The End of the World Running Club (38 page)

“I am sorry for the escort, really I am,” she said.

“Escort?” said Grimes.

“Aye, I can’t have just anyone walking around the place,” she said. “Dangerous, see, don’t know who you are.” She walked slowly around us, looking at our boots and packs. When she had completed a circle, she puffed a satisfied blast of air through her squat nose.

“Y’look very tired,” she said. “And hungry. Come with me and we’ll get you seen to.”

The woman turned to lead us away, but Richard interrupted.

“Mrs Rae,” said Richard.
 

She stopped in mid-stride and looked back over her shoulder, frowning. “Miss,” she said.

“Miss Rae,” Richard corrected. “I don’t fully understand why you felt the need to bring us out to you, and thank you for the offer of food, but we really need to get going. We’re on a tight schedule. If you could just allow us to leave, we’ll be out of here and on our way.”

Jenny Rae allowed the rest of her body to turn back to face the same way as her head. She looked sideways at Richard, annoyed, lodged her tongue in her cheek, then looked up at the sky.

“Be dark soon,” she said. “Too dangerous.” She nodded, her mind made up. “You’ll stay here tonight, have dinner, leave in the morning.” She motioned to two boys nearby.

“You don’t understand,” I said. Her eyes narrowed as they moved imperceptibly in my direction. “We’re already late, we need to get going now.”

“Late?” she said. “Late for what?” She fixed her legs apart and craned her neck forwards, wobbling on her hips and pulling a ridiculous face. “Godda date?” she drawled, to great hoots of laughter from the children on the street.

“The boats,” I said. “We need to get to the boats.”

Her eyes widened ever so slightly at this. She flapped her arm down violently to hush the laughter.

“Boats, is it?” she said, looking down her nose at me, legs still wide in her comedy stance. “Met some more like you t’other day.” She looked suspiciously between us. “Wonder if you know ‘em?”

We said nothing, although every one of us was now thinking of Yuill and Henderson. There had been no sign of them since we found the abandoned Land Rover before Carlisle. Would they have taken the same route, found themselves in Manchester too, met the same escorts out to Jenny Rae?

After a few moments of silence she puffed indignantly.

“Boats,” she said. “Alright. Tell you what, you stay with us tonight and we’ll give you a lift out of Manchester first thing, make up for a bit of time.”

“Lift?” said Grimes. “You have a car?”

“A car?” said Jenny Rae, her face frozen in shocked amusement. “Ha! You don’t know the half of what we’ve got love. Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

We followed Jenny Rae along the street and out into a closed circle of red-brick, squat council houses that sat around a small patch of land that may once have been covered in turf. It was now frozen dirt flecked with snow. In the centre, stuck in the hard ground, was a wooden stake about ten feet tall. A few younger children were playing football around it and stopped as we passed, a young boy with badly shaved hair held the football between his hands and watched us walk behind Jenny.

“James…” she said, a low warning in her voice. The child whipped his gaze away from us and threw the football back into the game.

“Ah’ve always lived here,” she said as we walked around the circle. “Lived in that house when I was a girl.” She pointed back at a dull green door. “Then moved to that bigger one when I married.”

More faces at the windows as we walked, families peering out through broken glass and dirty curtains.

“It’s never once occurred to me to leave,” she said proudly. “It’s home, always has been, always will be. I’ve raised my kids here and now it’s their home too.” She turned to us. “Not many can say that these days,” she said, then caught herself, released a terrible hoot of laughter. “Well, not now anyways, eh?”

She laughed to herself for a while longer as the five of us exchanged looks. We had no idea what kind of person we were dealing with here. When she had finished chuckling, she pointed up to the sky.

“Before it happened, you know,” she said. “Before them things fell to Earth, you couldn’t see all this sky, not as much of it anyway.” She traced a finger around the circle of black cloud that hung perpetually above us, smiling. “Tower blocks,” she said. “One, two three, four, five of them.” She dotted her finger at spots above the rooftops. “All around us, blocking out the bloody light. I didn’t mind much, it were all I knew, but my dad did.” She cupped a hand to her mouth. “Didn’t you, Dad?” she shouted across the circle to an old man struggling with a key in a door. A plastic bag was looped over his arm. He looked back and grunted something, shook his head and went back to working the lock. She waved him away. “Deaf as a post.”

