Glenn Kleier - The Last Day

Anke screwed up her face. “I don't know that I'd go so far as to accept any of those millenarian theologies,” she said. “But you can't just dismiss last night out of hand, can you?”

“Maybe not,” he replied slowly, still somewhat distracted by his new awareness, “but I find it hard to believe that any intelligent deity would mark His return by terrorizing His public. I guess I'll do as Bollinger suggested. I'll just wait and see how it all looks in the light of day.”

His wait was over. The dawn was breaking. Feldman glanced at his watch and realized that, with the streets in such poor shape, he might be hard pressed to drop by his apartment for a change of clothes.

Anke was already on her feet. “I understand you'll be leaving Israel soon, permanently?”

Feldman shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I'm afraid so. This was just a temporary assignment with WNN. I've got a new job waiting for me back in the States.” As he stared into her eyes, his promising new position was losing some of its allure.

She nodded, a fleeting look of disappointment showing on her face. “Well, Mr. Feldman”-she smiled again-”this was one New Year's Eve I don't suppose we'll soon forget!”

Feldman rose and walked toward her. This time he wasn't thwarted in his designs. The kiss was long, and long overdue. He felt the earth moving again. And left feeling more reinvigorated than his hour and a half of sleep warranted.

Driving was tedious, hampered by toppled walls, fallen utility poles and electrical lines. He stopped briefly at his apartment for fresh clothes. There was no newspaper on his porch. He opened his door and noted with dismay his slovenly, unkempt quarters, which compared poorly with Anke's tidy, well-appointed town home. He shrugged and made a firm commitment to purge the place at the earliest opportunity.

Peeling off his shirt, he tossed it near a laundry basket in the corner and pulled on a fresh shirt from a pile of clean clothes near his bed. As he picked up his shoulder bag, his cellular phone rang. It was Hunter. Bad reception, but no disguising the excitement in his voice.

“Goddamn, I've been trying to get through to you for an hour!”

“Well, my phone's been open,” Feldman confirmed. “The cells in the area are probably overloaded.”

“Listen carefully in case I lose you,” Hunter said, panting. “This is incredible! One of the WNN Cairo teams came in early this morning and we all drove down to Bethlehem. You got to get down here right now! We missed it, pal!”

“Bethlehem? What's going on in Bethlehem?”

“This is where the epicenter of the quake was. The same place where we saw the lightning storm hit last night. There's some really weird shit going on down here and I'll tell you all about it, but get here quick before we lose this scoop.”

“Okay, okay, but what about Bollinger and our meeting?”

“I couldn't get through to him. Tell him we got him one hell of a follow-up story to last night. Get everybody and everything down here, now! There's a second mobile unit on its way from Cairo that should be at headquarters soon. We'll need it, too. When you get down here, look for a WNN RV with a satellite dish parked near David's Wall in the open area between King David and Manger streets on the north side. If we're lucky, we'll be the only media operation here. Bye!” Hunter was gone.

God, does this guy never sleep? Feldman thought as he phoned Bollinger from his car. But the circuits were hopelessly tied up. Slowly wending his way through Jerusalem, the reporter was surprised to see so many buildings with severe damage. The darkness had certainly masked the destruction. Passing by the Old City, he could see major cracks showing in the walled-up entranceway of the ancient, sacred Golden Gate. Shaking his head at the destruction, he turned off on a south highway and impatiently made his way out of the city.

Bethlehem was ordinarily a very short drive from Jerusalem, virtually in the suburbs, only about ten kilometers south. But in the aftermath of the earthquake, the trip today was prolonged. Feldman had ample time to work the redial button of his cellular phone. Finally, he got through to Cissy.

“Where are you?” she wanted to know. “We've been trying to reach you all morning!”

“I'm on my way to Bethlehem,” he told her.

“Where? Have you heard from Hunter?”

“Yeah, he's in Bethlehem now.”

“What the hell's he doing there? Jimmy said he took off with one of the new Cairo mobile unit teams early this morning. He's got my car and he was supposed to pick me up for the meeting, the bastard!”

Feldman heard Cissy talking off-phone with someone and Bollinger jumped on the line. “Jon, what's going on?”

“Arnie, Hunter called me a while ago from Bethlehem. He's down there with one of the teams from Cairo. He wants the entire crew and equipment down there right now. Says we've got the chance for a real scoop if we hurry.”

“What's the story?”

“He didn't have time to give me details, but he said Bethlehem was the center of last night's quake and that thunderstorm. He said there's some really weird shit going on down there.”

That seemed to have Bollinger's attention, but he sounded irritated at the last-second fire drill. “This had better be good, Feldman,” he warned. “I'd like a little more detail to go on than ‘some really weird shit’ before we all just haul ass out of here in the middle of a story.”

“That's all I know, Arnie, but he was pretty insistent.”

Bollinger signed off, still grumbling. Feldman switched on the car radio. Finally, Israel Radio was back on the air. Feldman had to wait for the English version before he heard more appalling news of the night before. The widespread, global panic. The violence, the destruction, the death. This only reinforced in his mind his earlier argument to Anke.

Underscoring Hunter's claim, Israel Radio also confirmed Bethlehem as the epicenter of a major earthquake measuring seven point one on the Richter scale. With the exception of a mild tremor reported in Rome, apparently none of the other millenarian stronghold cities around the world had suffered like disasters.

Bethlehem, Israel 9:33 A.M., Saturday, January 1, 2000

Arriving in Bethlehem from the north, Feldman overlooked a picturesque hillside town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, primarily Christian Arabs whose families had lived here for hundreds of years. Other than in the ethnic origin of its residents, Bethlehem had changed little since the birth of Christ. From rolling, sparse pasturelands that surrounded the town, shepherds still drove flocks of sheep and goats along worn, narrow, cobblestone alleyways into the central marketplace bazaar. Side by side with ancient, historic structures, newer construction had been randomly squeezed in over the centuries. But built of the same indigenous stone, most were hardly distinguishable from their predecessors.

Interspersed among this maze of densely packed dwellings were the elegant white-sandstone spires of a dozen churches. Including the center-most focus of the town, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Church of the Nativity, located in Manger Square over the grotto that Stephen Martyr had identified in A.D. 155 as the precise spot where Christ was born.

Feldman was amazed there was no visible damage from the previous night's violent quake. Instead of a disaster zone, he found the town swarming with millenarians. Shops and cafes were bustling and there were no signs of interrupted municipal services. No cordoned-off areas for utility repairs, no emergency crews digging through rubble.

The crowds were densest not near revered Manger Square in the center of town, as Feldman had anticipated, but at a large, parklike common on the north side. The common was encircled by connecting loops of Sderot King David on the north and Sderot Manger on the south- sderot being the Hebrew word for “street.” Near where the two loops of the boulevards met, Feldman spotted the WNN RV, parked behind a row of stucco buildings.