The End of the World Running Club (45 page)

The music was a slow, hymnal drone; deep flutes and woody, reverent descant searching for a melody above. In the sea were three men in black, standing in water up to their waists. Two held larger torches much higher than the rest. The third stood in front of them holding a book.  Each member of the procession moved up to meet him, whereupon he would touch them on the forehead, read from the book, move his hand around their scalp and push them down gently into the filthy brine. He read from the book as he held them there. A baptism, I thought. But the hand remained clamped against the scalp and the head far beneath the water until the white dress began to flap in the torchlight and the water began to splash and froth. Occasionally, one or more of the two torchbearers would step forward to help out with a particularly wild struggle. And then the body would twitch and finally lie still and float away with the rest behind them towards the dark horizon, and the next would be beckoned to the front.

We watched it all for an hour at least. In horror at first, then in confusion, anger, sadness and finally restlessness, as the lack of light drove us to think of shelter and safety for the night. Apathy arrives very quickly.

“Idiots,” said Bryce. It was the second thing any of us had said all day. “Let’s go.”

We rejoined the main road and ran until we could no longer hear the terrible music or the crashing of the sea. When it was dark we had reached the borders of a small town, where we found a multi-storey car park that was still - barely - standing. We started a fire on the second floor of the stairwell using the wood from a half-burned door. We had no food. A deep puddle had formed in a hole in the concrete. We boiled some of the water in the unbroken can of Alice’s stringyphone and shared it out in sips, then boiled some more. Fires started in the distance. They were small, so we weren’t worried, but we still kept a watch that night. I took the first. I drank another tin of boiled water and burned my lips on the metal to take away their dry itch. I spoke words into the can after every sip. I stared into the fire and out at the others burning around the demolished town and thought about gravity, about how it holds everything, even things with no weight, like thoughts, dreams, love. Even flames struggle to escape it.  Everything is weighed down. Everything is pushed down towards the sea. Everything is kept at bay.

Some time after midnight I shook Richard awake and he took over. I went to sleep thinking of how it would feel to run through the night.
 

N
O
W
HITE
P
ROPHETS

I was awake before I really knew it; my eyes were open but my brain was far behind. Harvey was standing at the far corner of the car park and howling into the grey morning mist. I knew now that it was him I had been hearing. He had been the source of the animal howl that had woken me every morning since. I watched him raise his chin and pull back his arms to open up his chest, then release two strangled, dry yowls. The noise was dampened into fast-dying echoes by the wet stone, but some found its way outside and soared away into the low sky. I sat up so that he would see me watching when he turned. He did and said nothing; he acknowledged me with a quick smile and bent down to the puddle.

We each drank as much as we could of the dirty water, then filled the bottle with it, packed and left into another gloomy dawn. Harvey tried to make conversation, but Bryce and Richard were having none of it. They kept themselves apart, separating themselves from each other using Harvey and me as a wall.

“We need food,” was all Bryce said. There was nothing anyone could say back.

We navigated the stairwell of the car park and made our way out through the dull, empty streets of the crushed and nameless town, headed south again. The strange lightness I had felt and kept secret the day before had gone. I could feel and hear the bones of my hips, knees and ankles moving against each other. With every stride, my legs and back screamed that the next would be impossible. My head thumped with hunger and dehydration.

A heavy mist came down around us. The tarmac became broken up and we found that we were no longer running on the remains of a motorway, but on a smaller road with tight bends. We stopped at a car wreck in the ditch. It had been pulling a caravan that had separated and spun into a field where it now lay on its side. We avoided the car - it looked like a family inside - and searched the caravan, finding a dry, crumbled packet of digestives that we shared out silently in a circle. We emptied the contents of the caravan’s plumbing into plastic cups and drank it. There was a pool of filthy water in the bowl of the toilet. We drank that too, then we carried on.

The mist became heavier, then became fog. Richard, Bryce and Harvey were turning to ghosts in front of me.

