It was a brushfire, high up on Woodland Hills, between Ventura Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, that at last changed Season’s mind about staying in the house. It had probably been started by someone’s house burning, although under normal circumstances the fire department would almost certainly have been able to catch it before it spread to the surrounding hills. Now there was no fire department, and by early evening, with a dry north-easterly wind blowing, the sky over Los Encinos Park and all the woods around was dark with smoke. Carl had gone up to Season’s bedroom, where Season had been lying on her bed in a fetal position, with a half-empty bottle of Old Grandad beside her, and said, ‘Can you smell that? That’s smoke. The whole canyon’s alight, and we’re going to have to move.’
Season hadn’t looked at him. ‘Do we have to throw in our lot with Granger Hughes?’ she asked. ‘Is that really necessary? Can’t we make a run for it on our own?’
Carl had shaken his head. ‘We wouldn’t stay alive for twelve hours, not on our own. It’s wolf-pack time, out in the open. Come on, Season, I think I understand something of what you’re feeling. I understand how violated you feel. But there’s nobody around you now who wishes you anything but warmth and healing.’
Season had sat up, and scratched her blonde hair with both hands. ‘I guess the worse thing was that I had a revelation. I suddenly realised that all men who enter a woman’s body by force, or by blackmail, or by any means apart from love and consent, are rapists. Criminal intruders. Unfortunately, the law in California says that you’re only trespassing when seventy five per cent of your body is inside of someone’s premises, so I guess that lets rapists out.’
‘Season,’ Carl had warned her.
‘I know,’ Season had nodded. ‘This isn’t going to do me any good. But what the hell is?’
She had sniffed, and smelled smoke. ‘Is the canyon really burning?’
‘It’s burning. We’re all packed up, and ready to leave.’
‘Is Sally dressed?’
‘She’s all ready. Come on. Season, this is the only way.’ Season had stood up. ‘I guess,’ she agreed, clutching herself closely, as if a window had suddenly swung open, and chilled her in an unexpected breeze.
Now, here they were in the Hughes supermarket, along with 116 other people, all strangers; along with two toilets, two washbasins, 1440 cakes of shower soap, twenty-eight cases of assorted toothpaste, and more family-sized detergents than Season had seen together in one place in her life. Since Wednesday night, Mike Bull had been working out on his office calculator an optimum practical diet for his 120 charges – a diet which would give each of them as varied and healthful an intake of food as possible – and yet which would eke out the supplies in the supermarket’s stockroom for the longest time. The electricity supply was out, and so they had been forced to throw away all their chilled meat, frozen vegetables, and fish. And Mike Bull had spent an arduous two days sorting through every single container of canned foods, setting aside every one of them which had been packed in the last twenty-one days. Unlike Ed, however, he didn’t open them up and dump them. He labelled them clearly SUSPECT and shifted them out of sight. He reckoned that a time could well come when people were going to be hungry enough to take the risk of contracting botulism, especially if they were going to die of starvation anyway.
Tony, Mike’s under-manager, had been put in charge of security. In the early part of the week, there had been a temporary police encampment on the dusty triangle of asphalt just opposite, where Franklin and Highland intersected. There had been two patrol cars, a machine-gun emplacement with sandbags, and a couple of roving motorcyclists; and although they had been positioned there to intercept looters who were trying to escape north on to the Hollywood Freeway, their presence had kept scavengers and looters well away from the battered supermarket.
Now, however, the police had been pulled back to headquarters, and the post was deserted. The looters were back, in vicious little droves of a dozen at a time. Tony had barricaded the rear exit doors with piles of wooden pallets, snopping carts, and stockroom junk. Even if the looters managed to break the locked steel-and-glass doors, they would be caught in a ceiling-high tangle of metal banding and splintered wood that would catch them as effectively as barbed wire.
The front doors, already cracked and broken from Sunday night’s rioting, had been locked, and then the steel railings which separated the checkout desks had been unscrewed from their original positions, and slotted through the door-handles to prevent anyone from pushing them open.
Tony had cleared an area of five or six feet in front of the doors, and this was his ‘no-go’ zone. Anyone who managed to break into the supermarket as far as this would find themselves in a crossfire between Tony, with a .22 target pistol, and Gina’s uncle, with a scatter-gun. That was all the firepower they had, since not one of the congregation of the Church of the Practical Miracle had brought a gun, or even owned one. Carl had a .38, which he had kept to scare off burglars, but only one round of ammunition. Tony had grinned, and slapped him on the back, and told him, ‘make every shot count, huh?’
That Friday morning, one by one, the people lying on the supermarket floor in their blankets were waking up. They stretched and yawned and blinked at each other, and in every face Season saw that moment of waking realisation – Oh, I’m not at home, in my own bed. I’m here, in this besieged community of fellow refugees. She also sensed a distinct a’I’mosphere of growing hostility between the people here, a resentment at being cooped up in awkward and embarrassing contact. Before the famine, most of the members of the church had been enthusiastic about Practical Miracles because the notion was innovative, fun, and always proved to be a conversation-stopper. ‘You actually believe in miracles?’ their dinner hostesses would say. ‘You can walk on water, that kind of thing?’ And they would answer, ‘Well, it’s been done before. No reason why it shouldn’t be done again.’ They hadn’t joined the church because they were passionate and like-minded believers. They’d joined it because it was fashionable, and cute, and now the shallowness of their Christianity was beginning to show. There had been fierce arguments on the morning bathroom line already, ‘Christ – you’ve taken hours – and now the whole john stinks!’ There had been wrangles over privacy, ‘Are you staring at my wife, buddy?’ And, inevitably, there had been petty jealousies over rations, ‘How come that guy has two tomatoes and we only have the one?’
Granger Hughes, however, was untouched by his followers’ materialistic squabbling. If anything, the siege in the supermarket had made him even more spiritual than before. That morning, as everybody awoke, he walked up and down the aisles in a white cotton kaftan, his hands extended, nodding to each of his disciples and blessing their day. As he came to the end of the one-time canned vegetable counter, where Season was sitting up against the wall, watching over Sally, he paused, and stood above her, with the sun gilding his hair like a California halo.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.