Jam

by Unknown

  “Don’t do it!” said X.

  “No!” called Angela suddenly. “Do it! ’Cos, like, we really want to get shot and everything. That’d just be peachy keen.”

  Lord Awesomo paused in the act of negotiating his loosened hand coverings around the trigger guard. He almost seemed impressed, but only for a moment. “Too little, too late,” he growled, raising the sight to his eye and taking aim at X.

  Later, I wondered if things would have happened differently if he’d chosen someone else for his first kill. Because all of a sudden he wasn’t aiming at X, but at the chest of a newly risen Y, who had leapt to his feet with surprising speed.

  Awesomo pulled the trigger. The single shot cut through the noise of the storm like an exclamation mark. Y’s body shook, and Awesomo grunted with pain as the recoil slammed his wounded shoulder.

  “NO!” yelled X.

  Y’s eyes closed for a moment as he absorbed the pain, then opened. It was his only change of facial expression. His mouth and nose were firmly set, not quivering. I saw blood appear among the knotted network cables that wrapped his torso and drip onto his austere military underpants.

  At first, I thought he was falling forward, dead, but he put one foot forward and it became a lurch. He stalked towards Lord Awesomo with the inexorability of a giant boulder slowly rolling off the top of a hill.

  Awesomo backed away, fumbling with the gun’s mechanism. He fired again into Y’s chest, barking animalistically as he took the recoil. I heard X make a little gasping squeal through her hands, but Y didn’t even stop. He kept walking, getting faster with each step, as more of his own blood mingled with the rain. The latest shot had done serious damage to one of the important knots holding the network cables in place, and Y was able to free his arms. He brought his giant hands around and outstretched them like the kind of zombie this apocalypse was sorely lacking.

  Perhaps the same thought had occurred to Lord Awesomo, because his next move was to aim for Y’s head. Y was still a few feet away, but he was fast transitioning from a traditional zombie lurch to the modern fast zombie sprint. The pain was clearly getting to Awesomo, and his hand coverings were becoming looser and harder to work with, but he finally readied the rifle for another shot. He aimed the wobbling barrel and fired, screaming at length as he did so as if the extra air behind it could accelerate the bullet.

  Something that belonged on the side of Y’s head flew off in a spray of blood and bits of cartilage. Y ignored it. He pushed Awesomo’s rifle barrel away with one hand while seizing him by the throat and lifting him off his feet with the other.

  Even then, Y didn’t slow down. He plucked the rifle out of Awesomo’s grip, like a stern father confiscating an annoying water pistol, and cast it off the roof. Then he began tearing away loosened plastic wrappings and tape, which trailed in his wake like streamers off a wedding car, until Lord Awesomo’s skinny, pale limbs and pretentious black T-shirt were exposed.

  The rest of us could only watch, stunned. The gray-clad goon with the baseball bat seemed about to take another whack at Y, but he took one look at the big soldier’s frozen face and lost his bottle.

  Y finally slowed and stopped when he reached the very edge of the roof, holding Lord Awesomo over the jam as the scrawny young man clawed at the hand around his neck, and the last of his protective bags fell off his legs and fluttered down into the jam.

  Only then did Y allow himself to die.

  The strength in his outstretched arm began to sap and Lord Awesomo’s weight pulled him off balance. The two men fell forward together, Y’s grip still refusing to loosen, and they disappeared into the red.

  It was as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers and woken us all from a trance. X and Ravenhair ran to the edge first. Angela and I shambled up either side of X. The two gray-suited goons apparently had other things to do.

  This should have been the point that we saw either Y or Lord Awesomo clinging to a window ledge or an extruding drainpipe or something. But that didn’t happen. Neither of them was there. I could see Y’s empty webbing floating on the surface, torn to pieces as the jam had claimed the organic rations stored within. Nearby I could just about make out an eyebrow piercing that had belonged to Lord Awesomo.

  The storm was moving on. The sky had almost rained itself out and the deluge had simmered down to a gentle patter. A final peal of thunder rang out, gentle and distant, like a rumbling farewell. The weather was seriously overdoing the symbolism that day.

