They drove into Los Angeles at dusk on Monday night. They had been held up for more than half a day in the Mojave Desert by burst coolant hoses, clogged exhausts, and flats. Then there had been the treacherous business of driving in convoy through the small towns east of the Los Angeles conurbation – towns where small raiding parties still roamed the streets, shooting at any thing that looked like food.
Pasadena had been a ghost town, a white mirage that shimmered under the sandy peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. They had stopped on the freeway overlooking the town for a twenty-minute rest, and a scrappy meal of processed meat, canned raspberries, and tepid water. They had seen nobody in the streets anywhere, and heard nothing but the persistent whistling of the warm wind. It was as if the whole population of America had eerily vanished.
As the sun glowered at them from up ahead, as crimson and sorcerous as a witch’s fire, they drove slowly westwards along the Ventura Freeway, weaving their way in between wrecked and abandoned cars, until they reached the intersection with the Hollywood Freeway. Ed had ordered that every car in the convoy should have at least one gun at the ready, but the freeways were deserted, and they saw nobody.
‘The first thing I want to do is check with the FBI office,’ said Della.
‘Where’s that?’ asked Ed.
‘On Hollywood Boulevard, between Ivar and Vine.’
The sun had gone by the time they reached Hollywood Boulevard turnoff. As they came up the ramp to street level, they saw the heavy palls of smoke hanging over Los Angeles, and they could smell burning and death on the wind. A police car sped past them along Hollywood Boulevard, heading east, with its lights Hashing and its siren warbling.
‘Just about the first sign of life since Victorville,’ remarked Della.
The convoy drove at ten mph along Hollywood boulevard, between the stores and the movie theatres and the parking lots, until Ed pulled the Chevy wagon in at the curb by Hollywood and Vine.
‘It’s here?’ he asked Della.
In the back seat, Shearson Jones was asleep, and snoring heavily, with his nose in the air like a Walt Disney beaver.
‘A little further, I guess,’ said Della. ‘There – where that office entrance is. Let me take a look at the shingles.’
Ed nudged the wagon forward, and leaned over to see the signs outside of the office building. It wasn’t much of an office building – a three-story, beige-tiled walk-up in that particular architectural style which you could only define as ‘Hollywood Boulevard east of Cahuenga.’ A little bit Spanish, a little bit 1930s, a little bit H.G. Wells.
The signs outside read: Super AA1 Detective Agency, Inc.; Walston Retreat Tyres; BK Investments Ltd.; and YSS (Photographic) Inc.
‘That’s it,’ said Della.
‘What’s what?’ asked Ed. ‘I don’t see any sign saying “FBI”.’
‘You think we advertise ourselves? This is supposed to be a safe house – somewhere where agents can conceal themselves.’
She opened the door of the wagon and stepped down. ‘I won’t be more than a couple of minutes,’ she said, ‘I’m just going to check if there’s anybody still there.’
Although it was still quite light, Ed found it difficult to make out her face in the shadows. Maybe it was the way her hair was falling. Maybe it was simply the fact that there were no streetlights, no fluorescent display tubes in the derelict storefronts; not even a blazing vehicle to see by. Yet the names on the wall were clear enough.
Ed said, ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Della told him. ‘And it’s really better if you don’t. They’re going to be pretty jumpy, and they might decide to shoot first and talk about the weather afterwards if they don’t know who you are.’
‘In that case, you go in first, and tell them that I’m bona fide. But I’d like to stay with you, all right?’
‘Who’s going to take care of Shearson?’
‘Shearson can take care of himself. What do you think he’s going to do – drive all the way back to Washington?’ Della hesitated, and then she said, ‘All right. I’ll call you when it’s clear.’
Taking the pump-gun with her, she disappeared into the entrance of the office building. Ed waited on the sidewalk for what seemed like a half-hour, watched by a tired and pale-faced Karen, and by an indifferent Peter Kaiser. Shearson was still sleeping, and his rumbles sounded like minor eruptions of Mount St Helens.
