Skyquakers (27 page)

She took him back to bed and covered his legs with the white
sheets. He said he was feeling better now. He ripped out the IV needle and Lara
gave him a Band-Aid to cover the pinprick hole. It was probably sunstroke, he
suggested. Lara wasn
’
t well-read enough into
medicine to come up with any other diagnosis. Maybe
Moonboy
’
s
teleportation left him with some sort of inter-dimensional motion sickness. But
in case it really was Lara causing it, who may have indirectly come into
contact with alien microbes while on board the cloud, she found some shower
facilities and gave herself a good scrub with a bucket and sponge. She washed
her hair and brushed her skin with antibacterial hand-wash until she was almost
red. She redressed and came back to see Ned smiling with a lot more colour in
his skin.

‘How are you feeling?
’

‘Better,
’
he said.
‘
Heatstroke,
I bet. I had it before when I was young. My skin went red and itchy, I had
horrible headaches and vomited a bit.
’
He scratched his arm, but
only because the mosquito bites were annoying him. Some he had scratched all
the way down to a scab.

‘Stop that,
’
Lara barked, like a mother.
She sat on his bed.
‘
You gave me a fright. Glad you
’
re
okay.
’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her for the first time. After a
pause, he looked around the darkened room, lit only by a torch Lara had left shining
upwards on the bedside table. ‘Do you know where we are?
’

She nodded.
‘
You
’
re not
going to like it. We
’
re in Darwin.
’

Ned sat forward.
‘
You
’
re joking.
’

Lara threw aside the curtains. The blackened city opened up
to him, unlit and neglected. From his bed, he could see fragments of a
war-torn, disintegrating metropolis. Being here left him with the same fears as
Lara. They both knew what had become of this place; they had both heard stories
of the aerial assault unleashed upon the coastline, of the survivors who were
hunted and killed by the Suits, shot in the back while trying to escape or
burned alive in their bunkers. Psycho led that attack, Lara explained, both to
please his new rulers and for the pure satisfaction. It was not that he had a
grudge against the world. He had never mentioned that he had suffered any sort
of injustice or abuse which would make him hate Mankind or want revenge. He
purely did it for his own fulfilment. He thought he was helping Earth progress
by wiping out the species which contaminated it beforehand. This only made Ned
hate him more. He couldn
’
t understand how one guy could
do all this and feel nothing afterwards.

‘He
’
s a sociopath,
’
she said.
‘
It
’
s probably
something I should
’
ve recognised very early on,
but he hid it well.
’

‘You were friends.
’

She shrugged.
‘
We had a
…
connection.
’
She drew the curtains again.
‘
I
know it was stupid coming here, but it was the closest hospital I could find.
Who knows how many Suits are still roaming this place? I
’
m not going
to be responsible for your death as well, so we
’
ll leave in
the morning. I
’
ll stay up and watch out.
’

‘For what?
’

‘Dingoes? Them? What do you call them again?
’

‘
Skyquakers
.
’

Lara smiled. She liked that name. Everyone seemed to.

‘Get some rest.
’

‘I
’
m not tired,
’
he said.

He wouldn
’
t let her take watch on her
own, so they stayed up together with the whole hospital to themselves. Lara
dragged another small mattress into the room and found more pillows and
blankets. There was another unoccupied room next door, but the thought of being
separated frightened the hell out of both of them. So they sat together on the
floor under the torch light. They ate canned tuna, stale crackers, and drank
Solo. They talked for a while, but not about anything meaningful. They talked
about the worst movies they had ever seen. The best New Year
’
s
Eve celebrations. The quirkiest relatives. Somehow it comforted Ned. It felt
very similar to the bonfire conversations he used to have with the settlers at
Zebra Rock. All of it was perfectly superficial, meaningless, but it was the
only way to keep the overhanging despair out of their minds. He felt as though
if he stopped talking, he would simply break down into little pieces, crumble
and fall apart, and she wanted to keep him amused for as long as possible for
more or less the same reason. She knew a lot about the social aspects of the
human mind, about how it coped with grief and anger, and she used every skill
she had to keep him happy. So they spent most of the night huddled there on the
same mattress, picking at Doritos, making small talk about things which didn
’
t
matter to either of them anymore.

Well into the night, or early into the next morning, silence
fell. Lara was lying on her back, hands behind her head as she stared at the
roof. Ned was sitting against the wall, his legs bent over hers. He fiddled
with the little circular Band-Aid in his elbow joint where the needle had been.
They were both incredibly tired, but neither of them could sleep.

Lara had now heard of all the interesting people Ned had met
since he emerged from his refrigerator: Jackrabbit, the hopeless wanderer,
Moonboy
, the glow-in-the-dark teleporting dog, the ranger
and his daughter, the settlers, and all the weird and wonderful things he had
seen in between. He showed her the scars on his body where he had sustained all
his injuries: cuts on his legs from running through whipping grass as the
Quaker farms went up in flames, a bruise in his snuffbox where he had hit
himself with a hammer whilst helping to attach a second rainwater tank to the
gallery, and a collection of others which he could not explain or hadn
’
t
noticed much until now. He claimed he knew how to grow the best pumpkins and
how to jumpstart a tractor. He had almost been eaten by a lagoon monster and
had witnessed herds of spectacular alien horses in the desert. He said he was
only seventeen, although if he had turned eighteen already he didn
’
t
know when.

As for her, she softly and absent-mindedly admitted that she
always knew the Quakers were coming because of some dreams she had as a child.
She mentioned it so casually and received little more than a bemused hum from Ned
in return. It would have been a significant revelation six months ago, but now
it was nothing more than a useless fact. Lara felt her innermost secret did not
hold as much weight as when she told Dylan. She supposed the novelty had long
worn off.

