Hayley quickly dragged her tongue across her forearm, and lapped up the ten captives who had been entertaining her. In seconds, they were thrust to the back of her mouth, and down her esophagus to her stomach, where they were quickly forgotten. As Chip and the girls headed back to the parking structure on Marsh street, Hayley recognized one of the guys who was protesting. She waved to him as she left, and he saw her and waved back. He had gone to Matheson University with Hayley and her friends the year before, but he had moved away last semester. He was a very talented football player. It took about fifteen minutes to load up the captives, and when they returned, the protesters had come up with a mantra that they kept repeating: "People are not for sale! You should go to jail!"

Hayley walked up to the guy she knew, and gave him a hug. He stopped repeating the mantra the others were chanting, and returned Hayley's hug. He was one of the few protesters who wasn't carrying a sign.

"You were the best football player at our university!" said Hayley. "What's it like playing for Cal Poly?"

"Actually, I play for Cal State Northridge!" the boy said. "My dad got a job there, that's why I had to move!"

"Why are you protesting?" Hayley asked.

"You should be protesting, too!" the guy said.

Meanwhile, Pearl, Susan, and Crystal Mae were observing Hayley, although they couldn't hear the conversation. "He's a traitor to his race!" said Crystal Mae. With her white supremacist tattoos and her swastika necklace, it was clear where Crystal Mae stood on the issue. "The shrunken people are just micro-slaves now! They have fallen under our dominion, and it's our destiny to rule over them as a race of gods!"

"That protester she's talking to is hot!" Susan said to Crystal Mae. "I hope he doesn't turn Hayley into a bleeding heart!"

Hayley stepped closer to the guy she was talking to and asked, "Why are you all fired up about helping Raleigh's victims?"

"They should have the right to live just like everyone else!" the boy said. "Being black or Mexican shouldn't cancel out your right to be considered human! One day they were people, the next day they were toys! How do you feel about what's been happening, Hayley?"

"I never had a problem with people who weren't white, but now that Raleigh has jump-started a revolution, I say why not go with the flow?"

"But that's so wrong!" said the boy.

"Look, it really won't make any difference if you protest!" said Hayley. "The world has changed, and it'll never go back to the way it was before! I didn't ask for this to happen, but now we all have to deal with a world we didn't create!"

Hayley reluctantly waved at the boy, and turned around to walk back to Pearl and Hannah and the others, but before she left, the boy grabbed her shoulders gently, tilted her body back toward his, and kissed her on the cheek. As he did this, he stuck a business card in her right hand. As Hayley left him and returned to her friends, she saw that the business card had his cell phone number on the front.

"Call me!" he said as she turned away and stuck the card in her pocket. Crystal Mae was especially upset that Hayley had talked to the protester, and stood there with her arms crossed in front of her, as if she expected an explanation or an apology from Hayley.

"Did he convince you to turn away from the dark side?" Susan asked.

"He tried to," said Hayley, "but I think his perspective is weird. I mean, if I had a choice when Raleigh first showed up, I would've voted for her not to go through with any of this! But seeing as to how Raleigh didn't give anyone a choice, and this is the way the world is now, I just can't feel any sympathy for anyone who's against her!"

"Those guys are weirdos!" said Crystal Mae. "They're all traitors to their race! Raleigh should establish a new world order, and outlaw anyone who's against us, and shrink them, too!"

After a few minutes, as the clock in the square approached 9:00 a.m., Polly approached Chip with some news. "One of the fembots said we can only take as many captives as we can carry away in one load. I asked if we could use a hand cart, and she told me we could!"

"Are you serious?" said Chip. "I need to get to a hardware store!"

Chip ran back to the parking garage and got in his truck without saying goodbye to the others. By the time he got back from the hardware store and parked back in the parking structure, it was past 9:00, but only by about fifteen minutes. He pushed the hand cart through the crowd, and approached the tables where the fembots were handing out captives. Chip grabbed thirty boxes, and used bungee cords to strap the boxes to the hand cart. The girls already had their additional captives, and nobody was allowed to return for more. The fembots had a way of calculating who had been there already, and how many captives each person had acquired.

Chip, his sister Pearl, and her six friends marched back to the parking structure, where Chip abandoned the hand cart because there was no room for it in the bed of his truck. There were about a hundred and fifty cardboard boxes, with a thousand captives in each box, and the girls put most of the boxes in the back of Chip's truck, because there wasn't enough room in the other two cars. The rest of the boxes were in the backseat of G-girl's car, because nobody was sitting back there.

