1.

Clouds stain the horizon: an ice storm, according to the television. Starting late this afternoon, at the height of rush hour, the northern suburbs can expect to be coated with freezing slush. The people here drive like clowns on cocaine. Since I am far to the north of the city, an hour from where suburbs give way to farms and forests, it's probably sleeting already. I'm being kept deep underground in a room warm enough to make most clothing too hot to wear. Despite the heat, these images of the storm-darkened sky send chills rippling through me. Stifling in here, Antarctica outside, and I am naked. I am naked.

2.

Who's crazier?

Me, or him?

Him, because he runs this inferno? This Factory? Profits are up, demand can't be met, the machines roar, and the vats boil day and night. Garish blue labels are applied to the bottles, which are then packed into cardboard cartons. Conveyor belts convey an endless stream of product (that's what the Emperor calls it, product) to a fleet of trucks. The trucks dispatch the cartons to points around the country. Orders are pouring in from all over! And he barely sleeps. Only when he thinks nobody is looking. There are so many demands on his time. Always, some problem takes him away from his rooms. From me.

Or me? Am I the one who's nuts? Probably so, because I despise him and I am infatuated with him in equal measure. He keeps me here. He is my heroin and I am addicted to him, I cannot get enough of him, I want my mouth to be salty with the taste of him. I want the smell of him on my body. If it means I have to stop showering and brushing my teeth then so be it. The blood he comes to me smeared with, I will preserve it like sacred oil; I will anoint myself every morning and night. I want him on my tongue. I want him to leak from my pores. I want him to crawl inside my skin and become one with me. I cannot be filled up with him enough to become content. If I become him, then there will be no more me, and I will not have to hate myself. I can hate him instead.

3.

Blind slaves labor on machines. All of them can see and all of them are employees on a payroll but they hold their heads down--gluing labels, pushing buttons, pulling levers, not free to leave until the Emperor sounds the whistle, not free to quit without his permission, not free to eat or piss or place a telephone call unless he allows it: slaves. I cannot tell them apart by the end of the day. They are filthy. Sweat sluices through the grime that cakes their bodies. The first time I saw the Factory floor I swooned. I was unsteady on my feet, recovering from grievous injuries, and the smell overpowered me. Locker-room abattoir urinal stink. I could feel greasy molecules of stench coating my sinuses when I inhaled. Great dark machines loomed, roaring monoliths. When I passed over the floor on a catwalk I felt myself becoming slimy. The Emperor saw the gleam in my eye, saw the blush rising through my pallor, and smiled.

"All this is mine," he said in a voice as rich as rotting meat, barely audible over the din below.

He took my hand and led me back to his quarters. He had sewn my stitches himself, by hand, daring me to cry out when the thick needle penetrated my flesh. He had pulled coarse thread though a deep wound in my leg, then coated the area with salve. With glue. I had lain in a dark room for days, fed chunks of roasted meat and dry bread, with metallic water to drink from a battered tin mug. Primitive, I know, but I'm not in the world any longer. I'm here. When the gash had closed up, the Emperor cut the stitches with a pair of scissors too dainty for his ham-hock hands, showing a rough delicacy as he snipped. I winced when he jerked the stitches free. He used his teeth. I got an erection. I will show you the Factory, he'd said. Come. I followed. I surprised him. He hadn't expected me to like what I saw.

4.

We drove out to the Factory, made our way over the fences at the perimeter of the property, and broke in: Joshua, Erich, Reynaldo, and me. Was it curiosity? Stupidity? Has anyone ever found a way to tell them apart?

Rey had heard rumors: "They use meat."

Josh was scornful, "Well, yeah, of course. That's what kids always say about glue. It's made of horse meat. They put horses in an enormous vat and boil them down until there's nothing left but mush and a few teeth."

"That's disgusting," Erich said.

"It's protein, isn't it?" What had made Josh fixate on the Factory? It had been open a year. This corner of the state had been prosperous once… but not recently. The Factory irrigated a withering region with jobs and cash. So people spread sinister rumors to make life seem more exciting than it really was. This is the story of the human condition. Josh cared, because…? "That's why it works so well. If that's what they use. I bet it is."

