The End of the World Running Club (27 page)

I saw three ships come sailing in

on Christmas Day

on Christmas Day

I saw three ships come sailing in

on Christmas Day in the morning

Gloria raised the gun to his head.

“Careful girl,” he breathed. “Don’t want to give her nightmares.”

“Too late for that,” said Gloria. She squeezed the trigger and I looked away as Hugh’s head became a stain in the snow. The blast echoed around the pine trees above. Gloria stepped back and we faced each other. None of us said a word. I had the urge to bolt. We had no idea what she intended to do next.

At last she lowered her gun. “It’s OK,” she said gently. She looked around at the yard with a peaceful look on her face. “I’m not here for you.”

The truck had two rows of seats and a flatbed at the back. It started first time, to a roar of delight from Bryce. We found a barrel of red diesel in a shed and strapped it into the back. Then we got ready to leave. Bryce was in the driving seat, the engine rumbling, with Richard next to him.

“Thanks,” I said to Gloria as I threw my pack in the back. “Why did you come back?”

Gloria held her arms around Sofia and swung gently on her hips. She frowned a little as if I had misunderstood something.

“You need to find your daughter,” she said. She looked down at Sofia, who was starting to gurgle.

“You hungry, poppet?” she said, turning away and walking across the yard, around the four bodies. “You want fed? Think these piggies want fed too.”

Grimes and Harvey climbed in the back, leaving the door open for me. Bryce stuck his head out of the driver’s window.

“I’d like to get the fuck out of here now, please,” he said.

R
ETURN

We drove fast. We joined the main road again and began to head south. The thrill of sudden speed, of seeing the road rushing to meet the tyres and the landscape circle by outside the window, mixed with the adrenaline of having just escaped death, filled me with an inescapable rush of hope. I felt that we might have a chance of making it to Cornwall, that seeing Beth, Alice and Arthur again was a real possibility. The presence of this feeling in itself was enough to make me realise that it hadn’t existed until now. I had been travelling without any belief that I could get to where I needed to be.

The last time I had driven this road we’d been on our way to see Beth’s brother, Simon, and his family, who had moved up to Wales from London the year before. He had previously worked for a large corporation in a tall building, doing something intangible with money that had made a lot of it come his way, but had decided to pack in the stress and long hours of city life and head out to the country, trading in their Hampstead townhouse for a steading with substantial acreage, stables, horses and a sea view.
 

We spent a weekend strolling around warm meadows and along impossibly long, empty beaches. On the first evening we sat outside at a distressed oak table and watched their three blonde, curly-haired daughters take Alice running through the long grass of their garden as the sun set. We ate salad from the vegetable patch and locally caught fish from cracked plates, drinking cold, expensive wine from Simon’s collection. I sat and felt the warmth and effortless peace of their home, allowing my glass to be refilled and becoming drunk with love and envy. Beth was pregnant with Arthur at the time and Alice was two. I had no idea how to achieve a life like this.

“We just wanted to return to the basics,” said Simon’s wife, a tanned, blonde Norwegian, impossibly attractive and witty. I felt guilty just sitting next to her. “You know, feel nature again. London’s so full on and, well, with the girls getting a bit older we thought, you know, let’s downsize.”

I think a fair few people had thought that they’d wanted this: a return to something quieter and simpler than the life they had found themselves in. They had watched the television and seen the property and cookery shows. They had wanted the grass, the tall trees, the stone, the wood, the wool, the bulbous tomatoes picked from their own greenhouses, the candlelit parties in local barns with cups of homemade cider from old casks, the fiddler in the corner, the old clothes and muddy boots. Against the muddled pallor of their own existences, they had seen these things and wanted out. They actually thought of it as being
out
. An escape from the machine.

But it wasn’t an escape. It wasn’t a return to a
simpler life
; it was a version of a simpler life. A version that replaced cholera, dysentery, freezing winters, lost harvests, frequent stillbirths, domestic violence and incest with underfloor heating, Sky Plus, solar panels and plump trust-funds. It was just another decoration: wallpaper, not a return.

