Runaway Nun (Misbegotten) Read online

  RUNAWAY NUN

  A Novella By Caesar Voghan

  Copyright © 2014 by Caesar Voghan

  No portion of this eBook may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reversed engineered, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval device, in any form and by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the author’s permission is deemed copyright infringement and punishable by the law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the writer, the editors, and the graphic artists behind this eBook.

  Runaway Nun is the opening novella of Misbegotten Vol. 1, The Road to Harlequin Island by Caesar Voghan. Copyright © 2014 Caesar Voghan.

  Runaway Nun serves as the basis for the adaption into the graphic novel Misbegotten, Issue 1: Runaway Nun, illustrated by Justin Case. Copyright © 2014 Caesar Voghan.

  Misbegotten is a screenplay registered with The Writers Guild of America, West, Inc., reg. no. 1643624

  For updates on the release dates of the novel and the future installments of the novel/graphic novel, check www.Facebook.com/MisbegottenTheNovel

  Story Editors: Ryan Oyler & Jay Murphree

  Copyeditor: Jen Juneau

  Cover Designed by Marilen Adrover

  Cover Photo by Mark Avgust

  In A.D. 1190, King Richard Lionheart sailed at the head of a fleet of 250 ships on a crusade to the Holy Land to recapture Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslim conquerors.

  During a sixteen-month campaign, Lionheart married a Spanish princess, almost died of scurvy, and won the admiration of all his enemies for his reckless valor in battle.

  To keep his soldiers’ minds pure, he fined those who used profanities, flogged the gamblers, banned prostitutes from traveling along, and enforced strict prayer routines.

  He reached within sight of the walls of the Holy City, but fatigued, outnumbered, and broken-hearted, he turned around without laying siege. Jerusalem was never recaptured.

  Richard Lionheart was thirty-three years old—the same age Jesus from Nazareth was when he was crucified.

  Runaway Nun

  Prologue

  The Last Supper of AH-21-RPK047-Q&Q

  From the berth where he lay wrapped in a blanket, Adolf Hitler fastened his stare on the crucifix stuck on the cabin’s bulkhead: two twigs held in place with a string of rusty wire and the stripped, withered man latched onto them. No crown of thorns dripping blood, no mane of curls fallen over eyes ravaged by Heaven’s wrath—Jesus had no hair and no eye sockets; he had a crooked grin, a short oblique slit etched into the wood under a nose curved like the beak of a bird of prey.

  The dry rasp of Adolf’s syncopated breathing grazed the silence inside the cabin. His chest barely swelled beneath the covers as the air whizzed in and out of his failing lungs. His eyes, moist and dusk, remained pinned to the figurine abandoned on its holy perch.

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam eternam. Amen…” Father Micon’s voice interrupted the dying man’s reverie.

  Adolf’s head fell back onto the pillow, and his eyes shifted to the sixty-year-old black man arrayed in a sackcloth cassock. A simple rosary hung around Micon’s neck, as it was customary for the abbot of a Franciscan monastery. His fallen hood revealed a bald head with tiny clumps of gray hair scattered around the temples like small clouds hovering over a dark and desolated planet. A frown dug its trench at the root of his nose—a scar left by long vigils filled with regrets and unanswered questions, lonely nights of which a pair of remorseful eyes testified silently. Seated at the edge of the bed, the priest raised his hand holding a communion wafer.

  Adolf glanced at the thin, almost translucent sliver of unleavened bread. The dry scent of baked flour teased his nostrils briefly, then vanished, swallowed by the stench of decaying flesh—his flesh. He returned his death-stung eyes on the wooden Christ.

  Following Adolf’s stare, the priest, too, rested his sights on the makeshift rood. A boy, or maybe a girl—somebody named Jacob or Sophia, faceless shadows living in one of the hundreds of orphanages that littered the barren landscape of Amerikania—had carved the artifact during their woodworking class, but neither Jacob nor Sophia cared too much for the Savior’s face. All that mattered was the bare, roughly hewn shape of a crucified human. A gaunt silhouette, bald and eyeless.

