Danny the motorcycle cop has a very, very bad day. Suddenly he's only an inch and a half tall, and though his spell-infused police uniform makes him all but invulnerable, a seemingly endless series of creatures see him as something to be snapped up and swallowed. At least he's safe enough, as long as the uniform stays on....

Vore, various/human, 'grand tour' (all the way through intact), scat, M/f sex.

*****

One long day on the road

By Strega

Chapter 1: The raccoons and their pet

"Is there a problem, officer?"

The two raccoons in the convertible looked up at him inquisitively. They were well-dressed, each of the five-foot-tall tall humanoid procyonids wearing matching white shirts and shorts tailored to allow their tails out the back. Charcoal-gray sandals and fingerless driving gloves completed the outfits: they were a perfectly matched pair, only their gender separating them.

"Just a routine check, ma'am. We're required to ask about any unusual pets we see."

The animal curled in the female's lap opened one eye, then pulled its nose from beneath its ringed tail. Danny had never seen anything like it: long of tail, narrow of skull, with a flexible muzzle resembling a pig's. It looked like nothing so much as a stretched raccoon.

"Oh!" The she-raccoon giggled. "Cheesers is a coati. Want to see his papers?"

"Yes, ma'am." Why was the male raccoon so nervous? His eyes kept flashing from Danny to the glove compartment., and cop instincts kicked in. "If you'll get them out for me."

He reached for the radio mike clipped to his chest, and moved half a step forward so that he could see the male's hands. When in doubt, be paranoid. It kept cops alive...usually.

The raccoon-woman reached for the glove box, hesitated...and the world went crazy around Danny.

He just had a glimpse of the clear capsule in the male's hand before the procyonid snapped it between his fingers. A wave of colorless energy flowed past the female raccoon and over him. That was when things changed. Air roared past his ears, his vision dimmed, and he staggered.

A second later he recovered, only to find himself in a strange new world. He stood on a rocky field, densely pebbled with head-sized gray stones that were half-sunk into the darker surface. An occasional tree made up of wide, flat green blades poked toward the sky.

In the distance a mountainous white wall loomed. Tall as a hill, it seemed flat, with perfectly horizontal grooves every fifty feet or so of its height.

A voice boomed over him, so basso profundo he didn't catch the first couple of words. '...have to do that?' Danny turned, and towering overhead was a gleaming red wall. Whatever it was, it seemed suspended in the air, and beneath its edge was an architecture of pipes and valleys.

Danny was not a dumb man. He turned, and sure enough, about two hundred feet away was an enormous gray disk with a silver center. The thick disk had a heavily corrugated edge. Bridgestone, said the writing on the disk. That made the white 'hill' the side of the convenience store, and the red one....

The convertible's door opened, and the female raccoon stepped carefully out into the parking lot. "Damn, it's a good thing we're the only ones here." This little convenience store on Ave. D was so far to the west of the Antelope Valley that only travelers on their way to or from the I-5 tended to visit it. Its isolation was one reason they had stopped; when carrying illicit goods they never stopped in anything resembling a town or city. It had just been bad luck that the cop had been there to take a leak, or whatever. "What did you hit him with?"

Cheesers dropped from her lap to the pebbly parking lot, grunting at the fall then snuffling around. As always, his flexible nose hoovered about, searching for anything edible someone might have dropped. Bugs, too, were highly edible in the coati's opinion.

"Shrink spell. He should be about an inch tall and...God!" The male raccoon appeared around the front of the Miata. "Get Cheesers off the ground! If the cop is --"

It was already too late for Danny. He'd stood staring up at the towering raccoon femme (as tall as an 18-story building, to him), and the coati landed right next to him. When he finally shook off his shock and turned to look at it, the motion attracted the animal's eye. Danny was just about bug-sized now....

Ambling forward, it thumped a paw down on him. Protective spells woven into his uniform blunted the blow, as they would have deflected a bullet, but the huge paw still threw him to the ground. He fumbled for his gun as the paw scraped him across the pebbles, and then the animal's mouth took him in.

Cheesers considered the little snack he had caught. At first chew, it was discouragingly tough. He almost chipped an incisor as he tried to snip it in half. Tonguing it to the rear of his mouth, he ground it between his molars. It was equally resistant there, like a little rock. And for some reason, his mistress was upset at him.

"Cheesers, you spit that out!" Abigail grabbed the coati up into her lap again. "Be a good boy and spit it out. I have a treat for you...God, Gary, what are we going to do?"

Of course, Cheesers was having none of it. He continued to masticate the tough little bug, and when his mistress offered him the slice of fruit, he took it. But only after disposing of the bug in the proper manner.

As a cop, Danny had been in some foul dives. Biker bars, sheep ranches, the backs of greasy spoons. Once he had to search the rear of a semi carrying crated poultry, and he'd smelled like chicken crap for days. But none of them could compare to this. Saliva had spread over him the moment he popped into the coati's mouth, and the huge, disgustingly fleshy tongue had moved him about like a toy, pushing him between the teeth to be chewed.

Again his uniform saved him, but it couldn't absorb all the force of the bites. What got through was still stunningly painful, and he dropped his automatic before firing the pistol even once. It sank into the thick saliva, churned around the coati's mouth as the tongue pushed him toward the rearmost rows of teeth.

