Good to have you back.

++++++

The raid
By José Carlos Martínez
ORAL REPORT ENTRY
22/12/56
Hssssssssss.
Lieutenant Magritte recording, hoping that someone will find this recording and
play it, perhaps before I decide to do something about my life … Sorry if I get
too personal, but in my situation I don’t really give a shit about what people think about me.
How to start? … Hell, let’s start with this … Sigh.
Whatever brought me here, and I don’t mean this hellish place but my career,
has no importance now. Money, fame, sex, whatever. This is not the place I
wanted to be in the end, that’s for certain.
The box I found, how could it even do this? This sky, this ground. Even the
sun. This is not a place I’ve met before, and I am certain it’s not in the Solar
System. And the dam box took me here.
The air feels different, heavy, like it’s rotting, like it’s dead. Where the fuck I
am? I have no fucking idea.
I have no comms. No radio. Nothing. How can I get outta here? I am even
afraid to walk and see what’s around. All I see are these black towers and
torrents of people coming. How did it happen?
Sorry, I have to come down, this is a report after all. Maybe it will be found
someday, next to my rotting body or in a pile of monster shit. I’ll be methodical
and provide as much detail as I can, perhaps too much and too personal, but
like I said before, I don’t care, sorry for the bad words and the lack of etiquette, but I don’t think that matters a lot right now.
Okay. Here we go. The ship landed on Pluto as usual, no activities, nothing
special. Just us and the planet, frozen as always, save for the hot spot on the
surface. We had changed the landing area in order to check it. On a planet
of moving icebergs and eternal cold, something as hot as five Celsius is worth
checking. But had we known … Ah, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.
Okay, so … The drones were sent and returned with nothing, save for the last
one. And that’s when things got weird.
The images. Something big and black as Hell, moving. Janick said it was
Godzilla and we laughed, because that thing on the screen could not be real,
it had to be interference of some sort, a small iceberg perhaps. And then the
satellite did not show any images. So the damn thing was not real. And we
kept telling ourselves that it wasn’t even when the ship was cracked open by
tentacles and we were being killed and eaten like peanuts in a bowl.
We hid in the escape pods and waited for the damn thing to eat us. And didn’t
happen. Mora and I waited and feared for the worst for what seemed like hours
while we tumbled, like leaves in a hurricane. And when we came outside the
pod I felt like I was waking from a bad dream. The ship was torn to pieces and
spread in a circular pattern, and in the middle … ridiculously small, was this box, this damn black box with patterns on it. And I took it. I guess that was the most stupid thing I could have done, but after what happened in the end, it would have made no difference if I took it or not. I put it inside the suit’s compartment and forgot about it for a while.
Mora and I walked to the base. Four hours under the dark, deep in the upper
area of the so-called “Heart.” We were freezing, and the batteries were emptying fast. The temperature was barely enough to keep us alive, and we kept on walking to the base. We should have landed there in the first place, instead of checking on the hot spot, but like I said before, perhaps it would not have changed anything.
In any case, we were following orders, and like it happens in the worse times for explorers, miners, and cops, we were following orders when tragedy fell upon us.
I kept seeing dark shadows looming above us, and I even thought I saw something flying, sometimes covering the light of the stars. But I knew that was impossible since the atmosphere was not thick enough to allow something to fly on its own power. And yet, I kept on seeing things.
And when we finally found the base on the distance, Mora and I almost jumped with joy, and we would have done so if we had enough air. As soon as we got into range we called on the radio, asking for help and to report what happened.
And nobody answered.
Another hour and the first symptoms of inhaling carbon dioxide were already
clouding our brains, but we kept on walking, holding each other like little girls,
when we finally reached a hatch and entered.
As soon as the airlock was closed and air began to flow the entry chamber we
removed our helmets and began to breathe in the air. I fell on my knees and
Mora fell heavily on her back, with her empty tanks keeping her from hitting her head.
We stayed there for maybe an hour and I opened the door to the base. And
the smell inside made me choke. When you’ve been in the army like I had,
you recognize the smell of burnt meat, human meat. They called it “long pig”
smell. And I had never smelled it in such a concentration. Doors were torn,
walls were broken and in the promenade, a pyramid made of blackened human
skulls awaited for us.
Mora lost it and opened her mouth as if to scream when we saw them. They
were humanoids, covered in what seemed blood-drenching human skins, chewing on bones. And rioting like birds, above their heads, long-necked things with wings, flying in and out the base, through its broken dome.
And the dome opened, not to the cold skies of Pluto, but to a reddish mass of
clouds which smelled like sulfur and brimstone. “Hell,” I said in amazement and half not believing it. But that wasn’t Pluto’s air we were breathing because that would have killed us in seconds. That was the sky of another world.
