The End of the World Running Club (16 page)

“Back ’n’ report a couple of soldiers shot Danny,” said the voice from the corridor.

“Soldiers?” said ours.

“Aye. Tellin’ ya, that was a squaddie gun, definitely. Not like these fuckin’ Polis pea shooters.”

I heard two harsh metallic taps against a wall.

“Aye, fuckin’ barrack boys alright,” he said. “I reckon it’s time we paid a trip up to the hills likesay?”

They haw-hawed out of the block with the rest of their pack. When we were sure they had gone, I pushed up the cushions and we both scrambled out, spluttering, pushing away from each other. We stood in the centre of the room, bent over double and catching our breaths. Bryce still looked white, but the makeshift tourniquet had stopped the bleeding.

“Fuck,” I said. “Now they know where we live.”

“Come on,” said Bryce, “Let’s get back before they find us.” Then he smiled as something caught his eye on the floor.

“Wee fucker left half his joint,” he said.

We followed the canal out of town and turned onto the Water of Leith where it slunk beneath the bouldered rubble of the A70. The river had once joined the Pentland Hills to the Shore. Dirt tracks, iron railings and asphalt paths had lined its banks as it meandered and frothed and waterfalled beneath stone bridges and tree canopies. It had been a quiet place. The water had allowed nature to flow through the city. Now it was a dry ditch. Weed, metal and rotten matter sprung from the mud. It had always smelled wet and pungent, the cycle of life and death in constant motion. Now it just smelled of death.
 

It began to rain as we reached Colinton Dell, rounding the corner onto the hill that led up to Bonaly. This had once been my home. Now it was just a dangerous mound of loose mud and mortar. Every few steps we would sink or stumble. Fallen trees made climbing even more difficult. Roots, stumps and trunks stacked across each other like giant matchsticks. Occasionally we would see human remains. Blackened skulls, torsos smeared against concrete, the occasional tiny clawed hand. We had quickly learned to let our eyes slide away from these horrors, swallowing the sickness fast and moving on. Even Bryce now quickened his pace when he saw them. We knew the best routes. We knew the places to avoid.

We reached the top and the ground flattened out. Bryce stopped at a set of rusted swings, the remains of a playground I had once taken Alice to. He sat on the swing and lit the remains of the joint he had found, watching me struggle through the last few metres of mud with thin lines of smoke trailing from his nose and through his thick hair. The brittle chain squeaked as he rocked slowly back and forth on the swing. I caught him up and bent over double, spitting.

“You need to get more exercise,” he said, handing me the wet stub. I puffed the last few hot drags and squashed it into the earth. I hadn’t smoked cannabis since university. Now any chance of escape was welcome. Something hard scraped beneath my boot. I cleared the mud and dug out a piece of metal - half a sign, white with black letters.

aly Store

Bonaly Store.

“This was near our house,” I said.

Bryce nodded and looked around. The black wreckage of the bypass lay ahead of us, dotted with the crumbling remains of burned cars. Behind and beneath us lay Edinburgh.

“Nice neighbourhood,” he said. “Lovely outlook.”

I saw movement behind Bryce. He turned his head back across his shoulder.

“Here come the boys,” he said, getting to his feet. Yuill, Henderson and Richard were walking down from the bypass to meet us. They stopped and we exchanged nods. Bryce coughed. I could see he was struggling, but he kept his eyes fixed on Yuill.

Yuill was expressionless, hands behind his back. He eyed Bryce’s shoulder.

“Well,” he said. “What happened?”

W
HAT
H
APPENED

The barracks were a mess. The survivors - the families and individuals who had been rescued from the devastation six months before - now outnumbered their saviours. The fifty or so troops that had remained in the barracks on the day of the strike were now down to eighteen. The rest had died on the salvage runs.

My first run was a couple of weeks after Grimes had called for volunteers. Beth wasn’t happy about it. Despite the assurances that it was safe, she thought that it was insane to go into a city full of buildings that might collapse at any moment. I did too of course, but I was more concerned with getting out of the stifling atmosphere of the barracks than surviving whatever was outside of it. My fidgeting was becoming unbearable. My legs twitched and ached so much I could hardly sleep. I still walked the corridors at night despite the fact that Arthur was no longer teething.

