Skyquakers Read Online Free Page A

now
uncomfortably small. He had seen every inch of this place, trekked the beaches
ten kilometres in either direction, explored every
opal shop and the backrooms of every grocery. He expected the houses and
buildings would start falling apart soon, and although he logically knew it
would take several decades before the cracks would begin to show, he still felt
as though such a time was not too far away.
    There were instances when Ned truly believed he had gone
insane. One morning he got up, got dressed in his white shirt, knee-high grey
socks and leather shoes, and went to school. He sat at his desk, took out his
books, and started to do some homework which was now several weeks overdue. He
peeked in the teachers’ drawers for their textbooks, as though trying to
establish what lessons he should have caught up with, then at lunch time he
went to the gymnasium and played basketball against himself, commentating his
every pass and goal as though a crowd were cheering him on. Then at three, he
packed his things and went home again. Never in his life did he believe he
would miss something as mundane as school in the aftermath of human existence.
    At the more lawless end of the spectrum, he decided to drink
beer (properly) for the first time, but it was grosser than he thought, so he
drank scotch instead. That was a bad night. It only made him depressed and angry.
He spent most of that evening on the roof of his house, the radio beside him
playing muffled music, where he drank and sang and danced along to Lily’s songs
with such enthusiasm that he almost toppled off the roof entirely. He made a
lot of racket that night, more than he had dared to ever make while an
omnipotent weapon was still searching the globe for lost creatures like him,
but tonight the skies were clear, the moon was bright, and the blackened town
was his kingdom to rule from above. Except, of course, it was all a farce, and
when the alcohol began to really take effect, the shadows of abandoned
buildings began to look as though they were sinking further and further beneath
him, and Ned, a king of dust, realised he was becoming more detached from
reality with every passing day. He looked to the sky, the stars and the moon,
and began to yell and scream at the universe. He threw an empty bottle at it,
only for it to fall lazily back to Earth and shatter on the pavement below. He
shouted that this was their fault and
that he hated them, whoever they were.
    The next morning, Ned had a bad headache, but the sound of a
beam woke him with a start. He hastily stumbled from his bunker in the garage
and saw the pink light through the window coming from afar. He climbed to his
roof, littered with last night’s mess, for a better view. Far beyond the town,
the big, grey cloud swirled, and from its core a streak of light shone down to
the ground with blazing intensity. He squinted through the purplish glare and
noticed this lone beam was somewhat different to the others he had witnessed:
it was wider, stronger, and lasted minutes, not seconds. It worried him, as
though this was a new development in whatever was happening here, and yet, it
could be just the opposite. Were they back? Were people coming home?
    Firstly, he ran to Lonely Lily and turned on his pocket
radio to hear a song playing. When it ended, her voice returned. He had an
inkling that, although Lily failed to acknowledge the global population ’ s
disappearance, if the opposite were to occur, she may be spreading her message
of joy to all of Australia that she was no longer alone in her tower. Lily,
however, seemed content and unfazed by the outside world, as usual. Perhaps
this was not such a joyous occasion then.
    Ned returned to the roof and used binoculars to observe the
beam. It was still there, humming away, sending down a tunnel of pinkish-purple
light to the earth. He sat there nursing a bottle of water and watched it from
his high post, just one beam shining continuously just beyond the borders