“Ahhh… Shit.”

                The words came out of my mouth almost reflexively as I saw the name plate on the wall. The last thing I’d wanted to see. Oh, I had had my suspicions. Radio Freedom had a stigma, of course. I might have lived in one of the most Disease friendly cities in the whole country, but that didn’t mean that every last person or company in the city was a leaf eating hippie, as the woman behind this door might brand them. Far from it really. The state offered some good tax breaks, and it was the Capital after all. It also happened to be where I was currently going to University, so my dumb ass while applying to every last possible job or internship I could for the summer had sent in to Radio Freedom as well, naively thinking I’d end up fetching mail…

And now here I stood before that fucking nameplate, my assignment as Studio Intern in my big dumb hands and wishing I had never gotten out of bed this morning. My head flicked over, glancing to the mirror in the rather dingy hallway of the studio. I looked good, at least. I knew that appearances were about to make or break the next 12 weeks of my life. The woman in this room was not the type to care about deeper things like ‘personality’ or ‘quality of a person’. I’d seen her streams – ‘Radio’ was an archaic relic of terminology at this point – enough that I knew that. But fortunately I was in pretty good shape, if I do say so myself. I’d started going to the gym as a teenager, been on the Swim team in High School, and kept myself in pretty good shape by working out. It was free entertainment after all, and this city was expensive as fuck. I didn’t have a lot better to do. I had, probably ill advisedly, dyed my hair green and cut it short a few days ago. This… was in retrospect not a good idea but the Rubicon was already crossed and I couldn’t exactly un-dye it in ten minutes. I’d deal with the consequences of that when it came, and I was pretty sure it would. I probably should have dressed better too. At least, better than a fairly nice shirt, jeans and sneakers. But what could I do? Do I look like the type that has money for nice clothes? Fuck off.

Deep breath. In. Out. In. Out. Reina James. Fucking Reina James. Whatever-Deity-You-Choose Damn it. Fuck me. No wonder I’d gotten this gig. Some stupid Radio, Television and Film Major with no real job prospects and no connections, this is the type of thing I’d get. Mostly because nobody else was stupid enough to take it, I’d assume. I lifted my hand, and I honestly think that this was the heaviest the thing has ever felt including that time I tried to learn how to box at the gym and got my clock cleaned. I lifted it up and knocked on the door. One. Two. Three.

“Come in!” The voice on the other side called. Muffled but recognizable. I turned the handle and entered the room, revealing the control booth of the operation. The sound board and assorted equipment was here, of course. It was a live show after all. It’s not like I would walk right into the studio from here. But there was only one person in the room. Well, no. That wasn’t correct. There were more people in the room than that. But only one person at my scale.

She was sitting in a rolling chair, toying with something in her hands. I had to give it to her, she was pretty. Really pretty. Stupid pretty, even. Not in perhaps a traditional way. Long brown hair that ran down her back. Pretty blue eyes. Shockingly delicate facial structure. If there really was some god up on high, he could at least have done me the courtesy of not making the nutjob hot. She had some kind of jacket on, which considering the heat outside was a clear sign of lunacy anyways, but the woman seemed intent on wearing it wrong considering it draped down around her arms. Arms that were toying with something small. Something very… human shaped.

“Now come on, I know you can bend like this,” Reina was saying as she toyed with the tiny figure. The little guy was probably about 3 inches tall, which made him pretty big for someone with The Disease, but that didn’t seem to be doing him a hell of a lot of good. “Don’t you stretch at all? What kind of God Fearing American Man are you? Come on! Show me what you’re made of.” She said before bending him in a way that human beings are most definitely not supposed to bend, resulting in a snap that made me wince. “Like I thought, filthy Pinko scum. Just no mobility. Ya let them control you because you’re Weak. Good riddance.” She idly tossed the man to the ground before looking up at me.
                “And you?” She asked, looking at me with considerable interest even as a booted foot lifted and obliterated the man. An act of mercy, probably. Human beings don’t really come back from being bent like that regardless of their size.
                “And I… what?” I said, staring at her foot in shock. Hey, I might have said it was a mercy but that doesn’t mean I condone treating those who are afflicted like that. It had been a few years since The Disease had swept across the world, and everything had changed. Yeah, yeah. That was the usual statements in the prologues of books. Yes, over half of the population – probably more like 2/3rds - had shrunken to approximately .25 to 3 inches tall. Yes, there was no known way to revert it. Yes, society was more or less accepting that accidents happened. Yes, the economy had nearly collapsed in the wake of it – but fortunately we’d managed to at least somewhat hold on. Not that it made me feel any safer in this moment. Yes, there was a sizable amount of the still large population that saw the afflicted as what were essentially second or lower class citizens.

