Bordello della Libertà (Aethertales Book 2) (3 page)

It
was only a matter of time before they stepped foot in an establishment that had
succumbed to the Sexual Labor Union of Talpretta’s empty promises. Outside the
door stood a throng of once successful working girls, loitering out in the road
until they were permitted to work one briefer, more financially insufficient
shift: their management, under pressure from the S.L.U.T., slashed their hours
to provide an “equal opportunity” for their less productive and less desirable
whores. It didn’t matter that they refused to offer their services to clients
who lacked the strong figure of a classical god, though they themselves were bloated,
lazy and unkempt; it was irrelevant that they preferred to simply lie slumped
on the bed, forcing the paying customers to do all the work. They were the
underprivileged, the disadvantaged and the oppressed, and they, more than
anyone, were deserving of a life devoid of competition, as competition was
demoralizing, and led only to the ambitious unfairly surpassing the
mediocre—and this was an unacceptable travesty, one that a civilized,
progressive society could never allow.

Lucia
caught sight of a bruise on one broken-spirited girl’s cheek; she reached out
and warmly touched her, asking, “What have they been doing to you?”

The
harlot accepted a cigarette from Lucia and held it to her lips, taking a deep
pull, and explained in a shaky voice muffled with smoke and sadness, “A lot of
us have gone back to street walking to make up for the income we lost. This is
the price you pay for achievement these days, I suppose.” Another girl stepped
forward and pulled down the neck of her blouse, revealing a deep gash that was
healing poorly; two others presented forearms that were once broken and had
never been properly set, leaving them strangely twisted. Lucia objected to the
dangerous measures they took to make a living, but they admitted that they saw
few alternatives.

“What
can we do?” sighed a prostitute with disheveled hair and a chipped front tooth.
“We’d all love to work in a secure, regulated brothel again, but it was stolen
from us when we were tricked into signing the union’s rosters. We’re unionized
now, and unfortunately, unions are afraid of girls like us.”

“I
used to make more tips in a week than minimum wage would pay in a month,”
lamented a pretty but sullen brunette, “and not because my clients were rich,
but because I earned my pay by working hard and always learning more about how
to fully satisfy a man.”

The
girl with the broken smile continued: “But ever since we had to give up our
hours to accommodate the girls who should have been fired months ago, and who
can’t
be fired now because of the union’s
defense of failure, we can’t make enough money to live the lifestyles we’d
become accustomed to. Now this is what we’ve been reduced to.”

The
brunette grasped Lucia’s hand as a desperate plea and cried, “This is the life
I swore to abandon forever when you came to Talpretta and changed everything
for the better. But now, even with all the good you’ve done, these collectivist
bastards are trying to throw us back out into the streets, demeaning us,
beating us, and shaming us, all while still seeking our services. Clients used
to come to us for more than just sex. Now, we do business in the dark with men
who don’t value us for anything but our bodies, and even those aren’t of much
value to them. When they can’t even see our faces in the shadows of a back
alley, aren’t we all interchangeable?”

“But
that’s just what they want, isn’t it?” Lucia said, handing a silk handkerchief
to a girl who’d begun to cry. “They don’t want us to stand out above the rest;
they don’t want us to excel, or succeed, or overshadow anyone else, even when
such an ambitious eclipse is deserved. They say we are all equal in value, but
in forcing equality, they have devalued us all. This city has given up its
freedom to earn an honest living in a misguided attempt to support those who we
are told are the disadvantaged and marginalized, but who are, in fact, just a
mob of lazy, unproductive parasites. The people of Talpretta have lost their
way. But I intend to lead them back to the righteous path for the second time,
and I will be damned before I see them go astray once again.”

