The swimming hole

Okay, first off, I’m no hero. I just wanted to get that out of the way right up front. I’m not a hero. I just a normal kid with a normal life… ok, so maybe my life is not so normal. Maybe it’s a little messed up. But still, it’s relatively normal and I was relatively happy with it. Or I was…

Wait a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that.

I had this best friend, Kurt. Kurt was head over heals for this girl Jenna. Of course Jenna was pretty hot and therefore other guys were after her too. Poor Kurt had these constant insecurity bouts. Did he have a chance with Jenna? Did she like him better than Rick Cantor? Did I think she could ever be interested him? Jenna was nice, but honestly I did not see what he saw in her. Or rather, I did not see what drove him so bat shit crazy he couldn’t talk about anything else but her. But that might be because Jenna was completely void of the Y chromosome, which took her completely off my radar, if you know what I mean.

Did Kurt know I sat on the other side of the fence? I honestly don’t know. I never did anything to hide it. But I didn’t announce it either. I mean straight guys don’t go around telling everyone they’re straight, do they? Of course they don’t. So why should I tell everyone what I was interested in?

And then there was Greg Batson… Oh man, Greg… I loved just saying his name. Greg. Greg. Greg. Greg. Greg. Greg. Greg. He was soooooo cute. He had that short spiky light brown hair and those cobalt blue eyes. And he had that muscley body, not huge, but tight and cut. I know because I saw him at the gym all the time. That’s right, I went to the gym. If you want to catch a guy with a good body, you’d better be a guy with a good body; that was my motto. Oh, I wasn’t going to be entering any contests. Not huge, but cut and solid, that was me, and I was damn proud to be that way. Or I was…

Wait a minute, getting ahead of myself again.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure if Greg was on the same page as me… If you get my drift? I mean there were some signs. He really wasn’t dating any girls, even though he could have been, easily. He dressed really well, or at least a cut above the jeans and a t-shirt ensemble so many of our peers were fond of. And he wasn’t really into sports.

So was he or wasn’t he?

I suppose I could have talked a little to him, maybe gotten a better idea. But there never seemed to be a good time. He was either with someone or I was. And when those rare moments occurred when we were alone at the same time, I seemed to forget how to speak.

I tell you it was a real problem.

And Kurt was no help. I was trying to explain things to him one day when we were walking home from school, but all he kept saying was, “Blah blah blah Jenna. Blah blah blah blah blah blah Jenna. Blah blah Jenna blah blah. Jenna blah blah blah blah.”

And that’s when we heard the shout. Toby Mathews was terrorizing Jimmy again. Toby was, you guessed it, one of the school bullies. He was big, naturally big. He didn’t play any sports or anything. He was kind of a loser, but he was a big loser and he liked to cause trouble. And poor Jimmy, who was small and skinny as a rail, was obviously his catch of the day.

Jimmy –who I liked to refer to as The Neighbor Child—lived next door to me. He was a couple of years younger, and he completely looked up to me. I was kind of an older brother figure. Neither of us had real brothers of our own, so we kind of adopted each other. He had someone to idolize and I had someone to annoy the shit out of me. You see how this worked?

But as annoying as I found little Jimmy, I wasn’t about to stand by and watch Toby turn him black and blue.

“Oh for pity’s sake, Mathews,” I called. “Why don’t you find someone new to pick on? You’re like a little kid watching the same video over and over and over again. Don’t you ever wonder if there are better kids to pick on, smaller, meeker, who scream much louder?”

“Shut up, Buckley!” said Toby. “Or you might be next.”

“Try it, and I’ll break your nose,” I said, trying my best to look fierce… and doing a damn fine job of it, if I do say so myself.

“I’ll fucking rip you to pieces,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said, “but not before I break your nose.” Man I could really feel that testosterone surging through me, and I have to say it felt great!

I saw doubt flicker across his face. I mean there was no doubt I could do it. Just like there was no doubt he could kick the shit out of me. I guess he was wondering if it was worth a broken nose.

But suddenly the point became moot. Jimmy ran to his bike, which had been lying on the ground nearby, hopped on it and took off like a shot. Toby, whose bike was also close by hopped on it and took off after him.

“Don’t think this is over, Buckley,” he yelled back at me.

Now this is how I know, I’m no hero. If I were a hero, I’d’ve run home grabbed my bike and chased after them. But I didn’t. I watched them go and in a minute they were out of sight. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone after them that day. Oh well, don’t think I’ll ever really know.

I didn’t actually see Jimmy again until that weekend. I was out in the backyard mowing our lawn when he called to me over the fence. It was hot and I was shirtless. And pushing the mower around was giving me a slight pump. I was enjoying the feeling and the view of my own buff body. My whole torso was covered with a slight sheen of sweat and the veins were bulging nicely around the cords and tendons of my well defined forearms. Damn, I had nice arms. They were a man’s arms. I loved being male. Our bodies were so muscular and hard and strong, just awesome. In fact I’d have to say Male was my favorite gender. Wasn’t I lucky to be born a member of my favorite gender?

“Hey Matt!” I heard Jimmy call.

Our lawn mower was pretty loud and I wondered if I just pretended I couldn’t hear him if maybe he’d just go away. No such luck.

“Matt!” he called louder. “Matt!”

“Yeah, Jimmy,” I called.

“Hey Matt, you wanna go swimming?”

Actually it was unusually hot out and even though I was only wearing shorts and flip flops, mowing the lawn wasn’t exactly keeping me cool. There were bits of grass and dirt plastered to my tight sweaty pecs and washboard stomach. A swim sounded bomb.

But on a day like this the lake was going to be very crowded. Probably too crowded for it to be any fun.

“I don’t know,” I said, shutting down the mower. “It’s going to be pretty crowded down at the lake.”

“Who said anything about the lake?” said Jimmy.

“Don’t tell me your parents put in a pool!” I said, rushing to look over the fence. But Jimmy’s yard was depressingly pool-free. But Jimmy was standing there dressed only in swimming trunks. Skinny as always, flat chest, flat stomach and well, pretty much flat all over with a towel draped over one boney shoulder.

“No, no,” said Jimmy. “Remember the other day when Toby Mathews was chasing me?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, thinking about it for the first time since it happened. There were no signs of bruises on Jimmy so it must have ended ok.

“Well, he chased me all the way to the back Hampton road,” said Jimmy. “I finally had to ditch my bike and try to lose him in the woods.”

“Dude, that’s pretty dangerous. People get lost in those woods all the time.”

“Not me,” said Jimmy. “And while I was in there, I found this great swimming hole. It’s a ways back in the woods, and I don’t think anyone ever goes there.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds bomb.”

“Can you help me with this first?”

Jimmy was pointing at his family’s wrought iron patio table. He tried to push it. He was leaning against it with all his weight and pushing it with all his might, but he was only budging it an inch at a time and turning bright red in the process.

“My dad says I have to move it before I can go swimming,” he said, huffing and puffing. “Could you give me a hand?”

“Sure,” I said. And with one graceful move I grabbed the fence and vaulted over it. Damn, I loved the way my body responded with strength and grace to anything I asked it to do.

Jimmy looked impressed too. “Whoa,” he said. Inwardly I was loving his awe, but outwardly I pretended to ignore it. “Where do you want the table?” I asked.

“I just have to get it off the patio,” said Jimmy. “Dad’s having it resurfaced.” He grabbed one end of the table. “If you want to get the other end…?”

“Please,” I said waving him off. Then I grabbed the table and lifted it easily. I carried it off the patio before Jimmy could blink. I thought his chin was going to hit the floor as I set it down on the grass.

“Damn you’re strong,” he said.

“That’s cause I work at it. Get your ass into a gym, boy, and you’ll get strong too.”

Then my phone rang. It was Kurt. Between the blubbering and babbling, I could just make out that Rick Petersen had asked Jenna out and she’d said yes. Oh boy, it looked like I had the makings of a full blown melt down on my hands.

“Sorry, Jimmy,” I said. “I gotta back out of the swimming. I have to do a little crisis intervention. But maybe next time.”

“Sure,” he said, looking disappointed.

“Of course she likes Rick,” I said into my phone. “Have you seen his arms?”

More blubbering and babbling

“Yes, I’d say she’s definitely into guys with muscles. Who isn’t?”

Okay, I know on the service it didn’t’ seem like I was helping much, but trust me, Kurt needed to hear this. I’d been after him for well over a year to start going to the gym with me, but I could never pull him away from his Wii. Now, I might have a chance.

It took me most of the afternoon to calm Kurt down. In the end I managed it by convincing Kurt that one date didn’t mean much. Jenna might just as easily go out with him… if only he’d ask her.

“But what if she says no?” he said.

“Then you’ll be free to forget her and get on with your life,” I said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Kurt. “You’re not in love with anyone. You don’t have to put yourself out there like that.”

“Errr… yeah,” I said, trying to convince myself that the thing with Greg was entirely different. Well, it was, wasn’t it?

The next Saturday I was out mowing the lawn again, (Depressing how fast grass grows, isn’t it?) when I heard someone calling my name.

“Matt! Hey Matt!”

I shut off the mower and listened.

“Matt,” came the voice again. It sounded like it was coming from Jimmy’s yard, but it didn’t sound quite like Jimmy. This voice was lower.

“Yeah?” I called out.

“You wanna go swimming?”

I walked over to the fence and looked over. There was someone standing there in Jimmy’s swimming trunks but it wasn’t Jimmy. It couldn’t be.

This kid had the beginnings of pecs, a soft six pack and small muscled shoulders. He had a face like Jimmy’s except it was less round, more angled, and he was probably taller too. It actually looked like Jimmy’s older more athletic brother—except I knew he didn’t have one. Was this Jimmy? Yeah, I guess it had to be. “Jeeeeezus!” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“It looks like you got beat with the muscle stick.”

“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy. “I guess I’m hitting a growth spurt.” He flexed and he actually had a bicep going there.

“Damn, boy,” I said, “You been working out?”

“Nah,” he said, dropping his arm. “It’s just the way I’m growing.”

“Why couldn’t I have grown like that? With genes like yours you should be hitting the gym, bro. You could be a real beast in no time.”

“I guess,” he said. “Anyway I’m going for a swim. Wanna come?”

“Back to that swimming hole of yours?”

“Yup. Been there every day this week. It’s so bomb. No one else is ever there.”

“I’d go except I told Kurt I’d help him out down at the gym. But…”

“…maybe next time,” he finished for me. “Yeah, sure.” His shoulders slumped and he turned to go. Damn, he was growing a back, too. He had to be working out.

“Why don’t you get the dork patrol to go?” That’s what I “affectionately” called his dweeb-like friends.

“Nah, they’d rather hang out and play video games.”

“You already asked then, hunh?”

“All week,” he said. “They don’t want to hike through the woods. But that’s what makes it bomb, because nobody else is there! And after a swim I feel really great.”

“That’s what exercise will do for you, bro,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but it’s more than that,” he said. “I can’t really explain it.”

“Yeah, well have a good swim, buddy,” I said. And then I finished up the lawn and went to meet Kurt at the gym.

You know, it wasn’t often I saw Kurt in gym clothes, so it was kind of a shock to me to see how pathetically skinny he really was. His arms were sticks and I think his knees were the thickest part of his legs.

“Well, let’s get started,” he said, walking up to me. “Now remember, I just want a little size. I don’t want to get too bulky, no oversized body builder arms or anything.”

I almost laughed out loud. “Don’t worry. When you leave here today you will not have oversized bodybuilder arms.”

He gave me an exasperated sigh. “I know that,” he said. “I mean in a couple of months.”

Oh boy. “Dude, trust me. You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said, “Well, let’s get you started. How about we do chest today? “

“Ok, I guess.”

“Good. Always start with the big compound movements. For chest, the best one is the bench press. You know what that is?”

“Of course I do. I always hear the jocks taking about it. They’re always asking each other how much they can bench.”

“That’s the one,” I said. We walked over to an empty bench. Someone had left the bar loaded with two 45 pound plates and I started to remove them.

“What are you doing?” asked Kurt.

“We’re going to start you with something a little lighter,” I said.

“Why?” he said. “Why can’t I start with this?”

“Dude, that’s 135 pounds.”

“So? I heard this guy say he could bench 180. He didn’t look that big. I bet I could bench 135 pounds.”

I was going to try and argue the point with him but I realized it would just be faster to let him try. “Ok, go ahead.”

He slid on to the bench. I helped him get into the right position and place his hands properly. He lay there for a moment and then he pushed. I could see him straining so hard he was turning red. After a few seconds he relaxed.

“I think you forgot something,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“How about unlatching the bar?”

“What?”

“The safety latches are obviously still down.”

I couldn’t help chuckling. “Dude, barbells don’t have safety latches. See for yourself.”

He slid off the bench and looked. His face fell. “You mean I’m that weak?”

“Probably,” I said, patting him on the back. “But don’t worry about it. That’s what we’re here for, to fix that. Now get back on the bench.”

He slid back onto the bench and I removed the 45 pound plates.

“How much are you going to put on?” he asked.

“We’ll start with just the bar until you get your form down.”

“You mean I’m going to be benching nothing? Oh that’s going to sound real impressive. When Jenna asks me how much I bench. I can say, “I bench nothing.”“

“Dude, the bar is 45 pounds.”

“Sure, that sounds soooo much more impressive than nothing.”

“Ok, first of all, do you really think Jenna is going to ask you how much you bench?”

“Maybe not, but if it should happen to come up in conversation…”

“What you’re saying is you want something to brag to her about. So, shut up, start lifting and maybe by the end of the school year you’ll have something to brag about.”

“The end of the school year?!”

“Maybe earlier, but it’s going to take some time, buddy.”

Then he lifted the empty bar off the supports—which I was silently grateful he could do—and we got started.

After we completed one set of 12 reps, I was fairly confident he had his form basically down and we could risk a little weight.

“All right!” he said.

“Yeah, but it looked like you were struggling with that last rep so I’m only going to add 5 pounds.”

“Ok,” he said.

“Trouble is I don’t see any 2 and a half pound plates,” I said looking at the weight tree by our bench.

Kurt sat up and looked around. “It looks like there are some over there,” he said, pointing.

Kurt was pointing to the bench across from us, and oh my God, Greg Batson was on it. He was obviously squeezing out the last couple of reps in his set. He was benching 225, and obviously putting everything he had into getting that bar up. Damn, he was wearing a tight wife beater, and watching those bare athletic arms pushing that weight up was amazing, and then when he got to the top he squeezed his pecs. Wow. Was I drooling? Oh my God I think I was drooling. He went into his last rep and it was touch and go weather he was going to make it. He didn’t have a spotter. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was to do that without a spotter? I almost ran over to give him a spot when, with a final push, he racked the weight.

He sat up and brushed his beautiful arm across his forehead. Damn that was sexy. This was my chance! It was the perfect time to start up a conversation. I took a step forward and opened up my mouth when suddenly I heard…

“Excuse me,” Kurt said, walking up to Greg, “Mind if we take these?” He stepped over to the weight tree and pulled off two 2.5-pound plates.

“No, go ahead,” said Greg. “I’m not using them.”

“Thanks,” said Kurt. “How much were you benching?”

“225,” said Greg.

“Whoa,” said Kurt, genuinely impressed. “I’m new at this, but isn’t that kind of dangerous without someone to watch you?”

“You mean a spotter?” said Greg. “I guess.”

“Well, next time if you need… a spotter, I’m right over here,” said Kurt.

“Thanks, dude,” said Greg. He held out his hand “Greg Batson.”

Kurt shook it. “Kurt Beckendorf,” he replied.

“Good to meet you. You work out here regularly?”

“Nah, it’s my first day,” said Kurt.

“Well, if you ever need a spot or some pointers, hit me up.”

“Ok, thanks,’ said Kurt, and he came back over with the two and a half pound plates.

My head just about exploded. Without any effort at all and on his first attempt, Kurt had just done what I had been trying six months to do. He was now on a first name basis with Greg, The Greg. Holy shit. I didn’t know weather to slap him on the back or punch him in the face.

I must have been scowling or something because he looked at me and said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said taking the plates from him. “Just get on the bench.”

I added the five pounds and guided him though eight reps, which pretty much took him to failure.

“Ok,” I said, “that’s it for the bench press.”

“Yeah,” he said, sitting up and rubbing his chest. “I think I really worked ‘em. What are we going to do tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? We’re just getting started with today. Next we’re going to do some flies.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Now, come on.”

Kurt got up and suddenly we heard this high sweet voice. “Hi Kurt,” it said.

“Hi Jenna,” said Kurt, suddenly turning beat red. “What are you doing here?”

“Just getting in a little workout,” she said.

“I didn’t know you worked out,” said Kurt.

“Sure,” she said. “Are you guys done with the bench?”

“Ah yeah,” said Kurt.

Jenna added another 10 pounds to the bar, lay down on the bench and proceeded to crank out 10 reps, while Kurt watched slack jawed. When she was done, he pulled me aside.

“Dude,” he said, “She’s stronger than me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I noticed.”

“But I’m a dude. How could she be stronger than me?”

“Because you’ve been letting your dudeness rot, buddy. Stick with your workouts and you’ll blow past her in just a few weeks. Wait and see.”

“You sure?”

“Bro, we’re guys. We’re fueled by testosterone, the wonder hormone. At puberty it floods our bodies like a magic elixir and makes our frames expand, our muscles swell and bulge; it can transform us from snot nosed, hairless weaklings into huge, powerful muscle beasts. And it has done this for boy after boy after boy, across the ages, sometimes in just a matter of months! We’re designed to grow big, powerful, muscular bodies. Compared to us, girls are flimsy, weak, pathetic things. We are the muscle sex! And this is the best time in our lives to exploit it! We are producing testosterone like we never have before and never will again. All our biological systems are working toward growth and development. Seize this opportunity to transform yourself! Make yourself into the huge, powerful being you were meant to be! It is your privilege as a male. I might go so far as to say it’s your duty, even your responsibility! So, what do you say, Kurt? Are you ready to release your potential, to become the beast you were born to be?”

Kurt just kind of stood there looking at me wide eyed and opened mouthed, but he nodded yes.

And that seemed to do the trick. The next day, even though Kurt told me his pecs felt like they were burning a hole in his body, he couldn’t wait to get back to the gym. And for the rest of the week it was Kurt calling me and wanting to work out.

I saved squats for last because I wasn’t sure his enthusiasm would survive them. And at the end of the workout, when he was sitting on a nearby bench, gasping for breath and threatening to throw up, he looked up at me and said. “I hurt. Even my pain has pain.”

“Dude, that’s the price,” I said.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” he said. “What do you know about steroids?”

“I know guys our age shouldn’t go near them.”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

“Sorry, dude,” I said. “No easy way out. You gotta do the work.” Of that I was dead sure.

And isn’t it funny how every time you’re dead sure about something, life goes out of its way to prove you wrong?

There was a nip in the air that Saturday when I went out to mow the lawn. So my shorts stayed in the drawer and it was jeans and a sweatshirt I wore to do the job. Fall had definitely arrived and I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I was going to miss the warm weather and all the bare skin and muscle on display, but on the other hand I knew I wouldn’t have to mow the lawn much longer.

I had just fished up when I heard the unmistakable clatter and clunk of a weight set being used. It was coming from next door, so I moseyed on over to the fence to have a look. Ah ha, I knew it. Jimmy’s been working out. There he was lying on an old weight bench getting ready to do some presses. Like me, he had on an old sweatshirt, but unlike me he was sticking to shorts… or were those swimming trunks? But… Holy crap, there were 205 pounds loaded on that bar!

“You’re not going to try and lift that, are you?” I called over to him.

He sat up suddenly and looked guiltily like I’d caught him whacking off or something.

“Ah… nah,” he said. “I was just fooling around.”

Christ, his voice was definitely lower. He stood up and holy hell, he was taller! Damn he had to be a couple inches taller! It was hard to tell under that sweatshirt but he looked broader, too. …and were those tear drops, poking out the bottom of his swimming trunks? Damn, they were! And those calves… they were softballs and pretty cut up!

“I was going to say that’s too much weight for a newbie,” I said, “but you sure as hell don’t look like a newbie.”

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been working out a little.”

“A little?” Something wasn’t jibing. This was too much muscle in too short a time. “You’re not on steroids, Jimmy, are you? Because at your age, they could seriously stunt your growth.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “not steroids…” Then I saw him look down at his arm like he wanted to flex it but was holding back.

“Then what?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, sounding a little peeved. “I’m just having a growth spurt, alright?”

“Ok, ok, whatever you say. Don’t get your jockeys in a twist.” I decided to change the subject. “So, what’s with the swimming trunks? You’re not still going to that swimming hole of yours, are you?”

“No!” he said a little too quickly. “I don’t go there anymore… it’s getting too cold. And besides, it’s kind of a hassle to get there and I think it’s on someone’s private property. I don’t want to get arrested or anything.”

Something about his attitude didn’t seem right. What he was saying made perfect sense, but I got the impression he was lying to me. But that was ridiculous. Why would he lie to me about something like that?

On Monday after school, I met up with Kurt again in the school weight room.

“Week two, buddy!” I greeted him. “Ready to do some chest?”

“Absolutely!” He said, loading the bar with plates… a few too many plates.

“What are you doing, dude?” I asked. “You really shouldn’t be starting with anything heavier than 50 pounds.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all weekend and I want to try it with 70 pounds today. I feel stronger,” he said, flexing his stick arms. “I think I’m ready to push though to the next level.”

Yeah, right. He wasn’t fooling me for a second. “70 pounds, hunh? Wasn’t that the exact weight Jenna was using last week?” I asked.

“Was it?” asked Kurt, trying to look completely innocent and failing miserably.

“Let’s just start with the 2 and a half pound plates and see how you do with those. If everything goes smoothly we’ll see how you do with 5 pound plates.”

“Oh come on, let me just try,” he said.

“Dude, if you go too heavy, you’ll hurt yourself. Then it could be weeks before you get back in the gym. You want to risk that?”

“I guess not,” he said, looking down dejectedly.

“Then climb on the bench and let’s get going.”

I pulled the extra plates off the bar and Kurt got into position. He began his set and was doing just fine. He was just finishing his last rep when Jenna strolled over again. Kurt quickly wracked the weight and sat up.

“Ah… hi, Jenna,” he said. “Just finishing my warm-up.”

Oh brother.

“Looking good, Kurt. Whose your friend?” she asked, gesturing to me.

Me? What did she want with me?

“Oh him?” said Kurt. “That’s my buddy, Matt.”

“Oh, hi, Matt, I’m Jenna.” She stuck out her hand. Ok. I guess I could shake her hand,

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi,” she said, “I see you in here a lot,”.

I just short of shrugged. I hadn’t noticed her but then I really wasn’t looking… at least not at the girls.

“How long have you been working out?”

“Oh… I don’t know….,” I said, feigning a fuzzy memory. I knew to the day. “Since I was 12.”

“It shows,” she said.

Suddenly I caught Kurt giving me the Glare O’ Death. Oh no. I did not like where this was going – on so many levels. I’d better do something to save this.

