Jam Read online

  I thrust the apple protectively behind my back as the owner of the voice came closer. Their movements didn’t sound like normal footsteps. They sounded like weird, slithering thuds. A shadow appeared on the wall that didn’t seem to have much in common with a human silhouette. For a heart-stopping moment I thought that the jam must have acquired the ability to climb to this height, and had gathered the necessary intelligence to take human form and voice.

  Then it came into the lobby. It wasn’t jam, but it was just as terrifying. It was humanoid, about six feet tall and with two arms and two legs, but its body consisted entirely of a glistening black substance that trailed viscously from its limbs. It was grotesque, but I couldn’t look away. I felt cold sweat run down my back, and tried to shrink further into my clothes.

  The thing’s featureless face tossed left and right, as if sniffing the air, and it seemed to notice the smashed vending machine. It lumbered over and ran one black flipperlike appendage over the ruined front of the vending machine.

  Oh god, I thought. Whatever it is, it’s found my scent. On top of that, my hastily adopted crouch was starting to make my legs ache. My knee twitched, bumping the back of the barbarian’s leg. It wobbled on its feet, and the black slime creature spun around at the noise.

  Instinct took over, and I dove behind the sofa. The monster didn’t seem to have seen me, but I was shaking more and more violently as it stomped towards the barbarian, closer and closer to me.

  I tried to push myself silently along the carpet with my feet, but when its quivering mass was within six inches, I panicked. My limbs moved of their own accord and I bolted away, shoving the sofas aside as I went, not daring to look behind me to see if the creature was following. I was still gripping the hilt of the sword and the blade made an ugly tearing noise as it dragged along the floor.

  I headed past the reception desk and down one of the halls to a junction, where I slowed to consider my options. There was another of the monsters. It was in a small kitchenette at the end of one of the passages, rooting through the drawers and cupboards for who knows what. This one was black, too, but with patches of white and dark green. I took a sharp left turn and kept running, boosting myself with the massive sword’s momentum.

  Soon I found myself in the main office space of the studio, a huge room with a strip of windows facing the street and thirty cubicles arranged into a neat grid, the occasional monitor-mounted action figure or Star Destroyer dangling from the ceiling in colorful defiance of conformity.

  A third monster was crouching under one of the desks. It hadn’t seen me, but as I came in, my sword banged against a radiator, and the monster looked up. My blood ran cold as it slowly stood upright like Godzilla rising from the ocean. This one was mostly green, and seemed to be wearing a Woolworths carrier bag on its head. It was the last straw in an ongoing sequence of absurdities that finally made my nervous system throw up its hands and refuse to go on.

  I stood petrified as the latest monstrosity lurched towards me, one shapeless limb outstretched. But as the beast passed in front of one of the offices, the door suddenly flew open and Don came out in midair, swinging his ax overhead and screaming at the top of his voice.

  He’d chosen his moment a little too early and the blade embedded itself in the carpet a few inches in front of the green slime monster’s quivering feet, leaving Don still clutching the handle, bent double and within easy attack range. I darted forward and swung my sword at the advancing demon. Seeing me coming, Don abandoned his attempt to stand up and stayed down.

  About halfway through the blade’s arc, it occurred to me that no one in their right mind would sell replica fantasy swords that were also sharp and efficient weapons. An instant later the sword’s flat edge bounced off the creature’s misshapen shoulder, knocking it off its feet and sending me spinning in the opposite direction.

  “What’s going on?!” I wailed, dizzy.

  “They took my build!” raged Don, jerking up and down in a futile effort to get the ax out of the floor. “They took my bloody bastard build!” He glanced at me. His red unshaven face and sweat-matted hair were only marginally less disquieting than the blob monsters. “LOOK OUT!”

  I heard the thud of footsteps behind me again. I was already swinging the sword even before I looked over my shoulder. The black one from the lobby was there, close, but not close enough. My blade whistled freely through the air and the creature shoulder barged me aside as my spin reached its three hundred sixtieth degree. I went flying into one of the cubicles like a shuriken, tripped on something expensive sounding, and lost consciousness when my head smashed into a quarter-scale Iron Man figurine.

