The End of the World Running Club (17 page)

Bryce offered me his cigarette. I shook my head and he turned away, walking slowly away to lean against a broken pillar.

 
I saw a glint of light and froze. Somewhere to my left, deep within the iron girders of the office block, there had been movement. I peered closer. Nothing. Then a shape, a shadow flitting between other shadows.

“Bryce,” I croaked. “Bryce, I…”

At that moment, Henderson and the troops emerged from the café. They carried crates of water, cans, packets, coffee, tea. Henderson was grinning.

“Good haul,” he said. “Let’s load these boys up and head home.”

They made three trips in and out of the café until all our packs were filled. Then we marched home. As we left, I looked over my shoulder, feeling eyes watching me from the darkness of a ruined building.

There were twelve volunteers in total. Each group of four joined a salvage run every week. We ventured further and further into the city each time, running more and more. I wouldn’t say it became second nature, but the initial shock of having to run had left me. I still hated it, but it was better than being inside. We learned about the city’s new shape. We learned about which buildings still stood, which roads were usable, which ones held horrors we could avoid if possible. Sometimes we returned with full packs and other times we returned empty handed. Occasionally I saw the shadows move. I was sure Bryce and Richard did too, although we never spoke of it.

After two months we began to make more regular runs. By the middle of November we were going every other day. That’s when we met them face to face.

It’s quite possible that there were many more survivors in Edinburgh than we had first thought, perhaps clinging for life in the maze of Old Town tenements or the protection of New Town basement flats. We didn’t know much about them. If they were there then we couldn’t reach them. The ones we found first were those who had laid claim to the streets. They were lean and hungry, organised, armed and aggressive. Bryce called them ‘Rabbits’, basically because they lived underground and he wanted to shoot them.

The name stuck. The Rabbits generally travelled in small groups with their heads in hoods. They were quick and understood the new layout of crippled streets left over from the strike. Wherever the patrols found sources of food or fuel, they found Rabbits. Wherever they widened their search area, they found Rabbits. They were everywhere and they didn’t like other people taking their haul. They didn’t like us.

We met the first group on Cowgate. This had once been a long street that ran low through the belly of the Old Town. Henderson called it a ‘sweet spot’ because of two factors. The first was that it had been full of bars, restaurants and hotels and therefore contained a potential wealth of supplies. The second was that it was now almost underground. The tall walls of the buildings on either side of it and the bridges that ran over it had collapsed and created a tunnel. The tunnel protected what was beneath it, but it also made it difficult to access. After weeks of trying, we had finally found a route through the rubble, sliding down a mound of scree that had once been the side of a car park. Winter had taken hold without fight and a constant fog hung over everything, making the dark days darker still. I was last to hit the bottom of the dirt mound. I scrambled to my feet and pulled out my torch. The rest of the group had lit theirs too. As suspected, the collapsed buildings had made a tunnel of the street. Its ceiling was an imperfect, rambling archway of destroyed brickwork and bent metal. We picked our way along, scanning the walls with our lights, looking for anything that might have been a door.

Halfway along I heard Henderson’s boots scrape to a halt on the stone. His hand was held above him. Fifty metres ahead of us, illuminated in a shaft of light from above, stood a boy. He must have been sixteen, maybe seventeen. He wore a black hooded top. His legs were apart, his fists hung by his side and his chin was raised in defiance. We watched him silently for a moment. He watched us back. Then he turned and ran.

Nobody moved. The boy sprinted down the tunnel and then suddenly took a sharp left through a wall. Henderson slowly lowered his hand.

“Butler, Greer, come with me,” he said quietly. “Everybody else, stay here.”

The two soldiers on either side of him followed Henderson down into the darkness. We waited while they first inspected the hole into which the boy had disappeared. Henderson shone his light inside, then the three of them crouched and went in.

We waited and listened. It was raining above us. The water had found its way through the gaps above and was forming filthy pools in the broken road. There was no other sound than this. Whoever was watching us was watching us out of sight and in perfect silence. A few minutes later, Henderson and the two others resurfaced. He shook his head as they reached us.

