NH   part XI

It’s rather hard to imagine what it must have been like. Not impossible, of course, as we have been through the same motions after all, but still the scale of the genocide was on par with no other event in History. Asia was struck by the most massive assault of all on our planet, the giantesses’ size showing their maximum all over this region. In this densely populated area, the appearance of the creatures triggered a devastating rollercoaster of mayhem and slaughter. The giant Asian girls had at her feet throngs and throngs of a panicked population that they could harvest at their leisure. Literally, they just had to bend down to pick up their food. We all saw images of these sexy colossi gathering in their palms tens of people before greedily slurping them down.  Maybe because of it, may be not, it is nevertheless from China that the first proven blow against the invasion was launched.
The effort was obviously worldwide. Connected still to the thinning but apparently indestructible Web, the scientific community kept struggling with the only problem at hand. All the military networks found themselves shared and exploited in a unique way since the advent of that technology. Passwords crumbled, access spread worldwide, impregnable databases opened up to the scrutiny of the desperate researchers and military alike. As an unexpected side-effect of the invasion, the first true universal networking of knowledge built itself up.
As it turns out, the Chinese scientists of the Beijing Molecular Institute were the first to make something out of it. Pity it took so long to reach us. Pity it took me so long to catch up with the news. And pity I learnt too much about it…

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We’re in a bad situation. No, “desperate” situation is more accurate. Yana is trying to sleep in my arms, as I hold her tight, in a futile attempt to warm her . I can feel her shaking like a leaf against me, and that tears pieces of my soul away that I am so helpless to comfort her.  The cave is not really cold. Spring is rather mellow this year but we’re all frozen, in the damp darkness. I hear my fellow survivors rattle away in the night, like heaps of disgruntled animals, unable to find the sleep they need, knowing also that if they find it, they may just not wake up from it. Outside the cave, a deep rumbling and regular sound can also be heard. Two vast lungs heaving to the quiet rhythm of an inhuman breathing. The breathing is loud and clear to us all. The giant girl has lulled herself to sleep at last, her face a mere meters from the opening of the cave. Damn it. This means someone’s got to try again.

Three weeks we’ve been huddling in the shallow recess in the flank of the mountain. Three weeks we’ve been listening to the monstrous biological noises outside. Her breathing, her urinating,  her grumbling stomach even. That is,  when she’s quiet, and not talking to us in this maddening voice of hers, throwing the mellifluous vowels of her strange language into the cave opening.  Three weeks she got us trapped in the cave with apparently no intention to leave any time soon.

She caught us as we were progressing on the narrow mountain road, our little convoy pushing ahead to cross the low pass and to start a welcome descent on the other side.  I heard the shout of our scout in the talkie-walkie, saw the massive face  of the girl smiling at us from the next ridge across the valley. We rushed back in panic towards the hollow we’d noticed a few minutes before in the mountain side, in the hope it would be large enough to contain all of us. Her huge naked body loomed further up the ridge, and when the massive feet crossed at last the top of the hill, a huge avalanche of rocks started to rumble down the mountain side, down to the valley below us. She followed it, her enormous feet digging in the soil with so much violence  entire  slabs of forest followed her wake. The long thighs propelled her vast body in our direction, showing fine-tuned muscles under the radiant skin. Her breasts lolled right and left under the strain of her run, but her radiant face, alight with a delighted smile was staring at us with an intense hunger glowing in their large blue  orbs. I was pushing Yana and the others towards the cave , on the road strewn with our dropped vehicles and possessions, when I saw the brown dome of the giant head surging back from the valley and ascending the  steep slope. We rushed inside the dark opening.

We had been ahead of it so, for us, running to it was a downward rush. For those who were way behind, it was a desperate climb up the road. Ten seconds after I entered the cave, the huge hand appeared on the road, grabbing it like a ledge, and pulling up the enormous naked body. I could see the massive shape rise above the slope, the face, the shoulders, breasts, belly, till eventually a gargantuan foot stepped in front of the opening, cracking the pavement open, as if it were mere biscuit. What followed were the screams of our comrades outside, as the girl turned her attention to them and started to pick them up. The too familiar pleas and shouts, the usual elevation of the sounds, the loud gulping, all this came through the opening, obstructed as it was by the rosy flesh of her foot.. It lasted quite a few minutes. Then the foot disappeared, creating a tremor that sent pebbles from the cave ceiling raining on our heads. More tremors and more screams echoed in our little space, as the girl chased away the last survivors of the convoy rear. None of us dared to walk to the entrance. And wise were we not to, as huge fingers thrust themselves into it a few moments later, like monstrous snakes, trying to reach us and throwing our refuge in near obscurity. The flagrance of her skin was reaching us in spite of all the dust she had raised.