That didn’t mean I was fine with them dying in front of me! Holy shit people, get your minds out of the gutter. Do you think this is some kind of filthy smut brain fetish story? This is my fucking life. And I was looking at the foot of a woman that had just used a very expensive, very nice and honestly sexy boot to obliterate the corpse of a man she had just snapped. And now she was asking me a question. A question that I don’t actually know what the question of is, and fuck she was hot, and fuck she was crazy, and oh god I want to run away please let me run away oh please oh-

                “Are you a Patriotic, God Fearing American Woman who loves freedom and is strong enough to stand against the Shrinks?” Reina asked me, her eyes as serious as she was crazy, which was pretty fucking serious. I could see the fervor in there. Oh man, I had at least thought somewhere in there that this was some kind of character. No, this was damn legit. Shit. Shit. Pull it together. Pull it together. You can do this. This internship is really damn important to your future. You don’t want to graduate with no experience right? You’ll never get a job. You have to have something. Freedom Radio is a big company, Reina Jones is just one part. It’s not like she’ll be a blight on you forever.
                “I… Yes?” I said awkwardly. It was probably the least convincing answer I could have possibly given. But her eyes lit up and she smiled.
                “Good! Welcome aboard then, uh… What’s your name?” Reina asked, looking at me with a cocked head. It was both a curious expression and the expression of a bird of prey scoping out said prey. Her eyes flicked to the side, catching some movement with said predatory mindset. “Hey now you little son of a bitch!” She called out, hopping to her feet. “Don’t you run away from me you coward! You damn Pinkos can’t do anything but run like the yellow bastards you are!” She called out as she stormed across the room. I yelped and jumped to the side, looking at whatever she was storming towards. It so happened to be a group of Afflicted trying to leave the door I hadn’t quite closed behind me. She stomped over and pulled the door shut in their face – one of the poor fuckers not quite jumping clear and getting slammed by the enormous structure as it clicked closed. The way his leg bent was… not good.
                I was mostly watching this in horror, honestly. I looked between them and Reina. She had stepped forward, her enormous weight crashing down with each step. They really were nice boots. They had this leather flap thing on the ankles that draped outwards and… Each enormous impact shook the world beneath her, tossing the Afflicted down there about. With the door closed, it was hopeless for them. Well, except for me. They reached up their arms and begged for help even as Reina bent down, her huge hand reaching towards them. Fingers that were long and elegant, and actually surprisingly rough. I remembered watching a YouTube video featuring her once. It had been almost comedic – a pretty girl out in the woods ranting as she swung an axe about how Patriotic it was to know how to survive in the wilderness away from the 5G Signals. That thought snapped me out of my stupor as I saw her pluck them up with practiced ease, lifting them all from the ground.
                “Bunch of little spies, off to report to their Shrinkie masters,” She said, using the derogatory term for the Afflicted. “If they’d just been strong, moral upstanding citizens then this would never have been a problem. You see… What was your name again? Well, whatever. The problem with Shrinkies is that they’re nothing but a bunch of Degenerates. God punished them all for their… Everything! You know what I’m talking about. They’re trying to take over everything out there, you… What was your name again?”

“Stella,” I said, transfixed as Reina ranted at me. She was still holding a grand total of five people in her hand, who were all screaming for help. Help I could give them… Should give them. But she had me transfixed as she carried on, and those blue eyes were… I swallowed, hard.

