‘Yes, sir,’ said Dave, his eyes hidden behind mirror sunglasses. Then he U-tumed the Pontiac around, and sped off east.
‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘Let’s press on.’
Shearson put in, ‘There’s no chance of breakfast, I suppose. The merest soupçon of canned pork roll?’
‘I see your tastes are beginning to adapt,’ Ed told him, climbing back into the wagon. ‘We’ll have you dreaming of M&Ms before the day’s out’
Twelve
Saturday was the first day of the final collapse of American society. Millions of people, most of them used to two or three substantial meals a day, now hadn’t eaten properly for three days. They were still strong enough to resist opening cans suspected of containing botulism, but few were so fussy about foods that might have been irradiated by cobalt-60. They were so convinced that ‘something would turn up’, and that they wouldn’t have to survive on contaminated rations for more than a few days that they decided to risk it.
Something might have turned up, if the looting and the burning hadn’t inflicted such grievous damage on the cities and the towns and the countryside, and if the National Guard and the Army had been able to devote their energies to distributing food and organising new crop programmes. But hunger and fear had broken down everything that had held the United States together. Brotherhood, E Pluribus Unum, had been a luxury that only affluence had been able to sustain. Now, each racial and ethnic and class community turned in on itself for protection, and within days the nation was tribalised.
On Saturday afternoon, declaring New York State a War Zone – the ninth state in two days – the Vice-President said that ‘twenty years of Civil Rights struggle had vanished in twenty minutes, as if it had never been.’ He added that ‘those people who are dying today are showing us that John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died in vain.’
Although interstate communications were now severely disrupted, and it was impossible to make an accurate count, it was estimated by the besieged Department of Health that somewhere between two and three thousand Americans died of botulism during Friday night.
Worse – hunger was beginning to affect the morale of the armed forces. Men of the 101st Airborne division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, refused to go to the assistance of beleagured National Guardsmen in Lexington until they were issued with rations. Deserters walked off camps and air bases in their hundreds, many taking their weapons with them. Five men of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were shot at Fort Bliss, Texas, for attempting to hijack a tank.
Flying across Illinois in a private plane, with special permission from the Air Force, Dan Rather broadcast one of the most moving reports of the whole famine. He talked about, ‘Acre upon acre of blackened fields… with grey smoke rising everywhere, like the fires of a primitive, prehistoric age…’ He was in tears as he finished his report with a prayer for the future.
The President, weak but improving, was released on Saturday evening from hospital. After he was briefed by his advisers on the national famine situation, and on the prospects of expediting aid from other countries, he asked about the freight train of supplies that was supposed to have come into Washington to help support the administration.
He was told gravely that it had been attacked by vigilantes, and burned. Bill Brinsky of The New York Times had appeared on television Wednesday night, and revealed ‘exclusively’ that the White House had arranged to feed top officials from secret stores of food, just as Ed Hardesty had claimed. As a result, angry mobs of black looters had raided each of the warehouses where government food was stored, and destroyed it or carried it off. ‘Perhaps our only consolation is that we didn’t have time to check the food for botulism or radiation,’ said the Vice-President.
‘You call that a consolation?’ asked the President, with tired but offended dignity. ‘The very least of our countrymen doesn’t deserve to die like a rat.’
The President’s economic adviser said later, ‘The President always finds it easier to be expansive when the worst has already come to the worst. By God, if he’d heard Bill Brinsky’s broadcast for himself, he probably would have had a heart seizure.’
During that first briefing, one report from the Pentagon went unnoticed. It lay on the President’s desk amongst a whole sheaf of papers on disease and medical treatment. It said, simply, ‘We are seriously concerned at this time about the preparedness of the United States to defend itself against pre-emptive military strikes from hostiles.’
The President was too tired, too confused, too hopeless, to read it and realise what it really meant.
Thirteen
By first light on Sunday morning, the mob around the Hughes Supermarket had swelled to five or six hundred people. Season, unable to sleep, had been watching them gather. They were Hollywood suburbanites mostly – ordinary men and women who lived in the quiet small houses on Yucca Avenue and Orange Grove Avenue and Oporto Drive. They hadn’t shouted or screamed or made much of a noise as they assembled around the fires of broken boxes and pieces of timber that had kept them warm during the night. But their very quietness had been menacing. They were people whose ordinary comfortable lifestyles had been abruptly taken away from them in the space of a few frightening days and now they wanted a share of what was left. They had already tom down the wooden cross that Granger Hughes had erected by the newspaper machines on the sidewalk and burned it. Now, in the grey haze of dawn, they surrounded the building in their chequered golf pants and their Bermuda shorts and their canary-yellow suntops, plain people who believed they had a right to survive.
Granger Hughes, in his white kaftan, came up to join Season at the window.
‘Pretty frightening, isn’t it?’ asked Season.
Granger shielded his eyes against the reflections in the glass. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t think it’s frightening. They’re all part of God’s flock, just as we are.’
‘If you think that, why are all of your friends sitting on all of this food, and why are we keeping them out?’
‘Someone has to carry on the Word,’ replied Granger. ‘Someone has to stay alive to keep the Lord’s teachings alive in the new world that must follow.’
Season looked at him for a while. Then she said hesitantly, ‘Granger? Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Okay? Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean any offence. It’s just that you’ve been acting kind of– I don’t know, spaced out.’
He stared at her, perplexed, but then he smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, in a voice that sounded more like the man she had first met, the man who had come around to Topanga Canyon to make love to her, ‘it isn’t often that an Old Testament situation actually happens for real, is it? I mean, this is a real Biblical workout for anybody’s faith. What next? Locusts? Seven fat kine, seven lean kine? Plague?’
Season turned and looked out at the silent crowds of people. The sun was up now, and they had let their fires burn down. They stood like ghosts of American suburbia amidst the drifting smoke. There was movement amongst them – shuffling, and rippling, as if they were trying to summon up enough courage to make a rush for the front of the supermarket.
‘I don’t know about tests of faith,’ Season whispered. ‘All I know is that I’ve never been so frightened in my life.’ Mike Bull came up, rolling up his shirtsleeves. He was already growing the beginnings of a beard.