Chapter 1: The New Normal
The first thing Jimmy registered was the smell of damp plaster and the sour tang of his own sweat. The second was the weight, a deep, warm pressure across his chest that made breathing a conscious effort. He opened his eyes. The ceiling, with its familiar water stain shaped like a lopsided skull, was now close enough to lick.
He shifted, and the entire world groaned. A sharp, metallic twang sang from beneath him, followed by the slow tear of fabric. The bedframe.
Lena murmured in her sleep against his neck, her breath a hot puff. Her arm was draped over him, but it felt less like an arm and more like a fallen pillar, smooth and heavy. He turned his head, the muscles in his neck cracking like knuckles.
Her face was pressed into his shoulder, peaceful. Even in the grey morning light seeping through the rain-streaked window, she was staggeringly beautiful. More so than yesterday. Her features were sharper, her lips fuller, her auburn hair a wild river across his bicep and the ruined sheets. Then his gaze traveled downward, following the breathtaking, terrifying slope of her.
The blanket had slipped. Her breasts, always generous, were now impossible. They spilled against his ribcage, each one a vast, soft weight that had to be over a hundred pounds, their curves swallowing the space between them. He could feel their heat through his thin tee. The mattress beneath them had formed two deep, permanent valleys to cradle them.
A cold, sharp thrill shot through his gut, followed immediately by a thick, pooling dread.
“Lena,” he whispered, his voice a low rumble that felt unfamiliar in his own throat.
She stirred, her eyelids fluttering. Her warm brown eyes focused on him, soft with sleep, then widened. Her breath hitched. “Jimmy… your face.”
“My face?” He raised a hand—a massive, thick-fingered paw he barely recognized—and touched his jaw. It was like tracing a cliff face. “Lena, look at you. Look at us.”
He began to sit up. The process was a disaster of sound and motion. His shoulders, wide as a doorframe, brushed the nightstands on either side of the bed, sending a glass of water and a paperback crashing to the floor. The headboard gave a final, mournful creak and snapped away from the wall with a puff of ancient plaster.
When he was upright, sitting on the edge of the collapsed bed, he saw the full truth. The room, their shabby little apartment bedroom, was now a child’s playset. The ceiling fan dangled perilously close to his head. The dresser mirror showed only from his collarbones up, reflecting a stranger with a brutally sharp jawline and intense, haunted green eyes.
And his body… it was a monument of sinew and power. His construction-worker muscles, once defined, were now cartons of stone under his skin. His thighs were thicker than the bedroom pillows.
Lena pushed herself up beside him, the movement sluggish under her new weight. The mattress groaned in protest. She looked down at herself, her hands coming up to hover over the incredible swell of her breasts, then skirting over the dramatic curve of her waist to the expansive swell of her hips. The simple cotton panties she wore were strained, the fabric digging deep into her skin. A silent tear traced a path down her cheek.
“What did it do to us?” she breathed.
“The virus,” Jimmy said, the word tasting like ash. The news had called it a global flu, a weird side effect of some new pangolin-bat hybrid thing. Shrinking in men, they’d said. A temporary reduction in stature and… other things. A biological quirk. They’d joked about it. He’d woken up feeling feverish, achy, and gone back to bed holding Lena, who was burning up too.
This wasn’t shrinking.
From the street below, a sharp scream pierced the drumming rain, then another. Not women’s screams. Men’s. High-pitched, panicked.
Jimmy lurched to his feet. The motion was too swift, too powerful. His head smacked the ceiling fan with a dull clang, sending it wobbling on its mount. He cursed, ducking, and took two strides to the window. His size-twelve feet—now what, size twenties?—were bare, but he could feel every splinter in the warped floorboards.
He peered down through the grimy glass. Four stories below, the rainy street was a scene of surreal horror. A man in a business suit, now no taller than a fire hydrant, was scrambling away from a puddle, his shouts tiny and frantic. A garbage truck was pulled over, its driver-side door open. The driver, now miniature, was standing on the seat, waving his arms at a looming woman in a nurse’s scrubs who was trying to calmly speak to him, her voice a booming echo.
Every single man down there was tiny. Diminutive. Shrunken.
