Famine Read online

  More Horror from Graham Masterton

  BLACK ANGEL

  DEATH MASK

  DEATH TRANCE

  EDGEWISE

  HEIRLOOM

  PREY

  RITUAL

  SPIRIT

  TENGU

  THE CHOSEN CHILD

  THE SPHINX

  UNSPEAKABLE

  WALKERS

  MANITOU BLOOD

  REVENGE OF THE MANITOU

  IKON

  SACRIFICE

  THE SWEETMAN CURVE

  The Katie Maguire Series

  WHITE BONES

  BROKEN ANGELS

  RED LIGHT

  TAKEN FOR DEAD

  BLOOD SISTERS

  BURIED

  LIVING DEATH

  DEAD GIRLS DANCING

  DEAD MEN WHISTLING

  THE LAST DROP OF BLOOD

  The Scarlet Widow Series

  SCARLET WIDOW

  THE COVEN

  Standalones

  GHOST VIRUS

  Famine

  Graham Masterton

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1981 by Sphere Books

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1981

  The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781838935757

  Head of Zeus

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Book Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  WHAT MAKES A MAN TURN INTO A MURDERER OVERNIGHT?

  FAMINE

  The Greek-looking man said: ‘This food in here—you think that you’re going to keep it all to yourself? All of it? Just because you’re a storekeeper you think you’ve got some God-given right to survive while everybody else starves?’

  Nicolas didn’t even want to think about it. He said: ‘I’m giving you three. You understand me? Three, and then I shoot.’

  The first shot missed. The revolver bucked in his hands, and he heard the bang of broken glass at the back of the store, followed by a sudden rush of green olives from three broken jars. He fired again before he could allow himself to think, and the Greek’s shoulder burst apart in a spray of gory catsup. And then there was a deep, deafening bavvooom! and Nicolas realized with strange slow horror that the Greek had fired back at him with his shotgun, and that he’d been hit, badly hit, in the belly and the thighs…

  ‘They are as sick that surfeit with too much.

  As they that starve with nothing.’

  —Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

  Book One

  One

  He was crossing the red-asphalt yard in front of the farmhouse when he heard a car-horn blaring from the direction of the north-west gate. He shifted the saddle he was carrying to his right arm and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the dazzling scarlet glare of the setting sun. A Jeep Wagoneer was bouncing along the track towards him, stirring up a high trail of shining dust, and whoever was driving it was in enough of a panic to ignore South Burlington Farm’s strict 5 mph speed limit.

  He laid the saddle down on the ground as the Jeep squealed and bucked to a stop in front of him. The door swung open and out scrambled his cereal-crop manager, Willard Noakes, as quickly as if the Jeep were about to explode. He was one of those skinny, awkward, jerky kind of people, Willard Noakes, and Season had once compared him to a Swiss army knife. ‘He seems to have so many arms and legs. He can open a door, and light a cigarette, and knock over a mug of coffee, and scratch his head, all at one time,’ she had laughed.

  But there was nothing funny or awkward about the way Willard hurried across to him now. Willard’s bony, sun-leathered face was smudged with dirt and there was dust in his walrus moustache. He said: ‘Ed, you’d best come quick. And I mean quick. It’s something real serious.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Willard?’ Ed asked him. ‘You came down that track like Evel Knievel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ed. But it’s something you got to see.’

  ‘An accident? Someone hurt?’

  ‘Well, you could call it some kind of accident, although I’m darned if I know what sort. And if anybody’s going to get themselves hurt, it’s going to be you.’

  ‘Okay.’ Ed raised his arm and beckoned to one of his engineering hands, who was hunkered outside of the garage, cleaning out a fuel-oil pump. The man laid down his tools and came across the yard, wiping his hands on a rag.

  ‘You wanted something, Mr Hardesty?’

  ‘Yes, please, Ben. Take this saddle into the house for me, would you, and make sure it’s hung up right. And tell Mrs Hardesty I might be a half-hour late.’

  ‘Sure thing, Mr Hardesty.’

  Ed climbed up into the Jeep’s passenger seat while Willard started the engine. They swung around the yard and then headed back towards the north-west gate, past the stables and the garages, and out through the white-painted fence.

  The Jeep’s FM radio was playing Coward of the County, almost inaudibly. Ed reached across and switched it off.

  ‘You want to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked Willard.

  Willard glanced at him. They were driving along the wide dusty track that ran beside one of their finest stands of shellbark hickories, and then out across the twenty-three thousand acre expanse of South Burlington’s northern wheatfields. The sun was almost melted away now, except for one smouldering crimson crescent and the miles of ripening wheat appeared to be an odd bright pink.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Willard, unhappily. ‘I think maybe you’d better see it for yourself. I don’t drink I’m competent to judge.’

