Грэм Мастертон - Famine

Granger reached into his basket and took out one of the packets of Kellogg’s crispbread, offering it to the man in the orange shirt. The gesture was so affectionate, and had such generous innocence, that Season had to close her eyes. However messed up Granger might have been – however eccentric and Californian his church – he was now offering food to the hungry in the sincere belief that God would help him to satisfy them.

The man in the orange shirt, unbelievably, actually took the crispbread and stared down at it as if he couldn’t quite understand what it was. But then he hurled it away from him, and turned on Granger with a screech of frustrated rage that Season could hear clearly, even inside the barricaded market. The man grabbed hold of Granger’s kaftan and ripped the back of it, exposing Granger’s naked back, and his blue shorts.

The crowd surged across the road as if they were runners in a marathon. The noise they made was hair-raising – a peculiar kind of ululating warble, as primitive and frightening as Zulus, or Apaches. They gathered around Granger in a furious, tearing mob, and for a moment he disappeared completely.

Tony, grey-faced, said, ‘They’re killing him. Right in front of our eyes. They’re killing him , Mike! ’

Season couldn’t say anything. None of them had really expected Granger to go out there and pacify five hundred starving people, but for a few heady minutes they had all wondered, just wondered, if miracles could happen for real. Season held Sally close, and when Sally asked her, ‘What’s happening. Mommy? Where’s Mr Hughes gone?’ Season tried to soothe her and stroke her, and say, ‘No place, honey. Maybe to heaven.’

But Granger wasn’t in heaven yet. Granger was still in hell. There was a sudden struggling in the crowd, a sudden desperate fighting and wrenching and screaming. And it was then that something came pushing and tearing its way through the howling crowds of people, arid collided with the windows of the supermarket with such force that they rattled and reverberated. Something that smeared red all over the glass with the feverish abandon of an action painter, trying to finish a masterpiece against the clock.

Season looked. Just once. And then she couldn’t open her eyes again, not for whole eons of agonised time.

They had already torn off Granger’s scalp, and most of his beard. One of his arms had been twisted around and around, right out of its socket, and there was nothing but blood and gristle where his left shoulder should have been. His scrotum had been wrenched from between his legs, and his thighs were plastered in gore. And as he shrieked and flapped his one broken arm against the supermarket window, his horrified followers saw seven or eight hands pull back his head and claw at his eyes, digging them out of their sockets in a welter of optic fluid and blood.

Then, mercifully, they dragged him out of sight. But none of the people in the supermarket knew how long they took to kill him, or what he suffered in those last minutes of his life.

Mike Bull came across to Season and touched her arm. She jumped, and opened her eyes.

Mike Bull said, ‘It’s – ah—’

He didn’t know what to say to her. He was dizzy with shock. For some reason, he was reminded of Anne, and he suddenly started to cry. The tears streamed down his face, and his mouth was puckered with suppressed sobs. Season gently led Sally away, back to the corner by the canned fruit shelves which they were beginning to know as their home. Tony said, ‘We shouldn’t never have let him out.’

Mike wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Y ou can’t stop martyrs from martyring themselves, Tony. He must have known as well as we did.’

‘But they tore him to shreds, Mike I mean, shreds .’

‘They wouldn’t have done if his miracle had worked, would they? Or maybe they would, I don’t know. Jesus worked all of those miracles, didn’t he, and they still crucified Him.’

Season, in her small corner by the fruit shelves, sat with her knees clasped in her arms, trying to understand what was real. Sally hadn’t been able to see Granger Hughes’ grisly last moments from where she was standing, although she understood now that something terrifying had taken place, that Granger had somehow been hurt.

‘Mommy,’ she said, quietly.

Season attempted a smile.

‘Mommy – is Daddy going to come save us?’

Season looked at her daughter – at their daughter – with a gentleness that misted her eyes. I mustn’t start crying, she thought. Not now, when I’m supposed to be strong. Not now, when Sally’s expecting me to reassure her. And yet Sally had put into words the flittering, irrational hope which Season had been holding out for all of these days of fright and uncertainty. Maybe Ed’s coming to save us. He must be coming to save us. He knows what things are like in Los Angeles. No matter what happened between us, he must be thinking of us now. He can’t still be in Kansas, looking after the farm. He’s not that kind of a guy. He’s boring, sometimes; and pretty often he doesn’t recognise what a woman needs out of her life. But he knows when she needs protection, and care. He knows when she really needs help.

And now, God damn it, God damn it all to hell, she started crying. She couldn’t stop the hot tears from springing into her eyes, from blurring her picture of the little girl that she and Ed had conceived between them, pretty and serious and patient And as she wept, she touched Sally’s hair, and told her, ‘Of course Daddy’s coming to save us. He’s coming right now. Of course he’s coming to save us.’

They had waited under a dense blue sky for three hours, their convoy drawn to the side of Route 66 by Topock, where the highway crosses Havasu Lake. In the western distance, five small clouds had stayed suspended close to the horizon for the whole three horns, not moving, unstirred by any wind.

The landscape was as hot and limpid as a painting by Dali, with the Sacramento Mountains up ahead, and the Hualapai Mountains behind. Arizona, on a Saturday in August. A country of heat-ripples and mirages and strange illusions.

Eventually, Ed walked back to the Chevy wagon, opened the door, and climbed into the driver’s seat. His passengers said nothing, but all of them looked at him with sweat-glistened faces, and expressions that pleaded: Please – move on.

‘All right,’ he said, with a dry mouth. ‘We’re pulling out.’

‘Thank the Lord,’ intoned Shearson. ‘Half an hour more, and I’d have been melted to butter.’

Ed started up the wagon’s engine, and the first warm blast surged out of the air-conditioning vents. He blew his horn three times, and the convoy coughed and whinnied and slowly pulled away from the roadside. They crossed the Colorado River, and then wound their way slowly northwest through the Sacramento Mountains, with the peaks of the Dead Mountains over on their left. The sky remained the same relentless blue.

‘Last lap,’ said Ed, as he drove. ‘We’re in California now.’

‘Three cheers,’ said Shearson. ‘Do you want to try that radio again now, see if we can’t pick up some news?’

Ed switched on the radio, rolling the dial between finger and thumb. There were one or two faint broadcasts, voices that were swallowed by topography and distance; but most of the time there was nothing but a heavy, colourless crackling. After ten minutes of trying, however, Ed picked up a tiny, remote voice which told him it was an emergency station, from Las Vegas, Nevada.

‘We hear that the President has recovered from his illness… and has returned to the White House to take charge of the crisis personally. We hear that several thousand people died during the past twenty-four hours from botulism… people who apparently considered the risk worth taking… And we also hear that Britain has flown two thousand tons of emergency supplies in to New York, against the express wishes of her fellow EEC members…’