Chapter 5: The Giggling God
The kitchen clock ticked, a hollow, mechanical sound in the ash-heavy silence.It was the only regular thing left. Lila sat at the table, her gaze drifting over the wreckage of her family. The silver luminescence had faded from a glare to a soft, persistent glow, like moonlight trapped under her skin. She traced a finger along the table’s edge, leaving a faint, sizzling scorch mark.
“I’m waiting,” she said, her voice no longer layered with power, but somehow worse for its normal pitch.It was just her voice. The voice that had once asked for help with homework.Harold pushed himself up from the dented refrigerator. Every movement was an effort of will against a crushing weight.He looked at Eleanor.His wife—no, just Eleanor now. She stood by the sink, her height reduced, her formidable presence collapsed inward. She was staring at her own reflection in the dark window, but Harold knew she wasn’t seeing her face. She was seeing the absence of what had been there an hour ago.The strategist was gone. The librarian remained, but her eyes held a vacant horror no library quiet could contain.
Chloe had sunk onto a stool, her long legs now dangling awkwardly, her frame swimming in her own clothes. She was blinking slowly, as if trying to clear a fog.The sharp, analytical glint was absent. She looked young, confused, ordinary.“Chloe,” Harold said, his voice raspy. “Can you…?”
She looked at him, blankly. “Can I what?”
“The canned soup,” he managed, gesturing weakly toward the pantry.“Could you get it? And a pot.”
Chloe nodded, a simple, obedient gesture that was utterly alien to her. She slid off the stool and shuffled to the pantry.The mundane task seemed to anchor her. She found the pot, she opened the cans.The metallic snick-pop was deafeningly normal.
Liam leaned against the counter, his arms crossed, watching Chloe work. His face was a twisted mask of contempt and a deeper, unnameable fear. “So we’re just making her dinner now?” he spat, keeping his voice low, aimed at Harold.“After what she did to Ben? After what she did to them?” He jerked his chin toward his mother and sister.
“What’s the alternative, Liam?” Harold whispered back, the words tasting like ash. “You want to try talking her down?You saw what talking gets us.”
“We could leave. Run.”
“And go where?” Harold’s eyes drifted to Lila, who was now humming a tuneless song, watching Chloe stir the soup with detached interest. “And do you think she’d let us?”
Eleanor turned from the window.Her movement was slow, stiff. She walked to the table, not with her former commanding stride, but with a tentative step, and pulled out a chair opposite Lila.She sat down, meeting her daughter’s mercury gaze.
“Lila,” Eleanor began, her voice soft, maternal.The voice from before everything. “Honey, you have to understand what you’ve done.That man… Ben… he had a family.A wife. Two little boys.”
Lila stopped humming.She tilted her head.“Did he? I couldn’t tell. He was just… noise.” She picked up the cracked wristwatch from the seat of Ben’s chair, turning it over in her hands. The second hand was stuck, jittering against the cracked crystal.“This doesn’t work anymore either.Nothing here works right. Not the clocks.Not the lights. Not the people.”
“People aren’t things to be fixed or broken, Lila!” Eleanor’s composure frayed, a crack of the old force showing.“They’re alive.They feel. You took that away.”
“Why?” Lila asked, genuine curiosity in her tone.“Why does that matter? You always told us not to worry about what other people think.To focus on ourselves.On our family. That’s what I’m doing.” She set the watch down with a click. “They weren’t family.They were a problem.I solved it.You used to like solving problems, Mom. Before you got… small.” She said the last word not as an insult, but as a clinical observation.Eleanor flinched as if struck.The truth of it was the cruelest cut. She had been solving problems, using her enhanced intellect to navigate the chaos of the Change. But her solutions had been about preservation, community, barter systems, safe zones.Not this. Never this.And now the intellect that had crafted those solutions was… ordinary. She was looking at a problem she no longer had the tools to understand.
Chloe brought a bowl of soup to the table and set it before Lila.Steam rose, smelling of salt and processed vegetables. Lila looked at it, then up at Chloe.“Aren’t you going to blow on it? It’s hot.”
Chloe blinked. “What?”
“You used to always do that when I was little.When Mom was busy. You’d blow on my soup so I wouldn’t burn my tongue.” Lila’s expression was unreadable. “Do it.”
