The Quiet Apocalypse

by Nick Cracknell

  My first thought was that I had been in some sort of road accident and a passer by was trying to help me out. I was lying on concrete having just come around, and immediately my mind kicked in to damage assessment mode. I flexed my muscles to check for injuries. I was stiff all over, but nothing seemed to hurt too much. My head was swimming, and my vision blurry, and as my eyes swam into focus I began to register the shouting woman above me. She was speaking in a foreign tongue, and sure enough when my eyes returned to normality I could see her face clearly.

  She was young, only a teenager, and strikingly beautiful, with an oval face, pale skin and jet-black hair. Her dark eyes bore the tell-tale slant of the orient. She had been shouting at me, but as she saw me rise back to full consciousness she began to calm down a little, and her words became more excited rather than manic.

  “Daijōbu?!” she was asking over and over, then something that sounded like “Kikemasu ka?!”

  I jerked my head up as I registered where I was. The terror hit me.

  “Hans!” I shouted at her. “Where is Hans? We have to get out of here now!”

  I sat up quickly, wincing as my back spasmed, desperately looking around me as my predicament came back to me. Hans had been chasing me just before I had fallen! If I had been unconscious for any more than a few seconds he would be on top of us by now.

  The girl was babbling something again in what I presumed now to be Japanese, and I suddenly realised the gravity of the situation.

  Here she was! The girl I had heard on the radio! Was I dreaming still, or was this actually reality?

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and she seemed to recoil in terror, shouting what was probably “Please don’t hurt me!”

  “It’s OK!” I assured her. “I’m not going to hurt you. Please, calm down!”

  She was becoming hysterical, either through a mixture or terror or sheer elation at having met another person.

  “Listen to me!” I shouted in her face, which seemed to upset her even more, while I took stock of the surroundings. We were on the pavement just outside Gambrinus again, and I looked up to see where I had just fallen from. It was all coming back to me, including the sign I had seen whilst flipping through the air.

  Radio Lanzarote. Fred Olsen…

  This was where she had been radioing from! The girl was struggling in my grip. She can’t have weighed more than 80 pounds, and I was considerably stronger. I relaxed my hold on her slightly, and she seemed to react positively and stopped crying.

  “Please, listen,” I said. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m the man from the radio! I’m the one you were trying to contact. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  She looked at me in confusion, and began shaking her head from side to side. “I no eat English,” she whimpered.

  I understood immediately. The poor girl was terrified. She must have found me unconscious in the street, or even seen me fall, and had rushed to help only to have me manhandle her in my confusion. A thought hit me. Maybe she had seen Hans as well…

  “OK, listen,” I said. “You are Japanese, yes?”

  I racked my brains for something to say to make my question clearer. The absurdity of it didn’t even occur to me. It didn’t matter a shit if she was Japanese or Norwegian as I couldn’t speak either.

  “Yaponais?” I asked. She seemed to understand and nodded her head vigorously.

  “Hai! Nihongo! Zhapanese!” she blurted.

  “And you don’t speak, uh, eat English, yes?”

  “Hai, no English, sorry,” she said, and bowed her head in a show of shame. My heart instantly went out to her. I resolved then and there to protect her no matter what, like she were my own daughter.

  “That’s OK,” I said, gently laying my hand on her shoulder and attempting to give her a smile. “Please don’t be sorry. No sorry! I no eat Japanese either. Uh, Nihongo no…”

  She smiled back, so far the one way we could indicate understanding of what the other was saying.

  “OK,” I said. “Sorry no. Good!” I gave her a thumbs up, which she returned with glee. “But listen, this is serious…” I continued. “Did you see another man here?”

  Her eyes narrowed in confusion, and I clenched my fists in frustration. How could I make her understand?!

  “Uh, you…”

  I pointed at her.

  “See…”

  I raised my finger to her eye and moved my head side to side in an exaggerated searching motion.

  “Another man here?”

  I didn’t know how to communicate this last part. Panic overcame me as survival mode kicked in, and I realised that instead of trying to find out if she had seen Hans we should get to safety somewhere first and then try to iron out the international relations.

  I grabbed her by the hand a little too suddenly and she winced again, but I was too concerned about my insane Kiwi doppelganger rounding the corner with a pick axe or something that I pulled her along the pavement, searching desperately for somewhere safe to hide.

  She complied, well, she didn’t really have a choice, but she didn’t try and pull her hand back from mine. We began to run towards the east end of Avenida Fred Olsen, towards the Gran Hotel. My plan was to get her there and hole up in a different room than the Penthouse, where Hans would surely be checking if he was still trying to find me.

  I jerked my head around in paranoia, glancing behind us to see if anyone was following. But the coast seemed clear. The possibilities ran through my brain as we hot footed it across the baking concrete pavement.

  Where the heck was he?

  He couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty paces behind me, and I was sure he would have seen me jump. Or fall. If so he could have either made the jump himself, or gone back down through the fruit store to ground level and round the back of the buildings again to catch up with me. But that would have taken time, and even if he had seen me fall there was no way he could have known how I’d land. Was he now watching from a vantage point, simply waiting to see where we went before picking up the trail again and surprising us just when we thought the coast was clear?

