“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 protecting 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.
