Lucia opened her large dark eyes and saw the light blue color of the early morning sky. She was not aware at all of the fact that she had been in an explosion that had made a building collapse. She felt the breeze in her arms, legs and torso and heard the sounds of the city in the distance.

All this indicated her that she was waking up outdoors and naked. That was weird. She usually slept naked but… why would she be outdoors? She tried to force her memory a little and the events of the previous day started to gradually come back to her head little by little. Slapping Phil, getting fired, the car accident, growing a couple of feet, pushing the mugger, the cops… they had tased her! And then she woke up in a chamber. Was that a hospital? That’s what they had said. Then, why the hell was she in the open and not in the hospital or whatever the hell that had been? And why was she naked?

She moved her hands to push herself up and check where the hell she was. She soon was sitting and looking down in the distance at several rooftops of 3 and 4 story buildings. So, she was somewhere taller. A higher building, perhaps? She looked down and what she saw was different, though. Her shapely legs were stretched in front of her and she seemed to be sitting just at ground level, not on top of anything. She followed her legs with her sight and soon reached her bare toes. All around her legs and beyond her feet all she could see was rubble. Was she sitting on some type of ruins?

“What the fuck?” she asked aloud.

Then, her sight went on and reached the end of the rubble. What she saw there made her jaw drop. After the piles of indeterminate chunks, there were streets. Impossibly small city streets. On them, there were cars, that did not look bigger than toys, and lined on both sides, there were buildings, that had the size of dollhouses. Her eyes moved then to the far distance, where she could clearly observe the city stretching in front of her. She started to slowly move her sight back to her and saw as the vast city ended at her toes, still looking incredibly small.

She quickly noticed that the ruins she was laying on did not seem to be below her but around her, as if she had burst through them, not just laid down on them. Another glance around showed her some burst pipes and water puddles forming around her sitting figure.

She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard, hoping that the world would make more sense when she took a new glance at it. However, when she did, reality still did not make any sense at all.

She brought her right hand to the rubble and grabbed a pile of it. Bringing it in front of her face, what she found was mostly what looked like parts of walls and ceilings. Among them there were some notes of color. She picked up a few pieces of rubble with her fingers and separated them, trying to examine some of the colored objects. She soon found one. After picking it up and dropping the rest of the rubble back to its original place, Lucia observed the tiny object with curiosity.

It was half broken, but she could see as it was rectangular, had tiny legs that were bent or broken, and the cover was a mix of white and green. It was not even two inches in length and a touch of her finger revealed that it was soft. It was quite twisted, but Lucia soon thought about a hospital stretcher because that is what it was. She looked at it a few more times, convincing herself that it could not be possible, but it was too evident that it was an incredibly small stretcher.

She searched a little bit more among the ruins until she found a square object, maybe 5 by 10 inches, the largest not broken object she had found so far. Taking it out, she brought it in front of her eyes. It was a sign. Below a blue cross, she could read:

HOSPITAL

She felt a shiver running through her back. Was that the hospital she had been the night before? The one the cops had taken her to? Why was the sign so small? Where would someone put something like that? It made no sense… but of course, it matched with her observation of the stretcher, or the streets or the cars… it was hard to convince herself that they were models or toys. She glanced up and took a better look beyond the buildings right in front of where she was. The skyline was familiar. Its scale felt weird, but the city looked exactly like Kingston, the place she’d lived during the last 5 years.

It could not be possible. Because if what she was observing was true, then, this could only mean that she was much bigger… a giant. And she knew that this was impossible.

The only problem with her belief that being a giant was impossible, of course, was that she remembered that she had has grown a couple of feet in a spurt the day before.

She breathed in hard, hyperventilating, trying to calm down. It could not be. People did not just become giants. This was out of the question. Was it not? People did not grow a couple of feet in a matter of seconds either, her mind quickly screamed, playing twisted games with her.

She tried to push the thought out of her mind, though. One thing was growing a couple of feet out of stress. It was incredibly weird and made her freakish, true, but she still was the height of a basketball player. There were people that were as tall as she had become the day before. But what she was seeing now was a miniature world around her. It was impossible for things to get so small… or for someone to get so big. It was so impossible that it was not worth wasting time thinking on it, right?

Besides, she had seen rubble, cars, buildings and some small objects, but all this could be easily created by someone with the intention of making a bad joke at her expense. Especially with her mind as sensitive as it was after the events of the previous day. Was this some elaborate trick from the cops? They would not cheat her! There was a trick, she was sure of that! After all, there was something that was missing and that would undoubtedly be there if she had really become a giant. People!

She looked back beyond her toes. She saw the same streets, cars and buildings. No traces of… what? Lucia stopped her scan and felt another shiver running down her spine. She had seen something that she had overlooked before. She had not been looking for them, so she had not found them. However, now she could clearly see they were there. Not in plain sight. Otherwise, she would have seen them before. But they were there. Hidden behind some cars, behind the rubble, behind their windows… but they were there. And they were just as small as the rest of her surroundings.

