"Fuuuuuuuuck!" 8 inch tall Merritt grunted, punching the desk leg beside him that was the size of a building column to him.
Fuck! His mind whirled with a kaleidoscope of his times with Etta.
"A fucking honeypot?!"
He grunted angrily, stepping away from the desk leg. A honeypot was an agent, man, woman, straight or gay who was used to ensnare an opposition man or woman, either to kill them on the spot, set them up for blackmail or keep tabs on and surveil them.
The two thugs who'd broken into his apartment had referred to Etta unmistakably, though without naming her, as a honeypot. Merritt sighed and stomped a few steps off from the desk leg and into the thick weave of the fringe edge of the blanket over his couch that hung down to the ground at the desk side. He replayed her orgasms. He replayed the casual way they had met in a club. Everything about it had seemed genuine. Sure she was like 100 out of 100 points beautiful, not just a 10 out of 10. But he was in serious demand, too. It wasn't like he was some short, fat, bald accountant who somehow believed that the completely out of his league honeypot was smitten with him.
He forced a deep, long exhale. "What the fuck?" he finally muttered.
The bigger thug on the other side of the room pushed the smaller thug toward the couch. "Everything, man. Everything." The smaller thug nodded and casually tugged at the blanket covering most of the couch.
With his ankles through the weave of the blanket, 8 inch tall Merritt was yanked off his feet so fast that his tiny ass had no chance to hit the carpet, nor his head. He went hurtling upward and over the arm of the couch like a rock suddenly thrown by a catapult. He flew what felt like 40 feet in the air and landed 60 feet away, bouncing on his extra round, tiny ass on the middle of the couch cushion farthest from here he'd been standing. He bounced again, this time on his abs and then steadied on all fours.
For a split second, he frantically extricated his ankles from the blanket's edge and tried to figure what to do. At first, all he could see around him was the plaid wool pattern of the blanket. He realized he only had a split second to move. If the smaller thug was going to go through "everything", he wasn't going to leave a blanket there. In fact, the little thug was idly sweeping the blanket out of the way. Miniaturized Merritt caught a glimpse of the all black backpack over the shoulder of the kneeling little thug through a tunnel of blanket folds. He threw caution to the wind and instead of diving between the seat cushions or trying for the gap between the cushion he was on and the edge of the couch, Merritt crawled as fast as he could toward the little thug's backpack. He got to the edge of the couch cushion and with both his tiny arms grabbed for a pouch that looked 3 feet wide and two feet deep on the outside edge of the bag. Just as he did, the thug stood up and with one casual gesture threw the blanket to the middle of the room.
Merritt, glanced down, it was like he was 35 feet in the air. He grabbed a seam with both hands and went head first, upside down into a rough nylon bounded enclosure that seemed 8 feet high, 3 feet across and two feet deep. It was a pocket for backwoodsman types to stick tools in while they hiked.
With great effort, tiny Merritt got himself right side up. His ballet dancer flexibility was quite helpful. But just the same he kept his head down below the top of the sleeve or pocket in which he found himself. The black nylon fabric looked opaque from the outside but tiny Merritt could push his face against the fabric and see through the tiny gaps in the weave.
As the little, though more than 150 times Merritt's mass, thug half turned, Merritt saw that he had pulled everything out of the couch. If he'd run off that way, the guy would have his tiny ass in his hands already. As Merritt watched the two of them go through his apartment, turning over everything, checking inside everything, he pondered what they would have done if they'd found him. Probably days of torture would have started at that moment. If he couldn't get free once he returned to full size in less than an hour, he'd be dead.
He'd have hated to admit it but watching them from inside a tool sleeve on the backpack of one of them, Merritt was actually kind of impressed at how well they turned his place upside down but put everything back exactly in its place.
On the other hand, he was repulsed by the way the two talked. Specifically the one carrying him on his back kept going back to the pictures that Merritt had on his desk, on one wall, on one shelf of the bookcase and on the refrigerator. "Mmm-mmm!" he kept saying and smacking his lips at the pictures of adult Merritt. This wasn't so bad. If a guy was gay he was gay. What got to Merritt was that the guy found the collage picture that include a cutout of a picture of 12 year old Merritt in ballet tights. For the remaining 5 minutes that they were in his apartment the smaller thug unknowingly carrying tiny Merritt kept letting out soft moans and disconnected phrases about how much he wished he could've sodomized 12 year old ballet dancer Merritt. "Mmmmmmm . . . . that little ass! . . . mmmmmmmm . . . rookie starfish . . . mmmmmmmm . . . mmmmmmmmm . . . shock in his eyes . . . . mmmmmmmmm . . . . not me! Can't be . . . ! . . . . Hahahahaha! . . . . yeah . . . can! . . . . Hahahaha! . . . No? . . . . Yessssssss! . . . mmmmmmm . . . tightest little . . . up the tightest little . . . mmmmmmm . . . everybody wanna . . . everybody wanna unh-unh-unh that! . . . mmmmmm"
Jesus, Merritt wondered, did they recruit all these corrupt bastards off some sex offender list?
