“I said, ‘HOW Y’ALL DOIN?!’” Prophet Jonas barked.[1]

Louder, but even less convincing, murmurs of attempted cheerfulness. Clearly those gathered in the pre-dawn desert cold just wanted to go home. At this point it didn’t much matter to them if home was on Jesus’ spaceship or back in the trailer park in Carson City.

As for Christine Temetri, her lack of enthusiasm stemmed not from her disbelief, nor even from her disgust with a transparent, philandering fundamentalist[2] nutjob like Jonas Bitters. Her lack of enthusiasm was, rather, a result of boredom, pure and simple. Christine was bored because she knew what was going to happen at sunrise: the sun would come up. That’s what always happened at sunrise. She had been through this routine a dozen times before, and never had anything remarkable happened at sunrise other than an eight hundred and sixty five thousand mile wide ball of nuclear fusion coming into view above the horizon.

For Christine, 5:44 a.m. was (if the Angler’s Almanac was to be believed, and she had no reason to doubt it) the time when she could pack up her lawn chair, throw it into the trunk of her rental car and drive to Salt Lake City, where she would catch the 10:25 flight back to Los Angeles. Once back home, she would sleep for a few hours, then try to assemble her notes, such as they were, into a 500-word article in time for the Banner’s deadline. Then, if the past few weeks’ editions were any indication, the Banner’s owner and publisher, Harry Giddings, would trim the article down to a pithy caption below one of Christine’s amateur shots of the girls in their bridesmaid dresses, something like:

Long wait anticlimactic for ‘ten virgins’

Well worth a plane ride from L.A. to Salt Lake City plus a four hour drive to and from the middle of nowhere. Christine yawned, trying to remember that she should be happy that she at least had a job – and a job doing ostensibly what she wanted to do: write.

Before going to work for the Banner, Christine had been a marginally employed substitute English teacher with dreams of being a freelance writer. Unfortunately, no one seemed particularly interested in her ruminations on life in eastern Oregon – that is, until she took it upon herself to write a piece on an apocalyptic cult near her home. She had intended to expose the group as a front for polygamy and tax evasion, but she found the cultists so pathetic and deluded that she was unable even to feign journalistic objectivity.