Alan never saw himself as an important person. Yes, all life was sacred, but as long as there were other people in the world who were firefighters or policemen, it wouldn’t be a worse world without him than without all the other folks who helped others and saved lives.
...yet it were only eleven inches of ballistic glass that separated him from the aerated chemicals of an alien world, an invisible cesspool of toxic compounds that resembled no earthling law of science or matter. An atmosphere that was a complete enigma as to how any one creature could survive breathing it’s fumes, even if native to another planet.
An even bigger enigma as to how there was one creature that could.
Staring was Alan’s job every day, both the easiest and hardest job he would ever know, staring through the window as stiff as a board. It were a series spanning months that he was required to observe; once, in a point in time that felt so long ago, there was another human in that cell. A woman that, as he thought he himself looked, didn’t seem any more beautiful than she did ugly.
Ah, those days when the standing on guard was so easy. If too sick to know he was there or too embarrassed to make eye contact, she would spend most of the time laying about, back when the blanket of her cot could shroud her entirely. Most days she wouldn’t even leave bed outside of getting her daily meals, the very last thing that would inspire her to move. He hated the food at the office, and the food they served the subjects was likely no better, but its taste didn’t diminish her appetite. She would eat from her trays till she were cleaning it with her tongue, its sub-par flavors inviting the last spark of life that she would ever know as a human.
Week by week, the schedule stayed the same. She would lay about, eat breakfast, lay, eat lunch, lay, eat supper, sleep. Then that morning when one breakfast wasn’t enough to help her feel, she asked for more. Another tray came for breakfast. Two would come for lunch, two again for dinner. Thus came the schedule for another week till two was so little that she was sobbing in hunger. Even a third tray couldn’t cure her hunger pains, nor four, but it was by her fifth that she was full enough to sit still, belly so round and bloated that she lumbered back to bed with a slight waddle.
By another week, breakfast was twelve.
Food became her drive in life, her time between naps spent waiting in anticipation for the next banquet to be prepared for her. The change meant progress at last, and her dining sessions were accompanied by scientists in three layers of hazmat suits. They would take questions from her, preferably ‘yes or no’ ones for when her mouth was too occupied with chewing to give lengthy responses, but with the silence the transparent wall had abandoned Alan to, he could only notice and care for the change that took over her physical form.
Where was once a modest chest came a pair of definite points that touched the front of her jumpsuit, and from them came a swollen set of milk-filled orbs that billowed past the size of her head, even after the excess calories fattened up her cheeks and chin. Her stomach was burdened by so much natural lard that even in its most empty state was a capacious sphere of paunch that sprung liberally off her abdomen, its weight crumpling the cot and metal chairs that her cell provided her, but by that point her trim rear had evolved into a hovering landmass of adipose floating along her legs that even two seats wouldn’t contain, forming her figure’s absolute widest point.
Such she was forced to eat her meals without something to sit on, but witnessing the scientists enter her room gave reference for a definite change in height, nearing the size of a grown mean even when she was sitting on the floor. New jumpsuits would be brought in every week or so to contain her ever-ballooning figure, the scientists increasingly nervous with their turns in entering her cell, maybe fearing she’d develop the hunger and ability to eat them, and under his steely facade Alan was amongst them. If it came to happen where she’d grab one of them and swallow them whole, he figured he’d be the first running out the door, probably before the alarms were even going off.
Yet an alarm was never pulled. If growing to perhaps the largest and fattest person in human history was the price, having food seemed enough for her. The regular schedule was allowed to resume around her glutting, save for her to answer questions in written form, her face was so often stuffed. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, suit change, sleep. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, suit change, sleep...
Rip!
... and if anywhere there was another case such as hers, that this change in size was something medical science could relate to and cure, the last doubt that this wasn’t human course was a rip that, when she was venturing to sleep one night, opened a gap to observe the skin on her stomach, a non-human shade of black striped by green around her waist. The scientists tore the rip wider to observe the large splotch of the color that painted her stomach’s curvature, but if the change gave her any feeling, it was a numbing that curbed any interest.
Growing meant more surface area, and more surface area meant more land to plot, the virus, parasite or whatever had infected her noticed. It blanketed her torso and spread to her limbs, and the shift in color twisted about whatever joints or human anatomy they passed over, hands and feet turning to puny nubs adhered to the blobby girths of her arms and legs. Last came her head, hair dying itself a glossy green lined with black striped and bluish splotches, then her face morphed beyond whatever humanity she had left; her lips receded, her nostrils both sealed shut before her nose completely flattened into but a patch of empty skin, and her pupils disappeared and left her irises two solid discs of blue, outlined by black lashes resembling eyeliner.
That was the first eye contact she’d ever made with him.
In one night, he’d gone from the spectator to the second party in a mute conversation separated by the glass. She’d stare at him, and he’d stare back, concentrating and calculating the thoughts that one another’s eyes alluded to when she was hogging herself on mountains of cafeteria trays sitting at either side of her, or when scientists were taking her measurements and drawing samples of blood.
Scientists that he was steadily growing to hate.
The bastards...in the same room as everything he wanted so much of at the moment, but didn’t even realize that they had. Getting to feel around her huge, no doubt relentlessly soft stomach with no errant of affection. Getting to feed her and make her bigger like it was only their jobs. She knew it, too. He could be wearing a bag over his mask, and the little twitches his body would emit could tell anybody with an eye for detail that he wanted to be with her so much.
That blank stare became a hammy expression of hunger, grunting out in pleasure that filled his ears with the noise when the wall left him deaf. She’d scratch herself more than too many times for it to be natural itching; she was feeling her own dimensions, hands sloping around the rolls and curves to her obtuse size with a coy grin aimed right at him. Walking anywhere in her dome was a jiggly saunter that let him see something else when he was used to seeing whatever there was when she was seated...and he had to see it all.
Not seeing her for more than a second would mean he would be fired, maybe arrested, but if he was too weak to resist and he typed those nine digits in that would release her, they wouldn’t have enough time. If her ability to swagger about with no visible pain could indicate her strength, she could overpower any human being with a gun. Maybe even sustain a bullet blast with all that blubber. If it was anything between her taking him up in glee or her crushing him beneath her behind in some act of dominance, he’d fantasized about it late at night, and hate himself all the more for being a good little soldier and staying at his post whenever going home.
She could see his life out of work firsthand, and her measures came all the more desperate. When her ass widened to such a size that it surpassed the bed, she put the pillow at its end and, pointing so that he would picture it as his own head, squeezed it in between the seismic intensity that left only a few metal pipes of the frame. Then it became so big that she could just approach the door backwards for no reason than just to press it against the entire glass wall which, when it was your entire line of sight, made it all that was left to be seen.
And what was it today? What was that wild, crazy antic she had in mind to top the last in seducing him into opening the door?
Nothing. Twelve feet tall, even wider, all she had on her mind was standing against the door, her titanic gut smooshed against the glass. She had an almost thankful smile creased along her blobby white cheeks, like she knew she’d already won and was grateful for him being such a good sport.
...is she right?
Choice 1: Alan gives into temptation. He frees her!
Choice 2: Alan remains strong. She has to resort to more underhanded tactics...
Choice 3: Alan opens the door, but shift over to a village near the laboratory, the first to feel the effects of the released gases...