Dust, the taste of ashes, and endless road.

Noah’s hair had grown long, and the slight paunch that he worried about for the most of his young adulthood had gone away. He strode purposefully, despite having no real direction, in carefully patched jeans, a small satchel flung over the leather jacket he liberated from a charred S-Mart.

His days were simple. He walked, and stayed in one place no longer than a day. His nights were spent reading by the light of a small fire. He caught rabbit and foraged for wild fruit.

The towns which he passed through were full of the dead. In an Iowa church, he found the congregation locked in travesties of worship, their bodies locked in contours of pagan veneration. He rarely saw anyone alive, and if he did, he generally avoided them. The Fall had changed humankind.

So he walked on in the drowning world. The lights had never left him. Ideograms swirled in his whispered breath. He carried something in his mind, an unthinkable immensity. Shoals of information. An Ark.