“I shouldn’t have said the Angel of Death; that sounds awfully arrogant of me.” The killer remained standing by the window with his back to it, effectively silhouetting himself so that Jason couldn’t identify him. “I’m an angel of death. I’m not the only one—there are others.”

“Orville, is that you?” Jason asked as the pieces began to fit together, finally making sense in his mind.

“That’s one of my names.” He held the spiked club casually at his side.

Jason remembered the thin, bearded man with the curly hair, the shell-shocked World War I veteran who gave Jason his trench knife but wound up taking it back later in the night. “You remember giving me your knife?”

“I realize now that you were my test, to see if I was ready, to see if I was worthy of becoming an angel of death.” Orville gestured to his chest with his trench club. “There was something weak in me. When I fought who I was and tried to put the war behind me, I was a restless, driven soul, but once I embraced who I am, I found peace.”

“Embraced who you are?”

“I kill people—that is my gift. It’s my calling, Maybe you’ve seen newsreels of men going over the wire in the daylight as the shells fall, leading with bayonets—that’s horse feathers.” Orville drew his trench knife from his side, slipping his left fingers through the brass knuckles. The spikes glinted in the moonlight. “We’d go out at night, try to kill as many krauts as possible, silently, get intel. Nobody was better than me, not even close.”

“To be honest, you did a good job the other day, taking out five of the mayor’s goons.” That was not just cheap flattery, but Jason was really impressed by Orville’s ability to silently take out the mayor’s men.

“You tested me, helped me realize my greatness, so you’re under my protection.” Orville looked at the tip of his knife, studying the edge. “My wife is having an affair with someone.”

Jason froze in fear. He was unarmed, naked, and paralyzed from the waist down, and yes, Jason had screwed Orville’s wife. It’s probably not a good idea to screw the wife of a man who regards himself as an angel of death, and actually has the skills to make a convincing claim.

“But that’s okay. I’m not a lover. Don’t even know what love is—that’s not what I’m here for.” Orville shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “Debbie was another test, to see if I was truly committed to answering the Lord’s call. I realized I had to leave her behind. She’s a good woman but killing is what I do—it’s why I’m here, and I can’t let a woman distract me, make me shirk my responsibilities.”

“A question, Orville. Why do you carry the knife point-down?”

The silhouette of the man at the window perked up, becoming enthusiastic. “With the point up, from the lip of the trench, it’s hard to stab downward. Once you’re inside the trench, all you have is the upward thrust, which is too easy to block.”

“But couldn’t someone just as easily block the downward thrust?” Jason pulled up his sheet to warm him. He tried to ignore the corpses on the floor and wondered when someone would show up to turn on the lights and help him.

“Laura had the night shift,” Orville told him. “No one will be here until the shift changes. But if someone tries to block the downward thrust, like an icepick, I can hook his arm, pull in, then cut outward against the throat.”

In his excitement, Orville demonstrated. “Someone blocks the club, the knife comes under and hooks, pulling and cutting. Or suppose I throw the fist to the chin: with the tip point-up at the sky, there’s no place for the blade to cut, but if I throw the punch to his chin tip-down, the blade is already cutting into his chest, and it’s an easy matter to twist the hand, slicing across his throat.”

“Thanks, Orville, you saved my ass here tonight.” Jason looked at the bodies crumpled in odd positions on the floor. “No telling what these crazy bastards were capable of.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Orville told him. “I see lots more in the city.”

That was a scary thought. Jason saw a light flash through the glass window in the door somewhere down the hall and felt elated. Sure, Orville, had saved him, but a person couldn’t bank on the mental stability of a man who called himself an angel of death, who was armed to the teeth, and who had just killed four people in the room.

When Jason looked back to the window, Orville was gone, and the window closed shut. That guy was a damn ghost. A nurse came to the door and opened it tentatively. “Are you okay? It’s like the power went out in this wing.”

“Or someone cut the lines,” Jason replied.

