The End Is Nigh

Jonathan Maberry — SHE’S GOT A TICKET TO RIDE

Kids, you know?

Tough to raise a kid in almost any household.

Tough to raise a kid with all the shit going on in the world.

You can’t lie to them and say it’s all going to be okay, because pretty much it’s not all going to be okay. There’s stuff that’s never going to be okay. Neither well-intentioned rationalization, protective lies, or outright bullshit is going to make it all right.

Bad stuff happens to good people.

That’s one of those immutable laws, like saying “everybody dies.” They do. Some things are going to happen no matter how much we don’t want them to. Even despite a lot of serious effort to prevent them from happening.

Rape happens.

Murder happens.

Abuse happens.

Go bigger: Wars happen. Poverty happens. Famine happens.

Take it from an arbitrary perspective: Tsunamis happen. Earthquakes and tornados happen.

Shit happens.

And it happens, a lot of the damn time, to good people. To the innocent. To the unprotected. To the undeserving.

Try to tell a kid otherwise and they know you’re lying.

Lie too much about it and they stop believing anything you tell them.

They stop believing you.

They stop believing in you, which is worse.

They stop believing in themselves, which is worst of all.

I see what happens when parents cross that line.

When they call me in, the kid has crossed some lines of his own. We’re not talking about “acting out.” It’s not selling dope to earn fun money or selling yourself as the fun guy. It’s not fucking everyone who comes within grabbing distance as a way of making a statement. It’s not getting a tattoo or fifteen piercings or going Goth.

We’re talking a different set of lines.

When they call me in, the kids have crossed a line that maybe they can’t cross the other way. Either they’re so lost they can’t find it, or they’re so lost they don’t think there ever was a line. All they can see is the narrow piece of ground on which they’re standing in that moment. Everything else is chaos. They don’t want to move because who would step off of solid ground into chaos? So they stay there.

That’s when they call me in.

Sometimes that narrow strip of ground is called a “crack house,” and they’re giving five dollar blow jobs so they can buy some rock.

Sometimes it’s some little group of nutbags who want to build bombs and blow shit up.

And sometimes it’s a cult.

A lot of what I do is with kids in cults.

They go in.

I go in and get them out.

When I can.

If I can.

Sometimes I bring back something that spits poison and is going to need to be in a safe place with meds and nurses and lots of close observation. Sometimes I bring back someone who will always be on some version of suicide watch. Sometimes I bring back a kid who is never—ever—going to be “right” again, because they were never right to begin with. Or kids who have traveled so far into alien territory that they don’t even know what language you’re speaking.

They spook the shit out of me, the kids who are so lost they’re empty. Like their bodies are vacant houses haunted by shadows of who they used to be, who people thought they were.

That’s sad.

That’s why a lot of guys who do what I do drink like motherfuckers.

A lot of us.

Sometimes you get lucky and you find a kid who’s maybe thinking that they crossed the wrong line. A kid who wants to be found, who wants to be rescued. A kid who is maybe drifting on a time of expectations because they hope, way down deep, that mommy or daddy gives enough of a genuine shit to come looking. Or at least to send someone looking.

Those are great. Do a couple like that in a year and maybe you dial down the sauce. Go a couple of years without one of those jobs and maybe you retire to sell TVs at Best Buy or you eat your gun.

I’ve had enough bad years that I’ve considered both options.

And then there are those cases where you find a kid who isn’t lost on the other side of that line. I’m talking about a runaway who found what he or she has been looking for. Even if it’s a cult. Even if it’s a group whose nature or goals or tenets you object to with every fiber of your being. When you find a kid who ran away and found himself… what the fuck are you supposed to do then?

It’s a question that’s always lurking there in the back of your mind, but it’s one you seldom truly have to ask yourself.

It wasn’t even whispering to me when I went over the wall at the Church of the Nomad World.

My target was an eighteen year old girl.

Birth certificate has her name as Annabeth Fiona Van Der Kamp, of the Orange County Van Der Kamps. Only heir to a real estate fortune. My intel on her gives her name as Sister Light.

