The Stranger by Simon Clark Read Free Book Online

inland. Hunger drove them farther north, as far as the U.S. border with its walls and fences to keep illegal immigrants out. There, as the saying goes, the irresistible force met the immovable object.
    Here’s another cutting. It contains an interview with one of the American patrol guards on the Mexican border the day of the Breakout.
“It’s all gone to hell. But how can you stop them? There must have been a million men, women and children. And there were kids holding babies in their arms.” The harrowing memories were enough to render the man’sface ugly, and he’d just lit his third cigarette in the ten minutes I’d been speaking with him. “They tore the border fence apart with their bare hands. . . . I mean, what am I supposed to do? Shoot them? Shoot kids and babies, for Chrissakes. All we could do was climb on top of our cruiser as they came by. They weren’t people; they were a whole flood. So we just hung on to the roof light and watched them pour by.”
    The flood that engulfed America began that dry-asa-bone May morning. “Refugees sometimes turn into invading armies,” prophesied one commentator, but millions of Americans contributed food parcels and volunteered to help avert a humanitarian disaster. We, as a nation, labored to do the right thing.
    Soon every state accepted a given number of refugees. And that flood kept coming. Empty hostels, hotels, army camps, redundant cruise liners were crammed to capacity. You could visit your local supermarket one day, everything normal. The next day you drove into the parking lot and there’d be five hundred Brazilians living in a shanty town of cardboard boxes. It got like that in the city parks. Tents made of sticks and carrier bags became home to millions nationwide. Of course they were all hungry. They all needed clean water. Medicines. Clothes. Shoes. And, goddam, we did do the right thing. We did our best to feed them. But there were too many. These half-starved bastards—and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, believe me—filled the streets begging for food. They weren’t violent or intimidating or anything. Of course, hardly any spoke English, and it seemed the only word they did learn was bread. So you’d walk downtown and there would be beautiful young Brazilian women or Mexican women (helluva lot of Mexicans seemed to get carried with the northward flow) and they’re all holding out their hands; they’ve got beautiful brown eyes that overflow with pleading, and they’re all saying one word as you pass:
    “Bread.”
    “Bread.”
    “Bread.”
    You might give them every penny in your pocket and still know you hadn’t done enough. Because between you and Blockbuster, or Barnes & Noble, or McDonald’s, or wherever the fuck you were going, is another ten thousand people all saying this one stupid word as you pass. Bread, bread, bread, bread . . .
    And you find you start getting angry with them, because deep down you’re angry with yourself. It’s human nature to help a person who comes to you for help. Only you can’t do it. You can’t help them all. And this one word comes in a soft pulsing chant as you walk on by.
    Bread
    Bread
    Bread
    Bread-bread-bread-bread-bread-bread . . .
    As one refugee stops saying it the next starts. Bread, bread, bread . . .
    Shit. After that you couldn’t swallow a piece of bread without it sticking in your throat like a stone.
    It wasn’t long before the people from South of the Border who became our sudden guests got a new name. Forget refugees. Or the “displaced.” Or even “victims.” They became bread bandits. I don’t think the name started on TV or radio. It was probably some word-of-mouth thing. A kid called a refugee a “bread bandit” one day. Within a week or so the name had spread. It wasn’t intended to be cruel, but it seemed apt. So it stuck. We still use it today. I’ve killed bread bandits.
    Diseases often develop in cycles. Good old syphilis is the classic example. It takes