Famine

by Graham Masterton

  Tony saluted him. ‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ he said, with no pretence of a German accent.

  Mike had only just gone back to his desk when his buzzer went. He returned to the window, and saw that there was a scuffle going on in one of the aisles. He quickly opened his office door, and made his way beside the cold meat counter to the scene of the disturbance.

  ‘All right,’ he demanded. ‘What’s going on?’

  The woman with the three shopping carts tied together was jostling with an elderly man in mirror sunglasses and a pale-blue shirt. She was loud, and rinsed with strawberry blonde, and Mike could see at once that she was going to be difficult. One of his assistants was trying to hold her back, while another one was picking up boxes of cereal that had scattered all across the aisle.

  ‘This lady thinks she can corner the cereal market,’ protested the elderly man. ‘All I want is a couple of packs of cornflakes, but she’s got every single box in the store.’

  ‘They’re all out of cornflakes, that’s all,’ snapped the woman. ‘Is it my fault if they’re all out?’

  ‘I think I have more cornflakes in the stockroom,’ said Mike. ‘How many did you want?’

  ‘Two packs, that’s all,’ said the elderly man. ‘I’m not an hysterical hoarder, like this lady.’

  ‘Who are you calling a hoarder?’ the woman wanted to know. ‘Do you have a family with six kids to feed? Do you have to worry about a husband who’s paralysed on one side? My family’s supposed to starve, so that a dusty old geriatric like you can have breakfast?’

  ‘Come on, madam,’ said Mike. ‘Nobody’s going to starve for the sake of two packs of cornflakes.’

  ‘Oh, no?’ the woman demanded. ‘Did you see that Kansas farmer on the television? He says we’re all going to starve, and that the President’s stocking up with food at the White House. Well, let me tell you, friend – if the President can do it, then sure as hell so can I.’

  ‘Listen, madam,’ Mike said patiently, ‘nobody’s going to starve. We have plenty of supplies right here in the store, and even more in the stockroom, and still more on order from our central depot. So don’t go panicking, huh? If you panic, you’re only going to help to create an artificial shortage.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me how much I can buy?’ demanded the woman.

  ‘I’m just asking you to cool it, that’s all. Walking around the store with these three trolleys all tied together, that’s a hazard to other shoppers. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d pay for your groceries and leave.’

  ‘You make me leave,’ the woman challenged him. ‘You just lay a finger on me and see what happens.’

  Mike was about to answer with another of his soothe-the-angry-customer routines, when he heard shouting and scuffling at the front doorway of the store. Tony was shouting, ‘We’re closed! Don’t you understand me? We’re closing up!’

  Somebody yelled back, ‘You can’t close! We’ve got a right!’

  Mike left the lady with her three trolleys and her piles of cornflake boxes, and pushed his way through the crowds of customers to the doors. Tony had managed to lock two of the doors, but the last one was being forced open by a press of angry people. There must have been two or three hundred of them outside, all jostling to get in.

  What goes on here?’ Mike shouted. ‘Hey, mister – we’re closed! We’re closing up now!’

  A tall young man with shoulders as broad as a surfboard and floppy sun-bleached hair was gripping Tony’s shirt and trying to push him out of the way. Behind him, a husband and wife in matching pink T-shirts that read GOODBYE J. P. SARTRE were struggling to force a shopping-cart into the store. Behind them was a wrestling turmoil of anxious and angry men and women, already panicked by the warning that America was going to starve.

  ‘You can’t close!’ shrieked a woman with frizzy hair. ‘Your sign says twenty-four-hour store and you have to keep that! It’s the law!’

  ‘In this store. I’m the law!’ Mike shouted back. ‘Now go home, cool down, and come back in the morning! There’s no crisis, we have plenty of supplies, but I can’t endanger you or my staff by letting all of you in right now. You got me?’

  ‘Just shove it up your ass,’ snarled the tall surfer, and roughly elbowed Mike aside. Mike tried to grip the chrome handrail by the door, but he caught his back against a stray shopping-cart, lost his balance and fell against the liquor counter. The next thing he knew, the doors were being forced open again, and crowds of whooping and shouting people were pouring in to the store.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, let’s have some order!’ yelled Mike. ‘Just take what you want, but don’t panic!’

