The nights were still lonely and quiet. The stars glistened without a shred of smog or pollution to dampen their glow. Nature’s sounds rang out, but no human voices spoke, no aeroplanes flew overhead, nothing moved which shouldn’t naturally move. From her castle on top of the cliff, Lara began to understand what it must have been like for those few lucky ones to step out from their bunkers and see the dramatic loss of life that day. She knew there had to be others like Ned. Even if the beams had successfully captured 99% of the Earth’s population, that would mean 70 million people were still unaccounted for. The statistics made her certain that she was not alone out here, but it was still not very comforting when all she had was an unfortified cabin and a cowardly alien dog.
Subsequent to food, she thought of protection. Ned had lost his gun when they first arrived here, and finding another would surely be impossible: this country had long ago abolished such artillery, and even the settler who had found the stash of weapons Ned once carried only did so after months of ransacking. Isolation was her only defence mechanism, but she did attempt some primitive measures: the bush and mangroves offered her many long, thin branches, which she began to twiddle into sharpened spears with a kitchen knife. She tried to use these to catch fish, even threw one at a blue-feathered pelican hybrid, but it flew away mockingly with ease. She kept her spears around the house in strategic places, in case something tried to come through the doors, or clamber up onto her balcony. Other than birds, mosquitoes, and another curious possum hybrid, nothing ever bothered her. If there was still electricity, this cabin would light up like a massive, glowing beacon on the edge of the cliff, signalling to any possible survivors that she was here, as well as attracting bloodthirsty dingoes and Psycho’s army of mindless zombies. Without light, night and day went by without any cause of alarm, with no imminent threats visible in the sky or on the ground. She felt safe with Moonboy, but at times, lonesomeness dominated. Talking to no one except for a dog made her feel as though her sanity was slipping away, so she decided to start writing things down. She had always speculated about keeping a journal, perhaps even a historical account of the world’s end as it progressed, but she struggled to find where to begin. She didn’t have a book, but she did have postcards from the petrol station back at Lee Point. These picturesque mementos depicted Australian scenery, beaches, sand dunes, dolphins, penguins, bushland, and the Harbour, of course, and although they were not large enough to transcribe history, they were enough to capture her fleeting thoughts.
She found a pen in a kitchen drawer. She sat under the stars, basking in Moonboy’s green glow, and wrote postcards to Ned, the way Ned wrote to his mother.
Dear Ned,
I hope you’re okay.
I miss you.
-Lara
Ned,
You were are a hero to me. You saved my life. I owe you mine.
I know one day you’ll come back.
-Lara
Dear Ned,
Today I saw these lizard things, like blue-tongues, but with echidna spikes all down their spines. They were weird. Moonboy barked at one as it walked along a branch. It just kept walking. Haha! I love this dog.
-Lara
And when the frustration really set in:
DEAR PSYCHO,
ONE DAY YOU WILL DIE A HORRIBLE, SLOW DEATH
AND NO HUMAN WILL HELP YOU.
ROT IN HELL
-LO
Like Ned did, she left the postcards in secret places all around her. She wedged one into the nook of a tree by the ocean. She placed one in the cabin’s mailbox at the end of the dirt driveway. She even folded one into a bottle and tossed it from the rock pools, allowing the gentle current to take it out to sea.
10
COLONY
There had been a few storms lately. The clouds swirled and rumbled as they usually did when they were on the move, blocking out the sun and bringing a cold wind across the northern coast. She kept inside the cabin, curtains sealed and Moonboy close by, until they all passed. The seas churned at the base of her cliff, crashing against rocks, and birds fled in the skies, but the cloud was not chasing anyone or anything; it was merely passing through.
Emerging from another storm, Lara went out into the yard to collect some of her scattered clothes, which had been blown from the balcony by the wind. She noticed a beam, a pink column of light, striking the earth in the east where Darwin once stood. She went back inside and collected a pair of binoculars from the cupboards, then went up to the upper decking to view the blasting light. This was the fifth in three days. The beams were wide in diameter, and shone for long periods of time – thirty minutes or more, some up to two hours. Ned had described these once to her, and called them ‘building beams’; as opposed to the beams which captured people and sucked them up into the sky, building beams carried material from the cloud back down to the ground. With them, Skyquakers had begun erecting farms and warehouses all across the country, growing their mutated crops and rearing enormous herds of hybrid animals. He had warned her that the Quaker farmers were often heavily protected by Suits, but they were almost always situated in rural areas, close to rivers or dams, in regions where farms had been previously established before their arrival. So, why Darwin? Agriculturally, it offered very little, but the city had become the epicentre of a number of bizarre, mostly devastating, events, giving her reason to believe the Quakers saw this place as highly significant. Historically, Darwin had served as a major communications intersection between the world’s allies during wartime, hence it became a major port for military submarines and fighter jets. The Quakers may have found a similar use for the northernmost capital. They were building a colony.