  Or was he gone all together? He was me, after all. A darker, psychotic, metaphysical manifestation of me albeit, but had the fall and my period of oblivion simply erased him from existence? I sincerely hoped it was the latter.

  We reached the roundabout at the end of the avenue and I glanced behind us again. Still no sign of the errant double. The girl to her credit had not resisted me at all, and was still clutching my hand, waiting for my signal for what to do. I pointed at the Gran Hotel and gestured for us to run in its direction.

  Once in the lobby she seemed to understand my thought process, and gestured towards the elevator. I strongly shook my head and pointed to the stairwell instead, and she looked at me strangely. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of the earlier incident, and for a split second I had a dreadful vision of a crowd of Hans’ pouring out of the lift and descending on us to rip us apart.

  The girl seemed to sense my trepidation and nodded enthusiastically, pulling me towards the stairwell instead of the other way round.

  I had no idea what we were going to do once we began ascending the emergency stairs. We got to maybe the fourth or fifth floor until I stopped, wheezing, and pointed to the entrance doors to the floor. On the other side, the floor was a mixture of conference rooms and suite accommodation. I kicked open the door of the nearest conference room. It was empty of course, with a long wooden table set out with fresh note pads and bottles of mineral water, and a whiteboard at one end for presentations. It looked safe enough, but I preferred a door with a lock and so we ran further down the corridor to where the rooms turned into guest accommodation and I tried the nearest door again. It was locked, but I had stolen a master ‘key’ from the reception area upon my arrival, which had allowed for my recent sojourn in the Penthouse Suite and all its luxurious trappings. I fished around in my beach shorts and found it, a credit card sized piece of plastic with a magnetic strip. I
closed my eyes in a silent prayer, to whom I didn’t care, and slid it into the card slot on the door. It pinged and the door opened to my relief. I pulled the girl inside and quickly shut the door behind us, relaxing ever so slightly as I heard the door automatically lock itself.

  The girl was looking at me strangely, with a mixture of curiosity and mild alarm. She obviously had no idea why I was seeking refuge so desperately for us both, and I realised at that moment that it was extremely unlikely she had seen Hans. She was just going along with my madcap antics and hoping I would come to my senses and we could have a decent discussion about the extraordinary circumstances we were in.

  First things first, I was parched and in dire need of a stiff drink. I scanned the room for a minibar, and located it in the small kitchenette area off the main bedroom. Inside was a chilled bottle of Cava, a couple of mini whiskeys and gins, and some ice-cold bottles of water. I downed both the whiskey and the gin, grabbed the water and the fizz and headed back into the living room where the girl was standing at the window, staring out across the sea to the mountains in the distance.

  I handed her a bottle of water and she nodded deferentially and said something like “Doumo.”

  I sat down on the bed and opened the Cava, resting for a moment and trying to catch my breath. I tried also to collect my thoughts and work out a plan of what to do. I was still terrified that at any moment Hans would burst through the door.

  I suddenly felt woozy, and had to lie down on my back on the bed. The girl was still looking out the window, presumably waiting for me to do or say something. The alcohol started to have its effect, and I couldn’t help closing my eyes. Within seconds I was asleep.

  28%

  When I awoke it was cool and almost dark, and the girl was curled up next to me in the foetal position on the bed. My head was spinning. I supposed it was a mini hangover after the spirits I had sunk so rapidly. I pulled myself up off the bed, listening to the girl’s breathing, trying not to wake her, and headed over to the panoramic window. The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and I realised it wasn’t the evening but dawn. Inconceivably I had slept through the entire night. I presumed the girl didn’t want to wake me and must have got bored and gone to sleep herself. I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all.

  I felt the urge to wake her, to finally learn what was going on and why she was here, but she looked so incredibly peaceful I couldn’t bring myself to do so.

  I was suffering a sort of delayed shock, I realised. The toll of the last three weeks had finally caught up on me, like a man who has been in debt for years who finally comes into a massive inheritance. Here she was, potentially the answer to all the questions I had been asking myself. Specifically, why was I here? Where was here? And what could be done about it?

  The girl stirred slightly on the bed and I jumped in shock. How on earth could I go about interrogating her if she spoke no English? Could she be dangerous, like Hans? She certainly didn’t seem like she could be a risk. She looked totally harmless, even vulnerable in her youth and the wide-eyed innocence that she had displayed in the street yesterday. But like everything else here, I had to be wary. I had to expect the unexpected…

  Explanations for her presence whirred through my mind. She could be a spy for instance. She could have been planted here by The Powers to assess my mental state or even sabotage it. She could yet turn out to be a figment of my imagination, although she seemed as real to the touch as my own body. But then how to explain Hans? He was a ghost. A manifestation of my own consciousness gone to seed. But the bastard was still able to inflict physical harm upon me. Had I done that to myself? I reached up and fingered the cut above my eye, wincing at the touch. Dried blood had caked over it. I inspected the cut in the mirror and without much medical knowledge even I could see it was the sort of wound that would usually require a stitch or two. Luckily it had clotted, and while not life threatening would probably result in quite a scar.

