Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ James said. He looked to Elizabeth. ‘Do you really want to take this chance?’

  Elizabeth knew they did not have a choice: they were all too weak, too malnourished, to run. All they could do was hide and hope for the best.

  ‘Evolution 101,’ Tim whispered to Ned. ‘Herbivores hide, carnivores thrive.’

  14

  WATER

  Under the Quaker-proof tent in the basement of Munroe’s gallery, the settlers at Zebra Rock survived the night. They heard no storm pass overhead and saw no pink and purple beams strike their makeshift home. Nothing else made a sound along the Ord until sunrise the next day, when the crow of alien birds woke them in harmony with the undisturbed wilderness of northern Australia.

  Red-eyed James checked the surroundings alone before returning to declare that nothing had changed: the gallery was untouched and nothing menacing could be seen in the sky. There were no footprints in the mud around their establishment to indicate any Suits had visited in the night; there was no smoke in the air to assert a nuclear bomb had gone off. The origin of the eruption must have been extremely distant, and it appeared to signal neither doom nor hope.

  It was Tim, more aware of the finer details, who discovered what had been lost overnight: the river. He called upon his brothers and sisters and directed their attention to the Ord itself. As of yesterday, the water level appeared to have dropped by half, according to Tim’s estimates. Although the rainy season had passed, the settlers did not expect a draught to hit them so quickly; something more dramatic must have occurred to block or redirect the flow of water. It was a concerning sight. This river was the life-blood of their settlement; any lower and the irrigation channels to their crops would run dry.

  Troubled, James volunteered to hike upriver towards Lake Argyle to see if there was an obstruction of some kind, while Michael and Andrew offered to go downriver to check out the state of the dam south of the abandoned farming town of Ivanhoe.

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The dam is far too close to them. We can’t go near the Quakers’ farms.’

  ‘So we just roll over and die while they take our water?’ James hissed.

  ‘We have huge rainwater tanks,’ she argued. ‘They can last us.’

  ‘We may not see rain for another nine months!’

  ‘We need to make sure the dam’s okay,’ Michael said, ‘or we may be stuck in a drought within a week. Really, Dr Lizzie, it’ll be fine. Andy and I can take care of ourselves.’

  The two parties left simultaneously the next morning, just after breakfast. They took with them packs containing water, food, torches, binoculars, a knife; there was no way to predict what they might come across. Elizabeth let James and the boys go on the condition that they had to be back by dark. There was to be no camping out overnight in a freezing desert, riddled with transmutated wild animals. Even if the issue was small and looked fixable, the three had to return to Zebra Rock, and then they would then tackle the problem together, as a family. It was unnerving for the settlers to be parted. Violet did not want Michael to go, but he kissed her on the cheek and said he’d be back by dinner.

  He wasn’t.

  James returned at sunset and declared there was nothing noticeable upstream which was blocking the river. The rest of the family then waited in nervous silence for the two boys to come home, and with every hour past sunset, tensions rose exponentially. Elizabeth panicked. She wanted to go after them into the bush, but James declared it would be idiotic: if the boys were caught, if they were dead, then she would be walking into the same mess. She pushed James away and screamed at him for bringing up such horrible scenarios, and they argued for half an hour before James took charge with fatherly assertion and forced all the children to their beds, keeping them enclosed within the safety of the Quaker-proof den under lock and key. Mummy and daddy and Munroe remained outside, where they continued to argue beyond the muffling walls.

  ‘I’m going after them,’ Elizabeth declared.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night, darl,’ Munroe barked. ‘You won’t be able to see a nothin’ out there. Sit your butt back down; your boys are coming back, okay? They’re just lost, or Andy saw something shiny and got distracted.’

  Munroe was too soft. They all knew something had gone wrong. The night grew darker and darker, bringing nothing but more violent and terrifying imaginative ends to their lost brothers. In the basement, Violet was silent while the others spent the hours dissecting each possible scenario with unflinching detail. Tim sat with her, and they sat in silence together.

