Carrie kept walking, following Todd's directions through the haze.
Suddenly two kids ran out onto a front lawn. A 7-year-old boy was being chased by a 5-year-old little girl. The two stumbled a bit as if they were half asleep or a bit tipsy. The boy held up a doll just out of the girl's reach. Neither seemed to notice Carrie standing in the street watching them.
"Give her back, Billy. Give my Dolly back."
Billy chuckled. "You can have her if you can grab her."
The little girl jumped and reached for the doll, but Billy pulled the doll away before she could catch it.
"Ha ha! Susie is a baby. Susie is a baby."
"Am not," Susie cried. "You're just a stupid meanie."
"Baby! Baby!" Billy teased waving around her doll. "Susie is a giant baby."
"Stupid!" Susie retorted. "You're nothing but a big dummy. You got a brain like a dinosawr, a little walnut brain. Stupid."
"Susie's a big baby! Susie's a big baby!"
"Dumb, stupid, dino brain, walnut head!"
The air around the kids crackled faintly, but they took no notice of it being so caught up in their taunting and teasing.
A sudden flash of light, like an arc of electricity, and both kids began to change at once.
Susie started to grow. In seconds she was taller than Billy, but she did not look any older. In fact she appeared to be getting younger as she grew. Her little dress tore away from her body as she outgrew it. Soon she was a toddler standing almost 6 feet tall wearing only a rapidly swelling pair of white underwear. The growing continued as she conversely became even younger. Her hair thinned out on her head as her face rounded out and her hands and feet became plump and soft baby appendages. With a loud thump that shook the ground under Carrie's feet, the 10-foot-tall baby girl sat down on her new diaper. She looked around, confused as to what had happened to her.
As Susie had grown, Billy had undergone a more subtle transformation. The top and rear of his head had begun to shrink inwards. In seconds he was left with a somewhat normal if a bit stretched looking face and a head behind it that was less than half its normal size. The brain inside of it must have been tiny, about the size of a large nut maybe.
"Duh," Billy said. Drool dripped out of his mouth. "Wuh happen' to mah head?" he slurred, his words dripping out languidly.
His giant baby sister whimpered in front of him as she looked down at her now relatively doll-sized brother and his shrunken skull. Her actual doll slipped out of his fingers.
Billy looked up at her with dull, unfocused eyes. After a long pause as he struggled to wrangle enough thoughts together to examine her, a hazy look of recognition appeared on his face. "Soo-see?"
Susie whimpered again, her eyes growing shinny with tears.
"I feel awl slow. Fuzzy," he muttered and rubbed his shrunken little head. "Wuh happen' to mah head?"
Suddenly, Billy looked up at her more closely and let out a loud guffaw. Then, grinning, he pointed at her and said, "Soo-see, you uh big bay-bee! Soo-see’s uh big bay-bee!"
Her face scrunched up, and Susie began to wail and cry with earsplitting volume. "Momma!" she called. "Momma! I sowry. Hewlp Billy! I sowry."
No one came to help, though. Momma, it appeared, had her own problems to deal with somewhere else.
Having watched all this happen, a stunned Carrie and Todd both just turned to look at each other and said, "Let's go," simultaneously. Then, they left.