Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  SKYQUAKERS

  SKYQUAKERS

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by A.J. Conway

  ISBN: 978-1-326-41712-3

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon and similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author.

  Edited by Ashley Conner

  Cover art by Eleanor Orchard

  SKYQUAKERS

  A.J. Conway

  PART ONE

  1

  STORM

  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

  ALONE

  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 a
gainst 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.