Chapter 5

Lucia had now a few quite empty blocks to advance. After the stress of her first encounter with a crowd and of being shot at, this helped to calm her down. As she advanced, she tried to keep her mind away from what she had done, and she managed to keep it busy with actual observations of the world around her.

She was incredibly large. She clearly towered over all the buildings on that section of the city, which meant that she towered over everything around her. Despite her size, she still moved gracefully and with agility, and when she did not stop, she covered blocks in mere seconds.

Everything around her looked incredibly small, despite how real it felt. Vehicles looked like nothing more than toys to her, and she was clearly larger, not only in height, than any building.

“How could this happen?” Lucia wondered. “People don’t just grow to become gigantic!”

As every time she advanced uninterrupted, she covered a huge distance in a short while. So, sooner than she had expected, she was standing once more over a crowded intersection. Having got deeper into the city, she was now meeting a group of people that had not seen her before or had not even heard about her before. She noticed that the reaction was different. There was an initial phase of puzzle and incredulity as she approached that gave way, just a few moments later, to panic.

By the time she reached the intersection, there had been a few accidents that had left it impassable. Many people had started running without a clear purpose or direction, which together with the effects of the accidents, resulted in the mob becoming pretty inefficient in getting away from her.

“God, I will need to start all over!” Lucia thought remembering the previous intersection. Then, she recalled how the last one had finished: with seven dead people. “Hopefully it will be easier this time.”

For starters, she was more experienced. Remembering that people had been pretty uncooperative to her reasoned attempts to have them help her, she decided that she should be more direct this time. Maybe this would work.

She cleared her throat and addressed the mass of people at her feet:

“Hello little people. My name is Lucia Torres. I don’t know how it happened, but as you can see I’m very, very big. If any of you has any clue about my size, I would be grateful if you stepped up and shared it with me. But since I don’t think this is going to happen, I merely want to get to the beach and wait for the guys that know there. I need to move down this street and you are in my way. I don’t need to tell you what would happen if I just moved forward and stepped on you. But you don’t have to worry; I don’t want to do that. I just need you to clear the intersection for me and I will leave you alone. So, get out of your cars, stop running and walk calmly to the sidewalks and buildings. I will just move forward and ignore you.”

She looked down at them. The direct approach seemed to be working a little better. There were still many people just running mindlessly, but others were trying to do as Lucia had told them. Her hope was that, seeing that, the rest would end up reasoning and acting rationally.

To her frustration, what happened was the opposite. Seeing some free space in front of them, some car drivers, instead of abandoning their vehicles, just tried to drive them out of the intersection. The results were several more accidents.

“Oh God! How stupid!” Lucia thought.

Her eyes followed a particular car: it was a large black SUV and after having crashed with a couple more cars, now it was ramming a third out of its way. Lucia was starting to become very pissed off with the driver. She could not stand it anymore when she saw that after having moved a smaller sedan out of its way, the SUV just ran over a group of four people and kept on advancing. It finally crashed with an abandoned van and, despite trying to advance, Lucia saw it was trapped.

Incredibly pissed off with the car, she bent down, her body casting a menacing shadow over the crowd, and reached out for the offending vehicle. Picking it up with three fingers, she stood up again and shot an angry stare to the driver through the windshield.

To the driver, two angry and impossibly big dark brown eyes now blocked his entire view.

“Do you know how hard it is for me to avoid hurting people? What made you think that I would tolerate anyone else to do it when I’m taking utmost care not to?” she asked, her angry voice filling the car and making windows rattle.

The driver instinctively pushed the gas and the wheels of the car spun furiously. They brushed a little the skin of her fingers, but it was not even causing discomfort. It was annoying, though. And it made Lucia think even lowlier of the driver, if that was even possible.

She moved her eyes from the car for a second a looked down to the spot where she had picked it up. The four people the SUV had trampled were still there, unmoving. Lucia frowned. Everyone in the crowd contained their breath as the giant woman remained motionless, apparently thinking. When her eyes opened, there was cold fire in them.

