“Sparrow was one of the scouts,” Dan said as if that explained it.

But it didn’t. Something was up. And she could smell it now as they drove onwards, the scent of anguish in the air, a miasma of ash and marshy earth and salted tears.

“Pull over,” came Sparrow’s voice.

Dan drew as close to the shoulder of the road as was safe and Sparrow leapt out, trying for the sake of propriety to make it behind the scrub but instead heaving the contents of his stomach onto the ground not far from the vehicle.

Jess and Dan both jumped out but Dan shook his head at Jess, so she stayed where she was, watching Dan stride over to Sparrow and say, “I’ll take you back.”

And Sparrow, shaking his head and pushing away the hand Dan placed on his back. “No. If she can stomach it, then so can I.”

Jess’s gut contracted again.

After an hour they reached the abyss. At first it seemed almost pleasant, a great square, surrounded by immaculate lawns. Bright red flowers, the color of love and hope, bloomed from well-kept beds. Two rows of wooden barracks stood on either side of a raked and tended street lined with trees, a road that swept forward grandly in a manner reminiscent of manorial gardens.

But then there was the stench. Not an odor or a smell. A pervasive and choking fetor that had Sparrow leaping from the jeep again, dry retching. Belying the reek and the fortifications, the impression of having chanced upon an estate was reinforced by the large cage of resplendent peacocks, the monkeys swinging on trees, and a parrot colored like a rainbow screeching “Mama!”

Jess almost didn’t wait for the jeep to stop before she climbed out and began to shoot pictures of this paradise, knowing this was what she had come here to do. To document the indescribable. The malodor clung to her and she knew that somewhere beyond lay the inferno.

Then Jess saw what looked like human figures, scorched, spread along the barbed wire fence, frozen in poses that indicated they’d been running. Desperate to risk death in order to flee what they’d faced inside the camp walls. But that wasn’t where the smell came from. It rose like an inescapable fog from the more than a dozen boxcars to the side of the camp, filled with the remnants of human beings, all dignity taken from them, their lives deemed worthless as they were left in the sun to ebb into the German soil.

For the first time, Jess realized there were degrees of death. That these once human beings were radically and starkly dead in a way that a person in New York who’d been placed carefully in a coffin, dressed, hands folded, awarded a tombstone and flowers, would never be.

Suddenly the women appeared. Or what were once women. These creatures had been pushed beyond the limits of what was human. Cadaverous, some crawling, or not even crawling; dragging their bodies along the ground with the last remnant of strength left in their arms. They were nothing but enormous eyes, bone, nostrils, and open mouths.