In his smashed-open store under the elevated highway, Nicolas Prokopiou lay half-conscious and bleeding. He heard the helicopter as it passed overhead, but it was just one more blurry noise in a night of chaos. Fire sirens whooped in the distance, and there was a crackle of shooting from the direction of Marquette University.
He closed his eyes and thought of Serifos. The dense blue skies, the dark blue seas. The fishing boats with their sun-faded paint, tied up with salt-faded ropes. The days when he had stood by the harbour, his hair ruffled by the wind, and dreamed all kinds of dreams.
A few minutes before dawn, he died. He suffered very little pain, and his death was like falling asleep. It wouldn’t have comforted him to know that Dolores was already dead, with half of her head blown away in crimson spatters and her body lying exposed on the sidewalk in her pink baby-doll nightie. Nor would it have comforted him to know that Chris, the looter, had survived; and was shivering under heavy sedation in hospital, blinded and burned, while his wife and children waited apprehensively at home for the food that he was going to bring.
Two
That same night, at the Hughes Supermarket on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, Mike Bull was organising his defences. Mike Bull was the supermarket manager, and the medium-sized twenty-four-hour store at the intersection between Franklin and Highland was his first important appoin’I’ment. Before he had been promoted, three months ago, he had been fruit and vegetable manager of a branch further downtown. N ow, at the age of thirty-one – a stocky, terse, but good-humoured bachelor with a face as pudgy as Mickey Rooney – he was running his own ship, and he was determined that night that the rats weren’t going to clamber aboard.
He hadn’t seen Ed Hardesty’s television appearance – nor the frantic and frightened news programmes that followed. But within twenty minutes, a laconic customer with long greasy blond hair and frayed denim shorts had advised him to blockade the store. ‘You should hear the TV, man. Walter Cronkite reckons we’re all going to be starving by Thanksgiving. And you know what that means, don’t you? Folks are going to start stocking up on every damn thing they can get.’
Mike had looked around the store. It was his business to sell what was in it, and if people came in and cleared his shelves, then no matter what the reason, he should be pleased. But the prospect of a food panic made him uneasy. The tough and the young would clear the place out, and leave the weak and the elderly without supplies.
He beckoned his under-manager, Tony, across to his office. Tony was Italian, young, and combed his hair a lot. Tony wanted to make it in the movies, and as far as he was concerned, retail selling was a total pain in the ass. But he liked Mike, and he didn’t like being yelled at, and so he came and stood in Mike’s office with an expression that was almost co-operative.
‘Have you heard the news?’ Mike asked him, rolling up his shirtsleeves.
‘News?’ asked Tony.
‘Yeah. It seems like these crop blights we’ve been hearing about – all those excuses why they couldn’t deliver the grapes and the tomatoes and the celery and all of that stuff – well, it seems like we’re in for some kind of a national famine.’
‘That bad, huh?’ asked Tony.
‘That’s what I hear,’ said Mike.
Tony scratched the back of his neck. It was quite obvious that he didn’t understand the implications of what Mike had told him at all.
‘I’m going to close the store,’ said Mike.
Tony frowned at his digital watch. ‘It isn’t time yet.’
‘I know. But it may soon be too late, unless we close this place up.’
‘Too late?’ asked Tony, baffled.
‘Sure. I mean – what would you do, if you heard that there wasn’t going to be enough food for you and your family during the coming months?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tony. ‘Stock up, I guess.’
‘Exactly. And that’s what people are going to start doing tonight, as soon as they realise how serious this situation’s going to be. Take a look at it now – have you ever seen so many people here on a Sunday evening? And look at those people there – those shopping carts are filled to the top.’ Tony peered through the window of the office into the store. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he said, slowly. ‘Look at that woman there – she’s got herself a train of three carts tied together.’
‘That settles it,’ said Mike. ‘I’m going to close the place up.’
‘What for?’ Tony wanted to know. ‘If things go on this way, we could make ourselves three times the weekly turnover, all in one night.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Mike told him. ‘We’ve got a responsibility to the whole community around here – not just the first fifty people with enough wit and enough money to clear the place out. And even if we do sell everything tonight, there’s no guarantee that we can restock until next week. If at all.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I think you’re wrong,’ said Tony. Mike looked at him sourly. ‘You can think what you like, but right now I’m the manager and I say we close. So get to it. And make sure you put up the steel shutters.’
Tony saluted him. ‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ he said, with no pretence of a German accent.
Mike had only just gone back to his desk when his buzzer went. He returned to the window, and saw that there was a scuffle going on in one of the aisles. He quickly opened his office door, and made his way beside the cold meat counter to the scene of the disturbance.
‘All right,’ he demanded. ‘What’s going on?’
The woman with the three shopping carts tied together was jostling with an elderly man in mirror sunglasses and a pale-blue shirt. She was loud, and rinsed with strawberry blonde, and Mike could see at once that she was going to be difficult. One of his assistants was trying to hold her back, while another one was picking up boxes of cereal that had scattered all across the aisle.
‘This lady thinks she can corner the cereal market,’ protested the elderly man. ‘All I want is a couple of packs of cornflakes, but she’s got every single box in the store.’
‘They’re all out of cornflakes, that’s all,’ snapped the woman. ‘Is it my fault if they’re all out?’
‘I think I have more cornflakes in the stockroom,’ said Mike. ‘How many did you want?’
‘Two packs, that’s all,’ said the elderly man. ‘I’m not an hysterical hoarder, like this lady.’
‘Who are you calling a hoarder?’ the woman wanted to know. ‘Do you have a family with six kids to feed? Do you have to worry about a husband who’s paralysed on one side? My family’s supposed to starve, so that a dusty old geriatric like you can have breakfast?’
‘Come on, madam,’ said Mike. ‘Nobody’s going to starve for the sake of two packs of cornflakes.’
‘Oh, no?’ the woman demanded. ‘Did you see that Kansas farmer on the television? He says we’re all going to starve, and that the President’s stocking up with food at the White House. Well, let me tell you, friend – if the President can do it, then sure as hell so can I.’
‘Listen, madam,’ Mike said patiently, ‘nobody’s going to starve. We have plenty of supplies right here in the store, and even more in the stockroom, and still more on order from our central depot. So don’t go panicking, huh? If you panic, you’re only going to help to create an artificial shortage.’
‘You’re trying to tell me how much I can buy?’ demanded the woman.
‘I’m just asking you to cool it, that’s all. Walking around the store with these three trolleys all tied together, that’s a hazard to other shoppers. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d pay for your groceries and leave.’