Nick Cracknell - The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]

Pulling Akari along was starting to become more of an effort as she was barely able to keep pace with my excited gait at this stage. We pattered over the empty ground, our feet hardly making any sound as the bare concrete absorbed it. Large yellow painted signs divided the area up into individual plots, and occasionally one would indicate the maximum wingspan of a particular aircraft. As we got nearer to the plane these decreased from 25m to 15m to 10m, which I took as a good sign. The smaller the aircraft the better was my philosophy, somewhat naively I supposed as the principles of flight were most probably exactly the same for a 10 metre plane as they were for a 50 metre one. Something in my head told me that psychologically I would be more comfortable behind the controls of a smaller plane though. A larger part of me thought it wasn’t even worth trying one of those, but as we reached it and the fuselage glistened in the last of the evening sunset I felt a strange surge of hope run through me.

It lasted as long as it took to do a once-round the plane. Even as a much smaller aircraft than the ones sitting on the apron at Terminal one it was huge, probably 15 metres long and in wingspan. It towered over Akari and myself as I ran around it, searching for some way to board. I realised how stupid the idea of hijacking a plane was when I realised that we couldn’t even board the thing. The main door was wedged shut and without some sort of crowbar mechanism there would be no boarding this particular jet. I felt useless, as if the life was being slowly sucked out of me with the dropping of the sun behind the horizon.

Which of course it was.

I glanced at Akari who seemed to have regained a slight colour in her cheeks. She was no longer as ashen grey as she had been in the terminal, but she looked at me sadly and shrugged her petite shoulders in a gesture of defeat. I shook my head. No, I thought, we are not going be defeated so easily.

I looked around again, searching for some inspiration, some small ray of hope within the dying light. Beyond the end of this particular concourse I saw a row of buildings, what looked like hangars, around a further 300 metres away. I hadn’t seen them before as they had been obscured by the absurd plane we had just come across, and my mind had been so focused on getting this one in the air that what I now saw in the distance hadn’t even registered.

Behind the row of hangars I was able to make out the nose of what looked to be a much smaller aircraft. It could have been a biplane for all I knew… a modern version of the pioneering craft that took the Wright Brothers on their first legendary journey! The nose had a propeller, which instantly I thought could mean that it was manually startable by giving it a good push in rotation as I’d seen in old war movies. But what the hell was an old biplane doing at Lanzarote airport? Surely there hadn’t been any made since the end of the Second World War?

My mind cast itself back to being nine years old and taking a pleasure flight in an old Sopwith Camel with my dad at a country fair somewhere in Dorset. It had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my young life, up there where the air was clear, just a pair of goggles and a seatbelt separating me from a thousand foot drop. The pilot had been an old RAF man who had been a war buddy of my grandfather, and had insisted he take us out on a brief overhead pass of the fair below. Almost 30 years later I could still remember him telling me about the history of the plane, and how it had the best roll-rate of any aircraft he’d ever flown. I had asked my dad what ‘roll-rate’ meant, and he said the engine never stalled and could fly on and on while using virtually no fuel. At the time the old boiler had astounded me by revealing that whilst in the air we’d been travelling at over 140mph, far faster than our car could have travelled on land. But it was there that my knowledge of biplanes ceased, and I doubted that even if that was what was behind the hangar in the distance that I’d ever be able to get it off the ground, much less land the damnable thing wherever we managed to get with it.

Any preconceived notions of how I would heroically start the propeller, away the chocs and be in Morocco for last orders were swiftly dealt a death blow as we rounded the corner of the hangar, and saw not an old WWII biplane or even a modern monoplane but a smaller jet without even a propeller on the nose. My eyes had been playing tricks on me and at first I couldn’t figure out how, but stepping back and reassessing the situation, for all it was worth, I realised I had not been seeing a propeller but merely a giant aloe plant situated slightly beyond the border fence behind the hangar. The long spiny green arms at a distance had appeared like blades on the end of the plane’s nose.

I almost cried in frustration, at my own stupidity as much as out of genuine disappointment. I leapt up on the nose of the plane and tried to glance through into the cockpit. It was as I expected; a row of dials, buttons, knobs and displays that meant I may as well be speaking Hungarian as flying this aircraft.

Akari was also wandering around the plane looking for some sign that would indicate how to operate it. Like me she was clutching at straws, and was probably doing so more out of simple desperation than the actual hope of finding something.

The jet was clearly a private or charter plane. Large bold letters displayed E-JET under the cockpit, and looking through I could see just three luxurious looking leather chairs in the cabin behind the two pilot’s seats.

I jumped down off the nose and approached the door. There was a handle set back into the bodywork in the shape of a doorstop with a keyhole in the middle. Obviously we had no key, but I thought back to the huge metal door on the radio outpost and how I had been ready to give up on that when in fact it had been open all along. I pushed the handle in, and it gave a little, the thin end poking out of the bodywork and demanding to be turned. I noticed there was also a pushbutton above the handle, with a small LED light that lit up as I turned the handle counter-clockwise. I pushed the button, and a hissing noise caused me to jump back in surprise, walking backwards into Akari who had been standing directly behind me. We both looked at each other in amazement as the jet’s staircase began to unfold itself in all its hydraulic glory.

I stepped inside and Akari followed behind me. It was a lot smaller inside than I had expected, having only ever been on big passenger jets before. It was no larger than a luxury sedan car, and I wondered if I’d have the balls to even be flown in one of these at however many thousand feet let alone try and fly it myself.

But then, we had no choice.

Akari coughed violently behind me, and hawked up a glob of blood which she spat out the open doorway as daintily as she could.

“Hayaku,” she rasped nonchalantly, circling her hands, and I took that to mean get a goddamn move on, matey . I nodded briskly and headed into the cockpit. It smelled of expensive leather and cologne, rather like I would have imagined an Oxford professor’s study to smell. This was clearly an expensive craft, with walnut burr paneling and leather lining surrounding my head. It was so small though! I wondered how anyone could be cooped up in this space for an extended period of time without suffering from claustrophobia.

I sat down in the left pilot’s chair. Being right handed it made more sense even though the throttle or steering wheel or whatever it was called was in front of me. It felt more natural having my right hand next to the main controls rather than my left.

I tried to get a grip on the controls in front of me. I reasoned that everything looked complicated because I didn’t know what it did, so if I tried to familiarise myself with the controls then it would become more natural. I pushed the steering wheel up and down, as if I were test driving a new car. I nodded in approval as it felt strong and didn’t give much. Despite the situation I felt a curious sense of power being behind the controls of this powerful aircraft, much more so than driving an expensive car. Then I snapped out of it. Another flashback came to me of my grandfather’s old boiler buddy croaking: “It doesn’t take much to control a plane,” and certainly with all these dials and switches it seemed like the plane could pretty much fly itself as long as I could get it going…