Famine

by Graham Masterton

  Season was about to say something sharp in reply, but she checked herself. Maybe she was just tired, and frayed, and depressed. Maybe she was sick of being imprisoned in this supermarket, sick of the lines for the washroom every morning, sick of the evening sing-songs and the daily arguments, sick of the whole way in which the Hughes Supermarket had become a microcosm of American smalltown thinking – we’re okay because we’re in here with our food, buddy, and just you keep your distance.

  Season was a smart, bright girl; a city girl. In the city, you learned how to be aggressive and you learned how to survive. But somehow, sitting on your own little pile of stuff wasn’t what real survival was all about. Real survival was working things out with other people – taking the risk to relate. Amongst these smug, quasi-religious Californians, Season felt even more alienated than she had on South Burlington Farm.

  ‘Granger,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I apologise. You offered to help me and I accepted your offer. I didn’t have any right to slander your beliefs.’

  But Granger didn’t answer. Granger was looking at her with a bright, mesmerised glassiness in his eyes that made her involuntarily turn around, to see if there was someone standing behind her.

  ‘Granger?’ she repeated. Even Mike Bull frowned. ‘You’re right,’ Granger said, in a hoarse, slow voice. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘I’m right? What are you talking about?’

  Granger raised his hand, two fingers extended, a gesture unnervingly reminiscent of Jesus.

  ‘Those people out there – they deserve the benefits of our faith – they deserve the miracles – just as much as we do—’

  ‘Granger,’ said Mike, taking his arm. ‘Why don’t you come and have a cup of hot coffee, and maybe some cookies? I know Nan Mameweck just brewed up.’

  ‘No, you misunderstand me,’ breathed Granger. ‘I’m being tested here. This is my test. This is how my faith is being put through its ultimate workout. Don’t you see it? How God has spoken to me, through Season here? How God has arranged this whole situation, this entire interface, so that I can discover at last what practical miracles really are?’

  ‘Granger, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ said Mike. ‘I mean, really.’

  ‘You don’t remember John, chapter six, verse five, when the five thousand followed Jesus to the mountain, and Jesus said to Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?’

  Mike Bull glanced outside at the restless crowds. ‘Well, yes,’ he said awkwardly, ‘but the plain fact is that we just don’t have enough.’

  ‘That’s it!’ cried Granger, ‘that’s absolutely it! The gospel is repeating itself! I have said to you – how are we going to feed all those people out there – and you, like Philip, have said the modem equivalent of what Philip said, which was. Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little. But Jesus had asked Philip this question to test him, right? Because it’s written in the Bible that Jesus knew what he would do.’

  Mike Bull stared at Granger, face to face, for a long time. Granger was trembling, and there was white spittle at the corners of his mouth. ‘Okay – sure,’ said Mike, uncertainly. ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘A miracle,’ said Granger. ‘A contemporary, practical miracle. Maybe not the feeding of the five thousand, but certainly the feeding of the five hundred.’

  ‘It can’t work,’ Mike Bull told him, with hushed earnestness. ‘Granger, it just can’t work.’

  ‘Do you think Philip believed the miracle that Jesus performed would work? Of course he didn’t. The only way that anybody can ever believe in a miracle is to see it happen in front of his eyes. Now, go to the stockroom and bring me five packs of that crispbread and two cans of tuna.’

  ‘Granger—’

  Granger seized the front of Mike Bull’s shirt, not angrily, but with intense religious passion. ‘It’s what we believe in, Mike. It’s what we actually believe in. And now’s our chance to show that it can happen for real. We can work a miracle, Mike, just the way Jesus did. Others have done it. Others did it in Jesus’s time, and Jesus didn’t mind. He approved of it. We can work this miracle, and at the same time we can purge ourselves of all of our selfishness and our greed. Don’t you understand me? This one act is going to be our salvation.’

  Season said, ‘Granger, if you go out there, they could very well kill you.’

  Granger shook his head. ‘No, no chance of that. I know whose voice comes out of your mouth, Season. You’ve tested me before. Tested me hard, when I thought that I was testing you. They won’t hurt me, those people out there. Especially when they see what I’m bringing them. Especially when they clear up after they’ve eaten, and realise how much they’ve left over.’