In the distance, towards Beverly Hills, Ed could hear firetrucks howling, and a quick rattling sound that was repeated again and again. It could have been machine-gun fire.
At last, an upstairs window opened, and Della leaned out. ‘There’s nobody here,’ she said. ‘You can come on up if you like.’
Ed walked back to the next car in the patient line of vehicles which were drawn up to the curb behind the Chevy. It was a tan Malibu wagon, driven by Jim Rutgers, Ed’s farm accountant.
Jim asked, ‘Are we going to be stopped here long, Ed? I think everybody’s anxious about where they’re going to spend the night.’
‘Give us fifteen minutes,’ said Ed. ‘Mrs McIntosh has to try to make contact with the FBI, just to tell them that we’ve reached Los Angeles, and that we’re holding Shearson Jones. After that, it’s their problem. But they won’t be able to say that we didn’t do our duty as publicly-spirited citizens.’
Jim turned around to his wife, and the four children sleeping in the back seat. ‘I just wish the public were as publicly-spirited as we are,’ he said. ‘I think about these kids, and what their future’s going to be, and I can tell you something, Ed, it makes me frightened.’
‘Me too, Jim,’ said Ed, as comfortingly as he could. ‘Just give me five minutes, and then we’ll find a place to stay for the night.’
He walked back to the office building and climbed the stairs. It was so dark inside that he had to feel his way up by the handrail. There was a smell of burned paper and urine. He reached the second-storey landing, and he was just about to climb up to the third when Della appeared from a doorway beside him.
‘They’re in here,’ she said. ‘Or, at least, they were in here.’
Ed stepped into a small reception area, divided off with reeded glass. On the wall was a calendar supplied by Mitsubishi Aircraft, with a picture of the Diamond I executive jet flying over San Francisco Bay. There was a grey filing-cabinet, with all its drawers open and empty, and an IBM typewriter with its keys jammed together, and a blank piece of note-paper still protruding from the carriage.
‘They didn’t even leave a telephone,’ said Della. ‘But I’m going to write a message and pin it to the wall. Maybe one of their agents will come by and contact us.’
‘And meanwhile we have to keep Shearson Jones captive?’
‘What else do you suggest we do with him?’
Ed looked around the deserted, shadowy office. ‘I suggest we let him go. Both him and Peter Kaiser. There’s no chance at all that we can bring either of them to trial. Not now. And, really, what does it. matter any more?’
‘You were the one who thought it was so important to expose Shearson on coast-to-coast television,’ said Della. ‘Now you want to let him go?’
Ed sat down at the receptionist’s desk, and tugged the piece of notepaper out of the typewriter. He read the letterhead carefully, and then laid the paper on the desk beside him. When he spoke, his voice was quite changed – distant and unfriendly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want to let him go because none of this famine crisis has turned out to be what it seemed to be.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
‘I know. But neither is anything else. If this is a safe house for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as you claim it is, then why were they using notepaper for Your Spread From The Sky, Inc.?’
Della frowned. ‘That was their cover. An aerial photography outfit. That’s all. You don’t expect them to put “J. Edgar Hoover” on their paper do you?’
Ed said, ‘Your Spread From The Sky, Inc., was responsible for spraying my crops with Vorar-D. As well as most of the other wheat farms in Kansas. And you want me to believe that it was a cover name for the FBI? And that you’re a legitimate FBI agent?’
He stood up. ‘Did you really call the FBI office when you were outside of Wichita? Or were you just making it all up? Come on, Della, I think it’s time you came clean with me, don’t you? Why are you really holding on to Shearson Jones? You don’t have any serious hopes of arraigning him. Maybe you never intended to. So why have you brought him all this way, and guarded him so well? What’s your connection with Your Spread From The Sky, Inc.? What the hell’s going on?’
