The Brief History of the Dead (12 page)

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.

He was a tall, strikingly intelligent man named Luka, with the quiet wit and prematurely graying temples of a movie scientist from the black-and-white era. Every so often, when he had been drinking or engaged in heavy conversation, a mood would come over him, and he would adopt the habit of speaking entirely in headlines.

“Phone Rings Three Times Before Laura Answers,” he would announce. “‘It Was My Mother,’ She Says.”

Or, “Evening Winds Down. Fornication Imminent.”

Or, “Sims Grows Bored with Discussion. Wanders Away to Bang Head Against Wall.”

She still thought of him—she couldn’t help it—whenever she read a newspaper headline that seemed to call a certain sort of attention to itself.
DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT “THE BLINKS.”

She hadn’t seen him since the afternoon before she left New York, when they’d had sex and ordered Thai food and then stood looking out over the city as they ate, watching the lines of traffic cluster and spread apart between the fixed chains of the stoplights. It was midsummer, and though the days were already growing shorter, the sun still would not set until eight-thirty or nine o’clock.

Luka lived on the thirty-third floor of the Future Building, in a two-bedroom apartment with a boomerang-shaped balcony that floated over the building’s courtyard. The two of them liked to stand there at the rail and gaze down at the crowds. It was tempting to say that the people looked like ants from so far above. Tempting, but not quite true. The people came in brighter and more eccentric colors than ants, for one thing, with strange appendages like briefcases and grocery sacks and umbrellas. And they moved with far less order, far less mindfulness, than ants ever did. Their motion was more like the formless winding of water insects skating over the surface of a pond, she thought, though no one would ever say that the people looked like water insects.

She and Luka were standing side by side, their elbows propped on the ledge of the balcony. He asked her, “So this time tomorrow, are you going to miss me?”

“This time tomorrow, I’ll be in an airplane somewhere over about Iowa.” Laura dreaded the prospect. “I’ll be sick to my stomach, with a splitting headache, and I’ll miss everything that’s not fifty thousand feet in the air.”

“Including me, though, right?” Luka prompted.

“Including you, Professor Sims.” This was what his students called him. “But it won’t matter, will it? Because in a few months I’ll tell my parents about us, and then I’ll drop out of college and move back to New York, and we’ll get married and live happily ever after. The end.”

Laura was teasing him in one of the few ways she knew how. He gave the sort of shallow, wincing laugh that people who don’t want to admit a joke has embarrassed them give. Both of them had understood from the very beginning of their relationship that they wouldn’t see each other again after the summer was over. But because he was so much older than she was, and also because he had been her teacher—if only for two hours—he felt a certain amount of guilt about the affair from which she herself was immune. “So much debauchery,” he would joke sometimes, shaking his head as she lay in his bed wearing only a T-shirt. And though she knew he was only kidding and she would always offer up a smile for him, there was a germ-sized speck of truth to what he said, just enough to put a note of real self-reproof in his voice.

“That’s right,” she repeated. “Married and happily ever after.”

“Well… I look forward to it,” he said.

“I’m sure you do,” she told him, and she patted his hand. “God, I hate flying,” she said.

“I know you do.”

And then, to lighten the mood: “Weren’t we supposed to have teleportation devices by now? Didn’t they promise us teleportation devices?”

“And rocket jet packs,” he added.

“And moving sidewalks.”

He pretended he was marching with a picket sign. “What do we want? Rocket jet packs!”

“Teleportation devices!” she added.

“When do we want them?”

“Now!” she said.

“The future!” he said, and something about it struck them as funny. They began to giggle, and then to laugh, catching themselves in one of those loops in which they realized how meager the humor of the original remark was, found the meagerness itself funny, and laughed even harder than they had before. Soon they were laughing at nothing more than the fact that they were laughing.

The terrorist warning beacons on the roofs of the city’s buildings flashed on with their blazing yellow lights, then went dark again after only a minute or two. It hardly mattered. No one paid any attention to them these days, anyway.

“Must have been a false alarm,” Luka said.

“Another one,” Laura said.

Her stomach was pleasantly tight from laughing. Luka took her wrist between his fingers and began to rub it up and down with his thumb, a hard touch that sent a shiver through her body.

Then something extraordinary happened.

A child who was cutting across the courtyard with her mother (at least they thought the child was a girl—it was difficult to tell from so far above) lost hold of the balloon she was carrying. It went floating out toward the street, cleared the roof of the garage next door, and then a crosswind plucked it from its path and brought it sailing back toward the Future Building, where it came twisting and bobbing up the long row of balconies, a quickly expanding red sphere. Laura could see the girl yanking at her mother’s arm, trying to pull her toward the balloon, but it was already far out of reach.

“I think that thing’s going to pass right by us,” Luka said, and sure enough, the balloon had hit some still corridor of air that ran up the side of the building. “You know,” he said, “I think I might be able to catch it.”

