Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

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.