The highway south of the city was empty.
It stretched out ahead of them in a long grey line, six lanes wide, running straight toward the horizon between low hills and the hollow shells of old apartment complexes. Cars sat abandoned where they'd stopped on the first day, doors hanging open, windows shattered, weeds growing up through their wheel wells. Traffic signs leaned at odd angles over the lanes, rusted and faded. A delivery truck lay on its side across the median, its cargo of cardboard boxes long since rotted into mush.
It was quiet. The kind of quiet Jin had almost forgotten existed, after weeks of crowded hallways and courtyards full of people.
They didn't all travel the same way.
