Few things in the past few years have given me as much joy as I feel now in watching the momentary hope squelched from Julia’s eyes, replaced with seething rage. If Gina and Faith weren’t still so precariously poised in Julia’s hand, I might even allow myself a little touchdown dance.
The towering brunette’s lowers her arm to the bedspread, allowing Gina, still clutching Faith to her bare chest, to stumble from the overbearing palm and onto the sheets.
In that moment, even from all this distance, I manage to catch Gina’s gaze. Her eyes appear to already be glistening, anticipating the particularly messy demise I seem to be arranging for myself right now. Her lip quivers, begging me to drop to my knees and give Julia what she wants so I don’t have to die.
“You!” Julia laughs, taking several booming steps forward. “You will never be small?” She slams each bare foot down with ample force, enough to rattle the walls and nearly knock me off balance. I clutch my knees, not daring to let myself fall before her, even now as she takes a final step and halts just short of me. A few inches before me are those murderously wriggling toes, the nails gleaming with that fresh coat of blue polish.
“No,” I say resolutely, staring up the monolithic spire of Julia’s body. Though I can’t even reach her ankle, we’re eye-to-eye now like never before. “You could make me into an ant, or dust, or a microbe if you wanted. It doesn’t matter. Because you couldn’t possibly make yourself big enough to stand above me. Or any of us.”
A pregnant pause ensues. Julia doesn’t conjure up a response, though as her foot suddenly lurches forward, her big toe pile-driving itself into my stomach, I think I have an idea of her opinion on my little speech.
My legs leave the ground as her firm digit squeezes the wind from my lungs and picks up just high enough that my tumble backwards and onto the ground isn’t going to leave any lasting damage. Though that’s not to say it doesn’t hurt like hell as I roll over backwards several times, fairly confident I now know what it feels like to be fired through the windshield of a high-speed vehicle. Even as I slide onto my side, clutching my sore stomach, the brunt of the assault still makes me feel as though Julia’s toe is pressing into my gut, compressing all my internal organs beneath the heft of her muscle and flesh.
In the next instant, the sensation is made into reality again. I feel her toe squeeze down onto my abdomen, preventing oxygen from making its way back in. Her heel pivots against the carpet, working me with such delicacy yet still keeping me pinned squarely under her digit.
Obviously Julia felt a practical demonstration would be the best refutation of my babbling about scale differences, and frankly, there aren’t many good rhetorical arguments I could be making now as she gives me another solid mashing. Though that’s partially to blame on the fact that I can hardly get enough air to eke out a life-giving gasp, let alone debate the issue.
Looking up between the crevice of Julia’s toes, her face high above is steadfast and determined, her eyes almost completely closed. I can see her sliding her tongue over her top row of teeth as she retaliates for my remarks, perhaps permanently. She savors every squirm beneath her foot that I can uselessly present. I’ve clearly pushed Julia way out of her emotional equilibrium bubble, enough so that I think I was close to getting exactly what I want from her, but right now, I appear to be on the losing side as she infuses fresh bruises into my aching body.
Maybe all of that wasn’t enough.
Maybe after all my foolish bravado about goddesses and bugs I still failed us all.
“JULIA!”
The scream surprises both me and its recipient, enough so that Julia actually lifts her toe off my quaking body. It takes a second for me to recognize the voice’s owner as Gina, and even less time for my heart to jolt into more action than when Julia was threatening to liquefy me a moment ago.
Julia gives her full attention over to Gina now, cocking her head to the side in that curious way she always does as she takes a few pounding steps back toward the bed. I fight my way to my haunches as I watch her enormous slender heels lumber off, but from the crushing blow followed by rollicking dizziness and robbery of air, I’m still trying to reorient my sense of the world without falling over again. I can feel my legs protest as I take a few wobbling strides after the massive teen.
“Yes, Gina?” Julia utters pleasantly, slipping easily back into that perturbed teacher voice we all know so well. It’s a mask I haven’t seen her wear in a while, not since she killed Beth. “Did you have something to add before I finish teaching my precious little Jack his most important lesson of all?”