“It’s great to finally meet you, Jenna,” I said. “Kurt talks about you all the time.”

Suddenly Kurt who was standing behind Jenna began frantically waving his arms and shaking his head no!

“Ah…” I said, “Ok. Actually, he never talks about you at all.”

Kurt flipped me off after that one. Hell, even I have to admit it was a pretty useless save.

“Kurt… Kurt’s got great potential,” I said. “He’s gonna be a real beast; wait and see.”

“I’m sure he will,” said Jenna, “with someone like you to train him.”

Suddenly and frantically Kurt started stripping the two and a half pound plates off the bar and replacing them with 25 pound plates. Christ, I knew what he was thinking as clearly as if I could read his mind. I had to stop him. But how could I do it without completely humiliating him in front of Jenna.

“Would you flex for me?” asked Jenna, looking up at me with big brown doe eyes.

“Ah…” I said, my eyes flickering frantically between Jenna and Kurt, who was sliding on to the bench. I wanted to call out to him to stop, but there was just a chance he might be able to squeeze out one rep. And if he succeeded, and we timed it right, he might just get the two of us out of this situation.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” said Jenna.

I had to admit I was a little tempted here. I loved showing off my 16 inch biceps, but if I flexed for Jenna right now, my ripped, vascular, bulging guns would definitely upstage Kurt’s little 95 pound bench press.

But Jenna didn’t wait for me to decide; she reached out and grabbed my upper arm.

“Whoa…,” she said. “You’re like stone! How much do you curl?”

Suddenly Kurt was pushing up on the bar as hard as he could. He was turning five different shades of red, but he got it up off the supports! Now was the time!

“Damn, Kurt, how may reps was that? I lost count,” I said hoping Jenna would turn and look.

But of course she didn’t. Kurt began the rep, lowering the bar. I was actually kind of proud of him. He was taking his time, just like I taught him. It was a solid negative rep. But when Kurt got to the bottom of the movement, that’s where he stayed. Damn! He was struggling, squirming, but he just couldn’t move that bar.

“I bet you curl at least a hundred pounds,” said Jenna.

“I…ah… yeah…sure…” I said, unable to take my eyes off Kurt. Suddenly he lost the battle. His arms collapsed and the bar came down on his chest, pinning him to the bench. Kurt was doing his best to squirm out from underneath it, but he looked just pathetic.

This is a disaster! If Jenna sees him now, it will be utter humiliation!

“See you around,” said Jenna. She was about to turn to go. I couldn’t let her see Kurt like that! I flexed my right arm and my beautiful, carved 16 incher bulged up. Not surprisingly, it stopped Jenna in her tracks.

Come on, Kurt! Hurry up and get out from under that thing!

“Nice,” said Jenna as she reached out and gave my bicep a squeeze.

Kurt was still struggling to free himself when suddenly a strong pair of hands appeared and lifted the bar right off of him. It was Greg Batson. “Thank God,” I sighed, mentally.

“What the hell is going on here?” said Greg. He looked genuinely pissed.

“I guess I kind of lost control of it,” said Kurt softly.

“You could have really hurt yourself,” said Greg. “Your useless workout partner should have been spotting you instead of hitting on that girl.” He shot me an angry glare.

Who? What? Where?

Kurt followed his glance and caught sight of Jenna just as she removed her hand from my bicep. Oh great, now Kurt looked like he wanted to kill me, too.

“Yeah, he is kind of douche,” said Kurt.

“Why don’t you come finish your workout with me?” said Greg.

“Thanks,” said Kurt. “I will.” Then the two of them, after giving me a look like they wished I’d spontaneously explode, turned and walked away.

Oh my god, by best friend just went off with the crush of my life and the two of them hated me.

And that left me with… Jenna—who looked like she wanted me to continue the gun show.

Great. Just fucking great. How could this have happened? How?

Of course, Kurt stopped talking to me after that. I called him, texted him, emailed him, hit him up on Facebook. Nothing. He even avoided me in the halls. Jenna, on the other hand was impossible to avoid. Suddenly she was everywhere. In fact it seemed every time I turned around she was standing there. I wasn’t sure how she did it. It almost seemed supernatural, and I wasn’t sure how to get rid of her. And I had to get rid of her somehow. I missed my friend.

Of course I still saw him every afternoon… in the weight room… working out with amazing Greg… Grrrrrrr.

I saw Jimmy a couple of days later. I was coming out of the school and there he was with the dork patrol. Jeeze, I don’t know how it was possible but he seemed even bigger! And seeing him with his friends really brought home how much he’d changed. He was easiest the tallest of them and he was definitely broader and way more thickly built than any of the others. His neck was really fucking thick. It was hard to tell with his jacket on but Jimmy looked like he could easily do military presses with his friend, little Pete Temple.

Pete of course was the junior member of the dork patrol and hadn’t even hit 5 feet yet. But then his whole family was kind of short. And he wasn’t just skinny, he was petite, you know he had really tiny bones. If he ever fell over it looked like he might shatter.

Then there was Donny Henderson. He was probably the tallest after Jimmy, but calling him chunky would have been kind. He had more padding than an easy chair and his face was just riddled with acne.

The final member of Jimmy’s little crew was Eric Dobson. Think big ears, freckles and a thick pair of heavy rimmed glasses and you’ve got him.

Yup, a sorrier bunch of losers was hard to imagine.

Toby Mathews thought the same thing and he pushed them aside as he strode right up to not-so-little Jimmy.

“We have some unfinished business,” said Toby. I guess he thought he was going to finish what he started the other week when Jimmy had lost him in the woods.

“Take a hike, Mathews,” said Jimmy.

That was a surprise. This was usually the part where Jimmy took off running.

Toby just grinned and said, “Take a hike. How about you take this instead?” And he nailed Jimmy right in the gut. And what a surprise it was to everyone when Jimmy took it almost without flinching. Toby took back his hand and was shaking it out in the air. Did he hurt it? On Jimmy? No, he couldn’t have. Jimmy must be wearing something under his jacket, like Clint Eastwood in that movie.

Then Jimmy hauled back and punched Toby right in the nose. I heard the crack even from where I was. Damn, blood was just started pouring out of Toby’s nose. “Oh fuck,” he said in a nasal voice. “Fuck!” and then he turned around clutching at his bleeding face and made a quick exit.

Everyone in the school yard started applauding. I went over to Jimmy and clapped him on the back. Damn, he was pretty hard under that jacket!

“Way to go, Jimmy,” I said. Then I turned to rest of the dork patrol and said, “See, if you guys all worked out like Jimmy here, you could be ruling this school.”

I thought I was just offering words of encouragement. If only I’d known.

Kurt kept avoiding me, and Jenna kept annoying me. After, like, the 10th time she “surprised” me outside my Trig class, I finally just said, “You know I’m gay, don’t you?”

“No you’re not,” she said. “You only think you are; and that’s because you never spent a night with me.”

“Yeah, that has to be it,” I said.

“Why don’t you come by my house tonight and see?” she said.

That was an invitation I really had no trouble refusing.

But I had a problem. Now that Kurt wasn’t talking to me, I was starting to get kind of lonely. One evening I even walked over to my backyard fence to see if Jimmy might be around. Of course there was no sign of him or his weight set. But I thought I heard clanking from the garage. I guess that only made sense. As the autumn was wearing on, it was getting too cold to work out outside. He must have moved his weight bench inside.

As I gave one last look at his garage before turning around to go back inside, I caught sight of something weird on the garage roof. It was just after twilight so it was kind of hard to make out what it was. At first I thought it was some kind of antenna or something, but then as I stared at it, I realized it was his family’s wrought iron patio table. What the hell was it doing up there…? Never mind that…how the hell did it get up there? It’s not like the wind could have blown it there. That thing was pretty heavy. Oh well, I’d have to ask Jimmy next time I saw him.

I could only take about another week of Kurt’s behavior before I finally cornered him outside the school. And I mean that quite literally. He was in a corner and there was no way out except past me and I was way stronger than he was.

“What do you want Matt?” he asked.

“I want you to start talking to me again,” I said.

“Why should I talk to the guy who stole my girlfriend?”

“Ok, first of all, she wasn’t your girlfriend. You barely talked to her. And secondly, I did not steel anyone!”

“Now you’re a liar, too,” he said. “How could you do this to me? You were my best friend and you stole my girl! And all this time I thought you were gay.”

“I am gay!” I said. “I’m as gay as they come… well, maybe not that gay, but pretty damn gay.”

“Then how come you’re always with Jenna? Everywhere I go I see the two of you together?”

“Dude, she stalks me. She won’t leave me alone. It’s like she has some kind of psychic radar that lets her know where I’m going to be and when I’m going to be there?”

“You mean she’s got a copy of your class schedule?” said Kurt.

I had to pause for a second to let that sink in. “It sounds a lot less creepy when you put it that way, but, yeah, that’s probably it.”

“Well, what did you expect with you flexing your big muscles all in front of her?”

“Buddy, I only did that so she wouldn’t turn and see you crushed by that barbell.”

Now it was his turn to pause and think. “Really?”

“Yeah, bro, of course. I’ve always got your back,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “guess I was wrong… sorry.”

“It’s ok, buddy. Friends again?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Awesome, maybe we could even work out together sometime. I mean, I know you workout with Greg now, and that’s gotta be awesome, but…”

I was really envious of Kurt. I’d had dreams about working out with Greg… and most of them had had sticky endings.

“Oh yeah… Greg…,” said Kurt.

“He must be a great workout partner,” I said

“To tell you the truth, he’s a little weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, every time he passes a mirror he pulls off his shirt and starts flexing in it.”

Oh my God, that was in my dream!

“And he’s always asking me to feel his muscles.”

Fuck! Oh fuck! I envied Kurt! “Really? What did they feel like—er I mean, seriously?”

“Yup, and the other day, after our workout, we went down to shower, and all the stalls except one were taken. He actually suggested we shower together—”

“Ok, shut up, Kurt. I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“But he also—”

“No, really, Kurt, if you say another word, I may have to hurt you.”

“Ok, but you’d probably make a much better workout partner for him than I did.”

“You think so?” I said.

“Yup,” said Kurt. “You both seem to be about the same level. Too bad he thinks you’re a douche.”

“He thinks I’m a what…? How…? Why would he think that?”

“Ahhhhh…,” said Kurt, looking guilty as fuck. “I don’t know.”

“Ok, Kurt, I really, really may have to hurt you now.”

Of course I didn’t. In fact we started working out together the next day. I was actually kind of proud of him. In just over a month of working out he’d gone from struggling with 55 pounds to finishing his bench work out with 6 reps at 75 pounds. Of course most of the credit went to me. I was the one who taught him how to work out. All he had to do was show up and do what I told him.

But he really seemed to be taking to the iron. I could actually have work out conversations with him now. Everything wasn’t just Jenna. He could tell he was getting bigger and stronger and he liked it.

Of course, like everything, this had its downside. He had this unrealistic picture of his progress. For some reason he was under the impression he was a junior Mr. Olympia. Don’t get me wrong; his flatness had definitely started to take on some shape, but he was still pretty much a stick.

“Oh come on, bro,” he said. “Halloween is still a week away. I can do it.”

“No, buddy, there’s no way you can go as the Hulk.”

“Oh come on dude, it would be so sweet. All I’d need would be a little green body paint. This body would take care of the rest,” he said spreading his skinny arms.

Yeesh. I was about to answer him when suddenly the thunderous voice echoed through the room.

“Ok, all you fuckin’ runts, clear out!”

I looked over and saw the biggest kid I’d ever seen standing by the weight room door. Holy shit, he was at least 6 foot 3 and wider than the doorway! He was wearing a wife beater so I had no trouble seeing his massive arms. He had huge muscular shoulders, biceps almost as big as soccer balls and forearms bigger than my thighs. And those giant arms were forced to arc out to his sides by his ridiculously wide back. Fuck, his pecs were another couple of near soccer balls, and they stretched that wife beater so far out in front of him, it was causing the bottom of the shirt to hike up and show off his brick like abs. His legs were the proverbial tree trunks and they pulled his workout shorts so tight around them I couldn’t understand how they just didn’t fly apart – especially considering the extra large package he was obviously carrying around inside them.

“You heard me!” he shouted. “Get out! We’re going to work out now and we don’t want any of you little boys getting in our way!”

“We?” I couldn’t help thinking. I looked over and saw another three big guys enter the room. Two of them were nowhere near as huge as their leader, but they still outsized me , and the third guy… Holy crap! He wasn’t just bigger than the leader, he was a monster, just fucking humongous—almost inhuman! He had to be nearly 7 feet tall and about 5 feet wide at the shoulders. He was shirtless so it was easy to see his body was all muscle, Huge thick enormous traps bulged up on either side of a tree trunk neck. He had gigantic, satiated delts that flowed into enormous, veined wrapped upper arms that looked like two massive muscle mountains, even when relaxed. His forearms were as thick around as a goal post, and his chest was two basketballs, hard, solid and ripped.

His abs… His abs were eight fucking mountainous plateaus of muscle leading down to his workout shorts—which didn’t do much to hide his python cock and his orange-sized balls. And his legs, crap, his thighs were so wide, the football players could probably practice blocking with them, though I doubt they’d budge them an inch. And I could see each and every gigantic leg muscle bulge and ripple under his skin.

He saw me gaping at him and flexed a bicep. He grinned as it expanded into a vein covered basketball. Then, not taking his eyes off me, he ran his hand over it, squeezing and messaging it. Then ran his hands over his massive, rock hard pecs and down over his muscle brick stomach..

Fuck, looking at him… so much muscle bulging out over every inch of his giant frame, I felt myself go rock hard in under a second.

Who was this guy? No way in hell could one of my classmates have grown into this beast without my noticing. Maybe he wasn’t a student. I was pretty sure you’d have to be at least 30 to have a body like that, but no… His face was the face of a high school kid! How was that possible…? Each of these guys… They had the faces of high school kids, but the bodies of guys who’d been pumping iron for a decade or more.

Then the leader – the first guy in – turned his gaze directly on me. I swear my heart stopped. Then he said, “Not you, Matt. You and your friend can stay if you want.”

Holy fuck! How did this guy know my name? Did I know him? I looked closely at his face and my heart, which had stopped earlier, just about leapt up my throat and out of my mouth.

“Is that…?” asked Kurt in a shaky voice

“Yeah…” I answered equally shocked.

“Jimmy?” I said. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“Didn’t recognize me, right?” he grinned. “Check this out!” Then he reached up grabbed his shirt and ripped it right off his own back. Hoooooly fuck, he was all muscle, every freaking, bulging, vein covered inch of him! His pecs were like round hard melons, his shoulders and back were as wide as the door. His upper arms were at least the size of my head, with thick angry veins leading up to bowling ball delts.

Damn, he was muscle perfection. Besides that killer upper body, he had the legs of a total beast. Each of his huge thighs was every bit as big around as his waist and carved with rolling, rippling sinew.

“Nothing,” said the hugely muscled neighbor child. “Just hit my growth spurt. That’s all.” And he flexed showing me a huge round bicep bigger than a soft ball!

Growth spurt my ass! I’ve seen virtually all my friends and classmates go through their growth spurts and I’ve never seen anything even close to this. But you don’t call a 6’ 3” behemoth an out and out liar. That wouldn’t be good manners.

“And who are your friends?” I asked.

“Ha,” he snorted. “You don’t recognize theme either, hunh? That’s ok. We get that a lot.”

I looked again and almost passed out on the spot. It was the dork patrol, except they were huge! …and one of them was a fucking muscle giant!

Donny Henderson—his acne was gone, his padding was gone; he was still thick but it was solid brawn! Muscle was bulging out all over him.

Eric Dobson had grown into his big ears. Besides, with arms like his, no one was going to be looking at his ears anyway. He still had freckles, but now they covered a rolling, bulging landscape of pecs, shoulders and abs. He was another total stud.

That meant the gigantic seven foot muscle monster had to be… holy crap…little Pete Temple. One look at his face confirmed it. What the fuck happened to him? He was such a fragile little wisp. Now it looked like a car could fall on him and he wouldn’t notice. Holy fuck!

“It looks like you and your friends all hit your growth spurts at the same time,” I said.

“Yeah,” grinned Jimmy. “Funny how that worked.”

Our weight room wasn’t big and by this time most of people there had picked up their stuff and left. But there was this one guy who was plugged into his Ipod and hadn’t heard Jimmy and the dork patrol—I had to stop calling them that. I guess they were the beast patrol now.

The guy was at the squat rack. He had just lifted the bar onto his shoulders and was about to start a set with 225. Jimmy strode over and easily lifted the bar right off the guy’s shoulders. The guy whirled around to see what happened and found himself facing Jimmy’s bulging striated pecs.

“I guess you didn’t hear me,” said Jimmy. “The weight room’s closed. Get out.” Then Jimmy started doing curls with the 225. Fuck, look at those arms swelling into hard, round, vascular massiveness. The guy took one look at Jimmy’s display of raw muscle, grabbed his stuff and ran from the room.

“Jeeze,” said Kurt. “How’d he get so big so fast?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but one way or another, I’m going to find out.”

Discovering Jimmy’s secret proved a lot harder than I thought. Neither Jimmy nor any of his crew would say anything about it. They just kept repeating the growth spurt story, but there had to be more to it. There just had to be. But I had no idea how to find out what it was.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Kurt about a week later at lunch.

“Too bad they’re not still little. Then you could force them to tell you,” said Kurt.

“If they were still little,” I replied, “there’d be nothing for them to tell.”

“Oh yeah,” said Kurt. “Good point.”

“Maybe we could pay one of them to tell us,” I said. “How much money do you have?”

“About $22.50,” said Kurt.

“22.50? That’s it? That’s pathetic!” I said.

“Pathetic? How much do you have?”

“About $45.00…” I said averting my eyes.

“That’s twice what I have. That makes you twice as pathetic!”

“Ah… no, Kurt. It doesn’t work that way. I’m only half as pathetic. No, don’t try and do the math. You’ll give yourself a headache.

“So, together that’s…” started Kurt.

“$67.50,” I finished.

“Probably not enough to buy the secret of the century,” said Kurt

“Probably not,” I said. “So, if we don’t have money, we’ll have to buy it with something else.”

“Something else?” said Kurt. “What else is there?”

“I don’t suppose any of them are gay,” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Kurt. “Why?”

“If you have to ask, I’m not going to answer.”

“Oh!” said Kurt. “You were going to… Oh…”

“Yeah, well that won’t work,” I said.

“It’s too bad you are gay,” said Kurt. “Other wise you could just give Donny Henderson a copy of Rage of the Dead. He’s been going crazy waiting for that to come out. I bet he’d tell us for that.”

“Ok, usually I can follow you Kurt, buddy, but this time you’ve got me stumped. What does my sexuality have to do with the most anticipated video game release of the year?”

I knew Donny Henderson was a die-hard gamer but whatever else Kurt had in mind… I just didn’t get it.

“Jenna!” said Kurt like he’d just told me the sky was blue. If anything I was even more lost.

“What about her?” I asked.

“Jenna is a beta tester for Scared Soft, the company who makes Rage of the Dead. She’s had a beta copy for a couple of weeks now. She’s so stuck on you, you could probably romance it right out from under her.”

“I could,” I said, winking at him, “or you could.”

Kurt kind of looked at the ground and shuffled his feet. “Nah,” he said, “she barely knows my name. You were right; she goes for guys with guns.”

Damn. Did I really want to do this? I mean, I knew Kurt was right about one thing; Donny would sell his soul for a copy of that game. But what would I have to do to get it for him?

I wrestled with the idea for the rest of the day. But in the end I just had to know how those guys got that big—no matter what the cost. And at about 7:00 that night, I drove up in front of Jenna’s house.

I decided to keep it strictly business, to walk right up and just lay it on the table for her. I’d try to buy it first, and if the dizzying sum of 67.50 didn’t move her… Then I’d see what else it would take.

I rang the bell and waited getting more and more nervous at the seconds passed. I wondered if this is what straight guys felt when they rang a girl’s doorbell. But of course it wasn’t. They would probably have been hoping for exactly the opposite of what I was hoping.

The door opened and thank God it was Jenna who opened it. Imagine if it had been her dad. What would I have said to him? That was one situation I never expected to find myself in!

Anyway, at first Jenna looked surprised to see me. Then this kind of coy smile crept across her face as she looked me up and down and undressed me with her eyes. God, I felt so dirty and so cheep.

“Hi Matt,” she said.

“Hey Jenna,” I said. “Surprised to see me?”

“Not really,” she said. “I knew you’d come around sooner or later. Want to come in? My parents went out to dinner.”

That, at least, was a break. I stepped in and looked around. Nice house.

“Can I take your jacket?” she said.

There was no easy answer to that one. I wanted to say, “No, I won’t be here long.” But if she wouldn’t take the 67.50, I might have to be… and the jacket would certainly come off then.

“Sure,” I said, shrugging it off. As she took my jacket those eyes wondered over my torso again. I had deliberately worn a tight t-shirt, one that showed off my hard, bulging pecs and wrapped tightly around my large, cut biceps. My forearms were pretty ripped and corded, too. That’s right; I was using my overt masculinity as a tool to manipulate her. I’d like to say I wasn’t proud of myself, but I actually kind of was. And man, what an effective tool it was. I looked down at those carved arms of mine and Hell, if I’d been her, I’d have given me anything I wanted. And the appreciation was not hard to read in her face, too. At least she had taste.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I stopped by,” I started. I figured this was as good of an opening as any for a business discussion.

But she didn’t say anything. She just dropped to her knees and started tugging at my fly.

“Hey, hey, hey, whoa there!” I said, trying to pull her hand away, but this girl was determined. No sooner did I pull one hand away than another one flew in to continue the job.

“Just a minute, sister,” I said, using both of my hands to grab both of hers. “We need to discuss terms.”

“Terms?” she said.

“Yup,” I said. “I’ve got something you want and you’ve got something I want.”

“Hunh?” she said.

“You want full, unrestricted access to man land, and I want…”

“What?”

“Rage of the Dead.”

“Oh, is that all,” she said, and dove back into my crotch.

And that, my friends, concluded negotiations.

After she practically ripped my pants open—she was unnecessarily rough and those were some nice pants—she asked me to remove my shirt. I decided to humor her. After all I really didn’t expect anything to happen on my part. She was, after all, a girl.

But when she released my little man from his cave, she began to use her hands and tongue to work a little magic on him. And man, I’m telling you it had to be black magic or voodoo or some shit like that because I’ll be damned if he didn’t start to respond.

In a matter of seconds I had a full fledge hard-on. What the fuck was happening? But oh fuck, it felt good. Damn, this woman new what she was doing! But, seriously, I defy any guy out there, gay or straight, to go through what I was going through and not get a serious hard-on. That tongue, those fingers, holy shit!

But just as my cock felt ready to explode, she disserted her post and started traveling up my ripped and muscled torso with her tongue. That was when I noticed she was naked! When the hell had she gotten naked! And then I realized I was naked too (although I had a much better idea how that had happened)!

