All You Can Eat

The van crawled up to the back door with the barest exhalation of gasoline fumes in the rain. The water bounded gleefully from the protective flanks of the beast as it sighed and settled in it's moorings, disgorging several figures from it's rear. The lights shone either way down the street, other than themselves they were utterly alone.

Dreadlocks were a common theme amongst the assembled, both men and women, as was the color green and a variety of tie died hues. They all wore sandals rather foolishly in the rain.

"We're here, Moonlight, get the drill."

Moonlight Sunbeam Waterfall, or Sydney as she was when she wasn't participating in domestic terrorism prepped the large electric drill against the door lock, and with a spluttering revolution the drill bit sunk into the mechanism, and before too long a metallic clanging sound could be heard on the other side of the door. With a gentle push, it swung inwards.

Three figures made their way inside, the Eco warriors fanned out, switching on the power, the lights, the steam trays. Soon, the inside of Harry's Stop And Glut Chinese Buffet All You Can Eat Palace glowed like a fairy tale treasure chest, a lone pearl of light on the otherwise darker lower east side of town. They made sure the front door was securely barricaded, before doing their best to hang table cloths over the windows, blanking the  street side view of the unfolding scene to the casual observer.

The three exited, and helped manhandle the bundle from the bag. From the outside, it looked like a simple roll of carpet, loosely bound with thick silver tape. It wriggled somewhat as it was moved.

The bundle was brought inside, out of the rain and into the buffet. It audibly "oof!"ed as it was dropped, unceremoniously onto the carpet. Freedom River Trout stepped over it, the leader of the group of five, and taking a sharp stick, poked his way through the tape, the carpet springing open to reveal it's captive charge.

She was young, not yet escaped from the terrifying pall of her twenties. Blond hair bobbed and weaved about her hair in an impossibly neat configuration, the slight curl at the tip a delicious subtlety in the mix. She obviously hadn't been dressed for the occasion, a tiny pair of improbably pink hot pants visible between succulent thighs and an over sized plain white shirt. It had been laundry day.

"Today is , like, totally a great day for the Vegan Vikings! For too long, the unchecked horror and such of all you can eat... "murder factories" like this has, like, totally robbed animals of the right to be all free and stuff! Yeah!"

The carpet bound and inappropriately attired woman groaned, and rubbed her head. She was dizzy, disorientated, and glad to be out of her paisley prison.

"This, like, carnivore will be the instrument of our justice! We will strike a blow totally at the heart of the meat culture dominating this city, by cutting the head of the snake like totally off! Death to Harry's Stop And Glut Buffet All You Can Eat Palace, death to the murderers!"

The kidnapped girl shook her head restlessly, the concussive buzz still hanging fug like over her.

What had happened?

*****

She remembered struggling in her apartment. A grim, life and death struggle, her veins standing out on her neck, red faced her eyes rolled back in her head, a thin foam of spittle formed at the edge of her lips.

Then the button finally did up, and she breathed out.

The hot pants, though neon colored and highly conspicuous, were nevertheless the only item she had to preserve her modesty, unfortunately they had been outdated by a recent... corpulent takeover of some future fast food interests.

They were very, very... snug.

Snug was a polite word for it.

Another way to put it would be "too small."

They hugged every curve. Every single one. She made her way over to the mirror, and made a surprised face when she realized she could see every detail of her own anatomy. This had been a bad day to run out of underwear. Though she did like how her butt took on the appearance of two well parked hatchbacks.

She fished a crimson bra out of the massive Matterhorn of mouldering laundry she had assembled in the middle of the room, and gave it an experimental once over.

Not too bad...

On it went.

She adjusted the fit of the cups, holding her chest firmly and also rather snuggly. It'd do, at least she didn't have double boob.

She fished around in the pile some more. Out came a white shirt, she usually slept in it, but this time it would have to be pressed into a more daytime roll. On it went. It was long enough to obscure the eye watering detail of her hot pants, but to her dismay the red of her brassiere showed through it.

"Oh well, Can't win 'em all..."

Nikita gave her hair a quick tease, watching it spring back to perfect shape. At least somethings were going her way today.

Unbeknown to her, she was being watched. The moment Nikita left her apartment, the black van across the street growled into life. She thought nothing of it, why, black vans had a tendency to appear around her recently. She guessed she must just attract such things.

It crawled after her down the dusky street, as she tottered along carrying armfuls of dirty washing. She made unsteady progress, in the glare of hindsight it was obvious that flip flops were not the best choice of footwear for such an expedition. Ignoring the creaking complaints of her tiny, tiny shorts, she made her way into the grease pitted fried chicken vendor down the street.

The van waited patiently while she picked up an outrageous box of reformed chicken. Once it had been a drug dealing, old lady mugging, womanizer of a chicken. Now, nothing but a humble golden fried treat. Reformed indeed.

The box perched precariously, roosting even, atop the pile of laundry. Somehow, a hand snaked up to it and fished a leg out of the box, retreating with the prize back behind the bundle. The van regarded her cautiously, before crawling after her once more.

