Leann and Savannah’s heads spun around, their hair whipping about as they searched the tree branches above where they had crouched to tease and toy with the young shrinkers trapped in the mud puddle who could do nothing as the pair splashed them around with bus-sized bare feet.
Garth felt his knees wobbling already as he perched on the end of the branch, having thrown himself out into the open in completely plain view, but he constricted every muscle in his body, steeling himself, then shouted again into the open air of the orchard.
This time, Savannah’s enormous eyes caught on him almost immediately, boring right through him as she rose to her dirt-caked feet with an audible squelch in the filth around the roots of the tree and stood back at her full height. Garth’s inch-and-a-half body was just a few inches above the top of her head.
They gazed at one another for several paralyzing seconds, sizing one another up. Garth felt a lump the size of a pebble trapping itself in his throat, but he held firm, grasping his clammy hands behind his back to keep them from shaking as he awaited his fate. Leann had risen to her feet as well, crossing her arms and giving her enraptured friend several encouraging nods in Garth’s direction.
The curious shrinker-hunter’s eyes lit up like Christmas the longer she stared up at Garth, and her lips curled into a joyous grin. Her hand rose up to the level of her neck, as though she was considering snatching him up right then and there, but she seemed to think better of it, instead, looping her index finger between the curly ends of her hair.
“Well hi there, my itty bitty little friend,” Savannah cooed quietly, obviously afraid of spooking away her easy catch. The shrinker himself only blinked but refused to falter in his stance.
Between the legs of the towering young girls, down in the mud puddle, he could see the four teenage shrinkers scrambling quickly to the edge of the dirty pool, splashing as little as possible now that the two girls’ attentions were momentarily diverted.
Good.
Maybe this idiotic and sacrificial gesture of his wouldn’t be for nothing.
Now he’d just have the rest of whatever semblance of a life his new owner offered him to hold a seething grudge against those little morons down on the ground who couldn’t use their heads for once.
“I thought there must’ve been more up there,” Leann commented. Her hand descended back into her pocket where she’d deposited Tom, and through the shuffle of the denim, Garth could tell she was twiddling him back between her fingertips again.
“What do you think you’re doing up there all by yourself?” Savannah questioned sternly to the silent Garth as though disciplining a child. “You might fall all the way down, and if you fell, it would…”
“You’d be a little red spot,” Leann said bluntly. She scrunched her toes, pinching dozens of grass blades between them, and ripped them from the ground with a simple lift of her heel. “And then you’d get skooshed, because we wouldn’t even see you.”
“Leann!” her friend gasped, turning around to face the girl, but swiveling back just as quickly, in case Garth tried making a run for it. “Don’t say things like that. You’ll scare him.”
“Well, it’s true. He should know how dangerous it is for little guys like him to be up so high with us,” the girl defended. She drew her closed hand back out of her pocket and examined Tom again, caging her slender fingers around him. Clicking her tongue disapprovingly, she shook her head. “What would they even do without us?”
Maybe live, Garth thought to himself. He clenched his tiny fists, bracing himself for impact whenever it arrived.
“I guess that’s true,” Savannah sighed in agreement, biting the corner of her lip in thought. “They… they need us, don’t they? They need us to find them and take them home.”
Garth allowed a quiet sneer to escape his lips, though he doubted it could be heard. His eyes darted down to the muddle puddle below, which he realized was empty now. The shrinkers had escaped.
It didn’t absolve him of the loss of his friend’s freedom, but maybe, just maybe, what’d he’d just accomplished could be counted as good karma before whatever fate awaited him in the immature hands of these girls.
He at least would have that much peace.
“Of course they do!” Leann said, giggling a little at her friend’s apparent ignorance. “Why do you think the laws are set up like that? They’d never be able to live on their own. These ones are probably starving. We’re like angels for them, I bet.”
“You’re right,” Savannah said, nodding, and smiled dreamily to herself. Obviously this last image in particular was very agreeable to the youth.