  ‘You’re not competent? How competent do you think I am?’ demanded Ed. ‘You’ve been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I’ve been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day.’

  Willard thought about that and then shrugged. ‘All I can say is. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve never even heard about anything like it before. But I’m not asking you
to take a look at it because I think you might know what it is. I’m sine you won’t. I’m asking you to take a look at it because it’s your farm.’

  ‘Is it the crops?’

  Willard nodded. ‘I can’t even describe it, Ed. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean that. Forty years or not.’

  The Jeep sped them across the flat, early-evening landscape. The sky faded gradually from a florid rose-colour to a dusky ceramic blue and a cold and creamy moon hung above the horizon. Ed sat sideways in his seat, his arm slung over the back, watching his fields revolve slowly around him.

  His fields. He still couldn’t quite believe it. The idea that he actually owned all eighty-five thousand acres of South Burlington Farm – the idea that each handful of dirt he could dig his fingers into for more than ten miles was his own personal property – it all seemed like a strange waking fantasy.

  South Burlington had always been his father’s, by ownership and by deed and by that special kind of title that only a lifetime of sweat and pain and sheer arrogance can earn. His father, Dan Hardesty, had been short, stocky, and pugnacious, a tough little bustling pig in Levis. He had built his farm by aggressive mechanisation, shrewd marketing, ruthless buying of agricultural real-estate, and by never sleeping for more than four hours a night.

  To Ed, and to Ed’s mother, and to Ed’s older brother Michael, the old man had seemed to be immortal and indestructible and it was only when he had collapsed from a stroke in the middle of last year’s harvesting, felled in one of his own fields under a sky like boiling blue ink, that the family had come to understand at last that he wasn’t going to live for ever. Dan Hardesty, the creator of South Burlington Farm, the wealthiest, toughest man in Kingman County, Kansas, was only days away from death, and someone was going to have to take over.

  Michael, as stubby and proud as his father, had been the legal and natural successor. During his teenage years, Michael had stayed on the farm, learning the modem and computerised business of growing wheat, while Ed, who was tall and wiry and thoughtful, like his maternal grandfather, gravitated away from the farm, and then the county, and eventually, the state. In the years of Kennedy and Johnson, flower-power and Vietnam, Ed had gone to Kansas University in Manhattan, Kansas, on a financial study course and then to Columbia Business College, and eventually made his way to New York, where he had been taken on by a smart new investment corporation called Blyth, Thalberg & Wong.

  As a boy, Ed had always disliked the farm – maybe for no other reason than he knew it was never going to be his. The farm was all dust and heat and just like his father had been demanding of his mother, he had been equally demanding of Ed, as if he was trying to test him, and maybe break him. Whenever Ed had tried to slip out on a date with one of the girls from the neighbouring farms, or from town, his father had invariably caught him at the gate and given him some last-minute chore like folding sacks or sweeping up dust, so that if he ever made it to the girl’s house, he was always at least an hour late and perspiring, and prickly as a scarecrow with wheat chaff. One pretty and unkind young girl had nicknamed him Li’l Abner.

  On the day before Dan Hardesty’s funeral, however, as the family were solemnly gathered on the farm to pay their last respects to the man who had built their lives for them, Ed’s whole existence had been turned upside down. Michael had been obliged to drive over to Wichita late in the afternoon for an urgent meeting with the bank. On the way back, just after midnight, he had tried to overtake a truck on route 54 where it crossed the South Ninnescah River, and he had failed to see another car coming towards him in the mist. The Kansas Highway Patrol had estimated the collision speed to be 125 mph, head-on.

  Henry Pollock, the bald and breathy family accountant, had taken Ed aside after his father’s burial and said: ‘If you want South Burlington, son, it’s all yours. You only have to say the word.’

  He remembered glancing across towards Season, who had been standing a little way away from the family crowd in her black veil and her black suit like a beautiful and elegant raven; and he remembered thinking – she knows that Pollock’s offering me the farm, and she knows that I’m going to have to say yes. Why doesn’t she come across and support me? Why doesn’t she take my arm and say it’s all right?

  Well, he knew now why she hadn’t, he thought to himself, as Willard drove the Jeep across the pale reaches of ripening wheat. He sure knew now.

  Willard switched on the Jeep’s headlights. ‘The worst of it’s just about a half-mile up ahead, right over there, to the left. Do you mind if I take her staight across the wheat?’

  ‘If you have to,’ Ed told him. His father had always gone apoplectic with fury if he found tyre-tracks across the fields, and Ed had tried to keep the same rule about respecting the crops. There was only one way to run a farm like South Burlington, and that was efficient and hard, and with no favours to anyone. He sat uncomfortably in his seat, while Willard veered off the road and drove through the tall, rustling crops.

