The Brief History of the Dead

SIX. THE STATION

The bulges in the snow were graves. At first Laura had mistaken them for natural formations, like the terraced ridges that sometimes appear on beaches or deserts when the wind blows just swiftly enough to carve its own patterns in the sand and just slowly enough not to disturb them. She had even – shamefully, she now realized – climbed on top of one of them, balancing herself at a flat spot along the crest to look out over the ice toward the bay. But as the days passed and the station remained deserted, the truth gradually dawned on her. The zoologists and technicians who had manned the station were dead. She had read their names on the duty roster that was tacked to the bulletin board: Armand Koen at the top, Nathan Sayles at the bottom, and between them eighteen others. Twenty names for twenty graves, strung out along the back side of the building like a row of beads.

One of them must have stayed alive long enough to bury the others – but who, she wondered, had buried him? What had killed them all in the first place? And how long ago had they died? She searched the station carefully, but it offered her no clues: no journal, no voice recording, not even a message inscribed on a post somewhere, a single cryptic word like the settlers of Roanoke Island had left: "Croatoan."

Croatoan. Cro-Magnon. Caveman. Cave painting. Graffiti. Confetti.

Confetti. She had been in elementary school when the last of the manned space shuttles had exploded over the launch gantries of Cape Canaveral. The footage had shown a million fragments of plastic and aluminum tilting and floating in the coastal wind, catching the sunlight in a great mass of sparks before it rained down over the spectators in the stands. At the time, when her teacher turned on the television, Laura had thought – all the children had thought – that they were watching an old-fashioned ticker-tape parade. They had laughed and whispered, and someone at the back of the room had even applauded. Then Ms. Terrell had told them that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. "I can't believe you children, celebrating tragedy like that. It's terrible, that's what it is."

Soon enough, the image on the television screen had cut to the exact spot of the explosion, a strangled black cloud in the robin's-egg blue of the sky, and they had all realized what was going on. The silence that had filled the air was so complete that it made the classroom seem empty, she remembered, just the skeletons of a few dozen desks and chairs packed together on the carpet. It was the same silence Laura had heard the evening she arrived at the station. The sun had almost vanished by the time she drove the sledge into the center of the encampment. She was exhausted, of course, but she was also elated. She parked beneath a wooden overhang and slid out onto the ice. The wind was completely still. Surely someone must have heard the sound of her engine cutting off, but no one came outside. She would just have to surprise them at the door. The snow around the building was unbroken – no footprints, no sledge tracks, only a few small holes where some icicles that had fallen from the edge of the roof stuck out of the ground like fence posts. She had to punch through the crust with her boots in order to clear a path to the front door. When she got there, she banged on it with her fist. No one answered. What was going on?

She tested the lever and found the door unlocked. "Hello?" she called out as she stepped inside.

The lights were still working, and so were the heating panels. She could even hear the receiver crackling on a table in the corner. But there was nobody in the station.

Her heart sank. She had journeyed untold miles across the cold and the darkness and the broken ice, and for what? She walked through the sleeping quarters, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room, expecting at every turn to find someone reading a book, eating beans out of a can, or shuffling a deck of cards in that noiseless way people had of sliding them back and forth in blocks between their palms. As far as she could tell, though, the building had simply been abandoned. There was no sign of recent human presence, no damp boots or sweating glasses of water. The rooms were quiet and undisturbed. It would have been obvious to anyone that they had been forsaken.

In the open space of the living room there was a couch. She discovered that it was long enough for her to stretch out on at full length. She propped her feet up on the armrest and stared at the ceiling. Slowly her skin began to prickle and flush as her capillaries opened up. The warmth from the heating panels wafted over her in tangible waves. It was only when she lay absolutely still that she realized how cold she had been.

She was too tired to figure everything out. Her back was aching, and all her muscles were sore. She had been traveling for God knows how many days, and she only wanted to rest.

She went to sleep on the couch and did not wake up until deep into the next day. Her first thought when she woke was that the members of the party must have left on some sort of scouting expedition. The emperor penguins whose migratory habits they were studying were supposed to begin tending their eggs at this time of year, weren't they? So maybe the team had set out to observe them, making camp on the other side of the mountains.