A girl in a pink puffer jacket cycled past. She veered in suddenly towards us and made Harvey jump a few steps.

“Watch it, Danni!” said Jenny Rae as the girl pedalled away, giggling. “They’re good kids mostly. We have our problems like anywhere, but we get by.”

“How many people live here?” said Harvey, straightening himself out.

She shrugged. “Hard to tell, changes all the time, people come and go. Come mostly. About two hundred here I think, then there’s another three we’ve got across the field, hundred in…

“Field?” I said.

“Aye, that’s what we call it. The field. No man’s land.” Her eyes filled with volition. “It will be one day though. Promise you that.”
 

More faces, scared, somehow out of place behind the grey netting. She led us around to the opposite wall of the circle and into a tunnel that cut through between the houses. Three teenaged boys were huddled at the opening, smoking.

“Jenny,” one said, a broad smirk on his face as they looked us up and down.

“Boys,” said Jenny Rae. “Go and tell No. 73 they’re having guests tonight.”

“Alright, Jenny,” said the same boy.

“Take their bags as well,” she said.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Grimes. Bryce growled.

“I insist,” said Jenny Rae, fixing Grimes with a stare. The boys moved forwards. Grimes let her pack fall. We followed, hesitantly.

The boys gathered up our packs and we walked on. One of them muttered something and the other two burst into that horrible, strained laughter that can only be achieved with a teenaged throat. The tunnel was long and low. Darkness was falling fast outside and I felt time moving on. Another day lost, another day further from Beth.

“When it happened I thought we were done for,” she went on. “All them lights, beautiful really but they came down so fast. I saw a couple, just small ones I suppose, hitting Ash.”

“What’s Ash?” said Grimes.

“Ash Court. One of the towers. Ash, Beech, Oak, Hawthorn and Willow.” She counted them off on her fingers and held them up for us to see. “I saw the top of Ash explode, then another hit lower down and it started to fall. That’s when I ran inside. I thought I was going to be crushed. I thought all the towers would fall on top of us and that we’d all be squashed into the ground. I just held onto my kids and kept my head down, tried not to listen to all the explosions and screams outside. I started praying, got the kids to pray as well, I’d never prayed in my life before! Never even taken them to church! After a few hours, when all the noise had died down, I went outside and the sky was filled with flames and black smoke everywhere. The towers were gone, but somehow...somehow we were still alright. All this was still here.”

We left the tunnel and came out onto another road with a tall metal fence on the other side. Behind it was a small warehouse, and beyond that was the burned, barren wasteland we had walked across.

“I mean, look at it,” she said. “Were we friggin’ saved or what?”

She laughed. A terrible big, booming, donkey-like laugh, too long and too loud.

She kept laughing as she led us along the road to a short stretch of red-bricked semi-detached houses set back behind small, grassless front gardens. They looked out onto the expanse of empty ground behind the fence. She stopped and turned us toward the view, admiring it like a farmer looking across a well-ploughed field. In the distance, the buildings of the city centre rose out of the mist. Along the edge of the wasteland I could see the crumbling blocks and the new sea lapping against them. We were on the coast, separated from the city by a long, open, flat urban moor.
 

On the other side of the fence, two men in black jackets walked up and down. They held guns. One raised a hand at Jenny and she returned the greeting.

“I don’t know what it was like with you,” she said, barely containing her glee, “but the fires burned for weeks here. We still thought we were dead, that they’d reach us here and we’d burn alive, but they never did. Then there was fighting, a lot of fighting. The city didn’t get it too bad, see. It were a mess, lots of people dead, but not as bad as some places from what I’ve heard, London and that, y’know. It were mostly the suburbs that got it. Everyone who survived, working class, middle class, people from estates and those from the nice parts, we all rushed into the centre to find food. It were chaos for a long time. The police, what was left of them, tried to keep control but there were riots that went on for days.  The city centre got more damage from them than the whatdjyamakcallits. At first, all the nice folks, middle-class ones like you” - she turned to me - “they all sided with the police, thought they were going to protect them.” She started laughing again, swung back on her hips. “Friggin’ pigs didn’t know what they were doing! All they were doing were protecting themselves. It were chaos. Guns, gas, riot shields, all that nonsense.” She wiped her eye. “These men and women, the ones you see in suits and high heels, always rushing around dropping their kiddies off at the big schools, they didn’t know what to do, running all over the place and trying to hide in burnt-out shops. They weren’t used to feeling unprotected, unsafe.

