Post
by CKent45 » Mon Jan 27, 2025 3:59 pm
The next day, Ben awoke to find Anang staring at him with tiny amber eyes that glowed softly in the shadow cast by the window frame. “I’m still tiny,” she told him pathetically. Ben had no idea what to say, so he simply petted her head, running his fingers through her hair, which at least seemed to soothe her frayed nerves.
When they emerged to the kitchen, Tim was sitting there over a cup of coffee while Stanley was asleep on the couch and Daniel was passed out on a recliner. “I finally got hold of Oliver,” he reported to them unhappily. “He called me to complain about spamming him with messages and I told him to shut the fuck up and get over here as soon as humanly possible.”
“When was that?” Ben asked him.
“Half hour ago. He wanted to shit shower and shave and I told him to quit screwing around and figure it out after he got here.”
“And the others?” Ben asked while setting Anang on the counter, still dressed only in a tent sized t-shirt whose collar was constantly slipping off of her shoulder and threatening to expose her breast.
“We took shifts staying up,” Tim answered. “We’re sure we’re out of the woods and they’re all gone, but I didn’t want to take any more chances.”
Ben made breakfast, cooking up Anang’s favorite sausages, bacon and eggs, and though she needed to eat while sitting on Ben’s lap at the table, they did lift her spirits slightly. Ben then helped her with a bath, but when he tried to leave to offer her some privacy while soaking nude, she insisted he stay with her while she washed up, never more than arm’s length away.
“Do you hate me?” Ben asked while sitting on the floor beside the tub. She stopped lathering her body for a moment, looked up at him, then down at her miniature body surrounded by a near swimming pool sized bathtub.
“It’s not your fault,” she assured him.
“I did trigger the device,” Ben pointed out.
“If you didn’t I would not have been strong enough to take him, and he would have killed you both. Even if it was the last thing he did.
“It’s not fair,” Ben complained.
“I was completely useless when I needed to do something and I couldn’t get to you in time. If it hadn’t been for that device, he would have killed you.”
“Not exactly,” Ben contradicted her. She lifted her head and looked at him. He then knelt and turned to face her and lifted his shirt, revealing four bloody punctures on the middle of his chest. “He wasn’t shrinking fast enough to stop him. You were the one that saved me. If you hadn’t leapt in, I would be dead right now. But I would have rather died than be responsible for doing this to you,” Ben told her with obvious guilt and regret. She smiled and her eyes filled with tears, though she managed to keep them from overflowing.
“It was worth it,” she told him with a smile and a nod. “I would choose it again if I had to.”
When Oliver arrived, he was in quite a piss poor mood, immediately laying in to Tim for his callous treatment, but Tim slapped him and turned, pointing to Anang, who was sitting on the back of the couch with her tiny feel dangling far above the ground. “Look what your damn device did to Anang!”
Oliver’s face went a ghastly shade of white once his mind was able to process her appearance, and then he actually fainted in front of her. The moment he hit the ground, Anang’s expression moved from dejected and distraught to one of disgust. “You consider him a man?” she asked in her now tiny voice. Ben sighed and shook his head but rubbed her shoulders before joining Tim in helping revive Oliver.
Once Oliver was back up again, all he could do was stare blankly at Anang, who was more than a little irritated with him. “Please tell me you have another one of those devices,” she begged.
“It doesn’t matter,” Oliver answered her.
“IT DOES MATTER! I CAN’T LIVE LIFE THIS TINY!” Anang screamed back in the most potent display of emotion since they’d met her.
“No, what I mean is that even if the device could undo this, you’ll have to wait for the next time a space-time fold occurs.”
“So I’m stuck like this for a month?!?!”
“I don’t know, I don’t know…” he mumbled, holding his head in his hands, then a thought suddenly occurred to him and he jumped to his feet. “I need to investigate the site RIGHT NOW! I need to get readings as fast as humanly possible!” He then ran out the front door to his car and began pulling out equipment.