  He tried to stand up on the handrail so that he could make himself heard over the hideous shrieking and gabbling of the crowd, but a fortyish-looking man in sunglasses grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him down again.

  ‘I ought to beat your brains out!’ Mike screamed at him. The man shrugged. ‘I was doing you a favour. You’re wasting your breath, trying to stop the great American public from panicking. It’s their favourite occupation.’

  ‘Just get out of my way!’ Mike told him. ‘Tony – let’s get back to the office! Gina, Wendy – clear out of your cash registers and lock them up!’

  ‘Asshole,’ said the man in sunglasses, unaccountably. Mike helped his checkout girls take the cash boxes out of their registers, and then he and his staff fought their way through the aisles back to the office.

  All around them, the store was surging with hysterical shoppers – fighting and scrambling and tearing at each other as they attempted to cram their baskets and their shopping-carts and even their pockets with anything they could lay their hands on. A five-foot display of baked-bean cans clattered to the floor as Mike and Tony led the checkout girls past, and Mike was hit on the side of the face by a falling can. Right in front of him, a woman in stretch ski-pants and curlers was kneeling on the floor, gathering up packs of bacon in her arms and whimpering.

  There were shouts and splintering crashes as shelves collapsed under the weight of people climbing up on to them to reach the topmost boxes of food. A woman screamed, ‘I’m pregnant! For God’s sake don’t push me! I’m pregnant!’

  People were taking everything. Not just cans of vegetables and meat; not just staple supplies; but pet foods and bottles of lavatory cleanser and fluorescent plastic sandals. They seemed to have forgotten why they were there, and what they had come for. Now they were even ripping the plastic edging from the shelves, and smashing the refrigerator cabinets. Mike, as he managed to usher everybody into his office, saw one man in a flowery Hawaiian shirt beating his fist against an empty spice rack until his fingers were spattered with blood; and another sight that was to stay with him for days afterwards – a pretty young girl in khaki jeans clutching five or six crushed French loaves, and wetting herself, all down her thighs.

  Mike pushed Tony into the office ahead of him, slammed the door and locked it.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ shuddered Tony. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that in your life? They’ve gone bananas!’ Mike went over to the telephone, and dialled 625 3311, for the police. The telephone rang for a long time before it was answered, and outside the office window the screaming and the smashing grew louder and even more frightening.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ breathed Mike ‘What’s the matter with these people? We’ve got a riot on our hands.’

  At last, a dry voice said, ‘Police. Is this in connection with tonight’s emergency?’

  Mike hesitated. ‘It’s a riot, if that’s what you mean. Up at the Hughes supermarket on Highland.’

  ‘Okay,’ the voice told him. ‘Hold on for a moment, and I’ll have you connected with the emergency squad.’

  Mike held his hand over the receiver while it rang on a special extension. Through the office window, he could see a middle-aged woman trying to climb up on to the cookie shelves, to reach three or four scattered bags of Pepperidge Farm ginger-nuts. Another woman leaped on her back, cl
awing at her T-shirt, until it ripped apart. The two women fell into the aisle, fighting and scratching, and knocking over two other women as well. Mike saw blood and torn-out hair and bare breasts scored with livid red furrows.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said into the telephone. He loosened his necktie, and unbuttoned the first couple of buttons of his short-sleeved shirt. One of the checkout girls, Wendy, was starting to sob.

  At last, a snappy police sergeant said, ‘Yes? Emergency squad.’

  ‘I’m the manager of the Hughes supermarket on Highland,’ said Mike.

  ‘Okay,’ said the sergeant, ‘Hughes supermarket. I’ve made a note of that. We’ll get there when we can.’

  ‘When you can? We have a riot here! People are getting hurt!’

  ‘Listen, mister, we have a riot in every supermarket in the city. Four supermarkets on Santa Monica boulevard are burning. All I can say is that we’ll get there when we can.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do? They’re stripping the place!’

  ‘You’ll just have to let them strip it. I’m sorry, mister, but we simply don’t have the manpower. I’m sorry.’