"People say that about Chinese food, too," said Erich. "It's not really pork and beef you're getting. It's Fido and Fluffy. What a load of crap."

Rey protested. "But I've heard it's not horses. I've heard they send out trucks to the morgues and the graveyards. It's bodies. It's people."

"Bullshit. I heard that the Factory buys up the… I don't know what to call them, leftovers from stockyards and slaughterhouses, but no corpses. No body parts. That's morbid," I said.

"So we should go look," Joshua said. "We can take my car."

His father had bought him a new Citroën for his birthday: sinuous, black, very fast. After our token resistance--"We'll get caught!" and "What about school?"--faded, we couldn't say "no". Students are like that.

5.

I shouldn't have fallen asleep in the car as we drove out of the city and into the vast green expanse of nothingness beyond the suburbs. Then I might have had a better idea how to get home. This is what I thought when we were attacked. But I couldn't help it at the time. Erich and I took the back seat. I dozed off with my head in his lap, his cock stiff against my cheek. Rey and Josh wouldn't have cared about me unzipping Erich's jeans, taking him in my mouth; they'd have been happy to watch. I thought about it. I wanted to. Erich stroked my hair. They didn't know we'd been up late feasting on each other the night before, tasting each other here, licking this, swallowing that. I sucked honey off his cock and he poured white wine down the length of mine to catch the Chardonnay stream in his mouth. He came with my two fingers deep inside him, his salt spilling over my tongue and mixing with the sweetness of the honey. We hadn't gotten much sleep. It couldn't be helped.

6.

"Lions!" Josh, who had taken the lead, screamed.

It had been too easy to break in: no alarms, no sentries with rifles, just a high chain-link fence, easily climbed. No strand of barbed wire at the top, even. The Factory loomed beyond, a featureless grey monolith. Dense smoke, the same color grey as the building's façade, billowed from a pair of smokestacks. We stopped and stared, then caught sight of something rushing toward us. The approaching shapes looked like tremendous dogs at first, and dogs would have been bad enough. Then I recognized the matte golden color of their coats. Joshua turned and sprinted back the way we had come. He was the tallest, with long cross-country legs; he moved fast. The fence lay only a hundred yards behind us. Rey seemed frozen to the spot where he stood, a dozen feet ahead of Erich and me.

In the split-second we had, I made a fast choice, "Run!"

I gave Erich a shove. We raced behind Josh toward the fence, screaming Rey's name but knowing there wouldn't be enough time to reach him before the lions did. With the agility of a squirrel, Joshua scaled the fence. Erich stumbled. I pushed him upward against the fence, away from me, hesitated long enough to see him climbing, then started up, myself.

I almost made it: three-quarters of the way up, high enough to be feeling sure of myself, and then came the swipe of a tremendous paw. The world went red. In a moment of weightless blankness, I tottered. I almost lost my grip on the fence.

Erich, at the top, grabbed my flailing arm and hauled me up before the lions made a dessert of my bowels.

We almost got away.

Even now, when I sleep in the Emperor's cell, I grieve my losses. In my nightmares, I still hear the sounds of the animals, eating.

7.

Men in dark blue uniforms caught us climbing down the fence on the other side, and led us at gunpoint into the monolith. The lions, mysteriously, stopped eating Rey after taking several bites out of him. They padded back toward the building. Maybe he tasted bad. I'd never noticed, myself. Or maybe they were remote-controlled and someone had pressed a button. A black bank of clouds had eaten the sun, and cold rain started to fall. I think the men led us by Rey's mangled remains out of sadism. The lions had torn out his throat and ripped open his belly. Rain washed his blood into the grass. Organs gleamed. Dead brown eyes stared at a point in space above and behind our heads.

"How can you look?" Joshua asked, his voice breaking.

"I want to remember what they did to him," I said.

8.

"One of you will die, one of you will stay here, alive, and one of you will leave." "What do you mean?" Josh protested. "You can't do that!"

"Look at me," the man in the raw meat coat said. "Look closely. Think about what you see."

I saw a tall, dark man, hugely muscled, in a cloak assembled from cuts of raw meat. Thick steaks somehow attached, still bleeding, still shiny with the fluids of whatever beast they'd been carved out of, marbled with white fat. This expanse of sartorial carnage extended to the floor. His collar, the breasts of some kind of fowl. His belt, intestines I assumed, tied around a single white bone. He wore no shirt, only boots and some kind of leather pants, as rough-hewn as he himself was.