Ben wrapped Anang up in his winter jacket, which now was more of a home to live in compared to how she swam around in it before. Ben carried some of Oliver’s items in one arm, while Oliver and Tim carried whatever they could handle and Oliver walked ahead of them so frantically that he was practically running.
When Ben let them know they’d arrived, he looked around at the carnage, though the two bodies were the most shocking to allof them. They hadn’t moved, however whereas before they were unusually stiff, they now almost looked like petrified wood.
“What happened to them?” Anang asked through a quivering voice.
“Probably a side effect of dying on another world,” Oliver answered. “I can’t talk. I need to get this done as quickly as I can,” he frantically told them, then began scurrying around, logging everything as quickly as he could and staring at all of his instruments as they lit up in ways the other three had never seen before. “Oh not good, not good, not good,” Oliver muttered, but still refused to answer any questions and instead began asking Ben for a beginning to end breakdown of the event, starting with where the dogmen had emerged into their world. Oliver spent a fraction of the time collecting data before he insisted they make a beeline back to the cabin.
Once they were in the cabin and plugging his devices into his laptop and downloading data as quickly as he could, still refusing questions or explanations. Once he had everything compiled, he began thumbing through programs and sorting out the data.
“When are you going to tell me how to fix this?” Anang asked him in a begging voice.
“I won’t have the answer to that today,” Oliver told her while scrambling to make some basic observations about the data. He then finally sighed heavily and looked at her.
“How could this have even happened?” Ben demanded now with enough force that Oliver swallowed hard knowing that he was getting no more leeway.
“Okay… okay… how…” he said while fidgeting and using his hands as if they could collect his thoughts for him. “Start at the beginning… Anang, you said you knew of three caves behind the waterfall,” he pointed out, and Anang nodded in response. “And then do you remember that when you told me about that something didn’t line up with my readings?” Again she nodded and waited for him to offer at least something useful about her tiny predicament.
“I don’t understand,” she interrupted.
“From beginning to end,” he nodded, leaning toward them. “You said there were three caves, and I believed you, but my data didn’t seem to line up with that, so I’ve been studying it and trying to figure out where I was missing something, but after seeing you and… the body of the other one… There is only one cave, Anang.”
“That is not possible. The snapping turtle men and the giants are not on this world.”
“What your people saw were not giants. They were us,” Oliver explained with shaking hands. “There aren’t three caves behind the waterfall, there is just one, but how you travel through the waterfall determines how you arrive in this world. Your people were not arriving in a world of giants, they were arriving in this world and they were arriving shrunk down to only a few inches tall. When the field was inverted, it dragged the field back over the dogman, but you were still in the field, so it affected you as well. You must have been far enough away that you weren’t completely affected, but it was still enough to shrink you down to half your size. He was RIGHT in the middle of it, so he got shrunk down to only a few inches tall. The single smartest thing your people have done is when they arrive in our world that small, they turn back right away, because if they ever got stuck on this world…”
“They would be mouse sized forever?” Tim asked when Oliver failed to finish his thought.
“Can you undo this?” Ben demanded forcefully.
“I told you not to be anywhere near the field when it was activated!” Oliver whined to Anang. “I didn’t know what it would do, but I knew that something might go wrong. I never thought THIS was something that could happen, but this is why I told you to get as far away as possible as soon as the device came out!”
“You are not blaming this on her,” Ben growled, and Oliver shook his head vociferously.
“I’m not trying to blame. This is all experimental. The only way I knew she could be safe was if she was as far away from it as she could get. Why did you stay?”
“He was going to kill Ben,” she answered with a heavy frown. “I almost didn’t make it.” Ben then gave a brief synopsis of the events that preceded her shrinking and Oliver nodded and hung his head.
“I don’t know if I can fix this. I do know that we can’t even try until the fold presents itself again. And even if I do? Let’s say the dogmen got shrunk and retreated back home again. In this case, I don’t think that would have fixed it. I think they would have emerged on their own side still shrunk because the way it worked was it kind of, dragged both sides of the space-time fold over you both at once. You were caught kind of by the edges of it, but it was still the same process.”
