Runaway Nun (Misbegotten) (3 page)

“As you wish, Monsignor,” Ulf
replied. He walked around the High Priest without even a look, approached the
girl and helped her rise to her feet. The girl turned to her mother. Her eyes
opened, and the crystal-like tiny globes flickered with a strange glow.

“Take heart, mother. Mary had a
little Lamb—the Lamb did not die. Nor shall you.”

“Slaughter that beast!” the High
Priest bellowed at the top of his lungs, then let out a hoot. “Roast that
sucker!”

“Sunrise—” the mother said,
her voice choking on tears.

The girl smiled at her mother. “Remember
cousin Jonah?” she continued. “He was in the belly of the fish for three days
and three nights. Alone. Forsaken. Praying in the rotten, humid darkness, away
from seashells and seahorses—”

Ulf grabbed her elbow and jerked
the girl away.

“Farewell, mother,” the girl said.

The woman kept her teary eyes on
Ulf as he led her daughter toward the group of children eligible for orphanage,
crowded in the shade of the double-decker.

Elano took a step back when the
girl’s mother cast herself at his feet, her hair scattering all over. She attempted
to kiss the tip of his boots.

“Thank you, priest,
thank
you. May the gods show you mercy as you’ve shown my
daughter,” she cried out in one breath, her shoulders rattled by sobs.

Elano took a few rushed steps back
toward his broadsword. He grabbed its handle and yanked it angrily from the
ground. He looked at the wailing woman lying prostrated in the dirt, her
shoulders shaking vehemently, her hair scattered over dirt. Arms tied behind
her back, she drew her knees close in and, using her forehead as leverage
against the ground, pushed herself up. Sharp pebbles cut into the skin of her
forehead.

The High Priest turned toward her,
a disgusted grimace on his face.

“You sold your soul. And your
daughter,” he said. Then he spat in her direction. “Cursed by the gods of this
land, forever!”

Elano spun in place and trudged
away, casting one last glance over his shoulder.

As the woman straightened herself
up, a few glistening drops of blood trickled between her eyes. Just like the
crown of thorns thrust upon the Savior’s head, Elano thought as he sheathed his
sword across his back.

4

USS
Pittsburgh
had once been the pride of the Tenth US Navy Fleet, the
spearhead of its rapid deployment force. A hundred jets rested in her vaulted
hangars or gleamed in the sun on her flight deck ready to become airborne on a
minute’s notice. But that was in the World Before, when the US Navy was still a
force to be reckoned with, the pride of a prideful nation—a dragon that
spoke like a lamb and had ambitions to rule the world.

Stripped to its
bare
navigation installations, weapon systems dismantled, jet fighters dumped into
the ocean, the carrier now served as the largest floating hospice the world had
ever known. Its superstructure island had been remodeled into an abbey,
complete with steeples and a bell tower. At its top, a baroque cross rose above
the cluster of twirling radars, antennas, and satellite dishes. Anchors dropped
all the way to the ocean’s floor, the giant ship remained at rest, an unmoved
mover eloping from the night’s thick shadows.

Standing on the bridge wing,
Father Micon looked at the shapeless clouds that hid the moon. Blackness upon
blackness stretched its deep folds over the Atlantic, with only the host of
position lights on the flight deck below glittering into the night.

Re-christened
Domus Mariae
, the carrier had been dedicated to the Blessed Heart
of the Virgin in a grand ceremony on Christmas Day of 2072, Anno Domini.
Twenty-five years later, Micon still remembered that December morning. A
blizzard was sweeping over the Hudson Bay, icy needles nabbing at faces, the
frost-dipped wind cutting through the heavy robes of the prelates lining the
flight deck, all of them eager for the dedication homily to come to a blessed
end so they could crawl back to their burning fireplaces, their cups of
steaming cider, and stare at walls heavy with portraits of clinically depressed
saints.

Micon had never questioned the
Church’s ban on military technology. All those multi-billion dollar
steel-encased ships—the giant carriers, the lethal destroyers, the sleek
frigates—that were littering the ocean floor off the shores of Norfolk,
San Francisco, or Hawaii. Or the strategic bombers, fighter jets, drones,
attack helicopters, tanks, and artillery pieces cast at the bottom of the
junkyard in North Texas—a giant dump hole strewn with barrels poking out
of armored turrets and mounds upon mounds of weapons, anything from mortars and
assault rifles to machine guns and rocket launchers, all rusting under a
scorching sun.

