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dear to their hearts. I imagined that I was the only person on the face of the scorched planet who felt so alone.

Time dragged slowly on and, even at midnight, the temperature was such that it was difficult to keep walking. I hoped that the planet would be able to survive long enough to allow me to reach Samantha as I could not bear the thought of dying alone without her. I had quickly got used to the fact that I might not live for much longer and had accepted my painful and inevitable destiny. What I couldn't bare to face was dying alone.

I wished that I could have met Sam at another time. If we'd met before all of this had happened then we could have forged an incredible life together. I knew that if I had known her for longer then I would not have been here alone, tramping across the starved, empty countryside in the middle of the night.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Although I wanted to reach Samantha in the shortest time possible, after walking on for another two and a half dry, dull and dragging hours I knew that I would have to stop and rest. As I had already admitted to myself on a number of occasions since starting the mammoth walk, spending a little time with Sam was infinitely preferable to spending no time with her at all and I knew that if I didn't stop for a while then I would be burnt out before the morning sun appeared.

The boredom of my march combined with the overpowering heat and a lack of distraction to devastating effect to leave me feeling numb and exhausted. In all the time that I had been out on the roads, I could only have seen four or five people in the darkness and they had been little more than shadowy figures in the distance, not one of them had been close enough to speak to. The countryside through which I walked was quiet at the best of times and I could not recall having passed even a single building in the last hour.

Although I had not deviated from the route which I had planned to follow, as I stumbled along my mind began to play dangerous tricks on me. I had concentrated such effort on getting to Samantha and keeping the prescribed path that I suddenly began, quite irrationally, to convince myself that I was on the wrong road. The fear inside - which grew steadily with each passing mile - was not so much that I might be following the wrong road, it was more that the monotonous, gloomy and repetitive landscape offered nothing in the way of confirmation that I was on course. I began to think that if I had made a mistake with my clumsy map reading, then the chances were that it would be far too late to be able to do anything about it now. I knew that I was working against a clock that was quickly counting down time against me and I also realised that an error now might mean that I would never reach Samantha before the end. Eventually, in a desperate attempt to rest my body, clear my mind and satisfy myself that I was heading in the right direction, I stopped for a while.

I stood at the roadside and looked around for somewhere to rest. I soon realised that, as there were no cars to worry about anymore, it didn't matter where I stopped, and so I dumped myself in an unceremonious heap on the hard kerb stones which lined the sides of the sticky tarmac road. Feeling the tiredness flowing out of my weary body, I let myself fall back onto the dry grass verge and I lay there in an exhausted silence, staring up into the dark sky above me. I heard the sudden, crunching sound of footsteps on brittle grass in a nearby field and, rather than get up and investigate, I simply chose to lie still and wait until the noise had passed me by. I screwed my eyes tightly closed, hoping that I would be left alone to relax in peace.

'Evening, mate,' a gruff voice said, startling me and shattering the silence. I cautiously opened one eye and saw that a face peered down at me from over the top of a hedge which separated the road from the fields beyond. The face belonged to a man who appeared to be around the same