The Brief History of the Dead (16 page)

Her walk was quick and steady—a march, almost—and it always cleared her head. At least for a while. But as soon as she stopped to rest, she would begin thinking about her friends and family again, begin thinking about even the most glancing acquaintances. She would remember her smallest interactions with virtual strangers, people who were very probably dead now. She would hear all the things they had said to her, bumping around inside her head like flies against a window. Bump—and Martin Campbell, the boy she used to baby-sit, would hop onto her lap and say, “Can a lion beat up a tiger? Can a shark beat up an alligator?” Bump—and her mail carrier would knock on her door (this was during the week she came down with the flu) and say, “You can’t just let your letters pile up like this, Ms. Byrd. I won’t squeeze anything else into that box until you empty out what’s already there. Oh, and God bless you.” Bump—and her boss would tell her, “I don’t care if you think you got suckered into it. You can’t back out on me this late in the game, Laura. You’re our woman, you’re going to Antarctica, and that’s the end of it.” Bump—and she would hear them all at once, not only her boss and her mailman and Martin Campbell, but everybody, a tremendous crowd noise, as though all the people she had ever encountered were clamoring to her in their millions of voices.

She had been at the station for three or four weeks already, and her body had slowly repaired itself. She was no longer sore when she got out of bed in the morning. The hitch in her back had vanished, along with the ulcers in her mouth and the rivery tingling sensation in her toes and her fingers. She could almost feel her muscles knitting themselves back together, becoming strong again, bending and firm, like a suit made out of chain mail. True, there was still a bruise on her left leg from the time she had stumbled against the corner of the sledge, but it was gradually yellowing out and losing definition. She could barely even feel it anymore.

The food locker was fully stocked, with hundreds of boxes of vegetables and hundreds of cuts of meat. The pantry was stuffed with containers of rice, beans, and milled grain, alongside dozens of cases of soda and bottled water. She could easily stay in the station for another year without eating all the food, but she wasn’t sure if she should. If Joyce’s journal was correct, and the virus had infiltrated the station along with the last delivery, there was every chance in the world that the food was contaminated, as well. Unfortunately, without the equipment to test for the virus and some better idea of what she was looking for, she had no way of knowing for sure. No way other than by weakening and dying, that is, and she had been eating freely from the station’s food supply for weeks now without any sign of infection. In fact, she was healthier than she had been when she arrived.

So maybe the virus had already died out. Maybe it needed sunlight in order to propagate, multiple hosts in order to survive. Or maybe it was simply biding its time, incubating in her blood, leaving glistening silver slug-trails as it slowly crawled toward her heart.

Whatever the answer, she didn’t see that she had any choice in the matter. She would have to keep feeding herself from the pantry and the locker. The food she had brought in the sledge was down to a few last bags of granola and a half-dozen hardened biscuits. If she was going to get sick, she was just going to have to get sick.

Bump—and she heard her mother saying, “Honey, if you sleep with the fan blowing full blast on you like that, don’t you know you’ll catch fever?” Bump—and then her ex-boyfriend said, “You do realize ‘communication’ has the same root as ‘communicable,’ don’t you?” Bump—and the man sitting next to her in La Hacienda Mexican Restaurant said, “Sweet fabulous Lord, I’m hungry!” tucking his napkin into his collar like a bib. She did not think she knew the man, though she must have met him at some point. She began to walk the floor again.

It was the first entirely dark week of winter. Occasionally she would become restless, bored with her circuit of pacing, and she would open the door and walk outside for a while, though never without donning her protective clothing—snowsuit, boots, mask, and gloves. She would look at the moon and the stars, or at the tattered layer of cirrus clouds, or at the scarves of the aurora—which, because of the scrubbed transparency of the air, seemed to rest just a few yards above the ice. The klieg lights ticked every so often. The station’s vents gave off clear rivulations of heat. The weather was cold enough to flash-freeze the moisture in her breath, and on those rare occasions when the wind was perfectly still, she could hear a thousand particles of frost falling to the ground as she exhaled, chiming like tiny bells as they hit the ice.

