by David Moody
Jenny could now see images of a desolate, war-torn country. The bombed-out shells of buildings. Streets filled with dust and debris, grey rubble everywhere. Craters in roads. Columns of stationary vehicles that had been scorched and were never going anywhere. And beyond the skeletal remains of the city, under ominous skies filled with dirty rain, Jenny saw endless refugee camps. Line after line after line of grimy-looking tents stretched away into the distance. Queues for water and food. A group of kids wearing rags for clothes kicked a drinks can for a football as detonating bombs flashed like lightening on the horizon.
She’d seen images like this many times before on the TV news, but this was as vivid and real as the multiple views of the Bleed’s advance they’d watched previously. This was a window into another time and place. She could smell the sewage in the gutters and could hear the pitiful cries of the terrified and the starving. Was this somewhere in the Middle East? Syria or Iraq, perhaps? Or some other flashpoint she’d forgotten the name of? It wasn’t that she didn’t care, it was just that there’d been so many wars in so many places that it was hard to keep track.
“Where is this?”
“New York,” Maddie replied. “The big rotten apple. See, my version of Earth didn’t have a chance to get destroyed by the Bleed; we’d already destroyed it ourselves. Who needs interdimensional demons when you’ve got human beings?”
Jenny was stunned into silence. There was no doubt Maddie was telling the truth—the pain was writ large across her face—and yet Jenny detected something else there too. Anger. No…it was more than that. Hatred. “So what does this have to do with me?” she asked.
“Everything.”
Maddie returned her attention to the machine. As Jenny watched, the images of devastated New York were replaced with a collage of pictures and media reports. It was like watching the life she remembered filmed through a slightly different filter: news programs and websites she recognized, but all viewed from an alternative angle. The BBC was the EBC—English Broadcasting Company—for example, and Google had a more authoritarian, state-sponsored sheen. Maddie’s Earth was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Jenny asked. “We don’t have time for this, Maddie. The Bleed is closing in. If we don’t start working together and fast, then before we know it the whole world will be completely fu—”
She stopped talking when she saw images of her own face.
A mugshot.
A newspaper front page.
A website report.
People wearing T-shirts bearing her image.
Other people burning effigies of her and flags emblazoned with her face.
People fighting in her name against armies fighting to bring her to justice.
“So, can you see why I’m pissed now?” Maddie asked.
Jenny was struggling to process this latest development. New images continued to flash in front of her. The enormity of what she was seeing was beginning to sink in, but Maddie couldn’t resist stressing the point, just in case.
“It was all your fault. Apparently, you were the mastermind behind a terrorist attack that triggered the war. Granted, it was a different version of you, but it was you all the same. You’re the one who started the war that tore my world apart.”
Tears were running from Jenny’s eyes but her hands were still chained-up and she couldn’t wipe her face. Maddie stood less than a meter away and stared at her, seeming to demand a response.
“What do you want me to say?” Jenny sobbed.
Nothing from Maddie.
“Come on! Tell me what you want! Do you want me to apologies? Want me to say sorry and beg forgiveness? Want me to repent for something I didn’t do? If what you’re saying is true, Maddie, and I have no reason to think otherwise, then that’s not me. She might look like me and talk like me and have the same name as me, but she’s not me.”
“I know that.”
“Then let me out. Even if your Earth is lost, let’s try and save this one.”
“I can’t. Because even though you’re right, and she’s not you, it’s pretty clear you’ve got a heck of a lot in common. Same face, same eyes, same hair, same DNA. And it’s no coincidence that both you and she are involved in situations that have resulted in whole planets being destroyed. It makes me think you and her might both think the same way, so that leads me back to my first question: are you guilty? Is it your fault this planet’s dying?”
“No.”
“And how do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t. I guess the only way is by setting me free so we can fight this thing together.”
“Don’t know if I can risk doing that.”
“And I don’t know if you can risk not doing it. Time’s running out.”
“I know.”
“Maddie, if you truly thought I was capable of the things you’re claiming, I think you’d have got rid of me already.”
Maddie paced the room again, now looking everywhere but directly at Jenny. “You’re half right,” she eventually said.
“Only half?”
“Yes. I’m seriously tempted to get rid of you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because this machine won’t let me do half the things it’s capable of. Whether you realize it or not, I think you’re the only one who can fully control it. I understand it and I can operate it, but you’re the only one who can use it to its full potential and help us get anywhere. So I don’t have any choice but to trust you if I want to get home in one piece. But listen up and listen good. You fuck with me and I’ll kill you.”
9
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
It looked like the hotel was under siege. The clockwork machine warned Jenny and Maddie and showed them views of the massively overcrowded streets of Surfers Paradise. Other views revealed that the roads towards the place were clogged with traffic, everyone trying to get closer. “What’s bringing them here?” Jenny asked, confused.
“Yeah, about that,” Maddie said, sounding guilty. “Might be my fault.”
“What did you do?”
“I think word had already got out that there was something weird happening here, ’cause there were already crowds in town the night you got arrested.”