But she couldn't imagine they would leave the station entirely untended.

Maybe, then, they had been evacuated. Maybe there had been some sort of emergency and they had been lifted out over the ocean, all twenty of them, leaving their equipment behind so they could return for it later.

She sat down at the radio thinking that she might get in touch with Coca-Cola and then with someone who could tell her what had happened to the station's inhabitants, but when she tried to tune the headphones in, they greeted her with a mixture of shrill, discordant tones that cut through her head like a metal rod. The sound made her skull ache. The other frequencies she dialed were no better: all either perfectly silent or filled with the same terrible banshee's wail as the first. She tried to establish a web connection on one of the station's computers, but without luck. Then she found a satellite phone on a stack of books next to the transceiver. Though she didn't see how the thing could work so far away from a relay tower, she punched in the number for the Atlanta office anyway. To her surprise, following a few seconds of soft clicking and humming, the connection went through.

But the corporation's voice mail system must have been out of order.

The phone rang and rang. She counted the seconds off tick by tick, measuring them by the clock above the computer. After five minutes, she hung up.

When she dialed the number again the next day, she heard only an airy rattling noise that seemed to breathe and then suddenly fade away, muffled by the distance the way that bombs detonating on the surface of the earth must sound from the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The station was fully outfitted, so there was no need for her to unpack the sledge. She found soap and shampoo in the shower, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, and a box of hundreds of red and yellow toothbrushes in clear plastic sleeves beside the bathroom sink. The food locker was filled with vegetables and cuts of meat stacked on top of one another in wrappings of crisp white butcher paper, and the pantry was stocked with several dozen cases of Coca-Cola and bottled water. She would stick to the water. She hadn't really been able to enjoy a Coke in years. It was that old adage about mixing business with pleasure: her days were somewhere between sixty and seventy percent Coca-Cola already, and she refused to give any more of herself over to the stuff.

At first she expected the station's team of scientists and technicians to come walking through the door at any second, shucking their coats and gloves, banging the snow from their boots in a parade of kicking and stamping. She had expected Puckett and Joyce to return to the shelter on the far side of the mountains in exactly the same way. But as the days passed and no one arrived, she grew accustomed to the station's capaciousness and silence. Sooner or later, she was sure, someone would come back for the equipment and find her there. Until then, she was content to wait.

She tinkered every so often with the radio or the computer or the telephone, tapping and dialing, listening for a human voice, but she never managed to reach anyone she could talk to. That was all right. Here at the station, after so many weeks on the ice, her solitude didn't seem to matter so much. For now, it was enough that she had a real bed, a warm room, and a diet free from jerky and granola.

There were still a few hours of indirect sunlight in the middle of the day, a single thin sheet of it straitened over the horizon. That was when she liked to go outside. The kliegs had been fitted with hoods so that they would direct most of their light to the ground, and her view of the sky was remarkably clear. It was a washed-out blue with wide streaks of red and orange in it, and there was a small peppering of stars there, so hot that they shone right through the atmosphere. Sometimes she could even see the trails of the satellites making their transit over the gap in the ozone layer. She would wait for the sun to vanish and for the rest of the stars to come out, and then she would go back inside.

It was during one of these outings that she decided to explore the terrain around the station. The wind was blowing so hard that her scarf flapped around her like a pennant, and she had to use a hiking stick to keep her balance among the drifts. The ground leveled out as soon as she reached the back of the building. She turned the corner and paused to catch her breath. That was when she found the bulges in the snow. They were packed hard, like outcroppings of stone. She climbed on top of one, looking out over the shelf toward the ocean. She could see a broken line of water in the distance, a trail of black dots and dashes at the very edge of the ice. It was like a message tapped out in Morse code. Certain patches of ice had been buffed to a mirrorlike polish by the wind, and they shone with the same red-veined blue as the sky. When the sun fell and the ice lost its color, she hopped down from the bulge and continued her journey around the building.

