Jam Read online

  I lay clutching my bed sheet in my fingers for a moment until something kicked the back of my mind and suggested that now was a good time to go with the first instinct. I threw my bedding aside, grabbed Mary and my balled-up plastic bags, and ran after Don. I tripped on something body shaped and heard someone swear.

  “Don!” I whispered, loudly.

  He grabbed me roughly under the armpit and dragged me into a little display kitchenette, pinning me to a glass-fronted drinks cabinet. He kept a hand over my mouth until the muttering and consternation in the next room had settled back into ironic snores. “What the hell are you doing?!” he whispered.

  “I want to go with you,” I said plaintively.

  “Are you serious? Why?”

  “I may have done a bad thing. I think I should probably get out of here before anyone finds out.”

  “What do you mean, may have? Did you do it with your eyes shut?”

  “All right, I did do a bad thing.”

  “What sort of bad thing?” he asked, in a tone of voice strongly implying that he definitely did not want a detailed account.

  I took a look around. No one seemed to be listening, but I leaned close and whispered into his ear so quietly it was barely a step up from mouthing. “I may have fed Princess Ravenhair’s budgie to Mary.”

  He tottered back a step, clutching his temples. His tonsils groped for syllables for a few seconds before his voice found coherence. “That was you? I’ve been random searched three times! I saw them beat up a guy ’cos he was holding a blue feather duster!”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was hers. Mary was getting really thin and I thought I could just apologize later.” I looked at the toes of my shoes. “Please let me leave with you.”

  He sighed in irritation. “Fine, but if they catch us, I don’t know you. I guess I could use a lookout, actually.”

  He let go of me and resumed his expedition to the store entrance. Following him was difficult at first, because he moved quickly and every time I tried to keep hold of his plastic coattails he’d shake me off angrily, but when we were far enough from the more populous sleeping areas he turned his flashlight back on.

  Soon we were back in the main area of the mall. The ubiquitous torches, routinely refueled with cheap designer clothing and lit in the late afternoons, had fizzled out by this time of night, so Don’s dancing pyramid of light was the only break in the pitch blackness. Don waited impatiently while I put on my plastics, but when I started to make for the down escalator the light danced off in the opposite direction, towards the stairs that led up to the cinema.

  “Er!” I grunted. Don’s flashlight beam stopped and shone in my face impatiently. “The exit’s down this way. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and so is the jam,” said Don from behind the dazzling glow. “The jam keeps eating people who try to go outside. Remember? We’re going to escape over the rooftops.”

  “Oh. Right.” The explanation sounded perfectly reasonable, but something about it made me scratch my head uneasily. “Is that the only reason we’re going this way?”

  Don chuckled unpleasantly. “You can be shrewd when the mood takes you, can’t you, Travis.”

  “Your hard drive?”

  “My build!” We trooped as quietly as we could up the stairs. “I put a year of my life into that. So going by my yearly income it’s got to be worth at least forty grand. That’s a sound investment. You could buy a car with that.”

  Fortunately the guards weren’t on duty in the little snack bar that had been converted into the Crazy Bob museum, and the entire cinema lobby was as silent as the tomb. Don crept eagerly forward and splayed his hands upon the glass like an orphan outside a sweet shop.

  “There it is,” he said, fogging up the glass.

  “What sort of game is it?” I asked.

  “It’s not really a game. It’s more of a proof of concept than anything else. For this new bit of hardware our parent company put together.”

  “Wait, so it doesn’t actually do anything without the hardware?”

  “No, but don’t think that makes this pointless or anything. There’s at least one other unit at the head office in Bellevue.”

  “So what if Bellevue’s covered in jam too?”

  He thought about this. “Then this is pointless after all. And so is my life. And so is yours. So we might as well kill ourselves.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He tapped the glass, and the bong echoed loudly through the silence. Both of us glanced around, wondering how deserted this lobby would stay if we kept making noises like that. He found a discarded towel under the slurpee machine, wrapped it around his fist, and brought it down on the display case. The glass wasn’t impressed, and judging by Don’s reaction, his wrist hadn’t been a big fan of the performance either.

