Famine

by Graham Masterton

  Peter abruptly stood up. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’m going to walk out of here and you can’t stop me.’

  Della stepped forward, her hands on her hips, her big breasts swaying under her shirt. ‘If you so much as take one step out of this room, Mr Kaiser, I’ll blow your head off.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said Peter.

  ‘Wouldn’t I? This state is under martial law. You’re a dangerous suspect attempting to escape FBI custody.’ Peter shook his head. ‘I think you misunderstood me. You wouldn’t dare because, without me, you wouldn’t have a case. I’m your evidence, apart from those papers you stole, and you know it. So I’m not frightened of you, Mrs J. Edgar Hoover. Not one bit.’

  He turned, and walked determinedly towards the door in his flapping khaki pants. Della, almost casually, reached for the pump-gun which she had left propped against the bureau in the corner. She raised it, pumped the action, and said softly, ‘Freeze, Mr Kaiser. You’re under arrest, and if you attempt to get away I’m going to have to shoot you.’ There was a formality in the way Della spoke to him that made Peter hesitate. Halfway through the door, he paused, and looked at her over his shoulder. She was standing with the gun raised to her shoulder, the sights marking his head. He licked his lips, as if he had just finished drinking a bowl of particularly nasty tomato soup.

  He stood where he was for what seemed like a whole minute. Then he turned around, and went back to the sofa. ‘The day they started hiring whores for cops, that was when the whole legal system went down the tubes,’ he said. ‘Can you believe this hooker, being a cop?’

  Della kept the gun levelled at him, but Ed stepped forward and laid his hand on the barrel. ‘That’s enough, Della. You may be an agent of the law, but this is my house, and that’s my sofa, and I don’t particularly want to have holes blown in it.’

  He raised the barrel of the pump-gun until it was pointing at the ceiling, although she tried to resist him. He looked her straight in the eyes and said, ‘You understand? Because this is the time when people are going to start making their own laws, like they did in the frontier days.’ Della didn’t answer, and lowered the gun. Peter Kaiser, from his place on the sofa, watched them both closely, but said nothing at all.

  *

  That night, Thursday, Ed was woken up by the deep, distant coughing of shotguns. He sat up in bed, and listened. There was another shot, and another. He shook Della’s shoulder, and said, ‘There’s a firelight going on out there. Can you hear it?’

  She raised her tousled head from the pillow. ‘It sounds like it’s coming from the main gate,’ she said.

  Ed swung out of bed, and switched on the light. He tugged on his jeans and a T-shirt, and opened the top drawer in his rococo-style bedside table. Della, pulling on an old red sweater of Season’s, watched him sharply as he took out a Colt .45 automatic, and checked the magazine.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘A family heirloom?’

  That’s right,’ he told her. ‘My father bought it to keep my mother in line. Now, let’s get out there and see what’s going on, shall we?’

  Peter Kaiser was already on the landing when they opened their door, in a large pair of blue undershorts with green flowers splattered all over them. Blinking at Ed, he said, ‘I heard shooting. Did you hear shooting?’

  ‘Just keep your head down,’ said Della. ‘Don’t forget you’re a valuable witness.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Peter.

  Ed ran ahead of Della downstairs, and opened up the front door. They crossed the verandah under a sky that was dark and windy and heavy with cloud, and Ed led the way across to the farm’s Wagoneer. He swung himself up into the driver’s seat and started the engine without even waiting for her, or opening the passenger door to let her in.

  ‘There’s no mistaking that you’re the boss around here,’ she complained, as she clambered up, and laid her pump-gun down on the Jeep’s floor.

  Ed twisted the Wagoneer around the asphalt in a squittering curve, and then roared off towards the entrance road and the main gates.

  ‘They’re threatening my farm,’ he snapped, thrusting his hand into his hair and brushing it back off his forehead. ‘Don’t you understand that? Or have you never owned anything you cared that much for?’

  Della said, ‘I’ve never owned anything. There never seemed to be any point to it.’

