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

by Adrian J. Walker

Things of certainty about things uncertain.

Parents trailed behind them, lumbering on all fours through the hot fug of their own offspring like damned souls in some long-forgotten circle of hell.

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.

I kept stumbling on, putting one foot blindly in front of the other, watching it all, filling my fat face with it all, frowning at it all, wanting it all to just go away.

I was never that much into social media (all those pleas to like this, share that, validate me, laugh at me, support me, update this, or upgrade that—I just couldn’t take it),

We’re idiots. Creatures of denial who have learned not to be afraid of our closets. We need to see the monster in the room before we scream.

And that’s when we finally got it, with no time left to prepare.

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.

To me, running was just showing off, a way for self-obsessed pricks to show how much more focused, disciplined, and healthy they were than you.

Perhaps there was a reason why we had filled our world with distraction after all. Perhaps there was a reason why we surrounded ourselves with plastic and light and excess. Perhaps our collective consciousness remembered all too well what it was like in darkness, surrounded by wet, rotten wood, mud, and nothing good to eat.

It did no good to think too deeply about this, about what sort of world we were allowing Sofia to be raised in. This question is already the burden of every parent, no matter when or where they

“Ed,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re capable of.”

We had made it only two miles from the plane before I called the others to stop. They stood around me, sipping water and mumbling words of encouragement as I gasped for breath on my knees. I said nothing back because I knew all I wanted to say was that I couldn’t go on, that I had never felt this bad, that the road ahead would defeat me without even noticing I had trodden on it with my weak and trembling feet, that I had made a mistake, that I was cold and hungry, that I was fantasizing about what giving up would feel like, that there would probably be other ships, that I was already dealing with the shame of accepting that my family was gone so that I could return to the relative comfort of not walking. That I did not like running or walking or any kind of exercise. That I despised it. That I would never ever get used to it. I said nothing. Caught my breath. Carried on.

But don’t get into the habit of letting people tell you what to believe, son. That’ll get you into all sorts of strife.

I didn’t feel like I was winning and couldn’t imagine a time when I might overcome these physical and mental obstacles standing in my way. Every second was a breath away from screaming out stop and falling to the ground. At times it felt like I was so close to doing so that I actually felt my legs slowing down, my head bowing, and my hands falling to my knees, actually felt the sickening combination of shame and relief as I gave up. But then I would realize that I had not slowed down, that my head was still facing up, that my arms were still swinging weakly by my sides, and I would be back to feeling torment, mixed, for the briefest of moments, with a kind of proud surprise.

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.

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.

My eyes were drawn to the water lapping around the edges of the city, out of place and unsure of itself against its new shore. I saw tiny white specks, gulls moving around on the waves and flapping clumsily up onto high window ledges, the urban cliffs in which they were now making nests. An erosion was beginning, which, I imagined, would result in a beach after enough time. The sand would be made of bones, credit cards, fridges, cars, and sofa springs. Dunes would form and grow tufts of grass. The sun might eventually shine on them, a young boy might tumble down them, laughing, rolling in the trillion, trillion fragments of debris and detritus, dust ground from the lives who had once walked the bed of the rolling ocean into which he crashed. The living would run through the dust of the dead, just as they always had done.

The task seemed less impossible the more we pushed on. Every mile I conquered was one less to endure.

Hope became my drug.

“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 make you feel something like how the truth would make you feel if you could hear it.”

I mean you, everyone. We, I suppose. The human race. Where are you going?”

“It’s never the end, Ed.”

against the

“Anyway, just saying: I’ve seen a few things myself. I know how weird it can get. We’re not really supposed to be on our own, Ed, we’re not built for it. Spend too much time running away from reality and that’s exactly where you get.”

“When I was a boy my father told me that life was like being on a boat,” he said. “You can’t control the wind and you sure as hell can’t control the ocean. One day it’s calm and the next it’s a storm, and there’s nothing you can do about that. All you get is a tiller and a sail and the weather you find yourself in.”

“We’re all born screaming, Ed. The moment we pop out our throats open, and the same scream bursts out that always has. We see all the lights and faces and the shadows and the strange sounds, and we scream. Life screams, and we scream back at it. After a bit of time we learn to be quiet; we learn to muffle it. But life doesn’t stop. It just keeps screaming. All. The. Time.” He tapped his finger on the table three times and sat back.

You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over.

If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance

or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and ho...

I wasn’t numb, just indifferent; the pain was still there but it didn’t seem to matter as much.

I was running, and my body wanted everything to do with it. My mind wanted everything to do with it.

I don’t know what happened between then and now. We never stay constant, no matter what we promise; the world has its way of pulling you about the way it wants. But some things pull you back to where you were before. Like a woman’s face through the bars of a gate.

“I have and I’ll change. I will. All I want is you.” I held my hand to touch Arthur’s gleeful face and smiled, then looked down at Alice, looking up at me with that dark look of hers. “You and these things here. I’m just sorry it took the end of the world to make me see that.”

You want to know the truth. You want to know if what happened happened. I’ll tell you what I believe.

But I know where I’m going, and that’s good enough.