Back at the Exchange [humil]

*This idea came to me one day while cleaning, hope it’s Ok here.*

It’s been awhile since I was last at the Exchange.

The Exchange was a small community; at its core were the people that had barricaded themselves in at Musu point just outside of Dangjin City during the Collapse. Most of those were people who had the foresight to buy, borrow, or steal as much food, water filters and other essentials when they ran *just* after the city was hit by the plague bombs and *just* before it was sealed off by the military. In those first few days the military was more concerned with keeping people out of the city and supplies in; no one bothered with the fledgling encampment until it was too late to do anything about them.

The Exchange core were part lucky, part organized, part selective; no one got in without three things – a negative antibody test, a useful skill, and a contribution to the collective. Food, filters, medications, consumables along with agriculture, engineering, medical skills. One lucky woman in possession of more than a thousand doses of antibiotics was allowed inside despite being stripped naked by the military hunting for looters as she left the city. With those hips and the size of that balloon I was surprised she could even walk, never mind hide it well enough to fool soldiers.

And me? My contribution was less impressive; I just happened to be living there the day bombs fell.

The plague bombs did less than various countries hoped they would, of course. The bombs infected so many and they in turn infected so many more but since it killed so many so quickly the plagues ended up being less contagious than they’d hoped, and barely affected anyone in the countryside. Not that those people escaped all effects, of course….the collapse of the urban centres often meant that the smaller towns could no longer get at first what they needed to stay comfortable, and then eventually even what they needed to survive. Tending your own chickens means less than you think when your neighbors grow hungry and it was amazing just how many office workers discovered how it felt to leave, underwear long gone and thighs sticky with come, with an ever smaller sack of grain after trying not to make eye contact with the pigs while farmers and their sons, with dirty cocks and dirtier fingers, bent them over the railing taking turns; payment a cup of rice for each one of them coming inside of her. And then when things were at its worst, just how many of those former office workers discovered that their only value after being used by the farmer was as a *topping* for the rice.

Thankfully things never got that bad inside the Exchange. But out in the countryside, I saw it all.

Lacking any hard skills in those early days I was one of those assigned to scavenge. I know they figured we’d be eaten, or raped then eaten, or eaten then raped in short order and every one of us that ended up under kimchi was one less person taking up irreplaceable resources…but to my bemusement I turned out to be good at it. I was surprised at just how many people left *for* the cities as the death count climbed ever higher and how much useful gear was left behind. Boxes of tissues under beds and in baskets, snacks inside desks, fruits and vegetables in gardens. Lightbulbs. Fuel. Parts. Ever scarcer, used by the dead.

One year later, many, many trips outside and a nod at the gate guards and I was home again. They knew me and by now I was good for a lot of things the community needed. And I was. Penicillin scavenged from the wreckage of a pharmacy, vitamins from under the bed in a house mostly ash when a fire swept through months before. Bras and underwear from a car overturned in a field. A package of toilet paper; more valuable than gold. I was not like many of the others, with nothing to offer for food and a place to sleep but themselves, and they being worth less than the second-hand clothes I was bringing in. People were a buyer’s market, and by now the buyers were a sybaritic lot.

I dropped my goods off for some trade tokens. Did better than expected on the penicillin, a shipping container washed ashore with a couple boxes of vitamins rendered the ones I brought in more or less worthless. The toilet paper got me a fistful of tokens over and above what I’d hoped to get…time to indulge in a little hedonism of my own.

I strolled over to the Zoo; the section of the settlement that housed those that had nothing to offer but themselves. I paid a token and amused myself in a crowd of people watching the end of a wrestling match between two men. Oil sheened their bodies as they struggled against each other, but within a few minutes one had pinned the other beneath him and with that that oil the first man roughly penetrated the second man and began to thrust in and out as hard as he could. The second man began to struggle under the ramming and got his head slammed against the ground again and again until he went quiet, the first man never stopping the movement of his hips, his ape-like yawps rising over the cheers of the crowds. After a few minutes he grabbed his opponent’s hair and pulled his head back *hard* as he rammed his hips against the other man’s backside and howled as he came. When he dropped the other man’s head in the dirt I left to see what other exhibits the Zoo had on offer.

At the next tent down five more tokens bought a brother and sister act, both pathetically underfed, ribs showing through the skin on both of them. Upon receipt of his tokens the handler placed food inside a cage made of wire mesh, locked it, showed the key to the siblings, then bowed and melted back behind a curtain. Silently, the brother lay in the dirt while the sister climbed on top of him. She stroked him until he was hard enough to enter her, then she put him inside of her and began to move. Tears ran down her face as she moved with him inside of her, unable to take her eyes off the meal waiting for them at the end, but him with his eyes closed, head turned towards the back and her crying while trying her hardest to make him come as quickly as possible was far more turn-off than turn-on and I left before the climax of the act.