"Now... Like, totally grab her!"

The van yawned open next to her, and in a scatter of discarded thongs, she was gone.

A lonely chicken leg spun to a stop on the pavement, a solitary bite missing from its bread crumbed exterior. All was still.

*****

She remembered nothing after being dragged into the van. She assumed they had knocked her out, but the truth of it was they weren't the most experienced of kidnappers. She'd caught her head on the door frame when they dragged her into the folk rock cavern inside the van, putting her out for the count. The hippies had panicked, not knowing if their charge had expired or not, so wrapped her up in a carpet and spent the next few hours driving around in a terrific panic looking for a ditch to dump the body in, before realizing she was still breathing, and had fallen asleep in the carpet, a carpet which now seemed to be snoring loudly, and mumbling something about cake.

And so here she was.

And here they were.

And was that... yes, it was Chinese...

Her favorite. Or at least one of her favorites.

The air in the van had been thick, close, hot and spiced with the hot boxed scent of pot smoke. To the sleeping brain, it tormented her with visions of sugar plums dancing in her head. Which she ate. The brain, already in a state of concussion and perhaps shock, believed whole heartedly in what it's creepy uncle the subconscious mind was showing it. Like the promise of puppies and funny stories it went along with everything it was told, believing it implicitly, all the while Nikita grew hungrier and hungrier...

There was Chinese food, lots of it, and a big glowing sign saying all you can eat... and something that looked like a Dryad telling her to eat it all, especially the meat.

She obliged...

The first steam tray hoisted effortlessly out of it's housing, the burner just lit beneath the contents barely steamed with little to no heat, lemon chicken. Nikita took great greasy handfuls, stuffing them eagerly into her face. First one, then another, then another. Slowly, she made her way through the shallow metal dish, scooping eagerly at the contents, hand to mouth, hand to mouth.

Delicious.

The smoke of the hippies still swirled in organic, wool blend, no artificial fiber coils inside her skull, every nerve and twinging synapse screaming at her to feed, eat, glut, devour, consume and imbibe all and every item of food within arms reach.

There was a loud, creaking whine. With shrimp in hand, Nikita looked down, fearing the source to be her own slightly bulging stomach. There was a loud pop, and she flinched instinctively.

A metal rattling sound.

She looked into the dish, and saw to her surprise the Levi Strauss Jeans Company trademark staring back at her. In a small, distorted circle. She quickly realized a deep and relaxing thing... it was the button from her shorts. There was a staccato, steady rhythmical grinding sound, and by the sensation and source of the feeling, she surmised correctly it was the zipper, now mercilessly at the whim of the overhang of her stomach, which had gratefully pushed out and over the waist of the tiny shorts,sighing and grumbling happily at it's liberation from the petite pink prison.

Happily,she returned to the steam tray, snatching up a morsel or five, stuffing them into her eager mouth, chewing thoughtfully and then spitting something out.

The button struck a girl square in the forehead. She deserved it, she was called Creedance Clearwater Revival, without the slightest inflection of irony.

The shrimp vanished rather rapidly. Deep fried crustaceans were no match for a determined set of molars and incisors.

She chewed and swallowed, ate and enjoyed, rinsed and repeated.

Steam tray after steam tray fell to the onslaught of her insatiable mastication, the teeth chewing ceaselessly, save a quick pause to swallow and refill the cavernous mouth. The hippies watched in craven delight as the inventory of Harry's Stop And Glut Chinese Buffet All You Can Eat Palace vanished in an uninsured instant, the unstoppable avarice of the kidnapped girl slowly overwhelming his business.

Her shirt gave up the valiant effort of containing her increasing paunch. Slowly, the material had gotten progressively tighter and tighter, odd snapping sounds coming periodically from the seams, until it took on the same appearance that the hot pants had borne that evening when she managed to pour herself into them. The shirt was so tight you could see every minute mole and detail of her brassiere through it, so tight as to render it tansparent almost. There was a digestive sigh from Nikita's midriff, and with the slightest ripple of the ever more succulent flesh her shirt rolled up the heaving girth adorning her front, exposing the creamy flesh of her engorged belly. A hand slipped to it, testing it's fullness and ability to hold more. It found much to it's liking, and after making an attempt to wipe the sweet and sour fingerprints from its surface, continued to Stop And Glut all over again.

*****



River Trout looked ill. Not just ill, nauseous even. His face had taken on the same greenish tinge as parts of his clothing, which despite having been home tie died in his bathtub, were actually very expensive, and paid for by mummy and daddy's trust fund.

He managed to avoid retching, and watched in disbelief as another empty steam tray clanged to the floor in desolate abandonment. If he were a poet, as he pretended to be, he could have said something poignant about the subtlety of the light as it reflected from the sauce licked steel, an autumnal cast to it's melancholic presence.

Instead he watched in mute silence as she got plum sauce everywhere.