For centuries man had enabled
himself to kill at a distance, and wars had grown into mass executions guided
from far away. Death rained from heaven with the simple tap of a button on a
joystick hidden somewhere in a Nevada bunker. The Church had finally spoken: a
man will take another man’s life only when he is the bearer of a divine
commission; and he will do so with his own hands: swords and not missiles; an
ax and not an RPG. The way of the bullet is the way of the coward one, the
wicked, and the faithless.

If man must be at times God’s chosen instrument to execute His just
and holy vengeance, then in the enemy’s eyes one should stare when delivering
the ultimate sacrament—the taking of another’s life. Eyes are the gates
of the soul, so penetrate the darkness and behold that engorged tumor called
sin, suckling on the divine gift of life. Then take that gift back in the name
of our Lord and Savior, the Alpha and the Omega, the Judge of the living and of
the dead.

Thus Inocentis III had proclaimed
ex-cathedra in
Nunquam Iterum
, his
first encyclical in the aftermath of the Blessed Collision. And his words
abided.

Micon heard footsteps behind him
and turned. Father Lambert’s lanky silhouette emerged from the darkness. The
ship’s captain, a square-jawed man with a trimmed beard and a pair of piercing
grey eyes gleaming from the shadow of his hood, stepped closer. He shook his
head in disappointment.

“They are late again,” Father
Lambert
said. “This time by three hours. No radio signal, no
contact, nothing.”

Father Micon patted Lambert on the
shoulder; he knew his fears all too well. Every time
Nautilus
tarried on its return voyage from Harlequin Island, the
captain was afraid he would never see his submersible again.

“The Lord has them in the palm of
His hands,” Micon said. “His will rules over the undersea, too. Why worry your
weak heart, my brother? Keep the faith.”

“What about keeping you warm,
huh?” the captain said.

“I will survive the night,” Father
Micon said, wrapped his robe around his frame and returned his stare to the
dark ocean.

The wind picked up the pace. A
sudden gust spun over the waves crested with fresh foam and carried the spray
high into the air, splashing the bridge with a myriad of small drops. Micon tasted
the salt,
then
pulled the hood of his habit on. Father
Lambert drew near and rested his vein-creased hands on the parapet, clutching
the rail. He nodded at the letter Micon held in his hand, the Vatikan’s seal
hanging loose at the end of a ribbon.

“Any news about the
Clinton
?”

“It was spotted again, three weeks
ago. This time by a fishing boat off the coast of North Carolina,” Micon said.

The letter in his hand, delivered
that evening with the rest of the mail, did confirm that USS
Bill Clinton
was still at large after
all these years. A
Los Angeles
class
submarine, one-third the size of its ballistic-missiles sisters,
Clinton
would have been the ideal vessel
to run the shuttle back and forth to that godforsaken island. Instead, Lambert
had to rely only on the twelve-man submersible, the only deep-sea-rescue asset
aboard the carrier. The number of trips had increased in recent months, and
that had taken a toll on the small vessel. On top of that, when the ocean was
rough,
Nautilus
had a hard time
surfacing underneath the iron belly of Harlequin Island, always at risk of
being hurled by the angry breakers into the massive structural columns that
kept the giant artificial island above sea level.

Down on the flight deck, a team of
friars was unloading bales of supplies from the cargo area of a twin-engine
Chinook helicopter. A friar held up a lantern while the others rolled the
bundled packages down the loading ramp and stacked them on a four-wheel dolly.
The lantern’s faint light beam fell for a second on the coat of arms emblazoned
on the chopper’s fuselage: the keys of Saint Peter, the New Vatikan, crossed
underneath the papal tiara. To the left was the spiked-sun with a
cross—the insignia of the Jesuit Order.

The Jesuits…

The Jesuits had kept an entire
fleet of helicopters in the name of strategic mobility for their
troops—God’s marines still had to be hauled to distant places in pursuit
of the enemies of righteousness, so the Pontiff gave them a fifty-year dispensation
from the ban. They had half a century to clean up the world of unfaithfulness,
or as long as those helicopters would last.

