The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  “What is this then?” she said. “A whisky club?”

  Bryce winked. “Always room for one more member,” he said.

  Grimes pushed her glass towards the bottle and leaned back with one boot against the table.

  “Fill it again and I’ll forget I saw you,” she said.

  Harvey reached out for the bottle but Bryce had already lifted it. He filled Grimes’ glass and passed it to her. She took it and looked around at us.

  “Well, carry on,” she said. “Don’t stop on my account. What were you talking about?”

  The others looked back at me.

  “Ed here was telling us what happened to him,” said Harvey. “Ed?”

  I cleared my throat and faltered. Grimes blinked at me.

  “You were trapped in that cellar, weren’t you?” she said. “Underneath all that rubble.” She nodded to herself, remembering. “We’d almost given up for the day, did you know that? The pilot didn’t want to land, but I made him.”

  “How did you know they were there?” said Harvey.

  “Thermal imaging binoculars,” said Grimes. “They were almost out of charge, but I had one last scan out of the window and I was sure I saw something flicker.” She turned to me. “We wouldn’t have gone back to that area for another week at least.”

  I allowed the questions I knew were forming in the minds of these four strangers hang unanswered. I knew that we wouldn’t have made it another week in the cellar, probably not even another day, and that would have been my fault. Grimes was only stating simple facts, but it was as if they were somehow conspiring to reveal the bigger truths I was already trying to hide.

  I was drunk. I fell asleep before I could warn my wife. My son woke me up, otherwise we’d all be dead. Amongst the supplies I hastily crammed into a box was a half-full bottle of balsamic vinegar. I found some pipes in the cellar and I didn’t know what was in them because I didn’t know how my own house worked. I thought it might be easier if the pipes were full of gas…

  “We were lucky you found us,” I said. “Thank you.” I turned quickly to Harvey. “What about you, Harvey?” I said. “What were you doing in Edinburgh?”

  He smiled and pointed at his mouth. “Don’t let the accent fool you,” he said. “I’ve lived here most of my life. Moved here to marry.”

  “What about your wife?” I said.

  “Died a few years back,” said Harvey.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, with that useless spasm we all give to another’s grief.

  “Nah, don’t be,” he said. “It’s a good thing really; Mary would’ve hated all this.”

  “You were waiting for us when we found you, weren’t you, Harvey?” said Grimes, smiling. “Outside with your bag packed, clean clothes, hair combed, like you were going on a bus tour.”

  “I could hear you coming a mile off,” chuckled Harvey. “Besides, when you get to my age, you like to get ready well in advance.”

  “How did you survive?” I asked.

  “Old widowers always rise early,” he said, wagging a finger. “And we eat a lot of canned goods.”

  The next morning, at breakfast, Grimes stood and announced that they were looking for volunteers to join the salvage missions into the city. It had been another night of broken sleep and the whisky had given me a hangover. Arthur was sat on my knee, screaming again, one fist jammed between his sore red gums as I struggled to force porridge past it. Alice was crying too, tired, clinging to her mother like a limpet and clawing at her clothes. Beth sat trembling and sniffing with her head in her hands. Her nose and eyes were wet with tears.

  Grimes looked around the room as some of the men raised their hands tentatively. I saw Bryce and Richard raise their hands. Arthur flailed in my arms and threw his other fist at me, slamming a chunk of porridge into my eye. He laughed and then hurled the bowl to the floor.

  I wasn’t a completely bad father or husband. But I wasn’t a good one either.

  I wiped the goo from my eye and raised a hand.

  POT NOODLE

  4 MONTHS LATER

  Bryce grunted.

  “I could take one out. Two. Right now. Easy. Bam bam.”

