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

the time trying to keep them cool with wet flannels. Our water supplies were now very low. Food too. The candles had all gone and the torch’s batteries were also running out. Alice wouldn’t eat. She began crying quietly in her sleep, still the only noise she made. The toilet box was starting to reach its limit. I tried double sealing it but in my haste I spilled some of the vile liquid onto the floor. I covered it with an anorak, but it did no good. The close air in the room was now thick with the smell of shit.
    I spent long periods staring at the hatch, yearning to be outside in whatever hell now lay above. I imagined fluttering ash and molten rock, a heat haze on the rubble, a poisonous breeze. And yet how cool and fresh the air would feel against my face compared with the fetid atmosphere of the cellar.
    Then I would stare at the pipe. The more I stared, the more I convinced myself that it was full of water. I could break it, drain it, prolong our survival, perhaps enough for...for what? A rescue party?
    Or it could be a gas pipe. I could break it in the middle of the night and kill us all. Beth, Alice and Arthur would not know what had happened.
    Then I got sick. High fever, headache, sore throat, aching bones. I tried to function for a day, coughing and spluttering while I brought flannels, mouthfuls of water and spoonfuls of tomato ketchup (pretty much all we had left) to Beth and Arthur and trying in vain to interest Alice in either. Then I gave up and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Beth threw me a blanket and I hugged it around myself, pressing my hot face against the cold floor.
    I fell into a dream in which I was the glass within the kitchen door of our house. A hundred faces were pressed up against me, saliva drooling from their mouths and spluttering from their noses as they heaved and panicked to push through me. I stood, unable to move, my glass arms and legs stretched out as if I was on a rack. I felt my glass face bake in the sun. Then the sun became bright, overexposed light that seared and finally exploded everything around me. The faces burst and sizzled against me. Their cheeks charred and crumbled into dust, their eyeballs boiled and melted down my neck like marshmallows.
    I woke up gasping, fumbling for the water bottle. I almost had it to my lips when I paused. It was our last one, less than half full. I tightened the lid and put it back As I sat back against the wall and caught my breath in my dry throat, I saw Alice’s face in the single shaft of evening light looking at me. I watched her for a while, trying to work out what she was doing. He lips were moving. She had the can in front of her mouth.
    Very slowly I picked up my can and pulled it to my ear. All I could hear was Alice whispering in the corner, but then I shuffled along the wall so that the string was taut.
    “Just a dream, Daddy,” she said. “Just a dream.”
    My heart buckled. I put the can to my mouth and motioned for her to swap hers to her ear.
    “Just a dream,” I said. “Are you thirsty?”
    “Daddy?”
    “Yes?”
    “The lady, Daddy. The lady was sad. She was crying.”
    I picked up the water bottle and crawled across the floor to Alice. She sat up with the can between her knees and I flung my arm around her neck and kissed her cheek. She buried her face into my neck and grasped my ear tightly and we both sobbed quietly into one another as Beth and Arthur snored fitfully in the corner.
    Eventually I clambered around so that I was sat next to her and looked up at the ventilation shaft. There was still some light.
    “Have some water,” I said. “Here.”
    I opened the bottle and raised it to her lips. She brought her hands up to meet it, but in doing so she dropped the can to the floor. The loud noise made her jump and she flinched, knocking the bottle from my hands. I struggled to catch it but it flew out of my reach.
    “Sorry, Daddy,” Alice cried in alarm. “Sorry! Sorry, Daddy! Sorry!”
    Beth roused in her