Free The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker Page A

was touching, of course, but, like most things that happen to you when you’re stuck underground, also unbearably crushing.
    I kept track of the time and the days by turning my phone on every now and then. This had the added advantage of providing more light but I was careful to only keep it on for a few minutes at a time, switching it off when I had abandoned my hopeless fantasy of somehow finding a signal. After a week - two nights of relative peace, five of madness - Alice stopped screaming. Very soon afterwards she stopped speaking as well. She spent most of her time tight-lipped with her dolly clasped to her chest in her corner or staring at the opposite wall with her thumb firmly planted between her lips and a bunny’s ear pressed against her nostrils. She was emotionless. Unresponsive unless she needed food, water or the toilet, in which case she would simply move towards whichever one was required and stand waiting until it was organised for her. We panicked, immediately craving her screams. Beth tried to coax her back with the usual bait of cuddles, stories and songs. But a wall had come down. A door had slammed shut. Her brain had moved to its next level of defence: complete lockdown. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out; sit tight and wait for this all to disappear. I thought she had lost her mind.
    When Beth gave up, I tried my usual repertoire of raspberries, hoots and silly faces, all of which became sinister grunts and gurns in the near dark. Alice ignored me. Her trust no longer belonged to anyone but herself.
    We ate the last of the cans of beans for dinner. I had become obsessed with making sure we ate every last particle of whatever we had, so when we had finished the beans I broke up a crust of bread into small pieces and smeared each around the inside of the can. I passed these to Beth, who either ate them or passed them to Alice. She tried one with Arthur, who explored the bean juice with his tongue before ejecting it in disgust and letting it dribble down his chin. He was still only interested in his mother’s milk, which meant that Beth always ate more than me.  
    After only a few days I became quietly insane with hunger. Before, my plates had been piled high with squashy carbohydrates, fatty protein and refined sugar that masqueraded as a balanced, nutritional, middle-class diet. Large, expensive cuts of meat and home-cooked chips hid behind slivers of baby broccoli like fat thieves behind a twig. Lean fish drowned in cream and packed with double helpings of pasta. Bowls of rich ice-cream, ‘hand-made’ crisps, rustic dips...with the wine, I was probably topping over 4,000 calories a day. On the rare days when I watched what disappeared down my gullet, my brain stepped in and rounded down, compressing the total to the magic 2,500 figure you’re led to believe is what an average male should be living on, what and average male needs to live on. The problem with this, of course, is that the average male is not a good target to shoot for. The average is very low.
    I had swollen slowly with the blubber of these wasted calories. And exercise...who had time? I would sit in the park at lunchtime with some meaty, cream-smothered sandwich, baulking at the runners strutting past in lycra, spitting my crisps at the fast music sizzling from their earbuds, knocking back disgusted gulps of fizzy chemicals at the leers of determination on their taut faces. Why did they bother? Why did they struggle?
    I hated them. To me running was just showing off, a hideous way of telling other people how much more focused, disciplined and healthy they were than you. How much more average they were than you, the sub-average gibbon who watched from a park bench with its pre-packed lunch. Gyms were just as bad, except in gyms you had it coming at you from all angles: weight lifters out-lifting each other, cross-trainers quietly tapping up their speeds to match their neighbour’s, treadmillers pounding their feet to some unheard,