How gracious, in turn, for the
Jesuits to provide a supply line for
Domus
Mariae
. It was all politics, and Micon had no illusions that one day they’d
foot him the bill. However, if it hadn’t been for the Jesuits hanging on to
their helicopters, the Franciscan Order wouldn’t have been able to salvage the
Pittsburgh
. The Franciscans’ goals had
been less lofty. They had no holy warriors to deploy, no righteous wars to
fight; they simply wanted a floating monastery to spread God’s love across the
seas to the other five continents from where no news had arrived for decades.

At least that’s what Micon had
envisioned when he was appointed the abbot for
Domus
Mariae
. Little did
he know he would end up stuck in the middle of the Atlantic, running a death
shuttle back and forth to Gottfrey’s demented playground.

“Let’s go inside, old man,” Father
Lambert said, laying an arm around Micon’s shoulders as the two prelates
strolled back toward the bridge’s door. “What would Heaven think of a
Franciscan priest sneezing during the homily?”

“That would be the ultimate
sacrilege, wouldn’t it?” Micon said.

“Nothing a heartfelt confession
can’t fix.”

“You’re wrong, my brother. Some
sins, no confession can fix.”

“Blessed Mary, here we go again.
Who’s whining now?”

“Leave the Virgin out of this,
Lambert.”

“She’s the only one whose
supplications the Son won’t turn down, and at this point I need all the help I
can get,” Father Lambert said, then held the bridge’s door open. Micon stepped
in, and the captain followed.

The door slammed shut behind the
two priests just as the bell started to toll, calling for the Compline, the
last prayer service of the day in the aftermath of which the Great Silence
would be summoned throughout the entire monastery ship.

Down on the flight deck, a friar
hurled one last parcel on top of the overloaded dolly.

5

The bell tolled three times. For a
few moments, the chimes drowned out the dull murmur of the ocean waves blasting
the hull of the carrier. Awaken from their slumbers, a pack of seagulls circled
the bundle of antennas cluttered around the bell tower, then flew back to their
roosting sanctuary under the cover of a satellite dish. Once the tolls’ echo
finally died, the birds folded their wings, huddled against each other, and
went back to sleep.

Hauling off the bale-stacked dolly,
the team of friars rushed past the main entrance of the abbey and disappeared
around the corner on their way to the back depository. A second later, the door
cracked open and, concealed by the slumping hood of a robe, a woman’s face shone
briefly in the moonlight. She looked over to her left then her right, glancing
across the deserted flight deck,
then
she stepped out.
She nudged the door back in its place, and, holding the hem of her nun’s robe
above her ankles, she raced toward the Chinook helicopter’s double-hunched
silhouette looming in the dark.

The nun dashed underneath the
propeller’s limp blades, climbed the short flight of stairs leading to the
chopper’s cabin, and knocked on its door. It opened immediately, the squeal of
its hinges causing her to cast a worried glance over her shoulder. A novice
monk, skittish and no older than twenty with a freckled face and fidgety hands,
peeked through the doorway. He wore the black cassock of the Jesuit order, the
cloth hugging his body tightly, held in place with a tincture knotted around
his waist.

“Hey, handsome,” the nun whispered,
and cracked a hurried smile.

The novice monk panned his jittery
eyes from the ringlets of blond hair wandering out of the slumping hood, to her
lips, blood red in the light that drizzled from the cockpit’s emergency box. The
nun glanced back one last time at the abbey from where the muffled voices of
friars and nuns reciting their communal prayers were echoing through the night—words
in Latin about contrite hearts and the demons of the flesh and God’s relentless
grace abounding toward sinners.

The monk grabbed her by a shoulder
and pulled her in.

“Easy now, handsome—”

The door slammed closed behind
her; the lock clanged shut.

Once inside the cockpit, he
removed her hood and took her head in his hands. His eyes collected every
single detail of her face, like going twice through a checklist.

“God in Heaven,” he mumbled, and
swallowed hard.

She arched her lips again, but
stopped halfway into a frozen simper. There was no need to try and seduce the
man before her. She just looked at him, the unfinished smile creasing her face,
her eyes bathed in pity, her hands crawling on his chest. He was young, but
already like all the others—weak, drenched in his own lust, helpless, and
ready to sell his soul—but his soul was of no use to her.

The novice monk caressed her hair
and gently put the rebel hair locks back in line with the curls that wrapped
around her face like a cursed halo. Suddenly, he dropped to one knee, scoured
with his hand under the copilot’s chair, and pulled a neatly folded paper from
underneath. He stretched it out and held it up to the light alongside the nun’s
face. It was a page from a TIME photo album he’d found in the rubbles of the
public library where he’d spent his solitude challenge at the start of his
novitiate—forty days of fasting with nothing but rainwater collected in a
tin can, a few crumbs of mildewed bread, and a family of rats that kept him
company.