Those few days are hard to piece together. I can’t say which event followed which, where we slept or which roads we took. We were all over the place. I had little idea of where everyone was at any given time. For long periods of time I was unaware of either thinking or running. I would suddenly come to and realise that I was still moving and still breathing, but that I had lost the others. I didn’t know if I was in front of or next to Bryce, if I had fallen far behind or if I had stumbled off the road and was now running in the wrong direction. I would move for miles in the steadily increasing resignation that I had lost them. Then a dark shape would appear and I would surge ahead, fixing my eyes upon it and resolving to keep my concentration. Thoughts became intangible and disconnected. They were like explosions of ash. Each one that arrived lasted only moments before it fell away and disintegrated, as if there was nothing to support it, nothing to hold it together. Eventually I would return into the same deep, oblivious trance where there was no pain, no thought, no memory.

Our rest stops were erratic and frequent. Sometimes without registering it I found myself leaning over, letting the wet mist drip down around my neck and across my boiling cheeks. Other times I would be either retching or hearing someone else do the same. During one stop, I pulled off my right boot and found that the back of my heel had become pulpy and white. I prodded it and a chunk of flesh sheered off, leaving a raw, pink welt behind. The pain was fierce, but distant and momentary. It was as if it - like my thoughts - could find nothing to latch on to, nothing to keep it alive.

On one occasion I opened my eyes and saw that I was lying on the ground by a ditch. I had been asleep. A dull panic swam across me, but I didn’t move. I looked around and found Bryce’s crumpled boot somewhere on the ground next to me, then the shapes of Richard and Bryce lying sprawled on the dirt. I wondered distantly if they had died. I focused on a clump of grass that was fluttering in the wind in front of me. It was coarse and brown, a stubborn, ugly fist of life still clinging on. There was movement beyond it and I looked up to see a large rook perched on a stone wall. It cocked its head and squawked loudly. Then it raised its black wings and jumped, gliding down to stand next to my head. It twitched its head left and right, inspecting me with its wings folded. I looked up at it, meeting its curious attention. For a brief moment I felt it might speak to me. Perhaps it was a blessing, sent to help me.
Get up
it would say.
Get up and run
. But then it pecked at my face. Its dark beak was quick and my right eyelid slow to close. A sharp pain funnelled into my brain and I jerked to full consciousness. Then it pecked again, the same eye, keeping its head down and its beak close this time. I brought my left hand around and slammed it down on top of the bird, smashing its neck into the dirt. Its wings flapped and rattled behind and it almost slid from my grasp, but I leaned up, putting my weight on my hand and bringing the other around to help until I was crouching above the bird, squashing it into the ground. Its eye flitted wildly around and its beak worked silently. Blood from my own eye trickled down my face and fell onto the bird’s slick feathers. I pushed hard. There was a series of snapping sounds and the bird lay still, its wings caught in one last spasm before curling slowly in like burning parchment.

I sat back on my haunches and caught my breath, looking down at the broken mess of bird below. The right side of my vision was a dark smudge. Pain stabbed at me erratically with every twitch of my eye, as if some vengeful ghost of the bird had already risen to resume its pecking from beyond death. I held a hand to my face and stood up. My knees and pelvis cracked. I woke the others and told them what had happened. Harvey tore of a strip of shirt and tied it in a knot around my head so that it covered my eye.

Then we ate the bird. If we had eaten it raw then I think that might have been the end of us. I think that would have been too much. Eating carrion is one thing, but the experience of biting through feathers and into warm sinews would have drained us of whatever last dregs of hope and volition we still held. We cooked it. Somehow we made a fire using Bryce’s lighter and some dry wood at the foot of the wall and we cooked it, plucked and gutted. It was foul, although the kidneys had a gamy, rich taste. There was barely enough meat to warrant a meal but the feeling of having made a fire and eaten anything seemed to restore enough will for us to get moving again. We waited for the fire to die and moved on.

