Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  Signs directed her to a local day hospital, a little further south of the CBD. It was dark by the time they rode up to the front. She parked her quad in the emergency bay and carried him inside, one arm over her shoulder. The front glass had been smashed in, either by a storm or by desperate hands who knew where to look for drugs. They stumbled inside to a dark, neglected reception area. Papers were scattered and blown across the floor and computers were smashed. Light fixtures had fallen from the roof and a bed lay tipped in the hallway. She carried him to a room where he could lay down on a bed. She made him drink more water, but he immediately vomited it back up.

  ‘You need to rehydrate.’

  In the half-light, she managed to find a bag of saline and a tray of needles. With little experience in playing doctor, she somehow managed to get a needle into the vein of his elbow joint, tape it up, and find a pole to hang the saline bag from. She found a stethoscope and timed his heart rate in comparison to her own. His was much slower, although the panic and adrenaline may have elevated hers above normal. With nothing more she could think to do, she pulled off the boy’s shoes and let him recline in bed with a bag of fluid gradually seeping into his body, in hopes it would miraculously restore him. He was feverous, covered in sweat, and shivering uncontrollably. She managed to get him to take ibuprofen, but there was no way to know if this would help or exacerbate the problem. She tried to make him suck on lollies or chocolate, to keep his sugar up, but he refused all food. Eventually, she simply had to let him rest. When the saline finally began to take effect, he stopped shivering and fell asleep. Lara found a pillow from the next room and slept on two armchairs pushed together, always in reach of him.

  Ned woke to the sound of a distant voice. He pried open his eyes to a hazy, dark world. He lifted his head and looked around the hospital room where he now slept. Through the curtains he saw the sun had set over the unknown city. There were no lights on, not in this building or anywhere. But he still heard a voice. Someone was sobbing. It echoed down the corridor of the abandoned hospital and into his room. The soft voice cut in and out, as though gasping for air. Ned sat upright attentively, unable to detect exact words, or even what gender it was, but it was certainly human. He looked to Lara. She was asleep on a chair, wrapped in a jacket.

  He threw aside his sheets and gently lowered himself from the bed. His bare feet touched the cold floor. Still attached to a saline bag through an IV line, he took the silver pole with him and carefully emerged out into the hallway. The hospital rattled with the outside wind, wisping through broken windows and torn vents in the roof. Scattered papers blew across the floor. Doors left ajar creaked back and forth on rusty hinges. A broken light fixture swayed overhead, with live wires hanging from it. He avoided them and ducked under. The voice was still sobbing, crying, and he couldn’t tell which room it was coming from. It sounded very far away, echoing along the barren hall to reach him, and yet, from time to time, Ned heard crying behind him as well, as though there was more than one voice, as though it was trying to trick him. Paranoid, he swung and looked over his shoulder, only to see a dead-straight corridor leading into darkness. No one was there.

  I’m going crazy.

  ‘Ned.’ He spun again to see Lara standing in the doorway, yawning. ‘What are you doing up?’

  Ned wasn’t sure. He turned back to the hallway to listen to the sound again, but it was gone.

  CALENDAR

  She took him back to bed and covered his legs with the white sheets. He said he was feeling better now. He ripped out the IV needle and Lara gave him a Band-Aid to cover the pinprick hole. It was probably sunstroke, he suggested. Lara wasn’t well-read enough into medicine to come up with any other diagnosis. Maybe Moonboy’s teleportation left him with some sort of inter-dimensional motion sickness. But in case it really was Lara causing it, who may have indirectly come into contact with alien microbes while on board the cloud, she found some shower facilities and gave herself a good scrub with a bucket and sponge. She washed her hair and brushed her skin with antibacterial hand-wash until she was almost red. She redressed and came back to see Ned smiling with a lot more colour in his skin.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘Heatstroke, I bet. I had it before when I was young. My skin went red and itchy, I had horrible headaches and vomited a bit.’ He scratched his arm, but only because the mosquito bites were annoying him. Some he had scratched all the way down to a scab.

