22
After Ianto had told the small group his story, he ended with the sentence: "So...does anyone want to ask me any questions?"
The stunned group remained silent, all looking at one another. The others had arrived back and were settling in as he spoke, nodding their silent agreement to his story.
The scenes on the muted TV were bad enough, but now they had someone in the room that already had experienced these things and had lived to tell the tale.
Christopher grunted and asked, "So you had knowledge of these things before you were attacked yourself?"
Ianto shook his head. "I had no idea what was happening. One minute I was at work having a normal evening with Owen here, the next these things came out of the dark and attacked everyone. They had turned a minute later."
"Because of the...spiders?" Joan queried.
"I know. It sounds like an episode out of the Hammer House of Horror programme, but that's what happened. I saw it for myself." Owen scratched just above his eyebrows and took a quick breath in. "The man in the gown attacked us."
It was now Angela's turn, who squeezed her husband's hand tighter with the horrendous news that she was hearing. "And is this gowned man dead?"
Ianto lifted his arms up and shrugged in unison. His body language suggested that he didn't know. "I hit him with my car."
"It was all happening so fast" Rhiannon cut in, "Please, the kids don't want to hear this again."
Angela began to sob and admitted, "I thought for a second that being out here we would be safe."
"We are, to a certain degree." Owen was trying to put a positive slant on the situation.
"What do you mean?" asked Stripy Steve.
"Well, if we were in the city, it'd be a fucking massacre."
"I live in my apartment on the fourth floor." James looked to be getting angry. "I would have been okay."
"No you wouldn't," said Ianto, confidently. "I saw one of these thing head-butt its way into this couple's car. Even if there was just one of them, your door wouldn't have stayed on its hinges."
Ianto had asked the owners for a drink of water.
The owner, Christopher Horton, stood up from the couch and announced that he needed the toilet. Ianto was unsure that he actually needed the toilet, or that Christopher wanted somewhere private to cry.
They all sat down when more breaking news appeared, and Christopher refrained from going to the toilet and put the volume up on the TV.
Ianto shook his head. What now?
It was new footage. The footage was from CCTV cameras, and it was showing an incident on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow's City Centre. The infected were in a group of eleven, running, and one of them had spotted something. As soon as that one individual veered left, they all followed its path and smashed their way, using their fists and heads, through the shop, entering a Holland and Barrett store. They assumed that a human had been spotted and that was the reason for the change of direction.
A worker hiding in the shop, maybe. This proved to the group that barricading was going to be a waste of time, which frightened the hell out of them.
The spiders swarmed across the ground like an oil spill, surrounding the feet of those already taken by the Hitchhikers.
The anchorman's lips were moving, but it was hard to take in the information. It was stressed that experts had no idea where the spiders had come from, but some experts lambasted this statement and a researcher claimed some people knew exactly how this had developed into such a catastrophe.
He told the people on SKY News that he was certain that they had come from the research centre in
Newcastle where scientists had been developing a vaccine for cancer on certain animals and insects.
There had been reports, denied by the government that a scientist dressed in a white gown attacked people in the centre a few days ago after being bitten by spiders he had been experimenting with.
God, end of the world and they still don't want to admit there are aliens?
The CCTV had been disabled.
A day later, there were violent riots on the streets of Newcastle and Sunderland that ended in bloodshed.
A minute later, another piece of film had been sent in from a member of the public. It was one of the most frightening pieces of film, probably because it was real, Ianto had ever seen. It was videoed by mobile phone, so the footage was predictably a little shaky.
An unnamed person was taking footage of his neighbour running out of her home. Initially the footage that was being filmed was filming the street, but a scream had distracted the phone-owner, and the woman ran out of her house screaming.
"Rhia, take the kids to the other room" Ianto said softly, as he swallowed.
It appeared that the woman on the screen was being chased by one of her own children and was eventually taken down in the street by two other 'hitchers', as the media were beginning to call them. The spiders chasing the children swarming past to the mother.
The shaky phone zoomed in and the woman's throat was bulging as the spider crawled into her mouth. Blood poured out of her and Ianto immediately thought she was screwed. The spiders quickly backed away from her, as if she was on fire, and now she was infested. Her body jerked the once and she quickly got to her feet and began running towards the next melee. Thirty seconds had passed and the woman dropped to the floor and never got back up.
It appeared that the blood loss from her torn-out throat was the demise for this newly infested woman, and the anchorman informed the public that another infested human had died from being hit by a car.
The newsman read off a few bullet points and told the public that these things can die like normal humans, and that they're infested with something that they have no knowledge of.
People who knew what was going on were based in Newcastle's Research Centre, and they were all now infested or dead.
"We're fucked," Joan cried. "We are all totally fucked!"
Jack was struggling in the front door with wood in his arms, surprised when Ianto rushed to him, not to take the wood but to embrace him.
It was worth getting wet again for.