Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  Think, Ned, think!

  The Quaker ships that destroyed Darwin would have instantly flattened any sort of military radio tower being used to form a resistance against them, but a sweet, little, lonely girl locked in a soundproof room of an abandoned outback university couldn’t possibly pose any threat…

  Ned began smiling more and more. He felt something big coming, something awesomely devastating. Like the Quakers, he had been fooled by the innocence of Lonely Lily. She was not a DJ; she was a weapon.

  Lara didn’t want to stay in Darwin another minute, but Ned was adamant that this girl needed to be rescued for more than simply the company. By sunrise he was redressed and had the quad bike rumbling again. He sat there with both hands around the bars, fit, perky, determined to continue fighting.

  ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘You’re going after some voice you heard on a radio because your gut is telling you to? What if it’s a trap?’

  ‘It is a trap,’ he admitted, ‘but not for us.’

  Lara was reluctant to join him, but she did not want to be left wandering this city alone. With no alternative ideas on where to go now or what to do next, she wrapped her arms around Ned’s waist and he roared off, speeding out of the emergency bay and back through the twisted, demolished streets of Darwin. In the morning light, the destruction appeared so much worse. There were areas as large as football fields which had been bulldozed, bombed, or obliterated into a crater. The roads were littered with debris three metres high, forcing Ned to find multiple detours and testing the quad’s fat 4WD tyres to their limit as it clambered over and under the rubble. It looked as though a war had taken place here. Not once did they see a sign of life.

  Highway signs directed them to the city’s major university, north of the CBD, situated along the beaches of what they now knew was the Timor Sea. They drove unopposed towards the campus grounds, surprisingly unharmed by the madness that took place in the city’s centre. The university complex was comprised of three major buildings, each flanked by wide open fields, palm trees, adorned with contemporary architectural designs and Aboriginal art. Glass panels made up much of the structural exterior, very few of which were cracked or broken, and other than some scattered papers, toppled bicycles, and a fallen palm tree, the place was in a fairly stable condition. In the morning sunlight, the unsettling sound of silence swept across the school. Ned parked the quad in the centre of campus, on the lawn just outside the cafeteria. The engine cut off and they both stepped down, only to stare up and feel the lingering eyes of no one watching them.

  Despite its human abandonment, there was still life to be seen: some strange camels had ventured onto the campus lawns and were munching away at the unattended grasses and ferns. The camels were clearly mutant hybrids, crossed with something similar to a rhinoceros: horns, a slender neck, but stubby lower limbs and thick, grey skin. Their dopey faces and obvious herbivorous diets left Ned and Lara only mildly amused. They moved on, leaving the bizarre animals to graze.

  Ned was quick to find a campus map plastered to a wall. He scanned his finger down the list of faculties until he found the location of a mixing and recording studio in a building dedicated to the performing arts. He looked up. Atop a four-storey building sat an enormous dish and several aerials. It was hard to tell in the daylight, but he swore he saw a light on.

  Lara was reluctant to follow. ‘This… doesn’t feel right. I think we should leave.’

  Approaching the doors, Ned said over his shoulder, ‘You stay here, then. I’ll only be a minute.’

  ‘Ned…’

  He ignored her.

  Inside, another wall-mounted directory indicated the radio broadcasting studios were on the fourth and top floor. The elevator was useless without power, so he bounded up the staircase, three at a time, all the way to the top. He was racing himself now, picking up more and more speed with every leap. He couldn’t slow down, or else his thumping heart may overtake him and he may pass out before he made it. He rounded each new staircase without bothering with the floors beneath: they were cold, abandoned and lightless, and there was nothing in them which mattered to him.

  Outside, Lara stared up at the glass walls, hoping to see Ned’s silhouette flash by a window. She felt nervous. Being without him made her feel infinitely more alone. She was a sitting duck in a strange, foreign world. She looked around the eerie campus grounds to see the cameloceroses had disappeared from the lawn, and birds with strange wings darted across the sky with some sort of urgency.

  Then a dog barked. It frightened her so much that she almost fell over, but she turned, and there, standing on the other side of the campus, was a little black and white dog, with long, curly ears and shaggy fur. He was on his toes, tip-tapping away, not wanting to come any closer. He barked again.

  ‘Moonboy?’

  Moonboy barked once more, but it was overpowered by something much louder.

  The sound of thunder was so intense, so massive, that it made the glass walls shudder. Ned, running by them as he scaled the last of the stairs, was halted by the powerful eruption. He flinched almost. He turned to the windows, still reverberating from the blast, and could not help but to look up. He and Lara saw the same thing appear from the ether: a storm. A super cell of colossal size came twisting downwards onto the campus, onto the whole city, as though a cloudy wormhole was ripping open through time and space. Clear skies one minute, darkness the next. A powerful wind began to sweep across all of Darwin. A mass of cloud and rain swirled and hammered the sky with claps of thunder, void of lightning. Within minutes of its arrival, the whole city was encompassed within the cloud’s shadow. It hovered low over their heads, swirling, growing like a plague with arms and legs and tentacles, spreading to every corner of the city.

