Read Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 for Free Online Page A

voice. We were a pack.
    Branches snapped. Grunts. Breathing. Underbrush mashed underfoot.
    The girl stayed in the trees and veered to her right, away from the road. She was prey. All she thought was escape, survive .
    Something in the sound changed up ahead.
    Struggle in the trees.
    That was quick!
    The girl was caught.
    Screaming! Not the pursuing Whites, but the girl.
    The hair on my neck stood. My blood flowed ice cold. It sounded like murder. The wolves had caught Little Red Riding Hood and were eating her alive.
    I stopped and watched the last Whites ahead of me disappear into the darkness.
    The girl’s voice didn’t sound like that of an animal. It sounded human. She sounded human.
    “No!” A voice ripped through the black forest in a bloody gurgle, then squelched down to nothing.
    Only the sounds of the beasts remained, triumphal, snarling at one another, staking their claim at the kill.
    “ No!”
    Is that what I heard?
    Like a jackboot kicking me in the head, a pariah of a thought hit my brain. What if she wasn’t a Smart One? What if she was a Slow Burn, just like me? What if she had simply been wondering how she could get inside and join us?
    What if?
    What if?
    She screamed just a like a normal human.
    What if?
    No!
    Fuck!

Chapter 6
    In the blackest of moods, I marched down the center of the street, the tip of my blade still red with the gymnast ’s blood. A long helix of Whites was rounding a corner far ahead. But my thoughts were elsewhere.
    Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked , because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second-guessing.
    “ No! ” That’s what she screamed, but it couldn’t have been.
    I simply had to remember it differently.
    Repression is your friend.
    I had black holes aplenty in my heart for tossing in such memories. I just needed to keep shoving until this fucking memory let go and fell.
    I angled toward a pair of Whites squatting beside a bed full of dead brown flowers beneath three enormous oaks in the front yard of an oversized, overpriced house, with ridiculously oversized white columns holding up a stupid little roof over a just-pissed-me-off-for-being-there front porch. When I stepped off of the asphalt and into the grass, I had their complete attention. They were both disheveled, with blood on their shirts and smears on their faces, indisputable evidence of what they were; mindless, murderous, monsters. Their death would cleanse the guilt I felt over the gymnast.
    But she had to be a monster , too. She had to be.
    I raised my machete to do the bloody work that was only necessary to rip the memory of that gymnast’s screams from my mind and push the whole episode into a forgettable black Hell. But the pair wasn’t mindless enough. I don’t know what they saw or what they deduced, but just before I got within machete range, they both jumped to their feet, ran across the yard, and around the corner, casting furtive glances behind.
    I didn’t chase.
    Fuck.
    I squatted down beside the bed of dead flowers and stared at the grass.
    Did she really scream “No”?
    Should I have maybe made a sign with my hands? I didn’t know sign language. A thumbs up? An okay sign? How do you communicate without talking?
    Repression skills, don’t fail me now.
    I looked around. The next house over had an SUV sitting in the driveway. My plan was to blow it up. Well, not that one in particular, just the first one I came to. And that one was first. I’d need to break into the house and get a towel or a pillowcase or something to stuff into the gas tank. I could light it and run off. The explosion would draw the mob away from our gate. Hopefully.
    It was a simple plan.
    But as I sat there looking at the SUV, I started to ask myself some questions. Does it really work when you blow up a car like that? In all honesty, I didn’t know. It always worked in the movies. But in the movies, machine