Free Runaway Nun (Misbegotten) by Caesar Voghan Page A

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