Skyquakers (30 page)

Captain hissed,
‘
You are sick boy.
’

‘
Shut up, old man!
’
he
cried. He spun to Ned.
‘
Where is she?
’

In response to his resistance, he hit him again.

Lara spent the next two weeks alone.

Emerging from a strange vortex through time and space, she
woke once again in an almost identical spot on the beach where she had appeared
mere days before. The pristine blue waters and white sands of the Timor Sea
were very familiar, except this time she was alone. Panic-stricken, she searched
for her counterpart up and down the beach, in the mangroves where the dense
shrubbery cut up her arms and legs, calling out his name to the treetops. She
hiked inland through the bush to the wooden boardwalk and followed it up the
cliff to the surfer’s beach house. She checked each room, but they were empty.
She clambered up the staircase to the top deck and saw nothing but chairs and
hammocks waiting for her in the sun. No one was here. She looked eastwards.
There was a crater where a city had once been, and clear skies where she had
moments ago witnessed a storm. It was hopeless. Ned was in the cloud now. She
had watched him slip away from her fingers and be carried off by the wind as
Darwin was sucked into a black hole. Almost instantly she speculated that he
was dead, and if he wasn
’
t, she hoped he was not in
pain. She wept for him.

All she had now was
Moonboy
. The
alien dog had followed her this time. He appeared on the deck by her side,
looking up at her with his big, sad, alien eyes, as though he too felt
something was missing. She knelt down to him, ruffled his shaggy black and
white fur. He whimpered a little.

‘Yeah, I know, boy,’ she sighed back.

With nowhere to go and no one to guide her, Lara made a home
for herself and
Moonboy
in that cabin. She rounded up
the foods in the cupboard which were edible and disposed of the ones which had
begun to mould over and stink up the place. There wasn
’
t much to
eat, so she had to ration what she had. There was rice, a few sauces, canned
beetroot, carrots and peas. The bread and raw vegetables had moulded over, but
processed foods such as Doritos, chocolate bars, and coffee still lingered
about. She was not accustomed to the blackout and kept forgetting simple things
like the lightbulbs, the refrigerator, the TV, and running hot water were all
luxuries of the past. She made a campsite out of the cabin. She found a gas
barbeque in the garage and brought it indoors to become her kitchen. She used
the iron stovetop for most of her cooking, for boiling water, and for heat in
general when the sun went down and the cabin became an igloo.
 

Water was an issue, since it was severely lacking. Despite
being surrounded by an endless ocean, finding something drinkable was
difficult. The fridge contained a couple of bottles of Gatorade and a slab of
soft drink. She collected the water from the bowls and basins of the toilets
and kept them aside for boiling food. The small pile of essential supplies she
had gathered on the kitchen table was frighteningly meagre, made up mostly of
rice and processed or canned foods, with no vegetables, meat, or dairy. After
rationing everything out as thin as possible, she struggled to find a way to
spread it all across a week.

‘How did he do this for months?
’
she asked
Moonboy
out loud.
‘
Living
alone, fending for himself, no electricity? A week of this and I’ll be dead.’

Moonboy
just stared up at her with
his tongue dangling from the side of his dopey mouth.

‘I wish Dylan was here,
’
she said.
‘
I
wish Baba was here too.
’

Each morning began with a walk down the surfers’ secret
boardwalk to the enclosed beach, in hopes of finding evidence that Ned had
fallen from the sky and returned. The ocean still moved with the gentle pull of
the current, and the mutated forms of nature were all that inhabited this
place. Earth remained undisturbed by any new footprints.

She swam a lot. She borrowed the surfers
’
boards and attempted to try them, but failed comically.
Moonboy
couldn
’
t stand the water, so was
constantly barking at her from the shoreline as though she was in mortal
danger. When surfing failed, she headed west and went exploring around the rock
pools. All submerged wildlife – corals, crabs, fish, jellyfish, molluscs – were
somehow immune to the events that took place in Melbourne that November day,
and undoubtedly in every city worldwide. They were the only things she considered
hunting, but her survival skills were shoddy. In the outback, most things were
considered poisonous until proven otherwise, animals, plants, and insects
alike. This left her with very few options. As for the mutated wildlife, their
growing numbers were as evident as when she and Ned first landed here; the
birds, lizards, possums and foxes had all changed, some beyond recognition. A
new ecosystem was slowly developing around her; food chains had been broken and
reassembled. She could see the scale of the Quakers’ plans when she sat and
admired it for long enough. As wondrous as it was though, it left her with
nothing but dread: they were evolving and she wasn’t. She thought of the
dingoes. The camels. The possums. Christ, what next?