Perhaps I’m being unkind or just jealous. But seriously, how many people could ever have afforded to live like that?

I thought of Gloria, wide-eyed with love for her daughter, gazing around the yard of her new home as if she was being given a tour by an estate agent, feeding the bodies of its owners to their pigs. She had returned to something, and it wasn’t wallpaper. I thought of Cornwall, of the hoards of survivors for whom escape to the simple life seemed like the brightest outcome. I thought of them trickling out of the country, escaping back to civilisation. The place we came from, the place many had yearned to return to, was not a place we really wanted to be.

Around midday we joined the motorway. I watched the landscape spin past as we drove. The changes to it were dramatic and everywhere. Hills were flattened, imploded, fields and forests corrupted and burned.  As we got nearer to Carlisle, the road showed more and more signs of damage and we had to slow down in places to negotiate potholes and bulges in the tarmac. The few cars we saw had been either tossed into fields or stopped eerily in their tracks.

As I looked out of the window, I suddenly became aware of Grimes next to me. She was looking across my line of sight. I followed her gaze to Richard in the front seat. When I looked back at her she caught my eye and looked quickly away.

Just then, Bryce slammed on the brakes and the truck came to a shuddering halt.

“What’s happened?” I said. “Why have we stopped?”

“Up ahead,” said Bryce. “Look.”

“Christ,” said Richard.

Harvey, Grimes and I leaned forward and peered through the windscreen. We were on a shallow uphill climb. About a quarter-of-a-mile ahead of us, parked at the summit, was a black Land Rover.

“Do you think it’s them?” I said

“Yes,” said Grimes. “That’s them.”

“Why have they stopped?” said Harvey. “They were a day’s drive ahead of us at least.”

“Fuel, perhaps?” said Richard.

Grimes shook her head. “They had plenty in the tank to take them past this point, and plenty more in reserve.”

“So what, then?” said Richard. “Breakdown?”

Bryce turned around to Grimes.

“What do you think…” he said, pausing. “Laura?”

“Possibly,” she said, ignoring the jibe. “Or someone found them.”

“Which means they could find us,” I said. “Which means they could be watching us now.”

We looked ahead, waiting for something to happen, for the car to start, lights to come on, a door to open or a movement of any kind. Nothing happened. Bryce shifted the gear lever into first.

“I’m going up,” he said. Nobody argued as he pulled away.

We were about a hundred metres from the Land Rover when the reason why it had stopped became clear. For about half-a-mile in front of it lay hundreds of abandoned cars. Some had stopped, others were overturned or piled into each other, those furthest away were black, burned shells. The road was impassable. Even if it were, there would have been little point in driving the short distance. Beyond the burnt-out cars, the road rose vertically into the air. A torn lip of tarmac hung above the cars with broken pipes and twisted girders sticking up from it like veins and tendons from a severed limb.

“The road…” said Richard in astonishment. “It’s been blown apart.”

We stopped the truck next to the Land Rover and inspected it. It was empty. No food, water, guns or ammunition.

“They’ve taken everything,” said Grimes, slamming the boot shut. “Let’s take a look up ahead.”

We took our packs from the truck and walked. Bryce reached the broken piece of road first and climbed up to its edge. When he got there he stumbled back a few paces, then steadied himself on a pipe. As I climbed up to him he turned and, for the first time since I had met him, I saw an expression of genuine surprise on his face. He blinked.

“I think we’re back to our feet,” he said. “Take a look.”

I held onto the pipe and looked over the lip of road. Behind it was a gigantic pothole, at least ten metres across and spanning the entire width of both carriageways. The ground on either side of the road was thick with mud, littered with cars that had tried to pass around it. The road beyond the hole was in an even worse state than the side on which we stood. It had shattered. Whole cars had disappeared into the gaps between its fragments. It stretched on as far as we could see. There was no possible way of driving onto it.

Richard reached us, took one look around the edge and jumped back, throwing up his hands in frustration.