Yeah, I know.

Anyway, Sister Light was a few days away from her nineteenth birthday, at which point the first chunk of her inheritance would shift from a trust to her control. It was feared—and not unreasonably so—that the girl would sign away that money to the Church of the Nomad World.

That chunk was just shy of three-point-eight million.

She’d get another chunk the same size at twenty. At twenty-one, little Sister Light would get the remainder out of trust. Thirty-four million in liquid cash and prime waterfront properties, including two in Malibu.

Mommy and Daddy’s lawyers hired me to make sure none of that happened.

I would like to think that they also had their daughter’s emotional, physical and—dare I say it with a straight face?—spiritual wellbeing in mind.

Nope, can’t really keep a straight face on that one.

But, fuck it. It’s a cult, so maybe the Van Der Kamps are the lesser of two evils. I’m not paid to judge.

So over the wall I go.

The Church of the Nomad World is located on the walled grounds of an estate. The estate was sold at auction after the previous owners went to jail for selling lots and lots of cocaine. The church officials, according to my background checks, were very businesslike during the purchase and all through the legal stages. They wore suits. They spoke like ordinary folks. Their CFO wore a Rolex and drove a Beamer.

It wasn’t until after the title and licenses were squared away, the walls and gates repaired, and the 501(c)(3) papers were in place that the church changed its name. Until that point it was the Church of the World, which sounds like every other vanilla flavored post-Tea Party fundamentalist group. Not that they put a sign up. They became the Church of the Nomad World in name only. That label appears on no forms, no licenses, no tax documents.

Everybody knows about it, though.

At least everyone who follows this sort of thing.

As I wandered the grounds, I saw signs of the things they taught in this church. Lots of sculptures of the solar system. The current thinking is that we have eight planets—Pluto having been demoted—and then there are five dwarf planets: Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and our old friend Pluto. Plus four hundred and twenty-odd moons of various sizes, plus a shitload of asteroids. Millions of them. I noticed that many of the more elaborate sculptures included Phaëton, the hypothetical planet whose long-ago destruction may account for the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Those same sculptures had a second moon orbiting the Earth: Lilith, a dark moon that was supposed to be invisible to the naked eye. So, whoever made the sculpture naturally painted it black.

Had to get the details right.

One sculpture of Earth not only had Phaëton, but Petit’s moon, the tiny Waltemath’s moons, and some other apocryphal celestial bodies I couldn’t name.

However here on the grounds, there is an additional globe in all of the solar system sculptures and mobiles. It’s big—roughly four times the size of any representation of the Earth. It’s brown. And it has a name.

Nibiru.

For a lot of conspiracy nuts, Nibiru is the Big Bad. They variously describe it as a rogue planet, a rogue moon, a brown dwarf star, a counter-Earth, blah blah blah. They say it’s been hiding behind the sun, hence the reason we haven’t seen it. They say that it has an elliptical orbit that—just by chance—swings it at angles that don’t allow any of our telescopes to see it.

But they say it’s coming.

And, of course, that it will destroy us.

End of Days shit.

Bunch of Doomsday preppers are building bunkers in the Virginia hills so they can survive the impact.

Take a moment on that.

Worst case scenario is a brown dwarf star—best case scenario is a rogue moon. Hitting the Earth. And they think reinforced concrete walls and a couple of cases of Spam are going to see them through it?

Their websites talk about the Extinction Event, but they’re building bunkers and stockpiling ammunition so they can Mad Max their way through… what, exactly? Even if they didn’t die during a collision, that would likely crack the planet and send a trillion trillion cubic tons of ash and dust into the atmosphere. Even if they didn’t immediately choke to death or freeze during the ensuing ice age. Even if the atmosphere wasn’t ripped away and the tectonic plates knocked all to hell and gone. Even if they lived through a computationally impossible event, what exactly would they be surviving for?

That’s the question.

