We’ve been riding for another four hours when something up ahead gets my attention. I can’t quite tell what it is I’m looking at yet, but something about the view ahead of me isn’t quite right.

The closer we get, the better my view becomes, and it dawns on me that we’re approaching a series of massive craters that have completely obliterated the road.

We drive up to the precipice and stop. One by one, we dismount from our bikes and stand side by side in a row staring at the chasm before us, the latest hurdle blocking our way.

“It looks like the Grand Canyon,” Bree says.

I don’t know how she can find beauty in it at all. To me, it looks like a scar in the earth. A war-inflicted wound. A gash that will never heal, violently blighting the world.

I can’t help the disappointment that bites at me. We’re less than two hours from Houston and now we’re facing another massive detour that might add who knows how many hours onto our journey. We’re so low on gas, I don’t even know if our bikes can handle going off course again. The last thing we need is to be stranded and have to proceed on foot. It would be a cruel trick for fate to play on us when we’re so close to the Texas border.

“What are we going to do?” Molly says. “We can’t go around it. It looks like it stretches on for miles.”

She’s right. The crater goes on and on, as far as the eye can see.

“We’ll have to find a way down,” I say.

“You want to drive through it?” Ryan questions me, an eyebrow raised.

“What about the radiation?” Ben adds. “It will be worse down there. We can’t risk exposure.”

As much as it frustrated me when the two were arguing, having them team up against me is even more annoying.

“Do either of you have a better plan? You know how to make a bridge?” I say sarcastically in response. When I’m met by a wall of silence, I add, “Didn’t think so.”

And with that, we get back on the bikes and begin driving slowly along the edge, looking for a place we might be able to drive down. But this crater isn’t home to a slaver community. No one’s chiseled a path for bikes into the crater’s edge. It’s just a sharp, jagged hole, blasted into the earth by a nuclear bomb.

“If we had some rope, we could try shooting it across with an arrow,” Molly says.

“I’m pretty sure that only works in cartoons,” I say. “Plus, there’s the whole not having any rope situation.”

“What if we abandon the bikes?” Bree says from behind me. “Maybe we’d be able to scramble down?”