Jam

by Unknown

  “It was the Hibatsu settlement!” said X indignantly.

  “And they’ll be next, I think,” he said, wallowing in his newly restored status. Tim tried to say something urgently through his taped mouth before the nearest guard silenced him with the butt of the confiscated pepper-spray toy gun.

  Our party of five moved through the jam in single file towards the ringed black hole that marked the stairwell, a sight that had once provoked slight amusement at its resemblance to a puckered arsehole, but now evoked an executioner’s block. Behind our unhappy queue came most of the mall’s population, following down the escalator in a seemingly endless multicolored train. As we stopped near the edge of the hole the crowd spread out into a circle, cutting off all possible exits.

  “Fellow followers of the true way of Crazy Bob,” said Lord Awesomo grandly, holding his arms at right angles to his body. “Today is a day for celebration, as we rid ourselves of the unsavory element that has plagued us for almost three days. Praise be to Crazy Bob.”

  “Hail Crazy Bob,” went the crowd ironically, all rebellion forgotten. I cast my head back to see that there were two silhouettes at Crazy Bob’s usual position. One in the cardboard mask and crown, and a shorter, female one in an aluminum-foil cape.

  “Even in that short time these consummate villains have committed the following grievous offenses. One, a great number of completely deliberate murders. Two, conspiracy to commit completely deliberate murders.”

  “Why . . .” whispered X to herself. Or, again, she might have been saying Y’s name. Perhaps we should have kept their code names the other way around after all.

  “Three, spreading lies in an attempt to incite poor, innocent, misled citizens to revolt, including our beloved princess.”

  Tim moaned into his tape, wrestling with his bonds halfheartedly for a moment.

  “Four, most blasphemous assault upon the divine person of Crazy Bob. Five, deliberate theft of sacred artifacts, to wit, one consecrated hard drive.”

  “Drinks coaster,” growled Don to himself, like the first foreboding rumble before a catastrophic volcanic eruption.

  “Six, fraternizing with criminals, harboring knowledge of their actions, and allowing them, through inaction, to occur unchecked.”

  “Okay, now that’s reaching,” protested Angela.

  “And finally, perhaps their most heinous crime, consuming the actual body of His Tweetiness, Whiskers Ravenhair. And being an accessory to the consumption of said icon.”

  I looked up at Princess Ravenhair’s shadow. “Don’t do this,” I said. She didn’t move.

  The end of a broom handle prodded me between the shoulder blades, forcing me to the edge of the puckered entrance to the jammy underworld. The rail around the stairwell had been removed, and the stairs bashed out, so only the hole remained. Jam ringed it like a stationary waterfall plunging into a fruit-scented blackness so complete it seemed to be sucking at my eyeballs. Mary pulled her legs tightly around herself as I held her over the drop.

  “Does our first perpetrator have anything to say in his defense?” asked Lord Awesomo sincerely.

  “W—”

  “Too bad.”

  Something hard and wooden bashed the back of my legs, and I would have fallen to my knees, but my knees kept right on going. The mall blurred upwards to be replaced by a darkening red chimney. It was all I could do to keep my body arranged feet first, clutching Mary in both hands above my head.

  The three feet of jam slowed my fall just enough to prevent both my ankles snapping like rice crackers, but my breathing hole came within inches of the jam’s surface. I stood up as fast as I could, balancing Mary’s box on my head as the first extended tendril of jam started to bat at my face like a curious cat.

  At the bottom of the Pit was the smaller, secondary eating hall, the small collection of restaurants that had sold the cheapest, greasiest food in the complex. All of them had their shutters down. There were no torches, but from the remnants of the light shining down from above, I could see the entrance to the cheapo store across the hall, its windows smashed in and its stock of useful supplies no doubt exhausted.

  And then a sparkle of reflected light caught my eye, and my gaze slipped down. The surface of the jam was completely covered in small shards of glittering glass, far too much to just be from the shop windows. I could also see scattered collections of knives and even a coil of razor wire. And as I let the focus of my gaze track closer to me, I could see a great number of torn plastic bags in the ring of the light.

