Skyquakers
Page 2
People’s belongings had rained all over the paddock: clothes flung from suitcases, laptops, life jackets, food trolleys and chunks of unidentifiable machinery. Ned sifted through the scattered debris. Nothing was of particular use or interest to him; electronic devices were either shattered beyond repair or had dead batteries, and the packaged food smelt off. He managed to find the cockpit, tipped and detached from the rest of the body, and sat in the captain’s seat before the control bench, facing a cracked glass screen and a dashboard of buttons. He placed the headphones over his ears and re-enacted the plane’s fatal end as he imagined it may have been.
‘What the hell is that, Johnny?’
‘A beam in the sky, sir?’
‘Oh, dear Christ, it’s coming right at us! Deploy the missiles!’
‘This is a commercial aircraft, sir! We don’t have any missiles!’
‘Then, if we’re about to die, Johnny, I must confess something to you.’
‘What, sir?’
‘I love you, Johnny.’
‘Sir, this is not the time!’
Boom! Crash! Neeeeoooow…
He later found an uncoiled life raft and gazed upon it with boyish charm. He stole the raft and dragged it by some rope to the beach, north of town. In the water, he dumped it there and deployed it. The yellow bundle expanded into a boat, and Ned went rowing around the bay, east to west, and down into the inlet, admiring the mangroves along the bank, the greenery which sprung up near the water, and the calmness of it all. He sailed until sunset, admiring the red sphere on the horizon, and then went back inside only once it got too dark and chilly.
Before he knew it, a week had passed.
A week? Had it suddenly been that long? A week sleeping in his fridge; a week cooking pasta over the gas stove by himself, conjuring up some imaginary sauce out of tomato paste and mayonnaise; a week wasting the day away, swimming in someone else’s pool and playing his Gameboy until all the batteries in the world ran out. This was getting silly now. Ned felt as though this was a very difficult game of hide-and-seek, and he was failing terribly at finding anyone. Everyone come out, come out! I give up! You can stop hiding now! Game’s over!
Or maybe he really was the last one.
‘This is stupid!’ he shouted.
It was time to raid things, he decided. If he was going to be alone, indefinitely, then he needed to begin fending for himself. Wyndham was a small town, but there were plenty of homes, shops, camping supplies and farming outlets around, which, in theory, could supply a single person with resources for months and months. He needed to stock up. He needed to prepare for the long haul. This was an emergency and he needed to begin taking things seriously.
Flies and mould had long taken over the abandoned and unattended foodstuffs in the grocery stores and people’s dead fridges. Perishable food was gone; fresh fruit had begun to show brown spots, the milk was curdling, cheese was beginning to smell and the meats were looking rank, so it was back to basics. Armed with a wheelbarrow, Ned gathered all his survival goods from the local grocery, from as many houses as he could break into, and constructed a bomb shelter out of his garage. He stocked up on canned foods, bottled water, chocolate bars, toilet paper, batteries, matches and camping equipment, a hunting knife, over-the-counter medications, and any sort of non-digital form of amusement he could find from Sudoku puzzles to a yoyo.
Every now and then, maybe once a day, maybe once every two days, the clouds overhead rumbled and turned dark, indicating another storm passing by. Ned ran back to his fridge and sealed himself in every time. He knew that whatever was up there, it seemed to be looking for humans, but other animals were targeted, too. He saw a few horses on a hill, forgotten or missed during the initial attack, be absorbed by a beam. Perhaps they were not quite sure what humans looked like, and simply took anything alive, mobile, and with a warm heat signature.
He started saying ‘they’ in his head a lot, to the point where it began to bother him. This entity, this mass of cloud and its laser beams, was sentient at the very least. It knew where to find people: in homes, or in schools and buildings, or wherever it saw a lightbulb go on. Only something intelligent could operate a lightbulb.
But who were they? He refused to say the ‘A’ word until the tenth day.
