Skyquakers (5 page)

Ned washed himself in the creek, soaking his armpits and
hair, and then proceeded to pack up his things.

Jackrabbit watched him pack. He sighed and repeated to him,
‘
You
ain
’
t
going to Ivanhoe.
’

‘I told you, I am.
’

‘You die,
mai
.
’

‘I
’
m going to find people.
’

‘I know where people are.
’

Ned looked up.
‘
What? Where?
’

‘Not in Ivanhoe.
’

‘You told me last night there was no one
—’

‘I know a place where some folks are setting up, south of
the ’
Nunurra
. Called Zebra Rock.
’

‘How many?
’

‘A dozen,
’
he guessed lazily.

Ned stared. ‘Why didn
’
t you tell
me before?
’

But he only shrugged. He said it was about three and a half
day’s walk from here.

Ned stood up and calculated things.
‘
I won
’
t
have enough to get me there, especially not for two.
’

‘For two?
’

‘You
’
re coming with me, aren
’
t
you?
’

‘No.
’

‘Please! You can get me across the desert. You’ve done it
before! You know where people are! Take me there, and then you can go on your
way. I won
’
t make it there on my own!
’

‘Come on,
mai
…’

‘Please! Please! What else am I meant to do? I
’
ve
been living in a goddamned fridge for nearly a month!
’

Jackrabbit gave a loud, extended moan, as though it was a
horrible inconvenience to him and his aimless travels. Finally he grumbled and cursed
something under his breath, which Ned took as a yes. The wanderer took his hat
and his stick and started walking back the way he came. Ned hoisted his pack
onto his shoulders and eagerly followed.

Hell began here.

The flat, salty crust of the Earth, scarred by the sun,
stretched before him, from north to south, and endlessly east. The hard earth
of the
Kununurra
was impenetrable and strained his
swollen ankles, and the dried-up creeks burned scars across the dead terrain.
All colour save for blood-orange had been sucked from this place, all life
abandoning it, leaving nothing worth governing over, even before the abduction.
The sharp peaks of red cliffs jutted from the sand like the molars of some
subterranean beast, and what little vegetation there was looked villainous,
prickly and twig-like, sustaining nothing but themselves in this constant
drought. To stand at the desert’s brim was like staring into a sinking pit of
quicksand from which very few were expected to emerge alive. There stood Ned.
No signs, no tracks, no shade, and definitely no water: the 30-kilometre hike
was going to be painful, but at least there was now something tangible to reach
on the other side.

They walked for hours, due east. Jackrabbit wasn
’
t
very chatty. Ned was reluctant to ask too many questions; he could tell by the
man
’
s body language as he laboured through the dirt
that he was not in the mood. He was interesting though, mysterious, complex.
There were a lot of scars on his arms and neck; long scratches, some that
looked as though they may have been knife wounds, stitched up long ago. They
did not have much to talk about anyway. They were strangers, one on a mission,
the other a nomad. Jackrabbit used his long stick to walk across the dry,
cracked earth, drawing a dotted line for Ned to follow. They journeyed in
silence.

At the stroke of midday, Ned collapsed to his knees under
the heat and the strain of his weight. Jackrabbit turned around to see how
exhausted his sweat-lathered body was. He let him take a break, although
without shade, and with nothing but warm water and small morsels of food, it
did not provide much relief from the agony of the
Kununurra
.
He looked to his wrist-bound pedometer and was shattered to see how little they
had come. Jackrabbit said he was walking too slowly. He blamed his oversized
pack. Ned refused to dump it, knowing it contained too many vital things, but
the one thing they were both lacking was food and water. There was not enough
for both of them, not at the pace Ned was going. Water, in particular, was
becoming a major worry.

Jackrabbit suggested a detour. He knew where to find
something interesting, he said, and he changed his angle slightly north. It was
worrying to go off-track, but up north it was slightly greener; more creeks to
pass by, a little more shade, and more edible bush food too. This whole area
was actually a floodplain, Jackrabbit claimed, and when the big rains came
down, the nearby river, the Ord, flooded into luscious, shallow pools. The
faint outlines of these teardrop-shaped pools were visible from a high perch.
All around them, Jackrabbit pointed out to Ned the hidden remnants of seasonal
lakes and oases which were invisible in summer. Despite his exhaustion, Ned
admired the
Kununurra
for its volatility:
desert-savannah one season, lakes and wetlands in another.
 

