“Come in Sparky, I’m in position. You and Paddy all set?” I whispered into my radio mike.
“Roger that,” his voice crackled in my earpiece.
“Crates, Boomer…?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
I moved forward in a crouch, rifle held in front of me. Our objective was only a dozen yards ahead of us, no sign of resistance.
I’d gone only a few steps when suddenly I froze. Someone had moved behind a fat pine tree. It had to be an enemy soldier - but had he seen me?
I got my answer when he opened fire.
Shooting back at him without looking, I dove headlong into the bushes.
Then all hell broke loose and I was caught in crossfire from three different directions, pinned down. Damn, we’d really walked into it this time. The shots were coming uncomfortably close so I hugged the ground, not daring to raise my head for a look-see lest it be shot off.
Froggy and Kelvinator charged in from their backup positions, firing from the hip to scatter the men in front of me, but I saw one of them go down, riddled with fire.
I crawled on my stomach several yards through the dense foliage and circled behind the first man I’d seen. Crouching, I took careful aim, shouting at him to get his attention.
He spun around with a look of stunned disbelief on his face as I drilled a shot into his chest.
Now that the element of surprise had been lost, I dashed forward, hoping that the rest of my squad was doing the same from the other direction.
Pausing behind a thick tree stump, I caught a brief glimpse of Boomer pegging shots into the trees, but couldn’t see what he was firing at. Over to my right, Sparky ran from cover to outflank an enemy bunker that Paddy was suppressing with a hail of fire, but he took one in the leg and went tumbling.
One by one my men were taken out. We were not going to make it.
I knew it was hopeless, but I didn’t care any more. Throwing caution to the wind I made a final mad dash towards our objective, firing wildly. I didn’t see the man hiding the tall grass in front of me until it was too late.
He opened fire with his semi-auto rifle, hitting me in the face. Right between the eyes.
Everything went... green.
“Damn,” I muttered, thoroughly annoyed at myself for getting killed like this.
The guy who’d shot me laughed.
“Canuck, you’re gettin’ old! Your reflexes are going.”
“Oh shut up,” I wittily riposted, wiping the green goo from my goggles and face mask with a cloth so I could see to make my way back to the neutral area.
We were, of course, playing paintball...
Back at the base camp, I took off my mask and put my rifle down on a picnic table.
My team, ‘The People’s Front of Judea’, was here practising for the annual grudge match against our archrivals, ‘The Judean People’s Front’. Out with us on this fine May morning were several other teams, The Splat Kings, Merrill’s Marauders, and The Paintmeisters.
It had been a relaxing game so far. Not a cloud in the sky and it was lovely and warm, a scorching +14C (that’s about +57F to you metrically-challenged Americans... hey, after several continuous winter weeks of -31F you’d think it was scorching hot too.)
When the current game ended and the last of the paint-covered guys returned, we broke for lunch.
“Hey Froggy, throw me a can of Coke,” I said, pointing to the cooler.
“What, your legs they are broken?” he replied indignantly.
“That’s right, I forgot. You Frenchies have ‘special rights’ in this country. God forbid you should stoop to serving an Anglophone. Pardon moi.”
“Stupid WASP.”
“Gallic pervert.”
Of course it was only right that he and I should carry on like this, we being of French and English ancestry respectively. Our people had been cheerfully antagonising each other for centuries now, and who were we to disrupt the natural order of things? However, we really were close friends and had been since high school, but most people thought that we hated each other.
At some point during the gormandising of hotdogs and boisterous exchanges of irreverencies, the women arrived.
Nobody actually saw them drive up, they just seemed to appear out of thin air. There were ten of them, and they looked like they should have been at a photo shoot instead of shooting paintballs. The ladies were wearing traditional dark green tiger stripe camo, but carried pink rifles, masks and ammo belts.
Women can accessorise anything it seems
“Hi, my name is Shannon. Is it all right if we join you,” a tall brunette asked tentatively, as if there was some chance that they might be rejected.
The guys just gaped at them, unused as we were to large groups of attractive women joining us in this particular sport. I stood up, hastily removing my bush hat as I waved them over.
“Sure, come have a seat,” I said.
They sauntered over to the barbecue pit and proceeded to enchant us with an assortment of smiles and coy expressions.
Shannon stepped forward, put one foot up on the bench of the central picnic table and leaned on her raised knee.
“So, who’s the high commander here,” she asked casually, looking around at our stubbly faces. (We never shave on paintball days, since a little growth of beard makes us feel more rugged and masculine.)
The guys elected me spokesman by virtue of my height. At six feet three inches I was the only guy taller than her, which they apparently considered an important advantage. They shoved me forward before I could protest.
We sat down facing each other across the table, with our respective genders standing behind us.
“Care to play a little ‘guys against girls’,” she asked, reducing my heart to a blob of maple syrup as her soft brown eyes locked me up and threw away the key.
“But there’s forty of us,” I stammered, “And only ten of you.”
“Oh, I know the odds are in our favour, but none of us wants to sit out,” she replied, smirking. “You’re not scared, are you?”
Our manly pride thus besmirched, I accepted her challenge on behalf of all the guys.
“And what stakes do you wish to play for,” she went on.
“Oh, getting serious are we? Let me just confer with the lads,” I said, gathering them in a huddle. Sparky kept peeking up now and then to keep an eye on the women.
I returned to the table and sat down again.
