Jam

by Unknown

  “Let’s follow her,” said Angela, rising and breaking into a jog. I did likewise; by now I was curious, too.

  By the time we entered the stairwell we could hear X’s sensible shoes clacking loudly on the concrete steps several stories above. I was barefoot and Angela still had her sneakers, so we were confident our footfalls would go unheard. Nevertheless, every time X’s footsteps paused, the two of us would drop into half crouches and freeze.

  After who knows how many stories, I was sweating even harder and beginning to feel considerable sympathy for the elevator team when we heard a door open and close. A heavy door. The roof access door.

  X’s footsteps were now inaudible, so we sprinted up the steps with renewed vigor. “She’s going to the roof,” said Angela. “Maybe she’s had a working phone all this time. Maybe she’s trying to get a signal.”

  I practically piled into her as she stopped to open the roof access door silently. We needn’t have worried. The Agriculture team were all watching X suspiciously, and X was standing at the edge with her back to the rest of the roof.

  She had her head bowed and was examining the contents of her plastic bag, which we couldn’t see. We watched her carefully from behind the bare soil where the potato salad had been planted. With her back to us, all we could see was that X was either turning something over and over in her hands or wrangling an energetic mouse.

  Then, without warning, she flung something off the building. Instinctively Angela and I ran forward and leaned over the edge as if to catch it, but to no avail. We watched the remains of Y’s torn-up webbing until it dropped into the jam, out of sight.

  “Hey!” said Angela. “Are you destroying evidence? Stop it!”

  X was quite startled by our sudden appearance, and her mouth flapped wordlessly like an offended party host. She was still holding the plastic bag open, so Angela thrust her hand in and withdrew a set of dog tags.

  X snatched them back hurriedly as if they were her unwashed underwear, then held them to her face reverently, which is where the comparison breaks down.

  “Y’s things?” I said.

  “No one else is going to mourn him,” said X, tucking the dog tags into her sensible bra. “I just . . . had to do something. But there’s nothing to bury. This felt right. That’s all.” She looked up, and frowned at Angela’s openly dubious face. “That’s all,” she repeated, with greater emphasis.

  “How can we believe anything you say?” said Angela nastily, not dropping her camcorder. “Practically the very first thing you said to us was a lie.”

  X put on that slightly condescending half smile which was always the signal she was slipping into press-conference mode, but now there was a hint of desperation behind it. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  She wasn’t helping her case. I sighed in irritation. “Look, we know that HEPL is a real thing. You can be honest with us.”

  “Travis!” Angela nudged me sharply in the ribs.

  “Well, it hardly matters now, does it?” I protested. “Show her that thing we found.”

  X bravely maintained her half-smiling expression of feigned bafflement as Angela reluctantly went to her trouser pocket and produced Y’s ID card. X’s face froze and I saw a spark of strong emotion behind her patronizing eyes. I could practically hear the chill running down her spine.

  She reached for the card. Angela warily passed it over, whereupon X flicked the card away over her shoulder without breaking eye contact. It spun through the air right off the building and out of sight.

  “What the hell’d you do that for?!” shouted Angela.

  “Do what?” replied X innocently.

  “You threw our card away!”

  “How odd, I don’t remember that at all. If I had done such a thing there’d be a card around as evidence, but there isn’t any.” She was trying to keep looking smug and authoritative but there was desperation in her eyes. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll see you later.”

  It took until X was most of the way back to the stairwell door for Angela to become unstupefied. “You are beyond belief! You can’t even be grown up about it!” X didn’t turn around. “This is why nobody likes you people anymore!”

  The roof access door slammed shut. X was gone. Angela glared at where X had been, then glared at me instead. “Nice thinking, there, Travis. Let’s just wave our evidence around in front of her. We’re a regular Woodward and Bernstein.”

  “The cigarette company?”

  She sighed and sat down on the edge of the roof, dumping her face unhappily onto her fists, where it remained for all of half a second. “Well, it’s not too much of a problem,” she said, sitting upright again. “We know about Human Extinction Protocol Libra. We don’t need the card to continue the investigation.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?” I sat down next to her. “What do you think it is, then? HEPL, I mean?”

  “Okay.” She wriggled into a more comfortable position, holding her hands flat and parallel to each other in frozen pre-applause. “Let’s pin down what we know. We know it’s something to do with human extinction. We know X and Y landed on our building because they thought it was an HEPL outpost. And we know X and Y don’t want us to know about it.”

  “Well, we know X doesn’t want us to know about it,” I said, stroking my chin. Each day without shaving made my fingers gravitate there more and more often.

  “And why do you think that is?”

  “National security?”

  “Ah!” Angela waggled her finger. “I’ve been thinking about that. I’m not sure this is just an America thing. Because X and Y thought there’d be an HEPL outpost in this country. So that means it’s international. Could be more of a corporate than a government thing. Did X or Y ever actually say they work for the American government?”

  “Yes.”

  Angela waved a hand dismissively. “Well, they’re liars. We’ve established that.”

