Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  The girl’s mouth hung agape in shock for a moment. She asked, ‘Where am I?’

  Ned offered her a bottle of water. ‘On Earth.’

  She took the bottle with shaky hands and drank. She then spat it up again, splattering a little onto her sheets.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Ned said, reaching for a dry cloth. ‘Just take it slowly.’

  Lacking energy, she collapsed back onto her pillow again and stared at the roof of the gallery. Her eyes darted back and forth, searching her mind for clues, but there was only hazy confusion.

  ‘Earth?’ she muttered.

  ‘Here, I have soup,’ Ned said, ‘but it’s probably cold now. I can get some bread if you’d prefer.’

  The girl turned her head and stared at him from her pillow. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the one who caught you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You fell from the sky. I caught you… sort of.’

  She shut her eyes again and placed a hand to her forehead. ‘Jesus…’ She took a few deep breaths before asking, ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Since they took everyone?’ He counted in his head. ‘Months. I’ve lost track.’

  She shook her head, utterly confused. ‘It only felt like days…’

  Ned moved the soup aside and shuffled closer to her. ‘You… you saw the Quakers, didn’t you?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Them. You saw them, didn’t you?’

  She stared at him and understood the hint. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are they?’

  She pushed back a throbbing headache in her skull. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, what do they look like?’

  ‘Why the hell does it matter?’

  ‘It matters to me! It matters to everyone!’

  ‘Everyone?’ She looked down. ‘Whose pyjamas am I wearing?’

  ‘Dr Lizzie’s. She changed you out of your muddy clothes, if that’s okay. And Munroe kept watch of your pulse. And I made sure you had soup—’

  ‘There are others? Here?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes. We didn’t get beamed.’

  ‘Shit.’ She fell back onto her pillow.

  ‘Why is that bad?’

  ‘Because none of you should be here, not near me. You can’t be near me. I can’t be near you. I need to get out of here!’

  She tried to get up again, but Ned pushed her back down.

  ‘No, you’re not healthy.’

  She stared at him from her mattress. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ned,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

  She hesitated for a moment before uttering, ‘Lara.’

  One of Elizabeth’s students walked into the room, only to see the fallen girl awake and Ned talking to her by her bedside. Shocked, he ran back out and shouted out to James and the others, announcing her miraculous awakening to everyone. Shuffles of feet began thunderous down stairs and students appeared from every doorway.

  Before they all came barging into the room, Ned grabbed Lara by the shoulders and hissed, ‘The red eye: don’t tell him anything. Got it?’

  Seconds later, Elizabeth came in, along with James, Munroe, Violet, Tim, and others. James always had his gun in his hand, and when he saw the fallen girl awake, he strutted in with a cocky grin. His burnt scarred eye was hard to miss.

  ‘Afternoon, missy,’ he said. ‘So does it speak English or do I have to start beeping Morse code?’

  ‘I speak just fine,’ she barked. ‘Who are you all?’

  ‘Why? Who’s asking?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me, missy. You think it’s a coincidence that you fell right onto our settlement, not two weeks after we gave those Ivanhoe Quakers a run for their money? You Suits must think we’re pretty stupid, huh.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘She’s not one of them,’ Ned said.

  ‘How do you know? Did you ask her? Do you know who she is? Where she came from? I didn’t think so.’ James crouched in front of the girl’s mattress. He inched close to her and grinned. ‘Now, we can do this very easily, or we can do this very painfully. Who are you and why were you sent here?’

  ‘Sent? I wasn’t sent—’

  James cocked his gun. ‘Try again.’

  ‘I wasn’t sent by anyone!’

  ‘I’m going to count to three…’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about—?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘I can’t remember anything!’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Please, I—’

  James aimed his gun, but Ned beat him to it: he aimed his own rifle at the roof of the gallery and fired a shot. The sharp boom and the clatter of the roof’s structure startled everyone and made them leap back, even James. Once the dust and the silence settled, and Ned saw he once again had the room’s attention, he lowered his arms and said to James, ‘Her name is Lara.’

