The Heebie-Jeebies
(Short Sci-Fi Horror Story)
By Antony W.F. Chow
Copyright © 2016 by Antony W.F. Chow, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author.
The book cover was made by the author based on Dreamstime.com stock image ID #53361097, “Blue Earth seen on moon surface.” The image is copyrighted © by Rfischa and was used under Dreamstime’s Royalty Free license. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this work are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The middle-aged Asian man stood in front of the display panel, a shot of scotch in hand while admiring the view of Earth. The 3D replica of the home planet was compiled from images taken from visual sensors on Lunar Base 4, where Dr. Lee Man Yeung worked as an engineer specializing in the structural integrity of the base. In other words, he was a glorified building inspector.
A tall black man soon joined Yeung in admiring the image of Earth. “Anything special today?” the man asked while sipping on some beer he brewed in his apartment—strictly as a hobby, of course.
Yeung looked back and saw Dr. Bruce Leroy Armstrong, the head of engineering section and Yeung’s boss. “I spent the day tracking down air leaks in Storage Facility 12, and using the spider-bots to patch the holes in the building,” the underling replied.
“How many did you find and how many has been patched up?” the boss asked.
Yeung hesitated for a moment because his boss wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Well?” Armstrong prodded.
“I’ve managed to scan one-fourth of the facility today, and so far I’ve found two dozen breaches. Most of them were fixed by the spider-bots, but two of the holes were too big and too deep for the bots to fix. I need to ask Jordan to 3D print bigger patches for these holes,” the inspector reported.
Armstrong was not pleased. “Yeung, you mean to tell me that you’re behind schedule in your inspection?”
The employee protested the implication that he was slacking on the job. “Sir, Storage Facility 12 is a Class A building with major freezer units for our food stores and delicate instruments that require storage in sub-zero temperature. These electronics interfere with computer scans of the building. I have to scan major sections of the facility manually, with a hand scanner, and that’s the reason for the delay in schedule,” he explained. “And due to the need for manual scanning, I formally request assistance to scan Storage Facility 12,” he added.
“Denied,” the supervisor rejected the request immediately. “The engineering section has been understaffed. I don’t have extra bodies to pull out of their critical assignments to help you do yours.”
“Well, there is some sort of sickness going around in the base,” Yeung noted. “A lot of people have been calling in sick lately.”
“Hush!” Armstrong put a finger to his lips. He furtively looked around the lounge and saw that no other colonist was paying attention to their conversation. “Don’t spread rumors!” he hissed with a harsh glare.
The Asian man visibly shrunk under the stare. He looked around and confirmed that no one was eavesdropping on their conversation. “Look, boss, I’ll be honest with you. There is something going on in the base that is giving me the heebie-jeebies. When I pass by some of our fellow colonists, I feel a sense of, let’s say, ‘wrongness’ from them. I have no proof, but my gut feeling says something big is going down soon.” The man drew closer to his boss. “I don’t want our base to fail again, just like our predecessors,” Yeung shared his worry.
“History said there were malfunctions on those moon bases,” Armstrong replied. “The first one was caught in a solar flare that incinerated all human life on board. All the instruments and circuitry on the base were fried. The second one was bombarded with large debris from a passing comet, resulting in loss of structural integrity and the colonists were sucked out into space,” Armstrong raised his eyebrows for emphasis. “The third base was struck by a meteorite and the impact led to a total loss of the base. These are the official explanations for the loss of our previous lunar bases, and I have no reason to think otherwise. Neither you nor I was alive when we lost those bases in 2025, 2030, and 2040. Fifty years have passed since the loss of our third base, and I’m confident that Lunar Base 4 will prove to be a thriving base from which humanity’s dreams of interstellar travel will finally be launched.”
“Here, here,” Yeung raised his glass.
Armstrong touched his glass against Yeung’s, and each man took a sip of his respective drink. The boss looked at the official time on the display and saw that it was past 10 PM. “Look, it’s getting late. Let’s finish our drinks and continue with our assignments tomorrow. If I can’t find anyone in engineering to help you finish the manual scan of Building 12, I may join you myself. Sounds good?” he asked.
“Yes, sir!” the employee saluted.
***
The next morning, when Yeung arrived at Storage Facility 12, he was accosted at the building’s entrance by a blonde woman whose hair was tied up in a bundle behind her head. The inspector saw that she was holding an environmental survival unit (“ESU”), like himself.
The woman offered a pretty smile that accentuated her baby blue eyes as Yeung approached the entrance. “Hi, I’m Gladise Richberg from Materials section. Please call me Glady,” she introduced herself warmly and held out her hand. “I’m volunteering to assist you in your manual scan of the building,” she explained.