  I watched nervously as he tiptoed purposefully over to the area where the ticket collector used to stand, where he unhooked a shiny brass bollard from its velvet rope and carried it back to the counter, patting the thin end on one palm.

  “Er,” I said, as he wrapped the towel around the bollard’s heavy end. “Don’t think I’m harping or anything, but is this really necessary?”

  “That does sound quite a lot like harping,” he said, making a practice swing.

  “I mean, they’re not actually doing anything to the hard drive. They’re just keeping it locked up in here. They’re not gonna touch it because they’ve declared it all sacred and stuff. Maybe you could just come back for it once you’ve sorted out escaping the city and all that.”

  He seemed to think about it, which made me feel quite proud. “Yes, but they are all complete lunatics,” he pointed out. “They might suddenly decide that the hard drive must be smeared in holy marmalade and put in the holy microwave.”

  “They might just as easily decide to stab our eyes out while we sleep,” I said, speaking from my deepest personal concern. “Maybe we should just get out of here now.”

  He sighed and looked at the end of his makeshift weapon sorrowfully. “I guess you’re right. Lead the way, then.”

  I probably should have expected this, but the moment I elatedly turned around to look for an exit there was a thunderous crash behind me. The towel did indeed soften the sound of the initial impact between the bollard and the glass, but it couldn’t do much about the apocalyptic shatter, or the symphony of tinkling shards falling to the ground.

  Don recklessly fished his hard drive out of the ruins and held it aloft. “Changed my mind! Leg it!” he said at lightning speed, before sprinting for the upward-leading stairs without even checking to see if I was following.

  The shock at Don’s sheer audacity planted me to the spot for a few seconds before I heard footsteps from below, and someone yelling “WOO WOO WOO” in imitation of a burglar alarm. I ran after Don, up the staircase leading to the theaters and Crazy Bob’s throne room. At the top of the stairs I risked a look behind and saw three security guards, in uniform black T-shirt-and-boxers sleepwear sans bags, arriving on the scene of the crime. Then a hand seized my shoulder like a Vulcan neck pinch and Don hauled me around the corner.

  “Don’t make a sound,” he hissed. “There’s like fifty paths we could have taken. As long as nothing—”

  “Who are you?” demanded Crazy Bob. In addition to the cardboard mask, he was wearing an Ebenezer Scrooge–style nightshirt and nightcap combo and was holding a candle in a saucer, perhaps all provided for him in the name of irony. He was standing directly between us and the concealed emergency-exit door to the roof. “Are you the idiots crashing around at this time of night?”

  “Just passing through!” said Don, displaying his palms.

  Crazy Bob stepped firmly into his path. “I ordered a cup of tea half an hour ago and when I say I want a cup of tea I expect there to be . . .”

  I glanced fearfully back at the guards in the lobby. One or two of them were peering curiously in our direction. I put a vibrating finger to my lips. “Shushush ushush shu
sh!”

  This proved unwise, because Crazy Bob took it as a challenge. “How dare you shush me!” he bawled. “If there’s one thing I will not tolerate from uppity—”

  Don shoved him. Not roughly, but hard enough to send Crazy Bob’s frail form tottering back into the cardboard stand for the upcoming Interstellar Bum Pirates movie, breaking it loudly in two. Crazy Bob yelled incoherently for someone to call the police, and he was joined by a chorus of WOO WOO WOOs from the lobby.

  Don shoulder barged his way into the emergency stairwell. I made the briefest possible check for injuries in Crazy Bob—superficial, if any, judging by the way he was flailing his arms and legs—and slipped after Don before the door could swing shut.

  By the time I’d climbed the stairs, burst out into the open air, and caught up with Don, he was all the way across the roof. He’d stopped because he’d picked the wrong rooftop edge to run for, and there was nothing to jump down into but the jam that filled Queen Street, seven or eight stories down.

