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

by Adrian J. Walker

The line between any two points in your life is liable to be strange and unfathomable, a tangle of chance and tedium. But some points seem to have clearer connections, even ones that are far from each other, as if they have a direct line that bypasses the normal run of time.

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.

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.

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.

The living would run through the dust of the dead, just as they always had done.

It’s hard being a human. Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we’re doing, and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we’re just lucky.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. 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 how you’re going to move it behind you.

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.

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.