Free Elements of the Undead: Fire (Book One) by William Esmont Page B

from her soul. The best she could hope for was to lie still and wait for the relative coolness of evening. Even then, true relief would only arrive in the final hours before dawn, after the heat of the previous day had finally radiated into the night sky.
    Whoever invented the concept of hell must have lived in the desert , she mused. To make matters worse, there was the dust. No matter what she did, no matter how much she washed, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling she was covered with a fine layer of the stuff. It got into everything, her bed, the food, even the water.
    She sighed and rolled onto her stomach. At least I’m not alone… She chuckled.
    For reasons she hadn’t yet been able to determine, the undead seemed to suffer from the heat as much, if not more, than the living. Not all of them, of course. There were always pockets of the bastards, the outliers, who didn’t obey the rules. They were the ones to watch out for. They would sneak up on you during a supply run and take a chunk out of your ass, putting an end to your miserable existence in a hurry.
    There was a knock at her door, a gentle, back-of–the-knuckles rapping. She tensed instinctively, forgetting for a moment where she was, thinking she was back in the brothel and a client was outside her door waiting for his session. She breathed out and forced herself to relax. Came back to the present. Those days are over. Never again. She rolled over and ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing it back. “Come in!”
    The door creaked open a few inches, and a smiling brown face peered through the gap. “Megan?”
    She sat up. “Everyone’s here,” Cesar Aguilar announced. “Are you ready?”
    Something in his tone, the tentative nature of his question, took her back to the first time they had met. Megan’s car had died as the bombs fell on Las Vegas, the engine falling silent as the electromagnetic pulse scrambled the complex electronics embedded within. It was only blind luck that she had been stretched across the seat searching for the instruction manual in the glove box when the sky caught fire. Five seconds earlier and she would have lost her sight to the blast.
    With nowhere else to go, she had set out on foot, heading south to her sister Chloe’s place in Arizona. The trip was uneventful except for one night south of Flagstaff when she had encountered a group of three men heading in the opposite direction. Megan was sleeping in an abandoned minivan on the side of the highway when she was suddenly awakened by a beam of light stabbing into her eyes. A man’s face leered at her through the window. A live man.
    Fearing the worst, she had grabbed a tire iron and scrambled out the other side of the vehicle, only to land in the arms of a burly man with an iron grip. He snatched her weapon and tossed it to another man she couldn’t see, and then he had spun her around and slammed her against the side of the van. He grabbed her wrists, squeezing them together so hard she thought they would break.
    “Are you bitten?” he demanded, his voice dripping with malice and a hint of fear.
    Megan shook her head. “No.”
    “Check her,” another man said, a little too enthusiastically. Visions of rape and murder raced through her mind, paralyzing her. A few minutes later, it was all over. The man with the iron grip stepped away and turned his back as she began to dress.
    “We had to be sure,” he said apologetically. Megan fumed with anger, yet she understood. A bite was a death sentence.
    The men had turned out to be part of a small community of survivalists holed up a few miles down the road. Megan was the first live person they had seen in weeks, and they were desperate for news from the outside world.
    The next morning, Megan had set off with a pistol, a backpack full of food, two plastic milk jugs full of water, and assurances from the community that she was welcome to return if she didn’t find what she was looking for. It wasn’t until she