“Right, right. Stella. Look, Stella. I’ve got one rule here. Freedom. That’s it. We believe in the Constitution; we believe in the Right to Remain Our Size. We don’t bend the knee. That’s what is important in here.” She paused, looking down at the people in her palm. She idly plucked one up and tossed them in her mouth, chewing. My eyes widened about like I’d just witnessed a murder, which I had.

“Oh don’t worry about it,” Reina said, making a dismissive gesture. “I bought them all fair and square. You’re not a narc, right?”

I spluttered a little. I needed to call the cops, right? I mean, she’d just eaten somebody. They were Afflicted, sure, but that was still a person. I had to…

“What, are you not cool, Stella?” Reina said, her eyes narrowing a little. “You on the side of the Government? Infiltrating?” She leaned forward a bit, reaching down and with purpose picking up another figure. A woman this time – she screamed and flailed between tree sized fingers that dangled her idly. “Are we going to have a problem?” She asked me before putting the woman in her mouth and starting to chew.

Fuck, that was another one. Another person murdered. But… I swallowed. She was threatening me. Not with murder or death. No, she was threatening me with something far more horrible – losing my internship. If I didn’t have this for next year when I graduated, I was fucked! The economy wasn’t kind to people like me if they didn’t have job experience. I’d be completely up shit creek without a paddle. So here I stood, in front of Miss Anti-Affliction Conspiracy Theorist Queen herself, who was still stupid pretty, and I was being offered a choice. Be accessory to Afflicted murder, or be fired. It should be an easy choice. It should be…

“No, Ma’am,” I said, feeling my sense of self respect evaporate into thin air. Reina’s smile widened as she picked up a man from her palm by one leg, letting him dangle. She’d said she bought them. Not going to lie, I knew a few people that sold Afflicted too. It wasn’t exactly hard to get some, but most people I knew used them as maids and stuff. It was still illegal as hell, but most people treated it about like weed. Honestly you were probably more likely to go to jail for buying pot anyways.

Look, I know what you’re going to say. I should have stood up to her. I should have said something. I should have made a speech, punched her in the face, and stormed out. Queen Shit, people would have posted on Twitter. Lots of likes and retweets. But none of those would have helped my job prospects. So instead I gazed into the eyes of this monster as she lifted another human being to her lips. Her distractingly beautiful lips, and opened her mouth. The hot wet breath that rolled out of there washed over the tiny figure she was holding, and then the poor little bastard was tossed in beyond those massive pearly whites the size of their whole body. The abyss that had yawned open to consume the unfortunate fucker slammed shut and he was most likely never heard from again. At least, when she opened her mouth to speak to me again there was no sign.
                “Glad to meet another Patriot then, Sophia. Welcome aboard.” She reached out, patting me on the shoulder before turning and headed for the door to the studio.

The sound engineers at least were normal people. Well, relatively. I could tell that Reina had a taste, and that taste was big tits with blonde hair. Blue eyes. The engineers were like that, and so was the studio manager. I must have stood out like a sore thumb with my green dyed short hair but nobody said anything about it so I’ll take that as a win. Fuck yeah. Take it where you can get it, right?

Sarah, the studio manager, was an impressive woman at least. Our eyes met and I felt the chemistry between us… Of me, a lowly intern and her, God on High. What, you thought it was going to be romantic? I’m as gay as the day is long but I don’t shit where I eat. I already had enough trouble on my hands considering that my Boss was literally murdering people in front of me and smiling about it. Sure, they were just afflicted, and nobody cares about Afflicted. But come on! She ate people! And I… well, I really just kind of let it happen because I really really need this damn internship. I don’t want to be poor for the rest of my life, damn it!

Anyways, Sarah did me a solid and gave me the tour of the studio. There was the control room, of course. Sound board, the Engineers and the Director. There was the studio proper, with the ‘Size Wars’ Desk for Reina’s batshit crazy show. The camera, of course, which had an operator I hadn’t met. Then the back room.

