They heard a rattling noise, and they knew that the crowds were trying to pull down the stockroom door.
‘If we want to keep that food intact, we’re going to have to do something fast,’ said Tony. ‘That’s a pretty good lock on there, but it won’t hold them out for ever.’
Mike covered his mouth with his hand. Halfway up the hardware aisle, a woman lay doubled-up on the floor, bleeding and sick. Another woman was walking unevenly through the crowds that still milled around the supermarket, her hair awry and her eyes staring.
‘I have an idea,’ said Mike. ‘Gina – pass that sack of waste-paper, will you?’
An hour ago, Mike had been irritated to find that the cleaner hadn’t taken the plastic bag of trash away. It was nothing more than crumpled-up wrapping paper, out-of-date invoices, used carbon paper, and string. But it would suit his present purpose just fine. He carried it to the office door, propped it up against his legs, and then reached in his pocket for matches.
‘You’re going to set fire to the place?’ asked Tony.
‘Just a limited fire, I hope,’ Mike told him. ‘Enough smoke and enough yelling to get these people out of here.’
He struck a match, and paused for a while to let it burn up. The rattling of the stockroom door grew increasingly ferocious, and he thought he heard a hinge tearing. Then he dropped the match into the bag of waste-paper, and watched it flare.
‘Are you ready?’ Mike asked Tony. ‘When I give the word, we open the door and go out yelling fire. And I mean yelling.’
‘I’m game,’ said Tony. He reached into his shirt pocket, took out his green plastic comb, and ran it with a stylised flick through his hair.
‘You look like a prince,’ said Gina, with friendly sarcasm. Tony realised what he had done, and grinned sheepishly.
‘It’s kind of a habit,’ he said.
The bag of trash was blazing hot and smoky now. Mike said, ‘You set?’ and before Tony could answer, he tugged open the office door, and kicked a shower of fiery paper into the store.
‘Fire!’ he screamed. ‘Fire! Fire! The place is on fire!’
‘Fire!’ yelled Tony, right behind him.
The effect on the crowds was immediate; and even more dreadful to Mick than the way in which they had first surged into the store. They let out a low quavering moan, like a wind on a seashore, and then that moan rose into a scream. Then, there was nothing but scrambling and pushing and a chopped-up shrieking which made him turn away towards the smoke and the burning paper with a grimace of disgust.
He didn’t feel holier-than-thou. He knew that if his own life was at risk in a fire, he’d be struggling to get out along with everybody else. But somehow the way that the crowds in his supermarket were tearing at each other to get to the exits, the way that women were wrenching at each other’s clothes, the way that men were screaming like small children, that all turned his stomach.
In a matter of a few minutes, the supermarket was almost empty. Two or three of the customers were too dazed or too hurt to walk. One man was lying face-down in the poultry freezer, his face against the ice, and it was plain that he was dead. Mike lifted him out, and laid him down on the floor. The man flopped back with his eyes open and the side of his cheek the colour of chilled turkey.
‘You think you should say some words?’ asked Tony, stepping beside him and looking down at the body.
Mike shook his head. ‘I’m a supermarket manager, not a priest.’
‘The doors are all locked now,’ said Tony. ‘I put the shutters down, too.’
‘Thanks, Tony,’ said Mike.
Curls of black burned paper drifted across the floor in the silent draught from the supermarket’s air-conditioning. There was a sharp odour of smoke in the air.
‘Did they go far?’ asked Mike. ‘Or can we expect them back?’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Tony. ‘There were still quite a few of them gathered around outside when I put the shutters down. Twenty or thirty, maybe. They know the stockroom’s still untouched, so I guess they’ll be back.’
Mike laid a hand on Tony’s shoulder. ‘If you want to leave now, slip out while the going’s good, I won’t hold it against you. I’d like to send Gina and Wendy home.’
Tony shook his head. ‘What do I want to go home for? To watch all this on the TV?’
‘Okay, but we should get the girls out.’
Gina was standing at the open office door. ‘We’d rather stay,’ she said. ‘At least until it’s quiet.’
Mike said, ‘You know the crowds may come back; and they may be a damn sight more vicious than they were just now.’
Gina nodded. ‘All the same, we’ll stay, if that’s okay by you.’
Mike looked around the wreckage of his store – the collapsed shelves, the smashed freezer cabinets, the food that was strewn all over the floor and trodden into a surrealistic salad of Cheerios, baked beans, loganberry jelly, bootlaces, cat food, and plastic doilies.
He said to Tony, ‘Go to the liquor cupboard, will you, and bring me a bottle of bourbon. Make sure you charge it down to me. I think I could use a drink.’
Three
All over the United States that night, fires were burning. From the top of the Hancock Building in Chicago, a CBS News reporter described the dark and fiery scene beneath him as ‘a preview of hell… like something by Hieronymus Bosch.’ Not many of his listeners knew who Hieronymus Bosch was, but the vision on their screens was unmistakable. Block after block of garish fires, hideous shadows, and running people.
Thousands of stores, restaurants, hotels, warehouses, and hamburger stands were broken into, all over the country. Anywhere there was food, there was violence. At a branch of McDonald’s in Darien, Connecticut, seven looters were shot dead by police as they tried to break into the restaurant’s cold store. One of the dead men was found to have tucked dozens of free McDonald’s airplanes into his windbreaker, presumably to take home for his children.
At the Iron Kettle restaurant, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the seventy-two-year-old proprietor was crushed against a brick wall as she attempted to stop looters escaping from her restaurant in a pick-up truck.
And in New York City, at Macy’s, hundreds of screaming men and women broke the windows of the delicatessen hall on 33rd Street and poured into the store, leaving amidst the shattered glass two dead women and one man with his left cheek sliced off. The crowds looted all the fresh and canned food they could tear from the shelves, and then they rampaged through the rest of the store, oblivious to the shrilling alarms and the policemen with nightsticks who patrolled the counters with orders to ‘contain, but not arrest.’
One of the managers of Macy’s who witnessed the looting said, ‘It was terrifying. It was like sale time in Hades.’ And New York’s Commissioner of Police, in a hurriedly-called television interview, explained, ‘It’s a disaster. But, it’s way beyond our power to prevent looting and theft on such a grand scale. We have neither the men nor the facilities. All we can do is try to ensure that the looting is carried out with the minimum of risk to life and property.’
During the night, Manhattan was a hideous nightmare. Ambulances and police cars whooped and screamed through the echoing streets, and there was the sporadic crackling of gunfire from Harlem and the West Side. The South Bronx, already devastated by arson, became an inferno whose glow could be seen as far away as New Rochelle. In Brooklyn, fifteen women were trapped and burned to death in a Woolworth store as they tried to escape with hair dryers, bicycles, garden furniture, and cosmetics. Their bodies were twisted up ‘like little black monkeys’ and their loot was melted in their claws. Almost all the food had been pillaged now from restaurants and stores, and people were helping themselves to whatever was left.