Jam Read online

  “I’m gonna go on ahead and make sure we get good seats,” said X suddenly, breaking off and speed walking away. “I’ll see you there, Angela.”

  “ ’Kay,” replied Angela with unusual warmth.

  I watched X go, her gait a little eccentric as the bags on her feet negotiated around her sensible shoes. “Have you been spending a lot of time with X?” I asked Angela.

  She lowered her camera. “Yeah, we’ve been talking a lot. We’ve been bonding a bit while we scavenge for magazines to read. I think she’s really starting to open up. It’s kind of scary. Anyway, don’t change the subject.” The lens came right back up. “Why weren’t you killed when you went out of the mall?”

  “Because it’s Y,” I said.

  Don slapped himself again, this time with both hands. His forehead was becoming severely reddened. “Travis,” he said with a slightly maniacally calm voice. “You and I are going to have to have a little chat about the importance of keeping certain pieces of intelligence to ourselves.”

  “What do you mean, it’s Y?” pressed Angela.

  Don sighed. “Fine! Let’s tell the world! Y’s holding out on the roof and shooting arrows at anyone who tries to leave! And he didn’t shoot us because we’re his mates and now we’re protecting a murderer which is almost certainly a capital offense! See, Travis, this is how not to do it!”

  “It’s Y?” reiterated Angela. The camcorder floated hither and thither for a few revolutions as she assembled a jigsaw puzzle in her head, then focused on the top of the escalator where we’d last seen X’s retreating form. “That two-faced cow!”

  Our expedition to spy on the plastic people was getting more catastrophic by the second. First we had given ourselves away to the very first person we saw, then we had ruined a burgeoning friendship. “But I don’t think it’s because of a conspiracy or anything. It’s just plain self-motivated independent murder, I think.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” muttered Don.

  “The truth is getting bigger all the time,” said Angela, narrating. “We have to tell Tim about this. It could be just what he needs to swing the election.”

  “There’s that word again,” said Don. “What election?”

  Angela made off down the escalator after X, and we hurried to keep up. “Tim’s challenging Lord Awesomo for leadership of the mall,” she revealed.

  “Leadership?!” said Don incredulously. “He doesn’t need to! We’ve got an in with Hibatsu, and their settlement’s much better run. Slightly less murder.”

  “Well, he didn’t know that. He’s won an awful lot of the people here to his side. They’re about to have a debate.”

  By now, I could see what she was talking about. The auditorium in the main food-court area was full to capacity with a writhing sea of plastic-covered bodies, all paying rapt attention to the three individuals on the stage: Tim on the left, Princess Ravenhair in the center, and Lord Awesomo on the right. Each one was standing behind a makeshift lectern constructed from a stack of milk crates.

  Lord Awesomo wasn’t at all comfortable with public speaking without a veneer of irony. His face glistened with sweat—more than the usual amount that being wrapped in plastic created—and his hands fidgeted with his topmost milk crate when he wasn’t toying nervously with the part of his fringe that extruded from his head bag.

  I wouldn’t have picked Tim as a good public speaker either, but he seemed somewhat more comfortable. He was gripping his lectern rather tightly but he was managing to maintain an approachable smile. I remembered that he had busked a few times in the underground walkway near the train station, so maybe that gave him the edge.

  “All right, settle down, everyone,” instructed Princess Ravenhair, silencing the nervous crowd. There was a portable whiteboard on her lectern with some questions written in a variety of festive colors. “I know we all want to know what’s to be done about the leaving the mall problem, but we’ll be hearing proposed solutions as part of the debate.”

  “Yes, about that,” said Lord Awesomo sternly, struggling to survive in a low-irony atmosphere. “Do we really think it’s a great idea to be holding elections right now?”

  “Hang on,” said Tim. “Are you saying democracy should be suspended because of a crisis situation? Isn’t that what the Bush administration were proposing at one point?” A smattering of applause from Tim’s side of the audience, which prompted him to continue. “This whole can’t-leave-the-mall thing has proved quite beneficial for you, hasn’t it, Lord Awesomo? A nice, convenient scare to keep the population from getting too uppity? Almost suspiciously so, I’d say.”

