The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Bryce. He leaned forward and peered at me from where he was standing unsteadily by the fire. “Veszhtables? Greenhousesh? What do you think this is, The Good Life? What’s your plan, you gonnae…gonnae start a fucking commune or something?” He gave a hoot and wobbled back on his heels, gripping the fireplace to stop himself from falling into the flames.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong with that? Why do we need to leave the country? Where would we go? What’s there that’s so great? Internet? Television? Department stores? Fast food?”

  Richard leaned forwards and began counting on his fingers.

  “Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish and short out of life.” He rabbit-eared his fingers. “You think that going back to nature is going to make your life more enjoyable? You’re a fantasist, Ed, and a selfish one. What about your kids and your wife? You think they’d be alright? You think you could really support them and protect them? You probably couldn’t even keep a cactus alive, let alone feed your family from a vegetable patch.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “I’m saying, society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother or both. Pain, filth, famine and war were everywhere and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after each other. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go and live in River Cottage. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.”

  With that, Richard snatched his drink and stood up.

  “Not going on the fucking boats,” he muttered. He glared back at me, then faced the fire. “Ridiculous.”

  “I could grow vegetables if I wanted,” I mumbled, refilling my glass. Bryce began to laugh.

  “Alright boys, alright,” he said. “Time out. Ed, don’t be a dick. And Dick, get down off your high-horse, you sound like you’re running for…I dunno…King of…bloody…pfft…anyway. Rupert, old chum, old mate, have you got…got any kinda…I dunno…entertainment for this party?”

  Rupert looked back at him conspiratorially.

  “Funny you should say that,” he said. “Got just the thing.”

  Half an hour later, I was sat next to Bryce on the sofa, half-listening to him talk about tattoos. Rupert had wheeled in an ancient wind-up gramophone and was pouring through a thick stack of LPs. The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams was playing and through my badly focussing eyes I could just make out Grimes dancing with Richard. She lay her head against his chest. I was aware that Bryce had stopped talking and he knew he was watching too. Then I saw Grimes move her hand slowly up Richard’s neck and try to pull his head towards hers. Richard pushed it away and broke away from her, turning back to face the fire and leaving her suddenly on her own in the centre of the room. Her shoulders were tight and her hands had clenched into balls by her side; it was the same position I had seen her in when Yuill and Henderson had abandoned us in Carlops.

  She turned and said something to Rupert as the music faded to the click and crackle of the needle on the ancient vinyl. “Of course, my dear, of course. You can sleep through there.” Rupert pointed through double doors to an adjoining room. “There’s a sofa and I’ve put out some blankets. Usually gets warm in there from this here fire.”

  Grimes laid a hand on his shoulder and left, quickly, closing the doors behind her.

  Rupert turned to us. “Think I’ll call it a night too, gents, if you don’t mind. Should be enough room for you in here. Two sofas over there, another here and…oh, right.” He looked back at the arm chair, where Harvey had fallen asleep. He picked up a blanket from a pile by the door and laid it across him. “Good night, old man,” he said. “Good night, all.”

  We waved him good night and Richard, Bryce and I took a blanket each to our sofas. The comfort of that thick blanket and those deep, velvet cushions was the most I’d felt in almost a year. I stared at the ceiling, sensing time passing and willing away the morning, the time when I would have to get up, go out into the cold and start running again. Then I felt bad for feeling this when we were still so far from Cornwall, and the guilt gave way to urgency and a sudden need to move and be close to Beth, Alice and Arthur. My head suddenly filled with a thousand breeds of panic: the dizzy horror of separation, the implausibility of reconciliation, the physical recoil from the task at hand, the still present eeriness of the fact that what had happened had happened - the world had been smashed apart - the whole strange and alien coldness of it all. My mind began to spin like an engine stuck on full throttle. My heart stuttered and raced, deafening me with the sound of fast-moving blood. I tensed my muscles, fighting for control, until finally my thoughts settled into a kind of low, pulsing sense of doom. My heart gradually slowed too, and I cursed whatever part of human evolution had led to this kind of emotional somersaulting. I thought about what Richard had said. Maybe I was a fantasist. Maybe I was no good. Maybe I couldn’t look after my family. After all, I hadn’t been doing a great job before the end of the world, so why now?

  I think I was just starting to drift off when I heard a spring creak. A moment later I saw Bryce padding across the room with a candle. He paused at the double doors to the adjoining room where Grimes was sleeping, then looked over his shoulder at Richard, snoring soundly in the other sofa. He didn’t seem to notice me looking back. Then he turned back to the doors, knocked twice, softly, and went in. I heard low voices coming from inside, Grimes saying something kindly but firmly, Bryce’s voice sounding different - boyish and broken, helpless. Then silence, followed by footsteps returning to the door. I shut my eyes as it quietly opened and shut, holding my breath until I heard the sound of the sofa behind me creak once again under Bryce’s weight.