At night, she ate her rationed food on the upper deck,
surrounded by anti-mosquito candles.
Moonboy
lounged
beside her and his florescent fur shone green under the moonlight. He was her
living nightlight in the unruly darkness, allowing her to see her way around in
the bush, allowing her to read a book in bed before she fell asleep. It became
more and more natural to have him around, and he, in turn, took comfort in her
while his true master was away.

The nights were still lonely and quiet. The stars glistened
without a shred of smog or pollution to dampen their glow. Nature’s sounds rang
out, but no human voices spoke, no aeroplanes flew overhead, nothing moved
which shouldn’t naturally move. From her castle on top of the cliff, Lara began
to understand what it must have been like for those few lucky ones to step out
from their bunkers and see the dramatic loss of life that day. She knew there
had to be others like Ned. Even if the beams had successfully captured 99% of
the Earth’s population, that would mean
70
million
people
were still unaccounted for. The statistics made
her certain that she was not alone out here, but it was still not very
comforting when all she had was an unfortified cabin and a cowardly alien dog.

Subsequent to food, she thought of protection. Ned had lost
his gun when they first arrived here, and finding another would surely be
impossible: this country had long ago abolished such artillery, and even the
settler who had found the stash of weapons Ned once carried only did so after
months of ransacking. Isolation was her only defence mechanism, but she did
attempt some primitive measures: the bush and mangroves offered her many long,
thin branches, which she began to twiddle into sharpened spears with a kitchen
knife. She tried to use these to catch fish, even threw one at a blue-feathered
pelican hybrid, but it flew away mockingly with ease. She kept her spears
around the house in strategic places, in case something tried to come through
the doors, or clamber up onto her balcony. Other than birds, mosquitoes, and
another curious possum hybrid, nothing ever bothered her. If there was still
electricity, this cabin would light up like a massive, glowing beacon on the
edge of the cliff, signalling to any possible survivors that she was here, as
well as attracting bloodthirsty dingoes and Psycho’s army of mindless zombies.
Without light, night and day went by without any cause of alarm, with no
imminent threats visible in the sky or on the ground. She felt safe with
Moonboy
, but at times, lonesomeness dominated. Talking to
no one except for a dog made her feel as though her sanity was slipping away,
so she decided to start writing things down. She had always speculated about
keeping a journal, perhaps even a historical account of the world
’
s
end as it progressed, but she struggled to find where to begin. She didn
’
t
have a book, but she did have postcards from the petrol station back at Lee
Point. These picturesque mementos depicted Australian scenery, beaches, sand
dunes, dolphins, penguins, bushland, and the Harbour, of course, and although
they were not large enough to transcribe history, they were enough to capture
her fleeting thoughts.

 
She found a pen in a
kitchen drawer. She sat under the stars, basking in
Moonboy
’
s
green glow, and wrote postcards to Ned, the way Ned wrote to his mother.

Dear Ned,

I hope you
’
re okay.

I miss you.

-Lara

Ned,

You
were
are a hero to me. You saved my life. I
owe you mine.

I know one day you
’
ll come
back.

-Lara

Dear Ned,

Today I saw these lizard things, like blue-tongues, but
with echidna spikes all down their spines. They were weird.
Moonboy
barked at one as it walked along a branch. It just kept walking.
Haha
! I love this dog.

-Lara

And when the frustration really set in:

DEAR PSYCHO,

ONE DAY YOU WILL DIE A HORRIBLE, SLOW DEATH

AND NO HUMAN WILL HELP YOU.

ROT IN HELL

-LO

Like Ned did, she left the postcards in secret places all
around her. She wedged one into the nook of a tree by the ocean. She placed one
in the cabin
’
s mailbox at the end of the dirt driveway. She even
folded one into a bottle and tossed it from the rock pools, allowing the gentle
current to take it out to sea.

There had been a few storms lately. The clouds swirled and
rumbled as they usually did when they were on the move, blocking out the sun
and bringing a cold wind across the northern coast. She kept inside the cabin,
curtains sealed and
Moonboy
close by, until they all
passed. The seas churned at the base of her cliff, crashing against rocks, and
birds fled in the skies, but the cloud was not chasing anyone or anything; it
was merely passing through.

Emerging from another storm, Lara went out into the yard to
collect some of her scattered clothes, which had been blown from the balcony by
the wind. She noticed a beam, a pink column of light, striking the earth in the
east where Darwin once stood. She went back inside and collected a pair of
binoculars from the cupboards, then went up to the upper decking to view the
blasting light. This was the fifth in three days. The beams were wide in
diameter, and shone for long periods of time – thirty minutes or more, some up
to two hours. Ned had described these once to her, and called them ‘building
beams’; as opposed to the beams which captured people and sucked them up into
the sky, building beams carried material from the cloud back down to the
ground. With them,
Skyquakers
had begun erecting
farms and warehouses all across the country, growing their mutated crops and
rearing enormous herds of hybrid animals. He had warned her that the Quaker
farmers were often heavily protected by Suits, but they were almost always
situated in rural areas, close to rivers or dams, in regions where farms had
been previously established before their arrival. So, why Darwin?
Agriculturally, it offered very little, but the city had become the epicentre
of a number of bizarre, mostly devastating, events, giving her reason to
believe the Quakers saw this place as highly significant. Historically, Darwin
had served as a major communications intersection between the world’s allies
during wartime, hence it became a major port for military submarines and
fighter jets. The Quakers may have found a similar use for the northernmost
capital. They were building a colony.

