The Brief History of the Dead

EIGHT. THE VIRUS

So Puckett and Joyce had made it to the station. They had followed the same path Laura had, sledging over the western edge of the continent's land mass, then down the ice stream and across the frozen sea. According to Joyce's journal, the weather had been good to them, with a brisk wind and a steadily slackening snowfall. By the time they reached the fissures and jags of the ice stream, the few remaining wisps of cloud had dissipated entirely. They had lost a day or two repairing a broken runner. They had come across a few crevasses that were too wide for them to cross. And of course they had bickered, as they always had, about when to rest at night and when to start out again in the morning. But for the most part their journey had been an equable one.

It wasn't until they pulled up to the station that their troubles truly began.

SEVENTY-FIRST ENTRY, FEBRUARY 25. Arrived. Finally arrived. We slid into the camp around noon, made our way down the short path to the station door. So wonderful to see the impressions of boots stamped into the snow, rather than all that endlessly smooth white ice. Made me feel like Robinson Crusoe standing on that island beach of his. P. beat on the door, expecting someone to answer. And after a while someone did, but not from inside. The crew were all around back. There were six of them. They came scrambling around the corner of the building, carrying picks and shovels. Saying things like "You finally came," and "We didn't hear the engines," and "We almost missed you." Who they thought we were, I didn't know. I told them our situation and asked if we could use their equipment to contact the Atlanta office. They looked absolutely crestfallen. Said we were welcome to try the equipment, but -. The "but" must have meant that it wouldn't do us any good. Which it didn't. The radio worked, and the satphone, and the computer, but no one was picking up. One of the men said they hadn't been able to get in touch with anybody for weeks, not since their last supply shipment was dropped off. P. asked the man his name. He said Meatyard. He tapped the duty roster, where it was spelled out. There were twenty names up there. "Where are the rest of you?" I asked, and Meatyard said, "There is no 'rest of us.' We're all that's left. We just buried Mongno out back. You don't want to be here." They told us about the whole ordeal. The story was that some sort of virus had invaded the station, making its way into the building along with their last supply shipment. Puckett: "What was in the shipment?" Another man (Turner? Dykstra?): "Food, soft drinks, cleaning fluids. Nothing out of the ordinary. We asked for a plasma crucible, but they neglected to bring it." Me: "And when did people first start getting sick?" Turner (or Dykstra?): "Nine days later. That's when we saw the first signs. It was just Washington initially. And then ten days later [note: I think he must have meant the next day, i.e., the day following the ninth, but not for certain], he passed away." And then it was Meatyard again: "The six of us might as well be clanging our bells and shouting, 'Unclean, unclean. '" He told us that all the reports said the virus germinates pretty quickly. P. asked what reports, and they showed us the articles they had downloaded from the newspapers. A clean dozen of them. London, NY, Bombay. Apparently the virus is part of some worldwide epidemic. I have to say the situation looks pretty dire. People are dying by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. Jesus. I wondered about Karen, Jessica, Marcus, my mom and dad. Fuck. Fuck. Jesus. My mom and dad. So many people. I should remain professional here. Vm sorry. No wonder we never heard anything from Coca-Cola. I'm sure we'll manage to get in touch with somebody sooner or later – they can't have forgotten about us completely, can they? Sooner or later. Sooner or later. Just a question of when. In any case, Puckett and I decided to stick with the food stores we brought on the sledge. Less risk that way. One of the men (Sayles was his name) spent the whole conversation wincing, swallowing, shivering, rubbing his eyes. Kept breathing in this funny way that made it sound like he was preventing a sneeze. Preventing one sneeze after another. What's wrong with this guy? I wondered. It turned out that what was wrong with him was the same thing that was wrong with all the others, the ones who had been buried out back. He died late this evening. Which makes fifteen. Somebody once told me that more people die while the sun is setting than at any other hour of the day. Sunset and dying, night and the grave, one ending and another. Is this true?

True – every word of it.

Laura remembered exactly where Joyce had been when he'd heard this particular fact. She remembered the loosely hanging red and white streamers, the high-pitched whistling of the sound system, even the table where he had been sitting at the time. She remembered it all quite distinctly, because she had been there as well.

