TABITHA

Andrew Hall

© Andrew Hall 2014

Find me on Twitter at
@andrew_in_space.

Cover art by Gerry Arthur

All rights reserved. No
reproduction without permission.

This novel is a work
of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events
are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

1

The
end of the world came quietly one day and landed in the sea. Nobody noticed a
mediocre meteor, or saw what was growing on it. Humanity was too busy with
hunger and war; tight margins and premium goods. Some people, like Tabitha
Jones, were busy losing their jobs.

Tabitha worked in a run-down office in a Welsh seaside
town. A town of chip wrappers, graffiti, rain. Rust stains seeped through
whitewashed ironwork on the old seafront. The sea was a murky line in the
distance, a dull brown mass. Tabitha could see it all from the office window,
faded and murked by a film of sandy grime on the glass. She ran her fingers
idly over her old computer keyboard. Every button was smooth and shiny and worn
out. Marketing Admin Assistant wasn’t an interesting job. Graduation felt like
a lifetime ago. She could be making films, she told herself. In another life, a
world away, up there in her daydream.

‘Tabitha, could I have a word in my office?’ said a deep
grave voice. Bill Mangle, CEO. He loomed suddenly at her desk, tall and
black-suited, as pale and gaunt as an undertaker’s stereotype. He turned
sharply and walked off. Tabitha stood up and smoothed down her shirt and skirt
nervously. She followed Bill through the silent staring office into a
worn-carpet corridor. They passed sunbleached accolades hung in old gold
frames, and a sorry Spanish plant wearing decades of dust. Walls papered in
eighties seasick grey. Everything had that strange dusty smell of ancient
cigarette smoke, like the fabric seats on an old coach. Tabitha had always
hated that smell. Bill led the way in silence; a funeral procession of two.
Tabitha’s palms felt clammy; her stomach was scrunched up in a ball. What was
this about?

Bill
shifted uneasily in his chair. It creaked in his silent office. He looked up
from his long knotted fingers on the desk at the young woman sitting opposite;
at her wide green deer-in-the-headlight eyes, half hidden under a mess of
ginger curls.

‘Tabitha…’ he sighed gravely, breaking the silence.
‘There’s no easy way to say this,’ he said apologetically. ‘We’re making
losses. We need to let a few of you go.’ Tabitha could only stare at him. He’d
dropped a cartoon ton-weight on her life. Sawed out the floor beneath her in a
perfect circle. His words rang in her head like a deep dull church bell in a
graveyard. There’s no easy way to say this. We need to let a few of you go. It
occurred to Tabitha that this was actually quite an easy way for him to say it.
She didn’t mention this. All her young life, many of Tabitha’s opinions had
never quite made it to her mouth.

‘But I’ve been here for years,’ she mumbled.

‘Well, two years,’ Bill chuckled gently,
dismissively. Grinning with crooked teeth. He shifted again in his creaking
seat; coughed into the awkward silence. ‘The industry’s changing,’ he
explained, scratching a dry clean-shaven cheek. ‘There just… isn’t the work
anymore.’ Tabitha stared blankly at Bill’s desk. At the fake wood-grain coating
on its surface. She smelled the musky whiff of old aftershave that filled the
gloomy room. Heard the bland clock on the wall, older than she was, ticking
plastic time in the silence.

‘Ok,’ she said quietly. Job, gone. Just like that. She
didn’t see the point in getting angry. She wasn’t very good at it. There were
lots of lay-offs these days, she told herself. This was the hollowed-out
economy.

‘Ok,’ she repeated, lifelessly, making brief eye contact
as she stood up. She saw his eyes and looked away. He always had that dark
intense look, like he was weighing her soul. Tabitha looked down at the carpet,
her go-to looking place, where no one ever stared back.

‘Should I go now? Or…?’ she mumbled.

‘I think it’s probably best,’ said Bill, in his kindest
fake-kindness voice. His flinty eyes and sharp sunken cheeks did little to
complement his tone. ‘Probably better to spend your time looking for a new job,
mm?’ he said. Bill seemed brighter now, like a weight had lifted off his
shoulders. He was stroking his chin, thinking. ‘I know this chap actually, he’s
looking for a cleaner,’ he said. ‘I’ll write you up a good reference, mm? Yes.’
Bill decided before Tabitha could reply. She didn’t want a cleaning job.
Something wasn’t right. She wanted to ask about her notice period for a start.

‘Oh, and don’t worry about serving your notice,’ said
Bill, as if he’d read her mind.

‘Ok,’ she mumbled, defeated, opening the door. Wait,
wasn’t that something she was entitled to? She should be pressing him about it.
That all seemed a bit confrontational though.

‘Oh, Tabitha?’

‘Hm?’

‘Nobody emptied the bins over the weekend,’ said Bill,
with a confidential tone. ‘What with the hot weather and everything… would you
mind just… taking the old bags on your way out? Please?’ Tabitha stared at him,
and didn’t say what she wanted to say. She’d need a good reference for her next
job. Best not to rock the boat.

‘…Ok,’ she replied timidly. She left Bill’s office and
closed the door silently behind her.

The
main office was eerily quiet when Tabitha reappeared from the corridor. She was
walking on a floor that didn’t quite feel like it was there. Pale, thoughtless,
she reached her desk in a daze and switched her computer off. A phone was
ringing somewhere behind her. She emptied the contents of her desk into a
rustling carrier bag. Her stapler. Her pens. Her work schedule, lovingly
drafted one weekend; packed with tasks that she’d colour coded by order of
importance. All redundant now, just like her.

‘Everything alright love?’ said Gwen in her sing-song
voice, peering over the partition from the desk behind.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied. She didn’t want to talk about
it. Not with Gwen, anyway.

‘What happened?’ said Gwen, with the look of someone who
knew full well.

‘I’m leaving.’ Tabitha replied quietly. She wanted to
keep it vague. Everything about Gwen was an intrusion. Always had been.

‘Leaving? Oh, how awful!’ said Gwen dramatically, with
all the sincerity she could muster. Tabitha didn’t look Gwen in the eye. She
couldn’t stand to see the look of victory there; the look she was so bad at
hiding.

‘What’s going on?’ said Gavin, half-interested, popping
his head up a couple of desks away.

‘Tabitha’s been made redundant,’ Gwen declared sadly,
revelling in the drama. Strange that Gwen knew the exact reason why she was
leaving, Tabitha thought to herself. She didn’t mention this though.

‘Oh no, really?’ Gavin murmured, after a brief pause to
click Save on his spreadsheet. Tabitha watched him trying to formulate some
sympathy. Maybe he was waiting for her to say something. He looked down at his
computer to type something quickly.

‘How come?’ he said eventually, looking up at her again.
Tabitha was already walking away down the office.

‘Bye then,’ Gwen called sarcastically.

‘Bye,’ Tabitha replied quietly, barely looking back.

A
big dead moth lay frayed and dusty on the kitchen window sill. The summer sun shone
bright and milky through grubby glass. Tabitha wrestled with the sticky sides
of the bin bag to tie it up, and carted its stinking weight out of the office
kitchen with a second bag. She’d never known a smell like it; like death and
dairy. Lazy flies followed the sour fumes out into the corridor.

‘Alright Trouble?’ said Kevin, smiling his creased old
grin as he ambled into the office. He always smelled of old hair gel. He
studied the bin bags in her hands. ‘Who made you the bin man then?’

‘I’ve been laid off,’ she said quietly. Kevin’s wrinkled
face dropped. He was the one person in the office she’d actually wanted to
tell. He looked angry. He clenched his big old hands into fists; knobbly
knuckles turning white.

‘Wait here,’ he growled, walking off. ‘And put them
bloody bin bags down girl,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘He’s taking the piss.’

Kevin stormed into Bill’s office and slammed the door
behind him. It wasn’t clear what was said during the muffled shouting match,
but the rest of the office tried their best to listen in. Tabitha had never
heard so much anger, and she was all the way down in the corridor by the front
doors. When Kevin emerged he growled at everyone to get back to work. He walked
back out into the corridor with a face like thunder, like a grumpy old hound.
Tabitha was going to miss that face.

‘Prat,’ Kevin snarled. ‘Well, I tried to talk him out of
it,’ he sighed, his stubbly face softening. ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen,
love. Not if I want to keep my job. I’m sorry.’ Tabitha looked into his sad
eyes, and she wanted to hug him. She didn’t, though. It might have turned out
awkward. She wasn’t good at contact.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said, smiling. ‘It happens a lot
these days, people losing their jobs.’

‘Well it’s a bloody shame that people like you have to
go, and some of them keep a job,’ he said quietly. Tabitha smiled. ‘If
it’s any consolation though, I reckon there’s more lay-offs coming soon anyway.’

‘It’s not any consolation, really,’ Tabitha told him
quietly. ‘I don’t want anyone to lose their jobs.’

‘Look, don’t worry about them,’ said Kevin. ‘You just
look after yourself, alright?’ he was smiling sadly.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Tabitha replied.

‘You never know. Losing this job might be the best thing
that ever happened to you. A good kick up the bum to find something better,
maybe.’

‘Maybe,’ Tabitha agreed quietly, welling up.

‘So, you better come back here and see us when you’re a
high flyer, alright?’ he said. Tabitha nodded, with a tear running down her
cheek.

‘And leave them bloody bin bags here, will you?’ he
said, pulling them out of her hands to give her a hug.

‘Bye Kevin,’ she said, her voice muffled in his musty
jumper.

‘Bye Trouble,’ he replied. ‘Now go on, get lost. Go and
get a better job.’

The
gravel in the car park crunched under Tabitha’s shoes, stabbing crisp sound
into the silence. There was only the grey distant hiss of traffic noise in
town; no other sound in the world. Tabitha’s head was empty of thoughts. She
didn’t know whether to grieve or celebrate. Maybe this was a time for both.
She’d been cut loose, so what now? Did that mean she was falling, or flying?
Maybe it was up to her. Yes; it was up to her. A whole world was open to her.
Tabitha climbed into her car and shut the door on the office behind her. She
turned the key in the ignition. As the engine started up she felt like she was
starting a new chapter in her life. She could go anywhere she wanted, do
anything she wanted. She was absolutely free. So… why did she feel like
everything had come crashing down on top of her? She reversed out of the tiny
office car park and drove off down the road. It was Friday; there was a weekend
to enjoy. The next few weeks, strange and uncertain, could stay on the far side
of Sunday. As for now… she knew exactly where to go.

Tabitha’s
worries disappeared for a while once she parked up at the supermarket. She’d
always liked supermarkets. They were magnolia paint for the mind. A busy
vanilla distraction, plain and orderly. She hadn’t been to this one before,
though. She didn’t normally drive this way home after work, but she was feeling
daring today after losing her job. Life was too short not to try a new
supermarket once in a while.

She thought quite highly of the supermarket’s exterior
on her way in. Tasteful brick pillars, accentuated by the clean sharp lines of
modern glass. A class act, really, though she wanted to reserve judgement until
she’d seen the customer service. She felt a cool blast from the air vents over
the doors on her way in. The fake breeze touched her head for a moment like a
good thought. She picked up a shopping basket and felt the reedy rubber-plastic
handle in her hand. She studied the black-dotted sick-beige of the floor tiles
under her red suede shoes. Walking in through the customer barriers she began
her browsing tour, eyeing the shelves like an art critic. She put a crinkling
packet of grapes in her basket, bright poison green. Crunchy biscuits, sloshy
wine, and a definite slab of chocolate. Cheesy pizza. Serious DVD.

A blazered shop manager followed an old man around the
store at a distance. She sprayed asthmatic puffs of air freshener discreetly in
his wake. The old man smelled of urine. A very sharp cloying smell, like car
park stairwells. Tabitha saw him walking this way. She smiled to him as she
passed by, to show him that she didn’t mind the smell. He saw her, but didn’t
acknowledge her. He had bushy eyebrows, grumpy jowls. Tabitha watched him push
past a young man rudely in the next aisle, and suddenly felt more entitled to
dislike his sour old smell.

‘Excuse me, I was in the queue,’ Tabitha told a tall man
in front of her. He ignored her. Short hair, gold chain, angry red tan. He’d
simply walked over and made himself the front of the line for the self-service
tills. He’d taken her place, jumped in front. The crook. Tabitha was just the
right height to face his armpits too, and the dark smelly sweat patch under
each one. He looked like a gym fan, steroid-angry. Tabitha sighed and turned
away, refusing to even look at him. The supermarket checkouts bipped incessantly
like robots praying. A faint smell of sun cream filled the store. Everyone at
the tills, staff and shoppers, shared the same crabby, clammy exhaustion in the
summer heat.

‘Excuse me, you pushed in the queue,’ Tabitha tried
again, quietly. It wasn’t like her to press a point like this, but she felt
fighty today. How could someone flaunt the rules like this? She’d left the
standard six-foot gap between herself and the self-service checkouts. It was
the unspoken law. A decent-sized space to let other shoppers make their way
past the queue. Everyone knew they should do that. Not only had this man
strutted over and stood in front of her as if she wasn’t there – he was also
becoming an obstruction to hurried lunch-breakers, tired mums and frail old
couples trying to get past. Civilisation was lost on this man. Social rules
were just flimsy guidelines to people like him, like dull terms and conditions
printed on toilet paper. No one else in the queue behind her said anything. He
was her problem. The man shoulder-strutted to the next checkout that freed up;
the one that should have been hers. He even glanced back at her then, looked
her up and down, and dismissed her as a lesser female specimen. What annoyed
Tabitha more was that he paid and left so soon, leaving her to use the same
checkout. Like she was left owing him something. She put her basket down at the
checkout, and despite herself she smelled the lingering stink of fresh sweat.
He was still pissing her off, and he wasn’t even here.

‘Approval needed,’ said the checkout. Tabitha sighed a
sigh, tiny and exasperated. Why hadn’t she scanned the wine last? She could
have been bagging the rest of her things up. She was out of sorts today, as her
mum would say. Sunlight spilled through high windows. Cranky children were
stropping with their mum at the next till along. Shrill screams. Tabitha didn’t
notice the short figure standing beside her.

‘Have you got any ID love?’ said a smiling perm-lady,
appearing from nowhere. She worked here. A rectangular badge on her large bosom
declared that she was BRENDA.

‘I think so,’ Tabitha replied, fishing her driving
licence from her purse. It was the purse with the art-nouveau cat, her favourite.
Worn and well-loved. She knew she had her licence in there, of course, but she
didn’t just want to tell Brenda “Yes” in case it sounded too abrupt. She passed
Brenda her licence, and watched her examine it. Tabitha had always hated that
picture of herself. A mess of ginger hair, curling round a pale face that she
wished was someone else’s. Some people looked nothing like their driving
licence photos. Tabitha matched hers exactly.

‘Happy birthday for last week then,’ Brenda said
brightly, looking up from the licence. Tabitha smiled back, pleasantly
surprised. She felt rushed though, conscious of the checkout queue behind her.
She was probably holding everyone up. Brenda seemed unaware of this risk.

‘23 last… Saturday?’ said Brenda, giving her licence back.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Tabitha replied happily. It was
nice to have someone taking an interest. She felt like she should get a move on
with her shopping, though. People would be waiting behind her. She hurried her
food through the scanner. Another checkout lady put Tabitha’s DVD through for
her, but she wasn’t as smiley as Brenda. The new woman looked Tabitha up and
down for a moment like a style critic, and all but screwed up her nose in
distaste. Tabitha paid the checkout and snatched her debit card back from the
reader, trying not to look back at the queue. She could feel their eyes on her.
She felt them waiting impatiently to buy their things, and get back to all the
jobs they still had. Tabitha grabbed her plastic bag of emotional first aid and
left.

‘Bye love,’ Brenda called to her, while she helped an
old lady bag up bottles of vodka.

‘Bye,’ Tabitha replied quietly, happily. She was
definitely coming here again. Top-notch customer service, it really was. There were
too many people around, though. There were always too many people around. She
put her headphones back in to block them out.

Home
was an old rented house on the seafront. Tall and narrow. Single glazed.
Victorian brick. Dark green door. The small front garden had grown wild in the
summer sun. Tabitha stayed clear of it, especially the bees and wasps that
prowled the haphazard flowers. Threatening as tiny flying tigers. She stepped
around frantic ants on the stone steps up to the door. Mog was looking out at
her from the window, a lazy black fuzzchunk of feline indifference. Tabitha
slid her key in the door lock and opened up a darker, cooler world inside the
house. She shut the door on the hot bright world outside, vast and full of
dangers. It still smelled of bolognese in here. A lingering whiff of garlic in
the air, nose-grabbingly pungent.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked Mog, who was slinking into
the hallway from his sleeping spot on the couch. He sat down by the stairs and
studied her with grumpy green eyes. Meowed at her. ‘Fine, you can have the
bag,’ she said, unbuttoning her jacket. ‘Just let me get the stuff out first.
Oh, and I lost my job today.’ She sighed and hung up her jacket, and plodded
through the shady old living room to the bright cheap kitchen. She’d have to
tell her mum about her job at some point. She really wasn’t looking forward to
that. Probably best to get it out of the way though.

‘Why? What did you do?’ said the mobile phone on her bed.

‘I didn’t do anything Mum, they just made me redundant,’
Tabitha replied.

‘You don’t need to shout.’

‘Sorry Mum. I’ve got you on loudspeaker, while I’m
getting changed.’

‘What?’ said the phone. Tabitha picked it up.

‘I had you on loudspeaker, I’m getting changed.’

‘Oh right,’ her mum replied, only half understanding.
‘Well… you can always come back home if you need to, love.’

‘I know. Thanks Mum.’

‘Did they say why?’

‘They’re laying off a few people, supposedly. They’re
not doing well with the business.’

‘Did you ask them why you had to go though?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘There wasn’t much point, Mum. They’d already decided to
let me go.’

‘Well I would’ve been giving them what for, if I were
you.’

‘I know, but you’re better with people than me Mum.’
Tabitha heard her mum sigh.

‘You’ll have to start speaking your mind, love,’ her mum
replied. ‘There’s a lot of people in the world who’ll get the better of you if
you don’t.’

‘I know,’ Tabitha replied sadly. Numb to the advice.
‘I’m going to go now Mum, I’ve got stuff to do.’

‘Alright love. You’ll find somewhere better than that
place. Bye love.’

‘Thanks Mum. See you soon.’

‘Oh, have you heard from John yet?’

‘No. I don’t want to.’

‘I don’t blame you love. He’ll look back one day, and
he’ll be sorry that he ever left you.’

‘I don’t really want to talk about it Mum.’

‘Alright, sorry love. Remember, time’s a healer.’

‘I know,’ Tabitha said impatiently. ‘See you soon.’

‘Bye love. Oh, are we still going shopping tomorrow?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Alright then. Bye love.’

‘Bye Mum. Bye.’ Tabitha wrestled her damp sweaty socks
off and sat down on the bed. She dug her toes into the carpet fibres, and
thought about moving away from this town. Another country maybe. Somewhere she
could learn to be shouty and passionate, and use her hands when she spoke.
Somewhere that fruit grew larger, fresher, and wine cost normal prices. She
looked up and dreamt of taking a plane up into the blue, far beyond her room’s
white ceiling. There was still a dead fly smear up there. John, her ex, had
always left dead flies right where he killed them. No attempt to clean them up.
It was disrespectful to the fly’s memory, if nothing else. With any luck John
was batting flies away right now, thought Tabitha. Sat on a street somewhere.
Homeless and penniless because he couldn’t afford to keep Izzy in
designer shoes. Tabitha smiled at the thought.

‘Seriously though, I wish both of you the very best,’
she lied, telling it to the empty room where she and John used to sleep. Now it
was her nerd nest, filled with her favourite clutter to hide the memories of
him. Movie posters covered the walls, brash and beautiful. Books were piled
high on every flat surface, collecting dust and dead midges. Her space-robot
speakers blared crunchy electronica. Crisp molten beats under folding pixel
soundwaves. Tabitha felt tears coming at the thought of giving up her house.
With no job though, she couldn’t pay the rent. Decent jobs weren’t easy to come
by around here. She shook the thoughts out of her head, grabbed her glass of
wine, and went downstairs to put her film on. Her pizza would be ready soon. A
steaming floppy slab of deliciousness. A doughy plaster for the soul. Mog would
be waking up too, cleaning and preparing before his afternoon snooze. At least
she still had her cat, Tabitha told herself. He was one good thing to come out
of that job. She’d bought him with her first wages, a dopey black kitten with
lazy blue eyes. She liked cats. No questions, no walks, very little clean-up.
Just badly timed demands for food and affection.

Tabitha felt Mog’s purrs vibrate his warm body, curled
up in her lap while she sat on the couch. Her new film was loud, explosive. Mog
snoozed through it. His soft black fur had that strange cat smell, faint and
oily-sweet. His fur tickled Tabitha’s nose as she smelled him. She felt his ear
flick against her wrist as she stroked his head. An Olympic purrer. Tabitha
sipped her dizzy wine, chewed her steamy pizza, and watched movie stars save
the world. The wine went down easy, and didn’t help a bit. She couldn’t drink herself
back into a job, or back into happiness. Much as she wanted to.

2

Saturday
was bright and hot. Tabitha bit into sweet squishy plum flesh. She hid her
mouth away from passers-by in town as the juice rolled down her chin. What a
slob, she told herself. Nobody seemed to notice though. She chewed the cool
flesh slowly, smushing the taste into her tongue.

‘I’ll get you some hair clips,’ her mum fretted,
reaching for Tabitha’s tangle of hair. It was the opposite of her mother’s
short, grey, sensible mum-do. Tabitha ducked her head away from the imminent
mothering, and went for another bite of her plum. A wasp had installed itself
in the juicy bite mark. Tabitha dropped the plum like it was ablaze, and danced
away up the high street as the wasp harassed her.

‘Stop moving around,’ her mum called up the street. A
couple grinned at Tabitha flailing as they walked past. Tabitha was too frantic
to feel embarrassed. That would come later. Why wouldn’t the wasp just leave
her alone? Didn’t it know that she had enough problems?

‘I think it’s gone now,’ said a cheery man coming out of
the pound shop. Tabitha looked at him with embarrassment, looked down at the
ground, and walked off back to her mum. Still on edge, she dodged a butterfly
on her way back.

‘Let’s go to the cafe now,’ said Tabitha, taking the
carrier bag off her mum. She imagined everyone on the street watching her. She
looked down, away from staring eyes that weren’t really there. She studied the
chewing gum circle-splats on the pavement. Some old and black; some fresh and
white and sticky. Tabitha breathed deep and straightened out her new green
dress, her summery pride and joy. Her mum was browsing a shop window.

‘Mum? Shall we go to the cafe?’ she said, itching to get
out of the street where she’d embarrassed herself.

‘In a minute love. There’s only a few things left on my
list.’ Her mum always had a few things left on her list.

‘…Ok.’ Tabitha replied, despite how much she wanted to
disappear to the coffee shop. She’d just have to avoid people’s stares, that
was all. And it was probably best to leave the plums in the carrier bag until
she got home. Too risky.

‘Who is it we’re waiting for?’ said her mum. She angled
her face up to peer at Tabitha through her glasses. Tabitha wasn’t listening;
preoccupied with how busy it was in the cafe. It smelled like cake in here, and
strong exotic coffee right out of an advert. It was noisy though. Alive with a
crowd of multi-tone voices that shrieked and laughed too much. Their loud
cluttered chatter spattered the creamy brown walls, and Tabitha didn’t like it.
It made her edgy, so much commotion over nothing.

‘Tabitha?’ said her mum.

‘Hm?’

‘Who is it we’re waiting for?’

‘Just Emma and Jen,’ Tabitha replied, slurping quietly
at her latte. She checked her phone. No text; no call.

‘Has Emma still got that funny hairdo?’ said her mum,
right on cue.

‘She does, yeah,’ Tabitha said with a smile. She liked
Emma’s hairdo. It was a brash personal statement. Everything about Emma was a brash
personal statement. She did everything loud, fast, and all of it with a series
of comedy faces. One of those force-of-nature types.

‘Are you alright love?’ her mum piped up. ‘You’re very
quiet today.’

‘Yeah, just thinking,’ Tabitha replied. Truth was, she
just couldn’t relax in here. The noise was too much. The bee wrestling with the
inside of the window made things even worse. Tabitha glanced over to make sure
it hadn’t come nearer.

‘I’ve not seen a hairdo like Emma’s before,’ said her
mum. ‘And that waiter too, he’s got funny hair.’ Her mum nodded at the smiling
barista serving the customers.

‘Mum, keep your voice down,’ Tabitha said quietly.

‘Well he does have funny hair. And those glasses are too
big for him.’

‘Mum.’

‘Hi!’ came a loud voice across the cafe. Tabitha looked
over and smiled at Emma and Jen, hauling their shopping bags through the door.
‘Scuse me, thanks!’ said Emma, bustling through, her volume turning a couple of
heads. She was loud as ever, as if she didn’t care what anyone in there thought
of her. She’d never cared in school, either. Tabitha couldn’t imagine being
like that. Her mum looked over at them, smiled, and looked Emma’s white-blonde
hairstyle up and down.

‘I’m so sorry about your job,’ said Emma, dropping her
bags under their table to give Tabitha a hefty hug. She stood back and coughed
her smoker’s cough, and struck up a noisy conversation with Tabitha’s mum. Jen
stepped in and hugged Tabitha lightly by contrast, slender and graceful. Emma’s
polar opposite. Neither of them had really changed since school. Jen drew a few
glances, willowy and pretty, especially in her white summery dress. Tabitha
noticed her glance around and smooth her curly hair down against her ear.
They’d tried to convince Jen for years now that people were staring because of
her looks, not the burn scars around her ear. Jen had never really believed
them though.

‘How are you doing, apart from the job?’ Emma asked
Tabitha. ‘I like that dress, where’s that from? What are you drinking?’

‘Too many questions,’ Jen chipped in, smiling.

‘Sorry,’ Emma laughed. ‘Who wants a drink?’

‘Pour vous, and… pour vous,’ said Emma, setting their
coffees down on the table.

‘Oh god, what happened to your hand?’ said Tabitha,
nodding at the gouge beside Emma’s thumb.

‘Yeah, that was Archie,’ Emma chuckled. ‘He’s one of our
new polecats. He’s a nibbler.’

‘A nibbler? He’s taken a piece out of you,’ Tabitha
replied, examining the wound. Emma always had cuts and scrapes on her hands
from the animal sanctuary. Every once in a while though she’d come back with a
big fresh scar.

‘Is a polecat like a ferret?’ said Tabitha’s mum. ‘I
thought they didn’t let go when they bit you.’

‘They don’t,’ Emma replied, with a proud grin. I had to
give him a couple of hard smacks.’

‘Emma, you work in an animal sanctuary,’ said Jen
in disbelief.

‘Yeah, so?’ she replied. ‘If it’s taking my hand off
I’ll kill the little bastard first.’

‘Please tell me you didn’t kill him,’ said Tabitha.

‘No, course not,’ Emma replied. ‘He won’t do it again
though. Anyway, what about your job?’

‘Well no one ever tried to bite me, they just laid me
off,’ Tabitha said with a grin. Jen giggled. Tabitha hesitated as Emma expected
to hear more. What was there to say about being laid off, really?

‘I always said she was too good for that job,’ Tabitha’s
mum chipped in, and the great debate began. Tabitha could only watch from the
side lines for the rest of the conversation, drowned out by louder voices than
her own. She studied the dry latte froth that ringed her cup, and tried to get
a word in edgeways. She hadn’t changed since school either.

‘Come out tonight,’ Emma commanded, looking at Tabitha.
Their conversation stopped. Suddenly Tabitha had all their eyes on her, and she
shifted around in her seat. She’d wanted a quiet night tonight. Just her and
Mog, enjoying the last few days in their house.

‘Please come out,’ Jen added, between polite hay-fever
sneezes.

‘Go on,’ her mum chipped in. ‘It’ll do you good to get
out.’ Tabitha looked around at their expectant faces. They really wanted her to
come out.

‘…Ok,’ she told them, hesitant, already worrying about
how much she was likely to drink.

Emma,
Jen and Tabitha headed out into town later under a balmy evening sky. A bat flitted
overhead. They could have been somewhere in Spain, Tabitha thought, it felt so
warm tonight. Apart from the grey buildings, typically British. And the grease
smell of chippies, and the lager-drunk shouting coming from every pub they
passed. Bad music filled the air.

‘How about the cinema?’ Jen suggested. Tabitha’s magic
word.

‘We’re on a night out,’ Emma protested.

‘Cinema sounds good,’ Tabitha replied happily. Jen
sneezed and sniffled into a tissue.

‘Yeah but she’ll want to go and see that aliens one,’
Emma piped up. ‘It looks rubbish.’

‘But if you’ve never seen it, you don’t know,’ said
Tabitha. ‘You might like it.’

‘It’s always just loads of fighting and stuff,’ Emma
sulked.

‘I like fighting and stuff,’ Tabitha replied.

‘Well, it’s Tabitha’s call tonight,’ Jen said brightly,
smoothing her hair down over her ear as people passed by. ‘It’s National
Tabitha Night.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise,’ said Emma sarcastically. ‘Fine.
Boring alien film first. Then can we go and have a proper night out?’

Popcorn
at the ready, Tabitha watched the movie with baited breath. A lightshow danced
over a sea of faces in the dark cinema. A wall of sound hit her, drowned out
her thoughts. Roaring aliens; yelling heroes. Laser blasts and unlikely
explosions. A different world. Tabitha’s life outside disappeared now. She
drank in the effects, devoured the plot. Fell in love with everything
not-normal-life about it. How could Emma prefer TV soaps to this? Why
would anyone want to watch some gritty drama that they could see for real in
the street? Tabitha tangled herself up in the film, lost to the world.
Revelling in it. It was a far cry from the new romcom Jen had suggested; a
heartwarming tale of blah blah blah. What was the use in a film set that didn’t
flood, collapse, explode? What was the point in a character who wasn’t overly
gritty, overly virtuous, or wasn’t dressed in a skintight outfit? Emma had long
since divided her attention between the film and her phone, and had more
interest in the small screen in her hands. Jen was watching though. It wasn’t
her thing, but she was good at humouring people. Tabitha got her movie fix
though, and that was all she really cared about just now. She munched her
popcorn, slurped her cola, and let the hellish fury of million-dollar lights
and sounds beat her brain around the galaxy.

It
was a loud night out. The club smelled vaguely of sweat and strong spirits. The
music was even louder than the movie. A dark sonic world of crashing bass and
machine-gun drums, at war with silence and daylight. Tabitha felt careless and
confident, shouting conversation to Emma and Jen through the music. She even
got up to dance, so she’d definitely had too much to drink. She never danced
without a prior skinful, and now the club spun hectic when she left the table.
Emma and Jen were smiling in the dark; twisting shapes in front of her on the
dancefloor. Tabitha saw the way men were looking at Jen; sneaky glances and
drunken stares. She felt a vague nausea creeping over her; probably the shots
they’d done. It was only early, too. Why did she always have to drink so much?
Emma and Jen had been buying her shots constantly, as if that could change
anything about her situation. But she’d hardly refused them. She drained her
drink and looked around her; at the sweaty faces swimming in the loud brash
gloom.

Tabitha
staggered out of the taxi and made her unsteady way back to her front door. She
waved to Emma and Jen in the car and half stumbled, half fell when she turned
the key in the lock. The taxi had already pulled away when she turned to close
the door. She slammed it shut without meaning to and sat down on the floor in
the hallway, watching the murky drunken dark spin around her head. She couldn’t
even hold herself up straight. Her neck and shoulders moved of their own
accord. She propped herself up with her hands, swayed, then slowly sank to the
carpet. She stroked Mog when he came up to see her, and lay down when he
wandered off. It was just easier to stay horizontal when she got this drunk.
Luckily the room didn’t spin for long before she started snoring.

Sunday
was a grim grey zombie hangover day, and never really happened as far as
Tabitha was concerned. The highlights were headaches, crying and watching a box
set with Mog. And rain.

On
Monday Tabitha woke up early. No job to go to; the king of all lie-ins. The
warm sun glowed through the curtains, and half blinded her when she pulled them
open. Dust tumbled in the air, drifting down in the morning light. Mog wandered
in and jumped up on the bed.

‘Morning you,’ Tabitha said softly, stroking his head.
Mog was having none of it, and decided he was in a biting mood today. Tabitha
slipped her hand under the bedcover, and moved it around like a mouse for him
to chase. He hunted the rippling shape frantically, tail whipping as he clawed
the covers. Playful and murderous. Tabitha lifted the sheet up and pounced on
him with it, covering him over.

‘Got you,’ she told him, as he sat still in the duvet
cave. ‘You lose. You have to do the washing up now,’ she told him, lifting the
bedcovers back. Mog studied the moving covers expectantly, hoping for another
round. Tabitha watched him and smiled. She couldn’t refuse her cat.

Tabitha decided to start a blog today; an old some-day
fantasy to launch her to fame and fortune. She read lots of other bloggers
who’d done it; self-made experts in whatever subject they liked. She could be a
movie blogger; maybe even the biggest in Wales. Certainly the only one in this
town, so that was a start. She pictured having free movies to review; paid ads
on her website. She’d never need a day job again. She had it all planned out;
all she had to do now was work her arse off. So there she sat by her computer,
by the whistling window of her top-floor study, overlooking the grey summer
sea. She sipped her tea. Scalded her tongue. She'd given up smoking, but still
held her pen like a cigarette. She caught herself, then placed the surrogate
cigarette back on the desk. A nicotine-starved synapse made her eyelid shudder.
Mog leapt up and strutted across the keyboard. He walked past her to sit on the
far side of the desk, and licked his paws with noisy rasps. Tabitha stared at
Mog’s writing on the screen:

.;iudxs
z\

Tabitha tapped the Caps Lock off again and slouched with
a huff. It was 11:04. The internet had eaten her morning. It’d be high time for
a cake or a donut if she still had a job. She put that massive, crushing
thought from her mind with a shake of her head. She looked back up at the
computer screen, at the text in its entirety:

It’s

.;iudxs z\

She’d started this new document when the sun was rising
over the sea. She’d seen a scatter of dandelion seeds drift by in the warm
summer air; felt inspired and began to write. Hours later, she’d just watched
her cat casually beat her word count. The sunshine had long since faded to grey
rainclouds. Tabitha sat back and lifted the mug of steaming tea to her mouth
again, forgetting her sore tongue. She burned her lip, cursed. A falling
trickle of tea pattered down and turned the crotch of her grey jogging bottoms
into a hot black piss patch. Then came another power cut. Mains electricity had
never met with the full approval of this old house. The computer's gentle fan
died. The screen faded to black with a helpless tut. Her morning's work,
unsaved, was gone forever. That could have been the It’s to start an
internet sensation, she told herself. The greatest blog in the world. Once
again cruel fate had conspired to thwart her chances of fame and fortune.
Tabitha saw her grim hedge-haired reflection in the black computer screen. She
couldn’t hear the birds singing any more outside. Rain blew in from the sea.
She stood up and pushed the chair away with her bum, and pulled the old window
back down an inch to close off the cold whistling gap. She blew on a stray
dandelion seed on the window sill, and watched it sail up towards the ceiling.
She glanced out of the window as raindrops plinked and pattered on the glass.
Wished for a decent summer. With shuffling slippered feet she carefully carted
her mug of tea downstairs. Mog tried to get under her feet every step of the
way.

‘Why are you purring?’ she asked him, as
they went down the second creaky staircase together. She had to stop and start,
sidestepping him, trying not to stand on a paw in the gloom. The lights in the
house flickered and came back on.

The salty scent of bacon filled the kitchen,
filled the house. Both well-fed and sleepy, Mog and his human snoozed on the
couch to the gentle patter of the pouring rain. Meanwhile, up in the study, the
dandelion seed was moving. It had long since floated down when Tabitha blew on
it, and now it bobbed along the carpet to a damp mouldy corner of the room.
Tabitha hadn’t noticed how silvery the seed looked. She hadn’t seen its tiny legs,
no bigger than a mite’s, wriggling for something to root in. The seed burrowed
down into the damp carpet in the corner. With the quietest electronic chirrup,
a tiny grey shoot sprouted from the floor. The sound was just enough to wake
Mog, ears raised. As he jumped down from Tabitha's stomach she woke up with a
gentle grunt.

All afternoon the metallic shoot took in the sunlight
that emerged from the grey clouds. It produced pulsing little lights on tiny
fibrous branches. Its presence being neither intriguing nor frustrating to Mog,
it had been sniffed and left unharmed. Tabitha didn’t see it; she was too busy
trying to write her blog. She didn’t notice its rapid alien growth in the back
corner of the room. She tried her best never to look in that corner. It was a
useless cobwebbed space where the angled ceiling sloped in, too damp and mouldy
to leave a box or a bag there. Too disgusting to clean. If she never looked
there, she’d never feel guilty enough to clean it. She sipped fresh tea and
watched the sunlight sprawl over the ocean; a grey-brown eternity beyond the
road outside her window. The computer speakers gushed shameless pop into the
room, making Tabitha tap her toes to the beat. A seagull flew by outside with a
whooping call, laughing at Tabitha’s joblessness. She slouched there all
afternoon, staring at the bright glow of her blank-paged computer screen.
Typing. Deleting. Repeating.

A house spider, meanwhile, spent all afternoon in the
bathroom. It was scaling the inside of the grand old bathtub by frantically
picking out, with trial and much error, the rougher patches of the worn enamel
surface. By sundown its legs tapped against the rim of the bath.

A seagull sat on the weathered old metal railing on the seafront. Behind it,
across the road, a light in the top window of a town house glowed warmly in the
gathering dusk. Inside, a crazy-haired lady sat at her computer with her head
in her hands. She heard a couple on the street below, fighting and screaming,
probably drunk. She lost her train of thought. Thankfully they went on down the
street, giving Tabitha back her beloved silence. In the musty bathroom Mog
stared momentarily at a fresh hairball, and pawed the spider as it scuttled
across the rim of the bath. The spider fell to the floor, and quickly curled up
to receive a cat-batting around the lino. Caught and briefly mangled in the
dribbling depth of Mog’s mouth, the spider was coughed out to die in a corner.

Up the second staircase in her study, Tabitha suddenly
sat up and tapped away at her computer:

The
true value of films lies in

Hesitating, she slumped back in her chair with a huff of
defeat. Futility draped itself around her shoulders, as cold and comfortless as
a damp shawl with a charity-shop smell. Mog wandered into the room unnoticed.
He puffed up in fright at the thing in the back corner and made a swift exit.
Where a small grey shoot had sprung up from the carpet this morning there was
now an alien plant, two feet across, sitting spidery and silver in the shadowed
corner of the room. Opening its mouth parts, out slid a sinewy, synthetic snake
of a tongue. Tabitha was checking her messages, unaware. The tongue stretched
out silently across the room. It edged towards the back of Tabitha’s head while
she sat staring at her screen. A big bony needle on the tip was filling with
venom for the kill. Slouching in her chair, Tabitha typed something and then
deleted it again. The tongue stretched and swayed behind her, serpentine,
aiming for the top of her neck. It tensed up, coiled back, and shot out
silently. Tabitha kicked the chair back and walked out in search of her
vibrator, yawning like a foghorn. Unsuccessful, the silver plant tried to
wrench its spiked tongue quietly from the back of the chair. Mog came back in
and watched it cautiously from the door. Once free of the chair, the plant
swallowed its tongue back inside. Its body sagged with newborn exhaustion, and
splayed out metallic branches to absorb the growing moonlight. Its tiny lights
flickered out while it recharged, and it sat completely still. Mog stalked
around it, approached it. He gave it a careful sniff here and there, and batted
it with a paw. The silver plant did nothing. It was too hard for Mog to pluck
or chew, and smelled of not very much, so it held very little interest just
now. Mog gave up his inspection and resolved to play with the plant’s wriggling
limb in the future, when the opportunity presented itself.

Tabitha
slept peacefully that night in her double bed. She was sprawled out with
newfound freedom; no longer kicked or groped by a snoring boyfriend. Her soles
stroked the bobbly feel of clean sheets. The homely perfume of good washing
powder filled her head and tinted her dreams. Down the street, Mog strode along
a garden wall and thought about sex. In Tabitha’s bathroom a silverfish tapped
the house spider's hunched corpse with its antennae. In the study, the alien
plant woke up in the corner. It folded its branches down into spider legs, and
uprooted itself from the floorboards with a rustling creak. It scuttled its
sleek form down the stairs to the large landing, sniffing out prey. Tabitha’s
closed bedroom door thwarted it. It scrambled gently, soundlessly against the
door for hours while Tabitha slept. The tall gap beneath the solid door could
accommodate its skinny young limbs, but they flapped around redundantly and
soon withdrew. Tabitha turned over and began to snore, blissfully unaware. Her
ugly old piggy bank watched over her from the shelf beside the bed;
perma-grinned porcelain, glowing night-blue in the curtained moonlight. The
silver alien spider slinked downstairs to explore the distant drone of the
fridge.

Sunrise
over the sea front. The seagulls were calling already. Mog sat on the living
room window sill and watched them keenly, making short sharp meows. His head
darted back and forth to follow their flight. His pinprick pupils stared in the
bright dawn. Tabitha, fresh from the shower and towel-clad, padded barefoot
into the kitchen. She rustled cereal into a bowl and caught a waft of it,
sugar-sweet. Water dripped from her hair onto the worktop; glassy splashes
exploding in slow-motion. Cold milk crackled on her cereal, a silky white gush.
She smoothed her wet hair over her shoulder and dusted her cereal with extra
sugar, then flicked the kettle on and leant against the worktop while it
boiled. She leaned over and plucked a clinking cup from the hooks. Took a
clattering teaspoon from the drawer in front of her and put it in the cup. The
silver spider untucked its legs and crawled silently from the cupboard behind
her. Soundlessly it crept across the wall, and squatted its arachnid mass on
the ceiling over her head. Small lights on its body focussed their attention on
the top of her wet neck. Its spiked tongue slid out from its parting mouth, a
shining trunk slick with mucus. Silently the giant spider shifted its clawed
feet around on the ceiling for the best position. It moved one leg, then
another, then another. Soft as petals it lowered two clawed legs to join its
tongue, ready to grip Tabitha’s temples before it punctured the base of her
skull. Tabitha waited for the kettle and stared at the floor in a bleary-eyed
haze, oblivious. She wiggled a finger in her ear with a wet rattling squelch to
loosen the water that welled there. The kettle boiled. Steam rolled up against
the cupboards and clouded the cold metal arms that descended, inch by inch.
Condensation gathered on the lowering spike and turned to droplets. Propped
against the kitchen counter, Tabitha put a spoonful of sugary cereal in her mouth
with a cold crunch and munched it loudly. A bead of moisture rolled down the
alien tongue, dripped from the bony spike and landed on the back of Tabitha’s
neck. She scratched idly where the drop fell and crunched another mouthful of
cereal, turning to look out of the window at the greying sky. She tutted at the
weather. The giant spider hesitated at the sound. Mog jumped up on the worktop
behind Tabitha, stood up on his back legs against the cupboard and pawed the
alien tongue playfully. His swishing tail caught the teaspoon with a tinkle in
Tabitha’s empty cup. Tabitha turned at the sound.

‘Mog, get down,’ she said. Then she saw the bony spike
above her head. She looked up at the silver spider on the ceiling. She didn’t
gasp or scream. She felt her insides twist for a second in primal fear, and
ducked down from the jabbing spike. Then she ran. The spider dropped and
scuttled after her, inches from her heels. Mog streaked past her upstairs and
into the bedroom. Tabitha sprinted in after him. She tried to slam the solid
old door behind her, trapping the spider’s tongue in the doorframe as it shot
towards her knee. The rubbery limb stopped the door from closing. A pair of
spindly silver legs edged in through the gap around the door, waving in the air
to find her. The thick tongue withdrew then, and Tabitha saw her chance. It
took all of her strength to bang the door shut on the spindly legs. They
curled, frayed and lifeless, on her side of the door. With terrifying strength
the spider tried to wrench its dead metal limbs free from the doorframe. The
door shuddered loudly on its hinges. Tabitha's shaking hands snapped the lock
shut on the door handle. Her heart was hammering; the metal taste of fear
filled her dry mouth. Her thoughtless panic gave way to terrified confusion.
She searched her head for some kind of meaning, some kind of plan. Mog stared
hunched and saucer-eyed from the top of the wardrobe in the corner. Silver legs
whipped frantically through the gap under the door. Tabitha backed up to the
bed out of their way. Getting nothing from her phone but white noise, Tabitha
slammed it down on the bedside table. So it was just her, then. Just her and
death at the door, sudden and inexplicable. She was balled up on the bed, half
tempted to hide under the covers like a screaming cliché. The monster wasn’t
going anywhere though. The door was taking a beating, and she heard it crack on
the other side. This was her only chance to stop it, whatever the hell it was,
while the door still stood between them. Tabitha gritted her teeth and switched
her brain back on. What would her movie heroes do? She willed her hands to stop
shaking, and she put some clothes on. New t-shirt, old jeans. In her own good
time. Meanwhile the thing scrabbled relentlessly against the door. Made
spaghetti of the nice new carpet in a hail of fluff. Tabitha searched the
bedroom for weapons, but saw nothing. Coat hangers, lamp, hairdryer. TV, shoes.
She glanced over at the electrical socket beside the door.

Crawling towards the door, she grabbed nervously at a
trapped metal limb in the doorframe. Pulling it, the spidery leg snapped off
redundantly. The metal was dull and smooth like silver rubber. Angular grains
like engravings ran up its spindly length. The small clawed hand at the tip
rolled back when she pulled it, like a cat’s paw or a foreskin, to reveal a
toothpick-thin spike. The leg was a thing of exquisite, murderous beauty. But
it was no use to her as a weapon; bendy as a plastic snake. The spider felt her
presence there and thrust another leg beneath the door, plunging a spike into
her thigh. Spurting venom into her flesh. Tabitha screamed. A hot rush of shock
filled her veins, and something alien too. Her adrenaline surged. She yelled as
the metal limb wriggled out from her leg. Blood dribbled and streamed from her
wound, soaking through her jeans onto the cream carpet. Before the spider leg
could strike again she grasped it, wrenched it into a boomerang shape and
rammed its needled bloody tip into the mains socket. Plugged it in. Nothing happened.
The socket switch wasn’t on. The leg writhed and tried to free itself, but
Tabitha held it in place. More legs scrambled for her under the door, flailing
and slamming. Panicking, Tabitha let go of the limb and pushed the socket
switch beside the jammed-in claws. There was a sudden loud crack and a spark,
and the thing’s body slumped to the floor outside with a thud. Tabitha’s blood
coated the metal claw that had stabbed her, and boiled from the wall socket in
bright red bubbles. The lights went out. Tabitha took a few deep breaths,
sitting by the wall. She gave up searching for sense. She grunted at the pain
in her leg and hobbled to the door, unlocked it. She stood there and listened
for it outside, just to be sure. When she opened the door an inch and peered
terrified through the gap, she saw a dead alien spider crumpled on the floor.

A little later the dead creature sat propped up by the
wall on the landing, wiry legs poking skywards, and could easily have passed
for a discarded art project. Downstairs Mog squatted in his litter tray in the
kitchen, and wondered how to cope with recent events.

Tabitha had flipped the power back on. The phone was
still dead; she had to get out and be with her mum. She’d disinfected and
bandaged her leg. Already her thigh was patterned with steel-grey veins where
the thing injected her; a web of right-angles blushing beneath her skin. She
should have asked someone on the street to call an ambulance, but she was
paranoid. It’d be just like a sci-fi film, she told herself. She’d be
quarantined, experimented on. Maybe even dissected in some secret government
lab. No, she had to get to her mum. She had to tell her friends. At least then
people would know if she disappeared. She knew all about armies and
governments, and their fondness for testing strange new things. She’d seen
enough movies to know a thing or two about that.

‘Are you ok?’ she asked Mog. He was sitting despondently
on the living room carpet. ‘I’m going out for a while, ok?’ she said, hobbling
over to stroke him. She had to see her mum. The shock hadn’t sunk in yet. It
was too strange to sink in. Mog purred at her strokes, and nuzzled her cold
hands. ‘See you later,’ she said gently, and limped back to the hallway to
wrestle her trainers on. Suddenly Tabitha stopped and gasped. She felt the
angular veins spread from her thigh; pins and needles under her jeans. The grey
veins coursed up her sides and down her arms. There was a crushing pain in her
chest then, like someone was stamping a breezeblock into it. She was having a
change of heart. She fell to her hands and knees, gasping and screaming. The
hallway twisted into darkness, and even the retching feeling running through
her body couldn’t keep her awake. Her brain shut everything down. Sick,
terrified, soaked in a cold sweat, Tabitha fell unconscious on the carpet.

3

Lindsey watched the bustle of New York rush past
outside the cafe. Yellow taxis crowded the road. Offices and department stores towered
above the street, half-blocking the blue summer sky. A man passing by glanced
in at her through the window; a pretty girl sulking at the world. She had her
arms crossed, sat facing her boyfriend Alex at their usual table. Staring at
him with smoky eyes, wishing she was somewhere else. Like back in Mike’s
apartment, wearing nothing but his bed sheets. It was hot today. Too hot for
this.

‘I just don’t understand
you sometimes,’ said Alex, leaning back from the table between them. After three
years together, Lindsey said to herself, he’s finally hit the nail on
the head.

‘You know, I think you
enjoy it when we do this,’ Alex concluded, giving up on his interrogation. He
leaned forward and sipped his coffee. ‘You like getting into these fights,’
he said. ‘That’s the only way I can see it.’ He sighed, frustrated. Lindsey
said nothing. God, she hated the smell of his coffee breath. He slurped it too.
Every single time. Just one of her pet hates about him, on a list that had
grown and grown. She didn’t like that t-shirt on him either. Lindsey checked
her phone then crossed her arms again with an angry sigh, looking out of the
window at the world. Wishing she was out there in it somewhere, minus Alex. She
used to love his impulsiveness; his ups and downs and his surfer-blonde hair.
He was still hot, but somehow she couldn’t stand anything about him any more.
His brother couldn’t come fast enough to meet up with him as far as she was
concerned. Then she might even be able to leave them to it, and go talk to Mike
in peace. She checked her hair in her phone camera. Outside the cafe window,
people on the street stopped and stared into the sky, raising their phones to
take pictures. The bright summer sky had filled with shooting stars, strangely
slow and graceful. Heavenly papercuts in the blue. Lindsey and Alex didn’t
notice.

‘Look, I’m sick of
wondering about this,’ said Alex. Pausing, thinking. Chewing over the words in
his head. Running through the consequences if he was wrong. Best to just come
out and say it. He sighed. ‘…Is there someone else?’ Lindsey felt a hot heavy
rush at the question, like her blood had turned to molten lead. Her stomach
twisted. She couldn’t find the words. Just what was her thing with Mike,
anyway? Was he going to be ok with her moving in? Or was she just a toy to him?
She lost track of time in her silence. Trying to work out an answer. Why not
just tell him?

‘Lindsey. Answer me,’
Alex demanded, fixing her with a stare.

‘Yeah,’ she blurted out.
She hadn’t even thought this through.

‘Yeah what?’ said Alex.

‘I’ve met someone,’ she
replied, looking down at the table. Alex laughed, incredulous.

‘You’ve been cheating on
me?’ he said, smiling in disbelief. She’d never seen him stare like this
before. Intense. She couldn’t look him in the eye. She moved her finger through
spilled sugar on the table top; coarse grains that tumbled under her touch.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
Alex said nothing; he just stared. ‘I met him at the party,’ Lindsey added.

‘I don’t want to know
where you met him,’ Alex scoffed, sipping his coffee. ‘I don’t care.’ Lindsey
had expected a shouting match. Alex was good at those. But this new
indifference… she didn’t know how to react. By reflex she looked down at her
phone. Alex grabbed it out of her hands and smashed the screen against the
table corner. Lindsey jumped, watched him cautiously. People were staring.

‘How about a real
conversation?’ he suggested, smiling at her. ‘You know, where you’re not
looking at this fucking thing?’ Alex dropped the shattered phone into Lindsey’s
drink and sat back, savouring the look on her face. She stared at the corpse of
her phone.

‘Look at me,’ he said
quietly. Lindsey hesitated, opened her mouth to speak. This was a new side to
him.

‘I think…’ Lindsey began.
‘I think –

‘No, you don’t,’ Alex cut
in, grinning. ‘You just spread your legs.’ He sipped his coffee. The lights
went out, and the music stopped. Alex didn’t even get to see the look on her
face, it was so dark in here suddenly. There was a car crash outside the
window, a shrill sudden bang. Screeching brakes. More cars smashed together
behind it, all the way up the street.

‘What the hell?’ Alex
mumbled. Lindsey’s mind strayed from what she was about to yell at him; there
was suddenly a lot of shouting and screaming outside. People got up from their
tables and wandered outside. Lindsey and Alex watched by the window. A couple
of women on the street were helping an old man from his car; blood ran from his
forehead. Pale with shock, he stared wide-eyed as they sat him down on the
kerb. The cups and cafe windows rattled at a distant explosion, and suddenly
the street erupted into screams and shouts.

‘What’s going on?’ said
the man at the table beside them. Alex could only shrug and shake his head. It
was gloomy inside the cafe, with only the sunlight through the windows to see
by. Everyone was asking the same things; no one knew the answers.

‘Hey, this lady needs an
ambulance!’ said a big man at the door. He was pointing outside, where a woman
sat bleeding in the ruin of her car.

‘What happened?’ said the
waitress behind the counter, shrill-voiced, reaching for the phone.

‘She doesn’t know,’ the
big man replied. ‘Says her car just cut out and she couldn’t control it.
Everyone’s saying the same thing.’

‘The phone’s not
working,’ the waitress replied, looking lost. The man at the door cursed.

‘Well, can everyone stop
just sitting there and come help?’ he said, looking around at the diners.
‘There’s crashes all the way up the street!’ there was a sudden tremor and
another distant explosion, and the echoing sound of screams down the road. Alex
and Lindsey heard a man shout for everyone to stay indoors.

‘There’s no sirens,’ said
Lindsey as they got up. Suddenly the dark cafe was getting more and more
crowded as people rushed inside for shelter.

‘What’s going on?’ Alex
asked a woman who’d come inside, pressed beside their table with the sudden
crowd.

‘I don’t know,’ she
replied simply, shaking her head in shock. ‘There’s a big dustcloud, like a bomb.
Heard this guy say a plane had come down.’

‘A plane?’ said
the man at the table beside them, standing up from his seat.

‘I heard that too,’
another lady chipped in, budging over towards them. The chattering crowd from
the street swelled behind her into the cafe. Another explosion shook the walls;
this time much closer. Some of the windows cracked in sharp icy splits. The
noise outside was unmistakeable; panic.

‘We need to get out and
help!’ said Alex, trying to push at the mass of people. After a brief confused
silence outside the streets filled with running crowds.

‘We need to get out
there!’ Alex insisted, stuck against the chattering mob inside.

‘When there’s planes
coming down?’ said Lindsey, grabbing his arm. There was a deep whirring
noise then, louder and louder. The whole street erupted into yells and
terrified screams. A helicopter ploughed down into crashed cars outside and
burst into flames, a deafening glimpse of hell. The cafe windows blew and
rained glass down inside. The terrified crowd was ducking and shouting. Alex
tried to get out from behind the table. He felt Lindsey’s hand holding onto his
arm. He looked into her frightened eyes, gripped her hand, and pulled it away.

‘What the hell’s going
on!?’ the waitress screeched, stuck behind the counter in the yelling press of
people. There was a man praying somewhere in the crowd. Everyone screamed and
yelled again as the cafe floor shook beneath their feet. Dust tumbled down from
the ceiling, peppering their heads. Suddenly the place filled with more
screaming people, a panicked crush of pedestrians fleeing the carnage outside.
All chattering about the same thing – that the power was out. That their phones
didn’t work, and the city had ground to a halt. That there were planes falling
from the sky.

‘Alex? Alex!’ a man
yelled from the door. The cafe was rammed; there was no way for him to push
through. Alex looked over the mass of people to see his brother David, stuck in
the crowd at the door.

‘We have to get out of
here, come on!’ David yelled over the screams and shouts.

‘I’m climbing out of the
window, get back outside!’ Alex called back, pointing at the shattered frame.
David fought his way back out through the crowd to meet his brother on the
street, as Alex climbed carefully over the shards in the broken window. The
smell of smoke filled the air.

‘Lindsey, give me your
hand!’ said David, reaching into the cafe window over the shattered glass.
Lindsey reached over and took David’s hands, and stepped cautiously over the
broken glass in the window frame.

‘Where do we go now?’
said Lindsey, terrified.

‘Go wherever you want
to,’ Alex replied with a shrug.

‘You’re just going to
leave me here?’ she said.

‘Yeah, I am!’ he yelled.

‘Guys, can we not do this
right now?’ David chipped in.

‘She’s been cheating on
me,’ Alex told him. David looked at Lindsey. She looked away down the street.
He thought better of saying what he was about to say.

‘Everyone, get out of
there!’ said Alex, beckoning the cafe crowd onto the street. Frightened faces
turned to him from inside, watching through broken windows. ‘This building’s
going to collapse if a plane comes down! Get outside!’

‘We need to stay in
here!’ a man called out over the chatter. ‘It’s safer in here!’ Alex didn’t have
time for a debate. They’d be safer if they were all moving.

‘What the hell are you
doing? We have to get out of here!’ he yelled back at the crowd. There was a
sound then like nothing they’d ever heard before. A feeling pounded in their
chests; an uneasy vibration like bass in an over-loud nightclub. The sound
seemed to come from miles away and overhead at the same time; a deep static
hiss that echoed through the city. Louder than fireworks; bigger than thunder.
There was a tearing noise then, a rabid digital rush, filling the city and the
sky above them. The ground shook violently in a sudden earthquake.

‘David!’ said Alex,
pointing off down the road. They couldn’t see what was making the noise, but
they could see the fallout in the far distance. There was a dust cloud the size
of mountains, a boiling grey mass, crawling up into the sky on the far side of
the bridge. There was rain too; a hail of bricks and stone. Lindsey ran for the
cafe door and pushed her way inside again. Alex and David ran for their lives
as a car-sized chunk of concrete tumbled out of the sky. It tore through an
office block across the street, sending a landslide of stone and brick dust
crashing down onto the sidewalk. The streets were filled with screams against a
chorus of rumbles and bangs. Stonework crashed down in the eerie silence. The
air was filling with dust and smoke, and more chunks of road and building came
hurtling from the sky into the street. The press of people inside the cafe
watched through the shattered windows. Staring at stores and restaurants across
the road, all filled with panicked faces watching the sky. Outside on the
street, stray survivors limped towards doorways or lay in pools of their own
blood, reaching out to no one. The rocks and concrete rained down all around
them from the looming fallout in the sky, smashing car windscreens or
clattering on the asphalt. A woman ran out from the Italian restaurant across
the street to help an old man bleeding on the road. She sat the old man up and
cried out for help. Faces watched from every window. A moment later, they both
disappeared beneath a giant piece of asphalt that crashed down on the road. The
ground shook at the impact, rippling the road and cracking paving slabs.

Lindsey and the crowd in
the cafe stared in horror at the scene outside. A screaming boutique across the
road was suddenly demolished by a falling piece of tower block, in a deafening
burst of glass and stone.

‘Where’s the basement!?’
one man yelled at the cafe waitress. ‘Show me where the basement is, now!’
suddenly everyone was fixated on getting into the basement, shouting and
screaming for safety. Lindsey watched people limping out from the dust cloud
outside, dazed and pale. Bright red blood, garnet-stark in the daylight. Bricks
still rained from the gloomy sky in a constant pounding chorus. The noisy crowd
in the cafe had found the trapdoor to the basement. They quickly filled it, but
more people were trying to push their way down inside to safety. There were
screams of protest from below, as people crushed against each other in the
pitch black cellar. Claustrophobic yells. A thundering rush drowned out their
shouting then; a rumbling tide above their heads. The floors above crashed down
on top of them in a dusty crush. The cafe collapsed into screaming rubble.

Alex and David were running. They had to get to their
family, and get away from the city. The colossal dust cloud crept down every
street, drying their mouths and lungs, blinding and choking them as they ran.
Behind them other people edged outdoors too; calling after them in the dust and
silence, unsure whether to stay or go. It was like running through fog, and all
the while the hail of rocks and grit pummelled everything around them. The
fallout cloud above them only grew bigger, rolling over the sky to block out
the sun. Abandoned cars and dust-pale bodies appeared through the choking mist.
A grimy film of dirt coated everything. It powdered the sidewalk thickly under
their feet, like fake snow on a hot dead Christmas. Buildings toppled around
them and people screamed for help, but the brothers didn’t stop running. When
entire walls were sailing through the sky from across the river and crashing
down in the streets, all they could think was run. They’d always managed
to keep perfect pace when they were younger, but David had let himself go. He
was starting to lag behind.

‘Down here!’ Alex
shouted, taking a side street where the dust cloud wasn’t so thick. David
stumbled and retched on the road, but Alex was there to pull him up and drag
him on. The city sounded like a warzone around them, all echoing cracks and
booms. A rock crashed down onto a dumpster on their left, cratering the lid.
Alex watched his feet running but didn’t feel like he was there. He felt his
heart racing, but he wasn’t sure if he was still attached to it. Everything was
dizzy and spinning in the shock. His brother’s voice was right next to him, but
far away. All he felt were the stinging pebbles that struck his skin, raining
down on them after another massive, static hiss. All he knew was that they were
running. Running from a volcanic cloud that was twice as big now, filling the
sky. When they reached the far end of the side street onto another block, David
grabbed Alex’s arm. Begging for a moment to stop and catch his breath.

‘Jesus Christ,’ David
panted, gasping for air. He felt like passing out. They stared down the road at
the ruined city beyond the river; everything burning and collapsing. Through
the huge gloomy cloud of the fallout, there was a dark shape moving in the sky.
A black monstrous mass of tentacles that loomed over the city, only hinted at
through the dust cloud. A twisting tower of light spewed out from its belly,
toppling skyscrapers in a thundering rush. Churning more of the city up into
the sky. Alex opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t find the words. The
blond brothers could only look from the ship to one another, silent in
disbelief. Something exploded behind them, throwing them into the air. David
watched the world spin around him, as if in slow motion, and the road came up
to slam him in the face. All he heard was the ringing in his ears, high and
endless. Senseless, he lay there staring at the dust cloud in the sky, vast and
tumbling, like a volcano had blown. Nothing mattered for a little while, and he
closed his eyes... Then he remembered that he wasn’t waking from a dream. He
was lying on the road at the end of the world. He had to get back to Helena and
the kids. That was all that mattered. He looked around desperately for his
brother, ears still ringing. The street was a silent grey fog, tilting and
shaking as he looked around at it.

‘Alex?’ he called out.
His voice echoed down the empty street, into the creeping wall of dust.

‘I’m here,’ came his brother’s
muffled voice behind him. Alex helped him back to his feet. David staggered.
Blinking and dust-pale, he realised that he couldn’t see from his right eye.
Alex held him strongly by the shoulders, staring at him in shock. His brother’s
face was inches from his own, but he could hardly see him in the ashen gloom.

‘Are you ok?’ David
slurred, with the taste of metal in his mouth. As he wiped his chin he realised
his arm was blackened and soaked in blood. He tried to put some weight on his
right leg and screamed.

‘Take it easy. I’ve got
you,’ Alex said gently. He helped David into the passenger side of a car close
by. Alex turned the key in the ignition, but there was no sound. He cursed,
slamming the steering wheel.

‘Nothing’s working!’ he
yelled, trying his phone. He got back out and helped David to his feet. Alex
tried not to look at the gaping hole in his brother’s stomach.

‘I’m getting you to the
hospital,’ said Alex.

‘If it’s still there,’
David mumbled, smiling. He was still smiling when he collapsed on the road,
staring shell-shocked at the sky. Alex had to catch him and lie him down, just
to stop him hitting the road hard.

‘Here, hold this on your
stomach to stop the bleeding,’ said Alex, wriggling out of his jacket. ‘Hold it
as tight as you can.’ He pressed his bunched-up coat against the hole in
David’s stomach, but his brother couldn’t lift his arms to hold on to it.
David’s blood was puddling around them on the road, stark red against the pale
snowy dust.

‘Hold it on there,’ Alex
insisted, wiping a tear quickly off his face. He looked into his brother’s
eyes. ‘Hold it on.’

‘I love you, man,’ David
whispered, as the sky and the city and his brother faded to black.

‘David?’ Alex said
quietly, watching his brother’s lifeless face. ‘David!’ Alex could only stare
in shock, holding his brother’s cold limp hand. David’s dead eyes stared up at
the vanishing sun. Overhead a vast black shape crawled through the sky.

4

Blinking,
Tabitha came around on the carpet. She’d been having the longest dreams, and so
vivid too. Of spidery silver legs in the dark, reaching out towards her. Of a
pain so fierce, she’d thought her heart was about to burst through her chest.
It took a while to get the feeling back in her limbs.

‘Oh, shit,’ she croaked drowsily, realising with utter
shame that she’d soiled herself. She sat up and squinted at the hallway around
her. Dry mouth; morning breath. Why did she have a hangover?

‘Ok… what just happened?’ she asked the empty house,
gasping for a drink. She’d never felt so desperately thirsty; so utterly
disgusting.

Half-blind she staggered upstairs to the bathroom and
threw up in the toilet. It wouldn’t flush properly. The sink tap just choked
when she turned it, and shuddered the pipes. There was nothing but a dribble of
brown sludge spluttering out; the same from the shower too. Cursing, she pulled
off her sodden clothes. She unwrapped the bandage around her thigh, peeling dry
like ancient paper; crusted with silver. The square grey veins had disappeared;
there was only a pock mark left where the needle had punctured her skin.
Shuffling out again, she fetched a big bottle of water from the kitchen to wash
herself off in the bathtub. The clean frothy perfume of soap had never smelled
so good; she still couldn’t believe that she’d crapped herself. Her body felt
numb as she towelled down and brushed her teeth. The bathroom was still a blur
in the white daylight; glowing smudges and dancing shadows. As her vision
slowly came back into focus, she stared at her hands. She wiggled her fingers,
turned her palms up. She raised her hands up at the window, just to make sure
she wasn’t seeing things. Her hands were grey. They were grey metal. Dull,
matte, rubbery metal. The grey faded back to her own skin tone at the wrists,
as if her hands had been spray-painted. Like she was wearing painted-on gloves.
She tried to grip the grey coating and peel it off, but there wasn’t a join.
She scratched at the armoured skin but felt nothing. She could still feel her
grey fingertips scratching at her wrists, at least. But clapping her hands, and
pinching them, and punching them, even banging them down on the sink to hurt
them… no sensation at all. She had, however, sent a crack right through the
heavy sink. Another whack, and the sink shattered with a gurgling spurt of
gunge from the pipes. She’d barely shifted her feet back in time to avoid
broken toes. Tabitha looked at her hands; looked around at the bathroom to see
if she was still dreaming.

‘What?...’ she mumbled to herself, sitting down on the
edge of the bathtub. When she glanced in the mirror, she saw someone new. Her
sad eyes were piercing green, lighter than they should have been. Her ginger
curls had turned a vivid shade of red. She stared in silent shock; raised a
grey hand to her face. That wasn’t her.

Dazed, Tabitha wandered back into her bedroom. She saw
the threadbare carpet just inside the doorway. It was all coming back to her
then, like a dream forgotten. Silver legs; lots of legs. And the stabbing alien
needle. She studied the little pock mark in her thigh where the needle had gone
in. It’d healed incredibly well for such a short time; there wasn’t even a
scab. Looking around as she got dressed, she saw a silver spidery leg on the
carpet behind the door. The alien. The socket… she’d killed it. It was out on
the landing. Tabitha turned around, and there it was. Propped up in the back
corner, legs jutting up against the wall. Just as sinister in death. She didn’t
want to go close, but curiosity pushed her towards it like a hand on the small
of her back. She reached out and touched a silver leg. Its skin rasped against
her grey palm like sandpaper. The same skin.

Tabitha sat down on her bed, and pulled her phone from
her pocket to call her mum. The phone didn’t switch on though. The charger
didn’t work either. Not the lights, or the radio, or her little TV. No
electricity, no running water… what was going on? Nothing made sense. She had
to get to her mum. Everything would be alright; she just had to get to her mum.
She had to tell her the whole terrifying tale.

When Tabitha came back downstairs into the living room,
Mog didn’t recognise her. She looked much the same but moved, smiled and
smelled differently. Her every step was a snake-hipped seduction to the empty
house around her.

‘Hi,’ she said softly, waiting for Mog to edge closer
for a stroke. Eventually he came and nudged her grey hands and circled her
feet, purring. Tabitha put some food out for him in the kitchen, and stroked
him as he tucked in. She couldn’t feel his fur on her fingers. There was a sour
rancid smell coming from the fridge; the power must have cut out while she was
passed out on the carpet. A cold puddle covered half the kitchen floor. Just
how long had she been unconscious? She took a carving knife from the kitchen
drawer to dissect the alien upstairs. She had to be quick. She had to get to
her mum. But if there were more of these creatures out there, then she had to
know how to stop them. She had to know what made them tick. Suddenly this was
survival.

As she skinned her kill quickly in the bathtub, Tabitha
realised that her body felt leaner. Stronger. She peeled back the alien’s skin
in a rush and caught her wrist against the edge, and it sliced her skin like a
tin lid. Blood like quicksilver streamed down her arm for a second, before the
stinging cut healed up. A few seconds, and it’d closed up completely. She
stared at her blood, shining silver like mercury, still dribbling down her arm.
It tasted good. Beneath the spider’s skin were fibrous muscles, solid
bunched-up cords of white meat. It hardly smelled of anything; just metal and
faint salty flesh, with the clammy whiff of oil mixed in. Its splayed legs
looked part spider and part crab. Its silver blood dripped thick into the
bathtub, pooling and trickling down the drain.

After the quick dissection Tabitha slipped the carving
knife into her belt. She’d wasted enough time. How could she not have rushed
out to see her mum first? She hurried downstairs and swapped her trainers for
hiking boots.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ she told Mog in the kitchen,
rushing back through the living room for the front door. She stopped for a
second, and felt a tingling in her chest. A sudden burst of lightning arced
around her; a noisy crackling hiss. She stared in shock at white veins of
electricity, coming from her. Something in her chest came to life where
her heart should have been; something made of living metal and current. Voltage
coursed through her body. Frantic branches of lightning jumped out of her,
scorching the walls. Tabitha was paralysed; feeling too good to do anything
about it. High on a neon cloud in her head. She tensed up inside when the
electric feel embraced her. Weak at the knees. She felt the current reaching in
everywhere, warm and tingling. Some new part of her mind fantasised about
cables and circuits; saw their amorous voltage reaching out towards her. There
was a lightning storm around her in the living room. Her clutter and magazines
were sailing through the air, blown against the walls in a hissing gale of
static. Mog escaped out of the cat flap in the kitchen door. Tabitha threw her
head back. The volts reached into her, right in. They made her gasp. She moaned
and smiled, climaxing. Every electronic shook and rumbled then, and exploded
suddenly in a cloud of sparks and smoke. The stuffing from the couch tumbled
down like foam snow. Tabitha writhed on the carpet as the waves of pleasure
died down.

‘Hm?’ she said in a daze, sitting up to look around. A
lightning storm had scarred her living room. Possessions in ruins. TV on fire.
As her senses came back to her, Tabitha remembered her mum. She had to get to
her. Drunk on voltage, she picked up the TV and sent it bursting through the
window. She leapt out after it; cast her old self aside. Tabitha was about to
become much, much more.

Tabitha leapt down to the garden. The shattered plastic
corpse of her TV lay in pieces around her. She stood and stretched, took in the
seaside. Walked out onto the street. She wondered what everyone would make of
her now, lithe and confident; bright red hair and steel-grey hands. But the
street was empty. The air was a heavy silence. The sky was cloud-muddled, stark
and white. Beneath it the grey world sprawled in shock, silent and bleak. The
drains reeked; the cloying sulphur smell of decay. There were no city sounds,
no hiss of traffic in the distance. Only the tide and the seagulls. Where was
everyone? She got into her car and it wouldn’t start. No lights, no radio,
nothing. This was getting too weird. She cursed and slammed the car door, and
walked off down the road at a panicked pace. The world seemed empty of people.
Far too quiet.

‘…Hello?’ she called down the street. No answer.
‘Hello!’ she called louder. Nothing. Not a single car on the roads; no sign of anyone
as she wandered. The world was empty, silent as a grave.

Down the main road away from town, something caught her
eye. Looking over the iron railing by the sea, Tabitha saw a huge black shape
beneath the waves. It looked like a kraken or a sunken ship, strewn in fairy
lights. What was it, a submarine? The water was too shallow here, surely. The
wind blew cold. She looked around to see twisting smoke, rising up all over
town along the bay. It looked like a warzone. Her next footstep sent a cracked
smartphone skittering expensively across the pavement. Tabitha went to pick it
up, then changed her mind. Strange to find a smartphone just lying around on
the pavement, broken or not. She stood up and looked around, and left it alone
like evidence at a crime scene.

‘Hello?’ she called out again, jogging down the road
towards her mum’s house. ‘Hello!’ nothing but silence. An empty world. No one
answered their doors when she knocked. This was beyond strange now; it was
frightening.

The daylight was cold and hard, and made the grey world
greyer. Tabitha hurried on and turned a street corner. She stopped suddenly,
staring at shapes on the road. Pale leathery forms tumbled in the wind like
popped lilos. Skins. Tabitha put her rough hands to her mouth, felt the sickness
rising up. They were people. Corpses. Boned and gutted, just haircuts
and skin, dried up and drained out and flapping down the pavement in the
breeze. One skin was draped over the kerb beside her; another tangled up in a
fallen mountain bike on the road. Tabitha ran back around the corner and
vomited over the rusted railing by the sea. Out there in the harbour by the
bobbing boats something caught her eye, caught her breath. Another black
lurking mass, a creature in the ocean. It looked like a bone-clad squid, a
writhing submarine. Tabitha stared in horror. The black shape reached up a
tree-thick tentacle from the water and pulled a fishing boat down into the
deep. It smashed and twisted the boat idly into its mouth, hidden in a mess of
arms. Tabitha could only watch in disbelief. A sudden metal shriek shot through
the silence, echoing down the road. She turned to see a pair of silver spiders,
scuttling down the street towards her.

‘Oh my god,’ she mumbled, wide-eyed, backing away. A
third spider emerged from a house on her right, edging down the wall from a
broken window. Staring, terrified, Tabitha reached for the carving knife tucked
into her belt. The spiders were closing in on her. She refused to believe it.
Her brain switched off when the first spider jumped. Instinct and adrenaline
drove her knife deep into the spider’s chest, with a squelching spurt of silver
blood. The spider screamed and clattered to the road, kicking at the air.
Tabitha backed away from the other two that crept forwards. She yelled and
jumped away from long jabbing tongues. The carving knife was still buried in
the first twitching spider; she couldn’t get it now. The other two were
stalking closer. Scared, unarmed, Tabitha looked from one to the other. Their
lanky legs clattered on the tarmac, stilted and silver. Black mouths drooling.

‘Get away!’ she yelled, waving her arms. The nearest
spider jumped and clutched her wrist, clawing her flesh. Tabitha screamed,
reacted. The spider fell to the road with a knuckle imprint in its head,
scratching around in a daze. Tabitha looked at her balled-up fist, solid and
grey. She hadn’t felt a thing. The other spider pounced, and she leapt away.
Before it could turn around she jumped in and hit it, then hit it harder. It
staggered on the road. She ran back over and wrenched the carving knife from
the dead one, and stuck it deep into the second. A metal scream, and the thing
dropped dead. She wrestled the knife back out with a squelch.

‘I’ll kill you!’ she yelled at the last spider, the one
with her knuckle print in its head. Tabitha felt her pulse pounding. She’d
never been in a fight. The spider was still drooling for the scent of her.
Crawling towards her. Edging its tongue out hungrily.

‘I’m warning you!’ she said, pointing the knife at it.
She’d never said that before in her life. She’d never really stood up to
anything before. The spider scuttled towards her regardless, and leapt. Tabitha
jumped away, but too slow. The thing sank a claw into her side and dragged her
screaming to the road, and leapt on top of her. Slid its tongue out towards her
face. Tabitha yelled, gripping the spike and wrestling it away. Panicking, she
stuck the knife deep into the spider’s head. The blade squeaked in through the
metal skin and suddenly the spider was a dead bleeding weight on top of her.
Gasping, she struggled out of its cage of dead legs. She staggered up and
backed away, and held the knife out at nothing around her. Breathed heavy.
Staring, wide-eyed, looking for danger on the empty road. She glanced down at
her ripped t-shirt and the silver blood that streamed from her side. She sat
down on the kerb and lifted her t-shirt up, only to see the wound healing up
before her eyes. The spider’s venom was in her veins though. She could feel it,
like a deep scalding chill. It hadn’t killed her the first time though; why
should it kill her now? She waited a minute on the kerb, and the cold rush
faded from her veins. She stood up and felt alright. No numb tingling; no
thumping pain in her chest. She tucked the silver-bloodied knife into her belt
and ran down the street for her mum’s house.

Tabitha reached the suburbs gasping for breath, far up
the hill away from town. All the houses were empty here too. Every street was
lifeless. Nothing but the odd seagull overhead. A garden gnome smiled from a
shrubby garden outside a bungalow, oblivious to the eerie silent world. Tabitha
leapt the garden wall and looked in the windows, but there was only gloom
inside. It was the same in every house she peered into. Pale sheets around her
caught her eye though, tumbling on the road or tangled up against hedges. They
weren’t sheets though… they’d been people. She didn’t look; she couldn’t. Every
time she saw an empty skin she crossed the street. She didn’t feel sadness,
only shock. Her fear took priority. Prey was selfish.

‘Hello? Mum?’ said Tabitha, closing her mum’s front door
behind her. Right away, the murky light in the house set her on edge. The
curtains hadn’t been opened, and that was very un-Mum.

‘Mum?’ she called out. She walked slowly down the
hallway, checked the kitchen and the living room. There was a smell from the
kitchen like sour milk, and the closed blinds gave her childhood home a dim,
languid light.

‘Mum,’ she called up to the bedrooms, climbing the steep
staircase. Her insides felt like concrete. She touched an old photo of Dad,
hanging on the wall at the top of the stairs. He was smiling; he’d always been
smiling. His grin was almost a gurn. He was always scruffy and daft, wearing
that dirty old jacket and turned-up corduroys. Shirts he could never be
bothered to iron. He’d always dressed like an old man. Tabitha felt a pain push
through her as she stroked the photo, like a shard of glass in her heart. Not
just for Dad, though. There was already a fresh weight of dread creeping over
her in the silence.

‘Tell me she’s alright Dad,’ she whispered to the photo,
voice trembling. ‘Don’t make me go in. Don’t make me go in.’ Her dad’s picture
just smiled though, gently oblivious. Smiled to her from history. Tabitha knew
what was coming. She felt all her life and joy draining out, and only cold hard
horror in its place. She didn’t want to turn away from Dad’s picture.

‘Mum,’ she said quietly, hoping against hope, looking at
the bedroom door. There was a smell coming through underneath it, and the sound
of flies buzzing inside. Tabitha placed a grey hand on the door and pushed
gently, slowly. She didn’t want to see everything. She only wanted to be sure.
She peered through the gap in the door, only inches wide. She saw a shoe on the
lilac carpet. And Mum’s desk, a neat clutter of perfume bottles and jewellery
boxes. Only one of the five ever had jewellery in it, Tabitha remembered. The
rest of them were full of shells and pebbles and dusty old feathers, and twigs
and ‘artefacts’ from when all three of them went on their walks. Mum had kept
everything. Her fluffy old dressing gown still warmed the chair it was draped
on. Behind it was the little heart on the mirror, drawn in red lipstick. Mum
had told her off when she caught her drawing it, until she saw it was a love
heart with MUM written inside it. In ten years, Mum had never wiped it off.
Tabitha didn’t open the bedroom door any wider. She couldn’t. Looking in the
mirror, she didn’t need to. She glimpsed the reflection and saw a lifeless
shape on the bed, half-hidden in the dim light of the drawn curtains. Tabitha’s
heart and strength and love fell out of her then, and what little of the
bedroom she saw through the half-open door became a teary blur. It was Dad all
over again; the deepest kind of pain. It ended her world, ripped her heart in
two. Tabitha burst into tears. She jumped as something brushed against her
hair; a note taped to the door. It didn’t say her name on the front, just My
beautiful girl. Tabitha picked it off the door and unfolded it. Gently she
closed the bedroom door and stood trembling on the landing. The letter was
written in a hurried scrawl, so unlike her mum’s usual notes. She had to blink
the tears away just to read it.

My
Tabitha.

Don’t
come in love, please. I’ve gone to be with your Dad now.

I
can’t put into words what I’m feeling. I’ve tried to get to you but I can’t, I
feel so helpless. If you find this, just know that I love you more than
anything in the world. It’s all happened so quickly. The phones aren’t working,
I’ve tried over and over to talk to you. I’m so sorry my beautiful girl. I
tried to come to you, but there were things on the pavements. One got me in the
leg and I ran back inside. I don’t know what’s happening.

There’s
too much to say, I can’t put it all into words. I’m going to go and lie down
now love, I feel so faint. I hope that you and God will forgive me for leaving
you.

Don’t
worry love, and don’t be sad. Me and your Dad will see you when you come to be
with God. I’ve left plenty of sleeping tablets in the bathroom if you need
them. But only if there’s no other way.

Whatever
happens love, don’t be scared. We’ll always love you and we’ll be waiting for
you. Do what you think is best, and remember that we’ll always be watching over
you.

See
you soon, my beautiful little girl. All my love, always,

Mum
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Tabitha wiped away her tears. She felt shell shocked.
Her mum had always left notes around for her, to tell her she was out and when she
was getting back. Except… she wasn’t coming back this time. She’d never see her
again. She could make out a crinkled dot on the bottom of the note, where a
tear had fallen and dried. Her mum’s. She kissed the note and tucked it inside
her bra, close to her heart. She thought that she should give Mum a proper
burial, but how could she? Mum said not to come in, please… so she
wouldn’t. That was what Mum wanted. Tabitha laid her palm on the door, sank to
the carpet. Cried out every tear she had. She’d always thought she’d had her
heart ripped out for good when Dad died, and it could never hurt like that
again. But there it was again, that terrible empty feeling, like all the light
and love had bled from the world.

Tabitha’s eyes were pink and bloodshot when she looked
around again at the landing. Blinking out of a heartbroken trance that felt
hours long, she saw her mum’s old powder-blue ribbon tied around the door
handle. Sniffling, Tabitha picked the knot and took it off to hold it. Should
she give her a funeral? How could she not? But… Mum had said not to come in.
That was the best thing to do then. She didn’t want to go inside anyway, not
really. She wanted her mum to stay as a bright happy thought, distant and holy.
Her impish grin, her sunglasses on, sitting in the deck chair in the sunny back
garden. That’s how she’d remember her. Tabitha tied the ribbon around her belt
and knotted it off, and kissed Dad’s photo as she went back downstairs. Numb.

Tabitha heard a tiny clatter in the back garden when she
stepped back out of the front door. Eyes pink and raw from her tears, she
walked around the side of the house to peer over the garden gate. There was a
silver spider round the back, sunning itself on the lawn. Tabitha recognised a
shred of her mum’s nightie, tangled up around one of its spindly legs. Her
gripping fingers sank into the creaking wooden gate. Anger broke her barriers
down. Burnt her fear to the ground. For the first time in her life she was mad
enough to reach out into the world and destroy. Her brain switched off. Tabitha
booted the gate open and ran at the spider. It turned and pounced. She caught
it, wrestled it to the grass. Slammed her fist hard into its head with a
jarring dent. Again. Stunned on the grass, it screamed when she wrenched a leg
away from its body. Tabitha felt her teeth clenched so hard it hurt. She shoved
the screaming struggling creature back down to the grass and punched it again,
pulling its claws away to tear another leg from its body. When its needled
tongue shot out from its mouth, Tabitha gripped the stabbing tip and turned it.
She pushed it, slowly, back through the screaming creature’s body. Skewered it.
She pulled the carving knife from her belt, and punched the spider to the
ground again before it could crawl away. She sank her knife in deep while it
screamed, and skinned it alive.

A cold wind stirred up as Tabitha left the front garden,
and closed the gate behind her. She’d mounted her kill on the gate spikes like
a grizzly totem; a warning to the rest. She’d ripped and peeled its silver skin
away to reveal the fibrous white flesh, like a shelled lobster. Tabitha took
one last look at her mum’s front door, and headed back down the road towards
town. Grieving and heartbroken in the lonely silent world; dead inside. Jen and
Emma had to be ok. They had to be. If they weren’t… she didn’t know what
she’d do. Maybe if it came to it she could take all those sleeping pills, like
her mum said in her note. Wait, how could she? She still had to survive, she
convinced herself. No matter what.

Rubbish
tumbled down the streets as Tabitha walked back into town. She was numb. She
felt nothing but a phantom lump of nausea balled up in her throat. She wanted
to run to John. But her ex lived miles away now. With her. Izzy. If they
were still alive. The thought of John being dead hit her like a ton-weight, and
broke her heart all over again. Tabitha headed down a street off the main road,
looking around at total devastation. Rubbish rustled and blew in the street.
More skins too, tucked away on doorsteps or caught climbing in through open
windows. She headed on and knocked on the door of Emma’s flat. No reply. Her
phone still didn’t switch on. The door was easier to force open than she’d
thought.

‘Emma?’ she called up the staircase. She didn’t need to
walk into the flat though. An empty arm hung loosely over the top stair, and
the smell said the rest. Tabitha collapsed into tears on the stairs. Dragged
herself to her feet and ran outside. It was a nightmare. It had to be. She was
ready to wake up now. But everything looked too real and vivid to be a dream.
The sickness felt too real. By the time she reached Jen’s house, she only had
to peer into the broken living room window to know enough. Tabitha crossed the
road, leant by a lamp post, and threw up on the street.

She’d cried until the tears stopped coming. Tabitha
stared at the sky, stared at the sea. Numb and torn up, alone in the silence.
The breeze ran through her hair. A carrier bag rustled and blew in the wind
nearby, pinned to the street by a new boxed-up clothes iron inside it. Probably
dropped when its owner was running for their life. Tabitha just stared out at
the sea, looking without seeing. No one to run to, nowhere to go. A ghost town
all around her, murdered while she slept. A dead world that didn’t make any
sense. She leant on the railing and looked out at the waves, as if they held
the answers. She didn’t notice the spiders creeping up around her until she
turned back, and found herself surrounded. The old Tabitha might have screamed
and curled into a ball then. But she’d been peeled raw, and there was a new
Tabitha in there somewhere, waiting. And all it felt was anger. Every cell in
her new body said fight. When the first spider pounced she punched a
dent deep into its body. She spun around, gripped another by its spindly legs
and tore it limb from limb. Every punch was like a sledgehammer through a
breezeblock, sudden and stunning, a dull metal knock echoing down the
road. Some spiders scuttled away. Others came in from the sides to grip and
twist and stab. Tabitha’s muscles felt like springs inside her, stronger than
she’d ever known. She spun and stomped another spider into the kerb with a
crack. One behind her screeched and pounced. She gripped it hard and smashed it
into the iron rail by the sea.

‘Come on!’ she yelled, breathless and rage-hot, punching
and pummelling another into the kerb. At its edges the horde began to slink
away, while the braver ones were beaten down into the road. Tabitha screamed
and sent another flying with a kick. All the quiet anger she’d been collecting
for years, it all came bursting out of her. It was burning through a new body
that knew how to use it. Knew how to do damage. The rest of the horde backed
away, watching her wrestle one to the ground and pull it apart screaming. Back
into their alleys and doorways, back into basements and drains, the swarm of
chittering monsters crawled away over their dead to leave the red-haired human
alone.

‘Is that all you’ve got!?’ she yelled, throwing a dead
spider after them. Breathless, she sat down on the kerb, watching her cuts and
bruises heal up and fade away. She saw her silver blood left behind on her
skin; licked it. It tasted tingly, metallic, like tonguing a nine-volt battery.
Tabitha was exhausted, but thought better of collapsing on the pavement here.
The surviving spiders watched her from their hiding holes. She staggered to her
feet and stared at them. They didn’t come out towards her. She walked off into
town through her alien kills; a jumbled mass of curled-up legs like upturned
silver crabs.

Town
was empty and deathly silent, like permanent dawn on a Sunday morning. Rubbish
and rubble filled the kerbsides. A fox looked up from the torn carcass of a bin
bag, staring at Tabitha as she came closer. She watched it quickly turn and pad
away, inconvenienced by her presence.

Trees stood strangled in metallic tentacles. Shops had
been looted; corpses littered the high street. Empty husks, drained out dry.
Silver spiders hugged the walls of distant buildings, waiting for signs of
life. Thick grey rainclouds rolled in from the sea. Tabitha saw a flash in the
corner of her eye, and looked out over the water. She saw the grey bleak sky,
and the solid salty slab of sea stretching on forever… but there was light
there too. It wasn’t a light she could see too well through the clouds, but she
felt it. Like the sky was electric, and the sunlight was up there somewhere
with all the promise of life in it. It was a vague feeling, hardly there
really, like hands hovering an inch over her skin. Something tingled inside
her. Her thoughts jigsawed around in her head – moving and turning, finding new
places to fit. She saw the sea crawl with current for a second; a billion
blinking connections between electrolytes. It was a fleeting vision that flared
like a holy revelation, then suddenly vanished from her sight.

‘What?…’ she mumbled, blinking at the beach below. What
was this, that she was feeling? For a moment then, the sun was all that
mattered. Like a god had come down to look after her. She felt a strength she’d
never known before, surging through veins and connections beneath her skin. It
was a revelation without an answer; the morphine bliss of a fleeting dream,
making less and less sense the more she tried to recall. And suddenly, the
world was grey again. The dull black road stretched off into town, and all
sense of light and current had gone from her mind. Everything was human again.
All the strength she’d just felt in her body suddenly left her. She felt like a
flat battery. All she wanted to do was rest. And cry.

5

In
the town centre a few streets away, a young man was running for his life. One
minute he’d been having a whispered argument with his brother, while they looked
for food in a looted corner shop. The next thing he knew, his brother had
slumped lifelessly on the floor under a pack of silver spiders. He’d pulled his
gun and shot the first one dead, and barely made it out of the shop alive. Now
he was running through the empty streets with tears in his eyes, never looking
back as the things scrambled after him. He felt a claw nick his leg, and he
spun around and shot. Three bullets left. The spider staggered and dropped, but
the rest of the silver horde was gaining fast. All he could smell was brick
dust in the air. The metal clattering racket of the horde filled his head. He
yelled out in fear as he ran; primal wails that echoed in the empty streets.

Tabitha
wandered further into town, following the echoing crack of gunshots. The place
was a ruin; broken windows and half-toppled shops. Strange dandelion seeds
floated down as she passed by. The seeds that landed in the sunlight sprang
into tiny grey shoots, growing visibly into spidery little plants. Tabitha stopped,
watched them grow. So that was where the spiders came from. She walked closer
and ground the shoots into the road with her boot. Some of the windows she
looked up at were covered by splayed silver spiders. Their bodies were stark
and still and murderous as she passed by. She couldn’t tell if they were
watching her. She didn’t know if she could go another round with more of them,
she felt so tired. Tabitha coughed quietly and hurried on away from them. She
wandered by a lone pram on the street, abandoned. At least there was nothing
inside it. No tiny skin. An empty drinks can clanked and clattered down the
road in the wind; the only noise in the eerie silence. The homes and shops were
dark and empty around her. Her town was dead.

Dev
felt like he’d been running forever. The horde was right on his heels. His
lungs heaved; his legs pumped battery acid. He spun and shot another spider
that came too close. Two bullets left. He looked around desperately for
somewhere high to climb. He couldn’t run much further, and there was no point
locking himself in a car that wasn’t going anywhere. None of the cars worked
any more, and they wouldn’t protect him. The spiders caught up to him before he
could shoot and dragged him screaming onto the road.

Tabitha
was sure she’d heard running footsteps just then. A man yelled for help, down a
street off to her right. She saw sunlight bouncing off a silver cluster of
spiders, pulling a figure to the road. Tabitha came running. The spiders on the
high windows stirred to life behind her, dropping down to the street.

Up ahead the horde bared their spiked tongues as she
came closer. Their throaty hisses warned her away from their screaming prey.

‘Get away from him!’ she shouted, pulling the carving
knife from her belt. Her fists felt solid, heavy. Like weapons. Adrenaline
cancelled out her exhaustion. Tabitha yelled at the spiders, and one sprang
towards her. She leapt and gripped its legs that cut her, and it fell limp when
she stabbed it hard through the head. Something took over her; a new instinct.
She sent the spider flying into the horde like a hammer-throw, scattering them
away from the man on the road. He staggered away in terror, pointing his gun at
spiders that suddenly weren’t interested in him. They were all creeping away
towards her.

‘Up there! Climb up there!’ Tabitha shouted, pointing at
the roof of a bus stop. He ran and climbed up onto a big plastic bin, and
hauled himself up onto the bus stop away from them.

‘Behind you!’ he called back. He was pointing at a
handful of spiders stalking up the road.

‘Shit,’ she mumbled, suddenly surrounded. The old
Tabitha hesitated. The new Tabitha reacted. She yelled and buried her knife in
a spider’s back with a slick tinny crunch. She spun and punched another with a
shrill crack. Adrenaline pumped; time slowed down. The spider hit the road in
slow motion; imploded on the tarmac and lost a leg. Tabitha’s swing turned her
body through the air in an arcing dance. She landed on her feet, raised her
knife. A third spider rushed her, flicking its legs out like a net. She dodged
its jabbing spike. Looked for a gap. Stuck the knife in deep with a burst of
silver blood. She wrenched a grey leg off her kill with a crustacean crack.
Swinging the dead limb she fended off the rattling horde around her, whipping
them back.

‘Get away!’ she yelled nervously, as the horde closed in
around her. Tabitha felt a very human terror returning to her, creeping down
her spine like a cold hand. When a claw stabbed her calf she gasped and jumped
away. The old Tabitha would have tried to run then. The new her clenched her
fists, gritted her teeth. She laid into the spiders and filled the street with
ringing thuds, the song of striking metal. The man kicked one to the road as it
scaled up the side of the bus stop.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. Tabitha didn’t hear him. ‘Behind
you!’ but she didn’t catch his distant voice over the clattering metal. She
glanced up and saw him pointing. Before she could turn around a jagged spike
stabbed her in the back. Tabitha screamed and saw it jut through her stomach,
black against her pale t-shirt. She felt the venom coursing through her. She
could almost taste it in her blood, cold as ice. But harmless to her. All she
felt was the stabbing spike, an overpowering agony, squelching and wrenching
itself out from her back. She spun and stamped her attacker in the head,
staggering it back. She screamed as blood slapped down on the road from her
wound. Clutching her stomach she leapt forward and smashed her fist into the
spider’s head. Shoved it to the ground and pummelled the life out of it. Her
pain was secondary. Survival came first. She spun and booted another away, and
ran after it to stick the knife in deep. She tore the limbs off another, and
tossed it aside to scream and bleed. The surviving horde was hesitating. A
sudden silent peace. The only sounds were Tabitha’s gasping breaths and the
distant roll of the tide, and the slow tapping of spider legs on the road. The
creatures stepped back when she came closer. Exhausted, Tabitha grabbed at
another and pushed the knife in. Watched it flinch and scuttle away across the
street in a trail of silver blood. The last few gave up and backed away, and
tucked themselves back into gaps in the toppled buildings. Silver legs bunched
up into shadowed arachnid fists, watching her from cramped dark corners in the
ruins.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ she asked the man, as he
climbed down from the bus stop. His jacket and jeans were torn and filthy.
Tabitha clutched the stab wound in her stomach as the silver blood streamed
out, slumping down against a crashed car. The man came over to stare in dumb
panic at her. His stubbled face was a scruffy patchwork of pale dust and bright
red blood.

‘They got you,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Yeah’, she mumbled, doubled over in agony. She lifted
the side of her t-shirt, and gritted her teeth as she pressed her grey hands
against the wound. At least it was closing up now.

‘Tell me what happened. To everything,’ she said,
glancing around at the dead world.

‘What, you don’t know?’ he replied, baffled. He stared
at the silver blood covering her grey fingers. ‘Let me help,’ he said. Tabitha
shook her head.

‘It’s fine. It’s healed,’ she replied. The man watched
in shock as her pale skin knitted together. Tabitha took a few deep breaths. At
least the ripping pain had faded from her insides. She felt weak though, like
she was ready to pass out. She could tell she’d lost a lot of blood; she was
sitting in a puddle of it. The man crouched down beside her. He was younger
than she’d first thought, under the blood and grime. He couldn’t have been much
older than her.

‘Is that your blood?’ he mumbled. He dabbed a
finger in the silver fluid on her hands.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she snapped, jumping up and staggering
away.

‘Alright, I’m sorry,’ he said defensively, backing off.
‘As long as you’re alright.’ Tabitha looked him in the eyes, and saw a man as
scared as she was. His black hair was a tangle of dust and grit. He sat down on
the road, and pulled up a trouser leg to check his own wound. It wasn’t deep.
More importantly though, it wasn’t poisoned. ‘So what happened to you?’ he
said. He grimaced as he pressed blood out of his wound.

‘I was unconscious,’ Tabitha replied, leaning against
the car. She felt dizzy, but she had to stay on her feet. ‘I woke up today, and
suddenly it’s the end of the world.’

‘So you didn’t see any of this?’ he replied.
Tabitha shook her head. ‘But that was three days ago,’ he said. Tabitha stared
at him, disbelieving. Three days? How could she have been unconscious
for three days?

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said. ‘From the start.’ He
pointed her in the direction of the town hall, and the clock tower that was
shattered to rubble.

‘Let’s keep moving,’ he suggested, with a sniffing
nervous tick. They started off down the road, looking back over their shoulders
to make sure the hidden spiders weren’t following.

‘They came out of the sea, and just massacred us,’ he
said, looking round at the abandoned buildings. Some of the shops and offices
simply stood empty and dark; others had been torn down to ruins. ‘After the
spiders, there were these huge black things like squids. They were tearing
buildings down. Like, eating them. But like I said, that was three days
ago. What happened to you?’ he said. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Unconscious, in my house,’ she replied. ‘One of them
stabbed me. Injected me with something. I thought I was dying of a heart
attack, and I passed out.’ The man stopped walking.

‘You should be dead,’ he mumbled, looking at her in
disbelief. Tabitha shrugged. Maybe she wished that it had killed her. She
looked around at greying sheets of office paper, tumbling and whispering down
the street in the breeze. She saw a kid’s cuddly toy face-down in a puddle, and
had to look away.

‘Anyway, next thing I know, I’ve woken up today like
this,’ she said. Tabitha looked down at her grey hands, still covered in silver
blood. She wiped them on her jeans.

‘Well I’m glad you came around when you did,’ he said,
shell shocked, looking back at the spidery silver corpses on the road.

‘So tell me what happened next,’ said Tabitha.

‘Well, like I said, all this happened three days ago. In
the middle of the night. The sky turned white, like lightning, but… everywhere.
It’s hard to explain. Then all the lights went out. Everything just stopped
working.’

‘EMP,’ Tabitha muttered. Something straight out of a
film.

‘What?’

‘EMP,’ she repeated. Hadn’t he heard of that? The man
just shook his head, bemused. ‘It’s something from science fiction,’ she explained.
He shrugged. ‘Electro-Magnetic Pulse… it fries every circuit in the blast
radius.’ She felt like a knob for saying blast radius. No one said that.

‘Does it do that?’ he replied, nodding up behind
her. Turning, Tabitha saw a fallen satellite buried in the roof of a shop.

‘…Yeah,’ she mumbled, staring at it with a grim
fascination. It was huge, ruined. A hulking lump of space hardware sticking out
from mossy roof tiles. An even stranger sight than the rubble of shops around
it.

‘Well, I’m Dev, by the way,’ he said, holding out his
hand. Breaking the hard silence of a dead world.

‘Tabitha,’ she replied, shaking his hand as gently as
she could. She could see the shock in his eyes then, the moment he took hold of
cold metal instead of soft warm skin. He didn’t pull away though; he had the
courtesy not to mention it either. His smile faded to a haunted stare.

‘I just saw my brother die, before you found me,’ he
said, hoarse voice trembling. He clamped a bloody hand over his eyes, sobbed
for a moment, and wiped the tears away down his dusty cheeks.

‘I mean, what is this?’ he said, looking around at the
shattered world. ‘Is it punishment from god or something? They’ve killed
everyone! What are we supposed to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tabitha mumbled quietly. Hesitating, she
put a grey hand on Dev’s shoulder as he sank down to his knees on the road. His
sobs clashed against the silence and the peaceful birdsong. The sky was a
gleaming blue. Towering clouds shone white in the sun. Their world had ended;
Earth had carried on as if nothing had happened. The thought struck her then, a
hard grim revelation. This was a new world now. And it wasn’t one that
tolerated weakness. Every gap and shattered window could have a spider inside
it, waiting for its chance.

‘We should get moving,’ she said softly. Tabitha stamped
her own raw grief deep down. Buried it under a good layer of grit, to dig up
later when she could afford to. If they both fell apart now, the world would
soon finish them off.

‘Come on,’ she insisted. She took Dev’s hand to pull him
to his feet. ‘It’s dangerous here. We should get going.’ Dev stood up, wiped
his bloodshot eyes, and nodded sadly.

‘Where to?’ he said, his voice thick with grief. Tabitha
looked around at the world, and tried to think where they could go. She glanced
down again at the cuddly toy in the puddle. She picked it up, wrung the grimy
brown water from it, and sat it upright on the kerb to dry in the sun.

‘We’re going to look for survivors,’ she said. ‘Then
we’re going to get out of here.’

They
walked on in silence for a while, keeping an eye on the walls and windows. The
only sound was their footsteps in the eerie silence.

‘Tell me more about what happened,’ said Tabitha,
leading the way down the high street. ‘That satellite fell down on the shop
back there, so what else?’

‘There was a plane,’ Dev replied quietly. ‘It just…
dropped out of the sky into the sea. We could hear the survivors, screaming in
the water. Something was eating them.’ Tabitha glanced at him. He stared
blankly down the road as they walked. Haunted. ‘The street lights all went out,
and then all the cars wouldn’t start,’ he said, frustrated. ‘Nothing worked.
Our phones didn’t work. TVs and radios didn’t work. There weren’t even any
police. Then the next thing we know, the army turns up.’

‘What happened then?’ said Tabitha.

‘We were all standing outside after the power cuts,’ he
said, shaking his head. Choking up. ‘It was pitch black, nobody could see
anything,’ he was sobbing. ‘Those spiders came out of the dark, from the beach
and... all we could hear was screams, and… things just falling out of the sky.’
He looked a million miles away, wiping away his tears.

‘Jesus,’ Tabitha mumbled, giving the sobbing man a hug.
He smelled of dust and sweat. She looked around at the ruins of her home town,
and let Dev let go first. He nodded his thanks for the hug, and wiped his tired
eyes with dusty hands.

‘So what about the army?’ she asked him.

‘They got butchered like the rest of us,’ he replied,
sniffling. ‘All their night vision and stuff, that all stopped working too.
There wasn’t much of a fight. It was just screaming, all night. The morning
after, there was no one left. Just me and my brother walking through town, and
five or six people we saw down the street. They didn’t see us. But we couldn’t
shout to them, in case the spiders found us.’

‘How have you survived?’ she asked him.

‘Just hiding,’ Dev replied. ‘That’s all we could do.’

‘So you’ve not tried to get out of town?’ she said,
watching him wipe the tears from his eyes.

‘Yeah, we did try,’ he replied, his voice faltering.
‘Ever since it happened, we were trying. There’s no way out though. Those
things are everywhere.’

‘What about the sea? Getting on a boat?’ said Tabitha.

‘Have you seen those things in the water?’ he replied.
‘They’re eating all the boats anyway. There’s no way out. There’s
spiders in the sewers too. You can hear them at night when you’re trying to
hide. You can’t sleep. You just have to keep moving and hiding, looking for
food.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Tabitha.

‘Yeah.’ Dev agreed, wiping the cold tears off his dusty
cheeks.

‘So, where are these other survivors you saw?’

‘Don’t know,’ Dev shrugged. ‘We only saw them once. They
could be dead by now.’

‘We should try to find them,’ Tabitha suggested.

‘There’s no point,’ he replied. ‘It’ll get us killed.’
His eyes widened with a sudden realisation. ‘Hey, we can get out of town now!’
he said. ‘You can handle the spiders, we’ll be alright! We can get out!’

‘Not until we’ve found those other people,’ Tabitha
insisted. Dev scoffed at the idea, stared at her in disbelief.

‘But everyone’s already dead,’ he said.

‘You don’t know that,’ Tabitha replied. ‘They might have
survived, like you.’ Dev was shaking his head.

‘We’re missing our chance to get out,’ he argued.

‘They might still be alive,’ said Tabitha. ‘We owe it to
them to find them.’

‘They’re not our problem,’ said Dev, shaking his head.
‘It’s not like they came to find me and my brother. I say leave them to it.’
Tabitha looked at him in shock. Was he really that cold? ‘We don’t have
to make this complicated,’ said Dev. ‘Let’s just get out. It’s every man for
himself now, anyway.’

‘Really?’ Tabitha replied, disbelieving. ‘So, I should
have left those spiders to kill you then? Is that what you mean?’

‘Hey, behind you!’ he said, pointing over her shoulder.
A spider was stalking down from the wall of a dry cleaners behind her, baring
its mouth.

‘What!?’ she yelled at it, pulling her carving knife
from her belt. The spider hesitated, and didn’t come any closer. ‘So I should
have left you to die?’ she asked Dev. ‘I should have let those things kill
you?’ Dev looked from the spider back to her.

‘…Look, you’re right,’ he sighed, dropping his
shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. You saved my life. But… this is our chance. Look, we
could get out of town right now,’ he said, pointing down the road. ‘Just a
couple of streets to the town hall, then we can take the main road and get out.
You could fight us a way out, I could watch your back. It’s simple.’

‘No,’ Tabitha said stubbornly, walking off towards the
market square. She couldn’t protect the ones she loved any more, and it burned
a hole in her heart. But maybe there were more people out there she could help.
She had to try.

‘Well, I’m going to make a run for it,’ said Dev,
looking at the shattered tower on the town hall. ‘Straight to the town hall,
then out down the main road,’ he said. Tabitha stopped and looked back at him.

‘They’ll come after you,’ she replied, looking up at the
buildings. There were spiders dotted around on half-hidden walls, splayed out
flat against the bricks. Watching. Dev looked up at them and hesitated.

‘And that one,’ Tabitha added, nodding at the spider
outside the dry cleaners behind him. Dev backed away from it. ‘But, it’s up to
you.’ She turned and walked away. Dev stared at the spider on the street,
edging its way towards him.

‘Fine, hold up!’ he said, defeated, running from the
spider to catch up with her. Tabitha scratched an itch on her cheek with her
strange rough hands. Her fingers felt like sandpaper. She waited for Dev to
catch up, and together they wandered on into the urban ruins.

‘So what’s going on with you, anyway?’ said Dev. ‘You
got stung by one of them, so now you’ve got some weird superpowers or
something?’ Tabitha walked on in silence. She watched stray newspapers shifting
around on the road, rustling and tumbling in the breeze.

‘What about the air force?’ she asked him, changing the
subject.

‘What?’

‘Alien invasion… where was the air force? Fighter jets
and things?’

‘No idea,’ Dev replied. ‘Busy fighting them everywhere
else first, probably. I don’t think this town’s high on their list of
priorities.’

‘True,’ she conceded. ‘So, where was the last place you
saw these survivors?’

‘Like I said, I don’t know. Last ones we saw were on the
street around the Queen’s Head.’

‘Right,’ said Tabitha, turning down a side street
towards the old pub across town.

‘This is insane,’ said Dev, watching the high walls of
the shops for spiders.

‘Saving people’s lives is insane?’

‘They’re already dead,’ he insisted.

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Well, they’re probably dead.’

‘Get over there.’

‘What?’

‘Over there!’ Tabitha snapped. She pushed Dev away as a
spider jumped at them from a doorway. She reached out for its silver legs and
regretted it, and pulled away with a deep cut on her forearm. Before she could
pull her knife there was a sudden echoing gunshot, and the spider dropped dead
on the road.

‘What are you doing?’ Tabitha snapped, furious.

‘What?’ said Dev, confused. ‘I killed it,’ he objected.
‘I saved your life.’

‘Yeah, with a really loud gun!’ Tabitha argued. ‘What
happened to you last time when you used your really loud gun?’ Dev stared at
her, puzzled.

‘All those spiders came chasing after you?’ she reminded
him.

‘Shit,’ he said, as the mistake dawned on him. Already
they heard a distant chittering noise, and legs clattering down brick walls.
Tabitha looked back down the road. Silvery shapes swarmed in the distance.

‘Run.’

Dev and Tabitha sprinted down a side street onto the
small town square.

‘Not that way!’ Dev said breathlessly, pulling Tabitha
away. ‘Stick to the walls!’ Tabitha looked back at the swarm as they ran. Half
the spiders had followed them down the side street; the rest had carried on
down the main road.

‘More corners,’ she said, gasping for breath. ‘We need
to turn more corners and lose them!’

‘This way!’ said Dev, running on down another side
street towards the shopping precinct. Tabitha had never run so fast in her
life. Mortal fear pushed her on; a desperate dread pounding in her chest. Their
running footsteps echoed in the silent shopping precinct beyond. Pillars and
walls of miserable sixties concrete. Dev led them on down a piss-stink
alleyway, past the dead market square. Every turn lost a few more spiders
behind them.

‘Queen’s Head!’ said Tabitha, when Dev looked to her for
direction. They sprinted on down the street for the pub as the last few spiders
scuttled on behind them.

They
were gasping for breath by the time they reached the pub. Tabitha peered around
the wall, back down the road.

‘They’ve gone,’ she said breathlessly.

‘Sorry,’ said Dev. ‘For the gun.’ He was staggering
around on sore legs outside the pub’s front door.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Tabitha replied. She couldn’t
remember the last time she’d been brave enough to call someone an idiot. She
couldn’t remember any time, actually.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, gasping for breath. The pub
sign creaked a little in the wind over their heads.

‘Just get me a drink,’ she said, staggering to her feet.
Neither of them saw the spider scuttle across the road behind them. Tabitha
screamed in agony and saw a bony black needle wriggling out of her thigh. She
tore the spider off her legs and kicked it away onto the road. Dev’s hand
hovered over his gun; he hesitated and looked around for another weapon instead.

‘Back!’ Tabitha warned him, backing away from the spider
herself. ‘Just get inside the pub!’ the spider coiled up its legs and pounced
at her. Tabitha gasped and met it head-on, grabbing its scrambling legs. Trying
to get a solid punch in. She screamed when its claws sank in; one in her arm
and one in her stomach. She landed a punch on its head and wrestled it to the
kerb, and pummelled it into the road until it stopped moving. She staggered
back and sat down on the road beside it, weak and breathless.

‘Shit, are you alright?’ said Dev, coming closer.

‘No,’ Tabitha mumbled, pale, clutching her bleeding
thigh with both hands. The wounds in her arm and stomach were pouring too. Her
silver blood pooled on the kerb and trickled down into the gutter. She felt it
setting in; a throbbing pain so fierce and maddening that she just wanted to
collapse on the pavement.

‘Here, let me tie this around your leg,’ said Dev,
hurriedly pulling off his jacket. Tabitha gasped at the pain when he tied the
sleeves tight around her thigh.

‘Lie back,’ he said, kneeling down on the road. ‘We’ve
got to raise your leg up, to slow down the bleeding.’ Tabitha lay back on the
pavement, and felt Dev’s hands grip her ankle and gently lift it off the road.
She gritted her teeth at the pain and stared at the blue sky above, and lay
still for a while to catch her breath. She felt faint; lightheaded. How much
blood had she lost today? All of it? She looked over at her kill. Slowly the
dead spider’s silver legs curled up tight against its body, like some weird
flower closing away from the sky.

‘It looks like the blood’s stopped,’ said Dev, having
held up her leg for a while. ‘You just can’t get a break, can you?’ he said
gently, lowering her leg back to the road.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Tabitha replied, taking his hand
as he helped her to sit up. ‘At least I’m still here though, I suppose.’

‘Little Miss Brightside,’ he said hoarsely, smiling.
‘Come on, I’ll get you that drink.’ Tabitha took his hand and gasped with the
pain as she hobbled up.

‘Are you alright?’ he said. ‘Sit down back down if you
need to.’

‘No, I’m fine,’ she lied, staggering to her feet. ‘It’s
safer inside the pub.’ She felt like collapsing. The world felt far away. She
freaked and backed away when she saw floating seeds drifting by.

‘What? They’re just dandelions,’ said Dev, giving her a
funny look. Tabitha watched them. They were dandelion seeds.

‘I thought...’ she mumbled.

‘What?’

‘I thought they were spiders,’ she said wearily. ‘Let’s
just get inside.’

‘Thank god they left something here to drink,’ said
Tabitha, perching on a barstool. Dev passed her a bottle of rum from behind the
bar.

‘Don’t you want something to go with that?’ he said,
with his sniffing nervous tick.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she replied, unscrewing the bottle cap
with a whispering grind. ‘If there’s a time and a place for a really strong
drink,’ she said with a smile, looking around at the gloomy pub. She gulped
from the bottle, gasped, and took another swig. She felt it go down like a hard
warm bolt of light, and tasted the spirit fumes on her breath. Dev took the
bottle and knocked a gulp back himself.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t come in here more often,’
Tabitha said sarcastically, looking around at the murky old pub.

‘Yeah,’ Dev chuckled. ‘It just looks the same at the end
of the world.’ The place was filled with over-varnished tables on an ancient
threadbare carpet. It had always smelled of sour ale and stale smoke in here,
and the closed curtains gave everything a glum half-light. Tabitha rubbed her
fingers over her cuts, healed and itchy, brushing away bright crumbs of dried
silver blood. The scars faded and vanished completely. She wouldn’t even have a
few badges of honour left to show for her fights.

‘So, we’re just here to get rat-arsed on rum?’ said Dev.
The glass bottle clinked against Tabitha’s metal hand as she took it back.

‘Well, it doesn’t look like there’s any survivors around
here,’ she said, taking another gulp. ‘So yeah, I’d say getting rat-arsed is a
good plan B.’ Dev cracked a smile, and took the bottle back.

‘To plan B then,’ he said, raising the bottle and taking
a big gulp. He coughed at the taste. Tabitha took a swig and put the bottle
down on the bar, and glanced around. The pub was starting to look better
already.

‘So, do you always dress like that, or is it just an
end-of-the-world thing?’ he asked her.

‘Dress like what?’ she replied.

‘Well, like a mountain climber,’ he said with a grin. He
must have meant her plain outdoorsy t-shirt; a breathable fabric kind of thing.
And the hiking boots.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said, affronted.

‘Nothing, I’m joking,’ he replied, taking another gulp
of rum. ‘It’s a good look for you.’ Tabitha watched his expression, and saw the
grin creeping back through.

‘What’s wrong with mountain climbers?’ she said. Dev
just sniggered.

‘I’m joking,’ he insisted. Tabitha watched him
suspiciously, and looked down at her clothes. She was half-covered in blood
stains like silver paint.

‘I look like a messy art student from the future,’ she
said, rubbing at a silver stain on her trousers. She looked up to see Dev
smiling at her. There was a sound on the floorboards upstairs. Wide-eyed, Dev
and Tabitha stared at one another in the gloom.

‘Was that a footstep?’ Tabitha whispered.

‘I think so,’ Dev whispered back. He hurried back round
the bar quietly and crept towards the old staircase in the back.

‘Wait,’ Tabitha whispered after him, struggling down
weakly off her bar stool. By the time she’d hobbled through the pub into the back
Dev was already creeping up onto the landing upstairs.

‘Dev, wait,’ she whispered, hauling herself up onto the
first step. Her leg burned with a fresh agony, still healing inside. She heard
Dev retch, and he came stomping back down the old wooden staircase.

‘They are here, the survivors,’ he said. ‘They’re
dead.’

‘Then we need to get out. Now,’ said Tabitha. Dev
followed her as she hobbled back through to the bar. She felt her head begin to
swim as they headed for the door. It wasn’t just the rum though.

‘Are you ok?’ said Dev.

‘Yeah, I’ll be alright,’ she replied. She felt a heavy
weakness in her limbs, like she was about to faint. It must have been the blood
loss. She had to get out into the fresh air, into the daylight, and just sit
down on the road for a while. Dev held the first door for her. Tabitha limped
into the small porch and opened the heavy front door, and hobbled outside to
squint in the sudden daylight.

‘Maybe you were right, about just getting out of town,’
she conceded, looking up and down the street to make sure it was clear. But the
pub door didn’t open again behind her. Peering back inside, it took her eyes a
little while to adjust to the darkness again.

‘Dev?’ she said. She put her hand to her mouth; felt
that cold familiar dread seeping through her bones. He was sprawled on the
floor, dead. There were gulping sounds and silvery shapes in the dim light;
spiders surrounding him. Tabitha kicked at one that hugged his chest while it
drank him. But her legs felt like jelly. Her kick only nudged it, and the
spider just hissed and carried on feeding. More crawled towards her. She felt
too weak to fight them; she could barely stand up. They were moving to surround
her. Before they could pounce she was back out of the door and running. The
spiders came scuttling out behind her, a sudden clattering rush on the road.
She broke out into a limping sprint, dragging her right leg. Gasping at the
pain. More spiders joined the chase from the toppled buildings around her.
Tabitha felt her thigh sting and her heart pound in her chest. All her grief
flew out of her head, and instinct took over. There was only run. She
couldn’t fight them like this. Without her strength she was just another
victim. Only prey, running for her life.

6

Tabitha
sprinted round the corner onto the ruined high street. Every other footstep was
a fresh agony, slamming her weight down on raw tender tissue in her leg. But
she had to keep running. The pack of spiders had grown to a swarm. Far too many
to fight. She ran past more strangled trees coated in black tentacles; more
spiders dropped down from the walls around her. The chittering silver mass
behind must have been fifty strong at least. She felt small metal claws
gripping at her boot heels, shaking them off as she ran. Her muscles burned and
her mind raced, looking all around her as the buildings rushed past. The metal
chatter of the horde was deafening; a tinny racket in a clattering tide. One
stumble, one unsteady step, and they’d be on her. She saw movement then, on the
road up ahead. Silvery legs in the distance. More spiders rushing towards her,
cutting off her escape. Nowhere to run. Tabitha kept limping on, though she
knew it was hopeless now. They’d have her surrounded in seconds, with no side
streets to escape. Breathless, Tabitha looked around desperately for somewhere
to climb up high.

‘In here!’ came a voice off to her left. Tabitha looked
over as she ran, searching for it. A woman ushered to her from an open cellar
window, right on street level. Tabitha gave it everything she had and broke
away from the swarm at her heels. She reached the far kerb and threw herself
down on her side, sliding in through the open window. It slammed shut behind
her as she hit the cellar floor; a thick metal shutter that closed the spiders
out. They crashed against it outside.