It’s also the question the Church of the Nomad World claimed to have an answer for. For them, the arrival of Nibiru was, without doubt, a game-ending injury for old Mother Earth. No going to the sidelines for stretches and an ice pack and then back in for the next quarter. Nibiru was the ultimate deal closer for the planet. Everyone and everything dies. All gone. Kaput. Sorry folks, it’s been fun.

But here’s the fun part: Nibiru isn’t going to be destroyed in the same collision. Nibiru is going to survive. It’s barely going to be dented. And the vast, ancient, high-minded and noble society of enlightened beings on Nibiru are going to reach out with “sensitivity machines”—I’m not making this up—and harvest those people who are of pure intent and aligned with the celestial godforce.

Don’t look at any of that too closely or you’ll sprain something.

I got all this from two of my sources. I did my homework before coming here. One source is Lee Kang, a doctor of theology at Duke Divinity School. You’ve probably seen him on TV. Did that book couple of years back about how science and religion don’t need to stand around kicking each other in the dicks. About how a rational mind can have both flavors. He was hilarious on The Daily Show. Killed it on Jimmy Fallon.

The other source is my science girl, Rose Blum. Rosie the Rocketeer. An actual rocket scientist. Well, her business card says “Observational Physicist,” which is too much of a mouthful. Smartest carbon-based life-form I have ever gotten hammered with. There are some nights I can barely recall knocking back Irish car bombs in a dive bar near the Jet Propulsion Lab La Cañada Flintridge near L.A. Her job is looking at the solar system using radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, optical astronomy, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray astronomy and every other kind of astronomy there is. She also works closely with some of the world’s top theoretical astrophysicists. Believe me, if there was something coming toward Earth that was big enough to destroy the planet, she’d know.

She would absolutely know.

I’d had some long talks with her when I first started looking for Sister Light. Rosie was always a high-strung woman. Prone to nervous laughs, mostly at the wrong times. She was also one of the few hardcore scientists I’d met who hadn’t lost her faith. She went to synagogue every week and took frequent trips to Israel.

The last time I spoke with her was ten days ago. I’d wanted to bone up on the Nibiru stuff so I would have the ammunition to counter whatever programming they’d force-fed to the girl. Rosie was in a hotel room in Toronto, about to begin a big three-day international symposium on NEOs (near-Earth objects). Nibiru was on the agenda because NASA and other groups wanted to have a clear and cohesive rebuttal to the growing number of crackpot conspiracy theories. Now that the Mayan calendar thing was well behind us, the apocalypse junkies had really gotten behind the imaginary, invisible, rogue dwarf star.

Can you imagine what those conversations must be like? All those scientists, with all that scientific data, trying to combat something with zero supporting evidence—and having a hard time doing it. Emails and phone calls were choking NASA’s Spaceguard program, Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking, Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, Catalina Sky Survey, Campo Imperatore Near-Earth Object Survey, the Japanese Spaceguard Association, and Asiago-DLR Asteroid Survey, the Minor Planet Center, and other organizations whose job it was to look for things in space that could endanger the Earth.

And some pinhead from Fox News even snuck in a question about it at a White House press conference, which made it blow up even bigger.

Rosie must have been feeling it, too. She was even more jumpy than usual when we spoke on the phone.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked.

“It’s complicated.”

“I bet.”

“There are protestors outside the convention center. Hundreds of them, from all over.”

“Seriously? Why? What are they protesting?”

“They… um… think we’re here to decide on how best to hide the truth from the world.”

I laughed. “Ri-i-i-i-ight. That’s why they brought the top astrophysicists from around the world together. That’s why they advertised the conference. That’s why they’re doing it all in plain sight, because you’re all trying to hide something.”

“This is serious, John. The crowds are really scary. We have a lot of security, and they don’t want us to leave the convention center without an escort. They even have police patrolling our hotels.”

“That’s nuts. What do they think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know. We have a conference in a few minutes. Someone from Homeland is coming in to talk to us about it.”

