Jam Read online

  His sentence was punctuated by the snap of Angela opening her camera viewfinder again. I wasn’t sure I entirely trusted the smile on her face. “Scoop,” she said, simply, before trotting down the steps.

  “Did she explain why she was in the fridge?” I asked, making to follow.

  Tim walked alongside me as I descended the steps. “She’s just being evasive and pretending everything’s normal.”

  “She sounds fine to me.”

  When we reached the gloomy kitchen, Angela had already moved past excitement at the possible deepening of the ongoing conspiracy and arrived at concern that X might genuinely have gone right around the garden path and up the rabbit hole. She knocked tenderly on the side of the weirdly large chest freezer, camcorder at bay. “X, we’re not angry or anything, we just want to know why you’re hiding in the fridge.”

  The lid opened a crack and X’s voice floated out. “Really, there’s nothing to worry about,” she assured us. “It’s not turned on.”

  “Er, that wasn’t exactly our concern,” I offered.

  “Yes, yes, I can see you’re thinking this seems like totally irrational behavior,” said X. She was pausing between each word in a stalling kind of way. “But I can quite easily put this whole matter to rest with the very simple and straightforward explanation for it.”

  The last ten or so words had taken close to half a minute. “Well?” said Angela.

  “Honestly, it’s hardly worth stating the explanation I’m about to give because you’ll all realize how massively obvious it is when you think about it.”

  Angela banged her fist on the side of the fridge, frustrated. “How can you be a secret government agent when you’re so bad at lying?!”

  “I’m not a secret government agent,” said X, lying badly.

  There was a whistle from above. We saw Don’s skinny form silhouetted against the light coming from above. “Oi! Fathead parade! Come back up here a second.”

  We left X quietly refrigerating herself and filed up the stairs in neat single file. The Everlong was closer than ever to the Obi-Wan, which was already blotting out the sun. We were close enough to start thinking about points of entry. The column of handholds forming a ladder seemed like the best bet.

  “How long do you think it’ll take to reach at our current speed?” asked Tim, spellbound by its massiveness.

  “At our current speed?” said Don, amused. “Somewhere within the ballpark of eternity.”

  It was only then I noticed that the Everlong wasn’t moving at all. And not for lack of wind, either. Our hair and beards were whipping merrily and the sail was fully puffed out.

  “Did we run aground?” said Angela, filming over the side.

  “Don’t see how we could,” said Tim. “Grab the poles. We’ll just have to push out of it.”

  In the middle of the river, there were no inorganic objects to push off of. I was concerned that our poles wouldn’t be long enough to go all the way through the jam, through how ever much river water there was underneath, and push off the riverbed, but I hit bottom with my hands a good two feet above the jam’s surface. With me and Tim both pushing, the boat was dislodged like a loose tooth and the wind took us again, resuming our journey towards the supercarrier.

  I looked back. I thought I saw an indentation in the jam exactly the size and shape of the Everlong’s hull. A moment later I looked again and the jam was perfectly flat. I wondered if it had been a mirage.

  “So, did we figure out why Agent Scully was hiding in the fridge?” asked Don conversationally as the hull of the Obi-Wan drew ever closer. “Is she sulking because you won’t let her be a bridesmaid?”

  “She said she had a good reason,” I said. “She never got around to telling us what it was.”

  “She’s such a bad liar,” said Angela unhappily. “It’s not fair. If absolutely everyone knows you’re full of bullshit then you’re not allowed to try to keep it going. It’s like April Fools’.”

  “Oh, it hardly matters now,” said Tim dismissively. He was looking up at the Obi-Wan. The base of the gray steel wall was mere yards away, now. “I wonder what we’ll find up there.”

  “I bagsy first go on the Internet,” said Don, batting his dangling hard drive like a cat.

  “All right,” said Tim. “Just tell me this. What will you do if you start up the Internet and there’s nothing there?”

