Prologue

“There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.”

- S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

            Tracy was beginning to wonder if she and Loyce should have been taken to the hospital before their jail sentence.  If, in fact, they should have received medical attention immediately after their arrest, or at least before the trial.  Was Loyce, she pondered, asking the same question?  Had she felt the same stomach-turning anxiety during the trial, the same compulsion to crawl somewhere dark and silent until everyone forgot she or Tracy Skaid ever existed?

Is this guilt? Tracy thought.  It could be: she had pleaded guilty, after all.  But so had Loyce, and after three years of delinquent partnership, Tracy could say with certainty that Loyce Flannery was mercifully unburdened by the presence of a conscience.  And, while Tracy had never been able to share Loyce’s carefree amorality, she did not feel that bad about any of the petty crimes they had committed together, or their recent attempt at a major robbery.  With the looming sense of impending doom which had kept its hold on her since the failed robbery of the chemical plant, the security of a federal correctional facility had seemed comforting.

The comfort proved fleeting.  Loyce, she had found out, was to be incarcerated at the same facility, which would not have been so bad under normal circumstances, except that Tracy had gotten her a much, much longer sentence.  In exchange for a shortened sentence (three rather than seven years), Tracy had spoken in detail about Loyce’s history of criminal activity, which had proceeded without serious consequence even before Tracy joined up with her, a confused, embittered kid grown into an equally ill-adjusted adult.   Considering the gradual escalation of Loyce’s parade of petty criminality and her borderline sociopathy, Tracy had decided that prison was the best place for her partner to be, for everyone’s sake.  

Loyce would kill her.  Tracy had only had a few fleeting glimpses of her through their first two weeks in South Dakota Women’s Prison, and every time she felt the other woman’s eyes on her when she wasn’t looking, her stomach coiled into a nauseous helix.  Loyce would cut her throat with a piece of metal or sharp plastic or a stolen tool at night, or in the cafeteria or some other public place because she would be careless with vengeful anger.  

“No chance, honey,” Tracy’s bunkmate had said.  “It’s harder to get a shiv in here than you’d think.”  The woman had smiled a yellow smile.  “I know, I tried.”

“Well, then she’ll use her hands,” Tracy had replied, resolutely unhopeful.  Loyce was taller than her by a head, and lean with muscle, and she had spent much of her time on the road compiling a vocabulary of quick, creative ways to hurt people as much as possible with little effort.  She had seen it happen.  Loyce liked getting her way and punishing people when she didn’t. Tracy brought one trembling hand to the bruise on her neck where her “friend” had struck her during the botched job that landed them in their cells.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Tracy remembered screaming after Loyce had shot the janitor in the chemical plant.  He had been gasping wetly, clutching his chest, writhing and kicking on the ground after the woman picking the lock to the side entrance had been surprised by his presence and reacted with her Browning Hi-Power.  “Are you crazy?  You could have --”  Tracy had been staggered by the force of Loyce’s strike.

“Don’t fucking talk to me like that!” Loyce had cried.  “Forget him and help me find the safe before anyone shows up.  Chrissake, you never usually overreact like this.”

They had found the safe, and then been found, in turn, by the local police no more than a mile away from the plant.  But not before they had found the dark steaming chamber of vats and the pressure failure within, which the janitor had been going to attend to before Loyce had shot him.  They had been blown against the wall by the blast of air, of discolored smoke that stained their clothes, of vapor that prickled their skin like a cloud of centipede legs, of overpowering and noxious odors like a pharmacy fire.  They had grown dizzier and itchier, and Loyce had crashed their car into a utility pole when the police had come after them after the robbery, unable to stop the road from seemingly flipping underneath her.

And they hadn’t gone to the hospital, and they hadn’t been tested, and now Tracy’s dizziness had returned, making the cell spin even as the anaconda coils of anxiety made it seem as if the world was closing in on her like a trash compactor, shrinking.

“Oh, shit!”

Tracy saw her cellmate was now out of bed, and pointing at her, open-mouthed, trembling.  Tracy was wondering why, when she at last realized that she was not imagining the tearing noise she had been trying to ignore, and her jumpsuit was bursting open.  She pressed her back against the wall, scooted toward the corner of the cell, willing herself to shrink down, waiting to wake up from what had to be some nightmare induced by inhaling the vapors at the plant.  But no; her feet felt like they were bound in lotus shoes, her chest and hips were swelling to destroy her clothes, and everything was all wrong.

“H-help,” Tracy gasped as her head smacked the ceiling and the shreds of her orange jumpsuit fluttered to the ground.  “Help!”  She tore at her untrimmed brunette mane and slid to the floor, fearing that there would soon be no room for her rapidly expanding body in the cell.  “Please, for the love of God, somebody help me!”

Her cellmate was doing just that, desperately rattling the bars and shouting for guards, and the women in the neighboring cells were following suit, filling the cellblock with the clamor of trapped animals waiting to be crushed.  It was all too much for Tracy.  She managed, agonizingly, to tuck her lengthening legs beneath her ballooning rear, get on her knees before rising onto her toes.  This was her only chance.

“Out of the way!” she bellowed at her cellmate.  The terrified woman flattened herself against the corner of the cell opposite the brunette behemoth, still growing with internal groans and pops and crackles, stomach and breasts swollen free of an undershirt now as thin as an old handkerchief, eyes wild with hysteria and pain  Tracy hurled herself at the bars containing her.  They may have been sufficient for humans subject to the laws of physics, but not the Unfortunate Growing Tracy Skaid: they bent, then tore out completely.  The huge woman was able to stand up outside the cell, eliciting assorted screams, whistles, and exclamations of astonishment from the other prisoners (“Look at the size of that bitch!”  “She could crush cars with them thighs, goddamn!”  “I like ‘em with meat on their bones, but not big enough to fuckin’ eat me!”).

I need to get outside, Tracy thought.  Before I get any--

There were more screams, but now from the neighboring cell block, and they were accompanied by gunshots and the rattle of exploding sting grenades.  Some of the screams were men’s.  Tracy had wondered, briefly, why no guards were coming to respond to the ruckus in her area.  She then heard why: a bass roar that sounded equal parts tiger, bull, and raging mountain gorilla.  More specifically, King Kong.  Nothing in the aural chemistry of that sound, so loud that it sent the whole of South Dakota Women’s Prison into full screaming-for-mother, bargaining-with-God pandemonium, suggested production by a human, but Tracy knew the only other woman in the prison exposed to the dreadful vapors of that chemical plant was probably undergoing the same impossible transformation as she was, and enjoying it far more.  Not wishing to meet her face-to-face, Tracy took advantage of the momentary pause in her growth -- she towered almost up to the third level of cells, her clothes obliterated, a Rubens altarpiece in three doughy dimensions -- and dropped to the floor with a boom, crawling toward the doors that lead outside, to the yard.  With one fist she sent the steel doors sailing into the yard and pulled herself through like a badger invading a molehill, her tremendous thighs beginning once more to expand just as they were being wrenched free of the doorway.  Tracy had nothing to measure her size against, but presumed herself to be in the area of four or five stories.  The awful, sensuous multiplication of cells had stopped, and Tracy peered through the crumbling doorway to see what was inevitably coming for her, thundering through the building, bringing with it the sounds of tearing metal and crunching bone.

