Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  ‘Look. Walkers,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Ned hissed. ‘You took me half way across the Kununurra just to see them? What the hell are you thinking? If they spot us—’

  ‘Nah, mai. You come with me. Got that knife still?’

  Hesitantly, he responded, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  Jackrabbit told him to set up camp first: dump his bags, collect wood for a fire, get the flames going and burning hot so to make sure there were only coals by the time they got back. They were uncomfortably close to Quaker land, less than a kilometre away from their establishment, but Jackrabbit was convinced they were safe enough here. In his eyes, the last remaining humans were nothing but small, unforgotten rodents scattered about the planet in numbers too few to be concerned with. Chasing after them individually would waste too much time and energy. They did not care for Ned and Jackrabbit, not the Quakers.

  But Suits were different, Jackrabbit said. They were the rat-catchers, set loose onto the empty towns and cities to smoke out the last of the human population. They knew where to find them, where to direct the sky’s beams, and they got smug satisfaction out of pleasing their new masters.

  ‘But why would people help them? Why would they turn on us like that?’

  ‘Dunno. Because they’re dicks, probably.’

  ‘I saw one guy in Wyndham, a Suit. He was talking to them, showing them things. How do they communicate with each other? Telepathically? Hand signals? Do they speak English, you think?’

  ‘You wanna see this or not?’

  They left their belongings at the campsite and headed towards the Quakers’ farm as the orange skies turned to dusk. Jackrabbit took Ned’s knife but also found a good palm-sized rock. Ned assumed they were going off to hunt for some game. He was partially right.

  Two small shadows weaved through the bush unseen and came to a rocky mound overlooking a bizarre and ominous sight. The Quakers’ farm was nothing short of an industrial-sized cattle ranch, covering a section of flattened land consisting of hundreds of thousands of hectares. A giant warehouse of familiar Quaker architecture stood in the epicentre of a series of oblong fenced-off paddocks, with newly planted grasses being cared for by integrated irrigation streams and sprinkling systems. This was the final, fully-completed form of the establishment Ned had witnessed being built in Wyndham. The warehouse was now operational and, according to Jackrabbit, at least two Quakers were permanently stationed here. The white glow of electricity lit up the interior of the building, and a series of other machines, one which looked like a water tank, another somewhat similar to an oversized garden shredder, were partially visible at the rear of the building, spewing out white smoke into the air. This farm appeared to be well into production, but production of what?

  ‘What are they?’ he gawked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Jackrabbit.

  The paddocks surrounding the warehouses housed tens of thousands of an animal breed that Ned had never seen before. It was some sort of wombat-like creature: four stumpy legs under a round, furry body, little black snouts and ears, digging about with their claws and munching on grass, but these wombats were the size of bears. They were worryingly tall and muscular, as though they had been fed buckets of steroids, and parts of their faces and bodies were slightly ‘off’, such as their prominent jawlines, or the way their back legs moved. They looked like the agglomeration of two or three animals, with extra outlandish body parts from worlds unknown glued into place. Despite their many similarities to animals Ned knew, their entire existence was eerie.

  ‘There’re so many of them.’

  ‘Ahuh.’ He nursed the rock in his hand.

  Ned paused. ‘You expect me to eat that?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not? Gotta eat, mai. One of these could feed ya for days, but you gotta get it on the fire before the flies get to it.’

  Jackrabbit said they should sit and wait until it was darker. They sat in the bushes, crouched low, swatting at flies as they watched the stars appear one by one. Ned pointed out the Quakers when he saw them emerge from the warehouse. They were still wearing their grey astronaut suits, so not much of them could be observed other than their height and their hand movements. What was uncomfortable was how much alike they were to humans in their movements: two arms, two legs, probably two eyes too. Jackrabbit appeared to be thinking to himself when he muttered, ‘I wonder how long it’d take for the fucker to suffocate if I stabbed him in the tank.’

  Ned was also interested in the tanks strapped to their backs, supplying their hoods with some sort of gas.

  ‘Maybe they can’t breathe here,’ he said.