She had not been able to prevent killing several people, and something inside her told her that this would repeat in the future. But she could do something about them killing each other because of her.

“Ok, people. New rule. Anyone who shoots at me, dies. And from now onwards, anyone of you who hurts another of you without reason dies too.”

Lucia closed her fingers as she finished the sentence, easily compressing the matchbox-sized car between them and crushing anyone and anything inside beyond recognition.

“It’s clear that you guys cannot behave rationally around me, so someone needs to put some order around.”

And like this, in a simple thought, Lucia had declared herself judge and executioner. Her little act of justice was not lost to the crowd, who reacted with renewed terror, increasing the volume of their screams. Still, they had not done much to clear the intersection. It pissed her off.

“Are you people damn stupid? Clear the fucking road before I step on you all!”

She had been forcing herself to be nice, probably to compensate for the fact that her size was so scary, but she was starting to lose her patience, which seemed to have become shorter as she had become larger. And Lucia had never been a very patient woman, to start with.

Her angry words, combined with the whimsical execution they had just witnessed, sent the mob into even a bigger frenzy, but this did not make them more efficient.

She was getting frustrated when another car did something completely unexpected. Turning, the white minivan drove towards her! She was incredibly surprised by this. She soon realized the driver’s intentions as he steered the car and drove between her open legs. At her size, there was enough space between her feet to accommodate four lanes, so the driver did not have too many problems driving under her.

She had to suppress the urge to move or do something to the car, though. Somehow, her first impulse had been to block it and reach for it. She managed not to react and just observed how diminutive the minivan was next to her cute feet. As it drove under her, looking barely like a micro machine, she realized once more how huge she was. It, once again, felt weirdly exciting. Somehow, she loved the idea of people passing under her as if she were some kind of massive arch made of flesh.

She was thinking that the driver’s idea had actually been pretty good from his own point of view, apart from very brave, when a noise caught her attention behind her. Turning, she quickly identified its source as the minivan itself. She needed one second to understand what had happened: the vehicle had fallen into one of her footprints. She had realized before that her feet were sinking in the asphalt, but she had not thought that they were sinking that much. The truth was that they were more than deep enough to become impassable obstacles to the little people’s vehicles. She could not prevent a light chuckle as she realized that the minivan’s front had actually crashed into the area where her heel had set in a previous step.

She felt a little guilty for the accident, so Lucia turned and bent down, grabbing the minivan with two fingers of one hand and removing it from the imprint of her foot. Bringing it to eye level, she saw that the airbags had gone off and that the front of the vehicle was actually pretty battered, with the windshield shattered. She removed some of the remaining glass with her finger and moved the airbags out of the way, to see that there were two people on the van, a man behind the wheel and a woman on the passenger’s seat. Lucia did not say anything; she just observed.

The woman started yelling almost immediately. The man, after a couple of seconds, shouted:

“Let us go, you giant bitch!”

Lucia’s mood quickly changed from curious to pissed off. She was getting very annoyed by the stupid attitudes of the little people. Narrowing her eyes, she fixed her angry stare in the little man and then said in a cold tone:

“Be careful. I’m seriously considering adding insults to my list of valid reasons to kill you tiny fuckers!”

Lucia silently enjoyed seeing the man swallowing hard and shutting up. Happy enough with that, she just added:

“I was just trying to help you, by the way.”

And she let the tiny van on top of a building to her right.

She turned, hoping that the little people were out of stupid ideas for a while. She was very wrong. She saw the flash the moment she turned. Almost immediately, she heard the “bang” and felt the sting in the stomach.

Once more, she was merely stung, not hurt. This time, the sting was a little sharper than it had been back in the previous intersection, though. She was incredibly pissed off. She had seen where the flash had come, this time, and her eyes quickly found a man with a rifle. With a rifle! Who the hell had a rifle in the car? The man was looking up, as if evaluating if he should shoot her again, when her huge eyes met his. This seemed to paralyze him.

