"Pull this truck over right now, or I swear to God I will kill the engine myself!"Sarah reached across the console with her left hand, her palm slamming against the heavy dashboard of the lead Blackwood transport."I'm not stopping!" Ethan shouted back, his gloved hands gripping the leather steering wheel so hard the seams groaned. Dark, violet-tainted blood dripped continuously from his left eye, pooling on the leather spokes and running down his sleeve. "We stop moving, and the engine blocks freeze solid in twenty minutes!""Look at your hands, Ethan!" Sarah screamed, tears welling in her eyes as she leaned across the bench seat, ignoring the stabbing agony in her freshly severed shoulder. "You're blinded by your own blood! You haven't blinked in four hours! You are driving us through a graveyard!"Outside the fogged, reinforced windshield, the world was completely dead. The roaring whiteout of Illinois offered no horizon, only jagged, fi

 "You can execute me right here on the snow, Commander, but I am not driving twenty tons of steel onto that fragile death trap!"Davis slammed his fists against the steering wheel of transport three, his face pale and slick with terror as he stared through the side window.Through the howling whiteout, the vast expanse of the Mississippi River stretched out before them, an endless, jagged plain of solid, deep blue ice. High above, the twisted, mangled steel girders of the collapsed suspension bridge leaned like broken ribs, buried beneath fifty feet of glacial buildup."Drive the truck, Davis," Ethan said, his voice terrifyingly calm as he leaned through the open door of transport three, his breath turning to thick mist."It's a suicide run!" Davis shrieked, pointing a shaking finger toward the dark, ominous depths visible beneath the translucent ice sheet. "The riverbed is unmapped! We don't know how thick the sheet is! The moment all three

 "If you take one more step toward those ignition keys, I will blow your knee off right here on the concrete!"Sarah stood in the shadowed entrance of the rest station garage, her left arm holding her heavy sidearm level, the sight pinned straight onto Davis's chest.Davis froze near the driver side door of the lead Blackwood. Behind him, two surviving lieutenants were clutching siphon hoses and extra thermal batteries, their faces pale, sweat freezing instantly into glistening beads on their foreheads."Put the gun down, Sarah!" Davis yelled, his voice echoing off the rusted metal beams of the abandoned Iowa rest station. "Look at him over there on that cot! He's not even a man anymore! He screamed forty dead voices through his throat before he crashed us into the snowbank!""He saved your miserable life on that ice, Davis!" Sarah shouted back, stepping forward, her boots crunching on the frozen grease floor. Her empty right sleeve fluttered

 "If you die in this seat, Ethan, I swear I will drive this truck straight off a cliff because I am not doing this without you!"Sarah’s left hand gripped the leather steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned ghostly white. Tears of sheer, blinding agony streamed down her soot-stained cheeks as she forced her body to hold the forty-mile-an-hour line through the flat, featureless whiteout of Nebraska. Every slight bump in the snow-packed interstate jarred her freshly severed shoulder, sending hot, sickening spikes of shock straight through her chest."I'm not dying..." Ethan rasped from the passenger seat.His head was tilted back against the headrest, his breathing shallow and rattling. Both of his eyes were completely blind now—his left eye a milky, lifeless white, his right eye entirely swallowed by churning, pitch-black static. Thick purple veins bulged across his temples, throbbing with a dull, unnatural glow."You haven't an