The End of the World Running Club (22 page)

Richard began running madly up and down the street, checking the engine and fuel tank of every mangled, rusted, broken and crushed vehicle he could find. Bryce followed. They slammed door after door with yells of frustration. Grimes blinked, aware that I was still looking at her.

“They didn’t tell you?” I said.

She shook her head once, almost imperceptibly. I turned back and looked up the road, now empty and smeared with mist. I could just make out the fresh tracks of the Land Rover in the snow. Bryce and Richard returned from behind us.

“Nothing,” said Bryce. “Like I said, they’re all…”

“Yes,
fucked
!” shouted Richard. “I know.”

Richard began pacing frantically, long arms bent above him with his hands over his head. Grimes walked back to the hotel and past Harvey. Harvey was still watching me.

“We’ll go back,” said Bryce. “Back to the barracks, back to Edinburgh.”

“And do what?” said Richard. “Start a fight with an army of hooligans? Steal some petrol from them?”
 

Harvey appeared at the door.

“They’ve left us food,” he said. “And a stove,” said Grimes from within the hotel. “And water.”
 

“Oh give them a fucking medal,” said Bryce. “Give them the fucking Victoria Cross!”

“We should stay put,” said Grimes. “Keep the fire going, wait for the rescue…”

“There’s NO RESCUE!” bellowed Bryce, arms wide, beating his chest with every word. “Why can’t you see that? THEY’RE NOT COMING!”
 

Richard gave one last yell of frustration that echoed from the burned brick on either side of the street. He took one long, shuddering breath and was quiet.

“Come on,” he said, walking towards the hotel. “Let’s see what they left us, work out what we’re going to do.”

Grimes had opened the box of food that Yuill and Henderson had left. Harvey made some tea on the stove and passed us cups while we pulled out packets of noodles, rice, pasta and beans and stacked them in piles.

Bryce broke the silence at last.

“Well, I can’t think of a better idea,” he said, throwing his empty cup on the table.

Richard was sat forward in his chair, long arms folded on his knees, staring solemnly at the dried food on the table in front of him. One of his legs was bouncing up and down on the floor. He glanced at Bryce and sat up straight, folded his arms and shrugged, leg still tapping.

“We can’t go back, can’t stay here. There are no cars. We have no other option.”

Grimes stood up.
 

“We move on then,” she said. “We pack all the food and carry as much water as possible. We move as fast as we can, keeping to the road until we find a vehicle.”

She looked around.

“Agreed?”

Bryce and Richard nodded and got up from their seats. Bryce picked up an empty pack and threw it at me. I caught it with one hand, spilling tea on myself with the other.

“Here,” he said. “Fill that.”

We packed the dried food into our rucksacks as tightly as possible and then put blankets on top. Each pack came with a four-litre hydration bladder. We filled them to the brim and then put as much water as we could into empty plastic bottles that we found in a bin behind the bar. We put as many of these as we could into the space remaining in our bags and tightened the rest to the outside of the packs using the loose straps.

When we had finished, we zipped up our coats and slung on the packs. Bryce threw his on as if it was filled with feathers. I tried to hide the fact that I was almost toppling backwards under the weight of mine. When we were all set we stood around in a circle, waiting for something. But there was nothing left to do but walk.

G
LORIA

I knew this road well. It was the one Beth and I had always taken when we drove south from Edinburgh. Many miles of long, straight tarmac drew a line roughly straight down through the Scottish Borders, banked on each side by gentle hills and long plains of farmland and forest. There was the occasional bend or hill and every so often you might pass one or two houses. There were only a handful of villages and only one example of what you might call a town. Otherwise it was sparsely populated and the lack of buildings and any real terrain meant that, on a good day, the sky opened up into a huge blue canopy. This, combined with a road that disappeared into the horizon, always made me think of driving through the mid-western states of America, despite the fact that I had never been.
 

After about thirty miles, the road joined a motorway that soared in great long bends through a series of hills, bridging rivers and cutting through rust-coloured moors and pine woods before widening again and crossing the border into England.

