A long valley stretched out ahead, covered with the usual scrawny vegetation and loose stones, but I could immediately make out a strip that looked different: the grass was even sparser, there were virtually no stones. It formed a straight trail to the next hilltop. The women had spoken of roads: could this be one? I went down towards it, deciding of course to follow it, even if it wasn’t heading eastwards, since I’d only chosen this direction to avoid going round in circles. I walked for a day and a half before reaching the summit of a long, low hill. As soon as I looked down, I saw the bus.

I say bus, but of course, initially, I didn’t know what I was looking at. First of all, it was half an hour away and all I could make out was a rectangular shape in the middle of the plain; and then, naturally, I’d never seen a bus. All I had to go on was what the women had told me, and none of them had given me precise descriptions of things that they took for granted. I only knew that it was a vehicle that could carry a lot of people.

My heart was racing as I ran down so fast that I was at the bottom in ten minutes. I stumbled a couple of times, because I couldn’t take my eyes off my goal: a huge rusty structure which was ten paces long and twice my height, standing on wheels that were mostly broken, with windows all around. As soon as I was halfway down, I could see the figures sitting in the bus, and I nearly stopped dead in my tracks, but I quickly got a grip on myself. I ran up to it, dropped my rucksack and stood rooted to the spot, trying to take in what I saw. I recognised a door with a handle, and I tried to turn it, but it came off in my hand. The panes were broken, I tugged at the frame, the door opened and immediately dropped off its hinges. I hauled myself up what remained of the steps and entered the bus.

Over the years, the corpses in the bunkers had mummified; these had become skeletons, dressed in the all-too-familiar uniform, equipped with their weapons and strange masks which hid their facial bones. They were sitting naturally, as if death had struck very suddenly and they’d slipped, without being in the least aware of their last heartbeat, into that final immobility where, for years, nothing had disturbed them. The driver was in his seat, his hands still gripping the wheel. On entering the bus, I’d raised a light cloud of dust which settled around me as I stood there dumbstruck. I mechanically did what I’d been doing for years and which had become the very structure of my mind: I began to count. I enumerated twenty-two passengers on the twenty-four seats, sitting in pairs on either side of a central gangway. So there were twenty-three bodies. Each one had a kit bag, either on his knees, or on the floor between his feet. Incredulously I made a careful check: there was no sign of panic, nothing suggested that they’d been forewarned of any danger. The bus had stopped in the middle of the plain and they had all died on the spot.