Della smiled at him, and put her head on one side, in a winning Shirley Temple kind of a gesture. ‘Ed,’ she said, ‘you don’t seriously doubt what I’ve told you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ed snapped angrily. He found that he was quivering, from exhaustion and shock, and from a sudden vertiginous sensation that the floor had disappeared from under him, ‘I just want you to tell me what all this is all about.’
‘How much do you actually know about Your Spread From The Sky?’ asked Della.
‘I know what Jack Marowitz found out. That they were flying over almost every farm in Kansas, just before the Vorar-D virus broke out And that’s too much of a goddamned coincidence to be true.’
Della carefully laid the pump-gun down across the desk. Ed didn’t miss the significance of the gesture, but he didn’t take his eyes off Della’s face, and he didn’t change his intense, unhappy expression.
‘Well,’ said Della, softly, ‘you’re right. They did overfly those farms. But the reason they did it wasn’t to spray any poison virus on them. The reason was that they had a tipoff about the blight, and they were reconnoitring the farms in the least sensational way they knew how, to see if they could detect who was doing it, and how.’
There was a long, taut silence. Then Ed said, ‘You expect me to believe that? You’re trying to tell me the FBI knew about the blight in advance, and they didn’t warn anybody? Not the Department of Agriculture? Not the President? Not even Shearson Jones?’
‘Until the blight actually broke out, Ed, they weren’t sure it was going to happen at all.’
Ed stood up, and walked across to the office window. He parted the lopsided Venetian blinds and looked down into Hollywood Boulevard. He couldn’t see the convoy of cars and wagons, but he could see Sam Gasiewicz on the other side of the street keeping guard, his rifle over his shoulder.
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. ‘Don’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.
‘Do you think we’re too late?’ asked Karen, from the back. ‘My God, just look at them. They’re like crazy people.’
‘They’re hungry, that’s why,’ said Peter. ‘Hunger always makes people crazy. Whether it’s for food, or sex, or money.’
‘My wife and daughter are in there,’ said Ed, flatly.
‘We know,’ replied Shearson. ‘And don’t think for a moment that we’re going to leave them to the distinctly untender mercies of this mob. We’re going to think of something. Do something. Your wife and daughter must be saved.’
‘As well as a year’s supply of food,’ put in Della, sharply.
‘What’s wrong with wanting to rescue the food?’ Shearson protested, angrily. ‘Don’t you understand, you stupid woman? Didn’t you hear what that hobo character said? A year’s supply of canned food could buy you anything you could conceivably dream of. That’s edible gold in there. In fact, it’s better than gold. It’s even better than heroin. Only a limited number of addicts crave for heroin. But everybody craves for food. Give them what they want, and in a few hours, they’re begging you for more. Don’t you understand what power that food in that supermarket could give us?’
‘Christ, you make me heave,’ said Ed. ‘Della – there’s little enough law and order in this country as it is – why don’t you elect yourself judge and executioner and blow the senator’s fat head off?’
A running looter collided blindly with their wagon, but carried on his way, waving a long kitchen knife.
‘I couldn’t execute the senator,’ smiled Della. ‘The senator is running absolutely true to character, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine.’
‘Fine? What do you mean, fine? Didn’t you hear him?’
‘I heard him. And that’s why I’ve been protecting him so carefully all the way from Kansas, both from you and everything else. Senator Jones has even shared half of my food ration, haven’t you, senator?’
Ed stared at her. ‘You gave him half your food? But what the hell for?’
‘Because, my darling, it’s my mission to keep Senator Shearson Jones in one piece. Alive, well, and avaricious. That’s why I agreed to come west with you, instead of taking him to Washington, because you were quite right about the dangers of travelling east. Too many looters, too many marauding mobs. And my superiors would have been very irritated if I’d lost him. Or his clever young assistant.’
‘Will you explain this to me, in words that I can understand?’ asked Ed. He knew now that it was urgent for him to find out what was going on; although he couldn’t help himself from glancing anxiously down Franklin Avenue towards the lurid gasoline fires that now lit up the outline of the Hughes Supermarket ‘It’s very simple,’ said Della. She raised the muzzle of her rifle slightly. Not more than a half-inch, but enough for Ed to notice.
