Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  Chris stood there on the keep for a while, just to make sure. Positive that Tabitha had stopped moving, he headed downstairs and unlocked the keep door. He approached her carefully, stepped over her to bolt the gate shut, and then felt her neck for a pulse.

  ‘I was aiming for your heart,’ he told her corpse on the courtyard. ‘But as long as I’ve put you down one way or another, you crazy bitch.’ Tabitha’s dead eyes stared at the ashes of the garden.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he told the others, as they edged their way out of the keep.

  ‘Make sure,’ said Sylvia, coming closer. Chris looked at her. Sylvia took the bayonet from Chris’s belt, knelt down, and buried it in Tabitha’s jugular. Sylvia watched for any reaction, listened for any hint of breath. Satisfied, she pulled the bayonet out, wiped it on a tissue from her cardigan sleeve, and handed it to Chris as she walked back into the keep.

  31

  The family moved so slowly, scuffing their tired feet along the sidewalk as they went. They coughed with dry throats as they mumbled to one another, cursing the flies as they picked their way through rotten skins. Mom, Dad, two young kids. The American Dream family on the run. They made so much noise trying to sneak through the ruined city that Alex had heard them all the way up the street. They were nothing special, really. Hobbling on blistered feet, draped in dust-grey rags; sluggish and bent with fatigue. Alex watched them from the shadows, tall and stern and staring. He’d seen survivors in worse shape. They didn’t look too sickly. But they certainly weren’t going to last long here in New York, wherever they’d come from. If they’d come here looking for somewhere safe, Alex could only guess at how bad the rest of the country was. He watched and followed as they worked their way around toppled skyscrapers, scaling giant hills of concrete rubble that used to be part of the city skyline. He followed them from the shadows of buildings; vast dark squares cut apart from the light of the sweltering sun. He’d learned pretty fast to stay in the shadows as much as he could. The spiders liked the light. Ever since the attack on the city, ever since he’d lost his brother, it’d been survival. By the time Alex had reached his parents to tell them David was dead, he got to see what the spiders were doing to people. He’d thrown up when saw his parents’ empty bodies. He’d fought for his life against the spider, and ran away. Well, what else was he supposed to do? There wasn’t anyone left to run to any more; nowhere safe to go. The water mains didn’t work anywhere. Luckily there was plenty of food and drink around, lining the shelves of gloomy grocery stores. Everything had happened so fast that the city had barely been looted. Empty skins covered the streets in a lot of places. It’d been weeks now since it all came down, and he’d only ever seen a few people in all that time. He knew by now which ones were surviving, and which ones were heading for trouble. The longer he watched the struggling family on the road, the more he was sure that trouble was going to find them before long.

  Alex adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder, and followed the family for what felt like an eternity. He had to know where they were trying to get to. There was only one thing that deep into the city, the way they were headed; and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t want to find it. If there was some colony of survivors hidden away though, somewhere between here and there, he had to know about it. If the family knew about a safe place hidden away he had to try to follow them there. He ducked into an office block, wanting a better view of where they were heading. He bounded up the flights of stairs inside, creeping out into a floor of office cubicles. He walked through wind-scattered paper and mouldy lunches on desks; row upon row of dead computers and abandoned chairs. Dusty family photos grinned at empty seats. Bird shit peppered the desks beside shattered glassless windows. An old bacon sandwich had putrefied to black on a plate; ancient coffees grew blue-white velvet skins. Alex settled down by a blown-out window in the far corner of the office, overlooking the road. He could see the family down below, wandering over the empty crossroads. Across the way, movie stars grinned gigantic from the scorched wreck of a billboard. Alex looked back to the family on the road, and a sudden movement off to their left caught his eye. He watched closely.

  ‘Hey,’ said a woman on the street corner, emerging from a burnt-out bookstore. The family froze and just looked at her. Alex watched with fascination.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said the woman. She was grinning, unhinged, caked in dust and dirt. Grimy t-shirt and jeans. She was holding a gun.

  ‘We’re trying to leave the city,’ the father replied. ‘We don’t want to fight.’