“Homeland? Why them? Most of the apocalypse cults aren’t dangerous. At least not in that way. I mean, sure the Heaven’s Gate people killed themselves, but that was mass suicide, not terrorism. It wasn’t a terrorist thing. They weren’t looking to hurt anyone else.”

“I don’t know, John. I’ll call you in a couple of days. When I get back to California.”

“Okay.”

“But… with that girl you’re looking for… ?”

“Yeah?”

“Be gentle with her. She’s eighteen. She waited until she was of legal age before she joined that church.”

“I know, but—”

“Maybe she really believes in this.”

“If she does, that’s an arguable case for irrational behavior.”

Rosie took a few seconds with that. “Every religion looks irrational from the outside. It all looks crazy, from a distance. If you’re not a believer. We Jews believe in plagues of locusts, giant bodies of water parting, burning bushes, people being turned into pillars of salt. You Christians worship someone who cast out demons and raised the dead. Why should we be allowed to believe in that stuff and this girl not be allowed to believe in something like Nibiru?”

“Hey, you’re the one who told me that the laws of physics and gravitational dynamics can’t support the presence of a celestial body that big without us seeing its effect on pretty much everything. You went on and on about that, sweetie. You’re the rational got-to-measure-it-to-believe it science nerd. I’m just a hired thug.”

She usually laughed at stuff like that. She didn’t this time.

She told me again that she’d call me, and that was the last time I talked to her.

I’ve been trying to get through to her office since the conference ended, but her voicemail’s jammed. Probably crank callers asking about Nibiru. Rosie was pretty high profile in the news stories about the gig in Toronto. She’s been very vocal about the scientific impossibility of it all.

Wish I could get her on the phone. Any new info she could give me might help with breaking Sister Light away from the Church of the Nomad World.

I’d need it, too, because my read on Sister Light was that she was more a true believer than a lost soul. That’s important to know because you have to have an approach. The lost ones are beyond conversations. They are terrified of finding out that they’re wrong. So much so that they’ll hurt themselves rather than face the truth. Buddy of mine had to call parents once to tell them their daughter slashed her own throat when she spotted the pick-up team coming to take her home.

Imagine that.

Fifteen-year-old girl who’d rather take a pair of fabric scissors to her throat instead of going back to whatever hell she’d fled. Whether their problems are real or imagined, kids like that are sometimes too far gone.

Not everyone can be saved. The people here at the Church should understand that. They believe only their initiates are going to hitch a ride on Nibiru. The rest of the unworthy or unrepentant will become stardust.

Stardust.

Sounds better than saying we’ll all burn in hellfire, which is what most of these nutbags say.

Stardust doesn’t actually sound that bad.

Stardust.

Star stuff.

I spotted her five minutes after I climbed the wall. Sitting on a bench by herself. No watchdogs.

Sister Light.

She was five foot nothing. A slip of a thing, with pale hair and paler skin, and eyes the color of summer grass. Not especially pretty. Not ugly. No curves, but a good face and kind eyes.

Intelligent eyes.

She was sitting on a stone bench in a little grove of foxtail palms and oversized succulents. A small water feature burbled quietly and I think there was even a butterfly. You could have sold a photo of that moment to any calendar company.

All around the grove was a geometric pattern of white rectangular four-by-seven foot stones. They fanned out from where she sat like playing cards. Four or five of them, covering several acres of cool green grass

The girl was wearing a white dress with a pale blue gardening apron. White gloves tucked into the apron tie. Her head was covered with the requisite blue scarf that every woman in the Church wore. The men all wore blue baseball caps with circles embroidered on them. Symbolic of the nomad world, I supposed.

I’d come dressed for the part. White painter’s pants, white shirt, blue cap.

Stun gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, hidden by the shirt. Syringe with a strong but safe tranquilizer. A lead-weighted sap if things got weird. A cell phone with booster chip so I could talk to Rosie, Lee or, at need, my backup. Three guys in a van parked around the corner. Three very tough guys who have done this before. Guys who are not as nice as I am, and I’m not that nice.