'She' was not quite the same she that had been brought into the restaurant groggily rolled in a scrap of carpet he'd stolen from his mum's penthouse. 'She', for a start, would take more carpet than the entire apartment complex contained to encircle her waistline.

She was vast, unbelievably swollen, her stomach a living ocean of rolling, bloated fecundity. He watched as she upended the last tray of egg fried rice, the snowdrop cascade of individual grains lost in the tsunami of cooked egg bits that accompanied the mass exodus from tray to stomach. The shirt had lost the fight, she'd had to remove it, so now clad in nothing but a bra and critically compromised hot pants the bloated vision before them lowered the steam tray, and for a moment seemed to consider her options. She had long ago lost the ability to stand, and so sat in a sort of lean, the weight of her stomach between her legs sufficient enough to counterbalance the drag of her torso backwards, holding her in a sort of fattened equilibrium, bum on the ground, belly between splayed legs, hands wiping grease and rice from her countenance.

After a while, her expression turned to one of grim determination. Her hands, looking tiny in comparison, moved with a practiced grace to her immense belly, and squeezed ever so slightly.

BbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRPPPPP!

She closed her mouth, thought about what she had just said, and collapsed backward. She hit the floor with a sloshy thud, her belly remaining in motion for several minutes after her downfall, gurgling and rippling, groaning and shuddering, the impact producing all manner of outlandish sounds from the pale ocean of flesh. The assembled counter culture warriors stood in awe of what she had accomplished, the buffet transformed from it's pristine state to one of nightmarish desolation and utter ruin, trays overturned, spattered sauce hand prints adorning every surface. On one of the larger surfaces, there was a great spherical dent where Nikita had lent on the steel surface to reach another tray in her feeding frenzy, her weight ballooned to such a degree that the indentation carried a tiny bevel in it's center, marking where her navel had been.

One of the girls stepped forward. He couldn't remember her name, he'd persuaded her to join his little cadre of tofu eating squatters simply because he thought she had a nice rack at the time. Regrettably she'd turned out to be a lesbian.

"Should I get the paint?"

The words jarred a sense of recollection, what did they do after their various "liberating maneuvers"?

Oh yes.

They had to let people know who'd done it.

"Sure... I mean, 'like, totally'."

The girl vanished through the back door for a moment before returning with an apple box full of assorted cans of well used paint. To the casual observer, it could pass as the working supplies of an extremely shoddy decorator, or perhaps a painter in the mold of Pollack.

They eagerly uncapped the cans, revealing the assortment of garish colors. They eagerly dipped brushes, and turned toward the slumbering leviathan as a single thought dawned in their collective consciousness.

The first brush kissed the engorged flesh tentatively, not sure of it's purpose, but with faltering precision drew a large, glistening 'A' on it's wobbling surface. The bristles lifted off for the merest second, the eyes watching to see if the presence of the paint would be noticed by the sleeping giant squatting atop the haplessly drowsy girl beneath it's laboring bulk.

A collective sigh of relief squeezed out as she mumbled something about batman and chocolate milk, but remained in the vice like grip of a deep, delicious sleep.

The painting continued, at far accelerated pace. More letters began to crowd the expanse of belly. She slept on, unaware of the mural evolving atop her massive gut, gently rising and falling with her snores, unashamed of its volume.

They continued, at frantic pace, for a few moments, before with a crash they were disturbed.

"FREEZE! Handsup!"

The police arrived in a shock and awe of flashlights and firearms.

The eco-warriors leapt in a shower of paint and brushes, the spatter of bright colors almost camoflaged by the rag tag assortment of garish garments they wore, each wearing a wide eyed mask of shock. The detective amongst them grinned in righteous triumph

"Good job the owners had a silent alarm installed! Guess Mother Nature's no match for modern technology!"

One of the hippies, Parsley Sage Rosemary Thyme looked slightly incredulous. She surruptitiously checked her extremely expensive wristwatch.

"We broke in four hours ago. What took you so long?"

The detective deflated slightly.

"Give us a break, miss, it's five in the morning. Why couldn't you have broken in at a more civilized hour?"

"Because there would be people still in here eating. We'd get caught."

"Ah. Guess that's why I'm not a criminal."

One of the policeman ventured a joke to cheer his boss up.

"Look at the paint, sarge... guess we caught them green fingered and red handed!"

"There's no green or red there Stevens."

"Oh."

"Cuff 'em."

"Sarge."

The assembled were led away to look forward to the date when a judge would decide if they were freedom fighters or terrorists. Morosely, the doors to the police van were closed, and the hemp lovers were driven off into the first glimmer of dawn.

The police turned to the still sleeping figure, undisturbed by the sound of a struggle-less arrest.

She lay, stretched out in all her gluttonous glory, stomach swollen out and displayed proudly to the world between a rather delectably lacy red number and a pair of tiny shorts that had seen much better days.

She moaned something about gravy, and a loud gurgle rumbled out from her stomach. Which rippled for effect.

Crowning her humongous girth, in six inch high letters daubed roughly upon it, were words.

Four of them.

"All You Can Eat."