  I heard an angry yell from above and Don thudded into the jam. The word “ARSEHOLES” burst from his lungs as he landed, apparently as some kind of reflex action. “Oh god. I’m still alive.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Ugh.” He straightened up. “So are you.”

  “I thought Tim was next?”

  “Oh, I think Awesomo wants to get up in his grill for a while. Do I even want to know what’s going on down here? Oh. Ohhh. That’s a lot of sharp objects.”

  “I think the idea is they’ll rip holes in our plastic bags if we try to move through them,” I said.

  “Well, Travis, it’s nice to see the trauma of death row hasn’t done anything to your razor-sharp reasoning skills.”

  X and Angela came next in a two-for-one pairing, Angela endeavoring to distance herself from X as soon as they landed. “Yikes,” she said, noticing the scattered array of cutting implements. Before anyone could stop her she moved to the edge of the safe area, picked up one of the razors in her bound hands, and started working away at the tape around her wrists.

  “What are they going to do to Y?!” demanded X, staring up the Pit.

  “You know what,” snarked Don. “If I were the kind of person to worry about other people, I definitely wouldn’t waste it on that steroid farm. He can take care of himself. Keeping ourselves alive is the hot-button topic for me.”

  Finally, Tim landed in the jam, almost on top of X. It seemed like it took longer than necessary for him to rise from his landing crouch, and when he did so it was with slow deliberation. He chewed tensely on his lip, surveying the thousands of glinting edges that surrounded us, then finally rested his gaze on me.

  “Travis,” he said. “None of this was your fault.” The intensity in his eyes and the fact that he had even brought it up implied the exact opposite.

  “Oh, don’t start moaning,” moaned Don. “Hibatsu’s a much better-run settlement. This one was going out of its way to kill itself. Y was just speeding up the course of nature.”

  “There we go,” said Angela, having freed her hands from the tape. She cut mine free next while I held the handle on the top of Mary’s box between my teeth, then produced her camcorder from some custom pocket in her plastic lining and addressed it. “So, how will the party get out of this one? Could it be possible to get through the death jam if we just move really slowly and carefully?”

  “Yeah, I bet all the owners of these thought something similar,” said Don unhelpfully, lifting one of the emptied plastic bags with one finger. “Oh, look. That one made it almost six feet.”

  Tim moved his way to the front of our little huddle. He dug around inside his plastic vest and produced a small pocket flashlight, which he shone around the darkened eating hall. “There’s the way to the underground bus terminal,” he said, referring to a particularly deep section of the blackness over to the right. “Looks like the jam’s clear there. They probably didn’t think they needed to fill the whole floor with sharp things. We just need to get over about fifteen feet of death jam.”

  “Oh, well, as easy as that, is it?” said Don. “Anyone know the world long-jump record in a peat bog?”

  Tim reached into his vest again and lifted out a coil of the same blue network cable we’d used to secure Y. Experimentally, he flung one end of the cable into the room. Fully extended, the far end reached about a foot past the death jam.

  “If we had some way to secure the far end to something high up ov
er there, like with a grappling hook,” he thought aloud, “we could shimmy along the cable to safety without having to touch the jam.”

  “Where are you getting all this stuff from?” asked Angela.

  “I thought it might come in handy. Haven’t got anything like a grappling hook, though.”

  “Well, so much for that, then,” said Don. “How about we eat Travis before we think about it some more?”

  “What if,” began Angela, with an enthusiasm that earned her everyone’s undivided attention, “we swam under the jam?”

  There was a silence as the rest of us digested this, which was broken when Don began slow clapping.

  “No, seriously,” said Angela. “All the sharp things are floating on the surface ’cos the jam won’t eat them, but everything underneath that’s safe.”

  “No it’s not; it’s jam,” I said. “It’ll suck our bodies out through our breathing holes.”

  “Not if we sealed them up,” said Tim, one finger to his lips and supporting his elbow with the other hand. Terror struck me as I realized he was actually going to endorse this plan of action.

