The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  “...won’t come…”

  “...will...patient…”

  “...kidding ourselves…”

  “...calm down…”

  “...old man…us down…”

  “...me remind you…”

  “...never supposed…”

  “...ranking officer!”

  There was a short silence after this. Then I saw Henderson’s dark cropped head lunge towards Yuill’s and they were down on the floor. I stood up to get a better look, but they were out of sight. I heard scuffles and grunts, then the door opened and I heard Grimes yell. In a few moments there was silence and the hotel door slammed shut.

  I picked my way down the rest of the slope. When I got to the hotel I met Henderson coming out. I stepped out of his way as he stared straight past me and stormed back up the street. Inside the bar Yuill was sat in the corner, staring at a map. His face was ruddy and damp, his hair ruffled. Harvey was asleep in a chair and Grimes was setting up the stove for dinner. She caught my eye.

  “Where’s Henderson going?” I said.

  “Trying to find more wood,” she said.

  Yuill suddenly got to his feet and strode out of the bar. The door swung shut and I heard his boots marching quickly off through the hard snow. When the sound had disappeared I turned to Grimes. She was trying to empty some water into a pan. She had lifted one of the containers up and was balancing it on one knee, both hands holding the handle with one elbow stuck up awkwardly. I thought of Alice trying to help Beth pour flour into a mixing bowl when they were baking. I went over to help her.

  “I can manage,” she snapped. “Get some of that pasta out.“

  She nodded over to a plastic box of food. I took out a bag of pasta and lit the stove, watching her strain with the water until she had filled the pan half-full. She let out a grunt and let the container fall heavily to the floor. Harvey flinched in his chair and frowned, then smacked his lips and let out a low, rumbling sigh as he fell back to sleep.

  “Think he’s OK?” I said.

  “Harvey?” said Grimes. She puffed through her nose. “Harvey’s as strong as an ox. It’s the rest of you I’m worried about.”

  She put the pan on the stove and busied herself with plates.

  “And those two?” I motioned to outside.

  She shot me a look that told me I was on dangerous territory. Perhaps she was considering how much she should tell me, how much she still valued that necessary border between soldier and civilian.

  She wrinkled her nose and placed the lid on the pan.

  "Men being men," she said.

  "I thought they were supposed to be being soldiers."

  "Same difference."

  The water boiled and we cooked the pasta. When Henderson and Yuill came back - silently, Henderson with a small amount of timber and Yuill empty-handed - we woke Harvey and ate. Bryce and Richard swapped shifts with Harvey and Grimes. Mine was next with Henderson, so I settled in my chair. I felt that sleep would be impossible but the exhaustion of a day pulling wood up a dirt mound overtook me. It felt like seconds later that Henderson was shaking me roughly by the shoulders.

  "We're up," he said, already making his way out of the door.

  I shook my blanket off and saw Harvey stumbling across the dark room in Grimes' torchlight.

  "Thanks, love," he whispered to her. "There's really no need to..."

  "Shh."

  She helped him down into his chair and found her own bench, pulled over a blanket over and curled into a ball. Harvey sighed and I saw the shadow of his great chest begin to move slowly up and down.

  Henderson was already some distance down the road when I got outside. It was pitch black but I could hear the clinical rhythm of his boots crushing ice ahead of me. I fought back the instinct to scurry after him. I was already less than excited about spending three hours alone with the man; the last thing I wanted was for him to think I needed his company in the dark. He had disappeared by the time I reached the turn-off at the woods. I climbed carefully and as I drew near to the summit, I saw him sitting on one of the chairs, staring into the fire. He heard me approach and stood up, away from the awning.

  I took a seat and watched Henderson stand like a sentry, looking north. His wide back was straight and arched and the strap of his rifle was tight around the steep rise of his shoulders. His legs were apart and his arms hung down by his sides, pushed away from his body by muscled ribs. I guessed that there was no other way he could stand. Some of the other soldiers had let their hair grow long during the six months since the strike. He had kept his cropped, almost to the skin. His dark scalp and thick, corrugated neck glistened in the orange light.