“Hi, Glady! Glad to have you here,” Yeung replied with a deliberate pun as he shook her hand. The smile on his face quickly evaporated when he felt the heebie-jeebies along his spine as he physically touched her.
The young woman noticed the sudden change in his facial expression. “Is there something wrong?” she asked with apparent concern in her light voice.
The Asian man blinked his eyes several times as he looked at her face closely. His intuition told him to run. But he couldn’t see anything wrong with her. “I think I might have a slight hangover,” he lied. Yeung had no idea why she was giving him the heebie-jeebies, but he lacked the authority to simply send her away. The best thing to do was to assign Glady to a different section of the facility so that she would stay away from him. Facility 12 was a big building, and once he assigned her to work on the other end of the building she would be nowhere near him.
“Have you been certified to work inside an ESU?” the inspector asked.
“Yes sir!” the temporary worker saluted.
Yeung turned on his tablet, which was connected to the moon base’s database, and pulled up Glady’s certification list. He looked through the long, impressive list of certifications and finally confirmed her certification in the use of the ESU. There goes the last chance to send her away, he thought ruefully. He turned off the tablet, looked up at her, and offered a fake smile. “Please put on the ESU now. Once I confirm that your suit has been properly sealed, we will enter the building together,” he said.
The young woman quickly put on her suit. She was very proficient at it, and only took a few more seconds than the well practiced Yeung.
The inspector saw a green light on the suit’s chest; the green color offered confirmation that the suit was properly sealed and air-tight. He turned on the radio inside his helmet. “This is Yeung. Do you copy, Glady?”
“Roger that, Yeung,” his partner replied over the radio.
The inspector handed out detailed instructions. “Okay, here’s the assignment for today. When we ente
r the building, I will go to the left and continue where I left off yesterday. You will head to the right, and perform your scan from that side. We will work for four hours, and then leave the building for an hour lunch break. Before you leave the building, you will need to report your progress in the app on your tablet. This report should include what holes you found and were able to repair, what you couldn’t fix, and the sections that you have manually scanned during the session. Please note that this isn’t a race to finish scanning the entire building. It’s more important to do a thorough job in finding all the cracks that need to be fixed. My boss is already aware that the repairs for Storage Facility 12 will take longer than originally scheduled, and he has given us permission to take as long as necessary to locate and fix all the cracks in the structure of the building. Do you have any questions?”
“No sir,” Glady replied.
“Okay. I’m going to enter the code to unlock the door now, and then we’ll work for the next four hours. If anything comes up, please contact me via radio,” Yeung said. He stood in front of the keypad to the right of the door and entered the access code. The door opened with a hiss. Yeung entered Storage Facility 12 and started walking to the section where he had left off yesterday.
The Lunar Base was a series of buildings on the surface of the moon connected by a series of underground tunnels. Originally, the conglomerates back on Earth wanted to make the base underground, but a cost analysis showed that it was much cheaper to create the base on the surface instead. The funding for the bases was raised through a mishmash of crowd funding, donations from private non-profits, and government grants. A substantial part of the construction and material costs were also donated, in the spirit of advancing the interests of humanity.
Yeung turned on his tablet and opened his logbook app. The app was a customized program that contained blueprints of each facility on the base. There was also a GPS tracker that tracked the portions of the building’s surface, from the inside, that had been scanned. The app had a compiler function that allowed Yeung and his boss to measure productivity—by the number of feet scanned, the number of cracks found and fixed, etc.
The current building was only four stories tall, but it was the width of two full football fields. The inspector walked along the ground until he reached the area where he had left off yesterday. He magnetized his boots and started walking along the vertical surface of the building. Yeung slapped the tablet on his right forearm; the back of the tablet had Velcro to attach to the Velcro on the arm of his ESU. He pulled the handheld scanner from his breast pocket and turned it on. The scanner used infrared light to find cracks in the walls of the building; when it does, the scanner will beep and vibrate. The scanner had a range of only fifty feet, meaning that Yeung had a lot of walking to do.
About an hour into his work, the inspector decided to check on his volunteer. “How’s the work coming along, Glady?” he radioed. He waited a few seconds; however, he did not receive a response. “Are you there?” Yeung asked. Another few seconds passed without a response.
The inspector pulled out his tablet and activated a ping. In a moment, he saw a blinking red dot marking Glady’s location within the building. He saved his current location for his manual scan into the app and then started descending down the wall. When he reached the ground, Yeung demagnetized his boots and started taking big bounces along the ground to cover more distance quickly under the moon’s 0.16g.
As the man approached the red blinking light on his map, he saw that the signal was coming from the normal food storage area. When he stood in front of the rows of grain silos, he found the ESU, along with woman’s clothes, scattered on the ground. “Where are you Glady?” he yelled. Without the GPS tracker, which was embedded within in the discarded environmental suit, there was no way for Yeung to locate his missing worker electronically. Suddenly, he heard movement in one of the silos and decided to investigate.
