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A POST-APOCALYPTIC YUKON CHRISTMAS STORY
Thirty years after the Light, the Yukon sky turned purple on the eve of Christmas. Then, the dead woke up.
Three decades of isolation have turned Dawson City into a hard, stubborn relic of the old world.
Inside the Sourdough Saloon, before Christmas, the town handles a different kind of crisis: a lack of survivors and the end of any postal service have left the legendary sourtoe jar completely empty, threatening to kill a century-old Klondike tradition.
Edouard Marsh, a meticulous local who long ago sacrificed his own digit to the jar, can only watch as the frontier loses another piece of its history.
But the Yukon isn’t done with them yet.
Since he lost his toe to a wolverine, Edouard has been plagued with phantom limb syndrome that acts up usually before bad storms, which is more often than not. But today, today, something is up. It has never hurt this much…
That night, a freak atmospheric event unleashes a violent aurora borealis across the northern territory. The energetic green sky ionizes the air, activating thirty years of accumulated radioactive fallout packed deep inside the Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP) cemetery.
Out of the shattered permafrost rise The Frozen Damned, brittle, freezer-burned ghouls from 1898 with wood-bark skin and muscle dense as cured leather. Driven by a chemical, heat-seeking aggression, they swarm the settlement in a desperate hunt for living thermal energy and moisture. Warm blood will do just fine.
To survive the night, Dawson City must wage a visceral, all-night war with axes and fuel-oil fires against a horde that doesn’t bleed and does not behave like traditional zombies. Because of course they don’t. This is the Yukon after all.
But when the green sky fades and the living stand among mountains of shattered, frozen carapaces, Edouard realizes the battle is only the beginning.
Because a true Klondiker never lets a resource go to waste.
WATCH THE COLD STORAGE VIDEO TEASER
Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.