“Real quick,” Tim interrupted. “You said that Anang’s people believed there were three caves, but there’s really only one. So boxwood man is us, the giants are us… but who is the snapping turtle man?”
“Who do you think?” Oliver asked in an ominous voice. “Who has the money, resources and technology to make armor and weapons to take on an entire village of super fast, super strong werewolves?” Both Ben and Tim’s eyes went wide, as Daniel and Stanley sat up and joined in the conversation after being woken up. “They’re coming. If they’re not already here, they will be soon,” Oliver explained. “I can promise you that what happened last night lit up whatever detection systems they have in place and they will not waste time getting someone here to investigate. I don’t plan to be here when they get here. I have no intention of tangling with them.”
“But what about Anang?” Ben demanded.
“I will make it my top priority to grow her back to normal,” Oliver insisted. “You need to make it your top priority that the men in black do not find a half sized girl who can transform into a werewolf,” he warned. “This land is already on their radar as a hot zone. It’s practically nuclear after what happened last night. If they find her, you will wish for the days when your biggest problem was Anang being shrunk.”
Oliver then cleaned up his gear and loaded it up into his car before departing as quickly as he could. Once they were standing there watching the empty driveway, Tim had Ben carry Anang out to listen and smell.
“Do you smell anything?” Tim asked after giving her several minutes staring out into the woods in the direction of their fight, and he got a chill up his spine when Anang turned to him with fear filled eyes and nodded slowly to him. “I’ll take Anang and you just try to keep your head down,” Tim offered, but Anang only clung tightly around his neck, refusing to go. “You’re no good like this,” Tim insisted. “Your leg is still shot, you said yourself that you can’t seem to shift and your shrunk down to the size of a toddler,” but Anang still refused.
“I can hide her,” Ben told Tim. “Given how small her is now, it won’t be a problem.” Tim questioned Ben, but nodded and the four older men gathered and climbed into their vehicles and left Ben and Anang behind. Once they were alone, Ben tied the gigantic t-shirt around Anang’s half sized frame as best as he could, then hoisted her up into the attic space. “I know it’s harder in that form, but make sure you are every bit as quiet as when you’re hunting,” Ben warned her, then sat at the table with his head hung down to wait for any possible fallout.
Anang carefully moved across the rafters in the ceiling despite her injured and weak leg toward the other side of the cabin to reach a faint light emanating up from below. When she got there, she found a vent that she could look through down into the living room and remained there watching over Ben in silence for quite a while until there was suddenly a loud knock at the door. Both Ben and Anang jumped at the sudden noise and Ben did get up to answer it, but before he’d even gotten two steps, the knock repeated, even louder than before. Ben paused and went rigid with fear, but balled his fist and quickly recomposed himself as the third knock was even louder than the first two.
“WHO THE FUCK IS BEATING ON MY DOOR?” Ben screamed out, which seemed to stop it long enough for him to approach. Ben first checked through the front window to see several men standing on the porch all dressed in black tactical gear and four black SUVs with similar men looking around the driveway. Two men noticed Ben in the window right away and Ben offered them a clear profile to see him before he moved toward the door as they ordered him loudly to open up. As soon as he opened the door, he braced it with his foot and cracked it open and as soon as he did, the nearest man attempted to shove it open, but found it locked in place. “Who are you and where’s your warrant?” Ben demanded to know.
Two of the men looked at each other with sneers, while the man at the door lifted a pistol to Ben’s face and said, “right here.” He was more than a little surprised, though, when Ben stared back unflinchingly.
“You’re trespassing,” he said, recognizing the man as one he’d encountered before along with Tim. “Again.”
“Mother fucker,” he growled and looked like he just might pull the trigger as Ben tensed to slam the door on his arm, but another voice, also familiar, called out, “Wait.” This man then replaced the first man and looked Ben in the eyes.