  We were crouched below a high dormer window looking south. It was one of a handful of lookout points we had managed to find along Lawnmarket, the medieval street that led down from Edinburgh Castle. We called it Pot Noodle because of the single, unaccountably untouched and unscarred, empty plastic cup of the same that we had found perched on the window ledge. The room had once been somebody’s bedroom, probably a student’s; the scorched walls still had a few remnant shreds of film and band posters, flyers, pictures of Che Guevara. Shreds of burned carpet clung limply to what was left of the floor. The boards were scattered with broken objects; a cracked mug, a bent fork, a lamp twisted by heat, nothing we could use. A charred metal bed frame stood in the corner, ready to disintegrate at a single touch like a used matchstick. On the wall beside it I had briefly registered the black outline of a human shape. We saw these a lot. Bryce called them ‘man-stains’: shadows of the dead scorched onto walls, steps, pavements, each a perfect imprint of the person in their last position as whatever blast of superheated sub-space rock had incinerated them.

  Everything in the room was covered in a dusting of snow. There was no roof and no back wall. Half the room was empty space and there was a six storey drop beneath it.

  Behind us were the remains of the city centre. Princes Street, Rose Street, George Street, Thistle Street, Queen Street: all now just black stumps and rubble. Cathedrals, churches, tenements and houses: all gone. The roads were strips of chaos dotted with lumps of upturned concrete that made them, for the most part, impassable. The long, wide hill of Leith Walk that once stretched down to the shore had been scrubbed down to a black skid mark. Dundas Street - once a long, straight thoroughfare through the wealthy streets of New Town - was now a deep gash piled with the shells of cars and bricks. The New Town itself was reduced to ash. All that was left was the bare outline of the streets; a flat grid of dust.

  Beyond everything had once been views out to the north: ocean, sky and mountain. Now all you could see was grey murk with the occasional glimpse of the dark waters of the Forth. On clearer days you could just make out the mangled wreck of the suspension bridge upended in the water like two metallic claws.

  There was little sign of life. The dead outweighed the living. The dead far outweighed the living.

  The remnants of some buildings still stood. The Old Town had fared better than most, its chaotic jungle of cobbled streets perhaps confusing the blasts just enough to prevent them from achieving the same annihilation as the younger streets. The long rear wall of tenements that stretched down from the Castle high above Princes Street Gardens (now a black swamp of filth) had been torn away, exposing a cutaway of homes and offices, their insides torched. If you clambered up the scree beneath them, you could just about manage to climb up through the rooms and half-demolished staircases to reach the top, where we were, now the highest point in the city.

  “Two bullets, two heads,” said Bryce, peering through the sight on his rifle. “Bam. Bam. Nighty night.”

  “Great idea,” I said. “Kill two, let the rest know where we are. Go for it, let’s see how far we get before they catch up.”

  Bryce pulled his head back from the lens to look at me, the barrel still pointing down onto the street.

  “Be good though,” he said, his gigantic, hairy cheeks twisted into a grin. “Eh?”

  Bryce and I had had a shaky start to our relationship. Everything I did or said seemed to piss him off at first. He had marked me as weak and conforming, a middle-class English misery with no balls who secretly wanted to be liked by people like him. I dismissed him as a loud-mouthed boor, all mouth and swagger that concealed a deep-seated nervousness about his intelligence. We both bristled with tired quarrels born in grey playgrounds.

  One evening I had been sat with Alice in the corner table, waiting for Beth and Arthur to com
e up from our room. Alice had been especially quiet that week and we were worried that she was going to revert to that state of shock she had fallen into during our time in the cellar. I had passed her the stringyphone and whispered something into my can that had made her smile. Seeing my chance, I jammed a finger into her ribs and tickled her until she was lost in her giggles and leaning helplessly into my side. Out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Bryce watching us. He was in line for food, midway through spooning a pile of tinned peas onto his plate. There was no menace in his face, no mockery, just appreciation. He gave a quick smile when I saw him, then looked away. Things seemed to get better between us after that, although Bryce was not the kind of person you could easily describe as a friend.

  The people we were watching were no friends either, but we weren’t there to cause trouble. I also doubted Bryce’s aim from that range. He shouldn’t have even been carrying a gun. It was only after weeks of pestering that Yuill had finally given in. Watching him now, grinning down the barrel of a standard issue SA80 made me nervous; picking off rabbits from your bedroom window as a teenager doesn’t make you a sniper.