“So… my job is mostly to make coffee?” I asked as I stood there in said back room, gauging the furniture. Some chairs for guests, a coffee maker, and a door to Reina’s private room. That was about all it was. Not a whole lot for me to do here.
                “Among anything else Reina wants you to do,” Sarah said idly. She was making a cup of coffee for herself as she spoke, not so much teaching me how to do it as just to make herself some coffee. “Be ready to get on camera if you have to. You don’t get paid for it, but it might pay in exposure. And when you do make coffee for Reina…” She reached over to a cabinet and opened it. “A teaspoon of each of these in there. Her Health supplements.”

An assortment of bottles I had to squint at to believe. Most of them had Reina’s face on them. Growth Powder. Anti-Shrinking Concentrate. Muscle Builder. Multi-Vitamins. My eyebrow rose as I gauged Wille Wonka’s Batshit Crazy Candy Lineup of Doom.
                “Seriously?” I asked, looking at Sarah.

“Seriously. Don’t forget any of them either. She can tell by the flavor. It’s not a joke.” She turned her head and glanced at Reina’s private room. “Also…” She said, reaching back behind even the shadiest of the supplements and pulling out another jar. A glass jar with a top that had holes in it. One with several Afflicted in it, pounding at the glass and screaming. “One for each cup,” Sarah said casually.

“Seriously?”
               
                “Seriously.”

I reached up and rubbed my forehead in disbelief. “And we just… do this?”

“Correction, you just do this. I didn’t see anything,” Sarah responded. “And I have legal documentation that I didn’t either.”

I sputtered a bit in disbelief. You have got to be shitting me. “You’re disavowing it? Really? She fucking eats people!” I burst out, unable to contain it any more. The blonde turned to me, looking down at me. She had a good 6 inches including her heels, so fuck me for wearing sneakers right? Her look of contempt made me feel like she had 6 feet on me however. A smirk crossed her lips.

“This is show business, sweetie,” She said to me as condescendingly as a southern grandma. “Bless your little heart. Now you just wait for Reina to come out and tell you what to do, Broccoli.” She reached out and patted my cheek before walking off, leaving me standing there in the back room alone beside the jar of screaming, pleading human beings that were just unfortunate enough to catch an uncurable disease.

                “Fuck me…” I muttered, glancing at them before walking over to one of the Guest chairs and tossing myself down into it. Even as I fell, I heard the squeak of a scream. My eyes went wide as a damn Owl’s and I hopped back up instantly, but hell – I already knew what had happened. There was a red spot on the couch right where I had thrown myself down. I twisted, checking my ass. Damn did it look good in these pa-

“Oh FUCK!” I shouted out as I saw the corresponding red splotch on my jean clad ass. Now I’d done it. I’d murdered an actual human being underneath my big fat fucking ass. The last thing some poor bastard had seen was my giant damn moon of a butt coming down at him, filling up his sky, embracing his world before he had about .1 second worth of feeling my weight prior to crumping to nothing because compared to him I weighed a few hundred tons. And now a person was dead.

“That’s it, I’m done! This is a fucking nightmare!” I swore as my foot lashed out, striking the coffee table which was an eminently terrible idea consider that while my ass may well have just obliterated a whole ass human being, the coffee table was rather heavy wood and my foot was still just that of a college co-ed wearing cheap sneakers. I jumped back and swore in pain, hopping on one foot. Could this day get any worse?

                The answer was a resounding yes, actually.

The job really was as simple as Sarah had said it would be. I talked a big game, but in the end I found some wet wipes and cleaned up the… problem. I’m not going to say I’m proud of it, but in the end what could I do? The value of the life of an Afflicted around here was clearly null. It wasn’t really a big surprise even – there were plenty of stories in the news about people ‘accidentally’ killing Afflicted and getting nothing but a small fine or a warning. I wondered for a moment if maybe that was a sign of the general direction of society. We really were creating an underclass based on size. That sounded insane to even talk about considering the world that I had grown up in. Well, mostly. I had been in High School when the Pandemic happened. Well, this pandemic. There was the other one too but I’d rather not talk about that. This one was way, way harder to deny after all – half the population shrinking down to being smaller than most children’s toys? No cure, no recovery? It was ridiculous.

