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

by Adrian J. Walker

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

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. How much more average they were than you—the subaverage gibbon who watched from a park bench with its prepacked lunch. Gyms were just as bad, except in gyms you had it coming at you from all angles: weight lifters out-lifting one another, cross-trainers quietly tapping up their speeds to match their neighbor’s, treadmillers pounding their feet to some nauseating soundtrack of their own puffed-up lives. Entire, windowless rooms crammed full of sweaty, unashamed, Lycra-clad peacockery.

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.