Jericho Iteration

Through the windows, I could see dark vacant lots filled with dense rubble where buildings made of unreinforced brick and mortar had once stood; streets blocked by sawhorses because ancient sewer tu

The train left the midtown combat zone and rumbled toward the downtown area. It stopped briefly beneath Union Station, but it passed Auditorium because the platform there no longer existed. Kiel Auditorium itself had survived, but where the old City Hall building and the city jail once stood were now vast lots filled with crumbled masonry, broken cinderblock, bent copper pipes, and shattered glass. Giant piles which had once been buildings, waiting to be hauled away.

By now the downtown skyscrapers were clearly visible, their windows shining with light; the Gateway Arch, seen above the spired dome of the old state courthouse, reflected the city lights like a nocturnal rainbow. For a minute or two there was no wreckage to be seen. It seemed as if the city had never suffered a quake, that all was sane and safe.

Then the train hurtled toward Busch Stadium, and the illusion was destroyed. Silence descended as everyone turned to gaze out the left-side windows at the stadium. Busch Stadium still stood erect; bright spotlights gleamed from within its bowl, and one could almost have sworn that a baseball game was in progress, but as the train slowed to pull into Stadium Station, the barbed-wire fences and rows of concrete barriers blocking the ground-level entrances told a different story.

A group of ERA soldiers were sitting on benches at the subsurface train platform; a couple of them glanced up as the train came to a halt, and everyone in the train quickly looked away. The doors opened, but no one got on, and nobody dared to get off. There was dead quiet within the train until the doors automatically closed once again. The train moved on, and not until it went into a tu

Busch Stadium wasn’t a nice place to visit anymore. Oh, people still did at times, but seldom voluntarily. There were whispered rumors that people who went to the stadium often didn’t come out again.

But, of course, that was only hearsay.

A few minutes later the train rolled into 8th and Pine, the underground hub station for the MetroLink. I got off here and took an escalator from the Red Line platform down to the Yellow Line platform. The station was cold, with a breeze that seeped through the plastic tarps covering a gaping hole in the ceiling where the roof had partially collapsed during the quake. A couple of ERA troopers lounged against a construction scaffold, smoking cigarettes as they watched everyone who passed by. I was careful to avoid making eye contact with them, but they were bored tonight, contenting themselves with ousting the occasional vagrant who tried to grab a few winks in one of the cement benches.

I managed to grab the Yellow Line train just before it left the station. It was the last southbound train to run tonight, and if I had missed it, I would have had to dodge downtown curfew patrols while I trudged home through the rain. At times like this I wished I still had my own car, but Maria

Not surprisingly, the train was almost vacant. Most of the South-side neighborhoods were under nine-to-six curfew, so anyone with any sense was already at home … if they still had a home, that is. Across the aisle, a teenage girl in a worn-out Screamin’ Magpies tour jacket was slumped over in her seat, clutching her knees between her arms; she seemed to be talking to herself, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. At the front of the car a ski

I had the seat to myself. The train came out of the tu

I didn’t dare to look around, afraid to see what could not be reflected in the glass: a small boy, wearing a red nylon Cardinals jacket, dutifully marking up his scorecard while mustering the courage to ask me if he could enter a Little League season he would never live to see …

Can I play Little League next year?

Goddamn this train.

“Not now, Jamie,” I whispered to the window. “Please, not right now. Daddy’s tired.”

The ghost vanished as if he had never been there in the first place, leaving me only with memories of the happy days before May 17, 2012.

Let’s talk about Jericho again.

There had been plenty of advance warning that a major earthquake might one day rock the Midwest. Geologists had been warning everyone for years that the New Madrid fault was not a myth, that it was a loaded gun with its hammer cocked back, and their grim predictions were supported by history. In 1811, a superquake estimated at 8.2 on the then-nonexistent Richter scale had devastated the Mississippi River Valley, destroying pioneer settlements from Illinois to Kansas; legend told of the Mississippi River itself flowing backward during the quake, and simultaneous tremors were reported as far away as New York and Philadelphia while church bells rang in Charleston, South Carolina.

And there were other historical harbingers of disaster, major and minor quakes ranging between 5.0 and 6.2 on the Richter scale during the years between 1838 and 1976, all caused by a 130-mile seismic rift between Arkansas and Missouri, centered near the little Missouri town of New Madrid. Sometimes the quakes occurred away from the Missouri bootheel, such as the 1909 quake on the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana, but most of the temblors happened in the region near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and during even the most minor quakes chimneys crumbled, roofs collapsed, and people occasionally died.

Despite geologic and historical evidence that the city was living on borrowed time, though, most people in St. Louis managed to forget that they lived just north of a bull’s-eye.

In August 1990 a New Mexico pseudoscientist named Iben Browning caused a panic by predicting that there was a fifty-fifty chance that a major earthquake would occur between the first and fifth days of December of that year. His prediction, based upon flimsy conjecture involving sunspots and lunar motion, was made during a speech to a group of St. Louis businessmen, and the sensation-hungry local media blared it to the public. By coincidence, Browning’s prediction was followed in late September by a minor 4.6 quake epicentered near Cape Giradeau. The quake did little damage, but the general public, already u

During a three-month silly season, St. Louis prepared itself for imminent disaster, climaxing on a Wednesday when the city’s public schools were shut down, its fire departments mobilized, and scores of citizens left town for vacation. When the prediction proved to be false-as was bound to happen, since earthquake prediction ranks with Rhine card ESP tests for unreliability-St. Louis ruefully laughed at itself and promptly began to forget everything it had learned about earthquake preparedness.