Famine

by Graham Masterton

  Ed immediately ducked low in his seat, and reached for his automatic. He couldn’t find it. Either it had slid backwards into the garbage on the floor, or someone had taken it. Peter Kaiser, maybe, when he wasn’t looking? There was another snap, and a high-powered bullet pinged off the hub of the offside front wheel.

  Inch by inch, Ed raised his head, until his eyes appeared over the sill of the Chevy’s window. It was impossible to see where the shooting was coming from, although he guessed the sniper was concealed in the old asbestos house. He could hardly see Dyson now, in the gloom of the evening, but there wasn’t any question at all that he was dead. Half of his head was lying on the road.

  Ed started up the Chevy’s engine, released the parking-brake, and slowly rolled away down the street, keeping his head down behind the door. Only when he was well around the corner did he sit up straight, and drive with howling tyres back to the highway, where the rest of the convoy were waiting.

  ‘Where’s Dyson?’ asked Della, as Ed stepped down. ‘Did he get us a car?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Ed. ‘There’s a sniper in one of the houses back there – hit him when he was trying to open a car door.’

  ‘A sniper?’ asked one of the farmhands, a tough little Nebraskan in faded overalls. ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go smoke him out!’

  Ed shook his head. ‘There’s no point. He’d probably pick off two or three of us before we could get anyplace near him. I don’t want anybody else dead, and that’s it. It’s serious enough, losing Dyson.’

  ‘What are we going to do about a car?’ asked a pale-faced woman, holding a sleeping two-year-old in her arms.

  ‘Well, we have a choice,’ said Ed. ‘Either you seven find somewhere to bed down for the night, and we’ll go on ahead and see if we can’t find another car for you, and send someone back with it; or else you can squeeze into the vehicles we have left.’

  The woman said, ‘Mr Hardesty, I’d rather stay. We’ve been travelling all day, we’re exhausted. And, besides, if we leave now, we’re going to have to abandon all of our food, and I don’t think we ought to do that.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said her husband. ‘Who knows when we’re going to fend anything else to eat? We can’t afford to abandon fifty or sixty cans of meat It could keep us alive for weeks.’

  Ed looked around at the other workers who had been travelling in the broken-down Mercury. Old Mrs Tilsley, who had given him fresh-baked cookies from her cottage window-sill when he was young, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Keith Perks; Henry and Susan Carlsson, who had come to work at South Burlington after their own farm in Dighton had gone bankrupt.

  God, he thought, it had been easy enough to accept responsibility for these people when he had been threatening Senator Jones with his automatic. But now they were looking to him to guide them through the worst disaster of their whole lives; and he wasn’t at all sure he was strong enough or even willing enough. He had left his own mother behind someplace. There hadn’t been time to go look for her. And apart from his mother, there were Season and Sally, in Los Angeles, who might even be dead for all he knew; and Jack Marowitz, and Willard Noakes, and Dyson Kane, who had all been butchered; and the Muldoon brothers, who had been doing nothing at all but their job. And everybody else across the breadth of the United States who had died in the riots and the looting that had followed his sanctimonious revelation of Shearson’s little bit of business on the side.

  If I’d just been adult enough to keep my mouth shut, he thought, then maybe the President would have had time to cope with the situation as it broke. If I’d thought the whole thing through before I started shooting my mouth off. If only Shearson hadn’t asked me to be his ‘representative farmer.’

  He said, quietly, ‘You’re sure you’re prepared to stay? We’ll send a car back just as soon as we find one.’

  ‘We’ll stay,’ said Henry Carlsson, in a firm voice. ‘I don’t expect there’ll be a whole lot of danger around here. It looks like everything’s been pretty thoroughly looted in any case.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Ed. ‘The rest of us will move on. Do you need extra shotgun cartridges, anything like that?’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Henry Carlsson assured him.

  So, twenty minutes later, the depleted convoy drove off into the darkness, leaving seven people behind them. Ed glanced in his rearview mirror and saw them signal a quick goodbye with a flashlight.

