by David Moody
Between them they scooped up their bags. “Your receipt?” the cashier asked, but neither of them answered. A final quick glance up at the mirror again revealed the woman who’d been watching them was now on her phone.
Out on the street, Jenny put her head down and marched away, but she’d only gone a few steps when she heard Maddie calling her. “Stop. It’s too late.”
Jenny looked up. “Fuck.”
Two police cars were hurtling down the road in their direction. She looked around but there were more cops blocking the other end of the street. And it wasn’t just the police who were getting involved—she and Maddie were already surrounded by a ring of onlookers. There was no easy way through. Jenny started to move in one direction, but the people closed ranks and prevented her getting past.
“Bitch,” someone shouted at her.
“Fucking traitor,” yelled another.
“Devil lover,” spat a third.
Jenny looked back for Maddie, but she was busy distancing herself from the scene. She’d eased herself back into the crowd, one of their number now, one of the faceless masses, leaving Jenny alone and completely exposed in a shrinking bubble of space.
There was no way out of this.
Someone threw something and it hit Jenny on the back of the head. Then another missile hit her in the stomach, and she dropped down, making herself as small as possible as the volley of objects and abuse continued. She covered her head, curled up into a ball, and sobbed.
It was exactly the same as the isolation she’d experience in London prior to it falling to the Bleed, and Maddie’s betrayal reminded her of how she was tricked before by Jayesh, the guy who’d helped her and pretended to support her, but who’d been acting on behalf of the gods all along, conniving to trick her from the outset. How could she have allowed herself to be fooled again so quickly? What chance did she have of saving the world, when she couldn’t even save herself?
Another rock hit her in the small of her back, and she braced herself for the onslaught. Any second now, she thought, and the kicks and punches would begin. Part of her just wanted it over with.
And then it stopped.
The shouting and jeering continued, but the violence ended abruptly. She dared to look up and saw she was now surrounded by police officers. The nearest of them grabbed her arm and dragged her up to her feet, then cuffed her.
She didn’t bother protesting. She knew there was no point.
The hate in the faces of every person she made eye contact with was evident and understandable. As far as they were concerned, she was the one who’d conspired with the gods to unleash hell on Earth.
She was the reason they were all going to die.
6
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
It took Maddie an age to get back to the hotel. The streets around the building were swarming with people and she was relieved that, for the moment at least, she was still anonymous. Staying hidden from the authorities should have been easy for her, she thought. She wasn’t going to be born for another couple of decades yet.
It was a relief to be back inside the clockwork room. Her stomach growled with hunger and she shoved food into her face as she worked. The taste of things caught her by surprise; she didn’t know whether it was because manufacturing techniques and ingredients had changed so much over the years, or if the stuff they were fed on the moon was just particularly bland, but even things that were clearly junk food tasted incredible to her today. She tried not to let herself get distracted. As much as she was enjoying it, decent food was just a temporary positive. The way things felt right now, everything was temporary.
There had to be a way she could get back to the moon from here, she just hadn’t yet had time to work it out.
She walked all the way around it again, looking for openings, panels, doors she might have missed previously, hidden exits they’d overlooked, but there were none. She then returned to the controls and tried following the advice she’d given to Jenny earlier: switch off, relax, think about what you want and let your hands and the machine do the work for you. And as soon as she did that, a window opened back into her own reality.
The surface of the moon.
She felt herself relax when she saw it. There was a strange comfort to be found in that desolate, featureless expanse of rock and dust. The contrast of the white-grey landscape against the blue-black of everything above was reassuring in its simplicity. Desperate to see the friends she had unwittingly abandoned, she adjusted her viewpoint to that part of the moon’s surface where the impossible lake and waterfall had been found, but there was nothing there. As remarkably as it had appeared from nowhere, it had now disappeared again.
She then tried to see what was left of the destroyed power station, but that wasn’t there either. There was no sign of the explosion, no damage or debris.
And then it struck her. “Use your brain, Maddie!”
No wonder she couldn’t see any of the things she expected—she wasn’t looking at the moon she knew from the war-scarred, late twenty-first century, it was the moon of today, the exact same satellite she’d stared at from the beach. Frustrated, she kicked the console and stepped away, and the image immediately faded to nothing.
She’d asked the machine to show her the moon, but here, that wasn’t her moon.
And then another thought struck her that made her feel immeasurably worse. She realized that, right now, the moon she knew had become an impossibility. The history books she’d studied in class (reluctantly, because school had never really been her thing) hadn’t mentioned the Bleed. There’d been no talk of vast wars between gods and demons and the like. So the fact that this world was, today, on the verge of being wiped out by the unspeakable horror Jenny had shown her, meant that the world she’d grown up on would never exist. Her family, friends, home…everything she knew and loved would be wiped out before she’d even been born, history rewritten.
