The End of the World Running Club Read Online Free Page B

stabbed the paper.
    “What does ‘imminent’ mean Jabbar?”
    Jabbar faltered, shaking, his eyes flicking between us both.
    “It’s already happened,” he hissed. “They’re already here.”
    I remembered the sudden gust of wind on the deck, the bending branches, the rumble. What was that?
    An aftershock. How far away? Glasgow? London?
    “Now go away! Get....”
    But Mark and I had turned from the shutters and were looking around us. Jabbar started to look upwards through the slats of the shutters as well. Far away, we heard a low, nasal drone. It was an ancient sound, like a rusted handle turned on something that had not been used in a long time. A sound that was not supposed to be heard any more, a sound that belonged in a different century. It began to rise slowly in pitch till it reached and held its hideous, gut-wrenching howl.
    An air-raid siren. A fucking air-raid siren.
    Jabbar sprang back from the shutters and fled back through the shop. Mark and I shared one last look and then bolted in opposite directions.
    “Beth!” I cried as I ran, Arthur laughing in blissful ignorance as he shoogled in his backpack.  
    “Get up! Get Alice up!”
    I sped through the archway and onto the path. The siren was beginning its first awful dive back down. Where the hell did Bonaly have an air-raid siren? The barracks I guessed.  It echoed off the hills and howled through the empty streets; a demented, sickening sound that had only ever meant one thing and one thing only: take cover, hell is coming, things are about to get VERY bad .
    As I crossed the road, I heard the banished dog from down the road join in the howl. Some weeks later, I would suddenly remember this noise in the middle of the night and weep, actually weep, holding my hands to my face so I didn’t wake and upset Beth and the kids.
    “Beth!” I screamed.  
    I saw people at windows now, woken by the siren. Tangled dressing gowns, puffy, confused faces frowning in the light. The sun that had seemed so warm and welcoming before was now vivid and terrible.
    “Get up! We’re...”
    The words actually caught in my throat. Ridiculous. I felt dizzy, the way you do when you’re a child about to call out for your parents in the night.
    “...going to be hit!”
    My mind reeled. Think . What do you do? What did those government broadcasts tell you to do? How do I arm myself? How do I survive?
    It occurred to me that I had subconsciously been preparing for this. Even in those last few strange and unfathomable days, a check-list had been forming in my mind, an old program from my youth kicking into life. In the eighties, nuclear war was absolutely, positively, 100% how I was going to die. Not asteroids, and certainly none of this slow climate change bollocks. The real deal. You were going to evaporate in an atomic blast: finished, done, end of. Then Aids came along and, if you were a teenager like me, your worries turned to fact that death was now lurking within every pleated skirt and behind every cotton gusset. Now sex was going to kill you.
    I could deal with Aids. I knew I wasn’t getting to have sex any time soon anyway, not with my face looking like an arse smeared with jam. But the nuclear threat was a different matter. That was real terror. And so began my first mini obsession since my five-year-old self first heard that something called a Tyrannosaurus Rex used to exist. I watched all the TV series, read all the books and kept all the survival pamphlets on how to make a homemade fallout shelter. I was fascinated and terrified. That bit in When the Wind Blows when the old couple walk out and think the smell of scorched human flesh is somebody cooking a Sunday roast gave me nightmares for a week.
    Although I had long since stopped being hung up on the apocalypse, that part of my brain had started making a list as soon as the first reports of trouble came in. I think it always had done. Every major catastrophe, every natural disaster, every impending conflict