Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

We leaned on my car, weak. When I got my breath back I looked at him.

‘I think we’ll get by,’ I said.

‘I think we will,’ he replied.

Euphoria. Brains short of oxygen.

He had blocked the road with the sheep truck and driven along the track from the south in an army jeep to the point where the steam drifted over the way. He’d pitched a tent behind the small hill on the left. It was a carefully calculated ambush. The previous day he’d come up from Waiouru to Turangi to check the power station at Tokaanu. He didn’t know much about all that, but he thought there might have been a power surge at 6.12 last Saturday morning, since some equipment at the army camp at Waiouru had gone into overload and all the circuit breakers had been tripped. As far as he could tell this had happened at the power station too. He was a lance corporal in the army, by the way, and I should call him Api. He’d had four years’ service. Weapons instructor. Wanted to be a mechanic, really. Anyhow; yesterday he’d been at Tokaanu, about midday, and he thought he’d heard a noise coming across the lake from the north, from Taupo. What kind of noise? Well, hard to say really. Maybe an echo, like a foghorn gone wrong, but a long way off, and sort of distorted.

I said I’d heard a sound in the evening a bit like that, only I was in Taupo and it seemed to come from the southern end of the lake. No, he’d not heard any sounds in the evening. But he thought it might be a car, so he’d set up the road block south of Turangi to catch anything coming along either the east or west sides of the lake.

He was very well prepared and equipped; I was a little surprised to realise that he seemed to have been coping very competently, perhaps even more adequately in some ways than I had, though this might be, I thought, in fact it probably was, only a superficial impression. We always overrate skills in other people we don’t have ourselves, and it couldn’t take much genius to pitch a tent and cook up a meal or two. Boy Scout stuff.

I sat on a folding chair whilst he uncorked a bottle of wine and produced some cold chicken and potato salad from a polystyrene container off the back of his, or the army’s, jeep. We drank several glasses of wine in celebration. It was a good New Zealand riesling, not the flagon of sugary sauterne I expected when he offered me white wine. He talked as he unpacked and readied the meal. I drank enough to become pleasantly relaxed, and sat there watching him with the thought drifting into my mind that maybe I had acquired Man Friday.

He didn’t have very much to tell which could decipher the mystery. When he woke up last Saturday he’d found the camp deserted and imagined that some exercise was under way and he’d not been told or forgotten. Like me, he panicked slightly, and like me, he checked all the radio wavebands. There was no power problem because they had auxiliary power supplies; all he had to do was to set the generators going. The clock phenomenon and the total absence of radio signals or transmissions had had the same unnerving effect on him. When he found Waiouru town empty as well, he had to decide what to do on the basis of his training. His instincts were, as he said graphically, to ‘run away and shit myself’. It was obvious, when he looked through all the barracks and living quarters, that people had not got up and gone, they had just—and here he spread his hands out and looked at me for a word, helplessly—well, they had just gone. Those that had clothes on had disappeared with their clothes. That was weird. He had remembered a lecture they’d had a couple of years before on the neutron bomb. It was supposed to kill people but not damage buildings; the radiation did it. Maybe some new weapon like that had been used? He concluded that it was his duty to stay in the army camp, so he’d surrounded himself with weaponry and waited.

‘If you run away, it’s desertion,’ he said; ‘on active service you’d get court-martialled.’ He paused. ‘It looked like the real thing to me.’

‘What if everyone runs away?’ I asked.

‘That’s a strategic withdrawal,’ he said, seriously.

‘What they used to call a retreat?’

‘Uh.’ He shrugged, not detecting any irony. ‘If you’re the odd one out, you usually cop it.’

‘That’s what they tell you?’

‘That’s how it is.’ He ate some chicken. ‘How it was, then. Hell, I don’t know. If we were being attacked, I couldn’t see anyone. Except…’ He stared pensively, looking away and then back at me in an almost furtive manner, as if dubious about what he might say.

‘Except what?’ I felt my stomach constrict.

‘I got this feeling…there’s something around, like something you think you just might see out of the corner of your eye, or like hearing a noise and then you listen and there’s nothing, and you can’t be sure…And it’s not everywhere, only in some places. And worse at night. Don’t you feel it?’

I had hardly spoken. For some reason I was wondering how much I ought to tell him about what had happened to me since Saturday.

‘Yes,’ I said; ‘I know what you mean.’

He sighed with relief.

‘Jesus. I thought it might be all in my head.’

‘Well it’s in mine as well, then.’

There was a pause. He drank some more wine. His eyes fixed on me above the glass.

‘Did you see anything?’

‘I was driving to Rotorua. It got dark, there was a storm coming on. I saw a thing like a…dog or a calf, come running at the car. No sound, and it seemed to vanish. It scared hell out of me.’

‘A dog ?’

‘Like nothing on earth. Bits of dog, bits of other animals. Teeth, like a wolf. No hair on it. White all over.’ I drained my glass. He uncorked the wine bottle and refilled it, his lips compressed, the frown dark on his face again. ‘You haven’t seen anything?’ I asked. He shook his head.

‘You reckon it was really there?’

‘I saw it.’ I held the glass in both hands. The pale straw-coloured wine reflected the sky and the glass held my distorted, curved image. ‘It’s evil, whatever it is,’ I said; ‘it gave off evil like a smell. I could feel it.’

‘Yeah. I know that.’

I gave him a questioning look, and he held his hands up, pink palms outward, as though pressing on a sheet of invisible glass in midair.

‘At times I can feel it,’ he said, ‘very close. But I don’t know what it is.’ He lowered his hands. ‘When I was a kid, about nine or ten, I woke up one night and there was my cousin Hemi standing outside the window looking in. It was moonlight, I could see him as clear as day. I said, “Hey Hemi, what you doing out there? Come on in.” And he walked off round the side of the house and I waited but everyone was asleep and there was no knocking on the door. I woke my brother up and told him and he said, “You must’ve had a dream, go back to sleep, Hemi’s in Whakatane.” So I went back to sleep. But I knew I’d seen him. And next day we got the news, Hemi died suddenly in the night, at Whakatane. Appendix or something. Well…’ and here he rubbed his forehead with his knuckles, nervously; ‘the next night, I saw him again, outside the window. And I thought, if Hemi’s dead then that thing out there shouldn’t be walking around looking like Hemi. It must be bad, and why is it after me? Wants me to join it, maybe? I mean, dead is dead , all the way. You might have liked somebody a hell of a lot, I liked Hemi, we were good friends, but you don’t want anything like that, not all dead, not staying dead, so I yelled, “Hemi, you’re dead! Go back, go away, you’re dead!” ’Course it woke everyone up and they reckoned I was having a bad dream. But when I shouted, that thing outside the window seemed to know. Like it was him, eh? And he really didn’t know he was dead. It just faded away.’