“Hey, you know what?” Leann began slowly as her gaze returned back to Garth on his exposed branch. Her fingers had closed back around Tom again, though as before, only enough to keep him firmly affixed to her probably sweaty palm after burying it in her pocket. She rolled her wrist around, giving him a steady roller coaster ride as she pondered. “He’s not all muddy like the others. He might be a good one to try putting in-”
“Oh!” Savannah gasped elatedly, recalling the earlier suggestion for oral activities before the thrill of catching one of her own. The girl’s hand had already ceased twirling coquettishly through her locks and was reaching upward, until her creamy palm was a matter of inches away from the tip of the thin limb Garth had put himself out on, youthful digits outstretched so that the shadow of her index finger was cast over her prey’s entire little body.
The girl’s tongue, pink and slippery, slicked a thin layer of saliva along the corner of her lip as she gazed up at the hapless shrinker, her fingers twitching already with anticipation. The sticky substance glistened in the sunlight.
“Don’t be scared, little guy,” Savannah whispered as persuasively as possible, practically lost in a trance now. “I’m not gonna swallow you. I just… wanna know what it feels like. To have you inside.” Her hand drew closer, careful not to jostle the branch, as her fingers loomed close enough for the shrinker to reach out and touch the firm flesh.
Garth gulped heavily, but found his breathing wasn’t heaving any longer with anxiety as he prepared to offer himself up into this greedy girl’s hand and, soon after, the blackness of her slimy maw.
He knew this was coming. Now he just had to take it.
In a sharp instant that utterly shattered the serenity of the orchard, Savannah’s face contorted, and a scream of pain erupted from her lips. Her fingers, a breath away from curling around their target to take him in for tasting, retracted as though she’d jammed her hand into a volcanically hot stove.
A second later, a shriek of just as much agony ripped through Leann’s throat as well, and she doubled over, falling to her haunches and already crying heavily.
The wind from Savannah’s massive appendage pulling back nearly knocked Garth from the branch toward a tumble of certain doom, but he swung his arms around just in time, latching onto the underside of the stick like a miniature sloth and hugging it to his body for support. With his gaze inverted toward the dizzying drop, the shrinker was able to make out Savannah’s right foot, still bare and caked with mud after her torment of the shrinkers in the puddle, with a plainly visible bleeding wound in the center, as if she’d been stabbed, and then, out of the corner of his eye, he could see something else, and he couldn’t help but let a smile cross his face that he had already presumed would never appear again.
Far below and resting in the grass by his potential captor’s injured foot was a small wooden device, no more than eight inches in length, that might’ve easily been mistaken for an old-fashioned child’s toy, if not for the jagged prong on the edge loaded with thorns, screws, and whatever other pointed junk the colony of shrinkers could get their tiny hands on when constructing their defensive battle machines.
Spring-loaded and reinforced with metal clips, the makeshift shrinker weapon was already being yanked back into the hole under the tree from whence it had ejected via pulley system. A similar one was visible on the opposite side, right behind where Leann was now cowering on the ground and weeping, clutching where the spiked arm had smacked into the top of her foot with the force of a striking cobra. Small bloodstains were painted across the tips of each where they’d accurately hit their mark.
As each machine disappeared back into the hole, Garth willed himself to pull back up, swallowing his fear and letting adrenaline take over as he hurled himself back down the length of the branch and into the relative safety of the foliage before Savannah could recover. His hands and feet, moving as a single unit to traverse the jungle of twigs and sprouts, didn’t allow him to stop until he’d burrowed himself in an opening in the wood just wide enough to squeeze his body in and hide. A small crack in the bark allowed him a partial view of the scene below.
“Oh my GOD!” Savannah screeched as she, too, lowered herself down, though she obviously didn’t trust the area in the grass enough to sit down as her friend did, despite the blood already trailing down the pale skin of her foot. It clearly hurt too much to even put partial weight on her leg. “Where’s your Mom?”