‘Fine, fine, fine!’ he yelled at no one. He threw down a can of baked beans and shouted it in his garage. ‘Okay, I’ll say it! I’ll say it, alright? Aliens!’
It didn’t change anything, deciding it was aliens; it did not reverse the process and bring back his mother. It did not restore the town to its former glory and put society back into motion. Instead, Ned received no reply other than the dead silence of abandonment. All of life remained on pause.
He came up with wild theories when he was bored or was struck, more often, with utter confusion. Surely, somewhere on Earth, with all their satellites and Hubble telescopes and space stations, people must have seen this thing coming. Space was really, really big, and Earth was only a tiny marble in a black, endless vacuum; how did they miss this one coming right at them? Scientists could predict a comet passing years – decades – in advance, couldn’t they? How could something so massive strike without any warning at all?
Or maybe the storm wasn’t detectable in the way a big metal ship or a passing piece of space rock was; alternative-dimensions, rips in time-space, a black hole, or something from the future. Maybe it was a disease, like a plague, but then what were the beams? His mind went off on all sorts of tangents, but none of his theories could ever be proven, not without first knowing what the enemy was. Was it mechanical? Was it biological? Was it even from this universe? All these thoughts hurt his head too much, so he stopped.
By two weeks, the loneliness had become a disease, a plague which had infected him and every standing home and cattle shed in this barren town, making them all look grey and lifeless. Time had stopped. Days rolled over, one after another, without him noticing. Ned hadn’t heard a spoken word, not even from himself, in almost a week.
Where was everyone? His neighbours? His mother? He wanted to know she was okay. He wanted someone or something to come down from the sky and just tell him that she was alive, and that they were all up there having cups of tea and playing Scrabble together. He had nightmares about entirely the opposite, and his mind envisioned torture chambers and big, lanky monsters ripping her ribcage open, just to see what made her tick. He woke himself up many times in his fridge-bed with these nightmares. He kept the hunting knife close to him, for some reason. He imagined if he was ever beamed up into the sky, he would appear before them in their ship with a knife, and he would fight to the death to get away from them.
We are not alone, and yet I am alone. The irony.
VOICE
The power had long gone out, but Ned still inspected the surrounding houses every now and then, testing their televisions to see if he could, by luck, catch any news updates, or find any Wi-Fi or working mobile phone to use to reconnect with the world, but all he found was a black, bar-less void in the global communications network. Even if there was still power, no one could report what had happened because there was no one there to report it, only Ned, and what would he say to the empty world?
‘Live from Wyndham, this is Ned reporting,’ he practiced as he pushed his wheelbarrow of bottled water down the littered streets. ‘As you can see, we are experiencing a Category 5 apocalyptic fuck-up right here.’
Radios were different. The ones which ran on batteries often still worked. It took more than two weeks for him to realise this, and when he found a hand radio in his mother’s drawer, which she sometimes used for horse races, he turned it on to immediately hear the voices of other human beings. Most were in another language. The signal was weak, the voices exhausted and losing touch with the rest of the world, perhaps dying or starving, or going mad, but nonetheless they were human. On 104.1 A.M., he heard Nickelback. Christ, really? He hadn’t heard music in weeks, but Nickelback was the last thing anyone on
Earth wanted to hear. But then when the song ended, a girl’s voice came to the microphone.
‘That was ‘Saving Me’, by Nickelback. You’re listening to Lonely Lily, the last DJ on Earth, live 24/7 from Charles Darwin U. If you’re out there, you know where to find me.’
Ned jumped up and down and started shouting and dancing in excitement. He knew it! He just knew it! Oh, Lonely Lily, if that was her real name, she was not alone at all! But the beams! How? he wondered. Well, radio studios were made of soundproof glass with lots of padding and electrical equipment in the walls; perhaps it all deflected the beams in the same way the fridge had. Who knew what other barriers naturally existed out there? Who knew how many thousands – millions – were still around, waiting to hear Lonely Lily and discover they too were not the last ones? Oh, it was a good day; a very good day.
