Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  Ned gathered twigs and dead logs from the surrounding bushes and mangrove forests. He dug a pit, arranged the wood, and sparked a flame using some matches in his pocket, the only keepsake that had remained on him. Lara didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything to her. She just sat there, useless, while he ran about and did his survival duties as he had learnt to do. Once brewing, they sat on the beach on opposing sides of the fire, not saying a word to one another for hours. Above them, the orange sky gradually went dark blue. The rest of the stars came out. The night still revealed nothing about where they were and how they got here, but Ned could come up with one possible, albeit strange, explanation.

  ‘My dog, Moonboy, has a habit of disappearing. I think he took us with him this time.’

  Lara smiled, but only briefly. ‘Where is he now, do you think?’

  Ned shrugged. Moonboy did what he wanted, appeared where and when he wanted.

  ‘We could be on the other side of the country,’ she said.

  ‘We could be on the other side of the world.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Lara. ‘I found a Fosters stubby in the bushes before.’

  Ned gave a little sigh of relief, as though it was comforting to know he was still on home turf, but this beach did not look the least bit familiar; Western sand was a lot redder than this, due to all the iron. In all honesty, he lacked the energy to care where he was, or how far away from home he was; those concerns were pointless now. Whatever home he had come to know felt like nothing but a fleeting mirage, a bad dream. Now he was awake, wide awake. To think none of it had ever happened was terrifying; to believe it had happened was even more so.

  He continued to sit and brew in silence until Lara eventually said, ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault.’

  Ned stared at her. Behind red flames, his tired eyes looked demonic. He gave no indication that he would accept her apology.

  ‘Why did they want you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because I escaped, I suppose.’

  ‘How did you escape?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Ned spat, ‘how did you escape?’

  ‘I don’t know! Someone must have saved me, and if it wasn’t Psycho, then I can’t think who it might have been.’ She said a name which heightened Ned’s attention. She could see he was about to ask. ‘The guy in the suit. I don’t know his real name. He defected across to them.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lara didn’t know. She had many theories, but at the end of the day, she just didn’t know.

  Ned began snapping a twig, bundling the two halves together, snapping them again. Each new bundle required a little extra force than the last, building thicker and thicker bales, allowing the rage to exponentially build. He hissed, ‘He killed them. My friends, my family—’ Red eyes burned through her. ‘He killed them.’

  ‘It’s not his—’

  ‘He. Killed. Them.’

  ‘It’s not his fault!

  ‘Whose is it, then?’ he shot.

  Lara kept herself from raising her voice; she was too tired. She simply looked at him from across the fire and murmured, ‘I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. You should have left me in the field.’

  He threw the sticks into the fire. ‘Yeah, I should have.’

  Ned went for a walk, claiming he was going to look for food. Lara tried to say that she wasn’t hungry, but he left anyway. He didn’t look for food; he just wanted to be alone. He discarded his shoes and walked along the mysterious beach, letting the wet sand sink between each toe and bury his feet inch by inch. Every soft wave pushed the sand from under him and his weight filled the empty void. If he stood here long enough, maybe…

  Bury me whole.

  But the sand was too kind.

  On the horizon, he saw an enormous fishing trawler, abandoned and left to float with the currents until it had become grounded in the shallows. He wanted to see a light flicker from one of its windows, a sign of life, but it was black and immobile, as it had probably been for months. Further along, he found a spot where beach-goers had once been lying, their towels and cricket equipment and blow-up toys left to gather sand. He took the towels, to use as blankets, and found two bottles of water in plastic bags.

  When he returned to the fire, he was disappointed to find Lara was still there. He half-expected to see she might have run off. He more so believed she was just a mirage too; another fleeting dream he had conjured in his head, just like the other imaginary people. But she was still by the fire in someone else’s pyjamas, placing another log on the flames and poking it with a troubled expression on her face.

  Ned gave her a towel to use as a bed or a pillow, and water. She thanked him, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He sat once more on the opposite side of the fire. It was second-nature to avoid being near her, as though she really was ‘contaminated’.

  Lara placed the towel down and sat on it. She crossed her feet and said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  Ned looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Whereabouts in WA are you from? How old are you? You must still be a teenager, right? Do you have siblings? Where did you go to school—?’