A faint flush of anger—or was it just humiliation—colored Chloe’s cheeks. The old Chloe would have eviscerated Lila with a sarcastic remark.This Chloe just stood there, uncertain. Slowly, she bent and blew softly across the surface of the soup.
Lila watched, her silver eyes unblinking.Then she picked up the spoon, took a sip, and made a face. “It’s bland.”
“It’s all we have,” Harold said, the words thick in his throat.“Then we should get better things,” Lila declared, pushing the bowl away. It scraped loudly.She stood up, the chair screeching back.The hum in the air intensified slightly. “I’m bored.This house is boring. You’re all…” She waved a hand at them. “Finished.”
“What does that mean?” Liam demanded, stepping forward, his fists clenched.
“It means I’m going out,” Lila said, walking toward the living room. “I want to see what else is out there to edit.”
“No,” Eleanor said, standing up.It was instinct, pure and simple. A mother’s ‘no’ to a child going out after dark.The absurdity of it hung in the air.
Lila paused at the entrance to the living room.She didn’t turn around. “You’re not in charge anymore.Remember?Baseline.” She said it as a final, definitive term. “But… you can come watch if you want.Liam, you’re coming with me.”
Liam froze. “The hell I am.”
Lila turned her head just enough for him to see her profile, the silver glow painting her cheekbone.“You carry stuff. Be useful.”
“I’m not your pack mule!”
“You are if I say you are.” She continued into the living room. “Or you can stay here and be quiet with them. Your choice.”
Liam looked at Harold, at Eleanor, at the ordinary, terrified shell of Chloe.His jaw worked. The anger warred with a survival instinct he’d never needed before.He wasn’t a star athlete here. He was prey in a room with a predator. With a sound of disgust, he shoved past Harold and followed Lila into the gloom of the shattered living room.
Harold moved to go after them, but Eleanor caught his arm.Her grip was weak.Human. “We can’t stop her,” she breathed, her eyes wide with a desperate plea. “But we can’t let her go alone.We have to see. We have to know.”
Together, they trailed after their children, two shadows clinging to the wake of a silent, glowing storm.
The downtown core was a gallery of fractures.The Change had not been kind to structures designed for a world of static physics. Buildings leaned against one another like drunken giants, their facades webbed with cracks that glowed with a faint, residual phosphorescence—the ghost of the Architect’s energy. Makeshift barricades of overturned cars and filing cabinets channeled the few desperate souls still out into narrow, nervous pathways. The air smelled of wet concrete, ozone, and the sour tang of uncollected garbage.
Lila walked down the center of Main Street as if it were a red carpet. Liam trailed ten feet behind, his shoulders hunched, eyes darting.People stopped to stare from doorways and shattered windows. They pointed, they whispered.Her glow was unmistakable in the deepening twilight.
She paused at a large intersection, the heart of the small city. A semi-truck lay on its side like a beached metal whale, its trailer split open, spilling boxes of generic athletic socks across the asphalt. A group of about twenty people were picking through the wreckage, stuffing socks into bags and backpacks. A survivalist scavenging operation.They froze as Lila approached.
One man, taller than the others, with the build of a former linebacker, stood up, clutching a bundle of white socks. “This area’s claimed,” he called out, his voice trying for authority but cracking with nerves. “Move along.”
Lila ignored him.She walked up to the cab of the overturned semi. She placed a single hand on its crumpled fender. The hum that had been a background vibration swelled into a palpable drone. The metal under her palm began to shimmer, the dents smoothing out, the scratches vanishing. With a sound of shearing metal and groaning hydraulics, the fifty-ton vehicle righted itself.Tires, flattened and shredded, reinflated and sealed. The engine coughed, then roared to life, a deep, diesel thunder that echoed off the broken buildings.The crowd of scavengers stumbled back, dropping their socks.
Lila patted the fender once, like patting a dog.Then she curled her fingers under the massive front bumper. With no discernible strain, no grunt of effort, she lifted the front end of the semi-truck off the ground.The wheels dangled, spinning lazily. She held it aloft with one hand, as easily as a shopping basket.A woman screamed.