“If we win, you ladies must host our Stanley Cup Finals Party next weekend,” I informed her gravely. The guys solemnly removed their hats at the mention of Lord Stanley’s chalice.
“That’s it?”
“Ye’ll have tae do the cookin’ and cleanin’ too,” our transplanted Nova Scotian Paddy MacFadden added.
Their leader looked to the other women on her team and they all nodded. She turned and accepted.
“And what can we offer you in the unlikely event that you win,” I asked.
Putting both hands on the table and slowly standing up, she leaned forward, placing her lovely face a few inches from mine.
“We will take absolute control of your world,” she said menacingly, a wolfish grin curling her lips.
“Ah! So you want to marry us, then.”
She blinked a couple of times, her grin fading somewhat.
“Never mind, we can work out all the details later,” I continued. “Although I don’t think you’ll need to be any more specific, since you’re not going to win.”
She just smiled again and winked at the other women.
We shook hands to seal the agreement and began to sort out the rules for this match.
“Double elimination. You get hit the first time and you’re out of it for ten minutes. Second time hit you’re gone for good,” I said. She agreed to that.
“Various flag stations, say ten per side,” she suggested. “Play goes on until one side is eliminated or all the flags on one side go down.”
“Jolly good.”
And with that the referees led each team to their starting areas.
* * *
We trudged through the trees following Kirk, one of the two referees.
We’d be playing on two adjoining fields, The Jungle and The Village. Kirk handed us our ten flags to hang in whichever flag stations we chose. Once we’d done that, we waited behind the line for the game to start.
I examined one of the business cards that the women had quickly distributed to all of us before we headed out. It read “Femmes Fatales”, their team name I supposed. It was certainly appropriate enough. The card also had an interesting silver holographic image about the size of a quarter. Strange that I’d never heard of their team, though. Shrugging, I tucked the card back into my pocket.
Kirk’s walkie-talkie crackled and Ted, the other referee with the women, informed us that they were ready.
“Lock and load,” I shouted theatrically, only slightly self-conscious. Forty cocking levers clacked loudly.
Then Kirk blew his whistle, Ted’s answered and, whooping loudly, we charged into the fray...
*************
We’d decided that the four teams on the guys’ side would work independently of each other. Two of the teams would advance straight ahead and the other two would run quickly up either side of the field following the boundary ribbons, to outflank the ladies defending their flag stations. Classic ‘Horns of the Bull’ tactics employed by Zulus in the early nineteenth century.
Our own flag stations were not well defended, the idea being that if all of us were on the offensive, we’d easily brush the ladies’ raiding parties aside by sheer weight of numbers. Only a couple of guys were left at one station, the rest of us were in the attacking groups.
My team was in the middle beside Merrill’s Marauders, advancing steadily through the dense undergrowth of “The Jungle”. I was on point, with Paddy backing me up. I moved forward quickly through grass that came up to my knees, darting from tree to tree. My breathing sounded unnaturally loud inside my mask.
We’d got about halfway across the forest when a shot rang out on our left, echoing flatly through the trees. We all ducked instinctively.
It was quite eerie, hearing the single shot grow into a cacophony of bangs and stuttering bursts as the guys in Merrill’s Marauders engaged the women they’d run into. The firing gradually petered out. Then, silence.
The skirmish ended almost as quickly as it had started.
As none of the other teams on our side used radios, we had no way of knowing what had happened. We could assume that the Marauders had wiped out the group of girls, but you know what they say happens when you assume: it makes an ass out of both of us, or something like that.
“Crates and Boomer, go check it out,” I ordered. “We’ll keep moving, so catch up with us.”
They quickly disappeared into the trees.
We continued on, reaching the end of the jungle without making contact with any women. We looked out over the expanse of the village, a collection of crude wooden buildings and barricades. No cover between the buildings, the ground was open, sandy. The fighting here would come in the form of grim house to house contests. Real close range stuff.
At the far end of the village was a single high wall similar to an army fort in the old west, with a covered firing platform running the length of it. Anyone up there had a commanding view of the entire village.
I exhaled slowly, scanning for signs of life. The women were bound to have occupied some of the buildings. We’d lose a few guys here, I thought.
Anyway, we had no choice but to go through it, if only to keep the ladies occupied while our two flanking teams did their thing.
“Okay, let’s go,” I whispered into the mike. We moved forward, swarming into the first couple of houses, peeking nervously around corners, each time expecting to get a face full of paint.
Nothing. Where the hell were they?
Before I could order another short advance, Boomer’s voice came over the radio.
“Canuck, we can’t find any trace of the Marauders. They’re gone, man. It’s weird, like they were never even here.”
This unsettled some of the guys. The Marauders were a damn good team.
“Where are you now?”
“On the left side of the village.” I saw him wave his rifle. “They should have been up here by now.”
So the ladies were better than we gave them credit for.
“Come on, let’s keep moving,” I said irritably.
This wasn’t going to be so easy after all...
************
I moved out of one house and went beetling towards another twenty yards away.
Suddenly, someone opened fire from atop the high wall; it was Shannon. Her shots kicked up sand all around me.
Startled, I skidded to a halt, pirouetted very gracefully and loped back into the house.
“What the hell are you laughing at,” I panted as Paddy returned fire through an open window.
“Och, ‘tis nuthin’,” he replied. But he continued to laugh, drawing some vague comparison between me and a drunken ballet dancer, the cheeky sod.
