Permafrost

Kallik thrust her hand up through the half melted earth, scratching at the cold, rocky Greenlandic soil until she felt the touch of the summer sun. The air licked at her dirty fingertips as she began to free the rest of her body from the ground. When her face was uncovered, Kallik wrenched her eyes open and they stung as white light encompassed her vision. As they adjusted, she tried to open her blue lips; her neurons firing faster than they had in hundreds of years. Her mouth split open, and she sucked in her first breath of the new millennium. The first thaw in thousands of years tasted crisp on her tongue, like the afterlife was whispering to her, "finally, you’re free.”

She slowly sat up in her shallow grave, and the cracking of her icy bones echoed through the small valley and caressed the icebergs floating in the distant fjord. Shakily she stood as small bits of earth crumbled out of her hair and droplets of water wept their relief down her skin, and to her surprise, she didn’t feel the austere sting of the world against her bare feet.

Looking down, her skin was nearly translucent, with no flush of color even at the tips of her toes or fingers. The one sensation she felt was the itching discomfort of cells waking up and desperately attempting to generate warmth, to no avail. The only heat she felt was from the glowing sun, so she allowed the light to slough off the cold dead eternity from which she emerged.

The landscape was devoid of any signs of human life as far as the eye could see. There were mountains to the north, brown turf for a few hundred meters surrounding her, and the fjord to the south. After a few moments of consideration, Kallik took a strained breath and began to stumble towards the water. Whatever amount of blood she had in her body seemed resistant to flow through her limbs; but she kept moving until the dying sun began to glimmer with mirth on the horizon.

Kallik pressed her lips together. She would have to find some way to stay warm that night, lest she succumb again to the frozen sleep. She glared at the sun for a moment before scanning the terrain for shelter, looking for a large boulder to block the wind, or a thick patch of grass to burrow into. But to her surprise, hidden in the shadow of a small clump of aspen trees, was a small deserted looking shack.

She made it to the shelter just as the sun dipped beyond view. She peered through the open doorway and found a dying fire with coals still smoldering in the center. In one corner there was a small pile of wood, and in another there was a large bag half open. Between the two was a pile of green paper with images of faces and strange writing on them. She moved inside and tore open the bag looking for food. There was a black moleskin journal which she set to the side, various pieces of clothing, some small strange containers of dirt labelled in a strange language, a water canister, and a package of smoked fish. She ripped open the package and downed all of it, and then began building up the fire. Once it had steady flames she dipped one of the cloths from the bag into the water canister and began to clean her face.

Just as Kallik moved to her arms a scuffle of footsteps came from outside and a tall man with curly brown hair, fair skin, glasses, and a few small fish hanging over his shoulder appeared on the threshold. He was rubbing his eyes from exhaustion but when he heard the sound of the crackling wood he jerked them wide open.

The man stumbled backwards at the sight of her, dropping the fish and cursing in a language she didn’t understand before scrambling to pull a knife from his belt to hold defensively before him. His eyes scoured her face with shock and fear and in a shaky voice he said something in that same language which sounded like a question. She scrunched her eyebrows at him and he spoke again in a different but familiar sounding language, Tunumiit, that the people south east from where she once lived spoke. She pressed her lips together and began to wipe at her skin again with the cloth, and he tried once more in her native Inuktun.

“Who are you? What are you?” he asked, holding the knife tightly in his white knuckled fist.

Mustering her first words in centuries, she whispered, “I don’t know.”

“Are you human?” he asked, his jaw clenched tightly. The look in his green eyes told her he was waiting for an attack.

“I think I once was,” she responded, looking down at her translucent skin. She imagined he could see her skull right through her face. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

The man watched her for a moment, took a deep breath and slowly lowered the knife in his hand, though he still stood in the doorway as if he was prepared to bolt. “Where did you come from?” he asked, stumbling over his words. He seemed unpracticed with her language, as if each word rested strangely on his tongue. “The closest town, Siorapaluk, is nearly fifty kilometers away.”

“I’ve been.... just at the northern edge of this valley,” she said.

"You live in this wasteland? I didn’t know there were Inuit settlements this far north,” he said incredulously.

“It wasn’t living.” She began to run the cloth over her hair. “And there aren’t any settlements.”

The man looked back outside as if weighing his chances of getting hypothermia. He turned back to her and searched for any signs of hostility, but when he found none he sat down just inside the entrance of the shack.

“My name is Emil Lorenzen,” he said and tentatively reached for the small black journal next to his bag. He pulled a pencil out of his pocket, opened the journal and began to scribble a few words in it while he looked at her. “I’m a Geocryologist from the Holar University in Iceland. What’s your name?”

