Nick Cracknell - The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]

I wanted my life to go on. I wanted to survive this place and live beyond it. I was so damned unfair that this was how it ended for me, if that was what was going to happen.

The more I considered it the more it made sense. I was never a sociable person. My idea of hell was a cocktail party, or any sort of social gathering at which I was expected to conform to certain rules. I liked rules, but for other people not for me. It wasn’t that I was a rebel, or a misfit or an outcast, or autistic or Aspergery or anything else… I just preferred my own company. Ironic, as I would have given my arms and legs for the company of another human at that point.

Was purgatory based on irony then? Did it focus on an individual’s hubris and make them live it out eternally? In some alternative Lanzarote was Alexander the Great being confronted with a never-ending list of lands to conquer when all he really wanted to do was have a glass of wine and relax?

So many questions, so few answers. It’s human nature to be inquisitive. From the moment we can speak we are asking why in an attempt to understand the world around us. I felt like a small child again, thirsty for as much knowledge as I could fathom but lacking the ability to gather it. I shook my head in frustration. Just one clue was all I wanted. Just one morsel of information to help me. It didn’t need to be the whole story, just the first chapter so I could at least begin to comprehend what was happening. That was, I think, the hardest part of all of this. The not knowing. Deny a man food and he will simply die. But deny him knowledge and his whole world will collapse.

Not me. I was determined to beat this. I had another Lucky and by this time the sun was up above the hills and I could begin transmitting.

Inside the station I flicked the ‘on’ switch, placed the little stone on ‘transmit’ and turned on the message again. I was going to give it a good hour before a response break.

During those hours I sat in thought far too much. I was going mad through rumination. I needed a distraction to keep me occupied while transmitting, so after another fruitless response break I ran the message again and headed down to Las Casitas to look for something else to do. I came back an hour and a half later having raided several houses for loot. All I found was a selection of Dick Francis novels (all in Spanish), a backgammon board and several bottles of Jim Beam whiskey. I took them all.

Three days and nights I sat either outside or on top of that transmitting station, sipping whiskey, reading books I barely understood and attempting to have a backgammon tournament with the chair acting as my opponent. I won every game of course. The chair was good, but not good enough to beat me. Each morning my percentage got lower, until the milestone of 50% hit as I awoke on day four. It was, I had decided, to be my last day of broadcasting. I had run out of food, I was stiff from sleeping outside on the roof, I hadn’t washed for days and most importantly of all I felt myself going gradually insane. I thought about packing up and heading over to Puerto Del Carmen to check out the bar scene but decided to give it one final blast of transmitting until sunset that evening for the miracle to happen.

It was a damn good job I did.

If I could describe the sound of that brief spurt of crackling static in mere mortal words I would, but if hope had a sound that was it.

It was around two hours until sunset and I was smoking outside the station about 30 seconds into a response period when I heard it. White noise coming through the CB speaker. The static of someone trying to communicate! No other sound in the world is like it, except maybe the sound of scratching burnt toast.

When I was a child my physics teacher had told the class that white noise was just microwave background radiation thought to be left over from the creation of the universe. In other words when you hear static on the radio you are listening the echo of the Big Bang.

This was almost as momentous for me. I ran inside the shack and hovered like a madman over the CB, praying for another hit. It came again about ten seconds later. The same burst of white noise with three or four brief gaps in between. I was certain it was somebody trying to get through. In a fit of tension I pushed down on the transmit button and spoke.

“Hello! Hello! Come in! Can you hear me Channel 19? Please respond! Over!”

Again the burst, and this time, oh my great God … I swore I could hear somebody trying to speak! It sounded like the vaguest undertone of a female voice beneath the static. There was silence for an agonising few seconds, after which I presumed whoever it was on the other side was waiting for me to respond. I repeated myself again, shouting into the CB.

“Come in! Can you hear me Channel 19? Please respond! Over!”

The static started again and this time I was sure; it was definitely a woman trying to be heard. She too seemed to be shouting, but the line was so bad that I couldn’t make out anything of what she was trying to say. My heart was racing; this was my first contact with another human in nearly three weeks! The line went silent again and I tried another message.

“Where are you Channel 19? Repeat, where are you located? Can you speak English? Over!”

Two seconds later she came back, clearer this time. I could almost discern an accent… was it oriental?

“k… English!” she shouted, then a massive crackle of static broke in and I missed the next line. When she came back a few seconds later the line had cleared again.

“I receive! I receive !”

“I receive you too!” I screamed, so excited I almost knocked the CB off the desk. “I repeat, where are you ? Give me your location!”

“I receive, I receive!” she repeated in her Eastern accent. It seemed to be all she could give out at this stage. She was probably as worked up as me.

“I hear you, I understand you receive. I am receiving you too. Do you speak English Channel 19? Over!”

The static cut in again.

D amn these short wave radios !

She was speaking again and I struggled desperately to make out what she was saying but the undercurrent of white noise was simply too loud. Over and over again she seemed to be shouting “I receive,” until I was at the verge of giving up.

“Say something else!” I shouted, not even into the CB. “Please give your location Channel 19. Over!”

This exchange went back and forth for at least another minute, during which I began to get increasingly frustrated with its lack of progress. The line was getting worse, I could barely even discern the I receives now, although I knew that’s what they were.

For good measure I was about to repeat myself one last time, when something incredible happened. For one brief second her line went totally clear. She spoke with such clarity it was almost as if I was in the room with her, wherever she was.

“I receive,” she said. “Fredo Sun! Fredo Sun!”

Then the line went completely dead.

You have to try to understand my predicament. Here was the first human contact I’d had in the guts of a month, having until now thought the entire island of Lanzarote (and possibly the world) was deserted.

Because of the effective range of the CB radio, that person had to be within a maximum of 20-odd miles from where I was currently situated. But those miles were as the radio wave flies so that was a pretty huge amount of territory to be dealing with. The plus side was that she was almost certainly somewhere on the south coast. The radio waves wouldn’t have travelled far enough in-land because of the increasingly mountainous terrain, as on any island, the closer to the centre you got. If like me she was broadcasting from a transmitting station it would be a case of a heck of a lot of cycling up and down the LZ-2 trying to spot the others. But that was the lesser of two evils. If she was in a town or city it would be like trying to find a piece of hay in a massive stack of needles. If only she’d given me a clue as to her location!