Road of Bones E-Book

Christopher Golden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 392

Beschreibung

"Tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell... I loved it." ―Stephen KingPursued by unknown terrors across the frozen Siberian tundra, a documentary-maker experiences a nightmare journey into the icy darkness in the terrifying new novel from the multi award-winning author.Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia's Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union's gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and were left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix "Teig" Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, "the coldest place on Earth", collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl―and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be.Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig's companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin's victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for Road of Bones

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for Road of Bones

“Golden, an economical writer, creates a mother lode of terror in just over 200 pages… Shamans and spirits, the undead and the feral, the creatures of the Kolyma Highway and the unimaginable horrors of its history make for riveting reading.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones is tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell. It will take you to a place you’ve never been before, and the trip will scare the hell out of you. I loved it.”

STEPHEN KING

“Two men willing to risk their lives for a last-chance reality TV pitch find themselves on a white-knuckle hell ride on Siberia’s infamous Kolyma Highway. Road of Bones is unrelenting and will chill you to your core.”

PAUL TREMBLAY

“The road is long, the night is cold, and there’s terror at every pullout, nothing but dread between. Just try and put this book down, I dare you.”

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

“A masterclass in mind-set and setting; I’ve never felt the temperature of a book so firmly. I’ve also never been so afraid to step outside. In some ways a quick story (the central events span much less than 24 hours), in other ways enormous: the emotional stakes could not be higher. A breathtaking experience, a glacial gust of a book, Christopher Golden’s best yet.”

JOSH MALERMAN

“Road of Bones is wonderful! The frozen waste is so vividly rendered, I felt the biting cold in my own bones and drew breath with the characters as they fought for survival against the vastness of nature. Gripping, eerie and ultimately beautiful. It’s a breakneck speed adventure, with so much soul at its heart.”

CATRIONA WARD

“I don’t know how else to say it. This book is scary as f***. Do not read alone in the dark.”

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

“This book is legit great. Golden is the master of what I think of as ‘adventure horror.’ People in strange places and extreme situations meeting terror at the edges of the world. Road of Bones is scary as hell and does not fuck around.”

CHUCK WENDIG

“Golden is writing at the top of his game.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED)

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Road of Bones

Print edition ISBN: 9781803361475

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803361482

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: November 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Christopher Golden 2022. All Rights Reserved

Original edition published by St. Martin’s Press, 2022

Christopher Golden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For John McIlveen and Tony Tremblay,the nicest guys in horror

1

Teig snapped awake behind the wheel and hit the brakes, but the tires found only ice. Prentiss screamed as they slid across rutted permafrost. Teig turned into the skid and tapped the accelerator, heart thundering as he tried to get the treads to grip the road. He looked past the guardrail at snow-caked treetops, mountains in the distance. The drop off the edge would kill them, but at least it would be faster than freezing to death on the Kolyma Highway.

The tires caught. Teig gave the wheel a nudge, turned away from the drop, but momentum slammed them into the guardrail. With a crump of broken metal, the truck broke through, tilted toward the drop, and Teig bellowed in fear as he floored it. Metal shrieked as the broken guardrail dug into the UAZ’s side panel, but the truck leapt forward.

Veins pulsed at his temples as he pumped the brake. He dropped the UAZ into park, killed the engine, and stumbled out of the truck on an adrenaline high that made him want to roar. Instead he dropped to his knees and leaned over the guardrail, sucking in breath after breath of frigid air. The view might have been spectacular, but the drop would have killed them. Thirty feet to his left a small section of the guardrail had been punched through, and another dozen feet of it was now bent and mangled, all from the impact of the truck. How he had kept them on the road, he had no idea. Teig took another deep breath, mostly to prevent himself from puking up the sugudai he’d had for lunch.

A door slammed. Boots crunched on the snow. Teig heard his name being called but he hadn’t finished combating his nausea quite yet. The cold helped. Icy air seared his lungs and stung his exposed skin. His breath fogged in front of him. The only sounds were the wind and his pounding heart and the ticking of the rapidly cooling engine.

And that voice. Prentiss.

“—fuck are you doing?” he barely heard.

Prentiss shoved him with a boot, shouted his name. Teig grabbed the guardrail to keep from toppling sideways onto the snow, his head clearing at last. He turned to glare at Prentiss, saw the fury and fear on his friend’s face, and knew he had to get on his feet.

“Keys, Teig!” Prentiss snapped. “Give me the goddamn keys!”

Just past him, Teig saw the side of the once-orange UAZ Expedition, now dented and scraped, the metal perforated in two spots, as if the broken guardrail had clawed at the truck. The thing might be a barebones model, but it had been enough to keep them alive.

