The End of the World Running Club (18 page)

The track was now at its steepest. Even Bryce had to slow down at this section. Yuill and Henderson were still marching ahead but Richard had fallen back.

“What do you think, Dick?” said Bryce as we caught him up.

“I don’t know,” said Richard. “RAF? Yuill’s trying to radio the barracks, see what’s what. Are you alright, Ed?”

Richard and Bryce had stopped and were looking back at me. Bryce was grinning, still holding his shoulder but standing straight. Richard had his foot up on a rock, looking for all the world like a man enjoying the view on his morning stroll. I puffed and wheezed behind them, tripping on my feet and scrabbling on the rocks with my hands.

“Fine,” I managed as I caught them up.

Suddenly we heard the drone again. Above us, just beyond the summit, we saw a long yellow tail rise up and turn.

“Is that ours?” said Richard.

“Aye,” said Bryce. “That’s us.”

“Wait!” I shouted, waving my arms. “Wait for us.”

Bryce turned to me in disdain.

“Aye that’ll do it, Eddie.”

Yuill and Henderson had already started running. Bryce and Richard followed with me at the back, my lungs heaving like dry furnaces and my eyes bulging with the strain.

I fell far behind. By the time I reached the barracks Bryce and Richard had already caught their breath and were standing by the gates. Yuill and Henderson were talking with Grimes in the main doorway, with Harvey loitering behind them. Bryce was smoking. He gave a slow handclap as I collapsed onto the tarmac, pulling off my pack and screaming for breath.

Richard helped me to my feet. He seemed uncomfortable, worried.

“Keep moving,” he said through gritted teeth. “Keep moving.”

“What...what….?” I spluttered.

Bryce exhaled smoke and pointed a gloved finger southward. The helicopter was long gone. It was getting dark, but I could just make it out, now just a speck on the horizon.
 

“We missed the bus,” said Bryce, taking another drag.

 
I watched it disappear into the black smear. There were no others now, nothing else in the sky but cloud and the approaching night. I looked at Richard, his jaw set, arms folded, feet pacing the tarmac.

“What’s wrong?” I said, as I finally found my breath. “Who were they?”

Bryce flicked his cigarette into the dirt.

“Why don’t you ask her?” he said.

Grimes was walking across, Harvey behind her.

“You need to come inside,” she said. “All of you, now.”

“What just happened?” I said. “Where is everyone? Where’s Beth?”

“Come inside, mate,” said Harvey, giving a weak smile. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

We went to the medical ward to get Bryce patched up. Even as we passed through the main doors, I sensed that the place was empty. Grimes wrestled Bryce’s great trench coat from him and inspected the wound to his shoulder.

“Bullet passed straight through,” she said. “Just needs cleaning and bandaging.”

“Bastards fucked up my coat though,” said Bryce.

I sat on a bed opposite them. Harvey stood next to me and Richard leaned silently against the wall with his arms still folded. Yuill and Henderson came in and sat down. And that was it. Seven of us.

I tried to keep my voice calm.

“Where is everyone?” I said at last. “Where’s my family?” I caught Richard’s eye. He clearly wanted to know the same thing about his son. Harvey laid a hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Ed,” he said. “Your family’s fine.”

I shook off Harvey’s hand and he drew back.

“Where are they?” I shouted.

Grimes had finished Bryce’s bandage and was wiping her hands on a towel.

“Harvey’s right,” said Grimes. “Don’t panic, your family is safe. They’ve been rescued.”

“Rescued?” I said. “Rescued where? By whom?”

“They’re new,” said Grimes.

“New?”

“Not British, not NATO, not United Nations. We don’t think any of those exist any more. They called themselves
Sauver
. They’re helping to evacuate Europe.”

We let this sink in for a little while. All I could think of was Beth, Alice and Arthur disappearing on the horizon. I realised I had never been further than a few miles from them in my life. Eventually Harvey broke the silence.

“The girl I spoke to was a Kiwi,” he said. “Pretty sure she was. Or maybe South African. Always get them mixed up.”

We all looked at Harvey. He tried a smile.