Before I could react her tongue had reached my nipples and was dancing around them. HOLY SHIT! I was someplace I’d never been. And then she mounted me, taking me within her and squeezing.

FUCK! Now I knew what straight guys were always babbling about. It felt amazing in there! I came in seconds, almost at the same time she let out an ear-splitting squeal.

I was panting and covered in sweat as she rolled off me. I looked over and she was in about the same shape.

“Hi,” she said, just as some headlights spilled in through the front windows and made patterns on the wall, before winking out completely.

“Damn!” she said. “My parents are home!” Then she was shoving my clothes at me at the same time she was pulling on her own. “You gotta go!”

Panic hit me and I started dressing as fast as I could. She grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward the back door while I still only had one leg in my pants, forcing me to hop all the way through the kitchen. Before I knew it, I was lacing my Vans on her back steps. Suddenly the door opened up behind me. A moment of terror hit me as I was sure it would be her dad. But it wasn’t. It was her. She bent down, shoved something in my hand and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

“Now get out of here!” she said.

I snuck around the side of the house and didn’t even look at the thing in my hand until I was stopped at a traffic light about 10 blocks away. It was the Rage of the Dead disc. I had done it, but at what cost? My cock wasn’t the only thing that gotten fucked back there. She’d done a pretty good job on my mind as well. What did all that mean? Had I really just had straight sex and liked it? Yup. Holy crap!

The next day at school I was not myself. If I had been I would never have walked up to Kurt and dangled the disc in front of him like I did.

“Holy shit!” said Kurt. “Where’d you get that?”

“From Jenna,” I replied, a little surprised at his question, “just like you said.”

“What do you mean just like I said?” asked Kurt.

“You know… I romanced it out of her.”

“You romanced her? You romanced my girlfriend?”

“Dude, yesterday you said she barley talks to you. Now today she’s your girlfriend?”

“It doesn’t matter. You know how I feel about her. How could you do this?”

“How could I do it? It was your idea!”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Yes it was! You sat right there and said I could probably romance it out of her. Those were your exact words!”

“I also said I wanted to kill Rick Petersen when he asked her out, but you don’t see him lying dead in a pool of his own blood, do you?”

“I guess not. Look, dude, I didn’t mean anything. It was all for the cause.”

“The cause?” said Kurt, picking up the disc. “What exactly did you do? She wouldn’t have just given this to you? Did you fuck her?”

His question took me so much by surprise that I guess I turned red as I stammered, “No…of course not…”

“You did! You fucked her. Oh my God you fucked my girlfriend!” Kurt yelled entirely too loudly, loudly enough to draw attention to us. I looked around, and of course Greg Batson was sitting at the next table and once again he was giving me the glare-of-death. Terrific.

“Dude, I think you’re forgetting that I’m gay.” Or at least I thought I was. Maybe I was straight? I looked over at Greg again and sproing! Nope, not straight. Maybe I was bi?

“Oh yeah…” said Kurt, calming down, “…gay… It’s a good thing, too, otherwise you might have to beat the crap out of me.”

“Dude, don’t you have that backwards?” I said.

“With your arms? I don’t think so,” said Kurt. “But I’d have to go down swinging… as a point of honor.”

“Whatever, Kurt,” I said. “Let’s go find Donny.”

Donny wasn’t hard to find and we were right; He really wanted that game. As soon as I waved it in front of his face he practically started drooling.

“It’s yours,” I said. “All you have to do is tell me how you guys got so big.”

“I don’t know…,” said Donny, never taking his eyes off the game disc.

“Ok, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll just put it up on Craig’s List.”

“No!” shouted Donny. “Ok, I’ll tell.”

I was gambling that Donny wasn’t used to being so big yet. If he’d wanted to he could easily have just pounded me into a pancake and just taken the disc.

“I guess it’d be alright since you’re Jimmy’s friend and all, but you can’t tell anyone else, ok?”

“Ok,” I said.

“Do you remember that day when Jimmy broke Toby Mathew’s nose?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Well, we all kept bugging Jimmy to find out how he did it. At first he wouldn’t say anything but finally he took us down to the boy’s room – you know the one in the basement that stinks so no one ever uses it?”.

I knew the place.

“He took off his shirt and he was just huge and ripped underneath. He had a solid cut six Pack, hard defined biceps as big as softballs, round bulging, striated pecs, and huge traps and shoulders. No one could believe it. At first he would only say he was having a growth spurt. But we knew that was bullshit.”

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“So we kept bugging him about it and then he asks us if we want to be like him. Of course we said yes. So he had us all get our swimming trunks and meet him at the edge of the Hampton Woods. Then he blind folds us and leads us way deep inside to this pond or something, and he tells us we have to go swimming in it.

“Well, it was kind of cold and nobody really wanted to do it, but Jimmy takes off his clothes and one look at those ripped, bulging muscles and we all decided to try it. It was fucking freezing but if felt really good in a really weird kind of way. We only stayed in for about 15 mintues but when we got out we all looked… well better. I’d definitely lost some fat and I could just feel that my muscles were bigger. So we decided to keep going—everyday. And every day we’d just get bigger, buffer and stronger. It was awesome!”

“What happened to Pete?” I asked. “Why is he so much bigger than you other guys?”

“Oh that,” chuckled Donny. “That happened the last day we went there. It was just getting too cold to swim and we knew we probably wouldn’t be able to stay in more than a couple of minutes but we want to get one last swim in before the winter.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“There was this one spot in the pond,” continued Donny, “out around the center where it was always bubbling.”

“Bubbling?” I asked.

“Yeah, just big bubbles of air just kept plopping to the surface.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Donny. “The water was so murky you really couldn’t see far underwater. Any way it kind of freaked us out so we stayed away from it. But not Pete. He just kept trying to figure out what it might be. So that last day he decided to swim out there and check it out.

“So he gets there and swims down to try and see. But he pops up a minute later saying he can’t see a thing and he’s going to dive even deeper—as deep as he can. We’re all shouting for him to come back to shore because it was really cold and our teeth were already chattering. But he doesn’t listen. He just dives down again.

“We were standing there freezing our butts off for what seemed like forever. We actually started to wonder if he was in trouble or something when suddenly the water starts bubbling like crazy. Then Pete pops up in the middle of it flailing his arms around like he’s drowning.

“We couldn’t go in after him because we were already turning blue. We were shouting at him to swim to shore, swim to shore! But it didn’t look like he could hear us. He was just yelling and waving his arms splashing around. Then suddenly he just raised his right arm in the air and it just started getting longer! It was amazing. At first it looked a little weird and kinda creepy, especially when his veins started getting thicker. They kinda looked like vines crawling up his arm, but that wasn’t all—his arm was bulking up, too.

“It just kept stretching longer and longer and muscles just seemed to be rippling out of it making it bigger, fuller and bulgier. His biceps got fucking enormous! It was fucking amazing. It was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And we could see his neck getting thicker as his voice started getting really deep. His shoulders and traps were just inflating like balloons. In seconds they got incredibly huge and ripped. His yells were turning into roars and he was shouting, “Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah!”

“It was over in a minute, the thrashing, the bubbling, everything. And then he started swimming to shore. Those huge arms were just pulling him through the water incredibly fast. Then he stopped a ways out from the shore. For a second we couldn’t figure out what was happening; then we realized he was walking! His had gotten so fucking tall he was already touching bottom. .As he got closer to the shore he kept rising up and up out of the water. The first things we saw were his huge fucking shoulders, fucking ridiculously ripped and bulging out all over! Then up came pecs like bowling balls exploding out of his chest at least two feet in front of him. Water was cascading off them like fucking Niagara Falls. As he kept rising from the water we saw his arms and they were just massive—I’m talking cannon ball biceps with thick veins running all over them arced out to his side because his fucking back was too wide to let them hang at his side! And then we saw the water running off abs like a fucking brick wall.

“His swimming trunks were completely shredded, ripped apart by massive veiny thighs. They weren’t covering anything—I mean anything! And it was fucking gigantic—if you know what I mean—and he was pretty much naked. And so fucking tall… Well, you’ve seen him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen him.” And I continued to see him every day at the gym when I worked out. Bulging, ripped, gargantuan muscles just erupted out all over him everywhere you looked from head to foot. The only thing even remotely recognizable was his face, grinning down from the top of an immense body, an unbelievably powerful frame built entirely of incredibly massive muscles. It was impossible to see him and not stare.

Did I want that? Oh yeah.

“Did Pete see what was at the bottom of the pond?”

“He’s not sure. He couldn’t see too well. He said it was old and rusty and air was bubbling out of it. When he touched it, it just fell apart and all the air seemed to escape at once. After that happened he just raced for the surface, and the rest… well, you know the rest.”

“So where is this pond?”

“I don’t know,” said Donny. “Jimmy made us go blindfolded. But we’re going back in the spring, just as soon as we can. We all wanna get like Pete.”

“I bet you do,” I said.

I gave Donny his disc and went away to contemplate my next move.

“That’s insane!” said Kurt as soon as we were alone. “Are you trying to tell me there’s some kind of magic swimming pool out there?”

“I don’t know about magic,” I said, “But there’s something going on. I think it’s worth checking out.”

“Do you even know where it is?”

“It’s somewhere in the woods behind the back Hampton road.”

“The back Hampton road? Those woods go on for miles!”

“It can’t be that far in. We’ll have to search in sections.”

“Are you sure Donny’s not just blowing smoke up our butts?”

“Dude, what happened to them is not natural. Can you think of a better explanation?”

“Ok, but you better be right.”

It was getting dark kind of early those days so we couldn’t go searching after school. We had to do it on the weekends. It was not easy. The Hampton woods were not tame. There were hills and ditches and thick prickly bushes everywhere. We both got pretty scratched up. This was the first time I ever found myself grateful I’d spent that year in the Boy scouts. I still had my compass and I remembered how to use it. We’d have gotten lost plenty of times without it. I thought Kurt would whine and complain all the time, but it turns out he was as interested in discovering their secret as I was. We were both pretty obsessed. We’d have to be. We went searching weekend after weekend, even if it was snowing.

One day, we were out there in the woods. It was pretty cold and windy that day, if I remember, and the wind was whipping right through our jackets. We were so cold we had just about decided to call it a day early, when we saw this other guy trudging though the woods. He saw us, walked over to us and looked us up and down.

He was a strange cat. To start with he was really short. I doubt if he were even 5 feet tall. He looked like he might be somewhere in his late 20’s. He was wearing glasses and one of those hats that were fur lined and had flaps on the sides. His coat would have looked far more at home on Wall Street, rather than the middle of the woods.

“You boys lost?” he said to us in a rather nasally, whiney voice.

“No,” we both answered simultaneously. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my compass and waved it at him.

“We’re just out for a hike,” I said.

“Not the greatest weather for it,” he said.

“Merit badge,” I said. “We’re trying to earn a merit badge. What are you doing here?”

“Louis Poindexter,” he said. “I’m with the EPA.”

“The EPA?” we both said simultaneously again.

“You boys haven’t come across any environmental hazards during your hike, have you?”

“Environmental hazards?” we both said. Ok, that was the third time.

“What kind of environmental hazard?” I asked, alone this time.

“Anything,” he said. “Anything that looks like it might pose a threat to this natural habitat.”

The two of us looked at each other feeling kind of puzzled.

“I saw a candy wrapper back there,” said Kurt pointing vaguely in the direction behind us.

“Ah, thanks, kid, but I’m looking for something a little more threatening than that. Here’s my card,” he said handing us a business card. “Call me if you come across anything that looks seriously wrong.”

I looked at the card. It had his name, the initials EPA and a phone number. It looked pretty plain, almost as though it were made on a PC.

“Alright, boys,” he said. “Enjoy your hike, and keep your eyes open.” Then he trudged off into the woods.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Louis. I was pretty sure he wasn’t who he said he was. But whatever he was doing, it was his own business.

Every-so-often after that we would see Louis off in the distance trudging through the snow, looking for whatever it was he was looking for. He would stop, wave, and then carry on his way.

And it just kept getting colder and colder. We’d had more than a few snowy days by the time December rolled around and we finally caught a break.

We came across a chain link fence. It wasn’t new. It looked like it had been there for a while. It was rusty but still sturdy and strong.

“What’s this doing here?” I said. “A fence in the middle of the woods?”

“Seems pretty random to me,” said Kurt. “Who are they trying to keep out?”

“Us?” I suggested. “Let’s do our best to disappoint them. Come on.”

We climbed the fence without too much trouble and ventured further into the woods. We hadn’t gone far when we spotted a large pond through the trees. My heart started beating faster. Was this it? We rushed forward, breaking through the dead, brittle underbrush, crashing through like a couple of bulldozers. I was pulling off my jacket as I went. I didn’t care how cold it was. I wanted a taste of what Jimmy had. I could almost feel t hose muscles swelling up on me. We finally broke out of the woods—and stopped short. Fuck. I mean really FUCK!

The pond was frozen clean over.

I bent down by the edge. It looked like solid ice at least a foot thick.

Fuck.

Kurt and I stood there staring morosely at the frozen pond.

“What do we do now?” asked Kurt. “Wait for spring?”

“We don’t even know if this is the right pond,” I said. “Let’s look around a little.”

We started off walking around the edge of the pond.

“What are we looking for?” asked Kurt.

“I don’t know,” I said, “signs that Jimmy and his friends have been here. Maybe something they left behind or maybe something weird or unusual.”

Suddenly we heard something moving through the bushes, something big.

“What’s that?” asked Kurt, his voice cracking. “Are there bears around here?”

The rustling was getting closer.

“Never heard of any,” I said, gulping.

“And you keep on top of that, do you?” asked Kurt. “I mean I haven’t exactly seen any issues of Field and Stream lying around your house.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Maybe we should Google it.”

I was being sarcastic but in a flash Kurt whipped out his phone and spoke the works, “Are there any bears in Hampton Woo—-AHHHHH!”

Kurt yelled for two reasons. First, the big something had finally burst out of the bushes in front of us, and second, he discovered he had no service. I don’t know which scared him more.

For me, it was definitely the beasty that was suddenly standing in front of us. It was built like a bulldog only about twice as big. It had a two foot long bushy tail and a kind of a pointed face like a badger or a… It couldn’t be.

“Holy shit! Is that …?” I gasped.

“A demonic monster from hell?” whimpered Kurt.

“No… It looks like… It looks like… a squirrel,” I said.

“No fucking way!” said Kurt. “No fucking way does any fucking squirrel get that fucking big!”

The squirrel-thing picked up a great big fallen branch in it’s big muscular front arms—it had to have at least 18 inch biceps—and just started gnawing through it. It didn’t pay any attention to us at all.

“Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s a good thing it’s a vegetarian.”

“Ah yeah,” said Kurt. “That thing is eating wood. Since when is wood a vegetable? It is holding up what has to be a 200 pound log, and chomping through it with just its teeth.”

“We better not let it bite us then,” I said.

“Good idea,” said Kurt and we slowly started moving away from the giant squirrel-thing.

“You were looking for something weird …?” said Kurt. “I think we found it.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “This has got to be the place.”

“So what do we do now? Come back in the spring?” asked Kurt, hopefully.

“No,” I said, “I want to look around a little more. See what else we can find.”

“Ok,” said Kurt. “I only hope it isn’t more squirrels.”

“Or bears,” I said.

“Great,” said Kurt, turning white, and looking around nervously. “Why’d you have to say that? If that’s a squirrel, what’s a bear gonna look like?”

“Seriously, dude,” I said, “don’t bears usually hibernate during the winter?”

That seemed to calm him down and we continued around the pond. We saw a couple of huge birds, but that’s about all, nothing with teeth, nothing that wanted anything to do with us. And we didn’t see much else until we got to the other side of the pond.

“What’s that?” I said looking out onto the ice. A little further on there was a weird shape sticking about six inches out of the ice just a few feet from the shore. It didn’t look natural; it looked manmade.

“I don’t know,” said Kurt. “Probably just a rock or something.”

“I’m gong to check it out,” I said.

“Are you crazy?” asked Kurt. “You don’t know how thick the ice is. You could fall through.”

“It looks ok to me,” I said. “I’m going to risk it.”

I stepped cautiously out onto the ice and listened carefully for the telltale sound of cracking. When I didn’t hear anything, I moved a little further out. Everything seemed ok so I cautiously crept all the way out to the weird shape. It was a section of a metal drum or a barrel. Clearly most of it was submerged under the ice with only small portion of it protruding above the surface.

“It’s some kind of a metal barrel,” I called back to Kurt.

“Yeah,” Kurt called back. “There’s another one over here.”

I crossed back over the ice and sure enough, there was another one right at the edge of the pond. This one was on its side half out of the water and we could see it had completely rusted through. Whatever had been inside was now long gone.

“Let’s see if there are any more,” I said.

It didn’t take us long to find what we were looking for. Just a little distance into the woods away from the shore, partly obscured by bushes, we found another barrel. This one was standing upright and was completely unmarked except for a symbol which I recognized immediately. It was the bio-hazard symbol.

“You think there’s anything inside?” asked Kurt.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s one way to find out.”

The top was all rusted. Kurt picked up a rock and began hammering on it. Three blows and he broke through. We peered in through the jagged hole and saw the barrel was filled with a thick blue sludge.

“Do you think this is the stuff that made those guys grow?” asked Kurt.

“Gotta be,” I answered. “What else could it have been?”

Kurt dipped his index finger into the barrel and when he pulled it out, he had a couple of drops of the blue gunk on the tip.

“Don’t touch that!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Finding out for sure,” He said. Then he stuck his finger in his mouth and licked it clean!

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted.

“Just testing it,” he said. If I grow a few muscles, then we’ll know.”

“You idiot!” I said. “That stuff was in the pond, diluted by at least a hundred thousand gallons of water. Who knows what the straight shit will do!”

“Fuck!” he said. “I didn’t think of that.” Then he tried to spit some of the sludge out, but it wasn’t working. “Damn it! Damn it!” he said, frantically wiping his finger on his shirt. But it was already pretty much clean. He’d just sucked it all off.

“Jesus!” he said. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I said, panicking. “Maybe we could go to a hospital or something…”

Kurt’s eyes went wide. “Oh shit! Oh shit, dude!” he said, “I feel really weird. I think… I think something’s happening…”

Suddenly there was this loud double POP as Kurt’s boots exploded. I mean they just flew to pieces, leaving him standing in the snow with his bare feet. And Christ, what bare feet! They were huge like fucking snow shoes with toes like half dollar rolls!

“Shit!” he said. “My fucking feet! Look at my fucking feet! What am I going to do now?”

“Christ, I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? Maybe you should have asked that question before you started guzzling the shit!” I shouted.

“Oh thanks. That’s a lot of help, Matt. Where am I going to find shoes? Do you think maybe they’re just swollen? Maybe they’ll shirnk baaaaaa..ahhhhhhhh!” And suddenly the fingers on his gloves started popping open, releasing huge sausage-like fingers seconds before the back of his gloves split apart as his hands expanded to about the size of dinner plates.

“Oh fuck!” he cried, holding up his huge mitts. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! I’m a freak! My mom’s gonna kill me! What’s she gonna say when she sees this?” He waved his giant hands in the air. Jezze, his palms were way bigger than his face!

“It’s ok, dude,” I said. “We’ll get you to a hospital. They’ll be able to—”

“Oh fuck!” he yelled. “Something else is happening!” and then he started shuddering. “Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! Arghhhhh!” At first I couldn’t tell what was happening, but then I noticed it. He was stretching up. Slowly his pants cuffs were rising up his shins and his wrists were sliding down out of his sleeves as he gradually began inching taller. He had already been a little taller than me and I watched in amazement as he slowly stretched higher and higher.

“Damn,” he said, looking down at me as he passed six feet. “Maybe this isn’t so bad.” The bottom of his parker rose up above his waste band and his shirt tails pulled out of his pants. Fuck, he was over six and a half feet now, way over, and he was still stretching. “I think maybe I can deal with this,” he said. Up and up he went. When he stopped his pants cuffs were just below his knees revealing his bean pole legs. A good six inches of his slim, smooth stomach was showing between the waste band of his pants and the bottom of his parker. And his arms were sticking out of his sleeves almost to his elbows. Christ, he had to be well over seven feet tall! To be honest he looked a little ridiculous, kind of like a clown on stilts in clothes that were ridiculously small on him. And with those skinny arms and legs, his oversized hands and feet still looked awkward and gawky.

“I always wanted to be taller,” he said, checking out his ridiculously long limbs, “Hey, do you think I could play pro basketball.”

“Pro basketball?!!!! Dude, you’re almost fucking 8 feet tall! We’ve got to do something to get you back to normal!”

He looked down at his tall gangly body. “Do I have to go all the way back to normal?” he asked. “Maybe I could keep a few inches.”

“Keep a few inches?!!!! What the fuck are you talking about? You’ll be lucky if you’re not stuck like this forever!”

“That wouldn’t be too bad. I actually kind of like this.” Kurt’s eyes went wide. “Whoa,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I think I’m getting bigger,” he said, and his breathing started getting harder. “Oh man, this feels awesome…”

“Oh fuck, dude,” I said. “You’re already gong to be scraping the ceilings. How much taller are you going to get?”

“Taller? I’m not getting taller, dude,” said Kurt. “I’m getting bigger.” And then I saw what he meant.

I probably noticed his stomach first because I was just about eye level with it. I could see it gradually broadening out and getting thicker, his abdominal muscles slowly emerging from under his skin.

I looked down and saw that behind his shins, his previously non-existent calf muscles swelling to the size of grapefruits, and getting bigger. His thighs, too, were swelling inside his pants.

His stick-like forearms broadened out as cords and tendons rose out of them and even his neck was getting thicker.

“Oh yeah, dude,” he said. His voice had dropped about an octave. “This feels amazing! I feel so fucking big, hard and powerful. Just look at my fucking muscles!” He started clenching and unclenching his fists watching his forearms bulge with muscle and then relax, bulge bigger and relax, bulge even bigger and relax. I heard a rustling and popping sound come from his parker as it started to inflate like a balloon. His pecs were already pushing out past the unzipped front and pulling his already undersized t-shirt tight. “Fuck, look at me,” he said, looking down at his expanding body, “I feel fucking awesome. It’s like being pumped full of cement.” He groped his own chest. “So hard. And my legs…”

His pant legs, which at this point resembled old fashioned knickers, were being stretched and distorted by huge thigh muscles, far larger than anything they were designed to hold. The first seam gave way and started a symphony of exploding rips and tears as a pair of juggernaut quads shredded and tore their way out into the open. Fuck. Look at those things. Huge, thick muscles woven together like massive vines around giant tree trunks with the pathetic remaining scraps of his pants plastered to them by sweat and melting snow.

“YEAH!” shouted Kurt, flexing his massive quads and making them explode with even more unbelievable size. “I can feel the bulk, the hardness, the fucking power! FUCK YEAH!”

And his cock was a fucking firehose drapped over two soccer balls!

