Alone with the Moon

It was a clear night, with only a stark silence to accompany the full moon hanging in the sky. A gentle mist cooled the landscape with a promise of becoming frost if the temperature dipped any lower.

Alyssa loved the night. The feral beauty it offered was untouched by the taint of daylight. Wild animals hunted during the dark hours, most criminals plied their unwholesome trade, and the majority of people were in a deep sleep, completely unaware of their surroundings.

And all this primitive beauty was under the watch of the sole occupant in the sky: the Moon.

Of course, there were countless stars dotting the black tapestry of the heavens, as well as a few planetary neighbors, but the Moon, with its splotched surface reflecting the hidden Sun's light, was paramount on its lofty throne a mere 250,000 or so miles from the Earth.

Gazing up into the satellite's face, Alyssa felt herself becoming transfixed by its pale glow. It lit the gloomy landscape all around her, revealing rows upon rows of crumbling and tilting tombstones and monuments.

Just why she liked spending time in Olivet Cemetery was as much of a mystery to her as to anyone else. Death was only a part of life, the only aspect of it that was certain beyond any doubt, so this finality was perhaps what attracted her to the graveyard.

Taking a few moments to study the carved memories on a few of the closer markers, Alyssa read them out loud.

"Bradley Fodren Born 1901 Died- 1993 Loving Husband and Father."

Well at least he lived to a ripe old age.

"Tiffany B. Geasal Born 1924 Died- 1925 Gone Much Too Soon."

She didn't live long. Poor thing.

"William Overlark Born 1934 Died- 1989 Missed by All.

The movement caught Alyssa's eye. Something to her left had shifted in the darkness. Only slightly, so much so that at first she thought she had imagined it, but after another movement off to her right, and still yet another directly ahead of her, she knew it was real. Of all the places on Earth where one did not want to see movement, a cemetery had to be near the top of the list. And especially at night.

"H… Hello? Is somebody there?" Her voice seemed to be that of a little girl's, frightened and alone.

She had read her share of horror stories and watched scary movies, and she knew that in all those fictional situations the antagonists always grew silent when first discovered, almost as if they (or it) wanted to prolong the terror of their intended prey. And Alyssa would have gratefully accepted that brief respite, albeit only a short one, and one that almost certainly brought with it a promise of confrontation.

But even that small luxury was denied her, because whatever was making the sounds only increased its efforts to be heard, and much to Alyssa's dismay, to be seen as well.

Whirling around, Alyssa frantically scanned the grounds for any danger. At first, all she saw in the moonlight was a few products of her imagination: something moving behind a gravestone; a funerary effigy turning its stone gaze in her direction; an ethereal ghost gliding through the trees.

But then she really did see something.

The aged tombstone shifted in the soil. It was a large marker, ornately carved and bearing the mostly-faded inscription of its owner, a Mr. Richard J. Gideon, and it crumbled as it moved.

Only it wasn't the tombstone that had moved. It was something beneath it that caused it to shift. Something Alyssa guessed was Mr. Gideon himself.

A skeletal hand shot up through the ground. It was mostly void of flesh, wearing only a rice-paper-thin layer on the tips of a few fingers. A mold-encrusted gold wedding band was still on one of the digits. The hand was then joined by another, and both began to claw at the soil as the corpse broke free from its earthly confines.

Alyssa was paralyzed where she stood. The entire cemetery was awash with moonlight (much brighter than it had been when she first entered the graveyard), and it revealed dozens of desiccated corpses in varying stages of decomposition, pulling themselves up out of their final resting places.

The unmistakable feeling of warmth began to creep over Alyssa's body then. Within seconds it was uncomfortable. In a minute, it was painful, so much so that it was even overriding her concern about her current predicament. It was a thick, dry heat, like someone was holding a blow dryer in her face.

The zombies lurched forward, their emancipated features ruined by years in the ground. They surrounded the sole living person in the graveyard, homing in on her life force.

Alyssa looked up. She had hoped to somehow gather some strength from her friend the Moon. She had always felt attached to it, being able to clear her mind of her troubles every time she lifted her head and gazed at its barren beauty. But this time something was wrong. Alyssa had to shield her eyes from the onslaught of light.

The Moon filled the night sky. Its pale surface was so close to the graveyard that Alyssa could have counted the craters one by one.

"How can that be?" she moaned while dead hands groped for her. "That's impossible. It can't be this close. It can't be."

And as she fell under the ravenous weight of the dead, Alyssa watched helplessly as the bright object in the sky, the Moon, her moon, grew smaller and smaller as it drifted up into the night.

The ship had infiltrated the sector effectively, spraying the graveyard with its potent mist, resurrecting the dead bodies to begin its invasion. Soon it would seek another burial ground.

And behind the ship, previously hidden by its bulk, was the Moon, shining its pale glow down on Olivet Cemetery and the bodies that swarmed there.