  “I . . . what? Are you seriously accusing me of being in on it?”

  “No, I didn’t say any such thing,” said Tim, springing a trap. “You’re the one who brought that up. It’s almost as if you’re feeling guilty about something.”

  “You . . .” began Lord Awesomo, before defiantly clamping his mouth shut to stop himself from giving Tim more ammunition.

  “Would the challenger like to make their statement first?” said Princess Ravenhair, sensing the mood in the room.

  “Probably a good idea,” said Tim. He took a deep breath. “I believe the current administration has proved themselves incapable of dealing with the crises the settlement is facing. With the jam consuming any of us who attempt to leave the mall, all Lord Awesomo can offer is ironic jokes and executions.” A number of audience members loudly agreed with this sentiment. “And he’s done nothing to investigate the hoodlums who just yesterday soiled the holy person of Crazy Bob. Hail Crazy Bob.”

  “Hail Crazy Bob,” went the crowd dutifully, casting their eyes up. The silhouette of Crazy Bob stared down motionlessly from the highest level. I felt a nodule of guilt throb painfully at the back of my head. Beside me I could hear Don’s teeth quietly grinding like a tiny lumber mill.

  “In addition,” continued Tim, speaking faster and faster like a snowball descending a hill. “His leadership has made precisely zero progress into our most pressing issue to date. He has failed to make any headway in unmasking the villain who has kidnapped Princess Ravenhair’s beloved Whiskers.”

  The nodule of guilt at the back of my head suddenly plunged all the way down my spine like a child on a sledge. A fresh coating of sweat further irritated my plastic-covered armpits. At the mention of Whiskers’s name, every head had bowed in mourning except two. One was mine, and the other belonged to Lord Awesomo, who appeared to be scanning the crowd.

  His eyes met mine, and a sinister smile unfolded on his face. Whatever doubt he may have had that I was guilty of budgiecide vanished when he saw my reaction. It was written all over my face in sweat and an embarrassed blush so vivid it felt almost neon.

  “Funny you should say that . . .” said Lord Awesomo, still staring at me.

  “Please wait for your turn to speak,” said Princess Ravenhair curtly, silencing him with a single glare.

  “So when’s he going to bring the guilty to justice?” said Tim. I attempted to wave my hands urgently and mouth tone it down, but he hadn’t seen me. “When will he act in the best interests of the people? I’ll tell you when it won’t be: it won’t be today! If he can’t give us answers right this minute, he’ll have proven he’s not competent enough to keep the peace!”

  Lord Awesomo was suddenly a lot more comfortable under the spotlight. His arms were folded and his hips were cocked nonchalantly. He waited until the cheers and chanting had completely died down before he gave a short, unimpressed cough and spoke.

  “I know who kidnapped Whiskers,” he said.

  Instantly the dynamic of the situation turned on its head. The many rapturous gazes aimed lovingly at Tim suddenly flipped over to Lord Awesomo like trains switching tracks. A murmur of surprise and interest broke out and began making the climb to full-on shouting argument.

  “Quiet!” barked Princess Ravenhair, in a tone I’d never heard from her before, and the room was shocked into silence. She turned to the smug-look
ing Lord Awesomo, eyes aflame. “Who?”

  This time Lord Awesomo flashed her a winning smile, which only made the situation tenser. “Oh, come on,” he said, enjoying his rekindled power. “Maybe most of you haven’t noticed, but there’s something in this very room that is literally classified as a birdeater. It’s a difficult connection to make, I know.”

  “A birdeater?” The princess cast an urgent look around, but thankfully didn’t seem to be as well versed in natural history as her colleague.

  Don nudged me in the shoulder. “Maybe now would be a good time to pull your thumb out of your butt and get out of here,” he whispered. He was probably right, but I was still pinned in place by Awesomo’s smiling gaze. Everyone in the room was deer-in-headlights frozen and any movement I made would immediately draw attention.

  “What’s a birdeater?” pressed Princess Ravenhair.

