An Act of Terrorism
by inflationPurveyor



The subway car seemed much smaller than it was. A symptom of the crowds, this phenomenon always induced the most distressing claustrophobia in Matt Farley. Try as he might, burying his face in some newspaper or magazine, he could never seem to ignore this creeping fear. It was this unsuccessful desire for distraction that lead Matt to catch a glimpse of the daily news that day.

The headline read: Terrorist Attacks Continue. The American Supreme Court decision to punish non-consensual inflation with life in prison had caused incensed psychopaths to rise up from the woodwork. All over the country, terrorists were causing widespread chaos and destruction as groups of innocents were blown up or even burst in public inflation attacks. So far, the usual number of victims per attack was 5 or 6, but larger numbers were not unheard of.

Matt shuddered and folded the paper shut. Nowhere felt safe anymore with all of this madness going on. Public places, crowded places, were especially worrying. Matt was never a very confident man, and the current state of fear was almost enough to push him over the edge. Almost. Matt, after all, had a job he did reasonably well, a car he could barely afford, and a mortgage. Society was not going to grind to a halt because of some terrorist attacks, and neither could he. He could not afford such a luxury.

As Matt stared fixedly at the floor, trying not to think about the closeness of his quarters or the thickness of the crowd, the train slid to a stop and a deluge of commuters boarded, increasing the size of the already incredible crowd. Nobody got off. The train was moving away from Union Station, which was exactly the direction everyone wanted to be going. Rumor had it that a New York subway station was going to be attacked, and Union Station was the biggest and the most crowded. Usually, at least. Right now it was probably deserted, Matt thought. The threat was hearsay, but nobody wanted to risk being caught in an attack.

Shouts jolted Matt from his thoughts. A high pitched scream could be heard near the front of the train, along with great deal of panicked yelling.

"Get away from her!" someone screamed. "Get away! She's gonna blow!"

"There's no room," said another, grim and resigned.

"Oh God no!" squealed a third.

Matt stood up on his seat, gripping a metal bar overhead and looking out over the crowd. Near the back of the train, a masked man was holding a hose attached to an air canister over a woman's mouth with one hand and a handgun with the other. Several other masked men and women, also armed, stood nearby. Their belts were lined with instruments of inflation.

The restrained woman would likely have screamed, were she able, but the hose in her mouth silenced her. All she could do to resists was flail weakly as her body filled up. Her breasts were already the size of beach balls, and her belly was bigger: twice as big, even. Her body was shaking and shuddering, creaking, struggling to contain the air steadily filling the helpless woman until at last...

BOOM!

Scraps of shredded skin and clothing flew in all directions, plastering the walls of the train in a smoking motley of fleshy pink, denim blue, and woolen red. A young man near the front of the gaggle surrounding the terrorists surged forward, but the terrorist brought her gun to bear, pressing it against the head of the charging man.

"Don't make me use this," she hissed. "Trust me, you'd rather pop." The man stood stock still and said nothing.

The terrorists quickly dispersed into the crowd, each one taking hold of an innocent bystander and going to work on them. Matt watched in horror as one terrorist unhooked the hose from one of the tanks on his back, labeled helium, and stuck it into the mouth of a woman nearby. A few feet away, another terrorist did the same to a man, sticking the hose down his pants and, presumably, into his rear end. Another terrorist seized hold of the man she had been holding a gun to just moments before, and hooked him up to her water tank.

This was all that Matt saw, because moments later someone fell against him, causing him to jump in surprise and bang his head against the overhead bar. He slumped down into his seat, reeling with pain that echoed in his head. When he finally managed to rise after what felt like several minutes, Matt was treated to an even greater degree of chaos. Several people seemed to have popped, sending multicolored shards everywhere.

Near the back, the man who had the gun to his head was almost full to bursting. His skin was almost transparent, and bubbles were visible beneath. He whined and held up his belly as the terrorist inflating him raised her boot to his swollen body and kicked, causing a splash and a spray of water.

Against the ceiling, an inflated woman was floating. She looked to be full, and her clothes had already blown off, but her terrorist had abandoned her for fresher fare. Would she pop, Matt wondered, or would she survive this harrowing train ride? Soon, more helium victims would join her as the terrorists made their way up the train car. Seeing an opportunity to move further away from the attackers, Matt seized it and sneaked through a rift in the crowd behind him.

