Congratulations, you’ve been drafted as the Solstice Sentry for Bunker 12. The pay is two iodine tablets and a fresh battery pack. Your shift begins at sunset.”
This is my work now: breathing the same filtered air deep underground. The world concluded on December 30th. Calendars became meaningless, though the clocks didn’t stop, and old holidays transformed into vicious, distorted traps. They gave me one task—guard the main door through the night. I’m just the apocalypse’s maintenance man, a watchman for a grave that claims to be a shelter. They handed me the rulebook. It’s not written in corporate jargon, but in survival. This is the operational manual for the most critical, terrifying, and absurd job in the remnants of humanity: standing guard against the forever winter.
Understanding Your Workspace: The Anatomy of Bunker 12
Bunker 12 wasn’t built for this. It was a geothermal survey station, deep in a mountain range, chosen for its stable bedrock and isolation. When the skies darkened, the lucky few—scientists, engineers, a handful of soldiers—sealed themselves in. The “Bunker” is a misnomer; it’s a warren of labs, storage bays, and dormitories clustered around a central geothermal vent. Heat is plentiful, but hope is rationed.
This airlock is my entire world. It divides the fragile human order within—all machine noise and whispered plans—from the absolute chaos without. There, the palette is endless grey: fog that kills, ash that buries, and the ceaseless, mournful howl of the wind. I am the door between them.Your post is a small recess with a reinforced viewport, a console for the bulkhead controls, and a stool. Your tools: a low-frequency radio, a single-beam flashlight, a sidearm with three magazines (they tell you it’s mostly for your own peace of mind), and the noise-cancelling headphones. Always the headphones.
Rule No. 1: The Howling Wind and the Jingling Peril
Your first night, the senior sentry—a woman with eyes like cracked granite—only emphasized one thing. “The wind lies,” she said. “And it carries lies with it.”
“If you hear jingling over the howling wind, put on your noise-canceling headphones immediately. That isn’t festive cheer. It’s a sonic weapon used to stun prey.”
The phenomenon is logged in Bunker 12’s archives as “Siren-Caroling.” In the initial winters following the Event, reconnaissance teams began witnessing figures within the snowstorms. Clad in faded red and green rags, they moved with a stiff, mechanized stumble. Their arrival is always heralded by the same disturbance: a thin, discordant chime of broken metal, carried on the wind. This is no mere noise, but a deliberate auditory weapon. The frequencies bypass conscious thought and trigger a deep, limbic urge to seek, to join.
To heed its call for more than a moment is to be forever changed. A forge-like heat blooms behind your ribs, echoing with memories of long-lost gatherings. It breeds the certain, desperate faith that everything you seek—community, purpose, salvation—lies in the void beyond the hatch. You will cycle the doors and walk out into the subzero waste to join them.
The elves are just ghouls in rags. They are not builders of toys, but of bone piles. The jingling is the sound of their harvest. The headphones are your first, best shield. They turn a lethal siren call into a muted, harmless tapping against your ears.
Rule No. 2: Sealed Chimneys and the Cremated Air
We sealed the chimneys years ago. A symbolic gesture, maybe, but a necessary one. He adapts. The ventilation system—a network of shafts that breathes for Bunker 12—became his new entry point.
“If black soot pours from the air ducts, do not inhale. It is not wood ash. It is the cremated remains of Outpost 8.”
Outpost 8 was a smaller station, 50 Kilometers Northwest. We lost contact with them three solstices ago. Their final transmission was a screaming garble over the sound of crackling flames and… laughter. Now, their substance visits us. The recovered particulate is extremely fine, with a high pH, and carries a distinct scent reminiscent of ozone and singed hair. Inhalation induces intensely vivid and distressing nightmares, followed swiftly by the onset of hemorrhagic fever. Standard containment protocol dictates the immediate sealing of the aperture using the reinforced sealing material supplied to all operational units. Monitor it.
But the true horror is if the tape peels back. Not from the dry air, not from a faulty adhesive. If it peels back from the inside, curling slowly away from the grate as if an unseen hand is working from the other side, you do not investigate. You abandon the room, seal the bulkhead, and tag it for decontamination. Something is in the ducts, and it is inviting you in, or preparing to come out.
