The End of the World Running Club (47 page)

“It’s all about resonance,” he said. I sensed his giant gaze washing across my shoulders, waiting for a response, but I kept my eyes shut, running blindly in the mud.

“I’ve got a story if you want one?” he said. I didn’t answer.

“OK,” he said chirpily. “So I knew a woman in India, lived on the mudflats next to the Ganges. Her house only had three walls and even they weren’t really what you’d call proper walls, not like you get nowadays. Anyway, so the front of the house opened out onto a deck and the deck ran down into the grass and the grass ran into the reeds and the reeds ran into the water. Over time, the water had risen over some of the reeds and the reeds had grown across some of the grass and some of the grass had grown over some of the deck and into the house. There was water from the river in her house and everything else in between. Crabs, flies, flowers, toads, spiders, I even saw a fish. Likewise, some of her house was in the river.”

His gaze again, awaiting a word from my mouth that never came.

“See?” he said. “There’s only an outside and an inside if you close the doors.”

“I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say.”

There was no answer. I turned and he was gone.

I carried on across the plain. Piles of earth began to appear, small at first, then large. When it got dark I found one and burrowed beneath it to sleep. I woke up retching, drank from a puddle and pushed on, alternating between a stumble and a delirious stagger. Halfway through the morning, I felt the familiar presence behind my left shoulder.

“So where are we going?” he said. It took a while for me to find the will to answer.

“You know where I’m going,” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t mean you, personally, now, with the running and everything. I mean you, everyone. We, I suppose. The human race. Where are you going?”

“I thought you were supposed to tell us that?”

“I already told you, I’m not here to tell you anything you don’t already know. In fact, I don’t
have
anything to tell you that you don’t already know. I’m quite simple really, when it comes down to it.”

“Peace and love, I suppose,” I coughed. Spat. Missed the ground and hit my arm. I wiped a thick string of phlegm from my face. My throat hurt. Everything hurt.

“Sure, why not? What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?” He sang the words and laughed another honest, wholesome laugh.

“Seriously though, where?” he said. “It’s a serious question.”

I laughed, a sad, maniacal laugh that sounded terrible next to his. It embarrassed me and I chomped my jaws shut.

“Where are we going?” I said. “Look around you!”

He did what I asked, looking up and back and down and ahead.

“What?” he said.

“It’s not where we’re going, it’s where we’ve gone!” I said. “This is it, the end. We’re done.”

He frowned and pulled back his head into his neck.

“The end?” he said. He shook his head. “It’s never the end, Ed.”

He looked down at his watch, suddenly distracted, as if he had just remembered something.

“Now listen,” he said. “It gets a bit hardcore up ahead, so this is where I get off. Just remember, Ed, don’t panic.”

He stretched out his arm and laid a warm hand, full of goodness, onto my shoulder. I felt tears in my sick eyes at his touch. It disarmed me; not because I thought he was real, but because I knew the opposite. I was creating this. I was creating this thing of hope. It was already inside of me, it didn’t come from anywhere else.

“Everything’s going to be OK,” he said. Then he let his hand fall and he broke off into the mist and disappeared.

“…Probably,” I heard him cough in the distance.

And then it was me, just me, running, stumbling, coughing and spluttering in the mud and the mist of a nameless pit. I was in the dark. Alone, alone, alone. Running alone, as I was sure I always had been. How hard did this have to be? How hard to simply exist, to move, to twitch muscles, to think, hope, accept, move, love and be loved.

There was some noise in the distance. Music, I thought.

I hit a rock and my right foot bent outwards. I sprawled into the cold, frozen mud and lay back, wide-eyed and horrified at the new pain in my ankle.

How hard? How hard did this have to be? To live?

And then I was back in Edinburgh, lying on the bedroom carpet and staring up into a shaft of winter sunlight swarming with weightless dust. It was a couple of months after Arthur was born. Beth and I were exhausted, with weeks of broken sleep behind us and nothing but the promise of the same ahead. We had argued fiercely about something ridiculous like the temperature of milk and I had retreated upstairs with Alice. She was toddling about on the other side of the bed, trying out new words, squealing at something. I lay, listening to my breathing with my eyes half-shut while Beth slammed cupboard doors and sobbed downstairs.