It had been last July, during the annual Coca-Cola Employee of the Year banquet, just a couple of months before she and the others were scheduled to be shipped off to Antarctica. Puckett and Joyce were sitting at separate tables, each with his own division of the company, and Laura was sitting in the other corner of the room with hers. She could see Joyce talking into his telephone, nodding wearily. Puckett was harvesting something from between his teeth with the nail of his pinkie, covering his mouth with his fist as he worked. The three of them had already been assigned to the polar operation, and she, for one, was dreading the ordeal. Her eyes couldn't help but pick the two of them out whenever they were in the same room together. Between the tables and the streamers and the vases stuffed with flowers, between the thousand other people dining at the banquet, there they were, Puckett and Joyce, flashing and smoking in her attention like beacons on distant hilltops.

The three of them were victims of a common disaster – that was how she saw it – though she never could have imagined how vast that disaster would be.

One of the waiters bent over Laura's glass with his pitcher of water, and she laid her hand across the rim and told him, "No more for me, thanks." The woman sitting directly behind her, the wife or girlfriend of one of the accounting executives, slapped her table and snorted at some joke someone had offered. The banquet's custodian, who was wearing a shirt and tie so that he would blend in with the crowd, crouched over, as though to inspect his shoe, then sopped a spill of wine up from the carpet. He tucked the napkin surreptitiously in his front pocket, straightened his tie, and stood back up.

The recipient of that year's Employee of the Year award was Lindell Trimble, the vice president in charge of public relations, who had boosted sales of the company's primary soda line by one quarter in metropolitan areas and one third in small towns with what he called his ambient graffiti campaign. The idea was to hire graffiti artists to paint Coca-Cola advertisements on sidewalks, walls, picnic tables, trees, and buses – any surface where they might attract attention. There were men and women drinking Coca-Cola products and saying, "Aaaahhh!" There were still lifes autographed with only the Coca-Cola wave and the initials C. C. There were short phrases written in black spray paint so that they looked like gang slogans: "Try Coke!" or "Coke Rocks!" The corporation had to pay a cleanup fine, of course, and occasionally also a small nuisance penalty, but such fines were prefigured in the publicity budget and were minuscule compared to the cost of advertising legitimately on such a wide array of public spaces. Several of the graffiti artists were arrested, and one, in the small town of Rison, Nebraska, was beaten by the police and hospitalized with a dislocated kneecap and two broken ribs. "And that was an unfortunate incident. Definitely you would have to put it on the debit side of the equation," Lindell Trimble said when he was at the dais accepting his Employee of the Year plaque. "But on the credit side, the campaign has caught on in certain communities – Dallas, Miami, Detroit – and we've got people we didn't even hire painting our ads for us. Kids who just think it's the cool thing to do. Disaffected teenagers and the like."

He took a sip of red wine. "I'm sure the rest of the PR and advertising gang will join me in testifying that kids that age are the hardest demographic to reach. Absolutely the hardest. So it's been a good year for us. But that doesn't mean we can just kick back and take it easy. On the contrary. It's exactly when you kick back and take it easy that all the energy, all the momentum, drains right out of you, and for a business like Coca-Cola, loss of momentum equals death. A body is more likely to die at sunset than at any other hour of the day – that's a fact. The trick, then, is to keep the sun from setting. That's what we're looking for at Coca-Cola, and what we in the PR division have been fighting so hard to achieve: a sun that never sets. A perpetual noon. Thank you."

He waited for the applause to dwindle to a few last popcornlike claps, and then he lifted his glass again in a sort of silent toast and drained it, tipping it up and over like a canteen, before he stepped down from the dais. Just then the automated security field sent its planes of intersecting light sweeping across the room, scanning for armaments or explosives. Lindell Trimble stumbled and dropped his glass as the light cut across his eyes. "Damn it," Laura heard someone whisper – the building's head of security, she presumed. "I thought I told them to turn those goddamn things off for the night."

When Lindell Trimble recovered his smile, he said, "Uh-oh. Caught in the cross fire." What Laura remembered best about the evening was the way a single syllable of laughter rose up from somewhere in the room, then stopped dead when nobody else joined in.