Loyce Flannery had never looked, to Tracy’s eyes, more beautiful or more grotesque.  Already grown larger than her brunette ex-cohort, Loyce had long outpaced the capacity of her clothes to stretch about her burgeoning body, and almost had to hunch over in the building.  Her unkempt dark hair hung about her face, her ice-chip eyes, her curled lips and half-radiant-half-feral grin; her prominent breasts hung like ripe honeydew melons above her boilerplate belly; her arms, all sinew and strength, her legs, pistons pumping beneath her obscenely swollen sex, hard ivory pillars of muscle swinging blood-stained feet.  In her fist she clutched a limp, jointless kewpie doll that dripped red all over her hand, a blue-clad doll that may have been a human not too long ago, a prison guard, but was now broken beyond all recognition by Loyce’s new might.  She tossed her hair back, looked down at Tracy peeping into the building like a frightened mouse through a hole.

“Well,” Loyce said in a raspy near-approximation of her original voice, “look who else is enjoying a delayed reaction.”  She tossed away the corpse in her fist, casually tore open a cell, and extracted the weeping trio of inmates within, rolling them around in her hands and examining them with fascination.  The massive woman squealed and jolted; her growth was resuming.  She dropped the women unceremoniously, screaming, to the ground to rub her hands over the ever-larger curves and muscular contours of her growing body.  She moaned, an unfeminine noise like a bison’s lowing, and leered at Tracy, who scrambled away into the yard.

“You never did know how to enjoy yourself!” came Loyce’s voice groaning from inside.  “I’ll show you what you could be doing with this power if you weren’t such a cowardly little shit!”

She can’t break through, Tracy hoped, she’ll crush herself to death in--

The roof burst open like an eggshell from Loyce’s rising head and the force of her fists thrust skyward.  She roared in ecstasy -- Tracy clapped her hands over her ears -- and vaulted out of the ruined building.  Tracy was still growing, but slower, and in a much less pleasurable fashion than the other giant woman in the prison yard.

She had to find a weapon.  What could a fifty-foot woman use to hurt an even bigger woman?  Prison makes many into masters of vicious improvisation, but Tracy had never picked up on that sort of thing, and her drastic increase in scale had made things that much more difficult.

“I was going to fuck you,” Loyce rumbled, striding across the yard, escaped inmates and frantic guards swarming out of the prison behind her.  “I was going to make you squeal like the little piggy you are before I broke your neck and smashed this shithole into dust.  But you don’t fuckin’ deserve that.”

Tracy bolted, stumbling under the burden of her increasing weight outpacing her strength, to the edge of the yard, to the high walls that would still be an effort to climb and misery to bring down.  Growing hurt.  Being big hurt.  Why wasn’t it hurting the monster advancing toward her?

“You betrayed me, you little cunt,” Loyce said.  She launched herself at the smaller giant, caught her by the hair as she tried to duck away.  She yanked Tracy off the ground and relished the sight and sound of another absurdly large human being reduced to tears by her strength.  It could only get better.  “After everything I did for you, after I helped your fat, worthless ass, you sold me the fuck out!  Well, I’m gonna teach you to fuckin’ regret that before you die.”  

Tracy lashed out with her right leg and thought her shin must have cracked against the hardness of Loyce’s torso.  The dark-haired leviathan released her grip on Tracy’s hair and watched her crawl backward with amusement.

“Where are you gonna go, huh?  You’re just big enough that you can’t hide, and just small enough that I can break you.”   She pounced on Tracy, whose scream was cut short by the weight of vast mammaries pressing down on her face.  Loyce wrapped the smaller woman in a tight embrace, and for an instant Tracy thought of a select few nights spent in motels or parked in the middle of nowhere, stuck in much the same position.  Loyce ran her fingers roughly through the hair she had just been pulling and whispered into her old friend’s ear.

“This is great.  You’re the perfect size for me.  Not bigger than me, not too small to play with.  See what kinda fun we could have?”  Tracy thought the sniffling she heard was fake, until she pushed her head free of Loyce’s cleavage and saw that she was actually crying.  “Why’d you have to tell them so much?  This coulda been great.  We’d have way more fun than even before we got thrown in here.  I could make you feel so good.”  She slid Tracy to eye level and kissed her passionately, caressing her face, kneading her breasts and soft belly and plump thighs.  There were distant cries of disbelief.

“I changed my mind.  I’m gonna fuck you.  I need to.”  Loyce sat up and panted as she shot up another many feet, perhaps more than ten, then lowered her immense weight back onto the confused, frightened Tracy.  Loyce giggled.  “I know you want me to forgive you, Little Piggy.  You wanna make me feel good sooooo bad, right?  You wanna make me forget what you did?  Well, I can’t, but I am gonna fuck you before I kill you.  What a way to go, right?”

Tracy sank her teeth into Loyce’s left breast and scrambled out from under her as the bigger woman fell back and bellowed that terrible, inhuman sound from when she outgrew her cell.  She looked back to the main building, where some of the guards were trying to restore order, corralling and evacuating the inmates, calling for help that still wasn’t arriving.  There were, she saw, some guards up in the towers, but they were too terrified to shoot at her or Loyce.  Probably for the best, she figured; they’d need some damn high caliber stuff to do any serious damage to either of them.  

“You’re dead, bitch!” Loyce said.

The giant charged.  Tracy took two steps back before Loyce was upon her, into the basketball court.  Tracy barely came up to her chest now.  Loyce reached an arm out for her prey’s throat, the other hand clutching her bleeding breast, and Tracy reached down for the nearest object she could use in defense.  As the hand fastened about her neck, Tracy grabbed the top of the basketball hoop and swung it at Loyce’s head.  The swing was too low; the base snapped off against the side of her neck.  Tracy clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut and hoped that God would forgive her and let her into Heaven to see her grandma.

Tracy felt the pressure of fingers disappear from her neck and a hot spray splash her face.  She opened her eyes, and they were stung by blood.  Blood on the jagged end of the hoop’s metal pole, spraying from Loyce’s carotid artery, from where the rusted metal had slashed the titaness’s throat wide open.  The giant dead body’s weight crashed down on Tracy; it dwindled a bit in height as it fell, increasing the blood flow to a gush.  Gallons of blood, and that awful metallic smell, coated the woman trapped underneath the slain giant.  It pooled out to drench the entire court and stain much of the yard.  

There must have been more screaming from the spectators, witnessing the brutal end to Loyce’s rampage.  But they were all drowned out, as was the arrival of National Guard helicopters, by Tracy, screaming the loudest of all, at a volume to be heard for miles, by none who could understand who it was or how badly she needed help.

