by Hall, Andrew
‘That’s it?’ she asked the gun, wiggling a grey finger inside in case there were any more bullets hidden away. She’d told the man to empty his pockets, once she had the rifle pointed at him. He hadn’t been carrying any more bullets though. Tabitha sighed at the meagre ammunition in her palm, and slotted each bullet back into the magazine. She pushed the bolt back in, and turned the handle down to lock it. The switch behind the scope must have been the safety. There was always a safety switch; the movies told her so. It was always on when the inexperienced bad guy tried to shoot the seasoned good guy. Tabitha pushed the safety up, so that she didn’t go shooting a third of her bullets by accident. So all those loud beautiful blockbusters had been useful for something after all, she told herself, despite her mum’s opinions to the contrary. The thought of her bit into Tabitha’s heart.
Tabitha zipped her hoodie up and stretched her stiff legs. The sun was setting; before long the sky had turned plum purple. She slung the rifle across her back, slid her new hunting knife into its sheath on her belt, and left the river behind in the gathering gloom.
She walked on through the trees as the stars came out one by one; specks of silver sand on a field of black velvet. One sore foot in front of the other, she trudged on through the night; tripping on roots and catching at sudden saplings in her way, blind to all obstacles in the inky dark. She wandered on until she left the trees behind, and the soil gave way to tall grass brushing against her sleeves. There was only the starry sky above her now; no more forest to block her view. She’d never seen so many stars before. These were the stars that showed themselves far away from the city lights, where there was only the pure dark of the countryside. There weren’t any city lights any more, she reminded herself. Now all of it was country dark. She went cautiously out in the endless grass, watching and listening for anything out there in the black. She walked on until it became a blind meditation. Listening to the rustling grass running over her boots. The clicking bats above. Her own breaths, shallow at first, until she sank her shoulders and reassured herself. She could handle this. She was armed. Whatever happened, she could always run away and heal. She hoped. She breathed in the smells of dirt and grass in the dark. Dragged her cold feet on through the night fields until the creeping blush of dawn.
As the sun crept up in the cool clear sky, Tabitha caught sight of the next town in the distance. Exhausted, she stopped for a little while and leant on a wooden fence. Felt the smooth bite of the wood grain against her wrists, sliding her skin over the timber with a whispering swish. She just wanted to feel something again, with no sensation left in her hands. Worth the splinter, just to feel it. She searched the sky for a sudden rumbling sound. A jet tore overhead. Tabitha’s heart soared when she heard the distant echoing blast of a bomb. Bombs could only be a good thing now, surely. It meant that people were fighting back. The firm boot of national defence. Order being restored. She watched a rising flower of fiery black smoke in the distance, blooming over the town where she wanted to be. There must have been soldiers nearby; maybe in the town itself. Or survivors, fighting back. She could help them. Another jet ripped past overhead. It was grey, a strange shape, with a very different sound. Wait… not a jet. Something else. Something alien. It belched a pillar of white light and chased the fighter jet through the sky.
‘What the hell?’ Tabitha mumbled, staring up at it in the distant dawn. It was flapping. What was it, a bird? A lizard? Whatever it was, it was huge and it was brutal. She watched the dark creature throw its wings out wide and catch the jet in the air. Tabitha prayed for the pilot to eject. Prayed to see their tiny shape escaping the carnage. But nothing. The creature ripped the plane to pieces and reduced it to a falling, flaming wreck. The spinning jet disappeared behind the buildings in the distance. Exploded in town with a deep echoing boom. The creature circled again. Tabitha gasped and ducked down in the tall grass, watching the sky until it flew away. She could only watch from the fields as the smoke rose up from the town, snaking black into the pale sky. The wind tugged at her hair as she looked out over the sprawl of buildings. She had to know what was happening in there. She had to get to the crashed jet.
10
Tabitha stalked into town with her rifle ready, watching for movement in the shattered buildings. It was the same here too; a ghost world. A thin dead covering of brick dust coated the cars she passed by. Torn-open office blocks bled flurries of paper in the summer breeze. It was hot and dry here; an urban desert. There was only the sullen creak of her leather boots as she walked the streets, cradling her rifle. Was this how it felt to be a soldier? Even they moved as a team though. She was on her own.