Jimmy looked at his own reflection in the window—a giant ghost superimposed over the crumbling world. A primal, throbbing surge of power resonated through him, centering in his groin with an almost painful urgency. He looked down. The sweatpants he’d slept in were stretched to their absolute limit, the fabric taut against a formidable, alien bulk.
He was the only one. The only man who hadn’t shrunk.
He’d grown.
“Jimmy?” Lena’s voice trembled. She had managed to stand, her head nearly brushing the ceiling, her phenomenal body swaying as she found her new center of gravity. She wrapped her arms around herself, a gesture that was now more protective than shy. “What’s happening out there?”
He turned from the window. The sight of her in their ruined room, magnificent and terrified, cut through the shock and the ugly pulse of power. This was Lena. His Lena. The woman who loved bad puns and burned toast and the tiny scar above his eyebrow.
“It’s the virus,” he said, his voice softening to that new, gravelly rumble. “They said it made men smaller. It… didn’t work on me. It did the opposite.”
“And me?” she asked, her brown eyes searching his. “I’m not smaller.”
“No,” he said, taking a careful step toward her. The floorboard screamed. “You’re… more. A lot more.”
A shaky smile touched her lips. “You always said you wanted a girl with curves.”
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I was an idiot. I didn’t know what I was asking for.” He reached for her, his enormous hand engulfing her shoulder. Her skin was so soft. “Are you okay? Does anything hurt?”
“Everything feels… heavy. And strange. Like I’m wearing a weighted suit that’s part of me.” She leaned into his touch, then her eyes drifted down his body, and the smile vanished. A different heat rose in her cheeks. “Jimmy. You’re… you’re huge. Everywhere.”
He followed her gaze, a flush of his own warming his neck. “I know. I can feel it. It’s… a lot.”
The shouts from the street grew louder, peppered with the new, booming voices of women—confused, concerned, sometimes laced with a terrifying note of panic or a strange, unhinged laughter. A car alarm wailed.
A car alarm wailed. It was a sharp, electronic shriek that seemed to pull the world into a sharper, more dangerous focus.
“We need to see the news,” Lena said, her voice tightening with a practical fear that Jimmy recognized. It was the voice she used when a kid scraped a knee on the playground. Assess, stabilize, act. She moved toward the living room, her steps careful and oddly graceful given her new proportions. Each footfall made the floorboards moan.
Jimmy followed, ducking instinctively through the bedroom doorway. The top of the frame grazed his hair. In the narrow hall, he was acutely aware of the walls pressing in, of the way his shoulders filled the space. He was a boulder in a gutter.
The living room was worse. Their second-hand sofa looked like dollhouse furniture. The TV, a fifty-five inch screen that had once dominated the wall, now sat at the level of his waist. Lena was already kneeling—a breathtaking, arduous process that made her exhale sharply—and fumbling with the remote on the low coffee table. Her kneeling position did things to her body, exaggerated the insane hourglass, made the heavy, full curves of her backside strain against her panties.
Jimmy looked away, a hot shame mixing with the relentless thrum of possession in his blood. This was Lena. He couldn’t think like that.
The screen flickered to life. A local news anchor, a woman named Cheryl who usually had a poised, calm demeanor, was visibly distraught. Her makeup was smudged. Behind her, the newsroom was in chaos, people moving quickly, their voices a jumble of panic in the background.
“—confirmed. We are confirming reports now of a near-universal physiological event affecting biologically male individuals worldwide,” Cheryl said, her voice cracking. “The so-called ‘Grey Flu’ appears to have triggered a rapid… a rapid diminution in stature and secondary sexual characteristics. Estimates suggest a reduction to between twelve and eighteen inches in height for adult males. We have no information on permanence or reversal. We are urging calm. Please, do not venture outside if you can avoid it. Emergency services are overwhelmed.”
The footage cut to shaky cell phone video from what looked like an office. A tiny man in a torn suit was standing on a desk, shouting up at a woman in a pencil skirt who was weeping, her hands over her mouth. The scale was all wrong. It was like watching a toddler throwing a tantrum, but the toddler had a receding hairline and a Rolex.
“Jesus,” Jimmy breathed.
“Jesus,” Jimmy breathed.
The footage cut to a new clip, a supermarket. A woman, easily six feet tall, was carefully placing a shrunken, crying man into the child seat of a shopping cart. His little suit pants were soaked. He was pounding his fists against the plastic, his screams inaudible over the newscaster’s voice. Jimmy’s gut twisted.
