by Hall, Andrew
8
‘Why are you doing this?’ Alex screamed. He was a bruised bloody mess, tied to a chair in a ruined New York office block. Surrounded by filthy grim faces, staring at him like he was a freakshow. Beyond the blown-out windows, the pale daylight cast a ghostly glow over an ocean of toppled grey buildings.
‘Why?’ he repeated. He pushed the words out through broken teeth, slick with silver blood. He swallowed a milky static gulp of it as more welled in his gums.
‘You were eating people’s skins!’ the burly man yelled back, disbelieving. ‘Who the fuck does that?!’ the small crowd around him nodded and mumbled to one another. Alex couldn’t hear their words properly. His bloody ears made everything a muffled mess.
‘It’s not my fault!’ Alex screamed, spitting blood as he spoke. ‘Everything else I eat, I throw up! I’m starving! Those skins are all I can eat now!’ the crowd stared, silent. Hanging on the monster’s words. ‘I can’t eat food any more, do you understand?’ he yelled. ‘Do you think I wanted this? What else am I supposed to do, starve to death?’
‘I saw a spider sting him,’ said a woman in the crowd, dust-covered and loudly spoken. ‘He should be dead.’
‘Yeah, and look what happens if they don’t kill you,’ the burly man replied to the crowd. ‘Turns you into a god-damn cannibal.’ He stared at Alex’s hunched body in the chair, barely conscious after his appeal. The carpet was a marsh of silver blood around his feet.
‘This isn’t right,’ said a young man in the crowd.
‘We’re not setting him loose,’ said a woman, holding her kids tight. ‘He’ll kill us.’
‘I won’t kill you,’ Alex mumbled into his chest. ‘Just let me go. Please.’
‘Well we can’t keep him prisoner,’ an old man chipped in. ‘I mean what do we feed him, skin?’
‘…Just let me go,’ Alex mumbled quietly.
‘What?’ said the burly man, stepping closer.
‘Let me go!’ Alex yelled, looking up at him with a mangled face. Beaten out of shape.
‘We can’t,’ an old woman said in the crowd, looking around at everyone. ‘We can’t do that. He’s too dangerous. Think about our kids.’
‘Can’t believe you’re pulling the kids card to justify this,’ Alex chuckled, looking up at the crowd. There was something else there behind his eyes, something dark and fierce. A new Alex. ‘I’m not going to eat your kids,’ he told them. ‘…There’s no meat on them.’ Gasps in the crowd.
‘I say we just kill him,’ said a young man at the back.
‘We can’t do that,’ someone else replied. A heavy silence, broken by a cough.
‘I can do that,’ said a man, pulling a gun from his pocket. The crowd erupted into moral debate. Alex strained again at the blue nylon rope that bound his wrists to the chair. Strained harder. The rope bit into his skin. Harder. His arms trembled with the effort. The rope stung, rough and cutting. The stem of the office chair cracked with a metal ping; a sound lost in the noisy chatter. The burly man leading the crowd had his back turned. Some of them saw Alex stagger to his feet and yelled to warn him, but it was too late. Alex wrapped his tied arms around the man’s neck, curled a bicep round his throat. The crowd were yelling and screaming. Alex squeezed the man’s throat with every ounce of rage he had. His new bloody hunger drove him to bite down hard on the man’s ear, ripping it away. Red blood coursed down the man’s neck as he screamed. Alex didn’t feel the crowbar smack against his head at first. It was too hard and heavy and sudden to register. He felt the second hit though, and felt the office floor pound against his face when he fell. The kicks that cracked his ribs, he felt those too. The crowd’s screaming angry voices filled his head; a mind already at war with itself. He yelled at the hammer blow that shattered his hand. The knife in his stomach. Screamed as countless hands and feet blocked out the daylight above him, reaching down to claw the life out of him. Panic bit. He flailed for life, grasping at nothing. He felt weightless then, light. The ceiling tiles floated by above his head as the crowd carried him. And suddenly all the raw horror of the new world fell away as he sailed out of the office window, twenty storeys high. The mob’s roaring cheer faded away above him; faces that peered out to watch him fall. He flailed limp in the huge empty nothing, and heard the rush of air that blew cold against his bloody ears. He looked beyond the shrinking faces, past the towering building above. There was only sky, vast and pearly white above him; sliding out of reach as he fell to the street below.
