172 Hours on the Moon (22 page)

Mia’s head felt foggy. It had only been an hour since the regular flow of oxygen from the generator had stopped, but she could
already feel how difficult it was becoming to breathe. Every breath gave her the sense that someone had already breathed this
same air and tapped it of all its sustenance. After the power went off, the temperature had slowly begun to rise. The sun,
which was beating down on the moon’s surface, ensuring temperatures of over two hundred degrees outside, was working its way
through the base’s insulation. And now that the cooling elements weren’t working anymore, there wasn’t much to keep the heat
at bay.

Midori was sitting by herself in a corner of the kitchen, trying to eat an apple. Caitlin was studying the map. It was her
idea to stick it out for another couple of hours before they left the base
for good and started their trek to DARLAH 1. The sun was still too strong out there. Without an atmosphere there was nothing
to protect them from its radiation, and therefore it was too dangerous to risk going out. Besides, Caitlin wanted to give
them an opportunity to drink enough before they left. Turning around and coming back wouldn’t be an option.

Mia was standing by the big window, looking out. In the reflection from the sun in the windowpane, she could see her own reflection,
unclear and dim. She turned on her flashlight and pointed it at her face. The reflection in the window got clearer. She could
see that she looked frazzled. The last several days had clearly left their mark. Mia thought she looked like a living ghost.
She had obvious dark circles under her eyes, and her hair hung limply to one side. It was a depressing sight. She lowered
the light, and her face disappeared from the glass.

“Mia? Are you sure you’ve had enough to drink?” Caitlin asked. Mia turned to her and nodded absentmindedly. She couldn’t bear
the thought of forcing herself to drink another drop of water here. It tasted metallic, old, rotten. It tasted like slow death.

She was impatient. Couldn’t they just go? Get it over with? She wanted to get out of here as soon as possible and never come
back. It had been a mistake to come here in the first place, the biggest mistake of them all. From the very beginning this
place had been eating away at her, and by this time, there was hardly anything left. The only boy she had ever had a chance
to love was out there somewhere with Nadolski, or alone. And she could almost smell the decay lingering in the walls. She
had to
focus to try to keep herself from imagining that it was the smell of Wilson, Stanton, and Coleman. She wasn’t sure where they
were, but they were nearby. She could feel it.

Again she raised her eyes and aimed the light at her face. She looked at the window. Her features were almost even clearer
now. She could study the details around her nose, her mouth, her hair. She didn’t look good. Resigned, she switched the flashlight
off and lowered it.

That was when she noticed it.

Her reflection didn’t disappear.

It stayed there in the window, even clearer than before.

For a second she allowed herself to just be fascinated by it. She made a face.

But her reflection didn’t change.

And in a fraction of the next second she realized:
That isn’t a reflection. That is you. Yourself
.

Out there
.

Mia screamed. She dropped the light and staggered backward as she saw her own face in the window sneer at her. She lost her
balance, bumped into the table, and knocked several plates off before she fell on the floor. Midori leapt out of her chair
and came running.

“Mia, what is it?” she yelled. “Mia?”

Mia pointed to the window, and Midori cautiously walked over to it. She looked out.

“There’s nothing there, Mia. Nothing.”

“I saw …” Mia couldn’t complete the sentence. She closed her eyes. Caitlin was up. She came over to Midori.

“What’s going on? Mia?” Caitlin stood at the window. “Did you see something? What did you see?”

Mia didn’t have a chance to respond. A hundred, a hundred and fifty feet beyond the base, Caitlin spotted Antoine.
Antoine!

He was standing there looking at her. He was wearing the same brown clothes he’d had on when she first met him. He waved at
her.

“Antoine!” she shouted. “Antoine! He’s out there. He’s alive!”

Mia registered the name but couldn’t quite comprehend it. Behind closed eyes, she was still seeing her own face, sneering
at her malevolently. As if it knew something she didn’t.

Caitlin was frozen, watching the boy outside. He waved again, then suddenly turned around and walked away from her.

“No, wait!” Caitlin yelled, then spun around and ran past the girls into the corridor.

“Caitlin, don’t do it!” Mia shouted. “It’s not him, do you hear me? It’s not him. It can’t be.
He’s not wearing a suit!
”

But Caitlin wasn’t listening. She was fueled by adrenaline and fresh hope and her own delusions. She ran like she’d never
run before, out of module one, past the computer room, and into the equipment room. Without a second to lose, she climbed
into one of the spacesuits, strapped on a full oxygen tank, and secured her helmet before she stepped into the decompression
chamber. The power had made the hatches unusable, and she was forced to close the innermost door manually. She held on tightly
to one of the handles along the wall and forced the outermost hatch up a few centimeters. A second later she felt the vacuum
outside sucking all the air out of the room and pressing her against the hatch wall.

