The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE

by David Moody

  “Got friends in high places have you, love?” he sneered, pulling her closer. “You got some new-fangled god-powered way of travel the rest of us mere mortals don’t have access to?”

  “It’s not like that. Look, none of this is my fault.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He answered with only one word, but it was sufficient to terrify her to the core.

  “Revenge.”

  “Get off,” she snarled, wrenching her arm to try and get away. “You’re hurting me.”

  “And you’re killing us.”

  Before she could react, the man twisted her arm behind her then put his free hand over her mouth to stop her yelling out. He hauled her away from the ocean and towards the imposing shadows between the bases of two tall apartment blocks on the opposite side of the road. Everything happened so fast that she couldn’t process what he was doing or what he might be about to do to her next. There were people nearby and she was distracted by the fact that no one else was reacting. No one seemed to give a shit. With the inevitable end of everything looming on the horizon, the fate of one random girl appeared not to matter in the slightest. Barely anyone even looked up. They all had enough personal drama of their own to deal with without getting involved in hers.

  Jenny tried to dig her heels into the parched grass lawn he was now dragging her across, but the speed he moved was such that she couldn’t get a foothold. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t bite, couldn’t fight at all…the irony wasn’t lost on her. This morning she’d survived attacks from countless hordes of toxic mutants, and now here she was, about to come unstuck at the hands of some random deviant surfer nobody. She felt angry more than scared. How fucking dare he!

  They were in an alleyway now; a dark maintenance corridor between two parts of the same building, out of earshot and view of everything and everybody else. He relaxed his grip slightly and she took full advantage. She shoved him away then kicked him in the balls and tried to break free. She only managed a couple of steps before he shot out his leg and tripped her over. Then, lying flat on her belly on the cold ceramic floor tiles, she felt his full weight drop on her. “You’re going nowhere, Jenny from London,” he sneered, his hot breath tickling her ear. She recoiled at his booze-tinged stink.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You kill me and the whole planet’s dead.”

  “Looks to me like it’s pretty much dead already.”

  “You don’t have to do this. I can help. If you let me I can—”

  “Do me a favor and shut the fuck up,” he hissed. “We ain’t got long left. Least you can do is give me a few minutes to remember you by.”

  She could feel him fumbling with his shorts. Dirty bastard. She’d rather he’d kill her than make her suffer whatever foul indignities he had planned.

  She kicked and writhed under his sinewy body.

  “Get off me!”

  “Still got plenty of fight in you, you traitorous little bitch.”

  “Do you really want to do this?” another voice asked, and Jenny, still pressed flat against the ground, barely able to breathe, looked up and saw someone’s dusty boots directly in front of her.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the surfer dude asked.

  Jenny put her head down again as something long and heavy sliced through the air above her. It hit her attacker with a nauseating thud. His body went limp on top of her and she dragged herself out from under his deadweight.

  It was Maddie.

  She was holding a wooden fencepost like she was the designated hitter, bases loaded and ready to swing again if Jenny’s attacker moved. There didn’t seem much chance of that happening. Blood was dribbling from his upturned ear.

  “Shit, you killed him,” Jenny said.

  “I thought that was for the best, given the circumstances.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You could try thanking me for saving your skin.”

  “And you could try apologizing for punching me in the face then running out on me.”

  “Unbelievable,” Maddie said, as she threw the bloodied fence post to one side and stormed away.

  Jenny went to check the body but thought better of it. She was in enough trouble as it was and didn’t want to incriminate herself further. She left the corpse in a pool of his own blood and went after Maddie. She hadn’t gone far. She was on the beach. She stormed to the edge of the surf and sat down. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared up at the moon hanging proud in the clear evening sky.

  Jenny positioned herself directly in her eye line. “I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever.”

  She sat down next to Maddie. “Shows how fucked up things really are, doesn’t it? You just killed a man and neither of us are freaking out.”

  “He was attacking you. And if everything you’re telling me is true, he’d have been dead soon anyway.”

  “Fair point. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You kind of told me to, back there.”

  Maddie almost managed half a smile. For a few precious seconds the only noises were the crashing of the waves on the sand and occasional voices as people wandered by.

  “Anyway, who says I’m not freaking out?”

  Jenny looked across. Maddie was shaking. Was it nerves? Adrenalin? Were the impossible events of this impossible day catching up with her?

  “We should get out of here. We don’t want to be around when someone finds him.”

  “What difference will it make? No one gave a shit when he was dragging you there. Might as well kick back and enjoy the time we’ve got left.”

  “Enjoy it?”

  “I don’t think you realize, it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve sat on a beach. A good portion of my life I’ve been on the moon, looking back at the earth, not down here looking up. This is a big deal for me.”

