The Quiet Apocalypse

by Nick Cracknell

  We raided a Caffe Di Fiore in Terminal 2 for some bottled mineral water and a few pre-prepared sandwiches that I stuck in a backpack I picked up in a news stand. There was total silence in the terminal hall and the flight boards indicating arrivals and departures were frozen in time as I expected they would be, but it didn’t diminish the sense of emptiness of the place. I stood in front of the main boards for a moment and took it in. Flights went mainly to mainland Europe. There were plenty to the UK; Bristol, Manchester and Heathrow being the main destinations it seemed, but Spain was strongly represented with Bilbao, A Coruna and Valencia all receiving regular flights throughout the day.

  Whichever day it was of course. I assumed the 4th of July…

  According to the signs, Lanzarote airport had two terminal buildings and a cargo terminal, and regardless of their point of departure aircraft were directed to park at something called the General Aviation Apron (PAG) upon arrival. I figured this would be a good place to start.

  But how the heck did one go about stealing a plane? Off the top of my head, I thought you’d firstly need to know a lot about the plane. How would I operate the systems and get the engines started with the problem of no fuel? This made the prospect of an electric craft of some sort again more appealing. I imagined your regular airline captain would have to go through thousands of hours of simulator training in order to get up to the required standard. So if we managed to appropriate an electric or working fuel-burning plane, how would we then get it in the air? Commercial airliners required a tug to reverse them out onto the runway. Another reason to opt for a smaller plane…

  Did a plane have keys? Would the cockpit only be accessible by a powered keycode? And then, if by some miracle we did get it off the ground and were able to fly unaided across to Africa, how the hell would we land the thing? One good thing at least, we didn’t have to worry about flight plans and ground control cops preventing our take off.

  I realised as I was standing in the middle of the terminal that I had lost Akari. I shouted her name and heard a small yelp coming from what seemed to be a row of shopping outlets on the other side of the terminal. Panic set in, and I ran in the direction of the sound. As I did, it got louder, like the sound of a small child having a tantrum or something. I ran faster, and rounded the corner into a Gucci store where I saw Akari in the oddest position. She was bending over a rack of handbags, trying to force her head between her thighs as if she were practicing a crash landing on an airplane. Aa I reached her I put my hand onto her back, saying her name over and over as her whole body seemed to be shaking and twitching like she was in the middle of some sort of episode.

  “Akari!” I shouted, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?!”

  She seemed to stop shaking at the sound of my voice, and looked up from her prostrated position. Her eyes were glazed over and she looked confused, drunk even… She didn’t seem to be able to focus on my face at all and appeared to be looking straight through me.

  “Koko wa dokodesu ka?” she said, her breath coming in short ragged gasps. Of course I didn’t understand this, but I assumed from her dazed expression that she was enquiring where she was or what was happening. It scared me a lot. Was this the beginning of the end for her? Had her percentage finally run out? If she was on just three percent a matter of two or three hours ago…

  I felt like I was watching an execution. That dreaded point when you realise you are witnessing somebody die and try as you might you simply cannot tear your eyes away. What made it even more prescient was that exactly the same thing could be happening to me in a matter of days.

  “Akari, please…” I begged. “Breathe, dammit!”

  I couldn’t face the thought of expiring right in front of me. I did something I never thought possible, drawing my hand back and bringing it down fast and hard across the side of her face. The slap seemed to have an effect and she shook her head as if snapping back into awareness. I had expected her to start foaming at the mouth and dropping to the floor in her final throes, but she suddenly seemed to improve and drew in a huge rasping breath.

  She stood bolt upright and a single tear welled in each of her eyes as if she’d eaten an extra hot chili. Instead of running down her cheeks as normal tears would do they welled and welled in the corner of her eyes until it seemed as though they couldn’t get any fatter without gravity taking its force. Then they seemed to leap out of her face in a forward motion; two large drops of salt water that sprang forth from her eyes and cascaded almost in slow motion to land on the floor in front of my feet. She gulped in huge breaths of air.

