"Bless and approve our offering; make it acceptable to you, an offering in spirit and in truth." He raised his voice even louder now, feeling the power of the words and forcing—by shear potency of will—the crowd to feel their power as well. "Let it become for us the body and blood of Jesus Christ, your only Son, our Lord."
"Throoo Chrisss’ aah Lor’, A-a-a-a-mennnn."
The congregation fell back heavily into their seats and waited as Father Handel closed his book and left it on the podium. Forlornly, he looked out over his fold and walked to the middle of the altar. There a silver tray lay on the heavy cloth Corporal which completely covered the table underneath. In the center of the elaborately engraved platter, a silver knife and a chalice covered with a dark purple cloth commonly called a Purificator was set. The exposed metal gleamed in the half light and the priest briefly touched it, meticulously adjusting its placement on the pall.
Off to the side of the Chancel, Father Handel heard the door to the sacristy open. Almost immediately, he sensed the congregation’s concentration waver and he knew he would need to hurry the service along. He would be only able to hold The Dead’s attention, and by extension of that, their civility, for a short time once the Offering was wheeled in. It was, after all, the thing for which a lot of Them had come. Well that and for their absolution, of course. He looked out of the corner of his eye and indeed saw the hospital gurney being pushed into the room by Javier, the young Hispanic boy who’d been serving as his acolyte these long weeks.
On the small metal table a young boy lay gagged, his hands securely strapped to his sides. There were a number of loosely wrapped, yellow tinged bandages covering several large bites which had been taken from the child’s torso and upper arms. Each bite in and of itself would have sealed the boy’s fate, sentencing him to a slow degeneration into one of the very Dead who now filled this church. It was now the order of things.
The wounded child’s gasp was audible through his gag as he caught his first glimpse of the congregation sitting attentively in the church. Weakly, he wriggled against his restraints. The horrified look of betrayal in his eyes was unmistakable. A small cry of fear escaped from beneath the cloth around his mouth and the sound of that cry broke Father Handel’s heart.
A palpable ripple went through the crowd as they all became aware of his presence, for even the ones who still clung to their faith became agitated as the living body was brought in. Yes, the priest thought, he would indeed need to hurry or this service would deteriorate into a scene from which he surely would not be able to escape.
The priest looked into the child’s frightened eyes staring up at him and despite the heart-rending empathy he felt, he tried to separate himself from the desperate emotion which lay trapped there. He stroked the boy’s messy auburn hair and bent over him, tenderly laying his lips upon the boy’s forehead. He paused and whispered, "My child, I absolve thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost of any and all sins of this life and I send you to sit at God’s side knowing that it is a far better place that you go to now than the one where you have been. May God have mercy upon your soul," and he paused, then whispered under his breath, "and mine."
The boy’s eyes darted about, unsure of the priest’s full meaning. Violently, the child shook his head back and forth as if saying, "No! No, you don’t have to do this!" He watched amazedly as the priest standing over him made the sign of the cross and touched his hand to his forehead. Finally tired from the extent of his exertions he fell still; panting rapidly. Tears slowly rolled down his dirty cheeks leaving wet discolorations in the filth.
Father Handel stood to his full height once again and gently picked up the silver knife on the table before him. He grasped the chalice and raised his voice to the throng. "The day before He suffered to save us and all men, He took an offering in his hands and looking up to heaven, to you, His almighty Father, He gave You thanks and praise. He took a glass, gave it to His disciples, and said: ‘Take this, all of you, and drink it: for it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’"
Feeling the power and majesty of the scripture himself, Father Handel pointed with the blade’s tip out over the heads of the crowd as if it were the very Flaming Sword of Uriel. "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Father, we celebrate the memory of Christ, your Son. We, your people and your ministers, recall His passion, His resurrection from The Dead, and His ascension to glory; and from the many gifts You have given us we offer to you, God of glory and majesty, this holy and perfect sacrifice: this child of God who has now become the body of Christ and the cup of eternal salvation which is His life’s blood."
For the briefest of moments, the boy and the priest locked eyes and an impassioned, but wordless exchange passed between them. The boy’s eyes pleaded for help and release. The priest’s cried out for forgiveness. The emotion that clouded the doomed child’s eyes was one that shook Father Handel to his very core. He gave the child the smallest of smiles in the hope that it would make the next moments more tolerable. Somehow though, he knew it would not. Abruptly, he dragged the glistening blade in his hand across the soft flesh of the young boy’s throat. Blood pulsed out of the gaping wound and pooled like oil onto the vinyl padding of the gurney. The child made a frantic gulping motion as his life pumped out of him in thick, syrupy surges. The priest quickly placed the chalice under the pulsing torrent at the boy’s throat, filling it with the hot, crimson fluid. An impassioned sigh ran through the crowd as the air became charged with the coppery scent of plasma.
Within moments, the boy stopped moving.
Father Handel set the now nearly full chalice aside and raised the now bloody knife into the air. He raised his gaze and once more looked out over the crowd.
"It was then that He, who is the one true messiah, looked to his faithful and, as they were eating, Jesus took the bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to the them, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body. Do this all in memory of me.’"
