The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  It said “Daddy?”

  80%

  In the dream I was paralysed. I lay on my back unable to move, sweat pouring from me and pooling on the floor under my bare back, whilst shadows stepped over and around me.

  Were they people?

  I couldn’t tell. They were puffs of black smoke, shadows that moved like remnants of coal fires dissipating up a chimney, cold and unrecognisable.

  Could they not see me?

  The smell was back, the tangy scent of bleach, like when you step into a leisure centre and you instantly catch a whiff of the swimming pool, chorine infused with human perspiration. It was a blur to me. I knew people were there but I couldn’t discern their shape to tell whether they were male or female, old or new, friend or unknown. I swam in and out of sight, but when I could see it was still just a blur. Some of the time I was aware of the voice from the phone, the little boy or girl saying ‘daddy’ over and over, and I knew it was directed at me but I couldn’t answer. I tried to speak and the words simply failed in my mouth, they didn’t even form in the back of my throat but I knew what I wanted to say. It was as if I was having some kind of out-of-body experience but I was still trapped in my own body. It was an in-body, out-of-body phenomenon. Then the numbers began flashing again, bigger and bolder that ever before, a luminous flashing ‘80%’ that filled my whole field of vision, and with it this time a rhythmic bleeping in the background.

  Then something new happened. They started to countdown, slowly at first, from 80% to 75% to 69% to 64% to 60% in the space of what felt like a single percentage per second. A single beep accompanied each decrease, as if it were a bomb counting down to the moment of detonation. Then suddenly, terrifyingly, it got quicker. The numbers sped up, or accurately sped down, faster and faster, and the beeping got louder and louder, and I was suddenly aware of what it meant. It was my life counting down before my very eyes. The numbers grew bigger the lower they got, 36%, 29%, 22%...18%...12%... and as they hit 10% they turned red and the light behind them became blinding until the noise and the light became total and I charged inexorably towards death and the bleeping became one giant shrill screech and the light finally consumed me and everything I knew.

  77%

  The stench of burning filled my nostrils as I came round. I was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, wisps of black smoke curling around the light fittings. The phone receiver was still in my hand, curled around my arm as I had gone down. The floor was rock hard and cold, and I gingerly raised the receiver to my ear as I remembered the reason I had blacked out. Instead of hearing that sweet voice again, there was nothing. Not even a ring tone. The phone had fallen on the floor as well and cracked open. A chip board emerged from the central seal in a kind of mocking salute that seemed to say ‘you will never get me to work again.’

  I got to my feet as quickly as the stiffness would allow and tried to gather my senses. I had fainted in sheer shock at hearing my daughter’s voice, and I was sure it was my daughter, how could a father mistake their own child’s voice?

  Then the burning smell registered in my brain and I sensed the change in the air quality. It was coming from the restaurant, and in a moment of horror I realised I had left the gas burner on and it was still boiling the soup.

  Black smoke poured out of the entrance doors to the restaurant but I could just make out the shape of the buffet and the large copper soup terrine that I had eaten from earlier. How much earlier I couldn’t be sure, but it must have taken a good half hour for all that soup to burn away and the terrine to start getting very angry at the persistent gas flame underneath it.

  I definitely needed to get in there to stop the flame before it started to spread, but the smoke was thick and billowing and I needed some sort of filter to block it out. I grabbed a table cloth from a tourist display in the lobby and plunged it into the fountain nearby. Once it was thoroughly soaked I wrapped it around my nose and mouth as tightly as possible, took a deep breath and ran back to the restaurant.

  The smoke stung my eyes and made them stream with water and I could feel tendrils of it creeping through my rudimentary mask, threatening to stop my lungs as I kicked past tables and chairs in a blind frenzy. I barked my shin against one and cried out as a bolt of pain shot up my leg and resolved itself somewhere in my chest.