  “It could be X is keeping it secret because if we find out the truth we’ll be very angry and might beat her to death or something.”

  “Well, we’d only do that if it turned out she was actually personally responsible for the jampocalypse.”

  The word responsible echoed around my skull, with X’s previous use of the word—in a conversation that had taken place on another rooftop—joining the chorus. Not for the first time I considered telling Angela. It seemed like a waste to keep the knowledge to myself, because I didn’t have the first idea what to do with it. I tested the water. “You wouldn’t actually do that, would you?”

  “Course I would,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I mean, we’ve never really talked about this, I think because it would just bring everyone down, but we’ve all basically lost everything. Our whole lives, people we loved . . . If someone is responsible for this, I hate them. There isn’t a survivor in this city who wouldn’t want to kill them, if they found out who it was.”

  She dropped her gaze, saddened by her own words. Now I was starting to want to beat X to death. “What if they didn’t mean to do it?” I tried.

  “Wouldn’t matter. You don’t want someone walking around loose if they can set off something like this by accident. They might get into another accident and blow up the universe.”

  “Excuse me, could you people please leave?” One of the farmers had been passive-aggressively tutting and trying to work around us, and had finally decided to abandon subtlety. We apologized and got up to head back downstairs.

  That’s when we heard the noise. A deep, rising roar like a slow tide. We’d heard it many times before, but it sounded very different from up here, heavily echoed by distance.

  “Another tidal wave,” I said, out of habit. When we’d first arrived I’d been quick to bring up the matter of the risen jam around the building, but no one in the community seemed to be that bothered by it, since it wasn’t getting inside and hadn’t risen any higher. By this time I’d adopted the Hibatsu attitude of bored defiance towards the jam. The
wave was far below me, as small and insignificant as a ripple in a puddle.

  Then I looked around, to see if Angela was watching, and felt myself fill with dread. The wave was coming towards the Hibatsu building from every direction. Up until then I’d assumed the waves had been heading towards the sea, or at the very least the river, but this wasn’t the case. The waves converged simultaneously against the four walls of the building with a loud chorus of wet slaps.

  After this violent crash, the jam settled back down. The sheath of jam around Hibatsu looked like it had risen slightly higher, but it might have been my imagination.

  “What the hell was that?” I was pushing my head and shoulders as far over the edge as I dared to get a better look at the building.

  “That’s how the jam rose,” deduced Angela. “The tidal waves have all been converging on this spot.”

  “Why?”

  Neither of us had an answer. We met each other’s confused looks, each trying to tell from the other if we were supposed to be scared.

  “Are you going, or what?” demanded the farmer.

  DAY 7.1

  —

  I was started from sleep at around seven in the morning by the sound of someone clearing their throat into a loudspeaker. I hauled myself sleepily up until I could see over my cubicle wall. There were two Hibatsu employees standing at the stairwell door.

  “Attention, level twelve,” announced the one with the loud hailer. “This is the daily test of Hibatsu’s emergency fire alarm. Please do not evacuate on this occasion. This is only a test. Now beginning fire alarm sequence.”

  He passed his loud hailer to his placid-looking friend, who immediately began screaming at the top of his voice. “AAAAAGH! FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! AAAAAAGH!”

  “That concludes today’s test of the level-twelve fire alarm,” said the first speaker, taking his loud hailer back. “In the event of a real fire emergency, the alarm would have been sounding continuously and from several different sources. Thank you.”

  There was a grumble of rising human beings all around me then, and it seemed pointless to go back to sleep. I sat up, yawned, stretched, and took the lid off Mary’s box. She chomped her mandibles in greeting, and I picked up an open can of cat food and dropped a spoonful onto her nest of cereal.

  I’d chosen cat food on the basis that cats also eat birds. The people in the Catering department had been very eager to let me have a crate of it, because they were terrified that their supervisor might one day suggest padding the human food supplies with the stuff. As I watched Mary eagerly feed, I had the warm, comfortable feeling that I was beginning the start of a lovely, boring routine.

  Even Don seemed upbeat. He was moving cheerfully towards the river of human traffic filing towards the stairwell. He saw me looking at him just as he was vanishing into the crowd, and he offered me a smile. It looked about as natural on his face as a moustache on the Venus de Milo. I had a feeling that his build was somehow involved.

  “Have you seen Tim?” I asked Angela, who appeared to have been up for a while. She was standing by the window filming the streets, perhaps to monitor the jam for odd behavior.

  “He had to go to Personnel to get his job assignment,” she said, without turning around.

  I nodded. That meant Kathy’s department, so I joined the queue for the stairwell. After yesterday’s discussion with Angela, I’d come to the decision to tell on X. The information was too big a thing to house in my small, humble mind, and Angela was right—everyone had lost a lot in the jampocalypse and that meant they had a right to know. Whether they had the right to murder X for it was still up for debate, which was why Angela was definitely not the person to tell.

