Tabitha (51 page)

Tabitha headed down to
the bars and restaurants that evening in a fitted blue dress. She wore her
bright hair up, and an extremely expensive diamond necklace and earrings plundered
from one of the jewellers. She smiled at imaginary passers-by, admired her
stark yellow eyes in a mirrored shop window, and made her way to the trendiest
bar. It was pitch-black inside; not much going on. So, she smiled to the
invisible patrons and came back outside again. She opted instead for an
open-plan bar overlooking the food court, and put her new purse down on the bar
top by her seat. It was nice here. A little busy, but nice. Tabitha sat down at
her barstool and glanced around for company, trying her best to fill every seat
with people. A dashing pirate captain was speaking with a dinosaur at one
table; at another a group of ladies were laughing over cocktails and dressed
like the suits in a deck of cards. Hearts touched Diamonds delicately on the
shoulder and laughed elegantly, like a silent movie star. Clubs was raving.
Spades was drinking a Manhattan.

‘Hi,
can I have a Manhattan please?’ Tabitha asked the speakeasy bartender. She got
up from her seat, walked around the bar and stood by the till.

‘Of
course, mademoiselle,’ she replied, in her manliest French accent. ‘I’m afraid
I don’t know how to make one, so I will just find out
pour
vous
.’ Tabitha pulled a cocktail menu from the stand
and studied the description. She poured two sloshes of bourbon into a cocktail
shaker. Probably a bit too much vermouth, and a sharp sour dash of bitters. She
closed it up and shook it, though it didn’t have nearly enough satisfaction
without the rattle of ice. All the ice, however, was a near-evaporated puddle on
the floor. Tabitha poured her warm concoction into a martini glass, and slid it
gently towards her seat on the opposite side of the bar.

‘On
the house for you mademoiselle, of course,’ she told herself, and walked back
around the bar.

‘Thank
you,’ she replied with a smile, glancing around as if she owned the place.
Which, in the absence of any surviving managers, was sort of true. She’d
inherited the world. Tabitha raised her glass at the thought and took a sip of
her warm cocktail. It was strong, really strong. Good. She looked down the bar,
and imagined Emma and Jen were here too. Jen would be politely turning down
some guy who’d come over, as usual. She and Emma had long since given up
resenting Jen for having her pick of the bars. It was more of an accepted fact
of life, like the tides or something. Unsuccessful with Jen, the men would
usually just walk away. Emma would normally try to jump in and talk to them
instead, if they hung around. Tabitha had always been thankful that Emma was
there to deflect the attention, so she’d rarely had to mumble and hesitate her
way through many encounters herself. She thought about John then as she sipped
her drink, surprised at how little she’d missed him. She hadn’t met him in a
club. He got talking to her in the park, while they were queuing for ice cream.
He was good looking, in a way. Awkward like her. Sometimes bossy, sometimes
spontaneously romantic. Easy to fall in love with. He’d always found it a bit
funny, how shy she was. Tabitha wondered what he’d make of her now. She
couldn’t help but remember some of their better moments, when they weren’t
arguing or just living around one another in stony silence. Tabitha raised her
martini glass and drained it with rapid sips; the best cure she’d ever found
for a lump of sadness in her throat.

‘Mm.
Another please,’ she asked the back of the empty bar.

Tabitha
spent a good while just sitting and drinking, staring at the huge ceiling over
the food hall like she was heir to an ancient sadness. Strong spirits turned
her grief into a massive melancholy, a gaping void without light or exit. After
a while she headed for the ladies’ toilets and looked shakily into a mirror,
staring at the thing looking back. Those weren’t her eyes, bright gold where
they used to be green. She ran her trembling black hands through her red curls,
her tears streaming through her makeup. Whatever that thing was in the
reflection, it wasn’t her. It didn’t act or move or stare like her. It was a
different person.

Tabitha was standing in
an
electricals
shop. She stared drunkenly at a
gigantic TV. The gigantic TV stared back at her. And the cricket bat she was
resting on her shoulder. She gripped the bat tight with both hands and launched
it into the huge glass screen with a textbook swing. A hard wooden thump and a
crisp glassy crack. She’d never heard such a satisfying sound. She brought the
bat back again, ready for another swing. The opulent screen wasn’t long for
this world. In a drunken rage Tabitha full-on murdered it, kicking it over with
an expensive thump on the floor. She smashed the bat down into the shattered
screen until glass shards bounced with every hit. She punched a hole through
the TV standing next to it, and threw the next one down to the floor with a
plastic crash. Swinging her bat, she obliterated a glass blender and smashed
expensive cameras and tablets in a blissful rage. She toppled a towering fridge
with a boom, and punched a crater in its big solid door. She slammed her foot
against another fridge, pushed it, and tipped it back with a thump that shook
the floor. She took her bat to everything on the shelves, smacking electronics
across the store with violent wooden knocks and clattering plastic bursts.