He'd proven impervious to the teeth, but the coati was not done with him. The slick tongue forced him to the rear of what, previously, had seemed a long, narrow muzzle. Now it was such a maw as a dragon might have, easily large enough to hold his bug-sized body. Danny felt the huge muscle forcing him ever deeper, and tried to wedge his fingers between two teeth. But like him, the teeth were slippery with saliva....

"Cheesers? Come on dear, spit out the nasty...oh, fuck." The coati was licking its chops, now, and while it lifted its muzzle for the fruit slice, it wasn't spitting anything out. "I think Cheesers swallowed him. Why the hell did you hit him with that spell?"

"He was reaching for his radio. He was suspicious." Gary eyed the motorcycle cop's ride. "I don't think he called in our tags, and no one saw us pull up here. I say we go."

Abigail climbed back into the Miata. "That poor cop. He must have died instantly."

Gary fired up the Miata and pulled back onto the road, heading for Lancaster, Highway 14, and, eventually - in maybe 5 hours, around noon -- Las Vegas, to sell the capsule-spells in the glove compartment and trunk. "At least he didn't suffer."

But the raccoons underestimated Danny. Pushed into the coati's throat and swallowed, he slithered through the fetid heat of the gullet. Coated with slime and pushed ever downward by the swallowing muscles, he soon arrived at the cardiac sphincter and was pushed through. All his struggles had been for naught; there was nothing to grab that wasn't smooth muscle just as slicked down with mucus as was. And so he pushed into the stomach, sinking into a mass of digestive fluids, half-digested fruit, Iams cat food, and the occasional bug.

As the revolting slop permeated his uniform and filled every crevice of his body, Danny calmly reached for his radio. He'd been in enough bad situations to trust his uniforms' spells. He'd be safe in here, no matter how disgusting his environment.

The stomach, of course, didn't know he was indigestible. It treated him as any other lump of food, kneading him between its walls and sloshing him around to ensure he was soaked in a copious quantity of its enzymes. Were it not for his protective spells, he would already be burning, his skin corroding. A bug-sized creature such as him would be reduced to a skeleton in mere minutes by this much acid.

Danny held the radio mike and waited for a bubble of gas to make itself available. While he didn't need to breathe thanks to his spells, he couldn't talk unless there was some genuine air (or methane, or whatever) to carry the sound. If he spoke into this mess, it would distort his voice. Not to mention the fluids were transmitting the thump of the coati's pulse and the heavy gurgles of digestion.

Swimming through the chunky goo, he eventually found a pocket of -- for lack of a better term -- 'air' - against one stomach wall. He pushed his face into the pocket, brought his hand and mike up, and sent out the call. "Officer needs assistance. Officer needs assistance. Officer down!" That last was not strictly accurate, but he figured he was 'down' enough to qualify. "Officer needs assistance." And he waited. When Dispatch replied, he could fill them in on the situation and then hold down the mike to give the DF teams something to home in on. Eventually the raccoons and their pet would be apprehended and he'd be extracted...somehow.

The stomach, eager as ever to digest this lump of 'food', squeezed and massaged him while he waited. He lost track of the bubble of air (the coati burped quietly as it dozed in Abigail's lap), and though he held the radio speaker to his ear, he couldn't make out a reply. After far too much waiting for his taste, he paddled his way around the dark pit of a belly and found another air pocket.

"Officer down. Officer down! Dispatch, please reply." The gut gurgled and moaned around him. He had swum 'downward' to find this pocket, and something near his feet was making sucking sounds that transmitted through the fetid slime to be more felt than heard. "Officer --"

But Danny, while a trained policeman, didn't know much about his radio. Like a soldier who merely uses a complex weapon, rather than understanding its inner structure, he simply assumed that since he could feel the cable from mike to radio and from radio to antenna, that it was intact. In fact it was intact. That was not the problem.

The problem was that when he shrank, reducing to about a fiftieth of his normal height, the radio antenna had shrunk the same amount. The physical length of an antenna directly controls its frequency output. The shorter the antenna, the higher its transmission (and reception) frequency. What had been a VHF (Very High Frequency) signal at 142 Megahertz was now radiating at over 7 GHz -- a band used by radars and microwave transmitters, not police radios. The power output was also reduced proportionately, and what wasn't soaked up by the wall of flesh around him hardly reached fifty feet. Even had there been a microwave repeater station right next door, it'd had been a stroke of luck if anything intelligible was picked up.

"...icer down. Officer down. Dispatch, please respond...crap." The stomach wall had moved him again, pulsing him between two hot folds of itself, and he lost his air bubble.

The one thing the stomach could do to him was make him sweat. It was over a hundred degrees in here, and humid as a hothouse. Danny was already thirsty. As revolting as the idea was, he would eventually have to take a drink of this...stuff...and just hope his spells kept it from dissolving his lips and innards. He was going to put that little experiment off as long as possible, though.

Now he had another concern. Trapped in a fold of the belly, he was being pushed downward (or upward; he couldn't tell). Something had grabbed his feet and was pulsing slowly up over his calves. It felt a lot like being swallowed, but much slower this time. Wanting no more of that, he jerked one leg upward, trying to slip his foot loose.

His foot did pull out, but the wall folding in from above didn't give him enough leeway to get his other foot loose. And now the sucking...whatever it was had begun to pulse more rapidly, pulling his leg deeper. Soon he lost the second foot again, then his lower thighs. Now, his hips. He shoved the stomach wall, trying to get a grip, but the thick slime slid through his fingers. Could this get any worse?

