Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  She cut across the road and into the woods on the other side, wearing a t-shirt and jumper for the coming autumn. She wore a grubby green wax jacket over the top, handy for the hood, and carried a new rucksack packed with as many useful things as she’d been able to find: candles, lighter, bottles of water. Jumper and thick hiking socks. Plasters and painkillers. String and tape, scissors and glue, and a dusty old torch that actually worked, much to her surprise. A map and compass too, which she studied again for the answers as she walked. She was miles from the city that she recognised on the map; nothing else seemed familiar. She looked around at the trees and breathed deep, feeling a little lighter than she had the past couple of days. Like a weight had lifted. She tucked her bright red hair behind her ear against the breeze, and studied the map. Jacket sleeve crinkling in the silence, she traced out a path with her finger. She picked out the best way quickly, impressed with herself, and headed off into the woods.

  ‘I should’ve been a girl scout,’ she told herself contentedly, and tripped over a tree root.

  35

  ‘We’re running out,’ said Jackie, rifling through cardboard boxes in the castle keep. ‘Chris, we’re running out of food.’

  ‘I know,’ he snapped hungrily, impatiently, trying to get warm by the fire. How could it have turned so much colder so quickly? The cold wasn’t just out there though. It was in here too, all around him, all the time. Cold stone walls. A growing hint of an autumn chill that was starting to grate.

  ‘Chris, we’re running out of food,’ Jackie repeated.

  ‘Yeah, I know!’ he yelled at her, shuffling closer to the dying fire.

  ‘Well, we need to go out and find some more,’ Sylvia demanded, glaring at him. Chris shook his head, staring at the glowing embers in the fireplace.

  ‘I’m not going out there,’ he said simply. ‘No way.’

  ‘And just what are we going to eat all winter?’ Sylvia replied, hands on hips.

  ‘Look, why’s it all on me suddenly?’ Chris yelled back. ‘Get your own bloody food!’

  ‘You’re the man, you’re supposed to go out there,’ Jackie shamed him. ‘Like a hunter.’ Chris laughed.

  ‘You don’t seriously believe in that gender role shit, do you?’ Chris replied. ‘Is that what Tony was to you, the big hunter-gatherer, bringing in all the food?’

  ‘Yeah, he was!’ Jackie snapped angrily, with a sad pride. ‘And don’t you dare talk about him like that! He was more of a man than you’ll ever be!’ Chris snorted a laugh.

  ‘We’re going out there together,’ Sylvia decreed. ‘Like a team.’

  ‘Yeah, well I don’t want to be in your team,’ said Chris. ‘I’ll look out for myself, alright? I’ll get my own food.’ Jackie and Sylvia stared at him. ‘Actually, I think I’ll just keep my food to myself. All this food left here,’ he said. He pushed past Jackie and took a cardboard box away from the stack in the kitchen, setting it down in the bed of sheets he’d made for himself by the fire.

  ‘That’s our food too!’ Jackie yelled. ‘You can’t just take it!’

  ‘I was here before you, and so was the food,’ Chris growled back. He squared up to Sylvia, looming down on her. ‘Get your own food, and stop eating mine.’

  ‘It belongs to all of us,’ Sylvia said threateningly, reaching for a carving knife on the table. ‘Back off.’ Chris glanced down as she took hold of the knife, suddenly wary of her. Hunger did strange things to people. ‘Back off,’ Sylvia repeated. She was holding the knife by her side. She looked up into his eyes; held him with that icy ancient stare. Chris couldn’t afford to look away, much as he wanted to. He was in charge here, and he had to show it. A dark thought crossed his mind; he’d be better off alone. Jackie was staring at him too.

  ‘Last chance Chris. Back off,’ Sylvia said quietly. Chris flashed a glance between them. He could back down, or he could fix the problem right now. He only had to finish the bitches, nice and quick, like it had never happened. The spiders would get rid of them anyway once he dropped them over the walls. He knew that the shotgun was over in the corner behind him, propped against the wall. The question was, could he reach it in time?

