The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  I replenished our glasses. He stroked the side of his with his thumb.

  “I used to enjoy it,” he said. “Not just the diving itself but the feeling of being somewhere….somewhere that I shouldn’t really...be. You know? Somewhere that should be somewhere else.”

  He glanced up at me.

  “You get a strange sense of perspective when you see an alarm clock under water,” he said.

  I nodded slowly and he looked back at his glass. He shrugged.

  “Like I say, most of it wasn’t very interesting, but occasionally you’d get something special.”

  He drained his glass in one gulp and slid it towards me.

  “Once I was asked to dive a plane wreck in the Philippines. A Second World War Japanese fighter that some magazine had been given permission to photograph. It had taken a nose dive.” He traced the arc of a crashing plane with his hand, whistling. “Sploosh...landed about thirty metres down, nose buried in a sand trench. One of the wings was torn off and there was a hole in the fuselage. I was just there as a guide and to provide safety instruction, nothing else.”

  He looked up.

  “You’re really not supposed to do anything else with these kind of wrecks,” he said.

  “Sea graves?” I said.

  He nodded. “Quite right. Outside only. But sometimes...well, he was taking too long and there was nobody else with us. I got bored.”

  Richard took the bottle and filled our glasses again. I was no longer cold. The sweet rum had even helped with my thirst.

  “So you went inside?” I said.

  “Yes. I swam in, took a look around.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Not much in the back. Some bottles, boxes and ammunition; nothing interesting, so I went up front. To the cockpit.”

  He paused and took a sip.

  “I swam up beside him, my head right next to his. He was sitting back in his seat, still in his uniform, still buckled in. His head was forward, chin on his chest. His hands were on his knees, both palms up. Like he was meditating.”

  Richard turned to the window and looked out into the darkness, still thumbing his glass. The light made sharp shadows of his hawk-like features and dark pools in his eyes.

  “I felt strange,” he said, and paused, frowning. “Vertiginous.” He seemed to roll the word around in his mouth as if tasting it for the first time. “I think that’s the word. Like a climber suddenly finding himself on ledge, staring down into a deep canyon. I was looking at sixty years of stillness, a violent scene from before my birth that had persisted out of sight throughout my entire life and would no doubt continue to do so after my death.”

  “Possibly not any more,” I said. He ignored this.

  “He had a locket around his neck that I didn’t want to open, but in his shirt pocket was a pair of sunglasses. I took them. I don’t know why, I wish I hadn’t, I knew I’d never wear them. A souvenir of the moment I suppose, like those photographs everyone takes but never looks at afterwards.”

  He smiled, sat forward and leaned on the table, staring into his glass.

  “You see,” he said, “I used to like diving because it was a way to escape the small stuff for a little while - girls, money, life...none of that existed under water. But when I met my friend there in that plane...that was something else, something permanent. Suddenly nothing mattered at all. I saw my future, everyone’s future...”

  He pointed at the back wall, then out into the night.

  “Entropy,” he said. “Entropy and decay. Everything turns to dust. Everything is constantly trying to return to the dust from which it came.”

  He frowned and picked up his glass. His face twisted into an attempt at a smile.

  “So why all the struggle?” he said, slowly draining his drink.

  He sat back and ran a hand through his hair. Very low light was beginning to show through the window pane.

  “Morning soon,” he said. “Expect we should sleep.”

  He licked his fingers and pressed them around the candle flame. Then he took his blanket over to a bench and lay down, immediately still. I sat watching the blue trails of smoke weave up into the dusty light. I realised that my left hand was numb from clutching the tin can of Alice’s stringyphone beneath my jacket. I pulled it closer, thinking about the creaking of timber and the slow crumble of concrete in deep saltwater, until I too was asleep.