The man was quite isolated, no one else around him, so he was very obvious. “How stupid can someone get?” Lucia thought, furious. She looked at him for one more second, her teeth clenched. Then, she took an exaggerated stride and stomped on him. Her foot sunk deeper than usual, and cracks formed in the tarmac around it. After a couple of seconds, she just stepped back, to regain the balance, observing her footprint and the red stain under the spot where the ball of her foot had landed.

It failed to feel bad. It felt very good, actually. She unconsciously knew that this was not justice, that it was retribution, but it did not make it feel any less good.

The truth was that she had killed yet another person, her tenth victim in a short while, if she discounted the hundreds of dead bodies in the ruins of the hospital. She blocked any feeling of guilt from her mind, though. The damn tiny fucker had shot her, after all!

The screams from the intersection intensified. She moved her eyes to it, from the footprint. Her action had only raised the panic level, but apart from that, the intersection was as blocked as it had been. Something in Lucia’s mind was starting to click. Her perception of people was starting to change.

She addressed them, angrier than ever:

“I’m getting fed up with you little people!” were her first deafening words. “I’ve grown. I’m a giant. Accept it! I already did”

She paused for a second and then went on:

“I’ve tried to be careful. I’ve tried to be nice. I only asked for some help, for some basic cooperation. But you could not do that, could you? All you can do is to scream and run in front of me, as if you were going to outrun me. And, oh yeah, shoot at me!”

Her last words sounded especially angry.

 “Well, I’m done being nice!” she announced. There was some increased unrest among the people, who were already very panicky to being with. Her next words supported this feeling.

“I will crush anyone who shoots at me, and I will crush anyone who hurts someone else because of me. As for the rest of you, the time for nice requests is over. You will follow my instructions, or I will force you to do so. And don’t fuck with me. I have half a mind to just trample you and be done with it!”

The giant had been scary enough before. Who would not be scared of a woman the size of a skyscraper, after all? Her words had just raised the panic level a few notches. She was not only gigantic. She was a very pissed off giant woman who casually talked about crushing people and that she had already proven that she was perfectly capable of doing it.

The intersection did not look any better after she had finished talking. Without too much hope she added:

“Now, clear the fucking intersection so that I can move on and forget about you stupid worms. You have ten seconds!”

Over half a minute later, nothing had changed.

“You asked for it!” Lucia announced as she took a step to the front and crouched, kneeling on the ground. She was not careful, and her knees caused minor tremors as they sunk on the ground.

She did not give any further warning as she stretched her right arm, planted her hand deep in the intersection and swept people and cars to the sidewalk. Her arm acted as a bulldozer, no one and nothing able to resist its amazing strength. Despite her anger, she was slow enough, trying just to push people aside, not to crush them. She could not prevent them from trampling each other or from getting caught by swept vehicles, so her movement ended up with several injuries. She did not care, though, as it proved to be very effective. Without even stopping to think, she repeated the movement with her left arm, effectively clearing herself a path in the first half of the intersection.

Advancing on her hands and knees, she positioned herself behind the remaining group and followed the same procedure, left arm first, this time.

Standing up, she resumed her walk, a clear path now in front of her.

She could almost not believe that she had several empty blocks in front of her. Apart from the obviously abandoned cars, which she now relished in crushing under her feet, there were but a few scattered people in the sidewalks. While this was what she needed in order to advance, she unconsciously regretted not having anyone to bully.

She did not have to wait for too long. She heard the bang and she felt the sting and her big eyes soon found yet another stupid man that was trying to bring her down with his tiny weapon. She was not concerned with the effects of the shots anymore. She was still incredibly pissed off at being shot at, though.

Why the hell was she getting shot at so much? Were people so stupid as to shoot at anything they were afraid of? Was the fact that she was actually a woman and not some Godzilla-like monster making it more compelling to attack her? It was incredibly irritating, and she had already made her mind up about how she would deal with this sort of behavior. At this point, she felt that the prerogative she had taken for herself about killing her attackers was even more justified by their stupidity than by the threat they represented.

