Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  ‘Will, c-come upstairs,’ said Liv, standing up. She walked over to him and took his hand. He looked lost, spooked. ‘Talk to me,’ she said softly, leading him upstairs. Tabitha shared a look with Chris and Jim. She was pretty sure they were thinking what she was thinking. That they were probably going to die today. She gritted her teeth, and got up to pull on her riot gear.

  Chris stood around the kitchen in silence, staring at the walls. Jim and Tabitha said nothing as they changed into their riot gear. Eventually Chris sighed, and walked out of the keep into the gloomy grey daylight.

  ‘He’s friendly as ever,’ said Jim, nodding at the door after Chris had left.

  ‘It’s Will I’m more worried about,’ Tabitha said in a hushed tone. ‘He’s changed.’

  ‘Well, losing Paul probably got to him,’ Jim whispered, taking a seat with Tabitha at the kitchen table. ‘One minute Paul was there, then he was gone.’ Tabitha thought about him. She’d been speaking to him. He was right there; real. He was alive. And then suddenly he was drained-out skin; ashes. A memory. Same with his kids too. Robert, Grace and Natalie were just a memory now. Would they even survive out there? Would they have survived in here anyway? Suddenly the Ghosts had lost half their numbers when they couldn’t have needed them more.

  ‘Will’s put it all on his own shoulders,’ Tabitha said quietly, clipping on her leg guards. She made sure the gaps between the front and back pieces were extra tight this time, to avoid any claws finding their way into her calves again. ‘Don’t get me wrong though, I’m torn up about Paul too,’ she added, feeling guilty for seeming so cold. ‘I just can’t cry about him though, not right now. I’m too scared.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Jim replied. ‘I can’t cry until there’s no one around me at all. Anyway, you don’t have to be crying to grieve for someone.’ Tabitha nodded, and laced up her boots extra-tight. Paul’s memory stung; more grief added to all the rest. The high gentle rustle of laces was the only sound in the melancholy silence between her and Jim. They heard Will crying quietly upstairs, and Liv’s soothing tones layered on top of the sound.

  ‘It’s all really got to Will, hasn’t it?’ Tabitha whispered, looking at Jim.

  ‘Everyone’s got their limit,’ Jim said quietly. ‘Losing so many people so fast… and I don’t think it’ll just be Paul that Will’s thinking about either.’

  ‘No, of course,’ Tabitha replied. It hadn’t even occurred to her. Will had lost his friends and family too, though he’d never mentioned them before. Knowing Will, he probably blamed himself for them too. Tabitha still thought she should have been feeling more grief about Paul, but the feelings just weren’t coming. She worried then that she was getting too used to death and grief. Desensitised, even.

  ‘I just hope Natalie and the kids are going to be alright,’ she told Jim, sighing out the tension in her shoulders. ‘Was it the right thing to do, giving them the car?’

  ‘You didn’t have much choice,’ Jim replied, getting up from his chair at the table. ‘We could have been shot if you didn’t give her the car. So don’t worry about it,’ he smiled his creased-up smile, gentle and ancient. Tabitha followed him out of the door and across the courtyard towards the curtain wall. The birds weren’t singing any more. It felt like there was a static weight hanging in the air all around them; a heavy tension like a coming storm.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Tabitha asked him.

  ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life,’ he replied. They hung around in the courtyard with a creeping dread on them, like they were waiting for a funeral to start. The insect chitter from the hills was constant; maddening. The deathly sound was enough to bury any scrap of morale they had left.

  ‘We’ve gotten too used to treating Will like the boss,’ Jim admitted.

  ‘One of us needs to be in charge though, or we won’t fight like a team,’ Tabitha replied. ‘We’ll all be fighting them on our own.’

  ‘So we need a new boss today,’ Jim said with a nod. ‘The person Will looks up to the most.’

  ‘Liv would be my choice too,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Should we go and talk to her?’

  ‘I’m not talking about Liv,’ said Jim, turning away from the wall. ‘I meant you.’

  29

  ‘There’s so many,’ Will mumbled, looking out over the curtain wall at the spiders massing in the distance. The others stood beside him and watched the swarm with grim fascination. A wind whipped at them suddenly, cold and fierce, and died away.

