The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  First things first, I had to steal the car.

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  Inside, the shop was as plain as you would expect of a car rental office. One desk sat in the centre of the reception area and a rubber plant stood proudly beside it by way of decoration. The computer on the desk was dead, not even pressing the on button stimulated the screen to life, so I hovered around trying to locate the key bank. I located it in the rear room; a square white box on the wall that I jimmied open with a chair leg to reveal four of five rows of various car keys. Never having been accustomed to a great deal of choice in life I just grabbed the first set that hit my eye line. The symbol on the black grip revealed that they belonged to a Toyota. I headed back outside immediately to find the car. The most obvious thing to do was walk outside, press the button and see which car beeped open. As I was learning though, not everything was as simple as that in Lanzarote. The keys I had selected weren’t of the remote keyless kind, but plain old manual openers. I didn’t even think they made those anymore.

  Every set I selected was the same. What in God’s name? With a deal of straining I wrenched the key cupboard off the wall and hefted it outside to try and open every car on the street. As I passed the desk in the main reception room I noticed the drawers were not locked and thought a quick rummage might yield something of use. Besides the expected piles of rental paperwork there was an additional set of keys in here, which I noted with anticipation featured an auto-open infrared button. With even greater joy I noticed that the leather tag attached to the set of keys sported the Porsche logo. Must belong to the owner of the franchise…

  Out on the street I scanned the pavement for signs of the Porsche in question, but all I could see were the standard white Toyotas and Seats that made up most of the rental inventory. A thought struck me, why would the owner of a successful car rental joint park his precious Porsche with the riff raff? He or she must have a private parking space somewhere, probably out the back. My suspicions were confirmed as upon searching round the rear of the building there, in its own designated parking spot, was a weather-beaten but quite beautiful 911. I pointed the key, held my breath, and pressed the open button. Nada. The red light didn’t even blink on the keys. I tried the key in the door and with some surprise discovered it was already open.

  I knew even before I turned the key in the ignition that the car would be as dead as leaves on a pavement. I knew even if I replaced the battery, spark plugs, alternator or any other part of the engine that controlled ignition that when I turned the key the result would be the same. Yet I held firm to one idea; maybe it was the fuel that had gone stale.

  Consider this: any fuel in a car that had been sitting in the relentless, pounding heat of the Canaries for more than a couple of months would surely have lost its qualities of ignition. How long had this car been sat here un-manned and un-started? It could have been weeks, even months or years since someone had sparked this baby up. There was the part of me that knew that, like the garbage bins, it had probably never been used at all. It was just a shell, a dummy corporation, a prop that had been placed here to make me retain the hope that there were, or had been, other people here at some point.

  A man could go crazy contemplating the implications. So instead of allowing myself to get caught up in another deep session of existential ruminating, I resolved to test out my fuel theory. I let off the handbrake and with no small degree of difficulty began to push the Porsche out of its spot and onto the main road. Five minutes later I had it round the side of the car rental office and at the junction onto the main drag, Avenue Papagayo. As luck would have it, this avenue was luckily on a fairly decent slope, heading from the church opposite at the crest of the hill all the way down the main street to a roundabout at the bottom about a quarter of a mile away. It was just a case of pushing it on to the Avenue, jumping in and coasting down the hill, sticking it in gear and popping the clutch while turning the ignition key and hoping something would catch.

  But in my excitement at finding the car and testing the fuel theory I had totally neglected to check the most important thing. The brakes. So when as expected the Porsche didn’t sputter into life on the decline but remained resolutely lifeless I got a heck of a shock upon slamming on the brakes when absolutely nothing happened. By this stage the speedometer said I was going 20 mph. But there was still a good three or four hundred yards before the road ran out and I hit the roundabout. I didn’t know it yet, but the roundabout wasn’t really that at all, but a slight circular raise in the road filled with gravel to indicate the presence of traffic control. Beyond it was a pedestrian walkway leading to more shops, separated by some fairly immovable looking concrete bollards.

