Tabitha (37 page)

‘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.