Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #12 March 2015 | Page 37

Hiroshi regained consciousness slowly. He could feel
a wet, stifling warmth covering his face. A prickly
sensation began to spread across his back. A dull throb
radiated from the top of his head, down through his
chest, and seemed to leak out of his fingers and toes.
He slowly opened his eyes. The maddening dull purple
glow caused his head to ache even more.
He was on his back, his hands tied behind his body.
He tried to sit up, but this caused an intense, blinding
pain, so he stopped moving, closed his eyes tight, and
tried to focus past the pain. As it subsided, he became
aware of other things.
There was a stench in the air, heavy and wet, reminiscent of rotting fish and seaweed. Although it would
have sickened most people, it reminded Hiroshi of the
odours of the fishing village where he grew up. This
thought helped him to push aside some of the aches
and pains that wracked his body.
As the pain subsided, sounds began to filter past the
pounding in his ears. There was a sick, wheezing
sound. It took Hiroshi a moment to realise it was
his own breathing. It was soon supplemented by the
moaning of a person in pain. Hiroshi was certain this
wasn’t him. Abruptly, the moaning stopped, replaced
by a fluid noise, like a toothless man slurping soup.

Hiroshi rolled painfully onto his side, looking in the
direction the slurping sound was coming from. His
mind reeled at what he saw.
He was in a cavern, so large that the far wall was lost
in purple darkness. A group of Lunarites were standing
nearby, swaying slightly. Their attention was focused
on a massive creature that lay on the cavern floor.
Its skin was translucent, the muscles and organs shifting shadows that moved sluggishly beneath the skin.
Hiroshi couldn’t see the creature’s legs, as the body
receded into the darkness. However, its long, thin arms
were visible. And what they held shook Hiroshi’s sanity. Clutched in the long, spindly fingers was a headless
body, a man in a Japanese uniform. The creature’s
head, almost lost in the mass of flesh, turned briefly
towards Hiroshi and glared at him with four black
eyes. It was chewing slowly, methodically. Its face
was covered in blood that pulsed from the neck of the
corpse. The blood looked black in the purple light.
The floor of the cave near the mass of shifting flesh
was covered in moving things. He squinted and saw
that they were infant Lunarites. T