  ‘Fine,’ he sighed, backing down. ‘I’m hungry… I’m not myself,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘None of us are,’ Sylvia replied warily, putting the solid knife back down on the table with a clunk. ‘Whether we’re going to work together or not, the fact remains that we’ll need food,’ she told them. ‘Something we need to think about. Let’s just leave it at that for now.’ Chris nodded calmly, seething beneath the surface. Sylvia left him alone, and headed upstairs out of the way. Jackie didn’t so much as look at him after that. Chris said nothing; he just sat down on his pile of sheets by the fire after he’d returned the box of food to the kitchen. Jackie went back to rummaging through boxes for anything else they could use. She didn’t see Chris staring at her from the corner of the room. Jackie and Sylvia had become a problem. He just had to bide his time until he could do something about them.

  36

  Tabitha trudged down country lanes and up a steady rise in the land, then back down beside a river to follow miles of roads and footpaths. It’d been years since she’d looked at a real fold-out map, but she liked to think she was halfway decent at reading them. It hadn’t been a skill that made her many friends on the yard back in school, but in geography lessons she’d been a boss.

  ‘Not making fun of my nerdy map skills any more are you, Lucy Wright?’ she muttered to her memory of a school bully, checking the mud for spider tracks before she pressed on. ‘Because I’m surviving in the woods like a pro, and you’re dead.’ She felt terrible for saying it really, but then she remembered just how miserable girls like Lucy Wright had made her school days. She tried to switch off her mind for the rest of the morning, like a zen monk or something. She was sick of her self-talk. The rest of the day would just be one long relaxing walk; a day for an empty mind.

  Tabitha watched bees and butterflies on the flowers around her as she ambled on down winding country roads. There were no signs of sheep or cows anywhere, but she could guess their fate. She didn’t imagine that hungry spiders would have been too fussy when they passed through here. Weren’t there any spiders left around here at all? Couldn’t she just find a nice small horde of them somewhere nearby, and drag their bodies back to the village to feed on them? She’d seen no sign of them, even by sunset, miles away from the village. Which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, she told herself, if not for the maddening hunger that was throwing her stomach into sore rumbling spasms. Added to her growing period cramps, even just walking was getting painful. But she hadn’t let pain stop her yet. She stopped for a second, breathed deep, and carried on walking.

  Tabitha paused for a while and studied the map, shining the torch on it in the deepening dusk. She traced the route of the footpath with a grey finger. It was still miles to the sprawling city marked on the map, and the thought of fighting spiders in the dark was a different story to hunting them in the daylight. She wanted to be hiding in the suburbs, not wandering out here in the woods in the dark. She was hungry for them, but she didn’t fancy being hunted by them in the blackness. They could wait until tomorrow morning, when she could see them to kill them. With any luck they were all nestled away in the city suburbs, far from the countryside around her. That way they’d be easier to find and easier to hide or get away from. She’d have to wait and see. A moth flapped and clattered on the light of the torch; Tabitha switched it off. The gloom of the woods around her didn’t seem quite so welcoming and sheltering as it had the other night, during her escape. Strangely, and against her instincts, the toppled ruin of an infested city felt like a more welcoming prospect. Certainly more welcoming than the deep, silent dark of the open countryside at her back. Maybe she was still a town girl after all. And another terrifying chase through the moors with a giant swarm at her heels really didn’t appeal. Tabitha’s hunger drove her tired legs on through the night, desp
erate to get her to the distant city. She needed her fix.

  The next day the sky was flat and cloudless, like a blue painted ceiling over the trees. After endless miles Tabitha came to a wood she’d followed on the map. It was peaceful in here, and the daylight replaced the terror of the night. Tabitha drank in the silence; weeks ago it would have made her nervous. No traffic noise, no distant sirens, no planes. Only birds singing in deep warbles and sharp high witters. The rich dark soil was soft and silent under her boots; it gave her a funny contented feeling, deep down. Flies swirled in the air; squirrels bounded across the path and scurried up into the trees. The green growing world hadn’t ended at all, Tabitha told herself. The apocalypse was only a human one; the simple extinction of a species. Everything else was fine. She came across a grubby book lying by a hedge; a survival guide to the wild. A few small tatters of skin and clothes lay around it though, and told her that the guidebook hadn’t worked all that well. She packed it all the same and hurried on, nervous and excited at the prospect of spiders close by. The human remains barely crossed her mind.

