Under the veranda of the art gallery, Sarah spent most of her days reading. She found a small bookshelf of old romances by the fireplace, which Munroe explained were once his wife’s. He gave them to her, having no use for them now, and she read every day after her chores were done. Sarah, like Tim, was a secluded girl, but apparently this new quiet, meek persona had only arisen after Darwin, Elizabeth explained. The burning city and the chaotic destruction, followed by the near-death experience of the Kununurra, had turned her into a passive mute. She was terrified of the dark, of noises, of the strange animals in the bush, even of the clouds in the sky. She was living in an endless state of panic, constantly convinced that something was out to get her. She broke down into tears often, collapsing into Elizabeth’s arms. She said she had nightmares about the burning people, and Suits shooting them as they ran; she imaged her family trapped in a building as the flames engulfed it. Elizabeth often spoke to the rest of her students about these instances, reminding them all that it was healthy and natural to feel scared, sad, and doubtful. Ned sympathised; at times it was impossible to keep these emotions bottled up inside.
Andrew was Michael’s best mate. They went through high school and university together back in Darwin, almost inseparable, except if Violet was around. Andrew was a happy-go-lucky clown, a slacker, a trickster, and a nuisance at times. It was often up to Andrew to lighten the mood, such as by telling a racist joke or pushing Violet in the river. He acted as though this was an extended holiday, a gap year. He wanted to wreak havoc upon the abandoned world: go into towns and loot them of all their treasures, proclaim himself king of the junkyard left over by the departed human race. He wanted to build a pirate ship and sail down the Ord, fighting off Suits with ropes and swords, saving women. He was waiting for the government – anyone’s government – to build enormous combat robots to send into space and fight off the Skyquakers. The settlers liked that term, ‘Skyquakers’, and adopted it from Ned. It was far easier to say than the ‘A’ word.
Speaking of Quakers, Ned did not see Moonboy for weeks. That strange hybrid dog disappeared without a trace, only to return out of the blue while Ned was hauling a wheelbarrow of pumpkins from the fields to the kitchen. The sound of barking made him drop the barrow and spin. Moonboy ran directly into his arms, whimpering and licking his face in excitement, as though he had only been gone since yesterday.
As for the settlers, they were startled and confused by the hybrid dog’s partially-alien appearance. At first, the one-eyed James tried to shoe him away with a rake, but Ned defended him.
‘Look at it! It’s one of their freaks! Get it away!’
‘No, he can be useful.’
‘How?’ James demanded.
‘He doesn’t like Suits either. He barks whenever they’re near. He can be our guard dog.’
Moonboy was discussed in length among the settlers before a decision was made, a decision in which Ned had little to say. Arguments carried on into the night. When the moon appeared, Moonboy started glowing green once more and amazed them all with his luminescent glow. The students, amused and scientifically curious, began discussing a similar phenomenon observed in jellyfish, and informed Ned that the concept of gene transmutation into other animals was not new, even here on Earth. From then on, Moonboy became far too fascinating to disregard. And he was too cute, too playful. Michael played tug of war with him with some rope. Sarah hugged him and let him lick her face in adoration. Eventually it was declared, after extensive whining and pleading, that the dog could stay, on condition that if he proved to be a threat, he would immediately be cast out.
‘Cast out? No, he’ll be shot,’ James asserted. ‘I’m not putting our safety in jeopardy because the kids are amused by a glowing mutt.’
Of course, Moonboy was never a hassle, never an inconvenience, and never posed as any sort of threat to the safety of the settlers. He spent his days catching flies and following Ned. He sometimes disappeared and reappeared in ways Ned was yet to comprehend, but he was as affectionate, as curious, and as loving as any normal dog.
