The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  We shook our heads. He looked between us, searching for recognition. He mimed posting a letter.

  “A postman, you know? Delivering letters and parcels?”

  Bryce frowned. “Aye, we’ve...we’ve heard of them, Harvey; go on.”

  “This was when I was a young man, back in Australia, back in the sixties. I come from New South Wales originally, lived out in the country, north side of Sydney. It wasn’t like in the cities, you know with a van. The country was spread out, miles between houses sometimes.”

  He stood up and walked to the side of the road. When he returned he was carrying a short stick. He sat down and held it to the light, smoothing it over in his hands. Then he used it to poke the fire, pushing back the blackening sheets of printer paper that were slipping from the pack.

  “I had two dogs that came with me. We were up at 5am, out the door into the sunshine, spent the day racing around the Bush and back home by the afternoon. Great life, always on the move. Me and the other fellas had dirt bikes to get around and my dogs would jump on the back. A lot of the time, though, if I knew I was going up a road I was going to come back down again, I’d just leave the bike and run with the dogs at my side. I started doing it more and more, probably clocked up around twenty miles a day most days. Got really fit. Great life.”

  He smiled, then his face darkened and he scratched the road at his feet with the stick.

  “Anyway, if you live out in the Bush then you’re pretty much a member of the Bush fire brigade as well. Some years are better than others. One summer it was sweltering hot, a real bad one. Then the sheep on a farm close to us got sick and started dying. The farmers didn’t know what to do with all the corpses; couldn’t burn them, see, in case they started a fire. Then, there were fires anyway, bad ones that spread and took out some houses. We spent two or three weeks trying to put them out, ambulances all over the place taking injured people back to Sydney. I didn’t sleep much. My dogs came everywhere with me, of course; I couldn’t keep them at home. Then everyone started to get sick, other animals too. Agnes and Annie, well, they got sick too. Real sick. I couldn’t do anything for them.”

  Bryce nodded slowly, the corners off his mouth turned down.

  “Losing dogs,” he said. “Hardest fucking thing. My grandad died when I was twelve. I remember Mum telling me when I got in from school and she might as well have been telling me what was for dinner. I didn’t give a shit, fucking alcoholic old prick. Our dog died a year later and I cried for a week. It’s hard.” He punched his chest. “Harder than losing a person.”

  “Well,” said Harvey. Bryce seemed to have knocked him off course. “I don’t really know about that. All I can say was that after that I didn’t cope too good. The fires stopped eventually but a lot of people had lost their homes.” He cleared his throat. “And more than that in some cases. Everyone was exhausted and nobody was particularly happy but, like I say, I’m ashamed to say I was doing worse than most, so I suppose what I did next had something to do with that.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “Well, one day, after everything had died down, I got up at 5am as usual and went outside to start work. I rode my dirt bike a few miles down the track, turned left at the creek and stopped at the top of the hill. The sun was coming up and I could see the light spreading west over the plains. The hill had cast a shadow on the plain beneath me. There was still smoke coming off the burned scrub and I could see the places where houses used to be, little black squares full of rubble, nobody there any more. It was all in this dark shadow. It felt like the end of the world.”

  He looked up suddenly and laughed.

  “Yeah…” he gestured at the darkness. “Not much compared with this I guess, but that’s what it felt like at the time. Anyway, between all the burnt-out houses and black scrubland, there was this long, straight road running south-east out of the shadow. No bends or hills, just this sharp line running through all the shit and leading out towards the horizon. As the sun rose, I could see the line extending further and further towards the horizon, as if it was drawing it for me on a map. Such a simple picture.”

  He stamped one foot on the ground.

  “Everything here was dark and dead.”

  Then he pointed his stick out across the fire.

  “Everything out there was bright and living.”

  He looked at us nervously, as though seeking acknowledgement for something he’d only just tried the very first time.