  “Then I will assume the onboard Internet connection is not working at present,” said Don reasonably.

  “Okay,” said Angela. “So what if the Internet is working but none of the sites have been updated in, like, twelve days except for a few blogs that are all going, ‘Oh no the whole world is in a jampocalypse and we’re going to be eaten a second after I’m finished writing this’?”

  Don remained phlegmatically tight lipped until she was finished. “In that case,” he began, “I will concede that Tim was right all along, shake him humbly by the hand, and throw myself out the nearest porthole.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” said Angela.

  “I totally would. Unlike you people I have no illusion as to my usefulness in an actual apocalypse, and believe me, death holds no fear in a world without cappuccinos. No, the most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.”

  “Why have we stopped moving again?” said Tim from the front of the boat. He took up a pole and tried to touch the ladder on the side of the Obi-Wan, but it was too short by about six feet.

  “Erm,” said Angela, filming all around. “Is it my imagination, or are we sitting a little lower in the jam than we usually do?”

  I looked over the side. The surface was definitely closer than I remembered. I saw the bit closest to me start to bulge in preparation for extending, so I quickly backed off.

  “Push off from the ground again,” said Tim, who had also noticed this. He picked up a pole.

  The boat split. There was the slightest creak of warning, then a deafening, crunching snap. The front and back ends both tilted crazily towards the middle and the mast fell sideways, hitting the jam with a harsh slap. The jam tossed a lazy tentacle across the boat’s middle like a sleeper throwing their arm around a bedmate.

  “OH JESUS BLOODY BLEEDING OUT THE ARSE,” yelled Don, apparently involuntarily.

  “What was that about death holding no fear?” said Tim, backed up against the handrail.

  I only became completely terrified when I realized that I’d been cut off. Circumstance had contrived to place Tim, Don, and Angela all on the front half of the boat while I was on the rear. I thought about taking a running jump over, but the river of jam suddenly widened with another tortuous crack and began to crawl up the deck with rows of thin, spidery limbs.

  “HELP!” cried Angela, practically standing on the front handrail.

  “Oh, come on,” snarled Don. “Who exactly did you expect to be listening to that, Angela? There’s—”

  Don stopped suddenly as something bonked him squarely on the top of the head. It was, of all things, a rung. One of several rungs attached to two lengths of nylon rope.

  “A rope ladder?” identified Tim correctly. He looked up. It was a long one leading all the way up to the top deck, colored in the stern dark gray of military issue. “Who sent that down?”

  “Dunno. Wait here and I’ll go ask,” said Don, wasting no time in grabbing the ladder and beginning to climb. The ladder swung and jerked sickeningly as he kicked his way up. Tim followed as close as he could without getting a kick in the face, then Angela, who was the only one to remember me.

  “Travis!” she cried, reaching fruitlessly towards me as whatever had extended the ladder suddenly began to retract it. She maintained eye contact with me right until she was too high to be seen against the bright afternoon sun.

  I stood miserably on the rear half of the Everlong like the last, unnoticed teaspoon in the washing-up bowl. I remained frozen until the questing jam caused the boat to shift hard enough for me to stumble.

  Against
all odds, my mind suddenly started working. And the first thing it came up with was a genuinely rational reason that someone would hide inside a fridge.

  Fortunately I was on the half of the boat with the deck hatch and the kitchen. Grabbing Mary, I descended the stairs. The boat was tilting far enough that the stairs were now a vertical wall, which gave me a painful washboard treatment as I fell into the kitchen, sprained my ankle on the tilted floor, and almost rolled straight into the sprawling red soup that used to be the sleeping area. I yanked the fridge door up to find X still there, hugging her knees and glancing up politely.

  “Erm . . .” was as far as she got before I got in the fridge with her, wedging my feet either side of her and bending almost double to fold the rest of me in. The chest freezer’s lid slammed down heavily with just a little coercion, sealing in place.

