They walk, lumbering, over the dried ruts and webbed cracks. The dust swirls from their feet and off their swaying backs and when that dust falls off their backs in an avalanche of WHOOPing brown, they look suddenly very tired. How long their weary trail winds on I couldn’t say— or where it began, either, for it stretches long past me. The whole continent must feel their treading feet shatter dead earth and hear their long, sighing breaths.

I see no young in the herd or dead being hauled. There are no deep tracks dragging through the spotted mess of footprints. Some are larger, but in the way a wrecked building looks larger; a rotting barn you can see both sides of, a crumbling concrete behemoth from another era refusing to fall over and stay down.

The dust makes it hard to see and think and my lips are cracked, my throat thirsty. I will follow them a little longer, and hope they come upon a watering hole. I don’t think that they will. Where they’re going, only the flies know.