I watch Gina give Faith a kiss on the forehead before wrapping the infant a little tighter in her cloth scrap and setting her down on the bed. Whatever she’s about to do, she obviously wants no collateral inflicted on the innocent two-day-old. She takes a few steps forward closer to the edge of the bed, her legs quivering but her stance just as wildly confident as mine was before Julia kicked it out of me.
“He’s right,” Gina declares, looking straight up at Julia as well and even pointing an accusing finger. “You can make us as small as you want, but none of us have to be small if we don’t want to.”
“Is that so?” Julia responds snarkily, practically daring a follow-up from her romantic rival. Copying her new tiny opponent, Julia prods her thumb into Gina’s chest, forcing her back a few steps, but my dearest friend holds firm. If I’m going down, she’s clearly intent on going with me and any others in this house, and most importantly, with our heads held high.
“Yes,” Gina musters.
“For someone so scared of heights, little Gina, you’re getting awfully mouthy,” Julia poses. In one smooth motion, she scoops her palm back under Gina and dangles her under the arms, holding her up with more than enough of a drop to set the shrunken girl’s phobia aflame. “Imagine how much higher in the sky you’ll be when I make you even smaller. You still think it won’t make a difference?”
I see Gina’s squirming grow more intense as she cowers in the terrifying grip of Julia’s playful fingers, rising up and up, her legs swimming over the open air of a topple equivalent to a naked dive off a skyscraper. This is easily the highest she’s ever been held in the air by our cruel tormentor, and no amount of my pleading would be able to save her this time.
And then it stops. Gina’s arms fall to the side against Julia’s restrictive digits, and she lets her legs hang calmly in the open. Her muscles appear to be constricting against further trembling. As she lifts her head up again to look Julia square in the eye rather than observing the death plunge below, I don’t need to be able to see her distant expression to know what’s happening, because the rage has flushed Julia’s cheeks three shades pinker.
“No, Julia,” Gina announces loudly enough for me to hear, her fear alive as ever but no longer keeping her prisoner. “It won’t make any difference… at… all.”
That did it.
“I guess we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?” Julia intones with a bloodthirsty cool. Plucking Gina back out of her opposite hand between a thumb and forefinger, she lets the lingering image of the spiraling drop sink in before lowering my personal savior back to the mattress far below. Even as she plops Gina from her grip, I watch her pull herself immediately back to her feet.
Julia stalks directly toward our massive gamble of a trap, her back to her two subdued detainees. Gina looks to me from the bedspread, hugging her arms around her chest, her eyes blank. Knowing there’s no way now to try and catch her up to speed on the plan, I give her a wink and the most reassuring smile I can come up with, no matter how much it’s going to confuse her. In spite of believing she’s about to be shrunken down to pinky-nail size and suspended high enough to give an astronaut vertigo, Gina returns the gesture.
I look to Gina as long as I can safely allow us, and by the time I turn back to our hulking companion, she’s already pounding back across the floor on a hormone-and-adrenaline-fueled warpath. There’s no pretense of her trademark politeness any longer. It’s all out there now. The tampered PMRD is already snapped out of its case and squeezed adamantly in Julia’s fist, the chintzy machinery whirring with life. I can see her palm is centered right over the handle, precisely where we need it. Her itchy trigger finger is curled in as she finishes tapping at the touch screen and takes aim directly at Gina, who doesn’t budge a muscle.
I cross my hands behind my back. Come on, Goodwin. Please let that genius still be in there somewhere.
Julia’s finger squeezes the trigger, but instead of bathing Gina in the PMRD’s damning green glow, a clunk resounds from inside, followed by a chugging series of clicks, as though the little machine was trying to give birth.
Please.
Please, please, please.
Please.
There’s a twitch in Julia’s eye as she slams her other hand into the side of the barrel and grits her teeth to hold back the roar, thoroughly enraged to find Gina hasn’t already been reduced to a ladybug. A final chirp brings an abrupt halt to the unsettling cacophony of ticking gears and mirror panels inside the PMRD, just as Julia was beginning to lower the deadly weapon away from its target. A frown etching into her forehead, I watch her grapple in irritation with the handle, allowing the partially chipped casing to peer out from beneath her fingers, and that’s when I see it.
