Jonah did not close his eyes. He stood tall. He pushed his broad chest out. He let his silver light burn with the heat of a thousand suns. "KEVIN!" Jonah roared at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing off the tall skyscrapers. "NOW!" Miles away, high up on the rocky ridge outside the canyon. Kevin stood in the freezing wind. He held the small black plastic remote in his good hand. His thumb rested lightly on the bright red button. He was crying. His tears froze on his cheeks. He looked down into the deep, dark canyon. He saw the bright red flare burning in the sky. He saw the massive, terrifying blue shape of the Glacier Horde squeezed perfectly into the center of the ruined city. He heard his father’s voice echo faintly on the cold wind. Now! "I love you, Dad," Kevin whispered. His voice did not shake. He was the leader of the pack now. He had to make the hard choice. He had to protect the family. Kevin pressed his thumb down hard on the red button. The signal flew throug

The sharp ice pierced Jonah’s pants. It hit his skin. But the Undying Will was awake. The lethal damage was instantly converted. A bright flash of silver light exploded from Jonah’s leg. FLASH! The wound welded shut into a new, glowing iron scar. The sharp ice blade snapped in half against the metal skin. Jonah reached down with his bare left hand. He grabbed the monster by its smooth, freezing blue head. Jonah squeezed his giant fingers. He crushed the solid ice skull like a dry eggshell. Blue powder sprayed over his boots. He dropped the headless body to the street. "Is that all you have?!" Jonah roared into the blizzard. His deep voice shook the snow from the nearby buildings. "Come on!" The virus heard him. The virus answered. The dark alleys poured out an endless river of monsters. There were not tens of them. There were thousands. They swarmed into the intersection. They climbed over the rusted cars. They piled on top of each other, forming a moving, shrieking wave of sha

Jonah waited. He could not trigger the bomb too early. If he blew the buildings up now, the front of the glacier would be buried, but the back half of the ten-mile-wide mountain would still survive. It would just climb over the rubble and keep moving. He had to wait until the absolute bulk of the horde was deep within the city grid. He had to wait until the monster mountain was perfectly trapped in the center of the granite canyon. The ice covering his face was melting slightly from his body heat. He could breathe a tiny sip of cold air. He waited. The monsters piled on top of him shrieked and ground their teeth. They tried to freeze him again. He waited. The ground shook so violently that the asphalt beneath him began to crack. The heavy, terrible shadow of the two-hundred-foot-tall ice mountain passed over his ice tomb. The noise was absolute hell. Millions of frozen faces snapping their jaws. The sound of a city dying. Jonah counted the seconds in his head. “One. Two. Three…”

The shaking was incredibly violent. The trees around them snapped and fell. The rocks tumbled down the hills. Then, the shockwave arrived. It was a massive wall of hot wind and deafening sound. The shockwave slammed into the trucks. The heavy metal vehicles rocked back and forth on their wheels. The windows rattled wildly. Kevin kicked open his door. He stepped out into the snow. Elena, Marcus, and the fifty survivors climbed out of the backs of the trucks. They looked toward the North. They looked toward the deep canyon. Above the canyon, the dark, bruised purple sky was completely hidden. A colossal, terrifying mushroom cloud of thick gray dust, black smoke, and white steam rose thousands of feet into the air. It looked like a volcano had just erupted in the middle of the frozen wasteland. The heat from the distant explosion reached them. The falling white snow suddenly changed. It began to rain a mixture of wet snow and hot, gray ash. The black and white flakes fell on thei

Tears poured from Kevin’s eye, mixing with the gray dust on the rocks below. He had run as fast as the machine allowed. He had broken the rules of logic. But he was too late. The math was right. Nobody could survive this. Kevin closed his eye. He prepared to scream his grief into the empty sky. Suddenly, a sound interrupted his sorrow. Kevin froze. He stopped crying. He held his breath. He listened carefully. The sound was coming from directly beneath the pile of massive concrete slabs Kevin was kneeling on. It sounded like stones grinding together. It sounded like something very heavy shifting in the dark. Kevin quickly scrambled backward. He grabbed his heavy iron mace. He raised it, his heart pounding. Was it a surviving ice monster? Was it a giant Siege Zombie digging its way out? A huge, solid slab of gray concrete, weighing at least five tons, slowly began to lift upward. It did not fly into the air. It was pushed. A massive, thick, scarred hand appeared from under the h