As the door yawned open, a hazy light fell over the figures on the floor, starting with the priestess. “Laura?” the nurse asked. “Laura?” The nurse started to crouch down, but saw the depression in the center of her forehead, where blood trickled from a hole the diameter of a nail. She screamed, a blood-curdling scream that consisted of one long, unwavering note that hurt his ears. She bolted up right and ran back down the corridor. Her scream echoed down the hall, until she was finally able to babble random words. “Dead! She’s dead! They’re…Oh my God! blood on the floor her head!”

As uncomfortable as Jason felt having Orville in the room, he was now alone with the bodies of four Satan worshippers on the floor. What was it they said about war, that it was 98% boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror? Jason had endured two days of monotony in his room, and now everything seemed to have gone off the rails.

Jason looked down at his legs. The capuchin sat on its haunches and flashed Jason that wide toothy smile, which always looked forced. The monkey took off his fez and held it with the brim up. Looking at Jason, he quickly arched his brows twice.

“What happened to your cup?” Jason wondered.

“I’m traveling light. There aren’t a whole lot of busking opportunities inside a hospital at 2 a.m.” He shook his fez and jiggled it a couple of times, stretching it toward Jason.

Jason removed his crumpled gown from off of his stomach and held it up like a dead raccoon. “I don’t even have my gown on, don’t have any clothes, don’t have pockets, and certainly don’t have a dime on me now.”

“No problem, we’ll do an IOU.” The monkey clambered closer and peered at Jason’s forehead. “Where’s your scar?”

“I don’t know. The nurse says it’s gone.” Jason started to slip on his robe.

“How did you know I was here?” The monkey flashed that wide, cheesy grin.

“It’s kind of hard to miss a capuchin in a red fez and vest with bright red trim.” Damn hospital gowns were a pain in the ass, draping a person’s chest from the front, like a poorly-designed apron.

“Maybe you felt me on your legs.” The monkey arched his eyebrows and regarded Jason with bulging eyes.

“What are you saying?” Jason was knotting one of the ties of his gown behind his neck, as though it were a bib.

The monkey reached down and yanked the bandage off of Jason’s leg.

“Arrrgh! Sonofabitch!” Jason yelled.

The monkey peered down at the spot where the chimpanzee had shot Jason with a .38 revolver. “This wound is healed, completely.” He ran a soft hand over the area.

“Hey! You can’t be touching an open wound with your...” Jason stopped in mid-sentence. “Wait a minute, that hurt when you ripped off the bandage.”

“When you got tested for hemochromatosis, and started getting treatment, that took your health up to a whole new level,” the monkey explained.

“But nobody comes back from a severed spine.” Jason leaned forward to tap his thigh. “I’ll be damned. I can feel that.”

“You’re having a conversation with an incredibly articulate monkey, so there are no limits.” The monkey sat the fez back on its head. “True story. Men are stranded on a boat in the ocean, thirsting to death. As thirsty as they are, they know they can’t drink the ocean water, because saltwater causes hallucinations and only speeds up dehydration and death. Another boat arrives, and the dying men are thrilled because they’re saved. The crew of the new ship tells them that the Amazon River pushes fresh water far out to sea. ‘You’ve been drifting in fresh water that you could have been drinking this whole time.’”

“So you’re saying I can walk?” Jason asked incredulously.

“Well, zombie walk, but you could call it a walk.” The monkey hopped down off of Jason’s legs and then dropped off of the bed, landing in a crouch.

Jason whipped off the sheet and tried to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, but they sat there like ham hocks. He was forced to use his arms to lift and push his legs off of the bed. Resting his hands on the edge of the bed, there was no way he could step down, so he had to attempt a short hop. His knees bent, then buckled when his feet hit the floor, which made him claw at the sheet to hold himself upright. He took one hesitant, shaky foot forward, and began to swing the other foot forward, when it clipped the corpse of a devil worshipper sprawled over the floor. Jason tottered and fell.

He turned to give the monkey a reproachful look, but the capuchin was gone.

Lying among the corpses on the floor was all the motivation Jason needed to crawl up to his knees, then up to his feet, and take several staggering steps to the door. He pawed the door open and stumbled down the hall, using the wall for support. Like a zombie, his feet scuffed the floor because he couldn’t quite lift them cleanly.