I heard a squeaky kind of stretching noise followed by a popping as the seams on his parker began giving way. Tears opened up and the fibrous white stuffing began spilling out as his whole upper body, from the bottom of his ribcage on up just kept getting wider and thicker.

“OH YEAH!” he shouted, and he raised his arms into a double bi.

Holy shit. I knew his arms used to be thin, but not anymore. Huge masses were stretching those parker sleeves from within. I could hear rapid popping and ripping as they just kept getting bigger and bigger until the huge rock hard mountains of flesh exploded out amidst an eruption of white stuffing.

“How’s that for some fucking guns!” Kurt shouted, staring at his monstrous biceps, and practically drooling. “Fuck! OH FUCK! I can feel it all over me! All my fucking muscles… They’re iron hard and they’re getting fucking huge!”

And they were. Bit by bit, his body was getting thicker and wider. SCREEECH! SCREEECH! STREEEEETCH! POP! His parker was breaking apart under the strain of his steadily increasing girth.

The bottom of his t shirt was rising higher and higher as his torso expanded. . I could actually see his smooth stomach separate into segments as his abs solidified and then suddenly began bulging out into a heaving brick wall of muscle. His huge pecs were stretching the hell out of the white undershirt. “Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh! OH SHIT!” he shouted as suddenly, with a huge riiiiiip, they just exploded out of it.

Fuck! His chest was massive, just fucking massive, two huge striated orbs jutting out at least two feet in front of him. Kurt reached up with his wide hands and ran them all over those rock-like mounds before they moved down to his abs which were now like eight muscle boulders piled on top of each other.

“Fuck me…” he whispered. “FUCK ME!”

There was another explosion of stuffing as Kurt’s sleeves were ripped away from the rest of the parker by his growing megalithic shoulders. Twice the size of my head, they were striated, segmented perfection. “I love this!” He yelled. “I FUCKIN LOVE MY HARD RIPPED POWERFUL MUSCLES! Slowly Kurt flexed his bis, grinning and enjoying every second as in a rapid succession of tears and pops, his massive, bulging, vein-covered arms slowly expanded, completely ripping apart his sleeves and tearing them to ribbons. “I FEEL LIKE A FUCKIN MONSTER!” he cried. Damn, his biceps had become enormous basket ball sized mountains of flesh.

“AHHHH… AHHHH… FUCK YEAH!” he yelled as – RIIIP—his lats exploded out the sides of his parker. Jeeze, in an instant his body looked twice the size, like it had doubled it’s width in a second, and it was just getting wider. His lats were thrusting out further. His gigantic shoulders were stretching boarder, and Fuck, his biceps were thicker than my torso and probably weighed twice as much!

His huge, massively muscled body was covered in a light sheen of sweat despite the cold and all that was left of his parker was the front piece. A tattered rag with a zipper, it was draped around his thick telephone pole neck and over his monstrous traps looking like a flimsy child’s bib as it was tossed around by his mammoth heaving pecs. With a swipe of his monolithic arm, he ripped it aside and stood there now completely naked in the wintry forest. He raised his impossibly huge arms to the skies and let out a roar.

“YEAH!” he bellowed. “No more skinny little Kurt! I’M A FUCKIN GIANT, A GINOURMOUS MUSCLE BEAST! Let’s see what I can do!”

He looked around and spotted a large boulder about the size of an SUV and covered with moss and leaves. He crossed to it in two strides, made his massive hands into two giant fists and started pounding the boulder like a punching bag. BANG! BANG! BANG! It sounded like a sledgehammer. Soon cracks began to appear in the boulder and huge chips of stone began flying off.

“YEAH! FUCK YEAH!” He shouted and doubled his efforts. Huge chunks of rock began flying off at high speed, and Kurt was laughing like a fucking maniac. He just kept shouting, “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!”

On chip flew right by my head and embedded itself in a tree.

“Fuck, Kurt!” I yelled. “Get a handle on it!” But he just kept pounding on the boulder until… CRAAAACK! The thing split in two. Then he reached over and lifted half of the boulder into the air. Massive muscles bulging like they’d just explode out of his skin, he just ripped it right out of the earth and raised it above his head. He let out another roar and smashed the half boulder down on its other half, exploding the whole thing into rubble.

“YEAH! I’M ALL FUCKIN MUSCLE!!” He cried.

No argument here.

“Ok, Matt,” he said walking up to me. Christ, he was gigantic now, just towering over me. I had to crane my neck to see him, a nearly six foot wide, massive wall of abs, pecs and biceps. I felt like an ant.

“It’s time to talk about you fucking my girlfriend,” he said, flexing his massive, vascular, wrecking ball biceps in front of me.

Fuck. I hadn’t confessed to having sex with Jenna yet, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now.

“Dude. Gay. Remember?” I said.

“Are you sure?” he said, grabbing me by the jacket and lifting me clear off the ground with one hand. Fuck. My weight was nothing to him now. “You better be sure.”

“Look, buddy,” I said, “there’s an entire barrel of that goop over there. I could be bigger than you in a matter of seconds. Do you really want to play this game?”

“Nah,” he said. “I was just kidding. I believe you.” Then he set me down on the ground. Phew!

But I still couldn’t help thinking. I could get huge like Kurt or even bigger. In a matter of seconds I could be a massive muscle beast. And that would probably solve most of my problems. I could easily get Jimmy under control, and Greg would probably drool all over me.

I walked over to the barrel and looked inside. Jeeze, it was almost full, more than 10,000 times what I’d need to make me a muscle god… if I’d wanted. And I did, but maybe not all at once like Kurt had done. Maybe I wanted to take my time.

“Come on, dude. What are you waiting for?” said Kurt.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Kurt you think you could carry the barrel out to the truck?”

“Easy,” he said.

“Don’t spill any on yourself,” I said. “It’s going to be a tight squeeze getting you into the truck as it is.”

“Fuck, I could carry the barrel and the fucking truck!” he said, flexing his megalithic arms.

Yeah, I could just see us rolling down Main Street like that. Riot anyone? “As much as I’d appreciate the savings on gas, I think we’ll do this in a more conventional way.”

Kurt did get the barrel out to the truck easily and he didn’t spill a drop. On the hike through he woods I just couldn’t take my eyes off him. What a freaking change! He was enormous! Every impossibly massive defined muscle looked like it was carved from stone! And he didn’t even seem to notice the cold. Damn that stuff did good work.

We took the barrel to my house and stored it in the garage. We threw an old tarp over it and stuck it in the back. With all the other junk in our garage, no one would ever notice it. We had an old blanket in there and I gave it to Kurt to wrap himself in.

“Dude, I’m not cold,” he said, “not at all. It’s like I’m imp… imp…

“Impervious?”

“Yeah, impervious! Fuck yeah!” The he flexed those incredible arms of his and those giant freakin vein-covered mountains exploded up. Fuck, and those giant pecs and those ripped up abs… I swallowed hard and had to remind myself, “This is Kurt, my goofy best friend Kurt. He is straight… and he’s also a fucking BEAST! Holy shit! I can’t fucking stand it!”

But outwardly I said, “You may be impervious, dude, and in the middle of the woods walking around with your cock swinging in the breeze might be ok, but here back in civilization, you better cover yourself up or you’re gonna get arrested.”

“They can’t fucking arrest me!” he cried. “What fucking cell could hold me?” And he made his massive pecs dance and he clenched his boulder-like abs.

Fuck.

“Ok, now you’re getting crazy. That’s crazy talk, dude. You’d better take it down a notch or you’re going to wind up shot.” I guess the concept of bullets had temporarily left his conscious mind because reminding him of them seemed to bring him back down.

“Yeah, ok, dude,” he said and took the blanket from me.

The next task in my impossible day was taking Kurt home. Actually transporting him—there was no trouble at all. I mean it was a tight fit in the cab but he did fit. And when we got to his house, he wanted to just walk in the door like he always did. I had to convince him to ring the front bell.

“What for?” he kept saying.

“Do you have your keys?” I said, knowing full well they’d been left in tangled heap of rags that used to be his clothes.

“I don’t need keys,” he said flexing those inhuman bis.

“Doesn’t your mom own a gun?” I asked.

“Yeah…?”

“Remember our earlier conversation about bullets?”

“Yeah, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

Obviously that blue stuff did a lot for the muscles, but it didn’t do a thing for the brain.

“Just trust me on this, ok?” I said.

We went up to the front door and I rang the bell. A minute later Mrs. Beckendorf opened the door. She took one look at humungous Kurt, massive muscles bulging out all over, with an old blanket wrapped round his middle, screamed and slammed the door.

“What just happened?” said Kurt genuinely dumbfounded. “It’s like she didn’t know me. How could she not know me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you’re almost two feet taller with massive ripped-to-hell muscles about 100 times bigger than she’s used to.”

“But that’s just the surface,” said Kurt. “My mom can see past all that.”

I didn’t bother to answer. I just rang the bell again. This time the door only opened a crack.

“What do you want?” said Mrs. Beckendorf from the other side of the crack.

“Mrs. Beckendorf, it’s me, Matt” I said.

“Oh,” she said, recognition flooding her face, “Who’s that?”

“That’s your son, Mrs. Beckendorf. That’s Kurt.”

“No, it isn’t!” She said. “That’s not my Kurt, not my sweet little Kurtty.”

“Mrs. Beckedorf, sweet little Kurtty had a sudden, unexpected and truly massive growth spurt. But it’s him. I swear. I mean look at his face. It hasn’t changed that much.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but that goliath is not my little boy.”

As you can see convincing her was not easy. In the end we had to go down to the police station where Mrs. Beckendorf had Kurt’s fingerprints taken in case he should ever go missing. Even when they matched she had a hard time with it. She kept crying and whaling that she’d lost her little Kurty.

Little Kurty tried to sit in a chair, but his massive physique was too much for it and he completely pulverized it. The cops had a big scale in back – I’m not sure what they used it for normally – but they put little Kurty on it and determined he was now almost 1500 lbs of ripped, shredded, muscle flesh. Damn. All the cops were coming over just to have a look at him. And he loved the attention. He’d flex at the drop of a hat. And there sure were a lot of dropping hats around that station.

Well, I’d done as much as I could and I was ready to go home. I don’t mind telling you I was pretty tired. At first Kurt didn’t want me to go, but I told him he could call me if he needed anything. His eyes opened wide.

“Oh my God,” he said. “My phone was in my pocket! And so was my wallet! And my keys!”

“Well dude, your pockets were pretty much shredded by those massive, vascular, iron-like quads of yours when they blew your pants apart and reduced them to rags.”

“How could we just leave them there in the woods? We have to go back?” cried Kurt.

“Not tonight, buddy. It’s almost dark and I’m exhausted. We can go back tomorrow after school and get them.”

“Unless somebody takes them!”

“There in the middle of the woods. No one is going to take them.”

By the time I got home, I was exhausted and I just about collapsed on my bed. I was glad I hadn’t dived headlong into that barrel, despite the temptation. When the time came, I didn’t want to go through that with my parents. I was definitely going to take this slow.

I had an eye dropper in my bathroom which I retrieved. Then I went down stairs to the kitchen and relived my mother of her rubber scrubbing gloves and an old plastic gallon milk jug. I washed the jug clean and then filled it with a gallon of water. I went outside to the garage, and using the rubber gloves I filled the eye dropper with the blue sludge.

I was extremely careful not to get any on myself. I paused for a minute and looked at the filled eye dropper. It dawned on me that if I swallowed this, just as it was, in a matter of seconds I’d be 10 times bigger than Kurt, with huge gargantuan muscles the size of cars exploding out all over me. I can’t say that thought didn’t give me a little hard-on.

But I controlled my self and just put a single drop in the gallon jug, put the cap on and shook it up real well. Then I emptied the rest of the eyedropper back into the barrel and covered it up again.

I went back into the house and still wearing the rubber gloves, washed the eyedropper and the gloves thoroughly. After I put the gloves away, I took the eyedropper and gallon jug up to the bathroom and drew myself a bath.

I was a little nervous as I got undressed. After all, I wasn’t sure what this was really going to do. Then I weighed myself. I wanted to do this as scientifically as possible. I weighed 170, which was what I expected. I pretty much knew my body measurements already so I didn’t bother to take them. Anyway, it was difficult to do by myself.

When the tub was full, I took a drop of water from the gallon jug and added it to the tub full of water.

Then I lowered myself into the bath.

I felt it instantly. There was a kind of vitality running all through me. I wanted to leap out of the tub and go jogging or go workout or something. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a tub, but I made myself stay. I remained in that tub for 25 minutes, and every second I felt amazing, like I just wanted to explode out of my skin.

When the time was up, I bounded out of the tub and rushed to the mirror. Holy crap, I was bigger! There was no doubt. My chest looked fuller; my biceps were thicker; my forearms were way more vascular. My abs had always been defined but now they were just popping out of my stomach. I hopped on the scale. 180. Holy shit, I’d put on 10 pounds! 10 fucking pounds! And I looked amazing.

I looked back at the tub. Damn, I wanted another bath. But I held myself back. No sudden dramatic growth for me. I needed to take this slow. One bath like this every week and in 6 weeks I’d be huge! 6 weeks after that, I’d be a monster! …not a monster on the level of Kurt or Pete, but that could always come later. And I’d sure as hell be giving Jimmy a run for his money! I’d have massive shoulders, pecs and arms way bigger than any 17-year-old had a right to have. And I’d probably get way taller too! Fuck yeah! I couldn’t wait!

I looked over at the gallon jug. I had only taken a drop out of it and it was still full. It occurred to me that 12 weeks and 12 drops from now, it would still be full. What was I going to do with all the rest of this shit? …not to mention the barrel in the garage!

Then I remembered Greg. I could always make him a little bigger. That would be hot. And now that I thought of it, there were a lot of other guys at school I’d noticed and thought, “if only he had a little muscle on him, he’d be so fucking hot!”

The potential and possibilities seemed endless. Yeah, shit yeah. I was ready to go for it. I was ready to do a couple of full body makeovers. Let’s make the world a more beautiful place.

The next day I got up early. And after a shower—during which I thoroughly enjoyed my slightly harder, definitely larger body—I tried to figure out how I was going to pull off all those full body makeovers. I had my gallon jug but I couldn’t walk around school with a gallon jug. That would be just a little too weird. I had to come up with something else.

We had a case of spring water bottles. I pulled out one of them and emptied about a quarter of it out. Then I carefully refilled it from my gallon jug. I figured that just a swallow from that bottle would seriously bulk up any guy who drank it.

On my way to school, I stopped by Kurt’s to pick him up. But my humungous friend met me at the door dressed only in a couple of blankets. I could see his ridiculously massive muscles bulging up beneath those blankets, and I couldn’t help wishing one of them would just fall off.

“Whoa, dude,” he said in his new thunderous base, “You got a little bigger.”

“You noticed?” I said, secretly overjoyed.

“You’ve been using the blue shit, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Just a little,” I said. “I couldn’t resist.”

“How come you’re still so fucking small?” He said flexing his beyond massive, ripped up, vein covered bicep and letting the upper blanket fall open, giving me a full, unobstructed view of those massive, striated, basketball-sized pecs and that cinderblock wall of abs, which he proceeded to clench and unclench. Fuck.

I thought about explaining the real reason I wanted to take it slow, but decided it would just be easier to give him a simple explanation he could easily understand. “Because then none of my clothes would fit and I’d have to walk around dressed only in blankets. You’re not going to school like that, are you?”

“Nah,” he said. “My mom won’t let me. She won’t let anyone even see me. She only let me answer the door this time because it was you.”

I thought about mentioning the fact with his size he really didn’t need to let anyone tell him what to do. He could probably do whatever the fuck he wanted, but I decided against it. Big or small, it was obvious his mom still ruled him.

“She’s not planning on keeping you locked up forever, is she?” I asked.

“No, just til the doctors see me.”

“Doctors?”

“Yeah, she made me an appointment to see one or two… or seven.”

“Seven?”

“Dude, I don’t want to go. What if they cure me?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not like you have the flu or anything.”

“But what if they do?”

“Dude, we’ve still got a whole barrel of that shit in my garage. If they cure you, we’ll just dose you up again.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

“Call me if the doctors find anything,” I said. Then I remembered. “Oh wait. You’re phone is still in the middle of Hampton Woods.”

“No, it’s not,” said Kurt, producing his phone from a fold in his blankets. “I got it back.”

“You went back to the woods?” I said.

“No, the EPA guy found it, along with my keys and my wallet. He dropped them by this morning.”

“What did he say? I mean if he found your phone, he also found your shredded clothes.”

“I don’t know. Mom wouldn’t let him see me. And he was trying to see me… really hard. But she doesn’t let anyone see me.”

Poor Kurt; I envied him and I felt bad for him all at the same time.

On my way to school I couldn’t help wondering about the EPA guy. What must he have thought when he found the remains of Kurt’s clothing. Whatever it was, I had a bad feeling I hadn’t heard the last of him.

And I was right. It was just after second period and I was walking to my next class when I spotted the EPA guy in the hall. He was off to one side talking to Jimmy! I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I could see Jimmy shaking his head and shrugging his huge shoulders a lot. For once I was glad he was keeping tight lipped about the swimming hole—that had to be what the EPA guy was after. Why else try to talk to Kurt and Jimmy. I wonder what he thought it was and why he was looking for it. Did he want to clean it up? That would be horrible. At all costs I had to keep him away from that place, not to mention the barrel of blue goop in my garage. I turned my head to the side as I passed Jimmy and him, hoping the EPA guy wouldn’t see or recognize me. Damn. This screwed everything up. I wondered if I should stop my experiments. I was really worried about it for about 5 minutes, but the temptation to create a bunch of muscled-up studs was too great. I decided I could probably go ahead as long as I was careful.

All day long I was just itching to give someone a swallow from that water bottle, but who? It had to be just right and done in such a way that it wouldn’t cause too much attention and I could enjoy the results.

By the time lunch time hit, I couldn’t wait anymore. I went to the cafeteria to find my first victim… err subject. I looked around at the throng. There was the geek table overburdened with laptops and glasses, and the jock table with the big, beefy football players in their letter jackets, there were the shop guys looking kind of scraggly in their flanel shirts and worn jeans.

Who should it be? Who should it be?

That’s when I spotted Bob Peterson in the lunch line. Of course! That was it! Bob was on the wrestling team. He wasn’t huge or anything. He was about 150 – but that was typical of our wrestling team. They did ok. They won a lot on points. But we didn’t have anyone competing in the heavier weight classes. Probably the main reason I never went to the matches. I think I weighed more than the biggest guy on the team… or I did. I could feel my face forming an evil grin. There might be at least one bigger guy after today.

“Hi, Bob,” I said sidling on up to him in the lunch line. I couldn’t help notice there was barely anything on his plate. “Going a little light on the chow, aren’t you? Don’t you have a match today?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking a little down, “and I think I’m going to weigh in a little heavy.”

I gave him a quick once-over. He didn’t look at all heavy to me. I mean he wasn’t tiny or anything, but heavy…? No way.

“That sounds like a good thing to me,” I said. “The bigger and stronger you are, the better, right?”

“Maybe if you’re a body builder like you,” he said. “But in wrestling it doesn’t exactly work that way.”

Whoa, he called me a bodybuilder. I guess that extra 10 pounds was really showing. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “Yeah ? So how does it work?”

“The goal is to come in at the top of your weight class. Too light, and the other guy will have the weight advantage; too heavy and you’ll wind up in the bottom of the next weight class up, and that’s even worse.”

“Why is that worse?” I asked.

“When you come in over like that, it’s usually water weight. The other guy could have as much as 8 pounds on you and if he’s in good shape it won’t be water, it’ll be all muscle.”

“I see your problem,” I said, “and I think I can help.”

“You? How?” He said.

“Well,” I said, scratching my head to come up with a good line, “there’s this new sports drink… actually it’s more like a sports nutrition drink.”

“A nutrition drink?” he said. “I don’t have time for that, dude, the match is this afternoon.”

“This stuff works really, really fast,” I said.

Then he kind of looked at me sideways. “What is it, some kind of drug?”

“Well… no… I mean, not exactly.”

“Sorry, dude,” he said. “I’m not going to do that. It sounds way too much like cheating.”

“Seriously, dude?” I said. “One swallow’ll hook you up.”

“Nah,” he said. “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t wanna mess with that stuff.”

“Ok,” I said, feeling a little awkward. Jeeze, I never guessed pumping guys up was going to be so difficult. Maybe I shouldn’t tell them before I give it to them. But would that be right? I mean I was positive they’d thank me afterwards. I know I would in their position. But should I?

I spent the rest of the day mulling over my little moral dilemma.

At the end of the day I found myself just outside the gym. I’d been thinking about that wresting match all day. I was determined. Bob was going to grow. I had my water bottle ready. I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. I stepped into the gym. The bleachers were set up and it looked like the teams were warming up. I spotted Bob’s mom and his little brother Brian in the stands and I took a seat nearby on the bottom row.

Bob’s mother was watching events with mild interest. Brian, even though he was wearing a pair of soccer shorts and a t shirt, was not exactly the athletic one in the family. He looked like he couldn’t care less. His attention was completely on his phone where it appeared he was alternating between texting and playing Angry Birds.

The first few matches were ok. But they started with the lighter weight classes and I would really have rather seen some heavy weights. But Bob would be up before them and I had to remind myself that that was what I was really there for.

At long last Bob stepped up to the mat. I couldn’t help but notice that Bob’s opponent was noticeably larger than Bob. It looked like Bob’s worst fears had come true. Oh well, it would probably make things easier for me.

The two wrestlers assumed the neutral position, standing opposite each other.

“Brian, pay attention,” I heard Bob’s mom say behind me.

“Why should I?” said Brian. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“Because, it’s your brother’s match,” said Bob’s mom.

“Who cares?” said Brian. “I hope he loses.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Brian’s mom. “You will watch him or there will be no TV or internet for a week.”

“Fine, whatever,” said Brian.

Then the match started. The two wrestlers came at each other. The bigger one grabbed Bob by the shoulders and pretty much forced him to the mat just with his arms. Damn, he was a lot stronger than Bob; that was clear. Bob was pretty agile, though and managed to slip out of his grasp. The two of them were grappling for position on the mat, but it was pretty clear Bob was doomed. In fact, the big guy was just on the point of pinning Bob when the period ended.

Bob staggered to the sidelines, had a quick word with his coach, and then moved toward the bench for his brief rest. But I caught his attention and gestured him over.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I’m fucked,” he said.

“The guy’s at the top of your weight class, isn’t he?”

“Not exactly,” said Bob. “He’s at the top of his weight class, which is one weight class higher than mine.”

“Is that legal?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t be,” said Bob, “but apparently it is. He’s killing me.”

“Here,” I said, handing him my water bottle. “Take a swig of this. You look like you could use it.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking the bottle. He took a swig, swashed it around in his mouth then swallowed it. Then he looked at me strangely. “Wow,” he said. “Was that water?”

I didn’t have to answer because the second period was about to start and his coach called him back to the mat.

