Chapter 2: A Growing Problem
The silence after Dwayne left was a physical thing, thick and heavy in the cluttered living room. Tracy lay on the futon, the neon discount sign buzzing like a trapped fly, casting jagged shadows. She’d pumped again, filled two more bottles. The mechanical rhythm had finally lulled her into a shallow, uneasy sleep.
She dreamed of the light. Not as a memory, but as a presence. It was inside her now, a liquid white current moving through her veins, singing in a frequency that vibrated her bones. It was restructuring her. Building something.
She woke with a gasp, drenched in a cold sweat that smelled oddly sweet, like diluted honey. The pressure was back, but different. It wasn’t just a deep pull. It was a fierce, outward expansion, a tautness so extreme it burned.
She sat up, and the sound of ripping fabric was shockingly loud in the quiet apartment.
She looked down. Her favorite sleep t-shirt, soft gray cotton from a concert a decade ago, had split clean across the chest. A jagged seam ran from armpit to armpit, and through the gap, her own flesh bulged, pale and strained in the sickly neon glow.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
She swung her legs off the futon, her body moving with a new, precarious heaviness. The simple act of standing sent a wave of dizziness through her. Her center of gravity was off. She shuffled to the bathroom, her gait unsteady, each step making the weight on her chest sway and ache.
She didn’t want to turn on the bright overhead light. She clicked on the small, dim fixture above the mirror.
The woman who looked back was a funhouse distortion of herself. Her face, with its tired hazel eyes and the familiar cascade of dreads over her shoulders, was the same. Below the neck was a stranger.
Her breasts were not just larger. They were profound. They dominated her torso, swollen mounds of flesh that began high up near her collarbones and curved down past her ribcage. The skin was stretched so tight it shone, a web of faint blue veins visible beneath the surface. Her areolae, once small and dark brown, were now vast, dinner-plate sized expanses of deep, purplish-black. They looked bruised, primordial.
A thin, steady stream of milk leaked from each nipple, tracing paths through the tense landscape of her skin and dripping, with soft, distinct plinks, into the dry sink basin.
The horror was cold and absolute. It froze her lungs.
Then, a new sensation, foreign and entirely unwelcome, cut through the numbness. It started as a deep, internal warmth, a pooling low in her belly. It wasn’t pain. It was a throbbing, insistent heat that spread outwards, making her skin feel hypersensitive. The brush of her own dreads against her shoulders felt like a caress. The rough terrycloth of her towel on the rack looked suddenly, absurdly soft. Her body was sounding an alarm, but it was the wrong kind of alarm.
She was becoming aroused.
It made no sense. It was a biological betrayal. This was a moment of pure terror, of body horror, and her traitorous physiology was responding with a low, electric hum of desire. The two sensations—the terrifying pressure and the humming warmth—wrestled inside her, creating a nauseating cognitive dissonance. She gripped the edges of the sink, her knuckles white, trying to anchor herself in the cool porcelain.
She needed containment. Control. She lurched back to her bedroom, to the closet where her old, giant terrycloth robe hung. She’d bought it as a joke, big enough for two people. She wrestled one arm in, then tried to pull it across her front.
It wouldn’t close. Not even close. The fabric gaped open over a foot of exposed, swollen cleavage. She tugged, a small, desperate sound escaping her. A seam under the arm gave way with a sigh.
That was it. The last defense. Gone.
The panic won. It surged up, hot and acidic, dissolving the last of her pragmatism. She stumbled back to the living room, found her phone on the floor by the futon. Her hands were shaking so badly she misdialed Dwayne’s number twice.
He answered on the first ring, his voice blurred with sleep. “Tracy?”
“It’s happening again.” Her voice was a thin, trembling wire. “They’re bigger. My shirt ripped. My robe won’t… Dwayne, I can’t cover myself.” The admission was stark, humiliating.
She heard rustling, the sound of keys. “I’m on my way. Fifteen minutes. Just… sit tight.”
“Bring something. To bind. I don’t know.” She was babbling. The warmth between her legs pulsed, a maddening counter-rhythm to her frantic heart.
“I got an idea. Hang on.”
The line went dead. She sank onto the futon, pulling the torn edges of her t-shirt together, holding them like a lifeline. The minutes oozed by. The arousal didn’t fade; it sat there, a persistent, shameful undercurrent. She focused on the fear, trying to drown it out. The pressure continued to build. She felt taller. Was that possible? When she looked across the room, the ceiling seemed marginally closer. Her perspective was subtly wrong.
A firm knock. She scrambled up, holding the shirt closed, and let him in.