She knows were’ in there and she’s adamant she’s going to get us for breakfast. She hasn’t moved away for three weeks. The giantesses are slowly driving their resources through the floor, so successful they have been at sacrificing us to their insatiable appetite. Food, that was once so abundant, is running in short supply in the region we were trying to cross, and for that matter, all over the country and even planet I guess. As a consequence, the determination of any giantess that encounters her food is strengthened by the simple rarity of it. What she sees now, she just doesn’t ignore.
We are near thirty people stuck in the cave (apparently an abandoned mine shaft whose end had collapsed and provoked the termination of the works). Some of us had food in their packs. Not enough of us. We ran out three days ago, in spite of the rationing. I lead a foray into the depths of the mine, through ugly narrow tunnels that revived a long forgotten claustrophobia in me. It was scary but it came with a prize, a rivulet of water trickling through a muddy wall. Not exactly a spring, but enough to cover our immediate needs. As for another exit, the dim hopes vanished pretty fast.
Now, as I listen to the sleeping giantess outside I wonder if this is indeed a race. We are going to start starving soon. Is she starving too? Can they be defeated by their own greed? Could she give up on us and start looking elsewhere for sustenance? I know it’s just wishful thinking. No matter how little they eat, they do not seem to be affected physically by any hardship. They are still as slender and beautiful, no matter how often they gorged themselves on our bodies when we were many, and they are still exactly the same today, when we are indeed an endangered species. Their redoubled efforts at finding us may be real, the reason is hardly starvation,  I suspect. Reaching for the satisfaction of a job well done, maybe?

So. She’s asleep again. Should we go for a sortie? How many of us? Can I really send someone out there to their death in the acid pit of her stomach?  Should I be the one to lead the charge? I find myself a rather feeble Odysseus, struggling with a very strange Cyclops. I wish I could blind her the way he did in the great book, calling myself “No one” and so fooling the entire host of our persecutors. But they cannot be harmed. They are Nature itself. They are beyond my reach and my meek plans. I decide to try in force this time.

Our last attempt had been a disaster. As soon as we heard the black-haired girl sleep the sleep of the just (her head propped on the road like a pillow, the rest of her body resting invisible on the slope below), we tried to let a group out. Like a captain on a sinking ship, I had decided to remain behind, but is it really an act of bravado, or just the result of my fear of confronting the giantess outside?  The fact is I wasn’t part of the exit party. Tom, Mike, Katie and Julie had approached the opening with extreme caution. All you could see outside was the red mouth of the girl, slightly opened, breathing her hot breath into our cave. The teeth were showing, perfect and white and enormous, opening on a wet, dark cavern, the reflection of our own. They had tip toed outside, past the large lips, and turned right to carry on upwards towards the pass. We waited inside, aligned in groups of three or four, ready to follow. We watched, as a sudden change in the breathing took place, and a humongous red tongue started to slowly pass on the red lips. Yet nothing happened for a few minutes. We knew it would take a good half an hour for the first group to reach the pass and perhaps find safety in the woods on the other side. 30 minutes is quite a short time. Thirty minutes is nothing really, we squander these minutes by the heap in our daily lives and reveries. We don’t notice thirty minutes.

 These were the longest of all, stretching like centuries. She did not give them the thirty minutes. A sudden snorting noise, and the mouth at the entrance of the cave lifted off the ground. We had a glimpse of the long brown hair lifting off too, and then the opening was clear. Crashing and crushing noises erupted on the slope of the mountain, as the giant body changed its position on the rocky face, toppling trees and dislodging boulders. Light poured in the cave, as the first screams reached us. I had sneaked to the entrance, and wishing I hadn’t, looked outside. The giant girl was smiling at Mike, who struggled between the pads of her fingers. He was brought right under her nose and she sniffed him like one would a fine cigar. His little fists could be seen trashing on the massive fingers. Her mouth opened quite large, as she seemed to deposit him right in her gullet, so deep she inserted her fingers. The giant eyes closed for a brief moment, as she swallowed our friend.