‘If it’s simple, then we should be able to follow it,’ put in Shearson. ‘I’d love to know why you consider my overweight carcass to be so extraordinarily valuable.’
‘Years ago,’ said Della slowly, as if she were speaking from a remembered script, ‘years ago – when this famine was being planned – it was decided by my superiors that as soon as the President had surrendered, a new President would immediately have to be installed in his place. But, he couldn’t be a Russian. To have a Russian President, all of a sudden, would be too much of a shock for the American people, and they would react violently. You are a violent people, as the frequent riots in your cities have shown us. Apart from that, a Russian President would find the nation too difficult to handle with any degree of success. Yours is a complex, unstable, hedonistic society. Very hard for a Russian to understand.’
She paused. Shearson had cupped his hand to his ear as if he were hard of hearing. Peter Kaiser’s face was stiff as a meringue.
‘We went to considerable trouble to pick as our future Gauleiter of America an established politician who would be able to carry off the burden of Presidential duties without feeling overwhelmed by them; a man whose face was already familiar to the American public; a reassuring, fatherly figure. And yet a man whose personal morals were so flawed that he would easily be encouraged by the gift of instant Presidency and great financial wealth to assist us in taking over the administration of your country as painlessly and as quickly as possible.’
Shearson Jones’ lips were opening and closing wordlessly.
Della turned to him, and smiled, and said, ‘Of course. Senator Jones, our first choice for Gauleiter was you. And that is why I consider your overweight carcass so valuable, and that is why I have been cossetting you and protecting you all the way from Kansas to the Pacific ocean.’
‘So,’ breathed Ed, ‘we were right about Your Spread From The Sky. And I was right about you. You’re not FBI. You’re a Soviet agent.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Della nodded.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ puffed Shearson, scathingly. ‘You’re a Red, my dear. An economy-size Mata Hari. There’s no “manner of speaking” about it.’
‘But what about the Blight Crisis Appeal?’ asked Ed. ‘If you wanted Shearson for a puppet President, why did you bother to steal all those incriminating papers?’
‘Because they’re incriminating,’ smiled Della. ‘We like to keep our friends in line; and if Shearson ever misbehaved himself, we could quite easily oust him from power and imprison him on the evidence of his past swindles. How could the rest of the world complain about that? The man’s an obvious, proven criminal. Apart from that, we needed to confiscate his personal millions, so that he would no longer have the means to escape us, nor to bribe anybody to help him.’
‘And why are you telling us this confidential and privileged information?’ asked Peter Kaiser. ‘Shouldn’t you have waited until Russian troops were actually wetting their boots on Malibu Beach?’
‘I’m telling you because there’s no other way I could have explained that there’s been a change of plan. We’re not going to attempt to rescue Ed’s wife and daughter; and we’re not going to attempt to lay our hands on that stock of food. Look at it – there’s a full-scale riot going on down there. All the people in that supermarket will be dead in an hour, and all the food will be looted. It’s not worth the risk.’
‘Risk?’ asked Peter Kaiser. ‘What risk?’
‘The risk of losing the next President of the latest addition to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That’s what risk.’
Ed gripped the steering-wheel with sweaty hands. He could try to wrench the pump-gun out of Della’s hands, but he knew that it was hopeless. She would have blown his face off before he had even turned around. He stared at the leaping dames at the intersection of Highland and Franklin, and his eyes watered with hopelessness, with tiredness, and with glare.
Shearson said, ‘I’m a man of some influence, you know, my dear Della. A figure of respect. I’m quite sure I could go some way towards quelling that mob of lunatics.’
‘They’d rip you apart,’ said Della. ‘They’re no better than wild animals.’
‘Well, if you say so,’ shrugged Shearson, drawing Ed’s Colt .45 out of his voluminous coat and pointing it at the back of Della’s head.