••

S
UDIKA

Passing
cautiously through the slums near the dingy wharf wasn’t a shortcut, as it
added another twenty minutes to Sudika and Lucia’s walk back to the
Bordello
della Libertà
. There were no red-tinted lamps casting an eerie, hellish
glow over the alleyways, as appropriate as they might have been; in their place
flickered old streetlights on rusted poles that once held flags, but nowadays
only sported the silken banners of spider webs and dirty shoes dangling by
their laces. Behind every dumpster hid a streetwalker, hiding from the
footsteps that grew louder, as they couldn’t discern Lucia’s towering heels from
a police officer’s boots. Lucia did not approach them, but only looked upon
them with pity, and passed by them just as quickly. Their eyes reflected a
broken soul; the bruises and burns on their dulling skin were proof of a broken
body. Lucia, however, refused to allow her convictions to be broken.

When
they reached their brothel, they found their doors and windows broken.

“What
the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sudika snapped when she saw the shapeless
blob that was Mr. Trygassi’s repulsive figure. He’d arrogantly pinned a
circular badge bearing the tasteless seal of the Sexual Labor Union of
Talpretta: a stylized vulva bound in chains, surrounded by the collectivist
Tetragrammaton, S.L.U.T., in a ring of scarlet letters. A useless white road
block on stilts stretched across the sidewalk before the
Bordello della
Libertà
, bound in yellow caution tape. A bold sign declaring
“Sensitivity
Zone”
stood at the front gate, flanked by two armed officers clutching
heavy assault rifles against their shoulders. Sudika couldn’t explain or
rationalize their presence, and she felt an unpleasant mix of protective fury
and deep terror. Her madam Lucia was running a legitimate, legal operation,
holding all the necessary permits and taking every precaution to ensure the
safety and health of both her employees and her clients. What could the union,
and apparently the government, be thinking?

The
union representative chuckled and wiped a glob of sugary saliva from his
swollen bottom lip. “I’m proud to say our union lobbyists have talked sense
into our political leadership, all in a single night. How persuasive true,
altruistic logic can be!” he boasted, clasping his hands together like a prayer
of thanksgiving offered to some nameless, invisible deity, known only by the
title of “greater good.”

“Tell
me: What is altruistic about bringing guns to a peaceful and
legal
place
of business?” Sudika sneered. “And who let your people inside without a
warrant?”

“Oh!
You mean the unfairly destitute that have taken up residence in your little
bordello? They’re not
law
enforcement,” Trygassi asserted. “As such, no
warrants are necessary—only
need
. Their
needs
are above the law,
you uneducated whores! Their
need
entitles them to your property, your
prosperity and your success, because it is an indisputable fact that those who
triumph over others could not have
possibly
done so by honest, fair
means. Check your
privilege
, you spoiled one-percenters, because
needs
have more value than frivolous social entitlements bestowed upon you for
your
selfishness
.”

“I
think you’ve mistaken that
they
are the ones receiving ‘frivolous
entitlements,’” Lucia quipped, pointing through a broken window, to an unruly
horde of masked Shatarins who were groping and pinning down other clients to
lick at their necks with a subhuman hunger. Among them scurried exotic pygmies
who chirped unintelligibly, screeching like vultures over those whom the
Shatarins had disarmed and violated; Sudika only caught one word:
“Xaztechua!”
Their men barely stood taller than
four-foot six, and their women, heavily pregnant and waddling about with their
fat rolls spilling over their girdles, scoured the kitchens, the bathrooms and
the bedrooms for anything of even the slightest value that they could plunder.
Trygassi stepped aside to block the grotesque scene from view and chastised
Lucia and Sudika for their prejudice.

“You
are hereby prohibited from passing beyond the boundary of this Sensitivity
Zone. Any trespassing would be a violation of these oppressed individuals’
cultures: the Shatarins’ right to enslave, murder, rape, exterminate and
cannibalize your employees and loved ones, and the Xaztechuans’ right to use
your wrongfully acquired property to make their lives more comfortable. Your
bigoted speech is offensive—your very
presence
is offensive, and we, as
collectivists, have a solemn obligation to protect these innocent people from
exposure to your
lies
, which will most certainly
trigger
their
anxieties and insecurities and throw them into the pit of post-traumatic stress
disorder!”