  “It’s a kind of spugubduh,” said Lord Awesomo nonchalantly, rocking on his heels. Then he slowly looked down and saw a wooden shaft protruding from his upper torso. Almost casually he clamped his hand around the wound, staring at the blood seeping through his fingers with boggle eyes. “Christ,” he said, slightly slurred. “Oh, yeah, that doesn’t hurt at all.”

  “Gerald!” cried Princess Ravenhair, running to his side with all animosity forgotten. She grabbed the extruding shaft and pulled.

  “Gnnngh! Please keep doing that!” said Gerald, swaying drunkenly. “I think that is doing the world of good!”

  “Stop being ironic!” she wailed.

  Someone near the front of the crowd suddenly made a startled little phut noise; then their plastic exoskeleton quickly inflated with jam. One of their friends suffered the same fate while picking, disoriented, through the empty bags that remained.

  Suddenly noticing the angle of entry on Awesomo’s wound, I looked up.

  The distant shadow of Crazy Bob was still there, but now the distant shadow of a makeshift longbow was visible in his arms. He also seemed to have lifted a lot of weights since I’d seen him last.

  By this point the crowd had automatically organized themselves in order of intelligence, with the slower of wit still in the center of the audience seating and the shrewdest already on the outskirts of the crowd, speed wading the hell out of there. Princess Ravenhair was trying to drag Lord Awesomo offstage, and she yelped as another arrow pierced one of the less forward-thinking members of the crowd.

  “Out of the jam!” yelled Tim, effortlessly stepping into the leadership role. “Everyone up the stairs!”

  Within seconds the four escalators leading to the next, jam-free level were packed with multicolored plastic and hurrying feet, like four giant, neurotic caterpillars. One or two unfortunates were shoved aside and met a sticky end as they fell full length into the jam, exposing their breathing holes to strawberry death. All notion of class had been abandoned and Princess Ravenhair and Tim, carrying the wounded Lord Awesomo between them, were just another screaming part of the anguished queue.

  Y was still picking off the stragglers, but with a manual bow and arrow he could barely dent the plastic people’s numbers. Don, Angela, and I remained, halfheartedly in cover, while X stood out in the open, staring up without fear.

  “Y,” she said, barely audible. Actually she might have been saying, “Why?” but there wasn’t time to ask for clarification.

  “That was Y, wasn’t it,” said Angela, as we tried to force our way up the escalator together.

  “Probably,” I said. “I think he might have worked something out with the Hibatsu people.”

  Her camera turned to me. “Hibatsu? How deep does this rabbit hole go, Travis?”

  We followed the natural flow of the crowd. By some unspoken agreement the plastic people were assembling in the residential area on the upper levels of the department store.

  I ended up back in our circle of makeshift beds. X was sitting quietly in the center wearing such a deep expression of concern that even Angela hesitated instead of stomping over to throw accusations. Don lay back on a beanbag and stared at the ceiling. Tim was over by Princess Ravenhair, helping a couple of handmaidens lay out Lord Awesomo.

  The princess herself was walking totteringly around the nearby area, fidgeting nervously and conversing briefly with everyone she passed. Then she noticed me, and my heart seemed to pump ice for a second as she stomped in my direction before it occurred to me to hide.

  “Travis,” she said.

  “I’M SORRY!” I blurted.

  “Do you know what a birdeater is?” she asked. Then, after a pause, “What are you sorry about?”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “that I don’t know what a birdeater is. Really, really sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” she said distractedly. Her foot was tapping woodpecker fast. She was wearing the hassled frown of a housewife whose dinner guests should have arrived an hour ago. “Someone said they think it might be a kind of lawnmower. Do you think someone might have done something to Whiskers?”

  “Um, how’s Lord Awesomo?” I said, attempting to coax her onto a slightly more pressing thread of conversation.

  “I can’t believe he’s known something about Whiskers all this time!” she said crossly. “I’m trying to get more details but he just keeps moaning and being delirious!”

  “Um, princess, are you all right?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I feel a bit numb. I think I’ll just . . . go over there for a bit.” Eyes wide with shock and apparently no longer able to bend her legs at the knee, she lurched slowly over to a display armchair and sat down—in the lap of its current occupant, but she didn’t notice and he seemed to be too polite to say anything.