  I woke to the distant, animal howl. The curtains were open and the room was full of dull shadows. It was still outside; the storm had passed. Richard and Bryce were still asleep on their sofas, but Harvey’s chair was empty.

  I got up and crouched next to the fire, warming my hands on the embers and enjoying the smell of soot and stone. I might have been expecting to feel worse, given the amount of drink from the night before, but all I had was a dull throb in my temples. My head was clear, my muscles were looser after the bath, and I even felt well rested. I had fallen into a deep sleep shortly after Bryce had returned from his visit to Grimes’ room, thinking of the many things that might have happened in there but knowing that there was really only one. I knew it was wrong to take comfort from this, but I did anyway. Other people’s problems, even those of your friends, are a great and terrible distraction from your own.

  I was thirsty so I made my way out along the dark corridor and through to the kitchen. Harvey was there, piling some of the wood left over from the night before into the stove.

  “Morning, Ed,” he whispered. “Thought I’d get her going early, didn’t think Rupert would mind. You want some coffee? I found some in this pot here, looks a bit old but smells alright.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We stood at the window and drank coffee while the morning light grew outside. We watched details of the landscape emerge slowly like drops of watercolour seeping across canvas - trees, fields, hills and fences - all the features of a traditional, rolling English landscape. In the grey shadows, it all looked normal and untouched, so much so that it might have been possible to trick ourselves into thinking
that, maybe, the devastation ended here. Maybe, beyond these hills surrounding us, people lived normally, the sun still met the earth, flowers still grew, cities still prospered. Or even - just maybe - what had happened had never happened at all. But then the light grew a little more and we saw dark blights appear - rough gouges in the earth, sections of hillside missing, forests flattened and black, ditches that tore open into hidden quarries of mud. I felt a nameless loss. A grief for something I had never known, a time and a country I could only hope to feel through osmosis, never first hand.

  “Storm’s abated, I see.”

  I turned to see Rupert next to me, peering through the glass.

  “Maybe today’s the day to tackle that garden,” he said.

  The others came in gradually, first Grimes, already dressed in her dried uniform, then Richard and finally Bryce, booming a loud “Morning!” as if nothing had happened. I watched him sidle past Grimes without a glance and help himself to coffee from the stove. Grimes herself avoided Richard’s eyes and joined Harvey and me at the window.

  “I’m sorry, Ed,” said Richard from the table behind me. “About last night. I had no right to say what I said, I was just, you know…bit drunk, angry, I suppose.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “Maybe you were right.”

  “No, no I wasn’t. It’s your decision, your life, your family. You must do what you feel you must do. It’s not my place to tell you what I think is right and wrong. I just,” he began, and sighed. “Just miss my son. I’m sorry.” He stretched his hand across the table. I shook it and he smiled. “No hard feelings,” he said.

  “None at all,” I said.

  “Aaaah, isn’t that…” Bryce began. But he stopped when he saw Grimes turning her face towards him, narrowing her eyes and giving a single, almost imperceptible shake of her head. Bryce cleared his throat and licked his lips, laying his cup down on the table. Grimes turned her head back

  “OK,” she said. “Once you two are finished cuddling, are we good to go?”

  We dressed in our dry clothes and filled our hydration bladders with rainwater from the kitchen tap. Then we thanked Rupert for his help, each shaking his hand at the back door before heading up the drive. I looked back to see him walking to an outhouse, re-appearing a few moments later with a rake and a spade. He crossed the yard, dropping first the rake, then the spade, retrieving them both from the gravel and then carrying them both down to the garden. I swallowed down the same feelings I had had the night before and followed the others back up to the main road.

  We made over thirty miles that day, alternating between running and walking every quarter of an hour and stopping for three half-hour breaks to stretch, eat and drink. We set up camp in a service station, where we found a full, unopened box of Mars bars hidden in the corner of an otherwise empty store room, and a vending machine containing three cans of Coke. We celebrated with two portions of noodles, sharing the Cokes and eating three Mars bars each before filling our packs with the rest. We woke to similar weather and travelled almost as well the next day. I picked up a blister that I burst and plastered on one of our breaks. I barely felt it for the rest of the day.

  It began to seem that what we were doing might be possible. The weather was cold but we were keeping dry. The road was broken but passable, with no major obstacles. Aside from a little awkwardness between Grimes and Richard, the night at Bartonmouth Hall seemed to have bound us a little more closely. Our joints and muscles ached, but the pain became manageable. We were feeling good and making progress. We were settling into a rhythm.

  A rhythm that I’m sure would have carried us to Cornwall without incident, had it not been for Jenny Rae.

  JENNY RAE'S FIELD

  We had been following Jacob’s advice, making our way inland after the Lake District, then skirting around the Yorkshire Dales until, three nights after Bartonmouth, we met a town where we camped in a ditch. We saw a fire on a hill that night and decided to start watches, just as we had done in Carlops. On the last day we noticed a strange light growing on western horizon, which we eventually realised was water. Soon we also saw blocky shapes rising in the mist before us. These were buildings; the tower blocks and offices that still stood in Manchester. It had been six months since we had seen anything taller than a three-storey tenement barely holding its crumbling bricks together. It was a strange feeling to see human structure again in such concentration - hope and sadness both at once.

