chapter 18

Tiffany ran out into the night. She was exhausted. Every muscle in her body ached and her head was throbbing in pain. She gasped for air and her heart beat like a race horse.

As she began to calm down, at least a portion of her sanity began to return. She realized she was naked and that her first order of business was to find someplace to rest and get warm. Fortunately, there was an abandoned warehouse near Dr. Lowenstein's laboratory. She approached carefully, hoping not to create a disturbance that would draw attention to her present state of nudity. She slowly and very quietly moved a huge sliding door, using every last bit of her massive strength.

Apparently she had managed to find the entry to a garage area where the semi-trailer trucks had been serviced. She squeezed herself into one of the repair bays, snuggled down and fell into a deep, almost coma-like sleep.

When she awakened, it was still dark. More to the point, she felt different. VERY different. For one thing, she was MUCH smaller. She didn't fill up the repair bay the way she had just before she drifted off to sleep. In fact, for the first time in weeks she felt almost normal physically.

Tiffany could see there was a restroom at the end of the warehouse and she made her way over there very haltingly, afraid she might bump into something and hurt herself. By some miracle the utilities hadn't as yet been cut off, so when she flipped the light switch the restroom lit up. She looked at herself in the mirror. Surprisingly, she was almost recognizable. From what she could tell, she had retained some of the height she had acquired during her "HULK-like" experience. She guessed she was about six feet two now. She was also lighter and much less muscular. If she had to guess, she figured she weighed somewhere between one hundred eighty and two hundred pounds. But she wasn't FAT. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

In her "previous existence" she had always been small-boned, almost delicate. Not any more. Her hands were huge, her feet were MUCH bigger than they had ever been. Her shoulders were VERY broad but her hips were fairly narrow and her legs were incredibly long. Most importantly, she looked like herself. Well, almost like herself. Her straight hair was now curly and it now had streaks of gray running through it. She had always looked much younger than her actual age. Not now. She didn't look OLD, but she looked more mature, more like a woman in her mid to late 30s than the dewy-faced ingenue she had been before.

Satisfied that she at least looked like a "normal" human being and with her keen intelligence and sharp observational skills still intact, Tiffany rummaged around the warehouse, looking for something to wear. She found a locker room and in it she found a pair of coveralls. It was WAY short in the legs and VERY tight through the shoulders, but it fit. At the bottom of the locker was a pair of sneakers. They didn't exactly fit, but Tiffany reasoned that something was better than nothing.

She opened a side entrance to the warehouse and started walking. She recognized where she was and realized she had a LONG walk ahead of her, but she was grateful that she had returned to some semblance of normalcy, hopeful she could return to her life as a working journalist.

Dr. Lowenstein, on the other hand, was not quite so lucky!!