Tabitha (41 page)

‘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.