‘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.