Mitchell Loughlin’s Reviews > Roadside Picnic > Status Update

He wishes for happiness for all, like Arthur

The end

As they wade through neck deep foul slime lightning crashes above them none stop. When they finally emerge in dry land Red orders Arthur to walk in front of him. A sees the globe and runs to it screaming with joy asking for Happiness for all. He is jerked off his feet and wrung out like a rag. Dead.
Red reflects on why he is here. If it’s fair to trade one son for his daughter. If it’s worth the money.

Arthur- vultures son, and red try to find the golden orb in order to make a wish. They navigate around traps like the gravity well, the air Turing into fire, thick green slime, and a couple others. All the while Ted knows he is using arthur to activate one of the last traps. Vulture also knew this and sent his son to die.

Red saves them Botha a couple times and this whole passage was very intense to read

A cool touch in the book was Nathan’s pov is way faster and energetic sounding while reds is very depressed.

Anomalies happen around those who leave and it causes dangerous accidents to sky rocket

Noothan though was using her to get info on the gangs. Red was with the vulture but they separate and red gets N drunk. Good lord is there a lot of drinking. Red introduced N to his dead who is one of the walking corpses and monkey has really regressed in the past few years. She has become more crippled by the desease the zone left her with

The can no longer leave if they were born near the zone. Statistical….

Noothan visits red and guts after getting the physics at totally loaded. They had talked about how much they have actually learned from the zones, which is not much. They have picked up a few new tools but have no idea how any of them work. Like using a sledge hammer to crack nuts.

Noothan chats with Guta. Apparently after red was arrested he would stop by occasionally to offer a hand. They grew a bond

N talks to the man interviewed in the beginning of the book. he is told the roadside picnic analogy. Assume you are on a road trip and you spend the night at a campsite the next morning you leave garbage behind but you have no intention of coming back. That, he believes, is what happened with the aliens. they left their trash behind unaware and unbothered by our presence like you would a squirrel at your campsite

Assuming about a 3 year time jump
Nooman, the man who stopped Red at the diner is the pov
He has been working to stop the flow of swag
Out of the zone, and thinks he did a good job. He learns from his C.O. That he has done a shit job instead. There is tons of swag flowing out through the vulture. On the surface the V has been laying low, a crippled, societies hosting picnic (basically orgies)

Ducking through allys and shortcuts he runs away. Stopping at home he takes something from the wicker basket and drops it at a secret location. He calls his buyer and tells him he’s caught, where the drop off was and to take care of his wife and daughter for the 3 years he’ll be in prison.

He takes a final look at his daughter knowing he did the best he could. He turns himself in