Blood sprayed outward in a red cloud, freezing instantly in the vacuum. It coated the creature's stolen face, painting Evans' familiar features in crimson. The blood crystallized in the cold, forming tiny red icicles that clung to the creature's cheeks and lips and chin. It drifted through the airless void, a mist of frozen red that glittered in the harsh sunlight.
Some of it landed on Chen's faceplate.
He couldn't wipe it away. His arms were too heavy, his strength too far gone. He could only watch as Thorne's blood froze on his visor, obscuring his vision, painting the world in shades of red.
The creature chewed.
Its jaw worked up and down, grinding Thorne's head to pulp. The teeth rotated and sliced and crushed. Bits of bone and brain and helmet fragments fell from its lips, drifting away in the low gravity. The body in its grip twitched once, twice, a final spasm of nerves that no longer had a brain to control them. Then it went still.
The creature swallowed.
It threw Thorne's headless body aside like garbage. The corpse tumbled across the lunar surface, arms and legs flopping, coming to rest against a small crater rim. The neck ended in a ragged stump of frozen meat and shattered bone. No blood flowed. The vacuum had already frozen what remained.
The creature turned back toward Chen.
It still held the flag pole.
Chen tried to crawl away. His leg screamed in agony where the pole pinned him. His suit alarms were deafening now, a cacophony of warnings about critical oxygen loss, about suit pressure failure, about imminent death. He didn't care about any of it. He just wanted to get away. He just wanted to not die like Thorne had died.
The creature walked toward him slowly. Each step deliberate. Each step measured. The boots crunched in the grey dust, leaving perfect prints beside the trail of blood that led back to Thorne's body. It was enjoying this. Chen could see it in those red, glowing eyes, in the way the smile never faded, in the relaxed, almost languid quality of its movements.
"Your friend tasted of curiosity," the creature said. Its voice was different now. Deeper. The Evans imitation was fading as it stopped trying to maintain the disguise. "Of rocks and science and wonder. He loved stones. He loved the history written in their layers. We tasted that love. We found it... interesting. Your kind forms attachments to inanimate objects. To places. To ideas. It is a strange way to exist, but we are learning to appreciate it."
It bent down and grabbed the flag pole.
And pulled it out of Chen's leg.
The pain was so intense that Chen's vision went white. He felt the pole slide out of his flesh, felt the vacuum sucking at the open wound, felt his blood boiling and freezing simultaneously as it escaped his suit. He tried to scream but no sound came. His lungs were empty. His throat was frozen. He was dying, and he couldn't even cry out.
The creature raised the flag pole.
Chen looked up at it. At the American flag, still attached to the bent and bloodied pole. At the red and white stripes, now stained with his own blood. At the blue field of stars, representing a nation that couldn't save him. At the creature's face, Evans' face, smiling down at him with those ancient, hungry eyes.
He thought about his parents. About his sister and her new baby. About his dog waiting for him at home, not understanding why he never came back.
The creature brought the flag pole down on his head.
The first blow cracked his faceplate. A spider web of fractures spread across the reinforced glass, obscuring his vision. The second blow shattered it completely, exposing his face to the vacuum. The cold was beyond anything he had ever felt. His skin froze instantly. His eyes crystallized in their sockets.
The third blow caved in his skull.
The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh—the creature kept swinging, kept pounding, kept reducing Chen's head to a red paste that froze in the vacuum and drifted away like crimson snow. The flag pole rose and fell, rose and fell, each impact sending frozen chunks of brain and bone scattering across the lunar surface.
It didn't stop until Chen's head was completely gone. Nothing remained attached to the neck but a ragged stump of frozen meat and shattered vertebrae. The flag pole was coated in blood and brain matter, dripping red icicles in the eternal cold.
The creature straightened up.
It looked at the flag pole in its hand. The American flag was barely recognizable now, torn and bloodied, hanging in shreds from the bent pole. It looked at the two dead bodies lying in the grey dust. Thorne's headless corpse by the crater. Chen's headless corpse pinned to the ground. It looked up at the black sky, where the main spacecraft orbited overhead.
Lena Petrova was still up there.
The creature smiled.
It raised one hand and waved at the sky. The same wrong wave that had alerted Mission Control. Too slow. Too deliberate. The fingers moving in the wrong order. A greeting and a promise, delivered across the void of space.
Then its head twisted.
Not a turn. Not a rotation. A twist. The neck snapped around a full one hundred and eighty degrees in less than a millisecond, so fast that Chen's cooling corpse couldn't have tracked it if he'd still had eyes. The creature's face was now looking directly backward, its body still facing forward, its feet still planted in the grey dust. Then it twisted back just as fast, the motion a blur that the human eye couldn't follow.
It was looking up at the orbiting spacecraft.
It could see Lena. Not with eyes. Not with anything human. But it could sense her up there, her terror, her grief, her desperate desire to run. It could taste her fear through the void of space, sweet and sharp and delicious. She had watched her friends die. She had watched Thorne's head bitten off. She had watched Chen beaten to death with their own flag. And now she knew she was next.