She was always shivering by the time she got back inside, which was curious to her. She had shivered so rarely on her trek across the ice field, and surely she had been much colder then than she was now. Maybe her body only shivered when she could anticipate being warm again: she knew there was a heated room waiting for her on the other side of the station door, and shivering was simply her body's way of reacting to that knowledge. Under such circumstances, it could even be considered a sign of hope. That was her theory, anyway. When she was trying to make her way through the blizzard, she had not exactly lost hope, but she had certainly not allowed herself to anticipate being warm again, and so her body had settled peacefully into its coldness, like a coin sinking to the bottom of a fountain, dropped by a little girl in a red cotton jumper who was only trying to make a wish.

She had been at the station for almost a week when she found the sheet of paper tucked under her mattress, a single folded leaf from a yellow legal pad. She opened and read it. It was a list, handwritten, of the twenty members of the emperor penguin party. There were notes scribbled in different shades of ink beside their names:

~ at least three a day

~ one in the morning, with breakfast, without fail

~ sporadically: "one every couple of days or so"

~ in the afternoon during radio sessions

~ at lunch – usually dinner, too

~ hates it, but might have a bit when there's nothing else around

~ no more than one or two a week

It looked as though the notes had something to do with the party's dining habits, but beyond that, Laura had little idea what they could mean.

In the printing margin on the left side of the page was a column of red X's, twelve of them, one beside each of twelve names. A thirteenth X had been partially completed, with one leg drawn and an apostrophe-shaped accent at the top that must have been the beginning of a second. The rest of the names were unmarked.

There was something about those X's. Laura stared at them, clenching her teeth in concentration. What could they mean? They reminded her of the crossbones that are supposed to be printed beneath the skulls on bottles of poison, or the sharpened tines on strands of barbed wire, or the vacant marks that cartoonists draw over the eyes of the dead. She was feeling sick to her stomach, though she didn't know why.

She ran her finger down the column and felt the impressions that the pen had bitten into the paper. It was at that moment, as she looked at the X's written alongside the list of twenty names, that she first began to suspect that something terrible had happened to them. And it was a short leap from there to her realization that the bulges behind the station were graves. X's. Exes. Excess. Wisdom.

She put on her boots and the rest of her winter gear and made the hike to the back side of the station. She had to see the bulges again. She had to look at them with her own two eyes now that she had guessed what they were. Sure enough, they were exactly the right size, just long enough and just wide enough to cover a human body. For the first time, she counted them to see how many of them there were. Then she counted a second time to make sure. There were twenty graves. She touched each one with her hand before she went back inside.

She examined the note again and set it on the stand beside the bed, weighing it down with a coffee mug so that it wouldn't waft to the floor. If it was time to undertake a more careful inspection of the station – and she believed that it was – she might as well begin with the sleeping quarters. She lifted the other mattresses one by one, looking for a diary or another folded sheet of yellow paper, but she found nothing but a watch on a long silver chain and a couple of pornographic magazines. Most of the footlockers had been very loosely padlocked, their catches undone or their keys poking out like fingers. She opened them and sifted through the piles of clothing and toiletries inside. It was amazing how much you could tell about a person from what he concealed in the lower right-hand corner of his footlocker. Beneath all the underwear and reading cartridges and Bertelsmann devices, she uncovered multiple sachets of cocaine and marijuana, a box of sixteen porcelain Walt Disney figurines, an antique Bible with gold embossing and annotations written in Victorian-era English, a large tub of Vaseline with a spoon sticking out of it, bottles of antidepressant medication and steroids and serotonin, and a pacifier knotted onto a frayed piece of terry cloth that must have belonged to someone's son or daughter.

There was nothing, though, that might explain what had happened to the station's people, all those biologists and polar technicians who had eaten the food in the cabinets and rumpled the beds. Nothing that would tell her where they had gone or what, if she was right, had killed them.

The bathroom and the kitchen had even less to reveal – a jar of fine olives, a few containers of bathing salts, and that was about it. Everything else – the food, the dishes, the toiletries – she had already uncovered days ago. But she had explored the kitchen and the bathroom pretty thoroughly in the course of her daily routine. In the dining room, which she had rarely visited, she found a garbage bag stuffed beneath a wooden storage hutch and filled with curved pieces of broken glass and stoneware – coffee mugs and drinking glasses, from what she could tell. The only item that was still intact was a cream-colored mug with a pale brown ring around the inside of the lip, exactly the color of the secret messages she remembered searing into sheets of notebook paper using lemon juice and a lightbulb when she was a girl. She looked beneath the chairs and end tables in the living room and in the chink of space between the couch and the wall, but she turned up only a few buttons and paper clips, a broken yardstick, and a thin layer of dust. She pried the cushions off the couch and uncovered a wallet containing a photograph of a cocker spaniel, and a license with the name Lewis Mongno on it. She recognized the name from the duty roster posted above the transmitter.

