Chapter 2: Towering Over the Blockade
The world had become a model railway layout, painstakingly detailed and pathetically small. The trek through the industrial park behind the ruined mall was a slow-motion nightmare of careful steps and constant, low-grade destruction. Danny led, Jenna a half-step behind, with the others—Megan, a quiet older woman named Rita, a teenager named Chloe who hadn’t stopped trembling—trailing in a ragged, silent line.
They moved between warehouses like giants in a canyon of corrugated steel. The asphalt underfoot, designed for eighteen-wheelers, was their only stable ground. Everything else was obstacle or casualty. A chain-link fence became a tangled bracelet around an ankle. A delivery van parked beside a loading dock was a soft, crunching thing under a misplaced footstep, the alarm bleating once before being silenced by tons of pressure.
The dust from the mall’s collapse still coated their skin, a gritty second layer. Danny felt it in the creases of her palms, gritty against her teeth. Her nakedness was no longer a shock, just a fact, like the deep ache in her muscles from holding herself in constant, unnatural caution. The wind at this height was a constant, chilly presence, whispering secrets across thirty feet of exposed skin.
They reached the edge of the industrial zone, where it bled into a wider service road and then a major six-lane intersection. Beyond it lay a sprawl of low-rise office complexes and, further, the dendritic veins of suburban streets that might, impossibly, lead towards home.
The intersection was a still-life of abandoned panic. Cars were frozen in a permanent gridlock, their doors hanging open. A city bus had mounted the median, its front end buried in a shattered lamppost. Shopping carts from a nearby big-box store lay on their sides like giant, skeletal insects, their wheels spinning lazily in the breeze. The silence was dense, broken only by the distant, Dopplered wail of a siren and the low hum of power lines.And then, movement.
From behind the hulking silhouette of a collapsed furniture warehouse, they rolled out: five sand-colored Humvees and, with a deeper, diesel grumble, a single M1 Abrams tank. They formed a rough line across the wide service road, blocking the way to the intersection. The tank’s long gun, depressingly small from Danny’s height but ominously precise, swung towards them. Turret hatches flipped open. Men in uniform stood, their faces pale smudges under helmets, their hands clutching mounted machine guns or the rims of hatches.
A figure emerged from the lead Humvee, a man with a loudspeaker. His voice, amplified and frayed with static, cut the air.
“CEASE MOVEMENT! REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE!”
Danny stopped. Her shadow, long in the late afternoon sun, fell across the lead vehicle, swallowing it in cool darkness. The others halted behind her, a wall of tense, dusty flesh. She could feel their fear, a palpable heat radiating from them.
The man with the loudspeaker lowered it, then raised it again. “You are in a restricted zone! You will comply with instructions! Sit down! Sit down on the ground immediately!”
Sit down. The absurdity of it almost made her laugh. To sit would be to collapse onto the road, a seismic event that would likely crush a Humvee and kill the man giving the order. It was an instruction from a world that no longer applied.
“We’re just trying to get out of the way,” Danny called down, her voice a low, rolling thunder that made the soldiers flinch. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“The only way out is via designated containment! You will sit and await processing!”
“Processing?” Jenna muttered from behind. “Like we’re mail?”
Danny kept her eyes on the tank’s gun barrel. It was trained on her midsection. She had no idea what a tank shell would do to her at this scale. Vaporize her? Tear a hole she could step through? The not knowing was a cold stone in her gut.
Then, the tingling began.
It wasn't the deep hum of the first time, or the sharp, violent wire of the second. This was different. A coldness, first, seeping up from the earth itself through the soles of her feet. A cold that turned to a prickling vibration, fierce and focused, climbing her shins with the speed of a lit fuse.
“No,” she breathed.“Not now. Not here.”
But it was undeniable.The world lurched. Again.
For the others, it was another violent doubling. She watched as Jenna’s face, already thirty feet above the ground, shot upwards, a mask of fresh terror. Bones elongated with sounds like timber straining. Skin stretched, taut and shiny, over suddenly massive frames. The shopping carts near their feet were kicked aside like bottle caps. The warehouse beside them now seemed squat, its roof barely reaching their thighs.
They were sixty feet tall. Beings from a myth, towering over the intersection. The tank was now a toy at their shins, the Humvees like children’s blocks.
A collective gasp, half-pain, half-shock, escaped the group. Megan let out a sob that was a gust of wind. “Make it stop! Please, make it stop!”
But for Danny, it didn’t stop.
The cold, prickling surge didn’t plateau. It kept climbing, a wave of impossible transformation cresting in her marrow. While the others groaned and stabilized at their new, horrific height, Danny felt herself continuing to ascend. Her perspective detached, surreal. The sixty-foot-tall women beside her began to shrink relative to her. Jenna’s aghast face was now level with her shoulder, then her chest.
The soldiers were screaming. The man with the loudspeaker dropped it, the feedback screeching before it died. The tank’s gun elevated frantically, tracking upwards as its target grew beyond its intended range of motion.
Danny’s body was a landscape of agony and expansion. Her skeleton was a city under construction, girders thrusting skyward. Her ligaments were bridges snapping and re-knitting with brutal efficiency. The air grew colder as she rose further from the warmed earth. The familiar rooftops of the office complexes became a textured carpet, then a map. The distant downtown skyline, once a jagged silhouette, now revealed the individual windows of its upper floors.She finally halted.
The world was miniature, achingly detailed, and unfathomably far below. She stood seventy-five feet tall. Her shadow stretched for a city block, a vast pool of cool darkness that engulfed the entire military blockade. Jenna and the others stood around her knees and thighs, looking up, their faces etched with a new kind of awe that bordered on terror.Of her.