There’d been some real fighting here in the town centre. Bullet holes peppered the buildings. The shop windows that still stood were shattered through, clouded white with a thousand webbed cracks. Useless barricades blocked the side streets; walls of tables and chairs with their legs poking skywards. Tabitha jumped at sudden birdsong; a blackbird that twittered loudly as it flew overhead. She was glad of the sound though, even despite her pounding heart. Nothing was worse than the graveyard silence here. Some of the shops were burnt-out shells; walls blackened from long-dead fires. She’d imagined some kind of resistance fighting back; there was nothing here. No skins, no spidery shapes; no fighting. No sign of life. Passing a ruined bank building, she stooped to pick up one of the leaflets that had blown out of the broken door onto the street.
‘Protect your world,’ Tabitha mumbled, reading the header aloud. Home insurance. A couple grinned at one another on the cover. There wasn’t anything about alien invasion cover inside the pages. Tabitha dropped the leaflet on the kerb and walked off up the dead high street.
Pigeons had gathered in the empty town square, pecking and strutting, oblivious to the urban ruins around them. Tabitha hoisted herself up onto the wall that surrounded the square, and looked around her in the hazy morning heat. There was a little toy skeleton on the ground nearby; bright green plastic grinning at her from the grave.
‘Anyone here?’ she muttered to herself, taking a sip of water from a plastic bottle. A bee swam by through the warm air. Tabitha sighed and shrugged out of her hoodie. She pulled the stale bread from the carrier bag, stared at it, and put it back. She couldn’t face another bite after how sick it’d made her feel yesterday. She looked around, shrugged, sighed. A fly danced by in the sticky golden sunlight.
Up on the flat roof of a hotel building she could see for miles. Two columns of smoke twisted up black in the distance; they must have been the crashed jet and the bomb it had dropped. The wind whipped white rubbish down the road below. The town laid out beneath her was a ruin of browns and greys, a square-mile demolition site. There were cars everywhere, parked up hurriedly on kerbs or abandoned on the main roads. Lined up in dead traffic like one huge dealership. She couldn’t get over how quiet the world was. There were no voices, no sirens; no perma-hiss of road noise. She’d never expected a peace like this, as lonely and brutal as it was. Far in the distance lay the dull green hills, and not a cloud in the sky. Somewhere miles behind, she thought about Sam and Jane sealing themselves back into their cellar. Scared. Tabitha felt her own gnawing fear too, but at least it hadn’t consumed her. Surely it was better to be out in the world, looking for other survivors. Or was it? Was this the wrong thing to do? Should she be holed up somewhere safe, waiting for everything to get fixed? It didn’t look like there was anyone left to fix anything. There certainly wasn’t any sign of the military here, like she’d expected. The empty new world sprawled out below, on and on into a hazy horizon. Despite her fear and her loneliness though, she felt alright up here in the sunlight. The more she stayed with the strange easy feeling, vague and slippery as it was, the better she felt. It grew in her like the seed of something, then it flooded through her. She felt strong. Her body buzzed and her brain tingled; it was the most beautiful feeling. Holding her metal palm to her chest, there wasn’t any semblance of a heartbeat. Just a muted vibration, humming and miniscu
le. She could feel her silver blood inside her; a soaring feeling that coursed current through her body. She felt a tingle across her scalp, down her neck. The energy inside her gave her that feeling again, like when she’d been in the woods. Like everything was connected in one big electric web, and the sun was shining down with an energy that felt almost sacred. She caught herself then, gazing in a reverie. She needed a plan.
It was morbid curiosity that drew her on toward the smoking crash site. She followed the trail of smoke twisting up into the sky, heading out towards a housing estate. The summer heat pressed close as she walked. The dry sticky breeze did nothing to cool her down. She felt her t-shirt clinging to her back, damp with sweat. Her feet were hot and sore, laced up in her boots like creaking leather ovens. She clamped a hand to her mouth when she rounded the next corner. Already she could feel the heat of the blaze. Crackling flames. There in front of her was the dead jet, lying mauled and mangled by gigantic claws. Broken and burning. The wreckage covered the road; the jet’s body had ploughed into the tarmac and smashed through a shop.
‘Jesus,’ Tabitha mumbled, stopping in her tracks. She hadn’t seen it at first. There in the wreckage was a spider, sat right in the blaze. Silver skin reflecting the flames; a lurking vision of death. Its mouth parts twitched and shuffled, dripping the pilot’s red blood. It shifted around to face her. Tabitha fumbled with the hunting knife on her belt. She felt her stomach lurch with dread, ready for the fight. But the spider didn’t move. As she stood staring at it, she realised how fat it looked.
