When the world went hot life changed for everyone. The rag-tag group of travellers moving south through what remained of the American heartland had no idea how bad life was for the rest of the world, there were no more international broadcasts and nothing to watch them on, and they no longer cared. The structure of society which allowed wages to be collected and the money to be exchanged for food and necessary items, and for that food and those items to be delivered to stores in the first place, had collapsed. Cities could not sustain their populations, what was left of them. Towns and villages walled themselves in, refusing the urban refugees admittance. All that was left for the survivors was a life on the road, scrounging for food and anything they could trade at these last vestiges of civilization. This group had crawled from the rubble of Bismark, North Dakota, into a scorched and savage America. Men, women, and children, they took what they could carry and went south to find this new land inhospitable and dangerous.
