Wiping the dirt, from his hands
As he walks from the grave
No one was saved…
                                              Eleanor Rigby
                                               The Beatles

I.

Father McKenzie pushed the clip into the M-16 rifle as he sat before the third floor window on Fifth Street and Main in East St. Louis, Illinois. He slid the window up and the cool night breeze swept in and tingled his face with it’s icy breath.

He rested the M-16 on the window sill and looked through the scope and watched the never-ending parade of junkies, prostitutes, pimps and street people that swept by below on the pavement. Snowflakes, large and fluffy, floated down from the black sky.

"Feathers from the wings of restless angels," Father McKenzie muttered.

Watching through the scope, he sighted on a prostitute, having an argument with her pimp boyfriend. The priest knew the young woman.

Twice he had taken her to methadone clinics and helped her dry out. Her name was Carla. She was a short Hispanic-Oriental mix of a woman who at nineteen was more child than adult.

The Father got her accepted at community college twice for a cosmetology program. Both times she promised she would finish and start a new life. She was so grateful that someone would give her a chance to do good that she thanked him with tears in her eyes.

Both times, she dropped out and went back on the streets, to more heroin and more beatings from her pimp when she didn’t bring home enough of the money that her body could make. She still came to confession, so Father McKenzie knew her life was secretly a cycle of self torture.

The priest trained the cross-hairs on the back of Carla’s head.

"Oh, Lord, Father in Heaven, please forgive what your servant is about to do. I want to serve you. I want to do what is right. You leave me only one choice. I am sorry."

He squeezed the trigger.

The M-16 barked in the priest’s hands.

Carla’s head exploded.

Her pimp-boyfriend Raul was showered with blood, bone fragments, bits of skin and teeth and hair.

Raul yelled, "What the fuck!"

Carla flew from her feet in an oddly graceful dive to the pavement.

"Your pain is at an end," Father McKenzie said to himself.

A bag-lady clutching a bottle of MD2020 to her chest began screaming.

* * *

"Father McKenzie was a good guy," The young black priest sitting at Detective Joe Briggs’ desk told him. "He was maybe the only really good man I’ve ever met in my life."

"So you keep saying," Briggs replied. "But I just don’t get this thing. He was so good, why would he ever do this?"

Briggs was a large black man. He dwarfed Father Michael Jones sitting across from him. If you took James Earl Jones’ head and placed it on George Foreman’s body, you’d have Joe Briggs.

Father Jones was shaking his head as he spoke. "All of us other priests, we had ulterior motives for living the life. For me, I just found out early that there were a lot of available women for a pious man. If you don’t have a scary face women will practically throw themselves at you when then figure they’re competing with god. I just kept my affairs private, so I never had a problem."

"Father McKenzie, he was the real thing. All he really ever wanted to do was help people. Praying and doing good works, that’s what he was about."

Joe Briggs looked hard in Father Jones’ face. "I don’t really care how wonderful of a guy your buddy was. I need answers."

II.

Raul spun in a complete circle, trying to figure out where the bullet came from. He had a big black leather cowboy hat on his head with red, white and purple feathers sticking up from the hatband.

Father McKenzie put his next bullet through the center of the feathers and sent the hat flying from Raul’s head, along with a chunk of his scalp and a piece of his brain.

"Forgive me Lord," He said and took aim at the screaming bag-lady. He pumped two shots into her and she stopped screaming.

The street below was emptying quickly. It was hard to aim at running people and make sure the shots would be fatal and death quick.

There was a Cadillac parked at the curb on this side of the street. Thinking they were hidden, two junkies out to get their supply of crack, were crouched beside it.

Police and ambulance sirens screeched through the chilled night air from blocks away, sounding like the screams of crying babies.

* * *

"The work we do, can wear on you," Father Michael Jones told Joe Briggs. "Especially when you’re someone like Father McKenzie was. He wanted to make a difference in those peoples lives. At the very least he wanted to save their souls so that their suffering in this life wouldn’t have been in vain."

"Well, that’s great," Joe Briggs said. "But it doesn’t explain why he grabbed a gun and started shooting these people you say he loved."

Father Jones looked in Joe Briggs’ eyes. He saw the weariness there. "You should understand this more than most people." He paused. "You being a policeman, you should understand how little difference each one of us will really make."

"So what." Briggs answered him. "You just keep trying. That’s all you can do."

"Well, in the case of a true man of faith, there is more that you can do. You can pray."

"Yeah right," Briggs said.

III.

Through the crystalline coolness of the falling snow Father McKenzie watched the people below on the street scattering like frightened ants.

In the end that’s all we are, Father McKenzie thought, as he watched them try to take cover. We are only ants and Our Heavenly Father is the ant-keeper or the exterminator when the mood strikes him.

He sighted on the head of one of the junkies crouched beside the Cadillac.