9
Tabitha was wandering through new-build suburbs on the edge of town; suburbs that she’d only seen in passing before now. Thin detached houses in fresh new brick, lined up along a brand new road that led into the woods. All their neat little gardens still primped and manicured to within an inch of their lives. There was a child’s bike laid out on the road, and dark broken windows in the empty homes. She tried not to look at the skins; walked on past and blotted them from her mind. She picked up an elastic band off the road, and slipped it around her wrist. Something useful to add to her knife and her stale bread. It was hardly a survival pack. That was why she couldn’t afford to overlook anything lying around. Not if it could help her chances of living through this. She headed up a driveway, intending to search the house for bottled water. It looked like a mineral water kind of house. When she peered in the living room window she saw a spindly silver shape reflecting the daylight in the gloom. She backed away, and headed back down the drive onto the road. Promptly gave up on the idea. It was probably better just to get out of town now. She checked over her shoulder and jogged on down the empty road, into the cover of the woods. People didn’t live in woods; maybe the spiders had no reason to come in here.
Tabitha wandered on for a while through the green silent shade of the trees, summer-full and hanging low. She could smell the thick thorny brambles and the waist-high grass; a heady whiff on the breeze. A little way down, the road gave way to walking paths, and she left the old stone walls behind. There was only the wild world ahead, vast and silent but for the sound of birds and the quiet creak of her boots. She tried to get into the habit of checking around her. Looking for danger, like a prey animal. That’s what she was now, she reminded herself. Just lucky prey.
Deep in the woods, through tangled brambles and storm-fallen trees, Tabitha came to a rocky dip with a sleeping bag in it. She pressed up against a tree, cautious. Convinced that an axe murderer was watching her from the woods all around. Crouching down against the tree, with only the sound of her own panicked breaths for company, Tabitha closed her eyes and climbed back out of her head. There were worse things than axe murderers now; of course there were. Axe murderers only wanted to straight-up murder you. Not capture you alive and drink your insides out. Looking around, she stood up and made her way closer to investigate. There were empty tins of food scattered around the sleeping bag, and a plastic bag full of unopened water bottles. And flapping in the wind against a tree trunk nearby, a skin in a coat and tracksuit trousers. Its withered feet had slipped out of its trainers, blowing in the breeze like a fleshy pair of tights. Tabitha wished she’d felt worse than she did about taking the food and water. But already that grim, nauseating edge was wearing off scenes like this. She’d seen a dozen others like it on her way into the woods. So many people had tried to escape in here and survive. So many skins; they’d lost their shock factor. A broken tree stood over the dell where she stood; a splintered pillar of rotten timber that stabbed the blue sky above. She felt her caffeine headache come back again when she stooped down to pick up a stray water bottle, and added it to her plastic bag.
Tabitha felt sluggish as she walked on into the woods, feeling relaxed without her regular caffeine in her bloodstream. For a little while the air felt syrupy all around her while she walked. Thicker to breathe, thicker to move through. She couldn’t believe how rough she felt, even after just a couple of days without a cup of tea. What had she been doing to herself, drinking that stuff every day?
‘God, sobriety’s miserable,’ she said, squinting at the bright sunlight. She stood and watched a crow for a while, wandering a patch of grass and thinking about its existence. It stopped and studied her for a while.
‘It’s alright for you,’ Tabitha said bitterly, watching the crow wandering on. She didn’t like the way it strutted around, like nothing was going on in the world. As if whatever had happened didn’t matter all that much.
