Pete and Eddie

“Gah!” exclaimed Eddie, thrashing against the seemingly endless supply of fabric bearing down on him.

“Eddie?” came Pete’s voice in the darkness.

“Pete?” replied Eddie, calling out.

The sound of scuffling preceded Pete’s arrival near Eddie.

“You okay? You looked pretty green around the gills earlier?” Eddie inquired.

“No, I feel okay now, but man what the hell is going on here?” asked the bassist.

“It’s like I’m stuck under the tarp at Yankee Stadium during a rain delay,” answered the guitarist.

“I don’t know, feels pretty smooth,” countered Pete.

“I didn’t say it was canvas, I just compared it to the tarp, you know, when it starts raining at the ball diamond and they wheel it out and sometimes one guy falls but they keep rolling out the tarp anyway. It feels like that situation, not that the fabric necessarily feels like a tarp,” explained Eddie.

Pete laughed, snorting a couple of times, “That is funny when that happens though,” he remarked.

Eddie chuckled.

“So what’s going on?” asked Pete, guffaw finished.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Eddie queried.

There was a moment of silence in the darkness broken by a high itch squeaking sound coming from Pete’s direction. “Did you just fart?” asked Eddie.

“Sorry,” replied Pete.

“Dude, I’m trapped under whatever this is with you and you just totally Dutch Ovened me, fuck man,” groused Eddie.

“Sorry, you know I got GI problems, it just sort of came out,” he said.

“You could have warned me, fuck,” he said, moving away from the foul stench created by Pete’s breaking of the wind.

Pete followed. “Hey, you never said what went on between you and that little girl’s momma?”

“You are so lucky I can’t shit myself right now,” Eddie cracked back.

“I said I was sorry,” Pete repeated.

“Amanda tells me to look out for her little girl,” Eddie said.

“What, like, make sure nothing happens?”

“No, no, like she says I need to worry about her, that I put a target on my back,” he said, emerging out from under the fabric that was over him.

“That’s fucked up,” Pete commented.

Eddie extended a hand to help Pete stand. “That what I told her, I said, ‘You better keep one eye on your little princess. I’m a wolf,’ then I howled.”

“What the fuck is this?” Pete asked, looking around.

“Looks like our room,” Eddie said in almost a whisper. In the weak light it was fairly easy to recognize the interior of the room Angeline had provided them, except everything was gargantuan.

Pete’s mouth hung agape as he nodded. “If our room was the Louisiana Superdome,” he breathed.

Eddie laughed, “This is messed up,” he said.

“Uh huh,” agreed the bass player. “This is our bed,” he murmured.

Eddie walked across the bed to the side where the mosquito netting vanished over the edge. Pushing against the fabric, he shook his head.

“What are you thinking?” asked Pete, trying to see whatever it was Eddie was trying to see.

Eddie turned, “Dude I think we are miniaturized, you know, like shrunk down. We can’t be more than two or three inches tall,” he offered.

“What does that mean?’ he asked.

“It means were are hooped, like seriously. Someway, somehow we got turned into shrimps,” Eddie said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Nobody can shrink nobody,” scoffed Pete.

“No?” challenged Eddie, “Look around numb nuts, we are tiny, stuck in a strange woman’s house during a freaking hurricane.”

“What’s that got to do shrinking people?”

“I think it’s because you pissed on that mark in the crypt thing, that’s what I think,” Eddie said.

“Voodoo shit,” said Pete slowly.

“Exactly, like some…” Eddie paused. “It was the rum, it had to be the rum,” he said emphatically.

“We all drank the rum.”

“All the boys did, which means the girls didn’t, which means we need to find Karli,” provided Eddie.

“What if it was something Angeline did? You know like some bayou hex or curse?” inquired Pete.

“Hmm, I still think it’s the rum. I think we fucked with some Haitian voodoo god and we’re being punished,” said Eddie, moving along the edge of the bed trying to find a break in the netting.

Pete nodded, running a hand over his head. “Maybe once the rum is out of our system, we’ll be, you know, returned to normal?”

Eddie stopped, turning to look at the other man, “Yeah maybe, but maybe not. If Karli is okay, we can get her to get us to a voodoo priest and try and undo this thing, know what I’m saying?”

Pete started nodding vigorously, “Yeah, that’s a plan, a good plan,” he said, smiling. The two men resumed walking and testing the netting.

“The trouble is we got to find a way to get to Karli,” Eddie vocalized.

“Or one of the girls, they could help too,” Pete offered.

Eddie stopped dead in his tracks, turning slowly

“What?” Pete asked,

“Something is not right here. You know, it was the warning Amanda gave, it seemed fucked up to me at the time, especially after the way I was eyeballing her daughter.”

“I don’t understand,” said Pete, confused.

“’I’ll try and keep her off of you,’ that’s what she said and look at us now,” Eddie continued.

“And?” prompted Pete.

“It’s like she knew something was going to happen,” Eddie shook his head.

“How could she know the graveyard rum was going to shrink us? Eh?” Pete asked.

“I don’t know, but think about it. Under normal circumstances I would split that little girl in half, she wouldn’t walk right for a week, but now, ha, now we’re super tiny and she could practically do anything she wants and there would be nothing we could do to stop her,” he said.

“That girl seemed pretty shy,” commented Pete.

“Right,” agreed Eddie, “But did you see the way Daphne was all over Aedin? What about Celeste, what would she do with a tiny you or me or one of the others?”

“But that’s assuming the girls aren’t shrinkified like us,” Pete said, making his caveat.

“All I’m saying is if they’re not shrunk, the only one we could trust is Karli,” Eddie clarified.

Pete nodded in agreement.

“Aha!” exclaimed Eddie, finding the split in the mosquito netting. “Now we can slide down this to get to the floor, then we’ll see if we can find Karli.”

Pete looked over the edge of the bed and then at Eddie, shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s safe to try and slide down that,” he commented.

Eddie snorted and taking hold of the thin sheer fabric began to hand over hand himself to the ground. Nervous, Pete followed suit. Once they were both on the ground, they began their search for Karli.