  I woke again. This time it was daylight. Henderson was sitting on his bench, leaning over his boots with a piece of wood. He looked over at me and I flicked my head up in greeting. He stared back at me without response, then turned back to his boots, picking dirt from their soles with his stick. Grimes was asleep, curled up into a tight ball with her face burrowed into the hood of her jacket. Richard was still stretched out on his bench facing the wall.

  I heard the door of the Land Rover bang shut.

  “Where’s Bryce?” I said.

  Henderson looked up and nodded at the door.

  I got up and walked to the door, met Yuill coming back in with a stove, water and food.

  “Bryce?” I said.

  Yuill nodded. “You’ll soon find him,” he said.

  I stuffed my hands into my pockets and walked outside. It had stopped snowing, but I could see that it had been heavy through the night. Everything was covered, many of the dead bodies too. The telegraph lady had picked up a drift around her frame and her nightgown was now frozen into a stiff triangle.

  “Morning!” came a voice from high above.

  I looked up at the gigantic mound behind the street. Bryce was crouching on the summit. He looked like a fat wizard, wisps of brown mist snaking around him. He grinned down at me and waved.

  “Want to see something?” he called down. His words found a dull echo in the silence of the snow-covered street. I looked up and down the hill, not fancying my chances on the loose earth.

  “Walk further along,” he shouted. “There’s a wood about half a mile out of the village where it’s not so steep.”

  I nodded and looked in the direction he was pointing.

  “See you soon!” he called. His gruff cackle disappeared behind me as I set off up the road.

  As I walked I saw nothing but mist and snow and a single overturned car that a hedgerow was slowly consuming. As Bryce had said, the high wall of earth on my left began to taper down as I made my way down the road. After ten minutes I found the wood and turned off the road, picking my way up the hill, back towards the village. It got much steeper towards the top and I was scrabbling when I met Bryce, now sitting on a rock and smoking a roll-up. I looked down on the village below and saw Grimes and Richard, who were now awake and outside holding steaming cups. We must have been at least a hundred metres above them.

  Beyond them, behind the pulverised houses on the other side of the road, I saw that the gentle incline that had once risen up to the Pentlands was now pockmarked with craters. Huge, deep ditches ran down from the top like scars. What looked like boulders were embedded in the earth as far as I could see, as if the whole hillside was a nest of alien eggs.

  “How’s your shoulder?” I said to Bryce.

  Bryce looked up at me in disdain.

  “Lovely,” he said, eyes like slits. “Thanks for asking. I’m touched.”

  I made a mental note to never ask him things like that again. He jabbed a thumb to his left, away from the road.

  “Now check this shit out.”

  I turned to look and nearly toppled down the slope. It was the clearest day I had seen for a long time. The sun was not exactly visible - no bright disc cutting through the thick cloud - but the light that made it through gave us miles of illumination. Before us was a deep crater that stretched out towards the horizon. This landscape had once been full of forests, farms and small villages. Now it was a canyon, miles wide and hundreds of metres deep. We were sitting on its outer ridge.

  I steadied myself.

  “Pretty fucking cool, eh?” said Bryce.

 
“I guess…” I stammered. “I guess that’s one word for it. Jesus. Was that an...an…”

  “An asteroid?” said Bryce. He cast one hand up theatrically at the sky. “You mean one of those streaks of light that started falling from the heavens? The ones that knocked the shit out of us for a couple of days?”

  Bryce flicked his cigarette over the ridge and spat after it.

  “Aye,” he said. “Probably.”

  I slumped to the ground and sat with my arms around my knees, looking out at the bizarre scenery. I had only seen the destruction of Edinburgh and I was strangely used to it. The idea of a city being levelled, even the one I lived in, was somehow easier to accept than a landscape I barely knew.

  Bryce rolled two cigarettes, lit them and passed me one. We smoked in silence, transfixed.

  When I had finished, I stood up. I was about to suggest that we head back down to the village when a deep groan sounded in the distance, rising up and stopping suddenly. We both looked across the canyon. The groan sounded again, higher now, like mournful whale song. It stopped, then sharp cracks and twangs reverberated around the crater walls.