  ‘Then maybe they shouldn’t have come here.’

  It was cold at night without a fire, but it was their only option if they were to remain unseen. Ned’s stomach was making wild sounds by the time Jackrabbit declared it was dark enough to proceed. The novelty of these wom-bears had now faded, and now all Ned could imagine was sinking his teeth into a big chunk of leg meat. It made him eager to get up and go, but Jackrabbit was a patient man. He had been timing how often the Quakers emerged to check on their produce, and when he was finally convinced it was safe, he made his move.

  ‘You stay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll get one.’

  ‘Why can’t I help?’

  ‘You’ll scare them off.’

  Ned sat in the grasses and watched from a distance as Jackrabbit snuck onto the property. He jumped a wooden fence and kept low, moving slowly along the grass, attempting to get close to a grazing herd. Of course, like all herbivores, the wom-bears were aware of something foreign in their midst and kept moving in a wide arc around him. He got himself closer into the centre of the herd, then returned to crouching in the grass. Eventually, the sluggish beasts forgot about him and went back to pulling grass up with their flattened teeth. When one little wom-bear, barely the size of a pony, ventured a little too far from its group, it was snatched up by the man lurking in the grass and brutally attacked. Like a crazed murderer, Jackrabbit cracked his rock over the animal’s head again and again until it stopped kicking and squirming. Around him, the rest of the herd scurried away, making honking noises of distress as they waddled off to the other end of the paddock. But they were not loud creatures, not loud enough to spark any alerts, and so Jackrabbit’s kill went unnoticed.

  He carried the carcass over his shoulders, its legs draping either side of his neck, red blood seeping from the open gash in its head. He laid it on the ground and used Ned’s knife to hack off the head. Useless, he said, and the less weight to carry back to camp, the better. Ned squirmed as he watched Jackrabbit hack through the arteries, the flesh, the fur, and the chunky spine. On the inside, these creatures looked relatively normal; pink flesh, red blood and white bones. He would not know what abnormal innards would look like anyhow.

  Jackrabbit carried the carcass over his shoulder, undeterred by the excessive blood on his shirt. Ned walked behind and had to stare at the big, red stump where its head once was. When they returned to their campsite, the fire had now formed a large pit of red-hot coals. Jackrabbit constructed everything, but Ned watched intently, knowing one day he may have to do this on his own. Jackrabbit dissected the wom-bear into pieces: off went the legs, the fur, the guts, although they were edible too, he claimed. What remained where four or five large meaty pieces: shoulders, thighs and some part of the breast. He arranged the coals with his stick and embedded the meat where he wanted it. He made Ned fan the coals with his jacket, to keep them glowing. After an hour, the meat was beginning to cook, and almost three hours after that, Jackrabbit was happy it was good enough to eat. Ned was so hungry that he burnt his mouth attempting to bite into it too quickly.

  ‘Slow down, mai. How is it?’

  ‘Chewy.’

  The wombat-bear hybrid was somewhat how he imagined game would taste like, although Jackrabbit claimed this was not like anything he had tried before. To Ned, the black charcoal from the coals was the most dominating flavour: the rest was s
imply meat and tendons.

  At last, satisfied, Ned lay down by the dying coals and felt the tiredness sinking in. Jackrabbit was nearby, hat over his face. The soft lapping of the nearby Ord began to lull them both to sleep, and with warm coals and fully bullies, the chilly desert night was a little more bearable. Jackrabbit said by tomorrow night they would be on the other side of the Kununurra, and the next morning they would find Zebra Rock, where the people were.

  ‘What are they like, these people? Are there kids there?’

  ‘Some,’ Jackrabbit said.

  ‘How did they not get beamed?’

  ‘They were swimming.’

  Ned clicked his tongue. ‘The beams can’t work through water. Maybe that’s why the fish are still around. Sharks would still be here too then, right? Ha! Could you imagine if they made them twenty times bigger too? Ha!’ Staring at the twisting, bulging branches of the boab tree over their heads, Ned then said, ‘You were right.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It was land they wanted. Farming land. For their alien cattle and alien crops.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jackrabbit retreated under his hat again and folded his hands on his chest.