  “We’re here to watch them,” I said, squinting down at the base of the building where Bryce had trained his rifle, halfway along the crumbling remains of South Bridge. I blew into my hands.

  “How many?”

  Bryce fixed his eye against the sight once more. He rested the barrel on the wool of his gloves, his one bare index finger poking out from a hole he had cut in them, twitching on the trigger.

  “Five,” he said. “No, six...seven. Seven of the little fuckers. They’re moving something, looks like...”

  “Let me see,” I said, moving over to take over the sight.

  “Wait, fuck off!” Bryce elbowed me away and I slammed into the window frame.

  “Give it here...”

  As I scrambled back to grab the rifle, my hand slipped on the wood and knocked a slate free from its place roof.

  “Shit.”

  “Edgar...” Bryce growled.

  The slate slid down and caught on the edge of the drainpipe beneath, tumbling down and shattering on the slick cobbles below. The quiet street suddenly echoed with noise.

  “We’re done,” said Bryce.

  There was a shout from the bridge, some movement.

  “They’ve seen us,” said Bryce. “Run.”

  I saw three small figures in the distance, running towards us.

  “RUN!” Bryce shouted, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me away from the window. I staggered and fell, my legs numb from two hours of crouching. As I sprawled on the bare floorboards I heard voices, angry shouts coming nearer. Bryce yanked me upright and shoved me towards the gaping hole where the rest of the room should have been. Beneath and beyond us, stretching out as far as we could see in the late winter afternoon was a sheer drop into dark chaos.

  We leaped into it.

  I landed first. The remains of the flat below stretched further than the one we had been in. We knew this because we knew this entire stretch of rubble; every hole, every walkway, every ladder, drop and climb. The voices were closing in. I heard shouts and footsteps begin to echo up one of the ancient stone staircases that spiralled up into the building.

  Bryce landed like a sack of bricks behind me. We both scrambled to our feet and made our way to the edge of the room. The floor stopped here. There was no wall between this one and the next, only two oak beams that stretched across a thirty-foot drop. We took a beam each and high-wired across them. Light was fading and I concentrated on my footing, trying to ignore the shouts getting louder behind me. Above us, under the low sky, the brittle, broken remains of Edinburgh Castle rose up on their plinth of volcanic rock. Snow fell on my outstretched arms and my face.

  Bryce faltered near the end of the beam but corrected himself and jumped over onto the last room, a bare floorboard that we sprinted across as seven figures spilled out of the stairwell and gave chase. As we reached the edge of the floor I heard two shots fire and a bullet whistle past my ear. I jumped the final few metres and fell over the edge onto the muddy slope beneath the castle. This had once been a steep, green bank that swept up from Princes Street Gardens to the Royal Mile. A few winding paths had led tourists up from the town to the Castle on sunny days. Fireworks had exploded above it and showered down onto throngs of heaving Hogmanay crowds. Now it was dirt and glass and gravel. Nothing grew there.

  Bryce was already ahead of me and running down towards the tracks. The old railway line from Waverley was still our quickest route back out of the town. The tunnel to Haymarket station had held, despite the fires that had raged within it. A single burned-out shell of a train sat halfway along, but aside from that it was a clear run.

  Another shot rang out behind us as we both hit the tracks and started picking up the pace. I followed the dark outline of Bryce as we neared the tunnel, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his long coat flapping behind him like a tent. Not for the first time I marvelled at his speed.

  Our pursuers had hit the slope and slowed down as they picked their way gingerly down it. A few wild shots flew harmlessly above us and we made up some distance. I caught up with Bryce as we hit the tunnel. The sound of our feet slamming against the ground closed in around us like the darkness. There was no light. Bryce flicked on his head torch and I followed the beam as it swept around the crumbling brick, catching the shadows of rats scurrying into the walls. We reached the first bend where the train wreck was lodged and I heard footsteps on the track behind us; voices close by and rattling off the walls.

  Now it was just a matter of speed.

