Nick Cracknell - The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]

She had that incredible deference so characteristic of the Japanese, but with a degree of sassiness thrown in that made her a very appealing character.

Of course, my Japanese was non-existent, but I found that after a while I could understand a few of the more common words that she kept using. Island seemed to be ‘shima’, radio was ‘rajio’ and she used the word ‘sora’ a lot, which coupled with her gesticulations I took to mean something like alone or empty.

But by far the most incredible thing I discovered about her was that she had been experiencing the same flashing numbers in front of her eyes each time she awoke.

The percentages!

She illustrated this by making a butterfly motion with one hand in front of her eyes and saying ‘Sūji’ over and over, until I presumed that was the word for numbers or a percentage. She became more and more animated as I explained my experiences to her and it seemed that although she had been here longer than I, she had had a fairly easy time of it compared to me.

Her story, from what I could tell, went thusly.

She had awoken, naked and weak and disoriented, in a room in a hotel somewhere in Costa Teguise, another popular tourist resort a few miles on the other side of the capital Arrecife. At first she had been too afraid and sick to leave the room, and like me stayed inside the compound’s grounds for at least four or five days, building up her strength with food until she was able to move around more freely. She didn’t have any visible injuries, but said her head hurt terribly for the first few days.

I sat amazed as she relayed this information to me by way of hand gestures and drawings of crude maps and outlines on pieces of the hotel’s complimentary stationary. She knew very little English, but was able to communicate very basic words and even sentence structure by squeezing her eyes shut as if pulling the words from the very darkest recesses of her mind. I assumed she had learned some English at school and, much like my French which I gave up aged 16, could summon odd words to the forefront of her brain with visible effort.

Apart from obvious injury she revealed her total lack of memory at anything other than her own identity, that of her sisters, and the fact that she was from Japan. I had to admit that my own memories were scarcer than they should have been, as I explained to her that I had been through almost exactly the same set of tribulations when I awoke in Playa Blanca.

She wasn’t aware of anyone else on the island, and I managed to deduce that she hadn’t seen Hans at all and that I was the first person she had seen in her time on Lanzarote.

She had spent some considerable time wandering the streets of Costa Teguise, grabbing different clothes from tourist shops and disposing of them daily for new ones, searching for clues or other people, but had become depressed upon finding nothing and had holed up in her hotel for a long time, unsure of what to do.

For around half an hour she seemed to be going off on a tangent, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying at all. I couldn’t be sure but I think she was describing having some kind of strange hallucination whilst hibernating at her hotel. I wanted to believe it was the same thing I had been experiencing during my blackouts, but I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.

Damn this language barrier!

She then seemed to have walked inland for a period of days rather than sticking to the coastline as I had, and from what I could tell her experiences had been just as fruitless as mine in uncovering clues to explain our presence here.

Ultimately, she could throw no further light on the reason for our desertion on the island and I groaned with frustration as this became clear. This must have upset her, or maybe she thought she had upset me, as she visibly shrank back in on herself almost halving her already diminutive stature in her perceived shame. I had to work hard to reassure her everything was OK, and that it was just my own frustrations rising to the surface and I would try and keep them in check. She seemed to be confused at the idea that someone would so readily show their emotions, without first considering what effect it could have on those around them.

What we lose in translation!

I vowed several times during our dialogue that if I ever did get off this island I would devote myself to anthropology, to the learning of other languages and cultures, as my woeful ignorance had exposed my complete lack of international relations. Although we did have reason to be proud of what we had gleaned from each other thus far without virtually any knowledge of the other’s language.

Every now and again she would pause to take a sip of water from a bottle she had extracted from the minibar, and each time she did she would very deliberately screw the top back on to its full tightness, as if trying to minimise any loss from evaporation. I took her to be a fastidious, very precise person. It was almost mesmerising to watch her movements, so deliberate and in tune with her surroundings. She was so young and healthy!

Like me, she had migrated to other cities to extend her search, and it was in Arrecife that she had been strolling along the beach front and noticed the Radio Lanzarote building. She had broken in and to her delight had found working equipment, and with a bit of practice had learned how to operate the CB radio that was in situ.

I marveled at her resourcefulness. As a 19 year old I could barely tie my shoelaces. With my background in radio hacking I wondered how anybody with no training could possibly learn their way around the myriad dials and broadcasting foibles of a standard system inside a radio station. Yet she had somehow managed it, through sheer tenacity and will, and had returned each day to check if anyone was broadcasting.

I marvelled again at the incredible string of coincidences that has brought us together.

What if she hadn’t found the radio station?

What if I hadn’t found the outpost?

What were the odds that we would both hit upon the same idea, and how even greater were they that we would both be transmitting/listening at exactly the same time?

The supernatural element of it made me wonder yet again if we hadn’t somehow been coerced into our behaviour. If somehow we had been subconsciously influenced or pushed towards the respectable broadcasting stations just to make it more interesting for whoever was watching or controlling this whole absurd game.

After a couple of weeks of waiting she had been browsing through the channels on her CB when she had stumbled across my recorded message, and the rest was history. She had somehow managed to translate my message, as weak as it had been received, and after waiting two days for me to come to Arrecife she had set off, on foot , to find the outpost I had mentioned in search of me.

That’s why she hadn’t been in Arrecife when I’d first arrived!

She was here, and I was here. But despite our best efforts it seemed we could shed no more light on the matter than that. I wanted to be able to solve this mystery for her as well as myself. I felt an almost paternal concern for her wellbeing, most probably predicated on her astounding vitality, like the first flush of womanhood in a very young girl. It seemed inconceivable that anything could possibly be wrong with this marvel of human vivacity. Her limbs were long and lithe and supple and white, and her hair was the darkest black I had ever seen, almost blue it was so black. Her skin was flawless, her feet as dainty as a princess, her eyes a dark brown that swirled with strokes of honey and cream. She was mesmerising, and the more she spoke the more I felt drawn to her. It was an extraordinary feeling, a mix of wantonness and protection that I struggled to unite within myself. But what occurred to me next put paid to any notion of sexual attraction, and awoke in me a primal instinct merely to ensure her survival.