Elements of the Undead: Fire (Book One) Read Online Free Page A

forgotten about her. She shrugged. This was Tempe after all. Anything was possible. Where’s a damn manager when you need one? She cast about, searching for one. A giant hand brushed her shoulder, and the next thing she knew, Big Don Harding, her supervisor, nudged her to the side and pushed past.
    Her stomach knotted up. She tasted bile, as if she was going to vomit. “You can’t go outside,” she said.
    He gave her a stern glare. “And why not?”
    “I…”
    He rolled his eyes. “Come on, Alicia. I’m sure it’s some kind of movie promotion or something. Whatever it is, they can’t do it here. Not without getting approval from Corporate.” He started for the exit.
    Alicia turned her attention back to the men in the parking lot. The first man was standing and staring at the people clustered around the door. Blood and gore dripped from his face, coating his chest in Technicolor-red. He chewed intently and swallowed the last bits of his meal.
    She glanced behind him at the body on the ground. It twitched. Alicia did a double take. She could have sworn the man on the ground had just moved. That’s impossible . As she stared in disbelief, one of his feet kicked out. Then, with a groan, he rolled over and struggled to his feet.
    Alicia swallowed hard. The man’s throat was in tatters, the fleshy parts chewed to the point where his vertebrae showed through, glistening white, slick, and greasy. His head tilted at an odd angle, the destroyed muscles of his neck barely supporting the weight of his head.
    Customers began backing from the open door, slowly at first, but then with a rising sense of urgency. Alicia sensed the fear sweeping through the crowd; it was an electric current triggering a full-blown panic in the blink of an eye.
    “I don’t like this,” she said. “I think you should close up.”
    Don was paralyzed, seemingly torn between his duty to the store and his instinct for self-preservation. The man with no throat turned his head, tracking slowly across the front of the building. He stopped and focused on Alicia, his empty gaze boring into her. He began to moan, the sound increasing in intensity until it became a full-fledged roar. He took a shaky step toward her. The other man licked his lips and followed.
     Alicia screamed, “Close the fucking doors, Don!”

Six
     
     
    Cesar smiled, recalling his first journey north—the heat, the people, the sense of hope laced with desperation. What he remembered most vividly was the overwhelming satisfaction of embarking on a grand adventure, of shrugging off his old life and gambling everything on his ability to survive the wilderness and avoid the patrulla fronteriza , the border patrol.
    The path undulated like an angry serpent, shattered red and brown rocks fading away to smooth desert floor before abruptly returning. Pebble-filled arroyos crisscrossed the landscape at random intervals, torturing him with constant reminders of nonexistent water.
    He got a small sense of comfort from being on this path again, from knowing he wasn’t alone in his quest for a better life. The mental image of thousands of feet marching north on this trail helped put him at ease despite the monumental task ahead.
    The sun rode low in the eastern sky. Already blazing, Cesar knew the day would be long and brutal. He figured they had covered twenty-five or thirty kilometers since exiting the old Chevy on the Mexican side of the border. They were well inside the United States by now, far past the point of no return.
    The going was slow. His ragtag group consisted of three men like himself, young, fit, and accustomed to working in the hot afternoon sun. However, unlike his first crossing, four women and two small children had also chosen to make the trip.
    Cesar was prepared for the journey, had been for as long as he could remember. Ever since his deportation a year earlier following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Kansas City, he had focused every waking moment on