The man walked the broken road under a sky gone gray with ash. He carried a knapsack, threadbare and stained, its straps cutting into his shoulders like wire. The wind bore no sound but its own keening, and the world lay quiet save for the crunch of his boots on gravel. He walked alone, as he had these many days, through a land stripped bare by some reckoning none could name. The trees stood skeletal, their branches clawing at the heavens like fingers of bone. No birds sang. No life stirred in the dust. He stopped at a crossroads where the signs hung rusted, their letters faded to ghosts. He squinted at the horizon, where mountains loomed faint and jagged, like teeth in the mouth of the earth. His breath hung in the air, thin and white, and he pulled the coat tighter 'round his frame. It was his father's coat, or had been, before the world turned to ruin. Now it was his, and it smelled of smoke and sweat and something deeper, something like sorrow. He knelt and touched the ground, fingers sifting through the dirt. It was cold, unyielding, and he wondered what it remembered of the men who'd walked it before. He rose and moved on, the road stretching endless before him. In his pack was a tin of beans, a knife with a chipped blade, and a book with pages soft as cloth, their words half-lost to time. He did not read it. He carried it because it was heavy, because it meant something to carry what was left. The sun sank low, a dull red smear behind the haze. He made camp in the lee of a crumbled wall, its stones blackened by fires long dead. He built no fire of his own. Fire drew eyes, and eyes brought death in this country. He ate the beans cold, spooning them from the tin with fingers that shook not from cold but from hunger's deep gnaw. He looked out over the plain, where shadows pooled like oil. Somewhere out there, he knew, were others. Men with knives. Men with worse. He slept with the knife in his hand, its blade a cold comfort against his palm. Dreams came, fractured and fleeting, of a woman with hair like wheat and a boy who laughed under a sky that was blue once, long ago. He woke to the same gray dawn, the same silence. He stood and shouldered the pack and walked on. The road led him to a town, or what had been a town. Houses gaped like skulls, their windows empty. He moved through the streets, wary, his shadow sliding over walls scrawled with words of warning and despair. He found a can of peaches in a cellar, its label peeled away but the metal still sound. He carried it with him, a small weight of hope. He walked on, toward the mountains, toward whatever lay beyond. The road was his scripture, its lines etched in dust and blood. He followed it because there was nothing else.