I became aware of him quite soon after we ate the bird. I became aware that I had been aware of him for some time without acknowledging it. At this point it seemed as if my consciousness had sliced into independent layers, countless sheets of awareness, fragile, gossamer thin, each one acting without knowledge of the others. I was none of them. I merely flitted between them like a mote of dust between shafts of sunlight.

He was a presence, barely a person, just a feeling of somebody running near me that wasn’t Bryce, Richard or Harvey. He was always somewhere behind my left shoulder, just on the edge of my vision. Although I was moving slowly, he seemed to be travelling at speed, eyes ahead, sleek and wild like a wolf running low to the forest floor. If I turned, he disappeared. Or, rather, he became indistinct. He was like a distant star you could only see if you turned your eyes to the light years of space surrounding it.

He came and went. Sometimes he was close, sometimes he was impossibly far.

“How long have we been running in this fog?” I said.

“Over four hours,” said Richard.

“Are you sure we’re still going in the right direction?”

“No,” said Richard. “I’m not sure of anything.”

The fog became thicker until our clothes and hair became soaked. I sucked at the drips of water running down my face, craving the next each time.

“I don’t think this is fog any more,” said Harvey’s disembodied voice ahead.

“What is it then?” said Bryce gruffly.

“I think it’s a...a...holy shit.”

I felt a spade of light and heat slamming into my face. I shielded my eyes, nearly toppled back. I heard the others making noises, nothing intelligible, just noises of shock and awe, the sounds people make when they have no words at hand.

Very slowly, I peeled back my hand from my eyes and allowed them to focus and adjust to what was in front of us.

Blue. Blue and yellow. Sky and sun.

Blue, cloudless sky and bright yellow sun. The entire horizon visible before us, all one hundred and eighty degrees of it.

We walked without talking. We felt the warmth of the December sun on our faces, tasted fresh air, felt our minds fill with colour,
blue, blue, blue
, felt the pressure drop in our ears. My heart reeled as my senses span into overdrive. I thought it would kill me. But it didn’t, the feeling settled and eventually we were just four men walking in the sunshine, struck with awe.

“It was a cloud,” said Harvey. “We were running in a cloud. Look.”

He raised a finger and pointed ahead. About half a mile in the distance, the shining mud on which we were walking stopped sharply and became a white mass. As we drew nearer, we saw it stretch further and further into the distance, until the entire ground ahead of us had turned into a fluffy, amorphous blanket.

We stopped at the threshold. The ground fell away sharply at our feet.

“That’s cloud,” said Bryce. “Beneath us, that’s cloud. This is a canyon.”

We stood and surveyed the endless white all around us and ahead of us.

“A very big one,” said Harvey.

Richard fell to crouch. The crumpled map hung loosely in his hand.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to Birmingham.”

We sat on the edge of the canyon for a while, trying to dry ourselves in the sun, still marvelling at it, yet growing more and more aware of the fact that we were soon going to be leaving it.

“We have to go down,” said Richard.

“What about finding a way around?” said Harvey.

“We have no idea how big this thing is,” said Richard. “We could be miles out of our way before we find a way around.”

“How many days until Christmas?” I said.

“Five,” said Richard.

“There’s no time,” I said. “There’s no time. We have to go down.”

I looked up at the sun one last time and let myself slip down from the edge.

“Ed!” shouted Harvey. “Wait!”

It was steeper than I had imagined it to be - not a sheer drop, although I’m sure a part of me was hoping it would be, but closer to vertical than was comfortable. I fell, scrambled, bumped along, hitting rocks and debris and trying to stay on my back. At times I left the ground completely, every time feeling sure that I was about to fall to my death, but every time landing back with a heavier thump with mud and scree hurtling beneath me. Something hit my hand and I felt a snap. I tucked in my limbs and shut my eyes and let gravity pull me further and further down into the pit. I heard the others above me, calling, then shouting out themselves as they started to fall. Down and down and down I went, further than seemed possible. Then I hit something hard with my shoulder, span and came to rest on flat ground, staring up into a high sheet the colour of slate.