The End of the World Running Club (11 page)

Arthur and I were the first ones to arrive. Alice was helping Beth wash clothes in the laundry. We sat in the corner, stacking empty pots into a tower.

“This your boy?” came a deep croak behind us. Arthur looked up and squealed, pointing over my shoulder. I turned. The old Australian man from the ward stood with his legs apart, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. He was big and barrel chested, strong looking. His hair was thick and tufted with grey, his eyes still white and vital. His brown weathered cheeks opened up into a beam and he gave Arthur a slow wave.

“Yes,” I said, standing. “Arthur.”

“Hello Arthur,” he said. “That’s a good name. I’m Harvey.”

He looked at me, extended a shovel-like hand. The shake was firm, well practised.

“Harvey,” he repeated. “Harvey Payne.”

“Edgar,” I said.

“Nice to meet you, Ed,” said Harvey. “I was so pleased when I heard he was alright.”

He turned back to Arthur and waved another slow wave. Arthur released a tremendous cry, his face creased with delight.

“Good lungs, too,” said Harvey. “That’s a good scream there, sonny. Don’t you muffle it.” He coughed and wagged a finger. “Don’t you let ‘em muffle it now, will ya?” He dragged a chair over and sat down, leaning forwards with both giant hands clasped together like tree roots. Then he picked up a bottle and offered it to Arthur.

I stepped back and let the old man play with my son. People were starting to fill the mess room now and soldiers were taking a line of seats along the front wall. Stuck to a whiteboard was a large map of the United Kingdom. Yuill stood before it, Grimes and another soldier behind him, watching families walk in. Men and women coughed quietly, moving their children cautiously through the room, picking a chair. I recognised the family from the room next to ours. The father led them through the ranks of chairs. His wife followed behind leading two teenagers to seats in the middle. The boy sat between his parents. The girl dropped into a seat three spaces away, crossed her bony arms and legs and turned the other way. I recognised a man near the front. I had met him once in the canteen line. His name was Richard. It was just him and his son.

Alice and Beth arrived and we took seats along the back row with Harvey next to us. The people who weren’t families found chairs away from the others. When it seemed that everybody had arrived and the low murmur dropped, the doors suddenly burst open and a mountain of hair and leather walked in.
 

Alice ducked behind my shoulder. She tapped my hand and passed me my end of the stringyphone. I put it against my ear.

“Daddy,” she whispered, voice fluttering with fear. “It’s the bear.”

Alice and I had seen him a few days after we had arrived at the barracks. A nurse in military fatigues had been wheeling him down the corridor on a stretcher that was barely big enough to carry his weight. His bloodied right arm had been clutched to his great bare chest, the barrel of his belly spilling out over his leather biker trousers.
 
He had winked at Alice, shot me a menacing grin as he passed. “Lovely day, eh pal?”
 

“Bear, Daddy,” Alice had said once he’d disappeared around a corner. “Bear.”

Alice was right: he did seem to have more genetically in common with a bear than with a man. Even his shoulders looked like they began halfway up the back of his head.
 

He paused as the doors swung shut behind him and scanned the room. His beady eyes twinkled like diamonds from a deep coal pit. His hair was black and long and a beard covered half of his face, all of his neck and what appeared to be a permanent grin. His long woollen coat fell open, revealing his right arm supported in a sling across his gigantic chest. He strode up to the front row and fell heavily on the last seat, looking up at Yuill as if we were all about to watch a cheap strip show.

His name was Bryce.

Yuill took one last look about. He was fit and lean with pale blue eyes. “Good morning,” he said. His voice fluttered. There were some mumbled greetings back. Bryce boomed back a pleasant “Morning!”

“My name is Second Lieutenant James Yuill. I am the...I am now the ranking officer here at Castlelaw Barracks.”

I looked across the quiet room. People were looking behind him, straining to see the map.
Ranking officer?
I heard someone whisper.

“Welcome,” he said.

