Section 6:
“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth.”
The man dreams of a pale bride with a dress of gauze and dark hair coming to him. He wakes up and it’s snowing again. He doesn’t trust his good dreams. He thinks it means death is calling him. On the road, they get to the top of a hill and the man puts the boy in the cart, stands on the rear rail, and lets it glide down the hill. The boy smiles for the first time in a long while. They come to a supermarket and find two soda machines tilted over and forced open. The man puts his hand deep into one of them and finds a can of Coca Cola. He tells the boy it’s a treat for him. Bubbly, the boy says. They make it to the city at dusk. They see the sweeps of interstate exchanges, and the dried-out, mummied dead everywhere. The man carries the revolver in his belt. The next day they get to the house where the man was raised. The boy doesn’t want to go in, but the man tells him it’ll be okay.
Section 7:
“He said that everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew all of this was empty and no substance to it. There was a good chance they would die in the mountains and that would be that.”
He takes the boy in his old house and he shows him his old room. The boy wants to leave and the man says they shouldn’t have come. A few nights later they feel a rumbling when they’re sleeping. The boy clings to him, crying. Once it stops, the man explains it was an earthquake and it’s gone.
They have to head up to the pass at the watershed, which is at five thousand feet. As they climb, it gets colder and they start to run into snow. It’s hard to push the cart and they only get a few miles farther each day. The air starts to get thin, though, and the man knows they’re nearing the summit. He recognizes it by the empty parking lot at the overlook. They have reached the gap.
Sections 8-9:
“High rock bluffs on the far side of the canyon with thin black trees clinging to the escarpment. They sound of the river faded. Then it returned. A cold wind blowing up from the country below.”
They continue on as it gets colder and snows again. They’re running low on food, but the boy admonishes his father for not eating enough, knowing he’s trying to ration it for him. They’re heading downward now, but the snow is still deep and the man has to pull the cart behind him. At some places where there tree trunks on the road, they have to empty everything out of the cart, pass all of it over, and then load up the cart again on the other side. After four days, they come down out of the snow. They start to hear a river that they finally reach. They discover the thundering sound they hear is a waterfall. The boy is mesmerized by it.
Sections 10-11:
“This is a good place Papa, he said.”
The man swims out to the waterfall, then goes back for the boy and holds him as he tries to swim. They find morels, a kind of mushroom the dad explains, and the boy thinks they’re good. The father puts morels in the boy’s hood, then they make camp by the river pool and cook up some morels with beans, tinned pears and tea. He tells the boy stories until he falls asleep. The next morning he tells the boy they can’t stay, even though the boy wants to for one more day. Because it’s nice, the man explains, it could attract others and thus it’s not safe.
They continue heading south until they come to a jack-knifed tractor-trailer lying on its side across the road. It’s been there for years. They’ll have to slide the cart under it, but they sleep in the cab that night. In the morning, the man checks out the inside of the trailer and only finds dried and shrunken dead bodies.