Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  46

  A thundering hell had erupted around Tabitha as she climbed ashore. Deep booming cracks of artillery pounded the alien ship relentlessly as it crept towards the army on the coast. Tabitha had to put her hands to her ears as she collapsed on the golden beach. The deafening violence seemed to fill the world. She couldn’t stay here. The beach and the palms were exploding in shrill bursts and ear-splitting bangs. Tabitha leapt away from a sudden shrieking laser bolt from the mothership, hitting the sand like a bomb blast behind her. She gasped and ran for her life, struggling to sprint in the sand as the churning cratered beach erupted around her. Tabitha ran blindly into a momentary sandstorm, escaping deep into a bank of palms and bushes up ahead. She jumped down into cover and backed up against a palm tree, hands clamped to her ears against the noise. She closed her eyes tight against the bursting blitz around her and curled into a ball between the bushes, kicking and terrified. A palm beside her boomed and cracked, collapsing with a creaking groan. Tabitha yelped and ground her teeth at the deafening chaos, writhing her legs as she tried desperately to hide herself away from it all. The beach was an endless pounding murder scene, palm leaves tearing and falling around her as the sand exploded. On the far side of the palms and bushes the army was spewing hell into the sky. The mothership crept ever closer over the sea. The fighting was all around her; where the hell was she supposed to go? With short sharp panic breaths, Tabitha opened her eyes and caught herself. If she stayed here she was dead. She stared for a while, stared at the bushes in front of her. Lost in a terrified trance.

  ‘Get up,’ she told herself. ‘Get up!’ Tabitha felt her energy returning as she caught he breath; hands and feet drinking the sunlight above. She refused to grieve for Seven and Fishbowl. Not now, anyway. Right now she had to survive. She locked the feeling away, deep down inside. They were gone, and she wasn’t. That’s how it was. She had to keep fighting. Tabitha hauled herself up from the sand and looked around frantically at the warzone. She couldn’t run for the sea; even now she could see monstrous black squids dragging their way out of the bright water onto the shore. Tabitha staggered off to the road beyond the trees. Grey dragons were spewing from the creeping mothership in the distance, dropping dead in a firestorm of missiles and rattling gunfire before they could even take flight.

  Tabitha emerged from the palms onto the road, and saw the full force of the tanks and artillery massed along the coast. A sea of beige metal, screaming and booming endless shots into the sky. There was a barricade up the road towards her, and soldiers lined up in a ditch right across the tarmac. Waiting for the enemy to come rushing up the beach and crash through the trees onto the road. All they got was her.

  ‘Contact!’ a soldier yelled at her. Tabitha dived down behind a palm tree as the assault rifles cracked and rattled death around her. She wrenched the alien pistol from her belt and returned fire behind the tree; biting static shrieks that warped the air and exploded into the soldiers’ ditch. The gun’s recoil jerked her wrist, spitting bolts of light into screaming men and women across the road. Tabitha rained hell on them; a racket of laser fire that dropped a soldier dead and forced the others into cover. She wasn’t being captured again. No way. Her next shot blew a soldier into the air, and the next vaporised another as the troops fired back. The crackle of gunshots rattled the palm tree with dull splintering thuds, and it collapsed down on the road with a crash. Tabitha leapt out from the bushes and took another shot, missed. Machine gun shots rattled into the road ahead of her and tore into her shoulder, forcing her back to hide amongst the trees.

  ‘Moving in, hold your fire!’ a soldier yelled. There was a sudden silence. Tabitha gasped for breath and pressed her hand into her shoulder, streaming bright silver blood between her fingers. The soldiers edged from their cover and stalked across the road towards her. Behind on the beach Tabitha saw monstrous black squids dragging their bodies up the sand towards her. Silver spiders and hulking black monsters were spewing from the mothership into the sea below, churning in the water and rushing out onto the beach in their hundreds. Tabitha was trapped. It was too hot here. A hard place to die, under the searing sun. Breathing was hard, and her shoulder streamed blood. Her heartcore pounded; her head screamed fear. The soldiers were getting close. Time to decide. She could shout out that she was human, and surrender to the army for tests… or go out in a hail of gunfire and end all the running, all the fear, once and for all.

