there was much else to do—actually gathering together for their God fix, but as far as most people were willing to admit in public, God was dead. The Faith party was for all those leftover believers who—even after the nukes and the Long Winter and the Water Wars of the western drought and the quake that ate California and the wave that drowned DC—refused to give up the ghost. They were for life, for morality, for order, for gratitude, and, until recently, not against much of anything. Except reason, my father was always quick to point out. Then BioMax unrolled its download process, and the Faithers found their cause.
    Now they’d found me.
    My window was still blocked, but I