Dwayne looked like he’d rolled straight out of bed. Basketball shorts, a faded hoodie, his scruffy beard even scruffier. In his hands was a large, unopened pack of Ace bandages and a pair of heavy-duty fabric shears from Automotive. His eyes went wide, taking her in—the destroyed shirt, the monumental, exposed curves, the sheer scale of the change since he’d left hours ago.
“Jesus,” he breathed, not leering, just assessing the engineering problem.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said, her voice tight. “What’s the plan?”
“Support. Compression. It’s all I could think of. We’ll layer ‘em. It’ll be better than nothing.” He stepped inside, his professionalism a calming force. “You need to… uh, you need to take the shirt off.”
The warmth in her belly flared. She hated it. She nodded, turned her back to him, and let the torn fabric fall. She heard his sharp intake of breath. Not desire. Awe. Dread.
“Okay,” he said, his voice deliberately steady. “Okay. Arms up.”
She raised her arms, feeling immensely vulnerable, the cool air on her oversensitive skin making her shiver. He moved behind her. She felt the first bandage, snug and firm, as he started wrapping from her ribs upward. His hands were careful, clinical, but the touch of his knuckles against the sides of her breasts, the pull of the elastic, sent jolts through her system. She clenched her teeth.
“Too tight?”
“No. It’s good. Keep going.”
He worked in silence, layering the bandages in a crisscross pattern, creating a makeshift harness. The compression was a relief, a containing force. The insane growth was still there, but now it was held, managed. With each pass of the bandage, the distracting, unwanted heat inside her seemed to recede slightly, pushed down by the more immediate sensation of being literally held together.
“This is some Frankenstein shit,” Dwayne muttered, concentrating on a knot under her arm.
A choked laugh burst out of her. “You’re telling me.”
He finished, securing the end with a metal clip. “Try moving.”
She lowered her arms, turned. The construction was bulky and strange, a mummified torso, but it held everything in place. She could breathe a little easier. “It works. It actually works.”
“For now.” He gathered the empty bandage wrappers. “You’re gonna outgrow this by lunchtime at this rate.”
The truth of it hung between them. The temporary fix highlighted the permanence of the problem.
Then, as she took a step toward the kitchen, a fresh, sharp twinge spiked from her lower back, up her spine. It wasn’t pain from the weight. It was a stretching sensation, a pop and a grind of vertebrae. She gasped, stopping short.
“What? What is it?” Dwayne was instantly alert.
“My back. It’s…” She straightened slowly, and her eyes leveled with his. They were exactly eye-to-eye. Last night, she’d had to look up at him. “Dwayne. Stand right there. Don’t move.”
He froze. She walked to him, her movements cautious. She stopped directly in front of him. Her eyes were no longer looking at his chin. They were locked with his.
“You’re taller,” he said, the words flat with disbelief.
She turned and went to the doorframe, the one where she’d marked her nephew’s height two summers ago. She stood against it. The pencil mark for “Ray, age 10” was now well below the crown of her head. She’d gained at least three inches since yesterday.
The practical horror of it unfolded. Her clothes. Her car. Her job. Her life. All built for a body that was ceasing to exist.
The warm, throbbing sensation returned, stronger now, washing over the fear like a tide. It was a full-body sensitivity. The feel of the bandages against her skin, the sight of Dwayne’s concerned face, the very ache in her lengthening bones—it all translated into a single, urgent, humiliating pulse of need. It wasn’t about Dwayne. It was her own system, hijacked, screaming for release, for connection, for anything to offset this relentless transformation.
She leaned her forehead against the cool wall, closing her eyes. “Something’s wrong with me,” she said, her voice muffled. “Beyond the obvious.”
“What do you mean?”
She couldn’t say it. The shame was too thick. She just shook her head.
He came closer. She could feel his warmth. “Tracy. Talk to me. It can’t get weirder than this.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “It does. My body… it’s reacting. Like it’s…” She fumbled for a clinical word. “Aroused.” She forced it out. “For no reason. Right now. It’s just… happening. Along with everything else.”
Silence stretched. She braced for his retreat, his discomfort.
“Huh,” he said, quietly.
She turned her head to look at him. He wasn’t staring at her body. He was looking at her face, thinking hard.
“The light,” he said. “It’s not just changing you. It’s… activating things. Whole systems. Lactation. Growth. Sex drive. It’s like it flipped every ‘on’ switch at once.” He ran a hand over his beard. “That’s not an attack. That’s a directive. Your body’s following a program.”
The analysis, so calm and logical, drained some of the shame away. It was a symptom. A malfuction. Not her.
