Chapter 2: Buck Grows
It felt like a yawn that had seized his entire skeleton and refused to let go. A deep, bodily unfurling. The sensation wasn’t painful; it was a profound, unstoppable stretching, a release of some fundamental pressure he hadn’t known was there. His grin felt wider, his teeth seemed larger in his head. He was still holding Finn, whose initial shock was rapidly dissolving into a kind of giddy, terrified elation.
“Buck, your arm,” Finn squeaked, patting the colossal forearm his legs were wrapped around. The muscles beneath the skin were hardening, expanding, the hair coarsening into thick wire. “You’re like… a redwood with biceps.”
The ceiling was now an immediate problem. With a low, grinding crunch, the top of Buck’s skull pressed into the textured plaster. A crack snaked outwards from the point of contact. Dust and bits of acoustic popcorn rained down onto his shoulders and into his beard.
“Okay, big guy, we gotta move,” Tommy said, his voice steady but tight. He’d grabbed Jesse’s hand and was pulling him toward the apartment’s short hallway, their eyes glued to the expanding man filling their world. “You’re gonna bring the roof down.”
Buck’s mind, marvelously clear and focused, agreed. He had to get low, get out. He crouched, an action that made the floorboards shriek in agony. Setting Finn down gently was no longer an option with his newfound scale; he simply opened his hand and let Finn slide off his palm onto the groaning floor. Finn stumbled but kept his feet, staring up, up, up.
On all fours now, Buck was still enormous, his back hunched against the ceiling. The living room was a dollhouse. He turned his head, and his shoulder bumped the bookcase. It teetered, then fell with a crash, scattering paperbacks like autumn leaves.
“The door,” Jesse shouted, finding his voice. “You have to get out the door!”
The front door was a tiny rectangle of freedom. Buck shuffled towards it on his hands and knees. His hip clipped the corner of the wall dividing the living room from the kitchen, and drywall exploded in a cloud of white dust. A length of wooden stud snapped with a sound like a gunshot.
He reached the doorframe. It was too small. Far too small. He could maybe get his head and one shoulder through if he turned sideways, but that was it. Frustration, a new and raw emotion in his expanded state, bubbled up. He shoved at the wall beside the door with the flat of his hand.
The wall didn’t resist. It gave way with a shuddering sigh, the lathe and plaster disintegrating into rubble. Cool night air rushed in, swirling the dust. He’d opened a hole big enough to drive a car through. Beyond was the familiar, weedy patch of his backyard, the chain-link fence, the dark shapes of neighbors’ houses.
Behind him, his three friends coughed in the dust cloud. “Well,” Finn gasped, “there’s your new exit. Very open-concept.”
Buck didn’t hesitate. He crawled forward, through the jagged hole he’d made. The wooden frame scraped against his broadening back, shredding what was left of his t-shirt. He was outside.
He kept growing.
The process accelerated once he was free of the house’s confines. On his hands and knees in the damp grass, he felt himself surging upwards. His perspective shifted dizzyingly. The single-story houses around him, which had always seemed modest but solid, were suddenly shrinking. His own roof was now level with his chest. The ancient oak tree at the back of his lot, which he’d never been able to climb as a kid, was a bushy thing he could have plucked from the earth.
He heard screams. Not from his friends, but from the neighborhood. Lights were popping on in windows. A car alarm two streets over began to wail.
“Buck!” Tommy’s voice, faint from inside the ruined house. “We’re coming out!”
He saw their three small figures emerge from the hole, picking their way over the rubble into the backyard. They looked like action figures. He had to protect them. From what, he wasn’t sure. From everything.
A sudden, wrenching groan came from his house. The structure, already compromised, could not handle the shifting weight of a giant crouched against it. The roof over the living room sagged. With a roar of splitting wood and shattering glass, a large section of it collapsed inward, sending a fresh plume of dust billowing into the night.
Jesse cried out and stumbled back. A chunk of asphalt shingle the size of a dinner plate bounced past Tommy’s head.
A new instinct, primal and clear, took over. Buck cupped his hands—now the size of dumpster lids—and swept them forward, gently corralling the three tiny men between his palms. He lifted them, a careful, living handful, and brought them up to his chest. He could feel their hearts hammering against his calloused skin, a frantic bird-like flutter. He held them securely against the thick, warm forest of his chest hair, a living cave of muscle and heat.
“Don’t look down,” he rumbled, his voice the bass note of an earthquake. He stood up.
The world fell away. His growth finally, abruptly, stopped.
He stood one hundred feet tall in the suburban night.
His head was level with the low, scudding clouds, their underbellies painted orange by the distant city lights. His feet, each as long as a pickup truck, were buried to the ankles in the soft earth of what had been his vegetable garden. The crushed remains of his house lay around his feet like a child’s block structure kicked over. He could see for miles. The downtown core was a glittering spill of jewels to the west. The chemical plant where he worked was a faint constellation of security lights to the north. The neat grids of streets, the ribbons of highway, the tiny, moving dots of late-night cars—it was all a map laid out beneath him.
