by Unknown
“All right, next item on the agenda,” said Gary, adjusting his ridiculous headdress and finding the right paper in the well-shuffled mess before him. “The aircraft carrier that has been spotted drifting at the mouth of the river.”
X’s head snapped around like a loose hinge. “What did you say?”
“Don’t let us keep you,” said Gary testily, poised and ready to start shuffling again at a moment’s notice. “You have big decisions to make.”
“You said there’s an aircraft carrier?”
“Look, just go up to the roof if you want to see it,” said David. “We’ve got a lot of items on the agenda and you’re not part of them anymore.”
X bolted from the room. The rest of us followed.
—
Hibatsu was the tallest building in the city, and the view from the top was spectacular. The inner city spread out below us, framed on one side by curving red hills like the contours of a sunburnt teenager’s face, and on the other side by the red-filled river. Brisbane’s center was just far enough from the coast to deter holiday makers, but the sea was still visible from the top of Hibatsu.
And there, spoiling the picturesque horizon, was the awkward, angular shape of an aircraft carrier, run aground and tilted ever so slightly to the left, but otherwise completely undamaged. It was far enough away that we probably wouldn’t have seen it had we not known to look.
“Oh, finally,” breathed Don as we took in the majestic sight of it. “I told you rescue would be coming. Now everyone can grow their sanity back.” He shoved Tim.
“Don, I think it’s run aground,” I said, shielding my eyes. “I don’t see anyone moving on deck.”
“Shush,” said Don, shutting his eyes and covering his ears. “Just let me believe it. Just for a moment. I need this.”
Angela turned her camera to X, who was groping her invisible beard with more and more ferocity. “Look familiar?” wheedled Angela.
It took a moment for me to realize what she was getting at. “Is that the aircraft carrier you and Y came on?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “The USS Obi-Wan. But it couldn’t possibly . . .”
“I thought you said the jam took it over?” said Angela. “Another in a long line of things you said that we can’t trust?”
“The jam was all over it,” said X, bewildered. “It was sinking when we left. All the crew were absorbed, we barely got off in . . .” She glanced down at the risen jam still sucking on the Hibatsu building’s lower half like it was a giant licorice stick. She turned her head towards me, away from Angela, and lowered her voice to a mutter. “The jam is all one swarm. After it cleaned out the Obi-Wan it would have had no reason to stay there. It must have withdrawn when it began concentrating on attacking Hibatsu.” She then looked Angela square in the camera and spoke at full volume. “I have no explanation for this.”
“You’re saying,” I said, “that the jam pulled out of the ship once it couldn’t find anything more to eat in it?”
“Yes, that theory you just came up with on your own sounds perfectly feasible, Travis,” said X loudly.
“I’ve got a question,” said Don, putting up a hand like a schoolboy.
“Yes?”
“Obi-Wan?”
X looked embarrassed. “It was a PR thing. There was an Internet poll to decide on the name, some website flooded the votes, by the time anyone found out all the signs had already been painted.” She peered at the ship again. “I have to get to it.”
“Why?” said Don. “If Travis is right, which is admittedly a pretty vast assumption to make, then it’s already been cleaned of survivors and food. It’s just floating scrap metal, now.”
“It has its own generator that should still be functioning,” said X.
“Oh, okay, so what’s the proposal here?” snarked Don witheringly. “Sail the big horrible thing up the river, lean it up against Hibatsu and plug in the air conditioning?”
“One of the things the generator will power . . .” said X. From the quiet smugness in her voice I could tell she was preparing some devastating move. “Is the onboard computer network with satellite Internet access.”
Don went very still and quiet for a few moments, his disdainful expression frozen. When he spoke, the words slid shamefacedly out of his flattened mouth. “I suppose we had better get over there, then.”
“Okay, here’s what I’ll do,” said X. She marched decisively towards the stairs and spoke as she walked, the rest of us half jogging to keep up like yes-men following a brainstorming Hollywood director. “I’ll take the sailboat up the river and board the Obi-Wan. I’ll make contact with the outside world, arrange a properly organized rescue, and get back to you guys before six o’clock.”
Tim grabbed her shoulder and stopped her. “We’re all going.”
“Oh?” Slightly panicked innocence radiated from X’s voice and eyes. “I wouldn’t want you to put yourselves out. I won’t really need any help and it’ll just be very boring.”
“We’re totally all going,” said Tim.
“Yeah, boring is good,” said Angela, smiling devilishly. “I love boring. Gives you plenty of time to talk about things, doesn’t it. Things like jam.”
“Could someone explain what’s going on?” said Deirdre unhappily. “Do we think X knows something about the jam?”
“No,” said X.
“Yes,” said everyone else.
“Try to keep up, dear,” said Don.
DAY 8.2
—
“We really should have thought about this sooner,” said Don.
“You mean we shouldn’t have crossed this bridge when we came to it?” I said—rather cleverly, I thought.
We were on the now rather sparsely populated fifth floor of the building, the new front in the struggle against the jam, and were deforming our faces stupidly against the windows along the west wall. The Everlong was below us, still tied to a third-floor window now buried in jam. The boat protruded horizontally from the wall and the very top of the mast was swaying back and forth a few feet below our vantage point.
