Moonscape

A short sci-fi thriller about a man in a lunar research facility.

Moonscape

     The airlock door crashed closed behind Daniel as he barely stumbled through in time. The bland grey floor panels of the composite interior materials rushed up to meet his face as he tripped and pitched forward to his knees.
     Gloved hands, out flung, slammed down against the floor and arrested his fall. He reached up and savagely ripped off the bulbous spacesuit helmet that was restricting his breathing.
     It bounced to the floor and skittered away, but not before he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the gold-tinted visor.
     Brown close-cropped hair dishevelled and unshaven face stained red with exertion, he spent several minutes prone upon the floor of the hallway panting for breath. Slowly recovering, yet still on high alert.
     When he finally got up again, the bulky white spacesuit made his movements clumsy and leaden. The heavy radiative blocking material weighed upon his frame like he was wearing a harness full of rocks.
     Daniel quickly unbuckled the hefty garment at the waist and heaved a breath of relief as he threw the top-most layer from his body, with the lower trousers of the suit following swiftly to land in a heap against the wall.
     Revealed beneath, his lean muscular frame was tightly encased in a cobalt blue thermal suit, revealing a broad chest and an embroidered rank badge adjacent to his name.
     Capt. Daniel Struthers Showed stark grey against the blue of the thermal material as he began to stride down the long, brightly lit tubular hallway. Deeper into the Lunar base.
     He’d nearly not made it. The insane sprint from the rover crash site, back to the sprawling complex had taken over an hour, and he’d nearly spent all of his oxygen getting here after the batteries on the crawler had died.
     Adrenaline and anxiety flared through him as he remembered what had propelled him so. What had scared him.
     Mid-stride he looked down at his hands. Gloved, they had been coated sickly red with blood. Now that he’d shed the cumbersome spacesuit, only his clean, bare white hands gleamed in the overhead halogens. So why did he feel the strong urge to scrub them ruthlessly clean?
     Rodriguez was dead. That was for certain.
     His number two had been right next to him, right beside him when they’d found it. Mere inches away when he’d died.
     Daniel shuddered at the memory and looked up, suddenly and violently confused.
     Where was everyone?
     Ten meters from the airlock the tunnel met a junction where it merged with the main structure of the base. Hab-domes and research facilities dotted the stony landscape connected by similar tunnels and junctions. In all there were twenty-five personnel on station at any given time.
     As Daniel turned in a slow circle, listening intently, straining for noise, there was nothing. Each of the four branching tunnels extended away from him towards their various facilities. Each utterly quiet.
     Each completely empty.
     He didn’t understand it. He was usually so confident, so composed, especially in his role as team leader here on this rotation.
     So why did he feel like there was a seething lump of ice in his gut and a hand of iron clamped around the base of his spine?
     Unwillingly, his mind crept back to the crater. To his friends death.
     The agonizing screams still echoed in his head. No matter how much he shook it to clear it, they wouldn’t fade.
     Where the hell was everyone?
      A sudden, chilling thought made him freeze in the act of calling out.
      Whatever it had been, it had been fast. Inhumanly fast. There was no way it could have beaten him here, could there?
     Reluctantly, he refrained from calling and chose the rightmost tunnel to stride down. Now his skin was afire with nerves.
     As Daniel made his way slowly down the bright tunnel his eyes were drawn to every shadow. Every nook, even the ventilation system overhead, the silvery metal air duct that snaked forward and around the corner seemed to contain something hostile. Something lurking.
     He rounded the corner and stopped dead.
     A wide semi-circular desk island surrounded by various laboratory equipment, server towers, and bench workspaces dominated the centre of the small dome-like room. He remembered from the layout tours that this was Doctor Eigen’s work station. The funny little elderly German cosmologist.
     There was a huge spattering slash of blood cast across the desk.
     From behind it across the absorptive fabric of the carpeted floor panels, a wide pool of nearly black crimson lay.
     Daniel’s hear skipped a beat and his horror set in.
     It had made it back before him. It was inside.
     Before shock froze his reactions he hit the floor in a crouch. Ducking behind the curving cover of the desk, he slowly and carefully rounded the low wall it provided.
     His ears strained even harder as he tried frantically to detect any sound over the sounds of his own shallow, panicked breathing.
     He knew in the tight cornered tunnels and corridors of the base, sound might be his only warning before something was upon him. He would not see it until it was too late. But hopefully, he would hear it.
     Not only that, but he hoped beyond hope that someone else was still alive inside the moonbase.
     And if there was, there was only one place they would go. The one place that made sane sense in this scenario.
     As luck would have it, he was merely two domes across from the shuttle pad, the wide concrete slab anchored into the loose scarp of the lunar environment.
     Daniel steeled himself, and took several deep breaths. And broke from cover.
     He exited the blood stained office into a tunnel off to the right, keeping low and quiet as he quickly and silently ran at a crouch down its lit passage.
     There were no more signs of the other team members, alive nor dead as he entered the small sphere of the biology lab. In a similar arrangement, a wide semi-circular work desk took up the centre of the room and was surrounded by shelves and rows of small, feeble looking plants and seedlings suspended in brightly lit hydroponic racks lining the walls.