  ‘School? Why the hell would I want to talk about school? Why would I want to talk about any of that?’

  ‘I’m just trying to take your mind off things.’

  Ned gritted his teeth. ‘For nearly five months, I have been doing nothing but trying to take my mind of things. It doesn’t work. Ever.’

  She pulled herself out of the conversation. ‘Sorry. I was just trying to make small talk.’

  ‘Talk? You want to talk?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘No, let’s talk. Let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about aliens and spaceships and the fact that everyone I’ve ever known is dead—’

  ‘Ned, don’t—’

  ‘Shut up. Let’s finally sit down and talk about the things that matter, yeah? It’s time I stop ignoring the obvious.’

  ‘The obvious what?’ she demanded.

  Ned slammed his bottle of water into the sand. He swore at the same time. ‘You came from up there! You saw them!’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Too bad! You don’t have a fucking choice! You are finally going to give me something.’ He leant across the fire with piercing, unrested eyes. ‘So, tell me. What do they look like, where did they come from, how did they find us, what do they want, and how do I kill one?’

  Ned’s rant left him fuming. His face looked redder than the flicker of the angry flames. Lara did not know where to begin, but clearly she was quite reluctant to answer any of his questions.

  ‘Tell me! Fucking tell me!’

  There was no point trying to start an argument with him. Lara kept calm and spoke softly, ‘I slept in a little, glass pod the entire time I was up there. The ones who put me there are the same ones responsible for what happened to your friends.’

  ‘My friends are dead because of you!’ he screamed at her, ‘so you better have been worth dying over. There better be something that made you more special than everyone else on this fucking planet, because they’re all dead and you’re alive. So why? Why did this happen?’

  ‘I didn’t choose this.’

  ‘All they wanted was you. They’d all still be alive if—’ He was stopped by tears. He hunched over and began sobbing in the sand.

  Lara lowered her head and hugged her knees. She had seen their bodies too. She didn’t think Psycho had it in him, but she was very, very wrong about that boy. She should have never indulged in his fantasies; she could have just stayed home, obliviously living her mundane life, taking sleeping pills every night to combat the nightmares. Instead she met a boy for coffee and shortly after he was responsible for genocide.

  When Ned recovered, he told her the shocking reality, ‘Seven billion people, and you’re the only one who’s come back.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Answers.’


  ‘Well I don’t have them. So what do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’ He sat back in the sand and fiddled with the plastic wrapper on his water bottle. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he muttered. ‘If I ever see him again, I’ll kill him.’ He looked to the sky. ‘Do you fucking hear me?’

  That night, Ned had nightmares. They were both asleep on the beach, the fire burning down to its coals, but then, with no provocation, he began screaming. The sound was so sharp, so piercing in an otherwise gravely silent night, that it startled Lara and immediately woke her too. She shuffled across the sand to the other side of the fire, to where he was tossing and turning on his towel. She shook him by the shoulders and woke him, but he continued screaming and crying, as though the nightmare hadn’t ended. She held him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and let him sink into her chest. She cradled him for an hour before he managed to close his eyes again, and even then, the burning images still haunted him. Forever.

  SIGN

  Ned woke with the dawn. He was itchy from tiny bites all over his arms and legs. He should have used his towel as a blanket; the mossies had been eating him all night.

  As for the fallen girl, she was in the water. She took advantage of the strange and isolated paradise, the blue aquatic shore, the hot rising sun, and the fact that she had not properly bathed in months. Ned saw her thigh-deep in the ocean, about a hundred metres out; the bay was shallow, and she could probably go out nearly a kilometre before needing to paddle. ‘Watch out for Loch Ness crocs!’ he wanted to shout, but frankly, he didn’t care. He saw gulls in the sky, but they were not like normal seagulls; each bird had two long, thin tails floating majestically behind them, like the streamers of kites. He saw Lara staring at them in wonder. She had not seen the New World yet, the strange combinations which now flew and crawled and hopped around. He saw them as plagues, locusts unleashed to devour the planet whole and the people along with it, stripping lonely wanderers to their bones until a carcass of a species was left to walk a carcass of a planet.

