“Simon, where the bloody fuck have you been? We are deep in the shit here brother,” said Jamie in his usual machine gun manner.
“Why? What the hell is so important that you would try and get hold of me in the middle of the night. You know I turn my phone off,” said Simon.
“Have you not been watching the news? Do you pay any attention to anything that goes on in this big wide world?”
Simon pinched the bridge of his nose, a headache was threatening to erupt behind his eyes. He was in no mood for bullshit. “Can you just get to the point? It’s early, I haven’t slept much and I have only managed one cup of coffee so far.”
“Spiders, Simon. Big fucking spiders, that’s what.”
Simon let go of his nose and frowned. His brain was still trying to convince him of what Jamie had just said. “Did you just say…..?”
“Yes, I said big fucking spiders. There was an outbreak of ‘em down at Wythenshaw hospital. I have no idea where they have come from, but some of the news outlets are saying something about bio-terrorism. They are killers Simon, one bite and you’re toast.”
“Jesus…”said Simon. He was scrambling for his remote control off his desk. It was crowded with scanning equipment and various computer equipment. Krissy referred to it as the black hole due to the amount of things that went missing if they were put on it. His remote control was the latest victim. He gave up after he knocked a stack of library books onto the floor and he pushed the on button on the back of the television.
“Jesus this ‘aint Simon. It looks like the work of the devil himself. The spiders have migrated to Newtown and it looks for all intents and purposes that they have stopped there for now….” Jamie was saying, but Simon barely heard him. The television was showing live areal pictures of the spider swarm in Newtown. From a distance it looked like a blackened oil slick on the landscape and then the camera zoomed in and showed the spiders in all their glory. Now he understood why Jamie had been on his case for most of the night. He was missing the story of the century. For Jamie, this footage would have paid the bills for the next ten years.
“I’ll get my stuff and I’ll head down to Newtown,” he said, cutting Jamie off mid-rant.
“You be careful Chief, those things are dangerous. Like I said, one bite and you’re finished.”
“I’ll be alright, I will take the van. It’s pretty solid, they won’t be able to get in there,” said Simon.
“Keep me in the loop Simon, I want to know everything that’s going on out there. There is talk of an army intervention going on, but there is also a rumor that they are sending in a scientific team. I can’t get any of it confirmed but you might see some of them in Newtown. If you do, try and get a word with them,” said Jamie and then cut off the phone without even waiting for Simon to reply. Simon locked his phone and put it in his pocket. He went back through into the bedroom. Krissy heard him enter the room and her eyes fluttered open.
“Hey babe, I got to go. There is a big story breaking and I have to get out there,” he said softly.
“Why? What’s happened?” said Krissy. She was still half asleep, but she rose up on one elbow. The duvet fell down revealing a naked breast.
Christ, you fell on your feet there kid, no doubt about it, he thought to himself.
“Have a look at the news when you get up. I haven’t got time to explain it all right now,” he said. He went round to her side of the bed and leaned in. He kissed her softly on the mouth.
“’k,” she said and lay back down. She was asleep again before Simon had even left the room. He went and stuffed his arms into his coat and loaded his pockets with the essentials such as his wallet, keys and several packets of chewing gum. He was about to go out of the door when his eyes fell upon his mobile radio scanner. He picked it up and took it with him, hoping that it might give him an inside scoop as to what the relevant authorities were going to do about the situation. The television studio was fifteen minutes’ walk. He picked up another cup of coffee along the way from the café that he and Krissy normally occupied when a full English breakfast was on the cards. It wasn’t the best in town, but he knew the owners pretty well. He would always strike up a pretty decent conversation with them every time he went in there. It gave the place an almost homely feel. The café had been deserted when he went in for his cup, save for the odd tramp that frequented the early doors looking for a fresh tea to warm their cockles. He hadn’t really been in the mood for conversation and the owners were the same. They were listening to the reports on the Newtown spiders on the radio and trying to prepare everything as quietly as they could so that they wouldn’t miss anything. Simon got to the television studio and went straight round the back to the car park. The security guard was there and Simon waved his identification badge at him. The guard tipped his hat to him and waved him through. There were two vans left in the car park and he opted for the older model. The newer one had more luxury, but it was forever plagued with technical faults. Simon thought that it had spent more time in the garage being fixed than it actually had done on the road. The older model seemed to be immortal. For the six years that Simon had worked there the old model had never broken down, never failed to start and never left a hapless reporter or cameraman stranded in the middle of nowhere. He headed into the garage to get the keys. He punched in the code on the lock and let himself in. There was nobody in there. The mechanics and technical crew didn’t show up until around ten. From what Simon could gather, there were no strict rules on when they chose to work as long as the jobs got done on time. There was a van in the garage right now. It looked like a shadowy monster without the lights turned on. The grill across the front of it looked to Simon like they were teeth, ready to chew him up at a moments’ notice. He grabbed the set of keys off the wall hook and went back across the car park to the van. He got in and started her up so he could get the engine warm enough to put the heating on. In the meantime, he hooked up his scanner to the aerial on the roof of the van and then he slotted it into place in the empty slot under the radio. He clicked it on and set it to auto-tune to see if he could pick anything up whilst he was driving to Newtown. The drive from Hemmington was one of his favorites. It went straight through Layton Valley, which had some of the best views you could ever hope to see, plus you could get a pretty good look at the town from a distance. He was going to stop at the viewing point to see if he could see what was going on from up there. It was a sunny day, so there wasn’t going to be any low slung cloud getting in the way. He put the van into gear and started to move. The guard let up the security banner and he tipped his hat to Simon again as he drove through it. He wondered if this spider thing was some sort of elaborate hoax. It was probably why he didn’t feel any apprehension about the trip. Perhaps if he saw it with his own eyes he might feel a whole lot differently, until then he was just going to take it all in his stride. He began to wish that he had bought a sausage and egg sandwich to eat whilst he was up at the viewing area. He decided that once this was all done and he got the footage he needed, he would reward himself with two of the fuckers.