It could. Gradually he was drawn into the sucking hole and into the tunnel behind it. About the time his waist was consumed, Danny reasoned out what was happening. Stomachs have a way in, and a way out. In his efforts to find an air pocket he had come too close to the lower valve, and was being sent into the intestine. He might not know a huge amount about internal anatomy, but he knew where this was going.

Pulled now fully into the small intestine, he was kneaded along by its peristaltic action. The surrounding villi felt his skin and uniform avidly, looking for nutrients to absorb, but unlike the soup of digested food sent downward by the stomach, he was un-absorbable. That was not a problem. Other indigestibles had traveled through this sausage of flesh. This, too, shall pass....

With no air pockets here, he couldn't transmit. All Danny could do was relax and hope the coati had a rapid digestive system. Gradually the intestine pushed him along, feetfirst. As revolting as the prospect was, at least it was a way out of this sauna. Maybe his only way.

*****

It happened at a rest stop past Baker (home of the world tallest thermometer!), California. Cheesers had been progressively more restless the last half-hour, and eventually Abigail told Greg the coati needed a walk. All three of them needed to use the restroom now, but Cheesers got priority, and they pulled into a slot at the end of the rest stop so they wouldn't have to let the coati wander too far. Sure enough, he scurried out into the sagebrush, found a spot he wanted and squatted.

Danny had been in the animal for hours now, and lately things had gotten nasty. Nasty-er, anyway. He had arrived in the coati's large intestine and come to a halt, squeezed in with a fair accumulation of other indigestibles. The growing volume of crap-to-be included large quantities of worn-out blood cells, bits of carapace from luckless bugs, fruit seeds, and food residue that wasn't quite interesting enough for the small intestine to vacuum up. He lay in that mess as water was gradually leached out, turning the slurry of unusuables into a more compact column of, to be blunt, shit.

Now the coati squatted, lifted his tail, and relieved himself. It only took a few seconds to expel the tube of used food, and Cheesers scampered back to be petted and loved. Shortly thereafter, Abigail and Greg used the bathrooms in the center of the rest area, and after that they were back on the road and on their way out of Danny's life.

Unpleasant though his life was as the moment. The muscular contraction that shot the coati-turd out was impossible to mistake for anything but the animal taking a dump, at least, if you happened to be part of that dump. Now the turd sat steaming in the winter air, and he was able to move at last.

Burrowing through the... stuff...that made up his prison, he soon emerged into the open. The very first thing he did was find a patch of grass (actually it was a spot of ground moss, since the 'grass' was two stories tall to him now) and wipe himself off. He had to rub every part of himself against the rough moss to get the worst of the crap off. Even so, he'd need dozens of showers to ever feel clean again. He was still slimed from head to foot, just less thickly now. And there was no way he was taking his uniform off to clean it. Not until he was his normal size again.

Comparing himself to the grass, he decided he was about an inch and a half tall now. Even inside Cheesers he had felt the steady vibration of the drive. He couldn't be sure how long he'd been inside the thing, but it was still - or maybe again - daylight, and he was obviously still in the desert somewhere. The raccoons had stopped at a rest stop, maybe?

In fact Danny was less than twenty feet from the fence around the rest stop. Cheesers had been in a hurry. Intervening brush as tall as a pine forest, from his perspective, blocked his line of sight to it.

He keyed the mike. "Officer Daniel Skerry to any other officer or dispatch. Please respond." *Sk* "Anyone receiving this, pleased respond." *Sk*

A sound behind him made him turn. There, head tilted and looking down at him with one bright eye, was a raven. From his viewpoint, a more than seventy-foot-tall raven....

Chapter 2: Raven and Coyote

Fear saved Danny. If he had ducked as it pecked, or tried to dodge, the bird would have had him. It might have taken a peck or two more, but eventually he would have ended up pinned between the bony upper and lower beak.

Terrified, he froze, and the descending beak slammed into his shoulder. His uniform's protective spells caused it to go as rigid as steel, and the pebble/boulder he stood on barely moved. All that impact had to go somewhere, though, and what didn't slam through the uniform to bruise him sent him flying sideward.

The raven straightened and blinked ink-dark eyes. Where had the bug gone?

"Caw." It tilted its head, and began to peck at the various blobs of coati crap. Surely the bug must still be close, merely hiding.

It was right. A couple of feet away, or close to a hundred feet from his perspective, Danny lay among the roots of a sagebrush. It had all been a blur after the beak hit him, and luckily he opened his eyes and saw the enormous bird before it saw him. He froze, just another clod of dirt.

*****

"That's weird."

"What is it?" Gary glanced over at Abigail, and saw she was looking at one of the the sheets of cardboard the spell capsules were plastic-bubbled onto. "Jesus, put that away! If that blows out of the car--!"

"Oh, relax, I'm not going to let it." The femme-coon opened the glove compartment just enough to pop the sheet in. "Dumb place to keep them anyway."

Gary kept the red Miata firmly in the slow lane, cruising down the I-15 at three miles an hour over the speed limit. Once in a while he changed lanes to pass an 18 wheeler, but then it was back to the slow lane. Not only was it smart to drive slow with a hundred thousand dollars worth of bootleg spells in the car, but it was about as fast as he liked to drive the convertible anyway. He liked the wind in his fur as much as the next raccoon, but there were limits.

"What's that? Not Vegas already?"