  Fuck the birds.

  With the sun now on his side, Ned went for a longer walk across the beach without fear of being attacked by creepy hybrids in the bushes. With nothing but a cliff-face to the east, he trekked the sand west and came to find a series of colourful beach boxes facing the open sea, once owned by holiday-makers. A few had their windows smashed in or their wooden doors kicked down, and inside they were littered with empty cans and water bottles; people like him were here once, but that may have been ages ago. Inside one of these makeshift bunkers he found clothes in a backpack: t-shirts, shorts, clean socks, and some for Lara too. In another he found a toothbrush and took advantage of it, along with the sunblock and the Stingose cream, for his bites. He took it all back to the beach to find Lara drying her hair with her towel. She had thrown off Elizabeth’s pyjama bottoms and was standing in only a wet singlet and her underwear. Ned held out some new clothes for her. She thanked him and took them. The shorts were far too big and she had to lace them up tightly; she had lost a lot of weight, she said, because she had been fed through a tube while she was asleep. She showed him the hole in the back of her neck, a fleshy circular stub which was already closing and scabbing over. Ned didn’t show any interest.

  ‘We need a sign,’ she said.

  He paused. ‘Like… from God?’

  She stared at him moronically and laughed. ‘A street sign, you idiot. So we know where we are.’

  Ned shook his head. ‘I’m done.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m done. No more. I’m over it. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘And what will you do here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Lie down and die, perhaps?’

  ‘How will that help anything?’

  ‘It won’t!’ he cried. ‘It won’t help anyone, but I’m just sick of trying. No matter what I do, I can’t win. Everyone who has ever helped me, every chance of happiness I get, it all gets taken from me. So, what’s the use? What’s the point in bothering to outrun them?’ He looked at her, wanting a real answer.

  ‘If we save just one person on this planet, it’ll be worth it,’ Lara said.

  Ned had darker ambitions now. ‘If I get to kill just one of them, it’ll be worth it.’

  Ned led the way to find food, water and shelter, because he was an expert at it now. They left the serenity of the beach and turned to the inland mangrove forest. It was a struggle to get through, forcing them to weave through tight-knit branches and raised roots, with dense foliage that scraped against the skin of their arms and legs. A machete would have been handy in this case, but like all his other weapons, such tools had been left behind at Zebra Rock when he was whisked into the ether.

  The mangroves thinned out the further inland they went, and eventually they found a clearing where tall palm trees stood angled from years of hurricane forces. Beneath the canopy, the lower ground was thick with trapped humidity, and within half an hour their clothes were wet with sweat. A cacophony of nature’s war cries constantly surrounded them, leaving them in awe at the strange new plants and animals that now inhabited this world. Miniature primates perched on the trees and ate odd pink fruit, lemurs perhaps, but surely those weren’t native here. Ned pointed out the green underbellies and the strange black eyes: signs of mutagenesis, according to Tim’s taxonomy. Deeper inland they found enormous anthills, built like dirt temples, where millions of fire ants had taken advantage of the brief lack of reptile and bird predators and flourished exponentially in numbers. Lara asked if they bite.

  ‘Everything bites,’ he said, and they made sure to steer very clear of the colony.

  They were not in the south, Lara declared: Melbourne beaches didn’t look like this. Her hometown’s waters were cold, rough and choppy, with fewer palm trees and featureless landscapes. This coastal wilderness was mostly uninhabited, even before the invasion: no nearby roads or towns could give them any indication as to what the closest city could be, but both had a feeling they were still in the Top End. The water was warm, the air too; they were certainly amongst the tropics. Lara asked if Ned had ever done this before with his dog, and ‘vanished’ with him to some unknown corner of the world. Ned wasn’t in the mood to humour her.

  They began following goat tracks left by campers, or maybe survivors, who had been here before them. A trail of canned foods, cigarette lighters, and beer bottles were like breadcrumbs through the bush, tracing the steps of the last living humans. Perhaps, like the biologists, a few had been swimming at the time and escaped the beams, only to emerge and find the world had abandoned them. Ned looked down at the cans and wondered if these people had felt the loneliness he felt. It was likely that they were all dead now, either hunted and killed, eaten by wild hybrid animals, or perhaps they turned cannibalistic on each other once the food ran out, leaving them to fall victim to themselves.