  We remained silent in the cramped pitch blackness as we felt the jam tearing the boat apart and surrounding us. The walls creaked metallically as the jam took up its usual three-foot depth around us.

  After several seconds of total silence, the first few twinges of back pain set in. “Er,” I said. “I’m actually quite surprised at how big this fridge is.”

  “But in many ways, not big enough,” said X curtly.

  She had a point. It was very stuffy inside the fridge. It got even stuffier when I realized I was sharing the fridge with a woman who, with no opportunity to change outfits since leaving the greenhouse that was the Hibatsu building, was wearing little more than a bra and skirt. The stuffiness ramped up another notch when I remembered that X wanted me dead. And I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.

  “Guess you knew this was going to happen, huh,” I said, to fill the silence. It was hard to think of how it could have been more awkward, unless I, say, sprouted an erection.

  “N—” began X, moving immediately to deny, but then she sighed in a way I found quite discouraging. “Yes. Of course I did. The jam weakens the boat more and more when it sails with too many people in it.”

  “And that’s why you and Y didn’t want to ride on the boat when we first found it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” I fidgeted with the edge of my T-shirt. “You could have told us this.”

  A pause. “I didn’t want anyone to suspect that I knew something about the jam.”

  My joints really were starting to hurt. I tried to shift my position, but I felt parts of me rub against soft, warm parts of X and I didn’t want her to get the wrong impression.

  “Travis?” said X softly.

  “Yes?”

  “Is your spider in here?”

  A familiar skitter against tupperware somewhere between us in the darkness answered her question. I laughed nervously. “This really is quite a big fridge, isn’t it.”

  “The air is going to run out very fast,” said X without emotion. “We’re probably going to die in here. We’re going to die because I couldn’t bear anyone suspecting I’d killed everyone else in this city.” A mirthless chuckle. “Guess I’ve no right to complain, do I.”

  Her words scared me, but at the same time they were quite calming in the face of death. “So you are responsible for the jam.”

  “Yes.”

  I let out a long, rather wasteful breath. “People might have understood if you’d just apologized.”

  “I’m sorry, Travis.” It was a little too late, but she meant it. I felt her moving, and after some rather difficult shifting of position she put her arms around my torso and buried her face in my shoulder. I could only sprawl, frozen, watching the spots form in the blackness as the air began to move hoarsely in and out of my lungs like a saw stuck in tough wood.

  The next thing I noticed was gravity shifting. Something was tugging on the further portion of the fridge, and after a moment’s ambiguity the fridge tilted forward onto its end. The lid sealed closed even tighter as the jam pressed it inwards.

  Then, all of a sudden, I was vertical again, upright and in a clinch with X. Her skin pressed warmly into mine. I could feel her hot, labored breathing on my neck. Mary grumbled jealously at our feet. The situation threatened to reach maximum awkwardness.

  “What . . .” she whispered.

  Something was pulling us upwards. The jam held onto us with all its tentacular limbs like a clingy child but couldn’t maintain its grip, and the fridge detached with a noise like a giant boot being withdrawn from thick mud. We swayed groggily back and forth as we ascended. From somewhere above us I heard the clink of heavy chains.

  “I think something’s rescuing us,” I said. The fridge knocked jarringly against something large and metallic which must have been the hull of the Obi-Wan. I pushed on the fridge door. It only opened half an inch, revealing that a chain was wrapped around it, but it was far enough to flood the tiny space with glorious, cool, fresh air.

  “We’re not going to die,” said X, with a curious joylessness.

  “We’re not going to—”

  My reiteration of her sentiment was cut off when I felt her hands clasp tightly around my throat. Ridiculous half syllables burbled from my lips. I felt my face redden and throb as the blood vessels in my neck were constricted.

  X pulled herself languorously up my body and rested her forehead on mine, pinning my arms to the back of the fridge with her knees. Ten seconds ago I’d been resigned to death, but that was swiftly forgotten as I jerked my hips and kicked my legs into hers as hard as I could, to no avail.