I could see the others trying to run upward on the little road, and the vast naked body of the girl against the slope, near level with them. As an act of playfulness, the monstrous woman had poised her hands on either side of them and, heaving up her chest above the road, slowly let her left breast come to rest upon Julie’s running shape. The young woman disappeared under the quickly flattening mass of flesh, as it pressed onto the road. A loud giggle erupted from above. When the giantess lifted her chest off the road again, I saw Julie’s crushed body stick to the underside of the breast, for a second, before dropping  lifelessly onto the mountain flank. Tom and Katie were invisible to me, high up on the road, but well within the reach of the girl. To them the horizon was the fleshy wall of the woman’s chest, the two enormous breasts level with their path. She collected both of them and they came into view. A second group rushed out then from our cave, aiming downwards, running their asses off in the dusty morning, hoping to make to the cover of the forest a few hundreds yards below. Tom and Katie were held for a second, back to back, crushed into the grip of two mighty fingers before being inserted in the drooling mouth. The girls chewed on them quite a bit before licking her fingers clean. She then looked downwards.

I don’t want to recall what happened to the second group. They were spotted easily by the hungry girl and dispatched in the cruellest fashion, the giant body passing briefly in front of the cave, creating tremors and rumbles all across the valley. I came back inside, white as a sheet, breathing hard. A moment later, a monstrous eye was peering into our hole, the wind of its blinking actually displacing air right to the depths of our refuge.

There wasn’t much to do any more. We decided to wait it out. Our food ran out, days passed like millennia, we felt the weakness settle in our bodies. Outside the girl would talk to us, the alien words hitting us and echoing around us. At times she blew into the cave, making the air foul and heavy to breathe. Our things were scattered against the walls by the gale-force blow. We huddled together in our fear and despair, waiting for the creature to fall asleep again.

Yana and I spoke about the future, about our  future kids, the house in the woods, the quiet swimming in the near-by lake, the love that united us. We gazed at each other, trying to forget the horror outside. The more I looked at her, the more I felt I had no right to let that future die in that hole. But the more I gazed, the more I saw the reflection of my own weakening. Yana had organized the rationing, and kept herself busy checking on the others, as we waited quietly for the opportunity. She was showing a strength and fortitude that quickly became the back bone of our survival in there. We made love among the others, as others did too, suffusing the cave for brief moments with a hope and joy that vanished quickly afterwards,  making the wait even more maddening I personally thought. One night we heard an enormous fart outside, certainly the product of the healthy digestion of our comrades.

…………………………………………………..

She’s asleep again, and I’ve opted for the simplest plan: a general escape. Genius. I went out for a check a few minutes ago, standing in front of the reclined faced (she will bear the marks of the rocks for a little while on her wondrous cheeks). I was staring at the face, in the strong moonlight, following with my eyes the nicely shape nose, the arches of the well-trimmed eye-brows, the complex lines of the long hair that covered the road on either side. It is now or never, we have lost enough strength as it is. I beckon to the group behind me. Yana comes up to me and lands a kiss on my lips, taking hold of my hand. We sneak outside, a line of hungry looking shapes, projecting our moon-made shadows on the rocky slope. We’re heading down the valley. Above us, for the first few meters, the nostrils blow their hot breath upon us, with a reassuring regular pattern. A deep inner roar come from the big orifices, as the girls gently snores. Under the huge eye-lids, the orbs are rolling heavily, following the satisfying feeding dreams of the giantess, no doubt. We pass by like ugly mice in front of a beautiful cat.

When we come to the long hair strewn on the road we lift our feet high among the strands, sweating at every noise the rope-like hair makes under our feet. We are extra careful not to pull on any strand, making our walk for a few meters akin to the crossing of a minefield. Once on the other side of the brown sea, I watch with anxiety the group crossing behind us. Everyone’s face is hard and concentrated, the movements slow and tentative, the fear visible. When we’re at last all across, we accelerate the pace. Incredibly enough more than one hour passes without any sign of motion from the girl above us. We’re launched into a desperate run now, feeling the weight of the fatigue in our limbs, but also the adrenalin that pushes us forward. We’re heading down straight into the forest, not daring to use the road, and the vicious laces that would bring us back in the direction of the ogre. Every pebbles that rolls down with us is a torture. But it’s too late to be cautious. We run forward. Many a times one of us would run straight into a tree, or is slashed in the face by a low branch. We help each other to come back to our feet and push further. The valley isn’t too far. I cannot see her any more , but I can still feel the presence of the vast body high above us, leant against the mountain flank, and I strain to hear the slightest rumble of rocks coming from that direction. In my hand I feel the sweat between our skins , as Yana keeps her firm grip on me.

