“Matt! Matt!”
George was shouting my name and shaking me so hard that Rebecca was awake before I was, bleary and dazed. Pushing his hands away a little I sat up.
“What’s the matter?” The light was on, but outside the small window the world was dark. “What the fuck is the matter?”
“Something’s happening to John. It’s not good.”
“Oh shit.” Grabbing my trousers I pulled them on,
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throwing a top over my shoulder for Rebecca, not that from the panicked look on the old man’s face anyone was too concerned about seeing a naked woman.
Still doing up my trousers, I followed him back into the dorm to John’s bed. Everyone was awake now, staring with dread, Daniel sitting on the opposite bed, Chris and Dean hunched over the boy. All I could see at first were his feet hanging over the edge, shaking, hands drumming fast into the mattress beneath him, the toes stretched taut. Dean stepped back to let George and I through, his own face a mask of terror. John’s eyes were wide with shock, staring up at the ceiling as his whole body convulsed angrily on the bed. Like his toes, his fingers were stretched tight, as if every sinew in his thin young body was straining to escape and his torso shook and shivered aggressively.
“John? John? Can you hear me?”
There was no response except a small trickle of drool escaping from the side of his open mouth.
“What is happening, Chris? What’s happening to him?”
He stared at me. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
Reaching forward, I grabbed the top of the grey T-shirt, which was now black with sweat, and ripped it down the middle, exposing John’s chest.
“Oh, shit. Oh fucking shit.” Involuntarily I stepped backwards, banging my calf into the bed behind me. John’s chest was alive with movement, the bumps rippling under his skin, jerkily breaking free from wherever they had attached themselves inside and making their way upwards. One protrusion pushed up over his sternum and into his neck, stretching his Adam’s apple, forcing his breath out in chokes and coughs as it
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wormed its way up into his throat. Whatever it was, I expected to see it emerge through his open mouth, but there was nothing. It seemed to have just disappeared.
“Where the fuck did it go?”
“Wherever the others are going.” George’s voice was shaking with his own terror as we stared at the disappearing lumps following that first into his neck. Once the final one had vanished, John’s convulsions stopped instantly, leaving him panting for breath. He blinked for a moment, and then his eyes moved round the room, focussed again. None of us able to speak, we watched as he pulled himself up into a sitting position, his fingers running down his normal torso. He grinned.
“They’re gone.” Looking round at us in amazement, he laughed slightly. “They’re fucking gone!”
My heart hammered in my chest. Yes, they were gone, but where? Had they just dissolved?
“What did you feel when you were convulsing?” Chris didn’t look too convinced. “Could you feel them moving?”
“Convulsing?” Reaching for his cigarettes, John paused, his smile wavering a little with confusion. “I wasn’t convulsing. I was asleep. You guys just woke me up.”
“No, you were…”
“Nggnnnnnnn … “
Chris was cut off by the keening noise that suddenly came from John, his hand dropping his unlit cigarette and flying to his head. Wincing, his mouth opened wider, almost reluctantly, as if being forced apart, letting the sound build into a shaking scream, his eyes meeting each of our horrified gazes with too vivid a
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consciousness before he pushed past me and ran to the door, escaping into the night.
Following him, the scream becoming less human with each second, but oh so full of agony, we stepped back into the humid air, George holding us back on the stairs, not letting anyone run down to where John had fallen on his hands and knees, his fingers clawing into the earth, digging deep furrows in the grass as he raised his head to look at us, still letting out that awful shriek.
The skin on his face was bleeding, and I couldn’t see where from, thinking he must have cut himself when he fell, but then I realised that his whole face was bleeding, bleeding through the pores, some dripping down from his hair. Grabbing Rebecca, I pushed her face into my chest, forcing her to stop looking, and smothering her own sobs into me.
He was shaking again now, his head distorting, and as the scream rose to almost a whistle the flesh of his cheeks and throat finally gave way, hard shiny black legs forcing their way through, ripping at him, tearing the life from him, aggressively bursting into the world.
