currently reading The Road by Cormac Mccarthy and thinking of a universe post apocalypse where andrew minyard who did not have any will to live nor die found a child whose parents were k*lled by scavengers. from this moment, he chose to survive to protect him no matter what. he made promises to the boy and to himself and they headed south along the road and survived day by day, hiding in the wood, trying to find supplies and water, they did everything they could to not starve nor die from the cold. seasons (or what is left of it) and months go by, they starved but did not die. they encountered dangerous people, almost died, but did not.
andrew and the boy know they have been followed for days or weeks, time is a difficult thing here, but nothing happened. they haven't seen a human being since the day andrew sliced the throat of a man who grabbed the child by the arm. they first thought they've heard an animal but it can't be because everything and everyone is dead. the child is scared. they walked on top of a hill and waited. the boy first saw light, a fire but no smoke. but then it started moving, fast. he asked if it was a dog. andrew said no. there ain't no dog like that. fox. he thought, but did not say it because it's impossible. and then it was gone. andrew remembers what a fox looked like in the old world and so that night, he dreams of one. in the morning he thinks he has hallucinated what they saw which can't do no good because if he starts thinking of beautiful things, far gone and extinct, it means he has giving up and that they are already dead. so they keep walking, they keep moving, they keep living.
but the fox is real. i mean not really, because it's not a fox but a person. he moves like an animal, shades of red like burning fire who turned those places to ashes. they saw it again, still from far away but with the binoculars, andrew realises this can't be an animal and he can't tell who the prey and who the predator is. he is ready to shoot, ready to kill because no one will touch the boy, he promised. but the child never saw such bright and warm colors in his life. he only knows the dark. and so he pleads his dad to wait. he once asked to not kill a dog, he didn't want to eat one. andrew did not kill the dog. and so he asks again. can we leave dad? i don't want to kill it. but again, not a fox, a boy.
a boy about andrew's age, he realises when they finally meet across a river. actually he could be much younger. what strikes him is the icy blue eyes through the holes of the fox mask. he's wearing furs and it's somehow really clean, he sits strangely. he doesn't look like a boy at all, andrew doesn't know if the boy even know what he is, who he is. he doesn't understand their language or so it seems. he belongs to the forest but everything is in ruins so he belongs to nowhere, just like them. but this is how it starts. a river. a gun. a child.
fire and ice.