“Couldn’t help feeling sorry for them,” she said. She scraped her boot on the side of the pavement, looked at the heel. “But then a funny thing happened.” She looked up, as if startled by the memory. “They started coming to us, asking for help, food, water for their kids. Can you believe that? Coming to us?”

More laughter. The more time we wasted listening to her and the closer we got to sunset, the more unsettled I felt. I felt nerves bristling in the others too. I wanted to get away, scale the fence, scramble across the wide, barren plane and get out of the city and on my way. I wanted to run.
 

When she had stopped laughing, she snorted, coughed, spat and ground the result into the dirt with her heel. Suddenly there was the sound of an engine in the distance and a window at the end of the street turned orange. Grimes spun around.

“Is that…” said Grimes. “Do you have electricity?”

Jenny Rae smirked.
 

“I heard this story once,” she said, zipping her jacket up and burrowing her hands into her pockets. “About how the future would turn out. The future back then, you know, not the future now. All the people who know how things work, the people with degrees and can make computers and toasters and that, they’d all live on the hills behind electric fences. Everyone else would live and die in shit.” She turned to us. “They wouldn’t need us any more you see, wouldn’t need our money.”

Another light went on in a house closer to us.

“Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” she said.  “Now, who’s hungry?” She turned to face Bryce. “What about you, big lad? What are you for?” She patted his belly twice. “Balti? Madras? Vindaloo?”

Jenny Rae led us to the end of the street, where we turned left, following the fence. Almost every house had at least one window lit, but halfway along there was a brighter, white light coming from a glass-fronted shop. A queue of people was spilling out of its door and onto the street. Steam and smoke billowed from its windows.  I smelled spices and a strange meaty tang on the air.

Bryce almost stumbled. He made a short gasping noise. “Is that...is that a takeout?” he said, his voice caught somewhere between anger, hope and joy.

“Aye,” said Jenny Rae, as if he’d asked something ridiculous. “Where would we be without a curry, I ask you.”

We got closer to the shop and Bryce began walking faster.

“Easy there, fella,” said Harvey under his breath. “What do you think they’re cooking in there?”

“I’ve never asked that question before,” muttered Bryce, raising his snout to the air like a hound on the scent. He inhaled deeply. “And I’m not about to start.”

When we reached the front of the shop, the queue was stretching out down the dark street. Cocky, tracksuited teenagers, smoking and hooting and shoving each other in the back, older men and women with pushchairs and beer cans and then, occasionally, a quiet huddle of faces started out from the line. Dark eyes, pale skin and frightened mouths. Clothes that weren’t theirs. They kept their heads down. This was not where they came from.

“Excuse me,” said Jenny Rae as we reached the door. A hole opened up obediently in the queue and she led us up to the shining aluminium counter. I squinted under the bright, fluorescent light, aware that we were being scrutinised by the crowds of people waiting around us, leaning against the tiled walls and the dirty glass behind us. We were only safe here because of the woman we were with.

Behind the counter were two Indian men. One hollered something back to the kitchen behind, noisy with sizzling flesh and clanging metal pans. Another was pushing back a small booklet across the counter to a man next to Jenny.

“No good,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re out till next month.”

The man, in his seventies, thick-set with short, thick white hair and stubble, slowly retrieved the booklet from the counter and slid it inside his thick, black, woollen overcoat. He shuffled around to leave, but Jenny Rae placed a hand on his forearm.

“Give him what he wants, Abdul,” she boomed. “Just this once.”

The old man looked into Jenny Rae’s face.

“Obliged,” he said. “Thank you Jenny.”