Jam

by Unknown

  “Sorry,” I said. “Is the Internet working?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I can’t bring myself to open the damn browser.” He rubbed his eyes violently. “This is when we find out, isn’t it? Whether or not everything can go back to normal. If the whole world’s gone, then I said I’d kill myself. You can’t just go backsies on that sort of thing.”

  “You could if you want. You know that guy who was shooting at us? He says—”

  “You do it.” He swiveled the monitor around and looked away, covering his eyes. “Just tell me if there’ve been updates in the last eight days. And if there haven’t, I dunno, just lie and say there have.”

  I leaned around him to the keyboard and entered the address for my favorite news site, BadNewsFromKittens.com, in which the latest negative bulletins were displayed in speech bubbles on photos of nonplussed cats, in order to create a softening effect. I pressed Enter, and waited.

  My heart seemed to be standing still at a point just below my tongue as the lonely radio graphic in the corner of the screen slowly animated. Don’s breathing was getting faster and faster the longer the silence went on.

  The error page came up like a vicious smack in the chops. My heart plunged down my torso and landed in my stomach like a turd in a toilet bowl.

  “Well?!” barked Don.

  “Er . . .”

  “Oh god, I knew it.”

  “Hang on,” I leaned closer. “Oh. Sorry, I put a comma instead of a full stop. Let me try again.”

  The cruel bastard of a browser seemed to wait even longer this time, but then the reassuring salmon-pink backdrop of Bad News From Kittens filled the screen, followed by the last few updates. In the most recent entry a tabby kitten attempting to sit on a volleyball meowed petulantly about the CEO of some investment company on Wall Street running off with his company’s pension fund. I checked the top left corner.

  “It’s dated today,” I said aloud. “It’s been updated today! The jam hasn’t reached America!”

  Don shouldered me aside and hunched over the keyboard again. He flashed a single dirty look at me for my choice of news source before turning back and madly rattling the scroll bar up and down. “Oh, thank christ.” His good mood didn’t last long. “Damn it, this computer doesn’t have TransferAGoGo. Going to have to download that before I can upload my build. Bloody government issue.”

  “Wait!” I grabbed his mouse wrist. “What’s that?”

  I scrolled down a little to see the entire picture that had caught my eye. It was an image of a tortoiseshell cat, sitting and staring up reproachfully at the cameraman, who had undoubtedly been the one to dress it in a miniature Akubra hat with corks around the brim. The speech bubble emerging from its unhappy mouth was decorated with Australian flags.

  “Miaow, cobber!” it read. “Australokitty is so sad to hear that there is still no transportation or communication to or from Australia since the country was devastated by a massive meteorite strike two weeks ago. A spokesperson from the US Navy announced that they will maintain a perimeter around the country until they are sure that there is no risk of space radiation, and only then can rescue efforts be mounted. Miaow! Does that mean Australokitty doesn’t get to chase kangaroos around the outback anymore? Fsst fsst!”

  “Meteorite?” I said.

  “Perimeter?” said Don.

  “Space radiation?” I added.

  “Those cheeky bastards,” said Don, astonishment in his voice. “They’re actually trying to cover this up. Where’s X?”

  “Angela’s chasing her somewhere. Thorn told us that the Americans brought the jam here on this ship and ran tests on it in the countryside and Angela thinks X might have set the jam free on purpose.”

  “Hate to say it, but Angela might not be far off the mark.” He read the screen again. “Almost impressive, isn’t it, the audacity of it all. Oh well.” He resumed searching for somewhere to download his favorite file-transfer software.

  “What about bringing America to justice?” I said, just to test the water.

  He looked at me. The frightening effect of his ghostly face hadn’t diminished much. “Travis, no one got punished for Iraq. No one got punished for the Bay of Pigs. No one will get punished for this. Just stop caring. It’ll make you feel better.”