  ‘…I don’t surrender,’ she told herself. Tabitha walked out from her cover and opened fire on hesitating soldiers; a black-clawed hellion staring them down. She spun her body and shot in a slow-motion dance to the death, turning on her toes as she fired and sprinted and leapt from bursting bullet holes in the asphalt. A bullet punched a hole in her lung; another burst her thigh and dropped her screaming to the road. She looked up and watched the man in front of her take the killing shot. Suddenly the soldiers erupted in white fire. The screaming men and women were ash in seconds. Tabitha stared. A black shape swept over the soldiers that came running towards her. Seven landed like an earthquake on the road behind her; a snarling death-black monstrosity growling low and savage. The terrified soldiers yelled and ran for cover at the sight of him.

  ‘Seven,’ Tabitha mumbled, wide-eyed in shock. He was alive. Her dragon roared deep and brutal at the soldiers ahead of them, stomping close to protect her. A ghostly hellfire glow burned bright in his black throat. Tabitha staggered away from the crackling gunfire and took cover behind Seven’s wing. The gunshots rattled and ricocheted off his scarred scales, and Tabitha clambered up his leg and ran along his back to the saddle. She still couldn’t believe he was alive until she felt her mind moving towards his; magnetic. She felt the saddle harness grasp her and her thoughts plug into his, like stepping into comfy old trainers. That neon superbright connection when their two minds clicked. Tabitha fired off laser shots from the saddle as Seven swept her up into the air. She had him circle round on the soldiers from behind, getting in a couple more shots to force their retreat as her dragon dived down rabid.

  ‘Don’t kill them!’ Tabitha yelled to him, as they swept down over the road. Seven spewed white napalm down on the empty asphalt, scattering the soldiers unharmed from the searing blast. Thank you, Tabitha told him with a thought, stroking his neck as they soared over the road. Seven snarled at booming cannon shells that exploded against his wing.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Tabitha yelled, pulling his angry mind away from revenge and steering them into the sky. They left the fighting far below, far behind. Tabitha looked back in the saddle at a screaming carnage on the shore. Spiders swarming through ranks of yelling troops. Hulking black monsters galloping up the beach to bite molten holes in tanks and tear soldiers in two. Men and women flailed for lost limbs on the blood-red sand; a hellish chorus of death and suffering as the aliens butchered them. And over it all the black tentacled mothership, creeping over the warzone and blocking out the sun. Tabitha couldn’t look any more. She turned back to the blue sky ahead. Freedom. She felt Seven’s fury in his thoughts, tried to calm him down. She glimpsed his memories as they flew. He hadn’t been dead when she’d found him; more like comatose. He’d felt her hand on his snout when she’d found him in the hangar. He’d felt the current from her skin. The spark brought him back, slowly, but she’d already gone when he woke up. He’d attacked the watchers that came to wipe his mind. He’d fought his way out and followed her scent through the hangar, leaping out of the massive doorway when the war was already in full force. He didn’t want to be apart from her. Tabitha welled up as she stroked Seven’s huge hot scales. She didn’t have to say a thing; she knew he could feel her thoughts. A sudden thunderstorm of energy erupted behind them. Tabitha swept Seven around at the noise that filled the sky, and they hovered to watch from a distance. She could only stare in shock at what she saw. The alien mothership had opened a vast white mouth in its belly, churning a stormcloud over the warzone. The world fell silent for a second, waiting for hell. With a thunde
ring god-rage static the ship spat down a vast beam of light into the beach. The bright doming blast annihilated the place and everything in it; humans and monsters alike. Tabitha clamped her hands to her ears and felt a terrible shaking in her chest. The growling rush of light bored a nuclear crater into the earth, leaving nothing, and the sea rushed in to fill the new landscape. A volcanic dust cloud boiled up around the monstrous ship over the coast. Tabitha watched in horror, transfixed at the towering fallout. Seven pulled at her mind.

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered in a daze, as her dragon steered them away from the scene. Tabitha flared Seven’s jet scales and tore off into the sky, leaving the black mothership and its scorched-earth devastation behind.

