Runaway Nun (Misbegotten)

by Voghan, Caesar

  Recklessly exposed, Elano strode behind the second squad of monks. Now and then, he fended off a wandering arrow or poorly aimed rock with the blade of his broadsword. He watched the first squad getting closer to the compound’s gate. From under the protective layer of overlapped shields, Ulf had seen the two double-deckers getting closer and closer and shouted at his men to pick up their pace. The Cardinal’s eyes darted back to the rim of the parapet from where sharp projectiles kept flying at his men. No gunshots yet, but that didn’t mean much—bullets and buckshot were luxuries, and were always spared for the close-quarter phase of the combat. His sights shifted back to the two busses about to be joined. One of the double-deckers carried a scenic vista of the Grand Canyon on its advertising panel. The colors of the poster with the bottomless slit were yellowed to a dismal patina, but Elano could still discern the words on the caption:

  Visit Native Indian lands by luxury motorcoach and marvel before one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Grand Canyon's West Rim!

  Take a ride over the newly built Hoover Dam Bridge, and still be back in time to spin the wheel in Vegas by nighttime!

  Includes continental breakfast and authentic Indian BBQ lunch.

  On the other side of the wall, the diggers strained and grunted struggling to push the double-deckers into place over the last few yards, when Ulf’s squad suddenly reached the gate. The monks raised their shields in one swift move as a cascade of rocks and spears descended from the rim of the parapet. The raised shields opened a clear line of fire for the first row of monks armed with crossbows.

  “Release!” Ulf commanded, holding up the protective layer of shields with the others.

  Firing rapidly, the sniper monks unleashed a hailstorm of bolts that found their way into the chests of the defenders, ripping through their bodies, thunking sinisterly as they penetrated the buses’ carcasses.

  Elano saw his raiders pouring in through the narrow passageway left between the double-deckers and disappearing inside the compound. Howling a desperate battle cry, the throng of diggers immediately jumped from their defensive posts atop the rampart and charged at the monks.

  “Hold!” Ulf shouted, and held his sword high in the air.

  The monks held back their next salvo; they lined up, aimed their crossbows, and waited until the first wave of assailants reached within a surefire deadly range.

  “Release!” Ulf ordered, slashing the air with his sword.

  The bolts whistled through the air like a host of enraged locusts. They severed limbs, split craniums and pierced chests, dropping scores of defenders into the dirt. Gushing freely, blood turned into crimson runnels that found their way into the parched ground.

  Elano and the next two squads finally barged their way inside the fortified wall. Flaunting crudely made weapons, cohorts of enraged diggers closed in on them from every direction, and a no-holds-barred medieval pandemonium took over the area around the tour buses and spread through the entire courtyard. Blade stroked blade, iron pounded iron, wood cracked and burst into splinters, bones were crushed, flesh ripped open, people howled, grunted, yelled, and cursed as they died. The cacophony of battle clamors raised into the morning sky like a grotesque symphony Elano had heard one too many times.

  Although outnumbered, the monks fought deftly and with economy of movement, letting the diggers’ blind courage drive them into defeat. Between delivering blows, Elano could hear Ulf shouting orders to ensure the monks maintained their close-knit formation. Like a detachment of riot troops with each man covering for the man near him, the monks waited patiently for that crucial second when one well-aimed strike would accomplish what a fury of poorly delivered strikes could not. They kept pushing the diggers back towards the cluster of buildings at the center of the compound, one square foot of desert at a time.

  Swinging his broadsword in wide arcs, Elano broke away from the closely-knit formation of monks and headed in the direction of the rampart where he had spotted the High Priest and his shotgun. Never a still target for more than a second, his body twirling in intricate fluid movements, he sliced his way through bands of diggers with an almost detached, mechanical efficiency. Blood spurting from slit throats, chopped arms, and split-open bellies splashed his arms, face, and black tunic. Its coopery tang invaded his nostrils like the cursed aroma of a drug engulfing his mind and emptying his soul of all fear. He kept wielding his broadsword, parrying poorly aimed lunges of spears and short swords, and delivering quick death in return—and then he heard the first gunshot.