"No," he said. "That's still an hour away. It's State Line. They built some casinos there. Buffalo Bill's, I think the first one was."

"Oh yeah," Abigail said. "Can we stop there? I gotta pee."

"Sure, hon." He steered them into the highway exit. "Um...what was weird?"

"What?"

"A minute ago you said--"

"Oh yeah. The tab you popped that capsule off was glowing."

"That is weird. Maybe they do that when you use one of the capsules."

"Maybe."

*****

Danny had begun to think the raven would never lose interest, but half an hour after pecking him it finally launched into the air with an irritated croak. He waited five more minutes to make sure it wasn't luring him out before he crawled out of the bush.

"I swear to God," he muttered, "When I get back to my normal size I am going to find those raccoons and kick the shit out of them."

That cathartic thought expressed, he climbed to his feet. It'd turned out for the best that he'd still been so smeared with coati feces - there had been dozens of similarly sized bits of crap the raven had to pick through - but the disgusting muck coating him had to go. Now that it'd cooled it'd congealed into a chunky, greasy-feeling layer. He walked toward the nearest clump of tree-grass to wipe it off. Luck was with him for a change, and he found a pool of dew in a leaf. He had forgotten how thirsty he was until he saw it.

His thirst slaked, he scrubbed crap off his uniform with handfuls of dirt. He badly wanted to take it off and wash it in the dew, but it was the only protection he had.

When he was as clean as he was likely to get, he tried to figure out which way civilization lay. There had to be a road nearby, unless the raccoons had walked their pet out into the desert.

He was thinking about climbing a bush to get a better view when he noticed the stems of the plant shivering. There was an almost-subsonic rumble...yes! Road noise! His change in size shifted the pitch of sounds, so everything sounded much deeper than normal, but that had to be car noise.

He tried his radio again as he made his way toward the noise, but once again got no response. Danny shrugged and headed toward the noise, into the rising sun.

*****

Las Vegas had the largest population of coonfolk West of the Mississippi. Though shorter and less strong than humans, they were typically smart, nimble-fingered and naturally nocturnal, all useful traits in a town full of casinos. Instead of hiring sleepy human waitresses, watchmen and card dealers for the night shifts, the rolls filled with raccoons. Throwing in all the other jobs they worked, from night shifts at convenience stores to call girls (and out-and-out prostitutes in towns like Pahrump), Las Vegas boasted a 'coonie' population over 100,000.

Ask any Vegas native where coontown was and he'd direct you to the North end of town, where you could drive blocks and not see a furless person. There were all-coonie youth gangs, coonie police officers, specialty shops selling locally raised crayfish and hand-made fur brushes, and a hundred other businesses aimed at separating the furry locals and slumming humans from their hard-earned cash.

It was the perfect place to disappear if you happened to have brown-gray fur and a ringed tail. The human clerk at the seedy coontown motel didn't blink when they said they needed the room for only six hours, and took their money without asking for IDs.

The badgers showed up half an hour later. Amelia was across the street at a mom-and- pop Cajun restaurant by that time, since they expected the 'baddies' to make a stink about the missing capsule. There was no need for both of them to be there, Gary insisted. Amelia tooled around the Internet on her laptop and ate spiced prawn, keeping an eye on the motel all the while.

The Wiki on spell capsules had only general information, but it linked her to a medical database. It turned out that shrinking spells were usually used for medical purposes, to shrink tumors and the like. There was more info, some of which explained a great deal.

Abigail was reading about police uniforms and picking between her fangs with a claw when the badgers came out of their motel room, got in their car and drive away. She waited. Eventually the door opened again and a bandit-masked face with extremely dark sunglasses peered out.

She picked up the order she'd gotten for him and crossed the parking lot. Nothing was said until the door was shut.

"I was starting to get a little worried, honey." She gave Garry's ear an affectionate nip.

"So was I. They docked us five hundred."

"For one capsule! Those bastards." It would come out of their share.

Garry shushed her, glancing at the thin walls. "We still got most of it. Want to celebrate?"

The room was rank with badger-musk, the smell of anger and a touch of fear. It didn't do anything for Amelia.

"We should get some rest. When we get back to L.A. we can talk about celebrating."

Gary nodded, disappointed, and stretched out on the bed. Amelia went into the bathroom to wash up. While she was in there she opened the pet carrier and made sure Cheesers had water. She fed him a few prawn, which he delicately picked apart.

She could hear Gary snoring already. Amelia took out the cardboard tab and held it close to Cheesers. The glow did not change. She turned a slow circle, and it brightened when she was facing roughly South. Amelia nodded and put it back in her pocket.

Five minutes later she was curled up next to Gary.

*****

Danny could see skyscraper-high trees ahead, and a looming cinder-block wall. He was almost to the rest stop. He peered around for any threat - even a fence lizard would be deadly dangerous at his size - and jogged for the finish line of rest stop lawn.

At his size the few yards of bare dirt stretched to near a quarter mile. He only made half that before a terribly familiar croak brought him up short.

A raven - he was sure, somehow, it was the same one - perched on the lowest branch of a rest stop tree. Before he could turn it dropped, spread its wings, and stooped down on him.

"No, damn it!" He ran, but the blast of air from its descent sent him sprawling. He was no more than a bug to the black bird, tiny, inconsequential except as a bit of ambulatory nourishment.

Near where he lay was a shard of plastic or glass as big and sharp-edged as a sword. Danny grabbed it up just as the beak came hunting for him. He thrust once, scraping the point along the edge of the beak, and then he was snapped up.

