The End of the World Running Club Read online

  “Alice!” I shouted. “Get down in the cellar, NOW!”

  Alice began a low moan.

  “ED!” shouted Beth. “Don’t, you’re upsetting her! Come on, darling, Daddy didn’t mean it.”

  “There’s no time! There’s no fucking time! Get down there NOW!”

  Alice’s moan rose up like the air raid siren. The air was now a nightmare of wails and howls of different pitches and intensities. The woman’s face was at the door, wild with terror and rage. Others behind had broken through our gate and were following up behind her. I ran to the cellar door and threw the crates of water down past Beth. I found our Maglite, grabbed it from one of the shelves and pushed it down the back of my shorts. Then I started pushing Alice towards the cellar hatch. She squealed and tried to wriggle away.

  “Alice, you need...”

  “NooooOOOO DADDEEEEE!!”

  Bodies were now pressed against our kitchen door, hammering and kicking the glass from top to bottom.

  No choice.

  “Alice,” I said. “I’m sorry, darling.”

  Beth instinctively withdrew down the steps with Arthur.

  I picked Alice up and dropped her down into the pit. She hit the stone floor with a thud and the air left her tiny lungs with a huh.

  Silent, winded, she tried carefully to get to her feet, but slipped and fell on her face. As Beth helped her up and brushed her down, Alice whimpered in shock at the betrayal I had just dealt her.

  I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the faces at our kitchen window. Then I followed Alice down and went to pull down the hatch.

  “I want my bunnies,” she said quietly.

  Fuck. The fucking, fucking bunnies.

  “Tell me you got her bunnies,” I said to Beth.

  “Oh no, oh shit,” said Beth. “Oh bollocks, they’re upstairs in her bed.”

  Alice’s bunnies went everywhere with her. In bed, in the car, on the sofa, at the table, at nursery. Everywhere. When she had a fall or when she was tired or when she was scared, they were her only source of comfort.

  When she was scared. I looked down into the gloom of the cellar.

  How long...?

  “My bunnies.” Alice said again, deadpan, no emotion, hand held out, all business.

  I weighed up the options. An unknown time spent in the cellar. An unknown time before fuck knows what happened to Edinburgh. Faces at the window trying to get in, trying to get to us. One of the square panes of glass in the door broke and a fist came through it.

  Suddenly, the air raid siren stopped. The air around us seemed to lurch in the silence as if we’d all just hurled ourselves over a cliff-edge. We were free-falling now, free-falling into whatever came next.

  I leapt up the steps and through the kitchen, up the stairs and into Alice’s room. My heart thumped in my throat. Everything was eerily quiet after the noise. The dog had stopped. Alice had stopped. Even the mob outside had stopped in momentary confusion.

  The bunnies were on Alice’s pillow. I grabbed them and turned but stopped as I left for the door. Out of the window, on a branch in our tree was a single small bird. It was a blue tit perhaps, chirping merrily away and flicking its head about like small birds do. Behind it, far away against the blue sky, I saw something else. A small dark shape that shouldn’t be there. Not a plane but something like it. A tiny speck moving quickly, a dark trail behind it. Then more behind that.

  I bolted down the stairs and threw Alice’s bunnies down to her. She pulled them to her face and began furiously sucking her thumb, rubbing their soft ears against her cheek. I fell down the steps and pulled down the hatch. As I did, I risked one last look at the door. The mob had renewed their attack on it. The first woman had her face and palms squashed against the glass. Fifteen or twenty others surrounded her, their pummelling fists sometimes connecting with the back of her skull.

  By her side was a little girl not much older than Alice. She was wearing a nightie and holding onto the woman’s leg - her mother, I supposed. She looked at me through one of the lower panes of glass, strange and calm amidst the rage and panic above her. A trickle of urine ran down her mother’s thigh and over the girl’s hand.

  Silence again, the noise sucked from the air. A blinding white light blossomed in the sky behind the faces at the window.

