Jam

by Unknown

  “The rules are different now,” argued X weakly.

  We turned a corner and the road ahead was broadly lit with glorious summer daylight. The jam-covered bus way was a sparkling red ramp back into the surface city. As we trooped out of the underground we were hit by the kind of sweltering humidity I’d come to associate with an incoming subtropical storm, and sure enough, the next thing I saw was a huge cloud hugging the horizon like a black bedspread gathered at the bottom of a mattress after a restless night.

  We were very close to the river again, on North Quay, which ran alongside Hibatsu and the plaza. The building itself was on our right, still thrusting powerfully upwards with the curious ring of risen jam around its base like a red skirt. We started wading towards it.

  “It’s even bigger than I remember,” said Angela. She and Tim were the only ones who hadn’t been inside the building before, I recalled (and probably X, although I definitely wasn’t about to make assumptions there).

  “What are they staring at?” said Don, looking ahead.

  We were close enough to Hibatsu now to see the silhouettes in the windows again, watching the outside intently. Their posture seemed wary and defensive, but none of them was paying attention to us. I followed the average angle of gaze and found myself facing back towards the mall.

  Specifically, one of the shops on the pedestrian precinct, just on the east corner of the plaza. I could just about see a multicolored cluster of indistinct objects on the roof like sprinkles on top of a cupcake. It was the entire population of plastic people. The frontmost group was carrying still-bound Y shoulder high.

  “Where’s she going?” asked Don.

  X was pushing her way through the jam towards the multicolored crowd, shoulders set like a mother hurrying towards a small child she’s caught exploring its nasal passages with a kebab skewer.

  “Crap,” said Angela, hurrying after her.

  “Just let her go,” suggested Tim.

  “No fear!” called Angela over her shoulder. She already had her camera out again.

  “Yeah,” sighed Don, following her. “Guess we shouldn’t count on finding another American before the chopper arrives.”

  I opted to follow him. “Fine,” said Tim. “I’ll meet you in Hibatsu.”

  “Er, you probably won’t,” I called back. “Since me and Don and X are the only ones they’ll let in.”

  Tim looked between Hibatsu and the plastic people a few times, weighing his options, before wading after us with a grumbling sigh.

  As we neared the building the plastic people had chosen as their stage I could make out some finer details. Lord Awesomo was standing closest to the plaza with one foot on a vent. Nearby, Princess Ravenhair watched emotionlessly, with Crazy Bob on her arm.

  The crowd dropped Y roughly on his knees. Lord Awesomo gave him only a passing glance. X had almost waded all the way across the plaza, but Awesomo showed no signs of having noticed her as he raised a megaphone.

  “Greetings, residents of Hibatsu and consumers of dick,” Lord Awesomo began. His amplified words rattled the still air of the deserted city. “We, the residents of the Briar Center and devoted followers of the true Lord, Crazy Bob, express our enormous thanks to you for sending an assassin to bring our settlement down from within.” He paused to let them digest his words. “These are extremely ironic thanks. You think you’re so great, don’t you, sitting around in your tall building with your offices and your . . . windows. Well.” Another pause. “You’re not.”

  “No, no, no, the stupid bastard!” said Tim. He caught my questioning look. “He’s declaring war.”

  A roll of thunder coughed its way across the plaza, a none-too-subtle reminder of the approaching storm. The Hibatsu building looked particularly sinister with the black cloud hanging about its shoulders.

  “With the full backing of my people, I will now make my official rebuttal to your attempt to kill us all.” He produced a knife from his pocket, its blade catching the darkening light. “I am going to rebut your agent right in the neck.”

  “No!” cried X.

  She was close enough to be heard. I saw Lord Awesomo’s gaze track to X, and then along the jam trail behind her to the rest of us trying to catch up.

  “Idolaters!” he roared. “The heretics yet live! Ready projectiles!”

  Plastic warriors took up position on either side of him. Most of them had apparently raided the armory of makeshift weapons and were wielding plastic crossbows and foam-pellet guns probably modified to fire flaming arrows or angry cats or something. But the soldier directly in front of Lord Awesomo was carrying, and god knows where he found it, a huge hunting rifle painted with unfriendly gray camo.