"No!"

The bird did not listen. With another snap of its beak he was engulfed. He hurtled into the back of the beak, and with a bob of its head it swallowed. For the second time in one day Danny slid helplessly down a fleshy chute. In the darkness and disgusting fleshy warmth of the bird he found a chamber - crop? stomach? - half full of hair, bits of bone and partially digested meat. Hard, rounded objects half as wide as he was tall rolled around, driven by rhythmic contractions of the bird's gut. Crushed into the mass of detritus, Danny sank wetly into the ball of fur and unmentionables.

For an eternity he struggled to free himself. Were it not for his uniform the rolling pebbles, lack of air, and digestive juices would have ended his life, just as he would have been digested by the coati had his uniform not protected him the last time this happened.

Finally he wormed his way to the surface of the ball of hair. There were bones in the mass as well, and he used the ribs of the mouse or whatever-it-was as a ladder. When he reached the confining wall of muscle once more he was angrier than he'd been in his entire life. And he had a weapon.

"Eat me will you," he hissed, and jabbed the glass shard into the wall. Again. And again. He couldn't see what happened when he did, but the shudder in the surrounding tissue told him he was doing something. He forgot for a moment that his "sword" was a splinter of glass less than half an inch long and stabbed it into the fleshwall with all his might.

Yes! He could hear the bird cawing! It didn't like having its insides jabbed, however much damage he actually did. A flow of hot fluid from the wall had to be blood. He stabbed again, and was rewarded by another shudder and an agonized croak that vibrated the whole bird.

"Want some more!", he snarled, and drove it in again. "I bet you want to spit me up about now!"

The bird's heartbeat, always triphammer-fast, thumped along even faster as he jabbed. He could feel it jumping, flapping, pained and unhappy. Surely it would retch him up--

There was a sudden, terrible crunch, and the bird lurched. The triphammer of heartbeat stuttered, slowed, missed a beat, then stopped altogether. Something compressed the body of the bird. Ribs popped. Danny stopped stabbing.

The glass splinter moved in his hands as the flesh around him rippled. Not like before, when peristalsis moved pebbles around to masticate the bird's meal. Something from the outside was squeezing the bird. One more a rib popped, then there was a wet tearing sound that pulsated through the dead body.

Something was eating the raven.

Red-tinted sunlight flooded in as flesh and bone ripped, and Danny caught a glimpse of wet black lips and brown fur. It was a coyote, one probably attracted by the raven's antics. He'd kept the bird too distracted to defend itself, or perhaps it just didn't see the coyote coming. It had already torn out a great chunk of feathers and meat, letting light and air into the raven's gut.

Danny couldn't risk staying where he was. For all he knew the canid would keep eating until the entire bird, him included, was consumed. Waiting until the beast had torn away another great bite of meat, he leapt off the ball of mouse hair and toward freedom. But the blood-slicked flesh he landed on was the slipperiest thing he'd encountered in a day that included trips down two different gullets. His feet shot out from under him and he slid helplessly forward, ending up caught between two of the raven's feathers.

Before he could get to his feet, great fangs flashed and the coyote's jaws clamped down. Feathers, flesh, a bone or two - and him - were ripped from the body of the bird. Once more he slid along a bumpy tongue, pushed toward the bottomless pit at the back.

"Oh god." The coyote tossed its head, swallowed, and it all happened again. The darkness, the powerful contraction in the surrounding throat that carried him downward, the thick coat of lubricating slime that formed on him as he slithered downward. Moments later he arrived in a gurgling, acid-filled pit, already partly full of bits of raven. Feathers, cracked bones and bits of flesh merged with the belly juices, forming a bog-like mass.

But Danny was beginning to understand stomachs. He had been all the way through the coati's guts then spent enough time in the raven's innards to see the similarities. There was no panic this time, just resignation. He knew he would be here for a while.

As fear ebbed, he suddenly realized he was ravenous. Breakfast, taken before dawn, was unimaginably far in the past; he didn't know what time it was. He choked down a few mouthfuls of raven as he lingered in a bubble of swallowed air. It was surprisingly palatable, though chewy. Next he felt around in the wet darkness for a weapon. He'd lost the glass sword somewhere between the raven's guts and the coyote's stomach. There were fragments of bone, but none felt sharp enough to gouge the belly wall as he had with the raven.

Another idea came to him. If he could not get the coyote to retch him up, perhaps he could at least accelerate his progress through its guts. Remembering what he had experienced inside the coati, he tuned his ears to the gurgling noises of the belly. Though he could not tell up from down, he could sense a pattern to the gurgling, and to the churning motions imparted by the rippling stomach walls. Swimming through the muck, following the movements of the belly, he searched for the exit.

After an endless time he found it. The slurping sounds as gobbets of liquefied flesh passed into the small intestine led him to the pyloric sphincter, and he pressed against the opening until finally it opened enough to allow him, a fraction of an ounce of mush, and a few small feathers into the small intestine.

Danny lay there resting for a few minutes - counting the coyote's thundering heartbeats gave him at least a vague sense of time - and then began to crawl forward. The intestine's peristalsis would carry him along no matter what he did, but he would get out faster if he helped.

Soft villi rubbed his uniform and skin, a million tiny fingers trying to absorb him. He was not food, though. Not digested flesh, softened by the stomach enzymes and the caustic juices of the stomach. As much of the fluid that accompanied him was absorbed, he crawled onward.