We walked out of Carlops some time in the mid-morning. The road stretched out ahead of us, long and straight as it always had been, becoming a dull white under the dirty snow. There was no huge sky - just a very low, dark mass of cloud. Mist pressed down upon everything, cocooning us even further from the world. Visibility was no more than fifty metres at best. We had no idea what lay beyond us or on either side of us. We were walking within a dense, oppressive bubble.

We passed the end of the crater’s mound. After that we were in unknown territory, following the faint and disappearing tyre tracks that Yuill and Henderson had left behind as they fled.

Richard checked his watch.

“West Linton is about a mile away,” he said. “It’s bigger than Carlops, probably more chance of a vehicle there.”

We walked some more in silence. The tarmac and the Land Rover tracks had now disappeared completely under the snow. The sides of the road seemed to be changing as well. Gaps appeared in the hedgerows. Then they became lower and clustered, before disappearing altogether and leaving a thin line of scrub in their place. I saw a cluster of trees far away in a field, branchless and black. The dirt beneath them was black too. There was a faint smell of smoke.

On the other side of the road I saw some dark outlines halfway up a hill. As we got closer I saw that they were cars, five or six of them, upended and burned down to their chassis. Dark fragments of metal and rubber lined the slope beneath them like the innards of flies smeared beneath a fist.

After another mile we saw dark shapes looming in the mist ahead - buildings. As we drew nearer we saw that the road turned right onto a street of houses running down a hill.

“This is it,” said Richard. “West Linton.”

Bryce tutted. “Aye,” he said. “The big smoke. Stick together and watch out for pickpockets.”

“Let’s just find a car and get going,” muttered Richard.

“I wouldnae put money on that,” said Bryce as we turned the corner.

The houses became clearer through the mist. These had once been tall, grand mansions set back from the road on steep drives. The hedgerows and trees that had provided privacy had been burned down to their roots and the houses stood naked for all to see. Every one was the same: a black, windowless shell, barely standing. No roof, most of the walls completely gone, the innards of the house exposed and still filled with broken, burned objects. All that was left was a brittle framework of charred struts dripping with meltwater.

Every drive had a car or two, all in the same state as the houses.

We walked slowly down into the village, picking our way carefully through street after street of scorched, empty buildings. We saw no bodies, or so it seemed. Almost everything we saw had disintegrated so much that it was impossible to recognise.  We passed a post office. The pillar box in front of it was now a sharp-edged, rusted stump. Its top had been blown clean away and inside was a pile of ash - the mail that had roasted inside of its red oven. The remains of a single envelope offered its corner up through the snow as if still expecting its collection.

“This entire road must have been on fire,” said Grimes. “All the way from Carlops. It might have been burning for days, weeks even.”

“So much for a car then,” said Harvey. “How far do you think this goes?”

“We know there was the big impact in Northumberland,” said Grimes. “Possibly there were other smaller ones around it. If the firestorm reached this then it could have affected everything south of here as far as Carlisle.”

Richard stopped walking,

“That’s almost a hundred miles from here,” he said.

Grimes turned and nodded. “More like eighty,” she said.

“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying there might be nothing ahead of us for eighty miles? How far have we walked today so far?”

“Three,” said Richard, chewing his lip. He looked at his watch. “And it’s already past midday.”

“That’s over a week’s trek,” I said.

“We don’t know how far this goes,” said Grimes. “We don’t know anything about what the country is like further south of this point. It might be alright.”

“Well we know what it’s like back that way,” said Bryce, pulling out his tobacco and papers.

Grimes looked around at each of us.

“Anyone who wants to go back,” she said, “now’s your chance.”

Bryce lit his cigarette. “Back to what?” he said, squinting as the smoke hit his eyes. He looked ahead and jabbed a finger south, then walked on.

“Let’s push on then,” said Grimes.