Ed stared at Della in total horror. She caught the look on his face, frowned, and said, ‘Ed, what’s the—’
Shearson fired, and Della’s face seemed to expand in front of Ed’s eyes like an over-inflated carnival balloon. Then there was blood and glass everywhere, and Della jerked forward in her seat. Ed’s ears rang with the noise of the shot.
‘Well,’ said Shearson, handing the .45 to Ed. ‘Severe times merit severe measures. I may be morally flawed, but I’m still a patriot. You’re next to her, Mr Hardesty. Do you mind kicking her out of the door?’
Ed opened the driver’s door, climbed down, and walked around the hood. He opened the passenger door, and lifted Della carefully down to the sidewalk.
Shearson said, ‘It’s more than she deserved,’ as Ed climbed up behind the steering-wheel again.
Ed said, ‘I made love to her once, that’s all. Now, what are we going to do?’
‘Well, we’re going to have to be quick, and we’re going to have to be bold,’ said Shearson, leaning forward in his seat ‘We’re pretty reasonably armed, compared with most of that mob. Shotguns against clubs. So my suggestion is that we form up these wagons of ours into some kind of a flying wedge – drive straight through to the supermarket doors – and keep the looters at bay while we let the people inside get out and while we organise any able-bodied men to load up whatever food they can.’
Peter Kaiser ran his hand through his hair. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, senator, that seems incredibly risky. There have to be seven or eight hundred people there. Maybe more.’
‘I know it’s risky,’ said Shearson, with exaggerated patience. ‘But consider the alternatives. Either we spend the next six months scrabbling for food like the rest of these poor wretches, or we load ourselves up with enough sustenance to keep ourselves independent and self-sufficient. And solvent, apart from anything else. Remember you can buy yourself a woman with a can of meat.’
Ed said, ‘I’ll have to go ask the rest of them. And the women and children will have to stay behind here someplace.’
Shearson twisted himself around in his seat. ‘There’s a hotel back there. That looks likely. Less chance of disturbing any irate and gun-happy householders. Now, I’d get moving if I were you. The way that supermarket’s burning, it doesn’t look like we’ve got ourselves a whole lot of time.’
It took Ed five minutes to persuade two out of the remaining three farmworkers in his convoy to join in a rescue attempt. One of them – Roy Guraing – had always had a soft spot for Season, and so he was pleased to volunteer. Nat Petersen was a little more reluctant, but he was single, and physically strong, and a good shot with a scatter-gun, and eventually Ed managed to talk him around. Jerry Stone wouldn’t go for anything. He had his wife and children with him, and in any case he thought Ed was crazy.
‘I’d rather throw myself into a volcano,’ he remarked. Ed shook his hand, said okay, and left him to look after the remaining two farm women, his wife, and his four children.
Ed went back to the Chevy, started her up, slammed the door, and said, ‘Ready? Peter – you cover the right side with the pump-gun. Senator – since you’re so handy with a .45 – you cover the left. Karen – keep your head down.’
He pulled the wagon out on to Franklin Avenue. Behind him, Roy Gurning drove on his left three-quarter flank in his Pinto wagon, and Nat Petersen drove on his right three-quarter flank in a Cutlass. Between them, the three cars formed a spearhead which took up the width of the whole road.
‘I just hope we know what the hell we’re doing,’ said Ed. He was sweating all over, and he couldn’t stop.
‘All right,’ growled Shearson, ‘Let’s go.’
Ed waved to Roy and Nat, and then slammed his foot down on the gas. With a throaty bellow, the Chevy surged forward, right into the running crowds, with the Pinto and the Cutlass hugging close behind.
Ed felt the wagon’s bumper hit two – three – four people. Their bodies made firm thumping noises, like huge insects hitting the windshield in summer. Someone screamed, and two men tried to run along beside him and claw the driver’s door open, but he was driving too fast, and Roy was coming up so close behind them that they had to dodge out of the way.
