Angrily I follow my patrol into the woods, jumping down with them from the high edge of the abutment and landing in the gravel, which bounces away from our feet as spongily as bits of dough. Keeping the weird ivory flank of the abutment in view, we slip in through the trees that seem to pour heavy, aching silence down on top of us. The tower drone is gone. Where have I heard it? I am off to one end of the line.

Then with a start I realize I’m hearing a new sound. A hum. The noise draws me. I see ahead of me some one crawling along the ground, draped in a churning mantle of flies. A livid patch of skin is exposed for a brief instant as the flies swarm and cloud the air, making a spinning column above the crawling figure, and alighting again. It’s their hum I heard, like but not quite the same as the drone from the tower. Pictures flash in my head of those fly-infested lips coning out to articulate speech; I rush forward but the hum is growing farther away. The crawling figure is disappeareing. I want to hear the words she breathes in exhalations of flies. I see her again, crawling painfully, one arm stretching out every few heartbeats toward some absent object.

Now she’s gone. I’m alone—no one followed me. I call out and rush back in what I think is the road’s direction. I don’t find it.

I stop calling. The woods seem to grow even more silent, so that I yearn after that irritating clopping noise. Figures are crossing between the trunks; the trees are thinner, the light brighter, in the direction they’re taking. They are so lean they look elongated, and walk barely moving their bodies, shuffling, heads thrown back, swaying, shadowy stiff and lean they look like wooden figures broken loose from the trees. As I begin to move in the direction they’re taking, parallel to them, they disappear in the confusion of thin dark trunks slipping by me. I wonder if these trees were once people like them, who simply stood still too long in one spot.

A clearing, like a scar in the forest. I stop at the tree line. Completely bare ground, with a ravine running through it. Here and there, emaciated people, naked or with a handful of rags at most, stumble from the forest near me, hair dishevilled, bodies withered, charred-looking but bloodlessly pale, faces and chests streaked with fluid. Near me, a woman stalks in a circle on sticklike legs, her arms wrapped around her stark ribs. Her buttocks are two knobs at the base of her pelvis. A wizened child sits by the edge of a brackish puddle, angrily striking the mud with his fists. Now and then I hear a growl or some other sound of anger and irritation, or a sob of pain, or the gagging noise as another one vomits. The ground is spattered everywhere with thin streaks of vomit; every one of them is vomiting intermittently. The stale air is permeated with a thin, acidic reek of vomit.