Road of Bones: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

Genres: Ghost; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Christopher Golden's Road of Bones is a stunning supernatural thriller set in Siberia, where a film crew is covering an elusive ghost story about the Kolyma highway, a road built on top of the bones of prisoners of Stalin's gulag…

Release date: January 25, 2022

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

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?


Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Golden