Dylan was having a very pleasant dream.

He was in a haute cuisine restaurant, the sort of ridiculously-expensive place that he could only afford for special occasions. Very, very special occasions. That night certainly qualified…it was his five-year anniversary, and Aimee had insisted on celebrating “somewhere very nice.” His girlfriend was seated across from him, looking deliriously happy. At that moment, her cheeks slightly flushed from the glass of pinot grigio in her hand, Aimee seemed like the most beautiful woman in the world. The flickering light from the candle on the table illuminated her high cheekbones, the golden waves of her hair. And those eyes, large and long-lashed and the color of sea glass, were irresistible. That was what had made him notice her on the subway in the first place: those mesmerizing eyes.

As Dylan smiled at her, she reached out and took his hands into her own. Her hands were always so exquisitely soft, scented with shea butter lotion. She wasn’t particularly vain about her appearance, but she did like taking care of her hands, particularly the nails.

“I love you so much, Dylan,” Aimee told him.

He opened his mouth to say something but that was when someone shook him awake. One moment he was in the expensive restaurant, reliving that night from years ago; the next, he was lying on the tiled floor of a department store, a haggard woman with short brown hair bending over him. Who the hell was she? Frantically, his mind searched for her name. Rachel. That was it. He had just met her a few hours ago, when he had dragged her out of the wreckage of a building.

“What the fu—,” Dylan started, dazed. Rachel’s hand whipped out and covered his mouth. When she raised one finger to her lips, he suddenly understood. He remained quiet as well, the two of them listening intensely. Thank God that there weren’t the rhythmic, rumbling booms that would have signaled her presence. Or the shrill, soul-rending shrieks, the sounds of suffering that would haunt him for as long as he lived, however long that may be.

But there were faint scratching noises, along with footsteps on the sidewalk. Which meant that her minions were lurking outside, ghoulish things that were like something out of a zombie movie. Except that they weren’t dead, even though Dylan got the impression that they wished that they were.

It was dim inside of the department store; the power had probably gone off days before, when she had first entered the city. He peered through the gloom, trying to see past the racks of clothing. If he squinted, he could make out the two glass doors and the makeshift barricade that he and Rachel had hastily constructed. Perhaps the people outside didn’t know that they were hiding in the store. Perhaps they would go away to find new victims. But Dylan knew with a terrible certainly that she was searching for him, using millions of stolen eyes to find him. A deep voice, masculine but with her distinctive speech patterns, confirmed this.

“I know that you’re in there, Dylan. Why don’t you just come out?” The voice belonged to someone else but the words were hers.

Rachel shot Dylan a confused and frightened look. He wished that he could explain everything to her, but honestly, he didn’t understand it himself. How someone could gain godlike power, for one thing. Whether it was some sort of black magic or innovative technology, he couldn’t be sure. All that mattered was that an otherwise normal person had gained incredible power and she was now hunting him.

Fists, dozens and dozens of them, began to pound at the doors, rattling the glass.

“Dylan!” It was another voice, this time feminine and higher-pitched. “Let me in, you worthless little shit!”

He shuddered, his eyes darting around, trying to locate a weapon. When the glass began to shatter and a mass of bodies pushed the barricade away, he was seized by animalistic panic. Run! Run! His brain was howling at him. And he certainly tried to do that, sprinting down the aisles of clothing with Rachel close behind him. A virtual sea of people chased after them, men and women and children, all of them screaming with her voice.

Dylan almost made it to the emergency exit. Almost. Then someone grabbed onto the back of his t-shirt, pulling him backwards. It was enough to slow him down and then they were upon him, swarming like angry fire ants. Dylan glanced up into countless faces and felt a jolt of mind-numbing terror.

The faces that leered back at him were awful to behold. Once, when he was eight years old, his father had taken him to see a ventriloquist. At first, he had been bored out of his mind, until the performer had shown the audience his dummy. The doll had been horrible, with big, blank eyes and a smirking mouth. That’s what all of those people resembled: ventriloquist dummies. And they were about to bring him back to the ventriloquist.

“Please, don’t,” Dylan pleaded, but it was too late. The horde was already dragging him toward the door.

