by David Moody
But then the Bleed changed direction.
There was another Bleed hammer now, this one south of Australia. “Shit,” Maddie said as the clockwork room showed its first strike. There was even more terror on the streets of the remaining cities as the population was now battered by shockwaves coming from a completely different direction. “We can’t defend against something like this,” Maddie said as she recalibrated the forcefield.
“We have to!” Jenny yelled at her.
“We’re already stretched to capacity. Maintaining the forcefield at this level is taking everything the room has.”
“What choice do we have?”
“Not many,” Maddie answered. “Look.”
The two hammers continued battering the orb, and there were signs of a third now being constructed off the west coast. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
12
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
Maddie had managed to balance the orb’s energy as best she could, subduing the effects of the constant battering of the forcefield from the three giant Bleed hammers. “That’s the best I can do,” she announced. “I’ve been able to sync the god-tech with the rhythm of the hammer blows, and I don’t think the Bleed has caught on yet.”
“So you’re anticipating the hits and shifting the power accordingly?”
“Exactly. And so far, it doesn’t seem to have noticed. I’m hoping I’ve been able to fool it into thinking the whole of the forcefield is stronger than it is.”
“Smart.”
“I know, but it’s not sustainable. All it’s gonna take is for another one or two of those things to appear, or for them to vary the rhythm. If they all start hitting at the same time, we’re in trouble. I don’t think they’d break through, but the damage we’d sustain in here would be catastrophic.”
“I get that. I understand. So why hasn’t it built more?”
“Yeah, that’s a concern…I think it’s up to something.”
“It’s not like it’s run out of energy or material, is it? It’s toying with us. The chances of the status quo being maintained are pretty much zero.”
“Exactly zero, I’d say.”
Whether the clockwork room actually existed in the same space and time continuum as everything else or in its own reality, for the first time Jenny could feel the vibrations of the Bleed’s non-stop attack. It felt like the enemy was getting through.
“Is there anything else we can do? Any power we can route or re-route?”
Maddie held her head in her hands. “Have you not been listening to me? I don’t know where the power source for this thing is. I don’t even know if there is a power source as such. I’ve done everything I can, everything it’ll let me do. As long as we’re having to protect such a massive area, we are always going to be vulnerable. And it’s not like I can just reconfigure the room to only protect land…as far as I can tell, the forcefield can only be circular.”
“It’s a sphere, though, right? What about the power we’re using to protect underground?”
“If we cut power down there, the Bleed will start burrowing under. From what I’ve seen, it naturally targets where we’re weakest, so, for now, maintaining the illusion that we’re not weak anywhere is the best we can do.”
The relentless beat of the demonic hammer blows was wearing Jenny down. It was as if they were hammering directly on her skull, and, though it remained constant, the pressure she was feeling was increasing. This was too much for one person to deal with. She’d never asked for this level of responsibility and felt hideously unprepared. Worse than unprepared—she felt useless. She had at her disposal the most incredible technology, and yet it seemed she couldn’t do anything with it. She felt worthless. She felt like a failure.
She wished that Dad was here to give her some guidance. Or Thirnas, the one god worth knowing. She even wished that she was the different version of herself she’d seen on Maddie’s Earth. Okay, maybe that version of Jenny Allsopp had been responsible for starting a global war, but at least she’d had some backbone. At least she’d done something. As Jenny paced the room, the god-tech showed her a series of images from around the country: millions of helpless people, every one of them relying on her to protect them from the Bleed. She was on the verge of failing them miserably. “What good is one person against an unstoppable enemy?” she asked herself. “I’m so frigging inconsequential. I’m like a speck of dust. I might as well not be here, for all the good I’m doing.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Maddie said.
“Leave me alone.”
“Looks like we’re stuck in this room together until the end; being left alone is a luxury you’re gonna have to get used to doing without.”
“Great.”
“I’m serious, though. Quit whining. Our time’s not up yet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You feel like a failure, but right now there’s really nothing for you to do. You’ll know when it’s your turn to step up, I’m sure. This machine needs both of us. If you weren’t important, the gods would have left you to die in London, don’t you think?”
“Suppose. What about you?”
She grinned at Jenny. “Oh, I know I’m important. It’s always been about me!”
“Your ego knows no bounds.”
“Damn right. Just do me a favor and remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a difference between defense and offense, but they’re equally important. One person can start a war—I know you did—but that same person can just as easily stop one, too. We’re in control of a piece of tech that has everything but weapons, as far as I can see, and you’ve said yourself before that we can’t attack the Bleed. Maybe we’re not here to fight it. Maybe that’s somebody else’s job.”
13
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
“What’s this?” Maddie asked. The clockwork room’s display had abruptly switched to a new view. The Bleed hammers were continuing to wreak havoc on the forcefield shield, but the perspective of the image the machine was presenting to Jenny and Maddie had unexpectedly changed. There was relative calm on the streets outside, from what they could tell, so why had the god-tech suddenly decided to show them this apparently random scene?
