‘You’ll just have to let them strip it. I’m sorry, mister, but we simply don’t have the manpower. I’m sorry.’

Mike didn’t know what else to say, how else he could plead. He held the phone in his hand for a moment, listening to the sergeant say, ‘Hello? Are you still there? Hello?’ But then he laid it back in its cradle.

‘What did they say?’ Tony asked him.

‘They said they’d do their best. It turns out that every supermarket in Los Angeles is being tom apart the same way. Four supermarkets are burning.’

‘Mother of God,’ said Tony, in a hushed voice.

Gina, the Mexican check-out girl, looked up from comforting Wendy. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do? Those people out there, they’ve gone crazy.’

Tony went close to the window. ‘They haven’t reached the stockroom yet. But I guess it’s only a matter of time.’

‘Is the stockroom locked?’ asked Mike.

Tony nodded. It was always locked. He made sure of that, personally. He combed his hair a lot, and yawned a lot when he was making out shelf inventories, but he never failed to obey instructions.

Mike joined him at the window. They couldn’t quite see the stockroom door from the office, but they could see the corner of the frozen dairy foods cabinet next to it. There was a pushing waltzing scrum of people there, and the floor was plastered with pink yogurt.

They heard a rattling noise, and they knew that the crowds were trying to pull down the stockroom door.

‘If we want to keep that food intact, we’re going to have to do something fast,’ said Tony. ‘That’s a pretty good lock on there, but it won’t hold them out for ever.’

Mike covered his mouth with his hand. Halfway up the hardware aisle, a woman lay doubled-up on the floor, bleeding and sick. Another woman was walking unevenly through the crowds that still milled around the supermarket, her hair awry and her eyes staring.

‘I have an idea,’ said Mike. ‘Gina – pass that sack of waste-paper, will you?’

An hour ago, Mike had been irritated to find that the cleaner hadn’t taken the plastic bag of trash away. It was nothing more than crumpled-up wrapping paper, out-of-date invoices, used carbon paper, and string. But it would suit his present purpose just fine. He carried it to the office door, propped it up against his legs, and then reached in his pocket for matches.

‘You’re going to set fire to the place?’ asked Tony.

‘Just a limited fire, I hope,’ Mike told him. ‘Enough smoke and enough yelling to get these people out of here.’