  Angela, who had apparently been recording our conversation, sidled up to me. “Awesomo mentioned birdeaters,” she said casually. “Sounded like he was about to start accusing Mary of having something to do with the Whiskers disappearance.”

  “Maybe,” I said quietly.

  “How desperate can you get? Literally his only lead is that someone’s carrying around a breed of spider that happens to be called a birdeater. In the wild they don’t even eat birds very much.” Her camera lens remained fixed unsettlingly on my face. “It doesn’t automatically follow that you fed Whiskers to Mary, does it, Travis? Travis? Does it, Travis? Why are you turning red, Travis?” She scrutinized my face and body language for a few seconds, camera intruding quite blatantly upon my personal space. “Oh, god.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” I protested. “I didn’t know it was her bird!”

  “I’d like to know whose bird you thought it was that made it entirely justified.”

  “Mary was going to starve!” I was backed up against a chest of drawers, hugging her box protectively.

  “What you should have done,” said Angela, “was think of it in terms of a kid’s movie. If on the one side you’ve got a pretty little cheerful blue bird who is the only companion to a young girl all alone in the world, and on the other you’ve got a giant venomous tarantula three times the size with big horrible spindly legs, which one do you think the audience would root for?”

  “I like her legs,” I whined.

  She clicked her tongue. “If Y weren’t on a murder spree you’d be in pretty big trouble, wouldn’t you.”

  “What did you say?” Tim had been pacing around the outskirts of Lord Awesomo’s sleeping area and had passed momentarily into earshot. “Y’s on a murder spree? Oh, hi, Travis, where’ve you been?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” said Angela, tapping the part of her plastic bag where her nose belonged before retreating from the conversation and drifting off to harangue X some more.

  “That was Y, wasn’t it?” said Tim. “On the top floor where Crazy Bob should have been? He’s the one killing everyone when they leave?” He glanced over at Princess Ravenhair, who was still sitting demurely on some uncomfortable person’s knee. “That’s absolutely perfect.”

  “It is?”

  “We know him. That means we
can figure out a solution. This is exactly what I need to gain the hearts-and-minds thing. And now Lord Awesomo’s out of action!”

  Tim had been making me more and more uneasy ever since I’d arrived back at the mall. I hoped I wouldn’t have to cross him off the list of the few remaining things I could rely upon, which was already down to two people and one spider. “Tim, you don’t have to!”

  “What do you mean?”

  I leaned close and lowered my voice. “We went to the Hibatsu building. Me and Don.”

  “Serious? What’s it like?”

  “Well, it’s full of nutters, but that’s kind of par for the course. It’s a different kind of nutters. They run the place way better than the plastic people do. Like, crazy well. They’re already growing crops on the roof, and they can draw up water from the river.”

  He winced. “The Brisbane River?”

  “It’s okay; the jam cleaned it.”

  “I was going to say, that might explain why they’re nutters. So they actually let you in?”

  “You have to pay your way, but they accept plastic bags.”

  Tim chewed on his lower lip. “Well, this is making things pretty awkward, isn’t it. I’ve been working hard on getting this settlement sorted out. I’ve got a following and I’m this close to taking power.”

  “How close?”

  He glanced back at Lord Awesomo’s prone form. “About two inches nearer the heart. I dunno. I’m going to have to think about this. So why does Y keep killing people, anyway? Did he flip?”

  However uneasy Tim was making me, we had been friends and housemates for a long time. The jampocalypse had brought on a new, slightly predatory spark in his eye, but he still had the face and the voice of the guy who had stayed up all night with me to drink a whole twelve-pack and play Ham Fighters 2 after my first bad breakup. I confided everything as fast as possible. “We think Y went to the Hibatsu building and he made some kind of deal with them to let him and X in and I think in return he has to suppress the plastic people and I think Hibatsu are trying to break up the settlement or absorb it or something because they asked me and Don to steal supplies for them but Y shot at me but not Don when we came back so I’m afraid he might be cross at me about something—”