‘You’re fired,’ said Shearson.
‘No way,’ Karen told him. ‘I quit your employ the night I found out about the Blight Crisis Appeal.’
Shearson tugged his shirt out of his waistband, and used it to wipe the sweat away from his neck. ‘I don’t know which irritates me more,’ he remarked. ‘Perspiration, or naïveté.’
Ed listened to this bickering without comment. He was still thinking about last night, and their hectic escape from the South Burlington Farm. In his mind’s eye, as he drove along the uneven blacktop to Liberal, he could see the roof of the old farmhouse flaring up, and the bedroom drapes flapping and flying from the windows like fiery wings.
After their first attack the raiders had eased off their gunfire for an hour or two; and at one time Ed was convinced that they must have retreated. Maybe one or two of them had been hit by shotgun blasts. Maybe they had decided that besieging the farm wasn’t worth the hassle, just for a few supplies. But shortly before dawn, the garages and stables across the yard had suddenly burst into flames, and Ed had realised that the raiders had been doing nothing more than regrouping and planning a final assault.
Fortunately, Ed had been almost ready to pull out by then. The two hours of ceasefire had enabled him to assign twelve men to loading the cars and the wagons, and the convoy was only short of a couple of cases of canned fruit when the raiders attacked in force. All the farmworkers and their families has scrambled into their vehicles, and they had driven out of the farmyard without lights, letting off shotgun blasts in all directions in a racketing parade, like Chinese New Year.
It had all been over in a few seconds. There had been a light, inaccurate spray of sub-machine gun fire in retaliation, which had broken the side window of the last car in the convoy, but that had been all. It was only a mile to the front entrance of South Burlington Farm, and even a heavily-laden wagon driving at forty mph can cover a mile in one and a half minutes.
What had hurt Ed more than anything else, though, had been the sight in his rear-view mirror of the farmhouse, blazing from verandah to roof like a galleon burning at sea. He had been brought up in that house; and apart from the family treasures stored in the attic, the old Hardesty photograph albums dating back to Edwardian days, there were a thousand memories in that house for Ed, from the strange patterns that were cast on the wall by the tiny stained-glass window on the upstairs landing, to the last rail on the back verandah, which he had worn smooth as a boy from riding as his pretend horse. It was like watching his whole childhood burn, the whole reason for his coming back from New York and setting up as a farmer. And as he turned out of the farm entrance, and drove into the darkness, he knew just why ordinary mortals should stay well out of politics and power, and never try to cross men like Senator Shearson Jones.
Liberal, Kansas, was deserted as they drove through. A gas station on the outskirts was still smouldering, and there were dead bodies lying on the forecourt, clouded in flies. They drove on, and crossed the state line into Oklahoma at 12.55 p.m.
Occasionally, they picked up random CB messages. But it was clear that most CB channels had been taken over by marauding groups of looters, and when Ed tried appealing to ‘Blue Lightning’ for advice on highway conditions through New Mexico, there was a suspicious silence, followed by the enquiry, ‘Where are you? Where you headed? You got any food with you?’
Ed had shut off the CB and glanced across at Della. Della had shrugged, and said, ‘We’re on our own. I guess we just have to realise that.’
It took the convoy three hours to cross the Oklahoma panhandle, stopping to open cans of corned beef just beyond Optima. Ed appointed two of his farmworkers as lookouts, but there was nothing to be seen but dust and sun. At a few minutes before four o’clock, they crossed into Texas at Texhoma, and started the 120-mile diagonal trek across the north-west tip of the panhandle.
A few miles into New Mexico, the Mercury Marquis started blowing steam and ground to a halt. The convoy stopped under a sky the colour of violet cachous while one of South Burlington’s mechanics took a look under the hood. Ed stood by, smoking a cigarette, his dark hair ruffled by the warm evening wind. One of the children, a boy of five in a grubby yellow T-shirt, was sitting a few feet away, his face still dirty with tears, watching Ed solemnly.
Della came up, holding the pump-gun in the crook of her arm. She stood silently beside him for a while, and then she said, ‘It wasn’t your fault you know, all of this. Whatever you’d said on television, it wouldn’t have made any difference. You understand that, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘Right now. I’m too tired to think about it.’
‘You’re worried about your wife?’
He nodded. ‘I keep worrying about everybody else’s wives and families, too.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. Don’t you see that? This famine was going to happen whether you announced it on prime-time television or not.’
‘I guess you’re right. The sick thing is that somebody started it deliberately. The blight, and the radiation, and the food poisoning. And, brother, didn’t they make sure they got to every source of food you could think of. Crops, grain, canned foods, frozen foods, you name it. I mean, we’re checking every damned can for pinholes, but supposing we miss one?’
Della said, ‘Maybe we deserved it. The famine, I mean.’ Ed looked at her. ‘I hope you’re kidding,’ he said. ‘Because whatever the politicians get up to, no kid deserves to be sitting on that rock like that kid over there, with no food and no secure future, when he should be home having his supper and getting ready for bed.’
‘You think the Russians did this?’ asked Della.
‘I don’t know who the hell did it. I’m not sure that I care. All I know is that the whole thing is totally squalid, totally underhand, and if I could lay my hands on just one of the people responsible. I’d screw their head off.’
Della shielded her eyes, and looked up at the dark purple sky, and the birds which circled above them with tireless patience.
‘It’s like the end of the world,’ she said, quietly.
Ed’s mechanics managed to get the Mercury to limp at fifteen mph as far as Tucumcari. There, its cooling system gave out completely, and the seven people who had been riding in it stood around like relatives at a funeral while Dyson Kane poked inside the steamy hood again, and pronounced it dead.
‘We just don’t have the spares,’ he said. ‘And it looks like the whole engine’s been damaged beyond repair. I’m afraid it’s RIP.’
Ed and Dyson left everybody beside the highway while they drove around Tucumcari, looking for abandoned cars or wagons. They found three, but all three of them were wrecked, or had wheels missing. There was only one reasonable-looking vehicle in the whole place, a shiny 1968 Cadillac parked outside an odd asbestos and corrugated-iron house in a sloping street with a view of Tucumcari Peak. It was almost dark now, and they were getting desperate.
Dyson jumped down from the Chevy and quickly crossed the street to where the Cadillac was parked.
‘It’s locked,’ he called, trying the handle. ‘Maybe I can open it up with a length of wire.’
Ed looked around the untidy interior of the wagon. There was a wire coat-hanger in back, and he leaned over the seat to reach for it. He heard a snap, like someone slamming a book shut, and at first he thought it was his seat mounting, clicking into place. But then he looked up and saw Dyson huddled up on the road beside the Cadillac, with a dark river of blood already sliding across the dusty blacktop from a wound in his head.
Ed immediately ducked low in his seat, and reached for his automatic. He couldn’t find it. Either it had slid backwards into the garbage on the floor, or someone had taken it. Peter Kaiser, maybe, when he wasn’t looking? There was another snap, and a high-powered bullet pinged off the hub of the offside front wheel.