The Road

A man wakes next to his child outdoors in a barren wasteland, in which the sky is described as “some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3). He remembers a dream in which his child leads him through a cave where he meets a creature “naked and translucent” who “turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly in the dark” (4). He guesses that the month is October but can’t be sure. He checks the landscape through binoculars and then wakes the child. His inventory includes a grocery cart, a pistol with two rounds, a tarp and some blankets, and very little food. They keep a few essentials in a knapsack in case they need to escape quickly from bandits.

They travel warily south along an unnamed road; “there’d be no surviving another winter here” (4). They reach a ruined gas station where they collect a small amount of fuel. The man is distracted by hunger. As a cold rain falls, they take shelter under a rock. That night, the man and the boy discuss death. The man assures the boy that “if you died I would want to die too” (11).

The next day, the man wakes cursing God. As they walk through an unnamed city, the man recalls a happy childhood memory of fishing with his uncle, “a day to shape the days upon” (13). They travel for days across a blackened landscape as the weather becomes colder. Without clear moonlight, the nights are black. It begins to snow, and the man deftly fixes the grocery cart. In a farmyard, they find a few people who had hanged themselves and a small section of cured ham. That night, the man dreams of a beautiful woman dressed as a corpse, a vision he views as an example of weakness in himself. They walk in the rain for a while as the man remembers his wife. In a supermarket they discover and share an old can of Coca-Cola.

When they arrive at the man’s childhood home, the boy is instinctually frightened of it. After lingering, the man decides it is best to move on. The man mentally plots a course through the mountains to the coast and considers the different ways he and the boy might die, including murder-suicide. In the days following, they encounter apparent victims of this form of death.

His son catches the man pretending to share hot cocoa while actually just sipping hot water. “If you break little promises you’ll break big ones,” the boy says (34). They reach a river and follow it, pausing to swim in a waterfall. They walk through the woods and find morel mushrooms. They debate staying but decide to move on, continuing on their course to warmer climates. They pass by a truck filled with dead bodies and, further along, evidence of a recent forest fire. Within the burned landscape they find a dying man, and the boy is upset that his father won’t stop to help him.

The man remembers the day of the apocalypse and his conversations about it with his lost wife. He recalls pleading with his wife to continue surviving. “As for me my only hope is eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart,” she tells him (57). She killed herself soon after.

A few days later, they see a caravan of masked, armed men led by a working diesel truck coming down the road. They run into the woods, leaving their cart but taking their emergency satchel. As they hide, a man comes into the woods to defecate and catches them. The man holds his pistol to him, and they begin a tense negotiation. The stranger grabs the boy, and the man kills the stranger instantly, leaving him with a single bullet remaining. They hide until the caravan moves on. Later, the man retrieves their plundered cart and they travel again. The boy is traumatized after watching his father kill somebody. The man assures him, “We’re still the good guys.” (77).