Amid the roaring music, the flashing lights and the ecstatic revelry of thousands who had come to the warehouse to celebrate their particular brand of freedom, Udo Schmidt considered himself a fortunate man.  His journey through life had been difficult, marked by violence and the miserable deprivation of a nation drained dry by misguided politics.  But now he lived in a country where food and security were plentiful commodities.  If you worked hard and took pride in your craft, Udo thought, you could experience wonders.

And so thinking, he followed a gaunt man between two long sheets of plywood, creating a passageway to the bank of restrooms.  Thinking about the bounty of wonders he had discovered in America, Udo rammed the ice pick into the soft dimple at the base of the man’s skull. 

Lights flashed from the crowded dance floor – a strobe of brilliant color exploded on walls painted black.  Speakers blared a hurricane of house music into the dark corridor.  The skinny lawyer convulsed, slapping the wall in spasm as Udo withdrew the spike and pressed his body against the quaking flesh.  He supported the thrashing lawyer’s body with his own, feeling an electric pleasure flow through him as Udo locked his mouth on that of the dead.  The lips tasted metallic like the terminals of a battery.

Anyone passing would have envied the lovers’ embrace.  These two men, allowed the freedom to express such intimacy, were beautiful.  Simply beautiful.    

Udo let the lawyer fall to the floor to be mistaken for another rave overdose.  He walked into the men’s room and winked at a blond boy wearing skin-tight shorts of a glittering spandex.  Udo flexed his arms and crossed to the sink where he extended his hands and used his wrists to open the faucets.  Water spat into the sink. The little streams of blood on his fingers vanished under the flow and were unnoticeable against the black porcelain bowl.

The blond boy, flexing his chest for Udo’s benefit, pushed up close and whispered in Udo’s ear.  “I bet you taste good,” the boy said.

Udo ran his tongue over his lips, retrieving a coppery residue from their surface.  The boy’s hand went to Udo’s crotch and began to rub.

“I bet you taste real good.”

“Later Trixie,” Udo said, a slight accent of German honing the edge of his consonants.  He patted the boy’s smooth cheek. “I got business.”  Bidness.

He pulled away from the frowning boy and his insistent palm.  In the hall Udo skirted the heap on the floor and entered the storm of noise, sweat and lust.

* * *

The morning following the rave, two thousand miles away, Udo returned home.  Dressed in a fine, Italian suit, he walked through the kitchen door and kissed his beautiful wife on the neck before snatching a piece of bacon from a sheet of paper towel.

“Stop that,” Anna said.  “That’s for the boys.”

“Ya,” Udo said, crunching the meat between his teeth.  “And what you got for daddy?”  He licked the salt from his lips and pulled his wife close for a deep kiss.

Anna slapped his shoulder, playfully.  “The boys will be down any minute,” she told him, wriggling away towards the stove.  “You must have had a good trip.”

 “All trips are good,” he said.  “I work hard and make sales.  Clients know how hard I work and they say, ‘If we gonna buy; we gonna buy from Udo.’”

“You should travel more often,” Anna laughed.

“You’d miss me too much,” Udo said around a second bite of bacon. “You’d cry and try to die without me.”  He eased up behind her and buried his lips in the soft skin of her neck, just below the base of her skull.  He ran his hands over her hips and pinched his voice into a high mimic of his wife’s.  “Oh Udo,” he cried in falsetto.  “Where is my Udo?  Where is my love?”  He began tickling Anna’s ribs and nuzzling deeper into her neck.  “’Oh life is cruel without my Udo,’ you’d cry.  And then you’d hang yourself from the living room rafters, and I’d have to marry another beautiful young woman to fix me crisp bacon.”

“Oh really,” Anna laughed, still wriggling from Udo’s probing fingers.  “And what makes you think I wouldn’t just find myself another handsome man to fix breakfast for?”

Udo stepped back and put the final bite of bacon in his mouth before casually saying, “Because I would kill you both.”

Anna shook her head and laughed.  His sons raced into the kitchen drawing Udo’s attention away from the back of his wife’s head.  Udo saw his boys, a wave of joy spreading through his chest, and growled low in his throat before hunching over and waddling comically across the kitchen to scoop them into a tight hug.