Once she felt the pressure equalize, she raised the outer hatch far enough to step out onto the surface.

Caitlin passed the closed hatch where Wilson and Stanton had died and continued around the exterior of module two. She was
struggling not to hyperventilate. When she rounded the corner, she spotted him outside the kitchen.

Antoine
.

She called out to him over the intercom, waved her arms. But he just stood there, motionless, looking at her. She stopped
for a second, unsure. Why was he staring at her? Why wasn’t he glad to see her?

Slowly he started walking toward her. With steady, rhythmic footsteps. Caitlin froze, unable to move.

Oh my God
, she managed to think.
What the …?

Mia was on her feet, standing next to Midori in the window.

They saw Caitlin standing perfectly still outside the window as Antoine rushed toward her at an alarming speed. He was virtually
skimming over the surface, as if he weren’t constrained by the laws of physics. In a flash, he disappeared right behind Caitlin.
Mia strained to spot him again, but he was out of sight.

“That’s not Antoine,” she heard Midori whisper. “That’s a copy!” It felt like the next few seconds lasted an hour. Mia heard
Midori speaking but didn’t understand what she was saying. Out of nowhere Antoine’s face popped up in front of the window,
his mouth twisted in a repulsive sneer, and right after that he was gone.

Caitlin turned to face them slowly and made eye contact with Mia just as something grabbed hold of her and tore her legs off
from under her. The look on her face was more one of surprise
than pain. She formed a word with her lips, but it was impossible to understand what she was trying to say. Then in an instant
she was pulled away, disappearing under the base, leaving the surface deserted and undisturbed.

Midori was in tears now, shaking uncontrollably and short of breath. The terrible sight of Caitlin’s sudden death was sending
her into shock. Mia wanted to just hold her, tell her that everything would be okay. But that wasn’t true. It was going to
get worse, much worse, if they didn’t get out of this place.

Mia knew she had to act fast. It was too late to do anything for Caitlin, but there was one glimmer of hope left. Midori was
squatting below the window, her head between her legs, sobbing silently. Drool was running out of her mouth.

“Wait here,” Mia commanded. “Lock the door and don’t open it until I get back, understand?”

“Where are you going?” Midori stammered.

“I have to find Coleman, if he’s still alive.”

“I don’t want to be alone here!” Midori pleaded.

“It’ll be fine. Just lock the door behind me and stay low.”

Mia grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter and ran out into the hallway, through the bedrooms and the bathroom, and down
the corridors. The beam from her flashlight flickered over the walls and ceilings as she ran as fast as she could. She checked
the computer room and then ran to the infirmary in module four, but there was no one there either.

And then she suddenly stopped.

Music. She heard music.

But that’s impossible. The power is out
.

Mia started trembling. She knew that song. It was the Talking Heads.

Somewhere nearby she heard a girl’s voice softly singing along to the words:
“Hold tight — wait till the party’s over, Hold tight — we’re in for nasty weather …”

The music stopped as suddenly as it had started. Something moved in one of the corridors; she could clearly hear the footsteps.
Then they stopped.

Mia listened. She slowly walked down the corridor, past the computer room again, and continued on toward module two, deliberately
putting one foot in front of the other, holding her flashlight up in front of her. She saw nothing. She turned around and
shone the light the other way. And now the light revealed a person at the very end of the corridor.

The person was identical to herself.

The figure was wearing the same clothes she usually wore, her black jeans. The jacket she bought at the flea market in London
the year before, which she wore almost every day. It had the same hair. Exactly the same face. With the exception of the unrelenting
sneer that hung over it.
And it’s wearing my Italian paratrooper boots
, she thought.

“Hi, Mia,” the figure said, taking a step closer. “Are you scared? It’s just me. Don’t you recognize me?”

Mia couldn’t speak.

“Aren’t you going to say hi?”

She didn’t respond.

“I’m sorry about that business with your friends. But there really was no other way.” Even the voice was the same as her
own. Just calmer, with a slightly different accent. The figure took another step forward.

“Stop!” Mia cried, pointing the knife at her.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, continuing to approach. “Were you happy to see Antoine again? I only did that
for your sake.”