Chapter One

“Wish I could forget and let the years go by
Wish I could escape from my dreams of you.”

- Katzenjammer, “To the Sea”

                Alison Daily’s new cohabitant loomed on the threshold like Hippolyta awaiting Heracles’s Ninth Labor.

            “Oh,” said Alison, first stepping back, then, embarrassed by her timidity, forward.  “Hello, Tracy.”

            “Hey, Alison,” the visitor replied.

            Alison stood aside and closed the door behind the woman who entered with her head ducked to avoid smacking it against the doorframe.  A sports bag almost as large as Alison swung on Tracy’s shoulder.

            “I see you travelled light,” said Alison.

            “I’ve never had much,” said Tracy.  She surveyed the living room, admired the dining room’s crystal chandelier swaying and scintillating above her head.  She stood by the sofa – about long enough to fit her – and stretched one arm up.  “High ceilings.  I like this place already.”

            “Do most of your clothes fit you this badly?”  Alison tugged at the hem of Tracy’s shirt, a myrtle green tee stretched thin over the woman’s bulk; her minor tug tormented the collar to the breaking point and shredded it down to Tracy’s sternum.

            “No.  Just the old stuff.”  Tracy looked everywhere around the house except down, at Alison.  I, uh,”—she rubbed the back of her neck—“wore it ‘cause I thought you might like it.”

            Alison took her in from breast height.  “I do,” she said.  “I like it a lot.”  She pressed Tracy’s stomach—God, she marveled, she really does almost have a six-pack—with both hands.  Tracy stood there in silent confusion until, feeling dumb, she realized the smaller woman’s intentions and sat down on the couch.  Alison kissed her.  She kissed Tracy as hard as she could and let herself fall into her arms, the larger of the two laying across the couch and pulling Alison into her embrace.

            “You’re just as wonderful in person,” Alison whispered into Tracy’s ear.

            “You too.”    

            If Tracy had been unfamiliar with the world of online dating before she met Alison, even more so had she been with the oxymoronic principle of remote intimacy, of love kindled in sound waves and anonymous blocks of text and crystallized in pixelated real-time images so far from the actual, warm thing.  Now she held Alison’s head against her chest like a beautiful little egg in her hands, and she felt that there was work to do, that the past of year of knowing and longing had evaporated in Alison’s presence.  Face-to-face, things were so—

            “Different.”

            Alison jerked her head up.  “What is?”

            “Being here.”

            “Yeah.  It’s nice, though, isn’t it?  I loved this place growing up, I always thought Craftsman architecture—”

            “With you, I mean.”  Tracy sat up.  She turned Alison onto her back and began to rub her stomach.  She had worried on the way there, briefly, that their size disparity would make contact with Alison feel like molesting a child, but reality was so much sweeter; her little frame had such full breasts, such wide hips, her pretty little oblong face had such pouty lips, bespectacled eyes such a lovely green.  She made Tracy feel ungainly by comparison, elephantine and slow, a curveless pillar of muscle.  “How well do I know you?”

            “Better than most people do when they decide to move in together,” said Alison.  She kissed Tracy’s head (smiling at how the huge woman blushed) and slipped off her lap.  “Trust me, I’ve heard some horror stories.  People reluctant to admit how little they have in common moving into one another’s homes to cement relationships and, without even realizing, sort of speeding them toward the end.”

            “Always so positive,” Tracy laughed. 

            “Not every couple has our chemistry,” Alison called from the kitchen, rooting through the pantry.  “What do you want to eat?  Probably starving from the bus ride.”

            “Starving, yeah.  Didn’t take the bus.”

            “What?”

            “Hitchhiked.”

            “Are you joking?”  Alison ducked her head in from the kitchen.  “That’s dangerous!”

            Tracy leaned over the sofa, raised an eyebrow, and folded her arms in such a way as to threaten her shirtsleeves with the same fate as her collar.  “Compared to prison?”

            “Fair enough.”  She disappeared into a renewed clangor of pots and pans.  “I’ve always meant to ask you, but I wasn’t sure—I always thought it might be indelicate, or too early…”

            “Yeah?”  Tracy was pacing around the living room, then out into the hallway that curved through the right side of the house, around the kitchen, leading into a bathroom and two bedrooms facing each other.  She was looking at the pictures on the white walls, looking for old stuff.  Most of them were college pictures from just a few years ago.  Alison had always been embarrassed to show her stuff from when she was a kid, but there had to be adorable, juicy stuff in a frame somewhere in the Daily house, hanging or on a bureau.  Tracy was peering innocuously around the bathroom when slender arms wrapped around her waist.

            “Did you have any prison wives?” Alison murmured into Tracy’s back.

            Tracy spun around and scooped her off the ground and Alison squealed with delight.

            “None as pretty as you,” Tracy said in-between raspberries on her love’s belly. 

            “Bet you went through half a dozen over three years.”

            “Haha, at least.”  Tracy started toward what she assumed was Alison’s room (it looked enough, through the partly-closed door, like the backdrop she recognized from so many Skype calls and profile pictures) when Alison said, “Wait.”

            Tracy waited.

            “Let’s eat first,” Alison continued, “then fool around.”

            “Sounds good to me.”  Tracy set Alison down.  “But believe me”—she crouched and grabbed the redhead’s derriere with enough force to elicit a gasp—“I won’t be fooling around.”

            Tracy felt it in the living room.  Like electricity raising her neck hairs, like the numb, slow prelude to a heart attack.  The moments came so rarely ever since men in black had given her over to men and women in white coats, after she and the huge exsanguinated corpse of her partner-in-crime had been spirited away to God-Knows-Where, to be, respectively, cured and dissected.  “Cured” being a word earned only after so much needling and cutting and soaking and spraying with a hundred thousand different aerosol hurricanes of various scents and sensations (few pleasant), after a week-long diminution from several stories high to a mere seven feet and with her white-coated wardens none the wiser as to how she defied the Square Cube Law and survived.

            The sensations, Opportunities as Tracy had labeled them, in the same way that someone who loses a foot to a snakebite labels tall grass as a Hazard, came with decreasing frequency through the remainder of her sentence, as she devoted more and more time to exercise, to tightening her new body into something forbidding and powerful, something she could for once like.  It must have been the final imprint of the gas, the scientists had thought, that she could so easily replace the flabbiness of her frame with hard muscle.  In under half a year she had traded her muffin top for a washboard, and the rest of Tracy Skaid followed suit.   

            And here was another Opportunity.

            Best to get this out of the way quickly.

            “Alison,” Tracy said.  Alison came from the kitchen, nervous at the way her name had been called the way things are said when the speaker needs to deliver distasteful news, and then doubly nervous at the way Tracy was standing, as if she had frozen in place from a sudden pain.

