Read Scorch Atlas for Free Online Page A

midsummer. Those who’d thought to brave the hail and made it now stayed indoors, their skins lesions with teethmarks. Bronze tanks patrolled the city. There was nightly concern over what to eat. You could imagine anything infested. Bugs showed up nestled in every crevice: in the bed sheets, in the oven. Some nights I just chewed the clumps out from my nails. I heard of an old man buried in his basement. I heard of young ladies smothered in their sleep. Fat cysts and burrowed nodules and red growths of sludge. No skin was safe. No simple evening. The national rate of suicide quadrupled. Sale of aspirin, rope, and razor blades became condemned. Other ways became more messy: one night a hundred dove off some skyscraper hotel. People began to wonder what _____ wanted. The airwaves filled with preaching: how to repent; what might save us; whom to look to; what to think. At night you could practically hear the low sound of our prayer, a billion lips all mumbling together into themselves. Meanwhile, by now, the cities lay covered in chrysalis, silken tents stretched across expressways, over homes. Our front door sealed shut with hive building. The cocoons crushed each time a thing moved. We waited. We blink-eyed through the night. In the end, the great unveiling: ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn’t think.

TELEVISION MILK

    Moths and blackbirds flooded the front yard. The trees uprooted, clogged with smoke. Someone was out there somewhere. We’d been waiting for forever. Downstairs the kids were naked, screaming with TV. They heard language in the bad transmission. In recent days it’d told them to shit straight on the floor. It told them to rip their clothes up, break our mirrors, lock me upstairs in the bedroom. My husband’s scalp now hung from the ceiling along with several hundreds skins of local cats. In the long night you could hear them squealing. You could hear the children’s chortle. They made cat meat casserole, cat meat salad, fur flambé. They fed me through the keyhole.
    Dan and I had once felt love. We’d made three sons—blonde heads each, like his, six endless blue eyes. They began as sweet boys with careful manners. I did what I could do to keep them near. Before the schools closed I’d been very active in the PTA. Sometimes I subbed for their gym classes, which made them blush. The school’s halls wormed with stabbing, maggots, grease, collapse, and homemade bombs. One boy in our neighborhood had his eye out. You should have seen what grew back in.
    I didn’t want my children to grow up frightened, unprepared. We enrolled them in karate. We bought them safety helmets, pugils, latex gloves and boots and masks. Dan wrote out lectures to read aloud before dinner, new forewarnings. His voice contained a smidge of squeak, a female banter, yet he still seemed to command the boys’ attention. Sometimes he had to use his hands.
    I‘d always dreamt of becoming Mother. As a child myself I slept surrounded: a billion plastic babies, each with a name. I would make them kiss and lay against me. I’d whisper them my want. I’d been afraid, as I got older, that I’d never meet the proper man. That I’d end up old and alone with no one nowhere. In the night I clasped my hands. I prayed. I asked. I asked. I looked. I watched. I praised. I found. Though Dan hadn’t been quite what I expected—balding and broke and older—he filled me full. He warmed my mind. He’d known the proper times to say the proper things.
    In the end his blood had run all black and made another pattern on the carpet.

    We’d made these babies despite the way at night the sky seemed drooping; the way sometimes the air hung thick as mud; so many buildings everywhere gone tilted, smothered, sucked into the earth or slung with sludge.
    The TV static made our house vibrate. My teeth rattled at my brain.
    The children let me out around the time for dinner and brought me downstairs to milk. It’d been