“Why do we need to keep gathering supplies?” she had asked. “We’ll be rescued soon. Why can’t we just wait and survive on what we have?”

“We don’t know when they’ll be here,” I had told her. “We need to make sure we have enough for the winter, in case we need to survive for longer. We can only carry so much in one run.”

I spoke like a hunter before the great hunt. The truth was I just wanted to get outside.

Four of us joined the soldiers on that first run; Bryce, Richard, his son and me. We wore heavy coats, a pair of thick trousers, boots, a helmet and a gas mask. On top of this, we were each given a large empty pack to carry. We carried a smaller one filled with our own food and water across our chests. We marched behind and within the six armed troops. We were mules.

There had been a briefing the night before on what to expect outside. Most of it we had already imagined. There were rules to follow. Do not touch anything unless told to. Do not eat or drink anything that does not come from your own pack. Do not stray from the path. Do not take any shortcuts. Do not run. Do not jump. Do not lean on anything. Toilet breaks are at allotted times and at allotted places.

At dawn the following day, the four of us stood sweating behind the main doors like deep space astronauts preparing to set foot on an alien shore. Through the condensation in my mask I watched Richard lean in and say something in his son’s ear. The boy nodded and Richard reached his hand around and gripped his shoulder, pulling him into his chest. Bryce stood beside me staring straight ahead, fists clenched at his sides; fuming after his first request for a gun had been denied.
 

Corporal Henderson was leading the run. I saw him raise a hand and the plastic sheets that surrounded the main doors were pulled back for us to walk through. We followed the soldiers into the dawn light.

Despite the confines of our kit and masks, there was a sense of a weight being lifted, of tension relieved, like removing a hat that you’ve been wearing too long. Cold air hit my face and the world opened up around us. The sun was not yet up, but it was still brighter than inside the barracks. The sky was heavy with thick, low cloud, but still higher than any ceiling.

We followed the troops across the yard to the main gates. My mask had cleared and I looked around at the buildings for the first time. Most had been flattened and were now just scorch marks and broken struts. The tarmac itself was ruptured and torn into high bumps and deep potholes. Large fragments of slate, brick and steel had been cleared from the yard and piled neatly by the broken wire fence.

Beyond the perimeter the Pentland Hills lay covered in dense fog. The light was lifting but we could barely see more than fifty metres ahead of us. We walked close to the soldiers as they marched us through the gates and along the stone path that led to the north face of Allermuir Hill. I felt relief in my legs and back as I walked, unrestricted, with nothing above or below me. Never in my life had I felt the need to move like this.

It could have been any other dark winter’s morning in Edinburgh. The fog and low cloud stretched out towards the Forth and beyond, obscuring what was usually a panoramic view stretching well into Fife. Even as we hiked the long track down towards the foot of the hills, we couldn’t see any detail of the wreckage we knew to be ahead. That day we were spared the view that would soon become familiar, the one I had seen glimpses of from the helicopter: an ancient city blown away like dust.
 

As we reached the bypass that separated the hills from the suburbs, Henderson raised a hand and we stopped. He turned to face us. I heard breathing all around, from the soldiers, from us. Richard patted his son on the back. Bryce lifted his mask and coughed up a round of phlegm into the mud.

“The footbridges across the main road aren’t safe,” said Henderson. “We have to cross the road itself. The surface is sound but there are obstacles. Keep close to the group and try to avoid looking into vehicles.”

Henderson turned and raised his hand again. We followed him down the last mile to the main road. I began to see objects by the side of the road. Car parts. At first they were small - mirrors, bulbs, hubcaps - then larger - a wheel, broken glass, bonnets, hunks of torn metal. I smelled oil, the thick stench of scrap yards. Then entire cars started appearing. They were burnt out, flattened, twisted and spread across the mud like dead birds.

“Eyes front,” said Henderson suddenly.