            “Listen,” Tracy continued, removing her jeans, panties, and shoes with quick, mechanical movements, leaving on only the torn t-shirt and her socks, “I need you to see something.  If you don’t like it—if it frightens you—I’ll leave.  I’m glad I can do this before I’m unpacked.”

            “Trace,” Alison said, laughing nervously, starting toward the half-naked woman, “what are you talking about?”

            “Watch.”

            The worn socks wore themselves, finally, to death against the wooden floor, stretching to transparency and the shreds without the feet inside actually moving.  The myrtle green tee gave a last futile protest as the tanned chest and arms within pushed inexorably free of their confines, as atoms flew into the expanding molecular cloud that was Tracy Skaid, drawn in by processes mysterious and alien in their mechanics (and sensual to behold), forming more and more new cells, new muscle, new flesh, without the orderliness of the burgeoning human body ever distorting. 

            Tracy’s head bumped the twelve-foot ceiling and ended it.  Her mousy hair now hung down to her shoulders.  She hated it long nowadays.  She shook it away from her face, the saw Alison, and remembered where she was and what she had just done.

            “I don’t let that happen a lot,” she whispered.  She lowered herself slowly to a cross-legged position on the floor, letting her nervous system get back to work, feeling her body become once again completely solid, thoughts and electrical impulses returning to normal speed.  The cool wood soothed her; the growth always generated a ton of heat, and it made for a lousy delayed reaction.

            She still had not made eye contact with Alison.

            Alison had not moved since she saw the shirt tear away from Tracy’s rippling arms.  She stepped forward, tin-soldier deliberate, and stopped immediately in front of the downcast eyes of the giantess.

            “Tracy.”

            Tracy’s head jolted up at the tone of Alison’s voice.  Was it chiding?  Even stranger, her eyes: there was recognition in them.  Of what, Tracy couldn’t tell, but it flashed through them as the little woman’s head nodded.

            “You thought that would frighten me?” Alison asked, with a disbelieving smile.

            “Um, well, yeah.”

            Alison beckoned Tracy forward.  She removed her glasses and embraced the great chiseled rectangular face and kissed its lips and ran her fingers over its jawline.

            “It takes a great deal more than that, Big Girl.  Will you be back to normal by the time I’ve got the chicken ready?”

            “I… yeah, are we just talking now?  After I turned into a giant and I’m naked in your living room?  You’re taking this really well.  Unreasonably well.”

            Alison rolled her eyes and fell against the kitchen portico, one arm raised to her forehead, petrified in Fay Wray mock-terror.  “Oh,” she said in the brassy gasp of a B-movie bombshell, “please, don’t come any closer—”

            Tracy grinned and stretched out a predatory finger.  She pushed her voice to the lowest extreme of its register; at twelve feet, somewhere in the range of an alligator’s bellow.  “Mmm, me want.”  She tickled her damsel until the little redhead was collapsed with helpless giggles and pleas to stop, and Tracy joined in, laughing hand-on-knees belly laughter, until her forehead touched the floor and her eyes were wet.

            “I’ll shrink fast,” she said.  “I’ll be hungry when I’m little again.”

            “‘Little’,” Alison echoed with wide-eyed sarcasm.  “Uh-huh, it’ll just be little old normal Tracy eating me out of house and home.”

            With Alison busy with the oven and with raw poultry, Tracy had a moment to contextualize her current position: almost twice her normal height and naked in the house of her Internet girlfriend who was entirely unastonished at witnessing her growth to the aforementioned abnormal size.

            There’s got to be a reason she took that so well, Tracy thought.  Love?  That was one thing.  But the gleam (or perhaps the shadow) of recognition in Alison’s eyes, the slow nod of her head as if she was seeing something unusual for the second time, had been unmistakable.

            Tracy thought, and shrank, as the sunlight waned.

            “You get these for free?” Tracy asked, fastening the Wonderbra around her chest.

            “Well, discounted,” said Alison.  “I’ve only been with Wonder Fashion for so long.  Once I’ve got my own line, that’s another story.”

            Alison had bought some large ladies’ wear for Tracy as a surprise for when she arrived.  After Tracy had shrunk and they ate, Alison had her try on some of the new stuff in her bedroom.

            “I know you will,” said Tracy, “your design portfolio is really nice.”

            “You’re just saying that.”

            “I’m not.” 

            “Well,” said Alison, “I showed you my design sketches.  Now it’s your turn to show me something.”

            “Oh.”  Tracy unhooked the bra and began to slide off her panties, wiggling her hips, looking over her shoulder at Alison through half-lidded eyes and biting her bottom lip.

            “I’ve already seen that,” Alison laughed.  “I meant the pictures you have from when you were younger.”

            Tracy frowned, mock-irritated, slingshotted her underwear at her girlfriend’s head, and began rifling through her bag.

            “Used to scrapbook,” Tracy said.  “Not well, but I did.  Only reason these aren’t digital.  And does this mean I get to see you as a cute little kid?”

            “Uh-uh.”

            “But I’m showing you—”

            “I showed you the new portfolio, this is the trade-off.”

            Tracy stuck her tongue out as she fished the small album from underneath her folded clothes.

            “Oh my God.”  Alison brought a hand to her mouth and flipped through the album with the other.  “Tracy, you were adorable!” 

            “Ugh, age seven: when I started the ‘chubby and awkward’ stage that didn’t really end like a stage is supposed to.”

            Tracy sat on the bed with Alison and shook her head at the grins, grimaces, and glowers frozen on celluloid, her grainy childhood, her adolescence (so few others in those pictures, fewer whose names she could remember, parents disappeared entirely), and her washed-out early adulthood.

            Then she was there.  Sitting on Tracy’s left side on the hood of a Cadillac (stolen, Tracy had learned a month after the photo had been taken), t-shirt and jeans both torn, arm around Tracy’s shoulders, both of them caught at the start of laughter.

            Alison must have felt her stiffen.

            “Is that… your friend?” she asked

            “No,” said Tracy.

            “Well, I guess she wasn’t really a friend…”

            “No, she was.  At first.  But—she just… It’s late.  I’ll let you finish looking.  I’m going to sleep.”

            “Wait,” Alison said, grabbing Tracy’s arm, “I’m sorry.  You probably feel weird about it since she died.”  She pulled Tracy back toward the bed.  “But… could you tell me about your condition?”
            “So you are curious.”  Tracy folded her arms.  “Why were you so cool about it?”

            “I mean…”

            “It didn’t remind you of—”

            “God, no.”

            “What, has it happened to you?”

            “Sort of.”

            Tracy’s brain skipped from one confusion to another and left her face petrified in numb stupefaction.