He was a mile into his journey when the radio scanner began to pick something up. It was garbled at first and then it began to sound like a human voice. He could make out the voice but not the words. He reached down and began to fiddle with the manual fine tuning, trying to clear the signal. As he was fiddling with the tuning he took his eye off the road. The van began to drift over the center line and then it suddenly ran over something. Simon jerked his attention back to the road and let out a string of curses. He pulled the wheel a little too hard and the back end of the van began to spin out. Still bellowing, Simon wrestled with the steering wheel and managed to bring the van to a halt. He was back on his own side of the road but he was facing the wrong way. He sat behind the wheel for a moment, sweat beading on his forehead and his heart jack-hammering in his chest. He had been very lucky; he had only been doing thirty miles per hour. Any more and he would likely have rolled the van. He looked out o
f the front window. There was something on the road, or more accurately, something splattered on the road. He thought he might have hit a rabbit or something like that, but there was something about the mound of twitching flesh that told him it wasn’t anything cute and fluffy that he had run over. He turned the engine off and opened the van door. He looked up and down the road in both directions. There were no other road users there, and he had a long stretch of road in each direction to survey. He hopped out of the van and stretched his back out. He began to make his way towards the dead thing in the road. First there was a tyre track from his van. It had tracked something that looked like the burst insides of a stagnant boil. It smelled absolutely rotten and it wasn’t helped by the fact that the tar mac was cooking in the morning sun. Simon kept on walking, not aware that his pace was actually slowing as he got near to the dead beast in the road. He knew what it was even before he got close enough to fully make out the smashed remains. It was a spider, a great big ugly spider. The vans’ wheel had flattened it right across the middle of its body. The legs were partially scattered across the tar mac and the ones that remained on the body were curled up underneath the mashed remains of its body.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” said Simon and started to run back to his van. He wanted to grab his camera and get some footage of the spider. It was a money shot that was for sure. He was willing to bet his dog and lot that nobody had got close enough to them to get some serious pictures of them. It might have had a van run over it, but it was still going to be a close up shot of one of them. He scrambled the van keys out of his pocket and unlocked the side door. All of the broadcast equipment was inside the back of the van, including his digital camera. He clicked the viewfinder onto the top of the camera carcass, picked it up and started to make his way back to the body on the road. When he got close enough to it he shouldered the camera and took a good two minuets’ worth of footage. He lowered his camera and started to walk back to the van with the intention of climbing in the back and transmitting the footage back to the studio where Jamie could sit and wank about it. At least it would keep the obnoxious little turd off his back for a few hours. He was almost lost in his thoughts of his new footage making the evening news when he realized that he could hear something. It wasn’t the drone of oncoming traffic either, it was something else. It was a clicking noise, almost like the sound of crickets at night but deeper. Out of sheer curiosity he turned his head. There was about a hundred spiders coming out of the grass near to the flattened corpse and making their way across the road. They weren’t moving particularly fast but the sheer number of them made Simon suddenly lose his bottle. He broke into a run, as fast as he could go without dropping and smashing his camera. He reached the van and was about to climb in the back when he looked back at the hoard crossing the road. They had changed direction and they were heading right for him.