  ‘I thought there was a hundred or so before,’ said Jim, squinting at them beyond the town walls.

  ‘Well, not any m-more,’ Liv replied. The nearest hill had since turned completely silver with gathering spiders. The sky was overcast above them; a steel-grey backdrop hanging heavy over the town.

  ‘What do you propose we do?’ said Sylvia, pulling up her coat collar against the wind.

  ‘What can we do?’ Chris laughed. ‘All we can do is go back into the keep and barricade the door.’ Will looked at him, uncertain. It sounded like a plan.

  ‘No,’ said Tabitha. ‘That’s our last resort.’ She noticed Jim moving closer to stand beside her. He didn’t need to say anything to show them whose side he was on.

  ‘Yeah, get upstairs in the castle,’ said Tony, completely ignoring her and siding with Chris. ‘We’ll break up the wooden stairs so they can’t get up.’

  ‘That’s what we did in the attic,’ Jackie added.

  ‘We’re not giving up that easy,’ Jim said gruffly. ‘You lot might not have any fight in you, but we do.’

  ‘Like I said, that’s a last resort,’ Tabitha told the others stubbornly. ‘Before it comes to that, we’re going to fight them.’ She was met with silent stares.

  ‘With what though?’ Will laughed desperately. ‘A few guns and a couple of spears? Have you seen how many there are out there?’ he looked around at their frightened faces. Their eyes kept flicking back to the hills, to see if the spiders were moving yet. ‘We’ve already lost Paul,’ he said sadly. ‘None of us were fast enough to save him, and that was just one spider. What chance have we got against all them? We’re just not going to win this time!’ Tabitha looked at him now and saw a different person. Since when had Will been beaten so easily?

  ‘And we can’t get away either, now she’s given the car away,’ Chris added, nodding at Tabitha. ‘We’re dead.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Tabitha said defiantly. ‘I’m not going down without a fight!’

  ‘But Will’s right,’ said Liv. ‘There’s j-just no way we can win this.’

  ‘We won last time,’ Jim replied.

  ‘Yeah but there were f-fifty last time, not five hundred,’ said Liv.

  ‘More than five hundred there,’ said Tony, watching the silver horde on the hills. Jackie stared at the spiders and took hold of his arm.

  ‘Yeah, there’s more of them,’ Tabitha conceded. ‘But that’s the only thing that’s changed.’ She looked at the hopeless faces lined up along the wall. Paul’s death really had gotten to Will. She could see it in his eyes. He looked haunted. Not the kind of ghost they needed right now.

  ‘This is the same fight as last time. Just longer,’ said Tabitha. ‘That’s all. We can win this.’

  ‘They’re going to flood us!’ Chris protested.

  ‘They’re going to do exactly what they did last time!’ Tabitha shot back. ‘They’re going to hit the walls down there and slow right down to a crawl. They’re going to hit the gate round there, and then we’ll pick them off one by one.’

  ‘We’ll pick off five hundred of them one by one?’ said Chris, incredulous. The others were chatting nervously.

  ‘I’ll pick off five thousand of them if that’s what it takes!’ Tabitha yelled back, so loud that she stunned the group into silence. ‘They took everything from me!’ she said, meeting their stares. ‘I’m going to make them suffer and die with everything I’ve got left!’ Will looked up at her. ‘I’ve not fought my way here through all tha
t death and rot out there just to give up and die now!’ Tabitha yelled. ‘Of course it’s scary, look at them all out there! But we’re the Ghosts. Nothing’s worse than a ghost! You can’t kill a ghost!’

  ‘I think our little club’s gone to someone’s head,’ Chris joked. ‘You do know that we’re not really ghosts, don’t you? That we can actually die, and we will when they get here?’ Tabitha stared at him. He was wearing that smug smile again; the one she’d grown to hate.

  ‘Piss off, Chris,’ she said. ‘Just go.’

  ‘What?’ he chuckled, looking round at the others.

  ‘Just crawl off and die somewhere,’ Tabitha said simply. ‘We all know you don’t have any fight in you, so stop holding us back. It’ll give us a spare gun, anyway.’ Chris laughed.

