The Quiet Apocalypse

by Nick Cracknell

  “Aaaaaaah!” he laughed. “I’m just fucken with you bro!”

  He dropped his weapon arm to his side and set the empty beer glass down on the table.

  “You fucken Brits!” he mocked. “Too bloody sensitive!”

  He pronounced it sinsituv.

  My shock broke, and I felt a wave of anger well up inside me.

  “What are you doing, Hans?” I asked him. “What do you want from me?”

  “What do I want?” he laughed incredulously. “It’s not what I want of you, bro. You need me! I’m the only thing that’s keeping you from going cuckoo for caca my friend.”

  He went silent. He had started breathing heavily again, as if incensed at my confusion. I shrugged and exhaled, not knowing how to respond. He seemed half way between a small child having a tantrum and a madman about to snap.

  He went on. “Who do you think’s been looking out for you all this time?” he said under his breath. “Who’s been watching you since Day One? Who bandaged your head to stoop you bleeding to death, eh? Who set out all the food for you so you wouldn’t starve? Who dragged your sweaty ass back to bed every time you collapsed like a drunken kent in the street? You know what I want? I want you to show me some fucken respect!”

  It came out ruspict.

  Whether it was the beer buzz or a sense of immortality, I felt the need to challenge him. Something deep within me wanted to prove this man, this apparition, wrong.

  “You’re lying,” I said, and speaking slowly I enunciated each word, as if to convince myself as much as to emphasise the point to him. “You. Are. Me!”

  He grinned again and his tongue lolled out. He looked like a rabid dog about to pounce.

  “You don’t get it, do you bro?” he said dangerously quietly. “I’m more than you. I’m better than you!”

  Bitter than you.

  “If it weren’t for me, you’d be pissing into the wind my friend. You’d be a wreck.”

  Wrick.

  “You want me sticking around son, let me tell you. I’m warning you right now, if I walk away you’ll be in a world of hurt little man!”

  He was using lines from my favourite movies against me now. He let that hang in the air, standing ten or so feet away, staring at me. Was he expecting a response? Did he want me to challenge him? I couldn’t work it out. It was the most extraordinary situation I had been in on the island so far, and there had been plenty. I was standing in the street having an argument with a visual manifestation… of myself. I decided enough was enough.

  “I’m not sure what you expect me to do, Hans,” I said hesitatingly. “But I’m not having this argument any more. You’re not real.”

  I turned my back to him and began walking towards the beach, fully expecting a tirade of abuse to be hurled at my departing form. After a few paces nothing had happened so I stopped and turned around again, not sure what to expect.

  But not expecting what I saw.

  Hans had disappeared. So had his beer glass. His chair was still pulled out from the table as if he had been sitting there all along, but aside from that there wasn’t a single trace of him. I stared, gawping, trying to make sense of the situation in my head. To my surprise, I had to stifle a small laugh. Well that’s that, I thought to myself. I shrugged and turned my attention again towards the beach.

  The attack came from out of nowhere. Somehow he had worked his way around behind me in silence. As I turned beach-wards, a thumping crack landed on the right side of my head just above my ear, and I screamed in shock and surprise. The pain exploded through my skull and my vision became awash with bright light. I reached up and grabbed my head with both hands, and felt a sharp blow land in my ribs, doubling me up. The pain tore through my chest in a massive wave.

  I gasped for breath, but kept my hands up to shelter my head from further blows. I felt a warm liquid start to course down my check, and in that instant I knew the bastard had glassed me. I managed to open my eyes in an attempt to parry further blows, and saw bright red blood dripping through my hands onto the pavement.

  “Hans! Stop!” I cried, still in shock at what had just happened. Another sharp pain barked through my left leg, and I knew he had kicked me. The blow knocked me off balance, and I fell to the hard concrete pavement, knees crumbling beneath me. I curled into the foetal position, trying to stop the attack. I felt powerless, unable to defend myself as I was in such pain and disorientation.

