still asymptomatic. We're holed up in the high school gym, away from everybody else. If it wasn't for the stupid quarantine, we'd be long gone by now. But it looks like there's no way out. As soon as one of us comes down with the Blinks, the rest of us are done for.' Is this true? If so, I don't understand what P. and I are still doing here. Why we're alive at all. Maybe the freezing temperatures have slowed the development of the virus. That's all I can imagine. We tried to radio Byrd again, but we didn't have any luck. What can she possibly be thinking right now? We were supposed to be back already, weren't we? I'm so sorry, Laura. I just hope you don't decide to follow us. You're better off where you are, believe me. I was sharpening my knife a few hours ago when Puckett interrupted me. 'Come here, you've got to see this.' 'What is it?' I asked. Puckett: 'Just come here, will you?' He had found a Web site broadcasting real-time images from orbiting satellites. This means two things: one, that the satellites are still working. And two, so are the relays. The images weren't detailed enough for us to see individual people, or individual bodies, but we could make out roads, buildings, and stalled lines of traffic. This is what we've left behind, our legacy to the rest of the universe – a world full of wrecked cars and empty buildings with the lights of ten thousand satellites blinking overhead. Surely there must be others like Puckett and me out there. Recluses who've managed to escape the virus somehow. Sherpas. Mountain men. Hermits living in desert caves. The scattered survivors who are always left after any calamity to tell people what went wrong. But then, there are no people left for the survivors to tell, are there? Just two – Michael Puckett and Robert Joyce. Or three – Laura Byrd. The food we brought in the sledge is gone, and we've begun eating from the station's supplies. No other choice, unless we want to starve to death. It's good to have meat again, and soft bread, and vegetables. At least something is good. After we found the satellite images, we spent half an hour or so arguing about whether we should try to reach the other side of Ross Island. Puckett: 'It's the only sensible thing to do. If the radio there is as good as Meatyard said it is, we might be able to make contact with somebody. 'Me: 'Or we could head back to the hut for Byrd. We can't just leave her there.' P.: 'And then we'll do what exactly? Bring her back here? What's the point? I say we make for the penguin roost. At least then we'll have some hope of rescue. We can try for Laura afterward one way or the other.' Me: 'All I'm saying is the longer we leave her there, the worse off she's going to be.' But Puckett is right, for once. We would be absolute idiots not to try for the other radio if there's even the tiniest chance it will work. We've used up the last few hours of the day restocking the sledge. Food, tools, camping gear, toiletries. The trip to the penguin roost shouldn't be nearly as difficult as the trip to the station was. The sky, even at this hour, is the deep red color of autumn leaves, with enough light still to see by. And according to the maps the terrain is mostly shelf ice. In other words, flat traveling, if not necessarily smooth traveling. We're setting out tomorrow morning. Eleven o'clock. We'll cut through Fog Bay, directly to the south of the island. Fm going to use the rest of the night to get some much needed sleep. My head is pounding. My eyes are killing me.
This was the last entry. Laura read the journal eight times over the course of the next three days, trying to determine what she should do next, whether or not she should leave the station, how likely she was to get sick. Had she been coughing more than usual lately? Had her eyes been watering? She seemed to remember waking up to sneeze the night she found the sheet of X's in the station, then swooning into sleep again before she could roll over or adjust her pillow. Was that a sign of the virus?
Also, what had happened to Puckett and Joyce? Had they made it to the other radio? Where were they right now?
She was worried about them.
When she finished the journal for the last time, she shut it firmly and held it in her lap. She sent the nails of her free hand across her scalp, a motion that her high school English teacher had once referred to as her 'thinking gesture.' Then she went to the pantry and began selecting the food she would take with her when she left the station.
Puckett and Joyce were right. If there was a chance she could use the radio at the penguin roost to communicate with somebody – any chance, with anybody – she would have to take it.
It didn't matter how slim the chance might be. It couldn't be worse than no chance at all, which was what she would have if she remained at the station.
And then, too, if she set out for the roost, she might be able to find Puckett and Joyce.
She had never unloaded the sledge, so the only supplies she needed to gather were food, clothing, and a few odds and ends such as aspirin, toilet paper, and a spare aerial for the transceiver at the penguin roost. She put the folio of Joyce's journal in the duffel bag, slipping it between her long Johns and her spare day socks and bookmarking it with the newspaper article she had found beneath the computer, the one about the virus's spread through North America: PLAGUE! DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT 'THE BLINKS.' Then she carried the entire bundle to the front door, along with the ditty bag of soap and toothpaste she had packed and the chest of frozen food.
The darkness outside was constant, with no trace of sunlight, so there was no reason for her to wait until morning to get under way. Morning wouldn't break for another month or so, anyway. A night so long made the sunrise seem imaginary – like Atlantis, or the Heavenly City, or the Garden of Eden. A pipe dream, she thought. Or maybe she should say a daydream.
The stars were nearly motionless. The moon was a brilliant white wedge, emerging from behind a thick bank of clouds. She packed her new equipment into the sledge's storage hutch, slipped the latch into place, and took one last walk around the building. One of the klieg lights, the one directly above the graves, shone hard and straight onto the twenty mounds, so that they cast heavy foreshortened shadows that pooled against the wall of the station like oil puddles. The wind shifted, and she heard the scraping and buckling sound of the sea ice. She headed back out to the courtyard and started the sledge.
She was worried that the fuel cell might have chipped in the freezing weather, breaking the circuit, but as it turned out, she had no reason to be. The engine engaged with a muffled hum that slowly grew louder. First the headlights brightened, and then the runners lifted, and then the internal GPS monitor flickered on, which meant that at least one of the polar relays was still working.
But the rest of the relay system must have been down – or large patches of it, anyway. The display indicated that she was at 2° S, 39.4° E, just south of the equator, somewhere around Kenya.
She took a long, broken breath, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the steering column. She was trying to decide whether or not she should laugh.
NINE. THE NUMBERS
How many people was any one human being likely to remember? A thousand? Maybe if you were cursed with a particularly slipshod memory. So then – ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? Of course, if you ran out your life in some small village deep in the Himalayas, the number would be greatly diminished, but Michael Puckett wasn't thinking about Himalayan villagers. Or monks, or nuns, or kids who never lived past that falling-down-drunk stage of toddlerhood. He was thinking about himself, his own life, and by extension he was thinking about Laura. She was the common element, after all, the link or what have you. After all the discussion he had heard in the city, that much was obvious.
He had spent the better part of a week trying to come up with a good solid number, one that took his entire forty-three years of life into account. At first he tried to make the calculations mentally, sorting through the great crowd of people in his head as he listened to the stereo or rested in bed at night. But when he realized how complicated the whole matter was turning out to be, he pulled out his #2 pencil and a blank pad of paper and settled down to work.
He began with his immediate family – his mother, his father, and his two sisters, plus the older brother who had died at the age of eleven when he snapped his neck jumping his bike into a creek-bed. Then he added his extended family into the mix: both sets of grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his great-aunts and great-uncles, his cousins, including his second cousins, the husbands, wives, and children of his cousins, the second husbands and second wives and in some cases the second children of his cousins, and so on. Next he counted off his schoolmates and teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, and then the schoolmates and teachers of