Lena made a small, wounded sound. “Those poor people.” She tried to push herself up from the coffee table, her arms trembling slightly with the new, unfamiliar effort of lifting her upper body’s weight. She stumbled, her balance off. Jimmy’s hand shot out, instinctively catching her around the waist. His fingers nearly met. She felt so small in his grasp, yet so impossibly, lavishly vast.
She leaned into him, her head resting against his pectoral. The warmth of her, the sheer reality of her new curves molding against him, sent a jolt straight to his already-throbbing groin. It was a demand, a deep, animal pulsing that drowned out the panic on the TV.
“It didn’t make us sick,” Lena whispered, her voice vibrating through his chest. “It changed us. Fundamentally. What are we now?”
“We’re us,” Jimmy said, but the words felt hollow. He was staring at the side of her face, at the elegant line of her jaw, then down to where the incredible swell of her breast pushed against his ribs. The thin fabric of her tank top was stretched to a translucent tightness. He could see the dark outline of her areola, the heavy, pendulous weight of her. A possessive heat flared in him, fierce and sudden.
His hand, still on her waist, slid upward, almost of its own volition. His palm, rough and enormous, covered the entire side of her ribcage. He felt her breath catch.
“Jimmy?” Her tone was a question, a whisper of uncertainty.
He didn’t answer with words. The noise from the street, the frantic news anchor, the crumbling world—it all faded into a static hum. There was only the heat in his blood and the monumental geography of her body. His hand moved again, smoothing over the dramatic curve of her waist, up the steep, soft slope. His fingers brushed the underwire of her bra, a flimsy barrier against the tidal mass of her flesh.
He cupped her.
His whole hand disappeared into the staggering softness. It was heavy, warm, a weight that filled his palm with a sense of absolute, primal rightness. He heard her sharp intake of breath, felt her nipple harden instantly against the center of his palm through the fabric. A low groan escaped him, rumbling up from some deep, uncharted place in his chest.
“God, Lena,” he grunted, his voice thick.
He groped her, his fingers kneading the incredibly dense, yielding flesh. He wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t a caress; it was a claiming. An exploration of a new frontier of her. He squeezed, testing the weight, and a shudder ran through her entire frame. Her knees buckled. He held her up easily, his other arm snaking around her back, pulling her flush against him. The sheer differential in their power was intoxicating. He could manhandle her now, and the raw truth of that burned through every nerve.
“Jimmy, stop,” she gasped, but her body arched into his touch, pushing more of that unbelievable softness into his hand. Her head fell back, exposing the long column of her throat. “We can’t… the world is…”
“The world is gone,” he murmured into her neck, his lips brushing her skin. He switched hands, his other palm claiming her other breast, weighing it, shaping it. The fabric of her top strained. “There’s just this. Just you. Like this.” He leaned down, capturing her mouth with his. It wasn’t their usual kiss. It was hungry, devouring, fueled by a dizzying cocktail of terror and unleashed power.
She kissed him back, her hands coming up to clutch at his shoulders, her fingers digging into rock-hard deltoids. A tiny, desperate sound escaped her throat. He walked her backward, his movements clumsy with urgency, until her back met the wall. The impact made a picture frame rattle and fall. He didn’t care. He pressed into her, his enormous body caging her, his erection—a terrifying, rigid log trapped in his sweatpants—pressing against the soft swell of her lower belly.
He broke the kiss, breathing harshly, looking down at what he was doing. His hands were on her, covering her, possessive and rough. Her top had ridden up. With a grunt, he hooked a thick finger under the strap of her tank top and her bra and pulled. The elastic, stretched beyond all limits, gave way with a quiet snap. The fabric slid down, and her breast spilled free into his waiting hand.
The sight stole the air from his lungs.
It was perfection on a colossal scale. Dusky pink areola, wide as a saucer. Heavy, full flesh that filled his hand and overflowed. He lowered his head, taking the peak into his mouth. She cried out, her hands fisting in his hair. He suckled, greedy, lost in the taste and the weight and the sheer outrageous reality of it. He was a giant, claiming his giantess. The absurdity, the horror of the morning, all of it combusted into this single, fiery point of contact.