“She’s on the wall,” I told everyone, although they could probably see her by now.
Peeking out another open window I saw a flash of long blond hair as another of the girls, Carol, dashed into a nearby shack. She was trying to get behind us.
I grabbed Paddy and propelled him out the back door.
“Over to the right, there. Go get her.”
I stuck the barrel of my .68 Special out the window and popped off a couple of shots to pin her down inside the shack.
Paddy inched his way along the wall of the house, holding his Automag ready. Just as he was about to jump around the corner and paint her up, a shot was fired from the upper level of a house on our left where Tamara, a fiery redhead, had been hiding, waiting for a target. Paddy turned, caught in the open against the wall like a duck in a shooting gallery. I stuck my head out the window to see if I could distract her, but before I could bring my rifle to bear, she shot Paddy square in the chest, the paintball exploding into a large pink splat mark. She pumped her fist in the air to celebrate.
Then the most absurd thing happened.
Paddy vanished into thin air, right before my eyes.
“Paddy, where’d you go,” I shouted into the mike.
His voice was faint, as if he was very far away.
“Wot in hell’s name’s goin’ on,” he demanded. “Where am I?”
I looked over again at where he’d been standing and saw something small and green in the sand. It looked like one of those G.I. Joe action figures. Only it was moving.
It couldn’t be...
“Paddy, can you see me,” I asked as I came out of the house, waving at him.
“Canuck... I don’t believe it,” he started to say. Then he broke off as a shadow fell across him. It was the Carol, whom moments ago he’d been stalking, now coming straight towards him.
“Oh mah God, lookit the size of her!”
As she approached she pulled a clear container out of her ammo belt and popped the lid off. Obviously she was going to catch Paddy and... and... Well, she was going to catch him anyway. This sort of thing was definitely not in the paintball rulebook.
Paddy turned and fled, but there was no way he could outrun a woman who must be about 130 feet tall, relative to him. I raised my rifle, thinking how ridiculous it was to continue playing when she was up to no good. I fired, hitting her on the shoulder.
Scowling, she paused and looked at me. She slowly put the container back into her belt and unslung her rifle. I braced myself. She couldn’t fail to hit me at that range and I couldn’t get away in time. I would be shrunk too.
However, raising the rifle above her head to show she’d been marked out, she simply walked off the field as if she was still playing by the rules.
“Okay, this is just too weird,” I said, retreating back inside the house before the other two women could draw a bead on me.
“Hey, what just happened to Paddy,” Crates asked over the radio.
“He got shrunk,” I replied, looking for the ref. “Kirk, get over here!”
When he arrived I told him what was going on.
“There he is, see? They’ve shrunk him down to three inches tall.”
“What?! There’s no shrinking in paintball! Who did it?”
I pointed at Tamara and he marched over to berate her, ordering her to come down. After listening to him rant for a couple of minutes, she raised her rifle and shot him in the leg. He shrunk instantly. She then crouched down and picked him up, dropping him into a plastic container.
Then she turned and came after me...
************
Discretion, so they say, is the better part of valour.
I elected to take this to heart for a change, under the circumstances.
Bolting from the house, I ordered the others to retreat. They headed back towards the woods, covering each other in pairs.
I paused behind a wooden barricade, firing to distract the two women as Crates and Boomer zigzagged towards the trees. But the Shannon, still high atop the wall, ignored my panic fire and mercilessly rained shots down on them, stitching paintballs across their backs. They disappeared from view.
Then she fired a couple at me. The instant the paintballs splattered against the barricade it shrunk out from under me, leaving me horribly exposed.
Most of our guys were in the trees now, sending a fusillade of shots against the far wall and Shannon was forced to duck. I was the last guy left in the village, aside from Paddy who was not making very good progress at his new size.
Tamara sprinted into a house between myself and the treeline, firing at the others on full auto. Froggy and Kelvinator cried out, shrinking from sight. Incredible guns these ladies had.
She paused, looking down on the ground where Boomer and Crates had been. I heard their panicked voices over the radio.
“Boomer, under here! Hurry up, she’s coming!”
“No, please lady! Hey, what are you doin’? Keep away from me!”
I saw her lean down and grasp Boomer in her hand.
“Don’t hurt me lady!” he shouted, struggling in her grip. “Careful, you’re squeezing too tight! Can’t breathe...”
She backed away, firing her rifle one-handed at the surviving guys in the trees. When she got under cover, she dropped the minuscule Boomer into one of the plastic containers on her belt.
“Leave me here, keep moving,” I hollered at the others, crawling under a loose plywood board to hide. I wouldn’t be able to get away in time and she’d end up shrinking the whole team down if they waited for me. I’d have to hide and make the best of it on my own.
But it was too late.
The last few members of my team got nailed one after the other. That left only me at my normal size.
From my hidey-hole I saw Shannon climb down the ladder on the wall and sling her rifle. She pulled out a small black device the size of a cell phone and waved it slowly back and forth.
“Can you get a fix on his homing beacon,” Tamara asked.
Shannon pointed the device right at me and started moving forward.
“Yes, he’s over this way.”
Her friend covered her with her rifle, realising that I was still armed and dangerous.
They came straight towards me. But how were they tracking me? What did she mean by ‘homing beacon’? Unless...
I pulled the business card out of my pocket again. The holographic image on it could be what they were tracking me with. I tore the card in half, across the image. It sparked and gave off a wisp of smoke. I looked up at them hopefully.
