The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  I blinked. Heard thumps and shouts and voices far away, making quick echoes.

  “Ed? Ed? Where are you?

  “Ed! Where the...ahh shit!”

  “Edgar!”

  I tried speaking, but only a thin, H-shaped stream of air left my mouth. There was a sharp pain in my right shoulder and the hand below it felt numb and strange. With some effort, I sat up on my left elbow, looked down.

  My index finger was pulled back and pointing straight up at me. The thumb had twisted upside down and hung loosely from its socket like a dead slug. The third finger was out of sight, hiding in a near right-angle beneath the remaining two that cowered together away from the horror of their siblings like two children having stumbled across a family bloodbath.

  “H..here,” I managed at last.

  “Ed? Is that you?” Harvey’s voice.

  “Here,” I said, louder.

  “Wait there,” said Richard. “We’ll come to you.”

  The voices snapped back and repeated like springs against concrete. I fell back and looked up again. Tall dark walls rose up into the cloud, skyscrapers of mud and stone. Some stood on their own, others massed together into long blocks. I felt like I was in a city, yet this was well beneath the surface of the earth.

  I heard scrabbles and curses far away. I think I drifted off. At least, I had the sense of time passing without me.

  “Ed! Ed! Are you still there?” Harvey’s voice again, further away this time.

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  “We can’t get to you, mate,” he said. “All these walls, it’s like a maze. Can you walk?”

  I shifted up again, managed to get to my feet.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Good, keep walking then, and keep talking, we’ll try to follow each other.”

  “Which direction?” I said.

  “The one pointing away from where you fell from, mate. Follow my voice, keep talking.”

  I saw the ground rise sharply ahead and guessed that it marked the beginning of the canyon wall, so I turned and walked.

  “Over here,” said Harvey, from somewhere far over to my left. “Actually Ed, I’m just going to say ‘here’, that OK? You say it too. Here...here...here.”

  It was dark of course, and misty, but I could see the direction the walls were making and followed them round.

  “Here...here...here,” I said. “Harvey?”

  “Here...here...here,” said Harvey. “Keep saying it, Ed. Here...here...here.”

  I followed the walls, holding my mangled hand to my chest, repeating the words like a mantra.

  Here...here...here...I’m here...here...here.

  Harvey’s here’s became softer, further away.

  “Harvey? Harvey? Where are you?”

  here...here………...here

  “Harvey, I’m losing you, here here here” I shouted.

  here……………..here…………..

  Eventually his voice faded until it was only a memory in my head - an imagined sound, carved from the silence. I stood still, holding my breath, willing it to return, until even my mind refused to conjure it for me.

  “Harvey! Richard! Bryce!”

  Nothing. I kept walking, following the walls. It became darker and the mist got closer. I bit back the panic. Then I froze. Then I ran.

  The concept of time or distance left me. I kept running, painfully, following the darkness of the wall on my left, listening out for any human sound. I kept talking.

  Here...here...here.

  I passed boulders, pipes, car parts, bits of road, some human remains, a jumble of industry and life either littered about the wide, muddy streets that had been carved into the prehistoric rock or wedged into the rock itself. I did not even allow myself to think of how this had happened. I just wanted to get out of the maze. Whenever I saw a puddle, I stopped and drank from it, burying my face in the dirt and sucking up the water like an animal. When it became too dark to see, I stopped and fell next to a huge iron girder that was speared into the ground. There was a warmth in the ground that unsettled me. I huddled into the giant metal groove and tried to sleep, gripping the broken can of Alice’s stringyphone in my uninjured hand, whispering to myself as I squeezed my eyelids shut.

  Here...here...here

  Here.

  I used to dread being asked whether or not I believed in God. Either answer aligns you with an entirely new set of certainties. Say yes and you’re certain of a myth, you say God bless you and mean it quite literally, you commit to a wild insanity of faith. Say no and you’re an atheist: confident, assured and certain of the scientific method and all of its own twisted ideas - string theory, infinite universes, emergent consciousness - equally strange, equally alien, each requiring its own version of that insane faith.

  I know now that it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.

  It’s hard being a human. Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we’re doing and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we’re just lucky. Our lives are filled with humdrum, dust and noise with no meaning. And yet they contain moments that seem to mean something, something we can’t describe but want to. Those moments leave holes that we want to fill. We want to name them, paint them, teach them, sing them. But we can’t. We can’t because when we try the hole disappears and all we can see is the imperfect, unrecognisable imprint of our own crude imagination. We want God. We want this life to end, for the curtain to go up and a kind, loving face to smile down on us, a warm voice to call us through and explain everything to us. The hole is everything we don’t know and everything we suspect, and we need a truth to fill it.

  People often wonder if we see that truth in dark places. Dark places like the one through which I ran. Sometimes people say they do. Others say they see only the darkness.

  God is a shape that fits a God-shaped hole. There, will that do?

  Do I believe in God? I still don’t know. Did I meet him in the canyon? Yes.

  Absolutely yes.

