Jam Read online

  “I wouldn’t hold out hope for those,” said Tim, sitting on the vent.

  “America’s got deep pockets.” Don waved the stolen garment. “See?” A moment’s thought passed. “How did you get back over here, anyway?”

  “Made a harness,” said Tim, gesturing to a slinglike device still hanging from the telegraph wire, apparently made from a ThunderCats bedspread.

  The unconscious woman suddenly gave a gurgling cough, and a stream of drinking water geysered out of her throat. Angela immediately started patting her about the cheeks, whereupon her patient swatted her away and sat up. “Wblguh?” she began, then revised, “What’s going on?”

  “You were unconscious. You were in a helicopter crash,” cooed Angela reassuringly. “But everything’s . . .” She sounded like she was going to finish with the words all right now, but thought better of it after a quick glance at the surrounding city.

  “The helicopter,” recalled the American woman aloud. She looked around, taking in our faces, but didn’t seem impressed. “Okay. What’s the situation?”

  Her voice was stern and official. The rest of us exchanged glances back and forth, none of us confident that we could deliver the kind of answer she was apparently expecting. “There’s a lot of jam around,” I said eventually. “And a helicopter just crashed.”

  She frowned at me, confused, like I’d just asked her the way to the nearest space station. “Which one of you is HEPL?”

  “What?!” barked Don.

  “We saw your signal,” she said. “HEPL. This is a Protocol outpost, isn’t it?”

  “It was supposed to say HELP,” said Don. “It was a typo. Or whatever you’d call it.”

  “A floor-o?” I suggested.

  The growing lines of concern on the American woman’s face became even deeper. They were the crags of someone realizing they had committed the kind of miscalculation that ends with exploding space shuttles and grim-faced news readers. “So . . . you’re not . . .”

  “Not what?” prompted Angela, interested.

  The woman’s hand suddenly flew to her brow and her eyes screwed up in pain. “Aagh! My head! Where am I? What just happened? I must have been raving up to now.” She opened one eye to check the dubious faces of those around her, then noticed the unconscious soldier I’d just pulled out. It was like an exposed wire had been touched to the base of her spine. She jumped like a pony out of the gates and started feeling him for a pulse in every conceivable spot. “Can you hear me?!” she yelled. “Please be all right!”

  I knelt down beside her as she began slapping at his colorless cheeks. “He hasn’t woken up yet. What’s his name?”

  “His name?” repeated the woman, freezing in midslap as I put her on the spot. “You want to know his name? I, er . . . I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember,” repeated Angela, rather unsympathetically.

  The woman clutched her temple. “Ow. Everything’s a blank. Just call him . . . X.”

  “What about you?” said Angela, adjusting her viewfinder.

  “I’ll be Y. Just call me Y.”

  “Do you mind if we switch those around?” said Tim, sitting on part of the wreckage with his chin resting on his hand.

  “What?”

  “Do you mind if you be X and he be Y? That way we can use your chromosomes to remember which is which.”

  For a moment the female survivor seemed about to burst into tears of confusion, but she took a deep breath and leveled her quivering mouth into something a bit more neutral. “Okay. I’ll be X, and he’s Y.”

  Suddenly the man we had recently christened Y moaned loudly and sat up, his heavy form folding like an overstuffed sofa bed. He clutched at his head. It was like watching a coconut getting stuck between two bunches of bananas. “Sir?” he said, in the way a lost child would say, “Mother?”

  “Everything’s all right, Y!” said X brightly.

  “. . . Sir?” repeated Y. This was apparently his default setting.

  “It’s okay, Y. It’s me, X!” she continued, not breaking eye contact or blinking. “I was just thanking these four CIVILIANS for pulling us out of the crash!” She emphasized the word civilians like a tourist pointing out an aborigine, waggling her eyebrows at him meaningfully.

  He glanced around at us, trying to figure out what page everyone else seemed to be on. “What about HEPL?”

