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Flowing. Blowing. Snowing.
She often found herself spi
Snowing. Snowball. Ball game. Ball bearing. Bering Strait. Straight man. Man about town.
Man about town. Laura had been working for the Coca-Cola Corporation for less than a month when they instituted what they called their "man about town" campaign. This was during the last big water-safety scare, when all the talk shows and newspapers were full of reports that the terrorists were pla
Four days after the electricity began to falter, it snapped off with a conspicuousness that she knew was final. A scent of cordite spread through the shelter – though it couldn't possibly have been cordite – and the Bertelsma
So this was her situation: no heat, no electricity, and soon there would be no food.
She knew what she had to do – knew, in fact, so immediately that she realized she must have been pondering the question for weeks.
Her only chance was to outfit the second sledge, abandon the shelter, and set off after Puckett and Joyce. If she made it to the western rim of the Ross Sea, she would find food, shelter, and companionship; if not, she would be no worse off than she already was. She didn't want to leave. The thought of venturing out across the ice, into all that cold and emptiness, terrified her. But there was no other choice.
She spent the next half-day gathering the supplies she needed: boxes of condensed and dehydrated food, a jar of multivitamins, a few cans of coffee, a dozen rolls of toilet paper, one change of clothing, her tent and sleeping bag and thermal lining, her first-aid kit, a bottle of sunblock, a coil of Alpine rope, several waterproof boxes of matches, the Primus stove and a few cans of heating oil, a bundle of candles, the spare tent, a small magnetic compass (the sledge was equipped with a GPS monitor, but she didn't want to take any chances), her flashlight and a box of extra batteries, the tool box, a cooking pot, a second cooking pot for melting ice into water, a few pieces of plywood, an ice ax, a pick, a sledging shovel, her pocket knife, and, finally, a harness and a pair of skis and ski poles, in case the sledge broke down and she had to haul the supplies across the ice herself. She used up more than an hour looking for an extra fuel cell for the sledge, but she wasn't able to find one. Which meant that either the corporation hadn't thought to provide them with one or that Puckett and Joyce had taken it with them. In either case, she would have to make do without it.
She was concentrating so hard on culling and sorting the equipment that she didn't even notice that the wind had stopped blowing until she swung the door of the hut open to a paling sky and a motionless field of snow. She stepped outside, tucking her hands in her armpits. The air was absolutely still. No matter where she looked she couldn't see a single cloud, though from somewhere a sparse, floury snow was falling.
It was one of the sunset days – that was how she had come to think of them – when the sky fills for hours at a time with trailers of pink and gold. A bare freckling of stars was just begi
She squatted down to examine the condition of the ice. Thousands of parallel ridges – sastrugi, they were called – stretched from the door of the hut all the way to the horizon, combed into the snow by the southern wind. But the ice was not too soft, nor was it too hard and dry, and she thought that it would make for good traveling.
She began to chip away at the mass of ice covering the sledge, setting the sharp end of the pick against it and hammering down with her palm. It was like breaking the stone from around a sculpture, and as the shards rained down around her feet by the thousands, she contemplated the distance that lay ahead of her, and the industry, and the luck, it would take to cross it.
THREE. THE ENCOUNTER
It was hot in the office, a terrible, parching heat that lifted the smell of ink from the mimeograph machine and filled the air with it. For a long time Luka sat at his desk fa
He was working on the latest edition of the Sims Sheet. The headline read ALONE IN THE CITY, and the subheading, in a slightly smaller type, EDITOR WONDERS, IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? That was as far as he had gotten.
He had spent the better part of the morning stationed outside the River Road Coffee Shop with a full stack of the early edition in his hands. From seven to eleven-thirty he had stood there, completely alone, reading the headline to himself: THE GREAT LEAVE-TAKING CONTINUES. Four and a half hours of waiting by the plate-glass window where dozens of bodies used to sit shifting about on rickety wooden stools, inching their coffees to the left as the sun came slowly into view. Four and a half hours of counting the birds on the ledges and the bits of trash blowing by on the street. Four and a half hours, and he saw not a single human soul, not even the people he considered his regulars, like the woman who wore the white beret, or the thin man in the wrinkled business suit, or the dessert chef who always poked his head outside just as Luka was packing up to leave.