  “Here,” I grunted, and opened my eyes from a barely visited sleep. I could see. I pushed myself out from the girder, growling as my limbs straightened, rediscovering my shoulder and hand and the more determined version of the pain to which they were both now dedicated. The mist had risen a little. I drank puddle water, every gulp provoking new pangs of hunger in my empty belly. Then I found my bearings and followed the wall again, walking a little until my legs stretched, then began to run.

  Again, no sense of time or distance, only the sense of pain from every direction, down, up, left, right, from skin, from bone, from muscle, from gristle, from hunger, from exhaustion, from eyes, ears, nose, tongue, bladder, stomach, legs, arms, hand, shoulder. From outside. From inside. Physical and mental. Pain from the present. Pain from the past. Pain in the future. Suffering and regret with little hope to alleviate either of them.

  Only the sound of two cans hitting each other beneath my jacket.

  Only the word, the mantra I grunted with every two steps.

  Here...here...here.

  I felt a sense of space open up around me; the walls were growing apart. The right one disappeared entirely, then the left, and the sound of my voice and my footsteps no longer echoed. The mist had lifted and I looked ahead at a wide, open plain of mud overhanging with colourless, textureless cloud. I felt soft spots of water on my face, drizzle against my skin.

  Here...here...here…

  It was as this plain opened up before me that I allowed myself to consider what was happening, what had happened - what had really happened. There was no shape to the world that I was running through, no detail, just brown flat mud and rain falling from dull cloud. Behind me was full of detail, full of strangeness. Grimes was dead. Harvey, Bryce and Richard had disappeared. I had heard about people experiencing hallucinations when running long distances, imagining things that were not the
re.

  Imagining people who were never there.

  Two water droplets that had formed on my cheek bulged and touched each other. The resulting trickle of rain water fell down through my beard, across my cracked lips and into my mouth.

  “Afternoon.”

  My heart jerked like a sleeping dog’s leg. I looked down at my left and saw a man running alongside me. He was small and wore a white smock and sandals. His hair was long and curled, his beard black and cropped. His eyes were pools of cobalt swimming with light. They made everything else seem hazy and ill defined. I could see more detail in the two small spaces they filled than in all the air around me; planets, suns, nebulas and infinite space.

  In his hand he held a bottle of wine. He looked up at me, raised his eyebrows and smiled with his mouth shut.

  I turned my eyes forward.

  Here...here...here…

  I heard a bottle being upended and fluid sloshing in glass. Then a gulp and a satisfied exhalation. I glanced back. The man was still there, wiping his white sleeve across his mouth, looking back at me with another sheepish smile.

  I frowned, turned away.

  I heard his footsteps, the soles of his sandals slapping against the mud.

  “Puh!” he said.

  I turned to see him shaking his head at me, eyes wide, mouth cocked in a smirk as if to say can you believe this weather?

  “Huh!”

  “Tuh!”

  He took another swig from his bottle, coughed and looked ahead, eyebrows raised into an innocent, crumpled frown. I turned away again.

  When I turned back the smile had disappeared. His face had fallen into deadpan, eyes resolutely on the road. The bottle was gone. His galaxy-sized eyes drifted right and snapped back when they saw me looking, his mouth pursed seriously. He glanced back at me twice, suddenly suspicious of me.

  I ran for a couple of minutes, his footsteps always just behind me and to the left. I heard the scuffling noise of fabric.

  “Ahem.”

  I looked back. A black T-shirt was now stretched over his tunic with writing on the front:

  J.E.S.U.S.

  The letters strobed and changed colour, cycling through a series of cheap, pixellated animations. They beeped and chirped like an arcade machine. He puffed out his chest, beaming proudly down at the letters as they danced and span. Then he looked up at me and winked, clucking his cheek.

  Again, I turned away.

  I heard a crunch. Looked back. A large kebab was flapping about in his hand. Meat fell out from the sides and the pitta had a huge, cartoon-sized bite mark in its middle. He was chewing slowly, looking delightedly down at the meat and letting chilli sauce dribble down his chin. He looked up, stopped in mid-chew, his cheeks puffed out like a hamster, then offered me some.

  I looked down at the kebab floating in front of me. It would be one step too far into madness, I reasoned, to accept it.

  He shook it encouragingly.

  “Unleavened,” he said through his mouthful.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He looked disappointedly down at the sandwich, then looked it over. Eventually he curled his lip.

  “Probably right,” he said, throwing it over his shoulder. “Not very healthy. Especially considering, well, you know, we’re running and that.”

  He ran up alongside me.

  “So…” he said. He bit into a large, dark green lettuce that he was suddenly holding in both hands and chomped down a mouthful. “I expect you’ve heard about people experiencing hallucinations when running long distances.”

  “And I expect you’re going to tell me you’re not, that you’re, you know…” I said, nodding at his still flashing T-shirt. He threw back his head and laughed, a big, open-mouthed laugh, so honest a sound that the air around him seemed to fill with colour.

