Skyquakers

SKYQUAKERS

SKYQUAKERS

A.J. Conway

PART ONE

Ned remembered the day when the storm came and took everyone
into the sky. He remembered it was hot, as it always was during November, and
that there was nothing particularly special or at all ominous about the
weather. In the far north of the barren bushland, the
‘
Top End
’
,
was his hometown of Wyndham. Days were hot and lazy throughout summer: the sand
was too baked to trek barefooted, and the townspeople sought after shade under
the trees and in the shabby pubs, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and open-toed
shoes.
Flywire
doors smacked against stale metallic
frames in the hot breeze and dogs panted as they lazed on the front porches.
There was never any warning of a hurricane, or any unusual weather phenomenon
to cause alarm. But on that day, the storm came without warning, and it swept
across the country – the world, maybe – so fast and so relentlessly that no one
stood a chance against it.

It was Veteran
’
s Day in early November.
Patriotic Australian flags were fluttering high from the porches of
weatherboard homes, outside the fire station, and across the windows of various
shops along the main street. There was a morning service at Ned
’
s
high school for the students. Veterans in green uniforms and brimmed hats stood
on stage and were introduced to the children as their former heroes. After a
flurry of trumpets by the school band, a withering old gent approached the
podium and was asked to share a story with the students.

‘We were on a destroyer sailing through the Gulf,
’
he told them, speaking his fragile words through a podium-mounted
microphone,
‘
and we heard of some planes coming over us, and we
had no idea if they were friends or enemies. My captain told me and my mates to
get out the paint and draw the bloody biggest Aussie flag we could on the deck,
across the whole damn thing. We had no idea why, but we painted away. We were
saved from being bombed that day by showing our flag, and reminded our allies
we were on the same side. You forget that sometimes; who
’
s on whose
team.
’

Sometime during that assembly, out on the grass in the
sunshine, the skies went dark and the wind picked up. Shade, at first, was
welcomed. The breeze was cool. Then it developed into something fiercer and
suddenly plastic chairs were rolling across the lawn and teachers were
attempting to keep their floral dresses from flying up. Before long, people
noticed this was something unusual. Perhaps it was the way the clouds were
moving, not as a mass of white and grey, but growing outwards from nothing, and
branching out with arms and tentacles over the sky, twisting and coiling into
each other. The clouds were thick. They rumbled with thunder, but without any
lightning or rain. The sun was blackened out, and that was the last Ned ever
saw of it.

The teachers attempted to call everyone inside, but the
students were too in awe. Then they saw the first beam. A flash of pink and
purple light, like nothing they had seen before, ruptured through a mass of
clouds somewhere in the distance. It struck vertically down and made a colossal
sound when it hit the earth: a thud of wind against a solid wall, a rupturing
explosion deep underground. What the hell was it? Not a spotlight: there was no
machine above it, only clouds. Not a weapon, or else there would be fire and
smoke. People were staring, pointing. Cries of confusion ensued, but not yet
panic.

Another beam lit up somewhere else, followed by two more
across town. One then hit the school grounds: a cylindrical tunnel of unnatural
light, fifty metres across, somewhat transparent but blindingly bright. It
shone down from a gaping eye in the storm, spiralling overhead with wisps of
grey and black. The light hit a classroom, engulfing it entirely, but not
destroying it. The beam did not damage any infrastructure; there was no
explosive release of energy or flash of fire, only light. It only affected the
people: those in the classroom who were struck by the beam were instantly
dissolved into particles of tiny glitter, and they vanished. Ned and fifty
others saw it through the glass windows and could not make sense of what they
had just witnessed: tiny specks of sparkling dust that were once human beings
were sucked up through that beam and into the angry sky. They just…
disappeared.

Logically, the school grounds broke into a frenzy, as did
every town, city, and continent which experienced the sudden onslaught of these
otherworldly lights. The storm was global within minutes. Anything moving was
engulfed into light, humans and animals alike. Ned remembered running, dodging
and swerving to avoid the unearthly beams, as behind him he saw other students
and teachers being struck and instantly vaporised. Hiding under desks and trees
did nothing; the beam pierced every solid surface and dissolved everyone in its
vicinity. Some idiots stood about to film it on their phones; they did not last
long.

Ned broke free of the school, as did dozens of others. They
scattered into the streets of Wyndham, as around them cars
–
now empty of their drivers
–
swerved and ploughed into
trees and local shops. A dog ran across the road and accidentally into a beam;
he went too. The local police arrived, sirens blaring, telling townspeople to
get inside to their homes. No, that did not work, but there was nothing in cadet
training about sky-beam safety; they were making it up as they went along. Call
the Feds. Call the Navy. Call the UN: the world was under attack. This thing
was everywhere and no one knew what it was.