  ‘I don’t make a habit of this, Ed, I can tell you,’ said Willard, as if he sensed his employer’s discomfort.

  Ed didn’t answer, and for a short while there was nothing but the whining sound of the Jeep’s transmission, the pattering of wheat ears on the bodywork and the occasional tap of a moth on the windshield. Ed thought: if you could drive a car into the ocean, this is what it would be like.

  Willard was leaning forward in his seat now and straining his eyes to see where he was. Eventually, a white marker stick appeared through the twilight and a flashlight was waved at them. Willard turned the Jeep in a semi-circle and stopped it. They climbed out into the warm, breezy night.

  ‘Hi, Mr Hardesty,’ said the man with the flashlight. ‘Glad you could make it so quick.’

  ‘Hi, Jack,’ said Ed. ‘Willard just caught me going into supper. What goes on here?’

  Jack Marowitz was one of Ed’s senior farm managers. He was young – only twenty-eight – but he had a silo-full of honours from the Iowa State University of Science and Technology in the agricultural uses of advanced chemistry, automation and computer techniques. It was Jack’s job to make sure that what grew in the fields came out of those fields in optimum condition and was delivered to the right place at exactly the right moment Jack could plan the harvesting of ten thousand acres down to the last half-hour.

  He was quiet, almost diffident, with a thick brown head of hair and Coke-bottle glasses, but Ed liked him because he didn’t rant and rave and he did his job well.

  Jack held up an ear of wheat in the palm of his hand and directed his flashlight on it.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked Ed. Ed peered at it closely, arid then poked it with his finger.

  ‘It’s rotten,’ he said. ‘The whole damned thing’s rotten.’

  The ear of wheat was blackened and every grain inside it was dark and slimy with decay. Ed took it out of Jack’s hand and sniffed it, and he could smell a distinctly sour odour, like whisky mash.

  ‘It appears to me like some kind of blight,’ said Jack. ‘The only trouble is, what kind? It certainly isn’t rust, arid it sure as hell isn’t smut.’

  Ed stood straight and looked around. ‘How much of the crop’s been affected?’ he asked. ‘Maybe it’s just some localised soil complaint. Maybe these seeds weren’t dressed.’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem,’ put in Willard. ‘And that’s why I wanted you to come take a look for yourself. It covers something like five acres at the moment, but it’s spreading.’

  Ed took the flashlight from Jack and walked a little way out into the wheat. He shone the beam this way and that, quickly, and every way he shone it, he saw the same thing. The ears of wheat were drooping on their stalks and they were all dark brown with decay. The smell of sourness was carried on the breeze, and under the light of that pale and emotionless moon, silently suspended on the horizon, Ed felt as if the world had subtly changed position on its axis, as if things would never be quite the same again.

 
; ‘You never saw anything like this at Ames?’ he asked Jack, switching off the flashlight and walking back.

  ‘Nothing at all. And, believe me, I saw some pretty grotesque stuff.’

  ‘When did you spot it?’

  ‘Round about two this afternoon,’ Willard explained. ‘We were making out the harvesting rota, just along the track there-a-ways. I was standing on the roof of the Jeep, looking around to see how the crops were lying, what with all those winds we’ve been having and all – and I could see a dark patch from the road. At first I thought it was the shadow from a cloud. But when it didn’t move, like the other shadows did – well, then I knew there was something wrong.’

  Two this afternoon?’ asked Ed. ‘It’s only eight now. How can you tell if it’s spreading?’

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘At two this afternoon, it was only covering two to three acres.’

  ‘What do you mean? You mean it’s spread two acres in six hours? That’s crazy.’

  Willard’s expression was indistinguishable in the dusk, but Ed could tell from the tone of his voice that he was embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid it’s true, Ed. We didn’t measure exactly, or nothing like that. But it seems like it’s going through the wheat like some kind of a slow fire.’

  Ed stood silent for a while, his hand over his mouth, staring at the dark patch of decaying wheat in the middle of his field. If the blight could spread at the rate of two acres in six hours, that meant it could eat up eight acres a day at the very least. The danger was that as the circumference of the blighted area increased, so the speed at which the disease burned up his crops would increase. Willard was right. It was just like a slow fire.

  ‘Let’s get in the Jeep,’ Ed suggested at last. ‘Then let’s circle the affected wheat and see how much of a problem we’ve got on our hands. I want to watch this blight in action. I want to see it actually spreading.’

  They climbed into the Wagoneer, and Willard started up the engine.

  ‘Make sure you only drive over unblighted wheat,’ Ed told him. ‘If it’s any kind of a fungus, I don’t want it spread around the farm on the tyres of your Jeep.’