The Great Awakening (Chapter 20)

Not even a week of preparation, let alone a few seconds, would have been sufficient. While, so far as the witnesses could tell, the giantess had pressed her finger into the street as slowly and as delicately as she could, the impact zone bred absolute catastrophe. Brutal gales distributed the smoke outward from her driving fingertip in every direction, and bowled over all troops within a half-mile. Vehicles that had simply hopped off the concrete before via those distant footfalls now sprung into the air like grasshoppers. Being even lighter, the soldiers themselves suffered far more aching landings, though Private Lyons managed to stay conscious and in one piece, despite some heavy bruising. His rifle had been ripped from his hands, and scattered somewhere among the dusty cracked-up debris that had befallen the streets in a matter of minutes.

He could hardly recognize this intersection as the same one they were assigned to guard only an hour ago, what with the whirling ash like pea soup fog, the buildings fractured up the sides, the cars flipped on their roofs, and of course the giantess’s index finger pointed at the earth as though to pet it, until the pressure kept up even harder, and the vulnerable crust split under the weight of her finger, pulling more even buildings into the makeshift sinkhole.

Their commanding officer was nowhere to be seen amidst the insanity, though given the volume of wreckage that tumbled into the streets following the giantess’s puckish fingering of the city, it was a wonder the entire block hadn’t dominoed on top of them all. Quickly, the next trooper in the ranks took the reins, ordering a retreat to more stable ground before anyone even had the chance to fire off a single round. Already the ground was beginning to behave strangely, no longer just jolting then going still while awaiting the next stomping aftershock; instead it jiggled, waving up and down like Jell-O. It was clear to the soldiers that if they waited too long, the whole surface just might collapse under them, after the giantess’s gophering fingernail had doubtlessly churned up the subway tunnels below.

Helping nearby fellow troops to their feet, Lyons and what remained of the company sprinted along the street as it buckled like a funhouse mirror effect come to life. Their progress was slow, however, as cars, streetlamps, and chunks of architecture now littered the path to “safety,” and more junk continued to rain down. The canyon of buildings on either side of the survivors trembled easily as grass blades in a windstorm.

Despite his better judgment, Private Lyons chanced a glimpse over his shoulder just as the woman’s finger arose out of the impression again, and felt for an instant that he was staring into the mouth of the underworld. There he bore bone-chilling witness to that gaping hole in Manhattan itself, longer than a football field, that the giantess had ripped into the streets with just a tap. A meteor strike would’ve done less damage; at least the effect of a fiery burning space-rock ended with one impact. This girl, by contrast, was a living ten-mile force of nature, her every extremity a recurring natural disaster unto itself, ready to dole out new obliterations wherever her interest took her.

Already she’d surely forgotten about whatever had caused her to poke these specific streets in the first place, and her attention was directed elsewhere, but for Lyons and his comrades, their reason to dread was only expanding. Rubble, vehicles, sidewalk strips, and buildings alike poured into that opening in the ground. Concrete cracks spilled in every direction, as though chasing the company, and threatened to pull them into the widening destruction their visitor had wrought via her playful curiosity.

###

Satisfied, Lilly examined the dust beneath and around her index fingernail up close, its beige grit composed of several distinctive buildings that actually retained enough of their shape to be recognized while shoveled under her cuticle. This, as far as she was concerned, made it well-worth gently caressing the streets of the shorter boroughs, but there was still so much more she had to explore, and so much more she had to touch, most importantly of all: to leave her mark, and see precisely what would happen to the most bustling city on this continent once she was through making it into her personal sandbox.

The sparkling multi-tiered pico-civilization so fascinated Lilly, with all its near-imperceptible intricacy ready to be laid low by her efforts, though much of it already suffered from her single footprint and finger-indentation. It seemed a total waste to stroll over the entire city still in her shoes, when she’d be unable to feel any of it beneath her. Outdoorsy as she was, the girl happened to love the feeling of stepping barefoot into a muddy creek, letting the clay squish up between her toes, and she had no doubt there would be similar tactile benefits to setting her naked sole and flared-out digits down on Manhattan as well. She’d spent the whole morning in these sneakers, after all, and beloved as they were, it was time for a change.

Her mind made up, Lilly hunched over and began meticulously unknotting her shoelaces, careful not to let the strings of her yet-unmoved foot hang in the water and get soggy, which she countered by tucking the aglets into the loopholes. Once both sneakers were loosened, like a practiced yogi the girl stood up from her crouched position and concentrated her weight into one pillar-straight leg, while sliding the other foot from its comfy hovel. Keeping serene balance, Lilly crossed her sock-clad appendage over her knee, peeling it over her heel, down her sole, and off the bulbed tips of her toes, which were already writhing and enjoying the cool breeze three miles in the air. The ankle sock was stuffed securely into the mouth of her shoe, and then the giantess repeated the act with her opposite foot, until both sides were liberated.

Not wanting to have them in the way of her fun, then, Lilly hooked both shoes by their cloth tongues, and deposited them gingerly into the ocean. With one bare foot now resting so near to the tempting waters, she couldn’t help but slide her toes back into the shallow drink, and then the rest of her ped as well. The Atlantic was refreshing as it gushed along her pale sole wrinkles and between her toes through divots wider than most rivers. The puddled waves were cold, and they twisted up in a pleasant spin like hot tub jet-streams as the girl scrunched her toes in the ocean, but Lilly wouldn’t be gratified by a cleansing dip alone. She wanted to feel the rest of New York under her, among her, sticking to her skin and becoming reformed from repeated billion-ton footfalls until it was an unrecognizable but colorful mosaic tattooed on her bare arches. Lifting her heel, sole, and toes out of the sea, she at last planted both feet firmly within city limits.

The moment Lilly’s naked soles molded their way into the brittle structures of an untouched portion of the city, she let loose a moan that rocked the streets nearly as fervently as her footsteps. She’d of course had to settle for imagining this effect before while wearing shoes in Chicago: the microcosm of sculpted construction humble millimeters high, all crunching to pulp from a million different pinpoints underneath her weight. By focusing then, she’d actually convinced herself that she could feel it all down there, everything from the skyscrapers to the people squashing flat as atoms, yet there was no need to fake that experience now.