Every now and then, when the room was void of all noise, Ned
heard sobbing. It was still echoing down the hall, calling out to him, fading
softly, then rising again a few minutes later. He strained to hear what it was,
but convinced himself it was the wind.

Lara noticed his constant distracted eyes.
‘
What
is it?
’

‘I don
’
t know.
’
He got up
and opened the door to the hallway again. He emerged into the dark hospital
corridor and could hear the echoes of crying. Behind him, Lara appeared with
the torch. She shone her beam of light down one end of the hall, then the
other. There was nothing but a rustle of the wind outside and scattered pieces
of a forgotten civilisation.

‘Do you hear something? Dogs? Suits?
’

‘I hear crying.
’

‘I don
’
t hear it.
’

‘
Shh
.
’

Ned was convinced the noise was real. Lara began to listen
as well, but for a long while there was nothing. Something clattered outside,
but it was nothing specific. A curtain down the hallway fluttered, but it was
just a breeze coming through a broken window. Everything else was still. It was
only as Lara turned to go back inside that the crying rose again. She spun
around to Ned, who had heard the same thing. Ned took the torch and inched
forward. His bare feet were light on the cold, tiled floor. They followed the
sound together, step by step. At the end of the hallway they came to a fork,
with two branching corridors trailing into endless darkness either side of
them. Ned was compelled to turn right, and eventually came to a plain,
inconspicuous closed door. He was almost certain that the noise was coming from
inside, even though it was still impossible to tell what the voice was and if
it was saying words.

He reached for the doorknob.

‘You have no idea what
’
s in there,
’
Lara whispered.

‘What if it
’
s a child crying? Or someone
who
’
s injured?
’

‘What if it
’
s not?
’

Ned took the torch and held it like a club. He swung open
the door and stepped inside, prepared to swing at the first thing that moved.

The room was dark. The window was wide open and the curtains
were fluttering wildly in the warm breeze. There was a bed, piles of clothes,
and empty syringes on the floor. There were personal effects everywhere: a
toothbrush, cigarettes burnt out in an ashtray, beer cans, vodka bottles, and a
coat strewn over a chair. There was no one in the room, but there had once
been. It appeared to have been a fort for a surviving squatter with some bad
addictive habits. God-knew where he was now or how long it had been since he
was here. His hospital room had an adjacent bathroom, where more of the
squatter’s clothes were hung over the shower rails and cans of deodorant and
shaving cream sat by the sink. Everything was dry, empty, and used up. He may
have run out of supplies and wandered off somewhere for another fix, or he may
have succumbed to any number of deaths.

There was certainly no one crying, though. Ned searched the
whole room, under the bed, but no one was here. He threw across the plastic
shower curtain in frustration and pushed his hands to his head.

‘What is happening to me?
’

‘Ned,
’
Lara called from the room. He
went back to her side, where she had found an interesting set of objects on the
table by the windowsill. Firstly, she found the origin of the strange sound:
there was a chunky old radio sitting idly by discarded cigarette butts, and one
of the AA batteries was slightly misaligned in its slot. The connection was
cutting in and out randomly, and the sound of crying Ned must have heard was
the intermittent static.

‘No,
’
he said.
‘
It
was definitely crying.
’

Lara pushed the battery wholly into its place. The static
rang out clearly, with a muffled, barely-audible voice in the background. She
concluded it was just the radio. Perhaps Ned was hearing what he wanted to
hear: a sign of human life, some sort of hope to grab on to.

She also had something else to show him: a calendar. It
seemed as though the squatter had been keeping track of the days and the months
while he had been here. Ever since December of last year, he had been drawing
crosses on the days as they went by. Some he had circled, quite boldly too, as
if something significant had happened then. The crosses stopped in late
February. The bold, circled dates occurred once or twice a month. After the
last circled date, there were no more crosses.

Ned made the joke that perhaps a woman had been living here.
Lara was convinced it was something a little more significant. Why would
someone squat in Darwin after seeing it become overrun if not for an immensely
important reason? The squatter was tracking something, and he had been hiding
here in preparation for these dates specifically.

‘And he had been listening to the radio,
’
she added.

‘It was Lily,
’
Ned suddenly declared.

‘Who?
’

‘Lily, the last DJ on Earth. It
’
s tuned to
her station.
’
He snatched up the radio and tried to turn up the
volume, but the batteries were running very low and the aerial was bent and
unable to pick up more than static. Ned began laughing. He sat on the
squatter’s bed and slapped his hand against his forehead.
‘
Oh
god, I
’
m such an idiot!
’

‘What? What is it?
’

‘Lily!
’
he shouted.
‘
She
’
s
here!
’

He found it hard to explain and he sounded ridiculous when
he tried, but he needed to tell Lara the story of Lily. He explained how his
loneliness over these months was only tolerable because of this voice, this one
voice which rang across the Top End and spoke to him through the airwaves. He
had fallen in love with a girl that he had never met, let alone knew was real,
and for some reason Lara could very easily relate. Others tried to convince him
he was crazy, but he listened to Lonely Lily
’
s voice
almost every night from Wyndham to Zebra Rock, and when the batteries ran out
on his radio, he would travel enormous distances across the Ord to other farms
and plantations to ransack kitchen cupboards for more. Lily convinced him that
humanity wasn
’
t doomed yet, that there were
still others out there. After all the tragedy, it was Lily
’
s
voice which remained: still playing songs, still telling stories, still a
living, breathing human. Now more than ever he was convinced of her
authenticity.