The Great Awakening (Chapter 3)

On the one-hundred-and-second floor of Willis Tower, just eight away from the tip-top, Sam was feeling quite pleased with himself. After his recent promotion, this was his first day sitting in the corner office with a panoramic view of Chicago. As this was the tallest building in the city, Sam really did feel like a bit of a giant monarch looking down on his kingdom, and what a beautiful kingdom it was. As a young executive, he’d climbed the ranks of the company fast, and having now settled into his new surroundings with such a gorgeous view of the sprawling storied metropolitan landscape beyond, he concluded that nothing on Earth could keep him from continuing this onward-and-upward trend.

            At least, that was how he’d felt several minutes before, when last looking out the window. Taking a sip of his coffee now, Sam’s gaze drifted past the glass again, over the concrete jungle of skyscraping marvels, and settled on something new: a rounded white arch-shaped obstruction one-and-a-half miles long sitting at the edge of town, stretching almost a half mile up, well-over even the prestigious Willis Tower’s height by more than quintuple. A uniform strip of what looked curiously like rubber, of all things, formed a continuous rim at the base of the object, and even this alone was taller than Chicago’s highest tower. The young executive wasn’t used to a view from this high up in the tower, and for a moment he frowned, having to ponder whether this wasn’t just a trick of the light or a hint of the distant mountains previously unseen from his old, lower-floor office. However, when the humongous white shape moved, it confirmed to Sam that this was no mirage or unsightly mountain. And then he saw much more than that.

            When the gigantic white object rose into the air beginning from its rear, it became much more than just a singular arch, but an island-sized oblong bulwark with deep dimensions. Circular openings like ship portholes (though of course not even a cruise liner was anywhere this big) lined the side of the great shape at its midpoint, with thick white cords two hundred feet wide apiece looped in and out of the portals. A broad flap sat atop the soft-rounded structure near the back, shrouded mostly by cloudy atmosphere. As the shape continued tilting in midair, revealing the true extent of its length and multi-faceted shapes as it was slowly thrust forward, Sam now realized too the huge thing wasn’t isolated. This was just the base of something far larger. It was attached to another shape, a pale peachy structure formed like a pillar that went up, and up. And up. And up. Past the Chicago smog, the cloud line, and into the skyscape itself, until it gave way to more familiar features that Sam could actually recognize, even if the scale at which he was seeing them made him woozy.

            A trick of the light had become a mysterious white mountain, which had become a UFO, which had become the body of a humanoid, a young woman specifically, who towered so obscenely tall over the city, it made Sam almost faint trying to take it all in. Fighting off the hysteria, he leapt from his desk and stumbled in a stupor across the room, slamming both hands and his nose to the glass for a better look.

            Even from this lowly perspective, with clouds and miles of polluted air existing between them, Sam could tell she was beautiful, with bob-length sleek dark hair, smooth porcelain skin, and large dreamy eyes like luminescent moons; she appeared to have at least some Asian heritage, though it was tough to tell from this distance, and in either case, the girl’s background was hardly Sam’s first gob-smacking consideration when, first and foremost, the lovely creature was not only impossibly tall, but currently walking toward and now into the fair city of Chicago like it was her personal doormat.

            Her shoe hovered stock-still a mile off the ground now. As if it was intentionally waiting, delaying the completion of the step. For what reason, Sam couldn’t say, but the obliviousness made him nauseous. The girl was fortuitously far away from Sam and the Willis Tower for the time being, but even so, that white sneaker of hers was so tremendous, alive with details from worn lace threads to black scuffs on the hyper-tall rubber toe rim, he felt as though he was staring at it from mere feet away. He craned his neck up, studying the underside. Jagged zag patterns and ovals decorated the rubbery sole which now cast a shadow over whole districts of the city, and perhaps the biggest shock of all was just how ordinary it looked. A regular white sneaker. It just so happened to be the biggest single thing Sam had ever seen.

