The Great Awakening (Chapter 4)

Trees, mortar, and flattened vehicles snowed down to the streets below the girl’s shoe, crashing against the sides of buildings and causing calamity on a scale that, mere instants from this point, would seem by comparison like a light springtime drizzle. When the downpour of junk slowed, there came one last moment of serenity, and then the shoe closed the final distance in no more than a tap, sole-to-earth, simultaneously demolishing dozens of city blocks from rooftop to foundation, turning stone, glass, and flesh alike into uniform cinder. Immediately dust formed a veil in front of the terrible white vessel of that shoe like its own personal storm cloud, but the presence of the unholy thing was still more than felt. While before Sam only experienced the girl’s first step by the traumatizing sight and the rolling shudder of the ground spilling in all directions, he was well within the blast zone this time, the tremors quaking him to the marrow. Pencils rolled off his desk. The windows vibrated. Even the floor holding Sam up bobbed, giving him good reason to peel his transfixed face off the glass.

            For the city blocks closer to the impact, panes shattered en masse, spilling glass shards hail-style onto panicked civilians already fighting not to get swallowed up by the mayhem. Facades, gargoyles, and chimneys were blown clean off their resting places, tumbling to the sidewalks, where many of them clobbered the screaming cloisters of hysterical victims who were lucky enough to miss the shoe’s chosen landing spot. Again whole buildings swayed as easily as grass blades in a tempest, a few tipping sideways and then coming to rest in the wake of a smoky shockwave. Cars bounced up into the air as though they might take off and fly away, only to come crashing back to earth like meteors, and then go airborne again when a building toppled nearby. Each time they landed, the vehicles came further apart, many igniting as they were stripped down to battered metal husks.

            In the streets directly below his once-coveted office view, Sam squinted to watch the streets splitting and cracking easily as bread crust. At the intersections, fire hydrants sprayed jetstreams into the air. Metal manhole covers blew a hundred feet up, spinning like tossed coins, while steam and flame belched from the openings as the gas lines burst one by one, block by block. Everywhere for a mile around where the giantess had set her foot, the destruction seemed to pass like a specter out away from the deadly site of the landing, and even beyond those borders, it was felt in the form of seismic activity. She was felt, and as the giantess stood now with both feet planted firmly on Chicago, anyone not yet privy to their upcoming extinction now saw with their own eyes, though most couldn’t believe it.

            Gradually the gray shroud of smoke dissipated again, perhaps even by the giantess herself arching her shoe off the buckling ground, and once again her sneaker came into focus, along with the infinite pillar of her leg rising toward the atmosphere. Far closer now to Willis Tower, just in the span of a single stride, the form of the towering woman’s shoe was thrown into far greater and more horrific detail for Sam. Threads thick each as coiled rope forming the massive mosaic of the sneaker fabric was only the tip of the iceberg. Lines of painted red and blue adorned the sloped white walls where the heels and toes curved to a round. Carved bumps and diamond-shaped divots decorated the winding rubber rim all around the circumference. Flecks of the ecosystems the giantess had stomped through were dotted along the cottony white landscape of her Chucks like dirt spots picked up from a muddy trek home, yet these weren’t just wet soil stains, but swaths of greenery, boulders from crushed mountains turned to pebbles, and the summits of half-buildings kicked up by the force of her foot leaving the ground. Even cars, more like grains of colored sand relative to where they’d landed, littered the intricate patchwork of the stitched cloth stretched for more than a mile over the shoe, some of them stuck under tight laces or in the metal well of the loops through which the shoestrings were tied.

            It was remarkable that something could appear so pure and white, so clean and even graceful from a distance, only to reveal itself to be so painfully rife with the carnage the shoe’s owner was currently bringing down on Chicago for no discernible reason other than that she chose to take this path.

            Sam crawled away from the window, lacking the strength to stand, until his spine was pressed to his desk, as he was too frightened to take his eyes off the chaotic panorama beyond. Aftershocks still trickled up from the ground to the tip of the city’s tallest building, causing the furniture to quake almost as much as the self-important businessman himself. It wouldn’t be more than a stride or two before one of those inconceivably immense feet fell upon Willis Tower. At the back of his mind, past all the hyperventilation and soul-stirring despair, Sam knew the logical thing to do was rush for the elevator or stairs and descend to ground as soon as possible. Unfortunately, he couldn’t convince his legs to pick him up now, having seen the giantess take just two steps. In any case, he had no faith in his ability to escape a being of that much unthinkable power, reach, and eerie nonchalance: whether he ran for his life from the first moment he saw her coming, or chose to lie here until his surroundings were split asunder by the almost-supernatural might of those sneakers crashing onto the planet’s surface again, his fate would likely be the same. Little of what was happening now could be understood, but that much seemed certain.

            From somewhere far off, even questionably real, Sam heard the whine of sirens, though he couldn’t tell whether it was police or firemen, and it didn’t seem to matter much. Through the fresh billowing smoke seeping out wherever the giantess’s shoe instep shifted side to side, he thought he saw a helicopter or two speeding over the imperiled city, but after they passed behind the shoe, he couldn’t see them anymore, and had no idea either whether these too were a mirage, or if they’d simply flown too high and crashed into the ankle. The thought of rescue from any of these sources was laughable, representing fleas combating a sky-touching leviathan of a creature. As though in a hypnotic trance, Sam witnessed the smooth porcelain skin of the girl’s shin and lower calf flexing in the subtlest and yet most violent way on an extraordinary scale, in preparation for her next move. Only by gnawing on his prayerfully clasped knuckles could he slow the shaking enough to watch her steadily.