  Tabitha stuck the pistol back to her alien belt so she could take hold of the saddle grip tenderly with both hands. She watched the coast stretching by, far below. She’d already searched the cockpit for Fishbowl with a fresh hope, but it wasn’t there. The watchers must have taken it; probably destroyed it. Tabitha watched the world from the saddle, and felt herself grieving for Fishbowl like she’d lost a pet. Lost a friend. Her tears came quickly. How could anything want to harm something so gentle? She felt Seven’s mind too, grieving with her. He’d been asleep for a long time; he didn’t know what had happened to the gardener creature. At least Tabitha still had him, though. Two monsters, she told herself, both free and denatured and running from their own kind. If all the world was against them then all of it could burn before they left it behind. They weren’t going to get caught again. Seven pushed an image into her mind; a fleeting glimpse of space beyond the blue sky.

  ‘You’re sure you can go up there?’ Tabitha asked him. His thoughts replied in the positive. ‘Is there somewhere else you can take us, like another world?’ she said. Seven replied that he could. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ said Tabitha, gripping the saddle tight. ‘But there’s just one last thing we need to do before we leave.’ She thought back to the hologram in the alien mothership, in the control room she’d stumbled into when she escaped. There was someone else the watchers were hunting; a mystery man in New York. Probably fighting for every second of his life just like her, wondering if he was alone in the world. Dreaming of a tribe to belong to. Tabitha knew that she had to find him. She had to know that she wasn’t alone.

  47

  The sun shone down bright on New York’s toppled brick-dust corpse. Birds flocked over a jagged landscape of ruined skyscrapers and jutting steel girders. Dead canary-yellow taxis punched colour into the grey streets. Bags and wrappers had blown into rubbled corners and crevices on the sidewalks, piled high like rustling plastic snowdrifts. Weeds and grass blew like tufts of hair in every concrete crack; an endless web of green veins through roads and buildings that reclaimed the city for the wild.

  Alex wrestled a silver spider to the road with a scraping clatter. He pinned it down with dark metallic hands and watched it squirm. Skewered it with the spike on his long black tail.

  ‘Make me stronger,’ he told the struggling spider. Its stab wound spurted blood as he dug his fingers in. He ripped the wound open with a creak as the spider shrieked and flailed; sank his black metal teeth down into the white flesh. Alex wrenched his head and tore away a limp bloody chunk of meat while his prey scrabbled and screamed.

  ‘Make me stronger!’ he roared at it, spitting shreds of white flesh as he chewed. The alien scrambled frantically, trying to get away. Pinning it down with his left hand, Alex curled his right into a fist and laid into it. He thumped and beat and battered the struggling spider over and over in the silent street, like a hammer on sheet steel, until its silver blood covered his knuckles. ‘Last chance,’ he said quietly, squeezing its head in his grey hand. The trembling spider gave up the fight and twitched its legs limply. ‘You won’t survive me,’ he told it. ‘None of you will. Now, make me stronger.’ Again he sank his teeth down into its back with sadistic feline pleasure, tearing away a mouthful of flesh in a bloody spurt. He let the taste touch every side of his tongue; a tingling electric sourness like lemons made of lightning. A sweeter aftertaste than any dessert in the world. And then, the gulp of blood. A taste beyond words; star juice. It floated his bones and massaged his mind, and blew every drop of tension clean away. Alex pushed back his blonde hair and looked to the heavens, closing his eyes. He sighed with satisfaction on a long shining high; his mind twisted crystal-bright and silver-aquatic in the sunlight.

  ‘Delicious,’ he told the spider, pointing to his mouthful. ‘Thank you.’ He gulped the cold tingling blood and swallowed the flesh, and leaned in to rip away another raw white shred. The maimed spider’s screams filled the empty street; filled the dead city. There was a sudden sweeping noise overhead, and a distant hiss of jet engines. Alex glanced up at the sound. Not fighter jets though; not this time. He looked up between the ruined skyscrapers and saw a black ship flying past. An alien ship. There was a woman riding it.

  ‘Well fuck me,’ said Alex, grinning as he watched them soar off over the city. ‘They’re heading for the hive,’ he told the mangled spider, as it flailed uselessly in the rubble to get away from him. ‘Looks like this is my lucky day!’ Alex said brightly, his eyes stark and manic in the sunlight. His heart was soaring as he dragged the spider back to him and beat it to death on the road.

