Sections 32-35:
“He hoped the boy had gone to sleep. He knelt there, wheezing softly, his hands on his knees. I am going to die, he said. Tell me how I am to do that.”
They camp with the man and share their food. They discuss a lot of different things, including the concept of God, and the father wonders what this man has seen. He tells them his real name isn’t Ely and that he couldn’t trust them with his actual name. They might tell someone. The next day they part ways with the man. The boy makes the father give him some food, and the father tells the man he should thank the boy. He doesn’t.
That night the father wakes up coughing and hopes he hasn’t woken the boy. The next day he tries to turn on their little burner and the gas has drained out of it. The boy didn’t know to close both valves. They’re running out of food, and they have to start cooking on a fire again.
The boy finds an old abandoned train. The father says it must have kept going until it ran out of fuel, years ago.
It’s still a while before they’ll reach the coast when they run out of food. Two days without food, the father knows it’s only two more days until they start getting weak. They run into two men, clothed in rags and emaciated. They want what’s in their cart. The father aims the pistol at them and the men back off. They keep going and find a place to make sure the men have moved on. The father gets a fever, has wild dreams, and sleeps for several days. The boy is terrified.
Sections 36-39:
“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. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I won’t let you.”
When they set out on the road again, the man feels weakened. As they’re walking, they come upon mummified dead people who look as if they’ve been burned into the macadam, along with their suitcases and boxes. The boy asks why they couldn’t leave the road, and the man says it’s because everything was on fire.
Later, when the father and son are eating a meal on the road, the boy says he thinks someone is following them. The man agrees, so they find a place to see who it is. It’s three men and a woman who’s pregnant. They stay where they are for the night, then get back on the road. They see smoke ahead, and the father says they need to check it out. When they get to the camp, the people have run away. Probably because they saw the gun, the man says. Then the boy turns away to lean into his father, and the father realizes what he’s seen, “a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” He tells the boy he’s sorry and worries he won’t speak again, but he does.
Farther down the road, they find a house across a field, where they stay for a few days. They find home-canned food in quart jars and have a feast made in the fireplace. They continue on the road and are almost out of food when they finally come to the ocean. The boy takes off his clothes and jumps into the freezing surf.
Sections 40-43:
“He held the boy and bent to hear the labored suck of air. His hand on the thin and laddered ribs. He walked out on to the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage.”
A boat that capsized is not far from the beach in the water. It’s about a hundred feet to get to it, and the boat’s sixty feet long, in about ten to twelve feet of water. The man wants to look in it for things they need. He swims naked out to the boat. He finds blankets, yellow rubber boots, a nylon jacket, a pair of women’s sneakers for the boy, but not much food. The father comes back ashore and they have trouble finding their things back where they left them. It’s getting dark and starting to rain hard, so they can’t find their tracks to follow them back. They finally find their stuff and get under the tarp to stay dry. They spend the next few days going back to the ship and getting everything from it they can. The man tries one more time to think of anywhere else on the boat he can look that he hadn’t thought of. He looks inside seats on the boat and finds a first-aid kit, a flashlight and some flares. The boy asks if they can send flares into the air as a celebration. The next night, they do. The following morning, the boy wakes up sick with a fever and the man worries he’s going to die. The man gives him Aspirin from the first-aid kit and holds him as he sleeps. The fever won’t break and the man is terrified.