Tabitha (53 page)

‘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.