Jericho Iteration Read online

  Get out of here, get out of here, this is my house, my house, MY HOUSE, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE THIS IS MY HOUSE!

  —and then, in that moment between life and death, the copilot studied the image on his night-vision screen and reached a decision.

  Ain’t nothing here except a damn dog.

  The ERA chopper rose upward, then angled away into the wet night, its lights following the ghostly strip of the ruined street until it vanished from sight.

  The dog got some more Little Friskies for his smooth move, and I haven’t slept since then.

  Perhaps you may feel secure, hiding behind whatever walls you’ve erected around yourself, but I tell you now, as solid fact, that what happened to me and my city is not far removed from you. None of us is safe, and any sense of security you may have now is a lie.

  My name is Gerry Rosen. I’m a reporter, and this is what happened to me during two days and three nights in Jericho, now better known as St. Louis, Missouri.

  From the Associated Press (on-line edition): May 17, 2012

  ST. LOUIS, MO. (AP)—A major earthquake, registering 7.5 on the Richter scale, struck St. Louis today, devastating large areas of the city and surrounding area and killing hundreds of people.

  The quake, which began at 1:55 P.M. and lasted approximately 45 seconds, was epicentered in the town of New Madrid, about 130 miles southeast of the city. The quake caused high-rise buildings in the downtown area to sway, destroyed scores of smaller buildings and countless homes across the county, and led to the collapse of a light-rail bridge spanning the Mississippi River.

  The exact number of people in St. Louis killed or injured by the quake is not known at this time. However, local police and fire officials say that at least two hundred fatalities have been reported so far and city hospitals are overwhelmed by people seeking medical assistance.

  Particularly hard hit by the quake was the downtown business district, where many older buildings suffered extensive damage. Although no high-rise buildings collapsed during the quake, many interior walls fell. Dozens of smaller buildings were completely demolished, burying their occupants under tons of rubble. These included the old St. Louis City Jail, where at least 35 prisoners were instantly killed, and the nearby City Hall, where at least 10 office workers are reported missing.

  Two local schools were also leveled during the quake. One city fire official said that there were “hardly any survivors” among the elementary schoolchildren who were attending classes at one of them, a Catholic private school in the city’s prosperous west side.

  Many streets in the downtown area have been ripped up by the collapse of underground caverns beneath the city, causing dozens of vehicles to fall into the gaping crevasses. Underground sewage pipes and electrical conduits were torn apart by the quake, causing the downtown area to be flooded with raw sewage. At least one chemical storage tank has been ruptured, and hazardous toxins are reported to be flowing through storm drains into the Mississippi.

  Electrical power has been lost to most of the city, along with telephone lines and cable communications systems. Scattered fires in various neighborhoods have been reported by utility officials, largely caused by severed gas lines. Efforts to control the fires have been hindered by breakage of municipal water lines to much of the city and the loss of firehouses in at least three wards.

  The William Eads Bridge, a major conduit for the city’s light-rail system, collapsed into the Mississippi River, and eyewitnesses say that a westbound commuter train was crossing the bridge from East St. Louis, Ill., at the time of the quake. No official statement has yet been issued regarding the number of casualties, but officials at the scene say that dozens of people who were riding the MetroLink train may have fallen to their deaths.

  The Gateway Arch, the national landmark on the west bank of the Mississippi that is the city’s symbol, survived the quake intact, although roof sections of the underground visitors’ center beneath the Arch fell during the quake, killing at least five people and injuring dozens of others. Witnesses report that the Arch itself swayed during the tremors.

  Missouri Gov. Andre Tyrell, who was attending the National Governors Convention in Las Vegas at the time of the disaster, has phoned the President to ask for federal assistance, says spokesman Clyde Thomson at the state capital in Jefferson City, itself rocked by the quake. Thomson said that Tyrell is flying back to the state, although commercial air traffic in and out of St. Louis International Airport has been suspended by the Federal Aviation Administration because of hazardous runway conditions.