  I reached the copper pot and saw it had turned red hot in the flame, the soup inside long melted away and just a charred mess welded to the sides as the heat continued to cook it. Shielding my eyes from the heat I managed to reach under the table it sat on to get at the gas canister underneath. The tube running up to the hob under the terrine had already started to melt, and I realised that if I had remained unconscious for even a few more minutes it could have gone completely and exposed the contents of the gas canister to the open flame. I didn’t want to think about what kind of explosion that could have caused.

  The handle atop the canister was also red hot and I had to lean down and loosen a portion of my tablecloth mask to wrap round it and try to turn it off. It hissed in protest as the wet cloth closed around it and I felt the heat rapidly start to transfer to my hand. Whether it had melded shut with heat or whether it was just a quirk of fate I don’t know, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to turn and shut off the gas. Meanwhile the feeder tube was getting slicker and slicker as the rubber melted away. I surmised I needed either to shut the thing off or get the heck out of there in the next 30 seconds. I twisted the handle with all my might, but it would not close, and when I felt the searing pain as the heat worked its way through the wet cloth and started to bite into my palm I knew I had to give up and get out. With one last ditch attempt I tried to kick the soup container off its housing, but was screwed in place and didn’t budge an inch.

  The smoked clawed at my lungs, acrid and choking, and I kept low as I made my way to the exit. Visibility was slightly better in the reception area, and thankfully I had left the lobby door open when I had come in earlier.

  I emerged into the bright sunshine of the afternoon and just as I sucked in my first lungful of fresh air a huge bang forced me to instinctively duck and hit the ground, seconds before a wave of heat and smoke and flame blew out of the doors behind me.

  Had I been inside I would have been toast.

  I stayed low until the heat subsided, crawling away from the entrance to the hotel on my hands and knees, half dazed and half choked. The heat from the blast combined with the heat from the midday sun meant the sweat was lashing off me, and my eyes were still stinging from the smoke as I made my way to the far end of the car park.

  As I reached the pathway that led down to the beachside I glanced behind me to see a grey cloud billowing out of the Hesperia’s entrance lobby. A combination of smoke inhalation and mild shock caused me to hurl my guts up on the spot. It was then I decided I had never needed a beer so badly in my life.

  ---

  The path opposite the hotel led down to the beach and the salty tang in the air got stronger. It began to clear my lungs of the smoke I had inhaled. Behind me I could hear the hotel raging as it burned over my shoulder I could see a black cloud rising into the sky. I felt inexplicably detached from the incident already.

  So what if the hotel burned down? What good did it serve any more anyway?

  There were no people around to stay in it. My mind was focused solely on getting to a bar so I could have a beer or two and think about the phone call. When the voice had spoken it had sent a jolt of electricity down my spine as if it had leapt from the earpiece directly into my body.

  My daughter. My little girl. Where was she? How had she known I would be in the Hotel Hesperia at that time? Why had she called me there instead of coming in person? Where were the rest of my family? If they knew I was here why weren’t they coming to get me?

  I had only heard the one word spoken yet I was convinced it was her. My little girl. I could picture her beautiful round little face as I always did when I was speaking to her on the phone and not in person, grinning and
showing her slightly squiffy teeth which she was so very excited about falling out in a couple of years so her ‘big’ teeth could take their place. She only ever wanted to be a big girl. Why was I thinking about her in the past tense? My mind must have been run ragged by the events of the past few days and I wasn’t thinking straight.

  Myriad thoughts flooded my mind as I emerged from a tunnel and into the broad daylight again with the beach stretching out in front of me. Empty. Sun loungers lay pointed at the water in perfect rows, inviting the tide in, then turning it away a few hours later, day after day, month after month. I wondered how long this place had been this way. Had it only been five or six days, or had this beach ever seen human activity? Sure, there were towels scattered on a few of the loungers, beer bottles half drunk on the plastic tables next to them that people had probably paid an extra Euro or two for the privilege of having somewhere to stand their drinks during the day instead of on the roasting sand, countless cigarette butts on the pavements, but were these simply manifestations of my subconscious? Had my mind simply put them there because that is what I would expect to see as part of a beachside environment?