Mia got down on her knees, holding the knife up in front of her, and let the figure come even closer. She was waiting until
she was sure it was within reach. She waited as long as she dared.

Then she struck. With a powerful thrust, she drove the knife into the figure’s thigh, and she could feel it forcing its way
into the flesh.

But the figure just took a step back, pulled the knife out, and threw it away. “Why did you do that?” she said, sounding disappointed.
“Come here, Mia. Come.”

Mia leapt up to a standing position, whirled around, lost her flashlight, and ran back toward the kitchen. She felt an intense
wave of pain as she smacked into a security hatch face-first. It knocked out one of her teeth.

“I thought you’d try to run,” the voice said. “So I shut the hatch.”

She was still coming closer. Mia became aware of something wet and sticky running down her forehead and realized she’d gotten
a gash in her head. The pain was throbbing now.

“I was the one who cut the power, too. And I shut that hatch outside to stop your friends from repairing the generator. I
met your friend Antoine a couple of miles from here, too. A handsome boy, very handsome. He was with someone else. Unfortunately
I couldn’t allow them to complete their task, so I … forbade them.”

In a panic, Mia’s hands fumbled their way to the bottom edge of the hatch and forced it up.

The footsteps came closer.

Closer
.

She was only a couple feet away now.

Mia flung herself down onto the floor and rolled under the hatch before it fell down again with a loud, metallic
clunk
. She got back up and sprinted the last few yards to the kitchen.

“Midori, hurry! Help me shut this door!”

Mia threw her back against the door while Midori desperately rotated the wheel until it was tightly locked.

“What happened?” Midori whispered, looking at Mia, listening intently for any sounds, her eyes glued to the door.

Mia didn’t answer the question, but her response was swift. “We have to get out of here.”

“Come on,” Midori whispered. “I know a place we can hide for now.”

The creature out in the corridor had either disappeared or was lying in wait. Mia and Midori crawled across the floor without
making a sound. They slid open the bolt that held the door to the dry storage room closed and crawled in there. Midori shut
the door behind them and set the lights on the floor while Mia ripped off one of the arms of her T-shirt and pressed the piece
of fabric against the bleeding, aching wound on her forehead.

Midori had regained her composure, but they were both exhausted, and the ever-decreasing supply of oxygen wasn’t helping.
In the glow from the flashlights on the floor, they looked like two ghosts, pale, their faces drawn.

“What’s going on, Mia?” Midori asked quietly. “Is the lack of oxygen starting to affect us? Are we hallucinating? Maybe there’s
something about this base that’s …”

“Killing us? Is that what you were going to say?” Mia asked. “Yes. Whatever it is, it really exists.”

“But what in the world were you going to do out there?” Midori whispered, her tone just as accusatory as it was nervous. “You
just left.” She raised the flashlight so it lit up the middle of Mia’s face.

“I was looking for Coleman,” Mia said.

“Why? You don’t even know if he’s still alive, Mia. Didn’t you hear what he said? He gave up.”

“I’m sure he’s alive. He’s here somewhere or other. Somewhere he’s sure he won’t be discovered by …
them
.”

Midori set the light on the floor in front of them. “But I don’t understand why you want to talk to him again. If there was
something else he could do or say to help, he would have told us before.”

“I think he knows more than he told us,” Mia said soberly. “And without that information we don’t stand a chance of getting
out of here alive.”

“So what do you suggest?” Midori asked.

“He must be somewhere in module one.”

“It’s a long way over there, Mia.”

Mia wasn’t listening. “Get ready.”

Seconds later they heard scraping sounds from the other side of the steel door out in the kitchen.

Mia slapped a hand over Midori’s mouth….

Followed by the sound of the wheel that was keeping the door out there locked. Or at least
had
been.

The door opened.

Mia and Midori didn’t move. They heard footsteps in the kitchen. Someone was slowly moving toward them. Mia pressed her hand
harder over Midori’s mouth. She wanted to shriek herself, fling the door open, and get it over with. But she sat there, her
back so tense that her shoulders ached. Without making the slightest sound, she leaned over and turned off the lights.

They sat in the darkness and waited.

Thunk. Thunk
.

Two knocks on the door to the dry storage room.

Footsteps.

Mia stared at the door, expecting it to open. Her head hurt so much it was almost impossible to concentrate.

Thunk. Thunk
. A little harder this time.

Then it was quiet.