She ate another chocolate bar, hoping the brief energy boost would help make sense of everything. She had a myriad different thoughts and ideas competing for attention in her head, and none of them made sense. How could she be here if the future she was destined to be a part of was being irrevocably changed—no, erased—by events taking place around the world right now? Was she about to disappear? Would it be like something out of a shitty time-travel movie and she’d just vanish? Would she be deleted from reality and cease to exist the moment her grandparents or great-grandparents were overcome by the Bleed? Or was it too late? Were her descendants dead already? She began to panic, fearing that she might be about to be erased from future history in the blink of an eye.
Maddie shook her head and closed her eyes tight, halting her thoughts. She knew that as long as she continued to exist, she had to keep fighting.
She returned her attention to the console, determined to understand how it worked and what it was capable of. If it had dragged her back through time, then surely she could go back further and find a way to prevent the Bleed from ever taking hold, thereby restoring the future that she remembered. Even thinking about what had happened, what was going to happen, and what might now never happen was confusing. Her life had become a swirling brain-stew of epic proportions, and she knew it would be impossible to keep track of all the possible outcomes and permutations. Was there even any point in trying?
Of course there was.
She cursed herself for being defeatist.
Maddie knew she had go back to basics. It was the number of questions that was overwhelming her, not the questions themselves. She needed to approach her situation in the same way she repaired faults with machines: step by step, stage by stage, troubleshoot one issue and then move onto the next. And the first step she had to resolve was obvious: STOP THE BLEED. If she could get back to the beginning and warn Jenny, maybe she’d be able to prevent the Bleed from ever getting a hold?
She laid her hands on the console and cleared her head, thinking about jumping back to London three weeks ago, visu
alizing the top of the Shard. She remembered it being an unusual-looking building and, as if it was trying to help her, the machine projected an image of the pre-Bleed London skyline. Good. She was finally getting somewhere. “That’s it,” she said. “Take me there. Take me there before all this began.”
The clockwork room never felt like it moved, so it was impossible to tell from inside whether or not her location had changed. She braced herself, ready for whatever this crazy antique world might be about to throw at her, then ran through the exit.
She knew before she’d reached the window on the landing that it hadn’t worked. Surfers Paradise. Southern hemisphere stars. Maybe she’d got the location wrong, but had she managed to jump back the required number of weeks? The streets outside remained a sea of people, but that wasn’t proof positive. She went down a couple of floors, looking for confirmation, and found a room where the guests were stoned and unconscious. The door had been propped open with a pile of dirty washing, and Maddie could hear the TV playing. She tiptoed in, holding her breath and wafting her hand in front of her face to dissipate the smoke haze, and saw that absolutely nothing had changed. The TV news was the same as before. The planet was still being devoured by the Bleed, and Jennifer Allsopp, the betrayer of everything and everyone, was at last in captivity.
Maddie dragged herself back upstairs. It didn’t make sense…she could make the impossible machine cooperate to an extent, but why hadn’t she been able to make it fly or move or materialize or do whatever the hell it did to get from point A to point B via all manner of space and time diversions? She could access and configure the machine, but little else.
And then it struck her.
“I’m a mechanic. I’m never gonna get anywhere without a pilot.”
7
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
It had all happened so fast that Jenny hadn’t been able to get her head around it. From a squad car, to a holding cell in a local copshop, to a prison van, to being blindfolded and shackled and bundled into a helicopter, to being chained to the wall in another holding pen, and now to this: a small concrete-walled cell, barely big enough for her to take more than a couple of steps in any direction. No windows. A metal door with no grille. Total isolation. She didn’t know if she was scared or angry, or what was getting to her more—was it the fast approaching Bleed and the fact she was helpless to do anything about it from here, or the fact that she’d been betrayed by the only person left in the world who could help her? Fucking Maddie. Fucking bitch.
She was completely unfamiliar with the area, so didn’t have any idea where she was being held. She’d tried talking to the officers who’d brought her here, but none of them had replied with anything more than grunts and shoves. Her request for a lawyer (not that she knew one) had been laughed at. Her basic rights—food, water, sanitation, information—had been unilaterally ignored.
Surely they must have seen what had actually happened in London? She thought that anyone who’d been watching must have understood that she was as much a victim of the Bleed as everyone else, that she’d been played for a fool by the gods just as the rest of the world had been? But no. It appeared that she’d become a convenient hate figure for those left alive to aim their nervousness and fear at. There was no point them getting shitty with the Bleed, that wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. It seemed to be far more satisfying to use her as an emotional punching bag instead.
Then again, maybe she deserved it? She was, after all, the one who’d opened Pandora’s Box and allowed evil to consume the planet.
Part of her wished they’d just get it over with quickly, but it was several more painful hours filled with self-recrimination before the oppressive silence was abruptly ended and the corridor outside her cell was filled with noise. Jenny had figured she was the only prisoner in this jail, because she’d heard nothing from any other inmates in all the time she’d been banged up. Even when she’d screamed out in anger, or for food or water, her cries had been met with nothing but utter silence, but now she could hear boots on the ground, the rattling of locks, the cumulative buzz of whispered conversations.