  He looked in the direction where the blast had come; the first thing he saw was a young monk lying in the dirt at the base of the rampart—his head gone, the bloody stump of his neck a mangled mass of flesh, sinew, and bone. From atop the wooden platform, the High Priest was aiming the smoking shotgun at a second monk who reluctantly advanced on him, holding a sword at ready.

  “Take cover!” Elano shouted at the monk who immediately dove behind the bodyshell of a rusted Cadillac protruding from the jury-rigged wall.

  Elano grabbed a spear off the ground and hurled it at the High Priest. The man’s instincts were sharp—he ducked just in time for the spear to jam its sharp tip into the wall behind. A snarl etched on his face, the High Priest jolted back on his feet and aimed the shotgun at Elano who was zigzagging among the contorted bodies of the dead, racing toward the rampart. The High Priest pulled the trigger. Elano ducked. The buckshot missed the young Cardinal and tore into the chest of a digger wearing a discolored DIAMONDBACKS jersey about to deliver a deadly blow with a nail-spiked baseball bat. The man shrieked and dropped to the dirt; the makeshift mace hit the ground.

  Hanging to the maze of beams and truces, Elano climbed onto the parapet. The High Priest tried to lock and load, struggling to unstick the pump-action mechanism of the shotgun for a few precious seconds. He finally aimed his weapon at Elano and was ready to fire when, springing forward, Elano whacked the gun’s barrel away with the tip of his broadsword just as the High Priest pulled the trigger. The buckshot headed straight for the sky. The High Priest cursed and, yelling at the top of his lungs, charged Elano, swinging the shotgun like a club. Elano avoided the incoming strike with a soft Aikido feint and walloped the High Priest with the pommel of his broadsword.

  The High Priest’s skull split open with a crack. He dropped the shotgun onto the planks of the rampart, doubled over, and tumbled over the rail; he hit the ground with a grunt, raising a small cloud of dust.

  Elano picked up the shotgun and fired all the remaining pellets at the sky, one after another, locking and loading and pulling the trigger until the last spent shell twirled through the air and the gun clanked on empty.

  The rapid series of gunshots brought the combat to a standstill.

  The remaining groups of fighting diggers took a few steps back and looked in the direction of the gun blasts. They saw Elano leaning against the parapet, holding the smoking shotgun above his head, still aimed at the sky.

  They saw the High Priest crouched on the ground, not moving.

  One by one, they dropped their weapons into the dirt.

  3

  Placed at intervals around the parapet, a squad of monks stood guard. They kept their eyes on the desert covered in waves of shimmering heat, swaying before their eyes like legions of drifting phantoms circling the three landed helicopters.

  Near the gate, two monks watched over a handful of young children huddled in the shade of a double-decker. One of them uncorked a water canteen and handed it to a skinny boy who was drawing shapes in the sand with a twig. The boy took the canteen and drank with small sips. The monk gestured to pass the canteen around. One by one, the children drank from it, glancing furtively at the monk, at the huge battle-ax sheathed across his back.

  Two other monks guarded a group of teenagers strolling around, picking up the bloody bolts that littered the grounds—pulling them from the dead bodies when needed, and dropping them in the rusty buckets they carried.

  At the other end
of the courtyard, half a dozen men were digging graves for the three monks who’d died during the raid. The bodies were veiled in their tunics, hands folded on their chests. Two of them had rosaries placed on their livid lips; the third cadaver had the rosary hanging from his interlocked fingers instead, the bloody stump of his neck hastily wrapped in a shirt borrowed from a dead digger.

  Hungry buzzards were already circling above, their banshee caws echoing from the sky like a bad omen. Flapping its wings, a daring bird finally landed near a cluster of cadavers, hobbled close to them, and proceeded to poke and nip at the eyes of the dead. Soon another bird joined in the feast, tugging out a string of intestines from a ruptured abdomen and flying away with it.

