Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller Read Online Free

small high-top, flat-deck trucks. She called them pickups , but Bobby often corrected her. “Pickups are smaller, Em. It’s the difference between a Hot Wheels car and a Tonka truck.”
    As his truck turned out of the lot, Emily went to wave, flash her lights, let him know she was there, and give him his cap. That darn curiosity, though, had embedded in every fiber of her being. She hesitated.
    Of course, he could be simply driving home. If he was, he certainly took the wrong turn to get there. It looked to her like a small dirt bike lay in the bed of the truck, too. Where would he be riding at this time of night? More puzzling, when did he start dirt biking?
    What to do?
    Should she really trail after him?
    The longer she followed him, the less reasonable her baseball hat excuse sounded. He’d probably see through the ruse. Now, though, she wondered if he was up to something so bad he couldn’t tell her. A cold tingle ran through her chest.
    Emily shook away the thought even as the idea he might be cheating, embedded like a prickle into her mind. How she hated those kind of prickles.
    She’d ducked beneath the dashboard as he drove out, but Bobby didn’t see her. He seemed intent on the road ahead like a man who’d been ordered to drive like every second counted.
    Emily knew she shouldn’t follow him. She should just turn the car around and drive back home. Bobby didn’t have the look of a man who wanted to be followed, least of all by a wife waving a baseball cap. She had to know what he was up to, so she followed.
    The farther they drove, the farther the prickle wended itself in, embedding so deeply it wasn’t coming out until she knew the truth. Time had taught her ignored prickles fester and become different things altogether.
    Fifteen years together, fourteen as Bobby’s wife, and they’d promised no secrets, even inserted the oath into their wedding vows. She’d had enough of secrets to last her a lifetime.
    Yet, here was her husband, clearly with a secret.
    This smelled like bad news, maybe for her, maybe for him, maybe for both of them. Now her mind was off racing with the possibilities. She wanted to turn back, but the curiosity had mixed with dread. Knowing a secret’s existence without knowing the secret could possibly damage their relationship even more than knowing the answer.
    So Emily followed her husband, even though every rational cell in her brain told her she was making a big mistake.

Chapter 4
    In a town like Karlgarin, which only existed to wrest coal from the ground, it only took five miles of travel before wilderness claimed the land. Yet, even this version of nature struggled to be more than an accumulation of half-alive stunted trees and ugly gray-green shrubs.
    Emily drove cautiously, staying a safe distance behind Bobby’s taillights. Thanks to the flat landscape, they were visible for quite some distance.
    Three songs played through in their entirety on the radio and Emily still hadn’t passed a single car. She couldn’t shake the eerie feeling she and Bobby were the only two people left in the world, survivors of one of those movie apocalypses.
    Bobby’s truck slowed, turned, and then continued. When she arrived at the spot a minute later, she realized he’d turned into Old River Road. The road led to a camping ground, which had closed long ago due to lack of business. Some crazy businessmen had thought he’d make a killing there by housing overflow workers. The mining company, though, had built their own airstrip in the end, and the extra workers simply flew in and out from the City.
    Now the grounds were an illegal dump for the locals, filled with old cars, fridges, and anything the trash yard would charge extra to take. The local joke was Old River Road was as far from a river as the town was from a five-star restaurant. The only place it led was a river of trash.
    Was Bobby dumping stuff?
    A seed of hope snuggled into her chest. No one’s heart was ever broken from