As I approached she set down the water bottle she’d been drinking from and watched with quiet grace as I approached.

She smiled at me. “You’re here to take me back, aren’t you?”

I slowed my approach and stopped at the edge of the little grove.

“What do you mean, sister?” I asked, pitching my voice so it was soft. The smile I wore was full of lots of white teeth. Very wholesome.

She shook her head.

“You’re not one of us,” she said.

“I’m new.”

“No, you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

The girl looked at me with eyes that were a lot older than eighteen. Very bright lights in those eyes. It made me want to smile for real.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“No, I mean… what’s your name?”

“Oh. John Poe.”

“Poe? Like the writer.”

“Like that.”

“Nice. I read some of his stuff in school. The one about the cat, and the one about the guy’s heart under the floorboards.”

“Scary stuff.”

“I thought they were sad. Those poor people were so lost.”

I said nothing.

She nodded to the empty end of the bench. “It’s okay for you to sit down.”

I sat, making sure that I didn’t sit too close. Invading her little envelope of subjective distance was not a good opening move. But I also didn’t sit too far away. I didn’t want to give her a wall of distance either. You have to know how to play it.

We watched a couple of mourning doves waddle around poking at the grass.

“My parents sent you,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“They care about you.”

Her reply to that was a small, thin smile.

“They want to know you’re okay,” I said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Of course. They’re your parents.”

She studied my face. “You don’t look that naïve, Mr. Poe.”

And you don’t sound like an eighteen-year-old, I thought.

Aloud I said, “If that’s something you’d like to talk about, we can. But is here the best place?”

“It’s safer.”

“Safer for whom?”

“For me,” she said. “Look, I understand how this is supposed to work. You come on very passive and friendly and helpful and you find a way to talk me into leaving the grounds with you. To have a chat at a diner or something like that. Then once we’re off the church grounds, you grab me and take me to my parents.”

“You make it sound like an abduction. All I want to do is bring you home.”

“No. You want to take me to where my parents live.” She patted the bench. “This is home, Mr. Poe.” She gestured to the lush foliage around us. “And this.” And finally she touched her chest over her heart. “And this.”

“Okay, I get that. Our home is where we are. Our home is our skin and our perceptions. That’s nice in the abstract, but it isn’t where your family is. They’re at your family home, and they’re waiting for you.”

Her smile was constant and patient. I wanted to break through that level of calm control because that’s where the levers are. Fear is one level. Insecurity, which is a specific kind of fear, is another. There are a lot of them.

“Mr. Poe,” she said before I could reach for one of those levers, “do we have to do this? I mean, I understand that you’re being paid to be here, and maybe there’s a bonus for you to bring me back. I know how Daddy works, and he likes his incentives. I think it’s easier if we can just be honest. You want to earn your paycheck. Daddy and Mommy want me back so they can put me in a hospital, which would make them legal guardians of me and my money. They think I’m nuts and you think I’ve been brainwashed. Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”

I had to smile. “You’re a sharp kid.”

“I’m almost nineteen, Mr. Poe. I stopped being a kid a while ago.”

“Nineteen is pretty young.”

She shook her head. “Nineteen is as old as I’m ever going to get.”

We sat with that for a moment.

“Go on,” she encouraged, “say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say anything. I just said that I wasn’t going to get any older. That probably sounds suicidal to you. Or fatalistic. Maybe it’s a sign of deep-seated depression. Go on. Make a comment.”

What I said was, “You’re an interesting girl.”

“Person. If you don’t want to call me a ‘woman,’ then call me a person. I’m not a girl.”

“Sorry. But, yes, you’re a very interesting person.”

“Which goes against the ‘type,’ doesn’t it?”

“Which type?”

“Well, if I was political, or if this was some kind of radical militant group, then you’d expect me to be more educated. You’d expect me to rattle off a lot of Marxist or pseudo-Marxist tripe. But the Church isn’t radical. Not in that way. We don’t care at all about politics. I know I don’t. We’re what people like you would call a ‘doomsday cult.’”

