by David Coy
Martha studied them. “Oh, my God,” she said, figuring it out. “You think that goddamned thing put….when Tim…when he…oh, fuck. Fuck me!” She started to get up out of the chair, her plump arms and legs squirming in a panic.
“Don’t,” Donna said, easing her back into the chair. “It’s just a safety precaution, that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about now. Not yet.”
“That’s easy for you to say, goddamn it!” Martha screamed. “You don’t have bugs in your woo woo!”
* * *
Rachel loved the soft purr of the shuttle’s motors. The easy drone merged with the panoramic view of the jungle below and washed away thoughts of the biological perils teeming just under its green surface. She curled in her seat, took a drink of coffee and let the view fill her.
Before she arrived on the planet, she’d fallen in love with Verde’s Revenge sight unseen, and as she knew it would be, this fertile environment was a perfect match for her—and her love had grown.
It is so beautiful. This planet is so beautiful. But so dangerous. So poisonous.
The green seemed to stretch forever. The gently rolling terrain was only rarely punctuated by an upheaval of rock, those too, deeply cloaked in green.
Surely there is nothing like it in the universe. Nothing this fertile, this rich and teeming. Nothing this—lethal.
She believed that Verde’s Revenge had entered something akin to Earth’s Cambrian Explosion, an epoch when life had sprung up and crawled, scrambled and grown over itself in wet masses of limbs, claws and eggs. Verde’s Revenge seemed stuck in that period of fertile grandeur where species clamored and struggled and evolved and morphed to fit ever better into the competitive biosphere of the planet.
She would never understand it fully. The systems, the relationships, the dependencies of one life form to the others, would be too deep, too wide and too complex for one person to fathom in a single lifetime. Perhaps in a few generations, should the colony survive, her own progeny might yet unravel Verde’s biological chaos. The most she could do was start the work. Just start it.
She rested her hand on her womb and imagined she felt a motion there, a gentle twist of vulnerable life. The growing child within her seemed so impossibly fragile against the teeming threats just a few thousand meters below them. She imagined her young daughter suddenly born, and sitting on her lap on just such an outing as this some two or three years from now, brimming with eager questions about the spooky environment around her, would cause Rachel to frame her answers just so to abate the inevitable nightmares that would accompany them.
Don’t be afraid. It’s life. Doing what life does.
About the Author:
David Coy's short fiction has appeared in The Meat Socket and Black Petals magazines. A native of Michigan and an alumnus of Wayne State University, he enjoys quiet time outdoors camping and hiking, bird watching—and rolling rocks and logs to see what's eating what. He currently lives in Oregon with two dogs, an ugly cat and five chickens.
Turn a Dark Phrase
A Collection of Short Stories
From the author of the Dominant Species Series comes a collection of frightening and captivating short stories. Each story will take you to some new and chilling place. There are alien parasites, murderous children, and people who get nothing more than they deserve in ways only David Coy can dream up. Turn a Dark Phrase reminds us that the most horrifying things live in the darkest corners of the human mind.