The Salt Road

Three years after the lights went out, the old interstate has a new name: the Salt Road. Grain, ammunition, and bad news run north across a treaty nobody can enforce. Ren Adair runs one of the last caravans — and lives by a rule. No passengers. No promises. Bramwell Osei was a cook at a Minneapolis hotel; now he runs the kitchen at a canal market and has spent the whole apocalypse watching the road, waiting for someone to take him east to his sister. Ren breaks her rule once. The road breaks it back. Twelve days of blizzards, raids, border tolls, and food that nobody else on the caravan knows how to make. By the last stage, they are the only two people in a market square with anything left to lose. But his sister is dead. He wants to stop walking. She never learned how. They part. They lie about it. And six months later, the caravan comes back through the same square. Some roads are long. Some are the only way home.