Lila turned her silver eyes on the group.She giggled. The sound was light, girlish, and it cut through the diesel rumble like a shard of ice. “Do you like my toy?”
The linebacker dropped his socks.His bravado evaporated.He took a step back, then another.
“Don’t run,” Lila said, her voice carrying without her raising it. It simply arrived in their ears, crisp and clear.“Running is rude. And I have to edit rude things.”
She swung the truck in a slow, gentle arc, holding it suspended over their heads. The shadow of the grille washed over them, a moving patch of darkness. “I think you should worship me,” Lila announced, as if suggesting they try a new game.“It seems appropriate. Go on.Get on your knees and say something nice.”
Terrified whimpers rose from the group. A young man near the edge, his eyes wild with panic, broke. He spun on his heel and sprinted down a side alley.Lila sighed, a disappointed sound. She flicked the wrist of her free hand in his direction.He made it four steps. On the fifth, his forward momentum simply ceased.His body didn’t fall.It came apart. From the soles of his feet upward, he resolved into a cloud of fine, grey dust. It bloomed in the alley mouth like a morbid puffball, then settled onto the wet asphalt, indistinguishable from the general grime.His fleeing shape was just gone.
Silence, absolute and suffocating, clamped down on the intersection.Then, as one, the remaining nineteen people sank to their knees.Some collapsed. Some lowered themselves with shaking deliberateness.A few were weeping openly, the sounds harsh and ragged.
“Louder,” Lila commanded, still gently swaying the truck. “I can’t hear you.”
A ragged chorus began. “We worship you… Praise you… You are powerful…” The words were a mess, overlapping, devoid of rhythm or faith, fueled only by primal terror.
Harold and Eleanor watched from the second-story window of a looted dentist’s office across the street. Harold’s hand was clamped over his mouth, biting down on a knuckle to keep from crying out. Eleanor stood rigid beside him, her face pale and bloodless, her fingers digging into the rotten wooden windowsill.
“We have to do something,” Harold whispered, the words muffled by his own flesh.“What?” Eleanor’s reply was a hollow exhalation. She stared at the scene below, at their daughter, a silver-lit icon of cruelty holding a truck like a toddler’s hammer.“Call the police?Reason with her? Harold, she turned a man into… into dust.She made me less. What tool do we have that she cannot unmake?”
Below, Lila was growing bored with the chanting.It was monotonous, uninspired. “You’re not very good at this,” she complained, her voice echoing strangely in the urban canyon. “Maybe you need motivation.”
She lowered the truck until its massive front tires were just a foot above the head of the kneeling linebacker.He was shaking so violently Harold could see it from their perch. A dark stain spread across the man’s jeans.“Sing a proper song,” Lila instructed. “A hymn.You know, like in church.”
The group faltered, their desperate pleas dying. They didn’t know any hymns. A woman near the back, her face streaked with dirt and tears, began to sing in a shaky, off-key voice. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”
A few others joined in, their voices trembling over the familiar melody. It was a horrifying caricary of worship, a gunpoint choir.Lila listened, her head tilted. A faint smile played on her lips.For a moment, she seemed almost moved. Then the smile sharpened into something edgier, more malicious. “It’s still not right,” she declared, cutting off the hymn mid-verse.“The feeling is wrong.It’s fear. Not love. I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
She paused, as if considering a great philosophical dilemma.The truck hovered.
“I want you to be part of me.”
Before the meaning could even register in the minds of the kneeling people—or in the horrified minds of her parents watching—Lila opened her hand.The semi-truck dropped.
There was no dramatic cry, no prolonged scream. There was a single, catastrophic, wet crunch-thud, a sound of compressing metal and obliterating biology.The ground shook. The window Harold and Eleanor leaned against rattled in its frame.Then, silence again.A profound, deafening silence.
The truck rested where nineteen people had been kneeling. From the edges of its massive tires, thick, dark liquid began to seep out, tracing the grooves in the asphalt.Lila lowered her arm. She looked at the truck, then at her own hand, flexing her fingers. She seemed to be checking for strain.There was none. She turned in a slow circle, as if expecting applause from the empty, broken buildings.Her gaze swept past the dentist’s office window. Harold and Eleanor ducked instinctively, but they felt a cold certainty that she knew they were there. That she had performed this for an audience.