  He was exultant now, feverishly excited and unstoppable. ‘Go, Mike,’ he said. ‘Go get the bread and the fish. And tell young Tony to make ready to open one of the doors, so that I can go out.’

  Mike hesitated, but Granger repeated, ‘Go,’ in such a quiet and beatific way that Mike found it impossible to resist him. He walked down the aisle to the stockroom, and came back a minute or two later with five packs of Kellogg’s crispbread and two cans of Chicken of the Sea. Seven or eight of Granger’s closest disciples had gathered around him now, wanting to know what was going on, and they watched in awe as Granger arranged the food in a supermarket basket and prepared to step outside.

  ‘That mob sure looks unhappy,’ remarked one of the men, a bald, sun-bronzed insurance salesman from the San Fernando Valley. ‘I’m glad it’s not me that’s going out there.’

  Granger laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You are about to witness a miracle. Doubting Thomas. When you see what happens, you’ll wish more than anything else that you were me, and that God’s generosity and kindness was flowing through you.’

  The man made a moue, and said, ‘Good luck, all the same.’

  Tony was ready at the door, holding his .22 target pistol. As Granger came forward with his shopping basket under his arm, he said, ‘You sure you want to go? If they try to attack you, I may not be able to let you back in.’

  ‘Attack me?’ smiled Granger. He touched Tony’s head with the sign of the cross. ‘They will adore me – and I will bring them in here afterwards friendly and laughing. I doubted my faith until now – just as you doubt it now – but this is the test – this is the time.’

  Season said to Mike Bull, ‘Do you really think we ought to let him go? I don’t know what’s come over him. One minute he was trying to persuade me that God had chosen nobody else but us to survive… now he’s risking his life to feed a whole mob of starving people with five packs of crispbread and two cans of tuna fish.’

  ‘I don’t see what we can do to stop him,’ said Mike.

  ‘But why does he even want to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s always been kind of changeable. You know, up one minute, down the next. But I think he’s been worrying for days about letting other people go hungry while we’re all holed up in here. He tried to justify it, tried to think his way round it, but I know that it made him feel guilty as all hell. I don’t think you helped much, needling his faith all the time. I guess he thinks he’s found a way to solve it now. He feeds everybody outside with a miracle, and that means we can keep the rest of the food in the stockroom with a clear conscience.’

  Season watched Tony sliding back one of the metal bars from the door. ‘Granger’s so messed up,’ she said. ‘I thought he was so together. But he’s so messed up.’

  ‘He’s been in analysis for ten years.’

  Granger stood with one hand clasping his huge crucifix as Tony reached down and turned the key in the supermarket door. In his white kaftan, he looked thin, spiritual, and vulnerable, quite unlike the first time that Season had met him, and very unlike the day he had come around to see her alone at the house on Topanga Canyon. Outside, on Highland Avenue, she could see the crowds shifting and swaying in curiosit
y. She looked at their faces, and in a strange way their hunger and their fear had given them the same concentrated intensity that Granger was showing on his face. It was an extraordinary confrontation of utter need with utter faith.

  Tony pulled open the door, and pushed Granger unceremoniously out on to the sidewalk. Then Tony locked the door again, and barred it. He glanced across at Mike Bull with an expression that meant – I didn’t want to, but what else could I do? Mike shrugged, and turned away. Mike wasn’t yet ready to have his support for the Church of the Practical Miracle and what the church believed in tested to the limit. He wasn’t yet ready to admit that he might have joined it because Mrs Linda Javits, divorcee, regular customer, and possible replacement for his dead wife Anne, was also a member. As it turned out, Mrs Javits hadn’t answered when Mike had tried to call her and tell her that the congregation was assembling in the supermarket, and for all he knew, she could be just as dead as Anne. He hadn’t told anybody, not even Tony, although Tony had noticed that he went into his office more often than usual, for a quick stiff shot of whisky.