  Shit, I thought as the needle reached 30mph. I began to weave in the road to try and slow the car’s momentum. There wasn’t much room to do this, with the pavement on one side and a line of parked cars on the other sandwiching me in, and all I succeeded in doing was maintaining a speed of around 33mph rather than slowing down. I pulled the handbrake, which did about as much good as asking the car politely if it would mind slowing down a bit. I pumped the brakes again out of instinct but they were clearly linked to the car’s on board computer which of course required power to work. I was going into those bollards regardless, which was going to do wonders for the Porsche’s chassis.

  There was a huge metal anchor in the centre of the roundabout, so I couldn’t even go over it in the hope that the gravel centre would take a bit of pace off. I skirted round it and went over the bollards at around 36mph with a crunch that suggested the car came off worse, and slammed into a standalone wooden hut displaying ‘Informacion Turistica’. This didn’t offer much resistance except to deploy the airbag, and with a mouth full of powder and zero visibility I ended up ploughing through an arrangement of metal chairs and broadsiding a restaurant called Sabina before finally coming to rest.

  I eased myself out of the car and checked myself over but apart from a slightly stiff neck I was absolutely fine. A brief inventory of the Porsche however revealed that the chassis was totally twisted out of shape, and along with three burst tires I felt this 911 had seen its final journey in Lanzarote or indeed anywhere for the foreseeable future.

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  Three hours later I had hiked almost two miles in increasing humidity to the outskirts of town and back where I’d managed to fill two jerry cans with fuel at an out-of-service filling station.

  I was soaked through with sweat but feeling pretty proud of myself. I’d broken into the SPAR opposite where I’d crashed for a bottle of paracetamol and a glug of whiskey to ease the pain in my neck. In the rear service area I found two large stainless steel refrigerated canisters of milk, each with a long plastic tube poking out which fed into an automatic coffee machine (also out-of-service) within the supermarket. After removing the plastic tubing I set about trying to find a fuel dump. There was bound to be one somewhere but it was unlikely to be central to the shopping precinct. Instinct told me to walk north out of the town. The shops thinned out and the roadsides became emptier and, sure enough, after half a mile or so at the end of Calle El Veradero I spied the tell-tale canopy of a filling station on the horizon.

  There was a small accompanying shop with a till and a few car related accessories, but most importantly two plastic jerry cans for holding fuel. None of the pumps worked of course, but lifting up the metal lid on the forecourt I was able to access two of the large underground storage tanks that held the fuel. One was only half full and the plastic tubing wouldn’t reach the fuel level inside, but the second was full. After some impromptu sucking I filled both jerry cans and headed back into town to find a suitable vehicle. I had no way of knowing whether I was transporting diesel or petrol, so figured I’d have to find two cars, one of each.

  I spent an hour examining the row of cars outside Autos Sol-Y-Playa again, and identified a diesel Seat Ibiza and a Toyota Yaris that ran on unleaded petrol. They wouldn’t be much good without keys though, and more time was wasted matching up
their number plates to the myriad sets of keys back in the rental store. After another hour spent sucking the spent fuel out of their tanks, I feverishly poured the ‘fresh’ fuel I’d collected into each car, one jerry can for each.

  Perhaps it was wishful thinking; the fuel in the filling station had almost certainly been sitting there just as long as the cars on the roadside and was highly unlikely to have any incendiary properties either, but there was a chance it would work and I was willing to try just about anything at that stage to get some answers. I hadn’t thought far enough ahead yet to even consider what those answers would be even if I did get a car to work and was able to drive around the island.

  What did I think I would find?

  That the next town along would be bustling with holiday makers swilling beer and sunning themselves on the beaches? Hope does strange things to the mind. It anoints you with that willing suspension of disbelief, and then so quickly removes it once the reality hits home.

