“Been a long time since I’ve seen birds,” Maddie mumbled.
As they watched, the flock was attacked by a single, hideously disfigured winged creature which was dripping with blood and decay. More dragon-like than avian, it didn’t look at all aerodynamic, barely even capable of flight, yet it soared somehow with ease. And then, in less than the time it took for the birds to flap their wings more than a couple of times, they were all consumed and absorbed to become part of their attacker. The resulting engorged mutant-thing flew away to find more, calling out with an awful half-caw, half-scream.
The Bleed chewed through the Arctic, soiling endless white sheets of ice and snow-covered tundra, turning everything crimson-black. A polar bear jumped between blocks of ice as the contagion neared, followed by its two cubs, in search of escape, only to find its way forward blocked by a horrific thing which had once been a whale—or perhaps many whales—that rose up from the depths and swallowed them all before being eaten itself by another creature ten-times the size and infinitely more abhorrent.
Jenny and Maddie watched cities fall as if they were standing in all those places together. New York, Paris, Beijing, Toronto, Berlin, Rio, Delhi…countless iconic skylines were overcome by vast floods and rivers of blood. From up high, each of these sprawling metropolises came to resemble scabs; darker crimson concentrations where the pain and suffering of millions upon millions of people were intensely focused. Immediately recognisable buildings crumpled as if they were made of paper—the Eiffel Tower, the Reichstag, the Empire State Building, Liberty, the statue of Christ the Redeemer—famous silhouettes erased forever, wiped out of existence and lost to memory. And with the population of the planet being eradicated as quickly as the planet itself, memory had become a precarious and increasingly temporary store.
And now they were witnessing images of people, and it was unbearably painful to watch.
They saw great stampedes, entire populations of people trying—and failing—to protect themselves and their loved ones and escape the oncoming gore-filled tide. They looked like ants waiting to be crushed by a boot. Helpless. Vulnerable. Doomed.
“Wait, look at that,” Maddie said, and she pointed at the crowded streets of some collapsing European city or other. “What the hell are they doing? Are they going to try and fight?”
Most people were fleeing, but there were many more who seemed instead to be standing their ground, just waiting. Another city now, and the same thing again was happening. There were hundreds of them, thousands in some places, hundreds of thousands even.
“Poor souls think they’re going to find salvation,” Jenny said sadly. “They think the gods are going to save them. They saw the gods in London, and they think more of them are going to drop from the sky, scoop them up, and whisk them away to safety.”
“What, to heaven?” Maddie suggested with thinly veiled disdain.
“Or wherever it is they originally came from. Fuck’s sake, have they got selective memory loss? Did they not see what happened? The gods sacrificed this planet and everyone on it to the Bleed. They’re not going to help anyone.”
“Maybe someone should have told them. If they think this is the Rapture, they’re going to be sorely disappointed.”
“I think that’s exactly what they believe,” Jenny said, and she looked away as another wave of bloody devastation crashed over thousands of people. It was painful to watch the devoted but misguided masses waiting and praying and singing and hoping, even harder to watch them die.
It was a relief when the perspective they were watching from changed again, though that relief was short lived. From a viewpoint so high they could see the curve of the globe, they flew over the United States and continued around the planet until they could see great swathes of Russia and China. The outline of individual landmasses was still distinct, but the coloration was all wrong. Everything that should have been green or brown or grey had been forever stained crimson, red and black. They watched once mighty empires taking their strangled last gasps of air.
“Nukes,” Maddie said, watching as a phalanx of missiles streaked across the sky from the direction of what used to be China and Russia, climbing high, then falling back to earth in gentle arcs. Vapor trails crisscrossed as rockets fired from numerous different nations and regimes flew towards a common enemy. Maddie looked away when the warheads detonated, anticipating the white-hot flash and burn of multiple explosions, but the room shielded them from harm.
When the intensity of the light finally began to fade, Jenny dared look again. She saw mushroom clouds rising up from many sites, but even those nightmarish swirling balls of hellfire were no match for the Bleed. It seemed almost to thrive on the destruction and toxicity being spewed from the blasts, and it consumed them, turning them to towering plumes of blood.
“We need a map to see where the Bleed is now,” Maddie said. “It’s no good watching the edited highlights like this, we need to see the full picture.”
Jenny’s hands swept across and just above the silver wheels of the console again, and a full 360-degree image of the earth appeared in place of the relatively close-up carnage they’d so far been watching. She stepped back and watched the intricately detailed visualization spinning almost imperceptibly slowly on its axis. Initially Australia was front and centre, its main cities illuminated by clustered pinpricks of light. It was only then that Jenny realized this was no map—somehow what they were looking at was the planet itself. “Whoa,” was all she could manage to say, well aware how much she’d just undersold one of the most remarkable things she’d ever seen. Maddie walked