Then, it was hell. They reached the intersection of Highland and Franklin and they were in the thick of it Sticks and stones drummed against the sides of the wagon, and there were screeches of agony and fright as he forced the hood of the four-wheel-drive vehicle right into the surging mob of people around the supermarket.
He heard Peter Kaiser shoot the pump-gun four or five times. He heard windows at the back of the wagon breaking. There was a chaotic howling ocean of distorted people around him, and yet he was still driving the wagon forward – slower now, because of the dense press of bodies – but still relentlessly forward over crushed arms and legs and bursting skulls. The banging of clubs and sticks against the vehicle’s bodywork was utterly deafening, and he knew that his face was pulled into a ridiculous expression of fear and concentration, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The last few feet were the worst. As the wagon pushed its bumpers right up to the supermarket’s doors, ten or twelve looters were caught in front of it, and shoved bodily through the wire-reinforced glass, like ribbons of raw meat through a grater. Then, with a last burst of low-gear power, Ed brought down the whole row of doors, and collided with the liquor counter.
They had miscalculated, badly. The mob was wild and unstoppable and far more numerous than they had realised. Peter fired three more shots and his pump-gun was empty, Roy Gurning’s Pinto had been swallowed up by the crowd, and Ed glimpsed its offside wheels as it was turned over, with Roy still inside it. Nat Petersen’s car had disappeared altogether, Shearson screamed, ‘It won’t work! It won’t work! Just back, up and get the hell out of here!’
But Ed, looking around the wrecked supermarket, had momentarily caught sight of Sally in the far corner, and nothing was going to get him out of that store without them. He forced open the Chevy’s door, pushing over two struggling looters, and elbowed and shoved his way between the shelves to where he thought he had seen them. Behind him the mob had begun to surge through the broken-open doors, and scrambled towards the stock-room. It was going to be looting first, revenge second.
For three insane minutes, Ed remembered everything his college football coach had taught him, and he pushed and shoved and bulldozed his way through the screaming scrum of people towards the shelves at the far back of the supermarket. Then, in an instant that was too fearful to be anything but blurred, unmemorable, and confused, he had scooped Sally up in his arms, and pushed Season ahead of him, and they were fighting their way back to the wagon.
‘Vee!’ screamed Season. ‘I can’t see Vee!’
‘Get out of here!’ bellowed Ed. ‘Just get to the wagon, and let’s get out of here!’
He was thrown back against a shelf, with an agonising jar against his back; but he managed to thrust his way on to his feet again, with Sally still awkwardly clutched in his arms, and struggled on. Somehow, bruised and sweating and grazed, his adrenalin at bursting point, he reached the wagon and threw Sally in through the door on to Shearson’s lap. Then he pulled Season up behind him, shoved her across beside Peter Kaiser, and started up the engine.
Slowly, grindingly, the Chevy backed up into the mob. Now that the supermarket stockroom had been broken into, few of the looters took any notice of the wagon at all, but pushed their way around it. It was food they were after, and the maelstrom of fighting and bodies in the supermarket was too confusing for most of them to understand what was happening.
They were almost out on to the roadway again when their rear bumper caught up with Roy Gurning’s overturned Pinto. Ed rocked the wagon backwards and forwards, but it still refused to budge. He pressed his foot harder on the gas and prayed to God for the Pinto to move.
Slowly, it did, with a grating screech of metal on concrete. But now the wagon had begun to attract the attention of some of the late-coming looters – the ones who knew they were going to be lucky to pick up a few battered cans of corn. Twenty or thirty of them started tearing at the doors and banging their fists on the windows, and Ed looked out in fright at a world that seemed to be nothing but grotesque, staring faces.
Abruptly, Shearson Jones’s passenger-door was tugged open. Shearson shrieked like a girl, and Peter Kaiser tried to reach across and grab him, but five or six pairs of hands pulled Shearson’s coat and pants, and heaved him bodily out of the wagon.
‘I’m a United States senator!’ screamed Shearson. ‘I’m a United States senator!’