  For one brief glimmering second of wonder I thought there was a spark of recognition from the engine of the Yaris when I turned the key in its ignition. Maybe it was the heat playing tricks on my mind but I could have sworn the needle on the rev counter moved a fraction of an inch as it registered the process of internal combustion in its lifeless engine. I was of course fooling myself. Nothing happened, nothing ignited, I would be driving nowhere on Lanzarote in either a Yaris or an Ibiza. It was like trying to strike a dead match.

  I sipped some more whiskey and sat on the pavement. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and involuntarily emptied my head of all thoughts. I went into a kind of trance of disappointment. The wind was upping, and the dark clouds I had noticed when at the library seemed to be rolling closer.

  A storm was coming.

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  I hadn’t really noticed it until now, but Playa Blanca sat in front of a large mountain range. The guide book called it Hacha Grande.

  Big Axe.

  The clouds that now rolled over the top of Hacha Grande were deep purple and very angry looking. The wind had picked up considerably to the extent that when I stood up from the pavement I had to steady myself by grabbing the door of the Yaris to stop from being gusted over.

  A strange feeling had come over me, a sense of wooziness that was more than just the side effects of the whiskey. I felt weak at the knees, lethargic, almost as if all my strength were being sucked out of me by that wind. I felt like the clouds were growing in volume in direct proportion to the strength leaving my body.

  More clouds of dust and dirt from nearby derelict spreads of land, cleared for future hotel developments, began to swirl and create mini cyclones that whipped around me and off down Avenue Papagayo. I needed to get inside and fast. I had never seen a storm grow so quickly. I considered the option of getting back to the Sun Royal. It was probably a good half mile walk, but the speed with which the wind was growing made me doubt I could get there in time. I broke into a jog.

  The wind didn’t seem to be coming from one direction but was constantly changing, so that one second I was running directly into it and making virtually no progress, and the next I was being buoyed along by invisible hands that pushed me from behind. Salt spray lashed at my face, and glancing to my right I saw the sea raging in and consuming the beach. The waves were doing something very strange. Instead of rushing in perpendicular to the beach they were landing in totally random formation, as if controlled by some arbitrary force underneath them. They came from left and right, smashing into the wooden huts that usually served beer and ice cream to thirsty sunbathers, spray and foam hurling itself into the air almost to the height of the surrounding buildings. Once even it seemed that the waves that had already landed on the beach were reforming and hurling themselves back into the incoming deluge. Thirty or so meters off shore huge geysers spurted out of the surface and leapt skywards like reverse whirlpools. It was like a scene from Moby Dick, and I could hardly believe that this was happening so close to where I was standing. If I had been on the promenade I would surely have been washed in to that murderous sea.

  I tried to pick up my pace to get to the turning onto Calle Janubio and thus start heading away from the beach instead of parallel to it. But as I did my situation became even worse. The clouds that had risen over the Hacha Grande had now slid down the side of the mountain and hit land, and were eating up the half mile or so of scrubland that separated the mountain and the Sun Royal. They actually seemed to be consuming the land as they came; great purple Pac Men swirling around each other and approaching with alarming speed.

  Then something happened that made me sure I was hallucinating. The mountain, Hacha Grande itself, started to move like a wave. Its ridges began to rise and fall in peaks and troughs like the lines on a heart monitor. I had that distinctive disinfectant stench in my nostrils again, and the world around me started to fade to black. I deliberately barked my shin on a nearby tree stump and screamed in pain, but it kept me conscious and I started to sprint towards the Sun Royal with all the strength I could muster. I knew I had to get inside the grounds before those clouds hit me.

  The clouds continued to swallow up the ground and were no more than three or four hundred metres away now, the same amount of ground I had to cover to get to what I hoped would be the safety of the hotel complex. The ground seemed to shake with the weight of the moving mountains (were they collapsing?) and I stumbled more than once on the perfectly flat tiled sidewalk. I felt like I was in the middle of the world ending.