“If that’s the wrong phrase, tell me which one to use.”

She laughed. “No, it’s fine. It’s pretty much true.”

“What’s true?”

“The world’s going to end.”

“Because of Nibiru?”

“Sure.”

“And—what is it, exactly? People can’t seem to agree.”

“Well,” she said with a laugh, “it’s not a dwarf brown star.”

“It’s not?”

“You think I don’t know about this. You think I’m a confused little girl in a weirdo cult thinking we’re all going to hitch a ride on a passing planet. You think this is Heaven’s Gate and Nibiru is another Hale-Bopp. That’s what you think.”

Again, she wasn’t framing it as a question.

“Well, let me tell you,” she continued, “what they tell us here in the church. One of the first things they did was to explain how it couldn’t possibly be a brown dwarf because that would mean it was an object bigger than Jupiter. Even in the most extreme orbit, it would have been spotted, and its gravitational pull would have affected every other planet in our solar system.”

I said, “Okay.”

“And if it was a giant planet four times larger than the Earth, which is what a lot of people are saying on the news and on the Net, then if it was coming toward the Earth it would be visible to the naked eye. And that would also warp the orbits of the outer planets. And it can’t have been a planet concealed behind the sun all this time because that would be geometrically impossible.”

“You know your science.”

“They teach us the science here.”

“Oh.”

“That surprises you, doesn’t it.”

“I suppose it does. Why do you think they do that?”

“No,” she said, “why do you think they do it? Why teach us about the science?”

“If you want me to be straight with you, then it’s because using the truth is the easiest way to sell a lie. It’s a conman’s trick. It’s no different than a magician letting you look in his hat and up his sleeve before he pulls a rabbit out. They don’t let you look at where he’s keeping the rabbit.”

“That might be true if the church was trying to sell us something. Or sell us on something.”

“You’re saying they’re not?”

“They’re not.”

“So, they have no interest at all in your trust fund?”

“A year ago, maybe,” she said offhand. “Two years ago, definitely. Not anymore.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“Because Nibiru is coming.”

“You said that it wasn’t.”

“No,” she said, “I said that it wasn’t a brown dwarf or a rogue planet.”

“You’re group’s called the Church of the Nomad World. Emphasis on ‘world.’”

“I know. When they started, they were using the rogue world thing in exactly the way you think they still are.”

“Uh huh. And there are YouTube videos of your deacons talking about how the gravity of Nibiru is going to cause the Earth to stop spinning, and that after it leaves the Earth’s rotation will somehow restart.”

“Those videos are old.”

“Six years isn’t that old.”

“Old enough,” she said. “Nobody says that anymore. Not here. Besides, if the world were to somehow stop rotating the core heat would make the oceans boil. And you couldn’t restart rotation again at the same rate of spin. The law of the conservation of angular momentum says it’s impossible.”

“You understand the physics?”

“We all do,” she said, indicating the others who walked or sat in the garden. “We study it.”

Her tone was conversational and calm, her demeanor serene.

“Then what do your people believe?” I asked.

“Nibiru is coming.”

“But—”

“You look confused,” she said.

“I am confused. If it’s not a brown dwarf and it’s not a rogue planet, then what is Nibiru?”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That’s the right question.”

“What?”

“That’s the question you should have been asking.”

“Okay, fine, I’m asking it now. What is—?”

“It’s an asteroid,” she said.

“An asteroid.”

“Yes.”

“That you think is going to hit the Earth?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“It’s going to hit the Moon,” she said. “And the Moon will hit the Earth.”

“An asteroid that big and no one’s seen it?”

“Sure they have, Mr. Poe. A lot of people have seen it. Why do you think everyone’s so upset? It’s all over the news, and it’s getting worse. There are all those books about it. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Talking, sure, but there’s no evidence.”

“There are lots of pictures,” she said, her manner still calm. “But I guess you think they’re all doctored. Solar flares causing images on cameras, that sort of thing.”

“And they disprove those things as fast as they go up.”