  Sarah lit some candles and then sat with Ned. She asked him, ‘Do you think they’re dangerous, the Skyquakers?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ned said. ‘I haven’t seen them do anything bad, not in person. I haven’t even seen what they look like under those astronaut suits.’

  ‘But it’s not them, it’s the Suits,’ said a student. ‘I’m more scared of them.’

  The origin and purpose of these ‘Suits’ was still a mystery to Ned. After hearing the horrific tales of Darwin, he could not picture these hunters and slaughterers as human beings. He imagined them as transmutated Quaker-hybrids, human bodies with the heads of blowflies, dressed in suits, armed with ray guns and unknowingly blasting away at a crowd of running people. The biologists, who had seen their perfectly humanised forms, were convinced that they were more likely prisoners and brainwashed captives. Dr Lizzie had always believed the Suits were perfectly aware of their actions, and had jumped ship the moment it began to sink to become loyal patrons to the Quaker movement. Surely no sane human would knowingly and willingly do such harm to their own people, but the damage to Darwin had been devastating, and the biologists could only pray others like them managed to escape the wrath of the Suits.

  Ned lifted his head with confidence. ‘Others are still out there. Heaps of them.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Lily!’ he cried. ‘Lily’s still out there. She’s locked away safe in her broadcasting room at Charles Darwin University. The last DJ on Earth. I listen to her every night.’

  The students exchanged suspicious looks.

  ‘But,’ Tim said, ‘they torched Darwin. The city, the schools, everything. The whole place is rubble.’

  ‘No, no, no. Jackrabbit tried to tell me all this bull as well, but Lily is real. How could I be listening to her voice every night if she weren’t?’

  ‘How can you be listening to her voice if there’s no electricity?’ Tim asked. ‘And a local station like that would certainly not have enough strength to reach this far out into the desert, let alone across another state border.’

  ‘She has a big generator, then.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Just listen to her!’ Ned seized his radio and flicked it on. He had a stash of AA batteries to keep the handheld device going, and he always had it tuned to 104.1. When he finally picked up a crisp sound, he placed the radio in the centre of the room for all the students to hear her human voice.

  ‘That was ‘Saving Me’, by Nickelback. You’re listening to Lonely Lily, the last DJ on Earth, live 24/7 from Charles Darwin U.’

  ‘Ew, Nickelback. Turn it off,’ one student moaned.

  Ned took the radio back and stared at it for a moment. Something familiar ticked, but he shrugged it off. ‘I guess with no new music coming in, she’s only got a limited playlist.’

  It was almost midnight when James finally went to bed. Violet sat up from her mattress and saw through the curtains Dr Lizzie still sitting outside by the fire, drenched in the glow of the white moon, silently sipping a cup of tea. She put on a coat and went to join her. Dr Lizzie didn’t protest it; perhaps she was too warn from James to protest anything anymore. Munroe was there too, drinking whiskey. No one spoke. The three simply sat in front of the dying flames as a cold breeze crept across the desert. No one made an effort to add more wood to keep the fire burning, as if there was no need to prolong the night.

  Violet tried to
catch Elizabeth’s eyes, cast down into her mug. She looked emotionally drained. James had the ability to suck the life out of people sometimes, and on this night she felt more powerless than ever against him. Violet was surprisingly calm, calmer than most believed she would be. She was a drama queen at times, a princess, but these last months had proven she was a warrior too. She sat there close to her teacher, simply watching the night, the stars, the wood burn down into glowing coals. She had watched the seasons change around her, from spring, to summer, and soon autumn too. In that time, the country’s condition had not improved: no new faces ever arrived at Zebra Rock; no word on the airwaves indicated there was anyone out there coming to their rescue. Often they all forgot that seven billion people had gone missing overnight, but somehow seven billion down to thirteen had a far lesser impact than thirteen to eleven.

  The coals had not quite turned to ash completely when a sound in the bush made them all pause and turn. Something approached them in the dark. The rustle of staggering feet alerted them, made them sit upright. A shadow emerged in the familiar height and build of one of their own.

