The darkness swallowed Evans whole as he descended into the fresh crater.
His helmet light cut a weak beam through the black, illuminating grey walls that looked wrong. Too smooth. Too wet. Fresh meteor impacts were supposed to be jagged and sharp and chaotic, full of broken rock and shattered stone. This crater was almost... organic. Like the inside of something. Like the walls had been melted and reformed a thousand times over billions of years.
"Evans to surface team," he said into his comm. "I'm inside the crater. About twenty meters down. Visibility is low but manageable. The walls look strange. Not what we expected."
Static.
He tried again, adjusting his frequency. "Chen. Thorne. Do you copy? I'm getting some kind of interference down here."
More static. Thick. Heavy. Like something was pressing down on the signal, smothering it deliberately, wrapping around it like a wet blanket.
"Lena? You reading me up there? Petrova, come in."
Nothing. Just the sound of his own breathing inside the helmet. The hiss of oxygen flowing through the vents. The thump of his heart beating faster than it should. The silence was absolute and complete, broken only by the sounds of his own body keeping him alive.
Evans kept descending. The slope was steep but his boots found purchase on the strange smooth surface. Each step kicked up small clouds of grey dust that fell back in slow motion, drifting down like snow in the low gravity. The light from his helmet caught something ahead. A crack in the crater floor. A fissure that shouldn't exist.
He stopped.
Fresh meteor impacts didn't create cracks like this. They created rubble and dust and chaos. Shattered rock thrown in every direction. This crack was clean. Deliberate. Like something had pushed its way out from underneath. Like something that had been buried had finally found a way to the surface.
Evans stood at the edge of the crack and aimed his helmet light down into it.
Darkness. Complete and absolute. His light seemed to stop at the edge of the fissure, swallowed by something that absorbed illumination rather than reflected it. The darkness down there was thick, almost solid, like looking into a pool of black oil.
"What the f**k," he whispered to himself.
Then he heard it.
A scraping sound. Coming from deep inside the crack. Stone grinding against stone. No, not stone. Something harder. Something sharper. Something that had been buried for a very, very long time and was only now remembering how to move. The sound vibrated up through his boots, through his suit, into his bones.
Evans took a step back from the crack. Then another. His heart was pounding now, slamming against his ribs like it wanted to escape his chest entirely.
"Nope. Nope. F**k this. I'm leaving. I'm leaving right now."
He turned to climb back up the crater wall.
The crack behind him exploded.
Not with sound. There was no air on the moon to carry sound. But with force. A shockwave of displaced rock and ancient dust that slammed into Evans' back like a physical fist. The impact sent him sprawling forward, face-first onto the smooth crater floor. His helmet visor scraped against the strange surface, leaving a long smear of something dark and oily across the glass.
Warning lights flashed across his helmet display. Suit impact detected. Integrity check recommended. Heart rate elevated. Blood pressure spiking.
Evans rolled over onto his back, gasping for breath, his arms raised defensively in front of his face. The dust was settling slowly in the low gravity, drifting down like grey snow, obscuring everything beyond a few meters.
And then he saw it.
Something had jumped out of the crack. Something small. No bigger than a human head, maybe smaller. It had landed about ten meters away from him and was crouched in the grey dust, completely motionless, like it was waiting for him to notice it. Like it wanted to be seen.
Evans' helmet light fell on the thing and his blood turned to ice water.
It was red. Dark red, like old blood that had dried and crusted over centuries ago. Its surface was smooth and wet and glistening in the weak light of his helmet lamp. It had no clear shape, no fixed form. Its body constantly shifted and rippled like a blob of thick jelly that couldn't decide what shape to take. Tiny tendrils extended from its central mass, feeling the lunar surface, tasting the vacuum, learning about this new environment after billions of years trapped underground.
This thing was ancient. Evans didn't know how he knew that, but he knew it with absolute certainty. It was older than the moon itself. Older than Earth. Something that had been waiting in the dark since before life began, dreaming of the day something would crack its prison open.
That day had come.
The meteor had freed it.
Then the thing turned toward him.
Evans screamed.
The creature had face. Red glowing eyee . Mouth with sharp teeth .But it was looking at him. Somehow it was aware of him. He could feel its attention like a physical weight pressing down on his chest, making it hard to breathe.
And as he watched, frozen in terror, a split appeared in its red surface.
The split curved upward.
Into a smile.
A smile. It had made a smile just for him. It had seen humans before, somehow, somewhere. Maybe in the dreams it sent up through the lunar surface. Maybe in the thoughts it had stolen from sleeping minds over billions of years. It knew what a smile was. It knew what a smile meant.
And it wanted Evans to know that it was happy to see him.
The smile was wide. Too wide. It stretched across the creature's entire body like a wound that had learned to express joy. The edges of the smile quivered with what might have been anticipation. What might have been hunger. What might have been billions of years of starvation finally about to end.
"No," Evans whispered. His voice was small and broken inside his helmet. "No, no, no, no—"
The creature jumped.
It moved faster than anything Evans had ever seen in his life. Faster than thought. Faster than fear. One moment it was ten meters away, crouched in the grey dust with that horrible smile stretching across its body. The next moment it was in the air, a red blur crossing the distance between them in less than a single heartbeat.
-Will be continued
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