Three-and-a-half hours’ walk north-east took them to the
banks of the mighty Ord River, the only permanent stream of fresh water in the
whole of the
Kununurra
, running south-east towards
Lake Argyle. They stopped there to cool off under the shade of trees, refilled
their bottles with fresh water, and gave in to the temptation of Ned’s
remaining resources, being merely a can of soup and high-protein energy bars.
They crossed the Ord where it was only waist high, although to Ned it was more
so chest high, and on the other side they continued north to Jackrabbit’s
destination. They did not arrive until sunset, when Jackrabbit suddenly halted
and crouched down into the grasses. Ned followed suit.

‘Look. Walkers,
’
he said.

‘What?
’
Ned hissed.
‘
You
took me half way across the
Kununurra
just to see
them
? What the hell are you thinking? If
they spot us
—’

‘Nah,
mai
. You come with me. Got
that knife still?
’

Hesitantly, he responded,
‘
Yes.
’

‘Good.
’

Jackrabbit told him to set up camp first: dump his bags,
collect wood for a fire, get the flames going and burning hot so to make sure
there were only coals by the time they got back. They were uncomfortably close
to Quaker land, less than a kilometre away from their establishment, but
Jackrabbit was convinced they were safe enough here. In his eyes, the last
remaining humans were nothing but small, unforgotten rodents scattered about
the planet in numbers too few to be concerned with. Chasing after them
individually would waste too much time and energy. They did not care for Ned
and Jackrabbit, not the Quakers.

But Suits were different, Jackrabbit said. They were the
rat-catchers, set loose onto the empty towns and cities to smoke out the last
of the human population. They knew where to find them, where to direct the sky
’
s
beams, and they got smug satisfaction out of pleasing their new masters.

‘
But why would people
help
them? Why would they turn on us
like that?
’

‘
Dunno
. Because they
’
re
dicks, probably.
’

‘I saw one guy in Wyndham, a Suit. He was talking to them,
showing them things. How do they communicate with each other? Telepathically?
Hand signals? Do they speak English, you think?
’

‘You
wanna
see this or not?
’

They left their belongings at the campsite and headed
towards the Quakers’ farm as the orange skies turned to dusk. Jackrabbit took Ned’s
knife but also found a good palm-sized rock. Ned assumed they were going off to
hunt for some game. He was partially right.

Two small shadows weaved through the bush unseen and came to
a rocky mound overlooking a bizarre and ominous sight. The Quakers’ farm was
nothing short of an industrial-sized cattle ranch, covering a section of
flattened land consisting of hundreds of thousands of hectares. A giant
warehouse of familiar Quaker architecture stood in the epicentre of a series of
oblong fenced-off paddocks, with newly planted grasses being cared for by
integrated irrigation streams and sprinkling systems. This was the final, fully-completed
form of the establishment Ned had witnessed being built in Wyndham. The
warehouse was now operational and, according to Jackrabbit, at least two
Quakers were permanently stationed here. The white glow of electricity lit up
the interior of the building, and a series of other machines, one which looked
like a water tank, another somewhat similar to an oversized garden shredder,
were partially visible at the rear of the building, spewing out white smoke
into the air. This farm appeared to be well into production, but production of
what?

‘What are they?
’
he gawked.

‘
Dunno
,
’
said
Jackrabbit.

The paddocks surrounding the warehouses housed tens of
thousands of an animal breed that Ned had never seen before. It was some sort
of wombat-like creature: four stumpy legs under a round, furry body, little
black snouts and ears, digging about with their claws and munching on grass,
but these wombats were the size of bears. They were worryingly tall and
muscular, as though they had been fed buckets of steroids, and parts of their
faces and bodies were slightly ‘off’, such as their prominent jawlines, or the
way their back legs moved. They looked like the agglomeration of two or three
animals, with extra outlandish body parts from worlds unknown glued into place.
Despite their many similarities to animals Ned knew, their entire existence was
eerie.

‘There
’
re so many of them.
’

‘
Ahuh
.’ He nursed the rock in his
hand.

