The End of the World Running Club: A Dystopian Survival Thriller About Endurance and Redemption

by Adrian J. Walker

I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

But it’s hard to stop thinking when there’s nobody else but you and a candle and an old house on the crumbling coast of a ruined country.

Edgar Hill, husband, father of two young children, homeowner, Englishman, full-time employee of a large, self-serving corporation, the name of which was soon to be scorched forever from its office walls—was the product of a sick environment, a civilization that had failed beyond hope. I wondered daily how we had ever even made it this far. It was a joke, pointless. How could we look after a planet when we couldn’t even look after our own countries, our own towns, our own communities? Our own families. Our own selves. Our own bodies. Our own heads. I was only halfway to the age when it’s OK to feel lethargic, cold, bitter, and confused, and yet I felt those things every minute of every day. I was overweight. I ate double portions, drank double measures, avoided exercise. I was inflating like a balloon on an abandoned gas cylinder. My world perplexed me—every day was a haze of confusion. My job grated my very core. My marriage gave me vertigo. And my kids… Well, I wasn’t what you’d call the most engaged father. I went through the motions

For me, then at least, being a husband and father meant being simultaneously exhausted and terrified. I was like a man on a cliff edge, nodding off.

The truth is that the end of the world, for me at least, came as a relief. Perhaps that comes across as heartless or selfish. All those people, all that horror, all that death. But was it just me? Didn’t you feel the same? Couldn’t you almost hear that collective sigh, sense the world’s shoulders loosen? Did you find no comfort in the knowledge that the show was over, that we didn’t have to keep it going anymore?

“Knew it. Parents, you’re all the same. You’re all ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that’ or ‘I can’t get my arse off the sofa; I’m tired’ or ‘My kids are so fuckin’ demanding, I don’t have time for anything else.’ Fuckin’ pathetic, the lot of youse. You chose to have the wee bastards.” He jabbed another finger at me and sat back in his seat. “You take your medicine!”

Early morning on a Sunday in Old Town meant people in late-license bars and clubs—the rough and dirty ones, places to be avoided. Bryce reasoned that the Rabbits were pill-heads, stoners, and kids on acid; thieves, criminals, and hooligans. They were used to running, used to surviving in shitholes. Those who survived the wreckage would find filthy, safe holes to shelter in, routes in and out of abandoned underground shops, and plenty of storerooms to plunder. It was ridiculous, of course. It spoke more about Bryce’s views on society than anything else. But nobody had a better theory.

I walked past Richard and Grimes. Bryce and Harvey looked at me curiously. The wind began to blow furiously around me, as if it had realized what I was about to do, even though I had not. You have to understand, you see, this wasn’t a choice. I hadn’t weighed the options; I hadn’t considered the practicalities; I hadn’t reached a logical conclusion. What happened next was not because of my own volition, not because I had found some hidden well of courage and determination. It happened because… Well, I can’t tell you exactly why it happened. Perhaps it happened only because I let it happen. I shall say this again: I hated running. I picked my way through the wreckage. Then I began to run.

Harvey told me that the resistance I faced wasn’t something I could ever beat. The best I could hope for was to learn how to fight it daily, to parry and lunge and keep it at bay by learning about how it worked. Some days it would win, others it would lose. He told me he learned this for himself while running through the Nullabor Plain. He had spent countless days beneath the sun, watching his shadow move around him as the sun arced across the sky, losing his mind with the heat and the unchanging landscape, and fighting his own resistance. He realized this resistance was like a shadow, and the darker the shadow was, the brighter the light shone. It was a part of me, and it would always be with me. When it was at its strongest, when things seemed to be at their worst, that’s when the brightest hope could be found. I should learn not just how to fight it, he told me, but, like every enemy, how to love it.

We think that language binds us, keeps us close, but sometimes I wonder how far apart we really are. We can make a million assumptions from the movement of an old man’s hand. Most of them are probably incorrect. All we have to go on is our own skewed window on the world. We’re like hermits living in the attics of big houses on lonely hills, watching one another with broken telescopes.

“I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after one another. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go live in a cave. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.”

I know now it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.

“I’d say you’ve let yourself be told too much already.” “What do you mean?” I said. “It means that maybe you should take things on face value for a change. Stop trying to unravel them.” He watched me for a while, light pouring from his face. “You’re white,” I said. “And you sound like you’re Welsh.” “Whatever you say,” he said with a shrug. “Jesus was supposed to be from the Middle East,” I said. “Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Ever wonder why there are no white prophets?” He shrugged again. “Maybe one day. Anyway, put it this way: You watch television, right? You know it’s not really little people stuck inside a box trying to entertain you. You know it’s just electronics and that inside; you know you’re just looking at lots of different pictures one after the other played really quickly, and you know those pictures are just made out of dots, right? But you’re still watching television, aren’t you? You’re still watching EastEnders or 24 or whatever.” He turned his eyes forward again. “Not so much nowadays, granted, but you get the idea. OK, put it another way: everything that happens, happens. In some form or other. Know what I mean?” I pulled my eyes back to the brown sludge stretching out in front of us. “Not really,” I said. “Do you know why people tell stories, Ed?” he said. He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t. He sniffed and went on. “Because the truth doesn’t really have any words of its own. They’re not enough, see? Stories work—good stories—because they...

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.

That other beast inside you, the one you rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes five hundred miles of agony. But mine was free now, for the first time since I was a boy, running with a grin like a wolf through moonlit bracken. Pain ran alongside me, kindred and beautiful and grinning my grin. I’ll always be here, it said. Always, but now we’re friends.

I felt like a child. I was a child; I am a child. Because we don’t grow up; we grow over, like weeds over new grass.