Evans didn't even have time to raise his arms in defense.
The creature hit him square in the chest.
Not his helmet. Not his faceplate. Not anywhere he could grab or push away. It hit him right in the center of his chest, directly over his sternum, where his heart was beating and pounding and screaming inside his ribs.
Evans looked down in horror.
The creature was small. Barely larger than both his fists pressed together. But it pressed itself against his suit with terrible strength, flattening its body against the fabric. Where it touched, the outer layer of his suit began to smoke. Not burning exactly. Dissolving. The creature was secreting something, some kind of acid or enzyme or impossible biological solvent that broke down the reinforced material of his spacesuit like it was made of wet paper.
"No!" Evans grabbed at it with his gloved hands, trying to pry it away. "Get off! GET OFF ME!"
The moment his gloves touched the red surface, they began to dissolve too. The thick protective fabric bubbled and melted, exposing the inner layers beneath. Evans yanked his hands back with a cry of pain and fear. His fingertips were exposed now. He could feel the cold of the lunar surface. The vacuum was only inches away from his skin.
The creature's smile widened.
It pressed harder against his chest, and Evans felt the last layer of his suit give way with a soft, terrible ripping sensation. Cold. The impossible cold of the moon touched his bare skin for the first time. He opened his mouth to scream again but the sound died in his throat before it could form.
The creature was inside his suit now.
He could feel it. Wet and warm against his bare chest, so different from the freezing vacuum outside. Its surface rippled and shifted, conforming to the shape of his body, molding itself against his skin like a second layer of flesh. The tiny tendrils he had seen earlier—thin as hairs, delicate as spider silk—began to probe at his skin. Testing. Tasting. Finding the spots where his flesh was thinnest, where his blood ran closest to the surface.
Then it started to drill.
Evans felt a sharp, burning pain in the center of his chest. Like a hot needle being pushed slowly, deliberately through his sternum. He looked down and watched in absolute horror as the creature's body elongated, forming a point, pressing itself into him.
His skin parted around it like water parting around a stone. There was no blood. The creature's acid sealed the wounds as quickly as it made them, cauterizing and dissolving and consuming all at once. His muscles separated. His sternum began to crack, a thin fracture line spreading outward from the point of pressure.
He was being opened from the inside.
The pain was beyond anything Evans had ever experienced or imagined. It was white-hot and freezing cold at the same time. It was pressure and tearing and the horrible sensation of something moving through parts of his body that were never meant to be touched by anything. He could feel the creature inside his chest cavity now, spreading out, exploring the space between his ribs and his lungs and his still-beating heart.
His heart. The creature found it. Wrapped itself around it with curious, gentle tendrils.
Evans felt his heart stop.
Not from fear. Not from shock. The creature had simply squeezed, gently, curiously, like a child examining a new toy. The muscle that had kept Evans alive for forty-two years, that had beaten billions of times without fail, simply... stopped. The blood in his veins had nowhere to go. It pooled in his chest cavity, warm and thick, and the creature drank it. Absorbed it. Learned everything about him from the taste of his blood.
Then it began to eat in earnest.
Evans was still conscious. Still aware. His brain was still functioning, still receiving signals from the nerves that the creature hadn't reached yet. He felt it consume his heart completely, leaving an empty space where the organ had been. He felt the creature move upward, toward his throat, toward his head, eating everything in its path.
It ate his lungs next. Collapsed them one by one, absorbed the tissue, learned how he breathed, how he spoke, how he laughed. His ability to scream disappeared with his lungs. He opened his mouth but nothing came out except a thin wisp of frozen vapor that crystallized on the inside of his helmet visor.
It ate his stomach. His liver. His kidneys. His intestines. Each organ was carefully, methodically consumed. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was left behind. The creature was learning everything about human biology, human structure, human weakness. It had waited billions of years in the dark. It was not going to rush this meal.
It ate his spine. Vertebra by vertebra, working its way down from his neck. Evans felt himself coming apart from the inside, felt his body losing its shape, its structure, its identity. He was becoming nothing. He was becoming food for something that had dreamed of this moment since before the Earth was formed.
His arms went limp as the creature consumed the nerves that controlled them. His legs collapsed beneath him, unable to support his weight anymore. He fell backward onto the crater floor, staring up at the black sky, at the distant Earth hanging in the void. So far away. So impossibly far away.
His daughter Sarah was down there. Waiting for him to come home.
The creature reached his brain.
Evans felt it enter his skull through the base, sliding up his spinal column like a snake through a tunnel. It wrapped around his consciousness, his memories, his personality. For one terrible, eternal moment, he was aware of the creature's mind touching his own. He felt its age. Billions of years. Longer than life. Longer than the moon itself. He felt its hunger. Endless. Bottomless. A starvation that had lasted since the beginning of time. He felt its patience. It had waited so long in the dark, dreaming of this moment.
It had dreamed of him.
-Will be continued 😎
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