  James and Ned locked glares. He stood close to the boy, keeping his red eye on him, as though waiting for little Ned to challenge the village chief. At his ankle, Moonboy started growling. Ned held his ground until eventually James gave a snicker and stepped away. He put away his gun and snorted, ‘That still doesn’t prove much. She could still be a Suit sent to spy on us.’

  ‘Really, James,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘She could be communicating with them, somehow. There could be a whole pack of them surrounding us right now. In fact, you two, grab your guns and get on patrol.’ He waved off two students, who seized their rifles and ran out the door like obedient soldiers. James swung back to the rest of them. ‘This is not going to end well. They’re dangling bait in front of us. They want us to believe she’s harmless so she can stab us in the backs.’

  ‘I am not on their side,’ Lara cried, pointing back towards the fields from which she came.

  ‘So, why you?’ James asked. ‘Why only one? Where are the rest of the seven billion?’

  Lara shied away. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do know and you’re lying to us!’

  ‘I’m only speaking to Ned,’ she said. She looked up to him. ‘I’ll tell you everything, but only to Ned.’

  James gave him a pep-talk outside the room before he allowed him to sit with her.

  ‘You keep that thing loaded, okay? If she makes a move, any move, you take action. Got it? You need to defend yourself and your family. We don’t know who this girl is or what she wants, so you have to be on your toes. And keep track of what she says: try to make her drop hints, about Suits, about the Quaker farms, anything. Keep asking and asking, tire her out, and eventually she’ll let something slip.’

  Ned humoured him, but deep down he knew this was just a harmless girl, not a criminal who needed to be interrogated. He did not care for James’ alpha-male commands; he only wanted to know the agonising truths that he had been longing for since his town and his country were abducted. His needs were simple: who were they, why were they here, was everyone okay, and were they ever coming back?

  He locked the door behind him, sealing him in a small four-walled room with Lara. She was still sitting in Elizabeth’s pyjamas on the mattress, frail, weak, and terrified. She was nibbling on bread and sipping some vegetable soup from a mug, but she was afraid of throwing it back up again, so she only took tiny portions at a time.

  Ned leant his gun against the door and came to sit with her. ‘I’m sorry about them,’ he said. ‘James is a dick.’

  ‘You’re not wrong.’ She placed down the crumb of bread she was picking at. ‘Can I ask, where in the world am I?’

  Ned found it difficult to explain, so he searched for a large fold-out map of roads and townships spanning the Kimberley region. The map was useful in locating homes worth looting, crossing off those which the settlers had already ransacked. Somewhere near the Western Australia-Northern Territory border, along the west side of a river snaking from Lake Argyle up to the northern coastline, Ned pointed to a little red dot where someone had wr
itten ‘ZR’.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Wow, I’m far from home.’

  ‘Me too. Where did they take you from?’

  ‘Melbourne. The last thing I remember was watching the Veteran’s Day parade, and then…’

  ‘A storm…’

  ‘And people started running…’

  ‘And the beams got them all.’ Ned sat back. ‘You wouldn’t have had a chance in hell in a big city.’

  ‘And you? How did you survive the storm?’

  Ned laughed. ‘A fridge.’

  It made Lara smile. ‘Didn’t even know that would work.’

  ‘At the time, neither did I.’

  ‘And the others?’ She nodded at the door, against which she assumed the settlers all had their well-poised ears.

  ‘Water.’

  She nodded. She then leant in and whispered, ‘Do you have paper and a pen?’

  Ned looked to the locked door, which he could tell was making her paranoid. He nodded and found a notepad and a black marker. He handed it to her and watched her begin to scribble down words.

  ‘And you’ve all been out here this whole time?’

  ‘A few of months,’ Ned said, ‘this guy named Jackrabbit found us all and brought us together at Zebra Rock. Munroe used to own this place with his wife, but she got zapped.’

