Jam Read online

  “Fantastic. Thanks for contributing.”

  “Well, this is going swimmingly,” muttered Don through his teeth. “Do you think we could be buggering everything up any faster?”

  The audience space was rapidly filling up with tottering plastic-bag golems of every shape, size, and color. Just as it was reaching capacity, Don tensed up and grabbed my upper arm.

  “There he is,” he hissed.

  “Who?”

  “The arsehole who took my build.”

  He wasn’t difficult to spot. Most of the plastic men wore bag suits of one color, so the thief’s patchwork outfit and Woolworths headdress stuck out like a jellybean in a box of raisins. He was right next to the aisle in almost the exact middle of the seating area. We must have walked right past him on our way in.

  “Perfect,” said Don quietly, glancing around. “Once whatever-this-is is over we’ll go and have a word. Assuming we’re not being eaten.”

  Once the entire plastic community had been assembled, the skinny bloke with the bangs held his pencil-thin arms out for silence. “Your attention, please,” he said. His voice wasn’t quite as commanding as he’d hoped, and he had to repeat himself a few times with increasing volume and petulance before the background noise quietened down to a rustle of plastic. “Tonight’s ceremony would like to begin, when we’re all ready. Hail Crazy Bob.”

  “Hail Crazy Bob,” replied the audience, throwing their heads back.

  I looked up where everyone else was looking and saw a mysterious figure standing alone on the highest level of the complex, head and shoulders silhouetted against the torch light, wearing what was unmistakably a crown. He was looking down upon us and waving a hand benevolently.

  “And hail Princess Ravenhair,” continued the director, although the word priest started to feel more appropriate. “Noble avatar of Crazy Bob on Earth and bringer of His message.”

  A plain, slightly overweight blond girl of around twenty—Ravenhair was presumably ironic—climbed up beside him. In addition to the prerequisite plastic bags, she was wearing a glittering silver cape made from strips of aluminium foil taped together. The priest backed away, golf clapping, to let her take center stage.

  “Brothers and sisters,” said Princess Ravenhair rapturously, eyes shining behind her rectangular glasses. “Today is the third day of the new era. The era of the Plastic People, chosen by God to be the forebears of the new race, chosen to be the only ones ’gainst whom the Jam of Satan would be powerless . . .”

  “They’re all bloody mad,” said Don, not quietly enough. All eyes fell upon him as Princess Ravenhair stopped, offended.

  “Something you want to add?” said the lanky priest spitefully. Until then he had been watching the princess with doe-eyed adoration.

  “You’re all bloody mad,” said Don at full volume, not a man to be intimidated by twenty-year-olds with bad hair. “The jam’s not powerless. It just can’t eat through plastic.”

  Something halfway between a groan and a patronizing snigger went up from the audience. Princess Ravenhair smacked her forehead. Someone near the front went, “Someone doesn’t get it,” in a singsong voice.

  “Oh, really?” said the priest in a tone of voice just shy of a shriek. “We, like, totally didn’t know that! We were just, um, wearing these things for some completely unrelated reason! Thanks for clearing that up for us!”

  “Yeah, we’re ironically worshiping,” said Princess Ravenhair, doing that eye-rolling, vowel-rounding thing. “God. We’re just trying to have a bit of fun with the idea. We’re not, like, an actual cult or anything.”

  “Are you happy for us to continue, then?” said the director. The two of them were standing either side of Don and looking down at his seated form like kindergarten teachers addressing a child defecating in a sandpit.

  “Please do,” said Don, sarcastically.

  “Lo,” cried Princess Ravenhair in ecstasy, sweeping right back into the swing of things. “Three days it has been, since our people came, tempest-washed, to the shores of this land of plenty. Five days since the pact with Crazy Bob, keeper of the Keys of Security, was founded. Hail Crazy Bob!”

  “Hail Crazy Bob!” cried the plastic people, casting their heads back again to receive another hand wave from their savior. My neck was starting to hurt.