  DAY 3.4

  —

  When I woke up, I was sitting in one of the wheeled office chairs. My wrists were being tied together behind the backrest, and my ankles had already been tied to the shaft under the seat. There was an Iron Man–shaped ache in my face.

  I looked up, and immediately regretted it. Two of the glistening swamp monsters were in front of me, talking amongst themselves. They were leaning against the window with their armlike limbs folded, which seemed an oddly casual pose for bloodthirsty hell beasts. The third one was behind me, still securing my arms.

  “What are you?” I said, voice trembling.

  “I’ll tell you what they are,” snarled someone to my immediate right. “They’re on the right path for an ax in the center parting, that’s what they are.”

  Don was also secured to a wheeled office chair. He had considerably more bindings around him but they were hastily tied, so he’d probably been struggling while they did it. That went some way to explain his furious, boggle-eyed stare and gritted teeth.

  “Are you—” I began.

  “DON’T even say it,” he barked. “Don’t even ask me if I’m all right. I don’t know how much inanity I can tolerate.”

  The one that had been putting the finishing touches to our ropes—the black one I had seen in the lobby—shambled to his fellows and the three of them went into some kind of whispering debate. Occasionally one of them would turn and look at us thoughtfully. It was clear the subject of their conversation was our eventual fate.

  I slowly leaned towards Don’s chair. “Are they . . . human?”

  He looked at me, anger at our captors swiftly replaced by sarcastic contempt for me. “Yes, Travis, they’re human. Those other things are desks. The things we’re sitting on are chairs. Stop me when you get confused.”

  “What happened to them?”

  He spoke loudly and slowly as if to a foreigner. “They wrapped themselves in bin liners.”

  What I had taken for the wet glisten of slime was, in actuality, reflections of light off a wrinkled, plasticky surface, and I could see strips of gray and black going around parts of their body that were probably duct tape. They were humans. Humans who had wrapped themselves in several layers of garbage bags. I wasn’t immediately sure if that was better or worse than their being swamp monsters, because at least the swamp monsters would have an excuse for looking that way.

  “Yeah, we’re talking about you,” said Don confrontationally, noticing that they were watching our conversation. “Come over here and we’ll do it to your face.” He clacked his teeth suggestively.

  The man wearing the Woolworths carrier bag on his head seemed to have been wordlessly nominated the leader of the trio. He strolled towards us while the other two watched worriedly from the background. Then he held up a hand to reveal an internal hard drive, which he turned over and over in front of Don’s snarling face.

  “Calm down, dude; you’ll give yourself an aneurysm,” said the Woolworths man. His voice was surprisingly young and nasally. Not teenage, but definitely on the fresher side of his twenties. “Why are you so crazy about this?”

  “It’s mine!” yelled Don. “It’s my build!”

  “Hey, did you work here?” said one of the other plastic-bag wearers, who sounded equally as young. “Did you work on Interstellar Bum Pirates?”
/>   Don’s furious response derailed on its way to the mouth and he sputtered in confusion for a second. “N—what? No! That wasn’t even a Loincloth game!”

  “Man, Interstellar Bum Pirates was so awesome,” said the leader. The hard drive glistened in the light. “Is that what this is? I heard they were making IBP 2.”

  Don wound his temper back in with superhuman effort and tried to sound rational. “Even if it was, which it isn’t,” he said, his voice like the sizzle of a spark moving along a dynamite fuse, “there’s nothing you can do to access it.”

  Some of this seemed to penetrate, but it didn’t dampen the leader’s mood. “Nah, it’s all good,” he exclaimed. “We’ll take it back to base and put it on display and all the awesomeness will come off it and we will marvel at the glory.”

  “What the hell?!” barked Don, back at full volume.

  “Er, it’s ironic,” explained the leader mockingly.

  “Dude, I told you it’d be a good idea to check this place out,” said the second one.

