The Savior

Dec. 2 - Wichita, Kansas

The Reverend Tucker Adams locked the door to the terminal ward at the hospital. He pulled an empty hospital bed in front of the door. His face turned bright red with the effort. He checked its position and then his watch. It was 3 o’clock in the morning.

His breathing picked up. Since the creatures began showing up, the hospital had become a sort of safe house. It was swarming with army guys, good Christian boys protecting those people who had taken refuge in the old building. Rev. Adams knew that he would only have a short time to do his work: The good Christian boys wouldn’t understand and would surely try to stop him. They didn’t yet know they were damned.

He dropped to his knees. “Korro, kale ma shata nurrunda ka sheileh! God, in the name of Jesus, please take these people into your arms so that they might live in heaven eternal.”

Adams stood up. He walked toward another empty bed near the door. He reached under it.

“Jesus, give me strength,” he said quietly as he pushed the primer button three times. He went over the facts in his head. If these people died, they would come back as those beasts. If they came back as those beasts they would be damned. These people would die; they were terminally ill. And he knew he couldn’t save their lives. But he could save their souls.

He pulled the cord.

The chainsaw began to sing. Rev. Adams knew the sound well. Before he was saved, he had been a lumberjack and a womanizer. He had a tattoo on his arm of a nude woman riding a chainsaw. The irony of this was lost on him as he brought the chainsaw down on a 20-year-old woman with terminal case of pneumonia.

Her eyes flashed open but before she could scream the chainsaw ripped open her throat. Arterial blood jumped out her freshly carved carcass and then stopped, along with her heart. The Reverend looked down: It seemed as if the blood flew everywhere except onto him. He took it as a sign, and continued.

There were six other occupied beds in the room. None of their occupants had woken up yet. He moved quickly to the next bed. It had a twelve-year-old boy in it. The reverend worked from the bottom up, which proved to be a mistake. As the boy’s feet and then thighs disappeared into red chipped meat, he screamed. The reverend, shocked by the sound, brought the blade of the chainsaw to bear on the child’s face, which opened as easily as a ripe melon, the contents of his skull spilling out onto the floor.

The next minute went by very quickly. The other patients had been woken by the scream. They were gathered together by a window and were weakly hitting it, hoping to get out. The good Christian boys were banging on the other side of the barricaded door, hoping to get in.

There was blood in the reverend’s eyes from the boy and they burned badly. He remembered seeing a picture of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam who once set himself on fire as an act of devotion and protest. He wondered if this is what that felt like; the burning of a soul coupled with the silence of a mind.

The patients’ screams of “WHY” and “NO” were cut short by the rotating blades of the saw.
“I won’t let you become those creatures!”

The saw cut through arms and hands.

“I’m sending you to God!”

The saw cut through torsos.

“The pain will be over soon!”

The saw cut through whatever parts were still whole. The reverend was making sure to cut each skull apart. At least these people, he thought, wouldn’t be damned.

By the time the door finally gave way, the reverend had finished his work. Adams didn’t turn around at the sound of the army boys screaming at him. Underneath their screams he could hear the mass of what had been bodies gurgling; it had something to do with chemicals of all those bodies mixing together. But underneath that he was sure he could hear the voices of angels singing.