The Great Awakening (Chapter 6)

For a brief, blissful, and wholly prideful second, Lilly silently rejoiced in her success as the three buildings were each uprooted from the ground, remaining whole and distinguishable like dry hairs between her fingertips. The moment her hand rose off the ground, though, the same thing as before happened, and where she previously felt the three highly-sensitive structures fitted against the dune-like rings of her fingerprints, suddenly Lilly was holding nothing but parched grime. More than a little frustrated now, the girl wiped the leftovers off and took her grievances out on the nearest block of skyscrapers she could identify, only instead of trying to baby them into being picked like flowers, the giantess extended just one finger this time, her thumb,  and brought it flying down toward the high-rises.

            “Ready or not, here I come,” she announced in a caring lullaby tone.

            Nothing about Lilly’s gesture was remotely dainty now except her lethargic first brush with the rooftops, searching for the exact tip under her thumbpad like braille dots. As soon as she felt the tickle of the spire looping along her fingertip, however, the girl jabbed down fast and relentless, driving the building down like a hammer to a nail with a swoop so clean the structure stayed in a single piece for only a split second longer until it shattered hard against the earth.

            “Got you now…” she muttered with a smirk. While this playful activity still didn’t satisfy Lilly’s desire to see a building from close-up, it did help alleviate her annoyance at the skyscrapers for being so brittle. To further soothe herself, she repeated the act another half-dozen times, fixing her thumb upon the roof of the filament-thin skyscraper and then stabbing it straight toward the planet’s crust with a swift and ruthless push of her finger. Some of them she nudged onto their sides before demolishing them to the ground under her thumb, but regardless, each one she encountered was sure to fall with little more than a tap of her finger. Two by two she wiped buildings off the map as if attempting to press them under the map, until only a limited handful of the very tallest scrapers remained standing.

            “Thank you for that,” she sighed. “I feel better now.”

            At this point, though, the time had come to try again for a more personal examination of these scintillating little structures, and since Lilly had so few left to toy with after jabbing or flicking most of them to rubble, her determination was renewed, as was her single-minded focus. She would have one. It would not break this time. And there was one building in particular she wanted to claim as her own.

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            Sam curled into the fetal position on the earthquake-shivering floor of the 102nd level, watching the city he knew so well and had only this morning believed would form the beautiful view from his new office window, now all turning to muck and ruins before his very eyes. He clutched both hands tightly over his ears, though this did nothing to ease the agony caused each time the girl spoke, her voice sounding out in a feminine lull that still somehow boomed with the bassline strength of a rock concert speaker blasting chorus from mere feet away. Her every understated mumble caused the windows to quake almost as hard as when she set her foot down. The man was pretty sure his eardrums would never recover, if he could even still hear at all by tomorrow, but this was scarcely a concern, as he had serious doubts he’d still be alive by then, let alone in the next several minutes.

            As Sam predicted, the towering ten-mile goddess had taken a third step closer, so near that he could no longer see the skyline or even any city sprawl behind her. Just a wall of her mile-plus-long white sneaker, far as the eye could see out the window. Upon this close impact, Willis Tower trembled and swayed with such tangible force he was quite certain this was his end then and there, yet miraculously the building held its ground, for now at least. Soon after, though, a part of Sam wished the girl’s shoe had come down quarter a mile closer to him and just gotten it over with, considering the heart-rending show that awaited once the skyscraper stopped lurching.

            Sam bore witness then to a series of grim and targeted attacks not committed by those colossal Chucks, clumsy as they seemed, but from the dexterous hand of the giantess herself. Two fingers thick across as whole neighborhoods descended from out of the clouds and lowered toward the city, gradual and purposeful, with clear intent to touch what laid below. Disbelieving and hardly drawing full breath any longer, Sam watched as the peachy concentric ovals of those football-stadium-sized fingerpads careened into view. These oblong shapes were much closer to Sam’s vantage now than the girl’s resting shoe and thus replaced the all-encompassing view of white sneaker fabric instead with her pale line-decked flesh constituting the entire sky.

            Her fingers drew together with two skyscrapers arranged between them, by design, Sam realized. Those poor locations fell into shadow, totally eclipsed by the lovely doombringer’s slender digits. When at last she squeezed, the massive curved plains of skin clapping back together with a deafening thump, Sam watched the two dizzyingly tall and extremely populous buildings bend like wet branches, each slowly and unnaturally matching the concave structure of her firm fingertips, and after the towers each were curled too far, they shattered.

            Sam didn’t even realize buildings that large were physically capable of rupturing so spectacularly, but there was no cloudy obstruction to let him think it was illusion. From the sidewalk all the way up to the highest lightning-rod a thousand feet up, the two buildings were utterly obliterated, turned to a chunky mess of glass, stone, and steel painted across each of the deep ridges forming the girl’s fingerprints. The rubble, in its temporary stillness, maintained an eerily similar shape to the skyscrapers pre-breakage as she held them in place, even if they were now assembled in pieces almost as small as Legos. After a pause, however, when her digits reared back away from one another and the giantess retracted her fingers, no longer supporting the fractured structures, the pair fell apart and then sprayed across the ruined ground as rubble, just like all the rest that had fallen victim. Except, since the destruction wasn’t hidden this time beneath a megaton-weight shoe, but in fact put on full display for Sam, he found he couldn’t burn the imagery out of his brain once he’d drunk it in.

            There was no functional point in this act, unlike walking. No need. She just wanted to do it, which he also gathered was true from what few of her explosively loud whispers he could interpret between the bouts of ear pain.

            For a rather surreal couple of minutes, Sam watched as two by two or even three by three the neighboring skyscrapers were eradicated clean off the map, either bunched up and turned to shards by the enclosing mountains of her not-so-dainty fingers, or simply driven into the Earth, one instant going from their former proud hundred-story heights and then the next down straight into the ground, replaced where once stood beautiful architecture with the far-stronger flesh-pillar of the girl’s pointed digit, uncomfortably beautiful in its own way too. In the man’s near-catatonic state while witnessing the horror, there was an all-around strange kind of near-allure about the display as, aside from knowing all the lives the giantess was claiming with each high-rise she ruptured under her brutal fingertip, there was no half-measure in her actions. Every building she touched was either broken down to its gleaming shards or otherwise buried deep in the planet, the wake of destruction almost appearing like a daylight fireworks display if Sam shut one eye and squinted.

            Once she’d touched just about all of them, nearly every single skyscraper in the district except Willis Tower, and certainly everything else even tall enough to be worth her time to grab for, the little audience of one had his clearest view of the city. Sam almost wished to be left in the dark, then. While the giantess had physically contacted relatively little of the urban sprawl with her bare fingertips or shoe treads, every piece of civilization in sight, no matter how close to the town’s border, had experienced her arrival in chaotic fashion. Bounced cars were littered over the streets and even rooftops like confetti; flames sprouted from cracked roads, windows, and vehicles; buildings were tilted if not resting on their sides. Meanwhile, those structures and citizens had been actually graced by the girl’s touch, of course, had even more grievous wounds to show for it, though perhaps luckily, not a single one remained intact or alive. Out of each of her wideset footprints cookie-cutting new craters leading all the way back to the outskirts of Chicago proper, smoke rose in dense gray towers far higher than even the city’s highest achievement of architectural scale.