Mia’s heart was pounding so hard that she was sure the figure on the other side of the door could hear it. She put a hand
on her chest as if to muffle the sound.

But then they could hear the creature taking a few steps back from the door. Silence again. Then the sound of rapid movement,
and the door to the kitchen banging shut.

The creature had probably left the room, but neither Mia nor Midori dared move for several minutes.

Finally Mia was the one to break the silence. She whispered as quietly as she could, “I think we’d better take our chances
now.”

“Wouldn’t it be best to wait a little more?”

“We don’t have time, Midori. DARLAH is almost out of oxygen — can’t you feel it?”

“Yeah,” Midori finally responded.

Mia squatted down and picked up one of the lights.

“Okay, Midori. Let’s do it. We’ll walk through the corridors to module one. Try to be as quiet as possible. If we meet anyone
on the way, you run in the opposite direction and try to make it to DARLAH 1, whether you’re with me or not. Good? Oh, and
another thing — there’s no point in attacking them. I tried. I stabbed one of them with a big knife. It had no effect at all.”

Midori nodded silently and replied, “The same for you. If someone attacks me, you run.”

As quietly as they could, they raised the bolt and opened the door of the dry storage room.

They shone their lights out into the kitchen. There was no one there, not a soul. The whole room seemed unusually desolate,
as if no one had ever been there.

Mia took the first step and snuck toward the door leading to the corridor with Midori right behind her.

They stopped about every five steps and listened, letting their lights sweep over the corridor before they proceeded, and
every time it turned out to be empty they were filled with an enormous sense of relief.

And then a fresh dread that the thing they feared was lying in wait somewhere in the darkness ahead of them.

They were past open security hatch M when Mia suddenly had an idea and stopped.

“What are you doing?” Midori asked anxiously.

“I want to check one place I forgot to look last time.” She turned around and aimed her light back the way they had come.

“Are we going back?” Midori asked.

“Not all the way,” Mia said. “Follow me.”

Mia headed toward the computer room, stayed to the left, and continued down the corridor. She didn’t know what made her so
sure, but before she even set foot in the greenhouse, she knew she was right.

She heard the sound of a man breathing.

Slowly she ran her light over the dense foliage.

And there he sat.

Coleman. Up against the apple tree, with a pistol in his hand. He looked up at them sadly.

“You girls shouldn’t be here now. Why are you still here? Didn’t I tell you to get out of this place?”

They could see him wave the muzzle of the gun over his head. He seemed more disappointed than surprised to see them.

“There’s someone here,” Mia told him. “Someone else.”

“What do you mean?”

And Mia explained. About Antoine showing up outside the window. About Caitlin going out to get him and disappearing. About
Mia’s double that she’d met in the corridor outside module two. Coleman listened, and when she was done, he lowered his head.

“Well, then, it’s really started again,” he said to himself.

“What’s started? What are you talking about?” Mia asked. She moved slowly around the tree, bending over, as if ready to pounce.
Her eye was on the open hatch door leading to the computer room. Midori was huddled under some large palm fronds
up against the wall. Every once in while she would suddenly turn toward the dark glass behind her, as if someone had tapped
her on the shoulder.

“What we’ve been afraid of all these years. What we came here to prevent.”

His laconic explanation frustrated Mia. It reminded her of Caitlin, the way she’d been after she helped herself to the medications.
As if Coleman had stopped caring now, too. But Mia knew better. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He was just holding something
back.

“What is it that you don’t want to tell us?” she demanded to know. “Something is trying to kill us here, don’t you get it?
Everything you’ve told us is bullshit and you know it. What are you so afraid people will find out?”

“Oh,” he responded. “There’s plenty to be afraid of. You ought to understand that by now.”

Coleman ran his hand across his forehead, wiping away the sweat. The dense foliage above him made his face appear even darker.

“Are you worried about NASA’s reputation or something? That people will find out this mission wasn’t a success? That you guys
were up to a lot more on the moon than you told people, is
that
it? I’m sure most people have managed to figure that out on their own by now.”

“No,” he replied. “That’s hardly it.”

“So what the hell is it, then? You know all about it, don’t you? You’ve known the whole time. And if you have even so much
as a tiny speck of conscience left, I suggest you tell us what you know so that we can get out of here.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know everything, Mia. No one does. The fact of the matter is that we know hardly anything.”

“But?” Mia prompted.

He took a deep breath. The smell of rot hung heavy in the steamy, overgrown nursery. “I thought it would be best if you didn’t
know anything. You must know that what I’m about to tell you now is top secret, sensitive information. It’s important that
you understand that.”