  Granger Hughes stood on the sidewalk outside the supermarket with the early-morning sunlight rising behind him. The cool breeze flapped his kaftan around his ankles. The crowd on the opposite side of the road stood silently and watched him.

  Granger raised a hand. ‘I have brought you food,’ he said, in a clear voice, ‘I have brought you sustenance enough for all.’

  There was a restless murmuring in the crowd. One or two of them stepped forward, until they were only a few paces away from where Granger was standing.

  ‘You should all be seated, as the five thousand were seated on the mountain,’ called Granger. ‘Then I will walk amongst you and distribute what I have brought.’

  One of the men, with a pinched face and an orange floral shirt, said, ‘What’s that you got in the basket? Samples?’

  ‘This is all I shall need,’ said Granger, with great calm. ‘Are you kidding?’ asked another man.

  Granger shook his head. ‘You may not be able to believe it now, but if you seat yourselves on die ground, I shall pass amongst you and you will see for yourselves how much is here.’

  ‘For chrissake,’ said the man in the orange shirt.

  ‘Yes!’ said Granger. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  He walked towards them with his wire basket on his arm. Season, watching him through the supermarket window, was holding her breath so tight that her heart was beating in long, slow bumps. She could hear Mike Bull behind her breathe, ‘Oh, my God.’

  Granger reached into his basket and took out one of the packets of Kellogg’s crispbread, offering it to the man in the orange shirt. The gesture was so affectionate, and had such generous innocence, that Season had to close her eyes. However messed up Granger might have been – however eccentric and Californian his church – he was now offering food to the hungry in the sincere belief that God would help him to satisfy them.

  The man in the orange shirt, unbelievably, actually took the crispbread and stared down at it as if he couldn’t quite understand what it was. But then he hurled it away from him, and turned on Granger with a screech of frustrated rage that Season could hear clearly, even inside the barricaded market. The man grabbed hold of Granger’s kaftan and ripped the back of it, exposing Granger’s naked back, and his blue shorts.

  The crowd surged across the road as if they were runners in a marathon. The noise they made was hair-raising – a peculiar kind of ululating warble, as primitive and frightening as Zulus, or Apaches. They gathered around Granger in a furious, tearing mob, and for a moment he disappeared completely.

  Tony, grey-faced, said, ‘They’re killing him. Right in front of our eyes. They’re killing him, Mike!’

  Season couldn’t say anything. None of them had really expected Granger to go out there and pacify five hundred starving people, but for a few heady minutes they had all wondered, just wondered, if miracles could happen for real. Season held Sally close, and when Sally asked her, ‘What’s happening. Mommy? Where’s Mr Hughes gone?’ Season tried to soothe her and stroke her, and say, ‘No place, honey. Maybe to heaven.’

  But Granger wasn’t in heaven yet. Granger was still in hell. There was a sudden struggling in the crowd, a sudden desperate fighting and wrenching and screaming. And it was then that something came pushing and tearing its way through the howling crowds of people, arid collided with the windows of the supermarket with such force that they rattled and reverberated. Something that smeared red all over the glass with the feverish abandon of an action painter, trying to finish a masterpiece against the clock.

  Season looked. Just once. And then she couldn’t open her eyes again, not for whole eons of agonised time.

  They had already torn off Granger’s scalp, and most of his beard. One of his arms had been twisted around and around, right out of its socket, and there was nothing but blood and gristle where his left shoulder should have been. His scrotum had been wrenched from between his legs, and his thighs were plastered in gore. And as he shrieked and flapped his one broken arm against the supermarket window, his horrified followers saw seven or eight hands pull back his head and claw at his eyes, digging them out of their sockets in a welter of optic fluid and blood.

  Then, mercifully, they dragged him out of sight. But none of the people in the supermarket knew how long they took to kill him, or what he suffered in those last minutes of his life.

  Mike Bull came across to Season and touched her arm. She jumped, and opened her eyes.

