She looked back at him, her mouth patchy with blood. Then she turned without a word and went through to the kitchen.
He switched the radio back on, and, listened to a short bulletin about a shooting outside of Los Angeles. Fifty police had ambushed a band of vigilante looters, and slain all of them, including eight women and a child of twelve. Most state highway patrols had now formed themselves into anti-looting squads, hunting down looters and killing them on sight. What the bulletin didn’t mention was that almost all of the recaptured loot was divided up amongst the arresting officers, and the district attorney’s office, and anybody else the highway patrols considered to be ‘close and special friends.’
It was still possible to buy certain foods on the black market. An NBC reporter had paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a can of Chicken of the Sea at a warehouse in Brooklyn, and he had been offered whole canned hams from Denmark and the United Kingdom for well over one thousand five hundred dollars each. Pots of Marmite, the British yeast extract, were selling at sixty dollars and upwards.
John Frederick Walters switched off the radio again, puffed twice at his cigarette, and then stood up. He limped unevenly out of the living-room, along the narrow corridor with its scenic print of Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey, still splattered with dried-up tomato sauce from the evening two years ago when he had thrown his pasta at Elizabeth in a fit of frustrated temper. He opened the kitchen door, and there Elizabeth was, sitting at the table beside the cheap cream-painted dresser, her fork raised, her eyes staring back at him in defiance and fright.
In front of her was a plate – one of the nice white octagonal plates that Elizabeth’s mother had given them for a wedding gift. There were only three left, out of eight. The plate was heaped with brown glistening lumps of meat. On the draining-board was a red-labelled can, with an open lid.
John Frederick Walters walked into the kitchen, and around the table. Elizabeth kept her eyes on him warily, her fork still poised.
‘Is that Alpo?’ John Frederick Walters asked harshly.
Elizabeth nodded.
John Frederick Walters went to the draining-board and picked up the empty can. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘you could do worse. It says here that it’s a complete and balanced diet. So why don’t you go ahead – eat it.’
Elizabeth hesitated for a while, biting at her lips. Then, in jerky slow-motion, she dug her fork into the dog food and lifted up two gravyish chunks. John Frederick Walters stared at her unblinking and said nothing.
Closing her eyes, Elizabeth put the dog food into her mouth. She slowly began to chew it, moving it from one side to the other, her eyes still closed, her empty fork held up beside her.
‘You’re lucky,’ said her husband, in a shaky voice. ‘Do you know how lucky you are? That’s an expensive brand. Some brands are nothing but fat, and tubes, and minced up gristle. Mind you, I should think that even Alpo has its fair share of offals.’
Elizabeth chewed and chewed, tried to swallow, and gagged. Saliva and half-chewed dog meat trailed from her lips.
‘God,’ breathed John Frederick Walters, ‘what are you doing? What about Jenna? How’s Jenna going to survive if her mother doesn’t eat dog meat to turn into milk? How are any of us going to survive?’
Elizabeth was weeping. She gagged again, and held her hand over her mouth to keep the food inside.
John Frederick Walters told Fort Wayne police officers early Friday morning that ‘I acted quick.’ He said, ‘I never thought the day would have to come when a wife of mine would have to eat dog food to nourish our baby, and I never thought the day would have to come when my girls would go without a meal. I’m not rich, I know that, and we could never afford much since my accident, but this is America, isn’t it? How come suddenly there was nothing to eat, and no prospect of nothing to eat?’
As Elizabeth choked over her mouthful of dog food, John Frederick Walters pulled down the frayed cord which was suspended over the stove for drying the girls’ undervests during the winter, twisted it twice around his hands, and then once around Elizabeth’s neck. She fell backwards to the floor, hitting her head on the beige linoleum. Her eyes bulged at John Frederick Walters in horror, but she was unable to speak, unable to breathe, and her face turned grey and shiny, the same colour as grey leather shoes. After five minutes, with the string cutting into his bare hands John Frederick Walters decided she was dead.