“Fuck!” He paced up and down, rubbing his hands on his head, then took another look.

“Fuck! Fuck!” he said again.

“What is it?” said Grimes as she and Harvey caught up.

“We’re fucked,” said Richard. “Take a look.”

Grimes and Harvey peered over.

“Oh,” said Harvey. “Oh crikey.”

 
“There’s no way we’ll be able to drive through,” said Grimes. “We should go back, find another road.”

Richard stopped pacing and surveyed the destroyed road before us. He put his hands on his hips and blew a sharp puff of air through his nose.

“There’s no other road,” he said quietly. “We’d have to go miles back to find another route, and even then there’s no guarantee we can rejoin the road south, or that it won’t end in something like this.”

He tightened the straps on his pack.

“The only way is forwards,” he said. “The road might be less damaged further on. We walk until we find another vehicle.”

We followed Richard across the pothole and picked our way along the road on the other side. After a couple of miles, as Richard had predicted, the road became less damaged. But it was still filled with cars. The entire road was a string of abandoned, crashed or burnt-out vehicles, a ghostly traffic jam that stretched endlessly into the mist. I pictured the morning of the strike, the road quickly filling with cars, people trying to escape mindlessly from the cities, not even registering that the damage would be unprejudiced. A bright and boiling morning, the air suddenly alive with car horns, the sound of screeching tyres, crying children, metal upon metal, people standing on roofs trying to see into the distance, pointing at something, shouts of rage from drivers trying to manoeuvre around wreckage, their wild eyes suddenly distracted by something above them, smoking lights streaming across the brilliant blue sky.

We spent the afternoon checking the cars with the least damage and avoiding those which had been involved in collisions and contained bodies. We targeted the ones with open doors, their drivers gone to face whatever life or death awaited them in the wake of the strike. We found some with batteries still working, but their tanks drained of petrol. Others had petrol, but no battery. We tried moving working batteries into fuelled cars and managed to start them, only to find we could drive them for just a short time before we hit another obstacle, had to walk some more and start again. We found a 4x4 that worked, managed to get it off the road and drove it for half a mile before the ground fell into a sharp drop. Our only choice would have been to drive it down into the valley. But there were no other roads there and the tank was almost empty. We abandoned it and started back along the road.

A strong, foul-smelling wind had started early in the afternoon. By sundown it had become a gale. We were tired and frustrated. The hope and elation I had felt as we had sped away in the Jeep earlier now lay in pieces at the foot of a brick wall. We were making hardly any progress. Each time we found a car that worked, we could only drive it so far before our path was blocked by a pile-up or a hole in the road. Then we’d get out and start searching for another car. Even as it got dark, I was sure I could still look behind us and make out the pothole where we had originally stopped.

There was a friction between Bryce and Richard, worsened by the fact that they couldn’t hear each other over the wind. I think I knew then that Grimes had something to do with it, although I didn’t consciously register it. When it became too dark to continue, we took shelter in two empty cars. We didn’t eat. The gale howled through the night, shaking the chassis and sending debris clattering along the road like hoards of metallic rats. None of us slept. In the morning, the wind was still gusting angrily. We lit a stove inside one of the cars, drank tea and ate undercooked, sauceless pasta. Then we continued along the road, trying car after car like the day before.

Some time in the late afternoon, we trundled to a halt in a red Volvo and stared at the pile of metal that spanned the road in front of us. Cars, trucks and at least one motorbike lay heaped on top of each other or had spun off the road. In front of them were four articulated lorries, bent and twisted, their necks twisting around each other like broken swans. Grimes had been driving. She switched off the engine and we sat listening to dregs of fuel swilling in the tank and the wind outside.
 

“We can’t keep this up,” said Richard. “It’s almost dark and we’ve only managed five miles. What date is it?”

“December fifth,” replied Grimes.
 

“It’s about 450 miles to the south coast,” said Richard. “Which means we have to average over twenty miles a day.” He opened the passenger door and swung out his legs. “At this rate, we’ll barely make Manchester by Christmas.”