Rule No. 3: The Airlock Gift and the Ironic Punishment
The most direct interaction comes in the form of the gift. It never happens on the same night, but always during the solstice watch.
“If a bright red box appears in the airlock, do not open it. His gifts are ironic punishments.”
The box Materializes between one scan of the viewport and the next. It is a perfect, glossy crimson, tied with a golden ribbon. It is the most vibrant color you will have seen in years. It preys on nostalgia, on the last shreds of childhood wonder. To open it is to accept the terms of the gift.
Last year, for the starving survivors of Sector G, a box appeared containing what seemed to be tinned ham. It was plague rats, genetically twisted, swarming and biting. The year before, for a community plagued by infertile crops, a box of vibrant, miraculous seeds that, when planted, grew into thick, thorned vines that strangled the hydroponic bays. The gift is a perversion of hope. The protocol is unwavering: incinerate the package immediately using the mounted flamethrower beside the airlock control. Do not let its glamour hypnotize you. It is not a present. It is a predicate, and the punishment is the verb.
Rule No. 4: The Fog and the Lead Beast
The external scanners are notoriously unreliable in the heavy radiation fog that blankets the landscape from dusk till dawn. Your Mk-1 Eyeball is your best sensor. And your greatest fear.
“If you see a glowing red light in the radiation fog, do not shoot. That is the lead beast. If you shoot it, the other eight will swarm.”
They are colloquially known as the “Reindeer.” No one knows their origin. They are the Iron-Stags, the silent huntsmen of the cursed mists. Their bodies are a blasphemy—a leather-bound lattice of bones, strung together not by nature but by a cruel, unseen hand. Their crowns are not of velvet but of piercing, fused bone, a thicket of daggers raised against the sky. From the deep sockets of their skulls burns a soft, infernal radiance, the red of dying embers. You do not see them approach; you see the fog itself begin to smolder with distant, drifting stars of blood-red light, moments before they are upon you.
The lead beast is the scout. It is passive, observant. It is testing your discipline. The instant you discharge your weapon, the single red light fractures into eight more, emerging from the fog in a terrifying, silent semicircle. They are fast—impossibly fast. They do not bother with the airlock. They target the Reinforced Viewport, striking with piledriver force until the quartz cracks. They are not here for food; they are here for carnage. They strip meat from bone in seconds.
The procedure is counterintuitive: you turn off your flashlight. You shut down any active scan. You sit in the utter, profound dark of your station, and you pray. You pray the red light drifts, uninterested, and fades back into the grey. You become a stone. Because in the economy of the end times, attracting the wrong kind of attention is a capital crime.
The Psychological Profile: Who Survives This Job?
The role of Solstice Sentry for Bunker 12 isn’t about being the bravest or the strongest. It’s about being the most resilient, the most boringly procedural. Successful sentries share traits:
Unwavering Routine Adherence: They follow the rules as if they are physical law.
Controlled Empathy: They understand the threat of nostalgia and consciously reject it.
Situational Awareness: They notice the tape peeling, the new quality in the soot, the subtle shift in the jingling pitch.
Existential Pragmatism: They accept the absurdity—the iodine tablet salary, the enemy dressed as folklore—and do the job anyway.
Conclusion: More Than a Guard, A Keeper of the Threshold
As the first hint of a sun that feels no warmer than the moon bleeds into the eastern fog, your shift ends. The inner door hisses open. The day-shift sentry nods, takes your headphones, and you hand over the Rulebook. You pocket your two iodine tablets and your fresh battery pack. Your payment. In the economy of Bunker 12, it’s a fortune.
The world ended on December 30th. But he didn’t. He still delivers. And as long as he does, Bunker 12 needs a sentry. The job is simple: you are the line between the last flicker of humanity and the predatory myth that stalks the eternal winter. You are the one who says “no” to the gift, “silence” to the siren song, and “invisibility” to the red eyes in the fog. You are the Solstice Sentry. Your shift is over. For now.
Huh. Good luck. Tomorrow night, it’s your turn again.
