Tabitha (18 page)

‘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?’