  ‘Ah-huh.’ She showed him the message.

  Ned read it and narrowed his glare at her. ‘What?’

  She flipped a page and began doodling again. ‘So your family, friends, all gone?’

  Ned was a little slow to respond, but he knew talking in this casual manner was keeping James happy on the other side of that thin, wooden door.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He leant in closer. ‘Do you know what they’re doing up there? Do you know why they took all of the people? And all the animals?’

  ‘Ned, I think you know by now. I mean, you already have that dog of yours…’

  ‘Hybrids. They’re making human hybrids?’

  Lara showed him the second message. Ned read it and leapt to his feet. ‘No!’

  ‘Shh!’ she snapped.

  Ned inched back. ‘What are you? Tell me! What are you?’

  James started banging on the door. ‘Ned! What’s going on in there? Open the door!’

  Ned knew he should have lunged for his gun, but it was too late. Outside, the thunder clashed. Moonboy started barking hysterically.

  PART TWO

  DREAM

  She had that same dream again, the one where she was swimming in an infinite blue lake towards the bright light of the sun, glistening through the ripples on the surface. Only it wasn’t like water, because she could breathe just fine, and it wasn’t the sun that she was swimming towards. She was very young in these dreams, a small child, drifting upwards, floating gently into someone’s arms. A tall man scooped her up from the lake and suddenly the air was thicker than it felt when she was submerged. He held her up and smiled at her: big eyes, long arms. He made gargling sounds and pulled funny faces to amuse her. She laughed. She touched his hands and they felt old, wrinkled, with thick, leathery skin under her soft palms. But it was a gentle touch, a familiar one. She called him Baba. He called her Lo. Little Lolo. It was all just baby talk. Baba and Lo played games, simple games, like identifying shapes and colours, and animals from picture cards. They were more like lessons, actually, and at first she struggled to memorise them, but gradually, as the sessions repeated themselves over and over, the words began to stick.

  Lara woke with her cheek against the pillow. She sat upright in bed and looked around her room, as though unsure if she was meant to be here. It was dark. Dylan was asleep beside her, rolled onto his side. He made a groaning noise.

  ‘Baba. Baba,’ she said out loud, forcing herself to recall the word which echoed in her dreams. Why was it so familiar? She was a baby back then, when Baba was in her life; she must have only been three, maybe four. Who was Baba? She thought of him as an uncle or a neighbour, an unrelated friend-of-family, but could not put a face to the name. More so, she didn’t understand why she kept having these repetitive dreams about this man from her childhood. The scene was almost the same each night and it was becoming frighteningly frequent. There was an underlying feeling of warning to these visions too, as though she needed to prepare. She needed to remember these lessons from her past for a future moment when they would be needed and her ability to recall them would be tested.

  When Lara was young, not long out of her cot, her parents noticed her obsession with her bedroom curtains: she could only sleep with them open, with the moonlight streaming in. When they asked her why she needed to do this, tiny Lara responded, ‘So that the people can find me.’ Thinking this was some reference to Santa or the Tooth Fairy, they let it slide as childhood imagination. To this day, Lara still slept with the curtains open. She felt uncomfortable, perhaps a little claustrophobic, without a view of the city lights from her bed, the red and white dots from the windows of the distant apartment high-rises of Melbourne, perhaps the beam of a passing helicopter. As a child, she was known to be a pleasant sleeper. She hardly ever stirred or woke her parents in restlessness. Not a peep was heard from her baby monitor until early morning.

  But lately that had not been the case. Eighteen years on, and dreams of Baba were flooding back like repressed memories. They were giving her insomnia. She wanted to wake Dylan and tell him all about it, but he worked night shifts and got home well after midnight, so disturbing him for something as trivial as a dream would only annoy him. Instead, she got up, went downstairs for a glass of water, walked in a circle around the house once or twice, and then went back to bed. As soon as she closed her eyes again, the dream vanished and she slept well. In the morning she woke with little concern for these images, and she went about her days awake and focused.