“I’m walking!” Maybe it was a stumbling gait, but if he walked like a zombie maybe it was because he felt like he’d just climbed out of the grave. He avoided the elevator and continued down the hall to the stairway. Yes, the stairs were going to be a lot harder, but he wouldn’t be trapped in an elevator and have to answer a lot of questions or get returned to his room.

Jason grabbed the handrail with both hands, and began lowering himself downward, like the opposite pulling in a rope hand over hand. His feet scraped and flopped over the edge of the steps, before plunking down on to the step below. It wasn’t pretty, but he was going down the stairs. He toppled forward, and spun, holding onto the handrail to keep from falling. He had to pull himself back up and get back upright so he could keep going down the stairs.

He reached the landing when he saw a sign in the form of an arrow pointing down the hall. “2nd Floor Surgery.” Dammit, he had another flight of stairs to negotiate, and he was still in his hospital gown, which was breezy and ill-fitting in the best of circumstances, but he’d only be able to fasten one tie.

He spied a janitorial closet to his right and decided that he could rest there. His hands were splayed against the wall for support, when he shifted to a decorative wood fixture running along the wall at waist height to help prop himself up. Looking over his shoulder at an awkward angle, he saw a chubby nurse emerge from surgery, taking purposeful strides toward the stairway.

“Celia!” Jason hissed.

The curvy nurse spun and looked at him. “Mr. Whitlock, what are you…” Then her brain bogged down, trying to process what she was seeing. She knew Jason’s diagnosis and prognosis as well as anyone. She had worked with dozens, if not hundreds of paralytic patients, and knew that paralysis was a one-way street, from which no one ever returned. Jason was not only paralyzed from the waist down, but had a number of herniated and fractured discs in his upper back, which made movement painful and dangerous, with the potential for a broken disc to cut the spinal cord. But her patient was walking along the side of the wall, and somehow had negotiated a flight of steps.

“Dios mío. Es un milagro,” she said in an awed whisper.

“Come here!” Jason said in a stage whisper, and gestured for her to join him in the closet. He agreed with her statement that it was a miracle, but he didn’t know how to explain it to her, nor did he have the time to try. He was swinging the door open, pushing down onto the knob for support, when Celia arrived at the closet far more quickly than he could stumble his way into it.

Celia helped support him, propping him up under the shoulder, and guiding him into the janitorial closet, where Jason leaned against a cart with a canvas trash bag and a rack for brooms and window squeegees. A leather thong dangled form a bare light bulb above him, so he yanked it downward, and the closet was lit.

“What happened to you?” she asked, and her tight breasts in her white nurse’s uniform pushed up against him as they were forced to huddle together in the confines of the closet.

“Let’s call it a Christmas miracle.” Jason grabbed both of her shoulders and looked at her intensely. “You can’t tell anyone I’m here. You can’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Someone tried to kill me, and I’ve got to get out of here. Understand?”

“But you, you’re paralyzed.” Her brown eyes looked at him curiously. “How?”

“I need my clothes.” Jason ran a hand through her frizzy black hair. “Can you get me my clothes? And don’t say a word!”

She nodded, and slipped out of the broom closet, which smelled of floor polish. Jason left the door open just a crack, and watched her butt knock from side to side under her tight skirt as she bounded up the stairs with rapid steps.

An idea formed in Jason’s head that he needed to get away from the hospital without anyone knowing he’d left. The mayor had already tried to kill him at the rectory, only Jason turned the tables on the damn chimp, and now someone had tried to kill him in his room. He needed to get out of the hospital, sneak out undetected, and hide somewhere until he could figure out his next move.

Peering through the crack in the doorway, Jason saw movement, and was elated at the thought of Celia returning with his clothes, but then he realized that the person approaching the closet was the janitor, as evident by the mass of keys on his belt. The man walked with a limp, as though each step on his right side dropped into a trench three inches deep.

How was Jason going to explain his presence in a janitorial closet? In his flimsy gown, it would be clear that he was a patient. If the janitor spotted him, then his plan to sneak out of the hospital was ruined, and he might as well send a map to the next chopper squad to come for him, marking his location with an ‘X’.