Read Online Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele - Free Book Online

your standard bunch of late-night riders.
    I had the seat to myself. The train came out of the tunnel; once again I could see the city. For an instant, though, as I stared out the rain-slicked windows at the lights passing by, I felt a presence next to me.
    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 unnerved by war in the Middle East and a shaky national economy, went apeshit.
    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.
    Iben Browning died a short time afterward without ever having made public comment about his apocalyptic predictions. In doing so, he gave the, city renewed overconfidence. Earthquake drills were canceled as the 1990 scare settled into the back of everyone’s mind, and the people of St. Louis once more settled into the safe, conservative mind-set that Nothing Ever Changes In Our Town. Even the 1994 Los Angeles