Грэм Мастертон - Famine

Ed had thought about that, in one of those vivid, jumbled, instant flashes of processed information. Then, without hesitation, he had lifted the pump-gun and fired.

The shot had blown the stuffing out of the cushions in the chair which Calvin Muldoon had been using for cover. The room had suddenly been filled with smoke, and echoes, and hundreds of floating duck feathers. Calvin Muldoon had been hit in the neck, and he had suddenly appeared with his hand held around his throat, kneeling bolt upright, his face as horrified as one of Shearson’s Kwakiutl masks. Thick red blood had been jetting out from between his fingers across the floor, spurt after spurt after spurt. His brother had shouted, ‘Calvin! Calvin, my God! Calvin!’

Next, they were out of the door, out into the night, and running. Della was way ahead, crossing the wide front drive to the travelled stand where the cars were parked. Ed trailed fifty or sixty feet behind, trying to drag Shearson along by the sleeve of his nightshirt.

‘I can’t run! I can’t run!’ wheezed Shearson.

‘I don’t give a damn!’ Ed shouted at him. ‘Run, or I’ll blow you to big fat pieces!’

There were three cars parked by a windbreak of red pines – Ed’s own Caprice Classic station wagon, in which he had driven up to Lake Vista with Della; a Chevy Suburban wagon which the Muldoons used to drive around the grounds; and Shearson’s rented Lincoln Continental. The chauffeur, a quiet and serious man with a permanent frown, had been put up in the guest cottage close to the main gates.

‘Keys!’ said Della, as Shearson and Ed caught up with her. ‘Did you remember your car keys?’

‘I didn’t even know I was going to have to drive tonight,’ said Ed.

Shearson gasped, ‘No more running. Please. I beg you. No more running.’

Della opened the Suburban’s left-hand door, and felt around for keys. ‘No damned keys,’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t they be careless for once?’

Ed, one-handed, the pump-gun still waving at Shearson Jones, opened up the Lincoln. It smelled of leather and car-freshener. ‘No keys here, either.’

Della looked back towards the house. Peter Kaiser appeared briefly in the open front doorway, and then disappeared again. All around them the night was windy and strewn with stars. They could hear Muldoon shouting, and Peter calling, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll choke him, for Christ’s sake!’

Della bit her lip. ‘They’ll be after us in a minute. You wait until Peter Kaiser finds those papers are missing. Listen – get in the car.’

‘What’s the point? We can’t get it started.’

‘Just get in the car. It’s downhill all the way to the guest house. If you can give it enough of a push to start with, we can coast to the gates, and then get hold of the keys from the chauffeur.’

Muldoon appeared in the doorway of the house now, and unexpectedly fired a shot. Ed saw the flash of the .45’s muzzle, and heard the bullet drone away into the pines.

Shearson said, ‘You’d better make up your tiny minds, because they’re quite liable to shoot us all.’

Ed tugged open the back door of the Lincoln. ‘Get in,’ he ordered Shearson. Shearson beamed smugly, and wedged himself inside with a great show of puffing and blowing.

‘I hope you realise this is all futile,’ he said, as Ed slammed the door on him.

Della opened the passenger door. ‘Give me the gun,’ she told Ed. ‘I’ll try to give you some cover while you get us started.’

Ed looked at her for one questioning second, and then tossed the pump-gun across the roof of the car. Della caught it in one hand, without effort, as if she’d been trained in gun-handling all her life. Even Ed couldn’t have caught it like that.

Releasing the Lincoln’s parking brake, Ed gripped the steering wheel in one hand and the door frame in the other, and started to push. At first, the car wouldn’t move at all. He grunted, and pushed again, and it swayed forward about a half-inch. Behind him, Shearson Jones said, with mock concern, ‘You don’t want me to get out again, do you? Would that be of any help?’

Ed gasped, ‘You stay – where you – are. I need – the ballast—’

There was another loud shot from the house, and a bullet pinged off the Lincoln’s rear bumper. Ed shouted to Della, ‘They’re trying to hit the tyres!’

‘That’s another fallacy,’ said Della. ‘You can’t burst a tyre with a bullet. They’re aiming for the gas tank, more likely.’

‘Whatever,’ panted Ed, and heaved at the Lincoln again. Gradually, with a slow gravelly crunching sound, the limousine began to creep forward. At first it wasn’t rolling at any speed at all, and Ed was worried that it would come to a stop as soon as it came to a gentle rise in the driveway. But he kept on heaving at it, and it picked up more and more momentum, until Della had to run along beside it.

There was a crackling fusillade of pistol-shots from the house. One of them ricocheted off the Lincoln’s trunk, with a noise like a complaining seagull. Another struck the gravel close to Ed’s feet.

‘Peter Kaiser’s shooting as well,’ said Della. She stepped up on to the sill of the Lincoln’s open passenger door, rested the pump-gun across the roof, sighted it, and fired one loud booming shot towards the doorway of the house. Shearson, inside the car, grimaced and said, ‘Jesus.’

‘All right,’ said Ed, ‘let’s get the hell out of here.’

The large black Continental bounced silently along the sloping driveway. It was eerie, travelling without an engine. There was no sound but the crunching of the tyres on the ground, the squeaking of the suspension, and Shearson’s thick panting in the back seat.

‘There’s the guest cottage,’ said Della, pointing to a small white-washed house set back amongst the silhouette of the trees. It was almost three o’clock in the morning now, and the sky had faded a little, to a pale shade of oyster, but the ground was still thick with the shadows of the night.

Ed steered the Lincoln around the curve which took the driveway to the main gates. Then he applied the brake, and opened his door.

‘Give me two minutes,’ he said. ‘If Shearson tries anything, shoot him. Anywhere you like.’

‘I hope you realise that the gates are locked, and that you don’t have a key to them, either,’ smiled Shearson, fatly.

Ed said nothing, but walked briskly across the driveway to the brick steps which led up to the guest cottage. He skirted around the shadowy wooden verandah, his feet echoing on the boards, until he came to a window with floral drapes pulled across it. He listened, and he thought he could hear the chaffeur snoring inside. He banged loudly on the window with the flat of his hand.

The bedside light went on straight away, with almost comical speed. A voice said, ‘Who’s that? What’s happening?’

‘Everything’s okay,’ said Ed. ‘I just need the keys to the car. Someone locked it by mistake, and Senator Jones has left some important documents in it.’

A long silence. Then the chauffeur said, ‘Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Sure it’s three o’clock in the morning. But the President’s called on Senator Jones for some urgent information, and we have to have those keys. Come on, pal, just pass them out, and then you can go back to sleep.’

Ed heard a cot creaking, and a loud sniff. ‘I’m not supposed to hand them over to anybody, you know.’

‘Senator Jones isn’t just anybody, and neither is the President. So will you give me the keys?’

Up at the house, Ed heard the whistling roar of the Chevy Surburban’s engine starting up. He stepped back from the cottage window, and peered up the hill. He could make out the wagon’s lights as Peter and Muldoon circled around the front of the house in pursuit.