  Ed wound the window down. They could hear the shooting quite clearly now – sharp, argumentative bursts of machine-gun fire, countered by the deep blasts of shotguns. The night air was warm and dusty, but it was dark too, with clouds covering the moon, and it was difficult to make out what was happening up ahead. They could smell gunsmoke drifting their way on the fresh easterly wind.

  In the light of his headlamps, Ed saw somebody lying in the roadway. He pulled up, opened the Wagoneer’s door, and jumped down. Della said, ‘What is it? What have you stopped for?’

  Ed didn’t answer, but crouched his way forward beside the Jeep’s front wheel, and then scuttled out to where the man was sprawled out in the dust. There was blood everywhere, most of it dried in dark Rorschach prints, but some of it still wet and globular. Ed carefully eased the man over on to his back, and then he saw who it was.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, through his teeth.

  It was young Jack Marowitz, dead. He looked as if he had been hit five or six times in the chest by a machine-gun, because the front of his yellow college sweatshirt was mushy with blood. As Ed turned him over, a strange sighing noise came from his perforated lungs.

  Ed heaved the body over to the side of the road, and then crouched his way back to the Jeep. The firing was much closer now, and he could hear unfamiliar voices shouting something which sounded like, ‘Get behind them! Circle around them, George! Get behind them!’

  Della said, ‘What’s happening? Who was that in the road?’

  Ed slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and revved up the Wagoneer’s engine. ‘Jack Marowitz, my crop adviser. One of the best in the business, as far as I was concerned.’

  ‘But what’s going on? Who shot him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds like some kind of a raiding party. They’re over there on the right, most of them. At least it sounds that way, from the gunfire.’

  ‘Where are your people?’

  Ed drove cautiously ahead for three or four hundred yards without lights. As he drove, he pointed to the fence which ran alongside the entrance road on the left-hand side. ‘That’s where Dyson was hiding himself yesterday, so I guess that’s where they are tonight. It was Willard, Jack, and one of the garage hands on guard duty until three o’clock.’

  There was a brief snatch of firing, and a sudden rattling of bullets against the side of the Jeep. Ed immediately swerved off the track, and stopped the vehicle beside the protective camouflage of a clump of stunted bushes. He pushed open the driver’s door, and scrambled quickly out into the grass, followed by Della.

  A shotgun banged loudly off to the left, and Della raised her head a little to see if she could pinpoint where the shot had come from.

  ‘Those are your people, aren’t they, with the shotguns?’ she asked.

  Ed nodded. ‘It sounds like it. Did you see where they were?’

  ‘I think so. Down behind the fence there, about five or six uprights along. The other people are using M3A1s.’

  ‘You can tell just by listening?’

  ‘Every gun has a distinctive sound of its own. And remember I’m trained.’

  Ed said, ‘How many of them do you guess there are? Six, maybe?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Della. ‘More, probably, by the way they’re firing.’

  Ed thought about that. Then he said, ‘In that case, I think we’d better go back and get some reinforcements. There’s no way that four of us are going to be able to hold off that many of them.’

  ‘I think it’s time to back off,’ said Della. ‘We don’t have any proper cover here or any spare ammunit
ion. Can you call Willard, and see if you can get him to hear you? Tell him to make his way back to the farm.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Ed, ‘who’s giving the goddamned orders around here?’

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’ Della demanded.

  There was another burst of light machine-gun fire, off on their right. The raiders were encircling them now, trying to cut off their escape back to the house.

  ‘If we don’t get out of here now, they’ve got us,’ said Della. ‘So what are you going to do? Call your friends, or die gallantly?’

  Ed looked at her intently, trying to make out her face in the darkness. ‘If any of us come out of this famine alive,’ he said, ‘what the hell are you going to do with your life?’ Della said, ‘Call them! If we don’t run, we’re going to have to fight.’

  ‘I asked you a question,’ insisted Ed.

  ‘Do you really think I’ve got the time or the inclination to answer you? But if you must know, I’m going to give up the FBI and do what I always wanted to do. Marry, settle down, live in Bluefield, West Virginia and raise children and flowers.’

  Ed said, ‘Bluefield, West Virginia?’