Eventually, of course, the inevitable could no longer be forestalled. Inflating and often bursting their way through the passengers, the terrorists eventually reached Matt's vicinity. He could no longer see the back of the train car, where the terrorists had come from, because one unfortunate girl had been blown up into a blueberry, blocking the whole train, stretching from ceiling to floor and wall to wall. She moaned pitifully. It was all she could do.

To the left of Matt, a terrorist seized a boy in his late teens and fed him a stick of blueberry gum. A group of women to the right of Matt were set upon by multiple terrorists, wielding all manner of hoses. A female terrorist lunged at Matt, sending him sprawling against the front wall of the train. He whispered a silent prayer as she knelt down and dropped a pill into a small tincture. It fizzed and steamed, before finally it settled.

The terrorist leaned forward over Matt and pressed the tincture to his lips, forcing him to drink. Before long, he felt a tingling within him, a bubbly kind of feeling. His insides hissed with carbonation as his belly began to swell, followed immediately by his ass and now-bulging crotch. Matt did not have time to rejoice in his enlarged manhood, regrettably, because he was almost immediately made acutely aware of his incoming mortality.

The boy to Matt's left had grown incredibly quickly, his blue form pressing against the walls, Matt, and the few people in between. The boy shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, his lips and cheeks engorged with juice. With a gasp, and a cry of terror, the boy exploded, showering Matt and the people around him with sticky blueberry juice. It dripped off of every surface.

Suddenly, the windows of the train revealed more than dark tunnel: the train had reached a station. Someone had evidently had the foresight to call the police, because Matt could see a number of uniformed officers, who had been waiting at the station, charge in through the doors. Matt's hopes were dashed, however, when he realized that the cops were still trapped behind the blueberry girl blocking the passage. They would be unable to reach Matt and the others.

"Please," screamed a woman to the right of Matt, who had not yet been set upon. "Please, save us! Just pop her and save us! It's too late for her already!"

"No!" the blueberry girl wailed. "No, please! Don't pop me! Don't pop me! I just want to go back to normal!"

The train had become suddenly and unexpectedly filled with tension of a different kind. Everyone had fallen silent, aside from the blueberry girl, who was sobbing audibly. Even the terrorists had stopped inflating their charges, which was little comfort to Matt because he was inflating independently of terrorist intervention. He had already torn through his shirt, revealing his yoga ball-sized belly and his pants had come unzipped, revealing a pair of briefs dominated by a bulge nearly the size of a beach ball.

After what seemed like ages, the police finally made up their minds. The blueberry girl's high-pitched moan pierced the air and tingled the spine as she was ruptured, blasting the train with juice, which flooded out of the still-open doors and into the station. Where the girl had been, there stood a group of seven police officers, one of whom stood with an arm holding a baton outstretched. Each was coated with blue.

The terrorists surrendered almost immediately. The police were better trained and better equipped, and the terrorists knew they would never have stood a chance in a fight. They were all taken into custody, handcuffed, and led away. The women to Matt's right were all relieved, but Matt was still panicking. Indeed, the only change for him was that he was even more bewildered and worried. He was still inflating, and the capture of the terrorists didn't stop that.

Matt's fear turned out to be unfounded. He was rushed out of the subway station, and on the street he was met with an ambulance. He was strapped into a gurney and loaded into the back of the ambulance. By the time he reached St. Joseph's hospital a mile or so away, he almost filled the back of the ambulance, his swollen body pressing against the emergency personnel huddled against the walls of the vehicle.

His gurney was rolled into the emergency room. Although he had burst out of his clothes long before, the hospital orderlies draped a large sheet over him. It made little difference, of course. His torso-sized manhood was still painfully visible, and his belly was not even slightly shielded from the medical chill of the hospital hallways.

His inflation was halted when the ER doctors hooked him up to an empty tank. The gas being produced flowed from him into this tank, until no gas was left to produce. They were, unfortunately, unable to remove the gas that was already inside of him. He was stuck at roughly the size of a small car.

"If you don't recover within a year or two, it's unlikely that you ever will," the doctor admitted. "We'll just have to wait and see."

Matt accepted this. He was grateful to have escaped certain death, and he knew he would qualify for disability, so money wasn't much of a concern. In the coming days, the attacks would be heavily publicized. Matt's involvement as one of the few who both inflated and survived was a very unique honor, and one of the only comforts he could lay claim to after the attack.

Unsurprisingly, even though this was the largest attack yet, the US government did not give in to the demands of the terrorists. Indeed, the US government would likely have raised the penalty for non-consensual inflation, were they not of the belief that this would only bait the terrorists more.

A state of emergency was imminent.