Ned remembered skidding to a halt as a beam opened up in
front of him and dissolved another handful of people into confetti. He stopped
inches from the purplish wall of unearthly light. He stared up, along its
blazingly bright surface and into the stormy clouds where it shot down from. It
was unfathomably tall, tens of thousands of metres, beaming down from the
planet
’
s atmosphere and perhaps beyond, maybe as far as
outer space. He remembered coming to two immediate conclusions: the first being
a nuclear weapon of some type, and the second being that seldom used
‘
A
’
word.

He remembered making it home; his mother was there, and she
too was panicking, telling someone on the other end of her phone to hang up and
get the hell out of wherever they were. She hugged him tightly when she saw him
burst through the kitchen, happy to see that he was still alive. Alive? Were
those other people
–
now floating bits of light
–
dead? She grabbed her car keys and said they were leaving. Ned argued
that it would do no good: the roads were jammed, crashes piled up and highways
blocked by desperate people trying to take the first exit out of town. They
would be cornered instantly. They needed to stay, hide,
do
something else. She would have none of his disobedience, not in such a time of
panic, and she dragged him by the wrist towards the door again, to the Ford
parked in their driveway. Ned stepped out to see the neighbour
’
s
house go up in a beam of purple. Little dots which were formally Mr and Mrs Delany,
and their cat, drifted through the roof and up into the hungry storm.

They weren
’
t dead, Ned told himself. He
had no idea how or why he thought that, but he knew they weren
’
t
dead.

They saw a plane in the sky, a commercial airliner soaring
high overhead.
Whoosh
, right into a beam. The plane instantly went down,
now depleted of all its passengers and pilots. It crashed somewhere in a
paddock, with a loud explosion and smoke. He felt the ground quake through to
his knees.

‘
Ned
! We have to go,
now
!
’
his mother cried.

Ned panicked and ran back inside, too frightened to face the
storm. His mother screamed at him, following him back through the house. He ran
to the garage, where an old refrigerator, not used in years, stood in a corner
among the lawn mower, pots of old paint, and some dusty golf clubs. Ned pulled
open the door. He ripped out the shelving. This won
’
t work, he
told himself. This was a dumb idea.

His mother appeared and shouted,
‘
Ned! We are
going
right n
—’

The beam hit her, and instantly Ned retreated into the
shelter. The fridge was struck too and fell, closed and sealed, with Ned
trapped inside. He curled up, as tight as a ball, and felt the fridge
clang
to the concrete floor when it fell forwards. There was a blazing purple light
through the gaps, engulfing his entire house, and the noise inside the beam was
like being trapped inside a jet turbine. Ned pounded against the walls, but the
door was pressed against the floor. No one heard him screaming

He stayed sealed inside the refrigerator until the thunder
and panic had stopped. Trapped in a cold, white coffin, he had no idea what
madness was happening outside the brick walls of his garage. Every few minutes,
a deafening
boom
overhead marked the
awakening of another beam, striking the earth from the heavens, capturing
another few wandering people in its cylindrical hold, and absorbing them as
glitter into the sky. There was panic. There were sirens and the sound of
something erupting. There was a car skidding and crashing into something solid,
someone calling someone else’s name, feet running, glass breaking…

Eventually it all settled, settled into silence.

Over an hour went by before Ned attempted to get out. It
took a lot more effort to escape the fridge than he had anticipated. With the
door pressed under his stomach, the old 80’s fridge was otherwise impenetrable.
He could not kick himself out, so he devised a way to roll: he swayed back and
forth in his box, rocking it a little more each time, until finally it rolled
onto one side and the door was free.

Ned tumbled out and saw his empty garage, dusty and grey,
and heard silence.

‘Mum?
’

Where his mother had been standing an hour ago, there was
now only dust in her place. He saw her get hit by the flash of pink, but not
vaporised, and so he wondered if she had managed to escape and run.

‘Hello?
’

The house was empty. He searched up and down, in her
bedroom, her closet, under the study desk, even in the cupboard under the
stairs. Then he peeked out the window, and there in the driveway the old Ford
had not moved.

‘Mum?’

Nothing.

No one.

He ran to the phone and tore it from the wall. There was no
dial tone. He slammed it down again. He found his mother’s Nokia on the kitchen
table and there were two missed calls since her abduction. He listened to the
voicemail that someone had left, but the recording was nothing but a series of
static muffles, and then nothing.

Nothing.

No one.

This couldn’t be happening.

