Skyquakers (33 page)

He found a vertical steel ladder and clambered down to the
lower platform. The moment his bare feet hit the floor, he was struck in the
gut by the swing of a slender steel rod. Ned collapsed, clutching onto his
aching stomach, and looked up just in time to see the second onslaught.

Psycho jammed the live end of the electric cow prod into Ned’s
chest and watched the surging volts make him twitch and scream. He retracted
his arm to stab again, but Ned rolled underneath him, leaving the prod to
strike the ground and, in turn, send a short zap up Psycho
’
s
arm.

‘
Argh!
’
he cried.

Ned was back on his feet, but only just. He lurched back
with each swing of Psycho
’
s weapon, pulling his guts in
to avoid being shocked. They danced around the brim of the beam as it hummed
pink, air blowing in their faces and fluttering Psycho’s suit jacket wildly. Ned
found his back against a wall, but managed to duck as another swing went for
his head. The prongs of the rod hit a pipe and the electrical current went back
up Psycho
’
s arm again. When he was doubled over, recovering
from the sting, Ned punched him across the face. The blow to the nose left
Psycho bleeding and dizzy. He collapsed against the wall. Both were panting.
Both were in agony.

‘Why did you kill them?’ Ned cried, doubled over. ‘Tell me
why you killed them!’

Psycho laughed.

There was an explosion somewhere on the ship, a big one.
Both were flown across the platform by the sudden jerking motion. Ned rolled
with the angle of the slanted ship. He skidded to a halt just inches before
tumbling into the gaping hole in the centre of the room. The pink light of the
beam’s outer ring blinded him, but through the gap he could see the cloud’s
undercarriage disintegrating; chunks of metal began to rain from the sky;
smoking, flaming debris clattered along the ship’s exterior and tumbled down to
Earth. The whole machine was beginning to creak and moan as it tipped to a
noticeably sharp angle. Flames erupted from various sectors, unleashing black
smoke into the sky. The exhaust system soon failed, and so the cloud-cover
which had kept the alien ship concealed behind a mirage began to retract and
expose the behemoth underneath. It was only once the vaporous cloak had receded
that the full marvel of the ship was revealed to the world bellow: a floating
city, the size of a rotating hurricane, pregnant with all of life’s creatures,
of DNA from two worlds, piloted by a race that had used this vessel to travel
immeasurable distances across the Universe for a purpose far greater than any
single human being could understand.

As unfathomable as the artificial storm was, it was not the
time to be awe-inspired by its grandeur; in mere moments this feat of
technology and engineering would come crashing down, killing everything in and
around it.

Vet knew of the other clouds, the other ships which circled
the Planet over continents and seas, all doing the same work as Engineer as
part of their
‘
great vision
’
.
The other clouds were just as large, just as heavily stocked with sleeping
cargo and mutant hybrids. None of them would come to their rescue, but Vet
still managed to get in contact with other biologists like him, and they
managed to make last-minute arrangements together before the nuclear meltdown
consumed them all. After all, if anything should survive, it should be the
natives which originally inhabited this place; they did not deserve to suffer
the consequences of his own species’ mistakes. Thankfully, his correspondents
agreed, and between them they found enough spare pods to take a vast majority
of the hibernating animals currently on board. Not all could be saved, but it
was good enough.

Vet stood alone in the warehouse, while around him the ship
jerked, rumbled, and began to fall apart. At the control bench, he powered up
the beams to extract the humans from their pods –
all
of them. The
system was overloaded as it was, causing a rapid accumulation of nuclear power
with nothing to ease the growing pressure and heat, so he needed to act fast
before the reactor blew up completely. He pushed hard on the lever, moving it
into its ‘lift’ position. A bright, pink light engulfed every capsule on every
shelf, all one-hundred-million of them, illuminating the entire warehouse with
an incandescent glow. Every sleeping human vanished into particles. Working
swiftly at the control bench, Vet was able to connect to every cloud in the
hemisphere, and they, in turn, were connected to their neighbours further out.
Vet unleashed the beams by hauling the lever into ‘drop’, but this beam was not
aimed down; it instead shot horizontally. Nuclear machines whirred. Somewhere
on the cloud’s exterior, a pink beam was shot across the horizon, carrying
within its radiance the hundreds of millions of biological specimens, large and
small, intelligent or otherwise. The beam shot over the desert, over the seas,
following the curvature of the Earth until it struck a recipient ship far, far
away. It took several minutes to fully transfer all of its matter, but Vet held
on tight, pushing down hard on the lever until his finger joints ached. When
all the energy was consumed, the beam shut off. Darkness fell upon the
warehouse. It was over.