  Although the local Emergency Broadcast System was crippled by the loss of the KMOX-AM radio tower, St. Louis Mayor Elizabeth Boucher went on the air from radio station KZAK-AM at 2:30 P.M. to plead for calm and cooperation from the city’s residents. “Please help our police and firemen do their jobs,” she said, “and assist your neighbors in whatever way you can.

  “May God help us in this time of crisis,” Boucher said, her voice shaking.

  Several small towns in eastern Missouri and southwestern Illinois were also devastated by the earthquake, the force of which has been estimated to be equivalent to the detonation of 900,000 tons of TNT, or a nine-kiloton nuclear explosion. Significant damage was also reported in Evansville, Ill., and Memphis, Tenn., and tremors were felt as far west as Kansas City, where a church bell was reported to have rung twelve times during the quake.

  Hundreds of National Guard troops from across the midwestern region are being sent to Missouri to aid local relief efforts. Spokesmen at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Emergency Relief Agency say that ERA troops are being mobilized at this time …

  Excerpt from The Big Muddy Inquirer:

  December 18, 2012

  Christmas In Squat City:

  “Santa Will Still Find Our Tent.”

  Seven months ago, Jean Moran lived in a two-bedroom ranch house in suburban Frontenac. Each morning she packed sack lunches for her two children and sent them off to meet the school bus, while her husband, Rob, skimmed the paper and had one last cup of coffee before driving downtown to the insurance brokerage where he worked. Jean then spent the rest of the day doing housework, paying bills, shopping for groceries, chatting on CompuServe with friends around the country … the daily affairs of a slightly bored young housewife who believed that her life was as solid as the ground beneath her feet.

  Then, one day last May, the ground was no longer solid.

  Now Jean Moran and her kids, Ellen and Daniel, are only three of some 75,000 residents of the vast tent city that is still in place in Forest Park seven months after the New Madrid earthquake.

  She still does housework—or rather, tentwork, the day-to-day housekeeping responsibilities shared by the four homeless families who occupy tent G-12—but gone are all the material things she once took for granted, except for a few family pictures she salvaged from the wreckage of her house.

  For a while after they moved into the park, Ellen and Danny went to school three days a week, attending one-room elementary classes conducted in the mess tent by volunteer teachers from the Urban Education Project, until government cutbacks closed the school last November. Now, while Jean fills plastic bottles from the water buffalo parked nearby, her children are two more kids playing in the frozen mud between the olive drab tents of Squat City.

  “I’m just grateful I didn’t lose them, too,” Jean says quietly, watching her kids as she hauls the two-gallon jugs back to her tent and stows them on the plywood floor beneath her metal bed. “They were both out in the playground for recess when it happened … thank God I was in the carport and managed to get out in the open, or they would have lost both their parents.”

  Her husband had also been out in the open during the quake, but he wasn’t as lucky as his wife and children. Rob Moran was killed when a cornice stone fell ten stories from a downtown office building while he was on his way back to work from a late lunch. He had a life insurance policy, just as the Moran house had been covered by e
arthquake rider on the home insurance, but Jean is still waiting for the money to come through. The small insurance company that had protected them went bankrupt before all its claims could be settled.

  With the insurance company now in receivership, it may be many months before the Morans are reimbursed for everything they are owed. Yet this is only one of many nuisances, large and small, with which Jean has had to cope as the widowed mother of two children.

  “Summer wasn’t too bad,” she says, sitting on her bunk and gazing through the furled-back tent flap. “It was hot, sure—sometimes it was over a hundred degrees in here—but at least we had things to do and people were taking care of us. And when construction companies started looking for crews to work on demolition and rebuilding contracts, some people around here were able to get work.”

  She laughs. “Y’know, for a while, it was almost like we were all in summer camp again. At first, we liked the ERA troopers. They put up the tents, smiled at us at mealtime, let Danny play in their Hummers and so forth …”

  She suddenly falls silent when, as if on cue, a soldier saunters past her tent. An assault rifle is slung over the shoulder of his uniform parka, which looks considerably warmer than the hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket Jean is wearing. For an instant their eyes meet; she glances away and the soldier, who looks no older than 21, walks on, swaggering just a little.

