Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [946]

I stood at the gate, staring in as strangers picked among the black bones of our homes. The ruins were still smoking, but men, women, and children were all over them, digging through them, picking fruit from the trees, stripping our dead, quarreling or fighting over new acquisitions, stashing things away in clothing or bundles… Who were these people? — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 946

Note

The long participial list (‘digging… picking… stripping… quarreling… stashing’) holds the sentence open until it becomes an inventory, and ‘stripping our dead’ lands mid-list as just one item among chores. ‘Black bones of our homes’ does the figurative work once and then gets out of the way. The flat question at the end — no exclamation, no adjective — lets the horror register as genuine incomprehension rather than outrage.