‘Are you alright?’ came a voice in the dusty gloom.
Gasping for breath, Tabitha looked up at a middle-aged woman, wiry and
athletic, helping her up off the floor. She was tanned and stern, with short
salt-and-pepper hair. The daylight crept in through a bank of glass bricks in
the street above. A pale milky light, painting their faces.

‘You saved my life,’ Tabitha gasped. She staggered over
to a pile of flattened cardboard boxes in the corner, and collapsed down on
them to catch her breath. An old pool table filled the middle of the cellar.

‘Well, technically you saved yourself. I just left the
window open for you.’ The woman smiled, and tossed her a plastic bottle of
water. She was deep-voiced and well-spoken. ‘I’ve left that shutter open for
everyone I’ve seen, but you’re the first person to make it inside. Did you see
all the empty skins of the not-so-lucky out there on the road?’

‘I wasn’t looking,’ said Tabitha, gulping the water. She
tried to smile about it. It didn’t really come off as the grim pleasantry she’d
hoped for.

‘Sorry, catch your breath,’ said the woman, rummaging in
a box in the far corner. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve had anyone else to talk
to.’ Tabitha just nodded, draining the bottle.

‘Have you seen anyone else?’ said the woman.

‘There was a man. They killed him,’ Tabitha replied,
suddenly shocked at the thought of Dev. Now that she had a minute to take
stock, his death hit her like a sledgehammer. ‘One minute he was there, then he
was just gone… just like everyone else,’ she mumbled. She stared at the far
wall, numb. The tears came quickly at the thought of her mum, her friends.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman, lifting a canister out of a
box in the corner.

‘I didn’t know him,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I – I don’t mean
that I don’t care what happened to him. I mean I’d only met him today.’

‘No need to explain,’ the woman said gently. ‘Life is very
fleeting these days. I’m sorry for what happened to him, all the same. For
what happened to everyone.’

‘Thanks,’ Tabitha replied, staring back at the wall.
What was it he’d said, that this was all some punishment from god? It seemed
that way, and she didn’t even believe in god. It was like a new plague. Tabitha
pulled her numb legs closer, and tried to rub some feeling back into them. She
felt exhausted. It was hard to believe that all of this had happened in one
day. Home felt like a week ago.

‘Sorry, I’m not much good at conversation,’ she said.
‘Not today.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the woman replied. ‘Just rest for a bit.
I imagine you’ve been through rather a lot recently.’

‘Are you a doctor?’ said Tabitha, looking around at the
clutter in the gloom. There were boxes of tablets, plastic syringes. Empty body
bags.

‘I am,’ the woman replied. ‘Part of the ill-fated relief
effort. Army field hospital, essentially. We got here just in time to get
massacred,’ she sighed sadly. ‘So, we made a run for this cellar. Pure luck
that we found the place.’

‘There’s a few of you?’

‘There were, yes,’ the woman replied. ‘Not now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tabitha.

‘So am I,’ the woman sighed. ‘No offense to your town,
but we should never have come here.’ Tabitha smiled sadly. ‘I’m Jane, by the
way.’

‘Tabitha,’ Tabitha replied.

‘Well, it’s good to see someone actually make it in here
alive,’ said Jane. ‘I’d given up hope, truth be told.’

‘Are we safe in here?’ said Tabitha. The spiders still
scratched on the metal shutter outside.

‘Perfectly safe,’ Jane said with a smile. ‘Do you need
some more water? I’ve got plenty here.’

‘No thanks,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I feel really weak
though. Do you have any food?’

‘I do,’ said Jane, walking over with a bottle of
antiseptic. ‘But first things first. You look like you’re in shock. Are you
hurt anywhere? Did they cut you at all?’

‘No, just grazes from the pavement,’ Tabitha lied,
looking for wounds. It was just easier not to explain her disappearing wounds.
She’d felt the sting of the pavement graze her side when she slid in through
the window, though it seemed to have healed up already.

‘Well, I don’t see anything.’ said Jane, putting the
antiseptic back down on the dusty old pool table. ‘Any dizziness, any blurred
vision?’

‘No,’ Tabitha lied again. She didn’t want to trust her
alien changes into the hands of a military doctor. She’d seen too many movies
where they wanted nothing more than to catch the peculiar and cut it open. She
hid her hands down by her sides.

‘I can’t feel much of a pulse,’ said Jane, pressing her
fingers against Tabitha’s neck. Tabitha said nothing about her new heart. ‘And
you’re sure you’ve not come to any kind of harm, the last few days?’ said Jane.

‘Got lucky, I suppose,’ Tabitha replied with a shrug.
The less she said, the better.

‘How are your boots?’ said Jane, standing up.

‘Fine, I think,’ Tabitha replied, looking over them as
she sat up on the flattened boxes.

‘Well, do you think, or do you know?’ Jane replied, with
a bossy tone. ‘Check the backs. Those monsters were right on your heels.’

‘Why does it matter?’ Tabitha replied, pulling her feet
closer to inspect the back of her boots.

‘Because if your boots come apart you’ll end up running
barefoot at some point,’ Jane warned her. ‘And unless you’ve got some very
impressive callousing on the soles of your feet, you’ll get caught out. And end
up like those skins outside.’ Jane fixed her with a matriarch stare. ‘Always
look after your boots.’

‘Alright,’ Tabitha protested, reminded suddenly of her
mum’s nagging. The thought of her mum stung, and a fresh tide of disbelief
washed through her. Jane wandered off to move some boxes from the corner.

‘Let’s have some light in here, shall we?’ said Jane.
Tabitha staggered to her feet and watched Jane rummaging around in a box. She
produced a pair of old oil lanterns, and lit them with a cigarette lighter.

‘Luckily there are still some people who believe in the
practical worth of antiques,’ said Jane, putting the lanterns down on the pool
table. ‘I’ve had these for years.’

‘How did you get in here?’ said Tabitha. ‘The same way I
did?’ Jane nodded over at the cobwebbed ceiling in the corner.

‘There’s a metal trap door there to the shop upstairs,
over where the steps are,’ Jane replied. ‘It’s probably too dark to see it
really. There’s a nice big pair of bolts on it too. There’s nothing getting in
here.’ Jane took a lantern and rummaged through some plastic bags on the floor,
fishing around amongst some tins.

‘Now. We have baked beans, or… more baked beans. Oh no,
sorry, baked beans with sausages. Need I ask which one you’d prefer?’

‘Beans and sausages, please,’ Tabitha replied with a
smile, famished. She thought about her mum, and her heart broke afresh. They
used to have beans and sausages on rainy weekends when they went camping
together. Why did everything have to remind her of mum?

‘Try not to think about them,’ said Jane, with a gentler
tone.

‘Could you tell what I was thinking about?’ said
Tabitha, wiping her eyes.

‘I could see it in your face,’ Jane replied. ‘In my line
of work you see that look quite a lot.’ She came over and took Tabitha’s hand.
Felt the cold, hard roughness of her palm. Tabitha pulled away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Jane, stepping back at the sight of
Tabitha’s grey hands. ‘They feel like… metal.’ Tabitha said nothing.
Things were about to get tricky.

‘What happened to you?’ said Jane, suddenly nervous. She
saw Tabitha’s eyes catch the lantern glow, reflecting the light like a cat’s.
Like a monster.

‘What?’ said Tabitha, suspicious of the way Jane was
studying her.

‘I said, what happened to you?’ Jane demanded, producing
a pistol from her coat.

‘What are you doing?’ said Tabitha, staring down
the barrel. She saw the sudden intensity in Jane’s eyes.

‘You’re infected,’ Jane said simply, pointing the gun as
she stepped closer.

‘I am not infected!’ Tabitha snapped as she stood
up, surprised at herself for squaring up to her. Jane cracked Tabitha on the
jaw with the pistol grip, dropping her to the floor. Before Tabitha knew what
was happening Jane was emptying a syringe into her forearm. The room spun in
slow motion.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Tabitha slurred, looking
around drunkenly at the cellar. Jane stepped around her, watching her carefully.
‘Would everything stop bloody injecting me?’
Tabitha mumbled, dropping unconscious to the floor. A door opened in the gloomy
corner, revealing the bright glow of lanterns in the cellar next door.

‘Did you have to be so rough with her?’ said a younger
woman, emerging from the doorway. She was blonde and gangly, dressed in a white
lab coat.

‘Just help me get her in,’ said Jane, struggling with
Tabitha’s wrists.

‘Oh wow,’ said the younger woman, staring at Tabitha’s
hands in the dim light. ‘It’s metal skin.’ She touched Tabitha’s limp hands.

‘She’s infected,’ said Jane, pointing at Tabitha’s legs
for the other woman to grab hold.

‘No, she’s mutated,’ the blonde woman replied,
taking Tabitha’s ankles. ‘It’s incredible.’

‘So you still don’t think vetting the survivors for
infection first is worth the effort?’ Jane asked her.

‘It’s not,’ the younger woman chuckled. ‘You always
think there has to be some security check to go through before we can do our
job. It probably just comes off as sinister, more than anything. Secret labs
and all that.’ Jane grunted unhappily with dented pride. Together they hauled her body towards the door, into the
brighter light of a makeshift clinic in the second cellar. They worked in
silence for a couple of minutes, hobbling through the clinic with Tabitha’s
limp body. Grunting and struggling to haul her towards a metal table.

‘She’s pretty,’ Jane observed, bringing more lanterns
over.

‘Gorgeous,’ the younger woman agreed. She hesitated then
in the silence, and looked up at Jane. ‘Wait, are you jealous?’ she said
playfully. ‘Even at the end of the world?’ Jane said nothing, and looked at her
grumpily. ‘I guess that’s a yes,’ the younger woman replied. ‘Are you scared I
might run off with her or something?’

‘If you run off with her, I’ll kill you,’ Jane told her,
with a hint of a smile.

‘Will you really?’ said the younger woman, grinning.

‘I’ll hunt you down and shoot you,’ Jane assured her,
smiling.

‘Well, I love you too honey,’ the younger woman replied.
‘Now help me get her on the table.’

Tabitha
blinked her eyes open and saw flickering lantern lights. She felt groggy, like her
head was off swimming. Panicking, she sat up on the table. She was surprised
that they hadn’t restrained her at all. She looked over at Jane, and a blonde
younger woman beside her.

‘See? I told you,’ said the younger woman. Tabitha
watched them warily. ‘Jane was convinced you’d try to attack us,’ she said.
‘I’m Sam, by the way.’ She sneezed. ‘Sorry. It’s too dusty down here. What’s
your name hun?’

‘Tabitha,’ she replied hesitantly. She watched them
carefully, and reached slowly for her belt. Her carving knife wasn’t there.

‘She was going for her knife, look,’ said Jane, pointing
the pistol at her.

‘Of course I’m going for my bloody knife!’ Tabitha
snapped back. ‘You’ve drugged me and pulled me into some creepy lab!’ she tried
to move off the table, but Jane stepped forward and emphasised that she was the
one with the gun. Sam stepped up beside her and ushered for Jane to lower it.

‘She’s got a point,’ Sam conceded. ‘These are
less than ideal surroundings for avoiding the creepy doctor scenario.’ Tabitha
stared into Sam’s eyes, pale sky-blue. ‘We don’t want it to be like that at
all,’ Sam said softly. ‘Jane’s just being overly cautious. We think your
changes are fascinating, Tabitha, so we’d just like to find out more about
them. About you.’ Tabitha looked at her warily, still conscious of Jane’s gun.
‘After that you’re obviously free to go, if you prefer,’ Sam added. ‘Probably
safer down here though. You’re welcome to stay.’ Tabitha looked from one to the
other. Jane in her dusty jumper and jeans, holding the gun. Sam in her light
uniform, smiling gently. They couldn’t have looked more different.

‘You just want to look at my changes?’ said Tabitha.

‘That’s all,’ Sam assured her. ‘Nothing sinister.’
Tabitha looked into Sam’s eyes, big and blue and sincere. Slowly she unclenched
her grey fists and put her alien hands back down on the table.

‘I’m sorry for Jane’s heavy-handedness,’ said Sam,
coming closer. ‘She’s seen a bit more action than I have.’

‘Are you calling me old?’ Jane chipped in grumpily.

‘God Jane, I’m saying you’ve seen more combat than me,
alright?’ Sam replied. ‘Now put the bloody gun away, will you? Tabitha’s not
going to hurt us.’ She turned to Tabitha and looked her over. Reluctantly, Jane
put the gun down.

‘Can I look at your jaw, please?’ said Sam. ‘Where Jane
hit you?’ Tabitha looked at her, thought about it, and nodded hesitantly.
Gently Sam turned Tabitha’s cheek to the light, and pressed it lightly with her
fingers.

‘It must hurt,’ said Sam. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘It did before. I can’t feel it now,’ Tabitha replied.
‘I can heal quickly, since the changes.’ Sam looked intrigued.

‘So these changes, how did they happen?’ said Sam. ‘What
happened exactly?’ Tabitha explained everything about the alien and her fight
with it. About its needled claw going in, and waking up with new hands. Sam and
Jane listened intently.

‘That’s awesome,’ Sam muttered, wide-eyed. ‘Medically
and… just in general.’ Tabitha couldn’t help but smile a little. She didn’t
know what kind of evil government doctors she’d been imagining, but they
weren’t Sam. Sam was more like a nerdy science teacher.

‘Would you mind if I took a little bit of blood?’ said
Sam. Tabitha studied her expression. If there was any malice there, Sam was
exceptionally good at hiding it. She looked like a kid in a toy shop.

‘…Ok,’ Tabitha replied. Probably better to find out as
much as she could about her condition anyway.

‘Thank you,’ Sam said with a smile. She took a
hypodermic needle from its plastic wrapper, and cleaned a patch of skin on
Tabitha’s arm with a wet pad.

‘So, you’ll feel a slight scratch, all that
business,’ Sam muttered, sliding the needle in. ‘Though I imagine you’ve felt
much worse than slight scratches recently. Oh my god, it’s silver. Look Jane,
silver blood! It’s incredible.’ Tabitha looked over at Jane, who’d taken a seat
in a gloomy corner. It looked like the distrust was pouring out of her into the
room, darkening the lantern glow from the corners. Tabitha looked back down at
her arm.

‘There we go,’ said Sam, pulling the needle out. She
pressed a small pad of gauze onto Tabitha’s arm. ‘Just hold that on there for
me, please,’ she said. Sam was transfixed by the plastic needle full of silver
blood. ‘Jane, you need to see this,’ she said, staring into the plastic vial.
Tabitha sat still on the table, watching them examine her blood. She felt a
sudden tingling in the air around her. The static press of a lightning storm.

‘Er…’ Tabitha muttered, feeling her hair begin to stand
up on end. She sneezed and electricity exploded from her body. It half
demolished the table she was sitting on, and flung Sam and Jane across the
room. Voltage arced through the lab in a sudden lightning storm, buzzing and
fizzing off the walls as it crackled away. And just like that, the chaos was
over. Tabitha stood looking at Sam and Jane in the corner, huddled down like a
bomb had gone off. Which it had, kind of.

‘…Sorry,’ Tabitha said quietly, looking around at the
demolition.

‘Can you do that again?’ said Sam eagerly, picking
herself up off the floor.

‘What the hell was that?’ Jane demanded, staggering to
her feet in the corner. Terrified, she pulled her gun on Tabitha.

‘Jane!’ Sam warned her, stamping out a small fire on the
floor.

‘Stop pointing that bloody thing at me!’ Tabitha snapped.

‘Christ Jane, put the gun away!’ said Sam. She put
herself between them, standing in Jane’s line of fire. Jane hesitated, and put
the gun away with a sigh.

‘Thank you,’ Sam said sarcastically. ‘Now can we just
have a look at this blood, please?’ Jane glared at her, and nodded moodily. Sam
pulled an old microscope from the smoking clutter on the floor. She set it down
on a stack of boxes and gathered the fallen lanterns around it, for as much
light as they could give her. Tabitha still smelled burning. Looking down at
her shoulder, she realised there were smoking holes in her clothes. She patted
the burning edges out, coughing as she tried to waft the smoke away.

‘Oh my god Jane,’ Sam muttered, studying the slide under
the microscope. ‘You need to see this.’ Jane looked equally dumbfounded when
she peered down the scope.

‘What the hell?’ Jane muttered, studying the drop of
blood. She moved the makeshift mirror beneath the microscope to catch as much
of the lantern light as she could. Sam motioned to Tabitha to come over and
take a look.

‘Those are my cells?’ she said, watching the jumble of
dots in the microscope.

‘There are two kinds of blood cells,’ Sam said
excitedly. ‘The round ones are obviously your own cells, but the diamond-shaped
ones… they’re alien cells. They could be some kind of organic metal or
silicone, I’m not sure.’

‘Nanotechnology,’ Jane mumbled.

‘Exactly,’ Sam replied happily. Tabitha moved aside to
let Sam look back down the microscope. Sam had given her a quick intense glance
just then, as they traded places. What was that? Fascination? Attraction? …Or
was she just the prize test subject?

‘These cells might explain your rapid healing, but how?’
said Sam. She ignored the smoking ceiling light that crashed to the floor
behind her. Jane and Tabitha jumped at the noise, and flashed a look at one
another. ‘I’m not even sure these are cells as we would understand
them,’ Sam muttered into the microscope. ‘There’s a nucleus, but not one that I
can recognise.’ Her excitement made her voice tremble. ‘They’re living metal.
They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I would’ve thought your immune
system should be fighting them, like any foreign body. But it looks like they
actually function in conjunction with your own cells. Oh, that rhymes!’ she
chuckled. ‘Function in conjunction. Now, if you had a high enough
concentration of these alien cells close enough to the surface…’

‘I’d have alien metal skin?’ Tabitha interrupted,
raising her grey hands.

‘Exactly,’ said Sam happily. ‘Have you had any other
changes?’

‘Just the hands,’ Tabitha replied. At least she hadn’t
grown any spidery parts, she supposed.

‘Still, armoured alien hands are nothing to be sniffed
at,’ Sam replied. She scraped the silver blood off the slide into a flask of
solution. Tabitha considered Sam’s strange choice of words, and made a sly
sniff of her hands while Sam shook the mixture. They smelled like copper coins,
and felt cold and rough against her nose. Jane flashed her a suspicious look.

‘When did all this happen?’ said Sam, inspecting the
flask of solution. Nothing was happening to the blood.

‘When that thing stung me,’ Tabitha replied. ‘It
felt like I was having a heart attack.’ She thought back to that sense of
dread, and the metallic pounding in her chest. How long had Dev said it was
since then? Three days? She thought back to his lifeless body in the pub. And
how little sadness she felt. Maybe she’d already run out of sadness.

‘It stung you?’ said Jane, leaning on the boxes beside
Sam. The lanterns cast her face in a craggy yellow light, picking out creases
and shadows.

‘A needle inside its claw, yeah. It injected me with
something,’ said Tabitha.

‘Then you should be dead,’ Jane replied, disbelieving.
‘You should be an empty skin.’

‘Sorry to disappoint,’ said Tabitha, looking Jane square
in the eye. Jane’s hand never strayed far from the gun in her belt.

‘An exchange and modification of cellular material,’ Sam
replied, awestruck as she looked up from the microscope and a fresh drop of
blood. ‘I had a listen to your heart too, while you were unconscious,’ she
admitted. ‘There wasn’t a beat, just… a really faint hum. Your heart
tissue must have mutated with the venom. Or, it might even have been completely
replaced.’

‘So what’s in there instead?’ said Tabitha, pressing a
palm to her breastbone.

‘I think it’s a core,’ Sam replied excitedly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It could be some kind of reactor or a generator, at a
guess,’ said Sam. ‘A power source. It might explain the explosion,’ she
said, glancing around at the messy cellar. ‘And all this came from a venom that
was supposed to kill you. You’ve had a completely different reaction to
the substance than any other victim I’ve seen.’ Tabitha watched Sam closely,
and how flustered she looked. She was fidgety; tapping the flask of blood
impatiently. There was definitely something going on there; Jane had noticed it
too. Sam was looking more and more excited by the minute, frantic even. She
hurried back to the microscope again, with an energy bordering on the obsessive.

‘It’s possible that an existing genetic mutation allowed
your body to incorporate the cells in the alien venom, rather than fall
victim to them,’ said Sam. She was talking rapidly, focussing on the blood in
the microscope. ‘I can only assume that these alien nanotech cells coursed through
your blood vessels and deposited in the heart. Rather than destroying your
tissues, they somehow acted as stem cells or templates… modifying your mammal
heart into an alien counterpart. A bioelectrical reactor.’

‘Are you alright love?’ said Jane, putting a hand on
Sam’s arm.

‘Yes, fine,’ Sam replied, affronted. ‘Why?’

‘You seem… frantic.’

‘It’s exciting!’ said Sam, tearing the plastic wrapping
off a hypodermic needle. ‘Don’t you think so?’ Jane looked at her.

‘Well yes, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You just look wired,
that’s all.’

‘Can you blame me?’ Sam replied happily. ‘Think of all
the applications!’ she was drawing a clear liquid into the needle from a small
glass bottle. They watched her tap the needle with a shaking hand.

‘Applications?’ said Tabitha, backing away. Sam turned
around and grabbed her arm.

‘Now if you just hold still a moment –

‘What the hell are you doing!?’ Tabitha snapped,
recoiling as Jane grabbed her shoulders. She felt the needle sink into her arm.
Sam held on tight to her struggling wrist.

‘Anaesthetic,’ Sam assured her. She emptied the needle
into her arm before Tabitha could pull away. ‘Only a biopsy. We’ll have you
back around in no time.’ Tabitha stumbled away from them and crashed into the
desk behind her. She felt her legs turn to jelly, watched Jane stepping closer.
The room spun as the anaesthetic coursed through her.

‘You want to cut me open!’ Tabitha heard herself mumble,
looking up at Sam’s blurry shape. Alarm bells were ringing in her head; her
paranoia. She felt Jane’s hands grip her arms behind her back.

‘I only want to see your core working,’ said Sam, by way
of a compromise.

‘You want to open my heart up!’ Tabitha slurred,
struggling to get free. She felt the anaesthetic bleeding all the urgency out
of her. Her limbs were impossible weights.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll heal right up again,’ Sam reminded
her brightly.

‘Anyway, you’re more hardware than human now,’ Jane said
in her ear. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard to piece you back together when we’re done.’
Tabitha shook her head and tried to fight for consciousness, and felt the
dizziness begin to fade like the shroud of sleep. She felt her heart kick in,
or her core, or whatever the hell it was. Current ran through her veins like
espresso. She felt her body defend itself, burning off the drug. She felt her
senses coming back to her; felt Jane’s strong hands gripping her arms behind
her back.

‘Just relax Tabitha, please,’ Sam said pleasantly,
approaching her with a fresh needle of anaesthetic. ‘It won’t hurt a bit. I
promise.’ Tabitha wrenched her arms free from Jane’s grip and hit Sam on the
jaw, laying her out on the floor. Jane staggered away and pulled the gun from
her belt. Tabitha leapt aside as the pistol cracked, deafening in the cellar.
Missed her. She tackled Jane and brought her crashing to the floor, kneeling
over her to grip her by the throat. Jane spluttered and struggled, and gave up
the pistol as Tabitha crushed her hand around the grip. Teeth gritted, Tabitha
raised a metal fist into the air ready to swing, and saw the terror in Jane’s
eyes.

‘Stop it! Please!’ Sam pleaded. ‘You’ll kill
her!’ Tabitha looked around at Sam in a daze, and back down at Jane gasping on
the floor. Tabitha saw her metal hand bunched into a cruel fist, and opened her
fingers out in shock. She would have smashed the woman’s skull, right there and
then – what the hell was happening to her?

‘Please, don’t,’ Sam begged, terrified, watching Tabitha
drag Jane from the floor.

‘Let me out of here,’ Tabitha growled, her hand still
clutched around Jane’s throat. ‘Now!’ panicked, Sam rushed past them to open
the door into the first cellar. Tabitha marched Jane into the other room and
shoved her off into the corner.

‘They’re still outside!’ Jane yelled hoarsely. ‘If you
open that shutter they’ll kill us all!’ but Tabitha didn’t so much as look at
the shutter where she’d come in. Instead she climbed the steps at the back of
the cellar, the wooden ladder that led up to the shadowed trap door. She pushed
at the hatch, but it only rattled in its hinges.

‘There’s bolts on it,’ Sam said timidly, holding onto
Jane. ‘You have to –

Tabitha smashed her fist up into the door and burst it open with a bang, bolts
or not. Daylight flooded the staircase, and a flurry of dust drifted down in
the glow. Tabitha looked up at the room above, and the doctors below in their
basement. They were just staring at her from the foot of the stairs, terrified
in the gloom.

‘If you follow me, I’ll kill you.’

7

There
was no sign of Mog when Tabitha got back home. She’d crept and sprinted her way
back through town, keeping to the walls. Taking cautious detours wherever the
spiders lurked. Bees and wasps still prowled her front garden, oblivious to the
dead town. Tabitha smelled the sickly-stale stench of rotten food as she went
inside and headed for the kitchen. She emptied a crinkling pouch of food into
Mog’s bowl, and went upstairs to her room.

It was all too tempting to climb in between the
bedsheets. Hide away, and pretend none of this was happening. She kicked her
boots and socks off and slid in. Pulled the warm covers close, and just sat for
a while against the pillows. She ran the soles of her feet over the bobbly
bedsheet; breathed in the fresh smell of good washing powder. The world stretched
only as far as her bedroom walls, safe and familiar and full of her stuff. For
a blissful moment she was hidden away inside comfort; a sunny fluffy world
glimpsed only in ads for fabric softener. But it didn’t change a thing. She
took her pale green eyes from the far wall and glanced out of the window at a
bright blue sky. That new world was still out there, sunny and lethal. Then
came that one sickening thought again; the barbed wire round her heart. There
was no one left who loved her. It was just her now.

She stared forever at the pattern on her duvet cover,
and felt too numb to cry. Working people with working emotions, they could cry.
Like water from a tap, on and off again. But Tabitha felt broken now. She was a
dropped vase, shattered; no more. All the grief had flooded out of her in one
big tide. Now she was just the pieces of a person. All the tears had dried
away. She felt exhausted. A headache thumped against her skull; probably
caffeine withdrawal. She wanted nothing more than to stay up here in her
beautiful house, comfy in her bed, and wait for everything to go back to
normal. But she knew that was just the little girl coming out in her. She’d
done the same thing when her dad died, when her world had fallen down around
her. And hiding under the bed sheets didn’t change a thing. After weeks and
weeks of it, it had taken her mum coming upstairs and berating her to finally
snap her out of it. I know it’s hard love. That was what she’d said.
It’s hard for me too. But life doesn’t stop. We both need to be strong, and
carry on. Now her mum was gone too. And Emma and Jen. John as well,
probably. Tabitha let the thought sink in, hard and glass-jagged as it was; she
was on her own. All the strength had to come from her. She could hide away from
that new world, or she could survive it. She could be the victim, or use her
new body to fight back. The bed sheets were paradise though. She didn’t even
need to fight, not really. The spiders would just find her and kill her in her
sleep… or she could end her life right now. There were plenty of sleeping
tablets downstairs. She could fall asleep and never wake up. Easy.

‘I’m not waiting here to die,’ she told her bedroom,
dragging her eyes from the window. She threw the covers off and pulled her
socks and boots back on. ‘I’m not. I’m not.’

Tabitha
clomped back downstairs in her boots. She called out to her cat and searched
the house, but there was still no sign of him. Sighing, she rummaged around the
ruins of her living room for a pen and paper, and scribbled a note on a
lightning-burnt cabinet.

Dear
Mog,

I
know you can’t read, but writing you a note makes me feel better. I have to
leave, Mog. It’s not safe here any more. I wish I could just lock the door and
close the curtains, and we can watch films and snuggle on the couch like we
always do. But the world’s changed now, and it’s dangerous. Thinking about it,
you might not even be alive any more.

I
need to find other survivors if I’m going to live through this, so I’m going to
look for them. I don’t know if I’ll be coming back. I’ll try to, if I can.
Maybe the army’s winning, somewhere out there. I don’t know. Please forgive me,
Mog. I know you’ll be alright. I love you, you stupid cat.

Tabitha
X

Tabitha kissed the note and put it down on the kitchen
floor, beside every bit of cat food in the house. He was a cat; he’d be
alright. It was her she had to worry about. She had to think survival. She felt
for the carving knife in her belt, and cursed when she remembered it was in
Jane and Sam’s cellar. She pulled the other knives from the wooden block and
studied them, and tucked a thinner longer one into her belt. The breadknife and
the smaller ones wouldn’t be any use anyway. Rifling in the kitchen drawers,
she pocketed an old crumpled tube of superglue and some safety pins. Bound to
be useful for something. The table mats and birthday candles, probably less so.
And the cigarette lighter for the oven didn’t work anyway.

She threw a hoodie on and shoved a hard stale heel of
French bread into a pocket. Set about rummaging through the other drawers for
whatever it was people needed for survival. Even the word felt daunting;
a vague concept. Suddenly a spider burst through the kitchen window, and
Tabitha ran as two more clambered inside. They were already climbing in through
the shattered living room window. They struck out at her as she dodged past and
fumbled frantically with the front door. Another spider was lurking on the
doorstep when she opened it. Tabitha leapt over it and fell clumsily down the
steps, and ran out of the garden as the chattering horde raced after her on the
street. Had they stalked her all the way back from the lab? She tried to summon
up the same electrical energy that had thrown Sam and Jane across the room.
Strained inwardly at a non-existent feeling. There was nothing there to summon;
she may as well have been trying to sneeze at will. At least the stab wound in
her thigh had long since healed. She sprinted down the road with a fresh
energy, a new intensity that the spiders struggled to keep up with. Her muscles
felt like coiled springs. Her heart was a power plant, launching her on. Boots
pounding the tarmac, Tabitha ran with every volt of power her new body could
summon. The silver chattering mass wasn’t at her heels for long. Every
sprinting step pushed the road away behind her; opened up the gap between them.
Instinct gripped her brain and numbed her burning muscles. One by one, the spiders
slowed and gave up the chase. Tabitha felt her lungs wrenching air, gasping for
relief. But she ran on, past dead skins and crashed cars and shattered
belongings on the road out of town. She wasn’t going to die here in the ruins.
She refused.

8

‘Why are you doing this?’ Alex screamed. He was a
bruised bloody mess, tied to a chair in a ruined New York office block.
Surrounded by filthy grim faces, staring at him like he was a freakshow. Beyond
the blown-out windows, the pale daylight cast a ghostly glow over an ocean of
toppled grey buildings.

‘Why?’ he repeated. He pushed the words out through
broken teeth, slick with silver blood. He swallowed a milky static gulp of it
as more welled in his gums.

‘You were eating people’s skins!’ the burly man yelled
back, disbelieving. ‘Who the fuck does that?!’ the small crowd around him
nodded and mumbled to one another. Alex couldn’t hear their words properly. His
bloody ears made everything a muffled mess.

‘It’s not my fault!’ Alex screamed, spitting blood as he
spoke. ‘Everything else I eat, I throw up! I’m starving! Those skins are
all I can eat now!’ the crowd stared, silent. Hanging on the monster’s words.
‘I can’t eat food any more, do you understand?’ he yelled. ‘Do
you think I wanted this? What else am I supposed to do, starve to death?’

‘I saw a spider sting him,’ said a woman in the crowd,
dust-covered and loudly spoken. ‘He should be dead.’

‘Yeah, and look what happens if they don’t kill you,’
the burly man replied to the crowd. ‘Turns you into a god-damn cannibal.’
He stared at Alex’s hunched body in the chair, barely conscious after his
appeal. The carpet was a marsh of silver blood around his feet.

‘This isn’t right,’ said a young man in the crowd.

‘We’re not setting him loose,’ said a woman, holding her
kids tight. ‘He’ll kill us.’

‘I won’t kill you,’ Alex mumbled into his chest. ‘Just
let me go. Please.’

‘Well we can’t keep him prisoner,’ an old man chipped
in. ‘I mean what do we feed him, skin?’

‘…Just let me go,’ Alex mumbled quietly.

‘What?’ said the burly man, stepping closer.

‘Let me go!’ Alex yelled, looking up at him with a
mangled face. Beaten out of shape.

‘We can’t,’ an old woman said in the crowd, looking
around at everyone. ‘We can’t do that. He’s too dangerous. Think about our
kids.’

‘Can’t believe you’re pulling the kids card to justify
this,’ Alex chuckled, looking up at the crowd. There was something else there
behind his eyes, something dark and fierce. A new Alex. ‘I’m not going to eat
your kids,’ he told them. ‘…There’s no meat on them.’ Gasps in the crowd.

‘I say we just kill him,’ said a young man at the back.

‘We can’t do that,’ someone else replied. A heavy
silence, broken by a cough.

‘I can do that,’ said a man, pulling a gun from his
pocket. The crowd erupted into moral debate. Alex strained again at the blue
nylon rope that bound his wrists to the chair. Strained harder. The rope bit
into his skin. Harder. His arms trembled with the effort. The rope stung, rough
and cutting. The stem of the office chair cracked with a metal ping; a
sound lost in the noisy chatter. The burly man leading the crowd had his back
turned. Some of them saw Alex stagger to his feet and yelled to warn him, but
it was too late. Alex wrapped his tied arms around the man’s neck, curled a
bicep round his throat. The crowd were yelling and screaming. Alex squeezed the
man’s throat with every ounce of rage he had. His new bloody hunger drove him
to bite down hard on the man’s ear, ripping it away. Red blood coursed down the
man’s neck as he screamed. Alex didn’t feel the crowbar smack against his head
at first. It was too hard and heavy and sudden to register. He felt the second
hit though, and felt the office floor pound against his face when he fell. The
kicks that cracked his ribs, he felt those too. The crowd’s screaming angry
voices filled his head; a mind already at war with itself. He yelled at the
hammer blow that shattered his hand. The knife in his stomach. Screamed as
countless hands and feet blocked out the daylight above him, reaching down to
claw the life out of him. Panic bit. He flailed for life, grasping at nothing.
He felt weightless then, light. The ceiling tiles floated by above his head as
the crowd carried him. And suddenly all the raw horror of the new world fell
away as he sailed out of the office window, twenty storeys high. The mob’s
roaring cheer faded away above him; faces that peered out to watch him fall. He
flailed limp in the huge empty nothing, and heard the rush of air that blew
cold against his bloody ears. He looked beyond the shrinking faces, past the
towering building above. There was only sky, vast and pearly white above him;
sliding out of reach as he fell to the street below.

9

Tabitha
was wandering through new-build suburbs on the edge of town; suburbs that she’d
only seen in passing before now. Thin detached houses in fresh new brick, lined
up along a brand new road that led into the woods. All their neat little
gardens still primped and manicured to within an inch of their lives. There was
a child’s bike laid out on the road, and dark broken windows in the empty
homes. She tried not to look at the skins; walked on past and blotted them from
her mind. She picked up an elastic band off the road, and slipped it around her
wrist. Something useful to add to her knife and her stale bread. It was hardly
a survival pack. That was why she couldn’t afford to overlook anything lying
around. Not if it could help her chances of living through this. She headed up
a driveway, intending to search the house for bottled water. It looked like a
mineral water kind of house. When she peered in the living room window she saw
a spindly silver shape reflecting the daylight in the gloom. She backed away,
and headed back down the drive onto the road. Promptly gave up on the idea. It was
probably better just to get out of town now. She checked over her shoulder and
jogged on down the empty road, into the cover of the woods. People didn’t live
in woods; maybe the spiders had no reason to come in here.

Tabitha wandered on for a while through the green silent
shade of the trees, summer-full and hanging low. She could smell the thick
thorny brambles and the waist-high grass; a heady whiff on the breeze. A little
way down, the road gave way to walking paths, and she left the old stone walls behind.
There was only the wild world ahead, vast and silent but for the sound of birds
and the quiet creak of her boots. She tried to get into the habit of checking
around her. Looking for danger, like a prey animal. That’s what she was now,
she reminded herself. Just lucky prey.

Deep in the woods, through tangled brambles and
storm-fallen trees, Tabitha came to a rocky dip with a sleeping bag in it. She
pressed up against a tree, cautious. Convinced that an axe murderer was
watching her from the woods all around. Crouching down against the tree, with
only the sound of her own panicked breaths for company, Tabitha closed her eyes
and climbed back out of her head. There were worse things than axe murderers
now; of course there were. Axe murderers only wanted to straight-up murder you.
Not capture you alive and drink your insides out. Looking around, she stood up
and made her way closer to investigate. There were empty tins of food scattered
around the sleeping bag, and a plastic bag full of unopened water bottles. And
flapping in the wind against a tree trunk nearby, a skin in a coat and
tracksuit trousers. Its withered feet had slipped out of its trainers, blowing
in the breeze like a fleshy pair of tights. Tabitha wished she’d felt worse
than she did about taking the food and water. But already that grim, nauseating
edge was wearing off scenes like this. She’d seen a dozen others like it on her
way into the woods. So many people had tried to escape in here and survive. So
many skins; they’d lost their shock factor. A broken tree stood over the dell
where she stood; a splintered pillar of rotten timber that stabbed the blue sky
above. She felt her caffeine headache come back again when she stooped down to
pick up a stray water bottle, and added it to her plastic bag.

Tabitha felt sluggish as she walked on into the woods,
feeling relaxed without her regular caffeine in her bloodstream. For a little
while the air felt syrupy all around her while she walked. Thicker to breathe,
thicker to move through. She couldn’t believe how rough she felt, even after
just a couple of days without a cup of tea. What had she been doing to herself,
drinking that stuff every day?

‘God, sobriety’s miserable,’ she said, squinting at the
bright sunlight. She stood and watched a crow for a while, wandering a patch of
grass and thinking about its existence. It stopped and studied her for a while.

‘It’s alright for you,’ Tabitha said bitterly, watching
the crow wandering on. She didn’t like the way it strutted around, like nothing
was going on in the world. As if whatever had happened didn’t matter all that
much.

‘Oh, look at me, I’m a crow, I’m not getting eaten by
aliens,’ Tabitha muttered. ‘Knob.’ The crow paused; eyed her cautiously. It
flew away on glossy black wings in clumsy lurching flaps. Tabitha would’ve
given anything to fly away with it, high above the empty world and the biting
silence.

Wandering deeper into the woods than she’d ever been
before, Tabitha took a seat for a while on a fallen tree. Up above, two little
birds chattered and sang endlessly at one another over the same bush. Up ahead,
Tabitha made out the waving black shape of an alien tree; one of the towering
black anemones that she’d seen back in town. It looked tree-shaped, she
supposed; but its thick arms waved around gently, surreal, as if it was
underwater. She noticed birds perching on its drifting branches, flitting from
one to another when the waving tentacles overlapped. The tree’s alien shape had
already taken root here. Already it had become just another part of the world.

Tabitha came to a pond and edged around it. She studied
the frogspawn in the murky water, crossing a sturdy wooden walkway to the far
side. A big dragonfly darted past her from the bushes and hunted around the
reeds; a tyrant among lesser bugs. Tabitha tried to blot out the summery
silence as she reached the far side of the pond; tried to keep her grief buried
deep down. The shallow mud made sticky pucker sounds as she lifted her feet.

She felt more alive out of town now, even despite her
grief; it was the strangest feeling. There was something new about the sunshine
through the trees, lighting up the leaves into emerald shades over her head.
Some strange revelation; a moment of holy bliss. She glimpsed tiny veins of
light in the leaves above; a running current. Life’s voltage. It gave her
butterflies, tingling just to see it. A natural attraction, heady as lust. The
rich dark black of the soil beneath the trees looked as good as chocolate cake
under her feet. She felt hungry, but not in her stomach. It was a longing that
ran through her whole body, like she was missing some vital part of herself. A
gaping want inside her; divine horniness. She didn’t understand the feeling. It
was something she’d never felt before.

Pigeons scattered into the air as Tabitha walked into a
clearing; wings flapping soft in the silence. She smelled the earthy green tang
of leaves here, half surrounded by a misty violet carpet of bluebells. Her
sight began to shift again. Looking closely at the roots of the nearest tree,
she saw energy there. Beneath the rough brown bark was a living light factory.
She could sense the leaves above her on the branches, drinking in the sunlight.
Everything around her had taken on a brighter shade, and it wasn’t just from
the light. There was something in the way she saw it. The only sound was her
footsteps; light rasping strokes on the sandy dirt path.

She saw a squirrel running along the top of a wooden
fence, bounding over the square posts in a rhythm of perfect arcs. Smiling, she
followed at a distance. She walked on and it ran from her, all along the
downhill path, until it stopped a few fence posts along and looked at her. It
had its back turned, as if it was hiding something. Tabitha stopped, smiled,
and edged a little closer towards it.

‘What’ve you got there?’ she said quietly, stepping
closer without trying to spook it.

‘Where are you going?’ said a gravelly monotone voice,
off to her left in the trees. Tabitha froze. It took her a moment to see him.
He wore muddy camouflage gear, like a hunter. Shaved head and a fierce look;
scowling and rough-stubbled. The brilliant colours she saw in everything
suddenly faded away. All the world lost its shine.

‘I said, where are you going?’ the man repeated. He was
pointing a rifle. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. There was an
intense hunger about him. Tell him what he wants to hear, she told
herself. Just get away.

‘None of your business,’ Tabitha replied, surprising
herself. The old her would never say something like that.

‘You what?’ he chuckled, stepping closer.

‘I said, it’s none of your fucking business where I’m
going!’ she said, standing her ground. The man laughed, loud and hoarse.

‘You should talk nicer than that, seeing as I’ve got this
pointed at you.’ He raised the rifle and aimed it between her eyes. Get
away, Tabitha told herself. Just run.

‘Well are you going to shoot me or not?’ she said. It
was the new Tabitha talking. Her gut reaction. She looked him right in the eye,
and held his stare. He saw her strange grey hands bunch into fists, and
hesitated.

‘Give me everything you’ve got,’ he said, stepping
closer. He smelled like stale tobacco.

‘What?’ she replied. It threw him. Tabitha stared down
the dark barrel of the gun; the promise of instant death.

‘Are you deaf, you stupid bitch?’ he growled. ‘Give me
everything! Your food and water, give it to me!’

‘You’d have it by now, if you had the balls to come and
take it,’ Tabitha said with a smile.

‘I’ll fucking shoot you.’

‘Do it.’

‘I’ll kill you.’

‘So fucking do it!’ she yelled. The man stepped closer,
hesitated. He wasn’t going to shoot her; she could tell. She was drunk on
adrenaline. Time to lay it on thick.

‘If you fire that, every spider for a mile around is
going to come here looking for us,’ she told him. ‘Now I know I’ll be alright.
They tried to kill me once and it didn’t work. All they did was give me these.’
She raised her hands for him to see. He had no idea how scared he looked. ‘But
you… they’ll find you, and they’ll hold you down and drink your insides out. I
don’t think you want that to happen.’ He’d been edging closer all the while,
rifle still raised and aimed at her face. Wide-eyed he looked her over, sized
her up. He dropped the rifle, pulled a hunting knife from his belt and came at
her. He was slower than her. When he went to stab her Tabitha grabbed the blade
tight, and put him on the ground with a broken nose. Before he could move she
was knelt over him, pressing the knife point in against the dry red skin on his
throat. He struggled. She pushed the point in to break the skin. He yelped.
Dark red blood trickled down his neck. He struggled again.

‘Don’t,’ she told him quietly, fixing him with a stare.
‘Those spiders are nothing compared to me. Now give me everything, and I’ll let
you live.’ She pressed the knife in a little more.

‘T-take it,’ he said. She could see the fear in his eyes.

Tabitha
walked on right into the evening, deep into the dusky forest. She had the
hunting knife on her belt in its leather sheath, and the scoped rifle slung
across her back by the strap. She hadn’t needed to keep checking over her
shoulder for the man; he hadn’t tried to come after her. She didn’t suppose he
would last very long out here anyway. Good. She’d had enough of bullies growing
up to last her a lifetime. Let them feel weak and terrified for a change.

She made her way down unfamiliar paths, further than
she’d ever been before through here. She knew the town on the far side of the
woods, but she didn’t know how to get there from here. She had to be heading
the right way though, she told herself. She’d been following the downward slope
of the land for a couple of miles at least.

Further on Tabitha sat down on a log by the stream, and
pulled the hard stale chunk of bread from her pocket in a shower of crumbs. She
chewed it until her jaw hurt with the effort; washed it down with a bottle of
water from the bag. She watched froth collect behind a fallen tree in the
stream. She picked the mud from her boots idly with the big cruel hunting
knife, and watched the sun set over the fields that stretched out beyond the
edge of the woods. She soon felt queasy though, and her appetite dropped right
off. Maybe that was a good thing, really. The bread would last longer if she
didn’t feel like eating much of it. She put a rough cold hand under her t-shirt
and rubbed her stomach, wincing at the cramps. Maybe she should have eaten
sooner, when she’d come around in her house. It’d been days now, and all the
bread had done was make her feel ill. The quiet bliss of the woods helped,
though. No jarring racket of voices; no people to watch her and laugh. There
was only the flowing sound of the stream; the vicious harmony of the birds. It
was a strange silence though, normally filled with the distant hiss of traffic.
The world was a new and lonely place.

After a few warm sips of water Tabitha sighed, and got
back up on her tired feet. She wasn’t used to walking this much any more;
there’d be a lot more of it to come too. Just one of those things, she told
herself. No use getting in a state about it, as Mum would say. Just one
footstep at a time. Picking up her new hunting rifle, Tabitha let the movies
guide her hands. She lifted the rifle’s bolt handle up and pulled it back with
a clack. Sure enough there was a bullet in there, big and brass. Fishing
it out, there was another beneath it. And another. Beyond that though, it was
just a dark empty recess.

‘That’s it?’ she asked the gun, wiggling a grey finger
inside in case there were any more bullets hidden away. She’d told the man to
empty his pockets, once she had the rifle pointed at him. He hadn’t been
carrying any more bullets though. Tabitha sighed at the meagre ammunition in
her palm, and slotted each bullet back into the magazine. She pushed the bolt back
in, and turned the handle down to lock it. The switch behind the scope must
have been the safety. There was always a safety switch; the movies told her so.
It was always on when the inexperienced bad guy tried to shoot the seasoned
good guy. Tabitha pushed the safety up, so that she didn’t go shooting a third
of her bullets by accident. So all those loud beautiful blockbusters had been
useful for something after all, she told herself, despite her mum’s opinions to
the contrary. The thought of her bit into Tabitha’s heart.

Tabitha zipped her hoodie up and stretched her stiff
legs. The sun was setting; before long the sky had turned plum purple. She
slung the rifle across her back, slid her new hunting knife into its sheath on
her belt, and left the river behind in the gathering gloom.

She walked on through the trees as the stars came out
one by one; specks of silver sand on a field of black velvet. One sore foot in
front of the other, she trudged on through the night; tripping on roots and
catching at sudden saplings in her way, blind to all obstacles in the inky
dark. She wandered on until she left the trees behind, and the soil gave way to
tall grass brushing against her sleeves. There was only the starry sky above
her now; no more forest to block her view. She’d never seen so many stars
before. These were the stars that showed themselves far away from the city
lights, where there was only the pure dark of the countryside. There weren’t
any city lights any more, she reminded herself. Now all of it was country dark.
She went cautiously out in the endless grass, watching and listening for
anything out there in the black. She walked on until it became a blind
meditation. Listening to the rustling grass running over her boots. The
clicking bats above. Her own breaths, shallow at first, until she sank her
shoulders and reassured herself. She could handle this. She was armed. Whatever
happened, she could always run away and heal. She hoped. She breathed in the
smells of dirt and grass in the dark. Dragged her cold feet on through the
night fields until the creeping blush of dawn.

As the sun crept up in the cool clear sky, Tabitha
caught sight of the next town in the distance. Exhausted, she stopped for a
little while and leant on a wooden fence. Felt the smooth bite of the wood
grain against her wrists, sliding her skin over the timber with a whispering
swish. She just wanted to feel something again, with no sensation left in her
hands. Worth the splinter, just to feel it. She searched the sky for a sudden
rumbling sound. A jet tore overhead. Tabitha’s heart soared when she heard the
distant echoing blast of a bomb. Bombs could only be a good thing now, surely.
It meant that people were fighting back. The firm boot of national defence.
Order being restored. She watched a rising flower of fiery black smoke in the
distance, blooming over the town where she wanted to be. There must have been
soldiers nearby; maybe in the town itself. Or survivors, fighting back. She
could help them. Another jet ripped past overhead. It was grey, a strange
shape, with a very different sound. Wait… not a jet. Something else. Something
alien. It belched a pillar of white light and chased the fighter jet
through the sky.

‘What the hell?’ Tabitha mumbled, staring up at it in
the distant dawn. It was flapping. What was it, a bird? A lizard?
Whatever it was, it was huge and it was brutal. She watched the dark creature
throw its wings out wide and catch the jet in the air. Tabitha prayed for the
pilot to eject. Prayed to see their tiny shape escaping the carnage. But
nothing. The creature ripped the plane to pieces and reduced it to a falling,
flaming wreck. The spinning jet disappeared behind the buildings in the
distance. Exploded in town with a deep echoing boom. The creature circled
again. Tabitha gasped and ducked down in the tall grass, watching the sky until
it flew away. She could only watch from the fields as the smoke rose up from
the town, snaking black into the pale sky. The wind tugged at her hair as she
looked out over the sprawl of buildings. She had to know what was happening in
there. She had to get to the crashed jet.

10

Tabitha
stalked into town with her rifle ready, watching for movement in the shattered buildings.
It was the same here too; a ghost world. A thin dead covering of brick dust
coated the cars she passed by. Torn-open office blocks bled flurries of paper
in the summer breeze. It was hot and dry here; an urban desert. There was only
the sullen creak of her leather boots as she walked the streets, cradling her
rifle. Was this how it felt to be a soldier? Even they moved as a team though.
She was on her own.

There’d been some real fighting here in the town centre.
Bullet holes peppered the buildings. The shop windows that still stood were
shattered through, clouded white with a thousand webbed cracks. Useless
barricades blocked the side streets; walls of tables and chairs with their legs
poking skywards. Tabitha jumped at sudden birdsong; a blackbird that twittered
loudly as it flew overhead. She was glad of the sound though, even despite her
pounding heart. Nothing was worse than the graveyard silence here. Some of the
shops were burnt-out shells; walls blackened from long-dead fires. She’d imagined
some kind of resistance fighting back; there was nothing here. No skins, no
spidery shapes; no fighting. No sign of life. Passing a ruined bank building,
she stooped to pick up one of the leaflets that had blown out of the broken
door onto the street.

‘Protect your world,’ Tabitha mumbled, reading the
header aloud. Home insurance. A couple grinned at one another on the cover.
There wasn’t anything about alien invasion cover inside the pages. Tabitha
dropped the leaflet on the kerb and walked off up the dead high street.

Pigeons
had gathered in the empty town square, pecking and strutting, oblivious to the
urban ruins around them. Tabitha hoisted herself up onto the wall that
surrounded the square, and looked around her in the hazy morning heat. There
was a little toy skeleton on the ground nearby; bright green plastic grinning
at her from the grave.

‘Anyone here?’ she muttered to herself, taking a sip of
water from a plastic bottle. A bee swam by through the warm air. Tabitha sighed
and shrugged out of her hoodie. She pulled the stale bread from the carrier
bag, stared at it, and put it back. She couldn’t face another bite after how
sick it’d made her feel yesterday. She looked around, shrugged, sighed. A fly
danced by in the sticky golden sunlight.

Up
on the flat roof of a hotel building she could see for miles. Two columns of
smoke twisted up black in the distance; they must have been the crashed jet and
the bomb it had dropped. The wind whipped white rubbish down the road below.
The town laid out beneath her was a ruin of browns and greys, a square-mile
demolition site. There were cars everywhere, parked up hurriedly on kerbs or
abandoned on the main roads. Lined up in dead traffic like one huge dealership.
She couldn’t get over how quiet the world was. There were no voices, no sirens;
no perma-hiss of road noise. She’d never expected a peace like this, as lonely
and brutal as it was. Far in the distance lay the dull green hills, and not a
cloud in the sky. Somewhere miles behind, she thought about Sam and Jane
sealing themselves back into their cellar. Scared. Tabitha felt her own gnawing
fear too, but at least it hadn’t consumed her. Surely it was better to be out
in the world, looking for other survivors. Or was it? Was this the wrong thing
to do? Should she be holed up somewhere safe, waiting for everything to get
fixed? It didn’t look like there was anyone left to fix anything. There
certainly wasn’t any sign of the military here, like she’d expected. The empty
new world sprawled out below, on and on into a hazy horizon. Despite her fear
and her loneliness though, she felt alright up here in the sunlight. The more
she stayed with the strange easy feeling, vague and slippery as it was, the
better she felt. It grew in her like the seed of something, then it flooded
through her. She felt strong. Her body buzzed and her brain tingled; it was the
most beautiful feeling. Holding her metal palm to her chest, there wasn’t any
semblance of a heartbeat. Just a muted vibration, humming and miniscule. She
could feel her silver blood inside her; a soaring feeling that coursed current
through her body. She felt a tingle across her scalp, down her neck. The energy
inside her gave her that feeling again, like when she’d been in the woods. Like
everything was connected in one big electric web, and the sun was shining down
with an energy that felt almost sacred. She caught herself then, gazing in a
reverie. She needed a plan.

It
was morbid curiosity that drew her on toward the smoking crash site. She
followed the trail of smoke twisting up into the sky, heading out towards a
housing estate. The summer heat pressed close as she walked. The dry sticky
breeze did nothing to cool her down. She felt her t-shirt clinging to her back,
damp with sweat. Her feet were hot and sore, laced up in her boots like
creaking leather ovens. She clamped a hand to her mouth when she rounded the
next corner. Already she could feel the heat of the blaze. Crackling flames.
There in front of her was the dead jet, lying mauled and mangled by gigantic
claws. Broken and burning. The wreckage covered the road; the jet’s body had
ploughed into the tarmac and smashed through a shop.

‘Jesus,’ Tabitha mumbled, stopping in her tracks. She
hadn’t seen it at first. There in the wreckage was a spider, sat right in the
blaze. Silver skin reflecting the flames; a lurking vision of death. Its mouth
parts twitched and shuffled, dripping the pilot’s red blood. It shifted around
to face her. Tabitha fumbled with the hunting knife on her belt. She felt her
stomach lurch with dread, ready for the fight. But the spider didn’t move. As
she stood staring at it, she realised how fat it looked.

‘You’re full,’ she said, stepping closer. ‘You can’t
even move, can you? You vile, creeping little shit.’ Tabitha stepped closer,
watching it. The spider backed away a step, reluctant to fight. It was all
Tabitha needed. She pulled the knife from her belt and ran at it. The spider
was a sudden wall of raised legs; jutting silver swords held up against her.
Tabitha wrenched away a stabbing leg and stomped the spider in the head, and
drove the knife in deep. She watched the dots of light along its body flicker
and fade out, and the thing slumped forward against her. Tabitha let its
curled-up body fall from the jet and crash down on the road, abdomen swollen
with its meal. She glanced at the drained body in the jet’s cockpit, and wished
she hadn’t. Retching, she jumped back down from the jet and bent over on the
road, holding her knees while she waited for the sick feeling to pass. She wiped
the silver blood from her knife against her filthy jeans, and slipped it back
into the sheath. She had to get away from here. At least she’d learned a couple
of things about the spiders, she told herself. Fire wouldn’t kill them, but
their own greed could certainly help.

Tabitha spent the afternoon working her way back through
the town centre, searching buildings for survivors or anything useful. It was a
long way to the next town over, and it looked like she really was on her own.
All she could do was stay alive and keep moving, and hope that somewhere out
there was some shred of civilisation. She moved cautiously, staying close to
the buildings in the shade. She passed by a popped football in the street,
browned and sad with a deflated dent. Further down the road she glanced at a
blood-stained novel left on a bench, crinkled and rain-warped and fluttering
open in the breeze.

Every other home and office she explored held their own
little stockpiles of food. Cupboards stacked high with tins and jars. Everything
that people had managed to loot, steal and panic-buy before the end of the
world, Tabitha told herself. As if having enough food was going to see them
through what was coming. She couldn’t believe how different the world looked
now, after only a few days without humanity to keep it tidy. Everywhere she
looked, dirt and rubbish and wilderness were creeping in like mould.

A leisure centre had been left wide open, abandoned.
Edging her way inside, the dark corridor was empty. The drinks machines had
been prised open and looted; Tabitha spotted a dented can of cola left over
beside the wall. It hissed and fizzed when she cracked the ring pull open, and
she clamped her mouth over the sugary froth before it escaped. Shaking the
sticky drips off her grey fingers, Tabitha headed back outside and looked
around at the empty world. She took another slurp of her can, guzzling until
she felt the bubbles sting her throat. Sighing with satisfaction at the sugar
rush.

When
she reached a dingy old block of flats, Tabitha felt torn. It looked like the
perfect place for those spiders to nest. It also looked like a good place to
hole up and stay safe… maybe there were people up there. Maybe they needed her
help. She had to redeem herself, after what had happened to Dev in the pub.

‘I could have saved him,’ she told herself sadly,
heading toward the open door of the tower block. If she hadn’t been drunk, if
she’d been paying attention… it had been such a split-second thing though. It
was all over in a moment. Tabitha wiped her tears on her arm as she climbed the
staircase, boots clomping quietly on the old dull floor tiles.

She didn’t explore any floors in the block that had
skins in the corridor. There had only been two floors so far that hadn’t. She
emerged from the first safe-looking flat with a rucksack, and put a stray
digestive biscuit she’d found into her hoodie pocket. There’d been practically
nothing else in the place but old furniture and a stale smoky smell. The next
flat she explored had been a good haul though. She emerged again with tins of
beans weighing down her rucksack, and crisps and chocolate too. Rummaging in
her crinkling carrier bag, she moved the bread and bottles of water into the
backpack and headed on up to the top floor.

There wasn’t much of a lived-in quality to the last flat
either; just a dead TV, strewn clothes, and a smell like rotten vegetables. A
clear lunchbox on the table was filled with fluffy blue-white mould, thriving
in the sunlight like alien candy floss. Tabitha gagged and couldn’t look at it.
She headed into the kitchen.

‘Jackpot,’ she muttered, opening the kitchen cupboards.
She opened a jar of black olives and plucked at the top one with her new
fingers, wrestling it slippery from the neck of the jar. There was no sign that
anyone had been in the flat lately; only the clutter of lives left behind. And
the most horrible little old vase she’d ever seen.

‘What the hell is that?’ she mumbled, taking the vase
off the shelf. It was warped and turd-brown; a seventies mistake. Her metal
grip sent a hairline crack through it. Wary, Tabitha put it back down before
she managed to break it. She looked out over the town from the grimy window,
and popped the wrestled olive into her mouth. It was a sharp salty shock on her
tongue, welcome and strange. And already it felt like too much in her stomach
when she swallowed. Where was her appetite? There was so much food here, all
stacked up waiting to be eaten, and she didn’t want any of it. She could barely
manage a second olive from the jar. Searching through the kitchen drawers, she
plundered some plasters and a pair of scissors. A couple of clean towels to
tear up for bandages, just in case. And a bright rattling box of painkillers.
Definitely.

A few minutes later Tabitha sat on the floor with a
bucket, stomach cramping, throwing up her two olives. Maybe she was in some
kind of extended shock, she told herself. She’d just have to keep trying. She
had to eat something soon though; she’d try again later. At least the bottle of
spring water tasted good. Really good, actually. She checked the brand on the
bottle. Had they changed the source or something? It was smoother than she
remembered. Strangely satisfying.

Packing
crackers, biscuits and the jar of olives into her stolen rucksack, Tabitha
looked around the flat and thought twice. She knew she couldn’t stay here.
While at first it seemed safe, high up here away from the world, she’d be
trapped. If the spiders came looking for her, there was no way out except down
all those steps. Staying here wasn’t an option. She bagged a packet of peanuts
from the cupboard; a good high-energy food. That’s what she needed. With one
last look around, she opened the door onto the dark hallway and left.

Tabitha headed back down endless flights of stairs and
out onto the street again. She caught a smell on the summer breeze, strong and
sour. There was a low hum behind her. Wait, not a hum, she told herself.
Growling. Tabitha took one look at the pack of dogs behind her and ran
for her life, sprinting past a burned-out car in the precinct. They were feral,
and they were fast. She could hear the high ringing of nametags on their
collars as they ran. These were pets once. Now they were hunting her, growling
and barking as if she were prey on a concrete plain. One snapped at her hand
but found only metal skin there; Tabitha felt nothing from the bite. She
punched the dog hard on the snout, and watched it trail off from the hunt with
a yelp. The rest were gaining though; alsatians and dobermans with a wild look
in their eyes. Spaniels and whippets trailed behind; less aggressive but too
hungry not to join the chase. Tabitha reached into her bag for food to distract
them, but a pit bull ripped the rucksack from her grasp. The dogs tore into the
bag like a body and fought over the food that spilled over the ground. They’d
stopped chasing her. Tabitha didn’t look back, and didn’t stop running. Then
she heard the sound that she’d been hoping against, as the dogs’ claws
scratched and clattered after her again across the precinct. She pulled the
rifle from her shoulder. Crouched, aimed, squeezed the trigger. Nothing
happened. Safety’s on. She fumbled desperately at the safety switch and
fired, and a doberman dropped dead. It didn’t stop the others though. They were
too close for her to reload the rifle bolt. She jumped to her feet, swung the
gun. Cracked the wooden stock against the alsatian’s snarling head. But the
pack was on her. She yelled as jaws bit into her thigh; she pulled the carving
knife from her belt and buried it in the dog’s neck. It yelped and ran with the
knife stuck in, and Tabitha pulled her hunting knife instead. Stabbed another.
Instinct left no room for morality inside her. All she saw were wild eyes. All
she felt were snapping jaws, ripping into her skin. Wrestling against them she
pulled the hunting knife from the yelping dog and stabbed a third, while their
jaws yanked her body this way and that. Adrenaline pumped so hard that there
wasn’t a thought in her head. There was only kill or be killed; a violent
tangle of stabs and bites and barks and screams in the empty precinct. When her
thoughts and her breath came back to her, all she knew was that they’d left her
alone. There were dead dogs around her, sprawled in their blood. The ones that
survived her were skulking away, limping and dotting blood across the precinct.
Gasping, bleeding, Tabitha watched them go. She still held the bloody knife out
in front of her as a warning to them, shining garnet-red in the sunlight. She
looked down at her arms and the punctured jaw marks in her skin, streaming
silver. Jeans and t-shirt ripped to shreds. She stamped her terror down inside.
Her breath was ragged. Her legs felt so weak she could barely stand. She fell
down to the ground in a puddle of silver blood, still holding the knife out at
the distant dogs. Her stark yellow-green eyes stared at them still, watching
the pack limp away across the precinct and slump down panting around the
dumpsters. The bag of food was torn open in the distance, its contents
massacred. They could have it. Tabitha hunched, still staring at the dogs, and
felt her sight fading to black.

‘Get up,’ she mumbled to herself, still holding the
knife out where the dogs could see it. She fought the blackness back from her
vision, and dragged her body away through the bloody silver puddle. She
staggered up to her feet, clutching her side in agony. At least the bleeding
had stopped, for the most part. There was still a gouge above her knee that was
taking a while to close. Wild-eyed she hobbled away, then realised she’d left
her rifle. She limped over to it in a shell-shocked daze, slung it over her
shoulder, and staggered away across the precinct. Still felt her heart racing.
Still stamping down the tears and the terror. Tabitha never took her eyes off
the dogs as she went. She made sure that they always saw the knife; that they
knew what would happen to them if they followed her. They had to see the knife.

11

It
was a chilly night. Tabitha spent it in the town library, two storeys up. She huddled
down in a nest of coats on a pile of giant beanbags, where she gave herself
permission to cry. Long-drawn sobs took over her body, shaking her by the
shoulders. She wiped the tears from her eyes with her wrists, and looked out at
the night through the window beside her. The feral dogs and silver spiders
wouldn’t find her up here. She hoped. Maybe that’s why she’d picked the
quietest building she could think of; a library. So she’d hear them coming. It
was ridiculous logic, now that she thought about it, since every building in
town was silent as the grave. But there was something more comforting about a
library, really. More so than an office or a shop. A library was meant
to be quiet. It was meant to be empty, more or less. Huddled in the corner beneath
the window, high above the streets in her beanbag nest, Tabitha felt a little
safer. The building was old, and the ceilings were high. She wasn’t especially
warm, but the coats kept what heat she had close to her body. She felt more at
home here, surrounded by so many words on the shelves. Like there were still
the spirits of people in this place. Lying back and hugging herself tight, and
pulling her mum’s note from her bra to hold it close, she even managed to fall
asleep.

There
was a scream a couple of streets away; a man’s scream. Tabitha woke with a
jump. She couldn’t see anything through the window. The night sky was clouded
over; the darkness was absolute. She heard a second scream, even louder than
the first. It was the sound of terror distilled, launched desperately into the
night sky above a dead world. She staggered up from her nest. She had to get
down there and help him. The third scream was cut short though; a life ended,
just like that. Tabitha sank back down into the corner, and cried into jackets
that smelled like people.

She didn’t sleep the rest of the night. But she couldn’t
head outside either. Not if she’d be running and hiding from the spiders in the
dark. Since she’d woken at the sound of the scream, Tabitha had been searching
for something to take her mind off it. It was probably a good idea to start
training, she thought, dragging herself from her idle melancholy. She had to be
strong if she wanted to survive, and not just an inner strength. A strong body
was probably the best survival tool she could have.

Tabitha lay out in a press-up position and took her
weight on her hands and toes. Pushed up off the floor and sank down again.
Repeated. She’d never been one for press-ups and sit-ups before, but now they
seemed to come so easily. She could feel lean muscles under her skin, tensing
and relaxing. They felt alien to her, as strange as her new metal hands. With
grunting breaths she pushed up, sank down. Pushed up, sank down. More press-ups
than she’d ever done in her life, and she’d barely gotten her heart rate up.
The action became a meditation. If she was going to survive in the world she
had to be strong. She switched off for a while and just trained, lost in
catharsis. By the time she stopped, trembling and sweating, the early summer
dawn had turned the black sky pink.

Tabitha went book hunting once the sun was rising.
Sunshine spilled in along the walls of books; dust drifting and rising in the
light. When she reached the section she was after though, she found only empty
shelves. Survival techniques, edible plants, the great outdoors… Every book had
been taken. It looked like everyone else had had the same idea. She did find a
cigarette lighter though, tucked away in an office drawer. It was old and
cheap, a grubby piece of plastic, clear bright yellow. And instantly the most
beautiful thing she’d ever seen. It held the promise of fire.

Tabitha headed up to the floor above, searching for
anything useful. When she saw the broken window though, she knew it was time to
leave. Her eyes followed a trail of dusty dots from the broken glass across the
ceiling, and rested on a spindly silver shape lurking in the far corner. Ok, it
was definitely time to leave. Tabitha backed away quietly and headed for
the stairs.

Outside on the street Tabitha squinted at the bright
morning sun. She kept close to the buildings for safety, and headed down the
main road. She shouldn’t have come back into the centre yesterday, she told
herself. Probably better if she just got out of town, and tried her luck in the
countryside beyond.

A
couple of streets down she saw a fresh human skin in a blood puddle, wrapped
and blowing around the base of a lamp post. It must have been the screaming man
from last night. A big man, judging by the loose clothes that dressed his skin.
A shape moved in the window across the road. She was surprised to see a dog
sitting there in the office window, a border collie, barking soundlessly behind
double glazing. Was it as wild as the others had been? Or had the empty skin on
the road been its owner?

‘It’s alright,’ she told the dog, walking over to put
her hand on the glass. But the dog wasn’t barking at her – it’d moved to see
over her shoulder. It was barking at something behind her. Tabitha turned
around. A spider leapt on her and forced her down to the road. She pounded her
fist into its head, over and over. It was larger than usual, and stronger. She
grabbed its stabbing tongue as it slid out. Had to wrestle it away from her
face. Her skin could heal quickly, but she didn’t rate her chances if that
spike went in through her eye socket. Holding the stabbing tongue at bay with
her left hand, she smashed the spider in the head with her right. Fighting for
life. Hitting it over and over until it staggered for a moment. Tabitha growled
with the effort and threw the spider off her chest. She leapt on it and slammed
her fist down, cratering its head. She pulled the knife from her belt and drove
it in through its metal skin, and the thing dropped dead on the road. She
stabbed it again. Again. Over and over. Exhausted, Tabitha raised her knife up
and hesitated. The bleeding spider wasn’t moving any more. She slumped down on
the road to catch her breath. Her arms were killing her. Maybe she shouldn’t
have done so many press-ups last night. Staggering to her feet she went back to
see the dog in the window, still barking at her. She wandered over to the front
door and turned the metal handle with a tired shaking hand.

The collie was staring at her down the office corridor
when she walked inside. It wasn’t barking any more, just whimpering.
Hesitating, but wanting to come closer. Producing the stray digestive biscuit
from her hoodie pocket, Tabitha sealed the deal.

‘Come here, it’s ok,’ she said softly, crouching down.
She kept a hand on her hunting knife, just in case. The dog padded over, tail
wagging. It didn’t seem all that wild. It took the biscuit eagerly and crunched
it with rapid chomps off the carpet, licking up the crumbs. When Tabitha held
out her hand, the dog came close and sniffed at it. It was confused by the
metal smell. Tabitha offered the pale skin of her arms instead; her face. The
dog sniffed at her keenly, and licked her mouth. Tabitha spat, smiled, and
suffered the licking. The dog came closer, tail wagging. Soon Tabitha was grinning,
holding the dog back in its excited hello. Peering round the back, it looked
like a girl. The round name tag on her collar read LAIKA.

‘You’re a softie, aren’t you?’ Tabitha said happily. The
dog wasn’t much more than dirty black and white fur on a scrawny frame. Breath
that smelled like warm rubbish. One brown eye, one blue. Both wide open and
gushing trust. Tabitha spent a good while fussing over her, and Laika was happy
for the attention. Tabitha was just happy to find something in the world that wasn’t
trying to kill her.

‘You’re too skinny,’ Tabitha told the dog, stroking her
soft smelly fur. A quick check of the cupboards in the staff kitchen revealed
nothing; not a scrap of food anywhere. But someone had been here, and not long
ago. Maybe the screaming man had lived in here, she considered. So hungry that
he had to go out into the lethal night to find food for him and his dog.

‘I’m sorry about your owner,’ she told Laika, who waited
patiently by her side with a sombre peace. She stroked the dog’s soft head.
‘I’m going to look after you.’

‘Stay,’ Tabitha commanded, sticking her head out from
the front door to check up and down the street. Laika sat obediently, staring
keenly. The dog took one whiff of the air outside, and licked her lips ready
for a meal. Tabitha held her rifle and edged out onto the street, sneaking and
glancing up at the windows for any sign of spiders. The road seemed clear, as
far as she could tell.

‘Come on,’ she whispered. Laika obeyed, and together
they stalked off down the street. Tabitha took them off the main crescent and
down the side roads, where hopefully there was less chance of trouble. Another
mile or so and they’d be out in the suburbs, away from the built-up centre.
Tabitha peered around the corner of a brick wall, before heading out down the
next side street. She froze at the sound she heard behind her. A cracking
squelch; flesh and bone. A spider must have killed the dog. Tabitha reached for
her knife, and took a couple of deep breaths for the fight. Slowly, she turned
around. No spider though.

‘Oh Jesus, Laika. That’s disgusting.’ The dog was
tucking into a dead rat, having sniffed it out and dragged it from an open
gutter. Tabitha wouldn’t have minded so much, but there wasn’t much left of the
rat that hadn’t rotted away. She could only watch in horror as Laika cracked
its head loudly in her jaws. She dropped it to the road with a wet slap, and
nipped the grey meat off it with her teeth.

‘I thought a spider had you,’ she told the dog. ‘Please
can I find you something better to eat, before you do that again?’ the
dog wolfed the last of it down and licked at the gore on the road.

‘You’re rank,’ Tabitha told her, leading them on down
the alley.

They
saw a spider down the next side street, on the far side of a full car park. It
had its back to them. Laika didn’t make a sound. Tabitha held out a grey hand
towards her, telling her to keep back. The dog hung around behind her, eyes
fixed on the spider. She didn’t growl, and she didn’t go for it. As they
stalked towards it, Laika stuck to Tabitha’s side. She couldn’t stop Laika’s
pack instinct though, and when she attacked the spider so did the dog. Tabitha
surprised it and killed it quickly with her knife, before Laika could jump in
and get herself hurt. But at least the dog had her back; it was worth the risk.

‘Good girl,’ she said, crouching down to rub Laika’s
sides. Immediately Laika started wagging her tail, and she was all too keen to
lick Tabitha’s face.

‘Actually let’s not do that, please,’ said Tabitha, recalling
the rotten rat as she stood up away from her dog’s affections. ‘Don’t take this
the wrong way, but you’re disgusting.’ The dog sat and looked up at her with
mismatched eyes. ‘Diet aside though, you’re a much better bodyguard than my
cat. Good job.’

They
only encountered two more spiders before they made it out of the centre and
into the suburbs. Both times, Laika had gone for the spider when Tabitha had.
She tried to signal to the dog to hang back and let her deal with it, but Laika
wouldn’t have it. Still, she was smart enough not to start barking and attract
every spider in town. Tabitha relaxed a little once they were clear of the
shops and offices. The silence didn’t seem so heavy out of the centre. There
was only the creaking sound of her boots, and the clawed padding of Laika’s
paws on the tarmac as they headed out of town.

‘Look, Laika.’ The dog’s ears pricked up at her name,
and she stared into Tabitha’s bright eyes. ‘No, look up there, up the road. I’m
going to find you some food.’ Tabitha pointed off to a petrol station in the
distance. Laika’s eyes didn’t follow Tabitha’s pointing hand, but she smacked
her lips all the same.

‘Yeah, you know that word,’ Tabitha said with a smile,
as Laika’s tail started to wag. They walked on down the road towards the looted
petrol station, past rows of reddy-brown terraced houses. A plastic meerkat
statue stared at her from a dark window; a vase of dead flowers in another. One
window had a small statue of a wizard on the sill, and a dragon holding a crystal
beside an ashtray. Every window was dark and dead; every living room an empty
murk inside. Tabitha hurried them on a little faster past the houses with open
doors. She didn’t need to guess what might be lurking inside. In a couple of
minutes they were getting close to the petrol station down the road.

‘So, do you think there’s any soap in there? For both of
us?’ said Tabitha, sniffing her armpits through her t-shirt. ‘Seriously, I’m
trying not to gag at the smell of us. To be honest, if it wasn’t the end of the
world, I don’t think we’d be walking this close together.’

12

‘Come on,’ she told Laika, creeping inside the petrol
station shop. The place had already been looted of everything useful, more than
once from the looks of it. Searching the shelves though, she was surprised to
find a couple of tins lurking at the back. Beef stew, cheap and nasty. She
wasn’t surprised it’d been left unscavenged. It looked disgusting, and she had
no appetite anyway. Laika was interested though; she started barking at the
prospect of real tinned food.

‘Shh! Bad girl!’ Tabitha whispered. She looked up over
the shelves to check the forecourt for any sign of spiders. Laika fell quiet,
staring at the tin. Tabitha cursed when she saw that there wasn’t a ring pull
to open it.

‘Looks like you’ll have to wait a bit longer, until I
can find a tin opener,’ she told Laika. ‘Sorry.’ Wait, why did she need a tin
opener? Squeezing hard, she sank her metal fingers into the tin lid. Ripped it
open. She scraped the smelly stew down into a sloppy pile on the tiled floor.
Laika wolfed it down faster than Tabitha thought possible.

‘Just keep quiet and eat your food,’ Tabitha told her,
looking around the empty shelves. ‘And don’t make yourself sick.’ Laika
finished it quickly, hacked, and threw it back up again.

‘Told you,’ said Tabitha, looking away from the sick.
When Laika sniffed around it and started eating it again more slowly, Tabitha
gagged and had to walk away. Looking around the rest of the shop, there was
practically nothing left on the shelves. Half the magazines still lay untouched
on their racks, though Tabitha had to wonder who in their right mind would loot
the other half in the first place. A style magazine was torn and sprawled
across the floor in tatters, ripped up into rodent nesting. Flawless models
grinned and pouted from the torn pages, half hidden under rat shit.

Peering over the shop counter, Tabitha saw that the till
had been prised open and emptied.

‘Seriously? Stealing cash at the end of the world?’
she asked the till, as if it held the answers. She took the weight of the rifle
from her shoulder, and put it down on the counter with a wooden clunk. Checking
the shelves, she couldn’t find any soap or shampoo. There wasn’t much of
anything left on the shelves; just a couple of car sponges and adaptors. In
truth she hadn’t expected there to be anything to wash with anyway. But it
would have been nice not to smell her own sweat for once.

‘How’s it going over there, dog face?’ she called over
the shelves. Turning the corner, she saw Laika licking up the last traces of
food and vomit. ‘Well, you’re disgusting, but I’m glad you’re not hungry any
more.’ Laika padded over and nuzzled Tabitha’s hand.

‘You’ll have to eat the other one now, if you want it,’
she said. ‘I’m not carrying your food around for you.’ Laika didn’t need much
convincing; her tail was sweeping the floor where she sat when Tabitha produced
the other tin from the shelf. She cracked the tin open and peeled it apart to
empty it on the floor. Again Laika was straight in, letting the last chunks
drop down on her head as she was eating.

‘You’re so thin,’ said Tabitha, brushing the gravy off
Laika’s head while she ate. She could trace the dog’s ribs against her fingers
as she stroked her side. Tabitha felt her tiredness weighing her down, putting
a slow numb filter on everything.

‘We’ll have a rest for ten minutes after you’ve
finished, ok? But then we need to get going. I don’t want to be around here
when it gets dark.’

Tabitha yawned and searched the shop one last time,
closing the metal shutter over the shop front against the world outside. She
couldn’t find anything to drink in the place. There was an office and a tiny
bathroom in a section off behind the till, but the sink tap shuddered loudly
and puked brown sludge, just like everywhere else. Once Laika had finished
eating she followed Tabitha into the small office. The collie didn’t need much
convincing to huddle down next to her on the floor, resting her head on
Tabitha’s thigh.

‘Someone’s sleepy,’ Tabitha said gently, stroking the
soft fur on Laika’s head. A few moments later Laika’s mismatched eyes had
closed, and her breath deepened as she slept. Tabitha sat for a while in the
silence, looking absent-mindedly at the far wall. They could only afford to
rest for a few minutes. Tired as she was, she couldn’t afford to fall asleep.
She had to protect them; get them out of town. At least the silence wasn’t the
same as it had been; it felt lighter now. With Laika there, that pressing
lonely feeling had lifted.

It
was getting dark when Tabitha woke up.

‘Shit!’ she growled, startling Laika when she got up.
Angry at herself. Why did she always have to fall asleep? ‘Come on, we need to
go!’ she said quietly. Tabitha lifted the shutter up as silently as she could,
and peered out of the shop door to check it was clear. They slipped out onto
the forecourt. Suddenly Laika was growling.

‘Oi!’ came a man’s voice, echoing up the forecourt.
Laika was barking at him as he approached. Tabitha tensed up. She’d left her
rifle inside on the shop counter. At least she still had the hunting knife
handy. She left it in her belt for now.

‘What’re you doing here?’ he shouted, coming closer. He
had a shotgun in his left hand, and a crowbar in his right. Wild thinning hair;
scruffy grey stubble on jowly cheeks. He was huge.

‘Looking for food,’ Tabitha called to him simply, aware
that Laika was still barking loudly. She tried to shush her, checking over her
shoulder for anyone or anything that might be creeping around behind them. The
man stepped closer, mere feet away. His craggy old face had a fierce intensity
to it; hard eyes staring. His jumper and jacket were covered in stains; crusted
silver and sickly yellow. ‘What are you doing here?’ Tabitha asked him
defensively, as he stared angrily.

‘Me?’ he said, affronted. ‘I live here! All round here,
this is mine!’ he pointed his crowbar out in a circle, as if to encompass
everything in sight. ‘All this is my territory, right?’ He burped through his
words. Was he drunk? ‘All them spiders don’t come round here, right, ‘cause
they know I’m here.’

‘Fair enough,’ Tabitha replied stiffly, wary of the
fierce look in his eyes. ‘Well, I found some food for my dog, and now we’re
going. It was nice meeting you.’

‘Food? What food?’ he said angrily, stepping closer.
‘That’s my shop!’ he yelled, pointing the shotgun at the petrol station.
‘That’s my food!’ he bellowed. He was red-faced, staring. ‘Fine. I’m
eating your dog then,’ he growled, pointing the crowbar at her face. Laika
didn’t like that at all. She lunged at him, sank her teeth into his leg. The
man screamed and raised the crowbar at Laika, but Tabitha leapt in and gripped
it before he could hit her. He swung the shotgun around on her. Tabitha
wrestled the barrel away, and the shotgun thundered. A window shattered on the
petrol station. Before the man could swing at her Tabitha punched him on the
jaw and staggered him. Another hit and he dropped his shotgun, and her third
punch floored him with a solid knockout. Tabitha’s ears rang from the gunshot.
Laika’s barks were a muffled noise to her. Her dog was trying to warn her. The
spiders had found them.

‘Come here,’ said Tabitha, pulling Laika behind her by
the collar. The three spiders crept in closer. Tabitha didn’t wait for them to
attack. She leapt on the first and battered it into the tarmac, and stomped the
second into the forecourt. Laika jumped in on the third one and bit onto a
silver leg.

‘No, Laika!’ Tabitha yelled. The spider struck out.
Laika yelped and jumped away. She’d been cut, bad. When Tabitha caught sight of
Laika’s dark red blood on the forecourt, nothing was going to save that spider
from what came next. Tabitha ploughed into the fight and wrestled the creature
away from her dog, beating vicious dents into it as she yelled. She gripped its
metal skin and pulled it, and tore the thing into pieces while it screeched and
screamed in a bloody mess. Laika barked behind her, trying to join in.

‘Get back!’ Tabitha commanded, staring Laika down. When
she’d finished with the spider’s mangled body, she turned around at a loud
gulping noise. The second spider had crept away from the fight. It was drinking
the man’s insides where he’d lain unconscious on the forecourt. Tabitha picked
up his crowbar and drove the straight side down into the spider’s bloated body.
It screeched and struggled. Oily silver-red blood poured out of its wound.
Tabitha’s second stab must have found its brain, because it collapsed suddenly
on the ground. Laika was limping over to her, leaving a trail of blood along
the forecourt behind her.

‘Stay still,’ said Tabitha, feeling a sad lump in her
throat at the sight. Gently she pushed the fur apart on Laika’s side for a
better look. It wasn’t a deep wound, but it wasn’t a neat one either. The
spider’s claw had torn the skin apart; the blood was streaming. Laika didn’t
seem to notice it; she was too busy trying to lick Tabitha’s face.

‘It’s ok Laika. It’s ok,’ said Tabitha, panicking at all
the blood. ‘Just keep still. I’m going to look after you.’ Tabitha pulled off her
hoodie and tied it around Laika’s middle to stop the blood, but the thick
sleeves made it too hard to knot properly. Laika yelped when Tabitha picked her
up. She carried her back inside the petrol station, and lay her down in the
back office. Her dog’s blood coated her grey hands.

‘I’m not letting you die. I’m not,’ said Tabitha,
stroking Laika’s head where she lay by the office wall. Tabitha went and pulled
down the shutters over the door and windows, and turned the shop upside down
looking for a first aid kit. All she managed to find though came from the
office drawers; a pair of scissors and some crumpled tissues. Dabbing the wound
with tissues did nothing though. The bleeding was far too heavy for that.
Panicking, Tabitha wracked her brain. There was nothing else here; what the
hell was she supposed to do? She remembered then; the jabbing shape pressed
against her leg. The superglue and safety pins in her jeans pockets. Superglue
worked perfectly well at sticking skin together; she knew that from painful
personal experience as a young art student. Blood streamed down onto the carpet
when Tabitha unfastened her hoodie from around Laika’s middle.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she whispered to Laika,
stroking her head. Picking up the scissors, she carefully cut away Laika’s
slick fur around the wound. She’d trimmed away as much as she could to expose
the skin; any more and she would have cut too close.

‘Don’t move,’ Tabitha said softly, heart racing as she
tried to hold her down. Laika whined and struggled. Tabitha fought to hold her
there on the carpet. Her struggling wasn’t helping the wound; it seemed to be
gushing more blood than before. She had to close up the skin, or at least try
to. There wasn’t time for all the doubts and worries in her head. If she didn’t
do something now, Laika was going to bleed to death.

‘Come on!’ she growled at the old superglue, squeezing
the tube hard. Her hands shook with the effort as she coaxed out a clear sliver
onto the nozzle. She pressed a ball of tissues against Laika’s wound and threw
them away, soaked in blood. Hands trembling, Tabitha pinched at the torn skin
and dabbed glue along the edge. Laika yelped.

‘Sorry,’ said Tabitha, terrified. She squeezed a final
spurt of glue from the tube and dabbed it on. Pushed the edges of the wound
back together until they met and stuck. Laika was still struggling against her.

‘Keep still, you stupid dog,’ Tabitha growled, pressing
her wrists and her body down to pin Laika against the wall. She regained her
blood-slippery grip on the edges of the wound, and held them tightly together
for a few more seconds until the bleeding had slowed down. She counted another
minute while Laika lay there, and peeled her fingers away from the glued-up
wound.

‘It worked,’ she told Laika softly, smiling. But Laika
wasn’t whining any more; she’d gone quiet.

‘Shit,’ Tabitha snapped, stroking Laika’s head gently.
Laika blinked sadly and just lay there staring at the door, eyes half closed.
Was she dying?

‘Just rest now, ok?’ she told her. ‘It’s the best I can
do.’ Sitting back against the wall, Tabitha stroked Laika’s head and kept a
constant watch on the wound. Laika was breathing alright, but she was so still.
Tabitha shifted around a little on the floor. The squelching noise from the red
sodden carpet told her that Laika had lost a lot of blood. At least the wound
had stopped bleeding though. She just hoped that it wasn’t because Laika had
already bled out dry.

Tabitha
watched over Laika for the rest of the night. She drifted in and out of
consciousness herself, sat there on the hard sodden carpet tiles. There was a
sucking noise outside, jolting her from half-sleep. Tabitha grabbed the man’s
shotgun where she’d left it on the counter, and went to investigate. It felt
hefty and solid in her hands; reassuringly lethal as she lifted the shutter and
looked out from the doors. Sure enough there was a silvery shape outside,
hunched over the man’s corpse and drinking out what was left of him. She wasn’t
going to waste the remaining shotgun shell on it. Too loud anyway. Tabitha
headed back inside and swapped the shotgun for the crowbar, and came charging
out of the dark shop to attack the spider. She dodged its spiked tongue. It
jumped. She swung the crowbar, dropped the spider to the ground. Before it
could right itself she buried the crowbar in its underside with a metal
squelch. Wrenching the crowbar from its twitching body, she took one last look
out into the night around her, and headed back inside. She pulled the shutter
down behind her with a clatter.

‘We’ll stay here tonight, but we need to get moving
tomorrow,’ she told Laika, stroking her head as she rested. ‘I said the same
thing before though, didn’t I? Oh god, this is my fault Laika. I’m so sorry.’
If she hadn’t fallen asleep today they could have been long gone from here.
They could have missed all this fighting. Laika would have been alright. She
smoothed down Laika’s fur, over and over, but more to take her mind off the
guilt. She heard Laika’s shallow breathing; felt her faint heartbeat. She felt
happier fussing over Laika than just sitting there still, going back over
everything in her head.

Later on, during one of her frequent checks out of the
shutter, Tabitha felt the rain spitting gently against her face. In a little
while it’d become a downpour. Rushing back into the office she emptied a pencil
pot of its contents, grabbed a dusty cup, and took them outside to catch the
rain trickling from the broken drainpipe. She went back in for some plastic
tubs and the office bin too, followed by the drawers from the cabinet. Anything
that would hold the rain. Within minutes it was lashing down in a summer
lightning storm. Tabitha heard the rainwater tumble and splatter from the roof
over the petrol pumps, falling like liquid glass onto the forecourt. She felt
the plastic tub fill up under the drainpipe, and switched it for another.
Collecting the water made her feel better. It felt better to busy herself with
something, rather than just lying with Laika unable to help her. Even if all
she could do was watch rain fill containers in the dark, she still felt more
useful out here. She carried a full tub back in to Laika, about the same size
as a big dog bowl, and set it down in front of her.

‘I brought you some water,’ Tabitha said softly,
stroking Laika’s paw. Laika stirred weakly in the dark. Her nose sniffed for
the water, but she didn’t move.

‘Here,’ Tabitha whispered. She took a mouthful of water,
tilted Laika’s head gently to one side, and trickled it slowly from her lips
onto Laika’s mouth. Laika licked at the trickle, and began to lap at it
thirstily. Tabitha took another gulp of rainwater for herself; it felt cold and
beautiful. Her next gulp she trickled into Laika’s waiting mouth, and again.
She fed her water until the tub was almost empty.

‘Good girl,’ Tabitha said softly, stroking Laika’s head
while she rested. She heard something clatter and gush outside. She rushed back
out from the office. A spider had knocked over the office bin full of water on
its way through the shop door. Tabitha took a running swing with the crowbar,
but the spider was too quick in the darkness. It stuck a needled claw in her
leg. Tabitha yelled and brought the tip of the crowbar down into its head to
silence it.

‘Shit,’ she said, gasping as she pulled the claw out
from her calf. She gave the twitching dead spider a furious kicking for good
measure. She felt the poison pulsing through her. That same strange, bitter,
cold sensation running through her veins, but nothing more. She barely even
felt lightheaded this time.

‘Thank you very much, for that,’ she grumbled. She
grabbed a spindly leg and dragged the dead spider out onto the forecourt. She
walked around to the drainpipe to swap a full cabinet drawer for the empty
office bin, and re-filled Laika’s water bowl before she came back in and closed
the shutter. Tabitha fought off sleep for the rest of the night, staying by
Laika to feed her water and check on the wound. Every so often she’d get up to
check the doorway, whenever she felt the drowsiness laying its hands down on
her head.

By the time the sun was lightening the sky over the
rooftops, Tabitha was tired but more than ready for the day. She’d been sitting
in rain-soaked clothes all night, and now they stunk of damp and clung cold to her
skin. As she stood up and stretched her stiff back, she heard the gentle
thumping of Laika’s tail against the drywall.

‘Morning, dog face,’ Tabitha said gently, smiling at
Laika’s puppy-dog eyes looking up at her. ‘How do you feel?’ the thumping grew
a little stronger at the question. ‘Don’t get up before you can. We’ll stay
here for as long as you need.’ She dribbled a little more water into Laika’s
mouth, and checked her wound in the dawn light. Her fur was crusted with dried
blood around the glued skin, and the carpet tiles were sodden red and still
squelched under her feet. But at least the wound had stopped bleeding. All she
could do now, she supposed, was hope Laika got her strength back – and that the
wound didn’t get infected.

‘I’d be an awesome vet,’ Tabitha told herself. She was
dipping the plastic tub into one of the office drawers outside, full of
rainwater. The forecourt was collecting dead silver spiders. ‘Hey Laika, would
I be a good vet?’ she said, coming back inside to her patient. Laika didn’t
understand but she wagged her tail a little, and looked up at Tabitha with her
mismatched eyes.

‘You’ll be alright,’ Tabitha said gently. She set down
the tub of water to stroke Laika’s soft head. ‘We’re partners now. I’ll protect
you.’

13

It took
another day and a night for Laika to start hobbling around the shop. Tabitha
tried her best to clean up after her, but the lingering smell of blood and dog
shit wasn’t going anywhere in that small office. Tabitha was glad to move Laika
out of the back room, and down behind the till where she could rest in the
sunlight. Laika seemed content to sleep most of the time. Tabitha was content
to watch her, and fed her water every so often. The rest of the time, though,
it was getting pretty boring waiting for her to mend. She wasn’t even sure if
Laika was still recovering, or just being lazy. Better to be on the safe side,
though. She’d just have to keep herself entertained in the meantime.

‘Pump number five, fifty pounds please sir,’ she told an
imaginary customer across the counter. Tabitha took his invisible money and
placed it professionally into the open till, and handed him his imaginary
change. She closed the till with a broken crunch, and the drawer drifted back
open again.

‘Lovely day,’ she said brightly, trying to close the
broken till. She listened intently to his conversation. ‘Well, that’s what I
think!’ she replied. ‘Why let the people with driving licences have all
the fun, that’s what I say!’ she listened again to the thin air beyond the
counter, and smoothed her hair down with a shy smile. ‘Do you really think so?’
she said coyly, looking down at the floor. ‘Well to be honest, I’m actually
starting to like them too.’ She admired her grey hands, wiggling her fingers
delicately. ‘Sorry? How did I get them? Well, I got injected with venom by a
giant silver spider from outer space. I know, right? Pret-ty crazy.’ Tabitha
nodded at his response, looking thoughtfully at the space in front of her. ‘Oh,
sorry! And here I am, chatting on! Take care, bye!’ Tabitha waved to the
invisible man as he left, and looked round at Laika lying on the floor behind
her. Laika looked up at her, and her tail beat gently against the empty
cigarette shelves.

‘Don’t you be judging me, dog face,’ she said. ‘I
wouldn’t have to make up customers if you had a bit more conversation going
on.’ Tabitha glanced around the shop and sighed, and looked out of the window
at the forecourt. The empty road beyond, and the bleak grey sky overhead that
looked distinctly un-summery. It was only a matter of time before more spiders
found them hiding here, and she wasn’t going to wait out the rest of the
apocalypse in a blown-out petrol station. They had to get moving, and find
somewhere safe. Laika was looking a little better, but Tabitha didn’t want to
make her limp along behind her all the way out of town. They couldn’t just plod
on for miles to the next town either, only to find the same scenario all over
again. She needed a change of plan, a way to cover more ground. The thought hit
her.

‘I wonder if there’s any cars left that work,’ she said
to Laika. Maybe a good solid garage would protect a car from the alien EMP that
had killed everything electrical. Or maybe an old car wouldn’t have anything
electrical inside it to kill.

Laika wagged her tail.
She didn’t know why her human was making sounds. It didn’t smell like there was
any food or trouble around. It seemed like humans just made noise because they
didn’t like the silence.

Tabitha stared out of the window, thinking.

‘I’m going out to look,’ she said at last, breaking the
long silence. She took the rifle and the crowbar with her, and patted the
hunting knife on her belt. Laika stood up. ‘It’s ok, I’ll pull the shutters
down behind me,’ Tabitha told her. ‘I won’t be long.’ She zipped her hoodie up
and took a gulp of water from the office pencil pot. Laika watched and whined
when Tabitha left her and brought the shutters down.

‘Be back soon,’ she said, taking one last look at her
dog inside the shop. She pulled the shutter right down to the ground, shutting
Laika inside. Tabitha breathed deep, shouldered her rifle and set off on her
hunt. The wind tousled her hair. The grey dead world sprawled ahead beyond the
forecourt, vast and lethal.

Laika’s human was gone for a long time. She didn’t like it.
Staggering up, Laika hobbled out from behind the counter. Through the back room
that stunk of blood, and out onto the shop floor. She sniffed at the trace of
the dog food in the aisle; licked at the floor hungrily. There was still
food-smell lingering in here, old and rotten, but there was nothing left to
eat. She wandered back to the counter, lay down in the corner, and waited.

Her human had been gone too long now. Laika poked her
nose under the gap beneath the metal shutter, but she couldn’t budge it. She
snorted and lay down in a sulk. Her side hurt; so much so that she couldn’t
twist around and try to lick it. Her human had stuck her back together somehow.
It felt itchy. Her ears pricked up then. There was a growl, far away. It was
getting closer. Laika hobbled up and sat up straight, watching through the
letter slot in the shutter. The growling was getting closer still, coming this
way. She growled back, barked. It hurt to bark. She felt anxious; she wasn’t
strong enough for a fight. Suddenly the growling grew loud; right outside. Then
it stopped. Laika smelled metal and fumes through the letter slot, but she
couldn’t see very much. She smelled her human though, and barked happily. The
shutter rolled up suddenly, and Laika was all over her human. Reunited.

‘Hi dog face!’ Tabitha said brightly. Laika was excited
to see her. She rubbed Laika’s good shoulder and got a full-face licking in
return. ‘Well, I missed you too,’ she said. Tabitha walked out onto the
forecourt and modelled her new classic car, like the grand prize on a game show.

‘What do you think?’ she asked Laika. ‘I’ve got no idea
how it’s still working,’ she said, scratching at a mark on the bonnet. She only
managed to scrape off the paintwork with her hard finger though, and thought it
best to leave it alone.

‘It’s probably too old to have any real electronics in
it, so I think that’s why it’s still running,’ said Tabitha. ‘Radio doesn’t
work, but it’s got a full tank though. And, best of all,’ she said, stepping
around the back of the car, ‘one careful owner… with loads of dog food
in their garage.’ She produced a bright tin from the boot, and Laika hobbled
over with sudden interest. She was tucking into the food even as Tabitha
emptied the tin onto the forecourt. Rummaging in the car boot, past all the
beans and biscuits she’d pilfered from the house, Tabitha produced a few empty
plastic bottles. She carried them off while Laika was eating, and dropped them
all down by her makeshift water containers by the shop door. Laika had finished
her meal long before Tabitha had filled the plastic bottles with water, and
wandered over to sit beside her.

‘How are you feeling?’ Tabitha asked her, dipping
another empty bottle down into the bin to bubble and fill with rainwater. Laika
looked at her, and smacked her lips in anticipation of some unknown possibility.

‘Go for it, if you’re thirsty,’ said Tabitha, trying to
pour the last of the water from the office bin into a bottle. ‘But don’t think
I’m going to feed you water like last time. That was a one-time thing.’ Laika
simply looked at her, watching her cart the bottles over and put them into the
car boot. Finally Tabitha brought the shotgun and the crow bar out from the
shop counter, and lay them down in the car’s rear footwells with her rifle. She
took one last look up and down the street, but saw nothing silvery or
crazy-people-shaped. ‘Right then, let’s go!’ Tabitha said happily. ‘Or just,
whenever you’re finished.’ Laika was squatting down on the forecourt. She left
a turd close to the man’s drained body, that Tabitha had been trying her best
to ignore.

‘Ready?’ said Tabitha. She held the car door open and
the passenger seat forward for Laika to jump in the back. Instead, Laika
wandered over to the water containers, and lapped at the rainwater left in one
of the cabinet drawers.

‘It’s fine, I’ll just wait here,’ Tabitha sighed,
looking off up the road. A glimmer caught her eye there; a shape reflecting the
sun. Another, and another. A horde of spiders. They must have followed the
noise of the car.

‘Laika! In!’ Tabitha commanded. Laika caught sight of
the movement up the street, and started barking at the coming swarm. There were
too many for Tabitha to count, racing down the road towards them. Tabitha
grabbed Laika up and carried her to the car, plonking her in amongst the
blankets and pillows that filled the back seat. Jumping into the driver’s seat,
Tabitha wrenched the key in the ignition. The engine roared as the chittering
mass of spiders swarmed onto the forecourt. Yanking the car into reverse, she
bumped the back wheels up over something that burst with a wet splatter.

‘Sorry, crazy man,’ she muttered to herself, realising
what the bump must have been. The spiders thumped and clattered against the
passenger door, and scratched their claws against the windows. Laika barked and
bared her teeth. Spinning the steering wheel, Tabitha threw the car into first
gear and tore off out of the forecourt, leaving the silver swarm behind.

14

‘God, you can stop barking now,’ Tabitha told Laika,
racing down an empty A-road. ‘You’re giving me a headache. Lie down, get some
rest.’ Eventually Laika tired of watching the fields roll by, and lay down
amongst the nest of blankets on the back seat.

‘Pretty darn comfy, I know,’ Tabitha said over her
shoulder. She smiled at Laika’s big yawn. Her heart soared at the feeling of
being on the road. ‘We’re going north. I think,’ she said. ‘Yeah look, there’s
the sign for the motorway.’ Tabitha caught herself checking her right for
oncoming traffic before she crossed the large roundabout. If only, she
thought. If only this was the old world, and she could cut in front of someone
right now. She’d give anything for a blazing row on the roadside, just for
normal interaction again. Just to know that there were rules to follow. Tabitha
crossed the roundabout and hit the motorway, and put her foot down. She’d never
imagined driving over a hundred before. She’d always stuck to the limit. Apart
from the odd abandoned car to dodge, she had a clear run. She’d never felt so
free. An empty motorway had always looked beautiful in the old world; now it
looked divine. She didn’t have much of a plan, really; just head north away
from the big cities, and hope that somewhere out there was a little remnant of
civilisation. She didn’t need the road atlas on the passenger seat to head
north, but it was bound to be useful at some point. She’d just have to see what
was waiting for her up there. Hopefully there was a quiet village somewhere; a
place the spiders hadn’t found. It was just a relief to be out of their reach
for a little while. Out of danger.

The high sun cast a warm glow over the old dashboard,
warming the skin on her arms. It didn’t do much to lift the sour damp smell
from her clothes, though. She’d have loved to swap them for fresh dry clothes,
with that new laundry smell. She kicked herself for not thinking of that when
she’d been to get the car. She could have raided the wardrobes in the house.
Instead she was stuck in damp blood-stained rags, which used to be a t-shirt
and jeans a few days ago. There was a creeping suggestion of BO too. It was
another smell that she wasn’t used to, having been a liberal deodorant user for
as long as she could remember. The new world would be a stinking one, she
considered. Thrown back to a time before plumbing and washing machines. As long
as she wasn’t getting eaten though, it was all good. Thinking about it, she
felt a fresh insight into the prehistoric way of life. Cavemen and cavewomen
with guns, fighting silver spiders. They had to be out there somewhere, and she
was going to find them. She glanced over her shoulder to the back seat, and
smiled. Laika slept on peacefully as they raced for the north.

It was around early afternoon, Tabitha guessed, judging
by the sun. She’d been driving for ages; she knew that much. The fields and
forests that lined the motorway had given way to hills, and just the occasional
farmhouse. Sheep and cattle lay rotting in the fields as she raced past. She
spotted silver spiders here and there, standing out against the green and brown
of the bracken slopes. One even sat on the road up ahead, waiting forever, the
way spiders did. Tilting the steering wheel a little, Tabitha pointed the car
at it. It loomed up before her, unaware, and crashed against the bumper even
louder than she’d imagined. The spider flew off to the side, tumbling on the
road. It finally came to a stop with its legs curled up, pointing at the sky.
Tabitha saw its body shrinking in the rear-view mirror, and smiled.

‘Oh, I’m sorry girl,’ she said, looking back at Laika,
startled from sleep by the bang. Laika looked from her to the road ahead, and
started barking.

‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha muttered, ploughing the brake. A
giant swarm of spiders spilled over the nearest hill in the distance; a sea of
jostling silver. Tabitha worked down the gears and slowed right down. She
watched from a standstill on the motorway as the tide of legs writhed and
tumbled down the slope. They spilled over a field and onto the motorway, only a
couple of hundred yards ahead. The swarm cut straight across the lanes towards
the fields on the far side, and clambered over the barrier on the hard
shoulder. Looking down into the valley on her left, Tabitha saw a village in
ruins. Apparently not ruined enough for the spiders, it seemed. They poured
down into the fields and clawed their way over dry stone walls to invade it.
Laika barked all the while, never taking her eyes off the horde, like she
wanted to take them all on.

‘Shh, now,’ Tabitha said soothingly, stroking Laika’s
side. There wasn’t much they could do for that village now. Laika whined and
hesitated, and lay back down on the covers. Sitting there at the wheel, on an
abandoned motorway in the middle of nowhere, Tabitha’s spirits sank. She’d
hoped to find some little corner of nowhere by now, untouched by the threat.
Somewhere she could rest; really rest. And not have to worry what might be
coming for her in the night. Civilisation, that’s what she was looking for. A
safe place, where tides of spiders couldn’t reach. It had to be out there,
somewhere. It was up to her to find it. The world could be a terrifying place,
with nowhere left to run… or hope could be waiting just around the next corner.

‘Well, we’ve come this far,’ she told Laika, taking the
handbrake off. The fuel gauge was two-thirds down. She’d have to find some
petrol soon if she wanted to survive. Shunting the old gearstick into first
then second, she took off down the empty motorway and left the ruined village
behind. She wanted to get as far north as she could. There had to be somewhere
left. Somewhere safe to hide away.

15

Laika dreamt. Sharp claws, reaching in the dark. They weren’t
dogs. They didn’t have the decency to bark and growl before they went for you. They
weren’t cats, and they weren’t for eating. They were only for killing. But you
couldn’t always smell them coming. Sharp legs, sharp little claws. They drank
everything out, and every day there were more of them.

The male human had barked, lots. They’d walked so far to
find the town, through woods and fields. He had hard heavy paws, and he’d used
them. He made the big building into their home, and there was no way out. He
hit. One time he hit and she couldn’t hear well afterwards, and she had to hide
away from him. There was nothing to eat, and he barked more and hit more when
he got hungry. Then he left her alone in the big building. She watched him walk
away. She saw him get killed through the window, and she barked and cried, but
there was no way out.

Then the female came. The female had hard paws too,
harder even, but she used them for stroking. She was gentle, and kind, and she
never barked. She had a salty face; it tasted good. She made sounds that didn’t
mean anything, but they were nice sounds. They were sounds to sleep to; sounds
nice to hear. She never hit. She brought food. She looked after her, like they
were their own little pack. They protected one other.

Sharp claws in her dreams, reaching for her. A fight
with them. She’d been walking with the female and resting, and then there was
the big male invader. Her female had defended her against him. Then there were
claws, cutting. The pain, and the smells, and the blood. The female took her
away and protected her, and cut away her fur with her paws to lick her wound.
It was bad. She thought she was going to die. Somehow her human had closed up
the skin, stopped the blood. She’d felt so tired, but it didn’t hurt so much.
The female had brought her water to drink, just like the male had once in a while.

The female was kind, but then she went away too. She’d
never felt so upset. She’d thought that the female was going to die outside on
her own, but there was no way out of there to reach her. No way to defend her.
She’d never felt so happy before either, when the female came back. Now they
were moving in the metal box, moving without walking, racing past fields and
hills. The pain had faded away. Now there was only warmth, and sleep, and her
female. She could have died happy now, so safe and wanted.

‘What are you dreaming about, dog face?’ Tabitha said
softly. Laika looked up from the back seat, patting her tail gently against the
nest of blankets.

‘You run in your sleep,’ Tabitha told her fondly. Laika
didn’t understand her human’s noises, but she liked them. They were gentle
sounds to rest to. Sounds to take her mind off the reaching claws in her dreams.

16

‘Bloody petrol stations,’ Tabitha mumbled, folding the
seat forward for Laika to jump out onto the forecourt. They were really out in the
countryside now, surrounded by hills and a pale blue afternoon sky. Birds sang
in the trees. Tabitha hadn’t wanted to stop driving until she’d run out of
road, and they were far away from everything. But the petrol gauge was right
into the red, and the motorway services was the first place she’d seen with any
cars around. The petrol pumps didn’t work. Tabitha looked around and squinted
in the bright sunlight, scratching her arm.

‘How do I do this?’ she asked Laika, opening the cap on
her car’s petrol tank. Was there some way to open up the pump? Would she have
to syphon it from another car? Laika finished her business outside the front of
the shop, and sniffed around for a while before she came back over.

‘You finished your dump there, dog face?’ said Tabitha,
looking for some way to open up the petrol pump stand. ‘Must be satisfying?’
she asked her dog. ‘Well, I’ve not been in days. So I’m a tiny bit jealous
right now.’ Tabitha didn’t even feel the need to go. She hadn’t eaten anything
in days, really, so it was no surprise. Laika padded over and looked up at her,
open-mouthed and smiling. Waiting patiently, attentively. Tabitha knew what she
wanted. She pulled a dog food tin from the pack in the car boot, and tore the
metal open to let the food slop down onto the forecourt.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of doing that,’
Tabitha said with a smile, putting the torn-open dog food tin down on the
petrol pump. She studied the petrol nozzle, and the hose. She hoped against
hope that the pump would still come on when she lifted the nozzle; it was dead.
With no electricity to power the pump she’d have to get the petrol out herself,
somehow. Even despite the new strength in her hands, there was no way the
petrol pump was coming apart. With Laika lying down beside her, Tabitha took
out her hunting knife and tried to prise the pump’s metal casing apart at the
seam. There just wasn’t any give; she’d probably break the knife blade before
the casing budged.

‘Well, that was a rubbish idea,’ she told Laika. She
gave up on the pump and went rummaging in the car boot. ‘Now I don’t want you
to freak out or anything, but I might have gotten you a present.’ Tabitha
produced a tennis ball, scabby and pre-chewed, which met with Laika’s rapt
attention. Smiling, Tabitha launched it over the wide open forecourt towards
the car park. Laika threw herself after it, claws scratching and clattering
across the concrete. By the time she came bounding back from the car park to
drop the slobbery ball at her feet, Tabitha had given up on dismantling the
pump. She threw the ball high over the car park again, and watched her collie
pant and charge and shrink into the distance after it. Tabitha tried to pull
away the petrol cap on the car parked nearest to her own, but she’d need the
keys. They weren’t in the ignition. Maybe they were inside the shop somewhere,
dropped around their owner’s empty skin. She didn’t fancy searching for them,
especially if there were spiders lurking in the dark shop. Trying another car,
it was the same story again. The keys were nowhere to be found.

‘For god’s sake,’ she muttered to herself, looking
around the forecourt at the abandoned cars.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she told Laika, who dropped
the ball down beside her again. The ball bounced and rolled off along the
forecourt. Laika skittered after it, mouth open to catch it, and brought it
back again.

‘Sorry,’ said Tabitha, throwing the ball again
absentmindedly. She crossed her arms, sighed, and stared at the stubborn petrol
pump for the answers. She could try the fuel caps on other cars, she supposed.
But even if she found the keys to get the cap open, how was she going to syphon
the fuel out? Modern cars had something in the pipe to stop people doing that;
she’d seen it on TV.

‘Ok. Lateral thinking and such,’ she told herself,
studying the car. ‘The fuel goes in there and down into the fuel tank. So…’ she
glanced at the jagged dog food tin resting on the petrol pump. The realisation
made her smile; a tiny victory. ‘Let me at the fuel tank.’

Tabitha punched at the locked boot on the newer car
until she could wrench it open. Sure enough there was a jack inside. She lay it
under the car with a clatter and wound the handle, tilting the car up to take a
better look underneath.

‘You look like a fuel tank,’ she told a square bulge
under the car. There was a big screw there; it wasn’t coming loose without a
wrench though. Instead she gripped the edge of the metal tank and squeezed.
Squeezed harder, until her hand trembled. Slowly the steel tank cratered and
puckered, and bent in her hand. Straining, she tore a crack in it. Petrol
dribbled from the slit, pattering down on the forecourt. The smell filled her
head.

‘Crap crap crap,’ she muttered, wriggling out from under
the car. She ran into the shop, cursing her lack of planning. Just as well that
there weren’t any spiders in here; she’d run in without thinking. She grabbed a
pair of plastic petrol cans and raced back outside to the car. She placed the
container under the trickle of petrol, and pulled the crack wider with a finger
until it was gushing like a tap. The plastic can drummed with the flow like a
bath running.

‘I hope you had time to fill it right up before the
apocalypse,’ she told the car, as if the driver was still sat inside.
‘Otherwise this could take a long time.’ Looking around at the handful
of abandoned cars on the forecourt, she just hoped they had enough petrol
between them to fill up her car’s tank. The flow of petrol tailed off then,
ending with a sorry little trickle into the plastic can. So it was going to
take a long time then. Tabitha sighed, and threw the ball for Laika.

Laika seemed to have endless energy where a tennis ball
was concerned. Tabitha was glad of the distraction while she squeezed at the
petrol tank on the next car along, trying to tear it. She shifted her grip on
the smooth tank, squeezed, but she couldn’t get a proper hold. She stopped when
the thought hit her.

‘You’re an idiot,’ she mumbled to herself, remembering
the hunting knife on her belt. If she could get the blade through a spider’s
skin, she could get it through this. She pressed the knife point into the tank
and stabbed it through, and pulled the plastic petrol can under it to catch the
flow. It was fast; she’d rapidly filled up the first plastic can and switched
it for the second, and ran back into the shop to grab the rest from the shelf.

Tabitha looked proudly at the full plastic petrol cans,
lined up beside her car. She’d never known that filling a car up could feel
this satisfying, as she popped the petrol cap and glugged the first of her
harvest into the tank. Laika had lain down to chew her tennis ball in the sun.
Tabitha had hoped to have a few cans of petrol left over to go in the boot, but
the last one went into the tank and still there wasn’t any sign of an overflow.
When she turned the key in the ignition though, the needle on the fuel gauge
jumped up into full territory. It was a good feeling, a deep satisfaction.
She’d bled every car in the place, and still there’d only been just enough
petrol between them to fill her tank for the next couple of hundred miles. But,
for now at least, the road trip was back on.

Tabitha took a few gulps from one of her water bottles.
Rainwater probably wasn’t the best stuff to be drinking, she supposed, and
there were silty bits in it from the drainpipe. But it was better than nothing;
the shop here had long been emptied of bottled water. She couldn’t get over how
little appetite she had, though. Maybe she should have tried inside the main
services building, and look for any scraps in the fast food restaurants. But
she had a bad feeling about what could be waiting inside. With so many miles of
countryside all around here, it was the perfect place for spiders to
nest. The sun was going down, and the thought of silvery swarms wouldn’t leave her
head. She wanted to be a hundred miles from here, out in the back of beyond
where the spiders couldn’t find them. She looked around to make sure she hadn’t
left anything, and opened the car door for her dog.

‘Come on, dog face,’ she said, getting Laika comfy in
the back. ‘Let’s go.’

Getting
the petrol together had taken longer than she’d thought. The sun was dipping
down behind the trees lining the road, and really she’d only just left the
services behind. The gathering clouds didn’t help either, and a little while
later she was straining to see the road in the dusk. She passed an abandoned
coach that stood dead in the slow lane. The road around it was littered with
greying skins, ghostly pale in the failing light; the passengers who must have
tried to run away.

Tabitha hadn’t wanted to stop driving, but the
headlights weren’t working and it was getting too dark to see. She parked up in
a lonely old mechanic’s workshop, out on the edge of a ghost town. She closed
the old wooden doors on the night, checked for any sign of spiders inside, and
settled back down in the car and locked the doors. She tilted the seat back as
far as it would go, and pulled a blanket from the back. Laika took a sudden
interest in her face in this new position, and gave her a thorough licking.
Laughing, Tabitha fought Laika back.

‘Get some sleep you,’ she said softly, stroking Laika
where she lay. Tabitha pulled a blanket over herself, and curled up against the
cold night. She heard Laika breathe in the blackness behind her; short deep
sniffs. She stroked Laika’s fur without feeling it. ‘Sweet dreams.’

The
next day’s drive took them down twisting country roads, punctuated here and
there with abandoned trucks and cars. The lakeland towns up here were small and
scenic, all grey stone houses and arty little cafes on winding streets. All
beautiful places to live, Tabitha told herself… if not for the fact that the
spiders had overrun them. Their big silver bodies were splayed murderous
against the stone walls of shops, or sat clutched and bunched like fists in the
tight gaps between the buildings. Tabitha’s safe-haven daydream had long since
crumbled to dust as she drove on through. Rotten skins tumbled on the streets.

There were fewer towns and villages further north. The
road took her on past wild fields and rugged crags, and still the silver
spiders lurked here and there on the landscape. The road wound on through
lonely hills, sided with mossy dry-stone walls older than tales. The engine
roared guttural and threw them on down the wild roads; a steel hymn.

Tabitha
yawned and hung on the steering wheel. Laika was asleep. A straight silent
A-road gave way to winding country lanes, and the landscape changed personality
again. On her right, pine forests sloped up above the road. Lakes and mountains
stretched out bleak and beautiful on her left, filling her view like an epic
movie scene. Even here, she glimpsed a flash of silver scuttling between the
trees. She felt a cold jolt of shock and steered around a huge spider on the
road, drinking out the corpse of a deer. Wasn’t there anywhere they hadn’t
reached?

By the afternoon she was well over the Scottish border,
further north than she’d ever been in her life. Every town she detoured
through, it was the same story. Shattered windows, blowing skins; urban
graveyards. Since then the bricks and concrete had given way to lonely roads
and villages; scattered pubs and farms. A while later these had given way to
endless miles of stark, empty heath. She tore down miles of bleak road, looking
for signs of life. She raced on past moors cloaked in mist that rolled down off
the mountains, and welled in ancient pine forests around her. She sighed and
yawned, and turned off at a junction in the country road to head towards the
sea in the distance.

Tabitha’s arse felt numb in her seat by the time she
reached the coast. There weren’t any signs around here; she could only guess at
where she’d brought them. Studying the road atlas when they’d parked by the
beach, it looked as if she’d headed as far north as she could go on the
motorway. After that there was only a sparse tangle of winding A-roads on the
atlas, snaking their way through lochs and mountains deep into the north. The
dark waves rushed and tumbled on the cold brown beach. Looking around, she
glimpsed another dead empty deer on the moors behind her.

‘It’s the middle of nowhere, and the spiders have still
been through here,’ Tabitha told Laika. Pissed off, she threw the atlas down on
the car bonnet with a slap. She looked from Laika to the slobbery tennis ball
she’d dropped at her feet. The sky hung lead-grey over the sea, promising rain.

‘We’ve not see a bloody soul, have we?’ she said grimly.
For a moment, Laika seemed to stand there listening to her. But Tabitha’s
problems weren’t her focus. All she wanted was another throw of the ball.

‘I wish I thought like you, dog face,’ she said,
reaching down for the slobbery tennis ball. She caught a whiff of Laika’s
breath in front of her, sweet and smelly, puffing from her panting mouth in
tufts of tumbling mist. ‘You only worry about danger when it’s happening, don’t
you? I envy you.’ She stopped tormenting Laika’s one-track mind and tossed the
ball down the beach. Laika took off after it like a shot, pounding four-clawed
paw prints into the damp dull sand. Holding the pages of the road atlas down
against the wind, Tabitha studied the road that had led her all the way up
here. Her greasy hair whipped at her face before she brushed it behind her ear;
a tangle of bright red curls in desperate need of a wash.

‘There wasn’t anywhere they hadn’t come to,’ she said to
herself, while Laika came racing back down the sand with the ball. Every town,
every village they’d passed had spiders lurking, and no sign of people. There
hadn’t even been bodies or skins in most places. They were like ghost towns.
Even the farms and pubs in the middle of nowhere had the spiders’ splayed
silver shapes resting on the walls, drinking the sunlight. Tabitha’s search for
some shining spiderless haven wasn’t going very well.

‘We’ll head down the east coast,’ she told Laika
hopefully. ‘Maybe they haven’t got that far.’ Laika sat smiling patiently,
panting the sea air, waiting for the ball to fly again.