He listened to Lonely Lily on the radio all day, everyday. He listened to her voice in the bathtub, took her with him on his wheelbarrow runs, even had her serenade him on his yellow raft as the two of them rowed around the bay at sunset; this voice, just a voice, became his best friend. When he could no longer take the torment of the never-ending silence, or when he felt the most depressed, Lonely Lily was always there. She spoke to him, she sang to him, and she occasionally cracked jokes with her intangible audience, if only to keep some sort of sound ringing out throughout the world.
‘Men are like parking spots,’ she said, ‘all the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped! Ha!’
‘Oh my god, Lily, that’s so funny! That’s, like, the funniest thing I’ve heard, ever!’
Friday nights she played indie jams and acoustic covers of classics. Tuesday afternoons was Animal Imitations Hour, when Lily would make an ambiguous animal noise and give her audience a few songs to guess.
‘It was a goose stuck in a barbwire fence! Anyone guess that?’
‘Lily, you’re so funny!’
Lonely Lily slept very little, only a few hours a night in her protective cube, he imagined, and during times when she was away from the microphone, she played a long playlist of songs with no indication that she would ever return.
‘If I’m not here tomorrow,’ she said to him every night, ‘then here’s the last song forever.’
After the initial shock of finding another survivor – that was a bad word to use, ‘survivor’, but it was becoming more and more natural to say – Ned wondered why Lonely Lily never addressed the elephant in the room: the storm, the beams, and the radical change which had crushed all of their livelihoods. Maybe she was living in the same fantasy as him and believed it was all a misunderstanding, a quiet game everyone was playing, and soon it would all be over and people would return to their normal lives, unaware that anything had ever gone wrong. She was in denial, like him, but subtle hints gave away her true loneliness: Lily would sometimes, between songs, begin a short soliloquy about her former life. She would tell him what she got for Christmas last year, or about her favourite dog which she missed, or about how ridiculous the concept of reality TV was and how many hours of their lives they had spent indulged in the meaningless lives of others. These were all the fragmented clues of someone who knew she was doomed, and Ned felt as though she was gradually writing her own eulogy. Eventually she would run out of stories to tell, and once everything was told, there would be no point existing anymore. One day he would turn on the radio and hear only static on 104.1 and she would be gone. He dreaded that day. Desperately, like suffering a long-distance relationship with a girl with whom, after merely a week, he felt he had spent a lifetime with, Ned anxiously needed to hear her voice every morning, and every night before he slept, just to know she still loved him.
‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘As always, you’re listening to Lonely Lily, live from Charles Darwin U, the last DJ on Earth.’
‘Don’t ever leave me, Lily.’
QUAKERS
By the end of the third week, he had searched the town high and low, inside and out, and had found no other life forms sheltering in fridges or hiding in any possible cracks where the beams may have missed them. He had grown insanely bored on his own, long abandoning books and Gameboy games for the thrill of smashing a BMW with a golf club, for no particular reason other than the therapeutic remedy of it. He had explored every house, ransacked every pantry and garage, and had stocked his own home high with canned foods, chocolate bars, tinned fruits and general living supplies. He had not seen an animal larger than a frog in a very long time, nor had he seen the footprint in the sand of any creature other than himself. He wore other people’s clothes, finding no need to wash his own if he had thousands of other wardrobes to choose from, and he imagined himself living other people’s lives as he wore them. Who had these intelligent beings been, the ones smiling in the family portrait on the wall? He didn’t believe they were real anymore; just mannequins whose faces gave the illusion that real people lived in this dollhouse, like some sort of nation-wide IKEA showroom. Wyndham was a fairly large rural town considering its distance from any major city, and yet to Ned it was now uncomfortably small. He had seen every inch of this place, trekked the beaches ten kilometres in either direction, explored every opal shop and the backrooms of every grocery. He expected the houses and buildings would start falling apart soon, and although he logically knew it would take several decades before the cracks would begin to show, he still felt as though such a time was not too far away.