His oldest boy, Christopher, wriggled away from his father and dropped into one of the white lacquered chairs.  Udo thought the boy looked high on drugs, but he didn’t believe that his eight-year-old was actually taking dope.  Christopher just had a far away look in his eyes. 

Those were sad eyes, Udo realized; though they certainly had no reason to be.

As a child, Udo had worn that same expression after his mother had tried to drown him in the bathtub or had left him alone in the house with nothing to eat but the things crawling along the baseboard.  But Christopher had never gone hungry, and Udo did not beat his children. 

You don’t beat children here.

Unlike his brother, Udo’s youngest son, Philip, was a happy child, now six years old and beaming up at his father.  “Was work good, Daddy?” Philip asked excitedly.

“Ya,” Udo said.  “I could’a sold them the moon.”

Phillip giggled.  “How much would the moon cost?”

“All of the stars in the sky.  But they would have paid it, because they see Udo, and they know they have to buy whatever he has in his pockets.”

“You can’t buy stuff with stars,” Phillip said.

Udo reared back with an exaggerated expression of shock; his eyes wide and his mouth open in a startled O.  “Anna,” he called, “did you hear what your son just said?  Phillip said you can’t buy anything with stars.”

His wife laughed, crossing the kitchen with a skillet of scrambled eggs.  She scooped a mound onto Christopher’s plate; the boy stared at his breakfast as if confused by the food before him.  “And what did you tell him?”

Udo grabbed Phillip around the waist and pulled him close, to nuzzle in the clean scent of his son’s neck.  “I tell him that we bought him with stars.”

The boy wriggled gleefully, trying to escape his father’s embrace, and giggled.  “You did not,” Phillip said, squirming in Udo’s big arm.

“We did so,” Udo said.  “We paid the angels a hundred stars for each of you and told them we would pay a hundred more — a thousand more — for such beautiful, smart children.”

His son seemed pleased with the story and stopped struggling.  The boy bobbed his head forward like a pecking chicken and kissed Udo’s cheek.

“Udo,” Anna said.  “Let Christopher eat his breakfast.”

“Ya,” Udo said, loudly.  He released his grip on the boy and slapped his rump.  “You eat.  Get big and play football.  Daddy needs a shower.”

Udo stood and sniffed his armpit before making a light retching sound that sent Phillip into another round of giggles.  Then, glad to be home, he left his family in the kitchen.

In the bedroom he peeled off his suit and dropped it on the floor.  He threw his remaining clothes in the pile and walked into the bathroom where he admired his reflection for five minutes before turning on the shower.  As the water warmed, he returned to the mirror and gazed at his powerful body until the glass fell beneath a cloud of steam.

Under the needling spray of the shower, Udo rolled his shoulders and let the night’s business and travel sluice down the drain.  He reminded himself to check his bank accounts in the afternoon to make sure the funds had been transferred, but that was merely a technicality.  He worked with good people.  Business people.

He lathered the hair at his crotch and massaged the foam over his cock, which had been aching since seeing his beautiful wife, believing that her fine figure and delicate face were his reward for hard work and being a good provider. 

He took good care of his family, surrounded them with wonderful things, and the security he felt on mornings such as this, knowing he would be able to provide for them far into the future, heated him with pride.

Thinking on his good fortune, Udo was suddenly aware of another presence in the room.  He spun and saw his wife approaching the tub.

Anna interrupted his shower with a sigh as she pulled open the sliding glass door.  “We have to talk about Christopher,” she told her husband.  “He’s been…”

But Udo didn’t want to speak of his wonderful children, not when he felt so much love for the beautiful woman before him, still thinking her his reward for being successful and needing her as a wife. 

He stepped dripping wet from the shower and wrapped his arms around Anna’s shoulders, pulling her face to his for a long kiss.  The power of her life poured over his tongue and filled him, blocking out all thoughts but those of passion.

He was cautious not to hurt her, but found himself tearing at the cotton fabric of her dress, eager to feel her warmth against him.  She whimpered in his strong grasp, his fingers shredding her clothes, letting the damp material drop to the floor as he pushed against her.

Their first coupling was raw, edging on violent as Udo wrestled Anna to the floor, driving deep inside her to release the love that had built in him over the last twelve hours.  He came with a dull roar, covering Anna’s lips with kisses so she could not distract his pleasure with talk of children.  And he continued to kiss her until the heat was upon him again.  Still rough, Udo took his time moving into his wife, envisioning the steel of an ice pick penetrating the soft flesh between a lawyer’s skull and spine.  Each thrust of his hips mimicked the thrust of the pick’s handle, burrowing into warmth until it cracked against bone.