  I heard his breath coming from above me, ragged and heavy, the breathing of a man in the throes of a furious breakdown.

  “Please stop!” I shouted as loud as I could, desperate for a second to collect myself and absorb the blows before any further reigned down. I daren’t move or straighten myself out in case I received a broken glass to the belly or face.

  “Just stop! Please for a second! Let’s work this out!” I cried in desperation.

  I heard a short, sharp snigger, high-pitched and absurd, from above me.

  “Not so fucken clever now, eh bro?” came his sarcastic retort. “Still think I’m not real now? Real as the blood in your head bro!” he shouted.

  I risked a glance. He was standing above me, engaged in some form of tribal shuffle. An absurd little dance, lifting his legs up and down and making as if to punch an invisible boxing speedball. My head was rolling and I had to fight back the urge to throw up. The pain was intense, masking my vision. My ribs throbbed. He must have swung a real haymaker into them.

  He danced on, yelling ‘eye of the tiger!’ at the top of his lungs, spitting onto the pavement. I was looking at myself, but a grotesque parody thereof, unable to convince myself that this was reality despite the throbbing in my skull. I knew somehow I had to get away from the madman circling me or else I would wind up dead. I suspected he meant to kill me and was just looking for an excuse.

  But what if all he had said was true? What if he was some kind of angelic doppelganger that had been looking out for me ever since my arrival on the island? Maybe not physically, but metaphysically… was he some sort of incorporeal embodiment of my imperviousness to physical harm? The falls, the explosions, the bees, the nuclear clouds… all of these things could have, should have killed me and yet, here I was lying on a sidewalk covered in my own blood, racking my brains as to how to escape.

  From myself.

  Maybe all this presence did want was a little respect, a little acknowledgement for protecting me thus far, and when he didn’t get it, it was in his childlike nature to lash out at those closest to him. Was he some kind of animalistic, base form of me, some anti-me that had been placed here to reveal to me my true nature in times of trouble? All this was rolling through my head as I watched the mad man shuffle just feet away.

  I decided I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I had to get away or risk a further beating that could possibly be my last. I waited until he shuffled his back towards me, then hastily, groggily rose to my feet as quickly as I could. I didn’t know where I was going, but it didn’t matter.

  I just ran.

  Amazingly I got around twenty feet of a start on him before he realised my subterfuge. A primal roar escaped his mouth.

  “Keeeeeeeeeeeent!” he screeched, and I felt the air around me tear a little as if in acceptance of the guttural howl he had emitted. That, and the beer glass landing next to me, shattering into a thousand pieces but missing me by a good couple of feet. This seemed to enrage Hans even more, and I swear I could hear his low grunt as he set himself and began charging after me.

  Even with my head start I could feel him gaining on me by the second. I knew he couldn’t possibly be any faster than me (or could he?) as he was me, but he didn’t have a suspected broken rib and a face full of blood to contend with. Each step I took, a bolt of pain lanced through my side where he had slammed me with his fist, and I had to sweep the mixture of blood and sweat off my forehead to stop it running into my eyes.

  I was running parallel to the buildings facing the beach, and in a split second decided that if
I continued that way he would catch up with me. I had to change tact quickly to avoid being gained on any further. Reaching the end of the block, I made a sharp right onto Calle Guenia, heading away from the beach.

  “Get back here ya little shit!” I heard him shout from maybe ten paces behind me. The feint had meant I was out of his eyeline, and he didn’t like that one bit. I thought quickly. He had the element of speed, but I had that of surprise. If I could keep feinting down a side alley or something he might lose track of me altogether.

  But it was a wide open road, just a through way from one Avenida to another, and there was no place to hide. Still running, I glanced around me for inspiration. I bore a sharp right again, heading instinctively down a more built up street, Calle Greco. Four storey buildings rose high either side, and I figured I was now on the other side of the bar Gambrinus. I heard Hans round the corner behind me, and took up the pace again. I sprinted past a couple of grocery stores, desperately searching for an open door or fire escape I could dash into. I was in his plain view again, and needed to find a way of staying out of his eyeline.

