Jam

by Unknown

  The roar of the water was joined by a raging, crackling backing track the closer I came to the computer room, and my nose was hit by a thick stench of smoke. Fire.

  There must have been a direct hit on the tower. The stairs leading up to the bridge were wreathed in flame. Most of the objects in the computer room were burning merrily away. I was about to move on when I saw that Don was still inside, still in the same chair and staring fixedly at the dead screen.

  “Don! Get out of there!” I yelled.

  “Half an hour!” he responded, not looking away.

  “The power’s off!”

  “No it isn’t!” He pointed to the screen, on which the burning items on the shelf behind him were reflected. “Still lit up!”

  I covered my mouth and dove through the flames to grab Don’s shoulder. “We have to go!”

  The fire glimmered in his eyes for a moment, then he shook me off and set about the computer case on the desk. “All right, hang on, let me just get the hard drive . . .”

  I grabbed him around the armpits and yanked him off his chair. I was amazed at how light he felt. He thrashed at me weakly as I dragged him out into the hall, knocking burning furniture into our wake and leaving the place an impassable inferno. I paused only to kick Mary’s box out into the hall, apologizing as I did so.

  Once everyone was out and safe, I let go of Don. He jumped up and shoved me roughly in the chest. “God damn it, Travis! If I can’t recover my build now I’m going to—”

  He was interrupted by a small but no less stunning explosion from the room we’d just left. Judging by the white vapor that was now mingling with the smoke, the fire extinguisher on the far wall had exploded. Don grabbed both sides of the doorway and stared. The chair on which he’d been sitting now had several greasy metal shards embedded in it.

  “Oh, buggering bum bollocks basket,” he breathed. “I was sitting there, I would have . . .” He flailed furiously in my direction. “You complete bastard! You saved me!”

  I was on the floor, partially curled up. “I couldn’t find a stick,” was all I could say.

  “You what?”

  “Angela and X, they . . .” I flapped a hand at the stairs leading down, from which roaring water was becoming increasingly audible. “I couldn’t find a stick.”

  “Is that your braindead-yokel way of saying they’re dead?” asked Don, but the spite was gone from his voice. He listened worriedly to the rushing tide. “We need to get off this damn ship. Are there lifeboats?”

  “There’s inflatable ones,” I said. They had been in a little alcove just under the main deck that wouldn’t have flooded yet. “But wait. I’ve got to find Tim first.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Travis,” said Don, pausing in the act of running for the stairs. “He made the bed; he can lie in it. We need to go, now.”

  I shook my head and picked up Mary. She twitched at Don defiantly. “I’m not letting anyone else die.”

  Don hesitated for a moment, then a familiar angry scowl broke out on his face. “Well, I’m not waiting for you. Enjoy the rest of your life.” Then he was gone.

  The fire that had been blocking the stairway to the bridge appeared to have died down, probably as a result of the exploding fire extinguisher. I stuck Mary’s box under my arm as I stamped out what few flames remained, then started up the dented metal steps.

  Looking up, I could see what remained of the bridge, my view framed by mangled metal and extruding bits of broken pipe and wire. I called Tim’s name, to no response. Through the smoke, it was hard to tell if he was even there.

  I kept climbing. When I ran out of stairs, I climbed the wreckage, finding handholds in the newly exposed infrastructure. When I reached what had been the top of the stairwell I paused for a moment to catch my breath, clinging to part of the twisted handrail, and that’s when I saw Tim.

  He was running across the airstrip towards the jam, clutching one of the packaged life rafts under one arm. At first I thought it was Don, but then another near miss lit up the scene and I saw Tim clearly as he recoiled from the blast.

  “TIM!” I yelled. He didn’t turn. Without thinking, I swung myself towards him as hard as I could and let go.

  I scraped my backside unpleasantly on the ragged remains of the wall, and Mary’s home took a rather severe knock. Then I found myself slipping onto the side of the lower, intact portion of the tower. I scrambled to find footing, but gravity sent me into a cartwheel, bashing Mary’s box a few more times against the metal. I flew the last few meters to the tarmac, twisting my ankle rather badly on impact and bouncing onto my chin.