  “Tasukete!” she croaked, and grabbed my shoulders to support her own weight. She seemed like she was choking.

  There was no more time to lose. I grabbed her by arm and began pulling her towards the signs that indicated the Cargo Terminal. She whimpered quietly as I dragged her along, still trying to catch her breath, trying to stave off another attack. It occurred to me to try and find a first aid booth, or medical station of some sort, but I knew that it would do no good. Time had caught up with Akari, and its relentless passage now planned to claim her unless I could achieve the extraordinary and get her off the island before.

  The adage ‘time waits for no man’ passed through my mind as we wove through a maze of small corridors designed for passport control and emerged into the dusky twilight of the early evening and onto the main concourse of the airport. I felt as though I was up against an immovable force, trying to stop the march of time.

  Even the air seemed to have taken on a thicker note. The wind had picked up, and it almost felt like it had back on the beach in Playa Blanca before the storm that produced the purple tendrils. I felt like something big was in the air; that the island somehow knew what we were planning and was about to send every soldier in its arsenal to prevent it.

  Akari was still rasping, but her airway seemed clearer and she was better able to breathe than a few minutes ago. She was still barely able to walk, and it was imperative that we made haste whilst any storm was still in its infancy. Thunderheads were gathering over the mountains in the distance, and I somehow felt that not only was Akari’s life in the balance but my own was as well. If we failed in this mission, I realised it could mean the end of both of our existences on the island and not just hers. I still had a good level of percentage to go, but what was to say that if I foundered with Akari that the island itself would take a bigger gulp and swallow me too?

  The concourse was vast and totally empty. Hollow husks of airliners stood in mocking salute on the bare concrete, almost daring us to approach and try them out for size.

  Akari suddenly coughed violently and a stream of blood shot out of her mouth and landed on the ground in front of us. She looked at me with undisguised panic in her eyes and grabbed her throat, desperately struggling for breath. Then she stopped dead, and her whole body jerked upright in rigid protest. Her eyes, already stretched as wide as they could, seemed to take over her whole face as she grasped to hold on to life.

  “Akari!” I screamed, not knowing what to say or do, and on hearing my voice her body seemed to relax somewhat, as if she had finally taken that longed-for breath that was so needed. She sucked in a huge laboured gulp of air and grabbed hold of my arms, stumbling and desperate for support. Her mouth was still covered in blood and she reached up with her sleeve to wipe some of it away trying to compose herself as she did so.

  She stopped dead still for about 10 seconds, then slowly raised her head up and looked at me with a small smile. She knew it was futile to try and communicate with me in Japanese at that precise moment so she simply held up her small thumbs in a gesture of ‘okayness’. It was probably the most relief I had ever felt in my life at a single hand gesture.

  I had no idea how long her seeming recovery had bought us, so I grabbed her by the arm again and we began looking around frantically for some sort of inspiration. Outside now on the concourse we could see the two terminals clearly. They weren’t huge buildings, unlike many airports
I had been to. I guessed from a row of six larger planes sitting idle on the tarmac outside Terminal 1 that it was used for longer-haul international flights, whereas Terminal 2 was smaller and from the few scattered smaller hangars was probably the one used for charters and inter-island flights. I decided that was where we should head if were to find a craft that we could operate. There was a vast expanse of concrete to the right of this terminal, almost totally empty except for one small airplane centred inside it. It looked completely out of place, being the only vehicle in such a large and deserted space.