  In the back of the wagon, Shearson Jones said, ‘I could happily get myself outside of a filet de boeuf en croûte with Perigourdine sauce. Do you know that’s a speciality of the Maisonette restaurant, on East Sixth Street, in Cincinnati, of all places? They also do an excellent trout, stuffed with crab.’

  Ed said, ‘I warned you, senator. One more word about food, and you’re going to be hitch-hiking your way to California.’

  As they headed through the hills towards Albuquerque, Peter Kaiser asked, ‘Do you want me to take over the wheel now? I’d be happy to.’

  Ed rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure if I can trust you yet, Mr Kaiser.’

  ‘Well, maybe you can’t,’ said Peter, ‘but you can’t stay awake all night. You’re going to have to sleep sometime.’ Della said, ‘He’s right, Ed. I can keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ed agreed. ‘But there’s just one thing.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  He reached his hand backwards from the driving-seat, and said, ‘You can give me my gun back, okay?’

  ‘Your gun?’ queried Peter Kaiser. ‘I don’t have your gun.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me you didn’t sneak it out from under my seat when we were driving along?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. What are you talking about? Do you want to search me?’

  Ed turned around in his seat. ‘What about you, Senator? Do you have it?’

  Shearson gave a small, contemptuous shake of his head which clearly implied that he didn’t have time for weapons. His weapon was his political influence.

  ‘All right,’ said Ed, flicking on his turn signal and drawing into the side of the road. ‘You can drive for a while. Three hours, straight down sixty-six; and don’t stop for anybody or anything, unless you see an abandoned car in good shape that we can send back to the Carlssons.’

  Peter Kaiser heaved himself up into the driver’s seat, while Ed squeezed himself into the back seat next to Shearson Jones.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d resist the temptation to rest your head on my stomach while you sleep,’ said Shearson.

  ‘I think I can manage that,’ Ed replied, and bundled up a towel to make himself a pillow.

  As Peter Kaiser drove the wagon through the night, Ed lay awake, exhausted but unable to sleep. The shock of Dyson Kane’s death on the streets of Tucumcari began to make him tremble, as if someone was shaking him to make him understand something – shaking him and shaking him and refusing to let up.

  He dozed for minutes at a time, and dreams danced in front of his eyes like some kind of grotesque carnival. The house at South Burlington, flaring up; Willard Noakes, collapsing into the darkness; and Dyson Kane lying on the roadway, his blood sprayed everywhere, only it wasn’t blood at all, but a pattern cut out of coloured paper, and when Ed walked towards him, Dyson turned his face around towards him and grinned a disturbing, idiot grin…

  As dawn began to rise through the Zuni Mountains behind them, they came across an abandoned white Pontiac, one of its doors still open, and its keys still in the ignition. There was no sign of the driver. Young Dave Morton, Olaf Morton’s son, volunteered to drive it back to Tucumcari and pick up the seven people they had left behind.

  Ed, pale-faced, unshaved, frowzy with sleep, said, ‘You take care now, do you understand? If anything goes wrong, you come speeding back to join us. We’ll take it slow from here, and wait for you two hours at Lake Havasu. Then we’re going on, whether you’ve caught up with us or not.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Dave, his eyes hidden behind mirr
or sunglasses. Then he U-tumed the Pontiac around, and sped off east.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘Let’s press on.’

  Shearson put in, ‘There’s no chance of breakfast, I suppose. The merest soupçon of canned pork roll?’

  ‘I see your tastes are beginning to adapt,’ Ed told him, climbing back into the wagon. ‘We’ll have you dreaming of M&Ms before the day’s out’

  Twelve

  Saturday was the first day of the final collapse of American society. Millions of people, most of them used to two or three substantial meals a day, now hadn’t eaten properly for three days. They were still strong enough to resist opening cans suspected of containing botulism, but few were so fussy about foods that might have been irradiated by cobalt-60. They were so convinced that ‘something would turn up’, and that they wouldn’t have to survive on contaminated rations for more than a few days that they decided to risk it.