  ‘I’m not going to fight you,’ the woman chuckled. ‘Not if you give me what I want.’

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ the mother replied, stepping out in front of her two children. Alex couldn’t see their faces from where he watched. The whole family was scruffy, scrawny; more dirt than skin.

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ the father repeated, standing up to the woman. ‘We’ll be going now.’

  ‘Everyone’s got something,’ the woman replied, grinning, looking him up and down.

  ‘Just leave us alone,’ he said, leading his family on down the road.

  ‘Hey!’ the woman yelled, and pulled her gun on them. Alex just watched from the high window, waving a fly away from his face.

  ‘Now don’t make me waste my bullets,’ the woman said brightly. ‘Just come over here and empty your pockets, and then you can go. I promise.’

  ‘Everyone’s always promising things,’ the father replied angrily. He pulled a revolver from his coat pocket and fired; missed. The woman shot back and hit him in the shoulder. The mother and children were screaming. The woman pointed her pistol at them. Alex aimed his rifle and shot her in the head, dropping her to the road. The father staggered up from the sidewalk and aimed his pistol up at him.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ Alex called down, standing up in the window with his hands in the air. ‘I’m going to come down and help you.’

  Alex and the family met on the crossroads; they couldn’t thank him enough for saving them. The hot sunlight spilled over them as they talked, painting the bright dead city in searing light and deep shadow.

  ‘God-damn lunatics everywhere,’ the father said gruffly, as Alex led him over to sit down on the kerb.

  ‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ Alex replied, inspecting the man’s gunshot wound. ‘Hey, let me take a look at that. Can you take your jacket off?’ the man winced as he took his arm out of the sleeve.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Alex, studying the wound as the man took off his shirt. His shoulder was streaming blood, slick and stark red against his skin in the sunlight.

  ‘Is it bad?’ said his wife behind him, as Alex leaned in to inspect the wound. She held their kids close to her; they both stayed deathly quiet and watched the strange man from a distance.

  ‘Well, his stress hormones are flooding his body,’ Alex replied, turning to her with a look of distaste. ‘Spoils the flavour.’ The father gurgled noisily and fell back onto the sidewalk, with a sickening knock as his head landed down. A look of horror spread over the woman’s face when she saw her husband dead with his throat torn out. She gasped when she saw the blood running down the stranger’s chin. His wild eyes. His sharp black teeth, grinning. She screamed and ran for her life, dragging her kids back down the street.

  ‘Run!’ Alex yelled gleefully. He breathed deep, contented. He loved a chase. They could wait a little while though; instead he looked down hungrily at the dead man on the sidewalk. It’d be a sin to waste all that fresh meat lying at his feet.

  32

  Tabitha woke up with a gasp, and looked up at the bright blue sky. She inhaled life; honey-sweet air to fill her lungs. She was alive. Her body ached, stiff and cold and pale. Surrounded by dead spiders from the fight. It all came back to her. Gripping her neck in sudden terror, the gory crater in her throat had healed up. She was drowning in blood though. She choked and coughed it up like bright mercury. She was lying on wet grass, thrown down outside at the foot of the castle walls. A sud
den burning thought filled her head; Chris. Revenge. One by one she remembered her losses too, breaking her heart all over again. Liv and Will had suddenly been ripped out of her life. Jim too. Emma and Jen, and Laika… but Mum’s memory stung the most. All she felt was a sick black numbness; a venomous disbelief. The sound of a helicopter filled her ears then; a deep chopping drone. She watched the sky. The helicopter grew louder, larger, until it was right overhead. Lying there with useless muscles, Tabitha turned her head and watched the helicopter set down on the field beside the hill. The world faded to black. When she came round again there were blurred figures walking by. She heard a conversation as the men passed her, although their voices were muffled like they were underwater. She tried to move but felt something banging in her head. Everything faded to black again.

  Chris headed up onto the top of the keep, and saw the helicopter’s rotor blades slowing down where it had landed beside the hill.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Jackie, putting her head up through the trapdoor.

