The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE David Moody (the red fox clan txt) 📖

attention to the scenes outside. “Can we risk waiting any longer? There are plenty of people in the water now, but there’s more who haven’t made it yet.”

“We need to get moving. You gave them enough time. Besides, the Bleed’s getting restless. It knows something’s up.”

Maddie was right. It was reacting furiously to the mass movement it detected inside the orb. The room showed them an angle from the upper levels of the dying Earth’s atmosphere. The outline of the orb was in full view below, and the Bleed’s agitation was clear to see. The rest of the planet was a sea of roiling red waves, whereas the bubble centered on the Gold Coast was a hive of much furious activity. There were so many legs and limbs and pincers and claws and other indescribable appendages thrashing around the perimeter of the orb that it looked like a dozen or more spiders fighting for attention. The ceaseless, chaotic movement caused great splashes and geysers of blood to spurt many miles into the air.

“If it works out what we’re doing, things could get nasty,” Jenny said. “The second we reduce the energy around the circumference of the orb, even just a little bit, it’ll try and break through, won’t it?”

“Most likely. I don’t know how we’re going to get around that.”

Jenny thought for a second. “I do.”

“Go on.”

“We play it at its own game. Trick it the way it tricked us.”

“How?”

“Distract it. Let it think it’s getting through, so it focuses its attention elsewhere.”

“I guess it’s worth a try. You ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

They operated their respective parts of the machine in perfect, unspoken unison, Maddie balancing the power of the shields while Jenny prepared to manipulate the size and shape of the orb.

“Reduce power over to the west now,” Jenny said, and Maddie immediately weakened the forcefield inland to a fraction of its original strength.

“This won’t hold for long,” she warned.

It took the Bleed barely any time at all to realize that.

It immediately swelled on the land-based side of the orb where the forcefield’s intensity was low and began to attack. Millions of blood-soaked feelers and proboscis began exploring, trying to root out weak spots and compromise the energy shield. Its foul excitement was palpable; it was as if it could sense that the distance between it and the remains of the human race had been dramatically reduced, and the prospect of feeding again drove it into a frenzy. It began to burrow and drill, to grind its way through.

But the plan was working, because on the ocean-side of the orb, where hundreds of thousands of people were now gathered in the water, the Bleed’s presence had substantially reduced.

“How long will it hold?” Jenny asked.

“A minute, less.”

“Okay.”

“You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“Right. I’m going to start reducing the size of the orb. You’ve only got a few seconds to get this moved into the right position. Understand?”

“Got it.”

“Three, two, one, NOW!”

Maddie began to imagine the forcefield holding its shape around a shrinking orb as Jenny sprang into action. All around the orb, the Bleed sensed that the protective dome of energy preventing it from feasting on mankind was decreasing in size and it flooded inwards.

Jenny’s fingers dashed lightly across the controls. She did everything she could to block out the enormity of the moment and focus on the task at hand, but it was almost impossible to ignore the fact that millions of lives depended on her every movement. And it wasn’t just those individual lives, either. The future of the entire human race now rested in her hands, along with everything humans had ever achieved. If she slipped, if she fucked up, if she took her eye off the ball for even a nanosecond, thousands of years of evolution, history and achievement would be lost from this universe forever.

A deluge of liquid death spilled across the last untouched region of the planet. Time seemed to slow down for Jenny, but she wished it would slow further still because she felt hopelessly under qualified. There’d been no chance for a dry run, no opportunity to gain any familiarity with these particular clockwork room controls, there was only now.

This moment.

One chance.

Live or die.

Sink or swim.

In her mind’s eye she focused on the hundreds of thousands of people waiting in the waters just off the last unspoiled section of Australia’s eastern coastline, and she imagined a line drawn all the way around them. It was a long elliptical shape which she hoped would encompass everyone who’d made it into the ocean. She didn’t dare dwell on them, but she could feel the pain of those who hadn’t yet made it. She tried not to imagine what would happen to them outside the forcefield; tried not to visualize their quick deaths or the paradoxically endless pain they’d experience as they were absorbed into the Bleed. Instead, she stayed focused on those in the water, picturing them held safely in an invisible, odd-shaped bubble.

Maddie waited as long as she dared, then rebalanced the energy levels around the misshapen forcefield.

The Bleed continued to flood forward, but all it could do was wash up and over the glass-like walls. Jenny relaxed. Those people left alive were safe, now floating in their own aquarium.

“We got them,” Maddie said.

“All of them?”

“Most, I think. More than I would have thought possible, if I’m honest. Now quit talking and get us out of here.”

Jenny glanced at an image on one of the clockwork room’s projections; crowds of people in the surf on the beach at Surfers Paradise where the Australian section of her nightmare had begun. They held onto each other, terrified, some of them struggling to keep their heads above water, all of them struggling to see in the miserable low light. And in the air many miles above them, the sky was blood red.

Planet Earth was dead.

She closed her eyes, put her hands on the controls of the clockwork room, and focused on Maddie’s moon.

18

THE MOON

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