For the first time since the strike, we could see the sun.
“Now if that’s not a good sign, I don’t know what is,” said Harvey.
We stuffed the noodles in our packs and refilled our rehydration bladders with the water that Grimes and Richard had found. After Bryce’s find earlier, we decided to take a look inside the cabs of the other lorries in the pile-up. We found a first-aid kit, another torch (empty of batteries), a bar of chocolate, a lighter, a map of the UK and a cricket bat. Bryce claimed the last of these and stuffed it in the webbing of his pack.
“Foxes,” he said.
There may have been more to take, but nobody wanted to spend too much time inside the cabs.
We shared the chocolate and left, clambering through the wreckage until we found the road. Then we began our first twenty-mile stretch. We walked for an hour, then began to run. I knew I had to keep my eyes on the treacherous road in front of me, but they kept drifting upwards, hypnotised by the sun, still visible and peering glumly through the clouds at the bare earth beneath, stripped of the life it had once ignited from dust.
Eventually it disappeared again, but my eyes still sought it out in the dark sky.
We were now running through Carlisle on what had once been the M6 motorway. The “backbone of Britain” as my father would have said, chin raised proudly as if he were talking about a war hero and not a bleak strip of pollution-carrying tarmac. This backbone - broken now - would be our trail south until we hit the Midlands. We planned a rough route using the map from the lorry, our first aim to hit Penrith before nightfall. Penrith was twenty-one miles away. I had never run more than three in my life.
Harvey ran at the front, with Richard and Grimes behind and Bryce and me at the rear. My pack felt heavy, even though it only contained noodles and water. My legs strained too, my boots like lead. A few steps in and my body began to tell me how little it wanted to do with this. Whatever this was I thought I was doing, I should stop right now - give up while I had the chance.
I didn’t give up; something kept me going, but whatever watery breed of will it was that got me through those first steps, those first miles, I knew then it wasn’t going to be enough. It already seemed hopeless to continue, and yet I had barely broken my stride.
A strange, broken rhythm appeared between my breathing, my heartbeat and my boots on the tarmac. This seemed to occupy me for a while, before Bryce interrupted my painful trance. I became aware of his great head leaning towards mine.
“You don’t believe that shite, do you?” he said.
“What shite?” I breathed.
He nodded at Harvey. “That shite. Running across Australia.”
I looked up at Harvey, springing on his heels ahead of us.
“Old man’s lost a few up here, don’t you think?” said Bryce, tapping his temple.
“I don’t know…” I said. Every word was a gulp. “He seems pretty good...at running.”
“Not denying that,” said Bryce. “But there’s nothing unusual about an old man who runs.” He leaned in again. “They’re always out there, aren’t they? Skinny bastards hobbling about in mangy shorts with their wee cocks flapping about inside.” He mimed a few flaps with his hand and grimaced. “Big difference between that and running thousands of miles across a desert, though, isn’t there? I’m telling you, he’s not right.”
Bryce suddenly looked over my head at something.
“Service station,” he shouted to the others. “On the right. Worth a shot?”
“How long have we been going?” said Grimes
Richard checked his watch. “A little over two hours,” he said.
“OK,” said Grimes. “We can take five minutes.”
We crossed the barrier and found the service station. It was empty. We rested and moved on.
The road and the landscape changed again. We saw craters on our left, small at first, then large. One huge canyon loomed to the right. The ground around us seemed to become even more absent of anything man-made than before. There was nothing, not even the memory of buildings remained, and no trees, of course. The road itself became more cracked, the spaces between potholes ever shorter. More of the cars appeared to have been burned until every one was a black husk, some still with bodies at their wheels like used matchsticks that might turn to ash in the next strong wind. Then, fewer and fewer cars were even there at all. Eventually the road disappeared completely until we were running on nothing but rock-strewn dirt covered by a layer of frost. The landscape was flat, colourless, scrubbed clean of life. It was as if the world had disintegrated into two dull halves: brown earth and grey sky.
We could still see the faint marks where the road had been, so we kept within their boundaries. The ground began to fall away beneath us and we began to walk downhill into a wide and shallow bowl of barren dirt. A bank of brown mist loomed in front of us, as if the ground itself was evaporating, mud ghosts rising into the gloom above them and obscuring everything around us. I felt some relief in my legs, then we were within the mist, running blind on flat, dry ground.
“I feel like I'm inside a fart,” said Bryce.
I could barely see Harvey now; he was just an outline in the mist ahead. The sound of our boots in the dirt and our packs shuffling on our backs became amplified, as if somebody had closed a door on the world. I felt an odd respite, cocooned from the road ahead, as if there was no more distance to go, that the journey itself was just in this small bubble. There was no longer any great expanse to endure.
Harvey’s shape became dimmer as he pulled away from us. Then I heard a noise, very distant, a dull plucking sound and a soft, high voice. It grew louder until I could hear that it was music: a man’s voice singing softly over a guitar. The strings sounded metallic, like steel, but dampened by the air around them; a low scale played slowly with mournful chords springing above it. Notes that didn’t belong to the chords beneath them snapped and twanged in the upper registers like wild birds trapped against a ceiling. The melody was lost and I couldn’t make out what he was singing, but every word was a breath, growing warily in his throat and dying with a warble, so that every note sounded like a hand stretching up out of a pit for something just out of reach, trembling and falling back.
