Famine

by Graham Masterton

  The front doors, already cracked and broken from Sunday night’s rioting, had been locked, and then the steel railings which separated the checkout desks had been unscrewed from their original positions, and slotted through the door-handles to prevent anyone from pushing them open.

  Tony had cleared an area of five or six feet in front of the doors, and this was his ‘no-go’ zone. Anyone who managed to break into the supermarket as far as this would find themselves in a crossfire between Tony, with a .22 target pistol, and Gina’s uncle, with a scatter-gun. That was all the firepower they had, since not one of the congregation of the Church of the Practical Miracle had brought a gun, or even owned one. Carl had a .38, which he had kept to scare off burglars, but only one round of ammunition. Tony had grinned, and slapped him on the back, and told him, ‘make every shot count, huh?’

  That Friday morning, one by one, the people lying on the supermarket floor in their blankets were waking up. They stretched and yawned and blinked at each other, and in every face Season saw that moment of waking realisation – Oh, I’m not at home, in my own bed. I’m here, in this besieged community of fellow refugees. She also sensed a distinct a’I’mosphere of growing hostility between the people here, a resentment at being cooped up in awkward and embarrassing contact. Before the famine, most of the members of the church had been enthusiastic about Practical Miracles because the notion was innovative, fun, and always proved to be a conversation-stopper. ‘You actually believe in miracles?’ their dinner hostesses would say. ‘You can walk on water, that kind of thing?’ And they would answer, ‘Well, it’s been done before. No reason why it shouldn’t be done again.’ They hadn’t joined the church because they were passionate and like-minded believers. They’d joined it because it was fashionable, and cute, and now the shallowness of their Christianity was beginning to show. There had been fierce arguments on the morning bathroom line already, ‘Christ – you’ve taken hours – and now the whole john stinks!’ There had been wrangles over privacy, ‘Are you staring at my wife, buddy?’ And, inevitably, there had been petty jealousies over rations, ‘How come that guy has two tomatoes and we only have the one?’

  Granger Hughes, however, was untouched by his followers’ materialistic squabbling. If anything, the siege in the supermarket had made him even more spiritual than before. That morning, as everybody awoke, he walked up and down the aisles in a white cotton kaftan, his hands extended, nodding to each of his disciples and blessing their day. As he came to the end of the one-time canned vegetable counter, where Season was sitting up against the wall, watching over Sally, he paused, and stood above her, with the sun gilding his hair like a California halo.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ answered Season. ‘This isn’t exactly the Beverly Hills Hotel.’

  ‘The Beverly Hills Hotel is a smoking ruin,’ said Granger. ‘It was raided on Thursday night, and two famous actresses were raped and tortured to death. So just be glad that this isn’t the Beverly Hills Hotel.’

  ‘What’s it like outside?’ asked Season.

  ‘The looters are still there, waiting for us to weaken. But we won’t weaken, of course. Mike Bull calculates that we have a good five months of food in here, and I can tell you that we’ll still be eating meat and fruit while those looters out there die of starvation and disease.’

  Season looked up at him narrowly. ‘You still think we’re chosen, don’t you? You still think we deserve to live while those people out there all deserve to die.’

  Granger smiled. ‘It is not for me to question the ways of God. God has decided many times before to test the spiritual and moral strength of his creation – with fires, and floods, and plagues. Now we have famine. Don’t you think, after all, that a famine is a fitting test for a nation that for decades has surfeited itself on steak, and candies, and sheer fat? This country has been so gluttonous that police chiefs have been forced to cut the pay of their officers if they don’t lose weight; and did you hear that they had to campaign against obesity amongst students at the Oral Roberts University? America has been a nation of pigs for too long, out of sheer greed, and God has seen fit to punish us for it. Only those who have faith in the practicality of his Word will be saved.’

  ‘I don’t believe in the practicality of his Word. Why should I be saved?’

  ‘Because you are one of my loved ones; and, in time, I know that you will come to understand that what I say is true.’

