“Johnny, Johnny,” the man said to the flickering viewscreen.

The boy on the other side looked up, as though he had heard the man speak. “Yes papa?”

The man pressed PAUSE. It was not a live image of his son on the viewscreen. It was a recording. A recording of the last conversation the man had with Johnny before they passed through the Crab Nebula, where the solar storm knocked out their communications array. And with the internal entertainment system out of commission thanks to faulty wiring– wiring that the ship’s engineer, Percy, was too incompetent to repair– the recordings were all that the crew had. They had all seen Mark’s daughter’s birthday party, Simon’s brother’s funeral, and Percy’s father’s pep talk. They had also seen Captain McGuire’s wife strip-tease for her husband at least a hundred times, much to the chagrin of the captain. But the ship’s clandestine porn collection had been fried in the solar storm, and he knew there would be mutiny if he deleted his wife’s private video session, so he allowed it.

The man pressed PLAY. “Eating sugar?” he asked.

The boy shook his head. “No papa.”

PAUSE. The porn collection and communications array were not the only things destroyed by the storm. The ship’s navigational array, secondary life support systems, and engine coolant system had gone too. They had to land somewhere, quickly. And the only viable place in range was a moon in the orbit of a gas giant called Talcyon 2. It was a rough landing, just shy of being classified as a crash, and it was clear afterwards that the ship would never fly again.

PLAY. “Telling lies?” the man asked.

“No papa.”

PAUSE. Percy had drawn the short straw after they landed. Captain McGuire must have used some kind of sleight-of-hand to force it on him, because he was easily the most disliked member of the crew. A cocky and rude 19 year old who only go the job because his father was high up in the Interstellar Exploration Corps, IEC. Barely tolerable as a crewmate and outright incompetent as an engineer. He billed himself as a brave man who laughed in the face of danger, but faced with being the first of the crew to step out into the unknown moon, he broke down. “Please,” he said through tears, “we don’t know what’s out there. I heard something last night. Something big. I think it’s out there. Please, don’t make me do it.”

They had all heard something big moving around near the ship the night after the landing. This was hardly a surprise, as the sensors had said that the atmosphere was breathable, the temperature moderate, and the chance of life very high. Of course, it did not specify what *kind* of life…

The crew forced Percy into a survival suit and pushed him out the aft airlock. They then tuned in to his audio feed. “Report, Percy,” Captain McGuire said. “Tell us what you see.”

There was a pause. Percy said, “I see–”

Those were his last words. What came through the audio feed afterwards would haunt the man for the rest of his life. Percy screamed in anguish, but it was more than a scream, it was a horrible, otherworldly wail. The man had heard a similar scream from a former coworker in a factory on Earth, when his arm was ripped off by the machine when the safety mechanism failed. It was a wail and a scream and a sob all at once, and he had never thought he would hear it again. Percy’s feed cut out abruptly, and that was the last the crew heard of him.

Captain McGuire stared off into space, deep in thought. “Nobody goes out,” he eventually said. “Nobody goes outside the ship. That’s a direct order. Mark, set up the emergency beacon and start transmitting a distress signal. The IEC will come looking for us soon. We have enough food to wait. All we can do is wait.”

And wait they did. The hours turned to days, and the days to weeks, but there was still no sign of the IEC. The men slowly but surely began to fall apart. Prairie Fever, the man’s grandpa had called it, when the snow and the cold had kept his family penned up during the long winters in the Saskatchewan Administrative District. The men had only themselves, their recordings, and the uneasy sounds of something big moving around just outside the ship at night. Captain McGuire had hoped they would be able to find edible plants, or even live game when he had checked the sensors for this moon. But it was clear that there was no live game out there. No, it was something big, something *horrible…*

He pressed PLAY. “Open your mouth.”

Johnny smiled and did so, revealing the sugar he had taken from mom’s kitchen cupboard. “Ha, ha, haaa!”

The recording ended. The man rewound and pressed PLAY to start it again.

Mark was the next to go. He had woken up one morning covered head to toe in oozing sores, and his behavior was erratic. The quarantine area was offline thanks to the many system failures aboard the ship, so the crew wrestled him into the engine room and locked the door. Simon, the medical officer, said that it looked like some kind of flesh-eating disease. Mark screamed and pounded on the sealed door for 48 hours straight. Then finally, mercifully, the pounding began to slow down. “Does he have any food or water in there?” Captain McGuire had asked.

He did not. And because he could be contagious, the captain barred the remaining crew from going in. On the fourth day, the pounding stopped altogether. They never heard a sound from Mark again.

Simon was next. They had seen it coming for a while– he checked the emergency beacon and the short-range scanners every hour, sometimes every ten minutes, and after a few days of this behavior, they heard Simon talking to himself in his quarters. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he laughed.

It was no surprise when they found him curled up in bed, an empty bottle of painkillers in his lifeless hand.

Captain McGuire and the man were alone. The man had thought that they had the fortitude to withstand the grief and isolation, to hold on until the IEC rescue team materialized on the scanners. But that was before the things outside, whatever they were, started trying to get into the ship.

The man and the captain sealed themselves into the emergency bunker when they first heard the sound of the hull creaking. The sounds continued all night until around 4 am, there was a great crash. It sounded like the outer shell collapsing. The man looked to the captain to see his reaction. The stern, confident twinkle in his eyes that had earned him the rank of captain was gone. There was now only exhaustion and fear.

The creatures had retreated when day broke, and the ship still had three layers of hull between the remaining men and the horrors outside, but now it was only a matter of time…

The man had crept into the video room, careful not to make any sounds that might attract… whatever was out there. The captain remained in the emergency bunker, and before the man had started watching his final recording with Johnny, he heard a gunshot from the direction of the bunker. Then, only silence.

He was alone.

The man pressed PLAY once again. He knew that when night fell, the monsters would start tearing into the hull again. He had brought two bottles of tranquilizers and another three full of painkillers into the video room. Enough to kill him ten times over. He would take them before night fell, before the creatures resumed their assault on the ship.

But not yet. Not just yet. The man was going to spend the rest of the day reliving the final conversation with his son. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so alone.

The video ended, and, like clockwork, the man pressed PLAY. “Johnny, Johnny.”