And finally, on their bed, Udo made love to his wife a third time.  Gentle and considerate, he allowed her to find pleasure as he stared upon her lovely face.  No thoughts of steel or blood supported his desire; he only needed to see his wife’s joy.

But then the heat had been expelled.  Anna kissed his shoulder lightly and whispered what he already knew – that she loved him. She began to speak of their son, and Udo propped himself on an elbow and listened intently as his wife explained Christopher’s recent misbehavior, which included skipping classes, missing homework assignments and beating up an older boy on the playground.

This last bit of news startled him.  His oldest son did not seem inclined toward violence.  Perhaps he had been provoked.  “And what did the boy do to Christopher?” Udo asked, staring at the wall over Anna’s shoulder, his hand lightly rubbing his abdomen.

“Mr. Hahn, Christopher’s principal, said that the boy was talking with his friends when Christopher hit him over the head with a book and then began to punch him.  The boy was doing nothing.”

“But it was an older boy?” Udo asked.

“Udo, what difference does the boy’s age make?”

Udo had been the victim of numerous bullies in his youth.  He hated the cowardly brutes who had dominated his childhood with their taunts and merciless humiliations.  He had no tolerance for a bully, and he’d be certain to punish Christopher if he were becoming one.  But if the schoolboy were older, then his son would not have been acting as a bully.  This was an important distinction.  “I’ll talk to him.”

With this statement the conversation ended.  Udo slid out of bed, running his hands through his hair as he wandered back towards the bathroom, where he would let the hot raindrops of the shower remove the sticky residue of sex and his sudden weariness.

Just after lunch, he checked his bank account to find that the transaction had gone through satisfactorily and made some notations on a spread sheet program to close the books on his last job.  And as soon as he saved the file, storing it in a folder marked sales, Udo spent the next two hours surfing the web, endlessly amazed by the array of luxury available to him.

He ordered several books and an oddly shaped tub that promised to massage his feet while they soaked.  He bought a machine that made bread – a gift for Anna.  For his sons, he ordered matching music players with headphones.

Udo yawned.  He turned off the computer and went back to his bedroom for a nap.

* * *

Udo chuckled lightly, watching the antics of the cartoon cat and mouse inflicting unspeakable misery on one another as they raced across his thirty-two inch television screen.  The remote control rested in his lap.  In his hand, he held a cold mug of beer.  The mouse, having just had his tail tied in a knot, retaliated against the cat by igniting the feline’s fur with a blowtorch.  The cat bounced off the walls, searching for some way to extinguish itself, knocking into the birdcage and sending the cartoon parrot to inferno.

Suddenly distressed by the sight of the charred bird, Udo quickly switched channels, gulped at his beer and felt the sweat building on his forehead.

There could be no question that Udo understood evil; he’d been born of it, shat from between the legs of a devil-bitch and suckled on the putrid milk from her tit, suffering equally from the cunt’s violence and indifference.  But his mother’s face, like that of his father, were irrevocably erased from his mind like most of the memories of his childhood.  They remained shadowed images, reminders of what he would never want to be as a parent, heirlooms of misery he would not pass on to his own boys.

Only the hen, the vile fowl he’d found on the side of a littered road, remained clear to him, and its image was forever equated in his mind with genuine evil. 

Hungry, always hungry in his youth, Udo had been wandering away from the pain of his parent’s cottage, searching the countryside for something to eat, his belly swollen with deprivation, his head light.  A storm brewed thick that day.  Clouds with the black and gray hues of burned corpses rolled overhead.

After many hours of trudging along the dirt road, he found himself facing the possibility of a meal.

The hen, a creature adorned in reddish-gray feathers, struggled at the side of the path, flapping its wings uselessly and succeeding in raising only dust.  Udo picked up a stone and quickly murdered the crippled hen, crushing its head beneath the rock while pinning its bony carcass under his foot.

He made a hasty fire and roasted the bird until its feathers were charred and the pinpoint eyes had melted to the back of its head.  The smell of burning feathers covered a deeper, fouler stench, which Udo did not recognize.  But so consuming was his hunger, he ignored the odor, peeled away feathers and burned skin, and sank his teeth into the meat of the hen’s breast.

