There's technically a road under the tires of the old Jeep Max is driving--he can feel the slip of too-deep sand when one wheel leaves the buried asphalt, signalling that he's found another curve--but there are absolutely no other landmarks to speak of, and there haven't been for days... until, that is, he gets close enough to see that one of the massive sand-colored shapes is not, in fact, a dune, but a wind-swept statue of a sheep, as tall as anything he's ever seen, crooked but still standing.

The car finally runs out of gas about half a mile out, making him sling all his earthly possessions over his back to walk the rest of the way to it. Like a miracle, it has a small smattering of abandoned cars around it, and he finds himself trying to piece together the tragedies that caused their owners to leave such valuable resources behind while he shimmies their locks, his bones heavy with the effort of imagining a world calm enough to carve a giant sheep and the realization that, a few hard years' worth of deaths ago, he would have feared some desperate souls awaiting him for an ambush.