Chapter 6. Payback

She had read somewhere that the Pentagon was the biggest office building in the world. She did not know if that was true, but its characteristic shape had made it easy enough to identify. From her formidable height Kelly could see tens of miles around her. Her keen eyes had soon identified the Pentagon and once they did, Kelly’s mind was set on it.

The city of Washington, her real destination, was just across the Potomac, but she forgot about it for a while and focused on the home of the Department of Defense. She knew it housed thousands of military personnel. Among them would be the top ranking generals of the different military branches. As she observed the building in the distance, Kelly realized that those would have been the generals that had ordered the previous attacks on her.

Of course, after having reached that conclusion she was not going to leave the Pentagon alone.

With a confident smile in her face, she chose a path towards it and unconsciously put some swagger into her walk as she bulldozed her way in its direction.

General Schwarz was hurriedly walking across the halls, following the two military policemen in front of him. Two more MPs and a couple of aides were right behind. The sound of the alarm was getting into his head. The intermittent red lights were not helping either. He wondered who had been the genius that had designed the system and had thought that getting everyone out of his nerves would help, in the event of an evacuation.

He had refused to leave his office at first, but then he had seen the images of the giant woman, Kelly Hanson, less than fifty miles away and had been convinced by the responsible of his security that fifty miles were not that much when it came to Miss Hanson.

Memories of the images of the FSD right after the giant woman had left helped General Schwarz to make his mind up.

Before that day, in his more than forty years serving in the Army, General Schwarz would have never believed that he would be running from a young woman, but that was what he was doing. He was not the only one. The aisles of the Pentagon were crowded with frenzied people.

He should have never trusted General Archer… Madsen would have been a better choice. He was a gray man, with no creativity and little ambition, but he was prudent. He would not have messed up so much. It was too late for that now, though. As everyone else in the building, he had not taken the threat of the giant women in Hollner too seriously. As a matter of fact, he had been seeing it as an opportunity for a while.

An opportunity to finally close the research at the FSD and move the funds where they were really needed. And an opportunity to return a favor and have a rising star, General Archer, in his debt. The possibility that modern heavy weapons would not be enough to bring the women down had not even crossed his mind. And now, he was running, fleeing from his office, as a result of this mistake.

General Schwarz could not yet understand how one of the women, Kelly Hanson, had been able to grow much bigger than the other two. But he had already seen the consequences of her new size when she had effortlessly obliterated two entire brigades of his forces. And now, this woman was literally at his doorstep.

Together with his colleagues from the other branches of the armed forces, Schwarz had been trying to make up for his mistakes and to fix the mess for most of the last hour.

Satellites had been repositioned to lock on her, air observation units had been ordered to follow her path. Military intelligence teams had started to work on predictions of her future movements. And his staff had started moving troops around to ensure that they would have the right assets and numbers available the next time they had the chance to attack her. They should have done all that much earlier, of course. If they had done it, they might even have been able to stop the women in Hollner.

Now, their efforts to catch up with plans that should have been laid out much earlier had to be postponed. Their priority was saving their own lives.

They guided him down some stairs. One of the MPs in front of him forced a door open. Soon enough, he was out in the open. He could see his chopper fifty yards away. The rotor was already rotating, the aircraft ready to take off the moment he set a foot on it. Even if he was beginning to be out of breath, General Schwarz made a last effort and sprinted as fast as his sixty-two year old legs allowed. Soon enough he was being pulled into the chopper. His two aides were helped in, as well. None of the four MPs climbed with him, though. They just signaled to the pilot and he felt the helicopter lifting from the ground.

He risked a first look south right then. He felt a shiver running down his spine. The satellite and TV images had been impressive enough, but they had not been able to convey the true scale of the woman. After a short glance, he was beginning to understand it now. She was no more than a mile away and she was massive.

He guessed that she must be walking right next to the Interstate. As his chopper climbed a little higher, he could see that his guess had been right and that her feet were easily uprooting trees that could not reach higher than her ankles with every step they took. Live, the woman was even better looking than through the monitors. She also managed to inspire much more awe.

General Schwarz kept on looking at the approaching giant, silent, when he realized about something and felt as if he had been stabbed through the heart. Turning into the direction of the pilot, he screamed:

“Can’t we climb faster?”

The pilot did not understand him. He screamed louder, but the pilot pointed to his headphones and then in the direction of a smaller headset with a microphone hanging close to the General’s position. Frustrated, her put them on and repeated his question. He did not like the answer he got:

“We are moving as fast as we can, sir”

General Schwarz looked at the altitude needle and saw that it was just moving over the point that marked a thousand feet. Looking through the window again, he was taken by surprise by how much closer the giant woman had got in the few seconds he had not been looking at her. She was already at the parking lot!

