Famine

by Graham Masterton

  He turned to Della. ‘Are you really FBI?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you something else ? Somebody else altogether?’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Della. ‘Would I have taken the trouble to blackbag a whole lot of Shearson’s papers – would I have taken the trouble to keep Shearson and Peter Kaiser prisoner – would I have done any of the things I’ve done since you’ve met me, if I wasn’t?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Ed asked her.

  ‘Listen,’ Della told him, touching his arm. ‘I’m only interested in keeping Shearson and Peter Kaiser in custody until I can turn them over to the Bureau. I’m only interested in helping us all to find a safe place to hide out until this rioting and raiding is all over. That’s all. You can trust me, Ed. I mean it. You can genuinely trust me.’

  Ed didn’t answer. But after a long while, he let the Venetian blind fall back into place, and he wiped the dust from his hands on the sides of his jeans.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you say I can trust you, then I will. But if you do one single thing to jeopardise any of the people in this convoy of ours – if you make one single wrong move – then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the group and go out on your own. You understand that? What I’m saying?’

  Della leaned forward a little and kissed his cheek. The soft heaviness of her breast pressed against his arm. He could smell the particular fragrance that wasn’t perfume or soap, but just woman.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I know what you’re saying, but I won’t let you down.’

  ‘Now,’ said Ed, ‘I want to go look for Season and Sally.’

  *

  The winding road up through Topanga Canyon took them on a journey of funereal fantasy – as if their convoy of wagons was wending its way through the black recesses of a mortician’s nightmare.

  All the grass and all the trees had been burned to ashes, so that on either side of them they could see nothing but twisted stumps that had been reduced to charcoal, and vegetation like crumbling grey hair. The north-east wind had blown the debris across the road, so that their tyres ground and scratched on the asphalt, and threw up clouds of ash and grit.

  The smell was overpowering. A strong, sour stench that blew in through their air-conditioning vents and seemed to cling to their clothes. Now and then, they drove through a thick drift of smoke, and that started them coughing, and irritated their eyes, and by the time they reached Mulholland Drive, Shearson Jones was caught in an uncontrollable fit of wheezing and gasping.

  ‘We’re going to have to turn back,’ insisted Peter Kaiser. ‘Ten more minutes of this and the senator’s going to asphyxiate.’

  ‘We’re almost there,’ said Ed, in a flat voice. ‘The Snowmans’ house is up on the left.’

  ‘You seriously believe it’s still standing?’ asked Peter.

  Ed didn’t answer. Ever since they had turned their convoy off the Pacific Coast Highway on to Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and seen the charred and devastated hills, his stomach had been rigid as a football with fear. The bushfire must have swept all the way down the canyon unchecked, with no firefighters and no water-dumping aircraft to hold it back; and the chances of anybody having survived it were almost absurd. Please God, thought Ed, as he reached the turn in the road where the Snowmans’ driveway came down – please God don’t let me find them burned.

  The mailbox was still there, its post charred, its paint burned off; but Ed could distinctly make out the name C. Snowman. He turned the Chevy up the drive until he came to the parking area in front of the house.

  From the outside, in the darkness, the house didn’t look too bad. But when Ed climbed down from the wagon and crunched his way closer across the drifts of ashes, he could see that the interior was completely burned out.

  Della came up behind him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Ed clambered his way over fallen beams and blackened skeletal furniture until he reached the place which had once been the living-room. Incongruously, one part of the living-room wall still stood, and attached to it was a white telephone, drooping and distorted by heat. Ed almost expected it to ring, and to hear voices from the past. Next to the phone, still half-legible, were the words: ‘Ed Hardesty called from South Burlington Farm. Says he’s on his way to LA.’

  ‘The cop who wrote that said the place was empty,’ Ed remarked. ‘With any luck, they didn’t try to come back. But the question is – where are they now?’

  ‘I can tell you that,’ said a keen, sharp voice.

  Ed turned around, squinting against the glare of the convoy’s headlights to see who was talking.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. Della stepped to one side, and raised her pump-gun.

  ‘No need to be afraid,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not carrying a gun or nothing.’