I looked at Bryce.
“Do you hear that?” I said.
“Aha,” said Bryce.
Harvey was out of sight. Then I heard his boots scrabble on the ground and stop ahead. Almost immediately, we saw him again, stone still, rooted to the spot, looking ahead. Grimes had side-stepped him and had turned to look at his face. She followed his gaze up above us.
“Christ,” she said.
“Watch out!” said Richard, as I stumbled into his back.
“Shit, Harvey!” shouted Bryce as he hopped around him. “What…” Bryce’s mouth clamped shut as he too saw what Harvey was looking at in the dying brown haze. I straightened up, caught my breath and saw it too: an aeroplane, crumpled and twisted and sprawled on its front, its wings stuck up in the air like those of a maimed gull.
The music stopped short. A loud belch sounded deep in the mist.
“Holy fuck,” said Bryce.
“Planes,” said Richard. “There must have been…” he turned to Grimes. “How many do you think were in the sky when it happened?”
“In the UK?” said Grimes. “Four, five hundred maybe. Maybe fewer. The warning would probably have grounded some of the domestic flights. All the others would have been international.”
“The big ones,” I said.
We started to walk towards the wreckage. More detail emerged from the mist as we moved. The cockpit was scorched and tarry streaks ran back along its fuselage towards a tattered slit halfway along. Innards of seats and shredded metal spilled out of the hole. We kept our eyes up, aware of but ignoring the disintegrating corpses that we had started to make out around us. Most of them had already been half-claimed by the hungry, dry ground on which they lay prostrate.
“And in the world?” said Richard.
We stopped. Next to the opening, sat on a box, was a man. He was peering back through the mist at us, trying to make us out, frowning, mouth open and top lip curled in a faint snarl. His beard was thick and brown and high on his cheeks. He wore a stained, red baseball cap and a silver cross dangled from his left ear. He held a battered guitar in his hands, his left hand still gnarled into chord around its fretboard, right fingers stroking the string they had just been about to play. In front of him was a small, steaming pot sitting on a pile of ash.
“London’s shored, the coast is clawed, Birmingham’s a hole in the ground,” he sang. His accent was southern English, but with a drawl that made me think he’d been somewhere else. The vowels rolled like smoke in his mouth. He watched us for a moment, index finger still slowly stroking the string beneath it. A loon-like Popeye grin suddenly sprang across his face. Two front teeth hung down like a cartoon rabbit’s.
“Hello,” he said. He pointed a finger at the pot and raised his eyebrows. “Sausage?”
We kept our distance from him. When we failed to answer his question, he turned his attention back to playing his guitar, the same song again. The words were those he had just said.
London’s shored, the coast is clawed, Birmingham’s a hole in the ground...
Every time he reached the last word, he stopped and retraced the scale back down, then searched the fretboard with his hand as if making some minor adjustment. Then he started again, slower or faster, quieter or louder, higher or louder, different each time.
Eventually Grimes spoke to him.
“Are you alone?” she said.
The man looked up, smiling serenely at her, still crooning until he reached the end of the lyric.
“...Birmingham’s a hole in the ground…” He let the smile suddenly fall from his face and threw his guitar into the dirt and picked up a skewer.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just me. Why don’t you sit down?” He coughed and spat. “Sorry.” He pointed at the pot again, wincing as he swallowed. “Have a sausage?” He began to stir and scrape at the pot. “I think they’re sausages,” he said, peeping over the brim.
Grimes turned to us.
“I’ll check the plane,” she said.
“Me too,” said Bryce, dropping his pack. “Have fun.”
Richard, Harvey and I threw our packs down and sat down while Grimes and Bryce climbed up through the mess of broken plane into the fuselage.
“I found them in there,” said the man. He frowned as he stabbed something with his skewer. “In those foil containers.” He pulled out the skewer and held it tentatively in front of him, turning it in the light. He peered suspiciously at the bulbous, fatty blob steaming before him.
“Pretty sure they’re sausages…”
He looked at each of us, pointed the thing in our direction. We shook our heads, so he shrugged and took a large bite.
“How long have you been here?” I said.
“Me?” he said, frowning as he turned the gristle in one side of his mouth. He watched the remaining meat quivering on the skewer as if it might try to escape at any moment. “Just passing through. Arrived this morning, thought I’d see if I could get some breakfast.” He nodded back at the plane. “I’ve been through it already, there’s nothing there.”
He reached a finger back into his mouth and picked something from his molar. He inspected it for a moment.
“Nothing but these…sausages,” he said, popping whatever he had found back into his mouth. He swallowed the rest of the meat in one bite and picked up his guitar again.
London’s shored, the coast is clawed, Birmingham’s a hole in the ground…
“Are you singing from experience, mate?” said Harvey.
The man raised his eyebrows and adjusted his cap. “Yes, as it happens,” he said. “Pretty much, but d’you know the funny thing?” He sat back and lifted the toes of his boots off the ground, stretching his back. He pointed at his guitar.