  “And it is with great pleasure that we welcome the newest members of our family.” She gestured magnanimously to us and the other kidnap victims, and the priest ceremoniously placed an armful of multicolored bin bags and duct-tape rolls in front of them. “You guys already in the yellow bags can just sit out of this bit, I guess. Have you anything you wish to say on your arrival?”

  “Why did you kidnap us?” said Tim suddenly, finally breaking his thoughtful silence. “We’ve been looking for settlements. We’d probably have joined anyway.”

  “We can no longer take chances with recruitment,” said Princess Ravenhair, looking at her hands and shaking her head. “Too often are our members found unworthy by God, and are taken from us by the grasping arms of Satan.”

  Tim scanned the ceiling as he deciphered this. “Their bags get ripped?”

  Princess Ravenhair’s priestly manner vanished, and the audience groaned again. “Yes, their bags get ripped. We’re not actually saying it really is God or Satan or anything. God, you’re so weird.” She coughed and straightened her hair. “Wear, now, your sacred robes of brotherhood, and verily make sure the joints are nicely sealed.”

  I leaned sideways towards Don and whispered, “Do you think this is how all religions start?”

  Don wasn’t listening. He was scrutinizing the hard-drive thief in the Woolworths bag, considering the best angle of approach. It was hard to tell with the bag, but it seemed like the thief was staring back. I wondered if he’d recognized Don’s voice. Considering how much Don had been yelling at him in our first encounter, it wouldn’t have been too hard.

  “We have one more matter to address,” said the lanky priest, stepping out into center stage again with his hands gathered solemnly behind his back. “Bring forward the accused!”

  From behind the “curtain” emerged two large specimens in ugly gray bin bags, each holding one of the arms of a smaller, sweating young man with an overgrown hipster goatee and an olive-green bag ensemble. “Will someone please tell me what I’ve done?!” he said, bewildered.

  “Silence! Robert Something-or-other, you stand here accused of . . .” One of his hands came around from behind his back holding a scrap of white bin liner that someone had written on with black felt-tip. “Of a blasphemous act of theft: Stealing the last individual yogurt with strawberry pulp on the bottom from our benevolent Lord Crazy Bob, who had, quote, ‘set it aside and been really looking forward to it.’ ”

  “I didn’t know it was his!” protested Robert. “I could only get a meat pie for dinner and it’d gone off!”

  “So you admit your crime against the Most Holy!” cried the priest.

  Robert looked around at the pitiless plastic faces all around him, terror glistening in his eyes. He leaned towards the priest and hissed just loud enough for everyone to hear. “You said we were only worshiping him ironically!” he desperately emphasized.

  “Yes, just as you wronged him ironically,” said the priest, doing the emphasis with practiced ease and placing a friendly hand on Robert’s shoulder. “And just as we now punish you ironically.”

  The priest’s other hand came out from behind his back, clutching a vicious little switchblade. He swung it across Robert’s front in a swift, wide arc. Robert flinched, but the swipe did nothing but cut a long slit in his plastic wrapping.

  The nature of his punishment became immediately clear to me and Robert simultaneously. He was still babbling apologies and pleas as the two guards wordlessly flung him into the aisle. He landed full length in the jam and rolled madly around for a second, trying to hold the slit closed with his hands, before there was a wet sucking noise, his head bag filled with red, and his bags sett
led emptily onto the surface.

  “What the hell?!” chided Tim. “Why’d you kill him? You’re mad!”

  That contempt-filled groan went up again, and the priest clicked his tongue. “Do you think you people will get it on the six or seventh hundredth time? We’re being ironically evil.”

  “But he’s actually dead!” pressed Tim.

  “Ugh,” the priest waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t expect your generation to understand sophisticated humor. Now, if no one has any other business to raise . . .”

  “My lord!” cried a voice from the audience. Every plastic-covered head in the room turned to face the origin with a loud, joint rustle. It was the man in the Woolworths bag. “I’ve got something.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ve come to donate a relic to the church,” he said. “For, like, worshiping and being sacred and stuff.” He held up his shining prize. “This hard drive.”

  “What’s so holy about a hard drive?”