Even after all the time she had spent living in the Antarctic—and how long had it been? six months? seven?—she still patted her clothing down for a key whenever she headed back to the station. She would experience a split second of panic when she realized her pockets were empty. Then she would remember that the door was not locked, was never locked, and her heart would grow still again. This happened countless times.

She wondered how many other useless habits she was carrying around with her. Without even trying, she could think of at least two: she still left a spoonful of soup in the pot after she was finished cooking, so that no one would accuse her of taking the last serving, and she still coughed quietly before she opened the bathroom door, which was something her father had taught her to do in case anyone was sitting inside. She believed she had managed to cast aside most of the rest of her useless social habits—habits she had accumulated over a lifetime of living with other people. But there were almost certainly a few others she remained unaware of and was unable to put aside, habits she had no need of here at the bottom of the world.

The bottom of the world
. Despite all her years of education, that was still how she thought of this place. When she was a girl, she used to believe that if she began digging a hole in her backyard and kept digging until she passed through the center of the earth, she would eventually emerge upside down on the bottom of the world. She had imagined it as a place where everything was wrong, topsy-turvy, where everything was exactly the opposite of what it should be. The clouds were like mountains, the sky like a blue lake, and the stars were like smooth white pebbles resting beneath the water. The people who lived there crept across the ceiling of the earth like spiders. She had pictured them clinging to the grass in a strong wind, holding fistfuls of it in their hands, struggling not to tumble into space. The idea frightened her. She had decided then and there that the bottom of the world was a place she never wanted to visit.

She could never have guessed that she would live there someday—and not just at the bottom of the world, but at the
bottom
of the bottom of the world. Could never have guessed that she would almost certainly die there. But then, she could never have guessed so many things. That she would fall out of love with the man she dated in college and never speak to him again. Or that a degree in environmental biology would send her to work for the Coca-Cola Corporation. Or that her father would live through two separate heart attacks and a minor stroke without dying.

“You and your mother,” she heard him saying. “It could be ninety-eight degrees outside, and as soon as the air conditioner comes on, you both complain that you’re freezing.”

Bump.

