BooksBarbecue
Back Slow Burn
Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Incident One
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Incident Two
  13. Chapter Nine
  14. Incident Three
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Incident Four
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. Chapter Thirty-two
  39. Chapter Thirty-three
  40. Incident Five
  41. Chapter Thirty-four
  42. Chapter Thirty-five
  43. Chapter Thirty-six
  44. Chapter Thirty-seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-one
  49. Chapter Forty-two
  50. Chapter Forty-three
  51. Chapter Forty-four
  52. Acknowledgments
  53. Special Thanks
  54. About the Author

He looked down at himself—curling chest hair, lightly dusted with gray—a firm flat stomach—the bobbing club of his engorged penis, revealed by the open slit of the robe.

How odd that the memory of the Asian girl made him remember the smell of mu-shu pork. But it was more than a memory—it smelled like—

Like flesh cooking.

A feathery curl of smoke threaded through his chest hair, and the first pinpricks of pain flared red along his sides, his flanks, his arms, his back. He plucked at the robe fretfully, but it seemed stuck somehow-glued—Sharon Rose’s little joke? If she’d dared, he’d—

The pain sliced into his chest, nerves shrieking. He fought for breath, still thinking clearly about heart attacks and survival rates. He tumbled and caught himself against the wall. More smoke, greasy dark, puffed from his sleeve as his arm exploded in agony.

He saw the fire without believing it, white glowing tongues licking along his skin, searing it black, eating deep into raw muscle. He slapped in panic at his chest, his groin, the smoke burned greasy in his lungs and he coughed and got enough air to scream, a thin sound, hardly anything at all, really. Like a girl’s.

He bashed face-first into the wall and hardly felt the impact, left smears of blood and skin and black crust. Pieces of his robe flared and melted on his skin like patches of fur, and he clawed at them with his fingers but the skin was soft and rotten and slick, and his fingers sank deep into it and it sloughed away, still burning. Muscles worked gray beneath, burning black. When he pulled his hands away in horror, his fingernails came off and stuck like guitar picks in the ruin of his chest, and he glimpsed ivory bone where his fingers should have been.

Sharon Rose. It was his one coherent thought. The girl could call for help, do something, do anything. He screamed for her, but couldn’t hear himself, couldn’t really see anything except shadows—thick pressure in his chest, and he couldn’t get air. He lurched toward a shadow he thought might have been the girl but his legs faded and suddenly he was lying down and that was all right, the pain was not as bad, distant, going away.

Everything would be all right. Surely, everything would be all right now. He couldn’t possibly die like this, so horribly.

The last sound he heard was the cheerful sizzle of bacon.

Chapter Four

Martin Grady

Office of Environmental Hazards (OEH)