The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  I had been browsing through a dusty store called Tian Lu which promised ‘Articulos Orientalos’ and ‘General Merchandise’ on Calle el Coreillo looking for anything that might be useful. A wide-brimmed Chinese sun hat to replace my sombrero was all I found, but through the back of the store there appeared to be an area selling ice-creams. It was hotter than usual outside and the thought of a cold creamy one was too good to pass up.

  As I moved through the aisles of assorted crap I suddenly heard a noise coming from behind me. It was a dull thud, like a single footstep on a wooden floor, and seemed to come from towards the entrance door. Fear washed over me in a terrific wave. I froze still, hardly daring to breathe, in case I missed a second footstep. The shop was darker than any of the others I had been in thus far, and my eyes had still not fully adjusted to the change having come in from the blazing bright sunshine outside. My eyes squinted as they tried to attune to the gloom and identify the source of the thump. I stood stock still, breathless, for what seemed about 30 seconds but in actual fact was probably a lot less, before panic seized me. I guess I still hadn’t sobered up from the alarm incident, and was haunted by the vision of an army of undead zombies pursuing me through the streets.

  I turned and ran. In my state of semi-vision I stumbled over a stool and crashed onto the floor by the cash register, barking my knee on a wooden stool and inadvertently yelping in pain. I swore I heard heavy breathing approaching but snapped to it and realised it was just me. I pulled myself up half-expecting to see whatever it was that was pursuing me bearing down with a maniacal roar. I hauled myself to my feet, knee screaming in pain, and ran through the door to the rear of the store into the back room, straight passed the ice-cream maker and into a cold and completely white-tiled utility area. I realised with mounting horror that it was a dead end. There was one thin window at almost ceiling height, and still gripped with panic I leapt up onto the work surface and went at it. Mercifully it opened easily and without stopping to check behind me I began lurching through the window. It was slightly less than the width of my body, but the last couple of weeks had mercifully seen me lose quite a bit of weight and sucking in my stomach I was able to wriggle through, all the while imagining some horrific monster about to grab at my heels and drag me back in to splash my blood all over the white tiles.

  Quite a sight I must have looked from outside. Half in and half out, kicking and screaming as I fought to get out of a space no right-minded person would have got themselves into. I scraped my stomach on the window ledge but finally got over half my frame outside, meaning there was now only one way to go.

  Down.

  Six foot down onto the concrete curb. Scrabbling with one hand wedged under my groin and grabbing the window ledge for support I rotated myself around to get my legs out. By this stage anything that had been chasing me would have had ample time to grab hold of me but that hadn’t yet occurred to me in my state of panic.

  Inevitably, as gravity took effect, I slipped out and landed heavily on my back, the pavement jolting the wind out of me. As soon as I landed I realised how stupid I had been, and let out a hysterical bark of laughter as I lay and got my breath back. I sat up on my elbows and shook my head to orientate myself.

  That’s when I saw the sign saying Bibiloteca. The wooden door was white painted like every other on the street and looked like it would take a few hefty shoulder barges to break it open. Just as I was bracing myself for the first I stopped myself and checked the handle. It turned and the door swung open. It made sense; who would burgle a back-street library?

  I felt a sense of trepidation as I entered. Libraries were places of quiet of course, but the fact that everywhere else around me was so silent seemed to heighten the spookiness of this empty building. There was the inevitable and reassuring smell of dusty paper, and books lined every wall on shelves that looked older than the building could possibly have been. Somebody had taken care of this place. The floors were spotless, the sofas in the reading area plumped up, the information desk tidy and organised. There was no computer, but an elaborate shelving unit that seemed to hold millions of cards for checking books in and out. It was like stepping back in time. I had no doubt it had been run by a fastidious old man or woman, who took the utmost pride in keeping their library impeccably organised. The kind of people whose wrath you would incur by deigning to return one of their precious inventory late. Posters on the walls in Spanish no doubt advocated the benefits of reading.

  I was unsure exactly what I was looking for as I traversed the many aisles. I wanted to learn more about this place, to research why it might have been abandoned.

  It seemed to me there were four main reasons why an entire town could be deserted.

  It had become uninhabitable due to some sort of environmental disaster, flood, earthquake or such like. This included the most obvious example I could think of, Chernobyl, but that was due to a man-made disaster: nuclear meltdown. Playa Blanca had not been devastated in any way, so I ruled this option out.

  It had become the centre of some sort of military activity and had become contested, an invasion or something. But there was no evidence of martial presence anywhere, no guns, no tanks, no bomb damage, and of course no soldiers, so I ruled that out too.

  It had outlived its usefulness as a trading post. I ruled this out too, as it was obviously a popular tourist resort and had been catering for holiday makers so recently that their names were still in the log books in the hotels I had been in.

  Everyone was dead. Whether due to disease or famine or alien activity. Maybe the whole world was dead, and I was the only one left.

  It was option four upon which I ruminated the most. It seemed most likely that it was either everybody else that was dead, or it was just me. I kept coming back this idea of purgatory, and when I found a section on religion I must have become immersed as I didn’t even realise darkness was setting in outside and I hadn’t locked up. It was the door banging shut that jerked me awake the next morning.

