An Alternate Ending to The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The man was weak, his limbs trembling and mouth bloody with sores and cuts. He raised milky eyes to the boy, looking for some solace in the small, dirty face.
“You need to go on.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Only a matter of time before I’m dead. You need to keep moving.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can, and you will. No reason for you to die too.”
“I want to die with you.”
“That’s not the answer.”
The man lifted the crusted blankets over his head and laid still.
“Papa?”
“Leave in the morning. I’ll be gone then.”
“No.”
“Please.”
The boy sat still for a moment. He pulled an extra blanket from the cart and wrapped it between his body and the cold ashes on the ground. He laid by the man’s side until morning.

——

In the morning the boy was afraid to peel the blankets back from the man, so he left them. He didn’t know what to do, so he tried to pull the cart behind him along the road. It was too heavy for him, and he didn’t know how to use much of the equipment on it anyway. All the food was gone too, the last bits eaten a day earlier.
He tried to move the cart anyway, for his own benefit and for the man. He tried, but the wheels were stuck in the ashes like a mouse tail in a trap and it would not move by his small body alone.
“Papa! Papa!” He cried out, desperate and alone. Tears rolled down his face, staining the already gray sheet wrapped around his face. “Papa!”
His cries fell on dead ears, and the rest of the world stared straight ahead without comment. The boy was left sniveling in the snow, his head bowed deep into his lap. After a while he stood and walked to the cart, then pulled the pistol from it.
He shoved the gun into his pocket only to hear the pocket rip and the gun crash to the ground. Even with the wet ashes to cushion the impact the gun went off and sent the last bullet through the boy’s pants and into the woods beyond the road.
The boy stood silent, not sure if he was dead or if the bullet had missed him. He couldn’t feel anything anyway, it was too cold. Then he started to cry again, because the gun was useless. He had failed the man.
The boy reached into his pant leg and yelped as the hot metal of the gun burned his fingertips and the side of his leg. He picked it up gingerly by the handle and flung it off to the side of the road.
He moved along the road, not sure of where he was going or where he would end up. It was raining now, and the ash beneath his feet was becoming slippery and wet. He slipped and fell, face-down in the sludge. Tears and mucus could not be seen by the world as the boy cried and struggled to stand, his feet and hands sliding about the muck.
A shadow darker than the wet ashes was cast over the boy, creating a black silhouette that he could not ignore. He swiveled his head up to meet the flarepistol, the gun he had forgotten on the cart.
The man that they had abandoned, naked by the side of the road, was holding the weapon from a short distance away, the cart balanced in the ashes behind him.
The boy stopped crying, and instead began to shiver.
But he wasn’t cold anymore.

~ by scriken on September 1, 2008.