She focused her attention to a group of people that had hidden behind three parked cars. Even while sitting, Lucia’s head was so high above that she could see them with some ease. They were small, proportioned with the vehicles, and they were moving. Their movements seemed somewhat comical, due to their size, but Lucia did not laugh. If anything, she was terrified at the sight.

The group soon realized that she was observing them, and they reacted. Convinced that their cover had been blown off, the five people got out from behind the cars and started running down the street. This caused a chain reaction. When they saw them, some other of the people that had been hiding started running too. Soon, there were a few dozen people screaming and running down the street.

This was the final proof. As hard as it was for her to accept it, her mind could not come up with any other conclusion.

Then, her blood froze. She did not want to do it, but at the same time she knew that she had no other option than doing it. She brought her hand into the rubble by her side and dug into it, grabbing a handful of debris and raising it to her face.

As the chunks of concrete separated, the patches of color were easy enough to see. The shapes were also very recognizable. Lucia felt some nausea when she moved some remainders of the hospital apart with a finger and the very recognizable form of a torso and head showed up. It was visibly limp and very lifeless. When her body spasmed, about to puke, the debris separated a little more, some of it falling through the edges of her palm. A couple more bodies emerged. She could not hold it anymore. In a rush she tossed the contents of her hand and threw up right next to her.

“Oh God! Oh God no! Please, no, no!” she said

She looked around and realized that the entire mass of rubble around her body was probably filled with corpses. She was sitting in a mass grave. A mass grave she had created.

Lucia stood up in a rush, not able to throw up anymore, basically because her stomach was empty.

Then, she looked around her feet and started seeing some other patches of color within the ruins.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she started saying, hyperventilating again.

A quick look a little farther down showed her the crowd that had formed when her gaze had met the first group of people and out of instinct, she yelled:

“Help! Please, help!”

Her voice boomed. A few people turned. None stopped running.

Her eyes itched and soon tears started falling down her cheeks. She covered her face with her hands and sat on her haunches. And she cried for what looked like forever.

And then, a strength she did not know she possessed came out of nowhere and told her that she had to go on, that she had to find a way out of whatever the hell was happening to her. She removed her hands from her face, her eyes red from so much crying, and stood up.

It was the first time, save for the few seconds after she had removed herself from the ruins in a hurry, that she stood up at her full height. She looked around and saw that she was incredibly tall. With her bare feet firmly planted on the rubble, her head rose very high in the sky. From this vantage point of view, Lucia could see even more of the city spreading in front of her. To her left, to the west, she could see downtown and some of the commercial districts and beyond them, the sea. In every other direction, suburban areas spread as far as her eye could see. And everything looked like Kingston, the city she had lived in during the last five years. Only it looked much smaller.

From that height, she could also see that people that had fled from her right after she had woken up. Surprisingly, they did not look to be that far away. How could that be? She knew she had been crying for a long time. Distances felt different to her now, but the truth was that judging how far they were and how slow they seemed to be going, Lucia thought that she would be able to catch up with them if she needed to. That was the last thing she wanted to do, though.

She looked around, then took a few steps to get out of the eerie spot where she had grown; her bare feet made the ground lightly shake as she moved. Her right foot was next to a blue sedan. It was wider than the car was long, which impressed her. She could have easily crushed it, along with a few others. This was not what she wanted to do, of course. Crouching down, she reached for the car and picked it up with three fingers. The car felt lighter and more fragile than she had expected. The metal bent as she took a hold of it with oversized fingertips. Standing up again she brought it in front of her eyes. It was a pretty new Mazda 6. She liked that car. She turned her wrist, to look at the car from all angles. It looked amazingly real, not like a model car or a toy. The tires were used, the windows were dirty, its underside had accumulated grease… and her fingers were bending the doors and the roof. Pushing slightly harder, her fingers caved in a little more. Soon a crack appeared in one of the windows. Pushing it with one of her free fingernails, she increased the intensity until the window shattered. If that car really belonged to someone, she had fucked it pretty bad just by holding it. The repair would cost a few thousand dollars, she thought as she set the car on the ground again.

Of course, the realism of the car reinforced the fact that she was a giant. And if she really was a giant, then there was no way to think around the fact that there were several people buried in the rubble because of her. She tried to block the thought for a while, but then the question came naturally to her mind: How many?

There was no way for her to know, and the last thing she was going to do was to dig the rubble for more corpses. But judging from the size of the hospital, there was no way the body count would not be in the few hundreds.

“Oh God, Lucia!” she thought. “You’ve killed hundreds of people! Oh my God!”

Part of her still wanted to deny the truth. People did not become giants, period. There had to be an explanation. She held to one last thread of hope. Taking a couple more steps, she stood next to one of the ten story buildings that was still standing. It reached below her knee, proving yet again that she had not only grown but that she had become titanic.

