The Darkest Evening of the Year

cover, and as Brian turned back to Vanessa, he saw her stab Amy a second time, with another down stroke, and then she surprised him by shoving Amy toward him and surprised him again by coming at him as Amy fell forward between them. She might have half climbed over Amy to slash his face, but he emptied the gun at her, and she was done.
    Quaking with terror, he threw aside his gun, dropped to his knees beside Amy, whose face had darkened from white to pale gray, and took her pistol.
    Looking under the table, he saw Michael across the room, lying in blood, looking as if his shade had already left his flesh and was boarding the Hellbound train. His arm was stretched out in front of him, his pistol pointed at Brian, and enough of a quiver of life remained in him to pull the trigger.
    The round hit Brian in the abdomen, knocked him off his knees, and onto the floor beside Amy, where his left hand fell into her upturned right palm.
    If he was going out for good, he wanted to squeeze her hand, but he didn’t have the strength, and neither did she.
    The pain was so fierce, a furious white heat, that his vision blurred, but he nevertheless saw Hope toddering through the back door, trying to stay on her feet as Nickie dragged her with all the power of a team of sled dogs. In fact, as Brian began to go blind, in the strange euphoria accompanying massive blood loss, he saw Nickie fly over the table, toward them, and Hope flying, too, one hand clutched around the dog’s collar.

 
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    A my and Brian agreed that they were not cut out to kill people. They just didn’t have the right stuff.
    For one thing, they regretted having to pull the trigger even on certifiable sociopaths like Philip Marlowe. That turned out to be the born moniker of Billy Pilgrim et al., a name he never used because he hated all that it stood for.
    Their regret did not go as far as maturing into remorse. But when they thought about pulling the trigger on Billy and Michael and Vanessa, they sometimes felt a little sick to their stomachs, though Alka-Seltzer usually helped, also Rolaids Softchews.
    Another thing they were not good at anymore was skepticism in spiritual matters. Amy always had been a believer with an open mind, although stories about phone calls from dead nuns would once have tested the limits of her credulity.
    Brian traveled a greater arc than she had; now he acknowledges layers of mystery in the world, and he recognizes that what he saw in Nickie’s eyes was the light of a divine presence, perhaps the innocent soul of Amy’s murdered daughter empowered to return for a brief time and a limited purpose, or an angel.
    He is certain now that the sound he heard in his apartment, when he obsessively rendered Nickie’s eyes, had been the laboring of enormous wings, which argued for the angel answer. Amy’s view is that, since the job-assignment and promotion policies in celestial realms are not known to any living person, there is every reason to assume that the entity in Nickie was both her lost daughter and an angel, which were one and the same.
    A thing Amy and Brian were good at was dying without serious consequences. They had been mortally wounded in the kitchen of the caretaker’s house. They entertain no doubt about that, yet here they are, not only alive but without scars.
    The way Hope tells it—and she does not lie—Nickie dragged her into the kitchen and flew with her over the table. Hope had seen dead people often enough, but she had never flown on a dog before. She let go of the collar and “sat down plop and said Whoa .”
    Nickie spread herself over the wounded Amy and Brian as if she were a furry blanket. Their pale faces regained color, their eyes fluttered open, a few minor blemishes unrelated to the shooting and stabbing cleared up, Brian’s beard stubble vanished, Amy remembered where she had misplaced a recipe for fudge a year earlier, Brian found he’d regrown the wisdom teeth he’d had pulled years ago, and all the blood on their clothes and on the floor just “kinda went somewhere some way.”
    Hope also says Nickie did a “really silly lot of face licking” during the first few minutes of the healing, which explains why Brian’s first complaint after resurrection was that his lips tasted funny.
    Neither Amy nor Brian has any doubt that in addition to physical healing, they received psychological and emotional healing, for they have found peace sooner than their experiences would seem to allow.