A cold embrace
Sitting on the faded blue bench outside the once bustling dining hall, the woman gazed out across the containerized living units glistening in the bright sunlight. The units always looked like white and blue building blocks for some giant child…a perfect playpen for an Arctic Goliath.
The woman had always preferred solitude over the company of others. The art of acting in ways that catered to others' suitability always seemed disingenuous and exhausting, with little to no reward or tangible benefit.
That's why the woman showed a rare expression of excitement those many years ago when she was approved to join an elite team of academics ranging in specialties from marine biology to glaciology, geochemist to meteorologists on a work detail to Greenland. Her job fit well with her personality. Analyzing scientific and mathematical readings was her gig. While others find this line of work cold, impersonal, and boring she found it comforting. No need to engage in complicated social niceties with data.
And so when it happened, she wasn't all that upset.
The cool wind kicked up and stung her eyes as the woman continued to peer into the white void beyond the living and work units she had been residing in and around for years. This place had been so loud for being so remote, but now the only noise that touched her ears was the sound of it. It wasn’t really anything, at least as far as she had come to understand. She had come to find it comforting, something she had never felt with people. But people tend to dislike what and who they don't understand. And what she was, what she is, they clearly never understood.
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The sound is really all the woman remembers from when it started. She often would come out at night when everyone else would be asleep in their little metal box homes. It had been the dark season, so the night was the darkest she had ever experienced. She would stand outside and let the stillness of the world envelope her. The quiet of the Arctic is like nothing else anyone could ever experience. It truly is a deafening sort of silence. She could hear the snow shift, her eyelids blink; she would even sometimes think she could hear the Earth itself move. It was her favorite moment of every day. That night, she heard something else. Something so slight, so curiously tender in its vibration through her body and yet there was a tension behind the tremors…
The day it arrived seemed like any other day. The same as the one before, and the one before that. The others had been more excited and agitated than usual in the last few weeks. They had found something, or at least the numbers they had her analyze indicated that they had located something. There was discussion that more people from the home office may need to come to see for themselves what was discovered. She didn't concern herself with all that, but deep down, in places she preferred to ignore, she was the one feeling uneasy.
It started as a high pitch ring in her ears. Loud enough that she couldn't hear anything else. Not the other's voices, not the sound of her machines. All there was in her ears and mind was just the pitch of it. Then, noise disappeared as if turned off like a light. Not just the pitch of it but all noise. The silence only lasted about 15 seconds but felt like an eternity. And then, it began.
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First came the screaming, not from her colleagues, but from something else. Unlike any human scream, it sounded more animal with an eerie metallic engineered sound in the background. It was a mix of what may be a scream from a living monster and the sound of two plates of metal scraping against themselves. Whatever it was, it sounded immense, like a battle cry versus a terrified, wounded scream. Those screams would follow.
The woman didn't see it happen, only heard the thing that did it and the screams of her coworkers. As it began its work her vision got fuzzy like a television that had lost its signal. Throughout, what she could only assume from the screams and cries was sheer horror; she felt nothing…both externally and internally. The event, she estimated, lasted a few hours. All the while, she remained still, quiet, and blinded by the gray in her vision. When the screams ceased, the noise from whatever had been released was done with its ghastly duty. The woman’s vision slowly returned, and she was alone. It was as if all the others had never existed. There was no blood, no bodies, nothing. It had taken them and left her.
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The woman closed her eyes, even she had to give her retina a break from the blinding white of the snow and the searing chill of the Arctic. A familiar tremor made its way through her being, pulsing gently in her blood. She still enjoys the quiet, but it is her quiet now.
It happened years ago, at least as far as she can recall. She had stopped keeping track of the passage of time. No one ever came, although, to be fair, she never tried to reach outside her Arctic camp. Was everyone out there gone? For her, they might as well have been. For the best, she thought to herself as a small smile slowly appeared on her face. After all, people could never understand what she was or what she has become.
