Грэм Мастертон - Famine

He stood up. ‘Did you really call the FBI office when you were outside of Wichita? Or were you just making it all up? Come on, Della, I think it’s time you came clean with me, don’t you? Why are you really holding on to Shearson Jones? You don’t have any serious hopes of arraigning him. Maybe you never intended to. So why have you brought him all this way, and guarded him so well? What’s your connection with Your Spread From The Sky, Inc.? What the hell’s going on?’

Della smiled at him, and put her head on one side, in a winning Shirley Temple kind of a gesture. ‘Ed,’ she said, ‘you don’t seriously doubt what I’ve told you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ed snapped angrily. He found that he was quivering, from exhaustion and shock, and from a sudden vertiginous sensation that the floor had disappeared from under him, ‘I just want you to tell me what all this is all about.’

‘How much do you actually know about Your Spread From The Sky?’ asked Della.

‘I know what Jack Marowitz found out. That they were flying over almost every farm in Kansas, just before the Vorar-D virus broke out And that’s too much of a goddamned coincidence to be true.’

Della carefully laid the pump-gun down across the desk. Ed didn’t miss the significance of the gesture, but he didn’t take his eyes off Della’s face, and he didn’t change his intense, unhappy expression.

‘Well,’ said Della, softly, ‘you’re right. They did overfly those farms. But the reason they did it wasn’t to spray any poison virus on them. The reason was that they had a tipoff about the blight, and they were reconnoitring the farms in the least sensational way they knew how, to see if they could detect who was doing it, and how.’

There was a long, taut silence. Then Ed said, ‘You expect me to believe that? You’re trying to tell me the FBI knew about the blight in advance , and they didn’t warn anybody? Not the Department of Agriculture? Not the President? Not even Shearson Jones?’

‘Until the blight actually broke out, Ed, they weren’t sure it was going to happen at all.’

Ed stood up, and walked across to the office window. He parted the lopsided Venetian blinds and looked down into Hollywood Boulevard. He couldn’t see the convoy of cars and wagons, but he could see Sam Gasiewicz on the other side of the street keeping guard, his rifle over his shoulder.

He turned to Della. ‘Are you really FBI?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you something else ? Somebody else altogether?’

‘What do you think?’ asked Della. ‘Would I have taken the trouble to blackbag a whole lot of Shearson’s papers – would I have taken the trouble to keep Shearson and Peter Kaiser prisoner – would I have done any of the things I’ve done since you’ve met me, if I wasn’t?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ Ed asked her.

‘Listen,’ Della told him, touching his arm. ‘I’m only interested in keeping Shearson and Peter Kaiser in custody until I can turn them over to the Bureau. I’m only interested in helping us all to find a safe place to hide out until this rioting and raiding is all over. That’s all. You can trust me, Ed. I mean it. You can genuinely trust me.’

Ed didn’t answer. But after a long while, he let the Venetian blind fall back into place, and he wiped the dust from his hands on the sides of his jeans.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you say I can trust you, then I will. But if you do one single thing to jeopardise any of the people in this convoy of ours – if you make one single wrong move – then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the group and go out on your own. You understand that? What I’m saying?’

Della leaned forward a little and kissed his cheek. The soft heaviness of her breast pressed against his arm. He could smell the particular fragrance that wasn’t perfume or soap, but just woman.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I know what you’re saying, but I won’t let you down.’

‘Now,’ said Ed, ‘I want to go look for Season and Sally.’

The winding road up through Topanga Canyon took them on a journey of funereal fantasy – as if their convoy of wagons was wending its way through the black recesses of a mortician’s nightmare.

All the grass and all the trees had been burned to ashes, so that on either side of them they could see nothing but twisted stumps that had been reduced to charcoal, and vegetation like crumbling grey hair. The north-east wind had blown the debris across the road, so that their tyres ground and scratched on the asphalt, and threw up clouds of ash and grit.

The smell was overpowering. A strong, sour stench that blew in through their air-conditioning vents and seemed to cling to their clothes. Now and then, they drove through a thick drift of smoke, and that started them coughing, and irritated their eyes, and by the time they reached Mulholland Drive, Shearson Jones was caught in an uncontrollable fit of wheezing and gasping.

‘We’re going to have to turn back,’ insisted Peter Kaiser. ‘Ten more minutes of this and the senator’s going to asphyxiate.’

‘We’re almost there,’ said Ed, in a flat voice. ‘The Snowmans’ house is up on the left.’

‘You seriously believe it’s still standing?’ asked Peter.

Ed didn’t answer. Ever since they had turned their convoy off the Pacific Coast Highway on to Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and seen the charred and devastated hills, his stomach had been rigid as a football with fear. The bushfire must have swept all the way down the canyon unchecked, with no firefighters and no water-dumping aircraft to hold it back; and the chances of anybody having survived it were almost absurd. Please God, thought Ed, as he reached the turn in the road where the Snowmans’ driveway came down – please God don’t let me find them burned.

The mailbox was still there, its post charred, its paint burned off; but Ed could distinctly make out the name C. Snowman. He turned the Chevy up the drive until he came to the parking area in front of the house.

From the outside, in the darkness, the house didn’t look too bad. But when Ed climbed down from the wagon and crunched his way closer across the drifts of ashes, he could see that the interior was completely burned out.

Della came up behind him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Ed clambered his way over fallen beams and blackened skeletal furniture until he reached the place which had once been the living-room. Incongruously, one part of the living-room wall still stood, and attached to it was a white telephone, drooping and distorted by heat. Ed almost expected it to ring, and to hear voices from the past. Next to the phone, still half-legible, were the words: ‘ Ed Hardesty called from South Burlington Farm. Says he’s on his way to LA .’

‘The cop who wrote that said the place was empty,’ Ed remarked. ‘With any luck, they didn’t try to come back. But the question is – where are they now?’

‘I can tell you that,’ said a keen, sharp voice.

Ed turned around, squinting against the glare of the convoy’s headlights to see who was talking.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked. Della stepped to one side, and raised her pump-gun.

‘No need to be afraid,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not carrying a gun or nothing.’

‘Step into the light where I can see you,’ said Della. There was a hesitant, shuffling sound, and then a small, soot-smudged man emerged into the headlight beam. He looked like a grubby, tattered, erratic second cousin of Donald Pleasence. His jacket was singed at the back, and he wore burnt brown mittens.

‘Pearson’s the name,’ he said, brushing ash from his sleeves. ‘Longtime resident of Topanga Canyon and environs. You looking for the folks who used to live here?’