 Moisture, a fluid Udo mistook for the natural juices of the bird, oozed down his chin as he ground the meal between his teeth.  In pulling the carcass away from his lips, he gazed into the trench his incisors had made, and a fluid, like a yellowed gruel, oozed from the wound.  The full stench of the bird’s sickness coiled at the back of Udo’s mouth as he watched the drainage seep over the black feathers and along his hands.

Later, after having expelled the limited contents of his belly on the side of the road, Udo fell into a tortured sleep, during which, he imagined himself in hell, surrounded not by cherry-colored demons with sleek leathery wings, but by a battalion of these charred hens, standing eight-feet-tall with bristling singed feathers, serrated, razor-sharp beaks, and shriveled coal pits for eyes.

Christopher entered the house with a slamming of the front door that chased away the flock of cinder-hens from Udo’s thoughts.  Hell shattered, leaving Udo in his comfortable chair before the television, surrounded by the evidence of his prosperity.

“Christopher,” he called, remembering the promise he’d made Anna to speak with their oldest son.  Clicking the television to mute, Udo sat up in his chair to address the boy.

Wearing a red and white striped shirt, wrinkled jeans and the slightly opiated look Udo had come to expect on his son’s face, Christopher trudged into the living room and stood next to his father’s chair.  His head hung low, staring at his shoes or the carpet but not at his father.

“You’re having trouble with school,” Udo stated.  The beer had loosened his tongue, bringing his accent into sharper focus.

Christopher shrugged.

“Your mama tells me you been fighting and skipping class.”

Again, the eight-year-old shrugged.

“Why’d you hit that boy, huh?  He do something to you?  He bully you?”

Looking annoyed, Christopher shook his head slowly, his eyes still locked on the carpet.

“Then why, huh?” Den vy, huh?

“Another kid paid me five bucks to do it, okay?  He didn’t like the boy.”

“Why he didn’t like him?”

“Didn’t ask,” Christopher said distantly.  “Just wanted the money.”

Udo fought to suppress a smile, some dull sense of pride for the child, growing in his belly.  At eleven, Udo had been asked to kill a man by that man’s wife.  He’d followed the victim into the woods and had cut his throat with a piece of shattered glass; in return, he’d received a blowjob and a pair of tattered boots as payment. 

Udo shook his head, pretending to be disappointed because he knew that’s how he was supposed to behave.  “You stop causing trouble, Christopher,” he said, thinking five bucks was a decent price for eight-year-old muscle.  “You can be a great man if you study hard and don’t cause trouble.”

“Can I go now?” Christopher asked quietly.

“You do what I say,” Udo said, jabbing his finger in his son’s direction.  “Yah?”

“Okay.  Can I go?”

Udo swatted the boy lightly on the hip and said, “Go.”  Then he allowed himself to smile as the boy slunk from the room.  He turned the volume of the television back on and flipped back to the cartoon, grateful to find that the parrot, freshly incinerated, played no further role in the program.

* * *

 Udo tightened the rope around the woman’s neck, holding her several inches off of the ground and staring into eyes the color of sun-drenched emerald, waiting for the moment he could taste the life passing from her with his lips.  The lashes fluttered, capillaries erupted, staining the gem-colored irises with ragged dots of crimson.  Easing her weight to the floor, maintaining the tension on the rope at her throat, Udo put his mouth to the woman’s to taste metallic ecstasy.  His body trembled violently with the intense emotion flowing from her cooling form to his suddenly hot flesh, and Udo kept his lips pressed to hers for much longer than was normally his custom, unable to relinquish the euphoric waves of her flavor.

“Good,” Udo said in praise of the female corpse.  Straightening his jacket, he touched the woman’s shoulder with his well-polished shoe and nodded his head.  “Very good.”

An hour later, he was at the airport and four hours after that, he was pulling into the drive of his home. 

Anna had not turned on the yard lights, and that struck Udo as odd, because he’d paid a lot to have those lights installed and liked to see his big home awash in their glow.  Many times, he’d asked Anna to make sure they were on to remind Udo how well he’d done for his family.