  “Yes, that was an odd misspelling of help, wasn’t it?!” said X, speaking even louder and becoming quite manic. “But it’s okay! They were just explaining to me that it was a simple typo and is absolutely NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING THEY KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT.” Her sentence turned suddenly stern towards the end and if she had stared at X any harder his crewcut might have caught fire.

  “Ohhhh,” went Y, nodding, clearly still baffled but willing to play along. He looked down and noticed his missing trousers, but apparently decided not to mention it.

  “What’s HEPL?” pressed Angela.

  Y was about to speak when X placed a reassuring hand on his chest and looked into Angela’s camera lens, then put on a rather emotionless half smile and fluttered her eyelashes. When she spoke, she sounded like someone reading a prepared statement at a press conference. “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard of any such organization.”

  “Ooh, you liar!” said Angela.

  Tim, who had been yawning and glancing pointedly toward the Hibatsu building throughout the conversation, suddenly clapped his hands together and swung onto his feet. “Is this going to take much longer? We’ve got important things to get on with.”

  “Yes, what are you going to do about my house?” said Don petulantly.

  X adopted that winning-smile press-conference voice again and directed it Donwards. “We promise you will receive appropriate compensation as soon as we reestablish contact with our base.”

  “Oh,” said Don, nonplussed. “Well. Good.”

  “I meant, we have to get to Hibatsu,” said Tim, tapping his foot.

  Don sighed and got to his feet. “Well. Don’t suppose we have a choice, do we? Even if we could get back inside, I can’t be certain I even own a bed anymore.” He glared at Y as the big soldier experimentally poked the mangled helicopter rotors that were still lodged in the remains of Don’s apartment. “Of course, I might have about one hundred smaller ones.”

  —

  Having introduced herself and Y from the arse end of the alphabet, X explained their presence rather hurriedly. Apparently the two of them had been on an American aircraft carrier that had arrived as part of the disaster relief effort. The ship had ventured too close to the shore and been ensnared by the jam, which had quickly absorbed most of the crew. X and Y had made an assuredly extremely exciting last-minute escape on a gunship, with no time to enlist an actual helicopter pilot.

  Tim clapped his hands impatiently as the story concluded. “Well, now that we’re all satisfied . . .”

  “I have some questions—” began Angela.

  “SATISFIED,” pressed Tim. “I think we were all agreed that heading to the Hibatsu building was going to be our next course of action.”

  “The building with the SOS?” asked X, eagerly running with the change of subject.

  “Oh, yes,” said Don, folding his arms. “I’ve been very eager to hear your plan for how we do that, O glorious leader, bearing in mind the few miles of open streets and tall buildings between us and—where’s he going?”

  Y had already tied Tim’s makeshift harness to King Harold’s bent arrow with a long length of rope he’d been keeping in one of the pouches in his vest. He grabbed the wire and slipped his naked legs into the bed sheets with a single, smooth hop. Once he’d ridden safely across McLachlan Street like a baby being tenderly delivered by the stork, X wordlessly stepped up and started pulling the harness back with the rope.

  “There’s something not quite right about those two,” muttered Angela once X had slid out of earshot. “He hasn’t even m
entioned the trousers thing. I think that’s very odd.”

  “Well, no one else bring it up,” said Don sharply, snapping his waistband.

  “And you know what? I think she knows more than she’s telling.” She swung her camera around to capture my reaction to her announcement.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. The camera didn’t move. “Er. My goodness. How dishonest of her.”

  “Listen to me,” said Don, hissing over his shoulder as he hauled the harness back up for his turn. “Do not screw this up. I don’t care what their real story is. As far as I’m concerned those people are godsends. They’re going to be number-one priority for the rescue efforts. That’s how it goes. Your own citizens, then children, then white people, then everyone else. All we have to do is stay close and NOT offend them.” He glared pointedly at Angela, then quickly at Tim and me.

  “They destroyed your home,” said Angela.