  Something might have turned up, if the looting and the burning hadn’t inflicted such grievous damage on the cities and the towns and the countryside, and if the National Guard and the Army had been able to devote their energies to distributing food and organising new crop programmes. But hunger and fear had broken down everything that had held the United States together. Brotherhood, E Pluribus Unum, had been a luxury that only affluence had been able to sustain. Now, each racial and ethnic and class community turned in on itself for protection, and within days the nation was tribalised.

  On Saturday afternoon, declaring New York State a War Zone – the ninth state in two days – the Vice-President said that ‘twenty years of Civil Rights struggle had vanished in twenty minutes, as if it had never been.’ He added that ‘those people who are dying today are showing us that John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died in vain.’

  Although interstate communications were now severely disrupted, and it was impossible to make an accurate count, it was estimated by the besieged Department of Health that somewhere between two and three thousand Americans died of botulism during Friday night.

  Worse – hunger was beginning to affect the morale of the armed forces. Men of the 101st Airborne division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, refused to go to the assistance of beleagured National Guardsmen in Lexington until they were issued with rations. Deserters walked off camps and air bases in their hundreds, many taking their weapons with them. Five men of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were shot at Fort Bliss, Texas, for attempting to hijack a tank.

  Flying across Illinois in a private plane, with special permission from the Air Force, Dan Rather broadcast one of the most moving reports of the whole famine. He talked about, ‘Acre upon acre of blackened fields… with grey smoke rising everywhere, like the fires of a primitive, prehistoric age…’ He was in tears as he finished his report with a prayer for the future.

  The President, weak but improving, was released on Saturday evening from hospital. After he was briefed by his advisers on the national famine situation, and on the prospects of expediting aid from other countries, he asked about the freight train of supplies that was supposed to have come into Washington to help support the administration.

  He was told gravely that it had been attacked by vigilantes, and burned. Bill Brinsky of The New York Times had appeared on television Wednesday night, and revealed ‘exclusively’ that the White House had arranged to feed top officials from secret stores of food, just as Ed Hardesty had claimed. As a result, angry mobs of black looters had raided each of the warehouses where government food was stored, and destroyed it or carried it off. ‘Perhaps our only consolation is that we didn’t have time to check the food for botulism or radiation,’ said the Vice-President.

  ‘You call that a consolation?’ asked the President, with tired but offended dignity. ‘The very least of our countrymen doesn’t deserve to die like a rat.’

  The President’s economic adviser said later, ‘The President always finds it easier to be expansive when the worst has already come to the worst. By God, if he’d heard Bill Brinsky’s broadcast for himself, he probably would have had a heart seizure.’

  During that first briefing, one report from the Pentagon went unnoticed. It lay on the President’s desk amongst a whole sheaf of papers on disease and medical treatment. It said, simply, ‘We are seriously concerned at this time about the preparedness of the United States to defend itself against pre-emptive military strikes from hostiles.’

  The President was too tired, too confused, too hopeless, to read it and realise what it really meant.

  Thirteen

  By first light on Sunday morning, the mob around the Hughes Supermarket had swelled to five or six hundred people. Season, unable to sleep, had been watching them gather. They were Hollywood suburbanites mostly – ordinary men and women who lived in the quiet small houses on Yucca Avenue and Orange Grove Avenue and Oporto Drive. They hadn’t shouted or screamed or made much of a noise as they assembled around the fires of broken boxes and pieces of timber that had kept them warm during the night. But their very quietness had been menacing. They were people whose ordinary comfortable lifestyles had been abruptly taken away from them in the space of a few frightening days and now they wanted a share of what was left. They had already tom down the wooden cross that Granger Hughes had erected by the newspaper machines on the sidewalk and burned it. Now, in the grey haze of dawn, they surrounded the building in their chequered golf pants and their Bermuda shorts and their canary-yellow suntops, plain people who believed they had a right to survive.