  I slammed the hatch shut.

  CLOSE LIVING

  When I was a boy I had a favourite fantasy. It wasn’t about sex - I was eight or nine and the world was an infinite green field; I had no inkling of the deep precipice of puberty that yawned ahead. My fantasy was of a world without people. I would wake up and open the curtains to another bright summer’s day. Everything would seem normal. Cars lined the street, flies buzzed in the morning sun, starlings chirped in the tree on the street and a dog padded by our gate lolling its tongue. There might even have been a paper stuck in the fencepost. I would get dressed, walk downstairs and find breakfast laid out on the kitchen table. But no Mum and Dad, no sister, no brother. I would call for them through the house as if I didn’t know what had happened. I always added this detail to the fantasy, pretending for as long as possible that I was finding myself in this world for the first time. There would be no reply. All the rooms would be empty, the beds made, the curtains drawn. My family had disappeared. I would eat breakfast - usually Sugar Puffs, as I was only allowed that on Saturdays, grab my BMX from the shed and head out into the village.

  The streets would be empty and warm. I would call at friends’ houses knowing that there would be nobody there, then try the newsagents and find an open, fully stocked shop with no one to serve. I would walk slowly between the shelves, helping myself to sweets and comics. Then I would ride around the village, swerving onto the wrong side of the road and back. The primary school would be next. The gates would be open and I would cycle around the playground, then into the building and through the dusty, cool rooms of the school itself, observing my own empty coat hook and desk, the walls still daubed with paintings and the blackboard rubbed clean. Then it was out through the back gates and down the lane past the big houses, shouting hello! louder and louder, pumping my pedals faster and faster, filling with glee as I accepted the reality that I was alone in a world emptied of human life. At the bottom of the lane I would stop at a curved row of mansions, the posh part of the village. I would step through the hedge and into one of the back gardens of the house belonging to a woman I used to see walking her dogs down our street. She would have been in her thirties and her smiles gave me feelings I couldn’t quite place, feelings that crept directly from that same yawning precipice ahead. Her garden had a pond with a willow tree and a swimming pool. In my fantasy I would jump into the pool, swim a length and then get out, dripping on the patio. The French windows that led into the kitchen would be open and I would walk through them, eating sweets from the newsagent’s and letting myself drip on the black tiles and then onto the carpet as I walked upstairs.

  It would usually end there or I would skip to another part of the village or get distracted by something else. Later, as puberty loomed larger, I modified the fantasy so that the world still contained people, but people who were frozen in time. I was the only one who could move about and I was able to do as I pleased without consequence. Generally this meant heading straight for the bedroom of Emily Turner from the year above me at school and finding her in various states of undress - the chemistry churning about inside me had easily turned the childish bliss of a playground planet into a base sex laboratory.

  I suppose it was an unwritten rule of the fantasy that everything would return to normal once I had had my fun, that I could snap my fingers and everyone would return to their right places. I had no idea at the time that I was daydreaming something apocalyptic. Perhaps some part of me has always suspected, believed or hoped that I would end up here.

  Well… here, but maybe not quite like this.

  I woke with a shudder for the hundredth time that night. The twin howls of the air raid siren and the banished do
g silenced like the throats of ghosts slit as the dream snapped shut.

  The candle on the shelf had burned down to its last quarter and in its dim glow I saw Beth and the kids huddled in some restless breed of sleep. Beth’s head rested on a pillow that she had folded in two and pressed against a wall. Her eyes were closed but her eyebrows flickered occasionally. Her breaths were deep and quick. Alice was squashed into her mother’s left armpit and was still working her thumb in her mouth with one white rabbit ear pushed tightly against her nostrils. After five or six furious sucks her puffed lips would relax and her thumb would begin to fall out. Then she would flinch, like a toe from icy water, her mouth tightening and drawing her thumb back in.

