Tabitha by Andrew Hall Read Free Book Online

David, reaching into the cafe window over the
shattered glass. Lindsey reached over and took David’s hands, and stepped
cautiously over the broken glass in the window frame.
    ‘Where
do we go now?’ said Lindsey, terrified.
    ‘Go
wherever you want to,’ Alex replied with a shrug.
    ‘You’re
just going to leave me here?’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,
I am!’ he yelled.
    ‘Guys,
can we not do this right now ?’ David chipped in.
    ‘She’s
been cheating on me,’ Alex told him. David looked at Lindsey. She looked away
down the street. He thought better of saying what he was about to say.
    ‘Everyone,
get out of there!’ said Alex, beckoning the cafe crowd onto the street.
Frightened faces turned to him from inside, watching through broken windows.
‘This building’s going to collapse if a plane comes down! Get outside!’
    ‘We
need to stay in here!’ a man called out over the chatter. ‘It’s safer in here!’
Alex didn’t have time for a debate. They’d be safer if they were all moving.
    ‘What
the hell are you doing? We have to get out of here!’ he yelled back at the
crowd. There was a sound then like nothing they’d ever heard before. A feeling
pounded in their chests; an uneasy vibration like bass in an over-loud
nightclub. The sound seemed to come from miles away and overhead at the same
time; a deep static hiss that echoed through the city. Louder than fireworks;
bigger than thunder. There was a tearing noise then, a rabid digital rush,
filling the city and the sky above them. The ground shook violently in a sudden
earthquake.
    ‘David!’
said Alex, pointing off down the road. They couldn’t see what was making the
noise, but they could see the fallout in the far distance. There was a dust
cloud the size of mountains, a boiling grey mass, crawling up into the sky on
the far side of the bridge. There was rain too; a hail of bricks and stone.
Lindsey ran for the cafe door and pushed her way inside again. Alex and David
ran for their lives as a car-sized chunk of concrete tumbled out of the sky. It
tore through an office block across the street, sending a landslide of stone
and brick dust crashing down onto the sidewalk. The streets were filled with
screams against a chorus of rumbles and bangs. Stonework crashed down in the
eerie silence. The air was filling with dust and smoke, and more chunks of road
and building came hurtling from the sky into the street. The press of people
inside the cafe watched through the shattered windows. Staring at stores and
restaurants across the road, all filled with panicked faces watching the sky.
Outside on the street, stray survivors limped towards doorways or lay in pools
of their own blood, reaching out to no one. The rocks and concrete rained down
all around them from the looming fallout in the sky, smashing car windscreens
or clattering on the asphalt. A woman ran out from the Italian restaurant
across the street to help an old man bleeding on the road. She sat the old man
up and cried out for help. Faces watched from every window. A moment later,
they both disappeared beneath a giant piece of asphalt that crashed down on the
road. The ground shook at the impact, rippling the road and cracking paving
slabs.
    Lindsey
and the crowd in the cafe stared in horror at the scene outside. A screaming
boutique across the road was suddenly demolished by a falling piece of tower
block, in a deafening burst of glass and stone.
    ‘Where’s
the basement!?’ one man yelled at the cafe waitress. ‘Show me where the
basement is, now!’ suddenly everyone was fixated on getting into the basement,
shouting and screaming for safety. Lindsey watched people limping out from the
dust cloud outside, dazed and pale. Bright red blood, garnet-stark in the
daylight. Bricks still rained from the gloomy sky in a constant pounding
chorus. The noisy crowd in the cafe had found the trapdoor to the basement.
They quickly filled it, but more people were trying to push their way down
inside to