Tabitha (47 page)

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, desperate 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.

Through
the world-filling whisper of the rain, Tabitha heard a noise. Thunder split and
broke overhead like a god growling, but that wasn’t what she’d heard. What
she’d heard sounded like a car crash, around the next street corner and off
down the road.

She didn’t make out its
shape at first. It was only when it drooled glowing molten metal as it fed that
she noticed it, sprawled out and gripping close to the side of a city tram,
like it was making love to it. Its molten slather beaded and slopped from its
mouth and hit the wet road in a hissing cloud of steam. Its white eyes stared
at the sky, unblinking, while it shredded sheet metal and devoured it with
grinding black jaws. Everything about it was black and heaving. The monster
swallowed its mouthful of molten metal so loudly that Tabitha heard it up the
road. Some kind of exhaust jutted out of its back then; a glowing growth that
hissed and sighed a huge jet of steam. The monster's rubbery black metal body
gleamed in the rain and the grey daylight, dripping and hulking as it dropped
down to the road and rested. Suddenly its head snapped around in her direction,
white eyes staring. Terrified, Tabitha had hidden behind a half-eaten taxi. Its
bodywork was covered in messy welding where the creature had bitten and
slobbered. She peered around from the wheel arch, looking through the
doorless
back door, through the taxi’s torn-open front, to
where the alien stood in the distance. It hadn’t moved; it hadn’t turned its
head. It was just
staring
in the rain, eyes glowing
cold, watching down the road for any sign of the intruder. Tabitha didn’t dare
breathe.

Her
legs had cramped up. She didn’t know how long it had been; it felt like an hour
at least. The thing hadn’t moved an inch. It was frozen like a watching statue,
staring down the road, dripping in the never-ending rain. Tabitha was freezing.
She couldn't take this cramping cold any more. But she couldn’t face the
monster either. Her hard hands may have been enough to dent the spiders, but
not this thing. Its own hands were huge; black and clawed and cruel. It was
bigger than a bear. It could crush her, skin her, vomit molten steel over her…
whatever it was going to do if it found her, she wouldn’t be able to fight it.
Now she understood why the city was empty – everything had to run from it. Or
try to. And still it stared down the road. Unmoving, unblinking. Just breathing
heavy in the pouring rain.

Tabitha
couldn’t feel her feet any more, and she’d never thought that she could shiver
so much. Still the thing hadn’t moved; hadn’t come to look for her. She had to
do something. She shrugged off her rucksack, ready to run. She reached into the
back door of the taxi and pulled out a shard of glass off the back seat.
Getting a good grip on it she sent it spinning up overhead, high over the
creature, and it shattered on the road behind it. Tabitha watched it wide-eyed
from behind the taxi. As soon as the monster turned away to search down the
road, Tabitha was up and running. Instantly she regretted it; her cramping legs
wobbled and stumbled beneath her. 
You idiot! You stupid
woman! 
she told herself, dragging her body up from the pavement to run
on numb feet. She looked over her shoulder down the road. The creature still
had its back turned, prowling down the tarmac in the distance. Suddenly it
swung its huge arms and flung a car across the street in search of her. Tabitha
ran. She stuck to the kerb, where the cars and bins could hide her while she
put some distance between them. The thing glanced back up the street and turned
away again; she hid behind a bin in the middle of the pavement. She realised
that she couldn’t just run. It’d almost seen her just then. She was a good
distance from it now, but there was a clear line of sight down the road. If it
saw her running it would chase her down. Instead she looked over to her right,
to the door of an old pub that was hanging open. She didn’t care what might be
inside; it couldn’t have been worse than being hunted out here. The thing
turned again to look back up the street but Tabitha had already darted inside
the open door of the pub.
Pint glasses stood abandoned on metal
tables outside, dripping full with old rain and dead flies.