“And
if we do step over your useless fence?” Sudika asked.

“Then
you will be arrested on the spot.”

Lucia
swung her fist into Trygassi’s gaping mouth, and with a tortured squeal he
dropped to the ground, cracking the sidewalk under his titanic thighs,
unleashing a deafening thunderclap from the jiggling tsunamis of blubber
beneath his skin. She pulled a handgun from the confines of her lace panties
and put it in Sudika’s hand. “Only pull the trigger in self-defense,” she
instructed her sternly. “This time,
don’t
follow my lead. I’ll paint the
walls a lovely crimson with these maggots’ blood, in defense of us all, my
beloved
Bordello
, and my heavenly puttanesca. Tonight, we’ll dine in the
spirit of victory. A Romaean vendetta is always the best appetizer.”

••

L
UCIA

A bloated
tick of a Shatarin was the first to die. Though he nearly knocked Lucia over
with a swing of his undulating breasts—Lucia was disgusted that a man could be
bustier than herself—she dodged the wave of shaking blubber and slashed his
throat with her hairpin. He gasped for air with bulging eyes and drowned in his
own blood; when his slave-wife—all six of them, in fact—barreled at Lucia to
avenge the death of their oppressor, she produced a shotgun she’d inexplicably
managed to conceal beneath her corset over the course of the day, and
splattered their brains across the tile floors. With each shot, their bodies,
torn apart in quivering mounds, began to assume the appearance and consistency
of spoiled puttanesca.

She
caught sight of Sargon, her prized submissive, who did not move or fight
against the salivating Shatarin men ripping off his sheer, seductive clothing.
He did not respond to Lucia’s commands, or her anger at his unwillingness to
escape, but she soon realized that he had no choice in the matter: a collar,
stamped with a label identifying him as a “Sensitivity Trainee,” was locked in
place around his neck—an example of collectivist innovation that extended their
control over individuals from simple punitive taxes and social pressures to
direct tyranny over thought and action. His Shatarin rapists, before they could
even lay a finger on his near-naked body, fell at Lucia’s blood-soaked hands.
She tore off her designer brassiere and pulled it taut like a chain; the
Shatarins’ eyes filled with red and their lips turned blue when she wrapped the
armbands around their necks and forced the air from their lungs. Bare-breasted
and filled with a mother’s fury, she slammed her stiletto heels into their
chests and knocked their limp corpses to the floor, and took Sargon by the
hand.

A
band of radical feminists, their breasts exposed and hair buzzed down to their
skulls, pulled tomatoes from the kitchen and hurled them at Lucia’s feet. They
had the kind of bodies that the overconfident and delusional would label
“curvy,” though “obese” was a far more appropriate adjective. “Women are
people, not objects!” they shrieked. “You’re a shrill of the Patriarchy! You’re
a selfish seller of women’s bodies! You’re perpetuating rape culture!”

“Oh
yes,” Lucia laughed, sliding a set of knives out of a woodblock on the
countertop. “The
Patriarchy
: that elusive force you can neither prove
nor define. My girls aren’t selling their bodies—they’re selling a service, one
that has never fallen out of demand over the entire course of history. And what
you female-fascists don’t seem to understand is that I have
never
forced
them into this profession, and I have
always
enforced their right to
choose their own clients; this is not slavery, it has never been slavery, and
it will never
be
slavery. You claim that women have the right to choose
the manner in which they live their lives, but you condemn them for exercising
their freedom of choice, all because they don’t follow what
you
dictate
as being right for them.”

“You’re
a dirty
slut
!” the champions of women’s dignity and rights hissed. “You
and your filth bitches are
worthless
,
disgusting
whores
!
We hope your next client
rapes
and
kills
you and leaves your body
in a ditch!”