  ‘Stop that,’ Lara barked, like a mother. She sat on his bed. ‘You gave me a fright. Glad you’re okay.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her for the first time. After a pause, he looked around the darkened room, lit only by a torch Lara had left shining upwards on the bedside table. ‘Do you know where we are?’

  She nodded. ‘You’re not going to like it. We’re in Darwin.’

  Ned sat forward. ‘You’re joking.’

  Lara threw aside the curtains. The blackened city opened up to him, unlit and neglected. From his bed, he could see fragments of a war-torn, disintegrating metropolis. Being here left him with the same fears as Lara. They both knew what had become of this place; they had both heard stories of the aerial assault unleashed upon the coastline, of the survivors who were hunted and killed by the Suits, shot in the back while trying to escape or burned alive in their bunkers. Psycho led that attack, Lara explained, both to please his new rulers and for the pure satisfaction. It was not that he had a grudge against the world. He had never mentioned that he had suffered any sort of injustice or abuse which would make him hate Mankind or want revenge. He purely did it for his own fulfilment. He thought he was helping Earth progress by wiping out the species which contaminated it beforehand. This only made Ned hate him more. He couldn’t understand how one guy could do all this and feel nothing afterwards.

  ‘He’s a sociopath,’ she said. ‘It’s probably something I should’ve recognised very early on, but he hid it well.’

  ‘You were friends.’

  She shrugged. ‘We had a… connection.’ She drew the curtains again. ‘I know it was stupid coming here, but it was the closest hospital I could find. Who knows how many Suits are still roaming this place? I’m not going to be responsible for your death as well, so we’ll leave in the morning. I’ll stay up and watch out.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Dingoes? Them? What do you call them again?’

  ‘Skyquakers.’

  Lara smiled. She liked that name. Everyone seemed to.

  ‘Get some rest.’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ he said.

  He wouldn’t let her take watch on her own, so they stayed up together with the whole hospital to themselves. Lara dragged another small mattress into the room and found more pillows and blankets. There was another unoccupied room next door, but the thought of being separated frightened the hell out of both of them. So they sat together on the floor under the torch light. They ate canned tuna, stale crackers, and drank Solo. They talked for a while, but not about anything meaningful. They talked about the worst movies they had ever seen. The best New Year’s Eve celebrations. The quirkiest relatives. Somehow it comforted Ned. It felt very similar to the bonfire conversations he used to have with the settlers at Zebra Rock. All of it was perfectly superficial, meaningless, but it was the only way to keep the overhanging despair out of their minds. He felt as though if he stopped talking, he would simply break down into little pieces, crumble and fall apart, and she wanted to keep him amused for as long as possible for more or less the same reason. She knew a lot about the social aspects of the human mind, about how it coped with grief and anger, and she used every skill she had to keep him happy. So they spent most of the night huddled there on the same mattress, picking at Doritos, making small talk about things which didn’t matter to either of them anymore.

  Well into the night, or early into the next morning, silence fell. Lara was lying on her back, hands behind her head as she stared at the roof. Ned was sitting against the w
all, his legs bent over hers. He fiddled with the little circular Band-Aid in his elbow joint where the needle had been. They were both incredibly tired, but neither of them could sleep.

  Lara had now heard of all the interesting people Ned had met since he emerged from his refrigerator: Jackrabbit, the hopeless wanderer, Moonboy, the glow-in-the-dark teleporting dog, the ranger and his daughter, the settlers, and all the weird and wonderful things he had seen in between. He showed her the scars on his body where he had sustained all his injuries: cuts on his legs from running through whipping grass as the Quaker farms went up in flames, a bruise in his snuffbox where he had hit himself with a hammer whilst helping to attach a second rainwater tank to the gallery, and a collection of others which he could not explain or hadn’t noticed much until now. He claimed he knew how to grow the best pumpkins and how to jumpstart a tractor. He had almost been eaten by a lagoon monster and had witnessed herds of spectacular alien horses in the desert. He said he was only seventeen, although if he had turned eighteen already he didn’t know when.

