End Times is the book of my stage play, narrated by a pagan everyman walking the world after the collapse of human civilisation.

This isn't a bad road, as roads go. It hasn't been maintained since the Before, but then few have, especially unused ones in deserted places like this. It would be hard on the suspension of a car?if any cars were still around. It would be hard on my ankles if I wasn't walking carefully, even in these good boots.

I found them on a dead man in his snowbound cabin last midwinter. Buried the old man but not his boots. Burned his chopped firewood every day and ate from his larder until springtime melted the snow and his mountain neighbours unwelcomed me.

It's a good road for safety, this one, high on a spine of hills but not too high to show me on the skyline if someone looks up from the plain. I could stride out along here with reasonable confidence.

Could, if I felt like it. Which, truthfully, I don't.

Not only because I've been walking for too many days and nights with all I own wrapped in my bedroll across my back, and I could do with finding a safe hole to rest up in.

Mostly it's because the dawn view from up here is pretty much the same as every dawn view I've seen since the Before. Desolation isn't too strong a word for it. Ruined, wasted, abandoned civilisation.