The Great Awakening (Chapter 19)

The ground had tremored incessantly every time she so much as moved, even before the humongous lady’s body was fully visible through the Atlantic mists, vibrating the private’s boots and rattling the windows of nearby storefronts. Once she actually set foot on the edge of the city, however, mere trembling turned to full-blown quakes. Private Lyons had grown up in California, and been present for some of the worst seismic events on North American soil in the past two decades, and still those shakes were nothing compared to this. It was as though the ground itself had come alive, engaged in an epileptic seizure, and was taking injury for miles around wherever the girl’s sneaker crashed into the planet’s crust.

Her foot rested almost a mile away from Private Lyons and his company, yet the ground was so unsettled that the street was already spitting up hunks of asphalt like popcorn kernels during her demolishing smear along the coast. With every new occurrence that resulted from the giantess’s merest twitch or pivot on the ball of her foot, the soldier was sure he’d seen it all, and then that mountainous white sneaker of hers would twist just a little closer toward the heart of the city, even as she stood still with the backs of her heels on the beaches, and bring on increasingly violent preludes to calamity.

Window panes fell out of place and shattered in the street. Street lamps wobbled. Car alarms went off. And that was only a taste. Her clearing of the first-contact ground troops sent a shudder through the whole thirteen-mile landmass. Buildings around Private Lyons’ post groaned like great ships about to launch into the sea. Signposts went down. Doors toppled off their hinges. Compact cars bounced an inch off the ground. The enigmatic dark-haired beauty hadn’t even fully lifted her foot off the ground to take a step on NYC yet, though at the bending of her knee two and a half miles skyward, the soldier saw it was coming.

The first true step the titaness took into the city proper was when Private Lyons at last received the full picture of exactly what they were up against. Not even seeing her towering visage outlined against the sky like a modeling backdrop had made it clear, nor had viewing her grotesquely immense footwear coming to rest astride the shore. He’d heard the deafening barrage of tank shells and personal gunfire unloading literal millions of bullets at her attire over the course of the several-minute attack volley, followed by brief silence and then the earth-moving smash of her fingertip burrowing into the ground. Yet it was only when she’d cleared a quarter of the coastline in one swing, took that sobering lunge well-inside the city limits, and at last hovered above them as well as “over,” that the private comprehended the magnitude of her singular power. It was unthinkable, unprecedented in all of human history, and so was she.

Ash and smoke now shrouded the horizon overhead of where the girl had trampled a square mile of Manhattan districts beneath her heel, yet that sneaker was still fully visible through the dusty carnage. For now. Soon the cloud spilling out from under her foot unfurled between alleys and rolled over rooftops, enveloping a quarter of the city in lung-clogging grit from the force of that weighty single step alone. Private Lyons tried to slow his breathing and shield his eyes, though in a flash, it became extremely difficult to see more than a block away, let alone open one’s eyes. Ocean froth gushed still haphazardly through the streets after the localized tsunami effect of her shoes shuffling up to the land, and wasn’t helped as split water mains spurted manhole covers into balconies and treetops. The company took pointless shelter behind their Humvee, which had flipped onto its side after the quake. Masks were salvaged out of the vehicle, and at last the private could inhale and open his eyes again, though once he was peering through the rubbery visor of his breathing device, he almost wished to return to the anonymous ash-burst that had momentarily turned the chaos into soothing white void.

Once they could see the girl again, the troops realized she was bending to a crouch, and extending her shapely arm over her handiwork. Half-mile-long fingers unraveled from a gentle fist one at a time, while the overwhelming creased peach expanse of her palm descended fast right above where Private Lyons and his cohorts were posted, and many of the surrounding city blocks as well. The giantess’s rainbow bangle-bracelet thumped as it revolved like a planetary ring around her wrist, and if the soldier closed one eye, her colorful jewelry made it look very much like a portal had opened in the sky, and poured through a three-thousand-foot-wide feminine hand to reach for the fragile architecture below. Through that narrow space differential between the girl’s bangle and her forearm, Lyons could just barely make out that lovely, intentioned face five miles, with her pupils trained on the exact district in which the private and his company just so happened to have been assigned.

Above the roar of the wind, plus the general din of emergency alarms, wailing civilians, and grumbling building foundations, the young soldier heard his commanding office shouting at his troops to prepare to fire. So he did just that, pointing his rifle to the sky just in time to realize that the sky as he knew it had disappeared. Neither did he find the dusty gray expanse brought on by the simultaneously demolition of so many high-standing stone-and-steel structures. The view as far as the private’s eye could see, between apartment complexes and skyscrapers alike, was of tender pinkish flesh. What little sunlight could still break through the impromptu smog filled in the lines of ID prints and a million micro-divots in the skin. Her open palm had seemingly swallowed up the rest of the outside world, as it floated less than a quarter-mile off the ground.

Then something even closer and twice as troubling arched into view. Though the giant creature’s hand still hovered flat above the city, fifty-story-thick digits included, her forefinger alone bent at the first joint, aiming that creamy spiraled pad of her extremity and its smooth manicured nail toward the streets below. It was plain she had an objective to touch down with a fingertip that could’ve just about filled up a sporting arena on its own. Slow as she was approaching to make contact, there was no conceivable force in this city, and probably not in the whole country, that could’ve stopped her from steadily uncurling that pale digit now. Intersections full of tanks and Humvees certainly tried, blasting the palm-flesh sky with every size of artillery they had onboard. Rooftops flashed electric blue as dozens of rail guns joined the midair fracas.

All this military might, just as had been the case for the lads on the beach, served only to create a blinding light show of flame and soot, while the giantess continued right on doing exactly what she wanted to do, unmindful of the armaments rocketing at her by the megaton. In this case, that meant continuing to dip her fingertip down and down, until she was cresting the rooftops and powderizing them with her gentlest nudge. The rail guns went silent first. She wasn’t satisfied with just brushing into and through the brickwork structures, however, but continued pressing toward the earth at the same pace, undeterred. Fresh payloads of chalky ash billowed out as these buildings were annihilated from the rooftops down, floor by floor, half-second by half-second. The tanks fired off their last useless chorus of missiles just before she touched them, too. Lyons and company were thankfully stationed just beyond the bounds of her ever-lowering fingerprint vortex, but that didn’t mean they could breathe a sigh of relief yet either. As her digit made berth with the street only three blocks away from the private’s station, the troops steeled themselves for the inevitable side-effects of existing so painfully close to something in motion at that grand a scale.