Getting the count done didn't take Eric particularly long but since he didn't know the safe combination, he had been forced to knock on the closed door to Ken's office. Even through the thick wood, he could hear the big man grunt in annoyance before his chair creaked and his shoes clacked loudly against the floor.

“What?” He grumbled at the same time he opened the door.

He was already looking down but Eric swallowed a lump in his throat as the giant's thick head had to dip down even further to notice him. Clearly, Ken had been expecting to look at Brianna but a faint smirk came across his face when he spotted Eric.

There was a slight glassiness to Ken's eyes and his thick belly gurgled in front of Eric.

Even though he was nowhere close enough the giant's face to smell it, the smaller man knew that the giant had probably knocked back a beer or two while his employees closed down the store. He almost wanted to try and peer around his manager's immense frame before he thought better of it. Taking a step back, he cleared his throat and announced, “The count's finished, I just need you to unlock the safe so I can put it away.”

Ken's big chest heaved as he sighed, “Alright.”

He stepped forward, without warning or concern, and essentially hip-checked the smaller man. Eric grunted when he hit the floor and while he scowled up at his boss, he realized that Ken wasn't even paying him any mind. He was already striding down to where Eric had been counting the money in the small security office where the safe was next to the break room.

Silently fuming, he pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his jacket and backpack from his locker before trying to hurry his way out of the store.

“Going so soon?”

Ken's voice stopped him in his tracks as he passed by the security office.

He turned and watched as Ken lazily double checked his work, not truly counting any of the bills but simply running his thumb over them before rezipping the bags shut. When he was satisfied, the big man simply tossed the bags into the safe as if they didn't each contain hundreds of dollars each.

“Was there something else you needed...” Eric gritted his teeth before he added, “Sir?”

“No, not really,” Ken shrugged his broad shoulders, “Brianna normally stays with me till I close up the store but I guess that's just the kind of driven girl that she is.”

Eric bit his lip to fight the urge to shout at his boss and then he took his phone out as he weighed just how willing he was to kiss Ken's ass on the off chance he could actually be promoted to shift lead. He knew that it didn't really matter either way since Ken probably just wanted to torture him a little longer, maybe even make him perform some demeaning task before they left, which is why he would need some kind of good excuse.

The fact that it was almost midnight wouldn't matter but then his weather app warned of an approaching storm.

“I'd really love to, sir, but I'll have to take a literal rain check...” He forced a smile to his face as he awkwardly held up his phone, as if to show the bigger man the forecast.

“Why would a little rain-” Ken stopped mid-sentence to chuckle, “That's right, you don't have a car. You have that little bike, don't you?”

Eric could feel heat rising in his cheeks, “It's an e-bike, they're actually better for the environment and probably what more people should be riding.”

Ken continued to laugh as he tossed the last bag in and slammed the safe shut. “Sure, you keep telling yourself that's the reason you ride it.” He again walked through the doorway that Eric was standing in, though this time he patted Eric's head hard enough to make the smaller man stumble out of the way. “I'm going to finish up some paperwork before I drive home. Ride safe, squirt.”

Eric huffed and straightened himself up but the faint noise made Ken pause.

The lumbering man glanced over his shoulder and Eric felt himself deflate when he caught the look on his boss's face. There was a menace to his eyes and a cruel twist to his usual haughty smirk. It was clear to him, in that moment, that Ken wanted him to say something about the way he battered Eric and other shrinking employees around or for Eric to complain about being passed over for Brianna. Ken clearly wanted an excuse to stomp back up to Eric and knock him down a peg or two, if for no other reason than he could.

With his whole body trembling, Eric said, “H-have a good n-night, sir.”

Ken's cruel smirk grew into a wider, almost genuine, grin. “You too,” he clearly reveled in how much fear he had put into Eric in that moment as he added, “Squirt.”

Eric watched Ken stroll back into his office and he waited until he heard the soft hiss of a beer can being opened before he started to hustle through the store. Lights shut out as the clock struck midnight and the timer turned off every other row. The aisles around him loomed larger in the shadows, reminding him of the customers and employees who had taunted him over the past four years.

When he first started working, another shrinking floor worker named Bob had told him to steer clear of any teenagers. Bob had insisted that they were the worst customers that he could encounter, since they understood that he was an adult but one who had no power over them. Later that week, a different coworker named Suzie had shrugged when he mentioned teens being the worst. She had said that mean kids would be mean to any adult that didn't have power over them, regardless of size. The way they treated her at 4'1'' wasn't much different than how they did when she was 5'8''. According to her, it was the archetypal 'Karens' that were the worst; most of them probably were former mean teenagers who had only grown more entitled over the years until they were enraged that a shrunken person wasn't on the ground kissing their shoes and thanking them for the privilege of serving them.