“What did you do, Maddie?” Jenny asked again.
“That forcefield or orb or whatever it was I used to get you out of trouble…”
“Go on.”
“It struck me it might be useful, so I left it around the top of the hotel.”
“Great. Might as well have put a sign on the street, god-tech this way. Did you not think?”
“To be honest, a crowd is the very least of our concerns right now.”
Maddie adjusted the view projected by the clockwork room so that they could track the movements of the Bleed. It was accelerating. They could see its increased speed as clear as day as they watched from overhead. Mile after mile after mile of ocean was turned blood red as death devoured the world.
But what was left of the human race continued to resist.
Far below the point from which they watched, a warship from the Japanese Maritime Self-defense Force ploughed through the unspoiled waters on a collision course with the approaching ungodly menace. The ship was a destroyer, one of the largest in the Japanese fleet, certainly the largest left afloat. The way it cut through the waves, racing towards the enemy with a fearless arrogance, gave it a misplaced air of invincibility. More than ten thousand tons of war machine and weaponry sailed at maximum speed towards the demonic evil which had long since devoured the proud country from which the ship had set sail on its final mission.
From their remote vantage point, both Maddie and Jenny thought the warship already looked lost long before it engaged the enemy. The ocean churned, almost appearing to boil, and the ship bobbed like a kid’s toy in a bathtub. Its captain brought it to a sudden full-stop several miles from the furthest advanced tendrils of the Bleed, t
hen ordered his crew to unleash hell. Every missile was fired, every torpedo released. Naval guns and Phalanx CIWS fired repeatedly into the red until every last munition was spent.
And none of it had any impact whatsoever.
If anything, the Bleed appeared to feed on the countless detonations, absorbing the energy of each individual blast, feasting on fire. For the briefest of moments, it looked like the Bleed had temporarily been slowed, but the illusion was fleeting, and what happened next was yet another sobering reminder of the unnatural power of the enemy they were facing.
A blood-red tsunami reared up miles high, drowning the warship in shadow. The wave climbed higher and higher, tipped with a swirling crimson froth which appeared perpetually about to break.
Then it stopped.
Its unnatural coloration apart, until that moment, the water had generally behaved as water should, but the laws of physics had been abruptly abandoned. The liquid began to shape itself into an enormous hand which reached down, plucked up the warship midway down its hull, then squeezed so hard that the vessel snapped in half. Countless tiny pinprick figures dropped down towards the surf—some jumping, most falling—and though it was hard to see from such a distance, Jenny was aware of lightning fast, blood-red spiderwebs shooting up from the polluted waters and infecting every last one of them before they’d reached the waves below.
Maddie moved her palms in an arc above the main console and their viewpoint shifted upwards, panning out as they climbed away from the massacre on the Pacific. She recalibrated, centering the image on their physical location on Australia’s south-eastern coast. The rest of the earth was almost completely blood-colored now, with only a ragged, roughly circular patch of unspoiled land and ocean remaining clear.
“We’ll never stop it,” Jenny said.
“Work that out on your own did you? I think we can slow it down, buy us a little time so we can figure out how to get out of this dimension and back home.”
“This is home,” Jenny reminded her.
“It was for you, maybe, but there’s gonna be nothing left of this place before long. Drop me back to my moon then you knock yourself out and come back here if you like.”
Jenny ignored her last comment. “Okay, so how do we do this, mechanic? What kind of weapons does this thing have?”
“No weapons as such, but the forcefield or whatever it is I have around this place is pretty easy to control. From here I can adjust the radius and the focus. Working on the basis that what’s gone is gone, we need to make it as wide and as strong as we can and centre it on the hotel. Make sense?”
“Makes sense.”
The two women set to work, both moving in perfect, unspoken unison, almost entranced, as they focused their minds on their intended outcome and subconsciously manipulated the god-tech. Time lost all shape and form; they could have been at the controls for seconds, minutes or hours by the time they were finished. Jenny staggered back until she reached the wall, then slid down it into a heap on the floor. She was exhausted. Dripping with sweat. It had taken an unnatural amount of energy.
“Did we do it?” she asked, breathless.
Maddie was leaning over the console, trying to catch her breath. “Not sure yet.”
“Why did that take so much effort?”
“Because we made the orb so huge, I think. It’s almost like we have to fuel the room’s energy.”
She stepped to the side where a silver panel of unmarked dials were situated in a matte black panel. By laying her fingertips on various ones, she was able to will the machine to make a few minor adjustments; another display opened, initially showing them the skyscraper-like hotel they were holed-up in. From here there appeared to be no discernible difference. Nothing had changed.
Jenny returned to her position at the console and began to manipulate the display. Her fingers danced above it and their window onto the world reacted accordingly. At first they were looking up into the sky overhead. Largely clear and blue, they could see glimpses of the outline of the massively expanded forcefield where layers of wispy white cloud bumped up against it inside and out, hundreds of meters above the hotel roof.
Their view changed again; Jenny made ushering wave-like gestures, and now it was as if they were watching pictures from a camera that had been strapped to the front of a jet. The world raced past below them at lightning speed, flying north.
