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

by Adrian J. Walker

if you have to go around digging up graves to prove your own sanity then you’ve probably already lost it.

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.

Belief, memory, fear—these things hold you back, weigh you down, stop you moving.

Everywhere I looked there was some kind of conflict: infants disagreeing, trying to lay their own boundaries, little souls crashing together. All that noise and clamor, life beginning as it meant to go on—a struggle.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved my wife and I loved my kids, but that doesn’t mean to say I had to be happy about it.

the cars sped by, endless, a swollen sea of souls washing past the windshield.

The truth is that the end of the world, for me at least, came as a relief.

Did you find no comfort in the knowledge that the show was over, that we didn’t have to keep it going anymore?

One week for the country to plunge from the blissful apathy of a heat wave, through detached concern, into that strange new territory of danger, threat, panic, and, finally, oblivion.

All I know is that the end—in the end—came from the skies.

The past is a foreign country, someone once said. They do things differently there.

Birdsong. The birds. The birds were missing.

The subtext of the man cave, of course, is that men don’t want to spend any time with their families.

You want to know how long it takes for the fabric of society to break down? I’ll tell you. The same time it takes to kick a door down.

The noise faded, and the light left the cellar. I switched on the Maglite. Then came the blast and the heat and the sounds of the earth tearing apart.

Not quite fright, not quite flight; just a quiet and necessary abandonment of human thought, as if we had adopted some default state that had existed long before us.

home-cooked fries hid behind slivers of baby broccoli like fat thieves behind a twig.

the doors suddenly burst open, and a mountain of hair and leather walked in.

Wide, freckled mounds of flesh clung to my lower back, hovering above my buttocks like unhappy clouds.

We both bristled with tired quarrels born in gray playgrounds.