How hard?
I thought.
 How hard does this have to be? To bring life into the world?

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alice looking at me, smiling, her chubby fists at her mouth, realising something, plotting something, excited by a new scheme. She ran across to me and stopped suddenly at my head, gazing down through the light shaft onto my tired, drawn face. Then she bent over and paused, hovering above my head and searching my tired face, breathing little, excited breaths. Then she placed her lips softly on my brow. It was the first time she’d ever kissed me.

I choked on a lungful of icy air and I was back in the pit. I peeled my head from the mud and got to my feet. There was the sound somewhere of somebody howling, me I supposed as my twisted ankle took its first weight. The noise of the music was growing louder. I staggered forward and broke into a limping run towards the sound. And then I was stumbling, gasping and shuddering up a hill.
 

And then the mist cleared.
 

And I felt warmth.

And I broke out into bright sunlight, blue sky and a thundering wall of sound.

It was freezing cold and brighter than I imagined anything had ever been. I watched it all through my one good eye. My right was sealed shut with scabs beneath Harvey’s bandage. There were people everywhere, crowds, hungry faces, worried faces, lost faces, happy faces, drunken faces, toothless mouths, camp-fires and makeshift tents made out of rags and sticks, sizzling meat, smoke and steam, stalls selling food, tattered clothes, families keeping close, traipsing along in what appeared to be a gigantic queue snaking towards a tower of metal, beggars holding out their hands for food, musicians singing and playing, girls half naked and daubed with mud and paint, dancing, eyes closed, lost in something else away from the world, noise and movement all around them. A man in a ragged pinstriped suit and hollow eyes barged past me, spinning me into a fat woman and her child. She growled and shoved me and I fell. I heard laughter, then someone pulled me up and patted me on the back. I staggered on, trying to focus on something in the glare of the new sunlight. Every face that saw me reeled or sneered or looked away in horror. A topless teenaged boy walked past in sunglasses, six-pack and pectorals glistening in the sunshine, a grin of white teeth exposed for all the world to see. He had his arms around two girls. One of them looked me up and down, then pulled back her mouth as she saw my hand.

“Whatchoo staring at, mate?” said the boy. “Oy. I’m talking to you. Cyclops. Hear me? What the fack are you looking at?”

I moved back, but the boy had released his girls and was stepping towards me.

“Ed!” I heard a voice from through the throng and spun my head.

“Oy!” said the boy. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, you…”

And suddenly Bryce was there, towering next to the boy, holding a cup of something. I saw Harvey behind him. His arm was wrapped in a sling.

“Ed!” he said. “Christ, I thought we’d lost you for good!”

Bryce turned his head down to the boy, who had stopped talking.

“You got some trouble here, Ed?” said Bryce. “Ed?”

The world span again, tumbling down as my head hit mud and my eyes were filled with blue light.

F
AMILY

I woke up beneath a blanket in a warm, hard bunk. Light spilled down a dark wooden wall from a small window above. The room was moving to the sound of water gently slapping against a bow. I rolled over and saw Bryce sitting on a bunk opposite. I felt relief. I didn’t know why at first. It was ephemeral, a floating feeling with no cause or effect. Then I remembered the feeling of running alone, the feeling that I had always been running alone. But Bryce was there. He was right there in front of me, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands and hair hanging down to the floor.
 

You’re here
, I thought.

For a moment I thought I’d caught him in some vulnerable moment, imagining him to be in a kind of bedside vigil. I wondered how long he’d been there like that, worrying, hoping, praying. Then I heard a gaseous rumble erupt from somewhere deep in his throat. He retched and spat. I looked down and saw a bucket between his feet.

“Are you alright?” I said.

He lifted his eyes from the floor a little, then let them drop again. “Boats,” he whined. “Fucking hate boats.”

“Boat? What happened?” I said. “Where are we? What was that…”

I remembered leaving the canyon, feeling the shock of sunlight again, the freezing air, spinning around in some ghoulish carnival of noise and light. Bryce retched again. Something came up this time and hit the bucket in a single jet. He gave a moan of relief and sat up to look at me, wiping his mouth on his wrist.

