Грэм Мастертон - Famine

Nicolas edged his way along the shelves, keeping his back to the serried cans of tuna and eggplant, his revolver held high in both hands. As he moved around, he was able to catch sight of a blonde woman in a fawn tracksuit, standing beside his display of bottled fruits, and another young man, unshaven and dark, a Greek possibly, or an Italian, in army fatigues.

Nicolas said, ‘You lay down the stuff and you get out of here. You understand me? I’m used to dealing with bums.’

The man by the freezer cabinet said, ‘Mister – there’s no way we’re bums.’

‘You’re not bums? What are you doing looting my store, if you’re not bums? Now, get out of here.’

The woman said, ‘We’re sorry. But it’s the food crisis.’

‘Just get out,’ said Nicolas, waving the revolver towards her.

‘You don’t understand,’ the man by the freezer cabinet told him. ‘There’s hardly any food left. This is the last place, just about. How are we going to feed our kids? We’ve got kids.’

Nicolas looked from one face to the other. It wasn’t hard to see that they were as frightened as he was. These weren’t the hard, amused faces of shakedown artists, or street hoodlums. These were just ordinary people caught in a desperate and unfamiliar act. He felt sorry for them, almost. But he felt protective towards Dolores, and himself, too; and, after all, the food in this delicatessen was his, not theirs, no matter how many kids they had.

‘Go,’ he admonished them.

There was an uncomfortable pause, but then the Greek-looking man in the army fatigues reached down behind the bread rack and lifted up a shotgun. It wasn’t the kind of shotgun you saw on the streets, sawed off, with hardly any stock. It was a long-barrelled hunting gun, still shiny with oil.

Nicolas veered the revolver across the store. ‘Drop it,’ he said. ‘Put it down, or I’ll shoot you.’

The Greek-looking man said, ‘This food in here – you think that you’re going to keep it all to yourself? All of it? Just because you’re a storekeeper you think you’ve got some God-given right to survive while everybody else starves?’

Nicolas didn’t even want to think about it. He said, ‘I’m giving you three. You understand me? Three, and then I shoot.’

The Greek-looking man, still holding the shotgun, looked across at the man by the freezer. A question passed between them, unspoken but obvious. Nervously, instantly, Nicolas fired.

The first shot missed. The revolver bucked in his hands, and he heard the bang of broken glass at the back of the store, followed by a sudden rush of green olives from three broken jars. He fired again, before he could allow himself to think, and the Greek’s shoulder burst apart in a spray of gory catsup. The girl shrieked, a silly short shriek that made Nicolas frown at her as if he couldn’t believe anything so ridiculous. And then there was a deep, deafening bavvooom ! and Nicolas realised with strange slow horror that the Greek had fired back at him with his shotgun, and that he’d been hit, badly hit, in the belly and the thighs. He was shocked, off-balance, hurt. He felt as if someone had splashed blazing kerosene between his legs, as if he was burning and burning and would never stop.

In perceptual slow-motion, he looked down towards his legs, and saw that his pants were in bloody ribbons, that his thighs were as black and raw as hamburger meat, and that the remains of his penis were dangling from a thin shred of skin. He collapsed, both physically and mentally. His mind folded in on itself like a Chinese conjuring trick, and he pitched to the floor. He was aware of somebody shouting, and bright lights, and the feel of the plastic floor-tiles against his cheek, but that was all.

Dolores came down the stairs and into the store as the three looters were climbing out through the shattered window. She saw Nicolas lying doubled up against the shelves that ran the length of the middle of the store, and the blood that was sprayed all around him. She could hardly make out the looters at all, because she was half-blinded by the car lights, but the looters saw her.

She screamed, ‘Stop! Stop!’ although she didn’t want them to stop at all. One of them hesitated, holding a shotgun one-handed, its stock tucked under his arm. Dolores stared at him for a moment, at his almost invisible silhouette, and then marched formidably across the store towards him, clambering through the shattered window in her baby-doll nightie, her feet slashed by broken glass, until she was out on the sidewalk. The car meanwhile was backing off the sidewalk, bouncing on to the road, and getting ready to take off.

Dolores said to the Greek-looking man with the bloody arm and the army fatigues, ‘You’ve killed my husband.’

The man said tensely, ‘Back off. You hear me? Just back off.’

‘You’ve killed my husband,’ said Dolores, simply. It seemed important to tell the man what he had done. ‘He came from Serifos. There are blue skies there, and blue sea. Now look.’

She turned back towards the darkened store. She couldn’t see Nicolas in the shadows, but she knew he was there. ‘His name was Nicolas Andreas Prokopiou.’

A hoarse voice from the car shouted, ‘Gerry! For Christ’s sake!’ And somewhere in the air, far away, Dolores could hear the whoop of a police siren. She took two or three steps forward, and the man with the shotgun took two or three steps back.

‘Gerry!’ screeched the blonde woman’s voice from the back of the car.

There was one more second of uncertainty, and then the Greek-looking man raised his shotgun, and shot Dolores at almost point-blank range in the face. He had meant to blind her, so that she could never recognise him again, but before tonight he had only used his shotgun for hunting rabbit. He had never seen what it could do to a human being from only two feet away. It almost blew her head off, in a fountain of blood that jumped five feet in the air. She teetered around, spun and then fell.

The Greek-looking man ran to the car, threw the shotgun in through the open window, then tugged open the door and climbed in himself.

The woman said, ‘You’re out of your mind! If I’d known you were going to do something like that, I wouldn’t have come! Do you hear me? You’re crazy!’

‘Just shut up,’ snapped the man in the plaid jacket, as he pulled away from the kerb, with the car tyres shrieking like strangled chickens.

They tried to make their way towards Lisbon Avenue, so that they could escape from the centre of Milwaukee through Wauwatosa, and eventually out on Appleton Avenue to Menomonee Falls, where they had come from. But even though Sergeant Kyprianides hadn’t been around to answer Dolores’s call for help, the Milwaukee Police Department had surrounded the city in force. There were road blocks on all the major highways out of town, and as they reached the intersection of Lisbon and North, they saw police lights flashing up ahead of them, and the spotlights of police helicopters flickering from street to street like August lightning.

The man in the plaid jacket jammed on the brakes, and the station wagon slithered to a halt.

‘What do we do now?’ he demanded. ‘They’ve blocked the road.’

‘Either we leave the food and walk, or we try to break our way through,’ the Greek man told him.

‘How can we leave the food?’ asked the woman. ‘We need that food. If we don’t have food, we’re going to starve. For God’s sake, Chris, we even killed for it.’

‘Gerry killed for it,’ said the man in the plaid jacket. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want any killing.’

‘Oh, no?’ said Gerry. ‘I seem to remember it was your idea to bring the shotgun along.’

‘As a deterrent,’ said Chris angrily. ‘I didn’t mean for you to me the damned thing.’