            “I mean, not exactly,” Alison added quickly.  She talked with her hands, Tracy noticed, when she was embarrassed.  “I had this hallucinogenic episode years ago, when I took a tour of the Wonder Fashions Research and Design Headquarters, I had taken some allergy medication, and I believe I was exposed to some chemical vapors—basically, between the drugs and the chemicals I had this trippy, Lewis Carroll-esque fever dream.  It can remember it with surprising clarity, I ate some cake and shot up about six feet—my clothes all stayed on besides my underpants, for some reason—and there was this whole world under the facility, with creepy, wide-faced little fairies tending these (oh Jesus) phallic-looking fruit, and I sucked out some of the juice to get unstuck from between some trees.  My tits broke the trees, and… it’s not really important, the rest of it, and I woke up later, missed a bunch of the tour, could have sued Wonder Fashions, to be honest, but I wanted to work there so I figured, What’s the point?”

            Alison remembered to breathe.  “Anyway, when you grew, it just reminded me of that fucking bizarre dream.  Minus the ballooning tits.”

            “Why,” Tracy said, slowly, “was I not told this story when we were talking online?”

            “Can you imagine how weird it would have been for me to even see that crazy nonsense typed out?”

            Tracy fished her toiletries from her bag and went into the hallway bathroom to brush her teeth.  “Hey,” she called to Alison with a mouthful of toothpaste, “should I sleep in the next bedroom?  I’m gonna take up most of the bed at my size, and my bag takes up a ton of space; maybe I should make that my area?  I’ll stay in your bed when we, y’know, fuck.”

“I don’t mind sharing the bed,” said Alison.  “I really don’t.  Besides, I’m certain you’ll be great to sleep on.”

            Tracy came back in for her bag and tousled Alison’s hair on the way.

            “Don’t,” said Alison.

            Tracy recoiled.  That was the sort of dead tone of voice she had used when she was younger, when someone did something she didn’t like.  Typically Loyce.  You developed that tone when the person never stopped.

            “Sorry.”

            “No big deal,” said Alison.  She chuckled to break the tension.  “You couldn’t have known.  I should have mentioned it at some point.  Just a pet peeve, happens a bit much when you grow up as short as I am.”

            “Eh, five-two isn’t that bad.”

            Tracy threw her bag onto the bed in the room across from Alison’s.  It didn’t feel like a guest room.  Its layout mirrored Alison’s, though any evidence of a previous inhabitant had been stripped away.  Tracy checked the dresser drawers: empty.  She opened the top drawer of the night stand and was rewarded: two pictures.

            In the first were two girls, no older than thirteen.  They were standing on a green field, captured in ethereal brightness by sunlight reflected in the camera.  One of the girls, the much taller, wore a soccer uniform, and stood with her left foot planted on the ball, left hand in a fist on her hip, right arm encircling the other girl.  What a smile: glad, victorious, challenging.  Her dark hair, not even shoulder-length, had (Tracy could just make them out) purple highlights.

            She did not yet know how or why the purple in the girl’s hair seemed familiar.

            The shorter of the two had to be Alison; same auburn hair, definitely her face, albeit younger and without glasses.  Her smile revealed the gleam of braces.  Her left arm was around the waist of the other girl, and in her right she carried a gold trophy.  Tracy couldn’t see the name on the plaque.

            She turned over the picture.  On the back, written in permanent marker: “Alison after Big Sis’s tournament win.”

            Alison had a sister and never once mentioned her to Tracy.

            Fair enough, Tracy thought, maybe they’re estranged.  Maybe she’s dead, like her parents.

            And yet…

            The second photo: “Big Sis” quite a bit older, perhaps 17.  Her figure had developed, the cuteness eroded from her oval face.  Adulthood had suited her.  Faded jean jacket and dark pants, hands in pockets.  The camera looked at her from the side.  No smile here; she was annoyed, or sad, perhaps both.  She was on the side of the road, sky dominated by a threatening nimbus, browning grass laid flat by wind.  Her hair had, left of her face, a prominent streak of mauve.

            Tracy was almost sick before she turned over the photo and read the caption in Alison’s handwriting: “Last sighting of the elusive Megan Small.”

            Megan Small.

            Tracy recalled watching that face, purple-streaked hair blowing high against helicopter gusts, on the news for what seemed like an eternity after her return from the desert.  Heard the stories of her growth and rampage at a different prison within the same week she had killed Loyce in the prison yard, and the following catfight between similarly-affected women not even two days later.  And then that face, dominating the 24-hour news cycle; smiling with satisfaction; eyes shut, mouth open in a moan of pleasure; bottom lip bitten, eyebrows wiggling, an expression so cartoonishly devious one was tempted to laugh, until the footage cut back to the wreckage of San Diego, the great bleeding chunk torn from America’s West Coast; head high, prideful, eyes wild with malice as that ordinary young woman in the picture strode naked and gargantuan down city streets increasingly too narrow for her to navigate, after bursting from the courthouse, violating and destroying everyone inside.  The audio of her voice, amplified to godlike thunderclap volume, taunting the National Guard, roaring with anger, crying out in orgasm after the cure dispensed by the jets failed and her growth peaked and she pleasured herself with the bridge; always that clip, and the cars tumbling from so, so high up, falling past the buildings already ruined, the streets and tanks already flattened, screams drowned out by the shameless moaning and panting, by the almost comical exhibition of the massive aroused woman caressing herself, aggressively probing her vagina, groping her own swollen breasts.

            Calling down to her victims.  Calling herself “the new law.” 

            “A goddess.”

            Tracy clutched the pictures very, very, tightly between her fingers as she walked back to Alison’s room.  A short distance over slow steps.

            The teary testimonials from relatives of victims, computer simulations of how different structures succumbed to the damage she wrought, speculation on how it happened, how it was possible, what it meant, how could a human being even do something like this?  The President’s address to the nation, the UN restoration effort, the charities and benefit concerts.

            The suppositions about the Giant’s fate: after having her way with the bridge, she was just falling asleep before she started in a panic and shrank more rapidly than she had grown.  She disappeared into the ruins.  Officials had appeared on television to reassure the world that she was presumed dead, drowned in the Pacific, or crushed in the rubble she had created, or burned to death in one of the fires she had started.  Dead of a heart attack, a stroke, some failure of her body due to the immense stress of her size-changing.  Or, more fancifully, shrunken away to nothingness.  Still, there were the conspiracy theories, ominous and persistent, that the government was holding her in captivity, waiting to re-release her and install the New World Order.  Or, worse (depending on who you asked), she had simply escaped.  She was hiding somewhere. 

            Just biding her time.

            “Alison.”

            Tracy’s girlfriend had just turned out the lights and was under the covers, glasses off, hair a mess.  Tracy turned on the bedside lamp and placed the photos in its light.  Alison put her glasses back on and looked, and removed her glasses when she looked back at Tracy.  She did not want to see Tracy’s face.

“I…”  Alison hugged her knees.  She shook her head.  “I thought I had remembered to—to put them away, somewhere.  I-I thought.”

            “Alison Small.”

            Alison was taking quick, shallow breaths.  Tracy shut the door and sat on the bed. 

            “We have some more sharing to do,” she said.   

– Hey.  Hey, c’mon, frickin’ answer, Meg.