He went upstairs, leaving Elizabeth lying in the kitchen. Alice and Wendy shared a bed in the small second-storey bedroom over the living-room. They were both asleep in the darkness, in their white flock cotton nightdresses, and John Frederick Walters stood at the end of the bed watching them – their upraised wrists, traced with blueish veins, their thin ankles. He reached down and held Alice’s bare toes in his hand, gently and lovingly. He wanted to kill them, he knew he had to, but he didn’t know how. How do you kill children you love? How can you instantly end their lives without hurting them?
He picked Wendy up, and carried her sleeping into the bathroom. Her arms lolled beside her as if she were already dead. He felt as if he were mad, or drugged, or even as if he were someone else altogether. Supposing there wasn’t really a famine at all? Supposing his radio had been telling him lies? But he looked around him at the white enamel bathtub with its green-coloured stain; at the can of lavender talcum powder with the rusted rim; at the fingerprinted mirror where Elizabeth had plucked her eyebrows and he had always shaved. And even if the radio was lying, what the hell was the use of a life like this, for any of them?
He took a safety-razor blade between finger and thumb, and then sat on the toilet seat with the sleepy Wendy on his lap. She mumbled, ‘Daddy… what are we doing?’ but he shushed her soothingly as he stroked her forehead, and then gently but firmly gripped her hair and slit her throat, as deeply as he could, from one side to the other. She didn’t even protest; didn’t even seem to realise what was happening. But then there was a sudden explosive gargle of blood and air, and the whole bathroom was arrayed in red. He dropped Wendy off his lap, in horror and utter fear, and she lay kicking her left foot against the side of the bath, kick, kick, kick, as she died. It was like watching a run-over dog die, only a thousand times worse, and he reeled with the dreadfulness of it.
‘I didn’t lose my resolve, though,’ he told the police. ‘I knew the rest of them had to go, too.’
He went upstairs to the small attic room where Jenna slept in her pink-painted crib. He had spent hours on that crib himself, sanding it and decorating it. Just above Jenna’s slumbering curls there was a transfer of a grinning burro, wearing a straw hat.
John Frederick Walters was glad that Jenna had gone to sleep again. He doubted if he would have been able to kill her if she was crying. He leaned over her crib, kissed her, and then pressed a pillow against her face for what seemed like a half-hour. It was probably only five or ten minutes, but it was enough. Jenna May Walters died of asphyxiation, aged 179 days.
Alice was the last. Alice, too, was asleep, and all she said when he softly opened the collar of her nightdress and held the razor-blade against the side of her throat was, ‘What time is it?’ Then the sheets were stained with ever-widening darkness.
The police stopped him on Anthony Boulevard, trudging north. His fingers were stuck together with dried blood. They held him up against the car while they searched him, and then they sat him down on the curb and subjected him to an impromptu interrogation. He admitted murdering his family, and offered to take them back to Number 8 so that they could see for themselves. They sat him on two spread-out sheets of week-old newspaper in the back of the car, and drove him south again.
Under the emergency powers granted to the Indiana police during the state of national crisis, patrolmen were permitted in what they considered to be ‘extreme circumstances’ to administer summary justice and execution. The two patrolmen who had picked up John Frederick Walters were in little doubt that the homicides at Number 8 were (as they later put it) ‘extr
eme in the extreme.’
At seventeen minutes past two on Friday morning, they asked him to kneel in the middle of his back lawn, which he did. They asked him if he had any last wishes, and he told them that he had one Lark left, in the living-room, next to the radio, and that he would appreciate the chance to smoke it. They conferred, and then said no, they didn’t have time to watch him smoke a cigarette. Then one of the patrolmen lifted a .357 Python revolver and blew John Frederick Walters’ brains into the peonies.
*
Just before he went to bed at dawn on Friday morning, the Vice-President was handed a lengthy and detailed medical report on the long-term effects of severe dietary deficiency in the United States. He was reminded that a moderately active male between thirty-five and sixty-five required 2900 calories a day; and that a woman between eighteen and fifty-five requires 2200. An estimate of available food supplies showed that even with careful conservation, and even with an intensive programme of agricultural revival, there would be less than one quarter of the necessary calories available to each American man, woman, and child during the coming six months.