“We’re coming in. Do you want your family’s cabin ripped apart, or do you want to just let us in?”
“I’d bet money that once you’re through this door you’re gonna fuck the place up anyways,” Ben answered back defiantly. The man remained stoic and stood there appraising Ben.
“No,” the man finally decided. “Talk to me and we don’t touch anything inside,” he promised.
“Inside,” Ben repeated sarcastically.
“We won’t break your stuff,” he said. “Same goes out here.”
“You guys are the types that will kick the door in my face the second I loosen my grip,” Ben challenged.
“We can do this the nice way, or the hard way. I will let you choose the nice way and we will stick to that,” he promised.
“And if I don’t say what you want?”
“We’ll do this the nice way,” he insisted. “Next time I come here will depend on how nice things go. But this time? Nice.”
Ben looked the man over, then at the ones behind him and after hesitating, the man motioned for them to step back and once they did, Ben stepped back as well, opening the door wide for them to file in surprisingly peacefully. Once they were in, the man looked around, then looked Ben up and down again noting the scratches and cuts that were evident on him from the night before. “Let’s sit down, Mr. Larson,” he stated. The man then shifted his rifle to his side and sat down on the couch, so Ben moved a chair and sat opposite him
“What do you say we just cut the bullshit?” the man asked Ben. Ben raised an eyebrow and stared at the man without showing any emotion. “What the hell happened out here last night?”
“Care to elaborate?” Ben asked the man.
“Please don’t push, Mr. Larson. I’m cutting you a lot of slack by dealing with you like this.”
“You’re fishing. Be specific, please,” Ben asked back with a little more cordiality. The man sighed and looked around, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
“Let’s start with your encounter four years ago,” he began. “We’re aware of the story, and we’re aware how it sent you into a tail spin. What did the creature look like?” he asked. “How is that? Is that specific enough for you?”
Ben stared at him for a good long moment, and thought his question over. “That’s why you didn’t just kick the door down. You want information, and you can’t just take it.”
“Something like that.” Ben wrapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, then opened up and described everything he remembered about how Anang appeared four years before to him in as good of detail as he could. The man stared directly into Ben’s eyes the entire time, listening intently to his every word. “Why do you think it let you go?”
“I can’t read minds,” Ben answered back forthrightly. “Maybe it was afraid of my rifle. I did stick it right in its chest, after all. Maybe it didn’t think I was worth the effort. Maybe something in it just wanted to torment me. Honestly, though, I’ve spent most of the last four years asking if all of it was nothing but my imagination.”
“But not last night,” the man countered. “Any doubts you have left are gone now,” he asserted. “Why didn’t you call the sheriff?”
“Why would I?” Ben asked back. “Talking about this stuff has caused me nothing but problems. Besides, the rest of the world seems to think I’m just delusional.”
The man stared quite intently at Ben, scrutinizing him with extreme intensity, and then he sat up rigidly. “Clear out,” he ordered his half dozen compatriots. “Everyone.” They all looked at each other, but then filed back out of the cabin again. Once they were alone, he removed his rifle and set it on the coffee table facing away from them both. “Tell you what, Mr. Larson…”
“You know,” Ben interrupted, “It just doesn’t feel right to be called that. It doesn’t feel genuine, either.”
“Just Ben, then?”
“Just Ben.”
“Ben, what would it take to get you to loosen your tongue about what’s going on? How’s a million dollars sound?”
“Are you bribing me?”
“Compensation. For loss of reputation. Loss of employability. For some help that I could use right now. So? How does that sound?”
“What’s the catch?” Ben asked him.
“How about five million?”
“That sounds like it comes with even more strings attached.”
“I’m just trying to do a job, Ben. What’s the harm in just telling me what’s been going on here?”
“I don’t know. The fact of the matter is that the last time I saw you, you were trespassing and ordering me around on my land. You lied to my face, you treated my grandfather’s hunting rifle like a Frisbee, you beat me up and you ground my face into the dirt. Now you’re here and you want to play polite and cordial and pay me ridiculous amounts of money for information that I’m not quite sure exactly what it is you’re looking for. You don’t answer to anyone or anything I’ve ever heard of, and you don’t seem to follow rules. So let’s say I do tell you what you want to know? What are you going to do with that?”