  Tabitha followed her map out of the woods and up over a hill, and then down a beaten path towards a distant lake. She felt a strange kind of peace out here, a sad peace. It hung over her head like a ragged spirit, and followed her over stiles and fences into squelchy bright fields. She plodded up a country road past torn-down houses, then down through the dry cracked mud of an empty river bed. Slowly making her way towards the sky-blue patch of water on her map. Her head had started to feel heavy like concrete; it could only be her body withdrawing from spider blood. Every booted footstep was a slow-motion hypnosis, jarring her legs on the stony path.

  The lake ate the daylight and shone like rippling black steel. The only sounds here were the leather creak of her boots, and the birds filling the world with a high gentle music. On the hill just behind her the moss shone in the sun like thick green velvet, wet to the touch. Something about the moss drew her closer; a kind of electric tingle. Maybe it was the sunshine, warming the back of her head. Or the breeze, sending a cool wonderful shiver down her neck. There was something there though, in the soft bright green of the moss. Nothing she could put her finger on… just a sensation. Some current of life, or light. She wasn’t sure. And just like that, the feeling was gone.

  The peaceful lake shore was too tempting not to sit down for a while. Tabitha heaved off her backpack with a grunt, looking around at the silent world. She took a seat on a flat stone by a mossy old tree, gnarled and ancient. The uneven grassy ground at her feet gave way to tumbled stones by the lakeshore, only a few short feet away. It was a peaceful place to take her boots off and rub her sour smelly feet for a while. It felt so good just to rest; an aching relief. Her clammy feet felt cool in the breeze. The only sound was the tickly lapping of the water against the rust-coloured stones on the shore, shining muddy orange in the sunlit shallows. A sudden high birdsong filled the air, with a noisy reply from a bird in the trees across the lake. The longer she rested, the more restless her mind became. Sore memories and aching guilt. Tabitha sighed and stamped down her grief. She allowed herself a small gulp of water from her backpack, laced up her boots, and set off again.

  Skirting around the lake shore, Tabitha headed into another wood. Trudging past oaks and beech trees, eventually she found herself in the soft sudden silence of a pine grove. It felt strangely still here, like the wind couldn’t penetrate the branches. No rustling leaves. Beneath her boots lay a carpet of pale brown needles, dotted with pine cones. Birds whooped and chirped in the silence. She picked up a pine cone and ran her fingers along it, popping and clicking the jutting scales. She thought about the pine cones on the fire, back in the castle. In better days than these.

  It was midday or so once she’d cleared the pines, judging by the height of the sun through the trees. She stopped and stood for a while in a small clearing, sipping from a bottle of water. Picked idly at the moss on a tree stump. The moss had grown to cover it over; a thick bright carpet of wet fur, rustling and dripping at the touch of her grey fingers. The tiny green fronds fascinated her. Seriously, what was so interesting about it? Was she into moss now, she wondered, as well as spider blood? Was that part of her new nature? She couldn’t stop herself looking at the stuff, like it held a deep mystery. A tingly feeling that she wanted to get back. A midge jumped up from the moss into the sunlight, whirling away in a frantic dance into the air. Where her eyes followed it, she saw something else in the distance. It was a pale shape, strung up from the branches of a tree in the clearing. There were other shapes too; other trees with drifting sheets tangled between the leaves. She walked closer. They were pale, rotten. Fly-covered skins, strewn over the branches. Tabitha felt a churning sickness inside when she looked at them, moving in the breeze like clothes hung up to dry. There was a man’s body here too, skinned and crucified on the jagged ruins of a torn-open tree. A gruesome statue, pinned and contorted; Christ the anatomy model. Tabitha clamped a hand around her mouth and retched at the sight. The body’s raw fibrous muscles were bared to the world; not blood-red but a dull rank brown like old steak. There was no way the spiders could have done this. There was something else out there.