  I came to a corrugated security door, the type that slides in front of a store at night for extra protection, and noticed there was about three inches of gap at the bottom. Without thinking, I reached down and with all my strength gave it a hefty tug upwards. By dint of fate it budged a few more inches, and I was able to get down on all fours and slide underneath, instantly pivoting back on myself and slamming it down shut just as Hans reached the other side and began banging on it in fury. The noise was deafening in the small area I now found myself hiding in and yet again I couldn’t help worrying, despite the insane apparition that was chasing me, that all the noise would bring even more unsavoury predators out of the woodwork. I lay still, trying to take stock of the surroundings, while the intense banging continued.

  Visions of the living fog/smoke that had chased down the mountain towards me at Playa Blanca flew threw my head, and I found myself begging for it to come again and this time claim Hans in its grasp.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on the surroundings again. My eyes wouldn’t adjust to the darkness having come straight out of bright sunlight, and it took a moment for it to come into clarity. I was in a store room of some sort. Wooden boxes marked verduras lined the walls and there was a dank, musty odour of old food. I must be in the back of a restaurant or grocery store, I thought.

  I hauled myself to my feet and stepped through the darkness, barking my shin on something hard and letting out a small yelp of pain. Hans must have heard, as his banging on the metal door went up a notch and I heard him screaming.

  “Get your ass bick out here and face me like a man!” he was bellowing. “I’ll ring your scrawny little nick you kent!”

  Instinctively I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion. What the hell had made him so angry at me? I continued in to the store room, my vision adjusting with each step and saw a staircase leading upwards. Putting a storey or two between me and this madman suddenly seemed like a tip-top plan, and I ran up it in three or four steps.

  There was another, this time PVC, door at the top which yielded with much less effort than the security door below, and I found myself in another store room. This one smelled more of chemicals, and shaving foam or something, and indeed through a set of flimsy curtains I came into a hairdresser’s salon which must have sat above the restaurants lining the beach in front of Fred Olsen.

  The entrance door was locked, but a good kick or two at the lock and it soon flung open, and I came out on a concrete balcony confirming my suspicions as it looked out over the beach.

  I paused for a second, and realised the muffled banging coming from below had stopped. This could mean two things… Hans had either given up trying to get into the storeroom and was looking at alternative means of entry in my pursuit, or he had gotten in and was again right behind me.

  I ran along the concrete balcony, which was a walkway to various commercial outlets on the second floor above the restaurants. There was an opticians and a couple of real estate agencies, but they were all shut and had big, glass frontages that wouldn’t offer much by way of a hiding place. I looked over the balcony at the street below.

  Only a ten foot or so drop, I could jump it!

  I leapt up onto the wall and steadied myself, and was about to jump when something out of the corner of my vision stopped me. It was a sign above a store frontage. It took a split second for me to register it, but when I did I froze stiff as the meaning of the sign sank in.

  At that precise moment, in my crouching position about to leap to the concrete paving below, my foot caught underneath me. Momentum conspired against me as it had on the glass roof of the Sun Royal when I had tried to disable the alarm. I lost my balance and shot forward head first into nothing but air.

  As the ground rose up to meet me, the vision of the sign behind me was still imprinted in my mind’s eye.

  Radio Lanzarote.