  ‘Army,’ he replied. He watched the figures who’d emerged from the helicopter, climbing the last few steps and banging on the barred iron gate in the wall. Armed to the teeth.

  ‘Tea?’ said Sylvia, as the five men entered the keep.

  ‘No,’ replied the one in command, looking around at the living room. He was tall, black-haired, with a fierce cutting look like a living Roman statue.

  ‘We’re here because three weeks ago, we lost contact with a patrol in the hills nearby,’ he said. ‘And because six days ago, a fighter pilot followed an airborne creature to this location. And destroyed it.’

  ‘You mean that dragon thing?’ said Tony.

  ‘Indeed,’ the man replied. ‘As the pilot flew overhead he discovered a large concentration of enemy spiders, massing to attack this castle. When he returned to us he claimed that he’d engaged the massing horde and neutralised them, and then engaged the flying creature. We’re here because we want to know what attracted all this attention in the first place.’

  ‘Because we beat the spiders the first time,’ Chris replied. ‘They attacked again.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the man replied. ‘They don’t like to be beaten, we know that much already.’

  ‘Major, they’ve got assault rifles,’ said one of the soldiers, pointing at the gun propped up in the corner.

  ‘We took them from the patrol,’ said Chris. ‘We’re putting them to good use.’

  ‘Those are army property,’ the major replied. ‘You two, collect the rifles. Make sure they’re all accounted for.’ Two of the soldiers behind him came forward, and began turning the place over for the guns.

  ‘You can’t take them,’ said Tony. ‘We need them. To stay alive.’

  ‘Army property,’ the major repeated, slowly. ‘Private,’ he said, glancing at another soldier.

  ‘Kill this man if he speaks again.’ The soldier aimed his rifle at Tony, and motioned to him to step back. Tony edged away towards the corner of the room, with Jackie holding onto his arm in terror.

  ‘There’s a woman outside the walls, barely conscious,’ the major observed. ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Chris corrected.

  ‘She was coughing,’ said the major. Chris stared at him, speechless.

  ‘We shot her dead,’ Sylvia insisted. ‘She was cannibalising one of our own.’

  ‘When was this?’ said the major.

  ‘Five days ago,’ Sylvia replied. ‘Surely she would have died from dehydration by now, if nothing else.’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen plenty of corpses in my time,’ said the major. ‘I assure you, she’s alive.’

  ‘She’s not natural,’ Chris muttered, horrified at the news.

  ‘Really?’ said Blake, taking a sudden interest. ‘How so?’

  A bee came close by; a sharp sudden buzz in Tabitha’s ear. Startled, she gasped and woke up. She blinked at the blades of grass in front of her eyes, blurred and gigantic. She pushed herself up off the ground, and staggered against the castle wall and the clattering spider corpses around her. There was the helicopter, down on the field below. An army helicopter. And suddenly her old paranoia came back, like a demon from the deep. If the army was here, they’d want her. Just like Jane and Sam had wanted her in her hometown, down there in their lab. Nanotechnology. That’s what they’d said when her blood was under the microscope. They’d wanted to cut her open, and use what she had. They’d taken a lot of interest in what her body could do; the army would be the same once they found out about her. She looked around her and saw no one. She had to get away. Her revenge could wait; survival came first. She staggered up again from the castle wall, and ran. She ran as fast as her weak wobbling legs would carry her. She ran down the steps, down the grassy hill, onto the field and away from the helicopter. Her muscles burned and her heart hammered. She had to get away. That was the only thing she could think of. She’d head into town and then disappear into the countryside, before anyone came looking for her.

  ‘She runs well for a dead woman,’ said the major, watching Tabitha from the castle wall down the scope of a sniper rifle. The woman was close to the park gates; hard to miss with that tangled shock of red hair. Within seconds, she’d be out of sight and into the warren of streets beyond.

  ‘Has she gone?’ said Jackie, squinting into the distance.