Vet looked up and saw the room around him was now empty.
Every little pod was left with nothing more than a two-inch pool of murky brown
water. He smiled at his own success. He thanked his colleagues for their help
and said his farewell. The radio cut out short of his final words, but that was
expected; the ship was tilting now. The walls rattled. Pipes were bursting and
the smoke of raging fires began to seep through the cracks. Vet awaited death,
but a
pinging
sound awoke him. He
turned and looked up at the supercomputer, its massive digital screen looming
over him with a soft, blue glow. The programs were still running, although the
screen itself was cracked and the whole system was soon to fail with the
failing ship. Vet approached cautiously. He looked down and realised the vial
of that native boy’s blood he had inserted was now empty: every drop had been
sucked up, and from what fragments of DNA the computer had found, it had made a
brilliant genetic discovery. Sadly, with the ship’s imminent collapse, it would
never be known to anyone outside of this room.

Ned needed to get back to Earth.
Now
.

No point in thinking too much about whether or not to take
the leap: either the fall may kill him, or the eruption of the entire cloud
would most certainly kill him. While the pink light around the beam’s brim
still hummed, and the bolts of electricity still sparked, he considered now his
best chance of escaping the
Skyquakers
.

He managed to get to his feet, as shaky as his legs were,
and, with dwindling energy, he limped towards the fatal edge. He decided not to
hesitate and simply take the plunge into the pink and purple mist. His first
foot stepped up to the brim. The second took him over.

Psycho caught him by the arm, gripping him with razor-like
fingers, and managed to pull him back. He swung Ned towards him and punched him
across the face, connecting his knuckles to his lower jaw. Ned was thrown to
the ground. Psycho, grinning through the streams of blood running down his chin,
reached for the black gun in his belt. Ned looked up and kicked him in the
crutch. He gave a cry and the gun fell from his hands, skidded along the
metallic floor, and then toppled over the edge of the hole, gone.

Ned got to his feet and ran for the beam. He went to leap a
second time, but Psycho spear-tackled him from the side. The two rolled away,
kicking and scratching and ripping each other’s clothes. Ned was the first to
get up. He looked down at Psycho and hit him across the face, again and again
and again, each time with burning, raw anger. And each time, Psycho just
laughed. Ned pulled him to his feet, and the two stood there at the beam’s
edge, wind blowing about their hair, the pink, dazzling light shooting up from
their feet. Ned had him by the lapels of his suit, now battered, torn and
stained with smears of red. He held him close.

‘You’re going to die knowing the names of every single human
being you murdered,’ Ned shouted at him over the wind.

‘That’s fine, take all the time you need,’ Psycho smirked
back. Blood trickled down his nose and from his eyebrow.
‘
In
twenty seconds, you’ll be joining me.’

Ned saw the ship collapsing around him, worse now than
before. Above, there was another explosion. The alarms kept blazing. The base
of the ship was disintegrating and falling apart. Fires raged. Nuclear engines
were grinding to a halt and steaming. Psycho may be proud enough to go down
with the ship, but Ned had other arrangements. If only he had more time to gut
this bastard open and tear that smirk from his face. But he could not have both
his revenge and save Lara. It came down to a choice.

Psycho leant close and whispered through blood-stained
teeth,
‘
You
’
re out of time,
mate
.
’

Ned made his choice. He looked down. He looked back to
Psycho. Then he swung his leg, locked it behind Psycho
’
s knee, and
pulled him backwards over the edge.

They both fell.

Lara had decided it was time to depart from her cabin on the
cliff.

