The End of the World Running Club (19 page)

"We need to find shelter," he went on. "We can stay here tonight, then set up a permanent camp tomorrow, somewhere on higher ground. Henderson, Grimes, follow me. You two, back to the car. We'll come for you when we've found somewhere suitable."

We got back in next to Harvey. Bryce was still out for the count.

"Fellas,” said the old man happily. “So what caused all the mess?”

"We don't know," said Richard. "But it was big enough to move a mountain."

I was nodding off to sleep when Henderson opened the front door and started the engine.

“Rooms are ready, gentlemen,” he said.
 

Bryce was still asleep.

“Bryce,” said Richard. “Bryce.”
 

Richard turned and landed a sharp punch to Bryce’s sternum. He grunted awake, swiped out a fist and fell off his seat, growling as he landed on his bad shoulder. I helped him up. Henderson drove us carefully down the street. The headlights illuminated everything we had already seen. Harvey seemed to know to keep his eyes down, but Bryce looked around him in wonder.

“Fuck me,” said Bryce, looking around in wonder. He tutted as we reached the telegraph wire with the dead woman. “Always one at the end of a party, eh?"
 

Henderson parked up at a small hotel at the end of the street. It had not been damaged as badly as the rest of the buildings. Some of the hill had forced its way into the back rooms, but the front was still held together and the windows in the lower floor were still intact. The front door opened into a bar. We scanned our torches around the room. There were no bodies but the back wall was collapsing and the wooden bar was half crushed by the ceiling. The tables, seats and carpet were all covered with dust and the air was thick with whatever was upstairs. Grimes retched and I felt a well of bile rising in my throat.

“Keep that door open a little while,” said Yuill. “Let some air in.”

We took some blankets from the Land Rover and set up camp, each taking a seat to lie on. I zipped up the hood of my jacket and lay down in a booth, stared into the darkness at a torn bar menu hanging limply from the table, then fell asleep thinking about Arthur.

I woke up thirsty and frozen. It was still dark, but the room was somehow lighter. I could see the shapes of the others sleeping in the other seats. Shadows flickered and I heard a noise behind me. Richard was sitting in the bay window with a glass and a bottle on the table in front of him. He was staring into a short candle flame. I got up and walked over. Bryce snorted in his sleep and heaved himself over onto his side as I passed.

Richard silently offered his hand to the seat opposite. I sat down and inspected the bottle. It was sticky and old.

“Bacardi?” I said.

“All I could find. It was either that or Chardonnay." He wrinkled his face. "Grab a glass if you can find one.”

I found a chipped tumbler amongst the mess behind the bar and filled it. Richard raised his glass and we both drank. I took another second slug and felt warmer. We both watched the flame for a while.

“I used to be a salvage diver,” he said after some time. “Before I was married. I used to travel quite a bit - Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, South Africa - anywhere there was work. Shallow water stuff mainly, not always that interesting. Sometimes I just had to help remove the working parts from boats that were slowly sinking, other times it was valuable cargo from something that had already sunk.”

I replenished our glasses. He stroked the side of his with his thumb.

“I used to enjoy it,” he said. “Not just the diving itself but the feeling of being somewhere….somewhere that I shouldn’t really...be. You know? Somewhere that should be somewhere else.”

He glanced up at me.

“You get a strange sense of perspective when you see an alarm clock under water,” he said.
 

I nodded slowly and he looked back at his glass. He shrugged.

“Like I say, most of it wasn’t very interesting, but occasionally you’d get something special.”

He drained his glass in one gulp and slid it towards me.

“Once I was asked to dive a plane wreck in the Philippines. A Second World War Japanese fighter that some magazine had been given permission to photograph. It had taken a nose dive.” He traced the arc of a crashing plane with his hand, whistling. “Sploosh...landed about thirty metres down, nose buried in a sand trench. One of the wings was torn off and there was a hole in the fuselage. I was just there as a guide and to provide safety instruction, nothing else.”

He looked up.

“You’re really not supposed to do anything else with these kind of wrecks,” he said.
 