  Violet whispered, ‘Michael?’ The shadow didn’t answer. She stood. ‘Michael!’

  She leapt over the fire and ran through the long grass towards him. When Michael looked up, she saw his familiar face under the moonlight. He teetered towards her. They collapsed into each other’s arms panting, frantic.

  ‘Michael! Someone, help!’

  James and the other students leapt from their beds and ran outside. They all saw Michael in Violet’s arms in the dirt: clothes torn, skin cut, exhausted. He was draped over her, embracing her with all his strength and crying into her blonde hair with gasps of panic and relief. Closer, the others came to see his extensive injuries. His face was smothered in dirt and grazes. His upper thigh was bleeding profusely from some sort of puncture wound. He was pale and dehydrated, but more shockingly, he was alone.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he kept wailing. ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

  ‘Jesus, he’s shot!’ James cried. ‘Munroe! Get a first aid kit!’

  ‘Where’s Andrew?’ Elizabeth demanded.

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

  ‘Quick, get him inside,’ Munroe ordered.

  They dragged Michael into the gallery. On a mattress, they laid him down and managed to tear open his old jean pants to see the bloody wound above his knee. Munroe began working with cloths and bandages while others held up torches for better light. Michael was wailing as he lay there. He pressed his hands against his head and kept crying over and over, ‘Oh, god! I’m sorry! I couldn’t!’

  James seized his wrist and sharply demanded, ‘What the hell happened, Michael? Where is Andy? Where is he?’

  Michael shut his eyes and started sobbing, ‘He’s dead.’

  For a moment, there was nothing.

  Elizabeth stuttered, ‘What?’

  ‘He’s dead. They caught him. They killed him. Oh, god, I’m so sorry!’

  Violet covered her mouth with her hand. Other students stepped back in horror. Elizabeth kept shaking her head as tears began to form in her eyes. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘Don’t lie to me, Michael! What happened? How could he—? He was right there with you!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he wailed. ‘I left him… I can’t believe I left him… But he’s dead. He’s really dead.’

  Munroe held a pair of small tweezers in his hands. ‘Hold him down,’ he told the others. ‘I have to get the shrapnel out.’

  As the metal ends plunged into the open gash in his thigh, Michael gave out an agonising scream. It was too much for Violet and she had to leave the room.

  In the morning, after spending a night mending him, Munroe came to the others around the campfire and recalled the story that Michael had told him. In misery, the settlers sat together and forced themselves to hear it. It was the only way to convince themselves that it was real, that it wasn’t just some nightmare they had conjured in their sleep.

  In short, Michael and Andrew made it to the dam just south of Ivanhoe and found a big problem: it had been blown apart. A tremendous amount of water was gushing out through an open fissure in the concrete walls, flooding the Ivanhoe lowlands below. The boys made it to the bridge spanning the dam wall, where they saw dozens of Quaker warehouses and farms which may have spanned over 200,000 hectares. With binoculars, they could see little specks in silver astronaut suits, working in the fields with ploughing machines and vehicles which looked like tractors. Their crops were flooded with foot-high river water and thick irrigation channels ran in parallel lines for tens of kilometres: the Ord was being drained to grow their mutant produce, and on a scale they had never witnessed before.

  Andrew, whose hunger was beginning to get the better of him, wanted to get a closer look at the farms, but Michael told him it was time to head home. They left the bridge, heading back into the dry bushlands and south along the dying river, but suddenly Andrew was shot in the back and collapsed. Bleeding out his shoulder, he shouted for Michael to run. In panic, he did. He scurried to the nearest tree line and fell to his stomach, hiding in the dense bushland and tall grass, and from there he watched three Suits advance in on Andrew’s cowering body. One was carrying a strange machine gun, which looked to be made of glass, but the leading guy, a skinny, dark-haired young man with not a speck of dirt on his fabulous silver suit, held a long metallic prod with a two-forked end. He peered down at Andrew through sleek aviator sunglasses and shouted at him for a while. In between, he jammed his prod into his body. Andrew screamed as his four limbs twitched, like he was being electrocuted. This happened seven or eight times until Andrew stopped moving completely and was dead.

