Read Online The Apocalypse Reader by Justin Taylor (Editor) - Free Book Online

lean toward a tablemate at dinner and explain how sailors hundreds of years ago managed to pierce the tough armor of a whale's hide without batteries or sonar or rocket fuel. Toshikazu's ad took up a quarter of the page-a crudely designed block of text accompanied by a low-resolution photo of a man hanging upside down from a palm tree, aiming a blowgun at an off-camera target. The text read, "Taking care of loved ones can be a difficult and painful process. Kitano Toshikazu has trained in academies in Europe IV and South Paraguay for over seventeen years. He will treat your loved ones with grace and respect in their final moments, ensuring that they leave this world in peace and with dignity." Burtson did not want his son to feel pain when the time came to take care of him. Worse, though, was the thought of how the boy would be treated afterward if Burtson left the job to the special ops team at KraftMark. They were brutal and immoral, especially Douglas. Rand had once shown Burtson a snapshot of his son's corpse. The kid had packed a clutch of naked, hairlined friends into one of the branded delivery trucks and crashed the thing into a transmission tower. It made the evening news statewide, which was as good as a death sentence. Rand and Burtson were standing side by side in the corporate restroom at KraftMark headquarters in Delphine. Rand held up a blunt, smudgy Polaroid in the blank wallspace at which Burtson was staring absently. "They gave me this instead of Julian," he said. The boy's naked body was covered in cigarette burns. A pair of panty hose yanked over his head made his face distorted and fat, as if he'd been stung by bees. There were a couple of finishing nails buried in his chest, right through the nipples. Burtson didn't want that for his son. It wasn't necessary.
    They trudged for hours, nothing visible ahead or behind them but a massive, shapeless wall of treetop-ish gray. Toshikazu surged forward deliberately, silently-through the thick water, waltzing through the spidered vines. Alan was out here, somewhere, broadcasting via shortwave radio the ingredients to the Whatever!?!Round , a new snack cake developed for KraftMark by Rand and his team for the fall "Fuck You, School!" lunch series. It had already outsold Molt.com's Wearables Serious Action Fruit Fudge in three of the test markets. The leaked ingredient list could sink KraftMark, though-everyone was nervous. One of the PR advisers, someone high up-he didn't know half the PR staff-had picked up the signal after getting a tip from the foreign bureau. So far, they'd contained the spread of the broadcast, but it was only a matter of time before it spread.
    Something fell out of a tree. Something hard wrapped in something soft. It collided sloppily with a brittle tin roof from the burned-out settlement on the bank, voiding the night of birdsong with its clamor. Burtson crouched reflexively, breathlessly, hugging the rifle to his chest as he hunched in the muck. Toshikazu went on cutting through the water like nothing had happened. This was pretty much the way Toshikazu operated. One morning, Burtson had awoken to the sight of a translucent orange scorpion perched on Toshikazu's face. "Hey man," Burtson had whispered, lightly gripping Toshikazu's shoulder, "Hey man, I don't mean to alarm you? But there's something on your face." Toshikazu opened his eyes, trained them on the insect, and quickly stuffed it into his mouth, chewing fast. All the while, his features were as calm and composed as a white wooden chair. When he'd finished chewing he rolled over and his face went slack almost immediately, weighty with sleep.
    Scorpion on his face .
    The swamp deepened without fanfare. The water rushed up to his chest, roiling up into the trough of his armpits, suddenly and outrageously cold. He smallened.
    "What's this? How much deeper will this go?"
    Toshikazu did not respond.
    "So that's it? Once we're in the thick of it, you ignore me? You certainly had a lot to