“Shit, no!” Gigantic feet clad in white sports socks blocked the path ahead.
“Right!” Sarah grabbed my arm and pulled me with her as she swerved to avoid a car and sprinted across the intersection with Main. A gigantic pale hand dropped from the sky to our left, smashing through the asphalt and blocking the way south past the school. We had only one way left. It was pretty clear we were being herded.
“Oh no!” A voice boomed from above, dripping with sarcasm. “Where will you go now little shrimps?”
As we sprinted past an upturned sheriff’s car with the rest of the crowd we could see the blockage ahead. A pair of sneakers, each longer than a bus, had been placed on their sides across the road at the end of Main. We were trapped. There were peels of laughter coming from the sky. “Well, now we have you where we want you. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
“Now we’ve caught, we get to play with you.” Thundered another voice. Deeper and huskier than the first, but still clearly feminine. It was Betty’s. I remembered the girl who’d been the year below me in High School with her mop of ginger hair. I remembered she’d sucked me off behind the Safeway when we were too young to know any better. Now she worked the til at Safeway. I’d graduated, gone to college, graduated again, come back to my hometown, and she was still here. The others were Elle and Trish. They were a pack of three at high school. None of them had ever left town. I heard they all lived in a trailer together. How they had grown to this monstrous size I had no idea, but I was terrified. I needed to keep my head down and get out of here.
Elle spoke now, she was on her knees at the end of the road, her head low, peering at us all as we stood trapped on the road, looking at the faces in the crowd.
“We got plans for you little shrimps. Listen here, we run this town now, and we want some chores done. First things first, I want my nails done, and Betty here needs her bush trimmed.”