"We're listening, Lena," Chen said quietly, barely moving his lips. "What's happening? What's wrong?"
"That's not Evans. Mission Control confirmed it. His vitals are wrong. His heart rate hasn't changed by more than one beat per minute since he came back. His movements are wrong. His wave was wrong. Whatever came back from that crater, it's something else wearing his face. Something that killed him and took his shape. You need to get away from it. Get to the lander and launch immediately. Don't wait. Don't look back. Just go."
Chen's heart slammed against his ribs like a prisoner trying to escape. He glanced at Thorne, who was staring straight ahead, his face pale and sweating behind his visor. A single bead of sweat ran down Thorne's forehead, and Chen watched it trace a path along his nose.
"How do we—" Chen started.
"Just keep walking normally. Don't run until you're close to the lander. If it realizes you know, it might attack before you can get away. It moved fast when it waved. Faster than anything human. You can't outrun it if it decides to chase you."
The creature ahead of them stopped walking.
Chen's breath caught in his throat, freezing there, refusing to move. The thing stood perfectly still, its back to them, its helmet facing forward. Waiting. Listening. Could it hear their comms? The frequencies were encrypted, secured, designed to be private. But this thing wasn't human. It had taken Evans' shape, absorbed his memories, learned his voice. Who knew what else it could do?
"Commander?" Thorne's voice was remarkably steady given the circumstances. Chen could hear the terror underneath it, a thin vibration like a plucked string, but Thorne was holding himself together through sheer force of will. "Everything okay? You stopped."
The creature turned its head.
Just the head. The body remained perfectly still, facing forward, feet planted in the grey dust. The head rotated on the neck, smooth and slow, no friction, no resistance, until it was looking back at them over its own shoulder. The angle was wrong. No human neck could turn that far. No human spine could achieve that rotation without breaking. But the creature's head kept turning, kept rotating, until its face was pointed directly at them while its body still faced away.
"Everything is fine," the creature said in Evans' voice. The tone was perfect. The pitch was perfect. But there was no breath behind the words. No air. Just sound shaped like speech. "I thought I heard something. A voice. But it was just the wind."
There was no wind on the moon. No atmosphere. No air to move. The lunar surface was silent and still, unchanged for billions of years except for the slow rain of micrometeorites and the occasional larger impact.
Chen and Thorne exchanged a look of pure terror through their visors. The creature's face was visible, Evans' face, those familiar features that Chen had seen every day for three years of training. But behind those blue-grey eyes, something red slithered and coiled in the darkness of the pupils. Something ancient. Something hungry. Something that had waited in the dark for longer than humanity had existed.
"Let's keep moving," Chen managed to say. His voice sounded strange in his own ears, too high, too tight. "We're almost at the lander. Almost there. Just a little further."
The creature smiled. That same wrong smile that Chen had seen before but couldn't name. The lips curved upward. The cheeks lifted. All the mechanical components of a smile were present. But the eyes never changed. The eyes remained flat and cold and ancient, watching them with the patience of something that had waited billions of years and could wait a little longer.
"Yes," it said. "Let's go home. I miss Earth. I miss the blue sky and the green grass and the sound of birds in the morning."
Chen felt ice crawl down his spine. Evans had never talked like that. Evans was a pilot, a practical man, not a poet. He talked about fuel ratios and flight paths and whether the coffee in the galley was getting worse. He didn't talk about birdsong.
The creature turned back around and continued walking. Chen counted his heartbeats, feeling each one like a hammer blow in his chest. One. Two. Three. The lander was fifty meters away. Forty meters. Thirty. Close enough to touch. Close enough to escape.
"Now," he whispered to Thorne. "RUN."
They broke into a sprint.
The low gravity made running strange and floaty, each stride carrying them meters through the air before touching down again. Grey dust exploded around their boots, rising in slow-motion clouds that hung suspended in the vacuum. Chen's lungs burned. His muscles screamed. His suit systems flashed warnings about elevated heart rate and excessive oxygen consumption. He didn't care about any of it. He just ran.
The lander was right there. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
Behind them, the creature didn't run.
It walked.
Slowly. Deliberately. Each step measured and precise, the boots planting in the grey dust with mechanical regularity. It didn't hurry. It didn't chase. It simply walked toward them with the calm confidence of something that knew it had all the time in the universe. Which it did. It had waited billions of years in the dark beneath the lunar surface. It could wait a few more seconds while its prey exhausted themselves in futile flight.
Chen reached the lander first and slammed his gloved hand against the external release. The hatch hissed open, precious atmosphere venting into the void in a white plume of crystallized vapor. "GO GO GO!"
Thorne dove through the opening, tumbling inside, his body bouncing off the far wall of the small cabin. Chen followed, grabbing the hatch handle with both hands, pulling with all his strength to seal them inside.
Through the closing gap, he saw the creature.
It had stopped walking. It stood about twenty meters from the lander, watching them with that horrible, frozen smile. The smile was still there, still fixed on Evans' stolen face, but it had changed somehow. It was wider now. More knowing. Like it was enjoying the chase. Like their terror was a seasoning that made the coming meal more delicious.
-Will be continued 😎