After four years though, Eric had realized it wasn't any of the customers that he really had to keep an eye out for. Even the ones he found to be the worst, Immune people who tried to be 'conscious' of his 'disability' and ended up only humiliating him more, were still only annoying. It was his fellow coworkers that posed the biggest threat.

Someone who wasn't paying attention with a forklift could kill a normal-sized person but when they didn't check for shrunken people at all? They could take out one or two people before they probably even noticed and corporate would probably go out of their way to blame it on the shrinkees. A customer could be escaped by going to employee only sections of the store but his coworkers could go everywhere too. If you had a shrinking attack while on the job, you wouldn't be safe in the breakroom or employee bathroom if it was a big one.

As far as Eric knew, no one had actually ever shrunk enough to be abducted by a coworker but it was hard to keep track of seasonal employees and it was impossible to know if Ken annoucning that someone had quit was really because they had or if they had shrunk down and been smuggled out by one of their coworkers.

Mounting up on his e-bike, Eric shuddered from the realization that clearly Brianna thought she could get away with it. It was possible she thought that because she was nineteen and Immune and thus figured nothing bad could happen to her but she also might have known something he didn't. Maybe someone had been taken when she was a part-timer or maybe the Immune employees bragged about how many times they had squashed or kidnapped their fellow workers with each other.

The thought plagued him the whole way home.

He kept imagining himself flailing about in his own clothes when he'd hear her footsteps approaching, rattling his entire world. He'd go still with fear but her fingers would still find him and lift him up into the air, so high his ears would pop, and her arrogant laughter would rattle his tiny body. He could imagine the rest of his life as her shrunken slave; cleaning mud out of her rugby cleats, filing and painting her nails, and simply being forced to watch from her feet as everything in life was handed to her because she was Immune.

Tears mingled with the fat raindrops that pelted down against his face as he turned into his apartment complex. He didn't bother to brush them away, even after he came under the overhang of the stairwell that led to his upstairs neighbors. Sliding his e-bike in beside his roommate's, Eric locked it quickly and then walked down the thin strip of dry concrete to their front door.

The living room was dark as he entered but he could see light coming through the bottom of Justin's door. His roommate did remote IT work on various short-term contracts, and when Eric had once asked if he could get into that, he learned that not only was he not qualified but the pay was actually worse than what he got working in retail. The benefits were better, because they actually existed, but Eric couldn't justify having less money to spend on the few things that brought him happiness in the world.

Justin seemed to simply sit in his room, either because he was working, playing video games, or watching other people play video games. In a way, Eric almost envied how little shrinking seemed to have effected Justin's life.

Wiping away the tears and rain, Eric hauled open the fridge and grabbed a can of beer out of it. Since beer cans were slightly too big, they always felt awkward in his hand but Eric enjoyed the fact that at his size, the buzz went a lot farther than it would have otherwise. He had watched normal sized guys have to drink a lot more than he did to feel anything and it always brought a smile to his lips when he realized just how much further his beer money took him.

Of course, anyone who was still normal sized probably had a lot more money than he did.

Brianna certainly did, she was making at least a dollar more an hour than he was.

That thought made him guzzle a third of the can in one gulp and grab a second one to take with him back to his room. He glanced at the furniture in the living room, most of it the remnants of what he had in his college dorm room, and frowned as he took in how it all looked a little too big to him now. It had looked that way for years but it weighed on him a little more as he walked into his room, where he had bought furniture appropriately sized to his frame.

That meant that it was all technically children's furniture but Eric didn't care.

He liked being able to sit at a desk where he didn't have to reach up or use a booster for the seat. His small bed didn't make him feel like he was sleeping on a mattress fit for some giant. He could actually use every drawer in his dresser easily, since none of them were out of reach.

It was the only thing that made him feel normal.

The beer was already hitting him by the time he cracked open his second, and he found himself ignoring the tabs he had open on his laptop and simply sitting on his phone flicking through a dating app.

Woman after woman whose profiles read 'Shrinkees Swipe Left' made him frown more and more until he finally switched over to Instagram. He smiled as cute pictures of dogs and cats scrolled by, interrupted only by the occasional slightly offbeat pet like a ferret or guinea pig. His timeline was the result of finely pruning every Immune or Asymptomatic person he knew from his social media accounts and playing the algorithm until it finally showed him content that actually made him happy. Yet, it was still broken up by the standard ads and 'Accounts You May Know.'

Most of the time it was old friends of his from high school and college but tonight, his thumb lingered when he saw a new suggested account 'BriFiFoDunham02'.

