In days gone past there would have been trout in the streams and in the glens. Cupreous and slick and bright as day. Now in these worn trenches nothing but starving soil and ash and no water, not even a few brief drops. When the plains broke down into a long decline they stopped and Seulgi took the binoculars from her bag and glassed the dim horizon as it broke into a cancerous dawn. All colour bleeding away like painted oils. She scanned the distance in its dismal becoming and then again and then returned the binoculars to her satchel. A road perhaps ten or fifteen miles away that had once been a grand highway. Follow that, Seulgi. Follow it east or west or wherever it takes you but stay close and stay low and pray that it takes you somewhere. She turned to the others.

‘There’s a road,’ she said. ‘Maybe a couple hours away. Maybe more.’

‘Can we rest?’ said Wendy. Her face a porcelain reflection of some deathly pallor that Seulgi quite disliked the look of.

‘We can’t afford to,’ she said. They put up no protest and when they had taken their bags and rewrapped their feet and seen to their blisters they moved on. They passed fields where vineweed undergrowth sprawled forth over the ground and where rats and great insects with fat bellies and grotesque bald paperskulls came and picked at the ashen dirt and then scurried away again. When the sun rose it came weak and sallow and colourless and their benighted march was not lifted by its arrival. The other two said nothing. In the biting wind all they heard was the rustle of the bags around their feet like some susurrous swarm coalescing about their broken and tired bodies. When they made it to the embankment at the bottom of the highway it was neither night nor morning for there was no sunlight save a pale halfmoon blinded by ashen skies and in that ominous limbo they existed as luminescent spectres with their diminutive frames cast in shadow across the ground like penumbral mutants from some otherworldly existence trudging forward part and parcel to the expired terrain they bore witness to.

They climbed the hill and up over the railing and onto the highway. Looking one way and then another. Beyond the other side yet more unturned fields of soot and black dust and fogkept wastelands where none dare venture. Yeri sat and opened her backpack and took out the food she had left and placed it on the cold ground and sorted through it. One unopened candy bar and two hardtacks in a little ration package and a bottle half filled with freshwater three days old. She took the candy bar and turned it in her hand as if it were some ancient relic untouched by man’s hands for centuries.

‘Don’t,’ Seulgi said. She craned her neck down.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Don’t.’

‘I need to eat.’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘Eat it then.’ Seulgi turned east and took the binoculars from her satchel. ‘If you’re hungry, eat it.’

Yeri rolled the candy bar around in her hands and put it back in the bag and slung it across her back and sighed. If only food were a right still afforded to them. Seulgi raised the binoculars and glassed the horizon and then turned west and did the same again. Rusted sedans and ashen pickups laid scattered like the russet skeletons of some lost species of beast unknown to man’s sensibilities. One with its doors splayed out and one with its windscreen still miraculously intact and then more sat behind them as if in hibernation, all along the highway in snaking columns. She put the binoculars away and turned to her companions. Their frostbitten candlewax faces like frightened mice. Wendy the worse of the two and in her sullen eyes there lurked the spirit of sickness waiting to devour her.

‘Let’s go,’ Seulgi said. She raised the satchel and took it across her back and set off eastward with the others in tow. Ahead of them the road filled with great craters where the storms had blown away the concrete and the railings splintered and buckled like broken limbs on each side of the causeway. They kept at their pace for perhaps another five miles, perhaps more. What luxuries supplied to them save the gift of still living where so many others did not. Time was not one of these and so they measured their days by the glint of the waning halfsun. Yeri with a wristwatch in her bag but it had shattered more than a year ago and all it held was some weak form of sentiment of some description even she did not know.

An hour or so later they passed by a convoy of sixteen-wheelers stranded in the lot of an old gas sta