  Behind us, the stairwell door slammed rhythmically against the wall as our pursuers joined us on the roof. Don and I glanced at them like prison escapees at a spotlight.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I’ve got this!” he said uncertainly. Feverishly he reached a hand into his plastic neck hole and produced a plastic bag and a marker pen. He threw the hard drive into the bag, tied up the end, and scrawled TO: HIBATSU on the side. Then he flung it with all his might into the jam, vaguely in the direction of the tallest building in the blacked-out skyline. “There!” he yelled triumphantly, a somewhat irrational look in his eyes. “Now there’s nothing to worry about!”

  The loss of the holy hard drive definitely hadn’t given the three plastic men pause for thought. “Seize the heretics!” cried the middle one, swinging what I think was a gardener’s sickle over his head. The sound of WOO WOOs filled the air.

  Don’s expression froze. “Shit!”

  The plastic pursuers were almost on top of us. The ringleader had already wound up his sickle, ready to embed it in the nearest convenient torso or skull. If they ploughed right into us at this point we’d all fall off the roof, too, but I wasn’t sure how to bring that across in the six or seven feet that remained between them and us.

  There was a blur in the air somewhere behind the three guards, then the sickle wielder stopped dead as a subtle thunk rang out. He looked down as if someone had just pointed out a stain on his jumper, then he collapsed to reveal the wooden shaft protruding from his spine.

  The two remaining pursuers met each other’s terrified gaze, each waiting for the other to take the leadership role until the next arrow made the decision for them by lodging itself jarringly in the head of the guy on the right. He bit his lip and got as far as “FFFFFFF” before joining his cohort on the floor.

  The newly elected leader showed greater shrewdness and made the command decision to leg it. An arrow found its way between his shoulder blades. For a moment, he groped madly as if seeking a particularly resilient itch; then he, too, fell.

  Y hopped down from the top of a tall air-conditioning unit some way off to the left. He was holding a makeshift longbow constructed from a strip of wood and a tightened pair of underpants, and he had made himself a little quiver and bandolier from a lady’s handbag. He placed one muscular foot on one of his defeated foes in a triumphant pose, letting the moonlight play off his ridiculous chest muscles.

  “Mr. Sunderland,” he said slowly, by way of greeting. “Mr. . . . Travis.”

  “You killed them,” said Don, disturbed.

  “They’re dead,” I reiterated.

  “They were a threat,” explained Y.

  The pool of blood under the guy who’d been shot in the head had swelled out as far as Don’s foot. “For god’s sake,” he said, hopping to the side. “Why the hell did you . . .”

  Suddenly a realization hit Don like a snow shovel to the back of the head and he fell to his knees at the roof’s edge. He stretched out a hand towards the barely visible speck of colored plastic drifting slowly up Queen Street. “For god’s sake!” he screamed. “Why the hell did I do that?”

  DAY 4.5

  —

  “So it’s you, isn’t it,” said Don, as the three of us made our way across the rooftops to the crossroads where we’d left the Everlong.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” said Y, in that “official” tone of voice he and X used for lying through their teeth.

  “Yes, you do. You’re the reason why none of the plastic people can go outside, aren’t you? You’ve been sniping them with arrows from the roof. Wooden shaft, so the jam destroys the evidence, but the metal arrowhead’s still moving fast enough to cut through the plastic. Quite ingenious, really. Did you come up with it?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” repeated Y. The look he gave Don from under his thick brow made Don immediately drop the issue.

  By now we were on the roof of the burger place at the mall crossroads, on the corner of Queen and Albert. From here, we could jump directly onto the roof of the horrible archway where the top of the Everlong’s mast was still stuck. The boat was precisely where we had left it, if a little battered from the tsunamis.

  “Get to the Hibatsu building,” said Y, preparing to take his leave. He was breathing heavily, his massive shoulders rising up and down like the tides. “We’ll meet you there.”

  “So you’re definitely coming to Hibatsu?” asked Don, still enamored with the potential of American rescue helicopters.

  “I will return to Hibatsu when my business here is concluded.”