He clicked on it and he found himself staring at a profile picture of Brianna shot from on the floor to make her look gigantic. She was dressed in her rugby gear; a polo in her school's colors, matching shorts, and muddy cleats that looked like they could crush every bone in his body. He scrolled back through her posts, most of which were utterly mundane selfies, group photos of her with friends, and vacation pictures. However, the ones that stood out to him were the ones that bore a litany of familiar hashtags like 'Immune4Life' 'Giantess' and 'StompingGame'.

The most recent one was clearly taken by her on a run, one foot propped up on the opposite knee while she leaned against a tree to take a picture. The well worn tread of her sneaker was coated in a gory mess that stretched from the ball of her foot all the way to the heel. The sight of it made Eric's beer laden stomach churn but he couldn't stop himself as he read the caption.

'Some #shrinkees just don't know to get out of my way. Worst part is that this little thing messed up my pace. No sub-8s for me today. #running #runninglife #JustImmuneThings #Immune4Life #Shrinkee2ShoeStain...'

The comments were even worse, as friends of hers complained about similar incidents where shrinkees 'stained' their shoes because they wouldn't get out of the way. His eyes lingered on one comment asking how she would clean it and her response that said 'Hopefully I'll get lucky at work today and bring home a slave to take care of it.'

Chugging the last of his second beer, Eric was ready to stop staring into the horrifying abyss when he noticed there were more comments to load. Already too tipsy to stop himself from doomscrolling, his eyes widened as he read them.

These weren't from Brianna's friends but from total strangers who she clearly just ignored, assuming that they weren't muted entirely.

Some of them said that they wished they had been whoever she had crushed. Others asked to come and serve her, listing their heights and asking if they were small enough to be her 'houseboy' or in a few cases 'housegirl.' There was even one that read 'Fuck, I wish I was't Immune, if I was a shrinkee I'd pay to be your slave.'

Eric couldn't tell if he wanted to laugh, cry, or vomit as he got to the accounts offering to sell her shrunken people. All she had to do was apparently DM them for a price quote and go through their profiles to see who was 'in stock.'

His thumb hovered over one of the sales accounts for a while, his eyes drooping and his hand wavering the whole time. A hiccup finally snapped him out of it and he shook his head, “Fuck, I should just go to bed...”

He closed his laptop, dropped his phone down beside it and simply flopped down onto his bed before rolling about to wrap himself up in a cocoon of blankets and sheets. The weight of his eyelids made them instantly close while the world seemed to keep spinning around him.

All Eric dreamt of that night was being found at work, flailing in his own clothes, by Brianna.

When he finally came to, it was only the slight ache in his skull that tipped him off to the fact that he was simply thrashing against the blanket burrito he had turned himself into the night before. When he went to toss the comforter off though, he found himself shoved back by the sheer weight of if.

“No,” he croaked, opening his eyes to find himself encased in near total darkness.

Fear shot through his body in a cold sobering surge.

“NO!”

His scream was absorbed by the comforter that he pushed against to slowly inch his way free. He cursed and spat and clawed against the fabric before he finally saw daylight streaming through the collapsed hole at the edge of the blanket mass. Gripping the edges, Eric yanked himself out into harsh light of mid-morning with an angry shout.

“Justin! Justin! Code Red!”

He screamed the emergency phrase they had both agreed on when they moved in together as he collapsed onto his bedspread. Eric scrambled toward the edge of the bed and swung down to the floor, not even registering how big of a drop it was until he hit the carpet with an inelegant thud.

“Fuck,” he muttered before shouting, “Code Red! Justin! Justin!”

Standing up, Eric breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that he still easily cleared the bottom of his bed but then he realized that he didn't rise up anywhere close to the top of his box spring, let alone his mattress.

“Oh shit, no, no, no,” he shook his head, “I'm below a foot, I just know it.”

Then he heard the soft thumps of Justin's footsteps.

Eric started to shake, the sound so similar to how he imagined Brianna's footfalls in his own dreams. He found himself stumbling back against his bed frame, just like he had the night before when she cornered him against the shelves.

The door creaked open and Justin strode in.

His white socks mashed carpet fibers down and the faintest tremor passed beneath Eric's tiny feet. He craned his neck back over his roommate's thin almost hairless legs, over the cargo shorts he was wearing, and then across a vast field of gray that he realized was Justin's t-shirt. When he met his roommate's boyish face, high up in the sky at a lofty height of five feet, a little yelp came out of his tiny body.

Especially when Justin chuckled, “Wow...”

Even though he knew that Justin was a shrinkee, a guy who had once been a little below average height who had dwindled down to five foot nothing over the years, Eric was suddenly terrified of his roommate. He was completely at the other man's mercy and the look on Justin's face showed that he knew it.

“Hey there, little guy,” Justin licked his lips as he said those words and his toes wiggled against the floor.

Eric moved to dive under the bed but Justin took one powerful step forward.