Finally, in the bottom drawer of the computer desk, she found what she was looking for: a printed copy of the home page of a newspaper. The newspaper was out of Kansas City, Missouri – The Kansas City Light – and it was dated February 3rd.

Which was to say that it had been printed sometime between three and four months ago, if she hadn't lost track of too many weeks.

The headline was a single word, PLAGUE, with an outsized exclamation point. The subheading read: DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT "THE BLINKS."

Laura's first lover had been a journalism professor at Columbia University, where she had spent the summer after she graduated from high school taking a ten-week college prep course. She was there to study environmental biology – her prospective major – but she chose the professor's Introduction to Journalism course as her one elective. Though she dropped the class after a single session, the two of them continued to see each other for the rest of the summer.

He was a tall, strikingly intelligent man named Luka, with the quiet wit and prematurely graying temples of a movie scientist from the black-and-white era. Every so often, when he had been drinking or engaged in heavy conversation, a mood would come over him, and he would adopt the habit of speaking entirely in headlines.

"Phone Rings Three Times Before Laura Answers," he would announce. " It Was My Mother,' She Says."

Or, "Evening Winds Down. Fornication Imminent."

Or, "Sims Grows Bored with Discussion. Wanders Away to Bang Head Against Wall."

She still thought of him – she couldn't help it – whenever she read a newspaper headline that seemed to call a certain sort of attention to itself, DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT "THE BLINKS."

She hadn't seen him since the afternoon before she left New York, when they'd had sex and ordered Thai food and then stood looking out over the city as they ate, watching the lines of traffic cluster and spread apart between the fixed chains of the stoplights. It was midsummer, and though the days were already growing shorter, the sun still would not set until eight-thirty or nine o'clock.

Luka lived on the thirty-third floor of the Future Building, in a two-bedroom apartment with a boomerang-shaped balcony that floated over the building's courtyard. The two of them liked to stand there at the rail and gaze down at the crowds. It was tempting to say that the people looked like ants from so far above. Tempting, but not quite true. The people came in brighter and more eccentric colors than ants, for one thing, with strange appendages like briefcases and grocery sacks and umbrellas. And they moved with far less order, far less mindfulness, than ants ever did. Their motion was more like the formless winding of water insects skating over the surface of a pond, she thought, though no one would ever say that the people looked like water insects.

She and Luka were standing side by side, their elbows propped on the ledge of the balcony. He asked her, "So this time tomorrow, are you going to miss me?"

"This time tomorrow, I'll be in an airplane somewhere over about Iowa." Laura dreaded the prospect. "I'll be sick to my stomach, with a splitting headache, and I'll miss everything that's not fifty thousand feet in the air."

"Including me, though, right?" Luka prompted.

"Including you, Professor Sims." This was what his students called him. "But it won't matter, will it? Because in a few months I'll tell my parents about us, and then I'll drop out of college and move back to New York, and we'll get married and live happily ever after. The end."

Laura was teasing him in one of the few ways she knew how. He gave the sort of shallow, wincing laugh that people who don't want to admit a joke has embarrassed them give. Both of them had understood from the very beginning of their relationship that they wouldn't see each other again after the summer was over.

But because he was so much older than she was, and also because he had been her teacher – if only for two hours – he felt a certain amount of guilt about the affair from which she herself was immune. "So much debauchery," he would joke sometimes, shaking his head as she lay in his bed wearing only a T-shirt. And though she knew he was only kidding and she would always offer up a smile for him, there was a germ-sized speck of truth to what he said, just enough to put a note of real self-reproof in his voice.

"That's right," she repeated. "Married and happily ever after." "Well… I look forward to it," he said.