The expressions on Midori’s and Mia’s faces clearly indicated they felt the idea of anything being top secret at this point
was ridiculous. And Coleman had to agree, in a way.

He sighed heavily and set his weapon down in the grass. “The moon missions didn’t end in 1972 because of a lack of funds or
interest from the public, as people thought. The truth is that we no longer dared to send anyone to the moon. Have you heard
about
Apollo 13
?”

They had. Nadolski had given a lecture on all the space missions in the Apollo program. After
Apollo 11
’s first moon landing, the nearly catastrophic
Apollo 13
mission in 1970 was the most well known. And definitely the most exciting.
Apollo 13
experienced an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks two days into the expedition. Almost without power and oxygen, the astronauts
had been forced to continue on to the moon to make use of the weak gravitational field to fling themselves back toward Earth.
It was definitely a miracle that they survived. And the sentence
Houston, we have a problem
was forever burned into space history.

“The world held its breath during the days that was going on,” Coleman continued. “But for the wrong reason. Because there
never was an explosion aboard
Apollo 13
. The whole thing was a lie, a complicated, convoluted, well-rehearsed lie to hide what actually happened. Because the truth
is that
Apollo 13
landed in the Fra Mauro area according to plan. But something unforeseen happened.”

“What?” Mia asked, suspicious, peering out into the darkness for signs that someone was observing them. But she didn’t see
anything.

“The pilot of the lunar lander, Fred Haise, came in contact with …
something
down in the Fra Mauro crater. It started when he observed an … anomaly … from the window of the lunar lander, and NASA ordered
him to investigate it.”

“But this doesn’t at all match what the astronauts themselves said about the whole thing,” Midori protested. “I watched the
interviews. I read the biographies Nadolski gave us. I heard the tapes from the command module. You’re lying.”

“I wish I were. And I’m sure Haise wishes that what he told the world was true, too. But it isn’t. Everything you’ve read,
heard, or seen was made up. Fred Haise was on the moon, and he found something that shouldn’t be there.”

“What?”

“Well, the reports were unclear … until today. But it had to do with a figure. Someone or something that looked exactly …
like … himself.”

“Like what we saw!” Midori exclaimed.

“Yeah…. Fred Haise just barely got away, made it back to the lunar lander, and, along with Jim Lovell, left the surface of
the moon after just a couple hours. A quick evacuation. But there’s
more. It happened on several of the moon missions. This was just one of many episodes. There were problems going back as early
as
Apollo 11
. Midori, you found Buzz Aldrin’s boots, right?”

She nodded.

“Well, they weren’t left on the surface to reduce weight, as you were told. He threw them in the hopes of hitting something,
something that was coming toward him. The truth is that for all these years, most of the folks at NASA believed that the astronauts’
descriptions of seeing copies of themselves on the moon had to do with some type of reflection, an optical illusion brought
about by the environment here. People believed that up until the event involving Haise in 1970. After that, everyone involved
in Mission Control in Houston was ordered to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and since then they have been excluded from any
further research findings. The top brass at NASA started cooperating with the military to build a base on the moon that could
be used to study and potentially wipe out the phenomenon. NASA also got SETI researchers involved.”

“SETI?”

“The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here. I just thought I’d get that out
there. We’re dealing with something much, much more dangerous. Something that’s completely unknown to us. It’s unlike anything
we know about, because it operates totally outside all normal patterns, completely emotionless. It’s beyond all goodness,
all evil. It just is. And it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than pure destruction.”

“You’re saying it’s not an alien? How can you be so sure of that?”

Coleman was quiet for a long moment.

“NASA captured one of them in 1972. Well, a piece of one.
Apollo 17
was attacked as it prepared to take off from the moon, and when they tried to close the hatch, one of the copy’s arms was
severed.”

“So they’re human?” Mia asked, feeling a strange surge of hope for a moment.

“No. Studies of the severed arm showed that it did not contain any organic material. It wasn’t alive, never had been.”

“So what is it, then?”

They were sitting next to Coleman now. Mia was keeping a constant eye on the hatch leading to the computer room. In this darkness
they should have been staying well hidden or keeping in constant motion. They weren’t doing either. They could be discovered
at any time. But she had a feeling that what Coleman was telling them was important for them if they were going to have any
chance at getting home.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘doppelgänger’?” Coleman asked.

Mia had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded like the name of some insect. “Say that again?”