Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  ‘You’re perfect,’ he said softly, and kissed her. Tabitha hesitated, and tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. She kissed him back, and felt the warm strength of his body move closer to hers. She felt his hand on the back of her neck, heavy and strong. Felt a blissful wholeness to take her sadness away. And the fierce sudden agony of a blade pushed into her heart. He’d stabbed her with her own knife; he was staring with a black-fanged grin. Tabitha gasped and clawed him wildly and kicked herself away to the wall. Staggering to her feet, panicked, she stared in shock at the black handle of her knife jutting out of her chest. Silver blood streaming down her front. A pain that threatened to tear her mind in two. Alex was on all fours over in the garden, yelling and shouting as he clutched a hand to his mangled face. Screaming, Tabitha pulled the knife out from her chest. The tear in her catsuit healed up, but not her skin. The wound was too deep, too far into her core; her heart wasn’t healing. She felt the hot blood gushing through her suit, and the wrenching horror of death as her heartcore pounded and sparked. Muffled and distant, as if underwater, she heard Alex laughing. He was coming closer, grinning as he walked.

  ‘Let me eat you,’ he said happily, still clutching a hand to his bleeding face. ‘I need to eat the strongest to get stronger, and you…’ he pointed a grey finger at her, in awe of her. ‘You’re a masterpiece.’ Tabitha staggered away as he stepped closer, punching her own chest in a daze just to keep her heartcore from stuttering to a stop. It still wasn’t healing. She held the bloody knife out at him weakly; dropped it with a clatter as her heart sparked and burned like phosphorus in a flare.

  ‘Come on, let me eat you,’ said Alex, holding out his hand to her. His sharp tail was waving behind him. ‘Like I said, you’re perfect. I need you, Tabitha. Your strength, your abilities… I need them inside me. And like I told you, I only get stronger when I eat strength.’ Tabitha couldn’t back away fast enough, and in a moment Alex was up close. She saw his dark figure in silhouette against the starlit wall behind, hand out and tail writhing. Demonic. She backed into a pillar and collapsed on the floor. Alex stood over her, smiling his coal-black smile. His voice was a distant mumbling in the deep; murky and half-clear.

  ‘Let me eat you,’ he repeated, with a seductive tone. ‘Come on.’ Tabitha looked up and barely saw him in the growing dark of her vision, still punching her chest to keep the current flowing.

  ‘I need to eat you,’ he insisted, smiling at her. ‘It’s all I’ve really wanted to do since I first saw you,’ he admitted, as if he was declaring his love for her. ‘But I really didn’t want to face off against your magic dragon,’ he chuckled. ‘So… I’m sorry. There’s no prisoners to rescue,’ he said, pulling a sad face. ‘The story got you in here though, away from your bodyguard.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘You really made me work for this! I almost died!’ he recounted it like a funny story. ‘So here I am thinking I can, you know, kill you somewhere along the way. But guess what, you’re still not dead!’ he chuckled, shaking his head. ‘But in all seriousness… just die already. I don’t want to get too close again.’ He pointed at his mangled cheek, streaming silver blood. Slowly, in agony, Tabitha reached for the gun on her belt. Alex moved his tail around playfully and skewered her wrist before she could reach it. Tabitha screamed, echoing in the cathedral. She wrestled against Alex’s tail as it wriggled out of her arm and tried to bury itself in her face. She gripped the point, swerving it away from her eyes with all the strength she had left.

  ‘Just fucking die,’ he chuckled, wiggling his tail around playfully to try and evade her grasping hands. The ground shook then. There was a distant explosion through the cathedral door, and Seven swept up the ramp and crashed down in front of them. He took one look at Tabitha in her pooling silver blood and roared like thunder, lunging out to clamp his jaws down on Alex. Alex leapt away and ran for a pillar, sheltered from the white napalm that Seven belched out furiously across the floor. Seven was about to hunt him down as he disappeared down the hall, but stopped and turned at a thought in his head. The red-haired creature… she was dying.

  Tabitha reached her hand out towards Seven. He was growling with a burning fury, and turned back to the melting doorway where Alex had disappeared. Desperate for revenge.