They were coming for her.
With an utter disregard for her dignity, sanity and welfare, Jenny was dragged out of the cell and shackled, then marched along a narrow, grey-walled corridor. Her fear was such that it was hard to take everything in, but the lack of any other cells made her question whether this was a jail at all? Her mind was racing now, trying to imagine what was coming next. Would it be an intense interview by Australia’s equivalent of the FBI? Torture? Or perhaps they’d re-watched the footage from London and realized they’d got it wrong after all, that she was actually trying to save the planet, not condemn it. Or was she going straight to trial…or worse?
After walking for what felt like miles along a maze of further corridors, dragging her feet because the weight of her chains made it impossible to pick them up, her guards led her out into an open, garage-like loading bay which stank of exhaust fumes. In a brief moment of rest, she became aware of a deep, resonant noise which seemed to fill the air; an ominous bass-filled buzz like constant thunder.
There was a cage up ahead, roughly the size and shape of a phone box. She was shoved into it and it was locked and bolted before she was able to turn around and protest. The cage was then hoisted onto the back of a flat-bed truck, and she gripped the cold bars tightly as the truck began to move. Her hands were numb and her arms grew quickly tired but she had to hold on. There wasn’t even room in the cage to sit down.
A roller door lifted and the truck, surrounded by an attachment of armed guards, drove out into the open. The light was so bright after her hours of captivity that Jenny couldn’t initially see anything. She screwed her eyes shut, nauseous with a combination of nerves, movement, and sudden activity, and instead she focused on the background noise, which was continuing to build. It had become an all-consuming wave of sound; a tsunami of shouts and jeers. Christ, she thought, how many people are out here?
The answer was tens of thousands.
The truck was heading along a gravel service track towards a huge sports stadium. Jenny could hear an announcer’s voice on a PA, and even though she couldn’t make out any of what was being said, it was clear the crowd was being whipped into a frenzy. The truck climbed a steady slope then turned off onto another track and followed a gentle bend around to one of the cathedral-like stadium’s service entrances.
The noise became deafening as they approached. From her elevated position on the back of the truck, Jenny could see that the place was packed. The stands and pitch alike around the elliptical stadium were packed with people, with a gap a couple of meters wide running directly from where they’d entered to the opposite end of the colossal building. There must have been close to a hundred thousand people here, and the hatred that every last one of them had for her was palpable. The view in whichever direction she looked was awful—fractious hordes, all baying for her blood—and so, instead, she just focused forward and tried to block it all out.
“Traitor!”
“Scum!”
“Evil bitch!”
The volume increased as the truck trundled deeper into the crowd, and it came almost as something of a relief when the cumulative noise reached such a peak that she could no longer make out individual insults and threats. She was hit with a barrage of objects from the crowd: pints of beer, bottles of piss, rotten fruit, broken hoardings, torn up seats—whatever people could lay their hands on. At times like this she questioned whether this world was even worth saving anymore.
As horrific an experience as it was, she could see how it must have been therapeutic for a population waiting helplessly to be slaughtered. She wished she could have a chance to explain why she’d done what she did and how, if they’d just let her go back to the clockwork room, there was still a fraction of a chance she could turn things around. But there was no point. Any one of the assembled throng looked ready to tear her limb from limb because of what t
hey’d decided she’d done.
The truck slowly trundled down the entire length of the stadium before stopping in front of a massive makeshift stage. A crane dropped down and grabbed Jenny’s cage like an arcade claw game, then picked her up like a prize and swung her around. She was deposited in the middle of the stage, completely alone.
Though it was already at an ear-splitting volume, the crowd’s noise increased again. All Jenny could do was stare out at the endless faces staring back at her. There was no escape. Absolutely nowhere to hide.
And then every single voice was silenced.
Pumping, militaristic music began blasting out of the speakers positioned around the ground. Jenny looked around, struggling to move in the close confines of the cage, and saw that lines of figures were filling seats behind her. Some uniformed, others suited or robed, they looked like some kind of bizarre opera chorus. There were so many of them that it took several minutes to get them all into position. A row of particularly miserable looking bastards filed into the seats closest to her. She noticed that two massive video screens—one either side of the stage—had flickered into life. She didn’t know where the cameras were, but they were showing who this motley cast of characters were: religious leaders, military leaders, members of the government (including the prime minister), then a woman who, according to the caption under her face on the screen, was “Chief Justice of Australia, Briony Griffiths.” She was a frightening looking creature; grey-haired and grey-skinned, as wide as she was tall.
Then the cameras switched, locking onto Jenny’s face in tight close-up. Whichever way she turned now, there was another one ready to film her. She had absolutely no way of escaping the unblinking glare of the prying camera lenses.
Jenny was on trial.
This was primetime entertainment: the might of the Australian legal system colliding head-on with rock opera.