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something over which the Drounge had no control.
Why it kept moving it did not know. Perhaps an instinctive feeling that so much pain should not long
remain in any one place. Possibly some atavistic urge to seek a peace it had never known. Survival,
reproduction, feeding the normal components of life did not drive or affect it. Staring relentlessly
forward out of oculi that were not eyes in the normal sense, but which were misshapen and damaged and
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bleeding, it existed in a state of perpetual migration.
Gliding over a field of grass, it would leave behind a spreading swath of brown. Fire would have had a
similar effect, would have been cleaner, purer, but the Drounge was a collage, a mélange, a medley of
murder, and not an elemental. In its wake the formerly healthy green blades would quickly break out in
brown spots. These would expand to swallow up the entire blade, and then spread to its neighbors. It
was not a disease but an entire panoply of diseases, a veritable deluge of afflictions not even the
healthiest, most productive field could withstand. After a few days the formerly serene grassland or
meadow would stand as devastated and barren as if it had been washed by lava.
Sensing solidity, a herd of wild goats brushed past the patient, persistent Drounge as it made its way
northward. Tainted blood and other impure drippings promptly stained their flanks. Some hours later,
their thick hair began to fall out in ragged clumps. One by one they grew dizzy and disoriented, dropping
to their knees or keeling over on their sides. Tongues turned black and open lesions appeared on freshly
exposed skin. Pregnant ewes spontaneously aborted deformed, stillborn fetuses, and the testicles of rams
shrank and dried up.
Eyes bulging, black tongues lolling, the toughest and most resilient of them expired within a day. Vultures
and foxes came to feast on the dead, only to shun the plethora of tempting carcasses. Something in the
wind kept them away despite the presence of so much easy meat. It was a smell worse than death, more
off-putting than disease. The fennecs twitched their astonishing ears as they paced uneasily back and
forth, keeping their distance yet reluctant to abandon such a tempting supply of food. Vultures landed
near the bodies, fanning the air with their dark, brooding wings. Accustomed as they were to the worst
sort of decay, a couple took tentative bites out of the belly of a stinking ram.
Within minutes they were hopping unsteadily about. Feathers began to fall away. The hooked, yellow
beak of one bird developed a spreading canker that rotted the face of its owner. Within an hour both
hardened scavengers lay twitching and dying alongside the expired goats.
Enormous wings spread wide as the survivors took to the air. For the first time in their relentlessly
efficient existence, they had encountered something not even they could digest. The foxes and hyenas
slunk away as if pursued by invisible carnivores armed with immense claws and fangs. Only the insects,
who could sustain the losses necessary to make a meal of the deceased, found the ruminant desolation to
their benefit.
Field or forest, taiga or town, it was all the same to the Drounge as it proceeded on its never-ending
march. What happened when it passed through a city was unpleasant to the point of becoming the stuff of
nightmare legend. Some called it the judgment of the gods, others simply the plague. All agreed that the
consequences were horrific beyond imagining.
People perished, not in ones and twos or even in family groups, but in droves. Symptoms varied
depending on what afflicted part of the Drounge each encountered. Wounds refused to heal and bled
unstoppably, until the unfortunate casualty shriveled like a grape left too long in the sun. Lesions
blossomed like the flowers of death until they covered more of a sufferer s body than his skin. The daily
clamor of the community; the give and take of commerce, the fluting arpeggios of gossip, the chatter of
small children that was a constant, underlying giggling like a symphony of piccolos, was entirely subsumed
in shrieks of pain and wails of despair.
So the city died, its inhabitants shunned by surrounding communities. Those who lived long enough to
flee were denied sanctuary by their terrified neighbors. They wandered aimlessly, perishing in ditches that
lined the sides of roads or beneath trees that could provide welcoming shade but were unable to mourn.
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