  37%

  In the blackness, yet again I was powerless to act. It was like a conspiracy! I felt aware of everything around me, but I wasn’t able to see anything. I could hear voices again, and I could smell that strange antiseptic smell like cleaning fluid on a urinal, not unpleasant but acrid. It was so strong that I felt my throat burning, if my throat was even there. It was another in-body, out-of-body hallucination. At the back of my mind I knew something important, possibly life-changing, had just happened to me, but even though I wracked my brain I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. I was dreaming within a dream. Was someone touching me? Prodding me? Like in a medical examination? It felt like I was being handled, but I couldn’t tell where. It felt like I should be being handled, but wasn’t. All I could do was lie in the blackness, trying not to gag on that sharp, disinfectant stench, hoping that whatever held this power over me would be merciful and not decide on a whim to, oh I don’t know, prick out my eyeballs with a sharp stick or some other horrifically simple pointy object. Was this what Locked In Syndrome was like? I apprehended that people with LIS were at least conscious and able to see their surroundings, if not interact physically with them? Wasn’t that how they were able to communicate? Eye movements and the like, speaking in code? I couldn’t see anything at all. Total, inky blackness with conscious thought. The thought came to me that I could be stuck like this forever, lying in an eternal womb of thought with nothing and nobody to acknowledge it. Perhaps I had passed through the Purgatory stage, and this was now hell. Again the concept of an irony-filled, bespoke damnation came to me. Was this my own private hell, an existence that allowed me to recognise smells and sounds and the presence of other humans, but allowed absolutely no interaction with them? An ironical stab of tailored perdition born from a constant desire for peace and quiet while I was alive? Was this a dream within a dream, or a nightmare within a dream? Or a dream within a nightmare? Was this some metaphysical fuck-you that was being foisted upon me in death in a mocking sneer at my own failed existence? Suddenly it was as if I had been injected with paranoia, or deliberately infected with a sense of low self-worth. I needed to get out of this state and quick, before it sucked me down and trapped me forever. What if I never woke up? I had a vague feeling of what I was supposed to be doing; that there should a life to be lived beyond this. I couldn’t put my finger on where I should be. I understood the concept of a life, maybe even a family and a job, but it was as if they were just out of my reach. Physically and mentally. An unseen barrier held them aloft. Could I see them in the blackness or was it my mind playing tricks on me? They were the outer rings and I was the centre of some twisted Venn diagram, hanging yolk-like, a world of albumen just beyond that filmy barrier of consciousness that I was destined never to break through.

  Unless…

  I strained my mind, pulling on those fragments of reality, trying to concentrate the million pinpricks of thought, each too tiny to be perceived individually, into a concentrated bubble, the way night-vision goggles do with the residual light in the darkness.
I pulled them towards my mind’s eye, the sheer effort making my brain want to explode, not in pain but in rampant frustration. Slowly, painfully slowly (it could have been an hour or a year for I was unable to discern time in this bubble) like a snail inching its way over a hill, the light in my mind’s eye began to grow. I felt like I was fighting a battle that could never be won, like I was cycling up a perpetual incline towards a desert oasis that remained the same distance away no matter how fast my progress. More than once I nearly gave up. The pinprick of light seemed to be growing, then it would shrink back again, and I would be left gasping at the effort. Perhaps it wasn’t growing, but simply pulsating and taunting me instead. I pulled harder, willing the light to grow with every fibre of my consciousness. And just when I thought it was over, the light began to expand again, this time with a greater sense of purpose than just a mere pulsation. Here it was! My own light at the end of the tunnel! Except this was no tunnel. A tunnel needs an entrance and an exit, something tangible to allow access and egress. There was nothing tangible in this place. It just was. But the light was still growing, even when I eased back on the mental pulling. I had done enough it seemed. It had transcended its own barrier now, and had become exponential. This was either a good or a bad thing. I knew that the light would now grow to engulf me, and release me from the inky blackness, but what would happen when it did was anybody’s guess.

  I waited and it didn’t take long. The light became a dazzling rainbow, every possible colour radiating from its central whiteness, and I could feel my body begin to react. Here it comes, I thought, and as it folded around me I felt almost human again. I braced myself to wake, to be reborn into reality. And when I was, a female was shouting at me.

  33%

  “Mister! Mister! Okiro!”