  I now doubted the very existence of everything around me. My nihilistic tendencies were causing me to reject what my eyes could see right in front of me. All I wanted was to get off this island and get back to my family.

  Anger coursed through me, I could feel my veins widening at the futility of it. I needed a plan. Some plan of action.

  I began to run. I think it was out of exasperation. Suddenly I wanted to know instantly what was in every building, every hotel, down every side street in this ridiculous place. I already knew there were no people here, but if I could prove that fact then at least I would then know I could rely on nobody else but myself to get out of this situation. I wanted to find someone, anyone, tear information out of them, make them talk and tell me why this was happening to me.

  Emotion got the better of me and I collapsed on the sandy beach, reaching to the sky and screaming in vain. I don’t know what I yelled. ‘You can’t do this to me’ or ‘somebody help for god’s sake!’ or some shit like that. Whatever it was, nobody heard and nobody came. Only the waves answered with their inexorable lapping. I lifted my face towards the horizon, sand clinging to my tears, and gazed at the vast blue expanse of ocean in front of me. I could see another island, it must have been Fuerteventura, rising out of the blue sea maybe two or three miles away. Could I swim for it?

  I could just wade into the water now, I told myself. I wasn’t in the best physical shape but hey, at least I was wearing swimming shorts. How long would it take to swim three miles? Was it even three miles though? Distance is hard to judge on the water. It could have been 10 miles for all I knew. What if I cramped up or got attacked by a shark?

  I was overanalysing the situation. I should just jump in, what did I have to lose? But a part of me knew that no matter if I made the swim in one piece and got to the island across the sea, I would be in no better a position than I was now.

  For there would be nobody there.

  Hope had deserted me.

  I collapsed on my back in the sand and stared at the bright blue sky. I desperately wanted to be asleep, or unconscious, anything so that I didn’t have to deal with this stunning sense of isolation and solitude. But I had spent a good portion of the last five or six days out like a light, and my body was pumped with the adrenaline of the run. So I sat and regained my breath, with the sun on my bare back and sand in my hair.

  One solitary cloud hung above me. It looked a bit like a plane, and a bit like a shotgun. At that moment I would have given all I owned for either.

  74%

  The hotel burned for three days. There was no way I could stop it. At first it just seemed to smoke and smoke, with plumes of black cascading into the perfect blue sky. I watched it while sitting in a bar on the beach, wondering whether to have beer or sangria or start on something a lot harder.

  By my third beer I could feel the heat cascading off it, the air itself seemed to be melting even though I was a good 500 yards away. I drank, losing myself in the roar emanating from it. What the heck was burning? I asked myself. It was just one almighty block of concrete.

  At around 4pm an almighty explosion seemed to rock the whole beach. Then the flames assumed their totally unchallenged hold and the Hesperia seemed to audibly sigh as it became engulfed. The boiler unit must have caught, or the heat had reached a store of gas canisters or something. Whatever, nobody was going to want to stay there anymore and it was all down to me. I felt curiously detached from my actions. Was I a criminal? I hadn’t reported the incident after all. Who could I report it to? All the phones were dead. I heard no alarms as fire engines came rushing to extinguish the blaze. No sirens as police came to administer control. Nothing. Just the crack and whoosh of an enormous ball of black flame less than a quarter of a mile away. Once or twice what breeze there was changed direction and the plume threated to engulf the beach, but at the last moment it steadied itself and continued its rise straight up into the azure heavens above the hotel.