  Tim had already inflated his life raft. It was circular, with a red canopy almost as vivid as the jam. I wondered if it was made of the kind of rubber that the jam liked to eat, but Tim wasn’t letting the same thought bother him. It looked like he was getting ready to launch.

  Every part of my body was registering a screaming complaint, but I forced myself onto my hands and knees. I went into a crawl and felt Mary pat my back encouragingly through a crack in the side of her mangled box as I transitioned it with painful difficulty into a bipedal run-limp.

  “TIM!” I called again.

  He didn’t turn around, but I was almost certain he hesitated. The sniper rifle he still had dangling from one hand twitched momentarily. Then he started pushing the life raft towards the jam, running behind it like a bobsledder.

  I put everything I had into my legs, so that everything above my waist seemed to stream limply behind me like an unfurled windsock as I concentrated on reaching him before it was too late.

  The life raft slid out onto the jam. Either it wasn’t rubber or it was too heavily processed and treated to be of interest to the jam. Satisfied, Tim leapt into the entrance flap. The jam-filled gap between the sinking airstrip and the raft was expanding rapidly with every—

  I jumped. My twisted ankle shrieked and time seemed to slow down to let me savor the pain for as long as possible. Below me, the jam quivered in excitement.

  I flopped down onto a yielding surface of bright red. My mind had already started up the first reel for the scheduled flashing of my life before my eyes when my senses tactfully reported that I’d landed not on the jam, but the life raft’s canopy. A human-shaped lump struggled out from under me and Tim’s face appeared around the flap.

  “Travis,” he said. “Thank god you’re all right. Get in here.” He did a very good job of sounding genuine.

  I crawled inside but paused at the flap to watch the scene we were quickly drifting away from like a puck on an air hockey table. Most of the Obi-Wan had sunk below the viscous waves. Only the last portion of the airstrip and what was left of the tower remained visible. The lights on the American ships that marked the perimeter hovered dispassionately like hyenas circling a dying man in the desert.

  Tim grabbed me and pulled me back, zipping the flap closed with his other hand. “Keep it down,” he hissed. “Hopefully this thing’s red enough that they won’t see us.”

  A tiny battery-operated light in the roof of the canopy illuminated the raft’s interior. Tim leaned back against the opposite flap. I leaned back against mine, letting Mary’s crumpled box fall gently to the floor. It was intact only in the broadest possible use of the word, but Mary was flexing her legs, uninjured.

  “So much for that,” said Tim, after we’d sat panting for a while.

  “So much for what?” I said. “Tim, what the hell were you thinking?”

  “That was going to be our settlement. We would’ve been living like kings in the new age.”

  “There is no new age. The jam only covered Australia and Dr. Thorn could have gotten rid of it. Until you shot him. And by the way, why did you do that?”

  Tim’s hands were clenched together in front of his face, pushing his mouth shut. He took a deep breath through his nose, then lifted his head. “Travis. Have you ever considered that maybe, overall, in the long run, the jam was a good thing?”

  I screwed up my face. “
No! No, that never crossed my mind! It killed everyone!”

  “But what were they doing? Nothing. Just . . . stuff. Shifting numbers and papers around at stupid office jobs or hanging around at the mall being ironic. The jam took that all away; it gave us back the chance to fight for our existence. It gave us the chance to be human again. You agree, right?”

  “Tim?”

  “What?”

  “Just stop.”

  There was a slurping sound outside, and the canopy fluttered as if something had struck it. The floor began to tilt, and I felt the inflatable walls deform oddly.

  Tim carefully unzipped the flap behind him, and I did the same to the one behind me. The raft wasn’t moving. It had sunk a couple of inches into the jam, which was visibly puffing up towards us.

  “It’s trying to get in,” reported Tim from his side.

  “Small raft, two people close together,” I thought aloud. “It can sense us. What do we—”

  When I turned around, Tim was holding his sniper rifle again. He was sitting staring at the space between his legs, with the gun across his chest. “Travis,” he said.