It
was dark inside the pub. Terrified, Tabitha went straight for the old wooden
bar and hid away behind it. She’d hesitated at first when she saw a figure, but
it was just her reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar. It smelled like
stale smoke in here, like dust and ale. Human smells. She sat down on the floor
behind the bar and pressed her back against the wood, facing the fridges;
facing away from the front door. It was a solid old bar, made of good strong
wood. She told herself this as if it mattered; as if it would protect her.
There just had to be something big and solid and safe between her and that…
thing. She was so frightened she could hardly think. The only thought in her
head was an instinct –
hide. 
The only sounds were her heavy
breathing and the endless patter of the rain outside. And then, a pounding on
the road. Footsteps. And a sound like sniffing, deep and hungry. Tabitha peered
around the bar and saw white eyes in the half-open doorway. She heard the
monster’s heavy panting, massive and furious. Tabitha pressed her back against
the wood of the bar where she sat on the floor, rain-soaked and petrified. She
clutched a hand to her mouth to stifle her panicked breaths. She prayed to
whatever gods were up there, whatever cosmic forces that had anything to do
with anything, that she wouldn’t hear the sound. The sound of a heavy foot on
the floorboards inside the doorway. The sound of death coming for her. The
floorboards creaked. Tabitha felt her
heartcore
pounding. Everything sped up and slowed down at once, and fresh adrenaline
surged every time the creaking footsteps drew closer to the bar. Tabitha looked
up from the floor, eyes wide with terror, as the wooden bar-top over her head
creaked and groaned under the weight of a giant black hand. The smell of
burning wood filled her nose as the alien drooled molten metal down on the bar,
peering right over Tabitha’s head at its reflection in the mirrored wall.
Tabitha watched its white eyes in the mirror, drifting as it swayed its head,
figuring out the image of itself. She watched its reflection look down at her
then, hiding behind the bar. She saw its white-circle eyes shrink to murderous
dots. The last thing it saw was a blinding white cloud as Tabitha emptied the
fire extinguisher into its face. She jumped out from the bar as the monster
smashed it to splintered pieces, roaring and spitting red-hot metal. Blinded,
the creature spun and pounced on the place where it heard her footsteps,
demolishing the floorboards. Tabitha bolted out of the door and off up the
street, back the way she’d come, back towards the square. There was a
dust-cloud explosion behind her as the thing burst out of the brick wall,
roaring and blind. It crashed against a car and punched it into wreckage. But
Tabitha was already far up the street. She looked back at the huge black thing
thrashing around on the road, colliding into cars and walls in an unseeing
rage. She had to get away from here, out of the city. This was her only chance.

She
stopped running when she reached the square, and looked around her. The grey
skins soaked in the rain and mud beneath her feet. Countless corpses,
stretching on forever. She saw the small skins too, and the very small skins.
The sight gave her a lump in her throat; a vile sick feeling in her heart. She looked
from the skins to the black monster down the street, clawing at the blinding
foam in its eyes, but only managing to smear it around. It had all these lives
to answer for. She’d managed to trick it; trap it. Revenge burned in her mind;
Chris had sparked the fire and now it rampaged through her thoughts. A new
reason to live. Chris would get what was coming to him; the creatures too.
Maybe it was time the aliens learned something about humanity’s talent for
vengeance. Tabitha clenched her metal fists, gritted her teeth, and walked back
down the road towards the monster.

‘Ready
when you are.’

The monster had
exhausted itself by the time she drew close to it, still blind to her presence.
It was snarling; shaking its head and stamping the pavement as it tried to see.
Growling huge and guttural like a furnace. She couldn’t do it enough damage
with her fists, Tabitha told herself, but she could still use her strength
somehow. Quietly she stepped through the broken glass doors of a musty homeware
shop and rooted around in the shadows. Planning her fight, she took a paint tin
from the shelves and popped the lid off with a screwdriver. She searched the
aisles for knives, chisels; anything she could use. It didn’t seem to be that
kind of shop; it was more cushions and candles than cables and crowbars. When
she found a man’s rotten stinking skin in the back corner though, she dropped
the screwdriver and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what he’d been
carrying.