‘Alright. One more, then we’re going,’ said Tabitha,
picking up the sandy tennis ball. ‘I want to find another petrol station before
dark. And do some drink driving too, if I can help it.’ Tabitha launched the
ball into the sky, into the sea. Laika bounded into the gloomy surf, snatching
up the ball where it bobbed and drifted in the waves. She padded back again,
triumphant, and dropped the ball by Tabitha’s feet. She shook her wet fur,
sneezed out the salty water, and waited expectantly.

‘No more, Laika,’ said Tabitha, patting the back seat
until her dog jumped up inside the car. ‘Let’s find you somewhere better to
play,’ she said, looking around at the brown sand and the wind-whipped tufts of
grass. ‘This is grimmest bloody beach I’ve ever seen in my life.’

Tabitha rejoined the motorway south, and drove in
silence for a while until she could turn off for a large roundabout. She
studied the atlas on the passenger seat to make sure she was heading east.

‘This is it, then,’ she told Laika, who barely opened
her eyes in response. ‘Road Trip, Mark Two.’

After
long enough on the road to make her legs stiff, Tabitha spotted a motorway
services and pulled in. A little wiser now, she worked fast to bleed petrol
from the abandoned cars. She glanced around the place with tired eyes, paler green
than they used to be. She looked in through the dark windows of the modern
cafe. She didn’t want to go inside here either; it looked like the perfect
spider nest. She just wanted to fill up her tank and go. There had to be
somewhere safe. She had to keep that thought in her head. In her rush she
dropped a couple of the plastic petrol cans as she took them from the boot.
They fell with an empty plastic clatter. Something twitched across the
forecourt then. A spider, scuttling towards the noise.

‘Oh come on then!’ Tabitha yelled, losing it. She shut
the car door before Laika could jump out, and stepped out onto the empty
forecourt where the spider could see her. ‘I’ve had enough of this survival
shit,’ she told it, pulling her knife as it scuttled closer. She felt something
rise up in her body, a tense fury. The spider pounced. Tabitha leapt and
smashed her fist in its face. It dropped to the forecourt with a junkyard
crash, and she was on it with her knife. By the time she’d done with it and she
was thinking clearly again, it looked like bloody roadkill on the concrete.
Breathless, Tabitha stepped back and wiped the silver blood off the knife
against her torn jeans. She admired her work on the spider; she was getting
more confident. Its splayed grey legs jutted up from a jagged massacre. Silver
blood ran across the forecourt in a river, stark and pale under the vast shadow
of the petrol station roof. Tabitha stepped back and sheathed her knife, and
thought about everyone they’d taken from her. She looked around at the huge
empty world, alone in the silent fields beside a dead motorway. Too numb for
tears any more. There was only the gaping sadness. And a hardness inside. She
remembered her mum’s ribbon blowing at her belt; her note folded up in her bra.
She had to carry on; that was all she needed to know.

‘They never stop trying,’ she told Laika, cracking a tin
of dog food open and shaking it empty on the forecourt. ‘So maybe that’s one
thing we can learn from them.’ Laika took one last sniff of the dead spider and
came padding back over for her food. She nipped and lapped at the mound of
brown mush. Tabitha stared exhausted at the petrol pumps and zoned out, looking
without seeing. Her tired eyes drooped shut for a moment. ‘Right,’ she said,
patting her cheeks to wake up. ‘I’m going in there to find some caffeine. Raw
coffee beans, anything. I don’t care. You, finish that stuff and have a dump.
Then I’ll get us some petrol, and we’re out of here. I mean you’re lovely and
everything, but you’re rubbish conversation. And to be honest, I’m so sleep
deprived I’m going insane.’

Bleeding the petrol tanks seemed to go easier with some
cold coffee inside her. It tasted horrible, and it was making her queasy, but
it definitely blew away her sleepiness. As Tabitha poured the last plastic can
of scrounged petrol into the tank, Laika started growling. Tabitha looked up to
see a gang of men in the distance, wandering closer through the field. Had they
seen her?

‘Quiet now,’ said Tabitha, pulling Laika back by the
collar. ‘Back in the car,’ she said, helping her into the back seat. Tabitha
hurriedly drained the last bit of petrol into the tank. She screwed the cap
shut and wriggled the keys free.

‘Alright darlin?’ came a shout from the distant gang.
Tabitha shut the car boot, suddenly numb with dread. She looked over to see the
men jogging across the field towards the forecourt.

‘Have you got any food love?’ the first man called over,
climbing the short fence.

‘Have you got any tits?’ another man added. They were
laughing. ‘Come here, we want to talk to you.’ Terrified, Tabitha shut the car
door and roared the engine into life. Laika was barking in the back seat.

‘Oi!’ one of the men yelled, shocked to hear the engine
start up. They were sprinting across the forecourt for the car. Hands shaking,
Tabitha yanked it into first gear, floored the accelerator… and went nowhere.
The running gang had reached the far petrol pumps. The car wheels were spinning
and screeching. Handbrake. Tabitha pulled the handbrake off and roared
out of the forecourt. A thrown hammer thundered against the car boot. Laika
barked and growled at the gang through the back window. A shrinking, slowing
mass of dirty denim and feral faces.

‘It’s alright,’ Tabitha said shakily, racing down the
slip road and back onto the motorway. Laika was still barking. Tabitha checked
for traffic over her right shoulder by force of habit. ‘Shh, it’s ok,’ she said
softly. With shaking hands she reached back to stroke Laika until she whimpered
and fell quiet. ‘It’s alright,’ she told her quietly. Just under the surface
though, Tabitha felt anything but.

She drove on in silence for the rest of the day,
reaching back to stroke Laika once in a while for comfort. Whether it was for
Laika’s comfort or hers, she couldn’t be sure. Her thoughts ran away with her
in the meantime, as the motorway stretched on endlessly before her. Caffeine,
fear and imagination were a horrible mix.

Tabitha
had run the petrol gauge half down before she parked up for the night. She
refused to stop driving until she really couldn’t see a thing. All she cared
about was getting as far away as possible, far from anyone. She parked up on a
hilltop that night, far from any towns and villages. Better to get caught by a
pack of spiders than a pack of people, she told herself. At least the spiders
only wanted to kill her, nice and quick.

17

The
drive back down the east coast the next morning was mercifully uneventful. They
passed back over the English border, tearing down an A-road beside the sea. Silver
spiders twitched and moved in the villages as she passed through; draining the
bodies of sheep in the fields, or stalking endlessly over the rain-soaked
moors. The coast stretched on forever beside them, empty and grey. Every town
they passed looked like a dull graveyard. Houses and shops and council flats,
all toppled ruins. Their walls dotted with spidery silver constellations.

Tabitha patted her cheeks to stay awake. She drove past
crippled villages beside the sea, pretty and torn open. Fields of cows with
swollen udders, left to their own devices. A pack of feral dogs on the
roadside, eating the body of something or someone. She didn’t slow down to
look. Tabitha took a worried glance at the fuel gauge, and put her foot down to
get away from here. It felt like they’d been on the road for a lifetime.

The motorway was coming up ahead, after she’d passed
through a sunny crypt of a city on the coast. Tabitha’s legs were getting numb.
The fuel gauge was well into the red as they tore down the motorway south.

‘We’ll have to find a petrol station,’ she fretted,
looking around at the silent countryside. She hadn’t seen any signs for
motorway services; she couldn’t count on finding one close by. A couple of
miles on, wracked with fear about running out of petrol, Tabitha took the next
turn-off and joined the country lanes along the coast. She really didn’t want
to stop around here, ruined and desolate as it was. When she reached the next
large roadsign, she slowed right down to stare at it. There was something
scrawled over the town names, painted in a scruffy hand. She studied the messy
writing as they drew closer.

FOOD
+ SHELTER 3 MILE STRAIGHT ON

Tabitha
could have cried. It was the most beautiful sign she’d ever seen.

‘Laika, look,’ she said softly, waking her up. ‘I think
we’ve found somewhere.’ Tabitha felt her shoulders relax, like a weight was
lifting. She breathed deep, and pulled her tired eyes from the sign. She threw
the car into first gear and tore off down the road. Suddenly the glum sky and the
grey country lane had a new brightness about them.

A couple of miles on Tabitha ground the car to a halt
and stared over the steering wheel, eyes wide, watching. Down a hill in the
back of beyond, she saw a village in the distance with no signs of destruction.
It was a tiny place on the coast, untouched, walled in by a range of rocky
crags behind. Tabitha climbed out of the car and watched the place for a while
down her rifle scope, kneeling down beside the car bonnet. She fended off Laika
happily when her dog had the sudden urge to lick her ear.

‘Oi you,’ she said, ruffling Laika’s head. She looked
back down the scope. Down in the village, something moved. Or someone.

‘What do you think?’ she asked Laika, sitting patiently
beside her. Laika turned and looked at her, holding her gaze with a soft dog
smile. Crazy mismatched eyes, bright in the growing sunlight.

‘I say we go and have a look,’ said Tabitha, zipping up
her blood-stained hoodie. ‘Watch my back when we get down there, ok?’ she
helped Laika into the car and popped the seat back. Nervous and excited, she
started the car up and drove off down the road.

The rain had started to fall lightly by the time she
reached the village. Without working windscreen wipers, the raindrops filled
her view. The world outside disappeared in a glassy smudge. She wound the
window down, wiped at the windscreen with her hard palm. She just hoped that
she wouldn’t plough into something and wreck the car in her rush to park up.
Probably best to slow down a bit. The grey sea tumbled in along the sand. Laika
watched from the back window as they passed cottages and a little old shop,
untouched by the end of the world. Here and there Tabitha glimpsed faces in the
windows, drawn to the alien sound of a working car. Coughing, nervous, Tabitha
parked up on a patch of gravel by the sea. The cool salty breeze hit her as she
stepped out of the car and looked around.

‘Come on you,’ she told Laika, lifting the seat forward
to let her out. Laika sniffed around the grass beside the car park. The rain
pattered down with soft slaps in the grass. Tabitha grabbed the shotgun from
the footwell and locked the car door, and waited for Laika to finish her
business on the grass.

‘Ready?’ said Tabitha, patting her leg as she walked
off. Laika padded on alongside her, and together they headed down the road
towards the village. She’d overshot the place intentionally, parking on the
main road, just in case they had to get out quickly. Maybe she should have
parked closer, she wondered. It was a tiny place, wind-whipped and silent. The
old houses were painted bright white, built from rough rugged stone. A rusty
old black and white fingerpost pointed the way. Tabitha saw no sign of spiders
in the fields around her. It was strange though; there were indents in the
grass, and the ground had been torn up in places as if there’d been a struggle.
But there were no empty skins here, animal or human. Strange that there wasn’t
any birdsong either. There were always birds singing, everywhere she went.
Everything about the whitewashed village ahead of her had a deathly silence
draped over it. Maybe it was so quiet and uneventful here that the spiders
hadn’t found the place. But she couldn’t help but wonder how long that would
last. Surely their luck was bound to run out one day, and the spiders would
find this place. The trees around here looked especially dull, green-barked and
twisted under a lead-grey sky. The silence was all-consuming. Suddenly alert,
Laika turned and barked.

‘Hello?’ came a voice behind her. Startled, Tabitha
turned around to see a little old lady up the street. She wore a heap of skirts
and cardigans, wrapped up against the wind. ‘Are you alright over there?’ said
the old lady, in a high song of a voice. She was waving to her repeatedly, as
if Tabitha couldn’t see her.

‘Hi,’ Tabitha replied, walking towards her. She kept
Laika close by the collar.

‘Are you tired love?’ said the old lady, meeting her on
the road. She looked at Tabitha’s shotgun warily with blue watery eyes. Her
skin was so pale and wrinkled she looked like she belonged in a fantasy movie;
a wisened old crone with a curly grey tangle of hair. ‘You’ll want a bed for a
while love? Somewhere warm to get some sleep?’ she said.

‘If it’s safe here,’ Tabitha replied cautiously, looking
around the white houses and bungalows on the main road.

‘Yes, yes. Safe as houses here,’ the old woman replied.
‘Come on now, out of the rain before you catch cold. And look at you, your
clothes are all torn up as well. Let’s get you bedded down for a bit, before everyone
starts prying into your business.’

Tabitha walked with the old lady as she ambled up the
road, and shivered in the sea breeze. The lady was dressed warmly though, with
two cardigans buttoned up over her jumper and skirt. Her face had a sad old
warmth to it, homely and fretting. There was a lone cottage further on, out on
the edge of the village.

‘Are there lots of people here?’ Tabitha asked her,
breaking the silence. She thought it was strange that the old lady had said so
little so far.

‘Oh I don’t know, must be a dozen of us or so,’ the old
woman replied shortly, as if Tabitha was being nosy by asking. She had a
hacking chesty cough. When they passed through the garden gate and got to the
front door she took a firm hold of Tabitha’s arm, with an iron grip that only
little old ladies possessed.

‘Tell me love,’ said the old woman closely, dipping her
voice and checking over her shoulder. ‘Do you have any food on you, in the car?’

‘A few things, yeah,’ Tabitha replied, setting the shotgun
down by the doorframe. ‘Isn’t there much food here?’

‘None,’ the old woman replied, shaking her head. She did
have a kind of intense look about her. Hunger.

‘I’ll split my food with you,’ Tabitha told her. The
woman’s face changed completely.

‘Oh lovely,’ she whispered desperately. ‘Yes. You sleep
here, and I’ll have a bit of your food for rent, alright?’

‘Alright,’ Tabitha replied happily. ‘When was the last
time you had something to eat?’

‘Something proper? More than a week now, yes.’

‘A week?’ Tabitha replied, horrified. She hadn’t
eaten in ages either, but it was worse to know a little old lady was going so
hungry. ‘But there’s hardly any people here, there has to be plenty of food
left to go round,’ she said. ‘What about shops? Supermarkets?’

‘What supermarkets?’ the woman replied, smiling sadly.
‘Only two corner shops here, love. A lot of people took all the food they could
find and left the village. Hardly left us a scrap. There were more of us
before.’

‘But you’re by the sea, what about your fishing boats?’
said Tabitha. She looked over at the small harbour, barely a hundred yards down
the road.

‘No, no,’ the old woman said with a hoarse hush, as if
Tabitha was talking about the devil himself. ‘There’s things in the water now.
Dark horrible things. Huge. They’re eating everything. No, we daren’t go near
the water. Young Jonathan set out in his fishing boat the other day and the
thing had him, poor man. We’ve got allotments coming on now, but they’ll be
weeks and months growing.’

‘So you’ve had nothing to eat in all this time?’ said
Tabitha, disbelieving.

‘Nothing but what we can catch or shoot,’ the old woman
admitted, exhausted. ‘We’ll catch the odd fish or a sparrow now and again, but
there’s not much meat on them to go around all of us. And we daren’t go out too
far in case those things come looking for us.’

‘Jesus,’ Tabitha muttered, looking around at the
village. It wasn’t exactly the safe haven she’d been hoping for.

‘You must have been keeping fed, if you’ve come from
down south,’ the old lady observed.

‘Well… I’ve not been eating at all,’ Tabitha mumbled,
with a strange hint of guilt.

‘You’ve not eaten?’ the old woman replied, shocked. ‘A
car full of food, and you’ve not been eating!’ she looked appalled. ‘And
you’ve not eaten the dog either, what’s the matter with you?’

‘My dog? I’m not going to eat my dog!’ Tabitha
replied, disbelieving.

‘More for us then,’ a young woman called over the garden
gate. Tabitha jumped. The woman had a glazed look in her eyes. Short
bleach-blonde hair; skin tanned with hard work in the sun. Dirty vest top. Dry
cracked lips. She was eyeing up Laika and Tabitha both, like they were meat
hanging on butcher’s hooks.

‘Give us your dog,’ the young woman told her. A man
walked up beside her to see, with more people wandering out from the village
streets behind them.

‘Yeah, give us your dog,’ the man repeated, eyeing Laika
hungrily.

‘We’ve got kids starving,’ a woman chipped in. Tabitha
watched them carefully. She’d never known that faces could look so haunted.

‘I’m not giving you my dog,’ she said firmly.

‘We’re not giving you a choice,’ the young woman replied
at the gate. ‘We’re starving. It’s food. Give it here.’

‘Try it,’ Tabitha replied, making her grey hands
perfectly clear for them to see. The young woman staring back wiped the snot
dripping from her nose, and stood back off the garden gate.

‘We’re not asking,’ she said, fixing Tabitha’s look with
a dead stare. The young woman pulled a knife from her pocket.

‘Rose, leave her be,’ the old woman pleaded. ‘The dogs and
cats were ours to eat… this one’s hers. We can’t do that to the girl. Let her
go. This is wrong.’

‘So you’re not hungry now, is that it?’ Rose replied. ‘I
didn’t see you saying no to a piece of dog when it was going round,’ she said.
‘We were starving. We’re still starving. So give us the fucking
dog.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Tabitha, looking between them. ‘You
ate your pets? What’s wrong with you?’

‘We’re survivors,’ Rose replied proudly. She turned
and whistled sharply up the road, and a dozen or so people emerged from the
warren of streets. They were wandering to the garden gate to look over their
visitors, studying Tabitha with cold zombie stares. Dirt picked out every
crease in their faces. None of them could have been as old as they looked. It
was dirt and hunger and desperation that was aging them. They looked tired;
starving. A desperate blankness in their eyes. They were all looking at Laika.

‘A week,’ Tabitha chuckled nervously, disbelieving, as
she held Laika’s collar close by her knee. ‘Eating your pets after a week. Look
at you.’ People in the small crowd were glancing at one another; keeping quiet.
Someone coughed in the silence.

‘Ten days,’ said the man beside Rose. ‘Do you know how
hungry you get in ten days?’

‘What else are we supposed to eat around here?’ said a
gangly teenager.

‘But what about rats? Rabbits?’ said Tabitha, trying to
reason with them.

‘We’ve had everything around here,’ a woman replied.
‘Couple of lads went outside the village hunting and never came back.’

‘But doesn’t it break your heart to eat your pets?’
said Tabitha.

‘Breaks my heart more to see my kids starving to death,’
a big man replied. ‘I’d do anything to make sure they get fed.’

‘That’s right,’ said Rose. ‘Whatever it takes to stay
alive,’ she said, looking around at the group. Tabitha glimpsed nodding heads
in the crowd, and held Laika close beside her. The villagers were gathered
close around the garden wall.

‘Give us your dog,’ the man beside Rose repeated;
exhaustion slurred his words. Tabitha watched their faces in the silence. They
weren’t going to let her go without relieving her of Laika, apparently.

‘My kids are starving,’ said a bolshy woman, as if she
was entitled to Laika by default.

‘It’s not like we want to eat you,’ Rose chuckled
menacingly. Tabitha wouldn’t have put it past her though, given a few more
weeks. ‘Just give us your fucking dog.’

‘Over my dead body,’ she told them. Rose shrugged with a
smile as if to accept the challenge, and opened the garden gate.

‘There’s food in the car, take that,’ Tabitha told them,
compromising.

‘Yeah, we will do,’ Rose replied, stepping in through
the gate. She motioned to the mob of villagers on the road to follow her in.
‘Thing is though, that food’s not going to last very long between us. Your
dog’ll last longer. Now give me the car keys, and give me the dog.’

‘Come and get her,’ Tabitha replied, backing away. Laika
was snarling savagely as Rose stepped up the garden path.

‘I’ve put down plenty of dogs before now,’ Rose replied,
showing the scars on her arms. ‘They’re worth the mauling, for the meat on
them.’ Men and women were crowding the street behind her, looking over the
garden hedge. The old woman had already slunk away inside her cottage, and was locking
the door noisily. Tabitha looked over her shoulder, and realised the old woman
had taken the shotgun too. She couldn’t do much about it now. It wasn’t worth
turning her back on the mob to retrieve the gun for the sake of one shotgun
shell.

‘So let me get this right,’ said Tabitha, looking around
at them. ‘You’re going to eat my food and take my car, and then you’re going to
kill my dog and eat her?’

‘Yeah,’ a woman called from the crowd, gaunt and
greasy-haired.

‘Just making sure,’ Tabitha replied, clenching her
fists. ‘Come on then.’ Rose ran at her. Teeth gritted, Tabitha went for her.
She blocked Rose’s punch and made a bloody mess of her nose, dropping her to
the ground screaming. Laika raced past her, growling at a middle-aged man
running in through the gate. The man yelled as Laika bit into his calf. Tabitha
landed two good hits on his jaw, and he stumbled back onto the lawn and didn’t
get back up. She looked around at pissed off faces, baying for her blood.

‘Get her!’ Rose snarled, clutching her streaming nose as
she staggered up from the grass. She leapt at Tabitha and wrestled her to the
ground, trying her hardest to press the knife into her throat. Tabitha strained
to hold the blade back.

‘I’m going to eat you too, you fucking bitch,’ Rose growled
in her face. Looking up into those wild staring eyes as she struggled, Tabitha
believed every word. Laika charged in and bit at Rose’s face. Taking her
chance, Tabitha shoved Rose aside and smashed her fist into her face to lay her
out cold on the grass. The spectators were suddenly rabid, crowding for the
garden gate to rip her to shreds.

‘Come on!’ Tabitha yelled. She burst out of the gate and
kicked a big man back off the kerb. He steadied himself and came in to hit her.
She gave him a jab on the jaw that chattered his teeth, dropping him to the
tarmac. The mob surrounded her. Laika scattered them, barking fierce and feral.
A woman cracked Tabitha hard in the cheek. Tabitha felt adrenaline rush when
she spun around, and with a fistful of alien knuckleduster she knocked the
woman’s teeth in. She pulled another woman to the road by her hair, booting her
in the head in return for her kicks and scratches.

‘I’m just getting started!’ Tabitha snarled into her
face, and kicked her again. She shoved a man away and hit out at another,
staggering him to the road. Laika yelped; a scrawny man had stabbed her.
Tabitha screamed as she ran at him. She twisted the knife from his grip and
buried it in his stomach. As he yelled and staggered away, Tabitha pulled the hunting
knife from her belt. She lashed out at the mob; sliced a hand that reached out
for her. Suddenly they were backing away; angry looks had turned to fear.
Panting breaths and shuffling feet in the sudden silent peace. The man she’d
stabbed was yelling on the road behind her, clutching his stomach and fighting
Laika away. Breathless, Tabitha stared at the group. She just stood there,
between them and Laika, as her dog mauled the screaming man. Tabitha watched
the faces in the crowd, and let Laika savage him. None of them made a move for
her. The next man she went for backed away. Suddenly she had more space around
her. The mob was backing off. Laika growled and bit down again. The man’s
screams filled the silence.

‘Stop it!’ a woman yelled. Tabitha stared her down. The
man was screaming for his life.

‘Come on, Laika,’ she said, pulling her snarling dog
away. The crowd looked angry, and scared. She went for the biggest among them,
but he backed away with his hands out in surrender. Looking down the road to her
car, Tabitha saw a little boy watching from a cottage doorway.

‘I would have given you the bloody food, if you’d asked
for it,’ she told the group, pissed off. She spat silver blood on the ground
and walked off towards the car.

‘Take me with you,’ said a middle-aged woman, coming
forward from the mob. She reminded Tabitha of her mum. ‘I didn’t fight you. I
didn’t want to eat your dog. Take me with you, please.’ Tabitha stared at her.

‘Did you eat those dogs and cats?’ said Tabitha.

‘We were starving,’ the woman pleaded. ‘There’s nothing
else to eat here. We didn’t have any choice.’

‘You didn’t have any choice,’ Tabitha repeated, furious,
staring into the woman’s eyes. ‘I bet you’ll be eating each other in a few more
weeks,’ Tabitha told them.

‘If it comes to that, yeah,’ Rose called back, nursing
her bloody nose. People looked around at her. ‘Whatever it takes to survive.’ A
few others were nodding; hesitating. They probably would turn cannibal if Rose
made it ok. Just following the leader. Tabitha felt a rising sickness in her
stomach at the thought; a black nauseating bile.

‘You’re animals,’ she told the mob, disgusted. ‘Stay
here and rot.’

Tabitha
kept turning to look back at the villagers as she walked back to the car. Thank
god she’d locked it up; someone had already tried the door and the boot with a
crowbar. Tabitha reached into the back for her hunting rifle, aiming it at the
mob as they wandered up the road towards her. They didn’t come any closer.
Living zombies, gaunt and pale.

‘Come on,’ she told Laika, helping her up into the back
seat. Taking one last look at the desperate mob, Tabitha hesitated. Thin
children watched from cottage windows. Tabitha opened the boot quickly and left
some of her food on the road. The mob watched in silence as she slammed the
boot shut and climbed into the car.

‘You saved me,’ she told Laika quietly, leaning back to
kiss her on the head. Laika just sat there with a canine peace, watching the
mob warily, and went in to lick Tabitha’s face gladly. Tabitha saw her dog’s
bloody mouth.

‘Let’s get you cleaned up first, ok?’ she said, pushing
her back gently with trembling hands. She turned the key in the ignition and
took off down the road, and caught sight of the mob in the rear view mirror. A
lifeless ragged tribe, pale and staring as they vanished from view. She turned
her attention to the road ahead, and the journey south. There had to be
somewhere left that wasn’t like this. Somewhere that people hadn’t stooped to
eating their pets, and weren’t seriously considering eating each other too. She
wanted to believe that somewhere out there, people hadn’t earned the silver
spiders that were coming for them.

18

Tabitha
raced down the motorway south. The car was running on fumes, but at least the
rain had stopped and she could see where she was driving. She looked back at
Laika every so often, making sure she was alright.

‘You’re ok aren’t you, dog face?’ she said doubtfully.
Laika was licking her side where the man had knifed her. It was more of a cut
than a stab wound, when she’d pushed Laika’s fur back to see it. There wasn’t
much blood; Laika seemed calm enough. Taking it with typical canine resilience.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tabitha told her, watching her in the
rear-view mirror. Laika’s ear moved at the sound of her voice, but she lay
still. ‘I just seem to get us into trouble, every time. I’m bad luck.’ She
looked back at the road, still rolling on forever beneath the car.

‘Unless it’s you that’s bad luck,’ she added, smiling.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.

‘And what the hell’s going on with my eyes?’ she said,
staring at her reflection. They’d grown such a light shade of green lately that
they looked almost yellow in the daylight. ‘Maybe we should just get on a boat,
what do you think?’ she asked Laika. ‘We could fill it up with food and water
and just sail off. Nothing could get us out there.’ It was a nice idea, the
more she thought about it. And the more she thought about it, the faster she
talked herself out of it. There’d be a storm. They’d run out of food and not
catch any fish. They’d run out of water and have to drink from the sea, and
then they’d be sunburned and crazy and end up eating each other. And to cap it
all off, those giant black squids would find them and eat them. She’d forgotten
about them. It was a terrible idea, when she really thought about it.

The motorway followed a wide river south, the water
burning orange in the fading sunlight. Tabitha watched the grassy sandbanks and
the endless sea give way to green fields. The sun was setting on yet another
worst day of her life. She ran her tongue over the grainy film on her teeth,
thinking. She clenched her jaw, tense. Gripped the steering wheel hard until it
creaked.

‘I don’t know where to go, Laika,’ she said, defeated.
The dog’s ears pricked up at hearing her name, but she hardly looked up. ‘I
don’t know what to do,’ Tabitha admitted. Hiding away in the back of beyond had
been a bad idea, then. It was either die in a town, or die in the country. That
was all the choice they had. The needle on the fuel gauge was hanging just over
empty.

‘I thought people could survive out in the sticks,’ she
said, easing her foot off the accelerator. The engine roar died down. ‘I mean,
that’s why we set out in the first place. To find somewhere safe, out of the
towns. Then when we get there...’ she was shaking her head in disbelief. How
long had it been since the invasion? Ten days, like the man said? Ten days and
the country had turned into a wild pit. Then there was that group of men, back
at the petrol station. The ones she’d tried to blot from her mind. They might
have raped her, if they’d caught her. She would’ve murdered them if they’d
tried, looking back now. Facing the village mob had broken her fear. Maybe that
was just humanity now; possible rapists and potential cannibals, scratching
around for food at the end of the world. This stuff only happened in the
movies, she told herself. It didn’t have any place in reality. No one was ever
supposed to go through this.

‘I mean, all that stuff takes months to happen, surely,’
she told Laika, shaking her head. ‘Nobody thinks about turning cannibal in a
fortnight.’ Apparently people would, though. And all it would take was for one
starving psycho to make it ok. So… this was humanity minus law and order. Minus
farms, supermarkets and the national grid. Screwed. The countryside whipped by
a little slower as Tabitha left her foot off the pedal. A motorway junction
drew closer. Maybe it was just better to find a place where there weren’t any
people at all. At least there they could live out their last few days in peace
together, before the spiders found them.

Tabitha pulled up at a big roundabout in the middle of
nowhere. Yanked the handbrake up. Switched off the engine. Pine trees covered
the hills on her left, a gloomy mass in the twilight. There was a road sign on
her right for a village with a strange name, eleven miles away. Another huge
patch of the back of beyond. Silent as the grave, just like everywhere else.
Tabitha stared ahead for a little while behind the steering wheel, blank and
despondent. Pushed the locks down on the doors with a grey finger. She climbed
into the back with Laika, and buried herself under the blankets on a nest of
pillows. Once Laika had stopped sniffing and fussing over her, Tabitha brought
the rifle closer in the footwell beside her. The blankets smelled like dog,
safe and musty. Tabitha’s breaths sharpened, shortened, and the sobs came
jumping out of her. She thought about gangs coming to rape her. She thought
about a village of hungry people trying to kill her. Wild dogs, and weirdos
with guns. And spiders. And her mum and friends too, like a black hole twisting
in her chest. Laika lay down on top of her then, warm and graceless, and
stretched up to lick the tears on her cheeks. Startled, Tabitha smiled through
her sobs. Her dog looked up at her, resting on her chest. She ran her thumbs
along Laika’s cheeks; scratched her behind the ears. Checking the fur on
Laika’s shoulder, the knife wound had already clotted and dried. The glued skin
on her other side had knitted and scabbed. She couldn’t smell any infection, at
least.

‘You’re not as skinny as when I found you,’ she said,
stroking the black fur on Laika’s head. ‘So at least I’m doing something
right.’ She felt her dog’s warm weight against her stomach where she lay. Her
soft furry head resting across her chest. Her smelly breath. She watched Laika
peacefully in the last light, eyes closing a little more with every stroke on
her head.

‘Me and you against the world,’ Tabitha said softly,
looking out at the fading light.

Tabitha
gasped and woke up, terrified. Laika lifted her head suddenly, staring at her
in shock. Tabitha looked around. It was light outside. She was in the back seat
of the car. The rifle lay beside her, just down there in the footwell. It’d
been a bad dream, nothing more.

‘Morning,’ she said sleepily, rubbing her eyes. It hurt.
Her fingers felt like sandpaper. Laika hauled herself up off her as Tabitha
moved to sit up.

‘Stop looking at me,’ Tabitha told Laika, squatting down
beside the car. They were high on the moors, miles from anywhere. ‘I can’t go
when you’re looking at me.’ Laika didn’t have the same reservations, though.
Her dog stared at her while they both peed. Laika’s crazy mismatched eyes
didn’t help either.

‘Are you done?’ she asked her dog, still squatting by
the car. Laika wandered off. Tabitha sighed, and commenced a satisfying
post-sleep piss. It was strange how much better the world looked sometimes,
after a few hours’ sleep. A cold wind hissed through the blonde dead grass that
covered the moors, lumped and dry as tinder. A bird warbled somewhere out
there, past the broken-down ruins of an old stone house. Strange, but the bird
didn’t sound like it belonged here. It was the kind of sound she’d only
expected to hear in some far-flung rainforest. The sound died down again, and
Tabitha was alone in the wild pressing silence. She pulled her torn jeans up
and stretched in the sunlight, and cursed when she remembered how low the
petrol was.

It didn’t take long to leave the high moors behind, and
the strong winds eased off as they drove on south towards green fields. Tabitha
parked them up for a little while, just to stretch her legs again. She was
taking breaks more often now. The novelty of driving had long since worn off,
and she was glad just to be standing around and walking for a little while.
That, and she was desperately trying to come up with a plan before she ran out
of petrol.

Tabitha rubbed Laika’s tennis ball down her forearm,
unable to feel it in her palm. She felt the cold wet dew on it from the grass
where Laika had fetched it. Felt the chill of the breeze where it blew against
her wet arm. Passing the ball between her hands though, she felt nothing. Only
the weight of it, the shape, but not the touch. Like she had gloves on. This
was alien skin, spider skin. It made sense that they were unfeeling creatures.
Did that make her an unfeeling creature then, at least in part? Laika barked,
and snapped her out of her thoughts.

‘Sorry,’ Tabitha replied, throwing the ball. ‘Human
problems.’ Laika raced after the ball across the dewy grass. She chased it
down, snatched it up, and ran back to drop it at Tabitha’s feet. Staring into
Laika’s eyes, Tabitha saw total dependence. Canine devotion. Laika seemed to
smile as she panted, waiting to play. Tabitha lifted the ball, drew her arm
back to throw. Laika jumped into her stance, ready to run. Watching the ball.
Hooked on the thrill of the chase. Tabitha launched the tennis ball high into
the air, and watched Laika pelt after it. Tabitha thought about how much the
dog had fought to protect her, like nothing else mattered. Laika only made room
for one thought at a time, she supposed. Threw herself into each new thing, and
only that. Eating, dumping, chasing, protecting. There was no room for
uncertainty in her head, no room for doubt. There was only the urgency of
whatever came next. Hunting and fighting. And the thrill of the chase. Maybe
that was the secret of happiness. If Laika managed to stay happy at the end of
the world, maybe she could too.

They
raced on down the motorway under a clear summer sky. The next services they
passed was a burned ruin; the petrol station nothing but ash and scorched
metal. Two burnt-out cars lay dead on the forecourt. Tabitha’s petrol gauge
read empty, and there wasn’t another services for miles. They’d be stranded out
here soon, and then it’d be back to wandering the roads. Unless they passed a
stray car or braved a town centre, and Tabitha didn’t fancy her chances with
either. Time to pick a nice quiet place in the hills around here, and pray that
the spiders never found them. Tabitha looked back at the hills again, eyes
drawn to something. So she hadn’t just imagined it. There was a tiny black wisp
there ahead of them, reaching up into the blue. As Tabitha drove closer, it was
clearly smoke from a fire. A couple of minutes later, as the motorway cleared
the nearest hills from view, Tabitha’s eyes fixed on a tiny dark square on a
distant peak. A castle. The lazy smoke trail she’d followed was curling up from
the roof, reaching into the hazy summer sky.

19

The
town that surrounded the castle was deserted. Tabitha parked up on the high
street. She patted the hunting knife on her belt, and hoisted the rifle around
her shoulder. It was quiet here. There were cars around too; plenty to scrounge
some petrol out of. But she wanted to check the town over first. Better to take
any residents head-on, she decided, than let them take her by surprise.

‘Come on, you,’ she told Laika, letting her out of the
back seat. ‘And keep quiet.’ They passed through a stone arch, into the old
heart of the town. The castle overlooked everything from a tall hill on her
left. The rising smoke trail had disappeared. The town was small but built-up;
everything crammed together on old narrow streets. Every house and shop was
tilted and warped, like they’d been built for a fairy tale. Over the rooftops
she could make out the crooked spire of a church. There were no tall offices
though. No blocks of flats, and no factories. It seemed like a place cut out of
history. Laika sniffed at the rank gutters, and followed her nose away up the
street.

‘Laika, stay close,’ said Tabitha. She looked up at the
uneven rooftops, and around at the glass panes of old shop windows that
distorted their looted interiors. Laika padded back up the street, and nuzzled
Tabitha’s hand. It was a shame to loot beautiful old shops like these, Tabitha
thought. She imagined what the town would look like with a good covering of
snow, street lamps lit, like a scene in a children’s story. Even despite all
the broken doors hanging off their hinges.

At least the toy shop had been left alone; Tabitha was
glad. Teddy bears and wooden figurines still crowded the window. There were
rattles and trains in there; toy soldiers and dolls. She didn’t think anyone
made those old toys any more. Then she saw it. The door was intact; still shut.
It had been barred with two thin shiny chains, nailed to the corners of the
doorframe like a giant X. Fixed around the chain links were little padlocks;
memorials. Tiny locks on fragile chains. So easy to break, but still
intact. Locks on a shared memory through that old shop door; protecting a
bright warm thought from the world. Tabitha saw a note taped to the inside of
the window, written in a shaky but elegant script.

Take
the furniture for fire wood, if you must. But please, don’t burn the toys. Take
them for your children, if you are still blessed with them.

These
are dark days, and innocence is one of the few lights we have left.

Tabitha stepped back from the shop’s warped little
window and the old toys inside. She felt a lump in her throat.

‘Come on, Laika,’ she said, her voice faltering. She
moved away from the shop. She didn’t want to be so close to something so
fragile, as if just being near it might break it. Laika started growling.

‘Hey!’ came a voice down the road. A young woman stood
down at the end of the narrow street, aiming a shotgun at her. She was tanned
and dark-haired; big brown eyes staring nervously. ‘What do you w-want?’ the
woman called over.

‘Petrol, for my car,’ Tabitha replied. A cool breeze
tousled her hair. ‘Are you living up in that castle?’ the woman stood there,
said nothing. Tabitha grabbed Laika’s collar to keep her close. With her other
hand she pulled her hunting rifle around and pressed the stock into her
shoulder, aiming at the woman down the scope.

‘I’ll shoot you,’ the woman warned her. She had an Irish
accent.

‘I’ll shoot you,’ Tabitha called back. ‘Who’s going to
do the most damage, at this distance?’ the woman stared, hesitated. She jumped
at a scuttling noise behind her, and checked over her shoulders nervously.

‘So, are you n-normal?’ the woman stuttered, still
aiming the shotgun.

‘What?’ Tabitha called back.

‘Are you normal?’ the woman repeated, adjusting the
shotgun against her shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied, for the sake of argument. She’d
never liked the word normal. When it came to people, there was no such
thing. Especially now. Anyway, she was probably as far from normal
as it was possible to get. Exhausted, Tabitha waited for the woman to respond.
But she was just standing there, sizing her up, aiming her shotgun.

‘Look, if you’re going to shoot me, just do it,’ Tabitha
called up the street. ‘I’m tired of this shit.’ She heard falling roof tiles
behind her, slipping and cracking on the road. Laika started barking. It was a
spider, clambering across a rooftop above them. Stalking them. The woman
studied Tabitha carefully, and lowered her shotgun.

‘It’s not s-s-safe out here,’ the woman stuttered.
‘There’s a few of us living here, inside the c-castle. Come on.’

‘I’m Liv, by the way,’ said the woman, as they made
their way quickly through the narrow streets. The sun above them was a pale
staring eye.

‘Tabitha,’ she replied. ‘This is Laika.’

‘Well, I’m glad to meet you T-Tabitha,’ Liv replied.
‘And Laika,’ she added. She was turning her head constantly as they crossed
town, checking this way and that. Looking from the road to the rooftops for any
sign of spiders. Tabitha was running through everything in her head. Everything
that might happen once they reached the castle. Mugging, raping, murdering.
Imprisonment. Experiments. They might take her car and eat her dog. Eat her too,
maybe. The woman didn’t seem that bad, though. Yet.

‘Do you do this a lot?’ Liv asked her, as they crossed
the main road through the town centre.

‘Sorry?’ said Tabitha, dazed.

‘Zone out, I mean,’ said Liv. ‘You l-look exhausted.’

‘Well, I feel it,’ Tabitha admitted, dropping her guard
a little. She checked for oncoming cars as they crossed the road. She caught
herself doing it and looked at Liv, and felt like an idiot.

‘One good th-thing about the apocalypse,’ Liv observed,
smiling. ‘No traffic.’ Tabitha’s glum tired face softened into a smile. ‘It’s
not far now,’ said Liv. ‘And Jim’s around this c-corner here. He’ll watch our
backs while we get to the castle.’

‘How many of you are there?’ said Tabitha, stooping to
reassure Laika while they walked.

‘Four.’

‘Four?’ Tabitha repeated, shocked. She’d expected
more survivors than that.

‘It’s weird; we’ve all lived around here for years, and
never met before now,’ said Liv, pushing her hair back in the breeze.

‘How did you survive?’ said Tabitha. They crossed another
road, skirting around the high street. Tabitha realised why when she glimpsed
the silver shapes, hiding along the shop fronts.

‘We’d seen smoke coming from the c-castle,’ said Liv.
‘There were five of us out here in town, living from house to house. We’d seen
a fella up there on the castle wall, waving and sh-shouting one day. So, we
made a run for it. Up to the castle. They k-killed two of us on the way,
though.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tabitha said gently.

‘Well, we’ve both lost people, I’m sure,’ Liv replied grimly.
‘But th-thanks. All we can do now is hole up in the castle, and wait for the
army to come.’

‘The army’s on its way?’ said Tabitha, looking at her.

‘Will thinks they will be. One day.’ Liv replied. ‘But
you should probably ask him about that yourself. I’m n-not very good at
optimism. Not like he is. Look, there’s home,’ she said, nodding at the castle.
It loomed large on the hill around the next street corner, separated from town
by a small field. Suddenly someone stepped out from a doorway beside them; a
man in his sixties. His grizzly expression creased up into a smile.

‘A new face!’ he said brightly, with a smoker’s voice.
‘Thank god for that. Liv was getting really depressing to talk to.’ He grinned
like a schoolboy, and put his guard up. Liv laid into him with a few punches on
the arm.

‘Alright, I’m sorry! Sorry!’ he pleaded, laughing all
the while with a dopey infectious chuckle. Tabitha couldn’t help but smile.
With a wave of his hand he led them on quickly towards the castle. He was
wearing a thin cardigan over a creased shirt, and had longer hair than she was
used to seeing on an old man. Pensioner grunge.

‘Sorry love, what was your name?’ he said. He squinted
when he smiled.

‘Tabitha,’ she said, shouldering her rifle. ‘This is
Laika.’

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Jim,’ he replied, in a broad
accent she couldn’t quite place. He shook her hand while Laika sniffed around
him, tail wagging. ‘Jeez, your hands are freezing!’ he said. ‘And… metal.’

‘What?’ said Liv, looking at Tabitha’s hands. ‘I thought
they were g-gloves. What’s that about?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Tabitha replied, exhausted. Laika
came back to nuzzle her hand. At least her dog liked her cold grey fingers.

‘Well, I like stories,’ said Jim, leading them on
towards the park gates and the castle beyond. ‘And we’ve got plenty of time to
hear it, you know. Nothing else to do here.’ Liv smiled. Tabitha felt herself
starting to relax a little. Her heart had stopped racing, at least.

They
reached the castle by a winding path of old stone steps, giving Tabitha a
chance to see just how high and sheer the encircling outer wall really was. The
stairs curved up around the hill and ended with an iron-barred gate in the
castle wall, set into an old stone archway. A tall grim man with gaunt cheeks
opened the iron gate for them to come inside the walls.

‘Tabitha, this is C-Chris,’ said Liv. ‘Chris, Tabitha.’
Tabitha smiled at him.

‘Alright,’ Chris grunted, closing the gate behind them.
He didn’t seem too thrilled about Laika’s greeting either. He coughed dryly and
watched them walk through. Tabitha glanced back at him. He looked… intense.

‘He’s like that with everyone,’ Liv muttered. ‘I’m still
trying to w-work out why he’s such a knob all the time.’ Tabitha smirked. Jim
led them across a small courtyard, up some steps to the square castle keep. The
whole place was solid, simple. The keep tower stood in the centre, with grass
and gardens around it. The thick stone curtain wall circled all of it, making a
towering barrier against the world outside. It felt safe here; its own little
world. The wall was wide enough for two people to walk along and watch the
whole town from the hill top. With the iron gate closed in the archway, there
was no way in other than climbing the high curtain wall. It was only eight or
nine feet tall above the garden inside the grounds, but closer to a thirty-foot
drop on the outside to the rocky hill below. Looking around the garden Tabitha
saw that half the grass had been turned over to bare black soil, and shoots
were starting to show.

‘Jim’s very proud of his allotment,’ Liv whispered to
Tabitha. Jim was opening the solid wooden door of the keep to let them inside.
‘If you ever find five minutes to help him with his plants, it’ll mean the
world to him.’ Tabitha smiled, and looked out over the garden. Birds were
singing; water was trickling out through a stone font set into the rock wall.

‘Fresh sp-spring water,’ Liv boasted, nodding at the
font.

‘Amazing,’ Tabitha replied happily, thinking about all
the washes she could have. She’d never smelled this bad in her life; surely the
others must have noticed it. Chris grunted and pushed past them, climbing the
stone steps up onto the wall. He walked along the battlements, watching the
town below for any sign of spiders. Or, he was just being antisocial. Tabitha
wasn’t sure.

‘Will!’ Jim shouted inside the door, up at the roof of
the keep. ‘It’s our driver, from the vintage car!’

‘You saw me coming?’ said Tabitha, as she and Liv headed
inside.

‘And heard you,’ Liv replied.

‘Hard to miss you,’ Jim said brightly, welcoming her
inside the keep with a sweep of his hand. ‘It was the only sound for miles.’

‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha mumbled, looking around inside the
keep. Where she’d pictured dark stone walls and a long-gone roof, there were
nests of blankets and sofa cushions, and a new ceiling just over her head.

‘This used to be a visitor centre, of sorts,’ said Jim,
pointing out the tiny cafe kitchen over to the right. ‘It’s a shame the gas
oven doesn’t work,’ he added. ‘At least there’s food in the cupboards though.’
It was so warm in here. A solid wooden table took up the centre of the room,
surrounded by plastic stacking chairs. The other tables and chairs had been
pushed to the walls to act like shelves, holding a random assortment of boxes and
bags. A log fire blazed in the stone fireplace, filling the room with the sweet
smell of burning pine cones. It was a home. A man climbed down the wooden steps
from the floor above, looking like he’d just come from a festival. Wide smile,
dreadlocked hair, and two gnarled scars down one cheek.

‘I’m so glad to meet you,’ he said, beaming. He shook
Tabitha’s hand in both of his. ‘I’m Will. Or William, if you’re mad at me.’

‘Tabitha,’ she replied, aware of him looking down at her
hand. She pulled it away.

‘Metal gloves?’ he said.

‘Skin,’ she replied awkwardly. He looked at her with
fascination, but didn’t pry any further. She was grateful. Keen as she was to
make a good first impression, she couldn’t hold in her pee for much longer.
‘Um… do you have a toilet here?’ she asked them.

‘Yep, just head back outside,’ Will said brightly.
‘There’s an outhouse around the far side of the keep there. It’s not an elegant
setup, but it works,’ he said with a grin.

‘Thanks,’ Tabitha replied, smiling politely. She was
glad to get out of the door for a second, just to avoid any more questions
about the skin on her hands. She headed around the keep with Laika, through the
garden and down to an ancient stone shed built against the curtain wall. Will
was right; the toilet really wasn’t an elegant setup. The outhouse had a barred
hole in the corner of the floor, with an old wooden seat built around it and a
circle cut in the middle. Glancing down through the hole, Tabitha saw nothing
but a long drop to the hillside below. Medieval drainage at its finest.

Tabitha
admired the garden as she walked back round the side of the keep. Laika was
rolling on the lawn. Bees hummed sharply, swimming between the bobbing flowers.
Tabitha stopped for a second to breathe it all in. Green grass at her feet, and
the bright blue sky above. The smell of flowers and sweet summer haze. It was
beautiful here, tucked away from the world outside. Chris stared at her from up
on the curtain wall as she headed back for the keep. She met his gaze. Did he
have some kind of problem with her? She didn’t want to call him out on it
though. She’d only just gotten here, and she didn’t want to make any trouble.
Tabitha did her best to ignore his cold hard stare. She headed back up the
stone steps onto the small courtyard, walking back inside the keep.

‘We’ll be getting a stew on s-soon,’ Liv piped up,
pulling a chair out for Tabitha at the table. ‘Now get your boots off, and I’ll
fetch you some fresh s-socks.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea love?’ said Jim. He was already
hooking an old black kettle onto the rail over the fire.

‘Oh god, yes please,’ Tabitha replied. How long had it
been since she’d had a brew?

‘Is it too hot for you in here?’ said Jim. I realise
we’ve got a fire going in the middle of summer.’ He nodded at the strips of
bright sunlight in the walls, shining through narrow windows that used to be
arrow slits.

‘Oh no, it’s just right,’ Tabitha replied, smiling
politely. It felt like the cool stone walls drained a lot of the heat anyway.

‘The whole castle was a visitor centre,’ said Will,
noticing Tabitha looking around at the room. ‘I was lucky I got up the hill
here, when everything kicked off. And guess what was waiting for me at the
top.’ He grinned at her, and showed off the twin scars on his cheek. ‘The gate
where you came in was padlocked then. So, I had to climb up the archway over
the gate and then up the curtain wall to the top, with one of those things
trying to kill me!’

‘Good motivation to get good at climbing,’ Jim chipped
in from the fire, watching the kettle.

‘Absolutely,’ Will replied.

‘You climbed up that wall outside?’ said Tabitha,
awestruck.

‘Adrenaline’s a wonderful thing,’ Will said with a grin.
‘It was either climb up that wall or get caught by the spider. No contest.’

‘So you were the first one here?’ said Tabitha, unlacing
a boot.

‘I was,’ he said. ‘Lucky for me there weren’t any
spiders inside the castle here, once I’d got over the wall. So, I started
setting fires on top of the keep, and these three showed up a few days later.’
He took Tabitha’s boots and socks from her as she pulled them off. He carried
them over to a bucket of water, tipped a little soap powder into it, and set
about scrubbing them with an old brush.

‘Oh no, I’ll do that,’ said Tabitha, feeling guilty for
them all suddenly slaving over her.

‘No, you’re our guest today,’ Will replied. He wrung her
socks out, and hung them by the fire to dry. ‘There’ll be plenty to do
tomorrow,’ he said brightly. ‘But today you’re having a rest. So I say make the
most of it.’ Laika had no problem taking their hospitality. She was already
settled down by the fire, gnawing a dog chew that Jim had produced from a
plastic bag.

‘Keeps the wild dogs busy while you run for it,’ Jim
said knowingly, tapping his nose. He popped a tea bag into a cup, and put in a
good amount of long-life milk and sugar without having to ask. The new girl
looked like she needed a good dose of both.

‘It’s so… civilised,’ said Tabitha, gazing around in
awe. Liv came back down the wooden stairs with a dry pair of socks.

‘Well, I’m glad you think so,’ Will replied happily,
setting down her scrubbed boots close to the fire. ‘We want it to be a little
piece of civilisation here. A safe place to come to.’

‘Don’t you feel like you’re in danger though? With all
the spiders in town?’ said Tabitha.

‘Well, yeah,’ he admitted. ‘But… you just live with it.
People have always been in danger though, if you think about it. It’s our
natural state, really.’ Will took a seat, and thought about it. ‘If you look at
it, it’s only the last few hundred years where we’ve had it safer,’ he said.
‘Now we’re back in the Stone Age. But we’ve always had fire and the tribe to
take our minds off the danger, and the dark. That’s why we’re staying here.
It’s the safest place we’re going to find.’

‘The philosopher,’ Jim told Tabitha, nodding at Will
with a grin.

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome here,’ Tabitha
replied. ‘I’m so glad I found this place.’ Will grinned. Tabitha thanked Jim
for the huge mug of tea he set down for her. It was sweet, milky, and it warmed
her insides like a fire in her soul. But it wasn’t just the hot water that felt
warming. The aftertaste was unmistakable. ‘Jim, is there whisky in this?’

‘Could be,’ he said, with a cheeky smile.

‘Listen, d-don’t you be getting her drunk and
suggestible, you s-sly old git,’ said Liv, taking a seat at the table. Jim
laughed as he walked outside. Liv glanced at the new girl next to her. She
looked exhausted; pale as a sheet. Tabitha looked up at Liv for a second with
tired vivid eyes. She smiled, and looked back down at her mug on the table.

‘You look ready for a r-rest,’ said Liv gently, taking
Tabitha’s metal-skinned hand in hers. Tabitha was surprised by the contact. She
nodded silently, dipping her head as the tears came. Liv flashed a look at
Will, and he obliged by following Jim outside and closing the door behind him.
Once they were alone, a sudden sob heaved its way out of Tabitha’s chest. She
pulled her hand from Liv’s, and leaned in to hug her tight.

‘Dread to think what the girl’s been through,’ Jim told
Will, as they joined Chris on the wall.

‘She’s got weird hands,’ Chris observed, pulling his
jacket collar close against the wind.

‘Well, I’m sure there’s a story there,’ Will replied.
Tabitha’s muffled crying inside the keep filled the edge of their hearing. ‘She
can tell us when she’s good and ready.’

‘How do we know she’s not got some weird alien
infection?’ Chris replied. ‘Or the dog?’ it was a good point, thought Jim, but
a cold one. He agreed, though he didn’t want to. They both looked to Will for
an answer.

‘Something called trust,’ Will said sternly,
fixing Chris with a stare. ‘Tabitha would say something if she was going to put
us in danger.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Chris scoffed. ‘That’s not
trust. It’s called being naïve.’

‘Look, I’d sooner think the best of someone new and be
proved wrong, rather than just not trusting anyone,’ Will replied. ‘If we can’t
trust our own kind then we’ve already lost this war.’ The wind blew around them
in the heavy silence.

‘You still think there’s a war left to fight,’
said Chris.

‘Not this again,’ Jim mumbled wearily, as Will and Chris
launched into another shouting match behind him.

A
little later the group sat talking around the table together inside the keep.
Tabitha felt that tense, knotted fear inside her begin to loosen; a primal
relief that could only come with safety in numbers. She looked around the keep
for a moment while the rest of them talked, still amazed that a place like this
could exist in the new world.

‘You’ve got spears propped up in the corner,’ Tabitha
observed, as Jim brought over bowls of stew to the table.

‘They were up there on the wall when I got here,’ said
Will. ‘Not sure how much use they’re going to be, but they’re better than
nothing I suppose.’

‘They’re blunt,’ Chris grunted, shovelling stew into his
mouth. Jim brought his own bowl of stew last, and sat down to join them. There
was a sudden hush around the table, where the chatter gave way to eating and
clinking spoons.

‘This is delicious,’ said Tabitha, breaking the silence.

‘Thank you,’ Jim replied proudly, as the rest agreed
with full mouths. Tabitha scooped up another steaming spoonful of stew. It was
thick and hot; a steamy orange mush of onions, carrots and potatoes. She
devoured it, suddenly too hungry for polite pausing spoonfuls. She just had to
hope that she was over her vomiting phase by now.

‘It was my better half’s recipe,’ said Jim. ‘It’s the
celeriac that does it, I think.’

‘Ooh, celeriac?’ said Chris. ‘Bit exotic for you,
Jim.’

‘Celeriac’s not exotic,’ Liv chipped in, picking
something from her teeth with her fingernail. ‘It’s j-just that some of us know
how to cook things other than ch-chips.’ Jim and Will were grinning. Chris
glared at her angrily, and said nothing. Tabitha dropped her spoon with a
clatter, and clutched her stomach suddenly. She jumped up from the table and
rushed outside, hand clamped against her mouth.

‘Tabitha?’ said Liv, following her outside where she was
throwing up.

‘The food’s not so good then,’ Chris joked.

‘Shut up Chris,’ Will warned him. Jim looked worried
about what his cooking had done to the poor girl.

‘Every time I eat something,’ Tabitha sobbed outside.
She wiped away the sick from her chin with a rough metal hand. Liv put her arm
around her.

‘…Do you ever f-feel hungry?’ Liv asked her, rubbing her
back. Tabitha shook her head, and wiped her snotty nose with her wrist.

‘But you still feel weak, like you’ve n-not eaten?’ said
Liv. Tabitha nodded. Liv thought for a while in the silence. Tabitha sobbed and
leant in to her shoulder. Liv opened her mouth to speak; hesitated.

‘Hun, what you were telling me about your heart and your
b-blood… maybe your stomach’s changed too. Maybe you need to eat the kind of
things that they eat.’ Liv only realised how bad that sounded after she’d said
it. They’d both seen what the spiders ate. Tabitha hid her face away in her
grey hands, and cried.

‘Oh God, I’m s-sorry,’ said Liv, pulling her close. ‘I’m
so sorry.’ Beyond the castle wall, the birds sang in a sunny grey world.

Liv insisted on taking Tabitha upstairs to the beds.
Their sleeping quarters were a Spartan set-up; old fold-out canvas sun beds,
draped skeletal in throws and bed sheets. Liv opened the door of a storeroom in
the corner, and sat Tabitha down on the bed inside. There was a narrow window
in here, like the arrow slits downstairs, letting in the fading light of dusk.

‘I claimed this room to m-myself, away from the boys,’
Liv said proudly. ‘A lady needs her privacy.’ It was cosy in here; a snug space
filled with cushions, blankets and books. Liv sat Tabitha down on the bed, and
looked her ragged silver-stained clothes up and down.

‘Here hun, I’ve got a spare top if you’d like it,’ said
Liv. ‘I packed it in a hurry when everything happened, so it might not be my
best one. It’s clean though.’

‘I could do with something new to wear, thanks,’ Tabitha
admitted, taking the crinkled t-shirt that Liv produced from a backpack in the
corner. Tabitha looked down at her own dirty t-shirt and jeans. They were
covered in holes and tears; browned with dirt and blotchy with silver
bloodstains.

‘Thank you,’ Tabitha said gratefully, smoothing her new
t-shirt out on the bed beside her. ‘You’ve all made me feel so welcome.’ Liv
smiled, shrugged her shoulders. They could hear Laika climbing the wooden steps
leading up from downstairs. A few moments later she came padding in, and
plopped down beside Tabitha on the bed.

‘No, Laika,’ said Tabitha. ‘Off. You can’t come on here.’

‘It’s ok, I don’t m-mind,’ said Liv, stroking Laika’s warm
head. ‘Just get some rest, ok?’

‘Would you mind explaining everything to the boys,
please?’ said Tabitha. ‘It’s… I feel like a leper or something.’

‘Of course hun, if that’s what you w-want,’ Liv replied.
Tabitha smiled a little.

‘Thank you,’ she said, relieved.

‘And if they ask you anything awkward, you just c-come
to me,’ said Liv. ‘I know how to k-keep them in line. Same if there’s anything
you want to talk about. You come st-straight to me.’ Tabitha hugged her. ‘Now rest,
will you?’

‘Alright,’ Tabitha replied softly, smiling as Liv left
and closed the door. She lay there on the bed with Laika, rubbing her mum’s
blue ribbon between her finger and thumb, and tried to think about the good
times as she dozed off. For the first time in a long time, Tabitha felt safe.

20

It
was a chillier morning than most, and the sky was overcast. Tabitha zipped up
her hoodie when she wandered outside the keep, and pulled the hood close around
her neck. It was going to be an early autumn this year, from the looks of it.

‘Morning,’ Will said brightly, up on the curtain wall
beside the courtyard.

‘Morning,’ Tabitha replied, climbing the stone steps to
join him.

‘How did you sleep?’

‘Really well, thanks,’ she replied, stifling a yawn. ‘It
was really nice of Liv, to let me sleep in her bed.’

‘Well, it’s not just her bed,’ Will said with a smile.
‘We can all use it, if we want to. It’s just that she’s been the bossiest about
keeping hold of it.’ Tabitha smiled, and hesitated. Thinking how to say what
she wanted to say. Probably better just to be honest about it.

‘I’m embarrassed about yesterday,’ she told him. A
blackbird flew overhead.

‘Well don’t be,’ Will replied, watching the town below.
‘From what Liv said, you’ve been through a lot.’

‘I just don’t want anyone to think I’m weak,’ she said.
‘Crying since I got here, and being sick all over the place…’

‘Trust me, no one thinks you’re weak,’ Will replied.
‘None of us could have done what you’ve done. I mean, look what you’ve survived
just to get here. Liv told us everything. You’re different.’

‘I’m just the same as all of you,’ she said, shaking her
head. Did he mean her hands?

‘Yeah, you’re still human like the rest of us… but look
at what you can do. You’re like… superhuman.’

‘That’s comic book stuff,’ she said dismissively,
thinking about her favourite films.

‘So you don’t think the way you heal is superhuman?’
said Will, disbelieving. ‘Having alien blood, and alien strength? You’ve got,
like, superpowers. They’re not things to be ashamed of, mate,’ he
chuckled. ‘Be proud of them. I mean, they’ve got you this far in one piece,
haven’t they?’

‘Well, yeah,’ she admitted. He did have a point.

‘You’re just who we need, Tabitha. You could be the one
to turn this war around.’

‘Well… it’s not really a war. They’ve already won,’ Tabitha
pointed out.

‘No, it’s still on,’ he replied stubbornly. ‘It started
the day they came here, and we’re still fighting it now just by staying alive.
They only win the war if they kill every last one of us on the planet. And not
a second sooner.’

‘Well, that’s a good way of looking at it,’ she
admitted. ‘So if the war’s still going on, how do we stand a chance of winning?’

‘Us,’ he said simply. ‘It starts with the five of us. We
need to become something.’

‘How do you mean?’ she said.

‘Well, I used to think the army would come here and save
us, but the last couple of days, I’m not so sure,’ said Will. ‘Maybe instead,
we need to save ourselves. I want us to become an idea for other people.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Tabitha, smiling in
apology.

‘Well, all will become clear,’ Will said brightly. ‘I’ve
got a new plan for us. I’ll be telling everyone about it later on.’

Liv
headed back over to the fireplace in the keep as Will and Tabitha came back
inside. She made herself look busy, and pretended she hadn’t been peering round
the doorway at them while they were talking on the wall.

‘Morning,’ Will said brightly.

‘M-Morning,’ Liv echoed. ‘I’ll get some breakfast on.’
Her mind was racing. Why wasn’t she the first to know about the new plan? She was
always the first to know the plans. She was the one Will confided in, but he
hadn’t mentioned his new idea to her at all. Had something changed?

‘Thank you, for last night,’ Tabitha told Liv. ‘I should
be the one making breakfast, though.’

‘Oh no, it’s fine hun,’ said Liv, smiling. ‘As long as
you’re feeling better, that’s all that matters.’ Having had her offer of help
politely refused, Tabitha left Liv to make the breakfast and went to fuss over
Laika for a little while. There was something different about Liv this morning;
she was sure of it. Something a little more frosty. But she didn’t know her
yet. She didn’t know any of them yet.

A little later Will had asked everyone to meet up in the
keep, and waited for them to come inside before he made his speech. Jim slurped
his tea at the table and cringed at the taste.

‘Liv, this milk’s off,’ he said. ‘Tastes like porridge.’

‘Yeah, it’s o-oat milk,’ Liv replied. ‘Don’t you like
it?’

‘Well, not in my tea I don’t. Haven’t we got any of the
proper stuff left?’

‘The long-life milk?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Only one c-carton left,’ Liv replied. She stepped
closer, and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘But while it’s you Jim, you can
have it to yourself. We’ll pr-pretend it’s all gone, ok?’ she winked at him.

‘Scandalous,’ he chuckled quietly. He slurped his tea,
and grimaced at the oaty taste.

‘Give me that,’ said Liv, smiling. ‘I’ll make you
another cup.’ Chris came downstairs yawning, woken from sleep. Tabitha stepped
back inside the keep door, having gotten rid of Laika’s business out in the
garden.

‘Right everyone, this is a biggie,’ said Will, rubbing
his hands together with excitement. He was grinning like a little boy.

‘Not another idea,’ Chris moaned, flattening his
bed hair as he took a seat at the table.

‘See, it’s that can-do attitude that I love about you,
Chris,’ Will said brightly. ‘Now. I’ve been thinking,’ he told the group. He
hesitated. ‘I don’t think the army’s coming here to save us. If they were, they
would have got here by now.’ Jim nodded gravely. ‘If we’re going to survive
here, we’re going to have to start heading outside for food and things,’ Will
continued. ‘At least until the allotment gets going,’ he added, with a nod to
Jim. ‘So… I say we need to take charge of this town. To do that, we need to
turn ourselves into something more.’ Liv nodded.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ Jim admitted.

‘Well, I mean that we need to band together and become a
team,’ Will replied. ‘We could be the start of something big. I mean, Tabitha
managed to find us, so what if there’s more people out there? Looking for a
place like this?’

‘It was just luck that I found this place though,’
Tabitha chipped in.

‘Exactly, so we need to advertise,’ Will told the group.
‘We need to get noticed, so other people out there can come and find us.’

‘An urban l-legend,’ Liv suggested.

‘Exactly!’ said Will, banging his fist on the table. ‘A
tribe,’ he said excitedly. ‘Like a… a group of heroes. With a mission to
protect people.’

‘That sounds shit,’ Chris chipped in. ‘Have you been
drinking or something?’

‘See, Chris agrees with me,’ said Will sarcastically,
ignoring him. ‘It’s a great idea.’

‘So just like that, we’re going to be a bunch of
heroes?’ said Chris, chuckling in disbelief.

‘Just like that,’ Will said with a smile. ‘Every group
of heroes in history started out the same way. Just a handful of people,
agreeing to a cause they believed in.’

‘What heroes?’ said Chris, looking around at the others.
‘This is real life, do you understand? There aren’t any heroes in real life.’

‘So doctors and soldiers, and, and relief w-workers,
they’re not heroes?’ said Liv.

‘That’s different,’ said Chris, folding his arms.

‘No, it’s not,’ Will replied. ‘Those are real
heroes. And we can be too. It’s like you said Liv, doctors and soldiers and
relief workers. We can be those things to other people. We can help people
here.’ Jim grunted his approval.

‘So we’re a team now?’ Tabitha chipped in, moving it on
a step. Making it official.

‘That’s right,’ Will said happily. ‘If we’re all
together on this?’ the others looked around at one another and nodded, glad to
be part of something bigger. Chris stayed quiet, arms crossed.

‘So what do we call ourselves?’ said Jim.

‘Well, that’s what we need to decide,’ Will replied
excitedly. He fetched a pad and pen and put them down on the table. ‘I’ll get
some food on the go, and we’ll have a brainstorm.’ Chris moaned at the word.

‘A what?’ said Jim, screwing his face up.

‘Brainstorm,’ Tabitha replied. ‘It means we’ll have a
think about it.’

‘Ohh,’ said Jim. ‘Is that a proper word? Brainstorm?’

‘Afraid so,’ said Liv, smiling at Will.

‘Yeah, but it’s only a certain kind of person who uses
words like brainstorm,’ said Chris, aiming it at Will.

‘Look, just get some ideas written down,’ said Will,
pointing a half-eaten biscuit at the writing pad on the table. ‘Please.’

Coming
up with a name took longer than they expected. It wasn’t easy to think of
something that everyone could agree on. The group had already drained their
cups and emptied their plates while they were thinking, and the clammy fatigue
of a board meeting had settled in over their heads. With nothing else to do
though, nobody wanted to be the first one to give up.

‘The Leftovers,’ Chris suggested, picking his nose.
‘Because we’re the last people left over after the main course.’

‘God, that’s grim,’ said Liv. ‘I vote n-no on that one.’
Will, Jim and Tabitha agreed. The daylight from the open door painted their
faces bright against the gloom and shadows. Tabitha looked over at Laika, resting
on the rug by the white ashes of the fire. She smiled to see her so safe for
once. So content.

‘The Knights,’ Jim chipped in. ‘We live in a castle, and
we want to protect people. So we’re like knights.’

‘It’s a good one,’ Will replied, noting it down on his
pad in a scruffy hand. Tabitha had never seen anyone hold a pen so strangely.
‘So. We’ve got The Resistance, The Survivors, The Wolves, The Guardians, and
The Knights. And a lot of crossed out names we can’t agree on. Any
more?’ the room was quiet. Only the high cheeps and chatters of the birds
outside. Jim coughed to break the silence.

‘The Ghosts,’ Liv suggested, after a moment of thought.
‘Because we’re going to rise up from the dead, and haunt our enemies. And
because it s-sounds cool.’

‘It does sound cool,’ said Tabitha, smiling. Will
nodded. Jim grunted his approval, past caring. Tabitha’s heart leapt at the
sticky social glue she felt around her. They’d brought her in and stuck her to
the family. She was there at the start of this, whatever it was. The movement.

‘Oh Liv, that does sound cool,’ Chris mocked her. ‘Are
you two just here to kiss each other’s arses? Get a room.’ Tabitha didn’t have
a reply. She could only look at him, dumbfounded. Surely it was too soon to be
getting into fights; she hardly knew him. Well, she knew he was a prick now,
anyway.

‘Actually, Tabitha would be the first p-person I’d get a
room with in this place,’ Liv shot back. ‘And I bet she’d be a damn sight
b-better than you, chicken dick.’ Will burst out laughing. Jim and Tabitha
grinned. Chris glared angrily at Liv, lost for words.

‘Chicken dick,’ Jim chuckled to himself, tickled.

‘Right, should we get back to business?’ said Will,
grinning.

‘Just g-give as good as you get with him,’ Liv advised
Tabitha, holding Chris’s angry stare. ‘Even science can’t explain why he’s just
such a massive pr-prat.’

‘It’s only since I got here that I got like that,
actually,’ Chris replied. ‘It must be the c-company.’

‘Chris,’ Will warned him.

‘Well bloody well leave then!’ Liv yelled.

‘You leave!’ Chris yelled back, kicking off a shouting
match between them.

‘Don’t you dare take the piss out of her!’ Jim bellowed.
Laika looked up, startled from sleep. She looked to Tabitha amidst all the
shouting. Tabitha looked back and shrugged, bemused.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Will sighed, standing up. ‘Everyone,
shut up!’ he slammed his hands down on the table, and the room fell silent.
‘We’re called The Ghosts, alright? I can’t be arsed with this any more.’ Jim
grunted and nodded. Liv was still fuming. ‘Why do our family meetings always
turn out like this?’ said Will, despairing. ‘Anyway. Phase Two. Follow me
outside.’

‘Now,’ said Will, pacing in the garden. The others were
assembled to hear the plan.

‘Tabitha, I don’t think any of us have mentioned it, so
you won’t be aware of this,’ he said. ‘We had an army patrol coming through the
hills over there, last week.’ Tabitha looked in the direction he was pointing,
but saw only the curtain wall. She felt stupid for looking, but no one seemed
to notice.

‘The army?’ said Tabitha. ‘Coming here to rescue you?’
she gave Laika a stroke as she came to sit by her feet.

‘We don’t know,’ Will replied with a shrug. ‘They might
not even have known we were here. All we know is what we heard from the
fighting one night.’

‘They could have been a g-gang, like a militia,’ said
Liv.

‘Maybe,’ Will replied, nodding. ‘But they sounded
disciplined to me, to hear them shouting. Personally, I think they were trained
soldiers. But we’ve not seen anyone come to find them since then.’

‘They were screaming for a long time,’ Chris chipped in.

‘They were,’ Will replied grimly. He looked back at
Tabitha. ‘Anyway, long story short, we don’t think those soldiers need their
guns any more, unfortunately. But if we could get hold of them… just think what
we could do here. We could take the town back.’

‘You want to go out there on the m-moors?’ Liv
said doubtfully.

‘For some new hardware that could really change our
fortunes,’ Will replied, smiling.

‘It’s risky,’ Jim chipped in.

‘Risky?’ said Chris. ‘It’s going to get us
killed!’ he stared around at them. The sky was turning grey up above the castle
courtyard.

‘Not if we’re quick. And careful,’ Will replied. ‘Plus,
we’ve got a car now.’ He nodded to Tabitha.

‘There’s not enough petrol in it though,’ Tabitha
replied, feeling like she’d slurred her words. Suddenly she was feeling drained
with a creeping exhaustion. ‘It was running on empty when I got here.’

‘Well, there’s that minivan p-parked round the back on
the drive,’ Liv suggested. ‘The engine won’t start, but it should have some
petrol we can sy-syphon off.’

‘Syphoning doesn’t work any more,’ said Chris. ‘They put
valves in now to stop people doing it. You have to –

‘Put a hole in the fuel tank,’ Tabitha chipped in.

‘Yeah,’ said Chris, looking over at her.

‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Will. ‘So. Once we’ve filled
up Tabitha’s tank,’ Jim sniggered.

‘Oh Jesus, Jim,’ said Liv. ‘You’re nearly s-seventy. Grow
up.’

‘Sorry,’ he chuckled.

‘Once we’ve filled up Tabitha’s car,’ said Will,
‘we’ll decide who goes out there to find the army patrol. And bring the guns
back here.’

‘Hold on, you can’t just decide we’re all going
out there now!’ Chris objected.

‘It’s not up to Will,’ Jim replied gruffly. ‘We’re all
going out because we want to.’

‘I don’t want to!’ Chris shot back.

‘But it’s like Will said,’ Liv told him. ‘If we don’t
start looking s-soon, we’re going to run out of food. Eventually.’

‘But those spiders might still be out there,’ said Chris.

‘Yeah, they might be,’ Will agreed. ‘But they might not.
They might be a hundred miles away by now. Think about what we could gain though.
If we get guns, we can defend ourselves here. And even if we do run into
trouble out there, we’ve got Tabitha and her talents on our side.’ Will smiled
at her. Tabitha felt embarrassed at the praise. Looking to Liv didn’t help,
though. She saw an uncertainty there in Liv’s face. Maybe even a dark trace of
jealousy, before she looked back to Will.

‘So,’ said Will. ‘How do we decide who’s going out?’

‘We’re all going,’ said Liv. ‘We’re a t-team.’

‘Someone should stay back and guard the castle,’ Chris
chipped in. A silence of indecision hung over the group suddenly. Everyone
waited for someone else to decline or volunteer, one way or the other.

‘Well, how many seats are there in your car?’ said Jim,
breaking the silence.

‘Only four, actually,’ Tabitha replied. ‘We’ve got the
gear to bring back too, so it’ll be a tight fit anyway.’

‘Exactly,’ said Chris. ‘So one of us should stay back.
To guard the castle.’

‘Yeah, you already m-mentioned that,’ said Liv
accusingly. ‘Would that someone be you, b-by any chance?’ Chris gave her a dark
look.

‘Wow, my hero,’ said Liv, walking past him towards the
keep. ‘Try not to let those evil flames b-burn the dinner while we’re gone,
guardian of the c-castle.’

‘Piss off,’ Chris replied.

‘Right. Boots on, people,’ said Will, following Liv to
the keep. ‘No time like the present. Oh, and nice one for volunteering to stay
here mate,’ he told Chris, patting him on the shoulder as he walked by. ‘Very
brave of you.’

‘Piss off,’ Chris repeated, looking away.

‘Yes, very good of you Christopher,’ Jim joined in,
walking by. ‘A true gent.’ Tabitha walked on by after Jim, saying nothing.
Chris still gave her an angry look though, despite her silence.

‘And you can piss off too,’ he told her.

‘I’ve not said anything,’ she replied, trying her best
to skirt around a confrontation.

‘No, you just thought it instead,’ said Chris
accusingly. ‘Just come out and say it. You don’t like me.’ Tabitha sighed and
stopped walking. A skinny moth fluttered up from the grass at her feet. The old
Tabitha in her head begged her to say nothing and walk on. The new Tabitha
didn’t care.

‘Look,’ she said, squaring up to Chris. ‘You’re letting
a pensioner take your place in my car, while you stay here nice and
safe.’ Chris tried to say something; Tabitha interrupted. ‘I understand
self-preservation. I do,’ she said. ‘But there’s self-preservation, and then
there’s being a coward that won’t pull their weight.’ Chris stared at her in
shock, lost for words. ‘Yeah, I’m quiet around people,’ she said, looking him
in the eye. ‘But don’t think I’m a pushover. For your own sake. I’ve had to do
a lot of things to stay alive the past couple of weeks and I’m so much
worse than you realise.’ Chris didn’t say a word. Tabitha held his stare, and
walked away. Laika followed her as she headed off into the keep. Chris stood
there alone in the garden, watching her go.

21

Tabitha took Liv’s shotgun and ran back through town,
sticking to the old stone walls of the shops and houses. Fear spurred her on;
the chance that a sudden silver swarm might come spilling out of a back street
behind her. She reached the stone archway and climbed back into her car, and
cursed for not parking up at the castle in the first place. She turned the key
in the ignition and headed up the winding roads around town, heading through
the park gates towards the castle. Taking the steep road as it wound left, she
parked up on a drive beside the castle hill. The others were waiting for her.

‘Excellent work,’ said Will. ‘Right, let’s get a move
on,’ he told the group, wary of any silver shapes that might be lurking while
they stood outside the castle walls. They’d already jacked the minivan up to
expose the fuel tank. The whole task went so much faster with a few extra
hands; in a few short minutes they had the car’s petrol tank full.

‘You know, I never stopped to think if the minivan might
be a diesel,’ said Will, carting one of Tabitha’s plastic petrol cans over to
her car.

‘Just a lucky guess?’ said Tabitha, filling another
container beneath the van.

‘All the time,’ Liv said despairingly. ‘He lives by
lucky guesses.’ Will shrugged.

‘Well, he’s been a lucky sod for as long as I’ve known
him,’ said Jim. He zipped up his jacket against the breeze, colder than it
should have been for August. He looked out over the trees at the hilly moors in
the distance. ‘I just hope your luck lasts us while we’re out there.’

Tabitha
started the engine up and turned the car around on the whispering gravel drive.
She rolled steadily through the narrow park gates and joined the winding road
into town, still tempted to check left and right before she took the turn.

‘I can’t b-believe we’re in a working car,’ Liv said
excitedly in the back, watching the shops roll by. Jim sat quietly beside her,
secretly dreading the mission to come.

‘Shame the radio’s not working,’ said Will in the
passenger seat, fiddling with the dials.

‘We could have rewired it to broadcast an SOS signal or
something.’

‘You can’t do that, can you?’ said Liv.

‘Of course not,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘But I bet
it made me seem really impressive for about two seconds there.’

‘Really impressive,’ Liv replied sarcastically.

‘Oh, next left please,’ said Will, directing Tabitha
down a winding road past a small supermarket. The four of them fell silent for
a while as they watched the dead world rolling by. Tabitha felt butterflies in
her stomach at the thought of heading out into the wild. The others must have
been as nervous as she was. Jim coughed. Tabitha hoped he was going to say
something; anything to break the silence. Any little conversation, just to
interrupt the dark thoughts running through her head.

‘Wait, I think I heard something on the radio!’ said
Liv, breaking the uneasy quiet.

‘Really?’ said Will, turning around.

‘Yeah, listen!’ she said. They listened intently for a
sound in the silence, watching the radio in the dashboard as if it was about to
spring to life. Liv started singing quietly.

‘L-listen, it’s a music station,’ she said, interrupting
herself before she went back to her song. The others were smiling.

‘Turn it up,’ said Jim. Will turned the dial, and Liv
sang a little louder.

‘It’s strange, you don’t hear lots of songs about
giraffes,’ said Tabitha, nodding along to the tune.

‘It’s shocking what they’ll put on the radio these
days,’ said Will, watching the town give way to fields. Liv laughed through her
singing, and hit a dramatic chorus with her fist in the air.

‘Jeez,’ said Jim, cringing at Liv’s shrieking guitar
solo. Outside the windows, the fields rolled away as the moors loomed closer.
Secretly exhausted, Tabitha willed herself to stay focussed on the road. And
the danger that could be out there on the bleak moors, waiting for them.

Will directed Tabitha to a turn-off in the fields, and
they took a dirt road up into the moors. A couple of minutes later the town was
a distant cluster behind them, looking no bigger than a model.

‘Well, this looks like a good place to start,’ said Will.

‘Just anywhere around here?’ Tabitha checked.

‘Yep, please,’ Will replied. Tabitha brought the car to
a stop and stepped out onto the windy moors, and pulled the seat forwards to
help Jim climb out.

‘So what’s the p-plan?’ said Liv, looking around
nervously at the windy wild.

‘We’re looking for any kind of remains,’ Will replied.
I’m pretty sure that this is where the army patrol were, when they got
attacked.’

‘This is where we saw the flashes, wasn’t it?’ Jim
agreed.

‘I think so,’ Will replied. ‘So. Liv and Jim, you’ve got
a shotgun each, if you can pair up,’ he said. ‘Tabitha, you’ve got the rifle,
and I’ll stick with you because I’ve got diddly squat. If we all spread out a
bit, it shouldn’t take us long to find the bodies. Let’s get this done.’

They
fanned out in pairs and scoured the moor in silence, listening intently for any
scuttling legs. The wind rushed against Tabitha’s face in sudden gusts,
throwing her hair around like a greasy scarlet blaze. Will coughed quietly
beside her as they walked, studying the grass and heather for any clues.
Tabitha felt dizzy with hunger; so weak that she wanted to sit down right there
on the moor.

‘There was something I wanted to ask you about,’ said
Will, breaking the silence. ‘Liv told us about your travels… and she said you
mentioned a dragon.’

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied awkwardly, unsure what to say
about it. It sounded insane. ‘That’s the only word I could think of to describe
it.’

‘Well, that makes things more interesting,’ Will replied
with a smile. ‘What was it like?’

‘Well… Big. Grey. Dragon-shaped. It was breathing fire,
or some kind of energy maybe. I watched it catch a fighter jet and tear it to
pieces.’

‘Jesus,’ Will muttered.

‘Are you worried that one might come here?’ she asked
him.

‘Well, I would be if it showed up, definitely,’ he said,
with a grim smile. ‘But that’s a big if. I mean, it might never come
here. I don’t think we’re going to attract that much attention, really. It’s
not like we’ve got fighter jets.’ He smiled, shrugged. Tabitha hoped he was
right. ‘And there’s not really much we could do to stop it anyway,’ he added.
‘So worrying about it isn’t really going to do us any good.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is,’ Tabitha replied.

‘Wow,’ said Liv. She took one look over the far side of
the hill and covered her mouth at the sight. Jim looked around at it in shock.

‘Over here,’ he called out, waving Will and Tabitha
over. They stopped their search of the moor and came to join them up on the
steeper ground.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Will, looking down over the hill.
Tabitha nodded in agreement, grimacing at the remains. Empty skins wearing
empty uniforms; a dozen popped soldiers sprawled in the grass.

‘Right, let’s take everything we can. Helmets, uniforms,
everything,’ said Will. ‘Let’s get a move on. Those spiders might still be out
here.’

It was grim work. The stinking skins had already begun
to rot into their uniforms, clinging to the fabric like slimy grey leather.
Will had barely taken the jacket off the first body when he retched.

‘Right, sod this,’ he said, shaking floppy tatters of
rotten skin off his fingers. ‘This is taking too long.’

‘And it’s the m-most messed-up thing we’ve ever had to
do,’ Liv chipped in.

‘Yeah, that too,’ said Will. ‘Just get the guns, the
helmets, and the vests. And any equipment they’ve got on them. We’ll put it all
in the car and burn the bodies, then we’re done.’

‘Burn the bodies?’ said Jim. ‘We haven’t got time for
that.’

‘We’ll make time,’ Will replied stubbornly. ‘We can’t just
leave them out here to rot. These are people. We owe it to them to give
them a proper funeral.’

‘I’ve got a lighter,’ said Tabitha, fishing it out of
her hoodie pocket. The cheap bright lighter from the library drawer. That
library felt a million miles away from here, in lonelier days.

‘I’m telling you, we won’t have time,’ Jim argued.

‘Well, let’s get this st-stuff in the car first,’ Liv
suggested. ‘Then we’ll think about it.’ The others nodded and grunted, trying
not to look down any more at the remains. Switching off to it. It was bad
enough having to peel the soldiers’ empty fingers off their assault rifles
before they could put the guns in the car boot. They took all the radios and
headsets they could find; unclipped the heavy armoured vests from around the
uniforms. They filled the back seat of the car with the soldiers’ helmets. The
bayonets, grenades and spare ammunition got crammed into the car boot with the
guns.

‘Well, I think that’s all of it,’ Jim said eventually,
wearing a pained expression as he fought to get his breath back on the slope.

‘Tabitha, are you alright?’ said Liv. Tabitha looked
exhausted, white as a sheet.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she lied, feeling far away from Liv’s
muffled voice. A shiver ran through her clammy skin. She felt a strange hunger,
sudden and fierce. Not in her stomach though. It was coming from the core that
used to be her heart.

‘Let’s get back to the castle,’ said Jim, looking at her
with concern.

‘Listen,’ Tabitha whispered, shaking and pale. The
others stopped; heard nothing. ‘You can’t hear it?’ she said quietly. They
shook their heads. ‘Spiders. Just over that hill behind us.’ Jim looked
terrified.

‘Everyone back in the car,’ said Will, wide-eyed with
panic.

‘We may as well s-see if the guns work,’ said Liv,
raising her rifle.

‘There!’ said Jim. A spider had appeared on the hill in
the distance. Liv aimed her rifle at it.

‘No!’ said Will, grabbing the gun off her. ‘Everyone
back in the car. Now!’ Tabitha nodded. Sweat trickled down her temple; she felt
faint. She didn’t feel herself falling until the ground punched her in the
head. The next thing she knew she was being dragged to the car and helped into
the passenger seat. Their shouting voices sounded distant. She sat and stared
at the white sky through the windscreen, battling to keep her head up. The
others piled into the car. She could hardly turn to face Will beside her in the
driver’s seat when he said her name. As he turned the key in the ignition a
silver horde burst over the hill behind them.

‘Go, go!’ said Jim in the back, drowning under a pile of
army helmets. Spiders crashed into the car boot, punching their claws through
the bodywork with crunching stabs. Will floored it and skidded the car back
onto the dirt road. Tearing down the bumpy lane with the spiders right behind
them, Will brought them racing back onto the main road. The spiders spilled out
from the lane, close behind, metal claws scuttling on the tarmac. Liv looked
back and saw a claw embedded in the boot, dragging a silver body up towards the
window.

‘Will, there’s one still on the car!’ she said.
Panicked, Will jerked the steering wheel from side to side. The car weaved and
jolted violently down the road, shaking the spider loose. Clawing for a
foothold, the spider slipped and clattered on the road and crashed into the
chasing swarm. The car was speeding up; there was a wider gap between them and
the spiders.

‘We’re l-losing them,’ said Liv, looking out of the back
window. One by one the spiders gave up the chase, shrieking metallic and
slinking away.

‘I could have shot that first one on the hill, you
know,’ Liv protested.

‘Yeah, and then I’d have to die defending you from the
rest of them,’ Will replied. ‘So I’m glad you didn’t try, to be honest.’ Liv
smiled at his answer and looked away out of the window beside her, thinking
over his words.

‘How is she?’ said Jim, nodding at Tabitha’s slumped
body in the front.

‘Never been better,’ Tabitha slurred, trying to smile.
She was watching the road back into town with heavy eyes; feeling clammy and
sick. Like some toxic alien flu was clutching at her skull.

Will raced back through town like a joyrider, high on
the victory of their first mission. He passed the park gates and turned left
onto the long gravel drive, parking up beside the van around the back of the
castle. Together they helped Tabitha out and sat her down on a stone step. Liv
left for the castle and came back with Chris, and a wheelbarrow between them to
cart the stuff back inside. She put a bottle of water in Tabitha’s hands, and
crouched down with her to look her over.

‘I was t-terrified when you just fell down like that,’
Liv said quietly. ‘Never do that to me again, ok?’

‘Sorry,’ Tabitha replied weakly, smiling through the
embarrassment. The others were hurriedly filling the wheelbarrow with assault
rifles from the car.

‘Drink up,’ Liv told her, helping her with the cap on
the bottle. ‘I should give them a hand with the st-stuff. Will you be ok here
for a minute?’

‘Mm, m-hm,’ Tabitha replied, with a mouth full of water.
It went down cool and smooth. Nothing had ever tasted sweeter. Liv smiled and
walked off to the car, and stopped. There was a rustling in the bushes. Her
smile faded to a look of dread.

‘Spider!’ she yelled. She and Will snatched a rifle each
out of the wheelbarrow. A silver spider burst from the shaking bushes. Liv and
Will were cursing, fumbling with the guns. Tabitha sprinted past them and leapt
on the spider, burying her knife in its head. The spider shrieked and
struggled; the others watched in shock. Tabitha screamed as the spider stabbed
its claws into her leg, and she knifed it over and over until it dropped dead
on the gravel.

‘Jesus,’ said Will, running over. Tabitha tugged at the
spindly silver leg attached to hers, and yelled as she plucked the spider’s
claws out of her calf.

‘We need some bandages!’ Will yelled to the others.

‘It’s fine. It’ll heal soon,’ said Tabitha, sitting down
with a gasp to press her hand against the gushing silver blood. The others stared
at her in a shocked silence. ‘There might be more,’ she said, looking up at
them. ‘We should get going.’ Wincing, she moved her hands to check the wound.
It was closing, shrinking. She staggered and hobbled as the others helped her
up.

‘We’ll carry you in,’ said Will, still in shock.

‘No, thanks,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I’m fine. Really.’ She
let go of their shoulders and limped towards the car. At least the bleeding had
stopped. She felt the flesh beneath her skin moving and knitting.

‘Is it healing?’ said Liv, worried about her.

‘It’s getting there,’ Tabitha replied, trying to smile.
‘It’ll be fine in a couple of minutes.’

‘So why don’t they heal fast then, like you? The
spiders?’ said Chris. ‘I mean, you’ve both got the same blood.’ He’d been
staring at the trail of silver that Tabitha had left along the gravel.

‘Dunno,’ said Tabitha, refusing their help any further.
She tried putting a little more weight on her leg, and hobbled to the boot of
the car. ‘We should get all this stuff inside,’ she said, putting a couple of
guns in the wheelbarrow. ‘There’ll be more spiders coming. There’s always
more.’ She started filling up the wheelbarrow with clattering rifles and
ammunition.

‘Hold on, you’re in no fit state for that,’ Jim told her.

‘I’m fine, honestly,’ she replied. ‘Let’s just get all
this into the castle.’

‘Alright,’ Will agreed. ‘Liv, grab a gun and keep watch
please. Chris, take the helmets up to the keep mate. Jim and Tabitha, you’re on
the wheelbarrow. I’ll get the rest of the stuff.’

‘We should take the spider up too,’ Tabitha suggested,
rubbing at her headache with a rough hand. ‘I’ll show everyone how to kill
them.’

‘Good idea,’ said Will. ‘I’ll take it up.’

‘No. If you catch its claws they’ll poison you,’ she
replied. ‘I’ll take it up.’ Will looked from her to the spider, and nodded. She
looked so tired and deathly pale that he didn’t want her to exert herself; but
she also looked so pissed off after her fight that he didn’t want to disagree
with her either.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘You saved our lives,’ he added,
giving her a hug. Tabitha smiled, taken by surprise. Liv glanced at the two of
them together. ‘Right everyone, let’s get a move on,’ Will told the others. ‘I
believe that’s mission accomplished, by the way.’ The others joined him in a
mini applause, and set to work getting the guns and vests inside the castle.

‘The Ghosts are rising,’ Will told them proudly,
watching his dream come true. Urban legends in the making.

‘Shut up Will,’ said Chris.

22

‘I can’t believe it,’ Jim mumbled, walking around the
dead spider sprawled on the kitchen table. ‘I’ve never seen one this close.’
Leaning in, he studied it like art in a gallery. Cautiously the group felt at
its curled-up legs. They studied the cuts and dents where Tabitha had stabbed
it. Jagged slits and punctures scarred its hard bright skin, gleaming like
chrome in the daylight.

‘So how’s the, er, project going?’ Will said quietly,
turning to Jim as he studied the alien’s stab wounds.

‘Hm, about halfway there,’ Jim replied, tapping his nose.

‘What project?’ said Liv, overhearing them. She studied
Jim’s face as his sneaky creased-up smile faded away.

‘It’s amazing, really,’ Will cut in, studying the alien
to change the subject. He crouched down to peer at it over the edge of the
table, staring in wonder like a six-foot boy. Liv looked at him suspiciously,
trying to think what he could mean by project. Tabitha sat down by the
empty fireplace with Laika, stroking her side and checking her dog’s healed-up
wounds. Laika had whined like a puppy when Tabitha appeared at the castle gate.

‘Well, there’s definitely some armour there,’ said Liv,
pushing a bullet against the spider’s silver skin. ‘But Tabitha did get
a knife through it.’

‘We should try the rifles out,’ said Chris, eyes
lighting up.

‘Hell yeah,’ said Will, standing up. He lifted the
spider off the table with a clatter, every bit as heavy as it looked.

‘Don’t,’ Tabitha warned him, reaching out to take it off
him. ‘If a claw catches you –

‘It’s fine,’ Will replied. ‘Look, not poisoned,’ he
said, shrugging with a grin. ‘But thanks for your concern.’ Tabitha smiled and
left him to it. Liv watched the look between them.

‘Is it heavy?’ said Jim.

‘It is,’ Will replied, wrestling it carefully for a
better hold. ‘Maybe the armour’s not much good against bullets though, if we
hit the right spot. There’s only one way to find out.’ He carted the dead
spider across the room, and stepped carefully through the door onto the
courtyard. ‘So, in the name of science, I demand that we mess around with guns!’

‘Go closer,’ said Jim, peering over Chris’s shoulder in
the garden.

‘Shut up, I’m trying to aim,’ said Chris.

‘You’ll miss it. We can’t be wasting bullets,’ Jim
replied, between coughs.

‘Shut up!’ Chris snapped, aiming down the rifle
sight.

‘How come you’re the one shooting the rifle?’ said Jim.
‘You didn’t even come out to find the bloody things!’

‘Gents,’ Will said calmly, motioning for Jim to step
away. Birds sang loud and high in the afternoon air. Chris took aim at the dead
spider on the lawn. The group stood around behind him, fingers in ears, ready
for the shot. Laika scratched on the door inside the keep, whining to come out.

‘Shh.’ Tabitha said softly, standing close by the door
outside. Her metal fingers felt freezing in her ears. Better than going deaf,
though. Chris took aim, held his breath, and closed his finger round the
trigger. The rifle cracked, echoing from the castle through the silent town.
Panicked birds fluttered up out of the trees.

‘Missed it,’ said Jim, over Chris’s shoulder.

‘I hit it!’ Chris replied.

‘You didn’t!’ said Jim, squinting at it.

‘I hit it! Look, you blind old git!’ Chris growled. Jim
pushed Chris to the grass, ready to hit him.

‘Who’s got the gun?’ Chris threatened.

‘Just try it, you little shit,’ said Jim, looking ready
for a fight.

‘Gents!’ Will cut in.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Liv muttered at them, walking over to
the spider to see what the bullet had done. Tabitha stroked the bottom of the
keep door where Laika was still scratching inside, trying to shush her.

‘Went through,’ said Liv, studying the bullet hole in
the spider’s skin.

‘I told you,’ said Chris. Jim made a point of not
looking at him, in case he was wearing that gloating smile. ‘Can I shoot it
again?’ he said, sighting down the rifle.

‘What the bloody hell for?’ said Jim. He was fretting
about their pile of ammunition, which was already one bullet lighter.

‘It’s fun,’ said Chris. ‘And it’s good practise.’

‘Yeah, and if you keep practising there won’t be
any bullets left when we need them!’ said Jim.

‘It’s two bullets,’ Chris replied. ‘What’s your
problem?’

‘You’re my problem!’ said Jim. ‘Give me the gun.’

‘Come on Chris, that’s enough for n-now,’ Liv added.
Chris ignored her and took aim at the spider. ‘Will, Chris wants to sh-shoot it
again,’ said Liv. Jim tried to take the rifle off him; Chris was ready to hit
him with it.

‘In a minute,’ Will replied absently, his back turned.
He was studying a bullet he’d popped out from one of the rifle magazines.
‘Actually… I say we let Tabitha show us how she kills them. For when we run out
of bullets anyway.’ Tabitha looked up from the door, still stroking the wood
where Laika scratched unhappily.

‘Can I let Laika out now, or are you still shooting?’
she said, looking up at the faces that had turned to her expectantly.

‘No of course, let her out,’ Will said with a smile.
Chris cursed, and handed the rifle to Jim. After Laika’s happy reunion, and a
good bit of canine attention, Tabitha went over to the alien corpse and turned
it on its back. They gathered around her in the garden, watching Tabitha
wrestle the spider’s dead curled legs away from its chest.

‘All this armour underneath is twice as thick as the
topside,’ Tabitha told the group, pointing a grey finger at the skin on the
spider’s flat belly. It was a star-shaped bunch of sockets where the legs
joined the body. ‘It’s better to go for the top side, especially the head,’ she
said. ‘I can punch a dent in the skin or get a knife through it, but only
because of my hands. You guys might need something heavier, like an axe or
something.’ Chris opened his mouth to say something.

‘Shut up Chris,’ Liv said pre-emptively, before he could
say something sarcastic. He didn’t look happy about Tabitha’s lecture.

‘The brain’s your best bet,’ Tabitha continued, flipping
the spider back over on the grass. Its legs clattered to rest like the limbs on
a dead crab. ‘The brain’s around here, above and behind the mouth. It’s
probably easier to show you, actually.’ Tabitha wiggled her fingers down into
the stab wound in its skin, and with an effort she peeled back its hide and
tore it off. Silver blood welled inside its body, and trickled down on the
grass in shining streams.

‘Jesus,’ Liv mumbled, staring in horror at the stringy
white muscles inside.

‘So that’s the brain,’ said Tabitha. She was poking at a
slick grey swelling, no bigger than a golf ball.

‘What’s that, the heart?’ said Will, stepping around the
spider. He examined a black sphere, nestled away behind the sinewy sac that
housed the creature’s tongue.

‘Yep,’ Tabitha replied, tucking her hair back behind her
ear. Liv looked between them for a moment, and noted the body language. Will
motioned to the others to come closer. ‘Don’t touch its claws, anyone. Or its
mouth,’ said Tabitha. ‘It’s got venom that’ll liquidise you.’

‘Yeah, we know,’ Chris said sarcastically, looking round
at the others. ‘Thanks for the lecture though.’ Tabitha looked up at him, said
nothing.

‘Chris, will you please stop being such an
obnoxious arse?’ Liv asked him sincerely.

‘I’ve seen them jump a good seven or eight feet,’
Tabitha continued, waggling one of the spider’s rattling legs. ‘But what you
really have to look out for,’ she said, reaching down in between the spider’s
mouth parts, ‘is this.’ She took firm hold of the bony spike inside, and
stretched the tongue out like a five-foot spring.

‘That’s what they drink your insides out with?’ said
Jim, horrified at the pale gristly trunk.

‘That’s right,’ Tabitha replied, letting go of the
tongue and watching it shrink back down inside the thing’s mouth. ‘What it
drinks goes back here,’ she said, walking around the back of the body. She tore
away a fleshy membrane under the armour, revealing a translucent pouch.

‘That’s the stomach,’ said Liv, poking it.

‘Yep,’ Tabitha replied, stretching the sac out a little.
‘You can tell which ones won’t go for you, because they’re already fat and
sluggish when this is full.’

‘When they’ve already eaten, yeah,’ Jim said gravely. He
thought about the one that took Mary from him. He offered Liv and Tabitha a
rough old hand each, helping them up from the grass. ‘Well, I’ve seen enough of
that fella,’ he said, looking away. He turned his back on the spider and the
group, and looked up at the clouds. He ran his hand over the white stubble on
his chin, and thought about Mary. He felt his eyes watering a little, and wiped
away the tears quickly before anyone could see. ‘Let’s get back inside,’ he
said, studying the sky. ‘There’s rain
coming. And I’ve not had my cup of tea.’

‘Are the two things connected?’ Chris chipped in
sarcastically. Liv glared at him and shook her head.

‘Shut up, Chris.’

‘So we’re armed and dangerous now,’ Will said happily.
‘The Ghosts are in business!’ there was a small round of applause around the
table in the keep. Will even passed a handful of biscuits out to celebrate,
crumbly and packet-fresh.

‘So what’s next for the m-mighty Ghosts?’ said Liv,
dipping her biscuit into her tea. Jim watched her, and wished he’d done the
same with his biscuit before he’d eaten it. Tabitha watched them all munching
and felt her stomach rumble.

‘Well, I’ve got a couple of things in mind,’ Will
replied. ‘But leave it with me for now. In the meantime, we’ve still got a
castle to run.’ Liv and Jim nodded. ‘And I’m proud of us, you know?’ Will
added. ‘We went right out there and did the job. And now we’re in a better
position to help other survivors if they turn up. So, cheers,’ he said, raising
his cup of tea. Tabitha raised her mug of water to clink against the other
cups, though Chris didn’t join in. She glanced at him and saw only a dark look
in his eyes; nothing short of hate. He looked away.

The
skies brightened up in the afternoon. Jim, Liv and Chris were working in the
garden. In the keep Will was busy with their new equipment, counting out rounds
and grenades on the kitchen table.

‘Let me help,’ said Tabitha, sitting on a pile of
cushions with Laika. She opened up a tin of steak stew, a treat from Jim, and
let it slop down into Laika’s bowl.

‘I already told you, you need to rest today,’ Will replied,
sharing out the ammunition with his back to her. ‘You’re not well enough to
work.’

‘I’m fine,’ she protested. Laika dug into her food bowl
hungrily with quiet lapping bites.

‘You collapsed out on the moors this morning,’ Will said
over his shoulder, counting the remaining bullets. ‘What if it had just been
you out there, on your own?’

‘I know,’ she conceded. ‘But I want to work, though.’
There was a hanging silence while Will counted out the last bullets, and busied
himself with organising the army helmets and bulletproof vests in order of
damage.

‘You don’t want everyone to think you’re lazy, is that
it?’ he said.

‘Well, yeah,’ Tabitha replied hesitantly, ‘but mostly
because I’m really bored.’ Will snorted a laugh. ‘There must be something I can
do to help, while I’m just sat here,’ she said. Another hanging silence. Will
banged his hand down on the table. At first she thought he was angry, but he
turned around with a grin. That was the bang he made when inspiration struck.

‘I’ve got an idea, while everyone’s out,’ he said,
smiling. ‘If you’re up for it?’

‘What is it?’ said Tabitha, sitting up on the pillows.

‘Come upstairs,’ he said. ‘We’ll need a bed sheet.’

The
rain that Jim predicted never came. It turned out to be a good afternoon for
them to get the allotment weeded, which ran semi-circular around the foot of
the keep. Liv and Jim were down on their hands and knees, pulling weeds from
the soil in silent companionship; Chris was putting in a half-effort over to
one side. Jim had never seen the need to talk while he was working. Liv had
always felt a little anxious about holding conversations anyway, so it was nice
when she didn’t have to. Chris, on the other hand, had been muttering every
complaint that crossed his mind. That there must be easier ways to grow food
than this. That they could shoot birds and eat those instead. That they could
even set up a fish pond in the garden, maybe. And that planting carrots and
potatoes and cabbages was a lot of hard work for very few calories in return. Eventually
Jim had heard enough, and threw down his weeding knife with a loud sigh.

‘Look lad, do you want to eat or not?’ he growled. Chris
said nothing; just stared. ‘Then shut up moaning and get your head down. Like
her.’ Liv looked at Jim and smiled. She wished her dad had been more like him.
But she didn’t like to think about her dad. His drinking, and his shouting. And
how much she missed him.

‘Let’s have a b-break,’ she suggested, sticking her own
knife into the soil. She sat back on the grass and smiled at the blue sky,
brushing the crumbly soil off her hands. A butterfly danced past on the warm
breeze.

‘Timing,’ said Will, coming out of the castle keep. He
was walking over carefully with a tray of drinks.

‘What is it lad?’ said Jim, picking up a glass off the
tray with a grateful nod.

‘Very strong,’ Will replied, taking a glass himself. He
handed one to Tabitha as she came outside. Liv couldn’t help but notice how
happy Tabitha seemed, coming out of the keep with Will. Certainly a far cry
from how pale she’d looked this morning. They’d been alone in there for a good
while, and she was pretty sure that Will liked Tabitha. He was a good-looking
guy; she’d be surprised if there wasn’t something going on between them.

‘To civilisation?’ Jim suggested, eyeing up the glass of
liquor.

‘And The Ghosts,’ said Tabitha, smiling.

‘Hear hear,’ Will concurred, raising his glass. They all
necked the stuff together, and coughed and grimaced as it went down. One by one
they swore off the stuff, and still went back for more from the bottle. Will
and Tabitha glanced around at the others, and kept an eye on their expressions.
Waiting for them to see it.

‘Well look at that,’ said Jim, staring up at the keep.
Will and Tabitha smiled. Liv and Chris looked up and saw a big white banner
draped down over the wall of the keep. Weighted down against the wind with
silvery spider legs like grizzly totems. It was a giant ghost, painted in thick
black outline on the white sheet. Above it were three words: A SAFE PLACE.

‘That’s awesome,’ said Liv, staring up at it.

‘It’s just a couple of bed sheets stitched together,’
Tabitha replied. It had come out pretty well though, she thought, considering
her limited artistic talents.

‘Right, yeah, so why don’t we just tell everyone where
we are?’ Chris mumbled unhappily, studying the ghost banner. Tabitha’s smile
disappeared.

‘Well that’s the point,’ Will told him, wondering how
Chris could be so against it.

‘So what, you’re happy for all the rapists and cannibals
she’s talked about to come knocking on the door?’ said Chris, glancing at
Tabitha. He did have a point, she considered. The same cold dread ran through
her again like a knife; like she was back in that creepy seaside village all
over again.

‘No, it’s for all the sick starving people who need our
help,’ Will countered.

‘Oh right,’ Chris replied sarcastically. ‘More
new people coming to eat all our food. It’s the same thing.’ His look aimed the
sentiment squarely at Tabitha.

‘Don’t even start,’ Will growled, stepping up close to
Chris. ‘If you want to play that game, fine. I was here first. You’re here
eating my food. I’ve told you before, you’re free to piss off out of
this castle any time you like. But we both know you’ll stay right here where
it’s safe, and do as little as possible to help.’ Chris stared at him, and
looked away. Will turned his back on him, back to the group.

‘Anyway, long live the Ghosts!’ Will told the others
cheerily. ‘The sun’s out, and we’re not dead. Two reasons for a party right there.
So let’s take this up on the wall.’ He nodded behind them at the battlements,
up on the curtain wall above the garden. They took some blankets and cushions
from the keep and set them down by the railing on the wall, and called to Laika
to climb up the steps and join them in the sun.

Tabitha
felt the rough drink go down easier the more she had. The company and the hot
summer sun were the perfect mixers.

‘Paw,’ she told Laika. Smiling her dog smile, Laika
flopped her paw into Tabitha’s grey hand. ‘Good girl!’ Tabitha said tipsily.

‘Is this hooch?’ Chris mumbled to Will, staring at the
bottle of spirit in his hand. There wasn’t a label on it.

‘It could be,’ Will slurred, tapping his nose.

‘Isn’t it just v-vodka?’ said Liv, sniffing her glass.

‘Could be,’ said Will, smiling.

‘Are you a b-bit too drunk to know either way?’ said
Liv. He smiled and nodded.

‘Good stuff though, whatever it is,’ Jim chipped in from
his deck chair.

‘Mm,’ Tabitha said into her glass, mid-swig. Laika lay
down beside her. Tabitha stroked her side. She looked around her and saw
friends, for the first time in so long. It couldn’t have been three weeks ago,
when everything happened. And still, it felt like a lifetime. She’d come so far
from home; she surprised herself. She’d never get her mum or Jen and Emma back;
they were still a sore thought and a heartache of disbelief. But she was safe
here, and she had people to call a family. Compared with what she’d seen of the
new world, this was the best thing that could happen to her. The best people
who could ever happen to her. Well, maybe apart from one. But it wasn’t bad
going, ending up here. She was safe. The sunlight and the drink bleached
everything in her vision; made the world sharp and bright. With her new family
around her, and the wide green view under a late summer sun, Tabitha forgot
about the world outside. Just for a little while. Looking around at their
smiling faces, she was pretty sure that the others had forgotten about
everything too. God, I’ve missed this, she told herself. If only she
could have brought Mum and Emma and Jen here. If only she’d gotten to them
sooner.

‘I’m feeling m-more civilised already,’ said Liv, after
another glass. Chris was still in a sulk, but he tolerated their company to
stay within easy reach of the spirit bottle. Will was dealing cards. Jim looked
out over the wall at the park below, leaning quietly on the stonework with a
glass in his hand. In a tipsy day dream, he felt like he had his girls and his
sons-in-law back around him again. A subtle smile creased his flinty old face.
He watched a blackbird flutter past over the trees in the park; a dark
feathered spirit cutting through the balmy heat. The warm sun crawled from
sparse clouds, flooding the green world with a light that felt as old as he
did. Tears welled up in his eyes at the thought of his family, and he wiped
them away and made sure that the others hadn’t seen.

‘Come on, you,’ Liv coaxed him, taking his glass and
setting it down on the wall. ‘We’re p-playing cards. And you don’t g-get to
duck out of it this time.’ She and Tabitha took a hand each and hauled him over
to sit with them on the blankets. Will cheered.

‘Cards, Chris?’ said Will.

‘No,’ he replied, sipping his drink, sat on the edge of
the wall with his feet hanging over the garden below. Will held his stare for a
moment, and went back to dealing cards out to the group.

Under the wide watchful eyes of a white painted ghost, a
few tiny shapes sat huddled together on the castle wall. Drinking and laughing
in the bright summer sun, in their last little corner of civilisation. Beyond
the park below the town lay dead and septic. Prophetic newspapers blew past
empty streets and lurking silver shapes.

23

‘Spot on,’ said Jim, amidst the munching and clinking of
breakfast around the kitchen table. Sausages and beans steamed on their plates,
bright and orange as paint.

‘Delicious,’ Liv agreed, busily feeding her hangover
away.

‘Delicious?’ Chris grunted groggily. ‘It’s beans.
Again.’

‘Give it here then,’ said Jim, taking Chris’s plate off
him. Chris pulled the plate back, and slammed it down on the table.

‘Don’t touch my food,’ he growled.

‘Well stop bloody complaining then,’ Jim replied,
shovelling in his breakfast. Tabitha could only watch longingly with a
post-drunk hunger. Her brain still very much wanted her to eat. But her stomach
lurched at the prospect of food, making her feel ill just thinking about it. It
didn’t help that everyone was eating loudly, and the smell of stodgy
deliciousness was filling her nose. At least her cup of water was good; the
best she’d ever tasted. Cold and smooth, straight from the spring outside in
the courtyard. She sipped it and tasted things she’d never experienced before.
Tiny reactions; electrical pops. A cool fresh electrolyte, fuelling sparks in her
heart. It almost felt like wine in her head; a new sensation. She ran her metal
fingers up and down the cup in a high rasping whisper, enjoying her strange new
high. The more she focussed on it, the less she felt like eating anyway.
Tabitha looked up from her cup and smiled at Laika in the corner, waiting
patiently beside the table for everyone’s leftovers. Everyone always left a
little bit for her.

‘So, we’ve got the g-guns,’ said Liv, in between
mouthfuls of beans. ‘So what’s next?’

‘Well, now we go out and find people,’ Will replied with
a full mouth, scraping the last few beans from his plate.

‘What do you mean?’ said Jim, blowing his cup of tea to
slurp at it.

‘Survivors,’ Will replied. The clinking and clattering
of plates stopped suddenly.

‘No,’ said Chris, moving the beans around his plate.
‘I’m not going out there.’

‘We need to,’ Will replied calmly. ‘It’s on us to help
other people find this place.’

‘Nah,’ Chris said simply. Will stared at him, silent and
furious. Liv saw a fight brewing. Tabitha watched in silence, sipping her water.

‘What’s the plan then?’ Liv asked Will, overlooking
Chris’s sulk. Arguing with Chris wouldn’t change his mind on the subject; Liv
knew that much. He was always an arse; some days it was just more concentrated.
And yeah, he had every right not to go with them outside if he didn’t want to.
Just so long as he knew that any food and supplies they brought back weren’t
his to use. He could go hungry, for all she cared.

‘We’re going to the police station,’ Will told them,
having thought it over for a little while. ‘I think there might still be riot
gear in there. So that’s our next place to go.’

‘Riot gear?’ said Jim, confused.

‘Yep,’ Will replied. ‘We’ve got guns and bulletproof
vests. But that won’t be enough against spiders. We need armour.’

‘I would have thought a castle would be enough to
stop the spiders from killing us,’ said Chris.

‘Unless they get inside,’ Liv replied. Jim nodded,
gulping his tea loudly and putting his mug back down on the table.

‘Exactly,’ said Will. ‘And we’ll need to go outside
again for food, supplies, et cetera.’ He rubbed his tired eyes and fretted at
the thought. Chris shook his head, and pushed the beans around on his plate
some more.

‘So, the police station,’ said Liv. ‘Do you think we’ll
be r-running into a lot of spiders out there?’

‘I think so, yeah.’ Will replied, with a grim nod.

‘We will,’ said Tabitha, hugging herself against her
gnawing hunger.

‘Exactly,’ said Chris. ‘So it begs the question, why
even go out there any more?’

‘For food,’ Liv snapped. ‘You know, so we don’t
st-starve to death.’

‘And because there are still people out there looking
for help,’ said Will. ‘We’ve got the means to help them, and this place to keep
them safe. We owe it to them.’

‘We don’t owe anyone anything,’ Chris shot back. ‘Why
should we have to risk our lives to help other people, just because you say so?’

‘Chris,’ Will warned him. The others stopped eating, and
waited in the tense silence.

‘All this time you’ve been banging on about doing this
and doing that for other people,’ said Chris. ‘When we all know, deep down,
that we’re all just looking out for ourselves. So don’t pretend like you’re
some knight in shining armour, when we all know that you didn’t save a soul to
get up here in the first place. You just wanted to get out of harm’s way.’ Will
stared at him across the table. Chris looked down into his cup of tea, lost in
thought for a moment. ‘I’ve seen people down there in town when it all started,
crawling over each other like rats to get away from death,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen
crowds trampling little kids to get away from those spiders. I’ve seen people
dying face down in the streets in their own shit and blood, with no one hanging
around to help them. Even these two,’ he said, nodding at Liv and Jim. ‘The day
we all ran up here to get inside the castle, I saw a man and a woman pushing
Jim out of the way to get away from the spiders. Pushing past an old man to get
up here; not helping him. No one was helping anyone. It was all just survival.
If you can leave someone else to get eaten, that just means there’s one
less spider looking for you. That’s what it’s like out there. So don’t tell me
we owe anything to anyone.’ The others sat in silence. Tabitha knew he was
right. That was the worst part. She thought back to all the skins she’d seen;
she’d just been glad that they weren’t her. Liv and Jim looked on
silently between Will and Chris. Will looked angry. They didn’t get involved
when Will looked angry. Something was burning up inside him.

‘We owe it to civilisation to help people!’ Will yelled
back at him, slamming his fist down on the table. ‘Civilisation looks after its
weakest, and that’s what we’re doing!’

‘Civilisation?’ Chris said mockingly. ‘Five
rejects and a bloody dog, that’s civilisation is it?’

‘Yes it is!’ Will snapped, slamming the table again.

‘Towns. Armies. Hospitals. That’s civilisation mate,’
said Chris. ‘And it’s all gone.’

‘We’re rebuilding it!’ Will shouted back. ‘One brick at
a time, one day at a time!’ his angry look softened to despair. ‘I mean, why do
you think we get up every day?’ he asked Chris. ‘What do you think we’ve been
doing all this hard work for?’

‘Us,’ Chris said simply. ‘I’m not working for other
people, and I’m not growing food for other people. I’m doing it all for me,
because that’s called survival.’

‘You can’t think like that. We don’t think like that!’
Will said desperately.

‘Yeah?’ Chris replied. ‘Ask this lot. See what they
think.’

‘I’ll t-tell you what I think,’ Liv snapped at him. ‘I think
Will’s right, and you’re wrong. That’s all I need to know.’ Will nodded, and
looked to Chris for his reply.

‘So you happen to agree with what the alpha male
thinks,’ said Chris, nodding. ‘See, that’s interesting.’

‘What?’ said Liv.

‘Pairing up with the leader, reflecting everything that
he’s about,’ said Chris, looking between them. ‘That’s survival at work.’

‘Piss off,’ Liv told him.

‘You’re talking out of your arse lad,’ said Jim.

‘I’m telling it like it is!’ Chris yelled back. ‘You
think there are survivors out there? You’re out of your minds. This
isn’t something that people survive!’

‘I’m a survivor,’ Tabitha chipped in quietly. ‘I found
this place. You’ve all helped me survive.’

‘Yeah, but look at you!’ Chris chuckled. ‘Look at what
you’ve turned into! That’s the only reason you survived.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to her like that!’ said Will,
shouting over Liv and Jim.

‘What am I then?’ said Tabitha, losing her temper. ‘Go
on, tell me what I am!’

‘Well, you’re a freak,’ Chris replied, with a look that
said he was stating the obvious. ‘You’re not even human any more,’ he told her.
Tabitha’s newfound rage took her over, fuelled on the latent black hate of a
bullied childhood. She went for him. Liv jumped in after her, grabbing her arms
to pull her back. It took all three of them to stop her from hitting him. Laika
was barking.

‘You’ll kill him,’ Liv warned her.

‘That’s the idea,’ Tabitha growled, straining against
them.

‘T-Tabitha. You’ll kill him.’ Liv repeated,
looking into her wild eyes. Tabitha stared past Liv’s shoulder at Chris. He was
smiling at her as he stood up from the table.

‘So this is the real Tabitha coming out,’ he said.

‘Don’t you dare start!’ Liv yelled at him.

‘Chris, go outside,’ Will warned him, struggling with
the others to hold Tabitha back. Tabitha hesitated then, and breathed deep. She
heard Laika’s barking, frantic and distressed. She felt her new friends around
her, straining to hold her back from something she’d regret.

‘Chris, go outside!’ Will repeated.

‘…I’ll go outside,’ said Tabitha, easing off. She felt
the others relax around her, still holding her close. Like a family. She
stepped back, and looked around at their worried faces. ‘I’ll go out for a
while,’ she said, nodding. ‘No one come out after me.’

‘I’ll go w-with you,’ said Liv.

‘Please, don’t,’ Tabitha said gently. Liv watched her go
and wanted to say something. Wanted to be there for her. Tabitha stepped
outside the keep and shut the door behind her, and Will sighed with relief.

‘I’m not holding her back next time,’ Jim warned Chris.
‘Actually, if you come out with anything like that again, I’ll hold you down
for her. How’s that?’

‘Jim,’ Liv pleaded. ‘Please don’t m-make this any
worse.’ There was a sudden crackling bang of lightning outside, loud as a
firework. Liv raced out onto the courtyard, and found Tabitha punching a stone
block in the wall. Laika was barking unhappily in the keep.

‘What was that?’ Liv said in shock, looking around the
courtyard. There were smoking black marks on the cobbles. The others watched from
the open door. Tabitha was busy laying into the curtain wall. Her thudding
punches sent chips of stone flying. Liv stepped closer. ‘Tabitha, what was
that?’

‘Lightning,’ she replied, stepping back from the wall.
‘From inside me.’

‘Lightning?’ said Liv, disbelieving. Tabitha
shrugged. Her grey knuckles were white with stone dust.

‘Like he said, I’m a freak.’

‘Chris was talking out of his arse,’ Jim said from the
doorway, shaking a sore hand. He had red knuckles. ‘He didn’t mean what he
said.’

‘No, I did,’ Chris replied, rubbing his sore jaw. Will
had to hold Jim back from hitting him again.

