Don and Travis realize they can move through the jam if they cover themselves with plastic. However they are ambushed by three men wearing bin-liners, who steal the hard drive and take it with them. Along the way, Travis and Don stop by Don's office to pick up his 'build,' a hard drive. They discover a sailing boat named the Everlong, which they use for their travels.

Unable to return to the apartment, the group makes their way to the Hibatsu Building. Soon afterwards, a helicopter crashes into their apartment building, and the group recovers two American soldiers from the wreck a female who names herself 'X,' and a male soldier who is named 'Y.' X lets it slip that they had mistaken Don's rescue sign for an organization named 'HEPL,' but denies it soon afterwards. While Tim believes they will need to rebuild society, Don believes they are merely waiting for rescue. The party decides to head to the Hibatsu Building, a large infrastructure in the middle of the city. Travis and his roommate Tim soon join up with Angela, a journalism student, and Don Sunderland, a game designer (who had previously appeared in Mogworld.) While searching for supplies, Travis and Tim come across a giant goliath bird eater spider, which Travis decides to take with him, soon naming it 'Mary.'

The jam also can extend part of itself towards any organic material it can sense. The jam eats organic material such as rubber, cotton and people and is repelled by inorganic material such as plastic. One morning, Travis wakes up in his apartment in Brisbane to discover the city has been covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating strawberry jam after it devours his flatmate Frank. The novel centers around a group of survivors in Brisbane, Australia after the city is covered with 'carnivorous' strawberry jam that eats organic material. The concept for the novel can be seen in his weekly Zero Punctuation review of the survival horror game Dead Island where he says that people would not be able to cope if civilization ends in any other way than a zombie apocalypse. It is his second published novel after Mogworld in 2010. Jam is a science-fiction post-apocalyptic novel by British video-game critic Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw.

Jam yahtzee