Tainted Rose

by Abby Weeks

  Tainted Rose

  Abby Weeks

  Copyright © 2014 Abby Weeks

  To find more by Abby sign up to my mailing list.

  This work is presented by the author.

  To get in touch please contact:

  abby@type‐writer.net

  ISBN 978‐1‐927947‐24‐1

  The following story is based partially on events from my life. However, none of the characters are intended to represent actual people and the story is not told with any trace of malice or ill will. I believe that the purpose of stories is to bring people closer together and to help us deal with the events of our lives. I know some of what follows may be difficult for some readers and I ask simply that you stick with the story to the end. There is a lot of light, life and love in this story, as there is in my heart. Thank you for reading.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Quote

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Back Matter

  *

  “ALL ART IS EROTIC.”

  Gustav Klimt, 1862‐1918

  *

  “EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS ABOUT SEX EXCEPT SEX. SEX IS ABOUT POWER.”

  Oscar Wilde, 1854‐1900

  *

  I

  ROSE MEADOWS WAS A STRIPPER. She didn’t want to be a stripper, she had never intended to be one, but that was the way things were and there was nothing she could do about it. If there was one thing life had taught her in the ten long years since her father’s brutal death, it was that you couldn’t always control what happened in your life. There were other forces at play, dark forces, and they often had the last word over your destiny.

  Rose had never spoken to anyone about what had happened to her. She didn’t tell people how she’d ended up in this place and how it made her feel, she didn’t talk about the nightmares that would keep her up in the middle of the night in a blind panic. Who would she have spoken to? She had no one. She was as isolated and alone as a young girl could be.

  But if she had been able to talk to someone about it she would have said that along with the humiliation and the embarrassment of being forced to strip every day, there was also a feeling of power to it. There was an intense thrill to being up on the stage in front of all those men. There was a lustful sort of pleasure to being the center of their attention, to having all those hungry eyes feasting on the exquisite details of her body, lusting after her beauty, desiring to touch her, to be touched by her. She had learned that as with so many other things, there was a tainted pleasure to the pain.

  When the lights came on and the music started there was nowhere else in the world that could give her that thrill, that sense of being wanted and adored, as the stage of the strip club. Despite everything that had happened to her, the terrible chain of events that had led her life to this desolate place, dancing gave her a rush of adrenaline like nothing she’d ever experienced. And while she deeply hated the men who had taken her to this place, who had reduced her to near slavery, she never transferred that hatred onto her customers. She bore no ill feeling toward the men who came in to watch her dance. In this place, this isolated, desolate bar at the very ends of the earth, the customers were the only friends she had.

  If there was someone to talk to, and if she was being completely honest, she would have said that sometimes she even liked dancing. She didn’t know if that was something she should have been ashamed of, she was being forced to dance in the sleaziest, most sordid bar imaginable, under the very worst conditions, but that was the truth. She kind of liked it. And after all she’d been through, all the horrible things that still happened to her on a near daily basis, she needed something that gave her pleasure. If it wasn’t for the dancing, she would not have survived.

  She knew it would come as a shock to most people. They’d be surprised to learn that a stripper could actually enjoy her job. Most people thought of dancers as the very lowest of the low, the very bottom of the social order. They thought of dancers as the poor, desperate and naive girls that they so often were. And they thought of them as whores.

  And there was a time when Rose would have thought much the same thing. No one would ever have called her naive, not after the childhood she’d had, but she hadn’t expected to become a stripper and she certainly never would have guessed that she would like it. She’d spent a lot of time trying to build up a life for herself that could be considered respectable, normal even, and dancing didn’t ever play a part in that plan.

  She had been an orphan since the age of twelve. She’d grown up in the care of the City of Montreal and the various foster parents she’d been placed with and she’d worked hard to become a good and responsible citizen. She’d had a steady job as a waitress in the city’s old quarter. She was enrolled to start classes at McGill in the fall. She wanted to learn how to work with leather. She loved leather, she’d loved it ever since her father had given her her first biker jacket as a child, and she’d decided that she could make a good living making biker jackets, racing suits and other leather clothing for the motorcycle clubs she knew. Those clothes reminded her of her father and if she could have spent her time making them, she’d have felt closer to him.

  *

  ROSE KNEW BETTER THAN MOST girls her age that life didn’t always work out the way you planned, and sure enough, her dream of studying fashion and leatherwork never happened.

  A series of unforeseeable and tragic events occurred that changed her life forever. She’d gone from living her happy life, or at least as happy a life as she could make it, to becoming a prisoner and a slave in a lonely outpost hundreds of miles away from the nearest city. Instead of living and pursuing her dreams in a beautiful city, Rose now worked for the DRMC, the Dark Rebel Motorcycle Club, and she was a slave. She was there by force. She had no choice in the matter and no control over it. She lived and worked by the side of a highway that was about as remote a place as you could imagine in Canada’s vast, wild north, close to the border between Ontario and Quebec.