***

All around him, the city was in ruins. It looked like a large-scale war had been held in the middle of downtown, with buildings crumbled and thick black smoke rising everywhere. And it was all because of her. That someone could cause such massive destruction was almost incomprehensible.

The silence was the worst part. On a normal day, there would be all kinds of urban noises, cars honking and people talking on cell phones and dogs barking. But except for their echoing footsteps, Dylan couldn’t hear anything else. He supposed that it made sense. Besides Rachel and himself, everyone in the city was either dead or enslaved to her will. He considered trying to reason with his captors, but he knew that it would be futile. The only person that he could try to reason with was her, and he didn’t believe that was even possible anymore.

They paused at an intersection and Dylan gawked at the sight before him. It looked like deep quarry pits had been randomly dug into the street, some with crushed vehicles embedded in them. But these weren’t pits. No, they were immense footprints and it was clear that they had been made with deliberation, that each deadly step had been meant to maximize the number of causalities.

His captors began to pull him across the street and he tried in vain to avoid the huge patches of blood that marked the pavement. At one point he had to step over the remains of a body, so thoroughly crushed that it looked like red jelly leaking out of rumpled clothes. When his gorge rose, he fought back the urge to throw up.

Beside him, the color had drained from Rachel’s face, small beads of perspiration dotting her forehead and cheeks. He realized that he knew nothing about her, except that he had saved her life. She could have been a teacher or a doctor or a stay-at-home mother. If circumstances had been different, he would have liked to get to know her better. The only thing that he could do was grab onto her hand, trying to offer what little reassurance he could.

They turned a corner and what lay ahead of them was incredible. Almost every surviving person in the city (and there had to be thousands and thousands of them) were on their hands and knees. They were all so still, as if they were carved from marble rather than made of flesh.

And towering high above them, so impossibly gigantic that she seemed more like some Hollywood special effect than an actual person, was the giantess. Dylan had seen her on the news, of course; CNN and MSNBC and every local channel had been playing footage of the rampaging giantess nonstop. It was amazing and terrifying to see someone that large, so enormous that she rivaled skyscrapers in height. And the worst part was that he knew the monstrous creature with her sea-glass colored eyes.

Far above him, the giantess’ face tipped downward as she stared at him. When she spoke, his entire body reverberated with the thunderous sound of her voice.

“Hi, Dylan,” she said, her mouth splitting open in a demonic smile.

He wasn’t certain how to react. All around him, her mindless slaves shifted and turned to look at him. Their gazes were unnerving, but hers…hers was absolutely horrifying.

“H-hello, Aimee,” he managed to choke out.

***

When Dylan had broken up with her a few months prior, Aimee hadn’t taken it well. Then again, she had never taken bad news well. When her boss gave her a less-than-perfect review, when a package was delivered to the wrong apartment, when he forgot to send a thank-you card to her parents…all these things were utter disasters to her and he caught glimpses of the raw rage that lurked below her calm exterior. That anger had been one of the contributing factors to the break-up.

Although she hadn’t blown up at him when he had told her that it was over, her eyes had smoldered with that familiar rage. It had made him uncomfortable sitting there on the park bench, watching her ball her manicured hands into tight fists.

“You’ll regret this,” Aimee had growled, blinking back tears. It had seemed like such an empty threat at the time. But now, standing before the looming giantess, Dylan understand how real the threat actually was. He wanted very much to run, but he knew that her minions would catch him with ease. So he was forced to just stand there and gape up at his ex-girlfriend, trying to comprehend what she had become.

Aimee was seated amongst her tiny slaves, a living goddess amongst insects. She was nude and although Dylan had seen her body many times before, its new size made it seem like the body of a stranger. Almost shyly, he glanced up at her bare breasts, each one large enough to dwarf their old apartment living room. To his shock, he spotted a wide streak of dark crimson on the left breast. Dried blood, he saw, and it wasn’t hers.

“It’s so good to see you again, Dylan,” Aimee purred. His teeth began to chatter, as if it were frigid outside instead of sultry. The giantess glanced at him expectantly, so he answered, “It-it’s g-good to see you too.”

