"Six-Legged Shadows"

Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror edited by Ryan C. Thomas and published by Permuted Press is now available for purchase from Amazon.com. Read an extract from Brian M. Sammons and my contribution "Six Legged Shadows".

“It’s impossible, Captain, for grass to have mutated this much in such a short space of time.”

Time of course was relative. While it had taken us fifty-two-thousand years to circumnavigate a small portion of the galaxy and return to the Earth, only one-hundred-and-eight-years ship time had passed for us. That was just one of the oddities of faster than light travel. Now the home of our great-great-grandparents was in the midst of an ice-age. Massive ocean-sized snow caps buried most of North America, Europe, Russia, and the tip of South America.

We expected vast changes to Earth when, or make that if, we returned. Our forefathers had left a dying planet choking on the years of pollution it had ignored in the name of progress. So massive climate changes were likely and we planned accordingly.

What we didn’t expect, when our buzz-shuttle landed in the arid lands of northern Australia, were the mutations that had flourished in our absence. Grass now grew taller than trees and spread as vast forests across the planet.

“I mean, what kind of mutations could have caused that kind of evolutionary change?” Julie McKay asked our group as she took a laser to a fibrous strand. She ran a series of standard tests on the sample with her portalab. “It’s exactly like wild grass, only much, much bigger.”

Of course it is not only the grass that is bigger, but you would expect that in a story about giant creatures. Also featured are stories from D.L. Snell, Steven Shrewsbury and Cody Goodfellow.