‘Jesus Christ, Chris!’ Liv yelled at him. ‘Can you make
this any worse?’ Chris shrugged. ‘Don’t rise to it,’ she told Tabitha, who was
walking back towards the door.

‘Fuck him,’ Tabitha said simply. She turned her gaze
from Chris to Will. ‘So we need riot gear from the police station?’

‘We do,’ Will replied.

‘Right. So let’s go,’ she said. She pushed past Chris to
get back inside the keep. Liv smiled.

‘I’m not going out there,’ said Chris, standing in the
doorway as the others followed Tabitha back inside.

‘Yeah, we know,’ Tabitha replied, picking up an assault
rifle from the stack in the corner. ‘I think we’ll manage without you,’ she
assured him. Chris stared at her as she crouched down with Laika for a while,
stroking her sides to calm her down.

‘You just r-run along upstairs and survive while
we’re gone,’ Liv told Chris, on her way back inside. ‘Like a rat.’

‘Watch the street corners,’ said Will, heading out in
front with his gun raised. The town centre was silent as a grave. The only
sounds were their footsteps and tense shallow breaths. They wore the army vests
they’d taken from the soldiers, though they felt strangely light and thin for
body armour. Jim had suggested that the vests weren’t much good at stopping
spiders, which was why the soldiers had died with them on. They had to be
better than nothing, though.

‘Shout up if you see a spider,’ said Will. ‘And tell us
if you’re going to shoot. That way we’re not all wasting bullets on the same
one.’ They stayed close and moved through town together, watching the roofs and
checking down side streets. Everywhere on the roads there were crinkled old
sheets of newspaper, flapping and tumbling in the wind. Tabitha looked down at
a loose front page that simply declared INVASION. The ink was too rain-smudged
to read the rest. The photo showed a dead spider on a road, with a soldier
standing beside it.

‘Tabitha, stay close,’ said Will, looking back at her.
Tabitha jogged on back to them, checking the street behind them.

‘There, on the l-left!’ said Liv, raising her rifle.
‘I’ll take it!’ a spider came creeping towards them from behind an abandoned
car, and then scuttled out quickly once it was close. Liv knelt down on the
road and steadied her rifle scope on the spindly silver shape approaching. Her
rifle cracked. The thing dropped dead.

‘Shot!’ said Will, grinning. Liv felt his hand on her
shoulder. ‘Right, let’s pick up the pace,’ he said, jogging on. ‘The noise is
going to bring them all out to look. Anyway, it’s not far to the police
station.’

Tabitha
was first through the door into the station, and closed it after the others
once they were inside. There didn’t seem to be any sign of spiders in here.

‘Are you sure they keep the riot gear in here?’ said Jim
quietly, looking around the gloomy building.

‘I’m positive,’ Will replied. As Liv and Tabitha
wandered ahead into the reception area, Will took Jim to one side. ‘So er,
how’s the project coming along?’ he said quietly.

‘What project?’ Liv said impatiently.

‘Never mind,’ Will told Jim. Jim tapped his nose. Liv
glared at Will suspiciously as he walked on ahead into the murky reception.
‘Right. Liv, come with me and we’ll try downstairs,’ said Will. ‘You two, search
the rooms up here please. And be careful.’

‘Will do,’ said Jim, following Tabitha down the corridor.

‘Seriously, what project?’ Liv asked Will, as they
headed downstairs.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Will said dismissively, leading the
way.

Jim
and Tabitha stuck together as they searched dark grey offices and store rooms;
they kept their rifles raised and watched one another’s backs as they edged
down the main corridor.

‘Keep an eye out for first aid kits and things,’ Tabitha
suggested.

‘Good idea,’ Jim replied quietly. Tabitha saw how wide
his eyes were in here, even in the grey half-light of the building. He was
petrified.

‘There’s only three rooms left,’ she told him, trying to
ease his mind as he opened the first door. ‘This is the smallest police station
I’ve ever seen.’

‘Have you seen a lot of police stations in your time?’
said Jim, grinning.

‘Oh no, not at all,’ she replied with a smile. ‘I’ve
only seen them on TV really.’

‘Well, I’ve only seen this one station,’ Jim replied. ‘A
good few times though,’ he admitted.

‘Really? What did you do?’

‘Got drunk,’ he said simply, scratching his white
stubble. ‘Drink never agreed with me when I was your age. Got me into all kinds
of situations.’ Tabitha didn’t know what to say; that she was sorry to hear it?
That it was all behind him now? She let the silence hang in the air between
them.

‘Anyway,’ said Jim. ‘Well, there’s nothing in here,’ he
concluded, searching the darkness in the first room. ‘Do you think –

‘Jesus Christ,’ Tabitha blurted, and spun around and
shot. The spider shrieked and threw itself back against the wall in the
corridor. Its legs kicked and writhed in the air. Silver blood gushed from the
gunshot wound. Tabitha got in close, wrestled its limbs and shoved her knife
deep into its head. The spider shuddered and stopped moving, dead legs curling
in.

‘Are you guys alright?’ Will said breathlessly, running
up the stairs down the corridor.

‘It’s ok,’ Tabitha assured him, stepping aside for him
to see the spider. ‘We took care of it.’

‘We should all be sticking together,’ Will suggested.

‘What sorry?’ Tabitha replied, her ears ringing from the
gunshot.

‘We should all stay together,’ Will repeated.

‘No it’s fine, really,’ Tabitha assured him. ‘We’ll get
this done faster if we stay in pairs.’ Will glanced from her to the spider and
nodded reluctantly, and headed back down the corridor to speak with Liv.

‘Can we get going?’ Jim asked Tabitha, breathing
heavily. He looked terrified.

‘Sorry?’ Tabitha replied, ears still ringing.

‘I said can we get going? Outside?’

‘Not yet,’ Tabitha replied, nodding at the doors at the
end of the corridor. ‘Only two more rooms to check.’

‘They’re toilets,’ said Jim, following her down the
corridor.

‘Yep.’ Tabitha replied.

‘I don’t think they’d keep riot gear in the toilets.’

‘No, but there might be something in there we can use.
Toilet paper, for a start.’ Jim’s eyes lit up. They’d all been missing toilet
paper. It was one little luxury away from a hot shower.

‘Alright then, you take the ladies’ and I’ll take the
gents’,’ he said. He was looking at the doors like were about to jump out and
attack him.

‘No, we need to stay together,’ said Tabitha. She
thought back to Dev in the pub. She’d only left him alone for a second. That
was all it took.

‘I know, but that’s the ladies’ toilets,’ said Jim.
Tabitha looked at him, smiled. He was serious too.

‘I really don’t think anyone’s going to mind Jim, under
the circumstances.’ Jim thought about it for a moment.

‘…Yep, good point.’

‘It’ll be locked,’ said Liv, following Will down the
corridor towards the final door.

‘And you know that from all the way up here?’ Will
replied, grinning.

‘Woman’s intuition,’ she said, watching the walls for
any movement.

‘Bullshit,’ said Will. He tried the door handle, and
smiled at Liv victoriously as the door opened up.

‘W-Whatever,’ she replied. ‘Let’s just have a look
inside so we can go.’ They crept on into the dark room, pointing their rifles
at the corners. Watching for movement; listening for claws in the dark.

‘I can’t see a b-bloody thing in here,’ said Liv.

‘Wait,’ said Will, stopping to inspect something in the
blackness. ‘Is that…’

‘What?’ said Liv, nervous.

‘Oh, yes.’ Will rapped his knuckles against hard
plastic; a riot helmet as round and smooth and solid as a bowling ball. ‘I knew
they’d be in here,’ he said, hauling the body armour up from the bench. ‘Man’s
intuition.’

‘You’re unbelievable,’ she replied. ‘This whole trip was
a lucky guess. Admit it.’

‘Oh absolutely,’ Will replied, grinning in the dark.

‘You’re a jammy git,’ she said. ‘We could have been
k-killed for nothing coming here.’

‘Well, it’d be your fault then for following me in
here,’ he teased.

‘Of course I’d follow you in here,’ she said sadly. Will
was busy rummaging for plastic shields in the dark; he hadn’t heard her. Liv
hauled up some body armour from the bench and took it out into the corridor.

‘Well that was a wasted journey,’ said Jim, walking back
down the corridor with Tabitha.

‘Jim, a journey that ends with soft quilted toilet paper
is never a wasted one,’ Tabitha replied sagely. ‘I bet your bum’s been crying
out for this kind of softness.’

‘Well, I won’t deny it,’ he chuckled. ‘But I say we keep
it to ourselves,’ he said with a wink.

‘Sneaky,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. ‘I like it.’

‘So… that thing that happened to you before,’ Jim said
carefully, ‘the lightning that came off you in the courtyard… can you do that
whenever you want to?’

‘I wish,’ Tabitha replied. ‘It’d make things a lot easier.
It only seems to happen when I don’t need it.’

‘That’s useful,’ Jim chuckled. ‘Still, there’s always
the off chance it comes in handy, I suppose.’

‘Come down!’ came Will’s voice downstairs. ‘I’ve found
it!’

‘We found it!’ Liv called after him.

‘Hide your toilet paper,’ Jim cautioned Tabitha. They
ducked the rolls behind their backs as Will came back upstairs.

‘We found the riot gear,’ Will said happily.

‘Great,’ Tabitha replied, looking at Jim. Jim nodded.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Will.

‘Nothing,’ Jim replied. Tabitha shrugged and shook her
head to agree.

‘Wait, are you hiding something?’ said Will,
looking between them with a grin.

‘Nope,’ said Tabitha. ‘Didn’t find anything. So where’s
the riot gear?’

‘Show me what you’re hiding,’ Will chuckled, trying to
see behind their backs. A roll dropped out from Jim’s hands and bounced on the
tiled floor. Will grabbed it before Jim could stoop down for it.

‘Oh my god,’ said Will, feeling the softness of the
paper. ‘It’s so smooth.’

‘I know,’ said Tabitha.

‘Right. Nobody tell Liv,’ Will said quietly. ‘And
definitely don’t tell Chris.’ Jim and Tabitha shook their heads.

‘Nobody tell me what?’ Liv called up to them, standing
at the bottom of the stairs.

‘…Nothing,’ said Will, hiding the roll behind his back.

‘Whatever,’ Liv replied. ‘L-Let’s just get the riot gear
and go, shall we? Before we g-get eaten by spiders?’

‘Good idea,’ said Jim, watching her disappear
downstairs. ‘We need to hide these,’ he muttered.

‘There’s a sports bag behind the desk there,’ Will
whispered back. ‘You two go on, I’ll be down in a second.’ He jumped over the
desk and grabbed the bag.

‘Guys!’ Liv called impatiently.

‘Coming!’ said Will, stuffing the toilet rolls into the
bag. He motioned to Jim and Tabitha to head downstairs.

‘Wow,’ said Tabitha, looking at the gear that Liv had
carried out of the lock-up. The armour stood in a rank against the wall in the
corridor, death-black and beautiful. ‘Wow,’ she repeated.

‘I know,’ Liv said happily, setting down a plastic riot
shield so she could show off her new police belt. ‘Baton, p-pepper spray and
handcuffs,’ she said, doing a little twirl. ‘Everything a girl needs for an
ar-armageddon scenario. ’

‘There’s no way the spiders are getting through that,’
said Jim, knocking on a plastic breastplate leant against the wall.

‘Well, let’s hope not,’ said Will, walking down towards
them. ‘And sorry to say, there’s only one way to find out for sure.’

‘So let’s f-find out,’ said Liv, pulling on an armoured
vest.

‘Does anyone else feel awesome?’ said Tabitha, as they
headed back through town. They were all dressed head to toe in black riot gear;
plastic shields in one hand and their rifles slung across their backs.

‘Well, I’d feel m-more awesome if we weren’t carrying an
extra suit for the R-Rat,’ Liv replied.

‘Agreed,’ said Will. ‘But even if he doesn’t use it,
it’s still spare parts for us.’

‘We should have come in the car,’ said Jim, lugging the
spare boots and leg guards in his arms.

‘It would’ve been too dangerous,’ said Tabitha. ‘Too much
noise. They’d all be out here waiting for us.’ Will nodded.

‘Well, there’s one waiting for us,’ said Liv. She
dropped the spare arm guards and reached for her gun. It was harder to move in
the riot gear; harder to aim.

‘Rifles!’ Will told the others, as the spider scuttled
closer. The group fumbled for their guns. Liv’s shot dropped the spider dead on
the road, and echoed across the silent town.

‘You’re an evil shot,’ said Tabitha, pulling her clear
visor up to admire the kill. Liv grinned and blew the gun barrel.

‘There’s more,’ said Jim. ‘Behind us.’ Will turned to
look round, and dropped the spare vest and the sports bag when he saw them.

‘Just leave the spare stuff guys,’ said Will. ‘Run.’

They
raced down the high street, sprinting breathless past dark dead shops. The
silver spiders chittered and swarmed down the street behind them, chasing them
down.

‘Run!’ Will yelled, hanging back to pick off a couple of
spiders with his rifle. The shots cracked and echoed down the street. Spiders
tumbled dead on the pavement. ‘Jim, get a move on! Come on!’ Will yelled. He
ran on behind them, firing on another couple of spiders getting too close.
Tabitha had to hang back for the others to catch up, surprised at how far ahead
she was. Since when could she run like this?

‘Will, come on!’ Liv shouted to him down the street. He
was still firing on the horde, fending them off. Breathless, Tabitha jogged
back down the street to help Jim hurry up. She saw the look in Liv’s eyes then,
as she waited for Will to catch up with them. There was more than just concern
there. It was something deeper than that.

‘I’m coming! Just go!’ Will replied, running on at their
backs. ‘Take the next street on the right, it’s quicker!’

‘Are you sure?’ Liv called back, her voice shaking as
she ran.

‘Do it!’ he said, turning to aim his rifle at the
spiders gaining fast. ‘Piss off!’ he yelled at the spiders, his body shaking as
he rattled crackling shots into the horde.

Out
of town, Will and Tabitha dragged Jim tired and gasping up the hill towards the
castle. Liv trailed behind them, picking off the spiders that came scuttling
too close.

‘I’m running out of bullets!’ she shouted over her
shoulder, plugging another spider that came racing towards her out of the creeping
horde.

‘We’re almost there!’ Will yelled back, pulling Jim on
up the steps. ‘Chris! Get the gate! Chris!’ Chris ran down from the castle wall
and pulled the iron gate open for them, and stood there watching them while
Will and Tabitha helped Jim up the last few steps.

‘Help us then!’ Will yelled at him. Shellshocked in the
sudden panic, Chris came forward to help Jim inside.

‘The dog, Chris!’ Will shouted. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he had
to let go of Jim to grab Laika’s collar, and pulled her barking and snarling
back into the courtyard before she got out.

‘Stop, stop,’ Jim gasped, shaking his arm free from
Chris to sit down in the courtyard.

‘Jim, keep hold of the dog mate. Stop it running out,’
said Will, panicked. He ran back for the gate. He stopped and looked back.
Chris was just standing there with Jim. ‘Fucking do something, Chris!’

‘Do what?’ Chris shouted back. Will yelled in a rage and
ran back down the steps onto the hill.

‘Liv!’ Tabitha yelled, running back down the hill for
her. Liv had fallen behind. The spiders were gaining on her faster than she
could climb the steps. Tabitha watched in horror as one of the spiders jumped
on Liv and knocked her down. Tabitha screamed and leapt down the steps,
half-tumbling, and ripped the spider away from Liv where she thrashed on the
ground.

‘Liv!’

‘I’m fine, I’m ok!’ she said, her voice muffled through
her visor. There were vicious cuts and scratches down her breastplate, but the
claws hadn’t gotten through.

‘Go!’ said Tabitha, putting a bullet in the spider as it
scuttled back over. ‘Come on!’ she yelled, dragging Liv beside her.

‘Is she alright? Is she ok?’ said Will desperately,
running down the hill.

‘She’s fine, get her back inside!’ Tabitha replied,
half-dragging Liv up the steps for Will to help her. Chris opened fire on the
spiders from the curtain wall above them. ‘Go!’ she yelled to Will. Tabitha
shot another spider that raced up the hillside on their right, and followed on
behind Liv and Will as they struggled exhausted up the hill. The spiders crept up
the steps below them; a stalking deathly mass.

‘Fuck you!’ Tabitha yelled at them, squeezing the
trigger on her rifle. She laid into the horde with a rattling thunder of
gunshots, blinking at the flurry of bullet cartridges that clacked and spat
from her rifle. Dead spiders tumbled away; more crept up towards her. She
dropped the empty magazine from her gun and slammed in another with a click.
She kicked a spider away and opened fire again, punching blood-burst bullet
holes into the chittering swarm. The scuttling spiders shrieked and bled and
dropped dead at her feet as she held back the silver tide.

‘Tabitha!’ Will yelled back to her, helping Liv through
the castle gate. Tabitha ran from the swarm at her heels and sprinted on up the
stone steps. Muscles burning, she staggered through the stone arch and back
into the courtyard. Will swung the tall barred gate shut after her, slamming
the bolt across with a ringing clang. The spiders smashed against the solid
bars like a bursting car crash; rabid and shrieking and locked outside.

‘We’re all in!’ Liv yelled to Chris. ‘Stop shooting,
we’re all in!’ Tabitha backed away from the gate as the spiders’ legs flailed
for her through the iron bars. Their bodies were too big to get through. Liv pulled
her helmet off and let it drop to the ground with a plastic knock, bending down
and gripping her knees to get her breath back.

‘You saved my life,’ she said breathlessly, looking up
at Tabitha in disbelief. Tabitha pulled her plastic visor up, grinning and high
on adrenaline. She felt the deep ancient thrill of cheating death; the best
high in the world. Laika whined and wriggled away from Jim to be with her. Her
new family stood there exhausted on the courtyard, safe and sound around her.
She hadn’t felt this happy in a long time. Her banner rippled in the wind
behind them, up on the wall of the keep. The Ghosts. A sudden starving hunger
made her dizzy. The next moment, she blacked out and hit the cobbles.

‘Take small sips,’ said Will, putting a glass of water
in Tabitha’s shaking hands. They’d lain her down on a nest of cushions beside
the fireplace in the keep. Laika came straight over once they were inside, and
insisted on fussing over Tabitha and lying down beside her.

‘Ghosts was actually a good name,’ said Chris, looking
at her pale face. ‘She’s the same colour as that bed sheet hanging outside.’

‘Chris, why don’t you go upstairs before I actually
sh-shoot you?’ said Liv.

‘That’s too quick,’ said Tabitha, sipping her water. ‘I
wouldn’t get to beat him to death.’

‘Wow,’ said Chris, looking around at them. ‘Is that
normal, for someone to say things like that?’

‘Oh, I’d be holding you down while she did it,’ Liv
assured him.

‘Chris, go upstairs. Please,’ Will growled.

‘Strange that I never got death threats before
she came along,’ said Chris, on his way upstairs.

‘Well you’re b-being such a dick lately that I’d get
used to them, to be honest,’ said Liv, watching him go. The others visibly
relaxed once Chris was out of the way, and settled down around the table with
exhausted sighs. A tired silence draped itself over the room.

‘How are you doing, lass?’ Jim said eventually.

‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ Tabitha slurred
lethargically, taking a cold sip of water. ‘So drained, I mean.’ She could barely
move the glass up to her lips. Laika’s body felt warm against her leg.

‘You n-need to eat,’ said Liv, worried. ‘I’ll get you
some soup. Or m-maybe something plain, like crackers.’

‘I don’t think I could keep them down,’ Tabitha replied,
feeling her stomach twist. Or whatever it was her stomach had turned into.
‘I’ll try to eat tomorrow. I just need some rest, really.’

‘Ok hun,’ said Liv, setting a fresh glass of water down
by the fireplace for her. ‘I think we’re all getting an early night tonight
anyway. It’s been a long one.’

‘Definitely,’ said Tabitha, groaning as she sat back on
the pillows.

‘Do you need a cover?’ said Will, bringing another sheet
over for her.

‘No, thank you,’ said Tabitha, smiling with tired eyes.
‘You’ve all done more than enough for me since I got here. You guys must be
sick of looking after me.’

‘Not at all,’ Will assured her. ‘You’ve done plenty for
us too, don’t forget. And anyway, we’re a family now,’ he said, putting the
rolled-up cover down beside her. ‘We look after each other. That’s what
families do.’

24

Tabitha
woke up peacefully. The pale glow of dawn lit the arrow-slit windows and the
edges around the keep door. Jim snored upstairs. Laika let out a sleeping sigh
as Tabitha stroked her head. She thought about Mog, and missed him terribly.
She imagined him sitting squat and grumpy by the bedroom door, waiting for
food. Or curled up sleeping at the end of the bed, a furry philosopher lost in
thought. Should she have just abandoned him like that? What else could she do
though, walk him around on a lead wherever she went? She smiled at the thought.
He’d be better off on his own anyway. Besides, she hadn’t seen any empty cat
skins on her travels. He’d be alright. He was a cat. Tabitha’s leg felt
white-hot where Laika had been pressed against her all night. She got up
carefully to leave Laika where she was. As she headed outside though, her dog
was right behind her.

‘Morning, dog face,’ she said quietly, letting Laika
push past her legs to yawn and stretch outside. Tabitha breathed the dawn air
deep. The breeze felt summer-cool on her skin; birds sang to the infant
daylight. Laika padded around the courtyard to follow a smell. She didn’t like
keeping her dog cooped up in the castle grounds like this, but it wasn’t safe
outside the walls. Straight away, Laika went over and squatted down over the
dewy grass in the garden.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Tabitha told her. She climbed
the steps up onto the curtain wall, and watched the mist clinging to dips in
the hills outside town. Birds fluttered between the trees in the park below the
walls. She saw dead silver shapes lying there too, shining damp with dew in the
rising sun.

‘Morning,’ Will called down from the top of the keep. ‘I’ll
be down in a tick.’ Tabitha smiled and watched him disappear from the roof. She
turned back to the curtain wall and the dead spiders below, and let the sun
wake her up a little. The surviving horde was out there beyond the park
somewhere; scattered and lurking in town. She got lost in her thoughts for a
little while, wondering what might have happened yesterday if things had gone
differently. Like if Jim had fallen in town, or if she hadn’t reached Liv in
time down there in the park. It didn’t bare thinking about; not with all the
grief and guilt already gnawing away inside her for the people she’d lost.
Laika got up from her feet to greet Will as he climbed the steps onto the wall;
Tabitha was glad for the distraction from her thoughts.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Will, watching the mist
fade around the park. Further out beyond the trees the fog still lurked like a
ghostly shroud; a lingering glow around the crooked houses and the old church
steeple.

‘You’d never know we were running for our lives down
there yesterday,’ Tabitha replied. Laika lay down again by her feet, watching a
blackbird intently in the garden. ‘I thought you’d still be in bed this early,’
said Tabitha.

‘Nah, couldn’t sleep,’ he replied, leaning on the worn
metal rail beside her. ‘I’ve had our next mission on my mind.’

‘Already? What’s the plan?’

‘I want to go out and look for survivors, and bring them
back here,’ he said. Tabitha looked away from him at the town laid out below.
She thought about the swarm, waiting somewhere in that warren of streets.
They’d only just escaped the spiders with their lives. Why was he so keen to
risk everything again so soon?

‘I think,’ Tabitha began, looking for the right words.
What did she think? That it was a bad idea, that someone could die? A lifetime
of agreeing with people made the truth hard to say.

‘Just tell me honestly,’ he said, with a shrug and a
smile.

‘It’s a really bad idea,’ she blurted out. Speaking her
mind always had a new thrill to it.

‘Of course it is,’ Will said happily. ‘So was getting
the guns. And the riot gear. But we managed it. And now we’re in a better
position because of it.’ He sneezed at the bright sunlight.

‘Bless you,’ Tabitha chipped in.

‘Thanks,’ he chuckled, after another. ‘So yeah, I want
us to use our position now to help other people. And then grow the Ghosts to
help even more people after that.’

‘Well, it’s a good reason to go out there again, I
guess,’ she said, watching a cackling magpie flutter down to the field below.
‘But to be honest, I’m more worried about us five. I just don’t want to lose
anyone else.’

‘Me neither,’ Will replied. ‘But we just can’t afford to
stand still. We have to keep this momentum going, or else we’ll just be
treading water here for the rest of our lives.’

‘Aren’t you afraid though?’ said Tabitha.

‘Oh, I’m terrified,’ he admitted. ‘But fear’s just as
bad for us as the spiders are. There’s a trick though, to get past that fear.
Do you know what it is?’ Tabitha looked at him, and shook her head. ‘The truth
is, we’re already dead. Like ghosts,’ he said, pointing a thumb at the banner
behind them. ‘As soon as we accept that, we can really start living. And
helping people.’

‘I don’t think I understand,’ Tabitha replied.

‘Well, it’s simple,’ he said. ‘I could die right now
just by tripping and falling down those steps. Jim could die of a heart attack
while he’s lying in bed, god forbid. Or yeah, a thousand spiders could some
climbing up the walls here and drink our insides out, and there’s nothing we
could do about it. There’s a million ways to die, just like that. My first day
up here taught me that, when I got away from that spider by the skin of my
teeth. I mean just look at the world now. Just like that, death can come for
all of us.’

‘That’s really grim,’ Tabitha chuckled, running her rough
metal palm against the stone wall.

‘It doesn’t have to be,’ he said. ‘You just accept that
your end’s coming, no matter what you do. I think this’ll all be easier if we
just get comfortable with the idea, do you know what I mean? Death’s a
guarantee; it’s only a matter of time and place. With that kind of thinking, we
can kill our fear. And then we can go back out there stronger, every day, and fight
back. And live a life that people are going to remember us for.’

‘You mean like becoming heroes,’ said Tabitha.

‘Exactly. And I’d sooner go down fighting, trying
to help other people. Not holed up starving in a castle, trying to hide away
from the world. Not that I’m naming anyone.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Tabitha, smiling. They watched
the silent park for a moment.

‘So,’ he said, picking at the peeling black paint on the
rail. ‘Going back out there to find survivors. Is it do-able, or have I just
gone insane?’ Tabitha looked out at the wild world. Yes, it was a stupid idea.
And yes, any of them could die, for the sake of finding a survivor or two out
there. But… she was a survivor herself. And they’d taken her in without a
second thought.

‘I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found
this place,’ she said, looking out at the world beyond the wall. ‘I probably
would have lost my mind along the way. Driving all around the country until
something finally killed me. That would’ve been the rest of my life. Short and
scary.’ Will nodded. She was one of them now, Tabitha told herself. Part of the
family. One of the Ghosts. It was a daft name really, for a group of misfits
playing soldiers. But she clung to the idea all the same. She held onto the
idea of them because the new world was a violent mess, and this was the one
thing that had given her life any meaning since she’d lost everything.

‘You guys gave me something to feel hopeful about, for
the first time since all of this started,’ she said. Will smiled.

‘And do you want other people to feel that hope as
well?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s the best kind of
feeling, especially now.’

‘Except, people won’t come to us like you did,’ he
replied. ‘I mean, what were the chances of you finding a car that still worked?
A million to one?’

‘Probably, yeah,’ she said with a smile.

‘There’s other people out there, I know it,’ he said.
‘They’re scared and hungry, and they can’t get to us. They don’t even know we
exist. But we can go out there and find them, and bring them back here and keep
them safe. We’ve got all the gear, and we’ve got this place to protect them.
That’s why I want us to go back out there again. As dangerous as it is.’
Tabitha looked out at the world again, as the mist over town shrank away under
the bright sunlight. Her hand went to her mum’s ribbon tied on her belt. She
remembered what Will had said the other day, as corny as it was; the Ghosts
were rising. More survivors… more Ghosts. A tribe. An army.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out there and find
them.’

‘Fantastic,’ Will replied, beaming.

‘So when do we start?’ she said.

‘Well… I was going to suggest that we leave it for a few
days, until you’re feeling better after your blackouts,’ Will replied. ‘But I
don’t think that’s going to happen somehow.’ Tabitha smiled, and shook her head.

‘Nope. We’re going today,’ she said.

‘Today?’ Will replied. ‘Well, I might need to see
what the others think about that first,’ he said with a grin. ‘But personally,
I’m all for it. Get back up on the horse and all that.’ Tabitha smiled. ‘Well,
it sounds like Liv’s up,’ he said, hearing a cough inside the keep. ‘I’ll go
and ask her if she’s up for another mission. Wish me luck.’ Tabitha smiled and
watched him go, and turned back to the world outside the castle.

‘What do you think, dog face?’ she said. Laika nuzzled
her hands and licked her fingers as Tabitha crouched down beside her. ‘I bet
you think we’re insane, don’t you?’ she said, ruffling Laika’s sides. ‘Mind
you, you probably thought people were insane to start with.’ Laika broke into a
play fight, and went open-mouthed for Tabitha’s arms. Laughing, Tabitha pushed
her away, and knelt down to wrestle with her on the wall. Fending off Laika’s
attacks, she pinned her collie down gently on her back. Paws dangling, throat
bared, Laika lay there with total acceptance that Tabitha was in charge. She
ran her grey hands through the thick white fur on Laika’s chest, and wished
more than anything that she could feel it between her fingers. Laika sat up
panting and smiling, probably wondering when breakfast was coming. Tabitha knew
the feeling. Already she felt that same gaping hunger coming on inside her,
draining her. It cramped her stomach and left a hollow feeling in her throat.
And yet the thought of eating anything made her want to retch, like it was all
rotten flesh or something. Suddenly it dawned on her, a thought so terrifying
that it seemed to slide cold and wet down her back. It’d been weeks now. If she
couldn’t force some food down soon, and keep it down… she probably wasn’t going
to be around for much longer.

‘I’ll be alright,’ she told Laika absently, reassuring
herself more than anything. ‘I’ll just keep trying. There’s bound to be
something I can eat.’ Laika got up and shook her fur out, wagging her tail by
Tabitha’s side. ‘Anyway, mission number three today,’ she told Laika, stroking
her under the chin. ‘Wish us luck.’

‘Is this really necessary?’ said Liv, taking the last
bits of firewood from the car boot and carrying it across the moor. They’d
spotted the wood stacked up outside a DIY store on their drive out of town, and
parked up hurriedly to cram it into the car.

‘Of course,’ Will replied, spacing the wood and
newspaper out over the rotting skins. They’d driven back out to the moors where
they’d found the dead army patrol the other day. Will had insisted on giving
the soldiers a proper funeral. They’d forced Jim to stay back at the castle and
rest today, since he was limping about on sore legs after yesterday’s chase.
None of them doubted his spirit, but Will had to explain to him that if he
couldn’t walk around very well today then he couldn’t really run for his life
if it came to it. Jim had taken it with good grace, and set to work in his
allotment instead. Chris had opted to stay back at the castle again, despite
the free space in the car. Will had left him with loud, angry instructions to
weed the paths, brush the courtyard and scrub the outhouse toilet before they
got back.

Liv dropped the last few bits of timber onto the pile of
skins with a knocking clatter.

‘Should be enough here,’ said Will, spreading the pieces
around. Tabitha fished the plastic cigarette lighter out of her hoodie pocket
and handed it to him.

‘Did you put some of those lighter blocks in here?’ Will
asked her, crouching down by the empty corpses.

‘All of them,’ Tabitha replied.

‘Well, at least we know it should catch,’ he said
brightly, cupping the lighter flame in his hands.

‘That’s a-all of it,’ said Liv, stuffing the last few
bits of newspaper down between the timbers. Will put the lighter flame to a
wedge of newspaper. He tossed it into the middle of the pile, and stepped back
as the flames crept out into the wood and the lighter blocks. The three of them
stood back and watched the fire take hold. The greying skins became shrouded in
flames and floating shreds of blackened paper.

‘We should s-say something,’ Liv suggested over the
crackling fire, staring at the grim scene.

‘Well,’ Will began, thinking. ‘…We didn’t know these
people,’ he said, watching the flames grow. ‘But we know what they believed in.
They believed there was something left to fight for, even now. They wanted to
bring hope to people, because they knew how important that is. Hope only needs
a spark to catch on, and then it spreads. Like fire.’ Liv and Tabitha stood
close by, watching as the flames burned away the death and the rot. ‘When we
took the guns off these people, we carried on their fight,’ Will concluded.
Smoke drifted up into the sky, reaching for the white clouds above. The fire
danced hypnotic on the moor. Will turned away from the blaze, looking to Liv
and Tabitha. ‘We need to carry on what these people started. We need to give
people hope. Like what we were saying on the wall this morning,’ he said,
nodding at Tabitha.

‘Why, what were you saying this m-morning?’ said Liv,
looking between them. They didn’t seem to see what she was getting at with the
question. Well, she couldn’t help but feel suspicious of them. How many
conversations had they left her out of, exactly? She used to be the one he told
all his plans to. It made sense though really, Liv told herself. Tabitha was
just a better catch. Stronger, prettier. What was worse, neither Will or
Tabitha had the decency to tell her what was going on between them. She wanted
the truth.

‘Well, we were kind of just talking about how any of us
could be gone tomorrow, so we may as well… you know, just jump in and find
people,’ Will said brightly. Tabitha smiled between them. ‘I mean like, reach
out to people, instead of just waiting around being afraid,’ he said. ‘And just
live every day like it’s our last, you know? And build a new life together?’
Liv nodded, and felt her heart break. She knew what he was getting at. She
should have told Will sooner about her feelings for him. Or told Tabitha. Now
she’d never get the chance again. Will and Tabitha smiled at one another, just to
rub it in for her. Will couldn’t understand why Liv looked so sad about the
idea of heading out to find survivors.

‘I mean, don’t you agree?’ he asked her with concern.
She’d always been the one supporting him; why did she seem so down? Was she
finally sick of risking her life for his crazy ideas? ‘Liv?’

‘Yeah,’ she said quietly, looking down at the ground. ‘I
understand.’ What more did he want from her? Her blessing? So good of Tabitha
to keep quiet and let him do all the explaining, like she wasn’t even a part of
this. Maybe he just preferred quiet women like that, who’d just stand there
looking pretty.

‘Look,’ said Tabitha, pointing behind them. There was
smoke drifting up from a distant fire across the fields; a winding black trail
springing up into the blue sky.

‘They m-must have seen our smoke here,’ said Liv, trying
to bury her feelings. She wondered if it was her stutter that put Will off.

‘It can’t be more than a couple of miles away,’ said Will,
watching the distant smoke with a kind of reverence. Liv and Tabitha headed
back to the car; Liv took the passenger seat while Tabitha sat down in the back
and reached for her assault rifle.

‘Do you th-think we’ll have some trouble?’ said Liv,
looking back at Tabitha as she clipped on her seatbelt.

‘Just being prepared,’ Tabitha replied, checking the
bolt on her rifle. ‘There’s always spiders somewhere.’

‘I didn’t m-mean the spiders,’ Liv mumbled quietly.

‘Sorry?’ said Tabitha, leaning forward to hear properly.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Liv replied, looking out of her
window. Tabitha went back to checking her rifle.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Will, nodding to the distant
smoke as he sat down in the driver’s seat. He slammed the door shut. Tabitha
winced at the hard bang; a pet hate of hers.

‘Let’s go!’ he said, and promptly stalled the car in his
rush to get off. ‘Sorry,’ he chuckled, restarting the engine. ‘Right.’ They
took off down the dirt path that led back to the country road, and raced off
towards the distant sliver of smoke.

‘Hello?’ said Will, approaching the farmhouse
cautiously. Liv and Tabitha followed behind him, keeping their rifles aimed at
the house. The smoke had been rising out of the chimney; a thick black column
that spoke of desperation. Whatever they’d been burning in there, it didn’t
smell as clean as wood. Will had parked the car close by, in case they had to
make a swift exit from the place. The fields around shone green in the
sunlight. Sparrows chirped and fluttered in the hedge as they made their way
closer to the house.

‘Keep your guns up,’ said Liv, looking in at the dark
windows down her rifle sights. She’d already come too close to a spider
yesterday. At least it had sharpened her wits, though. Now she wanted to be
ready for anything.

‘And watch out for any dogs around,’ said Tabitha. She
thought back to the wild pack, and their jagged clamping teeth on her flesh.
She wished that Laika was here with her.

‘Hello?’ Will repeated, trying the handle on the front
door. It opened soundlessly, and gave way to a gloomy wall of thick stale air
inside. Tabitha followed Will as he went in through the porch; she looked over
his shoulder at a dark old living room inside. The floorboards creaked beneath
a worn carpet.

‘God,’ said Liv, cringing at the smell when she stepped
into the house. She took one last look outside and closed the front door behind
her. Better to be stuck in the house with a couple of lurking spiders, than
have a whole horde of them following them inside.

‘Is anyone here?’ said Tabitha, splitting off from Will
to try upstairs. The old steps warped and creaked under her boots.

‘Be c-careful,’ said Liv. When she stepped into the
kitchen, a dirty saucer cracked beneath Liv’s boot. As she turned around to
look down she accidentally knocked a jar of mould off the counter with the
barrel of her gun. It shattered on the tile floor in a puffing cloud of spores.
Liv sighed and stepped away, clearly terrible at following her own advice.
‘Actually, forget being careful,’ she told them, aware of the sour powdery
smell of spores. ‘Let’s just g-get a move on, before we catch something.’

‘Definitely,’ said Will, scouring the living room with a
look of distaste. He used his rifle to poke a crumpled newspaper to one side on
the carpet, revealing a dry pile of shit beneath. A door creaked open at the
far end of the living room. Will turned around in shock and pointed his rifle
at the figure that emerged.

‘You’ll have to forgive us our current circumstances,’
said an old lady, stepping into the living room. ‘We’ve only been here for a
day and a night. I assure you that the mess in here is nothing to do with us.’
She was upright; well-spoken. Her wavy grey hair reached down to her cardigan
collar. There was a keen, sharp look about her that hadn’t dulled with age.

‘Are you alright?’ said Will, lowering his gun as she
came into the room.

‘Fine, thank you,’ she said politely. ‘Just old.’ She
came to stand by the crackling fire, warming her wrinkled hands. ‘Welcome to
our little piece of paradise,’ she told them.

‘Have you c-come far to get here?’ said Liv, noting the
woman’s accent.

‘We’ve come a long way,’ she replied wearily, with a
tired nod. ‘We haven’t eaten in days. So, as soon as we saw your smoke over the
hill, we got the fire going. And then we just hoped you’d be the kind of people
we actually wanted to come and find us.’

‘I’m sorry, who’s we?’ said Liv.

‘The gang,’ the woman replied with a smile. ‘I’d better
introduce you. I’m Sylvia, by the way,’ she said, shaking Will’s hand. A girl
screamed upstairs. There were sounds of a struggle.

‘Tabitha?’ Liv called upstairs.

‘That’ll be the gang,’ said Sylvia, rushing past them up
the creaking staircase.

‘She’s breaking my hand!’ said a middle-aged man, who’d
grabbed at Tabitha’s gun and was paying the price for it. A young woman had her
hands wrapped around Tabitha’s other arm. A little boy and girl stood terrified
in the corner.

‘Stop this!’ said Sylvia, running into the bedroom. ‘She’s
here to help us! They all are!’ but as Paul and Natalie let go of the woman,
Sylvia felt a doubt crawl down her spine. The strange woman looked wild. Tense
and angry, like a cornered animal. A tangle of red hair hung over half her
face, brighter than the paint on a post box. Her eyes were unnatural; not brown
or green but a stark, vivid gold.

‘Who are you people?’ Sylvia demanded, edging away
towards Paul and the children.

‘What do you mean?’ said Will, coming to stand by
Tabitha.

‘There’s something… weird about her,’ said Sylvia,
glancing at Tabitha. The old woman stood between the strangers and her family,
barring the way.

‘Hey, I’m right here,’ said Tabitha, rubbing the redness
on her arm where the girl had gripped her. ‘I know, I look a bit strange. But I
promise, I didn’t mean you any harm.’

‘You had your gun pointed at my kids!’ the man growled,
pushing past Sylvia to square up to her.

‘You just shocked me when I saw you! I’m sorry!’ said
Tabitha, throwing her hands up. ‘We thought this place was full of spiders when
we got here, didn’t we?’ she said, looking to Liv and Will.

‘That’s right,’ Will added. Liv was nodding.

‘You just spooked me,’ Tabitha told the family. ‘I
didn’t know what to expect when I came in here. I’m sorry.’

‘Daddy, she’s got funny eyes,’ said the little boy.
Tabitha looked at him and saw how frightened he was, clinging on to his big
sister’s coat. Watching him stare only made it worse, though. When he hid away
from her completely, it broke Tabitha’s heart. The man and the old woman still
stared at her like she was dangerous.

‘We should get you guys b-back to the castle,’ said Liv,
stepping in. ‘It’ll probably take two trips. We won’t fit you all in the car at
once.’

‘You’ve got a car?’ said the man, turning from Tabitha
to Liv. ‘How? How is it working?’

‘Well, we’ve got Tabitha to thank for that actually,’
said Will, smiling and putting a hand around her shoulder. Liv glanced at them
together. ‘You know what, I want to straighten this out right now,’ said Will.
‘This here is the nicest woman you’ll ever meet. She’s had it hard. And yeah,
she’s gone through a few changes, so she looks different. But trust me when I
say that she’d never want to harm anyone. Never.’ Tabitha looked up at him and
smiled. Liv’s heart sank. If there was some small part of her still holding out
for Will, that smile between them was all the proof she needed.

‘I think we all need to get to know each other a bit
better,’ Will told the family. Sylvia and the man still looked defensive
though. The kids still looked afraid. Tabitha couldn’t stand their staring.
Like she was a monster. She had to do something.

‘Here,’ she said, offering the man her assault rifle.
Will wanted to stop her, but thought better of it. Tabitha looked into the
man’s weary eyes. He wouldn’t take it. She watched the surprise on his thin
weathered face as she pushed the gun into his hands.

‘I know you attacked me to protect your kids,’ she told
him. ‘And I defended myself because I was being attacked. Now if you don’t like
me, or you still don’t trust me, all you have to do is pull the trigger. Any
time.’ She stood there and looked into his tired eyes, wide with uncertainty.
But the rifle stayed where it was, cradled in his hands where she’d put it.

‘…I don’t want to,’ he said awkwardly, handing the rifle
back. ‘I don’t like holding this.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Tabitha, taking it from his hands.

‘Let’s g-get out of here,’ said Liv, looking around at
the gloomy bedroom with its old damp wallpaper. ‘No offense, but this p-place
is really depressing.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Sylvia, leading them out
of the bedroom. She threw Tabitha a cautious glance on her way out.

Will
and Liv tore off down the road back towards town, with the man and his three
children in the back of the car. Despite Liv’s offers, Sylvia had insisted on
staying back to wait for the second trip. She and Tabitha hung around in the
farm house in the pale milky light, waiting for Liv and Will to come back and
pick them up.

‘You’re new around here too,’ Sylvia observed, watching
Tabitha from the kitchen. There wasn’t any warmth in her tone towards her. She
eyed Tabitha with a cold hard look, arms folded defensively.

‘What makes you say that?’ Tabitha replied, picking up a
handful of red embers from the fireplace.

‘You look like you’ve seen more than they have,’ said
Sylvia.

‘You mean I look old?’

‘No. This is what old looks like, dear,’ she
said, pointing at her own face. ‘You look wary.’

‘Weary, you mean?’ said Tabitha.

‘I meant what I said,’ Sylvia replied shortly. ‘Wary.
Like an animal. Doesn’t that hurt?’ she nodded at the embers, glowing red
hot in Tabitha’s hands.

‘They just feel warm,’ she replied, dropping them back
down in the fireplace. ‘I don’t have much feeling left in my hands any more. It
feels nice.’

‘What happened to you?’ said Sylvia, looking her up and
down with morbid curiosity.

‘They did. The spiders,’ Tabitha replied. ‘By rights I
should be an empty skin, but I’m not.’

‘So you changed when they stung you, is that it?’ said
Sylvia. Tabitha nodded. She stood up from the fire, and went to look out of the
window for any sign of the car on the country road.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I’ve got more changes to come,’
Tabitha admitted, watching the clouds in the pale blue sky. ‘I mean, I haven’t
eaten in weeks.’

‘You can’t stomach food any more?’ said Sylvia, watching
her with fresh concern. Tabitha glanced at her; shook her head. ‘Perhaps you’re
turning into one of those things then, since they stung you,’ Sylvia said
coldly. ‘In that case you’ll need to eat what they eat. And you and I both know
what that means.’

‘I’m not turning into one of them,’ Tabitha
replied, pissed off with Sylvia already. ‘Whatever I’m changing into, I’m still
human.’

‘Nevertheless, let me make one thing clear from the
start,’ said Sylvia, fixing Tabitha with a stare. ‘I saw the way you looked
when I found you upstairs. Unnatural. Now I haven’t brought my family through
hell the past few weeks only to have them threatened in our new home by a
strange woman with a strange appetite. People have threatened my family before,
and they’ve lost.’

‘You killed them?’ said Tabitha.

‘I killed them,’ Sylvia echoed. ‘And if anything else changes
in you that puts my family in danger, I’ll kill you too.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Tabitha said grimly, watching the
car appear on the road in the distance. ‘But if you do, I’ll be taking you with
me.’ Sylvia looked into those stark gold eyes across the room, catching the
daylight like a cat’s. There was something about the girl that she couldn’t put
her finger on; something wild and unsettling.

‘I’m sure you will,’ Sylvia replied.

25

‘Welcome to your new home,’ Will told Sylvia happily, as
they walked through the iron gate into the castle courtyard. Tabitha trailed
behind them and closed the gate, and turned to see Jim in full conversation
with the newcomers in the garden. Chris hovered around on the wall, watching
the strangers carefully. Especially the sad blonde girl.

‘Now we’re all here,’ said Will, ‘Guys, this is Sylvia.
This is her son Paul, and his kids –

‘Natalie, Robert and Grace,’ Sylvia interrupted. ‘But
Paul isn’t my son. We’re a family by necessity, and I’m afraid I’m not at all
related. More’s the pity.’

‘Well, we know what you mean,’ Will replied. ‘We’re a
family too.’

‘A dysfunctional one, sometimes,’ Liv said with a smile,
tipping her head in Chris’s direction.

‘No such thing,’ Sylvia said dismissively. ‘A family is,
by definition, functional.’

‘Well, I suppose it is,’ Will replied brightly. Behind
him, Liv and Jim caught one another’s looks.

‘I think there’s someone the kids might like to meet,’
said Tabitha, opening the door of the keep.

‘Oh god, it’s a dog,’ said Sylvia, grabbing Paul’s arm
in fear as Laika came padding out. They both looked terrified. ‘Is it
diseased?’ Sylvia demanded. ‘Has it bitten anyone?’

‘No!’ said Tabitha, fussing over Laika as she tried to
lick at her face. ‘Well, I mean she’s bitten some people, but only to
protect me.’

‘Are you bad with d-dogs?’ said Liv.

‘Just the packs that have been trying to kill us for weeks,’
Sylvia snapped. ‘Paul, keep the children away from it!’ Paul shrugged and
smiled while his kids met their new favourite interest.

‘Have you ever tried to separate kids and dogs?’ he
said, grinning while his kids gave Laika the fussing of a lifetime. His sad
sandblasted face changed completely when he smiled.

‘She’s a good dog,’ said Jim, trying to stop Sylvia
looking so worried. ‘Anyway, you all look like you could do with some food in
you. I’ll bring out some fried eggs and beans for you, if that sounds alright.
And a pot of tea.’

‘Raw potatoes and dirty water would sound good to me
about now, actually,’ said Sylvia, with an unexpected smile. ‘Anything more
would be heaven.’ Jim smiled, and led Paul and Sylvia off to the keep.

‘Yeah, why don’t we just use up all our food in one go?’
Chris mumbled to himself up on the wall, turning to look out at the world
beyond the castle.

‘It’s good having some kids about,’ said Jim, slurping
his mug of tea in the sunny courtyard.

‘They don’t know whether to eat their food or play with
the dog,’ Paul told the others, watching his kids on the grass with a broad
grin. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ he said, turning to them with tears in
his eyes. ‘I thought we were going to die out there.’ His tears rolled down and
cut through the grime on his sunken cheeks. Liv took his hand in hers.

‘There’s nothing to thank us for mate,’ Will said
gently, putting a hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘You were the ones who made it this
far. You found us. What’s it been, a hundred miles? Two hundred?’
Paul nodded. ‘And you brought your kids all the way here.’ Sylvia wiped away
her own tears, and took Will’s hand and thanked him.

‘How touching,’ Chris muttered up on the wall, handing
his empty cup to Tabitha when she made the rounds to collect. He turned his
back on the scene. ‘I wonder what’ll happen to all this happy families shit
when we run out of food.’

‘They were starving, Chris,’ said Tabitha,
pouring the dregs of his tea over the wall. She wished she could have thrown
him over with them.

‘Well, they might as well get used to the feeling,’ he
replied. ‘We all should. Oh sorry, I forgot. You’re already there. How’s that
going for you, starving?’ Tabitha clenched her jaw.

‘You know, you’re one of the most vile people I’ve ever
met,’ she replied.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ he said bluntly. ‘I think it’s
funny.’

‘I know what your problem is,’ said Tabitha, studying
his stare. ‘The world’s a scary place now, so you’ve closed off to everyone in
case you suffer any more.’

‘Or maybe I’m just a cold heartless bastard,’ he said
simply. ‘And now with the end of the world and everything, maybe I’m just more
of a cold heartless bastard. Now you will let me know when you’re on death’s
door, won’t you, so I can get the champagne out?’

‘Isn’t there anything human left in you?’ said Tabitha,
trying to understand him.

‘No. What about you? Is there anything human left in
you?’ he glanced at her grey hands then, and stared into her stark eyes.
Looking down on the freak. Tabitha felt a rage burn inside her, and cracked the
cup to pieces in her hand. It was so tempting to just hit him. She had to rise
above it.

‘Oh nice, and now we’re a cup down too,’ he said,
looking at the broken pieces in her hand. ‘Good work, Anger Management.’

‘Piss off Chris,’ said Tabitha, walking away. ‘Right out
of the gate, if you wouldn’t mind.’ She tried to avoid the others as she walked
across the courtyard towards the keep. Liv was coming over though. Tabitha
quickly wiped her eyes on the back of her wrists.

‘Tabitha? Are y-you ok?’ said Liv, coming over to walk
beside her. ‘I saw you talking to Chris. That never ends well, for any of us,’
she said. Tabitha laughed a little, sniffling.

‘What did he say to you? I’ll kill him,’ said Liv.

‘No,’ Tabitha said quietly. ‘It’s ok. It’s better just…
left alone. It’s not worth a fight. I don’t need any more reasons for him to
hate me.’

‘Chris hates e-everyone,’ Liv said soothingly, putting
an arm around Tabitha’s shoulders as they walked back towards the keep. ‘And
don’t worry about Sylvia either. She’ll have to get through me first. And you
know Will and Jim are on your side.’

‘I know,’ Tabitha replied quietly, smiling.

‘Oh god, your hand!’ said Liv, looking down at the
broken cup between her fingers.

‘Yeah, I kind of hoped you wouldn’t see that,’ Tabitha
replied. ‘I got angry. Sorry about the cup.’

‘Never mind the bloody c-cup!’ said Liv, pulling
Tabitha’s hand up to see. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ Tabitha said gently. ‘Weird metal hands
and such.’

‘Come on,’ said Liv, walking with her to the keep door.
‘As of n-now, Chris has a restraining order on him. If he comes within f-fifty
feet of you, I’ll officially beat the crap out of him.’

‘Fifty feet? But that’s like the far side of the
castle,’ Tabitha chuckled.

‘Good,’ said Liv. ‘Best p-place for him. And as for
you,’ she said, holding the keep door open for her, ‘I order you to go and sit
with Laika and the kids. Relax.’

‘But I should probably –

‘Orders,’ Liv cut in, fetching a carrier bag. ‘Now give us
that b-broken cup, and I’ll bag it up and chuck it over the wall.’

‘I think it was Jim’s favourite though,’ said Tabitha,
feeling bad.

‘Tabitha, it’s a bloody cup. Now go and say hi to
the kids, will you?’

Natalie
brushed her blonde hair aside and looked up at Tabitha cautiously as she walked
over to them. She was sitting with the twins in the garden, making a daisy
chain with Grace. Robert was busy inspecting an ant’s nest in the soil.

‘Do you mind if I come and sit with you for a while?’
said Tabitha. Grace looked up warily at her, and moved closer to her big
sister. Natalie watched Tabitha and nodded silently, rubbing her palms together
nervously. The girl had a strange ghostly quality about her, Tabitha thought.
She looked grubby and tired, buried away in a jumper and jeans; cold and pretty
as winter.

‘We’ve not had the best introduction, before,’ Tabitha
began. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ Natalie said quietly. ‘I think we got off on
the wrong foot.’

‘Completely,’ Tabitha agreed, smiling. ‘It was all in self
defense. I promise.’ Natalie didn’t look completely convinced; Tabitha could
tell. But at least she was willing to hear her out. It’d take a little time,
that was all. She just needed an icebreaker. And she already had the best one
around.

‘Laika,’ Tabitha called across the garden. Her collie
looked up from where she was resting, and padded over to sit and smile beside
her.

‘So, this is Laika,’ said Tabitha. ‘I think you guys
have already met.’

‘Is it your dog?’ Robert asked her. Tabitha nodded with
a smile.

‘Where did you find him?’ said Grace, shaking Laika’s
paw.

‘She’s a girl,’ Tabitha replied, stroking Laika’s head.
‘She was locked in a big building with no one to look after her.’

‘Did you rescue her?’ said Robert, sitting apart from
them. He was still giving Tabitha some distance.

‘I suppose I did,’ she replied, smiling.

‘Robert, come closer,’ said Natalie, reaching out her
hand towards him. ‘Tabitha’s our friend.’ Tabitha had never seen such a haunted
look in a little boy. In both of them. They’d probably witnessed things that
they never should have seen. Not so young. Robert studied her and shuffled
closer on the grass, and sat down next to Laika and his twin sister. Right off
the bat Laika came closer and licked his face. Robert flinched and giggled, and
he and his sister were suddenly busy fussing over Laika again.

‘How old are they?’ said Tabitha, watching them chatter
to her dog.

‘Six,’ Natalie replied, brushing the grass off Grace’s
tattered dress. Laika loved the attention from the twins. She looked regal and
sleepy between them, sat there in a calm flurry of stroking.

‘Why don’t you take Laika and play on the grass?’
Natalie suggested.

‘Can we?’ said Robert, looking to Tabitha.

‘Course you can,’ she replied with a smile, pleasantly
surprised to be asked her permission.

‘Come on Laika!’ said Robert, running off down the
garden with the dog following behind. Grace shouted and ran after them.

‘They turned six just before all this happened,’ said Natalie,
once the twins had run off down the garden. ‘At least mum got to give them one
last birthday party, before…’ Natalie rubbed her palms together hard, and burst
into tears. Tabitha put her arms around her. ‘Dad never wants to talk about
it,’ Natalie sobbed. ‘And Sylvia’s always saying I shouldn’t cry in front of
the kids. Is it just me, or is that really weird? We argue a lot about it.
She’s always saying that I need to be strong. How though? How are you supposed
to just not cry when your mum dies?’

‘Of course you need to cry,’ said Tabitha, holding
Natalie close. ‘And you don’t need to listen to Sylvia anyway. We’ve all got
your back.’ Natalie smiled.

‘She must think she’s our mum, since she took us in and
helped us,’ Natalie said quietly. ‘And don’t get me wrong, we’re glad she did.
But… she’ll never be a mum to us. Our mum died. I don’t want Sylvia trying to
replace her.’

‘No, I wouldn’t want that either,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I
lost my mum too, when this happened. There’s no way I’d let anyone replace her.’

‘What did you do?’ said Natalie, wiping away her tears
with her cardigan sleeve.

‘Skinned the bastard that did it, and stuck their body
on the garden gate.’

‘Do you mean a spider, or a person?’

‘A spider,’ Tabitha replied. ‘But yeah, I imagine there’s
some people out there who are just as bad.’

‘There are,’ said Natalie, with a haunted look. She
wiped her eyes, and watched the kids play.

That
night the Ghosts slept on the floor in the lounge and kitchen, while the
newcomers got the beds upstairs.

‘Bloody beans,’ said Chris, farting loudly in the dark
living room.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Liv. ‘I’m t-trying to get some
sleep, Chris. That’s disgusting.’

‘Well it’s not my fault all we eat is b –

‘Beans!’ Jim yelled, sitting up. ‘Every
day you’re moaning about them! Shut up about the fucking beans!’

‘Jim, there are k-kids upstairs,’ said Liv. Tabitha felt
Laika wake up beside her.

‘Oh I don’t give a shit,’ Jim growled. ‘They’ll be
listening to me knock his teeth out if he carries on, never mind swearing.’

‘Really, Jim? Is that what you’re going to do?’ Chris
said sarcastically.

‘Yeah it is, you little prick!’ Jim shot back.

‘Guys,’ said Will, trying to keep the peace.

‘Don’t fall asleep,’ said Chris.

‘You what?’ said Jim gruffly.

‘Don’t fall asleep.’

‘Or what?’

‘Or you might not wake up,’ Chris said quietly. ‘Lots of
old men die in their sleep.’

‘Don’t you threaten me, you little bastard!’ Jim yelled,
and jumped up into the room to punch the darkness where Chris was lying. Laika
started barking.

‘Jim, it’s me!’ Tabitha protested, holding her hands out
against his punches. Jim found out the hard way though, as his knuckles
connected with her metal palms.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry lass!’ he said to the darkness,
gripping his sore knuckles. Tabitha shushed Laika, pulling her back by the
collar. They heard Chris laughing in the blackness of the room.

‘Excuse me,’ came Sylvia’s voice upstairs. ‘Could we
keep it down a bit please, while the children are asleep?’

‘Sorry, of course,’ said Will. ‘Gents, go back to sleep or
take it outside.’

‘Fine,’ said Jim, crashing into the kitchen table as he
wandered about in the pitch black. ‘Come on then,’ he said.

‘What?’ Chris replied.

‘We’re taking this outside. I might even see you better
out there anyway.’

‘…Alright, fine. I’m sorry,’ said Chris, hesitating.

‘No, we’re settling this like men,’ Jim insisted,
opening the door to reveal a starlit sky. ‘No one tells me they’re going to
kill me in my sleep.’

‘Go on, Chris,’ said Liv. ‘If you talk like a bitch,
you’re going to get smacked like a bitch.’ Tabitha burst out laughing. Chris
didn’t move from his bed. Jim walked back in with the dim glow of the moonlight
to see by, and dragged Chris from the floor.

‘Get off me!’ said Chris, struggling. Jim dragged him on
regardless.

‘Don’t do t-too much damage,’ said Liv. ‘I am not getting
up to help you carry him back inside.’ Jim pushed Chris out of the keep, and
shut the door behind them. The others heard their shuffling feet outside,
followed by a shout and a fall. A few seconds later the door opened again, and
Jim popped his head in.

‘Someone help me get him back in,’ he said quietly.

‘Jesus Christ, Jim!’ Liv yelled, jumping out of bed. ‘Is
he bleeding?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Shh!’ said Sylvia upstairs.

‘Er, excuse m-me!’ Liv called up the stairs.

‘Liv,’ said Will.

‘No! I won’t be shushed in my own castle!’ Liv snapped
indignantly.

‘Liv, I’ll get Chris,’ said Will. ‘Just calm down.’

‘Don’t tell m-me to calm down!’

‘I’ve got him,’ said Jim, dragging Chris back in through
the door.

‘Is he bl-bleeding?’ said Liv, patting Chris’s scalp. It
felt dry enough. Chris mumbled something as they lay him back down on the floor.

‘Well he’ll sleep tonight, the little tyke,’ said Liv.

‘Jim, can you do that every night? Before he even
starts?’ said Tabitha. Liv and Will laughed and agreed.

‘I’m sorry lass, about hitting you,’ said Jim, mortified
about it as he closed the keep door. ‘I thought you were Chris, I couldn’t see
anything.’

‘It’s fine,’ Tabitha assured him. ‘I didn’t feel a thing
anyway. How are your hands?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ Jim replied in the dark,
grunting as he sat back down on his coat by the wall. ‘As long as you’re not
hurt.’

‘I’m fine Jim, honestly,’ Tabitha said gently.

‘Right, can we all finally get some sleep now?’ came
Sylvia’s voice down the stairs.

‘Will you shut up?’ Liv shouted at her. It
sparked an argument between them at either end of the staircase.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Will, wrapping himself in a blanket
and walking outside.

‘You look tired,’ said Liv, pouring Will some fresh tea
at the kitchen table the next morning. He didn’t seem to acknowledge the
gesture though.

‘Well, I slept outside last night,’ he replied wearily,
rubbing his eyes.

‘Did you?’ she said, putting the tea pot back on the
side. ‘I didn’t n-notice.’

‘Yeah, because you were busy having a shouting match all
night,’ he replied, hunched over and sipping his tea.

‘Sylvia was being rude,’ said Liv defensively. ‘They’re
our g-guests. Guests should be polite.’

‘They’re not our guests, Liv. They’re family now,’ said
Will.

‘Well, even more r-reason to shout at her,’ Liv replied.
‘Families have rows, that’s what th-they do.’ Will sighed and sipped his tea.

‘Has sleeping beauty woken up yet?’ said Jim, coming
inside from the allotment. Liv shook her head. ‘Jeez, I gave him a shiner
there.’ He studied Chris’s black eye with a particular pride.

‘He’s not moved since,’ said Will, looking over at
Chris. ‘Jim, I think you might have done him some real damage there.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t have said he’d kill me in my sleep,’
Jim replied in his defense, pouring himself a cup of tea.

‘Jim’s got a p-point,’ said Liv, sitting down beside
Will.

‘Thank you, Liv,’ Jim replied, bringing his mug over to
the table. He took a creaking seat with a weary sigh. ‘Well, with any luck he’s
in a coma,’ he added. ‘At least it’d give us some peace and quiet for a few
weeks.’

‘Jim!’ said Liv, laughing in disbelief.

‘Nope, he’s still alive,’ said Will, watching Chris stir
and start to groan.

‘Well, I shouldn’t get my hopes up like that,’ said Jim,
sipping his tea. They enjoyed the sunlight and the sleepy silence together for
a little while; blows and tea slurps being the only sounds to break it.

‘So Jim, the er, project,’ said Will, after a couple of
minutes’ silence. ‘All going to plan?’

‘All coming along nicely,’ Jim confirmed, sipping his
tea.

‘This again? What bloody project?’ Liv snapped. ‘What
are you t-talking about?’

‘Well, I should probably get going,’ said Will
dismissively, standing up and stretching. ‘Lots to do.’ Jim nodded, and got up
and left Liv alone at the table.

‘What project?’ she demanded. ‘Why is it a secret?’ Jim
coughed and headed outside. Will whistled innocently and walked out after him.
Annoyed, Liv sat alone at the table and racked her brain.

‘What p-project?’ she mumbled, frustrated. ‘Grr!’

The
sun climbed in a pale white sky that just couldn’t muster the energy for a
bright blue day. Liv and Tabitha stood on the curtain wall, watching the town
beyond.

‘Sylvia just doesn’t talk to me. At all,’ said Tabitha.

‘I’ll happily trade p-places,’ Liv replied. ‘Every time
she sees me, she’s got something else to n-nag me about.’ They could hear Jim
in the garden behind them, telling the twins about his allotment. The kids were
helping him to water it, though Robert was more interested in getting Laika to
bite at the flow from the watering can. Paul and Natalie were sweeping the far
end of the garden path, but they couldn’t help but watch the twins laughing.
It’d been a long time since they’d heard them laugh.

‘I don’t think S-Sylvia trusts you,’ said Liv,
shrugging. ‘You know me, I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you. She probably
just doesn’t like you very much.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Tabitha. She watched a vivid green fly
buzz down and land on the wall, shining metallic in the sunlight. ‘I’ve never
had anyone not like me before. Now I’ve got two, and I’m living with them.’

‘Well, it g-gets easier the more it happens, believe
me,’ said Liv. ‘And if it’s any c-consolation, I don’t think she likes me very
m-much either.’

‘She’s over there talking to Chris now, by the gate,’
Tabitha muttered.

‘He’ll have her hating the whole lot of us b-before long
then,’ Liv said with a grin. ‘Crying shame.’ Tabitha felt her worry on the tip
of her tongue. Better to just come out with it.

‘She thinks I’m going to turn into something,’ Tabitha
confided. ‘Something that’ll hurt the kids.’

‘That’s crazy! She’s paranoid, that’s all,’ Liv said
dismissively. ‘Ever since they got here, she’s b-been telling the kids don’t
do that, it’s d-dangerous. She’s afraid of everything.’

‘I know, but she’s not just being weird with me because
I’m different,’ said Tabitha. ‘It’s like she’s afraid of me. Like I’m going to
flip and turn into a monster or something.’ Liv laughed.

‘She’s insane,’ Liv said simply. ‘Wait… you don’t
believe her, do you?’ Tabitha shrugged her shoulders, and blinked away a tear.
Liv looked at her then, and stopped seeing the woman who’d taken Will’s
affections. She saw her friend crying.

‘God Tabitha, you c-can’t even think like that!’ Liv
told her. ‘You’re the nicest person I know.’

‘But what if something changes, inside me?’ Tabitha
replied, looking into Liv’s eyes. ‘I’m so hungry. What if I do need to
eat …people? Like a spider?’

‘Don’t you d-dare talk like that,’ said Liv, pointing a
finger in Tabitha’s face. She gave her a tight hug. ‘Your body’s just changed a
little bit, that’s all.’

‘You sound like my mum when she was giving me The Talk,’
Tabitha chuckled, sniffling. Liv laughed.

‘Well, you’re practically t-turning into a superhero,’
Liv said gently. ‘Of course your body’s going to change a bit. B-But look at
you, you’re awesome!’ Tabitha smiled. ‘Your appetite’s just trying to catch up
with your new body, that’s all.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I know so. Here,’ she said, producing a chocolate bar
from her coat pocket. ‘This is my top-secret stash,’ she said, looking around
to make sure no one was watching. ‘The last three pieces of chocolate l-left in
the world, and I’m giving one to you. That’s how much I believe you’re
not going to t-turn into a cannibal.’ Tabitha laughed through her tears. Liv
snapped off a piece of chocolate and put it in Tabitha’s hand. ‘Now try and eat
that.’ Tabitha watched Liv as she raised the chocolate to her mouth. She
smelled cocoa, milk, sugar. The same old smells that she’d been hooked on, once
upon a time. Every smell jumped out. Now the cocoa smelled bitter, like dirt.
The milk smelled sour like rank cheese. The sugar, pure sickly-sweet. She would
have stopped Liv eating this, the way it smelled to her. There was nothing
wrong with it though, that was the thing; it was just ordinary chocolate. Liv
mimed putting it in her mouth, to spur Tabitha on. Tabitha held her gaze, and
put the vile thing in her mouth. She couldn’t help but cringe at the tastes on
her tongue. She closed her eyes, breathed out through her nose, and chewed. The
piece cracked and mashed and melted in her mouth, and felt big as a brick. An
explosion of bitter, sour and sickly-sweet. She clenched her jaw to stop
herself gagging. She gagged anyway, and then threw up her breakfast of water
over the wall.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Tabitha mumbled, covering her dripping
mouth. Liv looked pained and wanted to help her; Tabitha just wanted to get
past. ‘I need to wash the taste out,’ she told her. ‘I’m sorry.’ Liv watched
her run off down the steps, edging past Chris and Sylvia into the keep.

‘What’s wrong with Tabitha?’ said Natalie in the garden,
watching her disappear inside.

‘She can’t eat, love,’ Paul said quietly, looking up
from the stretch of path he was sweeping.

‘She can’t eat?’ Natalie repeated.

‘Not a thing,’ he said sadly. ‘All she can stomach is
water, since she changed. That’s what Chris said, anyway.’

‘But if she can’t eat, isn’t she going to die?’ said
Natalie, turning to him in panic.

‘I don’t know, love,’ he said quietly. ‘No one seems to
know.’

‘We need to talk,’ said Chris, shutting the trap door at
the top of the keep.

‘What’s on your mind?’ Will replied, as he studied the
town below.

‘What?’ said Chris. Will turned to him. ‘You’ve never
said “what’s on your mind” before.’

‘Have I not?’ said Will, puzzled.

‘Makes you sound like a manager,’ Chris said with a
grin. ‘I think someone’s getting a leadership complex.’ Will could only think how
easy it was getting for Chris to deserve black eyes these days. He was
changing, and not for the better. Jim really had given him one hell of a panda
eye, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

‘Just tell me what’s wrong, Chris,’ Will said
impatiently.

‘It’s the food,’ Chris replied.

‘We’re running out,’ said Will. ‘I know.’

‘Yeah, we are,’ said Chris, looking intense. ‘Having
twice as many mouths to feed, that’s going to happen. I want to know what we’re
going to do when we run out.’

‘Well, we’re going to get some more food before
the old food runs out,’ Will suggested.

‘Where from?’ Chris snapped. ‘I’m not going out on a
food-finding mission. Not out there.’

‘Yeah, we know,’ Will replied. ‘We’ll go out and
get some more. We’ll take our guns. You’ll stay here, as usual. Don’t worry
about it.’

‘No, I am worried about it. I’m worried about starving
to death.’

‘Chris, what’s this about?’ said Will, turning to face
him. He’d never known someone to look so tense. ‘You’ve been acting weird ever
since Tabitha got here.’ Chris looked at him and sighed.

‘Well, we had a good thing here, before she came,’ said
Chris, smiling. It was a desperate smile. ‘There was just enough food to last
us. And just enough space. Now look at us. We’re a pissing hotel. Kids running
round screaming, dog shit all over the place, no proper bed to sleep in… and
soon we’ll have no bloody food left either.’

‘Look Chris, this isn’t just your home,’ Will told him.
‘It’s open to as many people who can fit inside it. It’s a bloody castle, mate.
Alright, it’s not a very big one, but it’s big enough. And as long as everyone
pulls their weight, we’re not going to run out of food.’

‘But there’s only so much space,’ Chris countered.

‘You just don’t see this place for what it can be,’ said
Will, shaking his head. ‘This is a place where we can thrive. When
there’s enough of us and we’re strong enough, we might even fight back and take
the town. And then you can have all the bloody space you want.’ Chris went to
say something, and changed his mind. The breeze ruffled his hair.

‘It was better before,’ Chris muttered, reaching for the
trapdoor.

‘Before what?’ Will asked him, not seeing his point.

‘Before her.’

26

It
was a quiet day; a day for jobs. Paul and Jim talked motorbikes all afternoon,
weeding the rest of the garden at an easy pace. The twins were playing fetch
with Laika. Liv watched Tabitha’s back from the curtain wall as she worked
outside the iron gate, making a round of the hill to check for spiders or spot
anywhere they could get in.

‘So, do you know anything about this secret project?’
Liv asked Tabitha quietly, as Tabitha headed back inside the curtain wall.

‘Project?’ Tabitha replied, smiling as she closed the
gate.

‘The one Will and Jim k-keep talking about,’ said Liv,
locking the gate bar with a clang.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Tabitha said brightly, still
smiling. ‘Would you like a brew?’

‘So you’re in on it!’ Liv accused her, following Tabitha
back up the courtyard. ‘What is it?’ she demanded, jogging up alongside her.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Tabitha said innocently.
Liv stamped her foot and growled up at the sky, and stormed off to find Natalie
to press the investigation.

Meanwhile Sylvia went snooping around upstairs, and emerged
with a book from Liv’s bedroom to read with the twins in the garden. Chris
tried his best to make awkward conversation with Natalie on the wall, until
they spotted Liv coming over. Natalie saw her chance to get away, and told
Chris that she had to help Liv with something.

Will watched over his growing family from the top of the
keep, and smiled to himself. He couldn’t help but take a bit of selfish pride
at the sight; this place had been so dark and dead when he’d first got here. He
took one last look over the garden, and headed back down through the trapdoor
to get to work in the kitchen.

As
the sun sank in the sky, Will stepped outside and invited everyone into the
keep.

‘A family that eats together stays together,’ he said
brightly, holding the door open for everyone to come inside. Tabitha stroked
Laika and led her into the keep after the others, walking in on excited chatter
inside. The small dining table had been extended with a few more tables from
the walls, and candles flickered on a bed sheet for a makeshift tablecloth.
There was even tinsel taped up around the walls and ceiling, and the light and
breeze of the summer evening still filled the room through the open door.

‘Will, it’s beautiful,’ said Liv, giving him a hug.
Everyone was making the right noises as they sat down to their fresh stew, and
Will was grinning. Even Laika had a good portion in her bowl.

‘Tuck in, everyone,’ he said happily.

‘Wait,’ said Sylvia, placing her hands together.

‘…Are we saying grace?’ Jim whispered to Liv. Liv
shrugged.

‘What?’ said Grace, eating her stew open-mouthed. The
table filled with smiles. Natalie shushed her while Sylvia waited to speak.
‘Jim said my name though,’ Grace protested, with a voice as high and clear as a
bell in the sudden silence.

‘Dear Lord,’ Sylvia began. ‘Thank you for bringing us
here to this safe place. Thank you for this meal, and for these good people.’

‘Amen,’ Paul joined in, smiling at the others around the
table. ‘Personally I think God’s a load of rubbish, but anyway. Amen to the
rest of it.’ The rest of the table grinned with him, watching Sylvia’s look of
distaste.

‘We’re all entitled to our beliefs, or sad lack
thereof,’ Sylvia replied, with a barbed tone. ‘Regardless. I’d like to thank
William, and everyone, for taking us into their home.’ She lifted her glass of
water to him. ‘It’s a big adjustment to make, to accommodate all of us. But
we’re going to take the rough with the smooth, and personally I hope there’s
plenty of both. Keeps things interesting.’ She winked at Will, and raised her
glass. ‘To the Ghosts,’ she said. Everyone joined in the toast, and promptly
dug into their stew.

Sylvia watched the table as they ate. She watched Chris
in particular, and how he behaved. After speaking with him for five minutes
this morning, Sylvia knew that he was a little shit stirrer. Unfortunately in
her experience, shit stirrers did seem to have a good nose for the stuff – and
they knew where it was coming from too. He certainly had a lot to say against
Tabitha, and there was bound to be some truth in that somewhere. She could
hardly forget her first meeting with the girl; a scene that looked for all the
world like a feral human threatening her family. Nor could she see past
Tabitha’s strange unnatural side. It was hidden away from view most of the
time, with only the slightest hint that it was there. But she saw it
nonetheless; a fleeting glimpse when Tabitha let her guard down. She saw it in
the way the girl watched them eat, with a jealousy verging on hatred. She saw
it in Tabitha’s reflexes, when she played catch with the twins. She moved too
quickly, too fluidly. She was unsettling. Tabitha caught her staring, and
looked at her. Sylvia held her gaze. Tabitha broke first and looked back down
awkwardly, and took a sip of water. Victorious, matriarchal, Sylvia turned her
attention back to her meal.

‘Tabitha doesn’t have any stew,’ said Robert, pointing
at her bowl with his spoon. ‘Will, Tabitha doesn’t have any,’ he said.

‘It’s alright,’ Tabitha said with a smile. ‘I’m not
really hungry.’

‘But you have to keep your strength up,’ Grace said with
concern. ‘That’s what New Grandma says.’ She looked over at Sylvia. ‘Everyone
needs to eat and keep their strength up, don’t they New Grandma?’ the table
fell silent, lost in an awkwardness that no one knew how to break.

‘I’ll just be a minute,’ said Tabitha, getting up from
the table and heading outside. Liv got up and followed her out.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Robert, looking around at them.

‘It’s alright,’ Paul told him. ‘Tabitha’s just not
feeling well, that’s all.’

Outside
Tabitha was opening the iron-barred gate in the wall.

‘What are you doing?’ Liv called over, running across
the courtyard to stop her.

‘I need to go,’ Tabitha sobbed. ‘I don’t belong here.’

‘What? Why? W-What’s happened?’

‘You’re all so… fucking human,’ she said, wiping
her tears away with her fingers. ‘Ow,’ she added angrily, looking down at her
coarse metal hands that had scraped her eyelids.

‘Tell me what you’re th-thinking,’ said Liv, trying to
hold the gate shut. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m thinking I don’t want to die like this,’ Tabitha
replied. She looked at Liv with stark teary eyes; yellow gold on bloodshot
pink. ‘I’m so hungry Liv. It’s driving me mad. I’d sooner die
fighting than starve to death.’

‘Then you’re giving up,’ said Liv. ‘Everything you’ve
gone th-through to get here, and you’re throwing it all away because you’ve got
it into your head that you’re s-starving to death.’ Liv took Tabitha’s hand and
turned her away from the gate. ‘You’re s-safe here, Tabitha. You’re loved
here. Don’t walk away from that. We’ll find a way round the hunger, somehow.’

‘It’s not just the hunger though,’ Tabitha replied,
sliding down the gate with her back against the bars. She sniffled, snotty.
‘It’s the way people look at me sometimes. Like they’re sorry for me. Or like
they hate me for what I am.’

‘Look, no one’s going to change what they think of you
just because you d-don’t like it,’ Liv snapped, banging the bolt shut on the
gate. The sound rang through the bars. She crouched down, and looked Tabitha in
the eyes. ‘If you don’t like what s-someone thinks about you, tell them to go
and fuck themselves and then walk away. Or I’ll d-do it for you, until you get
the hang of it. Or, I’ll throw them over the castle wall myself.’ Tabitha
laughed, and dabbed at her snot with her sleeve. Bats clicked overhead in the
purple sunset sky.

‘Here,’ said Liv, uncrumpling a tissue from her pocket.
‘Clean yourself up. You’re a snotty disgusting m-mess.’ Tabitha laughed again,
and filled the tissue with a crackling flow of wet snot.

‘Jesus,’ said Liv, cringing and looking away.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ said Tabitha,
leaning back against the gate.

‘Well I know what I’d do without you,’ Liv replied. ‘I’d
still have my last tissue and my last bloody piece of ch-chocolate.’ Tabitha
smiled. ‘Come on, let’s go b-back inside,’ Liv told her. ‘And don’t you dare
freak out on m-me like that again.’ Tabitha was just staring at her though,
wide-eyed. Her mouth was opening and closing.

‘Don’t, you look weird doing that,’ said Liv. Suddenly
her smile faded to a look of horror. Tabitha was gasping. There was a silver
needle in her neck.

‘Oh god!’ Liv screamed, trying to drag Tabitha away from
the gate. ‘Help!’ a spider on the other side was gripping her, with a claw
buried in her spine. Tabitha only stared ahead, wide-eyed and gasping. Her body
was jolting with the metal claw writhing in her spinal cord. Everyone came
rushing out of the keep, yelling and screaming when they caught sight of the
scene. Laika was frantic. Sylvia took one look at what was happening and pulled
the screaming twins back inside.

‘Get her away from the gate!’ yelled Will, pulling at
her other arm.

‘It’s inside her spine!’ Liv screamed, ducking away from
a silver claw through the bars. ‘We can’t just pull her away, it’ll paralyse
her!’

‘Do it!’ Will roared. Together they gripped her arms.
Paul grabbed her legs, and they pulled her away from the spider with a snapping
sound.

‘That was her spine!’ Liv screamed.

‘She’ll heal!’ said Will, getting them all back from the
gate. ‘Tabitha, can you hear me?’ he said, shaking her shoulder. She was
unconscious. ‘Just keep her on her side, make sure she’s breathing!’ he said.
Sobbing, Liv held her hand to Tabitha’s gasping mouth.

‘Is she breathing?’ Will demanded.

‘I think so,’ said Liv, panicking.

‘Is she breathing, yes or no?’ he yelled. ‘Get
your ear down and listen! Feel for her breath on your cheek!’

‘She’s breathing!’ said Liv, checking again.

‘Right, Chris, get your hand on this wound!’ Will
commanded, pressing his own hand against the hole in Tabitha’s back. Her silver
blood was already pouring between his fingers, puddling on the courtyard around
his knees. ‘Chris! You need to stop the blood while I get a bandage!’

‘But it’s spinal fluid, it might be infected,’ Chris
said nervously.

‘Fine!’ said Will, biting back his contempt. ‘You get
the bandages! Second box down on the right, by the kitchen counter! Go!’

‘Back from the gate everyone, right back!’ said Jim,
pulling Laika snarling and barking from the gate. ‘Natalie, go and sit down
love.’ He took her hand and led her back inside. She was trembling; white as a
sheet.

The spider lashed its tongue in through the bars, trying
to reach for them. Jim came back out from the keep with a rifle, and took aim
through the bars and shot the scrambling spider. It collapsed against the gate
with a dead metal clatter.

‘Liv, how’s her breathing?’ Will demanded, keeping his
hand pressed tight against the hole in Tabitha’s back.

‘It’s ok,’ she replied, staring at him nervously.

‘Take her hand, Liv. Talk to her,’ he said. ‘Chris,
where’s those bandages?’

‘Here!’ he said, rushing back outside and fumbling one
out of the packet. Will took it off him and unravelled it, and pressed it hard
against Tabitha’s wound.

‘Liv, I’m going to lift her body up a second and pass
the bandage through underneath,’ said Will. He heaved Tabitha’s side off the
cobbles, and poked the bandage through beneath. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Liv, blinking her tears back. She took hold
of the bandage and brought it up to meet the other end around Tabitha’s chest.

‘Tie it off for me Liv. Tie it as tight as you can,’
said Will calmly. Liv fumbled with the ends of the bandage, looped them round
one another, and pulled them tight into a knot.

‘And another bandage,’ said Will, motioning to Chris. He
pressed the second bandage pad against the first one, and he and Liv tied it
off tight on top.

‘I think the bleeding’s stopping,’ said Will, taking his
hand off the bandages.

‘Because it’s all come out already,’ Liv sobbed, looking
at the silver pool around them.

‘She’ll be alright,’ said Will, pushing his palm back
against the bandages. ‘As long as she’s still breathing, she’ll be alright. Liv,
try to keep her on her side.’

‘She’s p-pushing against me,’ Liv replied in shock.
Tabitha gasped a few silent words, and pointed at the spider’s corpse on the
other side of the gate.

‘Don’t,’ said Liv, as Will tried to hold her back.
Tabitha flopped down onto her front, and crawled on her elbows back towards the
gate.

‘Tell me what you n-need,’ Liv said desperately. ‘I’ll
bring it to you. Tell me.’ Tabitha could only gasp at the words though. They
wouldn’t come. All she could do was keep crawling for it. For life.

‘She needs the spider!’ said Liv, opening the gate to
pull the corpse inside with a clatter. Tabitha dragged her body up to it, and
held its wounded head to her mouth.

‘She’s drinking the blood, through the bullet hole,’ Liv
told them, as Will closed the gate. Tabitha drank at the wound like a baby on a
bottle, curling her body around the corpse. She started to feel her legs again,
as she gulped down the blood like silver milk. Her spine moved and clicked back
into place. She felt full, suddenly. Tripping. Thoughts raced; gunshots of
colour. A lightning kaleidoscope filled her head with bleeding rainbows; liquid
pyrotechnics and inkblot supernovas. All the world was silver; all the world
was peace. The high wrapped around her, an electrostatic bath; a forcefield
soul hammock. Tabitha rolled over on her back, and felt her own spilled blood
on the ground against her arms. It was the same blood as that spider. She
dabbed her hand and licked her fingers. It tasted just the same. Exquisite. She
watched the sky. The stars were stabbing through the dusk above; celestial
pinpricks of light that flared and tailed as she moved her head. Faces appeared
on either side of her as she stared up from the cobbles. She smiled. She knew
those faces. They were calling her name, like a distant dream. Waiting on the
far side of her glassy psychedelic trip.

‘Tabitha?’ said Liv, stroking her hair that was slick in
the silver puddle of blood.

‘I’m ok,’ Tabitha said quietly, smiling at her friend.
They held her hands, Liv and Will. She hardly felt their hands touching hers,
but she knew they were there holding on. It was the faintest feeling, just a
hint of a touch. She felt her heartcore reacting to the spider blood. Charged
and lubricated; stimulated into frenzied repair.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Will. ‘Does it hurt
anywhere?’

‘Just my whole spine,’ Tabitha croaked. ‘Liv, let’s not
talk by the gate again.’ Liv smiled and sobbed, kissing her head. Will called
to the others to come out and help her inside. Chris couldn’t be around her
though. He ducked back into the keep, with the image playing over and over in
his head. The way Tabitha looked when she was feeding on that spider. Like an
animal on a kill; like something possessed. A vampire, that’s what she was.
Draining the life out of that thing with a fierce intensity, hellish and feral.
One day soon, that could be him she was feeding on. It could be all of them.
The thought crept in and filled his head. She was just like the spiders, and no
one else could see it.

27

Tabitha
gasped and woke from weird dreams. She found herself in Liv’s room in the dawn
light. She happily fought off Laika’s frenzied attentions, and felt bandages
tight around her middle. She untied them and peeled off the absorbent pads from
her back, stiff with dry silver blood.

‘Thank god,’ said Liv, sitting on the floor beside her.
Tabitha jumped to see her there in the morning gloom.

‘Have you been there all night?’ said Tabitha, swinging
her feet down off the bed.

‘Of c-course,’ said Liv, smiling. ‘I wanted to m-make
sure you were alright. No one slept a wink last night.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tabitha, hugging her tight and kissing
her cheek. ‘Thank you for looking after me. All the time.’ Tabitha took Liv’s
hand and coaxed her up from the floor, and guided her by the shoulders to plonk
her down on the bed.

‘You’re sleeping today,’ Tabitha ordered.

‘You’re sure you’re alright?’ said Liv, while Tabitha
pulled the bed cover up over her.

‘I’m fine,’ she said gently. ‘Sleep, you.’

‘You’re up! How are you feeling?’ said Natalie, wiping
the table down as Tabitha came downstairs with Laika.

‘Incredible,’ she replied, grinning. Natalie hadn’t
expected her to be walking around so soon. She certainly hadn’t expected a hug.

‘Nobody could sleep last night, we were so worried,’
said Natalie. ‘We couldn’t get the twins to stop crying.’

‘I’m sorry for doing that to everyone,’ Tabitha replied.
‘It was a stupid place to sit, by the gate. I should have known better.’

‘Oh god no, don’t apologise,’ Natalie replied, handing
her a cup of water. ‘I’m just glad you’re alright. You’ll have to see the
twins.’

‘Where are they, in the garden?’ said Tabitha, pushing
the door open on a gorgeous morning.

‘Tabitha,’ Natalie called to her quietly. ‘We were all
really scared for you last night. Jim was crying.’

‘Oh god,’ said Tabitha. ‘It must have been bad. But I
don’t remember half of it, to be honest.’

‘It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,’ said
Natalie. ‘And I’ve seen some messed up stuff. It’s probably better that you
don’t remember it, actually.’

‘I’m sorry you had to see it,’ Tabitha replied
awkwardly. She didn’t know what else to say. She wasn’t in any great pain; she
hardly remembered the grizzly details. Everything that happened was a blur of
shock. There’d been fierce pain, and then nothing. She’d passed out and woken
up with a feral hunger she’d never felt before; bloodlust. And then a sudden
burst of silver light as she drank the spider, when the world had blown into
twisting colours like ink in water. She’d felt so full and high and
tingly-intense after her bloodmeal that she could have orgasmed. Maybe she had.
After that she’d slept like a baby, and somehow the whole ordeal had been worth
it just to sate her sickening hunger.

‘Tabitha?’

‘Hm?’ she snapped out of her daydream and found herself
in the kitchen. Natalie was looking at her.

‘Are you ok?’

‘Oh yeah, fine, thanks,’ Tabitha said absentmindedly.
‘Just… a bit of a flashback, that’s all.’ Natalie looked pained about it; she
needn’t have. Tabitha couldn’t remember feeling this good before. Like someone
had turned up the colour and the sharpness on life, all the way to the top.

‘Sorry, what was I doing?’ said Tabitha, hanging around
in the doorway.

‘You should go and see everyone,’ said Natalie.
‘Especially the twins.’ Tabitha nodded in a smiling daze, and wandered outside.

‘Hey you two,’ she said, walking down into the garden
with Laika in tow. Grace and Robert ran over as she sat down on the grass, and
hugged her tight.

‘We thought you were going to die,’ Grace said quietly.

‘Will said you wouldn’t though,’ Robert added. ‘He said
you had special powers.’

‘Have you got special powers?’ Grace whispered in her
ear, like a close-guarded secret.

‘Yes I do,’ Tabitha whispered back, smiling at Grace’s
look of surprise.

‘What special powers?’ said Grace, desperate to find out.

‘She’s got healing,’ Robert said knowingly.

‘Yep,’ Tabitha replied, showing off the hole in the back
of her top. ‘Look. No scar.’

‘Just mental scarring for the rest of us,’ Will joked,
walking over from the wall.

‘You saved my life,’ said Tabitha, getting up and
hugging him tight.

‘Well, technically you saved your life,’ he
replied, smiling at Jim and Paul coming over.

‘We just stopped all the life leaking out of you.’

‘You did make a bloody mess though,’ Jim chipped in. ‘I
was up all night scrubbing that courtyard. Don’t you ever do that to me again,
lass. Frightened the life out of me, seeing you like that.’

‘Sorry Jim,’ she said, looking up into his tired old
eyes. She gave him a tight hug.

‘I’m so glad you’re alright,’ said Sylvia behind her,
coming down the steps from the wall. ‘We were so worried.’

‘Thanks,’ said Tabitha, giving her an awkward hug. There
was something off about her, though. Like she was holding back; distancing
herself. Tabitha supposed she shouldn’t be too surprised about that.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Chris, coming down from the
wall. It was a cursory question though, nothing more. No trace of concern in
his tone. A formality.

‘Much better, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Hungry though.
Really hungry.’ She couldn’t miss the way Chris stared at her then. He couldn’t
hide his feelings to save his life. He looked afraid of her.

‘Yeah, we thought you might be hungry,’ Will replied
warmly. ‘We kept the spider for you.’

‘It’s round the back of the keep here,’ said Will, as if
it was completely normal, walking with Tabitha down the circular path from the
garden. Tucked away around the corner was the dead spider that attacked her
last night, sat in a pool of dried silver blood on the cobbles.

‘Is there anything you need?’ he said, watching her
approach it.

‘Oh, no thanks,’ she said with a smile.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then,’ he said brightly,
awkwardly, and walked off back round the corner. Tabitha looked at the metal
corpse at her feet, and felt a surge of hunger inside her. It was a primal hate
and a nervous lust; some strange new feeling she’d never felt before. Any kind
of etiquette she’d felt obliged to maintain flew out of the window. She threw
herself down on the dead spider and ripped its armour open, and sank her teeth
into stringy white muscles. She bit down with a fibrous creak and sucked at
silver blood. A cold deliciousness filled her mouth, like juice bleeding from
the flesh of an orange. A liquid thrill, tasty and potent. She gulped it down,
gasped at the perfect taste, and quickly went back for more. How long had it
been since she’d kept a meal down? Two weeks? Three? She drank another mouthful
of bliss and threw her head back, staring at the bright blue sky with the taste
of life on her tongue. Orgasmic.

‘Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were here,’ said
Sylvia in surprise, getting a good eyeful before she turned to walk back around
the corner.

‘Yes you did,’ Tabitha called to her. Sylvia stopped and
looked at her, affronted. ‘You knew exactly what you’d see here,’ said Tabitha,
sitting back on the path with silver blood coating her chin. ‘Was it the kind
of freakshow you’d hoped for?’

‘I’m not here to judge anyone,’ Sylvia snapped.

‘But you do it anyway,’ Tabitha countered, getting to
her feet. The blood’s silver-glass psychedelia changed the world as she looked
around. She felt her core thriving on it; easing her muscles and blowing down
her fears like an old brick wall. Horny voltage peeled away her old nature,
until she felt her new self deeper inside. She’d had enough of Sylvia’s
matriarch routine, standing there staring like a grim nun. All her righteous
distaste and bulletproof snobbery.

‘You know, it’s a shame you can’t try that silver stuff,’
Tabitha told her with a sensuous tone, licking her lips slowly as she walked
over. She got up in Sylvia’s face. ‘Because it’s so, fucking, good.’ Her lips
dripped silver. Her gold eyes smouldered under blood-red curls. Nervous, Sylvia
edged back a little. Tabitha studied her face; that look in her eyes. ‘Say it.’

‘Say what?’ Sylvia replied, backing up a step.

‘Whatever you’re thinking about.’

‘Nothing we haven’t already discussed,’ she said
awkwardly. ‘Just stay away from my family.’

‘They’re not your family,’ said Tabitha, wiping the
silver blood off her chin. ‘And any problem you’ve got with me, come out and
say it. I don’t like the way you look at me.’

‘Well, I don’t like the way you look.’

‘How do I look?’

‘Feral,’ said Sylvia. ‘Unnatural.’ Tabitha grinned.

‘If only you could feel what I feel,’ Tabitha replied
quietly, holding Sylvia’s stare.

‘Tabitha!’ said Will, running back round the corner.
‘It’s the spiders, they’re outside!’

‘How many?’ she said, leaving Sylvia standing there.
Will looked terrified.

‘All of them,’ he said.

‘Oh my god,’ Natalie muttered, watching the silver swarm
from the curtain wall. They’d massed on the field below, a chittering horde of
fifty at least.

‘What’s happening?’ said Robert, looking up at everyone
on the wall.

‘Come inside now,’ said Sylvia, taking Robert and Grace
by the hand and leading them back into the keep. ‘And you, Natalie.’

‘I’m staying with them,’ she replied. Sylvia stared at
her; Natalie looked defiant. ‘I want to help.’

‘You’ll help them by coming inside, out of the way,’
Sylvia told her.

‘If Natalie wants to fight, we’ll gladly have her,’ Will
chipped in, looking to Paul.

‘But she’s too young!’ Sylvia protested.

‘I’m nineteen!’ Natalie shot back. ‘And I’ll do whatever
I like Sylvia, thank you!’

‘Natalie,’ Paul warned her.

‘What?’ she replied, watching Sylvia hurry the twins
inside and shut the door. ‘No one tells me what to do. Especially someone I’ve
only known a few weeks.’

‘I like her,’ Liv muttered to Tabitha. The group lined
the wall and watched the horde with morbid fascination. The spiders had come
for them in force.

‘I’ve seen them massing like this before,’ Tabitha told
the group, nodding at the spiders down in the field. ‘They swarmed when they
were chasing us through town, but this is different. Now they’re coming
together to hunt us.’ She thought back to the horde that had scuttled down
across the motorway, storming the village over the distant field. She’d just
brought the car to a standstill, and watched them go. It was all she could do.

‘We can set fires down there and kill a few at once,’
Will suggested, watching the spiders scuttle and lurk on the field.

‘It won’t work,’ Tabitha replied, remembering the
crashed fighter jet. ‘I’ve seen one sitting in a fire before. It didn’t
even flinch.’

‘We’re safe behind the wall,’ said Chris, looking for
someone to agree. ‘We don’t need to do anything. They’ll find out they
can’t get to us, and they’ll leave us alone.’ Tabitha noticed how shaky his
voice sounded.

‘That’s n-not going to work,’ said Liv. ‘They’ve been
here before and given up trying to get to us. If they’re back now, then that
means they’re d-determined to get in.’

‘Liv’s right,’ said Jim. ‘They’ve come back here for us.
They’ll try to get up over the wall.’

‘So they’re here for a fight,’ said Will, watching the
silver shapes. ‘Well let’s give them one.’

‘What do we need to do?’ said Paul.

‘We’re getting the riot gear on,’ said Will, nodding at
the keep. ‘And the shields too. Paul, Natalie, you go with Chris. He’ll show
you how to use the assault rifles. I’ll keep an eye on the spiders. The rest of
you… you know what to do. Just be ready when it starts.’

‘Come on girl,’ said Tabitha, leading Laika upstairs
into Liv’s room. ‘You stay here now. Stay. Good girl.’ She stroked Laika’s
head, and looked into her mismatched eyes. ‘I don’t want you running out there
playing hero, dog face,’ she told her softly, while she reached for her belt
and hunting knife under the bed. ‘We both know how that turned out at the
petrol station.’ She ran her fingers over Laika’s scar on her side, where her
fur was growing back. ‘Be good,’ she said, leaving Laika whining as she closed
the door. Her riot gear was hot and awkward to move in. Better to have it on,
though.

As Tabitha headed back downstairs, Robert and Grace
looked up at her with frightened faces. Sylvia was fussing over them, trying to
read them a book. She paused to wipe some dirt from Robert’s cheek with a
tissue from her cardigan sleeve.

‘Tabitha, what’s happening?’ said Grace.

‘Never mind, Grace. Come on, let’s read this next page
together,’ said Sylvia, as she tucked the tissue back into her sleeve.

‘We’re fighting the spiders,’ Tabitha replied, smiling
at the twins’ interest. Sylvia gave Tabitha a quick dark stare, as if she’d let
slip a terrible secret. As if it was best to just not talk about the danger
outside.

‘Are you going to beat them with your special powers?’
said Robert.

‘Yep,’ Tabitha replied, picking up her riot shield and helmet
and heading for the door. ‘You two be good and stay in here, ok? It’s not safe
outside.’

‘Ok,’ they said together, watching her go. Sylvia glared
at her as Tabitha shut the door behind her.

‘Any news?’ said Tabitha, walking up onto the wall to
join the others. Liv, Jim and Will were in their riot gear too. Everyone held a
rifle. Everyone looked scared.

‘Nothing n-new,’ Liv replied. ‘Just some alien spiders
swarming on our doorstep to kill us.’ Paul coughed nervously. ‘But at least
they’ve not m-moved, and there aren’t any more of them.’

‘Oh, and two more soldiers to join the fabled Ghosts,’
Will told her, motioning to Paul and Natalie.

‘Congratulations,’ Tabitha said with a smile, buckling
on her belt. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Ready to fuck some spiders up,’ Natalie replied,
lifting her assault rifle.

‘Oi, language,’ said Paul, glaring at her. ‘…But yeah,
me too. It’s about time we got some revenge.’

‘Just remember, shots are a last resort,’ Will cautioned
the group. ‘Unless they’re climbing up the walls, don’t shoot.’

‘Yeah, I’ve told them already,’ Chris chipped in.

‘Well I’m saying it again,’ said Will. ‘If they’re on
the walls or getting through that gate, then you shoot. Aim carefully
and take single shots. If they’re not getting in, just watch and wait from a
distance. And talk to each other. Let everyone know what you’re seeing.’

‘I’ll take the gate,’ said Tabitha. ‘If one gets me
through the bars, at least I’m not done for.’

‘Agreed,’ said Will. ‘Paul, go with her please mate. You
can cover her from the wall. So Jim, where did you hide those spears?’ Jim
tapped his nose to hint at his secret, and headed back towards the keep.

‘Spears?’ said Liv, watching him go inside. ‘The ones
propped up in the corner?’

‘Yep,’ said Will. ‘Except they’ve been gone for a few
days, if you noticed?’ Liv shook her head. ‘They were totally blunt,’ Will told
her. ‘Jim’s been sharpening them up again so we could use them. And hiding them
from the kids, of course.’

‘He kept that quiet,’ said Liv. Looking around though, no
one else seemed surprised. A lightbulb went off in her head. ‘Wait, that was
the project you two were always whispering about!’ she said. Everyone
was smiling. ‘Why did it have to be a s-secret?’ Will shrugged.

‘We just thought it’d wind you up, not knowing,’ he
said, grinning like a schoolboy. ‘We saw you snooping around the castle
sometimes, trying to find out what we were up to. It was too funny to spoil it.’

‘You little sods!’ Liv snapped. Will laughed. ‘What was
the point in that?’ she said, frustrated. Will shrugged again, grinning.
‘As if anyone would be that immature!’ she said, stomping her foot. ‘And you
all knew about this?’

‘Yep,’ Tabitha said with a smile. Chris, Paul and
Natalie nodded, grinning.

‘But that’s s-so childish!’ said Liv. ‘Why?’

‘Mystery solved then?’ Jim called over, carrying the
pair of spears back up the courtyard.

‘You sneaky git!’ Liv snapped at him, watching him grin
like a big kid. ‘Was it worth it, really?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he chuckled, climbing the steps onto the
wall. ‘Sorry, lass. You’re just so easy to wind up.’

‘Oh, piss off,’ said Liv, crossing her arms in a sulk.

‘Wow, good job sharpening them,’ said Will, taking hold
of a spear. Jim smiled proudly as Will admired his work. The spearheads were
aged and dull for the most part, but they had fresh keen edges that shone
cruelly in the sun.

‘What do you reckon?’ said Will, passing the spear to
Tabitha. ‘Are these going to be much use against them?’

‘Er, yeah, these’ll do it,’ Tabitha replied,
dumbfounded, staring up six feet of wooden pole at an evil point on the top.
She’d been in on the joke on Liv too, but she hadn’t seen Jim’s project until
now. Suddenly the shining hunting knife on her belt didn’t seem all that
impressive.

‘They’re getting closer,’ said Natalie, watching the spiders
creep up the field.

‘Right,’ said Will, watching the silver shapes moving.
‘Tabitha, take that spear and go to the gate please. Paul, go with her for
supporting fire. Liv, you and Natalie take the middle stretch of the curtain
wall please, and Chris and Jim, take the far end of the wall around the side.
I’ll take the other spear and move between all of you. Just keep the talk up if
anything happens.’ The Ghosts spread out to their positions. They stood in
silence for the most part, watching the spiders and waiting.

‘It’s so tempting to take a shot from here,’ said
Natalie, watching the spiders across the field down her rifle scope.

‘It really is,’ said Liv, trying her own scope. ‘I’d
have that cocky one there, the one sitting out in front on his own.’

‘Oh, that’s mine,’ Natalie replied, smiling. ‘I saw him
first.’

‘You think you c-could hit him from here?’ said Liv.

‘Pretty sure I could, yeah.’

‘Well, we’ll s-see about that.’ said Liv. ‘Will, we’re
taking a shot!’ she called across the wall.

‘No, absolutely not,’ he called back from the gate.

‘Do it anyway,’ Liv muttered to her, nodding Natalie to
the wall. Natalie aimed down her rifle scope, paused, and squeezed the trigger.
An echoing crack, and the spider in her sights dropped dead.

‘What did I just say?’ Will yelled. Natalie looked at
Liv guiltily.

‘Sorry, I misheard you!’ Liv called back, grinning with
Natalie. She looked down her scope at Natalie’s kill. ‘Jesus girl, you’re a
g-good shot,’ Liv told her. Natalie smiled. Her dad caught her eye by the gate
and turned away from Will beside him, and gave her a discreet thumbs up.
Natalie grinned proudly, and shrugged as if it was nothing.

‘Has the fighting started?’ said Tabitha down by the
gate, picking up her helmet off the ground.

‘No, it’s just Liv being a knob,’ Will muttered,
climbing the stairs onto the wall beside her. ‘Paul, you might be better off
coming up here actually mate. You’ve got a better shot on the other side of the
gate from this corner of the wall.’

‘Right,’ he said, jogging up the steps. He tripped near
the top, but managed not to fall. ‘Sorry,’ he said nervously, joining Will on
the wall.

‘It’s fine mate,’ Will said brightly. ‘You’re in good
hands with Tabitha. Just stay relaxed. Stay focussed.’

‘Right,’ said Paul, breathing out. He shook his legs
like he was ready for a football match.

‘We’ll be alright,’ Tabitha told him, smiling. ‘They’re
not getting through this gate.’ Paul nodded with a tense smile, and breathed
out nervously.

‘They’re coming!’ Liv shouted across the wall.

‘Right!’ Will called back. ‘Are you two good to go?’ he
asked them.

‘Yep,’ said Tabitha, putting her riot helmet on.

‘Yeah,’ Paul replied nervously.

‘Alright. I’ll be back down as soon as I can,’ said
Will. He glanced out over the park. The spider horde was creeping up the hill
towards the castle walls; a shining deathly tide come to wipe them out. This
was war. Will breathed deep in a moment of silence; looking for the words.

‘Right everyone, stay calm, stay focussed!’ he shouted
across the wall, making his way along the battlements with a spear in his hand.
‘This is where it all starts! Remember everything those monsters took from you!
Find all your anger and all your hate! Use it! Rain it down on them! They do
not climb these walls! These are our walls!’

‘We’re going to fuck them up!’ Liv yelled. She thought
about her family. Everyone the creatures had taken from her.

‘Come and get it you little bastards!’ Jim shouted down,
thinking about his wife and kids.

‘Pay them back for everyone they’ve taken from you! From
us!’ Will yelled across the walls. His voice echoed in the dead town. ‘Here and
now, this is where the Ghosts rise up from the dead! Today we do more than just
survive! This isn’t survival, it’s domination! This is where it all
starts! This is the day the world fights back!’ the Ghosts’ shouts echoed off
the curtain wall.

‘They’re coming up the steps!’ said Jim, peering over
the wall. Down below the spiders were winding their way up the hill.

‘Come on then!’ Tabitha roared, smashing her spear against
the gate. ‘I’m going to carve you open and drink your fucking blood!
Come on!’ Paul watched her from the wall with a shocked fascination.

‘Are you ready Paul?’ she yelled.

‘Ready!’ he shouted back, aiming his rifle down at the
steps outside. A sudden tide of silver shapes rushed and clattered up the steps
and crashed fierce against the gate. Tabitha yelled and drove her spear deep
into the first one that reached through the bars. She ripped the spear out with
a gush of silver blood, and thrust it through a second with a tinny crunch.
Twisted, pulled, blood gushing, and buried the spear tip in a shrieking third.

‘Open fire!’ Will yelled across the castle, as the
spiders started scaling the wall. There was a sudden rattling roar of gunshots,
and the climbing spiders tumbled from the walls and crashed back down the hill.
A frenzied hail of shouting echoed from the walls, drowned out by the crackling
thunder of gunfire. The spiders crawled and dropped and crawled again, reeling
from shots and crashing apart on the rocks like shining scrap. A shrieking tide
that never gave up; a constant creeping crowd. The Ghosts fought them back with
everything they had; every shout and shot and raw frayed nerve.

‘Tabitha, how’s the gate?’ Will called over.

‘Fine!’ she yelled back, slamming her shield against a
spider’s tongue that shot through the bars. She replied with her spear,
snarling as she shoved it in through the spider’s mouth. Silver blood puddled
around her feet. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all theirs!’ she told Paul, when he looked
down at all the blood. ‘Keep firing!’ she said. He turned back to the spiders
over the wall and plugged another two that scrambled up the steps.

‘Save your bullets! Wait for a clear shot!’ Will shouted
across the battlements, leaning over the wall to spear another spider climbing
up.

‘They keep coming!’ Natalie yelled, shooting a climber
in the head as it lashed out with its tongue.

‘Good! Let them come!’ Liv yelled back. She squeezed the
trigger and punched a bullet hole in another, and watched it shudder and drop
suddenly off the wall. With adrenaline gripping their bodies, every minute felt
like an hour. The spindly silver shapes seemed to scale the walls in slow
motion. Aiming their guns took a lifetime. Every sharp sudden shot was a soaring
victory, or a terrifying defeat and another bullet wasted. Their hearts leapt
when they watched a spider lose its footing, and crash down on the rocks below
the walls.

Tabitha screamed and buried her spear into another one
through the gate. Cutting through armour and ripping the spear back out; a
slow-motion speckle-drop burst of shining silver blood.

‘I’m out of bullets!’ Chris shouted to Will, as he made
his way over with a spear.

‘How many are climbing up there?’ Will called over.

‘There’s no more here,’ said Jim, looking over the wall.

‘If any more come up, leave them to Jim,’ said Will. ‘I
can’t afford to give you any more bullets.’

‘But that’s insane!’ Chris shouted. ‘I can’t help him to
fight if I don’t have any bullets!’

‘And we’re all screwed if we waste all the bullets now!’
said Will. ‘Let Jim handle it!’

‘Tabitha’s hurt!’ Paul yelled. Will left Jim and Chris
to it, and ran back along the wall.

‘They got her in the leg,’ said Paul, as Will came
running over.

‘It’s fine,’ said Tabitha, picking herself up off the
courtyard and hobbling to her feet.

‘What’s the damage?’ said Will, watching the spiders
trying to claw at her through the gate. Leaning over the wall, he managed to
spear one in the side with a metallic shriek.

‘It’s nothing, it’s healing up,’ she said. ‘I just got
sloppy. I can fight.’

‘Alright then, I’ll take your word for it,’ said Will.
‘Keep it on them you two, you’re slaughtering them!’ Tabitha staggered back to
the gate and gritted her teeth for revenge, and thrust her spear into another
one that reached in for her.

‘They’ve stopped climbing up over here!’ Natalie
shouted, looking down over the wall.

‘Right!’ Will called back. ‘Paul, how’s your ammo?’

‘Almost out, I think,’ he said.

‘Right, Natalie! Come up here please!’ Will called down
the wall. She came running.

‘Natalie, help your dad keep them away from the gate,’
Will told her. Natalie nodded and ran over to be with her dad. Paul watched his
daughter lean over fiercely and shoot a spider climbing the wall, looking for
all the world like a trained soldier in combat. He felt insanely proud of her,
and insanely worried for her in equal measure.

‘Dad!’ said Natalie, snapping him out of it. ‘Let’s give
it to them!’ Paul nodded and leant over the wall beside her, and shot another
spider edging up the grass on the hill.

‘Badass,’ said Natalie with a smile, giving her dad a
nudge.

‘They’re on the run!’ Jim shouted. ‘Look!’ the dozen or
so remaining spiders were scuttling away down the hill and onto the field below,
heading back towards town. Cheers echoed across the walls. Tabitha finished off
one that Natalie shot, and staggered breathlessly away from the gate. She sat
down in the courtyard, unclipping her leg guard for a better look at her wound.

‘How is it?’ said Paul, looking at the silver blood
streaming down her boot. Natalie was staring.

‘Fine, thanks,’ Tabitha replied, wincing as she pushed
the skin together on either side of the slice. ‘Claw got in between my leg
guards. It’s alright, it’s closing up.’

‘You’re handy with a spear,’ Paul told her. ‘Terrifying,
actually.’

‘Thanks,’ Tabitha laughed, hobbling to her feet again.
‘I never knew I was a spear kind of girl. So, do you still not like holding a
gun?’ Paul smiled and held his rifle tight.

‘Hey, if it keeps my family safe, I’ll stand there by
that gate all day and all night with this gun in my hands.’

‘We’ll take it in shifts,’ Natalie added, hugging him
tight. They turned at the sound of cheering along the wall, as the Ghosts
watched the last spiders limping away into town.

The
rest of the day passed on a high; the warm sunlight and the singing birds had
never felt sweeter. Nothing amplified life like knowing they were still around
to enjoy it.

‘Is anyone else really hungry?’ said Natalie, picking at
the grass in the garden where they all sat in the sun.

‘Starving, actually,’ said Paul, watching the twins
chasing a butterfly along the path. ‘Why don’t we see what we’ve got to eat?’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Chris, getting up off the
grass with Paul and Natalie.

‘That’s a first,’ said Jim. He looked at Liv. It wasn’t
like Chris to volunteer his help, ever. He had been looking at Natalie a lot
though.

‘Chris,’ Liv called to him, waving him back over. She
waited for Paul and Natalie to disappear into the keep. ‘I don’t think
Natalie’s interested in you,’ Liv told him. Chris glared at her, and said
nothing as he turned and walked off towards the keep.

‘Hey, whatever motivates him to help out in the
kitchen,’ said Will. ‘I don’t think Chris has ever helped to make a meal
before.’

‘Bit of grub wouldn’t go amiss, whatever slop he ends up
making,’ said Jim, rubbing his rumbling stomach.

‘I think I’ll get something to eat too. Or drink.
Whatever you want to call it,’ said Tabitha, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll be
outside the walls for a bit, ok?’

‘No worries,’ said Will. ‘Just give us a shout if
anything happens.’ Tabitha nodded and walked off for the gate.

‘I know one th-thing though,’ Liv said quietly, sitting
back on the grass. ‘Chris is going to be stirring some shit about T-Tabitha
while he’s in there.’

‘Probably,’ said Will, lying down in the sunshine. ‘But
that’s freedom of speech. It’s a free castle. We’re not going to start policing
people’s opinions.’

‘I just don’t want any of the n-new folks to take her
the wrong way,’ Liv muttered, watching the sparrows. ‘Especially Sylvia.’

‘Everyone takes everyone in their own way,’ said Will,
watching the clouds. ‘Tabitha’s different. People are bound to talk about that.
But we need to trust people to make up their own minds about her. About all of
us.’

‘Wisdom Will, that’s what I’m going to call you,’ said
Jim, lying back on the grass for a snooze. ‘Someone give me a nudge when Chris
brings my food out. I’ve been waiting for him to cook us something for a long
time.’

‘Just smell it for poison before anyone eats it,’ said
Liv. Will chuckled, and sneezed at the bright blue sky. Liv watched him
smiling, squinting at the sunlight; oblivious to her. So what was going on with
him and Tabitha? She’d never seen them together, they never talked about one
another… were they having problems already? Or had she just gotten the wrong
end of the stick the other day? Had she imagined the whole thing and nothing
was going on at all? The more she puzzled over it, the more muddled it became.
She’d have to ask Tabitha straight, when she could get her alone. Maybe there
was no Will and Tabitha any more, or maybe there never had been. She could try
for Will’s attention now, though she’d tried and failed so many times before.
She looked away from him sadly and watched a bumblebee browsing the flowers by
the keep. Sparrows fluttered down on the far edge of the grass, hopping between
the bushes. Liv stared into nothing, lost in thought. All that rage and all
that violence up on the wall, and now everything was back to the same bright
sunbleached silence. All was right with the world again, empty and lethal as it
was. Maybe it was a world that she’d just have to face on her own.

Tabitha
made her way down the stone steps outside the gate, winding her way down the
hill onto the field. It was a bright afternoon, with a hot sun and a cool
breeze. The spiders piled by the walls were too close; she wanted the walk.

A lone dead spider out on the field dazzled her in the
light, reflecting the sun. She ripped a leg off it and sucked the blood from
the meat; cold and fresh like electric double cream. She looked back at the
castle, and out at the town beyond the park gates. Thinking.

She saw no sign of spiders around in town, as she made her
way downhill and round a bend in the road towards the dead shops. Birds filled
the silence with cheeps and songs, the only sounds in the world. From the top
of the high street she had a good view of the stone archway where she’d first
come into town, and the fields beyond too. There was a line of dots there,
moving across the fields, catching the sunlight. The silver spiders, marching
off into the countryside. From here they looked no bigger than mites.

‘They’re leaving,’ she mumbled to herself, staring in
disbelief.

Prowling a row of terraced houses, Tabitha booted a
front door open and whipped her assault rifle round from the strap on her back.
There was a musty smell as she crept through the hallway, like a charity shop.
She tried her best to ignore the sound of buzzing flies upstairs, and headed
into the kitchen. The cupboards were filled with tins. Taking two big shopping
bags from a cupboard, she filled them with whatever she could find – spaghetti,
gravy granules, soup, beans. The next house had empty cupboards, and the one
after that. It seemed like a lot of people had tried to just pack up and leave.
Another house down the street was a jackpot though. Easily enough tins to keep
them all going for a week or more, if they were sparing with their meals. On
her way to her third house, Tabitha stopped and picked up an MP3 player off the
street. She wriggled an earbud in and tried to switch it on. It didn’t work.

‘Obviously,’ she sighed, tugging the earbud out. She
tossed the music player across the street with an expensive clatter, and
mumbled the song she’d most wanted to hear on it.

By
late afternoon Tabitha came traipsing back across the field towards the castle
with two full shopping bags. Her arms ached with the weight as she climbed the
steps. It was only when she saw the spider corpses littered around the walls
that she remembered how hungry she was. She set her bags down for a second, and
tore into the nearest spider curled up on the steps. One taste of its cold
blood made her gasp, desperate for more. She ripped at the white flesh and
shoved her face into the hole, lapping and sucking at the silver blood that
pooled inside. Swallowing it gave her tingles down her spine. The world looked
sharper, more vivid when she looked up. The sky was water-blue. And Chris was
standing there above her on the wall, looking down at her. He didn’t say
anything; he didn’t have to. She could see the revulsion on his face. He just
stared at her, as if catching her feeding was accusation enough.

‘What are you up to?’ said Liv, coming up beside him.
‘Hi!’ she said, looking down to see Tabitha below. ‘You’ve been gone ages, we
were getting worried.’

‘I found food,’ Tabitha replied, wiping the spider’s
blood from her chin.

‘Bloody hell, nice work!’ said Liv. ‘I’ll give you a
hand with the b-bags!’

‘So you’re just going to pretend you didn’t see that?’
Chris muttered to her quietly, turning away from the wall. Liv glared at him.

‘See what? T-Tabitha eating?’ she said.

‘You’re acting like it’s normal,’ he said quietly. ‘Her
ripping into those things. Like an animal. It’s fucked up.’

‘She’s doing what she n-needs to stay alive,’ Liv shot
back, waving away a fly. ‘We all are. It’s s-survival, like you said, remember?
And you’re the only one here who’s making it into a problem.’

‘It’s not just me who’s got a problem with it,’ he
replied. ‘Ask Sylvia.’

‘No need,’ said Liv. ‘I’m sure you’ve already p-poured
all your opinions into her ear, you slimy little shit.’ Chris glared angrily,
and watched her go. ‘Keep stirring,’ Liv called back over her shoulder. Chris
bit back his words, and walked off down the wall.

‘Wow,’ said Will, setting out Tabitha’s tins and jars on
the table. Everyone had gathered round to look at the haul, chatting excitedly
about what was on the menu. ‘And you didn’t run into any spiders in all
that time?’

‘Well that’s just it,’ said Tabitha, rubbing Laika’s
side. ‘They’ve gone.’

‘Gone?’ said Jim, looking up from the tin of peas he’d
been admiring. The room fell quiet.

‘I saw them on the fields,’ she said, suddenly awkward
in the silence. ‘They were marching off in a line.’

‘Get in!’ Will shouted, slamming his fist on the table.
Everyone jumped. ‘We’ve won!’ he told the room. ‘We’ve got the town back!’

‘We don’t know that,’ Sylvia chipped in. ‘They may be
coming back with more.’ She had a point, thought Tabitha, though she didn’t
want to say she agreed. She didn’t want to give Sylvia the satisfaction. Robert
glanced around and took a chocolate bar off the table while no one was looking.

‘You mean like reinforcements?’ said Paul. ‘But they’re spiders,
they wouldn’t think like that.’ He looked around for someone to agree.
Desperately hoping.

‘Exactly!’ said Will, filled with a new energy. ‘They
already swarmed on us, and we beat them! I mean come on, they’re animals,’ he
told the room. ‘Animals understand two things. Hunger, and threat. If they’re
leaving, I don’t think they’re coming back.’ The room erupted into chatter
again.

‘I can’t b-believe it,’ said Liv, grinning.

‘Believe it,’ Will replied, giving her a hug.

‘I can’t,’ she said playfully, her voice muffled in his
jumper.

‘You have to,’ he insisted, resting his chin on her head
while they embraced. When she hugged him tighter Will felt butterflies in his
stomach. Maybe he was finally ready to move on from losing Anna and let himself
get close to Liv. God knew, he’d wanted to. He just didn’t want to go trampling
all over Anna’s memory in the process. When Liv glanced at Tabitha to gauge her
reaction to their hug, she was even more confused. Tabitha was smiling at her.