“Sea graves?” I said.
 

He nodded. “Quite right. Outside only. But sometimes...well, he was taking too long and there was nobody else with us. I got bored.”

Richard took the bottle and filled our glasses again. I was no longer cold. The sweet rum had even helped with my thirst.

“So you went inside?” I said.

“Yes. I swam in, took a look around.”

“What did you find?”

“Not much in the back. Some bottles, boxes and ammunition; nothing interesting, so I went up front. To the cockpit.”

He paused and took a sip.

“I swam up beside him, my head right next to his. He was sitting back in his seat, still in his uniform, still buckled in. His head was forward, chin on his chest. His hands were on his knees, both palms up. Like he was meditating.”

Richard turned to the window and looked out into the darkness, still thumbing his glass. The light made sharp shadows of his hawk-like features and dark pools in his eyes.

“I felt strange,” he said, and paused, frowning. “
Vertiginous
.” He seemed to roll the word around in his mouth as if tasting it for the first time.
 
“I think that’s the word. Like a climber suddenly finding himself on ledge, staring down into a deep canyon. I was looking at sixty years of stillness, a violent scene from before my birth that had persisted out of sight throughout my entire life and would no doubt continue to do so after my death.”

“Possibly not any more,” I said. He ignored this.

“He had a locket around his neck that I didn’t want to open, but in his shirt pocket was a pair of sunglasses. I took them. I don’t know why, I wish I hadn’t, I knew I’d never wear them. A souvenir of the moment I suppose, like those photographs everyone takes but never looks at afterwards.”

He smiled, sat forward and leaned on the table, staring into his glass.

“You see,” he said, “I used to like diving because it was a way to escape the small stuff for a little while - girls, money, life...none of that existed under water. But when I met my friend there in that plane...that was something else, something permanent. Suddenly nothing mattered at all. I saw my future, everyone’s future...”

He pointed at the back wall, then out into the night.

“Entropy,” he said. “Entropy and decay. Everything turns to dust. Everything is constantly trying to return to the dust from which it came.”

He frowned and picked up his glass. His face twisted into an attempt at a smile.

“So why all the struggle?” he said, slowly draining his drink.

He sat back and ran a hand through his hair. Very low light was beginning to show through the window pane.

“Morning soon,” he said. “Expect we should sleep.”

He licked his fingers and pressed them around the candle flame. Then he took his blanket over to a bench and lay down, immediately still. I sat watching the blue trails of smoke weave up into the dusty light. I realised that my left hand was numb from clutching the tin can of Alice’s stringyphone beneath my jacket. I pulled it closer, thinking about the creaking of timber and the slow crumble of concrete in deep saltwater, until I too was asleep.

I woke again. This time it was daylight. Henderson was sitting on his bench, leaning over his boots with a piece of wood. He looked over at me and I flicked my head up in greeting. He stared back at me without response, then turned back to his boots, picking dirt from their soles with his stick. Grimes was asleep, curled up into a tight ball with her face burrowed into the hood of her jacket. Richard was still stretched out on his bench facing the wall.

I heard the door of the Land Rover bang shut.

“Where’s Bryce?” I said.

Henderson looked up and nodded at the door.

I got up and walked to the door, met Yuill coming back in with a stove, water and food.

“Bryce?” I said.

Yuill nodded. “You’ll soon find him,” he said.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and walked outside. It had stopped snowing, but I could see that it had been heavy through the night. Everything was covered, many of the dead bodies too. The telegraph lady had picked up a drift around her frame and her nightgown was now frozen into a stiff triangle.

“Morning!” came a voice from high above.

I looked up at the gigantic mound behind the street. Bryce was crouching on the summit. He looked like a fat wizard, wisps of brown mist snaking around him. He grinned down at me and waved.

“Want to see something?” he called down. His words found a dull echo in the silence of the snow-covered street. I looked up and down the hill, not fancying my chances on the loose earth.

“Walk further along,” he shouted. “There’s a wood about half a mile out of the village where it’s not so steep.”

I nodded and looked in the direction he was pointing.

