“Better, let’s get working.”
“What? How?”
“Ask the machine. Clear your mind, but try to stay focused on what you want to know. From what I’ve seen, clearing your mind’s gonna be the easy part.”
Jenny glared at Maddie across the room. She was glad to have her around, but that didn’t mean she had to like her.
She approached the central console and looked down at the controls. She’d studied them before, but she still saw things she hadn’t noticed previously—dials and switches that hadn’t been there, other mechanisms side-by-side that she could have sworn she’d seen in different places on the display before. Had the layout changed? Was she even standing in the right place? The console was triangular; who was to say she wasn’t just disorientated and on the wrong side?
I’m never going to be able to do this…
Jenny felt the pressure of saving the world on her shoulders, and the surprisingly equally intense pressure of Maddie scrutinizing her every move. Nothing was happening. She realized she’d lost her focus because she was thinking too hard about trying to think about the right thing.
Switch off. Relax.
It felt counter-intuitive in the circumstances, but it worked.
Jenny stopped thinking about the immediate situation and concentrated instead on the question she wanted answered: What had happened around the world in the weeks between her escape from London and arrival in Australia? She almost lost focus again thinking about the impossibility of that split-second turning into weeks, but she managed to course-correct herself without too much trouble. Her hands were moving over the controls now. She fought against the instinctive urge to re-take conscious control, and just let herself do what she had to do.
“Something’s happening,” Maddie said. “You did it.”
“I didn’t touch anything.” Jenny stepped back and saw that a display had appeared above the console. Actually, it was less like a display in the usual sense of the word, and more like a window she was looking through. This wasn’t just an image being projected for her and Maddie, it was a complete recreation of a moment in space and time. Jenny could feel wind and rain on her face and could smell the cool outside air. It was so vivid that she thought she’d be able to reach in and touch this other place, but everything in her gut screamed at her not to. Keep your distance, she warned herself. She was scared she’d be dragged into the nightmare she’d asked to be revealed.
And it absolutely was a nightmare.
“That’s Dover,” she said, recognizing the iconic white cliffs on the south-east coast of England. It didn’t take long to understand why they were being shown what happened here: this was the point where there was just a twenty-mile gap between the coasts of the United Kingdom and mainland Europe, no distance at all for the Bleed to cover. “I don’t like this…”
“We need to see it,” Maddie said.
“Yeah, but it’s going to be like taking a trip through hell.”
Jenny wasn’t wrong.
As they watched, the sea water around the base of the chalky white cliffs began to change color. The tide churned and boiled as grey-green turned to crimson red, then a cascade of blood started to pour over the tops of the cliffs themselves as the Bleed’s awful infection spread.
Their point of view pulled back and climbed as if everything they were watching was being filmed with a camera on a crane, the perspective altering to reveal more of the world from high above. From an astonishing height they saw that the entirety of the UK and the Republic of Ireland had been stained blood red. The distinctive outlines of both countries became increasingly less defined as the vile pollution continued to spread.
The focus returned to the south where the Bleed moved through the waters of the English Channel like a slick, mixing and washing and rolling towards France and the rest of Europe. The amount of detail Jenny could see was insane. The clockwork room’s technology had an apparently infinite zoom, and from hundreds of meters above the waves down to being below the surf, they could see everything with pin-sharp precision.
The water itself was changing constantly. The currents carried the infection, as did the thousands upon thousands of creatures living below the surface. They watched teeming shoals of fish trying and failing to outrun the Bleed. As the disease overtook them, hundreds of individual fishes were mutated and conjoined to form gigantic sea monsters which, in turn, combined to make an even larger grotesquery. Thousands of fish, jelly fish, dolphins, crustaceans…all living things from plankton to whales were swept up and welded together in frenzied, blood-soaked seconds. Jenny’s view shifted upwards again, now looking back down, and she watched the resulting behemoth cruising through the waves with graceful ease like an organic submarine. It crashed into the coast of France like a torpedo just moments later. It had covered over twenty miles in little more than the blink of an eye.
When the Bleed collided with the beaches at Calais and Dunkirk, its relentless attack continued. Now Jenny watched scenes reminiscent of those she’d witnessed first-hand in London as the helpless population was swiftly overcome and assimilated by the evil contaminant. She could see hundreds of thousands of terrified people running for cover, but none escaped. All became blood.
Their view now shifted north.
The march of the Bleed had continued outward in all directions since the initial outbreak in London. It tore through England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in no time at all, its hunger and hatred undiminished. Now, from an elevated viewpoint many miles above, Jenny and Maddie saw the scourge poison the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the North Atlantic Ocean.
The creatures of the land were wiped out almost instantaneously. The creatures of the air ultimately fared as badly as the creatures of the water. The Bleed rose and tore through flocks of birds that filled the skies. Whilst she’d always appreciated the beauty