“I’ve lost him! He was right here and now he’s gone.”
“Try the other one.”
She must mean Paddy.
“Hey Paddy, tear up that card they gave you. Rip it across the hologram,” I whispered into the mike.
I saw him do it. The woman stamped her foot in frustration as she lost his signal too. She put the device away and gripped her rifle.
“We’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way.”
I wasn’t about to sit there and go quietly.
I kicked the board off me and made a run for it, dashing through one of the houses and into the grove of birch trees sprawling along the right side of the village. The two women chased me, firing constantly.
The individual trees in the grove were spaced too far apart to provide any meaningful cover for me, which I thought was pretty damned inconsiderate of them. Paintballs whipped past my ears and thwacked into the tall, skinny trees, shrinking them down all around me as I ran, doubled over like a simian to present a smaller target.
I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw that I was widening the gap, although they were still doggedly pursuing me. At that moment I caught my foot on an exposed tree root. My rifle went flying out of my hands as I stumbled and fell. Immediately scrambling to my feet, I left the gun lying in the shrubs and took off again. The women would have caught up to me if I’d stopped to pick it up.
My headlong flight through the trees brought me to an open area with tufts of grass and wild flowers. I dropped to my knees, gasping for breath like a horse that someone had ridden half to death, and hastily went over my options.
To my right was a short path leading to the parking lot and neutral zone, but I dismissed it immediately. Carol was due to re-enter the game any second now and this is the path she’d be taking; I didn’t fancy meeting her half way, bereft as I was of weapons.
Across the forty yards of open space before me was a wall of dense foliage, ferns, and tall grass. If I could just make it over there I could go to ground and they’d never find me. I sprang to my feet and ran as fast as my army boots would carry me, my arms and legs pumping. I was really moving. I began to believe that I’d actually escape.
So naturally I was quite put out when the shot punched into my spine, causing my back to arch, arms outstretched like a sprinter crossing the finish line...
********
For a moment I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
Just a stinging bruise where the projectile had smacked into me, but then that was the standard effect a paintball had.
In the blink of an eye however, everything changed.
I got warm all over, kind of tingly. My vision blurred for a second and then everything seemed normal again.
But I quickly realised that things weren’t normal at all. I’d been shrunk, damn it!
I looked around me to see where I was, but the patch of ankle high grass I’d been standing in a second ago now appeared to be a field of elephant grass six feet tall, obscuring my line of sight. The skinny birch trees ringing the open ground soared far above me like ancient Redwoods.
But I could see Shannon all right, emerging from behind a tree and slinging her rifle as she slowly walked towards me, her long brown hair hanging forward over her left shoulder in a pony tail. She was peering down at the ground, looking left and right.
Now, as a lifelong giantess lover this was in fact a dream come true for me.
Although I really ought to have been frightened out of my wits I was unable to move, eyes riveted to her massive boots; they were made of shiny black leather, with pointed toes and low block heels. They came to about mid-calf on her.
At my normal size, she would have been about fifteen or twenty yards away. Now perspective was out of kilter and the tree she’d hidden behind seemed to be a good football-field’s length from me. But of course she was covering a huge distance with each step; she’d be up to me in no time.
I could feel the impact her boots made on the ground. Grass and flowers in her path bent and snapped underfoot like small trees. My God, a real live giantess. She was magnificent!
She was going to pick me up and stuff me in a container too, that seemed to be their standard operating procedure. But for what purpose? Who were these women, anyway? And how did they do
I waited patiently for her to pick me up, watching with a pounding heart as those gorgeous boots crushed any hapless flora and insecta in her path without even noticing them. Yup, any moment now she’d crouch down and wrap her long fingers around me and lift me waaay up... but instead she kept walking. She was now only a couple of steps away.
Then common sense tapped me on the shoulder.
Oh you idiot, I chastised myself. You’re wearing camo and standing stock-still in a clump of grass as tall as yourself. She can’t see you!
Horrified, I watched her right foot lift and move forward. It was going to come down right on top of me. I stood there like a stupe, noticing that the head of a flower was pressed flat into the sole of her boot. I would soon be joining it, apparently.
But an emergency neural signal somehow managed to reach my legs and I found myself leaping sideways just as her enormous foot crashed to the ground where I’d been standing, sending up a billow of dust. The clump of grass was pressed flat, sticking out from under her foot in all directions. Trance-like, I reached out and ran my hand along the smooth instep of her boot. Lying on my back I saw her left foot swing over me as she continued walking. Then her right foot lifted up and away and I was left lying there, heart thumping like billy-o as I watched her move on.
I decided that maybe I’d better try to escape, since I really had no idea what she would do to me after I’d been captured. For all I knew, the women were here catching something for their supper.
I ran back in the direction that I’d come from, pausing once to look at her. She had retraced her footsteps and was on hands and knees now for a closer look at the ground I’d been standing on. Good thing I’d run when I had the chance.
“Canuck, where the bluidy ‘ell are ye,” Paddy called over the radio.
“I’m not far from the parking lot,” I replied, trying to get my bearings. “I’m coming back along the trail. Gather everyone together and I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
“Aye, tha’s good ‘cos we’ve discovered somthin’ real interestin’...”
***************
It was indeed a “real interestin’” discovery.
