The Crimson Earth

Contents Title Page Copyright Clarissa Bright & Chloe Parker Dedication Triggers & Tropes Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Guide Contents Start of Content The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. This work is intended for a mature audience. Originally published in the I Am The Fire Anthology Cover Design by Jervy Copyright © 2023 Chloe Parker & Clarissa Bright All rights reserved. CLARISSA BRIGHT & CHLOE PARKER SCI-FI WHY CHOOSE ␥ - Alien Mafia Brides - VEILED IN SHADOW - Falling Star - CELESTIAL SINS COSMIC CONFESSIONS RADIANT RITES ␥ for all the women who demand bodily autonomy TRIGGERS & TROPES CONTENT WARNINGS: THE Crimson Earth takes place in a universe where aliens have started an authoritarian breeding program on Earth. Please note that this novella deals with themes of loss of autonomy, rape, forced birth, and abortion. Tropes: Dark Romance Mars Needs Women Why Choose Morally Grey Main Characters Trigger Warnings: Stillbirth (Ch 1) Genocide (Chs 1, 4, 6) Off-Page Rape (Chs 4) Thoughts of Suicide (Ch 6) Discussion of Mass Graves (Ch 6) Climate Decay (Ch 7, 11, 12) Medical Crisis (Chs 1, 8) Our first priority is your comfort and safety, so feel free to skip this particular story if you feel unsafe at any time, or if this just isn’t your thing. CHAPTER ONE ␥ ZIGGY Please note that this chapter contains graphic descriptions of a post-operative room as we set the scene for a horrific authoritarian dystopia. Sensitive readers may want to skip this chapter and move on to Chapter Two; however, if you want a full picture of the world of The Crimson Earth, read on. The room smells like rust. That's the worst part about this job. It doesn't matter how much we scrub the floors and the windows. The drapes and sheets go into the giant basket that we take to the industrial washing machine back in the apartment complex. I can hear a woman wailing outside. Her breathing sounds like it stops for a few seconds, then she starts again. It's the sort of deep, pained scream that used to make my blood run cold. But you can get used to anything. It turns out that the human threshold for normalcy doesn't stop adjusting itself when you reach the point of agony. Brains, at least fully developed ones, are irritatingly adaptable. Danielle, my assistant, looks past me. Her eyes are dark brown and brimming with tears, particularly when she sets her gaze on the bundled up and unmoving baby on the mattress. Stillbirth. Another stillbirth. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the Aelyd breeding program, the aliens making practically no effort to ensure human women are safe. Now that they’ve taken care of the men, many of these aliens treat us like vessels—expendable as long as we crank out enough babies for their species to thrive. We treat the babies with reverence. Whether they survive or not; that's kind of out of our purview. We do our best for their mothers. That means we do our best for them. "You need to take her away," I say to Danielle after she's collected herself. She sniffles, a question in her eyes. "Mom. Uh, Phoebe. She can't be here while I finish turning this room out, and she’ll be safer once she’s gone.” "She won't let me move her," Danielle says. I wish I had time to make her feel better. I wish I had any magic words to help. But I have to be tough. It’s the only way we can keep going. "I don't care," I lie. "You can't let her see the baby when we take him out." Danielle wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She chokes on her tears. "How do you do this, Ziggy?" She asks. "You're not heartless, but I've never seen you cry." "I don't get to cry. They do," I say softly, tucking my hair in a tight ballerina bun. "Get Phoebe and take her away, Dani. Please." "Okay," she says. She opens the door and I watch as she disappears into the darkened hallway. I can see the flicker of candlelight, the silhouette of a woman who hasn't quite reached middle age yet but isn't far from it, her face worn from the unfairness of it all. There aren't magic words. There aren't even empty ones. No language, human or otherwise, can make this person feel better. We rally around them because that's the least we can do. We keep them alive, hoping they'll heal. Some—many—try to terminate the pregnancies themselves. We do our best to help, but access to medicine is limited, and there’s no way to know if they were successful. We have to wait. And some, some unlucky ones like Phoebe, they have to go through labor. Even when the baby has died. Whether it was the woman’s doing or just another statistic, there's no real way for us to know what’s going to happen until after the babies are born. We just don’t have the technology. Before Aelyds made contact with Earth, things didn’t seem that bad. Sure, we couldn’t swim in the oceans anymore, and fertility rates were dropping, but humanity was making progress. We were on the edge of something spectacular. We just didn’t realize that the alien species that made first contact with us was also going to be the thing that brought on the end of the world as we knew it. It was slow. They recruited the men