“Somewhere below the equator anyway,” he said. “She seemed real nice, very efficient. Their uniforms were yellow, just like the choppers, all clean too.” He looked at Grimes for support. “Looked like they’d eaten well too, didn’t they?”

“Where are they evacuating from?” I said.

“Cornwall,” said Grimes. “There are ships taking passengers south. It seems the northern hemisphere was the most badly affected.”

Richard suddenly nudged himself from the wall with his shoulder.

“And they took everyone?” he said. There was aggression in his voice. Grimes took a step back.

“You let them take everyone?”

He strode over to Grimes.

“You let them take my son?” he shouted into her face. “Without me?”

Yuill and Henderson leaped forwards to restrain him.

“Easy,” said Yuill. “Let her finish.”

Richard backed off, still staring furiously at Grimes. She met his fierce eyes without flinching. I sensed that she had faced up to male anger before, either in or out of the army.

“We told them you were out on a salvage mission,” she continued. “But they said they couldn’t wait, that if anyone was going with them, they had to go now….”

“And you let them go,” Richard broke in. He was shaking. “You let my son go.”

Grimes held up her palms.

“But we managed to persuade them to send another chopper,” she finished. “There are a few more still in the north. They radioed for one to change its route to pick us up.”

Richard seemed to relax a little. I was still wound up tight, a coil of fear in my belly.

“When?” said Richard.

“They said within two days.”

There was silence in the room for a while. Even Bryce seemed lost for words.

“Private Grimes made the right call,” said Yuill. “Our main objective was to make contact with the outside world and get the survivors to safety, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Grimes, looking down at the floor.

“What are you still doing here, Harvey?” I said. “Why didn’t you go?”

“Figured I’d stay and make sure you blokes were alright,” he said.

Yuill crossed his arms and looked between me and Richard, who had positioned himself back against the wall. “Your families are safe,” he said. “They’ll have food, shelter and medical supplies.” He scanned our worried faces, his full of relief. “So we wait it out,” he said, standing up. “One or two days and we’ll be on our way back to civilisation. We’ll stay out of the city and when the help arrives we’ll tell them about the other survivors too.”

“Rabbits?” said Bryce.

“Yes, the Rabbits,” said Yuill. “Presuming they want rescuing. Now I suggest this evening you get some rest and…”

“About that...” I said.

“Yes?” said Yuill. “About what?”

“About the Rabbits,” I said. “There’s a problem.”

We crammed as much as we could into the back of the Land Rover. We shut off the generator and emptied as much of the remaining fuel as we could into tanks. We filled jerry cans with water and packed plastic boxes with dried food. We took two portable stoves and two large gas canisters, radios, batteries and blankets from the store, clothes, possessions. We hadn’t planned on going any great distance - only far enough away from the barracks to be safe until the chopper arrived - but we didn’t want to have to risk returning to the barracks. If the rescue didn’t come as expected, then we were going to push south.

The news that we were under threat rocked Yuill visibly, his face flickering with fear as I told him that the Rabbits knew our location. It became very clear to me then how desperate he was to find civilisation, how he was still just a young man forced into a role he did not want and could not fulfil.

We considered the possibilities: stay and fight or leave and risk being abandoned. We opted to leave right then and there, to drive south and find somewhere safe to camp where we could spot our rescue helicopter coming. It would only be for a couple of days.

It was almost dark and freezing cold by the time we were ready to leave. I ran down the main corridor, heading for the stairs with the last pile of blankets.  I stopped when I reached the end, then walked back to our room and looked inside. The light was low, but I could make out clothes and bedsheets strewn around the place, imagining Beth hastily pulling together the stuff she might need for the trip. Had she paused, I wondered? Had she considered staying and waiting for me? Had she been given a choice? Had Alice cried for me?

Grimes called down from the main doors. I went to leave, but saw something else in the darkness. Alice’s stringyphone was tangled in a heap on the pillow. I lifted it gently and slipped it inside my coat, then closed the door and went upstairs.

T
HE
S
TRUGGLE

Henderson drove. Yuill and Grimes sat up front. Harvey, Richard and I took the back seat and Bryce rode in the back with the equipment.