If Ned was the baby brother, and Moonboy was the family pet, then naturally Elizabeth and James adopted the roles of mummy and daddy. Technically Elizabeth was still in charge of her students, and they still called her Dr Lizzie in her presence, but as for James, he had lived a bachelor life in Darwin until now; eleven kids and eight farms were not what he expected to inherit. As far as the students knew, the two – biologist and diving instructor – were ‘old friends’, but it was a bipolar love-hate relationship. At times, the students heard them screaming and shouting at the top of their lungs in the fields, or crashing pots in the gallery kitchen. Other times they saw them entangled by the fireplace, keeping warm from the downpour. They were certainly sleeping together, but as parents do, they were very evasive of the topic and made sure that none of the kids ever heard or saw them. Whether they were actually in love was entirely irrelevant; for now, the sex was therapeutic, a way to release tension after a hard day’s work or another emotional breakdown, or simply because they needed it.
Ned liked Dr Lizzie more than James. She was extremely fit, the fastest runner on the baseball team, a hard thrower too. She was a team leader, whose students looked up to her for encouragement and orders. She was also the nanny, the nurse, the therapist, and the bedtime storyteller. She had dived off of almost every coast from Monkey Mia to the Great Barrier Reef, and told magnificent stories of the crystal waters of Thailand and Costa Rica. She had hiked through the thickest jungles and wadded through wetlands and into mystical caves of far-away worlds, looking for rare algae or some kind of sea cucumber. She had never had a desk job and never planned to stop adventuring into the deepest oceans of the world. She was engaged to be married once, which she let slip accidentally one night after four glasses of wine, but it didn’t work out.
Red-eyed James was not fond of Ned or Moonboy, nor did he enjoy his days at Zebra Rock. He was a bit of a slavedriver in the fields, telling the students to keep digging and picking if he saw them slacking. Despite the dominant ‘chief of the village’ persona he was attempting to adopt, the students all hailed Elizabeth as their queen and much preferred to take orders from her. But James, over the months, went through short periods of insanity-driven tyranny. He was incredibly watchful of people’s food intake, as though they had to ration the plentiful fruits of their labour, and sometimes he’d confiscate an electrical device, such as an iPod or a digital watch, claiming it needed to be destroyed so that it wouldn’t set off ‘alien radars’. This happened to Ned’s radio, and he screamed and fought with James for his right to keep Lily until Elizabeth finally returned it to him. He was arrogant and invasive of personal space: three times he told Michael and Violet to go to their beds after catching them sitting together on the veranda of the gallery. They only did so because they were too tired to argue.
Elizabeth refused to let James’ personal insecurities dominate the family, but she understood his frustration with the world. She would try to counsel him, but it would only end in yelling. When he was at the end of his rope, he would go behind the gallery and have a cigarette, and Ned could hear him from his bed inside, grunting and snorting profanities, most of which were aimed at Skyquakers. He kept preaching about how ‘his’ country was being invaded, that this was ‘his’ land they were taking, ‘his’ people and ‘his’ freedoms. Once or twice, Elizabeth caught James talking to a few of her male students, Andrew and Ned among them, about how they needed to start taking action. He wanted guns, and he knew some of these farms were packing rifles to hunt foxes and rabbits. He wanted to head back to the Ivanhoe dam, maybe even all the way back to Darwin, and do some damage to the invading forces.
‘They’re just fucking farmers,’ he grunted. ‘What have they got, huh? Shovels? Glow-in-the-dark sheepdogs? Why should we be living like prisoners in our own country? This is our home. They came here to pick a fight with us. We have every right to fight back. If we don’t, who will?’
&
nbsp; Elizabeth despised this kind of talk, and would drag James away if she ever caught him.
‘How dare you brainwash these kids with your moronic ideas,’ she snarled. ‘What do you think they are? Soldiers? They’re students, for God’s sake!’
‘Not anymore,’ he sneered. ‘We need to teach these kids some discipline. They need to know how to defend themselves. They will come back for us one day, Liz. Those Suits will come back with flamethrowers and guns and they will murder us all.’
‘I will not let you put a gun in a child’s hand and send them off into a war we can’t win. Have you wondered why we haven’t been disturbed in months? It’s because we haven’t caused them any trouble. If we show them that we are, in any way, a threat, they will destroy us.’