  At least the ribs are all there, Micon thought, and he counted them. Half a dozen hurried scratches. The wound was there, too—a smear of red ink marked the spot where the centurion pierced God’s own heart shedding blood and water. There were nails drawn through the figurine’s wrists, barely visible under a thin coat of paint, so from a distance it looked like the man from Nazareth defied gravity by means of a mysterious, albeit cruel, force.

  The fluorescent lamp on the bulkhead buzzed and flickered erratically. Shafts of light seeped through the wafer approaching the dying man’s lips. Adolf opened his mouth and took in the Eucharistic provision. The abbot smiled, and his pupils welled up. He wiped a wandering tear away with the heels of his palm. He had seen the mystery at work countless times. One last meal. A thin sliver of bread. An arcane rite in which all souls eventually found solace at the portals of death.

  Adolf tightened his jaw and tried to crunch the wafer, but he couldn’t muster the strength. The bread melted slowly on his tongue and gathered at the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and swallowed the lump with the body of God—a small holy fetus made of baked flour and a dying man’s saliva. He strained to speak. Heaved. A labored rasp left his lips. Eyes shut tight, he swallowed again and grabbed the abbot’s hand.

  “May God pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed by the evil use of thy body, my brother,” Father Micon said, squeezing the replika’s hand.

  Adolf let out a grunt, then opened his eyes and glanced one last time at the outcast clinging to his contorted wood, alone in his agony. He tried to smile, but only a fright-filled rictus quivered on his face. He lifted his arm halfway toward the skinny Christ and gaped in a mute resignation. The sleeve of his gown fell back revealing the serial number branded on his wrist in thin keloid-letters: AH-21-RPK047-Q&Q.

  Outside, the ocean kept smashing angry swells against the hull of the aircraft carrier. The muttered splashes reverberated through the ship’s armature like the fading echo of an angry God giving up on his world, fleeing back into whatever hidden darkness He had come from in the first place.

  Adolf’s limp hand slumped on the blanket. His eyelids, heavy with darkness, closed. One last tear rolled down his cheekbone—a round, clear bead that drew a wet trail over the blistered skin of his face as it made its way toward his chin.

  A wisp left his lips, and death claimed him.

  Father Micon traced the sign of the cross over Adolf’s forehead. “Pax tecum,” he whispered.

  Dressed in their sackcloth Franciscan habits, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi stepped from the doorway, laid a white shroud over Adolf’s lifeless body and started to wrap the dead replika in it.

  “Thank you, my brothers,” Micon said.

  He patted Churchill on the arm, then stepped out of the cabin and strolled away down the ship’s dimly lit passageway.

  1

  Churning the crisp morning air with their howling rotors, the three Black Hawk helicopters sailed over the rocky carpet of the Arizona desert. The vast expanse of sun-scorched hardpan was once again set ablaze by the shimmering orb ascending from behind the long ridges cresting the horizon in the East. The cloud
less sky looked aflame with the sunrise, too.

  Inside the point helicopter, the squad of warrior monks was busily readying their fighting gear for the day’s raid. Some tightened the leather straps on the patches of armor covering their chests and shoulders. Others double-checked the firing mechanisms on the multi-shot crossbows resting in their laps, oiling their springs, nuts, and levers, or testing the bowstrings. Most of them carried swords; a few carried battle-axes—double-bladed hacking weapons designed to cut through wood and iron alike.

  Clad in the black Jesuit cassock, Father Elano slid a whetstone over the blade of his broadsword. The faint grind of the hone caressing the steel was barely audible, as the dull thumping of the propeller’s blades drowned out any other noise inside the cabin.

  From the glistening surface of the blade, a man stared back, and for a few moments Elano didn’t recognize himself. Lured by the rotors’ numbing cadence, he let his mind play with the thought that an evil twin was looking back at him from behind a divide that kept castaway souls at bay. His shoulder-length hair gathered in a small bun, the same three-day stubble coating his face, the Cardinal cross hanging from his neck, everything was there, except the eyes—vacant, shadowed by doubt and a tiresome discontent, eyes he refused to recognize as his own. Elano shook the thought off. With long strokes, he made a few more gentle passes with the whetstone over the blade’s edge, carefully avoiding the inscription engraved on it:

  “In Nomine Domine”

  The copilot’s head appeared in the doorframe of the cockpit, looked over at Elano, and raised his right hand, all five fingers spread out.

