Skyquakers (10 page)

Of course,
Moonboy
was never a
hassle, never an inconvenience, and never posed as any sort of threat to the
safety of the settlers. He spent his days catching flies and following Ned. He
sometimes disappeared and reappeared in ways Ned was yet to comprehend, but he
was as affectionate, as curious, and as loving as any normal dog.

If Ned was the baby brother, and
Moonboy
was the family pet, then naturally Elizabeth and James adopted the roles of
mummy and daddy. Technically Elizabeth was still in charge of her students, and
they still called her Dr Lizzie
in her presence, but as for
James, he had lived a bachelor life in Darwin until now; eleven kids and eight
farms were not what he expected to inherit. As far as the students knew, the
two – biologist and diving instructor – were
‘
old friends
’
,
but it was a bipolar love-hate relationship. At times, the students heard them
screaming and shouting at the top of their lungs in the fields, or crashing
pots in the gallery kitchen. Other times they saw them entangled by the
fireplace, keeping warm from the downpour. They were certainly sleeping
together, but as parents do, they were very evasive of the topic and made sure
that none of the kids ever heard or saw them. Whether they were actually in
love was entirely irrelevant; for now, the sex was therapeutic, a way to
release tension after a hard day
’
s work or another emotional
breakdown, or simply because they needed it.

Ned liked Dr Lizzie more than James. She was extremely fit,
the fastest runner on the baseball team, a hard thrower too. She was a team
leader, whose students looked up to her for encouragement and orders. She was
also the nanny, the nurse, the therapist, and the bedtime storyteller. She had
dived off of almost every coast from Monkey Mia to the Great Barrier Reef, and
told magnificent stories of the crystal waters of Thailand and Costa Rica. She
had hiked through the thickest jungles and wadded through wetlands and into
mystical caves of far-away worlds, looking for rare algae or some kind of sea
cucumber. She had never had a desk job and never planned to stop adventuring
into the deepest oceans of the world. She was engaged to be married once, which
she let slip accidentally one night after four glasses of wine, but it didn
’
t
work out.

Red-eyed James was not fond of Ned or
Moonboy
,
nor did he enjoy his days at Zebra Rock. He was a bit of a
slavedriver
in the fields, telling the students to keep digging and picking if he saw them
slacking. Despite the dominant
‘
chief of the village
’
persona he was attempting to adopt, the students all hailed Elizabeth as
their queen and much preferred to take orders from her. But James, over the
months, went through short periods of insanity-driven tyranny. He was
incredibly watchful of people’s food intake, as though they had to ration the
plentiful fruits of their labour, and sometimes he
’
d
confiscate an electrical device, such as an iPod or a digital watch, claiming
it needed to be destroyed so that it wouldn
’
t set off
‘alien radars’. This happened to Ned
’
s radio, and he screamed and
fought with James for his right to keep Lily until Elizabeth finally returned
it to him. He was arrogant and invasive of personal space: three times he told
Michael and Violet to go to their beds after catching them sitting together on
the veranda of the gallery. They only did so because they were too tired to
argue.

Elizabeth refused to let James
’
personal
insecurities dominate the family, but she understood his frustration with the
world. She would try to counsel him, but it would only end in yelling. When he
was at the end of his rope, he would go behind the gallery and have a
cigarette, and Ned could hear him from his bed inside, grunting and snorting
profanities, most of which were aimed at
Skyquakers
.
He kept preaching about how
‘
his
’
country
was being invaded, that this was ‘his’ land they were taking, ‘his’ people and
‘his’ freedoms. Once or twice, Elizabeth caught James talking to a few of her
male students, Andrew and Ned among them, about how they needed to start
taking action
. He wanted guns, and he
knew some of these farms were packing rifles to hunt foxes and rabbits. He
wanted to head back to the Ivanhoe dam, maybe even all the way back to Darwin,
and do some damage to the invading forces.

‘They
’
re just fucking farmers,
’
he grunted.
‘
What have they got, huh?
Shovels? Glow-in-the-dark sheepdogs? Why should we be living like prisoners in
our own country? This is
our
home. They came
here
to pick a fight
with
us
. We have every right to fight back. If we don’t, who will?
’

Elizabeth despised this kind of talk, and would drag James
away if she ever caught him.