‘We can go out and get all the food in town,’ Natalie
said excitedly, thinking about tinned hot dogs. She hadn’t seen any on the
table. She’d dreamt about hot dogs some nights, when her gnawing hunger finally
gave way to sleep.

‘I can get back to my house,’ said Jim, thinking about
his allotment and Mary’s photographs.

‘And look for survivors,’ Will chipped in, releasing Liv
from their hug. Chris chuckled at that.

‘I don’t think there’s going to be any survivors,
somehow,’ said Chris, appealing to the room.

‘Do you know that?’ Will shot back.

‘Well no, but –

‘So don’t write off people’s lives like that if you
don’t know,’ Will snapped.

‘Alright, fine,’ Chris said defensively, throwing his
hands up. He turned his attention back to the food on the table.

‘When are we going?’ said Natalie.

‘First thing tomorrow,’ Will replied. ‘I want to get as
much food back here as we can. It’ll be hard work, so everyone get some good
sleep tonight. Especially after our big victory feast.’ The room filled with
smiles. ‘Right. I’m going to get the fire going for the biggest pot of chilli
you’ve ever seen. Jim… bring forth the secret whiskey.’

‘The big bottle?’ said Jim, nodding very discreetly at
the toolbox in a dark corner.

‘No, the secret secret whiskey,’ Will replied, nodding
even more discreetly at the boxes across the room. At the plastic bottle of
curiously golden methylated spirits.

‘You sneaky gits,’ said Liv, eyeing them up.

‘You’ve got no idea,’ Jim chuckled, ambling off to ratch
through the boxes for the whiskey. Tabitha watched Jim filling a few glasses on
the table, and handed them out to people one by one. She just hoped that her
new insides could still handle more than water and spider blood.

Liv
left the noise of the party in the keep to find Tabitha outside in the garden,
throwing a stick down the path. Laika raced after it, throwing herself in among
the bushes to find it.

‘Hey you,’ said Liv, coming to stand beside her.

‘How’s it going?’ said Tabitha.

‘I’ve had a b-bit to drink,’ said Liv. ‘You?’

‘Same,’ Tabitha replied, with a tipsy smile. ‘I came out
for some fresh air.’

‘Well, at least you can s-still drink, you must be glad
about that?’

‘Definitely,’ said Tabitha, taking the stick from
Laika’s mouth and throwing it again.

‘Everyone should be entitled to a drink at the end of
the w-world,’ Liv mused, taking another sip with a swaying hand.

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Tabitha said happily, clinking
her glass of whiskey against Liv’s. ‘She’ll want to do this all night now,’ she
said, nodding at Laika as she rustled out from the bushes. Her collie padded
back up the garden in the dusk light, and dropped the stick tentatively at
Tabitha’s feet.

‘She’s so l-lovely,’ said Liv, crouching down to stroke
Laika’s side. ‘I always wanted a dog when I was little.’

‘It’s funny, I never did,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I’ve always
been a cat person.’ She thought about Mog back home. Had she abandoned him, or
did he abandon her? She hoped he was alright.

‘What do you think about Will?’ said Liv.

‘As a pet?’ said Tabitha, grinning. Liv laughed.

‘Just in general.’

‘…I think he’s spoken for,’ Tabitha said with a smile,
holding Liv’s gaze. Liv felt something leap inside her. Was it relief? Love? Or
just selfishness?

‘But I thought you t-two were…’ said Liv.

‘What? No!’ Tabitha replied, shocked. ‘Where did you get
that idea?’

‘On the m-moors,’ said Liv, confused. ‘What W-Will said
about you two talking on the wall, and finding new p-people…’ Tabitha was
laughing.

‘Yeah, finding survivors,’ Tabitha explained, grinning.
‘…You thought he was talking about me and him?’ Liv looked embarrassed. ‘Oh
god,’ said Tabitha, giving her a tight hug. ‘Seriously, Will meant finding
survivors. There’s nothing going on there, I swear. Cross my heart. Or whatever
my heart is these days. Cross my core.’ Liv looked at her, smiled, and buried
her face against Tabitha’s shoulder with embarrassment.

‘I’m an idiot,’ said Liv, her voice muffled in Tabitha’s
hoodie.

‘Yep,’ Tabitha chuckled. ‘He’s all yours.’

‘So, not even a little b-bit?’ Liv asked her, looking up
tipsily from her shoulder.

‘Will? No. Honest,’ Tabitha said with a grin. ‘Anyway,
I’m really not into the whole pairing-up thing right now,’ she added, sipping
her drink. ‘I’ve got a few things to work through first. Grief, identity
crisis, body confidence issues…,’ she said sadly, counting on her fingers.
‘Recent ex, probably dead; the end of the world… take your pick.’ Liv smiled in
sympathy and took hold of Tabitha’s hand. ‘We’re all grieving though,’ Tabitha
added. ‘We’ve all got stuff to deal with. Sometimes I forget that.’

‘Do you still regret w-what happened to you?’ said Liv.
She felt the cold sandpaper touch of Tabitha’s fingers resting gently around
hers.

‘No,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. It felt good to say it,
even if it was only half true.

‘Promise m-me you’re alright,’ Liv slurred.

‘I’m fine,’ Tabitha assured her. Liv was getting into
looking-after mode again. Tabitha knew she had to put a stop to it, and
definitely tonight. ‘Look, you’ve done more than enough caring for me already,’
Tabitha said gently, looking into Liv’s eyes. ‘Do something for yourself for
once. Go and tell Will how you feel.’

‘Well, I’m just w-worried that he’s got someone else in
his s-sights,’ said Liv, tapping Tabitha’s hand with her finger.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Tabitha told her, shaking her
head. ‘I mean Will’s friendly with me, but he’s different around you. But if
you don’t ask him, you’ll never know.’ Liv smiled and nodded, looking out over
the garden under a spellbound summer dusk.

Tabitha
slept fitfully that night in the kitchen, tossing and turning between bad
dreams and Jim’s seismic snores across the room. Up above her on the ceiling a
spidery shape crept down in the dark, opening its legs out like a clawed hand.
Tabitha saw it, but too late. It dropped down on top of her. Reaching,
wrestling, stabbing. It drank the life out of her while she struggled quietly
against its strength. Tabitha sat upright with a gasp and realised it was a
dream, and edged away into the corner to look around at the dark room. She
pulled her mum’s rustling note from her bra to hold it close. Laika came to lie
beside her. Tabitha felt her heart racing. Or whatever that thing was in her
chest that had replaced it. Wringing her hands together nervously, the rough skin
rasped. A cold sweat stuck her t-shirt to her back. She was hungry for silver
blood; hungry for her next fix. A word came back to haunt her then, and she
burst into quiet tears. Freak.

It
was Will’s turn on the new nightly watch, and it was drizzling. He huddled for
warmth beside a small fire on top of the castle keep.

‘Come on,’ he muttered to the heavens, to the stop-start
showers. ‘If you’re going to rain, give me a thunderstorm.’ The fire crackled
and guttered when the wind made it over the turret around the top, but for the
most part the flames seemed to be surviving the damp. Soaking up as much heat
as he could, Will got up from the fire and walked over to the edge of the
tower. He leant his body against the wall, staring out into the dark for any
sign of spiders coming back. But there was nothing to see; not even the outer
edges of the keep. The inky moonless dark may as well have been a black curtain
pulled down in front of him; only the warm glow of the fire held it back. He
heard the trapdoor creak open behind him.

‘How’s it going?’ said Liv softly, climbing up onto the
roof.

‘Boring,’ he replied, feeling a little rough after his
whiskey. ‘What brings you up here?’

‘Couldn’t s-sleep,’ she said, wrapping her blanket tight
round her shoulders. At least the rain was easing off.

‘Wouldn’t be my first place to come to if I couldn’t
sleep, I’ll be honest,’ Will said with a smile. ‘There’s nothing to see, for a
start.’

‘Well to be fair, I came up m-more for the company than
the view,’ she said, nodding at the black night all around them. It was like
nothing else existed beyond the castle walls.

‘Aw, thanks mate,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’m flattered.’

‘There was something I’d been meaning to ask you
a-about, actually,’ she said, stepping closer to the fire. ‘I j-just wondered
what you thought about T-Tabitha.’ She could have been so much more subtle
about that, Liv told herself. Why did she have to go and say it like that?
She’d never been any good at this stuff.

‘She’s awesome,’ Will replied, smiling. Liv’s heart
sank. What did he mean? ‘I feel really bad for everything she’s going through,
though,’ he added.

‘Yeah, m-me too,’ Liv replied absentmindedly.

‘I don’t like her that way though, if that’s what you’re
asking,’ he said. Liv looked up at him. Before she could say anything else
though, she realised how awkward he looked about the subject. He looked away
from her, staring into the fire. ‘There was someone that I felt very close to,
once,’ he said sadly.

‘R-Really?’ said Liv. Her heart may as well have dropped
off the castle walls.

‘Yeah, she was my best friend,’ said Will, looking off
into the dark. ‘It feels like such a long time ago now, with everything that’s
happened.’ Liv listened and felt sore inside; a sad, dull ache. ‘I’d never met
anyone like her,’ Will said with a smile, reminiscing. ‘We got talking one day,
just by chance. Then the more I got to know her, the more I felt like we were
completely connected.’

‘What happened t-to her?’ said Liv, wanting nothing more
than to climb back downstairs and crawl into bed.

‘Well like I said, we got to know each other pretty
well,’ Will continued, oblivious to Liv’s pained expression. ‘She felt like my
best friend,’ he said, pulling his coat in tighter against the wind. ‘Until
another woman came along with these weird superpowers, and then my best friend
started getting all arsy and jealous...’ He was grinning.

‘I hate you,’ she said, once the penny had dropped.

‘I hate you too,’ Will replied with a smile.

‘Well if you hate m-me, then why did you just take hold
of my hand?’ she said quietly.

‘To transfer my hate to you. It’s a hate transfer,’ he
replied.

‘I see.’

‘Why did you just put your hand on my cheek?’ he said.

‘Hate transfer,’ she said softly, running her thumb
across his scars. She felt his hands slide around her waist, pulling her close.

‘I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,’ he said softly.

‘I’ve wanted you to,’ she whispered back. The dim warm
glow of the fire picked out their faces; painted in light like spirits in the
dark. The pressing night surrounded them, deep black without the glow of city
lights. The night felt bigger and darker than they’d ever thought possible,
back when the real world still stood. But the tiny patch of cold black night
between their faces, between their bodies, that grew thinner as they moved
closer together. Thinner still, until they were kissing. And suddenly, both
caught in that ancient spell cast by wide eyes and warm bodies, the night and
its terrors meant nothing at all.

28

The
next morning Tabitha set out into town with Jim, Liv and Will, moving through
the streets with their rifles raised. They headed down the high street and
watched the darkened windows around them. They studied their reflections in the
windows as they walked, looking thinner and tougher than they remembered.
Cracked phones littered the street here and there, lying beside crumpled piles
of clothes and fly-swarmed rotten skins. At least there wasn’t any sign that
the spiders were still here.

‘They really have just up and left, haven’t they?’ said
Will, taking off his riot helmet.

‘I think it’s as safe as it’s going to get,’ Jim agreed,
trying not to look at the skins.

‘It’s clear!’ Will yelled towards the castle. Natalie
waved up on the distant wall, and ran down to get Paul and Chris into the car.

‘Why can’t we go?’ said Grace, waving from the courtyard
as they left the gate.

‘Because it’s dangerous,’ Sylvia replied, seeing Paul
off as he backed the car down the driveway.

‘But Will said it’s safe now,’ said Robert, picking his
nose.

‘Back inside,’ said Sylvia, leading them into the keep
despite their protests.

‘So what’s the plan boss?’ said Natalie, climbing out of
the car. Her pink hayfever eyes reminded Tabitha of Jen, back home. The grief crept
fresh over her mind again.

‘We’re going to spread out into town and fill the car
with anything we can use,’ Will told the group. ‘Food, tools, first aid kits.
Anything.’

‘Toilet paper,’ Jim suggested.

‘Absolutely,’ said Will, smirking. ‘But only the really
good stuff.’

‘Should we split up, do you think?’ said Tabitha.

‘We might get a better mix of stuff that way,’ Will
agreed. ‘So, two pairs and a three. Liv, would you like to partner up?’

‘I’d love to,’ she replied, with the dirtiest smile
Tabitha had ever seen.

‘I’ll go with Natalie,’ Chris suggested.

‘Alright,’ Natalie replied, looking a little wary of him.

‘Me too,’ said Jim, enjoying the scowl on Chris’s face.

‘Paul?’ Tabitha said brightly. They nodded to one
another.

‘Right then,’ said Will. ‘This is the most central place
we can park the car, so I’ll see you all back here when the car’s full. Happy
hunting!’

‘We’ll go to m-my place first,’ Liv suggested, walking
down the street with Will. ‘There were a few things I wanted to show you. In my
house.’

‘I’d really like to see them,’ Will replied as they
went, grinning like a schoolboy. Liv turned back for a second and gave Tabitha
a dirty wink. Tabitha glanced at Jim; he raised his eyebrows in reply. Natalie
caught their eyes and mimed being sick as she watched Will and Liv go. Paul and
Chris were aware of the silence, but clueless as to what was going on.

‘What?’ said Chris.

‘Never mind,’ Tabitha replied, shaking her head. ‘Let’s
get going.’ Will and Liv were quickly disappearing into the distance, running
down the street like a pair of teenagers.

‘So where’s your house?’ said Paul, walking with Tabitha
down the high street.

‘Oh no, I don’t live here,’ she replied brightly. ‘I
lived in Wales before all this.’

‘Wales?’ said Paul, surprised.

‘I’ve done a bit of travelling since everything
happened,’ said Tabitha. ‘I don’t know this town at all, really.’

‘Well, we could just pick any house to start with,’ Paul
suggested, pausing for a moment for a chesty cough. ‘How about that one?’

‘Fine with me,’ she said, following him to the front
door. Paul tried the door handle, and it opened with a squeak.

‘Wait,’ said Paul, sniffing the air in the porch. ‘Yep,
this is a good house.’

‘And you can tell just by smelling it?’ said Tabitha,
smiling at him.

‘Plenty of practice since everything went pear-shaped,’
he said. ‘We’ve broken into more homes than you’ve had hot dinners. …Oh,
sorry,’ he said, realising his choice of words.

‘It’s fine,’ she said warmly. ‘As long as I’m getting
some kind of dinner I don’t care, even if it is alien blood.’ Paul still looked
guilty. ‘Honestly, I don’t mind,’ she assured him. ‘If I’m getting a meal, I’m
happy whatever it is. I just really don’t like being hungry.’

‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ he said. ‘I used to be a 38 waist,
before all this happened. Now look at me.’ He sucked his thin cheeks in to make
his face look even more gaunt.

‘Paul, that’s horrible,’ she said, smiling.

‘Yeah, no one likes it when I do that,’ he chuckled,
heading down the hallway. ‘Now, the first thing I look for in a house these
days is a smaller pair of jeans,’ he said, checking the radiators. ‘My arse is
falling out of these.’ Tabitha followed behind him down the hallway, resisting
the urge to look at his bum after he’d mentioned it. Paul spotted something in
the dining room.

‘Look at these!’ he said excitedly, grabbing up a couple
of toys from a box in the corner. He turned around with a huge grin, holding up
a rocket ship and a tyrannosaurus.

‘They’ll love them,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. She couldn’t
believe how happy he looked with his finds. ‘Does Grace not go in for dolls?’

‘Nah, she’s not fussy,’ Paul said proudly. ‘Is it right
though, to take these? …I mean, these used to belong to someone’s child…’

‘Best just to think about your own kids,’ Tabitha
advised him. ‘Just think about how much they’ll love them. It’s better than
leaving them there in that box, surely.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he agreed happily, bagging up the
toys. ‘They’re going to love them.’ Tabitha thought back to the little old toy
shop she’d seen in town, the first day she got here. She didn’t doubt that the
twins would love everything in that shop. And Paul would surely take them there
and spoil them, if he knew about it. But she remembered the gold chains… all
those little padlocks hung up in an X across the door. They couldn’t take those
chains down. No… Paul wouldn’t want to take them down either. The thought was
just too sad.

‘What about Natalie?’ said Tabitha, trying to take her
mind off the toy shop.

‘Already sorted,’ Paul replied with a smile, producing a
pen knife from his pocket. ‘She’s always been the practical sort. Like her mum.
Anyway, shall we get hunting in the kitchen? I want to get back and give them
their presents.’

‘Course,’ Tabitha said happily, leading the way into the
hall.

The kitchen was bright and old, and well looked after.
Paul screwed up his nose up at the rotten contents of the fridge, and tried the
containers on the kitchen side instead.

‘Nice,’ said Tabitha, pulling cupboard doors open to
reveal a full shelf of tins.

‘Hot chocolate powder,’ said Paul, admiring his find
that’d been tucked behind the kettle.

‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ Tabitha replied, bagging
up the tins.

‘Fire blanket?’ he said, holding one up.

‘Bound to come in handy,’ she replied, stuffing jars of
pasta sauce into the bag. They packed their bags in silence for a little while,
content with the simple pleasure of stocking up tins and jars for the castle
food stores.

‘Do chocolate digestives go off?’ said Paul, studying
the out-of-date packet.

‘I don’t know, actually,’ Tabitha replied. Paul was
rustling some out of the packet. ‘They look fine to me,’ she said, studying the
pale dusty coating on the chocolate. ‘How do they taste?’

‘Mm. Gvv. Reeryr gv,’ he replied through a mouthful,
spitting crumbs all over the floor. He laughed, and sprayed more crumbs in the
process.

‘That’s classy, Paul,’ said Tabitha, grinning. ‘Real
classy.’ Sometimes he looked like the weariest man she’d ever seen. When he
smiled though, he looked like a big kid. She waited for him to swallow the dry
mouthful before he could speak.

‘I’ll keep them for me and the kids, if you don’t mind,’
he said, stuffing the biscuits into his coat pocket.

‘Fine with me,’ Tabitha said with a smile and a shrug.

‘We used to have this competition sometimes, every night
after tea,’ said Paul, as he rummaged through the clattering kitchen drawers.
‘We all dipped our chocolate biscuits in our tea at the same time, and then
we’d see whose lasted the longest when we took it out.’

‘I used to do that with my dad,’ said Tabitha, smiling
at the thought.

‘Robert always wins,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t know how he
does it. Grace says he’s cheating and using magic biscuits.’

‘Well, I believe her,’ Tabitha said happily, filling
another bag with food.

‘That’s probably best,’ Paul replied, crouching down to
look through a drawer. ‘You’ll find that it’s generally just easier to just
agree with my kids,’ he said. ‘They’re very opinionated. And stubborn. I’d be
lost without them though.’

‘I think your kids are amazing,’ said Tabitha.
‘Considering everything they’ve been through. You must be really proud of them.’

‘I am,’ he said quietly, turning to look at her.
‘They’re growing up in a world I can’t handle,’ he admitted, wiping his eyes. ‘Robert’s
going to be ten times the man I could ever be. And the girls are going to be
twice the men he is.’ Tabitha laughed. ‘There’s been some messed up stuff I’ve
had to drag those kids through, on the way up here,’ said Paul. His voice was
shaking. ‘I dragged them away from their home, after they’d seen their mum die.
I wish to god there was some way I could go back and stop them seeing that. I
mean… I don’t want to be one of those stern old dads who never makes any room
for his kids’ feelings,’ he fretted, staring at his packing on the table. ‘But…
I don’t want to be a dad they think is weak either. Especially the way
everything is now. How am I supposed to find the balance though? Do you know
what I mean?’

‘Just keep doing what you’re doing,’ Tabitha said with a
smile.

‘Hm,’ Paul replied, unsure. ‘I worry about what they see
when they look at me,’ he admitted, his voice thick with grief.

‘They’ll look at you and see what everyone else sees,’
Tabitha assured him, putting her hand on his back while he cried. ‘They’ll see
the man who raised them single-handed, and protected them through all of this. And
found them a new home where they could grow up safe. So don’t be so hard on
yourself, ok?’ Paul sniffed and nodded, and wiped another tear away.

‘Sorry,’ he said with a smile. ‘I can’t talk about this
stuff around the kids. I don’t want them to see me crying.’

‘Just come to me any time you need to talk, alright?’
she said. ‘Come to any of us. We’re a family now. Or a tribe. Whatever you want
to call it.’ Paul smiled at her, and wiped the tears off his cheeks.

‘Hello?’ came a voice from the front door. Paul and
Tabitha looked at one another in surprise. They didn’t recognise the voice.
Tabitha rushed back down the hallway. When she got to the open front door, there
was a couple standing outside.

‘God Tony, what’s wrong with her?’ the woman asked the
man, looking Tabitha up and down.

‘Are you alright love?’ said Tony with concern,
approaching Tabitha cautiously. He was tall and broad; a bodybuilder.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Tabitha suspiciously, backing
up a step into the hallway. They were looking at her like she was about to
attack them.

‘What happened to you?’ said the woman, staring at her
with a look of distaste.

‘The aliens,’ said Tabitha defensively. ‘I’m fine,
really. Paul?’ she called back down the hallway.

‘Your hands are all…’ the woman backed away a step too,
with no attempt to hide her revulsion.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Tabitha, fixing her with a stare.
Tony watched her carefully.

‘Hi!’ Paul said warmly. The couple were visibly relieved
to see someone who looked more like them. Tabitha stepped aside as Paul came to
the door, only too happy to let him speak with the strangers. As bad as she
felt about it, she didn’t want to talk to them. Not with the way they were
looking at her.

‘I’ll get the bags,’ she said, disappearing down the
hall into the kitchen.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ said the woman, in a hushed
tone. Tabitha still heard her. She had a loud voice, and her hushed tone wasn’t
all that hushed.

‘She’s fine, really,’ Paul assured them.

‘She looks weird,’ the man said quietly. Again, not all
that quietly. Tabitha clenched her rough grey knuckles and dragged them along
the textured wallpaper as she went, grating foamy white specks from the wall
that fluttered down like snow on the carpet.

‘So where have you guys come from?’ Paul asked them,
changing the subject as he invited them into the house.

‘We’ve been in the attic at Jackie’s house, down the
road,’ said Tony, pointing a thumb at Jackie beside him. ‘We’ve been staying up
there after everything kicked off. Anyway, we heard some shouting yesterday
then a car today, so we came out to look.’

‘You must be hungry,’ said Paul, closing the front door
behind them.

‘Starving mate, absolutely starving,’ said Tony, filling
the hallway as he walked through into the kitchen.

‘Would you like some beans?’ said Tabitha, trying again
with the couple.

‘Cold?’ said Jackie, puzzled. Tabitha looked at her.
What did she expect?

‘So there’s no power anywhere?’ said Tony, trying the
light switch. ‘We didn’t know if it was just Jackie’s house or what.’

‘It’s the same all over the country, I’m afraid,’ Paul
replied.

‘Why, where have you come from?’ said Tony.

‘The other end of it,’ he said brightly.

‘Thanks,’ Jackie mumbled, looking distinctly unimpressed
with the bowls of beans Tabitha put down on the table for them. Tabitha wasn’t
about to go to any more effort than that for someone who kept staring at her
like a freak.

‘We’ll get you some hot food when we get back to the
castle,’ said Paul.

‘You’re up in the castle?’ said Tony. ‘Why didn’t we
think of that?’ he asked Jackie, spooning cold beans into his mouth. ‘Is it
just the two of you?’

‘No, there’s a few of us,’ said Paul, pouring them a
glass of water each from a bottle. ‘We’re out in town getting some food
together, since the spiders seem to have buggered off.’

‘So they have gone!’ Tony told Jackie, with a look of
victory. ‘I had to drag her out screaming from that attic, she said they were
all still here in town!’

‘Yep, they’ve gone,’ Paul assured them.

‘Since when though?’ said Jackie, picking at her meal.

‘Since we kicked their arse in a fight,’ Tabitha said
proudly. She tried to hide her delight as she watched Jackie eating cold beans.

Despite
the way they looked at her sometimes, Tabitha couldn’t fault the new couple’s
work ethic. The four of them scoured half the houses on the street looking for
food and supplies, and came back to the car with eight full bags of food and a
toolbox. The others greeted the new faces warmly where they stood around the
car.

‘Welcome to the gang!’ said Will, shaking Tony’s hand
enthusiastically. ‘I’ve seen you round town before mate, the bodybuilder guy!’

‘Likewise mate, you’re the dreadlocks guy,’ Tony said
with a grin.

‘Where have you been staying?’ said Jim, stopping to
introduce himself before he loaded another bag of tins into the car boot.

‘Well we’ve not been living in a bloody castle, put it
that way!’ Tony said happily, shaking Jim’s rough hand. Natalie screamed
suddenly around the street corner. Paul came running. There was a spider on the
road, scuttling towards her. Panicking, Natalie fired her rifle. The shots hit
one of the spider’s legs; not enough to stop it. Before she could shoot again
the spider leapt on her, knocking her to the road. Paul raced in and grabbed
the spider, throwing it off her with a clatter.

‘Get away from my little girl!’ he roared at it, keeping
himself between them. Natalie reached for her gun on the road and tried to aim
around her dad at the hissing spider. The others came sprinting around the
corner then, finding Natalie screaming for help. Paul yelled and grabbed at the
spider’s legs as it leapt at him, and dropped dead on the road with the
creature’s tongue in his heart. Natalie screamed. Tabitha ripped the spider
away from Paul and threw it down on the road. Hysterical, Natalie shot the
spider over and over until it was nothing but frayed and tattered flesh.
Already it had drunk out some of her dad’s insides, though. The spindly silver
corpse leaked a bloody silver-pink soup from its belly.

‘Oh my god!’ Natalie screamed, dropping down next to her
dad’s body. She touched his face with shaking hands, trying to get him back
somehow. Lip trembling, she stared into his eyes that looked up at the sky.
‘He’s dead!’ she screamed, disbelieving. She stroked his head and grabbed at
his clothes, frantic to pull him back into the world. The others gathered
around, looking on, shell shocked. But something else caught Tabitha’s eye
then, far in the distance. Things moving, out beyond the town walls. She looked
down at Paul and Natalie on the road, and came closer.

‘Get away from him!’ Natalie yelled at her, blinded with
tears as she held her dad’s lifeless hand. ‘Get away!’

‘Natalie,’ said Tabitha, reaching out towards her.

‘Get away!’ Natalie screamed, eyes wild, pointing
the rifle at her.

‘Alright,’ Tabitha said gently, putting her hands up.
She backed away towards the others and wiped her tears away. ‘Will,’ she said
quietly, nodding at the movement she’d spotted on the distant hills.

‘Jesus. Look,’ Will told the others, pointing at the
fields through the stone arch. He was holding on to Liv as Natalie aimed her
gun at the group. They watched more and more silver dots appear on the distant hills,
reflecting the sunlight. Too many to count. A faraway droning carried in on the
breeze; a deathly insect chitter. Natalie looked up at the sound and saw the
spiders swarming on the hills. Wide eyes red with tears, she staggered up from
the road and kept her rifle aimed at the others gathered on the street.

‘I’m taking the car,’ she said, sniffling back her snot.
‘I’m taking my family away from here.’

‘You need to stay here with us,’ Will said calmly,
putting his hands out as she aimed the rifle at him. ‘Stay here in the castle,
and we can keep your family safe.’

‘Safe?’ she screamed back, looking at her dad’s body on
the road. ‘You call this safe?’

‘Stop p-pointing that gun at him!’ Liv yelled, trying to
get in front of Will to protect him.

‘You said the spiders weren’t coming back!’ said
Natalie, wiping her nose. ‘You said so! We trusted you!’

‘I was wrong!’ said Will. ‘I’m sorry!’

‘Sorry doesn’t bring my dad back!’ Natalie yelled hysterically,
raising her rifle. ‘I’m taking my family! It’s not safe here, I’m taking them
away!’ Will watched her, and chose his words carefully.

‘Natalie, it’s best if we –

‘If you try to stop me I’ll kill you!’ Natalie screamed,
storming over to aim the gun right in his terrified face. Tabitha watched Liv
watching the gun. Liv was about to do something stupid to protect Will; she
could tell. Jim was too old to be put through this, and Chris looked like he
was about to make a run for it. If any one of them tried something…

‘Here, take the car,’ said Tabitha, pulling the keys out
of the ignition. ‘Get your family away from here. We won’t try to stop you.’
She held out the keys for Natalie to see.

‘Throw them down,’ said Natalie, staring, aiming the
rifle at her. Tabitha tossed the keys down the road to Natalie’s feet. ‘I’m
protecting my family,’ said Natalie, convincing herself. Tabitha nodded. ‘Get
away from the car.’

‘We won’t try to stop you,’ said Tabitha, motioning for
everyone to step away. Natalie seemed torn between her dad’s body and the car.
The chattering insect drone was getting clearer. The crest of a distant hill
was turning silver.

‘We need to bury my dad,’ Natalie told them, panicked
and heartbroken.

‘Natalie, we can’t do that,’ said Will.

‘We need to bury him!’ she repeated. ‘I buried my mum,
so I’m going to bury my dad!’

‘The venom inside him would kill us,’ Will said, as
gently as he could. Liv wiped away a tear, and held onto Will’s hand.

‘We’ll burn him then,’ said Natalie, pale and shaking
with the shock. ‘I want him to have a

funeral.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Will. ‘We’ll do whatever you want
but just please, put the gun down. Trust us.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ she replied, her voice nasal with
her tears. ‘You said it was safe out here. I don’t trust any of you. We’re
going to give my dad a real funeral. Do it.’

The group took as much wood, coal, paper and lighter
fluid as they could find from the houses nearby, and piled it up over Paul’s
body on the road. Natalie stood in the street all the while, aiming her rifle
at whoever came close to her dad.

‘She’s insane,’ Chris muttered to Jim, coming out of a
house further down the street. ‘This is what you get for giving guns to people
you don’t know.’

‘Shut up Chris,’ said Jim, carting out a broken-up
chair. ‘Just do whatever she says, then we can go home.’

‘We shouldn’t have come out of the bloody attic,’ Tony
whispered to Jackie, carrying a stack of newspapers up the road.

‘Let’s just go,’ Jackie whispered. ‘Come on, Tony.’

‘No,’ he shot back. ‘She can see us. It’s not worth it.
Just do what she says.’

‘Give me the lighter,’ said Natalie, eyes red-raw with
tears. Tabitha tossed hers over. Natalie stood there with the lit flame blowing
in the breeze, staring at the pile of wood and paper at her feet. She closed
her eyes tight and put her hand on the woodpile, and whispered a few last words
to her dad beneath the timber.

‘Bye dad,’ Natalie finished with a sob, setting light to
the newspaper stacked around him. ‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t protect you. I’m
sorry that I’m burning you in the middle of the street,’ she said, with a
desperate laugh, wiping her tears away. ‘There’s no time to do anything
properly these days,’ she told the flames, watching them catch across the
broken-up furniture. ‘I’m going to look after Grace and Robert,’ she told her
dad in the bonfire. ‘I’ll die for them if I have to. I promise.’

‘I’m sorry, lass,’ said Jim, stepping forward.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ Natalie snapped bitterly, watching
the flames burn her dad away. ‘This is nothing to do with you.’ They stood for
silent minutes around Paul as the blaze consumed him, watching Natalie sob and
whisper to the flames all the while. Something caught Tabitha’s eye then,
through the heat haze over the fire. A black figure on the distant moor,
stalking through the silver swarm. When she moved aside to see past the heat
haze, it was gone. Natalie walked past the Ghosts as Jim and Liv wiped their
eyes, staring coldly at them as she pulled the car keys from her pocket.

‘You’re really letting her take the car?’ said Chris,
disbelieving.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied, watching Natalie climb in and
slam the door.

‘Don’t you think we might need it?’ he growled.

‘Not as much as she does,’ said Tabitha, as Natalie started
up the roaring engine and drove away. Tabitha felt an extra little sadness
then, besides her grief for Paul, watching Natalie drive off in her car. She
thought about how far it had brought her, and watching Laika sleep on the back
seat. At least she still had Laika though, waiting for her back at the castle.
And thinking about it, things could have turned out even worse here on the
street. Tabitha breathed a sigh of relief as Natalie drove off down the road,
sure for a moment back then that Natalie was going to shoot them. She looked
around at the others on the pavement. All of them staring; all of them shell
shocked at everything that had just happened.

‘Well, you’ve just let her take our escape plan, if we
ever needed one,’ Chris snapped. ‘And it’s looking pretty fucking likely that
we do,’ he said, watching the silver horde massing on the hills.

‘Oh yeah, and there goes all the f-food we just spent
all d-day packing!’ Liv chipped in angrily. ‘What the hell were you
th-thinking, doing that?’ she demanded. Tabitha looked at her sadly, and said
nothing. It broke her heart to have Liv yelling at her.

‘We can find more food,’ Jim said calmly. ‘And in case
you hadn’t noticed, Tabitha just stopped us all getting shot.’ Will nodded. Liv
looked from Jim to Tabitha, and her scowl softened.

‘Oh god, I’m sorry,’ said Liv, walking over to grab
Tabitha in a tight hug. ‘I didn’t see it like that. I’m sorry.’

‘Well, it’s not all bad then I suppose, if you put it
like that,’ said Chris. ‘Now can we start walking back to the castle before all
those big alien spiders get here?’

By
the time they’d walked back to the hill leading up to the castle, they’d heard
all the details of a shouting match between Natalie and Sylvia inside the
walls. Sylvia was nothing to do with Natalie’s family, from the sounds of the
argument, and Natalie was taking the twins and leaving. After the slam of a car
door the Ghosts saw Natalie racing down the driveway, with the twins watching
them in panic from the back seat. The car roared off down through town,
disappeared out of the stone arch, and sped off down the country road towards
the distant motorway. And just like that, half of their new family was gone.
Once the Ghosts got back into the courtyard they found Sylvia hurriedly tucking
a tissue away in her cardigan pocket.

‘She’s taken them,’ said Sylvia, standing up straight
and stern; hiding her grief.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Will, coming forward.

‘It’s done now. There’s no undoing it,’ Sylvia replied,
matter-of-factly. Her eyes were bloodshot with tears. ‘Natalie was right. They
aren’t my family.’

‘She’s doing what she thinks is best, to protect them,’
said Tabitha.

‘I know,’ Sylvia replied coldly, opening the door into
the keep. The hills beyond the castle walls were lined with swarming silver dots.
‘We need to protect ourselves too, from the looks of it. We have a war coming
to us.’

‘I saw something else, up on the hills,’ Tabitha told
Liv in the keep, as they watched Tony and Jackie looking around the castle
grounds outside. ‘It was a figure. Just… watching.’

‘Like a p-person?’ Liv said nervously.

‘It looked like one,’ Tabitha replied.

‘You two need to get suited up,’ said Will, coming over.

‘Tabitha says she saw a f-figure on the hills,’ said Liv.

‘A figure? What do you mean?’ Will replied absentmindedly,
tightening the strap on his rifle.

‘Like a human figure, but taller,’ said Tabitha. Will
looked up from his rifle. ‘It looked like it was leading the spiders,’ she told
him. Will could only stare at her, dumbfounded.

‘What, you mean like another alien?’ he said quietly.
‘Another kind?’

‘It looked that way,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Maybe we got
their attention after the last fight, so they brought a manager down. It looks
like it’s going to be a bigger attack.’

‘Shit!’ said Will, pacing the kitchen. ‘So what, was it
just one figure? Did it have any weapons?’

‘I only saw one,’ said Tabitha. ‘I couldn’t tell if it
had any weapons or not.’

‘Well did you see what it was doing then? What it was
telling the spiders to do?’ Will replied, panicked. ‘We need to know!’

‘Will, c-calm down,’ said Liv, worried that he looked so
frantic.

‘Calm down?’ he said. ‘We’ve got an alien army coming
for us! And there’s these new things leading them now, and you’re telling me to
calm down? Nah, we’re dead,’ he said, holding his hands up against the back of
his head. ‘We’re fucking dead.’ Chris and Jim looked around at him from the far
side of the room, and saw the man who’d always led them start to pace around in
terror.

‘Will, c-come upstairs,’ said Liv, standing up. She
walked over to him and took his hand. He looked lost, spooked. ‘Talk to me,’
she said softly, leading him upstairs. Tabitha shared a look with Chris and
Jim. She was pretty sure they were thinking what she was thinking. That they
were probably going to die today. She gritted her teeth, and got up to pull on
her riot gear.

Chris
stood around the kitchen in silence, staring at the walls. Jim and Tabitha said
nothing as they changed into their riot gear. Eventually Chris sighed, and
walked out of the keep into the gloomy grey daylight.

‘He’s friendly as ever,’ said Jim, nodding at the door
after Chris had left.

‘It’s Will I’m more worried about,’ Tabitha said in a
hushed tone. ‘He’s changed.’

‘Well, losing Paul probably got to him,’ Jim whispered,
taking a seat with Tabitha at the kitchen table. ‘One minute Paul was there,
then he was gone.’ Tabitha thought about him. She’d been speaking to him. He
was right there; real. He was alive. And then suddenly he was drained-out skin;
ashes. A memory. Same with his kids too. Robert, Grace and Natalie were just a
memory now. Would they even survive out there? Would they have survived in here
anyway? Suddenly the Ghosts had lost half their numbers when they couldn’t have
needed them more.

‘Will’s put it all on his own shoulders,’ Tabitha said
quietly, clipping on her leg guards. She made sure the gaps between the front
and back pieces were extra tight this time, to avoid any claws finding their
way into her calves again. ‘Don’t get me wrong though, I’m torn up about Paul
too,’ she added, feeling guilty for seeming so cold. ‘I just can’t cry about
him though, not right now. I’m too scared.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Jim replied. ‘I can’t cry
until there’s no one around me at all. Anyway, you don’t have to be crying to
grieve for someone.’ Tabitha nodded, and laced up her boots extra-tight. Paul’s
memory stung; more grief added to all the rest. The high gentle rustle of laces
was the only sound in the melancholy silence between her and Jim. They heard
Will crying quietly upstairs, and Liv’s soothing tones layered on top of the
sound.

‘It’s all really got to Will, hasn’t it?’ Tabitha
whispered, looking at Jim.

‘Everyone’s got their limit,’ Jim said quietly. ‘Losing
so many people so fast… and I don’t think it’ll just be Paul that Will’s
thinking about either.’

‘No, of course,’ Tabitha replied. It hadn’t even
occurred to her. Will had lost his friends and family too, though he’d never
mentioned them before. Knowing Will, he probably blamed himself for them too.
Tabitha still thought she should have been feeling more grief about Paul, but
the feelings just weren’t coming. She worried then that she was getting too
used to death and grief. Desensitised, even.

‘I just hope Natalie and the kids are going to be
alright,’ she told Jim, sighing out the tension in her shoulders. ‘Was it the
right thing to do, giving them the car?’

‘You didn’t have much choice,’ Jim replied, getting up
from his chair at the table. ‘We could have been shot if you didn’t give her
the car. So don’t worry about it,’ he smiled his creased-up smile, gentle and
ancient. Tabitha followed him out of the door and across the courtyard towards
the curtain wall. The birds weren’t singing any more. It felt like there was a
static weight hanging in the air all around them; a heavy tension like a coming
storm.

‘Are you nervous?’ Tabitha asked him.

‘I’ve never been so scared in my life,’ he replied. They
hung around in the courtyard with a creeping dread on them, like they were waiting
for a funeral to start. The insect chitter from the hills was constant;
maddening. The deathly sound was enough to bury any scrap of morale they had
left.

‘We’ve gotten too used to treating Will like the boss,’
Jim admitted.

‘One of us needs to be in charge though, or we won’t
fight like a team,’ Tabitha replied. ‘We’ll all be fighting them on our own.’

‘So we need a new boss today,’ Jim said with a nod. ‘The
person Will looks up to the most.’

‘Liv would be my choice too,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Should
we go and talk to her?’

‘I’m not talking about Liv,’ said Jim, turning away from
the wall. ‘I meant you.’

29

‘There’s so many,’ Will mumbled, looking out over the
curtain wall at the spiders massing in the distance. The others stood beside
him and watched the swarm with grim fascination. A wind whipped at them
suddenly, cold and fierce, and died away.

‘I thought there was a hundred or so before,’ said Jim,
squinting at them beyond the town walls.

‘Well, not any m-more,’ Liv replied. The nearest hill
had since turned completely silver with gathering spiders. The sky was overcast
above them; a steel-grey backdrop hanging heavy over the town.

‘What do you propose we do?’ said Sylvia, pulling up her
coat collar against the wind.

‘What can we do?’ Chris laughed. ‘All we can do is go
back into the keep and barricade the door.’ Will looked at him, uncertain. It
sounded like a plan.

‘No,’ said Tabitha. ‘That’s our last resort.’ She
noticed Jim moving closer to stand beside her. He didn’t need to say anything
to show them whose side he was on.

‘Yeah, get upstairs in the castle,’ said Tony,
completely ignoring her and siding with Chris. ‘We’ll break up the wooden
stairs so they can’t get up.’

‘That’s what we did in the attic,’ Jackie added.

‘We’re not giving up that easy,’ Jim said gruffly. ‘You
lot might not have any fight in you, but we do.’

‘Like I said, that’s a last resort,’ Tabitha told the
others stubbornly. ‘Before it comes to that, we’re going to fight them.’ She
was met with silent stares.

‘With what though?’ Will laughed desperately. ‘A few
guns and a couple of spears? Have you seen how many there are out there?’ he
looked around at their frightened faces. Their eyes kept flicking back to the
hills, to see if the spiders were moving yet. ‘We’ve already lost Paul,’ he
said sadly. ‘None of us were fast enough to save him, and that was just one
spider. What chance have we got against all them? We’re just not going
to win this time!’ Tabitha looked at him now and saw a different person. Since
when had Will been beaten so easily?

‘And we can’t get away either, now she’s given the car
away,’ Chris added, nodding at Tabitha. ‘We’re dead.’

‘Fuck you!’ Tabitha said defiantly. ‘I’m not going down
without a fight!’

‘But Will’s right,’ said Liv. ‘There’s j-just no way we
can win this.’

‘We won last time,’ Jim replied.

‘Yeah but there were f-fifty last time, not five
hundred,’ said Liv.

‘More than five hundred there,’ said Tony, watching the
silver horde on the hills. Jackie stared at the spiders and took hold of his
arm.

‘Yeah, there’s more of them,’ Tabitha conceded. ‘But
that’s the only thing that’s changed.’ She looked at the hopeless faces lined
up along the wall. Paul’s death really had gotten to Will. She could see it in
his eyes. He looked haunted. Not the kind of ghost they needed right now.

‘This is the same fight as last time. Just longer,’ said
Tabitha. ‘That’s all. We can win this.’

‘They’re going to flood us!’ Chris protested.

‘They’re going to do exactly what they did last time!’ Tabitha
shot back. ‘They’re going to hit the walls down there and slow right down to a
crawl. They’re going to hit the gate round there, and then we’ll pick them off
one by one.’

‘We’ll pick off five hundred of them one by one?’
said Chris, incredulous. The others were chatting nervously.

‘I’ll pick off five thousand of them if that’s what it
takes!’ Tabitha yelled back, so loud that she stunned the group into silence.
‘They took everything from me!’ she said, meeting their stares. ‘I’m going to
make them suffer and die with everything I’ve got left!’ Will looked up
at her. ‘I’ve not fought my way here through all that death and rot out there
just to give up and die now!’ Tabitha yelled. ‘Of course it’s scary, look at
them all out there! But we’re the Ghosts. Nothing’s worse than a ghost!
You can’t kill a ghost!’

‘I think our little club’s gone to someone’s head,’
Chris joked. ‘You do know that we’re not really ghosts, don’t you? That we can
actually die, and we will when they get here?’ Tabitha stared at him. He was
wearing that smug smile again; the one she’d grown to hate.

‘Piss off, Chris,’ she said. ‘Just go.’

‘What?’ he chuckled, looking round at the others.

‘Just crawl off and die somewhere,’ Tabitha said simply.
‘We all know you don’t have any fight in you, so stop holding us back. It’ll
give us a spare gun, anyway.’ Chris laughed.

‘Yeah, it’s alright for the freaks among us with super
healing,’ he replied. ‘They know they’re not going to die that
easily anyway.’ Tabitha stormed over and pushed him off the inside edge of the
wall, down into a bush in the garden. Tense, nervous, Liv burst out laughing at
the sight. Jim was chuckling.

‘You think I wouldn’t die fighting for these
people?’ Tabitha screamed at Chris, as he wrestled himself from the bushes below.
‘Do you?’ Chris said nothing. He just glared at her.

‘Anyone else who shares Chris’s thoughts can crawl off
and die somewhere too!’ she said, looking around at their faces. ‘I don’t give
a shit anymore! Anyone who isn’t going to fight tooth and claw just to carry on
living, just piss off into a corner and wait to die!’ the others were staring
at her in shock. She ignored Chris’s hail of expletives from the garden below
as he climbed out from the bushes.

‘You can’t talk to us like that!’ said Jackie.

‘Listen,’ Tabitha told the others calmly, ignoring her.
‘We don’t know how much time we’ve got before the spiders attack us,’ she told
the group. ‘But we do know what’s going to happen when they get here. And we
can prepare for it.’

‘Prepare?’ said Tony. ‘There’s nothing to prepare with.’

‘We’re going to barricade the gate,’ she said, looking
round the castle. ‘We’ll put barriers up on the walls too. Anything we can do
to slow them down, and pick them off one at a time. What are the heaviest
things in the keep we can use to barricade the gate?’

‘The two big cupboards,’ said Will, stroking his
stubble. ‘And the table and chairs.’

‘Alright then,’ said Tabitha. ‘You and Tony, get them
out here against the gate. And leave some room to jab a spear through.’

‘Alright,’ said Will, nodding. He walked off with Tony
back to the keep. Suddenly Tabitha felt all the responsibility fall to her.
They were all looking to her to tell them what to do. Don’t freak out, she
told herself. You do not have permission to freak out. What would the heroes
do in the movies? They’d own it. They’d be a boss about it.

‘Liv, Sylvia, bring out every gun, knife, tool,
whatever,’ she told them. ‘Anything we can use as weapons. Pile them up here.
Chris, are you still playing?’

‘Fuck you,’ he said in the garden, brushing leaves off
his jumper.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Show Jackie and Tony how to use a
rifle. And Jim, you come with me.’

‘We need barriers up on the walls here, to make it
harder for them to climb over,’ she told Jim, as they walked along the curtain
wall together.

‘Barriers? Like what?’ he replied, studying the stone
blocks along the battlements.

‘I don’t know,’ Tabitha admitted. ‘Wooden boards,
plastic sheets… anything that’ll slow them down so that they have to trickle
through to us.’ Jim looked around at the castle, hand on chin, thinking.

‘Well we’ve got the wooden trellises in the garden, how
about them?’

‘Perfect,’ she said, jumping off the wall down to the
lawn. ‘We’ll fix them to the top of the wall,’ she said, grabbing hold of the
closest trellis to pull it away from the keep. ‘We want to make it as awkward
as possible for the spiders to climb over, so we’ve got time to fight back.’

Once the gate was barricaded, Jim, Tony and Will set to
work on the walls too. Using trellises and table tops they managed to block off
most of the gaps in the parapets, the old stone teeth that ran along the top of
the wall. Fixing the trellises to the outside of the parapets, they strapped
and tied them to the hand rail with whatever belts, string and nylon rope they
could find. The new barriers wouldn’t keep the spiders out indefinitely, but
hopefully it would slow them down enough to make them vulnerable. Tabitha
meanwhile headed back into the keep, and led Laika upstairs while she changed
into her riot gear.

‘Do you want to know a secret, dog face?’ she said, once
they were alone upstairs. She crouched down for Laika to lick her face. ‘I’m
scared shitless,’ she admitted, with a nervous laugh. ‘And I want you out there
next to me, protecting me like you always do. But you can’t go out there. Not
now. It’s too dangerous.’ She rubbed Laika’s sides and stroked her soft sleepy
face, and kissed her on the head. Laika looked at her peacefully with her
mismatched eyes, silent and alert. Tabitha’s oldest friend in the new world.

‘I wish we had some riot gear for dogs, then I’d have
you out there with me,’ she told Laika with a smile. ‘But you’ll have to stay
put for this fight.’ Laika just looked at her, placid as ever.

‘What I’m trying to say is …have a good life, if you
don’t see me again,’ Tabitha told her, feeling her voice tremble as she stroked
her. ‘But you’re a smart dog. You’ll be alright. Go and find a nice man dog and
have some crazy-eyed puppies together.’ Tabitha smiled at the thought. ‘You
could do me a favour though and howl for me, if I die. It’d mean a lot.’
Tabitha blinked her tears away, and stroked Laika’s cheeks. ‘Love you, dog
face,’ she said, getting up to walk away. ‘Stay.’

Liv
stood with Tabitha on the wall. Their riot gear was heavy and hot in the muggy
midday sun, and smelled like stale sweat. Liv pulled the itchy fabric away from
the back of her neck.

‘Is this everything we’ve got?’ said Tabitha.

‘Yep,’ Liv replied, with a grim nod. They were looking
over their weapons stockpile, stashed together on the wall. Two spears, eight
assault rifles, two shotguns and a hunting rifle. A pretty good haul, all
things considered, but there was hardly enough ammunition left to rely on the
guns too much. The two boxes were more promising, though. One was filled with
the soldiers’ bayonets; the other with hand grenades. Aside from those was a
small pile of kitchen knives, a hammer, and some screwdrivers. Tabitha did a
double take. Liv was holding a fire axe.

‘I didn’t know we had a fire axe,’ said Tabitha.

‘Neither did I, until I s-started rooting around,’ Liv
replied. ‘If you’re taking a spear, it’s only fair that I get a big old axe.’

‘May as well face death like a real warrior, on a castle
and everything.’ said Tabitha.

‘Damn st-straight,’ Liv replied. ‘I even got in some
action with Will before, too. Turns out mortal terror makes me horny. We’re
practically b-barbarians. Will’s definitely barbaric, if you know what I mean.’

‘Thank you, for telling me that,’ Tabitha said
sarcastically. ‘It’s good to know.’

‘He does this th-thing where he –

‘Ok,’ Tabitha cut in, putting her hands over her ears.
‘Some things are just too beautiful and graphic to put into words.’

‘Sorry,’ said Liv, laughing. ‘I’ll keep that between me
and the wife.’

‘Thank you,’ Tabitha replied with a smile, uncovering
her ears.

‘Look, they’re moving,’ said Liv, watching the swarm on
the hills. The spiders’ bodies reflected the sunlight like a shimmering
landslide, slow and gigantic. Tabitha expected Will to be around to shout
orders, until she remembered what state he was in. It was up to her now.

‘We need to form up!’ Tabitha called out, waving to the
others to come up onto the wall.

‘Tabitha,’ said Liv. ‘You’re like a s-sister to me. I
love you.’ Her riot gear clattered against Tabitha’s as she went in for a tight
hug. ‘Just in c-case we don’t win, of course.’

‘Likewise,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. ‘But we will win.’

‘Obviously,’ said Liv, with a sad smile. She squeezed
Tabitha tight and kissed her cheek, and turned to the others as she picked her
fire axe back up. ‘Everyone, up on the wall please!’

‘How’s Will?’ Tabitha asked her quietly.

‘Not good,’ said Liv, watching the others climb the
steps onto the wall. ‘Seeing Paul die really got to him. I don’t think he’s going
to be up to any inspiring speeches today.’

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Tabitha replied, turning away
from the spiders that were swarming down into the outskirts of town. She
watched the Ghosts file out onto the wall. A gallery of sunken faces, hungry
and scared. Even with their riot gear on and their shields ready, Will and Jim
looked like shadows of their former selves. Chris, she considered, had always
looked like a shadow of his former self. Tony and Sylvia watched the swarming
spiders spreading out into town. Jackie lit up a cigarette with shaking hands.
Tabitha looked around at them, and wondered what the hell she could tell them
to make this a battle worth fighting; a battle they were going to survive. She
thought for a moment; cleared her throat.

‘One day, we’re all going to die,’ she told them, taking
up one of the spears Liv had put by the wall. ‘All we get to choose is whether
to face it, or to be afraid of it.’ Jim coughed. Chris shifted uneasily where
he stood.

‘What matters is how we live, and how we’re remembered,’
she told them. ‘When death comes for us we can face it in fear, begging on our
knees. Or we can look it in the eye and go out fighting. We can be remembered
as heroes, if we want to be. We can die legends. A great man told me that once.
And he’s standing right there.’ Everyone looked at Will. He was surprised by
the sudden attention. Liv smiled at him, and took his hand in hers.

‘There was another man who called someone out for a fist
fight in the middle of the night, because he wouldn’t stand for threats. He
knew there was a line that you just don’t cross, and there are things worth
standing up and fighting for. And he’s standing there.’ The others looked at
Jim as Tabitha nodded to him.

‘No hard feelings Chris,’ said Jim, looking around at
their smiling faces.

‘There’s a woman standing here too, who walked out on
her own into a town full of spiders to lead me up here to safety. Armed with
nothing but a shotgun and the biggest pair of balls I’ve ever seen.’ Liv
laughed. ‘She’s a force of nature, and she fights like one too,’ Tabitha told
the group. ‘And now I’m proud to say that she’s my sister.’

‘Oh you,’ said Liv, grinning.

‘And I’ll be completely honest, there are two people
here that I don’t like, and they don’t like me,’ said Tabitha, looking at Chris
and Sylvia. ‘But I don’t doubt that they’ll fight for their home to their last
breaths. I’m sorry Chris for accusing you, and for pushing you off the wall.’

‘…S’alright,’ Chris grunted, in a rare show of grace.
Whether it was grace inspired by mortal terror, Tabitha couldn’t be sure.
Sylvia just glared at her, and said nothing.

‘And there are two new faces here who’ve had a baptism
of fire, and they wish they’d stayed in their attic away from all this,’
Tabitha continued.

‘Yeah, we do,’ said Jackie, eyes wide with fear.

‘But when was the last time you ate before today?’ said
Tabitha.

‘A week ago, or more,’ Tony admitted. He looked at
Jackie to agree. ‘…So yeah, we would have starved to death eventually,’ he said.

‘And that’s why we’re up here in this castle,’ Tabitha
told the group. ‘To keep people safe and look after each other, and give each
other hope. That’s civilisation. Here inside these walls, this is
civilisation. And take it from me, this place is worth fighting for! These
walls are worth fighting for!’ she banged the end of her spear down on the
stones at her feet. ‘I’ve seen places all over where civilisation is dead!’ she
told them. ‘In all that time, I’ve never seen a place like this. I’ve seen
gangs and wild dogs out there, prowling for victims. I’ve seen starving people
who are going to turn cannibal just to feed their kids, even if they survive
the spiders. That’s what’s left of civilisation outside these walls, but we’re
safe here! This is our home! And nothing threatens my home and the
people I love. Not while I’ve got a breath left in my body to fight for them!’

‘Hell yeah!’ said Liv. Tabitha didn’t get the resounding
cheer she’d been hoping for, but there were definitely some positive-sounding
grunts and mumbles. It was a start.

‘If you fight as much as you talk, we should be
alright,’ Chris said sarcastically.

‘Well any time you want to put all that charisma to good
use with a rousing speech, feel free,’ she replied, pushing past him as she
headed for the centre of the wall.

‘Tabitha’s right,’ said Will, coming forward. He took
the other spear from the wall. ‘The first day I got up here, I saw things
clearly,’ he told the others. ‘We’ve been fighting a war ever since those things
appeared. And yeah, they’ve been destroying us,’ he said. The group watched him
silently.

‘But we only lose if we give up hope,’ he said. ‘We can
die, but the fight carries on. As long as people believe the cause is worth
fighting for.’ Liv smiled. ‘I’ve had this idea in my head, ever since I got
here,’ Will told them. ‘I wanted to take people in and help them, and start a
tribe. All the survivors without families, hiding away out there afraid for
their lives – they could come here. We’d look after them. Train them to fight.
We’d get strong enough to take those things on, and fight back for our homes.’
The group watched him silently, hanging on his words. ‘We could get scattered
to the four corners of the Earth today, but I’ll tell you what: we’ll take that
fighting spirit with us, wherever we end up. That tribe spirit. It’s an idea.
It’s like Tabitha said, you can’t kill an idea. We’re the first Ghosts. And
Ghosts don’t die. They just go out fighting.’ Jim nodded. ‘We didn’t choose
this fight, but we can choose how it ends,’ Will told them. ‘And I’d sooner die
fighting today, than spend the rest of my life running away and hiding from
them like a fucking rat!’ Liv cheered. ‘I’d sooner die today with a spear in my
hand, hacking those fuckers apart and covered in silver blood! With you lot, my
tribe, fighting with me!’ Tabitha grinned. ‘This is a shit world to live in!’
said Will. ‘I’m going to build a better one, or I’m going to die trying! Are
you with me?’

‘Yeah!’ Liv shouted out. Sylvia was listening; even Tony
was looking ready for a fight.

‘I’m not waiting to die, I’m going out fighting today!’
Will yelled across the walls. ‘I want to rain down all fucking hell on those
things for everyone and everything they’ve taken away from us! I said are you
with me?’

‘Yeah!’ the others echoed.

‘Well let’s give them a fucking war then!’ he shouted
over the walls. ‘Everyone get a rifle, let’s do this!’ the group busied
themselves grabbing weapons from the wall. Beyond the hill, the spiders crept
ever closer through town.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ Chris told Will. ‘You lot have
got riot armour on, in case you hadn’t noticed. The other half of us aren’t
going to last very long when the spiders get up on the wall. These aren’t going
to stop us getting stabbed.’ He looked down at his bulletproof vest, salvaged
from the dead soldiers on the moors.

‘I want you guys close to the keep then,’ said Will. ‘If
the spiders start getting over, I want you inside there and up on top of the
keep to give us covering fire. Understood?’

‘Yeah,’ said Tony, putting his arm around Jackie. Chris
couldn’t agree fast enough, given the chance to be up inside the keep.

‘Right everyone,’ said Will. ‘Take a bayonet each and
two grenades. Two each. None of us know how to use these properly, but the idea’s
pretty simple. And we’re damn well going to use them anyway.’ The group dipped
into each box in turn, walking away with weapons of war in their clammy hands.

‘I’ll tell you when to drop a grenade over the wall,’ he
said. ‘I’ll tell you when to fix on your bayonet.’

‘And what if you’re not around any more?’ said Chris.

‘You do it then,’ said Will, watching Chris look uneasy
all of a sudden.

‘They’re on the field!’ said Liv, watching the spiders
approach the hill.

‘Right, Tabitha, get on the gate please!’ said Will.
‘The rest of you, spread out along the wall!’ Tabitha jumped down to the gate
and picked her gap between the barricade, giving her spear a couple of practice
stabs through the bars. Reluctantly, Chris came over and stood on the end of
the wall close by, to be closest to the door of the keep.

‘If you let them get in, I’ll kill you,’ he told her.

‘They’re not getting in,’ she replied. ‘But I would love
to see you try.’ He fell silent for a moment, watching the silver mass creeping
over the field to surround the castle.

‘Are you using that?’ he said, nodding at Tabitha’s riot
helmet on the cobbles.

‘No. I can’t fight with it on. Take it,’ she said,
passing it up to him. He’d be less inclined to talk with that visor down
anyway. Chris said nothing as he took it.

‘Very gallant of you, Christopher, to take that for
yourself,’ Sylvia remarked further down the wall, watching him put the helmet
on. ‘I’m fine without it, but thank you for offering.’

‘Age of equality,’ Chris said with a shrug. ‘Every man and
woman for themself. But that’s probably still quite a new idea to someone your
age.’ Sylvia glared at him, and turned her attentions back over the wall.

‘They’re coming!’ said Liv, the wind whipping at her
hair. There was a chittering chaos on the field as the spiders came scuttling
up the hill. They’d reached the stone steps winding up to the castle.

‘Come on then!’ Will yelled at them from the walls,
raising his spear. ‘I’m going to cut your fucking hearts out and eat them raw!
Come and see what monsters look like! Come on!’ when the first spider
made it to the top of the steps Tabitha roared and speared it through the gate
in a burst of silver blood. Chris took one that climbed the wall beside him,
slamming his shield up against the spider’s shooting tongue. Panicking, he
buried his bayonet in its mouth and twisted the blade, driving it in deep. He
felt something crack inside the spider’s head, and it tumbled back off the wall
to crash down on the steps. Tabitha skewered another and tore its silver skin
apart as she wrenched the spear out. Will charged past Liv to spear one that
made it right up the wall; Liv leaned over a gap between the parapets and shot
another climber in the head.

The
fight was gruelling; never-ending. At least the barricades worked, though. Most
of the spiders were clustering at the foot of the castle, falling over one
another like maggots to get a foothold on the wall. The chattering tide crashed
against the stones, and piled up against the wall in a swelling mound.

‘Jim! Drop a grenade there, straight down!’ said Will,
watching as the spiders massed against the wall below. Jim watched Will
carefully and held the grenade out in front of him, holding it gentle and
nervous like he’d caught a bird. Jim pulled the pin out and dropped the grenade
straight down over the wall.

‘Cover your ears!’ Will shouted out. They ducked down by
the wall. A couple of seconds later there came a loud vicious crack. Looking
over the wall the explosion had scattered the spiders, mangling half of the
cluster and throwing the rest down the hill.

‘Good work Jim, open fire!’ said Will, aiming a rifle
shot over the wall. ‘Give it to them!’ Jim pulled the rifle from his back and
plugged another climber, watching it drop back and crash down on the rocks
below.

When Tabitha skewered her next one through the bars and
pulled her spear back, a living chunk of spider came with it and dropped on the
courtyard.

‘Jesus!’ said Chris, aiming his rifle in terror at the
flailing limb.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Tabitha, stamping it to
death on the cobbles. Chris watched in horror as she picked it up, cracked the
armour like a lobster shell and gulped the stream of silver blood that came
gushing out. He just stared at her.

‘What? I’m hungry,’ she told him, wiping the blood off
her chin. It slipped down better than wine, cold and fresh and heady. When she
picked up her spear again, she found Chris still staring at her. ‘Chris? The
spiders?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied, turning his attentions back to the
wall. ‘Shit!’ Chris jerked his shield up and blocked a tongue that came
whipping up over the wall, knocking him down on his back. Sylvia turned and
shot the spider out of the air as it leapt up onto the wall. It hit the top of
the wall dead and tumbled back down with a crash.

‘Jesus Christ, you can shoot!’ said Chris, struggling to
his feet.

‘I’m a country girl. I’ve been shooting since I was a
child,’ Sylvia replied, plugging another spider that clawed its way up the
battlements.

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ said Chris, shooting another that
was scaling the wall.

‘Because everyone treated me like the babysitter, and
never bothered to bloody well ask me,’ she replied.

‘Tony! Grenade, straight down mate!’ said Will, looking
over the wall. He mimed pulling the pin out, and watched Tony do the same.
‘Straight down!’ Tony leaned over and let the grenade tumble down into the
silver swarm massing below. He and Will put his hands over their ears, and
nudged Jackie to follow suit. A sharp sudden blast, and then Will was shouting
to them to get back to firing their rifles. Further along Liv leant over the
wall and buried her fire axe in another spider, as it struggled to find its
final foothold in the stonework. She pulled the axe back out with a spurt of
silver blood, and saw Will running up to her. He grabbed her and kissed her
fiercely.

‘I like you with an axe,’ he said, grinning. ‘How’s it
going?’

‘Hard,’ she said, dropping her axe to shoot another
spider that was edging over the wall.

‘Someone regretting the “gigantic fire axe” option?’
said Will.

‘Piss off,’ she said, smiling.

‘Help!’ Jim shouted, fumbling to fit the bayonet to his
rifle. Will saw silver legs on the wall beside him, tapping and climbing over
the top.

‘Watch yourself Jim!’ said Will, sprinting down the wall
with his spear held like a long-jump pole. As the spider emerged over the
parapet Will ran the spear into it with a crashing stab, and tossed its gushing
body off the wall.

‘On your left!’ said Jim. Will turned and speared
another, failing to stab through the armour but still giving it a good push off
the wall. ‘There’s too many!’ said Jim breathlessly. ‘They just keep coming!’

‘Use your other grenade mate, I’ll stay here with you,’
said Will.

‘Right,’ said Jim, pulling the grenade from his pocket.
Will jabbed another spider, and skewered a second. Jim turned and tossed his
grenade over the wall.

‘Down!’ said Will. They crouched down, hands on ears,
waiting. Nothing happened.

‘…Did you pull the pin out mate?’ said Will.

‘What?’ said Jim, taking his hands off his ears.

‘Did you pull the pin out?’

‘…Shit.’

‘Well, hopefully twice the bang then,’ said Will,
pulling a pin from one of his own grenades and dropping it over the wall. ‘This
is my new favourite sound,’ he told Jim gleefully, clamping his hands over his
ears for the violent boom that followed. ‘Now that’s just beautiful,’ he said,
as they looked over the wall at the bloody silver carnage below.

‘Must be at least twenty we got then,’ said Jim,
studying the twitching pieces of spider beneath the wall.

‘I’ll be dreaming about this tonight,’ said Will,
spitting over the wall at their bodies.

Tabitha
buried her spear in another spider reaching through the gate bars, releasing a
slick silver gush as she tore it back out again. She blinked away from a spurt of
silver blood that dappled her face. Already the dead spiders were piling up at
the gates, with more scrambling over them to reach inside.

‘I can do this all day!’ she yelled past the barricade,
as the crush of spiders crowded against the creaking gates. Another spat its
tongue through the barricade at her, slamming its spike against her riot gear.
She replied with a savage thrust and killed it instantly, and licked the blood
on her spear when she pulled it back through.

‘You’re a freak,’ Chris told her, shooting another that
climbed the wall.

‘So you keep saying,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Let me know when
you get past a hundred kills though, won’t you?’

‘You’ve not killed a hundred,’ he said angrily.

‘Count the bodies,’ she replied, nodding at the
dismembered mess scrambling around at the gates.

‘You’re messed up,’ he said, plugging two shots at
another spider that crawled up the wall.

‘Alright, so I’m a freak,’ she said, stabbing another
through the bars. ‘But at least I’m good at it. You’re the worst shot I’ve ever
seen.’ Chris looked pissed off, and went back to defending the wall without
another word. Tabitha glanced up at him between kills. She liked seeing Chris
pissed off.

‘Come on, let the bastards have it!’ Will shouted across
the wall. The sea of silver swelled and swarmed on the hill below. ‘I want them
shaking and shitting themselves by the time they get to these walls, and I want
them to see that we never, never give up!’ he yelled. ‘This is going to
be the day they find out that we’re the ones to be afraid of!’ the others
cheered across the wall.

‘Look!’ said Jackie, waving Will and Tony over. There
beyond the sea of spiders they saw a tall dark figure. It didn’t move like a
human.

‘What is it?’ said Tony, watching it in terror.

‘Another kind of alien? The one Tabitha mentioned?’ said
Will. He checked that the wall below was clear of spiders, and tried to get a
better look down the scope of Tabitha’s hunting rifle. The figure was just
standing there, out beyond the field of spiders. Watching.

‘More importantly, can we hurt it?’ said Sylvia, coming
over. ‘May I?’ she took the rifle from Will, leant it on the wall and took her
aim. The hunting rifle cracked. ‘Ha!’ she exclaimed, handing the rifle back.

‘She hit it!’ Will laughed, as the distant watcher escaped
back into town.

‘Right between the legs,’ Sylvia added. ‘William. May I
take one of the shotguns?’

‘Take whichever you like,’ he said happily, picking them
up from the wall for her to choose between.

‘May as well go out in a hail of bullets,’ she said,
taking her shotgun back to her place on the wall.

‘Hear hear,’ said Will happily. ‘Right Jackie, let’s get
you dropping some grenades.’

‘No, I don’t want to,’ she said nervously, edging closer
to Tony.

‘So you’ve tried it before?’ said Will, smiling. ‘You
didn’t like it?’

‘No of course I’ve not done it before,’ she said,
affronted.

‘Then how can you know you won’t like it?’ Will said
with a grin.

‘First time for everything love,’ said Tony, holding out
her hand and putting his second grenade in her palm. Jackie looked at it,
terrified. A sudden roar cut through the drone of the swarm then, echoing from
the town.

‘What the bloody hell was that?’ said Tony, watching the
town beyond the field.

‘Sylvia, I think you upset our new alien friend with
that shot,’ said Will.

‘Good,’ Sylvia called back, blasting another spider with
her shotgun as it edged up the wall. There was another roar then, and the sea
of spiders suddenly surged towards the middle of the wall. What started as a
wild scramble became rabid but orderly; a total change in their behaviour. The
swarm was forming ranks. They were being directed.

‘They’re climbing on t-top of each other!’ Liv yelled,
shooting desperately at the sudden flux of spiders clambering up the wall below
her.

‘Everyone, over here!’ Will yelled, running over to be
with Liv. The spiders piled up into a single tumbling mass below them; a
writhing silver hill that swelled and grew against the castle wall.

‘Someone give me a grenade!’ yelled Will, as the others
opened fire on the growing mass. Jackie put one in his hand, glad to be without
it. Will pulled the pin and prayed to god, and dropped it over the side.
‘Everyone down, cover your ears!’ he yelled. There was an echoing boom through
the park. The top of the swarming hill burst apart like a living firework,
scattering spiders high over the field below.

‘Another!’ yelled Will, watching the mass regrow rapidly
towards the top of the wall.

‘Grenades, everyone!’ Will shouted desperately. ‘Any
you’ve got left!’ one after another the Ghosts pulled the pins on their
grenades and let them tumble down into the swarm. With every booming crack, the
massing spiders tumbled and clattered down off one another with a sound like a
truckload of scrap. The field became littered with their dead shapes, and a
rain of silver blood splashed down on the rocks and grass below. But still the
swarm kept swelling and climbing, edging its way relentlessly towards the top.

‘I’m out of bullets!’ said Jim, as the others fired
uselessly on the mound.

‘They’re going to come over! Tabitha, get over here!’
yelled Will. ‘Shields up! Everyone without riot gear, get inside! Now!’ the
first spider came clawing over the top of the wall as Chris, Sylvia, Jackie and
Tony ran for the keep. Will yelled at the spider and speared it through, with
barely enough time to pull the spear out again before more of them climbed
over. Tabitha ran up onto the wall and remembered something then, as she felt
the wind tossing her hair.

‘Chris, throw my helmet back! Chris!’ she yelled. But he
was already running in through the door. Tabitha turned around and saw spiders
come clattering over the wall, crashing down around her in a frenzy. She buried
her spear in the first spider that scuttled towards her. The second took her spear
with it as it fell shrieking from the wall, the wooden pole slipping clean out
of her slick bloody hands. More spiders were smashing against the others’ riot
shields, pushing them back down the wall towards Tabitha and the keep.

‘Tabitha!’ Liv screamed, hacking at the mass of spiders
with her axe as they spread out over the wall.

‘We need to get back into the keep!’ Will shouted to
Liv, putting the clear visor down on her helmet. He bashed his shield into a
spider as it spat its stabbing tongue at them, and Liv buried her axe down in
its head with a crunching squelch. Tabitha came running along the wall to help
them as they backed away. A spider grabbed out at Jim’s legs and tripped him,
and jabbed a needled claw into the sole of his boot. He screamed and pulled the
claw away, kicking the spider back.

‘Jim!’ Liv yelled, hacking the spider to pieces to give
Jim chance to get away.

‘It got my foot!’ Jim screamed. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s
burning!’ Jim collapsed down in agony. It was a metal-tasting fire inside him,
searing his leg like a red-hot poker through the heel. He was screaming,
hysterical with the pain. Will dropped his spear and shield and grabbed Jim
under the arms, dragging him away down the wall towards the keep. Liv held the
spiders back for them, driving her axe down into another that edged too close.

‘Go and help Jim!’ said Tabitha, running past Liv to
tackle the spiders head-on.

‘Keep them off us, and follow us into the keep!’ said
Liv. She passed Tabitha the fire axe and ran to help Will. ‘Stay close behind
us!’ Liv called back. Tabitha watched them dragging Jim along the wall towards
the keep, flailing and screaming with the pain. It was just her and the tide of
spiders, then. She felt the weight of the axe and shield in her hands, ready to
swing as one crawled closer. A rifle cracked, and the scuttling spider dropped
dead. More spiders burst and fell down behind it. Tabitha saw Chris and the
others standing on top of the keep, opening fire on the horde.

‘Move!’ Chris yelled down to her. Suddenly there was a
distant rumbling sound, high and thin over the scuttling racket of the horde.
Tabitha turned to see a dot in the sky, growing larger and louder by the
second. A fighter jet. As it passed overhead something dropped from its belly.
As soon as Tabitha realised what the falling shape was, she ran. The towering
mass of spiders exploded with a deafening boom behind her, blowing the mound of
spiders apart and raining them down over the field in their hundreds. Tabitha
lay face-down on top of the wall, surrounded by a giant dust cloud like a dry
choking fog. She heard nothing but a high ringing in her ears as she sat up; a
shrill droning racket. It masked the sound of the few surviving spiders
scuttling along the wall towards her.

‘Tabitha!’ came a muffled scream, like it was
underwater. ‘Tabitha!’ dazed, she looked over at the screaming figures through
the dust. Will and Liv had lain Jim down in the courtyard, unsure whether to
get him inside or to come back for her.

‘Go!’ said Tabitha, waving them on, choking on dust.
Even her own voice sounded a hundred miles away. She picked up the riot shield
and the fire axe where she’d dropped them, and saw a spider come scuttling
suddenly out of the foggy dust towards her.

She barely managed to block its stabbing tongue with the
shield, staggering back as it swiped its claws at her feet.

‘Come on!’ she growled, waiting for it to come in again.
When it pounced she bashed the shield into it to floor it, and buried the axe
in its head with a bloody squelch.

‘I can’t see anything down there!’ came Chris’s voice
through the dustcloud, up on top of the keep.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Sylvia called back. ‘There’s no use
wasting bullets if we can’t see!’ down on the wall, Tabitha adjusted the shield
against her arm. Two more spiders crept towards her out of the dust. More
followed behind them; Tabitha reached for her hunting knife. As soon as she
heard barking though, she froze up. Laika had gotten outside.

‘Laika, come here!’ Liv screamed, as she and Will
dragged Jim in through the door of the keep. Liv tried to grab at Laika’s
collar but she was too fast, and bounded across the courtyard and up the steps
onto the wall. Ears raised, teeth bared, Laika was growling feral at the
spiders creeping up on Tabitha.

‘Laika, stay!’ Tabitha yelled desperately, looking back
at her as the horde of spiders edged closer. When she turned back to face them
one of the spiders leapt on her shield and clung on. As its weight knocked her
off balance another dragged her to the ground. Tabitha screamed. She struggled
helplessly against their sudden strength gripping her limbs, holding her down.
Working in unison. Her frantic writhing was useless against so many; her riot
armour made it even harder to move. Panicking, Tabitha tried to force the
lightning out of her body; pushing and willing it with every nerve. It was
useless. Screaming, she felt claws grip her head still; felt a spider’s sudden
weight as it crept onto her chest. There in front of her a spike slid out from
a slimy black mouth, edging towards her eye. She smelled death on it, coming
for her at last. Laika crashed into the spider and bit down on a leg, dragging
it off Tabitha’s chest. Even before Tabitha could get to her feet she heard
Laika yelp. She pulled her dog away from the spiders as fast as she could, with
Laika’s blood slapping down on the stones at her feet. Tabitha screamed and
split the spider in half with the fire axe. She cratered the head of the next
one, punching it over and over until the spider stopped moving. The third she
tore the legs off, and sank her hunting knife into a fourth. The fifth dropped
dead before she could get to it, bleeding from a bullet hole. The shooters on
the keep picked off the last few on the wall through the fading dust cloud.
Tabitha wrenched the fire axe free from the first spider, and swung it deep
into another that still lay twitching on the wall.

‘Clear!’ Chris shouted across the castle, delirious.
‘We’ve won! We’ve fucking won!’ Tabitha turned away from the spiders, and her
heart broke at the sight. Laika limped and collapsed by the wall, lying there
in a growing pool of blood beneath her. The fighter jet tore overhead again,
and an echoing boom massacred the spiders still left on the field below.
Tabitha sat down by the wall, and lifted Laika up to cradle her in her lap. She
felt Laika’s warm blood coursing out of her body, making her fur slick and wet.
It streamed down Tabitha’s arms as she held her close. Laika whined quietly,
and closed her mismatched eyes.

‘Oh, my beautiful girl,’ Tabitha said softly. She held
her cheek against Laika’s warm head, and kissed her soft fur.

‘I’ve got you,’ she told her, past the lump in her
throat. ‘It’s ok.’ She stroked her dog’s bloody fur. Laika’s body gently
slumped then, lifeless in her lap.

‘I love you,’ she said quietly, kissing Laika’s nose.

‘Tabitha!’ said Liv, running over. ‘Are you hurt?’
Tabitha looked up at her and shook her head. Liv was staring at Laika.

‘How’s Jim?’ said Tabitha, sniffling back the tears.

‘He’s not g-good. At all,’ Liv replied. ‘Tabitha, I’m
s-so s-sorry about your dog. I opened th-the door and didn’t think, a-and –

‘Liv,’ Tabitha replied softly, looking down at Laika.
‘If she hadn’t come running out I could be dead now. She saved my life.’ Liv
watched her stroking Laika and burst into tears.

‘This is f-fucked up,’ Liv sobbed, putting a hand over
her eyes. ‘Everything.’

‘I know,’ Tabitha said softly, laying Laika’s body
gently to one side as she got to her feet. ‘Look, why don’t you go back inside
and help Jim?’ Tabitha suggested, hugging Liv tight. ‘I’m just going to put
Laika in the garden. I’ll only be a second.’

‘Ok,’ said Liv. Carefully Tabitha carried Laika down the
steps and into the garden, laying her down by the bushes at the bottom of the
lawn.

‘Tabitha? Are you alright?’ Will called over, stepping
out of the keep onto the courtyard.

‘She’ll just be a minute,’ Liv said quietly, walking
over to him. ‘It’s Laika,’ she told him quietly. Tabitha stood up from the
grass, and sighed at Laika’s body laying there. A vast shadow swept overhead.
Looking up at the blue sky, she heard a weird rumbling that seemed to come from
everywhere at once.

‘What’s that noise?’ said Will, looking around as Liv
held close to his side. They watched the sky from the courtyard. There was a
sound like flapping wings then, a colossal whoom. A dark grey head rose
up beyond the wall, huge and reptilian. White eyes stared; grey wings drowned
out the daylight. The creature opened its jaws to reveal a pale glow in its throat,
crackling like static. Liv and Will stared for a moment in silent shock, and
held hands as they ran for their lives. Tabitha screamed and ran for them along
the wall as the hellish creature drew breath. It spat a sudden gout of white
light, obliterating Liv and Will in a burst of ashes. Tabitha stared in horror,
refusing to believe what she’d just seen. She watched the creature crash down
on the wall and look over at her, and she leapt down off the battlements and
ran for the keep as the garden erupted into white flames behind her. The
creature spat down a pale firestorm as she ran, incinerating the grass and
Jim’s allotment. The monster leapt down into the raging flames to hunt her.
Something shot out of the sky then and exploded against its body, and the
creature roared and took off into the air. The same fighter jet thundered
overhead, and circled around for another strike. The huge creature headed high
and dodged and weaved away from the jet that chased it, but took another
missile hit in a burst of flames. The thing roared and dropped out of the sky,
crashing down into town in a boiling dust cloud. The jet tore off into the blue
then, vanishing from sight. Tabitha just stared at the sky in disbelief. At the
smoking black scorch mark where Liv and Will had stood. At the garden in flames
all around her.

‘Chris,’ Tabitha mumbled, heading around the far side of
the keep. The thought of Liv and Will wrenched inside her. She felt sick, numb.
The heat from the garden was unbearable; the flames cut her off from the
courtyard. She’d need to go right around the keep to get in. ‘Chris!’ she
called, coughing at the smoke. ‘Sylvia!’ even her bedsheet banner on the wall
of the keep had burned away to nothing. As Tabitha rounded the keep and came in
through the door, she stopped dead in her tracks. She looked at Jim in shock.
Will and Liv had laid him out on the table. They’d taken off his riot gear, and
cut open his trouser leg. He was lying there just breathing, fast. The venom
had made his leg wither away to nothing. ‘Chris! Anyone!’ she called out. She
looked up the stairs and saw Chris just standing there, wide-eyed and
motionless.

‘They’ve got dragons now!’ he laughed desperately.
‘What’s next, fucking ogres and wizards coming through the gate? What the fuck’s
going on?’

‘Jim’s dying down here, for god’s sake!’ she yelled
back. ‘Help me!’ Chris and the others plodded downstairs, and took one look at
Jim and stayed away. They were just standing there, shell shocked.

‘Jesus Christ, we need to help him!’ Tabitha yelled at
them. Chris took his eyes away from Jim and looked at her. He was white as a
sheet.

‘How?’

30

Chris
was right. There was nothing they could do to stop Jim’s leg collapsing
further. They could only keep him drunk to dull the pain, and try to stop the
endless bleeding from the cratered needle hole in his foot. After a big dose of
vodka, Jim’s screams had reduced to an endless groaning.

‘The blood won’t stop!’ said Tabitha in a panic,
unwrapping another blood-soaked bandage with a wet slap on the floor. She tied
another tight around his foot. The others had refused to touch Jim’s blood, in
case the venom got to work on them too. They could only stand around uselessly,
watching Tabitha. Their silent presence was grating on her while she worked.

‘I don’t need a bloody audience!’ she snapped, brushing
the hair away from her forehead with the back of her wrist. Jim’s blood coated
her hands with a slick red shine, marbled against her grey skin beneath. The
others stepped back, but carried on watching with a morbid fascination.

‘It’s in his hands,’ said Tony, watching Jim’s skin
slowly pock and pit. Worst of all, a few minutes later, the small dose of venom
had stopped working and left Jim half mangled on the table. Once he’d regained
his senses enough to ask where Liv and Will were, Tabitha was the one who had
to break his heart with the news. She’d never heard anyone wail like that
before; a tortured scream like his mind was coming apart along with his insides.

‘Kill me. Please,’ Jim whispered eventually, over and
over, like a prayer. He prayed to Tabitha as she held his hand. When she
changed his bandage again and disappeared from view, he prayed to the distant
faces in the dusky gloom of the keep. The ones that wouldn’t come too close.
Tabitha couldn’t tell him that she would end his suffering, though. She
couldn’t tell him that she wouldn’t, either. She didn’t know what was going to
happen to him, and she was scared.

‘Will you help me? Please?’ she said, turning to her
silent audience.

‘I’m not touching him,’ Tony said bluntly.

‘Get me some pillows and sheets then!’ Tabitha snapped.
The others just stared. ‘Now!’

Tabitha
set them to work building a bed of cushions in the corner, closer to the fire. She
couldn’t just leave Jim to bleed on the kitchen table.

‘Chris, it’s getting too dark in here,’ she said,
putting her wrist on Jim’s forehead. He was red hot. Chris hadn’t taken the
initiative; he just stared at her. ‘Do you think I’m just making conversation
or something?’ she snapped at him. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Light some
candles! Christ!’ was it all on her now to tell them what to do?

‘I think Sylvia’s in shock,’ said Jackie. She was sat
down in the corner, looking outside at the glow of the white flames from the
garden.

‘Get her some water then, I don’t know!’ said Tabitha.
‘I’m trying to stop Jim dying here!’ she sighed, frustrated, as Jim’s
bandage began to soak through again.

‘I think we need to lie her down,’ said Chris, lighting candles
with a cigarette lighter. He looked up at Tabitha. Waited for acknowledgement.

‘Then bloody do it!’ Tabitha snapped. ‘Stop waiting for
me to say yes or no!’

Affronted, Chris put the candle down and went to get
Sylvia a drink. Once they’d convinced her to lie down upstairs, Tabitha had
managed to unfurl a bed sheet out under Jim’s body on the table. His limbs felt
way too light.

‘Help me get him down over there,’ she said, taking a
corner of the sheet. Gingerly the others took a corner each, and together they
hoisted him up. Jim was screaming with the pain.

‘Quick!’ said Tabitha. They rushed Jim over to the
corner of the room, and laid him down on the bed of pillows.

‘I need to lie down, I can’t handle this,’ said Jackie,
putting her hand on her forehead. She was looking to Chris for an answer.
Tabitha supposed that Jackie knew she’d get a more agreeable reply from him.

‘Er, yeah, go and lie down,’ said Chris.

‘Are you fucking serious?’ Tabitha muttered. ‘Keep an
eye on Sylvia then, while you’re up there,’ she told Jackie over her shoulder.
Tony was going upstairs with her too, without the effort of giving an excuse.
Personally Tabitha couldn’t have cared less for Sylvia, for all the help she’d
been. Wasn’t she supposed to be the hardy matriarch sort, the last one to
crumble? Maybe Tabitha had seen too many movies. Or maybe she’d just stopped
feeling, she considered. In place of grief for Liv, Will and Laika, there was
only a numbness setting in. Either she was in shock, or she’d just stopped
feeling. Maybe it was emotional self-defence, she considered. Just putting the
walls up once and for all, and switching off to it all for good.

‘Kill me,’ Jim whispered to her, carrying on his prayer.
Tabitha looked at him lying there on the floor, and her walls crumbled again.
She took his hand in her own and burst into tears.

Dusk
gave way to dark, and Chris closed the door of the keep. White flames burned
down outside. For the longest time, Chris and Tabitha sat with Jim and said
nothing. Tabitha lay a cold damp cloth on Jim’s burning forehead, and moved a
few candles closer on the fireplace beside him to see him better. The
flickering candlelight picked out deep shadows in his pale old face; the
creases and furrows of age. Jim’s cheeks had grown more hollow, even over a few
hours. His eyelids were heavy, and he didn’t try to move. Maybe he couldn’t. At
least he’d stopped screaming and groaning. Tabitha had felt her heart crack
open every time she’d heard him scream.

‘Water, love. Please,’ he said hoarsely. Tabitha nodded
and searched for the cup in the gloom.

‘Liv and Will, they’re gone,’ said Chris, staring at the
floor. A chasm of silence followed after it.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied, lifting the cup of water to
Jim’s lips. She probably could have expressed more feeling about the loss, but
it wouldn’t come. She’d shut down. Like after her dad’s funeral when she was
little, when she cried so much that she ran out of tears. The only thing left
inside her now was a pit, black and bottomless.

‘End it for me,’ Jim pleaded with Tabitha, gasping as he
swallowed more water. ‘Just do it.’

‘You’re not going to kill him,’ said Chris, a ghoulish
face in the corner, lit by the dim glow of candlelight.

‘That’s not your choice,’ Jim croaked. ‘I’m still here,
you know. I decide whether I want to die or not. I just wish one of you
bastards would do it. I don’t care who.’

‘You can’t ask us to do that, Jim,’ Tabitha replied.

‘No, I can see that,’ he said angrily. He turned his
head to look at Chris. ‘I thought this prick would jump at the chance to do me
in.’ Chris glared, and said nothing.

‘Fine, I’ll do it myself,’ said Jim. With a grunt of
agony he hauled himself up on the bed, and reached over for an assault rifle
left propped up by the fireplace.

‘Jim, no!’ said Tabitha, wrestling the gun out of his
grasp.

‘It’s my choice!’ he snapped, trying to pull the gun
back. Tabitha felt just how weak his arms were when she tugged the rifle out of
his hands.

‘There’s no bullets left,’ said Chris, getting up from
his seat. ‘And even if there was, I don’t want your blood on my hands. I can’t
deal with this. I’m going upstairs.’

‘You can’t!’ said Tabitha, disbelieving. She watched
Chris turn his back on the scene and climb the stairs; easy as that. ‘Well I
hope you sleep well then, you piece of shit!’ She yelled after him. ‘We’ll try
not to make too much noise for you down here!’

‘You’re not man enough to do a job that needs doing!’
Jim shouted, watching Chris climb the stairs. ‘I’d put you out of your misery, you
can bet on that!’ Chris disappeared into the gloom upstairs. Tabitha heard
their whispered voices. Jim was breathing heavily.

‘You’re trying to wind him up,’ said Tabitha, checking
Jim’s foot. At least the bleeding had slowed right down.

‘I thought it’d be easy,’ said Jim, wincing as he got
himself more comfortable on the blood-sodden bed.

‘How do you feel?’ she said.

‘Like my insides are on fire,’ he replied. ‘Like my
bones are melting.’ Tabitha reached out to hold his hand, but he winced and
pulled away. ‘It hurts,’ he said in apology.

‘I’m going to get you through this,’ said Tabitha,
offering him more water.

‘No you’re not lass,’ he replied, looking her in the
eyes. ‘There’s no cure for this.’

‘But the venom’s stopped,’ she said, helping to lift the
cup to his lips. He took a trickling gulp, and gasped as the water went down
his dry throat.

‘It’s not stopped, it’s just slowed down,’ he told her.
‘I can feel it, in here,’ he said, rubbing his chest with his old fingers.
‘With any luck, my bloody ticker would just get the message and stop.’

‘You can’t talk like that,’ said Tabitha, voice
trembling. She wanted desperately to reach for his hand, but she couldn’t. ‘You
can’t die,’ she said, as the warm tears welled in her eyes. ‘You’re all I’ve
got left.’ Jim smiled sadly and reached his hand out, and took hold of
Tabitha’s despite the obvious pain he was in. He kept his hand gripped around
hers for as long as he could, and then dropped it back down on the bed.

‘You’re not the religious sort,’ he observed, resting
his head down deeper on the pile of cushions behind him.

‘No, I’m not,’ Tabitha agreed, sniffling.

‘My wife, Mary, she was very devout,’ he said. ‘Prayed
all the time, for everything.’

‘Aren’t you religious?’ said Tabitha.

‘Well yes, but not a patch on her,’ he replied. ‘She was
a real saint. Especially for me. I was a real troublemaker.’ He grinned at the
memories. The pair of them sat there in silence for a little while, with the
candles flickering a dim warm glow on their faces in the dark.

‘Mary’s going to be waiting for me,’ he said. ‘If I make
it up there, of course.’

‘Of course you will,’ Tabitha replied.

‘You don’t even believe in heaven,’ Jim chuckled. ‘You
don’t need to pretend.’ Tabitha smiled. ‘Mary always had enough faith for the
two of us,’ he told her. ‘I was never very good at it. But I think there is a
better place up there. And I think she’s waiting for me there. She’s probably
cleaning the place right now. Always bloody cleaning everything.’ Tabitha
laughed.

‘She sounds like my mum,’ she said.

‘I bet she was a woman of God too,’ said Jim.

‘She was,’ Tabitha replied, smiling at the thought of
her. ‘She was a strong woman.’

‘Well now I know where you get it from,’ said Jim. ‘Was
she a stubborn little madam too?’ Tabitha laughed.

‘Runs in the family,’ she said.

‘Well, she’ll be waiting for you up there too,’ said
Jim. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’

‘It’s a nice thought,’ Tabitha replied, smiling. But
only a thought, she told herself.

‘So what do you think comes after all this then?’ said Jim.
‘Nothing?’ Tabitha hesitated. How was she supposed to tell this to a dying man?

‘It’s alright, you can tell me,’ he said, as if he’d
read her mind. ‘I know what I believe.’

‘Well, yeah. Nothing,’ said Tabitha. ‘Like falling
asleep, but not dreaming. And never waking up. Just… not existing.’

‘Well, that doesn’t sound all that bad either,’ Jim
replied. ‘Bit boring though, if you ask me.’ Tabitha smiled.

‘Well, we wouldn’t know how boring it was if we didn’t
exist any more,’ she said.

‘Nah, give me the pearly gates any day,’ said Jim,
coughing and wincing at the pain. ‘Unless I’m heading down.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

‘Ah well, it’s not up to you,’ Jim replied knowingly,
with a strained cough. ‘I just hope Mary’s done enough praying for me, because
I haven’t.’

‘You’re going straight up there when it’s your time,
Jim,’ said Tabitha. ‘But it’s not your time yet.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Jim, with a wet crackling voice.
‘It’s in my lungs, the poison. I can feel it stinging. Oh God, I wish the thing
had just given me the full bloody dose. I’d be dead by now.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Tabitha replied, voice trembling.

‘Just end it for me love,’ Jim pleaded quietly. ‘Please.’

‘You can’t ask me to do that Jim,’ said Tabitha, broken
hearted, wiping away her warm tears. ‘Please don’t ask me.’

‘Alright love. I’m sorry,’ he said sadly. ‘Come on then,
tell me more about your mum.’ Tabitha smiled at the thought of her; a little
flicker of light in the dark.

By
dawn Jim had convinced Tabitha to get some sleep. All her grief and tears had
hit hard in the early hours, and it was only through sheer exhaustion that she
fell asleep. It couldn’t have been too long since then when she woke up, since
the light around the door outside was still just a dim glow. But the door was
half open.

‘Jim?’ she said, looking around the empty keep. ‘Jim!’
she ran outside into the dawn light; birds filled the pink sky with high songs.
She saw a shape up on the wall, moving gently in the breeze. Jim’s empty skin
was still clutching on to the dead spider’s leg, with the needle buried in his
arm. Shell shocked, like wandering in some waking zombie dream, Tabitha knelt
down beside Jim’s corpse and gently pulled the spike out from his skin. His
thin pale remains were wet and porous like a sponge; Tabitha watched his blood
drip from her palms after only a touch on his arm. She heard the door of the
keep creak open then, and looked around. Sylvia stared at her, and terror crept
across her face.

‘You killed him,’ she said, staring at Jim’s empty skin
and the silver claw in Tabitha’s hand. Tabitha dropped the spider’s leg.

‘He did it himself!’ Tabitha replied. ‘I’ve just woken
up and found him out here!’

‘She’s killed Jim!’ Sylvia screamed into the keep.

‘He did it himself!’ Tabitha yelled back, panicking,
stepping away from Jim’s empty body.

‘Why would I kill him? I woke up and found him
like this, I swear!’

‘He couldn’t have come all the way out here on his own!’
Sylvia said accusingly. Chris rushed to the door, and saw Tabitha backing away
from Jim’s remains with blood on her hands.

‘What the fuck?’ he mumbled, staring at Jim. He looked
back at Tabitha, his eyes wide with fear.

‘What did you do?’ he asked her, with a look of
revulsion.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Sylvia chipped in, fixing Tabitha
with a stare. ‘She was hungry!’

‘What? No!’ Tabitha protested. ‘I know this looks
weird, but I swear I’ve just woken up and found him out here! You have to
believe me!’

‘Does that sound a bit too convenient to you?’ Sylvia
asked Chris, backing away towards the door. ‘You’ve seen what she’s like when
she’s feeding. It was only a matter of time before she moved on to us.
Starting with the weakest first.’

‘What?’ said Tabitha, walking down the steps off the
wall. Chris and Sylvia were muttering to themselves.

‘Jim was asking her to kill him all night,’ Chris
mumbled, glaring at Tabitha in horror.

‘Then she’s a murderer at best,’ Sylvia replied,
pale-faced. ‘At worst… she’s a cannibal.’

‘What are you saying?’ Tabitha demanded as she crossed the
courtyard, struggling to hear their lowered voices by the keep.

‘Back inside,’ said Chris, as Jackie and Tony peered out
at the scene. ‘Everyone, get back inside!’

‘No!’ said Tabitha, running for the door. Chris ushered
Sylvia back inside and slammed the door shut, turning the key in the lock
before Tabitha could reach it.

‘I didn’t do anything!’ she screamed at the door. There
was no reply. All she could hear were panicked tones inside, muttering between
themselves. ‘Jim did it to himself, I just found him!’ she screamed. ‘You have
to believe me!’ there was a sudden slam on the other side of the door.

‘I bet you drank his blood out didn’t you, you fucking
freak!’ Chris yelled. ‘If I had any bullets left I’d put them right through
your skull right now, I swear to god!’

‘I didn’t do it!’ Tabitha yelled back, punching the
door. Teeth gritted, she punched it again, aiming for the lock. Her third hit
cracked the wood.

‘She’s going to get in, she’s going to kill us!’ Jackie
screamed. Tabitha heard only muffled panic inside the keep as she carried on
punching dents and cracks into the wood.

‘Get a knife or something!’ said Tony.

‘They’re all outside!’ Sylvia replied.

‘We’ve still got the bayonets!’ said Chris. ‘Bring the
rifles down, and the bayonets!’ Tabitha stopped, and heard Jackie crying inside
the keep. It was fear. She was making them afraid for their lives. Tabitha
stepped back from the door, away from the terrified voices inside. She walked
over the scorched stones where Liv and Will had been standing, into the ashes
of the garden where she’d lain Laika to rest. Everything, taken from her.
Everything a ruin. Like the world had ended all over again.

The
keep was quiet for a long time. Tabitha tried the door, but gave up when she
heard Jackie start screaming again.

‘Leave us alone!’ said Sylvia inside, cold and
officious. The matriarch standing up to the monster at the door. Tabitha sighed
and walked away. She took Jim’s skin and clothes from the wall and buried them
in the ashes of the garden, where his allotment would have been. He would have
liked that. She hoped that he did find Mary again, cleaning up heaven ready for
him to arrive. She couldn’t think of a brighter thought than that; it even
eased her grief a little bit. She walked up the steps back onto the wall, and
looked out over town. She couldn’t try to stay here with these people, not now.
Sylvia was right; it was best to just leave them alone. But where could she go?
There were more threats out there than just the spiders; Tabitha knew that better
than anyone. She looked back at the scorch mark, and the ashes of the garden
where she’d put Jim and Laika to rest. She wished she could cry, but all she
felt was numb. Emotionless. As if she’d shut down completely. The wind blew
cold today, and the sky was grey and overcast. Stark gloomy weather to match
how she felt. She heard the trapdoor shut on top of the keep behind her.
Turning around, she saw Chris looking down at her from the top.

‘Feeling brave enough to talk to me now?’ said Tabitha.

‘Everyone I get close to dies, but the freak still
lives,’ said Chris. He looked down on her with nothing but contempt. ‘I
shouldn’t have been surprised that you’d finish off Jim. I mean, you’re the
only constant in all their deaths. It’s like Sylvia says. At worst, you’re a cannibal.
At best, you’re a curse.’

‘Don’t pretend you’re grieving for them,’ Tabitha
replied, ignoring the accusation. She dragged over a dead spider and sat down
on the steps up to the wall. ‘You’re grieving for yourself, and how screwed you
are without them.’

‘Fuck off,’ Chris snapped, looking down on her. ‘I was a
Ghost too. And I knew them better than you ever could.’

‘You weren’t a Ghost,’ she replied, wrenching apart the
spider’s armour. ‘You never believed in what Will was trying to do. You weren’t
prepared to fight for it. You weren’t one of us.’ Chris glared at her. ‘Like
you said that time, it’s always been about survival for you, and only you,’
Tabitha continued. ‘Now that they’re gone, you’re lost. You’re not heartbroken
for Will, or Liv, or Jim. You’re heartbroken for poor Chris. And you’re worried
how much harder it’s going to be without them around to carry you.’

‘Fuck you!’ he shouted down. Tabitha smiled, and knew
from the silence that followed that she’d struck a nerve. Chris watched her
gulping down the spider’s blood. It made his skin crawl to see it; she could
tell.

‘If it was up to you, you wouldn’t have let me through
that gate on the first day,’ said Tabitha. ‘You might even have shot me on
sight.’ Chris shrugged. ‘Well, you’ll be glad to know that I’m leaving today,’
she said. She could see how relieved he looked, even at this distance. She
sucked down another gulp of cold silver blood, a dancing static flavour in her
mouth. ‘Well, all I can say is, I’m glad there were good people here like Liv
and Will, and Jim. People who wanted to reach out to strangers like me and give
us a home, and not hide away in their tower like you.’

‘Yeah, Will tried to reach out to the world,’
Chris said sarcastically. ‘And look where that got him. Look where it got all
of us. We could have been safe here, if only we’d not tried to play soldiers
and bring a war down on us. And it’s all your fault.’

‘My fault?’ Tabitha chuckled, tearing a leg off
the spider. ‘How do you work that one out?’ she watched Chris’s face as she
drank the blood from the severed leg. She delighted in his horror. She wanted
him to see everything she was.

‘Will never had any of these ideas before you came
here,’ said Chris. ‘Nobody did. Then a fucking… vampire freak shows up, and
suddenly everyone’s ready to take on the world.’

‘So you’re saying that it was wrong to go out and help
people? That outsiders don’t belong here?’ she said, shaking the last few drops
of silver blood into her mouth. She prayed that Chris would take the bait. She
wanted the others in the keep to hear his answer.

‘I’m saying all this is your fault!’ Chris shouted back,
not giving her the pleasure of railing against his housemates in the keep.
‘What happened to Will and the others is your fault! If you’d never come here,
then they’d still be alive!’

‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Tabitha shot back. ‘I haven’t
killed anyone!’

‘You brought all this down on us!’ he yelled. ‘You
killed all of us the second you showed up here, and you brought all those
fucking spiders with you!’ Tabitha thought about screaming back, but she
stopped herself. She even toyed with the idea of throwing the dead spider at
him, and praying that some of its venom found its way into his skin. But it
really wouldn’t have helped her case.

‘I’m just going to go,’ she said, pulling away the
barricade to get to the gate. She took one last look at the ashes of the
garden, and the scorch mark where Liv and Will had stood. One last look at the
wall where they’d fought together for their home, and the place where Laika had
saved her life. Then all the grief and the tears came at last; a stinging hymn
that rose up out of her lungs and left her body like an aching tide. Maybe her
heart left her then too, she imagined, already broken up to dust inside her, and
just sighed out into the breeze like ashes. She had to leave this place. She
turned away sadly, and pulled the bolt open on the gate.

‘Tabitha,’ said Chris. She turned and looked up at him. ‘We
found a bullet.’ He was aiming a rifle at her; her own hunting rifle. He shot
her in the throat. Tabitha gasped and fell to the ground, clutching her burst
bloody flesh. The others crowded around Chris on top of the keep, looking down
at her writhing on the cobbles. Saying nothing. Tabitha felt the current
streaming out of her, bleeding breath from a silvery crater in her neck. All
she heard was her own gasping breaths, and a bird singing in the distance. The
wall and the scorched garden blurred and disappeared as she lay there gasping,
bleeding, for the longest time. Tabitha swallowed blood with a slick gulp and
fought for her last breath, and her body slumped lifelessly on the courtyard.

Chris
stood there on the keep for a while, just to make sure. Positive that Tabitha
had stopped moving, he headed downstairs and unlocked the keep door. He
approached her carefully, stepped over her to bolt the gate shut, and then felt
her neck for a pulse.

‘I was aiming for your heart,’ he told her corpse on the
courtyard. ‘But as long as I’ve put you down one way or another, you crazy
bitch.’ Tabitha’s dead eyes stared at the ashes of the garden.

‘She’s dead,’ he told the others, as they edged their
way out of the keep.

‘Make sure,’ said Sylvia, coming closer. Chris looked at
her. Sylvia took the bayonet from Chris’s belt, knelt down, and buried it in
Tabitha’s jugular. Sylvia watched for any reaction, listened for any hint of
breath. Satisfied, she pulled the bayonet out, wiped it on a tissue from her
cardigan sleeve, and handed it to Chris as she walked back into the keep.

31

The
family moved so slowly, scuffing their tired feet along the sidewalk as they
went. They coughed with dry throats as they mumbled to one another, cursing the
flies as they picked their way through rotten skins. Mom, Dad, two young kids.
The American Dream family on the run. They made so much noise trying to sneak
through the ruined city that Alex had heard them all the way up the street.
They were nothing special, really. Hobbling on blistered feet, draped in
dust-grey rags; sluggish and bent with fatigue. Alex watched them from the
shadows, tall and stern and staring. He’d seen survivors in worse shape. They
didn’t look too sickly. But they certainly weren’t going to last long here in New
York, wherever they’d come from. If they’d come here looking for somewhere
safe, Alex could only guess at how bad the rest of the country was. He watched
and followed as they worked their way around toppled skyscrapers, scaling giant
hills of concrete rubble that used to be part of the city skyline. He followed
them from the shadows of buildings; vast dark squares cut apart from the light
of the sweltering sun. He’d learned pretty fast to stay in the shadows as much
as he could. The spiders liked the light. Ever since the attack on the city,
ever since he’d lost his brother, it’d been survival. By the time Alex had
reached his parents to tell them David was dead, he got to see what the spiders
were doing to people. He’d thrown up when saw his parents’ empty bodies. He’d
fought for his life against the spider, and ran away. Well, what else was he
supposed to do? There wasn’t anyone left to run to any more; nowhere safe to
go. The water mains didn’t work anywhere. Luckily there was plenty of food and
drink around, lining the shelves of gloomy grocery stores. Everything had
happened so fast that the city had barely been looted. Empty skins covered the
streets in a lot of places. It’d been weeks now since it all came down, and
he’d only ever seen a few people in all that time. He knew by now which ones
were surviving, and which ones were heading for trouble. The longer he watched
the struggling family on the road, the more he was sure that trouble was going
to find them before long.

Alex adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder, and
followed the family for what felt like an eternity. He had to know where they
were trying to get to. There was only one thing that deep into the city, the
way they were headed; and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t want to find it. If
there was some colony of survivors hidden away though, somewhere between here
and there, he had to know about it. If the family knew about a safe place
hidden away he had to try to follow them there. He ducked into an office block,
wanting a better view of where they were heading. He bounded up the flights of
stairs inside, creeping out into a floor of office cubicles. He walked through
wind-scattered paper and mouldy lunches on desks; row upon row of dead
computers and abandoned chairs. Dusty family photos grinned at empty seats.
Bird shit peppered the desks beside shattered glassless windows. An old bacon
sandwich had putrefied to black on a plate; ancient coffees grew blue-white
velvet skins. Alex settled down by a blown-out window in the far corner of the
office, overlooking the road. He could see the family down below, wandering
over the empty crossroads. Across the way, movie stars grinned gigantic from
the scorched wreck of a billboard. Alex looked back to the family on the road,
and a sudden movement off to their left caught his eye. He watched closely.

‘Hey,’ said a woman on the street corner, emerging from
a burnt-out bookstore. The family froze and just looked at her. Alex watched
with fascination.

‘Where are you going?’ said the woman. She was grinning,
unhinged, caked in dust and dirt. Grimy t-shirt and jeans. She was holding a
gun.

‘We’re trying to leave the city,’ the father replied.
‘We don’t want to fight.’

‘I’m not going to fight you,’ the woman chuckled. ‘Not
if you give me what I want.’

‘We don’t have anything,’ the mother replied, stepping
out in front of her two children. Alex couldn’t see their faces from where he
watched. The whole family was scruffy, scrawny; more dirt than skin.

‘We don’t have anything,’ the father repeated, standing
up to the woman. ‘We’ll be going now.’

‘Everyone’s got something,’ the woman replied, grinning,
looking him up and down.

‘Just leave us alone,’ he said, leading his family on
down the road.

‘Hey!’ the woman yelled, and pulled her gun on them.
Alex just watched from the high window, waving a fly away from his face.

‘Now don’t make me waste my bullets,’ the woman said
brightly. ‘Just come over here and empty your pockets, and then you can go. I
promise.’

‘Everyone’s always promising things,’ the father replied
angrily. He pulled a revolver from his coat pocket and fired; missed. The woman
shot back and hit him in the shoulder. The mother and children were screaming.
The woman pointed her pistol at them. Alex aimed his rifle and shot her in the
head, dropping her to the road. The father staggered up from the sidewalk and
aimed his pistol up at him.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Alex called down, standing up in the
window with his hands in the air. ‘I’m going to come down and help you.’

Alex
and the family met on the crossroads; they couldn’t thank him enough for saving
them. The hot sunlight spilled over them as they talked, painting the bright
dead city in searing light and deep shadow.

‘God-damn lunatics everywhere,’ the father said gruffly,
as Alex led him over to sit down on the kerb.

‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ Alex replied, inspecting the
man’s gunshot wound. ‘Hey, let me take a look at that. Can you take your jacket
off?’ the man winced as he took his arm out of the sleeve.

‘Jeez,’ said Alex, studying the wound as the man took
off his shirt. His shoulder was streaming blood, slick and stark red against
his skin in the sunlight.

‘Is it bad?’ said his wife behind him, as Alex leaned in
to inspect the wound. She held their kids close to her; they both stayed
deathly quiet and watched the strange man from a distance.

‘Well, his stress hormones are flooding his body,’ Alex
replied, turning to her with a look of distaste. ‘Spoils the flavour.’ The
father gurgled noisily and fell back onto the sidewalk, with a sickening knock
as his head landed down. A look of horror spread over the woman’s face when she
saw her husband dead with his throat torn out. She gasped when she saw the
blood running down the stranger’s chin. His wild eyes. His sharp black teeth,
grinning. She screamed and ran for her life, dragging her kids back down the
street.

‘Run!’ Alex yelled gleefully. He breathed deep,
contented. He loved a chase. They could wait a little while though; instead he
looked down hungrily at the dead man on the sidewalk. It’d be a sin to waste
all that fresh meat lying at his feet.

32

Tabitha
woke up with a gasp, and looked up at the bright blue sky. She inhaled life;
honey-sweet air to fill her lungs. She was alive. Her body ached, stiff and
cold and pale. Surrounded by dead spiders from the fight. It all came back to
her. Gripping her neck in sudden terror, the gory crater in her throat had
healed up. She was drowning in blood though. She choked and coughed it up like
bright mercury. She was lying on wet grass, thrown down outside at the foot of
the castle walls. A sudden burning thought filled her head; Chris. Revenge. One
by one she remembered her losses too, breaking her heart all over again. Liv
and Will had suddenly been ripped out of her life. Jim too. Emma and Jen, and
Laika… but Mum’s memory stung the most. All she felt was a sick black numbness;
a venomous disbelief. The sound of a helicopter filled her ears then; a deep
chopping drone. She watched the sky. The helicopter grew louder, larger, until
it was right overhead. Lying there with useless muscles, Tabitha turned her
head and watched the helicopter set down on the field beside the hill. The
world faded to black. When she came round again there were blurred figures
walking by. She heard a conversation as the men passed her, although their
voices were muffled like they were underwater. She tried to move but felt
something banging in her head. Everything faded to black again.

Chris
headed up onto the top of the keep, and saw the helicopter’s rotor blades
slowing down where it had landed beside the hill.

‘Who is it?’ said Jackie, putting her head up through
the trapdoor.

‘Army,’ he replied. He watched the figures who’d emerged
from the helicopter, climbing the last few steps and banging on the barred iron
gate in the wall. Armed to the teeth.

‘Tea?’ said Sylvia, as the five men entered the keep.

‘No,’ replied the one in command, looking around at the
living room. He was tall, black-haired, with a fierce cutting look like a living
Roman statue.

‘We’re here because three weeks ago, we lost contact
with a patrol in the hills nearby,’ he said. ‘And because six days ago, a
fighter pilot followed an airborne creature to this location. And destroyed it.’

‘You mean that dragon thing?’ said Tony.

‘Indeed,’ the man replied. ‘As the pilot flew overhead
he discovered a large concentration of enemy spiders, massing to attack this
castle. When he returned to us he claimed that he’d engaged the massing horde
and neutralised them, and then engaged the flying creature. We’re here because
we want to know what attracted all this attention in the first place.’

‘Because we beat the spiders the first time,’ Chris
replied. ‘They attacked again.’

‘Fair enough,’ the man replied. ‘They don’t like to be
beaten, we know that much already.’

‘Major, they’ve got assault rifles,’ said one of the
soldiers, pointing at the gun propped up in the corner.

‘We took them from the patrol,’ said Chris. ‘We’re
putting them to good use.’

‘Those are army property,’ the major replied. ‘You two,
collect the rifles. Make sure they’re all accounted for.’ Two of the soldiers
behind him came forward, and began turning the place over for the guns.

‘You can’t take them,’ said Tony. ‘We need them. To stay
alive.’

‘Army property,’ the major repeated, slowly.
‘Private,’ he said, glancing at another soldier.

‘Kill this man if he speaks again.’ The soldier aimed
his rifle at Tony, and motioned to him to step back. Tony edged away towards
the corner of the room, with Jackie holding onto his arm in terror.

‘There’s a woman outside the walls, barely conscious,’
the major observed. ‘Why?’

‘She’s dead,’ Chris corrected.

‘She was coughing,’ said the major. Chris stared at him,
speechless.

‘We shot her dead,’ Sylvia insisted. ‘She was cannibalising
one of our own.’

‘When was this?’ said the major.

‘Five days ago,’ Sylvia replied. ‘Surely she would have
died from dehydration by now, if nothing else.’

‘Well, I’ve seen plenty of corpses in my time,’ said the
major. ‘I assure you, she’s alive.’

‘She’s not natural,’ Chris muttered, horrified at the
news.

‘Really?’ said Blake, taking a sudden interest. ‘How so?’

A
bee came close by; a sharp sudden buzz in Tabitha’s ear. Startled, she gasped
and woke up. She blinked at the blades of grass in front of her eyes, blurred
and gigantic. She pushed herself up off the ground, and staggered against the
castle wall and the clattering spider corpses around her. There was the
helicopter, down on the field below. An army helicopter. And suddenly her old paranoia
came back, like a demon from the deep. If the army was here, they’d want her.
Just like Jane and Sam had wanted her in her hometown, down there in their lab.
Nanotechnology. That’s what they’d said when her blood was under the
microscope. They’d wanted to cut her open, and use what she had. They’d taken a
lot of interest in what her body could do; the army would be the same once they
found out about her. She looked around her and saw no one. She had to get away.
Her revenge could wait; survival came first. She staggered up again from the
castle wall, and ran. She ran as fast as her weak wobbling legs would carry
her. She ran down the steps, down the grassy hill, onto the field and away from
the helicopter. Her muscles burned and her heart hammered. She had to get away.
That was the only thing she could think of. She’d head into town and then
disappear into the countryside, before anyone came looking for her.

‘She runs well for a dead woman,’ said the major,
watching Tabitha from the castle wall down the scope of a sniper rifle. The
woman was close to the park gates; hard to miss with that tangled shock of red
hair. Within seconds, she’d be out of sight and into the warren of streets
beyond.

‘Has she gone?’ said Jackie, squinting into the distance.

‘Almost,’ the major replied, smiling. He tightened his
finger on the trigger, and the rifle cracked and echoed across town. The force
of the shot hit Tabitha like a sledgehammer in the back. She fell down on a
sudden splat of her own silver blood, painted there on the path in front of
her. Whatever was coursing through her body suddenly was too strong to deal
with. The park gates swam before her. Face-down she clawed at the gravel and
banged her forehead on the path, desperately trying to come round and stand up.
But fighting only made it worse. She may as well have been underwater, gasping
harder and harder for air.

‘Evidently a bullet won’t be enough to kill her,’ Sylvia
told the major. ‘Take it from us.’

‘I don’t want to kill her,’ he replied, leading his men
down the steps towards the castle gate. Chris and the others followed behind.
‘It’s a sedative round,’ the major told them. ‘We use them on the spiders, when
we need specimens to study.’

‘You’re taking her away then?’ said Chris. ‘To study?’

‘She could be extremely valuable to us, if what you’ve
said is true,’ the major replied, turning to Chris. ‘And I’ll assume that
you’re telling me the truth, because you’ve nothing to gain by lying about it.
And everything to lose by lying to me.’ Smiling, the major turned
to his men. ‘So, let’s go and meet this miracle woman,’ he told them, leading
them on through the gate and down the hill. ‘Healing from fatal gunshots,
lasting five days without water, feeds on spiders… some very useful
talents to have. We’ll need to open her up. See what makes her tick.’
Chris stared at him, looking uneasy at the thought.

‘Do you think I’m inhuman?’ the major asked him.

‘She’s the inhuman one,’ Chris replied, clearing his
throat. ‘As long she’s gone from here, I don’t care.’

The
soldiers carried Tabitha’s unconscious body back across the field, with Chris
and the others watching them carefully. They wandered closer to the helicopter
as the soldiers dragged Tabitha towards it, and hoisted her inside. The major
turned back to Chris and the others, looking them over as he approached.

‘Are you taking us somewhere safe?’ said Chris, coming
forward. ‘A refugee camp?’

‘No,’ the major chuckled, amused at the question.
‘There’s nowhere like that to take you. I just wanted one last look at your
shitty little existence here before I leave. God, I wish I had a camera.’

‘We’ll die! You need to take us with you!’ Tony yelled,
squaring up to him. The major took a pistol from his belt and shot Tony in the
head. Jackie screamed and dropped down beside him, holding on to his fallen
body.

‘You’re vermin,’ the major told them. ‘And I don’t
suffer vermin gladly. You’re all the same. Scraping around in the ashes,
waiting to starve. Now the woman you left to die here is an interesting
specimen. You lot, on the other hand, have nothing to offer us but your hunger
and disease. I wish you all a good quick death.’ With that he climbed back into
the helicopter, followed by the soldiers. Chris, Jackie and Sylvia could only
watch in horror as the helicopter lifted away. Chris ran towards it, jumping up
desperately to try to grab hold of it. It rose too fast though. The rotors
whipped a flurry of sandy soil into their eyes as they reached up for it; their
last hope. The noise drowned out their desperate screams and shouts, as they
watched the helicopter tilt forward and climb off into the sky.

33

Tabitha
came around in a black room. The only sounds were her own panicked breaths and
a squeaking plastic rustle, as she struggled against solid restraints that held
her limbs and head tight to the chair. The smell in here was one of cleaning
fluid, cloying and false-fragrant like old hospital wards. There was the feel
of a hospital gown on her too; a clammy plastic smoothness on her skin,
crinkling softly as she tried to move around. A fluorescent ceiling light
flickered then, and came on with a quiet ping. Squinting at the
brilliant white walls, Tabitha’s blinking eyes settled on the room. An
interrogation room. She panicked, struggling against her sudden situation. Her
restraints were metal cuffs in the chair, inches thick around her wrists and
ankles. Solid and unyielding. A steel table and chair stood several feet in
front of her. A red light came on over the door then, caged in little white
bars caked with age-old coats of paint. An old waiting-room buzzer blared an
electrical belch, and the heavy old door opened. A tall man strode in with an
arrogant smile and perfect posture, and took a seat at the table. He was
middle-aged, sharply dressed. Black hair. Thin creased face. Consummate
military man.

‘Major John Blake,’ he said, edging his chair closer to
the table. He rested his hands down gently on the table top. ‘I’m the one who
shot you,’ he said. He was well-spoken, with a voice thick as molasses that
filled the bare room. ‘It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,’ he said. Tabitha
watched him fearfully, still struggling against her restraints. Blake just sat
and smiled. His neat back-and-sides picked out his sharp gaunt features. The
buzzer went again, and the door opened. An aide strode in with a cup and saucer
and a squat, steel, cafeteria coffee pot. Blake smiled at Tabitha as if they’d
invited her over for tea. He waited patiently while his aide, who didn’t dare
look at her, poured steaming coffee into his cup and left the room.