  “You don’t think it’s coming,” I said. I threw a log on the flames, poked it into place. Swirls of sparks spiralled up into the smoke.

  “What makes you say that,” he said. The words were dried of question, nothing more than a remark.

  I held back my answer. Neither of us was ready to get his little fray with Yuill out in the open.

  “You think we should be back at the barracks,” I said instead.

  His head twitched in a half turn and he puffed out through his nose.

  “I think we should be moving,” he said. He came back to the awning, sat down.

  “Me too,” I said.

  He sniggered and did something to his rifle, then rested over his knees with the barrel pointed at me. He took a cloth from his pocket and began rubbing it up and down the length of the gun in long, slow sweeps.

  “I joined the army to fight, not to chaperone,” he said.

  I watched the barrel as Henderson cradled and cleaned it. Its single dark eye stared blankly back.

  “Nobody asked for this to happen,” I said.

  He threw me a dark grin. His sweeps became shorter and faster, until he was furiously rubbing a single square inch of metal near the stock. I watched the gun jump and twitch on his legs like a mongrel having its belly scratched.

  He looked up at me. His strokes slowed and lengthened again.

  “It’s alright,” he said, one gold tooth glinting in the light. “It’s not loaded.”

  We spent the rest of the shift in silence. I drifted off a few times. Each time I jerked awake from a half-dream in which I was tied to rocks and sinking beneath deep water. Beth, Alice and Arthur were kicking safely on the surface above. Both times I opened my eyes to see Henderson glaring back at me in disgust. The third time he was standing up.

  “Go back,” he said. “Send Yuill up.”

  Henderson was taking double shifts to account for our odd number. At first we had assumed that Harvey would sit them out, but he had insisted.

  “There’s really no need to fuss…”

  It was light when I walked back to the hotel. Yuill was already awake and met me at the door with a nod. Everyone else was asleep. I tried, but couldn’t. My legs were twitching again.

  We were into our third day and the helicopter was officially late. We spent the time alternating shifts, keeping warm, eating and sleeping, although I could barely close my eyes without falling into the same dream: little legs cycling through the blue water above me, three shapes growing smaller and smaller as I sank deep into darkness. If I did sleep it was for only minutes at a time. I woke up with a gargled cry, my face creased into a frown, my limbs tense.

  By mid-afternoon Henderson was back on watch with Harvey. The snow had stopped and Bryce, Richard and I had decided to do something about the bodies outside, if only so that we were spared the view on our journeys to and from the ridge.

  We started with the ones slumped against walls and sprawled in the street. These were the easy ones. We were grateful for the freezing temperature and kept their faces down where possible. Then we took the bodies lying out of windows or doors. These were more difficult as they required manipulation. All of them had died dressed in night clothes suitable for a heatwave, some not dressed in much at all. Our thick army surplus gloves protected us from feeling much definitio
n, and the snow and ice hid much of what would have been visible, but we couldn’t escape from the sound. We spoke loudly about anything until we had dragged them all to the ditch behind the road and rolled them in.

  There was a small body which we had all avoided. It lay curled around the base of a post box and was mostly skeleton. Bryce eventually took it, wordlessly, wrapping it in a tattered sheet he found in the back of a car. He carried it across and bent down over the ditch, laying it carefully on top of the others. Richard and I watched from a distance, wondering at this unusual act of care as much as at the horror of the whole afternoon. When he had finished, we brushed earth and snow over them all with our boots.

  Then we looked up at the telegraph woman.

  She was no longer dangling. The temperature had frozen her into a solid flag of bone and fabric. Her free leg stuck out in a grisly right-angled semaphore. Both arms reached for the ground, her inverted nightgown covering everything but the bones of her hands. One of them was gnarled into a fist. The other was half closed apart from a single finger, which seemed to be pointing.

  “How do you think she got up there?” I said.