The emerald luster I know all too well, firing not from the end of the firearm, but from its cobbled handle, thanks to Goodwin’s careful tweaking of its internal hardware last night. And it appears to have hit its target dead-on.
Julia’s probably already feeling the cold sliding cancerously beneath her skin as she begins losing inches faster than I can blink: an entirely novel experience for her, I’m sure. She flings the traitorous PMRD into the mattress headboard hard enough that some of its casing cracks away before the whole junky contraption plops onto her pillow. Even if the full effect of her intended fate for Gina can’t take hold, the device’s potent rays have already beamed against her skin for several seconds. It’s more than enough to do some damage.
Sinking into the billowing shell of her clothing like a parachute, Julia wrestles through the skirt as the ground looms closer. She flops onto the carpet with a hard slam on her back, kicking out of the restricting articles and scrambling back to her feet with fists clenched, hair tussled and pale flesh of her full naked form completely on display like the rabid animal she truly is.
I’ve seen her completely nude before, but never like this. Now, she truly is stripped of everything.
Gina’s looking understandably flabbergasted as she scoops Faith back up and retreats further away from the edge of the bed, but not nearly so much as the actual victim of our elaborate deception. Staggering back, taking it all in as she passes below the two-foot mark, Julia looks briefly to me, familiar fire in her eyes as the ruse at last becomes clear. By the time she’s processed the madness of it, floundering to her haunches with intermingled terror and fury, I can’t imagine Julia stands at more than a modest twelve inches tall. Not tall enough to reach up to the bed now, even, to grasp for Gina, or more importantly, the damaged PMRD.
Still plenty tall to kill me where I stand, of course.
And as she refocuses on me with a vengeful fervor, those blue eyes radiating so brightly they might as well be screaming, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Julia will kill me if she can lay another hand on my body.
A cry bursts from her lips, bloodcurdling enough to make you think she’d been shot through the chest rather than reduced in size. Tears flow from her reddened eyes as her hands pass frantically across the smooth curves of her body, checking to ensure everything is still there, and probably hoping it’s just a trick of the light. To Julia, of course, what we’ve done is far, far worse than any physical punishment that could be doled out by goddess or man.
This is her literal worst nightmare, come to fruition.
Even if we all die right now along with what remains of human justice, I think I can go contentedly knowing we deposed Julia from her throne and brought her whole miniature empire down into the dust. Right now, she’s discovering herself precisely where she’s spent years trying to convince us we and we alone belong.
Beneath.
My ex-girlfriend is already sprinting toward me, her loss of height doing little to impede her now-unquenchable thirst for grisly comeuppance, and at four times my stature, it doesn’t take much to close the distance. In another moment she’ll have my neck in her fist. Another moment after that she’ll have a lump of bloody flesh in her fist.
That’s when I feel a different and much smaller hand around my ankle, tugging me roughly down to the ground. It’s Brian, yanking me with all his might into the preserving temporary sanctity underneath the crack of the door. Julia’s hands slam into the wood, her fingers clawing for me just as I pass beneath the threshold: far too thin for her to follow us with her entire body. Julia’s palm grazes against the top of my head, nearly closing in with those powerful fingers, but I pass from her grip and back out to the hallway before she has a chance to pop my skull open.
Screeching erupts cataclysmically from the bedroom as Julia sets about kicking the door, and almost immediately, we hear the rattle of her laptop’s power cord being tossed up at the door handle, clearly to pull it down and continue in carnivorous pursuit. Ravenous as Julia is now in her painfully vulnerable and emotionally unleashed state, no barrier made of wood, steel, or hellfire is going to stop her from ripping the life directly out of my throat.
Brian throws an arm around me, too scared to speak. We’re not out of the woods yet, and we know we can’t have much more than a minute to act, given how frantically we can hear the rattle of Julia’s improvised lasso against the door, just barely missing its mark. With any luck, Kelly and Goodwin are already in place inside the wall.
“Plan B?” Brian whispers urgently.
“Plan B,” I agree as we take off running in the other direction just as the bedroom door handle twists downward.