  65%

  Again the disorientation. Again the flashing numbers. But this time coupled with the shock of being jolted awake by a loud noise. I sat bolt upright and the pain instantly hit me as my screaming limbs protested at being wrenched from their comfort. I had fallen asleep on a wooden desk on my arms, and my back spasmed as I sat up.

  The main door to the library had slammed shut. I had forgotten to close it before I drifted off. Begging the question, how had it done that? Another mind trick like the footstep in the shop yesterday?

  Tentatively I made my way to the front door, suddenly aware yet again of the incredible silence that pervaded the room. There appeared to be some noise emanating from the other side of the door on the street. It sounded like dragging feet or something.

  The zombies have finally found me, I thought.

  I realised there were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a mid-terrace, designed to be kept shaded from the blazing heat outside by rejecting any form of opening in its fabric. So I couldn’t even see outside to determine the source of this latest nerve-shredding sound. There was only one way to find out.

  Slowly I turned the handle and, taking a deep breath, yanked the door fully open expecting to be greeted by rotting, groaning faces and a good ripping apart. There was nothing but a steady wind. It seemed to increase in speed slightly as I took it in.

  The dragging noise I had heard was a newspaper blowing around in a circular vortex on the street outside. Talk about an anti-climax. The door had slammed shut in a draught, that was all it was. I audibly sighed in relief, but then I noticed that the sun had vanished behind some fairly ominous looking clouds in the distance. Something about those clouds made me retreat back inside and seek shelter. The temperature had dropped considerably, almost to the point where I was cold for the first time since being here. I rifled through my rucksack and slipped on another T-shirt as I repositioned myself at my desk and tried to recall what I had learned the night before.

  The books were s
played out in front of me, illustrated with rich classical drawings depicting fiery landscapes and winged angels and one of Dante staring at a mountain. The inscriptions were obviously all in Spanish, yet I was able to understand quite a lot by plumbing the depths of my memory for the remnants of school Latin classes.

  The overriding theme behind purgatory was the concept of the soul being purified in order to enter the next phase of existence, which in Christianity is either heaven or hell. Mostly, it is regarded as a state of mind, but in medieval times it was conceived as an actual place, a sort of limbo between life and death.

  It made perfect sense to me, I was sorry to discover. By no means was I a religious man. Years of Anglican education, going to church four times a week in the British school system, had instilled in me a deep boredom of and for Christian traditions. But it hadn’t totally erased in my mind the belief in a higher power, of a more glorious afterlife for example, and I could not shift this notion of post-mortem suffering before everlasting paradise.

  Or damnation.

  The kicker was that the dead person had no say in the matter. If I was stuck in purgatory, and I remained divided on whether or not that was the case, it was down to those I had left behind to determine my fate. Whether Buddhism, Catholicism or Judaism, they all held fast to the belief that praying or making offerings to the dead somehow assisted them in their journey to their final abode. More worryingly, the Greeks apprehended that purgatory consisted of ‘temporary punishments agreeable to every one's behaviour and manners.’

  One phrase struck a chord. According to Origen, some sort of early Christian scholar, “He who comes to be saved, comes to be saved through fire.” A fire that burns away sins and worldliness like lead, leaving behind only pure gold. I had experienced my share of fire on the island, from the perpetual and searing sun to the inferno that had destroyed the Hesperia hotel. Was this a baptism of fire?

  I looked down at my arms. They had turned from a livid red in the first few days here to a deep nut brown now. I was tanned, I had lost what little weight I needed to before I came here… I was looking pretty good. Perhaps this was the cleansing process. Perhaps my soul was undergoing purification at that very moment?

  There was a lot of literature about indulgencias, the most literal translation of which I assumed must be indulgences, or a sort of religious get out of jail card. From what I could ascertain, if you were granted indulgencias through the prayers of others your time in purgatory was shortened by a certain amount of time: cuarentenas, or quarantines. These could be increased by pious actions. Interestingly, quarantines were thought to be measured in periods, for example the 40 days of Lent. In reality it sounded like a money-making tool for the medieval church. But with some quick calculation I thought 40 days sounded right around the time my percentage would hit the big ZERO.

  Whether I believed all this or not, the correlations between popular religious belief in this idea of purgatory, even in fiction, were laid out before my very eyes. In Comedia Divina Dante’s purgatory is a mountain somewhere in the southern hemisphere, and is the only land there. That sounded a heck of a lot like Lanzarote to me. All I could see was water and mountains…

  Ultimately, I was no closer to determining whether I was existing in an indeterminate state between life and death, or was simply stuck on an island in the middle of the Atlantic at someone else’s behest.

  I smoked as I emerged onto Avenue Papagayo, sipping from my water bottle and inhaling the scent of the man-free streets. The air was definitely thicker, like the way it cloys just before a rain storm. It got me thinking, how would the world smell if humans had never populated it? Without roads, buildings, or cars? I got a sense that this place was returning to how nature intended even at this early stage of its abandonment. The air hung heavy with that unmistakable scent of heat on road. It seemed purer than it should have with no car exhausts to pollute it.

