Sermon Number 482 from "The Book of the Damned".
BRAIN DEAD
"Rush him in here, Nurse," Dr. Grant ordered. His steel-gray eyes smoldered beneath their heavy lids. After scanning the twisting body that thrashed about on the gurney before him, the doctor turned his attention back to the nurse. "What've we got here, Chapman, some sort of seizure?"
Nurse Chapman looked flushed and stricken. Her face glistened with a slick sheen of sweat that threatened to bead and drip off her long, pointed chin. Crooking her head awkwardly, she struggled to look up at the surgeon towering above her small frame. As she looked into the depths of his uncompromising eyes, the color drained from her face.
N-n-no, Doctor. A-a-a Christian," she stammered.
Dr. Grant's chiseled features tightened into a mask. He glared downwards at the pitiful husk of a man who babbled inanely of the coming rapture. The gurney supporting the once rational thing creaked in protest at each palsied jerk made by the creature.
But the good doctor's eyes held no pity for what lay on the gurney. The creature's philosophy had been its own undoing. Like an addict injecting pure horse into throbbing, distended veins, the Christian had drowned its rational thoughts with rantings of the Anti-mind. Now, its mind bled almost dry of Reason, it suffered the terrible consequences it brought on itself.
Dr. Grant was not without mercy. He tugged the sheet firmly over the bulk of the living corpse as Nurse Chapman openly wept.
"Brain dead," he spat. "Log it as D.O.A."
And the thing was transported swiftly to the morgue. |