  “Thus ends the never-ending battle that was Y’s life,” narrated Angela, pointing her camcorder straight down. “An ending with a lesson for all of us. That he who lives by the jam, dies by the jam.”

  “We didn’t cause the damn jam!” yelled X. “Why didn’t anyone stop him?!”

  “Which one?” said Angela, pointing her lens in X’s face. “The one with the gun, or the professional killer?”

  “They’re dead!” wailed Princess Ravenhair.

  “Angela,” I said quietly, urgently squeezing her upper arm. “They’ve both lost people close to them. Perhaps we should—”

  “Are you telling me not to document this?” said Angela. “I should think a lot of people will be wanting to see for themselves the downfall of the two biggest murderers in—”

  X and Ravenhair both simultaneously broke away from the edge and launched themselves at Angela, clawing at her face and neck. The two mourners were both babbling incoherent but obviously offended streams of high-pitched half words, while Angela’s attempts to apologize were dissolved over and over again into pained shrieks.

  X grabbed Angela by the shirt and hauled her to the edge of the roof so that her head and shoulders dangled perilously over the jam. The realization that I was going to have to attempt an intervention settled uncomfortably on my

  shoulders.

  “Er,” I began.

  Any inspiring friendship speech I could have made was preempted by the voice that suddenly echoed across the plaza. “Attention, leader of the Briar Center survivors,” it said. It was distorted through a loudspeaker, but recognizable as belonging to Kathy, the Hibatsu settlement’s director of Acquisitions. “You are losing this battle to a degree my colleagues and I have elected to describe as embarrassing. We believe it would be in the best interests of your settlement to immediately surrender, ceasing the unnecessary squander of limited resources.”

  Plastic bags littered the square like blossoms under the moulting cherry tree of the Hibatsu building. Only a handful of the plastic people remained unjammed. They were huddled in small groups behind some of the modern art installations, asking each other if they knew what was going on.

  I saw Lord Awesomo’s discarded megaphone lying dented near the exit door. I grabbed it and hurried it to Princess Ravenhair in the hope of distracting her further from Angela. “You have to surrender,” I said.

  Ravenhair glanced down at the megaphone as I pressed it toward her, then squinted at me as if trying to make out my face in dim light. Then she shoved me away. “Leave me alone!” she barked. “Everything was fine until you and your friend showed up!”

  I backed off, glanced at Hibatsu, then backed back on again. “I’m sorry!” I said. “How many times am I going to have to say sorry?!”

  “You’ve only said it once,” said Ravenhair, in the wet, shaky voice of someone trying to speak while blubbering.

  “I’m sorry again!”

  “Attention again, Briar leader,” came Kathy’s voice. “If you do not respond, it will be assumed that agreement has been made to resume hostilities. Obviously we would like to avoid this option if possible, and we assumed you would feel the same way.”

  “One second!” I called into the megaphone, before pressing it into Princess Ravenhair’s stomach again. “Look, this is bigger than you and me,” I said. “Your people are dying. More will die if you don’t act. You have to be a leader now.”

  Overwhelmed, she dropped to the floor and hugged her knees, burying her face in the gap between
them. I prodded her unmoving shin with the handle of the megaphone. Eventually she burst into life and madly swatted me away. “Leave me alone!” she yelled, before returning to fetal position.

  “Deirdre, please,” I tried.

  “I’m not doing anything for you,” came her voice, muffled, from between her thighs. “You killed my Whiskers.”

  “Oh, for christ’s sake, grow up, you flaky bitch,” said Angela angrily, now back on her feet and free of X. “Okay, so Travis probably was in the wrong when he fed your budgie to a giant carnivorous jungle tarantula, but a lot of people have died because of you going off about it.”

  Princess Ravenhair didn’t respond, but she didn’t react violently, either, so at least she was thinking about it. My next action would have to be carefully considered. I knelt down in front of her and laid the megaphone carefully on one of her feet. It slid off.

