The Road

After a few days, the man wheezes and realizes that there is something wrong with his health. “I am going to die,” the man thinks. “Tell me how I am to do that” (175). The boy realizes that the propane tank is prematurely empty because he left the valve open.

For days they walk in the cold across a barren landscape. They explore a stalled passenger train but find nothing more in it than a package of paper plates. The man notes that their trauma-stunted imaginations do not allow them to reconstruct the train in their minds as it was.

After extended travel, with their stores reduced, the man marks their location on the map and realizes that they are still two or three weeks from their destination on the coast. They shelter from the rain in an old shed, and that night the boy dreams that his father died. The next day, the boy repeats: “There are other good guys. You said so” (184). The man says there are, but they are in hiding.

On the road again, the pair come across three emaciated men in hiding. The father holds them at bay with his pistol, and they walk on without incident.

The next morning, the man wakes up with debilitating flu-like symptoms. He recovers over the course of four days while the boys cares for him. His dreams swing between nightmare and nostalgia. After the boy has a nightmare, the man consoles him: “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up” (189). When he is finally well enough to travel, the man senses “some new distance” between himself and the boy (190). When they come across the charred remains of many people, the boy is calm and unresponsive.

While camping, the boy senses that they are being followed, and so the pair hide their cart and themselves. Four people come into view, including one pregnant woman. The strangers explore the campsite and move on. The next day, the man and the boy see a trail of smoke ahead of them and decide to carefully spy on it. They are not quiet enough, and they scare away the campers. Exploring further, they find a newborn infant roasted on a spit over the dwindling fire. The man and the boy are traumatized. Later, the boy will ask from where the baby came, and the father will be silent.

As they continue toward the coast, their food stores run out. After two days without food, they spy a house a mile from the road and decide to explore it. The boy is afraid, but the man assures him that they’ll secure the area. They find jarred potatoes and vegetables which may have spoiled but decide to eat them anyway after thoroughly cooking them. They stay in the house for four days, stoking a fire and replacing their clothes. They leave freshly stocked with pickled potatoes and vegetables.

They finally reach the coast, which is as desolate as any other place: “Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the grey squall line of ash” (215). The boy swims in the freezing ocean, and the man remembers better times when the ocean seemed more hospitable. They set up camp beneath a tarp. They walk down the beach and explore an abandoned sailboat where they find a few more items of sealed food, rope, and weatherproof clothing. Returning to camp, they realize that the boy left the pistol near the boat. Backtracking, they lose time and find themselves exposed in the pitch black of night in a rainstorm before stumbling back upon their campsite.

They camp for several days on the beach, unloading the sailboat. The man soon begins tasting blood when he coughs. Giving the boat a thorough search, he finds a first-aid kit and a flare gun with eight cartridges. The boy points out that while there’s “no one to signal to,” the flare could be shot off that night as a celebration or used for protection. Trying to work out a new plan, the man says, “There are people. There are people and we’ll find them. You’ll see” (244). That night they shoot off the flare. The boy suggests that it’s a signal to God that they exist.

The next day, the boy falls ill and runs a fever. Fearful and exhausted, the man nurses the boy back to health, stoking a fire and feeding him. It takes several days until the boy awakens, remembering only his dreams but not wanting to say what they were.

Soon after, they return from a last day of exploring and discover that all their things have been stolen from the beach. An hour later they catch up with the looter. His appearance is “scrawny, sullen, bearded, filthy,” and he has only a knife with which to defend himself (255). In a fit of anger, the man commands the looter to strip. When the man protests, he says “you didn't mind doing it to us” (257). They leave him like that, and the boy vehemently protests. “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” says the man, to which the boy responds, “Yes I am. I am the one” (259). They double back, but they can’t find the looter. The boy refuses to talk to the father for a time.

They travel through a nearby town but find nothing of value. At the edge of the town, someone shoots an arrow at them and misses. A second arrow pierces the man’s leg as he hovers over the boy. The third time the shooter appears in a window, the man hits him with a flare gun. He circles around and enters the post to confront the shooter but finds only an injured man and a woman holding him. The shooter escaped with their bow.

The man and the boy hole up in an old store and the man tends to his wound with the boy’s help. The next morning, the wound is swollen and throbbing, and he spends the next two days recovering. “When you wake up coughing you walk out along the road or somewhere but I can still hear you coughing” says the boy (269).

They travel along a part of the road that runs parallel to the coast. There is blood in the man’s sputum, and both the man and the boy now understand that the man is dying. They travel for four days, moving inland. At a crossroads they establish camp “and when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die” (277).

The narrative switches to the boy’s perspective. “You don’t know what might be down the road,” the man says. “We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again.” (278). The boy watches over his father as he dies. The boy worries about the little boy he thought he saw earlier, and the man assures him that “goodness will find the little boy” (281). The man dies in the night. The boy stays with the man for three days in a state of grief.

A strange man appears on the road, and the boy waits for him with his pistol ready. The man is healthy, strong, and well-armed. When the boy asks, the stranger assures him that he’s “one of the good guys” (282). The man has a family, including a woman and a pair of young children. He reveals that he’s been searching for the man and the boy. The stranger honors the dead man by wrapping him in a blanket.

The boy is united with the adoptive stranger’s family, including the woman who declares her happiness to see him. The narrator concludes by describing the fish that used to live before the apocalypse: “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (287).