  “Oh, even better,” said Don. “So we’ll have just enough time to enjoy the sensation of not being dissolved before we suffocate.”

  Tim hid his stress well, but I’d learned to recognize signs that he was getting tense. For example, rising to Don. “You know what, Don, you criticize everyone else’s plans. Why don’t you ever put forward any of your own? Since you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

  “Okay, here’s my plan,” said Don without hesitation. “We continue this conversation after a nice dinner of Travis. Garnished with spider legs.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to breathe under there anyway,” said Angela. She had produced her camera from inside her plastic wear and was taking in the death jam. “Get down, swim, come up, pull the bag off, needn’t take more than thirty seconds at most.”

  “And only one of us needs to do it,” said Tim. “They just have to tie the cable up so the rest can get across.”

  “I nominate Travis,” said Don immediately.

  “What?!” I interjected, as Tim nodded reasonably in agreement. “I can’t . . .”

  “Travis,” said Tim, looking me square in the eye. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re obligated to do this to make up for anything.”

  His words were so much noise. The real meaning was in that look. Tim had once gotten depressed and eaten all of Frank’s drinking chocolate, and when Frank had confronted us, Tim made up a story about extremely selective rats while shooting me a desperate look urging me to back up everything he said. This was that same look, times fifty.

  “This’ll do,” said Angela, dredging a largely unbroken transparent bag from the cluster of abandoned outfits on the jam’s surface. She pulled it over my head like a mixture of a hangman and a fussy mother on her child’s first day at school. “This tape’s still sticky, too. Take a deep breath.”

  “Wait!” I said as she came at me with the duct tape noose. “Could someone . . . hold onto Mary?”

  Angela took the box as Tim repositioned himself carefully to keep at least one person between him and the spider. I checked my joins and filled my lungs, and then felt a friendly but firm hand seal a few layers of tape over my breathing hole, angle me towards the clear patch of jam, and push me down onto my knees.

  Blood was rushing to my head as if trying to get away from the jam. The plastic flattened itself against my mouth again and again as fear took hold. I must have hesitated a little too long, because either Tim’s hand or Don’s foot hit me hard between the shoulder blades and I fell forward onto my stomach.

  The jam usually repelled whatever it couldn’t eat, but it had enough of a scent of my meat through the thin plastic to embrace me warmly. It was like swimming through an ocean of carnivorous worms, all fighting each other to get at me. The bag over my face wasn’t quite taut, and I could feel jam trying to push its way into my eyes, ears, and nose. A horribly tonguelike extrusion was trying to wedge itself into my mouth like a nervous teenage makeout.

  I half crawled, half swam my way along the tiled floor. With each movement my brain tried to convince me that I must have gone far enough by now and it was time to surface for some yummy oxygen, but I could still see light reflecting dimly off the broken glass above my head. Still, there was less and less the further I moved from the circle, and soon there was nothing but pitch darkness, omnipresent all-over massage, and no air.

  My heart was beating so fast I must have been using about three idiots’ worth of oxygen. It felt like I’d been under for at least an hour by the time I couldn’t see anything glittering sharply overhead anymore. I pulled myself a few final inches, gathered my feet beneath me, and stood.

  I was almost upright when I felt something snag my plastic, and it was too late to stop. There was a tearing sound like the universe ripping open. I looked down to see a line of plastic just above my navel drooping down towards a piece of barbed wire.

  I unsnagged it just as the hole was falling open and slapped it against my stomach. I stood like Napoleon at attention for a second, waiting for my entire body to be yanked through a millimeter-wide slit. But the jam wasn’t eating me. I’d risen a little earlier than I should have done, but I was safe.

  Then my lungs seemed to twist painfully in my chest and I tried to inhale, only to feel plastic flattening against my open mouth. Hurriedly I shoved two fingers into my mouth to break the seal, and succeeded, but pushed a little too far and gagged. Bent double, I felt the hole by my navel falling open again, so I clasped it shut with both hands just in time for the second wave of puke.