We went into the Pentlands and away from the city, aiming for the main road that travelled south to Carlisle. The hills were no longer green and rolling. They were a mess of dried scrub and churned up, stagnant mud pits. Tracks no longer existed. The headlights occasionally passed over the bones of sheep and dogs. Everything was covered in dull, grey snow.

At Glencorse Reservoir we became stuck in a ditch and spent an hour pushing ourselves out. Richard and I sat shivering in the freezing mud that had sprayed across our bodies. It was around midnight when we finally found the road. It was potholed and strewn with fallen trees and dirt from the surrounding fields as if the earth was trying to reclaim it. After an hour of cautious driving we reached a small village called Carlops, where we stopped.

Henderson turned off the engine and let the headlights die. It was utterly dark and utterly still. No life, no sound, apart from Bryce’s deep snores from the back and the slow sloshing of fuel and water coming to rest in their tanks. I was cold and tired. I missed Beth. I wondered where they were, whether they had arrived in Cornwall.

Yuill and Henderson got out without a word, leaving Grimes asleep in the front. I watched their torch lights bobbing along the ground towards the village. Carlops had not been much more than a handful of small cottages lining each side of the main road. Henderson’s beam swept the road and I could see that something pretty major had happened to one side of the street. The houses seemed to bulge out into the road as if pushed from some great force behind them. Bricks were scattered across the pavement. Branches burst through the windows and rotted doors.

I heard Yuill’s voice.

“Grimes!”

Grimes woke with a start, unbuckled herself and slid out the passenger door, her torch quickly joined the other two by the bulging buildings.

“A fallen tree?” I ventured to Harvey and Richard.

“No,” said Richard. “Too much of it.”

He turned and fished a torch from a bag in the back.

“I’m going to take a look,” he said. “Coming?”

I turned to Harvey.

“That’s alright, Ed,” he said. He glanced behind him at Bryce. “Reckon I’ll stay here and look after Cujo. You go ahead."

I took a torch and followed Richard out into the darkness. It was snowing. Dark tufts floated down through the yellow light of my beam and joined the hard packed ice on the road. I crunched through it taking short breaths. The air was frozen but not fresh. It was close and dusty and a sharp taste caught in the back of my throat. To be inside with the warm smell of my family, even restless under a blanket on a stone floor, was suddenly all that I wanted. Not to be outside in the fetid frost, far from anything that might be called home, standing with strangers and trying to work out what had caused a street to burst open.

"Not a tree," repeated Richard as we reached the others. We trained our five beams on the buckled brick. "A hill.”

Every house was filled with dirt. Tree roots and boulders spilled out through windows and walls. Splintered furniture lay on the pavement, some reaching the other side of the street. The houses on that side were crushed under car-sized chunks of mud and rock. Every roof was demolished, every wall cracked or smashed apart. One house was buried entirely in a brown boulder of earth. Another one had a bath hanging from its window, hurled across the street from the house opposite. Everything was shattered and covered in a thick layer of mud.
 

Behind the street lay the cause of the destruction. An immense tower of brown earth loomed up into the sky, stretching higher than our torch beams could reach.

"Landslide?" I said.

"Something like that," said Yuill. "Although you'd expect it to have extended across the road. This looks more like the hill just...moved."

"Like something pushed it out of the way," said Grimes.

Yuill murmured something back. The snow had become heavier and a wind was picking up. We heard creaks and flutters as it disturbed the bloated innards of the ruined buildings. Yuill took his beam from the dirt and scanned the street ahead. Henderson followed.

"We can investigate in the morning. Right now we need..."

He stopped as the light picked out other objects. Bodies. Some were half out of windows, others slumped and twisted against walls, others buried in rubble. They were only partly clothed and I remembered again that most of them would have been in bed when it happened, maybe still asleep. They would not have heard any sirens.

What used to be a woman hung upside down from a telegraph wire by one foot. Her tattered nightgown had fallen down over her head. Most of her grey corpse had been picked clean by birds. I covered my mouth instinctively. I had already seen plenty of corpses on the salvage runs, but death was still a shock. Yuill spun his torch away from the street and we did the same.