  Watched intently by Ulf, Elano stabbed his broadsword into the ground in front of the rows of captured diggers. On their knees, hands tied behind their back, the men who survived the raid were scattered among the rest of the compound’s inhabitants: mostly women and children who’d been brought out from their underground shelter where they’d sought refuge. Necklaces with amulets, earrings, and all sorts of jewelry adorned the women and children’s heads and arms, displaying bizarre symbols and words in a pagan calligraphy that Elano didn’t recognize. The mishmash of strange-looking clothes that covered their bodies bore testimony of their scavenging practices. On some of them, written in brightly colored large letters, there were words Elano could read, although they meant nothing to him: GAP, Aeropostale, Polo, Nike, and a host of other cryptic names that the World Before took pride in and perhaps even worshiped. Painted on top of a T-shirt hanging off a skinny teenage girl, a stick man holding a fishing rod waved and smiled back at Elano—“Life is Good” was written underneath.

  Elano stepped in front of the High Priest. On his knees like all the others, the man stared at the ground. The blood from his head wound was slowly coagulating around his left ear, jellying into his braided hair. Dejected, he glanced at the crucifix-shaped hilt of Elano’s sword.

  “Our God is a merciful God. He desires that none of you should perish, but that you forsake your wicked ways and come to know Christ the Savior,” Elano said. He glanced at the High Priest’s bloodshot eyes, searching for that glint of stubborn rebellion he knew would still be there.

  The High Priest didn’t disappoint—he hawked up phlegm and spat on the ground.

  “You and your holy hippie can go straight to Hell,” he mumbled.

  Ulf drew his sword instantly, the blade leaving its sheath with a sinister hiss. He took one step toward the High Priest, both hands gripping the hilt, readying his weapon for a blow meant to put an end to all blasphemy.

  Elano laid a hand on the young monk’s shoulder and held him back. Eyes burning with righteous indignation, Ulf glared at the High Priest. The High Priest held his stare, and taunted the young monk back with a sneer. As Ulf took one step back and reluctantly sheathed his sword, Elano moved in closer to the High Priest, and bent over. He inspected the bleeding wound, assessing its gravity with the eyes of a concerned surgeon. He touched the crack in the skull, dipping his finger in blood. The High Priest jerked his head back.

  “Killing is easy,” Elano said, wiping the blood on the High Priest’s shoulder. “Breaking a soul? That’s hard. But God loves hard.” He sought the High Priest’s eyes and smiled. “And He has prepared a place for those He loves: three thousand feet underground, my brother.”

  The High Priest grinned, defiant.

  “The lungs give out first, then the eyes. Can’t tell day from night,” Elano continued. “That’s when you start seeing with the heart. Trust me, brother—you haven’t seen glory yet.”

  “And you, monk, haven’t seen shit yet,” the High Priest replied. He coughed, hawked another load of phlegm, and spat it at Elano’s broadsword. Blood and spittle trickled on the blade.

  The grin returned on the High Priest’s face. “When you get to Hell, tell the holy hippie ‘Hi’ from me, will ya, monk?”

  “Down in the belly of the earth, my brother,” Elano said, and he resumed his upright stance. “Where God draws near—” It was then that he saw the girl, on her knees, almost hiding behind the High Priest. She was frail, with a pallid demeanor, and light blonde, almost bleached hair falling in helter-skelter soft curls that concealed her eyes. An amulet with a small, desiccated claw—of a squirrel or a rat?—hung from around her neck. Stirred by the way she held her statuesque pose, Elano sauntered around the High Priest and dropped slowly to one knee in front of her. She didn’t move, as if she hadn’t seen him drawing near.

  The High Priest looked over his shoulder and scowled at Elano.

  “You’re treading on holy ground,” the High Priest said. “The oracle won’t lie; it can’t.”

  Elano glanced at the High Priest, then turned back to the girl.

  “All men bare their souls before it,” the High Priest continued. “I dare you on the hidden stars above and the nameless rivers below—be careful, monk! Ignorance’s is from on high, ain’t that what the good book’s saying?”

  Elano paid him no mind. He raised his hand and gently parted the girl’s hair, exposing her eyes. Her eyelids were shut tight, her face straining to keep them that way. Once she sensed Elano’s touch, the girl jolted and started to sway from side to side, humming softly, whispering strange words—chanting almost.