  ‘Shit,’ Ned panted.

  It was the biggest thing he had ever seen. The centre of this storm began to open up and form an eye. The tunnel grew outwards, creating a sinkhole through which all life could be consumed. A hurricane had arrived, the mothership of all storms. Ned looked upon it as a final screw you to his continuous out-running and out-living their every attempt at flattening him. This was their last stand, finally putting an end to his revolt against them. This was personal now, he felt. He had successfully pissed off an entire race, enough to make them waste stupendous amounts of energy on his destruction and, ultimately, the fallen girl’s return.

  Not without Lily.

  They couldn’t take him until she had been found, so he raced on, faster than before. The thunder kept clashing as he scaled the last of the stairs, tripping clumsily in haste to reach the summit. He could hear the storm roaring outside, pounding against the glass walls. Purple-pink sparks from the centre of the eye began to ignite as their alien machinery slowly powered up. The world went grey and dark, covered in a shadow more tremendous in size and power than he had ever dealt with. Along the coastline, the seas rose and crashed against the shores with angry churns, while the palm trees were swept sideways and the birds were forced to flee.

  Lara was standing beneath the storm and stared in horror at the oncoming force. Moonboy was still barking, beckoning her to come with him. She refused to move until she saw Ned reappear, but he had vanished within the walls of the building. Around her, the campus was blown with such great force that it looked as though it was rocking and quivering atop its own foundations. She lunged onto a pole in order to brace against the wind. Behind her, a palm tree was torn from its roots. It toppled, crushing an abandoned car left sitting in a parking bay. Something big was coming.

  ‘Ned!’ she screamed.

  Emerging onto the fourth floor, Ned, at last, made it to the sound studios. The doors were heavy. The walls were padded. Everything was thick and soundproof, and when he stepped in, silence instantly replaced the storm. All the chaos of the outside world vanished, leaving solely Ned with his own panting breaths. He looked around at these dark, boxed-off rooms. The sound barriers built into these walls and floors had helped keep a si
ngle girl from being beamed into the sky, and the machinery around this cocoon still hummed, as though small generators were operating in here. He knew it. He knew it. All those sceptics were wrong. She was waiting for him, for anyone; why else would she have been broadcasting her angelic voice, day and night? What else would she possibly be waiting for if not a hero?

  He checked every room and every studio. Band equipment had been abandoned exactly where their musicians had been standing. Swivel chairs were askew and tipped over. The building had taken no damage from fire or any other onslaught, meaning it must have escaped the Suits’ wrath. Lights were even on, actual lights. Something was powering this place. Someone. Someone was here.

  Behind the last door, at the end of the corridor, Lily was talking into her microphone in her private booth. Ned approached the thick door and placed a gentle ear against it. He could hear her voice, the same voice he had listened to for months, the voice which kept him happy and full of joy during the days and sung him to sleep at night. He had fallen so deeply in love with this voice, and meeting her left him both terrified and exited. Was she expecting him? Was she expecting to see anyone? What should he say when he walked in? Did they have time to fall into each other’s arms before they both evaporated into dust?

  Just to see her face, just for a second, before his inevitable end, would perhaps be enough. If we save just one person on this planet, it’ll be worth it. Lily would be that person.

  After one last breath to slow his racing heart, Ned pushed against the heavy door and entered a tiny cubicle. A microphone hung at mouth-level, a chair was sitting by a desk, surrounded by a dashboard of buttons and three large computer screens in an arc around the broadcaster. Classical coils of tape were rolling, all powered by a large generator in the corner, which appeared to have been dug up from somewhere and plugged into every bit of machinery in the room. She knew how to power her station, how to make herself heard to half the country and yet remain invisible to the Quakers. Every day, for nearly six months, she had been calling herself the last DJ on Earth, and encouraging Ned to find her and rescue her.

  Ned stared at the unoccupied room where Lily should have been. Instead of the girl of his dreams, there was nothing. He became breathless.

  ‘What? Wh – no…’

  The chair was empty. The microphone was on, but no mouth spoke into it. The tapes rolled, replaying a voice which spoke over and over, telling the same stories that Lily told, playing the same songs that Lily liked, over and over and over again, in a loop which lasted weeks, maybe months, and then would begin once more, all without a single human hand operating it.

  Lily did not exist. The voice he heard was pre-recorded. If any actual girl once did sit here, she had left this place long ago. The dust which lathered the keyboards and circuits proved it.

  Ned didn’t know what to do. He didn’t understand why. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why? Why?’ He spun around her big leather chair, as though it was all a joke, but there was still no one.

  Lily had deceived him from the beginning. In her chair, taped there, was a note explaining how and why.

  Ned, distraught and almost paralysed in anger, gently reached out and took the note, careful not to damage the tape or any part of it. He read her scribbled words. It was rather long. With every sentence, he felt Lily’s voice resonating in his head. It explained everything, things which she could not explain over the airwaves, which were too important to be said out loud. Ned suddenly saw all her reasons, all the schemes of the world unravelling. This tangled, horrible mess suddenly had purpose, and Ned felt a chain of reactions now in motion here, reactions which had been in play long before he ever switched on a radio, perhaps long before he even found himself locked in a refrigerator.