“See you soon!” he called. His gruff cackle disappeared behind me as I set off up the road.

As I walked I saw nothing but mist and snow and a single overturned car that a hedgerow was slowly consuming. As Bryce had said, the high wall of earth on my left began to taper down as I made my way down the road. After ten minutes I found the wood and turned off the road, picking my way up the hill, back towards the village. It got much steeper towards the top and I was scrabbling when I met Bryce, now sitting on a rock and smoking a roll-up. I looked down on the village below and saw Grimes and Richard, who were now awake and outside holding steaming cups. We must have been at least a hundred metres above them.

Beyond them, behind the pulverised houses on the other side of the road, I saw that the gentle incline that had once risen up to the Pentlands was now pockmarked with craters. Huge, deep ditches ran down from the top like scars. What looked like boulders were embedded in the earth as far as I could see, as if the whole hillside was a nest of alien eggs.

“How’s your shoulder?” I said to Bryce.

Bryce looked up at me in disdain.
 

“Lovely,” he said, eyes like slits. “Thanks for asking. I’m touched.”

 
I made a mental note to never ask him things like that again. He jabbed a thumb to his left, away from the road.

“Now check this shit out.”

 
I turned to look and nearly toppled down the slope. It was the clearest day I had seen for a long time. The sun was not exactly visible - no bright disc cutting through the thick cloud - but the light that made it through gave us miles of illumination. Before us was a deep crater that stretched out towards the horizon. This landscape had once been full of forests, farms and small villages. Now it was a canyon, miles wide and hundreds of metres deep. We were sitting on its outer ridge.

I steadied myself.

“Pretty fucking cool, eh?” said Bryce.

“I guess…” I stammered. “I guess that’s one word for it. Jesus. Was that an...an…”

“An asteroid?” said Bryce. He cast one hand up theatrically at the sky. “You mean one of those streaks of light that started falling from the heavens? The ones that knocked the shit out of us for a couple of days?”

Bryce flicked his cigarette over the ridge and spat after it.

“Aye,” he said. “Probably.”

I slumped to the ground and sat with my arms around my knees, looking out at the bizarre scenery. I had only seen the destruction of Edinburgh and I was strangely used to it. The idea of a city being levelled, even the one I lived in, was somehow easier to accept than a landscape I barely knew.

Bryce rolled two cigarettes, lit them and passed me one. We smoked in silence, transfixed.

When I had finished, I stood up. I was about to suggest that we head back down to the village when a deep groan sounded in the distance, rising up and stopping suddenly. We both looked across the canyon. The groan sounded again, higher now, like mournful whale song. It stopped, then sharp cracks and twangs reverberated around the crater walls.

“Fuck me,” said Bryce. “Look at that.”

He pointed at the wall opposite ours. The southern end of the ridge was crumbling and falling into the pit. A huge wedge of earth came away and slid down in slow motion. We felt the ground rumbling beneath us, dirt dancing around our boots. We exchanged a glance. Bryce sprang to his feet and we both jumped down the steepest part of the slope. I fell through thin air for longer than I was comfortable with, then hit the earth on my back. The impact knocked the wind from my lungs and I gasped for breath as I started sliding down the hill. My coat had ridden up and was half-covering my face. I couldn’t see but I heard Bryce rocketing past me, whooping like a child.

I was picking up speed. I yanked down my hood with one hand and dug into the earth with the other, managing to brake just enough to be able to sit up. I saw Bryce nearing the buildings below, digging in his heels and tumbling into a heap by the hotel. Soon I was next to him, spluttering into the snow while he lay on his back laughing into the sky.

“Again Daddy, again!” he said, getting to his feet and patting his bad shoulder. It now seemed nothing more than a nuisance to him. He grabbed me around the chest and hauled me to my feet as the others came running to meet us.

“What was that noise?” said Yuill.

"That?” said Bryce, brushing himself down. “That would be a landslide.”

He squashed a finger over one nostril and blew a round out into the dirt, then did the same with the other.

“Now,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Did I hear somebody put the kettle on?”