  We knew the geography of the train well: the blockages, the angle of each carriage, the width of each door and how it led to the next, the position of each blackened husk sitting in its seat. There had been only a few passengers that early on a Sunday morning. The train would have stopped in the tunnel as the warnings came, an apology from the driver over the tannoy, a few tuts and papers shaken, then the very faintest sound of the sirens, not enough time to panic before the first one hit, flooding the tunnel with liquid fire.

  I followed Bryce's route through the train and out into blackness. We lost our pursuers for a moment, but as we saw the dim light of the tunnel's exit at Haymarket we heard them gaining on us once again. They were quick.

  A shot rang out and another bullet flew past my head, a little too close for comfort this time. I pushed down my head and lengthened my stride, putting some faith in my feet. I could feel them now closing in now. They were no longer shouting, just running; using all of their energy to catch us.

  Bryce reached the end of the tunnel and immediately launched his huge bulk onto the platform on the left. He hit the stone wall with his chest, with his arms scrabbling on the concrete and his legs kicking the thin air beneath. His buttocks heaved in great circles as he struggled like a water buffalo in a rising river, unable to pull himself up.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted as I reached the end of the tunnel. “Keep running!”

  “Get me up! Get me up!”

  “They’re almost on us!”

  “Just get me fucking up!”

  I stumbled on the gravel as I ran into the grey light and heaved Bryce’s legs onto the platform. He grabbed my arm and hauled me effortlessly alongside him. I followed as he sprinted up the remains of a metal staircase. At the top, Bryce crouched and swung his rifle round. I fell down behind him, wheezing, gasping.

  “Bryce,” I spluttered. “What the hell are you doing? Let’s keep moving!”

  Echoes of footsteps clattered off the walls of the tunnel, louder and louder.

  “I’m buying us some time,” said Bryce calmly. His own breathing had already slowed and I could tell his heart rate was doing the same. Mine was still hammering, trying to escape from my ribcage.

  Bryce was a freak. From what I knew of him, his life before the strike had had a single purpose: pleasure. Food, drink, drugs and sex. He had never lifted a weight, never cy
cled a bike, would have hurled you across a room if you had suggested that he take a jog. You would never have seen a man with a build like his on a track, but Bryce could run five miles flat out without breaking a sweat. Against all evidence to the contrary, he was a natural runner with the heart of an Olympian. I could never keep up with him.

  “There are at least seven of them, you idiot!” I said, trying to pull back his shoulder. “Come on!”

  “They’re pussies,” said Bryce, shrugging me off and adjusting his sight. “A couple of shots and they’ll run home to Mummy.”

  “No no no, Bryce, come on, think. They’ve usually given up by now, but they’re still running. They’re fed and they’re armed and they’re pissed off. They’ll kill us. Now for fuck’s sake let’s keep running, they’re almost on us!”

  “Toooo late,” sang Bryce, his finger wrapping itself around the trigger of his rifle.

  The front runner hurtled out of the tunnel and skidded to a halt on the tracks. He was tall and lean, with a thick black hooded top pulled down over his gaunt face. He pulled a pistol from his green combat trousers and held it out in both hands, scanning the station. I ducked behind Bryce. Another two arrived from the tunnel and almost tumbled into each other. They were both shorter than the other, but just as skinny, hoods up as well. They were all young, probably still teenagers. The leader held out a hand towards them and they spread out on the tracks, pulling out their guns and looking warily around the station.

  “Bryce,” I hissed. “This is not a good idea.”

  “It’s a fucking great idea,” he said, and let off a shot.

  The bullet hit the wall of the tunnel and a cloud of dust and rock exploded around the three young men. They instinctively fell to the tracks and started scrambling back towards the safety of the tunnel. Bryce fired a couple more rounds and the leader returned fire in our direction before disappearing into the darkness.

  I fell back against the rear wall of the steps, my ears ringing from the shots, my heart still pounding from the run and now from the gunfire. Until six months before I had never even seen a gun in real life, let alone one spitting bullets at me.