A terrible lie. The sight of the giant woman who had callously caused such death and destruction made his skin crawl. But what else could he say? She could have squashed him beneath her thumb if she desired. And maybe that was what she was planning to do. He looked again at the blood painting the gentle curve of her breast and he couldn’t help but cringe.

Without any warning, the giantess moved, stretching out her hundred-foot long legs. Dylan was too petrified to move a muscle as one of her mammoth feet barreled by him. The foot acted like a steamroller, rolling over numerous people and pulping them beneath its murderous weight. Her minions didn’t move, allowing the giantess to pulverize them as she made herself comfortable. It was only when she plowed her foot over a parked SUV and through the exterior of an insurance agency that she stopped moving.

“Aimee, why are you doing this?” Dylan demanded, concrete and shards of glass from the insurance agency building crashing down behind him.

His ex-girlfriend laughed. How many times had he heard that laugh before, at parties and on vacations and even when they were watching a sitcom together? Except now it had taken on a sinister quality.

“Because it turns me on,” she replied, as if the answer was obvious. “You have no idea how exhilarating it is to be this powerful. Do you see all of these people around me?”

Tentatively, Dylan nodded.

“Their lives are mine. They can’t even run away if they wanted to. I control their minds and I decide whether they live or die.” As if to demonstrate this, she pointed at three people, a middle-aged woman in a business suit and two young men.

“I think that I’m going to kill the three of you,” Aimee announced. None of her chosen victims moved, not even when her vast shadow swept over them. With delicate precision, she pinched the head of one man between her thumb and forefinger, lifting him up from the crowd. He didn’t struggle; his limbs dangled loosely as the giantess held him above the others. One of his sneakers fell off, tumbling down into the crowd, but no one reacted. Their attention was on the giantess.

“No!” Dylan protested, but she had already applied a small amount of pressure. To her, it was negligible, but to the tiny man in her grip, the pressure was lethal. Almost instantly, his skull imploded and blood and grayish brain matter squirted out. The body convulsed and then fell from Aimee’s grip, landing with a splat on the sidewalk.

Although he had witnessed her rampages on television, actually seeing his ex-girlfriend slaughter someone was appalling. Even worse, she did it with such cruel delight, her eyes widening with excitement. Aimee was grinning lustfully, sadistically, as she plucked up the other man. Again, there was no objection as she ripped him in two, his body separating at the abdomen and spilling viscera in long, glistening streamers.

“Aimee, stop it!” Dylan was screeching this time. She eyed him, waggling her blonde eyebrows slightly, which had always amused him in the past but now seemed grotesque.

“Why? I’m having such fun,” Aimee said, picking up the middle-aged woman and cupping her against her right breast. A normal person would have screamed as they were shoved against the soft flesh, but the woman was eerily quiet. The only noise that she made were her bones breaking as the giantess mashed her against her breast. Aimee giggled almost girlishly, removing her hand and revealing the pathetic remains of the woman. Dylan watched the gore slowly dribble off of his ex-girlfriend’s breast before he tried to bolt.

Several of her minions tackled him simultaneously, knocking the breath from his lungs and sending bright lights flashing before his eyes. They held him down on the street, so that all that he could see were their stupidly blank faces and the twilight sky overhead. By the time that they finally released him, Aimee’s chilling gaze had settled on Rachel. The other woman flinched; then, as Dylan looked on in wonder, her body sagged visibly, although she never broke eye contact with the giantess. It’s eye contact, he realized. That was how she did it. Once her victims looked into those eyes, she invaded their minds.

Aimee leaned forward slightly, the ground shaking with the intensity of an earthquake beneath her. She peered down at Rachel, who swayed back and forth.

“Would you like me to eat you alive?” The giantess inquired in an almost gentle voice.

Rachel smiled far too broadly, so that it resembled a grimace. “That would be lovely.”

It was almost too ghastly to watch. Rachel marched toward the waiting giantess, still wearing that hideous smile. To Dylan, she looked like the worshipper of some primal goddess, the sort who would gleefully slit the throats of her family in order to please her deity. Or her own throat, as the case may be.

Rachel reached the canyon formed by the giantess’ towering legs. Without any hesitation, she began to climb up one of the calves. Against the pale expanse of Aimee’s flesh, she looked completely small and insignificant, a minuscule speck. Dylan feared that she would fall, but she scaled the leg swiftly, pulling herself up onto it with unnatural determination.