  “Tim?” I replied, clutching my knees.

  “I think, Travis, if one of us were to . . .”

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to hear him say it. “Yes, I know. But . . . Angela and X, they’ve . . . I don’t want anyone else to . . .”

  “It’s going to be either one of us, or both of us.” His voice was maddeningly steady and he still hadn’t looked me in the eye. “It doesn’t make rational sense for both of us to . . . So we have to decide.”

  The boat shifted again, and sank another inch.

  “Well, logically,” said Tim. “It should be you.”

  Finally I met his gaze, and his eyes stabbed coldly through his fringe. Unconsciously I drew my legs up into a defensive position. “What do you mean, logically?!”

  He inched closer, and I tried to inch into the wall. “Because, really, we wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for you, would we. You jumped onto my life raft. There were loads of spare ones, more than enough for one each. You should have gotten your own.”

  “There wasn’t any time!”

  Tim rose to his knees and pointed the sniper rifle at my chest. “You won’t feel anything. It’s a big bullet. Just put the end in your mouth.”

  I tossed my head left and right like a toddler refusing a spoonful of mush. “No! Stop being crazy!”

  “Crazy?! This is what makes sense! You agree this is all your fault, right? If it hadn’t been for you we wouldn’t have been kicked out of the mall and none of this would’ve happened. Why do you have to be such a dick about it?”

  “Tim, please!” The barrel was against my cheek, still smelling of the shot that had killed Thorn. He steadied the gun with one hand and reached for the trigger.

  My arm moved. In some desperate animal response, I threw the first thing that came to hand.

  Mary’s box had taken some punishment on the way down the tower, but even I was surprised when the lid and most of one side flew off on impact with Tim’s throat, sending several plastic shards pinging away.

  Tim backed off. The barrel of the rifle lowered to the floor. The broken box rolled noisily away, empty, and Mary leapt to Tim’s face.

  A shudder ran through his entire body, catapulting the rifle out of his hand. He clamped his eyes and mouth shut as Mary’s claws sought purchase on his cheeks, and blew sharply out through his nose. He madly tossed his head back and forth and left and right, but when she was finally dislodged she grabbed his collar on the way down and took up position on his chest.

  He backed away in a panic and swatted rapidly at his chest with his fingertips, wanting to scratch her off but unwilling to touch any more of her than was necessary.

  By the time she fell, landing on her back with a muffled squeak, Tim was already too far to catch his balance. He plunged straight backward through the flap behind him and disappeared from sight. I heard a yell cut off by a wet slithering noise, then some kind of amorphous belch as I felt the jam retreat from around the life raft as it fought amongst itself over a meal.

  I lay where I was. There didn’t seem to be any point in moving.

  DAY 9.2

  —

  The next time I opened my eyes, daylight was meandering in through the open flaps. I could hear the sound of waves. My limbs were slightly numbed from exertion and sleep, so I pulled myself exhaustedly to the nearest flap and hung my head loosely over the side as if about to throw up.

  Water. The raft was floating in good, old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness water, rolling away in all directions with a gentle swell. I looked down, and saw the ocean’s depth falling away into reassuring blue-black. Besides the life raft itself, there wasn’t a single square inch of red to be seen.

  When the raft was at the peak of the swell, I could stick my head out, strain my eyes, and just about see a few distant funnels and masts belonging to the US Navy’s perimeter, but they must have been literally miles away. I’d drifted unnoticed out of the jam. I’d escaped.

  I flopped down on the floor of the raft. Mary was on the other side, picking through the remains of her box for scraps of cat food. I looked over my shoulder at the sea again, and the blue-black infinity of the undrinkable water was less reassuring than it had been a moment ago.

  “At least we’re safe from the jam?”

  “Forgive me if that doesn’t make me turn little happy somersaults,” said Mary.

  I blinked. She looked up innocently.

  “Mary?” I said, after a minute.