  —

  It was clear that Don was going to be hogging the Internet for a while, so I took the opportunity to aimlessly explore the Obi-Wan, stomping around with my hands in my pockets, looking for someone to take charge and dictate the next course of action. Occasionally I heard running feet, which I presumed to be the ongoing X-Angela pursuit, but it had always moved on by the time I got there.

  Finally I climbed a hatch in the ceiling of a storage room full of inflatable life rafts and found myself outside again, at the side of the runway. I peered out to sea and tried to spot the edge of the jam, but it was the middle of the night, the moon was drifting unhelpfully over the land, and the landing lights that now lit up the entire deck like a Christmas tree certainly didn’t help, either.

  Dr. Thorn stood near the other edge, watching the city through a set of high-power military binoculars. There couldn’t have been much to see at midnight with the power still off, but he seemed to be getting something out of it.

  “Oh, hello again,” he said, hearing my approach. “Do have to say, it’s nice to have people around again. I’ve spent the last eight days on my own here and I actually think I might have started to go a little bit peculiar.”

  “Can you really destroy the jam?” I asked.

  “Definitely, definitely, certainly yes. We’d created a small amount of Peanut Butter at the end of our last field test session.”

  “And it worked?”

  “No. But given another couple of hours I’m sure I could have ironed that out. Sixty to seventy percent sure, at any rate.” He turned back to the city, then almost immediately turned around again. “Hey, have you seen that sniper rifle?”

  “The one you were shooting at us with?”

  “Yes, that fellow. It’s not mine, you see. I was going to put it back in the locker where I found it.”

  Afterward, I couldn’t tell which had come first: hearing the shot, a hideous, penetrating noise pounding through the air like a giant pneumatic hammer, or seeing Thorn flinch. A hole no bigger than a dollar coin appeared in his T-shirt, and I heard a collection of wet, slippery objects splash upon the tarmac behind him.

  He rocked on his heels. His brow creased and his mouth opened, as if he was about to start complaining about the unfairness of it, but then he spat up blood and slumped to the ground.

  For a moment, I felt like all the bones in my legs had simultaneously stabbed downwards about three feet, pinning me to the ground. It was only when I saw a glimmer of moonlight reflected off a rifle scope on the roof of the control tower, winking like the green on a set of traffic lights, that I broke into a run.

  There were no more shots, and I managed to get through the tower hatch and slam it closed with my entire body weight. My ongoing shriek faded like an inflatable running out of air as I slowly slid down onto my arse.

  “What’s gotten into you?” called Don from across the way. “It’s something to do with all that blood down your front, isn’t it.”

  I glanced down. Dr. Thorn’s arterial spray had left a flower of gore across my upper chest. I stumbled drunkenly into the computer room and collapsed into a chair. Don had already started the upload of his build, and now appeared to be composing a lengthy and profane e-mail. “Thorn’s been shot,” I said, my lips feeling numb and alien as they formed the words.

  “Who’s been shot?”

  “Dr. Thorn! The guy who was shooting at us with a sniper rifle!”

  He took a moment to digest this. “So what’s that, karma?”

  “Please take this seriously! There’s a murderer loose!”

  “And who do you think that would be?” He still wasn’t looking
away from the screen.

  “I don’t . . .” I forced myself to think through the fog of shock. The killer definitely wasn’t me, unless I’d finally snapped in some extremely complicated way. And Don would have had to be an Olympic-level sprinter to get down from the roof in time for me to have met him here. Of the remaining candidates, only one had recently been strangling me to death in a kitchen appliance.

  “X, it’s got to be X,” I said aloud. “She’s trying to silence us all.”

  Don whistled. “Guess we’d better not say anything about what Australokitty just told us.”

  “I’d really appreciate it if you started panicking like a normal person!”

  “Don’t pressure me.” He quickly checked the progress of his upload. The bar was about a tenth of the way across. “This is the first good mood I’ve been in for quite a while. The world isn’t jammed and I’m uploading my build. I’m sorry; it’s going to take a while for me to come back down to your level.”