But James relentlessly hammered the fear of invasion into them all: ‘They’re taking our land. They’re growing their hybrid cattle and bird freaks. That means there will soon be billions of them. Once they establish enough farms, grow enough food, the rest of them will come. They don’t just want the earth and the water; they want the whole bloody planet.’
13
CARNIVORE
At the beginning of March, the heavy summer rains stopped. It was still very warm, creating a humid atmosphere along the Ord, but with the dreaded dry season on the horizon, the settlers prepared for the droughts. They had to keep careful watch over their water tanks and the flow of the river in order to monitor and predict what type of season was ahead; if Zebra Rock was to become their permanent residence, they may as well start preparing months – years – in advance.
While food was still plentiful, the settlers had had to resort to vegetarianism over the past three months for obvious reasons: the cattle, the birds, and all native wildlife larger than a spider had long ago vanished, leaving a blank slate on which the Quaker farmers could begin anew. Besides Sarah, the only true vegetarian, the rest never quite adjusted to it. Almost every night they would sit around the fire and dream about bacon or a greasy cheeseburger. Once in a while they caught a barramundi from the Ord using a catchment system Tim had engineered from scratch, but it was not frequent enough to rely heavily on. As a result, the settlers could not keep up their physiques and, by the end of summer, they found themselves quite lethargic and severely lacking in muscle mass. In the mirror they could see their cheekbones, and the pallor of their skin gave them a hollow, ghost-like appearance; their clothes were much baggier on their frames, belts needed new holes. It was becoming more difficult to muster the same energy and enthusiasm as before; most preferred to sleep now instead of play baseball, and lifting the same weight in a wheelbarrow had become twice as strenuous. James was the first to say it out loud, while the rest pretended not to notice:
‘This isn’t working. It just isn’t enough.’
They had to stay fit, he argued, in order to be prepared for whatever dangers tomorrow might throw at them. The settlers knew what this meant, but they didn’t want to imagine it: they needed alien meat. But what was out there and how much of it was edible?
Every week since the storm, more and more hybrid animals had arrived on the planet, replacing the native wildlife, the cattle, even the crops, with transmutated copies. Sometimes they looked very similar to the species they replaced, like Moonboy, and other times they looked remarkably foreign. Along the Ord and across the Top End, the hybrids were becoming more and more noticeable, in greater numbers and variations. The birds in the sky, the rodents along the banks of the river, even some of the flowers beginning to bloom; they were all not from this Earth. This bizarre and gradual shift was both daunting and beautiful. One morning, from the peak of a red cliff, Ned was drawn by Andrew’s eager gesture to look down onto the desert plain below. Contrasted against the rising sun, a herd of hundreds of quadrupeds, like horses, but with the long, thin beaks of ibises, were slowly crossing the plain towards a watering hole. It stirred up many bizarre emotions at once.
The biologists were intrigued by the emergence of the hybrids, constantly trying to determine the underlying scientific relevance of it all. The students frequently discussed the possibility that this was all part of a global biological experiment, like some sort of planetary petri dish, or a universal Noah’s Ark, while others wandered if it was for the purpose of a larger colonisation plan. Very few of the hybrid replacements were being actively farmed by Quakers in their warehouses; most were released into the wild to multiply and thrive, so it was difficult to interpret the Quakers’ motives. Tim, the family scribe, had a growing stack of sketch books wherein he had begun an encyclopaedia of the hybrids, drawing them from multiple angles, estimating their size and weight, and cataloguing them to the best of his knowledge using current taxonomic references. He wanted to go further, which meant capturing them, dissecting them piece by piece, but Elizabeth did not want her students to stir trouble. She encouraged them to leave everything alone; there was no telling how dangerous these things were, what hidden fangs or poisons they harboured, or what diseases they carried.