Kevin, one of the Paintmeisters, was with the rest of my team when I met up with them. He’d been shrunk down when his squad had attacked a flag station, but managed to evade capture. He’d wandered into the village just as we were getting the piss kicked out of us and joined up with Paddy and the others when the two women had gone chasing after me.
It seems that his entire team had been captured. I told him about the homing beacon. He swore, tearing his up.
“Listen to this,” he continued. “I heard a couple of ‘em talking about the ‘mother ship’, comparing us to other planets they’d conquered, the changes they were going to make to Earth after they’d beaten us, stuff like that.”
“So they were serious,” I mused aloud. They really were going to take control of our world if they beat us today! And now their shrinking tactics made sense to me, too. They could simply walk onto our side of the field and pick up our flags unhindered. No wonder they didn’t care if they were so badly outnumbered. After one shot we wouldn’t be a threat any more. However, Kevin did have some good news in that both of our flanking teams had taken down nine of the women’s ten flags before being stopped, as most of their flag stations had been unguarded.
“If we can get that last flag, we’ll have won,” I said.
The others were less than enthused.
“But just think of it, lads. If we win, we’ll have two of the greatest pleasures in life at the same time, beautiful spacewomen serving us beer and munchies AND hours of hockey on t.v.!”
This seemed to motivate them a little.
“Ah, oui, but the women are now too big to be shot,” Froggy observed.
“True, we’ve lost the means to mark them out, BUT,” I paused, dramatically lifting my index finger, “we’ve gained the ability to sneak in undetected.”
We moved off in the general direction of their last flag station, winding our way through the enormous village and into the trees on the women’s side. The ground was moist and mossy here, owing to the presence of a marsh.
After a few minutes’ progress, I heard an horrific noise. We froze, terrified.
We heard it again, a loud croaking sound. There was a sudden movement to our left as something green and fat sprang into the air and plopped to the ground about thirty feet in front of me. It was a bullfrog. A very large bullfrog. It was bigger than a mini-van.
“Doon’t nobody move,” Paddy said helpfully. “They only catch things wot are movin’. Ye’d never dodge aside in time anyway. He’d have ye in a flash.”
“Yes, thank-you for the biology lesson, Paddy,” I hissed; I was point man and the first likely to be snatched by the frog.
It kept looking at me. I knew he could see me, the bastard. A minute dragged by as I stood there displaying symptoms of advanced rigor mortis, staring at the frog. His throat pulsed. He blinked occasionally. What the hell was he waiting for?
“Hang in there Canuck, we’re going to get you out of this,” Sparky reassured me as he slowly inched his way back down the trail. In fact, all of my brave comrades were sidling into the grass on the edge of the trail.
“Come on, come on, hurry up and kill it,” Crates urged from the safety of the bushes.
“Kill it? Kill it? Look, I’m not bloody Beowulf! Charging into a hail of paintball fire is one thing but engaging giant hungry amphibians in hand to hand combat is just not on. Jeez, a man has to draw the line somewhere, eh,” I said through my teeth.
“Och, well I expect I’d better take care of this then,” Paddy said casually, taking a running leap onto the frog’s back.
The beast croaked in alarm, jumping into the air. Paddy somehow clung to his mount, riding it like a broncobuster as they hopped off into the sunset together like it was some kind of absurd spaghetti western. They were never seen again.
Or at least not for another half-hour, which is how long it took Paddy to wander back down the trail, covered in slime.
“‘e went intae the pond,” Paddy offered by way of explanation, wringing out his hat...
*************
We made our way back into the village, deciding that it was too difficult, not to mention dangerous, to continue along the swampy trail on foot. Also, I had a cunning plan.
“Okay, I think it was around here,” I said, waving the others over. “Start looking.”
During our battle in the village, I was certain that I’d seen Tamara spill a few paintballs when she reloaded her rifle’s ammo box.
“Here they are,” Kelvinator shouted. “Five of ‘em.”
They were the size of large beach balls. We picked them up and proceeded down the other trail towards the parking lot. We stopped when we reached my abandoned rifle, lying undisturbed under a bush. It loomed over us like a Krupp howitzer.
I scrambled up onto the ammo box and pulled the lid open, emptying the ordinary paintballs onto the ground.
“Okay, pop those pink babies in here and we’ll drag the gun down the trail to the parking lot,” I said.
“Oh sure, and while we’re at it let’s knock off Fort Knox,” Crates muttered.
“Let’s have a little less sedition and more effort, please.”
We strained to move the massive weapon, dragging it inch by inch along the trail. It was bloody heavy. Fortunately the parking lot wasn’t very far away, even by our standard of distance.
Finally, we could go no further. We sat there wheezing like teakettles, the barrel of the gun pointing through the grass at the row of vehicles. We hadn’t the strength to carry on. We’d have to fire it from here.
I made sure a paintball was sitting firmly in the firing chamber. If it misfired and burst the gun its self might shrink, and even if it didn’t we’d have to waste precious time sponging out the barrel before firing again.
The first target was Paddy’s jeep, a military surplus vehicle with an open top that he’d bought for $100 several years ago.
I scrambled over the gun, peering along the barrel to aim it. When I was reasonably sure of nailing it with the first shot, I jumped down. The rest of the guys had looped a long strip of boundary ribbon through the trigger guard as a firing rope and were holding either end from a safe distance behind the gun.
“Fire,” I shouted, slashing my arm downward like an eighteenth century gun captain.