  ‘So they’ve made sheep and wom-bears and crocodiles and birds. What are they going to make out of humans? Are they going to farm us too? Do you think they eat humans?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Actually, nah, I don’t think so. We wouldn’t taste nice. But then what would they do with the ones they don’t want? I mean birds, crocs, and cattle can all be eaten, but there’re heaps of things they beamed up that are inedible. Can you eat a rhino, or a leopard, or an echidna?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘See? Then what will they do with them?’

  But Jackrabbit knew nothing. He shrugged and rolled over. Ned returned to staring at the trees and the stars that sparkled between the branches. He imagined what the Quakers might do when they wake to find a wom-bear’s head chopped off just outside their paddocks. Would they be mad? Would they sound the alarms? Good, Ned thought. Leave it for them to find. Leave it on a pike with a flag of Earth fluttering beneath it. He was proud of his achievements tonight.

  You are not alone, assholes.

  MOONBOY

  Ned was wary of creeks and rivers these days; a rational phobia, since he knew what scary new things were lurking around these parts now. He bathed and brushed his teeth in the shallows of the Ord in the morning, with a clearly mapped-out escape route to a high tree branch if it was needed. With his clothes dumped on the bank, he stood waist high in the fresh water, flanked on all sides by untouched bushland and the spiked red cliffs of the northern Kununurra. There were still fish in the water, normal fish, so he tried his luck with his hands, but they were too small and slippery. He tried again with a long, thin stick, attempting to hunt independently like Jackrabbit could, but that also failed. There was one particular school of fish that kept swimming around him mockingly, tempting him to chase and dive after them. It resulted in numerous failures and fruitless splashing about.

  ‘Got one yet?’ Jackrabbit asked.

  Ned made a girly scream and quickly hid his nakedness under the waterline. The man just laughed at him.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You ain’t never gon’ get fish like that.’

  ‘Go away!’

  Jackrabbit laughed and went off somewhere else down the river.

  Ned, embarrassed, abandoned the hunt and quickly got out of the water. He dressed himself and headed back to camp to pack up his belongings. When he arrived, he found a new friend there. A dog, a border collie-like breed, had invaded his camp and was gnawing at the discarded bones from last night’s wom-bear carcass. He was chewing on a rib when Ned appeared.

  ‘Oi!’ he shouted.

  The dog, timid and innocent, backed away with his head down and his big, black eyes glaring up at Ned with adorable guilt.

  ‘Hey, boy.’ Ned smiled and leant down to the dog. He held out his hand for him to sniff, and a green, slimy tongue licked him. Ned retracted his hand quickly. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’

  The dog stared at him moronically. His tongue hung from his mouth, bright green. He sat with his head cocked to the side, ears pricked up. They were alien ears, like the long ears of a hare, but with curly ends. His eyes were bigger and blacker too, all pupil and no colour. The rest of him was like any other canine: black fur with a white underbelly, four paws, bushy tail, a long nose and pointy teeth.

  Jackrabbit returned from the creek and shouted, ‘Oi! Get outta here, ya rotten mutt!’

  ‘Come on, it’s just a dog.’

  ‘It’s a Walker’s dog! He’s probably from the ranch! Shoo! Go on, get!’

  The dog was scared off. Tail between his legs, he slinked away, looked back, and then ran off into the bush. He must have come from the warehouses, he agreed: maybe Jackrabbit left a gate open and he escaped into the wild.

  Ned watched him go. ‘I miss dogs,’ he said. ‘I miss animals. Normal animals.’

  ‘We’re leaving. Now.’