  ‘It’s not what you say that concerns me,’ said Season. ‘It’s what you do.’

  Granger raised a hand, and said, ‘O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave: thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit. Sing unto the Lord: for his anger endureth but a moment: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Season. ‘A prayer for everlasting sexual licence? Cry tonight, but get your rocks off tomorrow?’

  Granger slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘You’re so resentful, aren’t you? So angry. But there isn’t any need to be. You should feel happiness, that the Lord has protected you in this country’s terrible time of trouble. You should feel content. You should forget the past and consider the happiness of tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget those Hell’s Angels,’ whispered Season. ‘And I don’t think I’ll ever forget you.’ There was venom in her voice, undiluted, and crackling with hostility. Granger flinched, as if she had spat at him.

  ‘I think I have other people to talk to,’ he said, rubbing his cheek slowly with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll forgive me?’

  It was an unfortunate choice of words. But Season didn’t retaliate any more. She simply turned away, and left Granger standing there, uncertain and irritated. After a while, he resumed his beatific smile, and continued on down the bottled fruit shelves, blessing his uncomfortable flock, and wishing them a safe and prosperous day.

  By noon on Friday, they had reached the outskirts of Liberal, Kansas, only a few miles from the Oklahoma line. Ed pulled the Chevy wagon in to the side of the dusty highway, and wiped the sweat from his face. Behind the Chevy, the small untidy convoy of cars and wagons pulled up at the side of the road, too, and out climbed farmworkers and their wives and children, stretching themselves and lighting cigarettes and rubbing their faces with towels and handkerchiefs.

  Della, sitting next to Ed, laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘How are you feeling? Are you okay?’

  Ed nodded. ‘I think so. Just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ asked Peter Kaiser, from the back.

  ‘Later, yes,’ said Ed. ‘We hit sixty-six at Tucumcari. New Mexico; and I want to keep us driving through New Mexico at night. You can take over then.’

  Shearson, wedged in a corner, bejewelled with beads of sweat like a Chinese Buddah, said, ‘Is there any danger of getting anything to eat at this juncture? It is lunchtime, you know.’

  Ed glanced at the clock on the dash. ‘We’ll stop to eat once we’re out of Kansas. You can have a swig of water if you like.’

  ‘Dear God for an ice-cold martini and a basket of cold pheasant,’ murmured Shearson.

  Without turning around, Ed said, ‘Senator – if you’re going to talk food all the way to Los Angeles – you’d better get out now. The situation’s bad enough without you adding your frustrated gourmet fantasies to it.’

  ‘I shall remember you, Hardesty, when all of this is over,’ Shearson growled. ‘I shall remember you as the only man alive who ever managed to force me to diet. Not even my doctor could make me give up oysters Rockefeller; but you did. I shall have your entrails one of these days.’

  ‘On toast?’ asked Della. ‘Or à la mode?’

  Lennie Merritt, one of the stockhands, came walking up to Ed’s wagon, brushing the flies away from his face.

  ‘Mr Hardesty?’ he asked.

  ‘What is it, Lennie?’

  ‘M
y little boy Peter’s real sick back there. Brought up his breakfast, and won’t take nothing but sips of water. I’ve talked to my wife, sir, and the Billingtons, who are riding in there with us, and I’m afraid we’ve decided to pull out of the convoy and stay here for a while. My wife has an aunt in Dodge City, and we reckoned on travelling back up there.’

  Ed looked down at the man’s pinched, sweaty face, his eyes squinting against the glare of the sun. He looked like one of those labourers in those A. B. Frost paintings that Season was always going on about.

  ‘You know how risky it’s going to be, out on your own?’ he asked Merritt. He didn’t really have to put that question; he asked it more for the sake of his own conscience than to dissuade Merritt from going.

  Merritt, of course, nodded. Nobody could have failed to miss the carcasses of burned-out trucks and cars that were strewn along the highway; or driven through abandoned communities like Greensburg and Minneola, where boarded-up houses and looted stores were now visited only by family dogs, fiercely hungry and scavenging for food, without realising how dangerous the countryside had become.

  ‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘Give my love to your wife, and take a whole lot of care. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Merritt. ‘And Mr Hardesty, sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Lennie Merritt dropped his gaze. ‘I just want to say that I’m sure sorry we never got the time to work the farm out the way we should have done. I think you would have made a real good boss.’

  ‘Thanks, Lennie,’ said Ed, and sat silent for a long time as the man trudged slowly back to his dusty green car.

  ‘Are we going to move on?’ asked Shearson Jones. ‘Or are we going to sit here in this heat until we melt into pools of human grease?’

  ‘You speak for yourself, Senator,’ said Karen, from the tail compartment, where she was sitting amongst hurriedly-stacked cans of corned beef and carrots and peas, and two large polythene containers of water, which sloshed loudly as they drove along.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Ed. ‘We’re leaving.’

  He blew the horn three times, waved his arm out of the window, and the farmworkers hurried back to their cars and started up their motors.

  ‘You should have been on Wagon Train,’ said Shearson, sarcastically.

  ‘You should have been on The Gang Show,’ retorted Karen.

  ‘You’re fired,’ said Shearson.

  ‘No way,’ Karen told him. ‘I quit your employ the night I found out about the Blight Crisis Appeal.’

  Shearson tugged his shirt out of his waistband, and used it to wipe the sweat away from his neck. ‘I don’t know which irritates me more,’ he remarked. ‘Perspiration, or naïveté.’

  Ed listened to this bickering without comment. He was still thinking about last night, and their hectic escape from the South Burlington Farm. In his mind’s eye, as he drove along the uneven blacktop to Liberal, he could see the roof of the old farmhouse flaring up, and the bedroom drapes flapping and flying from the windows like fiery wings.

  After their first attack the raiders had eased off their gunfire for an hour or two; and at one time Ed was convinced that they must have retreated. Maybe one or two of them had been hit by shotgun blasts. Maybe they had decided that besieging the farm wasn’t worth the hassle, just for a few supplies. But shortly before dawn, the garages and stables across the yard had suddenly burst into flames, and Ed had realised that the raiders had been doing nothing more than regrouping and planning a final assault.

  Fortunately, Ed had been almost ready to pull out by then. The two hours of ceasefire had enabled him to assign twelve men to loading the cars and the wagons, and the convoy was only short of a couple of cases of canned fruit when the raiders attacked in force. All the farmworkers and their families has scrambled into their vehicles, and they had driven out of the farmyard without lights, letting off shotgun blasts in all directions in a racketing parade, like Chinese New Year.

  It had all been over in a few seconds. There had been a light, inaccurate spray of sub-machine gun fire in retaliation, which had broken the side window of the last car in the convoy, but that had been all. It was only a mile to the front entrance of South Burlington Farm, and even a heavily-laden wagon driving at forty mph can cover a mile in one and a half minutes.

  What had hurt Ed more than anything else, though, had been the sight in his rear-view mirror of the farmhouse, blazing from verandah to roof like a galleon burning at sea. He had been brought up in that house; and apart from the family treasures stored in the attic, the old Hardesty photograph albums dating back to Edwardian days, there were a thousand memories in that house for Ed, from the strange patterns that were cast on the wall by the tiny stained-glass window on the upstairs landing, to the last rail on the back verandah, which he had worn smooth as a boy from riding as his pretend horse. It was like watching his whole childhood burn, the whole reason for his coming back from New York and setting up as a farmer. And as he turned out of the farm entrance, and drove into the darkness, he knew just why ordinary mortals should stay well out of politics and power, and never try to cross men like Senator Shearson Jones.

  Liberal, Kansas, was deserted as they drove through. A gas station on the outskirts was still smouldering, and there were dead bodies lying on the forecourt, clouded in flies. They drove on, and crossed the state line into Oklahoma at 12.55 p.m.