“I wrote these words before it all happened,” he said. He beamed proudly back at us. “They were about something different back then, had a different tune and all. Now it’s a whole new song.”
He sat forward again, swallowed and belched. He blew out, looking glumly at the pot.
“I don’t think they were sausages,” he said.
“You don’t sound like you’re from Penrith,” said Richard.
The man flipped his eyes away from the pot and flipped his cap again, shuffling in his seat. He moved with a nervous quickness like a character in a silent film, like his life was playing too fast and he had to slow himself down to stay on the same timescale as the world around him.
“Nah,” he said. “Nah I’m from down south. South coast.”
“How did you get up here?” I said.
“I walked,” he said. He sniffed and wiped his nose with a finger “Had to after it happened. Everyone did. Everyone who was left. Most people started heading for London though didn’t they? Why? I told them not to, what’s the point? What were they going to find there?”
He looked at us, the question clearly not as rhetorical as it sounded. We heard some bangs and clattering noises from the plane as Bryce and Grimes worked their way along the fuselage. The man glanced back, then placed his hands back on the fretboard and looked down at it sadly.
“Stupid. Why does everyone always head for London? What are they looking for? What are they going to find? I went the other way.” He pointed a flat palm to his left. “I went east along the coast...well, what the coast is now anyway.”
“Where were you going?” I said.
“Cornwall,” he said, picking out a few notes on the strings. “I had family there. I made it across in a week. It was OK, better than where I’d come from, but it was still a mess. Fires everywhere, holes in the ground, everything different. I couldn’t find anyone where I thought they’d be, so I found a safe place and holed up for a bit.”
He stopped and held his fist in front of his mouth, blowing a gust of intestinal gas through it.
“Yeah...definitely not sausages,” he said.
“That was, what, six months ago?” said Richard.
He nodded, still holding his hand to his mouth.
“Why are you up here, then?”
He released another belch and took a breath.
“That’s better, yuck, sorry.” He waved his hand in the air in front of him. “Why am I here? I had to move on again. It got crowded, dangerous. People started coming from all over the place, then there were people with guns in uniforms trying to sort everything out, trying to divide everyone up.”
“Army?” said Harvey.
“Dunno, don’t think so. They looked foreign, wore yellow. They started building this big fence.”
“A fence?” said Richard. “What kind of fence?”
“Don’t know, I couldn’t work out what was happening. I asked but nobody would tell me. I saw somebody get shot. This girl. She was trying to find out too, but they wouldn’t listen so she grabbed one of them and he turned and shot her in the chest.” He slammed his chest with one hand. “Right through the heart. She just fell like a doll, dead.” He sniffed, spat, shook his head. “I got my stuff and left, started walking back across the country.”
“To London?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Big smoke. Huh. That’s all there is there now: smoke.”
He looked up at us.
“I’m not kidding either,” he said. “Literally. Nothing. There. No buildings, no roads, no people. After four days’ walking I thought I’d taken a wrong turn, you know? Thought I’d gone too far north. Then I found this hole and I looked inside and there were all these dead people, families all sitting cuddled up together against walls. On one of the walls I saw this metal sign and I realised it was a tube station and I was already halfway across London. Seriously, nothing but smoke and ruin. Then I saw water everywhere and I heard an explosion,
so I thought I’d better head off again.”
He looked across at me, then at Harvey and Richard, eyes scanning all over our clothes and packs. Suddenly he stood up and thrust a hand across the pot.
“I’m Jacob, by the way,” he said. We shook his hand and he jumped spasmodically back to his seat and took up his guitar.
“What are you guys doing, then?” he said.
Richard raised his eyebrows and puffed through his nose.
“We’re going to Cornwall,” he said.
“Shit,” said Jacob. He gurned and scratched his cheek hard. “Why?”
“Have you heard about the ships?” said Richard.
“Ships? Yeah, someone I met in Sheffield said something about that. Are they real then? I thought they were made up.”
We told him about the barracks, the helicopters, about Yuill and Henderson, about our families. Grimes and Bryce jumped down from the plane.
“Nothing,” said Grimes.
“Not even booze,” said Bryce.
“Sorry man,” said Jacob. “This is all that was left.” He pointed down at the pot. “Help yourself...although I wouldn’t…”
Bryce had already speared a lump of bubbling matter and was chewing it down. “Mmph,” he said, releasing a squirt of grease through his lips that dribbled down through his black beard. Jacob looked up at him, a smirk of disbelief on his open mouth.
“So,” he said at last, fidgeting with his cap. “If you want to get to Cornwall, keep east, but not too far east. Anything west of the Pennines is dangerous; too unstable. There’s nothing there but holes and crags. The water’s inland as far as Manchester, which means you have to go through it. There are still buildings there, shelter, water and some food. But there are people as well.” He winced a little. “So go as quickly as you can. You’ll have to leave this road after the Lakes and head inland; approach Manchester from the north, unless you want a swim.”
“What are the roads like after Manchester?” said Grimes.
“Better. You can walk them OK, but you’re pretty exposed.”
“Exposed?” I said. “Exposed to what?”
The End of the World Running Club Page 24