  They crossed the Ord south once again, away from the floodplains, back into the desert. They walked the Kununurra for seven hours, without shade or rest. Across the flat, desolate world, a powerful sandstorm picked up. Ned wrapped his singlet around his mouth and nose, and Jackrabbit did the same with a black bandana. The two lonely travellers pushed through the sharp-cutting wind, head down, unable to see more than a few metres in front of them. It was long, arduous and disorientating. Ned conclusively knew he would be dead out here without a guide, without direction, without knowing what to eat and what to avoid. Jackrabbit continued to demonstrate his knowledge of local fauna and flora by pointing out several fruits and nuts that the desert shrubs offered them. He found bush cashews and saved them in his pocket to roast later, and limes were native to the area too: delicious, sour, with a strange pink flesh on the inside of a green bulb. It gave them a source of sugar, enough to push on.

  Ned collapsed in the storm. Jackrabbit picked him back up. He dragged the boy to the side of a butte-like rock formation where the wind was cut off, allowing them to breathe a little better. Along the hill’s base they found a boab tree. It was called the Tree of Life for a good reason, Jackrabbit said, as he rested Ned’s frail body against it: the tree’s fat, bulbous trunk stored water enough for it to survive in the desert, and enough to aid a dying man. He showed Ned how to drain the tree: he peeled off the bark and slit the trunk with deep, long criss-crosses using Ned’s knife. Slowly, water began to drain into the slits, which Ned could collect with his t-shirt and then suck from. Ned sucked sweet tree water from his singlet and although it felt like nothing but measly drops, it was keeping him alive. He would never have thought of these things if he had been out here alone.

  They decided to wait until the storm died down a little before moving on. Sheltering against the trunk of the boab, Jackrabbit sat and admired the boy beside him.

  'So now you got it, mai? Dun’t need me no more. You can teach them Zebra Rockers a few tricks too.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay with them?’ Ned asked, covered in sand, head to toe. ‘You know where people are, and yet you went off on your own instead. Why is that?’

  The man shrugged and adjusted his hat. ‘Meh. People and me dun’t get along too well.’ He looked down and noticed Ned’s silent attentiveness. Jackrabbit gave a moan. ‘Look, mai, before all this shit, well, I’d been in and out of jail a few times. You know, for stupid things, beatin’ up dickheads and stuff. People and me just dun’t go together. And now that they’re all gone, I got no one who’s gon’ get in my face, right? I can just do me own shit. So yeah, I go the other way when I see people. They dun’t want me, and I dun’t want them.’

  Ned looked down. ‘Really? So you’re happy to spend the rest of your life alone?’

  ‘Meh.’

  Jackrabbit announced that the other end of the Ord River was up ahead, meaning this was the end of the Kununurra. The rel
ief made Ned want to collapse; two days of desert-crossing and at last, he was on the other side. He joined Jackrabbit on a rocky edge and was shown the town of Ivanhoe beyond the Ord: flat, green, with thousands of hectares of beautiful farmland, luscious lakes, and a town built with asphalt roads, homes with beds to sleep in, canned foods to eat, and motorcycles to ride. But what Ned didn’t see, to great dismay, were people. The town looked dead and abandoned. The cars in the street had not moved. A fluttering Australian flag was left ratty and wind-torn part-way up the post. Doors were left swinging open on their rusty hinges and all the inhabitants looked to have vanished in the same fashion as they had gone from Wyndham.

  ‘I told you,’ Jackrabbit said, ‘nothin’.’

  Ned supposed it was worth a try. He did not know why he believed Ivanhoe would be more immune to the same disaster which struck his town and the rest of the country; it was simply a place on the map he thought may have been isolated enough to have made it through the storm. It had been naïve hope.

  He said softly to Jackrabbit, ‘Just take me to people.’

  The wanderer nodded and turned south, but before he could take another step, a dog barked.

  Startled, they both spun and met the same border collie again, the green-tongued alien canine with its long, curly ears and big, black eyes. The dog was sitting there not two steps away, panting in the heat. It left Ned and Jackrabbit completely stumped; nothing had been following them, not for eight hours across a desert, not this close on their heel. In the lifeless savannah and sands of the Kununurra, they would have certainly noticed a little black speck following their trail from a good distance. The origin of this curious, dopey-looking dog quickly became a riddle, and now the two looked upon the hybrid animal with guarded suspicion.