  Richard scanned the houses behind.

  “From that one probably,” he said, pointing up at a large window that had been burst apart. Behind the window and in front of the earth, which packed the room like every other along the street, was an upended metal bed frame.

  “Flew through the window, caught her foot, hit the brick on the way,” he said. “Probably unconscious or dead by the time she hit the wire.”

  He stepped up to the telegraph pole and looked it up and down. He placed a hand against the wood and tried it. It rocked a little but it was still firm. He stood back and assessed the house next door.

  “We could try climbing that wall,” he said. “Loop a rope around the pole, shimmy across and…”

  A large rock sailed across the top of the wire and landed in a gutter.

  “Oof ya…” said Bryce. I turned in time to see him launching a second. This one hit the wire near the woman’s foot and span to the ground. “Go on ya bastard...” he said.

  Richard raised his eyebrows. “Or that,” he said.

  We went to work in the rubble. Richard went for smaller, sharper bricks which he threw with speed and spin - I imagined he was no stranger to fast-bowling. Bryce stuck with the larger bricks that he hurled at the wire like a shot-putter. My approach evolved into a basketball-style upwards push, my plan being for the bricks to drop down upon the wire, dislodging the woman’s foot from above. Most of them fell short; Bryce’s crashed into the roofs and Richard’s whistled by the wire like bullets. We cheered whenever there was a direct hit. We were like boys doing something they shouldn’t in a place they shouldn’t be.

  Eventually Bryce gave up with his method and copied mine. He chose bigger and bigger chunks of masonry, at last finding a ten-brick slab in the wreckage and dragging it to the road.

  “Watch out, boys,” he said. Richard’s last stone flew wildly away and we both stood back. Bryce hauled the brickwork onto his chest and braced himself. He stood for a second like a weight-lifter preparing for a jerk, but instead he took two steps back, then three forward, ending in an almighty thrust that sent the bricks spinning in a slow, steep arc. They landed directly onto the wire, which bent down and snapped, releasing the woman to the ground in a heap.

  We instinctively raised our hands in a cheer, but stopped as the woman’s body rolled over. Her head was exposed now. The bottom part of her face was gone, now just tooth and jawbone, but the top was still covered in some grey flesh. Long strands of silver hair had come loose from a tight bun at the back of her head and trailed down across her furrowed brow. Her eyelids were open. What was left of one eye looked sadly up at us from the ground. A silver cross lay in the snow in front of her, hanging from a chain around her neck.

  The wire shook back to position above us, sending soft flakes of snow down upon the woman’s broken body below. We stood silently for a minute, unable to take our eyes from her face. Eventually Richard stepped forward. I was about to follow when we heard a shout from above. It was Harvey’s voice. Then came Henderson’s, followed by a rumble and creak. We looked up and saw scree falling down the mound. Harvey and Henderson were on their feet. It looked as if Harvey was stamping out the fire, then Henderson had his hands on his shoulders, then another louder rumble sounded from closer to the road. Yuill and Grimes were out on the street now, running. Then halfway up the mound we saw the earth disappear into a huge pit.

  Everything began to move quickly. Bryce, Richard and I ran to the other side of the road as the ridge above began to fall. Harvey and Henderson were coming down with it in a tumble of fire, smoke and tarpaulin.

  Henderson managed to keep upright and slid down the landslide on his back, kicking with his legs and digging in his arms. Harvey, however, sprawled headfirst and was swallowed by a wave of earth from behind him. His limbs and head surfaced once or twice but by the time he reached the rooftops he was almost completely engulfed. One of his feet protruded vertically, motionless. We climbed up the mound towards it as the dirt settled and Henderson slid safely to a stop.

  “Pull him out!” I said. “Dig and pull him out!”

  Bryce and I yanked Harvey’s foot as Henderson and Richard ploughed at the loose earth with their hands. A second foot appeared which Yuill and Grimes took hold of. I braced myself against a chimney and we heaved back as Richard and Henderson burrowed deeper. I grabbed a limp and lifeless arm. Grimes found another. With one last heave we pulled on all four limbs and Harvey slid out of the dirt like a newborn calf.

