by Unknown
“We have to get moving quickly or we might lose their trail,” he said, mostly to himself. His foot didn’t move.
“Uh,” I coughed. “Don, I’m not questioning you or anything, but . . . are you absolutely sure that getting your hard drive back isn’t totally, totally, 100 percent not just a tiny bit unnecessary?”
“Yes, I am sure,” he said, not looking away from the jam. “It’s my best work. It’s a new dimension of interactive entertainment.” His teeth clenched and his voice grew in volume. “Thrills! Spills! Epic adventure! FUN! FOR ALL! THE FAMILY!” He screamed and thrust his foot into the jam. “AAAAAAGH! CHRIST THAT FEELS WEIRD!”
He watched his leg as he brought it in and out of the goo a few times, but it didn’t seem to come back any shorter. He brought his other foot forward and waded into the lobby until the jam level reached his crotch. He winced. “Aaaah haahh. Hah. That’s quite nice, actually. Come on.”
“Hang on.” I tied up the plastic bag into which I’d just placed my sack of food supplies, then suddenly noticed the apple lying where I’d left it on the top stair. “Oh. Damn. I left my apple out of the bag.”
“Ugh. Well, just hold it, then. Hurry up. I’m not waiting for you.”
As Don turned and stomped away, the fear of being left behind overtook my fear of the jam. I clasped the apple tightly in one hand and walked forward. The sensation of my legs sinking into the jam was unlike anything I’d felt before. It couldn’t decide if it was repelled by the plastic or attracted towards the juicy filling, so it compromised with a rhythmic squeezing sensation, like being play bitten all over my body by a horde of toothless puppies. I was shorter than Don, so the jam reached my crotch quicker, and that experience was everything it had been hyped up to be.
Between my weight and the jam’s repelling effect, my feet weren’t actually touching the ground. I was moving through the jam by cycling with my legs and using my sack of supplies as a makeshift oar. Don was making faster progress because he wasn’t holding fruit and could use both his arms, so by the time I stepped very, very carefully through the broken glass in the front entrance, he was already at the street corner, waving me forward.
The stuffy interior of the anti-jam suit wasn’t at all improved by direct sunlight. Little reservoirs of sweat were pooling uncomfortably all over my body and I was starting to feel like a carnival goldfish. But Don was making good on his promise not to wait for me, and I was forced to push through my growing exhaustion. Being stuck alone with nothing but two questionably reliable bin liners between me and the jam was not an attractive proposition.
I emerged from the large front entrance doors into Ann Street and my hope lifted. The Everlong hadn’t been pushed far—it was only about fifty yards ahead. I slogged towards it with renewed vigor, but I couldn’t see any sign of Tim or Angela on deck, and they weren’t answering Don’s cries.
It was requiring more and more effort to keep moving. Pain nipped at my legs, and the sweat was starting to pour. It seemed like the jam grew thicker with each step.
I glanced down. No. Not thicker. Deeper.
With the next step, the jam came up to my belt buckle. Three steps later, it was three inches higher. For a horrible moment I thought that the entire surface of the jam was rising, but it was followed by a considerably horribler moment when it became apparent that the deep spot was limited to a very short radius around my waist.
Jam was crawling up my body inch by inch, unconcernedly pressing and massaging my stomach and spine as it went. I called Don’s name but he was too far ahead, and more to the point there was a plastic bag on my head, so I was shouting for the sole benefit of my own ears.
My rising coat of jam was starting to tickle my armpits. It gripped me around the middle like a glistening fist, and dragging it along with me was halving my speed with each step. I raised my apple over my head. Don was a speck, and there were still forty yards to the Everlong. I was on my own with this one.
I’d have to think about this laterally. I searched my panicking mind for what I knew about the jam. It was red. Okay, that would do for a start. It was red and sticky and smelled like strawberries. It very quickly absorbed any organic matter that touched it. And when it was near something it could eat . . .
