by Rick Chesler
He waved an arm to Asami and Caitlin and the trio ventured into the subterranean world once again. They set out to find the ruptured wall into which Suzette had vanished. Following their earlier footprints helped to a degree, but they had to be careful not to retrace their earlier dead ends. The familiarity due to this being their second trip inside, as well as the overriding sense of purpose at rescuing Suzette, or at least locating her body, drove them forward, and they soon found themselves in the general vicinity of the spot.
Asami stared at the ground, analyzing the pattern of footprints leading off in various directions. “I could swear this was the place. “ But when she looked up at the wall—at both walls, but especially on the side where she had expected the opening to be—it was solid. “This is it, isn’t it? Blake?”
The Outer Limits leader stood in place while looking around. “Yes. I do think it is, but this...” He reached out and put a hand on the wall where they thought the opening had been. “This obviously isn’t it, there’s no opening here.”
The three of them looked around in bewilderment. “We should have taken a GPS point,” Asami said.
“GPS doesn’t work underground.” This from Caitlin.
“So we’re lost.” Blake slammed his fist into the wall in frustration.
Caitlin put a hand on his shoulder through the suit. “Calm down, Blake. We’ll—”
And then the wall started to move.
The stone was sliding from left to right as they faced it. When Blake lifted his hand from the wall and held it frozen in midair a few inches out from the wall, they could see a reddish oval patch travel past his fingers. Slowly, though not at a glacial pace.
“Wall’s moving!” Caitlin backed up a couple of steps. Asami and Blake both froze. They watched the wall begin to move faster, and then the direction of its motion changed. While continuing to move left to right, now it began to roll from top to bottom, as if a gigantic cylinder was being rotated as it slid along a track.
Asami pulled on Blake. “This is no rock wall! This is...this is...tell me what the hell you know about those creatures, Blake! Because that’s what this is, isn’t? It’s a giant one of those things!”
Caitlin gasped audibly.
The billionaire backed up from the wall to where Caitlin stood. The ginormous creature continued moving, blending in with the surrounding rockscape so well that were it to be motionless it could not be detected by the casual human eye.
“I swear that I had no idea about anything like this. I mean, okay, I knew about the small creatures like the one Martin and I brought back to the lab. But I can assure you that I had absolutely no knowledge of anything like this...”
Suddenly, the lunar life form’s tail end—they assumed it was the rear end since it was the last part of the body to pass by them as it moved—left a gaping hole in the rock wall. A hole exactly like the one Asami had descended into earlier.
“This is it,” the selenologist declared, voice subdued with a sense of indescribable awe, wonder and dread all at once. “This is the same opening I dropped into earlier.”
Caitlin leaned toward the opening to better look inside. “That means that before, this massive snake or whatever it is, just happened not to be here. That cave down there is its den, I guess. This whole tunnel complex...” Her voice faded as she looked around.
“Tell me again what happened to Strat Knowles, Blake!”
“Stop it!” Blake ordered. “Stay calm. Let’s not jump to any conclusions! Martin is working as we speak on characterizing the specimen.”
“I don’t need anyone to characterize anything for me!” Asami trilled. “Did you see the size of that thing? We’re not safe in here, Blake...and Suzette’s video...what she fell into...” She peered into the hole. She lowered her voice. “Oh my God.”
“What is it?” Blake also moved closer. All three of them now looked inside, the humongous animal having moved somewhere out of sight.
“The floor.” Asami pointed. “It’s solid again.”
The three moonwalkers looked at one another through their faceplates. “Which means that one of those...things...is in there right now.” Caitlin turned to back to stare down the hole.
Asami nodded. “These creatures—whatever they are—they are so big, and so numerous, that they actually seem to make up the tunnel walls themselves. But then when they move, empty spaces like caverns are left behind.”
“The little ones are here, too,” Caitlin said, lowering her head while she stared at the tunnel floor. The others turned to look and there they were: creatures the size of the one they’d collected earlier, burrowing in the lunar dirt.
“It’s like this entire tunnel system is nothing but a massive den for these things,” Caitlin said.
“Like we wandered into a giant insect hive,” Asami agreed.
Blake ignored them, taking another step closer to the opening. “Suzette? Can you hear me? I’m here with Caitlin and Asami at the entrance to the cave you fell into earlier, over.”
A few seconds passed during which the only sound was the slight rasp of their breathing in the suits.
Blake was about to say that they should go back to the LEM when they heard it.
“—ake...I’m here... —elp me!”
26 | Alive
“Suzette!” Blake shouted into his helmet transmitter while he stared into the subterranean lunar pit.
“Sounded like she said ‘help me,’” Caitlin said, also peering into the void. Only Asami looked behind them and along the tunnel they were in.
“Suzette, we heard you! Where are you?”
The marketing VP’s voice came again, but it was garbled and unintelligible. Sort of bubbly, like a person trying to talk underwater. They all waited a few seconds but no more transmissions came.
“I didn’t get any of that,” Caitlin stated.
“Me neither,” Asami seconded.
“She must be too deep into that pit for the radio signals to propagate normally. Probably down into the secondary cavity.” Blake turned away from the edge of the hole.