‘You’re full,’ she said, stepping closer. ‘You can’t even move, can you? You vile, creeping little shit.’ Tabitha stepped closer, watching it. The spider backed away a step, reluctant to fight. It was all Tabitha needed. She pulled the knife from her belt and ran at it. The spider was a sudden wall of raised legs; jutting silver swords held up against her. Tabitha wrenched away a stabbing leg and stomped the spider in the head, and drove the knife in deep. She watched the dots of light along its body flicker and fade out, and the thing slumped forward against her. Tabitha let its curled-up body fall from the jet and crash down on the road, abdomen swollen with its meal. She glanced at the drained body in the jet’s cockpit, and wished she hadn’t. Retching, she jumped back down from the jet and bent over on the road, holding her knees while she waited for the sick feeling to pass. She wiped the silver blood from her knife against her filthy jeans, and slipped it back into the sheath. She had to get away from here. At least she’d learned a couple of things about the spiders, she told herself. Fire wouldn’t kill them, but their own greed could certainly help.
Tabitha spent the afternoon working her way back through the town centre, searching buildings for survivors or anything useful. It was a long way to the next town over, and it looked like she really was on her own. All she could do was stay alive and keep moving, and hope that somewhere out there was some shred of civilisation. She moved cautiously, staying close to the buildings in the shade. She passed by a popped football in the street, browned and sad with a deflated dent. Further down the road she glanced at a blood-stained novel left on a bench, crinkled and rain-warped and fluttering open in the breeze.
Every other home and office she explored held their own little stockpiles of food. Cupboards stacked high with tins and jars. Everything that people had managed to loot, steal and panic-buy before the end of the world, Tabitha told herself. As if having enough food was going to see them through what was coming. She couldn’t believe how different the world looked now, after only a few days without humanity to keep it tidy. Everywhere she looked, dirt and rubbish and wilderness were creeping in like mould.
A leisure centre had been left wide open, abandoned. Edging her way inside, the dark corridor was empty. The drinks machines had been prised open and looted; Tabitha spotted a dented can of cola left over beside the wall. It hissed and fizzed when she cracked the ring pull open, and she clamped her mouth over the sugary froth before it escaped. Shaking the sticky drips off her grey fingers, Tabitha headed back outside and looked around at the empty world. She took another slurp of her can, guzzling until she felt the bubbles sting her throat. Sighing with satisfaction at the sugar rush.
When she reached a dingy old block of flats, Tabitha felt torn. It looked like the perfect place for those spiders to nest. It also looked like a good place to hole up and stay safe… maybe there were people up there. Maybe they needed her help. She had to redeem herself, after what had happened to Dev in the pub.
‘I could have saved him,’ she told herself sadly, heading toward the open door of the tower block. If she hadn’t been drunk, if she’d been paying attention… it had been such a split-second thing though. It was all over in a moment. Tabitha wiped her tears on her arm as she climbed the staircase, boots clomping quietly on the old dull floor tiles.
She didn’t explore any floors in the block that had skins in the corridor. There had only been two floors so far that hadn’t. She emerged from the first safe-looking flat with a rucksack, and put a stray digestive biscuit she’d found into her hoodie pocket. There’d been practically nothing else in the place but old furniture and a stale smoky smell. The next flat she explored had been a good haul though. She emerged again with tins of beans weighing down her rucksack, and crisps and chocolate too. Rummaging in her crinkling carrier bag, she moved the bread and bottles of water into the backpack and headed on up to the top floor.
There wasn’t much of a lived-in quality to the last flat either; just a dead TV, strewn clothes, and a smell like rotten vegetables. A clear lunchbox on the table was filled with fluffy blue-white mould, thriving in the sunlight like alien candy floss. Tabitha gagged and couldn’t look at it. She headed into the kitchen.
‘Jackpot,’ she muttered, opening the kitchen cupboards. She opened a jar of black olives and plucked at the top one with her new fingers, wrestling it slippery from the neck of the jar. There was no sign that anyone had been in the flat lately; only the clutter of lives left behind. And the most horrible little old vase she’d ever seen.