For almost two weeks, Lara had watched the flattened city progress into a colossal engineering project. On a clear day, she could see them working from her deck: machines like bulldozers and steamrollers were being used to level the ground, and dozens of warehouses and solid towers, perhaps radio stations, jutted up from the earth like silver matchsticks. Moonboy did not like them. He barked whenever they were near, forcing Lara to lock herself inside and try to calm him as a mechanical storm passed overhead. Inside, she felt the same dread as the dog. With each passing day, the colony grew larger, and more and more beams were being summoned to import materials from the sky. She imagined that space would one day house millions of the freaks; soon they’d be walking on the surface, designing their own cities, raising families, forming states, living off the land as they had reconstructed it.
She said to the sky, ‘You wouldn’t like to see this, Ned.’
Her water and soft drink supply ran out four days ago, but thankfully she had found a new source. Initially she thought of digging, but any bore water she found would be too salty and contaminated with all sorts of junk. There were no streams or lakes which she could spot from her post, and eventually she resorted to an orange farm two hour’s walk from the cliff. The farm had enormous rainwater tanks and a small manmade reservoir, filled from the last rainy season and left untapped, so she filled up two two-litre plastic bottles a day and carried them all the way back to boil.
She also ate a lot of oranges, somewhat incessantly, as though being by the sea on poor morsels of food would bring about some sort of scurvy. The oranges had overgrown the plantation to the point where they were breaking the branches and causing the trees to bend. Many had dropped to the ground to be left for the flies and the mutant birds. She took a basketful home with her everyday to keep them from rotting, but the vitamin overload did more harm than good once the bouts of diarrhoea set in. She became ill for two days and could do nothing but lie in bed and moan. She had a dirty bucket next to her on one side and boiled tank water on the other, but the dehydration was overwhelming in the humidity and the heat, and it became impossible to eat anything. Moonboy was concerned. He would lie at her feet, his little alien nose on her ankle, and simply wait for her to get up. She wished he had the power to understand her. Go get help, boy! And he’d vanish, only to r
eturn moments later with a doctor he had dragged with him from Sydney or Tokyo or New York.
On the third day, she felt well enough to sit upright. She went to the bathroom to wash herself and managed to catch a glimpse of her naked form in the mirror. What she saw was a skeleton. Her cheeks had sunken inwards, her eyes too, and her limbs looked frail and twiggy. When she breathed in, every rib could be seen, protruding from under her skin. The crests of her hip were visible on both sides, and her knees looked like misshapen bulges half way down her stick legs. She was in the worst shape she had ever been.
The only thing that was going to save her was water and better food, but there was very little of either left in the cabin. The cupboards were bare. The rice had all been cooked and every can was empty. She couldn’t stand the sight of another orange, so she threw them off the cliff’s edge and into the bushes. She decided to go back to the orange farm to search for something more sustainable. In her state, under the scorching sun, the walk took her more than three hours. She stumbled down the same long, dusty roads that she and Ned had ridden on the quad bike not long ago; she could still see the tyre tracks they had made while they celebrated the wild wind in their hair and the brief moment of joy their togetherness had given them. The tracks made her sad to look at, so she brushed them away with a swipe of her feet and the sands buried the memory.
Before Lee Point, a dirt road veered west, taking her towards the lonely orange farm in the middle of nowhere. She was always on the lookout for dingoes and other moving things in the bushes that flanked the roads. She had one of her sharpened spears with her, in case she needed protection, but out here the world was flat and dead; this was the edge of the bushland and the beginning of the unforgiving desert, and neither offered her any shade, water, or sense of wonderment. The Top End was harsh and hellish. She was a dust-lathered vagrant in a dying world, weakened to her bones, her mind torn by lonesomeness and insanity. There was that constant pain throbbing in her chest: guilt, shame, unpaid debts.
A dozen dead for me.
He grinned as he shot them all.
A dozen dead for me.
She had too much time with her own thoughts.
From the dusty road, she walked onto the abandoned plantation. Acres of orange trees yawned out before her in their thousands. With her two plastic bottles, an empty one in each hand, she weaved through the trees, all neatly lined and overgrown, towards the little house in the distance and the two giant rainwater tanks connected to the gutters. She carried an empty backpack, planning to fill it with food from the farmers’ cupboards, if there was anything left.
She paused when she heard giggling. She stopped and scanned the trees with careful eyes. Giggling? She heard it again, followed by voices, young voices, talking to each other.
Lara crouched down under a tree and shuffled forwards. Through the rows, she could see someone walking around. She concealed herself beneath the overhung shrubbery and watched in terrified silence as two girls came skipping through the oranges, holding hands. One girl was human, the other wasn’t.
The older girl, the human one, was dressed in jeans and a flannelette top. She looked about sixteen. Her brown hair was tied back. She looked a little dirty, a few smudges on her clothes and dirt lining her boots, but otherwise she was fit, well, and freshly bathed. The only striking thing about her was a scar on the back of her neck. Lara instinctively touched her neck, where she too had a bump and a scar forming there. The identity of the girl was obvious then: she was not a Suit, but a prisoner, except there were no chains on her, nothing restraining her, nor did she look as though she was forced to be in these fields. In fact, the girl was laughing and smiling. She was holding the hand of a Quaker child in a gas mask and a silver body suit. They were playing together.