  “Fuck me,” said Bryce. “Look at that.”

  He pointed at the wall opposite ours. The southern end of the ridge was crumbling and falling into the pit. A huge wedge of earth came away and slid down in slow motion. We felt the ground rumbling beneath us, dirt dancing around our boots. We exchanged a glance. Bryce sprang to his feet and we both jumped down the steepest part of the slope. I fell through thin air for longer than I was comfortable with, then hit the earth on my back. The impact knocked the wind from my lungs and I gasped for breath as I started sliding down the hill. My coat had ridden up and was half-covering my face. I couldn’t see but I heard Bryce rocketing past me, whooping like a child.

  I was picking up speed. I yanked down my hood with one hand and dug into the earth with the other, managing to brake just enough to be able to sit up. I saw Bryce nearing the buildings below, digging in his heels and tumbling into a heap by the hotel. Soon I was next to him, spluttering into the snow while he lay on his back laughing into the sky.

  “Again Daddy, again!” he said, getting to his feet and patting his bad shoulder. It now seemed nothing more than a nuisance to him. He grabbed me around the chest and hauled me to my feet as the others came running to meet us.

  “What was that noise?” said Yuill.

  "That?” said Bryce, brushing himself down. “That would be a landslide.”

  He squashed a finger over one nostril and blew a round out into the dirt, then did the same with the other.

  “Now,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Did I hear somebody put the kettle on?”

  WATCHES

  Harvey lit the stove and served us strong black tea in the bar. It made me think of Cornwall and the dismal camping trip I had forced Beth on. I thought of Beth's patience, Arthur's howls, the rain, packing the tent in the dark, Beth laughing as I slid in the mud. My own childish insistence that we went in the first place, to prove a point, stamp my foot, make some idiotic rebellion against the world I thought was dragging me down into its mire. In my mind, camping was supposed to remove us from modern life, from all the things I thought we didn't need, all the complications I thought were unnecessary. I had no idea what that actually meant until then, in that bar, when modern life had - along with my family - been removed from me instead. Perhaps, after all, there was a reason why we had filled our world with distraction, why we surrounded ourselves with plastic and light and excess. Perhaps our collective consciousness remembered too well what it was like in darkness, surrounded by wet, rotten wood, mud, and nothing good to eat.

  We found a basket of sugar on one of the tables. I emptied two tubes into my cup and we sat around, drinking our tea in silence. Yuill and Henderson were outside in the snow. I heard them talking quietly. Then Henderson's voice became louder. He spat a single word I didn't quite hear, punctuated with a thud like a fist hitting metal.

  I looked at Richard, then at Bryce. He resisted the urge to make a jibe. Then Yuill walked in and filled his cup from the stove. His hand shook as he poured. He turned to face us, cup against his lips, fist on his hip.

  "We'll stay here," he said. "Keep watch for the chopper."

  Richard frowned. He pointed a thumb behind him like a question mark.

  “What about that thing?” he said. "It’s clearly unstable. It could fall on top of us at any moment. We'll be crushed."

  Yuill stared at nothing. His cup hovered before his lips.

  "We'll take precautions,” he said.

  “Precautions?” said Richard. “What precautions can you take against a mountain that’s going to fall apart at any moment?”

  Henderson walked in. He let the door close and glared around the room. Yuill glanced at him.

  “It's worth the risk,” said Yuill. “The ridge is a good vantage point. It’s high up. We can keep a fire going up there, make sure they see us."

  “What about the hills to the west?” I said.

  “You’ve seen the damage, I assume?” said Yuill. He fixed his eyes on the corner of the room, away from Henderson, cup still hovering before his mouth.

  “They’re impassable,” he said. “Far more hazardous. Besides, the other choppers flew directly south from Castlelaw. We can only assume that this one will follow the same route, which means it will pass directly over the crater.”