  “I’m not going to tell you anything, sunshine,” he said, still laughing. He turned his eyes towards me. Blue, luminous tendrils seemed to be streaming from them, reaching out towards me and pulling me in. “I’d say you’ve let yourself be told too much already.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “It means that maybe you should take things on face value for a change, stop trying to unravel them.” He watched me for a while, light pouring from his face.

  “You’re white,” I said. “And you sound like you’re Welsh.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said with a shrug.

  “Jesus was supposed to be from the Middle East,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Ever wonder why there are no white prophets?” He shrugged again. “Maybe one day. Anyway, put it this way, you watch telly, right? You know it’s not really little people stuck inside a box trying to entertain you. You know it’s just electrics and that inside, you know you’re just looking at lots of different pictures one after the other played really quickly, and you know those pictures are just made out of dots, right? But you’re still watching telly aren’t you? You’re still watching Eastenders or 24 or whatever.” He turned his eyes forward again. “Not so much nowadays, granted, but you get the idea. OK, put it another way: everything that happens, happens. In some form or other. Know what I mean?”

  I pulled my eyes back to the brown sludge stretching out in front of us.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Do you know why people tell stories, Ed?” he said. He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t. He sniffed and went on. “Because the truth doesn’t really have any words of its own. They’re not enough, see? Stories work...good stories...because they make you feel something like how the truth would make you feel if you could hear it.”

  I closed my eyes, shivered a little at the thought of what was happening to me. The past seemed like a grey corridor fading behind my back, dissolving into blank space and difficult questions, leaving nothing and nobody in it.

  “It’s all about resonance,” he said. I sensed his giant gaze washing across my shoulders, waiting for a response, but I kept my eyes shut, running blindly in the mud.

  “I’ve got a story if you want one?” he said. I didn’t answer.

  “OK,” he said chirpily. “So I knew a woman in India, lived on the mudflats next to the Ganges. Her house only had three walls and even they weren’t really what you’d call proper walls, not like you get nowadays. Anyway, so the front of the house opened out onto a deck and the deck ran down into the grass and the grass ran into the reeds and the reeds ran into the water. Over time, the water had risen over some of the reeds and the reeds had grown across some of the grass and some of the grass had grown over some of the deck and into the house. There was water from the river in her house and everything else in between. Crabs, flies, flowers, toads, spiders, I even saw a fish. Likewise, some of her house was in the river.”

  His gaze again, awaiting a word from my mouth that never came.

  “See?” he said. “There’s only an outside and an inside if you close the doors.”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say.”

  There was no answer. I turned and he was gone.

  I carried on across the plain. Piles of earth began to appear, small at first, then large. When it got dark I found one and burrowed beneath it to sleep. I woke up retching, drank from a puddle and pushed on, alternating between a stumble and a delirious stagger. Halfway through the morning, I felt the familiar presence behind my left shoulder.

  “So where are we going?” he said. It took a while for me to find the will to answer.

  “You know where I’m going,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t mean you, personally, now, with the running and everything. I mean you, everyone. We, I suppose. The human race. Where are you going?”

  “I thought you were supposed to tell us that?”

  “I already told you, I’m not here to tell you anything you don’t already know. In fact, I don’t have anything to tell you that you don’t already know. I’m quite simple really, when it
comes down to it.”

  “Peace and love, I suppose,” I coughed. Spat. Missed the ground and hit my arm. I wiped a thick string of phlegm from my face. My throat hurt. Everything hurt.

  “Sure, why not? What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?” He sang the words and laughed another honest, wholesome laugh.

  “Seriously though, where?” he said. “It’s a serious question.”

  I laughed, a sad, maniacal laugh that sounded terrible next to his. It embarrassed me and I chomped my jaws shut.

  “Where are we going?” I said. “Look around you!”

  He did what I asked, looking up and back and down and ahead.

  “What?” he said.

  “It’s not where we’re going, it’s where we’ve gone!” I said. “This is it, the end. We’re done.”

  He frowned and pulled back his head into his neck.

  “The end?” he said. He shook his head. “It’s never the end, Ed.”

  He looked down at his watch, suddenly distracted, as if he had just remembered something.

  “Now listen,” he said. “It gets a bit hardcore up ahead, so this is where I get off. Just remember, Ed, don’t panic.”

  He stretched out his arm and laid a warm hand, full of goodness, onto my shoulder. I felt tears in my sick eyes at his touch. It disarmed me; not because I thought he was real, but because I knew the opposite. I was creating this. I was creating this thing of hope. It was already inside of me, it didn’t come from anywhere else.

  “Everything’s going to be OK,” he said. Then he let his hand fall and he broke off into the mist and disappeared.

  “…Probably,” I heard him cough in the distance.

  And then it was me, just me, running, stumbling, coughing and spluttering in the mud and the mist of a nameless pit. I was in the dark. Alone, alone, alone. Running alone, as I was sure I always had been. How hard did this have to be? How hard to simply exist, to move, to twitch muscles, to think, hope, accept, move, love and be loved.