  Granger Hughes, in his white kaftan, came up to join Season at the window.

  ‘Pretty frightening, isn’t it?’ asked Season.

  Granger shielded his eyes against the reflections in the glass. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t think it’s frightening. They’re all part of God’s flock, just as we are.’

  ‘If you think that, why are all of your friends sitting on all of this food, and why are we keeping them out?’

  ‘Someone has to carry on the Word,’ replied Granger. ‘Someone has to stay alive to keep the Lord’s teachings alive in the new world that must follow.’

  Season looked at him for a while. Then she said hesitantly, ‘Granger? Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Okay? Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean any offence. It’s just that you’ve been acting kind of– I don’t know, spaced out.’

  He stared at her, perplexed, but then he smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, in a voice that sounded more like the man she had first met, the man who had come around to Topanga Canyon to make love to her, ‘it isn’t often that an Old Testament situation actually happens for real, is it? I mean, this is a real Biblical workout for anybody’s faith. What next? Locusts? Seven fat kine, seven lean kine? Plague?’

  Season turned and looked out at the silent crowds of people. The sun was up now, and they had let their fires burn down. They stood like ghosts of American suburbia amidst the drifting smoke. There was movement amongst them – shuffling, and rippling, as if they were trying to summon up enough courage to make a rush for the front of the supermarket.

  ‘I don’t know about tests of faith,’ Season whispered. ‘All I know is that I’ve never been so frightened in my life.’ Mike Bull came up, rolling up his shirtsleeves. He was already growing the beginnings of a beard.

  ‘That crowd’s looking pretty threatening to me,’ he said to Granger, pressing his face to the window. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if they try breaking in.’

  ‘Couldn’t we try throwing them out a few cans of food?’ asked Season. ‘Wouldn’t that show them we meant well?’ Mike Bull shook his head. ‘If they think we’ve got food to spare, just to keep them at bay, that’ll only get them worked up even more. Besides, we don’t want to help to prolong their stamina, do we? – not even for one day. Give them two, three days, they’ll be weak as kittens. Then, if we’ve managed to keep them out, they’ll either die, or they’ll try someplace else.’

  Sally, rubbing sleep fr
om her eyes, came up and put her arms around Season’s waist. Season stroked her hair, and then bent down and kissed her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just seems to me that for active church-members, everybody here is acting pretty damn uncharitable.’

  Mike Bull said, ‘Listen, lady – this might not seem like charity – but charity’s no use at all unless it works. If we open the doors of this supermarket and let everybody in, our whole stock of food – five months of food – is going to be gone in five minutes. Tomorrow, we’ll be hungry. Now, what’s the point of that? Do you want to see your daughter starve? Do you want to see her ribs showing through her skin? Because if you do, that’s the way to do it.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ said Season, defensively. ‘I don’t want Sally to starve and I don’t want to starve myself. But look at those people out there. They’re just ordinary people, like all of us.’

  ‘They didn’t follow the Church of the Practical Miracle,’ said Mike Bull, in a level voice. ‘And this, to me, is the practical miracle, with the emphasis on practical. Our people surviving this famine, and coming out the other side.’

  Season turned to Granger. ‘I can see why your church was so popular,’ she said, caustically. ‘You were only interested in miracles that helped your unworthy little selves. Wholesome, capitalist, racially-selective, no-bussing. Proposition-thirteen, private-medicine-oriented miracles.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Mike Bull. ‘We let in Hispanics. We even let in blacks. Tony there – he’s Italian – he was going to join.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any blacks or Hispanics here in the supermarket,’ said Season.

  Granger laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Regretfully, we couldn’t contact everybody in time,’ he said.

  ‘Besides,’ put in Mike Bull, ‘what are you being so critical about? This church has saved your life, hasn’t it? And your daughter’s life? Just be thankful you’re not out there with all of those hungry people!’