  He glanced at Awesomo for a nod of confirmation, then began to draw a bead on the petrified X, and suddenly it was as if someone had pulled the cord on the little bathroom light in Y’s head. He threw himself forward into an impromptu break dance, sweeping the legs out from under the three plastic people standing closest and using the momentum to flip himself onto his feet in a complex blur of gymnastics.

  The sniper turned at the sound of his allies scattering to the floor like bowling pins and took a ringing heel kick to the chin. The end of his rifle flew upwards and a shot cracked harmlessly into the sky.

  “Seize him!” ordered Lord Awesomo, before his own legs were swept out from under him.

  Some of the plastic people must have seen those fight scenes in martial arts movies where the crowd of bad guys all attack in single file, but none of them had heeded the lesson they should have learned from them. One by one, they managed to summon sufficient courage to run forward swinging punches or big pieces of wood, only for Y to send them reeling back clutching their sensitive areas. It was particularly impressive considering that both his arms were still secured to his trunk.

  Someone jumped onto his back, wrapping their arms around his throat. Y did a lumbering forward somersault, landing on his attacker with an eye-watering crunch. Lord Awesomo seized the opportunity to grab the rifle from its unconscious owner and aim the sight squarely at Y’s forehead, scrambling back to keep out of the reach of his powerful legs.

  “Jesus Christ!” panted Lord Awesomo. “I don’t know what you run on, you mad bastard, but don’t you ever run out of it?!” He cocked the gun.

  I heard a sound behind me, distant but quite recognizable as straining rope and clonking wood. I turned around to see something large and mechanical being operated on the roof of the Hibatsu building.

  I was one step behind everything that morning, because the next thing I heard was a catastrophic crash behind me. I turned again and saw a mangled filing cabinet slowly peel away from the massive dent it had just made in the wall of the plastic people’s building.

  Lord Awesomo stared up at Hibatsu, nonplussed. On the roof, the distant silhouettes of people were pulling back the arm of something large, mechanical, and catapult-like.

  “They’ve got a catapult,” I said.

  “Actually, I think that’s a trebuchet,” said Don.

  “The first shot is fired!” announced Lord Awesomo. He held his rifle above his head. “The battle will be ours! Charge, men! And women!”

  Thunder rolled, and the long-promised storm began, skipping straight past the initial spitting to relentless sheets of rain. A couple of the braver plastic people readied their improvised weaponry and leapt straight off the roof, bouncing off awnings or counting on the jam to break their fall, while the majority filed disorganizedly through the roof access door, emerging shortly afterwards from the shattered ground-floor windows of the shop.

  A photocopier with a missing lid descended from on high and landed squarely in the jam with a heavy thump. It bounced and rolled forward a few yards, knocking a handful of would-be besiegers aside like Skittles, but did nothing to slow the assault at large.

  “Stop this!” cried Tim, his voice drowned out by the rain as plastic people charged by either side of him. I grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him
behind the piece of statuary Don, Angela, and I had ducked behind when the fighting started.

  “There’s got to be something we can do!” he said. “This is insanity!”

  “You only just noticed?” said Don. “Interesting question, isn’t it. Who’s more insane, the demonstrably mad people, or the guy who tries to reason with them?”

  “But they’re all going to be killed!” wailed Tim. “They haven’t got a hope against Hibatsu!”

  “How do you know that?” asked Angela, seeking the best angle to capture the slaughter from our hiding spot.

  “Hibatsu have the higher ground, better weaponry, and an armored, defensible position,” said Tim impatiently.

  “Ooh, someone plays strategy games,” said Don.

  “And the plastic people are all standing around in man-eating jam,” said Tim. His fingertips rattled against the metal of our cover in an anxious rhythm. “One slit in the plastic and they’re done for.”

