Jam

by Unknown

  “Why is that an issue?” said Don.

  X scowled, holding Y’s head like an owner comforting a beloved hound. “S . . . Y is not some kind of soulless assassin droid. Do you really think all this hasn’t gotten to him? He is one of the most professional soldiers I have ever worked with, but when his orders are conflicting with what he knows is right, of course he’s losing control!” She met Angela’s dubious gaze. “And he was a heavy smoker, okay?”

  “Ah!” Don clapped his hands. “Who called it?”

  “The point is, there’s no damn conspiracy!” concluded X.

  “Except for Hibatsu conspiring against the plastic people,” I said. “That’s technically a conspiracy.”

  “All right, yes. There is a conspiracy to that extent. But there’s no government cover-up and the jam was not released by the American military!”

  “So who did release it?” said Angela.

  X made a frustrated noise, clawing at her face. “No one released it! Not deliberately! You people, you just can’t cope unless you’ve got someone to blame! Sometimes things just happen for no reason!”

  “Well, speaking of having someone to blame,” said Tim, “what are we going to do now? The plastic people are waiting for us to say we’ve sorted all this out.”

  “Haven’t we done that already?” I said.

  “Uh, we didn’t do shit,” said Don, who had now taken the escalator back up to our little conversation. “Just keeping that out there.”

  “Y, your orders have changed,” said X to her huge, murderous puppy. “You are just my bodyguard again, okay? Your only task is to keep us both safe from physical harm.”

  It seemed like a little red light died in Y’s eyes. “The Hibatsu settlement gave me orders,” he said quietly, shoulders sagging. He spoke of orders in the way he’d speak of a child of his own.

  “Don’t you worry about Hibatsu,” said Tim. “I’m going to offer them peace as soon as I’m the leader of the mall. But that all hinges on telling the people that their mysterious killer has been brought to justice, and I don’t think they’re just going to accept the assurance that he’s calmed down now.”

  “I will not allow you to harm him,” said X, standing in front of Y protectively.

  “No, I guess not,” said Tim uncomfortably, rubbing his chin in thought. “I think what we should do is bring him in alive. We can get hold of some cables from somewhere and tie him up.”

  “But then they’ll kill him,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll make a speech,” said Tim. “Something about being the better men and not having to sink to the same level to prove our moral superiority. You know, all that kind of bullshit. It’d be a great opening for my declaration of peace with Hibatsu.”

  “I don’t know about this . . .” said X.

  “Sir,” interjected Y. Even when speaking in quiet despair, as he was now, the echoes of his gravelly voice boomed around the silent mall. “It’s okay.”

  The two Americans stared at each other in silence, a whole universe of different emotions bouncing back and forth between them.

  Then Tim clapped his hands. “All righty then, let’s get going. Oh, hang on,” he added, as everyone started shifting their weight. “Travis, Angela, could you go fetch Crazy Bob and meet us back at the department store? They’ll feel a lot more magnanimous if they can see he’s all right.”

  “Can do,” I said, relieved. I glanced over to Angela for confirmation, but she seemed to be lost in thought. Tim and X escorted Y towards one of the electronics shops like two zookeepers bringing a shamed bear to trial, Don following behind. Angela filmed them as they went, chewing on a knuckle. As they rounded a corner and disappeared from view, she slowly closed the viewfinder on her camcorder and let it fall to her side.

  “She’s probably telling the truth, isn’t she?” she said. “Sometimes things just happen for no reason. There’s no big conspiracy behind the jam.”

  “Isn’t that sort of a good thing?” I said.

  “Yeah . . .” said Angela, turning it over in her head like a taffy machine. “Yeah!” she added, with slightly more confidence. “It means we don’t live in a world where people do that sort of thing to each other. That’s a good thing.” Her smile faded, and she looked at the floor sadly.

  “Are you all right?”

  She forced the corners of her mouth back up her face. “Yeah!” She laughed insincerely. “Stupid, really, when you think about it, isn’t it? A conspiracy doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. There’d be too many people to swear to silence to pull this off. And there’d be no reason for the American government to do this to Australia rather than, you know, Iraq or wherever.”