  Pulling Akari along was starting to become more of an effort as she was barely able to keep pace with my excited gait at this stage. We pattered over the empty ground, our feet hardly making any sound as the bare concrete absorbed it. Large yellow painted signs divided the area up into individual plots, and occasionally one would indicate the maximum wingspan of a particular aircraft. As we got nearer to the plane these decreased from 25m to 15m to 10m, which I took as a good sign. The smaller the aircraft the better was my philosophy, somewhat naively I supposed as the principles of flight were most probably exactly the same for a 10 metre plane as they were for a 50 metre one. Something in my head told me that psychologically I would be more comfortable behind the controls of a smaller plane though. A larger part of me thought it wasn’t even worth trying one of those, but as we reached it and the fuselage glistened in the last of the evening sunset I felt a strange surge of hope run through me.

  It lasted as long as it took to do a once-round the plane. Even as a much smaller aircraft than the ones sitting on the apron at Terminal one it was huge, probably 15 metres long and in wingspan. It towered over Akari and myself as I ran around it, searching for some way to board. I realised how stupid the idea of hijacking a plane was when I realised that we couldn’t even board the thing. The main door was wedged shut and without some sort of crowbar mechanism there would be no boarding this particular jet. I felt useless, as if the life was being slowly sucked out of me with the dropping of the sun behind the horizon.

  Which of course it was.

  I glanced at Akari who seemed to have regained a slight colour in her cheeks. She was no longer as ashen grey as she had been in the terminal, but she looked at me sadly and shrugged her petite shoulders in a gesture of defeat. I shook my head. No, I thought, we are not going be defeated so easily.

  I looked around again, searching for some inspiration, some small ray of hope within the dying light. Beyond the end of this particular concourse I saw a row of buildings, what looked like hangars, around a further 300 metres away. I hadn’t seen them before as they had been obscured by the absurd plane we had just come across, and my mind had been so focused on getting this one in the air that what I now saw in the distance hadn’t even registered.

  Behind the row of hangars I was able to make out the nose of what looked to be a much smaller aircraft. It could have been a biplane for all I knew… a modern version of the pioneering craft that took the Wright Brothers on their first legendary journey! The nose had a propeller, which instantly I thought could mean that it was manually startable by giving it a good push in rotation as I’d seen in old war movies. But what the hell was an old biplane doing at Lanzarote airport? Surely there hadn’t been any made since the end of the Second World War?

  My mind cast itself back to being nine years old and taking a pleasure flight in an old Sopwith Camel with my dad at a country fair somewhere in Dorset. It had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my young life, up there where the air was clear, just a pair of goggles and a seatbelt separating me from a thousand foot drop. The pilot had been an old RAF man who had been a war buddy of my grandfather, and had insisted he take us out on a brief overhead pass of the fair below. Almost 30 years later I could still remember him telling me about the history of the plane, and how it had the best roll-rate of any aircraft he’d ever flown. I had asked my dad what ‘roll-rate’ meant, and he said the engine never stalled and could fly on and on while using virtually no fuel. At the time the old boiler had astounded me by revealing that whilst in the air we’d been travelling at over 140mph, far faster than our car could have travelled on land. But it was there that my knowledge of biplanes ceased, and I doubted that even if that was what was behind the hangar in the distance that I’d ever be able to get it off the ground, much less land the damnable thing wherever we managed to get with it.

  Any preconceived notions of how I would heroically start the propeller, away the chocs and be in Morocco for last orders were swiftly dealt a death blow as we rounded the corner of the hangar, and saw not an old WWII biplane or even a modern monoplane but a smaller jet without even a propeller on the nose. My eyes had been playing tricks on me and at first I couldn’t figure out how, but stepping back and reassessing the situation, for all it was worth, I realised I had not been seeing a propeller but merely a giant aloe plant situated slightly beyond the border fence behind the hangar. The long spiny green arms at a distance had appeared like blades on the end of the plane’s nose.

  I almost cried in frustration, at my own stupidity as much as out of genuine disappointment. I leapt up on the nose of the plane and tried to glance through into the cockpit. It was as I expected; a row of dials, buttons, knobs and displays that meant I may as well be speaking Hungarian as flying this aircraft.

  Akari was also wandering around the plane looking for some sign that would indicate how to operate it. Like me she was clutching at straws, and was probably doing so more out of simple desperation than the actual hope of finding something.