“Teig!” Prentiss barked. He thrust out his hand, palm up.

At last, the word keys registered in his brain. Teig launched himself from the ground, rushing to the open driver’s door. He’d left the keys in the ignition but Prentiss had naturally assumed otherwise. Teig reached in, turned the key, and the engine hummed and clicked, groaning. Trying to turn over.

The cold had seeped in already.

“Fuck!”

Prentiss grabbed Teig’s jacket from behind and shunted him aside. He climbed into the driver’s seat, tapped the accelerator, foot on the brake, and tried the ignition himself. It coughed but didn’t catch.

From behind the steering wheel, Prentiss turned to stare at Teig, eyes wide. “Felix, what the fuck did you do?”

Teig wanted to pitch him over the guardrail. Most days he and Prentiss were close friends, maybe best friends, but as colleagues they spent a lot of time virtually on top of one another, often in close spaces or on dangerous terrain. Prentiss might be a much larger man, but Teig had never let himself be bullied. Not by anyone.

Of course, most of the time he didn’t have it coming. Today, maybe he did.

“Try it again!”

“I don’t want to flood it,” Prentiss said. He might be angry, but his eyes were bright with the fear of a dog in the lights of an oncoming car.

“Start the fucking truck!”

Prentiss turned the key. The engine coughed again, started to grind, and the floor dropped out of Teig’s stomach. He loved his work, but he didn’t want to die for it.

The engine caught, growled to life, and left Teig and Prentiss staring at each other, relieved but still amped up.

“You fell asleep behind the wheel,” Prentiss said, his voice only a rasp above the rumble of the engine.

Teig exhaled, his body finally registering just how cold he was. Even with all his layers, he felt it in his bones. His exposed face stung as if with sunburn, but he knew this feeling, understood it was just the brutal cold. Clouds hid what passed for daylight in Siberia in the winter. The display in the truck had read thirty below zero, Celsius, and it would get much colder in midafternoon, when the sun went down. Even now, that sting would turn into frostbite in ten minutes or so, if they stayed out there on the road and he left his face uncovered. He reminded himself not to face the elements without pulling on his balaclava. Growing up, he just called those things “ski masks,” but Prentiss always corrected him. Seventies bank robbers wore ski masks, apparently, while secret agents and assassins wore balaclavas. As if he needed Jack Prentiss to teach him how to be cool.

Okay, maybe he did.

“Hey,” Prentiss said, reaching out of the truck with his boot and nudging Teig with it. “You fell asleep behind the wheel.”

Teig couldn’t deny it. He’d almost killed them—twice. First hitting the guardrail, then turning off the engine.

“I’m wide awake now,” he said.

“You think I’m going to let you drive after that?” Prentiss asked. He rubbed a glove across his graying beard. “Jesus Christ, how did you convince me to come here?”

Teig ignored the second question. “Look at the road and tell me you want to drive, and I’ll happily take a nap in the passenger seat.”

Prentiss exhaled. He turned up the heat, staring out the windshield at the road ahead of them. After a moment, he slid over without a word and Teig climbed up into the driver’s seat. He yanked the door shut, put the UAZ in drive, and started once more along the Road of Bones.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Prentiss said.

Teig forced a smile. “Don’t bore me to death and I’ll stay awake.”

*   *   *

They’d started the journey in Magadan, a port city on the Sea of Okhotsk, in northeast Siberia. The city’s population hung just below ninety thousand and kept declining as the elderly passed on and young people departed. Migration tended to only happen in one direction out here, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Nobody picked up their lives and decided to seek a fresh start in Siberia.

Teig had done plenty of reading about the treacherous weather, especially up the Kolyma Highway, but he only began to really understand after the first two hundred miles, when his gaze kept shifting between the gas gauge and the roadside. There were gas stations every hundred and fifty miles or so, but with the wind and snow, the crunch of tires on permafrost, and the white silence that stretched out around them, the idea of those gas stations began to seem like dreams of a desert oasis. If you ran out of gas on the Kolyma Highway in winter, you stood a fair chance of freezing to death.

They’d departed Magadan with a full gas tank at eight o’clock the previous morning, an hour before dawn, and managed a little more than half the sixteen-hour drive before settling into the accommodations Teig had arranged. They slept at a lodge whose chief appeal was the presence of a garage where the truck’s engine and fuel line wouldn’t freeze overnight. The stopover was so small its name had already faded from memory, more a settlement built around a gas station than a proper town. The Kolyma Highway did not draw a lot of tourists, but the number was greater than zero. Even so, the old man running the lodge studied them with the curiosity of an anthropologist.

