To say these guys were musclemen or hunks didn’t do them justice. They were mutations, like fancy goldfish—this one bred for a long fantail, this one for bubble eyes, this one for a dwarfed body. Instead, it was: This one lifted for elephant neck size, this one for a rhino chest, this one for legs as thick as tree trunks. Bodies blown up like overstretched balloons. As they worked out, blood vessels popped and pulsated under hairless skin; muscle and tendon became anatomically defined. It made Marge hurt to look at them.

What possessed men to do this to themselves? Spend hour after hour lifting backbreaking weights? Getting their butts shot up with anabolics that could potentially cause cancer or sterility?

Then again, what possessed women to starve themselves to flagpoles and barf up their meals?

When Marge stood the thoughts side by side, she realized that anorexia wasn’t all that different from extreme bodybuilding. Both groups contained people with distorted body images going to extreme measures to “perfect” their bodies.

The perfect body.

Marge regarded her own corpus collosus. She wasn’t fat, but she was large—heavy-boned, thick wrists, long limbs, and more than a fair share of muscle mass. And like every woman she had ever met, Marge was dissatisfied with the way genetics had molded her. Big-gal physique would never be featured in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition. But Marge could live with the pain. All her parts worked and required little maintenance to run efficiently. Perfecting the body was just too much damn work.

But obviously not too much work for the twenty-five or so men in the room. As Leek had described, the builders grunted and growled, sweat bathing their faces and bodies. Dressed solely in tiny little briefs, they did squats and lifts, leg and bench presses, thousands of sit-ups on slant boards, hundreds of push-ups and pull-ups. They lifted umpteen pounds’ worth of freestanding weights atop their heads, muscles bunching, veins bulging, their wet beet-colored faces turning more purple with each second. Then, in a flash, the barbells crashed to the floor, sending vibrations Marge could feel through her spine.

But no one else in the room seemed to notice.

The smell of toil and sweat combined with the heat made the place stifling. She felt deep wet circles soaking the pads under her armpits.

She jumped as metal crashed against metal, sending a ringing into her ears. Weights slamming into each other. A deep shout followed.

“Can someone teach this dickbrain how to use the weights properly!”

No response.

Without reason, Marge suddenly opened her purse and felt for her gun. Not that it would probably do much good against these guys. Their chests were probably steel-lined.