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

by Adrian J. Walker

I was down here, biting my fingernails and scratching my stupid head about questions of basic plumbing.

Note to self: learn basic plumbing

I pictured the morning of the strike, the road quickly filling with cars, people trying to escape mindlessly from the cities, not even registering that the damage would be unprejudiced.

At other times, I whiled away minutes of brain activity imagining the same conversation with him: me telling him exactly how wrong it was for him to ask someone to repeat themselves when they had barely started talking, that you could work out missing words in sentences by the context provided by the others.

some older adolescents skulked in covens along the sidewalks.

In the end, I thought, this is how we all end up: running alone through our own wilderness, the landscape of disjointed events that form our lives, with nobody to make sense of it but ourselves. The road is ours, and ours alone.

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