We left the village and picked up our pace. I tried not to think about the time and the distance, about how far I was from Beth and the kids, about whether or not they were safe, still in the country or already powering away from it on a ship. I tried not to think about finding a car that had petrol, or about how to start it, or about what we would do when the petrol ran out. I tried not to think about the knot of panic and hopelessness that tightened in my gut with every step. I tried not to think about the cold, or our food, or our water, or about how much I wanted this not to be how life currently was. I tried not to think about anything.

We walked for two hours and then stopped to eat biscuits next to a dried stream. There were no other villages and every farm or lonely cottage we came across was the same burnt out husk as the last. The mist had lifted and we could see further than before. The landscape on either side of us was the same: every tree and hedgerow, every blade of grass was gone, leaving an undulating, lifeless plain of discoloured snow with nothing taller than a stump to punctuate it. The road was damaged too. Occasionally one of us would stumble into a deep pothole in the hidden tarmac beneath our feet.

As the light faded it began to snow. Before long we were walking in a blizzard and we tumbled into a three-walled cattle shed in a nearby field for shelter. We managed to get a fire going and cooked some pasta as flurries of sleet blew in from outside. We spent the night huddled together in a corner with our hoods pulled tight.

The snow had stopped by morning and we continued down the road. We walked all day without speaking much. Some time in the late afternoon we turned a corner onto a long stretch of road. About a mile or two ahead of us was a hill. We could just make out a wooded area near the top where the trees didn’t seem so badly damaged.

“It’ll be dark soon,” said Grimes. “We’re going to need to think about shelter.”

“Those trees,” said Richard. “Could we try there?”

“Better than nothing,” said Grimes. “There might be some wood dry enough to make a fire...”

We stopped in our tracks. As if on cue, a thin trail of smoke had begun to rise from behind the trees.

“Is that a camp fire?” I said.

“Has to be,” said Richard. “Let’s take a closer look.”

We made our way towards the trees. By the time we had reached them, it was almost dark and we could see flames flickering high on the ridge above us.

We waited by the ditch and watched.

“Yuill and Henderson?” breathed Bryce.

Grimes shook her head.

“They would have made it a lot further already,” she said. “Besides, I don’t see their Land Rover and there are no tyre tracks up the hill.”

“All the same,” said Harvey. “Could be them. Who else have we seen along this road?”

The smell of the smoke reached us and we heard the distant cracks and pops of the fire. There was no other sound, no voices from the hill, no movement but the flicker of orange flame against the barely visible twilight.

We picked our way gingerly through the ditch and over the razed hedgerow. We kept close to the tree line as we walked up the hill, avoiding the deep snow and the exposed space of the field. I felt the warmth of the fire growing stronger and we instinctively stopped before we reached the top, moving back into the shadows. I crouched next to Grimes. There was still no sign of life. Grimes patted me on the shoulder and pointed at something beyond the trees. I peered up through the smoke at the remains of a building. The shadows of stone walls flickered in the light of the flame. Rubble and slate lay on the ground. We edged closer up the hill until we were almost next to the fire. The heat on my face and hands suddenly made me want to crawl closer and sleep by the flames; I hadn’t realised how tired I was.

We looked at each other, all asking the same silent question:
is it safe?
Nobody had the answer, but the heat of the fire was hard to ignore. Richard moved first. He stood and walked out into the open, through the remaining expanse of ankle-deep snow and up as far as the edge of the circle of orange light. Bryce and Grimes followed, then Harvey and I, until all five of us were standing on the perimeter. The fire was small and spitting sparks from thin logs. On the other side of the fire was a single white plastic garden chair. One arm was blackened and warped. Behind that, further into the darkness, we could see the stone walls of the building more clearly. It had been a small farm cottage. Like every other building it was badly burned and one half of it had crumbled into ruin. The other half, however, still seemed intact and sheltered by the remains of a roof. One window clung to its frame.

We stood warming ourselves for five minutes, maybe more, each of us aware of the stone building beyond, the single chair and the fact that the fire had been recently tended. I have no idea why we stood there for so long. Or why she let us.