  “Attention again, again,” came the voice of Kathy from across the silent battlefield. “We feel it worth mentioning that a member of your ruling cabinet has already offered his surrender on behalf of your people, but our company policy does require that we have a unanimous decision before any official confirmation can be made. It’s just a paperwork thing.”

  Finally, Princess Ravenhair untucked her face. “What did she say?” she asked, sniffing away tendrils of dripping mucus.

  I strained my vision to its limits and peered into the windows of Hibatsu to get a better look. Now that I was looking for it, I saw it next to Kathy: a colorful plastic bag ensemble in the colors Tim had been wearing.

  “I think Tim might have told them he’s one of your leaders,” I said.

  “Now that’s cheeky,” said Angela, zooming in to the building as far as she could.

  Princess Ravenhair stood up, taking the megaphone from her foot, and followed our gaze. She took in the Hibatsu residents, who were looking on dispassionately like schoolteachers watching one of their number administer a telling off. Then her gaze traveled down to the pathetic scene of the ruinous siege and the ten or eleven surviving plastic people looking to her for action. Then her gaze traveled down further still, and came to rest on Lord Awesomo’s discarded piercing.

  Not looking up, she took up the megaphone and held it to her lips. “We surrender.”

  The megaphone fell to her side as if pulled down by the sheer weight of responsibility settling on her. Her eyes closed, sending two final tears rolling down her cheeks, and she cast her head back to bathe her face in the light of the morning sun, newly peering from around the retreating storm clouds.

  I coughed. “You need to turn it on.”

  Princess Ravenhair swore and fumbled the switch. “We surrender!” she repeated, tetchily.

  DAY 6.3

  —

  “Okay, now that’s over with, item two on today’s agenda,” said Gary the chairman, in the darkened meeting room at the very top of the Hibatsu building. “Finalizing the merger with the Briar Center. I believe we have the managing directors here?”

  Tim and Princess Ravenhair were sitting at the big meeting table, gently sweating in the permanent humidity. Don and I were standing behind them, trying to keep up the stance of victorious insurgents guarding political prisoners.

  “Now, just to confirm, you are both amenable to the surrender action?” asked Kathy, pronouncing the question mark as a momentary raise of pitch at the end of the sentence.

  “Yes,” said Tim. Ravenhair just nodded. She’d been sitting on her hands, staring at the varnished tabletop.

  “Well, I must say,” said Philip, the head of Agriculture. “You’re a lot more coherent than the last person we dealt with from over there.” I winced, and glanced at Ravenhair, but she didn’t react.

  “The Briar Center population that survived the siege this morning are being held in our Acquisitions department,” said Gary, checking his paperwork. “A total of twelve individuals. I should mention that nine of them have already renounced their membership of your community and been inducted with us. I gather they were eager to stop having to wear plastic coverings with the, er, internal environment being what it is.”

  “Still working on it,” said David the air-conditioning guy testily. “We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have, but I’m waiting on Kathy to put together a dog acquisition strategy document.”

  “So really, it’s over to you,” said Kathy, pushing two handwritten contracts and pens across the table to Tim and Princess Ravenhair.

  “Erm, I just have one question,” said one of Hibatsu’s directors whose name I didn’t know. “It was my impression that company policy was to only hire new employees if they contributed enough resources to support them.”

  “And that contribution will be adequately made once the Briar Center resources have been acquisitioned,” said Kathy, “as well as the plastic bags that remain at the site of this morning’s merger.” I had to wonder about people who used the word acquisition as a verb when acquire was much shorter and easier to spell.

  “Transferring the resources to this building could be the first job of our new recruits,” suggested Gary. This brought on a round of nodding.

  Tim had already signed his paper. Princess Ravenhair seemed listless, so he carefully slid the pen into her hand and moved it around until something vaguely signature-like had been marked on the page. “So,” said Tim brightly. “Since we will be donating our, er, resources and manpower, I would like to gain some understanding of how your settlement works.”

  “Mm, certainly a tour can be arranged,” said Gary.

  “And after that I’d like to talk to your leader.”

