The End of the Road

The ending section of the road brings answers to some questions that arose along the way. The main one that I had been wondering about was the little boy that the man's son had seen as they passed through a city.
As they were stopped in a city in the first half of the novel "the boy was sitting on the steps when he saw something move at the rear of the house across the road. A face was looking at him. A boy, about his age" (84). In this area the boy also "heard a dog bark" but the father did not (82). The boy begins worrying about the little boy he saw and the dog he heard, saying "we could take him and we could take the dog... and I'd give that little boy half of my food... what about the little boy?" (86).
Shortly after,  the man 'explains' that the boy wasn't actually hearing a dog, he was remembering one. "The dog that he remembers followed" the family for two days, but in the end they just left it, and "that is the dog he remembers. He doesn't remember any little boys" (87). This shows that the man thinks his son is hallucinating, or something of the like, which makes the reader worry for the boy's mental health.  Which is a valid worry, seeing as he'll grow up in a world with no legitimate life other than a few starving humans and no company other than his father.
However, in the last section of the book this worry is settled. When the man dies, the boy "stayed three dayss and then he walked out to the road and he looked down the road and he looked back the way they had come. Someone was coming" (281). The man that is walking towards him is "one of the good guys," he and his wife "have a little boy and... a little girl" and they take in the boy to go with them. This explains the young boy that the little boy saw at the beginning of the novel. This also means that the little boy will have more people to talk to and play with, and the reader is relieved knowing that the boy will continue to live and grow with this new family.