  “Lately, though, they’ve turned mean,” she goes on, a little more quietly now. “Like we’re just a bunch of deadbeats who want to live off the dole … I dunno what they think, but that’s how we’re treated. Sometimes they pick fights with the guys over little stuff, like someone trying to get an extra slice of cornbread in the cafeteria line. Every now and then somebody gets pushed around by two or three of them for no good reason. We’re at their mercy and they know it.”

  She lowers her voice a little more. “One of them propositioned me a couple of weeks ago,” she says, her face reddening. “He made it sound as if he’d requisition some extra blankets for the children if I’d … y’know.” Jean violently shakes her head. “Of course, I’d never do something like that, not for anybody, but I think some of the other women around here who have kids … well, you do what you think you gotta do.”

  She pulls at her lank hair as she talks, trying to comb out the knots with her fingers. It’s been several days since she has taken a shower in the women’s bath tent. Like everything else in Squat City, hot water is carefully rationed; she gives her bath cards to her kids.

  “Last night Ellen wanted to know if Santa Claus was going to visit us even if we don’t have a chimney anymore,” she says. “I told her, ‘Yes, sweetheart, Santa will still find our tent.’ I didn’t tell her I don’t know if he’s going to bring us any presents—I’m hoping the Salvation Army or the Red Cross will come through—but I know what she wants anyway. She wants Santa to bring her daddy back …”

  Her voice trails off and for a couple of minutes she is quiet, surrounded by the sounds and smells of Squat City. The acrid odor of campfire smoke, burning paper and plastic kindled by wet branches. The monotone voice of the announcer for Radio ERA, the low-wattage government AM station operating out of the Forest Park Zoo, talking about Friday night’s movie in the mess tents. A helicopter flying low overhead. Children playing kickball.

  “Let me show you something,” Jean says abruptly, then stands up and walks between the bunks to push aside the grimy plastic shower curtain separating her family’s space from the others in G-12. “Look in here …”

  In the darkness of the tent, a middle-aged man is lying in bed, his hands neatly folded across his chest. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s asleep or awake; his eyes are heavy-lidded, as if he’s about to doze off for a midafternoon nap, yet the pupils are focused on the fabric ceiling of the tent. He is alone, yet he seems unaware that he has visitors.

  “That’s Mr. Tineal,” Jean whispers. “He used to own a grocery down on Gravois. He was buried alive under his store for six days before firemen found him. Six days, with both arms broken, and he hung on until they located him. After he got out of the hospital, they put him here, and he’s been like this ever since. His wife and his daughter have been tending to him, but I don’t think I’ve heard him say fifty words the whole time we’ve been here.”

  Jean lets the curtain fall. “Three days ago, an ERA caseworker stopped by. They do that once a week, mostly just to have us fill out more forms and such. Anyway, this bitch—I’m sorry for my language, but that’s the way she was—the lady looked him over once, then turns to Margaret, his wife, and they’ve been married now for over thirty years, and says, ‘You oughtta just let him die. He’s only using up your rations, that’s all.’”

  Jean walks back to her bunk and sits down on the same impression she had recently vacated. Once again, she’s quiet for a few minutes, gazing down at the muddy tracks on the wooden floor.

  “So what do you think?” she says at last. “Is Santa going to visit us this year or what?”

  From the Big Muddy Inquirer: April 3, 2013

  St. Louis To ERA: Go Away

  ERA to St. Louis: Thanks, But We Like It Here

  Like a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome but is apparently deaf to hints that it’s time to hit the highway, the federal Emergency Relief Agency shows no signs of leaving St. Louis anytime soon, despite the fact that the last aftershock of the New Madrid earthquake has been felt and many local officials say the city is off the critical list.