Her next step took her even closer. He could not believe how something so big could be moving so fast. Despite her size, her movements were swift and even looked graceful…

One more step and she was almost on top of them. General Schwarz realized that they were not much higher than her chest. A quick look at the altitude needle showed him that they had just passed the 1,200 feet mark.

The woman took just another step. When she completed it, a dark shadow was cast inside the chopper as her titanic body blocked the Sun. He saw her drawing her right arm. General Schwarz barely had time to let out a last sentence:

“Oh fuck”

Kelly casually backhanded the bee-sized helicopter, swatting it out of the sky. A few more choppers were rising in front of her, their movements ridiculously slow. She did not even need to hurry to finish them off with a variety of lazy gestures of her arms. Soon, there was only one helicopter left. Kelly carefully positioned herself and reached out, brining her hand right behind it. Then, in the ultimate gesture of contempt, flicked the aircraft with two fingers, sending it spiraling forward and down.

A quick look around showed Kelly that there were no more helicopters to worry about. There were hundreds of vehicles on the ground, but she was not concerned about them. No more concerned than she would have been at a procession of ants, in any case.

She could take it slower, from here onwards. The Pentagon and all those that had been on it were at her mercy.

She had been making her mind up on the way. As she had got closer to the DoD and the suburbia around Washington D.C. the population density had kept on increasing. A few miles off, Kelly had decided to get into the Interstate, to spare the neighborhoods around it from the effects of her footfalls. This had had the collateral effect of dooming those trapped in the highway, or at least those that had the bad luck of being where feet that were nearly as big as a football pitch landed. She had been determined to advance towards the Pentagon and had reached the conclusion that her impact on the highway would be smaller than anywhere else. By that point she had already accepted that her presence would have consequences, no matter how careful she was. There was no point in trying to deny that. At most, she could try to minimize them. It made her feel better with herself.

Other than that, Kelly did not spare any other thought on the dozens of lives ending under her soles. Her mind was focused on her destination and what she would do once she got there.

Her first feeling, after seeing the Pentagon, had been of curiosity. But as she advanced towards it, it had been replaced by a combination of anger and arrogance.

“They really wanted to kill me” Kelly had thought. “They threw everything they had at me… they just did not realize how powerful I really am. Still, they managed to hurt me, when I wasn’t big” her thought had gone on, thinking on the period where she had been a mere 250 feet tall. “I cannot let this go” her mind finally added.

By the time she had stepped over the ridiculous fence around the building and into the parking lot, ending dozens or cars under each foot, Kelly’s mind was made up. Those that had attacked her would pay. The soldiers they had sent against her had already suffered the consequences of their decisions. Now, it was the turn of the ones that had actually made the decisions.

Kelly had first taken care of the few helicopters taking flight on the west side of the building. They were likely to have some of the bigger fish in the Pentagon on board and she was not going to let them go. Once she was done with them, it was time to decide what to do with the rest.

Of course, Sonya had seen her approaching. How could have she missed her? She was so huge! As a matter of fact, Sonya had not yet understood the true magnitude of the gigantic young woman that was now standing outside of the building she worked on.

Sonya was not a member of the armed forces. She was a cook. One of the thousands of civilian personnel that worked in the home of the Department of Defense every day.

As hundreds of other people working in the kitchens and the cafeteria, Sonya had headed towards the closest evacuation point when the alarms had started blaring. She would have assumed that it was yet another drill if it had not been for the disturbing news she had been hearing all day long and the visible amount of tension in many of the top military personnel she had seen. Once she had reached her assigned meeting point, right in front of one of the doors of the south wing of the building, all hell had broken loose.

When Sonya realized that everyone was in panic mode and that no one would be giving any meaningful instructions, she had made her own decision. She had rushed outside, following a large group of people. It was not until she had stepped on the lawn that she realized that another group, basically as large as the one she had joined, had decided to stay indoors.

The shakes had made her look in the direction of the approaching giantess soon enough. Screams erupted around her. Sonya was transfixed. She had seen her on TV, but she could still not believe that she was real. She reacted when the giant’s foot set on the ground and Sonya was almost thrown off her feet as a result of the shake. Then, like most people around her, she started screaming and running without apparent purpose.

Sonya did not realize the full magnitude of the danger until a much stronger shake finally made her lose her balance. When a dark shadow was cast over her, Sonya managed to roll over and look up. She screamed like crazy and pushed her hands outwards when she saw a massive sole descending from above and heading in her direction. In the last instant, Sonya said her farewells to the world and to all her loved ones. Then, the foot landed.

