Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

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.