Then it bent down and picked something up from the lunar surface.
The American flag.
The flag they had planted hours ago, in a moment of pride and achievement. Chen remembered that moment clearly. Thorne had made a small speech about humanity's future in space. Evans had said something about his uncle's driveway. They had laughed and taken photos and felt like they were part of something bigger than themselves.
Now the creature held the flag pole in one gloved hand and examined it curiously, tilting its head to one side like a dog examining a strange new toy. The red and white stripes hung limp in the vacuum, no wind to make them wave. The blue field of stars looked almost black in the harsh lunar sunlight.
Then the creature threw it.
The flag pole crossed the twenty meters in less than a heartbeat. It wasn't a throw that human muscles could achieve. It was a launch, a projectile fired with impossible speed and precision. The pole cut through the vacuum like a missile, no air resistance to slow it down, no gravity to alter its course.
It struck the lander's external fuel line with a sound that Chen felt through the hull rather than heard. A deep, resonant thunk that vibrated up through the metal and into his bones.
Metal screamed. Fuel began venting into the vacuum, a frozen white spray that glittered in the sunlight like a cloud of diamonds. The lander's systems flashed urgent warnings. Fuel pressure dropping. Engine capability compromised. Launch impossible.
"The fuel line!" Thorne shouted, his voice cracking with panic. "It broke the f**king fuel line! We can't launch without that line!"
Chen grabbed the emergency sealant kit from its wall mount and threw himself toward the breach. But before he could reach it, another impact rocked the lander. The creature had picked up something else—a rock, a piece of debris from the meteor impact, something heavy and sharp—and thrown it with the same impossible force. This projectile struck the landing leg, buckling it inward with a screech of tortured metal.
The lander tilted sharply to one side. Chen lost his footing and slammed into the wall, his helmet cracking against the metal surface. Warning lights flashed across his visor. Suit impact detected. Helmet integrity at risk.
"Control!" Chen screamed into his comm. "The lander is compromised! Fuel line breach, structural damage to the landing leg! We can't launch! We're trapped down here!"
"Get out of there!" Maria's voice crackled back, strained with desperation. "Get out and run! Find cover! Hide!"
"Run where? Hide where? We're on the f**king moon! There's nowhere to go!"
A third impact. This one hit the hatch itself, denting the reinforced metal inward. The seal buckled. Atmosphere screamed out through the gaps. Through the small window set into the hatch, Chen saw the creature walking toward them. Still slow. Still patient. Still smiling that horrible, knowing smile.
It reached the lander and stopped.
Through the window, Chen watched it bend down and pick up the flag pole again. The pole was bent now from the first impact, the metal twisted and scarred. The creature examined it, running its gloved fingers along the damaged length. Testing its weight. Testing its strength. Finding the sharp end where the metal had torn.
Then it drove the pole through the hatch window.
The reinforced glass—designed to withstand micrometeorite impacts and extreme pressure differentials—shattered like thin ice under a boot. The pole punched through and kept going, missing Chen's head by inches and embedding itself deep in the far wall of the lander cabin. Fragments of glass floated in the escaping atmosphere, glittering like tiny stars.
Vacuum screamed into the cabin.
Chen grabbed Thorne and pulled him toward the emergency oxygen masks, but the creature was already reaching through the shattered window. Its arm extended. Stretched. The bones and joints that shouldn't bend were bending. The muscles that shouldn't stretch were stretching. The arm grew longer and longer, the elbow bending backward, the wrist rotating in ways no human wrist could rotate. It reached into the cabin like a serpent, weaving through the spraying atmosphere, seeking its prey.
It grabbed the edge of the hatch and pulled.
Metal screamed in protest. Bolts sheared with sharp, percussive cracks. The entire hatch door tore free of its frame, the hinges snapping like dry twigs. The creature tossed the door aside like garbage, and it tumbled across the lunar surface, kicking up grey dust where it landed.
The creature stood in the opening, framed by the black sky behind it. Its helmet was gone—knocked off during its attack or deliberately removed, Chen couldn't tell. Evans' face stared at them, still smiling, still wrong. The familiar features were all there. The jaw. The cheekbones. The slight grey at the temples. But the arrangement was off somehow. The proportions were slightly wrong. The face was a mask that didn't quite fit the thing wearing it.
And the eyes.
The eyes were completely red now. No blue-grey remained. No white sclera. No dark pupil. Just solid, glowing crimson that pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, like breathing, like something alive and ancient and hungry.
"You should not have run," the creature said in Evans' voice. The words came out flat, without inflection, without the natural rises and falls of human speech. "We would have let you live. We only needed one shape to wear, one vessel to carry us to your world. The others could have gone home. They could have lived their small lives and died their small deaths. But you ran. You made us chase you. Now we will take all of you. We will learn all of you. We will become all of you."
It stepped into the cabin.
---
The Attack
Chen threw himself backward as the creature's hand—Evans' hand, but wrong, the fingers too long now, the joints bending in too many places, the nails grown sharp and dark—swiped through the space where his head had been. He felt the wind of its passage, felt the displacement of the escaping atmosphere. He hit the far wall of the cabin and scrambled for anything he could use as a weapon.
-Will be continued 😎