  Tabitha swept low over the toppled skyscrapers and landed down on an office block to give Seven a rest. Sandy flows of dust and rubble whispered and tumbled to the street where Seven set down. Tabitha glanced down at the road beneath them. Nothing but dead traffic and blowing rubbish, and dropped phones glinting in the sunlight. Landslide mounds of demolished buildings faded into a haze for as far as the eye could see. Hills of dead masonry swamped corporate HQs and gloomy boutiques with broken signs and shattered windows. There didn’t seem to be anything left alive here. She’d seen something there in the distance though, beyond a mountain range of grey grassy rubble. A mass of black and white growths almost like a forest, and a strange throbbing light beyond it. Seven looked down and growled.

  ‘Where can I get one of those?’ a man called up from the street. Tabitha jumped at the voice and peered over the edge of the roof at a blonde man below. Jacket and jeans caked in dust; a beautiful brute. Tabitha didn’t trust him one bit. She didn’t trust anyone any more.

  ‘Leave me alone, or I’ll kill you,’ she called back. Her voice echoed in the dead city street.

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ he replied. ‘But us monsters should stick together.’ Tabitha couldn’t help but peer down again. The man was holding grey hands up, and shaking some kind of spear. Wait… not a spear. That was a tail. He was a hybrid like her; the watchers’ wanted man.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said, suspicious of him.

  ‘Alien superpowers,’ he said brightly, taking a seat in a cratered car roof. The roof made a thin metal thud under his weight. ‘I’m Alex,’ he said warmly. ‘Nice to meet you. So, what happened to you?’

  ‘Same,’ she replied warily. How had he found her so easily? Did he know she was coming here? Had they been drawn together, like Seven was to her? Or maybe she was just hard to miss, riding around on a big black dragon.

  ‘Are you going to stop pointing that gun at me?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine,’ he chuckled. ‘Can we at least talk down here on the street, so I’m not shouting to every spider in town?’ Tabitha watched him cautiously. He had a point. She didn’t trust him, but she didn’t want him dead either. She’d seen enough violence.

  Alex watched the dragon soar down from the rooftop, and felt the road shake under the car when it landed down. The woman still had the alien pistol aimed at him as he came closer. She’d left a good distance between them. Plenty of room for the dragon to torch him if he tried anything.

  Tabitha stayed on Seven’s back, watching the man walk closer. He was lean and muscular, and had that same animal quickness about him that she recognised in her new self.

  ‘You were looking at the
hive up there,’ the man observed, glancing at the office block above and flicking away a fly with his tail.

  ‘Is that what it is?’ Tabitha replied.

  ‘Or maybe you’d call it a garden, I don’t know,’ said Alex. ‘It’s where they’re all coming from, anyway. It’s where they grow. You can see the place glowing at night on the skyline.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the hive,’ Tabitha replied, still aiming the gun.

  ‘Really? So why did you come here?’ he asked her. Tabitha hesitated. How could she say that she was here for him? She didn’t even trust him. She’d come all this way to meet her fellow fugitive, to find out what he was; it turned out that he was just like her. Now what?

  ‘I get it, you’re here for the others,’ said Alex. Tabitha watched him carefully as he stepped a little closer. He moved strangely; fluid and feral.

  ‘What others? You mean the aliens?’ she said. Birds chirped in the grey silence.

  ‘I mean people like us,’ he replied. Tabitha stared at him warily, gripped with a happy shock and a rotting doubt. Wanting to believe him.

  ‘There’s more of us,’ he assured her, opening his hands out. ‘Those things have been rounding us up, keeping us in the hive. God knows what they do to those poor bastards, but I swear… on a really quiet night… I can hear them screaming sometimes.’ Tabitha’s mind shot to a hellish vision of torture and death. Her tribe. ‘I saw a couple of young kids like us just a few days ago, you know,’ said Alex. ‘They were dead on the road. Killed by a gang, I think.’ Tabitha’s eyes widened at the thought of them. ‘I don’t know which is worse,’ Alex said sadly. ‘How the aliens treat us, or how the humans do.’

  ‘So… you don’t think we’re human?’ said Tabitha. She was dwelling on the thought of the dead children.