by David Moody
The temptation to think this woman had been driven mad by the strength of the sun out here was strong, but Jenny detected a note of real conviction in her voice. She didn’t know what to say. Her own story was no less far-fetched. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but a few hours ago I was standing at the top of the tallest building in London, fighting for my life.”
“London? As in London, England?”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit. That place burned up years ago. It was one of the first cities to fall after the war began.”
“Which war?”
“The war. The big one. The final one, remember? Are you a couple of cylinders shy of a muscle car or something?”
“Are you talking about the Bleed?”
“The what?”
“I really think we need to talk. Will you come back upstairs?”
“We can talk here. Why should I go anywhere with you? You seem unbalanced.”
“Says the woman who says she’s from the moon.”
“Blow me,” she said, and she tried to push past Jenny and head back down the stairs. Jenny blocked her way.
“Wait, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I think we’re both in the same boat. I don’t think either of us planned on being here right now.”
“You can say that again.”
“I believe you. Like I said, I was thousands of miles away too. Next minute, I end up here.”
The woman turned back to look out the window again.
“None of this makes sense. Is this some kind of screen? Are you just showing high-res pre-war footage on a loop?”
“It’s real,” Jenny said.
“What year is this?”
“2022.”
“Nope. I’m dead. Not how I figured the afterlife to be, but it could be worse. Let’s hope Sandra doesn’t end up here.”
“Well you seem pretty alive to me. I’m Jenny, by the way. What’s your name?”
“Maddie.”
“This isn’t the afterlife, Maddie.”
“I know that much. When you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s no god, no devil, no heaven or hell. I don’t believe in any of that; I believe in the power of machines.”
“Don’t be so quick to write it all off.”
That was the final straw. Maddie stormed back in the direction of the clockwork room. “The last thing I need right now is some little Jesus freak getting all evangelical on me.”
“It’s not like that,” Jenny said, following after her. “Just let me explain.”
But Maddie clearly wasn’t in the mood to listen. She went back into the room and started to examine it, feeling her way along the featureless walls. “This is crazy,” she said.
“What is?”
“This place…the walls are pretty much frictionless. You can hardly even feel them. And the light…”
“What about it?”
“Where does it come from? There are no windows in here, no lights in the ceiling, but we can see everything. How the hell does that work?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, and she walked the opposite way to Maddie around the central console—the only visible structure of any note in entire place—then stopped her. “Listen, I know you’re probably scared, but—”
“I’m not scared,” Maddie snapped, indignant. “I’m a lot of things right now, but scared ain’t one of them.”
“—but I really do think we need to compare notes and tell each other everything we know. Maybe then we’ll be able to understand what’s going on. Tell me exactly what happened before you were here.”
Maddie went to speak, then stopped herself. “Nope. You’re gonna say I’m crazy.”
“For the record, right now I’m not sure if I’m sane. Tell me your story and we’ll try and outdo each other.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“You’d have to go some to beat me,” Jenny said.
“Try it. You first.”
“So, a couple of days back, a god turned up in London. Not the god, just a god. Then things got really wild.”
“How so?”
“The Thames stopped flowing, then more gods turned up, people started acting like zombies, that kind of thing. The city was overcome. Poisoned. I was at the centre of it all, and I tried to stop it, but there was nothing I could do.” She paused to remember all the nightmarish things she’d seen. She’d barely had time to process everything that had happened. “Now you.”
Maddie shifted from foot to foot then cleared her throat. “There was an explosion. Power station blew and took out part of the base. We got away in a mower.”
“A what?”
“A truck.”
“A moon truck?”
“Do me a favor, shut up and listen. Don’t talk. You’re reminding me too much of Derrick.”
“Touchy.”
Maddie glared at her but continued. “Had a close call, thanks to the blast wave, but crashed the mower. Those of us who were still in one piece got away, but we were attacked by . . .”
Her sudden hesitation unnerved Jenny. “Go on.”
“We were attacked by some kind of monster. Looked like a giant tick. We were in pretty bad shape. Found a lake with a waterfall.”
“On the moon?”
“Yes, a waterfall and a lake on the moon. Am I winning yet? I saw some light coming from behind it and me and the people I was with went to investigate. We were in a tunnel, going down deep. There was no light, and we were going deeper and deeper and it was getting narrower and…and here I am.”
“So you came to Australia through a tunnel behind a waterfall on the moon?”
Maddie seemed almost apologetic about how dumb that sounded. She shrugged. “Yes.”
She looked surprised when Jenny didn’t baulk at her story. Instead she just nodded thoughtfully, trying to take it all in. “Then it sounds like things have been pretty screwed up for both of us.”
“You can say that again.”
“So, you’ve not heard of the Bleed?”
“No.”
“How do I explain this? You need to suspend your disbelief, okay?”
“Listen, I just told you I escaped from a giant tick monster through a waterfall on the moon, and now I’m in ancient Australia. My disbelief is already well and fucking truly suspended.”
