Грэм Мастертон - Famine

‘Will you hurry up, please?’ Ed called out. ‘Senator Jones is real impatient.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ said the chauffeur, from behind the floral drapes. ‘I’m trying to remember if I left the keys in my uniform pants or my Levis. I did some work on the car earlier on, you know. The brakes were squealing like hogs. Do you know what it was? Dust, that’s what it was. This perishing Kansas dust, in the linings.’

Ed stepped back again. The lights of the Muldoons’ wagon were already halfway down the hill, flickering their way through the pines. He could hear the whine of the four-wheel drive, and the crunching of the tyres on the gravel.

He thundered on the chauffeur’s bedroom window with his clenched fist. ‘Are you going to give me those fucking keys or do I have to tear down the wall and get them myself?’

The drapes abruptly parted. Then the sash window came rattling up. The chauffeur was standing there in pink striped pyjamas, solemn and frightened, with his hair sticking up from sleeping. He was holding out the keys like a small boy who’s been caught stealing candies.

Ed snatched the keys out of the chauffeur’s hand, and ran back along the verandah. As he hurried down the brick steps, he could see the Chevy wagon only two hundred feet away, and he was caught in the glare of its lights. He threw himself into the open door of the Lincoln, stabbed the wrong key into the ignition, wrestled it out again, stabbed another key in, and then twisted the engine into screaming life.

Dazzling headlights crowded his rearview mirror. There was a shot, and the back window turned to milk. Della screamed at Shearson Jones, ‘Get down! They’ll take your head off!’

Ed tugged the gear shift into reverse, and then pressed his foot on the gas pedal. Another bullet banged into the Lincoln’s trunk, with a hollow echoing sound.

The limousine’s rear wheels slithered and shrieked on the gravel, spraying up dust and stones. Then it shot backwards, straight into the oncoming Chevy wagon, and there was a loud kabbosssh! of colliding metal. Ed felt his neck wrenched from the impact, and Shearson tumbled against the back of his seat with all the elegance of two hundred and fifty pounds of Idaho potatoes. But Ed pulled the gear shift right down to second, shoved his foot on the gas again, and the Lincoln roared forwards towards the main gates with its rear end sliding sideways and its suspension bouncing wildly.

The car collided with the wrought-iron gates, and stopped, its engine bellowing in frustration. Della was clutching the back of her seat, her eyes wide, her pump-gun ready for a last quick shoot-out with Peter Kaiser and Muldoon. Shearson was lying sideways now, and puffing in pain.

‘They’re coming again!’ shouted Della, her voice shrill.

Ed threw the Lincoln back into reverse, stepped on the gas again, and for a second time the long black car hurtled backwards into the battered Chevy wagon. For long seconds, both vehicles were locked together in a crunching, grinding tangle of bumpers and crushed lights, their tyres whinnying and their engines outraged. Then Ed changed back into drive, and the Lincoln surged forward into the gates with another resonant crash of metal.

They wouldn’t have made it through if it hadn’t been for Muldoon’s powerful wagon, right up behind them. Muldoon gave them an extra shunt as they hit the gates, and the force of both vehicles together was enough to burst open the locks. The Lincoln slewed out into the road, its trunk lid flapping up in the air, its radiator grille twisted and broken, but still roadworthy and going at full speed.

‘Now, hit it!’ screamed Della, in excitement. ‘Get your foot down and really hit it!’

‘What the hell do you think I’m doing?’ Ed demanded, juggling with the steering wheel as the Lincoln skidded sideways around a ferociously tight curve. ‘This isn’t a sports car, for Christ’s sake. This is a two-ton limousine!’

The road from Fall River Lake leads down to Fall River itself, and joins up with the east-west highway which runs through Keighley and Augusta and back into Wichita. But it’s a wiggling series of hairpins, through rocks and pines and deceptive tunnels of light and shade, and the thin strip of blacktop is patchy, uneven, and often cambered the wrong way.

Ed glanced in his mirror as they sped beside the lake. Through the frosted rear window, he could see the flash of headlights as the Chevy wagon came after them. He said to Della, breathlessly, ‘They’re right in back of us. Why don’t you try to pick them off when we take the next right-hand curve?’

Della shook her head.

‘Why not?’ yelled Ed. ‘They’re trying to kill us!’

‘Maybe they are, maybe they’re not,’ said Della. ‘They’re trying to catch us, more than anything. But I don’t like to shoot at people unless I really have to.’

Ed lost his concentration for a moment, and the Lincoln barely made it around a long left-hand curve, its tyres screaming in a falsetto harmony that went on and on, until Ed couldn’t believe that he was going to be able to hold on to the car any longer. He was plastered in sweat by the time the road took a twist in the opposite direction, and they were driving downhill through a shadowy archway of pines.

He checked the mirror again, and the lights of the Chevy Suburban were still behind him, although further away now. Nobody in their right mind would have taken a curve at that speed on purpose.

‘Listen,’ said Ed, as he piloted the Lincoln down a fast slalom of alternating bends, ‘They’re chasing us, they’re shooting at us, and you don’t think you really have to shoot back?’

‘I want Peter Kaiser alive,’ said Della. ‘He’s going to be a material witness to this fraud, and he’s more susceptible to legal pressure than Shearson Jones.’

In the back of the car, lolling from side to side as the Lincoln howled around curve after curve, Shearson Jones said, ‘So that’s who you are, my gingery angel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, incarnate. No wonder they gave me such a cock-and-bull story about you when I asked them to check you out.’

Della twisted around in her seat. With her loosely-tied emerald-green bathrobe and her upraised pump-gun, she looked like some kind of comic-strip Dragon Lady, all silk and cleavage and sawn-off rifle. As he glanced across at her, it occurred to Ed, noi for the first time that night, that she must be naked under that wrap.

‘You know something,’ he said, as he spun the Lincoln through a steep-sloping S-bend, ‘this must be the craziest night of my life.’

‘You’re wrong,’ breathed Shearson, leaning forward and resting his arms on the back of Ed’s seat. ‘Last night was the craziest night of your life. The night you announced to 250 million Americans that they were probably facing imminent starvation. That was the craziest night of your life.’

Ed said nothing. He still hadn’t mentally got to grips with what had happened last night, and right now, pushing this 7-litre Lincoln down a tortuous mountain road, he didn’t have the time to. He flicked his eyes across to the mirror again, and the Chevy’s headlights were still there, still dancing and jiggling close behind him, occasionally obscured by the flapping lid of the Lincoln’s trunk.

They flashed past a sign, and Della said, ‘Fall River, two miles. We’ve almost made it.’

Shearson said, ‘I’ll have your scalps for this. I hope you understand that. You, Hardesty; and you, my dear; and that pontificating Charles Kurnik at the FBI. Three scalps, to add to my collection.’

‘Shut up, senator,’ said Ed, and at the same moment one of the Lincoln’s front tyres burst. There was a loud, flabby report, followed by the slap-slap-slap of tom rubber on the road, and then the huge limousine was swerving and sliding from side to side, with Ed spinning the steering-wheel in a desperate struggle to keep the car out of the trees.