Udo’s aggravation and unease were somewhat soothed by the glow emanating from the kitchen at the back of the house.  Anna would be preparing his supper, he thought.  That was good.  Maybe the boys would be out for a while; that would be even better.

Inside, he turned on the light in the living room and set down his briefcase.  The odor, hopefully not his dinner, struck him as he entered the hallway that led to the kitchen.  The reek of something dead, but not fresh, climbed into his nose.  Udo turned on the hall light and for a moment, thought of hell.

The birds – a squadron of robins, jays and crows – had been nailed to the walls of the corridor.  A few of the birds still twitched, their wings flapping uselessly against the frames and glass fronts of family pictures.  Others, those that showed the rot and molt of having been dead for days, perhaps even weeks, perched stiffly – long silver nails impaling their bellies, their throats and their wings.

Unable to access his instincts, thrown into a viscous pool of shock by the avian carnage surrounding him, Udo stumbled forward.  Breathless, he pushed open the kitchen door and found another atrocity, which drew him deeper into the murky pool of trauma.

Anna lay naked on the dinette table, her wrists and feet tied to the table’s legs with her sex wide open to him.  She did not struggle and for a terrible moment, Udo thought his beautiful wife might be dead.

“Welcome home,” Christopher said, stepping out from the shadows of the pantry, tapping a butcher’s knife against his thigh.  The doped look he often found on the boy’s face had been replaced with a sharp stare, an intelligent, violent stare.  Christopher waved his blade at the secured body of his mother.  “You gonna fuck her now?”

For Udo, his home was a place of security and sanity, supposing his control over his family was assured and need not be manipulated or enforced.  And so confusing did he find this scene, thrown into dislocation by its crude violence and overt insanity, that he could not immediately respond.

“Isn’t that how it works?” Christopher asked, tracing the blade of the knife between Anna’s legs.  “You pull the life out of people and then pump it into her, filling her with hate and fear every time your balls explode?”

“Christopher put the knife down,” Udo said, taking a step into the kitchen, finally able to access his instincts.

“Don’t you want her cunt?” his son asked.  “Isn’t your cock aching from a long day’s work?  Just slide it in her, Udo.  Make some more like me.”

He appraised the situation calmly, despite his son’s vile words, knowing that even in a child’s hands the knife could do significant damage to him.  Cautiously, Udo backed his son against the wall and cast a quick look at his wife before returning his attention to Christopher and the dangerous blade in his son’s hand.  “You’re sick,” Udo said.  “We need to get you help.”

Under his father’s shadow, Christopher began to laugh, a sound of tinkling glass.  “You don’t know sick, Udo.”

“Was work good, daddy?”

Phillip’s voice, happy to see him and musical, startled Udo.  He turned to tell the boy to go back to his room while Daddy took care of Christopher and mommy, but the words were cancelled in his throat.

The baseball bat connected with the side of Udo’s head before he could speak.  Dropping to the floor, he caught a glimpse of Phillip’s grinning face.

And the laughter of his children carried him into darkness.

* * *

Udo dreamed of Hell, ran through the arid landscape, pursued by a squadron of singed demons, their feathers black and jutting and their shriveled coal-pit eyes locked on him as they soared against a sky the color of plum meat.  Two of the charred flock broke away from the formation and dove for him, serrated-razor beaks aimed for his face.

And then he was falling, suddenly awash in pleasure as he felt the ecstatic release of orgasm.

Udo woke, the wave of ecstasy receding rapidly as the ache in his head rolled forward to replace it.  The first thing he saw was a small hand wrapped around the shaft of his cock.  He blinked.  The hand was gone.  He was strapped to a chair, naked and sweating, his face ten feet from the splayed legs of his wife, who now twitched against her binds on the dinette table.  Udo fought his own binds, trying to find a weakness in them, but his movement amplified the anguish in his skull and proved useless in freeing him.

“Got it,” Phillip said, from his father’s side.

Udo turned to see his boy step away from his side, holding a small glass, its bottom coated with semen. Phillip carefully scraped more of the fluid from his fingers, using the lip of the glass to capture the residue.

“Give it to me,” Christopher said, closing the distance between his brother with three quick steps and taking the glass from Phillip’s tiny hand.

Disgusted by the thought of what his child had done, Udo returned to fighting his binds.  “What are you doing?” he roared.