  It all began with Lily, and ended…

  … with him.

  The letter was signed at the bottom:

  Left in lieu of you.

  Or, in brief:

  LILY.

  Very quickly he came to realise how much of a genius the broadcaster was. Everything made sense now. Ned was satisfied that, despite having never met her, he could prove she, whoever she was, had once been a real person. He found Lily; he would always have that achievement to claim. What came next depended on how Ned reacted to her letter. The fact that there was a calendar in the studio, hung up on the wall and marked with crosses and circles, made the answer so much clearer.

  But the thrill of the chase was cut short by the colossal boom of thunder, and the earthquake which started afterwards. Ned had to latch onto something as he began to feel the building shake. The walls began moving, things on the table began to shift side to side, fall off, shatter and break on the ground. There was a glass wall looking into Lily’s studio, but it shattered instantly when the walls bent too far for it to handle. The cracks began to appear. The floor began to feel unsafe.

  ‘No!’ he cried. Lily’s sanctuary was being destroyed. He saw cables snap. Connections to the generator were lost. The sound cut out, and suddenly Lily died.

  Lara felt the ground under her feet shifting. She looked to the buildings and saw them begin to bend. Glass began to rain down from the windows as they shattered. The campus was disintegrating. The whole city was being blown apart, but this was not just a storm anymore. The hurricane overhead was humming with a mechanical noise, as fierce as the turbines of a thousand jumbo jets. Dust began to lift from the ground, swirling upwards into a spiral over her head. She staggered back and looked up. Above, the epic eye of the storm was sparking furiously with pink bolts. They zapped things within their reach: tall trees, the aerials of buildings, causing the air to crack with powerful thunder. The beam – the one, singular beam – had reached its maximum potential, now covering an area three times the size of the capital city.

  She stared, pale in the face, as the first demolished pieces of Darwin were torn from their foundations in broken chunks, lifted into the air, crumbling upwards into the sky. It was taking everything.

  ‘Ho – ly – shit.’

  Ned, with Lily’s letter in his hand, raced down the same staircase he came up. Around him, the building was shaking, huge cracks began to appear through the concrete, and glass was bursting from the walls at every turn. The building was falling apart; he could feel it. The sky was very, very angry. It was taking no chances this time: no fridge or body of water could save him. Nothing was going to stop their absolute obliteration of the planet and every remaining worm that had previously slipped through their fingers.

  With every bounding leap, the previous floor above him peeled away and was sucked into the sky. Colossal boulders of concrete lifted clean off and vanished into the storm, while industrial beams and electrical wiring ripped the place apart. Hurricane-strength wind was now pouring through the open gashes, while even the stairs themselves were beginning to feel loose under his feet. He cowered away from the windows as they all shattered. He ducked and slid as a metal beam crashed down from the disintegrating upper floors. He was outrunning a vengeful god; it was a race he would never win, but he ran hard. He leapt down the last flight of stairs and rolled just as multiple tonnes of debris collapsed behind him. When he burst through the doors, back onto the open campus lawn, Ned joined Lara and faced the epic finale of the Skyquakers’ wrath.

  The eye of the super cell towered over them, sparking with pink and purple bolts of lightning, and like a drain, it was sucking up the Earth from its roots. The buildings were being torn up, decaying into fragments as they became trapped within in the gravitational upwards pull of the eye. Iconic skyscrapers of Darwin were blown away like sand and were carried up into the sinkhole. The trees, the sea water, the animals, flailing helplessly in the air – the sky took them all.

  Lara was latched onto a pole, screaming at him. She pointed to Moonboy across the grassy fields of the campus. Ned knew what she wanted to do: grab the dog.

  Moonboy, frightened by the chaos, ran off. Lara ran after him, with Ned quick to follow. They ran through campus as, behi
nd them, the sky stripped the earth clean. The ground shook. The blackened clouds were screaming. The scooped-up debris shattered into dust as it neared the eye, just as Ned had witnessed with people and animals. As the buildings and the trees were taken, their foundations uprooted as if latched onto mere strings, so too did Ned begin to feel the ground beneath his feet become loose. The asphalt began to crack and pull apart. He could even feel it on himself, the upwards draft, weightlessness. He fought against it to stay grounded, making sure each and every foot hit the earth with certainty.

  ‘Moonboy! Wait!’ Lara cried. The little dog ran his heart out, but she caught up and leapt onto him, pinning the alien mutt to the grass. She spun around and cried out to Ned. She held out her hand to him, waiting to be taken away from this place.

  Ned felt the ground lifting now. His feet were running on hovering slabs of thin ice, breaking apart with every touch. He leapt down from hovering boulders of concrete as they began to rise beneath him, each bound pulling him further and further away from the crust of the Earth. He desperately reached out to Lara and Moonboy, huddled together in the storm as around them the city was swallowed into the black hole. They reached, they grabbed onto each other, but Ned was torn away. The earth beneath him, the road and the dirt and the roots, was torn up. Suddenly he was airborne, carried into the sky aboard a plank of asphalt.