“Okay. Point taken. So, gods exist, and it turns out they’re not the big deal you might have thought. They’re just another species, like us, except far more powerful. And because gods exist, so do demons and devils.”
“I’m skeptical…I have no reason to be, but I am.”
“It’s true, I swear. The Bleed is the way evil moves between places and dimensions. Some kind of malevolent…thing. The first god I met came here to try and save the planet, but the others came to sacrifice Earth to try and stop the Bleed from spreading beyond.”
“Assuming you’re not talking out of your ass, your first god won, didn’t he? Looking out of that window on the stairs just now, things look a lot better out there than I remember.”
Jenny shook her head. “The Bleed got through and it’s coming for us. It destroyed London, and now it’s working its way across the entire planet. We don’t have long left. According to the TV news I just saw, we’ve only got a couple of weeks tops before it reaches this place.”
“Oh, that’s just perfect.”
“It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen. It started spreading through the water. The Thames turned blood red. When it infected people—I guess that’s the right expression—it did terrible things to them. It was like it broke them apart then put them back together out of order. People were mutating everywhere I looked…turning into monsters…individuals combining to become a new whole …”
Maddie just looked at her. She didn’t look convinced. “You still haven’t told me how you got here. How you escaped.”
“Thirnas, that’s one of the gods, he knew my dad, and they told me about places like this, about the clock
work rooms.”
“Wait, your dad was friends with a god? I wish I had some popcorn for this.”
“I know how it sounds…”
“Crazy is how it sounds.”
“But it’s true. And it’s no crazier than your story, to be fair.”
“Point taken,” Maddie said. “Continue.”
“When the Bleed broke through and started to take hold of London, I knew I had to get away. Thirnas told me I’d find one of these rooms at the top of the Shard, and I managed to get to it before the city was overcome.”
“So this god and your dad told you about this crazy tech?”
“Yes.”
“Never mind that the whole city was going down in flames?”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Just you?”
“Yes, just me. My dad died trying to protect me, and just before he died he told me…”
“What?”
Jenny paused, aware that her already unbelievable story was about to sound even more implausible. She felt stupid saying these things. She could just about cope with internalizing everything, but the events of the last couple of days were too preposterous to repeat out loud.
Okay. Deep breath. “Dad told me he wasn’t my real dad. That he’d brought me to Earth when I was born.”
“What, like Superman?” Maddie laughed.
“Fuck you, I’m serious. My dad died for me, you know. He looked after me all my life. He told me I’m half-god.”
Maddie laughed again, and this time she didn’t stop. “Okay, you got me. I almost believed you up to that point. Fun’s over now though. I’m gone.”
She walked towards the door.
“You can’t leave.”
“Watch me.”
“Where will you go?” Jenny asked.
“Anywhere but here. Think I’ll go and relax on that impossible-looking beach out there and wait for this bad trip to finish. I drank a lot of water on the moon just now. There must have been something in it that’s making me hallucinate and imagine I’m having conversations with psycho demigods.”
“Please don’t go.”
“Try and stop me.”
“Stay here and help me work this out. We’ve been brought here for a reason.”
“I’d rather repair an engine with a Q-tip.”
“I almost wish I was insane, because everything would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with if I was mad. What’s happening out there is real. You have to believe me, Maddie.”
“I do?”
“Just think this through for a sec. We’ve both been transported here to the same place at the same time, and that can’t just be coincidence. The technology in this room is like nothing else on Earth and if we can just—”
“Save your breath,” Maddie yelled at her. “You’re delusional, and I’m done wasting time here. My friends need me.”
“What, your friends swimming in a lake on the moon?”
“Don’t piss me off, I’m Irish; we’ll throw down for no reason.”
“Get over yourself, for Christ’s sake. There’s so much more at stake here than you and me.”
“You’re bringing Christ into this now? Is He one of your pals too? Another friend of your dad?”
“Don’t mock me. I’m trying to help.”
“The only way you can help me is by getting out of my damn way.”
Jenny wasn’t budging.
Maddie snapped. She swung a punch and knocked her out cold.
3
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
Jenny could only have been unconscious for a few seconds, but by the time she came around, Maddie was long gone. She picked herself up off the ground and shook her head clear. Somehow the pain in her face felt positive, cathartic, and it helped her to focus. She tried to put herself in Maddie’s shoes. If she was telling the truth—and as far-fetched as it sounded, in the circumstances, Jenny thought she probably was—then Maddie’s fear and disorientation must have been even more overwhelming than her own. If she herself had been transported to a world she thought no longer existed, only to be told it was on the verge of annihilation, then maybe she’d have had a similar reaction. But what hurt Jenny more than anything, she thought, even more than the punch on the jaw she’d just taken, was the fact Maddie wanted to get back to the moon to help her friends. It made her realize just how completely, hopelessly, inexorably alone she was right now. Her dad was gone, Thirnas was gone, and now she was stranded on the wrong side of a dying world. The only person left that she had any connection with had just stated their intentions by laying her out cold.
