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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.
-2-
My target was an eighteen year old girl.
Birth certificate has her name as A
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.
-3-
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.