  It was a rough and lawless place that federal and provincial police rarely ventured into. Few people had ever heard of it and even fewer had seen it. If it wasn’t for the things that had happened to her, Rose herself would never have seen the place and she’d have been glad not to.

  She tried not to think about what had happened to her, about the rapid and confusing events that had taken her from her normal, happy life to this wilderness hundreds of miles north of the nearest civilization. Her old life was gone, it was over, and the less she thought about that the better. A thousand miles of wild forest and remote lake country separated her from her past and no amount of tears would ever change that. She wasn’t going to escape, she wasn’t going to get her old life back, and no one was coming to rescue her.

  The bar she worked at was called the Velvet Cat but they just called it the Cat. It lay by the mighty Trans-Canada Highway, a road so vast and desolate that it was rarely used by anyone but loggers and truckers working for the northern mines. Life was different there, society lived by different rules, and Rose knew that the sooner she came to terms with that the better off she would be. She
wasn’t in Montreal anymore, she was in the wilderness, and she knew it.

  Often on her days off she would sit by the side of the highway, smoking Du Maurier cigarettes and watching the logging trucks pass by. She pictured the places they were headed. That road linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans over a span of five thousand miles. It was one of the longest roads in the world. It passed through towns and cities across the continent. At some places it was a four-lane freeway but here in the desolate wastes of the far north it was little more than two muddy lanes covered in snow and ice for most of the year. There were entire months when the road was virtually impassable and the truckers and loggers had to fit chains to their tires just to get through the slush.

  During those months Rose thought she might die of loneliness and boredom. Weeks could pass without anyone coming into the bar. There was no one to dance for, no one to talk to, and it felt very much as if there was nothing left to live for. It would get so dark and the temperature would drop so low that it was hard to see how any life survived up there at all. Vehicles froze up, pipes burst. A few times during the winter the bar’s beer kegs even froze. The manager, a fat, old biker named Murdoch Hound who’d been with the DRMC for over twenty years would just thaw them out in his office and serve the beer to customers as if it had never happened. They would complain that it was flat but the Velvet Cat and the club that owned it offered no refunds.

  It wasn’t just the cold and dark and isolation that got to Rose in the winter. It was the fact that Murdoch had so much time on his hands. When there weren’t any customers there would be nothing for him to do. He’d get bored, and then he’d get to eyeing up Rose and it would be all she could do to keep his greasy hands off of her. That’s when things would get slow in the town too and some of the other club members would come out to the Cat to blow off steam. All of the scams they were usually running would come to a halt and they would be at a loss. They’d ride out to the bar and get to hard drinking, the kind of binge drinking that could continue for days. They’d never really sober up. They’d drink hard liquor all night and when they woke up in the morning they’d get right back on the bottle. They slept at the bar and the place would turn into a complete zoo.

  It was Rose who always paid the price. The men would come after her with a vengeance, they were even more aggressive than they usually were, and they’d try to do things to her that most people would never even imagine. If Rose could erase from her mind the memory of some of the things that the local DRMC members had done to her, she would.

  *

  THE DARK REBELS OWNED THE Velvet Cat and a string of other bars and strip clubs along the Trans-Canada. Up till now all their ventures had been on the Quebec side of the border. They were the largest and most powerful MC in Quebec. They’d been in the game for years and had chapters all around Montreal and Quebec City. They’d wiped out most of their competition in a series of fast and brutal wars about ten years ago. Rose’s father’s club, the Sioux Rangers, had been one of the clubs that had been wiped out. The Cat was the DRMC’s first bar across the border into Ontario. It was a big risk for them. They knew it could start a turf war with one of the big Ontario clubs but so far nothing had happened. This place was so remote and so far north that none of the Ontario clubs had paid it any notice.

  The chapter in Val-d’Or ran the bars on all the northern routes and the local vice-president came out about once a week to check on things. He was a real brute, a big muscly guy by the name of Serge Gauthier who kept his head shaved and had these crazy blue eyes that Rose would often have nightmares about in the middle of the night. That man had done things to her that should have gotten him locked in jail. He was a real sadist, a crazy drug addict, and a filthy son of a bitch. Once a week he’d ride out to the bar from town and stay overnight. Rose was always expected to spend the night with him and she loathed those nights with a passion. Serge would check on Murdoch, make sure things were running smoothly, and ride back to town in the morning with the weekly take. Those nights were hard on Rose. She knew she could only tolerate them for a little while longer before she snapped.

  Dancing was one thing. Being used as a whore and a sex slave by Serge Gauthier was another matter. She could manage Murdoch, he was old and wasn’t the fastest on his feet, but Serge and his friends were different. They were genuinely scary. Rose had no doubt that they’d killed people, even women and children. They seemed to have no honor, not like the men she’d known as a child. They carried guns they could easily conceal. They did coke and speed and other drugs. And they were brutal to her when they got her cornered in a bedroom.

