Reading Skills: The Kill Order

The book that I read was called “The Kill Order”, which is the prequel to “The Maze Runner” series. In this book there are four main characters named Mark, Trina, Alec and Lana. They all live in the same community in the woods after the fled from the sun flares. “Bodies litter the floor, naked and burned. Screams and cries of pain pierce his eardrums and echo of the walls. People are limping about, arms outstretched, their clothes on fire and their faces half melted like wax. Blood everywhere. And an impossible surge of heat washes through the air” (Dashner 49). This quote describes the scene that Mark and Trina had just witnessed right after the sun flares had hit. The sun flares were a natural disaster that scorched most of the earth and made it too dangerous to live on anymore. I could make a text to world connection using this text because the sun flares relate to global warming. They both deal with destroying the earth and affecting it in a negative way. 

Another connection I could make using this book would be a text to text connection. In “The Kill Order” the author explains about a disease called the Flare. This is a disease that the Government had specially created so that they could introduce it into the population and hope that it would kill of a good amount of people. They created this disease so that they could decrease the population therefore decreasing hunger and starvation levels as well, because there were too many people for the amount of food that was available to satisfy. The government thought that as soon as the Flare did its job for them, they would get rid of the disease by using an “antidote”. But their plan backfired because by the time the disease had done its job, it had also mutated meaning that their “antidote” wouldn’t work to stop the new disease. “The more he saw, the more numb he grew to the strangeness of the new world. This sickness that had been spread on purpose… He saw a women jump of a roof and land, broken, on her front steps. He saw three men drawing circles in the dirt and jumping in and out of them, like kids playing a game… A woman eating a cat. A man chewing on a rug… Two kids throwing rocks at each other as hard as they could, bloodied and bruised from head to toe. Laughing all the while.” (Dashner 261). So this would make a connection to “The Scorch Trials” which is the second book in the series and it talks about how the people who were infected by the disease (known as Cranks) went completely insane. They became crazy and unpredictably dangerous, because you would never know what they would do. One second  the Crank would just be minding its own business, and the next it could suddenly start attacking you. "The Scorch Trails" also talking about the Gladers journey through the land that was struck by the sun flares which connects to the setting in the boo of "The Kill Order".