     Across the far side of the room was a large polyplastic white hatch to one of the larger domes of the base. The oxygen-rich microclimate of the agri-dome.
     Daniel crept his way across the abandoned room, careful not to tread on many of the loose sheets of paper scattered everywhere.
     The sealing hatch to the agri-dome slid aside, and he stepped lightly into its hermetically sealed white sterile chamber, wincing at the gaseous hiss the door made as it closed behind him again.
     For a heartbeat, he paused at the door opposite the entry in the small chamber, listening once more. Then tapped the activation panel on the side of the door and stepped through.
     A blast of warm, humid air hit him first. The wet sounds of sloshing, running water from the circulated pool system somewhere off to his left gurgled noisily.
     Daniel blinked in the gloom and cursed. The automatic opacity system running through the external, transparent skin of the dome had activated in a simulation of a night-cycle. With no reliable source of the diurnal passing of the sun, it was designed to replicate an earth-like environment to the closest detail. And that meant for eight hours a day, the dome was plunged into near complete darkness. Like now.
      Surrounding him, tall bamboo shoots and several towering evergreens loomed in the shadow. Smaller scrub bushes and undergrowth littering the floor of the hundred-meter square space provided a thousand different places to hide to his frantic, searching eyes.
     But there was no time. Every minute spent not moving was a minute lost.
     Daniel, still keeping low, slowly waded into the strange forest-like scene that was the agridome.
     He followed the clear-cut path running through the centre of the park-like environ, breathing in the scents of earth and cloying plant rot as he willed his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
     When they did, the revealed shadows and outlines of the many varying platforms around him merely added to his paranoia as they seemed to resemble grasping claws and outstretched talons.
     He passed through the centre, and around the ornamental sun-dial embedded into the ground there.
     He was just making his way down the opposite trail, towards the far side of the dome when he froze solid, ice stabbing into his heart as it slammed against his chest.
     A snapping crack, like a gunshot echoed through the darkened expanse of bush. From somewhere over his right shoulder.
     Daniel stood, and broke into a frantic run.
     Thundering down the path, something crashed through the underbrush behind him, scant meters away. Every step he felt as if something would scythe through the air at him, and he’d be wrenched back into the darkness.
     He pounded the last few steps down the grainy earthen track and vaulted through the open door, slamming his hand down on the control panel to seal it.
     The rolling hatch slid shut before his eyes as he watched the vegetation roil towards him down the darkened track.
     It sealed with the same airy hiss.
     He was still staring at the closed door, heart racing, when something heavy slammed into it from the other side.
     He jerked back, nearly tripping over something by his feet.
     Daniel looked down, and into the dead, glazed eyes of Lieutenant Zeke, the Nigerians wide brown eyes forever frozen in his deathmask.
     A wide pool of blood expanded around the corpse from its left shoulder, where the arm had been completely, and disturbingly cleanly, severed off.
     Reeling, Daniel turned and repeatedly punched the opposite door’s activation panel.
     It slid wide, and he tumbled out, exiting into the tunnel beyond that extended in both directions either side of him. He chose left, and, caution abandoned, sprinted down the hallway.
      As he rounded the corner to the engineering bay and the shuttle dock, he took a look back behind himself, down the tunnel again to the open door of the agri-dome chamber. Nothing perused him, but the horror of the dead eyes seemed burned into his retinas.
     He continued forward, into the wide rectangular bay. He quickly strode to one wall and removed a long, heavy power wrench from its bracket. Rows of tools and replacement parts lined the walls of the place, but he ignored the rest of them as he strode towards the far end of the bay.
     There, another airlock door, tubular and round stood sealed tight, above a short flight of stairs. The shuttle bay.
     He made to move towards it.
     With a creak and another loud hiss, the circular door of the airlock slid open, its divided door rotating and splitting down the centre.
     There was no-one inside.
     Through the open portal he could see into the waiting ship. Blood red emergency lighting cast the interior into stark contrast, emphasising the black of the shadows it couldn’t reach.
     He slammed to a halt in his tracks.
     It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.
     A long, rake-thin four fingered claw extended out and around the edge of the airlock door.
     The skin of the hand, a pallid white-grey, matched the colour of the rocky landscape outside of the base perfectly. Daniels heart stopped.
      Something wrenched his left leg out from under him and he slammed to the floor, breaking his nose in the fall.
       His screams resounded throughout the base as he was dragged bodily backwards, deeper into the structure.
      They didn’t last very long.

Reviews

[Arundass TP]

I love the end of the writing how you finished the story. good work.

[DC]

Hi Alphagemini,
Thanks for the opportunity to read your story. I didn;t see the upload date until I finished reading it, so apologies if this is coming out of the blue and refering to a work that you've long set aside.
The writing is excellent. Your descriptions are great, and the pacing is strong.
Did you continue this?