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

by Adrian J. Walker

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.

“You know what the worst thing is about hangovers?” he said. He tapped his head. “This. All this shit up here. Sore head, sore stomach, pah…” He waved a hand. “Nothing. It’s all this nonsense going around your noggin. All the doom and the gloom and the guilt and woe. All the stuff that doesn’t really exist. That’s what brings you down.”

“Moment you can’t take somebody on their word, might as well give up. Not worth it anymore. Civilization’s dead.”

“About how the future would turn out. The future back then, you know, not the future now. All the people who know how things work, the people with degrees who can make computers and toasters and that, they’d all live on the hills behind electric fences. Everyone else would live and die in shit.” She turned to us. “They wouldn’t need us anymore, you see. Wouldn’t need our money.”