She wasn’t dead. It took her a while to realize it, though. The shake had been so tremendous that her sight clouded and a loud whistle was all her brain could hear. Then, the situation started to get clearer and Sonya saw a massive wall of flesh at arm’s reach. She needed a few seconds to understand that it was the upper half of the woman’s big toe. The lower half was buried deep in the ground.

The foot remained idle for a long while, telling Sonya that the woman had actually stopped where she was. She risked looking up. She could just make an immense body, dark and featureless, since it was blocking the sun. It raised so impossibly high, that the part Sonya assumed was her head was clearly deformed from perspective.

Sonya instinctively knew that she had to stand up. That she had to run. But she could not. A few seconds later, the toe moved. It pushed down with the force of a massive bulldozer, digging the earth even deeper. Sonya did not realize that the giant woman was just flexing it as part of the process to take another step. The toe, followed by the rest of the foot, rose high into the air at an impossible speed. Under it, the day turned into night for Sonya. She did not have too much time to think about it, though. The ground under Sonya broke, as a result of the force the titanic foot had applied on the area when it was lifting. Soon, Sonya was rolling down a steep slope, until she reached the bottom of the depression, fifty feet below. She immediately realized that her leg was broken. She considered herself lucky to be alive, though.

She ran out of luck a second later, when a massive chunk of asphalt dropped out of the dark sky. Sonya did not have time to understand that it had been debris raining from the woman’s sole. Everything just turned black.

Kelly guessed that the reason why the Pentagon was the largest office building in the world was its extension, since it barely reached above her ankle. True enough, the building and the area around it were vast. Almost as vast as the small town she had stopped by a while before. From her point of view, almost directly from above, she estimated that the building was almost as wide as she was tall, and she had not found too many things that could rival her new proportions, ever since she had got them.

The grounds around the building were gradually getting crowded. From up above, Kelly could see several small groups of people running in different directions. From her position, it did not seem as they were running with any specific purpose other than trying to get as far away from her as possible. They were not being very successful.

“I believe you guys have been paying a lot of attention to me all day long” Kelly said, her voice carrying her message all across the Pentagon grounds and also to most of the suburbia that extended several miles around it.

“I thought I should come by and say ‘Hi’” she added. Even if it was intended to sound as mockery, Kelly’s tone was too serious for that. She felt really pissed off at the people that had ordered the attacks on her and in her mind, this included everyone on the building.

“I want to show you how helpless you are against me”

Kelly chose the group of people that was closest to her. She guessed that it was about a hundred people strong. It only took her one step to bury them deep into one of her footprints.

“Your bullets, tank shells, rockets and missiles cannot harm me” Kelly said. “But you don’t know just how much it pisses me off being attacked by something as worthless as you” she added, her tone getting even more upset and making everyone around her even more scared, if that was even possible.

Her words were immediately followed by a second step, finishing another group’s attempt at fleeing.

She did not follow the rest of groups immediately. She stopped and observed, hands on her hips. Soon enough, she had identified the different evacuation points. Slowly, deliberately, Kelly walked around the Pentagon and made sure to crush every exit from the massive parking lots. When she was done, she stopped and looked again, trying to make some sense of the erratic patterns of the fleeing people.

One of them caught her attention soon enough. There was a spot where several groups were converging. Focusing on it, she was pleasantly surprised once more when her large eyes gave her all the detail she needed. She saw the people disappearing… no, they were getting underground. Then, she saw the sign that marked the subway station.

“Do you really think that you will be able to get away from me like that?” Kelly said aloud

No one really knew what she was referring to, but she did not care. She just removed her hands from her hips and headed towards the subway station in a calm pace. She reached it in half a dozen steps. Inadvertently, she also dealt with several dozen people that had tried to reach the apparent safety of the station.

Kelly was not careful at all as she let herself drop to her knees and took a closer look at the crowd. Reaching out with her right hand, she gave a try to her recently acquired skill and trapped three people between her thumb and index finger. The three of them were alive by the time Kelly brought them in front of her eyes. Two of them were in military uniform. Kelly just sneered and then tossed them carelessly to the side, making them fly for hundreds of feet before they landed.

All the finesse she had used to capture the three people was gone as she tried to fit her massive hand through the entrance of the subway station. It was quite obvious that the opening in the ground was not big enough for the new magnitude of her hand, but she did not care and just bulldozed her way in.