There was a body. Through the front window of a Volvo lay the charred figure of a man. It looked as if he had been crawling, with one hand outstretched and the other beneath him. He was on his knees with his buttocks raised the way babies sometimes sleep. His head was turned to face us with his cheek against the metal of the car bonnet. There were no features, just gaping black holes of ash.

“Eyes front,” yelled Henderson sharply. I had fallen behind. I faced ahead and quickened my pace to catch the others.

We stopped at the embankment and Henderson pointed out the safest route down. The cars that hadn’t been blown up the hill were upended or on their side. Some were nestled against each other like sleeping creatures seeking warmth. There was other debris on the road that I made a mental note not to inspect too closely.

Once across, we clambered up the opposite bank. Henderson shouted something and two other soldiers yelled something back. They began to run. One turned to me. “Pick it up now,” he snapped as he pulled away.

The four of us watched as our chaperones yomped into the mist.

“Come on,” said Richard. He took his son by the shoulder and picked up his feet. “Or we’ll lose them.”
 

I didn’t think I would make those first three miles into the city. I was terrified, swamped with bad memories of school cross country runs, frosty mornings and freezing knuckles, a humiliating slap on the belly from the PE teacher as I stumbled into the school gates, the last one in. Three things helped. Firstly, I
had
lost some weight and gained a shred of fitness from those previous weeks of training; secondly, it was all downhill; and thirdly, there were distractions. Bryce glanced to his left as we passed a flattened terrace at Gracemount. He stumbled, retched and spat.

“Aw Christ,” he said. “Don’t look over there, man.”

I did, wished I hadn’t, looked back ahead and tried to forget what I’d seen. The further we ran, the further I felt I was plunging into a dream. Each destroyed building, each strange clearing, each empty space that my mind told me should have been filled with something, each new body...everything that should have brought me closer to the reality of the destruction brought me further away from it. By the time we reached level ground, I was slogging away in a trance.

Bryce shoved me in the shoulder.

“Hey,” I murmured. We had stopped. Bryce waggled his water bottle at me. I looked around to see everyone else taking sips from their own bottles. I took my own out and drank.

We had been following what had once been a road. On either side of it was a patchwork of flat rubble. Sections of some buildings still stood, but never more than a few metres high. A few black and leafless trees still stood amongst the spray of brickwork, but there was little left of the street as it had been.

The fog was lifting. Beyond us were the remains of two tall buildings. One now lay against the other, the one furthest from the blast taking the weight of the first. They had no walls and no windows, and only shreds of flooring remained between the frames of iron that spiralled up into the low cloud.

In the shadow of the second structure lay a much smaller building. It had been crushed but there was some of it left. I could make out a door and part of a window.

“The ditch to our left was the Union Canal,” said Henderson. “There’s not much water in it now so we can cross it on foot. We believe that building on the other side of it used to be a café. As some of it is intact, there may be some supplies in there that we can use.”

Henderson screwed the cap on his water bottle and replaced it in his belt.

“This is our only stop today. We’ll take what we can and head home.”

We crossed the foot-high ditch water that lined the canal’s trough. I walked behind Richard as he helped his son negotiate the debris. The mud brought up new objects with every step and I didn't want to know what they were. I kept my eyes fixed on Richard’s pack until we reached the other side.

Henderson sent in two soldiers to assess the safety of the café. They signalled the all clear and then the remaining troops followed them in, leaving the four of us outside in the still, grey, silent morning.

Bryce lifted his mask and lit a cigarette. Richard sat down on a wall with his son, who was holding his head between his hands and shaking. I lifted my own mask and looked around. The air was not fresh. It was cold but not fresh. It was like...it
was
...a fridge full of rancid meat.

About a mile away I could make out the dim outline of Edinburgh Castle rising up behind the fog. The shape was all wrong. Chimneys were gone, turrets were cracked, the whole thing seemed to have heaved to one side. I tried to work out where we were. Having just crossed the canal, and from the broken landmark before us, I guessed were somewhere near Lothian Road. The two collapsed buildings must have been the new offices that had sprung up a few years before. The café would have been opened with the new businesses in mind, closed on Saturday morning. There would have been nobody in there at the time of the strike. At least we weren’t robbing a grave.