The man shot her thrice more before he realized that the bullets were having no effect on her. Then, he turned and started running.

“Oh no, you won’t!” she said as she started walking in a more forceful pace, her feet sinking deeper in the ground than when she walked just calmly. He was, of course, going to die. Had he been the first one to shoot her, Lucia might have let him flee. Things had changed, though. In her mind, the only possible course of action was crushing him. That was how fast she had adapted to her new situation.

Even though the man had a two blocks head start, it only took her a few steps to catch up with him. He had been as stupid in his attempt to escape as when he had decided to shoot her. Instead of trying to hide inside one of the buildings on the street, he had just tried to outrun her, like most people seemed to be trying to do, not realizing each of her steps accounted for dozens of their strides.

Once she was immediately behind him, Lucia smirked and said:

“Bye bye, little fucker!”

She raised her foot high, as high as she could, and stomped down hard. Of course, it would only have taken her to set her foot softly on him to crush him beyond recognition, but she was angry, and she wanted everyone else to notice.

Her foot crushed the man and sank deep in the ground. It felt satisfying… until she realized that her foot kept on sinking. Soon, there was nothing under it and she felt as her leg dropped much more than she had expected. As she began falling sideways she realized that she had stepped on a tunnel or something.

She shot out an arm to try to stop the fall. Her hand found the roof of a building to her left but it rested there for barely a second before it pushed through it as if it were a wet tissue. As her position started to become more horizontal, her sunken leg reemerged through the front of a store on the building to her right. Her ass crashed into the building she had tried to use as support and the rest of her body started bulldozing through floor after floor of the block until they both met the ground and a large cloud of dust emerged from the spot she had fallen into. Only her legs remained on the street. The rest of her body was now resting on piles of rubble.

“Oh, fuck!” she yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she repeated.   

Sitting down, she unconsciously dusted herself off and, hearing some screams, she looked down to see a couple of bodies flying after her hands had swept them from the top of her breasts together with bricks, timber and other rubble.

“Fuck!” she let out once more.

She looked down the length of her body, to see if there were any other survivors resting on it. She found a couple of bodies in her amazing cleavage, but as she lifted them to her eyes she saw that they were lifeless.

Three more bodies near her cunt proved to be as dead as the previous two. The rest seemed to be only rubble.

Lucia turned to look at her back, as carefully as she could. As she did, she heard a scream to her right and realized that there had actually been a living man on her right shoulder that had lost his balance and was falling. Reacting instinctively, she tried to turn and shot her hand out, trying to catch him mid-flight. The only thing she got, though, as her arm was describing an arc, was to make it sink it deeply on a tall building to her right, sending the largest part of the façade of three stories to the ground below. The rubble buried the falling man.

“Fuck!” she repeated.

She looked around and despaired. To her left, most of the buildings of an entire city block had crumbled as a result of her falling body. To her right, her foot and arm had caused severe damage to two additional buildings. And all around her, she could only hear screams.

She finished dusting herself off, large chunks of building falling to the road, as she thought on what she had done. She had only wanted to finish someone that had been attacking her. She had been in her right to do so. But the consequences were tragic. She knew that there were a lot of people in those buildings. Dozens of people. Maybe hundreds. In her short time as a giant woman, Lucia had already dealt with three people that had shot her and, after some initial doubts, she had felt good to be able to kill them. But the collateral damage had been terrible. She had slayed six innocent people first and now… now hundreds of people were dead because of her.

Images of the hospital came back to her and reminded her that this was not the first time she was the cause for hundreds of deaths. Her mind had no problems in finding perfectly good explanations for the killing of those that had attacked her, but this… it was hard to take, almost impossible.

All the rage and all the confidence that she had accumulated during her trek faded away and were replaced by despair and frustration. Lucia soon felt tears running down her cheeks. Her mind searched for a way out, but did not find any. Her sight was soon clouded, the tears taking everything.