  “Yeah, man, I think this calls for an ironic high five,” said the first. The pair immediately thrust out their arms and slapped the backs of their hands together. Then, with no further discussion, they started heading for the exit.

  The third, who still hadn’t spoken, didn’t move at first, but glanced between us and them a few times. “Erm . . . are we just . . . leaving them tied up, then?”

  His colleagues didn’t even look at him. The Woolworths-bag wearer just sniggered while the other said, “You just don’t get irony, do you, Martin.”

  After Martin, embarrassed, had scurried after his fellows, I sat waiting patiently while Don screamed and bounced around on his chair for a few minutes. Eventually, he gave a last few halfhearted barks of anger and sunk back into his seat, his head bowed forward, defeated.

  I coughed. “Did you really make Interstellar Bum Pirates?”

  His head shot back up again, hateful energy renewed, but he managed to stop himself before he exploded again. He screwed his eyes shut and took a few deep breaths, then answered in a moderate if quivery tone of voice, “No.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame. Me and Tim used to play that co-op. It was really—” I tailed off when my words were competing with a loud roaring noise coming from outside, like a subway train driving past. “What’s that?”

  “Another tidal wave,” said Don nonchalantly.

  “What?!” I hopped up and down a few times, hoping I could vibrate myself free.

  Don smashed his chair into mine like a dodgem car to calm me down. “Look, if the other wave didn’t get inside the building then this one won’t, will it? Focus on something important.” Sure enough, the roar swiftly faded into the distance and we remained undigested. His own words made him realize something, and he spun in his chair to show me his wrists. “Have I been tied up with strips of plastic bag?”

  I checked behind his back. “Yeah. A blue one.”

  “I thought so. I’ve got an idea. We have to get to the kitchen.”

  That was easier and considerably less embarrassingly said than done. To make the chairs move we had to toss our heads back and forth and thrust our hips forward to wheel down the hall towards the kitchen, inch by humiliating inch. Don made better speed, but I managed to stay close enough behind to keep talking.

  “WHAT hapPENED in HERE?” I asked, voice modulating oddly with each push forward.

  “GOT as FAR as my OFFice. DIDn’t SEE aNYone. GOT my HARD drive OUT of my CASE when ONE of THEM came IN.” He paused for a moment to get his breath back. “I HID unDER the DESK and he TOOK the HARD drive. I don’t know WHY. I guess they’re atTRACted to SHIny OBjects. I only NOTiced after he’d LEFT. Then I ran OUT of the OFFICE and THAT’S when I RAN into YOU again.”

  Once we were in the kitchen, the tiled floor was a lot easier to navigate on casters than the carpet. Don rolled himself over to a crumb-stricken gas stove and turned his back to it. “Tell me when I’ve got the front hob.”

  I looked. “No, you’re just grabbing the knobs, there.”

  He blinked. “I meant the knob that controls the front hob.”

  “Oh! Yeah, that one.”

  He turned it. By some miracle the jam hadn’t affected the pipes, and the stovetop started hissing gas. After a minute or so of effort Don grabbed a barbecue lighter from the counter. It clicked emptily as he pulled the switch, but it created enough of a spark to ignite a predictably large fireball on the stovetop.

  “Where do you think they came from?” I said, as he gingerly held his wrists towards the flame.

  “I don’t know. Ow. But they took my build so wherever they are, we’re going to go there and keep setting fire to things until they give it back.”

  Finally, the plastic strips stretched unhappily in the heat and he pulled his hands apart, then untied the rest of his bonds. “Right. I need to see if they took anything else important from around here. Can you do a check for supplies and meet me on the balcony?”

  “Could you untie me first?”

  He stopped on his way to the door and rolled his eyes. “Oh. Whatever.” He snapped the plastic from around my wrists and left me to take care of the rest.

  Once my legs were free I glanced momentarily at the door he had gone through, then turned back to the kitchen counter and turned off the stove. Then I rooted through all the drawers and cupboards until I found a shiny white-handled can opener glittering invitingly in a cutlery drawer. I tested its weight in my hand, and felt immensely proud of myself.

