The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 5

TWO. THE SHELTER

The wind had been blowing for twenty-three days, first from the east and then from the south, making a prolonged death moan inside the vents. Occasionally a gust of ice would push its way through the hut's system of turns and baffles, and hundreds of clear gray crystals would come fanning out over the room, peppering down onto the desk and the floor. Laura would stop whatever she was doing and watch them melt. She was disheartened by how long it took. The heating panels were obviously breaking down, if not crippled beyond repair. Next the lights would go, and after that, if she was still alive, it would be the food stores. What a total damned disaster.

The trouble had started nearly a month ago, when the antenna had snapped off the communications array. She and Puckett and Joyce had reconstructed the event as best they could. The antenna was a slender aluminum stilt sheltered inside a large satellite dish, and a thick casing of snow and ice had collected around it. The wind had driven the temperature above freezing for a day or two – the same freak wind that was slowly melting the ice shelf out from under them – and the mass of snow and ice had slipped from the bowl of the array in one giant chunk, taking the antenna along with it.

That was it. That was all that had happened. The whole thing was unbelievably stupid.

Why hadn't the dish been constructed out of thermogenic metal? Or, failing that, why hadn't someone positioned it so that it would remain empty? Or, at the very least, why hadn't the three of them been provided with the equipment they might need to repair it? Sometimes it seemed to Laura that the entire expedition had been slapped together by monkeys. But no. It had been planned and financed entirely by the Coca-Cola Corporation, as either a publicity exercise or a research expedition, depending on where you read about it: an internal document or a news release.

The idea was to send a team of people to the Antarctic to explore methods of converting polar ice for use in the manufacture of soft drinks. The ice cap was already melting, after all, pouring into the ocean by the tankerload, and the corporation might as well take advantage of it while they still could. That was their reasoning. The advertising department had even devised a new slogan: "Coca-Cola – made from the freshest water on the planet," which, if it caught on, they planned to modify in a year or two to "Coca-Cola – now that's fresh!"

The expedition was supposed to last for six months. The planning board had appointed Michael Puckett the polar specialist, Robert Joyce the soft drink specialist, and her, Laura, the wildlife specialist. There was some debate as to whether they should call her a "wildlife" specialist or an "animal life" specialist – was Antarctica wild in the same way that, say, the Amazon of the last century was wild? – but the argument was quelled when someone suggested that the board consider the word "wild" in its original sense, as a neglected or uncultivated region. So it was that the photograph of Laura that appeared in all the newspapers, the embarrassing one that depicted her stuffing underwear into a military-style canvas bag, bore a caption that read, "Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter." Her first lover had been a journalism professor, and she was well aware of the subtle ways that newspaper editors contrived to mock the stories they found absurd. Even now, with the cold gradually folding itself around the hut like a pair of hands, she could feel the color rising to her cheeks as she thought about it. Photographs. Wildlife. Monkeys.

Wasn't there an old television commercial that showed a family of monkeys sharing a bottle of Coca-Cola at Christmas? She was pretty sure she remembered seeing something like that when she was a little girl.

In any case, it was not long after the antenna splintered free of the satellite dish – two days, to be exact – that the radio gave a few last sputters of white noise and chopped-up syllables and then went silent. Why couldn't she stop rehearsing the details? The web and telephone connections fell dead along with the transceiver, so that the three of them – she, Puckett, and Joyce – had no way of contacting the corporation for help. Puckett insisted that they search the shelter for any spare parts they could use to patch the radio or the transceiver back together. There were only two rooms to go through, a living area and a sleeping area; nevertheless, the operation took them half the day. They uncovered several hundred bags of pemmican and jerky, a jar of ten thousand vitamin C tablets, a bundle of electric blankets tied together with elastic cords, two kerosene lanterns, six cans of freeze-dried coffee, a Primus stove, an extra pair of collapsible tents, and even a rudimentary tool chest, but nothing that would help them fix the radio or the broken antenna.

The equipment register was plain. Laura knew they wouldn't find anything else.

The fact was that if even one of their communications systems had been working, they could have requested the material they needed to repair any of the others. But with each and every one of them broken, they were flat out of safeguards.

The people at Coca-Cola knew everything there was to know about advertising and market research and product positioning, but not quite enough, as it turned out, about polar exploration.

The three of them waited almost a week for the corporation to reestablish contact with them. Puckett kept digging out his ice cores, and Joyce kept testing the water to see if it met the company's purity specifications, and Laura kept searching the area for even the slightest sign of wildlife. She couldn't help but think that the work they were doing was a waste of time, that the corporation already knew everything they cared to know about the continent from their dozens upon dozens of feasibility studies. After all, if the expedition had been a serious scientific endeavor and not just a way of drumming up interest in Coca-Cola's newest product line, wouldn't the powers that be have sent more than three people along? Wouldn't they have conducted a more rigorous training program? No, the expedition was a publicity stunt – nothing more than that – and they all knew it. Still, the three of them kept working. It was the best way they could think of to kill the time as they waited for help to arrive. These weren't the days of Shackleton and Scott, after all, when you could disappear into the polar waste for years at a time before anyone noticed you were missing. Expedition protocol required that they submit a statement of progress to the corporation every twenty-four hours, by three in the afternoon Pacific Standard Time, and until the radio went dead they had never missed a day. Of course, three in the morning and three in the afternoon could be indistinguishable so far south, where the sun might float in the sky for months at a time, and it was possible that they had mistaken the one for the other from time to time. But there was every difference in the world between missing a deadline by a few hours and missing it by four, five, six, seven days. The corporation must have realized something was wrong by now.

Soon enough, someone would cut through the wind and the snow to rescue them. Laura could picture it even with her eyes open. A sledge would come slicing across the ice, a team of riders would climb out, and the supplies they needed would be dropped at their front door. Or a helicopter would chop down from overhead, unload a new transceiver, and screw itself back into the air, leaning forward in the wind like a dragonfly.

In the meantime, she could just sit playing cards with Puckett and Joyce. They stared at the reinforced arches along the inside of the hut. Every so often, one of them would press a palm against the door to feel the cold seeping through the metal. They had plenty of time. The three of them began to hear voices calling out to them, dogs barking, the digging noise of engines – sounds that were couched inside the wind like plants flexed inside a seed. Eventually, though, they realized they were just imagining things. No one was coming for them. They had been forgotten.