No Road South

Chapter 1: Gray Country

The world had been gray for seven years.

Warren Massey stood at the crest of what had once been an interstate overpass and looked south across the ruined flats of central Tennessee. The sky was the color of old concrete, same as it had been every day since the eruption. Same as it would be tomorrow. Beneath that permanent ceiling of ash-choked cloud, the land stretched out in frozen monotony—collapsed rooftops poking through drifts of volcanic soot and snow, skeletal trees standing like burned matchsticks, the highway itself a cracked and buckled ribbon disappearing into the murk.

He pulled his scarf tighter against the wind. It cut through everything out here. The thermal underlayer he'd scavenged from a sporting goods store in Kentucky was good for maybe ten below, and the temperature hadn't been above that in weeks. His boots were military surplus, the left sole patched with epoxy and a strip of tire rubber. They'd hold another hundred miles. Maybe two hundred if he was careful.

Warren was always careful.

He shifted the pack on his shoulders—thirty-two pounds today, lighter than last week because he'd eaten through two cans of kidney beans and a tin of sardines—and started down the overpass ramp. The footing was treacherous. Ice had formed a skin over the ash, and beneath that was crumbled asphalt with rebar fingers reaching up to snag an ankle. He tested each step with the steel-tipped walking stick he'd fashioned from a curtain rod, planting it ahead of him and transferring weight only when he was sure.

Fifty-seven years old. Bad left knee from a construction accident in his thirties. A dull ache in his lower back that never fully went away. He couldn't afford a fall. Out here, alone, a broken bone was a death sentence. He'd seen it happen. A man named Colby, back in the second year, had slipped on a frozen creek bed outside Louisville and snapped his tibia. The bone had come through the skin. Warren had splinted it, carried the man for two days, and buried him on the third.

Colby was the fourth person Warren had buried. There had been two more since.

He reached the bottom of the ramp and turned south on the highway. The wind was at his back now, which helped, pushing him along like a cold hand between his shoulder blades. He walked with a steady, mechanical rhythm—not fast, never fast, but relentless. He'd learned years ago that speed killed you out here. Speed made you sweat, and sweat froze, and frozen sweat pulled the heat right out of your core. Better to be slow. Better to be steady. Better to be the tortoise in a world that had killed every hare.

The highway cut through what had been a small town. He could tell by the density of the ruins—houses packed close together, a strip mall on the right with its roof caved in, a gas station with pumps still standing like metal sentries guarding nothing. He'd stopped checking gas stations for food two years ago. Anything worth eating had been stripped in the first eighteen months after the eruption. Now the only reliable finds were in places people hadn't thought to look—basements with sealed entrances, commercial kitchens behind collapsed restaurants, the occasional fallout shelter built by some Cold War paranoiac who'd stocked it with canned goods and never needed them.

Until the world actually ended, anyway.

Warren passed through the town without stopping. There was nothing here. He could tell by the tracks in the ash—other travelers had come through recently, their boot prints preserved in the frozen surface like fossils. At least three people, maybe four, heading south like everyone else. Everyone always headed south. The thinking was that somewhere below the ash line—maybe Florida, maybe the Gulf Coast, maybe Mexico—the sun still broke through and things still grew. Warren had been heading south for five years and hadn't found that place yet. But he kept walking, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping meant dying, and Warren Massey was not ready to die.

Not yet.

He made camp that evening in the shell of a fast-food restaurant. The walls were mostly intact, which cut the wind, and the kitchen still had a functioning gas line—not that there was any gas in it, but the steel counters made a decent surface to set up his small camp stove. He melted snow in a dented pot, heated it until it steamed, and poured it over a handful of instant coffee he'd been rationing for three weeks. The coffee was stale and bitter and tasted like salvation.

He sat on the counter with his back against the wall and drank it slowly, savoring each sip. Outside, the wind moaned through the gaps in the building, carrying flurries of ash and snow that hissed against the windows like sand. The light was fading—not that it ever got truly bright anymore, but there were degrees of gray, and the darkest gray was coming.

Warren pulled out his map. It was a road atlas he'd taken from a truck stop years ago, its pages soft and fragile from handling. He'd marked his route in pencil—a wandering line from what had been Cincinnati, down through Kentucky, into Tennessee. He studied the terrain ahead. The highway would take him through Murfreesboro, then south toward the Alabama line. If the roads were passable. If the bridges held. If he didn't run into anyone who wanted what he had.

He folded the map carefully and tucked it back into his pack. Then he checked his supplies: eleven cans of food—mixed vegetables, chicken broth, two cans of pinto beans, a can of peaches he was saving for a day when he needed something sweet. A bottle of water purification tablets, half full. A first aid kit with gauze, tape, antiseptic, and six ibuprofen. A hunting knife. A .38 revolver with nine rounds. A fire starter. Two lighters. A coil of paracord. A headlamp with dying batteries.

It wasn't much. It was everything.

He ate a can of chicken broth cold—no point wasting fuel to heat it—and washed it down with the last of the coffee. Then he pulled his sleeping bag from the pack, climbed inside it on the counter, and lay there listening to the wind.

Seven years. Seven years since Mount Paleo had ripped itself apart in what the scientists had called a VEI-8 event, a supervolcanic eruption that ejected enough ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun across the entire northern hemisphere. Warren had been in his office in Nashville when it happened—a civil engineer reviewing drainage plans for a new subdivision, the most mundane work imaginable. The ground had shaken. The sky had turned black. And then the ash had started falling, and it hadn't stopped for months.

The first year had been the worst. The die-off. Crops failed within weeks. Supply chains collapsed within days. The government tried to maintain order, but you can't govern a country that's starving to death in the dark. By the end of that first winter, the cities were graveyards. Warren had watched Nashville tear itself apart—the riots, the fires, the desperate caravans heading south on interstates clogged with abandoned cars. He'd stayed too long, trying to help, trying to use his engineering skills to shore up shelters and water systems. By the time he'd finally left, he was alone.

He'd been alone ever since. Not by choice, exactly. People found him, or he found them. They traveled together for a while. And then they died—from cold, from sickness, from violence, from the simple grinding mathematics of a world that couldn't support human life anymore. After Colby, there had been a woman named Patrice who'd died of pneumonia. After Patrice, a teenage boy named Denny who'd been shot by raiders outside Bowling Green.

Warren had stopped learning names after Denny.

Not really. He still learned them. He just tried not to.

He closed his eyes. Sleep came slowly, as it always did, accompanied by the wind's low howl and the tick of ash against glass. He dreamed of green things—grass, trees, the jasmine that had grown along the fence of his house in Nashville. In the dream, the sun was warm on his face, and his wife, Louise, was calling him in for dinner. He could smell pot roast. He could hear her voice, clear as a bell.

He woke in the dark to silence. The wind had stopped. The temperature had dropped.

Warren lay still for a moment, orienting himself. Fast-food restaurant. Tennessee. Heading south. Alone.

Always alone.

He packed up in the predawn gray and started walking.