  ‘Yeah, it’s alright for the freaks among us with super healing,’ he replied. ‘They know they’re not going to die that easily anyway.’ Tabitha stormed over and pushed him off the inside edge of the wall, down into a bush in the garden. Tense, nervous, Liv burst out laughing at the sight. Jim was chuckling.

  ‘You think I wouldn’t die fighting for these people?’ Tabitha screamed at Chris, as he wrestled himself from the bushes below. ‘Do you?’ Chris said nothing. He just glared at her.

  ‘Anyone else who shares Chris’s thoughts can crawl off and die somewhere too!’ she said, looking around at their faces. ‘I don’t give a shit anymore! Anyone who isn’t going to fight tooth and claw just to carry on living, just piss off into a corner and wait to die!’ the others were staring at her in shock. She ignored Chris’s hail of expletives from the garden below as he climbed out from the bushes.

  ‘You can’t talk to us like that!’ said Jackie.

  ‘Listen,’ Tabitha told the others calmly, ignoring her. ‘We don’t know how much time we’ve got before the spiders attack us,’ she told the group. ‘But we do know what’s going to happen when they get here. And we can prepare for it.’

  ‘Prepare?’ said Tony. ‘There’s nothing to prepare with.’

  ‘We’re going to barricade the gate,’ she said, looking round the castle. ‘We’ll put barriers up on the walls too. Anything we can do to slow them down, and pick them off one at a time. What are the heaviest things in the keep we can use to barricade the gate?’

  ‘The two big cupboards,’ said Will, stroking his stubble. ‘And the table and chairs.’

  ‘Alright then,’ said Tabitha. ‘You and Tony, get them out here against the gate. And leave some room to jab a spear through.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Will, nodding. He walked off with Tony back to the keep. Suddenly Tabitha felt all the responsibility fall to her. They were all looking to her to tell them what to do. Don’t freak out, she told herself. You do not have permission to freak out. What would the heroes do in the movies? They’d own it. They’d be a boss about it.

  ‘Liv, Sylvia, bring out every gun, knife, tool, whatever,’ she told them. ‘Anything we can use as weapons. Pile them up here. Chris, are you still playing?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said in the garden, brushing leaves off his jumper.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Show Jackie and Tony how to use a rifle. And Jim, you come with me.’

  ‘We need barriers up on the walls here, to make it harder for them to climb over,’ she told Jim, as they walked along the curtain wall together.

  ‘Barriers? Like what?’ he replied, studying the stone blocks along the battlements.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tabitha admitted. ‘Wooden boards, plastic sheets… anything that’ll slow them down so that they have to trickle through to us.’ Jim looked around at the castle, hand on chin, thinking.

  ‘Well we’ve got the wooden trellises in the garden, how about them?’

  ‘Perfect,’ she said, jumping off the wall down to the lawn. ‘We’ll fix them to the top of the wall,’ she said, grabbing hold of the closest trellis to pull it away from the keep. ‘We want to make it as awkward as possible for the spiders to climb over, so we’ve got time to fight back.’

  Once the gate was barricaded, Jim, Tony and Will set to work on the walls too. Using trellises and table tops they managed to block off most of the gaps in the parapets, the old stone teeth that ran along the top of the wall. Fixing the trellises to the outside of the parapets, they strapped and tied them to the hand rail with whatever belts, string and nylon rope they could find. The new barriers wouldn’t keep the spiders out indefinitely, but hopefully it would slow them down enough to make them vulnerable. Tabitha meanwhile headed back into the keep, and led Laika upstairs while she changed into her riot gear.

  ‘Do you want to know a secret, dog face?’ she said, once they were alone upstairs. She crouched down for Laika to lick her face. ‘I’m scared shitless,’ she admitted, with a nervous laugh. ‘And I want you out there next to me, protecting me like you always do. But you can’t go out there. Not now. It’s too dangerous.’ She rubbed Laika’s sides and stroked her soft sleepy face, and kissed her on the head. Laika looked at her peacefully with her mismatched eyes, silent and alert. Tabitha’s oldest friend in the new world.