“Oh fuck,” he said and started to climb the van. It had a small ladder welded to the side of it near the back so they could get some decent high angle shots. He had just enough self-awareness to take his camera up the ladder with him. If they were going to attack him, then he wanted to film the whole thing. He got to the roof of the van and he looked back over the road. The spiders were nearly at the remains of their fallen comrade. The spiders climbed over the carcass as if it was a rock in the road rather than one of their own. Simon dropped to his belly, wincing slightly at the fact that the clear skies and blazing sunshine had heated the roof to a temperature that temporarily sizzled his skin when it made contact. He pushed the camera slowly to the edge of the front of the roof and pressed the button. He didn’t have the time nor he nerve to set the shot up properly. It was just a case of hoping for the best. The clicking of the spiders became so loud that Simon had to put his hands over his ears. He could feel the spiders bumping the van, making it sway gently on it suspension. Simon gritted his teeth, waiting for one of them to scale the van and take a bite out of him, but it didn’t happen. Soon the clicking noise was fading behind him and the rocking of the van had ceased altogether. He rolled slowly onto his back and then sat up. He could see the last of the spiders heading off the road to the left and into the grass.
“Newtown,” he said to himself, “They’re heading for Newtown.”
He waited there for a few minutes, just in case there were any stragglers playing catch-up. When he had decided that they were gone he grabbed his camera and stopped it recording. He climbed down the small ladder and opened the side door again. He heaved himself inside and pulled the door shut. He hooked up his camera to one of the monitors and played the footage back. He almost jumped for joy when he realized that he had captured an almost perfect shot of the hoard that had just passed him by. He dug his phone out of his pocket and dialed Jamie’s number. Jamie answered after two rings.
“’lo?”
“Jamie, I have got something special for you,” said Simon. He was amazed by just how out of breath he had become. It must have been delayed excitement or shock.
“Whatcha’ got for me?”
“I have footage of the spiders, pretty close up too. I’m gonna send it to you.”
“If its as good as you say it is, then you are getting yourself a nice little bonus. I’ll set things up my end and then you can send it through,” said Jamie and cut the phone off. Simon put the phone into his top pocket and smiled to himself. If he was getting a bonus he could do something nice with Krissy, like perhaps look at a new place to live for them both, then they could be out of that grotty tower for good. But then he began to wonder to himself that if the problem in Newtown wasn’t solved, then there might not be even that grotty tower to call home. He sent the footage over to Jamie and then he got out of the back of the van and back into the front again. He gunned the engine and turned the van around in the road. He set off for the viewing point which was about a mile away from where he was right now. As he drove, his heart was picking up the pace again and sweat was beginning to run down his face. This situation was becoming far too real for his liking. It occurred to him that he might be going to investigate the end of civilization as he knew it.
16.
Lorna had been drifting off to sleep when Briggs’ phone rang. It played a shrill, high pitched and overly jolly tune when it rang. Briggs pulled the phone out of his inside pocket, jabbed the button and put it to his ear. He greeted his caller and then his face dropped as if he was talking to someone he had absolutely no time for. He got out of his seat, made his way to the back of the van and sat on the seat that had been Lorna’s bed the previous night. He mumbled away into the phone, the sound of the vans engine drowning out any chance that Lorna had of hearing what he was saying. From the look of his body language, the person on the other end of the phone was saying things to him that he didn’t want to hear. After a short while he rose from his seat and turned his back towards the rest of the crew. His left arm began to gesticulate wildly and his voice rose to a half-shout that Lorna still couldn’t quite make out. He jabbed the button on the phone and uttered something else that sounded suspiciously like ‘good fucking bye’ and he returned the phone to his pocket. He began to make his way back up the van to his seat near the front. There was a generous flare of colour in his cheeks and he had to keep clearing his throat after raising his voice to his mystery caller.
“Who was that?” said Shannon.
“Orders from our higher power,” said Briggs.
There was a moment of almost awkward silence between them. Lorna could tell that Briggs was flustered.
“Well, what did they say?” said Shannon.
“Plenty, but we are going to carry on regardless, that was the gist of it,” said Briggs.
“Who do you work for?” blurted Lorna, barely believing that she had allowed herself to ask the question.
“It doesn’t matter. The less you know the better,” said Briggs without looking at her.
“I think I should know who it is we are risking our arses for,” said Lorna. She was becoming impatient. She did
n’t like to be kept in the dark.
“Look, if I tell you, then it could mean trouble. Right now you have plausible deniability.”
The van suddenly came to a halt. Johnny turned around and eyed Briggs. “Look doc, why don’t you just tell her everything. If we get out of this alive, who is going to tell? Who would believe her? Just knock off the bullshit and come clean would ya, then we can all get on with the task at hand and stop fucking around.”
Briggs looked at Johnny for a moment. He drew in a breath to begin arguing with him but Johnny was staring him down in such a way that Briggs just let the breath out in a long sigh. He rolled his eyes to the roof and then he looked at Lorna.
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