"Oh Lord," He said out loud. "How could you forsake them like this. They are like blind children wandering in the night."

The junkie in the cross-hairs was Jerome Coffee. He was an ex-golden glove amateur boxer whose dreams of fame and glory went up in the smoke of a crack pipe. At six-foot tall and weighing one-hundred and thirty pounds, now Jerome was so frail that most fourteen year-old boys could put him down.

The priest’s vision momentarily blurred. He wiped a tear from his right eye and pulled the trigger on the M-16.

Jerome Coffee’s head was jerked backward, slamming into the side of the rear end of the Cadillac. The bullet went through Jerome’s head, through the rear panel of the car and into the gas tank.

The explosion was deafening. Flaming pieces of burning car rained down on the street. Jerome’s dead body was tossed against the building Father McKenzie was in like a discarded rag doll.

The other junkie was blown through the air at least thirty feet. Miraculously, he was not knocked unconscious. He landed on his feet with his head and upper torso on fire. The junkie ran down the street screaming in pain.

* * *

"For you and me, praying ain’t no big deal," Father Michael Jones said. "It’s kind of like buying a lottery ticket. No one really expects to win and no one really expects their prayers to be answered."

"So?"

"So for Father McKenzie, it was different. He was tired of all the filth that was shoved on him everyday. Tired of all the suffering and pain that he had to see and could do nothing about. He didn’t just ask for answers. He demanded answers. He demanded that God do something for these people."

IV.

Father McKenzie switched the M-16 to full auto. He sighted on the running, flaming junkie. He sent a short burst into the junkie’s back, shoulders and head. The junkie did a short dance of death for the three seconds that the bullets riddled his body. It looked like he was attempting dance steps he’d seen on Soul Train. He went down on the pavement and continued cooking and didn’t move again.

The shrieking police cars arrived, four of them. One of the cops got on a bull horn. "You in there," He barked. "This is the police." As if he didn’t know. "Cease your firing. We have you surrounded."

"I’m not going anywhere," Father McKenzie said to himself.

* * *

"Lot’s of people pray," Joe Briggs said.

"Yeah, but this time, God listened," Father Jones replied. "God answered him too. Spoke to us all. All of the priest’s of the different religions of the world."

The look that Briggs gave him made Father Jones say, "I’m only here making this statement because I’ve verified what I heard with a lot of other priests from several other faiths. I’ve done a lot of calling over the last few days and a and quite a bit of soul searching."

Joe Briggs leaned forward to listen.

"A voice came from the inside of my head and from all around me. I thought it was a halucination until I talked to other priest’s who told me that the voice told them what it said to me. The voice said, I am your creator. You have taken the gift of an immortal soul and a wonderful world and made a mockery of it all. You are not worthy. I take back the gift of immortality. From this moment forward, the gates to heaven and hell are closed. When you die, you now become only dust."

There was silence between the two men for a minute. Then Briggs asked, "So, that was all that he told you?"

"Yeah, except that he thanked Father McKenzie for finally getting his attention about what a mess we’d made of this world. Of course he did also say that Father McKenzie’s soul would be the only one he’d take into heaven."

V.

Father McKenzie stood up in front of the window with the M-16 in his hands. Through the door to the hallway he heard the sound of running feet as a swat team converged on this room.

A voice shouted over the bull-horn, "Drop your weapon out the window. Stand with your hands in the air. Police officers will be entering your room. Do not resist and you will not be harmed."

Father McKenzie had a powerful urge to lean out the window and shout, "All right coppers, you’ll have to come in and get me. You’re not taking me alive!" Instead, he said nothing. He stood with his back to the open window, pushed the button on the M-16 to eject the clip and let it fall to the floor.

A loud knock came at the door followed by, "Open up! This is the Police!"

Standing with the M-16 pointed at the ceiling, Father Mckenzie waited for what would happen next.

He didn’t have to wait long.

There was a loud crash and the door was knocked inward off it’s hinges by two Swat team members using a battering ram. Two others ran around them and dove to the floor with their rifles pointed at Father McKenzie.

"Drop the weapon!" One of them shouted.

Father McKenzie had an odd look of serenity on his face as he brought the barrel of the M-16 down.

"Don’t!" The other officer shouted.

When the M-16’s barrel was at chest height, they opened fire.

Father Mckenzie was knocked backwards by the bullets that pumped into his body. Chunks of flesh and blood flew out of him and sprayed the walls on both sides of the window behind him. He went backwards crashing through the glass, his arms outstretched like an angel who had never learned to fly, then smashed into the sidewalk.

* * *

Father Michael Jones signed the statement he gave to Detective Joe Briggs and they shook hands.

Briggs asked, "How do you feel about the message you were given?"

"I just have this feeling of sadness because of the way we messed everything up. In the beginning, the world was beautiful."

Briggs watched as the young priest walked away.