  “There was no path down to the road,” he continued. “I dropped the bike and picked my way down the slope to it, fell a few times, skidded down most of it on my arse and fell in a heap of dust at the bottom. Then I stood up and looked down the road. And then...” He shifted a little on his seat and shrugged. “Then I just started running.”

  He looked into the fire for a long time, then up at us as if he had just remembered we were there.

  “I know,” he said. “Stupid really.” He tapped his stick on the ground and laughed through his nose, then stared into the flames once again and was quiet.

  Bryce raised his hands and looked between us.

  “That it?” he said. “That’s the story? You went for a run?”

  “Ah, yeah,” said Harvey. “Yeah, that’s about it, I guess. Went for a run. Pretty big one mind.”

  “How far did you run, Harvey?” I said.

  “Oh well,” said Harvey, scratching his chin. “Hard to say, really; I didn’t have a map and I wasn’t following a route. I met a few people on the way, you know, other folk on the road. I remember one pair of blokes in a truck who spent their time driving around the country, following the coast, just looping and looping around. I met them five or six times I think, coming in the opposite direction. I slept wherever I could, ate and drank whatever I could find. Eventually I reached a bay and saw an ocean I hadn’t seen before. I stopped and sat on a rock and looked out at the sea crashing against these huge rocks. I could smell the salt, feel it getting on my skin and in my air, tasted it on my lips. It felt good, I felt like I’d reached where the road was taking me, felt like I’d found my coast.”

  “Where were you?” said Bryce.

  “WA mate,” said Harvey. “Western Australia, place called Kalbarri.”

  Bryce thrust his head forward and gawped.

  “Western Australia?” he said. “That’s on the other side of the country.”

  “That’s right,” said Harvey. “Beautiful place, too. I slept rough on the beach for a few weeks before one of the locals took pity on me and let me stay for a while. I found a job cooking fish.”

  Bryce’s mouth was still agape, a cavern of flickering shadow in the firelight.

  “And you ran all that way?” said Bryce.

  Harvey scratched his head, rocking it this way and that.

  “Hard to say exactly how I got there,” he said. “A while later, some university people got wind of what I’d done and wanted to talk to me about it. They wrote about me in some journal or other. I told them what I knew, the places I’d seen, and they tried to piece together my route.”

  He began to trace lines in the dirt with his stick.

  “Near as they could place it, I ran south, meandered around Victoria for a while, found my way up into South Australia where I got lost in the lakes, circled back a few times, eventually hit the south coast and then joined Route 1, straight across the Nullabor plain before gravitating north and getting lost again before Kalbarri. They told me I should have died a few times. Truth is, I don’t really remember many of the details, and some of the people I met might not really have been there; hallucinations, you know? Dangerous thing to do, stupid like I say.”

  He paused and drew a single line through the others he had made at his feet.

  “I didn’t choose it, though,” he said, meeting my eyes and narrowing his. “That road. I didn’t decide to run that far on it. It chose me.”

  Bryce stared across the fire at Harvey. Eventually he snapped his mouth shut and shook hi
s head.

  “Fuck me,” he said, getting to his feet. “Just fuck me sideways. Ow.”

  “Take it easy there, big fella,” said Harvey, getting up to help him. Bryce waved him away.

  “I’m alright, just going for a piss.”

  Bryce hobbled around to the back of the truck. Harvey held my gaze for a while, then let it drop back to the flames.

  “So what do you remember?” I said.

  Harvey reached across and pulled another two packs of A4 from the pile and threw them onto the fire.

  “Well,” he said, “bearing in mind this was almost fifty years ago, Ed, and I don’t remember much about anything back then...I remember...I remember the feeling of becoming lighter somehow. Not physically, although I lost a lot of weight. Mentally, maybe. I felt like things became a lot simpler when I ran.”

  “What things?” I said.

  “Ah you know, things. Life.”

  He tapped his foot nervously a few times.

  “Ed, I didn’t have any reason to do what I did. It just happened, and I saw it happen to you today. When you ran off like that, you didn’t really decide to, right?”