His eyes kept darting back and
forth from the photograph of the platinum blonde woman to the robe-covered
replika in front of him. Same
ruby red lips, same bedroom eyes with just a tinge of sadness in them, same
never-ending eyelashes like a collection of black parabolas sloping heavenward,
and, yes, the beauty mark—exactly in the same place, slightly up and to
the left of her perfectly arched mouth.

“It
is
you,” he mumbled. “God—”

“Damn right, handsome,” the nun
replied, and she barely touched his chin with her index finger, a half gesture
like chasing an insect away. Her gentle tap sent a ripple through his body; he
kept his wanton eyes on the picture.

In the photograph, the woman wore
an ivory cocktail dress that left her arms and shoulders bare. A gust of air
wafting through a grating in the pavement swirled her dress up around her
waist, exposing a pair of strong, flawless legs—legs made to break a
man’s spirit and turn his sacred vows into nothingness.

She wore underwear—tight,
immaculately white…

The novice monk swallowed a knot
in his throat and looked at the replika in front of him dressed in a black,
loose-fitting, pathetic robe... He turned the photograph toward the nun, and
nodded at the woman immortalized in it.

“What about—I mean, do
you
have a pair of—like
these—like
she
does—you
know—the white panties?” He blurted the last word. Blushed. God must
surely understand. Heaven is a place for sinners, and he was about to become
one.

“Sorry, handsome, but I left those
on the island,” the nun said.

She grabbed the tincture wrapped
around his waist and pulled him in. The novice monk let go of the photograph.
The rumpled page sailed to the floor of the cabin.

Eyes glued to the woman in front
of him, the monk started to fumble with the knot of his tincture, desperate to
untie it. The nun turned her face away and glanced at the array of navigation
gauges, knobs, switch consoles, and throttles that cluttered the helicopter’s
flight deck; two rosaries hung off the cyclic levers, the tiny crucifixes
dangling at the end of strings of wooden beads. She paid no attention to the
young man hovering over her, who kept mumbling and pulling at the knot of his
tincture as drops of sweat gathered on his brow.

“God in Heaven have mercy on me, a
sinner. Mercy, Father, mercy—”

He finally hurled the loose
tincture to the floor.

“Mercy it is, handsome,” the nun
said, and faced the monk again. She pulled the hemline of her robe up. The white
of her legs stabbed the monk’s heart like a heavenly vision. The third heaven
opened and thousands upon thousands of angels with brass trumpets and
spread-out wings descended on a cascade of hallelujahs.

He lifted his cassock and pulled
down his pants, then grabbed her waist and drew her in. He grunted as he found
his way inside her. She gasped and bit her lower lip. His breathing quickened
and soon turned into the heavy painting of an animal in heat—lost,
enraged, chasing its mount in the dark. He kept thrusting and heaving and
thrusting again.

“God almighty!” He coiled his arms
around her waist. Moaned.

The nun flung her arms around his
neck in an embrace devoid of any tenderness, her fingers barely touching his
hair. She turned her face away, and this time she glanced outside at the ocean
sunk into the night, the position lights of the carrier reflected in the
cabin’s windshield dancing before her languid eyes.

“Now, easy, handsome, easy…”

With a growl, the novice monk
smashed himself into the nun and the two tumbled onto the floor. He groped at
her buttocks with one hand, covered her face with the other, bit her neck, and
groaned in a hasty orgasm. She stretched out her arm, her hand gripping the
side handle on the copilot’s chair. She held fast onto it, while pacing her
breathing to that of the man crushed on top of her. On her uncovered wrist, a
string of numbers scarred into her pale skin came into view:
MM-13-RPK091-Z&Q.

Heaving, mumbling incoherent words
about Heaven and Hell and the cleansing blood of the Lamb, the monk buried his
face in her hair.

From the creased TIME photograph
cast nearby, the woman with the gust-blown dress and the innocent face of a
doll kept staring at the two collapsed bodies rattled by sudden spasms, clinging
to each other in a quiet desperation. Her bedroom eyes were open in wonder, her
mouth curved in a tired yet inviting smile holding both a promise and a curse.