The Road
It’s not that bleak, actually. They find “plenty” of food (and eventually lose it), there are several bands of marauding cannibals, but also regular people too. Just like the real world, with much less people.
Man and his Boy travel the land, due south, towards the warm weather. Everything is broken, burnt down, used up.
Their first encounter is with some marauding cannibals, with a big truck for support. Our protagonists are sleeping in a car, when they approach. To gather information, the Man fucks up, and calls attention when the Boy is threatened at knife point. He wastes 50% of his ammo on an headshot, but they survive. Now they no longer have enough ammo for a murder-suicide.
They find a manor with a locked basement that turns out to be some kind of human livestock pen for cannibals. Yikes! The previous farmhouse with a hanged family after running of of food is less bleak. At least they find a Coke can afterwards, gimme that sugar rush.
When exploring another abandoned house, they come across a prepper bunker, and while it has no electricity, they can eat and shower “at will”. At the first weird noise from outside, they load a cart with as much food as they can carry and fuck the fuck off.
Whenever they sleep, the Man reminisces about the apocalypse itself, how his pregnant wife did not want the Boy, for she doesn’t want to just survives, she wants to live! She dies anyway, takes off her warm clothes and runs off into the woods, just like that, abandoning her family.
They are getting close to the coast, they pass by an old man slowly travelling the same road as them. Against Man’s protests, the boy helps him out with food and some God-related conversations. The boy is curious, and has some god-related questions, but the adults will talk first.
Finally, the beach, but there’s nothing there, just more road. When the Man swims to a beached ship for medicine and food, a dude comes up and steals their shit, on account of the Boy being sleepy and sick. They catch up to him, and strip of all his resources. He remains butt-naked on the road, but the Boy doubles back and forces the Man to give his back his clothes ans some food. They no longer catch him.
Many conversations about God later, the Man takes an arrow to the heel and dies in pain. Our Boy continues to carry the fire with another family.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.