Thanks to a coin toss at the beginning of the meet, Bob had the defensive position. He got down on all fours and his opponent took the position standing above him. All things being equal, this didn’t look like it would last long… But all things weren’t equal, were they? I could feel my self grinning. Yes… yes… I thought I could see the stuff starting to work. Yes. I could definitely see it! Bob’s arms were getting thicker; his triceps were bulging out, forming pronounced, heavy horseshoes and his biceps were expanding, evolving into curved, bulky, vein covered masses. His shoulders were getting broader and growing into large striated, segmented muscle balls. Damn, under his singlet I saw his back swelling and shifting, his lats getting wider and denser. And his legs were increasing in size, gaining inch after inch of ripped, solid mass.

Fuck, he was a beast.

“Mom, did you see that?” gasped Brian from behind me.

“See what?”

“Bob just grew! He just got huge!”

“Well, he’s been working very hard,” said Bob’s mother.

“No, I don’t mean that,” said Brian. “He just got huge now, like right now, like right there on the mat!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Bob’s mom. “People don’t grow instantaneously. He’s been getting larger for a while now. You just haven’t noticed.”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” said Brian.

If Bob’s opponent noticed anything he didn’t let on, and when the period started he just went at Bob like he expected him to be easy to throw down. But he couldn’t budge Bob, not even an inch, not that he didn’t try. He tried move after move, but nothing would shift Bob, nothing. And Bob was just down on all fours chuckling away.

And suddenly Bob just stood up. His opponent tried to stop him, but he couldn’t, and suddenly he noticed why. Bob was fucking huge. Fuck, everyone could see now. Besides his large arms, shoulders and wide, powerful back, his pecs had become big, full mounds of muscle with striations you could see, even through his singlet. Same with his abs, they were a collection of deep cuts and bulges pushing out through the Lycra. Bob was beastly all around.

His opponent looked a little shocked. Bob glared at him, let out a little growl and then, seemingly effortlessly, lifted his opponent off the floor and threw him to the ground in one swift, powerful movement. His opponent fell on his back and in a second Bob was on him for the pin.

As soon as the whistle blew, Bob was up on his feet, stomping around the mat, flexing his impressive bulging, vein covered biceps at the spectators and shouting, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

There was a bit of a commotion as the visiting team was accusing us of substituting wrestlers in between periods. The coach was obviously confused by Bob’s sudden increase in size, but he still managed to argue that there had been no substitution.

During the controversy, Bob came over to me and said, “What the fuck, dude?” and he pointed to his newly enhanced bulging bicep. “What was in that bottle?”

“Meet me in the weight room after the match,” I said. I guessed I owed him an explanation.

Both wrestlers had to be reweighed but it was decided there had been some confusion at the initial weigh in. Bob had gone from the bottom or the weight class below his opponent to the top of the weight class above. So, the match was still legal and Bob’s victory was upheld.

When Bob met me in the weight room afterwards, I gave him the condensed version of the story. I had discovered a new muscle building supplement that worked instantly and I was trying it out on certain carefully selected friends. But it was a complete secret and he couldn’t tell anyone.

“Wow,” said Bob feeling his arm. “That’s what one swallow will do?”

“Yup,” I said offering the small bottle. He took it from me and looked it over carefully. Of course there wasn’t any label on it or anything. Finally he unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.

“It doesn’t smell like anything.”

“Nope.” I said.

“I don’t suppose I could have another swallow?” he asked tentatively.

Suddenly a small figure darted out of the shadows and grabbed the bottle from Bob’s hand.

“What the…?” we said simultaneously. It was Bob’s little brother, Brian.

“Give that back, maggot!” called Bob.

“No way,” he said shaking his head. Bob lunged for him, but Brian dodged him and ran around the other side of the bench.

“Give that back,” yelled Bob, “or I’ll pound your head so far down, you’ll have to unzip your fly to eat!”

“Fuck that!” said Brian. “You think I want you any bigger? I’m tired of being your punching bag!”

“Dude, when I catch you, I’m gonna hurt you so bad, your pain’ll have pain,” said Bob.

“Yeah? We’ll see about that! My turn to be the big brother!” And suddenly he was chugging the bottle.

“No! Wait!” I cried. I sprang to grab the bottle away from him but it was way too late. He finished it and stood there grinning at us.

“Oh my God, what’s going to happen?” said Bob looking at me.

“What’s going to happen?” laughed Brian. “What’s going to happen is I’m going to get fucking huge! And it’s going to happen right here, right now, right in front of you. Are you ready for that, you fucking douche? ‘Cause I sure as hell am!”

“Is he?” Bob, asked me, his voice cracking.

“Bob…,” I said. “Drinking that much… forget huge, think fucking massive…”

“Oh yeah!” said Brian. “I like the sound of that.” He grinned. “Whoa,” he said, his voice a little deeper. “I can feel it happening, bro! You are going to be so fucking sorry you were ever born!”

I head this strange kind of crackling, popping noise and as I looked I thought I could see his calves swelling out a little… no they were definitely getting bigger. And the short light hairs on his legs had started getting longer, thicker and darker.

“Oh yeah,” said Brian. “Things are definitely changing.” He flexed his arms, but there was really nothing there. But then, as we watched, two hard-looking, golf ball sized biceps bulged up on his thin arms.

Bob started laughing, but the laughter died on his lips when suddenly Brian’s biceps doubled in size! Fuck, they just instantly morphed into two huge, cut baseball sized boulders bulging out of his upper arms.

“Oh fuckin Ay!” he said. “Check out these guns! Already big enough to fuck you up!” Then I saw his ankles thicken – no it wasn’t just his ankles, both his feet were getting wider and broader and in an instant I heard a thick tearing sound and a thousand threads breaking, as his growing feet split apart his sneakers and tore his ankle socks into threads. Man, his feet were mammoth.

“I’ve got big feet now, bro, bigger than yours! Giant feet! Muscle feet!” Jeeze, he was right. I’d never seen musclar feet before, but his… damn.

“And my legs,” he continued, “my legs feel… fan-fucking-tastic!” Then, as I watched, his gym shorts, which seconds before had been loose and hanging to his calves, rode up above his knees as his legs grew longer. His thighs appeared to be a single slight bulge of muscle. But now I could see that slight bulge was getting larger and wider. Muscle fibers were becoming visible, pronounced, and beginning to push up and out from beneath the skin, increasing in size. Fuck. And his thigh wasn’t just one bulge anymore. I could see the different muscles separating out and taking shape as they kept getting bigger and bigger. Oh man, the sight was overwhelming; his legs kept getting thicker and stretching up longer, bulging up with new powerful muscles!

“Hahaha!” he laughed. “My legs make yours look puny, bro!”

I shot a quick look at Bob. Fuck, he was right. Damn, Brian’s quads were enormous! And cut!

“AH! AH! AHHHHHHHHHHH!” he shouted as his shirt rode up exposing abs that were swelling into cobblestones. His upper torso kept stretching wider and wider pulling his shirt tighter and tighter across pecs that were emerging, striated globes of muscle. “Fuck,” he said. “It feels like my body’s bulging up stone. It feels awesome!” His shirt formed stress creases seconds before I heard the RIIIP RIIIIP RIIIIP of gaps opening up all over it, giving me a peek at the bulging mounds and huge flexing ridges of sinew beneath. He looked at me, grinned and flexed both arms. His biceps erupted with size, easily 18 inches of powerful, bulging sinew, and growing! “Fuck yeah!” he shouted. “What do you think of that bro?”

I watched as his sleeves slid off those large, boulder-like mounds and bunched up below his ballooning shoulders. His arms were huge, bigger than mine, bigger than Bob’s. Fuck.

“I’m gonna get so fucking jacked! AH AH AHHHHHHH FUCK!”

And suddenly he exploded upward, gaining several inches in height in an instant!

“Fuck yeah!” he shouted, his voice deepening further. “Getting fucking huge!” He grinned down at us. “Thinking about running yet, bro? You should be.”

Fuck he wasn’t huge, he was gigantic! He was towering over both of us, at least a foot! How much fucking taller was he going to get? So fucking wide and bulging out all over! And he was still growing!

His t-shirt, now drum-tight and covered with tears, was rising up to the bottom of his ribcage, his now boulder-like abs were swelling and pushing out of his stomach.

He pulled a side bicep flex and holy crap! His arm was mountainous! His sleeve didn’t stand a chance. As soon as he flexed that thing there was a POP, POP SNAP and it just exploded into shreds. Now there was nothing to obscure those bulbous boulders of sinew as they erupted out of his arm, a least 20 fucking inches of raw, bulging, vein ridden power – and still growing!

“Hey there, maggot,” he said to Bob, grinning from ear to ear. “You want to discuss who’s the big brother now?”

He turned toward Bob and pulled a most muscular and that was it for his shirt. POP, POP SNAP RIP RIIIIIIIP and it was fluttering to the floor, revealing his now gigantic muscle-ridden torso in all it’s glory. Huge striated pecs, a mountain range of abs, a neck thick as a fire hydrant, mountainous traps, shoulders at least 4 feet wide and ending in bowling ball delts.

“Or maybe we should wrestle for it!” he screamed. “You wanna wrestle, Bob?”

He let out a YELL, kind of a combination ROAR/GROWL as his shorts were torn apart by his monstrous expanding quads,. Fuck, just one of his quads had to weigh more than I did. Now he was standing there immense and naked. And he kept getting bigger and wider and taller.

“AH HA HA HA!” he roared. “Look at me fucking now, bro!!!!!”

It was hard not to. Fuck, muscles just kept erupting out of him, growing, swelling developing deep striations. He had to be nearly 7 feet tall! Each pec became the size of a basketball and his biceps were just as big. Each of his abs grew to be the size of my fist! And his legs just defied description with their massive intertwining heads, each one incredibly thick, cut and defined under his paper thin skin.

By the time he stopped he was massive, an almost floor to ceiling, almost wall to wall massive muscle giant. A steer would be smaller – and probably weigh less, too! Jeeze, the heat he was giving off… he was making the room hot just with his body temperature. He was so big he had his own gravitational pull. I could feel myself being pulled toward him—although that might not have been gravity.

And the steer’s tail? Well he had that hanging between his legs.

He then began a flexing session where he flexed and felt every muscle he could reach. And there were plenty of them, all gigantic beyond belief. Fuck, you could tell he was loving every minute of it.

I’m fucking massive!” he cried, “fucking massive! And my body’s like stone. Every fucking inch is massive stone-like muscles. I’m a total fucking beast!” And he went on like that for several minutes.

“Ok, bro,” he said, glaring down at Bob, after he finished. “It’s payback time. Now I’m going to pound you so hard, you’re gonna havta open your zipper to eat! …except I think I can actually do it!” He flexed his monstrous, peeked, vein ridden biceps, looked at them bulging to outrageous dimensions, and laughed.

And then Bob did the only thing he really could do. He turned and ran for his life. But Brian didn’t waste a second before he took off after him. Damn that kid could move pretty fast for being so massive! I hoped Bob got away ok.

I didn’t start gathering my thoughts until I got home that night. Was my first day of experiments a success or not? I’d managed to buff up one jock. That was good. But I also accidentally created another muscle beast. That was not so good. I guessed I could claim partial success, ok, mostly success. Actually, the more I thought of it, muscle beasts were not a bad thing. I planned to be one myself someday. In fact, muscle beasts were pretty awesome. Therefore, my experiments were a complete success!

On to day two!

That night I was really having problems sleeping. Visions of Bob growing huge, and then, with muscles bulging, effortlessly picking up and throwing his opponent to the mat, played endlessly in my mind, along with images of skinny little Brian exploding into a massive muscle beast. Damn, all that muscle was so hot, so amazing, so incredible, I wanted some. And I knew I could have it anytime I wanted.

But I kept telling myself if I took it too fast, people were going to notice. Then the pro-muscle side of me answered, “So what? Fuck ‘em.”

But then the reasonable, rational, sane part of me said, “You saw all the problems Kurt had; do you want that to happen to you?”

Mr. Muscle answered, “Kurt’s going to be fine. In a few months all this will have blown over and Kurt will be living large, extremely large. And you could be living just as large, or even larger, if you want, and I know you want. I know the effect Brain’s biceps had on you when they exploded into immense, veiny boulders. And I know how you felt seeing his back grow wide, thick, and muscle ridden, and then rip its massive way out of his shirt. You want a massive, powerful body, too. I know you do. And you could have one, right now if you wanted.”

Fuck, I did. I wanted it…

“But what about mom?” asked rational me. “You saw how upset Kurt’s mother was. Do you want to put mom through that, too?”

“Oh, that’s low,” said Mr. Muscle, “using mom like that, that’s low.”

“And besides,” said the rational side, “I liked my first 10 pounds. It was pretty awesome. I don’t want to grow all at once. It’d be over too fast. I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.”

“That’s true,” said Mr. Muscle. “That’s true. So how about another 10 pounds, right now. That’d be fuckin’ hot!”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Rational. “It may be too much, too soon.”

“Bull Shit!” said Mr. Muscle. “Bob put on way more than 10 pounds and people figured he’d always been that big and they just hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s true…,” said Rational. “Maybe I could manage another 10 pounds—but that’s it!”

“Fine, fine,” said Mr. Muscle, “another 10 pounds, I’ll settle for that—and it’s going to be soooooo fucking hot!!!!”

So, in the middle of the night, I found myself getting up and drawing a bath. I didn’t know what I was going to do if Mom woke up. How was I going to explain this? But as it happened, she didn’t wake up. And when the tub was full, I added a drop from my gallon jug. Of course at this point Mr. Muscle woke up and reminded me that if I took just a few swigs from the jug, in seconds I could be a massive, impossibly strong, ripped-up muscle behemoth. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted.

But I stuck to the plan and climbed into the tub. Damn, I’d forgotten how amazing it felt in there. All my nerves were lit up and dancing. I suddenly had so much energy I could barely stand to stay in the tub. But I made myself. On this Mr. Muscle and Mr. Rational were in complete agreement.

Fuck, I could feel it. I could feel the blood just gorging my limbs. I could feel my heart beating faster and more forcefully. I could feel my body swelling, getting harder, like a really good pump. Fuck, this was intense!

25 minutes later I exploded out of the tub. I don’t mean I climbed out, or got out, or even hopped out, I exploded out. I had so much energy and the strength in my arms was amazing. When I got out of that tub, it was more like a gymnast’s dismount, than anything else. Water went everywhere. The bathroom was soaked!

I landed on my feet. Damn, my legs felt strong and sturdy, more than ever before. I turned around and looked at myself in the mirror. HOLY FUCK! I looked awesome!

My shoulders, arms, pecs, everything had noticeably bulked up, and fuck, I was even more ripped! I no longer looked just sculpted. My body had some mass to it now. It looked powerful. I flexed. Large, full, veiny biceps bulged up. Fuck. 18 inches, had to be, at least. I felt one. Jeeze… hard as a rock.

I flexed my pecs. Damn… boulders… they looked and felt like striated boulders… And my abs… like a set of six large rocks carved out of my stomach… so fucking hot. And I think I might actually be an inch taller, too!

I felt myself getting hard, just looking at my reflection, and holy crap, my cock was larger too!

Oh, I couldn’t stand this. This was way too fucking hot! Time to hop in the shower and savor some of this hotness!

Damn, my stamina was amazing. I must have been in there two hours, just feeling and soaping and stroking. Fuck, I must have blown a bucket load.

When I got out and started checking myself out in the mirror again, all I could think was, “I gotta take another bath!”

“Whoa…. Take it easy, bro,” said Mr. Rational. “I know this is hot and all… ok, amazingly, mind blowingly hot… but any more, and it won’t be so easy to pass off.”

Ok, ok, he was right. I had to get a hold of myself. I cleaned all the water off the floor in the bathroom and forced myself to go back to my room. But I couldn’t sleep. I still couldn’t keep my hands off myself. I had gotten so big and hard and awesome!

Finally I just got up and went to my computer. I went to the school’s web site to try and lay out a plan for tomorrow. I decided to go to the intramural sports page to see what other teams might benefit from my attentions. The answer was immediate, obvious and right up front: The swim team! I mean that’s how this whole thing started wasn’t it?

Our school had an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool. One of our graduates who made it big and loved swimming donated it to us. This made our school a very popular place to hold swim meets, and naturally enough, our school had one of the best swim teams in the State. Of course there was no meet tomorrow, but they would be practicing!

I went to bed very happy with my idea and finally fell asleep. When I woke up I went straight back to the bathroom and took another fantastic, although much shorter, shower, and I started to get dressed.

Holy fuck! All my clothes were tight! I mean, I had some tight shirts I liked wearing from time to time, but those didn’t fit at all. My more conservative clothes were now straining to contain my new hard, bulging mass. Fuck, I loved the way my t shirt hugged my body, the way my pecs thrust out in front of me and the cotton cloth just molded it self around them. I loved seeing my biceps fill the sleeves, seeing the cloth bunch up under the strain. I guess I should have been worried about people noticing how big I’d gotten, but it was just the opposite. I couldn’t wait to go to school and show off my new body!

And of course I was also looking forward to… altering the swimming team! I knew exactly how I was going to do it! I decided to bring a small quantity of the pure blue sludge with me. I could dump a little of that into the pool and then just sit back and watch the magic!

I grabbed a small bell jar from the kitchen cabinet along with the rubber gloves and went out to the garage. Wearing the gloves I carefully dipped it into the barrel and put about a dollop of the straight blue shit into the jar. Fuck, I probably had enough to get half the school jacked up right in my hand. I got really hard just thinking about using it on the swim team. All that muscle…fuck. I almost wanted to try some myself. But I didn’t. I just carefully stowed it away in my back pack. And at the last minute I decided to bring my eyedropper, too. Who knew what use I might find for a drop of the blue stuff?

Usually I would just stop by and pick up Kurt on my way into school, but I wasn’t sure if he would be going in today, so I called him. Oddly enough, his mom answered his phone. She told me that yes, Kurt was going into school that day, but I needn’t bother to pick him up.

That was all she would say. That was weird.

I had my day all planned out. I would lay low all day, maybe give Greg a good look at my new huge, ripped biceps at lunch, and see what his reaction was. Then I’d head down to the swimming pool right after school and… improve the water.

But my plans kind of went out the window as soon as I got to school. The door had barely closed behind me when I was accosted by Bob. Jeeze, he was all bruised up.

“You gotta help me,” said Bob. “Brian’s out of control! It’s like every time I round a fucking corner I bump into him… and then bounce off. He’s the fucking great wall of muscle now, huge, hard as steel and impossibly strong. And all he wants to do is wrestle. “Let’s wrestle. Let’s wrestle.” That’s all I fucking hear from him. And it’s fucking killing me! There’s gotta be an antidote, something to turn him back into the scrawny little wimp he was!”

“Ah… sorry, Bob,” I said. “It’s pretty much a one way trip. No way back that I know of.”

“Fuck!” said Bob, “I’m screwed! Except… do you have any more of that shit? You know, maybe I could bulk up a little bit more, you know, so I could stand a chance against him?”

Oh shit. All I had with me was the straight blue goop, and even a drop of that would make Bob way too big. I didn’t want to do that with Mr. EPA snooping around. I was pretty sure I could help Bob, but not today. And he’d have to take the slow and easy route like I was doing.

“Ah… I don’t really have anything with me today,” I said. “But I’ll bring something tomorrow.”

“Oh… ok, that’s great…” said Bob. “But do you think I could stop by your house after school or something, you know, pick it up? Because I don’t even want to go home. He goes into my room and uses my stuff, and if I say anything all he says is, “I can do anything I want now. Get used to it.” Then he stands there towering over me and flexing those ginormous pecs and abs of his and I just can’t take it anymore.”

“Sure,” I said. “But I’ve got something to do right after school. So why don’t you stop by after dinner.”

“Yeah! Thanks! Ok, I’ll be there!” said Bob, and he hurried on his way.

I hadn’t gone two steps when I felt this soft hand on my new bigger, harder shoulder.

“Is it possible you’ve gotten even more sexy?”

I stopped and turned. “Hi Jenna,” I said.

“I haven’t heard from you in a while, Matt,” said Jenna. I was beginning to think you didn’t care?”

Well, to be honest, I didn’t. But I couldn’t say that, could I? I mean that would be rude. “Well, you know, the busy life of a gay guy, you know, going around and being gay and everything. Did I mention I was gay?”

“Come off it. You’re not still hiding behind that?” said Jenna. “I thought we put that little urban myth to bed the other night, literally.”

“Ok, well,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and I prefer to think of myself as gay with heterosexual tendencies.”

“Really?” she said, smiling. “I can do a lot with a tendency.”

And suddenly she was standing in front of me, really, really close and running her hands over my pecs. “My goodness, you’re bigger,” she said, “a lot bigger. I don’t know how …and harder!” And she reached down and grabbed my crotch. “Let’s get you even harder.”

“What are you doing,” I asked, responding to her despite my best intensions. “This is sexual assault!”

“It would be,” said Jenna, “if you were running your hands all over my chest and crotch. But I’m a woman; the rules are different. Besides, what guy complains when a woman feels them up?”

“I… I would,” I said, sounding as unconvincing as I felt. Oh yeah, I wanted to fuck her. There was no mistaking that. Man, what was the matter with me?

“Really?” she said. “Then go ahead; call for help.”

When I didn’t say anything right away she said, “Just as I thought. A guy is a guy is a guy.” Then she went in for the kiss.

I didn’t actually see the shadow; it was more like I felt it looming up behind me. Or maybe it was all the body heat that that immense frame put out, or maybe it was just that all that mass concentrated in one area changed the dynamics of the air. But whatever it was, I knew Kurt was there, just the same as if I could see him.

I didn’t even feel his hand on my shoulder before I was flying through the air. I crashed into the lockers, putting a nice dent in them before I slid to the floor. Ouch.

I looked up and there he was. Bulging, ripped, gargantuan muscles just erupted out all over him everywhere you looked from head to foot. All that was left of my dorky friend was his face, scowling down at me from the top of an immense body. He was wearing some kind of a bodybuilder’s shirt, kind of like a wife beater but with far less cloth. And what cloth there was fitted him pretty damn tightly. It was obviously designed to show off those unbelievably tightly woven configurations of incredibly massive pecs, abs and lats. And damn, did it do a good job. It made me dizzy just to look at him.

He was nearly 8 feet tall and about five feet wide at the shoulders, with huge thick mountainous traps dwarfing his fire plug neck and brushing the back of his skull. He had gigantic, satiated wrecking ball delts sitting on top of enormous, veined wrapped upper arms that looked like piles of boulders cemented together. His forearms were as thick around as my waste. His chest was two wrecking balls, hard, solid and ripped.

His abs… I could count eight concrete blocks of muscle clearly defined under his shirt leading down to his he ridiculously tight soccer shorts.

And his legs, crap, I could see each and every gigantic leg muscle bulge and ripple under his skin as he just slightly shifted his weight.

The last thing you wanted to see was an angry face looking down at you from the top of that behemoth of a body. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I was looking at.

“Get your hands off my girlfriend!” he roared.