  —

  I came out onto the front balcony with a plastic sack over one shoulder and the apple in the opposite hand.

  “What’s in there?” said Don, pointing.

  I jiggled my two prizes. “Food from the snack machine in here. And the apple’s important so it gets its own hand.”

  “Whatever. There’s a problem.”

  He pointed into the street and it didn’t take long to realize that the problem was the Everlong, namely that its current location was not immediately apparent. “Where’s the boat?”

  “Must have been that last wave.” He hit the balcony rail and I jumped. “God damn it!”

  “Couldn’t Tim and Angela come back for us?”

  “They’d have to figure out how to sail the boat first.” He drummed his fingers anxiously. “And before that they’d have to figure out how to stop being retards.”

  There was nowhere to climb onto from the balcony, and the wave must have pushed all the vehicles out of the street, leaving us without steppingstones. Navigating across the rooftops was no longer tenable now the area was transitioning to the business district; fifty-story skyscrapers stood side by side with older ten-story buildings like fathers and sons at the urinal together.

  Something in the jam caught my eye. “What’s that?”

  The surface of the jam was never even, since it remained at an approximate depth of three feet regardless of the rising and falling of the ground underneath, but a strip of it leading from the front entrance of the building was disturbed strangely. It seemed to be divided into three parallel furrows that grew better defined the further they went from the building, like the wakes of three small boats.

  “The plastic men,” growled Don ominously. “The ones that took my build. They can move through the jam.”

  “That must be what the bin liners are for,” I said.

  “Yes, that was pretty obvious, Travis; keep up. We need to find a way to follow them.”

  Our eyes met. Then our gazes simultaneously traveled downwards, taking in each other’s unsealed, nonplastic clothing.

  —

  About twenty minutes later Don and I rendezvoused in the emergency stairwell that led down into the jam-filled lobby. We had agreed that he would search levels two and three while I covered four, five, and six.

  “Couldn’t find many bags at Loincloth,” he said. “They were all gone from the kitchen.”

  “Yeah, I saw them rummaging around in there,” I said
. “I found a whole bunch in the clinic upstairs.” I waved the roll of yellow bags marked biological waste. “And I emptied all the bins and took the liners that weren’t ripped or smelly.” I waved a slightly damp wad of plastic in my other hand.

  Don produced three rolls of duct tape and tapped them rapidly against his palm like a nervous tambourine player. “Right. Good.” He looked into the jam, which was rubbing itself into the bottom of the next flight of steps, then looked away and covered his face. “No, not good. This is stupid. All it’ll take is one tiny rip and we’re spreadable.”

  “So more than one layer, I’m thinking.”

  We dressed in silence from the abundance of yellow medical bags the roll provided. Starting with two as stockings, then two with the ends opened up as shorts, then one with two leg holes as a sort of nappy, then one with three holes as a sort of vest, then two for each arm. We taped up the joins until our knees, elbows, and waists had tripled in size. Then we added a second layer.

  “Mum always told me not to do this,” said Don as he readied one of the smaller, transparent bags. “Shows what she knew, the bitch.” He pulled it onto his head and sniffed disgustedly. “Where the hell’d you get this?”

  “Just a waste paper basket,” I said honestly, neglecting to mention that it had been in a women’s bathroom.

  He took a few experimental breaths, then snatched the bag off, gasping for air. “Okay. Okay. Mum may have had a point. It’s going to need a breathing hole.”

  “But . . .”

  “I know, I know, but it’s only three feet deep; it shouldn’t even come up to head height.” He wriggled his finger through the bottom of the bag, then pulled it back on. He seemed a lot more comfortable, even though a single tuft of hair stuck stupidly upright from the hole, fluttering in time with his breaths. Satisfied, he taped up the join around his neck and shoulders.

  I followed suit, and my world quickly became a very warm and moist place with a constant orchestra of crinkling plastic. Don started making his way down the steps toward the jam, but the determination slowly faded from his gait until he stopped with one foot hovering six inches above the shimmering red surface.