The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  Given the nature of my predicament, wasn’t Lanzarote, with its moon-like craterous landscape, year-round clement weather and isolated position in the middle of the Atlantic perhaps the perfect place to live out the Apocalypse? If the rest of the world had turned into a zombie infested, disease ridden, post nuclear hell planet, then yes. If at this very moment the Prime Minister was a mile underground in London, relying on air and water filtration and canned beans until it was safe enough to emerge in a few years and attempt to rebuild society then, by comparison, my situation was positively chipper. On this island, there were no marauding cannibal gangs trying to roast my head for meat, no biological or chemical agent or clouds of radiation to make my flesh melt off at the slightest breath, no blood-driven, rage-consumed mutants around every corner, hibernating by day and hunting by night, no herds of man-eating dinosaurs, no survival of the fittest, no bunker-dwelling, shotgun-toting Judgement Day peddlers, no lawyers...

  Lanzarote just… was.

  At least, I hope it was. I could be proved very wrong of course. Was my skewed vision of the end of the world drawn from watching too many post-apocalyptic Hollywood representations? Any one of the above scenarios (well, apart from the dinosaurs and part of me still believed… wanted to believe… that Jurassic Park could happen) was a very real possibility given the state of the planet. If humans were really hellbent on destroying civilisation then it was only a matter of time. If global warming was to be the downfall of humanity then it had better get a damn move on, because as things were it wasn’t rising sea levels and melting glaciers we needed to be worried about, but fingers on nuclear buttons. Chemical attacks in unpronounceable regions of countries many people couldn’t even point out on a map.

  Maybe that’s what had happened. It was perfectly possible that I wasn’t on this island at all, but strapped to a gurney in a makeshift field hospital, convulsing and hallucinating the whole thing. Maybe the guy on the stretcher next to me was having the same recurring nightmare, except instead of drinking rum and going slowly crazy on an abandoned Atlantic island he was climbing Kilamanjaro with Marilyn Monroe or caddying for Jack Nicklaus on endless rounds of Augusta National. Happiness is relative after all.

  So was I in a dream or a nightmare? Was I happy here? Should I be counting myself incredibly lucky, or a victim of a cruel trick of fate. Only time would tell, and I just hoped I would know a hell of a lot more by the time my number (0%) was up…

  Happiness is relative.

  Health, I had. Nourishment, I had. Pleasure, I had. I was free to explore, eat, drink and sleep my way to whatever awaited me in however many percentage points I had left. I wasn’t bound by responsibility, no bills, no family, no job. Should I be taking advantage of this fact while I had the chance?

  When my time was up, would I awake back in the same little flat I’d lived in for three years, dreading the daily commute back to the same office I’d worked in for the last 13 years, drinking the same vending machine coffee and eating the same cardboard sandwiches, listening to my esteemed line manager Rod attempting to flirt with the HR girl Brenda, all the while wishing I could methodically push a sharpened pencil up his cavernous left nostril, the one that was so inexplicably and maddingly larger than his right?

  Or would that just be it? Would the lights go out?

  Or would I wake up somewhere else, with another 100% to live out, but in far less propitious circumstances? Instead of Playa Blanca in the quiet season, as a float driver on the Somerset carnival tour?

  ---

  There had to be a way out. For my own sanity I needed to explore more of the island. I had been so caught up in the car idea that it never occurred to me there were other modes of transport that could get me out of Playa Blanca. And they were bloody everywhere. I just hadn’t registered them in the forefront of my brain. Maybe the bang on my head that I’d sustained being propelled through the glass doors had knocked it there.

  I headed into town again and sure enough there was a long rack of bikes of all shapes and sizes tethered to individual iron railings by the beach front. Outside the Jungle Discoteca I selected what looked to be a fairly sturdy road bike, not too professional looking, and went about hacksawing the chain lock. It took about 20 minutes to get through and sunset was almost upon me by the time I got it loose.

  Afterwards I felt liberated and headed into the Harp Bar right by the disco where I poured myself an ice cold draught beer and sat on the terrace to watch the sun go down. Out of instinct I kept my new acquisition next to me in case it got stolen. It needed a new saddle, the existing one had obviously seen a fair few miles, but I surmised I wouldn’t be going long distance on it and I could put up with a sore ass if it meant discovering something (anything) more about my predicament.

  Did it matter though?

  At some point I was going to have to consider the very real prospect of my own mortality. I had been here for at least 13 days. In my earlier calculations in the library I had deduced that if the numbers kept on reducing at their current rate, I had around 20 days left to figure something out. That gave me a small sense of relief, for 20 days was actually quite a long time. The numbers only appeared when I woke up, either after sleeping or being rendered unconscious. There seemed to me no differentiation between the two, the numbers were counting down pretty consistently, around 3% or 4% each time. So all I had to do was avoid sleep and being knocked out or blacking out. Easy.

  I chastised myself again for thinking too much. I was always a thinker, a procrastinator, rather than a doer. As a child I was blessed with more than a modicum of intelligence but never seemed to actually put it to use. I remember my teachers telling me that I had ‘the brains’ and if I chose to use them I ‘would go far’. It seems I never did, as I didn’t go far. I ended up working as an actuary for an insurance firm. Just one more termite in the enormous mound of human life.