They all heaved on the trigger rope and the .68 Special barked out, kicking sharply. The paintball flew across the parking lot, corkscrewing through the air, as is their wont, and hit the jeep in the front grill. The vehicle shrank.
I tried to get them to aim the gun at Crates’ 4x4 truck, but the report from the gun had momentarily rendered us deaf. We stood there shouting “what?” at each other for a couple of minutes before I finally made them understand.
We then gave ourselves hernias trying to shift the gun over, realising that the women must have heard the shot. They would probably be here in a few minutes to investigate.
After missing twice, Crates’ truck was eventually shrunk. Abandoning the gun, we pelted across the sandy parking lot and climbed into the little vehicles and moments later we were driving back along the trail. I was in the jeep with Paddy, Froggy and Kelvinator. The rest were in the pickup truck, two of them in the cab and the rest being tossed like salad in the back.
“This is much better than walking, eh,” I said smugly.
We bobbed up and down in our seats like pistons as the jeep careered over the rough terrain.
“‘ow aboot a little music,” Paddy said, turning on the stereo. I recognised the tape instantly. It was the same one he’d had in there since 1989, ‘Jock McHugh and his Wailin’ Pictish Highland Bagpipe Band do the Oldies’.
Ironically enough the first song they played was Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’...
***************
We drove back into the village and things went swiftly to hell in a hand-basket.
The three giant women we’d tangled with earlier were standing there, staring at us in amazement as we roared into view.
“Turn around! Turn around,” I shouted, seeing the giantesses come after us.
“Oi, gerroff the steerin’ wheel,” Paddy demanded; I’d momentarily lost my senses and tried to commandeer the vehicle. Having almost been crushed once today, I didn’t wish to relive the experience.
As Paddy and I struggled for ascendancy the jeep hurtled onward and sped between the Carol’s legs; she still had orange paint on her shoulder where I’d shot her so long ago. She turned and pounded after us, arms reaching down to clutch hold of us.
Froggy and Kelvinator, sitting backward in the rear seats of the jeep, thus experienced a reasonable facsimile of the T-Rex chase scene from Jurassic Park. They didn’t enjoy it at all.
Meanwhile Crates was driving his truck like a maniac (nothing out of the ordinary, actually), skidding in the sand as Tamara lunged ahead to scoop them up. She slid forward on her stomach, kicking up a bow-wave of sand, arms outstretched to grasp the truck. But Crates pulled another skidding turn before she could lay hands on them.
At our tiny size, we appeared to have an edge over the women in agility. They of course made up for it with an extra-long reach and the ability to move proportionally farther with each step; it remained to be seen who had the overall advantage.
The small black truck sped up and bounced inside one of the houses, the red-haired woman close behind. The third giantess, Shannon, jumped into the doorway at the other end of the house, crouching down like a catcher waiting for the pitch.
At the last minute, Crates pulled a tire-squealing J-turn and headed back the way he’d come. Tamara couldn’t stop in time and stumbled over her leader. The truck flew out of the house, turned towards the swampy path and vanished into the undergrowth.
Carol hadn’t given up on us, however. Paddy, having reclaimed the steering wheel from his demented team leader, was driving circles counter-clockwise around a huge wooden barricade. Froggy and Kelvinator kept up a continuous yowling from the back seat as they watched the giant woman’s efforts to catch us.
Suddenly she stopped and turned to face the other direction. We didn’t realise that she’d done this of course until we rounded the corner again and saw a gigantic boot blocking our way. Paddy emitted a piercing Gaelic shriek and wrenched the wheel hard to the right. The jeep barely missed a head collision with her foot, scraping along her instep instead.
We’d lost a lot of momentum because of the emergency manoeuvre. The blond stamped her other foot down in front of us before we could speed up, scaring the bejabbers out of us with the noise, shock wave and swirling dust storm it caused. Paddy again cranked the wheel over to preserve our lives, downshifting to lower gears for better acceleration.
Then darkness engulfed us as Carol crashed down on her hands and knees over us, trying to smother our escape. She almost succeeded.
Her right hand tried to grab us, but Paddy floored the gas pedal at that instant and we rumbled over the fingers of her left hand. I looked over my shoulder to see her kneeling in the sand, rubbing her abused digits. She couldn’t catch up to us now, as we were moving too fast over the sandy ground. Moments later we turned into the trail and radioed Crates to let him know we were still alive.
We stopped after a few minutes to rest, gloat over our narrow escape, throw up, and so on.
Crates’ truck was hidden on the other side of the trail; they’d pulled grass and branches over top of it to render it invisible. We did the same before gathering together to discuss the plan of attack.
Just then the trio of disgruntled giantesses stormed down the trail after us, but they didn’t see us. We heard a garbled radio message, however. It was Boomer, calling us from his container on the giantess’ belt.
“... do you read me, over? They’ve taken... flags ... except one. You’ve got... rry up and take their... one or... t’s all over.”
The message faded as the giantess walked out of range.
“So they’ve got most of our flags, eh,” I said. “We don’t have much time, then. How can we get the women’s last flag down? It’s got to be like fifty or a hundred feet off the ground.”
We mulled it over for a while.
“Looks like the only way is to just climb up there,” Kelvinator said finally.
It would be a hell of a climb.
I sighed. “Well come on, let’s get this over with...”
