JAMMED
It bit him. Had bitten him, those seconds back. They'd been scavenging--
Why were we scavenging? What were we looking for? We were home, we were safe, we had clothing, clean water, cupboards full of food and medicine--
He'd gone into a room alone, in this-- Where the hell are we? His mind sent along a last clear suggestion: "house." A big old place, garrets and pitched roofs and shutters smacking over black windows in the rainy night wind. Okay, so that was the second-to-last smattering of logic: Why the hell were we scavenging after dark? Only an idjit would--
But the questions were completely irrelevant now. He'd been bitten. By a tall man who'd come thrashing up out of a bedroom closet on the second floor. A lobster-claw-pinch as his teeth locked on Jim's arm, a startled terrified shriek from Jim's mouth--
And then, though-- and this wasn't right at all: the man, hearing the shriek, girlyish sounding and mortally hurt as it was, had stopped biting Jim and said, garbling around bits of gore, some belonging to Jim and some not: "I say, old chap, I'm terribly sorry. Was that your arm--?"
He looked and sounded like John Cleese. Jim sputtered at him: "It was, you-- you bloody cow--!"
"Right, then." The infected man sneezed a nose- and mouthful of raspberry-jam-like phlegm onto Jim's punctured forearm. "Best have your girl hack that off for you, what?"
Jim turned, looked behind him. Selena had been--
Where the hell is she--?
She wasn't there. She'd been right behind him, coming in. She'd scored herself another machete, this one from an army surplus in-- wherever the hell they'd been when they were home and safe and not playing like idiots scavenging the Addams House in the middle of the bloody night-- and she'd had it with her. Now she and her slasher were gone.
Jim turned back to gore-faced John Cleese. But he was gone, too. And Jim-- Jim, he could feel--
Rage. Like magma flowing up his spine and filling his skull--
A second later, he did all the things he'd ever seen newly infected do:
1. He shouted unintelligibly.
2. He doubled over. To an observer, he would appear to be either (a) enjoying a sudden bout of food poisoning or appendicitis or (b) demonstrating how a paparazzo might look following an encounter with Sean Penn.
3. He flailed in a spastic way. Arm-windmills, shoulder twitches, etc.
4. He retched up a chunky red mouthful of something resembling raspberry jam.
5. He paused, still doubled over, and licked his lips.
No, hold on. That number five: wait--
Wait--
Jim licked his lips again. The chunky stuff that had just erupted from his innards didn't just look like raspberry jam: it was raspberry jam. And he realized it. He could still think. Agony wasn't burning away his God-given rationality. He felt suddenly silly, bent over as he was; he straightened up. He stood for a moment and picked around his mind, nudging about in his synapses as one might look for a popcorn hull gone errant in a molar for the shrieking, feral, burning, blah blah blah etcetera rage that had to be simmering and popping in his brain.
It wasn't there. No rage. None. Moreover, he felt strangely calm about it. He couldn't even muster a dusting of frustration over the failed search for it. He blinked, and his arm throbbed but wasn't even particularly sore, and he belched a lumpy belch that tasted pleasantly of raspberry jam. He'd gotten some of it on his sweatshirt, which was a pretty sky blue and would take a purple stain away from the encounter, but Selena was a whiz with that Danish take on Stain Away, and she could--
"Jim--?" Her voice, on cue, Selena's, calling from out the door and down. Downstairs. She'd taken the dining room and pantry while he checked the upstairs: he remembered now.
"Be right down, darlin'," he called back. His voice gurgled a bit around the jammy stuff in his mouth. He went to leave the room.
He caught his reflection in a dresser-top mirror and stopped.
His eyes were raspberry-jam red.
"Oh... fuck."
Selena called again: "What are you doing up there, Jim?"
Jim stared at his reflected eyes. "Umm, nothin'--"
"Are you alright--?"
Footsteps on the stairs. She was coming up. Jim backed back into the room. Selena appeared in the doorway. He swung his head to the side, closed his eyes.
"I said, Jim, are you--" The floor creaked as she came closer. He thought how happy she'd been, finding that new machete. Big shiny bastard, it was. On sale as well.
"Selena, there's, umm, something I need to tell you--"
"Shit--!"
"What--?" He thought maybe big raspberry-jammed John Cleese had re-popped from the closet; he opened his eyes to look and found Selena staring at him.
"You were bitten--!"
She swung back the machete.
"Holy fuck--!" Jim stumbled backwards, away from her. Maybe he'd landed a variant of the virus: the sheer sissy terror version. "Selena, wait: it's not what you--"
She swung. Jim jumped aside, remained intact. He ducked and bolted. His foot caught on the carpet; he stumbled; he ran right into the doorframe and knocked himself sideways. The machete thunked into the doorframe where his shoulder had been a moment earlier.
Ah hah--! A giddy moment: Missed me!
Then: a still-giddier moment as his sideways knock spun him out the door, across the landing at the top of the stairs, and over the banister.
The world went by in a kaleidoscope blur. Then the landing next down was kind enough to catch him with merely spine-compressing, lung-flattening force. Jim lay flat on his back and urped up a mouthful of raspberry jam.
"STAY. RIGHT. THERE. YOU. BASTARD." Selena, a flight of stairs above him, pointing with the machete and speaking as pleasantly to him as a mouthful of all-caps-and-points dialogue would allow.
Jim stared up at her with terror in his jam-tinted eyes, and his squashed bellows permitted him no more than a murmur: "Ah, fuck it then." He rolled to his feet, stumbled again, and somersaulted down the second flight of stairs. Selena thundered down the stairs behind him.
Jim bolted for the door with raspberry-tasting air whistling through his mouth to his lungs, and he ran out onto the wide gray-wood porch in the raining dark, and he blundered and stumbled down the steps, and his feet hit the black wet ground and sank, and he was that quickly stuck fast. Stuck like in quicksand in something thick and fruit-smelling--
Up to his knees in raspberry jam he was, and Selena was down the rain-slippery steps now and coming toward him-- and why the hell wasn't she stickin' in the jam, then? Probably those Martens she'd picked up: the soles were alkali- and petrol- and fat-resistant. Hadda be jam-resistant too, then, the new ones-- she was walkin' toward him with death in her clover-amber eyes and her machete in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other.
A loaf of bread--?
"Tea time, innit, Jim--?" she said. Lightning flashed above her head. She raised the machete.
"But you hate jam, love--!" Jim shouted.
He sat straight up. His surroundings were dark, soft, decidedly unsticky. Next to him, Selena stirred, sighed, rolled toward him, and murmured:
"What'd I tell you, Jim--? Four little words."
Jim sat shaking. His mouth tasted like Danish toothpaste. Which tasted nothing like raspberry jam. He tallied quickly in his rage- and sheer-sissy-terror-free head: "No pizza before bed?"
"That's them."
"Smart one, aren't yeh?"
"Mmm hmm. Go back to sleep, sweetheart."
"In a minute. I need a drink of water."
He edged into the bathroom. To the mirror he presented his eyelids, the crown of his head. But he had to-- he had to look. He stared for a moment at the sink, and then he looked suddenly up. His reflected eyes were--
-- blue. Pale blue in the pale light of the bulb above the mirror.
"Daffy bastard, yeh." He shook his head at himself. Then he switched off the light and padded back to bed.
THE END