“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’?”