For almost two weeks, Lara had watched the flattened city
progress into a colossal engineering project. On a clear day, she could see
them working from her deck: machines like bulldozers and steamrollers were
being used to level the ground, and dozens of warehouses and solid towers,
perhaps radio stations, jutted up from the earth like silver matchsticks.
Moonboy
did not like them. He barked whenever they were
near, forcing Lara to lock herself inside and try to calm him as a mechanical
storm passed overhead. Inside, she felt the same dread as the dog. With each
passing day, the colony grew larger, and more and more beams were being
summoned to import materials from the sky. She imagined that space would one
day house millions of the freaks; soon they’d be walking on the surface,
designing their own cities, raising families, forming states, living off the
land as they had reconstructed it.

She said to the sky,
‘
You wouldn
’
t
like to see this, Ned.
’

Her water and soft drink supply ran out four days ago, but
thankfully she had found a new source. Initially she thought of digging, but
any bore water she found would be too salty and contaminated with all sorts of
junk. There were no streams or lakes which she could spot from her post, and
eventually she resorted to an orange farm two hour’s walk from the cliff. The
farm had enormous rainwater tanks and a small manmade reservoir, filled from
the last rainy season and left untapped, so she filled up two two-litre plastic
bottles a day and carried them all the way back to boil.

She also ate a lot of oranges, somewhat incessantly, as
though being by the sea on poor morsels of food would bring about some sort of
scurvy. The oranges had overgrown the plantation to the point where they were
breaking the branches and causing the trees to bend. Many had dropped to the
ground to be left for the flies and the mutant birds. She took a basketful home
with her everyday to keep them from rotting, but the vitamin overload did more
harm than good once the bouts of diarrhoea set in. She became ill for two days
and could do nothing but lie in bed and moan. She had a dirty bucket next to
her on one side and boiled tank water on the other, but the dehydration was overwhelming
in the humidity and the heat, and it became impossible to eat anything.
Moonboy
was concerned. He would lie at her feet, his little
alien nose on her ankle, and simply wait for her to get up. She wished he had
the power to understand her.
Go get help,
boy!
And he’d vanish, only to return moments later with a doctor he had
dragged with him from Sydney or Tokyo or New York.

On the third day, she felt well enough to sit upright. She
went to the bathroom to wash herself and managed to catch a glimpse of her
naked form in the mirror. What she saw was a skeleton. Her cheeks had sunken
inwards, her eyes too, and her limbs looked frail and twiggy. When she breathed
in, every rib could be seen, protruding from under her skin. The crests of her
hip were visible on both sides, and her knees looked like misshapen bulges half
way down her stick legs. She was in the worst shape she had ever been.

The only thing that was going to save her was water and
better food, but there was very little of either left in the cabin. The
cupboards were bare. The rice had all been cooked and every can was empty. She
couldn
’
t stand the sight of another orange, so she threw
them off the cliff’s edge and into the bushes. She decided to go back to the
orange farm to search for something more sustainable. In her state, under the
scorching sun, the walk took her more than three hours. She stumbled down the
same long, dusty roads that she and Ned had ridden on the quad bike not long
ago; she could still see the tyre tracks they had made while they celebrated
the wild wind in their hair and the brief moment of joy their togetherness had
given them. The tracks made her sad to look at, so she brushed them away with a
swipe of her feet and the sands buried the memory.

Before Lee Point, a dirt road veered west, taking her
towards the lonely orange farm in the middle of nowhere. She was always on the
lookout for dingoes and other moving things in the bushes that flanked the
roads. She had one of her sharpened spears with her, in case she needed
protection, but out here the world was flat and dead; this was the edge of the
bushland and the beginning of the unforgiving desert, and neither offered her
any shade, water, or sense of wonderment. The Top End was harsh and hellish.
She was a dust-lathered vagrant in a dying world, weakened to her bones, her
mind torn by lonesomeness and insanity. There was that constant pain throbbing
in her chest: guilt, shame, unpaid debts.

A dozen dead for me.

He grinned as he shot
them all.

A dozen dead for me.

She had too much time with her own thoughts.