When they’d set out from the lodge this morning, heading northwest, the air had already been cold enough to kill. The temperature kept dropping and Teig had begun to wonder if this trip had been an exercise in abject stupidity. He hadn’t shared that concern with Prentiss, who had only agreed to come on this trip out of friendship and because Teig owed him nearly eight thousand dollars. Prentiss knew Teig’s grand plans were unlikely to pay off without help, so he had come along to protect his investment.

Teig told himself that Prentiss still had a little faith in him, even when nobody else did. Cold comfort, but a comfort nevertheless.

The truck rattled along the road. Teig sat up straight, determined not to be lulled back to sleep. Kolyma Highway ran twelve hundred miles through the frozen heart of Siberia, from Magadan all the way to the sprawling river port of Yakutsk. Fewer than three hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, the port city received the equivalent of only five hours of sunlight each day in the month of December, and most of those days the sun hid behind the clouds. With an average low winter temperature of forty below zero, not accounting for the windchill, no person in their right mind would ever want to live there. Yet Yakutsk had a population triple that of Magadan—nearly three hundred thousand people. It had museums and theaters and nightlife, a beacon of civilization in a frozen wasteland. Humans, it seemed, were like cockroaches. Determined enough, they could thrive anywhere.

Teig and Prentiss weren’t going all the way to Yakutsk. They were going somewhere with far fewer people, somewhere even colder—the coldest inhabited place on earth, in fact.

“What the fuck is wrong with us?” Teig said with a laugh.

Prentiss sat up straight, shaking his head as if to clear it. “You awake?”

Teig flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. “One of us has to be.”

Prentiss frowned, taking offense. “With the sky up here, it always feels like I should be in bed.”

“At least it would be warmer.”

Technically it was daytime, but all that meant up here was a kind of forever twilight, a gauze-filtered gray-blue sky. Even with the heat in the truck up full blast, Teig could feel the cold through his boots and two layers of socks. His toes ached. His hands felt numb on the wheel, despite the thermal lining of his gloves.

“It’s not bedtime,” Teig said. “It’s basically lunchtime.”

“When do you think we’ll reach the next petrol station? We’re supposed to pick up the guide in . . .” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Half an hour.”

“We’ll be late,” Teig said. “But only twenty minutes or so. It takes forever to go anywhere on this road.”

Prentiss grumbled, but he settled into the seat like a bear in his den. The Englishman wouldn’t get an American football reference, but Teig always thought he looked like a retired offensive lineman. Six-foot-two, strong as hell, with a barrel chest and a proud beer belly. Both his hair and his bushy beard needed a trim, but such things were never Prentiss’s concern.

“I don’t need to look pretty,” he’d say. “I’m never the one on camera.”

They’d met four years earlier. Prentiss had proved himself to be grumpy, brutally honest, and diligent about his work. What clinched their friendship, however, was Teig’s realization that he’d found a tolerable traveling companion. Neither of them went out of their way to feign good cheer on dark days. The two men shared a philosophy that made room for mood swings, and that philosophy bound them to one another.

What bound them even more tightly, however, was the seven thousand, eight hundred, and forty-two dollars that Teig owed his friend. Prentiss wasn’t the only person walking around with an IOU from Felix Teigland, but the debt to him was certainly the largest. Teig was a fast talker, always with a scheme he would trumpet with unfettered enthusiasm—a feature documentary from a fourteen-year-old director out of Argentina, salvage rights to a Spanish galleon, a TV series about World War II comic book artists who were secretly spies, a mock-umentary in which the history of Scooby-Doo and his gang would be investigated as if they’d existed in real life.

Teig had come up through the ranks. He’d started the summer before his senior year in college working as a grip with the crew of Ghost Sellers, a reality documentary series about a trio of paranormal investigators whose schtick was to “officially” verify properties that advertised themselves as haunted. Mostly they were hotels and bed-and-breakfasts that used their ghostly reputations as a lure for tourists, but some of the episodes were about homes and other buildings for sale, where the owners thought being haunted was a selling point. Teig had worked on that crew for two seasons before the series was canceled, and he’d been extremely dissatisfied with the supposed hauntings and the so-called investigators. He had reason to want to find ghosts, but he’d never seen evidence of one, despite the show confirming twenty-seven “official” hauntings while he’d worked with them.

Still, it had started him in television. Since then, he’d worked his way up in various jobs. He’d been a research assistant, a PA, and occasionally an on-screen “talent.” Seven years ago, he’d founded his own company, Teigland POV, and after a wild four-year ride, he had established solid contacts with executives at Discovery and NatGeo. In quick succession he had sold a pair of documentaries and two series, the latest of which, Public Service, traced the history of sex work around the globe.