  Mr. Woolworths bobbed it a couple of times, perhaps to speed the thinking process. “Uh. It’s a, er, final link to, you know, the world that used to be. Technology and all that jazz.” The priest cocked an unconvinced eyebrow. “It’s an ironic present.”

  “Oh, well, why didn’t you say so sooner?” said the priest, snatching the trinket and holding it up reverently. “Oh, Crazy Bob, accept you this sacred offering of obsolete computing hardware? Clasp you this bounty to your holy bosom, to be never again sullied by the impure hand of Man?”

  The heads went back again. On the topmost floor, the mysterious silhouette of Crazy Bob offered a thumbs-up.

  “So shall it be so,” said the priest, handing the hard drive gingerly to one of the big guards who had thrown Robert. “It shall be moved to His Museum of Relics and protected for eternity from harm. Hail Crazy Bob!”

  “That little sod,” muttered Don under the inevitable chant, with equal parts hatred and wonderment.

  “That concludes the ceremony,” said the priest, needlessly; the audience was already chatting amongst itself and moving to leave. “Newcomers, make yourselves beds in the department store. Queue up here tomorrow at eight for your daily rations. Raiding parties to form at twelve. Look forward to working with you all. Hail Crazy Bob!”

  —

  “That little sod,” grumbled Don for the seventeenth time, about an hour later. He seemed to be in something of a trance.

  We had followed the shambling crowds of plastic humanity into the department store, which took up a significant percentage of the upper four levels. The bottom level was jam struck, but that had only been the menswear department, which had little use at present, given that fashion for both sexes had taken a sudden turn in the direction of crinkly kitchenware.

  Like most of the rest of the plastic people we were camping in the homewares section. All the beds, mattresses, and sleeping bags had been claimed by our new peers, but there were plenty of soft objects around we could lay our heads on. Tim found a beanbag, and I was making do with an old sack stuffed with a large quantity of designer lingerie.

  The plastic people weren’t so numerous that we couldn’t be nicely spaced out around the store, and the five of us had claimed a little private corner in the shadow of a bank of display refrigerators. Our little survival party would have been wholly reunited, were it not for . . .

  “Y,” said X, after we’d all finished exchanging stories. “What happened to him?”

  “He went off to infiltrate the center alone, for unknown reasons,” said Angela sniffily, implying with her pronunciation of unknown that the reasons might be less unknown to some individuals than to others.

  “I have to find him!” X said. “After that, we can leave and move on to Hibatsu.”

  “Why?” said Tim. His voice was outwardly casual, but the word hung heavy with implications.

  “I am not leaving without him,” said X, narrowing her eyes. “Those are my terms.”

  “I mean, why? It’s a settlement, isn’t it? That’s what we were going to Hibatsu for. They’ve got food. Supplies. Facilities. A decent staging point. It’s safe.”

  “Safe?!” I squawked.

  “Well, for a given value of safe, anyway.”

  “These people are absolute nutters,” said Don. “They took my build.”

  “They killed a guy!” I pointed out, exasperated.

  “I got the whole thing on camera,” said Angela proudly. She hadn’t taken her focus off X for the entire conversation. “Clear as day. Could be the next Zapruder film.”

  “Look,” said Tim, in a level and sensible tone that failed to calm anyone down. “So they’ve got slightly irrational policies. You could say the same about marijuana being illegal. Didn’t make you want to live in a country with no police, did it?”

  “They don’t murder you for possessing marijuana,” said Angela, turning her camera on him. “I sort of agree with X,” she said, grimacing as if the words tasted bitter in her mouth. “Maybe we should just find Y and get out of here before—”

  “No!” Don had been slumped down in his seat, anger simmering on a low boil, but now he sprang up like a bear trap. “I am not leaving this place until I’ve gotten my build back. Or they directly threaten my life.”

  “You’re all free to do whatever you want to do,” said Tim pointedly.

  “What’re you doing?” said Angela, filming X again.

  X turned to Don. “Y’s definitely in the mall somewhere?”

  “Assuming he’s not jam bait,” he said.