********
We drove our vehicles up as close as we dared, not wanting the sound of our engines to give us away. On foot, we made our way through the tall grass towards the last flag station.
We saw that the three giantesses were guarding it, perhaps now realising that we were still a threat despite our tiny size.
“Ha! This’ll teach ‘em not to underestimate men in the futu this to us? I would find out soon enough, I supposed. uuurrre...” Crates said, the crescendo at the end owing to the rope snare that had closed around his leg and hauled him rapidly up to a height of about fifty feet, sort of like bungee-jumping in reverse. He hung there impotently, arms flailing.
“Looks like the women have set some traps,” I commented as we stood in a circle looking up at him.
“Hey, get me down from here!”
“Sorry, Crates. We’ll have rescue you afterwards,” I said. “But while you’re up there, do you see anything interesting?”
“What? I don’t know,” he replied irritably. “Everything’s upside down. Damn, I’m getting head rush...”
Despite Crates’ protests, we kept moving, keeping an eye out for any more traps.
Unfortunately we didn’t have much experience with things like this and before long we’d tripped another one. This time it was some kind of net trap and it scooped up Kevin, Kelvinator and Sparky and held them aloft like cats in a bag, arms and legs protruding through the net.
The tripwire also set off a red flare.
“Over this way,” one of the women shouted. Now we were for it.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I said, leading the rest of the guys back the way we’d come. The giant women crashed through the undergrowth behind us, making a frightful amount of noise. At least we had escaped detection... no, wait, one of the women had seen us. She changed course to follow. Oh jeez...
We split up. I ducked around the nearest tree and dove into a clump of grass, my face peeking out to observe the goings-on.
Paddy headed towards his jeep. Big mistake. Before he could start the engine, Carol strolled up and stood with one massive boot on either side of him, hands on her hips as she looked down at him. She slowly lifted her right foot and moved it over top of his jeep. Paddy, being the sensible type, got the hell out of it.
He could only sit in the grass, whimpering, as she stepped on his beloved jeep. It crumpled under her foot like a beer can. She put her weight onto the ball of her foot and twisted back and forth a few times to make sure the little vehicle was crushed flat. Then she crouched down and looked at Paddy.
“Sorry about that,” she said, smiling sweetly at him. She held out her hand, palm up, and Paddy obediently climbed on, the fight gone out of him.
Froggy, having witnessed the destruction of the jeep, panicked and bolted into the open. He was promptly chased down and cornered by the other two women. Resistance, as the saying goes, was futile. He surrendered to them without another word.
Which left me, as usual, to salvage the situation. One against three, not good odds even under normal circumstances.
The only thing on my mind now was taking that last flag down. I skulked through the foliage, trying not to move the grass and leaves too much and so give my position away.
I heard them striding back in my direction. I sped up. They saw me. I ran like hell.
“This one’s mine,” one of them said. It was Shannon. I didn’t have to turn around to know that.
I ran across the top of a small log and moved down a plank lying perpendicular over it, like a ramp. She took a step forward and put her foot down heavily on the other side of it. My side shot up like a teeter-totter and I found myself catapulted through the air at a forty-five degree angle.
I was heading straight for their flag, which was draped over a branch like a giant curtain. I went headfirst into it and scrabbled frantically to clutch hold of the material; it was a long drop to the ground.
I hung onto the bottom edge of the flag with both hands. My tiny weight was just enough to begin pulling it off the branch. Slowly turning around as the flag slipped, I saw Shannon move towards me, hands outstretched. Funny, she almost looked concerned.
Then, with heart-stopping suddenness the flag slipped off the branch entirely, and I felt myself fall. Shannon dove forward, landing on her stomach in the grass, and I dropped into her cupped hands, breaking my fall.
The flag fluttered down and I was covered under the yards of material.
She lifted one edge of it and peeked under.
“Nice catch,” I said nonchalantly.
“Are you okay,” she asked, her voice so full of genuine concern that I forgot to be terrified.
“I believe so,” I replied. Then, “I think we won.”
“Yes, I suppose you did,” she admitted. She shook her head in dismay, as if this was something she was entirely unaccustomed to...
********
“So, you really are from another world,” I asked, standing in the middle of the picnic table. Shannon was sitting on the bench, resting her chin on her fists in front of me. The other guys had been released and were sitting on top of the other tables near the fire pit, chatting with the women.
“Yes, the level of science and engineering on our planet has developed to the extent that space travel is effortless. We visit the different planets in the galaxy and keep track of their development.”
Her voice, which before had been painfully loud to my tiny ears, was now being filtered through electronic earplugs she’d given to me, reducing the thunderous decibel level of her voice. They also made my voice more audible to her so that I didn’t have to shout all the time to make her understand me, like Basil Fawlty railing at Mrs. Richards.
They had also explained about the tracking devices, after a few of the men accused them of cheating. It turns out that they used the tracking devices to find us after being shrunk so that they didn’t step on us by accident. After all, they hadn’t come down here to kill us, only to challenge us to a friendly duel of the genders for ultimate control of the planet.
Shannon then went on to explain about the whole shrinking thing.
“You see, on a lot of worlds the natural order of things is disrupted,” she said.
“How so,” I asked pacing back and forth in front of her across the tabletop.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well, the male of the species has taken the dominant role in the day to day running of the government, economy, nearly everything, when it’s quite obvious that the female is better suited to this task.”
