Tabitha by Andrew Hall Page A

the
drain.
    After the quick
dissection Tabitha slipped the carving knife into her belt. She’d wasted enough
time. How could she not have rushed out to see her mum first? She hurried
downstairs and swapped her trainers for hiking boots.
    ‘I’ll be back
soon,’ she told Mog in the kitchen, rushing back through the living room for
the front door. She stopped for a second, and felt a tingling in her chest. A
sudden burst of lightning arced around her; a noisy crackling hiss. She stared
in shock at white veins of electricity, coming from her . Something in
her chest came to life where her heart should have been; something made of
living metal and current. Voltage coursed through her body. Frantic branches of
lightning jumped out of her, scorching the walls. Tabitha was paralysed;
feeling too good to do anything about it. High on a neon cloud in her head. She
tensed up inside when the electric feel embraced her. Weak at the knees. She
felt the current reaching in everywhere, warm and tingling. Some new part of
her mind fantasised about cables and circuits; saw their amorous voltage
reaching out towards her. There was a lightning storm around her in the living
room. Her clutter and magazines were sailing through the air, blown against the
walls in a hissing gale of static. Mog escaped out of the cat flap in the
kitchen door. Tabitha threw her head back. The volts reached into her, right
in. They made her gasp. She moaned and smiled, climaxing. Every electronic
shook and rumbled then, and exploded suddenly in a cloud of sparks and smoke.
The stuffing from the couch tumbled down like foam snow. Tabitha writhed on the
carpet as the waves of pleasure died down.
    ‘ Hm ?’ she said in a daze, sitting up to look around. A
lightning storm had scarred her living room. Possessions in ruins. TV on fire.
As her senses came back to her, Tabitha remembered her mum. She had to get to
her. Drunk on voltage, she picked up the TV and sent it bursting through the
window. She leapt out after it; cast her old self aside. Tabitha was about to
become much, much more.
    Tabitha leapt
down to the garden. The shattered plastic corpse of her TV lay in pieces around
her. She stood and stretched, took in the seaside. Walked out onto the street.
She wondered what everyone would make of her now, lithe and confident; bright
red hair and steel-grey hands. But the street was empty. The air was a heavy
silence. The sky was cloud-muddled, stark and white. Beneath it the grey world
sprawled in shock, silent and bleak. The drains reeked; the cloying sulphur
smell of decay. There were no city sounds, no hiss of traffic in the distance.
Only the tide and the seagulls. Where was everyone? She got into her car and it
wouldn’t start. No lights, no radio, nothing. This was getting too weird. She
cursed and slammed the car door, and walked off down the road at a panicked
pace. The world seemed empty of people. Far too quiet.
    ‘…Hello?’ she
called down the street. No answer. ‘Hello!’ she called louder. Nothing. Not a
single car on the roads; no sign of anyone as she wandered. The world was
empty, silent as a grave.
    Down the main
road away from town, something caught her eye. Looking over the iron railing by
the sea, Tabitha saw a huge black shape beneath the waves. It looked like a
kraken or a sunken ship, strewn in fairy lights. What was it, a submarine? The
water was too shallow here, surely. The wind blew cold. She looked around to
see twisting smoke, rising up all over town along the bay. It looked like a
warzone. Her next footstep sent a cracked smartphone skittering expensively
across the pavement. Tabitha went to pick it up, then changed her mind. Strange
to find a smartphone just lying around on the pavement, broken or not. She
stood up and looked around, and left it alone like evidence at a crime scene.
    ‘Hello?’ she
called out again, jogging down the road towards her mum’s house. ‘Hello!’
nothing but silence. An empty world. No one