Have you seen any black widows at your end? Smaller than the normal ones?
Oh God. That’s what the man in London had asked. He’d heard a broadcast about black widows. That was what was coming out of John. It had to be. Rebecca’s blood hadn’t killed it. From here it just looked like we’d royally pissed it off.
With John still screeching, but thankfully losing any real grip on life, the body of the thing pushed it’s way out through his extended mouth, all hard shiny shell, more like a beetle in a spider shape, its squat legs hairy and thicker than those of its giant mate, only two red
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angry pinprick eyes rather than a whole bank. Finally free, it twisted swiftly round and with a sharp hiss reached into the destroyed head and bit the tongue out, the two large mandibles sucking it in, chewing on it as it leapt away and disappeared across the grass into the dark half of the compound, where it could hide in the comfort of the night.
The silence was broken by the sound of Chris throwing up over the barrier, but no one moved. I could feel Rebecca’s breath coming hard on my chest, creating a damp space there, but I still gripped her tight, not yet ready or able to let go. Oh fuck. Oh, holy fuck. Was that going to happen to me?
We must have stood there for at least ten minutes, too shocked to move, the only sounds being Chris’s small moans as he finished being sick; then Dean spoke from the doorway, his tone monotonous with disbelief.
“I’ve got a lump on my chest. Oh God, I’ve got a lump on my chest.”
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Chapter Twenty-three
It was two days after that that George and I found the black spider fried by the main gate. It had obviously tried to scale it, and come off worse against the electricity. At least we knew they could die, that was a slight upside, and it seemed that maybe they weren’t party to that communal mind thing that the women had. That didn’t surprise me. As a species we’d never really known what was going on in women’s heads and I figured that Mother Nature wasn’t going to change that now. Staring down at the obscene creature, it was hard to associate it with John, even though it had evolved from his flesh and blood.
Sniffing, the damp air giving us the constant feeling of a slight cold, I looked over my shoulder at where Rebecca was throwing a stick for Chester, the two of them bouncing with happiness.
“You got any lumps, George?”
After John, Dean had been the first to show signs of the growths on his chest, but Daniel and Chris had joined him late in the afternoon of the next day. So far
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they were all still alive, the lumps not yet moving, but the atmosphere in the hut was sombre with the weighty anticipation of death. Dean hadn’t stopped crying yet, despite the sedatives Chris had issued him.
We’d decided it was giving John Rebecca’s blood that had speeded up the process, making the body less inhabitable for the newly evolving male and forcing it to hurry its own birthing process up, and that maybe it would take longer with the rest. Chris still claimed to be searching for a cure, experimenting with drugs in the medical room, but the couple of times I’d been in to see him I’d found him staring at his newly terraformed skin under his shirt with abject horror. I didn’t think he really had any hope of finding something to provide him with a miracle cure.
George lifted his head. “No, no new lumps. Just an old man’s body under this shirt. You?”
I shook my head. Despite finding myself checking every twenty minutes or so with a feeling of dread, I still had yet to find any evidence of anything growing inside me. My chest was smooth.
“The others are starting to give us funny looks. Like they hate us.”
George shrugged, lighting his pipe. “It’s only natural. They’re terrified. At least John didn’t know what was coming. They do. They’ve seen it firsthand. They’re terrified and we’re lump-free. Hell, I’d hate us.”
I stared out at the fence. The widows had pretty much abandoned their vigil now. Maybe they could sense the change happening in the men, or maybe they were off mating with their newly found partners. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Once again the oppressive atmosphere in the compound pressed down on me.
“Rebecca and I are thinking of leaving. We can’t
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stay here. Not even if the others, you know…die or change or whatever. We’ll stagnate. We want to find others out there. Especially now we’ve got the baby coming.”
I’d taken George into our confidence the night John had died and Dean found the first signs of change in himself. I’d needed to talk about something good and talk we had, well into the morning.