‘It’s a shame to detain you like this,’ Blake mused once
they were alone, blowing at the small cup of coffee that he held pinched
between finger and thumb. ‘But given your monstrous affliction, I saw no other
choice.’ He smiled, and sipped his coffee. Tabitha said nothing; only glared
and pulled at her restraints. She slammed the back of her head against the
chair rest, so hard that she hurt herself. Blake looked amused.

‘So much anger,’ he said with a smirk, placing his cup
down in the saucer with a gentle clink. He folded his fingers together on the
table. Big clean fingernails, filed to perfection. ‘Or should I say, so much
anger wasted. From one killer to another, my advice is this: pour every
ounce of your anger into effective actions.’ He sipped his coffee, and took on
a philosophical look. ‘Anger is a precious resource, and it comes in such short
bursts,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it on superficial displays, or… ineffective
expressions. Channel every drop of anger into effective deeds.’

‘You talk too much,’ said Tabitha, pale-faced, staring
into his dark eyes.

‘And you don’t talk much at all,’ he replied brightly,
putting his cup down with a clink. ‘It’s not like a captive to say so little.’
Tabitha ignored him and simply stared into his eyes, trying to will whatever
alien strength she’d been cursed with to snap her restraints. But they didn’t
even rattle.

‘I doubt that you’ll break those,’ said Blake, nodding
at her cuffs. He sipped his coffee. ‘I’m aware that it’s uncomfortable and
undignified, and for that much I apologise,’ he said. ‘But you’re just too
useful to us to let you escape. We’d like your abilities, you see. To us,
you’re a weapon. A bioweapon.’ He coughed politely, and webbed his fingers back
together on the table top. ‘Imagine soldiers immune to the alien venom,’ he
said proudly. ‘Soldiers who could heal in minutes, or turn their skin into
armour. These kind of abilities could turn the tide in this war. And God knows,
we’re in dire need of that. So, if there’s anything you can tell us now that’ll
help us, it would be much appreciated. We’d like to know how you tick, Tabitha.’

‘Why don’t you come a little closer and find out?’ she
replied, through gritted teeth. Blake barked a laugh into the room, sudden and
arrogant. Tabitha’s body trembled with anger. Her muscles ached and flexed
beneath her skin with the constant effort against her restraints.

‘Alright,’ he replied happily, as if he’d been invited
to join a game. He stood up and stepped towards her slowly, as if he were
approaching an exhibit. ‘I could never refuse the invitation of a beautiful
woman.’ He leant in close to her face, breathing his sour coffee breath on her
cheek. ‘Even an alien one, apparently.’ He smelled like aftershave and alcohol;
cigarette smoke and boot polish.

‘I’m human,’ she spat back. The head restraint pinned
her. She could only give his face a sidelong stare where it loomed at her
shoulder.

‘You don’t believe that,’ he replied playfully, looking
down at her hands. ‘And neither does anyone else.’ His fingers moved as if he
were about to touch her breast; he stopped himself. ‘I mean, you have those hands,’
he said. You drink the blood of an alien species to survive. Even
sitting still, you look like a wild animal. You’re a mutation. A
monster.’ He looked deep into her eyes, as if he were about to confide in her.
‘An abomination.’ His words bit her, more than she thought they could.
After everything she’d been through, after all she’d lost, it was still the
weight of words that cut deepest. They always had, ever since she was small.

‘And you’re going to cut me up,’ she said venomously.
‘So what does that make you?’

‘Oh, I’m not the one doing the cutting,’ Blake said with
a smile, straightening up to look down at her. ‘We have our own Doctor
Frankenstein, here on the base; I’m just the one who brings him the bodies.’

‘You mean there are more people like me?’ she said
furiously.

‘Not like you,’ he replied. ‘Just… people. Failed
experiments. We’ve put them down now anyway.’ He said it as if it were a
tedious formality, and turned away from her. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said
over his shoulder, walking back to the table. ‘Humanity’s already lost this
war,’ he said. ‘To survive this world, we need to become inhuman. And you’re
going to show us how.’ He scratched his forehead, searching for the words.
‘Don’t think of us as monsters,’ he reassured her. ‘We’re doing this for the
human race, not for me or you. Believe me, I’d have my own mother cut open if
it would save the planet. And anyway, I’m told that you died of a gunshot to
the throat and then just… came back to life. What’s a few scalpels and needles
to someone like you?’ Tabitha said nothing; she only glared and struggled
against the chair with a fresh fury.

‘It’s such a shame that you’re not more well-built,’
said Blake, with disappointment in his voice. ‘How much more we could have
learned from a stronger specimen.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘The one person we
find with the potential to help us win this war, and it had to be a bloody w –

Blake hesitated and stopped himself before he said it.

‘What? A woman?’ said Tabitha. ‘Is that what you were
going to say?’ Blake said nothing.

‘So there’s people listening to us talk?’ she said.
Blake’s angry silence was as good as a yes. ‘I don’t think you’re the one
wearing the trousers around here,’ Tabitha chuckled. ‘Your boss is a woman, and
you hate it.’ He sipped his coffee in silence. ‘So here you are, the big bad
major, afraid to share a room with a weak little woman unless I’m bolted to a
chair,’ she said. Blake didn’t say anything, or turn to face her. He merely
paused for a second, and sipped his coffee. ‘Is that how the big bad
Major got his stripes?’ she continued. ‘Getting his men to tie people down, so
he could take the piss without getting hurt? You’ll even get them to cut
me up and pull me apart too. I think the big bad major’s afraid to get his
hands dirty.’

‘Are you implying that I’m a coward?’ he said quietly,
between sips of his coffee. Images flashed in his mind, stark and fleeting. All
the horror he’d seen. He turned to her, and his expression changed. His look
took on a sudden ferocity, utterly detached.

‘I’m not implying anything,’ Tabitha replied. ‘You are
a coward.’ Blake pelted the coffee cup at the wall by her head. He launched
himself at her and gripped her hard by the jaw. He stared into her eyes with a
burning hate. Tabitha felt like her jaw was about to crack. Blake gripped,
harder, and patted the sheath on his belt for a knife that wasn’t there. He’d
had to leave it outside, on his superior’s orders.

‘Major Blake,’ came a woman’s voice over a speaker, calm
and crisp. Blake ignored it. He shifted his grip to squeeze Tabitha’s throat
and pulled back his fist, about to lay into her face. ‘Major Blake,’ the voice
repeated, insistent. Blake hesitated, and stepped back in a rage. He up-ended
the steel table against the wall with a ringing crash, and stormed out of the
door as the buzzer blared.

‘Bye darling,’ Tabitha called after him, listening to
his boots clomp down the hall as the door crept shut. ‘Come and see me again
without these cuffs on. I’ll tear your heart out.’

After
a short wait the door buzzer blared again. Tabitha jumped. The doctor seemed to
glide into the room, stooped and graceful like a greying vulture. For all the
threat of Major Blake’s anger, it was nothing compared with the dread she felt
at the doctor’s calm expression. He held a syringe and a glass bottle of clear
fluid in a veiny hand. His thick glasses framed eyes that looked too big. Eyes
that looked over her body, studying her strange hands. They didn’t dare meet
the hate and fury in her stare. They simply darted from her secure restraints
to the soft pale skin at the crease in her arm.

‘You’re here to cut me open, aren’t you?’ she asked him.
He didn’t respond.

‘I’m going to get free, and I’m going to strip the skin
off you,’ she told him. No reaction. She watched him draw clear fluid from the
bottle into the syringe. ‘When you cut me up, you just make sure there’s
nothing left of me,’ she told him. ‘Otherwise I’m going to come back for you
when you’re sleeping, and I’m going to skin you. We could make a night of it.’
His big wrinkly hands trembled when he poked the needle into her vein. ‘I’ll
skin you alive,’ she growled at him. ‘I’ll skin you alive! I fucking promise!’
the needle had emptied into her, and she felt anaesthetic plunge her mind
underwater. A much stronger dose. Her brain and body had disconnected. The room
was a white blur, shrinking from her view.

When
Tabitha woke up she saw two faces above her, standing in fuzzy silhouette
against a circle of surgical lights overhead. She lay restrained on an
operating table. Her body must have burned off the anaesthetic… no, it wasn’t
that. They just wanted her awake now, that was all. They’d already cut her open
and looked inside while she was unconscious. She could feel the closed incision
in her chest and stomach; the searing sting of stitched-up skin as it healed.
She was awake, but she couldn’t move a thing. Not even to struggle against her
restraints. Like her body had been unplugged from her mind.

‘Are you sure about this?’ said the woman standing over
her, sounding distant and husky-voiced. Her face drifted and blurred with the
lights above her, as if in a dream.

‘She needs to be conscious,’ the doctor insisted. ‘The
anaesthetic inhibits her abilities slightly. We have to know what she’s really
capable of.’ Tabitha was terrified. Again she frantically tried to struggle
against her restraints. But she couldn’t even twitch a finger. She was
paralysed, and yet she still had feeling in her limbs. She felt the tight
restraints around her wrists and ankles; the cold air against her legs.

‘Just make sure you don’t kill her,’ the woman commanded
him. ‘She’s too valuable. And keep the noise down.’

‘Trust me,’ he replied. ‘She won’t make a peep.’ Tabitha
tried to shout. She couldn’t make the sounds. Words wouldn’t come. All she
could do was watch, blink, breathe. She screamed silently in a fevered rage,
and roared words in her head that never escaped her still lips. She urged her
arms and legs to flail and strike out, but the muscles wouldn’t respond. She
lay motionless in a night terror, waiting for a waking jolt that wouldn’t come.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the woman told the doctor,
looking over Tabitha on the table but refusing to meet her eyes. As the woman
walked out, the doctor brought a scalpel over from a trolley. He lowered it
carefully to press it gently against Tabitha’s leg. Then the pain started.
Tabitha felt all of it, the blinding pain of the slice, stretching on for an
eternity as her mind writhed and screamed. Her relief was short-lived; another
instrument went in. The surgery had begun. She felt every ounce of agony, every
inch of surgical steel that clicked and jostled against raw bone. The pain was
maddening, drowning out every thought. She wanted to murder him. She’d never
imagined herself taking another life before, but now she knew what it felt like
to want someone dead. An animal hate burned in the back of her brain. One
procedure followed after another, on and on until she’d passed out and come
around and passed out again. The doctor was watching her expression as she
blinked her eyes open. I’m going to kill you. She screamed the thought
at him, over and over, trying to launch her mind at his somehow. Desperate for
him to know how much he was going to suffer when she broke free. It was the
only thought that kept her going.

The
operations wore on; Tabitha had long since lost her mind to the pain. How long
had it been since she’d first woken up on the table? Minutes? Days? Time had
bent and warped here under the ring of surgical lights, stretched and distorted
as she passed in and out of consciousness. The only constant was the pain of
the operations, and the little heavens in between as her body healed and the
agony subsided. Tabitha bled, healed, bled again. She tried to distract herself
from the insanity of her pain. She tried to fill her mind with a murderous
mantra; an angry wall against the searing stabs and cuts. Daydreams of violent
revenge on the people who’d stripped her humanity away. Blake and the doctor
here. The husky woman. Jackie and Sylvia. Chris. It was the only thought
she could cling to in the maddening tide of pain.

When
Tabitha came around again she felt a needle going into her arm. She could only
look sidelong at the doctor as he worked, staring and motionless like a living
doll. Was it back to the anaesthetic then? Was he finished with his torture?
She still felt the pain of her stitches all over. She didn’t feel any more doped,
now that he’d pulled the needle out. She realised with a shattered hope that it
wasn’t anaesthetic at all. He’d only taken a blood sample. He’d been running
wires into her back while she was unconscious. Plugging her in. The next round
of tests were far more terrifying, and she felt all of it. Every jolt of
current that he sapped from her heartcore, in the place where a human heart
used to beat. Every twitch and jerk, every sob, every wail that he coaxed from
her with the rods he slid into her spine. And to top it all, it was how he
spoke about her to the husky woman while he was doing his experiments. Like
they were looking under the bonnet of a brand new car. Talking excitedly about
adaptations and hybrid components, as if she wasn’t a person at all. If she had
any fear left inside her, any tears or panic or grief, she couldn’t feel it.
The doctor’s scalpels may as well have cut out her feelings. The electrodes
shocked every emotion away.

Tabitha
woke up again in the interrogation room. She stared in a daze at the doctor’s
clicking fingers in front of her, her bright eyes fixed on his hand like a
child. Everything slid back into focus. The doctor sat opposite her at the
steel table. To his right, the husky woman. Her sandy-blonde hair was greying.
She had thin lips and a stern look, devoid of compassion. The white fluorescent
light hummed above them on the ceiling. Tabitha stared dead ahead in her seat,
a zombie, looking past both of them sitting opposite. She stared at the far
wall; stared at the painted bricks. Tried not to think about the surgical
slices and bruises that covered her arms and legs. She had no strength left to
struggle against her thick restraints. There was that hospital smell again like
cleaning fluid, and the plastic stink of her gown. The clammy feel of patient
slippers on her feet. And that cold hollow trembling in her body lately; a
shiver that she couldn’t stop.

‘We’ve found so much that we can’t interact with,’ the
doctor told the woman. Tabitha heard his high croaky voice and it ran down her
back like a rusty nail. Her dosed-up thoughts were swimming and hard to grasp,
like vague glass fish in murky pond water. But she had a memory then. Of a
needle going in, and a threat she’d made to him. It was a distant thought,
fleeting and forgotten again. Someone had held her by the throat in this room.
He’d gripped her jaw and hurt her, and tried to reach out and touch her. She’d
made him angry somehow; made him overreact. She felt a spark of joy then. For
making him angry. There were more memories bubbling up in her mind, but from a
different time. Long ago. She remembered happiness, and her mum and dad. No…
they were gone. They’d died. Murky memories of friends, old and new, and a dog.
They were all gone too. It was just her now, stuck to a chair in a bright white
room, bruised and sliced and stared at in all her stark fault and mutation.
Dosed up on something that made life swim like a bad dream. The woman and the
doctor were talking.

‘You don’t have any concrete findings? Nothing
we can apply?’ said the husky woman, short-tempered. Tabitha’s eyes drifted
from the far wall between them; flicked to the woman. The woman held Tabitha’s
gaze, and then looked away from her.

‘I need more
time,’ the doctor replied, apologetic. ‘There’s no frame of reference… I need
to try different approaches. This is all new to me.’ Tabitha’s eyes flicked to
him. He looked away too. The hard light overhead bared everything. The grey
skin of her hands, the stapled slices in her skin, the plum-purple blush of her
bruises. Her hands shook.

‘Can she hear us?’ the woman asked the doctor. She
could. She could hear them. Yes, Tabitha said in her head. I can hear
you. Her throat and her mouth wouldn’t make the sound come out, like her
voicebox was on mute. She blinked her stinging eyes, and gulped in her dry
throat. Water, she said in her head. I’d like some water please.

‘She can,’ the doctor told the woman, after studying
Tabitha’s doped stare. Tabitha had zoned out, trembling and staring at the
blank white wall. When she looked around she found herself in the interrogation
room. She saw the doctor sitting there at a table in front of her, and the
husky woman beside him. The white fluorescent light hummed above them on the
ceiling. Tabitha found herself covered in cuts and bruises that stood out hard
in the light. She tried to speak; nothing came out. She panicked. Why couldn’t
she speak? Why couldn’t she move? What had they been doing to her? The woman
and the doctor just sat there, staring.

‘It’s unfortunate that she needs to be conscious for the
procedures,’ the doctor observed. ‘But her nanotechnology is so much more
pronounced when she’s awake. And it’s in everything. Cell regeneration,
bio-electrical current, respiration.’ Tabitha looked at him and understood, and
a creeping dread fell over her in that rare moment of clarity. Experiments.
Operations. She remembered now. She pulled frantically against her restraints.
Within seconds she was exhausted, and looking around at the room again.

‘Does she even know where she is?’ said the husky woman,
studying Tabitha’s lost expression.

‘It’s a side effect of the medication I’m giving her for
the procedures, to paralyse her,’ the doctor replied. ‘In the beginning she was
kicking and screaming too much for me to operate.’

‘I’d rather not know the grizzly details,’ the husky
woman replied, wearing a look of distaste. ‘All I want to know is, how much is
she aware of? How much will she remember?’

‘Very little, I’d imagine,’ he replied, studying
Tabitha’s searching eyes. ‘She’ll see us and hear us now, and in another two
minutes she could have forgotten everything all over again.’

‘What if you took her off the medication?’ said the
woman.

‘Well, she’d most likely suffer with chronic trauma at a
subconscious level. But nothing much on the surface, so to speak.’

‘I’m not interested in her psychology,’ the husky woman
replied, tapping a pen on her notepad. ‘All I need to know is whether we can
keep her around indefinitely without her attacking anyone.’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ the doctor replied, shaking
his head. ‘We’d have to keep her restrained permanently. Cared for, et cetera.
And medicated.’

‘We can’t spare those resources,’ the husky woman
replied simply. ‘Just take what you can from her and put her out of her misery.
Grow her cells or something, I don’t know. I want results. I want to see
us winning this war.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ the doctor replied, watching
Tabitha’s dazed expression. Tabitha saw the doctor there in front of her, and
the husky woman. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, reflected in the steel
table where they sat. Had they asked her a question? She couldn’t remember.
When Tabitha opened her mouth, she realised that she couldn’t speak. Why did
she have so many cuts and bruises? Why couldn’t she move?

‘Take her in again this afternoon,’ the woman commanded,
watching Tabitha panic in her chair again. ‘Her hands are the priority. If they
won’t do what you want, open them up and force them. Or cut them off.’

‘This afternoon?’ the doctor replied. ‘But she’s been in
surgery non-stop for four days. Her body won’t cope with any more trauma
unless she’s given time to recover.’

‘I don’t care how much trauma her body can cope
with,’ the woman growled, standing up from the table. ‘I care about getting
the alien tech out of her and into weapons we can use against them.
Before we’re all extinct. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly clear, Ma’am,’ the doctor replied, suddenly
fearful of her as she loomed over him. The husky woman gave him a cold stare
and knocked on the door. A soldier opened it from the other side, and held it
open for her as she left the bright room. The doctor looked at Tabitha for a
moment, and got up from his seat to walk around behind her where she sat.

I remember now, Tabitha
said to herself, as the doctor pulled her wheelchair away from the table. You’re
the man I’m going to skin.

There
was a wait before Tabitha’s next operation could start. She lay prepped and
restrained on the operating table, half panicked and half dazed in amnesia. The
doctor kicked and fiddled with some kind of battery block in the corner of the
room. A monitor bipped relentlessly beside her, and reminded her of supermarket
checkouts.

It was a long wait on the operating table before the
doctor could start the procedure. Tabitha was bolted down with the thick cuffs
around her limbs, although she couldn’t move her body anyway. She could only
stare in paralysis at the ring of lights above her, or catch glimpses of the
doctor in the corner of her eye. Once the equipment was up and running again,
the doctor loomed over her and began to cut her left hand open. Though she
panicked and tried to pull away, she hardly felt a thing. Her grey hands had
always been numb to touch anyway; it was only the sounds of chopping and tearing
that ran through her. Until he started on the flesh and bone beneath. Tabitha
screamed silently, her mouth still. The doctor watched her carefully for any
reaction. All she could do was stare frantically into his oversized spectacled
eyes whenever they hovered into view above her. When the doctor moved aside for
another instrument, Tabitha strained her eyes left to see the mess of her hand.
He’d opened up the metal skin; picked her finger joints apart. Sawn her thumb
half off. She drifted away in a daze of agony, lost in the pale speckled
ceiling. The bipping monitor brought her back round. When she looked again at
the ceiling, she realised she was in the operating theatre. Her hand was agony;
what had he done to it? How long had she been here?

I’d like to stop now, please, she said to him, inside her head. I’d like to go to
sleep and not wake up. Put me down like an animal, and then you
can take whatever you want. Just please, no more. The doctor pulled a
strand of grey flesh from her palm, pushed the monitor trolley beside the bed
out of his way, and scurried off to examine his prize under a microscope. Tabitha
felt a sudden tingle in her dangling broken fingers. Shocked, she glanced over
through the corner of her eye. The monitor bipped closer beside her, inches
from her hand. It trembled then, attracted to her like a magnet. The casing
rattled slightly. A spark jumped from the monitor to her finger; a tiny
blue-white arc of voltage. Another spark came after it, leaping to her dangling
dissected fingertip. The current wiggled inside her arm, up into her shoulder,
and tickled the bones in her neck. Current reaching out to her, embracing her.
She felt the voltage heal her. Something popped back together in her spine, and
she blinked suddenly like she’d woken up from a dream. Her throat felt there
again. Her core and her limbs felt there. She wiggled her toes. She made
a tiny noise in her throat, a sorry croak, too quiet for the doctor to hear in
the corner. Her hand was agony, a total mess. At least she could move it now
though, a little. Her mangled hand was her escape plan.

Tucking in her half-sawn thumb as best she could,
Tabitha gritted her teeth and tried to bunch together her strung-out fingers. A
sickening pain hit her as she pressed her loose thumb deep into her palm,
trying to make her hand as thin as possible. With a sharp tug, and with plenty
of blood around to lubricate it, she managed to pull her mangled left hand out
through the restraint with a whispering squelch. She looked over at the doctor’s
back, wide-eyed with her secret success. The doctor was still hunched over the
microscope in the corner, blissfully unaware. With broken bleeding fingers
Tabitha searched the metal band that restrained her head. There was a smooth
recess on the front of it; a button. She pushed her sturdiest mangled knuckle
into it, dripping silver blood on her face, and heard a soft click as the head
restraint popped open. It was worth the agony to hear that click. Free to move
her torso, she reached her left hand over to her right cuff. It was harder to
press the release button on the distant restraint though, with virtually no
command of her mangled fingers and thumb. The release button felt miles away.
The pain made her head spin. Desperately she reached over again and pressed a
loose knuckle into the sunken button. The shackle popped open with a tiny
click. With her upper body free, she sat up and unlocked her ankle cuffs and
cradled her mangled left hand.

The doctor was taking a scalpel to the strip of grey
flesh, cutting it into thinner strands. Silently Tabitha swung her legs over
the edge of the table, disconnected her tangle of leads and tubes, and set her
cold feet down unsteadily on the tiled floor. The doctor was decanting a flask
of acid into a glass beaker, to see how a strand of her grey flesh would react.
Tabitha loomed at his shoulder, unseen. Unheard. She could reach over right now
and crush his hand around the beaker, she told herself. Acid and shards of
glass seemed like a good way to start with him. But wait. He’d scream, and
she’d be caught. She waited for him to put the flask down, and then wrapped her
arm tight around his neck from behind. She felt her thin bicep press hard into
his throat. She squeezed with every ounce of her hate, glaring at the back of
his balding head as he collapsed back on the floor. She tried to lift him, and
had to stifle a scream at the pain. Her left hand wasn’t going to be good for
anything just now, especially not lifting bodies. The answer jumped out at her
like instinct. Putting her hands on the bipping monitor, Tabitha felt the
voltage inside. She felt it rise up from the wires at her touch, drawn to her
body. The current was coming from a big battery over in the corner, like a car
battery. Tabitha reached in for the current, and the current reached out to
her. The entire charge in the battery surged up the cables and leapt into her,
curling around her organs and stroking her skin. It tingled in her like wine
and good sex. She looked down at her mangled hand, and saw the flesh and metal
skin knitting together. Healing. She flexed her fingers like new.

Tabitha dragged the doctor towards the operating table
and lifted him up onto it. She snapped the cuffs shut on his arms and legs, and
around his big head. She filled his gaping mouth with gauze and cotton wool,
and tied it up with bandages to stifle his screams. When he blinked at the
surgical lights above and came around, she was staring at him. He had a look of
pure terror, trying to shake his head and move his limbs. Struggling
frantically against the restraints. She just stared into his eyes.

‘Hi,’ she said quietly, savouring his panic. All her
thoughts had been coming back to her. All those dosed-up hazy memories that had
been swimming around vaguely in her head. They were clear again; falling into
place. Tabitha remembered. The doctor stared in terror. Tabitha’s sympathy was
dead. It was that way he’d looked at her, when he poked that first needle into
her arm. How many times had he cut her open and dived straight in, despite her
endless kicks and screams? Not once had he looked at her and seen a human
being. All he’d seen were possibilities. Weapons. Living armour. Strange organs
and superhuman healing. To him she was only Test Subject.

‘Do you remember what I said when we first met?’ she
asked him, setting out the instruments on the trolley beside her. ‘I said I’d
get free and then I’d strip the skin off you. Well, here we are.’ He writhed
and struggled afresh, with tiny muffled screams coming from the clump of gauze
in his mouth. She watched his staring eyes, huge behind his thick glasses. She
showed off her healed hand to him. She wanted him to see how little damage he
could do. How little pain she could feel. She had to prove that to him. Before
she showed him how much pain he could feel in return.

‘You’ve got no idea what I am,’ she told him, picking up
the cruellest scalpel from the trolley. ‘Or what you’ve done to me.’ She tapped
her temple. ‘I used to be a nice person, once. Shy. But that was before
everything happened.’ The doctor could only stare, trembling in fear on the
table. ‘You’ve changed me,’ she told him. ‘You all have.’ She rested the
scalpel blade on his hand, and watched his eyes. A bead of sweat rolled down
his forehead. She heard his breaths, quick and shallow and nasal. She pressed
the scalpel into his palm, popping the skin. Dragging, slicing. Peeling. He was
screaming. Ruby-red flesh and peering white bone.

‘Hearts are quite weak, really,’ Tabitha observed,
holding her hand to his chest. ‘Human hearts, I mean.’ His heart beat fast;
faster than she’d ever thought possible. She could feel the muted electric
pulse through his breastbone that jerked that rubbery muscle, flushing red
blood to his raw dripping hand. Tabitha felt upset, frustrated.

‘I really wanted to skin you alive,’ she told him,
disappointed in herself. She’d gone back on her word to him. All she could
manage was his hand, shining wet and red under the surgical lights. ‘Maybe it
takes a certain kind of person to torture another human being,’ she said
softly, pricking his side with the scalpel. He yelped. ‘I wish I had your
stomach for torture, I really do,’ she whispered in his ear. His eyes widened
as she placed a cold grey hand around his throat. ‘I wish I could strip all the
skin off you and wait hours for you to die. But I couldn’t do that to a person.
I’ll never be like you. And I’m glad.’ She tightened her grip around his neck,
tighter, strangling the life out of him. He threw his body against the
restraints, rattling the metal table in his panic. He stared into her yellow
eyes, pleading silently for life. Tabitha hesitated. She finally saw something
human in him, and she hated him for it. Why couldn’t she do it? How could so
much hate crumble away so easily? She remembered all her pain, and gripped his
throat hard again.

‘I can’t,’ she mumbled, loosening her grip altogether.
He stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath through his nose. ‘There’s been
too much death,’ she said, backing away to the wall. She’d already taken more
revenge than she could stomach. Seeing the mangled ruin of his hand proved that
to her. She’d done that to him. Only a minute ago, she’d felt like she could
have done so much more. But she couldn’t take his life away. That would have
made her the monster they expected; a feral creature who deserved her
restraints. Killing him would be their victory, not hers. There was a knock at
the door.

‘How’s it going in there doctor?’ came the husky woman’s
voice. The door edged open slowly. ‘Any developments?’ she said, stepping
inside. It took her a moment to take in the scene and realise that doctor and
patient were in the wrong places.

‘Hi!’ said Tabitha brightly, and laid her out on the
floor with a punch on the jaw. ‘Where’s the way out?’ Tabitha demanded,
gripping the dazed woman by the throat.

‘I… I,’ the woman stammered, terrified. Tabitha pressed
the bloody scalpel against her neck.

‘Tell me or I’ll cut you open,’ Tabitha growled, staring
into the woman’s wide eyes. ‘Tell me now.’

Tabitha
peered up and down the white corridor and edged her way out from the operating
room. Her bare feet slapped against the cold tile floor on her way down the
silent old hallway. Then it struck her. The lights were on. Electricity. It
couldn’t have been coming from a battery; maybe there was a generator here. She
reached her grey fingers out to a socket in the wall, and voltage leapt out
into her hand. It felt like hot water, soothing and intense. It wanted to be
inside her. She knelt down and pressed her lips against the wall socket, and drank
voltage. The lights flickered down the corridor as she drained the wires. There
was a distant shout of panic at the sudden gloom, somewhere off to her left.
She put her mouth to the socket again, and drank deep. The blue light oozed
into her waiting mouth. The voltage coursed through her like an orgasm. She
felt wired, intense. Superhuman. When she breathed the voltage back into the
socket, all the lights blew in a sudden sparking racket. She’d never heard a
more beautiful sound.

‘What’s happened to the power?’ a soldier shouted down
the dark corridor.

‘Get downstairs and try the fuse box!’ shouted another.
‘We need to get the floodlights back on, right now! We’re fucked if they come for
us now!’ Tabitha grinned at their frightened voices, revelling in their panic.
She ran off down the corridor.

‘We’ll be fine,’ said another voice. ‘We’ve got night
vision cameras outside.’

‘Yeah, but they won’t work if there’s no bloody power
on, will they?’ the first man screamed back. Tabitha ran her hand along wall as
she went, feeling her way in the pitch black. Suddenly there was no wall
against her fingers. She turned the corner, and heard more voices behind her in
the dark.

‘Get outside!’ a man yelled to another. Running
footsteps echoed up the corridor. Tabitha ran on and turned a corner at the
end, and ran into someone in the darkness.

‘Who’s that?’ said a woman in the dark. Tabitha felt for
the woman’s shoulder, grabbed it, and slammed her fist into her face to drop
her to the floor. Thoughts, plans, mercy, she didn’t have time for them. This
was escape. This was survival. Suddenly red lights flickered on down the
hallway; a backup generator.

‘Thank god for that!’ came a distant voice.

‘They’re coming!’ another voice screamed. ‘They’re on
the moors!’ Tabitha ran from the sound of sprinting boots, deeper into the
maze. Breathless, she reached a barred window in the corridor. She saw
spotlights moving outside in the inky night, and soldiers shouting and massing
on the yard. A military base, bigger than she expected. An old siren had
started up. As the spotlights swept over the moors beyond the big chain-link
fence, Tabitha glimpsed things reflecting the light. Swarming shapes in the
dark. She stood away from the window, still gasping for breath. The distant
voices behind her forced her to run. She had to get out. She had to survive
this.

Even
with the dim red backup lights on it was impossible to find a way out. The base
was a labyrinth, a sprawl of concrete corridors. Every corner brought more
corridors, more turns. Barefoot and hospital-gowned, Tabitha sprinted down an
empty hallway. She tried the door at the end, rattling the handle open; it was
a store room. The siren wailed outside in the yard, and she heard gunshots and
screams. Down the next corridor on her right a fire exit glowed to her in green
and white, her salvation. Far up the corridor behind her, a soldier shouted at
her and shot. Tabitha ducked away from the shots and ran. The gunfire was
deafening on the concrete walls. She didn’t stop to look back; just ran for the
exit. She’d never run so fast in her life. Bullets punctured the tiled floor
around her feet, shattering with ceramic snaps like broken cups. She zig-zagged
from one wall to the other as she ran. He was running close behind her. Closer.
She banged against the fire exit but there wasn’t a metal bar to push. It was a
lever at the top. Breathless, she tried to grab at it. Desperate to escape
outside.

‘Get on the ground! Now!’ the man yelled. He was coming
closer with his pistol aimed. Tabitha turned to face him. Stared at him. She
saw fear there in his eyes; it was unmistakeable. He had the perfect shot, and
he wasn’t firing.

‘You need to reload,’ Tabitha told him.

‘Get on the ground or I’ll kill you!’ he roared.

‘If you had any bullets left you would’ve shot me,’ she
replied. The soldier hesitated and quickly took the empty clip from his gun,
reaching desperately for another clip on his belt. Tabitha ran for him and
burst his nose with a punch. He dropped like a sack. She took the gun from his
hand and the spare clips on his belt, and reloaded it. She was all but deaf
from the gunshots. She thought about taking his clothes, but there wasn’t time
for that. She heard more soldiers running down the corridor in the gloomy red
distance, shouting and searching for her. Tabitha reached up for the lever at
the top of the fire exit, and punched it open with a clang.

It was dark outside, and the air was warmer. The base
was full of shouting. Soldiers were rushing out into the yard; machine guns
rattled glowing shots into the moors. Tabitha kept to the wall and edged around
the corner, looking for the quietest way out of the base. Her eyes were drawn
to a pale shape blowing beside her, caught under the lid of a metal dumpster.
It was her mum’s ribbon, still tied to her ruined belt. Inside the dumpster her
clothes and boots had been burned to ash. In the scorched ruins of her bra she
saw a pale corner; her mum’s note. The paper crumbled away to nothing when she
tugged it free, breaking her heart. She pulled her charred belt from the
dumpster and fastened it around her waist, tucking her pistol into it. Checking
around her, she crept around the corner to find a parked jeep on the yard. The
door wasn’t locked. She ducked down inside and looked around for a way out of
the base. A searchlight flicked past and blinded her for a second, and she
ducked back down with a gasp. Had they seen her? She waited for shouting,
frozen in the jeep’s footwell. They must have missed her. She crept up from the
footwell and looked around through the windows. The whole base was ring fenced,
and the only way out was manned and barricaded. Would the jeep smash the
barricade, or the barricade smash the jeep? Whatever she was going to do, she’d
have to do it fast. She couldn’t stay parked here so close to the fire exit.
Even now soldiers were bursting out of the door and running round the corner.
She fumbled for the jeep’s ignition in the dark, but felt only flip switches instead.
She tried the switch where the keyhole should have been, but nothing happened.
The jeep probably wasn’t running any more, just like everything else. Soldiers
were fanning out from the fire exit, searching and shouting in the dark beneath
the racket of machine guns and the air-raid siren. Tabitha switched seats,
opened the passenger door and climbed out as quickly and quietly as she could.
She started running for the fence, hoping to climb over before the searchlights
found her. The shock of the solid tarmac jolted hard through her bare feet. Her
every footfall seemed to land on a sharp stone, stumbling her as she ran.
Before she made it to the fence though, the searchlight on the tower caught
her. A machine gun rattled rounds into the tarmac around her. Blinded by the
light she ran for the distant barricade, but the soldiers there were already
yelling and firing at her.

‘Dragon! Dragon!’ came a shout across the base, and
suddenly the searchlight on the tower burst into white flames. The huge dark
creature swept past in the night overhead, lit for a moment by the flaming
watchtower beneath it. Tabitha was hidden in the darkness again. She ran for
the fence and started to pull at the screws that held it to a concrete post. A
rumbling growl rolled overhead in the darkness, weird and alien. The dragon
swept down over the base and spat a pillar of white light into the complex.
Soldiers screamed in agony as buildings erupted into thundering white flames.
Tabitha’s fingers wrenched and pulled at the screws in the fence. She picked a
corner of the chain-link away from the concrete post as quickly as she could.
The dragon roared and rushed over the base again, bursting another building
apart in flames the colour of moonlight.

‘Get a lock on it!’ a man yelled, off across the square.
Tabitha recognised the deep voice. It was Blake.

‘Locked!’ replied the soldier beside him, shouldering a
missile launcher. The launcher spat its missile skywards with a rasping hiss,
and clapped and boomed against the dragon’s roaring silhouette overhead. Blake
yelled. A cheer went up from the gathering soldiers. The dragon’s body crashed
down on the pitch-black moors, framed in the eerie glow of white fire.

‘They’re coming for the gate!’ came a distant yell from
the barricade. Tabitha watched Blake lead his men across the yard, opening fire
on the night where the floodlights caught moving shapes on the moors. Some of
the soldiers fired uselessly into the night sky, blind to a second dragon that
swept overhead. Another white fireball screamed down from the black sky,
blowing another building apart. The flash of light lit the night around them,
and for a moment Tabitha saw a creeping horde filling the moors. Already
soldiers were deserting, yelling and running for the barricade. They disappeared
from the glow of the floodlights and screamed in the darkness beyond the fence,
butchered in the night.

‘Open fire!’ Blake bellowed. Something huge and black
had appeared to tear down the barricade; a monstrous shadow that roared demonic
as the soldiers shot it. Tabitha cursed and gave up on the fence, and ran for a
jeep parked off to her right. She just had to hope it was working. She saw
Blake across the square, silhouetted against the floodlight behind him. She
jabbed at the switches and buttons on the jeep’s sparse dashboard, and felt her
heart leap as the engine roared into life. Before she could reach for the
handbrake though, the jeep’s engine spluttered and died.

‘Shit, shit!’ she hissed, fumbling with the switches
again. Blake had spotted her in the glare of the floodlight and opened fire
with his rifle, ignoring the spiders that spread out into the yard behind him.
Suddenly the second dragon landed down on the roof of the headquarters with a
crash, and spat a jet of fire down over the screaming soldiers below. Tabitha
pulled down the window and aimed her pistol at Blake, shooting at him as he
approached. She hit him in the shoulder as he reloaded. He looked at her in
shock while she aimed for his head. Tabitha pulled the trigger. The pistol just
clicked, empty.

‘Fuck!’ she yelled furiously, and ducked down against
Blake’s returning shots as he stormed towards her. She flicked at the switches
and the engine whirred and coughed and rumbled to life again; the jeep’s sudden
headlights blinding Blake as he approached. Tabitha threw the jeep into gear
and floored the accelerator, and drove straight for him. Blake tried to jump
aside but hit the headlight with a bang, thrown to the ground as Tabitha
ploughed through the perimeter fence.

Tabitha
skidded the jeep onto the road across the moors, tearing off into the night.
She felt high; drunk on freedom. Jolts and bumps shook her body in the seat.
She checked her mirrors for any sign of the alien horde, but there was nothing
in the blackness around her. Maybe they wanted the base more than a stray
survivor. She clung to that hope and felt her heartcore pounding as she put the
base further and further behind her. She heard a helicopter somewhere above,
and it sounded like it was getting closer. Within seconds it was flying
overhead, and a spotlight blinded her. A machine gun rattled. The shots came
punching and banging and ringing against the jeep’s bodywork. Tabitha swerved
off onto the moors, helpless, trying to escape as the shots punched through the
roof. There was a white burst of light in the sky. The helicopter erupted into
flames, spinning and droning as it ploughed into the moors behind her, lighting
the night in a flaring fireball. The second dragon’s grey shape rushed past
overhead.

Tabitha joined the road again and slammed the
accelerator down. She killed the headlights, trying to slip away from the
creature in the dark. But it had already seen her. Its white staring eyes
blinked in the night sky above, stalking her. Another flash of white light. Tabitha
jumped from the door and smacked hard into the ground as the speeding jeep
burst into flames. Looking up from the dirt, she saw the jeep flip and tumble
and come crashing down on the moors. The dragon swept overhead with a tidal
rush as she struggled to her feet. She ran. The cold earth slapped against her
soles and pounded her heels. A rock cut the ball of her foot, and stumbled her.
But she kept running. She heard scuttling behind her, muffled in the grass and
mud. The hillsides flashed white with distant explosions, and the night sky
filled with the cracks and booms of a warzone over the military base. She
didn’t look back; just kept running. There were gunshots, far away, rattling
into the night. Tabitha’s hair streamed away behind her as she ran. Spiders
tried to snap at her heels in the darkness. She didn’t turn to fight them. The
chittering racket grew until it filled the moors behind her. The horde was
chasing her. Tabitha gasped for breath and pounded her feet into the ground,
sprinting with everything she had. Twin shooting stars glided by overhead;
white eyes in the inky night. Again came the ear-popping rush of giant wings.
Every thought left her head. All she could do was run. She ran from the
scuttling tide at her back and the dark wings in the sky. She ran from the
thunder-clap bangs of artillery over the hills. The lightning-strike bursts of
white light. But beyond the clattering metal rush of spiders, she heard other
sounds too. The strange rumbling of alien wings, and the distant scream of
soldiers. And the faintest trickle of running water. Tabitha followed her ears
and veered off to the left as she ran, and the sound of water grew louder.
Clearer. There was a slope to the moor here. She felt the ground get suddenly
steeper and then slope down, and she threw herself onto her side to slide down
the damp hill. The wings rushed by only feet above her head, and the dragon
roared as she missed its snapping claws. Tabitha hurtled down the slope on her
side, feeling the rough grass scratch and burn against her legs. Suddenly she
hit a freezing rush of water. A deep river carried her now, faster than she
could ever hope to run. The chittering wall of sound behind her grew distant,
and the legion of spiders gave up the chase with a chorus of angry screeching.
Tabitha gasped for air as the river current carried her. She glanced up at the
starry night and slicked back her wet hair, breathing freedom in blissful
gulps. Swept along in the river.

Her relief was short-lived though. Within a couple of minutes
the rocky riverbed was banging against her feet. The current tumbled her up
against gravel and stones, where the river broadened out and grew shallow.
Dripping trickles of icy water, Tabitha leapt up the crumbling turf embankment
back onto the moors. She dragged herself on and broke into a sprint. She heard
the sudden beat of wings up behind her. White fire burst out of the sky. She
leapt away from the rushing blast, but screamed at the flames that seared her
feet. The creature rumbled overhead, flying off into the night again. Tabitha
forced herself to keep running. She had to survive. Up behind her on the slope,
the chattering tide of spiders burst over the hillside after her. Muscles
aching, she yelled and ran. She was tired; they were gaining fast. A hundred
yards behind her. Fifty. Thirty. Again the white eyes swooped down out of the
night sky towards her. She saw its body, grey against the black night. She
leapt up over the dragon’s snatching claws and gripped tight to the scales on
its leg. She felt herself pulled suddenly into the air, and felt her stomach
turn over like she was on a rollercoaster. The wind rushed in her ears and
chilled her wet gown. She was twisting and turning in the air, clutching its
giant kicking leg as they flew high above the moors. The creature bellowed and
the night spun around her, making her body lurch and her stomach turn. Over the
next sudden hillside a dark lake sprawled out beneath her, sudden and vast and
glistening in the faint sliver of moonlight. The dragon shook and writhed and
kicked, and she lost her grip on its scales. Her stomach twisted. Suddenly she
was falling from the sky, flailing and gasping and screaming in mortal dread as
the lake loomed large below. A jet of white fire leapt out towards her overhead,
but she was falling too fast for it. The dragon disappeared in the night sky
far above. Tabitha sucked in her breath and held her hands out to take the
impact, and the lake slammed into her palms like a brick wall. Her wrists were
a sudden stinging agony. Everything was bubbling and black under here; a
choking muffled rush of bitter-cold water. But Tabitha was laughing when she
broke the surface again, coughing and spluttering the lake’s sour dirty taste.
Treading the black water that lapped at her ears she felt nothing, thought
nothing. There was only the soaring primal rush of cheating death.

Tabitha
climbed ashore on the far side of the lake, her feet slapping on wet silty
sand. Tufts of spindly grass poked through the fine sand where she fell to her
hands and knees. The beach by the lake was made of coarser grains, big and
sharp against her skin where she crawled almost face-down in the dirt. The
waves sloshed and fizzed on the lake shore behind her. The dim moonlight picked
out shapes on the sand; twigs and rotten leaves strewn along the tide mark.
Drowned feathers and shreds of plastic bag, scattered around her fingers in the
washed-up froth. She staggered to her aching feet and looked up at the night
sky, gasping for breath. Up over the lake the dragon roared in defeat, and gave
up its search of the water. Tabitha saw no sign of the spiders here; the moors
were far behind. The dark world tumbled around her then as she collapsed
breathless onto the dirty sand. She’d escaped. She stared up at the sky, and
the stars that stretched on forever. She’d never seen them so bright before. A
million pinprick suns painted on the black night. They shone cold, scattered,
oblivious.

Beyond the lake shore was a forest, invisible in the
deep dark but rustling in the wind. Tabitha heard clattering legs in the
distance, getting closer. Staggering to her feet with a weary grunt, she ran in
amongst the trees. Her thin flimsy hospital gown clung to her body, ice-cold in
the wind as she ran. She had to get away from the sound of the clattering legs.
Maybe she’d imagined it; maybe not. She had to run though. She had to get far
away.

Every other footstep was a jagged punishment; a jutting
rock or a hard root against her bare feet. But everything in here smelled like dirt
and trees, and it had never smelled so good. A fresh earthy scent all around
her that felt like coming home. A world away from the hospital smell of the
military base. There were no glaring fluorescent lights here, exposing
everything she’d become to anyone who wanted to stare. There were no restraints
to pin her down. No drugged-up daze to tangle her mind in amnesiac knots. Best
of all, there were no people here. Only mortal fear. She could handle mortal
fear; running for her life. At least now she’d die free. Imprisonment was the
real terror; she knew that now. Facing death without a chance to fight back.
But no more. She’d never be caught again; she refused.

Tabitha tore on through the pitch black woods. Tripping
and cutting and bruising, and banging into trees she couldn’t see. A fierce
wind picked up, shredding the clouds away from the murky moon’s anaemic glow.
Tabitha forced herself to keep moving. They could be right behind her in the
dark, searching for her. So she ran. Every time she slipped down, or tripped,
or hit a root and went flying into a tree trunk, she picked herself up. Wiped
the cold grainy mud from her stinging cuts, and carried on. She had to keep
running. They were all dead and gone now, everyone she’d loved. But she wasn’t.
Not yet. Something primal had taken over, there in the back of her mind. A dark
snarling hunger for revenge and survival. It kept her legs running, and her
arms pushing past the branches. It kept her from giving up.

34

Tabitha
was miles away by dawn. She looked down the hillside at the distant lake,
spread out before her in the pink growing light. It looked no bigger than a
puddle from where she stood, stretching her legs on a sandy footpath winding up
a vast hill. She could see where she’d come from too, far away on the distant
moors, where smoke rose in lazy black towers from the ruins of the military
base. Turning her back on it, Tabitha looked down the other side of the hill on
a landscape she didn’t recognise. It could’ve been anywhere; all rolling green
fields and winding country roads. Off on the horizon she could make out the
tower blocks of a distant city in the haze.

‘Where do I go?’ she mumbled to herself. She felt a
concrete lump of grief rising in her throat; swallowed it down. Much too big to
handle now. She wiped the tears from her eyes, gulped the feeling down again,
and tried to focus on where to go next. She had all the country to choose from,
and all of it dangerous. She stood and stewed in indecision, thinking
everything through as the sun rose in the sky. When she’d taken to the roads
with Laika, she’d thought she could hide away from the spiders in the
countryside. But the opposite was true. She thought about last night too, when
she’d been running for her life. Except for the river, there’d been nothing
between her and them. The spiders were too fast in open country; they’d almost
caught her. At least in a town or a city there was a warren of windows and
doors to hide behind. An obstacle course she could use to get away from them,
and survive another day in the grey ruins. But that was no way to live, she
told herself. She’d have to think bigger than simply running and hiding. Right
now though all she could think about were her sore filthy feet, and the endless
freezing bite of the wind through her wet gown. Dew clung to the grass where
she sat for a moment, winking like beads of glass in the gold morning light.
They slid away to nothing at the touch of her finger; a momentary beauty, lost
forever.

Tabitha hobbled down the far side of the hill on cold
battered feet, and felt the bruised bones aching beneath her bare filthy soles.

‘…Too much to ask to grow some bloody metal skin on my
feet,’ she grumbled, limping and staggering down the path as the birds sang in
the pines.

There
was some old fallen stonework further down the hill, hidden between the trees
like a tumble-down garden. Tabitha came to a peaceful pond in the heart of it,
once fed by an ornate waterfall that had long since mudded up. Her presence
startled a pair of ducks that stood by the edge of the pond, whispering soft
grumpy quacks as they sploshed down into the brown water and glided away.
Tabitha stared at the water; a deathly mirror reflecting a zombie version of
the sky. Pondweed lurked just under the rippling surface there; rot-green
feathery combs reaching up from the murk. Birds chattered and sang in the trees
all around her, filling the silent murdered world with chaotic melody. She
could never get used to the new quietness of the world. There were still the
charred ruins of a fire in the dirt nearby; a nest of scaly charcoal logs that
still smelled smoky-sweet when she kicked at them. There was a dusting of white
ash on the ground, and scorched grass around it. She thought about festivals
and campfires; barbecues and drunk pictures with old friends. She thought about
her gran’s old fireplace too, a memory from her childhood. She’d lay her empty
crisp packet down onto the red coals, and watch it shrink down into a bubbling
plastic blob. Back in a different life. A snapping twig jolted her from her
thoughts. It was just a squirrel, scurrying up a tree nearby. Tabitha turned
back to the pond. She could have lain down by the ashes of the fire there, and
gone to sleep. At least just to get off her sore feet for a while. But it wasn’t
safe to rest here. Too high up, too exposed, too everything. She turned away
from the dead fire, and hobbled on down the stony path onto a stretch of grass.
Her feet were grateful for the softness. She headed into the trees where they
grew thick and ducked under a low branch, slowing her steps down the slope and
jumping down over a stone wall at the bottom. She froze at a sudden rustle in
the bushes, but it was too gentle to be a spider. For one forgetful moment she
thought it might be Laika, until her heart broke all over again at the thought.
Just a blackbird.

She cut across another path, and edged her way down a
soily black slope. Past a tiny river further down the trees thinned out and the
hill levelled off. Not long after that she reached a stretch of farmland, where
tangles of sheep’s wool dotted a barbed wire fence. She took hold of the barbed
wire and pulled it away without feeling a thing, and climbed over the fence to
ramble on through the field. She even felt something close to peace, for a little
while. The sun was climbing over the distant fields, and she wasn’t being
hunted. The way things were now, it didn’t get any better than this. She tried
to focus on her good memories of the Ghosts; their victories and summer days.
Not the way they’d been torn away from her.

Tabitha
sighed with relief at the sight of the village. It was a tiny place, surrounded
by forest and tucked away from the world. The first building she came to was a
stone church, nestled in the middle of a jagged graveyard ringed by a crooked
old iron fence. Old spiralled handrails led up the wall to the latch door. The
rounded stone steps were half painted in white lichen; centuries-old stains.
She sat down on a bench for a little while, around the back of the church under
the shade of a pine. The birds were the only sound here; sudden chirps and
chatters and high sad songs. Tabitha closed her tired yellow eyes for a second,
and felt her head dip. She forced her eyes open again. She couldn’t sleep here.
She got up to walk down the graveyard towards the village. All the old
gravestones here were coated in a rich green dust of age, glowing in the
sunlight like nature distilled. Some of the gravestones were old. Very old. One
had been crudely inscribed with the date 1702; another, 1616. The people buried
here had long since found a peaceful sleep; a distant dream far from the new
world around her. There was no one left to mourn for the ones who’d died now.
No one left to laugh about an old tale, or to drink to their memories. It was all
just a violent chaos now, she thought, and no one left to weep for the loss.
But she was still alive, she told herself. And she intended to carry on living,
even despite everyone and everything she’d lost.

‘Bloody graveyards,’ she mumbled, as she headed out
through the gate.

There wasn’t any sign of spiders lurking in the village.
Almost like they’d never come here. With it being just half a dozen houses and
a town hall though, maybe the spiders didn’t see much point in sticking around.
Tabitha had tried the doors of every stone cottage, but only the last one on
the road would open. It was small, cosy. Ivy and flowers crowded the front
garden.

‘Hello?’ she called quietly into the cottage, closing
the front door behind her. The carpet was heavenly soft on her bruised bare
feet. No one had been here in weeks. She wandered into the kitchen, and saw
birds flitting between hanging feeders through the back window. The food in the
fridge was mouldy and reeking, but at least the cottage doors had been shut and
all the windows left intact. The spiders hadn’t been here. Every room seemed
half the size it should be. Some old post on the table told her where she was.
She’d never heard of the village before, though the post code was familiar.
Pale and shivering, Tabitha was half tempted to light a fire. The old stone
fireplace had a neat stack of logs beside it; no gas flame or broken electrics.
Just good old fashioned firewood. Desperate for warmth, Tabitha rummaged in the
kitchen drawers for matches. She paused as a thought crossed her mind. She
thought better of lighting a fire then, in case the smoke from the chimney gave
her away to anything hunting her. Instead she plundered the wardrobes upstairs
for as many fleecy tops and thick winter socks as she could find. It wasn’t a
cold day, but she felt a chill that ran right into her bones after last night.
She binned the sodden hospital gown and her scorched belt, knotting the
surviving half of her mum’s ribbon around her wrist like a bracelet. She pulled
on her fourth jumper, and put on pyjama bottoms and a woolly hat for good
measure. The soft warm bed was perfection; even better than the feel of the
thick carpet beneath her feet. A heaven she hadn’t felt in weeks.

‘Jesus Christ, that’s good,’ she whispered, climbing in beneath
the thick heavy covers. She stamped every thought down and fell into a sweet,
sweltering sleep.

Tabitha
woke from her dreams with a terrified jump. She sat up and looked around at a
chintzy room she didn’t recognise. It was the cottage, in the quiet village.
She remembered now. She’d been a world away while she slept, dodging white eyes
and flaming teeth in the frozen dark. She stretched her legs out in the
glorious warmth of the big bed, and threw off the thick hot covers. The clock
beside the bed said ten, but it wasn’t ticking. The looming grey skies out of
the window made it feel like evening. It didn’t really matter what time it was,
though. She wasn’t going anywhere.

She felt drowsy as she hobbled down the creaking
staircase. Peeled off her hot jumpers along the way. Every muscle in her body
was stiff and achy. She felt a faint hunger pang, but it passed while she sat
down on the couch to rub her aching feet. Her dry mouth and her headache told
her that it was water she needed most of all. The taps in the kitchen only
offered up a spluttering brown sludge, as usual. Her search of the place didn’t
turn up any bottles of water anywhere, but the kettle was almost full. She
poured herself a glass from it, and gulped it down with all the desperation of
a man lost in the desert in an old movie. She downed another glass and glanced
nervously up at the ceiling over the kitchen side, just to be sure there was
nothing lurking there. She hoped Mog was alright, all those miles away. Though
she didn’t think he’d be sitting around in her kitchen worrying about her. The
thought made her smile; that he might be sitting around on the window ledge
fretting about her being gone. Her smile turned to tears, as her thoughts of
missing Mog led to thoughts of missing everyone. What was she supposed to do
now, on her own in the world? What was the point of fighting to survive if
there was no left to care about, or to care about her? Tabitha hugged herself
as she shuffled back into the living room, sniffling and sobbing as she hauled
her sore muscles back up the creaking staircase.

She lay in bed and curled up under the warm covers,
looking through the window at the darkening sky. Her eyes were pink with tears;
crying had left her with damp clumped eyelashes and a subtle stiffness in the
skin on her cheeks. The pale sky through the window felt as numb and dead as
she did. Nothing in it, nothing happening. Only a bird, flitting by for a
second. All she could do was nestle down in the bed covers, and try not be
awake to think about everything.

The
sun was rising on a new day when she woke up, and for one sweet second she was
blissfully unaware until everything came back to her. The loss felt removed
though, or maybe she did. At least for now. Tabitha stretched out in the bed,
and felt the sting of stiff muscles. How could they be sorer today than they
were yesterday? She sat up and coughed to the silent house, and stood up to
stretch out her back. The stretching turned into a lazy yoga session, a
piecing-together of everything she could remember from a couple of half-arsed
lessons. Emma had been going through a heavy-duty fitness phase at the time,
and persuaded Tabitha to go with her to the classes. Tabitha would have given
anything to have Emma around again. To have anyone around again. The silence
and the loneliness here only made her grief feel all the stronger. She stopped
her yoga for a second and just stood there, halfway through a salute to the
sun. She stared at the white wall through the door in the hallway, blank as her
mind.

‘No,’ she told the silence; told herself. She couldn’t
just get lost in grief. She pulled her frozen gaze away from the wall and
looked around the room. How could she have made such a bloody mess after one
day here? Tabitha opened the window for a breeze and straightened out the bed
sheets. Scrunched-up tissues littered the floor like paper snowballs; she’d
already cried her way through every tissue in the cottage. She gathered them up
and stuffed them into the wicker bin, covering up the damp hospital gown in
there. She tried not to think about the fake feel of the plasticky gown against
her skin. She pulled on a thin jumper and jeans, both too baggy for her but
infinitely more human than the gown.

‘That’s better,’ she told the room, which was looking
much more presentable. There was a cool breeze blowing in with the birdsong,
with more a hint of autumn about it than the warmth of summer. It occurred to
her then that winter would be on the way too, and winter would be tough. She
hadn’t thought about the seasons this much before, not beyond the superficial
aspects like dark mornings and rainy days. Come the dark winter days there’d be
no heating, no light, no running water. Lighting fires would be risky. Well,
everything was risky now. But a cold dark winter was going to make things much
worse.

‘I wish you were here Mum,’ she whispered. Mum would
know what to do.

The whole cottage was clean and tidy by the time she
climbed back into bed. She’d dusted every surface, lifted every ornament. Cleaned
things that didn’t need cleaning, just to take her mind off everything. Tabitha
had never thought she could be capable of such mass hygiene. At least she’d
been too busy to think about everything, and now she was much too tired to
start. It could wait for tomorrow.

Tabitha
felt less stiff and sore the next day. The sky was as grey and still as pencil
shading. She’d always liked the blanketed feel of a grey day. Her gnawing
sadness pulled the tears out again, and long sorry sobs. For a while she dwelled
on the thought of Chris, and what she’d do to him if she ever found her way
back to him. Maybe he’d shoot her again. Maybe she’d skin him alive before he
had the chance. Her anger was only propping up her sadness though; once her
hate gave way again the tears came rushing back. She dried her eyes a little
later and sat down in front of the mirror on the wall, and combed her grey
hands through her greasy red hair. Her fingers caught against something with a
sharp tug; a stumpy little twig tangled up at the back. Once she’d teased it
out from her hair she’d pulled out a couple of small leaves and a spiny beech
nut too, and even shaking her hair rained down grit and dirt on her shoulders.

‘You’re disgusting,’ she told her reflection. The
thought was enough to dig up some bad memories from school. It drove her down
into the kitchen, where she unearthed an old bottle of whiskey and a bottle of
wine from a cupboard. It was a sixth sense of hers it seemed, to find strong
drink wherever it might be hiding.

‘To everyone,’ she mumbled with a dead tone, raising a
big glass of whisky to the sunlight through the kitchen windows. It shone clear
amber, warping the trees through the glass. She took a bigger gulp than she
should have, and winced at the beautiful burning feel. She opened her eyes
wide, coughed a little, and went back for more. This was going to be a
morning’s work at least, she decided, and it was best to get started from the
comfort of the couch.

The
next day greeted her like a punch in the head, the most vicious hangover she’d
had in years. She drew the curtains and the bright sun hurt. Opened the window,
and the birdsong grated on her. She shut the window again, and peed in the
bathtub as usual. At least that way the pee would drain away, she reasoned,
rather than sticking around in a toilet that didn’t flush. Number twos were a
distant memory it seemed, now that she could only handle a liquid diet.
Wandering down to the kitchen, Tabitha popped some painkillers that she’d found
in a cupboard and washed it down with a glass of funny-tasting water from the
kettle. She swore never to drink again, just as soon as she’d had the bottle of
wine this morning.

A little later the world had taken on a new brightness,
helped along by the wine. It was a parched brightness, false and intoxicated,
and served up with a dry mouth. But it was a kind of brightness at least. She
needed that. She was sweltering in her jumper though. She sniffed her armpits,
and staggered drunkenly upstairs to the bathroom to wash. The bath taps coughed
and spluttered sludge.

‘Oh yeah,’ she remembered, intoxicated, smiling as she
lost her balance. She swayed and semi-twirled against the edge of the bathtub,
trying to steady herself. She fell down to the floor, paused, cried for a
while. Then she climbed up again with pantomime drunken resolve, back into the
spinning room that lurked above the floor. She grabbed the body wash from the
shelf and headed downstairs. Staggered out of the front door and across the
road to the brook through the trees. She stripped off by the stream and strung
her clothes out in the tangling bushes.

‘Jeez,’ she gasped, walking down into the icy water. The
stones were slimy beneath her feet, deep down in the tumbling river that
reached her waist in the middle. She scrubbed her goosebumpy skin with body
wash, and watched the suds trail off down the current while she shivered. Last
of all she soaped up her face and hair, and ducked down into the water. She’d
never known a coldness like it in her life. It was a good kind of coldness,
wild and raw. And sobering, definitely sobering. It was much harder to climb
back out again, and she felt much more vulnerable all of a sudden when she came
to wrestle her clothes out of the bushes. She realised how risky it’d been
then, wandering out drunk. An easy target. What a stupid thing to do, she told
herself. Well, half of her told herself, anyway. The other half didn’t care any
more. She could handle whatever might come for her, that other half said. She’d
tear it a new one; she’d survive. She had a place in this world too.

Once she’d dressed, Tabitha walked back to the cottage
at a leisurely stroll. Panic gone. Bees buzzed between the flowers in the front
garden. She closed the door behind her, and went upstairs for a fresh fluffy
towel from the cupboard. She put on a clean vest top and trousers, and dragged
the duvet downstairs to the couch. Pulling a couple of books from the shelf in
the corner, she spent the rest of the daylight reading. Sleep came a little
easier that night, despite her tears. She rubbed her mum’s ribbon tied around
her wrist, unfastening it to wrap it around her hand and kiss it. Above all the
grief, she felt even worse about the nagging feeling in her head – that she
should have been crying more than she actually was.

Tabitha
woke up on the couch the next morning with a gnawing hunger, and an intense
thirst. The thirst she could remedy, drinking down the last of the funny water
from the kettle. That was all the drinking water in the house gone, and she
didn’t much fancy drinking from the river across the road. She’d have to go out.

During her village tour Tabitha found a big bottle of
water in one of the neighbouring cottages, having broken in through the back
door. There was no sign of anyone here either, just the ever-present stench of
rotten food. Maybe everyone had up and left at the same time; just taken a bus
and gone. There were only a couple of other houses to try for water, and they
only offered up two small plastic bottles between them. She couldn’t ignore her
hunger, though. And that wasn’t something she was going to fix around here it
seemed, even despite her shouting and clapping to try and tempt out any hiding
spiders. There was nothing here; just birds hopping about in the trees or
dragging worms up from the village green. It was such a beautiful place to hide
away, really. If only her survival wasn’t so tied to the spiders, she thought.
The great gaping chasm of hunger she felt today was a solid reminder. It felt
almost like a sudden parched thirst, an overwhelming urge to get what her body
needed. Was this how it felt to have a drug addiction? It was all she could
think about.

Tabitha curled up on the couch in her cottage and tried
to read her book and take her mind off the hunger. But the thought kept lurking
there in the back of her mind; the taste of that blood, the feel of it going
down. The appeal was nestled somewhere between Sunday lunch and an icy glass of
lemonade. A creamy-cold silver fix, a perfect thought. Tabitha cursed herself
for thinking about it, and tried to focus on the pages of her book. It didn’t
take long for the thoughts to come creeping back, though. Paired with the very
real ache of hunger in her stomach, the need took a constant effort to ignore.

‘Oh my god,’ she growled at herself. At her messed-up
appetite, like it was tugging at her sleeve. By evening she didn’t have the
daylight to read by any more, but she felt too hungry to sleep. All there was
left to do was lie there, and slide back into that same numb grief that had
been hanging over her shoulders like a spectre. Worst of all was knowing that
even despite her grief, the hunger for her next blood meal was struggling for
centre stage in her head. She wanted more time to mourn and get through her
loss, but more than that she wanted her fix. And for that she felt like the
worst person left in the world.

Tabitha
couldn’t sleep well that night. Her thoughts bounced constantly between hunger,
guilt and regret. By dawn she was walking from room to room, emptying the
drawers and cupboards for things to pack. Her hunger outweighed her fear, and
her grief. She was going out to hunt, and she didn’t think she’d be coming
back. It was probably going to be quite a journey to find any spiders
around here. She laced up her new hiking boots from the cottage across the
green, after ages spent hunting for a pair that fitted. They were old and musty
and cobwebbed, but at least they were the right size. She packed the book from
her cottage, and anything else she could see in the dawn light that might be
useful.

Tabitha closed the front door and put her hand on it as
she left, thankful for her fleeting home. If only the spiders were close by to
feed on, she thought. But she took the thought back. If the spiders were close
by, this village wouldn’t be the peaceful little place it was. Better to keep
it as a bright little thought. Locked away safe in her head, with the memories
of her parents and the Ghosts, and the chained-up little toyshop she’d found
before she met Liv. Tabitha touched the front door one last time, and imagined
Laika sleeping on the couch inside. That’s where Laika’s memory could stay,
Tabitha told herself. Peaceful and safe.

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, 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.

Tabitha emerged from the
shop and propped a three-foot axe against the outside wall. The chunky steel
head clunked on the pavement; reassuringly heavy. The edge shone in the
daylight. She walked out onto the street to find the monster resting from its
rage, eyes still murked in extinguisher foam, sitting motionless on the road.
Cold and trembling at the thought of what was coming next, Tabitha took a
couple of deep terrified breaths. She held the paint tin tight; one hand on the
plastic handle and the other cradling the base. Her next footstep took all the
will and conviction she had left. But she only had to think about the tiny
skins in the city square to make up her mind. She walked on as quietly as she
could, closer and closer to the thing, her footsteps hidden away in the sound
of the pouring rain. She closed in on the monster from behind, pale and
nervous. She couldn’t afford to miss; if she did it was all over. The thing
turned on her in a rage when she got close, but she was ready. High on
adrenaline Tabitha threw the tin of thick white emulsion into its face and
ducked its blind swipe. Throwing the paint tin down with a clatter she sprinted
back for the shop, grabbing up the bright yellow handle of the axe as she ran.
The monster pounded after her down the pavement, drawn to the noise of her
running footsteps. It was gaining fast, with all the hellish momentum of a
wrecking ball. As soon as Tabitha stopped running the monster beat the pavement
to shattered chunks where she’d stood. She emerged from the shop doorway beside
it and smashed the axe down into its head before she escaped up the road. The
thing roared like nothing she’d ever heard, filling the dead street. Bright
silver blood dribbled from its skull, mixing with the blinding white paint all
over its face.

‘So you do bleed,’ she
called to it down the street. With the axe still buried in its head, the thing
roared and charged blind towards the sound of her voice. Tabitha leapt away
from the old stone building behind her, and watched the monster smash
head-first into the limestone wall and collapse. With the thing stunned for a
moment Tabitha wrenched the axe out of its skull. With a yell she brought it
down hard onto its neck. It was a mistake; the blade deflected with a jolt off
thick armoured skin. The rumbling sound from the monster warned her to get
away. It spewed a glowing slop of molten steel in a scorching arc around it,
steaming on the wet road. Tabitha leapt away as drops of steel splashed her
leg; screaming and writhing as it burned through skin and bone. She scraped at
the burnt skin with her shaking hands, trying to claw the searing steel out
from her flesh. Yelling, she crawled and limped and staggered away. The monster
leapt back from the wall and brought its fists down into the road with an
earthquake tremor. Tabitha darted away as the thing hurled up another burst of
molten metal at her. In a slow-motion ballet she zig-zagged between cars and
leapt over benches as the monster destroyed everything at her heels. It
followed the sound of her footsteps and charged after her, ploughing through
cars and bins like they were cardboard. Tabitha spotted an old side alley off
the high street and ran down it. It was narrow; too tight for the monster to
fit. Stomping into the alley after her, its shoulders smashed through the brick
walls on either side. It lost its momentum as it ploughed through, swamped in
fallen bricks, and suddenly it was stuck between the narrow walls. Before it
could turn its huge body to squeeze further down Tabitha came running back
towards it. It vomited down the alley at her, but she’d left some distance. Its
next spew was nothing but a glowing dribble from its giant piranha jaws. And
then… nothing. The thing was pinned. Its white eyes stared, stark and murderous.

‘Are you finished?’ she
asked it breathlessly, waiting for the hurled liquid steel to cool in the rainwater.
Exhausted, the monster struggled and heaved against the brickwork holding its
arms. Leaping forwards Tabitha swung the axe into its face, over and over,
until the roaring head streamed silver. It tried to turn its body and grab her.
The thing roared and spat, spraying Tabitha’s coat with hot metal. Yelling, she
threw off her smouldering jacket. With a racket of crumbling brick the monster
wriggled an arm free from the wall. Tabitha swung her axe at its reaching hand,
but the skin was too thick. Suddenly it lurched forward and gripped her arm
with crushing metal fingers. The monster dragged her out screaming from the
narrow alley and threw her down into the pavement with a crack. Ears ringing,
head dribbling blood, Tabitha tried to crawl away in a daze. She reached out
limply for the axe on the road. The monster grabbed her up again and opened its
grinding jaws to push her inside. Tabitha wriggled an arm free and pressed her
thumb deep into its eye. It was hard, rubbery. But at least it hurt. The monster
dropped her with a snarl and clutched its face. Before its hands could grab her
again Tabitha ducked, staggered around it and swung the axe deep into the back
of its knee with a slicing crunch. She could tell from the scream how much
she’d hurt it. Silver blood streamed when she wrenched the axe away. Dodging a
swipe that blew apart the brick wall behind her, Tabitha stepped in and drove
the axe deep into the joint of its forearm. The thing roared in pain and
cratered the pavement with a fist as Tabitha leapt away. Silver blood spurted
heavy from its wounds, gushing and slapping on the tarmac as the monster
followed her. Watching it carefully, Tabitha stepped away and kept her
distance. Heavy feet and heaving animal breaths filled the silent road as the monster
limped and tried to reach for her. Seeing her chance, Tabitha lifted her axe
and sprinted back in to wound its forearm. With a sudden staggering swing the
monster struck her in the shoulder and sent her flying across the street. The
road spun below her. She lost her axe and landed hard on the tarmac in an ugly
tumbling scrape. The thing growled at her as she picked herself back up; both
of them limping and pouring silver blood. Tabitha clutched the claw wounds in
her shoulder and watched the creature staggering. It was worth getting hit
though, just to hurt it again. She left the monster to bleed for a minute. It
wasn’t healing like her.

‘Fight me! Come on!’ she
screamed, picking her axe up. At least the rain had stopped. The monster was
stumbling now as it came towards her. It pounced. She leapt away. It staggered
and ploughed into another wall behind her, shattering windows and bending
steel. It had to drag itself back up. Teeth clenched, Tabitha swung the axe
into the back of its wounded knee with everything she had. The creature’s
scream was deafening. She wrenched the axe out with a yell and a bloody
squelch, and swung it in again before the roaring monster grabbed her hard
around the waist. She squirmed and screamed as its grip crushed her. She sunk
the axe into its head, and the monster bellowed and threw her down on the road.
She crawled away gasping; it grabbed her leg. Dragged her back. She spun and
axed the joint in its forearm again; it snarled and dropped her. Breathless,
Tabitha crawled and staggered away as it punched the road into a cracked
crater. There was a moment of exhaustion between them; a staring split-second
reprieve. Dust-smudged and sweating, Tabitha swallowed hard with a dry throat.
The thing was growling like a landslide. She stood and faced it; it charged at
her. Adrenaline slowed the world down as the monster came in close. Time
crawled. Tabitha watched the creature swing in slow motion and hunched her
body, dipping her shoulders and arching her back. Feet pushing the pavement away,
she sprang out fast and feline and dived under its swiping claws. She rolled
and pushed up off the road behind it; airborne. Swinging the axe two-handed she
hacked off its forearm in a bloody burst of shining silver. She surprised
herself. The monster’s scream was music to her ears; violent poetry as it
staggered away. She stood staring, breathless, sprayed in silver blood as the
creature’s wound spurted. The monster roared; she yelled back. It slipped in
its own blood when it tried to lash out. Tabitha ducked in and punched the
bloody stump of its arm, and sent the monster reeling to the floor with the
pain. She dodged its slipping swipe and bit the axe down deep into the back of
its knee. It kicked out and grabbed for her, but she wasn’t there.

‘Behind you.’ Tabitha
took a hard lumberjack swing and took off its leg at the knee. The monster
screamed and crashed to the tarmac, and Tabitha stood ankle-deep in a sloshing
silver tide of blood. Adrenaline racing she leapt up onto its back and hacked
at its head, over and over, until the thing stopped struggling and screaming.
Breathless, gold eyes staring in shock, Tabitha staggered off the dead
monster’s back and inspected her cuts and bruises. The steel burns on her leg
were healing up; pushing beads of metal out from her skin. All around her,
silver blood pooled and ran down the reeking drains. Lying stark against the
silver road was the dead black brute, like some hellish fallen statue, its hot
skin steaming. Too late, Tabitha looked down and saw its white eyes still
staring. Its remaining arm shot out and gripped both her legs together. Tabitha
yelled and tried to pull away, struggling to balance. With half-dead slowness
the monster’s claws tightened and sank into her flesh. Tabitha screamed and
struggled. The hand held her still, but didn’t pull her closer. The monster had
stopped moving. Was it dead? Her axe swing glanced off its armoured hand in a
spray of sparks. Another swing and the axe slipped from her tired bloody grasp,
clattering out of reach on the road. She yelled and punched it, trying to climb
out from the fingers. The claws were deep in her flesh. She may as well have
been hitting a tank or a steam train for all the good it did. Then its arm
began to pull, dragging her closer with impossible slowness. Tabitha staggered
and fell to the road, screaming as it pulled her closer. There was little life
left in the monster’s brain; blood slopped and gushed from the alien’s head.
Its eyes flickered to grey and back to white, over and over, like faulty
lights. Its grip around her calves was inescapable; its movement snail-slow. It
dragged her towards its open bear-trap mouth slowly, inch by inch, like a
zombie. Its arm scratched and scudded on the silver-painted tarmac, dragging
Tabitha ever closer as she struggled. Panic filled her thoughts. She glimpsed
the grey sky above, the walls of shops all around her. She punched uselessly at
its arm, grasping desperately for the axe too far out of reach. She felt the
rough drag of the road on the back of her head. She was panicked, tired,
drained like a dead battery. Its mouth creaked open as it dragged her feet
towards its rows of teeth.

‘I am not dying in
slow motion!’ she yelled at it, punching its lifeless head over and over. She
tried desperately to pull her legs free from the inevitable. She wrestled
uselessly with alien fingers thicker than her forearms, black and solid as cast
iron. The still monster’s eyes flickered and greyed, staring. It didn’t flinch
when Tabitha clawed at them. Its teeth closed glacier-slow around her boots,
huge and cruel, piercing the soles. Tabitha screamed as the teeth sank in
amongst the skin and bones of her feet, so slowly, with a cracking drawn-out
crunch. She screamed louder than she ever knew she could. She was passing out with
the pain, feet gushing blood into alien jaws. She hit desperately at its head,
over and over; punching at the brain exposed there and frantically digging her
hand inside its skull. It was useless. She screamed and smacked the road in
agony and reached for the axe redundantly. But still the teeth sank down,
slower and slower. And then, they stopped. The monster’s grey eyes flickered to
black. The thing was finally dead. Tabitha sat there in a shining silver pool,
screaming, attached to the monster’s corpse. The teeth were stuck halfway
through her feet. Her blood gushed through her boots, welled in the monster’s
mouth, and dribbled out from its jaws to patter down into the pool of alien
blood. They both had the same blood; the same slick silver. Pale and shaking,
Tabitha struggled lethargically against the jaws. A rush of shock came over her
then, cold and sudden. Sickness filled her head; her vision faded to black.
When her head dropped back and hit the road hard, she didn’t feel a thing.

It was dark when she came around. A fresh shock of
pain coursed up her legs, and she gasped at the agony and remembered where she
was. Her head hurt; her scalp was caked in silver blood. The hulking black mass
of the alien looked even darker than the night around it. A full moon shone
above, pouring ghostly white light down on the high street where she lay stuck
in her monstrous bear trap. Caught by a vast black body in a silver pool.
Tabitha wanted to throw up at the agony but only dry-heaved, over and over.
Feeling almost drunk on the pain, she propped herself up on her hands. Looked
over its clutching fingers at her trapped feet between its teeth. She’d tried
not to move her legs when she sat up, but she couldn’t help it. She screamed
afresh when her legs had twitched, and she felt the grinding teeth and stabbing
fingers scrape against her bones. Punching the dead monster’s head in a rage
did nothing but make her scream again with the pain. She had to think. She had
to figure out how to escape before anything turned up here. One spider wasn’t
much to her normally, but stuck here she could meet a very slow death if one
turned up and tried to tire her out. She tried to open up the alien’s fingers
and jaws with her hands, but it was no use. The axe was just too far out of
reach, and digging in the monster’s squelching brain achieved nothing with any
motor reflexes it might have had left. She felt around its head and neck,
searching for bolts, seams, joints or rivets; anything she could use to
dismantle its head from its body. But the metal monster seemed completely
organic, whatever the hell it was. She sighed shallow; panicked and distraught.
Was this it? Was this how she was supposed to die, bleeding to death with her
feet caught in a dead monster’s mouth? What kind of superhero did that make
her? She tried to breathe deeper. Shallow shaking breaths in the moonlit dark.

‘I’m going to get out of
this,’ she told herself, cringing at the pain. ‘I’m going to get out of this.’
She thought back to the silver spider in the bathtub in her house; her first
kill. At first it seemed invulnerable, a metal monster. She’d cut it open
though, managed to dismantle it. She went through it in her head – the silvery
crustacean skin, the tendons, the white flesh beneath. Everything could be
reduced to its parts, whether it was an engine or an alien body. She knew alien
bodies better than anyone. Even better, her rough metal fingers were
practically pliers.

‘Start at the weakest
point,’ she whispered to herself, trying to ignore the maddening pain. ‘Break
it down. Start with the smallest piece.’ Tabitha reached down and grasped the
giant fingers gripping her legs. She felt down the first fingertip where it was
buried in her bleeding calf. Gasping at the pain, she wiggled the alien claw
tip as hard as she could. It wasn’t about to come loose. She breathed deep,
tried to stop panicking, and tried again. She strained at the finger with
everything she had, and the joint creaked and loosened. Staring in shock at her
victory, Tabitha pulled the finger away as hard as she could. She set to work
on the rest. It was agony, but it was worth it. Nothing motivated like the
promise of freedom. Wrenching the last curled finger from her calf, Tabitha
rested a while to let her legs heal up. She could barely even look at her feet
though, trapped and punctured in its giant piranha teeth.

‘Start with the smallest
piece,’ she repeated, like a prayer. She reached into the monster’s mouth and
gripped the smallest tooth. With a great deal of prising and wiggling, in a few
minutes she’d wrenched out the tooth from its jaw. She gasped and leant back
with the pain in her feet, staring at the starry night sky. The tooth looked
like black enamel, and it had a root. So the monster was more organic than
machine; it had to be. Tabitha felt more hopeful at the thought. The second
tooth came out easier; she prised it from the jaw with the help of the first
one. Same with the third, and the fourth. She worked her way back through the
rows of giant teeth, first loosening them from the mangled metal gums and then,
wishing she had a strong drink to go with it, pulling the teeth from her feet.

Tabitha blacked out with
the pain as she worked. Coming around, she reminded herself of her progress and
pulled more teeth. Willed herself on. The last one was the deepest; a knife of
black bone buried deep through her right foot. She pulled it out and screamed,
punching the road. She screamed again as she tugged her soles off the bottom
rows of teeth, one foot and then the other. Free. Tabitha took her numb legs
slowly out from the monster’s mouth, crying with the pain. She dragged herself
away from the cold silver pool of blood, shivering in rain-soaked clothes. She
had to get warm. All she wanted was a corner to crawl away into. She slunk off
to sit down in a shop doorway, with darkening eyes and the axe by her side, and
rocked herself to sleep. She woke up shivering soon after, and knew that she
had to get warm. Her feet hadn’t healed up. They weren’t bleeding, but the
wounds were black and festering in the moonlight through her torn-up boots. She
staggered up and leant against the wall of the shop doorway, and hacked away
the shutter over the door with the axe. Once inside, she slotted the axe
through both handles to bar the doors, and crawled off into the dark heart of
the clothes shop. She ripped coats and cardigans down off their hangers; piling
them into a nest down behind the tills.

As lonely as she’d felt
when she came clothes shopping here, back in the real world, Tabitha knew she
could rely on the sad knowing smiles of the checkout girls. The ones she could
spot a mile off; the ones like herself. Just like her, they had to put up with
the indifference and the judging glances of the girls who were better off,
better dressed, better equipped to handle life… just better. But now,
here, behind these tills where the sad girls used to stand and work, Tabitha
felt at home. It was a human point of reference; a familiar place. She felt
herself getting warmer inside her pile of coats and cardigans. For the few
moments before she fell asleep, Tabitha felt almost human again. Until the
dreams came, and the hands and teeth and white eyes descended on her in the
dark. She sat up, reaching her hand out to nothing in the empty shop. Her mind
raced as she lay back down and closed her eyes. Venom dreams; hallucinations.
The coats were human skins piled high over her, dripping silver blood and
molten steel that burned her skin. Her feet gushed blood and liquid metal. Her
hands curled and froze and cracked. Her feet burned and grew stabbing teeth.
Tabitha screamed and cried into hot human skins that were coats, and passed out
into a deep poisoned sleep.

It was dark when Tabitha woke up, and she remembered
crawling into the shop as if she’d been drunk or drugged. But peering over the
checkout counter, she spotted dots of light through the metal shutters over the
windows. It was morning, and she’d never felt happier to see it. She remembered
dreams, fleeting and terrible, slipping her mind. She limped over to the doors,
and then the monster came back to her in a jagged thought. Its staring white
eyes. Its grip. Its teeth. The sea of skins and a tide of silver blood, and the
gnawing cold of the night. Tabitha dropped to the floor and gripped her knees
to her chest, rocking and staring at the sign for a half-price sale.

‘Up,’ she commanded
herself, sighing out the tension. ‘Get up. Get up.’

Tabitha’s feet were agony
as she hobbled around the shop. She peeled off her cold damp jumper and t-shirt
and looked in the changing room mirrors. Everywhere but her hands, her skin was
still pale and freckled. Human skin. She hugged herself with grey metal hands
that seemed a little darker this morning, a little harder and stronger. Despite
her agonising feet and everything that had happened, she somehow felt more
energetic today. She was especially impressed with the muscular crease that ran
down her stomach. She’d never had one of those before. She felt springy,
powerful. She had intended to change into some new clothes here, but there
wasn’t anything practical for autumn. Only sandals and shorts; flimsy summer
dresses. Clothes from the old world, where fashion was a real thing. The
jackets were light cotton; nowhere close to her own musty weatherproof that
she’d tossed down smoking outside somewhere. She pulled her wet dirty jumper
back on and gave up on changing. It’d be warmer than anything here anyway, once
it dried off. Its damp stink and silver bloodstains gave it a hard-wearing
honesty that she didn’t want to part with. Her feet still throbbed and ached in
her torn boots.

Tabitha limped over to
the doors, unbarring the handles and throwing one open for a bit of daylight to
see by. Popping her head outside, the coast was clear. There was only the
hulking black corpse of the monster out there, sprawled massive on the road.
She couldn’t believe she’d killed it. As she walked out a little further,
Tabitha wondered why she was still limping. Surely her feet should have healed
up by now. Worried, she sat down on the shop’s doorstep and unlaced her mangled
boots. She peeled off her stinking blood-crusted socks, and with great
difficulty she pulled the shredded strands of fabric from the dark open wounds
on her feet. She noticed then in the daylight that her fingers weren’t grey any
more; they were black. As black as the monster on the road. They’d changed
since the fight; since she’d been asleep. At her wrists the black skin faded to
grey, and from grey to her own pale skin tone. Her hands felt so much harder;
heavier. Stronger. With a punch, she shattered a tile on the shop doorstep and
cracked the concrete beneath. She was definitely stronger than yesterday. She
finished pulling shreds of sock from the gouges in her feet, and stared in
horror. It wasn’t just the shadows in the doorstep and the strange milky glow
of the morning light; her feet really were turning grey. They were starting to
match the new black skin on her hands, growing darker and harder by the minute.
She jumped a little then at a giant moth resting in the doorway, halfway to a
small bat. She shuddered at its zombie stillness and pushed herself up from the
doorway, staggering out into the light.

Tabitha certainly felt
stronger once she stood in the growing sunlight, admiring the monster’s corpse.
She wished she had a camera, really. She could have buried the axe down in its
brains and posed for a photo with a foot on her kill. She couldn’t get enough
of the warm sun, like it held a new tingling fascination for her – just like
that bloody moss in the forest. An inexplicable attraction; some new alien part
of her mind maybe.

She rested down on a
bench with a bottle of whiskey from the torn-up pub, with the axe propped
beside her and her rescued coat drying in the sun. Closing her eyes, Tabitha
let the sun shine red through her eyelids. Whiskey had never tasted so sweet,
so hot. But then she’d never needed a drink as much as she did now. It went
down easy; a burning liquid smoothness to scorch her thoughts away. She sighed,
breathing deep in the sunshine. Smelled the whiskey fumes on her breath. The
rotten sulphur stench of the drains hampered the scene a little bit, but the
city was so peaceful, so empty. She wiggled her bare toes while she rested, and
gradually felt the pain in her feet subside. She noticed all sense of touch
fade away from her feet too, just like her hands. Nothing much she could do
about it; no point in missing it.

‘Well, I did wish for
them,’ she mumbled to herself, thinking back to her journey over the hills on
soft bare feet. She thought about her escape from the base. Flashbacks of
operations haunted her for a second; she killed the thoughts and dragged her
mind back to the present. Tried to experience the world around her, right here
and right now. Deep breaths. Her clothes stunk of damp. They’d dry while she
wore them, she supposed. When she stood up the limp and the dull ache had gone
from her feet, and the wounds had disappeared. Just like her hands, her feet
had grown dark and armoured like the dead monster’s hide. The new skin was
thick and iron-hard, black as coal.

Tabitha walked across the
road to test out her new feet, feeling nothing of the pavement under her hard
bare soles. Walking felt smooth and natural, better than wearing shoes. She
kicked a sturdy metal bin; left a dent. Kicked it again. And again. A sudden
anger rising, she punched it and kicked it until the bin was a crumpled ruin.
She kicked hard against a wall and shattered a brick into fragments, as if her
heel was a sledgehammer. She ran down the street and kicked a lamp post into a
bent tilt. Punched a phone box half to pieces and shattered bricks with her
fists in the wall behind her. Leaning on the wall to get her breath back, she
lifted up her feet one by one to take a closer look. The soles were covered in
tiny scales, super-grippy on the pavement. She launched herself into a sprint,
and felt a new strength in her feet like coiled springs. Heartcore racing, she
felt high when she circled back up the street and jogged to a stop by the dead
monster.

Tabitha found out just
how strong she’d become when she gave the alien corpse a cursory punch to the
head. Clenched her black hand into a fist and smashed it down into the
creature’s skull. She’d left a dent – she couldn’t believe it. Another punch
deepened it to a crater. And then the pain started. There was a tingling in her
hands then, sharp like an electric shock. Suddenly her palms were burning.
Every finger felt on fire. She screamed and shook her fingers and hugged them
tight under her armpits, stamping the road and desperate for the vice-grip
feeling to stop. The pain made her want to throw up, to faint, to cut off her
hands just to stop it. It felt like someone was taking a chainsaw to her
fingers. Tabitha staggered and stumbled into a wall. She dropped to her knees
and shook as the burning came on again, even worse than before. She screamed,
clenched her teeth; clenched her fists as she fell to all fours. Her trembling
hands were shifting, bleeding, changing before her eyes. Claws sprang from new
gaps in her fingertips, thick and stubby and sharp. The pain faded just as
quickly as it’d come, and Tabitha stared wide-eyed and nauseous at the claws. Her
claws. By reflex they sank back down painlessly into the new gaps in her
fingertips. By reflex, she could spring them out again like a cat. Sinking her
new claws into the dead monster’s back, she could even peel away its thick skin
a little. She licked the creature’s silver blood off her black fingers as she
stood up. It was sweet, but not in any way she could put a taste to. A stronger
hit than the spider blood. Her heart core raced as she swallowed a gulp;
excited. She felt an electrical buzz, elated at the taste, and her old appetite
came back with a vengeance. She lapped at the silvery blood that still covered
the road, ice-cold and refreshing. She caught sight of herself in a window,
licking blood off the tarmac on her hands and knees. She ignored herself and
carried on, as if she were licking up melted chocolate. It was a thin covering
though, and it tasted too much like the road. Like dirt in good wine. Pouncing
hungrily on the creature’s head, Tabitha peeled its skull apart and sucked at
the blood that had welled around its brain. It felt like milk and vodka going
down, cold and strong and silky. Her face was covered in it when she was done.
She felt tipsy; tingly all over. All the itchy anxiety was gone. Breast-fed
newborns didn’t feel this contented.

‘You’re delicious,’ she
told the alien corpse, leaning back against its body on the bloody road. With
her old hunger finally gone, Tabitha sighed with satisfaction and watched the
golden sun rise over the empty city. She felt one of those intense moments of
peace again, like the sunshine held some strange power over her. She felt her
mind resting, and the warm sun on her face. Maybe her bloodmeal had a lot to do
with the way she felt. Inspiration struck her then, and she wandered off to
find some plastic bottles. It was so simple; why hadn’t she thought of it
before?

Later on Tabitha retraced
her steps down the city streets, following the trail of destruction from her
fight the day before. Every trace of havoc; every cracked and crumbled wall. It
felt like a dream now. The worst dream of her life. She found her way back to
the taxi she’d been hiding behind in the rain, and retrieved her damp rucksack
still lying beside it. She zipped it open and popped a couple of packed
painkillers with a swig of water, and promptly retched them back up again.

‘Seriously,’ she mumbled
angrily, unable to keep even a pair of pills down. She packed up her rucksack
and looked back up the road. That was the square, up there. The sea of skins.
The thought gave her a sick hollow feeling; a massive sadness. Even worse that
she couldn’t do anything about it. She was sure that if the Ghosts were here,
Will would’ve had them burning every skin they could find in a huge bonfire.
Except… the Ghosts weren’t here. They were gone. It was just her. And after the
kind of dreams she’d had last night, she just couldn’t face seeing all those
skins again. She just wanted to leave this city. She never wanted to see this
place again. She turned away from the street leading to the square, and headed
back down the road away from the centre. That was the road to take now; the one
out of town. Tabitha put her rucksack back on, picked up her axe, and walked
away.

38

Tabitha was a few miles out of the city ruins by noon.
She’d made her way out onto the main roads and from there onto the silent
motorway. She zipped up her coat against the wind, glad of the warmth despite
her smelly damp clothes beneath. She had a good view of the city and the fields
from the top of the motorway bridge. The whipping wind blew the smell of human
shit up from the sewage treatment works down below. Far off to one side was a
sprawling consumers’ paradise; a roofed shopping centre the size of a town. Out
in the middle of nowhere really, compared with the jagged urban ruins far
behind her. She’d been a couple of times with her mum; it had a warm pull of
the familiar about it. That would be her new home, she decided, until she’d had
a chance to rest and feed properly.

Tabitha set off down the
far side of the motorway bridge, doubling back on herself at the turn-off. She
headed for roundabouts and towering signs for big-name outlets; studying the
trees and office buildings for spiders that just weren’t there.

There was no sign that the aliens had come here to the
shopping centre, but then there weren’t any cars here either. No sign of
people. The spiders would stick close to places with people, Tabitha considered.
No point them coming all the way out here when there was no one around to eat.

Trudging through acres of
car park under a cloudy blue sky, Tabitha kicked a bloated little packet of rain-soaked
tissues across the tarmac to break the silence and entertain herself. She
pushed her hair from her eyes and studied the giant entrance as she approached
the shopping centre. Huge heavy shutters stood solid behind the glass doors.
There was no sign of entry, no evidence of looters. The place just seemed to
have been locked up one night and never opened again. Tabitha slammed her fist
into the doors, buckling the lock and shattering the glass. She slipped in
through the dented doorframe, cracking shards of glass beneath her hard feet.
She flicked her claws out and dug them in under the huge metal shutter, and
strained until the lock popped and the whole thing started to creak and rattle
upwards. She dragged it down shut behind her once she was inside, just in case
a spider should find the spot where she’d broken in.

She was a dust-darkened
wanderer in a pristine white palace, as bright and silent as heaven. The
colossal shopping centre was spotless, untouched; a temple to everything the
creatures didn’t need. Tabitha stood before a large map telling her that She
Was Here, and studied it carefully. Over on one side of the roofed city lay a
gigantic food hall. On the far side, past fake streets lined with shops and
lamp posts, stood a courtyard with an artificial sky. Tabitha’s dry tongue felt
coarse against the roof of her mouth. She’d run out of water on the trek out of
the city. She headed off for the pharmacy chain, and broke in for a bottle
of water from the stinking fridges. A few more bottles went straight into her
rucksack, and then she was off to find a place to nest down.

Escalators stood frozen
as she passed by streets of shuttered shops. She wandered down a huge sky-lit
corridor, damp and grimy against the shining white walls, watched by staring
statues. It all looked so beautiful; so untouched. A museum of the mythical;
white hallowed halls in some strange consumer afterlife. The bottled water was
a cool liquid bliss in her dry mouth. The sunlight spilled down through the
glass ceiling, flaring as she squinted up at it. Beautiful. The warm clean feel
of the light, the fresh cold taste of the water as she gulped it down… she’d
never felt this before. Transcendent.

The corridor led
eventually into the colossal main bulk of the shopping centre. Tabitha couldn’t
get over how clean it all looked; the invasion hadn’t happened in here.
Daylight flooded in through the glass ceiling and gleamed against shop windows,
pristine. Up ahead a giant fountain stood motionless, with a pool of water
still as a mirror. She came closer. Beneath the surface she saw a hundred
tossed coins, and thought how they’d never mean anything again.

‘Hello?’ she said, into
the empty white street around her. She didn’t know why; she knew no one was
there. Maybe she just needed to hear a voice, after so much solid silence.

‘What did you wish for?’
she said, sitting on the edge of the fountain and looking at the shiniest coin
in the water. She dipped her hand in and tried to pick it up. Her black fingers
fumbled with the coin edges, trying to peel it off the floor of the fountain.
It felt like she was wearing gloves though; she couldn’t grip it. Her fingers
weren’t delicate enough any more. These were hands for killing, hard and
brutal. She took her black hand from the clear water, and felt sorry that she’d
even rippled the surface. The coins’ previous owners were gone now. She could
at least leave their wishes to rest in peace.

A little later Tabitha
could hear rain pattering on the glass roof over the streets of shops. It was
good, heavy rain. The kind that made her feel safe. It reminded her of the days
when her and mum would play board games, or read one another stories that
they’d made up. She’d always had such an infectious giggle, her mum. Their
laughs made one another laugh. Tabitha cried for a while in the chocolate shop,
picking out a few boxes that her mum would have liked. She couldn’t get over
just how neat and untouched everything was, as if all the shops had been
stocked up and left just for her. When she tried a chocolate though, she
coughed it straight back out. Of course she did. It was a moment of fantasy.

Tabitha put the best box
of chocolates down by the fountain, a present to her mum. Belgian ones; very
posh. Mum would have loved them.

It took Tabitha ages to
fish the single penny out of the shop till. All the checkouts must have been
emptied before the place closed up. There was only a dull old penny left, right
at the back of the change drawer. Her new fingers were hard and clumsy, and she
was still learning to use them properly. After several attempts, she’d managed
to pincer the penny between her claws and transport it carefully to her other
palm. Victorious, she closed her hand around it and headed back out from the
checkout. She didn’t feel the penny slip through her fingers; just heard its
high ringing sound on the shop floor. Tabitha sighed impatiently, watching it
roll around her in a circle. She stamped a black foot on it, and tried for a
while to peel it off the floor.

‘For god’s sake,’ she
mumbled, kneeling down so she was eye-level with the coin. Tried to edge her
claws underneath it. It didn’t help. She slid the penny along the floor towards
the shop door, and tried to push it up against the metal doorframe. That way
she could up-end it, and maybe pick it up more easily. But when she got there
the penny just stubbed against the metal edge of the doorframe, and
half-disappeared in the gap underneath it. She growled in defeat and punched a
dent in the doorframe, looking around the shop. There were some cards on the
checkout. She pushed the edge of a card against the penny, edged it out from
the gap, and it popped up and stayed put against the card. Smiling at her
victory, Tabitha gripped the penny hard against the card and took it to the
fountain.

‘Well, we got there
eventually,’ she told her mum brightly, as she dropped the penny into the
water. She wished for her mum and dad to find one another up there, whatever
happened to people when they died. Even if there wasn’t a heaven, and they only
found each other again in her imagination, it was good enough for her. She
thought about her friends too, and Laika. Just like the cottage, this looked
like a good place to rest their memories. Down in the water in a shining white
palace, where the monsters couldn’t find them.

Tabitha gravitated towards the big home store at the
heart of the shopping centre. She pulled up the shutter to cast a dim light on
the tables, rugs and lamps inside. The smell of air fresheners relaxed her as
she wandered in. For a moment then she could have been back in the real world;
just another shopper looking for more crap to fill her house with. Tabitha laid
her axe down and pushed two big sofas together at the back into a kind of
walled nest. She’d tried the beds; her nest was better though. It felt more
natural. She was glad to leave her rucksack down somewhere at last, and rubbed
her raw shoulders where the weight on the straps had been digging in. The
backpack had weighed a ton ever since she’d shouldered it again and left the
city, but she knew it’d be worth the effort when she got here. She pulled out a
few two-litre bottles from the backpack and lined them up on a table; each one
filled with silver blood that she’d milked from the monster’s corpse. Half a
cupful would keep her going for three or four days, she imagined, if she was
strict on her appetite. If she could just have a little when she was absolutely
starving in need of it, she might even make it last through the winter. She
wouldn’t have to go hunting outside in the freezing cold. She wasn’t hungry
right now, but she could just take a tiny sip. Just for the taste.

‘No,’ she told herself,
taking her hands off the nearest bottle. The swirled silver liquid was so tempting;
pulling at her gaze like a glass of wine and a slab of chocolate cake. She hid
the bottles away in a cupboard, out of sight and hopefully out of mind. She had
to keep her thoughts off the stuff if she wanted to make it last. Luckily
there’d be plenty of distractions around here anyway. After all, she was back
in civilisation.

Heading
out on a shopping trip through the vast centre, Tabitha caught sight of a
cookie counter and felt a deep longing for something sugary. Never again. She
sighed, and looked around at the other shops. She definitely had some kind of
craving though, and it wasn’t pulling her back to the sweet counters. She was
gravitating towards an electricals store.

Tabitha pulled the
shutter up and wandered into the gloom, browsing her way past expensive
speakers and games on sale. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was in here, but
she knew real cravings when she felt them. After all the changes that had
happened to her already she just went along with it. Her body had gotten her
this far; if her cravings pulled her over towards a rack of batteries down the
centre aisle, so be it. She took a nine-volt battery from the shelf and opened
the crinkling packet, and lifted the tip to her mouth. It felt nice, the sour
jarring jolt of electricity that pinched her tongue.

‘Ooh,’ she said quietly,
savouring the taste. It definitely had something of a silver-blood tingle about
it. She touched the battery back to her tongue again, and felt the volts empty
into her body.

Tabitha set down a
shopping basket full of batteries on a couch in the bookshop and went in search
of a new read. Faced with the choice of thousands on the shelves, suddenly the
old rain-warped book she’d brought from the cottage really wasn’t that
compelling. For two blissful minutes Tabitha forgot the world outside and
browsed a hundred printed minds on the shelves. Her eyes ate the blurb on the
back of a recommended read, and she was into the first page even before she’d
sat down on the couch. Interrupting herself, she grabbed some throws and
cushions from the shop across the way. She pulled off her filthy jumper and
trousers and nestled back down under blankets on the couch, surrounded by
bookshelves. Burrowing her brain back into the book, Tabitha sank back into a
wall of cushions and curled her metal feet up under her bum. She sipped wine in
a metal cup from an outdoors shop, since the glasses she liked kept cracking in
her grip. Turning the page she reached over into the shopping basket for
another battery, tonguing the moreish tips while she read on. She drained the
charge from one battery after another, like they were chocolates. The wine did
what wine did best. The throws felt so soft on her arms and legs that she
wished the world outside would disappear, and just leave her in here for the
rest of her life. The handwritten review on the bookshelf was right; this
really was a good read. Tabitha slurped her wine as she devoured her book, and
plucked another battery from the basket as if she shouldn’t really. A tear
patted down on the page as the words tugged at her raw feelings. It felt nice
to cry over something fictional for a change.

Shaving was a joy; after weeks of growth she’d never
been so hairy in her life. Tabitha browsed the shelves and used the best razor
and shaving cream she could steal. The stuff that smelled like it belonged in a
five-star hotel. It felt good to have smooth skin again. It wasn’t much in the
grand scheme of things, but in some small way she felt closer to a normal life.
She fantasised about washing her hair next; she couldn’t wait. Books, wine,
body hair management… she was feeling more civilised already.

After the glorious tingly
chill of a wet-wipe shower, Tabitha stood in front of the shelves of deodorant
for a while. She was faced with too much choice. Rank upon rank of flowery tins
of smell, dreamt up and discussed at length before they were boxed up and
marketed out. Driven all across the country and set out in neat little rows for
the discerning shopper. A bizarre state of affairs really, now that she looked
back on it. Tabitha stood and stared for a while, weighing them up. Which tin
of smell defined her best as a person? With a phantom feeling of consumer glee
she pulled the most expensive roll-on from the shelf. It felt cold and slick in
her armpits. It smelled like weird cucumbery flowers with a light dusting of
sugar; an alien sweetness that she wasn’t used to any more. She was used to the
smell of sweat and sour damp, and there was plenty of both in the grubby pile
of clothes she’d left in the bookshop. Sniffing her smooth perfumed armpits,
Tabitha went to sit among the dim pearly white of the makeup counters. She
browsed the shelves for the best eyeliner and the reddest lipstick she could
find. She switched her borrowed underwear from the cottage for a new black set,
and decided to devote the rest of her shopping trip to a new dress and shoes.
Until she remembered, and looked down at her feet. She wasn’t going to find any
shoes to fit around those things. In a way though, she supposed, her new feet looked
better than any shoes ever could. They were unique, for one thing. Lithe but
solid; alien chic. Midnight-black and animal. Her hands and feet were a
statement. Not that there were many people left in the world to make a
statement to. But… if the only people left in the world were the likes of Chris
and Sylvia, or Major Blake and his doctor, she wanted nothing to do with people
any more. People could crawl away and die screaming for all she cared. They
had it coming.

Tabitha headed down to the bars and restaurants that
evening in a fitted blue dress. She wore her bright hair up, and an extremely
expensive diamond necklace and earrings plundered from one of the jewellers.
She smiled at imaginary passers-by, admired her stark yellow eyes in a mirrored
shop window, and made her way to the trendiest bar. It was pitch-black inside;
not much going on. So, she smiled to the invisible patrons and came back
outside again. She opted instead for an open-plan bar overlooking the food
court, and put her new purse down on the bar top by her seat. It was nice here.
A little busy, but nice. Tabitha sat down at her barstool and glanced around
for company, trying her best to fill every seat with people. A dashing pirate
captain was speaking with a dinosaur at one table; at another a group of ladies
were laughing over cocktails and dressed like the suits in a deck of cards.
Hearts touched Diamonds delicately on the shoulder and laughed elegantly, like
a silent movie star. Clubs was raving. Spades was drinking a Manhattan.

‘Hi, can I have a
Manhattan please?’ Tabitha asked the speakeasy bartender. She got up from her
seat, walked around the bar and stood by the till.

‘Of course,
mademoiselle,’ she replied, in her manliest French accent. ‘I’m afraid I don’t
know how to make one, so I will just find out pour vous.’ Tabitha pulled
a cocktail menu from the stand and studied the description. She poured two
sloshes of bourbon into a cocktail shaker. Probably a bit too much vermouth,
and a sharp sour dash of bitters. She closed it up and shook it, though it
didn’t have nearly enough satisfaction without the rattle of ice. All the ice,
however, was a near-evaporated puddle on the floor. Tabitha poured her warm
concoction into a martini glass, and slid it gently towards her seat on the
opposite side of the bar.

‘On the house for you
mademoiselle, of course,’ she told herself, and walked back around the bar.

‘Thank you,’ she replied
with a smile, glancing around as if she owned the place. Which, in the absence
of any surviving managers, was sort of true. She’d inherited the world. Tabitha
raised her glass at the thought and took a sip of her warm cocktail. It was
strong, really strong. Good. She looked down the bar, and imagined Emma and Jen
were here too. Jen would be politely turning down some guy who’d come over, as
usual. She and Emma had long since given up resenting Jen for having her pick
of the bars. It was more of an accepted fact of life, like the tides or
something. Unsuccessful with Jen, the men would usually just walk away. Emma
would normally try to jump in and talk to them instead, if they hung around.
Tabitha had always been thankful that Emma was there to deflect the attention,
so she’d rarely had to mumble and hesitate her way through many encounters
herself. She thought about John then as she sipped her drink, surprised at how
little she’d missed him. She hadn’t met him in a club. He got talking to her in
the park, while they were queuing for ice cream. He was good looking, in a way.
Awkward like her. Sometimes bossy, sometimes spontaneously romantic. Easy to
fall in love with. He’d always found it a bit funny, how shy she was. Tabitha
wondered what he’d make of her now. She couldn’t help but remember some of
their better moments, when they weren’t arguing or just living around one
another in stony silence. Tabitha raised her martini glass and drained it with
rapid sips; the best cure she’d ever found for a lump of sadness in her throat.

‘Mm. Another please,’ she
asked the back of the empty bar.

Tabitha spent a good while
just sitting and drinking, staring at the huge ceiling over the food hall like
she was heir to an ancient sadness. Strong spirits turned her grief into a
massive melancholy, a gaping void without light or exit. After a while she
headed for the ladies’ toilets and looked shakily into a mirror, staring at the
thing looking back. Those weren’t her eyes, bright gold where they used to be
green. She ran her trembling black hands through her red curls, her tears
streaming through her makeup. Whatever that thing was in the reflection, it
wasn’t her. It didn’t act or move or stare like her. It was a different person.

Tabitha was standing in an electricals shop. She
stared drunkenly at a gigantic TV. The gigantic TV stared back at her. And the
cricket bat she was resting on her shoulder. She gripped the bat tight with
both hands and launched it into the huge glass screen with a textbook swing. A
hard wooden thump and a crisp glassy crack. She’d never heard such a satisfying
sound. She brought the bat back again, ready for another swing. The opulent
screen wasn’t long for this world. In a drunken rage Tabitha full-on murdered
it, kicking it over with an expensive thump on the floor. She smashed the bat
down into the shattered screen until glass shards bounced with every hit. She
punched a hole through the TV standing next to it, and threw the next one down
to the floor with a plastic crash. Swinging her bat, she obliterated a glass
blender and smashed expensive cameras and tablets in a blissful rage. She
toppled a towering fridge with a boom, and punched a crater in its big solid
door. She slammed her foot against another fridge, pushed it, and tipped it
back with a thump that shook the floor. She took her bat to everything on the
shelves, smacking electronics across the store with violent wooden knocks and
clattering plastic bursts.

‘Fuck you!’ she told the
shattered chaos around her, destroying everything she could never afford.
Nothing said white picket fence like a shop like this. It was a museum now, and
all the expensive exhibits meant nothing any more. All part and parcel of the
big consumer dream, and all of it useless and dead. The thought brought her
down; deflated her. Action was needed. Tabitha turned around and smashed her
cricket bat into pristine computer screens. Everything shiny must die,
she told herself. Pretentious, expensive, shit. The prissy laptop cracked and
bounced under her cricket bat, spraying plastic keys like alphabet teeth. And
then… she saw it. The pinnacle of modern tech. The widget to end all widgets,
set apart like a holy object on a pearly white display. Redundant in a
disconnected world; less use than a stone. Tabitha looked at the price tag on
it and grinned like a Cheshire cat. She shouldered her cricket bat like a
baseballer, tightened her grip, and smashed the god-widget out of existence
with a scattering crunch.

The next shop along
didn’t fare much better. Tabitha frisbeed ultra-pricey plates at the rest of
the shelves, bursting cups and punching bowls to shards. She threw expensive
carving knives that spun and thumped into the far wall, destroying a stack of
crystal glassware in a high ringing song and a tinkling smash. She grinned and
slammed her fist down on a dining table, demolishing a delicate table set and
flinging glasses across the store. She tore open the steel shutter on the
jewellers next door and kicked the door in, and smashed the glass cabinets
apart to take her pick from the shiny shit.

‘Excuse me, none of your
rings fit my fingers,’ she slurred at the empty space behind the counter. She
plucked a four-figure diamond ring from the shards of a glass case, examined
it, and tossed it over her shoulder.

‘What are they for?’ she
asked the empty counter, swaying where she stood. ‘Why do they cost so much?
Hm? Do they really make people happy?’ Tabitha tore her diamond necklace
off and flung it at the wall. Took her earrings out and tossed them on the
floor. She picked up a cruel shard of glass from the cases and closed her fist
around it. It split, cracked, shattered in her grip. Tiny specks of glass
glimmered on her fingers, catching the light of the sunset from the ceiling as
she left the shop. She took a swig from her whisky bottle outside and stared
down the street of shops for a while, resting and swaying on a handrail. What a
lonely place. All the first-world consumer crap she could ever need, and no
reason whatsoever to want it. Blood, air and water. And booze. That was all she
needed. No… that was all she could handle. No more chocolate, no more crisps.
No cola, popcorn, bacon or pizza. No more fresh apples, sweet and crunchy-red.
No one to share some dips with. No more family meals. Tabitha felt the tears
welling up in her eyes, and ground her teeth as she blinked them back.

‘Oh, fuck you,’ she told
the whisky bottle, and sent it flying through the air to shatter on the fake
street below. ‘I’m sick of this shit!’ she screamed at the echoing silence.
‘I’m the only person left in the world, boo fucking hoo!’ she kicked the glass
balcony wall with a crunch, turning it veiny-opaque in an icy shatter. Tabitha
stormed off back to the home store, and took a good gulp of silver blood from
one of her plastic bottles. She felt her heart-core racing at the taste, and
sobered up surprisingly quickly with the stuff inside her. She crawled down
into her nest of sofas and pulled a cover close around her. She felt safe;
hidden away from the world. It was no use just milling around all winter, she
decided. As big and well-stocked as the shopping centre was, the place would be
enough to drive anyone mad if they weren’t careful. If she was going to stay
here, she’d need to keep busy. She had to set her mind to something, and take
her thoughts off her grief. Movie montages ran through her head as she dozed
off. Thoughts of becoming something stronger; something more.

Tabitha woke up and stretched in her double-sofa nest.
She’d still had the same old nightmares, but at least they were fuzzy and
fleeting. She’d only woken up once in the night, so it was a good start. Maybe
it was her brain, she thought; too busy with ideas to dwell on dreams. Today
would be a busy one, she decided. Even if it was just folding clothes in a
couple of shops, she had to do something to keep herself occupied and feel
useful. For all of her indulgences yesterday, they’d only given her a hollow
kind of happiness. She had to apply herself, as her dad would say. Tabitha
mulled over her options as she made her bed.

‘Ok. Stop drinking,’ she
told herself, counting the resolution on her finger. ‘Get fitter. New clothes.
Stock up supplies here.’ Smiling at the tasks on her fingers, Tabitha smoothed
out her dress and headed out of the shop door. It felt better to have a plan.
Another idea occurred to her then, and she counted it ponderously on her thumb.
A black boiling thought that bubbled up again suddenly and gave new purpose to
her life. Revenge.

Tabitha plundered a
clothes store for shorts and a light vest, pulling off her dress to change.
What she needed was a training routine for the winter, to prepare herself for
the act in spring. She fixed Chris’s face in her mind. He was staring down at
her with the rifle aimed. Her murderer. Tabitha jogged out of the shop door and
off down the white sunlit street. Chris was going to die. It was the one thing
left for her to live for.

‘Oh god. Oh god,’ she
panted, jogging down another shining white street. She was heading for the
distant food hall to make a lap of the tables, then it was straight back to the
far side of the shopping centre as fast as she could run. Her footsteps hardly
made a sound; no more than bare feet would even despite their rubbery metal
skin. They felt strangely comfortable to run with; agile and free. Exhausted as
she was, she could never remember running as well as this.

Tabitha gulped a bottle
of water when she got back home to her nest, padding around the place on aching
legs. Sweating and shaking, she raised her arms up and pressed her palms
against the back of her head. For all her exhaustion, there was a high there
too. It felt good. Not as good as a gulp of that silver blood, admittedly, but
still good. Her mind strayed to the taste of the blood. She ran her tongue
across her teeth, imagining the sour tingly sweetness in her mouth.

‘God, stop thinking about
the blood!’ she growled at herself, and strolled out to a clothes shop across
the way. After a wet-wipe shower Tabitha changed into a jumper and skinny
jeans, and ruffled out her red curls in a mirror. Her legs ached. If she stopped
and sat down though, she knew she wouldn’t get back up again. Without giving
herself time to rest, she headed back outside and went into foraging mode. It
was better to keep busy.

‘Survival stuff,’ Tabitha
mumbled to herself, browsing the stores down at the far side of the shopping
complex. ‘Survival stuff.’ Maybe if she said it enough times, something might
spring to mind. She wanted to have a bag handy with everything she needed; but
what? Tabitha started with the basics. Fire was a basic thing. She flicked her
claws out and sank them down into some shop shutters, raking the metal apart to
get in. Inside the newsagents she plucked a handful of lighters from the
counter; the sturdiest she could see. And a couple of the cheap ones too, just
in case. They weren’t quite on a par with the gaudy old yellow lighter she used
to have, but they’d do. Tabitha glanced at all the cigarettes behind the
counter, and felt a sudden urge to spark up. How long had it been now since
she’d smoked her last cigarette? Not even losing her mum or seeing the end of
the world had made her want to smoke again; maybe her new body just didn’t want
her to. Besides, she couldn’t have a smoke without a drink, and she didn’t want
to drink any more. Resisting them, Tabitha turned her back on the cigarettes
and headed to the pound shop next door. She filled a carrier bag with some
comforts, impressed at the value for money. Tissues, toothbrush, and some
much-needed toothpaste. She tongued the film on her teeth, grainy and
disgusting. Hesitating, Tabitha opened up the toothbrushes right there and
scrubbed the filth away with a good dollop of bright toothpaste. So it was
minty freshness that was the great secret to happiness, she decided as she
brushed. She dwelled on all those great thinkers through the ages, searching
their thoughts and questioning existence in search of meaning and joy. And all
they’d had to do in all that time was consider the mint. Tabitha bagged the
toothpaste and took a few more boxes, just in case. Swilling a gulp of bottled
water, she looked for somewhere to spit. She could have just gobbed the
toothpaste on the floor really, for all it mattered. But her mum had raised her
better than that. Tabitha wandered off to the homeware aisle, and spat into a
plastic cup at the back of a shelf. Heading back through the shop she grabbed
some chocolate bars on her way out, just in case she met any more survivors
some day. She bagged up all the bottles of water from the shelves too, and
started her long journey back to her nest in the home store.

A second shopping trip turned up some warm thermal
socks and a couple of first aid kits, but Tabitha couldn’t help but wonder if
she was getting this stuff together for someone else’s sake. She didn’t need
socks or first aid kits; she hardly needed anything really. Was there really
any point dragging all that extra weight around, just in case she met someone
who needed help? It was a moral dilemma. Surely it was better to travel light
though, and any little extras would soon add up. She couldn’t just cart extra
weight around on the basis of just in case. She had to conserve her
energy in a survival situation, like that guy on TV had always said. Tabitha
dropped the socks and first aid kits, and broke into the stationery shop for a
pad and pen. She’d need to write a shopping list to get down to the bare
essentials.

As she headed off down
another street in search of the next item on her list, Tabitha stopped and
stared at a certain shop. It sold lingerie in the windows, along with more
intimate products on the shelves inside. Tabitha forced the door open and
stepped into the gloom, fishing around in the dark for phallic objects of
interest. She was gone for a while.

When she emerged blinking
into the bright sunlit street, Tabitha sighed and smiled and felt much more
relaxed. One more purchase had been added to her haul, having passed the
quality test. She dusted her jeans off, picked up her shopping bags, and
studied her list for the next shop to break into. She fancied a change of clothes. Something full-body;
something dark and tight. She plundered the next shop along for some going-out
makeup; coloured her lips sex-red.

A couple of minutes’ walk down the street, Tabitha found
her next stop. Forcing up the shutters and punching the locks to pieces on the
dead sliding doors, she pushed them apart and went inside the darkened shop.
This was where all the cool people used to come; shopping for the kind of
clothes she couldn’t afford and was convinced she wouldn’t look right in. A
sore resentment rose up inside her then; she thought back to the unkind glances
when she’d been in places like this before. Tabitha didn’t get much further
than the first rack of dresses before she walked back out on principle,
punching the glass doors into crashing shards as she stepped back outside.

Tabitha felt more at home in the sports shop. She’d
always liked places like this, surrounded by tracksuits and walls of trainers.
Swimwear, sportswear, bike gear, weights. They were beautiful. Hypnotised, she
rifled through crowded racks of weatherproofs and helped herself to a brand new
coat. A blue-grey parka with plenty of pockets, and a white fur trim on the
hood. The coating on the fabric looked so warm, so waterproof… she felt a
tingle come over her. She’d never appreciated a good coat quite so much as she
did now. Tabitha looked at the price tag, as if it mattered. She couldn’t have
afforded this, no way. She tried it on, and swapped it for a smaller size. It
was warm and comfy for winter; reassuringly heavy. It was just so deliciously
weatherproof. Looking around at the dim sunlit clothes racks on the walls,
Tabitha even had her pick of the best base layers mankind had ever produced.
This place was heaven.

Admiring her new coat in dark shop windows, Tabitha
headed on down another artificial street. A gadget shop stood out to her; they
always did. So much plastic crap; so enticing. Wrenching the door open, she
wandered into a gloomy grown-up toyshop crammed with office talking points.
Everything had batteries in; nothing worked. Nothing except a little plastic
flower by the open door, only four or so inches tall, swaying solar in its pot
in the pouring sunlight. Tabitha couldn’t resist it. She boxed it back up and
crammed it into her coat pocket, wrestling the zip shut over the plastic case.

Next on her list was the outdoors shop. Taking down a
rucksack from the racks, Tabitha rubbed it against the skin on her wrists to
feel the fabric. It felt dry, coarse. The material whispered against her skin,
and creaked quietly against the back padding where she squeezed it. She did
like a good rucksack. The rubbery plastic coating inside still smelled faintly
of the factory. There was even a zippy pouch inside. She stood there for a
little while, running the zip slowly back and forth with an empty mind and a
vacant stare, listening to the sound. Losing herself to grief and trauma for a
second, before she pulled her mind back to the task at hand. It was a good
rucksack.

Next Tabitha busied herself with a tour of the shop,
bagging anything else in her new backpack that she’d need to survive outdoors
in the spring. She’d missed a lot off her list, actually. Map, hat, binoculars.
A working torch, in case her old one from the village gave up. A spare compass
with a glow-in-the-dark needle. A couple of micro-fleece tops, two sturdy water
bottles, and some runners’ energy bars for survivors. She could always throw
them away later if her bag got too heavy.