I wanted to shout, “She came on to me!” But somehow I didn’t think that would help my case.

Then I thought about saying, “It’s not what it looks like,” but then it actually was kinda what it looked like and there’s no way he wouldn’t know that. So, I didn’t say that either.

Wow, I was running out of things to say.

“Excuse me,” said Jenna stepping between us. Oh my God, Jenna was going to save my butt! “But, I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I’m not your girlfriend. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Believe me, if I had, I’d remember.”

“But, Jenna,” said Kurt, his fierce expression dissolving into one of subtle panic, “it’s me. It’s Kurt.”

“Kurt?” said Jenna, squinting up at his face. “Kurt Beckendorf?”

Kurt nodded hopefully.

“Whoa,” said Jenna. “What happened to you?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” said Kurt.

“That, I believe,” said Jenna, looking him up and down appreciatively. “Why don’t we go somewhere and find a nice, quiet place and you can tell me all about it.”

“What about him?” Kurt practically growled, glaring in my direction. “You’re boyfriend?”

“Oh,” said Jenna, glancing down at me like she recently remembered I existed. “He’s kinda cute and all, but nothing like you.”

Kurt gave me a self satisfied smirk and flexed his monumental bicep for Jenna. It rose up on his arm like a pile of boulders.

“Oh my,” said Jenna, her eyes bugging out at the sight of Kurt’s incredible mammoth arm. “I think I might just faint. There’s an empty classroom right down the hall. You better get me there right away.”

Kurt scooped her up in his enormous muscle laden arms and quickly carried her off down the hall. Wow, Jenna didn’t just like big guys, she was a total muscle slut! Ha! Something in common at last!

And the day still had some craziness to come. It was between third and forth period when I spotted the EPA guy again. This time he was talking to Bob. Fuck, if this kept up it would only be a matter of time before he made it to me. Maybe I should call it quits now. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I mean there was the swim team to consider and I couldn’t disappoint them.

And there was another surprise waiting for me at lunch. I was just sitting there, minding my own business – well, actually I was thinking about how I was going to make things up with Kurt and, of course, I was also thinking about the improvements I was going to make to the swim team – when none other than Greg Batson sat down across from me. Whoa, my new size was already starting to affect my perspective. I thought he looked kind of skinny. I never thought of him that way before, but now I did. I mean he was still cute and all, and my heart was still beating faster now that he was sitting across from me, but he did look just liiiiiittle skinny.

“Ah, hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said back, somewhat flustered. I thought he hated me.

“I, ah, couldn’t help but notice you’ve put on some mass recently… I mean a lot of mass,” he said.

“You mean this?” I said and I flexed my bi. I loved feeling that large mound of hard flesh bulge up on my arm, pulling my sleeve ridiculously tight…RIIIIIIP! Holy crap! My sleeve spilt at the seam! It just ripped right open releasing my large, bulging iron-like bicep into the open. Fuck. It looked awesome rising out of my shredded sleeve. I was hard almost instantly.

And Greg… well, his mouth dropped open. I mean his chin practically hit the table and his tongue very nearly rolled out of his mouth. “Yeah,” he gulped. “That’s what I mean.”

“What about it?” I asked, taking full advantage of his obvious awe.

“I was wondering, you know, if maybe you’d give me a few workout pointers.”

“Sure,” I said, casually, although inwardly I was jumping for joy.

“Meet me in the weight room after school?” said Greg.

“Ok,” I said, “but not right after school. I’ve got something I need to do.” I couldn’t possibly neglect the swim team. “It’ll probably take about half an hour, but I’ll meet you after that.”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

And I have to say, as the day wore on I got more and more excited about swim practice, and of course, meeting Greg afterward. When the day finally ended I practically ran to the pool. I poked my head through the door and sure enough, there they all were.

There was a guy in one of the swim lanes swimming up and down the length of the pool. He was doing the crawl stroke and after he completed one lap, up and back, he hopped out and let the next guy in.

Obviously, they were working on the 100 m free style. How did I know? Well, you really couldn’t go to my school and not know a little something about swimming. Our pool had little touch pads at each end of each lane to help the swimmers time themselves. And they were showing some pretty respectable times.

I took a second to check them out. They guys not in the pool were standing at the end of a lane, waiting for their turn in the lane. They all had decent builds, a little on the slender side for my tastes, but most of them were pretty ripped. That made up for a lot.

I knew what I wanted to do, but again my conscious started to bother me. These guys couldn’t get too much bulkier without it affecting their speed. Their slender builds helped them glide through the water. More bulk would cause more resistance and slow them down. If I did this I would probably ruin the swim team.

I looked again at the cluster of near naked ripped up guys at the end of the pool and imagined them with another 50 pounds of muscle on them.

Damn. Looked like I was going to ruin the swim team.

I went over to the filter pump and lifted the lid exposing the small reservoir of rushing water beneath. Water was sucked in here, filtered and then shot back out into the pool. I looked around. No one was paying any attention to me whatsoever. They were all looking either at the swimmer or the display of their times on the board.

I pulled out my jar of the straight blue shit. I hadn’t brought much but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need much. A dollop, that’s all I’d need, a dollop. I know it wasn’t exactly a scientific measurement, but then I wasn’t exactly a scientist either. I opened the jar and carefully titled it until the dollop rolled out of it and plopped into the water. Then I replaced the lid on the filter and took a seat on the bleachers to see the results. I almost expected to see some change in the water, like a glow or something, but there was nothing.

The next guy in the pool was Ron Beckman. He was one of the best swimmers our school had. He had a lean and muscular build, an athlete at the top of his form. He dove into the pool and started on his lap. The coach was splitting his attention between watching the clock and watching Ron’s form. As Ron neared the end of his lap, I could see the coach shaking his head.

“Disappointing time, Beckman,” he said as Ron hopped out of the pool, and Sammy Edwards dove in.

Holy crap! Ron had put on a good ten pounds, and man, did he look good! His chest had a nice swell to it and his arms hung thicker at his side, looking pumped and vascular. Even his legs seemed bulkier while maintaining their ripped and segmented appearance.

“Something’s wrong with the pool water, coach,” said Ron. “It felt weird in there.”

“Weird pool water, hunh?” said the coach. “That’s the first time I’ve heard that excuse.” The coach, turned around, took one look at him and snapped, “Never mind the pool water. You need to steer clear of the weight room, Beckman. Too much bulk is not a good thing.”

Ron looked genuinely confused. “I have been, coach.”

“Yeah? Well, steer even clearer of it,” he said before he turned his attention back to the board. “What the hell is this, Edwards?” he bellowed looking at the swimmer’s time.

“Sorry, coach,” said Sammy, pulling himself out of the pool, and walking over to the coach, his new 10 pounds of muscle bulging nicely on his frame. “It was like I wasn’t moving right in the pool, like I was swollen or something.”

“Swollen?” echoed the coach. “Well at least you’re not giving me the weird water story.”

“Actually,” said Sammy, “it did feel kind of different in there.”

Then Jim Ortega, hopped out of the pool after his lap. Wow. His 10 pounds looked great too! But the coach obviously didn’t think so. He took one look at him and practically exploded.

“Look,” he shouted. “You boys have got to decide if you’re swimmers or bodybuilders, because you can’t be both!”

I checked my watch. Oh Crap, it was time to go meet Greg already! Damn! I could always skip it… But if I did, who knew when I’d get this opportunity again. I looked back at the latest swimmer pulling himself out of the pool, new muscle just rippling across his frame, and somewhat reluctantly pulled myself from the scene.

When I got to the weight room, Greg wasn’t there yet so I decided to pound out a couple of bench presses. I loaded the bar with my usual 225, and hopped on. It was easy, way, way too easy. I just started laughing because I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I racked the weight after a good 12 reps, feeling like it wasn’t even a good warm-up, and added another 4 plates just to see if I could do it. And you know what? I could. Fuck, I was benching 405! Damn… Damn… That’s more than I used to squat!

“Wait till Greg sees that!” I grinned to myself. Then it hit me. He was expecting some kind of gym advice. What was I going to tell him? I mean, I’d seen him in the gym. He already had pretty good form and seemed to know what he was doing. I couldn’t dose him with the blue stuff, because I’d already dumped all I had in the pool… Or had I?

I pulled open my backpack and pulled out the bell jar. Yup, there was just a little bit of residue on the bottom. No more than a couple of drops worth, but it would do. I walked over to the water bubbler and filled the jar to the rim, put the lid back on, and swished it all around, mixing it up good.

I looked closely at the jar. It looked harmless, just like water. But I knew it was way more potent than my gallon jug. No more than a drop of this for Greg. Anymore and he’d get way too big, way too fast for people not to notice. Good thing I’d brought my eyedropper.

I sat around and waited for Greg, but after a few minutes I got bored and stated working out again. I had started chest already so I just continued on with that. Damn, all my lifts were sooo much heavier. I was becoming a fucking beast!

Half an hour went by. I completed an epic set of cable crosses, and came to the realization that Greg just wasn’t coming. I have to say I was a little crushed, but then, what had I been expecting? Of course, he could also have a really good reason for not showing. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt until I saw him again.

In the meantime, there was still the swim team.

I returned to the pool and holy crap! It looked like I’d just walked into the Junior Mr. Olympia! These guys were all huge! –All of them! They were all over six feet tall with big, striated pecs, wide powerful, rippling backs, brick wall abs, segmented pylon legs and arms like gorillas! Fuck! Was it wrong to take pictures? I hoped not, cause out came my cell phone and I started clicking away.

A small group of them was standing to one side, flexing and comparing biceps, even feeling each others arms and pecs. Fuck, they all had softballs exploding out of their arms, big bulky shoulders, huge traps, and pecs like melons. Another few of them were over by the bleachers, pulling the metal benches off their supports and bending them with their bare hands. Damn…

But the biggest guys I saw were Ron Beckman and Sammy Edwards. They were at the pool side, having a wresting match. Damn, I almost didn’t recognize them. They were just gigantically massive hulked-out versions of themselves. Neither one of them was shorter than 6’ 6” and couldn’t possibly weight less than 350 pounds. Enormous arms clamped onto each other’s huge shoulders, each one was trying to use his mammoth arms to force the other one into the pool.

Sammy was just a little bit bigger, so it was no surprise when suddenly as he wrestled Ron off the edge and into the pool with an epic splash. A moment later Ron surfaced, and after treading water for a few seconds, pulled himself from the pool. Hooooly crap, he was bigger. His shoulders were bigger, his huge biceps bulged out just a little more. His whole body looked fuller and thicker with muscle. Fuck, now he was bigger than Sammy. They started in again and in a matter of seconds, the enlarged Ron had claimed his revenge and knocked Sammy into the pool.

And just like Ron before him, Sammy surfaced and treaded water for a moment, just a little longer than Ron had, and then he pulled himself out of the pool. Fuck, look at all the muscle! He had gotten even bigger than the bigger Ron. Sammy flexed his new more massive arms and clenched his cinderblock abs. He twisted back and for a little, obviously testing out how he moved with his new bulk. Then after this brief moment of checking out his new, larger body –you could tell Sammy liked what he saw—he started in on Ron again. Sure enough Ron was knocked back into the pool. But this time, I don’t think he fought too hard to prevent it.

Damn, what a game! Evan when you lost, you won!

The coach wasn’t exactly taking everything in stride. He was running back and forth trying to get everyone out of the pool and talking on his cell phone at the same time.

“Out of there Roth, come on!” he shouted.

“But coach…,” protested Alan Roth.

“I don’t want to hear it, Roth. Out of the pool now or you’ll be facing suspension!” And then the coach yelled into his phone. “I don’t care what you have to do; I want this pool drained immediately. There’s something wrong with the water! I don’t know exactly what. No, I can’t describe it to you either. Just get down here and drain the damn thing!” The he hung up the phone.

“Petersen, out the pool or I’ll see you out of this school!” yelled the coach.

And in this way, the coach bullied everybody out of the pool and sent them off to the lockers to get changed.

Ok, this I had to see.

So I followed them into the locker room.

At first it was great! The swimmers were having a great time trying to put on their old clothes and ripping right through them. It was incredibly hot. Most of them wound up tearing off their shirt sleeves and pant legs to give their new bulky, powerful limbs some room.

I was having a great time just watching it all until I saw Devin Platz and some scrawny freshman. Devin was one of the swimmers who hadn’t been very large before, but now he was enormous with huge ripped muscles bulging out all over him. The only problem was he was acting like an asshole, throwing his new weight around.

The poor short freshman had obviously been in the act of changing when he caught Devin’s attention; the kid was only in his tighty whities. The freshman was exceptionally small and under developed. His rib cage was showing. His stomach was almost concave. He had stick-thin arms and legs, no body hair whatsoever, except maybe a whisper under his arms and on his upper lip. It looked like puberty had only recently visited this guy. And now oversized Devin was shoving him around.

They were over by the equipment lockers, which were a lot like regular gym lockers only about 10 times as big. The entire bank was about 15 lockers long and was about six feet tall. They stored all the balls, bats, and other gym equipment in them. Devin took this kid and shoved him inside one, slammed the door and latched it. Then he went back to the other side of the locker room to laugh it off with his buddies. I could hear the poor freshman pounding on the locker door from the inside.

“Come on, let me out,” he called. “Come on guys.”

Well, that just sucked. That wasn’t why I grew the swim team at all. I didn’t want to create a bunch of bullies. I had to teach them a lesson and fast. And at the same time, I figured I’d be doing a huge favor for that freshman. If ever there was a purpose for that blue gunk, this was it. No kid should be that small in high school. A drop from my bell jar ought to fix him up fine.

I pulled out my bell jar and opened it up. Then I took the eye dropper and filled it from the jar. I pulled my shirt up over my head so he wouldn’t see my face. It was important I do this anonymously. The EPA guy was already getting too close. The only problem was I could only barely see where I was going. But with the jar in one and the eyedropper in the other, I made my way over to the locker. It was a little tricky opening the locker with the eyedropper in my hand but I did it.

“Thanks, dude,” said the Freshman, but before he could step out I intended to squeeze and flick the eyedropper, flinging a drop of the stuff on him. But I caught my foot on the locker door, tripped and before I knew what happened I had spilled the entire jar all over him. FUCK!

“Oh Jesus!” cried the freshman, looking at himself covered in what I’m sure he thought was water. Of course, it didn’t take him long to discover it wasn’t, because it didn’t feel at all like water. “What is this shit?” He tried to wipe some of it off, but it was already sinking in to his skinny little hide.

In a panic I slammed the door and latched it again. What did I just do? That was a least twice the amount Kurt had used. I pulled my shirt down from my face so I could see, and I saw the Freshman’s eyes peering out at me from behind the slits in the locker door.

“Thanks, a lot, dude,” I head him say. “That was…” Suddenly his eyes went wide. “What the fuck?”

Suddenly the locker door started shaking. “Oh fuck! I feel really weird! Let me outta here! Let me outta here! Something really fucked up’s happening!”

I started slowly backing away from the equipment lockers, realizing full well that if I were smart I’d be running for the next county. But somehow I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that shaking locker. I had to know what was going to happen.

Suddenly the shaking stopped and I heard, “Oh my God… my shoulders…? I’m jammed up against the… Oh my God… no way… My chest! My arms! Oh my God, I’m getting bigger! OH FUCK!”

Then the locker started shaking again only now it was more of a violent jerking. Then the shaking began to spread to the other lockers and in a matter of seconds the entire bank was rattling like crazy.

“How is this happening?” came his voice. It was a lot fucking deeper now. “Fuck, I don’t care how it’s happening! Just that it’s FUCKING HAPPENING! HAHAHAHAHA!”

And then I began to hear the guttural groan of bending, tearing, snapping sheet metal as the entire bank of lockers began to bulge and distort. Doors popped open, balls, bats, mitts all spilled out across the floor.

A great big bulge began to grow out of the top of the lockers. Fuck that had to be the kid’s head. And on either side, other bulges. CREEEEEEEK! POP! POP! They were stretching up,—man, they had to be his traps and and I could see them fucking growing, pushing up through the sheet metal, spreading wider, and winder.

“OH YEAH!” he cried.

And then the bulge ripped and the kid’s head popped up through it. Damn, it was the same head, the same little boy head, only now it was supported by a huge, thick corded neck that was wider than it was, and it was 8 fucking feet in the air… and rising!

“HAHAHAHAHA!!!! AWESOME!” said the little boy’s head in a voice that was lower than humanly possible. “OHHHH OHHHHH ARRRGGGHHH!” And on either side, huge mountainous bulging traps began breaking out of the locker tops, peeling the sheet metal back like a banana. Holy shit, they were the most massive traps anyone ever conceived of.

“Holy crap!!!!!!” said the kid, craning his neck to stare at his monumental traps. “OH FUCK YEAH!”

Then the top of the lockers bent, buckled and ripped apart completely as he continued to grow upwards and I saw his massive shoulders emerge, My breath caught in my throat at the impossible sight of his beyond massive delts. Fuck, they were two enormous masses of ripped, segmented striated flesh about three feet in diameter and made from muscle fibers thick around as my pinkie.

Fuck yeah! FUCK YEAH! I’m humungous,” he cried staring at his gargantuan shoulders, “a total fucking BEAST!”

KATHOOOM! The locker bank exploded outward as two huge monltithic arms tore out of the front of the locker bank. He roared as he caught sight of his arms. I don’t have the words to describe his biceps. To say they were startlingly huge would be a gross understatement. If I were to curl myself into a ball, I might be the same size as one of them. That’s not even mentioning his triceps. They swelled out twice as thick as his biceps, turning his upper arm into a fucking planetoid. And his forearms were unlike any other forearms that had ever existed. Incredibly thick, cable-like sinews intertwined with each other bulging and flexing, expanding to an almost unthinkable width just below the wrist, and huge thick palms the size of dinner plates with fingers as big as his arms used to be

.

And as much as I was in awe of his arms, it was nothing to the way he reacted. The look on his face as he gazed upon them was the look of rapture.

“I’m dreaming,” he said, sounding a little dazed. “I must be fucking dreaming.”

He raised his arms high above his head and then brought them down in a colossal double bi pose. Holy fuck! The mountains on his arms! They were giant, flesh covered boulders, a configuration of insanely huge bulges, with peeks the size of basket balls. They had monster veins running up and around them before disappearing into his giant delts. I literally felt myself getting week in the knees. The fucking power he must have! His biceps’ bulges had bulges.

“This is no fucking dream!” he said. “I can fucking feel this! I gotta see the rest of me!” The kid dropped his gargantuan arms and began to use them to rip apart the remainder of the wrecked locker bank. God, he was tearing the sheet metal like tissue.

“Yeah!” he cried, “FUCK YEAH!” as he tore the pieces of locker away from his massive pecs. Fuck, his pecs were globular masses of pure muscle, each one four times the size of my head.

“Oh man! I’m a FUCKING MONSTER! YEAH!”

Pieces of sheet metal flew in all directions as he continued to rip apart the pathetic ruined locker bank and free the rest of his gigantic torso. Damn, his abs were bulging, heaving steel hard bricks. Holy crap, I was looking up at them! I was looking up at his massive, cut lower abdominals, each one the size of a football. And Jesus, was he? He was. The muscle ridden behemoth was still getting bigger, bulging out, growing taller.

“AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!” he yelled and took a step forward, using his beyond massive thighs to walk through the lower section of the locker bank like it was a fucking cobweb. Damn, his quads were giant, shredded muscles around which mammoth configurations of steel-like cords and tendons wove like the cables of a suspension bridge. Fuck, one of his thighs was twice as big as his entire body had been just a couple of minutes ago. And then out it tumbled. Holy Fuck, there was a freakin’ fire hose hanging from his groin, draped over two huge, melon-like balls, it hung down past his continent-sized, ripped, vascular quads almost to his knees. I caught a flash of white. Was that? Yes it was. There, hanging off the end of that massive stock was the poor shredded remains of his tighty whities, obviously blown to smithereens by the explosive expansion of its owner’s mammoth equipment.

Crap, that little shrimp of a kid had to be about 10 feet tall, an impossible mass of insanely huge, bulging muscle that was at least 7 feet wide at the shoulders and over 4 feet thick with bulging, powerful sinew.

And he was grinning like a maniac,

“Guess I finally hit my growth spurt,” he said flexing and feeling his mountainous bicep. “And I gotta say I turned out fucking great!”

For the first time I realized I wasn’t alone, staring open mouthed at the muscle giant in front of me.

The swimmers, who had been changing at the other end of the room, were now standing around gawking too. They must have been drawn by the thunderous racket the kid made as he grew and tore his way out of the lockers

“You!” he shouted at poor shaking Devin Platz. “Come here!”

Of course Devin didn’t. He turned and ran. And the rest of the swim team was just behind him. The freshman let out a huge bellow and thundered after them. The building shook and there was a tremendous crash as the freshman broke right through the wall in hot pursuit. Crap.

What had I done? I stood there in a kind of shocked silence for a moment, just staring at the hole the freshman had made in the wall. When suddenly a figure appeared on the other side and stepped through. He took one look at me and raised his eyebrows. It was the EPA guy. Holy crap!

“We’ve got to talk,” he said.

The last thing I wanted to do was talk to the EPA guy.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” I said. And I tried to walk past him. But no sooner did I take one step then a huge figure stepped up next to him and blocked my exit. Holy crap, it was Jimmy. There he stood, monstrous pecs heaving in and out as he breathed, his brick wall abs clenched. Impossibly broad shoulders, with delts like cannon balls, combined with his wide, thick lats turned his torso into a fucking road block. His big fists were clenched, making his arms look threatening even though they were just hanging by his sides. Of course those huge biceps, with thick veins running up and over them, didn’t hurt either. And there he was just daring me to try and get past him!

I may have gained some size in the past couple of days, but he was still way bigger than me, way bigger.

“What’s going on, Jimmy?” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt.

“You ruined everything!” said Jimmy, looking way too angry for me to stay healthy. “We had a good thing going with the swimming hole and you fucked it up!” said Jimmy

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t fuck up anything,” I said looking around at the boys locker room which was pretty much destroyed. “…well, nothing important anyway.”

“You took all of the muscle stuff out of the swimming hole!” he said.

“Me?” I said. “I didn’t take anything out of anything!”

“Liar!” he yelled! “Guys have been getting huge all over the place! I saw what just tore though here!” He pointed at the hole in the wall. “How could that have happened if you didn’t bring the stuff here?”

“Oh… that…? I can explain that… at least I think I can.”

“Save it!” yelled Jimmy. “I don’t need to hear any more of your lies! I just want to hear the sounds of your bones breaking as I beat the crap out of you!”

Then the EPA guy stepped up. “So, you see? You can talk to me, or you can talk to your friend here,” he said. “I’ll leave it up to you.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” I said, glaring at the runt and trying my hardest to look fierce.

The EPA guy didn’t look fazed at all. He just looked up at Jimmy and said, “What do you think, Jimmy? You want to have a talk with him?”