‘How dare you brainwash these kids with your moronic ideas,
’
she snarled.
‘
What do you think they are?
Soldiers? They
’
re
students
, for God
’
s
sake!
’

‘Not anymore,
’
he sneered.
‘
We
need to teach these kids some discipline. They need to know how to defend
themselves. They will
come back for
us one day, Liz. Those Suits will come back with flamethrowers and guns and
they will
murder us all
.
’

‘I will
not
let you put a gun in a child’s
hand and send them off into a
war we can’t win. Have you wondered why we haven
’
t been
disturbed in months? It
’
s because we haven
’
t
caused them any trouble. If we show them that we are, in any way, a threat,
they will
destroy
us.
’

But James relentlessly hammered the fear of invasion into
them all:
‘
They
’
re taking our land. They
’
re
growing their hybrid cattle and bird freaks. That means there will soon be
billions of them. Once they establish enough farms, grow enough food, the rest
of them will come. They don
’
t just want the earth and the
water; they want the whole bloody planet.
’

At the beginning of March, the heavy summer rains stopped.
It was still very warm, creating a humid atmosphere along the Ord, but with the
dreaded dry season on the horizon, the settlers prepared for the droughts. They
had to keep careful watch over their water tanks and the flow of the river in
order to monitor and predict what type of season was ahead; if Zebra Rock was
to become their permanent residence, they may as well start preparing months –
years – in advance.

While food was still plentiful, the settlers had had to
resort to vegetarianism over the past three months for obvious reasons: the
cattle, the birds, and all native wildlife larger than a spider had long ago
vanished, leaving a blank slate on which the Quaker farmers could begin anew.
Besides Sarah, the only true vegetarian, the rest never quite adjusted to it.
Almost every night they would sit around the fire and dream about bacon or a
greasy cheeseburger. Once in a while they caught a barramundi from the Ord
using a catchment system Tim had engineered from scratch, but it was not
frequent enough to rely heavily on. As a result, the settlers could not keep up
their physiques and, by the end of summer, they found themselves quite
lethargic and severely lacking in muscle mass. In the mirror they could see
their cheekbones, and the pallor of their skin gave them a hollow, ghost-like
appearance; their clothes were much baggier on their frames, belts needed new
holes. It was becoming more difficult to muster the same energy and enthusiasm
as before; most preferred to sleep now instead of play baseball, and lifting
the same weight in a wheelbarrow had become twice as strenuous. James was the
first to say it out loud, while the rest pretended not to notice:

‘This isn’t working. It just isn’t enough.’

They had to stay fit, he argued, in order to be prepared for
whatever dangers tomorrow might throw at them. The settlers knew what this
meant, but they didn’t want to imagine it: they needed alien meat. But what was
out there and how much of it was edible?

Every week since the storm, more and more hybrid animals had
arrived on the planet, replacing the native wildlife, the cattle, even the
crops, with
transmutated
copies. Sometimes they looked
very similar to the species they replaced, like
Moonboy
,
and other times they looked remarkably foreign. Along the Ord and across the
Top End, the hybrids were becoming more and more noticeable, in greater numbers
and variations. The birds in the sky, the rodents along the banks of the river,
even some of the flowers beginning to bloom; they were all not from this Earth.
This bizarre and gradual shift was both daunting and beautiful. One morning,
from the peak of a red cliff, Ned was drawn by Andrew’s eager gesture to look
down onto the desert plain below. Contrasted against the rising sun, a herd of
hundreds of quadrupeds, like horses, but with the long, thin beaks of ibises,
were slowly crossing the plain towards a watering hole. It stirred up many bizarre
emotions at once.

The biologists were intrigued by the emergence of the
hybrids, constantly trying to determine the underlying scientific relevance of
it all. The students frequently discussed the possibility that this was all
part of a global biological experiment, like some sort of planetary petri dish,
or a universal Noah’s Ark, while others wandered if it was for the purpose of a
larger colonisation plan. Very few of the hybrid replacements were being
actively farmed by Quakers in their warehouses; most were released into the
wild to multiply and thrive, so it was difficult to interpret the Quakers’
motives. Tim, the family scribe, had a growing stack of sketch books wherein he
had begun an encyclopaedia of the hybrids, drawing them from multiple angles,
estimating their size and weight, and cataloguing them to the best of his
knowledge using current taxonomic references. He wanted to go further, which
meant capturing them, dissecting them piece by piece, but Elizabeth did not
want her students to stir trouble. She encouraged them to leave everything
alone; there was no telling how dangerous these things were, what hidden fangs
or poisons they harboured, or what diseases they carried.