  He sat in the harness, wrapping it around him. “All the more reason to stay chummy. Maybe they’ll rebuild it out of something sturdier than polystyrene.” Then he pushed himself off the roof and wobbled down the line.

  “Or they’ll have us killed for knowing too much,” posited Angela. “Look at that Y guy. He could probably stand behind us and cough and our necks would just snap.”

  “Why are you so paranoid?” said Tim. “They’re just more numbers. Ergo, more strength.”

  “You said the jam would have appeared at around rush hour, right?” said Angela, in hushed tones.

  “Yeah?”

  “Rush hour, when a large percentage of the population would be clustered about at ground level? Seems a bit convenient, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s . . . kind of the opposite of convenient,” I said.

  She glared at me. “Not convenient for us! Convenient for them.”

  “Who?”

  “Invaders!”

  I glanced down into the street, baffled. “In the jam?”

  She grabbed me by the ear and pulled until I was facing the camera again. “Think about it. A weapon that instantly removes all the organic matter in a populated area, leaving the buildings and the infrastructure completely intact. No fighting. You don’t even have to raise your voice. Just move in and occupy what’s left. And lo and behold, a mere . . .” She quickly checked her watch. “Day and a half after the jam, here come the Americans. With their big rescue. Trust me. There’s something big behind this.” She took an excited breath. “And I’m going to find out what.”

  Tim coughed. “Angela, there are any number of weapons that remove the people and leave the buildings. Biological weapons and that. Jam seems like kind of a messy solution.”

  “Maybe that’s just what they want you to think,” she said, staring into the middle distance.

  “So once you’ve gotten to the bottom of the conspiracy and have the evidence you need to bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Tim airily, “whom, exactly, are you going to show it to?”

  Angela opened her mouth to reply, but that was as far as she got. She held up a hand for silence as she considered the question.

  “And how are you going to get it out there?” continued Tim, regardless. “Write it on a paper airplane? Train pigeons to carry your camcorder footage? It doesn’t matter how the jam got here. Civilization gets too large, it finds a way to destroy itself. If it hadn’t been the jam it would’ve been nuclear war or corrosive Vegemite. Who cares? All that matters now is how we rebuild.”

  From the other rooftop, Don made an extremely loud exaggerated cough to get our attention. He tapped his bare wrist meaningfully.

  “All right, all right,” said Tim, taking up the harness rope. “Who wants to go next?”

  “I’ll go,” I sighed. I stepped towards him, then froze. “Oop. Hang on. Almost forgot Mary.”

  “Who?” said Tim.

  I picked up the tupperware box, whose occupant shifted sleepily with the sudden movement. “Can’t just leave her here; we have to preserve whatever life is left,” I said, holding the box as close as I could bring myself to. “That’s what you said.”

  I took a step forward and he took a step back. “Fair enough. I’d just . . . I’m not creeped out or anything. I’d just rather you didn’t give it a name. Do you know what? I’ll go next. See you down there.” He hurriedly threw his legs into the harness and was gone.

  “Hey,” said Angela, tapping my shoulder. “Travis, listen. You agree with me, right? You think it’s important to get to the bottom of all this, right? For history and stuff.”

  I looked away from the unfeeling black gaze of her electronic eye and sighed. I stared at Mary, trying to think of what would be the best thing to say to avoid any kind of conflict. Mary had nothing to offer. “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ll help me get the real story out of X and Y?” She peered out from behind the camera to give me the full effect of her puppy-dog eyes. “If the Americans did this on purpose, that’s not something we can just let go, is it?”

  Tim had reached the corner-shop roof, so I started busily hauling the harness back up to avoid having to look at her. “But why would America invade Australia?” I said. “It doesn’t seem like there’d be much strategic value in it. Unless you’re really into Antarctic research stations.”

  Angela frowned as she thought about this. Then she put on her narration voice again. “Could Antarctic research stations really hold the answer to this mystery? My cohorts seem unconvinced. But who can say anything in a world gone mad?”