  “Are you going to stop getting to the bottom of it now?” I asked hopefully.

  “I guess we’re as close to the bottom of it as we’re ever going to get.” She hugged herself. “Feeling a bit . . . lost, now. Come on, let’s go get Crazy Bob.”

  I nodded, and took a step forward. My foot kicked something small and plasticky and it skittered across the tiles.

  I looked down. There was a little white card on the floor, like a driver’s license or a hotel room key.

  “What’s that?” asked Angela, not barking the question journalistically but only politely curious.

  I sank to one knee and reached for it. “It’s an ID card,” I said. “It’s got Y’s photo. It must have fallen out of one of his pouches.”

  Y’s picture had the usual fixed expression of mild shock, but his real name and most of the top half had been burnt off in the Knickknackery. What made my eyes boggle, though, was the name of the organization that had issued the card, written on the bottom-left corner in italicized block capitals:

  —

  HUMAN EXTINCTION PROTOCOL LIBRA

  —

  “H-E-P-L,” I realized. “That was the name of the company X mistook us for when she first—”

  I was interrupted by the loud snap of Angela reopening her viewfinder. A smile spread slowly across her face. “It’s always the moment when you think the trail’s gone cold, isn’t it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Let’s go fetch Crazy Bob,” she said, all energy returned. “We’ve taken the lid off the jam jar. Now all we need is a bagel.”

  “That’s right,” I said, jogging to keep up with her. “You used to work at Starbucks, didn’t you.”

  DAY 6.1

  —

  “What’s going on?!”

  “We’re just going for a little walk, Crazy Bob,” said Angela with the warmth of a nursemaid.

  “Don’t talk to me like a child. Where’s my tea?”

  Crazy Bob was alive and conscious, whatever that was worth, but had apparently suffered some kind of hip injury and couldn’t walk faster than a shuffle, so Angela and I each manned a shoulder and took some of his weight, braving the smell of armpit sweat and eucalyptus.

  “Do you think this is right?” I asked Angela, behind Crazy Bob’s head.

  “What’s that?”

  “Exploiting a confused old man just to control the people who inexplicably worship him?”

  She tossed her head back and forth pragmatically. “Isn’t that basically how the monarchy works?”

  Tim and the others were already back at the department store by the time we arrived. The shutters were open and the crowd was clearly of two minds as to whether to pack tightly around Tim or give Y as wide a berth as possible. The big soldier was trussed up so tightly with networking cables that he looked like he was wearing a big blue girdle. X was standing between him and the crowd, limbs uncertainly arranged in a defensive position.

  The plastic people were making some unpleasant noises when we arrived, and Tim was trying to maintain order. “No, no, no, listen,” he said, showing his palms to the crowd. “We’re not doing anything to him.”

  “He killed like a million of our guys!” said a member of the mob.

  “And that’s why we’re not going to kill him,” insisted
Tim.

  “Oh, yes,” said a pale Lord Awesomo, who was being propped up by Princess Ravenhair in front of a small legion of his loyalists. “Your logic is so clear to me now. Oh wait, no, it’s the complete opposite of that.”

  “Look, if we kill him, then we sink to his level.”

  “And what level’s that?” said Awesomo, as if the live debate had never been interrupted. “The level of winning?”

  “I know he cost us a lot of good people,” said Tim, retaliating by slipping right back into speech mode. “But we have a responsibility. We could well be all that remains of the human race. And if we let compassion and civility abandon us in these fragile early times, then it could be a very, very long time before humanity gets back on its feet.”

  “He’s right,” said Princess Ravenhair sadly. “Enough people have died already, Gerald.”

  As always, her feelings immediately shifted the mood of the entire populace. Lord Awesomo looked around at the shame-filled faces of the former lynch mob. “Oh, come on,” he appealed. “I’m not asking to have him hung, drawn, and quartered! It’s only one little kill and he got to do loads before he came over all pious. It’s hardly fair!” He wasn’t gaining any ground, so he went for the trump card. “Plus, he killed Crazy Bob!”