“Back… at the parking lot…” Leann wailed semi-coherently, obviously handling the pain far less capably than her friend.
“We should go. Now,” Savannah urged fearfully, holding out a hand for her friend to accept and stand up, but it was ignored. “P-Please, Leann? It hurts.”
“Why did they do that?” Leann gasped mournfully. She had been thrown for a serious loop by the rejection of her benevolent intentions for the tiny captures. Her eyes darted around the trees, obviously expecting further perils to emerge from between the leaves at a moment’s notice. “WE JUST WANT TO KEEP YOU SAFE!” she cried out.
“Put the other one back,” Savannah hissed with terror.
“What?”
“I said put him back! Let him go!” her friend demanded with increasing terror.
“B-But he’s m-mine!” she protested sadly, cradling Tom in her still-open hand and gazing at him with forlorn longing. The tip of her tongue, like her friend’s a moment before, lapped at her lower lip. “He needs me to p-”
Her words were cut short by a swift whizzing, followed by another yelp of pain from Leann and a shuddering wince in her opposite arm. Even without needing to see it clearly, Garth recognized the sound from numerous test runs he’d been present for. The girl had just been hit with a sharpened nail fired from a rubber band inside the tree. He doubted it had hit its mark accurately enough to remain lodged in her limb, but it had to have at least broken the skin, and judging by the dramatic uptick in her carrying on, the shrinker guessed it had.
“LEANN!” Savannah cried, tumbling backward in shock at the additional assault, but pulled herself back to her feet just as quickly. “Let go of him - now!”
“Okay, okay, okay!” Leann squealed, finally convinced, and opening her hand next to the mud puddle to let Tom to roll out to the ground. It was hard to tell from his height, but Garth felt fairly certain his friend was cautiously standing up after his release, and unhurt from the fall, which he’d apparently been protected from by Leann’s soft grip on her new pet.
The towering girls both stood now, snatching up their discarded shoes as fast as possible, and twitching as they limped out of the shrinker colony’s patch of apple trees. Only their whimpers of pain could be heard as they made the long trek back toward the parking lot.
Garth was already scrambling back down the tree, using a series of thin stems he’d discovered laced together for easy shrinker usage to descend even faster than before. There would be little time to get things together.
After all, this discovery by the girls had already ensured they couldn’t remain in this area any longer. Especially after the colony had caused bodily harm to two “innocent” girls who were simply going in search of new pets, they’d practically condemned this part of the orchard. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that within a matter of hours, someone from the farm would be out to these trees to smoke all the shrinkers out: many would be plucked out and probably sold or even used as stress toys if the orchard owners were in a bad enough mood. The rest would be flushed out of the trees with whatever combination of cats and pesticides would be necessary.
So, they would run. Again.
Already below, Garth could hear his friends moving about beneath the cover of the tree roots, gathering up supplies they’d need before the emergent exodus. He rappelled down the final portion of the wooden wall with deathly focus, narrowing the distance to the ground in a time no one but he could’ve pulled off. Then, as the shrinker reached the base of the apple tree, sliding down the last smooth root, he came to a stop before the muddle puddle, as a petrified but nonetheless miraculously unharmed Tom was dragging himself from the dirt.
The pair made eye contact, simultaneously addressing and forgiving all sins at once. And then the two shrinkers, toughened by unbearably difficult lives and underground existence to the point of discarding most emotions, threw their arms around each other and shamelessly allowed tears to roll down their cheeks. Garth pounded his friend and blood brother on the back, receiving the same treatment, then helped him up the final mud slick as they scurried toward the nearest tunnel to help with the packing.
The future was frightfully unclear, as it always was for their kind, and there were going to be even further dangers lying in wait as they searched for a new home in the deeper woods beyond the edge of the orchard. But Garth knew that after the events of this afternoon, he’d be damned if he was going to let the big hostile world out there take him just yet.