Prentiss shoved him with a boot, shouted his name. The only sounds were the wind and his pounding heart and the ticking of the rapidly cooling engine. Icy air seared his lungs and stung his exposed skin. Teig heard his name being called but he hadn’t finished combating his nausea quite yet. Teig took another deep breath, mostly to prevent himself from puking up the sugudai he’d had for lunch.Ī door slammed. How he had kept them on the road, he had no idea. 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. The view might have been spectacular, but the drop would have killed them. Instead he dropped to his knees and leaned over the guardrail, sucking in breath after breath of frigid air. 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. Veins pulsed at his temples as he pumped the brake. Metal shrieked as the broken guardrail dug into the UAZ’s side panel, but the truck leapt forward. With a crump of broken metal, the truck broke through, tilted toward the drop, and Teig bellowed in fear as he floored it. Teig gave the wheel a nudge, turned away from the drop, but momentum slammed them into the guardrail.

The drop off the edge would kill them, but at least it would be faster than freezing to death on the Kolyma Highway.

He looked past the guardrail at snow-caked treetops, mountains in the distance. Teig turned into the skid and tapped the accelerator, heart thundering as he tried to get the treads to grip the road. Prentiss screamed as they slid across rutted permafrost.

Teig snapped awake behind the wheel and hit the brakes, but the tires found only ice.

Road of bones by christopher golden