From the dusty road, she walked onto the abandoned
plantation. Acres of orange trees yawned out before her in their thousands.
With her two plastic bottles, an empty one in each hand, she weaved through the
trees, all neatly lined and overgrown, towards the little house in the distance
and the two giant rainwater tanks connected to the gutters. She carried an
empty backpack, planning to fill it with food from the farmers’ cupboards, if
there was anything left.

She paused when she heard giggling. She stopped and scanned
the trees with careful eyes.
Giggling
? She heard it again, followed by
voices, young voices, talking to each other.

Lara crouched down under a tree and shuffled forwards.
Through the rows, she could see someone walking around. She concealed herself
beneath the overhung shrubbery and watched in terrified silence as two girls came
skipping through the oranges, holding hands. One girl was human, the other wasn
’
t.

The older girl, the human one, was dressed in jeans and a
flannelette top. She looked about sixteen. Her brown hair was tied back. She
looked a little dirty, a few smudges on her clothes and dirt lining her boots,
but otherwise she was fit, well, and freshly bathed. The only striking thing
about her was a scar on the back of her neck. Lara instinctively touched her
neck, where she too had a bump and a scar forming there. The identity of the
girl was obvious then: she was not a Suit, but a prisoner, except there were no
chains on her, nothing restraining her, nor did she look as though she was
forced to be in these fields. In fact, the girl was laughing and smiling. She was
holding the hand of a Quaker child in a gas mask and a silver body suit. They
were
playing
together.

The teenager and the
Skyquaker
were skipping through the trees joyfully. The human was pointing out the
oranges. She took a ripe one down and peeled off the skin with her fingers. She
bit into the flesh and made a condescending,
‘
Mmm
!
’
sound. The Quaker girl took
the orange and examined it. She briefly took off the facemask connecting her
suit to her gas cylinders (an act Lara didn
’
t know they
could do) in order to bite into it, then she covered herself again and savoured
the taste. She said in her Quaker language, in words Lara could understand,
that it was yummy.

What the
hell
was going on?

The two skipped off together between the trees to explore
the wonderful world around them. Lara took the opportunity to shuffle out of
her hiding place and move on. She was crouching now as she darted from tree to
tree, nearing the house. Other voices came into earshot, more Quakers, adults.
A party of five, all in chemical suits and gas masks, were conversing under the
patio of the farmhouse, admiring the farm and contemplating what to do with it.
One Quaker had a Suit standing by him, a man in his late fifties with white,
wispy hair, firmly slicked back, his silver tie done up neatly, and not a speck
of dirt on his leather shoes. The old man stood behind his master and kept a
careful eye on the free-roaming human girl. She listened to them for a while as
they overlooked maps drawn up of this region. These Quakers were more or less
agricultural scientists, from what she could gather. They discussed the idea of
putting a warehouse here and setting up some of their hybrid fruit crops. They
were intrigued by the native’s house, built with wood and bricks, furnished
with the strangest oddities and contraptions inside, but it did not appeal to
them much as a suitable dwelling: the doorways were far too small for their
fully-grown, two-and-a-half-metre-tall physiques. The home would have to be
demolished to make way for an
iso
-pneumatic warehouse
where the farmer and his daughter could live safely on the surface of the
Planet.

Colonisation.

Lara snuck by them to the rear of the farmhouse. She acted
quickly to tap as much water as possible before making a mad dash out of there.
She impatiently watched the water lines of each bottle reach the top. With
furious hands, she twisted the tops back on and began packing them into her
backpack, but she was stopped mid-way by a voice calling out, in English.

‘
Hey.
’

She spun and saw the teenage human girl standing there,
utterly baffled. She saw what Lara was doing. She looked around her, confused
as to where she had come from. Lara stood motionless, terrified of what she
would do. She was not a Suit, so she was not brainwashed into obedience like
Psycho and the others, but she was well-conditioned enough to agree to be a
Quaker’s nanny.

The girl noticed the scar on the back of Lara
’
s
neck. She touched her own, reminding herself of what was once there.

Lara leapt forward and whispered,
‘
How did you
get out?
’

‘They let me out.
’
She narrowed her eyes.
‘
Where
did you come from?
’

‘I can
’
t say.
’

‘Are you alone?
’

‘I can
’
t say. Please, I know you
’
re
not like them. Can you get me food?’

She looked nervous. She kept checking over her shoulder, but
her supervisors were distracted, discussing soil and rainfall. She turned back.
‘
I can
’
t.’

Lara understood, so she packed up her things to leave.

‘Wait. If you go back out there, they
’
ll kill you.
’

‘I know.
’

‘Then, stay.
’

She stared at the girl as though she was a moron.
‘
Why?
’

‘Because they
’
ll feed you, and you get to
live out here again instead of sleeping for the rest of your life. I even get
my own room. Look it
’
s
…’
She
touched the back of her neck again.
‘
It
’
s not that
bad.
’

Lara zipped up her backpack.
‘
Goodbye,
’
she said.