When they dared to look again, Lila was walking away, down the center of the street, humming her tuneless song once more. Liam stood frozen near the alley mouth, his body rigid, his face a mask of such profound shock it looked like a separate entity from him.He was staring at the dark rivulets snaking from beneath the truck tires.
He did not follow her.He couldn’t move.Harold’s legs gave way. He slumped against the wall beneath the window, sliding down until he sat on the grimy floor. The taste of bile was sharp in his throat.He was shaking.Eleanor remained standing. She was staring at the spot where their daughter had been, but Harold saw her eyes were unfocused, looking inward. The librarian was gone now too.What was left was something raw, elemental, and shattered.
“We were wrong,” she said, her voice utterly flat.“We thought it was about strength.About intellect. About who was tallest or smartest.” A single, ragged breath hitched in her chest. “It was never about that.It was about… the permission to not care. She doesn’t have enhanced strength, Harold.Not really.She has a void.And the power flows into it. The Architect didn’t make her strong. He made her empty enough to hold the lightning.”
Down in the street, Liam finally stirred.He turned away from the truck, his movements jerky, robotic. He didn’t look back. He began walking, not after Lila, but in the opposite direction, towards the edge of town, towards the gathering night.
Harold looked from his retreating son to the monolithic, horrific tombstone his daughter had created in the town square, to the hollow shell of his wife beside him.
The problem was no longer the Change, or the Architect, or the crumbling world.The problem was Lila.
And as he sat in the dust of a dentist’s office, Harold Vance, former foreman, woodshop teacher, father, finally understood the true nature of their task. It wasn’t to survive her, or to control her, or to reason with her.It was a question older than cities, older than tools.
How do you stop a god who used to kiss you goodnight?He had no wood.He had no blueprints. He had only the quiet, desperate, and utterly baseline conviction growing in the cold hollow of his gut.
You find a way. Or you die trying.
The conviction was a cold, hard stone in Harold’s gut, but his limbs were water. He could not move from the grimy floor. Across the room, Eleanor remained standing at the window, her silhouette a still cutout against the deepening indigo of the sky. She wasn’t looking at the street anymore. Her gaze was turned inward, fixed on some null point in the past where this had all veered irreversibly off course.
“Liam,” Harold finally croaked, the name scraping his throat raw.
Eleanor didn’t turn. “He ran.”
“We have to find him.”
“And do what?” Her question held no inflection, just a flat, exhausted curiosity. “Put him between us and her? Use him as a shield? He’s smarter than that. He ran.” A shudder finally racked her frame. “He saw the editing.”
The word hung there, clinical and vile. It wasn’t murder. It was editing. Lila’s term had already infected their lexicon, a psychic stain. Harold forced himself to stand, his joints protesting. He joined Eleanor at the window, avoiding looking directly at the dark, spreading stain beneath the semi. The street was a tomb. No movement, save for a few scraps of paper caught in a faint, toxic breeze.
“We can’t stay here,” he said.
“We can’t go out there.”
“We can’t do nothing!” The shout burst from him, startling in the silence. It echoed in the empty dental suite, bouncing off the posters of smiling molars.
Eleanor flinched, finally turning to look at him. In the fading light, her face was all sharp angles and shadows, the face of a stranger. The nurturing softness, the calculating sharpness—both were scoured away, leaving this stark, exposed grief. “What is your plan, Harold? Nail her with a two-by-four? Reason with her? She turned Ben into dust and crushed nineteen people because their singing was off-key. What is your plan?”
He had none. The stone of conviction had no shape, no edges to grasp. He was a woodshop teacher. He fixed things that could be held. “We find Liam. We… we regroup. Chloe…”
“Chloe is gone,” Eleanor whispered, the words final as a slammed door. “The mind she had, the one that could have maybe… I don’t know… figured this out… it’s gone. She’s just a scared girl now. We all are.”
A low, resonant hum began to vibrate through the floorboards. It wasn’t the ambient thrum of Lila’s presence. This was deeper, more seismic. The instruments on a nearby dental tray began to chatter, a chorus of metallic teeth.
They both looked back out the window.
Down the street, a silver glow was intensifying, pulsing from the town square like a sickly heartbeat. It etched the broken buildings in stark, actinic relief. And at its center, a shape was growing.
