The Great Awakening (Chapter 15)

Then the giantess’s gaze passed on, but there was recognition in her expression, and her smirk only expanded like she’d spotted a good friend in a crowd. Perhaps because things looked so grim and he was now starved for remotely positive news, Brandon temporarily allowed himself the luxury of believing this was a useful development. She’d seen them now; her strides before were taken without even realizing there were infinitely tiny beings getting smeared by the county into her cratered footprints, and how could she? That meant she could make apologies and end the carnage before any more lives were unknowingly lost to her simplest gestures.

But that smile kept on widening, beyond mere knowledge, and into a devious glint that, in eyes this big, lit up like a comet. And then her fingers kept on coming down, a thumb and forefinger parted far enough that suddenly it looked to Brandon like a pair of indescribably-ginormous bridges were porting down to terra firma. She was reaching for them, just as cautious as she’d been when kneeling, but still with total intention. The girl had seen the people below, and not so much as flinched with guilt; if anything, she meant to touch more of them, to poke and prod and pinch, to terraform with just a stroke, to make them all part of a humorous experiment for no other reason than to sate her selfish curiosity, at the cost of every top-of-the-line military tool, plus thousands of lives. And that was just if she never stood to walk ever again, which seemed unlikely to Brandon, who turned and sprinted the other direction while the twin shadows of those fingers came lower, once again blotting out all light much faster than he could’ve traveled even in a drag racer.

Looking over his shoulder, he saw the detailed tracts of grooves and peach-textured divots making up the pale inner flanks of her long digits, coming into surreally sharper relief the closer she came to scraping the ends of her fingers through the land already abused by the distant actions of her flowing skirts and dropping knees. The nearer to the ground she reached, it became difficult for Brandon to believe he was even looking at part of a human hand, aided in comprehending its unfathomable scale only by the reference point of her pretty face still looming angelically in the sunlit space between those deadly digits. When the rounded tips of her fingers crash-landed a quarter mile from where he ran, despite sparing Brandon from being directly squished under their elegant weight, the force still bounced the ground like a trampoline and launched him into the air again. Only by plopping into a deep pond formed by a sprung water main was he lucky enough to continue breathing.

Swimming toward light and resurfacing, Brandon felt unadulterated dread washing over him more fervently than the gushing tide. He witnessed in stupefied nonbelief while the pinkish sworl-gridded pads of the giantess’s fingers pressed into the earth enough to create friction, paling her flesh. Then the thick dual spires proceeded to scrape toward one another, gathering up strips of planetary crust like wrinkles in fabric and filling up the smooth trenches in her fingerprints. When her digits met, they pinched together a crumpled ball of obliterated acreage including a cornucopia of powdered buildings, splintered woodland, and a sprinkling of human life. And then they rose again, taking this sacrifice with them. Her hand rose faster than it approached, in a flash leaving behind no sign of the landscape she’d plucked and stolen, only deep-tilled tracks in the ground thick as the boroughs of the city she’d come to see.

Debris rained down as her fingers, try as they might to keep the captured rubble intact, continued disturbing the grassy architectural lump, unintentionally mushing it all against her soft skin like a meat grinder. Even from a distance, Brandon realized he was in danger again when chunks of ripped-up civilization scattered in his direction from miles up, diving back below the water just in time to avoid getting pulverized by an eighteen-wheeler truck that dropped like a loose crumb out of the girl’s petite grip and tumbled his way. Still feeling the tremors, the trooper climbed back to dry land and couldn’t help himself from watching the full flight of the giantess’s hand up toward her face. It was staggering to realize that not a moment ago, that hand touching ground was close enough to have flicked Brandon across the Hudson all the way into Manhattan with the simplest twitch of a pinky, and in seconds her fingers ascended up to the level of commercial airline flights.

He saw her studying the fragile ecosystem sample she’d gathered between her fingers, not with pity, but fascination. She squinted and frowned, cutely wrinkled her nose, and pursed her lips as though scrutinizing a bacterial cluster from a microscope slide, when in reality, as she rubbed her fingers together, she was liquefying neighborhoods and bedrock alike, molding them to fit the delicate ravines of her fingerpad flesh like exfoliating moisturizer.

When Brandon at last saw the tips of her fingers so high above pushing together and turning the remaining blob of greenery-and-stone city to paste using less pressure than it would’ve taken an ordinary human to kill a mosquito, the spell was broken, and the soldier took off running again. He didn’t know what to do, or indeed what direction he was sprinting, but just knew he had to get away from her as soon as possible. Still, even after several minutes of full-bore racing, he paused to catch his breath and realized the giantess seemed no further away. There was no point in fleeing. She was so larger-than-life, such a nation unto herself, that escaping her by normal means was literally impossible. He could run all day, until his feet bled and he was exhausted into a coma, and she’d still be crouched there in his view, unmoving and peaceful, but still the most powerful creature on Earth.

Feeling hopeless, Brandon dropped to his knees and tried praying, at first to higher powers and then to the giantess herself, in case someone so tall, mighty, and capable of wreaking havoc unawares was also capable of telepathy and mercy. Crazier things had happened, and were still happening at this moment. As if in answer to his quiet pleas, though not in the way he’d wished, the ten-mile exotic beauty dusted the remainder of the mess from her fingertips, flippantly tossed it miles away, then immediately came back down for a second helping, faster this time, without hesitation. She took a firmer hold of the ground now, digging her fingertips in deeper before pinching them together, and though she did so over a mile away from where Brandon had effectively surrendered, he felt this quake even more violently than the last.