  “No, he didn’t!” said Angela grandly, as she pulled Crazy Bob and me out of the shadows and into the circle. She beamed at the gasp of wonder that subsequently went up.

  “Defilers!” cried Lord Awesomo desperately over the appreciative murmur. “They sully Crazy Bob’s holy body with their filthy hands!”

  “Are you the silly prat who’s been making all the noise?” said Crazy Bob. Lord Awesomo’s fearsome image was taking quite a beating tonight. “I’ve a good mind to call the police.”

  “Travis,” said Princess Ravenhair, noticing me on Crazy Bob’s other armpit. “Did you save Crazy Bob?”

  “Um.” I sought an honest answer. “A bit.”

  “I’m not happy with the service at all,” said Crazy Bob, unheard under the appreciative murmurs of the crowd who had apparently already decided what story they wanted to believe.

  “Yes, Travis and Angela are my right-hand men,” said Tim, seizing the opportunity to gain even more points, putting a hand on my shoulder. “They fully endorse my candidacy. And we’ll be holding the elections tomorrow as scheduled.” Lord Awesomo, defeated, seemed to slump as far as he could without actually falling to the floor. “My associates and I will guard the prisoner until we can get a cell ready.”

  “Well,” said Don, who had been lingering around the outside of the circle in an I’m-not-involved kind of way. “If we’re all quite finished with the returning hero thing, maybe I can finally go and get some damn sleep.”

  It wasn’t quite the moment when everything fell apart, but it was the moment the first crack showed. Crazy Bob’s cardboard face turned to scrutinize Don, and his gnarled arm unfolded to point accusingly. “You! It was you!” squawked Crazy Bob, furious.

  Don froze, pinned to the spot by the bony finger. “What?”

  “You’re the one who knocked me down and dinged me hip the other night!” he rubbed the side of his pelvis to illustrate. “I’m an old man!”

  “That was you?!” said Tim, as the plastic people turned to Don with suspicion.

  “No, it was not me!” said Don, with desperate but apparently convincing contempt. “Look at him. He’s senile. He couldn’t tell his own goldfish from the Bee Gees.”

  “And you were there, too!” Crazy Bob turned to me. I was still holding his arm, so I received a lungful of breath that smelled like cheese and onion crisps. “You, the silly boy with the Goliath birdeater.”

  And that was the moment when it all went to hell. It was as if someone had sat on the keyboard of a church organ, sending out an ominous chord that silenced the room.

  “What did you say?” said Princess Ravenhair, her tone of voice perfectly level.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, putting my hand over his cardboard mouth. “Just an old-man burp.”

  “Goliath birdeater?!” continued the princess.

  “Yes, that bloody horrible great spider,” continued Crazy Bob, not muffled enough. “And it said some very rude things to me as you ran past, too.”

  “Travis, look at me,” said the princess sternly. My heart almost pounded right out of my chest as I did so. “Is it true?”

  The sweat flooded into the furrows of my brow, creating little flesh aqueducts. They were all the answer she needed. It was a terrible sight to behold, all the good cheer being washed from her face by a dark cloud of betrayal. A pile of apologies and assurances welled into my throat but tripped on the way to my mouth, leaving me stammering. Princess Ravenhair dropped her gaze, then turned slowly away and disappeared into the crowd.

  Someone else came the other way, shoving their way to the front. A female plastic person in an opaque head bag. She grabbed Lord Awesomo by the bandaged shoulder, making him wince hugely, and pointed to Don and me.

  “That’s them,” she said, fearfully. “I remember. Those are the two guys I saw outside. The ones who knew the killer.”

  “Well,” said Lord Awesomo, clasping his hands and injecting several pints of delighted menace into a single syllable. “Suddenly this is all starting to fall into place, isn’t it. Everything’s fine, then you people turn up. Then something starts killing us, and all of a sudden one of you is using the deaths as leverage to take over the mall.”