Ned ran out the front door, letting the
flywire
lazily swing shut behind him. From his front driveway, he looked up to the sky
and saw the storm, that eerily catastrophic phenomenon, still lingered over
him. The grey clouds and thunder still loomed, but it was quiet, still, and
without the beams of light bursting from its core, it looked to be no less
menacing than any other storm system. The difference was, in its wake, this
storm had taken everything: the world was dark and silent now, and everyone in
town had vanished. The neighbourhood was deserted. He stood there, dumbfounded,
and stared at the barrenness. It was not just the people who were missing;
every bird and every dog, every cricket in the grasses, every living, breathing
thing on Earth was gone.

He crept low, behind a bush, behind the car, as though the
thing in the sky was watching him. He jumped over the back fence into the
neighbour
’
s yard, but, peering into their living room, he saw
they were gone, the cat too. Their television, however, was still on. It was
showing a news program, but there was no anchor behind the desk of scattered
papers. A light fixture had fallen into camera-view, and the camera itself was
a little off-centre, as though no one was holding it anymore.

This was real. This was nationwide, at the very least, and
the painful reality was beginning to clench around his heart like a vice:
nothing, no one.
It was like a bad
dream.

He spent all afternoon trying to contact for help. The Nokia
could still dial, but there was no response from emergency services. He called
every name in his mother’s phone book but no one picked up. He could perhaps
walk to the local police station or the hospital, but he began to wonder if
there was any point. Besides, the thought of leaving the house again terrified
him, as though the storm really did have eyes and ears, and after retreating
back into his home, Ned shut all the curtains in the house and kept away from
the windows. He refrained from making noise or switching on any lights, and
every few minutes he nervously peeked out the window again, wary of the skies.
Something was certainly watching him.

He camped out in the garage that night in his refrigerator.
His mum kept tiny tea candles in the bathroom as decorations and he surrounded
himself in their calming, scented glow. He sat with his candles, hugging his
knees, the Nokia in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other. He was
rigidly vigilant of any noise he heard outside, quick to douse his candles when
anything startled him.

Darkness came over Wyndham and the silence remained. He
wanted to close his eyes for a moment, hoping to wake up from this nightmare,
but then he would look around the shadows of the garage, see no one, and the
dreaded silence would make his heart palpitate again.

Someone, anyone, please!

Ned slept in his fridge that night. He laid it on its back,
door open, and made a cradle of blankets and pillows inside. He hugged his
Nokia, waiting to feel it vibrate, but eventually he fell asleep to the lull of
the surrounding ambiance, of which there was none.

During the first days, he continued to camp out in his
fridge, spending very little time away from the comfort of his makeshift
cocoon. Within twenty-four hours, all power was lost. The plant workers were
gone, Ned supposed, and in fear that he was soon to lose water as well, he
started filling all the plastic bottles, old containers, buckets, Nutella jars,
with drinking water. Living in an area prone to bushfires and hurricanes, he
was accustomed to some of the emergency routines and he knew water was one of
the most vital of all resources. The next was food. Ned woke to find the
kitchen was wet and realised the freezer, now dead, was leaking water onto the
tiles. He made the most of it by eating everything he could find, and in the
beginning there was no need for alarm: the house was well-stocked, so he
feasted on steaks and snags, pasta boiled on the gas stove, and
partially-melted ice cream whenever he wanted.

Three days passed.

No TV anymore, no video games, no traffic lights, no
internet. The Nokia ran out of battery soon enough, and with nothing to charge
it with, it was now as useless as a Dixie cup. If there ever was a chance to
reach someone else, it quickly passed. People were looking for him though,
surely. The police and the army and the A Team; they were all panicking right
now about little Ned, trapped and alone. No, not alone. He refused to believe that
was possible.

The first few nights felt like nothing but an extended
dream; too surreal to comprehend, too calm, too peaceful for the crushing
reality to properly take hold.
You are alone
, his head would say, but he
’
d
laugh at it. Like a lost child in the woods, Ned stayed put and waited to be
rescued. He slept in the fridge in his garage and spent little time away from
it. He was in suspended animation and was convinced that any second now,
everyone and everything would just reappear. He needed to be exactly where he
was as when they all vanished, or else his mother and his school friends and
the neighbours would return and wonder where he had gone.

By the fourth day, he started to get bored and
claustrophobic. During daylight hours he read a book on the couch, or played
cricket against the garage wall with himself, but it was becoming repetitive,
and life without electricity made the days feel long and uneventful. Food was
beginning to run out as well, so he raided his neighbours
’
homes for canned tuna, rice, chocolate bars, and warm cans of lemonade.
Having not spotted a single cloud in the sky for a couple of days now, he also
started occasionally looking for people in town, only to find a complete
absence of life. No dogs, no ducks, no possums, no cattle. The paddocks were
empty, their livestock evaporated into dust, and the remnants of the human race
were scattered in broken fragments along the streets and in the shops and
homes, hastily abandoned and forgotten by its dwellers during a wave of chaos,
like a bushland Chernobyl. He went into stores and saw the things others had
dropped during their scurry or when they were beamed. The main road was
littered with a few crashed, smoky cars, and meals in restaurants were exactly
where they had been left on the tables, only now, the flies were beginning to
get to them.

