They lay restless that night under the cover of an impasse by the side of the road that fell away into a narrow cave. It looked like some great wound inflicted upon the salted earth and they struggled to fit in but there was nowhere else to go and the ash had grown thick in the evening. They slept for four hours and when they awoke it was still dark and they could see nothing beyond their own cover. Faint moonlight from a pale half-hearted satellite high above but none reached them. In that hole they looked akin to foul creatures from some mythic fable in their hibernation. Spelaean hellions in hiding from the damned day.

Yeri rose and sat with her back to the cave wall and turned to the others.

‘Can we eat?’ she said. Her eyes sunken in their sockets. Her waxen visage so fatally flawed. Her deserving of her innocence still in this place but none of it afforded to her. Sullied and wounded and never to be put right again. A darkness in the world and a darkness in her heart. These questions with no answers. Seulgi took the satchel into her lap and sat half crooked near the entrance and nodded. She opened the satchel and took a hardtack from the packet and ate it in one bite. Military issue, no flavour. Possession of some neutered soul far from this place without need for such things any longer.

They ate their meagre rations in silence, the collective unfortunates in frame with their tiny appetites and their weak stomachs. Seulgi watched them carefully. If but these two could be taken from here and kept safe. If but. She watched how Yeri’s tangle of foul shirts rode up her stomach as she shifted about. Her ribcage so clear against her delicate bruised skin. A tender skeleton of matchstick bones fit to break. If but the hands of times were of a different fate. I would have liked to have known you before. Liked to have known both of you. If only our meeting were not so desperate.

When they had finished and rested they took out on the road again in the dawning light. A frail and parasitic sun with its sterile gift bestowed upon them. The ash had dimmed to a faint shower and all about it sat some two or three feet thick and in some places they had to stop and unwrap their feet and scrape out the odourless soot and then they moved again. Not once did they stay anywhere. They followed the road as it continued for ten or more miles across the whole morning. The highway somewhere far behind them and gone from sight. Signposts here and there with the colour stripped away like hollow shells devoid of instruction or information and occasionally the ochre body of an old car and all with their valuables stripped away, down to even the doors and seats, so that nothing remained but the wilted steel frames.

By evening they came upon a fork in the road and went straight. Light dimming away to a blind black they struggled to navigate. The cold biting at them. Raw red skin. In the later hours they traversed potholed roadblocks and fog too thick to peer through and emerged as gaunt and shapeless frames from the other side. Shambling noctambulists at odds to wander alone and isolated. The desultory eidolons suzerain over that creatureless domain. None spoke all day. Wendy in the bitter night the first amongst them to do so. Dragging her heels behind Seulgi and only the whistle of the blackened nightowls to keep them from silence.

‘Can we stop?’ she said. ‘Can we stop?’

They kept moving.

‘Why aren’t you listening? My feet hurt.’

‘No,’ Seulgi said. ‘We keep going.’

‘Why can’t we stop?’

‘You want to stop?’

‘My feet hurt.’

‘Fine. Stop.’

Wendy took one look around. Wayward soul contemptuous with her desolation should she stay. She turned back to Seulgi and hung her head and nodded meekly and followed and then they were going again. Vast stretches of road through unmarked wastelands. Smouldering ruins of ash and slag where once there had been fields of honeysuckle and daisies and tallgrass you could run your hands through. In that godless place they appeared utterly insignificant against the interminable darkness. Miniatures that they were and so they kept on, past yet more grey barrens and beyond hallucinatory landscapes where all manner of watchful beasts became one and the same.

They pushed on the whole night. Miles beyond counting. In the early hours they were rewarded with a brief dawning sun and they watched and ate their tacks and marvelled at it like children at some otherworldly circus beyond understanding or recognition.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Yeri said. Nobody else spoke.

They finished their food and travelled all through that morning, crystalline phantoms against a pink newborn sunrise. In the early afternoon the sun had wilted away and they were left in the dark once more. Thunder broke their mute pilgrimage but it did not rain and all that came was ash. They passed on beyond more cars. Signposts again here and there and not one still intact. These years and their awful tolls on all things human. The road seemed to never end. In the waning hours Seulgi took her binoculars and glassed the unwelcome evening darkness and stood to one side while the others waited in quiet.

She pointed across the grey night and they followed her eyes but they could see nothing.

‘What?’ Wendy said.

‘A town.’

‘How far?’

‘Five, maybe ten miles. Maybe more.’

‘Can we make it tonight?’

‘Do you want to stop?’