. . . then it slowly extended bits of itself towards it. That was what it was doing. It had the scent of something. I thought of the breathing hole in the top of my head bag. Was it reaching for that? Logically going through the facts step by step was proving difficult. The jam had closed over my shoulders and terror was grabbing my conscious mind by the lapels and metaphorically shaking it back and forth.
Then I looked at Don again. He was still wading nonchalantly along and wasn’t having any of the same problems. He had a breathing hole in the same place. So it couldn’t have been that. The jam was after . . .
I looked straight up. I was still holding the apple in my raised hand. Its bruises caught the sunlight prettily. I waved it left and right experimentally, and the tube of jam pulled my torso this way and that in time with the motion. It wanted my apple.
The jam was around my throat, making it harder to breathe. I could feel its clammy tendrils slithering up my chin. I gritted my teeth. I wasn’t going to let it take the apple, which had become, by then, far more than just bruised flesh and seeds. It symbolized the future of humanity’s self-sufficiency. I could still see Travis Orchard in my mind’s eye. If I didn’t do something fast, it would have to be a memorial garden.
I tried to turn my neck to look around, but the jam held it in place. I used all my strength to tilt my entire upper body and swivel my eyes around. I spotted a nearby alley with a tall wrought-iron gate leading into some kind of car park. If I threw the apple just right, it would be speared on one of the gate spikes and be safe until I could come back to pick it up. This was about the absolute best-case scenario, besides perhaps suddenly acquiring the ability to fly, but it was all I had.
I made to wind my arm for the throw, but the jam had already snared my shoulder and it refused to be pulled back far enough. I waved my elbow back and forth, trying to worry my arm out of the jam’s grip just for long enough. The jam covered my mouth, pushing its way between my teeth slightly, and my tongue tasted it through the plastic. Desperate, I summoned all my strength and poured it all into one last yank.
My arm came free. I almost fell backward with surprise. I was about to follow through with the throw when I noticed that my face was free, too. The jam was retreating of its own accord. Within seconds it was back at crotch level.
Then it kept going. It retreated straight past my thighs and came to rest just below my knees. I stared at it, feeling ridiculous, as if my trousers had fallen down. It wasn’t just around me this time—all the jam in the street had become lower than usual.
By the time I remembered with a start what a dropping jam level had heralded in the past, the rumbling sound had already penetrated the plastic over my ears. I looked behind me.
This wave was smaller than the first one we’d seen, barely seven feet, but it compensated with speed. Vehicles and debris were being thrown around like grit in a blender. I broke into a run and had almost covered another yard before the wave hit.
The jam slammed into my back and yanked my feet from the ground. With the remarkable boost to energy that only comes from imminent death I was able to keep my legs cycling fast enough to stay on the surface and my head firmly bowed, with the breathing hole pointing forward into the nonjammy air.
As I passed the crest I was launched into the air, tumbling like a rag doll. The wave was moving so fast that it had moved on by the time I started to fall.
Spinning end over end, my vision a blur, I caught a glimpse of a sign hanging from a lamppost coming straight towards me. I spread my arms, and an advertisement for an allegedly upcoming music festival slapped me full in the face. I slammed my arms and legs closed like a set of mantraps, and I wasn’t falling anymore.
I wobbled to a dazed standstill, and a f
ew moments of peace passed before I realized that the jam now appeared to be above me. My precious apple, which had landed between my right wrist and the plastic sign, rolled out of my grip. I craned my head back as if I could suddenly persuade myself to evolve a chameleon tongue in the next few seconds, but could only watch helplessly as it rolled through the air in dreadful slow motion and plopped into the jam. It ate it in an instant, chomping obnoxiously.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!” I wailed, the noise bursting from my lungs without my brain having any say in the matter.
“YEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeees!” came the echo.
I twisted around. The Everlong was barely ten yards away. Don was on deck, slamming closed the hatch under which he had been sheltered from the wave.
“Are you quite finished faffing about?” he yelled.
