Ed looked around at the other workers who had been travelling in the broken-down Mercury. Old Mrs Tilsley, who had given him fresh-baked cookies from her cottage window-sill when he was young, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Keith Perks; Henry and Susan Carlsson, who had come to work at South Burlington after their own farm in Dighton had gone bankrupt.

God, he thought, it had been easy enough to accept responsibility for these people when he had been threatening Senator Jones with his automatic. But now they were looking to him to guide them through the worst disaster of their whole lives; and he wasn’t at all sure he was strong enough or even willing enough. He had left his own mother behind someplace. There hadn’t been time to go look for her. And apart from his mother, there were Season and Sally, in Los Angeles, who might even be dead for all he knew; and Jack Marowitz, and Willard Noakes, and Dyson Kane, who had all been butchered; and the Muldoon brothers, who had been doing nothing at all but their job. And everybody else across the breadth of the United States who had died in the riots and the looting that had followed his sanctimonious revelation of Shearson’s little bit of business on the side.

If I’d just been adult enough to keep my mouth shut, he thought, then maybe the President would have had time to cope with the situation as it broke. If I’d thought the whole thing through before I started shooting my mouth off. If only Shearson hadn’t asked me to be his ‘representative farmer.’

He said, quietly, ‘You’re sure you’re prepared to stay? We’ll send a car back just as soon as we find one.’

‘We’ll stay,’ said Henry Carlsson, in a firm voice. ‘I don’t expect there’ll be a whole lot of danger around here. It looks like everything’s been pretty thoroughly looted in any case.’

‘All right, then,’ said Ed. ‘The rest of us will move on. Do you need extra shotgun cartridges, anything like that?’

‘We’ll manage,’ Henry Carlsson assured him.

So, twenty minutes later, the depleted convoy drove off into the darkness, leaving seven people behind them. Ed glanced in his rearview mirror and saw them signal a quick goodbye with a flashlight.

In the back of the wagon, Shearson Jones said, ‘I could happily get myself outside of a filet de boeuf en croûte with Perigourdine sauce. Do you know that’s a speciality of the Maisonette restaurant, on East Sixth Street, in Cincinnati, of all places? They also do an excellent trout, stuffed with crab.’

Ed said, ‘I warned you, senator. One more word about food, and you’re going to be hitch-hiking your way to California.’

As they headed through the hills towards Albuquerque, Peter Kaiser asked, ‘Do you want me to take over the wheel now? I’d be happy to.’

Ed rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure if I can trust you yet, Mr Kaiser.’