I remember that we tried to just… carry on. Where they could, they just built new smaller scale rooms onto schools. Where they couldn’t find Teachers of the right size, they just put tiny desks on tables at the front. That was a real trip. My best friend, Jackie, she caught it. I didn’t see her for weeks after she told me about the diagnosis, crying on the phone. I mean, let’s be honest. If you’re a half inch tall you don’t use a cell phone. That’s rough. Like most folks back then she got quarantined with a few other Afflicted until they found out that the disease wasn’t actually transmissible human to human. Science never did figure out the transmission vector, but fortunately we did at least get vaccinations for it. Not that it did any good for those who had already shrunk.

She told me a bit about that whole thing, actually. Getting taken to a Public Health facility. About how her and a few other unfortunates got locked in a room as she shrank. Apparently, some Doctor lady came in to check their vitals every once in a while wearing a mask, but that was about all of the human interaction anyone got in there. Shrinking away, losing yourself… Sounded like a fucking nightmare to me to be honest. The part she told me was scariest was when she had her final big decline – from about a foot to an inch. They say that one comes fast. Apparently for her and the others in the room it was fast enough that they couldn’t get back up onto the beds, which sounds like a stupid fucking design for a SHRINK quarantine room. So she just slept on the floor. Losing everything really takes it out of you, so you sleep a lot. Apparently. Wouldn’t know and thank fuck for that, sorry Jackie. Let’s be honest here, I love ya wherever you are but if it has to be you or me, I’d rather you be the one the size of my big toe. Shit, got distracted. Anyways, apparently she was sleeping on the floor and that Doctor lady came in. Seemed like the protocol was these kind of real thick socks, trying to cushion force in case of accidents like this. Kind of like a Tabi sock you’d see in an anime, right? But like, if you’re an inch tall and this lady has size 10s – that’s basically a god damn building in motion. A building with a few hundred tons of weight that can move faster than anything you ever imagined. And those Doctors are overworked as hell, so they’re not looking out too stringently.

So we’ve got a perfect recipe for disaster here. A few little Afflicted, freshly dwindled, scattered around on the floor. A big thick ass sock that makes it impossible to feel what you’re walking on. An overworked gal that’s probably checking a few hundred if not thousand afflicted a day since she’s either got natural immunity or the first round of Vax. A socked foot that is supposed to be cushioned, but… Jamie told me that she heard the footsteps and managed to wake up as she stomped on in, but some of the others weren’t so lucky. Crunch. Crunch. Wham! Is how she described it at least. Two poor bastards, or bitches, or nonbinary or who knows – gender is really pretty irrelevant when you’re a red stain on the bottom of someone’s foot – flattened in an instant. And Jackie… Well, I wouldn’t call her lucky or anything, but I guess whoever came up with the Tabi sock idea was at least not entirely stupid. She apparently ended up in that little niche between the toes and the ball of the foot, and the thick cushion meant that she only had a couple broken bones instead of turning into a grease smear.

I kind of wonder what happened to that Doctor after that. She had to notice what she’d done. I mean, she was missing two patients and clearly found Jackie. But I’ve never heard of a Doctor with Public Health getting fired or charged with murder. So maybe… we were already splitting up the rulebook into two classes even back then? But flashback in a flashback aside, when Jamie did come back to school it was… different. The Afflicted got their own special desk at the front of the room, right in front of the teacher. They didn’t really interact much with the rest of us, although they did need a student volunteer to help them off the desk if the Teacher wasn’t available. They had miniature scooters provided by the Government back then too… until they figured out that was a terrible idea. RIP Terrence, you were pretty cute, for a guy, but even a shrunken teenager is still a teenager, and the first person I’d ever seen killed considering he managed to rig a ramp to launch himself up into Katie Bullock’s shoe after she had taken it off. I suppose I technically didn’t see him die, but I did see her slide the shoe back on. He got up close and personal with the Prom Queen at least? Dreams do come true.

