59 pgs.
In Dispatch from the Abyss, the road calls Mama Jo back to the places she swore she’d never see again. Two weeks after the infernal detour that nearly destroyed her convoy, Jo’s restless nights are broken by a voice on the CB – the impossible voice of Cassidy, her long-dead mentor, crying for help from beyond the grave. With fellow haulers Darla Rae and L.A. Cruz, she traces the signal to a forbidden place whispered about in trucker legend: The Boneyard, where the Road brings its dead.
What they find is not a scrapyard but a vast, ritualized grave – a cathedral of rusted rigs arranged in occult geometry, each one humming with residual power and sorrow. The Haulin’ Coven discovers that the Boneyard isn’t merely haunted – it’s a machine, a psychic network powered by thousands of lost truckers whose deaths were catalogued and contained by the Infernal Logistics Authority (ILA). Cassidy’s spirit is trapped at its center, bound into the network like a living data node, sending out ghostly warnings before the coming refinery audit – Hell’s next great act of reclamation.
To free her, the coven must merge analog witchcraft with digital sorcery: L.A. builds a bridge between CB radio, circuitry, and spellcraft while Darla burns away infernal sigils one by one with living flame. Each act of liberation weakens the ILA’s hold but threatens to unleash a flood of bound spirits. In the final confrontation, Jo faces the spectral echo of Cassidy and relives the Hellstorm Memory – the infernal ambush that birthed her scars and the legend of the Iron Bride.
Cassidy’s final message is not a plea but a warning: the Road remembers, and the war between freedom and control is far from over. As the Boneyard begins to awaken, Jo swears to carry the dispatch forward – a message from the abyss that the living must now deliver.
Themes:
Haunted infrastructure • Survivor’s guilt • Feminine rage and solidarity • The machinery of grief • Freedom versus control • Techno-occult resistance
Tone:
Lyrical Rust Belt horror with cyber-occult resonance – equal parts Sorcerer, Event Horizon, and The Wages of Fear, set against the haunted backbone of America’s forgotten highways.
Page 1 excerpt:
“Two weeks had passed since the impossible detour, two
weeks since the demonic audit on a road that shouldn’t exist,
and the quiet had finally caught up to Jo. The cab of the Iron
Bride was a sanctuary of familiar smells-worn leather, stale
coffee, and the faint, ever-present tang of diesel-but tonight it
felt like a cage. It was 3 AM in a forgotten truck stop in the
armpit of Pennsylvania, the dead hour when the world held its
breath and the ghosts of the road whispered their secrets.
Sleep was a distant country she could not reach. Her mind
was a restless engine, turning over the events of the past
weeks, replaying them in an endless, torturous loop. The
impossible road. The jackknifed rig. Earl’s empty cab with its
faded family photo. The Auditor, that thing of rust and malice
that had tried to erase them from existence. And L.A., the new
sister, the digital witch who had saved them all with nothing but
a phone and a prayer.
Her hand, of its own accord, went to her wallet. She pulled out
the business card, its edges unnaturally sharp, the cardstock
cold as a tombstone. She’d handled it so many times in the
past two weeks that she knew every detail by touch.
INFERNAL LOGISTICS AUTHORITY. Compliance Division.
The red ink of the appointment-“Three months. Refinery audit.
Mandatory.”-seemed to shimmer in the dim cab light, a drop of
fresh blood that never dried. She traced the embossed letters
with her thumb, feeling the weight of the threat, the physical
reality of the reckoning that was coming.
Three months. Ninety days. Two thousand, one hundred and
sixty hours. It felt like a lifetime and no time at all.
She stared out at the rain-slicked asphalt of the truck stop
parking lot, a sea of sleeping giants under the jaundiced glow…”