The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE

by David Moody

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weird.”

  Jenny walked around to another face of the console, looking for inspiration. “There’s so much of this we need to try and understand. My dad used to say it was important to make sure you’d got all the facts so you could make the most informed decision.”

  “Sounds like sage advice. Was he a therapist?”

  “No, he worked in insurance, and somehow, he was from another planet and his best friend was a god.”

  “Then he was worth listening to, I guess. So, where do we start?”

  “Maybe we should focus less on the machine, and more on trying to work out why we’re here?”

  “Listening.”

  “Off the top of my head…I need to know what happened in the three weeks I wasn’t here, for starters. In the time between me leaving London and arriving here, how far did the Bleed spread, and how much damage did it do? How does it travel? How does it kill? I saw something on a TV when I first got here saying we’d got less than a month before it reaches Australia.”

  “So, if we can see what happened in the three weeks you lost…”

  “Then we might be able to understand what we can do in the time we have left, if anything.”

  “Better, let’s get working.”

  “What? How?”

  “Ask the machine. Clear your mind, but try to stay focused on what you want to know. From what I’ve seen, clearing your mind’s gonna be the easy part.”

  Jenny glared at Maddie across the room. She was glad to have her around, but that didn’t mean she had to like her.

  She approached the central console and looked down at the controls. She’d studied them before, but she still saw things she hadn’t noticed previously—dials and switches that hadn’t been there, other mechanisms side-by-side that she could have sworn she’d seen in different places on the display before. Had the layout changed? Was she even standing in the right place? The console was triangular; who was to say she wasn’t just disorientated and on the wrong side?

  I’m never going to be able to do this…

  Jenny felt the pressure of saving the world on her shoulders, and the surprisingly equally intense pressure of Maddie scrutinizing her every move. Nothing was happening. She realized she’d lost her focus because she was thinking too hard about trying to think about the right thing.

  Switch off. Relax.

  It felt counter-intuitive in the circumstances, but it worked.

  Jenny stopped thinking about the immediate situation and concentrated instead on the question she wanted answered: What had happened around the world in the weeks between her escape from London and arrival in Australia? She almost lost focus again thinking about the impossibility of that split-second turning into weeks, but she managed to course-correct herself without too much trouble. Her hands were moving over the controls now. She fought against the instinctive urge to re-take conscious control, and just let herself do what she had to do.

  “Something’s happening,” Maddie said. “You did it.”

  “I didn’t touch anything.” Jenny stepped back and saw that a display had appeared above the console. Actually, it was less like a display in the usual sense of the word, and more like a window she was looking through. This wasn’t just an image being projected for her and Maddie, it was a complete recreation of a moment in space and time. Jenny could feel wind and rain on her face and could smell the cool outside air. It was so vivid that she thought she’d be able to reach in and touch this other place, but everything in her gut screamed at her not to. Keep your distance, she warned herself. She was scared she’d be dragged into the nightmare she’d asked to be revealed.

  And it absolutely was a nightmare.

  “That’s Dover,” she said, recognizing the iconic white cliffs on the south-east coast of England. It didn’t take long to understand why they were being shown what happened here: this was the point where there was just a twenty-mile gap between the coasts of the United Kingdom and mainland Europe, no distance at all for the Bleed to cover. “I don’t like this…”

  “We need to see it,” Maddie said.

  “Yeah, but it’s going to be like taking a trip through hell.”

  Jenny wasn’t wrong.

  As they watched, the sea water around the base of the chalky white cliffs began to change color. The tide churned and boiled as grey-green turned to crimson red, then a cascade of blood started to pour over the tops of the cliffs themselves as the Bleed’s awful infection spread.

  Their point of view pulled back and climbed as if everything they were watching was being filmed with a camera on a crane, the perspective altering to reveal more of the world from high above. From an astonishing height they saw that the entirety of the UK and the Republic of Ireland had been stained blood red. The distinctive outlines of both countries became increasingly less defined as the vile pollution continued to spread.

  The focus returned to the south where the Bleed moved through the waters of the English Channel like a slick, mixing and washing and rolling towards France and the rest of Europe. The amount of detail Jenny could see was insane. The clockwork room’s technology had an apparently infinite zoom, and from hundreds of meters above the waves down to being below the surf, they could see everything with pin-sharp precision.

  The water itself was changing constantly. The currents carried the infection, as did the thousands upon thousands of creatures living below the surface. They watched teeming shoals of fish trying and failing to outrun the Bleed. As the disease overtook them, hundreds of individual fishes were mutated and conjoined to form gigantic sea monsters which, in turn, combined to make an even larger grotesquery. Thousands of fish, jelly fish, dolphins, crustaceans…all living things from plankton to whales were swept up and welded together in frenzied, blood-soaked seconds. Jenny’s view shifted upwards again, now looking back down, and she watched the resulting behemoth cruising through the waves with graceful ease like an organic submarine. It crashed into the coast of France like a torpedo just moments later. It had covered over twenty miles in little more than the blink of an eye.