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit!” the High Priest proclaimed, raising his eyes toward the sky in a mock gesture of devotion. He then turned to Ulf and grinned. “And that’s the whole damned truth, Amen?” And he winked at Ulf—Ulf’s jaw tightened.

  Knelt beside the chanting girl, a woman in her thirties with a mane of blonde hair in disarray and strikingly similar features to that of the girl kept casting pleading glances at Elano. The mother, Elano thought as he sized her up. The love for her child blended on the woman’s face with a sense of an imminent, foreboding dread. The mixture veiled her in a sudden aura of vulnerable beauty that touched him strangely, awakening a tender yearning—for what? Beauty and sin: the ancient spell. A true daughter of Eve at his feet, and he couldn’t stop from feeling a tinge of guilt. She was on her way to those cursed coalmines, the place where beauty was a currency most sought after; she’ll end up like all the others, he thought, selling her charms for an extra bowl of soup or the chance to work in the laundry rooms on the grounds above.

  He suddenly felt out of place, lost in the midst of a parched desert, forsaken before a girl with a shriveled claw around her neck, and a woman with pleading eyes. For a split second, he longed again to be released from his sacred vows and just simply be. The craving burned in his belly and descended lower, like a rolling fireball finding its way toward his groin. Resigned to temptation, he peered into the woman’s lustrous hazel eyes. The fear. The lust. The bargain. He was stirred—the man in him instantly awoken. Ianua Diaboli. Cursed to crawl, cast from the garden and now taking shape in his own flesh, swelling with blood. He turned to Ulf, nodded at the girl, then gestured in the direction of the kids gathered in the shade of the double-decker.

  “Why isn’t she with the rest?”

  “She’s too old, Monsignor,” Ulf answered.

  Elano turned back to the girl. “How old are you, my daughter?”

  “Ten in the flesh,” she said, her lips barely moving, eyes clenched shut.

  Elano stretched out his hand slowly, this time towards the girl’s closed eyes.

  The High Priest shifted on his knees, a muffled growl rumbling in his throat.

  “Cursed is the man who touches them, monk!” the High Priest said.

  Elano’s fingers got closer to the girl’s eyelids. She recoiled from his hand. A tremor rattled her thin body, her shoulders convulsed with a spasm. Then she remained still, anchored into the ground by an invisible force that kept her captive in its crushing wave-matrix.

  “I was there when they took the blood and the bone,” the girl said, and her eyes finally flinched open to reveal a pair of grey, washed-out eyeballs crisscrossed by thin capilla
ries but no pupils.

  A grin thrived on the High Priest’s face.

  “What do you see, Sunrise-At-Last?” the High Priest asked the girl.

  Elano panned his eyes from the High Priest to the blind girl and back to her mother. The girl’s mother swallowed once, her lips quivering.

  “Priest, I beg you—” she said.

  “I see a black man holding a cross,” the girl said, her dull eyes not blinking. She tilted her head slowly at an odd angle—Elano heard the bones in her neck cracking.

  “A skinny man hangs on the cross. Blood and water. Dirt and tears. No crows. And not yet Sabbath. The skinny man cries. The black man breaks bread before the children. The bread is not sweet. The wine is sour. The children eat their god. But one is not an orphan—”

  “Pay her no mind,” the woman blurted as she crawled on her knees toward Elano. “She’s ill. Show her mercy, I beg you!”

  The High Priest laughed and locked eyes with Elano.

  “She’s not ill. She’s a seer,” the High Priest said. “She’s dancing all over your soul, monk, isn’t she? Her feet burn, eh?” He then turned to the blind oracle and smiled.

  “Dance, Sunrise, keep on dancing, girl.”

  “Flesh from the flesh of men, soul robbed from on high,” the girl continued, singing the phrase with the intonation of a liturgical chant. The bones in her neck cracked again, her head regained its upright posture, and a faint smile blossomed on her face.

  Elano pinned his stare onto the girl’s dead irises, trying to penetrate into the cavern of her mind where peculiar words and images flashed swiftly like a zoetrope spinning fast, out of control. He’d recognized the black man breaking the bread before the children. And the wine was sour—he could still taste it in the back of his throat, twenty years later, dry and tart.