The creatures didn’t seem to mind us, and they regarded us with a lazy stare
that I recognized as the one someone has after eating too much and not having any interest in more food. Their bellies were distended to such a point that they seemed about to break, and perhaps fill the promenade with half-digested human remains.
Mora and I moved slowly towards the warehouse and as soon as we got inside
I began replenishing our oxygen tanks. We had another walk ahead of us, this
time to the hangars. The plan was to reach a trans-Neptunian space station or
even a moon.
“Inna, what has happened?” the poor girl asked me. She looked so frail and
small in her suit and I felt something moving inside of me. They always told that me I saw Mora as a daughter, but I knew better. I was in love with her and in that very moment, my throat felt like a giant hand was squeezing it and I was unable to answer.
“Inna?” she asked again and I had to rely on my training to calm down and try
and provide an answer.
“I don’t know. It is like something opened, a door to somewhere else. That thing that attacked the ship, it came out through it and returned. It’s in the hot spot area. And when it destroyed the ship and left … The damn box!”
I remembered the box, inside my back compartment. I opened it and took it
outside. I was able to see it under the light for the first time. It was as big as a
human head, a perfect cube, with intricate patterns on its black surface. When
I touched it, some of the patterns felt like moving, suggesting buttons of some
sort.
“Maybe it’s a key. They used it to open the door and come here.”
“But why here?”, she asked.
“Because there are not many of us here? I don’t know, but we have to contact
some other outposts and tell them about it. Maybe this is happening somewhere else. As soon as we make it to a ship we will call them from there. I don’t want to risk ourselves trying to reach comms with those things out there,” I said.
“They are eating our friends,” Mora said, with an unexpected coldness.
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” I said and filled another set of air
tanks.
After a while, I opened the warehouse’s hatch to its pressure chamber and we
went outside, hoping to find a ship. Half an hour later we were ready to hop into one and I was glad to find that it had not been harmed. And this time, I really saw those things flying above us, apparently not very interested in doing us any harm.
“They fly on their own,” I thought while wondering at how they were able to resist the cold outside and maneuver as well as they did inside the base.
When we entered the ship I used the network to call all the outposts and Earth.
I radio called and sent the telemetry of our suits as well as accessed the logs of
the base and our destroyed ship and transmitted them. And I made the mistake to peek into the base logs.
I saw a light in the promenade area. And then people just started to hurt each
other. I saw friends I knew for years hurting others, jumping and biting their
faces like animals. I saw them tearing their clothes apart and their skin changing into black, their bodies drying and becoming the humanoids we saw. I saw the dome breaking and big black tentacles entering, and what seemed like glowing red eyes piercing the darkness.
I saw the monsters flying over those who remained human and were killed and eaten, and then I threw up on myself. Mora had arrived at that very moment to see what happened and I turned off the screens and changed into fatigues.
After exiting Pluto’s gravity and entering deep space we received a confirmation from Jupiter-5, acknowledging the signal. I remember the face of the comms officer talking to me, with his eyes wide open and his face, a face I had only seen in war, when survivors went hysterical or in the middle of a PTSD attack.
I bet that man also threw up on himself.
We acknowledged back and then minutes later we were ordered to head to Mars in order to enter the military medical facility in Cydonia in order to be checked for diseases. We could not risk going to a smaller base in the Solar System and start a massive contagion without the proper containment measures.
It would take 24 more hours to reach Mars, and only six had passed when
we began to hear the emergency calls. First Neptune, the Saturnian moon
colonies, Jupiter and then Mars. Uranus was on the other side of Solar System
so it took other five hours to hear them.
I knew what was happening. The same thing as Pluto. The bigger bases had
more time to react than the smaller Plutonian outpost and actually transmitted emergency calls. It was all the same. Some big black things crawling out of nowhere, crew members becoming cannibalistic monsters. There were actually no weapons in any base since the Unification wars, so those who did not change had no opportunity against the others.
Mars had the bigger base and resisted for a longer time. Mora and I saw the
feeds from the base. Barricades being risen, and barricades being overrun by
monsters. And satellite images of those things coming from thermal anomalies
on the planet surface. Big black things, with tentacles and bodies resembling
humanoid giants. Giant hands and feet, disproportionate and grotesque.
When we reached Mars there was no place to land since the civilian colonies
were also destroyed or overtaken.
“Inna, take me to Earth, please,” Mora told me, with that strange cold expression in her eyes. My girl, my child was looking at me with the eyes of an old woman who had seen too much and just wanted to go home. I called Earth’s command and waited for an answer for 15 minutes. I called again and silence was the only response I got.
