Famine

by Graham Masterton

  Herman interrupted him. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘what are you talking about, radioactive? You can’t seal my ship off. I have to sail in an hour.’

  The safety inspector held his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘There’s no way. No way at all. Your ship, your cargo, and most of your crew – especially you, because you’ve been handling that thing – you’re all highly radioactive. You’re not going any place tonight but hospital.’

  ‘Then what the hell is that thing? And what the hell’s it doing in the wheat?’

  ‘The second question I can’t answer,’ said the safety inspector. ‘As for the first question – well, I believe it’s some kind of radioactive isotope.’

  ‘Isotope?’ queried Herman, looking at Errol Marx.

  Errol said, ‘Search me.’

  *

  During the evening, Donald Abbott and the bodies of his family were flown from the sanitarium at Cannon AFB to an isolation hospital on the outskirts of Phoenix, near Scottsdale. Donald Abbott was scarcely alive, and the medics at Cannon had given him only a one per cent chance of survival. ‘I never saw anyone so close to death without actually being dead,’ one of the doctors said later.

  The first diagnosis was food poisoning, and when it was discovered that the Abbotts had spent the past two days with Mrs Abbott’s mother in Santa Fé, police and health officials were urgently sent to her home to check on the food that the family might have eaten – and on the safety of Mrs Abbott’s mother herself.

  For two or three hours – until it was given a full medical clearance – the chief suspect was a tub of chocolate maple ice-cream, which only the Abbott family had eaten. Then the coroner’s report came in on the contents of Mrs Abbott’s stomach, and it was clear that she had consumed a frankfurter sausage and a quantity of bread sometime during Saturday evening. The coroner’s comment was bald and devastating. ‘The frankfurter sausage was analysed, and found to contain sufficient botulin to poison a horse.’

  The New Mexico Highway Patrol located Mary’s Diner within twenty-three minutes of being called from Phoenix. Mary, bewildered and shocked, confirmed that the Abbott family had eaten hotdogs there on Saturday evening. Eight airmen and a truck driver had also eaten there, but they had all chosen hamburgers, cheeseburgers, or reubenburgers. The Highway Patrol officers took away all the fresh meat from Mary’s Diner, sealed it in plastic, and sent it to Phoenix for tests.

  On Monday morning, at 10.30 a.m., Donald Abbott died of botulism.

  *

  The death of Donald Abbott and his family had yet to make news, however. What was news, as Sunday became Monday, was that a Kansas wheat farmer had stood in front of the cameras on live coast-to-coast television and announced that Americans were facing a whole lot more than ‘a noticeable percentage of inconvenience’ from the crop blights which had struck all over the country. They were facing nothing less than the total destruction of their agricultural economy, and possible starvation.

  The television people hadn’t pulled the plug on him, as Ed had expected them to. The director had recognised good hard news material when it was handed to him on a plate, and Shearson Jones had wrathfully decided it was better not to intervene. If he had ordered the transmission to be killed, he would only have given Ed’s comments more public credibility. But he had sat on his throne and glared in fury at Ed with a face like a malevolent blancmange.

  Ed had been chilled but sweating as he faced the dark, polished, noncommittal lens of the television camera. He had been aware of Shearson Jones, smouldering in his chair; and of Della, who had returned from the verandah to listen to him. In some ways, though, the most disconcerting face of all had been that of the elegant young black prompter, who had continued to hold up his idiot cards regardless of what he was actually saying. There had been moments when he had almost slipped into his pre-written speech, simply because he was groping for words, and there they were, up in front of him.

  ‘I was supposed to stand here today and tell you how much we Kansas wheat farmers need your help,’ he had said.

  ‘The trouble is, I can’t do that. My conscience won’t let me. Because the truth is that every one of you is going to need help just as badly as we do. This blight that you’ve been hearing about – these isolated crop diseases – well, they’re neither as slight nor as isolated as you’ve been led to believe.

  ‘What’s happening is that every major fruit, vegetable and cereal crop in the entire continental United States is being quickly destroyed by a virus. They’re not totally destroyed yet, by any means, but unless an antidote can be sprayed on the worst of them within a matter of days, this country is going to be facing shortages like you’ve never seen before, and that’s quite apart from the prospect of complete economic collapse.

  ‘I want you to know that an antidote to the virus was recommended to the federal agricultural research laboratories two days ago by the Pentagon’s chemical warfare experts. They’ve looked at the blight, and they believe it’s quite close to something called Vorar D – which was artificially engineered for defoliating the jungle in Vietnam. They think it’s curable, and they’ve already told that to Senator Shearson Jones.

  ‘Senator Shearson Jones, however, has kept that information to himself, just like he’s kept every fact about this crop blight to himself – even when it started to become clear that it could possibly herald a major disaster. And why? Because he wanted businesses and private individuals and Congress itself to contribute lavishly to his crisis fund. He didn’t want us all to be worried about our own problems, or the prospect of nation-wide catastrophe, because we wouldn’t dig so readily into our pockets if we were.