  “Are you really a journalist?” I asked, pausing in the act of climbing into the harness to voice a question that had been lingering for a while.

  “Yes!” she said, offended. “This is my duty. This is what I’m going to do. Some people are going to be the scavengers and some people are going to grow the food and I’m going to be the one who chronicles it all. You know, for future generations.”

  “That’s not really answering my question . . .”

  “Yes, I am a journalist,” she said loudly, before continuing much more quietly. “Studying journalism is more like being a journalist than actually being a journalist. You have to do a lot of theory.”

  DAY 3.1

  —

  We spent the rest of the second day investigating the convenience store. The jam had flooded the shop level, lured in by the promise of sausage rolls and stale donuts, but there was a maisonette on the upper level from which we recovered a small cache of supplies. Among them we found some bedding and sleeping bags, so we made a rather haggard attempt at camp on the roof to spend the night.

  I woke the following morning when I felt Tim trying to step over me. He was holding the supply box we had put together the previous night, containing the pittance of food from the shop apartment and the few tools and implements we had been able to recover from Don’s place.

  “Tim?” I said, sitting up and laying Mary’s box aside, which I had been spooning.

  He sat near the edge of the roof, put the box down, and silently motioned for me to come over. “Shh,” he added.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered, perching nearby.

  “I’m going to test a theory,” he replied, digging around in the box. His hand came out clutching the jar of crunchy peanut butter that had been part of last night’s dinner, along with half a bottle of ketchup and a pack of lemon-and-honey throat lozenges.

  I placed a hand to my chin as he carefully opened the jar, shook a generous blob of the stuff into the lid, then held the lid upside down over the street. He watched intently as it tumbled down onto the jam, where it was almost immediately absorbed.

  “Hm,” he said, stroking his five o’clock shadow like a research scientist.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said Don, suddenly revealing himself to be awake and watching intently from his pillow.

  “I thought there might be some reaction,” said Tim weakly.

  “Would that be because you’re an absolute cretin?”

  “You know. Peanut but
ter and jam. I thought they might cancel each other out.”

  “You don’t think that’s a bit irrational?” I said.

  Tim was slightly offended. “Will you look around? The city is being devoured by strawberry preserve. Rationality left us behind a long time ago.”

  “That’s not a good reason to start throwing our extremely limited food supplies to the jam,” said Don, snatching the peanut butter. “It’s people like you who started cutting hearts out to make the sun rise in the morning. You shouldn’t do this sort of thing when X and Y are around; it makes you look expendable.”

  A moment’s silence passed as something slowly dawned on us, one after the other.

  “Where’re X and Y?” said Don, as the realization reached him.

  “I knew it!” shrieked Angela, throwing her quilt aside and hopping instantaneously from a lying to a standing position. Her camcorder was already strapped to her hand, or she hadn’t taken it off to sleep. “I knew they were up to something! See if anything’s missing! Check your skin for puncture marks! They may have implanted microchips!”

  “The harness is gone,” I said, checking the wire.

  “They’re trying to strand us!” yelled Angela, without even taking a breath. “Before we can tell the world!”

  “They’re over there,” said Tim.

  “And now they’re over there!” added Angela uncertainly.

  I scanned the jammy horizon, and now that I knew what to look for, I spotted a blob of brightly colored ThunderCats-themed pattern a few rooftops away, on top of the clothes shop at the junction of Brunswick and Ann. X and Y were at the edge, looking down into the street. At some point during the night Y had taken down the ThunderCats bedspread and expertly cut and stitched it into a pair of pajama trousers.

  “That’s a bit passive-aggressive of him,” I said, as we hurriedly gathered up the bedding and supplies.

  “I don’t care,” said Don, trying to stuff his rolled-up sleeping bag into a canvas wrapper obviously far too small for the purpose. “I’m not giving these trousers up until he specifically says something. It’s cold up here.”