In practice, there would be far less. There was no question at all that ‘approximately 85 million people’ would have to go without food supplies altogether, and live off whatever they could scavenge. ‘We are going to have to face up to the fact that the world’s most technologically sophisticated society; a society capable of visiting the Moon; a society which only two weeks ago measured its anxieties in terms of breast-enlargements, jogging, psychological self-acceptance, and Howard Jarvis; is now going to have to accept the degrading spectacle of nearly a third of its citizens digging like hogs for roots.’
The report warned of rickets – a softening of the bones caused by a severe lack of vitamin D and calcium. ‘This can lead to a bending of the bones under the weight of the body and the application of normal muscular pressure. Hence the bow-legged appearance of children suffering from malnutrition, and the flattening of their ribs, which can contract their chest cavity, so that their liver is pushed outward, causing the distinctive “pot-belly” of the underfed.’ Rickets, the report continued, was also responsible for the high, square, intellectual-looking heads of starving children, along with their small-featured faces. Their teeth generally appeared late, and rotted away early.
Scurvy, or scorbutus, was another risk. Although it was very well known that scurvy was caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, and although in normal times it could rapidly and easily be cured, there was now a danger that many Americans would have to go without fresh fruit and vegetables for anything up to six months, and that would leave them ‘wide open’ to infection. The symptoms included bleeding gums, stinking breath, extravasations of blood in the skin, and even bleeding from the eyes, nose and anus. Scurvy patients were liable to suffer anaemia, agonising ulcers on their arms and legs, and, if they were still untreated, exhaustion, chronic diarrhoea, and fatal failure of the lungs or kidneys.
The medical report remarked that ‘the United States is now inevitably entering a period of disease and death that can only be described as medieval.’
At 6.35 a.m., the Vice-President took two sleeping-pills and went to bed on a cot in the small room adjoining the Oval Office. He asked to be woken at 10.35 a.m. precisely.
Through the bullet-proof glass of the White House windows, with their unreal submarine tint, he was unable to hear the brief rattles of heavy machine-gun fire over by the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
Eleven
Season Hardesty opened her eyes and tried to focus. She had taken three of Vee’s little green pills last night, and her vision was blurred, like five melted varieties of ice cream. Then the pink blurs resolved themselves into price tags, and the white blurs resolved themselves into empty supermarket shelves, and the yellow blurs became posters, advertising six-packs of Ale-8-One.
Season lifted the blanket. Next to her, cocooned in a large blue bath-towel, Sally was still sleeping, her thumb poised a half-inch away from her open mouth. Ever since they had left Kansas, Sally had taken up sucking her thumb again, and no amount of nagging or cajoling had been able to stop her. She never said out loud that she missed her Daddy, but there was something in her eyes which Season couldn’t fail to recognise.
She sat up. All around her, people were huddled in blankets and towels and even sheets of cardboard. The early sunlight was sloping through the small high windows of the supermarket so that it looked like the nave of a church; and since it was now the sanctuary of the Church of the Practical Miracle of Los Angeles, Inc., the holy atmosphere was appropriate. There were 120 people here – men, women, and children – the majority of them from Granger Hughes’s congregation, although Mike Bull and his staff had managed to bring in most of their immediate families too.
Season had resisted coming to the Hughes market on Highland until the last possible moment. The pain and humiliation she had suffered at the hands of Oxnard and his Angels had enraged her, disoriented her, and frightened her more than she could have considered possible. She wondered if she would ever be able to carry on a normal relationship with a man again. She could hardly speak to Granger, and even Carl unsettled her. Every time he put his arm around her to reassure her, she thought what does he want?
If there had been no famine crisis, she would have immediately sought the guidance of Vee’s analyst, and tried to learn to live with the shock of her experience by joining a post-rape encounter group. The irony was that she had been discussing the subject on Monday with a woman who lived across the road in Topanga Canyon. The woman’s daughter had been raped at the age of fifteen by two blacks, out at Griffith Park, and it had taken her three years of intensive and argumentative therapy to make her understand that she herself hadn’t been to blame. These days, though, the girl carried a .38 in her pocketbook.