After spending two weeks watching the colony grow from the
ashes of Darwin, and after encountering the strange girl at the orange farm,
she felt an accumulating sense of imprisonment on the isolated beach and knew
she would have to embark for safer territory if she was to survive out here
alone. She widened her search for houses to raid for food, finding
non-perishables in small quantities, and also came across a working vehicle,
much to her surprise: a white
ute
sat parked in an unused shed seventeen kilometres west of the cabin, its back
tray laid with rolls of carpet. She saw it as a mobile home, and drove it back
to the cliff to begin packing her things.

‘Come on,
Moonboy
.’

The hybrid dog leapt up onto the trailer and lounged on the
soft shag, wagging his tail. She stroked his head and then continued to gather
her remaining supplies. She had acquired a map of the Northern Territory and
it’s roads and had planned to follow a highway to
Kakadu
,
where she knew there was shade, water, and a town, but there was no way of
knowing what was out there and whether or not they were friendly. Even humans,
or things that looked like humans, could not be entirely trusted.

Once packed, she looked back at the cabin and felt a hollow
sadness; the beach house itself was not particularly close to her heart, but
abandoning it meant she was also abandoning any hopes in finding Ned. He never
returned from the sky, never washed up on the shore, and no postcards of his
ever appeared in her mailbox, even though she had written him numerous times.
As a last salute, she wrote him a brief note saying she was off to
Kakadu
and pinned it with a magnet to the fridge. She shut
the doors but left
them
unlocked, in case he ever came
back. She said goodbye.

As she sat in the driver’s seat, the sky erupted with a
blazing pink light.
Moonboy
started howling in
dramatic hysterics. Lara leapt from her seat and stared up. There was no storm,
but there was a beam, a huge beam, that shot over her head from south to north,
crossing the ocean and disappearing over the horizon.
Moonboy
continued to bark, sitting upright, ears alert. Lara didn’t know what to make
of it. She had never seen a horizontal beam, not like that. She followed the
beam’s direction and measured its position of origin with a compass: due south.

For some reason, she thought of Ned.

She revved the engine and drove off.

They freefell for a moment, but then they were floating.
Consumed within the heavenly power of the beams, Ned and Psycho both felt their
bodies being lowered gently to the ground amidst a pink tornado. Neither could
push nor swim against the flow; they had no control where they were going or the
speed which they fell. They felt the cold air rush by them, the clouds, then a
second layer of clouds, and suddenly a great, big slab of earth appeared
beneath them.

Looking up, all Ned could see was a machine, occupying the
space where the sky should have been. It too was falling. Then it began to
burn, and the whole sky turned red.

At the tipping point, the uncontrollable pressure building
inside the cloud resulted in a nuclear meltdown. The epicentre erupted. A
circular fireball of red and white flames formed a sphere, expanding outwards
and consuming everyone and everything. The vaporising power of nuclear energy
disintegrated and burnt through the ship as though it was made of loosely-held
particles of sand. The walls caved inwards. A second Sun lit up the daylight
with blinding, white heat. Everything within the cloud was devoured
instantaneously. Those locked within merely saw a flash of red before being
reduced to ashes.

Ned was on his back, motionless. It took him a few moments
to realise he was lying in a field of long grass, on Earth. He felt paralysed.
He lay on his back with all four limbs pinned down, fingers gripping the soil.
He stayed there for a moment, panting, and watched the sky melt.

The fireball in the sky grew outwards, as if in slow motion,
expanding from a central core, melting away the mechanical storm and engulfing
everything. It quickly became too bright to look at. He shielded his eyes with
a hand and felt the heat on his palm. The explosion seemed silent as it
devoured the alien ship, but Ned’s ears were still buzzing from the fall; all
of his senses were yet to catch up. He blinked once or twice and saw spots. He
sat up in the grass and saw a blur of silver which was Psycho. He was standing
on his feet, limping through the field. He was screaming at the sky as it
burned. He, like the blast, made no sound as he screamed. He fell to his knees
in anguish as he watched his dreams, his future, all fall apart.