  ‘Step into the light where I can see you,’ said Della. There was a hesitant, shuffling sound, and then a small, soot-smudged man emerged into the headlight beam. He looked like a grubby, tattered, erratic second cousin of Donald Pleasence. His jacket was singed at the back, and he wore burnt brown mittens.

  ‘Pearson’s the name,’ he said, brushing ash from his sleeves. ‘Longtime resident of Topanga Canyon and environs. You looking for the folks who used to live here?’

  ‘That’s right. Carl and Vee Snowman, and the people who were staying with them. A woman and a little girl.’ Pearson coughed, and wiped black-speckled sputum from his lips with the back of his mitten. ‘You carrying any food?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe. Do you know where the Snowmans are?’

  ‘Sure I know. But it wouldn’t be right to tell you for nothing. You got any canned meat? The safe variety, mind. I’m not giving out information just to get a dose of that botulism.’

  ‘How do I know you’re going to ell me the truth?’ asked Ed.

  Pearson coughed, and cackled. ‘A can of meat in this town, mister, is worth its weight in any kind of currency you care to mention. You can get yourself a woman for a can of meat. Or a whole heap of narcotics. Down on Santa Monica Boulevard, you can fix yourself up with a bag of good quality heroin for just one can of Campbell’s condensed oxtail, provided it’s carrying the right date of manufacture, and no pinholes. I even hear tell they’ve set up places for changing the dates on suspect cans, just to resell ’em.’

  Pearson came closer. He carried a smell with him, of sweat and ash and poverty. ‘With a can of meat being worth as much as that, mister, I wouldn’t care to double-cross nobody for it. Folks are getting killed for cans of meat. Don’t you think I don’t know you wouldn’t come hunting me out, ifn I gave you wrong information, and don’t you think I don’t know you wouldn’t kill me?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ed, with exaggerated ferocity. ‘I would kill you. Della – will you go get me a can of that Moms Kitchen Corned Beef?’

  Della hesitated, and then walked back to the wagon. She came back a few moments later carrying the red-and-yellow can with the smiling woman’s face on the label.

  ‘Okay, where are they?’ asked Ed. ‘And you make sure you tell me straight!’

  Pearson stared at the corned beef as if it were the Holy Grail. His stomach rumbled in audible peristalsis, and saliva ran from the corners of his mouth.

  ‘I haven’t eaten nothing since Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Only a pack of taco chips I found in one of the burned-out houses.’

  ‘Where are they?’ insisted Ed.

  ‘I’ll tell you where they are. They’re holed up at the Hughes Supermarket on Franklin and Highland. Them and maybe a hundred more from one of those nutty churches. You can’t get in there if you try. They’ve got the whole place barricaded. The rumour is that they’ve got themselves a whole stockroom of food, enough to last them for nearly a year; and that’s why the place is surrounded.’ Ed looked at Pearson acutely.

  That’s the God’s-honest truth, mister. I swear it on my liver,’ the old man promised.

  ‘All right,’ said Ed, and tossed him the can of corned beef. ‘Do
n’t try eating all that at one sitting. You’ll be sick as a dog.’

  Pearson may have been starving for five days, but he caught the can of corned beef as neatly as a professional ballplayer. Then he was off, hopping and skipping over the ashes with his prize held against his chest. Ed called, ‘Pearson!’ but it was too late. The old man was gone.

  Ed walked slowly back to the Chevy. Shearson had managed to control his coughing now, but he was breathing in deep, shuddering wheezes which sounded as if every tube in his bronchial system was clogged with mucus.

  ‘Are you ever going to let us rest, you infernal farmer?’ he wanted to know. ‘Or are you going to trail us around the west for the rest of our days?’

  ‘The senator’s sick,’ said Peter Kaiser. ‘Unless we get him someplace where he can rest, he’s going to get a whole lot worse.’

  Ed said, ‘My wife and child are apparently barricaded in a supermarket on Highland Avenue, along with a whole bunch of other people. From what that old hobo said, they have plenty of supplies, maybe enough for a year. It makes sense to me personally to try to go join them. I mean, my family’s there. But I also think it makes sense for all of us to try to get in there. Even if we don’t stay for more than a day or two, at least it’ll give us a breathing-space to get ourselves orientated, and decided what we’re going to do next.’