“I can’t discuss that,” the man replied. “And it’s really none of your concern.”
“It’s my concern if you end up doing something with what I say that crosses the line on what I know is right,” Ben informed him point blank.
“The money comes with no strings. It’s the most I can offer without calling my boss into this. But here’s a friendly warning- I don’t recommend dealing directly with my boss. You may not be familiar with the rules we follow, but we do answer to someone, and if he comes to get this information personally the odds aren’t what you think they are things will go how you want.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a warning. Sooner or later we’re going to talk about last night. The only reason I’m even bothering at this point is because you’re obviously maneuvering for something and I think once we work that out, you’ll talk to me. If I didn’t get that impression, we wouldn’t be talking. The main thing I want you to understand is that I think you’re better off if I don’t walk away empty handed. You know why we came here so soon. You know more than we do about it. Let’s not play games about that. So that’s it? Seems you think we’re some shady, behind the scenes group acting outside the law.”
“You all certainly act like it.”
“You know what I think? I think last night you got a taste of WHY we act like it.” Ben’s brow furrowed, carefully studying the man as best as he could, but his demeanor was stone cold. “A month ago. A couple days before we last saw each other. Did you have another dogman sighting?”
“No,” Ben answered immediately.
“Did you see anything?”
“I didn’t ‘see’ anything,” Ben emphasized.
“Go on.”
“There was something. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt like that night from four years ago. But I don’t know what it was. I didn’t really hear anything, and the forest didn’t go dead quiet the same way it did four years ago, but… there was something there. I don’t know how long. Eventually, it seemed to go away. It might have just been my imagination again.”
“Well, then we imagined it as well from another state,” the man informed Ben. “Did you get any sense of where it was?”
“I couldn’t stop looking off not far from where I ran into you and your guys. You weren’t quite in the same spot, but you weren’t far off either from where my gut told me to look.” The man considered his testimony and looked off to his left.
“Would it be too much to ask for something to drink?” Ben was a little surprised by the request, but agreed and then retrieved a bottle of Gatorade, which the man thanked him for. He then asked Ben some more about his first encounter, focusing on when he first realized the creature was there. Ben gave the best answers he could, while the man sipped on his drink and listened carefully. When Ben was done, the man sat upright and looked Ben dead in the eyes, showing he was satisfied, but also that he was very serious with what came next.
“I need you to tell me what happened last night. Seemed to me you were out there earlier because we saw a lot of vegetation moved around, but between whatever happened last night and what you were looking for this morning, I didn’t get a very clear picture. You were all over the place.”
“You find those things that look like petrified wood?”
“Yes,” the man answered emotionlessly. “But they were not wood last night.”
“No they were not.”
“You weren’t hunting last night,” he accused.
“I was.”
“But not for deer.”
“No,” Ben admitted.
“I need to know what happened to those two things out there. Did you do it?”
“Yes,” Ben answered him.
“How did you know when they would appear?”
“I didn’t. But this has happened enough that I had a rough guess. Some friends have been helping me post a guard each night, waiting to see if it would happen again.”
“Tim Boyd’s friends?” he asked, and Ben nodded. “You guys thought you could catch one?”
“I don’t like what’s been going on. I don’t want them here. I don’t want them taking deer that I knew were on the land but suddenly disappeared without a trace. I don’t like them spooking all the game, and I don’t like them apparently threatening me. Something’s been off since I got back out here and I didn’t want to be laying in bed when one of those things decided I was a good meal or something. Let me ask you something, you obviously know these things very well.”
“I can’t talk about that,’ the man answered coldly.
“Did you know they could talk?” Ben asked and suddenly the man’s rock hard façade cracked and he stared at Ben with his mouth hanging open.