  As I approached the still smouldering Hesperia, the stench of burning humanity crept up my nose, and cleared again almost as quickly as I continued down the path to the sea and the incoming breeze carried it away.

  Something occurred to me, and my pace sped up as I anticipated investigating it. I was looking for garbage, literally, as I didn’t think I had seen any and what the mind doesn’t see it doesn’t register. Indeed, what the nose doesn’t smell it forgets, yet something about the smell of the air as I rounded onto Avenue Papagayo caused me to double take.

  What do all towns and cities have in common? Go to any city, and even in the most upmarket area, if it’s hot enough you’ll get that nasty, cloying stench of human refuse on the wind. Maybe not all the time, but try and walk a few blocks without it and you’ll be sure to pick it up. You might not even register its presence as it’s so common, but it will cause you to curl up your nose without even realising it.

  Here, there was nothing like it. The air was clean, almost fragrant, with a floral whisper and overtones of ozone from the sea. I drew deeply into my lungs almost hoping to catch the spoiled tang of a back alley bin on the breeze, but got nothing.

  And that was what disturbed me.

  I ran behind the nearest restaurant, the Plaza Café, and sure enough there were two large green dumpers behind it. They were chained shut but I could prize them both open just enough to confirm my fears.

  Both were empty. Not only empty, but clean. In fact, sticking my nose into the gap and inhaling I could smell nothing but hot plastic. No rancid cheese, no mouldy vegetables, no build-up of that repugnant bin juice that always made me gag every time I had to empty my own trash. It was as if these bins had never been used for the purpose of garbage disposal at all.

  I felt numb. What was going on? Had there never been people here?

  The one sure-fire way to determine human presence in a place is by what they leave behind. We can’t help it, we are consumers and wasters. What we waste gets left behind everywhere we go.

  I sat on the pavement and tried to put the pieces together. I was surer now than ever that this was some kind of experiment and that I was the guinea pig. I saw a film once, I think it was German, about a group of volunteers put into a fake prison and split into guards and inmates. The inmates have to follow certain rules and the guards have to enforce them. It was a study in human psychology. I can’t remember exactly what happened but everyone ends up killing or raping each other. Maybe that’s what I was being put through, some sort of weird sick experiment to see how I’d react under extreme stress. But then how to explain the bees? Were they some sort of hallucination? Was I being drugged without my knowledge to increase the effects of the solitude?

  Suddenly I felt a burst of epic anger welling up inside. I stood, threw my arms up and screamed so loudly I felt my throat tear.

  “BASTARDS!!!”

  I drew the word out for almost a full eight seconds. In the silence that followed the echo I felt purified. The outburst relieved me and I felt the anger withdraw and a serene calm take its place.

  What was the point in panicking? Stressing myself out wasn’t going to help the situation. I resolved not to give them the satisfaction. Whoever was watching me, if anyone, would not gain the knowledge they sought. I refused to be their guinea pig. I scanned the street for hidden cameras, but saw only two standard CCTV jobs further down towards the end of the avenue. If this really was some kind of Truman Show rip-off they weren’t doing a great job of the coverage. Without thinking I slapped myself across the face, thinking the shock would wake me up and make me stop fantasising that I was the centre of some Orwellian assessment. The reality of my situation was still unchanged, regardless of whether or not I was being observed. I was still alone, and stranded in this place.

  The slap did help. I lit another cigarette and gathered my thoughts. It was time for decisive action, no point in pondering it anymore. I needed to take matters into my own hands, and not leave myself at the mercy of fate. Why eek out an existence here for a further 20 days, waiting to hit 0% and thus acquiesce to the inevi
table? As if denying my own determination I crushed the cigarette and went back into the Plaza Cafe to search for a drink.

  With a cool bottle of white wine minus three healthy swigs stuffed in my rucksack I made my way back out on to the Avenue Papagayo looking for inspiration. It came almost immediately, and I silently cursed myself for being so short-sighted. All this time I had been wondering how to go about hot-wiring a car, but the answer was staring me full in the face across the intersection from the cafe.

  I shook my head at my own lack of proactivity as I approached Autos Solyplaya, outside of which sat a large billboard saying ‘Rent A Car’…

  Getting inside was easy, as the metal rolling gate that was supposed to secure the shop interior had been left open, and it was just a case of rolling it up and kicking the wooden door in. It gave easily, and I was thankful I didn’t have to smash one of the large windows that fronted on to the street. I saw no reason to make excess noise even now, but mainly I didn’t fancy the idea of getting a shard of glass in my eye and having to hunt down a doctor’s surgery. The thought occurred to me that I should probably seek one out anyway and load up on antibiotics, emergency bandages, antihistamines and the like, as the first aid kit I had brought from the hotel was rudimentary to say the least. I wasn’t a hypochondriac by nature but it paid to be prepared. So far I had fallen off a roof, dislocated my shoulder and survived an exploding hotel, and the thought had crossed my mind that I might be immortal. Finding out would be interesting if something more serious happened to me, and for a second I wandered if stealing a car with the amount of alcohol I had put away in the past few days was a good idea.