“I know. Some of them. Like the one of Nibiru that was on YouTube a few years ago that they said was a Hubble image of the expanding light echo around the star V838 Mon. Yes, most of the images have been discredited. Most, not all. There are a bunch that still get out there, and NASA and the other groups say they’re faked.”

“They are fakes.”

“You say that, but you don’t actually know that, do you?”

I dug my cell phone out of my pocket. “I pretty much do. I have one of the top observational astrophysicists on speed dial. She’s been my information source for this ever since I began looking for you.”

Sister Light nodded. “Okay. Was she at the conference in Toronto?”

I grinned. “You keep up with the news. Yes, she was there.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rose Blum.”

She nodded. “She’s good. I read a couple of her books.”

“You understood her books?”

“Some of it. Not all the math, but enough. She’s right about almost everything.”

“Except Nibiru, is that right?”

“If she says it doesn’t exist, then no. If she told you that there was no dwarf sun or giant planet about to hit the Earth, then she was telling you at least some of the truth. But have you actually asked her if she knows anything about the asteroid heading toward the dark side of the moon?”

“I’m pretty sure she’d have said something,” I said, chuckling.

Sister Light shook her head. “I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.”

“I could call her.”

She stood up and walked over to one of the stone rectangles set into the grass. I joined her, standing a polite distance to one side. There was writing on the stones which I hadn’t taken note of before. I stepped onto the grass and read what was carved into the closest one.

Myron Alan Freeman.

It took me a moment, but I found the name amid the jumble of information I’d studied about the Church.

Freeman was a deacon, one of forty men and women who helped run the organization.

Below his name was the word: Peace.

I stiffened and cut a look at Sister Light. She nodded to the other stones, and I walked out into the field. Each of them had a name. Some I recognized, others I didn’t. All of them had the word ‘peace’ on them.

My throat went totally dry and I wheeled to face her. My heart was racing. I raised my shirt and gripped the butt of the stun gun.

“What the fuck is this?” I demanded.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like a fucking cemetery.”

She nodded. “That’s what it is.”

I drew my weapon but held it down at my side. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Every stone here?”

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“Yes?”

“Who killed them?”

Her face was sad. “Not everyone wants to wait for it to happen, Mr. Poe.”

“You’re saying they killed themselves?”

“Nobody here commits murder. It’s against our beliefs. Only God has the right to take a human life.”

“God… ?”

“The one true God, Mr. Poe. The one who has sent his angel, Nibiru, to end the suffering of all mankind.”

I looked for the crazy. I looked for that spark of madness in her eyes. The religious zeal. The disconnect.

I looked.

And looked.

“We believe,” she said. “We don’t require anyone else to. We don’t proselytize. We’re not looking for new members. We get a lot of them, though. People see the truth, they read through the lies in the media, the lies told by NASA and Homeland and everyone else. They see what’s coming and they know what it means. And they come to us.”

“For what?”

“Some of them want to be loved before it all ends. That’s why I’m here. My parents are so cold, so dismissive. I didn’t leave because I was acting out. I wasn’t going through teenage angst. I came looking for a place to belong so I could wait out the time that we have left among those who don’t judge, don’t hate, don’t want anything from me except whatever love I want to share. I’m only eighteen, Mr. Poe. I’ll be dead within a few months of my nineteenth birthday. I won’t have a future. I won’t have a husband or kids or any of that. I have this. This is the only chance I’ll ever have to give love. Here in the Church… I have love. I have peace. I have prayer.”

She turned away from the stone markers.

The grave markers.

“I want to live all the way to the end. I don’t want to commit suicide.”

“Why? What do you think is going to happen if this asteroid is real? Will you be transported off to a new world? Will you be elevated to a higher consciousness?”

I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“No,” she said simply. “When Nibiru hits the moon and the moon hits the Earth, I’ll die. It’ll probably hurt. I’ll be scared. Of course I will. But I’ll die here, among my friends, content with the will of God.”

I wanted to slap her.

I really did.