Everyone rode in the same car on the way back as they did on the way up. Susan Stabler was in the back seat of Hannah Holland's car, sitting next to Crystal Mae Miller. Susan still had ten captives astride each of her legs, for a total of twenty. They had done a pretty good job of holding onto the threads of Susan's fishnets while she had walked from the courthouse to the parking structure. They didn't understand English, but they had enough common sense to realize that they stood a better chance of survival as Susan's slave-toys than they had as ant-sized fugitives struggling to survive in a world of titans.

Once they were on the 101 freeway heading south, Susan had an idea. "Crystal Mae, let's play a game!"

"Does it involve swallowing captives?" Crystal Mae asked.

"Yeah!" said Susan. "Let's gamble!"

Crystal Mae reached her right hand under the collar of her tank top, into her bra, and pulled out a transparent titanium cartridge and set it on her right thigh, next to Susan. "I only have ten of them on me, so we're gonna have to bet one at a time!"

All of the captives on Susan's left leg were on her thigh and kneecap, while the captives on her right leg were on her calf. Susan lifted her left leg and rested it on her right leg, then plucked the captives from her right calf and dropped them on her left thigh, until all twenty of them were there.

"What did you have in mind?" Crystal Mae asked.

"Rock, paper, scissors!" said Susan. "We'll each bet one captive at a time! Okay, let's go!"

Both girls shook their fists in front of them and said, "One," then did it again, and said, "two," then on three, Crystal Mae had her hand miming a pair of scissors, while Susan was miming a piece of paper.

"Scissors beats paper!" said Crystal Mae, then she grabbed Susan's shrunken slave-toy and popped him into her mouth, and swallowed him. For the shrunken captive, there was never any hope; the thumb and index finger of Crystal Mae's right hand were so much more powerful than he was that it wouldn't have made any difference if he had been in the basement of a ten story building at the exact instant it was detonated by demolition experts. He was overwhelmed by the force of her tongue as he was plunged to the back of her mouth, and a massive volley of saliva dragged him down her esophagus into her stomach, where he spent the last several minutes of his life trying to determine by sense of smell what Crystal Mae had last eaten, never even knowing the name of his conqueror as the interior of her belly became his final resting place.

Crystal Mae Miller was the last of Pearl Grinder's friends who would ever come close to showing anything resembling mercy toward shrunken captives. Susan Stabler was second in line as far as being merciless, and on the other end of the spectrum, a few of Pearl's friends were probably slightly more merciful, but even they thought it was amusing to swallow captives, and to watch them get swallowed. Pearl and her friends were like a pantheon of vengeful goddesses who were incapable of being appeased, and Crystal Mae Miller was the cruelest of them all. For Crystal Mae's captives, there was no hope of survival; it was just a matter of time until they passed through her inescapable digestive system.

For the record, during the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" games that were played in the backseat of Hannah's car on the ride back from San Luis Obispo to Arroyo Lucia that morning, Crystal Mae won thirteen times, and Susan won seventeen times. By the time they reached the street Pearl lived on, all thirty of the captives had been vanquished. When Hannah navigated through the maze of abandoned cars left by the Mexicans the night before, parked, and shut the engine off, Susan was licking her index finger dramatically, to illustrate that she had just swallowed the last captive. Everyone unloaded the truck, and carried the boxes of captives into Pearl's living room.

"Where are we going to keep all these captives?" Pearl asked Chip.

"Sparky gave me the plans for building a brick structure with the schematics for something similar to a bug zapper grid surrounding the perimeter to keep them from escaping. It'll be about three feet high, and I can make it as big as I need to."

"When can you get started on it?" said Pearl.

"I can call the construction supply yard Monday, to get the bricks and cement mix."

"Monday?" said Pearl. "Chip, you need to build it today! Look at all these shrunken captives we have!"

Chip pulled out his cell phone. "I know the nephew of the guy who owns the construction yard, and I think I can get him to open the yard for me if I pay him cash. I've got a lot of money stashed in the safe in my bedroom, so that's not a problem. By the way, while I'm gone, call a tow truck and have them haul away all those cars that belonged to the Mexicans who got shrunk at the party last night."

After Chip left to go to the construction yard to get supplies for his project, Pearl looked up the number of a towing service while the other girls divided up the captives. Chip had more than anyone, but the rest of the girls each had about the same amount. Taz was amazed that they had scored so many.