All the relief Alan had felt when he had finally made it down the escalators and into the ticketing area of the subway station was gone when two almost consecutive shakes sent him off his feet as dust rained from the ceiling. Like many others around him, Alan managed to stand up when the shakes seemed to stop for a few seconds. He had never been in an earthquake before, but he doubted any of the most famous earthquakes in history would have felt stronger than what came next. Everyone was on the ground again, and this time dust was not the only thing that rained from the ceiling. Some pretty large chunks of concrete broke from it and seriously injured a few around him.

Screams erupted in the other end of the station, close to the escalators. He could not see what was going on. Soon, the station filled with a cloud of dust that quickly advanced towards him.

Alan barely had time to react when a huge pinkish mass emerged from the dust and trampled over him. In the last instant before everything went black, he recognized in panic five massive fingers that filled most of the station width.

Screams intensified around Carla when the lights of the station and the train car went out almost at the same time. She had been trapped inside the packed subway train car for over ten minutes. There were so many people trying to get in that the doors could not close. Dim emergency lights went on, flickering.

Carla realized she was screaming herself when the ceiling over the platform collapsed and the hundreds of people in there disappeared under a rain of concrete. The lights of the train went off once more. She could not see what was going on. Suddenly a new sound joined the screams. It was the loud groan of metal. It was all around her. The lights flickered once more and Carla realized that she could not see through the train car’s windows anymore. The lights were on just for a second. Then, the metallic groan got even louder. Carla barely had a fraction of a second to notice the increased pressure around her. The last thing she ever felt was an intense pain.

Kelly felt around with her fingers. She thought she recognized the texture of walls and ticketing counters as they were easily pushed by the strength of her digits. It was not the only thing she could feel though. She realized what the smearing feeling under her fingertips must be. She was pissed off enough with everyone on the Pentagon that she did not care.

She was looking for something. With her arm into the station almost all the way to her elbow, her fingers found the opposite wall. She felt around some. She thought she could make some escalators down.

Of course! The platform would be further below.

No problem, Kelly thought. She just pushed down and easily broke through the floor and into the next level. She never realized that her simple gesture had buried hundreds of people. She just kept on searching. Soon, her fingers found something.

“Jackpot!” she though; her fingertips closed around a tubular metallic object. Trying it out, she applied a little pressure and was rewarded by the expected deformation. Repositioning her hand, she took hold of the object and then pulled up.

Kelly’s arm spectacularly broke through the surface, making the rest of the subway station collapse on itself. Her fingers were holding something. It was what she had been expecting, even if it was obvious that going through a few layers of concrete had been harder on the train than on her skin.

There were only 5 cars. After all, it was a commuter train. The car she had taken hold of had completely crushed between her fingertips. She rested the remainders on the ground and then crouched down low to try to see through the shattered windows.

Kelly was happy that she could make enough detail, despite the ridiculous size of the train. Each of its cars was barely the length of one of her fingers. To her delight, she could still make a few moving people inside. She admired how tough they were. She imagined that from their perspective, her removal of the train from the station must have been pretty rough. She was thinking this when she realized that most of the people still moving were wearing uniforms. She sneered as she thought on them as the soldiers who had attacked her.

“You thought you could get away from me?” Kelly said, almost whispering. She knew that she could be heard perfectly well.

Her words made the few people that were still moving scream a notch louder. Kelly loved being able to hear them through the broken windows.

“No one can get away from me anymore” Kelly said. Her tone was more matter-of-fact than bragging

“You guys really did your best to try to hurt me, didn’t you?” Kelly then asked, her tone getting a little bit more upset

Of course, she was not waiting for an answer, so she just went on:

“Too bad you were too puny for that. I still did not like it, though”

As she finished saying that, Kelly rested a finger on top of the train car she was looking at and simply pushed down. The roof immediately collapsed under the titanic force of her simple gesture. She thought she could hear even louder screams from the remaining train cars. Not in the mood to waste any more time with the train, Kelly rose back to a kneeling position, rested her open palm on what was left of the train and effortlessly pushed.

A quick look down the crater she had left where a subway station had been told Kelly that the passengers of the train were just a small subset of her most recent pool of victims.

She felt just an instant of hesitation as she realized about the consequences of what she had done. Then, her resolve shielded her mind again as she thought:

“They should have known better than to attack me!”

Standing up, Kelly turned and looked at the big prize: the Pentagon building. Of course, she was not going to leave it standing.

There was no rush though. Looking calmly at her surroundings, Kelly looked at the various groups of people that were trying to get away from the ground around the DoD building. They had made quite a lot of progress, taking advantage of the time she had used with the subway station. In any case, the ones that were the farthest were but a few steps away. Of course, she was not going to let them get away.

