Joseph Grammer, Author

He smashed the glass without trying the handle. Flickering hall lights tossed shadows in broad slashes over the floor tiles, over filing cabinets and furniture piled up haphazardly, where the engineers had staged their poor man’s Thermopylae.

Reid stepped into the hall. No corpses; blood, smeared like children’s pictures over the bulwarks. His footsteps rebounded back to him between the walls, summing and fading like music drummed out by a lunatic, which was fitting since no moderately sane human would continue down the corridor of his own accord. He checked the radio: silent. Of course silent. It wouldn’t make sense for company equipment to function properly.

Even on a World Nations moon, missions were lethal. Some bigshot nabbed a contract, terraformed a patch, set up shop, and chatted every week with command, until one morning some nitrogen-breathing arthropod hiding in a crater battered down the doors or shredded the oxygen conduit. Then the company called the Mobile Integrated Reconnaissance, Observation, and Response Squad (MIROR). Reid and the Mirror Men.

Moon Haddonfield, out in the ass corner of vacant space, was not World Nations ratified. It was a classified project, some nightmare on the endless frontier.

In Reid’s vision a dot flared and died; he’d lost Kaz on the HUD map. They traveled in pairs, eight men to a team. Cheap and secret like cosmonaut speed, as his DI used to say. He and Kaz had passed through an airlock, overridden the controls—but the door slammed shut as soon as Reid passed through. No problem. He’d told the corporal: set a marker, find Bell and Kaplan, let them know what’s up.

Now the intercom was shot and he couldn’t check up on Kaz, or anyone.

This was three minutes ago, maybe? His clock always shit out on him when he needed it most.

Focus.

This part of the station was a laboratory. Biohazard decals and retinal scans for every door. Reek of antiseptic cleaner, dust, and the staleness of remade oxygen. Moonguys developed migraines after months in artificial air, no matter the pills they took (even cosmo speed).

“This is Naler, moving east in the lab, over.” Worth a shot. Talking to static didn’t boost your confidence in a blood-slick tunnel, though.

He ran through protocol. Stopped beside every door and tested the lock. Blood on the handles. The air was colder here, too, closer to the temperature of the moon. His breath frosted the recon helmet’s visor.

Reid had captained eighty-six missions in six years of service. He was an O3, a company officer, and he had no need for a fixed location. Most humans his age were married and spawning kids, cultivating hobbies for a dopamine boost outside their desk job. Reid preferred fieldwork, even if the rush in his throat now was deeply entwined with anatomical fear. He made an impact in a part of space no one saw, which was what his instructor had told him while pushing the non-disclosure form across the table.

“Kaz, what’s going on, over? Shit.”

No sound but his own. You’d think pipes would bang, doorframes settle in the shifting pressure. His armor rustled at the joints to remind him that the board of directors had “cut costs” on the plastic vests used for outstarring. There’d even been one or two oxygen failures.

Reid stepped around a particularly wide circle of blood and noted it was brown, dry. Someone killed these guys, then hauled off the bodies without signs of dragging? He pictured some unhinged scientist waving a pistol, vomiting nonsense about the apocalypse in 3983. Every once in a while an egghead lost it, couldn’t take the isolation; the company didn’t like to spread that data on the front pages, but it happened. Extraplanetary Schizotypal Fugue, with or without hallucinations. Gave the HR psychologists something to debate.

Reid smiled, even as the sweat cooled and froze on his lips. Probably the guy had just pissed off the group. Made the wrong joke, incurred the spleen of the wrong geek. You think junior high has cliques, go live on a sub-zero rock with a hundred other Type-A scholars. You’re better off cramming tiger sharks in a sink.

Something cracked like a twig. Reid stopped, swiveled at the waist with his AR-1220 panning the hall. He flattened his back against a metal wall and checked the way he’d come, the narrow strip of light from his guntorch lighting up the patches of ichor.

“Kaz you asshole.”

He waited ten seconds, counted them in his head, moved on. Kaz should be along soon; Bell had a gate-cutter, it would take care of the airlock no problem. In his viewfinder he saw the station’s blue-and-white schematic, all the twists and dead ends—but no dots where his squadmates should be. He thought about walking through another dim hallway on Moon Gaspar, when a pipe had burst in front of him, filling his sternum with pressurized shrapnel. Lucky that was before the cuts.

The hall ended, split left and right. A broad swath of red on the wall from someone’s desperate hand. Lovely.

Right went to the gas-labs, according to the map. Left was supplies. He went with the latter, figuring he could scavenge for something useful. Engineers like stuff that cuts through metal.

The way was cold and still, total darkness. His flashlight cut through the gloom to show clouds of milling dust that couldn’t have been floating without something to disrupt them.

“Kaz,” he said again, a whisper.

No bodies at all in the whole place. They’d pried the gates open, checked the oxygen, the pressure. Everything fine. Sure, the electric was spotty (here it was nonexistent), but nothing a few fuses wouldn’t fix. Had everyone gone on a goddamn lunar joyride? Was there some brothel on the other side of the rock he didn’t know about? Moon Haddonfield: a piss-poor location if there ever was one. So naturally they called in Reid.

He tested Supply Closet A’s plastic handle—locked. Breathing deeply, he tugged out his misfit (Multipurpose Survival Field Tool) and jammed the crowbar head into the space between door and lintel. The portal swung inward. He stepped over the threshold, swept the light around 180 degrees. Dun corpses piled high to the ceiling. No big deal.

Shit.

He spun around, finger on trigger, sweat glazed on his aching skin. Fucking psychopath in here. No bloating somehow—had he sterilized them? Dried them into mummies or puppets?

He faced the bodies again. No eyes, lips, or teeth to speak of. Fingernails gone. No clothes. Just bloodless husks, desiccated skin and meat around bone. He stared into a woman’s dark sockets, as if hoping for a clue to this massacre, and a tail flicked into view. As in, inside her head.

He squeezed semi-auto rounds into the wrinkled face and popped it like a grape. Dry chunks of meat like jerky pebbled the storeroom floor. He stepped back, wishing for a grenade, any explosive to unmake that pile. But you don’t bring bombs in a pressurized complex on a moon. Even the bullets were designed not to pierce the walls.

“Kaz, I found bodies, over. Answer me you creep.”

A strangled hiss.

“Kaz? You there, over?”

“Naler, ju…”

“Kaz, what the hell are you saying? You’re not coming in, over.”

“…call up….cont…”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Repeat. I got bodies over here, over.”

He covered a careful retreat, making for the airlock, leaving the door wide open. First rule: no heroics. His own steps thundered in his ears. Move slow, stop every three meters and check both avenues, move again. The airlock was the gold prize.

He moved back through the office, the door he had shattered. Whiteboards with notes and complicated jokes about physics. As a captain and pilot, Reid hadn’t gone past pitch, roll, and yaw, but even if he’d understood he wouldn’t have found them funny. Not on Haddonfield.

Visual on the airlock. Crack behind him, and he waited in the causeway to see what monstrosity would drag itself through the office to peel off his fingernails, uproot his teeth with nickel-thick claws.

Nothing came.

He made his way to the end. Through the porthole he saw the faulty lock, protected passage beyond. Now it was drenched in liquid, fresh and slick: a body leaning against it, the head helmeted but the head was leaning too far over.

“Kaz.”

No answer. He spoke into the mic, he knocked on the steel door.

“Kaz.”

Crack.

He swung around, fired a three-shot burst that ended somewhere in the office. Put a hole right through the engineer’s private puns.

 

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