We’ve reached the bottom of the valley, where the merry flowing of a stream is sending a warm feeling into our body. We stop for a quick drink. The only water available to us for the past three weeks had been muddy, with a disgusting copper taste to it. The clear stream is bringing back some strength. We head South, we actually came from originally, and where a small city is waiting for us, with all its shelter possibilities. High above the massive form of the giantess hasn’t moved. We can see the long legs and heavy buttocks, the long back and shoulders, all pressed onto the mountain. The feet are resting onto promontories. It’s actually incredible she can sleep standing like this, like an improbable beached whale on the slope. Then again, we remember having seen one sleeping on a mall, all across the buildings, as it was a soft mattress. Tough creatures they are.

Five hours later we enter in the suburbs o f the little town. The first thing we do is to rush to a convenience store we passed earlier this month and where stashes of food are still available. We all dive into the dried up food and cans like the famished lot we are. A few minutes into our meal, the loud rumbling of a mighty avalanche echo from the mountain road. My hopes were that the girl would indefinitely wait for us to come out of the cave, fooled into thinking we were still inside. But I was wrong. She’s coped somehow with the fact that we’re no longer there. And she’s heading our way. After a few minutes her tall body is entering the valley, dominating the quiet and deserted town. We have scattered in various groups into the buildings. In a few minutes she’s onto us. I can see the blue eyes high above, searching for our group, a slightly annoyed look on her face.
She takes out the first house, lifting its roof in a single wipe of her hand, sending tiles flying across town like so many projectiles. She crouches down, keeping the little house between her massive thighs, and explore the inside of it with her fingers. Then she goes to the second one. Damn, she’s going to be quite methodical, it seems, in keeping with the new behaviour our diminishing numbers have triggered in them. The second house explodes like a lego construction. Onto the third she goes. Under her foot, a big SUV disappears noisily, squashed into a pancake debris.

We move stealthily around her. My goal is to eventually come back to the destroyed zone. They usually don’t look twice behind them. The rosy light of the morning is sending our long shadows far from us and this is totally unnerving. We try and stick to the walls. The town is very small and I don’t want to be stuck again into the only underground parking lot, to be cornered again by the monstrous girl. We move like stealth fighters. I give signs to the group nearby, sending everyone ahead in short runs among the buildings. The destruction behind us is becoming stronger and closer, but we have to circumvent it somehow. At times, we see the shoulders and head dominating the street above the roof tops, the eyes like searching lights. The girl is smiling again, with this maddening serene smile of theirs, when they’re happy hunting us.

A roar explodes in the air above us. She has spotted some of us I think. Sudden tremors betray her jump toward her prey. I cannot see the group in question but the girl’s head is moving fast above the rooftops, her eyes suddenly eager and  she shows a smile full of teeth. Screams erupt quickly afterwards. I push Yana forward,  we slowly start angling our progression from house to house towards the first demolished building. Shouts of fear can be heard. I’m quite sure I recognize Nate’s voice, before it is cut abruptly by a swallowing noise. God, Paula was with him, a twelve year-old girl we’d found in deserted place a few weeks ago. As if to confirm my fear, a high girlie shriek can be heard, high in the air, as the little girl is being lifted to the hungry mouth. I feel sick. Yana’s eyes are full of tears. We plough our way through the shadows of the pleasant porches of the little community houses.

We hesitate at the main avenue, six lanes of opened road, covered in weeds already, heavy grass growing around the tyres of the abandoned cars. If we cross it, that would place us behind the progression of the girl, whose might body is looming high above us, crouching from time to time to gut a building or a house with loud wrecking sounds. We cross one by one, in a frenetic rush towards the old petrol station ahead. I wait there in the shadows for my comrades. Suddenly the girl looks back, for no reason at all,  spots Jimmy running across the tarmac. The huge body turns round, the breast balancing in the sharp motion. She comes our way, singing a strange melody, and swinging her hips like a catwalker as she inserts one of us in her mouth.