  X looked at each one of us in turn, giving various degrees of untrusting scowl. “I’m not leaving until I find him.”

  “Neither am I,” said Angela instantly. “Travis, what do you want to do?”

  I looked up, surprised at suddenly being consulted. “Er . . . I’ll just do whatever everyone else is doing.”

  “Oh, will you,” said Don, frustrated. “What a bold and respectable position. Just go to sleep, Travis. Maybe the personality fairy will visit you in the night.”

  I went to sleep anyway. Just to show him.

  DAY 4.1

  —

  It was probably early when I was woken by a sound. Weak morning daylight was filtering into the store from the dome in the main mall, and most everyone else on the floor was still asleep.

  Don, Tim, and X were all there, lying sprawled over their improvised furniture, but I didn’t see Angela. And Mary was awake, pawing restlessly at the side of her box. Then I heard the sound that had woken me again—a gentle fluttering of wings.

  I rolled over and followed the sound until I spotted the source. One of the plastic people’s living spaces had been set up just a few yards away, with a few pieces of bedding and personal belongings lying around. The human occupant was absent, but there, on the floor, was a birdcage.

  Inside the cage was a blue-and-white speckled budgerigar, preening itself unconcernedly to greet the new day. From out of nowhere the words Goliath birdeater shot to the forefront of my mind, and I glanced back at my restless spider.

  Mary wasn’t looking any healthier, and this was certainly an uncanny bit of providence. I climbed quietly off my sack of lingerie, crept into our neighbor’s territory, and placed Mary next to the bird’s cage to let the two examine each other. Mary raised her forelegs in excitement, but the budgie hadn’t even noticed her.

  I looked around, but not a single plastic person was stirring or looking in my direction. I asked myself: was this really the right thing to do? Well, no, obviously. Not at all. Feeding a stranger’s pet to yours is extremely hard to justify without the consent of the owner (or indeed the consent of the pet), especially when party A is a cute, smooth-feathered budgie full of the zest of spring, and party B is a big, hairy tarantula that would send most people dashing for the heaviest broom. And yet, of the three alive, conscious entities present, one wanted to be fed, and one wanted to feed the one that wanted to be fed, which made a clear majority.

  The budgie was still clean
ing its feathers without a care in the world. What exactly did budgies do? Sit in cages, mostly, occasionally squawking. Spiders keep a home clean of pests, and if people break into your house you can throw a spider at them and certainly give them cause to hesitate. Spiders were much worthier of life than budgies.

  This particular budgie also seemed to have no equivalent food shortage. A dispenser on the side of the cage was generously filled with seed. That was the other thing budgies did: eat seeds. Seeds, which Tim had said would be vital for cultivating sustainable crops in the new society. I thought back to that single precious apple I had nurtured, and which had been cruelly snatched from me. Here was this selfish little bastard necking seeds like water. When you looked at it that way, budgies were probably one of humanity’s biggest threats right now. This was just a devious, food-stealing crow with blue feathers.

  I opened the cage door, held the tupperware box sideways against it with the lid loosened, took another glance around for witnesses, then swiftly pulled the lid away. Mary wasted no time. The budgie couldn’t have been particularly attached to life, judging by the way it didn’t struggle much. Probably hadn’t been very happy. I kept my gaze on the middle distance, trying to avoid watching Mary having breakfast.

  “What the hell was that?” said Tim, sitting up.

  I quickly tipped Mary back into her box and nonchalantly sped back to our sleeping area. “Hmm?”

  “Sort of a squealing noise . . .”

  “I don’t hear anything.” I patted my knees rapidly for a moment. “Did you have any nice dreams?”

  He looked at me sleepily, raking his unkempt pillow hair back into place. “What’s with the feathers?”

  I brushed them off my thighs and crossed my legs. “What do you want to do today?”

  He seemed confused, but decided not to pursue the issue. He crawled around our living space gathering up his plastic bags. “I want to head down and talk to whoever’s in charge of the food around here. Want to come for the walk?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, sure,” I said, trying to casually gather up the feathers and fling them in the general direction of the empty birdcage I’d left a few feet away.