Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

But shortly after she topped the ridge, on her first night within listening distance of the penguins, her tent's soft coil gave out. She woke to find the walls rimed with frost, distinct blue-gray swirls of it that sparked and glistened in the candlelight. The sweat had frozen around the neck of her sleeping bag into a thick manacle of ice, and she had to break through it with a few hard jerks of her shoulders in order to climb out. Her clothing had hardened into a single bloomlike mass. She spent an hour or more pounding it loose and trying to fit herself inside. Then, when she was finally dressed, she dismantled the tent by hand. It took much longer than she would have expected. There was no way for her to get to the soft coil without ripping the fabric apart – and, in any case, she would have had no idea how to fix the thing without a replacement coil anyway – so she packed the tent away and used up the rest of the day threading the sledge through the cracks, rockfalls, and pressure ridges around the base of the cliff. Usually she was able to retain a little warmth from her night's sleep, but not this time. She was so much colder than she had been before. She would never have imagined that such a thing was possible.

The next night was worse, and the night after that was worse still. She had to rely on what little body heat she produced to keep herself warm, along with whatever fire she could make by burning the Primus stove, though she tried to use it no more than a couple of hours a day for fear of what would happen when the fuel was finally consumed. The coldest weeks of winter had set in, and the temperature had dipped to seventy degrees below zero – more than a hundred degrees of frost. Already the sweat she had generated inside her sleeping bag had turned it into a rigid, icy box. She was not sure how long it took her to thaw her way into the bag each night, but it couldn't have been less than an hour. She would jam her feet through the neck and slowly work her way down, stopping every few minutes to rub the muscle pangs from her legs until she melted a tunnel into the ice. She was barely able to squeeze her body inside.

Finally she would fall asleep, though from exhaustion rather than comfort. It was a poor, patternless sleep, not shallow so much as fragmentary, and it lasted no better than six hours. She would wake numerous times during the night with the force of her shivering and with the cramping that seemed to grip her piece by piece: her legs, her stomach, her shoulders. Then a time would come which she would decide to call morning, and she would start the day again, climbing out of her sleeping bag and plugging the mouth with her spare clothing so that it wouldn't freeze back together.

It took her four days to reach the rookery from the edge of the ice shelf, which was three days longer than she had expected. The ground at the base of the cliff was riddled with pits and crevices, barn-sized heaps of rock, slopes that rose suddenly from flat ice to insurmountable angles. Every time she thought she was approaching the knoll, she would come to some impossible place in the ice and have to turn back.

Often, she dozed off while she was marching. She wouldn't wake until she tripped over her own legs, or bumped into the side of the cliff, or put her foot through a rift or a crevasse. It was a miracle that she didn't kill herself.

Occasionally, when the wind dropped, she would hear the hollering of the penguins, a harsh, braying sound like a thousand doors opening on a thousand rusty hinges. Sometimes it seemed as though the birds were only a few feet away. But then the ice would rise up in front of her or the wind would begin to sob again and the sound would vanish.

Finally, a few hours into her fourth day in the harness, as she was pulling the sledge deeper and deeper into a ravine she could sense was slowly drawing together (another dead end, she thought), she discovered a break in the cliff. It was roofed over with snow, but it was just wide enough, just high enough, for her to fit the sledge through.

A rabbit's hole.

She ducked through the opening, came out the other side, and suddenly she was in the rookery. She couldn't believe it.

The penguins noticed her before she noticed them. They began gabbling and beating their paddles against their sides. The noise echoed against the barrier. There seemed to be fifty or sixty of them, maybe as many as a hundred, calling out to one another and rocking from side to side like fat black metronomes. They did not approach her, but they did not move away, either. They must have been used to the presence of human beings by now, she thought. After all, teams of scientists had been studying them for more than a century. As she was watching, one of them scooted into the sea, a long, curved finger of which reached all the way into the cove. It leapt back out clacking its beak around some little piece of food it had caught and waddled over to the others. The breeze carried the high, brave stench of their droppings. The smell was only barely softened by the cold.

The last free-swimming whale had been sighted more than thirty years ago, around the time Laura was born, and it was the general scientific consensus that the creatures had all but died out, just like the elephants and the gorillas and all the other great mammals before them. It was possible that there were a few isolated specimens still living in those scattered sections of the ocean that had not yet been cultivated for food, but it seemed unlikely. Certainly Laura had not seen any there in the Antarctic, and it had been her job to look. The continent still hosted herds of leopard seals and immense flocks of skua – though not, apparently, here in the cove – but it was the penguins who were actually thriving, living off the krill the whales were no longer alive to consume. They were as large as Laura had always heard they were. She wouldn't have been surprised if some of them weighed more than a hundred pounds.

The moon was partially hidden behind an exposure of black rock, but the light was still bright enough for her to make out the landscape. She was tired and sluggish, an old woman suddenly, frozen into her stiff old body, and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and close her eyes. But she knew that if she did she would fall asleep, and she couldn't allow herself to do that. Not yet.

She set off with the spare aerial in her hand. There was unusually little drift inside the knoll. Maybe it had all been compacted into ice. Or maybe a shift in the wind had blown it out to sea. In either case, it didn't take her long to find the remnants of the hut – a heap of cracked plastic, wood fragments, and twisted metal tucked inside a shallow scoop in the rock.

It looked as though the building had been crushed by a serac or an avalanche, some great chunk of ice and snow that had calved off the side of the mountain and smashed to pieces. If that was the case, though, it must have landed pretty damn hard. She could see pieces of jagged ice stretching in a great concussion ring around the hut – a thirty-foot halo of rubble. It must have made a sound like the detonation of a bomb when it landed. She could only imagine the upheaval it had caused among the penguins. She pictured a hundred birds diving madly into the ocean.

She felt infinitely tired all of a sudden. Her eyes fell closed, and she forced herself to open them. What was she looking for? Oh yes, the radio.

She made her way carefully through the debris, picking around in the wood and plastic and metal. She couldn't find any real trace of the transmitter, only a beaten aluminum panel that might or might not have been part of the housing. No doubt the thing had shattered into a thousand pieces when the building collapsed. Which meant that her trip across the ice shelf – the crevasse, the frostbite, the days and days and weeks of hauling – had been utterly meaningless.