“Go, go go!!” I shout to everyone, and we scatter in all directions. This is going to be a “everyone for himself” type of run again. The old familiarity of the action does not lessen the horror of it. The biggest grizzly bear we could meet is nothing compared to the giant form that comes closer, intent on treating us as mere little snacks.  Yana is white with fear and in her flight actually drags me along into the now well lit streets.  As we stop a second to catch our breath, I see one of us lagging behind being gently pushed aside by a giant toe. The form above him is gigantic, overwhelming, and incredibly beautiful in the morning light. The skin glows , tanned and healthy, the shape perfect in its feminity, the face that looks down is soft, gentle and very, very pleased, showing a sparkling set of teeth behind the full red lips.. The poor guy at her feet screams as the vast toes settle slowly on his body, and start rubbing him into the tarmac. The girl laughs a merry laughter and looks around for more fun. We are going critical again. She’s onto us and will not let go. I fear we’re just postponing the outcome. I grip Yana’s hand and resume the running.

That’s when the oddest thing occurs. Far above in the sky, I spot a red-colored object that seems to be drifting in our direction. It takes a second or two before I recognize the shape. A parasail. Someone is parasailing in our direction, high above the head of the giantess. Leaning against a wall, I take out my binoculars. It’s a girl. I can see the long blond hair streaming in the air currents around her head. She seems to aim straight at us. Where the hell does she come from? Why is she falling in toward the town? Is she insane? A bout of giggling smashes the silence of the valley , when the giantess also spots the slowly drifting girl. She walks calmly in the direction of the new comer, and, planting her feet through a house, and squashing a small van under the other, squarely waits there, her hand to her eyes to see the sail floating down towards her. She’s very excited.

“Turn, turn away, dammit, you fool” I voice between my lips, as we observe the slowly descending parasail. But the sail circles around closer and closer to us. The giant girl waves at it, and even makes a small excited dance, applauding loudly the slow descent. She sounds like a ten-year old at a fun fair. I look hard in the binoculars. The girl in the sail is grimly staring at the giantess. It takes a few more minutes before I notice the strange harness she wears. It does not seem to belong to the parasailing equipment. Four, no, five, bright red patches are attached to the girl’s body. Something in my mind clicks into place.

We watched terrified, as the sail comes closer. The giant girl is all cooing and talking as she starts reaching out for the tiny shape. A few minutes and the sail is gliding right above the giant girl and heading straight down. She lands into the open palm of the giantess. I’m dumbfounded, as I watch the sailing girl pull on the straps to actually stop her descent and aim perfectly at the giantess’s palm.  It takes an incredible courage to do this. Or incredible stupidity. The giantess is delighted with her catch. She quickly separates the flapping sail from the prize the morning has brought her. I see the tiny struggle of the girl into the big palm, as the harness is being ripped violently from her body. She’s shouting something I cannot hear. Something defiant and angry and…scared.  The giantess sniffs her catch again, tumbling the blond girl into her palm with the tip of her nose. Then two fingers reach for the tiny form and lift it high above the head. The giantess cranes her head back and slowly deposits the girl onto her mouth. I swear the girl is giving her the finger as she disappears between the lips. I’m frozen with the sheer surprise of the whole scene.

The giantess is quickly dispatching the victim through her gullet and a very slight swelling is all that shows of the passing of the blond woman into the giant throat. The giantess licks her fingers and turns to us again.

We’re hidden inside a low house now, and wondering what to do. Run again? Stay low? Where can we go now? I sneak a peek through the window just in time to see the giant girl close her eyes, emit a strange noise, and with a deep whimper, suddenly collapse onto what was the town-hall. The building explodes under the falling body, sending debris high in the air, bombarding us with tiles, and stones, and glass shards. A mountainous cloud of dust rises in the morning light.