  Occasionally, something odd would spark her memory. She would hear thunder and be jolted by the sensation of floating upwards. She saw an advertisement at the bus stop for ‘The finest lamb in town!’ and remembered the images of cows and sheep on preschool flashcards. Over the radio she listened to the announcement of the upcoming Veteran’s Day parade and it gave her shivers down her spine, along with flashes of Baba holding her, and that feeling of something lurking towards her – towards them all.

  When she first told Dylan about it, perhaps after the fourth consecutive dream, he seemed only vaguely entertained. He was eating cereal in the kitchen, leaning against the bench while watching the TV in the far corner of the room. She partially caught his attention as she tied up her hair for work.

  ‘Did I sleep well last night?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘I had a weird dream.’

  ‘Ah-huh.’

  ‘I keep having the same dream over and over. And they don’t feel like dreams; they feel like memories.’

  ‘Ah-huh. What time are you home?’

  ‘About six. Do you want anything?’

  Eyes still on the screen, he waved about the cereal box beside him. ‘We’re out of Coco Pops.’

  Lara and Dylan were both twenty-two, living in an outer Melbourne suburb in a one-bedroom apartment with no laundry and no elevator. While she studied her Masters in Social Sciences at a community centre during the day, he worked as a barman at night. Their routine schedules kept them on top of bills, but it was tiring. At times, Lara felt too young to be lacking this much energy. She felt as though she was stuck in the life of a forty-year-old, with ten-hour days, grocery shopping and laundry chores, reading the newspaper on the bus (honestly, who read the newspaper anymore?), and at night, all she wanted to do was sit in her trackie pants with a hot Milo and watch bad reality TV. She had drinks on Friday nights with work friends at a local bar, wine and calamari, but she was home before midnight. Any attempt to stay out later would overwhelm her with exhaustion.

  Dylan worked until the early hours, gone by the time she returned from the centre, and still asleep when she left in the morning. His waking hours were midda
y til first light; he functioned well on very little sleep and he enjoyed the night life. The concept of a nine-to-five workday bored the hell out of him, and so neither could grasp the appeal of the other’s lifestyle. It was the equilibrium of their lives, the downside being, obviously, the quality time with each other that they seldom achieved. A dinner for two out on a Wednesday night, or a Sunday afternoon movie: these small hours were infrequent, and both wished they had more, but not at the sacrifice of their beloved jobs. Once or twice a month Dylan drove to the centre and they went to a nearby café during her lunch break. Attempting to reverse the scenario never quite worked the same: after his ‘early’ shifts, finishing off at one A.M., Dylan, at least once a week, would call her up and invite her to meet him for a night in the city. By the slur of his words, it sounded as though he had arrived at the party already, but he could never convince her to come.

  ‘I have to be up at 6:30 in the morning, Dylan!’

  ‘Nah, it’ll be fine! Come on!’ yelled the voice on the phone. Several other voices could be heard egging her on in the background.

  ‘By the time I have a shower, get changed and get there, the fun will be over.’

  ‘Pfft! No it won’t!’

  She told him to have a good night, and then went back to flipping through magazines in her fluffy slippers.

  She was not sure exactly when the dreams began. Three months before the storm? Four? The first few she disregarded, forgot, or didn’t bother to connect. By the second week, a pattern was emerging. The name ‘Baba’ echoed in her head over and over, even when she was awake, and eventually she linked it to the visions she kept having at night. The picture cards, the words, the shapes and colours… Lara didn’t start school until she was five, but these lessons were when she was much younger. From what her parents recalled, she never went to any early learning pre-school. It was all a mystery. Baba and Lo: who were they meant to be?

  She asked her parents when she next visited them if any older man in her life had ever called her Lo. They couldn’t think of anyone, nor could they recall a tall man she ever called Baba.