Free Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler Page A

they’d fallen into a repeating circle—a long whirred loop they’d never leave—every inch around them lurched the same, what with the stagnant sun ruining all bearing and the anthills. He didn’t try to understand.
    They moved across the state, its borders pummeled, the land flattened out, awaiting flood.
    They uncovered liquid cupped in gutters and strained it through his shirt and drank.
    The girl’s skin turned soft and pasty. It snowed off her back in flakes. Randall stayed thankful they didn’t have a mirror.
    They came upon the coast.
    Even there standing on the bleached sand, Randall stood and sucked his tongue. He couldn’t imagine they’d made it that far. He hadn’t seen the beach since he went once as a child, afraid to step on the sand for fear of the clam holes, that they’d come up and rip into his feet.
    Now they found the water missing. Where once there’d been multitudes half-naked, bathing, sunbathing, the shore was swarmed with dragonflies. Their blue bodies hovered, buzzing, looking for further things that’d died: they’d already stripped the meat off of the beached trout, the scales of salmon husked off, glinting light.
    The sand cracked beneath their feet. The shore sat scummed over and pile-driven down, pale combs of foam dried at the farthest point where water’d lapped. Cracked shells of land-stuck jellies and uncased conch flesh sat overcooking, dried out, picked apart. Whole gulls with their skulls pecked in and post-ravaged by sand mites and worms.
    The sun had drunk the ocean.

    The sun more rapt than ever overhead.
    Randall’s eyes could not keep their focus as the girl picked ahead among the wreckage. She fished sand dollars out of murk pools. She giggled, gaffed, hummed la-la-la. Tucked in the half-smashed ruins of some sand palace, she found a transistor buried up to its antennae. She dug it out and cleaned the speaker. She wiped the corroded batteries and licked the dials white, straightened the wires with her teeth. Soon she had the half-ruined thing alive, burping static broken by occasional squeals of incoming sound.
    She skittered between the stations, searching to match the song set in her head. Randall didn’t have the heart to tell her it was useless, that nothing clear would come through now—how all those cryptic wavelengths once transmitting now were just more radiation. It made her happy just the same.
    With nowhere else to go and under such stench, they continued on along the seabed. They walked out where before the water had been, the stretch of crunching sand endless for miles. Randall shuddered as they passed close to where once the tides would have lapped over their heads—for years in sleep he’d found himself stranded in such black; the miles and miles of unknown depth culling him under, full of grime.
    They saw the dead all fuzzed and sunning. Whole fish schools. A swollen porpoise. Schools of jellyfish beat to vaseline. The seaweed knotted in fat brown scalps and punched with rash.
    In small landlocked pockets they found tiny lidless fish clustered in barnacles and eaten through by mites.
    Further out, there came another kind of wreckage: moored boats and ocean liners, rotting and picked apart by weather. Men’s skins lifted from their bodies. The whitewashed limbs of enormous swimming things held encrusted in the matted sand.
    They continued in a short trench out into the heart of where the wet had been.
    The phantom waves seemed to lap at Randall’s head. He breathed air that once would have been liquid. He kept looking back behind him, waiting to see the sea come back, enfolding. The brine filling his nostrils. The water wrapped around his face.
    The girl messed with the transmitter’s signals near him, squelching. Certain frequencies ached his teeth, CHPCHRRAKRAK . The bulbs and wires screamed. Randall imagined those same signals invisible in the air around him, licking up against his skin,
the same way they’d ruined his son: the errored