No time for this kind of pathetic self-pity, she told herself, sniffing back tears. As clichéd as it sounded, the world, or what was left of it, depended on her.
In the time she’d spent back in the clockwork room with Maddie, day had turned to dusk. She burst outside into the evening heat and looked for the other woman’s distinctive overalls and cap. The atmosphere in Surfer’s Paradise felt understandably uneasy; a curious mix of subdued gloom and drunken irreverence. There was no doubting that everyone was aware of the bloody horrors looming on the horizon, but a decent chunk of the population seemed to be avoiding thinking about it and were instead taking solace in drinking. Many of the clubs, bars and restaurants were packed.
Other people, it appeared, were taking an altogether more pragmatic approach to the impending end of the world. A number of homes and businesses had been packed up and loaded into cars, trucks and vans and were on their way out of town. Where they thought they were going, though, was anyone’s guess. Jenny knew they were wasting their time, as nowhere would be safe from the Bleed, but she couldn’t be overly critical. At least they were doing something. The alternative was just to sit at home and wait for the inevitable, and that felt like an unbearable prospect. Better to keep busy and stay occupied and to try and fool yourself into thinking what you were doing might actually make a difference, than to roll over early and passively await your certain death.
Jenny couldn’t see Maddie anywhere, and the longer she looked, the more she convinced herself she wasn’t going to find her. Maybe she’d already disappeared back to the moon as quickly as she’d materialized? Maybe she’d never been here at all? The teeming crowds weren’t helping. Maddie had a hardworking, lived-in face that became less distinct in Jenny’s memory the longer she thought about it. The chances of spotting her were slim to none.
Jenny walked at speed along the Esplanade that ran parallel with the ocean, knowing there was every chance she was going in completely the wrong direction. The walkway was busy, with occasional rowdy groups gathered around the regular public barbecue points, cooking food and drinking booze and doing everything in their power to distract themselves from the pending apocalypse. Jenny envied their freedom and lack of responsibility. She helped herself to a can of beer when no one was looking, then knocked it back fast as she scoured the place for Maddie.
There were lots of people who just seemed to be loitering, she noticed. Drifting. Not going anywhere. It didn’t make a lot of sense, (not that anything made much sense anymore). There was a huddle of them on a street corner with placards telling people to have faith, proclaiming: “Love and Jesus would show them the way.” It was as if they were waiting for the gods to swoop down and save them. Frigging idiots. Had they not seen how the gods had let her down and betrayed the entire human race in London? These fools were so fucking naïve, but she had neither the energy nor inclination to tell them.
Jenny changed direction and cut through the middle of another crowd, then heard someone call out after her.
“Hey, you!”
She kept moving, thinking—hoping—they were talking to someone else, but she already knew they weren’t. They called out again, and she continued to ignore them, but whoever it was wasn’t giving up on getting her attention. She could sense them right behind her now. Another burst of speed and they were alongside. She glanced across and saw it was a well-tanned surfer dude. He had l
ong hair that might have suited a bloke ten years his junior. He swigged from a bottle of drink.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m busy.”
“It is you, isn’t it?”
“I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
“No way, mate. You’re a Brit, I can tell from your accent. That girl was a Brit too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t give me that…you’re her, I know it. You’re Jenny. You’re the one who got mixed up with all that god business in London. Your face was everywhere when it happened. You were badass. Fucking awesome.”
Jenny smirked and tried not to let him see. She’d been called plenty of things, but she couldn’t remember ever having been called a badass before.
“Look, I’m really sorry, but I’m not who you think I am. I’m just trying to find my friend.”
“I’ll help you find her,” he said, grinning at her like a madman. “Serious!”
“Thanks, but I work better on my own. I don’t have a lot of time.”
“None of us do I reckon.”
Jenny looked across again. The tone of his voice had changed. The enthusiasm and excitement had disappeared, replaced with a gloomy despondency, and he was making her feel uneasy. She noticed also that there were fewer people around in this part of town. Just when she most wanted the reassurance of other bodies, there were none.
She sped up, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
“What’s she look like, your friend?” he asked, sounding brighter again.
“Average height, average build…pretty hard to describe, if I’m honest,” she lied.
“No one’s gonna believe me when I tell them I’ve been talking to God’s mate Jenny.”
“I’m not God’s mate. I’m not anybody’s mate.”
“How’d you get here, Jen? All the planes from the UK were grounded when the Bleed took ahold, so how’d you get from London to Oz? This place was locked down pretty quick, not that it made any difference.”
There was something menacing about his voice now. She needed to lose him quick. She pretended to spot Maddie in the distance and started to run, but he was one step ahead. He shot out his hand with the kind of reaction speed a drunk should never possess and grabbed her wrist so she couldn’t get away.