"I think we should all divide up part of our captives," said Hannah, "and give them to Taz. She couldn't go with us, so she shouldn't miss out."

All of the girls agreed, and soon they were divided out. Within minutes, Taz had the same amount of captives as everyone else. Chip's captives were put aside, awaiting his return.

"I think we should do something about those Mexicans from Ashwood City!" Taz informed the group. "They all hate Sparky, and we need to get rid of them, before they hurt him!"

G-girl stood up, and addressed Hannah. "Trade me all of your captives from Ashwood City for an equal number of my Chinese ones!"

Hearing this, Misty stood up within the transparent titanium cartridge she shared with Sparky, Zu-Zu, and Wam-Wam. She had a wide view of G-girl and the other girls, and she could also see most of the area within the clay walls of the miniature clay city that contained the cartridges that housed her homeboys.

"No problem!" said Hannah. "I only have three hundred. Crystal Mae has a hundred and eighty, and Taz has a hundred and twenty, if I remember right!"

"Listen up!" G-girl said to everyone. "Anyone who has Mexican captives from Ashwood City, trade them with me! I want all of them!"

For the next several minutes, the girls bartered with one another, until at last, G-girl had all of the transparent titanium cartridges containing the Mexicans from Ashwood City. G-girl ordered Taz and Polly to collect all of the cartridges containing the local Mexicans, and put them on a shelf where they would not be confused with the Ashwood City captives. Finally, G-girl opened all of the cartridges containing the Ashwood City Mexicans, and dumped them out within the clay walls of the miniature clay city on Pearl's dining room table. There were hundreds of them.

The first thing G-girl did was to address the tiny captives. "I will be your goddess today!" G-girl said, "And on the menu today, we have you!"

G-girl broke apart the two clay bricks directly in front of her, and ripped a section of the wall apart. Clenching her right hand into a fist, G-girl slammed it down on a group of captives, crushing them into a bloody pulp. G-girl lifted her fist, turned it over so she could see her handiwork, and smiled when she saw the crushed ant-sized corpses stuck to her hand. G-girl licked up the gore until her hand was clean, then slammed her fist down on more victims.

While G-girl did this, within the cartridge she was trapped in, Misty threw her arms around Sparky, and focused her eyes on the carnage. Without blinking, Misty witnessed the horror of it all as she dug her fingernails into Sparky's shoulders. There was nothing she could do as her family members and close friends were slaughtered like insects.

Instead of carefully licking up the corpses of her second group of victims, G-girl slammed her fist down again and again, and kept repeating the process until there wasn't a single survivor. A puddle of blood, flesh, and clothing littered the surface of Pearl's dining room table. G-girl was given a standing ovation by the other girls, but she wasn't done yet. G-girl dragged her palms across the table, licked her palms clean, then did it again. She kept trying to lap up the blood and flesh of the miniaturized victims, until Pearl came up behind her, and put her hand on G-girl's shoulder.

"I don't think you'll ever be able to lick up every milligram of flesh and blood, G-girl!"

"Well, I can sure as hell try!" said G-girl, as she dragged her right palm across the table and licked it again.

"I thought racial hatred was intense," Crystal Mae told G-girl, "but hatred between enemy gang members takes the cake!"

Inside Sparky's transparent cartridge, Misty had tears in her eyes, and she still had her head tilted away from Sparky's face, looking at the destruction. She held her fist in the air and said, "If only our positions could be reversed, I'd destroy that bitch!"

Soon after the captives from Ashwood City were vanquished by G-girl, Chip returned to build the brick structure where the captives would be contained. Chip had to rent a trailer that he hooked up to his truck to haul the bricks and concrete mix. Chip had contacted six of his construction worker buddies to help him, and they got to work in the backyard. Chip had rented a cement mixer, and he used it to mix the concrete mix and water to use as mortar. Chip's buddies knew what he was going to use the brick structure for, and agreed that it was a good idea to contain captives in such an efficient way.

When they had first started, the concrete foundation was poured within a wooden frame that Chip and the guys had hammered together, then they got to work doing the masonry. Five hours later, when it was completed, a three foot high brick structure dominated the center of the backyard. It was perfectly square, ten feet in diameter.

When the job was done, Chip went to the safe he kept in his bedroom, and pulled out a hundred dollar bill for each guy. After they left, Chip dropped down on one of the couches in the living room, his shirt almost completely covered with sweat and dry cement.

"Now we just have to wait for the mortar to dry!" said Chip.

To Be Continued!