“No. I did not. What did it say?”
“Four years ago? It’s all a blur. It wasn’t much, but it threatened me about my gun.”
“And last night?”
“It called me ‘little man.’” The man was shaken by this revelation. “They’ve never talked to you.” The man shook his head and thought hard before turning to Ben once more.
“Offer still stands. All you need to do is tell me what happened last night and how you managed to kill those two things, and the money is yours.”
Ben sat and thought good and hard before saying another word, the wheels of his mind turning slowly and deliberately. Eventually Ben opened up and told the man the story, though he left any parts including Anang. He explained that he woke up in the middle of the night with a gut feeling and Paul messaged him back confirming his feeling. He explained how he sat in the tree and just watched them as they materialized from seemingly nowhere and remained still until they all turned at him at once and then they started opening fire, and he explained the counter measures he set up to try to disorient them.
“Why did you think that would work?” the man asked Ben. “Obviously they could see you.”
“I don’t think it could,” Ben answered back. “At least not from that far away. All of these things had glowing eyes. I could see the light they cast on what they were looking at. I think those eyes let them see in the dark, but I don’t think they’re that good. I didn’t see those glowing eyes four years ago until it was right on me, but the ones last night I saw their eyes the entire time. That means the one four years ago had it’s eyes closed until it decided to confront me. It knew exactly where I was without looking at me. That means it either reads minds, or some other sense was guiding it.”
“Hmm…” the man considered, nodding at Ben. “And it worked. You killed them both.”
“All four,” Ben answered back, revealing that he’d missed at least one of the attackers the night before, again stunning the man into breaking his composure, but only briefly.
“You expect me to believe you killed four of those things last night? Just two of you?”
“I don’t give a flying fat fuck what you believe. You asked and I told you.”
“I will admit that those things are damn near indestructible.”
“That’s why we boxed them in and confused them, so we could get enough shots off to figure out where those shots would count.”
“Well where did they go, then?”
“I have no idea,” Ben answered him. “I don’t know what made the two remaining ones look the way they did this morning either. One was in a spot where the brush was completely trampled. I assume you saw that. The other was on the path directly from my tree stand out there. They’re gone now, but they were definitely dead. We made sure of that.”
“Something else happened out there that you’re not telling me. Something that lit our sensors up like a Christmas tree.” Ben tapped his knee, thinking hard.
“Well, I suppose I can just let you have it,” he explained, deciding it was a worthwhile gamble, then went to the kitchen and pulled the fried device out of a drawer and handed it to the man. “It’s no good to me anymore, but be careful. What’s left of it is extremely fragile. It might just fall apart in your hands.”
The man accepted it and looked it over carefully while holding it as delicately as he could. “You got this from Oliver Trunnel,” he determined. “This is why he’s been in the area lately. What does it do?”
“He had a theory that there is some kind of field causing this… thing. He said this device would invert the field and that might force them back through the other side again. Don’t ask me to describe what happened when I turned it on. I’m still trying to sort it out and everything was moving all at once. But I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. And that’s where the story ends.”
The man looked up at Ben again with eyes that were still continuing to search for something within Ben. “You think so,” he said in more of a challenge that an observation. “Well, Ben, you might want to reconsider that theory. You think you slammed the door shut, but what makes you think that you didn’t just drag it further open?”
Ben closed his eyes and put his head in his hand, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “You asked me to cut the bullshit. Did I do something to piss these things off? I wasn’t going to fire a single shot until I was sure they were in a mood to fight, and I’ll tell you what: they came last night looking for a fight.”
The man looked at Ben and scrutinized him for a good long while before carefully wrapping Oliver’s device and placing it in a bag on his hip. “You wouldn’t be the first one,” he told Ben cryptically.
“Then what will it take to make peace with them? Four of them came tearing at me as fast as I drive on the highway and they were screaming like all hell.”