  When the Bleed collided with the beaches at Calais and Dunkirk, its relentless attack continued. Now Jenny watched scenes reminiscent of those she’d witnessed first-hand in London as the helpless population was swiftly overcome and assimilated by the evil contaminant. She could see hundreds of thousands of terrified people running for cover, but none escaped. All became blood.

  Their view now shifted north.

  The march of the Bleed had continued outward in all directions since the initial outbreak in London. It tore through England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in no time at all, its hunger and hatred undiminished. Now, from an elevated viewpoint many miles above, Jenny and Maddie saw the scourge poison the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the North Atlantic Ocean.

  The creatures of the land were wiped out almost instantaneously. The creatures of the air ultimately fared as badly as the creatures of the water. The Bleed rose and tore through flocks of birds that filled the skies. Whilst she’d always appreciated the beauty and variety of nature, Jenny had to admit she didn’t know the names and types of birds she could see, nor whether their flights were seasonal or borne through fear and necessity. There were great clouds of them mixing together now, a single desperate migration.

  “Been a long time since I’ve seen birds,” Maddie mumbled.

  As they watched, the flock was attacked by a single, hideously disfigured winged creature which was dripping with blood and decay. More dragon-like than avian, it didn’t look at all aerodynamic, barely even capable of flight, yet it soared somehow with ease. And then, in less than the time it took for the birds to flap their wings more than a couple of times, they were all consumed and absorbed to become part of their attacker. The resulting engorged mutant-thing flew away to find more, calling out with an awful half-caw, half-scream.

  The Bleed chewed through the Arctic, soiling endless white
sheets of ice and snow-covered tundra, turning everything crimson-black. A polar bear jumped between blocks of ice as the contagion neared, followed by its two cubs, in search of escape, only to find its way forward blocked by a horrific thing which had once been a whale—or perhaps many whales—that rose up from the depths and swallowed them all before being eaten itself by another creature ten-times the size and infinitely more abhorrent.

  Jenny and Maddie watched cities fall as if they were standing in all those places together. New York, Paris, Beijing, Toronto, Berlin, Rio, Delhi…countless iconic skylines were overcome by vast floods and rivers of blood. From up high, each of these sprawling metropolises came to resemble scabs; darker crimson concentrations where the pain and suffering of millions upon millions of people were intensely focused. Immediately recognisable buildings crumpled as if they were made of paper—the Eiffel Tower, the Reichstag, the Empire State Building, Liberty, the statue of Christ the Redeemer—famous silhouettes erased forever, wiped out of existence and lost to memory. And with the population of the planet being eradicated as quickly as the planet itself, memory had become a precarious and increasingly temporary store.

  And now they were witnessing images of people, and it was unbearably painful to watch.

  They saw great stampedes, entire populations of people trying—and failing—to protect themselves and their loved ones and escape the oncoming gore-filled tide. They looked like ants waiting to be crushed by a boot. Helpless. Vulnerable. Doomed.

  “Wait, look at that,” Maddie said, and she pointed at the crowded streets of some collapsing European city or other. “What the hell are they doing? Are they going to try and fight?”

  Most people were fleeing, but there were many more who seemed instead to be standing their ground, just waiting. Another city now, and the same thing again was happening. There were hundreds of them, thousands in some places, hundreds of thousands even.

  “Poor souls think they’re going to find salvation,” Jenny said sadly. “They think the gods are going to save them. They saw the gods in London, and they think more of them are going to drop from the sky, scoop them up, and whisk them away to safety.”

  “What, to heaven?” Maddie suggested with thinly veiled disdain.

  “Or wherever it is they originally came from. Fuck’s sake, have they got selective memory loss? Did they not see what happened? The gods sacrificed this planet and everyone on it to the Bleed. They’re not going to help anyone.”

  “Maybe someone should have told them. If they think this is the Rapture, they’re going to be sorely disappointed.”

  “I think that’s exactly what they believe,” Jenny said, and she looked away as another wave of bloody devastation crashed over thousands of people. It was painful to watch the devoted but misguided masses waiting and praying and singing and hoping, even harder to watch them die.

  It was a relief when the perspective they were watching from changed again, though that relief was short lived. From a viewpoint so high they could see the curve of the globe, they flew over the United States and continued around the planet until they could see great swathes of Russia and China. The outline of individual landmasses was still distinct, but the coloration was all wrong. Everything that should have been green or brown or grey had been forever stained crimson, red and black. They watched once mighty empires taking their strangled last gasps of air.

  “Nukes,” Maddie said, watching as a phalanx of missiles streaked across the sky from the direction of what used to be China and Russia, climbing high, then falling back to earth in gentle arcs. Vapor trails crisscrossed as rockets fired from numerous different nations and regimes flew towards a common enemy. Maddie looked away when the warheads detonated, anticipating the white-hot flash and burn of multiple explosions, but the room shielded them from harm.

