Free Tabitha by Andrew Hall

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,