Dog Blood

to find a way out. In the farthest corner, hidden from view by another unidentifiable pile of rubbish, is a wide door that’s hanging off its hinges, half open. I duck underneath it, then turn back and prop it open fully so Adam can get through. His uneven footsteps and grunts and moans of effort make him sound like a monster in the shadows.
    “We can’t stay here,” he says.
    “Might be some other buildings around.”
    As soon as he’s completely outside, I put my arm around him and support his weight. We’ve only taken a few steps when he stops.
    “Fuck me,” he mumbles. “Would you look at that…”
    At the side of the long, narrow building is another clearing, out of sight until now, and the ground is almost completely covered with bodies for as far as I can see. There are hundreds of them, thousands probably, stacked up in massive piles. I leave Adam again and move toward the nearest one. From a distance the gloom makes it look like a single, unidentifiable mass, only distinguishable as human remains because of the countless hands, arms, and legs that stick out from it at awkward angles. As I get closer, however, a level of sickening detail is revealed. These bodies have been dumped-not even laid out-and those at the bottom have been crushed by the weight of the rest, leaving them unnaturally thin, almost like they’ve been vacuum-packed. Higher up, countless squashed, frozen, waxy faces stare back at me unblinking. Their discolored flesh, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes give each of them grotesque, nightmarish, masklike expressions. Seeing them makes me think about my own mortality. I don’t feel anything for any of the people here-they’re just empty shells now, each of them a spent force-but I swear I won’t end up like this.
    “Look on the bright side,” Adam shouts across the clearing.
    “There’s a bright side?”
    “’Course there is. You got away. That could have been you, that could. Could have been me…”
    I ignore him and keep walking farther into the clearing, following a narrow pathway between another two fifty-yard-or-so-long piles of death. Distracted, I lose my footing when I reach the end of the rows, and the ground suddenly starts to crumble beneath my boots. I fall back and find myself sitting on my backside on the edge of a vast hole, at least twenty yards square and deep enough for me not to be able to see the bottom in some parts. I know immediately what it is-a mass grave filled with an incalculable number of people like Adam and me. I get up and carefully walk around the edge. There’s a bulldozer up ahead with a massive metal scoop. At first I think they must have used it to dig the pit, but then I see there’s a scrap of clothing caught on the teeth of the scoop and I realize they were using it to fill it. Directly below me there are corpses reaching almost all the way up to the surface, piled up where they were tipped out. They look like they’re climbing over each other to get out.
    I jog back over to Adam, forcing myself to look away from the dead. How many sites like this were there, and are any still in operation? Even now as I’m wasting time here, are more of our people being killed elsewhere? Then another thought crosses my mind that makes me go cold: my daughter, Ellis. Did she end up in a place like this? Is she there now, waiting to die? Is she here? For a few desperate seconds I turn back toward the corpses and start looking through them, terrified the next face I see will be my little girl’s. Then, as quickly as sudden panic just took hold, common sense takes over again. If she’s here there’s nothing I can do. I have to believe she’s still alive. She’s all I’ve got left.
    “So where are they all?” Adam asks.
    “Who?”
    “The fuckers who did this. Where’d they go?”
    “I don’t know,” I answer as I lead him out behind the main building toward a group of three square-shaped, light-colored, prefabricated huts that look new in comparison to everything else. “Just abandoned the place, I guess. Maybe they were attacked?”
    “Hope the bastards got what they deserved.”
    Two of the almost identical shedlike buildings are locked. The corrugated metal roller door on the front of the third, however, is not. I open it fully and go inside. It’s small, cramped, and half full of bags of chemicals. Doesn’t matter. It’ll do for tonight. No one with any sense will come here, and even if they do, we’ll just play dead. I’d have