Nick Cracknell - The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]

Where the heck was he?

He couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty paces behind me, and I was sure he would have seen me jump. Or fall. If so he could have either made the jump himself, or gone back down through the fruit store to ground level and round the back of the buildings again to catch up with me. But that would have taken time, and even if he had seen me fall there was no way he could have known how I’d land. Was he now watching from a vantage point, simply waiting to see where we went before picking up the trail again and surprising us just when we thought the coast was clear?

Or was he gone all together? He was me, after all. A darker, psychotic, metaphysical manifestation of me albeit, but had the fall and my period of oblivion simply erased him from existence? I sincerely hoped it was the latter.

We reached the roundabout at the end of the avenue and I glanced behind us again. Still no sign of the errant double. The girl to her credit had not resisted me at all, and was still clutching my hand, waiting for my signal for what to do. I pointed at the Gran Hotel and gestured for us to run in its direction.

Once in the lobby she seemed to understand my thought process, and gestured towards the elevator. I strongly shook my head and pointed to the stairwell instead, and she looked at me strangely. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of the earlier incident, and for a split second I had a dreadful vision of a crowd of Hans’ pouring out of the lift and descending on us to rip us apart.

The girl seemed to sense my trepidation and nodded enthusiastically, pulling me towards the stairwell instead of the other way round.

I had no idea what we were going to do once we began ascending the emergency stairs. We got to maybe the fourth or fifth floor until I stopped, wheezing, and pointed to the entrance doors to the floor. On the other side, the floor was a mixture of conference rooms and suite accommodation. I kicked open the door of the nearest conference room. It was empty of course, with a long wooden table set out with fresh note pads and bottles of mineral water, and a whiteboard at one end for presentations. It looked safe enough, but I preferred a door with a lock and so we ran further down the corridor to where the rooms turned into guest accommodation and I tried the nearest door again. It was locked, but I had stolen a master ‘key’ from the reception area upon my arrival, which had allowed for my recent sojourn in the Penthouse Suite and all its luxurious trappings. I fished around in my beach shorts and found it, a credit card sized piece of plastic with a magnetic strip. I closed my eyes in a silent prayer, to whom I didn’t care, and slid it into the card slot on the door. It pinged and the door opened to my relief. I pulled the girl inside and quickly shut the door behind us, relaxing ever so slightly as I heard the door automatically lock itself.

The girl was looking at me strangely, with a mixture of curiosity and mild alarm. She obviously had no idea why I was seeking refuge so desperately for us both, and I realised at that moment that it was extremely unlikely she had seen Hans. She was just going along with my madcap antics and hoping I would come to my senses and we could have a decent discussion about the extraordinary circumstances we were in.

First things first, I was parched and in dire need of a stiff drink. I scanned the room for a minibar, and located it in the small kitchenette area off the main bedroom. Inside was a chilled bottle of Cava, a couple of mini whiskeys and gins, and some ice-cold bottles of water. I downed both the whiskey and the gin, grabbed the water and the fizz and headed back into the living room where the girl was standing at the window, staring out across the sea to the mountains in the distance.

I handed her a bottle of water and she nodded deferentially and said something like “Doumo.”

I sat down on the bed and opened the Cava, resting for a moment and trying to catch my breath. I tried also to collect my thoughts and work out a plan of what to do. I was still terrified that at any moment Hans would burst through the door.

I suddenly felt woozy, and had to lie down on my back on the bed. The girl was still looking out the window, presumably waiting for me to do or say something. The alcohol started to have its effect, and I couldn’t help closing my eyes. Within seconds I was asleep.

When I awoke it was cool and almost dark, and the girl was curled up next to me in the foetal position on the bed. My head was spinning. I supposed it was a mini hangover after the spirits I had sunk so rapidly. I pulled myself up off the bed, listening to the girl’s breathing, trying not to wake her, and headed over to the panoramic window. The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and I realised it wasn’t the evening but dawn. Inconceivably I had slept through the entire night. I presumed the girl didn’t want to wake me and must have got bored and gone to sleep herself. I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all.

I felt the urge to wake her, to finally learn what was going on and why she was here, but she looked so incredibly peaceful I couldn’t bring myself to do so.

I was suffering a sort of delayed shock, I realised. The toll of the last three weeks had finally caught up on me, like a man who has been in debt for years who finally comes into a massive inheritance. Here she was, potentially the answer to all the questions I had been asking myself. Specifically, why was I here? Where was here? And what could be done about it?

The girl stirred slightly on the bed and I jumped in shock. How on earth could I go about interrogating her if she spoke no English? Could she be dangerous, like Hans? She certainly didn’t seem like she could be a risk. She looked totally harmless, even vulnerable in her youth and the wide-eyed innocence that she had displayed in the street yesterday. But like everything else here, I had to be wary. I had to expect the unexpected…

Explanations for her presence whirred through my mind. She could be a spy for instance. She could have been planted here by The Powers to assess my mental state or even sabotage it. She could yet turn out to be a figment of my imagination, although she seemed as real to the touch as my own body. But then how to explain Hans? He was a ghost. A manifestation of my own consciousness gone to seed. But the bastard was still able to inflict physical harm upon me. Had I done that to myself? I reached up and fingered the cut above my eye, wincing at the touch. Dried blood had caked over it. I inspected the cut in the mirror and without much medical knowledge even I could see it was the sort of wound that would usually require a stitch or two. Luckily it had clotted, and while not life threatening would probably result in quite a scar.

It occurred to me that it was the first time that physical damage had manifested itself upon me since my arrival. Up until that point the fall off the roof, the shoulder injury in the restaurant, the fall from the balcony outside the station, being propelled by smoke tendrils through plate glass doors… none of these had left any lasting damage on my body. But Hans had caused me significant pain. My ribs still ached, I was bloodied and I looked a wreck.

The poor girl. What she must have thought upon seeing me! I had put off the inevitable long enough, I decided. It was time to wake her up and get some answers…

Two hours later, and after a great deal of gesticulating and international charades, we had established the very basics of our existence to each other.

Her name was Akari, and she was 19. I was amazed at this as she looked a lot younger, around 14 or 15 max. She had been on the island for as long as she could remember, but that part was still not entirely clear as she couldn’t actually remember anything before being on the island, except her name, age, and the fact that she had three older sisters. She reckoned she’d been here for about a month.