  “I get that, but we have to do something. We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I have to try. We have to.”

  “We? When did we come into it?”

  “We have to work together, Maddie. We were both brought here for a reason, I think. We just have to work out why.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “It might be your only chance of getting home.”

  “I guess. But there’s only two of us, and we’re miles from anywhere. You really think two people can make any difference? You really think you can influence the fate of the whole damn world?”

  “Yes. I know we can.”

  “You’re either naïve or crazy, I’m not sure which.”

  “Neither am I. We have to try, though. We got off on the wrong foot. We’re both disorientated, and neither of us really knows where we fit into all of this. We need to stop fighting and try and help each other.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Maddie thought for a moment longer. “So, if I did agree to help, what exactly are you proposing?”

  “Go back to that clockwork room and try and figure out how it works, take it from there. I’m sorry, that’s about as far as I’ve got in terms of making a plan.”

  Maddie shook her head, disconsolate. Jenny noticed that she was still staring intently at the moon. It seemed impossible to think that was where she’d come from, but stranger things had happened today.

  “I just want to go home. I left people behind. They need me.”

  “How long did you say you’d been living up there?”

  “Long enough or too long. It was a good place, a safe place, until…”

  “Until what?”

  “You see, that’s the thing. I guess I haven’t had chance to properly stop and think about it until now. We were there to escape the chaos of down here, and everything was good for so long, but it fell apart real fast. Too fast. The power station exploded, and that was it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did the power station explo
de? You said you’d been up there for years, so why now? What happened to change things? Did someone screw up or…?”

  “No, no…it was nothing like that.”

  Jenny went cold. “What then?”

  “Corrosion,” Maddie said simply. “Things that shouldn’t have decayed started falling apart. Materials that should have stayed strong for hundreds of years just started to crumble. Don’t ask me to tell you why, because I can’t explain. I know how things should work up there, but I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “The Bleed?”

  “Who knows? Maybe. Didn’t see a lot of blood but, to be honest, I didn’t get chance to investigate. We couldn’t stop it, ’cause it should never have been happening in the first place. It should have been impossible; we never prepared for anything like it. And as soon as we found it, we just had to get out and get away. And now here I am, thousands of miles and about fifty years away from home.”

  “And I thought I’d had it bad because I’d lost a few weeks.”

  “What?”

  “When I got here earlier today, it felt like just a couple of seconds since I’d been in London, but three weeks had passed.”

  “Interesting. Doesn’t make any more sense, though, because you jumped forward and…”

  “And you fell backwards.”

  “That room, whatever it is, can sure do some weird tricks. I think you’re right. If we can work out how to use it and send ourselves the other way, maybe we will be able to undo some of this mess.”

  “And do you think we can work it out?”

  “I’m the best mechanic you’ll ever meet. There isn’t a machine on the moon or on the earth or anywhere else I can’t come to grips with.”

  “Good to hear.”

  Jenny stood up and kicked at the sand.

  “Problem?” Maddie asked.

  “That guy just now…he knew who I was, and he wanted to hurt me. And I…and I can’t blame him. I’m the one who let the Bleed in. This is all my fault.”

  “Looks to me like you’re also the one who’s planning to make things right. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Easy for you to say. It just doesn’t feel right, us sitting here on the beach like this when there’s so much pain and death and devastation on the other side of the world.”

  “None of it feels real to me yet, if I’m honest. Sitting out in the open like this is alien to me.”

  “How did your people end up on the moon?”

  “Is your news here full of warnings about pollution and disease and famine and war and climate change and so on?”

  “Daily. Well, until the Bleed came and bulldozed everything else.”

  “And have you got to the part where all the scientists are warning things are looking really bad and the world needs to come together to find answers to all its problems before it’s too late?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, no one was listening. The leaders of the world sat there with their fingers in their ears, too busy looking out for themselves to do anything for anyone else. Got to a point where people couldn’t take any more. And when the millions of people who are going without are being preached at by the folks who have plenty…well, there’s only ever going to be one way a situation like that is going to end.”

  “Another war?”

  “You got it. It was a big one this time. Worse than all the other wars put together, and longer, too. Worldwide. And way before the dust had started to settle, it was pretty clear that there was nothing left of the world worth winning. Fortunately, some enterprising types had seen it coming and had started terra-forming the moon. I was one of the lucky ones who ended up with a roof over my head and a trade that kept me busy and in demand.”

  “So what about the power station explosion? Will there be anyone left alive up there?”