“At least we know she’s alive,” Caitlin said. “She must have found that equipment cache and been able to swap out her oh-two cylinder.”
“And hopefully the carbon dioxide scrubber,” Asami added.
Blake pointed to the climbing rope clipped to Asami’s spacesuit.
“Asami, let me use your gear. I’m going in after her.”
The selenologist hesitated, but only for a second.
“C’mon, Asami. Now, while there’s still a chance.”
“Here.” She gave him the gear and prepared the rope at her end so that she could belay him as he had done for her earlier. While they set up, they continued to call out for Suzette but didn’t hear her again. Then, just as Blake was about to descend into the cavernous hollow, a wrenching, haunting wail permeated their frequency.
Not words, though. Suzette, yes, but words?
“That’s the weirdest sounding scream I’ve ever heard,” Caitlin said.
“Shhhhh.” Blake halted, poised with his back to the open space below them, ready to drop inside. They listened some more and heard some indecipherable sounds, very strange sounding vocalizations, unidentifiable. And then, Suzette’s voice once more: “It hurts...so bad...help...” Her language degenerated into a babble of incoherent syllables.
Blake whipped his head around and eyed the pit below. The inner, deeper pit was still open. “You got me, Asami? I’m going.”
“Got you.” She tightened her grip on the rope and Blake rappelled down into the chamber, landing on the first level floor. He stood there a moment, this being his first trip into the hole and not exactly sure what to expect, especially with the creatures in the area. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, getting a feel for the ground, wondering if in fact it was real ground. It seemed to be.
“Looks like the pits are the spaces the creatures have left vacant, but the rest of the chamber floor is actually rock.”
He gazed down into it with trepidation, fearing that at any moment one of the life forms could come roaring up at him. But there was nothing, which was both good and bad. Good because there were no monsters lurking. But bad because, literally, he could see nothing. That black void seemed to be bottomless. He angled his head lamp this way and that, but although he could see the walls of the pit in its upper reaches, no bottom was visible.
“What’s down there?” Caitlin wanted to know.
“Not a whole lot that I can see, just—”Suddenly Blake felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. Not quite moving, like an earthquake, but more like a series of vibrations he could feel through his booted feet, like the sub-bass at an electronic music show. “Hold on.”
He looked around the room to make sure one of the creatures wasn’t creeping into the space from the far end that Caitlin and Asami couldn’t see. But it was all clear. He aimed his headlamp back into the pit at his feet...
...and saw rising movement. The pit was no longer pitch black as far as he could see, but now had what looked like a floor coming up at him, like an elevator. “Something’s coming up!” Blake reared back as he realized whatever it was would erupt from the hole any second now.
“Move, Blake!” the two women shouted, alerting him. He was already in motion as a gigantic worm-like animal burst from the subterranean tube and shot upwards toward the opening to the main tunnel Caitlin and Asami occupied. The creature towered above him as it rocketed higher, so close that Blake could have reached out and touched it, but he did not dare. He leaned so far backwards to make sure he wouldn’t be hit by the ascending snake-worm that he tripped and landed on his backside, moon-bouncing in slow motion until he stopped his motion with hands stretched out behind him. He sat there, staring up at the creature. He was about to push himself to his feet, deciding that should the animal change direction he would need to be mobile, but what he saw next rendered him absolutely motionless.
Some kind of anomaly marred the creature’s side. The white-and-silver colors immediately drew Blake’s eye away from the mostly grayish hues of the rest of the gargantuan body. Then he saw a splash of color and realized with a sickening, debilitating jolt of adrenaline that it was the Outer Limits logo. On a spacesuit. Suzette’s spacesuit. With Suzette still in it. The space-suited form of Outer Limits’ marketing executive was somehow attached to the animal. She wasn’t simply holding onto the side of it, though, or merely being bounced along by the animal’s motion.
Blake had to suppress the urge not to vomit in his helmet, a potentially dangerous occurrence that could have dire consequences while wearing a spacesuit. But it was difficult not to as the goliath worm-animal dragged Suzette past him and he got a close look at her.
Appendages of some sort penetrated her suit, fastening her body to the creature. But it was worse than just that, Blake saw as he focused on the alien tendrils snaking into Suzette’s body. Through it. The tentacle-like appendages were translucent, for he could see a liquid of some sort running through it. Altogether it had a bluish cast, but he wasn’t certain if it was a clear tube structure with a blue liquid inside, or a bluish tube structure with a clear liquid inside.
How is this possible? Blake understood at this moment that Suzette hadn’t found the left-behind equipment, but that the lunar dweller itself was somehow infusing her with oxygen, keeping her alive as a part of itself.
As a part of itself...
He recalled her words, just minutes ago...It hurts...
And then the creature bent slightly, contorted itself enough to be able to fit through the opening through which Blake had come down here, and he was suddenly helmet-to-helmet with Suzette Calderon. In the most surreal moment of his entire life, Blake Garner made eye contact with his employee.
“Suzette!”
