by Ellen Datlow
Boredom? Susan knew Jonathan spent several hours every week up on the surface. Hard to imagine that being boring.
The decorations would all disappear from the suits when they came back, cleansed with the normal re-entrance routine.
She stared at the PETTY marked at the top of Jonathan’s suit. It was bright green, as was everybody else’s name. Once outside, there would be no other way to tell everyone apart.
“Okay, it’s time,” she called to the class. The suits were starting to get warm, but they couldn’t activate the cooling system until their helmets were in place.
“Can I ask a question?”
Susan looked over and wasn’t surprised to see it was Matt Wiley. He was always asking questions. “Of course,” she answered.
“What about the Aliens? Aren’t they up on the surface?”
She hesitated and looked to Jonathan. He nodded and answered, “There’s no reason to believe the Aliens are on the Moon. That’s an old myth with no facts to back it up.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve been topside at least fifty times, and although there’s a lot we don’t know, we’ve never seen a single sign of any Aliens here. As far as we know, they’re all on Earth.”
A tiny voice carried from the back of the class, a voice Susan recognized immediately as belonging to her own daughter, Selene.
“What if you’re wrong?”
Susan said, “Nobody is wrong. This is totally safe, so you just need to enjoy your first Halloween!”
They finished up and started to gather around the tube. Only five people at a time would fit, so Jonathan went first with four kids. The next two trips took four kids each, while Susan waited for the last trip with the final two teens, including Selene.
As they rose up the two hundred meters to the surface, Susan felt like she was leaving her life behind. Going upside never felt normal to her. It was leaving the safety of the underground city for the vast expanse of the surface.
Nobody liked it. People belonged underground.
When she left the tube, the Earth was almost full, and it blasted enough light to cast shadows.
She tried to ignore it. She had to watch the kids.
“Testing. Can everybody hear me? Raise your hand if you can.”
Everyone raised an arm, some slower than others, but that was normal kid behavior. She knew they wanted to run and jump and explore, as she had the first time she herself visited the surface all those Earthies ago.
Soon enough.
There were surprises ahead, and she wanted them to enjoy them.
“So, remember, this is Halloween! It’s intended to be scary and fun and thrilling and…well, mysterious. I know you all want to go run around and jump, but we’re here to follow the Halloween Path.”
Even though most of their helmets had darkened due to the bright Earth-shine, she could see the kids staring at her in wonderment.
“Look at Earth,” she said. “That was where our ancestors came from. Humans lived there for thousands of years.”
She didn’t add, “Before they were all killed in a single day.”
She stared up, too. Earth was an extraordinary mystical globe high above, a brilliant gem stretching out above them, four times wider than the sun.
Jonathan added, “It used to be blue. The Aliens killed everyone and the planet ended up covered in bright white clouds. Nobody knows if it’ll stay that way forever.”
“When we get back,” said Susan, “you need to write a report, so pay attention.”
Jonathan took the lead and started half walking, half hopping ahead. Everyone else followed, with Susan at the end. She didn’t mind. It was Jonathan who’d come out the day before to set up the Path. She was just happy to see the kids on the surface, not freaking out, and being part of the day.
It was time.
Jonathan led the way to Station One, as they had planned. Everyone except him was skittish and had difficulty controlling their movements, but they were all having fun. Susan knew the suits were completely safe, so even if somebody fell onto a sharp rock, no damage would happen. If it was her, all she would feel would be embarrassment.
The Halloween Path was set up in the shape of a diamond with three stops before they would head back to Tranquility. Altogether, the trip should take an hour. Everyone had enough air for three hours.
The group hopped and skidded their way to the first stop. Jonathan had planned the route to navigate around any large rocks or craters. His footprints were still there from when he’d set everything up. All their footprints would be there the next time anybody took the same route. Nothing changed on the Moon.
When everybody arrived at the first stop, Susan checked the time. All good.
The kids formed a semicircle around a flat rock that had a holo-projector set up. When they crowded around, the projector started automatically using a technology nobody understood. They could hear the narration clearly in their suits.
Susan lost interest, having seen the show a dozen times already. The visuals showed an old-fashioned home as it might have existed on Earth, with kids showing up shouting “Trick or treat!” before a witch answered, screamed at them, and sprinkled candy into their bags. She hoped it was close to being accurate, but they’d never know for sure.
Instead, she looked back to the sky, to the amazing Earth.
Even though the sun was below the horizon, it barely mattered. Earth was the Moon’s bigger sun now.
Looking away from the homeland, the sky was pitch-black, sprinkled with a million tiny stars. She felt an urge to reach up and scoop the stars in her hand, like she imagined humans scooping grains of sand from a beach.
A sense of nostalgia grew in her, the loss of humanity’s roots, and she wondered about the most common mystery in Tranquility: Were the Aliens still on Earth, and if so, what were they doing?