We observe the body for a few minutes, stunned and unbelieving. It lies lifeless across the town centre, the long thighs resting on the remnants of a church, the un-breathing torso crushing the old town hall. Yana and I start walking up to it. As we come closer, a strange thing happens again, the body is no longer resting across so many buildings it seems. It does not even look so big any more. In fact the closer we get, the smaller it seems too. The girl is shrinking fast in front of our eyes, like a snow flake in the sun, her moving heels dragging slowly through the adjacent buildings, the receding limbs leaving crushed debris fall away to the ground as they diminish in size. This is insane. And so it is true. They can be killed. We’ve just witness an execution.  After a few minutes, as we now run toward the place, an incredible excitation running through our hearts and minds, the body is no longer visible.

It takes us nearly half an hour to find the body of a brown haired woman, a spitting image of our giantess, lying on a pile of rubble. She’s back to her original size. Back to the original shape and size of the unfortunate girl that was chosen to perform the gruesome task of wiping out our species. The girl has no expression on her face. She’s dead, another body in the ruins. We stare at it for minutes. I cant’ detach my eyes of this simple woman, so limp, so small. And I do feel sorry for the poor girl who probably never even witnessed any of the horrors her borrowed body created for us.

We look at one another, Yana and I, as more of our group are coming running to the centre of the scene. Everyone gathers around d the body. After a few stunned minutes, one of us asks the obvious question: “Where the hell are our people? She should have imploded ten times over!”
No, there’s no trace of the folks she just ate in her rampage, nor of the courageous girl that landed her sail in the palm of the once monstrous woman. We sit around the body, gazing at one another in disbelief and slowly letting the mixed feeling of joy and grief settle in our confused minds.

Later in the day we find the remnants of the sail the girl used to attack the giantess. Sewed into it, I find a single piece of paper. It bears a name : Laura Stilton. And a web address. Laura Stilton… Where did she come from? Was she part of a plan? We just know she saved us for certain death. I do not think we could have survived the attention of the desperate giantess. She would have turned every stone of the city before giving up. I guess we were lucky. She was probably in search of the creatures, and coming from the pass to the North, she happened to spot our own personal nightmare. I wonder who she really was and why she did this. It was clearly a suicide mission. The giantesses have proved indestructible to any external attack and I personally never thought an “inside job” would do the trick either. But it did. The girl went for the internal organs it seems, sacrificing her life to her goal.

We spend the evening in town. I organized the usual watch, they are so many of “them”, and we could really have another one on our back before soon. And we feast over every food we have gathered. Life is coming back. At dusk we have gathered to bury the now innocuous body of the brown haired girl. I gave a somewhat awkward speech over the grave, balancing as we are over the tragedy of this person and the remnants of our hatred for her. That night all of us sleep at last with a modicum of success. Hunger is slowly subsiding. But our bodies still bear the mark of the last days. Many are still grieving the losses of the last attack. Yana and I go to search for a working computer. And also for a real bed, where we can at last consummate the feeling of joy and liberation we feel inside. The future we’ve been imagining for ourselves about could still happen after all.

In the morning, at last, Yana and I get access to the Net. We find the website mentioned in Laura’s note: a very cryptic, highly encoded website, dedicated it seems to dispatching news related to the invasion and survival tips to anyone in the world. The site confirms the last figures we had heard. 378 giantesses have been put out of action. The site is very unclear about the method, which is strange, considering the method is pretty clear.  Most of the hits took place in Asia, it seems, and it is during this browsing that I learn about the Chinese breakthrough.

Still, the type of device is not clearly defined in any of the scarce paragraphs of the page. I organize a search group and we go back to the mountain road where twenty of us have died the Death. In the afternoon we reach the first strewn debris of our devastated convoy, suitcases, back packs, hand drawn carts. The sight is appalling. We have to walk among the seriously squashed corpses of our friends. (We hadn’t pay attention to any of this earlier on, in our mad rush down during the monster’s sleep) There is blood spattered on the boulders around us. Not all of them went into the giantess’s body. Finally we spot what I’m looking for. On a hunch of mine, we have dragged with us the mysterious metallic case ever since we encountered the doomed military plane way back in the South. The only survivor of the disaster had proven rather ignorant of the content, but was quite adamant it was vital to some sort of military plan in development. (he got squashed under the butt of a playful girl a mere three weeks after we rescued him, poor sod) . I open the case again. Inside, the ten red objects are nearly glowing and I have a bad feeling the metal casing is no luxury at all. But there’s no doubt in my mind. We’ve been carrying for months the very explosive/device / poison used by the parasail woman. She had 5 of them harnessed to her body, which means we probably have with us enough of the stuff to kill two, maybe three giantesses. I stare at the glowing blocks, a weird gelatin wrapped in some silicon casing, and neatly presented in the foam interior of the case. I close the case and sigh heavily. I wish we’d use this earlier. But then who am I kidding? Having the stuff is probably no good without the adequate trigger mechanism. I order our little gang back to the city. Whatever happens, I’m not having the rest of the group walk through this road again. We’ll tackle the slope further down the valley, I note to myself.

