'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.