There were instances when Ned truly believed he had gone insane. One morning he got up, got dressed in his white shirt, knee-high grey socks and leather shoes, and went to school. He sat at his desk, took out his books, and started to do some homework which was now several weeks overdue. He peeked in the teachers’ drawers for their textbooks, as though trying to establish what lessons he should have caught up with, then at lunch time he went to the gymnasium and played basketball against himself, commentating his every pass and goal as though a crowd were cheering him on. Then at three, he packed his things and went home again. Never in his life did he believe he would miss something as mundane as school in the aftermath of human existence.
At the more lawless end of the spectrum, he decided to drink beer (properly) for the first time, but it was grosser than he thought, so he drank scotch instead. That was a bad night. It only made him depressed and angry. He spent most of that evening on the roof of his house, the radio beside him playing muffled music, where he drank and sang and danced along to Lily’s songs with such enthusiasm that he almost toppled off the roof entirely. He made a lot of racket that night, more than he had dared to ever make while an omnipotent weapon was still searching the globe for lost creatures like him, but tonight the skies were clear, the moon was bright, and the blackened town was his kingdom to rule from above. Except, of course, it was all a farce, and when the alcohol began to really take effect, the shadows of abandoned buildings began to look as though they were sinking further and further beneath him, and Ned, a king of dust, realised he was becoming more detached from reality with every passing day. He looked to the sky, the stars and the moon, and began to yell and scream at the universe. He threw an empty bottle at it, only for it to fall lazily back to Earth and shatter on the pavement below. He shouted that this was their fault and that he hated them, whoever they were.
The next morning, Ned had a bad headache, but the sound of a beam woke him with a start. He hastily stumbled from his bunker in the garage and saw the pink light through the window coming from afar. He climbed to his roof, littered with last night’s mess, for a better view. Far beyond the town, the big, grey cloud swirled, and from its core a streak of light shone down to the ground with blazing intensity. He squinted through the purplish glare and noticed this lone beam was somewhat different to the others he had witnessed: it was wider, stronger, and lasted minutes, not seconds. It worried him, as though this was a new development in whatever was happening here, and yet, it could be just the opposite. Were they back? Were people coming home?
Firstly,
he ran to Lonely Lily and turned on his pocket radio to hear a song playing. When it ended, her voice returned. He had an inkling that, although Lily failed to acknowledge the global population’s disappearance, if the opposite were to occur, she may be spreading her message of joy to all of Australia that she was no longer alone in her tower. Lily, however, seemed content and unfazed by the outside world, as usual. Perhaps this was not such a joyous occasion then.
Ned returned to the roof and used binoculars to observe the beam. It was still there, humming away, sending down a tunnel of pinkish-purple light to the earth. He sat there nursing a bottle of water and watched it from his high post, just one beam shining continuously just beyond the borders of town. He used his binoculars again and swore, despite the intense brightness, that he could see little specks of light coming down from the sky, instead of going up. The point where the beam hit the earth was obscured by land and hills, so he could not see what was happening, but he could certainly hear it: the boom as the light struck the ground, the whirring of jet-like turbines, picking up the dust and echoing across the bushland. Skyquakers, he called the invisible masters of the storm. Cool name; he made it up himself.
So, what now?
It was dangerous, he knew, but if there was ever a chance to spot the return of the humans, then Ned wanted to be the first one to welcome them back with open arms. Likewise, if it was something less inviting coming to his planet, he wanted to be the first guy to grab a big, pointy stick and tell them to go home. He began to feel the excitement brewing. This was it: it was over. Everything was going to be okay. Almost a month on his own, but somehow he had survived. Had it been a test? A cruel, cruel joke? Did he pass?