—
After a few minutes, I was able to untense my muscles for long enough to slide down the lamppost. Don hauled me up onto the Everlong’s deck and I kneeled gratefully on my first solid horizontal surface in what felt like years, lovingly running my fingernails along the cracks.
“Mary!” I realized.
Don had been standing at the front of the boat, gazing out into the city. He turned his head. “And?” he prompted.
“And, Tim and Angela,” I added quickly. “Where are they?”
He turned back to the city. “Your girlfriend’s in her box below deck. I tripped over it on the way down.”
“What about Tim and Angela?”
“I dunno. I haven’t looked everywhere yet.” He suddenly gripped the rail and thrust his head forward. “There’s the trail!”
“I’m just going to see if they’re down there,” I announced, but Don was busy grinding his teeth at the jam.
It was dark below decks. Something must have happened to the battery, or the generator, or whatever the power came from. I had to keep the hatch open to see. Mary was at the bottom of the stairs, twitching unhappily as the darkness suddenly went away. I picked her up by the handle on the lid and held her like an old-fashioned lantern as I ventured further into the kitchen.
I tripped on something, rustling the noisy plastic outfit I was still wearing. I knelt, felt around at the obstruction with my hands, and after some examination, concluded that it was a drawer, wrenched from its housing.
As I adjusted to the darkness, I saw that all the drawers had been pulled out and their contents dumped on the floor. The cupboards and the chest freezer were open. The curtain had been torn down from the shower. The mattresses had been thrown around. Either burglars had come and ransacked the place, or someone had gotten really, really hungry.
That thought made me hesitate. As a party, we hadn’t had a meal since yesterday evening, and that had been mostly sandwich spread and cough sweets. How long would it take for starvation to drive Tim and Angela to madness? Had they torn the kitchen apart? Fought and fallen into the jam? Had one eaten the other? Going insane was a gradual process, I knew that, but it only takes an instant for the concept of cannibalism to switch from unthinkable to justifiable to breakfast.
I moved into the master bedroom, a private chamber with a double bed and a low ceiling that was constantly bumping the back of my ears. It was deep within the boat and far from the deck hatch so by rights it should have been pitch black. But somehow there was enough light to see all the disturbed bedding and raided cabinets.
Looking around, I saw that light was spilling through the cracks in the wardrobe. Something bumped the doors gently. I could see enough of a silhouette to tell that there was something moving in there.
I held Mary towards it like a pistol and she reared up, ready to strike. I started slowly edging forwards. I tried not to make too much noise with my breathing, but the rustling plastic bags all over my body rendered that effort somewhat moot.
When I was barely inches away from the door, I heard a whispered voice coming from within. “I’m in the cupboard,” it was saying, quavering with fear and grief. “The things have come back. Back for me. It’s all gone to hell here. I can hear them right outside the door.” A pause. “I just hope they can’t hear this.”
“Angela?” I said.
There was a long pause. “I said, I hope they can’t hear this.”
“I can hear this.”
There was a shorter pause. Then the wardrobe door suddenly flew open and I was dazzled by a mounted light on a handheld camera. Something shoved me around the middle and I fell onto my back, clutching Mary’s box to my chest. The light shone in my eyes again, illuminating a plastic fork that Angela was preparing to jam into my throat.
“Travis?” she said, stopping her fork with the plastic points tickling my Adam’s apple. Her torso was pressing the tupperware box painfully into my chest. Mary hissed jealously between us. “Why’re you dressed like a swamp monster?”
“They’re just bin liners!” I plucked at one of my sleeves to show her.
“Oh,” she said. Then she said it again two more times with increasing realization, glancing aside. She rocked back, heaving a sigh of relief while keeping the camera on my face. Then the lens snapped sideways. “Please tell me that’s food.”
Before I could answer she bounded over to the sack of vending machine snacks I’d somehow managed to hold onto up to now. I’d left it on the floor and it was spilling cupcakes, one of which Angela grabbed and attempted to inhale.