‘What the hell is that?’ she mumbled, taking the vase off the shelf. It was warped and turd-brown; a seventies mistake. Her metal grip sent a hairline crack through it. Wary, Tabitha put it back down before she managed to break it. She looked out over the town from the grimy window, and popped the wrestled olive into her mouth. It was a sharp salty shock on her tongue, welcome and strange. And already it felt like too much in her stomach when she swallowed. Where was her appetite? There was so much food here, all stacked up waiting to be eaten, and she didn’t want any of it. She could barely manage a second olive from the jar. Searching through the kitchen drawers, she plundered some plasters and a pair of scissors. A couple of clean towels to tear up for bandages, just in case. And a bright rattling box of painkillers. Definitely.
A few minutes later Tabitha sat on the floor with a bucket, stomach cramping, throwing up her two olives. Maybe she was in some kind of extended shock, she told herself. She’d just have to keep trying. She had to eat something soon though; she’d try again later. At least the bottle of spring water tasted good. Really good, actually. She checked the brand on the bottle. Had they changed the source or something? It was smoother than she remembered. Strangely satisfying.
Packing crackers, biscuits and the jar of olives into her stolen rucksack, Tabitha looked around the flat and thought twice. She knew she couldn’t stay here. While at first it seemed safe, high up here away from the world, she’d be trapped. If the spiders came looking for her, there was no way out except down all those steps. Staying here wasn’t an option. She bagged a packet of peanuts from the cupboard; a good high-energy food. That’s what she needed. With one last look around, she opened the door onto the dark hallway and left.
Tabitha headed back down endless flights of stairs and out onto the street again. She caught a smell on the summer breeze, strong and sour. There was a low hum behind her. Wait, not a hum, she told herself. Growling. Tabitha took one look at th
e pack of dogs behind her and ran for her life, sprinting past a burned-out car in the precinct. They were feral, and they were fast. She could hear the high ringing of nametags on their collars as they ran. These were pets once. Now they were hunting her, growling and barking as if she were prey on a concrete plain. One snapped at her hand but found only metal skin there; Tabitha felt nothing from the bite. She punched the dog hard on the snout, and watched it trail off from the hunt with a yelp. The rest were gaining though; alsatians and dobermans with a wild look in their eyes. Spaniels and whippets trailed behind; less aggressive but too hungry not to join the chase. Tabitha reached into her bag for food to distract them, but a pit bull ripped the rucksack from her grasp. The dogs tore into the bag like a body and fought over the food that spilled over the ground. They’d stopped chasing her. Tabitha didn’t look back, and didn’t stop running. Then she heard the sound that she’d been hoping against, as the dogs’ claws scratched and clattered after her again across the precinct. She pulled the rifle from her shoulder. Crouched, aimed, squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Safety’s on. She fumbled desperately at the safety switch and fired, and a doberman dropped dead. It didn’t stop the others though. They were too close for her to reload the rifle bolt. She jumped to her feet, swung the gun. Cracked the wooden stock against the alsatian’s snarling head. But the pack was on her. She yelled as jaws bit into her thigh; she pulled the carving knife from her belt and buried it in the dog’s neck. It yelped and ran with the knife stuck in, and Tabitha pulled her hunting knife instead. Stabbed another. Instinct left no room for morality inside her. All she saw were wild eyes. All she felt were snapping jaws, ripping into her skin. Wrestling against them she pulled the hunting knife from the yelping dog and stabbed a third, while their jaws yanked her body this way and that. Adrenaline pumped so hard that there wasn’t a thought in her head. There was only kill or be killed; a violent tangle of stabs and bites and barks and screams in the empty precinct. When her thoughts and her breath came back to her, all she knew was that they’d left her alone. There were dead dogs around her, sprawled in their blood. The ones that survived her were skulking away, limping and dotting blood across the precinct. Gasping, bleeding, Tabitha watched them go. She still held the bloody knife out in front of her as a warning to them, shining garnet-red in the sunlight. She looked down at her arms and the punctured jaw marks in her skin, streaming silver. Jeans and t-shirt ripped to shreds. She stamped her terror down inside. Her breath was ragged. Her legs felt so weak she could barely stand. She fell down to the ground in a puddle of silver blood, still holding the knife out at the distant dogs. Her stark yellow-green eyes stared at them still, watching the pack limp away across the precinct and slump down panting around the dumpsters. The bag of food was torn open in the distance, its contents massacred. They could have it. Tabitha hunched, still staring at the dogs, and felt her sight fading to black.