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.

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.

The world had designed me to be something. I was supposed to be a survival mechanism, a series of devices and instincts built, tested, and improved upon over billions of years. I was a sculpture of hydrogen, evolution’s cutting edge, a vessel of will, a self-adjusting, self-aware machine of infinite resource and potential. That was what the world had designed me to be. A survivor. A human being. A man.

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.

“So the world ends, and you lot start a running club. I’ll drink to that.” Bryce raised his glass, and we followed. “To the end of the world,” he said. “To the end of the world running club,” said Lord Bartonmouth.

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.

We want God. We want this life to end, for the curtain to go up and a kind, loving face to smile down on us, a warm voice to call us through and explain everything to us. The hole is everything we don’t know and everything we suspect, and we need a truth to fill 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.

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.

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.

At the top, I turned and faced the sun. Then I held out my arms, and into the screaming heat of that distant fireball rising above me, I screamed right back.