I watched her carefully over the top of Mary’s box. “Angela?”
“Whaff?” she said, cheeks stuffed like a hamster’s.
“You’ve been really hungry, right?”
“Yeff?”
I glanced back at the chaos in the kitchen, and chose my words carefully. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I think there have definitely been a lot of mitigating circumstances lately. I just want to know what you did with Tim.”
She looked at me expressionlessly, cheeks bulging, then swallowed. “Tim’s gone. The monsters took him.”
I nodded. “Do the monsters ever talk to you when nobody else is around?”
“I mean, the guys in bin liners, I guess. There were three of them. Came out of nowhere. They took all our cans.” She suddenly grabbed my arm urgently. “They took Tim!”
The penny finally dropped like a manhole cover into a vat of porridge. “They came through here?”
“I don’t understand where they could have come from, unless they were somehow able to walk through the . . .” She ran her camera gaze over my plastic yellow jumpsuit, then did that same thing again where she said “oh” three times. “What happens if it gets ripped?”
“There’s another layer.”
“What happens if that gets ripped?”
“Er.” I thought about this. “Death?”
“Not a perfect system, is it.”
The floor suddenly tilted a few degrees. Angela and I both looked at the wall when we heard something large and metal grinding against the outside like a horny robot.
The Everlong was moving, or at least trying to. I stumbled through the wreckage in the kitchen as the hull tilted left and right, as if trying to wriggle through a gap slightly too small for it. I trotted up the steps and another lurch almost threw me headlong into the jam.
The sail had caught the wind and was trying to pull the Everlong out of the little cluster of overturned vehicles that the jam waves had formed at the crossroads of Ann and Edward Street. Logistically this was turning out to be as straightforward as maneuvering to the front of a packed lift.
“Steer the bloody thing!” yelled Don. He was trying to keep the mainsail in place with his leg and push away from an overturned Volkswagen with one of the boat hooks.
I ran over to the stern, ducked under the mast, and grabbed the rudder. Holding it steady, I was able to keep the boat in line long enough to get free of the throng without splitting the entire hull open.
“Don?” said Angela, poking her camera out the deck hatch. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m going after my bu
ild,” he said, putting his weight into the sail and baring his teeth. “It’s a matter of life and death. If I can’t get that build back then it is officially the end of my life.”
“Build?” asked Angela, looking at me.
“The guys who took Tim took something of Don’s,” I said. Don made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a dry heave. “I think they were the same guys. They had bin liners on.” I glanced down at myself. “I don’t know how common that is, though.”
“Don’t you dare try to change my mind!” snarled Don. “I can still see their trail and we have to follow it before another wave wipes it out!”
“No, no, sounds like a plan,” said Angela.
“Yeah, makes sense to me,” I added.
Don did a double take. “What?”
His angry glare put me on the spot. I checked over my words but couldn’t see any part of them that could make him incredulous. “I said, it makes sense.”
He looked between the two of us a few times, then pushed the sail away from him savagely. “Are you people retarded?! We’re barely two streets from Hibatsu, I want to delay us who knows how long to get one measly hard drive back, and you’re both perfectly fine with this?!”
“But it does make sense,” I whined, cringing. “We can rescue Tim as well.”
“So you don’t want to do this?” ventured Angela.
“Of course I want to do this!” barked Don. “It’s just . . . oh, stop talking.” He took up the sail again.
Turning down Edward Street put us firmly in the city’s primary shopping district. The buildings were divided into shops and boutiques of every color and variety, punctuated by the occasional eatery. This neighborhood would have been particularly crowded at rush hour. Maybe it was my imagination but the jam seemed slightly thicker around that one really popular coffee place.
Something about the area creeped me out. The air was as still and quiet as always, but this time it was a deliberate stillness: not of death, but of alive things trying to keep very quiet. The sun was setting, the brightly colored shop fronts fading against the dusky blue-orange sky, and that wasn’t improving the atmosphere any.