  Mike didn’t know what else to say, how else he could plead. He held the phone in his hand for a moment, listening to the sergeant say, ‘Hello? Are you still there? Hello?’ But then he laid it back in its cradle.

  ‘What did they say?’ Tony asked him.

  ‘They said they’d do their best. It turns out that every supermarket in Los Angeles is being tom apart the same way. Four supermarkets are burning.’

  ‘Mother of God,’ said Tony, in a hushed voice.

  Gina, the Mexican check-out girl, looked up from comforting Wendy. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do? Those people out there, they’ve gone crazy.’

  Tony went close to the window. ‘They haven’t reached the stockroom yet. But I guess it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Is the stockroom locked?’ asked Mike.

  Tony nodded. It was always locked. He made sure of that, personally. He combed his hair a lot, and yawned a lot when he was making out shelf inventories, but he never failed to obey instructions.

  Mike joined him at the window. They couldn’t quite see the stockroom door from the office, but they could see the corner of the frozen dairy foods cabinet next to it. There was a pushing waltzing scrum of people there, and the floor was plastered with pink yogurt.

  They heard a rattling noise, and they knew that the crowds were trying to pull down the stockroom door.

  ‘If we want to keep that food intact, we’re going to have to do something fast,’ said Tony. ‘That’s a pretty good lock on there, but it won’t hold them out for ever.’

  Mike covered his mouth with his hand. Halfway up the hardware aisle, a woman lay doubled-up on the floor, bleeding and sick. Another woman was walking unevenly through the crowds that still milled around the supermarket, her hair awry and her eyes staring.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Mike. ‘Gina – pass that sack of waste-paper, will you?’

  An hour ago, Mike had been irritated to find that the cleaner hadn’t taken the plastic bag of trash away. It was nothing more than crumpled-up wrapping paper, out-of-date invoices, used carbon paper, and string. But it would suit his present purpose just fine. He carried it to the office door, propped it up against his legs, and then reached in his pocket for matches.

  ‘You’re going to set fire to the place?’ asked Tony.

  ‘Just a limited fire, I hope,’ Mike told him. ‘Enough smoke and enough yelling to get these people out of here.’

  He struck a match, and paused for a while to let it burn up. The rattling of the stockroom door grew increasingly ferocious, and he thought he heard a hinge tearing. Then he dropped the match into the bag of waste-paper, and watched it flare.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Mike asked Tony. ‘When I give the word, we open the door and go out yelling fire. And I mean yelling.’

  ‘I’m game,’ said Tony. He reached into his shirt pocket, took out his green plastic comb, and ran it with a stylised flick through his hair.

  ‘You look like a prince,’ said Gina, with friendly sarcasm. Tony realised what he had done, and grinned sheepishly.

  ‘It’s kind of a habit,’ he said.

  The bag of trash was blazing hot and smoky now. Mike said, ‘You set?’ and before Tony could answer, he tugged open the office door, and kicked a shower of fiery paper into the store.

  ‘Fire!’ he screamed. ‘Fire! Fire! The place is on fire!’

  ‘Fire!’ yelled Tony, right behind him.

  The effect on the crowds was immediate; and even more dreadful to Mick than the way in which they had first surged into the store. They let out a low quavering moan, like a wind on a seashore, and then that moan rose into a scream. Then, there was nothing but scrambling and pushing and a chopped-up shrieking which made him turn away towards the smoke and the burning paper with a grimace of disgust.

  He didn’t feel holier-than-thou. He knew that if his own life was at risk in a fire, he’d be struggling to get out along with everybody else. But somehow the way that the crowds in his supermarket were tearing at each other to get to the exits, the way that women were wrenching at each other’s clothes, the way that men were screaming like small children, that all turned his stomach.

  In a matter of a few minutes, the supermarket was almost empty. Two or three of the customers were too dazed or too hurt to walk. One man was lying face-down in the poultry freezer, his face against the ice, and it was plain that he was dead. Mike lifted him out, and laid him down on the floor. The man flopped back with his eyes open and the side of his cheek the colour of chilled turkey.

