The Brief History of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

were just imagining things. No one was coming for them. They had been forgotten.
    Laura was the last of them to reach this understanding. When she did, she became so dizzy that she saw spots of light in her eyes—thousands of them, exploding like distant stars. She thought she was going to faint. She muttered something about being out of luck, to which Puckett insisted that you could never really claim to be
out
of luck, since you never knew when things would get worse—or better, for that matter. Luck was not a limited resource, and there was no sense in trying to measure it. To which Joyce responded that the world was full of stories about people who ran out of luck: look at Prometheus, chained to his rock, with that eagle wresting out his liver for the rest of time.
There
was a person whose luck had been exhausted. To which Puckett suggested that maybe luck wasn’t the sort of thing people could be said to possess at all: maybe there were currents of luck, good and bad, that ran through the world, and sometimes we found ourselves in one current, sometimes in the other, but the water itself was never truly a part of us, we were just trying to stay afloat in it. To which Joyce said, “If you’ve never felt luck inside you—really inside you, Puckett—then you have no credibility on this matter.”
    Laura had been exasperated by the conversation at the time. It was the sort of spiritless debate that the men would toss back and forth for hours on end just to keep themselves entertained. She had threatened more than once to walk to her death in the snow if they didn’t stop. Now, though, she would have given anything to hear their voices again. Or any voice, for that matter.
    Puckett and Joyce had been gone for nearly three weeks. When it became obvious that the corporation was not going to send any assistance, they had set out with a loaded sledge toward the western rim of the Ross Sea, where a station studying the migratory habits of emperor penguins was supposed to be located. Their plan was to contact Coca-Cola, explain what had happened, and then, if they could, borrow a radio and a spare transceiver before heading back to the shelter. The sledge ran on the latest fuel cells, designed to operate for sixty days on a single charge. Even if the ice had gone soft or the ridges were lined out against them, it shouldn’t have taken them longer than a week to reach the station. They ought to have returned a few days later. Laura was beginning to resign herself to the idea that they weren’t coming back. She was alone in the hut, and she was frightened.
    Outside, the wind made a ringing noise between the cables. The tone shifted and pulsed in slow bands of sound that faded to silence at the upper end of her hearing register. It reminded her of the bells that used to ring at the summer camp she went to as a girl. There were two of them, at opposite ends of the camp, and she had discovered a place by the docks no bigger than her own body where the sounds would cancel each other out. She would stand there listening to the crickets and the lapping of the water inside a bulging pocket of silence. She walked back and forth in the confined space of the hut trying to locate such a pocket. In the corner above the computer station, maybe, or in the chink of space underneath the bed. Then she gave up and sat in her chair by the door and poured herself a glass of wine. It was a ’27 Merlot, their only bottle. It tasted wonderful.
    Polar bears. In the Coca-Cola commercial. It was polar bears, not monkeys.
    ~
    Four days later, she found a digital music player inside Joyce’s footlocker. She was washing her face on the other side of the room when the lock sprang open with the abruptness of a gunshot, and she couldn’t resist looking inside. Joyce had taken his journal, his toiletries, and most of his clothing with him, but he had left behind a stack of carefully folded long johns and a pocket-sized Bertelsmann player with a selection