  I spoke.

  “What if the chopper isn’t empty?”

  Yuill turned to me.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Well, if the Rabbits made it to Castlelaw, they’d most likely want to stay, right? There’s still food there, water, guns, everything they need. What if the helicopter lands and finds them instead of us?”

  Yuill considered this for a moment and then shook his head.

  “I can’t imagine they’d want to leave their little warren,” he said. “They have everything they want in the city. And now they have a nice place in the hills as well.”

  “But what if they do?” said Grimes.

  “If they do, then we’ll have company,” said Yuill, raising his voice in frustration. “But I don’t imagine they’d want to start a fight in a helicopter, do you?”

  He drank his tea in one gulp and placed the cup carefully by the stove.

  “We’ll keep our shelter here. We’ll make a fire on the ridge. We’ll take…”

  He looked at his watch.

  “...three hour watches. Keep the fire burning. There’s a flare gun in the Land Rover.”

  Richard got to his feet. He was the tallest of us all, standing a foot above Yuill.

  “A fire on the ridge?” he said. “Watches? Are you barking mad?”

  Yuill flinched and withdrew, looking suddenly like a foot soldier being berated by a senior officer. Something to do with Richard’s background or schooling had left him with a natural sense of authority and entitlement. Far more than Yuill at least.

  But Richard had no gun. Henderson stepped out of the shadows and took his place behind Yuill. Nobody spoke for a moment.

  There was a loud slurping noise from the corner as Bryce drained his tea. He tossed the cup over his shoulder and it landed with a clatter against the crumbling wall.

  “Right,” he said, lying back on his bench. “Wake me up when you boys have finished…”

  “Hey!”

  Henderson was upon him like a whippet, looming over the bench.

  “Get up!” he shouted.

  Bryce puffed out a laugh of surprise. He didn’t shift.

  “Well...hello to you too,” he said.

  Henderson bent slowly down so his face was in Bryce’s.

  “Get up, you lazy cunt,” said Henderson. “Get up and find some wood. We have a fire to make.”

  I thought for sure that Bryce would swing for Henderson, but he seemed to think better of it. He lay there for a moment, then slowly eased himself up from the bench.

  “Alrigh
t, sweetheart,” he said. “Fire it is.”

  Bryce brushed past Henderson and filled a fresh cup with tea from the stove. He drank it slowly with his back to him, winked at Grimes.

  “But I hope you’re not expecting a Christmas card from me this year.”

  He turned round to face Henderson, but he had already left the room.

  We found a tarpaulin in a garage and hauled it up to the ridge. Harvey and Grimes set up an awning and we put two chairs from the hotel beneath it. It opened out to the north so that whoever was on watch could see the helicopter when it came.

  We tore down the bar and broke down the wood. Most of the other houses were impenetrable, but we found some other furniture that had not become wet and rotten. We broke this down as well and spent the rest of the morning carrying it up to the ridge.

  Richard and Bryce took the first watch. I dropped off the last of the wood with them and made my way down the slope, thinking about Beth and the kids. It had been twenty-four hours since I had last seen them and I was starting to panic about where they were and how long we might have to reach them. I began to feel something pulling inside of me, joined to them; like an invisible thread between us, something being stretched too thinly and that might snap at any moment. I looked down at the road and at the ruined southern plains stretching out into the mist and caught my legs and arms twitching. I felt a sudden urge to sprint, to let myself fall down the hill and keep running, to haul myself down along the thread, gathering it up into my heart and pull them towards me. I stood still and let the feeling pass like an express train roaring through an empty station. I looked down at my shaking fists and waited for the sound of surging blood to leave my ears.

  There were voices from the road: Yuill and Henderson. They were arguing outside by the Land Rover. The tops of their heads were visible beneath the guttering of the hotel. They were facing each other, close. I could hear words this time, but only the ones that were shouted. I stayed crouching as I listened.