  He was going to say something else, but he was interrupted by a fast, sharp burst of bullets. Six or seven of them struck the Jeep Wagoneer. They heard the side windows crack, and the high, squeaky hiss of a punctured tyre. Then they heard someone calling, ‘Get over that fence. George! Along the back!’

  A man came running past the Jeep, doubled-up, holding a grease-gun, and panting as he ran. He came so close to Ed and Della that he almost kicked Della in the face – but he overshot them by two or three paces before his mind registered that what he had seen on the ground could have been two people. He skated to a halt on the grass, turned around, and just had time to raise his gun before Della rolled over on to her back, lifted her pump-gun, and blew his stomach into rags of bloody intestine.

  ‘That’s it!’ clipped Della. ‘Now, let’s get the hell out of here!’

  ‘Willard!’ yelled Ed. ‘Willard – we’re over here and we’re making a run for it!’

  Della’s gunshot and Ed’s shouting instantly attracted a whipping, whistling swarm of machine-gun fire. They lay flat against the turf as dust sprayed up all around them, and bullets penetrated the sides of the Jeep in a hurrying series of flat-sounding clonks. Another tyre burst, and Ed snarled at Della, ‘I thought you told me that couldn’t happen?’

  Ed raised his Colt .45 and strained his eyes to see what was going on in the darkness. Through the bushes, he could see most of the split-rail fence where Willard and the garage-hand were hiding themselves; and he thought he could see somebody huddled by the roadside, although it was impossible to see if the man was alive and dangerous or dead and safe.

  There was a long, tight silence, broken only by the occasional whistling of the grass in the wind, and by the rustling of birds, or gophers, or impatient gunmen. Ed whispered to Della, ‘There’s no sign from Willard. Maybe they hit him.’

  Della raised a cautious hand, and said, ‘Wait.’

  They didn’t have to wait long. A few seconds later, they heard someone running towards them. Ed lifted his head and saw two men sprinting fast and low alongside the split-rail fence. In front, holding on to his stetson hat with one hand and his shotgun in the other, was Willard Noakes; and just behind him was Ed’s young garage-hand.

  Ed fired twice into the air, to distract the raiders, and he was answered by a crackle of bullets. But then there was another sound – the snap of a rifle. It fired one ranging shot, then another; and then Willard collapsed in a jumble of arms and legs. The garage-hand bent over him, and Ed heard his voice on the wind like the voice of an anxious fledgling, saying, ‘Willard…’

  Ed started to get up, but Della seized the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance. For my sake – for your wife’s sake – just stay where you are.’

  Ed slid back down on to the grass. He was sure he could hear Willard moaning. And that wasn’t just anybody, hit by a bullet and hurt. That was Willard Noakes, one of his father’s closest buddies – the man who had taught Ed just about everything he knew – the man who had listened to his problems and given him friendly advice, and never once betrayed himself or South Burlington Farm or the good straightforward state of Kansas.

  You could never have said that Willard Noakes was a great man, or even a half-successful man. He was lonesome, as a rule, and unlettered, and when he wasn’t working or sleeping, he was watching television. But it took an effort of will that was almost muscular for Ed not to risk the bullets that were flying around that night and run across to tell Willard that he had always been loved, and respected, and that he wasn’t going to die alone.

  There were three more rifle shots. Snap – snap – snap. The garage-hand half-rose, batting his hands at the air as if he were trying to catch moths. Then he fell into the darkness, and Ed couldn’t see him any more.

  Della said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here, Ed. I mean it, darling, otherwise we’re going to be pigfeed.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘The two back tyres on the Jeep are flat, but I guess I can still drive her back to the farmhouse. I just hope they haven’t shot up the engine.’

  Della looked up. ‘They’re trying to surround us. I can hear one of them over there, in back of the fence. Can you hear that? Like, rustling. If we’re going to make a run for it, I think we’d better do it now.’

  They waited for nearly ten seconds; their hearts galloping, their breath shallow. Then Ed touched Della’s shoulder in the darkness, and said, ‘Let’s go!’

