The expedition’s trek to Colorado

The expedition’s trek to Colorado carries Peter’s diminished party away from the farmstead and into a landscape where roads, towns, and familiar measures of safety have largely disappeared. Told in part through Sara Fisher’s journal, the trek is shaped by practical decisions and bodily hardship, but its deeper change is a transfer of direction: Peter begins by choosing the way forward, while Amy gradually becomes the one the others follow.

Departure and Route

After the death of Caleb, Peter waits instinctively for his brother to speak and set the day in motion. When no command comes, he shoulders his pack and urges the group to use the daylight. Michael answers with the scale of their predicament: the open country is full of infected, and they are on foot. The exchange marks the departure as both a necessary continuation and a break in the old arrangement, in which Peter expected Theo to lead.

Sara’s journal records the route as a succession of improvised bearings. The party finds an orchard and, after days without enough food, eats small, wormy apples. They sleep in a rusted metal shed among old cars, having apparently lost the road; Peter judges that walking straight east should bring them to Highway 15 within a day. Their map, found at a gas station in Caliente, is their only guide. On the highway, quakes have broken the surface, and abandoned vehicles appear in clusters—sometimes a line of twenty or more. Peter estimates that they are covering about twenty-five kilometers a day, a pace that leaves Sara worried about Mausami, who is visibly pregnant. Theo stays beside her.

Fire, Ruins, and the Changing Landscape

The group remains on the highway when fire appears across the ridgeline. Turning back or leaving the route would mean abandoning the one dependable line through the landscape, so the travelers press on while the air worsens. When the flames draw too near to outrun, they take shelter in a roadside garage, using tarps, nails, and a hammer to cover its broken front windows. Sara can barely see what she is writing through the smoke. The refuge is temporary: after missing pages in the journal, the party appears beyond Richfield on Highway 70, where the fire has passed through and left dead animals and the smell of charred meat. They believe the screams they heard during the blaze were infected caught in it.

The first infected they find are three dead bodies huddled beneath a bridge. Peter’s explanation is that the party had seen none before because the infected drove the game to higher ground; when the wind shifted, the fire trapped them. The encounter gives a cause to the earlier absence and shows how the same landscape that obstructs the travelers also reshapes the movement of animals and infected. The road remains useful but damaged: parts of it have washed away, while its passage through the mountain passes still gives them a direction.

East of the mountains, the journey opens onto a dry tableland cut by deep gullies and scattered with bones. At a rocky rest stop, Sara reads old graffiti—“Darren loves Lexie 4Ever” and “Green River SHS ’16, PIRATES KICK ASS!!!”—whose long survival without readers makes her feel unexpectedly sad. In Emery, the group finds foundations, sheds, and rusting farm equipment but no working pump; Peter says they will search for a river the next day. The route repeatedly offers traces of habitation without restoring any of the life that made those places towns.

Separation and Continued Progress

The party turns south from Crescent Junction onto what it believes is Highway 191, having walked past the turnoff and doubled back. Peter explains that they are too far north for their destination and that they will eventually have to head south. During this stage, Sara decides to marry Hollis. They agree to keep what has happened between them private, though their life on the road leaves little room for privacy: the others are nearby, or one of them is on watch. Their relationship develops within the expedition’s shared routine rather than apart from it.

Mausami cannot continue the march, and Theo and Mausami remain behind at the farmstead. The loss changes the group’s composition and its pace. By the time the travelers reach Moab, they are six; Sara notes that without Mausami they are making better time. But the town has been washed away by the river. A vast wall of debris—trees, houses, cars, old tires—fills the narrow canyon, forcing the group to shelter in a derelict structure in the hills and plan to climb the ridge for a way through. The faster pace is therefore not a simple gain: it follows a painful separation, and the landscape continues to dictate where progress is possible.

Colorado and Amy’s Changing Role

After Moab, the group remains in the La Sal Mountains. Sara describes an autumn landscape of falling leaves, frost, and morning mist, but the stillness does not dispel danger. One night Amy sits bolt upright from a nightmare and says that a man keeps dying and cannot stop. She falls asleep again before Sara can learn whom she means. The journal gives no explanation for the vision, preserving it as an unsettling interruption on the route rather than resolving it into a clue.

A rusted roadside sign identifies Paradox and gives its population as 2,387. Peter checks the map, and the journal records the arrival plainly: they are in Colorado. Yet crossing the state line does not end the trek. The party moves through a broad valley under autumn sunlight, fills its canteens from cold water running in culverts, and sleeps in a barn beside a river. Snow falls overnight and melts by midmorning. The road has disappeared into grass and eroded earth; they follow a river Peter thinks may be the Dolores or the San Miguel, moving in two rows of three toward mountains visible in the distance.

By this point, the journey has acquired a meaning of its own: to move, to keep moving. Peter cannot imagine stopping or reaching an end. Amy walks beside him with a heavy pack, scavenged clothes, leather sneakers, and no glasses; she squints into the brightness and keeps her eyes forward. More important than these visible changes, Peter senses that she is leading them, and that the others’ task is simply to follow. The message Michael showed him long ago in the Lighthouse returns to his mind with each step: “If you found her, bring her here.” Colorado is thus a milestone, not a conclusion. The trek carries the group toward the hidden past of Amy’s origins, while its changing leadership makes the destination seem to be drawing them as much as they are choosing it.