  ‘You think you should say some words?’ asked Tony, stepping beside him and looking down at the body.

  Mike shook his head. ‘I’m a supermarket manager, not a priest.’

  ‘The doors are all locked now,’ said Tony. ‘I put the shutters down, too.’

  ‘Thanks, Tony,’ said Mike.

  Curls of black burned paper drifted across the floor in the silent draught from the supermarket’s air-conditioning. There was a sharp odour of smoke in the air.

  ‘Did they go far?’ asked Mike. ‘Or can we expect them back?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Tony. ‘There were still quite a few of them gathered around outside when I put the shutters down. Twenty or thirty, maybe. They know the stockroom’s still untouched, so I guess they’ll be back.’

  Mike laid a hand on Tony’s shoulder. ‘If you want to leave now, slip out while the going’s good, I won’t hold it against you. I’d like to send Gina and Wendy home.’

  Tony shook his head. ‘What do I want to go home for? To watch all this on the TV?’

  ‘Okay, but we should get the girls out.’

  Gina was standing at the open office door. ‘We’d rather stay,’ she said. ‘At least until it’s quiet.’

  Mike said, ‘You know the crowds may come back; and they may be a damn sight more vicious than they were just now.’

  Gina nodded. ‘All the same, we’ll stay, if that’s okay by you.’

  Mike looked around the wreckage of his store – the collapsed shelves, the smashed freezer cabinets, the food that was strewn all over the floor and trodden into a surrealistic salad of Cheerios, baked beans, loganberry jelly, bootlaces, cat food, and plastic doilies.

  He said to Tony, ‘Go to the liquor cupboard, will you, and bring me a bottle of bourbon. Make sure you charge it down to me. I think I could use a drink.’

  Three

  All over the United States that night, fires were burning. From the top of the Hancock Building in Chicago, a CBS News reporter described the dark and fiery scene beneath him as ‘a preview of hell… like something by Hieronymus Bosch.’ Not many of his listeners knew who Hieronymus Bosch was, but the vision on their screens was unmistakable. Block after block of garish fires, hideous shadows, and running people.

  Thousands of stores, restaurants, hotels, warehouses, a
nd hamburger stands were broken into, all over the country. Anywhere there was food, there was violence. At a branch of McDonald’s in Darien, Connecticut, seven looters were shot dead by police as they tried to break into the restaurant’s cold store. One of the dead men was found to have tucked dozens of free McDonald’s airplanes into his windbreaker, presumably to take home for his children.

  At the Iron Kettle restaurant, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the seventy-two-year-old proprietor was crushed against a brick wall as she attempted to stop looters escaping from her restaurant in a pick-up truck.

  And in New York City, at Macy’s, hundreds of screaming men and women broke the windows of the delicatessen hall on 33rd Street and poured into the store, leaving amidst the shattered glass two dead women and one man with his left cheek sliced off. The crowds looted all the fresh and canned food they could tear from the shelves, and then they rampaged through the rest of the store, oblivious to the shrilling alarms and the policemen with nightsticks who patrolled the counters with orders to ‘contain, but not arrest.’

  One of the managers of Macy’s who witnessed the looting said, ‘It was terrifying. It was like sale time in Hades.’ And New York’s Commissioner of Police, in a hurriedly-called television interview, explained, ‘It’s a disaster. But, it’s way beyond our power to prevent looting and theft on such a grand scale. We have neither the men nor the facilities. All we can do is try to ensure that the looting is carried out with the minimum of risk to life and property.’

  During the night, Manhattan was a hideous nightmare. Ambulances and police cars whooped and screamed through the echoing streets, and there was the sporadic crackling of gunfire from Harlem and the West Side. The South Bronx, already devastated by arson, became an inferno whose glow could be seen as far away as New Rochelle. In Brooklyn, fifteen women were trapped and burned to death in a Woolworth store as they tried to escape with hair dryers, bicycles, garden furniture, and cosmetics. Their bodies were twisted up ‘like little black monkeys’ and their loot was melted in their claws. Almost all the food had been pillaged now from restaurants and stores, and people were helping themselves to whatever was left.