Allen Steele: Jericho Iteration

According to the Book of Joshua, the Canaanite city of Jericho was destroyed after Joshua marched his army around the city’s walls for six days. On the seventh day, upon his command, the Israelites blew their ram’s horns and began to shout. The walls collapsed, thus allowing Joshua and his followers to overrun the Canaanites and claim the city as their own.

That’s how the legend goes, at any rate. About twenty years ago, archaeologists studying the ruins of Jericho in Israel, just outside Jerusalem, arrived at a different conclusion. They uncovered evidence suggesting that Jericho had been destroyed not by ram’s horns but by a major earthquake caused by a geological fault line running through the Jordan Valley. Furthermore, the city was destroyed at least a hundred and fifty years before the reported date of the Battle of Jericho. Hence, the Talmudic account differs considerably from modern interpretations of the same evidence: in short, people took credit for something nature had already done.

And now it’s Friday, April 19, 11:32 P.M. About three and a half millennia since the fall of Jericho, give or take a few hundred years, but who’s counting? It doesn’t make much difference in the long run. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of an abandoned, half-collapsed house in south St. Louis. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m dictating these notes into my pocket computer. Joker’s nicad is still fully charged, but I’m nonetheless keeping an eye on the battery LED. If it runs low …

Well, I’m sure I can find another. They’re not as hard to find on this side of town as, say, an unclaimed can of Vienna sausage. On my way here I passed a scavenged 7-Eleven about four blocks away; southside looters normally don’t go after batteries, although you never know.

I heard recently about a teenager who was killed scrounging through a video rental shop; seems he had been trying to make out with an armload of movies when a street gang that had claimed the store as their turf caught him. The story that made its way to the Big Muddy Inquirer was that they had strung him up from a telephone pole; when he was found the next morning, he had a copy of Hang ’Em High wrapped around his purpled neck. A touch of irony, if you like that sort of thing, although I doubt the guys who murdered him would know irony if it shot ’em in the ass with a Smith amp; Wesson.

Of course, this could be only another rumor. We’ve heard a hundred of them since the quake, and since it was never substantiated, we never ran it in the paper. Nonetheless, I think I’ll keep talking only until the low-battery light begins to blink. Bopping on down to the 7-Eleven ain’t what it used to be.

When the family who once lived here moved out of the city, as have so many others since New Madrid, they took with them whatever they could salvage. What little furniture they left behind is mostly buried beneath the rubble of what used to be their bedrooms; there’s also a bad stink from that part of the house. I hope it’s only a cat. Dead cats don’t bother me, but dead children do.

The former residents left behind the refrigerator and the stove, but since there’s no electricity in this neighborhood, they don’t work. Union Electric must have determined that this is a vacant block, because even the streetlights are inoperative. There’s also a filthy couch infested with insects, a mildewed Mickey Mouse shower curtain, which is the sole clue that there were once kids living here-like I said, I hope it’s only a dead cat I smell-and, on the top shelf of the kitchen pantry, a half-empty box of Little Friskies.

Got to be a dead cat.

I’ll have to ask the dog if he knows.

The dog who discovered me in the house was glad to have the Little Friskies. I found a forgotten spare key tucked beneath the back-door welcome mat-whoever once lived here didn’t have much sense of originality when it came to hiding places, but then again, St. Louis used to be a much safer place-and had invited myself in when I heard something panting behind me. I turned around to find, in the last weak light of day, a full-grown golden retriever who had followed me into the backyard. His big red tongue was hanging out of his mouth, his fur was as wet as my leather jacket, but unlike so many other strays I’ve seen recently he didn’t appear to be feral. Just a big old chow dog, living by his means in what used to be a middle-class neighborhood.

He sniffed me and wagged his tail, and didn’t mind when I patted him on the head, so I let him into the house with me. What the hell; we both needed company. As luck would have it-for the dog, at least-there was the box of cat food. He didn’t seem to mind the moldy taste. I only wish I could have eaten so well.

Friendly pooch. He decided to stay the night. I warned him that he was accompanying a federal fugitive and was thereby subject to prosecution to the full extent of the law, but the mutt didn’t give a shit. I had given him a bite to eat, so I was square in his book, and he paid me back by warning me about the helicopter.

Several hours later: the sun was down, I was exhausted from running. Lying on the couch, idly scratching at the fleas that had come crawling out of the upholstery, listening to the cold, hard rain that pattered on the roof and dribbled through the cracks in the ceiling. Eyes beginning to close. It had been a hell of a day.

The dog was curled up on the bare floor next to the couch, dead to the world, when he abruptly leaped to his feet and began to bark. I opened my eyes, glanced at him, saw that he was looking out the wide picture window on the other side of the room.

I couldn’t see anything through the darkness, but I could hear a low drone from somewhere outside the house ….

Chopper.

I rolled off the couch and fell to the floor, then scurried across the living room and through the kitchen door, out of sight from the window. By now the sound of rotor blades was very loud.

While I cowered in the kitchen, hugging the wall and sweating rain, the dog fearlessly advanced to the window and stood there, barking in defiance as the clatter grew louder. Then the helicopter was above the front lawn, invisible except for its running lights.

Captured by the Apaches.

One, at least: an AH-64 gunship, twenty-one thousand pounds of sudden death. Maybe it was an antique, but I remembered when I was a kid back in ’89 and saw the TV news footage of those things circling the skies above Panama City, hunting for PDF holdouts and some pimple-faced cokehead named Noriega. Now one of them was hunting for a journalist named Gerry Rosen.

By the way, did I mention my name?

For several long minutes the Apache hovered outside the window. I could imagine its front-mounted TADS infrared turret peering into the house, the copilot in the chopper’s back seat trying to get a clear fix through the downpour. The helicopter was close enough for me to make out the shadowed forms of the pilot and copilot within its narrow cockpit. The picture window shuddered in its tortured frame from the propwash.

It occurred to me that, if the 30-mm chain gun beneath the forward fuselage were to let go, the plaster wall in front of me wouldn’t protect me more than would a sheet of Kleenex … and if I ran for the back door, the IR sensors would lock onto me before I could make it through the backyard. Anyone seen on the streets by ERA patrols after the nine o’clock curfew was assumed to be a looter, and in this side of town they didn’t bother to make arrests anymore. In fact, they didn’t even give you the dignity of slinging an old Clint Eastwood flick around your neck.