  37

  Grey clouds had drifted over in the afternoon, with all the tense static threat of a thunder storm to come. The rain spat down cold and hard as Tabitha reached the city, lashing against broken windows and tumbling down them in paper-thin waterfalls. It wasn’t the city as she remembered it; this was a deathly ruin. For one sudden second lightning struck the whole world blind. Thunder filled the tomb-grey sky. The toppled city buildings in the distance turned the horizon into jagged concrete teeth. Tabitha walked on down the road, pulling her hood down further over her wet shadowed face. On either side of her the abandoned cars lay dead and mangled. They’d been crashed into lamp posts, bus stops, walls and one another. Ploughed into obstacles weeks ago by drivers senseless with fear. Here and there Tabitha saw bite marks in the cars’ bodywork. The marks were scraping gouges, twisted and torn out of side panels and roofs. Molten metal had been drooled around the bite marks and set hard like solder. One car’s bonnet had been torn half off. The car bled oil down the road, glossy and slick and multi-coloured in the puddling rain. Looking into the dark cavity of the car bonnet, something had gorged itself on half the engine block. The creature’s fading motor-oil footprints led off up the road ahead, into the heart of the toppled city. These footprints weren’t the small, neat, countless dots of spider feet. They were big, heavy, clawed and brutal. Bigger than both her feet pressed together. They were the footprints of a monster.

  The city centre was a stinking grey tomb. Tabitha smelled drains overflowing. The leaden sky gave everything a mood, and the rain pummelled any peace out of the scene. Whatever buildings weren’t toppled and lying dead across the roads were cracked and shattered where they stood; crumbled and half-demolished into ragged standing shells. There weren't any spiders here – it looked like they’d been and gone long ago. There was nothing here, street after street, and that was what spooked her the most. A city centre should never have nothing in it, she thought, even if it was half-destroyed. Rats or pigeons at least. But there was no sign of life. Wispy tufts of grass had grown up in the cracks all over the road, and were bent and dripping in the rain. Everywhere, phones had been dropped and scattered on the pavements; dead glass screens beaded with raindrops, reflecting the sky. Plastic bottles and wrappers filled the streets too; browned and sullied in the mud of brick dust that coated everything. Looking around at the rubble of civilisation, part of her wished that she’d seen it all come down. She’d always believed that some part of human nature drove them to watch things go horribly wrong, if only to justify all that primal fear. But there had been no great last stand here; no tragic battlefield, or fallen monument to the defiant human spirit. Her first glimpse of humanity was a rotten empty skin on a doorstep, caught by the spiders and drained out dry. TVs and laptops littered the road outside a looted
shop; probably stolen and dropped during the invasion. Some of the boxes even had flapping empty skins pinned down beneath their weight. Tabitha turned away from the sight.

  The square in the heart of the city was a vast open space with a huge statue at its centre; enclosed by towering shops and offices, half of which still stood upright. But nothing seemed to live here. The vile smell of death and rot filled her world; filled her head. Here and there a grey human skin flapped in the wind, or lay half-buried in the thin coat of mud that covered the pavements. Tabitha tried not to look at their stretched rubber-mask faces, contorted in hole-eyed screams. She tried not to look at their soaking tangles of hair, hanging in clumps from decaying scalps, on heads creased and crumpled like popped balloons. Humanity had been reduced to empty wrappers, left to blow and soak and rot with their plastic bags and soiled newspapers. Her next footstep was slippery and soft. She didn’t look down; she couldn’t. She realised then that the square was carpeted in muddy skins, as grey and flat as paving slabs, overlapping like fallen cardboard cut-outs. A sea of skin. A slick red-brown sludge bubbled and popped from the skins under the weight of her footsteps. It was the small skins that caught her eye though; they made her stare. And the very small skins. She felt the warm sting of tears once she’d noticed the very small skins. She looked up and kept on walking, had to keep on walking. She wiped the tears from her eyes so she could see her way. She had to find whatever had done this. She wanted to let it know that it’d missed one. She wanted to make it wish that it hadn’t come to this world.