"I am the law here. What I say goes. The four of you broke in. One has already died. His remains are going to be boiled down. One more of you will join him. One of you will stay with me, here. The other will go home and tell people not to break into to the Glue Factory."

"But that's murder!" Josh said.

"Your local authorities are paid to look the other way," said the man in the raw meat coat. "And the judges here are the best money can buy. We are the largest contributor to the local economy. You know as well as I do how fond the local people are of the students at your college. This is a public service."

"It's still murder, and it's wrong. You should let us go," Josh said.

I marveled at Josh's boldness: he stood only as high as the raw man's nose, but he didn't back down.

The raw man nodded at two other men, who stood behind him.

"Vat 3-B, " he said.

They descended on Josh. Erich tried to stop them. They shoved him aside. I could not move without fresh thunderbolts of pain ripping my leg apart, so I lay helpless and watched the two men hold Joshua down. One of them produced large scissors from his dark blue robelike garments. He cut away Josh's clothing like a nurse in an emergency room might have done in a different crisis. Josh's screams and struggles amounted to nothing.

"Don't overlook the piercings," the man with the raw meat coat said.

One of the thugs caught the stud at the corner of Josh's eyebrow between thumb and forefinger, tore it out, then did the same thing with the hoops in his earlobes.

"The remains of his friend are still fresh. Put them in the same vat. That's where this afternoon's shipment from… I don't remember where it's from, just add them to the new batch."

Joshua screamed himself hoarse as the thugs dragged him out of the room, naked, writhing, pissing in terror. They dragged him through a puddle of his own urine. Erich and I clutched at each other. I felt cold all over and would have thrown up if there had been anything in my stomach.

"You will leave because you are unhurt," the man in the raw meat coat told Erich. "This one is going into shock. I'll keep him. You have exactly four minutes to make it back to your car and drive away. The keys should be in your friend's clothes here. If I see you again, I will have you rendered down to a stew of protein and bones. Is that clear?"

"Go," I told Erich.

"I'll send help."

"Just be safe."

I think his parting kiss told the raw man everything he needed to know.

9.

"The product we make here has revolutionized the field of adhesives technology," said the Emperor, carrying me in his arms like a virginal bride on her wedding night. Fluids from his cloak of flesh soaked through my clothes but warmed me up instead of leaving me colder. The world felt far and wee. "The demand is unparalleled. Wounds close in half the time. Only the deepest, like yours, need stitches."

"I thought this was a Factory that made glue for paper dollhouses and flowers," I said, delirious.

"Our lesser product goes to that purpose, but the highest-grade adhesive we make is of surgical quality. Look down."

Below, I saw a conveyor belt delivering gigantic, gutted carcasses into a vat the size of a garage. Clouds of bloody steam issued from vats farther down the production line. Meat, melting. Bones, being boiled. Images blurred together: one tremendous maw to pulverize the living and the newly deceased (I thought I saw Josh down there, dry-heaved, then offered a feeble farewell wave); vats to melt the flesh down to its component proteins and amino acids; tubes and pipes and belts. There was some kind of chemicals involved. It all ran together into one overwhelming, erotic nightmare of the flesh. HR Giger himself had probably been commissioned to design the Factory floor.

The Emperor stroked my hair. The smell of him overwhelmed me, engulfed me. He could not have failed to notice my jutting cock.

"Are you going to boil me alive and make me into Elmer's School Glue?" I asked him.

"If you die, yes, I probably will," he said.

"Then I won't die."

10.

I healed in my cell.

The Emperor (this is what the raw man had instructed me to call him, and that is truly the best word for his role here: Emperor) cut out my stitches in his quarters, then lay me down on his coat of flesh. By some miracle, there were no flies. Only candles and incense, and butcher's diagrams on every wall.

"What keeps it from spoiling?" I asked him, luxuriating.

I had never known I'd find the idea of lying naked on a steak the size of a dining room table arousing, but there it was. I did. The steak was warm to the touch: skin. Meat. When I pressed down with my fingertips, juices collected in the little indentations I made. Little pools of blood. The crescents of my fingernails browned.

