Грэм Мастертон - Famine

In a matter of a few minutes, the supermarket was almost empty. Two or three of the customers were too dazed or too hurt to walk. One man was lying face-down in the poultry freezer, his face against the ice, and it was plain that he was dead. Mike lifted him out, and laid him down on the floor. The man flopped back with his eyes open and the side of his cheek the colour of chilled turkey.

‘You think you should say some words?’ asked Tony, stepping beside him and looking down at the body.

Mike shook his head. ‘I’m a supermarket manager, not a priest.’

‘The doors are all locked now,’ said Tony. ‘I put the shutters down, too.’

‘Thanks, Tony,’ said Mike.

Curls of black burned paper drifted across the floor in the silent draught from the supermarket’s air-conditioning. There was a sharp odour of smoke in the air.

‘Did they go far?’ asked Mike. ‘Or can we expect them back?’

‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Tony. ‘There were still quite a few of them gathered around outside when I put the shutters down. Twenty or thirty, maybe. They know the stockroom’s still untouched, so I guess they’ll be back.’

Mike laid a hand on Tony’s shoulder. ‘If you want to leave now, slip out while the going’s good, I won’t hold it against you. I’d like to send Gina and Wendy home.’

Tony shook his head. ‘What do I want to go home for? To watch all this on the TV?’

‘Okay, but we should get the girls out.’

Gina was standing at the open office door. ‘We’d rather stay,’ she said. ‘At least until it’s quiet.’

Mike said, ‘You know the crowds may come back; and they may be a damn sight more vicious than they were just now.’

Gina nodded. ‘All the same, we’ll stay, if that’s okay by you.’

Mike looked around the wreckage of his store – the collapsed shelves, the smashed freezer cabinets, the food that was strewn all over the floor and trodden into a surrealistic salad of Cheerios, baked beans, loganberry jelly, bootlaces, cat food, and plastic doilies.

He said to Tony, ‘Go to the liquor cupboard, will you, and bring me a bottle of bourbon. Make sure you charge it down to me. I think I could use a drink.’

All over the United States that night, fires were burning. From the top of the Hancock Building in Chicago, a CBS News reporter described the dark and fiery scene beneath him as ‘a preview of hell… like something by Hieronymus Bosch.’ Not many of his listeners knew who Hieronymus Bosch was, but the vision on their screens was unmistakable. Block after block of garish fires, hideous shadows, and running people.

Thousands of stores, restaurants, hotels, warehouses, and hamburger stands were broken into, all over the country. Anywhere there was food, there was violence. At a branch of McDonald’s in Darien, Connecticut, seven looters were shot dead by police as they tried to break into the restaurant’s cold store. One of the dead men was found to have tucked dozens of free McDonald’s airplanes into his windbreaker, presumably to take home for his children.

At the Iron Kettle restaurant, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the seventy-two-year-old proprietor was crushed against a brick wall as she attempted to stop looters escaping from her restaurant in a pick-up truck.

And in New York City, at Macy’s, hundreds of screaming men and women broke the windows of the delicatessen hall on 33rd Street and poured into the store, leaving amidst the shattered glass two dead women and one man with his left cheek sliced off. The crowds looted all the fresh and canned food they could tear from the shelves, and then they rampaged through the rest of the store, oblivious to the shrilling alarms and the policemen with nightsticks who patrolled the counters with orders to ‘contain, but not arrest.’

One of the managers of Macy’s who witnessed the looting said, ‘It was terrifying. It was like sale time in Hades.’ And New York’s Commissioner of Police, in a hurriedly-called television interview, explained, ‘It’s a disaster. But, it’s way beyond our power to prevent looting and theft on such a grand scale. We have neither the men nor the facilities. All we can do is try to ensure that the looting is carried out with the minimum of risk to life and property.’

During the night, Manhattan was a hideous nightmare. Ambulances and police cars whooped and screamed through the echoing streets, and there was the sporadic crackling of gunfire from Harlem and the West Side. The South Bronx, already devastated by arson, became an inferno whose glow could be seen as far away as New Rochelle. In Brooklyn, fifteen women were trapped and burned to death in a Woolworth store as they tried to escape with hair dryers, bicycles, garden furniture, and cosmetics. Their bodies were twisted up ‘like little black monkeys’ and their loot was melted in their claws. Almost all the food had been pillaged now from restaurants and stores, and people were helping themselves to whatever was left.

The Mayor of New York said on television, ‘What we’re seeing here is consumer anarchy. We’ve led people to expect certain privileges if they live here in the United States, and one of those privileges is an abundance of food. Now that privilege is threatened, and people won’t let it go lightly. They’ll tear this city apart first.’

In New York, more than anyplace else, the looting quickly took on distinctive social patterns. Up in Harlem, and down in the slums, the break-ins were usually violent, indiscriminate, and often ended in fire. Reports that reached the Police Commissioner’s desk by early Monday morning showed that most of the break-ins in poorer districts netted less than half of the available loot. The rest was smashed, abandoned, or burned. In the better-off parts of the city, however – in the east 80s and around Gramercy Square – the looting was systematic, and efficient, and effected with far less violence. Police surprised eight residents of Olympic Tower working as a co-ordinated looting team, with six station wagons, all legally rented from Hertz, and a truck. They had broken into a Safeway depot on 10th Street, breaking open the gates with bolt-cutters, and by the time a police patrol car came by, they had already loaded their vehicles with a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of foodstuffs. The officers counted two hundred cans of pâté de foie gras, at forty-five dollars a can, and a New York Post reporter remarked, ‘People aren’t taking what they think they’re going to need. They’re taking what they think they’re entitled to.’

By dawn, Detroit was burning. A heavy pall of white smoke hung over Hamtramck and Harper Woods, and they could smell destruction out at St Clair Shores. The night had been wild with helicopters and police patrols and shooting, and when the grimy sun rose over Lake St Clair, there were burned-out vans littering the Detroit Industrial Freeway and the Renaissance Centre was encircled by Michigan National Guard.

The Mayor of Detroit told the newspapers, ‘This was the worst night of my life. Black Sunday. And that isn’t any kind of a joke. This was the night the black people of Detroit let me down.’

The looting and the destruction had been so widespread that the news media hardly knew how to deal with them. From midnight, when the first horrified bulletins began to pour into CBS and NBC and ABC, each television channel had made the decision to stay on the air all night, with almost hysterical first-hand reports from San Francisco, New Orleans, Denver, Chicago, Washington, and New York.

It was easier to tell the individual stories. From Florida, Harold Kane Kaufman-Vorbrüggen of the Cordon Bleu restaurant in Dania, Broward County, hesitantly explained to newsmen how looters had broken into the kitchens and ransacked the larders and refrigerators. They had taken only the steak and the fish, and left thousands of dollars’ worth of truffles and escargots. One of the diners told the news cameras, ‘I guess we have to count ourselves lucky that looters have very little taste.’