Tabitha by Andrew Hall

her.
    ‘Is that your blood?’ he mumbled. He dabbed a finger in the silver fluid on her hands.
    ‘Don’t touch
me!’ she snapped, jumping up and staggering away.
    ‘Alright, I’m
sorry,’ he said defensively, backing off. ‘As long as you’re alright.’ Tabitha
looked him in the eyes, and saw a man as scared as she was. His black hair was a
tangle of dust and grit. He sat down on the road, and pulled up a trouser leg
to check his own wound. It wasn’t deep. More importantly though, it wasn’t
poisoned. ‘So what happened to you?’ he said. He grimaced as he pressed blood
out of his wound.
    ‘I was
unconscious,’ Tabitha replied, leaning against the car. She felt dizzy, but she
had to stay on her feet. ‘I woke up today, and suddenly it’s the end of the
world.’
    ‘So you didn’t
see any of this?’ he replied. Tabitha shook her head. ‘But that was
three days ago,’ he said. Tabitha stared at him, disbelieving. Three days? How could she have been unconscious for three days?
    ‘Tell me what
happened,’ she said. ‘From the start.’ He pointed her in the direction of the
town hall, and the clock tower that was shattered to rubble.
    ‘Let’s keep
moving,’ he suggested, with a sniffing nervous tick. They started off down the
road, looking back over their shoulders to make sure the hidden spiders weren’t
following.
    ‘They came out
of the sea, and just massacred us,’ he said, looking round at the abandoned
buildings. Some of the shops and offices simply stood empty and dark; others
had been torn down to ruins. ‘After the spiders, there were these huge black
things like squids. They were tearing buildings down. Like, eating them.
But like I said, that was three days ago. What happened to you?’ he said.
‘Where have you been?’
    ‘Unconscious, in
my house,’ she replied. ‘One of them stabbed me. Injected me with something. I
thought I was dying of a heart attack, and I passed out.’ The man stopped
walking.
    ‘You should be
dead,’ he mumbled, looking at her in disbelief. Tabitha shrugged. Maybe she
wished that it had killed her. She looked around at greying sheets of office
paper, tumbling and whispering down the street in the breeze. She saw a kid’s
cuddly toy face-down in a puddle, and had to look away.
    ‘Anyway, next
thing I know, I’ve woken up today like this,’ she said. Tabitha looked down at
her grey hands, still covered in silver blood. She wiped them on her jeans.
    ‘Well I’m glad you
came around when you did,’ he said, shell shocked, looking back at the spidery
silver corpses on the road.
    ‘So tell me what
happened next,’ said Tabitha.
    ‘Well, like I
said, all this happened three days ago. In the middle of the night. The sky
turned white, like lightning, but… everywhere. It’s hard to explain. Then all
the lights went out. Everything just stopped working.’
    ‘EMP,’ Tabitha
muttered. Something straight out of a film.
    ‘What?’
    ‘EMP,’ she
repeated. Hadn’t he heard of that? The man just shook his head, bemused. ‘It’s
something from science fiction,’ she explained. He shrugged. ‘Electro-Magnetic
Pulse… it fries every circuit in the blast radius.’ She felt like a knob for
saying blast radius . No one said that.
    ‘Does it do that ? ’ he replied, nodding up behind her.
Turning, Tabitha saw a fallen satellite buried in the roof of a shop.
    ‘…Yeah,’ she
mumbled, staring at it with a grim fascination. It was huge, ruined. A hulking
lump of space hardware sticking out from mossy roof tiles. An even stranger
sight than the rubble of shops around it.
    ‘Well, I’m Dev,
by the way,’ he said, holding out his hand. Breaking the hard silence of a dead
world.
    ‘Tabitha,’ she
replied, shaking his hand as gently as she could. She could see the shock in
his eyes then, the moment he took hold of cold metal instead of soft warm skin.
He didn’t pull away though; he had the courtesy not to mention it either. His
smile faded to a