At one point, through the nylon of the backpack sleeve, Merritt saw the bigger thug's phone light up though not ring. He immediately dialed a number.
"Yeah. His car still there? . . . uh huh . . . okay," he turned it off and informed the little thug that Merritt must still be at the dealership. They went through stuff in his kitchen in efficient, practiced fashion. After that the bigger one moved a chair under the smoke detector in the center of the apartment and the little thug placed what Merritt guessed were a bug and a camera in the smoke detector.
Then they left. They made their way quietly out of his apartment, down the hall and out and then walked to the lot of the Starbucks a block away. As they left, Merritt saw from a clock that he had 40 minutes left in his miniaturized condition. He'd considered jumping out in the apartment and as they were leaving but the big thug had been right behind the little one. He'd have seen him and through the nylon of the backpack Merritt could see that the guy kept a taser in his hand the whole time.
At the Starbucks lot they stopped beside a pickup truck. Merritt could see that the big thug was disappointed.
"There's not always a smoking gun," the little one unknowingly carrying tiny Merritt consoled him.
"I sort of wish he'd been there . . . for a fight, you know. They were so hyped about this guy being in great shape. You should see Boyscout run! Boy can he run! Be careful if you have to tussle."
"You'd have kicked his pretty ass."
"Damn right I would have. Get a few miles on the odometer and they act like any spindly young buck is gonna take ya." He pounded his fist on the hood of the truck. "Wish he'd been there!"
Merritt shook in the backpack pocket with the laughter of the little thug carrying him. "After ya tased him and he was just lying there and you gave him a lethal dose of smack between his toes, I'd whisper in his ear how I was gonna fuck him as he was dying. Hahahahahahah!"
The little one shook with laughter and Merritt gritted his teeth as hard as he could as the big one guffawed.
"Gotta love your work, right Gary?"
"Got that right, Francis."
With that, Merritt could still only see the pickup truck. He got a good look at its DC license plate and committed it to memory. But he heard the opening of a car door and with a couple wild swings back and then forward he saw, looking upward, that the backpack was being dropped on the floor of the passenger seat in the front of some kind of expensive sedan. Merritt poked his head out of the sleeve for a split second as "Gary" was walking around to the driver's door and saw a Mercedes emblem and black leather seats. The second the driver's side door started to open he withdrew back into the sleeve.
"Gary" drove for 15 minutes. Merritt could just about have said exactly where they were, knowing the streets in the area and watching Gary's turns. He knew that Gary was coming up to an odd area with multiple intersections and that he'd have to keep his eyes on the road. At just the right moment, tiny Merritt ran, hunched over, out of the backpack sleeve and under the passenger's seat.
Once under the middle of it, he grabbed some metal framing at his now shoulder height and went down on one knee to hold himself in place. He listened intently but there were no signs that Gary was aware of anything.
Tiny, 8 inch tall Merritt, still naked except for a dance belt, carefully made his way to the back of the area under the passenger's seat a few minutes later. Everything he did was fueled by harnessed anger now. These sick fucks would've killed him and molested his corpse if they'd gotten the chance. He had to wait, had to be in position for when the Chronivac transformation ended and he would instantaneously go from being 8 inches tall to six foot one.
So, slowly, sometimes only a step or two in a minute's time he moved to the floor behind the passenger seat, to the floor behind the driver's seat, to climbing up an unused seat belt to the rear seat behind the driver. There sat Merritt, feet dangling over the edge like the tiniest little kid ever when suddenly he felt it happen.
He was instantly his full sized self.
As luck would have it, Gary was stopped at a traffic light in some half wooded suburban area with no one else around.
"Hey thailor!" Merritt lisped behind Gary's left ear and then standing up and swinging with all his might he smashed his fist into bewildered Gary's right temple.
Naked Merritt grabbed Gary's shoulders and yanked the dazed perv over to the passenger's side. He climbed over the seat top and into the driver's seat. When Gary showed some faint signs of consciousness, Merritt smashed him again in the other temple. Now Gary was definitely out. Merritt took off his shirt. It wasn't a good fit. The sleeves were too long but Merritt just rolled them up. In a bag on the passenger's seat, he found a pair of rain pants, the sort that you wore over your regular pants in heavy rain or going through wet brush. Merritt put those on. Not bad He could go commando in those. The guy's shoes were a size smaller than Merritt wore but there were pretty worn, maybe only a half size bad now. Merritt took them off Gary and put them on. Overall it wasn't bad. Merritt took Gary's ID and every scrap of paper from the glove box and from the backpack. He took Gary's phone and wrote down every phone number in it, putting asterisks next to the one's called a lot and noting the times of some of the calls.
He drove Gary's Mercedes to a sketchy neighborhood not far from a much worse one. He was now less than 5 miles from his apartment.
He wiped down the car interior just in case and dragged Gary out to the curb just in front of the car. Next, Merritt got a rag from the trunk, lit it with Gary's lighter and stuck the rag down the gas tank with the flap held open with a stick. He wiped the keys and put them in Gary's mouth. He was blocks away when he heard people behind him shouting about a fire.