Грэм Мастертон - Famine

‘What do you think I was going to do with it?’ shouted Gerry. ‘A gun is a gun. If you don’t use it, there’s no point in taking it along.’

‘Will you two stop it,’ said the woman, as if they were two bickering nephews.

The police helicopter spotted them sooner than they expected. Chris was just about to get out of the car and check that the tailgate was properly closed when the night was suddenly roaring with noise, and a piercing blue-white halogen lamp filled the station wagon with unearthly Close Encounters kind of light.

The helicopter circled the rooftops above them for a few minutes, and then an amplified voice commanded, ‘You people – get out of the vehicle – make sure you get out slow and careful – and lay your hands on the roof.’

Chris looked across at Gerry, who was sitting in the back seat with his shotgun across his knees. The flackering of the helicopter rotors was so loud that they didn’t even attempt to speak. They just looked at each other and the whole of their high school beginnings were in that look, the friendship that had lasted through business college, and military service, and settling down in Menomonee Falls – Chris at the University of Wisconsin, and Gerry at Michigan & Muskego Insurance. The friendship that had brought them here together tonight, in this reckless adventure that had been conceived out of fear, and bravado, and a suburban dread of going short. Some families may starve, friend, but not mine.

Chris looked at Gerry’s bloodstained shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to surrender,’ he said.

‘And abandon the food?’ asked Gerry. ‘Meekly step out, with our hands up, and abandon the food?’

‘What else can we do?’ asked Chris, as the blue-white light fogged the interior of the station wagon, and the racketing bull-horn demanded yet again that they should step out of the vehicle.

‘We can fight,’ hissed Gerry.

‘Fight? Against a helicopter? Are you nuts?’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Gerry. ‘A helicopter is the most vulnerable thing you can imagine. Didn’t they teach you that in the service? One shotgun blast in the rotor, and you’ll bring them straight down.’

‘I’m not sure I want to bring them straight down.’

‘Either you bring them straight down, or we starve, and go to prison,’ said Gerry.

There was a moment in which none of them spoke. The helicopter roared lower, circling around the station wagon, and Gerry’s face, already white from shock and loss of blood, appeared as livid as a phantom in the spotlight, with hair that flared blue as a devil’s.

The woman said, ‘We’d better get out. If we don’t get out soon, they’ll start shooting, and the last thing I want to do is die by default.’

Chris held out his hand towards Gerry. Without hesitation, Gerry hefted up the shotgun from the back seat of the station wagon, and handed it over. The woman’s name was Madeleine Berg, and she was the divorced mother of three children. She said, ‘Chris, we’ve been neighbours for a few years now. Let’s call this thing quits.’ Chris broke the shotgun open, ejecting the spent cartridges. He reloaded it, and then he said, ‘Maddy, if you want to get out now, then get out. This food’s going back to Menomonee Falls.’

Madeleine turned around and looked at Gerry. None of them knew what they really wanted to do. They were dazzled by light and deafened by noise, and the amplified voice from the helicopter was telling them to get out of their vehicle now! – you get me? – now! or face the consequences.

‘Aim to one side of the light,’ Gerry suggested. ‘That way, you’ll be certain to hit the rotors.’

Chris glanced at them both. ‘Wish me luck, then,’ he said. He unlatched the station wagon door.

He didn’t even have time to aim. He had already waited too long, and as the minutes had passed by, the police marksman on board the helicopter had been growing edgy. As soon as the car door opened, and Chris showed his face, a small blizzard of machine-gun bullets banged into the metal roof. None of them hit Chris directly, but one of them drove a shard of metal as long and thin as a ballpoint pen straight into his right eye. Chris felt his eye burst, and he dropped to the sidewalk in sheer horror at what had happened to him.

The helicopter raged around the station wagon in a circle. Then the marksman opened fire again, and raked the vehicle’s roof and hood with over a hundred racketing shots. One of the last bullets hit the gas tank, and as Gerry and Madeleine were cowering in their seats, a hungry wave of superheated air, mixed with blazing gasoline, rolled through the length of the car. Gerry’s last vision of anything was Madeleine, with her hair frizzed by fire, the skin of her face already blackened, staring at him in agony and fright. Then his own world was consumed in excruciating pain, and he breathed in fire.

The helicopter hovered around the blazing station wagon for a few minutes, and then angled away over the rooftops. This was the ninth party of looters the police had stopped tonight, and now they were searching for more.

In his smashed-open store under the elevated highway, Nicolas Prokopiou lay half-conscious and bleeding. He heard the helicopter as it passed overhead, but it was just one more blurry noise in a night of chaos. Fire sirens whooped in the distance, and there was a crackle of shooting from the direction of Marquette University.

He closed his eyes and thought of Serifos. The dense blue skies, the dark blue seas. The fishing boats with their sun-faded paint, tied up with salt-faded ropes. The days when he had stood by the harbour, his hair ruffled by the wind, and dreamed all kinds of dreams.

A few minutes before dawn, he died. He suffered very little pain, and his death was like falling asleep. It wouldn’t have comforted him to know that Dolores was already dead, with half of her head blown away in crimson spatters and her body lying exposed on the sidewalk in her pink baby-doll nightie. Nor would it have comforted him to know that Chris, the looter, had survived; and was shivering under heavy sedation in hospital, blinded and burned, while his wife and children waited apprehensively at home for the food that he was going to bring.

That same night, at the Hughes Supermarket on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, Mike Bull was organising his defences. Mike Bull was the supermarket manager, and the medium-sized twenty-four-hour store at the intersection between Franklin and Highland was his first important appoin’I’ment. Before he had been promoted, three months ago, he had been fruit and vegetable manager of a branch further downtown. N ow, at the age of thirty-one – a stocky, terse, but good-humoured bachelor with a face as pudgy as Mickey Rooney – he was running his own ship, and he was determined that night that the rats weren’t going to clamber aboard.

He hadn’t seen Ed Hardesty’s television appearance – nor the frantic and frightened news programmes that followed. But within twenty minutes, a laconic customer with long greasy blond hair and frayed denim shorts had advised him to blockade the store. ‘You should hear the TV, man. Walter Cronkite reckons we’re all going to be starving by Thanksgiving. And you know what that means, don’t you? Folks are going to start stocking up on every damn thing they can get.’

Mike had looked around the store. It was his business to sell what was in it, and if people came in and cleared his shelves, then no matter what the reason, he should be pleased. But the prospect of a food panic made him uneasy. The tough and the young would clear the place out, and leave the weak and the elderly without supplies.

He beckoned his under-manager, Tony, across to his office. Tony was Italian, young, and combed his hair a lot. Tony wanted to make it in the movies, and as far as he was concerned, retail selling was a total pain in the ass. But he liked Mike, and he didn’t like being yelled at, and so he came and stood in Mike’s office with an expression that was almost co-operative.