Page 40 of What is Lost

Fast-forward twenty yearsto the mountains of Tajikistan:

John thought the old adage about things changing yet staying the same was true. The only differences were the road, the country, and the fact that he was freezing his ass off because, you know,winter.

After a night spent in the van—a miserable experience in the cold—they’d started out bright and early with an eye toward dropping straight south and making it to Khorog, a biggish city for these parts. Depending upon when they hit Khorog, they’d either jog southwest to the crossing at Ishkashim or call it a day and spend the night in town before heading to the border. John was rooting for spending the night which, at their current pace, seemed likelier than not.

They came on their fifth rockslide of the day two hours past the highest point on the TavildaraPass, which had been marked by a white shelter decorated with Russian graffiti. This time, neither he nor Davila even groaned. The slides were almost old news because they seemed endless on this downhill stretch. Several slides, piled high with snow at the foot of the jagged gray mountains on their left, had clearly been there a while.

The fresh slides were the problem. Any and all had to be cleared by hand, the rocks picked up one by one and tossed over the side, which, in itself, was dicey. The only way of knowing where the unpaved road was were from yellow metal markers set at erratic intervals or the deep gouges in snow that their driver, Parviz, said were from yaks or donkeys. So long as they stayed inside the outermost set of tracks, they could be relatively certain of not going tumbling off the edge.

“Where do the yaks come from?” Sucking down another lungful of air, John squatted and slipped his gloved hands under another basketball-sized rock. “Haven’t seen any…” He had to try twice before hefting the stone with a grunt. His knees shrieked with the effort as he slowly duckwalked to the edge. “Any places…people actually…live.” Or people, for that matter, though they’d seen long-abandoned homesteads: deep snow piled high on flat roofs, no curtains, no sign of habitation, no smoke trickling from a central stovepipe.

“Below,” Parviz said. Seeming content to let hispassengers do the literal heaving lifting, the driver made a sling from the front of his tunic into which he carefully selected stones, most no bigger than large hen’s eggs. “Most live valley,” he said, scuttling to the edge and bouncing stones from the sling.

“Makes sense, since we’re above the tree line.” Cradling a rock the size of a medicine ball, Davila hurled the boulder over the edge with an underhanded granny toss. Dusting his palms, he headed back to the debris field in long, powerful strides. “Only a few more, and we can go around.”

“Unh,” John wheezed, his breath clouding in the chill air. His own rock was half the size of Davila’s. His muscles shivered from the effort. Sweat oozed between his shoulder blades; his pits were sodden. Shuffling to the road’s edge, he settled for simply dropping his rock which bounced twice and then came to rest against a pileup of other boulders with a softclack.

“Hey.” Davila was balancing a boulder the size of a watermelon on one shoulder. “You good?”

“Just breathing.” He turned back to the valley, which was so choked with clouds that the bowl seemed filled with cotton candy. He couldn’t see the valley floor at all or the mountains opposite. A brief flicker of memory edged with terror: him as a stringy twelve-year-old terrified that, by venturing close to the edge, he’d somehow slip and hurtle,screaming, all the way down with no freeze-frame to save him.

He was about to turn away—when he stopped dead.

“Hey.” The word came in a thin wheeze. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “Hey, Davila?”

“Yeah?”

“Come here.” He didn’t want to take his eyes from the spot.Howhad they not noticed this to begin with? Why hadParviznot warned them?

“Problem?”

Oh, you could say that.“Just come here.” When Davila’s footfalls drew near, he pointed with a shaky finger to a spot about ten feet from the edge. “Look at that. Tell me what you think it means.”

A yellow sign with red Cyrillic lettering lay partially buried by snow. Enough was visible to see that someone had used the sign for quite a lot of target practice. Which would’ve been interesting at some other time and place because he hadn’t seen any signs of any kind along the way. But it wasn’t the bullet holes that had made all John’s spit dry up.

For a long moment, Davila was silent. A sough of wind gushed past; to their right, John could hear the crunch of stones under Parviz’s boots and then the driver said, “There is trouble?”

“You tell us.” Davila hooked a thumb downslope. “What the hell is that?”

Brow furrowed, Parviz planted his hands on hisknees, leaned forward, squinted then spat and turned with a shrug. Shrugging seemed to be the go-to in-country. “Is sign?”

“We see that,” John said. “The thing is what the sign’s about. Like, it’s yellow, and yellow mean pretty much the same thing world-over.”

“Be careful,” Davila said.

Like...warning, Will Robinson.“And, in this case,” John continued, “I think we’re supposed to pay attention to those words done in big red letters.”

“And the exclamation points,” Davila put in.

“Two of them,” John added. Although the words were in Cyrillic, he’d been able to dredge up a few characters from memory.Opas...something. Didn’t matter. A person would have to be a little brain-dead not to get the message from the accompanying diagram.

“So, Parviz,” Davila said, “help me understand this. You got this person here, this stick figure done in black, right? Getting knocked back from that black, exploding pyramid-shaped thing, which is exploding, right? Which is why you got all these jagged red lines?”

“Meaningka-boom?” John added.

“As in anti-personnelland minekaboom?” Davila said.

“Oh, yes.” Parviz grinned, his half-rotted pegs appearing in all their glory. “Say bombs in dirt.”

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