The teenager and the Skyquaker were skipping through the trees joyfully. The human was pointing out the oranges. She took a ripe one down and peeled off the skin with her fingers. She bit into the flesh and made a condescending, ‘Mmm!’ sound. The Quaker girl took the orange and examined it. She briefly took off the facemask connecting her suit to her gas cylinders (an act Lara didn’t know they could do) in order to bite into it, then she covered herself again and savoured the taste. She said in her Quaker language, in words Lara could understand, that it was yummy.
What the hell was going on?
The two skipped off together between the trees to explore the wonderful world around them. Lara took the opportunity to shuffle out of her hiding place and move on. She was crouching now as she darted from tree to tree, nearing the house. Other voices came into earshot, more Quakers, adults. A party of five, all in chemical suits and gas masks, were conversing under the patio of the farmhouse, admiring the farm and contemplating what to do with it. One Quaker had a Suit standing by him, a man in his late fifties with white, wispy hair, firmly slicked back, his silver tie done up neatly, and not a speck of dirt on his leather shoes. The old man stood behind his master and kept a careful eye on the free-roaming human girl. She listened to them for a while as they overlooked maps drawn up of this region. These Quakers were more or less agricultural scientists, from what she could gather. They discussed the idea of putting a warehouse here and setting up some of their hybrid fruit crops. They were intrigued by the native’s house, built with wood and bricks, furnished with the strangest oddities and contraptions inside, but it did not appeal to them much as a suitable dwelling: the doorways were far too small for their fully-grown, two-and-a-half-metre-tall physiques. The home would have to be demolished to make way for an iso-pneumatic warehouse where the farmer and his daughter could live safely on the surface of the Planet.
Colonisation.
Lara snuck by them to the rear of the farmhouse. She acted quickly to tap as much water as possible before making a mad dash out of there. She impatiently watched the water lines of each bottle reach the top. With furious hands, she twisted the tops back on and began packing them into her backpack, but she was stopped mid-way by a voice calling out, in English.
‘Hey.’
She spun and saw the teenage human girl standing there, utterly baffled. She saw what Lara was doing. She looked around her, confused as to where she had come from. Lara stood motionless, terrified of what she would do. She was not a Suit, so she was not brainwashed into obedience like Psycho and the others, but she was well-conditioned enough to agree to be a Quaker’s nanny.
The girl noticed the scar on the back of Lara’s neck. She touched her own, reminding herself of what was once there.
Lara leapt forward and whispered, ‘How did you get out?’
‘They let me out.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘I can’t say. Please, I know you’re not like them. Can you get me food?’
She looked nervous. She kept checking over her shoulder, but her supervisors were distracted, discussing soil and rainfall. She turned back. ‘I can’t.’
Lara understood, so she packed up her things to leave.
‘Wait. If you go back out there, they’ll kill you.’
‘I know.’
‘Then, stay.’
She stared at the girl as though she was a moron. ‘Why?’
‘Because they’ll feed you, and you get to live out here again instead of sleeping for the rest of your life. I even get my own room. Look it’s…’ She touched the back of her neck again. ‘It’s not that bad.’
Lara zipped up her backpack. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
11
ANIMAL
Captain sang old shanties to himself as he pissed in the corner where he was chained. He then dabbed the puddle with his hands and rubbed the clear fluid over his body, under his armpits, even on his face.
Ned was sitting against the opposing wall of the makeshift cell, his ankle chained to the pipes in a similar fashion to Captain’s. His face was bruised and dried blood covered his shirt. One of his wrists had lost all f
eeling, suggesting it was fractured. His lower jaw ached to move and his stomach had been in agony for too many days to count. There was a bowl of mushy food in front of him, but he was never hungry anymore.
He asked the Quaker, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Uh… relieving. Onto my body.’
‘Why?’
‘So zhey think I am still… uh—’
‘Crazy?’
‘Lots of crazy.’
Ned gave a brief smile. Captain continued singing to himself, bathing in his own filth, rubbing urine into his grey whiskers and all over his naked torso. Ned asked what he was singing. He told him it was an old patriotic song, like a national anthem. He asked if Ned’s type had an anthem and he nodded, but he was too tired to sing it.
Ned wrapped his arms around his stomach and doubled over. ‘I feel sick.’ He fell to his side and curled up on the hard floor.
Captain paused and took a moment to admire the native. They had both been in this jail for a while now, prisoners aboard the floating cloud. Barely fed. Often beaten. Captain did nothing as he watched the bossy one harass the native for hours every day. Each time he would ask the same questions, and each time Ned either refused to answer or claimed he didn’t know. During moments when he was most in pain, being electrically prodded or having his wrists twisted until they snapped, he gave his tormentor brief specks of information, but nothing which painted the portrait Psycho wanted to hear: there was a beach, a hospital, a pack of dogs, he said; he hadn’t seen the girl since the massacre at Zebra Rock. She went one way and he went another. He didn’t know anything about her except her name. Psycho didn’t believe him. He often accused Captain of playing a part in this game, keeping the boy quiet over his lost child, but the old coot would merely start singing or ranting on about something inconsistent, to the point where Psycho would give up and leave for another day.
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