“Shut up, Udo,” Christopher said.

“You sick little bastards,” Udo said.  “I give you everything, and you treat me like an animal.”

Phillip eased onto his tiptoes and kissed Udo’s cheek, then scurried to the kitchen sink to wash his hands.  His brother plunged the end of a turkey baster into the small glass and pulled fluid into the tip.  Turning the water off, Phillip hopped on one leg to the edge of the dinette table, joining his brother, who had just finished with the glass and its contents.

“Are you going to tell him?” Phillip asked excitedly, drying his fingers on a kitchen towel.

“No,” Christopher said.  “We don’t need him anymore.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

Smearing the plastic tube of the baster with petroleum jelly, Christopher looked directly into Udo’s eyes and said, “It’ll work.  I stole her pills last week, and she’s ripe.”  And then he turned to his mother’s body, slowly inserting the utensil into her sex, working the rubber bulb in gentle circles as he pushed the shaft deeper between her legs.  Christopher watched with the rapt attention of a clinician as he continued the insemination.  “And then we’ll have a sister,” he said, distantly, maintaining his focus between his mother’s legs.  “And a wife.  And then spawn of our own.”

Phillip nodded in time with his brother’s words, exuding all of the enthusiasm his six years of age could offer.

“Phillip,” Udo whispered, struck by the angelic features of his youngest son’s face.  “Your brother is very sick.  You can’t let him do this.”

Phillip bounced like a bunny up to the chair and pushed his face close to Udo’s, squinting and smiling as if peering through the lens of a kaleidoscope.  “But Daddy, it was my idea.  Christopher wanted to run away but we couldn’t go yet.  Not yet.  We aren’t strong enough alone. So we have to make more, and we couldn’t wait for you and mommy.  Not anymore.  Not anymore.”

“I’ll stop you,” Udo growled.  “I’ll kill you both before I let you … “

Phillip’s shrill giggle, the glee of a child, cut off Udo’s threat as it was being spoken.  His son spun back to the dinette, his arms outstretched as if imitating a helicopter.  Christopher was removing the baster from between their mother’s legs when Phillip stopped his twirling and put his head on his big brother’s shoulder.  “Is it done?  Is it?  Is it?”

“Yeah,” Christopher said, tossing the baster across the room to land with a clank in the sink.  He retrieved his knife from the table and aimed the blade at Udo.  “So what do we do with him?”

The venom in his son’s voice shot through Udo’s veins, bringing a poisonous rage he had not felt since childhood.  The sight of the music players he had bought them, strapped to their hips with the headphones tucked into the waists of their pants, infuriated him.  He had been a good provider; his children had never gone without clothes or food.  His own mother, that cunt, deserved this torture; his father equally so.  But Udo had been good to his family, had sacrificed and struggled for them.  He had done unspeakable things to make their lives something more than his ever could be, and he’d shielded them from these things.  Christopher and Phillip had never been touched by Udo’s violence.

But, a tiny voice in his mind suggested, they were created from it.

“What to do?” Phillip chirped.  “What to do?”  The boy put a tiny fist in his mouth and looked around the kitchen expectantly as if awaiting a surprise.  He began to duck his head rapidly, like a rooster pecking for worms, and then the child pulled his fist away to shout, “Little pieces!  Little pieces!  Little pieces!”

Terror finally found its way through disgust and anger.  Udo became aware, with the certainty of a condemned man, that he was going to die.  Somehow, his children had identified their father’s sins, and now they were going to punish him. “So, you want revenge?” Udo cried, his voice shrill with disturbed emotion.  “I never did nothing but good for you boys and you think you have reason to question me?  You’re judging me?”

“This isn’t a punishment, Udo,” Christopher said, his brother’s chant for little pieces growing in excitement behind him.  “You made us but you didn’t teach us.  You bred us and ignored us, so we need to learn a few things for ourselves before we go out into the world.”

“That’s right.  That’s right,” Phillip sang, leaping across the floor and pushing the blade of a paring knife into Udo’s cheek, the point piercing his gum to lodge in his jaw.  Udo opened his mouth to scream, and the blade tore free, drawn towards his open mouth, parting the meat of his face in a rough gash. 

“This isn’t punishment, Daddy,” his boy said sweetly, staring at Udo with shriveled coal-pit eyes.  “It’s practice.”