Грэм Мастертон - Famine

‘I’d rather throw myself into a volcano,’ he remarked. Ed shook his hand, said okay, and left him to look after the remaining two farm women, his wife, and his four children.

Ed went back to the Chevy, started her up, slammed the door, and said, ‘Ready? Peter – you cover the right side with the pump-gun. Senator – since you’re so handy with a .45 – you cover the left. Karen – keep your head down.’

He pulled the wagon out on to Franklin Avenue. Behind him, Roy Gurning drove on his left three-quarter flank in his Pinto wagon, and Nat Petersen drove on his right three-quarter flank in a Cutlass. Between them, the three cars formed a spearhead which took up the width of the whole road.

‘I just hope we know what the hell we’re doing,’ said Ed. He was sweating all over, and he couldn’t stop.

‘All right,’ growled Shearson, ‘Let’s go.’

Ed waved to Roy and Nat, and then slammed his foot down on the gas. With a throaty bellow, the Chevy surged forward, right into the running crowds, with the Pinto and the Cutlass hugging close behind.

Ed felt the wagon’s bumper hit two – three – four people. Their bodies made firm thumping noises, like huge insects hitting the windshield in summer. Someone screamed, and two men tried to run along beside him and claw the driver’s door open, but he was driving too fast, and Roy was coming up so close behind them that they had to dodge out of the way.

Then, it was hell. They reached the intersection of Highland and Franklin and they were in the thick of it Sticks and stones drummed against the sides of the wagon, and there were screeches of agony and fright as he forced the hood of the four-wheel-drive vehicle right into the surging mob of people around the supermarket.

He heard Peter Kaiser shoot the pump-gun four or five times. He heard windows at the back of the wagon breaking. There was a chaotic howling ocean of distorted people around him, and yet he was still driving the wagon forward – slower now, because of the dense press of bodies – but still relentlessly forward over crushed arms and legs and bursting skulls. The banging of clubs and sticks against the vehicle’s bodywork was utterly deafening, and he knew that his face was pulled into a ridiculous expression of fear and concentration, but there was nothing he could do about it.

The last few feet were the worst. As the wagon pushed its bumpers right up to the supermarket’s doors, ten or twelve looters were caught in front of it, and shoved bodily through the wire-reinforced glass, like ribbons of raw meat through a grater. Then, with a last burst of low-gear power, Ed brought down the whole row of doors, and collided with the liquor counter.

They had miscalculated, badly. The mob was wild and unstoppable and far more numerous than they had realised. Peter fired three more shots and his pump-gun was empty, Roy Gurning’s Pinto had been swallowed up by the crowd, and Ed glimpsed its offside wheels as it was turned over, with Roy still inside it. Nat Petersen’s car had disappeared altogether, Shearson screamed, ‘ It won’t work! It won’t work! Just back , up and get the hell out of here! ’

But Ed, looking around the wrecked supermarket, had momentarily caught sight of Sally in the far corner, and nothing was going to get him out of that store without them. He forced open the Chevy’s door, pushing over two struggling looters, and elbowed and shoved his way between the shelves to where he thought he had seen them. Behind him the mob had begun to surge through the broken-open doors, and scrambled towards the stock-room. It was going to be looting first, revenge second.

For three insane minutes, Ed remembered everything his college football coach had taught him, and he pushed and shoved and bulldozed his way through the screaming scrum of people towards the shelves at the far back of the supermarket. Then, in an instant that was too fearful to be anything but blurred, unmemorable, and confused, he had scooped Sally up in his arms, and pushed Season ahead of him, and they were fighting their way back to the wagon.

‘ Vee! ’ screamed Season. ‘ I can’t see Vee! ’

‘ Get out of here! ’ bellowed Ed. ‘ Just get to the wagon, and let’s get out of here! ’

He was thrown back against a shelf, with an agonising jar against his back; but he managed to thrust his way on to his feet again, with Sally still awkwardly clutched in his arms, and struggled on. Somehow, bruised and sweating and grazed, his adrenalin at bursting point, he reached the wagon and threw Sally in through the door on to Shearson’s lap. Then he pulled Season up behind him, shoved her across beside Peter Kaiser, and started up the engine.

Slowly, grindingly, the Chevy backed up into the mob. Now that the supermarket stockroom had been broken into, few of the looters took any notice of the wagon at all, but pushed their way around it. It was food they were after, and the maelstrom of fighting and bodies in the supermarket was too confusing for most of them to understand what was happening.

They were almost out on to the roadway again when their rear bumper caught up with Roy Gurning’s overturned Pinto. Ed rocked the wagon backwards and forwards, but it still refused to budge. He pressed his foot harder on the gas and prayed to God for the Pinto to move.

Slowly, it did, with a grating screech of metal on concrete. But now the wagon had begun to attract the attention of some of the late-coming looters – the ones who knew they were going to be lucky to pick up a few battered cans of corn. Twenty or thirty of them started tearing at the doors and banging their fists on the windows, and Ed looked out in fright at a world that seemed to be nothing but grotesque, staring faces.

Abruptly, Shearson Jones’s passenger-door was tugged open. Shearson shrieked like a girl, and Peter Kaiser tried to reach across and grab him, but five or six pairs of hands pulled Shearson’s coat and pants, and heaved him bodily out of the wagon.

‘ I’m a United States senator! ’ screamed Shearson. ‘ I’m a United States senator! ’

Then he was swallowed up by the mob; and it took all of Peter’s strength to slam the door closed again, and hold it shut against the scratching hands of frantic looters.

Ed, sobbing with fear and exhaustion, jammed his foot down on the gas pedal once more. Slowly, slowly, the wrecked Pinto began to slide out of the way. Then, it toppled, and the Chevy was clear. They surged backwards into the crowds, and drove backwards with their transmission whining in protest all the way to La Brea Avenue, almost a quarter-mile.

Ed stopped the wagon when they reached La Brea, and turned forwards in his seat to look at the supermarket. It was blazing from sidewalk to roof now, with huge tongues of fire licking at the night with a lasciviousness that could only remind him of greed, and pain, and hatred.

He stared at Season. She was wide-eyed, shocked, scarcely able to speak. Sally, in the back seat, was whimpering and shivering.

Then Ed held his hand over his mouth to try and stop the tears. But he couldn’t; they ran freely down his cheeks; and they sparkled in the dickering glare of the burning supermarket as if his eyes were on fire, too.

The next morning, when the burned-out shell of the supermarket was abandoned, they went back. Season walked amongst the bodies which lay between the empty shelves while Ed stood silently by the smashed and blood-smeared doors.

‘Vee’s not here,’ she said at last. ‘Nor Carl. I can’t see Mike Bull, either. They must have escaped. I knew this girl, though. Clara, her name was.’

From outside, Ed heard Peter calling, ‘Ed – come here. In the parking lot. And come on your own. Don’t bring Sally.’