Browsing the army knives on display in a solid glass
cabinet, Tabitha punched the top into shattered pieces and plucked the most
impressive models from their stands. She bagged a chunky army knife first, with
more fold-out tools on it than she knew what to do with. She wondered if she
could even get the thing open with her new fingers, and whether in fact she
needed it at all now that she had claws. Maybe it’d still be useful. The second
one she picked from the glass was a folding knife, solid and sharp and silvery
in the daylight from the door. Definitely worth bagging, even just as a back-up
to her claws. She took a belt from the racks and buckled it around her waist,
wishing she had a big old hunting knife to put on it. If there was one thing
she’d need out there come the spring, it’d be a big sharp hunting knife. She
had Blake and the army to thank for taking away her old one, notched and rough,
and crusted with dry silver blood around the handle. They’d taken her hoodie
too, the bastards. She loved that hoodie. They’d been through so much together.
Though she had to admit, the expensive new athlete’s base layer from the sports
shop would look a hell of a lot tidier.

‘Well, I think that’s everything,’ she sighed to
herself, taking one last look around the shop. She may as well try on her new
outfit she supposed, while she was close to the sports shop. It seemed to take
days to get around this place, and her legs felt too stiff and sore to come all
the way back here tomorrow if her clothes didn’t fit. Tabitha pulled off her
top and jeans and swapped them for the fitted base layer; a breathable grey
one-piece that looked almost like a wetsuit. Definitely the kind of darker,
tighter clothes she’d had in mind. It seemed more hard-wearing than she’d first
thought too, now that she’d zipped it up. There was some kind of rubbery mesh
in parts, tough and fitted. She liked the fit in the mirror, and tried on her
new blue-grey parka over the top. She noticed the fresh shop smell of them; a
world away from the musty clothes she was used to. Surreally clean. With one
last look in the mirror, and a final glance around the shop for anything she
might have missed, Tabitha decided to call it a day on her shopping trip. Maybe
she shouldn’t have gone for that run though, she told herself. It was making
her hungry for blood. She pushed the thought from her mind and shouldered her
new rucksack, heading outside into the bright white street. She froze to the
spot then, and stared down the street on her left. She’d heard a noise in the
distance. An echoing faraway crash, like a big steel shutter falling down.

39

By the time she reached the home store Tabitha could
hear clattering spiders and stomping footsteps through the shopping centre in
the distance. Heartcore hammering, she jumped at a shrill metallic screech off
down a street to her right. When she peered around the doorway into her new
home she saw a trail of destruction. They’d already been here. A huge black
shape moved around at the back there, sniffing loudly. It roared and flung her
sofas across the store, destroying tables and chairs. Terrified, Tabitha turned
and ran. There were silver spiders clustering down the street behind her too.
And then came their screeches. They’d seen her.

‘Shit!’ she growled,
looking back. They were gaining fast. Tabitha threw off her backpack and broke
into a sprint up the street. Feet pounding, vision shaking, she sprinted past
blurred clothes shops and the wishing fountain. The spiders burst down the
street after her, a tumbling silver tide at her heels. She turned to look as
she rounded a corner. Something came ploughing through the chittering mass,
tossing them into the air. A hulking black monster; a carbon copy of the one
she’d killed in the city. Its white eyes were fixed on her. Tabitha just ran
when she heard it roar. She didn’t look back any more; she just had to get to
the far doors. She heard it come smashing down the street behind her like a
tank, destroying the shops with primate swings. Its roar filled the place and
froze her blood. Tabitha heard benches flying as she ran, booming through shop
windows at her back. It was getting close, and the spiders behind it. She
sprinted round the next corner on her left, through double doors and past the
restaurants. She remembered seeing an exit on the far side of the food hall,
right down the next street there. The horde crashed and clattered behind her,
climbing over themselves to get into the side street after her. Legs burning,
Tabitha ran down the street into the dome of the food hall. She hurtled past
the open-plan bar where she’d been just last night. The horde smashed through
it behind her in a deafening rush, tables and chairs flying. Ahead was the huge
glass ceiling of the food hall, spilling light down on the chase. Tabitha’s
legs ached for rest but adrenaline kept her dosed, kept her running for her
life. She felt her heartcore pounding, humming like a generator as she ran down
the marble steps into the food hall below. She spotted the exit, there in the
distance. Suddenly the glass ceiling exploded high above; a deep thundering
boom that rained shining shards down all over the tables and chairs. Tabitha
jumped with fright as a huge grey shape crashed down into the food hall, dark
and reptilian. Just like the monster that attacked the castle. A dragon. It
turned and raised its huge head, white eyes staring at her. Took a breath in.
The horde tumbled and burst down the steps behind her, led by the hulking black
monster. Tabitha leapt away. The horde took the full force of the dragon’s
firestorm breath, screaming in the melting white flames. The dragon was
indifferent, turning to watch Tabitha escape. She looked back over her shoulder
and ran for the doors, smashing the glass and desperately tearing a hole
through the big steel shutters. Outside in the car park she gasped at the cool
fresh air, drowning her lungs in it. There was a massive crunching crash up
above her, as the dragon climbed back out of the roof. The chittering noise
grew louder behind her, back inside the food hall. She saw silver legs emerge
from the hole she’d made in the shutter. Then there was a crash inside, and the
whole shutter collapsed as the hulking black monster dragged its half-melted
body outside. Tabitha saw her chance. She ran back and leapt onto its
shoulders; flicked her claws out and buried them in its big head. It screamed
and flailed when she pulled an armoured plate away. She plunged her clawed hand
in through its skull and deep into its brain with a burst of blood, and the
monster dropped dead on the ground. She felt a spider needle stab her leg. She
spun around and sank her claws into the spider’s body, and pulled it apart in a
slopping gush of silver blood. Her punch to another went right through its
head. A kick to a third stunned it on the ground, and she stomped its brains
out. The dead monster bled a silver pool around her, reflecting the white sky.
Tabitha glimpsed a shape move across the reflection, high above. A cold shadow
passed overhead. The dragon was hunting her.

Exhausted, Tabitha ran
for her life. White fire tore up the car park at her heels, and the dragon
swept overhead with a dirty static growl. It spun around low in the air and
belched an albino inferno. Tabitha dived and rolled across the tarmac to dodge
the searing heat at her back. She looked back at a thundering noise to see the
wall of the shopping centre implode and topple into ruins. Another monster;
another frantic swarm of spiders. She had to get out of the open, find another
building to hide in. A supermarket adjoined the shopping centre, further off
down the car park. Hopefully too tight and cramped for the dragon to follow her
inside. Tabitha ducked down and ran as the creature flew overhead. She leapt
away from another fiery blast and beat out the flames on her jacket sleeve. The
supermarket grew larger and larger as she sprinted desperately for the doors.
She stopped herself against the steel shutters with a bang, and turned to see
the dragon circling the car park towards her. Its white eyes flared, trailing
light as they picked her out against the doors. Breathless and panicked, Tabitha
sprang her claws out and carved a hole in the metal shutter. The dragon wasn’t
slowing down. Tabitha tore her way inside the supermarket. Climbing in through
the hole, she looked back to see the dragon diving down towards the doorway.

Inside the supermarket
Tabitha sprinted down the main aisle to find a place to hide. The smell of
rotten meat in here was unbelievable; buzzing clouds of flies filled a couple
of aisles as she passed by. There came a crash then, sudden and deafening, like
a plane ploughing through the front wall. The dragon roared in a digital rush
and stomped into the store, and tore the front desk apart in its jaws. Tabitha
watched it from the corner of an aisle nearby. Its big stretched-rectangle
wings curled around into half-pipes; curved hollow legs with two square toes
apiece. It stalked down the main aisle and sniffed at the dusty gloom,
searching for her with pale eyes in the dark. Tabitha dragged herself away from
the corner and ran down the aisle, far from the dim daylight that crept through
the front wall of windows. She hid when she heard it coming. Down at the far
end of the aisle the creature’s huge head prowled past, smooth and square and
stubby-snouted. Tabitha hid away from its searching eyes. Once it moved on, she
ran. She heard it smash through the side of an aisle in the main supermarket
strip, raining down metal shelves and sacks of barbecue charcoal in a rustling
racket. The dragon roared when it heard her hidden footsteps running for the
front doors. It bounded back to the demolished doorway, cutting off Tabitha’s
escape before she could get there and staring around the store for any sign of
her. As she backed away down an aisle, Tabitha’s elbow caught a display stand.
A jar of sauce dropped and cracked open on the floor, echoing through the
store. Tabitha cringed, heartcore racing. She heard the creature’s prehistoric
footsteps, massive and metal, cracking the tiles as it walked. She ran from the
sound, hiding away around the far corner at the end of the aisle. Wait – suddenly
its footsteps were off to her left. Further into the store. It had passed her
by. Tabitha peered around the next aisle; saw nothing. Where was it? Could she
make a run for it? Tabitha crept out from her aisle and looked up and down the
gloomy main strip. There was a groaning metal creak above her. The creature
peered over the top of the shelves above the aisles and saw her there. Tabitha
gasped and ran. The wall exploded behind her in a white blast. Then the far
wall at the end of her aisle. She ran past fridges that burst into pale flames
behind her. Their glass doors blew in jagged shards and shotgunned the opposite
shelves. Tabitha screamed and fell to her knee, and hurriedly pulled a shard
from her thigh with a silvery squelch. The dragon crashed over the top of the
aisle and drowned the shelves in flames, throwing Tabitha to the floor. She
crawled away from the blinding blaze and the vast creature stalking through it,
and leapt away from another burst that destroyed the floor at her feet. Tabitha
scrambled and ran. Another flaming belch hit an aisle like a bomb blast; a
thundering assault to destroy her hiding places. Tabitha could only run and
dodge the collapsing shelves, and jumped away as lights and air conditioning
pipes crashed down from the ceiling. The dragon roared again, and destroyed
everything in its path to get to her in the heart of the store. It had
overtaken her though, searching the dim grey aisles all around it.

Tabitha stopped running
and backed up breathless against a shelf. The dragon had run past her and lost
her, and now it was roaring into the empty gloom trying to find her. Tabitha
saw her chance, and ran back for the front doors. The creature turned its head
at the sound of her footsteps, and scrambled after her. As Tabitha ran for the
doors the shelves erupted into a thundering tide behind her. The creature
crashed down and cornered her against the wall, a good fifty yards from the
doorway and the holy daylight outside. It had her pinned in this dark dank
meat-stench hell. Tabitha stared up at it and felt adrenaline fill her alien
veins. If she was going to die now, she was going to take the bastard with her.
The dragon belched a gout of white fire and torched the wall; a slow-motion
napalm tide as she leapt away. As the flames bloomed and burst super-slow
behind her, Tabitha sank her rough black feet into the tiled floor and pushed
it away beneath her. She leapt for the dragon like a cornered rat, pushing the
floor away again and sprinting between the monster’s arms. As the bright glare
of the flames died down, the dragon stopped tearing into the wall and realised
she wasn’t there. Tabitha flicked her claws out and grabbed onto its back leg,
climbing up the grey scales and leaping up onto its hip. The dragon roared like
thunder and twisted its body round, and crashed its side against the flaming
wall to shake her off. Tabitha was already up on its back though, claws in
deep, and clambered and crawled her way between its shoulders to get to its
neck. To its head. Gritting her teeth as she climbed, Tabitha imagined burying
her claws deep in its big eyes. All her grief and anger and burning hate drove
her on, gripping its neck with her claws. Jolting and shaking, the dragon
charged for the doorway. Tabitha lost her footing on its neck and slipped, and
slammed her tailbone down on a smooth dipped scale between its shoulders. She
sank her claws into its scales and held tight as the creature burst through the
doorway in a dustcloud, leaping into the blinding sunlight. The dragon growled and
launched itself into the air, folding its curved arms back out into wings.
Tabitha screamed high over the car park as the dragon twisted and turned in the
sky, trying to shake her off. The rushing wind roared in her ears. Suddenly she
lost her grip on the scales and felt weightless above the dragon. She was free
falling. Tabitha flailed her hands and grasped desperately for the scale she’d
been sitting on. She hit the dragon’s back again as it climbed in the air, and
regained her grip between its shoulders. The creature levelled out and went
into a steep dive, plummeting towards the car park. Tabitha’s stomach twisted
like she was on a rollercoaster. She held on tight to a curved lip at the front
of the scale she was sitting on. She felt two hand grips there that shivered at
her touch, and a harness snapped around her waist and shoulders. Suddenly she
was strapped to the scale like a saddle, spinning and screaming high in the
air. Something caught her eye then, between the handles in front of her; a glowing
white circle emerged on a bony bump on the scale. Panicking, she slammed her
palm on it and the whole saddle sank down inside the creature’s body. It was a
cockpit. She looked up to see two armoured scales close up the hole above her
head, shutting out the sky.

‘What…?’ she mumbled,
breathless in the silent dark. Her chest was pounding. Was she safe? All that
fighting for her life, was it over just like that? Her mind was a jarring
chaos, high on adrenaline. One minute she was about to be eaten by an alien
dragon, and now she was sitting inside her would-be killer like a pilot in a
ship. Heads weren’t meant to wrap themselves around stuff this strange. A dim
white glow grew inside the cockpit then, and the saddle shifted and changed
into a seat beneath her. Dots and circles glowed to life on a console in front
of her, jutting up like a bony grey ribcage. She wasn’t being thrown around in
her seat any more, or straining her body against the harness to stay upright.
The dragon had stopped struggling. Or was it a ship? She didn’t have a clue.
She just sat there silently for a while, getting her breath back. Trying to
work out what the hell had just happened.

Slowly the walls grew
brighter, and Tabitha saw that she was sat in a nest of curving metal shapes
around her. She reached for the ribbed console and pulled it closer, and
pressed gingerly at the glowing white seeds on it. They were hard like
cartilage though, a kind of leathery gel, and made noises like they weren't
keen on being pressed. There was a purple symbol glowing gently on the console
too; an ornate lotus the size of a beermat. It had a strange figure in the
middle, like a fallen-down seven with a dot on top. It didn’t do anything when
she pressed it; maybe it was the maker’s badge. An alien brand. Sitting back in
the seat she noticed a blue patch dead ahead, just past the ribbed console,
growing on the wall in front. The more she looked at the blue patch the bigger
it got, until the edge of a cloud appeared. She realised then that she was
looking out at the sky, through a window that wasn’t there. In a few more
seconds the sky had replaced the front wall of the cockpit and filled her
vision entirely, and she looked down and screamed. She saw the car park and the
shopping centre way down below. But she couldn’t see her arms or legs. Just the
wide world and the gaping vertigo view, hundreds of feet below. Tabitha freaked
out and struggled in her seat, and all of a sudden she was back in the cockpit
again.

‘What the hell’s going
on?’ she demanded, twisting and turning in her harness to look around the
cockpit. She saw the walls flex like muscle. They moved in a steady rhythm;
probably the creature’s wings beyond the walls on either side. She reached down
between her legs and felt the curved lip of the seat there, and she pressed her
palm on the dim white circle. The daylight shone down above her as the scales
parted over her head, and she rose up on the saddle out of the hatch. Suddenly
the wind was whipping her hair about and rushing against her ears. Sure enough
the dragon was just hovering in the air, beating its huge wings occasionally.
Beyond the sound of the wind and its beating wings she heard a weird drone like
jet engines, and looked down the dragon’s sides to see glowing vents between
its scales.

‘So are you an animal, or
a ship, or what?’ she asked the back of its huge head. It didn’t turn its long
neck to acknowledge her. It just hovered there, beating its vast wings every
once in a while. Tabitha closed her eyes for a second to steel herself, and
looked down at the car park far below. At the wandering monster and the spider
swarm trying to find her down there. She must have been seeing what the dragon
was seeing, during that vision there in the cockpit. She pressed the white
circle on the saddle and sank back down into the cockpit again. Sure enough
there was the blue patch of sky in her vision, straight ahead on the front
wall. The vision grew faster this time, and suddenly the blue sky outside
filled her view. No arms, no legs; she was seeing through the creature’s eyes.
She looked down, but didn’t feel her own neck move. It was all inside her head.
Tabitha looked around and saw the ship’s grey wings, beating by reflex. Its
vision was her vision, but it was more than that. She could feel how it moved.
She could turn its body this way and that, steering its huge mass with nothing
but a thought. They were plugged together. She took control of its wings, and
beat them herself. Tabitha laughed in her seat, shaking her head in disbelief.
Maybe this was a dream. Maybe she was about to wake up in her sofa nest in the
shopping centre. It just didn’t feel real. Except… she could feel the
creature’s energy radiating against her palms on the seat. The first sensation
her new hands could actually feel. Some strange electrical affinity. Tabitha
tried taking control of the creature. It responded; obeyed. She tucked the
ship’s back legs in against its tail. She felt the power of those jet scales
swelling in its sides; felt them flaring and rumbling to life. They were her
jets. She felt them in her body; the creature’s body. One and the same thing. Tabitha turned the dragon’s head towards the clear
morning sky, fired up its engines, and launched them both into the big wide
blue.

Tabitha left the shopping centre far behind, soaring
over the motorway and heading for woods and distant hills. She watched her
winged shadow rippling over roads and corrugated warehouse roofs; a vast dark
shape that tumbled like a deathly spectre over the trees below. Together they
shot over fields and scattered terrified sheep, whipping up dust clouds in
their thundering wake. They swept low over a river and kicked up a misty spray
behind them, and climbed and twisted sharply into the endless sky above. The
world was a green patchwork, laid out far below. Up above, only shining white
clouds and dazzling sunshine. Drunk on flight Tabitha pushed the creature up
and up into the blue, until the land far below was shrouded in a distant haze.
She gasped in shock and pulled away from the vision, and the dragon dropped
from the sky. Something had gripped her just then, tingling her limbs like an
electric shock. She took control again, and eased the ship down lower in the
sky. Its jet scales fell silent. They headed lower still, gliding silently over
fields and villages, until they landed down in a distant town on the roof of a
tall hotel building. Tabitha willed herself out of the ship’s eyes and dropped
out of her trance. She felt a little dizzy and disoriented from the experience,
but not drained at least. When she raised the saddle up through the hatch above
and unclipped her harness, Tabitha felt like she’d just finished a
rollercoaster ride. She looked down at the hotel roof and wondered how she was
going to jump down from the creature’s back. Did she have to park the thing
first? Or somehow lie it down on the roof so she could jump off its shoulders?
To her surprise it brought its wing around like a platform, waited for her to
hop onto it, and then it lowered her gently to the roof.

‘Er, thanks,’ she said
awkwardly, looking up at its white eyes that stared straight ahead. She
couldn’t believe it. The thing had been trying to kill her a few minutes ago.
Now it was completely indifferent. What had changed? Was it her alien hands,
some kind of fingerprint when she grabbed the saddle? Or had she just pushed
the right button to control it?

‘You’ve got a lot more
being nice to do before I forget you were trying to kill me,’ she told it. The
ship didn’t so much as look at her. Why wasn’t it trying to grab her, eat her?
It perched there like a statue on the rooftop, almost Art-Deco to look at with
its strange rectangular wings. At least it wasn’t the one that had killed Will
and Liv on the castle walls; Tabitha knew that much. She’d seen that one drop
and crash when the jet shot it down. If this had been the same dragon, she’d be
tearing it to pieces. Tabitha sat down on the roof and zipped her coat up,
rubbing the soreness from her trembling legs. The world was as dead and empty
as ever, except now it was a little chillier too. Autumn rust was creeping into
the leaves of trees down below on the street. The sun didn’t have that same
summer warmth to it any more. Tabitha peered back over her shoulder once in a
while, checking on the ship. It just sat there like a giant reptile, staring
ahead and doing nothing. What was it? Animal, machine, what? How could
it look like both?

Tabitha watched the sky and the ruined city in the
distance; the one she’d escaped and left far behind. She breathed deep, feeling
the wind toss her hair. She tried to ignore the hunger, deep and gnawing inside
her. All her bottles of blood were still in the shopping centre, and the place
was probably burning and overrun by now. There’d be more places to hunt now,
though. Anywhere she wanted. She could afford to think much bigger than just
here. She could travel anywhere, so long as she had enough fuel. What kind of
fuel did the ship run on, anyway? It didn’t really matter right now, she
supposed. Just so long as there was enough to get her where she needed to go.

‘There’s something important I need to do,’ she told the
ship, as she stood up on the roof and turned to face it. ‘And you’re going to
help me do it.’ With a click of her fingers, the ship lowered its wing for her
and raised her up onto its back. As the alien harness grew and stretched around
her and secured her in the saddle, Tabitha tried to imagine how her revenge
would play out. The thought had burned in the back of her mind ever since she’d
coughed and spluttered back to life, cold and frightened below the walls of the
castle. Chris. But first things first. There was something that Will
would want her to do before she left. Tabitha took off from the hotel roof and
climbed into the sky, steering the ship south. Back towards the ruined city of
skins on the horizon.

Tabitha
swept into the grim city on dark wings. The broken office buildings and tower
blocks rose up like some vast jagged ribcage around her. There was still
nothing living here; the place was silent as a grave. She landed the ship down
on a crumbling old office block, scanning the streets from the saddle. There it
was, off to her left through the toppled shops. A pale grey carpet in the
square. The sea of skins, rotting in the heart of the city. Tabitha gripped the
saddle and leapt the dragon off the roof, with a rollercoaster twist in her
stomach as they dropped. On rushing wings she took her ship down between the
tall buildings. Through the ruins the square sprawled out beneath her. Even up
here she could smell the grey dank rot of decay. She hovered the ship lower.
With nothing but a thought she made the dragon spit a white inferno down on the
square. Another great burst of fire, and another. Setting the skins alight,
Tabitha watched them curl and disappear in the pale flames. All those people.
They were getting a proper funeral now, just like Will would have wanted. Just
like they would have wanted. Tabitha hovered there for a while in the saddle,
hypnotised by the growing flames that burned away all the death and rot to ash.

After a soaring lap of the city Tabitha took off again
into the sky. She left all the bricks and tarmac behind and followed far fields
below, retracing her steps through the countryside. The fields below gave way
to familiar woods, and the lake and paths, and the beautiful village where
she’d stayed to rest. That felt like a different person now. Someone weaker.
Her old journey rolled by quickly beneath her now; a minute’s flight over a
route that’d taken days to walk. There was the hill that she’d climbed barefoot
in the night, frozen and exhausted in nothing but a hospital gown. And the lake
on the far side of it, where she’d fallen from the dragon. Wait, was this the
same one? Was she riding on it? There was no way to tell, it’d been so dark that
night. But Tabitha liked to think so. It felt like more of a victory that way,
returning on the same monster that had made her run for her life.

A minute later Tabitha was flying high over the pale
lonely moors, back towards the smoking ruin of the military base she’d escaped
from. A cold high wind whipped at her hair as she circled overhead, studying
the charred carnage in the base. There were dead silver spiders dotted all
over, no bigger than ordinary spiders from up here. Over on the hill beyond a
dead dragon lay crumpled in a rain-puddled crater. There was no reaction from
her own mount at the sight. Whether it was robotic or reptilian, she’d at least
expected some interest from the creature when it saw one of its own. But it
didn’t even acknowledge the giant corpse. Maybe it was just a ship after all.

The military complex was a burnt-out demolition site. It
was littered with charcoal bodies and empty skins that had turned to crackling
in the heat of long-gone flames. Tabitha could see the operating theatre below,
its roof torn open and bared to the world. There were two burnt corpses there
inside, half buried in the rubble. She couldn’t see any signs of life anywhere.
Specifically, she couldn’t see any signs of Blake. He could be any one of those
bodies in the yard, she told herself. She would have really liked to find him
in there somewhere, hiding in the burned wreckage, so she could catch him like
he’d caught her. Tabitha made a couple of laps of the base, and had her ship
spit a jet of fire through the ruins just to make sure no one came running out.
But there was nothing living here. So long as Blake had met some grizzly end,
she didn’t care. Tabitha turned the ship in the air and took off into the sky,
leaving the scorched ruins behind. Dry-lipped and half dead, Blake watched her
from the rubble below. He’d been drinking from a bitter puddle, hidden away
behind charred bricks and fallen girders when she appeared. He was wheezing,
gasping for breath, blinking at the blowing ash in the breeze. Cowering down,
he watched the dark deathly shape and the red-haired woman riding it disappear
into the blue above.

Tabitha
swept on into the sky, banking left until the thin black strip of a motorway
came into view. At least if she could take the right general direction she had
a hope of finding the castle again. But she had no idea which was the right
general direction. She’d been flown here when the army caught her; unconscious.
Not a clue which way to go. A blue dot of light appeared in front of her then
on the saddle, and expanded into a hologram globe the size of a football.
Tabitha reached out to it and zoomed in over Europe; over Britain.

‘Er,’ she said, hesitating, and pointed out on the glowing
map where she wanted to go. A white dot appeared on the map under her finger,
and the globe disappeared. Startled, Tabitha sat back in the saddle as the ship
began to tilt. It steered itself in a half-circle towards the north, and took
off of its own accord. The sudden rush of air was blinding; their speed made
the wind deafening in her ears. Tabitha pushed the white circle on the saddle
and sank back down into the cockpit, and let the ship’s view of the sky outside
take over her sight. She saw a faint white line there in its vision, stretching
out to the horizon. It was her route, laid out for her like a GPS from the
future. Laid out like she’d always been meant to take it. Her revenge.

40

Chris
woke up to a humming sound outside the castle keep, a strange droning rush. It
could only be a helicopter. Dirty cups and plates were rattling on the table
with the vibration. He grabbed the shotgun and climbed the ladder up to the
roof of the keep, pulling himself through the trapdoor to look over the town
beyond. The wind blew cold today; he pulled his coat collar closer around his
neck. Suddenly the strange noise grew much louder. It was coming from
everywhere; a rushing wind and a low rumbling growl. He looked over the other
side of the keep, and saw a ghost rising up outside the curtain wall.

‘Tabitha?’ he mumbled, pale with shock. His world came
crashing down at the sight of her. But… the soldiers had taken her away. They
were going to cut her open, take her apart. The hellish droning grew louder. Chris
stepped back in fright as a vast dark monster rose up beneath her. Wings
beating. White eyes staring. A cold spirit riding death, come to claim his soul.

‘That’s Jackie and Sylvia down there, isn’t it?’ Tabitha
called down. Two drained skins were flapping in the wind, down by the walls of
the keep. She glimpsed silver shapes lurking here and there in the fallen ruins
of the curtain wall. ‘You killed them,’ she observed, studying the skins and
their loose clothes. ‘That’s a new low for you,’ she told him, as she rose up
higher than the keep. Chris didn’t say anything though. Hands trembling, eyes
wide with fear, he raised up his shotgun and aimed it at her where she hovered.

‘Try it,’ she said. ‘See what happens.’ Chris panicked
and the shotgun thundered, emptying both barrels into the sky. The dragon did
nothing when the shot bounced off its thick scales. It barely seemed to notice,
and Tabitha wasn’t hit. Birds scattered up from the trees in the park.

‘That’s all I needed,’ Tabitha told him, hungry for revenge.
She poured all her burning fury into the thought, and felt the creature respond
beneath her. Everything Chris had ever said and done fuelled her hate;
everything that had happened to her after he’d shot her dead. She felt the
dragon’s sides swell with breath. Chris scrambled for the trapdoor. The dragon
belched a pillar of flame down on the keep that hit like a bomb blast, blowing
the top of the tower to pieces. The explosion echoed through the dead town in
warping ripples. Tabitha’s winged shadow passed over the scorched stones below.
She circled the hill and came in close over the castle again, hovering over the
burning keep. Chris was still in there somewhere; she knew it. Another burst of
white light from the dragon’s throat and the sleeping quarters exploded in a
crackling fireball. The tower top rained down on the flaming beds below.
Tabitha heard his screams somewhere inside. Good. Despite her grief to see her
old home in ruins, Tabitha wouldn’t miss this chance at revenge for anything.
Besides, this wasn’t her home any more. All the happy memories here had died
with the people she loved. There was only Chris now; defiling their memories
just by being alive. Let it all burn. Tabitha willed her ship to belch
fire down into the bedroom, torching the beds and collapsing the flaming
floorboards down on top of the kitchen. She felt the full brunt of her anger
rise up in her. More than she knew. Enough to drive her to kill someone. This
wasn’t the same as the army doctor she’d spared back at the base; Chris had murdered
her, without a second thought. He was asking for this. Tabitha watched for any
sign of him, and felt the heat rising up from the pale inferno. The keep was a
ruined shell. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted to level the place, to wipe it all
out now that Chris had poisoned everything. She wanted him to pay for what he’d
done to her. For what the army had done to her, once Chris had killed her and
left her to rot in a ditch. She rained fire down on the ashes of the garden,
boring a blazing crater into the earth. Taking control of her ship’s claws she
tore the curtain wall down into ruined shreds of stone, and watched red-hot
blocks tumbling down the hill into the park. Hovering overhead she took a gasp
of air and yelled down on the castle, channelling the creature’s breath with
her mind. Another pillar of white fire lit up the town, crackling down into the
keep and bursting the walls apart. Another blast tore the castle down to its
foundations. Another cratered the burning ground right down to bare glowing
rock. She wanted to raze it all, to wipe out every trace. To scorch everything
about Chris off the face of the planet. She waited, hovering around the white
inferno. If he still came crawling out of the flames then she wanted to be
there to mangle him and burn him away into the dirt. But there was nothing
left. Only ruins; glowing red rocks in the firestorm. The towering flames lit
her eyes with a hard white light. She aimed a blast at the rocky outcrop of the
hill beneath the walls, and watched it explode into dust and boulders over the
field. The stumpy remains of the curtain wall tumbled with it, and half of the
glowing red ruins toppled down onto the hill. One final blast bit deep into the
keep’s foundations, like a raw blazing nerve under a shattered tooth. The
towering fire had eaten everything; left no trace. Thick black smoke twisted
into the sky. An eerie fog had crept over the flaming ruins; hot air against
the cool breeze over the field. It grew into a haunted flickering mist, lit with
an eerie white glow from the flames. A resting place for ghosts. Tabitha took
one last look at her revenge in the wiped-out ruins and took off over the town.
She saw silver shapes moving down below, their bodies reflecting the flames.
The spiders hid away from the shadow of dark wings up above. Tabitha turned the
ship south, watching the world roll away beneath her. There was only one more
thing left to do.

Tabitha
couldn’t find her home town. She’d soared over endless fields and headed down
the coast, following the hologram map until she recognised the beaches and the
bay creeping closer. The sky was a blank mess of cloud, white and grey and
dull. Seagulls called and battled the chilly wind out over the dark waves.
There was the old pier down below, rusting in the grey sea. But all the
buildings were gone. Her house too. The entire town had been reduced to rubble,
and yet there wasn’t an alien in sight. As she flew over the road along the
seafront, Tabitha reached the crumpled street sign where her house should have
stood. Nothing but a heap of shattered bricks, just like everything else around
her. A land-sea of fallen masonry. She couldn’t believe that her home was gone.
This town was her place. It was where she always went back to, back in
the old world. It was the one place that grounded her, centred her. But there
weren’t even birds singing here any more. Just a cold stranglehold of dead
silence. She looked around from the dragon’s back, desperate for a sign of
something still standing. She pinned all her hopes on one last part of the old
world having survived; something left to save her sanity.

‘Mog?’ she called down, hoping to find some sign of her
cat. She wanted more than anything to see his bright pale eyes look up from the
ash and the rubble, somewhere along her street. She spent ages hovering low
over acres of foundations, searching the flattened town and calling to her cat.
She wanted him to be alright. She wanted to take him with her and look after
him, to make up for abandoning him. But there was every chance that one way or
another, Mog wasn’t around any more. Tabitha called a few more times here and
there, and gave up with a sigh. If she couldn’t find him with a bird’s eye view
of the town, and no buildings in her way, then she was never going to find him.
She landed down in the fine rubble that used to be her house, and saw shreds of
her belongings flapping beneath the sea of bricks. Turning around, she could
see all the way over to the ruined stones up on the far hill, on the street
where her mum’s house used to be. There was nothing left of her old life, then.
No place to call home. Tabitha sighed shakily, and brushed the tears from her
cheeks with her coat sleeve. There was a sudden wrenching noise then. Tabitha
looked over at the iron railings by the sea, and watched them bend and warp
under giant black tentacles. The dark tree-trunk arms dragged a whale of a
creature up over the sea wall; a grotesque black squid with a ring of searching
white eyes. Tabitha backed away from its sweeping tentacles as it hauled itself
over the sea wall after her. Her ship did nothing; it just watched the squid
pulling itself closer. A tentacle lifted high in the air and smashed down into
the rubble where she’d stood. Tabitha ran and leapt up into her ship’s saddle
and steered it round to face the squid. She reached out her mind to the ship
and felt the connection. She had control. Her ship reared up and belched a bolt
of light into the monster’s gaping mouth, and suddenly its long squid body
burst apart in a bloody thunderclap. Tabitha watched the slopping carnage
collapse on the road with savage satisfaction. She took off over the grey sea,
sinking back down into the cockpit as her ship climbed higher into the gloomy
sky.

The rest of the day she spent tracing the coastline
south, searching for signs of life. Miles and miles of empty demolition; towns
and villages wiped off the map. The sun set and the dusk light faded, and still
she’d seen nothing. She couldn’t fight off sleep any longer, and felt her eyes
closing at the controls. Setting the dragon-ship down to perch on a giant wind
turbine in the hills, Tabitha tilted her seat back, zipped up her parka, and
fell into a deep warm sleep.

When
she woke the next morning Tabitha knew she’d have to think up a different plan.
There was no way to tell how much fuel the ship had left, but she knew it would
only last for so long. She had to make the best use of it, and get to somewhere
safe. She launched her ship off the wind turbine with a heavy rattle, and
climbed higher and higher into the cloudy autumn sky. She shot up through the
gloomy mist until the clouds formed a pearly white field far below, stretching
on forever like meadows in heaven. Up above there was only sunlight, and the
big pale blue of the empty sky. It felt so peaceful up here, so far removed
from the ruined world below. Far from all that dirt and blood and death. She
remembered a flight abroad then, as she stared at the same view that she’d seen
from the aeroplane years ago. Suddenly her imagination kicked into high gear.
She was in an aircraft. She could afford to think bigger than her home country,
and there wasn’t anything to keep her here. Her friends and family were dead.
Her beautiful Laika, and her handsome Mog. Her grief had already exhausted her
a hundred times over; she was ready to move on. She had nothing left now but
the ship she was sat in, and she wanted to find out what happened next. Diving
down suddenly to whip beneath the clouds, Tabitha levelled out and followed the
coast north. Gliding over white cliffs and muddy sands, she turned her back on
the place she’d come from. She was taking herself far away from here. Nowhere
was easy to survive any more, but some places would be better than others. She
thought about that dream holiday that never happened; the one she fantasised
about at her office desk. She thought about warm white sands and a vivid
turquoise sea, and waves clear as glass. A place where palms swayed in the warm
breeze, and winter never came. The hologram globe popped up on the console
then. Tabitha reached out her black hands and gently turned the globe around,
and poked her finger into the Pacific. She zoomed in there, and found an island
in the middle of nowhere. She pressed a white dot into the map, and the line of
light appeared in her vision to guide her; fading to the horizon. Willing her
ship’s jets to full power, Tabitha felt a rollercoaster rush as she tore off
into the sky. She left her own country far below, far behind. She was heading
for a bright new home, hidden away on the far side of the world.

41

The
hologram globe tracked her ship’s progress north into the Arctic. The cold sea
was almost black, rippling away beneath her under a clear pale sky. After hours
of watching and dozing as the ship followed its path, an icy coast loomed large
beneath her. Tabitha sat up, stared. She dipped further into the ship’s vision
for a better look. She’d never seen anything so beautiful. They passed over
shining white cliffs, through warped bridges of ice. Towering natural shapes,
jagged and bizarre. She saw hulking icebergs so vast and white that the sea
glowed blue around their sunken masses. They flew past mountains of snow that
didn’t have names; too shifting and impermanent for humans to claim ownership.
Thinking about it, she couldn’t really blame the aliens for wanting to take
this planet. She’d want to take it too.

Tabitha
watched cracked ice sprawling for miles, like one vast broken window floating
on the black ocean. She dozed a while longer, trying to take her mind off her
appetite. When she blinked her eyes back open at the cockpit around her, she
sat up suddenly and took control. The hologram globe showed that she was coming
right up to the North Pole. She wanted to get out and see it.

The ship lowered her down on its wing, and Tabitha
stepped off onto crunching snow. Looking down, her black feet were a stark
contrast. She didn’t feel the snow between her toes. Tabitha zipped up her coat
against the biting cold, and left a trail of footprints from where the ship rested.
It was such a lonely place; a flat white infinity. The wind rushed past her
ears in a fresh stinging chill, despite her parka hood pulled down over her
face. There wasn’t a marker pole around here anywhere; she must have been
slightly off dead-centre. But the North Pole was the North Pole, after all. She
was near enough to say she’d been here, if there was anyone left to tell.
Tabitha turned stiffly in the cold, paranoid that the ship was going to leave
her here. Or remember its hostility at some point and reach over and eat her
when she wasn’t looking. But it just sat there like a grey statue of a dragon,
white eyes staring. Tabitha eyed it cautiously, a slave to her paranoid
thoughts, and turned her back on it again. The wind whipped. Tabitha blinked
against a sudden flurry of powdery snow, blowing up off the alien landscape in
a fine glittering dust. The sunlight caught the snow at her feet, and made it
shine like white grains of sand. It was so silent here, like another world
almost. Part of her couldn’t really believe she was here, freezing her arse off
at the North Pole. Another part of her couldn’t get past the fact that she was
just freezing her arse off. Tucking her hood tighter around her face, Tabitha
strode back stiffly through the crunching snow to the ship.

‘Er… wing. Please,’ she said awkwardly. The ship turned
its head to glance down at her, disinterested, and lowered a wing to raise her
up.

‘…Thanks,’ she muttered to it, climbing back onto the
saddle and sinking down into the hatch. She still felt weird about interacting
with it; on edge. Like trying to work around an ex once they’d both cleared the
air and knew where they stood. After all, the thing had been trying to kill
her. She should have fought it to the death on principle, or at least escaped
from it. But now she knew that the monster wasn’t a monster at all, but a ship,
things were different. And the thought of flying off anywhere in the world was
just too exciting for her to pass up.

Tabitha set off and watched the vast white world rolling
away beneath her from the cockpit. She kind of wished she’d brought a book. She
felt terrible for the thought, but the appeal of the Arctic had only lasted so
long. She pulled her hood down close, tucked her hands into her armpits, and
settled down for a nap. It was always a good time for a bit more sleep.

When she woke up, Tabitha studied the hologram globe for
a little while. The sphere glowed a gentle electric blue, and the white guide
line still traced a path over the top of the world right down into the Pacific.
At the moment they were over Alaska, moving slow on the map. Tabitha knew they
were flying as fast as a jet in reality; but their crawling pace on the
hologram globe seemed to tell a different story.

‘That’s Russia,’ she mumbled, plucking the globe off the
console and turning it gentle and weightless in her hands. Funny, she’d never
really thought of Russia and Alaska being quite so close to each other on the
world map. She’d always assumed there was some vast stretch of ocean between
them, but in reality they were practically touching. How did she not know that,
seriously? The revelation shattered her faith in her own geography skills.
Tabitha studied the globe and zoomed in on the white line that traced her
progress into Alaska. She watched it closely; there was no change in it.
Normally the white dot that showed their position would be crawling onwards,
snail-slow. Watching it now though, it looked like they weren’t moving at all.
Come to think of it, it didn’t feel like they were moving either. Usually the
ship would tilt a little against the wind now and then; that hadn’t happened
for a while. Tabitha pushed the white button on her seat and rose up through
the hatch, and looked around at pitch-black night all around her. The freezing
wind cut right through her coat, making her shiver. They were perched on a
mountain.

‘Hey!’ she called to the ship’s head. Her voice echoed
across a dark lonely wilderness. Silhouettes of endless pine forest sprawled out
under the cold starlight. ‘Why have we stopped?’ she demanded. The ship’s head
was looking up at the night sky. ‘Oh.’ Up above them, the Northern Lights shone
vast like a ghost-green river. There weren’t any movies to compare with this.
This was real. Or at least she thought it was real. It felt more like a dream.

‘Wow,’ she told the ship quietly, watching the shifting
green rift in a reverent hypnosis. Sometimes she’d heard Jen talk vaguely about
a life force in the world; something that she’d picked up from books on healing
and mysticism. Tabitha had never believed in that stuff. But when she stared up
in awe at the twisting eerie lights above her, the life force idea seemed
pretty damn close to it. Watching the dead Nordic light painting the starry sky,
Tabitha stopped thinking about the why and the how. Suddenly the science of it
fell away, disregarded, leaving only silent revelation in its place.

Later
Tabitha started up the ship’s jet scales with a white glow and launched into
the dawn sky. She had to wonder – why had the ship stopped there on the
mountain? Was it a warning that it was running low on fuel? Or did it see what
she saw when it had watched the Lights? The thought occupied Tabitha’s mind as
they flew on in the growing dawn, searching the cockpit console for any kind of
fuel gauge. Whatever creature normally flew this thing, how was it supposed
to know how much fuel the ship had left? Did it just know, with some deep
mental connection? There was so much that she didn’t understand. For all her
changes, Tabitha began to feel decidedly inadequate.

The ship flew on south over warmer oceans without any
sign of slowing down, but still the thought of fuel nagged at Tabitha’s mind.
Almost as much as her hunger, in fact. Eventually she took herself out of the
ship’s vision, and looked around at the fake dawn glow of the cockpit. She had
to know.

‘Are you going to have enough fuel?’ she asked the
walls. She felt stupid for asking the question. It was a ship. She’d be
waiting a long time for an answer. She waved her hands over the white seeds on
the console. Nothing. She reached her arms out at her sides, and could just
about touch the walls with her fingertips. The ceiling was just out of reach,
but it felt good to stretch her arms out. She searched everywhere. There were
no buttons, no dials, no screens or little glowing whatevers. Nothing to show
her how the ship worked. Tabitha stretched her arms a little more, then stood
up and shook her stiff legs out too, and peered around the back of the ribbed console.
A gentle glow caught her eye. There was a dim white light down there, hidden
away beneath twisting pipes like tree roots. She could feel the power there,
tingling in her fingers, as she leaned around the console and reached closer.
She stretched out her fingers, and placed them gently into the glow between the
roots. Gasped. She knew that feeling. It was electricity; a colossal current
hidden away beneath the floor. She had to take her hand away, the tingling pull
felt so intense. And she wasn’t even touching the surface of the glowing core
itself, nestled away down there in the metal roots. She put a hand on the
closest root to push herself back up again, and felt the voltage there beneath
the dull grey rubbery metal. She glided her rough hand over the root with a
rasping sound, and followed the feel of the voltage right along the pipe until
it merged into the cockpit wall. The power wasn’t coming from the glowing light
behind the console; it was coming in from somewhere else on board. Tabitha pressed
the white circle on her seat and rose up in the saddle onto the ship’s back.
Straight away she faced a biting wind, chilling her face and rushing in her
ears. She strained against her saddle harness and reached her hand down over
the ship’s huge scaly side. Sure enough she felt the same electrical current
coursing beneath its skin, right where the pipe would be inside the cockpit.
She slid her palm along the ship’s thick scales, following the feel of the
current as far as she could reach. Until she realised that she could feel the
current all over its grey skin. Then it dawned on her. The current wasn’t
coming from somewhere inside the ship; it was coming into the ship from its
skin. Solar power, huge and intense. Collected down there in the cockpit core,
in the glowing heart of the ship. It was a flying power station; probably the
key to the ship’s jet scales down its sides, and that terrifying breath that
seemed equal parts fire and energy. Tabitha sat back in awe, marvelling at it.
Not just the technical side of it; she could feel it. She felt the
voltage running through its skin. She could feel the ship’s power inside,
strange and colossal. The cold wind was unbearable out here though. She was
glad to sink back down into the cockpit away from it, and slipped back into the
ship’s vision to steer it. She made the ship tilt this way and that, keeping
the dim white line of the compass dead ahead. She took the ship higher into the
air, then corkscrewed back down towards the sea. She pulled it up at the last
second, and felt a rollercoaster dip in her stomach as she climbed back into
the air and levelled out. Tabitha headed high, dived straight down again, and
laughed as she felt her stomach rise and fall. She couldn’t pull again up
though, as hard as she tried. Suddenly they were plummeting towards the sea.

‘Pull up!’ she yelled at the ship, poking the console
frantically. They were still nosediving. The jets droned higher and higher as
the ship fell. Panicking, Tabitha shook herself out of the ship’s vision and
braced for impact. The sea loomed massive below, getting closer and closer.
Tabitha covered her eyes with her hands as they hit the water. The impact moved
her back a little in her seat, but it wasn’t really that much of an impact.
They were still moving. There weren’t any alarms, or any water pouring in.
Tabitha looked into the ship’s vision and saw the deep blue water all around
her. A silvery shoal of fish glided past in the distance. Down below was the
big dark deep, and they were fine. An amphibious solar-powered dragon ship,
she told herself sarcastically. Of course it was. Obvious, really.

‘You could have told me,’ she said grumpily, crossing
her arms and glancing around the cockpit. Her heartcore was still racing. The
ship swam when she willed it forward. She could feel its wings tucked in
against its body, and its feet and tail steering it this way and that. She felt
the jets in its sides too, leaving a vast trail of bubbles behind them. They
passed the terrified shoal of fish, scattering at the sight of the ship’s big
white eyes in the water. Its huge grey shape cut through the blue, twirling and
spinning playfully as it went.

‘You wanted to come down here,’ Tabitha said to the
ship. ‘That’s why you wouldn’t pull up.’ Ships didn’t have wants. They were
ships. She looked around at the glowing white walls; at the pilot seat and the
console. At the white seed things set out in front of her, pulsing with light.
‘What the hell are you?’ she asked it. ‘Are you alive? Or a robot? What are
you?’ getting no kind of response, Tabitha pulled the ship up towards the
sunlight rippling bright through the surface. They burst out into the daylight
and shot into the sky, leaving a showering trail of water sparkling and
crashing in their wake.

The
rushing sea below them grew lighter and lighter by the hour as they flew. The
water rippled hypnotic in reflected sunlight, creeping slowly from dark dead
blue to bright turquoise. Tabitha woke up to the sound of a gentle squelching
beep in the cockpit; a round organic sound she’d never heard before. She felt
weak, starving for blood. Headache, clammy skin. Sweating for a fix.

‘Are we there?’ she croaked dozily to the cockpit. The
globe popped up in front of her then, and zoomed itself in on the middle of the
Pacific. The white dot she’d first pressed into the globe had a ring of light
pulsing from it. They’d arrived. Rushing in her excitement, Tabitha pressed her
palm into the circle on her seat and rose up through the opening hatch. She
felt a heavy rush of hot air above her, like she was stepping off a plane. She
unclipped her harness before the seat could even morph into a saddle and looked
around her, speechless. The ship had come to rest on a blinding white beach.
Wispy palm trees rustled above her in a sea-salt breeze. The ocean was electric
blue; impossibly turquoise in the shallows and clear as glass where it lapped
and tumbled on the shore. It was the kind of place she’d only seen in movies
and travel magazines. The ship raised a wing up to help her down, and Tabitha
looked around at the island like she was dreaming. She shrugged off her
blue-grey coat and dropped it down on the white sand, warmer than she’d ever
felt in her life. She closed her eyes for a moment, just to take it all in. She
could hear the clear tide rumbling and rushing on the soft sand, and the wind
rattling gently through palm leaves behind her. The sight of it all gave her a
fresh thrill when she opened her eyes again, squinting at the warm sunlight in
an ink-blue sky. Tabitha wandered over to a palm tree and put her hand on it,
struggling to believe she was really here. The trunk felt rough against her
wrist; scaled and solid and fibrous. There were birds chirping in the
tropical forest beyond, and a lone mountain towering over the small island.
She’d never seen anywhere so beautiful. It was the kind of place she’d seen
online and always assumed to be a fake image, touched up to look surreal. But
here it was all around her, filling her senses. Even her red curls and the
blue-grey of her parka looked more bright and vivid in the strong sun. She
breathed deep, sat down in the sand for a while, and smiled. She couldn’t
remember the last time she’d smiled.

A little later Tabitha left her ship sitting in the
sunshine and wandered off down the beach for a look around. She heard a crash
behind her, and turned around to see the ship lie down in the sand like a giant
dog. It was basking; that was the only word for it. Looking much more animal
than mechanical. It was a mystery to her.

Laika would have loved it here, Tabitha thought, as she
wandered further down the beach. Her mum too, and Emma and Jen. And the Ghosts,
of course. What a place she could have brought them to, if only she’d known
what to do at the time. That old aching sadness started eating away at her. She
couldn’t think like that though, filled up with regret. Tabitha stopped walking
and squinted at the striking blue sky. At the lonely white beach around her,
stark and beautiful. This was it; this was how it had all happened, and she
couldn’t go back and change anything. She couldn’t bring anyone back, so what
was the point in feeling guilty about it? She felt glad to be alive, even if
she was the only one left. It was a cold selfish thought, but she couldn’t just
pretend that self-preservation didn’t apply. Not in a world like this. It
really was everyone for themselves, and she’d finally made it out of that grey
hell back home. It wasn’t like she’d abandoned anyone; they were all gone. As
for Chris… she was surprised how justified she felt about it. He’d already
killed her once, after all. He got a quicker death than her, anyway. And he had
it coming.

Tabitha walked on a little further, following the line
of palms that circled the island. Sweating in the heat, she paused for a moment
to watch the clear whispering tide. She sighed contentedly at the view and gave
up on her walk, and lay down in the sugar-white sand. It felt hot against her
legs; so hot that she scooted down the beach a bit further to stretch her legs
in the lapping waves. She lay back on wet sand and put her hands behind her
head, feeling the gentle tide rush against her sides. She breathed deep, and
stared up at the sky. There wasn’t a single cloud up there, just endless jewel-blue.
She watched an unfamiliar seabird glide overhead, sharp black and white,
tilting its wings in the breeze. No thoughts, no worries for a while. No
sadness. Just… whatever this was. A sunbleached reverie. By the time her
thoughts came back again, Tabitha was too hot to lie around anyway. She
couldn’t help but dwell on her next fix; a bloodmeal that wasn’t coming. She
stood up and turned her back on the beach, and swore she could hear running
water in the forest beyond the palm trees.

Tabitha
wandered through the palms and into the shaded jungle beyond. She came out at a
small clearing just beyond the beach, mesmerised at the sight. There ahead a
cold fresh waterfall tumbled down into a rocky pool, crowded with ferns and
framed by the forest. Tabitha took a few parched sips from the pool, stripped
off, and walked down the rocks into the cold water. It felt good to shiver in
there, like her past was washing away. Her base-layer catsuit was draped and
dripping on a boulder nearby, and looked much healthier for a wash. Tabitha
slicked her wet hair back and closed her eyes, and felt the cold water
goosebumping her arms. She remembered shivering in the rain, back when she’d
hidden from the monster in the city of skin. A dark memory that was all too recent,
and yet suddenly a lifetime away. All around her in the clear pool, the grime
and brick dust of a ruined city in England drifted away in coffee-coloured
clouds. Tabitha felt new. She waded over to the waterfall and edged beneath it.
Gasped at the cold endless smack of the water pounding down on her back,
beating the sad thoughts out of her head.

The beach felt warm and inviting when she ambled back,
drained and chilly from her cold shower. Tabitha sat down in the sand in her
underwear to dry off, close to the grey hill of the sleeping dragon. She
couldn’t really think of it as a ship any more; not if it was curled up asleep.
Tabitha shook out her wet hair and watched a crab on the shore, scurrying along
where the tide broke and soaked into the sand.

‘What do you think?’ she said, looking over at the
dragon. ‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?’ a bright white eye blinked open on the
grey mound, and the creature raised its head to look over at her.

‘Do you think?’ she asked it, scratching her
arms. Dwelling on her next fix. ‘I mean what are you, anyway?’ the dragon
raised its head and yawned wide before curling back up again.

‘Machines don’t yawn,’ Tabitha mumbled to herself. ‘But…
animals don’t have cockpits.’ There had to be some animal in there somewhere.
She wanted there to be some animal in there. A longing for
companionship, probably. And besides, she’d already made up her mind really. It
was animal to her; one thing left in the lonely world with a personality to
reach out to. Tabitha got up and walked over cautiously, looking the dragon in
the eyes. It stared right back, watching her approach. It looked like a rubbery
lizard impersonating a shark; sprawled out in the sand with all the graceless
menace of a basking crocodile. Tabitha reached out a black hand towards it, and
heard a deep rumbling growl from its throat. It stared. Tabitha didn’t flinch
as it growled louder; a crackling buzz that she felt in her chest like
nightclub bass. She looked it right in the eye, stepped closer still, and
placed her hand on its big flat shark snout. Some feeling filled her up then,
and quickened her breath. She felt current coursing out of its skin and into
hers, racing her heartcore. A new high. When she staggered back and the ringing
faded from her ears, the dragon wasn’t growling any more. Tabitha felt a
tingling in her hands and feet, like pins and needles. Her body went numb, and
she dropped down onto the sand. She didn’t feel her hunger any more though,
biting away and cramping her stomach like it usually did. The new feeling was
small at first; tickly tingles like feathers and tinsel on her limbs. But in a
couple of minutes it was a strong sensation, like someone was pressing their
warm skin against her hands and feet. Tabitha raised her metal hands up and
felt energy flowing into her. She looked at the dragon, which had lost interest
and gone back to sleep in the sand. Tabitha stared at nothing, trying to place
the feeling. This energy wasn’t coming to her from the creature, or from her
core. It was coming from the sky. Tabitha looked back at the dragon, staring in
disbelief.

‘I think you just made me solar powered,’ she mumbled.

Walking
for a while down the beach, Tabitha felt a new kind of rested strength. It was
like nothing she’d ever felt before; a renewing current flowing into her, as
unconscious and gentle as breath. Her hunger was gone. She’d left her base
layer by the waterfall and taken to wearing just her underwear; it was far too
hot out here for anything more. Walking in the lapping waves and stopping to stretch
out on the hot sand, she focussed all her thought on soaking in the sunlight
through her hands and feet. It felt weird at first, a strange tingling. But
once she’d learned the feeling and how to control it, she felt the sunlight
pour into her skin. Energy massaged her muscles. If she’d ever felt this good
before, she couldn’t remember it. It felt like all the light in the sky had
wrapped itself around her where she lay, like a blanket or a breeze. That was
the only way she could think to get her head around it. It felt like a cool
drink and a warm hug; like good sex and a morning stretch all at the same time.
For a few brief moments, she saw the sunshine very differently. Like a
revelation. The world around her paled away; only the sun mattered. Lust. White
lances of sunlight pierced the sky; shining down celestial from a god-reactor
with a megaton halo. Holy light. Divine fusion. Tabitha felt the tingling light
reach into her body and moaned, gasped, climaxed. Mouth gaping, she rolled her
eyes to the sky in orgasmic prayer. Shivered with a deep warm wholeness she’d
never known before. One last wave of pleasure came rolling and rushing and
crashing through her body, and she floated feather-light back to waking life.
Tabitha dropped out of her daze; saw the sky shining blue again. The sun was…
just the sun again. She sat up in the sand. Saw the beach, the island. She
remembered now. She felt strange and new; electrosexual. Over to her right the
dragon slept on. The breeze swayed the palm trees and tickled through the
leaves; the sound gave her tingles. The sky above looked deeper than the sea.
An electrical eternity, stretching up into endless space beyond the blue. Tipsy
and sated, Tabitha got to her feet and staggered dishevelled down the beach.

A little later she waded out into the shallows, and
floated on her back with nothing but the blue sky to see. The salty water
lapped at her lips; filled her ears in whispering glugs and trickled out again
with the tide. The water felt warm, floating her hair and soaking her
underwear. Gulls called overhead as the sun fed her skin. Bright turquoise
water glowed all around her; shimmering life-blue in the light. Tabitha slept
peacefully on the beach that night, warm and free and thoughtless, curled up
under a million clear stars in a light-marbled sky.

42

Tabitha
woke up with a confused scowl the next morning. She sat up and looked around.
White sand covered one side of her face; she brushed it off with a rough black palm.
Slowly it all came back to her; alien invasion, end of humanity, flying a
dragon to paradise. She questioned her sanity as she sat there on the beach,
shaking the sand from her hair. But the dragon was definitely there, a big grey
hill by the tide. Curled up like a giant lizard, drinking in the light of the
rising sun. Tabitha yawned and lay back, and stretched out on the sand. It was
a good, long, lie-in kind of stretch that she could feel in her shoulders. She
sat up, looked around at the beach, and idly took a handful of silvery white
sand. She watched it whisper through her fingers in silky waterfalls, and
thought about the thrill of flying again.

Back inside the dragon’s cockpit the controls seemed to
respond to her much faster. Tabitha even found herself slipping into the
creature’s vision straight away. The wings, the movement, the motion of its
flight… they all seemed to fit better. She felt a connection.

A leisurely flight over the island showed Tabitha just
how small it really was. Beyond the beach and the waterfall was nothing but
thick forest, and the steep mountain looming up near the island’s centre. It
was much the same around the far side of the island too; thick tropical forest,
jutting rocky shore, and lots of birds flocking away in terror at the sight of
them overhead. There was no village, no harbour that she could see; not even a
wooden shack. There was nothing in the sea around the coastline either, save
for a couple of dolphins further out. It looked like she was completely alone here,
and clearly the aliens hadn’t made it this far.

Tabitha flew back around the steep mountain in a wide
lazy circle, and already she could see her familiar beach in the distance. It
was strange how she felt so much in sync with the creature; like her mind and
its body worked as one. Suddenly she jumped out of her seat in shock, and let
the ship glide to a stop and just hover in the air. Flying high over the island
just then, with the warmth of the sun beating down on them, she’d felt
something. Happiness. Except it wasn’t hers. It came from the dragon.

‘Dragon, fly away,’ Tabitha called to it across the
beach. She wanted to test this weird connection between them; to see if they
could understand one another better. To see if she didn’t have to be in direct
control for it to respond. Down the beach the huge animal just sat there
staring, blinking its white eyes.

‘Dragon, take off!’ Tabitha commanded, as if she were
casting a spell. She even added a sweep of her hand for effect. Nothing. ‘Up!
Go! Fly! Er… verbal command! Fly away!’ no response. Tabitha sighed in defeat
and walked away down the beach, thinking. An idea hit her. Turning back to the
dragon, she put her hands to her temples and thought about it taking off into
the sky. With a few deep breaths, she tried to blank her thoughts out and just
picture the dragon taking off, or her taking off. It didn’t work. She clapped
her hands at the creature with a steely clank. Nothing. She ran towards it
waving her arms, trying to startle it, but there was no reaction. She tried to
mime taking off, and patted its wing for encouragement. It just watched her.
She tried to think back to the cockpit, and the purple glowing symbol on the
bony console. The maker’s logo, or whatever it was. Tabitha mulled it over
while the dragon stared at her. When she crouched down and traced a shape in
the wet sand the creature craned its neck and peered over to see. It was the
lotus symbol from the console, with the mystery mark inside it that looked like
a fallen seven. Maybe that was the key to communicating with it.

‘Seven?’ Tabitha tried, pointing at the glyph in the
sand. The dragon watched her with interest. ‘Seven?’ she tried again, pointing
to the symbol nice and clearly. ‘Seven, fly!’ she called out. ‘You’re Seven,
this is you!’ no reaction. The dragon just looked at her, looked at the sand,
and lay down again. Tabitha sighed and walked over to it, and put her black
hand on its grey snout. Except for the colour difference it was practically the
same rough skin.

‘Please. I need you to fly,’ she said. But the dragon
made no response. It simply stared with luminous eyes; circles of light that
could just as easily have been cameras as windows to a soul. The waves washed
against the white sand beside them in an endless tumbling whisper.

‘Why did you feel happy, when we were flying before?’
Tabitha asked it quietly, stroking its warm snout with a rasping sound. ‘And
how come I could feel it too?’ she felt its warm skin against her hands; maybe
it was the electric current she could feel. Whatever it was she liked the
sensation. Her hands had long since lost all feeling for everything else, but
she could feel her touch against the dragon’s rubbery metal skin. She felt its
deep warmth, like a rock in the summer sun. She put her face to its side while
it slept, and it felt hot against her cheek. It smelled like summer metal; like
oven-hot cars parked in the sunshine. Huge thick scales interlocked all down
its body like stone paving slabs. She felt its breath rise and fall. Heard it
breathing, big and deep. But nothing she did could bring her closer to it.
There was more to the creature than just idleness and aggression; she was sure
of it. It wasn’t just a weapon of war. There were feelings and personality in
there just waiting to be opened up… except she didn’t have a clue how to bring
them out. Maybe more than anything she needed to feel like she wasn’t alone in
the world. Like someone or something shared her feelings and knew what it was
like to be a monster. Sighing in defeat Tabitha slid down to the sand, lying
down by the dragon’s side. The sun disappeared then, as the dragon arched its
wing around to give her shade. Looking up in surprise, Tabitha grinned at the
realisation. The animal’s nature was coming out regardless of her, in its own
good time. Laying a hand against its side, Tabitha curled up and dozed off
smiling in her living metal cave.

Familiar
skins hung limp from branches that were claws. Spiders filled the dark with
shrieks and human wails. Tree-thick tentacles reached up for her from a deep
abyss, dragging her screaming into a gaping mouth of white flame. Waking up
dizzy and dry-mouthed from her nightmare, Tabitha crawled out groggily from the
shade of the dragon’s wing. Stretching and wandering down the beach, she felt an
unearned hangover sinking its claws into her. It was different though. It
didn’t feel like blood withdrawal, and it couldn’t be the aftermath of booze;
it could only be dehydration. The hot bright beach was a stinging daze, surreal
when she thought back to all the rain and tarmac where she’d grown up. A bit of
rain would be nice.

After a few good gulps from the cold pool, Tabitha
stretched her back and looked around the clearing. A bright beetle on a bush
popped its shell open and flew by. Birds whooped and called in the thick
forest, hidden by a million leaves glowing emerald green in the sunshine.
Tabitha looked around lethargically, inspecting her pink sunburn.

‘It’s too hot,’ she grumbled, almost a whisper, as if
she didn’t want to offend the island.

Tabitha
dived down into the sea with a muffled warping rush. The white sand of the sea
bed stretched off into a blue-green eternity. The water’s surface rippled and
shifted like a dancing mirror a few feet above, glowing white in the streaming
sunlight. Kicking her black feet, Tabitha swam down to the bottom and ran the
lazy sand through her fingers. She’d expected to see fish around; there was
nothing. Maybe too many nature documentaries had made all that wildlife seem a
little too close and immediate. After all, it took months to film all those
animal shots; she couldn’t just expect to see teeming life all around her.
Something tapped against her leg then, something rough. Tabitha freaked out and
shot back for the surface, kicking out to get away. She swam for the shallows
and tumbled back onto her bum, chest-deep in the sea. There it was again,
whatever it was, bumping against her leg. Tabitha looked down and saw a wide
grey shape in the clear water. Another drifted in beside it, vague under the
rippling surface. A stingray poked its snout out from the water, flapping
gently against her hands.

‘Hi,’ Tabitha said uncertainly. She seemed to be holding
the ray from beneath. Its dark eyes peered out from two bumps on its flat head;
a friendly grey fishpuddle that rippled and flapped against her.

‘Look at you,’ she said, smiling, stroking her hand
gently along its back. It was almost like a dog. The second ray splished up at
the surface, investigating. Tabitha tried her best to split her strokes evenly
between them.

‘You’re just a pair of little attention seekers, aren’t
you?’ she said happily, leading them out into deeper water. Tabitha put her
head back under and swam down to the sand a few feet below. The rays swept
around her, flapping their sides in slow motion; angelic splats in the clear
blue. Tabitha swam back up and gasped for air at the surface, and wished that
she had some diving gear to stay down longer. Not that it mattered that much;
her new friends promptly came back to her at the surface. She gently fended off
a ray’s advances as it bumped against her face, and gave it a soft kiss on the
snout. It only seemed to want more though, and the other ray pushed in for
attention too. For the first time in a long time, Tabitha laughed.

She felt in a better mood as she dried out on the beach,
wiggling her black toes against the white sand. Her damp hair dried stiff from
the salt water; tickly blood-red curls draped down beside her neck. She flicked
her claws out and combed it through. Strange how much more contented she felt
now; she was amazed at what a little animal interaction could do to lift her
spirits. At least she had some friends here now. She smiled at the thought. A
curiosity grew in her though, as she got to her feet and stretched on her
tip-toes. An urge to know more about the dragon, still basking on the sand. She
watched it resting. Had the thing gotten darker? She could’ve sworn it used to
be a paler grey than that. If she could find out more about her ship and what
it was, maybe it could tell her more about what she was becoming. She wasn’t
strictly human any more, she knew that much. She still looked like one, but
there was no getting around her hands and feet. Or her heart. Maybe she was
something else now; a new species. If she was feeding on sunlight then she had
more in common with the dragon now than she did with other people. She clung to
the idea of her ship as another castout, to fend off the loneliness. And it’d
probably gone rogue itself now, since she’d kind of taken ownership of it. It was
the one thing in the world that wasn’t trying to hunt her down and kill her.
Well not any more, anyway.

Sinking down into the cockpit, Tabitha’s rummage for
truths did little to enlighten her. The strange bony console remained a
mystery, solid and unmoving like a marble ribcage. There weren’t any metal
panels in here that she could remove and look underneath; more like rubbery
scales that she didn’t want to pull on in case it hurt. Studying it from the
outside there weren’t any engine parts that she could get to, wandering around
the dragon’s sides as it watched her. No pipes or components in sight. Its jets
were just rows of scales that could tilt open, like vents or gills. Everything
was organic, and all of it connected like a living thing. What about the
cockpit though? Something had to have built this, she told herself. Built a
living thing around a ship, or engineered some bizarre hybrid. It was strange,
though hardly shocking. She’d seen plenty of bizarre things already. But this
ship was a masterpiece. And, considering the seat and the controls, it was
designed to be flown by something like a human. She thought back to the dark
figure she’d seen with the Ghosts, out on the field beyond the castle. The
watcher during their war.

Fumbling around the cockpit, Tabitha discovered two
containers concealed under the seat. She found a strange water dispenser tucked
behind the chair in the back wall, and slurped at the cool filtered flow
gratefully; it felt like it was coming from some huge tank or sac in the ship’s
body. There was a handle down there by the seat too, which she guessed from the
bright warning symbol was possibly a control for an ejector seat. She thought
better of trying it to find out, and turned her attentions back on her new
finds. The containers were black and ridged, and made a strange squelching beep
when she pushed at them with her fingers. Both containers slid out from the
base of the seat then, and Tabitha’s face lit up with a smile. She had some new
toys.

The dragon kept a sleepy white eye on Tabitha as she
carted the two boxes out onto the beach, and spread their contents out on the
sand.

‘You’re so lazy,’ she said, turning to the dragon. ‘Is
that all you things do, when you’re not flying around blowing everything up?
You just snooze on beaches?’ the dragon closed its eye and breathed deep by way
of response, and went back to sleep.

‘Fine,’ she sighed, turning back to her new toys on the
white sand. ‘Ooh, it feels like Christmas!’ Tabitha rubbed her hands together
with excitement, adding a sharp grinding sound to the birdsong and the tumbling
waves. The first box held a folded slab of scaly fabric, probably padding.
Tabitha set it aside in favour of more exciting prospects underneath. She took
out something sleek and scaled, shaped like a fish without a tail. Closer
inspection caused the top to peel back into a spout, and she sniffed at the
contents. No smell. She poured it into her hand; it looked like water. She
looked back at the dragon; looked around the beach while she thought about it.
Daring herself, she took a sip and waited for something to happen. It didn’t
have a taste. She waited a bit longer for something to happen to her; tutting a
tune as she looked around at the beach. Just water then.

‘Well that’s disappointing,’ she mumbled, folding the
bottle top back over and tossing it down in the sand. ‘I wonder what this is,’
she said to the dragon, sitting down by the box. She heard his big eye blink
open; glimpsed the white glow off to her left. It just felt good to have
something there to talk to, to remind her that she wasn’t alone in the world.
Tabitha pulled a belt out of the box and laid it on her lap, made of the same
intricate grey metal as the harness on her ship’s saddle. There were two pieces
of equipment attached to it, one on either side. She brought the belt around
her waist to try it on. Just like the saddle harness the belt closed itself and
adjusted to fit her. She admired its design in the sunlight, and her gaze went
to the ribbon tied around her wrist. She paused for a moment, and wondered what
her mum would make of her now. The thought of her was still raw in her mind; a
wound that was never really going to heal. All she could do was carry on and
survive. That’s what Mum would have wanted; what everyone would have wanted.
Tabitha looked back down at her boxes of toys, trying to take her mind off
everyone. The belt was quite beautiful really, she thought, for rubbery metal
in murderous grey. She tried the object on the left of her belt, and the sheath
gave up its contents readily like a firm grip loosening. It was a black combat
knife; a thick handle and a cruel blade made from a single piece of engraved
metal. The object on the right of her belt didn’t budge though; a solid block
that wouldn’t open or detach despite her struggling. Tabitha sighed with
disappointment and sheathed her knife, picking up her water bottle from the
sand. The bottle stuck to the belt like a magnet, all very handy and
survivalish.

The next case she opened revealed a collection of bright
phials full of colourful liquids. She took one from its leathery slot and
contemplated trying it, but unlike the water bottle these looked positively
toxic. Having serious second thoughts, Tabitha slid the phial back into its
holder, closed the case and gently set it aside. The last item in the first box
was a tiny silver case with a white spider symbol on it. They must have been
seeds. Tabitha felt a cold creeping dread and put the silver case back in the
box. She really didn’t want to go opening the lid on those. Disappointed with
her finds, she grabbed the black slab of padding to stuff it back into the box.
It folded open in her hands as she pulled it from the sand. What was it, a
sheet? A tent? Intrigued, she opened it out to see the full size of it.

‘It’s huge!’ she told the dragon, drowned in ribbed
scaly cloth. Immediately the fabric shrank and jerked and wrapped itself around
her body. Tabitha panicked as she felt it moving, fitting itself to her shape.
She struggled against it and fell back in the sand, getting tailored against
her will. The real shock came when a hood popped up over her head and sealed
itself over her face, and she was looking around at the beach through fabric
eye-scales that turned transparent. A respirator hissed in her mask; cool clear
air to feed her panicked breaths. Claustrophobic, she felt around for a way to
take the mask off. It felt tough, like scaled stretchy leather. She couldn’t
get a decent grip on it. She patted her sides frantically, patted the suit, and
the hood snapped back down into a round collar. She sighed with relief and
looked around her. The dragon hadn’t bothered to look up from its sleep as
she’d struggled. Tabitha looked down at her new alien catsuit and stretched out
her arms, admiring the matte fabric. It was ribbed and scaled, raven-black. A
good fit, like a second skin. She’d never seen material like it; it looked
almost living. She pulled the fabric back from her hands and feet, and it
shrank to fitted sleeves.

‘Magic flight suits too, why not?’ she said to herself.
Feeling a little more impressed with her stash from the first box, Tabitha
opened the second and found three sturdy cases inside. Each one had a glowing
icon on it, like different plants. She opened them slowly to reveal loose seeds
inside, large and alien-looking, but harmless enough for now. She was wary of
planting them, but the temptation was overpowering. They could grow into
anything for all she knew, good or bad. Or very bad. There was only one way to
find out though.

Tabitha carted the box of seed cases across the beach
and into the thick forest. She set it down in the clearing by the waterfall,
and opened up the lid with a biting curiosity. She took a squishy white seed
delicately from the first case and pressed it into the sandy soil, and trickled
some water on it from her bottle. She did the same with a red seed and a black
seed from the other cases, planting them in a row. She sat herself down to keep
an eye on them, and inspected the box for some kind of alien instructions. A
few minutes later, nothing had happened. Tabitha sighed and got to her feet.
She’d expected some kind of rapid alien growth, like in a horror movie. She
opened and closed the box lid a few times, growing impatient. Bored, she turned
in a slow circle to watch a bright bird fluttering past. When she walked off
she heard a little pop under her foot, like bubble wrap. She raised her sole up
and saw a cracked husk in the soil. Another squishy white seed, oozing
pearlescent fluid into the dirt.

‘Sorry,’ she said to the tiny white puddle. It must have
fallen out of the case when she was planting the first one. But still, she was
half expecting something to happen to it now; maybe cracking it open was the
trick. A few minutes later though, still nothing. Tabitha left in a huff,
traipsing back to the beach with the box in her hands. She’d never had any
patience for keeping plants. Her dad had always been green-fingered, but
Tabitha had inherited her mum’s short attention span. If only she’d made more
time for green growing things when she was little, she said to herself; maybe
she would’ve seen more of her dad in their short time together. If only she
could have put up with the cobwebbed shed where he used to potter, or the
stuffy heat in their little greenhouse where the sour smell of tomato plants
clogged the air, maybe she might have known her dad better before he died. But
she couldn’t think like that now, she told herself, lying back down beside her
ship. There were too many people gone, and too much grief and regret already.
There were too many raw memories, and she didn’t want to face them again so
soon. They could wait, she told herself coldly. They had to wait, for
the sake of her sanity.

Tabitha kept to the shade of the dragon’s wing to keep
her pink sunburnt cheeks out of the sun. She tried again with the mystery
object on her belt, the unyielding solid block, but still didn’t have any luck
trying to move it. With the heat of the sun making her drowsy, and the warmth
of the dragon’s dark skin behind her not helping a bit, Tabitha soon headed
back off through the trees for a dip by the waterfall.

Dipping her head beneath the cold water in the pool, the
tumbling waterfall above sounded like a muffled rush on the surface. She
thought about the lake that she’d dropped into that night when she escaped,
brown and murky and bitter, falling through the sky from a dragon’s foot. It
seemed ridiculous now, just thinking about it. Escaping from the army and a
tide of silver spiders; being chased across the hills in the pitch black night,
by a dragon that was also a ship. Even better, hijacking a ship just like it
after slaying a monster and then jetting off to paradise. Tabitha wished she
could look back on it all and laugh at the madness of it, but it wasn’t funny.
The syringes and scalpels and death-black terrors in her nightmares, they
weren’t funny. Burrowing claws and hollow skins; burning flesh and screaming
loved ones. They’d never leave her dreams. All she could do now was throw
herself into her new life in the sun, trying to form a friendship with an alien
creature just to take her mind off it all. Tabitha switched her thoughts off
and stood up from the water, waist-deep. Smoothed her hair back, combing it
with her claws, eyes closed against the rushing waterfall. She shook her head
to empty out the flashbacks as the cold waterfall smacked down on her
shoulders. Then she felt tentacles slide around her knees; resting their
rubbery weight on her shoulders and feeling at her face. She opened her eyes,
yelled at the thing in front of her and punched it away. It was a fleshy
balloon the size of a football, clear as glass, with a mass of black tentacles
hanging beneath it. The creature reeled away in shock, bobbing and floating off
over the water, hovering away above the ground as quickly as it could. Its
tentacles wiggled as it fled, dangling from a stump of a body that was
frantically puffing jets of air. Cautiously Tabitha stepped out of the water as
the creature retreated. She could see its distress.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to understand where
the hell it had come from. She pulled her alien catsuit on slowly, so that her
movements didn’t spook it any more. Its slender tentacles anchored it to a tree
nearby, and the puffing holes on its vase of a body gasped and shut at a
panicked pace.

‘I don’t want to hurt you, er, balloon-thing,’ Tabitha
said softly. ‘You just shocked me, that’s all.’ She sat down on a rock by the
edge of the pool, studying the strange creature with a quiet fascination.

‘You must have come from that seed, then,’ she said, as
if she was making conversation with a stranger. It had no eyes to see her, and
no ears to hear as far as she could tell. It just looked like someone had
upturned a small fleshy goldfish bowl and plonked it down on some octopus limbs,
and told it to go floating around for no apparent reason.

‘Guess you were just saying hello,’ Tabitha said gently,
stepping a little closer. ‘Do you want some water, Fishbowl? Everything likes
water. We all go mad crazy for the water.’ Tabitha cupped her hands together in
the pool, and crept towards the creature with dripping fingers.

‘Water?’ she asked it softly, still wary of its gasping
gills. The water dripped steadily from her hands while she waited, and slowly
drained away. She had to try three more times before the creature was calm
enough to show any interest.

‘That’s it,’ she said, stretching her arms out further
towards it. Fishbowl waved a tentacle slowly towards the water in her hands.
The tentacle tapped delicately at her fingers, and seemed satisfied with the
metal skin it found there. It was strange; she could actually feel it tapping
on her hands. She thought she’d lost all sensation there, until she felt the
current in the dragon’s skin. Now she could feel the tapping tentacle tips as well.
Electric fingerprints. She watched a tentacle dip down into the water in
her cupped palms, and with a small draining sound it sucked every drop from her
hands.

‘Someone’s thirsty,’ she said softly, watching the
tentacle play along her fingers. She noticed how the creature drifted and
swayed, like it was underwater. It was calming to watch, part plant and part
sea creature; surreal and otherworldly. Before long Fishbowl had drifted past
her back over the pool, and dipped its tentacles into the water to drink.
Tabitha settled down on a rock to watch it, until it rose up and floated off
through the trees towards the beach.

She didn’t know how it knew, but when she followed
Fishbowl to the shore she found it tapping at the box of seeds from the ship.
Obliging, Tabitha carefully opened up the seed cases. She watched Fishbowl dip
its tentacles gently into two of them. It plucked three red seeds and three
black, and then drifted off back through the trees to the waterfall. To her
astonishment the creature found the two seeds she’d planted before and rooted
them out from the soil, carrying them away to a better spot.

Following Fishbowl back to the ferny clearing, Tabitha
saw it patting different patches of soil close to the pool. Deciding where to
plant. She watched closely as it pushed the four red seeds into the ground in a
neat row, each about two feet apart. With the greatest care it bent a tentacle
towards the seeds and watered each one in turn, and patted the soil down around
them with a feather’s touch. Tabitha watched, fascinated. She’d never seen so
much gentleness in a creature. The four black seeds, Fishbowl planted all
across the pool clearing. It pushed one into the dirt by the rock wall beside
the pool, and one in the soil on the other side of the waterfall. The third
seed it planted off by the forest to Tabitha’s right. The fourth was pushed
into the soil up on the small cliff above, close to the rocky edge where the
waterfall started.

‘You’re my gardener, then,’ Tabitha said with a smile,
reaching out to Fishbowl as it drifted past. Its tentacles lifted up and
gathered around her fingers as it drew close; tapping at her alien hands and
pale human arms. Satisfied with Tabitha’s presence, Fishbowl drifted back
through the trees towards the beach.

‘Whoa, let’s leave those ones for now,’ Tabitha called
to it across the sand, walking back to her collection of toys on the beach.
Fishbowl was tapping a tentacle on the silver spider case, but Tabitha promptly
brushed its arm aside and closed the lid on the box.

‘Let’s wait and see what grows out of the ones you
planted, ok?’ she said, crouching down beside Fishbowl where it hovered. ‘I’d
sooner fight eight killer plants than two boxes full. And spiders I could do
without, to be honest. I’m on holiday.’

Nothing
much happened after that. Fishbowl just hovered there on the beach, content to
do nothing. The dragon slept, surprisingly, with the occasional basking session
for variety. Tabitha clipped the belt back around her waist with the knife and
the water bottle attached, and watched the belt shift a little to fit her. She
put the two boxes of equipment back in the dragon’s cockpit with her parka, and
had to climb down her lazy ship’s back leg onto the beach when it didn’t bother
to lift a wing up for her.

‘I’m going for a hike, ok?’ she told Fishbowl and the
dragon, studying the forest ahead. She checked that her strange new water
bottle was full enough, and stuck it back to her belt. The knife would be
useful, but she wished she could detach whatever the thing was on the right
side of her belt. It felt hard and heavy enough to be a gun, but the shape was
wrong. At any rate there was just no taking it off. Tabitha gave up on it and
looked around instead, smiling at the sight of Fishbowl investigating the tide.

‘I haven’t felt this good in ages, actually,’ she said,
stretching her muscles as she wandered past the creature. ‘Maybe it’s the solar
power, what do you reckon?’ Fishbowl seemed to be lost in thought, hovering
calmly beside the whispering tide. Probably drinking in the sunlight too,
Tabitha considered, rather than contemplating its existence.

Tabitha’s walk took her far down the beach until she
reached a rocky outcrop, where the strip of white sand came to a finish. She
headed off into the forest there, and followed the sound of running water
through thick broad leaves until she reached a small river. Probably the same
river that ran down into the waterfall pool, far behind her – but where did it
start? Tabitha caught glimpses of the green mountain peak through the trees,
jutting up at the heart of the island. She decided to go for a climb.

There were no worn paths here on the island; no sign of
people whatsoever. Not even any big animals, from the looks of things. Just
plenty of frantic bugs and dancing butterflies, flitting between shady bushes
and bright tropical flowers. Birds and lizards clung to the trees as she passed
by, vivid blue and green in the streaming sunlight.

‘God, it’s hot,’ she told no one, stopping to look out
over the sea in the distance. She sipped from her strange black water bottle,
and snapped it back to her belt. Licking her lips she got the salty taste of
sweat, and she could feel the cool breeze blowing against her damp face. Her
alien catsuit seemed to keep the rest of her body cooler though, even letting
the breeze through its scales. She was practically an alien now, looking down
at her outfit. Strange how much she’d forgotten her old blood hunger, she
thought. Like a switch had been flipped off. She could feel the sun feeding
her, if she concentrated. She felt her body storing up the light like a living
battery; felt her heartcore humming so peacefully that she barely noticed it.
All that tension and hunger, all that worry about getting her next fix… the
need had just lifted away. All that wanting and desperation was gone.

Tabitha hiked on towards the mountain and slapped at a
fly on the back of her neck. The trees all around her were filled with the
cheeping and chattering of unfamiliar birds; an occasional whooping call came
from deeper in the forest. She’d only heard sounds like this in wildlife
documentaries. She could never have imagined actually being somewhere like
this; she could never afford it. What stood out most though was how she felt
here, surrounded by so many green and growing things. It was a deeper kind of
joy tied to her new nature; a primordial satisfaction. As if all was right with
the world. There it was again; another split-second vision of current in the
plants, coursing bright and golden through every vein in every leaf. Tabitha
saw shining liquid sunlight feed the trunks and petals with a cocktail bliss of
vitality; a supernature revelation. Then it was gone. She wanted to go with it,
whatever the vision was. A solar peace, endlessly connected through the fabric
of the world. Bigger than she could ever understand.

As Tabitha came into a grassy clearing at the foot of
the mountain all the birds grew silent. A shadow shot past overhead, rippling
across the wind-blown grass with the whoosh of giant wings. She looked up, but
saw only the dazzling glare of the sun. Before she knew what was happening a
crash shook the ground, and a sudden gust staggered her back. Blinking at the
flying sandy soil, Tabitha turned back to face the sudden shadow in the
clearing. She felt the deep bass of its growl resonate between her ribs.

‘Did you miss me, you big softie?’ she said,
smiling. The dragon turned its head away and eyed her sidelong, like a reptile.
It made a strange crackling grunt.

‘You thought something had happened to me, didn’t you?’
she said, carefully rubbing a grain of sand from her eye with a rough finger.
The dragon laid its head lower, and sniffed at her as she came close and
stroked its snout. Tabitha remembered that feeling of joy that had come from
the creature when they’d flown around the island. The way it looked at her now
seemed like nothing less than companionship. Or at least a mutually beneficial
partnership, if nothing else; scratching one another’s backs for an easier
life. Stroking its snout though, Tabitha didn’t believe that the creature could
be that calculating. It just seemed to have missed her.

‘I’m sure you’ve gotten darker,’ she told it, stroking
its snout. ‘You’re getting a tan,’ she said with a smile, looking over the
dragon’s scales. They’d been a pale cloud-grey when they arrived on the island;
she was sure of it. Definitely not the deep shade of charcoal that they were
now. ‘Let’s go for a ride,’ she said, looking up at the mountain.

Once
they’d soared up to the summit Tabitha perched the dragon down on the rocky
peak, and looked around at the island from the saddle.

‘It’s like no one’s ever been here,’ she told her ship,
looking out across the far side of the island. ‘But you’d probably be down
there hunting them anyway, if there was anything big enough to chase.’ The
dragon looked this way and that and swished its tail, ignoring her in favour of
the view from the mountain. ‘Come on, let’s build a campfire,’ Tabitha
suggested. ‘We can sing some cheesy songs. You’ll love it.’

Tabitha filled the peace and quiet with songs for a good
part of the afternoon, sweating and straining to hack off tree branches with
her strange black knife. It seemed to slice through anything without much
pressure; impossibly sharp. Instantly she regretted pushing the tip of the
knife against her palm, just to see if it could cut through the black skin. She
dropped the knife and swore loudly, sucking at silver blood until the deep
wound healed up. Grumbling, Tabitha got back to work on cutting branches. By
evening she was sitting in a leafy shelter on the mountaintop, watching the sun
set over the sea in a stark orange sky.

‘Thanks for your help with the old tree cutting,’ she
said sarcastically, looking over at the dragon. She thought the creature would
be sleeping as usual, but it wasn’t. Its white eyes were staring ahead,
watching the sunset from its rocky perch. Tabitha stared at the creature,
fascinated by its intelligence. That was why they’d stopped in Alaska too,
under the Northern Lights. Clearly the dragon liked to see this alien world at
its most beautiful, and she’d already felt that it could be happy. But she
couldn’t just call it the dragon any more. It needed a name. Tabitha
thought back to the beach, when she’d been trying to reach out to the creature
and get it to fly. She’d been tracing the strange symbol from its cockpit into
the wet sand; the one like a fallen-down seven in a lotus pattern.

‘…Seven?’ she said. The dragon looked around at her,
held her gaze, and looked back to the sunset. Tabitha felt her heart leap, and
walked closer. ‘Seven,’ she repeated. It looked down at her again, answering to
the name. Tabitha felt a rush of joy; a sudden connection with the creature.
Companionship.

‘You’re not a machine at all,’ she said, walking over to
watch the juicy orange sunset beside it. ‘I think something tried to turn you
into one, to make you fight. I’m sorry for what they did to you.’ She laid a
hand on Seven’s side, and stroked its rough skin with her own. Seven sighed
contentedly through its nose; a gigantic rush of air. Together they watched the
world glow surreal as the sun sank down into the sea.

Fishbowl had stayed in the same place all day
apparently, when Tabitha landed back at the beach at twilight. The strange
plant creature even hovered while it slept, with its tentacles hanging limp
beneath its body. With Seven on her right side and Fishbowl on her left,
Tabitha lay down in the sand and felt like they were their own little tribe.
She watched the peeking stars above, and remembered how good it felt to belong.
She thought about her parents, and her ex. About Laika and the Ghosts. She
thought about the others too, Chris and Sylvia, and how easily they’d turned
against her for what she was. Freak. But here, now, she belonged. Lying
beside the tumbling waves with the soft fine sand on her skin, Tabitha didn’t
feel alone any more with the creatures beside her. She had nothing they wanted;
no food or possessions. They could both survive without her, and there was nothing
keeping them here. But they stayed close anyway, sleeping beside her. They had
nothing to gain from her company but her company itself. For the first time in
a long time there were no dark dreams to haunt Tabitha’s sleep. There in the
company of monsters, she felt like she belonged.

43

When
she woke the next day Tabitha took a while to stretch on the soft cool sand.
She felt rested, recharged. Already the sun was climbing up over the sea,
taking the edge off the cool salty breeze. She felt full of fresh energy, felt
her hands and feet drinking in the light. Looking around her, she was lying
alone. Seven burst up from the sea in the distance then, a dark shape racing up
into the sky. It went diving and spinning and soaring overhead, leaving a fine
briny drizzle from its wings to drift down on Tabitha’s face. She watched it
loop in the air and fly away over the island, circling the forest and then
flapping down onto the mountain peak. Tabitha watched it resting, and wanted to
try something. When she whistled, loud and shrill, Seven turned its distant
silhouette to face her. Another whistle and it came soaring back down the
mountain, over the forest, and landed down on the beach in front of her.

‘Good boy!’ she said happily, stroking Seven’s huge snout.
‘Are you a boy?’ she said, looking around between its back legs. There
wasn’t anything there to give it away. ‘Well, you have to be one or the other,’
she told it. ‘You’re a boy. I’ve decided.’ Before long Seven was back up in the
sky again, circling the island and spinning in the air.

Tabitha found Fishbowl bobbing about by the waterfall,
carefully tending to the soil.

‘Morning,’ she said brightly, wandering into the small
clearing. The creature didn’t seem to notice her, drifting by with the
indifference of an insect or a jellyfish. To her surprise, Tabitha looked at
the soil and saw chunky alien shoots growing there already. The four red seeds
planted in a row were now stubby silver stems, like sharp thimbles poking up
through the dirt. Wandering around to the waterfall, she saw that the other
seeds had become sturdy black tubes, twice as tall as the silver shoots. She
could feel the energy of their growth there beside the water, strong and
constant. Tabitha closed her eyes and lost herself in the tingly feeling that
came over her; a heady mix of sunlight and birdsong painted over the rustling
forest and the rushing waterfall. She jumped when the silent creature’s
tentacles touched her arm; but Fishbowl was only getting around her on the way
to the pool. It stuck its legs into the water, filled them up, and went about
watering its crops for the morning.

By the time she returned to the pool when the sun was
high, after a lazy swim with Seven in the sea, Tabitha saw Fishbowl still hard
at work. Smiling mischievously, she pulled up her hooded black mask out of her
collar and crept into the clearing, skirting around Fishbowl with a ninja
sneak. She crept closer, until she was right behind it.

‘Boo!’ Fishbowl jumped and juddered, edging away from
her in fright. ‘I’m only messing,’ Tabitha said brightly, pulling her mask down
and giving Fishbowl a little nudge. ‘What’re you up to?’ Fishbowl didn’t seem
to be doing much at first; just drifting about in the clearing, passing between
the shade and the sunlight. But Tabitha soon saw that even this had a purpose.
With a few extra jets of air to take it higher, Fishbowl sailed up among the
broad leaves of the trees. Yawning, Tabitha watched Fishbowl snap off some big
palm leaves that cast a shadow down on its garden. Extra sunlight streamed down
on the sandy ground. Even while Fishbowl floated down and laid out the leaves
on the forest floor, Tabitha saw an instant change in the four silver shoots.
Now that the light poured straight down on them they began to grow visibly.
Tabitha sat close by to watch. Fishbowl did everything with a gentle, ponderous
pace, but it never stopped working. There were always insects to brush away
from its plants, and soil moistness to keep in check. Every so often it would
puff air over the seedlings through one of its tentacles; whether to breathe on
them or blow away any dirt, Tabitha couldn’t be sure. It was the first time in
her life that she’d paid any real attention to gardening. All it’d taken was a
bizarre creature from outer space to make it interesting enough to watch.

‘Is this food you’re growing?’ she asked it, breaking
the peace that had only been filled with birdsong, and the occasional gentle
puff of air. Fishbowl floated on past her and touched a tentacle to the silver
plants, which were growing rapidly into webbed silver mounds.

‘Well if these are for eating I hope you’re hungry,
because I can’t eat anything any more,’ she said, with a hint of sadness. She’d
already seen some juicy-looking fruits on her walks around the island, hanging
bright and tempting from the trees. She’d convinced herself that all the fruit
was poisonous though, to make herself feel better that she couldn’t eat it. She
told herself that it’d kill her in a grizzly over-the-top manner, just to keep
up the lie. As soon as she caught a good bit of sunlight on her skin though,
all thoughts of food flew out of her head. Nothing compared with the feel of
the warm filling sun through her body; a sweet neon tingle that perked her up
with a celestial taste all its own. The first silver cone-plant in the row made
a quiet squelch then, and a fleshy red flower popped out of the hole in its
narrow top.

‘Hey, this one’s grown a flower!’ she called to
Fishbowl. The creature was busy brushing a fallen leaf away from one of the
foot-high black stems by the waterfall. Suddenly it raised a tentacle in her
direction and drifted over quickly, as if it had sensed the new red bloom
spring into life.

‘It’s nice,’ Tabitha lied, looking at the webbed red
petals. It looked like someone had layered bright red veins together into a
flower shape, and stuck the flower stalk into a crooked silver vase. Fishbowl
seemed excited about it though, and busied itself with cleaning and blowing its
new flower. Another soft squelch, and a red bloom poked up out of the third
silver cone too. Before long the other two plants had caught up, and as
Fishbowl watered them the ugly dainty flowers began to spin and stop with the
wind.

‘They can’t be just for decoration,’ Tabitha said to
herself, crouching down to study the blooms as they twirled in the breeze. She
sensed something inside the silver cones, and touched a finger to the sturdy
silver stem closest to her. ‘It’s current,’ she said, surprised. ‘It’s wind
power! You’ve planted a little wind farm, you clever little bugger.’ Fishbowl
ignored her and went about its work. The thick black stump growing to the right
of the waterfall suddenly belched out a blurping mass of dark tentacles, like a
sea anemone dyed with ink. The tentacles began to drift and wave in the
sunlight, as if underwater. Fishbowl seemed rushed suddenly, with all this new
cleaning and watering to be done. Its alien garden was in bloom.

‘This one too,’ Tabitha told it, brushing her hand
through the new black fronds on another giant anemone. ‘It’s taking in the
sunlight like a solar panel, I can feel it!’ she said excitedly. ‘There’s
current inside there. Fishbowl, you’re a genius! But… what’s it for?’ Fishbowl
kept its secrets to itself though, and set about tending to its alien garden.

Tabitha
set off for a run a little while later, making sure she had her water bottle
with her for the growing heat. She wanted to finish a whole lap of the island;
it wasn’t really that big from the air anyway. The jog came easy; her body felt
brand new. The only tricky part to the run was working her way through the
thick forest, dodging tripping roots and sudden drops hidden by the leaves.
There wasn’t anything in the forest on the far side of the island, just as
she’d expected. No sign of people. She’d even felt a little trepidation, before
she started her run. She didn’t want to find a friendly little village
on the far side of the island. She didn’t particularly want to be around
people, or their curious stares. Curious stares were the best she could hope
for, really. She knew what else people were capable of when they were scared of
her. What Tabitha really wanted, more than anything, was to make sure she was
completely alone here. She wanted to start a new life, far away from
everything. Lonely and safe. She’d scoured the forest, and found nothing but
bright birds up among the branches. She got bogged down in slick warm mud on
her way back, knee-deep in the heart of a mangrove forest. She could have sworn
that the same crab had been watching her for the entire sweltering struggle
through the mud. Skittering over the surface just to mock her.

By the time she got back to her familiar stretch of
beach Tabitha was tired and soaking with sweat. The afternoon heat was
draining. She waved hello to Seven where he basked, and collapsed down in the
turquoise shallows to cool off. She lay back on the cool wet sand, with the
tide rushing in around her limbs. Her rest became a nap. By sundown she walked
off stiffly towards the waterfall for a wash.

When she reached the alien garden Tabitha was shocked at
how much the plants had come on. The black tentacle plants had grown from
bushes into young trees, taller than her. Her otherworldly gardener was still
hard at work.

‘Oh god, you look terrible,’ she told Fishbowl, as she
emerged through the forest into the ferny clearing. The creature was sluggish,
shaky, dragging its tentacles on the ground. It bobbed and drifted slowly as it
moved, like a leaky helium balloon.

‘You’ve been working all day, why don’t you rest?’ she
asked it softly, stroking a hand through its gentle tentacles. They touched at
her hand, but not as quickly as they had before. It looked half dead; even its
clear fishbowl head had lost its usual brightness. A cold grey thought ran
through Tabitha’s mind. Maybe the plant creature had served its purpose now.
Maybe that was it.

‘Are you dying, Fishbowl?’ she asked it sadly. She
stepped in front of it while it worked, trying to bar the way to its row of
wind-turbine flowers. ‘They’re fine,’ she told it, trying to block its floating
progress gently with her hand. But its tentacles pushed back, delicately,
steering its floating body around her arm.

‘Do you need another drink?’ she asked it, watching its
sad body drift on low towards its flowers. ‘Can I help?’ she pushed the words
up past a lump of sadness in her throat. ‘Don’t make me lock you inside Seven,’
she threatened. ‘I don’t want you to die.’ Oh god, she said to herself. I’m
grieving over a balloon. Tabitha felt tears come to her eyes then, as
Fishbowl gently sank down to the ground beside its flowers and stopped moving.
Tabitha crouched down and took a limp tentacle in her hand, stroking it
sadly. She could only stare, helpless in her grief. With a slow gentle effort
Fishbowl dragged a tentacle from the ground and patted the silver cone of the
first flower. Tabitha watched with teary eyes. There was a tiny arc of
electricity then, a bright little light that jumped from the flower to
Fishbowl’s outstretched arm. Suddenly Fishbowl rose up into the air, newly energised
with the current, and floated off past her perkier than ever. Tabitha wiped her
tears away, and watched the creature get back to work after its meal.

‘Oh.’

After
several failed attempts to get Seven to do something other than bask, Tabitha
returned to the garden at dusk. Fishbowl seemed to be winding down for the
night. Three of the red flowers had disappeared; she saw the last one fold up
and shrink back down inside its cone with a bung sound. The four black
anemone trees still waved their fronds though, albeit slowly in the fading
light. Stepping closer to the big black plants, Tabitha could make out a gentle
glow coming from them. By the time the last light of the sun had faded to
night, the small pool clearing was lit with a strange white glow coming from
the anemones. A little later, when the sky was filled with clouds of stars and
the birds had stopped singing, the pool clearing was lit like a twilight
garden. A cold wintry light emanated from the giant black plants, reflecting in
the water and shining against the tumbling waterfall. The light reflected in
Tabitha’s eyes, enchanted as she sat by the water. Fishbowl took a drink from
the rippling reflective pool and hovered over to rest by one of its black
trees. It must have felt more at home beside a familiar plant.

‘Goodnight,’ Tabitha said gently, touching her fingers
to Fishbowl’s resting arms. She felt them tap her hand softly in return. As she
passed by the alien flowers on her way back to the beach, their electrical
charge suddenly leapt out at her in thin lightning arcs. Tabitha stopped and
stared at them, wondering what was going on. Looking back, Fishbowl didn’t seem
concerned. Evidently this was a natural thing to happen. Feeling a tingle in
her body, Tabitha watched tiny white arcs of voltage worm their way between her
fingers. She felt an itchiness in her nose, like she was going to sneeze. Her
mind flitted back to Sam and Jane in the lab, and what happened when she’d
sneezed then.

‘Oh, crap,’ she said, and ran as fast as she could through
the trees. Off in the forest she sneezed loudly, and a ball of lightning
exploded from her body with a buzzing bang.

Seven blinked open his white eyes on the darkened beach,
stared for a moment, and settled back down to sleep. It was just the strange
little red-haired ape thing; the one that had brought him to this wonderful
place. She was flailing and cursing, batting out the flames on a few fallen
trees. She was a strange creature.

Seven
was already flying circles of the mountain when Tabitha woke up the next
morning. She dived into the turquoise sea with her alien catsuit on, breathing
compressed air from her pull-up helmet. She swam out further and down into the
deep, glad of the air supply when she discovered a sprawling garden of coral
down beyond a sand bank. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before; a waving
colourstorm of life that almost glowed in the rippling sunlight from above.
She’d never seen fish this bright; vivid shocks of colour weaving in and out of
the coral. Tabitha spent a while just floating there enjoying the sight,
letting all the vital colour and rippling light speak to the deepest part of
her. An incandescent paintbox hymn, seeping a holy golden feeling through her
body. A sea turtle appeared from the bright blue distance and glided past, and
Tabitha watched in reverent stillness. It was so graceful; so real. She’d
never expected to see one up close. She followed it at a distance into deeper
waters, leaving the coral behind. It was so peaceful down here, with the
sunlight rippling along the white sea bed. Up above the sun illuminated the
surface of the water; a vast glowing portal to another world above. A shoal of
fish slipped by in the blue, silver and staring. Down on the seabed clear
shrimps fiddled the sand. Anemones and starfish wafted and waved in their own
tiny world amongst the rocks. Life down here was oblivious to the Earth above;
another dimension under rippling aquatic sunlight. Tabitha felt a rare joy
rising in her; a peace she’d forgotten about. She jumped with fright when a
vast dark shape cut through the water above. All the sea life around her fled
in fear. Tabitha kicked and flailed and tried to swim away, until she realised
what it was and felt stupid for panicking. Seven dived down into the shattered
peace around her, a giant amphibian terror. Tabitha laughed into her breather
mask when he swam close, looking into her eyes curiously. Seven dismissed her
and swam off, a massive black monster in the bright blue. Tabitha floated in
the deep and watched him go. His tail had flattened into a fin like a giant
newt. Gills glowed softly on his neck in hidden recesses. She watched him with
a grinning pride as he chased terrified fish playfully, spinning and swooping
in the turquoise deep. Her monster.

After a while Tabitha’s flight suit made a squelchy
beeping sound, and she guessed it must be her air supply. Seven had long since
burst through the surface above and flown away; Tabitha had just been lying on
the sea bed, looking up at sunlight dapple and pierce the surface high above. A
weightless ecstasy.

When she swam back to shore and wandered out onto the
hot soft sand, Tabitha heard a sharp hiss coming from her suit. A raised bump
on the back was sucking air in, refilling itself. She took off the suit and
left it to hiss in the sunlight, and wandered off through the trees into the
forest beyond.

Fishbowl was tending to its plants in the waterfall
clearing, sipping only as much current as it needed from the flowers in its
garden. Tabitha watched it drink current from the anemones like nectar, and
then zap it out again into a red turbine flower to help it grow. The strange
plants seemed to grow ever larger by the hour, until by midday Tabitha was
sitting in the shade of an oak-sized anemone tree by the waterfall. A strange
feeling crept over her then; a drunken daze. The sun filled her body with a
fresh living light. She felt part of it all. A blissed-out oneness with
Fishbowl, the alien garden, the sun. She felt a sudden silver thrill; an
electro-hippie in a fleeting garden nirvana. And just like that, the feeling
was gone.

After
her waterfall shower Tabitha walked back out onto the beach in search of Seven.
She gazed up and down the sand as she pulled on her alien catsuit, squinting in
the bright sun and clipping the leathery metal belt around her waist. Something
far out to sea caught her attention; a thin grey shape crawling on the horizon.
A battleship. Not black or alien, but very much human. Tabitha felt her world
crash down all over again.

‘Shit!’ she muttered. Tabitha looked around desperately
for Seven and caught sight of him way up high; a black gargoyle shape perched
on the mountain.

‘Seven! Go, fly away!’ she screamed, waving her hands.
‘Seven!’ she whistled as loud as she could, but it was too late. The cracking
boom of artillery filled the bay. A deep weird whirring noise carried overhead
from the distant ship, and the top of the mountain exploded in a hail of dust
and rock. Tabitha screamed and stood frozen, staring wide-eyed at the rising
dustcloud on the peak. There was a roar then, and her dragon tore out from the
dustcloud and came soaring overhead. Tabitha’s heart leapt to see him alive.
More shots echoed from the ship; missing Seven and pounding into the hills
beyond in jumping bursts of sand. Trees toppled. Seven flew around overhead,
growling and panicked and unsure whether to attack.

‘Keep moving, don’t slow down!’ Tabitha yelled up at
him, running for the trees herself. The beach was suddenly a warzone behind
her; a deafening chaos erupting in sand-burst craters. Through the trees
Tabitha found Fishbowl still caring for its flowers, as if nothing was
happening. She ran for it and grabbed the flailing creature up in her arms,
sprinting off into the forest beyond. A deep whirring shot descended and blew
the waterfall garden apart.

‘Seven, down here!’ Tabitha yelled, as his black shape
swept overhead. He roared in answer and crashed down to the ground where the
trees grew thinner. Tabitha leapt up onto the wing he dipped down for her, and
quickly sank down through the hatch with Fishbowl wriggling in her arm. The
ground around them exploded in a hail of grass and soil, startling Seven as he
roared and took off over the trees.

‘Hold onto something!’ Tabitha told Fishbowl in the
cockpit. Her mind leapt into Seven’s like a plug in a socket and she launched
them into the sky. She could tell what Seven wanted to do, and felt nothing but
blind rage coming from his thoughts. When she circled overhead and saw the
smoking ruins of Fishbowl’s alien garden, she was inclined for revenge herself.
But the battleship only fired on them more as it drew closer to the island,
sending wiggling murder-bright lines of bullets rattling into the sky. Flak
burst and boomed in deathly clouds all around them. Seven fought Tabitha’s mind
for control as they flew, filled with a primal rage and desperate to attack.
She wanted to go, he wanted to stay; the result was a stalemate that had them
flying in staggering circles under a hail of gunfire. Tabitha set her mind
against Seven’s with every fibre of her being; straining to deny his murderous
instincts before it got them killed. He was a stubborn bastard. It hurt her
head just to push against his will; trying to overrule it was a shrill stinging
agony.

‘Let’s just go!’ Tabitha snapped angrily as she gripped
the seat, pushing her mind past Seven’s burning fury. His anger rushed back
over her mind like a bloody tide. Seven was racing for the ship now, wanting to
murder everyone on board. Tabitha tried desperately to pull him back as he dived
into the booming gunfire. Suddenly it felt deeply unnatural to have their minds
so intertwined; frightening. She was joined with a wild animal. Seven was
rabid, freaking out. Tabitha yelled and beat his will into submission. She
forced her control despite his objections, and steered his body away into the
sky. Suddenly they were soaring away from the battleship and their smoking
island. The stronger she held her will over his own, the more he growled and
submitted. The more his mind shrank back from her own, the stronger she pushed
him down. Afraid for her life, she wanted to be sure he wouldn’t turn them back
again. Suddenly Tabitha felt something click in her mind, and she stopped
pushing her will. It felt like a gear or a filter had slotted back into place.
Suddenly Seven felt like a ship again, no longer animal. His mind felt grey,
clinical, unthinking. Like a concrete floor for her own mind to stand on.
Absolute obedience. A slave.

By the time they were up above the clouds, high over the
endless sea and many miles from anywhere, Tabitha couldn’t feel Seven in there
any more. There was still a presence there in her head, of something willing
and controlled; but it was nothing more than a shadow. Software. Fishbowl
seemed lost as well, confined in the cockpit with nothing to do. Half its
tentacles gripped the side of the seat, steadying its bobbing body. The other
tentacles waved and writhed in a panic, like they had when she’d first punched
it away. Tabitha didn’t know how much Fishbowl could think about its lost
garden, but it certainly seemed distressed. We did nothing to deserve this,
she said to herself, her ears still ringing from the artillery blasts. Even
hiding away on a deserted island was a military threat, apparently. Growing a
garden and lying in the sun was clearly enough to warrant death or control. But
then, that’s most humans for you, Tabitha said to herself, searching the
hologram globe for another distant back of beyond. They ruin everything.

44

The flight
was torturously quiet. There was only the dull drone of Seven’s jet scales
outside. Tabitha tried constantly to reach out to his mind, but he wasn’t
there. Like his personality was locked away somehow; maybe even erased. He was
the same unthinking, unfeeling ship she’d felt when they first met.

‘Come back to me,’ she said quietly, touching her
fingers to the ribbed console in front of her seat. There weren’t any thoughts
or feelings in Seven’s mind. Only a blankness like silent TV static, waiting
for orders.

‘He’s gone,’ she told Fishbowl helplessly, past a lump
in her throat. ‘There was an animal in there. Now he’s gone, and it’s my
fault.’ Fishbowl looked absent too. Maybe panicked at being trapped in the
cockpit, flying through the air. Or maybe it felt lost without its plants
around, grieving for them. Tabitha sat back and hugged her knees to her chest.
All that sadness in her, locked away, came rushing back out again. She blinked
and watched her tears patter down on her knees, trickling off the scaly skin of
her catsuit.

It
was a clear starry night when she reached the next marker on her hologram
globe; a tiny secluded island off Hawaii. Seven saw differently at night. The
blackness of the world had given way to pale night vision, picking out the land
and the sea in ghostly whites and greys. Tabitha set Seven down in an island
forest and spoke to him for a while in the cockpit, but it was no use. Any
thoughts she’d felt from him once were gone, buried back down under the
obedience of a machine. The ship had only just found his freedom, and now she’d
stamped it right back into its cage again. Wait, she told herself. If
she hadn’t reined him in they’d be dead. Seven was wild when the battleship
turned up. She had to control him. Given his way they would have
attacked it and gone out in a blaze of glory; a thundering white firestorm to
tear the ship apart and slaughter everyone on board. But Tabitha didn’t want
that. More than anything else she’d wanted to escape back to peace and quiet,
far away, where the three of them could be left alone to survive. She touched
her hand out to Fishbowl in the cockpit, but it still didn’t respond. There was
no tentacle-tap of acknowledgement against her fingers. Tabitha sighed sadly
and climbed up through the saddle hatch, leaving Fishbowl inside and Seven sat
there like a statue between the trees. She pulled on her coat and wandered off
through the forest, gripping the alien knife at her belt in case this new
island wasn’t quite so deserted. She looked back at Seven, resting motionless
between the trees and staring ahead, just like a robot again. Tabitha sighed
and walked off into the forest. It sucked being the monster stuck with higher
thinking.

Of all the things Tabitha expected to run into on the
island, a star-studded party wasn’t one of them. She followed the noise and the
light through the trees and stumbled out at the bottom of a lantern-lit garden,
looking up at an ultra-modern mansion beyond. Walls of glass; sharp flat
concrete roof. People talking and laughing around a glowing blue pool.
Everything stylish, everything premium. Everything that should have stopped
existing after the invasion. Wait, was she dreaming? The place was alive with
famous faces, all dressed up for a cocktail party at the end of the world.
There was actual music; it sounded so strange now. Snapping beats and rolling
rushes of digital wavenoise. Brash and jarring against her familiar silence.
Tabitha pushed through the bushes and headed up the garden path, passing a
handful of movie stars who’d fallen quiet to stare.

‘Jesus, you look terrible,’ a comedy star chuckled to
her, looking her up and down in the lantern light. ‘Go get a drink.’

‘Thanks,’ Tabitha mumbled blankly, still looking around
the place in shock. The all-star cast smiled at her nervously, waiting for her
to leave up the path. Tabitha pulled her eyes away from them, numb and
star-struck, and wandered off. As soon as she turned her back she heard the
small group muttering and chuckling about her. A mini-pantheon of her movie gods
and goddesses, standing right behind her there on the lawn, bitching about her
behind her back. She ignored the sting and the embarrassment and walked off
towards the mansion, trying to convince herself that this was all still a
dream. It would have made more sense that way.

Tabitha stepped inside the open-plan mansion and met
with an alien scene. There was music, dancing, electric lights. Perfumed
smells. The clink of ice cubes in glasses. Laughter. Over in the corner lounge
an A-list actor was playing videogames with a supermodel. Playing more than
just videogames, on second glance. Tabitha could only scan the room in shock,
ignoring the few celebrities who were staring at her from their cliques. How
was everything working? And more importantly, how was everyone alive and having
a good time? Was she dreaming, hallucinating, or what?

‘Oh my god, I love it,’ said a glamourous blonde; a face
that Tabitha recognised from blockbuster movies. ‘Who are you wearing?’

‘Sorry?’ Tabitha replied in a daze, still getting over
how ordinary the woman looked in the flesh. Elegantly dressed and undeniably
beautiful, but inescapably ordinary too.

‘Who are you wearing?’ the woman repeated. ‘The
designer?’ Tabitha was lost.

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ a man chipped in beside
her, looking Tabitha up and down as if she was a mannequin. ‘Look at her gloves
though, those are incredible!’ he said, snatching up her hand to admire the
angular grains in her metal skin. ‘Look at the detail here, the weight
of it!’ he said. ‘James would be so jealous if he saw this. Where is he? James!
James, you have to come see this!’ several faces turned to look over at her.
Before long Tabitha had gained a small crowd of critics and admirers. She
looked around at them, not knowing what to say. She could only stare in dumb
silence; starstruck and out of practice with human interaction.

‘I love your contacts,’ a husky rock star told her over
the music with a nod and a grin, pointing two fingers at his eyes. ‘Very cool.’

‘Thanks,’ Tabitha mumbled uncertainly, staring at his
TV-friendly face with wide yellow eyes. Her quiet voice was lost in the noise
of the party.

‘Are you high?’ he asked her, grinning.

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you high?’

‘Er, no,’ she said nervously. Tabitha excused herself
and made her way carefully through the celebrity revellers, as if they were
made of glass. She coaxed and pardoned her way through the crowd over towards
the bar, desperate for that drink she’d been offered. That was the only reason
she was still here.

‘Who is that?’ she heard a woman mutter in
passing.

‘Indie movies, she has to be,’ her friend replied
derisively. ‘I mean, look at her hair.’ they chuckled condescendingly.
Tabitha felt her bullied schooldays bubbling back up in her mind and wanted to
lash out at the pair. She checked herself on that, and felt her claws sinking
back inside her fingertips. Maybe she was a little wilder than she thought
these days. A tall suited man looked her up and down approvingly as she
wandered through the crowd. When the woman on his arm caught him staring he
looked away.

‘Daddy, is she a monster?’ a little girl asked her
famous father. Say no, Tabitha said to herself, as she walked past them
towards the bar. Say I’m just like everyone else.

‘I think she is honey,’ he said warily. He was staring
at her hands and feet; her striking eyes. If there were any security staff
around, Tabitha was sure he’d be motioning for them to come over. It was
the way everyone was just staring but not saying anything. Not asking her what
happened, or if she was ok. Just staring at the freak on parade. People were
backing away. Tabitha felt something wither away inside her then; some last
little piece of her that still wanted to be accepted. She switched off to the
people turning and staring, muttering things to one another under cover of the
music. A drunk middle-aged man tried to shake her hand and introduce himself,
but he recoiled at her hard black fingers and cold golden stare. The barman
looked up and smiled as Tabitha approached, obviously trying to ignore her
hands.

‘What can I get you?’ he said with uncertainty, glancing
around.

‘Whisky please,’ Tabitha replied. She looked down at her
reflection on the mirrored glass bar-top. She recalled another bar, another
mirror. The hulking black shape in the city of skin, staring down at her in the
reflection. She remembered how scared she’d been, and the acid-trip dreams that
night after she’d killed it. She didn’t feel scared of these famous reflections
staring at her in the mirrored bar. This wasn’t real fear.

‘I’ll get this,’ a man said loudly beside her, shouting
over the music. He was grinning, drunk, muscular. He barged into her when he
moved a little too close beside her. He put a hand around her waist
possessively.

‘Business or pleasure?’ he asked her, his warm boozy
breath in her ear. ‘Name your price.’ His hand slipped down to her arse cheek.

‘Leave me alone!’ she said, pulling away from him.
Tabitha put her hand on the glass bar to steady herself, used too much
strength, and the entire mirrored shelf shattered and crashed to the floor. The
music stopped abruptly; every face turned to look. There were screams. The
falling glass had cut people at the bar.

‘Sorry!’ Tabitha mumbled into the sudden silence, not
knowing where to look.

‘Jesus,’ said the drunk muscleman, staggering away from
her as a small group of celebrities asked him what happened. Tabitha turned
back to the barman, waiting for her drink, but he was keeping his distance.

‘I think you should go,’ a woman called from the crowd.
Tabitha ignored her, shutting down to the sea of faces at her back with mixed
anger and embarrassment.

‘Can I have my drink please?’ Tabitha asked the
bartender. He just stared at her, backing away down the bar.

‘For god’s sake,’ she said, reaching over the bar for
the bottle of whisky. The bottle made a dull clink against her hand when
she grabbed it. She necked a couple of big gulps, and gasped at the fiery feel
in her throat as she turned to face the silent party. The way everyone was just
staring at her, not saying anything… it was starting to piss her off.

‘What?’ she asked them. She stared at her movie heroes
and heroines with contempt. They’d always had more grace and manners than this,
at least as far as she knew. Maybe with a bit too much movie polish she’d seen
people they weren’t. Right here, right now, they were just a snooty staring mob.

‘Somebody take her outside,’ a man said in the silence.
A heavy-set man looked around for support, and stepped towards her.

‘Don’t,’ Tabitha warned him, flicking out her claws. He
hesitated.

‘Take it outside, freak,’ a woman called from the crowd.
‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on with you, but you don’t belong here.
We’re trying to have a good time. Someone put the music back on.’ Tabitha
stared at them until frightened faces looked away. She peered over at the
celebrity casualties on the couch, being crowded and fussed over for the sake
of a few glancing glass cuts. Where was her sympathising crowd when she’d been
wounded? When she’d been stabbed, shot, cut through, opened up and picked
apart? Where was all the care and attention then? Oh yeah, she wasn’t human
like everyone else. She wasn’t vulnerable; she could take it. Everyone had
assumed that just because she could heal from it, she couldn’t feel it.

‘Get out of my house, you weird bitch!’ said a man in a
white suit, zipping up his flies and pushing forward in the crowd. ‘Who are
you, anyway? I didn’t invite you. Fuck off.’ Tabitha gritted her teeth and
walked slowly from the bar towards the doors. When the man tried to grab her
and force her out Tabitha sank her claws into his arms by reflex. He yelled and
backed away, staring in shock as he clutched his bleeding arm.

‘They’re coming for you too, you know,’ Tabitha told the
room of silent faces, taking another swig of whiskey as she headed for the
door. ‘All your money, all your talent, it won’t mean a thing when they
get here. You can’t buy your way out of this.’

‘What’s your point exactly?’ an actress said mockingly,
as Tabitha headed through the crowd towards the open glass doors. ‘You’re going
to die with the rest of us, you weird bitch. At least we’ve got the
means to enjoy ourselves before the end. No one even knows who you are.
What are you even doing here?’

Tabitha whistled into the night sky, and walked down
into the garden by the bright-lit pool. She just hoped that Seven still
responded to her whistle.

‘You think we’re bad people?’ the actress said angrily,
pressing the point, following Tabitha down into the garden. A crowd gathered at
the doors, drinking in the drama. ‘There aren’t any rules any more that you can
judge us by,’ said the woman, diving into the argument. ‘It’s survival of the
fittest now. We’re the fittest. So if the end’s coming, yeah, we’re going to
enjoy our money. And we’ll carry on enjoying it right up to the end.’ Other
people murmured their agreement in the crowd. ‘We’ll carry on enjoying
ourselves right until the end,’ the woman repeated. ‘We’ll carry on living right
until the end.’ The crowd of famous faces liked the sentiment. ‘The best survive,’
the actress told Tabitha, with a philosophical air. ‘The best look out for
themselves and survive to enjoy the spoils. Like it or not, that’s what makes
us human.’ Suddenly Seven dived down out of the night and landed heavily in the
garden, and the house filled with screams and yells at the roaring black
monster. Tabitha climbed up onto his back.

‘I’m glad I’m not human then,’ she replied, settling
down into the saddle. Tabitha took a swig of whiskey while the harness fitted
around her. With a thought she sent Seven leaping up over the garden with a jet
blast. The crowd screamed as the creature bounded off the mansion roof, and
they watched it tear off into the night.

Survival of the fittest. The woman’s words echoed in Tabitha’s head as she soared
into the starry sky. She looked down from Seven’s back at the dark world laid
out far below, and took another tipsy swig of the whisky bottle and threw it
into the night. Those people back there weren’t the fittest; not any more. They
were just hiding away from extinction, gorging themselves on the last scraps of
success while the new fittest took over the world. And trying to quote Darwin
to justify themselves wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference. Selfish
and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be
effected. They were fucked.