‘Fuck
you!’ she told the shattered chaos around her, destroying everything she could
never afford. Nothing said white picket fence like a shop like this. It was a
museum now, and all the expensive exhibits meant nothing any more. All part and
parcel of the big consumer dream, and all of it useless and dead. The thought
brought her down; deflated her. Action was needed. Tabitha turned around and
smashed her cricket bat into pristine computer screens.
Everything shiny
must die
, she told herself. Pretentious, expensive, shit. The prissy laptop
cracked and bounced under her cricket bat, spraying plastic keys like alphabet
teeth. And then… she saw it. The pinnacle of modern tech. The widget to end all
widgets, set apart like a holy object on a pearly white display. Redundant in a
disconnected world; less use than a stone. Tabitha looked at the price tag on
it and grinned like a Cheshire cat. She shouldered her cricket bat like a
baseballer
, tightened her grip, and smashed the god-widget
out of existence with a scattering crunch.

The
next shop along didn’t fare much better. Tabitha
frisbeed
ultra-pricey plates at the rest of the shelves, bursting cups and punching
bowls to shards. She threw expensive carving knives that spun and thumped into
the far wall, destroying a stack of crystal glassware in a high ringing song
and a tinkling smash. She grinned and slammed her fist down on a dining table,
demolishing a delicate table set and flinging glasses across the store. She
tore open the steel shutter on the jewellers next door and kicked the door in,
and smashed the glass cabinets apart to take her pick from the shiny shit.

‘Excuse
me, none of your rings fit my fingers,’ she slurred at the empty space behind
the counter. She plucked a four-figure diamond ring from the shards of a glass
case, examined it, and tossed it over her shoulder.

‘What
are they for?’ she asked the empty counter, swaying where she stood. ‘Why do
they cost so much?
Hm
? Do they
really
make
people happy?’ Tabitha tore her diamond necklace off and flung it at the wall.
Took her earrings out and tossed them on the floor. She picked up a cruel shard
of glass from the cases and closed her fist around it. It split, cracked,
shattered in her grip. Tiny specks of glass glimmered on her fingers, catching
the light of the sunset from the ceiling as she left the shop. She took a swig
from her whisky bottle outside and stared down the street of shops for a while,
resting and swaying on a handrail. What a lonely place. All the first-world
consumer crap she could ever need, and no reason whatsoever to want it. Blood,
air and water. And booze. That was all she needed. No… that was all she could
handle. No more chocolate, no more crisps. No cola, popcorn, bacon or pizza. No
more fresh apples, sweet and crunchy-red. No one to share some dips with. No
more family meals. Tabitha felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and ground
her teeth as she blinked them back.

‘Oh,
fuck you,’ she told the whisky bottle, and sent it flying through the air to
shatter on the fake street below. ‘I’m sick of this shit!’ she screamed at the
echoing silence. ‘I’m the only person left in the world, boo fucking
hoo
!’ she kicked the glass balcony wall with a crunch,
turning it veiny-opaque in an icy shatter. Tabitha stormed off back to the home
store, and took a good gulp of silver blood from one of her plastic bottles.
She felt her heart-core racing at the taste, and sobered up surprisingly
quickly with the stuff inside her. She crawled down into her nest of sofas and
pulled a cover close around her. She felt safe; hidden away from the world. It
was no use just milling around all winter, she decided. As big and well-stocked
as the shopping centre was, the place would be enough to drive anyone mad if
they weren’t careful. If she was going to stay here, she’d need to keep busy.
She had to set her mind to something, and take her thoughts off her grief.
Movie montages ran through her head as she dozed off. Thoughts of becoming
something stronger; something more.

Tabitha woke up and
stretched in her double-sofa nest. She’d still had the same old nightmares, but
at least they were fuzzy and fleeting. She’d only woken up once in the night,
so it was a good start. Maybe it was her brain, she thought; too busy with
ideas to dwell on dreams. Today would be a busy one, she decided. Even if it
was just folding clothes in a couple of shops, she had to do something to keep
herself occupied and feel useful. For all of her indulgences yesterday, they’d
only given her a hollow kind of happiness. She had to apply herself, as her dad
would say. Tabitha mulled over her options as she made her bed.