“A program for what?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. But we can’t fix it with bandages and a pump from Whale-Mart.” He squared his shoulders. “We need a different kind of doctor. Or… not a doctor at all.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we start looking for people who’ve seen that light.” His eyes were serious in the buzzing neon gloom. “Before whatever it’s building you into is finished.”
The truth of his words settled in the room like fine dust, chilling and inescapable. Tracy’s body throbbed in agreement, a network of alien signals she couldn’t silence. The program was running. She could feel its code in the ache of her lengthening bones, the deep pull of full ducts, the warm, shameless buzz between her legs that returned now, insistently, as she looked at him.
“I can’t think about that right now,” she said, her voice gravelly. “The program. I can’t.” The compulsion was a physical wave, washing logic away. It was a need to be grounded, to feel something other than fear or this clinical horror. She took a step toward him, the bandages crinkling. “Dwayne.”
He saw the shift in her eyes, the desperation that had nothing to do with panic. He took a half-step back, not in rejection, but in uncertainty. “Tracy…”
“Please.” The word was raw. She reached for his hand, placed it flat against the layered bandages over her heart. The heat of her skin bled through. “I need to not feel like a monster for five minutes. I need to feel like a person.” Her other hand went to the metal clip at her side. A flick, and the tension in the bindings loosened. “And I need you to help me with this first.”
He swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing. “With what?”
She guided his hand lower, to the top edge of the bandage. “The pressure is back. It’s building. It hurts.” This was true, but it was only part of the truth. The fullness was a constant, painful thrum. “I can’t reach the pump. It’s… awkward. With these on.”
Understanding clicked, mixing with something else in his gaze. He nodded, his professionalism wrestling with the electric charge now in the air. “Okay. Okay, let’s… get this off.”
He helped her unwind the layers, his movements slow and methodical. With each loosened loop, her body seemed to sigh, expanding into the newfound space. The bandages pooled at her feet. The sight of her fully unveiled, monumental and glistening with a thin sheen of sweat and milk, made him stop breathing for a second.
“Just… just relax,” he murmured, more to himself.
He fetched the pump from the bathroom, assembling the parts with familiar, efficient hands. He brought it to her, but she didn’t take it. She was watching him, her hazel eyes dark and unreadable.
“Not that,” she said softly. She sank onto the edge of the futon, the springs groaning under her new weight. The neon light cut across her shoulders. “It’s too cold. Too loud.” She patted the space beside her. “Sit.”
He sat, the pump forgotten in his hands. The scent of her, sweet milk and warm skin, filled the space between them.
Tracy reached out, took the pump from his slack grip, and placed it on the floor. Her heart was hammering, but the buzzing need inside her was a steady drum, drowning out the fear. She cupped the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in the short hair there. His skin was warm.
“There’s another way,” she whispered, her voice a low hum. “To relieve the pressure.”
“Tracy, I don’t think—”
“I do.” Her tone brooked no argument. It was the same voice that directed lost customers to aisle twelve. It was a command. “You trusted me. Now trust this. Please.”
She didn’t kiss him. She guided his head down, gently, insistently. He resisted for a fleeting moment, a stiffness in his shoulders. Then he exhaled, a long, surrendering breath, and let her bring him to her.
His mouth was hesitant at first, a soft, closed pressure against the taut, dark skin. Then she sighed, a sound of profound relief, and her body did the work. A warm, rich stream released, not a trickle but a smooth, insistent flow.
Dwayne jerked slightly in surprise, then stilled. He drank.
His eyes, wide open and staring at nothing, slowly drifted shut. A low, involuntary sound vibrated in his throat, not a groan of pleasure but of profound, shocking recognition. It was unlike anything. It wasn’t like cow’s milk, or almond, or anything from a carton. It was dense, velvety, carrying a flavor he had no reference for—a hint of vanilla orchid, of damp earth after rain, of something mineral and ancient. It was profoundly satisfying, a completeness that settled in his stomach and radiated outward, unknotting the tension in his own shoulders, softening the worry in his jaw.
Tracy felt it too. The painful, demanding pressure didn’t just lessen; it transformed. A deep, liquid warmth spread from her core, a heavy, golden relaxation that melted the fear, quieted the hum of alien directives. The sharp, shameful edge of her arousal blunted, becoming a diffuse, comforting glow. Her head fell back against the couch, her fingers loosening in his hair from a grip to a caress.
They stayed like that, locked in the strange, silent transaction, until the urgent pull faded into a soft, spent trickle. Dwayne’s sucking slowed, then stopped. He didn’t pull away immediately. He rested his forehead against her, his breathing deep and even.