When the last of the execs he’d befriended left Discovery and only one ally remained at National Geographic, he started to sweat. He needed something great, a show that he could pitch to anyone, not just those who already felt favorably toward him. What he wanted was his own Wicked Tuna or Ice Road Truckers or, God forbid, Duck Dynasty. A breakout show, something quirky but commercial. Something that would run for years and keep his company afloat. Without a home run, his career would hit the TV scrap heap in a matter of months.

Teig’s successes had made him enough money to keep the company going and to pay off most of the people who had gambled on their faith in him and lost. One by one, he made them whole. But there were still those he owed, and things were getting lean again, and Teig had started to worry.

He thought he’d found his home run idea with the Kolyma Highway, but he wasn’t going to sell it without some proof-of-concept video, something to bring into pitch meetings with him so he could say he’d been there, tell them what it felt like to be in a place so cold that a single mistake or one bad twist of fate might kill you.

So, here they were. Teig and Prentiss on the Road of Bones. What were friends for, if not to risk their lives together?

*   *   *

It wasn’t the desolation or the darkness or even the climate that had persuaded him to invest in this trip. It was that name, the Road of Bones. Official maps referred to it as R504. It wasn’t much of a road. The pavement started at both ends but not long thereafter the pavement gave way to packed gravel, which had been laid down over the permafrost for most of the Kolyma Highway’s length. In many places, the road was barely wide enough for two cars to scrape the paint off each other as they passed. The landscape consisted of snow, skeletal trees, mountains, and the occasional guardrail, as well as settlements that were considered urban but many of which were made up of a few dozen buildings and the hardy souls who went along with them.

In the days when Stalin had built the Soviet Union, massive deposits of gold and uranium had been discovered, which meant there was a lot of money to be made. Teig understood why people would have migrated into the region at that point—money was always a great motivator—but there had been people here for centuries before that, and their motives were a mystery. The Yakuts had come along in the thirteenth century, by which time there were indigenous tribes already living in the region.

He understood those settlers might have arrived in summer, but at the first winter night when the temperature dropped cold enough to freeze a man’s eyeballs in his head, most rational beings would have considered heading south.

The ones who’d had a choice, anyway.

“You’re dwelling on it again,” Prentiss said.

Teig exhaled. Usually he denied it, but this time he nodded. “Can’t help myself.”

“This is the show you want to make, man. If you’re going to let it get under your skin like this, why come all this way? I could be somewhere warm, with someone warm.”

“I know. You’re right.”

Prentiss snorted. “I’m always right, Felix.”

“You know I hate that name.”

“It’s your name! I’m not the one who gave it to you. Call your mother and shout at her if you like.”

Teig shot him a sidelong glance. “All right, John.”

“Only my gran calls me John, and that’s because I don’t have the heart to knock her teeth in.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, brother. You absolutely strike me as a guy who wouldn’t hesitate to knock his granny’s teeth in.”

Prentiss batted his eyelashes. “You say the sweetest things.”

The truck shuddered as Teig followed a curve in the road, tires grinding over the frozen ground. The engine noise had been like a drill in his skull for the first hour or so, but he had grown used to it.

Those ruts in the road, though, the way the truck rattled over them . . . Teig wouldn’t ever get used to that.

“You’re right. It’s all I can think about,” he said. “The bones.”

Prentiss exhaled. “I knew you were bloody dwelling on it again.”

*   *   *

Teig had spent his junior year of college in bed with a girl named Miranda, whose two favorite things were ghost stories and his tongue, in that order.

Out of necessity, he had watched what felt like hundreds of episodes of shows about tense-looking ghost hunters pretending to hear strange sounds or feel temperature changes in old houses. He’d been a determined skeptic at that point, though his time with Miranda would be the thing that later led him to Ghost Sellers. While Teig had kept his mouth shut about his doubts, Miranda had held him tightly while watching all of those shows, covered her eyes, jumped in all the right places. Teig never expressed his opinion, partly to avoid insulting her, but mostly because he did not want to have to explain the burning resentment he felt toward those shameless pretenders.

What would he have said?

I waited for my sister’s ghost, and she never came.

He would have given anything for just a glimpse of Olivia’s ghost, to know that somehow, somewhere, her laughter lived on.

Teig had been twelve years old when the silver minivan had slowed to a stop at the corner by their house, a frantic, cinnamon-furred puppy yipping happily by the partly open driver’s window. Eight-year-old Olivia had clapped her hands in excitement, beaming with joy as she started toward the van. The driver, in a dark hoodie and sunglasses, had left the van running as he moved into the back and racked the side door open, the puppy in his hands.

The goddamned puppy.

