Rachel, the only person in the world who trusted me (and wasn’t standing this side of the river Styx), had gone to the shrunken person rescue team. This left me in a drafty, rundown warehouse under the tender care of police chief scarecrow and his merry band of bazooka-wielding sociopaths.

Now compound the situation with the growing disturbances going on around the perimeter. Reporters trying to get the story of they’re careers and perverts just trying to get a look at my breasts? But the ones that really frightened me were the religious groups. I couldn’t read what their placards said. Maybe I just didn’t want to.

I’d read in books and seen in movies the kind of things that the church and its followers used to get away with. I’d never seen the aftermath of a clan murder, but I do know a little bit about fanaticism. I was only with the “Dominants” for a year, but it was enough to last a lifetime.

The sun was going down. Dark clouds were threatening rain, so I crawled into my shelter and tried to sleep. I lay bareback on the concrete floor of the warehouse. It gave a little under my weight, but not much. The place reeked of mould and dust but when the rain came I thanked God, if indeed there was one, that the roof didn’t leak. I rolled onto my side and slowly drifted into an uneasy slumber.

The sky was pitch black, but I could see everything in front of me like it was midday. I was in the middle of the street and I was back to normal size. Had everything else been some sort of nightmare brought on by the growth drugs? My over-growth, Mike in intensive care, the cops? Off in the distance I could hear footsteps running towards me. I slowly turned around, my body still stiff and numb from the drugs. And when the world stopped spinning I could see who was piss-bolting toward me. It was Mike!

I felt the adrenaline rush over me like a wave and suddenly I felt like I could take on the world. I broke into a sprint. I was sore, naked and the coarse surface of the road bit into my bare feet, but nothing was going to stop me.

As I got closer he began waving his arms, shouting. “Veronica, get out of here, RUN!”

As we ran into each other, he grabbed me by the shoulders. His eyes were wide with fear, breath whizzing with exhaustion.

Then, like distant, slow rhythmic thunder, a giant’s foot falls. Suddenly a gigantic female foot comes into view from a side street to the left, followed briskly by its twin. Mike and I stood there frozen in the middle of the deserted street.

My vision traced up the huge form in front of us. The two huge feet were attached to legs that wobbled from side to side, knees bent inwards, as if the mass above was trying to knock them over. My gaze continued, up its thighs, it’s crotch, but as my eyes came upon what lay above the midriff, I screamed.

Halfway up the midriff, the flesh of this creature began to fester and blacken, and where a human torso should have been was instead a horrid mass of writhing tentacles and bone spikes.

The main body was a vaguely human torso covered in large thick plates of black shiny bone, which scraped together as they struggled to stay balanced. They made a sound like knuckles cracking only much deeper. Out of it’s chest and left shoulder there was a cluster of three bone spikes. I’d call them tusks, but that would indicate that there was some kind of organization to the thing’s anatomy.

There was no head, but at a slight dip where the neck should have been I could see the sides of a huge mouth, drooling saliva and fitted with jagged teeth. Replacing its left arm was a swarm of tentacles covered in black sludge. They wriggled violently up and down, splattering the rancid black goo as they did so. Last, but definitely not least, was its putrid eye. Swollen, surrounded by welts and dripping with puss, it occupied the spot of the right arm.

The abomination gave a high-pitched wail and began staggering toward us. Each heavy step shook the ground like an aftershock. Its progress was slow, but I knew it would catch us. We had speed, but it could close the distance in only a few strides. We ran anyway. The little people always run.

We ran side by side, the creature’s enormous feet hot on our heels. Mike began to slow his pace. He was exhausted when I first spotted him, and now he was spent. He collapsed in a breathless heap on the road. I stopped and knelt beside him.

“Ronny…….go..”

“I won’t be able to escape Mike.”

“Ronny…you…could hide.”

“Where Mike? In one of these flimsy houses? No. Once a giant focuses their desires on you there’s no escape. You’d need something like an underground bomb shelter to hide from that thing.”

Suddenly a huge shadow came over us. Just what the fuck is that thing? It brought its shoulder back as if to throw a punch. Then the tentacles darted out with lightning speed entangling us both. Mike beat at the thing with what little strength he had left, but it was no use. We sailed into the air as it straightened its back. Mike pulled out a knife and began madly slashing at the black tentacles that entangled him, and the beast screeched in fury.

All I could do was watch. The vile thing caught his arm with two tentacles and began to twist. Mike’s screams filled the air as his muscles stretched and bulged under the pressure of the monstrous limbs, straining to stay coherent until they could bear it no longer. With an explosion of blood his arm tore open. The flesh hung ragged, beryl clinging to the bone, but the beast didn’t stop there. It continued to twist, the bone cracking like a brittle twig.

The vile thing took the rest of Mike’s limbs in much the same way, slowly twisting them off one by one as I watched. Then, as we lay there suspended by the tentacles, Mike’s body nothing but a torso with a head, it began to move us closer to the mouth. Somehow I knew this was coming. It opened its mouth and, along with the putrid smell, out came a dreadfully familiar sound. A cackling laugh, like a razor wire through the centre of your spine. That was Lyndon’s laugh. The monster had Lyndon’s fucking laugh!

The slimy tentacles started to become very hot. The slime turned to steam, sticking to my throat and burning my lungs.

My eyes flew open and a choked scream escaped my throat, followed by a deep phlegmy cough. The monster had been a dream, but the warehouse was burning down around me. The burning sensation on my stomach was a small piece of tin roof. The place was an orange haze of fire and smoke. Flames licked at the top of the roof, eating away at the supports, threatening to bring the whole thing down.