The whole floor shook, knocking him off balance, and his roommate's shadow was falling across his world in an instant. Cold clammy fingers wrapped around his midsection and Eric immediately tried to punch and kick for all that he was worth.

Justin continued to laugh as he stood and lifted Eric up to his face.

The faintest pop went off in Eric's ears as he stared into his roommate's big brown eyes, which raked over him like he was a piece of meat that the giant was regarding.

“Pl-please, Justin,” Eric found himself whimpering.

“Please, what?” The giant asked, the smile on his face obvious from his tone.

“Don't hurt me, man. You know this could just as easily happen to you.”

“Yeah, it could, but what would you do in my place?”

Eric's jaw dropped, “What? What kind of question is that?”

The world blurred as Justin turned and carried him out into the kitchen.

Immense lips smacked sleepily and then Eric was dropped unceremoniously onto the counter. He immediately scrambled to his feet and pivoted about to find somewhere to go but Justin's hand smacked down beside him, forming a huge wall of flesh.

“Don't,” the giant's voice rumbled overhead before he opened the fridge and extracted a bottle of cold brew. Justin took a long sip as he loomed above Eric's world, only the upper half of his body visible to the now truly shrunken man.

The long silence made Eric shift uncomfortably on the cool countertop.

“We never really talked about it, did we?” Justin finally said, “What we wanted the other to do if we shrank?”

Eric's whole body relaxed as his roommate seemed to suddenly be talking sensibly, “No, I guess we just... didn't want to think about it.”

“I figure you don't want to be sent back to your parents or any family, right?” Justin scratched his chin and took another sip, “If either of us were ok with that, we wouldn't be, like, living together.”

Eric found himself nodding along, “Y-yeah... that... I sort of thought that if this happened, I might change my mind, but I really don't want that...”

“Ok, so...” Justin shrugged, “What do you want me to do? Just drive you out to the nearest park and let you go?”

“What?!” Eric's eyes went wide and then he thought about the picture he had seen on Brianna's instagram. Had that been what happened to that shrinkee? Had they simply been trying to survive in the wilderness when they crossed a running trail at the wrong time? The thoughts swirling through his head made Eric shout, “No! Not outside!”

“Yeah, I wouldn't want to deal with animals and shit either,” Justin shook his head, “What about like friends or somebody at work?”

The thought of work made him think of Ken and Brianna again and he found himself shaking his head instinctively. He took a deep breath though and began to cycle through his friends before he realized that he didn't have many. There were a few other shrinking people at work that he was on good terms with and the same went for a few drinking buddies at a relatively safe bar not far from their apartment complex but all those people were in the same boat as him.

“Shit,” Eric finally said before he looked up at Justin with a pleading look on his face, “C-can't I just stay here?”

“What if I shrink?”

The question made Eric's shoulders slump and then he looked up at his immense roommate, “What about you? What would you have wanted me to do if you shrunk?”

“Oh that's easy, I'd have you give me to...” Justin's face lit up immediately, “Actually, duh... I can just give you to her! She's got tons of shrinkees that she takes care of.”

“You knew someone who takes care of shrinkees and it took you this long to mention it?!” Eric shouted up but Justin was already on the move, “Hey, where are you going?!”

His enormous roommate already had his phone out, his thumbs flashing across the screen. He stood on the countertop, struggling to see where the giant had gone or what he was up to but all he could hear was things being moved around in another room.

The soft thwacking of slides against the floor announced Justin before he returned and the giant smiled as he set a manilla envelope down on the countertop. “This is going to be great, it's still early enough that I should be able to overnight you to her.”

“Overnight me?” Eric said incredulously before he looked back at the envelope.

The inside of it was lined with thick bubblewrap, like it had been used to transport some kind of small electronics or something equally fragile. Before he could ask anything else, Justin's clammy fingers were wrapping around him once more.

“Dude, hey, wait, what the fuck are you doing?!”

Eric flailed but it was no use as he was shoved inside the envelope.

The moment Justin's fingers released him he started climbing back toward the entrance, “Hey, what the fuck?!”

Justin's index finger shoved against his face, dazing him as it pushed him back down inside the package. “Don't worry, dude, I remember her PO Box from when I bought some stuff off her Amazon Wishlist.”

His head spinning, Eric's thrashing was absorbed by the bubblewrap that surrounded him. He watched as Justin's fingers sealed the package shut once more and he heard a new piece of tape being slid over it.

“PO Box?! Wishlist?!” Eric shouted, “You don't actually know her do you, Justin?! She's just some girl on the internet, isn't she?! ISN'T SHE?!”

But his words didn't break through the thick insulation and then his whole world was upended as his former roommate picked up his prison and carried it out of their apartment.