  As we drew nearer to the city, the buildings became clearer and the water came closer. By mid-afternoon we could see that it had made a shore of the western part of the city. We could even see small waves lapping across the dirt yards of industrial estates and against the rooftops of sunken houses. We decided to stop early and stay north of the city, rather than walk into it as darkness fell. We left the road and found a long, natural cave that had formed high up on a collapsed grass verge. It gave us shelter and a good view of the city, so we set up camp and made a fire.

  Our initial surprise at seeing what we thought was a city intact, in comparison with the one we had seen levelled, faded as we looked at it more closely. Many buildings were still standing tall, but they weren’t what they had been. They were incomplete, their heads lopped off in jagged, diagonal tears. The floors below were windowless, with chunks missing from their corners. My eyes were drawn to the water lapping around the edges of the city, out of place and unsure of itself against its new shore. I saw tiny white specks, gulls moving around on the waves and flapping clumsily up onto high window ledges, the urban cliffs in which they were now making nests. An erosion was beginning, which, I imagined, would result in a beach after enough time. The sand would be made of bones, credit cards, fridges, cars and sofa springs. Dunes would form and grow tufts of grass. The sun might eventually shine on them, a young boy might tumble down them, laughing, rolling in the trillion, trillion fragments of debris and detritus, dust ground from the lives who had once walked the bed of the rolling ocean into which he crashed. The living would run through the dust of the dead, just as they always had done.

  Harvey dealt with the fire and Grimes organised the pot. Bryce sat back away from us and took off his boots to rub his ankles. He seemed distracted.

  Richard took out the map and studied it.

  “I think we’re here,” he said, pointing at an interchange about three miles north of the city. He drew his finger down across a mess of roads that spread south east, glancing up at the eerie coastline for reference.

  “We probably shouldn’t go near there,” he said. “Which means we’ll have to go here.” He pointed to a smaller road going directly through the heart of the city. “We can be through in a day, follow it south and rejoin the M6 in two or three days…” He traced the road down and jabbed it. “Here.”

  “That means...Birmingham by the sixteenth,” I said. I did some calculations. “Nine days to make the final three hundred miles.”

  It felt strange to be saying this with confidence. Even a few weeks before, it would have been with hilarity or despair. But what had changed? My body? Was I fitter? Perhaps a little, but certainly not that much after just less than a fortnight of movement. What had changed was my perspective. The task seemed less impossible the more we pushed on. Every mile I conquered was one less to endure. Every night and every morning was another twenty-four hours closer to Beth and the kids. Every hill I scaled was one more than the man who had almost let his family sleep through the end of the world believed he was incapable of scaling. And yet still he had scaled it. Nothing out there was changing, but everything inside was.

  “Let’s just concentrate on getting through Manchester,” said Richard. “Then we’ll see where we are.”

  We cooked noodles and watched the city as night fell. As the shadow crept towards us from the east, we spotted orange lights flickering in its wake; other fires like ours dotted about the city.

  Harvey passed plates round. I ate mine in three gulps and poured the remaining thin broth into my mouth. Bryce
took his, moved the noodles around a bit with his spoon and then threw the plate to the ground with a roar.

  “Fucking noodles!”

  He rolled away from us onto his side and crossed his arms, slamming his head against his pack and grumbling.

  “I need meat!” he said.

  In the morning, I was surprised to find myself awake before anyone else. It was not yet light but I could see the effects of the sunrise going on behind the cloud. A thin band of light was glowing on the wet horizon. I sat up, stood up, stretched and breathed in the fetid air. We had grown used to the stale smell around us all the time, but it seemed to be getting much stronger now that we were close to a city and the pressure of the cloud above did nothing to help. We knew what it was.

  I felt alright, better than I had felt the night before. The tight strain in my legs and back and the sharp pain in my knees and hips were there constantly, but it was as though the all-encompassing tourniquet in which my body was gripped was being slowly released. A small release each morning, but enough to allow me to walk more freely, feel gravity just that little bit less than the day before. I felt a surge of hope with every dim sunrise.

  I scraped some snow from the ridge with a pan and lit the stove. I sat and watched the small, fierce flame burn, enjoying being the only one awake for a change. The stove radiated warmth and promised me warm liquid. I tried not to think about it, afraid that my good mood was too fragile and might vanish like a butterfly under too much scrutiny.

  The water boiled and daylight found the ridge. I made tea and poured it into mugs for the others. Grimes woke up first.

  “Morning,” I said. She pushed herself up painfully from the hard ground and pulled up the hat that had been covering her face. She looked across at me, confused. Her skin was pale and her eyes puffy with sleep, the corners of her mouth downturned.