  Then suddenly the rain started. Big, heavy, pounding droplets that weren’t there one instant but bombarded from the very firmament of heaven the next soaked me to the core within seconds. The disinfectant smell got stronger as the clouds approached. They were close enough now that I could see finger-like tendrils of vapour preceding them, almost as if reaching out like antennae to gauge whether it was worth the clouds continuing. They swept over the dusty ground ahead of them in anticipation of reaching man-made construction, and in that second I knew that’s what they wanted.

  That, and me.

  Less than 10 meters from the glass doors to the reception area (thank god thank god thank god I left them open after jimmying them) the first fingers reached me. I swore I could hear a small, high pitched laugh as they wrapped around my legs. I waited to be yanked into the air and consumed whole by a purple Pac Cloud but I pushed on, my legs feeling like they were wading through treacle. I was within touching distance of that wonderful safe vestibule when the cloud reached me. For a split second I felt totally calm, resigned almost. The preceding desperate dash to safety and the knotted stomach tension that went with it disappeared, no longer relevant, as my fate had now been decided. I realised my feet were no longer touching the ground. I was suspended, inches off the pavement, the purple cloud underneath my feet blurring the white tiles into unrecognition. Without warning, I felt a sharp burst of pain in my side, like a shark had attacked from nowhere, as I was propelled through the doors. I felt the glass shatter around me in a million tiny shards and my whole body being thrown inwards. I braced for the impact of the ground but didn’t even feel it when it came.

  My last thought was that the shattered glass looked like a galaxy of beautiful stars. Then, again, blackness.

  62%

  Some unknown force didn’t want me to leave Playa Blanca, that I was now sure of. Had I been successful in getting a car started it wouldn’t have mattered. That clouds would undoubtedly still have got me as I raced out of town, and I would probably have ended up rolling the car into a ditch or a jagged gully of lava rock and been ripped to shreds… instead of waking up in the Sun Royal again, on my bed in room 704, seemingly totally unharmed.

  Whatever was going on, it was… unnatural.

  Look at it rationally. There was the food situation. After coming to, this time with 62% of my time remaining, I headed to the reception area to assess the damage caused. Again I had no idea how long I had been unconscious, but the sun was almost all the way across the hor
izon in the east so I assumed it must be late afternoon. Late afternoon when, I didn’t know. The restaurant was as I had left it. Everything was still fresh, and just as tasty as it had been the first day I discovered it. I was hungry, but not ravenous, so I estimated I had been out for a maximum of a day or two.

  The reception area looked like it had been hit by a bomb. And in a way it had. The glass doors had been completely shattered (by my body no less), and shards of milky glass lay everywhere on the floor. The decorative plants were lying on their sides, gravel strewn around them like blood at a murder scene. The sofa had been upended and lay upside down. Papers were everywhere, presumably from behind the desk. The computer had been blown off its perch and the screen had smashed. The cloud was nowhere to be seen. The evening was as clear and sunny as any other I had experienced on the island. The disinfectant smell that had accompanied the cloud had totally dissipated. The air was thick again, muggy, with that pleasant zing of aloe vera plants and foliage. I inhaled deeper, hoping to catch a waft of decay or human sweat, car fumes or spoiled food or anything that would signify the presence of other life. Just aloe vera and the faint tang of chlorine from the pool.

  It was Groundhog Day.

  Why Lanzarote? Why not Ko Pha-Ngan or a nice little atoll in the Seychelles? I mean there’s nothing wrong, geographically, with The Canaries in general. But there’s a stigma associated with them, isn’t there? Bleached white Brits turning into blood red Brits in 30 degree heat, knocking back weak lager and gobbling Full English breakfasts while their offspring weave in and around the tables like sugar-pumped sharks… wasn’t that the deal?

  That’s what I’d been given to believe anyway. The irony is, take away that visceral stereotype of the Western Tourist and what’s left is achingly beautiful. I should count myself lucky, I suppose. My knowledge of the islands was woefully lacking because I’d never been gripped with the desire to find out more about them, and this was solely down to my own prejudices.