I bought a gecko kebab (terrible, all bones), a small bottle of wine (also terrible; the rice they used for this batch must have been half-rotten) and wandered the outskirts of the exhibits. It was the usual; the settlement’s three brothels selling the good, bad, and the ugly, one of which had contortionists performing sex suspended by ropes outside, another with men in wooden stocks taking all comers – one token, one minute – and a game booth between them – “test your luck, toss a ring, circle a nipple, a prize every time and three rings on wins the grand prize, two sacks of rice and a sheep, guaranteed healthy!” – was doing steady business. I tried my luck with a couple of tosses, but the rings were too small to make circling even one nipple anything but a matter of luck. A sucker’s game, if ever there was one. I waved away the sticker I was offered as a consolation prize and looked over by the stocks where one group of men and women, bored with flesh-and-blood spears were trying their luck with blunted wooden ones, throwing them from a distance to try and bury it in one unlucky stockman’s ass. Bruises on his ass and gritted teeth told they weren’t having much luck. Wandered past the strip show tent – wondering not for the first time who’d waste their tokens there with a literal dog-and-pony show just two tents down – and headed over to my go-to exhibit, the Petting Zoo.

The Petting Zoo was where people ended up that were unwanted absolutely anywhere else in the Zoo, for whatever reason, and when they didn’t even want you as a glory hole you’d sunk pretty far indeed. Never given clothing no matter the temperature, fed at a trough with the leftovers and compost taken from the other exhibits and eateries, covered in garbage and mud, absolutely anything goes short of outright beatings when you paid your fee and donned your boots. The place fascinated me, and I didn’t really know why; there were far better shows and fun to be had almost anywhere else. And today, they had a new pet in the Petting Zoo since the last time I was in town, and I was delighted when I saw her.

I recognized her, of course I did. Yong-mi was a haughty middle-aged woman from just west of the city, who’d been married to a rich man before the collapse. She would come into town, look down her nose at all of us, buy her coffee and leave as though she couldn’t wait to get home and wipe the shit that was us off the bottom of her shoes. Me, she had a particular dislike of, and the dislike was mutual. Now she was out of her fancy clothes and naked, filthy from the dirt, covered in mud, stinking of compost, no longer the eternal beauty she’d professed to be when she’d paraded through the streets, better than all of us. No more.

I made sure to make eye contact with her before handing over my tokens, and made especially sure she watched me do it. I entered the pen and she scrambled away from me as I approached, so that one of the handlers had to rope her and tie her to one of the hitching posts in the yard. The rope was too short to allow her to stand any higher than on her knees, and that suited me just fine. Smiling kindly, I squatted beside her and reached out to stroke her hair. She shied away, but couldn’t get very far so I stroked her hair, gently, gently, and looked into her eyes.

“Hey, Yong,” I said to her, softly. “Remember when you told your friends last year that no one could ever want me, how I was ugly, flat like a man, rotten between my legs, dirty like a pig? Remember?” I smiled again. “Well, that’s not so bad to be. Here,” I said, grabbing a thick handful of mud and ooze, “let me show you how that feels like.” Looping the rope around the post to keep her still, I took that handful of mud and pushed it between her legs, forcing her thighs apart and squishing it up inside of her. Again and again, I took handful after handful of mud and compost and pushed it up inside of her, as much as would fit, then covered her opening with my hand and said into her ear, “Let’s see how rotten *you* smell now.”

I took my hand away and watched the muck ooze out of her, dripping onto the ground. I scooped up a handful of the mess and smeared it along her face, along her nose, telling her, “See? Now you are the one who smells rotten.” She said nothing, just stared at the ground, and I just stood and watched as the mud slowly ran down her legs until a man came up to us.

“Can I take over?” he asked. It was considered polite to wait until the previous person was done before taking over, but he seemed to be in a hurry for some reason. I didn’t mind; I was done here and ready to go, get drunk, and wake up under some stranger too sore to walk tomorrow. “Sure thing,” I told him. “Have fun with her.” Thanking me, he dropped his pants, smeared as much of the mud from her legs onto him as he could, then entered her, the mud still up in her, churning the dirt with every thrust of his hips.

“Have fun,” I told her, stroking her hair one last time, then went to see what the bar near my place had on tap.

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/qlfk22/back_at_the_exchange_humil