Finally, he leaned back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were clear, drowsy. “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” Tracy breathed. The world had softened at the edges. The buzzing neon sign was just a light. The clutter was just things. For the first time since the highway, her body was quiet.
She reached out to touch his cheek, her movements languid. As her hand rose, her eye level with his shifted. She frowned, the tranquil feeling receding just enough for observation. She’d been looking slightly down at him before. Now, the difference was more pronounced.
“Dwayne,” she said slowly. “Stand up.”
He did, a little unsteady, like he was pleasantly drunk. She rose beside him, the fluid movement effortless. She stood straight, looking across at him.
Before, they had been eye-to-eye after her last growth spurt. Now, the top of his head was squarely in her line of sight. She had to look down to meet his gaze.
“You’re shorter,” she stated, the words simple and cold in the warm room.
He blinked, the drowsy confusion clearing. “What?”
“You were taller than me this morning. Then we were even. Now I’m taller again.” She placed a hand flat on top of his head, then brought it to her own eyebrow level. The difference was maybe two inches. Clear. Unmistakable.
He stared at her, the profound calm the milk had induced now cracking, revealing a fresh, deeper fear underneath. He looked at the damp shine on her skin, then down at his own hands.
The milk hadn’t just relaxed them.
It had changed the equation.
It had changed the equation.
Dwayne just stared at his palms, turning them over as if they might have changed, too. The warm, settled feeling the milk gave him was now curdling into something else. “Did I just… shrink?” His voice was small.
“I don’t know.” Tracy’s own calm was evaporating, the golden haze burning off under a sharp, clinical sun. She moved past him, her stride longer, to the bathroom doorframe. She stood straight, her dreads brushing the top of the frame. “Yesterday, I cleared this by two inches. Now it’s three.” She pressed her back against the wood, marked the spot with her thumb. The evidence was undeniable. “It’s accelerating.”
“Okay, time out.” Dwayne ran a hand over his face. “We need data. Actual numbers.” He looked around, spotted a metal tape measure in her junk drawer, nestled with dead batteries and rubber bands. “Here. Stand still.”
He kneeled, hooking the end at her heel. The metal rasped as he stretched it up her leg, past the bandages pooled at her feet, along the new, uninterrupted line of her torso. He followed the curve of her spine, up to the crown of her head. He squinted at the measurement.
“Six feet even,” he announced, voice flat.
“I was five-eight.” The number hung in the air. Four inches in a few days. She took the tape from him. “Your turn.”
He stood against the frame. She measured him quickly, her hands efficient. “Five-ten and a half.”
“I was six-one.” He sounded almost offended. “I lost two and a half inches? To a milk mustache?” He paced the short length of the kitchen, agitation returning. “That’s not a side effect. That’s a transfer. You grew. I shrunk. It’s connected.”
The implication was a cold stone in Tracy’s gut. Her nourishment had a cost. Her relief came at his expense. The intimacy of minutes ago now felt predatory. “I can’t… I can’t do that to you.”
“You didn’t know.” He stopped pacing, thinking aloud. “But we know now. So we account for it. We find another outlet. We go back to the pump.” He gestured to the beige machine on the floor.
“The pump didn’t feel like that,” she said quietly. The profound quiet it had brought, the silencing of the alien hum, was already a fading memory. Her body was waking up again, the signals returning. The pressure was a dull background throb, but a new, specific itch had begun deep in her marrow. A restless energy. “And it’s not just the milk, Dwayne.”
She stepped away from the frame, rolling her shoulders. A series of soft pops echoed down her spine. She stretched her arms overhead, and her knuckles brushed the acoustic tile of the drop ceiling. She hadn’t been able to do that yesterday.
“It’s everything.” She let her arms fall, focusing inward. “The ache is moving. It’s in my legs now. A deep ache, like growing pains. But fast.” She began to pace, her movements becoming less careful, more expansive. She needed to move. She walked to the living room wall, placed her palm flat against it, and pushed.
It wasn’t a test of strength. It was an impulse. The wall held, of course, but the solid resistance felt good. Her muscles engaged, corded, and for a second, the restless itch subsided. Strength countered the ache.
“Whoa, easy,” Dwayne said, watching her.
“It helps,” she insisted, her voice low with concentration. She turned, her eyes scanning the cluttered room. They landed on the old, heavy metal filing cabinet she used as a TV stand. It was stuffed with manuals and old bills. Without a word, she walked over, gripped the sides, and lifted.
It came up. Not easily, but without the staggering strain she expected. Her back stayed straight. The weight was significant, but manageable—like lifting a large child. She held it for a five count, the muscles in her arms and thighs standing out, then set it down with a controlled thud that shook the floorboards.