  We all fell backwards and slid down the slope to the road. Harvey was lying still on his belly. I spun him over and swept the clods of earth from his face, cleared them from his eyes, mouth and nostrils.

  “Harvey!” I shouted, shaking him. “Harvey, are you OK?”

  A deep groan started in Harvey’s throat but caught on something. He convulsed into a cough and sprang upright, spitting dirt onto the tarmac.

  “Christ!” he shouted, hacking up more dirt and pulling it from his mouth with his fingers. “Fuck me!”

  I staggered back, relieved as Richard and Grimes helped Harvey to his feet. They supported him as he bent over with his hands on his knees, retching and cursing.

  Henderson slid down from the rooftops and stayed by the edge of the road, away from us. He sucked his teeth. I saw him exchange a look with Yuill.

  Harvey eventually straightened up and Grimes fed him water from her flask. He swallowed it painfully and blinked, looking around himself. His eyes found Henderson and suddenly shot through with anger.

  “You!” he rasped, staggering towards him. “You son of a bitch! You pushed me!”

  Henderson sneered down at Harvey and laughed.

  “Serious?” he said. He sucked his teeth and tapped his temple. “You’re off your head. I helped you. If it weren’t for me you’d be down in that crater right now.”

  “I know a push when I feel one son,” growled Harvey. “I know a push!”

  Harvey edged closer to Henderson, shoulders down and fists clenched, like a Jack Russell ready to pounce on a Rottweiler. Henderson stood his ground, twisted his face and shook his head.

  “Crazy old man,” he said. “Fucking crazy.”

  Bryce and Richard leapt forwards and held Harvey back.

  “Easy there buddy,” said Bryce. “Let’s get you inside.”

  They led him away to the hotel, patting his back, keeping him close.

  “I know a flaming push!” he shouted back.

  I looked at Henderson. He winked back and spat into the ground, then brushed past Yuill and walked towards the Land Rover.

  Back in the hotel, Richard helped Grimes clean up Harvey. He seemed to have calmed down.

  “I’m alright,” he said. “There’s really no need to fuss…”

  Bryce watched them from the corner, smoking. He was quiet. He wore an expression I couldn�
�t place and wouldn’t until a little later.

  Yuill paced the floor. It was getting dark.

  “It’s been three days now,” I said. “Even if the chopper’s still coming, which I don’t think it is, we’re not safe sitting under that thing. We have to move and find somewhere else to wait - if we should even be waiting any more. I mean, every hour we spend sitting here is another hour closer to the evacuation.”

  Yuill considered this for a moment, then nodded.

  “It’s too dark to leave now,” he said at last. “We’ll stay one more night and leave in the morning. Henderson and I will take the night shift, everyone else get some rest.”

  “Just keep that bastard away from me,” said Harvey. “Where is he anyway?”

  “Setting up another fire on the road,” said Yuill.

  Harvey grunted. “So long as he’s outside,” he said. “I don’t trust him.”

  Grimes cooked some packets of rice and dried vegetables, which we ate by candlelight. Yuill took two bowls outside. When I had finished mine I went out to relieve myself at the side of the hotel. I saw Yuill and Henderson eating and talking in the light of a large fire halfway down the street. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but there was no longer any hint of argument in their voices.

  I returned to the hotel and settled down in my chair beneath my blanket. Once again I was sure that sleep would be impossible, but I closed my eyes and surrendered myself to the darkness. Ghoulish faces danced in front of my eyes. I wandered empty streets. Dread lay around every corner, jerking me awake with some nameless panic and filling my head with strange, tangled thoughts that made no sense. My chest felt heavy. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to move.

  But I must have slept because I woke up. I woke up to the sound of wood scraping on the floor. And shouts, and the sound of an engine roaring.

  GONE