  At that point we heard a scuffling from out in the stairway and Angela appeared at the side of the doorway, walking backwards. She shuffled her way into full view with some difficulty, dragging X along with an arm around her neck, and jumped a little when she saw Don’s ghostly face. “Oh, it’s just you two.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She released X’s throat and booted her into the room with an irreverent kick. X fell onto all fours and made no effort to stand, keeping her gaze fixed on the floor.

  “Go on, tell them,” commanded Angela, summoning her camcorder mysteriously and planting it firmly to her eye.

  “I’m responsible for the jam,” said X, barely audible. Her voice was so plaintive I almost felt guilty for being in the audience.

  “I knew that,” I said.

  “Yeah, I thought we all knew that,” said Don, recrossing his legs.

  Angela was not to be disheartened. “And tell them why you did it!”

  “I released the jam deliberately because I was ordered to by a secret conspiracy within the American government,” said X. She was still keeping up the press-conference tone even as tears ran down her face.

  “There!” said Angela, panting with the adrenaline. “I’ve been saying it all along and there’s the proof. I did it. I uncovered the truth.”

  “Where did you just come from?” I interjected.

  “Below decks, I’ve been chasing her around a table in the cafeteria for about half an hour,” said Angela, puffing theatrically. “Is that your blood?”

  “So she can’t have shot Dr. Thorn!” I concluded.

  “Ezekiel’s been shot?!” cried X, suddenly rising to a kneel and clasping her hands as if in prayer. “Did he survive?!”

  “Yes. Well, at first. For like a second. But then he died, so I guess no.”

  X emitted a tortured howl that set everyone else’s teeth on edge and planted her face against the floor, clutching the back of her head in two clawed hands. Angela coughed, clearly uncomfortable, but kept filming.

  “Where’s Tim?” asked Angela, voicing my own sudden worry as the suspect list rather drastically narrowed.

  “He couldn’t have . . .” I began.

  “Are we absolutely sure there was no one else on this ship when we came aboard?” said Angela quickly.

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly go unnoticed. There could be any number of survivors lurking around,” growled Don, hands behind head and legs folded comfortably. “Or, y’know, Occam’s razor, Tim did it.”

  “How can you say that?!” I said, clutching at the air.

  “ ’Cos he passed by my door a few minutes ago. Heading up those stairs. I was going to tell you when you calmed down and let me get a word in edgeways.”

  I pushed past Angela, poked my head out the door into the stairway, and called upwards to where presumably the bridge and the roof access were. “TIM? ARE YOU UP THERE?”

  The only response was an elongated metallic groan, echoing from all around us. As it rose in volume and shifted into an ongoing hum I felt a rising vibration in the floor. Then the entire carrier lurched hugely and I was pulled from my feet.

  “TIM!!” I yelled, dangling from a banister that was suddenly at a very awkward angle. The hull shifted again.

  “Someone’s trying to start the engines,” realized X. “Someone in the bridge. It’s just up . . .” She attempted to run for the stairs when Angela shoved her back down.

  “You are so not going anywhere,” she said sternly, producing a length of thin rope she’d picked up somewhere for presumably this very purpose. “Travis, go up to the bridge. Find out what the hell Tim’s playing at. If it is Tim.”

  X didn’t resist as Angela began binding her to a chair, and I charged up the steps three at a time, which proved unwise when the ship lurched again and I tripped on the top step, slamming into the hatch at the top of the stairs. It didn’t give at all. I wrestled with the locking mechanism but something was blocking it from the other side.

  “Tim?” I hammered on the metal door. “TIM? Is that you in there? Everyone wants to know what the hell you’re playing at!”

  There was no answer.

  I hammered until my fist ached too much to continue. “Can you hear me? You’ve got to stop. You can’t drive this thing!”

  As if in response, the carrier gave one last violent shift, then leveled out. Glancing out a nearby window, I could just about see from the meager moonlight that the land had started moving away from us. He’d successfully pulled out of the sand and was heading out to sea.