  I nodded slowly, chewed my lip. “I suppose so.”

  “Well that’s how I felt too. When I left. I remember that. There was no decision made, and no reason. The big difference is that you have a reason. Your family.”

  He threw a hand out at the darkness.

  “Look at all this shit,” he said angrily. “There’s no way we can keep going searching for cars every day. They’re all fucked, the roads are fucked and if we keep crawling along then we’ll be fucked too. There’s not enough time. What you started today, that’s the only way through, I’m certain of it.”

  I shook my head.

  “Harvey,” I said. “We can’t run that far in that time, or I can’t at any rate. I’m just not capable.”

  He fixed me with his bright blue eyes.

  “Ed,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re capable of.

  Bryce returned and sat down.

  “So,” he said. “You ran across Australia and got a job in a chipper at the seaside.

  “It wasn’t a fish and chip shop,” said Harvey. “More of an outdoor BBQ really.”

  “Aha, sounds lovely,” said Bryce. “So what the fuck made you come to Scotland?”

  “Ahh, well, see Kalbarri’s a nice place, great beaches. Over the years it became a bit of a tourist trap. We’d get visitors from all over the world, especially in the summer. Anyway one night, about five years after I arrived, a girl came to the BBQ and caught my eye. I used to cook the fish up front, you see, so the customers could watch. She was called Mary, on holiday from Edinburgh. We became, you know, friendly…”

  Bryce grinned, “I bet you did, you dirty bastard,” he murmured.

  “...but she was only there for two weeks and then she had to go home. We wrote to each other, this was all before email and Facebook and all that crap. We had to actually write the letters and post them, you know?”

  “Yes, yes, Harvey, we’ve established that we know about letters,” said Bryce. “What happened next?”

  “The next year she came back. And the year after that. The third year, I decided to go back with her. We got married and I stayed.”

  “Just like that?” said Bryce.

  “Just like that,” said Harvey, smacking his palms together.

  Bryce shook his head in disbelief again.

  There were footsteps on the road and Richard and Grimes appeared in the glow of the fire. They both dumped a box each on the road.

  “Everything alright?” said Richard.

  “Oh aye,” said Bryce. “Everything’s hunky dory.” He gestured at Harvey. “We just ate some rats and Forrest Gump here told us his life story. What have you got?”

  “Water,” said Grimes, pulling open a box and handing out bottles. “Not much, but it should see us through most of tomorrow.”

  I broke the seal on mine and poured it down my throat. It was freezing cold and I spluttered a mouthful out down my front.

  “Take it easy,” said Grimes. “It has to last us.”

  Bryce took a sip from his. “And what else,” he said.

  Richard opened his box and a pile of brightly coloured plastic-coated slabs fell out.

  “Noodles,” he said. “Lots and lots of noodles.”

  We laughed, all of us, and I felt something like warmth rippling around the fire.

  LONDON'S SHORED

  That night I dreamed about cattle again. They were stuck in a pen inside a burning barn, mad with fear. I was looking down on them from a great height, watching them clamber over each other, panicking, their wide snouts wavering about, slick with mucus. The sound became louder and more frantic until a single cry rang out above the rest: a high-pitched, canine howl. I awoke.

  I was lying on my side inside the truck, facing the opening in the roof that led onto the road. It was light and I could see the fire’s loose ashes fluttering in a breeze. Beyond the fire was broken road and burned metal. I sat up and looked around the truck, heard Richard’s snores. Grimes and Harvey were nowhere to be seen. I heard a noise from outside, then Bryce’s voice.

  “Yes! You beauty!”

  I shook off my blanket and walked out. The lorry’s cab was not quite horizontal, propped up against the side of another. The passenger door opened and Bryce jumped down onto the road. He walked towards me, grinning, only slightly limping. In his outstretched hand he held a bottle.

