He soon realized why his friends had mostly stayed away before. It wasn’t because Lansdale and his fake dose had led him to think he was getting cured. His friends didn’t visit him here for one simple fact: he was in hell. Not even they could reach him in hell. He was back in the shit, was what he was. When a certain brand of GI went back up on the line, getting his hands bloody and his brain blackened all over again, his troubles would recede. That was why certain GIs needed to be back in combat so bad—until it became a death wish.

“Come and get it over with,” he shouted into the blanket only to inhale the sour air of the untold numbers who wore this grisly shroud before him.

Another hour passed. Hours? He was losing sense of time. He flung the damn blanket off and paced the room, the harsh light glaring down on him as he shielded his eyes with a hand like some sickly catatonic salute. Soon his stomach rumbled and he had a dry, metallic taste in his mouth. He had to urinate so he yelled, “Hey! Gotta piss here. Got a bucket? Hey!”

No one came. He urinated into the drain in the floor, and the translucent yellow of his stream told him he still had nutrients in him. “Lucky man,” he muttered.

He paced the room again—five steps one way, then the other, back and forth, gotta keep moving, always keep moving, stop and he was cornered. But he was fully cornered now. They were training him as an assassin. Some might call it a hit man, others an insurgent, and some a hero. No matter the name, history told that an assassin was used for all manner of power politics, good and bad and every credo in between. Often a lowly assassin such as he was presumed to be acting alone if not crazed, especially at first, but history often proved that certain forces were at least influencing the assassin if not ordering him directly. The targets varied. Regicides. Czars killed. Among the US presidential shootings, there was John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was used by the powerful as a pretext to set in motion the mobilizations that began the first World War. And not twenty years later, the Nazis used assassination attempts and bombings real and invented to begin dismantling democracy for one final Teutonic cataclysm.