~

SEVENTY-EIGHTH ENTRY, MARCH 11.
And then there were none. “Ashes, ashes, they all fall down.” Or how did it originally go? “Atishoo, atishoo, they all fall down.” About the Black Death, right? Though I can’t remember who told me that. The “ring around the rosie” part was for the red marks on the skin of the infected, the “pocket full of posies” part for the flowers they were buried with, and the “atishoo, atishoo” part for the sneezing that came over them before they died. I suppose the “ashes” version would do just as well, though. “Ashes.” I feel like the survivor of a volcanic eruption, one of those poor wasted souls who come stumbling out of the char when the whole damned thing is over and done with, saying they climbed down a well or ran into the hills to wait out the catastrophe. Weisz died yesterday. We buried him this morning. He was the last to go. The man was in pretty bad shape these last two days. I suppose I should say that it was a blessing he finally went, but none of this feels like a blessing to me. It feels like a curse. A goddamned curse. Jesus. What a waste. Now it’s just Puckett and me. Managed to find one more bit of information on the Web—part of a diary or personal log by some high school kid. Said that the incubation period was a matter of hours or days at the most. Here’s what he wrote: “A few of us are still asymptomatic. We’re holed up in the high school gym, away from everybody else. If it wasn’t for the stupid quarantine, we’d be long gone by now. But it looks like there’s no way out. As soon as one of us comes down with the Blinks, the rest of us are done for.” Is this true? If so, I don’t understand what P. and I are still doing here. Why we’re alive at all. Maybe the freezing temperatures have slowed the development of the virus. That’s all I can imagine. We tried to radio Byrd again, but we didn’t have any luck. What can she possibly be thinking right now? We were supposed to be back already, weren’t we? I’m so sorry, Laura. I just hope you don’t decide to follow us. You’re better off where you are, believe me. I was sharpening my knife a few hours ago when Puckett interrupted me. “Come here, you’ve got to see this.” “What is it?” I asked. Puckett: “Just come here, will you?” He had found a Web site broadcasting real-time images from orbiting satellites. This means two things: one, that the satellites are still working. And two, so are the relays. The images weren’t detailed enough for us to see individual people, or individual bodies, but we could make out roads, buildings, and stalled lines of traffic. This is what we’ve left behind, our legacy to the rest of the universe—a world full of wrecked cars and empty buildings with the lights of ten thousand satellites blinking overhead. Surely there must be others like Puckett and me out there. Recluses who’ve managed to escape the virus somehow. Sherpas. Mountain men. Hermits living in desert caves. The scattered survivors who are always left after any calamity to tell people what went wrong. But then, there are no people left for the survivors to tell, are there? Just two—Michael Puckett and Robert Joyce. Or three—Laura Byrd. The food we brought in the sledge is gone, and we’ve begun eating from the station’s supplies. No other choice, unless we want to starve to death. It’s good to have meat again, and soft bread, and vegetables. At least
something
is good. After we found the satellite images, we spent half an hour or so arguing about whether we should try to reach the other side of Ross Island. Puckett: “It’s the only sensible thing to do. If the radio there is as good as Meatyard said it is, we might be able to make contact with somebody.” Me: “Or we could head back to the hut for Byrd. We can’t just leave her there.” P.: “And then we’ll do
what
exactly? Bring her back here? What’s the point? I say we make for the penguin roost. At least then we’ll have some hope of rescue. We can try for Laura afterward one way or the other.” Me: “All I’m saying is the longer we leave her there, the worse off she’s going to be.” But Puckett is right, for once. We would be absolute idiots not to try for the other radio if there’s even the tiniest chance it will work. We’ve used up the last few hours of the day restocking the sledge. Food, tools, camping gear, toiletries. The trip to the penguin roost shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as the trip to the station was. The sky, even at this hour, is the deep red color of autumn leaves, with enough light still to see by. And according to the maps the terrain is mostly shelf ice. In other words, flat traveling, if not necessarily smooth traveling. We’re setting out tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock. We’ll cut through Fog Bay, directly to the south of the island. I’m going to use the rest of the night to get some much needed sleep. My head is pounding. My eyes are killing me.

~

This was the last entry. Laura read the journal eight times over the course of the next three days, trying to determine what she should do next, whether or not she should leave the station, how likely she was to get sick. Had she been coughing more than usual lately? Had her eyes been watering? She seemed to remember waking up to sneeze the night she found the sheet of X’s in the station, then swooning into sleep again before she could roll over or adjust her pillow. Was that a sign of the virus?

Also, what had happened to Puckett and Joyce? Had they made it to the other radio? Where were they right now?

She was worried about them.

When she finished the journal for the last time, she shut it firmly and held it in her lap. She sent the nails of her free hand across her scalp, a motion that her high school English teacher had once referred to as her “thinking gesture.” Then she went to the pantry and began selecting the food she would take with her when she left the station.

Puckett and Joyce were right. If there was a chance she could use the radio at the penguin roost to communicate with somebody—any chance, with anybody—she would have to take it.

It didn’t matter how slim the chance might be. It couldn’t be worse than no chance at all, which was what she would have if she remained at the station.

And then, too, if she set out for the roost, she might be able to find Puckett and Joyce.

She had never unloaded the sledge, so the only supplies she needed to gather were food, clothing, and a few odds and ends such as aspirin, toilet paper, and a spare aerial for the transceiver at the penguin roost. She put the folio of Joyce’s journal in the duffel bag, slipping it between her long johns and her spare day socks and bookmarking it with the newspaper article she had found beneath the computer, the one about the virus’s spread through North America:
PLAGUE! DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT “THE BLINKS.”
Then she carried the entire bundle to the front door, along with the ditty bag of soap and toothpaste she had packed and the chest of frozen food.