*****

There was little to pack when the raccoons left the motel. Just Cheesers, the coati's carrying case, a backpack with some clothes and a rucksack full of something else. This they slipped into a hidden compartment in the Miata's trunk. Then they were on the road again, driving at a carefully measured pace. Just another couple enjoying the early evening.

It was Amelia's turn to drive, but Gary loved the Miata and said he'd drive as far as the first rest stop. "The one by Baker?", she asked, and he nodded.

She passed the time petting Cheesers, and when Gary wasn't looking, she pulled the cardboard tab from her pocket. It glowed brightest when held toward the front of the car, and as the miles went by the faint glow slowly brightened.

Chapter 3: An unwelcome return

Crawling through the bowels of the coyote was exhausting work. The walls were coated with slippery villi, and each time the tube of flesh took a turn he had to worm his way past the tight bend. Eventually Danny could not put one hand in front of another any more and collapsed. He slept for a time, and even in his sleep he felt himself nudged forward by the intestine's peristalsis.

When he woke the walls were farther apart, the slurry of digested food less watery. He knew where he was and paddled downward, eventually having to dig his way into the thickening ex-food. Bit by bit he worked his way toward the exit. Somehow it seemed less horrible this time - instead of being ushered slowly through the predator's guts with the rest of the food, he went voluntarily, and faster.

When the soon-to-be-coyote-crap was too dense to make any further progress, he settled down to wait. He tried not to think about the gooey mass pressing in from all sides, the clumps of hair and softened bones from mice swallowed whole, the few feathers that had somehow made it here as fast as he had. Danny had never owned a dog and couldn't guess how often a coyote needed to relieve itself. He could only hope this one would do so soon.

Once more he napped. How long had it been going on now? He'd had a glimpse of light before the coyote swallowed him, but was it still the same day or the next one? Without knowing how long it'd taken to pass through the coati - and now the coyote - he couldn't even guess.

Movement woke him. The colon walls, out of reach but still felt by the forces the applied to the mass of used food, were squeezing inward. With no sense of up or down, forward or back, he could only hope it was what it felt like. And it was. The glutinous mass, part processed food, part dead cells and other bodily waste, and the rest indigestibles like feathers, fur and himself, moved. The walls squeezed, the anus opened and colon walls, slick as the gullet, allowed it to depart the coyote as a series of cylindrical fragments, held loosely together by fur that had passed unchanged all the way through the predator.

Danny, who had been through this once before, waited for the mass to cool a bit before digging his way out. He had been careless last time, and another predator had been waiting. This time he wormed his way out of the coyote dropping slowly, not even brushing aside the flies that had already landed to lay eggs.

The stench was awful, but familiarly blunted some of its impact. He resisted the urge to run once he had emerged from the mound and stuck close to it until he'd cleared his eyes with slow, careful motions. Again he was coated with a chunky layer of shit, but he used it as camouflage this time. He did not move from the pile until he'd looked in every direction, including up. Only then did he sprint to the nearest clump of grass to begin cleaning himself off, and only then did he pay attention to the time.

A crescent moon providing a bit of illumination, and the sky was otherwise packed with stars. He could tell from the lack of light pollution that he wasn't near a town. That had been true in Neenach, where his day had started, but it seemed even darker here. The building he'd seen before the raven ate him had looked like a rest stop. So, the raccoons had driven on after their pet ate him...toward what destination? He could see sagebrush outlined against the stars, but that didn't tell him even what state he was in.

He finished cleaning the glop off, again, and rubbed dirt over himself to get the last of it. A deep rumble came from behind, and he turned to see a glimmer of artificial light. Behind it he saw headlights pass by. He was still near the rest stop! He fumbled for his radio, before remembering that it didn't work right at his size, and found it was gone. It was outside his uniform and must have been torn away.

He was very thirsty. He didn't like to think what he'd had to eat and drink since this all started, but it'd been too long since his last drink of water. There was no dew on the grass, no spring here in the desert. Danny shrugged and started toward the rest stop. It was night, and many predators would be hunting, but at least he'd be harder to see.

There was a flash of light ahead as something illuminated a broad swath of ground. The light disappeared, then reappeared closer. Danny hurried forward. He probably wouldn't be able to talk to whoever it was, given his tiny size and short vocal chords, but they'd see his uniform and maybe, hopefully, realize he'd been shrunk. Somewhere there had to be a cure for his condition.

Another flash of light, then an immense shadow blotting out the stars. From his perspective it was as tall as a twenty-story building, and the ground quivered with each of its steps. Halfway up the shadow something glowed, far dimmer than the flash. Whatever it was turned toward him, brightened, then was blotted out by searingly bright light. Danny waved and jumped up and down as the flashlight centered its glare on him. A monstrous hand appeared in the light, and he shouted his joy as long-nailed fingers carefully picked him up.

"Look who we have here," the immensely deep voice rumbled. Danny suddenly realized that the fingers holding him were furry, the nails claws, and that the massive face in front of him sported cup-shaped ears and broad cheek-ruffs.

The flashlight came back on, briefly illuminating a coati at the end of a leash before turning upward. Danny already knew what he'd see when it reached the face.

Abigail giggled. The tiny policeman squirmed between her fingers, and Cheesers stood up with his paws against her leg to look.

