Examination review of Naomi Thompson, ID number 161, details in file. Full autopsy report in temporary file, pending transfer when communication channels open again. They were found clothed in the viewing room to the underwater study locations alongside approximately half of the team members. Numerous puncture wounds, grouped in fours, are along the neck, wrists, backs of the knees, and feet. All the blood has been drained from the body.
Cause of death is the drainage of blood by – [ahem]. By some form of animal unknown to us. Heat signatures for them have been picked up on the monitors. There is no definitive evidence of what these creatures may be, if they came from the ocean or the surrounding land, and no remains or residue was left behind. We have not found any indication that they are still in the facility. All members of Facility D are deceased. The other bodies are in similar states; however, some of them have wounds from blunt force trauma on heads, arms, and chests, possibly from trying to kill whatever was attacking them.
I am going to break this bracelet if I keep grabbing for it. It’s fine. Dr. Federman has plenty of spares. I think he may have brought along the kit he uses to make them. I swear there are new ones on his arms every time we take off our walking suits.
We’d already decided it was a terrible idea for me to drive. Though each facility has multiple cars, on the road between it’s just us and the one we drive in together, and if we crash, we go the hundreds of miles to the closest facility on foot. I’d had an idea that we could each take a car and I would drive behind so I wouldn’t feel so alone, and so if I crashed I wouldn’t halt our progress, but that was scrapped quickly. “You’re not getting behind that wheel,” Dr. Federman told me. The sight of my last crash must have been gruesome enough that he wouldn’t even hear of it.
Fickle, that man is. I drove half the way here.
Nothing could have been on the road. We knew that. We knew that, and we told each other that again and again and again, but logic does not help when all of your ill-timed instincts are telling you you are about to die.
Something kept hitting us on the way. Or multiple somethings. At first, it was just once, a light thump on top of the car, and even in my nerves at being away from the facility lights, I hadn’t thought it was anything more than a branch falling, rattled by our passing.
That’s what I told myself the next time it happened. On the third time, I told Dr. Federman that. On the fourth, he repeated my words back to me.
On the fifth and on, we had a script. Whoever had the lesser reaction to any new noise said it to the other, and the other would say it back.
We are scientists. We are people who have built our careers on cold and hard logic. When the facts are presented, we work with them.
We were so sure something was chasing us that Dr. Federman almost crashed himself. I think it’s a sad time when it’s a better idea to put me behind the wheel.
He’s broken a few of his own bracelets by now. I saw their pastel beads in the trash earlier, but he didn’t seem too upset about it when I asked him. Snapping their cords got out his nervous energy.
Nothing could have been following us. Someone out here, somewhere on this planet, would have noticed animals moving around. Especially if those animals were wont to attacking strange moving vehicles holding people who were too old to be frightened at the thought of monsters in the darkness.
Yes, Dr. Federman is nodding at me. [off mic] Maybe that’s what we should’ve been telling each other. We’re too old for it.
[on mic] Wish he’d stop pacing, though. Maybe it calms him, but it’s having the exact opposite effect on me. We’re resting in the rocket’s landing bay before going in to see the bodies, a room turned into the garage now that Facility D won’t be hosting any more rockets anytime soon. I wonder how many cars we’d crushed when landing in Facility A.
Should go inside soon, I think. The storm didn’t come anywhere close to Facility D, so there shouldn’t be any statues. Maybe fungus, but that’s easy to think about now. I think I said something about that a few weeks ago. It’d be most natural for a kind of fungus to be the first to leave the oceans, considering the amount of death on POGE that hasn’t had the opportunity to decompose in who knows how long. It’s fine for that to be here. We know not to eat any food that wasn’t pre-packaged back on Earth by now.
Who knows, maybe they all died from the flu. That’d be a nice change of pace.
No, I’m not doing this. There is a lovely beach out there, and a nice safe walk down the cliff, with not a single cave on that cliff that some bloodsucking little creatures can hide in. I’m going down there and I am not moving until all these bodies up here are eaten through by fungus or by whatever cursed thing has been following us for the past hundreds of miles.
No, let go of me. I didn’t sign up for this. No, I didn’t. I signed up for poison victims and homicide victims and natural disaster victims, not this!
The water’s nice. Dr. Federman’s sitting on the rocks a few feet away from me.
He agrees. The water’s nice.
There is a tide here. POGE has a single small moon orbiting it, somehow still attached despite the rough exit and subsequent millions of years hurtling through a featureless void. That’s some commitment, there.
I don’t know what Dr. Federman was doing while we were out there. He didn’t talk and he’d turned off his flashlight after a few minutes, sitting too far away from my own light for me to see him. I could hear the clacks of his bracelets beneath his walking suit occasionally, and the crunch of sand, but otherwise he was quiet.
There’s something special about only seeing a few feet of the ocean. On Earth, you can see the horizon far away, and the emptiness of that stretch of water is both peaceful and terrifying. Knowing that’s out there here, but being unable to see it, unable to see even that false ending of the horizon, is so much more poignant, so much calmer and scarier and more imposing. What little my flashlight could illuminate showed clean and clear water, no blue sky or stars or moonlight to reflect. Facility lights are set up along this beach, but they’d been turned off before we got here. Instructions on the outer doors of the facility say to keep them off when not immediately required. Some of the plants down here are light-sensitive and apparently can still become damaged even when dead.
I think my old shrinks had the right idea, for once. Meditation works. For an hour, or however long it was, I hardly thought of anything. I don’t think I could have if I tried. For weeks, my mind has been racing, and these past days have stretched my nerves so thin I felt I would snap at any moment. I did snap, earlier, though not as much as I could have, the release too small for me.
I don’t think I can repeat the peace of that moment, no matter how many times I try to meditate again. Disappointing.
Back to work, though. Sensors did pick up these creatures, whatever they were. They carried their own strange little heat signatures, unlike the hidden presence of the fungi. None are left within the building or for miles around us.
I believe they came from the ocean. The retrieval area was the first place they popped up on the sensors, large numbers of them quickly spreading out until they’ve covered the facility and all its members. The team didn’t know they existed.
Of course, they didn’t. I don’t know why I keep expecting to find evidence of them in the members’ journals. Nobody knew these were here. Nobody knew any of this was here, these monsters, the fungus. Whatever followed us.