            Then the waiting came to an end. In disbelief, the young executive watched that shoe-clad foot descending fast and unforgiving, making heavy berth in a blast of smoke that kicked off a chain-reaction of buildings around the ground-zero site toppling like dominoes. Even the ground itself seemed to dip slightly, the elevation buckling to her weight. Surrounding city blocks further out didn’t all fall over, but many of them visibly wobbled, like the foundations were made of melting ice, and came to rest at awkward angles, looking like they might capsize at any second. And though Willis Tower mercifully remained standing, Sam could feel the earthquake rock the building all one hundred and two stories up here. His coffee cup fell off the desk and shattered, spilling all over the brand-new carpet, but he didn’t even notice.

            Sam’s mouth hung agape. He simply couldn’t grapple with the math of what had just happened. Under that mammoth shoe, currently, there had to be an expansive disaster scene of leveled streets, lapping flames, buildings instantaneously reduced to particulate rubble, and thousands of lives extinguished among the grinding treads of the girl’s sneaker. All of that wasteland was currently sinking into a newly formed crater, thanks to the shoe pressing deeper into the earth. It was difficult to guess, especially with such a disorienting perspective, but Sam estimated that shoe was more than a mile and a half long. The devastation was unthinkable.

            Considering this unknown feminine being was currently in a place to absolutely demolish one of the country’s largest cities simply by marching over it, she was dressed strangely casually, albeit attractively, in a figure-revealing black top and a short skirt that didn’t even cover half her mountainous thighs. In his nightmares, Sam might’ve imagined an apocalyptic figure like this unassuming East Asian young woman to wear something more biblical, or at least alien, but there she was anyway, dressed for a head-turning day out and smiling winsomely down at the city she was very clearly aware she was stepping on.

            And she’d only crashed one shoe down so far. It was difficult for Sam to understand anything about this colossal beast of a lady who’d just set foot, literally, on Chicago, nor was it likely that any single person could comprehend anything about something so massive and nonchalantly catastrophic. But that smile on her lips was all he really had to understand. Even before her other shoe broke through the clouds, Sam knew it was coming, and unconsciously, he sunk to his knees and wrapped his arms around his legs in the fetal position, queasily shaking but unable to tear his eyes away from the dramatic horror unfolding on the other side of the city.

            When that second apocalyptic white Chuck descended like an angel of death, it swept aside the rising plumes of ash and dust from the fallout of her first step into Chicago proper easily as she might have swatted aside a fly. For an instant, the air was clear again thanks to the wind of her falling foot, dappled by sunlight, and Sam could see everything, both that terrifyingly colossal shoe and the as-now untouched urban sprawl resting contentedly in the giantess’s shadow. Again her foot came down slowly, deliberately, so much that Sam almost foolishly prayed she was becoming reluctant to rain down another mile-and-a-half long zone of utter demolition, caking the buildings, cars, people, and streets themselves into the honeycombed edges of each rubbery tread underneath her shoe. But there was no remorse in her hesitation here, as the look on her skyward countenance still told him she was merely delaying for the sake of curiosity and building anticipation. She wanted this.

            On the final approach, with but a few dozen paltry stories of distance left between the girl’s sneaker and the ground, a distance which had to mean almost nothing in the scheme of her gait, she paused entirely, her shoe lofted over the tallest buildings so close that anyone with a good throwing arm on the rooftops could’ve hit the deep trenches of the creamy footwear’s geometric underside. She held so impressively still now, save for the infinitesimal twitch of her ankle to stay upright on one foot, she might have always been a statue erected over them by the gods. For hundreds below, the sky had utterly vanished, turned to amber-brown rubber topography.

            Sam’s breathing halted in time with the midair freeze. Debris ranging from brickwork to cracked mountain to acres of forest clung like stuck gum in the wedged corners of those treads. However, as the giantess held steady, the next stretch of metropolis below her ironically spared a while longer only by the balance and strength of the same girl who was seconds away from shattering it all to grit beneath her monumental weight, the refuse started coming loose.