“Talk?” bellowed Jimmy. “Fuck no!” Then he balled up his fist and plowed it into me. Fuck. I’d never been hit by a car before but it couldn’t feel much different than Jimmy’s punch. Suddenly I was flying through the air, and before I knew what happened I’d collided with a bank of lockers, denting the fuck out them before I bounced forward and did a face plant on the floor. Fuck, that hurt!

“You want to talk now?” asked the EPA guy.

I was so mad I couldn’t see straight—of course it didn’t help that I was looking straight at the floor. Who the hell was this guy? He wasn’t with the EPA. Of that, I was now sure.

“Or should I let your friend have another turn with you,” asked the strange little runt.

I got to my knees and looked up at Jimmy. I could see he was just itching to have another go at me. Fuck, he was huge. Where was Kurt when you needed him? Oh… that’s right. Good thing he wasn’t around. He hated me, too.

I looked around for something to defend myself with. I didn’t see anything except… Wait a minute. I was clutching something in my hand. Oh my god, it was the eye dropper, the one I had been planning to dose the freshman with when I accidentally tipped the entire jar on him. It was loaded with some pretty potent shit. Granted, it was only an eye dropper, but it was full, and it was in my hand and right now it felt like my only chance.

I put it in my mouth and sucked it dry.

“ARRRRGGHHH” I cried, but it wasn’t in pain. I felt an insane energy ripping through me. It was like every muscle in my body was pulsing, throbbing like an engorged cock. My body was loving every second of it, and fuck, I could feel it building up inside of me, getting more and more intense! And then the muscles all over my body began to tighten. I felt them get thicker, heavier. Fuck, it was working. I was expanding, getting bigger, stronger and damn, it felt incredible.

“Well, what’s it going to be,” asked the little dweeb, “option A or option B?”

“I’ll take option C!” I shouted leaping to my feet and striking a double bicep pose. I watched my biceps explode out of my arms and grow bigger and bigger. I could feel the skin pulling taut around them, veins popping out and everything. Damn, they looked and felt amazing. And they were still swelling bigger!

“Holy shit,” said Jimmy. “What the fuck is happening?”

“My turn to grow some muscle!” I said. “And I’m just getting started!” I could tell Jimmy didn’t know what to think. But I felt so good I started laughing. I couldn’t help myself. It was just so fucking awesome.

I pumped my arms, and each time I did I felt my biceps grow larger and harder. Fuck, my biceps had become bulging granite-like masses. And my shirt was so tight… fuck, it just couldn’t hold them. POP POP SNAP and then my arms exploded out of my sleeves. Fuck, look at those guns; they looked huge! They had split heads and fucking peaks on them now, but I knew it was only the beginning. I could feel it. “Yeah! Oh yeah! Bring it on!”

And then my legs, oh fuck, my legs. I could feel my hamstrings and quads bulking up, getting huge and hard, and stretching my jeans to the limit. They felt like iron, filling my pant legs, making the heavy cloth feel light and feeble next to them. As the denim got tight I could see the different muscles separating out and taking shape beneath. And I could feel them just exploding with power. So fucking awesome.

And then the seams started popping. Oh fuck. The thick fabric started ripping, tearing, flying apart, as my mammoth quads forced their way out into the open. So fucking huge, so fucking strong. “ARRRGHHHHHH!” I shouted. I felt so good, so powerful, like a fucking beast.

“Fuck, dude,” Jimmy said to the little dork, “Maybe we should rethink this.”

“Yeah, maybe you better. Take a good fucking look.” I said as I felt myself stretching toward the ceiling and expanding outward in every direction as massive rock-hard muscles just burst out of me.

I could feel my shoulders stretching out broader, my torso was getting thicker, beginning to pulse and swell as it became solid, and heavy with muscle. I pulled my shirt up exposing my stomach, and ran my hand over it. I could feel the skin kind of shrinking in around the hard, growing rocks of muscle. Damn. I had developed a ripped eight pack. And the muscle tapered beneath a net of veins from my abs down to my crotch, still barely covered by the last remains of my jeans.

“FUCK!” I shouted, as my chest exploded out into massive boulders of pulsating sinew disintegrating my t shirt. I could feel my back rapidly expanding with hard, dense muscle, pushing outward, shoving the pathetic remains of my t shirt to the floor. My shoulders, my arms, they were passing huge, becoming immense, bulbous masses of throbbing muscle as my thighs bulged out thick and hard to new dimensions.

Fuck, I was gigantic, bigger than Jimmy now! I had to be at least 6’ 8” or 6’ 9” and I felt like I was all fucking muscle, all fucking power. I felt so fucking good, like I could do anything. I flexed my arm. Fuck. My bicep was unbelievable; it had a split head and was bigger around than a soccer ball with a vein thick as a rope snaking around it. And I could feel every solid, powerful inch of it blasting out of my arm.

I looked down at Jimmy and grinned. “Better rethink your plan, Munchkin,” I said. Then I grabbed him by the belt and hoisted him up with one hand. Fuck, it was way easier than I thought it would be. I could feel my massive iron-like muscles flexing and bulging under my skin as I effortlessly held the big guy suspended in the air. The look on his face… he was terrified! Why did that feel so awesome?

“I don’t know what this assholes been telling you, Jimmy,” I said, but that swimming hole was frozen solid when I found it. I couldn’t have done anything to it, even if I’d wanted to.”

Jimmy looked confused. “But then how…?” he squeaked.

“I found something better,” I said, flexing my other massive bicep in front of his face, “way better. Not far away, but it’s not going to effect your little swimming place one way or another. It should be just as effective just as soon as it thaws.”

“Seriously?” said Jimmy. “Then I guess I’m sorry.”

“Then I guess I can almost forgive you.”

“Almost?” he said, gulping. Then I threw him at another bank of lockers. He smashed into them denting them all up. Wow, the lockers around here were not having a good day.

“Now I can forgive you,” I said. The Jimmy got up and scampered away. I turned to the little runt, and started walking toward him. Fuck, my legs felt like they weighed a ton a piece. They were fucking ginourmous pillars of muscle and each massive rock-hard bulge felt packed with power. And each step I took shook the fucking building! What a fucking feeling!

“You’re turn,” I said to the runt. But he didn’t look fazed at all, which was kind of funny because one kick from one of these legs and he’d go flying through the next three walls and wind up on the front lawn. Fuck, I felt awesome.

“I wouldn’t do anything rash,” he said, “not if you want to see your little friend again.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Your friend, Greg,” he said, “didn’t you wonder why he never met you after school?”

“Kinda,” I said, not seeing the point in denying anything.

“Well, he didn’t meet you because I met him first. And if you ever want to see him again, you’ll play nice.”

“Who are you?” I said. “You’re not with the EPA.”

“No shit,” he said. “Now, take me to it.”

“To what?” I said.

“Don’t play games with me. You’ve got a barrel of a blue colored compound. I want it.”

Fuck, the barrel? He knew about that? Damn.

“I’m not going to say it again,” he said. “Take me to the stuff right now, or your friend Greg won’t be making it to graduation, or anything else for that matter. Got it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I got it. Poor Greg. What choice did I have? I had to take him.

We walked out to the parking lot in back. I was definitely getting stares. Fuck I loved walking. It was awesome with legs like these. I had this huge, had fantastic new body and I was just dying to try it out, but the little guy made me nervous and I figured it would just be better to give him what he wanted and get rid of him as quickly as possible.

As soon as we got into my truck and pulled away, I began to ask all the questions that had been flooding into my brain since I realized the little wasn’t from the EPA.

“So, who are you? And what’s the blue shit got to do with you anyway?”

“Who am I?” he said. “I gave you my card, didn’t I?”

“Ah… I sort of threw it out…”

He laughed. “Of course you did.”

“It was fake, though, right? You’re not really with the EPA.”

“No,” he said. “The card was fake, but the name was real. I am Louis Poindexter.” He laughed again, bitterly this time. “I don’t blame you for thinking that was fake, too. I mean Louis Poindexter? Could you get more stereotypically nerdy? And to top it off, I’m smart, too, damn near brilliant. And with my height, you can imagine what high school was like for me.”

“I guess,” I said. “Must have been pretty tough.”

“It was hell,” he said. “And after I graduated, things didn’t get much better. I was at the top of my class in college, but that didn’t matter. There was always some big douche lording it over me. Some big guy would come walking down the corridor, acting like I wasn’t standing there, forcing me to get out of the way or get trampled. They were always sniggering behind my back when I couldn’t reach something on an upper shelf. And they loved lifting heavy things right in front of me. Everyday of my life was a humiliation.

“I was in graduate school when I finally developed my plan. I majored in genetics and biochemistry and when I got out I went to work for a big biotech firm. But while I was designing their garbage eating enzymes, I was also working on my own project.”

“The blue goop?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately the company figured out what I was doing. They fired me and confiscated my work. I’d made at least a dozen barrels, experimenting with different strengths and combinations, before they caught me. I knew they couldn’t dispose of them the normal way because of the nature of the contents. They had to dump them illegally. I’ve been searching for years, and now…” He trailed off and stared out the window at the passing scenery.

I felt bad about what he’d gone through, but I really didn’t like this guy. There was something about his attitude. And I got the feeling he wasn’t telling me everything.

When we got to my house he hopped out of the truck before it had even stopped moving.

“Where is it?” he shouted. “Where is my barrel?”

“Jeeze,” I said, squeezing my huge, powerful body out of the truck. “Hold your goddam horses!” I had the feeling that if I twisted at the wrong moment I would warp the truck’s frame.

I finished extricating myself from the tiny compartment and looked down at the guy. He was so fucking tiny. I could just step on him now with one of my huge powerful feet and probably not even notice. But I didn’t know where he had Greg or under what condition, so I stopped.

He looked up at me and must have guessed what was on my mind from my expression. I’m sure it wasn’t hard to read.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Greg will regret it. Now, I’ll ask for the final time where is my barrel?!”

“In the garage,” I said, almost unable to process that this tiny guy was bending a gigantic muscle beast like myself to his will. Oh… and I could feel those rock-hard muscles working under my skin, expanding and contracting massively to my slightest gesture. It felt amazing.

We reached the garage and I threw open the door.

“Where is it?” he demanded brushing past me.

“Right there…” I said, my voice dying on my lips. The old tarp was there lying in a heap on the floor. But the barrel…

IT WAS GONE!

My brain was frozen. Where the fuck could the barrel of goop be? Someone had to have taken it. They had to have? But who?

“What are you trying to pull here, kid?” demanded Louis. “I don’t think your friend Greg is going to appreciate it much.”

“It was here this morning. I swear it was here this morning!” I said. “I mean how would you even move it…?”

Then it struck me. Was it coincidence that the only other guy who knew of the barrel’s existence also happened to be one of the few guys capable of lifting it? I think not!

“I know where it is,” I said. “Or at least I know where it has to be.”

“You better not be lying!” said Louis.

“I’m not,” I said. “Just wait here. I’ll go get it.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sticking with you until I get my barrel.”

“Fine,” I said. I started for my truck but then I something occurred to me. I flexed my, giant, veiny bicep and felt its warm, rock-hard massiveness under my fingers. Oh yeah, I was huge alright but Kurt was still bigger. He had to be about a foot taller than me and a few hundred pounds heavier – all of it muscle. And that’s assuming he hadn’t made any further use of the barrel. If he should decide to be difficult, I could have a real problem on my hands. I’d better go prepared.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and I ran into my house and up the stairs to my room. There it was, just sitting on my desk, that innocent looking gallon jug of water. I had the sudden urge to just chug it and explode into a beyond-gigantic muscle monster. I’d be massive; every single muscle on my body would be impossibly enormous, harder than diamonds and powerful beyond belief. Then I could take care of Kurt and the midget with just a swipe from one of my impossibly massive, muscle-ridden, powerful arms. They’d find Greg eventually. He’d probably be ok. …But could I take that chance?

Then I heard the doorbell. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I thought. I don’t have time for this! But something inside me, wouldn’t let me ignore it. I ran down the stairs, jug in hand, and pulled open the front door.

It was Bob. Fuck! I’d forgotten he was coming over. I was supposed to help him with his massive little brother problem! I looked at the jug in my hand and contemplated just giving him a splash with it and running, but I might just need every drop to deal with Kurt.

“Whoa,” said Bob, looking up at me, eyes wide. “You’re fucking gigantic!”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, resisting the temptation to give him a flexing show. “I don’t really have time to go into it now. I know I said I’d help you but…”

“No, no,” said Bob. “It’s cool. I just came by to tell you I wouldn’t be needing your help.”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah. You know the EPA guy?”

“I’m kind of familiar with him,” I said.

“He gave me the freaking antidote. My bro’s at the doctor now but when he gets back I’m going to hit him with it. The EPA guy said it’ll take him right back to normal no matter how big he got.”

“Seriously? …you know the EPA guy… he kind of lies. –Wait a minute! What did you have to tell him to get the “antidote?”“

Suddenly, Bob looked guilty as fuck. “What makes you think I had to tell him anything?” he stammered.

That fucker sold me out! And for an antidote that was probably colored water or something. Well, he’ll deserve what he gets when he throws colored water at that behemoth brother of his.

“Yeah, never mind,” I said. “I know what you told him. Goodbye, Bob.”

Then I shut the door on him without another word. Thanks to him I had a crazy psychopath I had to deal with. That’s the thanks I got for pumping him up.

I made a beeline for the driveway. The EPA guy was just standing there tapping his foot impatiently. “You know,” he said, “that took entirely too long. I think I’m going way too easy on you. I’m giving you an hour. If I don’t have my barrel by then, Greg’s gone. Are we clear on that?”

“Yeah, we’re clear,” I said. Jeeze, just what I needed, more pressure.

We got in the truck and headed for Kurt’s. On the way there I was stuck with a thought. What if I was wrong? What if Kurt didn’t have it? What would I do then? I started to speed but quickly decided that if the cops pulled me over, it might take too long and I couldn’t afford that.

That was probably the longest car ride I ever had. When we finally got to Kurt’s, it felt like the hour had to be up already, but it was only a 10 minute drive.

The EPA guy stayed in my truck while, jug in hand, I marched up to Kurt’s front door and rang the bell.

The front door opened and all I saw was an impossibly muscular torso. Kurt ducked his head down and squeezed his massively muscular body through the door and I found myself staring at his ridiculously thick corded neck with a kiwi sized Adam’s apple bulging out the center of it.

“I want my barrel, Kurt,” I said looking up past his chin at his scowling eyes.

“It’s my barrel now,” said Kurt, “and you can’t have it.”

Well, at least I was right about where it was.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I need that barrel. You see the EPA guy in my truck?”

Kurt looked over my head at my truck and then back down at me. “Yeah?”

“He’s holding Greg hostage. If I don’t give him the barrel, he’s going to kill him.”

“You’re lying,” said Kurt. “That’s not the way the EPA works.”

I slapped my forehead. “He’s not really with the EPA, you…” I stopped myself from saying, “moron.” I had to be careful. I did not want an angry behemoth on my hands. That could get messy.

“Yes, he is. I saw his card. You’re lying again,” said Kurt.

“The card was fake and I am not lying!” I said.

“Oh?” said Kurt, “Just like you weren’t lying when you said you didn’t sleep with my girlfriend?”

Oh fuck! She must have told him.

“That’s why you want the barrel, isn’t it?” said Kurt. “You want to get bigger than me again so she’ll like you better than me. Well, that’s not going to happen.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe this. That’s why he took the barrel! “Look, Kurt, I don’t care about Jenna. That was a one-time thing. She’s yours – no contest. I’m far more interested in Greg, and at the moment, keeping him alive.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I don’t care if you don’t believe me. Just give me the fucking barrel!” Looking past his gargantuan frame, I could see it, sitting right there, at the base of his stairs.

“Not a chance!” he said, crossing his massive bulging arms across his mountainous chest, and blocking my way completely.

I looked back at the EPA guy. He just looked back at me with raised eyebrows and tapped his wristwatch. Damn, this was taking too much time! I had no choice. I took the cap off my jug and took a couple of swallows.

I felt that electric sensation shoot through me, and start building, building, BUILDING! Oh fuck. Oh fuck. It’s coming, oh man. I could feel it fucking coming. OH FUUUUUUUUCK! And my body began just exploding muscle. My chest started pulsing and heaving as it expanded to the size of basketballs. Fuck, it felt awesome—beyond awesome! “OOOOH YEAH!” I cried. My shoulders just seemed to stretch out impossibly wide and I could feel them growing dense with thick, cut muscle. Giant traps rose up next to my widening neck while I sensed huge slabs of muscle bulging up out of my back, making my entire body feel bigger and thicker. “AH HA HA HA!” I shouted. My whole frame was stretching up and up as my abs bulged up to the size of my fist. I flexed my upper arms, and they swelled and bulged bigger and bigger until they were nearly twice size of my head, with veins the width of my fingers running up and over their baseball sized peaks. And they felt like iron, like big balls of iron exploding out of my arm!

But almost as soon as it started it stopped. Except now, I had to be close to 8 feet tall and I felt like one impossibly wide mass of gigantic ripped muscles, one rolling into the next. Fuck, I was bigger than Kurt! But then that had been the idea. Of course it was only by a couple of inches in height, but I had to have nearly 100 pounds of ripped, powerful sinew on him. Now it was me grinning down at him across a massive shelf of giant striated pecs. Fuck yeah!

“Now get out of my way!” I shouted. Damn, my voice was lower, too!

I grabbed Kurt to shove him out of the way, but it was not easy and he put up a fight. Suddenly he knocked the jug out of my hands and I watched horrified and the entire contents spilled into the dirt. Fuck! Then he ripped his way out of my grasp.

“So you wanna play the growth game?” he said. “Now it’s my turn.” And he turned and started squeezing back through his door. Fuck! He was going for the barrel! Damn, if he got to it there was no telling how big he’d get! I had to stop him!

I grabbed him and tried to pull him out of the doorway. But it wasn’t exactly easy. He was fighting hard against me. I know I was bigger, but he was no creampuff, not by a long shot. He grabbed the doorframe and tried to use it to pull himself through. By I pulled at him with everything I had and CRACK, ripped him and the doorframe right out of the house.

“Look what you did to my front door!” he shouted as he busted apart the door frame, which had somehow still been squeezed around him, into toothpicks.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You’re going to be sorry alright,” he said. Then I saw the effect ripping out the door frame had had. Now there was a huge opening in the wall, one plenty big enough for Kurt to fit through. He made a dash for the barrel. I lunged for his legs and succeeded in bringing him down. His outstretched arms landed just a couple of feet from the barrel. Kurt tried to pull himself across the floor to it. I was holding him back, but it was taking everything I had. Suddenly Kurt swung around and made a grab at me. Before I knew it, we were rolling around on the floor, each one of us trying to get the upper hand on the other.

“Stop it!” cried Louis. “Stop it, you idiots; you’re going to spill the barrel!”

But Kurt and I weren’t listening. We were too busy trying to get and maintain holds on each other’s massive, rock-hard, ripped and powerful limbs—not a completely unpleasant experience, I promise you.

Then, out of the blue, I saw Louis dart and weave right past us. Kurt saw him too. The two of us stopped grappling long enough to see Louis hoist himself up by the barrel rim and then just swing himself over the top and in. PLUNK! He just disappeared from sight beneath the blue goop.

“Holy fuck!” we both yelled simultaneously.

I had just enough presence of mind to jump up and push the barrel over. Blue goop went everywhere. Both Kurt and I leapt back to avoid being hit by any. I think we both felt we were big enough. Any bigger and existing in the regular world would be a real problem. And out tumbled Louis, just covered in the pure blue slime. Man, his suit was completely ruined!

“AH AH ARRRGH!” yelled Louis, and then I saw it start to happen. I saw Louis start to grow. “AT LAST!” he yelled. Fuck, I was sure I could actually hear his skin stretching like a thick plastic wrap. The shoulders on his blazer started blowing out. Then there was a rapid popping as the seams let go, pushed apart by protruding rock hard flesh.

“OOOH AHH HA! ARGHHHHHH!” he yelled as his pant legs filled and tore. Gigantically muscled thighs exploded through the rips and his pants burst into tatters. RIP! SNAP!

“MY GOOOOOOD, YESSSSS! ARGHHHHHHHH OHHHHHH!”—His body spasmed. RIIIIIIIIIIIP! Monster biceps and immense forearms were ripping out, tearing free from his sleeves! “I FEEL MONSTEROUS!!!!! ARRRRRRRRGHHHHH!”

His form began stretching taller and taller. “YES!” He cried. “OH YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!!”

Buttons were popping off of his oxford. “AARRRRGH!” Oh my God, the entire front of his shirt was just ripping to pieces as his massive pecs tore their way through and reduced it to shreds. And his entire torso just kept getting broader and broader. And his height… Jesus, he was at least 6 feet tall! And growing!

“AH HA HA HA HA ARRRGHHHH!” he cried. “Feels so good… ARRRRGHHHHHH!”

His growing, heaving pecs, blasted through the last remaining scraps of his shirt and thrust themselves out three feet in front of him. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” His neck thickened into a telephone pole and ripped apart his collar. His traps surged into massiveness. “OOOOAAAHHHH!” And together with his expanding delts blew out the rest off his blazer’s shoulders and sent it flopping to the ground. “ARRRGHH! OH OHHHHHH AH!”

With a final RIIIIIP, his pants completely gave way and fell to his feet past his shredded, pulsing thighs, which were now so huge they’d crush my truck just by themselves. “NNNNNUNGHHHH!” Unbelievably a few pathetic scraps of his shirt still clung to that massive, heaving upper body, mostly plastered to it by sweat with a few tatters and threads still wrapped around those impossibly huge, swelling traps.

“OOOAHHHHGHHHHHH! MORE!” he shouted

And holy crap, look at those feet. His shoes had long since been ripped apart, the remains vanishing under the spreading soles of those gigantic feet. I’d seen toddlers that weren’t as big as those feet and they seemed to be growing even more, becoming more solid with heavier bones, throbbing veins, and widening toes!

He was getting so fucking tall now, blowing past Kurt and me, crashing through the ceiling, maybe 10 feet, no, 11 feet! Holy fucking crap! And he was about 8 fucking feet wide at those massive planetoid shoulders! Jesus, he was already gigantic! How big was he going to get?

“We should get out of here,” I said to Kurt, and he turned and ran. I meant to do the same thing but somehow I couldn’t take my eyes off that humongous mass of muscle that Louis called a body. I knew it was dangerous but no way could I miss this. His calves were rapidly blowing up past the size of basketballs, flaring out larger and flexing behind his giant thickening shin bones. And his knees… holy crap they were practically up to my chest! And they were completely overwhelmed by his expanding thighs. Oh my God, his upper legs were evolving into humungous, undulating, tightly woven masses of powerful sinew, shifting and bulging under his skin, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And fuck, they were as wide as the fucking doorway! I could totally fit inside one of those suckers. And as massively wide as his legs got, they also stretched longer, making that colossal body even more impossibly tall.

“Jesus, Matt!” I heard Kurt cry. “What are you doing? Get the hell out of there!”

