Why did I choose this Job ?

It did get to me after a while. When I was alone and the lights were quiet I swear I could hear... whispering. After one particular incident, where I swore I heard clear words, I started wearing headphones. They helped quite a bit with filling my ears with noise and blocking out the outside world.

Once a week supplies were dropped in from the coastal base hundreds of miles away. We restocked the cigarettes, whiskey and other non essentials like food and water. I say that to point out whoever was paying for this was dropping serious money. I never met the main client. Rather, I was contacted through their representatives. Apparently, the man funding it was very wealthy, very driven and very religious, and he was highly invested in this expedition. He wanted a success, but no one knew his goal with this ordeal he was funding.

Also, once a week we would go out in the snow-rover. A giant SUV that could ride over the snow and ice. We would take samples of the ice and examine a previous dig site from the last crew. I could not imagine the crew that had to come all the way out here to build the facility, but I bet they got paid crazy money. Some days we would all go just to get out and see the sun (we couldn't leave during a blizzard), but most days only the necessary crew for the excavation would go. Whenever we went, we had to wear a harness attached by rope to the SUV, to avoid slipping down the ice and being injured. We can only go once a week due to the outside conditions and distance to the dig site.

I mention both of these to say that we were alone out here, and if a plane came Monday, then we had 7 days until it returned.

Then was the first big shift. It was exactly 2 months in the base. The team who left that day were the geologists, the biologist with one maintenance man to drive and man the harnesses. They left in good spirits and remained at the site for hours. However, they returned... shaken. They burst in the door while I was in the rec room with the therapist, and we immediately noticed the fear in their eyes. The lady geologist ran to the couple's room without saying a word. Her husband chased after, calling her name. We ask what happened and noticed the biologist was crying. The other therapist entered the room like a ghost, and without a word he ushered her into his office and closed the door.

The doctor burst in and boomed, "what on earth is going on?!"

"I don't know," said the first therapist. She was anxious, as was I.

"Where's Jack? (the maintenance worker who drove the SUV) Wait, where's the car?!" I inquired, opening the door to the outside. I saw nothing but our flag, a long set of footprints and miles of ice gleaming in the sunlight.

We sat for what felt like hours in the rec room, all of us who didn't go on the field expedition that is. The others were in the tall therapist's office. Panicked voices could be heard behind the door. Finally, they all exited. The geologists went to their room without saying a word.

The biologist sat in one of the empty folding chairs. The therapist stood behind her, hands on the back of her seat. She had clearly been crying since she returned.

"We got there ahead of schedule," she started, gathering her composure, "the dig site, we arrived at 0700 instead of 8, so we got to work early. At first all was fine. Jack was in the SUV minding the harnesses. I was chiseling away at a small patch of ice, when I heard the others call from below."

We looked at her, hanging on her every, shaking word.

She continued, "I slid down to the base of the hole... about 30 meters down, I think. They had struck a hard surface. We all dug together and pulled out a massive lockbox. Immediately we assumed it was left from the last dig, but the design was.. old. It looked like something from World War Two, it was heavy and sealed shut. We tugged the rope to signal Jack, but there was no response.

We started calling out for him, but he never called back. We couldn't see him from our vantage point. After a solid ten minutes of screaming we made our way up the hill using our tools. We used an extra length of cord to pull the box up. It took all three of us, but we got it up.

When we reached the top, Jack was nowhere to be found. We searched the perimeter for well over an hour, but with maximum visibility we would have seen him. We checked for holes in the ice and signs of foot prints, but his earlier tracks never left the side of the SUV. We loaded the box in the back, and kept searching.

We noticed something then. Something we absolutely should have seen already. When we climbed atop the vehicle for a better vantage point we saw a massive, single message in the snow…

Run."