  Arthur lay against Beth’s right breast, peaceful and oblivious. I felt some comfort knowing that he would not remember this, but it fell away when I wondered what his first memory would be, then again when I wondered if he would even have one.

  I thought about pinching out the candle but decided to let it burn in case Alice woke up. Instead I took a blanket from the stockpile Beth had hastily assembled and placed it over the three of them, tucking it carefully under Alice’s back and Beth’s right shoulder. Beth shifted her legs and turned her head as if I had brought her tea in bed. The movement filled me with grief. Only hours before I could have been doing just that: bringing her tea in bed. Now I wanted more than anything to see her asleep in our room, another night with Arthur over, warm morning sun streaming over the crumpled white duvet. I wanted to lay down a cup full of tea she would not drink, stroke her hair, close the door and let her sleep in peace.

  Not that I remember ever having actually done this.

  Those first days became punctuated with feelings like this, recurring realisations that every component of life had suddenly been removed. The house, the car, the furniture - all the physical objects that decorated our life. Then the roads, the streets, the buildings - the space we once inhabited. Then the television, the internet, work, streets, parks, pubs - the things we did. Each one produced a small flood of grief and required its own funeral as you realised it was gone forever.

  Then the people. Your friends, your family. Endless, spectral grief.

  I took another blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders, sat back next to the steps. I remembered my phone and took it out of my pocket. My battery was half dead, uncharged because of my state the night before. The time flashed 9:23pm as I turned it off.

  It’s difficult to piece together what happened after I slammed the hatch shut. Despite the lack of windows, the cellar was lit up in bright, searing light for what seemed like minutes. During this time we could hear nothing, but not because it felt like there was no sound. It felt like the opposite: as if the air had been overpowered, like a loudspeaker bursting. One huge burst of almighty bass and infinite white noise had surrounded us and was pressing down upon us.

  Then the noise faded and the light left the cellar. I switched on the Maglite. Then came the blast and the heat and the sounds of the earth tearing apart above us.

  At first I thought I had consigned us to cook in an underground oven. The temperature in the cellar suddenly rocketed and the sound above us was like an oak-sized blowtorch bearing down on the hatch. I grabbed Beth and the kids and we all fell to our knees in a huddle. I pressed my head against Beth’s and let out some last strangled goodbye. The hot air caught in my throat. I looked down at Alice, who stared back at me in disbelief under the glow of the torch. She was still reeling from the fall down the stairs.

  Was this you too, Daddy? Did you do this?

  I prepared for the furnace to ignite us. What would I see? The air quivering? Red skin peeling back on my daughter’s reproachful face? My wife’s hair smoking and catching aflame? The world itself smearing away as my eyeballs melted? But the heat drew back and we remained squashed together breathing short, whimpering breaths of baking air.

  Arthur was crying, of course.

  “Hot Daddy! Too hot!” cried Alice, caught somewhere between terror and amusement.

  I started to answer, to comfort her, but the short period of quiet was being replaced by another disturbance above. It started like a distant subway train rattling up the tracks towards a platform. Very slowly it began to get louder until it became a single intense whistling roar like a billion throats exhaling long lungfuls of air. It reached a crescendo until all we could hear was a howling gale and the hatch began to rattle violently on its hinges. Somehow we felt the wind inside the cellar as well. We huddled together again as the sweltering air spiralled around us.

  It blew for what seemed like an hour and beneath it all we heard distant, deep booms and crashes. It was too loud to hear our own voices, but I watched Arthur crying relentlessly before finally giving up and settling into Beth’s arms. Alice had clearly gone into some kind of shock. Beth lay back with her head against the wall. Her eyes were shut and her face was creased in what looked like prayer. I lost myself in the sound of the wind.

  Eventually the noise settled down and we were left in numb silence with ringing ears. The hatch rattled occasionally and I wondered for the first time what was now above it. Had we been buried deep in rubble? Or were we exposed and vulnerable? My mind thought back to the nightmare nuclear scenarios I had imagined as a teenager: falling ash, levelled cities, burned corpses.

