Scorch Atlas (8 page)

Every so often, the girl offered interjection, questions with no answers Randall knew—

Randall walked in silence...’ so that the paragraph reads: ‘Randall walked in silence, squeezing the puckered plastic of his son’s tricycle’s handles--worn thin by his own fingers, not the child’s. He’d tried several times to ride it: his enormous knees and legs tangled alone among the metal in the night.

Other hours of certain solitary evenings Randall heard his father talking through the house. Most of the speech, to Randall, swam in blather—BUGMERMENNUNMMEM USSIS LUMMMM. Some words he understood—
every inch of every inch of every thing you see is fucked
.
Might as well come ahead and muck it. Put your big head through the wall
.

Sometimes the boy joined in—his son who’d yet to use a voice, now stretched heavy, echoed, spooled in ache—mostly just repeating one thing over and over—
What else could you have done?

Through the past weeks they’d been louder.

Randall’s mother never said a word.

Randall felt the girl’s eyes on him now, her stuttered breathing, the film that made windows of her skin.

The birds had redoubled overhead. They circled a small circumference just above the city, black. There must have been hundreds now, suspended—a ceiling waiting to rain shit. The wings’ crick and neon cawing filled air the same way their feathers choked the light.

The girl tried to take Randall’s hand and their sweat-flushed fingers zapped.

The birds stayed just above as they moved forward. The sky had flushed a ruddy color, more blood than regal, thunder in some long drum roll slow and low all through.

Randall walked a little faster, his fat legs and ass meat rubbing, warm.

He could not stop thinking how if he walked long enough, he’d make fire. Spontaneous human combustion—his whole head set ablaze—his frazzled locks in wicks lighting the no-night firmament alive.

Behind he heard the girl there breathing, trying to keep up.

He stopped and knelt in the dirt to untie and tie his shoe. She tried again to take his hand.

Though he still slipped away, this time he sighed and scratched the moles sunk in his back. He put the tricycle down between them.

“There,” he said. “Ride that then. For a minute.”

She sat on the cracked seat and adjusted her thin legs. He couldn’t see her smile for all the hair.

They went to where the runoff ditches came together, where once the local council each year planted mums. The concrete was cracking open. The veins coagulated into lines, leading along the black, bump-battered surface down the gully to the clump of green most locals called a forest. The trees’ limbs had lost their baggage, the cells and skins all wilted, limping down. Even through the mesh of tree crap, Randall could hear the birds above.

The tricycle’s bald wheels ground against the gravel behind him, throwing off short showers of spark.

The suffered branches made a hall.

On and on with walking, Randall’s stomach queased from so much motion in their air. He named the first things that came to
mind, his own series of questions, spoke into his head—

After each he ground his teeth and tried to keep his tongue still, but the words slid on his gums and worked his lungs open, filled him with some color heavy even on the light enclosed.

On the far side of the forest, Randall realized they were headed for the dump—a half-mile-deep gorge just outside the town where people went to ditch their junk. For years it’d all been building up there, squat in the middle of what more fervent regions might have made a landmark. They could have sequestered it off, got government funding and a proclamation, brought fat tourists from all over to buy tickets to a sight to see. Instead they fed it their condom wrappers, their plastic linings, their lint-trap crap and old foil. Randall could smell the sum there from his bedroom when the wind blew the right way.

In the sky above, slow cycling color, the birds skronked at their approach. Randall could feel each of the thousands of tiny eyes glared down upon him, wanting him forward. He heard the innard questions cannoned, cawing, making lesions on his throat.

They called him on along the hill, still up the half-paved path that ended not just in sanitation, but in voltage—the machines birthing all the wires hung in nest over his house. Even before they’d reached the lip of the drop-off Randall could see the steel-gray multi-paneled mongoloid of boxy mass, the unknown smog and slither burping up to join the broth of skying clog above. The air all stunk of fire, shit and oil and liquidated hair. He’d grown accustomed after years of inhale, but this, much closer, made him choke.

At his side, hunched on the tricycle, the girl pulled the neckline of her dress over her mouth, her eyes already bloodshot, the veins blistering to knots.

From the top ridge of the chasm lip, they saw together down into the gorge.

At the bottom, piled among the trash, sat the grand finale of the Governor’s parade. The crepe left crashed and punctured. Bloating bodies squashed around old coupes, their metal crumpled, battered, caved. Whole truckbeds full of people toppled—people other people’d loved. Women Randall had ogled with gross wanting. The men he’d spent endless nights with pounding shots with, fly-licked blood now flooding from their mouths. Even the mammoth Governor replica whipped to pieces, its neck snapped and elbows bent. Not far, the Governor himself lay ripped, his new woman jackknifed at his side. Randall could not quit his brain from seeing each body somersaulting one after another. Their last air coming out or stuck inside them, hung.

Overhead the birds still hovered, half a billion screeching, shitting, hiding light.

The girl stood beside him mouth half open. He couldn’t even find the nerve to turn her head.

In his mind:
The birds. The birds.

A funny feeling came over him then—a tingle ripping through his fat. Looking down onto the wreckage, Randall felt the sudden impulse to go on and jump off, to throw himself into the chasm with the wind of the birds’ wings riffling his hair. He kicked a rock and watched it topple, pocking some ex-neighbor’s exposed skull between the eyes. It was only by some scummy nod of knowing that he didn’t just go on.