  It hit me. I had never really achieved anything of note. I had fathered a child but rarely saw her. My only attempt at marriage had failed just one or two levels south of spectacularly. I was a tiny cog in a wheel that would roll on regardless of my removal. The world would be no better or worse a place for my disappearance from it. It would simply shrug, exhale and keep on rotating as if nothing had happened.

  Why then had it put me here?

  It had to be some external, supernatural force that had done so. I had abandoned the idea that this was an experiment now, some kind of freakish Truman Show investigation that would determine how a person would react if you pushed them to the very limit of what their psyche could deal with. The storm, the mountains moving… nobody could have controlled or created that except a higher power. I had never been religious, but there was too much hard evidence to ignore. Part of me, the realist part (which made up a large part) still shrugged off the theory that this was anything more than a big practical joke. I’d seen the movie. In a few days I’d be looking back at the footage and laughing with whoever had arranged the whole thing. After thumping them in the crotch probably.

  The sun dipped below the horizon as I finished my beer and decided to pour another one. Inside the bar was a small stage with a couple of bass guitars hanging from the wall and half a drum kit set up. I stared at them for a moment, procrastinated, decided against it and went back outside.

  My bike was still there.

  60%

  The next morning I set off.

  It was a beautiful, clear day. I packed a few bread rolls in a rucksack along with some chilled cheese slices, a few apples, two litre-bottles of sparkling water and, as an afterthought (but not really) a bottle of brandy. I had no idea where I was going or where I would end up that night so I threw a big red blanket in as well, just in case I was destined to sleep rough.

  My hands were shaking as I pulled up the zip, and I realised I was nervous. Whether it was the thought of leaving behind the ‘safety’ of Playa Blanca or the anticipation of what I might find on my journey I didn’t know. But it was an odd feeling. Like the secon
ds before you are called in to an important interview.

  A hum of adrenaline coursed through me in the early morning sun. I had left early, not by design but simply because I hadn’t slept that well. The morning sun had barely risen and there was the slightest chill in the air as I pushed myself along, my thighs burning at the slightest incline. I realised how unfit I was when I had to stop at the top of Avenue Femés. This was the unofficial town line I realised from the map. After I crossed this roundabout I was heading into unchartered territory, boldly going where…

  Shut up, I told myself. You are cycling a main road, not teleporting to Planet P-29.

  This was the moment of truth. If I really was being held in Playa Blanca then something would surely happen now to prevent me from crossing this roundabout. Would it be anaesthetic bees, an hallucinogenic storm, a zombie alarm or an exploding hotel?

  Only one way to find out…

  I stepped on the pedals and with a sense of trepidation moved forward. I checked my right and left in case a car emerged out of the blue and slammed me back over the town line. I looked above me in case a huge devil bird came swooping down to grab me in its claws and deposit me back at the Sun Royal.

  In the end nothing happened, and I simply crossed the boundary onto the main road leading in to the body of Lanzarote. For the first time I felt a vague sense of anti-climax.

  I had chosen to take the lesser LZ-702 toward the village of Uga rather than the more main road, the LZ-2, for the reason that it stopped at more little villages along the way.

  More chance of finding someone else alive, I told myself, without really believing it.

  The going was very easy, the roads were in fantastic condition and totally flat. I covered the first few miles in about 15 minutes at a sedate pace. Then a two mile sharp incline brought me to the village of Femés. An establishment, the Restaurant Casa Emiliana, welcomed me at the top of the hill. It was boarded up and looked like it hadn’t served a meal for months, maybe even years. I didn’t even bother stopping to check inside.

  The rest of Femés was just as disappointing. Lots of small whitewashed houses with a few cars parked outside them but not much else. I selected one roadside house at random and parked my bike.

  Casa No.4, read its sign, looked as dead as the restaurant. The shutters were closed, and it looked as though it could do with a fresh coat of the ubiquitous white paint. The door was locked, but it was wooden and not strong and came off its hinges with barely a hefty kick at the lock.

  Inside the smell was of a home that had been shut up and uninhabited for a number of years. None of the electrics worked, and the kitchen cupboards were totally empty. Appliances had been left open to air, and the oven looked as though it had never been used at all. It had been lived in at some point though; there was an ashtray with a few butts on a coffee table in the main living area, and towels and clothes laid around the floors in a couple of the bedrooms. In the bathroom there was a dried out bar of well-used soap on the ledge of the bath. In the garden there were a few semi-circular stone walls, which I realised later when I came across fields and fields of them were for growing grapes. The small walls sheltered the fruit from the harsh winter winds that swept in from the Atlantic.

  It looked like a house that someone had tried living in, then gave up after a few days and sought more convivial surroundings. Femés seemed to me the kind of place that would look and feel like a ghost town even if it were fully inhabited. I felt sorry for Emiliano, wherever he was, for trying to run a restaurant business in such a place.

