The fluorescent lights buzzed like dying insects. Mike flexed his burned hands, watching the blackened veins pulse beneath the bandages. The gold in his blood shimmered just beneath the surface - no longer hiding, no matter how hard the System tried to camouflage it.
Lina stood by the window; her fingers white-knuckled around the sill. Outside, the moon hung swollen in the sky, its surface marred by a jagged crack that hadn't been there yesterday, its new crack glowing faintly red.
"They're not calling it a hallucination anymore," she said, voice tight.
"They're calling it a 'lunar thermal event,'" she said, voice tight.
On the muted TV, a news anchor gestured to a diagram of the moon while text scrolled:
NASA ASSURES PUBLIC NO IMMEDIATE DANGER.
Mike followed her gaze to the parking lot below. News vans clustered like carrion birds; their cameras trained on the sky. A scrolling banner on one of the screens read:
UNEXPLAINED LUNAR ANOMALY – GOVERNMENT ADVISES CALM
Calm. Right.
Lily sat cross-legged on the floor, crayons moving in frantic circles. The drawing took shape - a moon, cracked open like an egg, something black and many-limbed spilling out.
Mike's phone buzzed. A flood of notifications:
~ Military deploying to major cities
~ Global stock markets frozen
~ Riots in Tokyo, London, New York
~ National Guard deployed in 12 states
~ European Union emergency session
~ Religious groups gathering at Stonehenge, Mount Fuji
The System flickered in his vision:
» SYSTEM ARRIVAL IN: 6 DAYS, 4 HOURS, 37 MINUTES
» WARNING: CAMOUFLAGE FAILURE IMMINENT
Lina's hand clamped onto his wrist. "Mike. Look."
Lily sat cross-legged on the floor, crayons moving in frantic circles. The drawing took shape - a moon cracking open like an egg, black tendrils spilling out to wrap around stick-figure humans.
Mike: (kneeling beside her) "Lily-bug, what are you - "
She held up a finger. "Shh. It's telling me the colors."
Her hand moved to the black crayon, then suddenly switched to red.
"No. First blood. Then the screaming."
Suddenly, the stick-figure humans in her drawing suddenly grew mouths where their eyes should be, screaming in red wax.
Lina's breath hitched. Mike followed her gaze to the hospital TV, a reporter stood in front of a military barricade.
Behind her, something moved in the shadows - a hunched, spindly figure with too many joints.
The camera jerked away before Mike could get a clear look, but the reporter's voice trembled:
"- authorities are calling them 'Night Stalkers,' creatures appearing in low-light areas. Civilians are advised to stay indoors after sunset -"
They switched to another channel where the reporters were interviewing a supposed expert.
TV Reporter: " - assure viewers these 'Night Stalker' sightings are likely mass hysteria triggered by the lunar anomaly - "
The feed cut to a panel discussion. A gray-haired professor adjusted his glasses.
Expert: "These so-called 'shadow creatures' are textbook examples of group psychosis. The human brain - "
The screen glitched. For half a second, something moved behind the expert - a spindly darkness reaching toward his chair.
Then it was gone.
Lina's breath hitched. "They're real. The shadows are here."
Mike's golden veins burned. The System wasn't just coming - it was leaking.
Lina grabbed Mike's wrist. Her fingers were ice.
Lina: "We need to leave. Now."
Mike: (checking the door) "They've got MPs at every exit."
Lina: (gesturing to Lily's drawings) "And we've got that in our corner."
She lowered her voice.
"They're going to take her, Mike. You saw the orders on that nurse's clipboard."
Lily looked up, her crayon snapping in half.
"The bad men are coming,"
she said matter-of-factly.
"The ones with no shadows behind their eyes."
~
~
~
The jungle air hung thick with the scent of blood and rotting leaves.
Abby stood over Elder Moko; her spear still buried in his throat.
His remaining eye rolled wildly, his fingers twitching against the shaft as shadows leaked from his mouth like black saliva.
Around them, the jungle was silent - no birds, no insects.
Just the whispers.
Abby: (yanking the spear free) "You sent Marpe to kill me. Why?"
Moko gurgled, his hands clutching at the wound.
When he spoke, his voice was layered with something else - something that made the trees shiver.
Moko: (choking) "Not... kill. Sacrifice. The shadow... hungers."
A rustle in the bushes. Abby spun, spear ready - but it was just a Tapir, its eyes glassy and black.
The creature snorted, its muscles twitching unnaturally as shadows pulsed beneath its skin.
Abby turned to Elder Moko – still alive despite a spear to the throat.
Abby: (gritting her teeth) "You fed the animals to it first."