  “It was bad enough to do some serious damage, but not bad enough to end it all. I don’t know how many people died in the blast, but there are plenty of other bases up there. But shit, who knows what damage the radiation will do? No one’s ever blown up a power station in space before. If they can balance the power drains across the other substations and keep things moving, they should be okay. I need to get back up there and help. There are plenty of other mechs, but there no one that knows the ins and outs like I do.”

  “All the more reason for us to go back to the hotel and work out how the clockwork room works. Then, if it works like you reckon and we can move through time, we might have a chance of putting all of this right. I can go back and stop the gods from destroying London, and you can travel back and prevent the Bleed from infecting the moon.”

  “Travel forward. I’m ahead of you, remember?”

  “Yeah. Confusing.”

  “And you’re making it all sound easy.”

  “I’m under no illusions. Nothing’s easy anymore.”

  Jenny helped Maddie to her feet, and they started back towards the hotel and the clockwork room.

  In the short time they’d been away, the sun had completely disappeared. The atmosphere in Surfer’s Paradise was different now. Fractious. On edge. It felt like they were never far from trouble. A larger group of religious folks were campaigning under a streetlight at the edge of the beach, while another group of people were just across the road, hurling abuse (and, occasionally, broken bits of furniture) at them. Elsewhere, the plate glass window at the front of a bar shattered outwards and a crowd of fighters spilled out into the road, stopping the traffic. The violence was contagious. Several drivers got out to clear the way and were sucked into the melee, leaving the main street blocked.

  “Surfers Paradise,” Maddie said, shaking her head. “Maybe it was, once. Right now, it feels like we’re about as far from paradise as you can get.”

  4

  SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA

  That night, the clockwork room—the most impossible place on the planet by all rational measures—felt like an oasis. The name it had been given conjured up images of basic technologies with cogs and levers and nuts and bolts, and though all those were present, those images could not have been further from the reality of the place. There were technologies at play here which transcended even the most advanced human developments by millennia, all underpinned by concepts which would be impossible for even the most brilliant scientists and philosophers to grasp.

  This was pure god-tech.

  Though hours had passed, the atmosphere in the room remained consistent: always the same temperature and humidity. The lighting felt improbably natural, like being out in broad daylight but without any windows or sunlight. The room was almost completely featureless save for the central console, and that, apart from four wheels so silvery white they were nearly translucent was smooth. The door they used to come in and out (which, Jenny had noticed, didn’t seem to actually be there until they needed to go through it) was the only visible opening. Yet it felt remarkably complete, compact and self-contained, and it was silent; there was never any noise nor even the slightest vibration to suggest an external engine or other power supply. Nothing about the room made sense.

  But even more bizarre than the existence of the room itself, even more inexplicable than its physics or its power or capabilities, was the fact that Maddie and Jenny found that they could both operate it. They each gravitated towards different functions, but they both found they had an inherent understanding which deepened the longer they spent looking.

  “Maybe you’re half-god too?” Jenny suggested.

  Maddie just laughed. “Yeah, sure. Mom was an angel, I’ll give you that, but if my pop was a god, then he was the only god who’d willingly shit on anyone who ever asked him for anything. He was not a good man. Thought only about himself, and that was only when he wasn’t drunk and incapable of having lucid thoughts. If he’d been a god, he might have used his divine intervention to do something about the rioting and subsequent fire that laid waste to the correctional facility where he
’d spent the last decade of his decidedly ungodly life.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Maddie stepped back from the console and stared at it. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if it’s us working this thing or this thing working us.”

  “That’s no weirder than anything else that’s happened today, but it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re here. It seems to need us. If it was autonomous, the room would just operate itself, wouldn’t it?”

  “Think about it, though. This must be some kind of vehicle.”

  “It’s some kind of transportation system, that’s for sure.”

  “And a lot more besides, I’d guess. But you wouldn’t build a truck then leave it to drive itself around empty.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but how does it know what to do and where to go? I can’t explain how you got here, but I know when I stepped into this room at the top of the Shard in London, all I was thinking about was that I had to get away from there, that I had to get as far away as I could.”

  “And you did. If my memory of geography serves me right, you’re pretty much exactly on the opposite side of the planet, give or take.”

  “So we just think about what we want and the machine makes it happen? Surely it can’t be that easy?”

  “Everything would already be back to normal if that were the case. All I was thinking about was not getting attacked, and all I’ve thought about since I got here is getting home. No, I think there has to be limits to what the room can do.”

  “We could try asking.”

  “Asking who? Asking what? How?”

  “Asking the room? Right now, we’re flying blind. We don’t know how either of us fits into all of this, or why we’re here together.”

  “Or why a random surfer guy decided to try and take you out just now.”

  “It was because I’m internet famous.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Yep. I ended up on a livestream with a god when this all kicked off. Everybody saw it. The whole world.”