  Their trail went upwards until they found a wooden boardwalk and handmade steps, built into the side of a steep-rising hill and ultimately leading them to a cliff-top beach house. They climbed the wooden staircase to the summit and came to a spectacular two-storeyed home overlooking the secluded bay. The house was littered with surfboards, flippers, wetsuits hanging to dry, and, under a white sheet, a fat-tired quad bike. Ned tilted his head in amusement.

  ‘This place is cool, and it looks like no one else has been here yet,’ Lara said. She slid the glass doors open and made her way inside. Suddenly she screamed.

  Ned felt his heart skip and ran to her. He burst through the doors only to find her frozen at the entrance to the kitchen. On the kitchen table, a furry possum-like creature had broken in and was nibbling on a box of old honey oats cereal, left abandoned next to a bowl and spoon. The little critter crunched on cereal, its big, round, black eyes staring at them innocently. Of course, it was not a possum entirely. Its tail was rounded and appeared to be made of some sort of rubbery skin, as though a beaver tail had been sewn onto it. The creature was more or less an alien p
latypus-possum hybrid. Its eyes were not like normal marsupial eyes, and on its back it bore three thick, green stripes cutting across its grey fur from head to beavery tail.

  Ned found a broom and shooed it away. He locked the glass door behind it.

  Lara went to the cupboards and pulled them open. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t eaten in four or five months.’ She pulled out a can of peaches. ‘Yum!’

  Ned went upstairs. Most of the upper level was an enormous deck, furbished with outdoor seatings, banana lounges, and hammocks swinging in the breeze. It gave him a perfect view of the beach below, the thick bushland beneath them, and the endless ocean. To the east, there were rocky cliffs, impossible to scale. To the west, the faint outline of a metropolis could be seen in the far distance, obscured by morning fog. It was still impossible to tell where they were, but it was the first sign of civilisation they had been hoping for.

  By the time he came back downstairs, Lara had already eaten four cans of peaches. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at the mess she had made on the table and around her mouth. ‘I was starving.’

  Up on the top deck, the two reclined in lounge chairs with warm cans of Solo and admired the view for a while. The day was only early and yet the sun was blazing hot. They covered their arms and noses in sunblock and Ned used more Stingose on his bumps. Lara offered him some peaches but he said he wasn’t hungry. He assumed the unsettling feeling in his stomach was the guilt and remorse that still lingered from yesterday. The world was a dozen less now. It looked and felt so much emptier.

  Ned spontaneously began talking about the settlers, even though Lara hadn’t asked. He told her their names and where they were each from, and how long they all lived at Munroe’s gallery together at Zebra Rock. He described his pilgrimage across the Kununurra desert with an Aboriginal wanderer, who had saved him and the others from certain death. He told her of the farms they took over and the agrarian way they had worked and lived, planting and watering and harvesting from a variety of properties to feed themselves. Water was boiled from the Ord. Meat was scarce for most of his stay. He told her of their baseball games and their poker nights and their jokes around the fire and the love which sprang up from the ashes of a global catastrophe. He told her of James’ red eye, Tim’s inventions, Michael’s love and Sarah’s abandonment. He told her of their transition from a family to an army, the day Andrew died, and how he came to learn how to shoot a gun. He told her of the fire they started and the Skyquaker he had watched suffocate. Most of all, he told her about how innocent and loving and wonderful they all were. Towards the end of their days, it may have felt like they were at each other’s throats, but they had been more of a family than any other family he could remember right now. It should not have ended the way it had. Those people did not deserve, in the last minutes of their lives, to feel so terrified and helpless, and have to beg to not be killed. Sure, they knew it would eventually happen: the Suits who had hunted them from Darwin would one day turn up again, and the way they died was almost exactly how Ned had imagined they all would; but it still felt like a dream. He still felt that they were all back at Zebra Rock, waking up to soon find Ned missing from his bed. They would be searching for him around the Ord, calling out his name and hoping he would come home. He wanted to be with them so badly, even in death, if only to save him from endless and intolerable solidarity.