  “Five minutes to the drop zone, Monsignor,” the copilot said.

  Elano shifted his gaze to the rows of black-clad warriors. Young men in pursuit of God’s enemies, all in their twenties, fearless, covered in prayer, ready to stomp on and crush the head of the Snake—the Serpent of old, Satan himself. He looked at them with pride, and pitied those who might be dead by the end of the day. It had been almost seven years, by now. Four as a warrior himself, and three as a Cardinal—seven years chasing the unfaithful, seven years strewn with bodies sprawled in death and eyes staring into quiet voids not of their own choosing. The Western provinces were roaming with tribes of diggers: men and women dragging their shadows through the mounds of rubles, scavenging in the old ruins, burrowing through their tunnels in search of the World Before. Was it worth hunting them down, crushing their shafts leading to the underworld and gambling on the lives of all these young monks day in and day out? The Holy See had decreed, “Yes!” The Church’s re-education centers—the feared coalmines in the Carolinas—were brimming with stubborn, unrepentant diggers. For most of them Elano had already paid a price in blood—a price he found harder and harder to bear with each Search, Capture & Destroy mission. He’d thought more than once to ask the Holy Father to release him of his assignment, but to what end? Lionheart’s sword was entrusted to him and him alone; he had taken an oath before the entire Curia—it was bound on Earth, as it was bound in Heaven.

  Elano glanced over to the back of the cabin. Monk Ulf, a stern-looking boy found in the rubbles of a Las Vegas casino and now a full-fledged man and choice fighter, was praying silently, his fingers gently scrolling along the beads of a rosary. Ulf had been ordained to priesthood only a week earlier, but Elano had already appointed him as his second in command. It was Ulf’s first raid in that capacity, and he’d taken it upon himself to prove he was worth every ounce of trust. He had asked the night before to lead the first squad during the attack, and Elano had granted him the wish.

  The young monk felt Elano’s stare—he opened his eyes and turned his head toward his commander. Elano nodded once, in a silent go-ahead.

  Ulf got up and panned his eyes over his comrades, inspecting their fighting gear with a piercing stare. The airborne monks raised their heads, waiting. When he had their attention, Ulf pointed two fingers toward his heart and traced through the air a quick arc toward the floor of the cabin.

  “Load the crossbows!” he shouted loud enough to cover the blare of the engines.

  With fast movements betraying long hours of practice, the monks loaded the clips, each filled with six four-inch unforgiving steel bolts. Once they’d spanned the strings into the firing position, they rested the crossbows between their legs.

  Elano followed Ulf with the corner of his eye. As a young boy, Ulf had spent ten years in Beatus Lacrimae, the same Franciscan orphanage in the Panhandle where Elano himself had grown up. All his warriors were orphans, and all had put in their time at one orphanage or another before entering the Jesuit cadet school at the age of seventeen. The Franciscans raised the boys; the Jesuits turned them into men. On the training grounds in Nova Scotia, spiritual disciplines were matched with intensive training in swordsmanship, Aikido, flight lessons, and even firearms instruction. Although the Gunpowder Ban had been strictly enforced by the Church under the threat of anathema, the Jesuit monk warriors underwent training in handling firearms, just in case they found themselves in situations where firing an assault rifle or a .45 was their only recourse of defense.

  Reports from the scouts did mention the presence of firearms inside the diggers’ compound they were headed toward. As he rested the tip of his broadsword against one of the wooden shields that lined the cabin’s floor, Elano prayed that death wouldn’t touch his young men that day. He inspected the blade’s fresh sharpness with his thumb, then he used a corner of his robe to wipe the sword’s hilt and coat of arms cast into the cross-guard—the Three-Lion Crest, Lionheart’s heritage passed through the ages from one generation of holy warriors to another. He interlocked his fingers over the handle grip and bowed his head in a consecration prayer.