  Shearson wiped his face with his handkerchief, and coughed. ‘For goodness’ sake, Hardesty, stop giving us lectures in logic and feasibility and take us somewhere where we can get something to eat. And drink, too, if that’s not too much to ask.’

  ‘Senator?’ said Karen, and passed Shearson a Dixie cup of lukewarm water.

  ‘I shall have nightmares about tepid, plastic-tasting water for the rest of my life,’ said Shearson, swallowing it noisily. ‘Do you know something? I’m so much thinner than I was last week that if I stood up, my pants would drop to my ankles.’

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ said Ed, glancing at Shearson’s huge belly.

  Della said, ‘I don’t think we have much of a choice. I vote we try to get into the supermarket.’

  ‘I suppose that means I go too,’ put in Shearson. Della gave him a grin like caustic soda.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘I’ll go have a word with everybody else in the convoy and tell them what we’ve decided. They’ll all be able to stay with us, or go to their own way, whatever they want.’

  ‘What about me?’ asked Peter Kaiser.

  ‘You stay with me,’ Shearson reminded him, hoarsely. ‘I still pay your salary, remember, or at least I will do when I can get my hands on those bank accounts on Grand Cayman.’

  ‘The world’s collapsed around his ears, and he still thinks about his swindled money,’ marvelled Della.

  ‘My dear,’ Shearson reminded her, ‘everything that ever happens in this whole world has something to do with money. Even in the middle of a famine, you can’t lose sight of that.’

  *

  Two of the convoy decided to drop out and make their way to Mexico straight away – Jim Rutgers and his family, and everybody who was travelling with Sam Gasiewicz. There was a short but emotional goodbye on the Pacific Coast Highway at Topanga Beach, while the shadowy ocean seethed and foamed, and distant fires burned far away to the south. Moira Gasiewicz wept on Ed’s shoulder, and then her husband tugged her gently back to their car, nodded to Ed, and climed into the car himself.

  Ed stood watching the red tail-lights curving away towards Santa Monica, and then he said to Della, ‘All right. Let’s go see what’s happening at the supermarket.’

  *

  It was the third attack that night. Soon after dark, the first hails of bricks, bottles and chunks of broken curbstones had racketed and splintered against the supermarket doors, and blazing gasoline had been splashed on the sidewalk outside. Then, like demons from purgatory, the crowd had come rushing through the flames with home-made cudgels and axes and fenceposts wrapped in barbed-wire, and they had hammered on the doors, so furiously and so hard that many of them had smashed their fingers and knuckles. Inside, the congregation of the Church of the Practical Miracle had stood silent and frozen, waxworks, unable to do anything but watch.

  A second attack had come at nine o’clock, when one of the crowd had climbed on to the supermarket roof and tried to throw a Molotov cocktail in through the skylight. Tony, crouched behind the liquor counter, had shot at the intruder five times with his .22 target pistol as the man tried to light his home-made bomb, and had hit him twice in the arms, flesh wounds. The bomb had flared up, and splashed fiery gasoline all over the intruder’s clothes. Screaming, his hair on fire, his arms flapping in great circles of flame, he had run across the roof and toppled head-first off the edge. His body had blazed on the sidewalk for almost twenty minutes.

  Now, they were attacking again, and this time the thunder of rocks and bottles against the doors was relentless and deafening.

  Carl was sitting next to Season in her corner by the fruit shelves. They had been sharing the last of their dinner – a can of soya hamburger helper and a can of Green Giant spinach – while Vee had been singing Sally to sleep. Carl looked at Season with wide eyes, and he didn’t have to say anything at all. They both knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before the mob broke in, and when they did, there wouldn’t be any mercy for any of them. It was no good pretending that what had happened to Granger Hughes wouldn’t happen again.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible to – make things easier?’ asked Season, in a high, dry voice she scarcely recognised as her own.