As the tiny woman clambered over the knee and ran down the long length of the thigh, Aimee reclined backwards. Her expression was devilish as she watched Rachel’s steady progress. Would she actually eat someone? At first, Dylan didn’t think so. But as he looked from her bloodstained fingers to the debris that surrounded her body, including the rubble that had once been buildings, he wasn’t so sure.

“That’s a good girl,” Aimee said as the other woman ran up past her navel. She reclined her body further, lowering her head so that her chin touched her upper chest. Rachel moved between the giantess’ titanic breasts, the same breasts that had been used to murder other people. Once, she slipped on some sweat or oil on Aimee’s skin, but she quickly regained her footing.

When the tiny woman was close enough, Aimee’s grin disappeared as her mouth yawned wide open. It was terrifying to see the human mouth at such a scale, the huge slabs of white teeth like tombstones, viscous strings of saliva clinging to the pinkish-red upper palate. Like the entrance to Dante’s Hell, that’s what it resembled.

Yet Rachel crawled over the giantess’ lower lip, right onto the awaiting tongue. She crouched there on the slimy surface, looking out past the immense teeth and lips. At first glance, her face was serene. But Dylan saw a brief flash of the person still inside, the real Rachel, and that person was absolutely terrified. That was the last time that he saw her before Aimee’s dark lips closed and the giantess swallowed the tiny woman.

Dylan’s head spun. He probably would have collapsed if Aimee’s minions weren’t holding onto him tightly, their fingers burrowing painfully into his arms. He wanted to vomit, to sob, to scream. All that he could do was stare at the ground.

“Dylan,” the giantess said. “Look at me.”

He didn’t want to look at her. If he did so, he would be lost, turned into a mindless slave like Rachel. But he knew that if he didn’t obey her, she would squash him into a bloody splotch on the asphalt. His head seemed to weigh a million tons as he lifted it, looking up at the giantess.

Her eyes. Dear Lord, they were so…magnificent. And welcoming, like two warm pools of deep blue. Dylan’s breathing slowed down as he stared into them. The terror was replaced by something else, something that was almost love, but not quite. Like some fiendish mockery of it.

“Come here, Dylan,” Aimee ordered and as the multitude of hands released him, he did so. He teetered toward her, his legs moving on their own accord. She smiled down at him benevolently, her eyes glittering from a far distance. When he was close enough, Dylan dropped down to his knees. Everything was becoming so oddly detached, as if reality was merely something that he was watching instead of experiencing.

The giantess lowered her hand to the ground, her scarlet nails gleaming atop the pillars of her fingers. Dylan glanced at the gargantuan hand, then at Aimee’s faraway face. Gathering up all of his willpower, he said in a slow, emotionless voice, “Aimee, get out of my head.”

“I don’t think so,” she sneered. “Now, get in my hand.”

Even though Dylan tried hard not to, he obeyed, climbing up into her waiting palm. It was so soft and warm and alive, throbbing in time with her powerful heartbeat. He stood near her gigantic lifeline as she lifted him up several stories, bringing him toward her face. When she addressed him, her hot breath buffeted his face, stirred his hair.

“You love me, don’t you, Dylan?” She spoke quietly, but his eardrums still ached from the volume and proximity of her voice. Dylan couldn’t tear his gaze away from her colossal eyes and he saw his own slack-jawed expression reflected in them. Once again, that horrible feeling of love surged up in him, stronger this time. It was like a tidal wave, washing aside all other thoughts and emotions. The only thing that he could do was kiss her palm, once, twice. As Aimee smirked at him, he moved onto her oak-trunk fingers. She bent them languidly and he saw that they were still caked with the blood of her previous victims. But it didn’t matter. They were so very beautiful and he wanted to worship them, forever and ever.

Dylan kissed each of her five fingers, relishing the sensation of her skin against his lips. He could taste the awful mixture of blood and hand lotion on the enormous fingertips, but he kept kissing and caressing them with complete abandon. Aimee was his world now, his everything.

“I love you so much, Aimee,” he heard himself saying. And it was true.

He did.