The Great Awakening (Chapter 10)

When Lilly had succeeded in routing every single plane sent to gun her down, obviously to no avail, she took a pause to admire her handiwork, lament the fact that they’d sent no more fascinating little vehicles for her to catch, and only then recalled the fact that she’d been holding Willis Tower before the Air Force, National Guard, and whoever-else showed up to try and rain on her parade. She had quite forgotten her goal to collect the building whole between her fingertips, and now had no idea what had become of it, or where it would’ve landed once she absentmindedly let her digits part, and the skyscraper to tumble three miles back to Earth. She regarded the ground below, knowing there was no conceivable way she’d ever find it again, and sighed with a twinge of disappointment. Oh well. There would be other cities. And she certainly wouldn’t have to travel far to reach them, either: practically a literal hop, skip, and a jump for her.

            Chicago was a bit worse for wear now, to say the least, after her visit. The town was now largely characterized by the cratered footprints Lilly had left with her beloved white sneakers, not to mention the widespread chaos and destruction spread across the land wherever her crust-quaking strides had shaken down the infrastructure. In short, there wasn’t much reason now to linger here, after she’d come for a visit and had all her fun. Lilly didn’t imagine it would be terribly interesting trying to pick up any of the other buildings here for observation, when the skyscrapers were already so meager as to come apart like dirt in her fingerprints, and the map around her feet was so dull and gray now, mostly shrouded in smoke, that it wasn’t even worth the time for further sight-seeing. Shrugging, Lilly knelt down, waving a hand to clear the cloud of ash now hovering over Chicago like a storm about to burst. Seeing the downtown district, which she’d already mostly picked clean of skyscrapers, she could still spot a few measly high-rises standing tall amidst the ruins, or at least relatively tall, considering none of them could even reach higher than the rim of her shoe.

            Without even fully picking her foot off the ground, Lilly kept her heel anchored where it rested, but arched her rubber sole off the ground, twisting it to hang over the barren downtown where the last surviving skyscrapers still stood proudly. Returning back to her full height again, the giantess was so bored of this particular playground, she didn’t even bother prolonging the obligatory last annihilation of Chicago’s central hub. She just let her shoe fall. Like everything else that found itself underfoot today, the skyscrapers put up no fight, nor even any sign that she was stepping upon them, aside from that satisfying leaf-crunch she’d come to know as the final spindly silver landmarks were terminated.

            “Thanks for the hospitality, everyone. It’s been a fun visit, for sure,” Lilly intoned to the city below, to anyone still listening and undistracted by the apocalyptic emergency-state that had befallen the city in comprehensive fashion. She waved once more, gentle and princessly, and then shuffled her foot to the side, nonchalantly wiping out every structure on the lakeside coast on her way out of Chicago.

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            A change of scenery was definitely in order, though on her way east from Chicago, the towering beauty decided it was too limiting to just head straight for an exact destination. Instead she allowed the wind and her uncertain whims guide the momentous force of her colossal earth-devolving feet, though she at least had a vague endpoint in mind several states over, with a nice little side-seeing stop planned midway.

While the distance between Chicago and Cleveland was, for Lilly, like a pleasant stroll down a short city block, pausing to poke at the miniscule architecture and adorable topography as she went like springtime flowers, the giantess didn’t realize just how quickly the day had gotten away from her until she noticed the light already beginning to fade, washing the fearful towns surrounding Chicago in orange twilight. But, she supposed with a thunderous giggle, time just flew when one was having fun. And the girl was certainly having a better time exploring and then excavating manmade micro-civilizations than she could ever recall before.

            Now Lilly paid greater attention as she took each dramatic stride, gingerly setting her rubber white soles down on more landscape ahead and molding it precisely to the bumps and troughs of her sneaker treads. The darker it became, the harder it was to know what exactly she was stepping on, which wasn’t a problem necessarily, but the girl became disappointed at the thought of demolishing delicate terrain without even knowing what she was transforming into footprint-shaped flatland before doing so.

Over the course of the day, she’d learned to recognize the subtle difference in crinkly sound effects when she stepped on forestry, which was more akin to sliding her shoe through thin moss, or urban layout, a result closer to wintry frozen grass blades snapping and cracking with tinkling aplomb. These cute noises helped inform her of roughly where she was but, especially without the dense collection of downtown city lights like a firefly hive to guide her, Lilly found herself having to stoop and squint in the increasing shadow, studying the murky ground, before at last setting her shoe down on whatever woodland or podunk town she’d come across.

Not that Lilly cared; part of what so often drew the girl to hike and journey alone through nature was the unknown, and though this kind of march was considerably different than when she was an infinitesimal fraction of her current size, it still held the same lure.

Some puny pockets of civilization, little country towns or voluminous farmlands, went entirely unnoticed until after she’d “visited” whole places at once, when Lilly was intrigued by the crispy impact on deceptively-dark earth. She’d pivot, glacially arching her rubber-clad sole and smearing everything in a 180-degree arc, and then squat over the littered refuse at her feet, only to find faint glimmers of suburban lights blinking against the encroaching blackness, plus cultured fields and the appearance of sparse rural villages, now uniformly cut into the divoted geography of her mile-and-a-half-long shoe island undersides.

“Oops. That’s a shame,” Lilly sighed to herself, genuinely regretful, as she stooped over the muddied wreckage like a child playing with ants in waning summer hours. She glided her fingertip through the crushed debris of loam and occasional gravelly crumbs from demolished neighborhoods, scooping some of the dirt into the keratin curve of her upturned fingernail, then tipped it back over and watched the dust scatter. “It’s such a… waste. Believe me, I wouldn’t have done that if I knew you were down there, not when it’s gotten too dark to see. Sorry about that, everyone. I’d have liked to have tried to know you a little better before I, well, did anything to change you.”

After spending some time with her face dipped low to the ground, her pupils straining in search for signs of life across the shadowy ground surrounding her most recent footstep craters, Lilly’s gaze adjusted enough to perceive pinpricks of light, still too dim to illuminate the details of low-population counties, but enough that in time she discovered what had to be a highway. Though narrow, and still too poorly lit to track more than the ghostly whizzing of insectoid vehicles like gnats, the road would serve its purpose by leading Lilly somewhere new.

Happily, she crept along above the interstate thoroughfare on her hands and knees, unbothered by the feeling of earthen crust and more suburbs bending and mashing to paste under her slender shins, with the highway straddled low between her legs. The same went for her hands, as marshier ground and distant homes like chunky salt squelched in the spaces between long fingers while trudging forth on all fours. The giantess had never minded a little filth, though, and found herself nostalgic for peaceful late-night gardening as she traveled east, following the tiny glow of the highway line like plant roots through dark soil.

Just as the last vestige of sun disappeared, Lilly arrived at the place she’d hoped to meander since departing from the smote rubble of Chicago. It was difficult to tell where she was at first, of course, not only due to her bird’s-eye view, but the moonless darkess too. Fortunately, Lilly had visited the city more than once before, albeit from a much lowlier human vantage, but nevertheless was able to vaguely recognize the teensy overhead layout of the waterside city. Since she could’ve lay down beside Cleveland and dwarfed it by more than double with her incredible ten-mile stature, Lilly was just as tender on approach as she’d been on her last playful pilgrimage.