“Now just a goldarn minute,” I said, pausing mid-pace. “Just how do you think we men got to this position of dominance in the first place?”
Not realising that my question was merely a rhetorical lead-up to a pompous monologue explanation, she interrupted me.
“You bullied your women down through the ages with your superior size and strength, that’s how. That is, of course, the only advantage a male has over the female. And this is the thing that we correct when we visit a new planet. When we shrink the group of males that we challenge, they generally give up at once. It’s an object lesson, if you will; it makes them realise that without their size advantage, they have no hope of beating us.”
“And so if you’d won here today, you’d shrink all the men on Earth down to our size permanently?”
“Yes. Not only would it give your women the ability to control you, but it would also save a lot of space and resources on your world,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “You men consume a appalling amount of food.”
“But what great advantages do women have over men,” I persisted, perhaps a bit too boorishly.
The other giantesses all immediately threw in their two cents worth. “Better communication skills; smarter; more understanding; better organisers; more compassionate... Whereas men are conceited; arrogant; inconsiderate; brutish; uncouth; prone to violence...”
“All right, all right,” I said, holding up my hands in mock surrender. Actually, I had come to realise many of these things on my own anyway.
“However, I must admit that you Earthmen have shown that you have abilities beyond simple brute strength, although unfortunately many of them remain latent. And I suppose now we are obligated to fulfil the terms of our agreement,” Shannon said, almost bowling me over with a heavy sigh.
Naturally, I was very gracious in victory.
“Of course you’re obligated! What, you don’t think we’re going to let you ladies off the hook, do you? We won fair and square.”
She tried the ‘melt-my-heart-with-her-eyes’ trick again, but I didn’t fall for it. I wasn’t about to be denied my ‘beautiful-spacegirl-hosted Stanley Cup party’.
“Oh all right, we’ll do it,” she said, feigning utter disgust at the very idea. Then she broke into a crooked grin and reached forward with her hand, allowing me to hop onto her upturned palm. “You know, I must admit we never in a million years expected you Earthmen to beat us. Not even before we started shrinking you.”
I grinned sheepishly. “Well I’d like to attribute our success to superior intelligence, skill and so on, but really it was mostly good luck coupled with sheer bloody-minded obstinance, a male trait that does come in handy on the occasion by the way.”
She smiled at that. “You continue to impress me. Most males we’ve encountered would have boasted about their success ad nauseam. Perhaps there is hope for your race yet.”
Out of curiosity, I asked her what other changes they would have made to Earth had they won.
“Oh, we generally solve some of the more alarming problems, like famine, pollution, disease and so on. In your planet’s case we’d also share some of our technology with you to bring you more up to date. For instance, your computers are so inferior to ours that I can’t imagine how you get anything done with them,” she said offhandedly. “But you did defeat us, so we will leave you as you are to develop on your own, have no fear...”
She paused, looking at me in amusement.
“Why are you striking your forehead with the heel of your palm like that? Anyway, there is also one small thing that we do as well...” She blushed slightly, as if embarrassed. “It is the right of the victorious team in our culture to take the defeated side as personal concubines. Yes, I know it is savage and abhorrent. The custom dates back to a less enlightened time in our past. But it gets terribly lonely on our long voyages through space...”
Up until a couple of minutes ago, the other guys had been looking very pleased with themselves at having won a victory that was nothing short of miraculous, but now they stood frozen in place, jaws dropping in unison.
“Concubines,” they kept repeating to each other, as if that couldn’t possibly be right. That only happens in fantasies and naughty videos.
I cleared my throat. “Um, actually I think we might have to check back on the rules. You see we actually cheated by... by using vehicles! Yes, honour won’t allow us to claim the victory, so you’d better start taking over the world. We’ll go peacefully.”
She smiled again. “No, you did indeed win. You only bent the rules because we did it first with our shrinking guns.”
“Pshaw! We’d been planning to cheat the whole time! Right guys?”
They all shouted that this was indeed the case. We were all a horrible lot of cheaters they insisted, and a lengthy term of concubinage aboard the women’s space ship would certainly teach us all a much-needed lesson.
However, despite our protests, the women insisted that they’d lost and they wouldn’t even fight a rematch. They even commended us for our sense of fair play, damn it!
At that point, the women lined up and bade us farewell, then shimmered briefly and vanished. A few moments later a glowing red light shone over the area and we men were returned to our normal size.
I turned and looked uneasily into the stony faces of the other guys.
“Well, we saved the Earth fellas! How d’you like that, eh?” I said with forced enthusiasm.
“But I wanted tae be a conckabine,” Paddy said, chin quivering.
“Ah, Paddy. There’s more to life than being love-slave to a beautiful giantess,” I said, my voice catching and ruining my stoic expression somewhat.
“Good old Canuck, with his fine morals and virtues has shown us the error of our ways,” Kelvinator said. Then his smile went away. “Let’s get him, lads!”
And the ungrateful swine actually came after me, at which point the whole scene degenerated into a shameful “Dukes of Hazzard” type car chase along the dusty Alberta back roads.
However, the women made good on their promise and put on one heck of a good party the following weekend. They also agreed to shrink us down again for the day, and thus we got to watch the game on a forty-two foot t.v. screen, and the gigantic food and drink was a bonus too.
The only way it could have been better is if the Toronto Maple Leafs had made it into the final and actually won the Stanley Cup.
But then two miracles in the space of a week might have been asking for too much.
finis