‘Oh, look at me, I’m a crow, I’m not getting eaten by aliens,’ Tabitha muttered. ‘Knob.’ The crow paused; eyed her cautiously. It flew away on glossy black wings in clumsy lurching flaps. Tabitha would’ve given anything to fly away with it, high above the empty world and the biting silence.
Wandering deeper into the woods than she’d ever been before, Tabitha took a seat for a while on a fallen tree. Up above, two little birds chattered and sang endlessly at one another over the same bush. Up ahead, Tabitha made out the waving black shape of an alien tree; one of the towering black anemones that she’d seen back in town. It looked tree-shaped, she supposed; but its thick arms waved around gently, surreal, as if it was underwater. She noticed birds perching on its drifting branches, flitting from one to another when the waving tentacles overlapped. The tree’s alien shape had already taken root here. Already it had become just another part of the world.
Tabitha came to a pond and edged around it. She studied the frogspawn in the murky water, crossing a sturdy wooden walkway to the far side. A big dragonfly darted past her from the bushes and hunted around the reeds; a tyrant among lesser bugs. Tabitha tried to blot out the summery silence as she reached the far side of the pond; tried to keep her grief buried deep down. The shallow mud made sticky pucker sounds as she lifted her feet.
She felt more alive out of town now, even despite her grief; it was the strangest feeling. There was something new about the sunshine through the trees, lighting up the leaves into emerald shades over her head. Some strange revelation; a moment of holy bliss. She glimpsed tiny veins of light in the leaves above; a running current. Life’s voltage. It gave her butterflies, tingling just to see it. A natural attraction, heady as lust. The rich dark black of the soil beneath the trees looked as good as chocolate cake under her feet. She felt hungry, but not in her stomach. It was a longing that ran through her whole body, like she was missing some vital part of herself. A gaping want inside her; divine horniness. She didn’t understand the feeling. It was something she’d never felt before.
Pigeons scattered into the air as Tabitha walked into a clearing; wings flapping soft in the silence. She smelled the earthy green tang of leaves here, half surrounded by a misty violet carpet of bluebells. Her sight began to shift again. Looking closely at the roots of the nearest tree, she saw energy there. Beneath the rough brown bark was a living light factory. She could sense the leaves above her on the branches, drinking in the sunlight. Everything around her had taken on a brighter shade, and it wasn’t just from the light. There was something in the way she saw it. The only sound was her footsteps; light rasping strokes on the sandy dirt path.
She saw a squirrel running along the top of a wooden fence, bounding over the square posts in a rhythm of perfect arcs. Smiling, she followed at a distance. She walked on and it ran from her, all along the downhill path, until it stopped a few fence posts along and looked at her. It had its back turned, as if it was hiding something. Tabitha stopped, smiled, and edged a little closer towards it.
‘What’ve you got there?’ she said quietly, stepping closer without trying to spook it.
‘Where are you going?’ said a gravelly monotone voice, off to her left in the trees. Tabitha froze. It took her a moment to see him. He wore muddy camouflage gear, like a hunter. Shaved head and a fierce look; scowling and rough-stubbled. The brilliant colours she saw in everything suddenly faded away. All the world lost its shine.
‘I said, where are you going?’ the man repeated. He was pointing a rifle. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. There was an intense hunger about him. Tell him what he wants to hear, she told herself. Just get away.
‘None of your business,’ Tabitha replied, surprising herself. The old her would never say something like that.
‘You what?’ he chuckled, stepping closer.
‘I said, it’s none of your fucking business where I’m going!’ she said, standing her ground. The man laughed, loud and hoarse.
‘You should talk nicer than that, seeing as I’ve got this pointed at you.’ He raised the rifle and aimed it between her eyes. Get away, Tabitha told herself. Just run.
‘Well are you going to shoot me or not?’ she said. It was the new Tabitha talking. Her gut reaction. She looked him right in the eye, and held his stare. He saw her strange grey hands bunch into fists, and hesitated.