The inspector stood in front of Grain Silo 12-C and magnetized his boots. He started walking along the surface when he heard a sound of shifting grains from inside the silo. Concerned that the young woman had somehow fallen into the silo and was suffocating, the Asian man hurried up the silo until he reached the top. Standing on the edge of the silo, he looked down and saw only grain. The inspector pulled out nylon rope from the pocket on his right thigh; he tied one end of the rope to his utility belt and the other end to an extension rod on the edge of the silo.
The man peered into the grain, wondering if there was something inside the silo. Suddenly, Glady burst out from the grain! The movement startled him, and he almost fell in!
The young woman saw his reaction and laughed.
When Yeung's heart finally stopped pounding so hard inside his chest, he yelled at her. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
"I was bored doing the manual scan, and decided to skinny dip for a bit," she replied mischievously.
"I DEMAND THAT YOU COME OUT AT ONCE!" he screamed again.
With the smile still plastered on her face, Glady started to wade across the grain until she reached the still angry man.
Yeung reached out with his right arm to pull her up. As she came out of the grains, he suddenly realized that she was completely undressed. He quickly turned his head aside. "What, what happened to your clothes?" he stammered.
"'It's down on the ground somewhere. When I had the sudden urge to skinny dip, I stripped and flung my clothes out of the silo," she admitted nonchalantly.
"I'll carry you back down," the older man offered gruffly.
"Thank you," she smiled sweetly.
Yeung magnetized his boots and stepped on the shell of the silo container. He turned around, facing the ceiling, and knelt.
The young woman crawled onto his chest. She then straddled him and locked her ankles around his back.
The would-be rescuer straightened his knees until his body was parallel to the ground. He grunted when he felt Glady's full weight on his chest. Even worse, he had a full view of her ample chest. "I'm going to close my eyes and concentrate on walking down the silo. Please tell me when we reach the ground," he said. Without waiting for her response, he started walking backward down the silo. The walk took a little over a minute, but it felt like an eternity in hell. His back strained against the force of gravity. He was so tempted to demagnetize his boots and simply drop to the ground, but he wasn't sure that Glady's body could handle the impact without injury.
When Yeung got close enough to the ground, Glady removed her legs from his chest and hopped off. The relieved rescuer demagnetized his boots and dropped flat on his back. He was too exhausted to move. Suddenly, he felt the mischievous woman straddling him again and immediately opened his eyes.
But this time, he saw something different. It was Glady . . . but not Glady. Gone was the woman with the beautiful, smooth skin, golden hair, baby blue eyes, and full dark pink lips. In her place was a humanoid carrying her face, but her skin was patchy gray and coarse like sand. Her eyes and lips were jet black like outer space. But the worst part about Glady's new appearance was her hair—it was constantly moving about like a medusa’s.
Yeung tried to push her off but found that she was solid like a rock and his desperate struggle was for naught.
Glady offered a wicked smile as she grabbed his wrists and pinned them to the ground next to his head. Her face was now directly above his, separated only by the helmet of the ESU. Her hair shifted again and slowly wrapped around his head until it was sealed completely inside her hair. Finally, the inhuman Glady opened her mouth and spore-like objects poured from her mouth.
The spores soon covered the window panel on Yeung's helmet. He watched in horror as the alien substance slowly seeped through the glass and drew closer to his face. They're nanites, the engineer quickly realized. However, he was trapped within Glady's unbreakable embrace and he could do nothing—but scream.
* * *
Armstrong fidgeted in his plush seat inside his office. He couldn't help but feel the heebie-jeebies as
he patiently listened to Yeung's complaint about Glady from Materials section taking a skinny dip inside a grain silo, rather than conducting the manual scan that she had volunteered to do.
About the Author
Calling himself a "literary chameleon," the author is an experimental writer who enjoys the intellectual challenge of writing in a variety of lengths, from flash fiction stories to short stories to novellas to full-length novels. Fiction genres he has written in include science fiction, urban, thriller, fantasy, romance, and horror. He has been published on OneFortyFiction.com. He is currently writing a litrpg genre serial called, “CHRONICLES of a PC Gamer Stuck Inside an RPG.” It is published on Wattpad and RoyalRoadL.com and updated on a bi-weekly basis.
Antony W.F. Chow is a longtime resident in the hometown of the New York Mets MLB team and currently recovering from the heartbreak of his team’s 2015 World Series loss. He is also known as the author of Broken Hearted: A 9/11 Story. An unauthorized webcomic version is available on Google Play Store. He may be reached by email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @PuppyChowNyc
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