  She sighed. “Okay, look, usually I’d draw this out a bit longer, but frankly I’m starting to feel sorry for you. I’m not your stupid spider talking. I’m just a voice in your head.”

  “Am I going insane?”

  “No. That’s the most pathetic thing. You just think going insane is the sort of thing you’re supposed to do in this situation, so you’re pretending. You’re not even doing it right. The voice is supposed to be in your head; you don’t speak it out loud.”

  “Yeah, I thought that might be it.” I fiddled with my fingers for a bit, then stopped. “Everything’s going to be all right now, isn’t it? We’ll just keep going to America.”

  “Yes, we’ll just do that trip that takes months even if you’ve got an engine behind you, with no food or water. Everyone else who got lost at sea and died obviously just wasn’t trying as hard as we will.”

  “Getting to Hawaii or somewhere would take less time, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, there was me thinking you weren’t on top of things. Guess we’ve got nothing to worry about. You just sit back and relax so you don’t have to think about all the people you killed.”

  I gave her the death stare. “I didn’t kill anyone. You killed Tim.”

  “I didn’t throw myself at him, did I? And I wasn’t the one who dillied around while X and Angela bought it.”

  “You were the one who ate Whiskers,” I pointed out. “That’s what ruined everything at the mall.”

  “If you’re going to go that far back, let’s just blame all our mothers for giving birth to us. Whoever’s to blame, you’ve got precisely zero friends left and now you’re going to die alone in the middle of the ocean.”

  “Shut up!” I croaked, clamping my hands over my ears. “You’re not Mary!”

  “And another thing, this relationship you’ve imagined between me and you is really weird.” She groomed her legs languidly, the way a human woman might examine her nails. “The way you project all these emotions onto me because you desperately want to think something actually loves you . . .”

  I hit her. I crossed the short distance between us in a flurry of limbs and backhanded her across the raft. She landed on her back and skidded into the inflatable wall. I stared at my hand, shocked at myself. Mary uprighted herself laboriously and cowered back, gathering her legs.

  “Real big man,” she said. “Is this how you’re going to make
yourself feel better? Picking on a poor, defenseless tarantula?”

  I crawled slowly and calmingly to Mary and extended a hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, chin almost scraping the floor. “I’m just under a lot of—”

  She bit me. She wrapped a few legs around my hand in an almost romantic gesture, then sank her fangs into the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. I shook her off with another backhand and she tumbled away, dazed. I clutched my hand. It wasn’t that much worse than a bee sting, but a bee sting wouldn’t have left such an emotional wound. And a bee sting also wouldn’t have released urticating hairs. A horrible burning itch began to spread across my hand and arm.

  “Just an animal,” said the voice I’d been attributing to Mary. “Just a dumb animal that eats what’s put in front of it and bites what threatens it. It doesn’t love you. It’s scarcely even a pet. Birdeaters are notoriously aggressive. It’s not like those orange-kneed things you can train to sit on your head.”

  Perversely, my stomach rumbled again as I scratched madly at my hand. I hadn’t been marooned at sea for long, but I hadn’t eaten anything since my last rationed Hibatsu breakfast, and that had just been a juice box and half a tin of beans. With nothing to distract me, my hunger was a dark, sucking leech digging its teeth into my stomach walls.

  Mary was still dazed and making no effort to right herself. I glanced around in case I’d somehow missed an obvious, convenient box full of survival rations, then stared at her again, quivering with revulsion at my own thoughts.

  The Mary voice laughed unpleasantly. “What’s so disgusting about it? It’s probably a delicacy with natives around their natural habitat; the big horrible insects usually are.”

  “Tim had this theory,” I murmured. “That the word ‘delicacy’ means ‘the food that it’s most hilarious to try and fool foreigners into eating.’ ”

  “Oh, man up. Just try not to taste it on the way down.”

  I picked up Tim’s rifle and toyed with the idea of shooting my prey hunter style before a quick glance at the inflatable wall gave me second thoughts. I spun it around and prepared to bash the remainder of Mary’s life away with the butt. A single plaintive twitching of her upturned legs gave me cause to hesitate.