  ‘Seven,’ she said weakly. He looked back to where Tabitha was slumped against the pillar, weak and deathly pale. ‘Get me away from here, Seven,’ she said quietly, reaching a hand out towards him. Seven rolled his wing into an arm and gently picked her up, and placed her down in the saddle. The harness embraced her slumping body. Tabitha couldn’t see straight. Sparking life bled out of her onto Seven’s back. She held on tight to the saddle scale, terrified.

  Alex burst his tail through a silver spider that leapt from the wall. He’d escaped into some kind of sanctum, seduced by the pull of the building’s energy source deep inside. The rippling pulses of energy in here felt like a rushing tide; a suffocating static that pushed against him like a gale. He’d escaped death, back there in the garden. He refused to leave this place empty-handed. He’d only come this far with Tabitha’s help; if he couldn’t have her strength then he’d have the hive’s instead. The dragon could crash through the wall behind him at any moment, burning everything in its path. He had to get to the power source. There was no turning back. Gasping for breath, Alex fought his way through grasping roots in the tunnel walls and ran on into a glassy twilit chamber. His footsteps cracked the floor and shattered crystalline plants all around him, thin and heaven-spindly as spun glass. His frenzied hybrid silhouette came crashing through shining lights and celestial gardens; an agent of hunger and chaos that raced demonic through shining shattered beauty. Desperate to reach the reactor, starving for its strength with a lusting obsession, Alex battered another spider to death and stabbed a third in the chest as it leapt for him. Suddenly spiders were swarming out of the walls; a silver avalanche piling up to his waist to claw and stab against his hard skin. Alex yelled and beat them back in shining bursts of blood, wrestling out from the tide with a burning rage. He roared and smashed his way through the doors ahead, and found himself in a blinding blue room of crystal fronds. It was the heart of the building, where a billion plant-root connections reached out through the walls to the meadow and the forest beyond. A shining hub of growth and feeling; the parent of every electric garden in the hive. An alien intelligence far deeper and older than the watchers and their living weapons. But Alex didn’t see the life and the light. He only saw what he could take from it. There ahead of him was the pulsing core of the cathedral. Forcing him back with a wall of energy; a torturous current that burned his brain. He had to get to it; he had this one chance to take all that power for himself. Growling wildly he smashed the spiders that scuttled towards him. Beat them into the cracking glass coral all around him with icy crunches, murdering them as they swamped him. He roared and skewered another as he struggled forward, step by straining step. Black fangs drooling for the taste of power throbbing in front of him. He grabbed a spider up and ripped it in half when it blocked his way to the shining core, tangled up in a cage of dark roots. He felt the power of it cutting through his chest; he couldn’t breathe in here. His blood boiled under the energy; his metal skin peeled in the searing light. As he struggled the final few steps to the core a hulking black squid creaked and squelched down from the ceiling above him, arms reaching out like fingers from a gnarled ancient hand. Alex cut at the grasping tentacles with his tail and ripped the roots apart on the pillar, ravenous for the taste of it. His reaching fingers were inches from the core; the morphine promise of new power. Of domination. He buried his head inside the trunk as the squid gripped his limbs and pulled at them. Alex screamed, writhed against it, and bit off a chunk from the glowing core in a hissing shower of sparks.

  Seven sank Tabitha down gently into the cockpit. The cathedral walls were pulsing with light all around them; manic stripes and angry bursts like a vast neon chameleon dying. The ceiling was flexing, groaning. The far door to the heart
of the structure burned suddenly with a fierce light, and blew apart with a piercing bang. Churning blue stormclouds boiled out and ate the walls into raining ash, and suddenly the place was crumbling. Seven crashed back down the ramp from the garden as it burst into flames behind him. He spread his wings and tore through the main hall as pillars split and dropped around him. A rippling wall of lightning rushed up behind. The cracking floor was churning, tumbling into a thundering tide that devoured the walls as they collapsed. Seven crashed through the entrance hall and burst from the cathedral door as the building toppled and exploded. A blinding flash filled the city as he soared into the sky. A surge of power shot through the alien hive behind him, blowing the power plants in deafening bursts and splitting the blue mossy ground like an earthquake. Glass honeycombs all over the alien city cracked through and toppled monolithic, kicking up vast clouds of sparkling dust. Spiders and monsters were running down below, trying to escape the devastation. A single point of light swelled in the sudden silence, deep in the heart of the hive. Alex. He was altered by his meal; transformed. A shining hellish prince wrestling with new power. He nuked the ruined meadow in a vast ball of lightning, throwing the ruins of the alien city high over the wreckage of New York. Volcanic dustclouds churned up and blocked out the sun. Alex admired the destruction, his shining eyes drinking the sight of revenge. And there through the fallout the alien mothership emerged like a spectre, rumbling deathly and colossal over the ruins. Alex looked up and grinned at it like an old friend, itching for a fight. A new war in the making.