The priest turned back to the gurney and, with a sawing motion, he sliced deep into the meat of the boy’s exposed upper leg. The milky, white skin split and parted, exposing bright, yellow nodules of fat and the grey-red fibrous muscle tissue beneath. Once the initial cut was made, the priest discreetly handed off the knife to the boy, Javier, who had come up to stand quietly next to him.
Father Handel would leave the rest of the cutting for the boy to finish. The acolyte dutifully began slicing away small pieces of flesh and stacked them on the silver ciborium which sat next to the now dead boy. Javier busied himself with the task making sure, as he’d been told, to keep the pieces out of sight of the faithful who sat moldering in their pews. Father Handel picked up few of the first stacked morsels and deftly palmed them. His vision was now blurred by the tears coursing down his cheeks, but he knew that since he’d come this far,going the rest of the way was a given. He held the blood-covered morsels in his blood-soaked hand and reached over to retrieve the goblet.
He turned back to the congregation and motioned for them to begin their approach to receive this most unholy of communions. The crowd stood and began their protractedly shuffling, one by one, toward the altar.
Father Handel took a moment and reminded himself that this was a most precarious time. A large crowd gathered, blood in the air and fresh meat on display made his situation all the more dangerous, to say the least. He reminded himself with a castigatory thought that one mistake, one bite from one of these Dead, would seal his fate just as it had for the boy whose body was now being prepared as the communion host. The contagion or whatever it was that had made these creatures crawl out of their graves, would course through his body and in time make him one of Them. He’d nursed dozens of people suffering from such bites and he knew that once bitten the victim’s death decree had been irrevocably signed with
the black ink of affliction.
The first supplicant came forward, the thing’s eyes staring blankly straight ahead. It dropped clumsily to its knees in front of the Father and raised its head. The man’s face was horribly mangled from a mixture of ante-mortem wounds and post-mortem nibbling. Long, raking furrows were torn from his left eye across the place where his nose should have been and dug deep into the meaty flesh of his right cheek. The man dutifully opened his mouth and Father Handel carefully dropped the meat onto his tongue. The mangled face worked the morsel over; the man’s jaws chewing as a rapturous expression spread across what remained of his features.
The priest held the cup by its stem and offered it to the man. He placed it onto the man’s torn lower lip and gently tilted it. The dead man slurped up the viscous liquid like someone who had been lost in the desert and was dying of thirst. As the priest pulled the goblet away, the woman next in line pushed the first man so that she might receive her sample of what was now in her necrotic mind the Blood and the Body of Christ.
And so it went, hundreds of The Dead came and took their mouthful of flesh and their swallow of blood. Some were unsatisfied to get only a small piece of the boy, but The Dead had by now made their own rules and the jostling and non-verbal reprimands of the others made for a more-or-less smooth ceremony. The flock came and went in a cortege of putrescence and when the last of them had received their communion Father Handel instructed that the church’s doors be shut and barred.
~ * ~
As Javier moved away from locking the doors of the church, the priest gazed down at his now blood-stained vestments and abruptly sank to his knees on the steps of the altar.
It is all so difficult, Lord, and I am so tired.
How many times must he go through this before God would end this madness? From what he was continually hearing on his radio The Dead were still increasing in their numbers and still no hope was in sight. The voices on his radio at night sometimes spoke about people mounting a counter-offensive against The Dead and taking back the world. Some even spoke of how the Army was planning their own solution.
But so far, Father Handel saw little progress on either front.
As he sat trying to regain his strength and hold back his tears Father Handel tried to imagine, as he had many times before, what had humanity done? What could the severity of their sin have been to bring about His wrath and in this magnitude?
Was this to be a cleansing as Sodom and Gomorrah had been?
Why had He turned His back on those who might serve Him?
The priest looked up toward the carved face of the figure hung from the cross for some assurance that this was all a part of His plan.
Where was the divine justice in any of this?
His supplication, as usual, went unanswered.
Now all that Father Handel had left was to continue teaching His word and to hope that God, in His eternal wisdom, would look kindly upon his acts. After all, wasn’t he merely trying to do that which he was meant to do as a part of His design? Had he, too, gone astray? He felt in his heart that God would surely look upon his acts with a certain amount of clemency, since the priest had acted in His name so that he could continue to teach His word.
Right?!?
He looked over at the body on the gurney and saw that there was hardly anything left of the bound boy now. His corpse had been practically picked clean. Father Handel looked up again to the carved representation of Christ above the altar, hung his head and wept quietly. His shoulders shook from his heaving sobs. His body was wracked by the depths of his sorrow. He sensed rather than saw Javier walk up softly and stand next to him. The boy waited patiently for the priest’s outburst to abate. Once Father Handel’s tears subsided, the priest felt a small hand gently touch his shoulder.
"Padre," the boy said in the quietest of voices, "I take you to your room now. You shower and change clothes. I clean up here."
The priest, who was still only just a man, painfully stood and nodded wearily.
"Bless you, My Son," he said in a hushed tone.
"Padre?" the boy asked sheepishly as they began to walk.