He tilted out over the ledge of the balcony, and Laura seized her breath. When the balloon soared past, he looped his hand out in one swift gesture, like a bear snatching at a salmon. Suddenly he was holding it by the string.

Laura looked at the balloon, and then at him, and then back at the balloon. “I can’t believe you did that,” she said. “Five dollars to the man with the golden hand.”

He looked down into the courtyard. “They’re still down there. Come on.” He led Laura to the elevator and pressed the call button. The compartment must have been lingering just a floor or two away, because the bell sounded almost immediately. The doors slid open and then closed with a diminishing whispering noise, and as they dropped toward the lobby, Luka held the
CLOSE DOORS
button down with his finger. The balloon hovered at the ceiling. When the elevator reached the ground floor, he said, “Hurry,” and took her by the hand. They rushed past the doorman into the courtyard.

The child and her mother were gone. A man was feeding cheese curls to his dog, which was eating them fastidiously, like someone trying to split a seed open between his front teeth. A group of teenagers was listening to music on a pocket radio.

“They were headed down Thirty-second,” Luka said. “Quick. This way.” Laura followed him down the steps that led past the garage, weaving through a cluster of old men who were talking about the races, and then sprinted beneath a line of trees and scaffolding. At the end of the block, they saw a woman waiting with her daughter at the crosswalk.

Luka caught up to them just as the light was changing.

“Excuse me,” he said to the girl. He was out of breath from running, and he gasped a few times, his mouth opening and closing like a bellows.

It was just long enough for the girl to notice the balloon and say, “That’s mine!” She turned to her mother. “I told you so! A man catched it on his porch. I told you so!”

“‘Caught,’” her mother corrected her. And then the mother accepted the balloon from Luka and said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

She stooped over and wrapped the white string around her daughter’s wrist, making a knot. “I’m telling you, it would have been nothing but balloons from her for the next two weeks. What do you say to the nice man, Sarah?”

“Is this the first balloon you caught?” the girl said. “What’s your job? Is this what you do?”

“Say thank you, Sarah.”

“Thank you.”

The crosswalk signal, which had been green, began blinking on and off. “Shoot,” the woman said. “Look, we’re really in a hurry, mister. Thank you again. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Balloon Man,” the girl said, and Laura was sure that’s how the girl would think of him from now on, what she would call him whenever she told the story:
Balloon Man
. She and Luka watched the two of them dash across the street as the light changed, the bumpers of half a dozen cars nosing at the backs of their legs. They walked past a bookstore and an old movie theater, the girl’s outfit, the same yellow-green as a firefly’s bulb, flashing between the bodies of the other pedestrians, and they vanished into the crowd.

And then Luka said something that Laura knew she would never forget.

“You know, that may be the best thing I’ve ever done with my life,” he said.

~

What was the best thing she had ever done with her life? she wondered now, as she listened to the wind moaning outside the station. She had never founded a charity or raised a family. She had never saved another person’s life. Hell, she had never even saved another person’s balloon.

The best thing she had ever done with her life was probably some small, half-conscious act of kindness she had long since forgotten.

“Laura Byrd Gives Wildflowers to Her Mother and Father.”

Or, “Laura Byrd Offers Token to Man at Subway Terminal, Promptly Forgets.”

Or, “Laura Byrd Flashes Headlights, Warns Other Drivers of Speed Trap.”

When she had finished reading the article, she set the paper aside and put her head in her hands, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. If the paper was correct, a mutagenic virus had begun spreading through North America at the end of January, right around the time she, Puckett, and Joyce had fallen out of communication with the people at Coca-Cola. The virus was by all accounts lethal and had migrated by air and water from Asia and Western Europe. The nations of South America had attempted to establish a cordon to prevent its further spread, but pockets of infection had already been discovered in Brazil, Ecuador, and Argentina.

The paper referred to the virus as “the epidemic,” but said that it was known in popular discourse as The Blinks, because the first sign of exposure was often a redness in the eyes that caused an uncontrollable blinking response. Whether the virus was manufactured or the result of natural mutation had yet to be determined. But it was widely suspected to be manufactured.

Laura spent the next few hours hunched over the radio transceiver, adjusting the dial by the tiniest of increments, pausing at every frequency to listen for an intelligible signal. For a long time she heard nothing but white noise. Then, late in the afternoon, when she switched to the highest band setting, she picked up a voice speaking in a tongue she didn’t understand—a grinding, popping language filled with unexpected rushes and halts.

She gave a start. There was somebody out there.

She fed the signal through the computer’s translation program. The message was being broadcast in Malay. She listened to the interpretation:…
no survivors, repeat, no survivors. I can feel the sickness coming over me. I know I do not have long. I can only hope that this recording will continue to run as long as the power holds out. I love you, Piah. You will see me again soon, my dear.
There was a clicking sound, followed by a high-pitched whir of noise, and then the voice began again.
This is a message to anyone who is listening. Stay away from the city, repeat, stay away from the city. There are no survivors, repeat, no survivors. I can feel the sickness coming over me
…