By first light on Sunday morning, the mob around the Hughes Supermarket had swelled to five or six hundred people. Season, unable to sleep, had been watching them gather. They were Hollywood suburbanites mostly – ordinary men and women who lived in the quiet small houses on Yucca Avenue and Orange Grove Avenue and Oporto Drive. They hadn’t shouted or screamed or made much of a noise as they assembled around the fires of broken boxes and pieces of timber that had kept them warm during the night. But their very quietness had been menacing. They were people whose ordinary comfortable lifestyles had been abruptly taken away from them in the space of a few frightening days and now they wanted a share of what was left. They had already tom down the wooden cross that Granger Hughes had erected by the newspaper machines on the sidewalk and burned it. Now, in the grey haze of dawn, they surrounded the building in their chequered golf pants and their Bermuda shorts and their canary-yellow suntops, plain people who believed they had a right to survive.

Granger Hughes, in his white kaftan, came up to join Season at the window.

‘Pretty frightening, isn’t it?’ asked Season.

Granger shielded his eyes against the reflections in the glass. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t think it’s frightening. They’re all part of God’s flock, just as we are.’

‘If you think that, why are all of your friends sitting on all of this food, and why are we keeping them out?’

‘Someone has to carry on the Word,’ replied Granger. ‘Someone has to stay alive to keep the Lord’s teachings alive in the new world that must follow.’

Season looked at him for a while. Then she said hesitantly, ‘Granger? Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Okay? Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean any offence. It’s just that you’ve been acting kind of– I don’t know, spaced out.’

He stared at her, perplexed, but then he smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, in a voice that sounded more like the man she had first met, the man who had come around to Topanga Canyon to make love to her, ‘it isn’t often that an Old Testament situation actually happens for real, is it? I mean, this is a real Biblical workout for anybody’s faith. What next? Locusts? Seven fat kine, seven lean kine? Plague?’

Season turned and looked out at the silent crowds of people. The sun was up now, and they had let their fires burn down. They stood like ghosts of American suburbia amidst the drifting smoke. There was movement amongst them – shuffling, and rippling, as if they were trying to summon up enough courage to make a rush for the front of the supermarket.