“I was expecting you to say something like that.” He peered at me from behind his smoke. “Where were you thinking of heading?”
“North. You know, we keep thinking about that broadcast about the colony of children? Maybe there’s nothing in it, but maybe there is. It seems as good a place to head as any. See if we meet up with any other survivors on the way.” I stared at him, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t, so I carried on.
“We wanted you to come with us.”
It was George’s turn to stare out at the fence, and watching him I realised just how fond I’d become of him during the time we’d known each other. He was a good man, and a pretty wise one. I hoped he didn’t want to stay behind here and rot his remaining days away in this relic of a place.
“That’s very kind of you. I’ve been thinking of moving on myself, but I don’t think I’ll be able to come with you. I’ll head up to that colony if there is such a thing eventually, but there’s somewhere I’ve got to go first.”
“What do you mean?”
The air was quiet except for the lone sound of a bird calling out from one of the trees, its song muffled in the still of the morning.
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“Do you remember asking where I’d learned to sign, and I told you that my grandson was deaf?
I nodded.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. About how he’d be like Rebecca and Chester and that maybe there was a pretty good chance that he’d still be alive out there somewhere and needing me.”
“But that’s all the way down in Cornwall, George. … “
He hushed me with a smile and a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. I know you two have your priorities now. You’ve got that baby coming and you need to find some kind of community quickly. I’m just going to have to catch you up later, that’s all.”
Taking in a deep breath, he put one arm round my shoulder and steered me away from the rotting spider.
“I think we need to pack. Now that we’ve decided, I guess we need to be getting on our way, don’t you?”
I nodded, but my heart was heavy with the idea of him going off on his own. His chances were slim at best, but I knew that we couldn’t go with him. He was right. The baby was our priority.
We’d had to jumpstart the two Jeeps, but once they were purring they seemed happy enough to run. Dean and Daniel stayed in the hut, but Chris came out to see us off. He was pale and sweating, tears threatening his eyes.
“You lot take care now.”
I nodded and shook his cold clammy hand, not knowing what to say. “What will you do?”
“Well, I’ll let you out and then shut the gate. …”
“No, Chris, what will you do?” I stared at him, my heart full of pity.
He shrugged. “If it comes to it, I’ll just blow my
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brains out.” His smile was bitter at the edges. “But it’s amazing how much hope you can cling on to when you have to. Who knows, I might find a cure.”
“Well if you do, then get on the radios. Let the world know.”
“I will. I will. Look, I’d better…”
He didn’t finish his sentence, but instead scurried away towards the comms hut to get ready to open the gate.
We’d loaded up with plenty of food and equipment, no one having made any mention of us not taking anything, and we’d also packed up quite a lot of weaponry, as well as filling up some pressurised water sprayers, normally used for weedkillers, with blood solutions from Chester and Rebecca.
Rebecca and the dog were already in the passenger side when I wandered up to George to say farewell. He was standing tall and proud, but he still looked like a fragile old man. My heart aching, I looked at him, saving him to memory. There was little real hope of ever seeing him again and that must have shone out of my face, because I saw it reflected back in his.
“Don’t worry, son. I’ll be all right.”
My throat was choking up with tears, and instead of speaking I embraced him in a hug until he pushed me away.
“We’d better be getting along now.”
Nodding, I turned and headed back to the truck and climbed in alongside Rebecca and the dog, all of us watching as George made his lonely way to the vehicle ahead of us. Jesus, I hoped he’d make it.
Just as he was pulling open the door, Chester burst out barking and leapt out of the open window, running to catch the old man up. Without looking back,
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he jumped in. I called in vain after him, but he didn’t reappear. I guessed he’d decided that if George was going to have a chance of making it up to Scotland to meet us, then he was going to ride along. When the old man looked up to give us his final wave good-bye, this time both our grins were genuine. Chester would look out for him as best he could, and I felt better knowing that his journey would no longer be taken alone.