  “Shame we didn’t check it last night eh?” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Vodka!” he said. “Half bottle. Didn’t think the driver would mind.” He threw a thumb back to the cab.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  Bryce reached in his pocket and showed me a thick grey roll of duct tape.

  “For my ankle,” he said. He opened the bottle and took a long drink, five gulps, eyes to the sky, then exhaled loudly and passed it to me. I took a pull, felt my chest sear, took another and handed it back. Bryce belched and Richard appeared, his hair stuck out in owl-like tufts. He rubbed his face and frowned up at the sky with one hand against his forehead.

  “Is it brighter today or am I imagining it?” he said.

  “Dick,” said Bryce, handing him the vodka.

  “What’s this?” said Richard squinting at the label. Bryce sat down and began undoing his boot laces. We looked down as he first eased off the boot and then the sock beneath it.

  “Doesn’t look like there’s any swelling,” said Richard, taking a swig from the bottle. “Or bruising.”

  Bryce rubbed the thick, hairy flesh of his ankle between his hands and rotated his foot back and forth.

  “I told you,” he said. “It’s fine. Just went over on it.”

  He took out the tape and made four strips that he placed vertically on each side, then wound the tape around a few times and tore it off. Then he put his sock and boot back on and stood up.

  “Brand new,” he said, then reached his hand out to Richard. “Don’t be shy Dick.”

  Richard passed him the bottle.

  “Did either of you hear that sound?” I said.

  “What sound?” said Richard.

  “Like an animal. A howling sound,” I said.

  “Aye,” said Bryce. He passed me the bottle. “I did. Dogs maybe.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” mumbled Richard. “Sound asleep. Where’s Harvey?”

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t sound like a dog. There was something else to it, something a bit more, I dunno, human?”

  “Fox then,” said Bryce.

  “Do you think there are foxes out here?” I said.

  “Expect so,” said Richard. He rubbed the light stubble on his cheeks. “Scavengers. They’ll be aggressive too; we should keep an eye out for them. Make sure we keep our food wrapped up at night.”

  He looked up at something behind me. I turned to see Grimes walking back towards us. Her hair
was damp, pulled back under a black woollen hat. She carried some clothes and a towel which she stuffed inside her pack.

  “Good morning, Laura,” said Bryce. “I see you’ve washed. Are you sure we have enough water for that kind of luxury?”

  “Had to be done,” said Grimes. “Besides, I didn’t use much.”

  “These gentlemen and I were just having a spot of breakfast,” he said. Whenever he spoke to her it was like this: pretending to be a station above himself, purely to draw attention to the fact that he wasn’t. It seems obvious now why he was doing it, though it wasn’t at the time.

  “Would you care to join us?” he offered her the bottle. Only a few dregs remained.

  “No thanks,” she said. She looked down at his ankle.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, finishing it.

  “Can you walk?” she said. “Run?”

  “It’s fine,” said Bryce. “No problem.”

  “Good,” she nodded. “All the same, we need to take better care. We can’t afford injury if we’re going to...if we’re…”

  “Run to Cornwall?” said Bryce once again. He tossed the empty bottle into the embers of the fire. “This is definitely what we’re doing, is it?”

  Grimes squared to face him.

  “If you have any better ideas, just shout,” she said.

  Just then I heard Harvey’s voice.

  “Fellas!” he shouted from around the other side of the trailer. “Come here, quick! Take a look!”

  We went around and saw Harvey standing on the side of yet another overturned juggernaut that had sprawled into the crash barrier.

  “Come up!” he said. “You won’t believe it.”

  We each climbed up and followed Harvey’s finger, pointing at the horizon. We were on top of what had been a bridge, the beginning of an interchange into the town. Beneath us the streets were bleak ruins, the occasional pillar or crumbling tower block still standing alone, three dimensional anomalies in an otherwise flat world. But Richard was right. It was brighter that morning. There, just above the Earth’s natural horizon and unobscured by any man-made structure, a faint disc of light floated behind the thick black clouds.