The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE by David Moody (best selling autobiographies .txt) 📕

threw something and it hit Jenny on the back of the head. Then another missile hit her in the stomach, and she dropped down, making herself as small as possible as the volley of objects and abuse continued. She covered her head, curled up into a ball, and sobbed.

It was exactly the same as the isolation she’d experience in London prior to it falling to the Bleed, and Maddie’s betrayal reminded her of how she was tricked before by Jayesh, the guy who’d helped her and pretended to support her, but who’d been acting on behalf of the gods all along, conniving to trick her from the outset. How could she have allowed herself to be fooled again so quickly? What chance did she have of saving the world, when she couldn’t even save herself?

Another rock hit her in the small of her back, and she braced herself for the onslaught. Any second now, she thought, and the kicks and punches would begin. Part of her just wanted it over with.

And then it stopped.

The shouting and jeering continued, but the violence ended abruptly. She dared to look up and saw she was now surrounded by police officers. The nearest of them grabbed her arm and dragged her up to her feet, then cuffed her.

She didn’t bother protesting. She knew there was no point.

The hate in the faces of every person she made eye contact with was evident and understandable. As far as they were concerned, she was the one who’d conspired with the gods to unleash hell on Earth.

She was the reason they were all going to die.

6

SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA

It took Maddie an age to get back to the hotel. The streets around the building were swarming with people and she was relieved that, for the moment at least, she was still anonymous. Staying hidden from the authorities should have been easy for her, she thought. She wasn’t going to be born for another couple of decades yet.

It was a relief to be back inside the clockwork room. Her stomach growled with hunger and she shoved food into her face as she worked. The taste of things caught her by surprise; she didn’t know whether it was because manufacturing techniques and ingredients had changed so much over the years, or if the stuff they were fed on the moon was just particularly bland, but even things that were clearly junk food tasted incredible to her today. She tried not to let herself get distracted. As much as she was enjoying it, decent food was just a temporary positive. The way things felt right now, everything was temporary.

There had to be a way she could get back to the moon from here, she just hadn’t yet had time to work it out.

She walked all the way around it again, looking for openings, panels, doors she might have missed previously, hidden exits they’d overlooked, but there were none. She then returned to the controls and tried following the advice she’d given to Jenny earlier: switch off, relax, think about what you want and let your hands and the machine do the work for you. And as soon as she did that, a window opened back into her own reality.

The surface of the moon.

She felt herself relax when she saw it. There was a strange comfort to be found in that desolate, featureless expanse of rock and dust. The contrast of the white-grey landscape against the blue-black of everything above was reassuring in its simplicity. Desperate to see the friends she had unwittingly abandoned, she adjusted her viewpoint to that part of the moon’s surface where the impossible lake and waterfall had been found, but there was nothing there. As remarkably as it had appeared from nowhere, it had now disappeared again.

She then tried to see what was left of the destroyed power station, but that wasn’t there either. There was no sign of the explosion, no damage or debris.

And then it struck her. “Use your brain, Maddie!”

No wonder she couldn’t see any of the things she expected—she wasn’t looking at the moon she knew from the war-scarred, late twenty-first century, it was the moon of today, the exact same satellite she’d stared at from the beach. Frustrated, she kicked the console and stepped away, and the image immediately faded to nothing.

She’d asked the machine to show her the moon, but here, that wasn’t her moon.

And then another thought struck her that made her feel immeasurably worse. She realized that, right now, the moon she knew had become an impossibility. The history books she’d studied in class (reluctantly, because school had never really been her thing) hadn’t mentioned the Bleed. There’d been no talk of vast wars between gods and demons and the like. So the fact that this world was, today, on the verge of being wiped out by the unspeakable horror Jenny had shown her, meant that the world she’d grown up on would never exist. Her family, friends, home…everything she knew and loved would be wiped out before she’d even been born, history rewritten.

She ate another chocolate bar, hoping the brief energy boost would help make sense of everything. She had a myriad different thoughts and ideas competing for attention in her head, and none of them made sense. How could she be here if the future she was destined to be a part of was being irrevocably changed—no, erased—by events taking place around the world right now? Was she about to disappear? Would it be like something out of a shitty time-travel movie and she’d just vanish? Would she be deleted from reality and cease to exist the moment her grandparents or great-grandparents were overcome by the Bleed? Or was it too late? Were her descendants dead already? She began to panic, fearing that she might be about to be erased from future history in the blink of an eye.

Maddie shook her head and closed her eyes tight, halting her thoughts. She knew that