It had been Teig’s job to watch her that day. Their mom had been in the hospital, dad working in his office at home. Olivia had always pulled his hair and tried to boss him around plenty, but she’d also made him laugh the way nobody else ever had. She’d been a daring little kid, jumping from swing sets and searching for new ways to crash her scooter. Anytime one of their parents had said “you’re gonna kill yourself one of these days,” Olivia would narrow her eyes with a sly grin. “If I do, I’m gonna come back and haunt Felix every day forever!”

The van had been found behind an abandoned strip mall, black and twisted from fire.

Olivia had been found two months later in the same condition.

Teig had waited years for her promised ghost to appear, but it never had. By the time he got to Miranda’s college dorm-room bed and her obsession with ghost hunters, all hope for an afterlife had been burned away.

But after an entire school year with Miranda, watching those shows got him doing research on hauntings, and he began to wonder. Teig told himself it wasn’t hope, that he had zero expectation of Olivia’s ghost making a sudden appearance in his dorm room or on some episode of Haunting America, but a little spark of something had returned to him during that year, and it had never quite gone away. One day while working on Ghost Sellers, he’d been tasked with driving Deja Madison, one of the show’s stars, to the latest “haunting.” Teig had taken the opportunity to ask her, point-blank, if she believed in any of what they did on the show. He’d expected her to be angry, maybe even fire him, or to take him into her confidence and admit that it was all a sham. What Teig hadn’t anticipated was the way her eyes had lit up and the fervor of her confirmation. Yes, she’d said, at least ninety percent of what they put on television was pure theater, all bullshit to make audiences and the network happy.

“But that ten percent,” Deja had said. “That’s the sweet spot.”

She’d begun telling him stories about places she’d been, things she had seen and heard and felt, that were so unsettling Teig caught himself holding his breath a couple of times. They passed two hours in the car and Deja never tired of his questions, nor of talking passionately about the ghosts she believed she had encountered. Teig had ended that day not quite convinced, but not so determined in his skepticism.

He wanted to believe.

He’d always wanted to believe.

If one could be haunted, if ghosts might appear, then one day Olivia might keep her promise and come back to him, and Teig might finally be able to tell her how sorry he was for what had happened to her. He might finally be able to beg her forgiveness.

Years passed. Business took him on a ride. Success and failure chewed him up and now were getting ready to spit him out. He had given up searching for ghosts years ago, but if he was honest with himself, he’d never given up completely. When he first read about the Road of Bones, it woke something inside him, some little bit of fear and dread. He’d never been anywhere with a history as dark and sad as this place.

Despite the time he’d spent working with so-called paranormal investigators, he had never been anywhere that felt as haunted as this.

Teig shivered, and not from the cold.

He rubbed his eyes. “Shouldn’t be much farther. Once we pick up the guide, you should probably drive for a while.”

Prentiss shifted on the creaking seat. “You all right?”

“It’s a lot to take in. This place,” Teig admitted. “Reading about it is one thing. You see the word ‘gulag’ in print and you have a vague idea of what it is, but then you come up here and realize those prison camps were here.”

He glanced out his window, watched the dead trees passing by, the landscape so desolate it might as well have been another planet. But this was earth, all right, the world of human beings whose cruelty knew no bounds.

“I don’t like to think about that stuff,” Prentiss said, looking out his own window. “But you know, if you get this project off the ground, we’re going to be doing nothing but thinking about it for a long time.”

Teig exhaled. “People should know. The ugliest parts of history are the most important parts to remember.”

Prentiss nodded, and then the two of them let the rumble of the engine speak for a while. Teig meant what he had said. It felt important to him not to let the horrors of this place be forgotten. He’d lived all his life without ever hearing about the building of the Kolyma Highway, and when he’d asked amongst trusted friends, none of them could recall ever hearing the story.

There had already been a web of concentration camps in Siberia—gulags—but when the Soviets discovered gold and uranium deposits, Stalin wanted a road built between Magadan and Yakutsk. At least eighty new camps were constructed along the route to supply a readily available workforce. Political prisoners, criminals, unfortunate innocents, men who’d dared look at the wives of Soviet officials—they all fed the gulags. Hundreds of thousands were put to work building the Kolyma Highway. Over the years, as many as six hundred thousand people died while constructing the road, most by freezing to death.

Their bodies were buried where they fell, plowed under the permafrost.

Hundreds of thousands of frozen corpses lay beneath the Road of Bones. They were driving across potholed, rutted, icy graves—had been since they’d begun the trip—and there were hundreds of miles to go.

2

The station had no sign, but nobody passing by would have needed one. There were three rusting pumps beside a chain-link fence, beyond which stood a quartet of massive gasoline tanks. Elsewhere those tanks would have been underground, but whoever owned this faded fixture at the world’s end had decided against burying them in the permafrost.