            – Yeah, what is it?

            – Hey, where are you right now?

            – Hiding under a fucking storm drain, planning a route east, why’d you call?

            – You oughta come back to your old place.

            – Which ‘old place’ are you talking about?

            – Like, where you grew up.

            – Are you on some fucking drugs, Nikki?

            – No no listen, alright, you wanna hear this.

            – Oh yeah?

            – Yeah, remember that chick you told me about from the first time you were—

            – Keep your fucking voice down when you mention that shit, someone might hear you.

            – Right, sorry, I’ll whisper.  The first time you were huge and they took you to that place?  That chick you mentioned that they were looking at before-and-after pictures of, the one that had been huge too? They sent her back to another jail after they shrank her.  And you said she started off kinda chunky but in the newer pics she looked like Gina Carano or some shit?

            – Yeah, yeah, and so what?

            – She’s moved in with your sister.

            – …

            – Megan you there?

            – Are you sure?

            – Huh?  Yeah, big buff bitch, got dropped off at Ali’s house earlier in the afternoon.

            – Oh my God, that’s fucking perfect!  We’re going to get the team together at my old house.

            – Really?  That’s North Carolina, Meg, why not Kansas or something, not so far from the place you—

            – No, Jami’s up in Maine, it’ll be easier for her to meet us there without worrying about her doing some crazy shit to get arrested on the way to the Midwest.  Make sure Joan knows what’s up.

            – Yeah, sure, do I need to go get you or something?

            – Are you crazy?  If they catch you bringing me across state lines we’re both fucked, and anyway I need you there keeping an eye on baby sis and her big girlfriend.  See if they leave or something. 

            – How much longer are you gonna be?

            – Not much.  I can get pretty far in a day.  Hell, I might get there before you see the sun come up.

            – I guess I’ll wait up for you.

            – Don’t bother, Scarface; you’ll need a good night’s sleep.  I plan on paying baby sis a surprise visit before I let you know I’m there.

            – Holy shit that’s evil.

            – *POP*

            – The fuck was that, Meg?

            – My ride home.  I left some construction nails on the shoulder of the road, lemme take a look—yep, guy’s got a spare tire, and gas in the back.  My lucky day.  I’ll be seeing you, Nikki.

            – Yeah Meg, sure thing.

Chapter Two

“Lie on my back
Clouds are making way for me
I'm coming home, sweet home”

- Darren Korb, “I’m Here”

“It was their idea that I use the other name.”  Alison had pressed herself hard against Tracy’s chest.  Tracy turned off the lamp and laid with Alison on the bed.  Tracy knew exactly who they were: the same they that shrank her, probably the same they that created the gas that led to so much trouble in the first place.

“Witness protection?” Tracy asked.

“No.  They didn’t need to move me.  They moved things around me.  As far as records go, Megan Small never existed as anything other than an anonymous inmate who wrecked the West Coast and probably died, and Alison Daily has no relation to her whatsoever.”  Alison sniffed.  “A lot of the people who lived here when I was growing up are gone now.  Anybody else… they must have gotten some incentive to keep quiet about me.”

“Good thing.”  Tracy thought of all the women she had met in prison, and how she had heard from none of them since her release.  “Tell me about her.”

“She left.  She went away before she was eighteen, and I don’t know everything she got into, but she was in prison when Mom and Dad died.  She got out, but not for long.  Then you know what happened to the next jail she was in.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Alison made a noise in her throat, and Tracy recognized the sound of a scream being choked back.  The smaller woman was crying again. 

“How do you think I feel, knowing my sister killed all those people?  Do you have any idea how hard it is to not remember?  Even if everyone who knew me doesn’t say so, they know.  They all saw what she did.  What she turned into.”  Alison gulped as though surfacing for air.  She looked Tracy in the eyes for the first time since seeing the pictures.  “Do you still—”

Tracy’s lips silenced her.  “She wasn’t your fault,” Tracy said.  “People are only related by accident.  But now that I’m with you…”    

“I know,” Alison said, “I need to trust you with all this.  Tomorrow, ok?  I’ll tell you about everything.  No more secrets.”

Tracy nodded.  “No more.”  She enveloped Alison, rolling on top of her and kissing her until she was out of breath.

“Careful,” gasped Alison.

Without her glasses, Alison couldn’t see whether or not Tracy was smiling.  “Trust me, remember?”  Strong fingers tore away Alison’s clothes and began to explore.  That night, the two women slept like possums. 

A golem was walking down Matheson Street.  A creature far distant from Rabbi Loew’s behemoth.  Its ingredients?  No clay from the Vltava’s banks, no Hebrew incantations or rabbinical wisdom, just an ordinary woman in stolen clothes layered with mud from an unrestful nap in a ditch.  Where the Golem of Chełm grew continuously to a great size, the skulking thing on Matheson Street found the rain was sloughing off its earthen exoskeleton, leaving the woman beneath further reduced and very wet.

White lights glared through the darkness: the first car down the street since the woman had crept into the suburb.  She sprang across the road like a frightened deer, hurled herself into the swollen swale spilling out over the marshy lawns, let the rest of her mud coating dissolve, slithered through the gloriously cool rainwater, crept catlike up the steep slope from the water into someone’s backyard.  A backyard that had been her neighbor’s so many years ago.  A backyard that she had played in as a child.

How strange, to think of herself playing.  How much stranger, to think that she had once been a child! 

She wondered what her old neighbors would think of her now, returned with her face and body as evidence of so many years passed, returned with infamy stretching before her like a noon shadow, billowing behind her like a dark mantle.  How she must appear to a random passerby – slinking through backyards at night like a hungry raccoon – who didn’t know that this was her old neighborhood, that she had grown up and lived and left there long before anyone outside of that place knew her name.  Not that she cared what one might think, then or now.

Finally, in her backyard, she fished the knife from the pocket of the pants that were not her own – a man’s, made tight about her waist by fishing tackle – and plunged it into the sodden earth.  The heavy rain had made her job easy; her knees were already sinking into the ground as her left arm tore up sod and sifted through the nightcrawlers and liquid soil.  Then her blade found the phone line and sliced through.  She overturned the stone toad squatting guard beside the back door.  Sure enough: the spare key, just where her mother had always hidden it.

She may have become a stranger in her old neighborhood, but she would be damned if she wasn’t going to enter her old house through the front door.

She walked around to the front of the house, up the driveway, up to the front door as though nothing had ever changed.

How strange and wonderful to be back home!

Tracy was a heavy sleeper.  She had scarcely stirred when Alison slipped out from beneath her embrace.  The smallest of the pair shuddered and rubbed away goosebumps when she stepped out of the jungle climate of her bedroom.  Their bedroom.  She looked back at the outline of the amazon asleep under sweat-soaked sheets, flickering under the fan’s shadow.  Something coiled in her chest like a tightening fist, and it felt good.  Alison needed a drink of water (no telling how much weight she had lost in bodily fluids).  Tracy would probably wake up hungry as well as thirsty, given the pace she’d maintained for most of the night.  Alison had never spent so much time being lifted during sex.  She staggered to the fridge like a woman at sea.  Easy to believe, listening to the blast of rain against the roof.    

