I could feel it pressing against my rib cage. I vomited from the pain as several ribs cracked from the creature stretching out its limbs.

“This is Doctor Neil Bryant, the date is… oh god… the date is September 17th, 2033.” I spat blood into the recorder and erupted into a fit of coughs.

“Day twenty-three after contamination. Doctor Leslie Grant is deceased, as is Doctor Marcus Prickett. I’m due to suffer the same fate I’m afraid…” I paused, a memory of my daughter giggling as she blew on the seeds of a dandelion caused tears to well in my eyes.

“This will be my last log entry for Project Luna… please refer to journal entry 245 for details of initial contamination. The fossils we discovered on the moon’s surface were not fossils at all. They… they were cocoons it seems, and the alien lifeforms were dormant within them.” A limb stretched my abdomen impossibly far, I fell to the ground and screamed out in agony.

“I… I should have terminated myself after assisting my colleagues in doing the same.” But I couldn’t, I was a man of science after all, the world needed documentation. The desire to study the incubation occurring within me was great enough to outweigh the suffering.

“Irrelevant now… I have sealed all exits; the creature will not escape the lab. My hypothesis is after it… consumes me it will quickly starve before the government discovers what happened here. Ahhhhh… Tell my Lucy, I love her. Doctor Bryant, signing off.”

I dropped the recorder and ripped open my button-down shirt. The skin pulled from one direction to the other, like an elastic putty. I could feel it shredding my intestines with tooth and claw. The blood rising in my throat threatened to kill me by asphyxiation, but I had to hold on… I had to see it.

With one mighty push the creature erupted from my body, I cried out to a God I had never believed in as it left the cavern that was now my stomach. Blackness, the relief of death, crept into my vision. The fluorescent lights from above faded from sight.

I just… want… to see…