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.