  “Was that Travis?” wondered Angela, from the illuminated huddle across the way. It must have been too dark to see me from there.

  “Either that or the jam,” said Don. “Maybe Travis is where it draws the line.”

  “Tie it up, Travis, if you can hear me,” said Tim, throwing the cable out again.

  I watched the cable’s end plop onto the surface of the jam next to me. A thought occurred to me. They couldn’t see me. They weren’t sure I’d surfaced at all. And there was no reason I had to correct them. My stomach hurt, my face was covered in a film of tears, snot, and fresh vomit, and I was feeling more wretched than I’d ever felt in my life, which I’d incidentally just risked for someone else’s stupid plan. And all my so-called friends could do was make snarky insults and order me around. I didn’t need this. I could just leave them to it. Turn around and go. Make my own way through the underground bus way and start a new life.

  Alone.

  “Travis?” said Tim, with growing concern.

  I picked up the end of the cable and began securing it to the top of a nearby speak-your-weight machine. “Yeah, yeah, give me a sec.”

  DAY 6.2

  —

  And so, two slackers, a game designer, a would-be journalist, a troubled American agent, and a giant spider made their way through the darkened underground tunnels away from the Briar Center. The bus way would eventually lead directly to the plaza by the Hibatsu building, near the bridge. The karmic wheel had, perhaps, decided to give us time to get our breath back.

  After the others had crossed the death jam, we had continued in silence for some time, following Tim and his flashlight, trusting that he knew what turnings to take. Angela had stopped filming, and I had managed to seal the rip in my vest with some of the tape scavenged from the victims of the death jam. Mary was settled warily in the bottom of her box, probably thinking about what she had done.

  Don clapped his hands brightly. “Boy, we really buggered things up back there, didn’t we!”

  Tim gave him an icy look. “We didn’t.”

  “Oh, sure. You were stirring up the good kind of unrest.”

  “I wanted to help them!” said Tim unhappily.

  “You can only help people who want to be helped,” said Angela. “I heard that on a movie trailer once.”

  “If I could j
ust have gotten them out of their horrible self-destructive mindset . . .”

  “Well, it’s a phase kids have to go through, isn’t it?” I said.

  Tim glared at me. “Why did you have to feed Whiskers to your damn spider?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time that morning. “Mary’s sorry, too.”

  Tim swatted the air and jumped away as I held out Mary’s box for him to see. “Keep that thing away from me! It is not sorry!”

  “Of course she’s sorry. Look, she’s cringing.”

  “She’s poising to strike! Travis, listen to me. You need to stop projecting emotions onto the thing, before it bites someone’s face off.”

  “It was your idea to bring her,” I muttered sulkily.

  “Travis,” said Angela tenderly. “I do think the thing you have with that spider is very cute, but you are obviously projecting onto it.”

  “No, I’m not!”

  “That’s your case?” said Don. “Okay, here’s my counterargument: ‘Yes, you are.’ ”

  Tim had had enough. He stopped with a frustrated grimace and shined his flashlight at Don. “Why are you in such a good mood?!”

  Don considered this, apparently uncertain of the answer himself. “I dunno. I guess ’cos we’re not going to have to hang around so many people I hate anymore; that always cheers me up. And we’ve got a pretty decent excuse to go back to Hibatsu, where my build is.”

  “But we’re going back to the mall,” said X suddenly. She had been hanging at the rear. “We’re going back to save Y.”

  Tim and Don both fell conspicuously silent to concentrate on wading, so it was left to Angela to respond. “Look, if the entire mall wasn’t a match for him before, they won’t be any more of one now their numbers have been reduced. I bet he’s already waiting for us at Hibatsu. He’ll probably have murdered everyone there by the time we arrive.”

  “I already explained why—”

  “Yes, you say you’ve explained why he was murdering so much,” continued Angela smoothly. “But somehow I don’t think he’s going to stop just because no one’s telling him to anymore. Especially if the plastic people try to execute him.”