Tabitha sank down into the cockpit and watched the
world roll away beneath them; a gleaming mould-white carpet in Seven’s spectral
night vision. Spirit-white beaches and lead-grey rainforest rolled on forever
as they reached Panama. At least, Tabitha thought it was Panama. She didn’t
know. It was the narrowest stretch of land on the hologram map anyway. She saw
farms and cities in ruins, looking all the more haunting in her ship’s
nocturnal sight. She took Seven higher so that the dead towns and villages were
just vague patchworks far below. She couldn’t stand to see any more death and
destruction.

The peaceful cockpit kept
the temperature steady as Tabitha dozed, and the alien flight suit let her skin
breathe freely. She still couldn’t feel Seven’s mind though, despite her
attempts to reach out to him. Fishbowl was bobbing around placidly in the
cockpit as they flew, until Tabitha felt a gentle tapping on her arm while she
was trying to connect her thoughts to Seven’s.

‘What’s up?’ she asked
Fishbowl brightly, coming out of the ship’s mind and back into the cockpit. She
was just glad to have some interaction at last. Fishbowl simply floated there
next to her, and held out a tentacle.

‘Water?’ Tabitha guessed.
She plucked the strange bottle from her belt and looked around the cockpit for
a container to pour it in, but came up short. She glugged a bit into her cupped
palm, and Fishbowl was straight in with a slurping tentacle. Tabitha gave it a
few more glugs and drank a bit herself to take the edge off her whiskey
headache. She was going to have to drink much more water than this to stay
hydrated, she told herself. She refilled the bottle from the water dispenser
behind the seat; it had a cold smooth taste. It was a novelty just to have
water on tap again, there whenever she wanted it, easy as that. Where did Seven
get it from though? Was it filtered seawater? She laid a palm on the dispenser
and got a feeling from it; there was gallons of it held in a sac beyond the
ribbed back wall. At least she wasn’t going to go thirsty, then. Tabitha
yawned, stood up, stretched her legs. She’d have to decide where to go next,
she supposed. Right now they were just flying without any particular place in
mind. They should go somewhere uninhabited; that was all she could think of.
Maybe another castle somewhere. It wasn’t like they needed food or supplies;
they could live anywhere.

‘Where should we go?’ she
asked Fishbowl, pulling up the hologram globe on the console. Its blue light
lit her face with a calm glow.

‘Amazon? You’d like the
Amazon,’ she told her companion. ‘You could grow flowers bigger than a house
there. Hey, I could build a treehouse. Or what about Peru? It looks beautiful
there, from the pictures. What do you think?’ she turned to look at Fishbowl,
just glad to have something different to talk about. The creature just floated
peacefully beside her and did nothing. ‘Never mind,’ said Tabitha, watching
Fishbowl’s tentacles tap along her hand when she held it out. ‘I’m not very
good with decisions either. Let’s do that then. Let’s go to Peru.’ Tabitha
zoomed in on the hologram globe, held up her finger to the western coast, and
hesitated. There weren’t any countries marked out on the globe, of course. Just
land and sea.

‘Er,’ she mumbled, waving
her finger around the general area. Ok, so she really was rubbish at geography.
No point pretending. ‘Ah, we’ll know it when we see it.’ She took a guess and
tapped her finger into the deepest part of the curving west coast, in the
middle of the continent. Seven banked gently to the right, and Tabitha left him
to it while she lay back in the seat to get some sleep. She just couldn’t face
any more of that hard metal coldness that she felt in his mind.

‘Come back to me,’ she
told Seven quietly, reaching out to press her palm to the wall. ‘I’m sorry.’

By sunrise they were landing down quietly on a cloud-cloaked
mountaintop, crowded with stone walls as old as myth. Machu Picchu; she
couldn’t believe she was really here. Tabitha sat in the saddle for a while
just to take it all in, and watched Fishbowl float off to explore the grass.
She’d always wanted to come here. She was slap-bang in the heart of living
history, surrounded by a solid earthy slab of legend. With her short attention
span nagging at the reverent pause, Tabitha yawned away her sleep and jumped
down from the saddle onto Seven’s wing. His scales were so dark now; nothing
like when she’d first met him. Coal black. She made a point of stroking his
neck, but he didn’t respond. Tabitha sighed sadly and turned away, walking down
his wing like a ramp. She turned her attentions back to her destination and
drank in the feel of the place, old and sacred. She smiled at the mountain view.

‘Well, this is Machu
Picchu,’ she told Fishbowl, who was already bobbing around brightly above the
grass in the city square. As soon as the creature had caught the scent of
plants and earth on the fresh air it had pushed past her to get out of Seven’s
hatch and explore.

‘At least someone’s
happy,’ she said with a smile, watching Fishbowl tapping its tentacles on the
grass around them. ‘You could have a word with him if you like,’ she said
quietly, nodding at Seven. ‘He’s not the same any more.’ Tabitha wandered off
towards the steep edge of the mountain, and looked around at the misty peaks
that surrounded them. ‘Unless I’m just going insane, of course,’ she mumbled to
herself. She was worrying over the emotional health of a dragon and an octopus.
Still, who else did she have left to think about? Seven and Fishbowl were her
friends, in some weird way. Her monsters.

The clouds were lit gold
in the rising sun. The only smell was grass in the fresh breeze. Tabitha saw
light pouring over a different world around her, high and remote, hidden away
in miles of forest as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t quite a tropical
beach… but at least they were far from any battleships here. Her and Seven
could take care of any stray spiders if they came creeping up to find them, and
it was a long way up. It felt safe here; hidden. It was a good place to set up
their home. She just hoped it would last.

Tabitha placed her metal
hands on rough ancient stone, carved into steps leading up to a rock platform.
The stone walls of houses lined the mountaintop, from hovels to palaces. She
had a whole town to herself, and Fishbowl could fill up the empty squares and
foundations with new alien gardens. Tabitha smiled at the thought. All she
wanted was a chance to live in peace.

Seven had taken to the
high peak that jutted over the town, and perched there on the highest rock with
his wings spread to the sunlight. Fishbowl was floating around the stone
terraces on the edge of the mountaintop, taking a great deal of interest in the
grass and weeds and waving a tentacle through them. Tabitha looked around,
nodded contentedly, and didn’t know what she could do. She always seemed to get
teary in her quiet moments these days.

‘What am I supposed to do
now, Mum?’ Tabitha asked the sky and the steep outlook in front of her. Her
hand went straight for the ribbon on her wrist. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if I
had something to concentrate on, but there’s nothing left.’ She wiped her nose
on the sleeve of her catsuit. She sniffled snot, laughed a little, and looked
up at the sky. ‘Look, I’m still a big crybaby,’ she told her mum, smiling
through her tears. ‘I don’t know where I’m supposed to go, or what I’m supposed
to do. I mean, is it safe here? Or should I be on the other side of the world,
looking for survivors?’ she sat down and hugged her knees close, staring over
the steep drop at the hills and forest below. ‘I can’t even be around other
people any more though,’ she told her mum. ‘I’m not the same person.’ Tabitha
searched the heavens; watched the horizon under the golden sun, thinking all
the while. And none of it helped her. Maybe she didn’t have to do
anything. Maybe surviving for herself was enough. Perhaps this was her life
now; blissful stretches of silver peace, shot through with sharp red chaos
whenever they found her again. Just like being in the food chain, she supposed.
Everything else had been living like that for millions of years.

‘I’ll survive all of
this,’ she told the grass at her black feet. ‘That’s what I’ll do with my life.
I’ll just be a survivor. A damn good one.’

Tabitha strode back
across the grassy square with a new sense of purpose. Survival, she said
to herself. Like a mantra. It was a loose, misty kind of idea she had in her
head, but at least it was something to set her mind to. She felt better having
a plan, however basic it might be.

‘Water,’ she said to
herself. ‘Water’s the most important thing.’ She walked off towards Seven on
the peak, and was about to whistle him down into the city when she heard
running water off to her left. It was coming from the sprawl of roofless stone
houses, deep in the heart of the town. Tabitha followed the faint sound down
dirt-path streets until it became a clear sloshing gush, and she rounded the
corner of a stone alleyway to find the source. It was a square hole cut into
the rock face, slapping water down into a stone basin in the ground. Tabitha
sipped at a little to taste it, and filled her water bottle with a high-pitched
rumble. She noticed a sunken button in the base of the bottle once she’d filled
it, and pressed it in. The bottom split open like a flower, and a little filter
inside dripped a dab of brown gunge on the ground. The base closed back up
again, and that was that.

‘Well that was weird,’
she muttered, crouching down to dab her finger in the brown drip. It just
seemed to be dirt. The bottle must have purified her water.

‘Mm,’ she concurred with
herself, taking a sip. The water had a pure smoothness to it, fresh and
mountain-cold. She turned around and jumped as she bumped into Fishbowl.

‘Oh hi you,’ she said
brightly, sipping from her bottle. ‘Have some. It’s really good.’ She left
Fishbowl to drink from the stone basin, and navigated back through ancient
streets until she was back out on the green courtyard.

‘Ok, so water,’ she said,
counting the essential with her thumb. ‘Then food,’ she added, popping up a
finger and nodding at the sun. ‘Shelter… I’ve got a dragon for that… warmth,
see above… and, what else?’ she looked around at a loss, staring at the
mountain city. Searching for answers. There had to be more to survival than
that. ‘Protection from predators, I suppose,’ she said. She touched the handle
of the knife on her belt, and counted it off on her mental list by raising her
little finger. She had her claws too, strong enough to tear holes in monsters;
a small pack of spiders was nothing to her any more. ‘So now what?’ she said, a
tiny figure standing alone on the mountaintop. The only thing she really had
left to do was turn the ruins into a home. She smiled at the prospect, and
looked around for the best house in town.

‘So this is an orchid, I
think,’ Tabitha told Fishbowl, who was bobbing next to her on the terraces. It
reached out a tentacle and tapped at the flower then wrapped it around the
stem, about to pull it from the ground.

‘No,’ said Tabitha,
pulling the tentacle gently away. ‘It’s not a weed. It’s a flower. Flowers are
good. Bees need them.’ She watched Fishbowl floating there, puffing air from
its gills and hesitating. It reached back to the orchid and stroked it gently,
and patted down the ground around it.

‘Very good,’ Tabitha said
happily, watching Fishbowl move closer to water the flower from a tentacle tip.
‘Good job.’ She led Fishbowl’s tentacle gently over towards a second flower,
and patted around the ground there as well. Fishbowl got the message, and
watered that flower too. Tabitha smiled, and felt a contented feeling rising
inside her. She’d never thought that gardening could do that to her. ‘Well,
there’s a million more flowers around here,’ she told Fishbowl, looking around
the terraces. ‘Should keep you busy enough, if you fancy the job.’ Tabitha
watched her monster move on to a third flower further along, patting down the
grass around it and giving it some water. Suddenly it was hard at work with a
gardening project, back to its usual Fishbowl self. If only her ship was so
easy to handle, Tabitha said to herself. She looked up at her dragon perched
high on the peak. The sky all around them had grown thick with low cloud, and
her dragon stood out black as death against the drifting white fog and the
mountains beyond. The real Seven was still in there somewhere; she was sure of
it. Hidden away behind those big white eyes that stared at her from the peak.
She left Fishbowl to it on the terraces, and wandered off back to Seven across
the grassy square. The sunlight spilled down through the mist in heavenly rays,
pouring drama into a living landscape painting all around her. Tabitha could
only sigh and look around at the view, drinking in the sight of vivid green
grass and dark jutting mountains that surrounded them. She’d take some alien
seeds out from the cockpit, she decided, and let Fishbowl try to grow another alien
garden here. It was the perfect place for it, and she’d never seen the creature
look so content as when it had its garden. She peered up to the mountain peak
above to call Seven down, and looked around at the clouds at the sound of
sudden rumbling thunder. Except it wasn’t thunder. It was Seven, she realised.
He was staring down at her, growling.

‘Hey, what’s your
problem?’ she called up to him, coming closer. ‘Don’t you dare growl at me!’
she aimed a finger at him as he shifted his body round towards her on his rocky
perch. His growls were getting louder, until she felt them rumbling right in
her chest.

‘What the hell’s going on
with you?’ she said. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to take over your mind, or
whatever I did to you. I was trying to get us out of there. I was trying to
stop us getting killed.’ Seven carried on growling, and stretched out
his gigantic wings. ‘In fact, why am I even trying to explain anything to you?’
she said. ‘You don’t understand any of this anyway. I don’t know what to do to
make you –

Seven leapt off the rocky
peak and swept overhead, cutting her off mid-sentence. Tabitha turned to watch
him disappear into the vast wall of cloud, and heard him roar as he vanished
out of sight. ‘Or, you could just leave us here if you wanted to,’ she sighed.
‘Just like that.’ There was a thundering boom then from deep in the clouds, and
a flash of white light illuminated the mist. Seven came tearing back out of the
murk and soared over Tabitha’s head, circling the mountain. The creature was
too grey though, she realised. Too pale. It wasn’t Seven. Another roar from the
shrouded hills, and her big black dragon burst out of the clouds and shot after
it. Tabitha was shocked to see how much bigger Seven was than the other. The
scrawny grey dragon was like a battery hen; Seven was free-range. Was that
really what he’d looked like, just a few days ago? Suddenly it was diving for
her. Tabitha ran for her life. The smaller grey dragon didn’t get so much as a
flame from its mouth before Seven ripped it out of the sky and tore its throat.
The ground shook beneath Tabitha’s feet as the two dragons crashed down into
the city square, and she watched Seven murdering his own kind with a feral
intensity. The grey dragon roared and submitted beneath him, and Seven crunched
its neck and silenced it. He looked up at Tabitha with wild white eyes, silver
blood raining and slopping from his jaws. A tyrant. Seven bore down on the
mangled dragon like a hawk over its kill, his wings spread to conceal it. He
sank his claws deeper into the twitching grey dragon with a savage crunch. It
screamed in pain when he finished it off, and he bit down and tore its head
away from its gushing neck to tumble down the mountainside.

‘Er… thank you,’ Tabitha
murmured, frightened, uncertain if that was what she meant to say. It was an
automatic response. Seven had protected them from a threat, after all.
She was right to thank him. But mostly she was terrified by what she saw in
him. A true monster; as cruel and vicious as it was gigantic. Tabitha felt the
ground shake beneath her feet again, only this time so much stronger. There was
a sudden deep drone over the hills. The whole mountain seemed to be trembling
with a tremor; stone walls around her began to shake and tumble down. Seven
joined his guttural growl to the creeping tide of hellish thunder, and fixed
his eyes on a colossal dark shape that threw a vast shadow across the clouds.
Whatever was coming for them, it was big enough to shake mountains. Seven was
staring intently, ready to attack. Tabitha whistled to him, and he looked away
from the shadow and down at her. He hadn’t heard her shouting to him.

‘You can’t fight that
thing!’ Tabitha called up to him, with Fishbowl struggling in her arm. ‘It’ll
kill us! Let’s just go!’ Seven carried on growling at the vast shape emerging.
He looked back down to Tabitha and relented, sweeping down onto the square and
lowering his body for them to climb in.

‘Thank you,’ Tabitha said
softly, stroking his neck as the saddle lowered her and Fishbowl down into the
cockpit. ‘Now let’s get the hell away from that thing!’ Tabitha set Fishbowl
free beside her seat as the hatch closed, and she plugged into Seven’s sight.
He felt there again, no longer just grey concrete software; he was a
massive animal intensity in the back of her mind. Tabitha launched Seven into
the air and tore off through the clouds, leaving the vast dark shape to cast
its shadow down over the mountain city.

45

Seven shot between hills and swept down over arid plains,
kicking up a boiling desert dustcloud in his wake. Tabitha watched the dry
plains disappear beneath them and give way to steep jagged mountains that
jutted into the sky. She thought back to the fight. She’d seen the grey dragon
gush silver blood. Heard its screams as Seven had torn it apart. But… if not
the grey dragon’s frightened screams, then it would have been hers instead when
it came to kill her. She felt bad for Seven. He’d done the right thing, brutal
and terrifying though it was. He’d saved their lives. She wanted him to know
that thought. That she was grateful. She felt a tension release between them
then, somewhere in the back of her mind. Like the filter had lifted. His
forgiveness. Tabitha smiled, and reached out and stroked the wall of the
cockpit. She could feel the bond between them, really feel it in her head, like
shining silver strands connecting their minds. All of a sudden she felt a
rising anger in him. She felt his growling vibrate the cockpit. Dark shapes
were following them in the sky overhead. Tabitha didn’t need to guess what they
were.

‘Hold on tight,’ she told
Fishbowl, taking a tentacle and touching it the metal nest around the seat.
Fishbowl took hold of the nearest metal rib, and anchored itself firmly with
all its arms as Seven began to tilt. Tabitha turned Seven around to see what
they were up against. A large pack of grey dragons, and the vast black shape
creeping along far behind. Tabitha felt a rabid fury rising up in Seven’s mind,
just like she had when they were faced with the battleship. Only this time, she
didn’t try to hold him back. She was sick of running.

‘Tear them apart,’ she
told him. Seven snarled, wild and raw. They swept higher and tore off towards the
dragons. The leader of the grey pack belched a white jet of flame down on them.
It shook the cockpit, but did no damage. Tabitha yelled, Seven roared, and they
smashed into the dragon and bit deep down into its neck. The leader struggled
against Seven’s claws and bit back. Seven growled and flinched, but Tabitha
didn’t feel it. She wanted to tear its throat out, so that was what Seven did.
She wanted to break its wings off and send it plummeting to the desert far
below; Seven obliged. Tabitha looked up at a second dragon swooping down on
them from above, and had Seven meet it head-on in a feral wrestling match.

‘Fuck you!’ she screamed
from the cockpit. Seven roared demonic. Minds joined, they spat a fireball into
it. The grey dragon staggered at the blast. She and Seven were straight in
there to crack its head in their jaws. A third dragon crashed into them from
behind and tore a scale from Seven’s back. Seven growled and spun around, and
crunched the dragon’s jaws together in his own. Another chomp and its head
caved in with a bloody gush, and Tabitha opened Seven’s claws to send the
mangled creature flailing lifelessly to the ground. Another dragon collided
with them, and another from behind. They couldn’t fight away the third one too,
snapping at their wings and tearing away Seven’s scales. She felt Seven
panicking as a fourth and a fifth descended on them. Tabitha took control of
his wings. She curled them round into hollow arms, like she’d seen him do
before when he was walking, and hurled a punch at the dragon in front of them.
It snarled and broke away, and a second punch freed Seven’s wing from the
snapping jaws of another. Seven’s huge flightless body was too heavy for their
grasping claws, and suddenly Tabitha felt them falling free. She opened up
Seven’s wings and took off into the sky, spitting fireballs at the dragons that
followed in their wake. They couldn’t take on the pack all on at once, Tabitha
realised. Seven was strong but he wasn’t unstoppable. She’d have to lead them
on and pick them off one by one – unless the pack picked them off first, one
diving bite at a time.

Seven tore over stark
desert. The grey dragons followed close behind. They sank low towards the sand,
churning up dusty beige jetstreams in their wake. Tabitha twisted Seven around
a jagged hill, slowed to let the dragons overtake, and let Seven catch up and
tear the straggler to pieces. Seven tore it wing from wing in a firework burst
of silver blood, and threw the creature away to crash down dead in the desert.
The rest turned in the air and filled the sky with white fire. Seven burst
through the flames and smashed into the dragon in the middle. Tabitha folded
his wings and they dropped from the sky with the grey dragon flailing in their
claws. Seven ploughed the dragon head-first into the ground, cratering the sand
in a thumping burst. He took a solid grip around the dragon’s neck, and tore
its head from its body in a silver gush. Tabitha yelled and Seven roared as
they leapt back into the sky, and together they tore apart another in the pack.
Suddenly Tabitha felt a searing pain in her back, and realised that she felt
what Seven felt. A dragon behind them had clawed off a scale and bit Seven’s
skin, tearing into bloody white flesh. Seven spun around savagely and sank his
teeth into the dragon’s throat, biting over and over until the bloody body
dropped dead from his claws. Another dragon bit down into Seven’s wing and
another caught his tail, tearing off the tip. He was getting pinned down.

‘Go!’ Tabitha yelled,
wrestling Seven’s mind away from his fury and taking off into the sky. Seven
trailed blood as he tore off over the desert; a sparkling silver rain in the
hard hot sunlight. The dragons followed behind like a pack of dogs, looking for
the next chance to jump in. Tabitha and Seven turned to see them crowding the
pale sky behind.

‘Wait,’ said Tabitha,
taking a firm hold of Seven’s mind. From the corner of her eye, she saw the
dragons gaining on them. ‘Now!’ Seven spun around and snatched a dragon from
the sky, crunching its throat in his fangs. He dropped it and shot off again,
forcing the dragons to bank around and change direction to tail him. Tabitha
steered him into a wild spiral and took off in another direction again, keeping
the dragons working for their prey. They’d be easier to fight when they were
tired. Seven’s next retaliation went wrong though. Tabitha didn’t look before
she spun around to face them, and two dragons smashed into them and bit down
deep into Seven’s throat. Tabitha screamed at the pain and wrenched Seven away,
but he was already slowing down. They felt another smash from behind, and a
chunk torn from Seven’s side. Another from his back, and claws scratching at
his head. Seven twisted and writhed in the sky as they mobbed him, fighting
away one assault after another. Suddenly Tabitha felt a rush of panic from him.
He was afraid for his life. Seven broke away from the pack and climbed ever
higher, shooting straight up into the sky. Tabitha saw a split-second vision in
his frightened mind, with a feeling too. Stars. Space. Safety, mixed with fear.
A last resort.

‘You can go up there?’
she said, shocked. ‘Go then! Go!’ she yelled. How could he breathe up there?
Was that why he was afraid? Seven tore up into the dark high atmosphere, his
jet scales flaring with all the energy he had left. The grey dragons were all
around him, closing the gap. They attacked from all sides in vicious volleys,
and Tabitha felt Seven running out of strength to fight them all back. Another
bite here, another cut there. Grappling him and pulling at his wings; tiring
him out. Wearing away at him until his climb for freedom was a hellish
struggle. Suddenly the desert spun far beneath them as Tabitha fought for
control.

‘Come on!’ she yelled,
urging Seven to carry on climbing. She felt him lagging, beaten and bloody.
When one of the dragons crashed into them from the side and bit down into his
wing, Tabitha could barely get Seven to struggle against it.

‘Come on!’ she screamed
again desperately, wrenching his bloody wing away from the clamping jaws and
leaving a piece behind. But they weren’t climbing for the distant stars any
more. Seven snarled in pain and nose-dived, and Tabitha strained to straighten
him up. Her vision was fading to black as Seven tried to stay conscious. With
his mind fading from her grip, Tabitha couldn’t get in there to take control.
She couldn’t pull him up; they were just falling now. Tabitha tried desperately
to get back into his head, but it was like watching the world through a grimy
old window. An eternal drop to the desert as the pack dived on at their heels.
Tabitha made out a mountain looming below, a vast rocky plateau that towered
over the desert. It came up quicker now, and she felt Seven’s jets splutter and
stop. She wrestled to open his wings out, trying to slow their fall. It was an
aching strain on her mind, like lifting a rock. As the flat mountaintop got
closer and rose up beneath them, all Tabitha could do was try to slow Seven
down for the impact. They kicked up a dust trail behind them across the
mountaintop, and Tabitha saw Seven’s shadow getting larger beneath them as they
flew lower. The racing rocky ground got closer, closer… and bit. Seven ploughed
head-first into the mountaintop and buckled at the impact, somersaulting with a
violent jerk and smashing into the dirt. Tabitha’s vision went black, and she
felt blood rush to her head. She sank back out of Seven’s mind and looked
around the cockpit in panic, almost upside down. She unfastened her harness
with trembling hands. When the straps came loose, she fell down hard on her
shoulder against the wall.

‘Fishbowl?’ she said
breathlessly, gripping her shoulder in pain as she looked around the cockpit.
The creature was hidden away behind the seat, grasping on tight. Breathing
sharp shocked breaths.

‘You’re ok,’ she said,
stroking Fishbowl’s arms. It tensed up and moved away though, backing right up
into the corner. Tabitha looked up at the seat for the white ring of light to
open the hatch, but it wasn’t there. Instead she had to press her hands against
the saddle hatch and force it open, and suddenly the dust and the desert light
flooded her blinking eyes. She staggered out onto the rocky mountaintop, and
saw huge dark shapes circling overhead.

‘Seven!’ she yelled,
running around to look her dragon in the eyes. She stepped back in horror then,
as his silver blood pooled huge on the sand around her feet. Seven blinked his
white eyes open slowly, and made a low tortured growl.

‘Oh god,’ Tabitha sobbed,
laying her palms on his big broad snout. His torn flesh gushed. Seven tried to
move, growled with the pain, and collapsed down altogether in his blood. The
dragons landed down around them, surrounding them in a wide circle on the
mountaintop. Tabitha tried desperately to stop Seven’s bleeding, planting her
hands down tight against a huge gushing wound in his neck. It was no use. The
silver blood spurted out with all the force of a broken water main, soaking her
catsuit and the desert sand. Tabitha felt a shaking tremor then, and watched
the ground trembling through teary eyes. Up above something blocked out the sun
over the mountain. It was the vast black ship that had loomed over them in the
clouds; the one they’d had to run from. It was back.

The hulking black ship stabbed the desert landscape with
its presence, dwarfing the flat mountain beneath it. It was a ribbed
monstrosity, a death-black hybrid of whale and squid. Bigger than Tabitha
thought possible. She stuck close to Seven as a small black craft descended on
them, no bigger than a fly when it darted out from the mothership’s belly.
Tabitha was tired of running. Tired of being the freak. She just wanted to
finish what those things had started. With tired teary eyes she watched the
alien transport descend like a giant black wasp.

‘I’m going to protect you,’ she said, looking into
Seven’s half-open eyes. ‘If they even come near you I’m going to tear them
apart.’ The raw drone of jet engines kicked up a dust cloud in front of them,
and the black craft lowered itself down onto solid spidery legs. As the front
hissed open and a tall dark figure emerged, Tabitha put herself between Seven
and the transport. It looked just like the figure she’d seen long ago on the
edge of the castle field, studying the fight against the Ghosts. A watcher. It
walked down the white ramp towards her. It wore a mask and a black flight suit
like hers, though it looked more armoured. It must have been taller than her by
a good two feet or more. Everything about it was elongated; elegant. Sinister.

‘Come any closer and I’ll fucking execute you!’ Tabitha
screamed at it, pulling the knife from her belt. The grey dragons looked on
silently, like an audience of towering statues. The desert wind whipped up sand
around them, cold and dry on the silent mountaintop. The watcher was still striding
towards her. More dragons circled above them. A swarm of spiders came scuttling
out of the craft, surrounding her and Seven. The alien figure stopped in the
middle of the circle, and held out its hand to her. Beckoning her to come
closer.

‘Are you letting me surrender?’ Tabitha said cautiously,
walking towards it. More figures watched from the craft. She saw them over the
alien’s shoulder as she drew nearer. Slowly, carefully, Tabitha closed the last
few feet between them. Gently, the alien reached out its hand to her. Tabitha
watched it warily. All the fighting could be over, all the fear and all the
running; all she had to do was take its hand. But she was a Ghost. The last
one. And Ghosts went out fighting. Tabitha pounced and struck with the knife.
The figure grabbed her and threw her to the ground in a whispering cloud of
dust. Seven barked a blood-gurgling roar at the sight of Tabitha going down.
She ran at the watcher again and flew back down to the sand in a daze, only
realising after a couple of seconds that she’d taken a hard punch to the head.
The watcher walked over to Seven, and held its palm out before the dragon’s
jaws. Seven was growling savagely, but was struggling to move at all. The
watcher said something Tabitha didn’t understand, and seemed unhappy with
Seven’s behaviour. As she staggered to her feet, Tabitha watched the figure
place its palm on Seven’s snout. A small flash of light and Seven’s white eyes
flickered to black, and his huge body collapsed dead on the ground. Tabitha screamed
and ran at the watcher, and she felt a gunshot hammer into her back. She
smacked face-down in the dirt, coughing sand. Tabitha rolled painfully onto her
back and realised she couldn’t get up. She saw more watchers tying cords
between Seven and their transport ship. Dragging his lifeless body in beneath
the craft’s spider legs; taking hold. Tabitha watched the hard blue sky swim in
a daze. The glowing gunshot wound was draining all the energy out of her,
exhausting her. She could barely keep her eyes open, and fighting it only made
it worse. The world twisted and faded away as she lost consciousness. More
watchers crowded around to take hold of her.

Tabitha
came around for a moment, drifted out, came around again. They’d docked and
left the transport behind in a hangar; the watchers must have brought her onto
the monstrous mothership looming over the mountain. She was being dragged down
a ribbed white corridor brighter than heaven; one long fleshy ribcage. She
glanced down at glowing cuffs on her wrists; some kind of energy. Tough as
steel. She looked up and saw the stretched black figures escorting her, scaled
and armoured. Gripped with panic, she gasped and struggled against a tentacle
grip around her torso. Something was carrying her; something huge and
monstrous. Her fevered struggling earned her another paralysing shot to the
chest. The white living walls faded from sight again as the dark figures
dragged her on down the corridor.

Tabitha
woke again to the sound of alien voices, sonorous and beautiful. Their words
were a mystery. She found herself imprisoned in a beam of light, bound to the
confines of a bright circle on the silver floor. She stood up in a panic,
pressing at the light around her. It was a bizarre sensation, like
touching a rounded wall that wasn’t there. They’d taken her belt, her knife,
her catsuit. Instead she was wearing something cream-white and fitted like
fibrous skin, blinking all over with tiny lights. Again she tried to push
against the beam of light around her. Tried to hit it, claw at it. Nothing.
Pure resistance. The room around her was some kind of lab; a towering
transparent space with walls like twisting sculpted glass. It was a silent
palace, striking and empty. How could such a beautiful place feel so
terrifying? Tabitha turned in the beam to look around her. The light in the
room was coming from the walls itself, a soft cold daylight, coursing up the
glass cliffs like a pulsing current. When Tabitha’s eyes followed the room
around to the back, she froze and stared. Something was writhing there,
half-hidden in a blackness that covered the back of the room. A gigantic black
mass, flowered and tentacled. The blue drooling bloom at its centre looked big
enough to swallow Seven whole. Was it part of the alien ship? Some of its thick
arms were melded with the glassy walls, feeding pulsing waves of power into the
room.

Suddenly the far door melted open. Tabitha turned to see
a tall alien figure emerge from the white corridor outside. It wore polished
steely armour, thinly organic and elaborate. Two hulking monsters followed in
after it, sitting like guard dogs at the door as it slurped shut. The slender
watcher approached Tabitha’s prison and examined her through its mask, silent
and staring like the head of a sinister statue. It touched a gloved hand to its
collar, and the mask broke up into metal ribbons and disappeared. The face
staring at her was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Tanned,
smooth-skinned, with fleshy white feathers in place of hair. More angelic than alien.
It was staring at her with big bright golden eyes, the same colour as her own.
The watcher stooped to study her more closely. The door squelched open again,
and more watchers walked in to gather round her. They came close and studied
her, like a horror in a bell jar. Tabitha looked up into their huge golden
eyes; their tanned skin in pastel shades. They were tall, naturally elegant;
like stretched statues come to life. Different creatures out of their black
scaled armour. She couldn’t understand their strange words, but their body
language spoke volumes. They were the masters here. A superior race. Tall,
cold, distant. When the small crowd withdrew, Tabitha was left standing before
two of them. One was the same watcher who’d first entered the room. The second
was older, more cautious, dressed in some kind of armoured robe. It came
forward and asked the first watcher a question. It stepped around Tabitha’s
prison to study her, eyeing her hands, as if she were an artefact in a glass
case. Tabitha listened to a sonorous discussion between them that she couldn’t
understand. The first watcher opened its hand to the second to reveal a small
hologram of Tabitha, rotating there on its palm like a virtual voodoo doll.
Tabitha saw lights twinkling on her shining hologram, blinking in time with the
lights on her bodysuit. The watchers must have been recording her biometrics
with it. Every pulse, every breath. So she was a lab rat again, she told
herself. The second watcher spoke with the first and nodded, waving its hand to
give some kind of go-ahead. The others came closer again, studying Tabitha
intently. All of a sudden the beam of light that imprisoned her moved along the
ceiling and pushed against her, shoving her backwards with an unstoppable
power. Tabitha stumbled and shuffled her feet, trying desperately to push
against it. She was a spider trapped under a moving glass. The beam was edging
her closer and closer to the writhing black mass at the back of the room.

‘Wait! No!’ she said desperately, clawing at the wall of
light in terror. ‘I’ll do whatever you want! Please!’ the figures
watched her, following behind. They were talking, laughing. Tabitha was
entertainment; a freakshow to feed the monstrosity. She scratched her claws at
the smooth engraved floor, trying to dig her way out from the beam. The
watchers burst into strange laughter at the sight.

‘I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!’ she screamed at
them, scratching frantically at the curved wall of light. They were fascinated
by her anger, watching her progress down the room. Heartcore pounding, every
desperate thought ran through Tabitha’s head as the black mass loomed closer.
All those writhing arms, oil-black and grasping. That gaping mouth, drooling
and pulsing. It was hungry for her. Tabitha panicked. She could kill herself
first. A piercing dread shook her body as the drooling bloom opened wide for
her, and the beam pushed her close. Yes, she could kill herself. Claw her skull
apart. She just couldn’t get her trembling hands to rise up and do it. Instead
she could only hug herself tight, shaking in terror. The watchers were talking
excitedly, following her down to the end of the glassy room. Suddenly the beam
of light stopped moving. Shivering with fear, Tabitha couldn’t bring herself to
look up at the monstrosity. Her audience was silent, waiting. She just wanted
this to be over. When she finally managed to bring her eyes up on it, the beam
of light vanished. A mess of tentacles snatched her up and stuffed her into its
slimy gaping mouth.

Gasping, yelping, Tabitha felt herself being squeezed
down a claustrophobic throat. She felt a wild tangle of current in here, a
pulsing web of voltage. It was some kind of brain; a junction for conduits that
ran all over the monstrous ship. She felt all of it, a million connections,
racing through her mind from the fleshy walls. For one fleeting second she felt
what the ship felt. Hunger. Fascination. It wanted her essence coursing through
its conduits. Her genes; her abilities. Her healing. It wanted to feed her power
to the hive; to breed her blood into the whole. Slow-death synthesis. Moist
walls of muscle pressed against her and forced her down the throat. The fleshy
press made it impossible to move her arms from her sides; her claws were
redundant against the thick leathery tissue. Desperate, terrified, coated in a
slick mucus, Tabitha wrestled and struggled frantically against the force of
the throat. A big tentacled sphincter opened up ahead of her and pulled her
closer. A sudden stench of dead flesh filled her maddening head, carried up
through the giant gut on stinging acid fumes. She was screaming, wriggling
uselessly. Couldn’t breathe in all the hot sticky press. As the throat pushed
her head through the gaping sphincter, Tabitha saw a gushing boil of acid below
in a vast veined stomach. The choking acid fumes blinded her, burned her
nostrils. She coughed and retched with watering eyes; felt her nose running and
itching and stinging at the fumes.

The watchers heard a muffled sneeze and a sudden crackling
bang, and the monstrosity’s stomach burst open in a gory lightning storm.
Reeking acid gushed over the floor in a caustic tide, and the aliens ran from
it in sudden panic. One figure stumbled and screamed in the flood, gripping its
slender legs as the acid melted flesh and bone. Dazed, Tabitha realised she was
still alive. She clawed her way out half-blind and choking from the sagging
dead gut, dropping down to her feet in the open empty stomach. She slipped and
clambered out and ran for the distant door, yelling at the acid splashes that
burned through her suit. The watchers were pinned to the walls, skirting around
the flood of acid that smoked into the floor. The thick cloying stench of bile
and putrefied meat filled the room; the watchers were yelling and trying to get
to safety. Tabitha just sprinted straight through the acid puddle and felt
nothing on her feet, dodging shrieking white laserbolts as she ran for the
door. An armoured watcher ran to bar her way. She leapt at it. The figure blocked
her claws in a fly of sparks and struck Tabitha hard, knocking her limp. It
grabbed her neck and lifted her kicking into the air. It yelled to the others
and squeezed tight, choking her. Tabitha grasped at its strong solid hands,
clawing for breath. Her claws screeched uselessly against its armour. The
hulking black monsters galloped back to block the doorway behind it. No escape.
The watcher shook her like a ragdoll, laughing. Tabitha gasped and kicked at
the angelic figure as it choked her, passing out in its grip. Suddenly she
dropped to the floor, gasping for breath, and the alien strode around her
victoriously. It walked like a ballet dancer, slender and strong. She was short
and deformed by comparison; crawling fearfully into a corner of the room as the
figure paced after her. The other watchers had edged past the acid pool and
crowded in to surround her. Some were aiming guns at her, powering up with a
high-pitched drone. Tabitha whimpered and tried to hide away but her strangler
reached out and grabbed her head. Forced her to look it in the face. With big
bright eyes it searched the emotions in her expression. It pulled at her and
lifted her up again, this time by the front of her bodysuit. Tabitha was
gasping for breath. With a deep hypnotic voice, it asked her a question. She
had no idea of the meaning, but it stared at her curiously as if waiting for an
answer. When she struggled and scratched again the strangler laughed and
punched her hard in the stomach. Tabitha gasped and crumpled limp in its grip;
felt broken inside.

‘Just kill me,’ she coughed weakly, giving up, gasping
to get her breath back. ‘Just fucking kill me.’ The alien reached out with its
other hand and took hold of her head. It began to squeeze, slowly, almost
gently. But the pressure was constant, getting harder. The beautiful creature
caught sight of the pain in her eyes, and a smile played across its lips. It
asked her another question. The others gathered closer behind and made their
own comments, laughing. Tabitha felt a sudden tingling in her hands. Something
seeping into her from the strangler’s skin.

‘Kill me,’ Tabitha gasped, like a prayer, staring into
its golden eyes. She was tired of running, tired of hurting. Tired of fear.
‘Kill me!’ she yelled. She felt her fingers twitch. Her hands shook for a
moment. She felt stings through her palms then, through her fingers. She
screamed as the strangler’s armoured fingertips pressed sharply into her scalp,
and warm silver blood trickled down her temple. She looked down at the strangler’s
big gloved hand, gripping her white bodysuit. There were tiny silver lines
there in the gauntlet, like engravings. Like fingerprints. She felt the prints
in her own hands now. The final piece of the puzzle. Her left hand shot out to
the strangler’s belt; she felt an object there unfold and react to her new
fingerprints. Tabitha pulled the heavy pistol off the belt, pressed it up
against the strangler’s jaw and squeezed the trigger. A shrieking flash of
light. The other watchers screamed and yelled. Golden blood gushed over Tabitha
as they both dropped to the floor. She prised herself from the strangler’s dead
grip and took aim at another watcher in the sudden confusion. Blew its kneecap
apart. The scream was music to her ears as she tore the belt from the
strangler’s body. The others were shouting, scrambling for her as she ran.
Tabitha ducked from a shot cat-fast and opened fire on them, scattering the
crowd behind her. She shot another one down; one of the few with a gun raised.
Heartcore glowing, she took aim on the hulking black monsters running for her.
Blew their heads open with shrieking white shots. Wide-eyed, shocked at
herself, Tabitha sprinted for the door. Suddenly she was free, out of the door,
running for her life. White laserbolts screamed past her down the corridor,
bursting against the floor and exploding into the walls around her. Tabitha
spun and shot one of the watchers down, and sprinted for the next door. She
slammed her hand down on the door console, springing her claws out to pull at
the fleshy wiring underneath. To her surprise the door opened at just the touch
of her hand, revealing some kind of shadowy control room inside. Not quite the
exit she’d hoped for.

‘Shit,’ she muttered. A startled watcher turned from its
console to look at her. Panicking, Tabitha fired and dropped it dead. She
looked around the room for more figures, but found herself alone as the door
squelched shut behind her. She caught a glimpse of her own face on the console
then; a glowing hologram staring back at her. A thin gleaming line connected
her image to a huge globe across the room, showing her position on the
mothership over Florida. There was a second hologram too, staring from the
console beside it. A man’s face, vague and featureless. A line connected his
picture with New York on the globe. Was he like her then? Another freak the
watchers were hunting down? Suddenly the door melted open behind her. Tabitha
ran for a door on the far side of the room, leaping away from laser shots that
exploded the consoles around her. She ran out into another gleaming white
corridor, ribbed and fleshy. Feathery fronds grew from the walls like lamps,
wafting and glowing. Everything in here felt alive. As she ran she felt the
walls refiltering the air. Recycling their own light. The whole ship beyond
too, eating its own expended current. A living masterpiece. Even her own body
was feeding off it, that colossal hypnotic power all around her. She had to
focus. She had to find a way out, but where the hell was that? The ship had looked
as big as a city from the outside. Tabitha gasped at the running footsteps down
the corridor, and hid away in an alcove as the watchers approached. The wall
behind her in the alcove burped a squelchy beep as she backed up breathless
against it. Suddenly she was dropping. It was a lift.

Tabitha caught her breath and watched a muscular lift
shaft rushing past her on every side. The lift was dropping fast, dropping
forever. The floor was an artwork, just like everywhere else in the ship;
smooth rubbery stone etched with glowing geometric patterns. Hypnotically
complex; super-clockwork circles shifting and blooming and shrinking endlessly.
The whole ship filled with an alarm sound then, blurting a weird organic boop
all around her. A thought flashed in her head. For a brief second, she saw
another place. A hangar. It was Seven’s vision. Tabitha looked up in shock. Her
heart leapt at the thought of him being alive. It felt like he was reaching out
to her from the walls; from the lift itself. As if the whole fleshy fabric of
the living ship had carried his mind to hers.

‘Hold on,’ she said desperately, trying to grasp at the
thought of him. She was getting closer; she could feel it. She was coming to
save him.

The
bony elevator slowed, stopped and sagged open in a vast gloomy cargo hold. The
alarm echoed in the endless space. Tabitha checked around her for watchers and
crept out of the lift, pressing her back to the dull grey wall. She sprinted
down a corridor between cliff-walls of giant containers, skidding to a stop on
whispering feet when she heard running footsteps up ahead. She ducked back
behind the containers as a watcher ran past. She checked around the edge to see
it disappearing into the distance, and ran across the pathway towards the far
warehouse wall. Her mind felt drawn to Seven’s like a magnet, pulling her on as
she sprinted breathless through the far door.

Tabitha jumped in fright. A sprawling hangar stretched
out ahead of her, packed with grey dragons lying comatose. She ran inside in
search of Seven, ducking down beside some kind of console to hide away from
more searching figures in the distance. Creeping along beside the wall as
quickly as she could, Tabitha quietly ran the length of the hangar. She
searched, paused, and froze when she picked him out. Seven lay still as she
watched him from her cover, huge and black compared with his grey brothers and
sisters lined up alongside. But he was lifeless. Tabitha felt shell shocked as
she stared over at him. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. She’d felt his
thoughts. She ran across the hangar towards him when she spotted her chance.
Hoping against hope she put a palm on his snout, and… nothing. There was no
warmth to feel there, not like before. No thoughts of his to mix and mingle
with her own. He was cold, unmoving. There was no tingle of a current between
their skin. Tabitha looked to the ceiling, blinking the tears away. Maybe his
mind had been swallowed back into the mothership. Maybe that was what she’d
felt in the lift.

Seven’s cockpit was dark and empty; Fishbowl was nowhere
to be seen when Tabitha peered inside. The console wouldn’t respond to her, no
matter what she tried. There was no feeling of him in here. Seven was
dead. Tabitha sobbed quietly, pressing a hand to her bruised face. But she had
to stamp that cold black feeling back down. She had to survive. Pulling the
boxes out from under the seat, Tabitha saw that the contents were still
plundered like she’d left them. She hurriedly prised open the hatch of a
lifeless grey dragon beside Seven, and tore open the boxes under the seat. She
pulled a lid open and peeled off her white bodysuit, unfolding the black
material from the box. She watched the cockpit wall with a weary stare as the
scaly fabric fitted itself to her skin. Dead-hearted she pulled the new grey
belt around her waist, clipping on the water bottle beside the knife and the
pistol. Tabitha edged her head cautiously out of the hatch, and climbed down
the grey dragon’s back to the hangar floor.

‘I’m going to come back, and I’m going to slaughter
them,’ she promised Seven, kissing his dead snout. ‘For you.’ Tabitha laid a
hand on his snout and breathed deep against the lump in her throat, feeling the
tense grip of grief winding tight around her chest. A shot of light tore past
her ear suddenly, and another exploded against Seven’s shoulder. Tabitha fired
back on the running watchers, forcing them behind a pillar as she sprinted
away. More of them filled the wide doorway and came flooding into the hangar,
with a sudden storm of laser fire. Tabitha shot at them and ran for the nearest
grey dragon, banging her palms on its head to wake it up. Nothing. She tried to
prise her claws into the saddle, tried to open it up. Nothing. It was locked
down. She cursed and ran as the gunshots pummelled into the dragon’s side. She
ran instead for the end of the hangar, where the daylight shone from a gigantic
opening. Tabitha sprinted for cover as the shots shrieked and burst all around
her. She aimed her pistol, fired, sprinted again. Ducking and weaving as the
floor around her feet erupted in bursts of light. Another shot blew a crater in
a pillar, and the rubble burst against Tabitha’s head and knocked her sideways.
She steadied herself and shook off the sting, still sprinting for the opening
as the watchers hunted her down. Her first pistol was empty; another sat unused
on her belt. She threw the first one down as she ran, dodging another hail of
shots that punched into the floor around her. Adrenaline forced her on. Her
muscles burned. She had to keep running; that was all she could do now. She had
to escape and survive. The hangar opening was a shimmering wall of energy; a
barrier of light. Tabitha ran for it and braced herself to collide against the
wall, but felt nothing. She stumbled on, fell through the wall of light… and
the next thing she knew, she was dropping into open sky. The wind rushed in her
ears as she flailed, terrified. The vast sapphire sea sprawled infinite,
shimmering far below her as she fell. She felt a sudden shadow above, and spun
away from the grey dragon’s snapping jaws. Before it could lunge at her again
the dragon burst into flames, dropping dead out of the sky. Human artillery
crackled and boomed from the shoreline below, raining hell on the mothership as
it passed by the Florida coast. Gasping desperately as she fell, Tabitha dived
after the wreckage of the dead grey dragon as the sea loomed closer below.
Sinking her claws into its grey armour, she hung on tight and braced for the
impact. The sea hit like a wall of rock, smashing the dead dragon to pieces.
The force threw Tabitha back up in the air, flailing as she dropped and crashed
down into the clear water in a bubbling plunge. The sky was a deafening chaos
of shells and gunfire above her when she surfaced, treading water and blinking
back the salty sea. The huge black mothership reeled away from the roar of a
hundred tanks and howitzers biting into it, retaliating with shrieking white
artillery of its own. Tabitha had landed in a warzone.

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
thundering 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.

‘Do you?’ he replied. ‘Look at us. We’re a race above.
We’ve adapted. That’s why they’re hunting us. Why everything is
hunting us. Because we’re the real survivors. They’re all afraid of us.’
Tabitha watched him. He was making too much sense for her to be pointing a gun
at him. Still, she had her doubts. He looked strong, intimidating, even despite
his smile. His grin revealed a mouth full of sharp black teeth. She kept the
pistol on him.

‘The freak shall inherit the Earth,’ Alex added.
‘That’s why they’re so afraid of us. I came up with that myself, by the way.
I’ve had a lot of time on my own to think. Do you like it?’

‘How many are there in the hive? People like us?’ said
Tabitha, dismissing his question.

‘I don’t know. Nine, ten maybe? Those were the ones I
saw them taking in there, anyway. Could be a lot more inside,’ he replied.
‘Men, women, little kids. If they’re all still alive, that is.’

‘You want to get them out,’ said Tabitha, still
uncertain of him.

‘Of course I want to get them out,’ Alex replied
wilfully, his face growing stern. ‘They’re the only reason I’ve stayed alive,
so I could help them somehow. But I can’t do it on my own. I’ve tried. Now
you’re here too, we can help them together. Break them out of there and take
them somewhere safe.’

‘People like us? You’re sure?’ said Tabitha, clinging to
the hope.

‘People like us,’ Alex assured her. ‘We need to get to
them. We need to get together, all of us.’ he had Tabitha’s attention. ‘You
know to the aliens, we’re the threats. Not the humans,’ he said. His
face had grown fierce at the thought. ‘The humans? They were easy. The whole
invasion was easy. But when the freaks start getting together and fighting
back, that’s a whole different story. You and me, we could be the start of that,
you know? If we work together, we can get those people out of there. Our
people.’ Tabitha stared at him and imagined more people like them. A tribe. An
uprising. A sudden fleeting thought of a fight they could win. But… she’d
already had a tribe. She’d had the Ghosts. They’d tried to fight back; look
what happened to them. Maybe this would be different, though. She was stronger
now. She could protect them.

‘So, what do you think?’ Alex asked her, interrupting
her thoughts. Tabitha looked back to him and opened her mouth to speak;
hesitated. She felt torn. She didn’t want any more deaths on her conscience.
She wasn’t even sure if she believed him yet. What about the plan? Her and
Seven were going to leave the planet. That’s what they wanted, to leave it all behind
and find a safe new home. The thought had been so strong in Seven’s mind; in
both their minds. Now though… maybe she could take her tribe with her, wherever
Seven was taking her. They could all start again, on a new world. A new race
flourishing, far away from the world that hated them... if the man in
front of her was telling the truth.

‘You don’t trust me,’ Alex observed. Tabitha pulled her
eyes from the road where she’d been staring, lost in thought.

‘I…’ she hesitated.

‘You don’t have any reason to trust me,’ he said with a
smile. ‘It’s understandable. I mean you only just got here, you don’t know me,
and you’ve had the shittiest time because of what you are. And you’re a long
way from England.’

‘Wales,’ she corrected him.

‘Sorry. Wales,’ he said with a smile. ‘So yeah, fine,
you don’t have any reason to trust me. But look at that monster you’re sitting
on,’ he chuckled. ‘If anyone’s got a reason to be nervous, it’s me. If you
don’t trust me, you can just... vaporise me. I mean look at that thing.’
Tabitha stroked Seven’s neck proudly, and dipped into his thoughts. Seven
didn’t know what to make of him either. The man looked like her; he smelled a
little like her. That was the only feedback she could get. Beyond that, Seven
was preoccupied with getting away into space. He didn’t think much about a
tribe; she was his tribe. Tabitha smiled at Seven’s thought and fell in love
with him just a little bit more.

‘Look, I know I can’t make you trust me,’ said Alex.
‘All I can say is I’ve had a really hard time surviving out here. And
I’m not about to risk my life by crossing a girl on a, a, big-ass dragon.’
Tabitha stifled a smile. She sent her thoughts into Seven’s head. Let’s see
about these prisoners, she told her dragon. If he tries anything, you
know what to do. Seven understood.

‘What do you know about the hive?’ she said, looking
back to the man.

‘I know there’s some kind of air defences,’ he replied.
‘They’ll shoot you down if you fly too close. You’re not exactly inconspicuous,
riding around on that thing.’

‘Why do you care if I get shot down?’ she said.

‘Why do I care? Because I want to get my people out of
there,’ he said. ‘Our people. And you’re the best chance we’ve got.’
Tabitha went to say something, hesitated. ‘Ever since those things came here,
I’ve wanted revenge,’ Alex cut in. ‘It’s the only reason I’ve survived this
long. Now we can take it straight to them. And we can help people just like us.
We can save them. And blow the hive too.’

‘Blow it up? How?’ she said.

‘There’s a reactor in there,’ he replied. ‘Right in the
middle of that place. I’ve seen it, from the tall buildings over there behind
you. That reactor’s making the weird light you can see. If we blow that
reactor, the whole colony goes up.’

‘With us inside it,’ Tabitha added.

‘We’ve got that thing to fly us out of there,’ said
Alex, nodding at Seven with a kind of reverence.

‘Why don’t we just risk it and attack the place from the
air, and rescue them that way?’ said Tabitha.

‘You haven’t seen those air defences,’ Alex said grimly.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t trigger them already actually, flying in here like
that. They’d blow us to pieces before we even got close.’

‘He can walk us in then,’ Tabitha suggested, patting
Seven’s neck.

‘Really? Does he walk quietly?’ Alex said with a grin.
‘I think he’s great, don’t get me wrong, but something tells me that sneaking
isn’t his strong point. If we’re going to get those people out we need to do it
without getting seen. Otherwise they’ll probably kill them before we can get to
them.’

‘So you’re saying that we need to walk in there?
Right into the hive?’ said Tabitha.

‘It’s the only way we’re going to get in,’ Alex replied
with a shrug. ‘We’ll take out the air defences when we’re inside, and then we
can get your friend here to help us out.’

‘It’s suicide,’ said Tabitha. The film lover in her had
always wanted a good reason to say that. The rest of her was too busy being
terrified.

‘So? These days, just falling asleep is suicide,’ Alex
replied. ‘Taking a crap is suicide. Standing out here in the open talking…
everything’s suicide.’ He made a good point, Tabitha told herself reluctantly.
He was too confident about his plan though. Like talking about it was a
guarantee they’d survive. The man didn’t move like he should have, either; he
was too quick and graceful for his frame. She could kind of understand why
Sylvia used to feel uneasy around her, if that was how she moved too. But the
thought of Sylvia just pissed her off. All of Tabitha’s bitterness came rushing
back in like a tide.

‘You still don’t trust me?’ Alex asked her, stepping
closer on the road.

‘What gave it away?’ Tabitha replied, still aiming the
pistol at him.

‘Well at least tell me your name,’ he said with a smile.
‘I can’t just call you hot redhead on a magic space dragon.’

‘Don’t call him that,’ Tabitha snapped defensively.

‘Alright, sorry,’ Alex replied, holding up his hands.

‘He’s Seven. I’m Tabitha,’ she said flatly. She’d never
had time for cocky men.

‘Well it’s a pleasure to meet you, Tabitha,’ said Alex.
‘Hey… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off. Don’t take me too seriously.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ Tabitha replied, holstering her
gun and jumping down from the saddle. She led Seven closer until Alex grew
uneasy, and he backed away nervously from the dragon’s snout. Seven lay down on
the road then, basking in the sunlight.

‘I don’t like the way he’s looking at me,’ said Alex,
keeping his distance. Seven’s white eyes were staring at him, huge and
predatory. ‘What does he eat?’

‘He doesn’t eat anything,’ Tabitha replied, stroking
Seven’s shoulder. ‘He’s solar powered. So you really don’t need to be such a
pussy around him.’ Alex laughed.

‘Anyone would be a pussy around him, look at him!’ he
said. ‘So this guy is solar powered? I can’t believe it… I mean, look at
those teeth.’

‘He’s got a bite on him,’ Tabitha said proudly. ‘You
should see what he can do to his brothers and sisters.’

‘I can imagine,’ Alex replied, awestruck as he looked at
him. ‘So what about you, what do you eat? Are you hungry? Let me guess – spider
meat, rare and bloody, right?’

‘No,’ Tabitha replied. ‘I’m solar powered too.’

‘Great, so I’m stuck with a pair of fucking hippies,’ he
chuckled. Tabitha didn’t see the funny side. Alex watched her while she made
herself comfortable against Seven’s wing. She closed her eyes for a while and
felt the warm sun on her skin.

‘So what, you’re recharging right now?’ said Alex.
Tabitha nodded restfully. ‘And you never need to go find any food?’ Tabitha
shook her head. ‘How did you learn to do that?’

‘I just touched Seven on the nose,’ she said, eyes
closed, skin soaking in the light.

‘So, you rubbed a magic space dragon on the nose, and
now all you need to live is sunshine?’ he chuckled.

‘I said don’t call him that,’ Tabitha snapped. ‘He gets
more pissed off than I do.’ Seven was staring at him.

‘Alright, alright,’ said Alex, exasperated. ‘So your
body learned his solar power, right?’

‘Yep,’ she replied. ‘You’re welcome to try. I don’t
think he’ll bite you.’

‘You don’t think he’ll bite me?’ said Alex. ‘That’s
reassuring.’ Tabitha shrugged her shoulders, sunbathing. Alex approached
cautiously. Tabitha had her eyes closed. Seven started growling; a huge deep
rumble that Alex felt in his chest. Tabitha opened her eyes and saw Alex
standing over her, blocking out the sunlight. He had a hand held out to Seven’s
skin, hesitating.

‘I don’t think he likes me,’ said Alex, stepping back.
Tabitha looked up at him and laid a hand on Seven’s side.

‘Probably because you’re standing so close to me,’ she
observed. ‘He’s defensive.’ Alex stepped back a little more until Seven’s
growling quietened down.

‘It’s ok,’ Tabitha told her dragon, stroking a scale.
‘Just let him touch your nose for a second.’ Alex looked to her uncertainly and
then back to Seven, and stepped a little closer. He reached out his grey hand
and placed it gently on Seven’s snout.

‘I don’t feel anything,’ he said, his voice wavering
nervously.

‘It should tingle, like electricity,’ said Tabitha.
‘Does it feel hot?’

‘I can’t feel anything,’ he replied. ‘Nothing’s
happening.’

‘Maybe you just don’t work that way,’ said Tabitha,
shrugging her shoulders. ‘How did you get your abilities?’

‘Eating stuff,’ Alex replied with a black-fanged grin.
‘I got my new hands here from eating a spider, when I was in pretty bad shape.
The meat and blood fixed me right up. The rest I got from eating a big black
thing that the army shot up to pieces before they left. I don’t think I could
eat all your friend here though. He’s a little on the big side.’

‘I don’t think he’d let you eat him, somehow,’ Tabitha
replied. She had a thought. ‘You said the hive was like a garden, didn’t you?
Maybe you could eat some of the alien plants if we find any, for solar power,’
she suggested, feeling refreshed from the sunlight.

‘Do you think that’d work?’ said Alex, suddenly
intrigued.

‘No idea,’ Tabitha replied, standing up and dusting off
her alien catsuit. ‘It’s worth a try though, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Alex, looking her body up and down
when she stretched in the sunlight. ‘I like eating meat, not rabbit food,’ he
said with a grin.

‘Suit yourself,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Can you show me how
to get inside that hive then?’

‘What, right now?’ said Alex, sneezing at the bright sky.

‘Well, unless you’ve got anything better to do out here,
instead of rescuing your own kind?’ Tabitha replied, looked around at the
ruined city. Alex grinned.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said, glancing at the desolation that
he used to call home. Tabitha nodded grimly and thought about the dangers to
come, and went over to stroke Seven’s snout.

‘Stick to the rooftops, ok?’ she told her dragon,
stepping back as Seven climbed to his feet.

‘He’s going to watch over us, right?’ said Alex,
watching Seven stretch out his vast rectangular wings. ‘Tell him that he can’t
fly over the hive, or they’ll shoot him down.’

‘Did you hear that?’ Tabitha asked Seven. Her dragon
grunted a growl and took off from the street, his beating wings blowing a tide
of dust across the road.

‘Jeez,’ Alex mumbled, shielding his eyes from the dust
as he watched Seven take off into the sky.

‘Shall we get going?’ Tabitha asked him.

‘Let’s do it,’ Alex replied, watching Seven as he landed
down on a ruined office block overhead. ‘Follow me.’

‘First things to change were my hands,’ said Alex,
making conversation, as he lead Tabitha down a ruined grey high street.

‘Yeah, me too,’ Tabitha replied, looking down at her
metal palms. The breeze rustled warped sheets of newspaper along the pavement
around them.

‘It happened the same day that the world ended, actually,’
Alex continued, thinking back. ‘Seems like a lifetime ago now. That was the day
my brother died, and my girlfriend told me she was cheating on me. Some people
get all the luck, huh?’

‘Well, you’re still alive,’ Tabitha replied, looking up
at the ruined skyscrapers. They must have been a hell of a sight when they were
still standing. Now they tilted and crumbled like towering tombstones. A
graveyard of giants, standing haunted and annihilated in the stark sunlight.

‘No, you’re right,’ Alex considered, leading her on
around a street corner. ‘I am still alive, I should be grateful. Maybe
you and me, we made our own luck. How about you, you must have had a pretty
tough time?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Tabitha replied flatly.

‘That bad, huh?’ said Alex. ‘Well, I’ve seen everything
since the invasion. Things I never thought civilised people could do. I saw
this one guy who went crazy and started eating his own –

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Tabitha cut in. ‘Just… tell
me about the hive.’

‘Alright,’ Alex chuckled. ‘Well, down the bottom there,
that’s Central Park. The hive pretty much starts on the other side of it.’ Alex
noticed Seven swoop down onto a blown-out tower block right above them.

‘It’s probably a good idea for your friend up there to
stay right where he is,’ said Alex. ‘If he gets any closer to the hive they’ll
shoot him down.’

‘You’re paranoid,’ said Tabitha. ‘How do you know that,
anyway?’

‘I’ve seen airplanes trying to bomb that hive every day
for weeks,’ he said grimly. ‘They don’t try any more.’ Tabitha looked from Alex
up to Seven on the top of the apartment block, and whistled up to him. His
white eyes stared down at them.

‘Stay there ‘til I whistle for you, ok?’ she called up.
Her voice echoed in the empty street. Seven looked at her and then turned away,
watching the skyline.

‘Is that actually going to work?’ said Alex, swatting
away a fly. ‘He’s really going to come for us when you whistle?’

‘Of course.’

‘So, how did you end up with that thing for a pet?’ Alex
said with a grin.

‘It’s a long story,’ Tabitha replied. ‘And he’s not my
pet.’

‘Well, I’ve got a lot of time for a long story,’ said
Alex, picking his way over a pile of rubble. Tabitha thought about Jim then;
he’d said exactly the same thing when they’d first met. The memory of him
stung, hard. Memories of everyone.

‘Entertainment’s been a little thin on the ground
lately,’ said Alex, breaking Tabitha’s sad train of thought. ‘Go ahead, give me
the whole long story.’

‘Maybe we should just keep our voices down and look out
for spiders?’ Tabitha suggested.

‘Fine,’ Alex said dismissively, leading her on down the
street. ‘I mean, you were the one shouting to a big old dragon on a rooftop
just then, but whatever.’ Tabitha glanced at him and felt awkward. Maybe she
owed him an apology. ‘So, I get through about five or six spiders a day,’ said
Alex, changing the subject. ‘Unless I can get all solar powered, like you.’

‘You don’t sound too keen about it,’ Tabitha replied,
walking on down the dead street beside him.

‘Keen? What does that mean?’ he said.

‘You don’t sound like you like the idea,’ Tabitha
explained.

‘Oh, right,’ Alex said with a smile. ‘British English,
language barrier, you know?’ he chuckled. ‘Uh, nah, I kind of like the hunt,’
he said, scratching a stubbly cheek. ‘Must be pretty dull, sitting around in
the sun recharging all the time.’

‘I’m recharging right now,’ Tabitha replied, watching
her corners as they crossed a road packed with dead taxis. ‘I don’t need to sit
around.’

‘Well, I just hope you don’t fight like some lame-ass
hippie sun-feeder,’ Alex teased her. ‘If you do, we’re screwed.’ Tabitha
flashed him a look and said nothing. There was an awkward silence as they
picked their way through the sea of taxis; Alex whistled quietly to take the
edge of it. He was starting to grate on her.

‘Seriously though, I appreciate you being here,’ he
said, leading her on towards the park. ‘I couldn’t do something this crazy
without someone else like me to help.’

‘No, me neither,’ Tabitha admitted. She walked on beside
him and cooled off a little from her mood. Some people were just wankers, she
supposed; they couldn’t help it.

‘I’m just glad that there’s other people like me, you
know?’ said Alex. ‘It’s been lonely.’

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha agreed. They walked on in silence down the
street for a little while, passing shattered phones and wind-rustling snack
wrappers on the sidewalk. Tabitha trod on a box of cigarettes as they walked,
fat and spongy with rainwater. Alex kept quiet for a while. It was good to have
someone to talk to about things, Tabitha supposed. Someone like her; someone
who understood. She probably didn’t need to be so icy around him; so cautious.
He didn’t seem like a maniac or anything. And even if he was, she could handle
him. She’d handled far worse. If Alex was willing to risk his life walking into
the hive with her to help people, he really couldn’t be all that bad. As they
passed a cafe on the corner Tabitha stooped to pick up a little pot plant off
the pavement. It must have fallen from one of the tables that stood outside.
She set the plant back down on the table and gave the parched soil a glug of
water from her alien bottle. Alex watched her curiously.

‘You’re a gardener,’ he observed.

‘No, not really,’ Tabitha replied, thinking of Fishbowl
sadly. ‘I’ve just got a soft spot for plants these days.’

‘Yeah, so you’re a gardener,’ Alex repeated, grinning
his black violent smile. Tabitha stroked out some of the leaves on the plant
tenderly, and took it to another table to sit it in the sunlight. Teaching
Fishbowl about flowers on the mountaintop seemed like a lifetime ago. She
missed the creature terribly; missed its calm gentle presence. At least she
still had Seven though.

‘Thanks for the warning by the way, about the hive
shooting those jets down,’ she told Alex. ‘Me and Seven could be dead by now.’

‘No problem,’ he said, smiling. ‘Us monsters need to
stick together. Come on, it’s this way.’

48

Alien
trees had sprung up in Central Park, huge and black and tentacled like inky
upturned squids. Just like the ones Fishbowl had been growing by the waterfall,
Tabitha remembered sadly. Birds were chirping and hopping between the trees’
tentacles, oblivious to the fact that these alien growths didn’t belong here.
Everywhere Tabitha looked, strange new plants had flourished. Pale white tubes
grew everywhere in the soil, hollow and rubbery; phallic flutes like headless
mushrooms. Tabitha looked around at a wild world transforming; adapting new
elements into itself, just like her.

Their footsteps crunching down a gravel path, Alex and
Tabitha walked by a flower as tall as they were; a scaly blue limb with yellow
petals the size of palm leaves. Tabitha stepped closer, sniffed at it. It just
smelled like a flower, remarkably unremarkable. The petals just felt like petals
when they brushed her arm; the whole thing swayed gently in the breeze just
like anything else. Like the otherworldly bloom had belonged here since
prehistory.

As they walked on through the park it dawned on Tabitha
how peaceful it all was. The bright and bizarre had melded in with the
ordinary. The birds and squirrels didn’t care what was growing around them;
only whether they could climb it and perch on it. Bees hovered around alien
flowers and just dismissed them and buzzed away. The planet had moved on and
adapted to the new additions, and the human world was a fading memory. There
was new life here. Everything, growing. Flourishing. Nothing managed, nothing
pruned; nothing cut down. Just wilderness, growing unchecked, splashing the
world with bright alien colour. In her daze, Tabitha felt a sudden oneness with
it all. Like a magnet pulling her closer. A feast of current laid out for her,
ready to make her a part of it all. The alien garden was a pulsing voltage
goldmine; a vision of paradise. Full of everything she’d ever need, ready and
waiting if she wanted it. She only had to step in and live amongst it.

‘See that?’ said Alex, stopping for a second. Tabitha
snapped out of her daze.

‘Hm?’ she said, looking around sleepily. Alex was
pointing at a blood-red bird a little off the path, no bigger than a wren. It
was perched on a bobbing alien bloom on a spindly stalk, drinking tiny arcs of
voltage in the shade. Feet dusted in white pollen to carry away.

‘It’s an alien bird?’ said Tabitha, watching it hop from
one orb-shaped flower to the next. When it startled and flew away though, it
didn’t fly on wings. Tiny jet scales glowed on its sides, just like Seven, and
it floated up and zipped off into the trees. Tabitha smiled as she watched it
go; she didn’t know why. The cheeping creature was cute, but the meaning was
terrifying. The invasion wasn’t just about war; there was a gentler occupation
going on too, and it was happening all around them. The wildlife was moving in.

Tabitha’s heart leapt for a moment when she saw
Fishbowl, tending to a spinning red flower by the reservoir. Her heart sank
again when she saw a second Fishbowl, floating across the grass. The more she
looked between the trees, the more of them she saw. They were doing what
Fishbowl had done, in its tropical garden back on their island. Electricity
arced from the flowers into the creatures’ tentacles, and they moved on to the
next alien plant that gave up its voltage.

‘Now those things are interesting,’ said Alex quietly,
leading her on through the trees. ‘I’ve seen them taking the electricity out of
those plants and off into the hive, all day every day.’

‘What for?’ said Tabitha, following behind. The memory
of Fishbowl was a sore one. Her Fishbowl.

‘They’re feeding the buildings,’ Alex replied. ‘The
alien buildings, I mean.’

‘What alien buildings?’ said Tabitha, following his lead
up a footpath on the left. ‘What are they feeding them for?’

‘It’s… probably just easier to show you,’ he said.
‘Follow me.’

When they reached the city streets on the far side of
the park, Tabitha stared in shock at the scene through the trees. There was
hardly an inch of bare concrete or asphalt to see. Everything was carpeted in
rich green grass, unnaturally thick. Emerald-green moss had shrink-wrapped
acres of dead traffic and jumbled hills of rubble, like the world had swept New
York City under a monumental rug. Ruined office blocks were coated with grass
and saplings, sprouting and rippling in the wind like vertical meadows.
Everywhere the alien blooms had sprung up too, painting a dead world in bright
bobbing colours.

Alex and Tabitha made
their way down the grassy road with silent footsteps, glimpsing unearthly
insects here and there at their feet. A ginger cat watched them lazily from an
office window, swishing its tail and squinting in the sunlight. Another cat was
scrambling for an alien creature in a doorway; bright yellow prey somewhere
between a mouse and a lizard. Shiny metal crunched under Tabitha’s hard foot; a
drinks can buried in the carpet of bright moss.

‘And all those
environmentalists were paranoid about litter,’ Alex observed with a smile.
‘Leave it on the street or bury it in the ground, it doesn’t matter. The world
just recovers.’ Tabitha looked around at a grassland city. The shape of dead
traffic and broken towering buildings said New York, empty and
post-apocalyptic; but its green breeze-blown coating and churning frantic
wildlife said something entirely different. Planet Earth, Mark Two. A
flourishing sunblessed world, overgrown and beautiful.

Following Alex into the
urban jungle of jutting grassy ruins, and in through a broken-down greenhouse
of a bus that blocked the road, Tabitha emerged back onto the sunlit street and
stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Yep, that’s the hive,’
Alex said grimly, crouching down beside a crumbled wall. Up ahead between the
toppled green buildings, an alien complex was tucked away in a vast clearing.
Tabitha glimpsed a gentle humming glow coming from a city within the city.
There were towering structures sprouting from the vast demolition; webbed
scaffolds layered together like nothing she’d ever seen before. Ringing the
hive complex was an alien forest of black and white trees, shielding it from
the world. It was a bunched-up national park of a city, no wider than a stadium,
nestled away in the ruins of New York.

‘Did your dragon follow
us?’ Alex said quietly, leading them into the alien forest with a low-down
ninja sneak.

‘Don’t worry about him,
he’s fine,’ Tabitha whispered.

‘…Sorry. I just want to make
sure our escape plan’s still around.’

‘He’s fine. He’ll come,’
Tabitha assured him. ‘Let’s just get this done.’ Black and white alien pines
loomed over them like gothic christmas trees, each one pulsing with a thousand
tiny lights on its white branch tips. They’d sprouted from acres of rich bare
soil, dotted with Fishbowl’s black anemone trees that waved like underwater
creatures. Tabitha felt a strange tingling as she passed them by. She felt her
muscles relaxing; some strange affinity for the plants. The feeling was
becoming familiar to her, but no less heavenly for it; that blissed-out
swirling dynamo high of plant veins and silver-gold sunlight. A biocelestial
wholeness like nothing she’d ever felt before.

‘So you get that too?
That weird feeling?’ said Alex, looking back at her where she stood still.

‘What is it?’ Tabitha
asked him sleepily, feeling a sudden regret that they had to leave the sunlight
and tentacle trees behind.

‘No idea,’ he replied
quietly. ‘Look.’ Creeping closer beside him as he pointed through the trees,
Tabitha could make out the structures that crowded the hive beyond the forest.
They were alien nests, stacked high in glass honeycombs, twisted and
crystalline. Ringing the garden complex like premium apartments. The structures
refracted the sunlight like a still glass tide, warped and churning like vast
ocean waves frozen in time. Tabitha could only stare in silence at their
elegance; at how much they seemed to belong to the world.

‘I’ve never seen anything
go into those,’ Alex whispered, leading her on a little closer around a toppled
tower block in the forest. ‘It’s like their vacant lots.’ Tabitha imagined a
new city of watchers springing into life here, looking out on the New York
ruins from their crystalline homes. They were probably just waiting around on
their vast black ships until the world was free of fighting, and full of
familiar wildlife from their own planet. Waiting for grass and gardens to
overgrow any sign that humanity ever existed. The aliens had just been taking care
of the cockroaches before they moved house.

‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha
mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the scene as they emerged from the otherworldly
forest. She hadn’t seen this through the trees; it’d been hidden by the last
outlying office blocks. The alien garden clearing was even bigger than she’d
thought, stretching off over acres into the distance like its own landscape. An
alien countryside, fenced by the overgrown ruins of New York at its distant
edges. The twisting glass hive buildings carried on into the distance, hugging
the line of demolished tower blocks that edged the clearing. Alien birds
chirped strange noises into the breeze-blown silence.

‘We should get moving,’
Alex whispered. Tabitha nodded, speechless at the scale of the empty alien
home. They made their way quickly along the glassy walls of the hive until the
corner opened out on another wonder. An alien meadow, dotted with tentacle
trees, tended by countless carbon copies of Fishbowl. Standing before them was
a colossal cluster of towers like a power plant; an orderly growth of jutting
spires made from metal bones and tendons. Silver spiders crawled all over it.
The chimney structures swelled and breathed in the growing sunlight, drinking
it in. Up on the highest half-built spout grew twisted flowers; bright red
petal-heads that spun like turbines in the breeze. The same flowers that
Fishbowl had grown in his garden, but so much bigger. The largest must have
been six feet tall, growing out of the tower like a parasite.

‘All those plants are
collecting power for the hive,’ said Alex, staring at the towering spouts.

‘I can feel it,’ Tabitha
mumbled, transfixed by the whole scene. The tentacle trees, the turbine
flowers, even the ribbed walls of the spires… they were all gathering current
from the world. She tingled at the sensation, at the voltage that webbed and
pulsed through the alien grass at her feet. Every single cell in every single
growth, taking power from the world and feeding back into the whole. And
everywhere in the complex, the Fishbowl copies were drifting and tending to
their vast alien garden. There was a massive static crackling sound then,
filling the air above them with rumbling sparks. Alex and Tabitha looked at one
another and ran for cover. A bolt of lightning arced from a towering black
anemone tree and straight into a Fishbowl creature. Tabitha gasped as the
voltage threw the creature back in the air with a white-flash bang, and then it
simply picked itself up and floated off inside the hollow base of a ribbed
chimney.

‘They’re storing it all
up, the electricity,’ Alex whispered.

‘How? What for?’ said
Tabitha.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said
quietly. ‘Making more spiders, I think. Those big black monsters too. Growing
more armies to grow more gardens, I guess. Like a franchise. Get down!’
suddenly there were running footsteps close by, huge and powerful. Alex and
Tabitha ducked down into a crystalline pod along the hive wall, obscured in the
twisting grain of the glass. Peering around the smooth doorway, Tabitha watched
a black monster come galloping up the meadow back to the hive. It clambered up
one of the ribbed chimneys like an ape, stopping amongst the wind-turbine
flowers and retching on the half-built walls at the top. It heaved up glowing
molten steel, pulling and stretching and shaping it like spider silk into a
metal web around the structure. It was layering up the chimney, building it
taller. The red-hot metal cooled into a latticed web; another few feet of
circular wall to grow the tower higher. Alex and Tabitha waited for the black
monster to scurry back down the chimney, and watched it gallop off into the
monochrome forest.

‘They’re making those
power plant chimneys out of the spinning flowers,’ Alex said quietly. ‘I’ve
watched the squids and spiders grow those little red flowers into these giant
ones.’ Tabitha looked at him uncertainly. So the ugly little blooms that
Fishbowl had been growing were meant to turn into these hundred-foot chimneys?
And the hulking black monster that she’d faced in the city of skins… it was harvesting
steel from cars and trams to build up webbed metal walls around them.
Everything had a purpose for the hive.

‘It’s kind of hard to
believe that these things start out a foot tall,’ said Alex, as he admired the
towering structures.

‘But how?’ said Tabitha.
‘How do they get the flowers to grow that big?’

‘They use us,’ Alex said
simply. Tabitha took her eyes off the plant towers and glanced back at him.
‘I’ve seen it happening,’ he said. ‘When the spiders feed on people, they bring
the stuff back here and store it to feed the plants. We’re fertiliser.’

‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha
mumbled, staring back at the spouts with a new horror.

‘Or we’re steroids, I
guess,’ Alex added. ‘Sick as it is, it’s a hell of a system.’ Tabitha could
only nod and stare in silent revelation, watching spiders and Fishbowls
tirelessly to-ing and fro-ing between one another and the structures like a
giant ant colony.

‘They’ve been programmed
into doing this,’ Tabitha concluded, watching the tentacled gardeners at work.
‘Those things changed their nature and made them do this.’

‘You mean the tall ones?’
said Alex, turning to her. ‘The, er, alien people?’

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied.
‘Just like Seven. He’s animal on the outside, and a ship on the inside. They
turned him into a machine.’

‘Makes sense to me,’ Alex
replied. ‘I mean it doesn’t, in one way. It’s crazy. But I do know there’s some
messed-up genetic engineering going on. I mean, look at us.’ He grabbed his
tail and waggled it with a metal rattling sound, proving his point.

‘We’re freaks,’ said
Tabitha, with a slight smile. ‘But if the messed-up genetics have kept us alive
this far…’

‘True,’ Alex conceded.
There was a trembling in the ground then, coming from a smaller metal-webbed
chimney in the cluster that was already complete. Shorter than the tall chimney
being built, but still four storeys tall at least. As the afternoon sun crept
around a distant skyscraper and spilled light down into the hive, the whole
chimney stretched and swelled. There was a slow ripple up the structure’s
length, like grey muscles flexing beneath the metal latticework.

‘What’s happening?’ said
Tabitha. Alex was grinning.

‘Alien power plant,’ he
replied. ‘Pun intended. It’s starting up.’ A rumbling tremor shook the ground. A
giant organ spurted out from the chimney then, slick and shimmering with
iridescent mucus. But it wasn't an organ for long. Tabitha watched it unfurl,
broad and bright and webbed, and she recognised the shape. A gigantic turbine
flower like the ones Fishbowl had grown, bigger than any tree she’d ever seen.
It was drinking in the sun and turning slowly in the wind. The spinning bloom
gained momentum like a wind turbine facing the sky, and suddenly Tabitha felt a
flood of energy flowing into the hive.

‘Can you feel that?’ she
said, turning to Alex. He smiled and nodded, feeling the same tingling tide of
current rushing through his body from the ground. Tabitha watched it all with a
freaked out fascination. The hive was both a home and a power plant. No fumes,
no waste; only endless energy from the wind and the sun. A masterpiece of
engineering.

‘It’s weird,’ said
Tabitha, staring off across the meadow. ‘I always thought they just wanted to
be at the top of the food chain. And yeah, they do. But there’s more to them
than that.’

‘Well, they’re like us,’
Alex replied, with a sad smile. ‘We both want to build a world on our own
terms. They’re just better at it than we are.’ Tabitha looked at him. He’d hit
the nail on the head. ‘The worst part is, they’re probably much better for this
world than we ever were,’ he said. Tabitha watched the power plant grow in the
sun, spinning faster. It was true. She saw silver spiders and floating
Fishbowls, bustling past one another to work tirelessly for the hive. A garden
city flourishing. Everything grown, everything recycled. All of it fed by wind,
water and sun. No cars, no rubbish, no pollution… the new dominant race fitted
the planet like a glove, and they hadn’t even moved in yet. In the space of a
few weeks humanity had been chewed up, spat out and thrown down on Darwin’s
great scrapheap in the sky.

‘So yeah, that was the
newest neighbourhood,’ said Alex, leading Tabitha away from the power plant and
the glassy honeycomb complex.

‘So that’s just a part of
it? she replied, following him into another stretch of black and white forest.
They were heading for toppled buildings around the edge of the hive city.

‘Yep,’ Alex replied,
picking a sliver of white spider meat out of his black fangs. ‘They’ve been
growing the hive in a huge circle. Maybe they’ll just keep growing it out to
cover the city, I don’t know. But I know where it all started, and I know
that’s where the main reactor is. It’s the same place they’re keeping those
people like us.’

‘Where?’ said Tabitha,
desperate to know.

‘Right in the middle of
the circle,’ he replied simply, leading her around another toppled building.
‘There.’

‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha
mumbled, putting a cold metal hand to her mouth. Hidden away in the deepest
limits of the alien city was a colossal black plant; a living cathedral of
twisting roots and bone-fingered ribs that reigned over the new skyline. A dark
biogothic domination that punched its presence into the landscape like a
towering cluster of knives.

‘Can you feel the energy
coming from that place?’ said Alex.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha muttered,
startled at the sensation. They were nowhere near the building, and still she
could feel a pulsing tingle of current in her chest. Like her heartcore was
tuned in to the structure.

‘I’m just guessing now,
but I think this is where all the electricity goes,’ said Alex.

‘It feels like a reactor,
like you said,’ Tabitha replied, clutching at the feeling in her heartcore. It
was a supermassive magnet pull; black tidal waves of faith and fury inside her.

‘And if we can feel it
all the way over here,’ said Alex, staring at the alien cathedral, ‘…imagine
what’ll happen to the neighbourhood if we blow that fucker up.’ Tabitha looked
at him. Despite his tone he looked deadly serious; he wanted to wipe everything
out. Should they, really? There was so much new life here, and not all of it
aggressive; did they have the right to snuff it out? Tabitha thought about
everyone and everything the aliens had taken from her, and she soon forgot any
even-handed approach. A burning streak of anger rose up through her mind;
definitely Seven’s brand of rage. A footprint of his thoughts, imprinted on
hers. Black and boiling at the prospect of revenge. Tabitha glanced down at her
mum’s ribbon on her wrist, dulled in the dust of a life on the run. The
material still shone though, where the dirt rubbed away; a muted silky gleam in
the sunshine.

‘Let’s get those people
out. Then we burn it all,’ she said. Alex grinned and led the way.

‘It’s not the fastest way
there, but it’s safer,’ said Alex, leading Tabitha through the alien forest
along the outside of the hive. They made their way silently under the shadow of
the trees until they were facing the bizarre cathedral through the treeline,
looming large in the distance. Rays of sunlight shone through gaps in the
branches above them, dappling the ground in bright shifting spots. Something
tiny and alien scrambled away nearby, scurrying up a tree with scratching
claws. Tabitha took a few cool glugs of water from the bottle on her belt, and
passed the weird vessel to Alex. She looked around and saw silver plants
everywhere, growing like giant weeds.

‘Spiders,’ Tabitha
mumbled, backing away from them. Alex wiped his mouth with a sleeve and passed
her water bottle back gratefully.

‘It’s better to kill them
in the ground, if you can,’ he said knowingly, stooping down to drag one from
the soil by its branching legs. ‘They’re much more like plants right now.’ He
looked at Tabitha and smiled, and pulled the plant apart with a dribbling fibrous
snap. Its silver blood spattered and slapped on the ground.

‘Are you sure you don’t
want some?’ he asked her, between thirsty gulps. ‘It’s good.’

‘No, thanks,’ she
replied, turning away to look at the twisting cathedral. She thought about the
sweet taste of silver blood; the electric high. And the biting hunger between
fixes. She didn’t want that kind of dependence again. That was a life tied to
the spiders, hunting them and being hunted in return. And anyway… that blood
high just didn’t come close to the warm filling light of the sun on her skin.

Cautiously,
quietly, they made their way on through the trees and ruined buildings towards
the alien cathedral. The green grass hadn’t spread this far into the hive;
there was a more sudden change here between the old world and the new. The
ground beneath their feet faded from hard grass-scattered asphalt to a carpet
of pale blue moss, stretching all the way to the towering structure looming up
ahead. The broken-down buildings were covered with a living blue carpet, like
the wild new world was claiming everything. Bright giant fuzzball flowers
bobbed on spindly stalks; a million neon flowerheads glowed softly in dark
recesses across hills of mossy ruins. And spurring it all on was the weird
energy coming from that towering black structure; pulsing waves of life and
growth from a thundering lightwheel heart.

The trees and toppled buildings gave way to new twisting
plants as Alex and Tabitha neared the cathedral, standing silver and monolithic
above them as they walked. Tabitha stalked by cautiously, just to make sure
they weren’t a huge new breed of spider growing in the ground. The pair made
their way out from the trees and into a forest of flowers, bumping into
Fishbowls that puttered past on their way between the plants.

‘I’m not seeing any spiders,’ said Alex. Tabitha shot
him a look, motioning to be quiet. They were heading deep into the nest now,
far from any sight of New York. This was an alien world. The pale turquoise
moss grew everywhere, one vast carpet, softening their footsteps as they crept
closer to the cathedral across the meadow. Scattered windmill flowers towered
over the field, lining the way to their destination. Alex stopped suddenly.
There was a snapping sound in the forest, off to their left. A giant footstep.
They looked at one another in silent terror. Alex gripped Tabitha’s wrist and
ran, pulling her behind him back in among the trees. They ducked down behind a
thick tentacle tree, waiting in the silence. Tabitha’s insides were in knots.
The deathly quiet bit down into her nerves. The only sound was their hushed
breaths, rapid with panic. A hulking black monster crept by around the other
side of the tree, bigger than any Tabitha had seen before. It was looking for
them, sniffing at the air mere feet away on the far side of the tree trunk.
Huge claws crunching against the mossy blue ground like snow. Breathing heavy.
Its cold white eyes were staring, searching around at the trees and the forest
of flowers beyond. Tabitha reached quietly for the pistol on her belt, looking
wide-eyed at Alex. He looked back, just as terrified. Tabitha closed her eyes,
tried to breathe silently, and hoped against hope that it wouldn’t find them
there. The monster had stopped. It was just breathing. Sweat beaded and trickled
down Alex’s dirty cheek. The monster was sniffing around the tree, getting
closer. Tabitha tore a lump of brick from the mossy ground and tossed it away,
and it knocked against a distant tree trunk with a bamboo thud. The monster
growled and bounded after it, searching the trees beyond. Alex and Tabitha got
away in a silent scramble, looking back over their shoulders as the brute
disappeared into the forest. Suddenly the sunlight spilled down on them, and
they were out in the open again. Before Tabitha could ask, Alex grabbed her arm
and pulled her behind him as he ran for a towering alien chimney. Breathless,
they pressed their backs up against the structure and hid away. They stared at
the grim height of the cathedral across the blue mossy field; hell’s own
castle. They were running from fear into dread.

‘We need to get those people out,’ Tabitha told him,
trying to rally their spirits. ‘They’re our tribe. Do it for them.’

‘We’ll stick to the flowers,’ Alex whispered, looking around
the alien meadow for any sign of movement. Tabitha nodded, and they ran through
the thick blooms to the next chimney and hid against it. Tabitha looked to him
as they rested for a second. She nodded and led their sprint around to the next
power plant chimney along. Sprint by sprint, they were making their way closer
to the cathedral. Closer to freeing their tribe.

When they sprinted on and pressed their backs against
the next chimney along, Alex felt something around the corner tap against his
arm. Looking down, he saw a spindly silver leg around the curve of the wall.
The spider took a sudden interest, crawling out from inside the structure to
investigate. Alex panicked and dragged the spider out from the entrance, and
tore it limb from limb. It was a noisy execution; Tabitha helped him finish it
off quickly with her claws. They looked around the meadow once the thing was
dead, half expecting to have been heard by something. But the coast was clear.
Alex grinned at her and sighed with relief. He dropped the spider’s body and it
clanked loudly against a jagged lump of brick buried in the moss. Tabitha’s
heart froze. They looked around, petrified, as the sharp clanking sound rang
out across the meadow.

‘In here, quick!’ Tabitha whispered, running into the
hollow chamber inside the towering windmill power plant beside them. There was
a gentle glow in here, almost eerie. It was a walled garden; feathery white
fronds were growing all over the walls. Dotted everywhere were little
crystalline bird nests, growing seeds and plants that Tabitha already
recognised. Feeding on power from the chimney walls around them. So this was
where it all started; places like this grew armies. Alex tapped her shoulder
and pointed at something deeper inside the chamber. Tabitha looked and jumped.
It was one of the black monsters, standing like a hellish statue amongst vast
writhing leaves. A towering horror, frozen in time. It was growing from the
roots of the chimney itself; a monstrous black fruit not yet come to life.
Tabitha stepped closer despite herself, drawn to the huge terrifying energy she
felt around it. The statued abomination moved a little, cracking and
rustling in the rubbery metal leaves. Alex and Tabitha looked at one another
and backed away carefully.

‘Maybe we should find somewhere else to hide,’ Alex
whispered nervously. The statue’s dead eyes glowed into staring white life.

‘Definitely,’ Tabitha whispered back, already halfway to
the entrance. Nothing seemed to have changed outside though. They moved
cautiously out from the flower chimney and looked around. There was still a way
to go before they reached the alien cathedral and their tribe imprisoned inside.

‘Maybe we can just run for the doors,’ Alex suggested.
Tabitha looked over at the cathedral and around at the empty meadow. Maybe they
could, if they were quick enough. A pair of white eyes appeared in the forest
then, bobbing between the trees.

‘There, in the woods. It’s seen us,’ said Tabitha,
staring at the eyes. The black monster burst out from the forest and stalked
across the turquoise field towards them. Tabitha pulled the gun from her belt
and stepped out from the shade of the chimney.

‘Wait! You’ll blow our cover!’ Alex whispered
desperately, reaching for her.

‘It’s already blown,’ Tabitha replied, not bothering to
whisper any more. They watched spiders creeping out from the woods and tower
blocks in the distance. Tabitha held the pistol in both hands, taking aim. ‘May
as well blow it wide open.’ The monster was galloping across the blue field,
drooling hot metal as it closed the gap. Tabitha fixed the gun sights on its
bobbing head.

‘Shoot it,’ said Alex, staring in terror. ‘Shoot it!’
Tabitha waited until the monster was practically on them; until she couldn’t
miss. She squeezed the trigger and blew a sparking hole straight through its
skull. The crackling gunshot echoed across the field and left a clear warped
trail in the air behind it. The monster’s limp colossal body crashed and
crumpled into the moss, tumbling to a stop beside her.

‘You’re insane,’ Alex chuckled, walking out onto the
field to admire her kill. Spiders were streaming out from every distant crack
and crevice in the toppled-tower hills.

‘Well, you’re an idiot,’ Tabitha replied, nodding at the
dead silver spider he’d dropped down noisily on the ground. ‘So that round
thing up there, is that what shoots the jets down?’ she said, pointing at a
glowing sphere on a cathedral tower.

‘I think so,’ Alex replied. ‘Not exactly easy to get to
if you want to take it out.’

‘We don’t need to get to it,’ Tabitha replied, taking
aim. She shot three bolts of light into the high sphere, and it exploded in a
blue flash and echoed across the field. Strange, she thought. Artillery
shouldn’t be so easy to kill.

‘Wow, that’s a lot of
spiders,’ said Alex, looking around them. Tabitha looked from the cathedral
back to the blue field. The spiders were a crawling army of hundreds, creeping
out from every hole and tree around them. They swarmed out from the cathedral
entrance too; a chittering barricade blocking the way.

‘Have you ever seen that
many?’ said Alex in horror, stepping closer to her as the spiders crept onto
the field around them.

‘Once. You?’ she said.

‘Nope.’ Alex looked
around for a way out; somewhere to run. Saw nothing but spiders. ‘We’re going
to stay here and fight them, aren’t we?’ he said grimly.

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied.
‘With a bit of help.’ She whistled at the sky as loudly as she could. Alex took
his coat off for the fight and dropped it in the blue moss in a flurry of dusty
spores.

‘Do you heal quickly?’
Tabitha asked him, watching the spiders creep closer.

‘Nope. Never needed to,’
Alex replied, taking off his t-shirt. His arms and torso were covered in
rubbery black scales, just like the dead monster sprawled out in front of them.

‘The spiders can’t get
through this. I grew this when I ate the monster like that guy,’ he said,
nodding at Tabitha’s kill. ‘If they get me in the head though, I’m fucked,’ he
said, grinning. ‘So I try not to let that happen. Anyway, let’s fight.’ Alex
turned to walk away, heading for the massing spiders.

‘Alex! Wait for Seven to
get here,’ said Tabitha. ‘We can fight from the sky.’

‘I’ll take my chances
down here,’ he replied. ‘They’ll shoot your ship down, like I told you. There’s
more of those cannons around here, you know.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Tabitha
insisted. ‘Seven’s one of their ships, after all. Why would they shoot their
own kind?’

‘Well, if you say so,’
Alex replied doubtfully. ‘Like I said, I’ll take my chances down here. I’ve
killed enough of those things to know what I’m doing. And anyway… it’s a good
day to die. May as well go out in style.’ Alex left her and walked out into the
field of moss. The spiders were creeping closer, shrinking the circle on all
sides. ‘Whenever you’re ready!’ Alex yelled to the spiders, stretching his arms
out as if to welcome them. His sharp tail was writhing. Tabitha breathed deep
and watched the sky for a second. A bird flew past, oblivious, almost in slow
motion. The sky was a watercolour sea; a pale blue deep, stretching up forever.
She looked back down at a strange violent world, and a sea of creeping silver
that covered the turquoise field around them. No sign of Seven. Tabitha cursed
and ran over to stand with Alex, whistling at the sky again for her dragon.
Seven should have been here by now; she couldn’t wait any longer. Tabitha took
a breath, aimed her pistol at the creeping spiders, and fired.

‘So much for the plan,’
said Alex, watching spiders explode at Tabitha’s shot. Another scuttled towards
him and he leapt at it, and punched a hole through its head to drop it dead on
the moss.

‘The plan’s still on,’
Tabitha replied, opening fire on the spiders as they swarmed towards them.
‘We’re cutting a hole through to the doors,’ she said, nodding at the
cathedral. She whistled for Seven again as loudly as she could, and vaporised
the spiders scuttling towards her with a laser blast. The spider swarm rattled
and clanked towards them like a stabbing wall of legs, pouncing and falling
back against Alex and Tabitha’s kicks and punches. The fight had begun.

‘Looks like your friend’s
not coming,’ Alex called over his shoulder, throwing a spider to the ground and
stabbing his tail through another. Tabitha snapped her near-empty pistol back on
her belt, gritting her teeth and wearing a pissed-off stare. She flicked her
claws out and ripped the nearest spider to shreds. Leapt on a second and kicked
a crater in its head, and pulled the tongue clean out of another when it jumped
to stab her.

‘I’m not going down
without a fight,’ she told Alex, wiping silver blood off her face. ‘They’ll
have to pull me apart at the fucking seams to stop me.’ Alex and Tabitha looked
at one another; at the spiders surrounding them. They started a war together,
throwing themselves into the fight with everything they had. Crunching metal
punches slammed spiders down dead with dents in their heads. Stabs and clawed
gouges spurted silver blood into the air; thin metal shrieks painted the
clattering battle in murdered bursts. Wriggling bodies were lifted high and
broken down on the ground. Spiders thrown down cracked and clawed open, vicious
and visceral, streaming blood as their corpses flew back into the crowd.
Tabitha yelled and tore the legs off one and buried her knife in another, high
on the blood and the fury. Alex smiled as he watched her fight, whipping his
tail in a violent grinning dance to scatter the creeping horde. He dug his
hands down into a silver body and felt for its pounding heart, and squeezed
until it burst to gulp the blood. Fighting back to back, Alex and Tabitha
brought their own bleeding hell down on the spiders. Echoing yells and ringing
metal punches filled the meadow, holding back the tide one murderous victory at
a time.

‘Getting tired yet?’ Alex
called back, putting the spiders down one by one as they scrambled against his
metal skin.

‘I’m just getting
started!’ Tabitha yelled fiercely, tearing another spider apart in a slapping
gush of shining blood.

‘Behind you!’ Alex
shouted, as a hellish monster pounded feral across the field and crashed in
through the mass of spiders. Tabitha turned to face it. ‘Shoot it!’ he yelled.
Tabitha stared at the creature charging towards her. She’d be wasting her shots
on the spiders flying up in front of it; a tumbling silver shield as the
monster approached. It was up close in seconds. Tabitha leapt aside from the
creature and let it plough through the spiders behind her. The monster lost its
momentum as it turned back for her, caught up and staggering in the clattering
horde at its feet. It stumbled to a knee and Tabitha ran, leapt, and suddenly
she was on top of it. Anchoring her feet in its back she tore the armoured
plate from its neck with everything she had. Punched a crunching wet hole in
its skull and plunged her grasping fingers inside, and felt her claws slice
brain. The monster screamed and jumped up, staggering and reaching for her on
its back. Tabitha strained to drive her claws in deeper and tore the thick
gristly cord from its spine, and the monster spewed a waterfall gush of
gurgling blood and dropped dead with a crash.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Alex
laughed, admiring the violence. The spiders hesitated around the huge black
body, its gushing blood turning the blue moss into a shining swamp. Tabitha
stared at the hesitant swarm around her, catching her breath. They were coming
back though; regrouping. She couldn’t keep this pace up forever, not against so
many. It was going to be a long slow death once her energy started to run out.
Suddenly the swarm was scuttling back in for round two. Seven’s roar filled the
sky then, and his shadow swept down over the spiders like a deathly spectre. He
crashed down amongst them with an earthquake impact and lit the field up with a
white inferno, melting the spiders a dozen at a time. Alex laughed and cheered
at the carnage, stepping back from the searing heat.

‘Alright, I definitely
need one of those!’ he yelled happily, barely audible over the thundering rush
of Seven’s flames. The spider swarm was dwindling down, edging back as Alex and
Tabitha fought on. Seven cut deep molten trenches through the horde beyond,
hurling ghostly white napalm deep into their ranks until the survivors were
scuttling away.

‘There’s dragons coming!’
Tabitha yelled to Alex, watching the skies as she leapt up into Seven’s saddle.
‘Come with me!’

‘Take care of them!’ said
Alex, slamming his fist into another spider scurrying his way. The mossy field
burned white behind him. ‘I’ll handle the rest of these, just keep those big
fuckers off me!’

‘Take this then,’ Tabitha
called to him. She took the alien knife from her belt and tossed it down to the
moss by his feet. Alex grinned and picked it up, and promptly buried the blade
in a scuttling spider with a flying burst of silver blood. He pulled it out with
a squeak and carved another in half. It cut them like they were cardboard.

‘It’s beautiful!’ he
shouted back happily, slashing another spider apart and blinking away from the
blood.

‘I want that back,’
Tabitha called over her shoulder, turning Seven around and taking off over the
meadow. She looked back at Alex’s shrinking shape as she climbed off into the
sky. A single frenzied figure standing against the swarm, fast and
animal-violent; painting the blue moss in shining bursts of silver blood.

Tabitha’s rage bubbled up
black and burning as she sank down into the cockpit. Revenge filled her head.
Seven climbed high over the hive and the city ruins. The grey dragons loomed
closer, circling above.

‘I really hope you’re the
ones that caught us in the desert, because I’m going to fucking destroy you,’
she growled at the pack. Tabitha stepped into Seven’s mind and felt the full
rabid brunt of his rage in there; a shotgun blast of snarling bloody thoughts
that filled her head. Seven raced for the dragons on a collision course, taking
their orderly formation by surprise with his recklessness.

‘Get in there, Seven,’
she told him. ‘Kill.’

Alex heard Seven roar high above the meadow. He looked
up at a sudden bursting cloud of silver in the sky, shining in the sun like a
fluid firework. Dragon blood rained down on him from the heavens as he cut
another spider open, laughing as he wrenched the knife out with a slick spurt.
He grabbed another that leapt for him and wrestled it brutally to the ground,
savouring its metal screams as he hacked its legs away.

Seven tackled another dragon and ripped its throat
out. The grey body dropped away to the city below, crashing down on an office
block with an echoing dustcloud explosion. The dragons’ white flames did
nothing against Seven, huge and black and hurtling towards them. Their pale
skinny frames dived away as he crashed in amongst them.

‘You’re a bunch of
rookies,’ Tabitha said with a grin, swooping over the panicked pack as they
tried to fight. She spun Seven around and chased down a dragon that was scrawny
by comparison; clamped his claws down into the back of its neck and snatched it
out of the sky. Tabitha pressed Seven’s head close enough to see the fear in
the grey dragon’s eyes, and chewed its head into a mangled bloody mess. She
caught something moving in the corner of her eye. A dark figure was clambering
out of the grey dragon’s hatch; a watcher trying to escape his dead ship.
Tabitha screamed in a blind rage and spat a jet of flame down on the figure,
watching the dragon and its burning pilot drop and smash into the ground. She
felt a dragon bite Seven’s wing and yelled in anger, wrapping his body around
their attacker and crushing his jaws deep into the grey dragon’s chest. His
weight dropped the two of them to a tower block roof with a crash. Seven’s
victim was batting its wings and screaming for life in the dustcloud,
scrambling to get away. Seven dragged it back. Tabitha didn’t stop tearing the
scales and flesh until she saw the watcher pilot inside it, holding on for dear
life to what remained of the cockpit. Seven slammed his jaws around the deep
wound of his own accord and spewed flames into the dragon’s chest, bursting its
body apart in a tide of steaming blood.

‘Where the fuck are you
going?’ Tabitha screamed at the last two, leaping Seven off the roof to chase a
dragon down as it turned to fly away. Seven shot into the sky, staring hungrily
as he chased it down. The dragon was dodging and weaving, frantic to escape.
Seven snatched it up in his talons and bit down into its wing, tearing it off
at the shoulder in a gush of blood. The grey dragon screamed and fell away in a
spin, spurting blood in a silvery spiral before it crashed down into the ruins.

‘You’re really going to
wish you weren’t the last one left,’ Tabitha told the remaining dragon. It
glanced back at them gaining fast as it zig-zagged in the sky. Their prey gave
up ducking and dodging and opened up its jets into a straight-out sprint into
the blue, trying desperately to escape Seven’s shadow. Tabitha chased it down
and sank Seven’s cruel talons into its back, forcing the struggling grey dragon
to a rooftop where they could pick it apart one screaming shred at a time.
Tabitha thought about her mum and took her bloodbath revenge. She thought about
Emma and Jen, the Ghosts… and her Laika and Fishbowl. She thought about
herself, being force-fed to that monstrosity on the mothership. Thought about
every healed-up gouge and screaming punishment she’d never deserved. When the
watcher emerged broken from the grey dragon’s mangled corpse, Tabitha leapt out
of Seven’s cockpit to finish it herself. The dazed figure looked up from the
rooftop to see the human hybrid standing over it. Gold eyes staring, the same
colour as its own. It watched her carefully and opened its hands out at its
sides; asking for mercy. Tabitha flicked her claws out and ripped its throat
away, forcing the screaming watcher down on the rooftop to strangle the life
out of it.

Alex felt his arms cramping as he wrestled another
spider to the ground. He buried the knife in its heart and staggered to his
feet, exhausted from the fighting. Suddenly there was a clawing clambering
weight on his back as another pounced on him from behind. Grunting with the
effort he threw the spider over his shoulder and pummelled it into the ground.
Almost forgetting, he pulled the knife from the bleeding spider behind him with
a shrill metal squeak. He sighed breathlessly and looked around at the
never-ending swarm creeping closer. He felt his heart in his throat when he saw
the spiders bursting apart in the distance. Something huge was ploughing
through them to get to him. The biggest monster he’d ever seen.

‘Alright,’ he said,
exasperated, hacking another spider away. He had a tail; he had the knife. Maybe
he stood a chance. He faced the monster as it charged towards him. He was
faster, smaller. He could give it a matador cut when it came past. Enough of
those and he might even bleed its strength out. Alex leapt away too late
though, and the monster raked its claws down his arm as he dived aside. The
monster skidded in the moss and turned to run back at him. Alex wasn’t even on
his feet. A sudden shadow descended and bit down into the monster’s side.
Gigantic jaws mangled the screaming creature into a bloody mess, and tossed it
away to flail and die. Seven stood growling at the spiders, a deep murderous
rumble. Tabitha watched from the saddle as the silver tide hesitated and backed
away. There were no more dragons above; no hulking brutes charging from the
forest. Only the shrinking swarm of spiders sulking back, and a creeping hope
of victory in Tabitha’s mind. The breeze was thick with the smell of fire and
alien blood; the blue silver-marsh meadow was strewn with bodies around them.

‘You’re still alive
then,’ she observed, looking down at Alex sitting in the moss. ‘Oh god, your
shoulder!’

‘Yeah,’ Alex nodded,
staring at the gaping wound in his cradled arm. The torn scales and flesh
streamed silver, mixing with the spiders’ blood on his hands. ‘I could say that
it’s fine and I could carry on, but this really fucking hurts and
I’m losing a lot of blood.’

‘Come on,’ said Tabitha,
jumping down from Seven to help Alex to his feet. ‘We need to get you inside,’
she said, nodding at the living cathedral. ‘We’ll be safer in there.’

‘Let’s just get those
people out so we can get out of here,’ Alex grumbled, gripping his bleeding
arm. ‘And if they don’t sound grateful enough when we find them, I’m going to
be really pissed off.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Tabitha chuckled.
‘Seven, can you stay out here and keep the spiders away please?’ Seven growled
and snapped at the swarm to force them back. ‘I don’t think you’d fit through
the door anyway,’ she told her dragon with a smile, stroking his bloody snout.
Seven watched Alex and Tabitha stagger off towards the cathedral and disappear
inside. He stomped after them and sat by the entrance, guarding the door. The
surviving spiders lurked in the distant trees and ruins, creeping away into
their holes to wait. Seven lay down dominant, owning the empty field and
looking around at his kills.

49

‘Come on, we can’t stop
here,’ said Tabitha, helping Alex across a giant entrance hall. The structure
was a church of living metal inside, walls swelling and falling with peaceful
breath in the sacred silence. Pulsing current. A ghoulish towering hybrid, lit
by a million lights glowing cold and aquatic. It smelled like a forest in here.

‘Are you sure they’re in
here? The prisoners?’ said Tabitha.

‘They’re here,
somewhere,’ Alex replied, grunting at the pain. There was a rising heavenly
drone in this place, like it was seeping from the walls. A rumbling choir of
static in their heads. Their whispering footsteps echoed down the hall. The
choir of current was rising. And behind the sound, the breath of the building.
Constant, calm. Monumental.

‘We need to get you
bandaged up,’ said Tabitha, looking back at Alex’s trail of silver blood on the
scaly floor.

‘You know, I’m not going
to argue with that,’ Alex replied, grunting again at the pain as they moved
through melting doors into a vast hall. They crossed the room in a kind of
reverent silence; staring around at organic walls and glowing plants, ornate
and skeletal.

‘This place is
incredible,’ said Alex, breaking the silence. Tabitha noticed how pale he was;
shaky and sluggish. He was looking up at the high vaulted ceiling. There were
webs of branches or bones up there; alien scaffolds that seemed more grown than
built. Starlight twisted and fluxed in the fibrous rafters, lighting the place
with a ghostly pulsing glow. Alex pressed his palm into a bony temple column
beside them, and watched a glowing white imprint of his hand in the material
fading back to grey. For a second the skin of the column ran through with
illuminated veins, pulsing the touch of his skin to the rest of the cathedral
like a message. Alex stared up in wonder at the haunting light show and pressed
his hand against the column again.

‘Come on you idiot,
you’re bleeding to death,’ said Tabitha, helping him on deeper into the hall.
The walls grew brighter as they made their way up a wide ribbed slope, until at
the top they found a glowing garden in the heart of the building. Fishbowls
were floating around between alien shrubs and flowers, tending to their plants
under a pale aquatic light. There was a trickle of water somewhere, beyond the
trees ahead. Strange white proto-birds jetted their way between the flowers,
sipping arcs of current from the blooms. Insects Tabitha had never seen before
drifted placidly between the plants, floating and translucent like tiny
jellyfish bobbing through the air.

‘Well, seems like a nice
place to die anyway,’ Alex said shakily. He grunted with the pain as Tabitha
helped him through the flowers to sit him down on the blue moss.

‘You’re not going to
die,’ Tabitha told him, rinsing his wound with her water bottle. She looked
around the garden and plucked a huge spiral-patterned leaf from a smoky-red
shrub. She picked at the edge, and tore it into long spongy strips. Gently she
wrapped the strips around his metal-skinned arm and tied them off tight like
bandages, one by one. Tabitha worked in silence as the alien birds and insects
floated and fluttered around them in the garden. High above, miniature moons
hovered motionless below the ceiling. Glowing deathly pale, shining a watery
light down on the growing garden. A glowing cloud of stardust swelled and
shifted like a mist against the ceiling; a bonsai nebula writhing snail-slow
above their heads. Tabitha tied off one last strip of leaf around Alex’s arm,
and sat back on the moss.

‘Looks like you’ve stemmed
the flow,’ Alex joked, grinning at her.

‘You’re an idiot,’ she
replied, with the tiniest hint of a smile on her lips.

‘It really hurts,’ he
said, flapping his arm like a chicken wing.

‘So stop moving it,’ she
said despairingly. ‘Here, lie back.’ She plucked a giant tubular fungus and set
it down like a pillow, helping him lie down on the moss. A flurry of spores
puffed from the moss where he lay down, dancing up like glowing dust into the
air.

‘Are you trying to seduce
me?’ he said, grinning. ‘I’m not that kind of guy.’ Tabitha fought back a
smile, holding onto her stony expression.

‘You did well out there,’
she said, trying to change the subject. ‘You’re a good fighter.’ She checked
the bleeding beneath his makeshift bandages, and brought another leaf over to
tear up and replace the sodden strips. Tabitha worked in silence, scoring out
the strips with a claw before she ripped the leaf into pieces.

‘You’re the saddest
person I’ve ever seen,’ said Alex, watching her face as she tied the new
bandages around his arm. Tabitha looked up from his wound into his eyes, and
didn’t know what to say for a second. Caught off guard.

‘I’ve lost everyone,’ she
replied quietly, tying off the last strip of leaf. ‘Of course I look sad.’

‘No, there’s more to it
than that,’ said Alex, studying her expression where he lay. ‘And I know,
losing everyone is hell, and I’m right there with you on that one. I’ve lost
everyone too. But you look… lost. Absolutely lost. Like you’ve given up on the
world.’ Tabitha sat back on the moss, staring at the garden. He had no right to
start making guesses about her like that. But he was right. And the thoughts
bubbled up into words before she could stop them.

‘…I’ve killed people,’ she told him. It felt so weird to
say. It wasn’t something she’d ever expected to admit to. It wasn’t something
she was capable of. At least, she never thought so. The building looked so much
like some weird church though, that it felt like the right place to confess her
sins. And most of all she felt the weight on her mind lift, just a little, when
she’d said it.

‘I’ve killed people too,’ Alex replied, staring at the
moonlit ceiling high above. ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ he told the stardust.
He pushed himself up and grunted with the pain, and shuffled his way over
beside her. ‘Look, we had to stay alive,’ he told her. Tabitha looked up into
his eyes. ‘We did what we had to,’ he assured her.

‘I’m a murderer,’ she objected, quietly. She felt a tear
roll down her cheek. ‘I’m the worst kind of person. A monster. This thing I’ve
turned into… it isn’t me.’

‘We’re not the people we used to be,’ Alex replied. ‘But
what else were we supposed to do, just lay down and die? Let those people kill
us instead? This isn’t the same world any more. It’s just instinct, to
do what it takes to survive.’ He met Tabitha’s gaze. ‘Civilisation’s
disappeared,’ he told her. ‘So have the rules. Morals go out the window when
you’re trying to survive. Especially when you think about what we’re up
against.’

‘True,’ Tabitha said quietly, looking back down at the
bright blue ground. They were interrupted for a moment by a strange passer-by.
Both of them glanced up and watched an
alien creature swim by silently through the air, like an airborne squid or
a nautilus. A bony shoe-shaped creature with tentacles and staring eyes. It
drifted by, indifferent. Tabitha watched it go, thinking, and looked back down
at the ground. The grief and sadness she’d fought off for so long came back
with a vengeance, and swallowed her up completely.

‘Look, we’ve both done things we aren’t proud of, along
the way,’ said Alex. Tabitha looked up through her tears and saw a fierce
conviction in his eyes. An intensity. ‘But we did those things for a reason;
the only reason that matters. To stay alive,’ he said. ‘And here we are, still
hanging on, even after everything that’s happened to us. That’s all it comes
down to. Here.’ Suddenly he took her black metal hand in his own, and Tabitha
felt a current there between their skin.

‘Do you feel that?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied quietly, looking up into his eyes. It
was the strangest sensation; a tingling magnetism like she’d never felt before.
Electrostatic lust.

‘We’re different. We’re a new species,’ he told her.
‘We’re going to do whatever it takes to survive, and we’re going to do it
together.’ Tabitha looked into his stark eyes, and dropped her guard. She’d
only just met him. Whether it was the voltage or something else that made her
heartcore race, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that when he leaned in
closer, she didn’t pull away. Suddenly she didn’t feel so alone any more.

‘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.

‘Hi,’ she said in a drunken daze, smiling as she floated
up to Seven’s face. She held his jaw and bumped her mask against his big stubby
snout, kissing him on the nose. She felt their minds plug back together, and
felt Seven’s warm loving tide wash over her. A shining ecstasy of faith; a
fierce companionship spelled out in turning glyphs and rainbow shades in her
head. Laughing, high, Tabitha pushed off from his snout and tumbled over
herself in floating loops among the stars. She felt the light of the sun so
clearly up here; unfiltered. Her body drank in the radiation hungrily, soaking
up life and light until it felt like golden liquid bliss inside her. The sun
became a holy twisting enormity as she watched it; searing the black void with
turning hyperbright petals of light. Seven stretched out a wing and gathered
Tabitha in before she could float away. Grinning, Tabitha stroked his wing as
he guided her gently back. It was so silent up here. So still. Looking down on
it, the world didn’t look threatened, or covered in a creeping black cloud of
evil. It looked fine. The sun crested on the edge of its vast curve like a
halo, pouring golden light across endless green and blue below. The world
looks just the same as it’s always been, Tabitha told herself. Because
it is. It’s just changed tenants.

Tabitha
headed back down into the cockpit, and the hatch sealed above her. Atmosphere
flooded back into the cockpit in whispering jets of air, and Tabitha pulled her
mask back down into a collar again. She peeled the catsuit off her hands and
feet and floated down to her seat, and stared in shock at the thing that
hovered around beside her.

‘Fishbowl!’ she screamed happily, hugging the creature
close whether it wanted it or not. ‘Where the hell have you been? Have you been
hiding in here all along?’ she squeezed it tighter, heart leaping, until
Fishbowl was wriggling to get away from her. Maybe she had a fungal parasite
affecting her nervous system, Fishbowl considered.

‘Where were you hiding, you crafty bugger?’ said
Tabitha, ecstatic to see it. She let go of Fishbowl’s wriggling arms, and the
creature anchored itself against the seat and floated patiently at a distance.

‘Jesus,’ Tabitha mumbled, wiping a silver blood puddle off
the seat with her parka sleeve. Strange that she’d hadn’t seen her coat lying
around in here for a while, she thought. She liked that coat. She’d thought the
watchers must have gotten rid of it when they took Seven away. Then she
remembered.

‘My flower!’ she told Fishbowl excitedly, rummaging for
the bump in her coat pocket. She produced a crumpled plastic case and opened up
the little toy plant inside; a present to herself from the shopping centre.
Smiling, she peeled away the tab from a sticky pad underneath and stuck the
plastic plant down on Seven’s dashboard. When she switched on the tiny solar
panel the flower started dancing happily from side to side, taking in Seven’s
huge energy around it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Tabitha told Fishbowl in wonder;
blissed out on new life. High on the thought of green and growing things. Her
gardener didn’t notice the plastic flower though.

‘Well it’s not real, I guess,’ Tabitha admitted. ‘But I
like it.’ She watched the flower happily and sipped from her alien water bottle;
it was empty. She filled it up from Seven’s filtered dispenser in the wall
behind the seat, and took big parched gulps like she’d never drunk water
before. ‘Oh wow,’ she said quietly, savouring the taste. She felt the water
spark inside her, colder and smoother than all the silver blood she’d ever
tasted. It was a pure gleaming high that spoke to something deeper inside her;
fresher and more intense than anything she’d felt before.

‘Water?’ she asked Fishbowl, taking a rest in her seat.
Her gardener reached out. Tabitha tipped the bottle slightly, and poured it
gently into a spout that opened in Fishbowl’s reaching tentacle. When she put
her seat harness on and stepped into Seven’s mind, Tabitha felt the full
swirling mixture of shock and joy there in his head. A gleaming white space
that welcomed her, shining all the brighter now that she was gliding inside it.

‘I’m glad I’m back too,’ Tabitha said softly, heart
leaping as she felt their minds embrace. ‘Did you miss me?’ she asked him. She
felt his reply deep in her head, and cried happily for a little while in her
chair.

Tabitha
looked down at Earth through Seven’s eyes, thinking. There was no one to go
back to down there; no place to call home. No tribe. She sat back and wrestled
with her thoughts for a while, touching her black metal fingers to the dirty
ribbon on her wrist.

‘I’m leaving, Mum,’ she said quietly, sad and soaring at
the same time. ‘That’s not a world I can go back to.’ Pulling up the hologram
map in front of her, it showed Earth as a small blue pulsing dot in a large web
of lines. Tabitha spread her hands wide, and the map filled the cockpit with a
glowing constellation. Looking around it in wonder Tabitha saw a small green
dot, blinking far away on the web of light. It must have been the aliens’ home.
But there were other dots too, pulsing on the far side of the map. White
spheres to indicate stars; purple dots to represent uncertain planets. She felt
as much from Seven’s mind. Pulling the huge map around and moving her hands to
zoom out further, Tabitha saw more star systems with more purple planets. So
many new worlds that the aliens hadn’t reached. Seven felt worry and doubt
about them; they were the unknown.

‘That’s why we have to explore them,’ Tabitha told him
with a smile, pushing her finger into a random purple dot on the map. The
hologram vanished; their course was set. Maybe their new tribe was out there
waiting for them, somewhere in the stars. A white path of light stretched out
in front of them in Seven’s vision, reaching deep into space. It was their
route to an alien world far from here; a new beginning.

‘Ready?’ she asked her two monsters. Tabitha willed
Seven’s jet scales into glowing white life, and in a sudden burst of light her
dragon shot into the void. Theirs was the deep dark infinity; a holy silver
garden of stars.

* * *

* * *

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All reviews are greatly appreciated, and I’ll plant a seed for each one I get.
It’s what Fishbowl would want.

Find me on Twitter at @andrew_in_space

Other books:

Tales of the Strange and Grim