  Michael watched the whole thing, and with each stab of the prod he wanted to jump up and pound that arsehole’s head in with a rock until he too was a twitching, bloody mass. But, frozen in horror, he could do nothing but watch. When he was dead, Michael got up and ran. The Suit with the glass gun spotted him and sprayed bullets through the trees, landing one into his thigh. But they didn’t chase after him. The hike home took almost six hours because of the injury.

  Elizabeth collapsed into her hands. ‘My god. My god, I did this.’

  ‘No, Quakers did this,’ James hissed. ‘You really think we don’t need guns, huh?’

  ‘Don’t you dare bring that up now, you indecent bastard!’

  ‘Andy might still be alive if he had a way to defend himself. You want this to happen to all your kids, huh? You want to watch them get tortured and killed, one by one?’

  Finally Elizabeth punched him in the face, the one-eyed prick. She was not the only one who wanted to, but she was the first to finally push him to the ground. Standing over him, watching him rub his cheek in the dirt, she hissed, ‘Stay there,’ before marching off into the gallery to check on Michael.

  James got up. ‘Crazy bitch!’ He marched off in the opposite direction.

  Ned sat with Tim, Sarah and a couple of other students along the banks of the Ord. Not a lot was said that day. No one did any work. Some students found caves, cliffs, the wedges of tree branches – places where they could be alone. When they passed by each other, they did so with lowered heads, small pitiful smiles, but no words. Someone saw James leave Zebra Rock down a dirt road, but no one asked if he was coming back.

  Tim had something small in his hands which he claimed to have gotten from Munroe. It was the shrapnel from Michael’s leg, washed and dried out. Tim tried to reconstruct it in the palm of his hand. He eventually declared that the original projectile had probably been spherical in shape.

  ‘Like a BB?’ Ned asked.

  ‘Yeah. It’s got no shell, so some other force must push the trajectory out, like air. I can’t say anything definitive without seeing the gun itself, but I don’t think this is meant to be a lethal weapon.’

  ‘Munroe said Michael’s wound wasn’t deep,’ said Ned.

  ‘Why does it matter?’ Sarah hissed. ‘They still have flamethrowers and electric prod
s and ships in the clouds. They can still kill us if they wanted to.’

  ‘Then why haven’t they?’ Ned demanded. ‘We’ve been here for months; why the hell don’t they just come and get us, huh?’ He stood up and shouted at the sky. ‘I’m here, you arseholes! Come and get me! Come on!’ He saw a big, lumpy rock on the side of the river. He picked it up and heaved it into the water. ‘Aargh!’

  Tim dragged him back down. ‘Stop it.’

  Sarah hugged her legs. ‘They’ll get us all, eventually.’

  ‘No they won’t,’ said Tim. ‘You can’t think like that.’

  Sarah broke down into tears. She hated this place.

  Violet stayed with Michael and endured every moment of his agonising surgery. Afterwards, Munroe warned the boy his recovery would be indefinitely long and arduous: they had very few medical supplies on hand besides paracetamol, and the possibility of infection from this alien shrapnel was quite severe. There were no hospitals within reach, no doctors left on Earth: Zebra Rock was as prepared for bullet wounds as the 19th Century. Michael was in constant agony, sweating profusely. Violet did all she could to help by keeping him well hydrated and dampening his brow with a wet cloth, but she could see by the way he grinded his teeth and held his fists tight that he could not relax. Anger exacerbated the pain: Andy had been like a brother to him, and now he was dead. He kept replaying his traumatic torture in his mind. He could see that young Suit, the guy with the pretentious aviator shades, taking so much pleasure in his best friend’s pain.

  Staring at the roof, he whispered to Violet through his clenched jaw, ‘I’m going to kill him. I will never forget that Suit’s face, and when I see him again, I’m going to drive a knife through his chest. I’ll kill him, I swear it, Vi.’