“At least we won’t have to worry about guards,” said X.
I glanced around at the floor, which was deserted but for our party and the occasional individual running in and out to grab some possession as quickly as possible. “What’s with that, anyway?” I asked.
“I guess everyone prefers to be as far from the jam as possible, now,” said Angela.
“But now everyone’s getting more clustered together higher up,” I said, looking at X. “Won’t that make it easier for the jam to sense them?”
“Maybe,” said X. “Or maybe they’ll be far enough from the jam up there that it won’t be an issue. Either way, perhaps some of you should stay behind to make sure—”
“No,” said Tim and Angela in unison.
Tim ran his hands along the window directly above the boat and found the catch, wrenching it open with only slight
difficulty. The window fell ajar and a breath of cool air scythed blissfully through us. But when he pushed the pane out until the opening was wide enough to fit through, I suddenly noticed a thin piece of wire originating from somewhere around the ceiling becoming taut and then becoming slack with a little snapping sound—which is a scenario unmatched for creating a sudden hushed atmosphere of oh shit.
From the level above we heard something covered in bells collapse jangling to the ground, and it was a fair bet that anything with bells on was designed to be listened to. “It’s an alarm,” I realized.
“They must have installed measures to warn if any windows near the jam . . .” deduced Angela.
Don, who had been excitedly bobbing up and down on his toes ever since the notion of acquiring an Internet connection had penetrated his cynicism, shoved everyone aside and hopped up onto the window ledge. “Whatever!” he declared sagely. “Alarms just mean move faster!” Then he dropped onto the Everlong. Judging by his face he only realized the depth of this decisio
n’s badness in the moment after he’d thrown himself off.
He hit the mast hard and his weight caused the entire Everlong to swing down, her keel slapping wetly against the vertical wall of jam, before coming back up like a pinball flipper and dislodging him from the mast. When he hit the deck it went down again for a second round, and he had to cling to the rear handrail as it went fully vertical, legs kicking frantically over the drop.
“Are you all right?” I called down, once the boat was horizontal again and Don lay panting and spread-eagled on the deck.
“SPIFFING,” he replied, pronouncing the P like an armor-piercing bullet. “You should all come down and have as much fun as I’m having.”
We could hear voices from the stairwell and large numbers of feet slapping down the steps towards us. Tim started lifting his legs onto the open window. “Act, don’t think,” he chanted to himself nervously. “Act, don’t think.”
“Yeah, that’s our bloody motto now, isn’t it,” said Don, bracing himself at the rear handrail as Tim dropped onto the boat and made it lurch again.
X went next, with one last insistence to the rest of us that, no really, it was probably just going to be really boring and we could stay behind if we wanted. That only made Angela more determined to go next, very nearly shattering her camcorder against the mast as she landed.
I couldn’t help noticing that all the weight that had been added to the Everlong so far was making it less and less horizontal each time it came back up from a dip. Everyone sliding down to the far end of the deck wasn’t helping, either. I was now going to have to drop onto a forty-five-degree slant. Mary, whose box I had insisted on picking up on the way down, champed nervously on some leftover cat food.
The footsteps had reached the stairwell door, so I took Tim’s mantra to heart and switched from thinking to acting. Mary and I were perched on the window and ready to drop when Deirdre laid a hand on my arm.
“Travis, what’s going on? Why are we doing this?” she asked. She looked like she was close to tears.
“I’ll explain everything,” I said, sweating as I heard the door handle turn. “Just follow me.” From some neglected part of me came the words, “I swear I won’t let anything happen to you.”
There were already people spilling out into level five, looking for whatever had disturbed the windows. I clutched Mary’s box to my chest and jumped.
As my weight was added painfully to the growing pile at the rear of the Everlong, there was a small but incredibly foreboding snap from somewhere within the jam behind me. For the second time in as many minutes, I felt the sudden burst of panic that comes from the sensation that something previously taut has suddenly gone slack.
Whatever had been keeping the Everlong tied to the third-floor window frame had thrown up its hands and abandoned us. I had only a moment to look up and see Deirdre being pulled away from the window by rough, sweaty hands before gravity stopped daydreaming and the Everlong fell.
The five of us, screaming like theme park patrons, clung to whatever railings, edges, and limbs our flailing hands could find as the boat slid down the wall of jam. The boat flew down the slope and shot out across the horizontal plain, mast rocking madly back and forth.
With gravity shifted ninety degrees we were all now lying on the deck in a complaining pile. The boat still had quite a bit of momentum to use up and was wobbling its away along the jam, spinning as it went.
Once it had come to rest, no one spoke for some time. We crawled off each other and lay panting, waiting for our pounding hearts to use up the adrenaline.
“Is it over?” I said, timidly.
“I hope so,” replied Don. With superhuman effort he rose to his knees, rested for a moment to get his breath back, then threw his partially limp arms onto the rail and pulled himself up until he could see over the side. He took one look, then groaned and collapsed. “Whoops. Jinxed it again.”