  The Hibatsu directors exchanged eyebrow-raising looks. If this was a job interview, Tim had just lost his place on the list of maybes. “We are the board of directors,” said Gary.

  “Yes, I get that, but who actually makes the decisions?”

  “We vote. Any of us can put forward suggested changes to policy, and we debate whether they would be for the good of Hibatsu.”

  “But who exactly is Hibatsu?” asked Tim. I eyed him, wondering what he was getting at. He was leaning forward with chin between thumb and forefinger.

  “We all are,” said Kathy abruptly.

  Tim nodded, his knee bobbing spasmodically. “So, since this is a merger, could I get a seat on the board of directors?”

  “Certainly,” said Gary. “Since you were the leader of your settlement, we can definitely bypass a lot of the requisites. All you’d need to provide is a statement of intention, written sponsorship from at least one existing director, and character references from either three citizens of your previous employment or one fellow leader.”

  After a slightly stunned pause, Tim glanced hopefully at Princess Ravenhair, who finally made some kind of response. She glared at him with a look so poisonous it would have caused a massacre if she’d directed it at the river.

  —

  Most of us new arrivals were assigned sleeping quarters in one of the many, many generic cubicle farms that filled the building from top to bottom. Ours was on level twelve and divided into open-plan sections, each of which had four cubicles facing each other, perhaps to give the office workers the small mercy of company. It had been left to us to create bedding from whatever vaguely soft objects we could find. I’d ended up using a mail sack full of scrunched-up printer paper which rustled annoyingly when I lay on it.

  But on average, I was feeling quite positive, once I’d stripped off my plastic bags and trousers and let my T-shirt dangle from the waistband of my boxer shorts. I’d been straining my memory but couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone in power at Hibatsu would want me dead, which was a vast improvement on my earlier position. Mary, her species indigenous to rainforest, was quite at home in the moist, tropical atmosphere. Princess Ravenhair—technically just Ravenhair, now, probably—was still angry, but at least all secrets had been aired, and it was only a matter of time before she got over everyone she’d ever known being dead and was ready to start fo
rgiving and forgetting.

  Few of my companions seemed to share my feelings. Don refused to go topless or trouserless and was shedding angry sweat copiously as he assembled his own bed. Tim had been sitting in silent thought ever since we’d gotten back from the meeting. Angela had sat down nearby to review footage, but after I’d turned my back to make my bed for a few minutes she’d moved on.

  I spotted her hanging around another cubicle divider in the section next door, crouching weirdly with her arms and shoulders flattened against the felt. She’d taken her shirt off to reveal her increasingly sweat-stained bra, but had compromised with the jeans by simply rolling them up to the knee. The atmosphere around Tim and Don was starting to feel like a teacher’s lounge on the first day back from holidays, so I left Mary to enjoy the afternoon sun and sidled over to Angela with my hands gathered behind my back.

  She was trying to peer around the edge of the cubicle divider. “Whatcha doing?” I asked.

  Her hand shot out, closed around my T-shirt kilt, and pulled me down into a crouch beside her. Her finger not occupied with the camcorder touched her lips meaningfully.

  I peered over the top of the divider to see what Angela’s camcorder was occupied with, and saw X. She was sitting in one of the communal areas, peering at the contents of—what else?—a plastic bag. Kathy’s Acquisitions department had taken everyone’s plastic bags and placed them in storage, so this was a little suspect already.

  “What’s she up to now?” muttered Angela to herself.

  “Er . . .”

  It turned out the question hadn’t been directed at me. “There’s something important in that bag,” Angela said. “It’s something she doesn’t want us to know about, I’m sure. It could be the answer to all of this.”

  “Oh, for christ’s sake, Angela,” I moaned.

  I had to concede, though, that X was definitely being weirdly secretive about the bag’s contents. She glanced left and right, clasping the bag shut between her clenched fists. Angela and I tried to flatten ourselves another inch or two into the cubicle wall. X didn’t seem to have noticed us, but she still looked uneasy. She got to her feet and marched towards the stairwell door, speeding up as she passed the small work force brainstorming ideas on fixing the elevator.