Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth

The fact that I could consider this was, I realised, a sure sign that the menace outside had gone. No animal could have radiated malignancy like that. If I’d survived the Effect because of some freak or accidental immunity, then I might have a special resistance which something was trying to break down. There might be no logic to these phases, just a sequence of threats or attacks. I shall find out more, I thought. The dark lightened, my bravado increased. I know it’s evil, it comes at night, and I think I can keep it at bay with my mind under control. If I hold that control I can survive.

When I woke up the sun was streaming in from the bright silence.

For a few seconds of course I wanted to believe that everything would now be normal again. The absence of sounds defeated this idea even before I moved to peer through the blinds. The moment I moved, a succession of powerful muscular pains wrenched at my spine and shoulders, then at my legs. I remembered what had been happening and that it was acutely real. My bad dreams had never involved physical pain; they had been memorable for terror, the vertigo of falling or slipping down slopes towards chasms, or the impulse to run from some horror but not being able to, or the feeling of slow suffocation under deepening water; there had even been dreams in which I had to wander through strange buildings, opening doors of rooms which contained unrevealed horrors. But never physical pain.

I walked around the motel unit, wincing, looking out. Was it safe to go outside? All seemed clear. The word ‘normal’ would not do. I packed up my belongings and the food so that I could load the car quickly. The sooner I got away from here, the better. The Effect was so closely tied in my mind to this place that I thought its force might weaken the further away I went. The place to go, obviously, was Auckland. There were sure to be people there out of half a million. Surely.

Having moved the barricade from the door, I checked again and then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the balcony. Nothing had changed. I went down the stairs and glanced at my car, turning round slowly as I moved, my eyes checking the other cars, the back fence, the motel doors, the exit road, the cars again. When I felt reasonably safe I unlocked the boot of the car and went back up to the room to get my things.

Five minutes later, sweating, slightly out of breath, I had packed and loaded everything I thought I might need, including some blankets, sheets and pillows from the motel beds, plus some pots and pans, cups, cutlery and plates. There was no question of leaving a cheque; yesterday’s confusions seemed ages ago. Yet when I was ready to go, I found I was pausing, standing at the foot of the steps in the shade, trying to recollect something, reluctant to leave. I sat down on the steps and wiped my face with a handkerchief. As I pushed the handkerchief back into my pocket my arm banged against the iron railing of the stairs, and the whole rail vibrated. The sound came back from the darkness in the night. I realised I must be sitting exactly where the object had been; right there, the menace, the thing, the embodiment.

Once more, with an awareness now of following a repeated series of actions, I was leaping into my car, slamming the door and driving away from the motel onto the main road, a spit of loose stones under the wheels. And again I was heading into town, to the right, instead of away towards Auckland to the left. I was badly shaken. The tremor of the staircase had set up a resonance inside me which was acutely unnerving because it wasn’t wholly accountable merely as the memory of last night, allied to the fear of the thing outside. It was more, but it was inexplicable. My mind had marked a threshold; I knew that. And the full reason for this attack of nerves lay well on the far side of that threshold, locked away.

The town was unchanged, silent, full of hot light, narrow shadows, stopped objects. The locked houses were as dead as yesterday, their shut blinds like white eyelids across empty sockets.

I located a sports shop. The door resisted my attempts to break in; I had to smash the window and clamber in through the display of fishing rods, aqualungs, and golf clubs. Finally I found the gun cabinet, the rifles padlocked to a rack. It took an hour to pillage every cupboard and cabinet and drawer, forcing them open with a crowbar from the garage down the street, sorting out cartridges, bullets, and bolts, hacksawing the locks on the rack, cursing and sweating all the time, before I finally had a serviceable Remington hunting rifle and a large, wicked-looking pump-action shotgun, a 12-gauge which took six cartridges. I loaded the car with the guns and some boxes of ammunition, putting the Remington handy on the passenger seat.

The shotgun made me nervous. I placed it on the back seat on pillows and rugs. I also took a gas-operated cooking unit with spare cylinders, a sleeping bag and some containers to hold water or petrol.

The car had filled up considerably by the time I drove to the garage again. Robinson Crusoe, I thought. Self-sufficient, ready for anything. I was feeling more confident. I filled the petrol tank, hand-cranking the pump; checked batteries, oil and water, then filled a couple of the plastic containers with petrol and stacked them safely in the boot. Safe? If I had a crash, the detonation of all this would wake the dead.

The phrase disturbed me as it went through my mind, and I stopped, closing the boot, leaning on the sun-hot metal.

But the rush of practical concerns over-ran the pause. A few minutes later I was driving out of town, the doors locked from the inside, the windows half open, fresh air drying the sweat on my face, the loaded guns at the ready.

In the whole landscape nothing else was moving or alive. I sped faster and breathed deeper with a sudden exhilaration. Everything was shining in an empty clarity stretching away in all directions. There were no problems except the Effect. It had drained the world of every other puzzle and mystery. Except me.

I drove west through empty settlements and towns, abandoning more and more of the road code, cornering recklessly, not expecting to meet any other vehicles. Then, suddenly, I came round a bend and there was a milk tanker across the road and I was skidding sideways and braking, ramming the grass verge on the right. The car bounced violently, all the loose objects, guns, cans, were knocked off seats, clattering around, whilst I wrenched at the wheel. I missed the tanker by centimetres and came to a stop on the verge, the air shaken out of my lungs. The smell of burned tyres drifted in with the taste of dust. After a few deep breaths I opened the door to get out, but it jammed against earth and grass. I had to reverse onto the road.

There did not seem to be any damage. I opened the doors, rearranged the jumble of equipment. The sun was beating down from a shiny featureless sky the colour of blue enamel. There was a faint stench from the tanker. I climbed up and peered into the driver’s cab. It was empty. The keys were in the ignition. The engine had not been switched off, so the fuel had run out and the batteries were dead. After the disappearance of the driver the tanker had just coasted to a halt, slewing slightly to the right across the road. He would have been pulling the wheel over as he came round the corner, I thought. For the first time I wondered what exactly happened at the precise moment of the Effect. Was it painless and instantaneous?

Above the fuel gauge with its needle resting at E, there was a dashboard clip stuffed with papers and documents, and a photograph facing the driver’s seat. It showed a smiling Maori woman with several children who were grinning, frowning, or staring vacantly at the camera lens, the camera presumably being held by the father. Now, faced by bright light, the faces were staring into the empty cab of the tanker on the deserted road. The heat on the tarmac in the distance waved evaporated, detached images of road surface way beyond the cab windows. I climbed down and went back to my car. The long scar in the earth of the verge made me think how close I had been to an accident which could have killed me. I could have been trapped in a mess of metal under the tanker and spent days dying. Any injury would be fatal.