Free Skin on My Skin by John Burks

Go sit next to the big boy,” the guard laughed as he opened the Gate. “You two are made for each other. Go on in. There’s room for you at the bar.”
    The big boy? He could only be talking about the disfigured man from the apartment with the Toucher. Had he followed me? Was he the one playing with me in the first place with the graffiti? It didn’t matter. I would be in and out, quick and quiet as a mouse. He wouldn’t even see me and, if he was my stalker, maybe I could lose him here and get back home.  
    Maybe. There were a lot of maybes in my life that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with anymore. I stepped through the gate with more fear and anticipation than I’d felt in days.

    I’d watched a lot of movies that had scenes in topless clubs back before the Preacher’s Plague. A lot of them. I was drawn to the images of the underside of a dead world. I always imagined them as dark, smoke filled dens of debauchery filled with women ready to take my money for a dance. The interior of Club Flesh wasn’t in any way like what I’d watched on the old movies, and there wouldn’t be any lap dances. Club Flesh’s lobby was a series of sealed doors leading into plastic enclosed tunnels. Eight tunnels led off in different directions and circled what they called the bar. A patron would enter the tunnel, which was wide enough for his suit, and make his way around the bar to his seat. He would be sealed off from not only the other customers, but the dancers in the middle of the bar. Drinks could be ordered and delivered through two door-sealing mechanisms. In all, eight people could sit at the bar at any time and the length of time you were allowed to sit there depended on the loot you gave to the Banker.  
    The Banker sat in a small booth to the left of the entrances to the bar. The man did not wear a bio-suit behind his armor glass wall. A drawer below him, equipped with a sterilizing station, allowed access both to the goods brought in and the goods sent out. The entire affair was very sterile and the people who ran Club Flesh went through great effort to make the entire affair as safe feeling as possible, though the plastic walls and ventilators did little to comfort me. They made me feel like I was back home, staring through faded plastic at my father.  
    “What do you have?” the Banker asked gruffly.  
    The man was old. He’d been old before the Preacher’s Plague ravaged the world. He was also fat, which was a condition you didn’t often see in survivors and probably the reason he didn’t have a suit on. They just didn’t make them that big. The man gnawed on some unidentified haunch of meat and grease from it ran down the front of his filthy shirt. I put the case of liquor in the large open drawer and then pushed it through. The drawer stopped in the middle, the sterilizer hissed, and then the Banker pulled it through the other side.  
    “Incomplete case of Maker’s Mark. Interesting. The second one I’ve seen tonight, though the other was actually complete. Where did you get it, son?”
    I’d already tried the ‘last one’ comment and failed. I stayed quiet.  
    “No?” the Banker said, appraising me. “Fine. I’m sure you and your cohort can keep the secret. It is a big city, after all. And where else are you going to trade it but Club Flesh, right? So what do you want for it? An hour in the bar? Maybe a hand job like your friend?” he asked. I wasn’t sure how you managed a hand job in containment. He must mean something else other than the porn term.  
    “No sir,” I said. “I need a full set of seals for an M-1435 Bio Suit. Not this one,” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t know that it was, in fact, this one. “But my back up suit.”
    The Banker laughed at me. It wasn’t just a little giggle, it was an outright laugh, like I’d just told the man the funniest joke he’d heard since the plague. I cringed and feared being run out without my seals or the booze.  
    “A full set of