“I was once called Kallik.” She looked into the fire. “Though I expect all those that knew me by that name are gone now.” Her throat was already tired from the few sentences she had spoken already, but she asked, “What is a Geocryologist?”

He eyed the clumps of melted soil on the cloth in her hands. “I study the cold parts of the earth, glaciers, perennial sea ice, permafrost… and the things that reside within them. Why are you covered in dirt?”

She didn’t respond to his question and simply asked, “You are educated then?”

He nodded, “In some things.”

“Come here,” she told him and held out her hand.

Emil gave her hand a suspicious look before inching towards her until they were about a meter away from each other.

“Am I alive?” she asked, motioning for him to inspect her skin.

He hesitated before reaching out to take her hand. When they touched they both shivered slightly. His hand was hot with blood running under his skin, and she expected that he felt the burn of ice on his fingertips. He turned her hand over and placed two fingers on the thin translucent skin of her wrist. “Your pulse is only about ten beats per minute. And your body temperature is at least twenty degrees below normal.” He gave her a considering look. “I don’t see how you could be alive,” he said letting go of her hand and returning his to his lap.

She took a shaky breath and closed her eyes.

“But you’re breathing, and speaking, and moving,” he said.

She opened them. “So I could be then.”

He squinted at her and looked down to the journal in his hands, “I don’t know.”

Emil wrote another note before closing it. “I’m here because I’ve been looking for something. A bacteria that has survived for thousands, even millions of years in the permafrost. Due to increasing climate instability, organisms we have thought were long dead are waking up. Pathogens frozen in the bodies of wooly mammoths preserved for a millennium are leaking out and entering the groundwater. Bacteria melting in the soil and reproducing at a rate we’ve never seen before.”

He reached into his bag and grabbed another coat, and the bottom of it brushed over the pile of green paper, sending a few pieces scattered onto the floor between them. His gaze fixated on the paper before he shook his head, put the coat on, and looked back towards Kallik. “I’ve been collecting samples of the soil here, searching for some of these ancient organisms to figure out how they’ve remained in stasis for so long…. and whether or not they’ll become a threat as they start moving more freely in their environment.”

He cocked his head to the side and searched her face. “How long were you in the permafrost?” he asked, coming to the conclusion she hadn’t been willing to voice.

Her face cracked into a pained smile. “I’ve felt the distant warmth of hundreds of summers. Each one warmer and warmer until today. The light shining through crystalline ice felt like fire, though it was simply the ground around me melting.”

Emil's eyes widened.

She raised her hand up towards the ceiling of the shack towards the hole where smoke escaped through, and looked at the glowing stars above. “I couldn’t help but reach out towards it.” she said.

He nodded, “It’s the summer solstice. Today has probably been the warmest it’s ever been in this region of Greenland.”

Emil put his head back against the wall of the shack and shivered again. “Clearly bacteria and pathogens aren’t the only things stirring.” His eyes showed his tiredness now that he’d relaxed, but Kallik saw a sense of slight excitement shining in them.

The fire was getting low, and as there was no more wood to burn Kallik turned to the pile of strange green paper with its writing and faces, grabbed a handful, and tossed it into the flames.

Emil jerked his head up. “What are you doing? There’s at least twenty thousand America dollars there. We can’t burn it, it’ll be valuable if we can make it to town.”

“Would you rather freeze to death?” she asked simply.

He pursed his lips and rubbed his hand vigorously through his hair before sitting back down.

Kallik set a few more handfuls of the dollars next to her. “You say many things I don’t understand; climate instability, bacteria. Why are they valuable?”

“Ah, yes I supposed you wouldn’t know half of the things I’m talking about, having been frozen for centuries. I should have realized.” He rubbed his cold hands together. “Dollars are a form of currency, as a way to trade goods without having any goods yourself to trade. This place looks like it was a cache for illicit drugs, contraband, and cash. I expect no one’s been in here for years. The Americans probably froze to death before they could tell anyone where they stashed everything.” He reached out and grabbed a handful of the money and ran his fingers over the bills before sighing and tossing them into the flames. “Ridiculous spot for it.”

They heard the wind rustle through the trees outside. Emil frowned, stuffed his hand into his pockets, and looked unhappily at the few small fish he’d brought inside.

“Do you expect to die out here?” Kallik asked. “Fifty kilometer sounds like a long way to walk for a man gathering bits of frozen dirt to study.”

“I suppose that depends on whether or not we can figure out how you’ve survived out here so long,” he said with a tired grin.