  Mike Bull said, ‘It’s – ah—’

  He didn’t know what to say to her. He was dizzy with shock. For some reason, he was reminded of Anne, and he suddenly started to cry. The tears streamed down his face, and his mouth was puckered with suppressed sobs. Season gently led Sally away, back to the corner by the canned fruit shelves which they were beginning to know as their home. Tony said, ‘We shouldn’t never have let him out.’

  Mike wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Y ou can’t stop martyrs from martyring themselves, Tony. He must have known as well as we did.’

  ‘But they tore him to shreds, Mike I mean, shreds.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have done if his miracle had worked, would they? Or maybe they would, I don’t know. Jesus worked all of those miracles, didn’t he, and they still crucified Him.’

  Season, in her small corner by the fruit shelves, sat with her knees clasped in her arms, trying to understand what was real. Sally hadn’t been able to see Granger Hughes’ grisly last moments from where she was standing, although she understood now that something terrifying had taken place, that Granger had somehow been hurt.

  ‘Mommy,’ she said, quietly.

  Season attempted a smile.

  ‘Mommy – is Daddy going to come save us?’

  Season looked at her daughter – at their daughter – with a gentleness that misted her eyes. I mustn’t start crying, she thought. Not now, when I’m supposed to be strong. Not now, when Sally’s expecting me to reassure her. And yet Sally had put into words the flittering, irrational hope which Season had been holding out for all of these days of fright and uncertainty. Maybe Ed’s coming to save us. He must be coming to save us. He knows what things are like in Los Angeles. No matter what happened between us, he must be thinking of us now. He can’t still be in Kansas, looking after the farm. He’s not that kind of a guy. He’s boring, sometimes; and pretty often he doesn’t recognise what a woman needs out of her life. But he knows when she needs protection, and care. He knows when she really needs help.

  And now, God damn it, God damn it all to hell, she started crying. She couldn’t stop the hot tears from springing into her eyes, from blurring her picture of the little girl that she and Ed had conceived between them, pretty and serious and patient And as she wept, she touched Sally’s hair, and told her, ‘Of course Daddy’s coming to save us. He’s coming right now. Of course he’s coming to save us.’

  *

  They had waited und
er a dense blue sky for three hours, their convoy drawn to the side of Route 66 by Topock, where the highway crosses Havasu Lake. In the western distance, five small clouds had stayed suspended close to the horizon for the whole three horns, not moving, unstirred by any wind.

  The landscape was as hot and limpid as a painting by Dali, with the Sacramento Mountains up ahead, and the Hualapai Mountains behind. Arizona, on a Saturday in August. A country of heat-ripples and mirages and strange illusions.

  Eventually, Ed walked back to the Chevy wagon, opened the door, and climbed into the driver’s seat. His passengers said nothing, but all of them looked at him with sweat-glistened faces, and expressions that pleaded: Please – move on.

  ‘All right,’ he said, with a dry mouth. ‘We’re pulling out.’

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ intoned Shearson. ‘Half an hour more, and I’d have been melted to butter.’

  Ed started up the wagon’s engine, and the first warm blast surged out of the air-conditioning vents. He blew his horn three times, and the convoy coughed and whinnied and slowly pulled away from the roadside. They crossed the Colorado River, and then wound their way slowly northwest through the Sacramento Mountains, with the peaks of the Dead Mountains over on their left. The sky remained the same relentless blue.

  ‘Last lap,’ said Ed, as he drove. ‘We’re in California now.’

  ‘Three cheers,’ said Shearson. ‘Do you want to try that radio again now, see if we can’t pick up some news?’

  Ed switched on the radio, rolling the dial between finger and thumb. There were one or two faint broadcasts, voices that were swallowed by topography and distance; but most of the time there was nothing but a heavy, colourless crackling. After ten minutes of trying, however, Ed picked up a tiny, remote voice which told him it was an emergency station, from Las Vegas, Nevada.

  ‘We hear that the President has recovered from his illness… and has returned to the White House to take charge of the crisis personally. We hear that several thousand people died during the past twenty-four hours from botulism… people who apparently considered the risk worth taking… And we also hear that Britain has flown two thousand tons of emergency supplies in to New York, against the express wishes of her fellow EEC members…’