  Although 550 ERA troopers were recently withdrawn from Metro St. Louis and returned to the agency’s federal barracks at Ft. Devens in Massachusetts, some 600 soldiers remain on active duty in St. Louis County. ERA officials claim that the situation in St. Louis remains dangerous and that the agency’s paramilitary forces are needed to maintain order in the city.

  “Look at the map,” says Col. George Barris, commander of ERA forces in St. Louis. He points at a street map tacked up on a wall in the central command post, in what used to be the Stadium Club at Busch Stadium. Large areas of the map—mostly in the northern and southern sides of the city, as well as the central wards—are shaded in red, with black markers pinned to individual blocks within the red areas.

  “Those are the neighborhoods still under dusk-to-dawn curfew,” Barris explains. “The little black pins are the places where our patrols have encountered hostile action in the past 48 hours alone. Street gangs, looters, assaults against civilians—you name it. Now you tell me: do you really want us to just pack up and get out of here?”

  It’s inarguable that vast areas within the city remain volatile, particularly on the north side where three days of rioting late last December caused almost as much damage as the earthquake itself. Several parts of the city are so unsafe that authorities can patrol them only from the air, forcing SLPD to use military helicopters—including secondhand Mi-24 gunships recently purchased from Russia—instead of police cruisers.

  Yet many persons in the city believe that the continued presence of federal troops in St. Louis is only exacerbating the crisis. “Look at what we’ve been through already,” says LeRoy Jensen, a Ferguson community activist who made an unsuccessful run for the city council two years ago. “People up here lost their homes, their jobs, some of them their families … now they can’t even leave the house without being challenged by some ERA soldier. Everyone who lives around here is automatically assumed to be a criminal, even if it’s just a mother stepping out to find her kids after dark. How can we go back to normal when we’re living in a combat zone?”

  Jensen points out that when $2 billion in federal disaster relief funds were made available through ERA to Missouri residents after New Madrid, very little of the money found its way to poor and lower-middle-class residents. Like many people, he charges that most of the cash went to rebuilding upper-class neighborhoods and large companies that didn’t really need federal assistance in the first place.

  “The government based the acceptance of loan applications o
n the ability of people to repay the loans,” Jensen says, “but how can you repay a federal loan if the store you worked at is gone? Yet if the government won’t help to rebuild that store, then you can’t repay the loan. It’s a catch-22 … but if you get mad about it, then along comes a dude in a uniform, telling you to be quiet and eat your rations. And when the food runs out, like it did last Christmas, then they send in the helicopters and soldiers again.”

  Jensen also claims that ERA crackdowns on north-central neighborhoods in the city are based on social and ethnic attitudes among ERA troopers. “When was the last time you heard of a white kid in Ladue or Clayton getting busted by the goons?” he says. “Answer: you never do. But all these ERA troops, they’re rich white kids who got out of being drafted to Nicaragua by getting Daddy Warbucks to get ’em into ERA, so now they’re trying to make up for being wusses by kicking some nigger ass in north St. Louis.”

  As heated as Jensen’s remarks are, they have some justification. The Emergency Relief Agency was established in 2006 as part of the National Service Act, which also reestablished the Civilian Conservation Corps and started the Urban Education Project. Under NSA, all Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 are required to serve 18 months in one of several federal agencies, including the armed services. At the same time, ERA was founded to replace the Federal Emergency Management Agency after FEMA came under fire for perceived mismanagement of natural disaster relief during the 1990’s.

  After national service became an obligation for all young American men and women, CCC was the most popular of the available agencies. Soon there was a four-year waiting list for applicants to this most benign of organizations, with UEP being seen as an only slightly less benign way to spend a year and a half. Widely regarded as a hardship post, ERA was the least popular of federal agencies.

  This changed when the United States went to war in Central America. As casualties began to mount among American servicemen in Nicaragua, many young men and women sought to duck military conscription by signing up for the ERA. Can’t get into the CCC? Not qualified to be a UEP teacher? Want to be a badass, but you don’t want to risk getting your ass shot off by a Sandinista guerrilla? Then ERA’s for you.