Above, the legions watched, clocked in his ears. The black abrasion of the sky behind them now, made of all color, was on the verge of waking, breach.

Randall put a hand against his heavy skull and lard-rung forehead, the last door against the noise—the same fat fucking head he’d almost scratched off a hundred times. He could feel those goddamn questions for which again he had no answer, his brain into a lock they had the key to, so much scrape—

Muffled as they were, he could not quit it. Scrims of new night flushed his numb. His son’s head in the heavens, begging. His father behind, eyes brightened, wide. Randall covered at his holes. He turned toward the girl. Her eyes were wetter now, her skin pulled taut, showing their veins. The birds weren’t inside her, Randall could see that, though he could not name what it was that kept them out.

The girl pointed past him in the gorge rip, somehow aimed at one man bloated on top of several others, his black hair thick the way the girl’s was, his lips stretched and pleased, wide beyond their size. She nodded, blinking, forced her eyes closed, pulled her arms into her dress. She got off the trike, the cushion sticking. She wheeled the wheels to Randall and fixed his hand around the metal. So much rust. The once white grips now gray. He nudged the frame once with his right foot, again, again, until it tottered off the gorge edge. Below, it made no sound.

He turned back toward the girl, his whipped eyes brimming in the treble. He couldn’t move yet. He tried to see her. She nodded once and stepped toward. The birds lurched with her movement. Screeching. She didn’t blink. She reached.

This time when her hand hit his, he held it. It felt like his son’s once, during those few months he’d had a chance to feel—the palm pudgy and dampened, the fingers fragile, warm.

With the child, he turned around to face the forest, from the bird sound, from the sun.

 

They’d been walking for a week then. When the girl felt faint or winded, Randall would hoist her up. He didn’t like to stop for very long for any reason. He didn’t know where they were going, though he knew there had to be somewhere else from where they were—miles from any other city, miles from where they’d come.

In the blanched road they crossed dog carcasses wearing tags engraved with phone numbers, family names. Craters lined with white mud. Burnholes in the earth. The birds that had followed in fat flocks for the first few days had by now fallen from the sky, or disseminated after other things.

Randall let the girl eat leaves and roots and soft paper and anything preserved or clean enough. He had her chew her hair and nails for protein. When she asked what he would eat, he rubbed his gut. “So much saved up I could go forever,” he’d say in smile, though he knew if they didn’t find good food and water soon, they would wither, slump, and die.

They continued on together in a straight line beneath the scratched lid of the sky. The sun stayed stuck ahead unblinking. It did not wax or wane or become obscured by clouds or disappear
for night. The surplus glow affected Randall’s vision. The ground and air lightened several shades. Slim spheres of heat moved in his margin—gaudy, blistered blobs of nothing. Inside his head he saw slow color, melted, morphed, and neon-blinked. Sometimes the colors formed his son—two blistered eyes behind his own eyes. His brain burped and gobbled, wriggling.

He could hardly think of what had been. He said his name over and over under horse breath to keep his mouth shape from forgetting, but soon even those familiar syllables went marred. His skin began to feel taut and made of leather. It peeled in layers. Itched his blood.

He tried to make the girl stay wrapped in a tarp torn from a camper, but she kept letting it slide off—she wanted to see where they were going, though she seemed to know he didn’t know.

When they weren’t talking, which was mostly, she hummed in glitches, cuts of hymn he’d never heard. She’d insist he hold her hand.

They crossed expressways with concrete cracking, large gaps woke in the median where the cars had skidded off, their windows sweltered obscure with condensation, airbags deployed and flaccid, popped. Smoke and ash hung on the air in streamered fuzz. They passed long fields where all the grass had died and ruptured black. Where there’d been forests once the trees had fallen over rotten and turned half to mush against the ground, the dirt riddled infertile with threadworms and microbes, small creatures burrowing spored homes. Drainage ditches gathered backed up with yellowed foam that didn’t give when it was kicked, though the stench was almost liquid.

Sometimes the sky would open up. Storms would appear out of nowhere, without thunder or a cloud. The only thing that didn’t rain was water. Lather. Crickets. Lesions. Seed. Sand drenched in thin torrential pillars, poured from above by erupted hourglasses. Blades of grass came whipped by wind and sliced the thin skin of Randall’s wrecked head. Peapods, pine straw, even plastic—sometimes they had to dig themselves out of what’d come down. Worse were the insects—gnat, mosquito, aphid—wriggling at their eyes. They picked the shit out of one another’s hair.

They hid under bridges or in carports that’d been abandoned. They made lean-tos out of rotten saplings, formed pillows from dead leaves. Often within minutes the girl snoozed soundly no matter what surrounded, her small head humming; Randall only
ever tossed. He ripped his hair out in fat folds and threw up. He felt birds rutting in his stomach. His brain fizzled, swelling out.

He figured the sooner he did not remember, the sooner he would sleep.

The girl kept singing, making noise. She didn’t seem to notice what they’d come through. She announced what she’d be when she grew older. An astronaut, she said. A breadmaker. Randall often could not catch his breath.

They saw ruin and rocks and shit and stinging in long plates of earth congealed.

They saw whole buildings made to dander—where there’d once been people, now burned black and shrunken.

Sometimes Randall convinced himself 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.