  Most of the time she was too scared to oppose them. When they told her to do something, she did it. But she fantasized about one day cutting off all their dicks and forcing them to eat them.

  *

  ROSE PULLED UP TO THE parking lot behind the bar in the beat up old Ford that Murdoch let her drive. The car felt like it might literally fall to pieces every time she pulled out of the driveway. It could barely make the two miles along the highway from the house she stayed at with Murdoch to the bar. Unless it was really cold, he would take his bike to work and she had the use of the car. If it was too cold she’d have to ride in the car with him in the morning.

  She didn’t have to dance till afternoon or evening, and then, only when there were customers. Sometimes Murdoch would make her clean the place up when they were quiet but for the most part she just sat at the bar and drank coffee and waited to see who’d show up.

  All of their customers were truckers. They were the only people this far north. They weren’t allowed to drive all night like they used to in the old days because of safety regulations so they’d pull into the lot in front of the bar after sundown and sleep in their trucks. They’d come into the bar for a little entertainment before going to sleep. Murdoch would serve them beer and burgers that he grilled on an eighteen inch Garland electric grill and they’d eat and drink and watch Rose dance.

  It wasn’t the most glamorous life in the world, stripping in a roadside bar while the stench of grease and charred meat oozed from the grill. There were times when Rose would leave the stage weeping. But for the most part she tried to enjoy the dancing. She liked the music, she liked being in the spotlight, and when business was good she could clear a couple hundred in tips from the truckers. If someone paid to take her to the back room, she was expected to give them a little something to think about when they went back to their truck and bedded down for the night. That was just a part of her job and there was nothing she could do about it. She hated to think of herself as a whore but that basically was what she was.

  When it was really busy and the bar was full of men, harsh, coarse, rugged loggers and truckers from the wilds of the far north, she felt the thrill of being a performer. She could give fifteen or twenty men an erection with a single motion of her hips or a flash of her bare breasts. She felt cheap at those times too, she knew she was dancing in the filthiest, vilest place imaginable, but the excitement of the performance was real and she clung to it. It was all she had.

  Often she thought about trying to escape. She had the old Ford. Every time she got on the highway she fantasized about driving right past the Cat and heading off into the wilderness. The problem was that she knew the car would never make it. Even if it didn’t break down twenty miles down the road, she’d never be able to outrun Murdoch on his bike. She wasn’t sure she’d make it to the nearest gas station either. Murdoch kept the car and his bike fueled from a tank at the back of the house and the key was on a chain around his neck. And even if she managed to get fuel, which way would she run? West was hopeless. Timmins was four hours away and the Ford would die long before it made it over the treacherous hills that way. East into Quebec was Val-d’Or, which was closer than Timmins but that was also where Serge’s DRMC chapter was based and the club watched that highway. Murdoch would just have to call ahead and Serge and his guys would be waiting for her.

  She had nowhere to run, nowhere to
hide, and she knew it. She was stuck there, at least for the time being, and there was no point in thinking about escape. That’s how it had been for the past two years. When she’d first arrived, she’d thought of escape every day. She’d tried running the Ford west toward Timmins and Murdoch had caught her. She’d tried asking the truckers for help but they all knew how things worked. None of them wanted trouble with the DRMC. They had to live on that highway and the MC was harsh on anyone who betrayed them. Once she asked a guy who drove for a paper mill in Ontario for help, he was based farther away and she thought the MC might have less of a hold on him. She’d been wrong. He’d gone straight to Murdoch and the next week, when Serge came by to pick up his money, he beat her so badly she had to lay in bed for two weeks. He broke two of her ribs and she still wasn’t sure if they’d healed properly. She’d thought he was going to kill her. She didn’t want to risk going through that again. And there was no point going to the police. The closest station was in Val-d’Or and the MC had both officers on the payroll. She didn’t even know how far it was to the next police station but she was pretty sure their officers would have been bought by the DRMC too. You didn’t get to be the biggest motorcycle club in Quebec without knowing who to bribe.

  She did as she was told now. She danced when they told her to dance, she gave it up when they wanted to fuck her, and she didn’t talk to anyone about escape, ever. She’d accepted her fate.

  She stepped out of the car onto the muddy lot and was glad she was wearing snow boots. The snow was so filthy it was black. It was April, pretty much the worst time of year for slush and melt. The little warmth there was only served to melt enough ice to make a mess. She’d never imagined that somewhere so cold and so isolated could also be so dirty. She was glad winter was finally coming to an end. There would be more traffic on the highway and there was always a sense of hope that accompanied the coming of spring. She grabbed her bag from the backseat of the car and trekked through the filthy slush and in through the back door of the bar.