  ‘Almost,’ the major replied, smiling. He tightened his finger on the trigger, and the rifle cracked and echoed across town. The force of the shot hit Tabitha like a sledgehammer in the back. She fell down on a sudden splat of her own silver blood, painted there on the path in front of her. Whatever was coursing through her body suddenly was too strong to deal with. The park gates swam before her. Face-down she clawed at the gravel and banged her forehead on the path, desperately trying to come round and stand up. But fighting only made it worse. She may as well have been underwater, gasping harder and harder for air.

  ‘Evidently a bullet won’t be enough to kill her,’ Sylvia told the major. ‘Take it from us.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill her,’ he replied, leading his men down the steps towards the castle gate. Chris and the others followed behind. ‘It’s a sedative round,’ the major told them. ‘We use them on the spiders, when we need specimens to study.’

  ‘You’re taking her away then?’ said Chris. ‘To study?’

  ‘She could be extremely valuable to us, if what you’ve said is true,’ the major replied, turning to Chris. ‘And I’ll assume that you’re telling me the truth, because you’ve nothing to gain by lying about it. And everything to lose by lying to me.’ Smiling, the major turned to his men. ‘So, let’s go and meet this miracle woman,’ he told them, leading them on through the gate and down the hill. ‘Healing from fatal gunshots, lasting five days without water, feeds on spiders… some very useful talents to have. We’ll need to open her up. See what makes her tick.’ Chris stared at him, looking uneasy at the thought.

  ‘Do you think I’m inhuman?’ the major asked him.

  ‘She’s the inhuman one,’ Chris replied, clearing his throat. ‘As long she’s gone from here, I don’t care.’

  The soldiers carried Tabitha’s unconscious body back across the field, with Chris and the others watching them carefully. They wandered closer to the helicopter as the soldiers dragged Tabitha towards it, and hoisted her inside. The major turned back to Chris and the others, looking them over as he approached.

  ‘Are you taking us somewhere safe?’ said Chris, coming forward. ‘A refugee camp?’

  ‘No,’ the major chuckled, amused at the question. ‘There’s nowhere like that to take you. I just wanted one last look at your shitty little existence here before I leave. God, I wish I had a camera.’

  ‘We’ll die! You need to take us with you!’ Tony yelled, squaring up to him. The major took a pistol from his belt and shot Tony in the head. Jackie screamed and dropped down beside him, holding on to his fallen body.

  ‘You’re vermin,’ the major told them. ‘And
I don’t suffer vermin gladly. You’re all the same. Scraping around in the ashes, waiting to starve. Now the woman you left to die here is an interesting specimen. You lot, on the other hand, have nothing to offer us but your hunger and disease. I wish you all a good quick death.’ With that he climbed back into the helicopter, followed by the soldiers. Chris, Jackie and Sylvia could only watch in horror as the helicopter lifted away. Chris ran towards it, jumping up desperately to try to grab hold of it. It rose too fast though. The rotors whipped a flurry of sandy soil into their eyes as they reached up for it; their last hope. The noise drowned out their desperate screams and shouts, as they watched the helicopter tilt forward and climb off into the sky.

  33

  Tabitha came around in a black room. The only sounds were her own panicked breaths and a squeaking plastic rustle, as she struggled against solid restraints that held her limbs and head tight to the chair. The smell in here was one of cleaning fluid, cloying and false-fragrant like old hospital wards. There was the feel of a hospital gown on her too; a clammy plastic smoothness on her skin, crinkling softly as she tried to move around. A fluorescent ceiling light flickered then, and came on with a quiet ping. Squinting at the brilliant white walls, Tabitha’s blinking eyes settled on the room. An interrogation room. She panicked, struggling against her sudden situation. Her restraints were metal cuffs in the chair, inches thick around her wrists and ankles. Solid and unyielding. A steel table and chair stood several feet in front of her. A red light came on over the door then, caged in little white bars caked with age-old coats of paint. An old waiting-room buzzer blared an electrical belch, and the heavy old door opened. A tall man strode in with an arrogant smile and perfect posture, and took a seat at the table. He was middle-aged, sharply dressed. Black hair. Thin creased face. Consummate military man.