She rested her elbows on her knees and held her head with her hands as she sobbed.

She had tried it. She had tried to prevent being crushed by the latest joke life had played on her, to find a way out. And she had failed. Hundreds of new victims were witness of that. She was probably sitting in dozens of them.

This last thought made her take her head from her hands and look around. She was about to stand up, trying to at least put some distance with this last scene of her monstrosity, when she saw that the landscape had changed somewhat in the minutes she had been sobbing and ignoring the world.

Some people had, for the first time, stopped running. They were very obviously not interested on helping her, though. She understood it all when she saw a few vans with dishes on their roof. The news crews had arrived. A quick look around with her reddened eyes showed her several cameras pointed at her.

The realization that she had made the news send another cold shiver down her spine. Lucia had no hopes of going through this experience unnoticed, of course. But knowing that something was bound to happen was not the same as actually facing it for the first time.

She wondered which sort of headlines she was making:

“Giant woman kills hundreds?”, “Hundreds dead under a giant woman’s ass?”, “Disgruntled secretary gets huge and goes postal?”

She even let out a desperate chuckle as more absurd ideas ran through her mind.

She saw the people that had stopped to take a peak and linked the dots. They were too scared to try to help her or even to reason with her. But they were observing her now, once the news crews had arrived. She had turned from threat to a living object of morbid curiosity. Her blood started boiling once more as she felt observed and, after a while judged. The entire world would be judging her now and, no doubt, tagging her as a monster, someone who had killed hundreds in barely a couple hours. Very few terrorists could claim that.

And, of course, no one would be interested at all in her story, in her motivations, in what the hell was happening to her. They had their monster already. They had their source of fear and their entertainment at the same time.

Despair quickly started giving way to rage pretty fast. She lost it when she saw that a couple of the cameras were pointing directly at her private parts which, being naked and the size she was, were not private anymore. It was true that sitting the way she was, with her legs folded and spread apart, she was giving the world a hell of a beaver shot, but feeling assaulted in her intimacy was maddening all the same. In the current situation, after all that had happened, how could her pussy be making the news?

Lucia slammed her fist hard on the ground next to her, making it shake. Many of the people that had stopped to get their curiosity filled, feeling that she was no longer a threat, started having second thoughts. Then, she yelled at them, sending the majority of those that did not report news for a living into a flee.

“I’m not a fucking circus attraction!”

She felt somewhat satisfied to see the crowd’s reaction to her words. Encouraged, she stood up, sending most of the remainders of it into a quest to catch the ones that had started running earlier.

She preferred the view from up high, especially in the current circumstances. It made everything look even smaller, reminding her of her actual size. What had been a reason for despair a few minutes ago had suddenly turned into a status defining tool once more.

“And I’m not a fucking sex object!” she said, her words now coming from considerably higher. She stomped her foot for added effect, making even the bravest journalists have second thoughts about what they were doing.

“I’m a woman going through a freakish situation that has repeatedly asked for help!” Lucia then said. “But you know what? I’m fed up with you little people! You don’t want to help me? Fine! I can live with that, if you would at least leave me alone and tried making things a little easier for me. But you can’t do that, can you?” Lucia went on in an angry tone.

“And now, of course, the bad giant woman has killed hundreds of people! It’s your fucking fault! For God’s sake! I’m the size of a fucking skyscraper. You just need to stay out of my fucking way! Is it that hard? Well, it must be, because you just keep on getting in my path and shooting me and causing accidents and making my ass crush half a city block!”

She was breathing hard by the time she finished. Then, she calmed down, waited a couple of seconds and, in a colder tone, added:

“Would you like to see what would happen if I really wanted to crush you?”

Her words made the people around more scared, if that was even possible. Then, she rose her voice again and said:

“You don’t, do you? Then, stop fucking with me!”

She was panting by the time she finished. She found out that she did not know what to say or do, once she had gone with this rant. And then, like an answer to her words, she heard some sirens in the distance.