“No sign,” he said. “But there’s a maze of tunnels in there. He could be anywhere.”

He nodded back up to the surface.

“We’ll head back now, report it. The next party will take more lights. Let’s go.”

A few days later we heard boots running on the gravel outside the barracks. That day’s salvage party had returned early. I was in the corridor outside our room when the doors burst open and two soldiers came through, supporting a third between them. He was young, possibly not even twenty. He looked up at me in fear as they barged past. His face was pale and gaunt and he clutched both hands to his belly. They were slick with blood. The two soldiers dragged him through to the medical ward. I don’t know his name and we never saw him again. He was the first.

Two others had been killed as well. I don’t know their names either.

The Rabbits were now a threat. We had no idea who they were or where they came from. Bryce had a theory. It seemed fair to assume that the only people who survived the strike were those who were underground and awake at the time. At 6am on a Saturday in the Old Town, this meant people in lock-ins and clubs - the dirty, rough ones, places to be avoided. Bryce reasoned that the Rabbits were pill-heads, stoners and kids on acid; thieves, criminals and neds. They were used to running, used to surviving in shitholes. They knew where to find guns, ammunition, food. The clubs themselves would have been well stocked already. The New Town was exposed. Its wide streets were full of tall mansions looking proudly out to the north, their backs turned firmly on the filthy medieval squalor in the south of the city. The impacts swept them away, but it would have made a natural warren in the depths of the Old Town. Those who survived the wreckage would find filthy, safe holes to shelter in, routes in and out of abandoned underground shops and plenty of store-rooms to plunder.

It was ridiculous, of course. It spoke more about Bryce’s views on society than anything else. But nobody had a better theory.

The salvage missions stopped. Smaller patrols - armed soldiers only - were sent out in their place to monitor the Rabbits’ activity; where they were hiding, what they were doing, how many there were of them. These didn’t last long. They underestimated the Rabbits, got too close too soon, didn’t expect that they were being watched before they even reached the tunnel. Each party was met with an ambush or an unseen hit from a sniper. Within two weeks the Rabbits had picked off over thirty soldiers.
 

We had one thing in our favour. The Rabbits had a territory that they didn’t seem to like leaving. They must have guessed that the soldiers they met and ambushed came from one of the barracks to the south, but they had no idea which one and no idea how many soldiers were there or what kind of supplies they had. There was no suggestion that we were in trouble; for all they knew there was an entire army waiting for them in the hills.

Our distress beacon was a problem. If the rabbits were as organised as we thought then they would be scanning frequencies as well. They would pick our signal up soon enough and we would be sitting ducks. They would have an army barracks with supplies and ammunition and very little in the way of defence just waiting there in the hills for them to overrun.

Things became desperate. We were low on food, water and fuel. The temperature was dropping. Our numbers had diminished and chronic flu had broken out around the barracks. Many of the soldiers who were left were confined to their beds.

Our only hope was to keep our heads down and hope that the rescue party reached us soon.
 

It was decided that the salvage parties would start again, this time concentrating away from the Cowgate. In addition, further patrols would be made to watch the Rabbits’ activities from a distance.  Because there were now so few soldiers, Yuill asked again for volunteers to make these runs into the city. Anyone signing up would be given a gun. Bryce put his name down immediately.

That night I lay fidgeting on the floor, cold and staring into the darkness as usual. Arthur and Alice were asleep. I heard their covers move and Beth’s feet on the floor. She padded over to me and slid quietly underneath my blanket, pressing her warm body on top of mine. She kissed me, moved her hand down and pushed me gently inside of her. I was surprised at how wet she was and how much I could smell her, surprised at suddenly realising how much I missed that smell. We both stifled a noise as she began to move gently against me, pushing me deeper and deeper inside of her until her pelvis ground against mine. I stroked my hand down her back and over her buttocks, slipping my finger into the crack between them. Beth usually hated this, but she gripped my hair and pushed her face against mine, sliding her tongue into my mouth as we both came. She lay on top of me for a while, then stroked my brow and kissed me. I could feel her watching me, although I couldn’t see her. She kissed me again, then rolled off me and got back into her bed without saying a word.