Something clinked in the hallway.

Alison went to the front door.  Nothing but the storm and the melting light of streetlamps through the rain.  She felt like a child again, annoyed at herself for being frightened.  She sighed, and a knotted towel fell over her mouth.

Arms entangled hers.  Her face hit the rug.  She screamed and thrashed and stopped when the weight on her back increased and strong hands twisted her head until she expected to hear cracking.  Alison was blind: tears blurred her vision, the house was dark, and her glasses had fallen off. 

More pain, in her wrists: they were bound behind her back with what felt like fishing line.  Then her ankles.  She was rolled onto her back, and fully expected to be killed.  Alison closed her eyes.

Her assailant wiped the tears away with the loose end of the towel-gag.  Alison felt her glasses being placed carefully on her face.

“Wouldn’t wanna break those again,” whispered a familiar voice. 

Alison’s eyes were suddenly very open.

Heavy footsteps in the hallway.

“Here comes the big girl already…”

The invader was prepared.  More bonds tied and ready, and something that glinted in the meager light.  She slithered into the kitchen, shadowing Tracy.

The tall woman heard a muffled sound near the front door, and turned.     

“Ali?

Someone else kicked off from the wall and landed on her back.  Tracy reached over her head, couldn’t find anything to grab.  The attacker swung her feet into Tracy’s tailbone once, twice, three times, dropped to the floor and struck her behind both knees. 

Tracy fell.

“Goddamn you!”  There was pressure on the sides of her neck before she could even try to get up.  One arm was squeezing, and the other held something sharp to the big woman’s stomach.

“Just give up, will ya?” the other woman hissed.

Tracy would not.  She reached out one hand to snap something.  The arm squeezed hard, and Tracy passed out.

Done.  Now, the work of dragging the big one to a more convenient place and tying her.  Alison gave up struggling when she saw Tracy, limp, being moved to the living room.  She allowed herself to be slung over the invader’s shoulder without protest and tied to a chair.

“Well, sis,” said Megan, flicking on a light, “you sure know how to make a girl feel welcome.”

Tracy was in Hell, but she wasn’t burning yet.  She could hear sizzling and smell burnt meat from the turning spit of souls, and all around the wind howled. 

The air conditioning blew hair across her forehead.  Tracy realized she was still alive, and remembered where she had been.  Temples, neck, knees, back, and wrists were all sore, the wrists more so for being tightly bound with rope.  A towel gag was in her mouth.  The dimmed living room lights turned her swimming vision golden, and a golden voice came floating from the kitchen:

Now if you’ve lost your inheritance

And all you’ve left is common sense

And you’re not too picky about the crowd you keep

Or the mattress where you sleep

Behind every window, behind every door

The apple is gone, but there’s always the core

And the seeds will sprout up right through the floor

Coming fully to her senses, Tracy knew she must have imagined the loveliness of the singing.  Singing of the sprouting seeds, the voice lapsed into a declamatory snarl and a drumroll of kitchen utensils clattered on the countertop in a crescendo over the half-sung, half-murmured rubato:

Down there in the Reeperbahn.

Megan Small stepped into the living room and bowed, facing Tracy.  She twirled the fork and spatula in her hands.

“The album version goes on longer after that,” she said to Tracy, tossing back long rain-damp hair.  “Knew you wouldn’t be out for too long if I did that choke correctly.” 

Megan was still soaked, and her mismatched ensemble suggested unhappy fates for its many clothing-bereft former owners.  She extended a hand to Tracy, retracted it, chuckled. 

“I was going to introduce myself,” she said, “but I think my reputation precedes me.  That’s one way we’re alike, Tracy.” 

Tracy refused her captor the satisfaction of eyes wide with surprise, but she was very surprised to her name from Megan Small’s mouth.  Megan must have sensed it regardless.  “Didn’t think you were a big name outside of spooky government labs, right?” she snickered.  “Well, we shared one back before my big day.  It’s a little weird for me, seeing you bigger than bite-sized”—she held a forefinger and thumb an inch apart—“right in front of me, not scurrying around on the floor, not being talked about by creepy old dudes in labcoats looking at before-and-after pictures.  Hell, they had me on so many drugs, I was usually seeing about five of you at once.”  Megan threw an arm around Tracy’s neck, gave her a chummy punch on the shoulder.  “What a night this is for you, huh?  Not every day you get held hostage by a celebrity!”  A wave of the hand dismissed invisible hordes of fans.  She threw on her best Trans-Atlantic accent and gave a regal, Katharine Hepburn raise of the chin.  “‘I know, I know, you were expecting someone taller; what can I say, darling, we’re all larger-than-life on camera.’  Must be weird for you, not seeing me from a bird’s eye view or a shaky-cam upshot.”

A hand against the other side of Tracy’s head kept her from recoiling as Megan purred into her ear, “And am I a little quieter than you’re used to?”  Tracy held her breath to avoid the woman’s mephitis.  Megan smiled warmly at Tracy’s cringing discomfort before turning her attention to Alison.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, Ali.”  Megan tousled Alison’s hair and spoke with enough mock-sweetness to make Tracy’s teeth ache.  “My little sister’s grown up so much since I last saw her!  Living on her own like a big girl and everything, even getting fucked on the regular!  And what are the chances that you’d hook up with the same sexy, MMA-looking bitch that got ‘cured’ at the same time as me?”  She laughed.  Tracy cringed and bit into her gag; if she had her eyes closed, she could almost have mistaken it for Alison’s laugh.  “And you”—this directed at Tracy, along with the fork in her hand—“are my main reason for coming here, make no mistake.  As nice as it is to see the old place and my sweet baby Ali.  No, I’m here to be your best friend—not that you have a ton of choice in the matter—and have you join me on a little road trip.”

Tracy snarled a muffled refusal.  Megan shook her head and walked away.  “Sorry, not really coming through.  By the way: gotta say, you’re built like a tank (had to get that rope out of the garage just for you), but I’m not sure you ever learned how to fight.  Actually fight, not just hurt someone enough to scare them.”  Megan darted back into the kitchen, returned with a steak bleeding out its burnt last onto a plate.  She left it to cool on the table across from Alison and Tracy, hovering above it to waft the smell into her nostrils.

“We’ll talk about how the rest of our lives are going to go as soon as I’m clean and fed,” Megan said.  She darted her gaze around the house.  “Now… I can’t be the only music we have the rest of the night, that won’t work.”  She rolled her eyes at her younger sister.  “I remember, there was that CD player you used to have, is it in your room?”

Alison did not respond, or even lift her head to acknowledge Megan.