An invisible force blew them both away, a wave of air and
sound. Ned and Psycho were plucked from the earth and tossed back. They fell
and rolled in the grass. They lifted their heads together and stared at the
towering inferno. The ship had tilted sideways, and like the breaking segments
of a sinking vessel, they witnessed where sections as large as skyscrapers
began to tear and fall uncontrollably to the ground. When the first corner hit,
several kilometres away, it was like watching an asteroid strike the Earth: an
explosion of dust, a deafening boom, and fire erupting afterwards. The rest of
the ship began to break apart: continuous eruptions of fire tore colossal holes
through the ship, and the lesser pieces crumbled, tilted, and fell majestically
to the Earth. Each connection with the ground caused an earthquake. Geysers of
dust and rock flew hundreds of metres into the air. The sound was incredible.

They both had to run. The bulk of the ship was coming down
directly over them. A hurricane of metal. An endless shadow, expanding as it
neared.

When Ned
’
s hearing and other senses
finally returned, his body was bombarded with the sights and sounds of a
battleground. His heart beat with the full force of adrenaline, forcing him to
pick up his feet and run. He and Psycho were together, sprinting through the fields
as around them the sky fell. The explosions were now directly overhead,
shooting comets of steel at them from above, crashing into the sand and forming
craters large enough to flatten houses. But no matter how fast they moved, the
ship continued to loom closer. It became more and more difficult to outrun the
shadows. Ned simply kept his legs moving, his heart pumping, his eyes focussed
directly ahead. Psycho kept looking over his shoulder.

Eventually the shadows caught up. Dust blanketed everything,
until eventually they were running blind. Neither Ned nor Psycho saw the thing
which eventually crashed down in front of them, only that it was impenetrable.
The force it unleashed as it struck the Earth blew them off their feet. The
dust buried them.

It was some time later when Ned woke, gasping. He was still
on Earth. He was buried, but not crushed; his frail body had mostly been
shielded by a roof of fallen metal debris, while scattered around him lay a
field of glass, steel poles, and chunks of things. He pushed them away and
wriggled free. He crawled on his stomach until he found a pocket of air where
he could sit upright. Everything was on fire. Electrical cables sparked
overhead. There was the strong stench of petrol in the air. Ned’s skin was burnt,
cut, and bleeding
,
particularly
his leg, which had suffered a deep laceration from his knee
to his ankle. He shook glass shards from his hair. His bare feet looked to have
been pulled from a shredder, but at this time he felt nothing.

Ned was not the only one who had survived. He could hear
moaning and crying. It sounded desperate, like the last pants of a dying
animal. Ned tried to see through the dust, following the sound. He managed to
limp
through the mess. His ears were still ringing, but
he recognised a human voice. It could only belong to one other.

When Ned found Psycho, he didn
’
t know what
to make of him. Not all of him was there. Part of his leg was missing, leaving
only a bloody stump and torn silver pants. His face was covered in such
gruesome burns that he was hardly recognisable as a human; he looked more like
a partially-melted plastic mannequin, a fake model of what was once a living,
breathing, rational human being. All that was left of him was a twisted mess.
The stump of a body was still alive. He made these gurgling, wailing noises,
choking on blood as it dripped from his mouth.

Ned stood there for a while and watched him. Psycho tried to
reach out a hand. Many fingers were broken and twisted in different directions.
He cried for help. Ned could not think of any way he could help. In fact, he
considered doing very much the opposite and leaving him to rot. It would be a
distasteful justice, but he deserved little more. Ned wanted to sit here and
watch him until he too collapsed dead from exhaustion. He wanted this coward to
live and breathe and feel pain for as long as Ned had. There was no way in hell
he would extend a hand to him. After a few desperate reaches, Psycho realised
that too, and began trying to move himself instead. He tried to drag his body. Ned
felt sick watching.

There was a black gun lying amongst the rubble, left beside
a Quaker’s hand,
crushed
under ten thousand tonnes of
steel. Ned did a very kind thing that day. He went over and took the handgun
from the dead alien. He put his finger on what appeared to be the trigger and
aimed it down.

Psycho gargled,
‘
Wait
—’

Ned shot him in the head. It was quick. He then dropped the
gun and walked away.