I was looking right up through the hole he’d made in the ceiling. Fuck, his abs were thrusting out of his stomach, growing, widening into eight deeply carved, solid bricks of muscle that violently heaved in and out with every monster breath he took. “OOOOAAAAHHHHGGHH!

Damn. His forearms were evolving into enormous bulging and swelling masses of ripped cords and tendons just glutted with power. They had to be every bit as long as I was tall and they were thicker, much, much fucking thicker. His biceps were massive globes of vein covered sinew. Fuck his peaks probably had more muscle than my entire body.

AHH AHHHH AHHHHHHHHH!” he shouted as his pecs erupted to the size of wrecking balls, huge and ribbed with thick muscle fibers and his gargantuan lats spread out behind him about as wide as a two car garage.

I heard the sound of crunching wood and metal his head collided with the roof. Fuck.

Louis was a true giant. The fucking size of him… he was just so fucking massive. His bulk was just so overwhelming, so much fucking muscle over every bulging inch of him. At about 20 feet tall and more than 15 feet wide at the shoulders, Louis was a mountain of massive, heaving muscle.

And he was still getting bigger…

I heard the creaking of metal and the snapping of breaking beams as Louis raised his impossibly massive arms and pushed up the roof. “AAARRRRGHHHHH!” he cried. “Try and… AHHH!…contain me now…HA HA HA HA!”

I dove under a table to escape the falling debris. A huge chunk of roof fell right on the pool of blue goo, completely covering it. Oh well there was no way I could stop this now, even if I wanted to.

I stuck my head out to see what was happening. Most of the roof had been torn away and Louis’s expanding, cut mega shoulders were now ripping the rest of it apart as they heaved their way through. And he was still getting bigger!

The rest of the house started coming down around me and I realized if I didn’t’ get out soon, it would probably kill me. I made a run for the door. I had to go straight past one of his fucking mammoth feet. Damn, it was half the size of my truck! And the calf above it was bulging out beyond belief. It had to be about the size of one of those smart cars and completely ripped to shreds, and each gigantic muscle was clearly defined as it heaved and pulsed under his skin. And that was nothing compared to his fucking thigh. But I couldn’t stop to look. Pieces of roof and wall were falling down all around me. Weaving and dodging, I made it to the door and ran out.

Kurt was there and some police had arrived, but they didn’t notice me at all. They were too busy staring at the massive muscle monster exploding out of the roof. Louis looked like he was having the time of his life. His impossible arms came smashing out into the open. He raised them and gave a mighty flex. Holy crap, I’d seen cars smaller than his arms. Then he strode forward right through the wall just like it hadn’t been there. I found myself ducking again to avoid the flying bricks, wood and glass as Kurt’s house completely collapsed behind him. Holy crap, he had to be 25 feet tall and he was as wide as a house. And his muscles…fuck…

He had huge thick mountainous traps dwarfing his sequoia neck. He had gigantic, satiated planetoid delts supporting enormous upper arms that consisted of several giant muscle masses, all pushed together and bulging out where ever they could find room. His forearms were taller than my entire body, and much, much wider, each one a huge, writhing network of thick woven cords. His chest was two massive globes of sinew, hard, solid and ripped. They were so huge they looked like architectural features more than body parts except that they heaved in and out with each colossal breath that he took.

Each ab was a concrete slab of muscle, and there were ten of them leading down to his monster cock which had to be about 3 feet long, as thick as a sewer pipe, and it was just as stiff as one, too. I couldn’t help but think I could probably straddle it with both legs and ride it.

And his legs, crap, his thighs were so big around, they’d give a tanker truck a run for its money, and I could see each and every gigantic leg muscle bulge and ripple as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Hold it right there!” said a policeman on a megaphone. “You’re coming with us.”

“I think not,” boomed Louis. “I’m not accompanying you now or ever.” Then he raised his giant foot and brought it down on their empty vehicle, and then there was a huge, rending, bending, twisting metal sound as he crushed it like a bug.

“Any questions?” said Louis.

Fuck.

One of the cops just panicked and started shooting at him. And then the other one joined in. But those bullets weren’t more than bee stings to Louis now. All it did was piss him off. He raised his fucking arm. Damn, it was packed with enormous, bulging, ripped to hell muscles big as fucking cars and bigger than both cops put together. He swung it at them and they went flying at least 30 yards. Fuck me.

Louis watched them pick themselves up and scuttle off and he laughed.

“Whoa, Louis, I called up to him. “Chill, will ya?”

“Chill?” he laughed looking down at me, “I’m just getting started. I’m gonna make them pay for every time they laughed at me, for every time they brushed me aside. I’m gonna wreck their whole god dam city!”

“But what about Greg?” I yelled up. “You got what you wanted. You have to let him go!”

Louis just laughed again. “You are so simple minded; I don’t know why I like you so much. I never had him. I confiscated his phone then sent him home and told him to wait to for me. He’s probably still there, the moron!” He laughed some more and then kicked a parked car about twenty yards down the road with one of his massive bulging legs.

Suddenly he froze and his eyes went wide. “Hold on to your hats, boys,” he called. “Looks like the shows not over yet!”

He started and then suddenly it began to happen again. I heard this weird kind of bubbling stretching noise as Louis started getting even bigger. His colossal shoulders were stretching out broader and swelling up to the size of a VW. His bis were bulging into massive vein covered mountains. Hi pecs were inflating like two fucking blimps. His abs were developing into boulders, the crevices between them became canyons. And, fuck, he was stretching taller!

He flexed his impossibly gigantic arms. Christ, it was like watching a building flex. Huge domes of rock hard veiny muscle rose up on each arm. Jesus…

“YES!” he cried, his booming voice shattering a near-by window, “Much better!”

Fuck, he had to be 40 feet tall and he was muscle, all fucking muscle. All over his entire gigantic body, it didn’t look like there was anything under his skin but one massive muscle after another. Damn, I was overcome just looking at him. And suddenly he just started trashing everything in sight! I couldn’t take my eyes of him until pa chunk of a house landed 10 yards away from me. Then I grabbed Kurt and the two of us started running in the other direction.

“What the fuck???” yelled Kurt, when we finally stopped about 10 blocks away. “What the fuck just happened?”

“What do you think just fucking happened?” I said. “The EPA guy just went Godzilla on us!”

“Jesus, he sure did,” said Kurt. “I wonder if they can fire him for that.”

“For the last time, he’s not with the EPA!” I shouted. “EPA guys don’t go around smashing houses!” Then I saw the light dawn in his eyes.

“My house!” cried Kurt. “He broke my house!”

“Well, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t stolen the fucking barrel!” I shouted.

“Well, I wouldn’t have stolen the barrel if you hadn’t been fucking Jenna!” He shouted back.

“Look, Kurt, how many times do I have to tell you? I have no interest in Jenna! She’s all yours, lock, stock and fucking cunt!”

“Hey don’t talk about my girlfriend like that!”

“Ok. How’s this? She’s all yours, lock, stock and fucking pussy!”

“Ok, that’s better!… isn’t it?”

“What are we going to do, Kurt?” I said. “This is all our fault!”

“Our fault?” he said “How is this our fault?”

“If we hadn’t found that barrel in the woods and brought it back, none of this would be happening.”

“Maybe,” said Kurt, “or maybe he would have found it eventually on his own. We don’t know. Anyway, even if it is our fault, what can we do about it? You’d need an army to stop him now. And it’s not like there’s any antidote.”

“Antidote?” The word hit me like a lightning bolt. “Of course! Kurt, you’re a genius!”

“No, I’m not,” said Kurt. “Even I know I’m not… wait a minute. You mean there’s an antidote?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe, maybe not, but if there’s a chance…” Suddenly I was trying to remember; where did Bob live?

“Kurt do you have your phone?” I asked. “I kind of lost mine when my pants split apart, and I didn’t think to pick it up at the time. I don’t know; I guess I was kind of distracted.”

“S’ok, Bro, been there, done that,” said Kurt as he pulled his phone of out a pocket in his XXXXL basket ball shorts. Damn, I needed to get myself a pair of those. It was getting more than a little drafty, since everything I had was out swinging in the breeze. I would have asked Kurt to borrow a pair of his, but his house was pretty much a pile of rubble now. Guess I’d have to make do with… well, nothing.

I tried to use the phone to find Bob’s address, but my fingers had gotten way too big to type on the tiny keyboard.

“Just talk to it,” said Kurt. “Its voice activated. I can’t type on the damn thing either.”

I quickly found Bob’s address. Thank God it wasn’t far, just a few blocks. We should be able to run there pretty quickly, even faster since our strides were considerably longer and our legs were way, way stronger.

“Come on, Kurt!” I cried and we took off. Damn our footfalls were cracking the asphalt and setting off car alarms. I’d’ve been pretty damn excited about it if I couldn’t see gigantic Louis in the distance laughing and ripping up an office building with his bare hands. Fuck, it looked like he’d gotten even bigger!

We got to Bob’s house just as his Mom’s minivan was pulling into the driveway. Damn, Bob was out front waiting for it with the tiny bottle in his hand.

“No! Wait! Stop!” I cried!

Bob did stop, but I think he was frozen at the sight of two behemoths running at him full speed, one of them completely naked—which was me.

Then the door to the minivan opened and out stepped and out stepped Bob’s brother Brian. Damn, he was just as big as us.

Bob snapped out of it, as soon as he saw his massive baby brother. He uncorked the bottle and made a run for Brian.

“Stop, Bob, stop!” I yelled, but it didn’t have the effect I wanted. Instead, Brian turned and saw us running his way, which meant his back was to Bob, so he wouldn’t see his older brother coming at him with the antidote. It a couple of seconds it would be over. And we were too far away. We weren’t going to get there until it was too late!

Then I did something I kind of regretted. “Brian, watch out!” I yelled. “Bob’s got the antidote!”

I have to say it amazed me that Brian seemed to know exactly what I was talking about. He turned around in a flash, much faster than you’d think someone of his bulk could turn around, and grabbed Bob by the wrist just as his brother was going to empty the bottle on him.

Then he lifted his brother up by the wrist with one hand and looked him in the eye. “Whacha got there, puny? You trying to shrink me?”

“N… n… no…,” said Bob.

“I think maybe you were,” said Brian.

Kurt and I jogged up and Bob gave me the glare of death and said, “You fucked me over, asshole!”

I’d have to say that was pretty brave of Bob to say something like that considering he was surrounded by three behemoths, two of which had good cause to beat the living crap out of him. I know I thought he looked kind of big at one point, but now he looked like a malnourished toddler next to our giant, impossibly muscular bodies.

Brian turned to me and said, “Whoa, bro, you saved my ass. I guess I owe you.”

“Well, there are two things you could do for me,” I said. “First, I need that antidote.”

He reached over with his left hand and easily popped the bottle out of his brother’s fingers, which I imagine were getting a little numb by this point. Being very careful not to spill it, he gave the bottle to me.

“What’s the other thing?” he said.

“Lend me a pair of shorts?”

He did better than that. He also lent me a pair of shoes. He offered me a t-shirt too, but fuck that! I didn’t want any t-shirt covering up my medicine ball biceps, mountainous pecs and brick wall abs! Hell no! Let the world gape at the overwhelming wonder of my massive, bulging, muscular torso, and be awed.

And what about Bob? Brian had been dragging him around the house like a toddler with a rag doll. He wouldn’t let go of him for anything. I didn’t feel too bad for Bob. After all he had betrayed me and set into motion a series of events that may well bring about the end of western civilization! I was pretty sure we could leave Brian to deal with him.

I explained to the both of them what was going on. I quick check of CNN confirmed the basic facts. Louis was on a rampage, just creating a path of destruction wherever he went, and apparently having a blast doing it. I’d never seen anyone look happier. And it looked like he’d even had yet another growth spurt and gotten even bigger.

“You think the antidote will stop him?” asked Brian.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s a chance Louis was lying to Bob, and this shit won’t do anything. But we’ve got to try.”

“Why don’t we test it?” suggested Kurt.

There was an awkward silence, since none of us wanted to be the guinea pig. I mean, what if it worked?

“I know!” said Brian, “We can test it on him.” He dragged Bob up by the wrist, displaying him like a fish he’d just caught.”

“No!” cried Bob.

“What do you think?” Kurt asked me.

“Well, Bob did put on about 30 pounds with the shit,” I said. “We could put, like, a drop on him and see if he looses any of it.”

“If he does it’ll be fine by me!” said Brian.

“No, please, no!” said Bob

“Shut up, runt,” said Brian. “You got us into this! You’re lucky we don’t pulp you right now!”

While I hated the idea of shrinking anybody, even Bob, I hated the idea of going after mega-muscle-giant-Louis with this junk, not knowing if it would even work, more. And Bob did kind of bring it on himself.

“Ok,” I said. “Hold him steady.”

Bob started struggling wildly, but with Kurt and Brian holding him, he had about the same chance as a leaf in a tornado. I ripped of his shirt with one yank and very, very carefully, tapped a drop out of the bottle and onto the center of his chest.

We all held our breaths, and then slowly but certainly we saw poor Bob begin to shrink. His pecs deflated, his abs softened up, and his arms lost a lot of their size. It worked!

Bob was very upset when we let the little stick-boy go, and he scuttled off practically in tears.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” I shouted after him. “You don’t sell out your friends!”

Great, that was out of the way. Now all I had to do was get close enough to giant Louis with out getting crushed, and spill some of the antidote on him without getting any on myself. Easy, hunh? Oh yeah, piece of cake.

“Ok, who’s coming?” I said to Kurt and Brian.

“C…c…coming?” said Kurt. “Why don’t we just give the stuff to the police; let them do it?”

“Are you serious?” I said.

Kurt just nodded.

“Ok, consider for a minute that they actually believe us—which is doubtful in the extreme. They’re gonna wanna know where we got the stuff and how we got so big. Sure we can go to the police, if you’re down with spending the next few years at some government lab somewhere.”

“I’ll go,” said Brian.

“Really?” I said.

“Sure, sounds like fun,” said Brian.

“Fun,” stuttered Kurt, “are you kidding? You weren’t there. You didn’t seem him smash apart a house with just his massive arms.” Kurt gulped.

“Awesome!” said Brian. “Let’s go!”

“Come on, Kurt,” I said. “This is our mess. Now let’s go clean it up.”

Then Brian and I started off, with Kurt trailing morosely behind us. “I don’t even have a will,” he said.

“What are you worrying about?” I said. “Louis destroyed everything you own. You got nothing to leave to anyone.”

“Oh yeah,” said Kurt, “that makes me feel loads better.”

Louis was not hard to find. We just had to follow the billowing dust cloud, the deafening crashing noises and the swarming news copters and we found him pretty quickly.

The police had cordoned off the area, but really it wasn’t hard getting past them. As soon as some clueless motorist distracted their attention, it was easy to just step over the barriers and continue on our way.

We found Louis standing astride on a rubble pile that used to be a 10 story building, attacking another office building next door. At this time I’d say the score was Louis: 100—Office Buildings: 0.

A military type helicopter flew up and fired a missile at him. Louis batted it away and it went crashing into another office building. There was a tremendous explosion! Kurt, Brian and I ran for cover from all the flying debris. When the smoke cleared, another few acres of land had been cleared for future development. I don’t think the military will try that again. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease!

Louis was there alternating between pounding on his massive chest and knocking the concrete out of that other building.

“Ok, boss, what’s the plan?” asked Brian.

Oh…Yeah… Plan… I should make one of those.

My first idea was just to rush him, but in order to get to him, we’d have to scale a rubble pile and least 3 stories tall, and from the looks of all the jagged concrete, rebar, and twisted steel beams, rushing just wasn’t an option.

Sneaking up on him was next. He was fully occupied in disassembling that building, so one of us should be able to get close enough to dose him.

The other guys thought my plan was great—as long as somebody else did the sneaking.

Well, I guess it was my plan, so I guess I should be the one to carry it out. Carefully clutching the small bottle I began to climb slowly up the broken slabs of concrete. I was trying to be as quiet as I could. But, you know, I was still pretty new to being an 8-foot-tall behemoth with ridiculously hard and massive muscles exploding out all over my torso, making its dimensions impossibly huge and powerful, but a little awkward. I was finding grace and stealth to be quite a challenge. I would grab onto a piece of concrete a little too hard and it would crumble beneath my insanely strong fingers.

Once a concrete slab actually snapped and I lost my balance. I grabbed desperately for a steel girder. It saved me from falling but I could feel it bending and squashing under my unbelievably powerful grip.

I finally made it to the top of the ruin and I saw the unbelievably massive sight of Louis just a few yards away from me. He was at least 60 feet high now and just a mountain of muscle. His planetoid biceps alone must have weighed several tons. And he was just ripping the infrastructure out of that office building and letting it fall all around him. Fuck, I couldn’t get near him without risking getting crushed by a piece of it!

I heard and noise behind me and turned to find that Brian had followed me up.

“What are you doing here, bro?” I asked.

“I thought you might need a backup,” he said.

“What about Kurt?” I asked.

“Yeah… He thought it was best if he stayed below and was the backup for the backup.”

That’s my buddy, Kurt.

“Ok, there’s no way we’re going to get near him with all that shit flying around,” I said. “So, one of us needs to distract him while the other one hits him with the antidote.”

Brian looked a little uncertain until I said, “I’ll distract him. It will be easier for me. I know him.”

“You know him?”

“A long story,” I said handing him the antidote bottle. “Be careful with this and as soon as he stops throwing shit, hit him with it!”

“Got it,” said Brian taking the bottle.

“Oh well, better get this over with,” I said and I turned and walked as close as I could to the massive muscle giant.

“Hey Louis!” I called. At first, he didn’t hear me but I repeated myself even louder, “Louis!”

Suddenly he stopped and started looking around. It didn’t take him long to spot me.

“YOU!” he bellowed. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

“You know… I just thought I’d stop by and see how the wanton destruction was going.”

Louis just laughed.

Fuck, he’d stopped throwing things and had his attention focused on me. Why wasn’t Brian striking?

“Come up here so we can talk face to face,” said Louis. Then he reached down and grabbed me. Fuck! Where was fucking Brian?!

As Louis lifted me into the air, I looked back towards Brain and to my horror saw that the last piece of rubble Louis had thrown had landed right on top of him. Jeeze, it looked like the remains of an entire room! It hadn’t killed him but it probably would have if he hadn’t been an 8-foot-tall musclebound behemoth. Anyway, he was completely pinned beneath it, but I could still see the antidote bottle unbroken and clutched in his outstretched, waving hand.

But I had other problems. I was face to face with a 60 foot muscle giant and I was painfully aware of the size of his mouth. Damn, he could swallow me with one gulp!

“What do you think of my handy work?” he said, gesturing to the several blocks of devastation that surrounded us.

If I knew one thing it was that I’d better humor him. “On a Richter scale of 1 to 10, I’d say we’re looking at an 8.3,” I replied.

He laughed again.

“Just wait til I’m done. We’ll get that up to a 10!”

I looked around and spotted Kurt in the far distance below staring up at me, wide eyed.

“Maybe,” I shouted at the top of my lungs, “But what you need is a backup! Even better, a backup for a backup!”

Kurt obviously got my message because even from this distance I could tell he was terrified.

“And I suppose you’re applying for the job,” said Louis.

“Sure,” I said, trying not to be too obvious about watching Kurt. He had started climbing up the debris.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” said Louis. “About the only thing you’re good for is an afternoon snack.”

Holy shit!

“You don’t want to eat me,” I said. “Who else knows your story? Who else will be around to write the saga of Louis, the Terrible?”

Hurry up Kurt! I could see he had reached the top, but he hadn’t spotted Brian yet.

“Louis the Terrible? That’s a horrible name,” said Louis.

“Really?” I said. “What would you like to be called?”

Thank God! Kurt spotted Brian and he was moving toward him.

Louis seemed to be thinking about my question. That was a break, I needed every second I could get. Good, Kurt had the bottle.

“How about Louis, the Destroyer?” said Louis. “That’s a much better name, and I don’t really need you to write my story. I’d do it better myself… for the pathetic few who’ll be left to read it.” He chuckled, then slammed his massive fist into the building again, causing a rain of concrete and glass.

Kurt had been sneaking up on Louis and now he was dodging the falling rubble. Crap! He almost dropped the bottle! Damn it, Kurt! If you fuck this up, after Louis eats me, I hope he shits me all over you!

“No,” said Louis, as if coming to a conclusion, “I think you would make a far better snack than a biographer.”

“Kurt!” I shouted. “Hurry up! He’s going to eat me!”

Louis looked down to the ground and spotted Kurt. “What’s this?” he said. “It looks like your little friend. Good. I’m pretty hungry and you, alone, wouldn’t have satisfied my appetite at all.”

Louis lifted up his foot and tried to step on Kurt! But Kurt managed to dive out of the way.

Louis laughed. “This will be fun.” Then suddenly, all the humor went out of his eyes as he presumably spotted what Kurt had in his hand.

“No…,” he said, as Kurt lobbed the bottle at his shin. I heard the glass break. Louis dropped me, and I fell like a rock about 50 feet to the ground. If I hadn’t been a fucking beast, the fall would probably have killed me. As it was, it didn’t exactly tickle. All the wind was knocked out of me, I hurt all over, and I was barely conscious as I saw Louis start to dwindle.

His muscles seemed to be collapsing in on themselves as he slowly shrank in height.

“No! No! This isn’t happening!” he shouted. “This isn’t fair!”

And I’m afraid that’s the last thing I remember before I passed out.

I came to in a hospital, surrounded my Mom and Kurt and even Greg was there!

“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Louis?”

“Don’t worry,” said Kurt. “He shrank all the way down to his former midget size and now he’s been hauled away. From all reports, he’ll never see the light of day again.”

“And Brian?” I asked.

“He’s next door,” said Kurt. “He’ll be fine. They were going to put you guys in the same room, but you wouldn’t fit.”

“And what about….” I said, flexing my tremendous bicep.

“Yeah,” said Kurt, “That all came out. They know how Louis was using us—a bunch of unwitting kids—to test his serum. All of us have come forward about it, even Bob.” Kurt winked. “The doctor says you’re a medical miracle, and you should be outta here by tomorrow. Which is a good thing since the city is giving you, Brian and me medals.”

“Medals?” I said.

“For saving the city! In fact, we’re meeting with the mayor in about 20 minutes. So, we gotta go. Your mom is standing in for you.”

“So good to see you awake again, sweetie,” my mom said, and suddenly she and Kurt said their goodbyes and were gone. Now it was just me and Greg.

“Kurt told me what you were willing to do for me,” said Greg.

He did? Oh fuck. I could feel myself going red in the face.

“And I just want you to know, I think you’re the sexiest thing in the universe.”

Again, more blushing and no words.

“It’s just you’re just so big now, if we tried anything you’d probably break me,” he said casting his eyes over my enormous, hugely muscular torso. And I know I’ll never get even close to your size.”

“I don’t know,” I said, finally rediscovering the power of speech. “We can be creative… at least until spring comes.”

“Spring? What does that have to do with anything?” asked Greg.

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Can you swim?”