‘Ok.
Stop drinking,’ she told herself, counting the resolution on her finger. ‘Get
fitter. New clothes. Stock up supplies here.’ Smiling at the tasks on her
fingers, Tabitha smoothed out her dress and headed out of the shop door. It
felt better to have a plan. Another idea occurred to her then, and she counted
it ponderously on her thumb. A black boiling thought that bubbled up again
suddenly and gave new purpose to her life. Revenge.

Tabitha
plundered a clothes store for shorts and a light vest, pulling off her dress to
change. What she needed was a training routine for the winter, to prepare
herself for the act in spring. She fixed Chris’s face in her mind. He was
staring down at her with the rifle aimed. Her murderer. Tabitha jogged out of
the shop door and off down the white sunlit street. Chris was going to die. It
was the one thing left for her to live for.

‘Oh
god. Oh god,’ she panted, jogging down another shining white street. She was
heading for the distant food hall to make a lap of the tables, then it was
straight back to the far side of the shopping centre as fast as she could run.
Her footsteps hardly made a sound; no more than bare feet would even despite
their rubbery metal skin. They felt strangely comfortable to run with; agile
and free. Exhausted as she was, she could never remember running as well as
this.

Tabitha
gulped a bottle of water when she got back home to her nest, padding around the
place on aching legs. Sweating and shaking, she raised her arms up and pressed
her palms against the back of her head. For all her exhaustion, there was a
high there too. It felt good. Not as good as a gulp of that silver blood,
admittedly, but still good. Her mind strayed to the taste of the blood. She ran
her tongue across her teeth, imagining the sour tingly sweetness in her mouth.

‘God,
stop thinking about the blood!’ she growled at herself, and strolled out to a
clothes shop across the way. After a wet-wipe shower Tabitha changed into a
jumper and skinny jeans, and ruffled out her red curls in a mirror. Her legs
ached. If she stopped and sat down though, she knew she wouldn’t get back up
again. Without giving herself time to rest, she headed back outside and went
into foraging mode. It was better to keep busy.

‘Survival
stuff,’ Tabitha mumbled to herself, browsing the stores down at the far side of
the shopping complex. ‘Survival stuff.’ Maybe if she said it enough times,
something might spring to mind. She wanted to have a bag handy with everything
she needed; but what? Tabitha started with the basics. Fire was a basic thing.
She flicked her claws out and sank them down into some shop shutters, raking
the metal apart to get in. Inside the newsagents she plucked a handful of
lighters from the counter; the sturdiest she could see. And a couple of the
cheap ones too, just in case. They weren’t quite on a par with the gaudy old
yellow lighter she used to have, but they’d do. Tabitha glanced at all the
cigarettes behind the counter, and felt a sudden urge to spark up. How long had
it been now since she’d smoked her last cigarette? Not even losing her mum or
seeing the end of the world had made her want to smoke again; maybe her new
body just didn’t want her to. Besides, she couldn’t have a smoke without a
drink, and she didn’t want to drink any more. Resisting them, Tabitha turned
her back on the cigarettes and headed to the pound shop next door. She filled a
carrier bag with some comforts, impressed at the value for money. Tissues,
toothbrush, and some much-needed toothpaste. She tongued the film on her teeth,
grainy and disgusting. Hesitating, Tabitha opened up the toothbrushes right
there and scrubbed the filth away with a good dollop of bright toothpaste. So
it was minty freshness that was the great secret to happiness, she decided as
she brushed. She dwelled on all those great thinkers through the ages,
searching their thoughts and questioning existence in search of meaning and
joy. And all they’d had to do in all that time was consider the mint. Tabitha
bagged the toothpaste and took a few more boxes, just in case. Swilling a gulp
of bottled water, she looked for somewhere to spit. She could have just
gobbed
the toothpaste on the floor really, for all it
mattered. But her mum had raised her better than that. Tabitha wandered off to
the homeware aisle, and spat into a plastic cup at the back of a shelf. Heading
back through the shop she grabbed some chocolate bars on her way out, just in
case she met any more survivors
some day
. She bagged
up all the bottles of water from the shelves too, and started her long journey
back to her nest in the home store.