Teig frowned as he pulled the truck up to the pump, staring at a squat little building that must have been the cashier’s office. It looked more like a bomb shelter, a century after whatever war it had been built for. Someone had spray-painted a few Cyrillic letters that caused Teig to rethink his assumption that the station had no sign. It might’ve said “gas station” or “cash only” or “biohazard” for all he knew, but it meant something to someone.

He put the truck in park. The engine ticked and rumbled. Prentiss looked as if he’d fallen asleep, but the man snored like a grizzly with a deviated septum and right now he looked too peaceful to be anything but pretending.

“Cut the crap,” Teig said. “Go in and get the guide. And see if we’re supposed to pump our own gas.”

Prentiss opened his eyes, put on a pitiful face. “It’s awful cold out there.”

“I’ve got to keep the engine running. Besides, we both know you have to piss. You always have to piss.”

With a heavy sigh, Prentiss shoved open his door. The cold swept in, shocking and brutal. “You know I don’t like new people, Teig. That’s why you’re the producer and I’m the guy behind the camera. You wanted me to take the wheel anyway, so I’ll do that. You can handle our encounters with the locals.”

Prentiss leveraged himself out of the truck without waiting for a reply and swung the door shut. He marched around front and crossed through the headlights, the icy air casting his features in a strange light. He’d spoken the words in typical curmudgeonly good humor, but Teig knew he meant them. There were certain keys to being a good friend, chief among them loyalty, shared philosophy, and willing sacrifice, but Teig had learned that the most appreciated trait in a friend was knowing when to speak up and when to keep silent. Often, he failed in that regard, but he strove to learn and that had to count for something.

He gave the engine a little gas, listened to it roar, then climbed out and let Prentiss lumber into the driver’s seat.

Prentiss gave him a mischievous smirk. “If they sell snacks, get some.”

Teig barked laughter. “Look at this place. It’s like the zombie uprising has come and gone. I doubt they have those Flamin’ Hot Cheetos you love.”

“If they have anything resembling a Cheeto, I’ll be happy. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Teig trotted to the bunker, frowning at the spray-painted graffiti. The single window was filthy with what looked like decades of grime. Someone had used a finger to scrawl the word OPEN in English, and Teig wondered if that had been meant for him.

He pushed through the door and stepped into a cloud of acrid cigarette smoke. Most of the ceiling lights were burned out, but four bulbs provided enough illumination to see the two people in that square box of a room. A heavyset woman in wool trousers and a thick, stained sweater slouched in a plush purple chair, stroking the pelt of a sleek-furred Russian Spaniel. The dog sniffed in Teig’s direction and looked away, elegant and aloof, like a prince who’d found himself cast down to live amongst the peasantry. The woman raised an eyebrow in his direction, puffed a stinking Turkish cigarette, then turned to her human companion.

“This must be your American,” she said in tortured English, and smirked as if simply speaking his language showed her disdain for Teig, like she knew he couldn’t return the favor and wanted to remind him. She was right.

The man she’d addressed sat on a stool behind a small counter that sagged beneath the burden of a cash register. On a shelf behind him were displayed a variety of bags of chips and other snacks, but they could have been dried, shaved fish or nacho crisps for all he knew. Not a Cheeto in site. Cans of Coca-Cola lined the lowest shelf. Prentiss would be pleased.

“You’re late, Mr. Teigland,” said the man behind the counter.

“All the more reason I need a guide. I assume you’re Kaskil?”

The guide inclined his head in something approximating a bow and slid off the stool to emerge from behind the counter. Teig had spoken to him via email and once on Zoom, but in person he seemed jarringly out of place. Kaskil’s thick reindeer boots were old and scuffed and had clearly seen him through many a year, but his heavy sweater was crisp and new, vividly red. His trousers also looked new and when he reached for his coat and long, heavy scarf, they also seemed not only fresh off the rack but stylish. There were no boutiques or department stores on the Kolyma Highway, but Kaskil dressed like a man with money and taste. Tall and slim, he had his hair and mustache trimmed so he looked like a 1940s Hollywood actor, or he would have if not for the black spider tattooed on his neck, facing downward. Teig knew the tattoo meant something, possibly something criminal, even prison-related.

Kaskil saw him looking. “You have a question?”

“I’m going to have a lot of questions, but not the one you’re thinking of.”

The guide nodded once. “We should get along very well.” Kaskil gestured toward the door. “I presume you need gas.”

“And the bathroom,” Teig said. “And some of those snacks for my cameraman.”