  It soon became clear that the busy workers of Hibatsu were already well aware of this. When the first few courageous fighters of the plastic army had slogged far enough across the plaza to start losing their blood rage and wondering if this was still the great idea it had seemed like five minutes ago, the windows on Hibatsu’s fifth floor flew open with a grind of sliding plexiglass. A little heat haze belched out of the building, and tattooed, bare-chested office workers appeared, clutching improvised weaponry. The burlier characters had bows and crossbows made from ties and shards of desk, while others wielded handheld catapults twisted out of wire coat hangers and primed with elastic bands.

  The plastic people weren’t just outnumbered; they were the Celtic barbarians to Hibatsu’s Roman legion, with no organization or tactics. Someone yelled a command from inside Hibatsu and every wielder of a long-range weapon fired simultaneously. A merciless cloud of box-cutter blades, glass shards, and sharpened DVDs rained down upon the front of the charge, scything through plastic and lodging upsettingly in flesh with soft thuds, although that soon became the least of the victims’ worries when the jam did its part.

  “A-yup,” said Don. “Definitely not putting money on this one.”

  “We have to stop this,” said Tim, as those waves of plastic people closest to the front line abandoned their charge and started fighting each other for what little cover there was.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said Angela.

  “Where’s the leadership?!” said Tim, peering at the roof where Lord Awesomo had been. I couldn’t see anyone there anymore, partly because of the rain. It continued to fall hard and fast. The water sank straight down to the bottom of the jam, and I could feel it sloshing around my ankles.

  “X!” yelled Don. With everyone distracted with the massacre in the plaza, the American agent was making a beeline for the shop entrance, too far away now to listen to reason through the storm.

  Tim grabbed Don and held him back. “Travis, go after her. Find out if Y has left anything of the plastic people government. You have to convince them to sound the retreat.”

  “Me?” I said.

  He conceded my point. “Angela, you go too. Don, you’re going to get me into Hibatsu. I can talk to the leaders there.”

  Don shook him off. “Who are you now, plastic Jesus? Don’t think you can order me around.”

  “Don,” said Tim agreeably. “Do as I say, or I’m going to throttle you.”

  To my surprise, Don dropped his gaze and meekly followed Tim. For all his talk, Don still had the build of a video game developer, and while Tim wasn’t exactly Herculean, he definitely had the edge from all the occasions he’d had to carry his own amps to gigs.

  I went after X, Mary’s box still swinging at my side, Mary herself trying to shrink unhappily from the rain that bled through the breathing holes. Angela was right behind me, trying to shield her camcorder.

  X was already at the shop front, disappearing into the darkened interior. There were no more waves of plastic people to get in her way; they had all been wasted on that single, futile charge.

  I kept moving towards X, but my bin liner costume had begun to hamper my progress, trailing oddly, gathering around my feet, and tripping me up. I looked at my hands, and saw the duct tape coming away from around my wrists. The moisture was reducing the stickiness, loosening the seals that kept the jam at bay. Another strike against the plastic army.

  I tore away a trailing bag and picked up my pace. X had already gone up the stairs to the roof by the time we entered the store. We picked our way around the ruined shelving to the door at the back, which was still hanging ajar.

  I hesitated at the stairs. Angela took the lead and was halfway up the flight before I spoke. “Wait,” I said. “Do we have a plan?”

  She turned. “I don’t know. Do we need one?”

  “Uh. You mean before we burst out onto a roof full of people who keep trying to kill us?”

  “Hm.” She looked up. “I’ll just open it a crack, and then I’ll tell you what I see, and we’ll figure it out from there.” She pushed the roof access door open gently, inviting a trickle of rain onto the stairs, and tried to poke her entire camera through the narrow gap for a second before giving up and putting her eye to it.

  “Huh,” she reported.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, everyone seems pretty distracted out there. Y’s still alive. He’s very, very alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whoops! Look out.”

  She hopped back and flattened herself to the wall just as the roof door flew inwards and a plastic person, still clutching one of Jamie’s modified pellet guns, tumbled backwards down the stairs. I stepped aside and he came to rest with his head halfway into the jam. He convulsed madly for a second as his breathing hole was invaded, then another man-shaped cluster of plastic bags flopped emptily onto the surface of the insatiable red glop.

