Fall of Heaven III: The Death of Faith View Story Summary
Sabraton emerged moments later, followed by four women in robes. They looked like nuns in dark blue habits. Their skin was wrinkled with age and their eyes were covered with a white film, affecting that they were blind; yet they walked surefootedly behind the thin form of which Sabraton was possessed. The last woman pushed a long metal cart, which appeared to be almost six feet long. Its top shelf was covered with a sheet, the shelf below it home to surgical implements that could have also been torture devices.
As if it were a show, Sabraton’s Nurses halted the cart in the middle of the gym floor, so that the length of the table was visible from the bleachers. Malquior brought Judas to the four hags, and two of them took his arms. They grinned greedily, and there were few teeth to be seen in their wrinkled gums, which bled in some places as their mouths split with their expression.
The Nurses were stronger than Judas had imagined. The two grasping his arms dragged him to the cart, forcing him down onto the white sheet that covered the cold metal, while the other two removed their tools: one which looked like eyelash clippers, and one that seemed like a distant cousin to an ice cream scoop, with a sweeping blade that was sharpened exquisitely.
Judas struggled, but the Nurses held him fast. One of the Nurses, the one with the eyelash clippers, held his head down by the forehead with her right hand. With her left hand she maneuvered the clipper-like implement first to the man’s left eye.
The clipper forced the eyelid open, and Judas could not draw the lids together without ripping the flesh that was caught in the tool. The other Nurse with the scoop put the thing over Judas’s left eye, just below the spot where the clipper-thing held his eyelid. With a press of the little lever, the blade in the scoop swept around in an arc, with such force that it cut through the optic nerve.
Judas shrieked in agony as the world swam before his remaining eye, and where the other would have been there were flashes of red from the alarm and the pain. “God!” he cried, thrashing in the grip of the other Nurses. The clipper tool let go of his eyelid and he closed the empty socket where his eye should have been, even as it filled with blood.
“You must stop the bleeding, sister,” one of the restraining Nurses said, in a high-pitched, grating voice.
“One thing at a time, my dear!” the one with the eyelid holder replied, her words cracking in her mouth as she spoke. Her voice was lower than the first Nurse’s, but no less unpleasant. She knelt down to grab the surgical sewing kit on the bottom shelf, and offered the eyelid holder to the Nurse to whom she had spoken.
The other operating Nurse now had Judas’s eye in the scoop, like ice cream waiting to be transferred into a bowl for dessert. She unscrewed the cap of a jar on the lower shelf of their operating table and dropped the enucleated eyeball in. With mild interest she watched her sisters sew up the optic nerve and try to stem the bleeding.