  Soaring above it all, Seven had seen enough. He roared at the scorched thundering chaos of the world and left it all behind. He was going to take his red-haired creature far up away from it all, up beyond the blue.

  Slumped in her seat in the cockpit, Tabitha felt her heartcore giving up. Arcs of lightning were streaming out from her sparking chest; all her current bleeding out. She clutched her mum’s ribbon on her wrist, and knew there was no coming back from this. When she stepped into Seven’s mind to say goodbye she saw the stars through his eyes. He’d taken her up into space. Seven felt her there in his mind, in his vision, and turned back for her to see the view. Earth. She saw Earth. All the violence and all the suffering, left far below on a vast curved wall of blue. Just like the movies. Her eyes were hot with tears.

  ‘Let me see it,’ she said quietly, struggling to pull up the collar on her catsuit. The hood wrapped her face and hardened into a helmet. Tabitha unclipped her harness and floated up weightless in the cockpit. The helmet hissed air for her. The hatch opened up above her, and all the atmosphere in the cockpit sucked out in a sudden white gale. Immediately her flight suit fleshed out like a space suit, growing to cover her hands and feet. Tabitha clutched her sparking chest and floated up through the hatch, and began to drift free in space. Her tears floated weightlessly in her helmet as she tumbled into the void. Seven reached a wing out and gently guided her back, holding her close to his chest.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said softly, blinking to try and see it all in her fading vision. The helmet hissed air; she strained to breathe it. The world was far below now. Just a distant horror, seen from the safety of the stars. Tabitha felt the last drops of life running out of her; felt the sun’s energy leave her body. She stroked Seven’s wing weakly, and watched the world and the stars fade to black. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. Tabitha let go of Seven’s wing then, floating and silent. The helmet hissed air; she didn’t breathe it. Seven looked down at her, and he knew she was gone. He’d lost her thoughts in his head. He guided her drifting body back with his wing, held her close, and stared out at the stars.

  EPILOGUE

  A filthy woman dug for food in the rubble of Earth. A city lay in ruins all around her; a concrete graveyard, a grey desolation. She thought she was well hidden, but the shapes stalked her from fallen walls and blown-out windows. Silent as death, crawling close. Metal flashed and jutted, and a spidery silver plant punched one sudden silent stab in her leg. The woman kicked and ran; looking back with shaking vision and jarring panicked thoughts as the chittering pack chased her down. They leapt on her limbs and dragged her down onto the road; she struggled soundlessly as they wrestled and stabbed. Dust drifted up like dirty rising snow around them. The woman slumped and gargled as they injected her. Alien venom coursed through her body, liquefying living muscle and bone. The spiders drank her out and dropped her, and left her empty skin blowing down the road in the wind.

  Across the dead world on a sunbleached plain, a man spied a black shape in the distance. The fire-throated monstrosity that’d killed his town. He knew there was no running from it; no one could ever run from it. A dust cloud rose behind it as it galloped towards him. He took up his gun and fired, rattling every round into it. His bullets punched through its rubbery metal skin but did nothing to slow the monster down. It was on him in seconds, strong under the bright alien sun. It pulled his screaming head apart to lick out the gold fillings in his teeth. Bit the buckle off his belt and crushed the gun down into its red-hot mouth. It dropped his body like a bleeding doll. Kicking up another dust cloud, it was gone.

  In the largest hive, dark figures walked out from their mothership by the Potomac. There weren’t many of them; they were the upper order. Scuttling silver spiders paused and backed away when they approached. Stretched alien soldiers like themselves knelt down at their presence. Hulking black monsters ground to a halt, looking down at the ground as their masters stalked by. The watchers had come to the humans’ white palace, where their leader had been closed away in his room of command. They walked gracefully past white pillars scorched with laser marks, admiring the destruction. Suited human bodies had been mounted on spiked growths in the lobby for their pleasure.