"Not this time, dear." Then she spoke to the inch-and-a-half-tall cop.

"That spell was a medical one, you see. It shrinks tumors, then keeps them shrunk as long as there is something around them. That way, if they break loose in the body, they don't expand again in a bad place. Every six hours or so they 'feel' around them to see if it's safe to expand. Even if the tumor breaks up...well, you get the idea. You stay shrunk unless it's safe to grow."

Danny did his damnest to wriggle free, but she was ready and tightened her grip. If it weren't for his uniform bones would have ground together. Then a manicured and polished claw-point jabbed him in the chest.

"I wasn't able to find out as much about police uniforms," rumbled the shadowy she-raccoon, "So I am going to experiment."

The protective spell kept the claw from piercing his chest, and she slid the point around, seeing how far the field extended. The manual covered a situation like this, unfortunately. The worst thing that could happen to a cop was to be wrestled to the ground, because while the spells rendered one all but invulnerable, it had to be possible for others to remove the outfit if you were injured. If the raccoon guessed....

She did. Danny pushed at the claw as it hooked into the collar, but he could no more fight it than he could the huge predators that had their way with him earlier. A tug of her claw popped the front of his uniform top open, and with an almost inaudibly deep giggle she tugged it off him. He tried to use her moment of distraction to wiggle loose, but if coonies were good at anything, it was the inherited skill of holding onto small creatures that desperately wanted to get away.

Shortly she'd stripped him of uniform, shoes, and even his underwear. He was naked now, unprotected. She could crush him between her fingers. He watched her lift a rock and hide his uniform beneath, presumably so it wouldn't expand and be found. Then she straightened and held him up in front of her eyes.

"What now? What now, bitch?" Oh, to be full size again! He'd give up his badge to beat her to a pulp, her and her boyfriend.

She shook her head. He could understand her, barely, but his high pitched voice was too faint for even her better-than-human ears.

Then her muzzle opened, and this time, when he dropped toward the sharp fangs and salivating tongue, Danny only had his skin to protect him.

"There you are! I was getting worried." Gary had used the bathroom and headed back to the car to wait. As the minutes melted together and Abigail didn't reappear, he thought about looking for her. Maybe she'd been bitten by a rattlesnake while walking Cheesers? But the old Coon Scout rule, Be Where They Expect You To Be, kept him there.

She smiled as she loaded Cheesers into his carry case, then she settled into the driver's seat. It was full dark, past eleven, but that just made them more alert. It was daylight that made a coonie sleepy.

"Oh all right. As long as you're back." He was getting Cheesers' case settled behind his knees when he felt her hand on his belly.

"What, here?" He looked around. "Now?" But the protest was weak. It was late, most of the RVs were dark, and most importantly, she'd already unbuttoned his fly. His sheath was a shadowy bulge along his abdomen as her muzzle descended. Gary leaned back and grinned as she began to lick.

******

Danny made several attempts to escape the raccoon's narrow muzzle, but each time she either clamped her fangs together or pushed him back in with her tongue. Hot, slippery saliva coated his body and even her teeth, so it was impossible to get a grip on anything. Without his uniform, the stuff got into his mouth as well, and he'd nearly suffocated when caught briefly beneath her enormous tongue. At any moment she might chew him up, and he was one gulp away from a digestive fate he wouldn't survive a fourth time. But she just pushed him around her mouth, giggling.

When she lowered her head he slid toward the front fangs, and he half crawled, half swam toward possible escape. Yes! Her muzzle opened.

But it only opened enough to let something in, something long and fleshy and stiff. Bad though the light was, Danny knew it for what it was. A penis, and not a human one. She was sucking her boyfriend's dick.

She was playing with him, pushing him against the gargantuan cock with her tongue and rubbing him along it. Twice he managed to wiggle loose and head for the front of her muzzle, where her lips didn't quite seal - raccoons were apparently not so gifted for oral sex as humans. Both times she stopped working on her boyfriend and felt around with her tongue until she'd trapped him again. Everything was too slick to grip, and nothing was small enough to wrap his arms around. Desperately he scrabbled at the bumpy surface of the tongue, and the raccoon-shaft as thick as he was tall.

Gary felt the strange scratching as Danny's diminutive fingers tried to get a grip. It almost felt like Abigail had a bug in her mouth. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times she'd given him a blowjob, though, and still have a couple of fingers to spare, so he chalked it down to her teeth. What's more it'd been days since they were together, before the planning session for this run, and even a scratchy blowjob was still a blowjob. Lust excused a multitude of sins.

He was growling, the rattling churr a male raccoon let out during sex, and struggling not to start thrusting. Coon sex was rough and primitive by human standards, and it was hard for a male not to be aggressive once it started. He must think I'm teasing him, Abigail thought. Making it slower than it needs to be, clumsier. The truth was the tiny cop was crawling around in her mouth and she was beginning to worry he'd get out. It was harder than she expected to keep track of him and also service her boyfriend.

Gary's growling peaked, and he began to shudder. He tapped her shoulders to let her know it was about to happen, but she tasted the salt of his precum already and knew he was very close. She pulled back, leaving only half his long thin shaft in her muzzle, and rubbed his cock one last time with her tongue. Again she was clumsy, for her attention was not focused so much on him as on the wiggling bug she had to position just so.