Dwayne’s jaw was slack. “You stock shelves at Whale-Mart. You don’t deadlift filing cabinets.”
“I do now.” She was breathing heavily, but not from exhaustion. From a surge of something that felt like power. The itch in her bones had quieted, replaced by a warm, humming satisfaction. She looked at her hands. They were the same, yet they weren’t. “The light… it’s not just making me bigger. It’s making me denser. Stronger.”
A wild, desperate laugh bubbled up in her throat. “I’m a superhero. A leaking, hormonal, shrinking-my-friends superhero.” The laugh died as quickly as it came. “What is the program, Dwayne? What is it building?”
Before he could answer, a new sensation sliced through the hum. Sharp. Localized. At her temples. A pressing, insistent ache, as if her skull was too small. She grimaced, pressing her fingers against the bones.
“What’s wrong?”
“My head. It’s… pressure.” She stumbled back to the bathroom, Dwayne on her heels. In the mirror, her face was flushed. She leaned in, searching her tired hazel eyes. Was her vision blurring? No. It was sharpening. The individual threads of Dwayne’s hoodie behind her became distinct. The grout lines between the tiles seemed to vibrate with clarity.
But the pain at her temples intensified, a focused, drilling sensation. She watched, horrified and fascinated, as the skin there tightened. A subtle shift occurred. A hardening. A slight, angular prominence pushing against the flesh.
Her brow ridge was extending.
It was minute, but it was change. Her skull was remodeling itself. She traced the new, firm line with a trembling finger. Her face, her own face, was becoming unfamiliar.
“Your head,” Dwayne breathed, leaning in to see. “It’s… reshaping.”
The fear returned, cold and final. This was beyond augmentation. This was reconstruction. She was being made into something else, piece by piece, system by system. Lactation. Growth. Strength. Sensory enhancement. Now skeletal alteration.
The program had a blueprint. And she was the raw material.
She turned from the mirror, the dreads she’d kept for fifteen years feeling suddenly alien hanging against a changing skull. The restless energy was back, fueled by terror now. She needed to move, to outrun the feeling of her own cells betraying her.
“I can’t stay in this apartment,” she said, the words coming out in a rush. “The walls are closing in. I feel like I’m going to rip through the ceiling.” She grabbed her keys from the floor, her long fingers closing around them with a new, definitive strength. The metal felt flimsy.
“Where can you go? It’s four in the morning.”
“I don’t know. I just need to drive. To feel the road.” She looked at him, at his honest, worried face, now looking up at hers. A fresh pang of guilt hit her. “You should go home. Get away from me. Before I accidentally turn you into a action figure.”
He shook his head, a stubborn set to his jaw. “Not a chance. You’re stuck with me. But you’re not driving your Jeep. The seat’s already too small for you. You’d be hunched over the wheel like a gorilla in a clown car.”
He was right. The thought of cramming herself into that cab made her claustrophobic.
“So what, we walk?”
“We take my truck.” He jingled his own keys. “Bench seat. Plenty of legroom. We’ll go… I don’t know, to the old quarry. Nobody’s out there. You can scream at the sky if you want.”
It was the first offer that didn’t feel like a cage. Open space. “Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”
She went to pull on a hoodie, but the one she owned was now a crop-top, the sleeves ending halfway up her forearms. Dwayne wordlessly handed her his own from the floor. It was big on him. On her, it strained across the shoulders and chest, but it covered her.
They left the buzz of the neon sign and stepped into the pre-dawn chill. The air smelled of wet asphalt and distant rain. Tracy had to duck slightly to clear her own doorway.
Dwayne’s pickup was an older Ford, oxidized red and reliable. She climbed in, the extra height making the step down unnecessary. She filled the passenger space, her head a hair from brushing the roof. Dwayne started the engine, and they pulled away from the curb, from the apartment that no longer fit her.
She watched her neighborhood scroll by, the houses seeming smaller, more fragile. The ache in her legs pulsed in time with the engine. The pressure in her skull was a constant, low-grade alarm. But the open window brought cool air across her changing face.
“The quarry,” she said, not looking at him. “Then what?”
Dwayne kept his eyes on the road, his hands steady at ten and two. “Then we start looking for answers. For anyone else who’s seen that light. Online. Forums. Weird news reports.” He glanced at her. “We find out what the blueprint is for. And we decide if we’re going to follow it, or find a way to erase it.”
The truck sped down the empty street, heading for the dark outline of the hills. Tracy leaned her head against the cool glass, feeling every expansion, every subtle shift within her. She was a question mark speeding through the sleeping town. And dawn was still an hour away.