‘Give me everything you’ve got,’ he said, stepping closer. He smelled like stale tobacco.
‘What?’ she replied. It threw him. Tabitha stared down the dark barrel of the gun; the promise of instant death.
‘Are you deaf, you stupid bitch?’ he growled. ‘Give me everything! Your food and water, give it to me!’
‘You’d have it by now, if you had the balls to come and take it,’ Tabitha said with a smile.
‘I’ll fucking shoot you.’
‘Do it.’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘So fucking do it!’ she yelled. The man stepped closer, hesitated. He wasn’t going to shoot her; she could tell. She was drunk on adrenaline. Time to lay it on thick.
‘If you fire that, every spider for a mile around is going to come here looking for us,’ she told him. ‘Now I know I’ll be alright. They tried to kill me once and it didn’t work. All they did was give me these.’ She raised her hands for him to see. He had no idea how scared he looked. ‘But you… they’ll find you, and they’ll hold you down and drink your insides out. I don’t think you want that to happen.’ He’d been edging closer all the while, rifle still raised and aimed at her face. Wide-eyed he looked her over, sized her up. He dropped the rifle, pulled a hunting knife from his belt and came at her. He was slower than her. When he went to stab her Tabitha grabbed the blade tight, and put him on the ground with a broken nose. Before he could move she was knelt over him, pressing the knife point in against the dry red skin on his throat. He struggled. She pushed the point in to break the skin. He yelped. Dark red blood trickled down his neck. He struggled again.
‘Don’t,’ she told him quietly, fixing him with a stare. ‘Those spiders are nothing compared to me. Now give me everything, and I’ll let you live.’ She pressed the knife in a little more.
‘T-take it,’ he said. She could see the fear in his eyes.
Tabitha walked on right into the evening, deep into the dusky forest. She had the hunting knife on her belt in its leather sheath, and the scoped rifle slung across her back by the strap. She hadn’t needed to keep checking over her shoulder for the man; he hadn’t tried to come after her. She didn’t suppose he would last very long out here anyway. Good. She’d had enough of bullies growing up to last her a lifetime. Let them feel weak and terrified for a change.
She made her way down unfamiliar paths, further than she’d ever been before through here. She knew the town on the far side of the woods, but she didn’t know how to get there from here. She had to be heading the right way though, she told herself. She’d been following the downward slope of the land for a couple of miles at least.
Further on Tabitha sat down on a log by the stream, and pulled the hard stale chunk of bread from her pocket in a shower of crumbs. She chewed it until her jaw hurt with the effort; washed it down with a bottle of water from the bag. She watched froth collect behind a fallen tree in the stream. She picked the mud from her boots idly with the big cruel hunting knife, and watched the sun set over the fields that stretched out beyond the edge of the woods. She soon felt queasy though, and her appetite dropped right off. Maybe that was a good thing, really. The bread would last longer if she didn’t feel like eating m
uch of it. She put a rough cold hand under her t-shirt and rubbed her stomach, wincing at the cramps. Maybe she should have eaten sooner, when she’d come around in her house. It’d been days now, and all the bread had done was make her feel ill. The quiet bliss of the woods helped, though. No jarring racket of voices; no people to watch her and laugh. There was only the flowing sound of the stream; the vicious harmony of the birds. It was a strange silence though, normally filled with the distant hiss of traffic. The world was a new and lonely place.
After a few warm sips of water Tabitha sighed, and got back up on her tired feet. She wasn’t used to walking this much any more; there’d be a lot more of it to come too. Just one of those things, she told herself. No use getting in a state about it, as Mum would say. Just one footstep at a time. Picking up her new hunting rifle, Tabitha let the movies guide her hands. She lifted the rifle’s bolt handle up and pulled it back with a clack. Sure enough there was a bullet in there, big and brass. Fishing it out, there was another beneath it. And another. Beyond that though, it was just a dark empty recess.