  Don blinked. “What do you mean, return?”

  Y gave us one last dirty look over his shoulder. “When you reach Hibatsu, find a woman called Kathy.” His focus shifted suddenly to the middle distance. “Look, over there!”

  “What?” Don and I turned and looked, but saw nothing but the night sky. And by the time we’d turned back, Y had vanished.

  “Oh, real mature,” muttered Don.

  “Angela still thinks X and Y know more than they’re saying,” I said, conversationally.

  “Oh really? Does she also think they breathe oxygen and have arms and legs and everything else that’s patently bloody obvious?” He stepped up onto the ledge and jumped before he could have time to think about it. He landed with a clatter on a slanting corrugated surface and started sliding down towards the jam for a second before finding purchase with all four limbs like a climbing possum. “Oh god. That was so stupid.”

  I hopped onto the section of archway beside him, scrabbling wildly until my position was firm, which was even harder with Mary under one arm. He crawled on all fours towards the cluster of geometric shapes where the Everlong’s mast was caught.

  “Those guys can have as many secrets as they want,” said Don, prodding the top of the mast experimentally with one finger. “As long as they’re hooked up with rescue efforts they could have planned the Kennedy assassination for all I care. And that’s why we have to stay useful to them.”

  “How do you know we’re useful to them?”

  “Because we’re still alive.” He braced his shoulders up against a low section of perspex and started pushing as hard as he could on the mast with both feet.

  “Okay,” I said, watching him work. “So WHY do you think we’re useful to them?”

  “Dunno,” he said in a strained voice. The mast had barely moved. “I’m definitely not going to ask, in case it turns out to be one of those things where it hinges on us not knowing about it. Maybe it’s just ’cos we pulled them out of the wreck and they’re giving us backsies.”

  I thought of Y, that hardened soldier with a torso like one big giant clenched fist, his face its horny-nailed, calloused thumb. The man who could—and did—kill multiple individuals while most people would still be entertaining their second and third thoughts. The man who almost certainly had something to do with the mysterious absence of the two unconscious plastic people I suddenly r
emembered that we’d left tied to the boat. Somehow I doubted that backsies was a word in his vocabulary.

  After another two-footed push the mast finally came free with a sudden start, sending Don flying clean off the archway with a yelp. He grabbed the mast with all four limbs, making it creak back and forth, then slid awkwardly down its length, battered by sails all the way to a painful landing on the Everlong’s very solid deck.

  As I watched him pick himself up, dust himself down, and swear the air blue, I considered giving Don a full account of the conversation I’d overheard earlier between X and Y, the one in which the word responsible had been thrown around so intriguingly.

  But I didn’t, because I remembered that X and Y had referred to something called the “Sunderland issue.” Even I could tell that there was a lot going on below the surface, and Don had given me very few reasons to trust him. There was the chance that Don wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. But that was the best-case scenario. He might know exactly what I was talking about, and once he knew I knew, he’d be under orders from some shadowy conspiracy to cut my throat out while I slept.

  “What are you daydreaming about?” he snapped. “Are you coming down, or what?”

  I flinched, braced Mary between my knees, and gingerly wrapped my hands around the mast. Then I followed Don’s lead almost exactly, sliding uncomfortably to the deck by way of every sail and extruding component on the way down.

  “What are you going to do about your build?” I asked, rubbing my tender bits.

  He heaved a weary sigh. “It’s probably going to drift towards Hibatsu. The river’s that way. So we might see it. And anyway, I addressed it, so if the Hibatsu people spot it they’ll pick it up for us.” He sneered. “That was a good bit of rationalization, wasn’t it.”

  We headed southwest, towards the river and Hibatsu. The wind was light, but there was just enough to get us out from under the arch and close enough to the left-hand row of shop fronts to push ourselves along with the boat hooks. I felt a lurch of guilt as we passed the eastern entrance to the mall, the site of the ill-fated supply expedition. I recognized Sergeant Cuddles’s attire being nudged aside by the prow and felt a little bit ill.