  The silence continued. Beth was still holding the children tightly to her and her brow was no longer creased in panic. She looked at me expectantly and I saw her mouth move. I shuffled along the wall to where she was sitting.

  “Is it over?” she whispered. He voice was dry and cracked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”

  “Was it...was that...” she began, struggling to ask the obvious question and all the other terrible questions that it led to.

  Was that an asteroid? Had Edinburgh just been hit by an asteroid? Had the United Kingdom just been hit by asteroids? Where else had been hit? What was left? Who was left? What about my parents, my family? Would we be hit again? What was outside now?

  I nodded and moved closer, putting my arm around her shoulder. Arthur was, incredibly, asleep. Alice was curled up in a ball against her mother.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “We’re safe, we’re safe here.”

  Beth lay her head back against the wall and straightened her left arm. Alice flinched and let out a moan, thinking that she was losing her cuddle.

  “Shh, it’s OK darling, Mummy’s just stretching.”

  Alice flashed me another look of distrust as she huddled back in. I stroked her brow.

  “Those people,” said Beth after a long silence. “Who were those people at our door?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about that last image of the world - a child looking back at me in the way only a child can: an open circle of curiosity, cold and untouched by everything around her.

  “Don’t think about them,” I said.

  I was about to say they’re gone when I heard a noise from above. We both turned our heads to the hatch. It was distant at first, very quiet, but undeniably human: a muffled sob. Beth stiffened and darted me a look of warning. Instinctively she raised her hand and gently covered Alice’s exposed ear. Again, one single muffled sob in the far distance and then nothing.

  Then, much louder, a shriek. Pain. Unmistakable pain. Beth brought up her knees and quickly handed me Arthur, bringing her free hand over to shield Alice further. Alice accepted the renewed embrace without question. She had heard the sound too.

  The shriek was followed by a short, quivering wail and then a low moan. Then more broken sobs and several hacking, wet coughs. It was a woman’s voice. She must have been about fifteen metres from the hatch. Another shriek, then something else. She was trying to say something. The voice strained and pumped and then spluttered like a car engine starting on a cold day.

  “Hurrurr...urr...”

  Beth’s breathing quickened. I gripped Arthur, still sleeping soundly, to my chest.

 
A third shriek and another attempt at speech.

  “Hurrurr...urr...urrr...urrr...urrrrr...eeee”

  The hideous pattern repeated again and again: a single shrill shriek followed by a moment of quiet as whatever was making it pulled together the will to speak.

  “Hurrurr...urr...urrr...urrr...urrrrreeee”

  “Hurrurr...urr...urrrpp...eeeee”

  “Hurrurrrp...eeee”

  “Huurrrpp eeee.”

  Help. Help me.

  “Oh Jesus,” said Beth. “Oh no, oh no, oh please please no, oh Christ.”

  She started to cry. Alice stared straight ahead. I hoped Beth’s hands were enough to stop her from hearing.

  We tried to block out the noise in that strange and useless way you do by closing your eyes as tightly as you can and tensing every muscle in your body: the same way we had done that first night we had tried to break Alice of her night-time crying as a baby, smiling guiltily as we gripped each other in bed and buried ourselves into the pillows.

  There were others too. A male voice began to howl. It was an inhuman, animal sound that seemed to be moving about. I heard the sound of brick moving against brick. I guessed this one was mobile.

  Another male voice. This one was more of a wheezing growl that descended into coughing almost before it started. Then another female whimper that became louder and louder until it was a single scream that wouldn’t stop. Before long it was impossible to distinguish one from the next. The air above us became a choir of screams, howls, wails and moans. I heard a child crying Want! Want! Want! No!

  I don’t know how long it went on but the individual cries seemed to drop off one by one until only a single voice remained. It belonged to a woman, quite close by. It wasn’t a scream but an audible, intelligible, well-spoken whisper repeating the same phrase over and over.