"I'm sure you do," she told him, and she patted his hand. "God, I hate flying," she said. "I know you do."

And then, to lighten the mood: "Weren't we supposed to have teleportation devices by now? Didn't they promise us teleportation devices?"

"And rocket jet packs," he added.

"And moving sidewalks."

He pretended he was marching with a picket sign. "What do we want? Rocket jet packs!"

"Teleportation devices!" she added. "When do we want them?" "Now!" she said.

"The future!" he said, and something about it struck them as funny. They began to giggle, and then to laugh, catching themselves in one of those loops in which they realized how meager the humor of the original remark was, found the meagerness itself funny, and laughed even harder than they had before. Soon they were laughing at nothing more than the fact that they were laughing.

The terrorist warning beacons on the roofs of the city's buildings flashed on with their blazing yellow lights, then went dark again after only a minute or two. It hardly mattered. No one paid any attention to them these days, anyway.

"Must have been a false alarm," Luka said.

"Another one," Laura said.

Her stomach was pleasantly tight from laughing. Luka took her wrist between his fingers and began to rub it up and down with his thumb, a hard touch that sent a shiver through her body.

Then something extraordinary happened.

A child who was cutting across the courtyard with her mother (at least they thought the child was a girl – it was difficult to tell from so far above) lost hold of the balloon she was carrying. It went floating out toward the street, cleared the roof of the garage next door, and then a crosswind plucked it from its path and brought it sailing back toward the Future Building, where it came twisting and bobbing up the long row of balconies, a quickly expanding red sphere. Laura could see the girl yanking at her mother's arm, trying to pull her toward the balloon, but it was already far out of reach.

"I think that thing's going to pass right by us," Luka said, and sure enough, the balloon had hit some still corridor of air that ran up the side of the building. "You know," he said, "I think I might be able to catch it."

He tilted out over the ledge of the balcony, and Laura seized her breath. When the balloon soared past, he looped his hand out in one swift gesture, like a bear snatching at a salmon. Suddenly he was holding it by the string.

Laura looked at the balloon, and then at him, and then back at the balloon. "I can't believe you did that," she said. "Five dollars to the man with the golden hand."

He looked down into the courtyard. "They're still down there. Come on." He led Laura to the elevator and pressed the call button. The compartment must have been lingering just a floor or two away, because the bell sounded almost immediately. The doors slid open and then closed with a diminishing whispering noise, and as they dropped toward the lobby, Luka held the CLOSE DOORS button down with his finger. The balloon hovered at the ceiling. When the elevator reached the ground floor, he said, "Hurry," and took her by the hand. They rushed past the doorman into the courtyard.

The child and her mother were gone. A man was feeding cheese curls to his dog, which was eating them fastidiously, like someone trying to split a seed open between his front teeth. A group of teenagers was listening to music on a pocket radio.

"They were headed down Thirty-second," Luka said. "Quick. This way." Laura followed him down the steps that led past the garage, weaving through a cluster of old men who were talking about the races, and then sprinted beneath a line of trees and scaffolding. At the end of the block, they saw a woman waiting with her daughter at the crosswalk.

Luka caught up to them just as the light was changing.

"Excuse me," he said to the girl. He was out of breath from running, and he gasped a few times, his mouth opening and closing like a bellows.

It was just long enough for the girl to notice the balloon and say, "That's mine!" She turned to her mother. "I told you so! A man catched it on his porch. I told you so!"

"'Caught,'" her mother corrected her. And then the mother accepted the balloon from Luka and said, "Thank you. Thank you very much."

She stooped over and wrapped the white string around her daughter's wrist, making a knot. "I'm telling you, it would have been nothing but balloons from her for the next two weeks. What do you say to the nice man, Sarah?"

"Is this the first balloon you caught?" the girl said. "What's your job? Is this what you do?"

"Say thank you, Sarah."

"Thank you."

The crosswalk signal, which had been green, began blinking on and off. "Shoot," the woman said. "Look, we're really in a hurry, mister. Thank you again. I'm sorry."