  Della scrambled up first, and threw herself into the open door of the Jeep. Ed was up next, and he had started up the motor even before he was sitting in his seat. With the driver’s door swinging wildly, the Wagoneer jounced off the rough grass verge, and bucked its way on to the road. The rear hubs grated and bumped on the hard-packed soil, and when Ed thrust his foot down on the gas, the tyres slithered out from under the rims like agonised black snakes; but they were away, and heading back towards the farm as fast as the crippled Jeep could travel.

  Now, for the first time they saw the raiders they were fighting. Out of the shadows, on either side of the road, men came running out of the grassland, carrying rifles and machine-guns. They wore quilted jerkins and jeans, and most of them had scarves tied around their faces.

  ‘Can’t you get this damned thing to go any faster?’ fretted Della, as the Jeep ground laboriously along the track.

  ‘With two flat tyres? You want miracles?’

  ‘For God’s sake! We’d be quicker on foot.’

  A hail of machine-gun bullets smashed the back windows of the Wagoneer, and showered them with broken glass. Ed pressed the gas pedal flat to the floor, but although the engine screamed, and the back wheel rims screeched on the road, he couldn’t get enough traction to take them clear of the running raiders. If the Jeep hadn’t been four-wheel-drive, they probably couldn’t have got it to go at all.

  Two well-aimed rifle bullets penetrated the driver’s door, with a sound like warping tin, and one of them buried itself in the upholstery of Ed’s seat. He said, ‘That’s it. We’ve had it That’s the end.’

  But Della whooped, ‘We’re losing them! Ed, look we’re losing them!’

  Ed turned. They were travelling at almost twenty-five mph now, and the raiders were gradually falling behind. One or two of them had stopped already, and were raising their rifles and their machine-guns to their shoulders to give the Jeep a final scattering of fire.

  ‘It’s too far now,’ said Della, with relief, settling back in her seat. ‘They’ll never get the range. Not with those peashooters.’

  It was then that the Jeep’s tortured transmission gave out a hideous clashing noise, and locked solid. The vehicle jolted to a stop, and wouldn’t budge, even for Ed’s frantic jugglings with the T-bar shift.

  ‘Out!’ Ed shouted at Della. ‘We’ve got a
good start on them – we can still make it!’

  They were out of the Jeep and running before any of the raiders realised what had happened. But as they pounded along the dirt track towards the dark huddle of the farmhouse buildings, they heard the sporadic crackling of M3Als behind them and the denser, sharper report of rifles. Ed – even though he was running – could feel the night air herringboned by bullets. For the first time that night, he thought, ‘God – they’ve got me now. I don’t stand a chance. I’m going to die right here, right now, as suddenly as Michael died in his car.’

  He could hear Della running along beside him – her bare feet slapping on the track. He could hear his own painful gasps for breath. He closed his eyes and pelted along faster, totally intent on survival, totally intent on living and on seeing Season and Sally again.

  Then – there was another fusillade of gunfire. But this wasn’t behind them. This was ahead, from the farmhouse, and from the stables. This was the bellow of shotguns and the light twig-snapping sound of handguns. His own farmhands, shooting back. The firing from the raiders broke off abruptly as they scrambled for cover, and Ed and Della found themselves running through the night in unnatural silence, as if they were trying to escape through the muffled darkness of a nightmare.

  They reached the asphalt yard, and then they were stumbling up the steps of the farmhouse verandah, accompanied by an ear-splitting salvo of covering shotgun fire.

  Dyson was standing by the door, and he opened it up for them as they came running along the front of the house. Then he quickly slammed it behind them, and locked it. Ed said simply, ‘Shit. Thanks, Dyson.’

  Inside the farmhouse, the atmosphere was alarmed, and everybody was tight faced with tension. Even Shearson Jones had come down from his bed, and was sitting in Ed’s armchair, wrapped in a white towelling bathrobe that scarcely met over the white moon-like curve of his belly. Peter Kaiser was perched on the arm of the sofa next to Karen, with his arm around her – an affectionate gesture to which she responded by sitting up as rigidly as possible.