SEVENTY-FIFTH ENTRY, MARCH 5. Only two left now. Meat-yard and Weisz and that's it. This morning P. and I helped them bury Turner out behind the station. Difficult work. We went down two feet, then heaped the ice back on top of the body. Had to round the entire mass into a sort of hummock before we were finished. Didn't want the wind to rip it apart. I pointed out that the ice there was shelf ice. I.e., beneath the graves was the ocean, not solid land. To which Weisz said, "At this point I can't see that it matters very much, can you?" And he was right. In another century, when the glaciers have melted, there will be a long row of bleached skeletons resting on the bottom of the ocean, and who will ever know? Or if the climate repairs itself somehow and the ice stays firm, there will be eighteen frozen bodies packed inside, fully dressed in their flesh and their clothing. Eighteen and counting, I should say. And again, no one will care because no one will ever know. P. and I spent a good twenty hours this past week trying to contact Coca-Cola – or anyone else, for that matter. Failed, failed, failed. The newspapers have all stopped posting. Radio signals are scattered. Phone lines gone dead or diverted to answering systems. There's every single indication that the virus has taken a global toll. What's the word I'm looking for? Not an epidemic, but a -? Can't remember. I wish I was a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. Or better: I wish I was a camera, one of those news cameras you see hovering and darting around at traffic accidents. How else to know what's going on? I spent this afternoon arguing with Puckett about what we should do next – whether we should stay or go, whether we should prepare for the effects of the virus. So far we're symptomless. "But we won't be for long," Puckett said. "We were dead men the moment we knocked on that door." Me: "You can't know that for sure. Maybe we weren't exposed to the infection. Or maybe we're immune. Someone has to be immune, for God's sake." Puckett thinks I'm just being naive. So do Meatyard and Weisz. One of the downloads we read suggested that the virus can be spread through simple human contact, or even through indirect exposure in a shared environment. The old cover-your-mouth-and-don't-touch-the-doorknobs scenario. Pandemic. That's the word I want. Pandemic. Apparently there's an emergency radio by the penguin roost on the other side of Ross Island. "The knoll," Meaty ard called it. "It's a powerful little thing," he said. He claims there's a slim chance – but a chance notwithstanding – that it will be more help to us than the radio inside the station. Says we might be able to find a different tunnel through the reception. Should we try to reach it? If things get any worse, we might not have a choice. It's becoming colder all the time. Winter and the vanishing sun. The rifts and crevices freezing back over. The ocean receding. I keep thinking about Shannon and Ken and all the others back in Pennsylvania. I wonder how they're doing. No, let me tell the truth. What I wonder – what I really wonder – is if they're doing. P. and I were supposed to have made the return trip days ago. The trip back to the hut, I'm talking about, not the trip back home. Though for that matter, we were supposed to have made the trip back home days ago, too. Tried to radio Byrd this morning on the off chance that she had repaired the transceiver, but no success. She must think we're never coming back.

Not long after she found the journal, Laura resumed her routine of counting and pacing, numbering off her steps just as she had in the hut on the other side of the mountains. It occurred to her that maybe she was trying to walk away from everything. The station's rooms were arranged in a ring, with doors on each of the connecting walls, so that she could keep going for hours without ever reaching a dead end. Sometimes she would find herself counting into the thousands and the tens of thousands, taking one step after another in the same sort of blind compulsion that drives suicides to the edges of buildings, crossing through first the front room, then the kitchen, then the dining room and the bedroom and the living room, over and over again, until finally she would stop without thinking by the couch or one of the beds and collapse backward onto the cushions, falling with her legs rigid and her arms stretched out like a child playing catch-me.

It was one of those mind-emptyingly repetitious activities that people take up in order to suppress their anxiety. Some people rocked back and forth, or danced, or drummed their fingers on a tabletop. Some people exercised with heavy machinery. Laura paced.

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 its 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. Fm 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.

The darkness outside was constant, with no trace of sunlight, so there was no reason for her to wait until morning to get under way. Morning wouldn't break for another month or so, anyway. A night so long made the sunrise seem imaginary – like Atlantis, or the Heavenly City, or the Garden of Eden. A pipe dream, she thought. Or maybe she should say a daydream.

The stars were nearly motionless. The moon was a brilliant white wedge, emerging from behind a thick bank of clouds. She packed her new equipment into the sledge's storage hutch, slipped the latch into place, and took one last walk around the building. One of the klieg lights, the one directly above the graves, shone hard and straight onto the twenty mounds, so that they cast heavy foreshortened shadows that pooled against the wall of the station like oil puddles. The wind shifted, and she heard the scraping and buckling sound of the sea ice. She headed back out to the courtyard and started the sledge.

She was worried that the fuel cell might have chipped in the freezing weather, breaking the circuit, but as it turned out, she had no reason to be. The engine engaged with a muffled hum that slowly grew louder. First the headlights brightened, and then the runners lifted, and then the internal GPS monitor flickered on, which meant that at least one of the polar relays was still working.

But the rest of the relay system must have been down – or large patches of it, anyway. The display indicated that she was at 2° S, 39.4° E, just south of the equator, somewhere around Kenya.

She took a long, broken breath, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the steering column. She was trying to decide whether or not she should laugh.