Lucia wishfully thought that everything was still part of an extremely elaborate prank, and that the building would be the proof for that. It had to be part of the decoration. It was her last hope to discover that it was all a farce. Taking a step back, she crouched down low and brought her head next to the façade. The windows were too small, so she turned her head sideways a little and placed one of her huge brown eyes next to one of the windows. There was a woman there that had probably been observing her the entire time, from the apparent safety of her home. She did not like her sudden attention at all, now, of course. As soon as she was caught by Lucia’s eye, she turned and started running and screaming, just like everyone else. Soon after she left the room, Lucia’s attention was caught by something else. There was a TV in there and it was on. Surprisingly, Lucia could make out quite a lot of detail and she paid attention. The news was on and soon she saw that they were on the sports section. The anchor was soon replaced by images of a football game and the score was on the screen too. She knew which game it was. Kingston versus Hollner. And she knew the score, which was exactly the one that appeared on TV.

Lucia stood up again, the building dwarfed once more against her legs. This was too much already. She could not keep on denying it forever. There was only one possible explanation for what had happened. There had been an explosion. She had grown. A few city blocks were destroyed. Several hundred people were dead. And she was now a colossal giant woman.

She suddenly felt dizzy, the weight of the final acceptance striking her. She brought her hands to her head and felt as her right leg failed. She quickly recovered, though, taking a quick step to secure her stance. Her leg brushed against something.

Regaining her balance, she removed her hands from her head and looked down. Her sudden movement had brought her leg closer to the building and it had brushed against its façade, peeling it almost completely. Debris was falling and rubble was piling up on the street. A section of the top floors ended up collapsing, adding more rubble to the pile.

“Oh God! I barely touched it!” Lucia said in an angry tone.

Taking a step back, she looked at the half-crumbled building and added, still in the same angry tone:

“Don’t tell me I killed more people!”

There she had it. She had made just a simple movement and she had almost knocked over a building! She was a giant and the slightest of her acts seemed to possess an amazing capacity to cause destruction.

Suddenly, people started pouring out of the affected building, probably afraid that it would end up falling down. They ran very close to her right foot and she could see how ridiculously tiny they were compared to it. They were far from being able to reach her ankle!

The people were running and screaming in a pattern that was already starting to become familiar for Lucia, despite having been a giant just for a few minutes.

Instinctively, she addressed them:

“Help! Please!”

It was to no avail. The people kept on running and screaming, not reacting to her words. She insisted:

“People, please. I did not want to fuck your building! It was not on purpose! I won’t hurt you!”

But the people kept on running. This made Lucia mad. The thought of grabbing someone, of forcing someone to do whatever she needed against his will, passed through her head. Something in the back of her head told her she could do it, that it would even be easy. She discarded the idea, though.

Instead, she just stomped her foot on the ground, letting go part of her contained anger. It sunk considerably, making her surroundings shake with violence.

The ones closest to her foot could not keep their balance as the ground shook and fell to the ground. For an instant, Lucia was awed at what she had just clearly created. The thought of doing something, of grabbing them, passed again through her head, but she suppressed it again, looking at the fleeing crowd from her standing position. A certain type of anger was starting to rise inside her as she did so, though, anger at everyone who was not willing to offer her any assistance.

“Why in the hell did this happen to me? And how in the hell did it happen? God! I’m gigantic. Everyone is scared of me. And I cannot take a step without the risk of destroying something!”

Her fists were unconsciously clenched and her eyes narrowed as she observed the city while her mind worked like crazy. She breathed in hard and tried to relax.

“Calm down Lucia… there needs to be a way out of this”

But then, she felt a stab in her heart as she thought:

“I cannot live like this! What will I do? What will I eat? Where will I sleep? How in the hell am I supposed to relate to other people?”

She looked at the fleeing crowd again. Not a single person was willing to help her. She felt mad at them. She could be gigantic, but this was no reason to be so scared. Her mind conveniently blocked the victims she had already caused when growing through the hospital. Narrowing her eyes a little more, she said aloud, addressing the fleeing crowd in an angry tone:

“Fine people. If you don’t want to help me, I’ll take care of myself!”

This was easier said than done, though. She was on her own once more. She was sure that there were hundreds of more people inside the rest of buildings, but the streets around her were deserted, once the crowd had got far enough.

Lucia remained motionless as people slowly got away from her. Her mind started to fill with thoughts, none of them pleasant. She had been scared the day before, when she was “merely” seven and half feet tall. And now she was the size of a fucking skyscraper! What the hell was she going to do?

Lucia broke. She had been through too much over the last 48 hours. A cheating boyfriend, a harassing boss, every single aspect of her life going wrong and now… now she was the biggest freak ever. She recalled the words of the guy that had tried to mug her the day before: “Monster” he had called her. She chuckled out of despair. If he thought she was a monster when she was just over 7 feet, what the hell would he think about her now?

She did not cry this time. She froze. If anyone had stayed behind instead of fleeing from her, he would have seen that the gigantic naked woman remained motionless, with her gaze fixed in some undetermined point in the distance.