“I don’t know a way to make peace with them. It’s not really my area. If four came through, they meant business. If you figure out what gets them that pissed off, I’d appreciate you letting me know,” he said, then handed Ben a card with nothing but a phone number on it. “Cuz I haven’t figured it out yet. They just seem to come that way.”
Ben sighed heavily, but nodded. “I get the feeling I just betrayed Oliver.”
“Oliver Trunnel knows the game,” the man told Ben. “He knows where the lines are and where he can go. This? Is untraveled territory. We haven’t set up the boundaries yet.”
“You’re gonna be out there on my property again screwing around,” Ben accused.
“You leave us be and we’ll leave you be. If I need something, I’ll let you know. You think you can work with that?”
“I’m open to the possibility,” Ben replied. “No promises.”
The man nodded and reached out to shake Ben’s hand. “You got any trail cameras out there?” he asked Ben and when Ben nodded, he followed up by asking where. Ben described the locations to him and then the man was ready to go and Ben saw him to the door.
“So, you got SD cards to replace the ones I’m assuming you’re gonna take from me? Ben asked as they reached the door, and the man turned to look at Ben with an expression that asked, “are you shitting me?” and then he chuckled.
“You can afford to replace them,” the man laughed, and then stepped out into the driveway to gather everyone and head out.
Meanwhile, Anang was huddled up to the side of the roof, listening with her ear to the roof as they settled matters and prepared to go. “Why didn’t you let us handle this like normal?” one man asked the one that Ben had spoken with.
“How many times have we had those goddamn things dead to rights with five times their numbers and they cut through us like a hot knife through butter?” The man Ben had spoken with asked. “Two guys took down four of those things last night with nothing more than some cheap assed fake deer piss and some ran down forty-year old speakers. Sometimes you need to take a step back and realize when you’re the one being hunted.”
“You really think he could have taken us?”
“He knew we were coming. He was waiting for us. And you saw that he has the marks to prove he tangled with them last night. I don’t think he would have won, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to waste just one of my men in a fucking dick measuring contest. Besides, we got more by just being polite to the guy than we’ve gotten in years.
“They killed four of them,” another man interjected with a skeptic tone of voice.
“Well you were the one that seemed confused about why there seemed to be so many different looking tracks. And we saw the two. The others probably just got sucked back in again. Now quit whining and let’s get the hell out of here,” he ordered, and then they loaded up and drove out in a convoy. Ben continued to sit and wait for a good long while before Aang was sure that the coast was clear and he heard her knocking on the panel in the ceiling he’d lifted her up through. He opened it up again and then accepted her as she lowered herself back down and dropped into his waiting arms and brought him up to speed on what was said once they left the house while Ben wiped the dust and grime off of her with a wash cloth.
For the rest of the day there wasn’t much conversation. Ben spent a lot of his time with Anang on the couch moving her ankle and foot around to help her increase mobility again and held her foot every so often, having her push against his hand to exercise the muscles that had been dormant for two months. In between, he massaged her calf and leg as carefully as he could while Anang lay there staring up at him with soft amber eyes simply observing him.
Dinner was also largely silent, and Ben couldn’t help notice as Anang, who was propped up on a stack of old phone books to be able to properly use the table sat there examining everything within her reduced reach as if measuring these obscenely large household objects against her tiny hands and fingers. Halfway through dinner, Anang finally shared her thoughts.
“I should leave,” she decided in a high pitched but grim tone. “I should go. I should go so that I’m not a burden to you any longer.”
“You’re not a burden,” Ben replied flatly.
“I am nothing BUT a burden,” she decided. I’m still injured, I can’t run, I can’t jump, I’m shrunken down too small to fight and I can’t even shift anymore, and even if I could, I’d still be shrunk down and WEAK. Your people are as big a threat to you as my people are and the only reason for that is because of ME. You should have never dug me out of that hole, but if I go into the woods I can at least die with SOME dignity left.”
“You’re not going out into the woods to die,” Ben answered just as flatly as before.
“You said I wasn’t a prisoner here. I am choosing to leave because I am worse than useless now and I am the reason this fight reached your home.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Ben answered. This caught her attention and she gulped at his confession, apparently wavering now, but only for a minute.