  Occasionally, they picked up random CB messages. But it was clear that most CB channels had been taken over by marauding groups of looters, and when Ed tried appealing to ‘Blue Lightning’ for advice on highway conditions through New Mexico, there was a suspicious silence, followed by the enquiry, ‘Where are you? Where you headed? You got any food with you?’

  Ed had shut off the CB and glanced across at Della. Della had shrugged, and said, ‘We’re on our own. I guess we just have to realise that.’

  It took the convoy three hours to cross the Oklahoma panhandle, stopping to open cans of corned beef just beyond Optima. Ed appointed two of his farmworkers as lookouts, but there was nothing to be seen but dust and sun. At a few minutes before four o’clock, they crossed into Texas at Texhoma, and started the 120-mile diagonal trek across the north-west tip of the panhandle.

  A few miles into New Mexico, the Mercury Marquis started blowing steam and ground to a halt. The convoy stopped under a sky the colour of violet cachous while one of South Burlington’s mechanics took a look under the hood. Ed stood by, smoking a cigarette, his dark hair ruffled by the warm evening wind. One of the children, a boy of five in a grubby yellow T-shirt, was sitting a few feet away, his face still dirty with tears, watching Ed solemnly.

  Della came up, holding the pump-gun in the crook of her arm. She stood silently beside him for a while, and then she said, ‘It wasn’t your fault you know, all of this. Whatever you’d said on television, it wouldn’t have made any difference. You understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘Right now. I’m too tired to think about it.’

  ‘You’re worried about your wife?’

  He nodded. ‘I keep worrying about everybody else’s wives and families, too.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. Don’t you see that? This famine was going to happen whether you announced it on prime-time television or not.’

  ‘I guess you’re right. The sick thing is that somebody started it deliberately. The blight, and the radiation, and the food poisoning. And, brother, didn’t they make sure they got to every source of food you could think of. Crops, grain, canned foods, frozen foods, you name it. I mean, we’re checking every damned can for pinholes, but supposing we miss one?’

  Della said, ‘Maybe we deserved it. The famine, I mean.’ Ed looked at her. ‘I hope you’re kidding,’ he said. ‘Because whatever the politicians get up to, no kid deserves to be sitting on that rock like that kid over there, with no food and no secure future, when he should be home having his supper and getting ready for bed.’

  ‘You think th
e Russians did this?’ asked Della.

  ‘I don’t know who the hell did it. I’m not sure that I care. All I know is that the whole thing is totally squalid, totally underhand, and if I could lay my hands on just one of the people responsible. I’d screw their head off.’

  Della shielded her eyes, and looked up at the dark purple sky, and the birds which circled above them with tireless patience.

  ‘It’s like the end of the world,’ she said, quietly.

  Ed’s mechanics managed to get the Mercury to limp at fifteen mph as far as Tucumcari. There, its cooling system gave out completely, and the seven people who had been riding in it stood around like relatives at a funeral while Dyson Kane poked inside the steamy hood again, and pronounced it dead.

  ‘We just don’t have the spares,’ he said. ‘And it looks like the whole engine’s been damaged beyond repair. I’m afraid it’s RIP.’

  Ed and Dyson left everybody beside the highway while they drove around Tucumcari, looking for abandoned cars or wagons. They found three, but all three of them were wrecked, or had wheels missing. There was only one reasonable-looking vehicle in the whole place, a shiny 1968 Cadillac parked outside an odd asbestos and corrugated-iron house in a sloping street with a view of Tucumcari Peak. It was almost dark now, and they were getting desperate.

  Dyson jumped down from the Chevy and quickly crossed the street to where the Cadillac was parked.

  ‘It’s locked,’ he called, trying the handle. ‘Maybe I can open it up with a length of wire.’

  Ed looked around the untidy interior of the wagon. There was a wire coat-hanger in back, and he leaned over the seat to reach for it. He heard a snap, like someone slamming a book shut, and at first he thought it was his seat mounting, clicking into place. But then he looked up and saw Dyson huddled up on the road beside the Cadillac, with a dark river of blood already sliding across the dusty blacktop from a wound in his head.