The Great Awakening (Chapter 14)

Though the unknown woman was visible through the mist from many miles off, her dizzyingly lengthy strides crossed smaller towns in a single lethargic arc, and the lumbering swing of those polygonal-treaded shoe isles blotted out the sun several times, for longer and longer each time she unassumingly raised her leg again, getting nearer until she was one step away from reaching the coast. At this point, vehicular long-range weapons were engaged, launching an explosive assault from the safest distance possible, in hopes of halting the woman in her tracks, but Brandon could already see it wouldn’t have an effect. Still, he kept his heavy armament at the ready, and repeated the orders to his troops to make sure they maintained rank. Down the populous mainland shore, the troops did an impressive job of holding the line, likely just as paralyzed by horror as they were by duty to their order-barking superior officers.

She was standing a mile away, but may as well have been standing an inch from him, for how much of her there was to see, and still towering overhead. At first the stranger paused, right as the first bombing volley hit her shoes and ankles, which at first gave the amassed rows of army reserves lining the streets and waterfront false hope that their first strike had an effect. They quickly lobbed off additional rounds, and Brandon even heard some of his subordinates quiet down, either in stupefying terror or in belief that a squadron of comparative flea larvae-height humans had an actual chance to stop a creature that jaw-droppingly humongous using conventional weaponry. He didn’t want to be the glass half-empty guy, not when their statistical chances of survival were dwindling rapidly.

Then the girl’s shoe arched slowly off the ground once more, achingly gradual, in a roundabout way flexing her planet-shivering strength simply by bending the rubber and canvas of a shoe so heavy that it could’ve flattened all of NYC if she simply flung it across the bay by its laces like bolas, and doing so without even thinking, let alone noticing the combatants near her feet. When her sole hit earth again, taking the shortest and quietest step yet, unintentionally using the bough of her shoe to kick through the burly front-line soldiers and million-dollar military hardware like cobwebs, the real force of her presence was felt.

SPC Brandon and his troops, though a quarter-mile to the side of the girl’s terrain-crunching step trajectory, were bounced high off the ground, along with their transport, and were thankful to have a grass-padded landing. They were the lucky ones, too, as the squads standing face-to-foot with the girl’s warpath were blown away as though hit by a massive shockwave, when it fact it only took a gust of wind like a solid wall a half-mile wide.

Sobered by the sight of his peers plummeting into the water beyond, Brandon recovered and commanded the privates to take formation. Already random shouting and hysterical shot-firing was taking place across the mortified row of troops all the way down, but their position held, with brave troopers doing their best to “block” the giantess’s journey to Manhattan, except of course for the major opening in their defensive line she’d just accidentally swept into the Hudson with the breezy launch of her shoe and concussive after-effect.

            And this was only the beginning. Though she didn’t take another step, which at this stage might’ve saved the lives of her little opponents, walking right over their heads without noticing them, the giantess instead began lowering herself into a bow. Brandon felt as though he was watching a planetary body on a collision course with Earth; big as she seemed before, it was only her shoes that seemed a tangible presence before, doing most of the damage while her body above the ankles existed somewhere in the untouchable ether. Now, all of her was coming down to meet them, and she was even more astronomic than they could’ve imagined.

            Her skirts unfurled like night abruptly eclipsing the blue sky, flaring out entirely for just an instant long enough to get a glimpse up into the five-mile-high darkness around her panty-clad upper thighs. Then the collective curtain fell, at first in tandem with the giantess’s steady kneel and then surpassing it, and blasted the ground below with more concentrated wind. Brandon and his troops, though far enough back from the action not to be fatally affected, were nonetheless slammed face-first to the ground and held in place there. The force was so strong, pinning them flat with absolute authority, many soldiers during the delirious aftermath believed she’d actually stood upon them, twisting her shoe and exterminating them like termites, and that they were either in shellshock or on their way to the afterlife while her treads mulched them by the hundreds and thousands. Yet when the frigid rush passed, and her skirts settled back against those mighty pillared legs, they saw there was nothing restraining them but thin air.

            A thousand determined troopers had been brought to their knees, all while the girl did the same above them, but of her own volition. And it only required the fashionable fanning of her skirts. No sooner had the soldiers recovered enough to stand, or at least those still conscious enough to do so, when a more tactile impact was visited on the coast. A knee descended and heavily claimed its place in the terrain, crumbling hardy infrastructure and heavily-armed lives alike into a smooth bowl-shaped depression like a foam yoga mat meant for a ten-mile goddess. Bullet-spraying and explosions filled the air in the final heartbeats before the girl’s legs crushed so many of her detractors, one at a time in gentle sequence, but the wartime madness may as well have been a whisper next to the thump of the giantess’s body catching itself in the shuddering earth. Her knees and shoes sunk into messy landscape and left many of the floundering survivors in a hazy dust-fog. Some of them, only wishing to find their comrades again and survive the day, began firing at trees and house-sized hunks of rubble they at first mistook for the gigantic insurgent. Then the smoke cleared, revealing her catastrophic silhouette again, and they recalled that even the tallest tree or highest building in the capacity of normal-sized humanity would represent little more than a lost eyelash to someone so huge.

            SPC Brandon didn’t know how long he was left lying there with his body half-buried in mud, nor could he estimate how far he’d been thrown by the seismic ripple-effect of those legs softly burrowing into suburban sprawl. All he knew was that no one in his company answered when he called. Painfully rising, he found his bazooka, only to discover it was crunched in half, and so he stumbled about the transformed battlefield in search of life. It felt like he’d been transported suddenly to an overseas desert hot spot, given the ravaged lack of recognizable standing architecture now and debris dust forming the equivalent of a sandstorm.

Though he passed many corpses who’d endured harder landings than him, the able-bodied troops, scattered like blown pollen, were shouting even louder than the wounded, openly weeping and running in circles with the tenacity of mental patients. In any other circumstance, Brandon would’ve looked down on this as cowardice, but today completely understood their feelings. None would keep focus when he approached, as though Brandon had become a ghost, and at this stage he couldn’t be positive he wasn’t one. Discouraged, he wandered past their abject pants-shitting terror in hopes of finding someone who could offer a plan.

Unfortunately, the first remotely clear-headed person he encountered wasn’t a fellow soldier, but the enigmatic land-breaker herself, who only became visible again when her half-mile fingers darted like rockets through the clouds of her destruction, bringing back the sunlight over the traumatized troops, but even more clearly, the smiling soft-featured landscape of her face, looking directly over her handiwork. For a split-second, it almost felt to Brandon like those hazel-welled eyes were staring directly at him, perceiving his existence as an individual whose miniscule body could’ve used her spiral fingerprints as an inescapable labyrinth.