Silence, apart from a single loud laugh from Bryce, which Yuill ignored.

“I need hardly remind you that this situation is…” He opened his palms to the room. “Well, it goes well beyond anything any of us have had to deal with before. We’re all in shock. We’re all injured, tired and grieving. All of us have lost friends and family. Most of the people we know and love are unaccounted for. We have survived the ruin of a devastating...”

A man in the third row raised a tentative hand. Yuill raised his own against it.

“There will be time for questions later,” he said. “But in the meantime I have some good news. Er…”

He looked behind him and ushered the soldier to his right forwards. He was stronger built than Yuill and seemed older, although they must have been the same age.

“Private Guthrie, please.”

Guthrie took Yuill’s place at the front.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “In the four weeks since the event, we have been attempting to make radio contact with the outside world. We set up a distress beacon holding information about our whereabouts and status.”

He held up a piece of paper.

“Two days ago, we picked up a signal. It was very faint and very distorted.”

He looked down at the paper.

“At first we couldn’t hear what it was saying, but we managed to decipher what we believe to be the following fragments of information.”

He cleared his throat and began to read from the paper.

“The United Kingdom is being evacuated. All functioning planes are grounded due to the ash cloud. Ships are to depart from Falmouth harbour in Cornwall at the end of the year. Country-wide sweeps will be made over the coming months to pick up as many survivors as possible.”

Guthrie looked up.

“That’s all we have,” he said. He eyed Yuill and stepped back. Murmurs broke out around the room. Yuill held up his hands.

“Please, please,” he said. “There will be time for questions, please…”

The noise gradually abated and he lowered his hands.

 
“These are the facts,” he said. “We have shelter, a generator, medicine. We’re safe. All we need to do is…”

“What about food?” asked a voice.

“All we need to do,” continued Yuill, “is…”

“Water?” said another.

“...is…”

“Why did the helicopters stop? How much fuel do we have?”

Yuill stammered, holding up his hands again as if he was trying to quell an angry dog. He looked back at Grimes for support. Suddenly, out of the mass of questions being thrown at him, one rang out.

“What happened?”

The room began to quieten. People sat slowly and turned to see who had spoken. Richard was standing, his son looking up at him.

“What happened?” he repeated. “I mean...evacuation? The entire country? What...what the hell happened?”

Yuill’s hands fell as he slowly realised. We were ignorant. We had been awoken four weeks ago to bedlam and spent every minute since then underground. No television, no radio, no internet, no news. We had no idea what had happened to the world.

Yuill took a breath.

“Private Grimes,” he said. He offered her his place at the front. “If you please.”

Grimes stepped forward and glanced around the room. She held a pointer in her hand which she touched against the map on the wall behind her. Her hand was shaking.

“We don’t know the full extent of the damage, but we do know that we were hit hard up and down the length of the country.” She moved the pointer from south to north. “London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, even towns and cities as far north as Aberdeen saw strikes.”

She circled back south over the North Sea.

“Edinburgh itself was devastated. Four or five strikes wiped out most of the buildings. As far as we know, the fires burned for at least two weeks. There was no access for emergency services…” she faltered. “In actual fact...no emergency services were left to provide help.”

There were a few gasps and cries. A woman in front of me held her hand over her mouth. Richard’s hand shot up again and the noise died away.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Strikes? What actually hit us?”

Grimes stood still. I could feel her backtracking even further, finding words to describe the things she had assumed we already knew. She blinked and began again.

“In the early hours of the morning of August 3rd, we received news that a large number of…” - she faltered a little at the word - “…objects…were following a trajectory that would place them on course for a direct hit with the planet, landing mostly in the northern hemisphere, including a great many across the United Kingdom. Along with…”

Richard’s hand again. “How many?” he said.

Grimes paused again. “We don’t know for sure, but best guesses were that around thirty to fifty thousand individual projectiles were on course.”

She let the gasps and mutterings subside again.

