“Wait, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I think we’re both in the same boat. I don’t think either of us planned on being here right now.”
“You can say that again.”
“I believe you. Like I said, I was thousands of miles away too. Next minute, I end up here.”
The woman turned back to look out the window again.
“None of this makes sense. Is this some kind of screen? Are you just showing high-res pre-war footage on a loop?”
“It’s real,” Jenny said.
“What year is this?”
“2022.”
“Nope. I’m dead. Not how I figured the afterlife to be, but it could be worse. Let’s hope Sandra doesn’t end up here.”
“Well you seem pretty alive to me. I’m Jenny, by the way. What’s your name?”
“Maddie.”
“This isn’t the afterlife, Maddie.”
“I know that much. When you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s no god, no devil, no heaven or hell. I don’t believe in any of that; I believe in the power of machines.”
“Don’t be so quick to write it all off.”
That was the final straw. Maddie stormed back in the direction of the clockwork room. “The last thing I need right now is some little Jesus freak getting all evangelical on me.”
“It’s not like that,” Jenny said, following after her. “Just let me explain.”
But Maddie clearly wasn’t in the mood to listen. She went back into the room and started to examine it, feeling her way along the featureless walls. “This is crazy,” she said.
“What is?”
“This place…the walls are pretty much frictionless. You can hardly even feel them. And the light…”
“What about it?”
“Where does it come from? There are no windows in here, no lights in the ceiling, but we can see everything. How the hell does that work?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, and she walked the opposite way to Maddie around the central console—the only visible structure of any note in entire place—then stopped her. “Listen, I know you’re probably scared, but—”
“I’m not scared,” Maddie snapped, indignant. “I’m a lot of things right now, but scared ain’t one of them.”
“—but I really do think we need to compare notes and tell each other everything we know. Maybe then we’ll be able to understand what’s going on. Tell me exactly what happened before you were here.”
Maddie went to speak, then stopped herself. “Nope. You’re gonna say I’m crazy.”
“For the record, right now I’m not sure if I’m sane. Tell me your story and we’ll try and outdo each other.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“You’d have to go some to beat me,” Jenny said.
“Try it. You first.”
“So, a couple of days back, a god turned up in London. Not the god, just a god. Then things got really wild.”
“How so?”
“The Thames stopped flowing, then more gods turned up, people started acting like zombies, that kind of thing. The city was overcome. Poisoned. I was at the centre of it all, and I tried to stop it, but there was nothing I could do.” She paused to remember all the nightmarish things she’d seen. She’d barely had time to process everything that had happened. “Now you.”
Maddie shifted from foot to foot then cleared her throat. “There was an explosion. Power station blew and took out part of the base. We got away in a mower.”
“A what?”
“A truck.”
“A moon truck?”
“Do me a favor, shut up and listen. Don’t talk. You’re reminding me too much of Derrick.”
“Touchy.”
Maddie glared at her but continued. “Had a close call, thanks to the blast wave, but crashed the mower. Those of us who were still in one piece got away, but we were attacked by . . .”
Her sudden hesitation unnerved Jenny. “Go on.”
“We were attacked by some kind of monster. Looked like a giant tick. We were in pretty bad shape. Found a lake with a waterfall.”
“On the moon?”
“Yes, a waterfall and a lake on the moon. Am I winning yet? I saw some light coming from behind it and me and the people I was with went to investigate. We were in a tunnel, going down deep. There was no light, and we were going deeper and deeper and it was getting narrower and…and here I am.”
“So you came to Australia through a tunnel behind a waterfall on the moon?”
Maddie seemed almost apologetic about how dumb that sounded. She shrugged. “Yes.”
She looked surprised when Jenny didn’t baulk at her story. Instead she just nodded thoughtfully, trying to take it all in. “Then it sounds like things have been pretty screwed up for both of us.”
“You can say that again.”
“So, you’ve not heard of the Bleed?”
“No.”
“How do I explain this? You need to suspend your disbelief, okay?”
“Listen, I just told you I escaped from a giant tick monster through a waterfall on the moon, and now I’m in ancient Australia. My disbelief is already well and fucking truly suspended.”
“Okay. Point taken. So, gods exist, and it turns out they’re not the big deal you might have thought. They’re just another species, like us, except far more powerful. And because gods exist, so do demons and devils.”
“I’m skeptical…I have no reason to be, but I am.”
“It’s true, I swear. The Bleed is the way evil moves between places and dimensions. Some kind of malevolent…thing. The first god I met came here to try and save the planet, but the others came to sacrifice Earth to try and stop the Bleed from spreading beyond.”
“Assuming you’re not talking out of your ass, your first god won, didn’t he? Looking out of that window on the stairs just now, things look a lot better out there than I remember.”
Jenny shook her head. “The Bleed got through and it’s coming for us. It destroyed London, and now it’s working its way across the entire planet. We don’t have long left. According to the TV news I just saw, we’ve only got a couple of weeks tops before it reaches this place.”
“Oh, that’s just perfect.”
“It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen. It started spreading through the water. The Thames turned blood red. When it infected people—I guess that’s the
