Notes from the Future: Felonious Monk, Part III

I reach again and can close my fingers over the knob. I turn it.

Locked.

Footsteps on gravel, near stomping, close to the left.

"Halt!"

I halt, laying here on my stomach, trying to keep weight off of my right leg, right hand clutching the doorknob that won't turn. Does it matter what I do right now? Future Me is intact, if improperly healed. Maybe I can just stop trying, give up. Submit to the Prophet. Maybe everything will be okay; after all, I survive no matter what, right? All of this occurs to me in a moment as the footsteps come closer and the stepper of foots speaks:

"You halt in the name of the Prophet, Whore, and learn what Price is paid by Whores in the Night," he says, and I hear the click of a flashlight and see my shadow on the door in front of me. "Turn over, Whore. Spread your Unclean Parts for my Inspection."

I can't help it. I laugh, once. Almost a grunt, really, and you'd think this guy would notice the deeper tone. He doesn't. 

A crunch and pain. Sharp, hot, dull pain. He must have hit my leg. My vision is swimming and I'm hearing him whisper intensely about how I'd better turn over or he'll break my other leg because I'm such a whore.

I try to lift my left leg over my right. I'm woozy. I kick my right leg, it hurts like hell, if hell were white hot pincers tearing into that nerve that runs up the center of the leg. I scream.  Why didn't I scream before? Why can't I get my leg over my other leg? I turn my head slightly and, of course, he's pressing the butt of his rifle down on the spot where he hit my right leg. These assholes didn't have guns at the roadblock on Bollinger. Why now?

He's chuckling softly. 

I bend my left leg, try lifting it to get it over my right, it thumps against my cast but then slides over it and I'm able to use this awkward motion, supporting myself now with my hands, to turn over onto my back. 

Thing is, to do this I have to lift my pelvis into the air. And I'm in a hospital gown. So when the gown pulls away because it's pinned under my left hand and this Ezekiel is leaning in, pressing on my leg with his gun, there's my junk about half a foot from his face.

He's staring at it, stupid in confusion. I see him blush in the light from the windows behind me -- were those on before? -- and experience some unexpected self-consciousness.

"Sorry," I say. "Cold night. Shrinkage."

His face screws up in disgust and anger, he rears back, raising his rifle. To beat? To shoot?

The door supporting my shoulders and back yanks open behind me --

"Ezekiel! What do you think you are doing?"

-- and I collapse backward, right leg slamming to the deck. I howl. From somewhere far away I think I hear barking, but a voice is speaking above me and it's a stern woman and I listen closely because, am I going to die now?

"Why have you taken this man from his hospital room? He's a prisoner. And he's injured! What kind of Ezekiel harms an injured man? What kind of Ezekiel sneaks a prisoner out of the Hospital House?" The silence that follows this is the thick, Canadian Bacon kind of silence.

"I was -- he was outside -- I found him --" the Ezekiel is stammering.

"Oh, I saw and heard you threatening to rape this man," the woman says. "Rachels, seize him."

I think I'm going to be seized, but then I see Rachels in white nurse uniforms appear from the darkness around the Ezekiel and one of them has a syringe and injects his neck and he slumps and they easily lift him and step into the house over me, carrying him. I'm in so much pain, I don't even think to look up their skirts. This is how dire my situation is. Surely at least one of these nurses is going commando, and here I am in too much pain to care.

They're gone into the house and I hear rustling cloth and open my eyes as the woman with the firm voice kneels next to me.

"Hello, Edward," she says. Her eyes twinkle. "My name is Henrietta. I'm chief cook and bottle-washer here in the Hospital House. Glad to see you're up and about," she says this all very matter-of-fact as she's taking my pulse and listening to my heartbeat with a stethoscope. She looks me in the eyes. "Though I am surprised to see you here, because I just came from that room across the hall, there, where -- at least two minutes ago -- you were in bed, unconscious."

I'm staring at her. This is very interesting.

"This is very interesting," I say. 

"Yes. You have a fever, young man. I thought we'd gotten that taken care of; come along," and with the help of two nurses who arrive at that moment, I am lifted into a wheelchair. "Now you just sit tight while we get you something for the pain," she says. They move purposefully in three separate directions.

A flash of blue-white light comes from the room closest to me, the room across the hall where she said she'd last seen me. I'm alarmed by the light, it look electrical. I'm opening my mouth to call out when someone in that room shouts:

"Bon Dieu, où l'enfer suis-je? Hannibal!"

I'm trying to maneuver my wheelchair around the corner and into the room as Henrietta and the other two nurses materialize, all carrying some implement of medicine, striding toward me -- and, it looks like, the room -- with purpose.

I manage to get the wheelchair to turn so I can see into the room just as the three women arrive. 

There is a fat old monk standing there, mostly bald with a white beard. He has snow melting on his shoulders. I can smell cold night air on him. 

Seeming to sense us, he whirls. And freezes, staring at me. He has very bright blue eyes.

"Robert?" he asks, his pronunciation French but sounding like old, old, old French. I don't know how I know this. 

He looks from me to the hospital bed, and back to me. He points at each of me at the same time, shakes his head, laughs a little.

"Robert ..." he says. "Vous devez revenir. Il ya plusieurs d'entre eux. Nous ne pouvons pas survivre. Nous avons besoin. Comme il semble y avoir deux d'entre vous, peut-être que vous pouvez épargner au moins un ... ?" 

With a flash like lightning, a blue-white symbol appears in the air above and behind this old monk, seeming to wrap him in its arcane lettering. We're all shading our eyes, trying to see him. He reaches out a hand, calling something to me, his eyes desperate.

Then he's gone.