Danny was soaked, sweltering in hot saliva and exhausted. He caught a glimpse of the outside as the raccoon pulled her muzzle back, and made a last effort to swim for the front teeth. Her tongue caught him before he'd gone an inch, pushing him back. He was almost flat against the bulbous tip of the male raccoon's cock when it happened. The colossal member twitched and vast volumes of glutinous semen spurted forth. From Danny's perspective the male raccoon was close to three hundred feet tall. What was probably a normal, modest amount of spooge - whatever that was for a raccoon - from his perspective was buckets full, oil-drums full, enough to overflow a hot-tub.

It was hot, thick, and sticky, and the tongue trapped Danny in it as the rush of goo trailed off to a slow trickle. Saliva began to dilute it, but slowly. There was just too much. Danny struggled like an ant in honey, trying to free himself from the clinging blob. It had a shape of its own, holding together and sticking to his body as he tried to swim free. He couldn't breathe. It was quicksand, or indeed The Blob, in raccoon-spunk form.

Light again, seen dimly through milky semen and strings of saliva, as the raccoon let the cock slide out of her mouth. Danny was no longer in a position to swim for the exit. Entrapped in the gluey blob he slid toward the back of her mouth, pushed by her tongue. He made a last, half suffocated effort to squirm out of the goo, but her tongue arched up and pushed him into the waiting gullet. Danny slithered down her throat, accompanied by raccoon-spooge and drool. It was the fourth time he had been down a throat since this all started. Without his uniform to protect him, he knew it would be the last.

*****

Gary was lazing back in his seat, appropriately grateful and relaxed as Abigail drove. She had a mysterious smile on her face, and hadn't spoken a word since she reappeared in the parking lot. Without a word she'd sucked his dick, not even guiding his hand to finger her in return.

Only a few minutes out from the rest stop they saw flashing bubble-gum machine lights on the side of the road ahead. A cop had pulled someone over. Abigail changed lanes to leave lots of space in case the cop stepped out next to his car, and they both breathed a small sigh of relief as the lights diminished in the mirror.

"Only a few more hours," Gary said, and patted her hand on the stick shift knob. "It's almost over."

"Another few hours," she said. "We can change again in Victorville." Abigail checked her speed and slowed down a mile or two an hour. She was still excited, and though it'd been fifteen minutes or so since she swallowed, she'd swear she still felt the minute cop scrabbling away at the walls of her stomach.

She was mistaken. The blob of cum hadn't protected Danny at all. No sooner had he arrived in her stomach than he'd sunk into a slurry of almost-digested prawn and digestive juices, and the spooge melted right off. He had a last gasp of air from a bubble of air that'd gone down with him before he began to dissolve. Danny weighed less than a large beetle, and a beetle's carapace would slow the effects of the acid. All he had was tender exposed flesh. It was drowning that finished him off, but he wouldn't have lasted five minutes even with air to breathe.

By the time Abigail noticed that little scratching inside her, Danny was long dead. It was a few fragments of prawn shell that scratched her, not the softening bones of what used to be a police officer.

She had learned everything she needed to know on the Internet. Oh, she'd had to guess about the policeman's uniform, but the medical database told her plenty about the shrinking-spell. Because it was designed to reduce tumors to a harmless, and potentially almost invisibly small size, there was a minor spell on the cardboard tab itself that connected it to the main spell. This allowed doctors to see that the tumor (or policeman, in this case) was still reduced, and if need be track down the thing by using the tab as a dowsing-rod.

All in all they'd been very lucky. If the spell 'reset' timer had timed out when he was in the desert, there'd have been a full sized, very angry cop after them. Or, he might have been eaten by something and carried away, or underground, where she couldn't find him. Instead he'd run right into the beam of her flashlight. If she'd not kept Cheesers carefully behind her during the search, he might have gone down the coati's gullet a second time. Instead he'd gone down hers.

He'd been just the tiniest scrap of food, not even been worthy of a burp. Far less than she'd had from just one of the prawns she'd eaten earlier. Eventually his remains would resume their usual size, but only if the timer clicked over after they exited her body. Any particles of him that were absorbed into her would eventually 'forget' they used to be bigger. It was a very sophisticated spell, very expensive to craft. The badgers would probably use the remaining ones to shrink shipments of contraband. Or, for all she knew, maybe the cop wasn't be the first person to disappear this way. Badgers were carnivores too, and even a human could swallow someone that tiny.

Abigail wondered if she might somehow acquire a few more of the capsules. She'd quite enjoyed sending the little cop to his fate. He hadn't been filling, but he'd been entertaining. Maybe there'd be someone else who needed to vanish, one of these days. It was a very efficient way to dispose of a body.

Her belly let out a little gurgle. All this thought of the cop was making her hungry. Maybe they could stop in Barstow and get something. It'd been a very long day on the road, and it wasn't quite over yet.

*****

In the desert near Baker, a hundred yards from a rest stop, there was a faint flicker of light. Among the sagebrush was a little pile of coyote droppings, no more different or special than any other. Only the flies had been interested in it.

Now it burst open as something grew from within. The soft half-dried turd, not contained by an intestine, failed to keep the spell from resetting. While the largest bones of Danny's skeleton were the last, fast dissolving recognizable bits and his uniform remained shrunken beneath a rock, this one bit of formerly reduced material returned to its proper size.

The radio microphone with its spiral cord lay on the desert floor, coated with a thin veneer of coyote shit. Not twenty yards away something else expanded. A police-issue automatic, safety off, lay on the sand, greasy with its sheen of coati crap.