"Nothing. It rots. We throw it into a vat, and two weeks later schoolchildren glue bits of paper together with it. When the time comes, I have a new one made. There are people here who do that for me."

"You take whatever you want, don't you?" I asked.

He nodded. Looking down at me, he seemed eight feet tall, solid muscle. This is how Ares, the Greek god of war, must have looked after battle. Bloody, built, beautiful. I detested him. I craved him. I wanted to abase myself in a defeat that ached like victory.

"We take the homeless. We heal wounds. We accept the newly dead from hospitals to avoid filling cemeteries. We are rebuilding the economy in this part of the state. I see this as good," he said, undoing the leather pants.

"My leg has healed quickly," I said. "That's indisputable."

"I'm going to keep you here." His voice, rich as the blood in the jar by this bed, smooth as the rendered fat he smeared over my body, was an aphrodisiac. Naked, he knelt next to me, ladling the fat over me, spreading it. "This came from your friends, you know."

There just weren't words.

"But I let you live." He coated his cock with the stuff, then turned me over and lubricated the opening of my ass. Both Josh and Rey had been inside me before, but not like this. "Remember that. I chose you, and I let you live."

And then he followed Rey and Josh.

11.

This went on for weeks.

12.

I learned the workings of the Factory: trucks brought in loads of bodies and body parts all day and all night. The highest-quality surgical glue came from flesh fed to the vats still living. The kindergarten stuff came from slaughterhouse offal. Intruders could wind up in either product. We'd send the lions to intercept them. On a monitor in his rooms, the Emperor would watch the feast for a time. Very entertaining. Then he would press a button and signal the lions to stop. He would dispatch men with tongs and carts. I learned the shifts and the routines, the names of the machines.

I learned the working of the Emperor's body as days turned into weeks. He would untie the bone from the coil of flesh around his waist, dip it into a pot of rendered fat, and pleasure me with it. He showed me which spots to touch, where to put my fingers or my tongue, when to hold my breath, how to lose myself--and find myself--in him. I stayed drunk on his bloody come; there seemed to be no end to the supply.

And in the back of my mind, a single thought lingered: Erich?

13.

I've decided that seizing power is like having sex: timing is crucial when you spot the right opening. The Emperor had bent me over the handrail of one of the catwalks above the Factory floor. He'd buried himself up to the hilt in me, not caring if one of the sweat-grimed drones down below should happen to look up. He held absolute sway over them all. Did they want their kids to eat? Did they want their lights to stay on? Then they would do what they were told.

So big, I thought. Huge. He'd stretched me wider than I thought humanly possible. I knew how Vlad the Impaler's victims felt, dying on their spikes.

The semen spurted out of me and landed on one of the workers below. He didn't look up. He absently wiped the droplets off his upper arm without giving them a second thought.

That night, the Emperor made the permanent mistake of not locking me away in a cell when he slept. He'd grown complacent. I choked him on his belt of intestines, then snapped the bone he'd pleasured me with (it was still wet) and speared his jugular vein with it. Blood fountained. He marinated his coat of raw flesh in his own juices. When I summoned his attendants, I'd have the spot that tasted most like him grilled medium well and served up with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. I watched the Emperor thrash, clutching the bone jutting out of his neck. His eyes glazed over, fixed on the same point in space Rey's had, some uncountable time before.

His attendants came when I called.

"Vat 3-B," I told them, pointing at the tremendous corpse.

I stood before them as bloodied as the Emperor's corpse on its dais of meat, unabashed, challenging them with my own nudity. I didn't blink, didn't look down.

"Keep the bloodiest part of his cloak for the cooks," I told them. "You know what to do with the rest of it. I won't be needing another."

I hesitated.

"Actually, something in linen, I think, if anyone here has a tape measure. And have someone send a car for my friend Erich."

14.

Dark clouds stain the horizon above, and a winter storm threatens.

The Factory produces glue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We take the homeless. We heal wounds. We accept the newly dead from hospitals to avoid filling cemeteries. We are rebuilding the economy in this part of the state.

And Erich is with me, deep underground in this warren of rooms.

We eat well, and we are useful.

I see this as good.