It was Lila.
She stood in the middle of the intersection, her arms slightly spread. The silver energy wasn’t just around her now; it was pouring into her, a waterfall of lightning running in reverse up from the ground, from the cracked asphalt, from the very air. She was drinking it in. And as she did, she expanded.
It wasn’t a smooth, cinematic growth. It was a lurching, fracturing expansion. Her limbs elongated with audible, wet cracks that reverberated down the street. Her torso thickened, her shoulders broadening, splitting the remnants of her t-shirt like tissue paper. Ten feet. Twenty. The streetlights, those few still standing, now reached only to her calf. Her head rose above the two-story buildings lining the square.
“Oh, God,” Eleanor breathed, her hand finding Harold’s, crushing his fingers. Her strength was human, but her terror was superhuman.
Lila looked down at her own hands, now the size of sedans. She wiggled her fingers, and the gust of air they created rattled roofs and sent a dumpster tumbling end-over-end down an alley. A giggle bubbled up from her, a familiar, girlish sound, but amplified by the cavern of her new chest into a seismic rumble that shook the building Harold and Eleanor stood in. Plaster dust sifted from the ceiling.
“This is better,” Lila’s voice boomed, a peal of thunder shaped into words. “I can see everything from here.”
She took a step.
The impact was not a footfall. It was a localized earthquake. The asphalt under her bare foot cratered, sending a shockwave that shattered the remaining windows in the dentist’s office. Harold and Eleanor were thrown to the floor. The world outside dissolved into a cacophony of screaming car alarms, buckling metal, and panicked, distant human shouts.
When Harold pulled himself up, his ears ringing, the view had changed. Lila was no longer a girl in the square. She was a colossus astride their town. And she was bending down, her gargantuan hand reaching for the roof of O’Malley’s Pharmacy.
Her fingers, each as long as a man, closed over the peaked shingle roof. They did not grasp. They plucked. With a sound of shearing timber and snapping nails, the entire roof came away in her hand, as easily as lifting the lid from a box. She brought it close to one of her huge, silver-disc eyes, peering inside. Tiny figures scrambled in the exposed interior like ants from a disturbed nest.
“Oh, look! People hiding,” she cooed, her voice a deafening sing-song. She tilted the roof, shaking it. Several figures tumbled out, their screams insectile and thin from this distance. They fell three stories to the broken concrete below. The sound of their impact was a series of faint, final pops.
Lila giggled again, a sound of pure, unadulterated delight. She tossed the roof aside. It spun through the air and demolished the bell tower of the old Methodist church half a block away with a colossal crash of masonry and splintering wood.
“Lila! STOP!”
The voice was Harold’s. He hadn’t known he was going to shout. He was hanging halfway out the shattered window, the jagged glass digging into his ribs, screaming into the titanic storm of his daughter’s amusement. It was less than a whisper against the tumult.
But she heard.
Her head, the size of a small car, swiveled on her immense neck. Her silver gaze swept over the storefronts, hunting. It pinned the dentist’s office. A smile stretched her lips, wide and terrible. “Daddy! You came to watch!”
She took a step toward them. The ground leaped. The building groaned in protest. Harold clung to the window frame, plaster raining down around him. He saw her foot, vast and bare, descend onto a parked news van. The vehicle ceased to exist, flattened into a pancake of crumpled metal with a shriek of dying machinery. Something wet and dark squirted from the edges.
“Run,” Eleanor hissed behind him, pulling at his shirt. “Harold, run!”
But running was a concept for smaller creatures. Lila was already there. She crouched, bringing her face level with their second-story window. Her eye was a swirling maelstrom of liquid metal, bigger than their entire bathroom. Her breath was a hot, ozone-laden wind that smelled of thunderstorms and copper.
“Don’t run, Daddy. It’s rude.” Her whisper was a gale. “Watch this! I always wanted to do this with my dolls!”
She reached past their building, her arm a shadow that blotted out the failing light. Her hand closed around the water tower on the hill at the edge of town—the same rusted tower that had stood sentinel for a century. With a metallic groan that echoed for miles, she wrenched it from its steel legs. Water, thousands of gallons of it, cascaded down the hillside in a sudden, destructive tidal wave, sweeping away sheds and trees.
