The End of the World Running Club (20 page)

W
ATCHES

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.

“Alright, 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.

“...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…”