Chapter Two - A Night Without Night

By 9:00 p.m., Phoenix still felt like the inside of a furnace. Elliot, Mara, the security guard named Carl Bishop, and a teenage girl named Lucy, who refused to let go of a tablet computer, were jammed into an old pickup truck they had coaxed out of the basement garage. The dashboard temperature gauge was dead, the instrument panel flickering in and out as if the truck itself were already giving up. "The tires will blow," Carl said, starting the engine. "The asphalt's soft. Don't drive fast." "You're a firefighter and you still state the obvious?" Lucy said, angling her tablet toward him. "I hacked city cameras. Three main roads east are blocked. Wrecks, ambulances, abandoned cars. It's a hot river."