All the steps I’d taken to keep my family safe. All the food I’d thrown away, the laundry I’d done twice, the midnight trips to the doctor and the visits from the exterminator and the vaccinations and the pleas…it had all been for nothing. The agent of our destruction had grown in the lab where I worked, the lab I’d chosen because it let me channel my impulses into something that felt useful. I hadn’t even known it was coming, because people had been protecting me from it in order to protect themselves from me. This was all my fault.
Dr. Oshiro was saying something. I wasn’t listening anymore. One of the nurses in Rachel’s room had just turned around, revealing the small patch of gray fuzz growing on the back of his knee. The others would spot it soon. That didn’t matter. The edges told me that it had grown outward, eating through his scrubs, rather than inward, seeking flesh. The flesh was already infected. The burning had begun.
“Mom?” Nikki pulled against my hand, and I realized I was walking away, pulling her with me, away from this house of horrors, toward the outside world, where maybe—if we were quick, if we were careful—we still stood a chance of getting out alive. Nikki was all I had left to worry about.
Rachel, I’m sorry, I thought, and broke into a run.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.
SHE’S GOT A TICKET TO RIDE
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
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.
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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.
-3-
The Church of the Nomad World is located on the walled grounds of an estate. The e
state 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 min
utes. 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.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 32
