Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Tuck typed in SEPIE in the FIND field. An X had been placed in all the organ categories except kidney. There he found an H and a date. H? Har-vested. The date was the day they harvested it.

He typed in PARDEE, JEFFERSON. No “x’s” in any of the columns, but two H’s under heart and lungs. Of course the other organs weren’t marked. They’d been donated to the sharks and were no longer available. There was nothing under SOMMERS, JAMES. That too made sense. How would they get the organs to Japan without a pilot. Tuck wished he’d gotten the little blind boy’s name. He couldn’t take the time to scroll though all three hundred or so names looking for missing corneas. He typed in CASE, TUCKER. There were H’s marked under the heart and lung category. The harvest date was today.

“You fuckers,” he said. There was a shuffling in the back room and he stood so quickly the chair rolled back and banged into a cabinet on the other side of the office. The database was still up on

the screen. Tuck reached out and punched the button on the monitor. It

clicked off as Mato came through the door.

“What are you guys doing here?” Tuck said.

Mato pulled up. He seemed confused. He was supposed to be doing the yelling.

“We’re flying tonight,” Tuck said. “Do you guys have the plane fueled up?”

Mato shook his head. “Then get on it. I wondered where you were.”

Mato just looked at him.

“Go!” Tuck said. “Now!”

Mato started to slink toward the door, obviously not comfortable with leaving Tuck in the clinic. Another guard came into the office and when Mato looked up, Tuck snatched his paper and pencil from the desk. He dropped the pencil and when he bent to pick it up, he hit the main power switch on the computer. The computer would reboot when turned on and the doctor would only know that it had been turned off. He’d never suspect that someone had been into the donor files.

“Let’s go, you guys.”

Tuck pushed past Mato out the office door, shoving the paper in his pocket as he went.

Tuck made quite a show of the preflight on the Lear, demanding three times that the guard with access to the key to the main power cutoff turn it on so he could check out the plane. The guard wasn’t buying it. He walked away from Tuck snickering. Tuck checked under the instrument panel. Maybe there would be some obvious way to hot-wire the switch. He’d been lucky with the computer. The switch and all the wires leading into it were covered by a steel case. He couldn’t get into it with a blowtorch, and frankly, he had no idea which wires did what. It probably wasn’t even a simple switch, but a relay that lead to another switch. There’d be no way to wire around it.

He left the hangar and went back to his bungalow. Unless he found some way to get off the island, he was going to be short a couple of lungs and a heart come midnight. Beth would have at least one guard on the plane with her, probably two, given the circumstances. And he had no doubt that she’d shoot him in the crotch and

make him fly to Japan anyway. There had to be another way. Like a boat. Kimi’s boat. Didn’t these guys travel thousands of miles over the Pacific in canoes like that? What could the doc do? He’d been so careful about safeguarding the island that the guards didn’t even have a boat to chase him with.

Tuck put on his shorts and took his fins and mask to the bathroom. He knotted the ends of his trouser legs and started filling them with supplies. A shirt, a light jacket, some disinfectant, sunscreen, a short kitchen knife. He found a small jar of sugar in the kitchen, dumped the sugar into the sink, and filled the jar with matches and Band-Aids. When he was ready to seal it, he saw the slip of paper he’d written on in the office sticking from the pocket of the trousers and shoved it into the jar as an afterthought. He topped off the pants bag with a pair of sneakers, then pulled the webbed belt tight to cinch it all up. He could swim with the pants legs like water wings. The wet clothing would get heavy, but not until he hit the beach on the far side of the minefield. To Tuck’s way of thinking, once he was past the minefield he was halfway there. Then all he had to do was convince the old cannibal to give him the canoe, enough food and water to get somewhere, and Kimi to navigate. Where in the hell would they go? Yap? Guam?

One step at a time. First he had to get out of the compound. He checked the guards’ positions. Leaning out the window, he could see three—no, four—at the hangar. He waited. He’d never tried to make the swim while it was still light. They’d be able to see him in the water from as far away as the runway. He just had to hope that they didn’t look in that direction.

The guards were rolling barrels into the hangar to hand-pump the jet fuel into the Lear. Two on each barrel, four out in the compound, bingo. One guy had to be in the hangar cranking the pump. And Stripe was in the clinic. Showtime!

Tuck went into the bathroom, lifted the hatch, threw down the pants bag and his swimming stuff, and followed it through.

He weighed sneaking against running, stealth against speed, and decided to go like a newborn turtle for the water. The only people who might see him were the Doc and Beth, and they were probably in the process of pushing the twin beds together and doing the Ozzie and Harriet double-skin sweat slap—or whatever sort of weird shit they did. He hoped it was painful.

He broke into a dead run across the gravel, feeling the coral dig at his feet and the ferns whip at his ankles but keeping his focus on

the beach. As he passed the clinic, he thought he saw some movement out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t turn. He was Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, and Edwin Moses (except he was white and slow), a single head turn could cause him to lose his stride and the race—and boy, does that beach seem farther when you’re running than when you’re sneaking. He almost tumbled when he hit the sand, but managed a controlled forward stumble that put him face-first in four inches of water. The baby turtle had made it to the water, but now he faced a whole new set of dangers at sea, not the least of which was trying to swim with a pair of stuffed khakis around his neck.

He kicked a few feet out into the water, put on his fins and mask, and began the swim.

He’d been furious from the moment he heard the pilot’s voice in the clinic and he had fought the cloud of painkillers and the pressure in his head to get to him. Yamata watched the pilot stumble into the water before he tried shouting for the others. The shout came out little more than a grunt through his wired jaw, and his crushed sinuses allowed little sound to pass through his nose. His gun was in the guards’ quarters, the others were at the hangar, and his hated enemy was escaping. He decided to go for his gun. The others might want to take the pilot alive.

Kimi was trying to call up thunder and was having no luck at all. He’d been chanting and waving his arms for half an hour and there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

“You’re not holding your arms right,” Sarapul said. He was lying under a palm tree, chewing a betel nut and offering constructive criticism to the navigator. Sepie lay nearby watching.

“I am too,” Kimi said. “I’m holding them the same way you do.”

“Maybe it doesn’t work for Filipinos.”

“It’s because I’m shot,” Kimi said. “If I wasn’t shot, I could do this.”

Sarapul scanned the horizon. Not even a bird. “That’s it. It’s because you’re shot.” He spit out a red stream of betel nut juice. “And you’re not holding your arms right.”

Kimi resumed chanting and waving his arms.