Then he was swallowed up by the mob; and it took all of Peter’s strength to slam the door closed again, and hold it shut against the scratching hands of frantic looters.
Ed, sobbing with fear and exhaustion, jammed his foot down on the gas pedal once more. Slowly, slowly, the wrecked Pinto began to slide out of the way. Then, it toppled, and the Chevy was clear. They surged backwards into the crowds, and drove backwards with their transmission whining in protest all the way to La Brea Avenue, almost a quarter-mile.
Ed stopped the wagon when they reached La Brea, and turned forwards in his seat to look at the supermarket. It was blazing from sidewalk to roof now, with huge tongues of fire licking at the night with a lasciviousness that could only remind him of greed, and pain, and hatred.
He stared at Season. She was wide-eyed, shocked, scarcely able to speak. Sally, in the back seat, was whimpering and shivering.
Then Ed held his hand over his mouth to try and stop the tears. But he couldn’t; they ran freely down his cheeks; and they sparkled in the dickering glare of the burning supermarket as if his eyes were on fire, too.
*
The next morning, when the burned-out shell of the supermarket was abandoned, they went back. Season walked amongst the bodies which lay between the empty shelves while Ed stood silently by the smashed and blood-smeared doors.
‘Vee’s not here,’ she said at last. ‘Nor Carl. I can’t see Mike Bull, either. They must have escaped. I knew this girl, though. Clara, her name was.’
From outside, Ed heard Peter calling, ‘Ed – come here. In the parking lot. And come on your own. Don’t bring Sally.’
Ed walked around the side of the building to the parking-lot. It was strewn with twisted shopping-carts and burned-out automobiles. But Peter was standing in the far corner, where it seemed as if another, smaller, fire had been burning; and where there was an elaborate arrangement of shopping-carts which seemed to have been linked together to form a kind of barbecue.
When he was fifteen feet away, Ed realised what it was, and what had happened. Beside it, in a congealing heap, lay the naked remains of Senator Shearson Jones. Inside it, still half-cooked, were strips of flesh that had been cut from his thighs, his arms, and his belly.
Ed stayed where he was, and didn’t approach any closer. Peter Kaiser looked at him, unblinking, unmoving, as if he was a statue of a time that neither of them could remember.
*
They drove northwards, through Santa Barbara, on a day that was hot and clear. They spoke very little, and Sally, in the back seat, slept.
Peter and Karen had found Nat Petersen’s car, undamaged, but with no sign of Nat Petersen. After a half-hour talk together, they had elected to head together for Mexico, along with Jerry Stone and his wife. Ed had taken the Chevy, and his new-found family, and decided to try to find a new life for them in Washington or Oregon, out in the backwoods maybe, or in some secluded valley.
Season said, as they passed through El Encanto Heights, ‘I guess I should never have left you, really. I guess it was foolish of me.’
Ed smiled at her, not forgivingly, because she didn’t need forgiving, not for anything; but with that kind of love that sometimes feels like sorrow, because it’s so close, and yet it’s never quite close enough.
They pulled off the road a little further on, at Gaviota, overlooking the ocean; and they opened up a can of Mexicorn. The wind blew warm and fresh, and for the first time in days Ed began to relax. He felt impossibly tired.
They were almost ready to move on when they heard a low, vibrant, thrumming noise. It grew deeper, and louder, and closer, and within a few minutes they saw a formation of four-engined airplanes, turbo-prop bombers, approaching from the sea.
Thunderously, the bombers passed low overhead, and they shielded their eyes against the sun to watch them. Ed tried to count them, but there must have been more than fifty or sixty. All of them were camouflaged in khaki and blue; all of them left behind them long white vapour trails which scored the western sky long after they had headed eastwards over the Sierra Madre. All of them bore the red star of the Soviet Air force.
Ed looked down at the glittering ocean, at the spray on the California shore. Then he turned to Season and said quietly, ‘Well, we’d better get moving. We’ve got a life to lead.’