It was a brushfire, high up on Woodland Hills, between Ventura Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, that at last changed Season’s mind about staying in the house. It had probably been started by someone’s house burning, although under normal circumstances the fire department would almost certainly have been able to catch it before it spread to the surrounding hills. Now there was no fire department, and by early evening, with a dry north-easterly wind blowing, the sky over Los Encinos Park and all the woods around was dark with smoke. Carl had gone up to Season’s bedroom, where Season had been lying on her bed in a fetal position, with a half-empty bottle of Old Grandad beside her, and said, ‘Can you smell that? That’s smoke. The whole canyon’s alight, and we’re going to have to move.’
Season hadn’t looked at him. ‘Do we have to throw in our lot with Granger Hughes?’ she asked. ‘Is that really necessary? Can’t we make a run for it on our own?’
Carl had shaken his head. ‘We wouldn’t stay alive for twelve hours, not on our own. It’s wolf-pack time, out in the open. Come on, Season, I think I understand something of what you’re feeling. I understand how violated you feel. But there’s nobody around you now who wishes you anything but warmth and healing.’
Season had sat up, and scratched her blonde hair with both hands. ‘I guess the worse thing was that I had a revelation. I suddenly realised that all men who enter a woman’s body by force, or by blackmail, or by any means apart from love and consent, are rapists. Criminal intruders. Unfortunately, the law in California says that you’re only trespassing when seventy five per cent of your body is inside of someone’s premises, so I guess that lets rapists out.’
‘Season,’ Carl had warned her.
‘I know,’ Season had nodded. ‘This isn’t going to do me any good. But what the hell is?’
She had sniffed, and smelled smoke. ‘Is the canyon really burning?’
‘It’s burning. We’re all packed up, and ready to leave.’
‘Is Sally dressed?’
‘She’s all ready. Come on. Season, this is the only way.’ Season had stood up. ‘I guess,’ she agreed, clutching herself closely, as if a window had suddenly swung open, an
d chilled her in an unexpected breeze.
Now, here they were in the Hughes supermarket, along with 116 other people, all strangers; along with two toilets, two washbasins, 1440 cakes of shower soap, twenty-eight cases of assorted toothpaste, and more family-sized detergents than Season had seen together in one place in her life. Since Wednesday night, Mike Bull had been working out on his office calculator an optimum practical diet for his 120 charges – a diet which would give each of them as varied and healthful an intake of food as possible – and yet which would eke out the supplies in the supermarket’s stockroom for the longest time. The electricity supply was out, and so they had been forced to throw away all their chilled meat, frozen vegetables, and fish. And Mike Bull had spent an arduous two days sorting through every single container of canned foods, setting aside every one of them which had been packed in the last twenty-one days. Unlike Ed, however, he didn’t open them up and dump them. He labelled them clearly SUSPECT and shifted them out of sight. He reckoned that a time could well come when people were going to be hungry enough to take the risk of contracting botulism, especially if they were going to die of starvation anyway.
Tony, Mike’s under-manager, had been put in charge of security. In the early part of the week, there had been a temporary police encampment on the dusty triangle of asphalt just opposite, where Franklin and Highland intersected. There had been two patrol cars, a machine-gun emplacement with sandbags, and a couple of roving motorcyclists; and although they had been positioned there to intercept looters who were trying to escape north on to the Hollywood Freeway, their presence had kept scavengers and looters well away from the battered supermarket.
Now, however, the police had been pulled back to headquarters, and the post was deserted. The looters were back, in vicious little droves of a dozen at a time. Tony had barricaded the rear exit doors with piles of wooden pallets, snopping carts, and stockroom junk. Even if the looters managed to break the locked steel-and-glass doors, they would be caught in a ceiling-high tangle of metal banding and splintered wood that would catch them as effectively as barbed wire.
Famine Page 35