  ‘I wish we had some riot gear for dogs, then I’d have you out there with me,’ she told Laika with a smile. ‘But you’ll have to stay put for this fight.’ Laika just looked at her, placid as ever.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is …have a good life, if you don’t see me again,’ Tabitha told her, feeling her voice tremble as she stroked her. ‘But you’re a smart dog. You’ll be alright. Go and find a nice man dog and have some crazy-eyed puppies together.’ Tabitha smiled at the thought. ‘You could do me a favour though and howl for me, if I die. It’d mean a lot.’ Tabitha blinked her tears away, and stroked Laika’s cheeks. ‘Love you, dog face,’ she said, getting up to walk away. ‘Stay.’

  Liv stood with Tabitha on the wall. Their riot gear was heavy and hot in the muggy midday sun, and smelled like stale sweat. Liv pulled the itchy fabric away from the back of her neck.

  ‘Is this everything we’ve got?’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Yep,’ Liv replied, with a grim nod. They were looking over their weapons stockpile, stashed together on the wall. Two spears, eight assault rifles, two shotguns and a hunting rifle. A pretty good haul, all things considered, but there was hardly enough ammunition left to rely on the guns too much. The two boxes were more promising, though. One was filled with the soldiers’ bayonets; the other with hand grenades. Aside from those was a small pile of kitchen knives, a hammer, and some screwdrivers. Tabitha did a double take. Liv was holding a fire axe.

  ‘I didn’t know we had a fire axe,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Neither did I, until I s-started rooting around,’ Liv replied. ‘If you’re taking a spear, it’s only fair that I get a big old axe.’

  ‘May as well face death like a real warrior, on a castle and everything.’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Damn st-straight,’ Liv replied. ‘I even got in some action with Will before, too. Turns out mortal terror makes me horny. We’re practically b-barbarians. Will’s definitely barbaric, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Thank you, for telling me that,’ Tabitha said sarcastically. ‘It’s good to know.’

  ‘He does this th-thing where he –

  ‘Ok,’ Tabitha cut in, putting her hands over her ears. ‘Some things are just too beautiful and graphic to put into words.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Liv, laughing. ‘I’ll keep that between me and the wife.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tabitha replied with a smile, uncovering her ears.

  ‘Look, they’re moving,’ said Liv, watching the swarm on the hills. The spiders’ bodies reflected the sunlight like a shimmering landslide, slow and gigantic. Tabitha expected Will to be around to shout orders, until she remembered what state he was in. It was up to her now.

  ‘We need to form up!’ Tabitha called out, waving to the others to come up onto the wall.

  ‘Tabitha,’ said Liv. ‘You’re like a s-sister to me. I love you.’ Her riot gear clattered against Tabitha�
�s as she went in for a tight hug. ‘Just in c-case we don’t win, of course.’

  ‘Likewise,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. ‘But we will win.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Liv, with a sad smile. She squeezed Tabitha tight and kissed her cheek, and turned to the others as she picked her fire axe back up. ‘Everyone, up on the wall please!’

  ‘How’s Will?’ Tabitha asked her quietly.

  ‘Not good,’ said Liv, watching the others climb the steps onto the wall. ‘Seeing Paul die really got to him. I don’t think he’s going to be up to any inspiring speeches today.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Tabitha replied, turning away from the spiders that were swarming down into the outskirts of town. She watched the Ghosts file out onto the wall. A gallery of sunken faces, hungry and scared. Even with their riot gear on and their shields ready, Will and Jim looked like shadows of their former selves. Chris, she considered, had always looked like a shadow of his former self. Tony and Sylvia watched the swarming spiders spreading out into town. Jackie lit up a cigarette with shaking hands. Tabitha looked around at them, and wondered what the hell she could tell them to make this a battle worth fighting; a battle they were going to survive. She thought for a moment; cleared her throat.

  ‘One day, we’re all going to die,’ she told them, taking up one of the spears Liv had put by the wall. ‘All we get to choose is whether to face it, or to be afraid of it.’ Jim coughed. Chris shifted uneasily where he stood.

  ‘What matters is how we live, and how we’re remembered,’ she told them. ‘When death comes for us we can face it in fear, begging on our knees. Or we can look it in the eye and go out fighting. We can be remembered as heroes, if we want to be. We can die legends. A great man told me that once. And he’s standing right there.’ Everyone looked at Will. He was surprised by the sudden attention. Liv smiled at him, and took his hand in hers.