By observation, the settlers assumed the animals being
farmed by the Quakers were edible at the very least. For what other purpose
would they be breeding them in such tremendous numbers if not to feed
themselves? The biology students knew the basic facts of evolution: all
intelligent species had emerged from carnivores. If they were to experiment
with their palates, it would be safest to begin with one of those bovine- or
pig-like ungulates; one juicy thigh could easily feed them all for days and
keep their bodies from wasting. Ned confirmed the farmed animals were in fact
edible when he mentioned Jackrabbit’s story of the
wom
-bear
calf. Three months on, he was more than prepared to try it again.

The family voted whether they should consider following
Jackrabbit’s suit and making better use of what resources were around them, not
excluding the produce directly from the Quaker farms. Only Elizabeth was wary,
otherwise it was unanimous.

‘You want to begin stealing from them,’ she said bluntly,
‘like thieves.’

‘I have a better idea,’ James said. ‘We take what we need,
and we burn the rest.’

He wasn’t kidding either. James, whose face was still
scarred and whose patched eye remained blinded after the pain he had endured,
was growing frustrated at their stagnant lifestyle. If they were going to start
breaking into Quaker farms, he wanted something juicer to come from it than
just meat: he felt compelled to leave a smouldering crater where their
warehouses stood, mounted with a flag of Planet Earth on top, leaving no
survivors. He saw this as another example why the family needed guns, but he
was yet to find any in the surrounding homes.

‘We don’t need guns,’ Elizabeth reminded him, firmly.

‘I can build a rabbit trap,’ Tim said softly. ‘Maybe we can
just make a big cow-sized one.’

‘What about a spear?’ someone mentioned.

Andrew slapped his knee and nudged Michael in the ribs. ‘I’m
so
making a bow and arrow!’

‘Out of what? Shoelaces?’ Violet chuckled.

A flurry of chatter emerged of creative ways the family
could progress from gatherers to hunters, each student proposing their own insight
on how to kill, carry, and cook up an alien carcass of meat.

James halted the fun when he stood and hissed, ‘You think
this is all a game? You think this is funny?’

‘Go have a smoke,’ Elizabeth said, tossing him his lighter.

That night, the settlers were woken. Something big and
powerful, like an earthquake, or an explosion, shook them from their dreams.

Sarah’s terrified scream was the first thing Ned heard. He
sat up from his mattress, laid down across the gallery floor with the others’.
Everyone was on their feet within seconds.

‘Blimey!’ Munroe roared, stumbling in from an adjacent
bedroom.

‘Did you hear that?’ Michael asked Ned.

‘Yeah.’

‘What was it?’

James peeked out the window. ‘There’s nothing out there.’

‘A storm?’

‘Nothing.’

Sarah was rattled. She grabbed on to Dr Lizzie. Michael held
Violet’s hand.

‘What if it was a bomb?’

‘We would see fire,’ said Tim.

‘A very
distant
bomb.’

‘Maybe it’s the air force!’ Andrew cried. ‘Finally they’re
nuking these dudes!’

‘Shut up, Andy,’ Elizabeth hissed, feeling Sarah’s grip
tighten.

James shut the curtains. ‘We need to move.’

‘What?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes! I’m not taking any chances. A storm could arrive here
any second. Pack the truck, Munroe.’

‘Huh?’ the old man grumbled.

‘We’re leaving in two minutes,’ James ordered. ‘Everyone—’

Tim stepped up. ‘Wait! I have a better idea.’

‘A better idea than
getting
the hell out of here
?’

The shy boy nodded. ‘I made us a Quaker-proof bunker.’

The settlers were confused, but they followed him quickly to
see his creation. He had set it up in the basement of Munroe’s gallery. The
group descended the wooden staircase to see nothing but a small room, concrete
floors, brick walls. Tim pointed up to the roof to show them his masterpiece: a
plain two-by-two-metre blue tarp, waterproof, strung up by all four corners to
make an indoor canopy. The tarp was holding in a pool of water, only inches
deep. The pool sat above them, and at first it seemed moronic to think it could
combat an intelligent storm from another world, but gradually the ingeniousness
of it all sunk in: beams could not penetrate water. The biologists had
witnessed this first-hand. The tarp of water was mimicking those same
conditions which kept the biologists from being captured whilst scuba diving off
the coast of Darwin.

‘You’re kidding,’ James said. He looked to Elizabeth. ‘Do
you really want to take this chance?’

Elizabeth knew they did not have a choice: they were all too
weak, too malnourished, to run. All they could do was hide and hope for the
best.

‘Evolution 101,’ Tim whispered to Ned. ‘Herbivores hide,
carnivores thrive.’