  The nonstop grinding of the chopper’s blades created a numbing rhythm to which Elano tried for a few long seconds to align the words of his silent prayer, but frustrated, he gave up. He said a quick Hail Mary instead, grabbed the leather-strapped handle of his broadsword with both hands, and lunged to his feet.

  All the warrior monks inside the helicopter followed suit.

  2

  The three Black Hawks swooped low over the wall of the compound. From the open door of the leading helicopter, Elano surveyed the fortified wall that surrounded the digger’s hideout. A once-upon-a-time two-story-tall concrete stockade that encircled a military base, the wall had been reinforced with huge junkyard wreckages that included anything from crushed carcasses of eighteen-wheelers to dismantled high-voltage latticed poles, all piled on top of each other and rigged in place with plenty of razor wire. Here and there, long sharp spikes protruded from the convoluted metallic hotchpotch like the quills of a giant porcupine.

  An intricate web of steel cables roofed the enclosure, rendering impossible any kind of landing inside the compound’s walled perimeter. Two double-deckers sat with their rusty wheels on top of a set of railway tracks lined up transversally in front of the access gate. Ten-foot-wide and high enough for a man on horse to pass through, the gate was the only opening in the fortified wall.

  Elano turned to Ulf and pointed toward the two busses.

  Ulf nodded.

  A pump-action shotgun in one hand and a worn-out leather bandoleer full of shells in the other, the High Priest barged through the door of his aluminum trailer shaped like a blown-up torpedo. His hair hung in long thick braids over shoulders covered in intricate tattoos mixing Wiccan symbols and overly detailed vignettes from Kama Sutra. He was wearing only a pair of old breeches stuck inside equestrian boots the color of dried cranberries; thick veins wreathed his muscles, turning his lanky torso into an ideal showcase for an anatomy lesson. Yet the gray hairs in his beard and the wrinkles coating his suntanned face gave true testimony of his age—he was well into his fifties.

  “Sons of one-legged whores,” he muttered under his breath as he scowled at the whirring helicopters, the mad twirl of their propellers sending a shock wave through his trailer. From its doorway, three teenage girls, their long ha
ir in disarray, wrapped their nightgowns around their bony frames, and followed their master’s stare into the sky.

  The grinding turbines hollering above sent scores of diggers charging out of the run-down trailers and mobile homes arranged in a U shape, facing the entrance of a shaft that led to an underground gallery. They glowered at the descending helicopters, and ran back inside their rickety shelters only to emerge seconds later brandishing swords, spears, slingshots, pitchforks, bows, and arrows. With anxious stares, they turned to their leader.

  “Lock the gates!” the High Priest barked, pointing at the double-deckers. “Shelter the women and children!”

  The three young concubines jumped on the ground and darted to the entrance of the shaft, trailing the women and children who were already seeking cover underground. A group of diggers raced to the two buses and started to drag them toward each other in an attempt to cover the entrance of the compound like a double gate. Tires long gone, flaky paint curling off their sunbaked chassis, the busses squealed over the two tracks held firmly into the ground with thick iron barbs.

  With the rest of the defenders in tow, the High Priest ran to the fortified wall. They climbed to their posts behind the parapet of the scaffold-rampart that traced the wall on the inside. Arrows were hooked in, the bows’ strings pulled back. Extracting one shell at a time from his bandoleer, the High Priest loaded his shotgun methodically, cursing all gods that came to his mind—both those he worshiped and those he despised.

  The choppers finally landed, buffeting twirls of red dust with their prop wash.

  Within seconds, the three squads of monks jumped out and advanced toward the diggers’ compound. Like rehearsing a well-drilled maneuver, they maintained a tight phalanx formation, their shields held high, loaded crossbows at ready, swords unsheathed. Arrows kept whizzing toward them, biting into the raised shields with a dull thud. Rocks hurled from swirling slingshots rained harmlessly on top. Once in a while, a spear would whistle through the air and jab at the sandy terrain, then get crushed by the raiders’ hasty feet.