The mountain of Megiddo – sometimes called Har-Mageddon, or Armageddon for short – has been the site of a lot of really big disagreements throughout human history. This is a rather surprising fact, as on first glance there wouldn’t appear to be anything near Megiddo worth disagreeing about. Megiddo is devoid of nearly everything that commonly causes violent disagreements among people, such as petroleum deposits, waterfront property and soccer matches.

In actuality, the disagreements generally occurred elsewhere – often hundreds or even thousands of miles away – but no matter how vehemently the involved parties disagreed about whatever it was they were disagreeing about, they somehow always managed to agree to duke it out at Megiddo. The Battle of Megiddo is sort of the Superbowl of geopolitical conflicts – not so much a single event as a recurring contest featuring the two strongest teams of the current season.

The Battle of Megiddo was first fought in the 15th Century B.C. between the armies of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition led by the rulers of the city-states of Megiddo and Kadesh.

The Battle of Megiddo was next fought in 609 BC, between Egypt and the Kingdom of Judah.

The Battle of Megiddo was again fought in 1918 between Allied troops, led by General Edmund Allenby, and the Ottoman army.

The Battle of Megiddo was about to be fought again.

Armageddon, the place, was scheduled to become Armageddon, the event, one last time, just days from the date of Christine’s linoleum installation. Christine had no way of knowing this, of course. She was, however, starting to feel very uneasy about her linoleum, for reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint.

So this is it, Christine thought. Armageddon.

She looked around, trying to take in the spectacle. I should get a t-shirt, she thought. She supposed they offered a nice selection in the gift shop – maybe something along the lines of “I was at Armageddon and all I have to show for it is this lousy t-shirt.”

Below the terrace, the sheer walls of the Jezreel Valley fell away. It was mid-morning, but much of the valley was still in shadow. Christine tried to picture massive armies clashing in the ultimate battle for the fate of the world below. Unfortunately, Christine didn’t have much of an attention span, and her thoughts drifted back to her linoleum. It had been less than a day, and already she was having trouble picturing the pattern in her mind. She wondered if that was normal.

What am I even doing here? she wondered. I’m not qualified for this. I should be teaching high school English, not covering a war in the Middle East. I should be in the land of predicates and infinitives, not Predator missiles and intifadas. True, she had agitated for a “real assignment,” and they didn’t get much more real than this. But she had envisioned a happy medium between First Prophet Jonas Bitters and General David Isaakson of the Israeli Defense Force. Maybe a public official embroiled in some sort of sleazy sex scandal or, conversely, a porn star running for office.