  ‘I believe you ought to know that Senator Shearson Jones and some of the senior members of his staff have made provision to keep themselves supplied with food during the coming lean months; and I believe you also ought to know that the President himself has ordered the administration in Washington to be provided for. That’s how real the danger has already become.

  ‘This is the truth as far as I know it. There may be worse things happening which I don’t know about. The prospects for the fall and the winter may be better than I’ve been led to understand. I don’t know. All I can say right now is that this nation is faced with the prospect of a famine, and that every man, woman, and child has the right to know.’

  When Ed had finished speaking, the lofty triangular room had fallen totally silent. Then the elegant young black prompter had let one of his cards fall, and it had skated across the floor.

  Shearson Jones had lifted himself out of his chair, and waddled to the centre of the hall. His bulk had been dark, imposing, and immovable.

  ‘Hardesty,’ he had said, harshly, ‘you have just brought down the temple. The art of politics, quite apart from feathering one’s own nest, is to preserve the public’s sacred ignorance. The public, far from having a right to know, have a right to be kept in the dark. It is for their own good, their own safety, and their own survival. You don’t shout “fire!” in a crowded auditorium, even if there is a fire. You tell the audience that there has been an infestation of fleas, or that the leading actor has fallen sick, and then you usher them quietly out.

  ‘I admit quite freely, that I might have exploited some aspects of this blight to my own personal ends, although you will never get me to say so in front of a judge, or a Senatorial committee.

  ‘But you have seriously misjudged my capabilities as a politician in keeping this crisis low-key. I have been trying to save this country’s neck. And now, with your one foolish broadcast, you have guaranteed its strangulation.’

  Ed had stayed where he was.

  ‘I shouldn’t let it worry you. Senator,’ he had said, loudly. ‘You’ll be okay, won’t you? You have plenty of food, and plenty of wine, and enough money to last you through the next few months. Why should you be upset?’

  ‘Because the United States of America is my country,’ growled Shearson. ‘And because you have effectively undone
with two hundred ill-advised words the work of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and hundreds of Americans a hundred times abler and more dedicated to this country than you are.

  ‘Graft is one thing, Hardesty. Suicide is another.’

  Book Two

  One

  It was the sound of breaking glass that woke Nicolas up. Not downstairs, in his own delicatessen, but all over the city. Glass breaking, in street after street, with a terrible wintry jangle like sleighbells.

  Nicolas sat up, and listened. He was Greek, round-shouldered, with fuzzy grey hair all over his chest and back, although his head was bald and blue. Next to him, his wife Dolores was still sleeping, her heavy eyebrows drawn together with all the intensity of mating caterpillars. Nicolas laid a cautious hand on her shoulder, as if silently advising her to remain asleep.

  Outside, the noise grew louder. The cracking and smashing of huge plateglass storefronts. Then, suddenly, a series of malicious, slushy crashes, as glass display cases and cold-beer cabinets were attacked with hammers and bricks and bars. Sombody screamed – really screamed, as if their fingers were being torn off. There was a whole lot of garbled yelling, and then the distant scribbling sound of ambulance sirens.

  ‘Dolly,’ whispered Nicolas, but now she was awake. The danger in the night air was as strong as a smouldering mattress – too strong for anyone to stay asleep. She stared up at him, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead, and said ‘Nick? What is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Listen,’ he told her, as if he was going to tell her something interesting. But he meant: listen to the noise outside.

  They sat in their dark wallpapered bedroom in that rundown section of Milwaukee where the elevated highways leave you blotted in shadow in the summer, and blessed with nothing but dirty second-hand slush in the winter; and the two of them, both fifty-five years old, heard the chiming of glass that heralded the end of their life’s labours, and their small ambitions, and the mutual love which they had nursed through two delicatessen stores, one bankruptcy, five children, two deaths, and more freezing Christmases on the shores of Lake Michigan than they could remember.

  The smashing noises were coming closer. They were in the next street now. And they could hear something else: the pattering of running feet. Nicolas thought: they sound like rats, hurrying through the night. He had heard rats running across the floor of a flour warehouse once, and that was just what they sounded like.

  He hesitated for a moment, but then he gave a decisive sniff, and swung his legs out from between the sheets. He walked around the end of the bed, where his pants were neatly hung with their maroon suspenders still attached, and crossed the bedroom to the window.

  Dolores watched him as he held aside the floral drapes and peered down into the street. There must have been a fire burning not far away, because she could see the reflected sparkle of orange in his eyes. On the top of the varnished bureau beside him were the bits and pieces of his hobby – the modelling knives and tubes of glue and carefully-cut sections of balsa wood which he devotedly assembled into tiny ships. The sad gilded face of the Virgin looked down on him from a plastic icon.

  Dolores said, ‘What do you see?’

  Nicolas frowned. ‘Nothing so far. But it looks like something’s burning on the next block. An automobile, maybe. Or a van.’

  ‘They’re burning a van on the next block?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. I can’t see anyone around.’

  ‘Not even a cop?’

  Nicolas shook his head. They were both sensitive about the police, the Prokopious. In this neighbourhood, they were regularly shaken down and robbed, and the police patrols did very little to protect them. There were always plenty of police around at Thanksgiving, or at Christmas, when Nicolas gave away bottles of retsina and Keo brandy. But when the kids came around with their knives and their zip guns and raided the cash register, you could scream ‘Police!’ until you were purple in the face and nobody would come.

