The End of the World Running Club (6 page)

“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.

“
Please...help me…please...let me in...”

As she spoke, her words became closer until we could hear her outside the hatch. Then we heard a scrabbling sound on the wood. Beth shot me a look of warning.

“Ed?” she said.

“It’s locked from inside,” I replied.

She must have heard us because she paused. We heard a croaking sound, as if she was thinking, then a slurp of saliva and a painful gulp. And then she began to thump, slow and feebly, on the hatch.

“Please...help me...let me in...kill me...please...I want to die...please...help me...let me in...kill me...please...I want to die...”

At no point did I even consider opening the hatch. I sat down with Beth and we waited. After about an hour, when I felt sure that she would give up, we heard a sudden groaning sound - not human this time, but of concrete and metal. The woman stopped. I pictured her looking above her. Then there was a heavy, hollow crash. The hatch rattled and the ceiling shook and the woman was silent.

“What was that?” said Beth.

“Bricks,” I guessed. “Concrete, the rest of our house.”

We said nothing to each other. Eventually Beth lifted her hands from Alice’s head. He palms were slick with sweat and Alice lay sleeping with her hair drenched and matted.

Arthur had woken up and was beginning to make noises of hunger.

“Swap,” said Beth. She carefully released Alice from her arms and lay her down against the damp pillow. We must have been sitting there for most of the morning. We both winced and stretched our numb legs painfully as we stood up to change places. I passed Arthur across and Beth released her right breast for him to suckle.

There was no question of us talking about what we had just heard. We were learning quickly to bury what we couldn’t deal with. It was a primal decision that seemed to come from somewhere far away from us: deep within us or deeply between us.
 
Not quite fright, not quite flight; just a quiet and necessary abandonment of human thought, as if we had adopted some default state that had existed long before us.

I took out a bottle of water from the first crate. The riot at the shop was now a distant, foreign memory and I experienced another mini apocalypse as I imagined the building flattened. I opened the water and passed it silently to Beth. She began to gulp it greedily down - breastfeeding already made her thirsty at the best of times - but caught my warning look and stopped short.

“How long do you think we have to stay down here?” she whispered, replacing the cap on the bottle.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know what’s up there.”

“Do you think…” she began. “Is it, like...nuclear? Is there fallout?”

I shook my head. “Dust and ash, probably,” I said. “Can’t imagine there’s radiation.”

I suddenly felt claustrophobic. The baking air began to catch in my throat. I scrambled to my feet.

“Ed?” said Beth. “What are you doing?”

“Opening the hatch,” I said.

“What? Don’t be insane! You don’t know what’s outside!”

“I have to see,” I said. I clambered up the ladder and undid the lock on the hatch. Then I pushed. It didn’t move. I pushed again: not an inch.

“What’s wrong?” hissed Beth.

“It’s stuck,” I said, hammering harder on the thick wood. “Something’s on top of it. Fuck. Shit. Shit.”

“That woman?” said Beth.

I stopped and looked down at her.   “No,” I said. “Not unless she weighs thirty stone. It must be rubble. I need a lever.”

 
I jumped down from the steps and looked around the cellar. In the corner was a gleaming red toolbox. It was seriously underused, a hopeful gift from my father when we had moved in. I sorted through the shining tools and found a small crowbar in the bottom drawer which I took and rammed into the gap between the hatch and the ceiling. I pulled down as hard as I could but there was no movement. I put one foot against the wall and tried again with all my weight hanging from the crowbar. The surface began to splinter into a thin dent but the hatch gave no sign of moving. I gave one last heave and the iron came loose, sending me crashing down onto the stone floor in a shower of splinters. The crowbar clanged at my feet.

“Can’t you just take it off?” said Beth, sounding like any other woman watching her husband fail at a simple task.

“The hinges are on the outside,” I said. “I’ll need to break through.”

I took a hammer and a screwdriver from the toolbox and began to chip away at the hatch near the lock. After some time the head of the screwdriver popped through the other side. I wiggled it about. It felt like it was stuck in something on the other side. I got another screwdriver and stuck it into the hole as well, moving both of them about until the hole widened. Finally, I got the crowbar and jammed it into the hole, tearing back a quarter of the hatch in one go.