They were, according to the machine, looking at a densely forested region northeast of Bobong, Indonesia. It was strange to see lush green again after staring for so long at either the crimson death of the Bleed, the blue-green of the ocean, or the patchwork greys of the last remaining cities on Earth. The orb had cut an arc across the top of Taliabu Island, a sparsely populated regency. On one side, normalcy. On the other, nothing but death.
“What are we looking at?” Jenny asked, peering deeper into the image. She could smell the freshness of the forest as she looked out over mile after mile after mile of uninterrupted green. But even out here, at a distance of thousands of miles, the effects of the massive Bleed hammers could still be seen. The tops of trees shook then were still, shook, then were still. Leaves and branches thrashed with the constant shockwaves.
But beyond all that, nothing.
On the other side of the forcefield, the forest had been destroyed by the Bleed. Where there had once been thousands of trees and deep masses of vegetation, there was now a single undulating layer of red. So far, so horrific, but not totally unexpected.
“Think the machine’s starting to struggle?” Maddie suggested. “Been running this thing at full throttle for a while.”
Jenny wasn’t so sure. “No, it has to be more than that.”
Their view was continuing to change. They were now watching from much lower than before, moving through the undergrowth and leaf litter towards the wall of the orb. Their perspective was just about knee-height, close enough to the ground for them to be aware of scores of creatures taking part in a mass exodus away from the Bleed.
“Why now?” Jenny asked.
“What?”
“
Why are these creatures only choosing now to get away? Did they not think they were in trouble before?”
Then they reached the barrier.
“Shit,” Maddie said. “The Bleed tricked us. We thought the hammers were where it was attacking.”
“But they were just a distraction. They were too obvious. This is the real attack.”
The room zoomed in close. Through the forcefield, they could see sections of the Bleed elongating and mutating. Jenny had seen this before, when the forcefield had first gone up around them. The Bleed’s extrusions seemed infinite, starting out several centimeters wide and roughly circular, then drawing down to a pin-sharp point, still a distance from the outside of the orb. The points continued to refine and sharpen until they disappeared to nothing, then the room zoomed in again, showing them what was happening at a cellular, then a sub-atomic level.
“It always bleeds through,” Jenny said.
“Fuck, this is unbelievable. It’s trying to get in through the gaps between molecules.”
Maddie tried to divert the power of the machine to stop the Bleed’s microscopic incursion, but it was too late.
The moment the tip of the Bleed’s microneedle had fully punctured the orb, everything changed. It swelled and stretched the entry hole wider and wider, reaching a centimeter in diameter in no time at all. And then it continued to grow and expand. Ten centimeters, twenty…half a meter. Maddie tried to block it but realized quickly that there was no point. “We don’t have the power to stop this. The forcefield is stretched too far. If we protect this section, the hammers will break through elsewhere.”
The Bleed’s protrusion looked like a tentacle now, thrashing and writhing on the inside of the dome. It began to whip around furiously as the forcefield attempted to close the breach, but the sheer strength of the demonic entity was too much. As it had steadily consumed the planet and everything living on its surface, so it had absorbed the world’s energy and had become ever more potent, powered by everything it had killed.
It was fucking unstoppable.
The tentacle stretched again, then hollowed and became a tube-shaped sluice which allowed more of the Bleed to pour through. The pressure its liquid mass was under outside the vast forcefield was unimaginable, and it gushed through, spilling onto the forest floor whilst at the same time filling the air with bloody spray. In seconds, a huge swathe of green had been soaked with crimson gore. The blood began to run up the inside of the dome, defying gravity and corrupting everything.
“Get it closed up!” Jenny screamed at Maddie.
She was frantically working at the console but slammed her hands down with frustration. “Can’t do it. It’s too damn powerful.”
“Fuck!” Jenny cursed. “Then we’ve only got one option.”
“What’s that?”
“We have to reduce the size of the forcefield. I know we’ll lose some people, but if we don’t move fast, we’ll lose all of them. Do it, Maddie. Work out what the maximum threshold we can maintain is with optimum strength, then shrink the diameter of the orb. We have to stop this thing.”
Maddie glanced up at the clockwork room’s displays. Christ, in the short time she’d been looking down they’d already lost the whole of Indonesia. The rate the Bleed was advancing now was astonishing, far faster than before. It had moved fast enough before they’d acted to enclose Australia, but their time in isolation had been sufficient to let the pressure on the other side of the forcefield build to an inconceivable level.
She paused with her hand over the control. She knew the implications of what was about to happen.
“Do it,” Jenny said.
14
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
With vast amounts of the Bleed flooding in through the breach in the orb in what had, until just minutes earlier, been an area of unspoiled Indonesian rainforest, Jenny and Maddie had been forced to take desperate action to prevent the last few million people left alive being overwhelmed by the demonic infection. Maddie had instructed the clockwork room to reduce the radius of the forcefield barrier to the point at which it would protect the maximum area of land whilst providing solid resistance against the Bleed. The room seemed to pulse, as if anticipating the decision they were about to make. They’d known all along that casualties were inevitable, that the protective dome would have to be been reduced to substantially less than its original three thousand or so meter diameter, but they hadn’t bargained on what happened next.