 In the end, the government settled on paying tenders to carry the smaller students around after so many were doing stupid things on those scooters as a temporary measure until Afflicted scale facilities were fully finished and staffed. But aside from a few conversations, I more or less lost track of Jamie and most of my other Afflicted friends. I mean, it was just plain hard to keep eyes on them after all. In all kinds of ways.

Anyways, digression aside, the job. Once I cleaned up my mess I waited for my queue in the back room. That was Reina coming out of her private room, which eventually she did. Yeah, this was the woman I’d expected. She was dressed for the show of course – she’d set her hair and makeup, and her outfit was a Suit that fit her… decently. Blue, with a red undershirt and white tie because of course she has to keep it thematic. She looked at me, nodded and gave me a wink that made my blood run cold. The little flash of teeth as she did it made me remember that poor man from earlier. Dangled before those lips, tossed inside and chewed… a death worthy of nightmares to be perfectly honest. But here I was without much room to talk. I had just accidentally crushed someone under my big fat ass.

She went out to sit behind her desk on the set, and I got to work. Making coffee. I poured enough dubious health supplements into the cup after it was done that I was honestly surprised that a human being could survive them and then looked at the piece de resistance. The jar of Afflicted. I took a deep breath as I reached for it. It felt… strange. I’d held Afflicted plenty of times, that was no big deal. It was just a fact of life that these days there were humans not much bigger than my close cut fingernails. But to have a group of them, naked and screaming in a jar was a trip. There were a pair of chopsticks velcro’d to the side of the jar with a pretty obvious purpose. I swallowed hard as I held it, my hand perhaps shaking a little. Yes, I know I said I didn’t have much room to talk. That I had just sat on someone. But this… I looked from the jar in my hand, my fingers wrapped around it despite that there were several people inside of it. They were screaming, pleading. Desperate. Hoping for escape. But what could I offer them? They’d find out if suddenly the Afflicted jar here was empty. I couldn’t lose this gig. This was my break in. I needed it. I don’t want to be poor, damn it!

“Stella! Where’s that coffee? Do you want to be fired on Day 1?” Sarah’s voice echoed in from the studio. My back went straight and my hand whipped the lid off. I took the chopsticks in hand. I’m pretty good with them, actually. I love Sushi. Turned out it was good training because I managed to snag a man between the sticks, lifting him up. He screamed and pleaded even as I lifted him up and I winced a bit, but… Well, sorry little dude. It’s Me or You, and I’m going to pick me.

I dropped him in the freshly brewed coffee and remembered something terrible. Freshly brewed coffee is HOT. Really hot. Boiling, basically. No shit, right? Well, I had forgotten it for a moment. And do you know what boiling water does to someone a half inch tall? The screech the man made as he was very thoroughly cooked alive made me stagger back and damn near drop that jar, which would have been exactly what I needed at that moment – a bunch of broken glass everywhere. And anyways, that’s how I got my second bodycount. Yeah, I’m fucked. That was the thought in my head. I’ve been on this job for all of two hours and I’ve murdered two people. This was not a very promising start.

“Stella! Coffee!” Sarah roared from the other room and I yelped, grabbing the cup. The little body had sunk beneath now, blissfully out of sight and out of mind. I scurried out onto the set and placed the coffee cup before Reina who was getting some last minute makeup done while Sarah read her basic news points. She nodded to me again and lifted the cup, taking a sip. I could swear I saw her chew a little as a wicked little smile came across her face.

“Three… Two… One…” Came the countdown a few moments later. Standing to the side, I watched as Reina came alive before the cameras after the opening graphics of assorted bald eagles and such played.

“Goooooood Evening Patriots! Welcome to the one show on air for God Fearing, Flag Waving, Freedom Loving Normal People BY God Fearing, Flag Waving, Freedom Loving Normal People! Waging a war on Lies and the Government Conspiracies that want nothing more than to grind YOU underfoot! Welcome to… Reina James and the Big Picture.”