  I spent those days in a kind of wild daze, alternating between periods of desperate mania and extreme calm depending on how much I drank. Mostly it was until I blacked out, hoping that something would happen to me in my stupor that would either end or clarify my circumstances. Nothing did, and when I awoke each time, whether my mattress was the golden sand of the beach, or the wooden floor of a beer shack, or the hard unyielding boulders that lined the promenade, my mind was no more at rest than when I had gone under, and the pain that filtered through my brain like the march of the fire ants was the only thing that made me aware I was really alive. Even the numbers had disappeared, the flashing percentages that taunted me each time I came round. They had disappeared along with any semblance of hope I had held on to, and so I existed solely on a plain of nihilism, unwilling to either deny or accept this… this Pripyat that smothered me in its arms, uncaring, but also unwilling to let me escape from its grasp. And each time I woke, I yearned for the numbers to return, the only things give me some indication as to when this whole nightmare would end.

  And on the fourth day, as I was people watching on the promenade, they did.

  72%

  Talk about heel dragging. It must have been my tenth day on the island of Lanzarote that I decided I needed to formulate some kind of action plan. What that would be eluded me but I had been going all Edgar Allan Poe on myself, so to lighten the mood I began traversing the streets of Playa Blanca in the belief that if I walked around for long enough something would present itself. But as Mr Dylan may or may not have written before arriving at the actual lyric, how many roads must a man walk down before he knows what the fuck to do?

  Calles came and went, some of them sprinkled with the ashy detritus that had once been part of the Hotel Hesperia. It occurred to me, as I sat in El Restaurant Tipico Espanol eating a side salad of lemony squid and spicy aioli, what if there had been guests in the upper rooms of the hotel? My mind grasped at the thought of women and children clinging desperately to balconies as the flames crept toward them, eventually being forced to leap to the ground below to escape the heat. It bothered me so much that I couldn’t finish the bottle of cold Sancerre I had found chilling to perfection in the commercial fridge at the back of the restaurant, and had to hotfoot it back the to the smouldering hotel to check for bodies amongst the rubble. A momentary lapse of reason. Had I actually hoped I would find one? Maybe.

  When I found nothing but ashen lumps of concrete amidst the structure I laughed out loud. The sound bit sharply through the dull, lifeless fizz of burning rubble around me, and for a brief moment, a rare shard of hope that lodged in my throat and wouldn’t go down, I imagined somebody else had issued it; that another human had been silently watching me stand amongst the lifeless concrete remains and had been unable to stifle a bark of humour at the sight. Scanning the terrain, I saw nothing but tendrils of black rising upwards to pollute the undefi
led blue sky, turning orange as the day gave up and evening stepped in.

  I thought about returning to my hotel. I could use a shower and after my three-day bender I needed a sense of familiarity (however strange that may sound) and perhaps a comfortable bed to sleep in instead of sand. But something drew me back to the main drag that ran through Playa Blanca for one last recce before I turned in.

  There were rows of souvenir shops along Avenida Papagayo. For a while I just walked in and out of these gaudy money-traps, semi-naked, with my tool belt about my waist, trying on baseball caps emblazoned with varying messages. Most simply said Lanzarote, but I found one that announced I LOVE BIKINIS and decided in a moment of brazen manliness, very unbecoming of an educated man trying to cling to his 30s, to wear it. It gave me a sense of placement, an acceptance that I was but a tourist here even though I was the only one. I suppose you could look at it as a gesture of self-deprecation, of suppliance to my surroundings. As if I was giving in and saying, OK, fine, keep me here if that’s what you want. I was torn between acquiescing to and defying the unseen power that had placed me here.

  Was I beginning to feel a curious attachment to this place or was I going mad? Potentially both, I thought. Playa Blanca was definitely not the most attractive tourist resort in the world, but relatively speaking it was still a haven. How many families had stood where I was, in the cramped aisle of a Spanish tourist shop, perhaps scolding excited children as they grabbed at the displays of rubber water pistols and cheap sunglasses, picking up giant loofahs and making jokes about their resemblance to cocks, maybe just trying to escape the heat outside for a few delicious seconds to bask in an icy blast of air conditioning.