Lena was panting, her hips making small, involuntary circles against his thigh. “Jimmy… we shouldn’t… it’s not the time…”
“It’s the only time,” he growled against her skin, switching to her other breast, his hand still working the first. He was a man possessed, driven by a new engine in his blood. “Look at you. Look at what you are now. Mine.”
The word hung in the steamy air. Mine. It echoed the feral pulse between his legs. It was a truth and a threat.
It was a truth and a threat.
The word hung between them in the damp air. Lena’s eyes, wide and dark, searched his. He saw the fear there, sharp and immediate, but beneath it, a current of something else. A recognition. An answer to the raw, possessive hunger radiating from him. Her lips were parted, her breath coming in quick puffs against his chest.
From the street, another wave of sirens crested, a dissonant choir of panic. It was the world tearing itself apart. In here, the only sound was their breathing and the relentless, heavy drum of rain on glass.
Lena’s gaze drifted down his torso, past the wreckage of her tank top, to the formidable bulge straining the worn grey cotton of his sweatpants. It was a obscene tent, a blatant declaration of the change. It looked painful. It looked impossible.
“Jimmy,” she whispered, her voice husky. “You’re… that’s not…”
“I know.” His own voice was a gravelly strain. He shifted his hips slightly, a helpless gesture. The pressure was immense, a throbbing, demanding presence that short-circuited every other thought. The feel of her in his hands, the scent of her skin, the visual carnage of the world outside—it all funneled into a single, agonizing point of tension. “It’s like a heartbeat. But lower. And it won’t stop.”
He wanted to crush her to him. He wanted to tear what was left of their clothes off and find out, brutally, how they even fit together now. The impulse was so strong his muscles trembled with the effort of holding still.
Lena swallowed. Her hands, which had been clutching his shoulders, relaxed. One trailed down the granite plane of his chest, over the rigid ridges of his abdomen. He flinched at her touch, the sensation electric. Her fingers hesitated at the waistband of his sweats, then, with a resolve that seemed to solidify in the quiet, she hooked her thumbs into it.
“You can’t go out there like this,” she said, not looking at his face. Her focus was entirely on the task. Her tone was practical, almost clinical, but it trembled at the edges. “You’re a walking… monument. You’d cause a riot. Or a war.”
She pushed the fabric down.
The air in the room, already thick, seemed to congeal.
Jimmy looked down, a part of him disbelieving even now. It was his, but it wasn’t. It was a weapon, a pillar of flushed, veined flesh that curved heavily up against his stomach. It was grotesque. It was magnificent. A low, involuntary sound escaped him, part awe, part distress.
Lena made a small, choked noise. Her hand, dwarfed, floated toward it, then stopped. “Oh, my god.”
“I told you,” he grunted.
“You didn’t tell me. You can’t tell this.” Her eyes were wide with a kind of terrified fascination. She reached out, her fingertips brushing the rampant head. He jerked, a full-body spasm that made the wall behind her shudder. The skin was burning hot, like a fever had localized right there.
Her touch became more sure. Her palm, soft and cool, slid underneath, trying to heft the weight. She couldn’t. Her fingers couldn’t close around the girth. It was like watching someone try to grasp a fire hydrant. The sheer scale of it, the impossible reality, broke the last of her hesitation. This was a problem. Her Jimmy had a problem.
“You can’t function like this,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. She wrapped both hands around the shaft, her fingers lacing together. It was a two-handed job. A serious, two-handed job. She began to move, a slow, tentative stroke.
The sensation was so intense it blinded him. White stars exploded behind his eyelids. His knees actually buckled, and he threw a hand out against the wall to steady himself, plaster dust sifting down onto her auburn hair. It wasn’t just the physical feeling, though that was overwhelming—a tight, slick, fistful of fire. It was the sight. Lena, his beautiful, gentle Lena, on her knees before this monstrous part of him, her face a mask of intense, worried concentration. The contrast was atomic.
“Don’t stop,” he begged, the words torn from him.
She didn’t. Her initial clinical focus began to blur, replaced by a dawning, awestruck curiosity. She adjusted her grip, finding a rhythm. Up.Down. The glide was rough at first, then smoother as her own excitement betrayed her, moisture gathering at the slit, making her movements slicker. Her breaths started to match the rhythm of her hands, coming faster.
