“Unlike them, I could not stand to watch as the cage was surrounded. The worst weren’t even the running dead but the crawling ones-the blasted remnants left over from the earlier fight, whose bodies had half frozen and healed together in strange, awful configurations and now came scuttling out of burnt storefronts like a freak invasion.

“In seconds, the kennel was an ovum buried under a thousand competing sperm. The victims could be heard screaming as the cage crumpled… and then all vanished in a blinding flash.

“It was fire. White-hot fire as bright as the sun. Brilliant sparks rained down like a shower of stars, burning through anything they touched, incinerating skin and hair and turning Xombies into roamin’ candles, great balls of fire, their bodies consumed even from within by tumors of malignant flame. Inhuman torches fled the bonfire, shedding layers of flesh like dead leaves until there was nothing left to combust, and they toppled into paper-doll silhouettes of molten slag.

“Down at the river, there were more fireworks. Floating braziers which had once been piled with firewood for the pleasure of strolling tourists were now loaded with living, praying females, attracting an audience of avid blue spectators down the riverbanks and into the knee-deep scum, where there was no escape from the incendiary barrage that was loosed upon them, a glowing hailstorm that obliterated anything and everything in that blazing, boiling trench.

“On the opposite end of town, hung above the street, a pair of giant masks forged out of steel grating-playhouse faces of comedy and tragedy-were likewise packed with live girls and allowed to gather a tremendous cult before a tanker truck on the rooftop was detonated, showering jellied fire on the whole congregation.

“Such fire traps had been set in cities all over America, all over the world, and in one day they immolated millions of Xombies, perhaps tens of millions… plus thousands of uninfected women.