  As for her, she softly and absent-mindedly admitted that she always knew the Quakers were coming because of some dreams she had as a child. She mentioned it so casually and received little more than a bemused hum from Ned in return. It would have been a significant revelation six months ago, but now it was nothing more than a useless fact. Lara felt her innermost secret did not hold as much weight as when she told Dylan. She supposed the novelty had long worn off.

  Every now and then, when the room was void of all noise, Ned heard sobbing. It was still echoing down the hall, calling out to him, fading softly, then rising again a few minutes later. He strained to hear what it was, but convinced himself it was the wind.

  Lara noticed his constant distracted eyes. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He got up and opened the door to the hallway again. He emerged into the dark hospital corridor and could hear the echoes of crying. Behind him, Lara appeared with the torch. She shone her beam of light down one end of the hall, then the other. There was nothing but a rustle of the wind outside and scattered pieces of a forgotten civilisation.

  ‘Do you hear something? Dogs? Suits?’

  ‘I hear crying.’

  ‘I don’t hear it.’

  ‘Shh.’

  Ned was convinced the noise was real. Lara began to listen as well, but for a long while there was nothing. Something clattered outside, but it was nothing specific. A curtain down the hallway fluttered, but it was just a breeze coming through a broken window. Everything else was still. It was only as Lara turned to go back inside that the crying rose again. She spun around to Ned, who had heard the same thing. Ned took the torch and inched forward. His bare feet were light on the cold, tiled floor. They followed the sound together, step by step. At the end of the hallway they came to a fork, with two branching corridors trailing into endless darkness either side of them. Ned was compelled to turn right, and eventually came to a plain, inconspicuous closed door. He was almost certain that the noise was coming from inside, even though it was still impossible to tell what the voice was and if it was saying words.

  He reached for the doorknob.

  ‘You have no idea what’s in there,’ Lara whispered.

  ‘What if it’s a child crying? Or someone who’s injured?’

  ‘What if it’s not?’

  Ned took the torch and held it like a club. He swung open the door and stepped inside, prepared to swing at the first thing that moved.

  The room was dark. The window was wide open and the curtains were fluttering wildly in the warm breeze. There was a bed, piles of clothes, and empty syringes on the floor. There were personal effects everywhere: a toothbrush, cigarettes burnt out in an ashtray, beer cans, vodka bottles, and a coat strewn over a chair. There was no one in the room, but there had once been. It appeared to have been a fort for a surviving squatter with some bad addictive habits. God-knew where he was now or how long it had been since he was here. His hospital room had an adjacent bathroom, where more of the squatter’s clothes were hung over the shower rails and cans of deodorant and shaving cream sat by the sink. Everything was dry, empty, and used up. He may have run out of supplies and wandered off somewhere for another fix, or he may have succumbed to any number of deaths.

  There was certainly no one crying, though. Ned searched the whole room, under the bed, but no one was here. He threw across the plastic shower curtain in frustration and pushed his hands to his head.

  ‘What is happening to me?’

  ‘Ned,’ Lara called from the room. He went back to her side, where she had found an interesting set of objects on the table by the windowsill. Firstly, she found the origin of the strange sound: there was a chunky old radio sitting idly by discarded cigarette butts, and one of the AA batteries was slightly misaligned in its slot. The connection was cutting in and out randomly, and the sound of crying Ned must have heard was the intermittent static.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was definitely crying.’

  Lara pushed the battery wholly into its place. The static rang out clearly, with a muffled, barely-audible voice in the background. She concluded it was just the radio. Perhaps Ned was hearing what he wanted to hear: a sign of human life, some sort of hope to grab on to.

