The End of the World Running Club (30 page)

“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.

L
ONDON
'
S
S
HORED

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.
 

For the first time since the strike, we could see the sun.

“Now if that’s not a good sign, I don’t know what is,” said Harvey.

We stuffed the noodles in our packs and refilled our rehydration bladders with the water that Grimes and Richard had found. After Bryce’s find earlier, we decided to take a look inside the cabs of the other lorries in the pile-up. We found a first-aid kit, another torch (empty of batteries), a bar of chocolate, a lighter, a map of the UK and a cricket bat. Bryce claimed the last of these and stuffed it in the webbing of his pack.

“Foxes,” he said.

There may have been more to take, but nobody wanted to spend too much time inside the cabs.

We shared the chocolate and left, clambering through the wreckage until we found the road. Then we began our first twenty-mile stretch. We walked for an hour, then began to run. I knew I had to keep my eyes on the treacherous road in front of me, but they kept drifting upwards, hypnotised by the sun, still visible and peering glumly through the clouds at the bare earth beneath, stripped of the life it had once ignited from dust.

Eventually it disappeared again, but my eyes still sought it out in the dark sky.

We were now running through Carlisle on what had once been the M6 motorway. The “backbone of Britain” as my father would have said, chin raised proudly as if he were talking about a war hero and not a bleak strip of pollution-carrying tarmac. This backbone - broken now - would be our trail south until we hit the Midlands. We planned a rough route using the map from the lorry, our first aim to hit Penrith before nightfall. Penrith was twenty-one miles away. I had never run more than three in my life.

Harvey ran at the front, with Richard and Grimes behind and Bryce and me at the rear. My pack felt heavy, even though it only contained noodles and water. My legs strained too, my boots like lead. A few steps in and my body began to tell me how little it wanted to do with this. Whatever this was I thought I was doing, I should stop right now - give up while I had the chance.
 

I didn’t give up; something kept me going, but whatever watery breed of will it was that got me through those first steps, those first miles, I knew then it wasn’t going to be enough. It already seemed hopeless to continue, and yet I had barely broken my stride.

A strange, broken rhythm appeared between my breathing, my heartbeat and my boots on the tarmac. This seemed to occupy me for a while, before Bryce interrupted my painful trance. I became aware of his great head leaning towards mine.

“You don’t believe that shite, do you?” he said.

“What shite?” I breathed.

He nodded at Harvey. “That shite. Running across Australia.”

I looked up at Harvey, springing on his heels ahead of us.

“Old man’s lost a few up here, don’t you think?” said Bryce, tapping his temple.

“I don’t know…” I said. Every word was a gulp. “He seems pretty good...at running.”
 

“Not denying that,” said Bryce. “But there’s nothing unusual about an old man who runs.” He leaned in again. “They’re always out there, aren’t they? Skinny bastards hobbling about in mangy shorts with their wee cocks flapping about inside.” He mimed a few flaps with his hand and grimaced. “Big difference between that and running thousands of miles across a desert, though, isn’t there? I’m telling you, he’s not right.”

Bryce suddenly looked over my head at something.

“Service station,” he shouted to the others. “On the right. Worth a shot?”

“How long have we been going?” said Grimes

Richard checked his watch. “A little over two hours,” he said.

“OK,” said Grimes. “We can take five minutes.”

We crossed the barrier and found the service station. It was empty. We rested and moved on.

The road and the landscape changed again. We saw craters on our left, small at first, then large. One huge canyon loomed to the right. The ground around us seemed to become even more absent of anything man-made than before. There was nothing, not even the memory of buildings remained, and no trees, of course. The road itself became more cracked, the spaces between potholes ever shorter. More of the cars appeared to have been burned until every one was a black husk, some still with bodies at their wheels like used matchsticks that might turn to ash in the next strong wind. Then, fewer and fewer cars were even there at all. Eventually the road disappeared completely until we were running on nothing but rock-strewn dirt covered by a layer of frost. The landscape was flat, colourless, scrubbed clean of life.  It was as if the world had disintegrated into two dull halves: brown earth and grey sky.