  When the intensity of the light finally began to fade, Jenny dared look again. She saw mushroom clouds rising up from many sites, but even those nightmarish swirling balls of hellfire were no match for the Bleed. It seemed almost to thrive on the destruction and toxicity being spewed from the blasts, and it consumed them, turning them to towering plumes of blood.

  “We need a map to see where the Bleed is now,” Maddie said. “It’s no good watching the edited highlights like this, we need to see the full picture.”

  Jenny’s hands swept across and just above the silver wheels of the console again, and a full 360-degree image of the earth appeared in place of the relatively close-up carnage they’d so far been watching. She stepped back and watched the intricately detailed visualization spinning almost imperceptibly slowly on its axis. Initially Australia was front and centre, its main cities illuminated by clustered pinpricks of light. It was only then that Jenny realized this was no map—somehow what they were looking at was the planet itself. “Whoa,” was all she could manage to say, well aware how much she’d just undersold one of the most remarkable things she’d ever seen. Maddie walked around the console and stood beside her.

  The two women watched in subdued silence as the globe in front of them turned with increased speed. It was their position in space that was changing now, because more and more of the parts of the planet currently in daylight were quickly being revealed.

  Jenny wished it could have all stayed unseen.

  A huge swathe of the surface of the earth was now almost completely covered by the Bleed, a vast and uninterrupted spill of blood. Oceans and seas had become indistinguishable from land, the planet perhaps two-thirds gone. The infection had devoured everything as far as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Japan, Antarctica, and half of the South Pacific Ocean. Just Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, and a few other countries in the region remained as yet untouched.

  For now.

  Because the Bleed was still advancing.

  “We’re so screwed,” Maddie said.

  5

  SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA

  Even though Armageddon was sitting on their shoulders, Jenny and Maddie still needed to eat. Maddie had stolen a phone while they’d been out earlier, then hotwired it. Jenny watched her cannibalize the gadget, in awe of her skills. “How do you know how to do all that? I thought you said you were a mechanic.”

  “Machines need electronics, and thanks to the war, there’s been an ongoing shortage of useful electrical stuff for decades. You have to make do with what you can lay your hands on and adapt it.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “To be honest, I’ve always had a thing about messing with antiques,” she said, dismissive, and she handed the phone to Jenny. “This should let us pay for stuff now.”

  “Great. There’s a lot we need. Not just food…fresh clothes, water…this is literally the fight of our lives we’re facing. We need to be prepared.”

  “And sleep,” Maddie said. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to need to rest at some point.”

  “It’s jet-lag. It’s late here, but my body still thinks it’s earlier. The world feels out of sync with my brain.”

  “Yeah, try being from another planet.”

  They kept away from major outlets and instead used little convenience stores where there were fewer people. The prices were sky-high, but they were more concerned by the gaps on the shelves than the cost. There was more empty space than food. Anything that was sourced from outside Australia was out of stock, the economics of the dying world grinding to a halt. Panic buying had become the norm. There wasn’t a single toilet roll to be found.

  “Just get whatever you can,” Maddie suggested as they entered a third store and split up. “If it’s edible, buy it.”

  While they were away from the room and each other in their own little bubbles—Jenny thinking about the life she’d lost ten thousand miles away, Maddie trying to work out if she’d ever make it back to the moon—neither of them gave much thought to how people would be preparing for the inevitable arrival of the Bleed. Fortunately, most people seemed to be equally wrapped in their own problems.

  Most peopl
e.

  They caught up with each other at the counter of the store. Maddie was bagging up the few useful things they’d managed to find when Jenny nudged her in the ribs. She pointed up at a convex mirror mounted high so the shopkeeper could see down the aisles of his store from his till.

  “Trouble,” she whispered.

  “I see it.”

  A man and a woman were watching the two of them intently, and if they were trying not to look suspicious, they were failing miserably. They were whispering to each other and pointing. “Just act calm,” Jenny said under her breath. “It’s probably nothing. The hotel’s not far. We’ll be fine once we get back to the room.”

  “It’s getting there I’m worried about.”

  “Why?”

  “I know you told me you were on TV with a god, but I didn’t fully appreciate how much of a celebrity you actually are.”

  “What?”

  “Look!”

  The cashier had a muted TV on the desk alongside his checkout, and Jenny’s picture was all over the news. The news ticker headlines which scrolled along under her photo were clear and damning. In her three-week (or not) absence, it seemed those news agencies still managing to function had decided to lay the blame for the Bleed’s devastating incursion squarely at Jenny’s door. That wasn’t such a surprise. What really concerned her, though, was the photograph itself and the nature of the bulletin’s lead story. The picture had been taken here, on the Gold Coast, when she’d first emerged from the clockwork room earlier today.

  “Shit, they know I’m here,” she said, stating the obvious.

  Maddie was not impressed. “I stand corrected. You’re not a celebrity, you’re a liability.”

  “I’m sorry…I didn’t know, I swear.”

  “You didn’t realize you’re public enemy number one.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Think? I thought that surfer guy earlier had just taken a shine to you. Didn’t realize you’d managed to offend the whole planet!”