The scale was incomprehensible. A profound silence, broken only by the wind whistling past his ears and the faint, panicked sounds rising from the ant-world below, filled him.
The awe lasted about ten seconds. Then the reality crashed in.
He was naked. The last scraps of his clothing had been shed during the crawl out. The night air was cool on his immense skin. He was a hundred-foot-tall, hairy, naked man holding his three boyfriends in his hands in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
Sirens began to howl in the distance, converging.
“Okay,” Tommy’s voice came, muffled from the cavern of his chest.“Okay. This is happening. Buck? Can you hear me?”
Buck tilted his head down. The motion felt ponderous, monumental. He saw the three of them clustered in the cup of his hand, pressed against his chest. Their faces were pale blobs looking up at him. “I hear you,” he said, trying to keep his voice soft. It still rolled out like distant thunder.
“We need to… we need to get out of here,” Jesse said, his librarian’s brain clicking into practical mode despite the terror. “The police, the news… they’re coming.”
“Where do I go?” Buck asked. The question was ludicrous. He could take a step and be in the next town. He looked at his own street. If he put his foot down, he’d flatten three houses.
Finn, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, finally spoke. He wasn’t looking at Buck’s face; he was staring, utterly rapt, at the landscape of Buck’s torso—the vast slopes of his pecs, the canyon of his sternum, the rolling, hairy foothills of his gut. “This is the most insane thing that has ever happened to anyone, ever,” he breathed. Then he looked up. “Try to shrink!”
“What?”
“Shrink!You grew. Maybe you can un-grow. Think small thoughts! I don’t know!”
It was worth a try. Buck closed his eyes, a gesture that made the night go completely dark for the men on his chest. He concentrated. He thought of being in his couch, cozy and normal-sized. He thought of the tight confines of his factory locker. He willed his body to recede, to draw back in on itself.
Nothing. Not a twinge. He opened his eyes. “It’s not working.”
“Maybe you need to, I don’t know, relax?” Tommy suggested, his voice hopeful. “The growth was intense. Maybe you’re clenched.”
Buck tried to relax his massive shoulders. He took a deep breath, which created a small localized windstorm that ruffled the hair on Jesse’s head. He exhaled slowly.
He remained a hundred feet tall.
“Fuck,” he whispered. The word was a gust of despair.
He felt a small pressure on his thumb. Jesse had placed both his hands against it, leaning his full weight into the giant digit. “It’s okay,” Jesse said, his voice small but steady. “We’re okay. You didn’t hurt us. You got us out.”
“I destroyed my house,” Buck boomed, guilt washing over him. “I’m… I’m a circus freak standing in a crater. They’re gonna shoot me with tanks, or tranquilize me and put me in a zoo.” The enormity of his isolation was as vast as his body. He was a monster. A gentle, scared monster, but a monster nonetheless.
“Don’t you dare,” Finn snapped, his voice gaining its familiar edge. He smacked Buck’s chest—a pathetically weak impact against the toned muscle. “You are not a freak. You are a phenomenon. You are a walking, talking god of cuddles and chaos. You’re a giant bear! My giant bear!”
Finn’s words were a lifeline. They didn’t solve anything, but they reframed it. The despair receded a fraction, replaced by a flicker of that earlier, raw power. Buck looked down at Finn’s tiny, defiant form.
“What do I do, Finn?” The question was real.
Finn looked around, a theatrical director surveying a challenging new stage. The sirens were louder now. Red and blue lights strobed at the end of the street, blocked by the tangle of destroyed houses and the colossal legs of their friend.
“Well,” Finn said, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his face. “You’re a hundred feet tall and naked. The world is your oyster. And honestly, darling, the vibe right now is less ‘zoo exhibit’ and more ‘benevolent kaiju.’ So maybe… we don’t hide.”
Tommy’s head snapped up. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Finn said, his eyes shining with a mad light, “that if you can’t join ‘em, and you can’t beat ‘em… you might as well give ‘em a show they’ll never forget.” He looked up at Buck’s planet-sized face. “You feel strong?”
Buck flexed. Every muscle in his body answered with a surge of unimaginable, tectonic power. The ground trembled faintly. “Yeah,” he said, the rumble carrying a new, tentative curiosity. “I feel strong.”
“Good,” Finn purred. “Then let’s go for a walk. Gently. Avoid the main roads if you can. Head for the river. There’s space there. And the light pollution is fantastic for your complexion.”
Buck felt a laugh building in his chest, a seismic event of its own. The fear wasn’t gone, but it was being crowded out by something else: the sheer, unprecedented potential of the moment. He had his friends, safe against his heart. He had this impossible body.
He took his first step.