As his bravery strengthened, Ned became curious about the
black smoke in the distance. He trekked to the eastern paddocks outside of town
and saw the remnants of the plane crash that he and his mother had witnessed
together almost a week ago. It was so much larger than he thought. A huge,
white, metal carcass lay in demolished pieces within a sixty-acre slab of
unused land, shattered into enormous chunks. The cockpit, body, wings and
turbines were all separated, and slabs of the padded seats, joined in twos and
threes, sat limp on their own across the field. There was a trench through the
paddock where the craft had skidded, making it look as though a meteor had
crashed down to Earth. Cautiously, he investigated it. The grass around the
body was blackened and burnt away from the fires which must have sprung up from
the jet fuel. It still smelt like thick petrol, but nothing was burning
anymore.

People
’
s belongings had rained all
over the paddock: clothes flung from suitcases, laptops, life jackets, food
trolleys and chunks of unidentifiable machinery. Ned sifted through the
scattered debris. Nothing was of particular use or interest to him; electronic
devices were either shattered beyond repair or had dead batteries, and the
packaged food smelt off. He managed to find the cockpit, tipped and detached
from the rest of the body, and sat in the captain’s seat before the control
bench, facing a cracked glass screen and a dashboard of buttons. He placed the
headphones over his ears and re-enacted the plane
’
s fatal end
as he imagined it may have been.

‘What the hell is that, Johnny?
’

‘A beam in the sky, sir?
’

‘Oh, dear Christ, it
’
s coming
right at us! Deploy the missiles!
’

‘This is a commercial aircraft, sir! We don
’
t
have any missiles!
’

‘Then, if we
’
re about to die, Johnny, I
must confess something to you.
’

‘What, sir?
’

‘I love you, Johnny.
’

‘Sir, this is not the time!
’

Boom! Crash!
Neeeeoooow
…

He later found an uncoiled life raft and gazed upon it with
boyish charm. He stole the raft and dragged it by some rope to the beach, north
of town. In the water, he dumped it there and deployed it. The yellow bundle
expanded into a boat, and Ned went rowing around the bay, east to west, and
down into the inlet, admiring the mangroves along the bank, the greenery which
sprung up near the water, and the calmness of it all. He sailed until sunset,
admiring the red sphere on the horizon, and then went back inside only once it
got too dark and chilly.

Before he knew it, a week had passed.

A week? Had it suddenly been that long? A week sleeping in
his fridge; a week cooking pasta over the gas stove by himself, conjuring up
some imaginary sauce out of tomato paste and mayonnaise; a week wasting the day
away, swimming in someone else’s pool and playing his Gameboy until all the
batteries in the world ran out. This was getting silly now. Ned felt as though
this was a very difficult game of hide-and-seek, and he was failing terribly at
finding anyone.
Everyone come out, come out! I give up! You can stop hiding
now! Game
’
s over!

Or maybe he really was the last one.

‘This is stupid!
’
he shouted.

It was time to raid things, he decided. If he was going to
be alone, indefinitely, then he needed to begin fending for himself. Wyndham
was a small town, but there were plenty of homes, shops, camping supplies and
farming outlets around, which, in theory, could supply a single person with
resources for months and months. He needed to stock up. He needed to prepare
for the long haul. This was an emergency and he needed to begin taking things
seriously.

Flies and mould had long taken over the abandoned and
unattended foodstuffs in the grocery stores and people’s dead fridges.
Perishable food was gone; fresh fruit had begun to show brown spots, the milk
was curdling, cheese was beginning to smell and the meats were looking rank, so
it was back to basics. Armed with a wheelbarrow, Ned gathered all his survival
goods from the local grocery, from as many houses as he could break into, and
constructed a bomb shelter out of his garage. He stocked up on canned foods,
bottled water, chocolate bars, toilet paper, batteries, matches and camping
equipment, a hunting knife, over-the-counter medications, and any sort of
non-digital form of amusement he could find from Sudoku puzzles to a yoyo.

Every now and then, maybe once a day, maybe once every two
days, the clouds overhead rumbled and turned dark, indicating another storm
passing by. Ned ran back to his fridge and sealed himself in every time. He
knew that whatever was up there, it seemed to be looking for humans, but other
animals were targeted, too. He saw a few horses on a hill, forgotten or missed
during the initial attack, be absorbed by a beam. Perhaps they were not quite
sure what humans looked like, and simply took anything alive, mobile, and with
a warm heat signature.