Runaway Nun (Misbegotten)

RUNAWAY NUN

A
Novella By Caesar Voghan

Copyright © 2014 by Caesar Voghan

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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 cloudless 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.