I tumbled to the floor in a shower of dust and stone as the wood came away. Staring down at me from the hole was a woman’s face, red and bulging, surrounded by charred hair. A single globule of blood fell down from the holes I had made in her cheek with my screwdrivers. Behind her was the dense pack of brick and stone that had fallen and crushed her against the hatch.

I jumped up, gibbering something to myself, and grabbed an old piece of sackcloth from the corner which I stuffed into the hole until it had covered the dead woman’s head. Then I scrabbled back against the wall next to Beth.

Beth, who had fallen asleep again, roused.

“Did you manage it?” she breathed.

“No,” I said, staring madly back at the sackcloth. “We’re stuck.”

I didn’t tell Beth about the woman. Maybe she already suspected what I had seen by the horror on my face and the way I was squashing myself against the wall. Either way, she quite calmly accepted the fact that we were trapped underground, numbed again by the instinctive need to bury the unthinkable.

“There’ll be rescue parties,” she said, staring straight ahead. “We’ll be rescued."

So we were down here for a while.
 

I pictured the monochrome sketched images of the fifties bunkers from the nuclear advice leaflets I had collected as a teenager. A man would be sitting in a chair with a book, smirking at the curious change in circumstances. His wife would be leaning happily over her corner sink while a pink-cheeked child in a woollen tank-top pushed a toy car around his father’s feet. This was a family at ease with the apocalypse. They were prepared, protected and safe, as happy as they ever had been before. I imagined that, at some point, the father would rise from his chair and walk across to his cheerful housewife, lay one firm hand on her buttocks and squeeze, whereupon she would follow him across the room and behind some curtain to see to his needs while the child played on obliviously. Life and all its normality reigned.

I looked around our own dark makeshift bunker in the light of the candle. We had rarely been down here before. There were some storage boxes in the corner, things we had never bothered to unpack when we moved in. A broken vacuum cleaner stood next to the steps. There were plastic bags and dusty shelves with various objects scattered along them.

Beth passed me the water bottle. I had to fight back the urge to pour mouthful after mouthful down my throat. Instead I took a small sip and replaced the cap. We had three crates of six two-litre litre bottles. Thirty-six litres. Two litres a day between the four of us? Probably not enough. Two weeks? Three before we ran out? Would there would be rescue parties before then? All of these thoughts entered my brain in the same manner: accompanied by a strange, nauseous pulse as if I had stepped too close to the edge of a cliff. My mind did not belong anywhere near these questions. They were off-limits. I had no map.

I sat down next to Alice and put my arm around her. She stirred and looked up at me. Her eyes focused on me in the dim light and she recoiled.

“I want Mummy,” she said.

This was a first. Alice had always been a daddy’s girl, in spite of - or perhaps because of - my half-hearted efforts in that role. She usually called for me at night and was sometimes upset if Beth went through to her in the morning. It hurt Beth and flattered me. Now, at this sudden change in tide, I could feel Beth’s heart rising as mine sank.

“Oh, darling,” Beth cooed. “Mummy’s just feeding Arthur right now. I won’t be long.”

“I want Mummy,” Alice repeated, fiercer now and pulling away from me. I let her go and she stood up shakily and crept around to Beth’s other side, snuggling under her arm again. I buried the urge to take this personally.

I decided to take an inventory of the cellar, starting with the shelves. On the top shelf there was a packet of eight candles, one of which was half-used. Next to them was what used to be a large church candle but was now a crumpled disc of wax about an inch tall. Its wick had burned away and only a black dot poked out from the centre. There was an unopened tin of WD-40, a jar full of broken pencils, a stack of unopened bank statements addressed to the previous owners of the house, five paint colour testers, several identical Allen keys, a flat-blade screwdriver with a bent handle encrusted in white paint and a vase full of dried fucking flowers.

The shelf below it held an opened set of paintbrushes, a half-empty pot of white emulsion, a small sewing kit, a blunt bread knife, some superglue and two tea-towels with maps of Dorset stitched into them. Standing at the end was a bottle of cheap supermarket table wine, which I was almost certain had been there when we moved in.
 

Underneath the shelves was a black bin bag. I stared blankly at it for a while before remembering what it was. It had been sitting there since the previous Spring. I dropped to my knees and tore the double knot I had made in the plastic opening. The smell of woodsmoke and wet cloth burst out as I rummaged through it. Two scratched plastic plates, a rancid towel, an anorak and two white metal camping mugs stained with dried tea: the remains of our camping trip to Cornwall.