  “Okay, so maybe you can drive this thing,” I said uncertainly. “That still doesn’t mean you should! And you definitely shouldn’t shoot people, either! That was very unhelpful! Why did you even do that?!”

  I was talking to myself. I was sure Tim would have responded to me of all people, if only to tell me to just leave it. It couldn’t have been him.

  That was at the same time a massive relief and incredibly terrifying. I tried to force myself to think clearly and compose theories as to the identity of the unseen murderer I was currently doing my best to annoy. If Thorn had held out then another member of the crew could also have done so, perhaps another soldier like Y who had been driven slowly insane by—

  The hatch opened about six inches. Tim’s face appeared in the gap, looking rather pale and heavy around the eyes. He was still clutching the sniper rifle in one hand.

  “Travis,” he said, outwardly calm. “Just leave it.” Then the hatch slammed shut again.

  DAY 9.1

  —

  I kept knocking for a while, but Tim didn’t emerge again. I slunk back to the computer room, chin on chest. Angela seemed about to ask me how it had gone, but decided against it after seeing the look on my face.

  I sank down to the floor with my back to the wall, knees drawn up to my chest. X appeared to be asleep in her cozy-looking rope waistcoat, while Angela filmed her vigilantly. Don hadn’t moved.

  “I’ve got it,” said Angela suddenly, after half an hour of worried silence. “All we have to do is turn the generator back off. The engines’ll be cut and Tim will have to—”

  She was silenced by a vicious slap of hand against desk. Don had suddenly leaned forward, his easygoing mood gone as swiftly as it had arrived. “If anyone touches that generator before my upload is finished . . .” He paused for dramatic effect. “I will ram my thumbs into their eye sockets and jiggle them around really hard.”

  “We can’t just sit here,” protested Angela.

  Don leaned back into his chair. “Why not? I was going to go straight back to America anyway. What’s left for us back there?”

  “Hibatsu!” said Angela.

  “Deirdre!” I said, simultaneously.

  Don rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, they’re all adults.” He casually lifted his foot to rest it on the seat of his chair.

  As he did so, one of the many nagging suspicions I’d accumulated in the last few days started hammering on the alarm button. His trousers
were bathed in the glow from the monitor, and the way they completely didn’t go with his Mogworld T-shirt reminded me that he had stolen them eight days ago from Y’s unconscious form.

  The words the Sunderland issue suddenly bubbled up into my conscious thoughts. On two occasions back at the mall, Y at his most kill-crazy had refrained from attacking Don while Don had been standing in jam. They hadn’t seemed like last-minute twinges of guilt. Could there have been something he didn’t want to lose?

  It couldn’t possibly, said the back of my mind. There’s no way it could be in there so stop thinking it before you get disappointed.

  “Don,” I said, wetting my lips. “Have you gone through all the pockets in Y’s trousers?”

  He gave me one of his looks. “What possible interest do you have in the contents of Y’s trousers?”

  “Just tell me! Have you?!”

  “No, not all of them,” he said, arms folded. “Have you seen these things? I don’t know what those military types think anyone’s going to use all these pockets for . . .”

  I was standing up, now. “Could you turn them all out? Right now? Please?!”

  He frowned, but I’d sounded crazy enough that he didn’t argue. He stood up and went through each pocket, depositing a great deal of tiny, scrunched-up bits of paper and tissue on the floor before reaching into one of the least convenient thigh pockets and hesitating. I could see his fingers beneath the camouflaged material groping interestedly at something.

  He held it out for us to see. It was a USB drive, a small, black, unassuming one that couldn’t possibly contain something important.

  “This is what now?” asked Angela, turning her camcorder onto Don.

  “Dr. Thorn said Y had some data they had on a compound that can turn the jam into water,” I recounted, glancing excitedly back and forth between Angela and Don. “He said if we could just get this to him he could make . . .” A nagging thought finally got through and switched the track on my train of thought. “Nothing, because he’s been killed. Oh, god.”