He saw her part her lips to speak, but by then the creature’s head—if it was a head—had emerged into the tunnel where the screams of Caitlin and Asami drowned out all other sound on the comm channel. He reached out a hand to grab onto Suzette—saw that hers were pinned tightly behind her back, while her legs were immobilized—her feet actually disappearing into the creature’s flesh itself. A tube the diameter of a garden hose ran up through her chin into her mouth, disappearing to where, Blake could only imagine.
His hand slid off her spacesuit and she was carried higher by the alien beast. Blake watched helplessly as the animal passed through the fractured wall. It turned left, heading deeper into the tunnel system with Suzette in tow, her bubbly, distorted grunts echoing in their headsets.
27 | If It Isn’t One Thing
Blake stared up out of the chamber until he saw the creature’s tail end pass through into the tunnel. He heard Caitlin ’s voice.
“Blake, get out of there! Hurry, before it comes back.”
“C’mon Blake!” Asami added.
He felt the slack in his rope tighten as Asami prepared to belay him up. But now that the creature had left, he couldn’t resist taking a good look down into the deep chasm from which it had come. He turned around and directed his headlamp back into the pit. In it he saw a vision of Hell, a vacant hole seething with moving flesh, the floor opening and closing as giant worms passed through. Or snakes. Whatever the hell they were. But he knew one thing: he had been absolutely right that they had mistaken the very walls and floors and ceilings of this tunnel network for rock, when much of it was living flesh, constantly changing the configuration of the network of passages as they moved about. The humans were inside their hive, in an alien catacomb of sorts, assuming that if the creatures lived here, they must also die here. The notion made him nauseous and he turned away as Asami yelled at him again.
“Now, Blake!”
He moved to the wall below the opening, where he looked up to see Asami staring down at him, a glint of light from his headlamp reflecting off of her faceplate. He couldn’t see Caitlin but knew she’d be facing out into the tunnel, watching for more creatures. He “walked” up the wall, a task made easier in the low gravity—which he was grateful to discover was an actual rock wall and not some sort of living thing—while Asami pulled him up with the rope. He got a look at Asami’s eyes when he stepped back into the main tunnel; she was visibly shaken at having seen Suzette pass by her, raked across the wall by the worm-creature. She and Suzette had not gotten along well, but she would never wish this kind of fate on anybody. The spaceship incident with the camera seemed so trivial now.
“Thanks,” he said to Asami, unclipping his rope harness. “It went that way, right?” He pointed to their left, the direction that led deeper into the tunnel system.
“Yes.” Caitlin’s voice sounded weak. She, too, had been traumatized by what she had witnessed.
Blake checked his oxygen gauge. “We could chase after it for a little while, see if we might be able to rescue Suzette when it stops—rip her out of it—”
“No!”
“Blake!” Caitlin was even more forceful than Asami. It surprised her that he would put himself on the line for Suzette to that degree. It wasn’t heroism, though, that was the troubling thing. She knew it was the desire to save his own company’s reputation from the fallout that would surely result from a death—and a spectacularly hideous death at that. He wanted to save her only because it would save Outer Limits in the process. “There’s no way we can save her. Did you see her? It’s like she was a part of that thing…like...”
“Like it had injected her with its own blood vessels or something like that?”
Caitlin nodded, the reflection of Blake’s headlamp bobbing crazily in her faceplate.
“We need to worry about ourselves, Blake,” Asami cut in. “I can’t end up like that...I—”
She choked off a sob, envisioning herself entombed like Suzette into one of the organisms, being
dragged through the series of lunar burrows, for what purpose, she had no idea, but she couldn’t imagine a more horrible fate.
And it hurts. Help... it hurts!
Suzette’s plea echoed in her brain until she could take it no more and she turned to leave in the opposite direction the creature went.
“Okay,” Blake relented. “We’ll leave.”
“Good.” Caitlin breathed a sigh of relief as she turned to follow Asami toward the exit. She had been concerned that Blake’s judgment might be clouded by knowing that this horrendous event marked the end of his dreams of space leadership that he might do something stupid. But he fell into line after Caitlin and Asami, head on a swivel as he looked around for signs of the creatures while they progressed toward the exit.
They moved fast, bounding through the twisty passages, using their footprints to guide them, avoiding contact with the walls. A couple of small creatures wriggled here and there on the floor, but by the time they emerged out onto the crater’s inner slope, they had seen none of the larger ones. Asami hypothesized that perhaps the bigger individuals needed to stay deeper in the soil, that the larger they got, the deeper they ventured. She noted slightly higher oxygen readings in the soil samples taken from deeper underground.
“Can’t say as I give a crap about it right now, Asami,” Caitlin said. “I just want to get back to the LEM in one piece.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Asami said.
Blake led the way up the crater slope. As soon as they topped over the rim, they heard Dallas’ voice on the comm channel.
“Dallas to Outer Limits EVA party, do you copy, over?” he repeated himself.
Blake replied. “We copy you, Dallas. We just came out of the tunnels, now on the crater rim, over.”
He paused to look out over the plains while he waited for Dallas to respond. That their rover was still there was the first thing he confirmed. And in the distance: a gleam of light off of Black Sky’s LEM. But he saw no EVA activity between that ship and the rover, no space-suited figures slinking away after having sabotaged their ride.