The Great Awakening (Chapter 18)

Now with three perimeter miles of New York City’s terrain, roads, and even a bridge or two in obliterated shambles, with not a soul still alive and standing in that whole no-man’s-land region of breath-dusted beach and stomp-splintered ground, Lilly turned her attention to the next adjoining stripe of the city-wide defensive line. Admittedly, their ranks had lost some organization, falling into jumbled chaos as they witnessed the giantess wrecking hundreds and thousands of their comrades, all without even physically touching them herself. Still, the troops had rightfully come to see this as a last stand, and were letting rip everything they had left. Many had run dry of bullets after emptying every extra clip into the rubber flanks of the girl’s closest sneaker, to no avail, and so several bands of do-or-die drivers piled into the tanks and jeeps and made a run for the girl, while everyone else held back and prepped for the charge.

Strategy aside, however, every soldier for the next two miles, whether they’d chosen to fire from afar or sprint in for the kill, found themselves facing off with Lilly at precisely the same moment, when that sneaker swooped dramatically out of the ocean. It crested over the beaches by a precarious five-hundred-foot differential, zooming along overhead and eclipsing all in the darkness and cruel wind of her ocean-dripping shoe, until with just one minor swing of her leg, the fashionable destructor had her entire shoe threateningly poised above the next pointless line of beach defense.

Her shoe at least had the mercy not to drop all at once, though really the giantess just didn’t want to waste too much of the landscape in one plunge, instead wishing to relish the many sensations like she had in her last visited metropolis. Lilly pointedly lowered her limb, slowly as she could, until the rounded heel of her white footwear sliced a new canyon into the substratum. Every zealous vehicle on their way to meet the giantess found she was coming to them instead, when they were smashed into ironed-out metal pancakes and then molded uniformly into the jagged cuts of bedrock until Lilly’s shoe finally pushed off the planet just enough to free her heel from its mount. From there she began scouring the land, while her shoe remained burrowed a full quarter-mile into the beach. With such a hearty structure scooping out land below on its approach, the next two-mile stretch of beach, and the thousands of troops gathered fearfully in the sand, found the once-solid ground beneath them buckling like a house of cards.

“Sorry to the rest of you,” Lilly boomed. She pivoted her heel into the earth, scrunching and grinding both armed forces and the topography down to a dusty paste underfoot. “I’d like to personally greet each and every one of you who came out to see me for this parade today, but… I’ve got some sight-seeing to do, and the sun won’t wait forever. Actually, it’s one of the few things I can’t control now. But maybe we’ll all meet up somewhere in the middle. I think that would be nice.”

With that, Lilly majestically airlifted her other shoe out of the ocean with just the slightest bend of her knee. No longer partially seaborne, she set her foot down beside its canvas-clad partner, in the process leveling dozens of city blocks as the beaches and outlying streets had run out of room to hold her, now that the girl’s ballet stance required a full mile of space. All of Manhattan lay dead-ahead, ripe for the taking, and Lilly had every intention of taking advantage at this golden opportunity. Operating at a glacial pace so she didn’t run out of walking path too quickly, yet still moving with purpose, the giantess peeled her sneaker off the shuddering earth, arcing her demolition-loving foot a mile above the ground, over apartments, parks, and skyscrapers, taking her time in selecting the perfect first stepping stone.

###

Private Lyons wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up here. Just a few short months back, he’d signed up and received his fatigues and gear. Now, two days after basic training ended, he and his company were awoken just before the crack of dawn to hop in transports for a mass bussing to Manhattan. Less than an hour later, here he was, posted six blocks from Times Square with a rifle in hand and an uncomfortably high heartrate. They hadn’t received much briefing, only enough to know a single nondescript enemy “unit” was headed for the city, but judging by the fact that thousands of troops had been dropped off in New York City by breakfast and stationed at frequent strategic points throughout the urban sprawl, it wasn’t hard to guess that this was situation unlike any of the drills they’d run at camp. The soldier was too green and too nervous to deign to ask his commanding officer what in the hell they were in for, but fortunately, or perhaps not, the question was answered for him after not too long, when “she” first appeared over the rooftops.

Then again, “over” probably wasn’t quite the right word, as despite the fact that the mysterious East Asian lady was plainly visible, as though she was standing just down the block from Private Lyons, intel barked from superiors confirmed that the insurgent was still more than two miles away from the Big Apple’s shoreline. Yet even before she stepped closer, and step closer she did, her presence loomed large above the citizens and soldiers alike. The private was having serious trouble with the mental gymnastics of even understanding how truly humongous of a being she had to be that she could appear so distinct against the skyscape while standing out in ocean. It was like trying to imagine infinity, and even though there was indeed a “finite” end to her dizzying height some ten miles above the Earth, she may as well have been endless.

That seemed to be the consensus from the naval and air forces who took the first run at her, anyway. They were too far away for the private to see much more of the battle than the occasional explosion erupting like fireworks against the giant woman’s shoe rims, but since she kept right on peacefully trudging through the ocean, drawing dangerously close to the city now, in spite of reports that squadrons of jets and a whole fleet had been expended during the preliminary assault, it occurred to Private Lyons that maybe this much manpower in the city wasn’t overkill at all. In fact, once the girl’s half-mile-tall sneakers were poised at the very cusp of the metropolis, a hundred stories higher alone than the One World Trade Center tower, it seemed very likely that they were grossly outmatched.

Still, no matter this feeling in his gut, especially having never seen real action before, the private was conditioned to have faith in his comrades, especially a force of this size, and in the idea that victory would be achieved. It always had been in the past, thanks to the most heavily armed superpower on the planet, and today wouldn’t be any different, even though the young man had to admit he couldn’t imagine how it would happen. But he was just a soldier: a single link in the chain. So he gripped his weapon, willed his hands to stop shaking, and waited as calmly as was possible given the insane circumstances, as the woman’s shoe lifted out of the waters and proceeded to crush two miles of coastal real estate, and several million dollars’ worth of military hardware, under her monumental treads.