Moko coughed, his laughter getting wet and broken.
Moko: "The weak... go first. The sick. The crazy." (His fingers dug into the dirt.)
"Then the strong. Like Riggs. Like you."
Abby kicked him onto his back, her boot pressing down on his chest.
The shadows in his veins writhed, straining toward her wounded eye.
At this point, Elder Moko wasn't bleeding blood anymore, but a black tar-like substance that also looked like shadows.
Abby: "You traded our people for what? Guns? Medicine?"
Moko: (gasping) "For time. The shadow promised... to spare the tribe. If we gave it... Bridges."
His hand flailed toward the ledger.
"Your father... was the first. But you... you were always the best."
The Tapir let out a screech, its body contorting - legs snapping, ribs bursting through its sides as shadows reshaped it into something jagged and starving.
Abby didn't hesitate. Her spear took it through the skull, and it collapsed, twitching for the final time.
The Tapir's dying screech echoed through the trees - followed by something larger answering in a voice too human, sounding far, yet so chilling to hear.
"Run, hunter. The moon's first course... is served."
Abby: (back to Elder Moko with a colder expression) "You're dying. Tell me how to stop it."
Moko's grin was a rictus of blood and shadow.
Moko: "You don't. The moon... cracks. The lock... breaks."
(His voice dropped to a whisper.)
"The girl... Lily... she's not the key."
Abby froze.
Moko: (chuckling) "She's the door."
Shadows erupted from Elder Moko's corpse - too late to stop her spear.
Abby brought the spear down.
Abby's wounded eye - the one that had wept shadows since the golden orb shattered - throbbed. The System glitched in her vision:
» HOST DETECTED: ABBY (SOUL-LINKED)
» WARNING: SHADOWFRAGMENTS DETECTED IN WORLD LOCATION "ELDERS' CIRCLE"
Then - pain.
The soul-link to Lina wrenched her sideways.
She came to and heard a howl echo through the trees - too high, too many notes at once.
Abby spun to see a jaguar slinking toward her, its spotted fur rippling as shadows pushed against the skin from within.
The jaguar's jaw unhinged, revealing a second mouth inside its throat.
Abby ran.
~
~
~
Lina convulsed in the hospital chair; her back arching as tribal marks surged up her arms.
The scar on her thigh split open, not bleeding blood but vomiting shadows onto the floor.
Mike lunged, grabbing her before she could collapse.
"Lina!"
Her pupils were black pools, her voice not her own:
"They're coming. The small ones first. The feeders."
Lily looked up from her drawing, her crayon hovering over a fresh sheet.
"Daddy," she whispered. "It's talking now."
The shadows on the floor twitched, forming words:
NEXT MOON. WE EAT.
A crash echoed from the hallway. Shouting.
Something heavy being dragged.
The overhead lights flickered - once, twice - then died.
The blackout wasn't just in the hospital.
Cities across the globe plunged into darkness as power grids failed.
The darkness licked at Mike's vision - not just absence of light, but something alive.
Social media exploded with shaky footage:
~ A Night Stalker dragging a screaming man into a subway tunnel.
~ Soldiers firing into a swarm of shadowy, dog-sized creatures - only for the bullets to pass through until someone lit a flare.
~ A priest in Rome screaming as his own shadow strangled him – how poetic.
Elsewhere, in the crumbling edges of civilization:
~ A homeless man in Tokyo clutched his head as his shadow peeled away from the pavement and slithered into his ears. He stood, smiling, and walked into traffic - his body folding like paper when the trucks hit, only to reform minutes later.
~ A deer in Yellowstone staggered, its antlers cracking as shadows twisted them into barbed hooks. It charged a ranger's Jeep, flipping the vehicle like it weighed nothing.
~ In a psychiatric ward in Berlin, the patients all sat up at once. Their whispers harmonized into a single phrase: "The moon is a wound."
~ A trending tweet from "@NYCwalker" with an attached video: "My dog was barking at its own shadow for about an hour. Now the shadow is barking back."
The military broadcasts called them "Night Stalkers."
The internet dubbed them "Shades."
But some knew the truth.
These were just appetizers.
The military moved fast.
Martial law.
Curfews.
But the creatures didn't care.
They were testing the waters.
And the moon's crack widened.
The door burst open. Not CDC - military.
"Everyone stays put,"
the soldier barked, his rifle sweeping the room.
"Quarantine protocol."
Mike's golden veins flared.
The System screamed in his skull:
» WARNING: HOST "MIKE" IDENTIFIED AS ANOMALY
» COUNTERMEASURES DEPLOYED
The soldier's shadow moved on its own.
Lily picked up a scalpel.