  ‘In what way?’ asked Carl.

  ‘Well, for Sally. To make it painless.’

  Carl pulled at the skin of his cheeks as if it were tired pink elastic. ‘I guess Mike Bull has a whole lot of pharmaceuticals we could use. Aspirin, something like that. But that would take time.’

  There was a crash of reinforced glass as the mob outside began to hurl themselves at the supermarket doors with hammers and tyre-irons.

  ‘You don’t want to do it too soon,’ said Carl. ‘And on the other hand, you certainly don’t want to do it too late.’

  ‘She’s so pretty,’ said Season, looking across at Sally’s fine blonde hair, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I couldn’t bear it if they hurt her.’

  Vee could hear what they were saying, but she continued to rock Sally in her arms, smoothing her forehead to calm her down, and singing to her.

  ‘Roon, roon, rosie,

  Cuppie, cuppie, shell.

  The dog’s away to Hamilton,

  To buy a new bell;

  If you don’t take it.

  I’ll take it to myself.

  Roon, roon, rosie,

  Cuppie, cuppie, shell.’

  Her voice was drowned by a tumult of shrieking and banging. Carl laid aside his uneaten food, and said, ‘Mike’s going to need some help. For God’s sake, look, there must be a thousand of them out there.’

  The hammering grew louder and even more determined. One of the chromed steel bars that Tony had slid through the door-handles to keep the mobs from breaking in was actually bending now, and the door was half-torn off its hinges. The reinforced glass had held together, even though it had been crushed into a wired-together slush; but now the sheer weight of hysterical people outside of the supermarket was beginning to tell. One blood-smeared hand appeared through the opaque glass like the hand that had reached out of the lake for Excalibur, disembodied, groping blindly, unable to pull itself back because of all the furious people behind.

  Sally sat up. She was pale, alarmed, with dark circles under her eyes. Vee stopped singing now, and looked across at Season with an expression that conveyed all the fright that a sister and a woman could feel. The noise of screeching people and shaking doors was so loud that when Vee said something. Season could only see her lips move, and indistinctly hear the word ‘… please.’

  Mike Bull came across, walking with unusual speed and economy. He leaned over Season and said as quietly
as he could, ‘I thought we could starve them away. But it doesn’t look like we’ve succeeded. We can’t hold them off for a whole lot longer.’

  Season gave a wobbly smile. ‘You’ve done your best,’ she told him.

  Vee said, ‘What are we going to do now? You saw what they did to Granger.’

  Mike cleared his throat, looking from Vee to Season and then to Carl. ‘You’ve got that .38 of yours, don’t you, Carl? With one shell?’

  Carl nodded, His face was lined, and as white as typing paper.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mike, ‘I suggest you use it on…’ and he inclined his head towards Sally. ‘Back of the head, she won’t even know.’

  Season felt as if it were totally impossible to breathe. The noise outside the supermarket was hideous, and yet inside her head was nothing but silence and coldness and disbelief. Back of the head, she won’t even know. Where that fine blonde hair is parted into plaits, where I’ve caressed her so often as she dreamed herself to sleep. And she won’t even see her father again.

  Mike could sense what Season was thinking. But he muttered, ‘It’s the kindest way, you know. That mob’s out of their skulls. It’s going to be rape, torture, you name it.’ Carl cleared his throat, strangely formal. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thanks for the hamburger helper, if nothing else.’

  Mike tried to smile, but he couldn’t. All he could say was, ‘Good luck, people. I mean it,’ before he went off to warn the others.

  Sally said, with as much childish dignity as she could, ‘Mommy? Mommy, I’m frightened.’

  Season reached out and touched her cheek. ‘Yes, baby,’ she said. ‘We all are.’

  *

  They had seen the fires and the crowds from ten blocks away. Ed had ordered the convoy to draw up on the wide triangular piece of rough ground by La Brea Avenue, and now they were sitting in their wagons while gunfire popped and echoed through the night, and people rushed and ran and stumbled past them on their way to Highland. The word must have gotten around that the Hughes supermarket was on the brink of collapse, and that there was going to be plenty of food to be looted.