Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth

It looked as if a mass of rubbish had been strewn across the road, over the gardens and trees, and even on the roofs of the houses.

I took the rifle and cautiously got out of the car, locking the door. The burning smell was very strong. From behind the houses there came a crackling noise, suddenly, into the quiet. I walked along the side of the road. A pale-orange object which was lodged mysteriously in a broken tree proved to be a battered suitcase.

The rubbish everywhere was a compound of torn clothing, papers, odd shoes and shredded material; plastic bags and cups, personal effects. I stared at it. There were more suitcases. Going into the smoky gloom I found my way down a drive and emerged into what had been back gardens. An enormous burned scar ran across the ground. The houses in the next street were in ruins, just smouldering remnants, collapsed and buckled roofing iron and mangled carports, masses of brick here and there; black stumps of trees still glowing with hot charcoal. White ashes lifted in the slight breeze. Heaps of incinerated houses, huts and garages had been hurled all over the place. Skeletal cars, everything burned from them, were lying haphazardly around, some overturned.

I clambered cautiously over hot acrid remains of objects which had become indecipherable. Melted tarseal stuck to my shoes. The stench in places was particularly stinging, and my eyes were soon streaming with tears. Coughing and sweating, I stumbled as quickly as I could over more ashes, broken concrete and drainpipes, until I emerged on the other side of the smoke. It hung in a cloud across several streets. Further down, a fire was still burning, slowly, making loud snapping noises. Even out of the range of the burned and wrecked area, houses had been partly demolished and domestic wreckage flung across lawns. One house had been sliced in half and stood open in cross-section to the dull sunlight; a living room with pictures on the wall, a television set, a brass lamp with a turquoise shade, imitation-leather lounge suite; and purple curtains waving in the slight movement of air. I walked past. A tartan slipper and the door of a refrigerator were lying across some ripped cushions on the grass verge, the innards of the cushions spilling out amongst shards of broken glass and the decaying remnants of food, eggshells, oranges. At the end of a long scar across the lawn there was a metal object embedded inside the caved-in wooden wall of the next house. I went down the drive and crunched over the broken glass of the windows and doors. The house had been partly knocked off its foundations, and the front door was leaning to the left, its glass panels shattered. I climbed in. There was a smell of plaster, dust, fibreglass pink insulation disembowelled from the ceiling, and a rubbery, oily machine odour. Wedged into the centre of the ruined house, blocking the hallway and kitchen, were the huge black tyres and hydraulic mechanisms of an aircraft’s landing gear. One set of wheels, at any rate. The metal struts were buckled in places, otherwise scarcely damaged. They had thrust into the house at speed, locked in a senseless rigidity. The pink fibreglass hung down from the ceiling in tendrils with ripped corrugated iron and long, dead, cobweb filth. I looked in the nearest bedroom, just to check, but of course there were no people. My shoe crunched a small object: a glass ornament, one of several knocked from the dressing table. It had been a swan, the glass streaky white like petrified milk, translucent; I had broken its neck.

I went back outside. The smoke across the street parted and I could see the great tail fin of the crashed plane looming out of the debris, unburned, the Maori logo of Air New Zealand on the side like a brand on a shark fin. Everything else was charred, an empty carcase in pieces. I only walked far enough down what had been the street to discern part of a starboard wing and a massive engine, crushed and mottled with dark patterns of fire, still hot, wobbling the air with heat; then I turned and made my way up the street and across and back to my car. My eyes were acid from the reek of burned plastic, vinyl and styrofoam. The sharpness scalded my sinuses and throat. I put the rifle in the car and stood wiping my eyes. All the time I was thinking of this plane, yesterday, coming down at dawn from thirty thousand feet, from—where? Los Angeles? Tahiti? Singapore?—suddenly empty, spiralling down, metal and petrol, across the spread of deserted streets and houses.

And I’d thought I was driving towards some part of the answer, that I might begin to understand, to detect a pattern.

I could scarcely see the wreckage as I stood there, the heat blotting illusions into the air, my eyes watering. God, this couldn’t have any meaning, it was too insane.

I suddenly felt irrelevant and weak. The sun behind the smoke was dull orange, and it made the light very strange with a faded muddy pallor. I stared at the sky. The physiological mechanisms of weeping were operating on my face. I had not given way to the real reaction for a long time. Hardly ever, in fact.

The research centre, where I normally worked, was closed as usual for the weekend. I locked the car and walked to the main doors of the windowless concrete block, my rifle in one hand, the keys in the other. I had no specific reason for coming here, except that the centre was near Albany, a short drive north from Glenfield. And I felt uneasy about going back into the city or to my flat at Takapuna. Perhaps this building would be a secure place for the night. I felt defensive at the prospect of nightfall.

Once inside the doors I relocked them by slipping the catches back and went across the reception area to the door labelled RESEARCH 2. The air was cool and scented faintly of floor polish. The clock stood at 6.12. I took my identity card from my wallet and slotted it in the decoding unit. The power, of course, was off, so I flicked the battery switch. A green light came on and the door opened with a buzzing noise. Retrieving my card I entered, switching on all the emergency power. The door closed behind me and dim lights flickered on along the corridor. Hidden air conditioners began to hum. I went down the passage, turned right and descended to the door labelled SECURE UNIT. My card opened this door too. Antiseptic white light flooded down from panels in the ceiling. I felt stale and grubby as I walked along the inner corridor to my room, the polished lino sucking at the flecks of tar under my shoes.

Everything was as I had left it two days earlier when I went on leave. My desk, chair, books were all in their usual places. The air here was cold and I switched off the circulator. Partly from habit, partly to keep warm, I put on a white coat over my shirtsleeves and went to the research lab.

All the security devices had been no protection against the Effect. Every biological specimen and experimental animal had disappeared, even Atkinson’s collection of insects, the Drosophila melanogaster on which all his research had been based. The dead ones, of course, were still in their transparent plastic cases. The dead had survived. I wrinkled my nose at the laboratory-formaldehyde smell and sat down in front of Perrin’s half-completed three-dimensional genetic model. To the left there was the great double helix of the Watson–Crick DNA structure, spotlit by a special lamp like an icon in the sanctuary of a temple dedicated to mysterious rituals. Which, in a sense, it was. I had felt sure that Perrin worshipped it. He had claimed to be working towards a new understanding of the relationship between the ribonucleic acid molecule and the chromosome evolutionary model which he was constructing. He spoke of this in almost religious terms, a mystery revealed only to one who had been prepared to sacrifice. ‘Nobody finds out anything without sacrifice,’ he once said, pompously, just after I had begun to work here. It was one of his catchphrases. He was not a very sympathetic character. Perhaps none of us were. We didn’t have to be. I suppose we all had our eccentricities. As a research assistant I was very involved in what we called Section 2 Special Project, of which Perrin’s work was a part.