We decide to spend some more time in the city. We need food and our guns are ready for some mountain hunting. The more accurate shooters –that would include Yana – go for the hunt. Hopefully this region is now void of large predators and we’ll play that part for the time being. That, now, wouls be a welcome change. Myself, I spend the day pouring over the Net, sending our longitude and latitude to every site and mail address that seems even remotely connected to some military/ science effort. I copy / paste my message a thousand times, frenetically searching and browsing and cross-referencing. My message is simple. We have the stuff , we need the detonator. Please send someone, or at least any rendezvous point. By the evening my fingers are sour from typing and clicking. I start again the day after.

It goes on for two weeks. We have a giantess alert again; hide ourselves in the parking lot. Let the tremors pass over our heads. Wait another day before coming out. Business as usual.
Yana calls me, urging me to come out in the sun. A distinct noise is slowly growing through the mountains. The type of noise I haven’t heard for a long while. We spot the military jet as it zooms on us , filling the valley with the roar of its engine. It flies low, right above our crowd, as we flail our hands at it. We see it buckle right and left in acknowledgement, before disappearing beyond the pass. A few minutes later, the roar grows again and when the jet flies above our little town, we all applaud and cheer as we see a colourful parachute deploy.
 
It takes us some time to find it, but when we do, the military ensign on it is quite clear: it’s one of ours. A metallic casing very much like the one we possess is hanging from the tree where the parachute landed it. We gather round while one of us climbs up and cut the lines.
I open the case, as one would a religious relic. Inside, a rectangular box, with two LED lights on it. Some over complex electronic plate is stuck to it. It doesn’t take an engineer to know what this is. Whatever is required to detonate the weird explosive ,this is it. This is the straight forward answer to my message. We cheer and cheer: we’re armed, for the time since the start of the conflict.

Then everyone goes silent, as the enormity of what is being asked  is dawning on everyone’s mind. We have ten gelatine blocks. That means two “launchers”. Two very dead persons. Yana grips my hand and squeezes real hard, in a commanding manner, while staring hard into my eyes. I know what she’s saying. She will not let our future die with one of us. I was hoping for this reaction myself, I must say.

We’re all gathered around our dinner (the mountain proved generous in game) when I utter the question everyone has been thinking about all day. A big silence falls on the group. We all look at each across the dirty tables of the lonely little diner , in the penumbra of our lit candles. A man I hardly know gets up and walks to me. Alvin Blocken. All I know from him is that his family has been wiped out months ago. He doesn’t talk much. He just comes to me and shakes my hand. We all keep a stunned silence. I shake his hand, at a loss for words. We have our first suicide bomber. I’m relieved in a weird way. That is done. Or so I think. But then Aurelia asks the question I was now hoping to avoid for the immediate future. “Who’s the second one?”

None of us is ready for this. The device is also a tremendous hope that this nightmare could end, that there is indeed a future for us. We want to see it. I want to see it. I want Yana to see it.

The straw thing is such a cliché. We’ve all seen it, and it turns out it is just as dramatic and nerve wrecking in real life as we saw it in the movies. No straws are ever drawn without a death involved, apparently. I argue all evening against it. I don’t want anyone to do this. Alvin has his reasons, his eyes are burning with intent, and I respect this. But the others… No one should have to…. I argue for caution, for the right moment to choose, for the right girl to take out, all sorts of things. The conversation quickly turns into a row. Insults fly low. I realize they want someone handy to save them for the next encounters. They’ve been way too frightened by the last one.  In the heated argument that follows, it’s apparent they all want a nominee. Yet no one wants to volunteer. Great.
 
I sigh, defeated by the pressure, carried as it is by the intoxicating mood of our “victory”. Did they forget the girl died? Would I die for them? Maybe, yes, and that’s part of the issue.

I look at Yana, when my turn comes to draw the straw…..

Tbc?

nostromo