  Similarly, I couldn’t tell Don. He’d had far too much of a stake in the previous civilization and was not a man who suffered his enemies gladly. I still had a vivid memory of him tied to a chair back at his studio, roaring and bouncing around the room. If he channeled all that energy at X she’d probably get blasted through a wall.

  Another option had been X herself. There was the chance she would break down and confide the full story, then I would become the friend she badly seemed to need after the loss of Y. I decided against it because that was the best case scenario, and the worst involved her making a call to have the entire city nuked from orbit.

  So it had to be Tim, now removed from power and considerably more approachable. Of all of us, he was the least bothered by the apocalypse itself. If anything, it had given him a whole new lease on life. And he was still my best friend, as far as I knew.

  I met him in the Acquisitions department just as he was emerging from Kathy’s office. His new lease on life was a bit ratty, going by his slouch and darkened eyes. I gradually shifted my cheerful bounding to a sympathetic saunter as I approached. “Hi, Tim,” I said. “What did you get?”

  “Scavenge,” he spat.

  “Oh, like me and Don?”

  “Yes, like you and Don. In fact, you, me, and Don now have to take the Everlong back to the Briar Center and start loading up their food stores. I get to be the head of our division because I used to be a leader.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “No, it is not good. It’s humiliating.”

  “Um. I hate to bring this up, but you were never officially a leader.”

  The look he gave me made it very clear that I had to dial my good mood down a notch. “Where’s Don?” he asked.

  “I dunno. I saw him heading upstairs.”

  “Let’s go meet him.”

  Tim started walking towards the stairwell, shoulders hunched and hands tucked into the waistband of his underpants. I scampered after him.

  “Tim, I need to talk to you about something,” I said. “I found something out and I just need you to know about it. Do you promise not to tell the others? I’m afraid of how they’d react.”

  He paused with one hand on the stairwell door and looked at me, concerned. “You’re gay?”

  “No, no, no. It’s about the jam.”

  “What have you found out about the jam?”

  I waited until we were in the concrete stairwell and for a brief lull in the human traffic. “I overheard X say she felt responsible for it.”

  He froze in midstep with his back to me. He hesitated long enough for me to start regretting my decision, then I saw his shoulders untense. “Wait, you honestly thought she was being literal?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I had the same conversation with her a while back. I said we all have to take responsibility for the disasters that befall us because it was our way of life that brought them about. And she got this faraway look in her eye and she said that really spoke to her in a lot of ways.”

  I thought about pressing the point, but had lost confidence in my plan. I let it go, telling myself I’d have another attempt tomorrow, the same miserable assurance I’d given myself every single morning in high school after failing to ask out Tricia McGee.

  We met Don coming down the other way, apparently from quite high in the building, since he was even sweatier than normal, and in the already pungent atmosphere of Hibatsu he was the center of a particularly armpitty little aura.

  He was still in an uncharacteristically good mood, though. He smiled with both rows of teeth on display like an entire team’s worth of cricket bats speeding through the air towards us. “Well, if it isn’t Simon and Gar-dickhead,” he said. “Look. I have found more fulfillment than you will ever know in several of the pathetic, drunken jigs you call lifetimes.”

  “And how’s that?” asked Tim, not sharing Don’s glee.

  Don reached into his back pocket, then produced his hard drive, which he displayed for us between his fingertips like a glorious sunflower. “See how it shines,” he said reverently.

  “It’s your build,” I said.

  “And look, no coffee stains,” said Don, smug satisfaction making him virtually unrecognizable, lovingly fondling his prize like the delicate buttock of a beautiful girlfrie
nd.

  “Right,” said Tim, as we headed for the stairs. “Except that if there isn’t any civilization left anywhere it’s just a chunk of plastic and metal that’s really easy to scratch.”

  The Don I knew returned instantly, the frown sweeping over his face like a forest fire. “Cock.”

  —

  Someone had taken the trouble to pull the Everlong from Queen Street to the Hibatsu plaza, and no sooner had they finished than we were preparing to take it all the way back again. We’d suited up into some of the plastic bags Hibatsu had recovered from the battlefield. They smelled unpleasantly of fresh duct tape and death.

  Don stood at the back of the boat, pushing us along with the poles. I did my best to steer. Tim was sitting on the deck, deep in thought.

  “So what do you think of Hibatsu?” I asked him, once we were out of the building’s judgmental shadow.

  “I have some concerns,” he said.

  “Oh, do you,” said Don unpleasantly. “God forbid anyone run things differently to how his worship wants them. After all, he’s already got experience with completely cocking up one settlement. Two, if you count whatever the hell that thing at our old apartment complex was.”

  “The helicopter messed that one up,” I said. “To be fair.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t see Tim trying to wave it off.”

  “Do either of you have an actual point you want to raise?” said Tim sternly.

  Don rolled his eyes. I coughed. “Why do you have concerns about Hibatsu, Tim?”

  “Well, I might need a little longer to get the full picture, but my main gut concern with the Hibatsu settlement is that they’re evil.”

  He let the word sink in for a moment. “More or less evil than the plastic people?” I asked.