“Why are we on a boat, Bryce?” I said. “What happened?”

“Uhh,” said Bryce.

“What day is it?”

“Huh…uhh.”

I sat up and threw off the blanket, rolling my feet off the bunk. “We have to…” I began, but stopped as my right foot hit the floor. I shrieked. I’d forgotten about my newly injured ankle. I clawed for it, remembering as I did so my mangled hand, howled and fell back on the bunk in the grip of two suddenly screaming pain centres. My eye joined the party by beating sharp thumps in the ensuing blood rush, until the entire right-hand side of my body was possessed by pain.

“Wouldn’t do that,” said Bryce. “It’s not broken, but it’s a bad sprain.”

As the pain subsided, I looked down at my shaking hand. The last time I had seen my fingers, they had resembled a cutlery drawer. Now they were set neatly and bandaged to a splint. My ankle was tightly bound. I felt a tight tape across my eye and suddenly registered the smell of antiseptic. I sat up slowly and placed my feet more carefully on the floor so that I was facing Bryce. I caught my breath. He looked back at me.

“Did I tell you I hate boats?” he said.

“You should be on deck,” I said.

“That just makes it worse,” he said. He looked pitifully down at the pale beneath him. “I’ve nothing left to hurl anyway.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said. “What was that place?”

Bryce took a deep, shuddering breath. “The place you passed out? That would be the gate. The way in.”

“The gate to the boats?” I said, leaning forward. Suddenly the feeling of water beneath us filled me with hope. I had no idea how long I’d been running alone or how many nights I had fallen into some hollow in the dirt, shivered through sleep and then crawled out to carry on. Was it possible that the canyon we had found at Birmingham stretched all the way down to the south coast? Was it possible that I had run all that way?

“Are we here?” I said, elated. “Did we make it?”

Bryce’s sour smile told me the answer before he spoke.

“No,” he said. “We’re in Bristol. Two hundred miles short.”

“What’s the gate then?” I asked.

“The way to the boats,” said Bryce. “The route to Falmouth. There’s a big chunk of the south coast that’s smashed up and water-logged. Cornwall’s cut off from the rest of the country by a long causeway that starts at Bristol. That’s where they built the gate. That’s where they decide who gets on the boats.”

“The queue,” I said. “They were all waiting to see if they’d be evacuated?”

“Aye,” said Bryce. “After the broadcast and the rescue missions, more people turned up than they expected. More people survived than we thought, I guess. There aren’t enough boats, so they’re turning a lot of punters away. Oh and there’s a virus as well, a bad one. A lot of people are dying from it without the meds. You have to be tested and given a stamp to even be considered. Plus you…” He paused and looked me up and down. “You have to be in a certain state of health to get on.”

“What about the people they rescued?” I broke in. “Beth, my children, Richard’s son.”

“The choppers got here first. Everyone on them is guaranteed a place.”

“I have to talk to Richard,” I said. “We have to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Er, that’s not going to be so easy,” he said. He looked uncomfortable, trying to read my expression. “Don’t worry, he’s fine, it’s just…Richard got through. He made it down to the boats.”

“What. How. What. I don’t understand.” The words fell out flat and sick.

“We got here the day before you did, Ed. I thought you were gone for good, we all did. Richard managed to talk to a guard, explained the situation, got himself bumped up to the front of the medical queue and got the all clear. He had a twelve-hour wait in the queue to the gate and then he was through.” He reached a hand forward for my arm, but let it fall back. “He’s going to try to find your family, Ed. He’s going to make sure they’re OK.”

“I can still make it,” I said. “I can find the same guard and tell him who I am. They have to let me through to my family.”

Bryce looked down at his bucket, adjusting it with his boot. “I’m sorry, Ed. The gates closed about an hour ago. They’re not letting anyone else through.”

My insides shrank to a tight coil. “What day is it?” I said.

“Christmas Eve,” he said. He ventured out another consolatory hand, pulling it back once again before it could land on my arm. “I’m sorry, bud. The boats leave tomorrow.”