When we got closer I scanned the Moon and space stations. I saw the big black
blotches on the Moon and the space platforms torn to pieces. Nobody had to
tell me, this was an invasion and it had succeeded.
It was like the raid of London or Paris. A surprise maneuver and a strong blow
against an unsuspecting enemy. But that was necessary to rid the world of the
scourge of capitalism. To unify mankind and end the threat of war.
Quite the contrary, this invasion seemed unreasonable as it had been effective.
What would the invaders want taking the outposts which were nothing than
science endeavors? They could have taken only Earth’s defenses and claim
themselves victorious with no need to waste resources out there. Why the
humiliation on civilians when they seemed capable of taking on humanity’s postwar military?
And most important, why would some people change and become their pawns?
Why not all of the crew members?
I scanned Earth and saw a repetition of the European invasion all over the
globe. The air was being obscured by enormous fires and those giants were
everywhere. Dark clouds, like starling swarms, were following them, and I could only assume that they were the winged things.
More magnification and I could see people running from groups of cannibals on
the streets. Warships were sent flying through the air like children toys by giant monsters in the seas.
I was shocked.
We floated in orbit for five days, watching the destruction below us. We had to
land but I resisted the idea. Then Mora came with a better plan for both of us.
“We should commit suicide,” she said. Serious as ever. I was scared of her, of
how much she had changed. She was no longer my baby, but a 100-year-old
woman, with dark circles under her eyes and trembling hands.
I said yes and took out my charge weapon, a small pistol we officers carry
around, in case we got stranded in space with no chance to be rescued. I
guessed this was one of those occasions.
I removed the safety and contemplated it in my hand. It felt tremendously heavy and I looked at Mora’s eyes, trembling in doubt so much that she noticed it.
“There’s no other way out Inna,” she said. And then, I remembered, I remembered
the box. The box with the buttons. Maybe I could find a way to close the
door, to send those things back to wherever they came.
I took it out of the compartment and had a look at it. Those were definitely
buttons on it. Big buttons like those of a TV recorder. Mora said “no,” but it was
already too late. I pushed the buttons with a big desperate slap of my hands.
And I found myself here. In this place I don’t recognize, with an atmosphere
of death and decay that seems so far away from any conceivable experience
I had before, under these massive monolithic buildings with strange shadows.
It’s horrible.
And Mora … God … Mora was still on board the ship. I pushed the buttons
again and nothing happened. I tried, and tried and tried, over and over again.
It was like a single shot, like a one-use door to this place. I think I faded and
fell on the ground, with the weight of defeat and exhaustion pushing over me.
I dreamed of Mora trying to enter Earth’s atmosphere by herself and the ship
burning in the process. I saw my love torn apart and burnt to cinders, with her
eyes fixed on me. I woke up in time to see people, or what seemed like people,
coming. I found a place to hide and saw a procession of the humanoid things
arriving at the monoliths, with trophies. Women and children, half naked and
hurt, being dragged to the city of darkness behind me, while the beasts were
chanting something like “Yiah, yiah! Yuggr lagr!”.
And then it dawned on me. The reason behind all this madness. The boxes
were a one-time device for the monsters to use. The creatures were made from human flesh, to be activated when they were needed, perhaps taking millennia and transmitting their genes to their descendants until the right moment, when they were required to loot and take away prisoners with them, back to this place.
And the reason why was pretty clear when I saw the giants arriving too, taking
the prisoners with their massive hands and gorging themselves with them.
The only reason to raid our planet, our bases and stations is to eat. I remembered all those stories of the old gods demanding sacrifice and I knew I was watching them, coming from time to time to remind man how small it was compared to them, and how easy it was to prey on humanity.
We are their cattle.
I looked around for my charge gun and was unable to find it. But it was lost, as
lost as Mora was in space. I had lost everything and wanted to die.
And I will die. I will deliver myself to the monsters to be eaten and destroyed by their gods. And maybe I’ll meet Mora again, somewhere, and I’ll apologize for being such an idiot.
And I’ll also apologize, profusely, for never telling her that I loved her.
End of recording.
Oh shit.
Tsssssssss.

+1 Lovecraftian. I like the idea of something sinister happening on Pluto. Seems far away being on the outskirts of our solar neighborhood, but it's closer than you think. Nobody suspects Pluto...

Nobody suspected Pluto, until Mickey was killed. Good to have you back around JW.

I haven't even read it yet, but I'll be giving you a +1 just for the proper used of "fine toothed comb."

I'm proud of myself whenever just getting its/it's right.

Correcting that is one of my prime uses of the edit feature on SE. Its so easy to miss.

This is just a goofy little story I wrote last year based on a writing prompt of a skeleton in a messy room.