"Thank you, Balloon Man," the girl said, and Laura was sure that's how the girl would think of him from now on, what she would call him whenever she told the story: Balloon Man. She and Luka watched the two of them dash across the street as the light changed, the bumpers of half a dozen cars nosing at the backs of their legs. They walked past a bookstore and an old movie theater, the girl's outfit, the same yellow-green as a firefly's bulb, flashing between the bodies of the other pedestrians, and they vanished into the crowd.

And then Luka said something that Laura knew she would never forget.

"You know, that may be the best thing I've ever done with my life," he said.

What was the best thing she had ever done with her life? she wondered now, as she listened to the wind moaning outside the station. She had never founded a charity or raised a family. She had never saved another person's life. Hell, she had never even saved another person's balloon.

The best thing she had ever done with her life was probably some small, half-conscious act of kindness she had long since forgotten.

"Laura Byrd Gives Wildflowers to Her Mother and Father."

Or, "Laura Byrd Offers Token to Man at Subway Terminal, Promptly Forgets."

Or, "Laura Byrd Flashes Headlights, Warns Other Drivers of Speed Trap."

When she had finished reading the article, she set the paper aside and put her head in her hands, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. If the paper was correct, a mutagenic virus had begun spreading through North America at the end of January, right around the time she, Puckett, and Joyce had fallen out of communication with the people at Coca-Cola. The virus was by all accounts lethal and had migrated by air and water from Asia and Western Europe. The nations of South America had attempted to establish a cordon to prevent its further spread, but pockets of infection had already been discovered in Brazil, Ecuador, and Argentina.

The paper referred to the virus as "the epidemic," but said that it was known in popular discourse as The Blinks, because the first sign of exposure was often a redness in the eyes that caused an uncontrollable blinking response. Whether the virus was manufactured or the result of natural mutation had yet to be determined. But it was widely suspected to be manufactured.

Laura spent the next few hours hunched over the radio transceiver, adjusting the dial by the tiniest of increments, pausing at every frequency to listen for an intelligible signal. For a long time she heard nothing but white noise. Then, late in the afternoon, when she switched to the highest band setting, she picked up a voice speaking in a tongue she didn't understand – a grinding, popping language filled with unexpected rushes and halts.

She gave a start. There was somebody out there.

She fed the signal through the computer's translation program. The message was being broadcast in Malay. She listened to the interpretation:… no survivors, repeat, no survivors. I can feel the sickness coming over me. I know I do not have long. I can only hope that this recording will continue to run as long as the power holds out. I love you, Piah. You will see me again soon, my dear. There was a clicking sound, followed by a high-pitched whir of noise, and then the voice began again. This is a message to anyone who is listening. Stay away from the city, repeat, stay away from the city. There are no survivors, repeat, no survivors. lean feel the sickness coming over me…

She listened to the message a dozen times before she switched the transceiver off.

That poor man, she thought. That poor man and his poor lover.

And then, though she tried her hardest to avoid the thought, Poor me.

Outside, the night was deepening. There were still a few minutes of hazy light in the middle of the day, a sort of false dawn that seemed to seep directly into the atmosphere. The sun no longer appeared on the horizon, though, and the light quickly faded back into itself. Laura walked out into the snow and took a few deep gulps of air.

The sky was all moon and stars now. She found herself wondering if she was the last person alive. It was something she had speculated about before – something everyone who had ever read a science fiction novel had probably speculated about. But in her case, she thought, it just might be true. Maybe the reason she hadn't been able to reach anyone on the radio, telephone, or computer was because there was no one left to reach. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might truly be completely alone. She couldn't quite believe it, though.

She had already explored the station pretty exhaustively, but she decided to commence the search again from scratch, ransacking the cabinets and lockers, overturning mattresses and cushions, and peering beneath the heavy furniture with a flashlight. She had to find out exactly what had happened to the emperor penguin party. She had to know what all those X's meant.

The work was exhausting, but it paid off. Late that night, about to fall asleep from fatigue, she discovered a loose panel behind one of the beds. She popped it out of its mounting to look inside. In the crevice between the wall and the insulation, she found a small, hand-worn book. It was bound in leather. There were black patches along the lower right edge where it had been stained by the oil of someone's fingers.

She wiped the dust off the cover and opened the book to the first page. Journal of Robert Joyce, it read. First Entry, September 12.