The Great Awakening (Chapter 17)

            Naturally, the first thing Lilly did upon recognizing the masses of brave New York defenders was raise her forefinger like a queen’s scepter, point it earthwards, then drive it toward the beach with the strength of a drill that could’ve burrowed straight to the planet’s core. Instead, though, she settled for instantaneously melding a squadron of troops and Humvees with the dunes, then kept on digging and twisting her finger, pushing their remains and the gushing sands down to her delicate first knuckle, only then retracting it from the shore.

Lilly held her fingertip a thousand feet from her eye, which was so close that it took some focusing until it clarified in her vision. She was enamored of the silty residue left behind from the beach where she’d just punched a quarter-mile hole through hard-packed sand, and especially marveled at the multicolored flecks of metal husked tanks she’d flattened thinner than paper in the process of poking the shoreline. The scintillating texture of it settled into the loops of her fingerprints yet again, and now she was even more sure that she could mete out the feeling of tanks crushing to metal crumbs; while the individual bodies of the soldiers were just a little too small to be distinguished between the dirty mish-mash of broken military hardware and ocean-side grit, unfortunately enough, she knew they were there nonetheless, and smiled to herself, before dusting off the pad of her digit with her thumb, and returning her attention to the edge of the Big Apple.

“Gosh, there’s just so many of you…” Lilly whispered, speaking to her new hosts for the first time. She bowed her head even lower now over the ground defense to concentrate on the impressive line of insect vehicles again, though still held back just far enough that her exhales unsettled the already-whirlpooling puddles of river and ocean further beyond. “…and only one of me.”

Despite the crater her finger had cut into the beach right in the middle of their operation, the troops seemed to be holding their position, as near as Lilly could tell. Frankly, it was almost near-impossible to distinguish the battalions from green-and-brown speckles in the sand strip, but at least more possible than reading their camo-clad bodies running helter-skelter across dark earth. Once her colossal countenance was poised over them again, however, so near that her chin nearly dipped in the water, she spotted the same twinkle-light effect of their weaponry unloading at her by the ton. While she’d apparently dispersed the previously shoulder-to-shoulder phalanx of soldiers just by prodding the beach with a fingertip, since they were even harder to spot now, they clearly hadn’t surrendered. Lilly was far more touched by their inspirational resolve than she was at all affected by the thousands of bullets pinging off her chin every second.

Still, curiosity made it impossible to resist licking her lips to wet them, her serpentine half-mile-long tongue traveling from corner to corner of her mouth, before she puckered up to blow. If only there existed mega-billboards big enough to project Lilly’s whole face, this gesture might’ve looked like a glamour advertisement to the heavily armed companies of military men and women below. Of course, the average plastered-up imagery of fashion models, even when the photo was taken an inch away from her smile, couldn’t actually reach beyond the bounds of the massive poster to contact the audience beyond. Yet Lilly did just that, albeit indirectly, by puffing up her cheeks, inflating them with enough air to power all the world’s wind turbines for a day, and then proceeded to blow a warm stream of breath through the dampened portal, straight at the army. Lilly tried to be gentle, spewing air softly as though she was playing a flute note at the lowest possible volume.

Regardless of her restraint, the beach was thrown into adorable madness, at least from Lilly’s perspective. A mist of sand, and with it the dark spots of the troopers themselves, were whipped hundreds of feet off the ground wherever her wind blasted apart the beach, even higher than they were launched by her (literally) impressive finger when she stabbed the ground before. Tilting her head side to side like a slow-moving sprinkler, the giantess kept up the current of her airflow, and in a single exhaled surge from her lungs, stripped an entire mile of New York shoreline of its upper sand layers, soldiers, jeeps, and tanks. Trees tumbled end-over-end. Like projectiles themselves, the fine earthen particles and crushed artillery units alike were sprayed into the streets, crashing into intersections and the buildings with an ocean-adjacent view of the carnage. Once Lilly had nearly dredged herself of air, and used up the last of her oxygen reserves with an especially potent draft like a dragon belching flame, the ground troops and their useless instruments were sent flying back nearly as fast as the bullets they’d been using against their enemy moments before.

Surveying her handiwork until she had goose bumps, Lilly licked her lips once more and arose steadily, first to a crouch then a full stand. She was getting her sea legs now, so to speak, in this new ten-mile figure, and moved with greater confidence and speed than before, which of course meant that just the wind coming off her body as she returned to full stature cleaned out another two miles of surrounding beach. In order to rebalance herself, Lilly extended her right sneaker through the last drop-thin layer of ocean as it leveled off toward the beach, coming closer and closer to her opponents. The sea was parted Old Testament-style as she ground her sneaker treads through the ocean floor, until hardly any saltwater could make it under the natural dam of her foot.

The bulwark of the girl’s shoe settled just in front of a patch of as-yet unassaulted shore, a distance that looked to Lilly like an inch separating her toe-tip from the broken line of soldiers, which meant they still had a healthy thousand-foot buffer zone in between them and the living tower. It was doubtful the brave troops gathered here could see any of the horizon now: only a scuffed white rim rising out of the water like a mountain, its surface pockmarked with shattered bedrock and tiny missile scorches, though nothing from Mother Earth nor Uncle Sam had actually managed to penetrate the dense rubber barrier.

Even though Lilly hadn’t lifted her shoe out of the Atlantic in the process of sliding it up toward the absolute precipice of Manhattan’s border, the tension created by a billion-ton mile-and-a-half-long barge scraping along foundations had set off a chain reaction below the visible crust that was only now becoming apparent to the general’s amassed army when the ground started to tremble in an abnormal pattern, more jarring even than an earthquake aftershock. Then Lilly lifted her foot a few hairs’ distance off the ground, just a matter of stories-height if that, yet plenty of air-time to create lethal momentum when she let her sneaker plop back to the ground with just a hint more speed than gravity alone could provide.

Again all troops within a mile radius were bounced off the ground, this time hundreds of feet in the air by the force of an entire shoe smacking earth instead of a mere finger-thrust. Whole platoons of unprotected troopers rained back to the beach for a brutal bone-snapping crash-landing, while the tanks offered a marginally higher chance of survival, though not by much, as the impact collapsed most of them like soda cans.

As if the concussive blow of Lilly’s toe-tapping itself wasn’t enough, the already tenderized layers of bedrock and crust beneath here were finally split asunder by this heavy step, in the form of fissures traveling across the beach and into the streets beyond like a cracked windshield. Soldiers and vehicles that were far enough away from the ground-zero landing of the giantess’s shoe to avoid jumping skyward from the force instead had to content with earthquake ruptures zig-zagging toward them. People and bomb-slinging hardware alike were caught in the path of the widening crevices of stone and soil, tumbling into the black divots and piling atop one another as more hapless gunners failed to outrun the natural effect of Lilly’s pounding footfall.