Scorched Earth

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The sun rose like a wound bleeding across the charred horizon, its light filtering through the perpetual haze that had shrouded the earth for three years now. Marcus Thorne pulled the makeshift respirator tighter around his face and adjusted the straps of his weathered backpack. The weight of his meager supplies pressed into his shoulders, a constant reminder of how little remained in this scorched world. He stood at the edge of what had once been the thriving city of Portland, though nothing remained now but twisted metal skeletons and mounds of ash that the wind scattered like gray snow. The great fires had consumed everything organic, leaving behind a landscape that resembled the surface of some alien planet more than the Pacific Northwest he had called home. The silence was absolute, broken only by the whisper of wind through the skeletal remains of buildings and the soft crunch of ash beneath his boots. No birds sang, no insects buzzed, no voices called out in the distance. The world had become a tomb, and he was perhaps one of its last living inhabitants. Marcus checked his water gauge for the third time that morning. Half a liter remained, enough for perhaps two days if he rationed carefully. His food supplies were even more dire—a handful of protein bars and some canned goods he had scavenged from a buried convenience store. The radiation detector clipped to his belt clicked sporadically, a mechanical heartbeat counting down to his own mortality. Three years ago, the world had ended not with the dramatic nuclear exchange that Cold War strategists had predicted, but with something far more insidious. The atmospheric processors—massive machines designed to reverse climate change by scrubbing carbon from the air—had malfunctioned simultaneously across the globe. Instead of cleansing the atmosphere, they had released a cocktail of experimental chemicals that ignited the oxygen itself, turning the entire planet into a furnace.