The Halloween show finished with a loud clap, and the kids all jumped. So did Susan. Even though she knew it was coming, she’d been lost in thought.
“Time to go to Station Two,” said Jonathan. “Susan will be leading this time, so get in line behind her.”
As she led the way, Susan remembered some of the things that she’d found out about Halloween that she hadn’t managed to incorporate into the three projection shows. There just wasn’t time to include bobbing for apples, Halloween kisses, razor blades in candy, pumpkin pie, orange and black, egging houses (whatever that was), theme parks, and a hundred other topics that she’d dug up. Who knew how many were real and how many were myths? That was part of the fun.
Besides, she needed to leave some things for the class to research on their own.
She glanced back to be sure everyone was following her.
It took another ten minutes to get to the second stop, and Susan was starting to feel a bit winded. She wasn’t used to traveling this way.
When she got to the stop, the kids gathered around and started watching the second holo-cast. This one talked about traditions related to fortune tellers and diviners as well as people telling ghost stories to scare younger children.
Her favorite was how unmarried women sitting in a darkened room on Halloween night could look into a mirror to see the face of her future husband. If she saw a skull instead, she would die before marriage.
She could remember the script word for word, since she’d written it, with Jonathan’s help, of course.
Suddenly she looked around and realized Jonathan was not there. She blinked and looked again, sure her mind must be deceiving her.
But, no.
The tension that had been building up inside her made Susan feel like she was going to explode. She gulped and tried to not react, so that she wouldn’t scare the kids.
“Jonathan?”
No reply. Matt Wiley turned to look at her and then joined her as she hopped a bit in the direction they’d come.
“Jonathan!” Susan knew that there was panic in her voice, but she couldn’t help it.
“
Miss Sauble?”
Matt was beside her and had put a gloved hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, Matt. I think he just went to get something.”
“I know,” Matt said. “He’s the expert.”
The other kids were staring at them. Susan subconsciously looked for the girl with SAUBLE in bright green letters on her helmet. After another minute of no response from Jonathan, she said, “Let’s backtrack a bit. Maybe he’s nearby.”
They all started following along the messy footprints they had left. As they did so, Susan changed her frequency and asked Tranquility Central Communication if they’d heard from Jonathan. They had not.
It was a stretch to call Tranquility a city. Only two thousand people lived there, all the people left alive in the solar system. The outpost had started as a mining camp before the invasion, pulling out a surprising amount of raw diamonds. Every woman on Earth had wanted an engagement ring with a diamond from the Moon.
Now Tranquility did no mining. Its sole purpose was survival of the remaining humans.
About two hundred meters back, they found where he’d left the path. Two grooves led off to one side. They hadn’t been there earlier. Susan felt dread, knowing with a weird certainty that the parallel grooves were from Jonathan’s boots as he had been dragged.
“Stay here,” she said to the kids. Matt wanted to go with her, but she held out her arm to him, too. “I won’t go far.”
The grooves curved back behind a crater that rose high above her head. She shuffled along slowly, and her heart jumped when she saw a helmet ripped apart, lying on the ground.
On the faceplate, she could see PETTY in the now-familiar bright green color.
Blood covered the whole area, a giant splatter of darkness. It had flash frozen in the frigid temperatures.
The helmet itself had a giant jagged rip in it, like a ridiculous monster had taken a bite from it.
Aliens.
She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She wanted to run, but it felt like her feet were nailed to the Moon’s surface.
“Jonathan…?”
Whatever she said, the kids would hear.
There was no sign of the rest of Jonathan’s space suit, or of his body. There was a wide path that she could see continued to move around the crater into the emptiness beyond.
She had to get the kids to safety without panicking them.
Susan moved back to the front of the path, where the kids stared silently at her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Mr. Petty needed to go back because of a minor problem with his suit. We’re going to go back now, too.”
One of the kids asked, “Why did he just leave without telling us?”
Susan didn’t know for sure who asked, but she just snapped, “Because he didn’t. Let’s go.”
But where?
She knew the general direction to get to Station Three on the Halloween Path. They would have to go there, and then she could figure out the direction back to Tranquility.
“This way,” she said.
Susan started walking and realized she needed somebody she trusted to bring up the rear. Not Selene, though. She needed her up front, close to her.
“Matt, you make sure everyone follows. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Susan had never felt so alone in her life. She knew only a general way to the third stop, and she worked to get there. Every few minutes she stopped and hopped around to face the kids to be sure they were all following.
It took twenty minutes to get to the third stop.
When she got there, the holo started playing, but she just ignored it. The Halloween trip was the very last thing on her mind.
It’d been an hour since they’d left the city. Two hours of air left.
She counted the cohort members in her head…twelve, thirteen, fourteen…
Fourteen.
“Oh no.”
Matt Wiley was missing.