She leaned in, her hair trailing over his thighs. Her eyes, looking up at him from under her lashes, were no longer just scared. They were dark, hungry. The teacher was gone. Someone else was here.
“You’re so big,” she breathed, not a complaint, but a revelation. A claim. “They all shrank. But you… you exploded.” She emphasized the word with a tighter stroke, twisting her wrists on the upswing.
Jimmy groaned, his head thumping back against the wall. The pleasure was a tidal wave, building from that central, unbearable point, threatening to wash away his sanity. He could feel every ridge of her fingers, every shift of her palms. He looked down at her, at the breathtaking expanse of her bare back, the incredible swell of her hips still sheathed in those pitifully small panties. Her breasts, free and heavy, swayed with the motion of her arms.
“Lena,” he gasped. “Baby, I’m not gonna last. It’s too much.”
“You have to,” she said, her voice gaining a fierce, possessive edge he’d never heard before. “You can’t go anywhere until you cum. You can’t face that mess out there like a loaded cannon. So cum. For me. Let me see it.”
Her words were a detonation. The careful rhythm shattered. He snarled, a raw, animal sound, and his hands flew to her hair, not guiding, not forcing, but anchoring himself as the world narrowed to a single, searing point of release. It wasn’t a climax. It was an eruption.
It hit the wall above her head with a sound like wet paint slapped on brick. Thick, ropy jets that splattered across the faded floral wallpaper and dripped down. Then her chest. The next pulse painted warm stripes across the stunning, pale slopes of her breasts, gleaming against her skin. Another, and another. It seemed to go on forever, a seismic event wracking his enormous frame.
When it finally, mercifully ended, he was slumped against the wall, panting like he’d run for miles, sweat sheening his skin. The monstrous pressure was gone, replaced by a deep, twitching sensitivity and a hollow, trembling exhaustion.
The room was silent save for their ragged breathing. The sirens seemed distant.
Lena was still on her knees, her hands fallen to her thighs. She looked down at herself, at the mess glazing her skin. She didn’t recoil. Slowly, she lifted a finger, swiped through the spend on her collarbone, and brought it to her mouth. Her eyes never left his as she tasted.
That single, silent act was more profound than anything that had just happened. It was an acceptance. A communion. A re-writing of their rules.
“Okay,” she said softly, pushing herself up. Her movements were more confident now. “Okay. Now we can think.”
Jimmy could only stare, utterly spent, utterly owned. He had never felt more powerful, or more completely at someone else’s mercy. He pulled his sweats up, the fabric now uncomfortably sticky. Lena walked, with a new, conscious sway in her hips, to the remnants of their bed and pulled the least-stained sheet free. She began to wipe her chest clean, the action domestic and surreal.
“We need clothes,” she said, thinking aloud. “My stuff is all… wrong. You’ll never fit in your jeans.”
“The hardware store,” Jimmy mumbled, his brain struggling to re-engage. “Down the block. They have big coveralls. For painters.”
“Good.” She nodded. “We need food. Water. And we need to understand what’s happening. Really happening.” She tossed the sheet aside and stood before him, naked from the waist up, magnificent and fierce. “They’re little, Jimmy. All the men. And you’re… you. And I’m… this. What does that mean?”
It meant the old world was over. The rules of strength, of protection, of desire—all of it was shredded. He was the only rock in a river that had suddenly changed its course. And Lena, his Lena, was no longer just the woman he loved. She was a prize on a scale the world had never seen. And every giantess out there, every suddenly-powerful woman, would soon realize the same thing.
There was only one of him.
The knocking at their apartment door was timid at first. Then more insistent.
Jimmy and Lena froze, staring at the flimsy lock.
“Jimmy? Lena? You in there? It’s Mrs. Garroway from 4B!” The voice on the other side was strained, teetering on hysteria. “Please! My Harold… he’s so small, and he’s stuck in the toilet! I can’t get him out and he’s crying!”
Lena’s eyes met Jimmy’s. The intimate, world-shattering bubble they’d been in popped. The real world, with its absurd and terrifying problems, was right outside, knocking.
Jimmy took a deep breath, the air still tasting of sex and panic. He looked at his hands, capable of crushing that door to splinters. He looked at Lena, waiting for his lead.
He was the only one who could stand tall.
“Coming, Mrs. Garroway,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in the ruined room.