The Great Awakening (Chapter 7)

            Taking up the most space in Sam’s coveted office window view during all this, though, was naturally the invader’s shoe itself, a white godlike mausoleum standing over the mass grave she’d created simply by taking a step or three. Hovering still closer now, though, were the grand spires of those dastardly fingers, casting shadows off the fingerprint ridges and once again curling in toward one another. They were bearing so close to Willis Tower that Sam could soon see almost nothing else except the skin of her hand, spiraling crisscrossing textures decorated with skin-oil and a radiant rosy glow, like something viewed through a microscope. And then Sam could no longer deny that his number, and that of his coworkers, had come up now. She was reaching for them.

            He watched her thumb and forefinger reuniting but stopping short, leaving just a few hair’s breadths for her but a gap perfectly suited to Willis Tower waiting in the void between those digits. The sloped rinks of her fingernails, now with the blunted blades of the curved edges pointed at one of the final skyscrapers, were surprisingly well-maintained considering how easy it was to spot imperfections on a being of such immense scale. This was a girl who cared for appearances, keeping her cuticles even and her nails filed, though the actual shined platform was unpainted, natural and even pretty to Sam’s eye. For one last haunting beat, the man watched the distorted reflection of Willis Tower glinting at an angle off her manicured thumbnail, and then the mirror image vanished, as the two summits of her fingertips whooshed beyond his vantage, surrounding the building. The windows rattled at the swift passage of those mighty extremities coming so near, and suddenly Sam and all the rest of his peers on every floor below found themselves in the shaded inverted canyon of floating flesh, with the basin of her exquisitely focused fingers at the creased U-shaped point where they met. A racetrack-sized oval awaited now on either side of the tower, a hypnotic vortex of whorling print lines.

            She took her time in lining up for the capture, as her fingers went almost motionless from what Sam could still see of them. Chunks of debris rained continuously off those plush iron-strength pads, but otherwise the giantess had turned her digits into twin monuments suspended from the sky around Willis. Every heartbeat Sam expected to be his last, and time slowed to a crawl, allowing him to count out each pulse and then count the silence in between too while watching the girl’s hand, waiting for it to strike, for those fingers to swallow up Chicago’s tallest skyscraper like the maw of some Lovecraftian horror. When she did finally choose to pinch the building, it was with the same care and attention that she’d taken to position her fingers around it, but even so, the gentled impact of her fingerpads on those two sides of the tower shook all occupants and the infrastructure itself like nothing had before, including the planet-shaking footsteps it took to deliver the giantess here. Shelves flew off the wall, Sam’s desk crashed onto its side, the wide window cracked spiderweb-style, and splits rode up the walls of the office itself. Miraculously, the room remained in one piece, fragile though it had become in the thrall of those two astronomic fingers.

            Hands protectively wrapped over his head, even knowing how pointless it was, Sam sprawled on the carpet, wondering how long it would take for his spirit to realize the building had been crushed to molecules within an instant, and he was on his way to the afterlife. Given that his surroundings hadn’t turned to dust and flame yet, though, he slowly became convinced that the girl was delaying her gratification in smashing the last little souvenir on her horizon. It was just as well.

            The next quake he felt ripple through the tower still didn’t bring the giantess’s fingertips whipping through the walls to meet in the middle and pressurize everything between like sand into glass, however. Instead, the seismic activity burbled up from below, inexplicably, and then Sam glanced out the cracked window, seeing the ground steadily fall away. She’d picked Willis like a flower, wrenched it right out as cautiously as possible, and though the stem was damaged, it didn’t bend to her crushing strength. What’s more, they were ascending now, and fast. The higher they rose, one mile then two and three into the sky, the momentum building in the blink of an eye, the less tethered the man felt to the floor, until he and his office contents were rolling around the room. He could see nothing now of the recognizable world out the window except indistinct expanse, smoky and void.

            What he could see instead was undeniably an eye-poppingly gorgeous body, visible even through a solid two miles of cloud cover and falling hunks of the tower’s peak. Had he not already seen the being who’d plucked Willis straight off the map, he might have thought her a pleasant mirage on the way to their demise. She was so far away, technically, less than an arm’s length for her, yet she may as well have been standing just outside the window. As he bounced around the room, Sam let himself fall into a hypnotic calm for that shapely frame, a fashionable black blouse wrapped around modest feminine curves and short skirt that let her beautiful, toned legs remain largely on display to the world. If there was any being in existence that could have carried the mantle of the mythic Atlas, Sam was certain those legs had the strength to hold up the world. More and more of her body flashed by in the window, adding to a miles-tall living mural until the little man could at last experience all of her remarkable image.

            Her face was an absolute vision of loveliness: everything, from the crown of chin-level dark hair that framed her blemishless features, to her plush pink lips, and crackling hazel eyes with black-hole pupils that the skyscraper itself nearly could’ve fit through. Each deifically-sized feature helped compose an angelic portrait impossible to tear away from even in the tumbling chaos of the building’s contents, her already-natural beauty alone elevated to transcendental significance due to the unthinkable power and authority she now wielded over the world at her incredible stature. While Sam felt guilt in admiring her, he did so anyway. What more did he have to live for?

            Willis Tower stopped rising suddenly, and after a battered and exhausted Sam was finishing being slammed first into the ceiling then the floor along with all his broken belongings at neck-breaking pace, sheer will kept him awake. He clawed himself closer to the window inch-by-inch, all the while staring into the dazzling abyss of the girl’s eye, getting drunk on her thousand-mile gaze. He locked his consciousness now with everything he saw out the shattered window: batting fifty-story-long black eyelashes, the white sea surrounding the island of that gemstone-like hazel iris, and then eventually only the seemingly-bottomless pit at the center, staring so deeply at the building that Sam almost imagined she had seen him, too, and connected in some way. While he was dreaming, perhaps she’d deign to show that aside from her qualities as a humanity-razing ten-mile-tall terror, she had benevolent qualities too that made her a true higher power, and that she had chosen them exclusively to continue on living in her presence. Sam was just dazed, bruised, and delirious enough now in the face of such madness to believe anything, including that.

            Out of nowhere, Sam’s foolish dream was extinguished, and their perceived contact was split, when an explosion lit up the sky somewhere in the wide gulf between his fragile window and the lively face of the self-imposed raven-haired deity. Fire trailed after the eruption, and though at first the man assumed cruel fate just wanted to scorch the building into ash instead of merely rocketing it into the sky between the giantess’s crushing fingertips, the flames instead chased all the way to the girl, away from Willis Tower. Sam didn’t believe his eyes at first as he witnessed the inferno expanding to the comparative size of a glowing ember on her neck, as though she’d tapped a dying cigarette and let a smoldering dot of the refuse blow against her skin. Other similar sunspots of hot light made their appearance, flashing before vanishing to nothing again, just under her chin and below her mountainous cheekbones. After dragging himself up to the shattered panes again of his once-hallowed window view which now showed only beautiful nightmares and, he believed in his daze, the edge of outer space, Sam spotted additional micro-bursts of flame as well dotting the woman’s shoulders, right at the extent of where his vision reached upon the capacious landscape of her upper body, draped in that skimpy top. Was someone actually standing in defense against her?