The boy goes swimming despite the frigid weather. As they sit together on the beach, the boy wonders what lies beyond the ocean. They finally reach the sea, but the ocean is not blue, which disappoints the boy. They start to run out of food once again, but the land they travel slowly changes. At a grocery store with gas pumps, they manage to acquire a cupful of gasoline. They also find a wheelbarrow, which they use upon leaving to transport their new set of blankets and canned foods. The two of them stay in the house for four days, and the man makes new clothes for his son. The boy begs his father not to go to the second story of the house, but the man goes nonetheless. They make a fire in the fireplace, make dinner, and spend the night inside the house. Inside the house, they find very old cans of food. On the way, the man finds a few arrowheads and gives them to the boy to keep. The man insists they walk to the house to search for food. They filter the water and drink, but they have not eaten for two days. The father notes that he has not seen his son run in a very long time. They find a water source, and the boy runs ahead to drink from the water. In the face of the horror they have recently seen, the boy apologizes for having shown serenity about the corpses burned into the road earlier. During one stop, the boy says, “If we had that little baby it could go with us” (168). A shocking sight awaits them, which the boy notices first: “a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (167). The people left quickly, their food still cooking, so the man and the boy examine the abandoned campsite. Nothing remains in the woods, and the man surmises that the people were frightened of the man since they have a pistol. They smell cooking, and the man and the boy circle around it. They see smoke coming out of the woods, and the boy fears it is a trap. The next morning, the protagonists continue onwards. They make camp, and while the boy sleeps, the father sees a group of people, three men and a pregnant woman, who pass them by. They decide to leave less trash behind so that anyone behind them will not know they have a food supply. The father tries to prevent his son from looking, but the boy is surprisingly serene.Īt a stop, the father and the boy think they are being followed. These people were killed on the road in a great fire. They come across a gruesome stretch of road upon which corpses lay “half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling” (161). They continue to travel towards the sea, but the father is extremely weak. The man says, “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” (160).
One night, his son has a nightmare but refuses to describe it to his father. He watched a group of men set fire to a mass of serpents in the ground. The man remembers a winter long ago, when he was slightly older than his son’s present age. Section 7 extends from page 159 to page 184.