  I went limp. X renewed her grip. With the meager light from the cracked-open door I could see her face. Darkness was encroaching around my vision and it was like looking at her through a hole in a curtain on the far side of a dark room, but I thought I could see tears in her eyes.

  My head felt like a balloon full of scalding hot water. My lungs rattled in my ribcage. I could feel it coming, now, the final crescendo when the balloon would burst and everything would stop. X’s face was further and further away. My wrist was pinned, so with my last ounce of strength I patted her shin reassuringly.

  This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortuneteller I’d spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she’d turned out to be.

  DAY 8.4

  —

  “He’s dead.” Don’s voice was neutral.

  I made the effort to moan. I coughed through what felt like an entire hard-boiled egg lodged in my throat.

  “Oh, guess he’s not, then. Hush my mouth.”

  I opened my eyes, and was greeted by the night sky. I was still lying in the fridge, and the faces of Don and Angela were looking down with mixed degrees of concern.

  “See, this is what happens when you lock yourselves in a fridge with a limited air supply,” said Angela, helping me to my feet. We were on the deck of the Obi-Wan, which extended massively in all directions. It was utterly devoid of people or aircraft, which somewhat undermined its status as aircraft carrier.

  “Mm, you two were just spread-eagled over each other,” said Don, standing with arms folded lest he accidentally make some friendly gesture. “Hope you realize I’m going to have to tell your future bride about it.”

  “You’re lucky the crane thingy up here was still working,” said Angela as I picked up Mary’s box. “Only thing that does, mind. Tim’s gone to look for the generator.”

  “It’d better be there,” said Don ominously. “And X had better know how to get it working or she’s going to be an ex-X.”

  “Weak, Don,” said Angela.

  “Where is X?” I asked, one hand straying to my tender neck.

  Immediately Don and Angela both looked at an empty patch of the runway, which they seemed to find rather disturbing. “Where’d she go?” said Angela.

  “You were supposed to be watching her
!” snarled Don.

  “She was unconscious! I thought you meant, you know, make sure she’s lying on her side so she doesn’t choke on her lungs or whatever! Why would she just run off?”

  “Angela?” I said.

  “What?”

  “X is responsible for the jam.”

  It was like I’d flicked her off switch. Every muscle on her body hardened. Her face was trapped in a single moment of mild annoyance. After a few seconds, she brought her camcorder up and snapped the viewfinder open with a smooth sequence of very slow, deliberate movements. “Say that again.”

  “We thought we were going to die. She admitted it. She said she was sorry.”

  “Urgh. This had to happen when I was this close to an Internet connection, didn’t it,” growled Don. “Couldn’t you have had desperate life-affirming sex instead?”

  “I knew it!” said Angela, awkwardly trying to simultaneously film us and run around in circles looking for X. “Didn’t I say right from the start she knew more than she was telling?”

  “Everyone knew that,” said Don testily. “She’s not exactly Mata Hari.”

  “But I was the only one who cared!”

  “You’re still the only one who cares. What are you even going to do with this information now you have it? Right here and right now the most you can do is go up to her and go nyah-nyah-nee-nyah-nyah.”

  Angela turned on him and seemed about to fly off when, at the worst possible moment, our attention was drawn by a metallic clatter some distance away. X’s head appeared momentarily out of some kind of maintenance trench that ran alongside the main runway, then dropped hurriedly out of sight.

  “Hey!” yelled Angela. She had time to take one single step in pursuit.

  A gunshot crackled through the still night air. Something struck the tarmac-like surface of the aircraft carrier’s runway and threw up dust and shards a couple of feet away from Angela, who froze in place.

  “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” called an educated man’s voice from some distance away. “That must have seemed like I was trying to shoot you. I’m really not. I was just trying to look at you through the scope on this thing. It’s very powerful.”