"Yes, Javier?"
"Will La Muerte stop coming one day?"
"I don’t know, My Son. I just don’t know. I’ve heard on the short-wave that the Army may be coming. Perhaps they will be able to get a handle on things. Honestly, I had thought The Dead would have all rotted away by now, but… they still come. We must remain patient and trust that it is all a part of God’s will."
The boy walked and considered this. Absentmindedly, he wiped the blood on his hands on the seat of his pants. Deep red stains appeared on his already blood-spattered clothing.
"Padre?"
"Yes, Javier?"
"If La Muerte stops coming, who will be left for you to preach to?
"If The Dead were to ever stop coming, Javier, you and I would leave this place. I promise you that. We’d go and find ourselves someplace nice, someplace sunny and warm…" The priest raised his hand and gently mussed the front of the boy’s hair, "…someplace safe." The old man looked into the deep brown eyes of the boy. "How does that sound, eh?"
The boy broadly smiled up at the older man and nodded aggressively.
"Muy bien, Father," he said with a wide grin, "I would like that."
Father Handel smiled and sighed quietly. He leaned gently against the boy, dropping his arm around the younger man’s shoulders for additional support. The boy shouldered the older man’s weight and led the way into the stygian shadows of the church.
Chikara
Cleese stepped out of the Training Hall and walked onto the large expanse of grass which separated the gymnasium from the fighter’s cribs. After a few minutes of walking, when his view was no longer obstructed by the surrounding buildings, he stopped and took in the setting sun. The slowly descending orb hung just above the horizon and bled the entire sky a deep red. The sight of the sun going down always filled him with a sense of wonder, as it had for his entire lifetime.
Some things in this oftentimes rotten life could be so beautiful.
He slowly ran a hand through his hair and pulled it back from his face. A small spasm twitched in his back and he stretched the aching muscles with a sigh. He straightened his legs and methodically bent over at the waist to touch his toes. His hamstrings burned and felt as if they were made out of razor wire. After a couple of bounces to pull the muscles loose, he stood up, spread his arms and arched his spine until he heard it crack. The pain he’d been feeling from all of the training created a fiery sensation down deep in his muscle fibers. Every movement he made now caused his muscles to cry out in a symphony of suffering.
He felt tired—damn tired—but in a good way. He was damn near dead on his feet, yet conversely felt like a million bucks. Pain was, after all, just weakness leaving the body. Or at least that was what Monk had told him. Monk was full of shit like that, little aphorisms that sounded like they’d come straight out of a Shaw Brothers movie.
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
"Pain is temporary. Pride is forever."
To Cleese’s ears it was all "snatch the pebble from my hand…" -type bullshit, but it had a way of sticking in your head like gum.
A sudden stinging sensation buzzed high on his left arm. He swatted at its source only to find that a mosquito had landed and just bitten him. A small smear of blood and bug guts greased his upper deltoid. He wiped the goo off and spread it on his pants. It was a little surprising how firmer his body felt even after only the short time he’d been here. He poked at his bicep and liked what he saw.
He’d packed on some pounds and dropped literally an ass-load of body fat since arriving here. As his body started to slim down, he’d felt a lot of the speed and alertness of his youth return. Before stepping out of that helicopter, he would’ve been lucky if he could have walked a mile. Now he was clearing the "four minute" mark. At Monk’s suggestion, the blunts and alcohol stopped the minute Cleese had seen
what he was going to be up against. Him being high as fuck had been fine for pulling his meat out of the grease before, but given the current situation he figured a straight head and a clear throat would be better if he wanted to keep his noggin’ on his neck.
A sudden, sunset breeze blew coolly across his face. He turned his head toward it and breathed in deeply. The chilled air felt good as it swirled deep down into his lungs. It sure beat the hell out of the salt and urine smell of The City that was for sure.
Cleese looked around and decided that since Monk had been called away for some face-time with Corporate and he had some free time to kill, he would take a little walk around the compound to check out some of the sights he’d not had a chance to see. He welcomed the alone time and the chance to clear his head. So much had happened so quickly since he’d arrived here he felt as if he needed a little perspective. Oftentimes perspective could only be achieved with time, distance and solitude.
He walked aimlessly across the grass, heading in the general direction of the shooting range. He could hear what sounded like somebody popping off rounds, but the noise now coming from the range was nothing like it was during the busy time of day. It was a given among the fighters that being proficient with a gun was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. Being good with a weapon—be it fists, blade or gun—was second in importance only to the "Don’t Get Yourself Bit" credo.
For a few minutes he walked and did nothing but look at the sky and let his mind clear. Breathing in through his nose and out his mouth helped aerate his brain and calm his jangled nerves. He was nearly halfway to the range when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of some movement off to his left; at the top of one of the hills that butted up against one side of the range. He tried to focus on it, but given the distance, couldn’t see much of anything. Whatever it was, it was low to the ground and looked like a pile of large stones. He was about to dismiss it as nothing more than a trick of the light, but then saw it move again. Almost instantly his curiosity was piqued.
No Flesh Shall Be Spared Page 14