  It occurred to me that it was the first time that physical damage had manifested itself upon me since my arrival. Up until that point the fall off the roof, the shoulder injury in the restaurant, the fall from the balcony outside the station, being propelled by smoke tendrils through plate glass doors… none of these had left any lasting damage on my body. But Hans had caused me significant pain. My ribs still ached, I was bloodied and I looked a wreck.

  The poor girl. What she must have thought upon seeing me! I had put off the inevitable long enough, I decided. It was time to wake her up and get some answers…

  ----

  Two hours later, and after a great deal of gesticulating and international charades, we had established the very basics of our existence to each other.

  Her name was Akari, and she was 19. I was amazed at this as she looked a lot younger, around 14 or 15 max. She had been on the island for as long as she could remember, but that part was still not entirely clear as she couldn’t actually remember anything before being on the island, except her name, age, and the fact that she had three older sisters. She reckoned she’d been here for about a month.

  She had that incredible deference so characteristic of the Japanese, but with a degree of sassiness thrown in that made her a very appealing character.

  Of course, my Japanese was non-existent, but I found that after a while I could understand a few of the more common words that she kept using. Island seemed to be ‘shima’, radio was ‘rajio’ and she used the word ‘sora’ a lot, which coupled with her gesticulations I took to mean something like alone or empty.

  But by far the most incredible thing I discovered about her was that she had been experiencing the same flashing numbers in front of her eyes each time she awoke.

  The percentages!

  She illustrated this by making a butterfly motion with one hand in front of her eyes and saying ‘Sūji’ over and over, until I presumed that was the word for numbers or a percentage. She became more and more animated as I explained my experiences to her and it seemed that although she had been here longer than I, she had had a fairly easy time of it compared to me.

  Her story, from what I could tell, went thusly.

  She had awoken, naked and weak and disoriented, in a room in a hotel somewhere in Costa Teguise, another popular tourist resort a few miles on the other side of the capital Arrecife. At first she had been too afraid and sick to leave the room, and like me stayed inside the compound’s grounds for at least four or five days, building up her strength with food until she was able to move around more freely. She didn’t have any visible injuries, but said her head hurt terribly for the first few days.

  I sat amazed as she relayed this information to me by way of hand gestures and drawings of crude maps and outlines on pieces of the hotel’s complimentary stationary. She knew very little English, but was able to communicate very basic words and even sentence structure by squeezing her eyes shut as if pulling the words from the very darkest recesses of her mind. I assumed she had learned some English at school and, much like my French which I gave up aged 16, could summon odd words to the forefront of her brain with visible effort.

  Apart from obvious injury she revealed her total lack of memory at anything other than her own identity, that of her sisters, and the fact that she was from Japan. I had to admit that my own memories were scarcer than they should have been, as I explained to her that I had been through almost exactly the same set of tribulations when I awoke in Playa Blanca.

  She wasn’t aware of anyone else on the island, and I managed to deduce that she hadn’t seen Hans at all and that I was the first person she had seen in her time on Lanzarote.

  She had spent some considerable time wandering the streets of Costa Teguise, grabbing different clothes from tourist shops and disposing of them daily for new ones, searching for clues or other people, but had become depressed upon finding nothing and had holed up in her hotel for a long time, unsure of what to do.

  For around half an hour she seemed to be going off on a tangent, and
I couldn’t make out what she was saying at all. I couldn’t be sure but I think she was describing having some kind of strange hallucination whilst hibernating at her hotel. I wanted to believe it was the same thing I had been experiencing during my blackouts, but I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.

  Damn this language barrier!

  She then seemed to have walked inland for a period of days rather than sticking to the coastline as I had, and from what I could tell her experiences had been just as fruitless as mine in uncovering clues to explain our presence here.

  Ultimately, she could throw no further light on the reason for our desertion on the island and I groaned with frustration as this became clear. This must have upset her, or maybe she thought she had upset me, as she visibly shrank back in on herself almost halving her already diminutive stature in her perceived shame. I had to work hard to reassure her everything was OK, and that it was just my own frustrations rising to the surface and I would try and keep them in check. She seemed to be confused at the idea that someone would so readily show their emotions, without first considering what effect it could have on those around them.

  What we lose in translation!

  I vowed several times during our dialogue that if I ever did get off this island I would devote myself to anthropology, to the learning of other languages and cultures, as my woeful ignorance had exposed my complete lack of international relations. Although we did have reason to be proud of what we had gleaned from each other thus far without virtually any knowledge of the other’s language.

  Every now and again she would pause to take a sip of water from a bottle she had extracted from the minibar, and each time she did she would very deliberately screw the top back on to its full tightness, as if trying to minimise any loss from evaporation. I took her to be a fastidious, very precise person. It was almost mesmerising to watch her movements, so deliberate and in tune with her surroundings. She was so young and healthy!

  Like me, she had migrated to other cities to extend her search, and it was in Arrecife that she had been strolling along the beach front and noticed the Radio Lanzarote building. She had broken in and to her delight had found working equipment, and with a bit of practice had learned how to operate the CB radio that was in situ.