  About two miles further on I came to another village, even smaller, called Las Casitas. It was literally a few houses scattered off the main road, most looked to be in some stage of construction. Cement mixers and breeze blocks sat unused by the side of the road. Why would anyone choose to build a house here? This was truly the middle of nowhere. It was partially sheltered by dusty hills that rose either side of the road, but you couldn’t even call this scrubland. There was absolutely nothing growing in the soil except a couple of cacti. Geographic isolation was the only reason anyone would settle in such a place.

  A few of the houses were built into the side of these hills, with garages taking up the ground floor and the living accommodation perched on top. One double garage was sitting open and had two cars inside, both old Toyotas, and upstairs I found the keys to both in a house that had been lived in a great deal more than Casa No.4. But it was still abandoned. No electrics were on. This struck me as strange as in Playa Blanca everything was running, fridges, coffee machines, tills, beer pumps.

  Why was nothing working in the sticks?

  Naturally, neither car started. I smoked a Lucky and drank half a bottle of water in the teeming sunshine. I’d only been on the road around an hour and a half and the sun wasn’t nearly at its full height in the sky but already it was getting unbearable. I would have to find some shelter for the midday hours, but with the abundance of these little settlements that wouldn’t be a problem. Next on the line was Uga, which looked to be a more substantial size than these piss-pot shanties so far.

  As I came out of the Las Casitas something caught my eye on a hill a couple of miles away. It looked like a line-of-sight radio tower, probably for transmitting local radio across the island. It was definitely worth checking out though. Even if the electrics were down, if it was a transmitter station it might have a back-up generator or even solar power.

  Being a bit of a geek at school, I had for a while been fascinated by radio and had even built my own homebrew ham radio from a kit I begged my father to buy me for Christmas. I made my antenna by stealing a 20 meter length of copper wire from my uncle’s workshop and suspending it around my bedroom ceiling.

  I still knew a bit about transmitting from a course I’d done at university, but by that stage I was more interested in amateur dramatics and getting laid to seriously pursue it.

  A tingle of excitement ran through me as I imagined dialing in and DXing (geek-speak for contacting far-away stations) some kid in Singapore or Montevideo. The only trouble was that the tower was up some pretty hardcore off-road track by the looks of it. I would have to walk it or risk serious puncturisation on my bike tires. I cursed myself for not having included a puncture repair kit instead of a bottle of bloody brandy in my rucksack.

  I adjusted the sack on my back and started up the trail. Distances can be hard to gauge in strong sunlight especially when there are no large landmarks to go against, but I estimated it would take me about a half hour to reach the antenna and, hopefully, the transmitting station it served. I couldn’t see at this stage if there was a building underneath it which would indicate the presence of such a station, but my instincts told me it was almost certainly there.

  The walk was hard going, uphill in the searing heat and over stony ground that my flip-flops were not designed to enjoy. More than a few times I had to stop to rest and swig on the water. I told myself to take it easy. If something happened I wouldn’t last long being at least 10 miles from any civilisation, if it could be termed that. I had the first aid kit I’d grabbed from the pharmacy but it wouldn’t do much good for a sprained or broken ankle. The thought of spending the night out here on a cold and dusty escarpment with no shelter didn’t fill me with anticipation.

  Damn I wished I had a car!

  About half a mile from the antenna I saw the building. Just one, which was a good sign and a bad sign. Transmitter stations can be housed in several buildings or just one. Several would have meant this was a main station, generating its own signal at high power and covering a large area. One building alone meant this was probably an unmanned relay station, operating at low power to service, or fill in pockets of poor reception for, the main station. That was fine. If it was unmanned there was more chance of it having an emergency power supply. There would almost certainly be a manual override as well, so any maintenance men could carry out repairs.

  Transmitter stations are just that – transmitters. They take a signal from
the main station and bounce it onwards towards its ultimate destination. The only trouble is, although they can send as much signal as they need, they don’t have any capacity to receive. The antenna itself and the systems inside were useless to me unless there was a two-way communications device like a CB radio inside. This was what I was hinging my hopes on.

  Having reached it, it was clearly a very basic outfit. It was basically a 2 x 2m shack constructed of the local volcanic rock. The antenna mast was around 30 metres high, which with the flat terrain would have been more than enough to be in the line of sight of several other relay stations. There would probably be a number of them all over the island. There was an even smaller hut next to it of the same material, which housed an emergency generator. It was fuel powered, so useless in other words, but what really got my heart pumping was the small array of solar panels on the flat roof of the main building.

  If these were connected, and I had no reason to believe they weren’t, I might be able to get the radio up and running to broadcast.

  The next problem that presented itself was the metal door. My shoulder was strong enough to take a wooden door off its hinges but a steel plate door was something different. I looked around for a big rock or something heavy that would serve as a battering ram. The plateau of the hill was totally flat, with nothing in sight for miles except dust and the occasional stalwart bush trying to suck as much moisture from the parched ground as it could. Not so much as a boulder in sight. Plenty of fist size rocks but nothing that was going to worry this door. Gingerly I pushed up against it and gave it as much of a shoulder barge as I could without hurting myself. Then I tried a little harder. And again. The door didn’t even shake on its hinges and I was in serious risk of breaking my collar bone if I shoved any harder.