Kaskil rattled off instructions to the big woman in something that wasn’t Russian—Teig assumed Yakut—and then plucked the Turkish cigarette from the woman’s fingers and put it to his lips. He took a long drag and handed it back, after which the woman rose, kissed his cheek, and went to pack up snacks from behind the counter.

Teig blinked in surprise.

Kaskil smiled. “My grandmother.” He zipped his coat and wrapped the scarf around his throat, covering that spider. “Come on. I’ll fill your gas tank and show you how to find the toilet. Then I’ll take you to the coldest place on earth.”

*   *   *

An hour later, Kaskil seemed less amiable than he had at the gas station. Now at the steering wheel, Prentiss had banned him from smoking his putrid Turkish cigarettes in the truck. Teig didn’t much care either way, but since he’d be saying at least a temporary goodbye to Kaskil in a day or two and intended to keep working with Prentiss for years, he knew whose side he had to land on.

Prentiss had the Dead Kennedys playing through the speakers. He kept the volume down, which only served to turn the music into a low, thumping drone, a punishment to the skull. In the backseat, Kaskil sighed dramatically. Teig stifled a laugh. The guide seemed to have zero filter, which should make for good company, as long as Prentiss didn’t murder him.

“That was about me, wasn’t it?” Prentiss said, turning to glare at Teig.

“I imagine so. You tend to exasperate people.”

“Fuck you, Felix.”

In the backseat, Kaskil muttered something in his own language, but it blended with the quiet jackhammer of the music.

Prentiss shot a blazing glare at the rearview mirror. “Anytime you want to stop and take a cigarette break, let me know and I’ll pull over.”

Kaskil showed his teeth but Teig doubted anyone would have interpreted that look as a smile. In the gray light inside the car, Kaskil sat in a bubble of potential, radiating the energy of twin promises—one of aggression and the other joviality. Teig thought of his uncle Frank, who had always been ready with unsolicited advice while Teig was growing up. “Whatever people give you, give it back to them times ten,” Uncle Frank had said. “Be ready, always, to take everything to the next level. Someone’s nice to you, make it your job to improve their day, give them a laugh or a pat on the back. But someone comes at you with attitude, or looking for a fight, you drop the fuckin’ sky on their heads. Be ready either way, every day.”

The energy that radiated off Kaskil was what Teig thought of as “Uncle Frank energy.” If Teig didn’t know any better, he’d have thought Kaskil must be his long-lost cousin.

Now the guide shifted quietly in the shadows of the backseat.

“Mr. Teigland,” Kaskil said, “your friend is less charming than he thinks.”

Prentiss grunted in amusement. “Don’t worry, mate, I know exactly how little charm I have. I’m not bothered.”

Teig turned and smiled back at Kaskil. “He’s really not. If you’re seeking charm on this trip, I’m afraid I’ll be the best you can hope for.”

“I live in Akhust, my friend. Charm is in short supply.”

Teig blinked in surprise. “Wait, you live in Akhust?”

“My family are reindeer herders. I grew up taking care of the beasts.”

“You don’t look like a reindeer herder,” Prentiss said.

Kaskil laughed softly, all the tension vanishing. “I suppose not. I’ve traveled here and there, but I’m home to stay now.”

“And now you’re herding tourists,” Teig said.

“Reindeer are easier,” Kaskil replied. “We don’t have many tourists, but those who do come like to have someone to guide them. We get curious people, adventurers who want to explore and learn. Mostly in the summer, of course. It can be muddy, ugly terrain, but at least it isn’t trying to kill you.”

“And when there aren’t any tourists?” Teig asked.

Kaskil smiled. “Ah, well . . . the reindeer are at least more charming than Mr. Prentiss.”

Even Prentiss laughed at that, but Teig was still focused on Kaskil. The lowest recorded temperature in Akhust was just a hair shy of one hundred degrees below zero. He hadn’t been able to avoid preconceptions about the people he would encounter along the Kolyma Highway. Kaskil was not what he imagined, though the man’s grandmother filled the role nicely.

“We’ll want to interview you on camera,” Teig said. “Your family, too.”

Kaskil seemed not to hear. Prentiss drove through a series of deep potholes, jouncing all three of them in their seats, but Kaskil didn’t blink. Teig looked out to discover what had him so mesmerized and saw a concrete wall fifty feet from the road, topped by barbed wire. Beyond it were the roofs of industrial buildings, bleached white by decades of summer sun, almost blending with the snowy mountains in the background. They were ugly boxes with long rows of small windows, and Teig felt a swirl of nausea in his gut as he realized he was looking at a gulag.

The three men rode in silence until the abandoned prison camp vanished from view. The truck rumbled over more deep ruts in the road, and Teig pictured bones beneath their tires. Human skulls. Some of them might have been members of Kaskil’s family, a couple of generations back. Not long ago at all, really.