  I hurried up the stairs after Angela and was drenched by a fresh coating of warm summer rain. We’d managed to enter the fray completely unnoticed, partly because of the weather, partly because everyone was quite busy already. The first person we saw was X, standing a few feet from the door with her hands over her mouth. Princess Ravenhair was doing the same thing slightly further away. Crazy Bob was trying to hold his cardboard mask together in the driving rain.

  Everyone was watching Y. He was engaged in battle with Lord Awesomo and Awesomo’s two burliest goons, the ones with the gray bag covering. Awesomo himself was on Y’s back, trying to gain a strong enough hold to choke him. Y was busy kneeling on one of the goons and head butting him in the face, while the other goon was hitting Y repeatedly about the torso with a baseball bat similar to the one I’d used on him earlier.

  Y was obviously more than a physical match for Lord Awesomo or either of his goons, and probably would have been for about ten more on a level playing field. But Y was still only human—a human who hadn’t eaten or slept in some time and quite literally had both hands tied behind his back, and the baseball bat was starting to take its toll. Y’s attempts to shake Lord Awesomo off from around his neck had died down to feeble half twists, and the head butts he was pounding into the prone goon’s face were barely making a dent.

  The conclusion was foregone. Y put all his remaining effort into one last head butt, little more than a token tap of his forehead against the goon’s chin, before slumping onto his victim in an awkward horizontal cuddle.

  “Aw,” said Lord Awesomo, panting through several broken teeth. “Sure you don’t want to go a bit longer? I think I’ve still got a couple of unbruised bits.” He rolled off Y and lay on his back in the rain, catching his breath.

  “Y!” cried X. The big soldier didn’t move. The goon beneath him patted him on the back rapidly in what was either a reassuring gesture or an urgent request for oxygen.

  On hearing X’s voice, Lord Awesomo sat up. He scowled at her, then moved on to Angela and me. “You’re not supposed to be alive!”

  “Tim says you need to c
all the retreat,” I said.

  “Oh, well, if Tim said that,” he said ironically, crawling to his megaphone and holding it weakly to his mouth. “Come back, everyone! Mr. Important’s back from the dead and ready to save us from our poor, helpless selves!”

  “You haven’t turned it on,” I said, pointing to the switch.

  “OH REALLY. THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME KNOW. IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS BEING TOTALLY IRONIC OR ANYTHING.”

  Lord Awesomo was reaching some kind of singularity, operating on so many levels of irony that he was impossible to reach. I tried anyway. “All your people are getting slaughtered,” I appealed to Princess Ravenhair. “Princess. You can’t let this happen.” She sneered wordlessly at me, then looked away.

  “Urgh. I can’t believe what world-class intellects you people are,” groaned Lord Awesomo, raising himself shakily to his feet. “The plastic people will lay down their lives in the service of Crazy Bob. Even if every single one dies, they will live on in the paradise He has built for us, where honey flows from the armpits of cherubs.”

  “You’re insane,” said Angela matter-of-factly.

  Awesomo snorted. A little jet of blood and chunky bits sprayed from his left nostril. “You’ve never understood! No one like you could ever have led the plastic people! We’re not doing any of this seriously! We’re ironically waging a holy war! Don’t you get that?!”

  “But they’re actually dying!” I said. Behind him, the jam of the plaza was becoming a colorful soup of discarded plastic outfits dancing madly in the powerful rain.

  “They’re ironically dying!” corrected Lord Awesomo at full screech. “And I’m so ironically sick of you!” He marched stiffly to the edge of the roof, where his hunting rifle was waiting. Halfway there, he tripped on his own plastic bags and stumbled. The rain was getting into his duct tape, too. His ankle bags had loosened around his feet like untied shoelaces. “Fan-buggering-tastic!” He thrust out his arms to stop himself falling flat on his face, and smoothly gathered up the rifle in the same motion. He endeavored to point the barrel at all three of us simultaneously, and we threw our hands up in the air.