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

by Adrian J. Walker

That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

Harvey told me that 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. Some days it would win, others it would lose.

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.

Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain.

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.

God is a shape that fits a God-shaped hole.

We’re not really supposed to be on our own, Ed, we’re not built for it.

“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. “I reckon it does you good to remind it that you can still scream back once in a while,” he said. “So that’s what I do. I wake up and tell the sun I’m still here. Still screaming.”

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.

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.