We were four Humvees (one with an armored turret) and two tactical vehicles moving into undocumented space. Drones had been sent ahead of us to check for obstruction in the road. There was an arbitrary quality to the decay, what had been burned down and what remained. We passed a farm—soybeans—with several military vehicles parked outside of it.

What happened out here? I asked.

The soldier beside me said, It’s fucking animals out here. They go for the farms—you have to protect those first. Do you know how hard it is to protect a whole farm from ambush? But we’ve got to have the farms. For civilization. And it’s hard to fuck up a whole farm. A whole field. Do you know how hard it is to fuck that up without an airplane dropping a shit-ton of fire? And yet they creep in somehow and fuck it all up.

We were winding up some hills as the sun set—the roads were overrun with fallen branches or branches that had been put there. The vehicle in front of us had something like a cow catcher that knocked the debris aside. Then we were deep in the hills, and coming off the road to a long road through the trees, just two ruts. Tree branches banged against the side of the vehicle.

It should be here, the soldier said. This is where it should be.

We pulled up to a low structure—an old wooden shack—when the ground started to incline there were pipes emerging from it, and a grinding beneath us. Go! the soldier shouted.

But we were already falling—the earth beneath us dropped away, and we were crashing into a darkness.

I heard sprays of automatic gunfire, and then I was gone.