I panicked, franticly hitting at the walls, making the structure bend and sway, trying to get out. But that just made more pieces of hot tin fall to the ground. There it was, another hideous laugh echoed through the burning walls. That fucker had destroyed my life, raped me, nearly killed my lover, and now he was trying to burn me alive!

“Lyndon, you worthless dead shit! Haven’t you done enough?”

I had gone into the warehouse headfirst, which made it hard to get out since I couldn’t sit up without the roof collapsing. Guess I just didn’t think I’d have to be escaping a fire set by maniac nazis.

I began wiggling on my back slowly toward the door. My feet hit the Rolla door and I kicked with all my leverage. Once, twice, pop, the whole front wall collapsed and I was free to make my exit. I inched, or rather metered, my way out of the building, coughing all the way.

I managed to get to my feet just in time to see Lyndon and his crew speed off in his van. As I watched him disappear into the distance I saw two police cars had decided to give chase. It improved my respect for the cops that were “protecting” me. I knew that me being here was more for the public’s safety than my own, but someone had just tried to kill me for no good reason, and they were still taking their job seriously. I guess I assumed they’d be happy to see the “monster” burn alive.

Unfortunately, a moment later these thoughts of admiration were overwhelmed by the sudden urge to vomit. I ran over to the abandoned power plant, which was missing its roof, and pulled back my hair. I hadn’t eaten today, and since the food from yesterday clearly hadn’t grown with me all that came out was a gurgling cough and a little fluid.

I collapsed to the ground in a wheezing heap. The rain helped. I pulled off the burnt top and nappy to lay naked in the rain. The cool water pelted my skin and rushed down my body washing away the tension. Off in the distance I could hear the wail of fire trucks. It was about time. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, the concrete was hard but I was exhausted. I’d deal with the cops tomorrow.

The next morning, I had put my makeshift cloths back on. I felt like crap; my head hurt, I had second-degree burns on my stomach, left shoulder and forehead, witch I couldn’t get tended to because the medics were all too frightened to be close to me. And to top it all off I was sore all over from sleeping on wet concrete.

The fire fighters had managed to douse the burning building but by the time I awoke the place I was to sleep in had collapsed into an unrecognisable heap of rock and twisted steel. Sargent Scorder was there on his loudspeaker again and neither of us was in a good mood.

“Do you know who attacked you last night?” There wasn’t any accusation in his voice. From his point of view, it could have been just a band of loonies with no connection to me. But they weren’t, they were my arch-nemeses, and I wasn’t sure if I could trust Scorder or his people. I took a deep breath.

“Sargent Scorder, I did know those men.”

“Go, on.”

I related a much-altered version of what had happened between Lyndon, Mike and myself. I think I was giving the poor guy another migraine.

“I need a phone.” A pretty tall order at my size. Scorder answered with some amazement in his voice.

“What the hell are you going to do with a phone? Who are you going to call?”

“I can’t tell you, not yet. It’s not something I can disclose without permission. And you’ll need to rig something up so I can hear the person on the other end.”

“I don’t think we can do that, Miss Etherglade.”

“Sargent, am I under arrest? And even if I am, can I please make a call to my friend.” I stared down at the tiny form, seemingly a few feet away, and it seemed to make him nervous. Perhaps it wasn’t a good move considering the five bazookas, which were trained on me.

“Alright Miss Etherglade, I’ll see what I can do.” With that Scorder drove off in his car, leaving me to sit and wait some more. Man this place is boring.

An hour later, Scorder came back with a set of amps that was jerry-rigged to a mobile phone. I was to put the amp up to my ear and talk into the handset (Which, by the way, was encased in a large Styrofoam block, so it didn’t look like a grain of sand but rather a tiny chunk of Styrofoam with a piece of sand in it). I told Scorder the number and waited while the uniform placed it in the centre of my quarantine zone.

By the time I had picked up the tiny thing Rachel had already answered.

“Rachel it’s me Ronny.”

“Ronny, how…”

“It’s not important Rachel. What’s important is, I want to tell about what has been going on.”

“Ronny, we’ve talked about this. If you tell them about this war, then they’ll want to know where we are. And if they find out, then the crocked officials find out. And then we’re sunk.” That last word had an ominous tone emphasising her point. Did I mention she was cautious?

“Fine. I won’t tell them about that.”

“Do you trust this guy?” Did I trust him? I really didn’t know. He seemed to be doing his job. He’d had the gang that torched the warehouse arrested. He’d cordoned me off instead of just blowing me away. So I suppose the answer was yes, I did, but not totally.

You see, what I told you about the cops was not exactly true. They had kidnapped and shrunk me, but they were a minority. Most of the people who disappear into the shrunken world have stories similar to mine. However, most of the cops involved are actually impostors who are hired by people with enough money to have databases hacked, records falsified and are shielded by higher-ups. Like politicians or judges.

Most real cops wouldn’t even think about taking a bribe. I was unfortunate enough to have been taken by some who did. Guess it just burned me.

“I do Rachel. People need to know and I need to tell them.”

“We don’t even know how far up it goes, or how far spread.”

“From what I understand, it seems all the rich people the world over are in on it.”

“I trust you Veronica. I suppose it would have come out anyway. Have you had to deal with the press yet?”

“Thank God no. The good Sargent has been keeping them at bay.”

We said our goodbyes and Rachel hang up.

I put down the tiny device and turned to the line of police at the end of the area. I took a deep breath in through my mouth and slowly let it out through my nose.

“Sargent, did you catch those men who tried to cremate me last night?”

“Some. Are you going to tell me how you know them?”

“Did you catch a man named Zachary Lyndon?”

“Yes.”

“That man is a kidnapper, a rapist and a murderer!”