Ned paused.
‘
You expect me to eat
that
?
’

‘Yeah. Why not?
Gotta
eat,
mai
. One of these could feed
ya
for days, but you
gotta
get it on the fire before the
flies get to it.
’

Jackrabbit said they should sit and wait until it was
darker. They sat in the bushes, crouched low, swatting at flies as they watched
the stars appear one by one. Ned pointed out the Quakers when he saw them
emerge from the warehouse. They were still wearing their grey astronaut suits,
so not much of them could be observed other than their height and their hand
movements. What was uncomfortable was how much alike they were to humans in
their movements: two arms, two legs, probably two eyes too. Jackrabbit appeared
to be thinking to himself when he muttered, ‘I wonder how long it’d take for
the fucker to suffocate if I stabbed him in the tank.’

Ned was also interested in the tanks strapped to their
backs, supplying their hoods with some sort of gas.

‘Maybe they can
’
t breathe here,
’
he said.

‘Then maybe they shouldn’t have come here.’

It was cold at night without a fire, but it was their only
option if they were to remain unseen. Ned
’
s stomach
was making wild sounds by the time Jackrabbit declared it was dark enough to
proceed. The novelty of these
wom
-bears had now
faded, and now all Ned could imagine was sinking his teeth into a big chunk of
leg meat. It made him eager to get up and go, but Jackrabbit was a patient man.
He had been timing how often the Quakers emerged to check on their produce, and
when he was finally convinced it was safe, he made his move.

‘You stay here,
’
he said.
‘
I
’
ll
get one.
’

‘Why can
’
t I help?
’

‘You
’
ll scare them off.
’

Ned sat in the grasses and watched from a distance as
Jackrabbit snuck onto the property. He jumped a wooden fence and kept low,
moving slowly along the grass, attempting to get close to a grazing herd. Of
course, like all herbivores, the
wom
-bears were aware
of something foreign in their midst and kept moving in a wide arc around him.
He got himself closer into the centre of the herd, then returned to crouching
in the grass. Eventually, the sluggish beasts forgot about him and went back to
pulling grass up with their flattened teeth. When one little
wom
-bear, barely the size of a pony, ventured a little too
far from its group, it was snatched up by the man lurking in the grass and
brutally attacked. Like a crazed murderer, Jackrabbit cracked his rock over the
animal’s head again and again until it stopped kicking and squirming. Around
him, the rest of the herd scurried away, making honking noises of distress as
they waddled off to the other end of the paddock. But they were not loud
creatures, not loud enough to spark any alerts, and so Jackrabbit
’
s
kill went unnoticed.

He carried the carcass over his shoulders, its legs draping
either side of his neck, red blood seeping from the open gash in its head. He
laid it on the ground and used Ned
’
s knife to hack off the head.
Useless, he said, and the less weight to carry back to camp, the better. Ned
squirmed as he watched Jackrabbit hack through the arteries, the flesh, the
fur, and the chunky spine. On the inside, these creatures looked relatively
normal; pink flesh, red blood and white bones. He would not know what abnormal
innards would look like anyhow.

Jackrabbit carried the carcass over his shoulder, undeterred
by the excessive blood on his shirt. Ned walked behind and had to stare at the
big, red stump where its head once was. When they returned to their campsite,
the fire had now formed a large pit of red-hot coals. Jackrabbit constructed
everything, but Ned watched intently, knowing one day he may have to do this on
his own. Jackrabbit dissected the
wom
-bear into
pieces: off went the legs, the fur, the guts, although they were edible too, he
claimed. What remained where four or five large meaty pieces: shoulders, thighs
and some part of the breast. He arranged the coals with his stick and embedded
the meat where he wanted it. He made Ned fan the coals with his jacket, to keep
them glowing. After an hour, the meat was beginning to cook, and almost three
hours after that, Jackrabbit was happy it was good enough to eat. Ned was so
hungry that he burnt his mouth attempting to bite into it too quickly.

‘Slow down,
mai
. How is it?
’

‘Chewy.
’

The wombat-bear hybrid was somewhat how he imagined game
would taste like, although Jackrabbit claimed this was not like anything he had
tried before. To Ned, the black charcoal from the coals was the most dominating
flavour: the rest was simply meat and tendons.

At last, satisfied, Ned lay down by the dying coals and felt
the tiredness sinking in. Jackrabbit was nearby, hat over his face. The soft
lapping of the nearby Ord began to lull them both to sleep, and with warm coals
and fully bullies, the chilly desert night was a little more bearable.
Jackrabbit said by tomorrow night they would be on the other side of the
Kununurra
, and the next morning they would find Zebra Rock,
where the people were.