‘You make me leave,’ the woman challenged him. ‘You just lay a finger on me and see what happens.’
Mike was about to answer with another of his soothe-the-angry-customer routines, when he heard shouting and scuffling at the front doorway of the store. Tony was shouting, ‘We’re closed! Don’t you understand me? We’re closing up!’
Somebody yelled back, ‘You can’t close! We’ve got a right!’
Mike left the lady with her three trolleys and her piles of cornflake boxes, and pushed his way through the crowds of customers to the doors. Tony had managed to lock two of the doors, but the last one was being forced open by a press of angry people. There must have been two or three hundred of them outside, all jostling to get in.
What goes on here?’ Mike shouted. ‘Hey, mister – we’re closed! We’re closing up now!’
A tall young man with shoulders as broad as a surfboard and floppy sun-bleached hair was gripping Tony’s shirt and trying to push him out of the way. Behind him, a husband and wife in matching pink T-shirts that read GOODBYE J. P. SARTRE were struggling to force a shopping-cart into the store. Behind them was a wrestling turmoil of anxious and angry men and women, already panicked by the warning that America was going to starve.
‘You can’t close!’ shrieked a woman with frizzy hair. ‘Your sign says twenty-four-hour store and you have to keep that! It’s the law!’
‘In this store. I’m the law!’ Mike shouted back. ‘Now go home, cool down, and come back in the morning! There’s no crisis, we have plenty of supplies, but I can’t endanger you or my staff by letting all of you in right now. You got me?’
‘Just shove it up your ass,’ snarled the tall surfer, and roughly elbowed Mike aside. Mike tried to grip the chrome handrail by the door, but he caught his back against a stray shopping-cart, lost his balance and fell against the liquor counter. The next thing he knew, the doors were being forced open again, and crowds of whooping and shouting people were pouring in to the store.
‘For Christ’s sake, let’s have some order!’ yelled Mike. ‘Just take what you want, but don’t panic!’
He tried to stand up on the handrail so that he could make himself heard over the hideous shrieking and gabbling of the crowd, but a fortyish-looking man in sunglasses grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him down again.
‘I ought to beat your brains out!’ Mike screamed at him. The man shrugged. ‘I was doing you a favour. You’re wasting your breath, trying to stop the great American public from panicking. It’s their favourite occupation.’
‘Just get out of my way!’ Mike told him. ‘Tony – let’s get back to the office! Gina, Wendy – clear out of your cash registers and lock them up!’
‘Asshole,’ said the man in sunglasses, unaccountably. Mike helped his checkout girls take the cash boxes out of their registers, and then he and his staff fought their way through the aisles back to the office.
All around them, the store was surging with hysterical shoppers – fighting and scrambling and tearing at each other as they attempted to cram their baskets and their shopping-carts and even their pockets with anything they could lay their hands on. A five-foot display of baked-bean cans clattered to the floor as Mike and Tony led the checkout girls past, and Mike was hit on the side of the face by a falling can. Right in front of him, a woman in stretch ski-pants and curlers was kneeling on the floor, gathering up packs of bacon in her arms and whimpering.
There were shouts and splintering crashes as shelves collapsed under the weight of people climbing up on to them to reach the topmost boxes of food. A woman screamed, ‘I’m pregnant! For God’s sake don’t push me! I’m pregnant!’
People were taking everything. Not just cans of vegetables and meat; not just staple supplies; but pet foods and bottles of lavatory cleanser and fluorescent plastic sandals. They seemed to have forgotten why they were there, and what they had come for. Now they were even ripping the plastic edging from the shelves, and smashing the refrigerator cabinets. Mike, as he managed to usher everybody into his office, saw one man in a flowery Hawaiian shirt beating his fist against an empty spice rack until his fingers were spattered with blood; and another sight that was to stay with him for days afterwards – a pretty young girl in khaki jeans clutching five or six crushed French loaves, and wetting herself, all down her thighs.
Mike pushed Tony into the office ahead of him, slammed the door and locked it.
‘Jesus Christ,’ shuddered Tony. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that in your life? They’ve gone bananas!’ Mike went over to the telephone, and dialled 625 3311, for the police. The telephone rang for a long time before it was answered, and outside the office window the screaming and the smashing grew louder and even more frightening.
‘Come on, come on,’ breathed Mike ‘What’s the matter with these people? We’ve got a riot on our hands.’
At last, a dry voice said, ‘Police. Is this in connection with tonight’s emergency?’
Mike hesitated. ‘It’s a riot, if that’s what you mean. Up at the Hughes supermarket on Highland.’
‘Okay,’ the voice told him. ‘Hold on for a moment, and I’ll have you connected with the emergency squad.’
Mike held his hand over the receiver while it rang on a special extension. Through the office window, he could see a middle-aged woman trying to climb up on to the cookie shelves, to reach three or four scattered bags of Pepperidge Farm ginger-nuts. Another woman leaped on her back, clawing at her T-shirt, until it ripped apart. The two women fell into the aisle, fighting and scratching, and knocking over two other women as well. Mike saw blood and torn-out hair and bare breasts scored with livid red furrows.
‘For God’s sake,’ he said into the telephone. He loosened his necktie, and unbuttoned the first couple of buttons of his short-sleeved shirt. One of the checkout girls, Wendy, was starting to sob.
At last, a snappy police sergeant said, ‘Yes? Emergency squad.’
‘I’m the manager of the Hughes supermarket on Highland,’ said Mike.
‘Okay,’ said the sergeant, ‘Hughes supermarket. I’ve made a note of that. We’ll get there when we can.’
‘When you can? We have a riot here! People are getting hurt!’
‘Listen, mister, we have a riot in every supermarket in the city. Four supermarkets on Santa Monica boulevard are burning. All I can say is that we’ll get there when we can.’
‘But what am I supposed to do? They’re stripping the place!’
‘You’ll just have to let them strip it. I’m sorry, mister, but we simply don’t have the manpower. I’m sorry.’
Mike didn’t know what else to say, how else he could plead. He held the phone in his hand for a moment, listening to the sergeant say, ‘Hello? Are you still there? Hello?’ But then he laid it back in its cradle.
‘What did they say?’ Tony asked him.
‘They said they’d do their best. It turns out that every supermarket in Los Angeles is being tom apart the same way. Four supermarkets are burning.’
‘Mother of God,’ said Tony, in a hushed voice.
Gina, the Mexican check-out girl, looked up from comforting Wendy. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do? Those people out there, they’ve gone crazy.’
Tony went close to the window. ‘They haven’t reached the stockroom yet. But I guess it’s only a matter of time.’
‘Is the stockroom locked?’ asked Mike.
Tony nodded. It was always locked. He made sure of that, personally. He combed his hair a lot, and yawned a lot when he was making out shelf inventories, but he never failed to obey instructions.
Mike joined him at the window. They couldn’t quite see the stockroom door from the office, but they could see the corner of the frozen dairy foods cabinet next to it. There was a pushing waltzing scrum of people there, and the floor was plastered with pink yogurt.