  Having eagerly surrounded himself with a crowd of adoring followers Tim was quickly realizing what a terrible position that became if that crowd somehow transmuted into a hostile mob. “Hey,” he protested. “You’ve got nothing to tie me to the killings.”

  “Hm,” said Lord Awesomo with mock consideration. “No, I guess we don’t. After all, quite a lot of people joined the settlement that day, didn’t they. Of course, not all of them just declared themselves BFFs with someone who collaborated with a murderer and fed Princess Ravenhair’s favorite pet to a giant spider.”

  I covered my face with my hands as the increasingly moblike crowd drew closer. Tim didn’t say anything.

  “So,” wheedled Lord Awesomo, taking a step forward. “I suppose the question is this. Do you stand by your right-hand man?”

  Tim looked at me, and I looked at him back. I could see in his eyes that it would take more than a few weeks of laundry duty to make up for putting him in this position. We both understood that confirming any connection between us would obliterate his election hopes like a biscuit under a heel stomp. But we’d known each other since primary school, and all those years of mutual reliance was a lot to throw away for the sake of a shopping mall full of nutters in polythene.

  “I have known Travis,” said Tim, “for a long time.”

  I realized what he was doing as soon as the words tripped slowly out of his mouth in single file. He was going to try and have his cake and eat it.

  “If he has committed a crime, then I know he must have had a good reason to do it. And what I said about the human race still stands. If we are to survive, we cannot allow our emotions to cause us to self-destruct. We’ll investigate Travis, and Don, and all the others, we’ll find out why they did what they did, and we’ll try to understand.”

  An exchange of divided looks and murmurs swept throughout the collective. For a moment, I thought he might have actually done it.

  “And besides,” he added. “You can’t possibly equate the life of a human being with someone’s bird.”

  Even though he’d come damn close to becoming their leader, it was obvious to me that Tim had never truly understood the ways of the plastic people. He was genuinely surprised at the gasps of horror and distaste, and the fragile bone-china teacup someone threw at his head.

  “Hey, just putting this out there,” said Lord Awesomo. “Let’s throw them all down the Pit.”

  —

  The Pit turned out to be a stairwell in the middle of an open area of the food court whic
h led down to the very lowest level of the mall. I remembered when we first came to the Briar Center via the lowest entrance in the southwest, access to the majority of level B—which contained one large budget store and a few food retailers too gauche even for the main food court—had been closed off with shutters. We’d gone straight up the escalator to the level above. The few times I’d asked about level B, the plastic people had come over fearful and quiet or answered with more irony than usual.

  We’d barely been given time to meditate on our upcoming sentence before Lord Awesomo had ordered us marched to the Pit’s entrance, lashing our hands together behind our backs with some of the seemingly limitless duct tape the plastic people had lying around. Except me—my hands were taped together in front of me so that I could hold Mary’s box. She was very nearly claimed by the jam as a guard shoved me roughly down the escalator into the jam-filled food court.

  Tim followed after me. Lord Awesomo had made the extremely wise move of taping his mouth shut, but the baleful despair in his eyes when I looked back at him said it all. Don was next in our little chain gang, grumbling through tight, bitter lips.

  Y was fourth, still swathed in network cable, trooping without complaint down the escalator before the procession was halted by X, who was fifth.

  “He’s not wearing plastic bags!” she cried. Indeed, after catching fire earlier, he wasn’t wearing very much at all. And it seemed odd that he hadn’t been the one to mention it. “You can’t make him go into the jam!”

  A few members of our plastic escort argued her point, but Lord Awesomo, already waiting in the food court, spoke over them. “Take him back to the store,” he announced. “I’m going to take my time and think of a more interesting fate.”

  Y was led back up the mall, head hanging. “It’s not his fault!” said X. “He was obeying orders!”

  “Christ, she’s like a broken record sometimes,” said Angela bitterly, who was bringing up the rear of our procession.

  “Ah yes, orders, I remember that excuse going down swimmingly at Nuremberg,” said Lord Awesomo. “And these were the orders which you gave him, I understand?”