  The alien figure guarding the man-leader’s door let its masters through. The watchers looked around constantly at their strange new surroundings, wondering how such a race could ever have functioned. There were no solar cells on the walls; no wind turbines on the roof. Nothing in these human hives ever seemed to harvest energy to grow. They only sapped it away.

  The human leader himself was weak and terrified, unable to strengthen himself with sunlight. It was reported that the humans had to digest other organisms to survive, like the ancient orders of life on the watchers’ homeworld. Such inefficiency sickened them. This blue planet was so much larger and more fertile than anything they’d ever dreamt of. It was a paradise, and it was diseased with these… primates. Here their race could flourish, and explore more distant worlds. The human leader was making pleading sounds on the carpet. It was a vocal communication, much like their own. But like the humans’ bodies their speech was flimsy and inefficient. The figures gathered around him, and wondered why they’d ever asked for him to be left alive. There was no great secret to the hairless apes, no higher knowledge that they possessed. They were intelligent and aggressive, much like themselves; but the humans were the poorer player, and they’d lost. The things even fought amongst themselves like savages, destroying one another. They were redundant, a failed mutation; adept at reproducing but completely unsustainable. It was the best decision, the figures agreed then, to remove them from the ecosystem entirely. The animals that the humans had bred to consume would be freed; the crops they’d farmed would grow wild again. There was so much to learn from a planet that enjoyed such long days; such strong sunlight. Their own race would be stronger here than on their homeworld, too. Happier and more productive, breeding in half the time to fill these vast continents with new nations. Earth was perfection.

  The watchers had nothing to gain from prolonging the life of the human leader. The tallest among them came forward, lifted the screaming human into the air by its neck, and blew it apart with a bolt of light.

  Up in the starry void, Fishbowl finally emerged from the glowing recess behind Seven’s flight console. It climbed weakly from the tangled roots of the dragon’s power source, pushing past Tabitha’s blue-grey parka that it’d dragged into
the crevice for cover. The watchers weren’t searching for it any more. The dragon had escaped out of the atmosphere; they were safe. Fishbowl sensed a huge sadness coming from the dragon though, which seemed to be just drifting in space. It followed the scent of the human creature up out of the dragon’s open hatch, and touched its tentacles on her there as she floated against the dragon’s wing. Normally she’d pulse with energy, like any other plant. But now she seemed motionless, empty of charge. She wasn’t going to grow very well without any charge. Fishbowl tapped around her body for any residual energy, but found nothing. It touched a tentacle to her chest. That must have been where the energy went. Seven watched. Fishbowl anchored itself to the dragon with a couple of tentacles, and jolted Tabitha’s body with current. Nothing happened. It felt a huge store of solar energy in the dragon’s skin though, and drank a sliver in to recharge itself. When Fishbowl sipped in the current it went straight out again. It sipped more. Still no charge. Fishbowl drained at the dragon’s energy as hard as it could, but it simply flowed straight through it and into the human creature in its arms. At least the human was moving now, anyway. Fishbowl let go of her and tried another sip of current from the dragon’s skin. It seemed to work this time, and filled it up with charge. Satisfied, Fishbowl tapped its way along the dragon’s wing and climbed onto its back. It swam down into the cockpit and tucked itself in beside the seat, waiting for something more interesting to come along. Plants.

  Tabitha gasped for long-lost breath and felt her heartcore whirring into life. She opened her blinking yellow eyes and saw the stars. Life exploded back into her mind; a streaming vivid colourshock of shining soulglass. She felt the sun filling her up with energy; a celestial embrace. She looked around her, and suddenly everything came back from across a great dark divide. Every thought, every sensation; every soaring joy and stinging grief. Clutching her hands to her heart, she gasped at the memory of the sparking wound. She’d died. She’d felt the last drop of life leave her core. How had she come back? She looked up to see Seven’s big white eyes, staring at her in shock. Both of them were floating in a lunar ocean; a black star-dotted sea beyond the world.