When Maddie “flicked the switch,” the whole world shook.
In the area around the hotel on the Gold Coast, nothing appeared to have immediately changed. Within minutes, though, it became clear that the Bleed hammers had been silenced. The crowds filling the streets, cautious at first, then gradually optimistic, began to celebrate. From their limited perspective, the balance of power had shifted unexpectedly. No longer were they being pounded by the shockwaves produced by the Bleed, no longer were more and more people crowding ever forward towards the centre of the orb, pushing and shoving and fighting with each other for survival.
After weeks of relentless confusion and fear, in Surfers Paradise, it was a rare moment of relief.
But no one else was celebrating.
The clockwork room’s calculations had necessitated a massive reduction in the size of the orb, from thousands of miles in diameter to approximately sixty-four miles wide. And it was fortunate that so many people had been converging on the east coast of Australia, because the body count could have been far worse. As it was, somewhere in the region of three million people had been spared, but that left more than twenty million stranded in no man’s land.
For the majority of them, their continued efforts to stay alive kept them preoccupied and at first, many millions didn’t even realize their protective shield had gone. For days there had been a steady exodus of people on the Great Eastern Highway from Perth, on the west coast. Traffic crawled along the almost four-hundred-mile-long road towards the city of Kalgoorlie, both lanes now filled with traffic moving east. But the highway was carrying far more vehicles than it had been designed for, travelling through often inhospitable country, and the propensity for things to go wrong was high.
It wasn’t just the human population that was migrating. A mob of kangaroos, disorientated by the Bleed’s frequent shockwave booms, spilled out onto the road, trying to cross between slow-moving cars and trucks. A startled buck changed direction unexpectedly and jumped out in front of a Toyota Land Cruiser.
The driver, Stu Duggins, reacted late and swerved into the side of the car in the next lane, stopping both of them going anywhere. Duggins had been distracted, trying to pacify two kids in the back who were still heartbroken at leaving their home near the Barracca Nature Reserve. Christie, four, and little Stu, just two years old, didn’t understand why they’d had to leave, and why Mummy and Daddy had packed so many of their things from home. There’d been barely any room for Busby, the dog. Damn mutt had sat between the kids and howled all the way.
Cars began to swerve out onto the dusty orange sand to get around the collision, no question of anyone stopping to help. It pissed Stu off at first, but he didn’t react because he had far more pressing concerns. He wasn’t even bothered by the overweight jock in the car he’d crashed into who was cursing and yelling at Stu through his open window. He was, fortunately, trapped inside his little boxed vehicle because Stu had driven into his door and bent it out of shape.
Stu wasn’t even worried by the vicious looking kangaroos still hopping past, nor by the heat of the glaring sun, which was already burning his back.
Instead, Stu was fucking terrified, because everything had changed. He’d just about got used to the tireless shockwaves, and, though no one out here seemed to have any idea what was causing them, the fact that they’d stopped had somehow made him feel even more nervous. He looked up into the endless blue sky overhead and saw that it was completely clear. That panicked him too; until now, there’d been something up there protecti
ng them. He hadn’t known what it was, but he’d seen the clouds brushing against it and the sun glinting off its surface. Now it was gone.
So unless the Bleed—whatever the hell that thing he’d heard so much about actually was—had finally been defeated, they were screwed. And on the balance of probability, when the whole world except for Australia had already fallen, the chances of the human race being victorious seemed extremely fucking unlikely.
Stu’s instincts were correct.
Other than those that had already managed to squeeze through, there was a vast column of stopped cars lined up behind the Toyota, and a good number of the drivers who were unable to keep moving had got out to see what was going on up ahead. But then, almost as one, they began to turn and look west, back in the direction from which they were trying to escape.
A flock of birds thundered overhead. And thundering was exactly the right word, because at that moment the combined flapping of millions of pairs of wings filled the air. All shapes and sizes, every species, all desperately heading east.
When Stu saw what was coming next, he jumped back into his car and tried to reverse, doing everything he could to disentangle his vehicle from the one he’d collided with. Sherie, his wife, was equally terrified, but it was the lack of knowing that scared her. “What is it, love?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
Stu could barely spit out individual words. Whole sentences were out of the question. “Back there…I just…we don’t…”
“What did you see, love?”
Only one word was needed now.
“Blood.”
A glistening tsunami of filth and gore several miles high had reared up off the coast near Perth. Its incoming force was such that the ground shook and the line of stationary vehicles rattled where they stood. Stu revved the Toyota’s engine angrily, but it didn’t make any difference. The incoming wave could still be felt and heard over and above the racket of his motor. He shoved his foot down on the accelerator harder and harder, succeeding only in shunting the car he’d already hit. By now he could see the Bleed in the rear view: nothing but red in every direction.