  She also had something else to show him: a calendar. It seemed as though the squatter had been keeping track of the days and the months while he had been here. Ever since December of last year, he had been drawing crosses on the days as they went by. Some he had circled, quite boldly too, as if something significant had happened then. The crosses stopped in late February. The bold, circled dates occurred once or twice a month. After the last circled date, there were no more crosses.

  Ned made the joke that perhaps a woman had been living here. Lara was convinced it was something a little more significant. Why would someone squat in Darwin after seeing it become overrun if not for an immensely important reason? The squatter was tracking something, and he had been hiding here in preparation for these dates specifically.

  ‘And he had been listening to the radio,’ she added.

  ‘It was Lily,’ Ned suddenly declared.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lily, the last DJ on Earth. It’s tuned to her station.’ He snatched up the radio and tried to turn up the volume, but the batteries were running very low and the aerial was bent and unable to pick up more than static. Ned began laughing. He sat on the squatter’s bed and slapped his hand against his forehead. ‘Oh god, I’m such an idiot!’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Lily!’ he shouted. ‘She’s here!’

  He found it hard to explain and he sounded ridiculous when he tried, but he needed to tell Lara the story of Lily. He explained how his loneliness over these months was only tolerable because of this voice, this one voice which rang across the Top End and spoke to him through the airwaves. He had fallen in love with a girl that he had never met, let alone knew was real, and for some reason Lara could very easily relate. Others tried to convince him he was crazy, but he listened to Lonely Lily’s voice almost every night from Wyndham to Zebra Rock, and when the batteries ran out on his radio, he would travel enormous distances across the Ord to other farms and plantations to ransack kitchen cupboards for more. Lily convinced him that humanity wasn’t doomed yet, that there were still others out there. After all the tragedy, it was Lily’s voice which remained: still playing songs, still telling stories, still a living, breathing human. Now more than ever he was convinced of her authenticity.

  None of this seemed to have anything to do with the drug addict’s room though. He couldn’t explain the calendar or begin to wonder where the squatter had gone, but it was only the radio that mattered. The broadcaster on the other end, too muffled now to hear properly, had been begging listeners for months to come and find her at the Charles Darwin University. As in, the university of the city of Charles Darwin.

  Ned was grinning from ear to ear. ‘She’s here still, right in this city
. I can’t believe I almost forgot all about her, but she’s here!’ He held the radio as though he wanted to kiss it. ‘I never thought I’d actually find her.’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘I know everything about her!’ he cried. ‘I know her life story: where she grew up, where she went to school, her favourite music, her favourite food, even what she got for her eighth birthday. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Ned, I know what it’s like to want to meet your hero, but trust me, it never works out how you imagined it.’

  Ned looked back and forth between the radio and the calendar. He felt as though he was missing something. These two objects sat side-by-side as though they were related to one another, but he was struggling to see the connection. What did the squatter know that he didn’t? Had Lily been sending Darwinians different messages to the ones he had been listening to? Had he failed to read between her lines?

  Lara was by the window, peering through the blinds. ‘It’s almost sunrise.’

  Ned had made his decision. ‘I have to find her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One person,’ he said. ‘You told me if we could save one person…’ He held out the radio. ‘Someone has to rescue Lily.’

  LILY

  They argued until sunrise, like a child to his mother.

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘No, you’re not, mister.’

  ‘You can’t stop me!’

  Ned could not reason with her. She didn’t understand the astounding importance of Lily and what it meant to finally meet her in person. It was not just for the purpose of proving she existed to everyone who believed he had been fooled by a Siren’s song; there was something else now, something he couldn’t describe, which was drawing him towards her. They were so close to one another. He could not leave the city without first laying eyes on her, hugging her, maybe kissing her, if they had time. More importantly, Ned believed Lily, of all the humans left to wade in the sewage of this planet, possessed some sort of knowledge he lacked. It was only now that, after seeing the squatter’s calendar, he wondered if Lily’s radio broadcasts had been more than a meagre attempt to entertain the last few survivors on Earth. All this time, she had been relaying something to him, something secretly hidden in her recordings that only the right ears were meant to hear.