By observation, the settlers assumed the animals being farmed by the Quakers were edible at the very least. For what other purpose would they be breeding them in such tremendous numbers if not to feed themselves? The biology students knew the basic facts of evolution: all intelligent species had emerged from carnivores. If they were to experiment with their palates, it would be safest to begin with one of those bovine- or pig-like ungulates; one juicy thigh could easily feed them all for days and keep their bodies from wasting. Ned confirmed the farmed animals were in fact edible when he mentioned Jackrabbit’s story of the wom-bear calf. Three months on, he was more than prepared to try it again.
The family voted whether they should consider following Jackrabbit’s suit and making better use of what resources were around them, not excluding the produce directly from the Quaker farms. Only Elizabeth was wary, otherwise it was unanimous.
‘You want to begin stealing from them,’ she said bluntly, ‘like thieves.’
‘I have a better idea,’ James said. ‘We take what we need, and we burn the rest.’
He wasn’t kidding either. James, whose face was still scarred and whose patched eye remained blinded after the pain he had endured, was growing frustrated at their stagnant lifestyle. If they were going to start breaking into Quaker farms, he wanted something juicer to come from it than just meat: he felt compelled to leave a smouldering crater where their warehouses stood, mounted with a flag of Planet Earth on top, leaving no survivors. He saw this as another example why the family needed guns, but he was yet to find any in the surrounding homes.
‘We don’t need guns,’ Elizabeth reminded him, firmly.
‘I can build a rabbit trap,’ Tim said softly. ‘Maybe we can just make a big cow-sized one.’
‘What about a spear?’ someone mentioned.
Andrew slapped his knee and nudged Michael in the ribs. ‘I’m so making a bow and arrow!’
‘Out of what? Shoelaces?’ Violet chuckled.
A flurry of chatter emerged of creative ways the family could progress from gatherers to hunters, each student proposing their own insight on how to kill, carry, and cook up an alien carcass of meat.
James halted the fun when he stood and hissed, ‘You think this is all a game? You think this is funny?’
‘Go have a smoke,’ Elizabeth said, tossing him his lighter.
That night, the settlers were woken. Something big and powerful, like an earthquake, or an explosion, shook them from their dreams.
Sarah’s terrified scream was the first thing Ned heard. He sat up from his mattress, laid down across the gallery floor with the others’. Everyone was on their feet within seconds.
‘Blimey!’ Munroe roared, stumbling in from an adjacent bedroom.
‘Did you hear that?’ Michael asked Ned.
‘Yeah.’
‘What was it?’
James peeked out the window. ‘There’s nothing out there.’
‘A storm?’
‘Not
hing.’
Sarah was rattled. She grabbed on to Dr Lizzie. Michael held Violet’s hand.
‘What if it was a bomb?’
‘We would see fire,’ said Tim.
‘A very distant bomb.’
‘Maybe it’s the air force!’ Andrew cried. ‘Finally they’re nuking these dudes!’
‘Shut up, Andy,’ Elizabeth hissed, feeling Sarah’s grip tighten.
James shut the curtains. ‘We need to move.’
‘What?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes! I’m not taking any chances. A storm could arrive here any second. Pack the truck, Munroe.’
‘Huh?’ the old man grumbled.
‘We’re leaving in two minutes,’ James ordered. ‘Everyone—’
Tim stepped up. ‘Wait! I have a better idea.’
‘A better idea than getting the hell out of here?’
The shy boy nodded. ‘I made us a Quaker-proof bunker.’
The settlers were confused, but they followed him quickly to see his creation. He had set it up in the basement of Munroe’s gallery. The group descended the wooden staircase to see nothing but a small room, concrete floors, brick walls. Tim pointed up to the roof to show them his masterpiece: a plain two-by-two-metre blue tarp, waterproof, strung up by all four corners to make an indoor canopy. The tarp was holding in a pool of water, only inches deep. The pool sat above them, and at first it seemed moronic to think it could combat an intelligent storm from another world, but gradually the ingeniousness of it all sunk in: beams could not penetrate water. The biologists had witnessed this first-hand. The tarp of water was mimicking those same conditions which kept the biologists from being captured whilst scuba diving off the coast of Darwin.
Skyquakers Page 8