  The jet was clearly a private or charter plane. Large bold letters displayed E-JET under the cockpit, and looking through I could see just three luxurious looking leather chairs in the cabin behind the two pilot’s seats.

  I jumped down off the nose and approached the door. There was a handle set back into the bodywork in the shape of a doorstop with a keyhole in the middle. Obviously we had no key, but I thought back to the huge metal door on the radio outpost and how I had been ready to give up on that when in fact it had been open all along. I pushed the handle in, and it gave a little, the thin end poking out of the bodywork and demanding to be turned. I noticed there was also a pushbutton above the handle, with a small LED light that lit up as I turned the handle counter-clockwise. I pushed the button, and a hissing noise caused me to jump back in surprise, walking backwards into Akari who had been standing directly behind me. We both looked at each other in amazement as the jet’s staircase began to unfold itself in all its hydraulic glory.

  I stepped inside and Akari followed behind me. It was a lot smaller inside than I had expected, having only ever been on big passenger jets before. It was no larger than a luxury sedan car, and I wondered if I’d have the balls to even be flown in one of these at however many thousand feet let alone try and fly it myself.

  But then, we had no choice.

  Akari coughed violently behind me, and hawked up a glob of blood which she spat out the open doorway as daintily as she could.

  “Hayaku,” she rasped nonchalantly, circling her hands, and I took that to mean get a goddamn move on, matey. I nodded briskly and headed into the cockpit. It smelled of expensive leather and cologne, rather like I would have imagined an Oxford professor’s study to smell. This was clearly an expensive craft, with walnut burr paneling and leather lining surrounding my head. It was so small though! I wondered how anyone could be cooped up in this space for an extended period of time without suffering from claustrophobia.

  I sat down in the left pilot’s chair. Being right handed it made more sense even though the throttle or steering wheel or whatever it was called was in front of me. It felt more natural having my right hand next to the main controls rather than my left.

  I tried to get a grip on the controls in front of me. I reasoned that everything looked complicated because I didn’t know what it did, so if I tried to familiarise myself with the controls then it would become more natural. I pushed the steering wheel up and d
own, as if I were test driving a new car. I nodded in approval as it felt strong and didn’t give much. Despite the situation I felt a curious sense of power being behind the controls of this powerful aircraft, much more so than driving an expensive car. Then I snapped out of it. Another flashback came to me of my grandfather’s old boiler buddy croaking: “It doesn’t take much to control a plane,” and certainly with all these dials and switches it seemed like the plane could pretty much fly itself as long as I could get it going…

  Wishful thinking? I asked myself.

  In front of me there were six main controls. Airspeed Indicator, that was self- explanatory. Artificial Horizon, with a plane image that showed whether it was banking left or right. Fine.

  Altimeter was the height gauge, presumably above sea level.

  Turn and Bank Indicator I had no idea, but presumably it was to do with how fast or slow one was changing course and whether or not it was dangerous.

  The Heading Indicator was just a compass, easy. I guessed we wanted to head mainly east.

  Finally the Vertical Speed Indicator was again pretty self-explanatory, or how fast one was climbing or descending in feet per minute.

  I took a deep breath and felt more at ease. Akari coughed again and I could hear her hacking.

  “OK, love,” I said, “prepare for take off…”

  I looked around. She had collapsed into one of the plush leather chairs, and was desperately struggling to breathe. No time for jokes I thought, and scanned for an ignition control. I had half expected it but it was still a huge surprise when I found it located just behind the control stick and low and behold there was a key stuck in it.

  It looked like the same key that could have been used to open or lock the main door. The key was turned to the OFF position, naturally. But next to it there were four other possible options to turn it to. MAG 1, MAG 2, BOTH, and START. I didn’t want to start messing round with MAGs, whatever they were, so I just grabbed the key, held my breath and turned it to the full START position.