Lila held the massive, dripping tank aloft like a toy. Then, with a playful flick of her wrist, she threw it underhand, down Main Street.
It rolled.
The sound was beyond comprehension. A continuous, grinding, crushing roar. It flattened everything in its path: mailboxes, cars, lampposts, the remains of the barricades. A man who had been fleeing from a store was erased under its path, his existence terminated between a million-gallon steel drum and the unyielding pavement. Lila clapped her hands, the concussion knocking Harold back from the window. He landed hard on his back, the wind driven from his lungs.
“Eleanor…” he gasped.
She was pulling him up, her ordinary strength fueled by pure adrenaline. “Back stairwell. Now!”
They stumbled through the dark office, tripping over chairs, feet crunching on glass. Behind them, the world was coming apart. Each of Lila’s footfalls was a detonation. A crashing, shattering symphony followed her progress as she moved down the street, playing.
They burst out into the alley behind the building. The air was thick with pulverized brick dust and the sharp, astringent smell of ruptured gas lines. Through the gaps between buildings, they caught glimpses of the nightmare.
Lila was skipping. Her colossal feet crushed storefronts with each bounding step. She reached down and scooped up a parked city bus, her fingers punching through its roof. She peered inside. Screams, tiny and frantic, drifted out. She giggled.
“Time for everyone to get off!”
She held the bus in both hands and pulled. The metal screeched, deformed, and then tore in two with a sound like a dying leviathan. People tumbled out from both halves, a spill of tiny, writhing forms. Some hit the street and lay still. Others tried to crawl. Lila dropped the halves and brought her foot down in a careful, almost delicate stomp. The crawling figures vanished. She lifted her foot, examined the red paste and twisted metal stuck to her sole, and wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Messy.”
She moved on, her attention caught by the town hall clock tower. She wrapped her hand around its middle and squeezed. The brick and limestone crumbled in her grip like stale cake. The clock face imploded, gears and springs spraying into the air like metallic confetti.
Harold and Eleanor ran, not with purpose, but with the blind, panicked instinct of mice fleeing a collapsing barn. They ducked behind a overturned delivery truck, its cargo of baked goods strewn and trampled. Harold’s chest burned. Every crash, every giggle that shook the earth, was a fresh nail in the coffin of his old life. He wasn’t a father. He was a witness to a geological event that wore his daughter’s face.
“We have to get out of the town center,” Eleanor panted, her hair matted with dust. “She’s… playing. She’ll get bored or… or she’ll decide to redecorate this whole block.”
A shadow fell over them, cold and immense.
They looked up.
Lila was leaning over, peering down into their alley. Her hair hung around her face like curtains of night, her silver eyes pinpointing them from a hundred feet up. “There you are! I lost you.” She sounded genuinely put out. “Don’t hide. It spoils the game.”
Her hand descended, not to crush, but to corral. It was a wall of flesh and bone sweeping through the alley, smashing the walls of the buildings on either side. Bricks cascaded around them. Harold grabbed Eleanor and dove into a recessed doorway as the gigantic fingers, each as thick as a tree trunk, curled around the delivery truck they’d been hiding behind. She lifted it, tires spinning uselessly.
“Hmm,” she boomed, examining the truck. She shook it. More pastries and loaves of bread rained down. Disappointed, she crushed it in her fist. The metal compacted with a shriek, and she tossed the ball of scrap aside. It demolished the facade of a boutique.
Her attention snapped back to their alley. “I know! Let’s play tag! You’re it!”
Her finger, a blunted pillar, shot toward their hiding place. It didn’t touch them. It stabbed into the brick wall two feet from their heads, punching a hole clean through to the next street. Mortar and debris showered them. The giggle was deafening.
They ran again, scrambling over rubble, slipping on the sugary mess of crushed pastries. Harold’s mind had gone quiet, reduced to a single, primal loop: Not that way. Move. Hide. Breathe.
They spilled out onto a wider cross-street, a residential avenue. It was marginally less decimated, but the terror here was fresher. People were fleeing, screaming, dragging children, abandoning cars that were hopelessly jammed. All movement was away from the town square, away from the giggling thunder.
And then, against the flow, a figure was running toward it.