A few miles farther on they passed an abandoned church on the other side of the road. Half its stone face had collapsed into a tumble of rocks that the guardrail kept from spilling into their path. He wondered if the church had been built for the workers to pray for release from their suffering, or for their overseers to pray for forgiveness.

Teig glanced into the backseat. The gloom outside the windows seemed to have infiltrated the truck, the shadows to have deepened. Only the guide’s scarf seemed bright in the darkness there.

“Do you think they had funerals for the workers who died on the road?”

Kaskil’s eyes shone in the dark. Glistened. “The prisoners would have remembered their dead. There would have been prayers said, memorials if nothing else.”

He sounded more hopeful than certain, as if he refused to imagine otherwise.

Prentiss leaned toward the glass, peered down at the road beneath their wheels. The truck swerved a bit before he gripped the wheel a bit tighter and straightened them out.

“I hate thinking of all those people, just plowed under the road,” the big man said. “It’s not exactly holy ground.”

Teig fought the urge to roll his eyes. Prentiss had a superstitious side thanks to a religious upbringing that didn’t come out often. Horrifying as this place might be, Teig wasn’t worried about whether the dead had been buried in holy ground. He’d visited enough haunted places that he knew not to expect phantoms. The lives of those who’d died here were awful enough without adding the afterlife into the mix. But it would make for excellent and eerie television.

“Actually, some of the road has been blessed,” Kaskil said. “If you believe the stories.”

Teig perked up. “What stories?”

Still mostly in shadows back there, Kaskil turned to look out the window. “You must’ve done some research before you came. There are always ghost stories out here, but Ludmilla’s ghost has been very popular the past few years. She wanders the road, speaking prayers for the dead, hoping such blessings will allow their spirits to find peace. You will certainly want to devote an episode of your show to Ludmilla.”

Despite the hot air blowing from the heating vents, Teig shivered. He didn’t believe, but he wanted to. That little spark inside him, the hope that he’d see Olivia again someday, still burned. He saw Prentiss stiffen behind the wheel, and Teig couldn’t deny that he felt colder, that the little hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

“Are you saying you believe this story? You believe in this ghost?”

Kaskil leaned forward. The dashboard lights cast a blue pall over his features as he smiled. “Believe in her? I’ve seen her, my friend. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you see her, too.”

3

Teig had been hoping for a nap once Prentiss took over the driving, but having Kaskil in the backseat erased any chance of that. Narrating their journey came with the job of being a guide, but Kaskil didn’t just talk about the culture of Yakutia. Thus far, he had regaled them with tales of his father’s flatulence problem, his grandmother’s obsession with Japanese samurai movies, and his prison cellmate’s suicide. All of that paled, however, in comparison to the adventures of Kaskil’s brother-in-law, Aldyn. The husband of his older sister, Tuyaara, Aldyn left the house every day to pretend to work, but instead went to a small cottage just outside the town to bed an old woman who paid for the pleasure. The whole family knew—hell, the whole town—but he brought the money home and helped support the household, so nobody said a word. The widow had been through three husbands, two of whom she was suspected of murdering, but Kaskil thought as long as his brother-in-law wasn’t married to the merry widow, he was safe.

His mother had died more than a decade earlier in an accident involving a snowmobile and a northern deer. Teig might have thought this a work of fiction if not for the genuine pain in Kaskil’s eyes as he related the story. He knew it sounded ridiculous, even smiled as he said it, but the pain shone through. In the aftermath of his mother’s death he had grown closer to his sister. Tuyaara and Aldyn had a nine-year-old daughter Kaskil called his little sunshine girl. He said it first in Yakut and then in English, but Teig didn’t attempt it in the local tongue. He knew he’d be hopeless at it.

Kaskil directed this stream-of-consciousness babble at Teig as if Prentiss were invisible and the truck were driving itself. The big Englishman kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on what passed for a road. Occasionally he sighed, but he said nothing, grateful that he wasn’t the intended audience.

Teig’s skull thrummed and his neck ached with the bobble caused by the road. He vacillated between being amused by Kaskil and wanting to murder him, but Prentiss ran out of patience before Teig did.

“I’ve got to piss,” he growled, glancing at Kaskil in the backseat. “Anywhere I can do that without my bollocks turning to ice?”

Kaskil pointed at Prentiss. “I’ve got you covered. Another fifteen minutes or so and you’ll see lights off to the left.”

“A town?” Teig asked.

“I wouldn’t call Olonkho’s a town. Not even by Kolyma standards. But you will find a bathroom there. And a bar, if you’d like a burger or a vodka.”

Teig wanted both.