“I don’t want to be the reason you are all killed,” she insisted.
“We’re not getting killed. And you are staying here. We are going to get through this and I am going to see this through to the end. We’re not even close to done,” he told her with determination.
“Why? Why do you even care? I’m an alien in this world. I’ve caused nothing but problems and I’m just so tired, Ben. I’m tired. I’ve tried, and I’ve fought and I’ve hidden for years and I’m ready for it all to be over.”
“Then get some rest, because there’s no backing out of this. I’m not letting anyone take you and I’m not going to let you lose anything more.”
“But why?”
“Because you’re precious to me,” Ben answered her firmly, immediately shutting her up. “You changed my life that night, and it’s taken me four years to finally see why it was for the better. And I ruined your life just as much as you ruined mine, even though neither of us did anything to the other. No. I am not giving up because you are precious to me and I will see this through,” he determined with absolute finality that left Anang staring up at him speechless.
She then blushed and struggled to keep eye contact, but eventually she managed to pour in another dose of reality. “Nenaginad was not in that party of braves,” she informed him. “He will send more, and next time you can expect him to send many more than we saw last night. We barely managed to hold those four back. It only worked because we surprised them, but they will expect an ambush from now on. How can we hope to stand against them?”
“Because we have a shrink bomb,” Ben answered matter of factly. “When they step through, we won’t wait to fill them full of lead. We’ll drop that same shrink bomb on them that did this to you and then THEY will be the playthings in YOUR hands. They’ll be so small and helpless that even as small as you are right now, even you’ll be able to stomp them into the same tiny mud stains you stomped that other into. Or they can run back to their own homes stuck at only a couple inches tall. It doesn’t matter how many they send through, because all we need is a couple of those things at most the moment they step through and they will shrink down so small even mice will be able to rip them apart.”
Anang stared at him with her mouth hanging open, half smiling, but also still noticeably concerned. “What if those bombs shrink me more?”
“They won’t. One way or another, we use those bombs on them, and not on you.”
Anang was finally convinced and stared teary eyed at Ben. “What respectable woman is as tiny as I am?”
“The one who saved my life. And the one that changed my life,” Ben answered her. “And? Money’s not an issue anymore. You might not know what our money is worth yet, but I can promise you that five million means we are set.”
Anang slept heavily that night laying across Ben’s chest, her feet hanging over his hip bone. In the morning, she was quite refreshed, but immediately reminded of her dramatically reduced stature. Once they were up, Ben finally took the time to assess the damage of what had been taken from Anang and put her up against the wall to measure her. She stood there with a meek, pathetic expression staring up at him while only coming up to about mid thigh to him. She measured in at a rather unimpressive 2’10” and a shockingly light 15 pounds. He then carefully gathered her other measurements to find her clocking in at 16-13-18, with feet that were just less than five inches long and one and three quarter inches wide. With this, he had the basics on what he would need to rebuild her wardrobe on a much smaller scale than before.
Ben messaged Tim with her measurements using a code they’d agreed on as asking Tim to stop by the hardware store to pick up items for a “project,” and then they waited for him to arrive with something more than a giant t-shirt that Anang could strap down to her as a toga. In the mean time, Ben busied himself with dealing with her inability to move about. He wrapped her up in his winter jacket and carried her out to the pole building and set her on the workbench. Then she watched has he took her crutches and began measuring them, then scribbling on a piece of notebook paper while punching numbers into a calculator. He then began drawing on a piece of paper using a ruler until he had a rough idea of what he was building and scrounged around the building for scrap would that he cobbled together piece by piece into a new, tiny set of crutches.
Once he was finished, Ben carried her back to the cabin and let her try them out. While they weren’t as comfortable as the one’s she’d been using before, she was more than a little appreciative of his efforts and accepted them gratefully.
I'm happy you enjoyed this chapter. Sorry for the delay in responding; I've been out of town.