“Head back to where we saw the Japanese boat,” Maddie suggested.
“Already on it.”
They covered hundreds of miles in seconds, then stopped. Way ahead of them, the area of water where the bloody hand of the Bleed had torn apart the Japanese warship was now a sea of undulating, uninterrupted red. The water itself appeared to have congealed. Its surface rippled like the skin of a custard.
But it had stopped advancing.
Between the Bleed and the position from which they were watching, the water was clear. An invisible wall was preventing the bloody waves outside from mixing with the unpolluted seawater within the orb. Deep red lapped against the forcefield but was unable to penetrate.
“I think we did it,” Jenny said. “I don’t know how, but I think we actually did it!”
Between them, Jenny and Maddie had configured the god-tech to put a protective dome around all of Australia and several thousand miles of sea. As planned, the center of the forcefield was their location on the Gold Coast. It described a perfect circle with a diameter of somewhere in the region of three thousand miles.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how much power it takes to generate something like that,” Maddie said. “And the fact we’re able to control it from here…it’s unbelievable.”
“Hope it’ll hold.” Don’t think about it, Jenny warned herself, just use it.
From the various viewpoints the clockwork room presented to them, it was hard to appreciate the scale of what they’d achieved. The sunlight glinted off the forcefield in the sky like a sports car windscreen. “It’s a perfect sphere,” Maddie said. “It’s like we’ve taken a perfectly shaped chunk out of the planet.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“I think so. There are so few people left alive now, relatively speaking, that I figure we’ve probably got enough air and water in here to see us through. What I’m saying is, I think there’s more chance of the Bleed breaking through than us suffocating anytime soon.”
“How long do you think we can sustain this?”
“Honestly, I have no clue. According to all the laws of physics I’m aware of, what we just did is completely impossible. Draw your own conclusions.”
“But you must have some idea?”
“I don’t think the room’s power is limitless. I think what we’ve got it doing now is putting the tech under massive strain and I honestly don’t know how long it’ll last. Looking at the way it reacted when I rescued you compared to the way it’s holding up now, I’m thinking the room’s capabilities change according to its task. I had precision control when I was picking you up. This feels a lot rougher, a lot more brutal.”
“The gods used orbs like this for transport. Reckon we can do the same?”
“Transport to where?”
“Anywhere? The moon? Your moon?”
“Maybe. But it’s one thing moving a couple of people around, we’ve likely got millions of people trapped inside this bubble with us.”
“Sounds huge until you remember we’ve already lost more than seven billion.”
“I hear that. I just don’t know how the machine would cope trying to move that many bodies at the same time. If it could cope, even. I think for one or two people it could, theoretically, go anywhere, but with these kinds of numbers I’m not so sure. And even if we could move them, unless we can find an empty planet that’s capable of sustaining life, what’s the point? Anyway, all that’s for later. We need to deal with the Bleed first.”
“I hadn’t forgotten. How are we looking?”
Maddie checked the display. “Whatever it is
we’ve just done, it seems pretty stable. Trouble is, not knowing exactly how this stuff holds together, we’re never going to be sure. The most important thing for now is we’ve bought ourselves some time.”
They were watching from down at sea level now, their position just inside the forcefield, looking out. Now that this part of the world had been isolated from everything else, nature no longer had the same sway as it should have had. Within the orb, the tide and wind had stopped. It reminded Jenny of being trapped in a giant snow-globe.
“It’s trying, but it can’t get through,” she said as she looked through the invisible wall of the orb to the bloodied ocean where the Bleed had run rampant. When it reached the barrier formed by the god-tech and found itself unable to progress, it reacted with violent anger and aggression. Great grabbing hooks and pincers were formed from the bloody depths but were unable to get any purchase on the perfect sphere of energy now surrounding Australia. Soiled waves battered the forcefield, then washed away. Jenny couldn’t stand to look for too long. The polluted liquid was filled with the remnants of everything the Bleed had consumed. A huge upsurge broke against the surface of the orb, and as it drained away, she saw the remains of hands reaching out from the spill, trying to claw a way through. Every so often she saw shapes she almost recognized, things that had once been human, the faces of the dead who had been assimilated.
Maddie looked closer at the image, recoiling when another thing that was still vaguely body-shaped thumped against the side of the orb. She pinched the space between her fingers and thumbs, effectively zooming in on the section she’d been watching. Blood was running up the surface, as if it was feeling its way along. She increased the magnification still further. “I wouldn’t mind being sick right now,” she said.
“Fuck me,” Jenny said. “It’s never going to give up, is it?”
The splash of blood was almost animalistic in its behavior. They watched in close-up detail as what could only have been a droplet began to morph and mutate. It became a hand-like shape with infinite, millipede-like fingers that scratched at the smooth surface, feeling their way along. Then, when it realized it couldn’t get through, it abruptly changed tack. The finger-like protrusions began to lengthen and narrow, becoming needle-sharp extrusions with which it tried to drill through the orb.