I heard the boat creak. The jam didn’t seem to be as flat as it should have been. Somehow I’d slid over to the front of the boat, and out of fatal curiosity I climbed up to look down the prow. I found myself staring down into the jam-covered river, and the boat was tilting forwards again.
“Ugh,” I said wearily, bracing myself.
“What is it?” asked Angela.
“Uh. Round two, I think.”
The roller-coaster scream went up again as the tilting boat made its mind up and slid forward. The Everlong careened down towards the river like a sledge on an icy hill, shaking and jumping as the jam’s contours rose and fell with the uneven terrain of the riverbank.
Just as we reached the base of the slope the Everlong hit a rise with sufficiently ramplike qualities to send us flying a good six feet over the surface of the river jam. I was still attempting to dig all my toes into the hardwood deck when we hit the river.
The boat landed prow first and the point sank a good six feet into the welcoming red quilt. I was being crushed against the front rail by a balled-up mass of Don and Angela, and the jam was barely a foot away from hoovering the eyebrows right off my face. The boat remained stuck in that position, rear end sticking up absurdly, before the jam noisily sucked at the prow like a pensioner with a boiled sweet and began to crawl along the hull towards us.
“Everyone to the back!” commanded X.
With the varnished deck and the steep angle this proved quite a skillful climb, but in a five-part storm of grabs for handholds, masts, and each other’s limbs, we somehow managed to roll up to the rear in an undignified mass of humanity. Losing our scent, the jam gracelessly spat out the inorganic hull and the boat settled back into the horizontal. The five of us fell to the floor again, making twitchy invisible snow angels.
“Well, that works,” said Angela with forced jollity, filming the Hibatsu building as the wind picked up and it slowly retreated. “Now we just have to follow the river out into the bay.”
“Yippee,” said Don quietly, his face pressed into the deck.
“Do you wanna take the rudder?” said Angela, adjusting the sail.
“In a minute,” said Don, rubbing his chin. “I think I might have swallowed some fillings.”
DAY 8.3
—
I couldn’t stop checking my watch, even though it hadn’t been working properly since back at Briar. I had to keep glancing back at the Hibatsu building to make sure it was still there. By then it was just another drab corporate tower in a skyline full of them, except with a coquettish jam miniskirt that I swear was getting longer every time I looked at it.
The river valley was pretty windy and we were making for the coast in good time. The USS Obi-Wan had been visible on the horizon for a while now, but we still had a way to go.
“They won’t kill Deirdre, will they?” I asked.
Don was on the rudder, the length of the journey causing his initial excitement to gradually slip away like dandelion seeds in the wind. He shook himself from a doze. “Who’s Deirdre?”
“You know. Princess Ravenhair.”
“Oh, that. Would they kill her? By they you mean a community really big on capital punishment who believe their very survival depends upon a few scheduled murders, and by her you mean one of the scheduled murders in question who was just caught assisting a bunch of the other scheduled murders to escape their extremely necessary fate?” He puffed out his cheeks. “No, no, I’m sure they’ve already given her the Order of Lenin.”
“No, but wait, they wouldn’t, would they? The only reason they scheduled murders is because they needed to reduce the population. And we’ve already done that by running away.”
“You do have to understand you’re dealing with middle managers, here,” sniffed Don. “If the board of directors command them to jam pencils up their noses and head butt their desks, they won’t even think about disobeying until an interdepartmental memo tells them to.”
“But they can’t kill her,” I said, shakily. “I promised her she wouldn’t get harmed.”
“Oh, well, in
that case, she’s got nothing to worry about, has she.”
“Did you really promise her that?” asked Angela. She had been at the front of the boat filming the upcoming aircraft carrier, but now turned around to focus on me.
“Just before we had to leave,” I revealed.
“Oo-ooh.”
“What the hell does that mean?” interjected Don. “Was that a suggestive coo? You’re not honestly implying Travis has something going on with that bint? He’s not that dumb.” He only had to take one look at me. “Oh, for christ’s sake.”
“We don’t . . .” But that was as far as I got.
“Why don’t you get married?” said Don spitefully. “We’ll have a lovely ceremony on some rooftop and serve up some peanut butter and cat food for the guests. Maybe Mary could be the maid of honor and Whiskers could be the best man. Oh, wait. You murdered him.”
Mary hissed savagely from her box by my knee. I patted the lid mollifyingly. “She forgave me for that. Mostly.”
Angela closed her camera viewfinder with a snap, then walked all the way across the deck to my position. Then she placed a hand on my shoulder with slow deliberation, and gave me a patronizing look. “We’ll get you back to her,” she said.
I hung my reddening head. “Thank you.” I wished I hadn’t said anything.
Tim appeared on deck, ascending the steps slowly and deliberately like a schoolmaster walking grimly into class to announce who was getting the cane that morning. “Erm,” he said, in that very loud way people use to make sure you pay attention to the rest of their sentence. “Does anyone have any idea why X would hide inside the fridge?”
The three of us all turned towards him as slowly as possible to give us the most time to think of a response. I went with “No.”
“No,” echoed Don. “I would call that pretty irrational behavior.”
“Unless she was trying to cover up something inside the fridge,” said Angela bitterly.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought,” said Tim. He coughed. “X is hiding in the fridge.”