Something is moving beneath the ice.

In the Arctic, a research team drills too deep and awakens what should have stayed buried. In a Colorado mountain town, a carwash becomes the last fortress against an army of the frozen dead. At a remote ski resort, an ancient artifact resurfaces after centuries of silence. In an Alaskan wilderness, a lone caretaker discovers that the ghost town he's been maintaining has been dying from below long before he arrived. And at a drive-in theater on a winter night, four teenagers discover that some movies were never meant to be watched.

They are patient. They are cold. They do not hunger the way animals hunger.

They move the way cold moves.

The Xombie Protocols collects five interconnected tales of Arctic horror from Z.K. Walker — stories that ask what happens when the things we've buried refuse to stay buried, when the ice that was supposed to preserve becomes the thing that hunts, when warmth itself becomes the most dangerous thing you carry.

From the frozen reservoirs of Fletcher, Colorado to the glacial depths of Frosthaven, Alaska, from the snowbound peaks of Raven Peak to the flickering screen of the last drive-in in winter, something old and cold and patient is spreading. The military has tried to contain it. Scientists have tried to understand it. Survivors have tried to outrun it.

The ice doesn't hurry.

It never has to.

Includes: The Xombies • Xombies of the Last Carwash • Xombies of Raven Peak • Xombies of Frozen Souls • Bite Night at the Drive-In

Plus the bonus story: The Last Selection

"They moved the way cold moves — steadily, without doubt, eating up the distance between themselves and warmth the same way frost crawls across glass. Patient. Inevitable."

For fans of John Carpenter, Stephen Graham Jones, and the slow creeping dread of a winter that refuses to end.