“Asteroids,” said Richard, still standing. Grimes returned him the barest of nods.

“Asteroids, meteoroids, we don’t really know. At the time we had no idea how big they were, where and when they would land, or what damage they would do if they did. Every military base in the country was mobilised, including Castlelaw, Redford and Dreghorn barracks. Troops were sent to the city to keep control, to prevent panic, stop people from clogging the roads, help people if anything...if anything happened. They were sent out to Midlothian, Perth, Glasgow, the Borders too.”

Grimes looked back at the slim ranks of soldiers behind her.

“The soldiers you see here are some of those who were asked to remain. Our orders were to maintain contact with other bases and provide strategic support to those on the ground. We waited to hear news.”

She paused, looked back at the map.

“At zero-five-hundred hours, we got news from the United States that a rural area in Oklahoma was seeing small hits. As far as we know, they were the first. They weren’t doing much damage and for a while we thought that most of them might be burning up on entry. Very soon afterwards, more sightings were reported on the east coast of America. Then New York suffered a massive strike. Then reports came in across the US, from cities and rural areas alike. They were landing everywhere: every city, every town, every state.”

Grimes cleared her throat and edged closer to the map.

“Just before 6am, we received news that London had been hit.” She raised her pointer and touched it against dense coil of roads and words in the south-east corner of the map, the thick muscle of the capital exploding with arteries reaching out across the country.

“It was big,” she said. “It wiped out most of the East End. We were still in contact with London then. There was panic, obviously, and most of the military on standby down there were deployed to cope with the aftermath. Then there were two more strikes, much larger this time.”

Grimes withdrew the pointer.

“After that, we lost contact.”

“How many hit London?” said Bryce.

“We don’t know. A base on the South Coast reported something like twenty or thirty independent sightings within the M25 corridor, more outside of it.”

Sighs and gasps fluttered from the floor.

“Then,” Grimes continued, “reports came in from the RAF of eight extremely large clouds of smoke over Birmingham. A flyover confirmed that the Midlands had suffered countless massive strikes.”

She looked around the room. I could see she was trying to choose her words carefully. Every new piece of information could spawn another funeral for someone in the room, another nightmare for a child. But there was no other way, no other words for what she was about to say. She took a breath before continuing.

“These wiped out most of central England. Fires were reported in Wales, Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire….”

She began to raise her voice above the noise that was now filling the room.

“It happened very quickly after that. Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Leeds, all reporting single strikes followed by many more. Before we lost contact completely, we were hearing about strikes across the Lake District, in the Irish Sea, in the North Sea. One huge cloud was reported over Northumberland.”

The room was hushed again.

“Then we heard that Glasgow had been hit. Then Redford sounded the air raid siren. Pretty soon after we felt the strikes here.”

“How many?” I said.

Grimes shook her head.

“We don’t know. Enough to take out most of Edinburgh. We believe the entire Central Belt was hit very badly.”

Grimes stopped talking and stood holding her pointer behind her back. For a while nobody moved or made a sound. Eventually, Beth broke the silence. Alice cuddled into her arm as she spoke.

“In total…” she said. “...across the UK...how many?”

She paused. “We estimate somewhere between two or three thousand.”

The room itself seemed to release a single shuddering breath at this before returning to silence.

Like everybody else, my brain began attempting to process the impossible. I thought back to the pamphlets and books I hoarded as a teenager, the 1980s government service broadcasts designed in the event of nuclear war they had been airing in the week before, all grainy, the announcer’s voice urgent and well spoken. BBC English from another time and way of life.

“...in the event of a strike...stay indoors...get underground if you can...”

In the event of
a
strike
; singular.

Global atomic war was always depicted by some cheap animation of a globe, a few oversized mushroom clouds sprouting from its wobbling, crayoned surface like stalks of broccoli.

The advice was always to remain indoors, to wait.

“...remember...remain in your inner refuge...listen to your radio...wait for advice...”