‘I didn’t lose my resolve, though,’ he told the police. ‘I knew the rest of them had to go, too.’
He went upstairs to the small attic room where Jenna slept in her pink-painted crib. He had spent hours on that crib himself, sanding it and decorating it. Just above Jenna’s slumbering curls there was a transfer of a grinning burro, wearing a straw hat.
John Frederick Walters was glad that Jenna had gone to sleep again. He doubted if he would have been able to kill her if she was crying. He leaned over her crib, kissed her, and then pressed a pillow against her face for what seemed like a half-hour. It was probably only five or ten minutes, but it was enough. Jenna May Walters died of asphyxiation, aged 179 days.
Alice was the last. Alice, too, was asleep, and all she said when he softly opened the collar of her nightdress and held the razor-blade against the side of her throat was, ‘What time is it?’ Then the sheets were stained with ever-widening darkness.
The police stopped him on Anthony Boulevard, trudging north. His fingers were stuck together with dried blood. They held him up against the car while they searched him, and then they sat him down on the curb and subjected him to an impromptu interrogation. He admitted murdering his family, and offered to take them back to Number 8 so that they could see for themselves. They sat him on two spread-out sheets of week-old newspaper in the back of the car, and drove him south again.
Under the emergency powers granted to the Indiana police during the state of national crisis, patrolmen were permitted in what they considered to be ‘extreme circumstances’ to administer summary justice and execution. The two patrolmen who had picked up John Frederick Walters were in little doubt that the homicides at Number 8 were (as they later put it) ‘extreme in the extreme.’
At seventeen minutes past two on Friday morning, they asked him to kneel in the middle of his back lawn, which he did. They asked him if he had any last wishes, and he told them that he had one Lark left, in the living-room, next to the radio, and that he would appreciate the chance to smoke it. They conferred, and then said no, they didn’t have time to watch him smoke a cigarette. Then one of the patrolmen lifted a .357 Python revolver and blew John Frederick Walters’ brains into the peonies.
Just before he went to bed at dawn on Friday morning, the Vice-President was handed a lengthy and detailed medical report on the long-term effects of severe dietary deficiency in the United States. He was reminded that a moderately active male between thirty-five and sixty-five required 2900 calories a day; and that a woman between eighteen and fifty-five requires 2200. An estimate of available food supplies showed that even with careful conservation, and even with an intensive programme of agricultural revival, there would be less than one quarter of the necessary calories available to each American man, woman, and child during the coming six months.
In practice, there would be far less. There was no question at all that ‘approximately 85 million people’ would have to go without food supplies altogether, and live off whatever they could scavenge. ‘We are going to have to face up to the fact that the world’s most technologically sophisticated society; a society capable of visiting the Moon; a society which only two weeks ago measured its anxieties in terms of breast-enlargements, jogging, psychological self-acceptance, and Howard Jarvis; is now going to have to accept the degrading spectacle of nearly a third of its citizens digging like hogs for roots.’
The report warned of rickets – a softening of the bones caused by a severe lack of vitamin D and calcium. ‘This can lead to a bending of the bones under the weight of the body and the application of normal muscular pressure. Hence the bow-legged appearance of children suffering from malnutrition, and the flattening of their ribs, which can contract their chest cavity, so that their liver is pushed outward, causing the distinctive “pot-belly” of the underfed.’ Rickets, the report continued, was also responsible for the high, square, intellectual-looking heads of starving children, along with their small-featured faces. Their teeth generally appeared late, and rotted away early.
Scurvy, or scorbutus, was another risk. Although it was very well known that scurvy was caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, and although in normal times it could rapidly and easily be cured, there was now a danger that many Americans would have to go without fresh fruit and vegetables for anything up to six months, and that would leave them ‘wide open’ to infection. The symptoms included bleeding gums, stinking breath, extravasations of blood in the skin, and even bleeding from the eyes, nose and anus. Scurvy patients were liable to suffer anaemia, agonising ulcers on their arms and legs, and, if they were still untreated, exhaustion, chronic diarrhoea, and fatal failure of the lungs or kidneys.
The medical report remarked that ‘the United States is now inevitably entering a period of disease and death that can only be described as medieval.’
At 6.35 a.m., the Vice-President took two sleeping-pills and went to bed on a cot in the small room adjoining the Oval Office. He asked to be woken at 10.35 a.m. precisely.
Through the bullet-proof glass of the White House windows, with their unreal submarine tint, he was unable to hear the brief rattles of heavy machine-gun fire over by the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
Eleven
Season Hardesty opened her eyes and tried to focus. She had taken three of Vee’s little green pills last night, and her vision was blurred, like five melted varieties of ice cream. Then the pink blurs resolved themselves into price tags, and the white blurs resolved themselves into empty supermarket shelves, and the yellow blurs became posters, advertising six-packs of Ale-8-One.
Season lifted the blanket. Next to her, cocooned in a large blue bath-towel, Sally was still sleeping, her thumb poised a half-inch away from her open mouth. Ever since they had left Kansas, Sally had taken up sucking her thumb again, and no amount of nagging or cajoling had been able to stop her. She never said out loud that she missed her Daddy, but there was something in her eyes which Season couldn’t fail to recognise.
She sat up. All around her, people were huddled in blankets and towels and even sheets of cardboard. The early sunlight was sloping through the small high windows of the supermarket so that it looked like the nave of a church; and since it was now the sanctuary of the Church of the Practical Miracle of Los Angeles, Inc., the holy atmosphere was appropriate. There were 120 people here – men, women, and children – the majority of them from Granger Hughes’s congregation, although Mike Bull and his staff had managed to bring in most of their immediate families too.
Season had resisted coming to the Hughes market on Highland until the last possible moment. The pain and humiliation she had suffered at the hands of Oxnard and his Angels had enraged her, disoriented her, and frightened her more than she could have considered possible. She wondered if she would ever be able to carry on a normal relationship with a man again. She could hardly speak to Granger, and even Carl unsettled her. Every time he put his arm around her to reassure her, she thought what does he want?
If there had been no famine crisis, she would have immediately sought the guidance of Vee’s analyst, and tried to learn to live with the shock of her experience by joining a post-rape encounter group. The irony was that she had been discussing the subject on Monday with a woman who lived across the road in Topanga Canyon. The woman’s daughter had been raped at the age of fifteen by two blacks, out at Griffith Park, and it had taken her three years of intensive and argumentative therapy to make her understand that she herself hadn’t been to blame. These days, though, the girl carried a .38 in her pocketbook.