The Road

Traveling further, the boy spots smoke on the horizon. The man decides to carefully take a closer look but finds nothing. The small town they explore has a few faint signs of life, including a dog barking in the distance. The next night, the boy sees another strange boy dart out of sight. The father strictly forbids going after the stranger, and the boy sobs with uncontrolled grief. “I’m afraid for that little boy,” says the boy (86).

Their food reserves begin to run low. They pass by an old barn which had been the scene of a massacre. There are human heads painted and lifted on pikes. The next morning they wake to the sound of footsteps and see a large group of cruel-looking marauders walking down the road with handmade pikes, followed by a contingent of slaves. “They’re on the move. It’s not a good sign,” says the man (92). They remain in safe hiding and move on.

As the boy and man travel on through the snow, they are weak from hunger. The man struggles to build a fire among the snow in the woods. At night, the dead trees fall with a terrifying sound, and the boy and the man hide, exhausted. The next morning, the boy collapses as they attempt to find their cart. “We’re not going to die,” says the man to the boy, but the boy is dubious (101).

Soon after, upon waking, the man discovers fresh truck tracks a mere fifty feet from the fire around which they had been sleeping. They double their tracks and hide, watching from an elevated position. Soon after, two men arrive, explore their campsite, and leave.

After five days without eating, the man and the boy come upon a grand house on the outskirts of a small town. They explore the house and find evidence of recent habitation, with piles of clothing heaped in the corners. The boy is terrified. They discover the remnants of an old pig farm, and behind it a cellar. When the man pries open the cellar, they discover naked human prisoners, many with missing and cauterized limbs. The prisoners, who are apparently victims of cannibals, plead for help from the terrified outsiders. Just then, six people appear on the horizon, aggressively coming toward the cellar. The man and the boy make a mad dash to escape across an open field and into a nearby wood. They hide, and the man tries desperately to stifle a cough. He hands the boy the pistol with the one bullet in the chamber. “You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up” he whispers (113). The boy is unable to process what the man is telling him. That night, as screams emanate from the farm, they leave under cover of darkness, disoriented and afraid.

Later, the starving and delirious man leaves the unconscious boy and explores another nearby barn. There, he finds a few dried apples, a packet of powdered grape drink, and a covered cistern filled with fresh water. This refreshes them, but that night a freezing rain darkens their morale. Later, the boy reveals that he dropped the lighter in the previous panic. He also says he understands that if they’d stopped to help the prisoners, they would have died, too. After traveling a while, the boy needs reassurance that they would never eat people, and the man provides it.

They travel three more days in a state of starvation. The man worries that his reluctance to wake from sleeping and dreaming is a sign that he is ready to die. At the far edge of a small town, they find an unpromising home, empty except for a small tank of gas from which the man fashions a lamp. Further investigation reveals a three by six door buried under a few inches of earth. The boy is reluctant to open it, but after some soothing words, the desperate man opens the door and walks in. “This is what the good guys do,” he says. “They don’t give up,” (137). Inside, he finds an emergency bunker filled with supplies, including a multitude of canned goods, a cooking stove, and simple cots: “the richness of a vanished world” (139).

The pair eat. As the boy sleeps, the man takes a complete inventory. Besides a year’s worth of food, he finds new clothes, batteries, cleaning and hygiene supplies, and gold krugerrands which he ignores. The bunker features a chemical toilet and stockpiles of ammo but no gun. The man and the boy sleep and eat for two days, but the man begins to worry about the visibility of the uncovered door and realizes that they must soon travel again. During a meal of coffee, ham, and biscuits the boy prays for the people who built the bunker.

They stay for two more days, eating and resting. They clean themselves, and the man fashions a few fake slugs out of wood for his pistol to match the one live slug. The man does what he can to disguise the trap door from the outside. In town, the man finds a new shopping cart in better condition. A downpour necessitates their staying another day in the shelter.

When the rain stops, they load the cart with food, provisions, the two-burner stove and the gas tank. They start walking and the man estimates that they are “two hundred miles from the coast. As the crow flies,” (156). The boy and the man conclude that there are no longer any crows left alive, and the boy tells the man that he’s thrown his flute away. Later down the road, the boy asks, “What are our long term goals?’’ (160). The man has no answer for him.

The next day, they find a tattered old man walking very slowly ahead on the road in the same direction. Warily, they overtake him, and the three parley. The old man is starving, incoherent, and hallucinating. The boy prods his reluctant father to give the stranger some food from their store, which he does. They stop for the night, and the man says his name is Ely and that he is 90 years old, clearly an exaggeration. He speaks in calculated riddles and expresses no desire to follow the man and the boy. “I could be anybody,” he says, when the man asks if his name is really Ely (171), adding, “Things will be better when everybody’s gone” (172). In the morning, they leave him behind. The boy expresses his understanding that Ely might die soon.