FULL MOON - Chapter Two by Mark Watson
Blood in the Lunar Dark...
FULL MOON by Mark Watson
© 2026 by Mark Watson Books
Chapter Two: Werewolves On The Moon
Big Jim Cole was no mug. If you’d asked he’d have told you exactly that, and he’d have been right. You didn’t survive twenty years in the lunar desert and earn the name Scavenger Cole without a considerable amount of natural cunning and hard-won instinct.
As the thing dragged away the last remaining member of his crew, Cole gently set his carbine against the wall of the freighter and twitched his head slightly to the left, the micro-gesture that accessed his cortex-embedded systems. A millisecond before the creature swung its head toward him he activated active camouflage. He pressed his back against the wall, stiffened his suit, and through a combination of wearable and embedded tech, slowed his heartrate to a resting crawl and locked every joint in his body.
Nothing could see through the camouflage if he didn’t move. That was the theory.
He hoped that whatever abilities these creatures possessed, and not needing to wear a suit in hard vacuum was already a considerable one, didn’t extend to smell or hearing. The moon was a silent environment, technically. But technically and actually were two different things when something that size was three metres away from you in the dark. Cole had no intention of finding out the hard way. He would stay still, stay quiet, and try to understand what he was looking at.
After a long time the creatures moved into a pool of pale earthlight falling through one of the freighter’s intact viewports.
There were more of them than he’d realised. Too many to count quickly and he didn’t dare move his head to try. They were wolves. Upright, muscular, humanoid wolves, werewolves, his mind supplied the word almost apologetically, as though embarrassed by it, standing two metres tall or more, built like something that had never needed to compromise with gravity. Their fur was a dark, matted brown, the colour of scorched grass in the earthlight, and where the fur parted Cole could see the skin beneath was dense and reptilian, layered like something armoured from the inside.
He watched their chests. Watched their nostrils. There was no movement. No breath clouding in the cold, no rise and fall of ribs, no flare of muscle around the jaw. Whatever they did instead of breathing, they did it quietly and invisibly. Cole filed that away.
Then he saw what they were doing to each other and his stomach turned.
They were tearing things off one another. Pulling at their own backs and arms, fingers working at something embedded in the fur, passing pieces between them. It took Cole a long moment to understand what he was seeing…