She was trying to talk to me. She was trying to tell me not to do it. But I did it. I signed up. Bryce and I became partners. Our orders were to watch the Rabbits from a distance. Just to watch. Never to go near the Cowgate. Never to make our position known. Never to fire unless fired upon…

Stop me.
 

I’m talking as if we were soldiers. We weren’t soldiers. The fact was we were twenty scared and unfit civilians pretending to be soldiers. The fact was we were fucked.

And yet Yuill kept his uniform pressed and clean. Yuill barked orders at us as if we would snap our heels at the sound of his voice. Yuill demanded explanations.

“Well?” he said.

R
ANKING
O
FFICER

“Well?” said Yuill. “What happened?”

A cool breeze whipped around our boots and blew up some ash from the surface of what had once been my street. Yuill glared at me as he waited for my explanation. His hands were on his hips, his head was leaned towards me, his lips were tight and he was frowning; doing everything possible to show enraged authority. Yuill still considered himself to be ranking officer in charge of a functioning squadron of troops, but beneath every command and reprisal lay a quivering undercurrent of fear. He was not a leader; he was a young man in a situation he didn’t want to be in, trying too hard to be something he didn’t want to be.

“Bryce was hit,” I said.

Yuill frowned and nodded slowly. He glared at the dark red stain on Bryce’s coat as if he were speaking only to the wound and not to us. A breeze picked up and set one of the broken swings creaking behind him.

“I can see that,” he said. “But why?”

Bryce sneered.

“Because one of the little bastards fired a gun at me,” he said, spelling it out.

Yuill nodded again.

“And why would they have done that, I wonder,” he said.

Bryce grimaced and drew himself up. Yuill was getting to him. He always did.

“Ach,” he said. “My finger slipped, alright?”

Yuill turned his eyes up to Bryce’s face. He looked him over for a while like a farmer assessing the worth of a wounded bull. Then he turned to me.

“They followed you?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “But we lost them at Shandon.”

“Good,” he said. “No reason to expect that they know where you came from.”

“Well,” I said. “About that…”

He turned back to Bryce.

“You may have just narrowly missed starting a war,” he said.

Bryce snarled. He was just about to launch a retort, but was stopped short. There was a sound; a sound we weren’t expecting to hear. At first I thought it was an engine, a car; perhaps the Rabbits had found some working vehicle with which to renew their chase. But the noise got louder and more defined. It was coming from above. A low drone sliced into fast, dull segments. Blades chopping the air many times a second.

We looked up to the south. In the distance, beyond the flattened streets of Colinton, high above the torn forest of Allermuir Hill, a large yellow helicopter appeared. It hovered for a few seconds, then turned and tipped forwards, disappearing down behind the summit.

Nobody spoke. We all stared at the space where the chopper had been

“Who the fuck was that?” said Bryce at last.

Then, from nowhere, we heard more of them. To the west we saw one, then two, both yellow. Then one suddenly burst out over our heads and roared towards the hills.

“Rescue choppers,” shouted Henderson. “One’s at the barracks. Follow me.”

Henderson turned and began running. Yuill and Richard followed, leaving Bryce and me standing in the mud.

“Can you run?” I said.

Bryce looked down at me as if I’d asked him if he wanted to hold hands.

“Course I can fucking run,” he said.
 

He sprinted after the others, clutching his shoulder. I followed behind as always.

We made it across the bypass and began the climb up Allermuir. Halfway up we turned left onto a track that took us across its face, offering us a view of the skyline behind us, at least as far as the perpetual murk would allow. There were many more helicopters. Some seemed to be returning from across the Forth, others from further inland. All of them were flying south.