Liam.
His face was a rictus of fury and tear-streaked filth. He held a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, his old varsity trophy, in his white-knuckled hands. He wasn’t running to Lila. He was running toward the destruction, into the heart of the roaring chaos.
“LIAM! NO!” Eleanor’s scream was a ragged tear in her throat.
He either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He vaulted over a low garden wall and sprinted across a manicured lawn, heading for the next street over where the shadow of the giant fell.
“The idiot,” Harold choked out. “The brave, stupid idiot.”
They changed direction, chasing their son into the valley of the shadow. They rounded a corner and the scene opened up before them.
They were at the edge of a small neighborhood park. On the far side, Lila was on her knees, her giant hands busy. She had uprooted the old oak tree that once hosted little league team picnics. She was peeling the limbs from its trunk, one by one, with meticulous, childish focus. Each tear was a sound of heartbreak. Around her, the park was a hellscape. The swing set was a pretzel of melted steel. The slide was bent in half. And there were… pieces. Things Harold’s mind refused to fully process, but which the light from the burning hardware store painted in stark, terrible detail.
Liam didn’t hesitate. He ran right up to the titanic knee that was taller than his house. He screamed, wordless, a raw animal sound of absolute rage, and swung the bat with all his might against his sister’s shin.
The crack of the bat on her skin was like a firework. A tiny, insignificant firework.
Lila stopped peeling the tree. She looked down, her expression one of mild annoyance, as if bothered by a mosquito. She spotted Liam, a red-faced, screaming figure at her feet, drawing back for another useless swing.
“Liam,” her voice rumbled, a mix of affection and exasperation. “You’re so loud.”
She flicked a finger at him. It was the barest motion, a casual dismissal.
The force of it was like a cannon blast. Liam was lifted off his feet and hurled backward across the park. He sailed through the air, limbs flailing, and crashed through the clapboard wall of a craftsman-style home with a sickening crunch of wood and bone. He did not get up.
A sound escaped Eleanor, a silent, mouth-open wail that held all the air in the world.
Lila sighed, a gust that shook the trees she hadn’t yet destroyed. “He always spoiled the fun.” She went back to her tree, snapping the trunk in two now, discarding the pieces.
Harold stood frozen, the stone in his gut melting into a pool of liquid nitrogen. His son was gone. Thrown away. His daughter was a mountain of giggling malice. His wife was a ghost beside him. The woodshop teacher had no wood. The father had no children.
Lila stood up, brushing bark and dirt from her colossal hands. She surveyed her work: the crushed town center, the flattened park, the burning buildings, the screaming, running dots that were the survivors. She placed her hands on her hips, a gesture so familiarly, childhoodly Lila that it broke Harold all over again.
“It’s still not right,” she announced to the burning sky. “It’s too… brown. And breakable.”
She looked down at her own body, at the silvery, towering form. An idea visibly dawned on that vast, terrifying face. A smile of pristine, wicked inspiration.
“I know,” she whispered, and the whisper was a hurricane.
She closed her eyes. The silver light that suffused her began to churn violently, pulling inward, condensing. The air itself seemed to be sucked toward her, howling down the streets in a sudden, fierce wind that extinguished some fires and fed others. The ground beneath her feet buckled and sank, unable to bear the shifting, intensifying mass.
She was growing again.
It was faster this time. Her fifty-foot frame swelled, her outlines blurring in a nimbus of furious energy. Sixty feet. Seventy. Her head rose above the three-story bank building, then above the town’s tallest structure, the five-story old hotel. The streets became mere cracks beneath her. The parked cars were colorful beetles. The fleeing people were nothing more than scurrying grains of rice.
At one hundred feet tall, she stopped.
The town lay at her feet like a discarded playset. She took a deep, satisfied breath that sounded like a jet engine spooling up. The giggle that followed was the deep, resonant boom of glacial ice calving into the sea.
“Much better,” her voice declared, a peal of god-thunder that shattered every remaining window for a mile. “Now I can really play.”
She lifted her foot, a continent of flesh and bone, over a block of tightly packed Victorian homes. She held it there for a moment, savoring the anticipation. Down below, in the toy-sized streets, Harold Vance saw the shadow consume the world.
And then she brought it down.