“Matt?” She waited a beat and then yelled, “MATT!” She knew the yelling would do no good. If he was alive, he would have answered the first call. Safety was drilled into every Moonie as soon as they could crawl.
Aliens.
No, it couldn’t be. They weren’t really on the Moon.
Were they?
Nobody knew for sure, but the old stories that had been passed down for a half-dozen generations told of how the Aliens destroyed Earth and then left an outpost on the Moon, not realizing that humanity’s only remaining habitat was there.
Maybe they found out today.
She looked up at the blazing Earth, shining brightly in the sky, and wondered as so many others did before her, what exactly happened up there?
They would never know. She looked back at her fourteen remaining kids.
“Stay here. Move closer together so you can watch each other. I’ll be right back.”
She hopped back along the way they’d come, pursing her lips from fear. If something happened to her, what would happen to the kids?
She had to get them back.
There was no sign of Matt as she tracked back for several minutes.
If he was hurt somewhere and she left him, he would likely be dead before a rescue team would find him. Time was their enemy now as much as anything else.
If she didn’t leave him, who knew what would happen to the other kids?
She stopped and tried to think, but her mind didn’t seem to want to work. She didn’t know what to do.
“Mom?”
Selene’s voice shocked her back to reality. “I’m coming back,” she said.
“We’re scared.”
“I know. I’m almost there.”
—
THE TRIP BACK to Groundport was the longest walk of Susan’s life. She kept imagining Matt calling to her, but she knew it was never real. None of the remaining kids heard anything.
She took the trailing position this time, and she kept constantly chatting about which direction to go, so the kids would know she was still there.
When they got back to the Port, she once again counted the kids. Fourteen.
Oh, God, how can I tell Matt’s parents that I left him out there?
She blinked away tears and forced herself to just work on the task at hand. She waited for the shaft to open and she loaded the first five kids inside. She made sure Selene was in that first group.
Shortly everyone was back inside in pressurized rooms. As per normal protocol, they were scanned and cleansed, and then they waited in a holding area.
Susan thought about Aliens.
All the kids were chattering to each other, now that they were safely home. She knew they’d all been terrified on the surface, and she wondered if they’d ever feel comfortable going back again.
As the mandatory hour-long quarantine period ended, a door slid open and they were free to leave.
Standing in the doorway was Jonathan Petty.
She thought she was hallucinating, or maybe that Aliens had somehow entered his brain and were controlling his body.
“Hi, everybody!” he called. He was grinning widely, and two techies that walked into the room with him laughed along with him.
“What the hell?” Susan stared but didn’t know what to say.
“It’s Halloween, remember?”
The kids all stared at him, as confused as Susan.
“Remember what I said about Halloween? It’s a chance to be somebody you’re not. Sometimes that’s a scary person, and this year I wanted to make you all feel like you were experiencing a real Halloween up on Earth. I wanted to be an Alien for you, and scare you a bit.”
“You mean…your helmet? The blood?”
“All fake. Prepared ahead of time. I thought the blood was a nice touch.”
It still wasn’t sinking in to Susan. “It wasn’t real?”
She looked at the kids, and she could see them all starting to smile and grin, mostly at her own discomfort. After all, they hadn’t seen the site where Jonathan’s helmet
and spilled blood were.
Fake blood, she corrected herself.
“I really think this is what Halloween was like,” Jonathan said. “Kids going out trick-or-treating and the people in their homes scaring them. Isn’t that right?”
Susan couldn’t help but nod. That sounded right to her, too. She just hadn’t expected to live through a real Halloween.
Why had the people on Earth done this year after year?
“Halloween must have been awful,” said Selene.
Jonathan smiled. “We’ll never understand, but the good points must have outweighed the bad.”
In spite of herself, Susan ran to Jonathan and hugged him. She’d never done that before, but she still needed to be convinced he was real.
“Where’s Matt?” she asked.
“Matt?”
Susan looked through the door Jonathan had come through. “Isn’t he with you? He’d want to…”
She snapped her head back.
“Tell me he was part of the trick.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked at the kids, scanning them all, and then he said, “Oh, God, what happened?”
“He was there one minute and then he wasn’t.”
“He’s still out there?”
Susan couldn’t reply. She felt sick and frozen.
—
THE RESCUE TEAM suited up quickly. Susan and Jonathan went with them. She led them to the last place she knew for sure Matt had been with them, and then to the third leg of the Halloween Path, the first place she noticed he was missing.
They never found a trace of him. A week later, they held a remembrance service for him.
In her heart, Susan blamed herself. She should have been the one at the end of the line, not Matt.
When she was back in her cabin that evening, she cried.
She never wanted to think about Halloween again.
About the Authors
Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Cainsville modern gothic series and the Casey Butler crime thrillers. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, the Age of Legends fantasy YA series, and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. Armstrong lives in Ontario, Canada, with her family.