She mentally chose a group and took a first step in their direction. As usual, her foot sank deep into the soft ground. It had already happened, back when she was “only” 25-stories tall, but ever since she had got bigger the world felt like walking on beach sand all the time.

Her next step was different, though. Unknown to her, her foot had landed precisely on top of the subway tunnel. The structure had never been built to withstand levels of pressure like the ones her once delicate feet were now applying to the ground and so, her foot kept on going, sinking quite deeper than she had expected. With her other foot already in the air for the next step, Kelly could do nothing to regain the balance.

She fell forward seemingly in slow motion. Her hands tore through the different layers of the Pentagon building as if it had never been there before sinking deep into the ground. Soon, her oversized breasts made short work of an entire wing of the building.

Sections of the complex she had not even touched went down in solidarity with the rest as Kelly’s head finally hit the ground.

A third of the world’s largest office building was gone and all Kelly had done was lose her balance. Feeling a little embarrassed by her clumsiness, Kelly remained motionless as the cloud of dust settled. It took it a while and in the meantime she just folder her arms under her chin and tried to make some detail of the still blurred landscape in front of her.

As the view became clearer, Kelly started to make dozens of button-sized men in the central courtyard of the building, trying to recover from her fall. It had clearly been much worse for them than it had been for her. The realization amused her. She let a chuckle out.

“I’m sorry that I crushed your building under my boobs” she said in a soft and mocking tone

“Back in High School boys used to say that they were like dual airbags” she said. “I guess that they look more like wrecking balls to you now, don’t they?” she mocked

Just then, a loud groaning sound interrupted Kelly and everyone else in the area. Despite its thundering volume, the groan had a certain familiarity.

Kelly took everyone out of their doubts soon enough.

“I haven’t eaten anything in the entire day” she said, the unmistakable feeling in her stomach confirming what the groan had announced

The ant-sized men in front of her massive face had been scared before. Now they looked utterly terrified. Kelly quickly understood and let a loud laugh out.

“You think I am going to eat YOU?” she asked, amused

She observed them for a few more seconds, the realization of the terror they had felt making her feel even more powerful.

“Oh, come on!” she then said. “I doubt that all of you together would be even worth a bite” she added, mocking

Then, she thought aloud: “I wonder what women my size eat around these parts, though”

She kept on observing the tiny specs, unconcerned by their attempts to get away from her or even into the building. One way or another she would have no problem to get them. Still, she was not going to eat them.

“Of course I’m not going to eat them” she thought. “It would be just wrong” she mentally added. “I want to be their goddess… I want to rule them. They need to know I’m unstoppable but they cannot see me killing them for sport or even worse, feeding myself with them” she thought. “This is what Casey never understood” her mind added, wondering for the first time in a long while what Casey and Lisa would be doing. She realized that she had left them alone for too long and had no hopes that they would be following her instructions. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now… she could deal with them again once she was done with taking over the country. In the end, she did not feel as it would take her that long.

She felt happy that she was still capable of drawing a line between what she felt was right and what she felt was wrong. Of course, her new size had required her to change the position of the line. Her power was now so absolute that conventional morals did not apply to the vast possibilities within her reach. Her absolute power had also meant that there was no one to tell her what was right and what was wrong anymore. She made her new morals as she went.

And she was not going to eat people. Still…

Removing her right arm from under her chin, Kelly made a fist and slowly moved it towards one of the groups of people directly in front of her nose. She set it slowly on them and once her knuckles touched the soft ground, she moved her closed hand forward, until it smashed against the building, caving a hole from the ground floor to the roof.

They had attacked her. They had tried to kill her. And she did not feel like letting this go. She was in her absolute right to do so. She would not be like Lisa, either. She understood her new status, her new position in the world… she understood her power. And she was not going to apologize for it. She was going to use it. She was not going to go on a mindless rampage and kill people just for the sake of it. She wondered what the body count would have been if Casey had been the one to get her size. But she would not let attacks on her go unpunished either.

Almost as a side note, her mind added that she was not going to get concerned by the collateral victims of her new magnitude. She had already more than accepted that they were unavoidable.

Yes, she had a moral compass. She repeated it to herself a couple times more. She did not expect the rest of the world to share it, but of course, the rest of the world were not her.

Happy with the thought, she smashed her fist in another previously unscratched section of the Pentagon in front of her. Stretching, Kelly started to push herself back on her feet. There was not that much of the Pentagon left, even if most of the destruction had ended up being quite unwilling. On the other side of the Potomac, Washington looked appealing.

She looked at some of the masses of uniformed ants still trying to get away from her. Of course, she was not going to let the job unfinished. She knew that once she got started it would not take her that long, though.