I wanted to hit her until she didn’t believe this bullshit anymore. We stood there in a churchyard surrounded by the graves of five hundred suicides.

“You need help,” I said. “Everyone here does.”

“No we don’t. We’ve found what we need. We don’t require anything else but to be left alone to pray, to love each other, and to die.”

She nodded to the stun gun I held.

“You can use that on me. You can take me by force. No one here is going to try and stop you, and you probably have help somewhere close. So… sure, you can take me against my will. If you do, and if they manage to lock me away somewhere where I can’t escape or can’t take my life, it won’t change anything. I’ll still die. We all will. However you’ll die knowing that you robbed me of being happy before I died.” She stepped close to me and looked up into my eyes. “Is that what you want, Mr. Poe? Is that what you really think is best for me? Will taking me out of here actually keep me ‘safe’?”

I got home around eight that night.

Last night.

I let the other guys go. Told him that we’d drawn a blank. Told them I’d call when I had a fresh lead. It was all the same to them. They were day players.

At my apartment, I cracked a fresh beer and took it out to the deck to watch the sky.

The moon was up. Three-quarter moon.

I drank the beer. Got another. Drank that.

Sat with the moon until it was down.

I tried fifteen times to get Rosie Blum on the phone.

Fifteen.

Cell. Office. Home answering machine.

Finally someone picked up.

Not Rosie, though.

It was her roommate. Rachael Somethingorother. A junior astrophysicist.

“Hello—?”

There was something about the way she said it. Tentative and a little weary. Like she was afraid of a call. Or of another call.

“Rachael? It’s John Poe,” I said. “Is Rosie there? I’ve been trying to get her for days and she’s not picking up. I really need to talk to her. Is she there?”

She took too long to reply.

Too long.

“John… I’m so sorry,” she said.

So sorry.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It… it’s going to be in the papers. God, I’m sorry. I thought someone would have called you.”

“What’s going to be in the papers? What’s wrong? Where’s Rosie?”

“She’s gone… ,” she said. “I didn’t even know she had a gun. Oh god, there was so much blood… oh god, John… ”

I stared at the night. Listened to the voice on the phone.

“When… ?” I asked softly.

“Last night,” said Rachael. “When she and Dr. Marcus got back from Toronto. They came back from the airport and they went straight into her room without saying anything. I thought… well, I thought that maybe they were together now. That they’d hooked up in Toronto and, well, you know… ”

“What happened?”

“Like I said, I didn’t even know she had a gun until I heard the shots.”

“Shots?”

“Yes. Oh god, John… she shot him in the head and then put the gun in her… in her… ”

She may have said more. There must have been more to the story, but I didn’t hear it.

I dropped my hand into my lap, then let it fall down beside my deck chair. The phone landed hard and bounced away. Maybe it went over the rail. I don’t know. I haven’t looked for it.

I’m sitting here now, and I don’t know why I’m recording this. I mean… who the fuck am I leaving a record for?

I watched the news this morning.

Sixteen suicides. Eight of the speakers at the Toronto conference.

Eight others who were there.

Not counting Rosie and Dr. Marcus.

Eighteen.

All of them there to talk about Nibiru. To work out what kind of message to tell the world.

Eighteen.

I guess the message is pretty clear.

I’m going to leave this recorder here on the dashboard. Not sure what good it would do for someone else to find it.

Across the street I can see the wrought iron gates and the granite pillars. And beyond that the white stones in the green grass.

I can see Sister Light standing there, watching my car.

Watching me.

Waiting for me.

Smiling at me.

She lifts her hand.

A welcome gesture.

Okay, I tell myself.

Okay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He’s the author of many novels including Code Zero, Fire & Ash, The Nightsiders, Dead of Night, and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of the V-Wars shared-world anthologies. His nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Jonathan writes V-Wars and Rot & Ruin for IDW Comics, and Bad Blood for Dark Horse, as well as multiple projects for Marvel. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club; and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. He lives in Del Mar, California. Find him online at jonathanmaberry.com.