“I’ll assume it is,” sighed Megan.  She returned from searching Alison’s room with the CD player, covered in dust, and with Tracy’s half-emptied bag.  “It’ll be good for the atmosphere.  All this thunder and lightning can get you on edge, and the last thing I need is for you two to be tense.  High blood pressure’s not something you want when your circulation’s almost cut off.”

Tracy tugged at her bonds.  They were expertly done.  Even she couldn’t just rip through so much rope.  

“Well, whaddaya know?” Megan said, rifling through Tracy’s bag.  “Big Tracy’s got some nice taste in music!”  She produced Bone Machine.  “This is one of my favorites.”  Megan put the CD into the player, and Tom Waits began his gravelly prophesying about the end of the world.

And the earth died screaming…

“I can tell you’ll be good to have around,” Megan said to Tracy.  “Now, you two just relax for a minute while I shower and get out of these shitty clothes.  Been too fucking long since I showered.”  She left the two bound women in the barely-lit living room, taking the steak with her.  Alison heard the water running, and hoped desperately that lightning would strike the house and electrocute her sister in the shower.  Then they would only have to wait until Tracy had another spurt and freed them.  Or she wouldn’t, and they would be in a different quagmire.

She turned her head to look at Tracy, who was still glowering straight ahead.  Alison grunted for her attention.  Tracy met her gaze, and the fear in the smaller woman’s eyes fueled the rage that seethed at the invasion of this outlaw into their home.

From the CD player, Waits’s sobbing:

I said we’re all gonna be just dirt in the ground

Tracy had expected a long shower.  Her first shower after being released had lasted half an hour.  Megan instead returned in less than ten minutes, fully naked, and holding a Winchester Model 12 shotgun.

“Of course you didn’t sell Dad’s waterfowl gun,” said Megan, reclining on the loveseat across from her captives’ chairs.  “Always looked nice up on the wall in their bedroom.  Still think he should’ve put it up in here, but at least I knew where to look.”

There came the croaking chant:

All stripped down

All stripped down

She was just as beautiful as she was on TV, Tracy thought.  It made her sick.  Megan’s hair, minutes ago long and greasy from neglect, had been cut to shoulder length.  It hit Tracy what was off about it, still: no mauve.   The hand that wasn’t on the stock of the shotgun was idly drumming fingers against the ample breasts pancaked against her chest.  They were not as swollen, nor was the rest of Megan as voluptuous as after her colossal growth spurts, but…

If Tracy could have freed just one arm, she would have punched herself for the pang of lust she felt stab between her legs looking at Megan.  The woman was a stone hourglass; everything besides her bosom was hardened, not with workout muscle, but with what remains when too much running and hiding and killing whatever food you can’t steal burns away everything soft inside and out.  Tracy had seen it before.  But never as attractive as the woman now posed like a painter’s model, aiming a gun at her and her girlfriend, idly scratching a barely-trimmed bush and flexing tired, (lovely Tracy thought with inward disgust) strong legs.

“Just made a call on your phone, sis,” yawned Megan.  “Nikki Lonsky should be here from one of the houses next door.  You’ll like her.  I told her to move here awhile back, keep tabs on you, let me know if the Men in Black were stopping by, any spooky top-secret government stuff, whether or not they were watching over the place, yadda yadda.  Didn’t seem like it.  Guess they were pretty quick to wash their hands of us once I disappeared and your name got changed.  She’s one of a few friends that you and Tracy are gonna be meeting today.  She’ll be your—”

Megan’s head jerked up.  Her eyes flicked here and there, giving her the mien of a lost dog.  She focused on Tracy.  The brunette protested through her gag when the woman with the gun pressed her nose into her hair and sniffed deeply.  Alison’s reddened eyes grew wide. 

“It’s you,” Megan breathed.  She shivered.  “It’s inside you.  The vapor, the growth-gas, I can smell it.  I couldn’t before I cleaned off, but now…”  Again she sniffed about Tracy.  “Mmm, different than mine, not as strong as mine was, but I recognize it.  Oh, that’s just fantastic.”

The front door opened to the stormswept street, and a damp sandy-haired woman with a jagged scar under her left eye entered, wringing out her sweater.

“Looks like my spy showed up!” said Megan.

“H-hey, Meg!” chirped Nikki Lonsky.  She stiffened when Megan approached to greet her in the nude.  Megan patted her on the back, and Nikki went in for a full hug.

“Whoa there.”

“I’m just glad to see you made it,” said Nikki, following her to the captives.

“Nikki: Alison and Tracy.  Alison and Tracy: Nikki.”

Alison looked at Nikki Lonsky and recognized, in spirit, any one of the women who had frightened her during visits to Megan in her earliest days of incarceration.  Tracy looked at her and recognized a certain type of person.  She saw how Nikki looked at her comrade, and Tracy could tell that, as far as Nikki was concerned, Megan Small was still the biggest person in the world.

“Shouldn’t be long before they get here,” Nikki said.  “Naomi’s closest, should show up right about sunrise, then I think Joan, and Jami will be last.”

“Last?  I thought she’d already started from Maine, what she fuck has she—”

“It’s Jami, Meg.”

“Yeah, stupid question.”  Megan sighed and massaged her forehead.  She tossed the shotgun in Nikki’s direction.  “Catch!” 

Nikki cracked herself on the head trying to avoid grabbing the trigger.  She leveled it at Alison and Tracy.  “Were they trying to break free?”

“Nah, they’ve behaved themselves.  But I had to get a little rough with them, ‘specially Big Guns over here,” said Megan, slapping one of Tracy’s sizable biceps.  “Ali’s quiet, as usual.”

Alison barked something through her gag.

“Love you too, sis.”  Megan again whispered into Tracy’s ear, holding her head still.  “Another thing we’ve got in common, Trace: we’ve both gotten used to looking down at people.  And I’m already sick of looking up.”  She started toward Alison’s bedroom, glanced over her right shoulder and met Tracy’s eyes.  Megan winked.  “You keep an eye on them until company shows up, Nikki.  I’m gonna sleep for a while, in a real bed.”  Shuffling and rattling from the bedroom.  “Just as soon as I find where Ali keeps her—”

Bzzzzzzzzz.

“Found it!”

The bedroom door slammed shut.  The dark muttering of thunder overhead was soon punctuated by the rhythmic knock of a headboard against a wall.  Nikki turned down the music and sat across from the bound women.  She smiled uneasily. 

“You girls might as well try to sleep a little.  This place is gonna be real busy in a few hours.”

Tracy snorted and rocked on her chair.  Her head throbbed from trying to will an Opportunity.  Alison was breathing heavily. 

“Sorry you can’t be more comfy,” Nikki said.  “Meg’ll probably let me untie you as soon as AAGH JESUS!”

The house flashed white and the sky cracked.  The lights went out.  For a little while the storm fell silent as if in apology for the last fiery shout, and the Small house was quiet except for the gasping of a woman postponing her sleep and the high-pitched drone of her electronic lover.