  ‘What do you think’s happening?’ asked Dolores. ‘All that glass breaking. It sounds like a war.’

  ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the food shortages.’

  ‘You mean that television programme? I don’t understand.’

  Nicolas let the drapes fall back into place. His face was sweaty and serious. ‘You heard what they said on the news. They said keep calm, don’t try to stock up on more food than you need. But you think people are going to take any notice of that? They panic when there’s a shortage of gas. They panic when there’s a shortage of bread. In my opinion, that’s what they’re doing now. Panicking. Breaking into food stores, looking for supplies.’

  Dolores said anxiously, ‘They’ll come here.’

  Nicolas nodded. On the bedside table just behind Dolores’s black wavy hair, his luminous alarm clock read three in the morning, almost to the minute.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Dolores. Her question was punctuated by a loud crash from across the street, and the sound of a woman shouting. Nicolas turned and regarded the drapes as if he expected them to fly apart of their own accord.

  ‘I’ll call the police,’ he said.

  ‘The police? And what will they do?’

  ‘I’ll call Sergeant Kyprianides.’

  ‘You really think he’s going to worry? Just because he’s Greek? He’s as rotten as all the rest of them.’

  Nicolas unbuttoned his striped pyjamas, peeled them off, and folded them up. He was a short, heavy man, with a girdle of fat around his hips. He found a clean pair of jockey shorts in the bureau drawer and then stepped into his pants. In the stained-pine wardrobe he found a clean red shirt.

  ‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said.

  Dolores said, ‘What for? What can you do on your own?’ Nicolas pointed towards the window. ‘What for? Do you hear what they’re doing out there? You want the store wrecked?’

  She climbed out of bed. She was wearing the pink baby-doll nightdress he liked, with the frilly panties. Her sagging breasts showed dark-nippled through the nylon, and her thighs were creased with fat.

  ‘I don’t want you wrecked,’ she said, and she really meant it. ‘Who cares about a few bowls of taramasalata?’

  Nicolas held her wrist, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘The day I let some bum walk in off the street and tear my store to pieces without lifting so much as one finger to stop him – that’s the day I’m going to be laid out in my coffin. You got me?’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and opened the door to go downstairs.

  It was then, right then, that the front window of their own store was smashed in. It was so loud and violent that Nicolas said, ‘Hah’ in involuntary shock. Dolores crossed herself, and whispered ‘Mother of God.’

  Nicolas was angry now. He could hear people shouting downstairs as they clambered into his store through the broken window. Looters, in his store, trampling over his displays and his counters, and helping themselves to all the things he had worked for years to buy. Helping themselves to the cans and the bottles and the home-cooked pastries. Destroying his life and his livelihood.

  The .38 police revolver was on top of the wardrobe. Nicolas stalked over, reached up for it, and brought it down. Dolores said, ‘Nicky – for God’s sake – leave them—’

  ‘Leave them?’ he asked her. His mouth was tight and he had that bitter, hard, sorrowful look in his eyes, the same look he always had when they were robbed or ripped off. ‘In this country, you have to fight for what’s yours. You understand me?’

  He pushed his way down the landing to the stairs which led to the store. Dolores came after, trying to pull his sleeve, but he shook her loose with one impatient twist. He knocked askew a picture of fishing boats off the island of Serifos. Blue skies, bleached boats.

  Dolores said, ‘No, Nicky, please.’

  Nicky, halfway down the stairs, turned and looked back at her. The revolv
er was raised awkwardly in his left hand. From downstairs, there was another splintering crack as the looters broke into his refrigerated display cabinet, and someone shouted, ‘Get that canned food at the back – all that canned stuff!’

  Dolores said nothing, but walked quickly back along the landing in her pink baby-doll nightie to where the telephone hung on the wall by the stairs. Nicolas heard her dialling, and knew that she was calling Sergeant Kyprianides. He felt short of breath, and afraid, but there was no point in waiting until the police turned up. They might not turn up at all, what with all the smashing and looting that was going on tonight throughout Milwaukee. They’d be busy taking care of the breweries, and the big department stores. What would they care about one small Greek delicatessen in the grittier part of town?

  Nicolas went down the dark stairwell, unbolted the brown-painted door at the bottom, and pulled it cautiously open.

  He was dazzled straight away by car headlights, directed right into the smashed-open store from a station wagon that had been pulled up across the sidewalk. There was a sharp smell of burning paint, and the night air was warm and electric with fright. He drew the door open a little further, and he could see the outline of a man in a plaid jacket, leaning over the frozen-food cabinet with a large plastic trash bag in one hand, helping himself to broccoli and asparagus spears and mixed vegetables and TV dinners. He could hear feet crunching on broken glass in back of the store, too, but from where he was standing he couldn’t see anybody.

  ‘Are you through with that frozen food yet?’ a voice demanded.

  The man bent over the freezer cabinet said, ‘Give me a minute, will you?’ as he gathered up boxes of Hungry Man dinners by the armful.