Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

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.