She looked down. The tank was the size of a loaf of bread. The soldiers were fleeing their vehicles, scrambling over the asphalt, their movements frantic and insect-like. One of the Humvees, abandoned in panic, began to roll slowly backwards, crashing into a streetlight with a tiny, crunching sound.
The silence that followed was immense. The wind up here had a different voice, a cleaner, lonelier howl. Her own breathing was a deep, rhythmic bellows, each inhale pulling in gallons of thin, cold air. Her heart was a bass drum in a cavern of ribs, each beat a slow, deliberate thud she felt in her throat.
“Danny?” Jenna’s voice was a shout from far below, small against the vastness. “Can you… can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” Danny replied. Her own voice startled her. It was lower, resonant, a vibration that seemed to travel through the ground itself. She saw the fleeing soldiers flinch, clapping hands over their ears.
She focused on the tiny figures. They were regrouping, clustering behind the overturned Humvee. One was speaking frantically into a radio. The tank, unmanned, sat inert.
The power dynamic had shattered. They were not just tall women to be contained. She was a geographic feature. A living landmass. The thought was isolating, dizzying.
A new sensation announced itself: a raging, hollow hunger, so intense it felt like her stomach was trying to digest her own spine. The calories burned in the last hour must have been in the tens of thousands. Her metabolism was a furnace screaming for fuel. At the same time, a deep, pervasive heat built within her—not a fever, but the thermodynamic result of a body the size of a house, struggling to cool itself. She felt sweat begin to bead on her vast back, evaporating almost instantly in the wind.
“We need to move,” Danny said, forcing her thoughts into practical channels. “Before they call in something bigger. Before we pass out from hunger.”
“Move where?” Rita, the older woman, called up. Her voice was strained. “At this size? We’ll break the city.”
“Then we don’t go through the city,” Danny said. Her eyes scanned the horizon, thinking in macro terms. The industrial park backed onto a wide, concrete-lined flood control channel. Beyond that were the city’s outskirts: power lines, scrubland, the wide, grey ribbons of the freeway. “The river channel.The banks are wide. No buildings. It leads out to the basin.”
It was a plan. It was something.
Taking a step now was an act of profound consequence. She lifted her foot, a column of flesh and bone as massive as a silo. The asphalt where it had rested was cratered, a web of fractures radiating outwards. She placed it down a hundred feet away, in the empty intersection itself. The impact was a deep, booming whump. The ground shuddered. Cars near the impact point bounced on their suspensions. The lamppost beside the crashed bus swayed violently.
She was a force of nature now. A walking earthquake.
The others followed, their own steps less cataclysmic than hers, but still devastating. Four more craters, four more shockwaves. The sound was a series of rolling concussions. Windows in the office complexes across the road shattered spontaneously, raining glass in a glittering cascade.
They reached the edge of the flood channel. It was a vast, concrete trench, maybe fifty yards wide, with a trickle of brown water at its center. The banks were sloped concrete, stained with tide lines and graffiti. It was perfect.
Danny stepped down into it. The concrete wall came up to her mid-calf. The sensation of coolness from the shaded channel was a relief against her overheated skin. She started walking, the trickle of water barely covering her feet, flowing around her ankles like a shallow creek.
The others descended behind her, a procession of titans in a concrete gorge. They fell into a rhythm, their strides eating distance. The city began to peel away on either side, replaced by the backs of warehouses, then scrubby trees, then open land.
The hunger was a sharp, screaming void. Danny’s vision swam momentarily. She saw a copse of trees ahead, growing from a crack in the channel’s edge. Without thinking, she reached down, wrapped her hand around the trunk of a mature eucalyptus, and pulled. Roots tore from the earth with a sound like velcro magnified a thousand times. She lifted the twenty-foot tree, brought it to her mouth, and bit.
The taste was bitter, green, and overwhelming. She chewed, the fibrous mass a challenge even for her jaw. It wasn’t food. It was fuel. The others saw her and followed suit, ripping up trees, shrubs, anything organic. The channel banks were stripped bare in minutes, leaving raw earth.
It was grotesque.It was necessary. They were no longer consumers. They were locusts.
The helicopters found them again, skimming the edges of the channel, keeping a wary distance. Danny ignored them, focusing on the mechanics of movement, of survival. The sun began to set, casting long, distorted shadows of giants down the concrete canyon, painting them in shades of orange and deep purple.
As darkness seeped into the sky, they reached a wider part of the basin. The concrete gave way to natural earth banks. The city was a glow on the horizon, a distant fever dream.
Jenna drew level with Danny’s knee, her face pale in the twilight. “What happened back there? You kept going. We stopped. Why?”
Danny looked down at her, then at her own hands, vast and capable of tearing down buildings. “I don’t know,” she said, the truth a cold weight in her chest. “But it means the rules are different for me.”
The implications hung in the darkening air, unspoken. If the growth was ongoing, unstable, then there was no ceiling. There was only the sky, and the terrible, lonely prospect of outgrowing even the earth itself.
In the distance, a new set of lights appeared, not the winking navigation lights of helicopters, but bright, fixed points on the ground, arrayed in a wide perimeter across the basin ahead.Larger vehicles. More soldiers. A larger containment.Danny stopped. The others stopped behind her. The wind carried the faint diesel rumble of heavy machinery.
They were being herded. Contained not by walls, but by geography and force.
Danny felt the cold tingling in her feet again, faint, but unmistakable. A precursor. A threat.Or a promise.
She stared at the lights blocking their path, the vast, empty basin around them, and the incomprehensible sky above. The anchor of her dry humor was gone, burned away in the furnace of her metabolism. All that was left was a terrible, scaling pragmatism.
“They’re not letting us through,” she said, her voice a low rumble in the gathering dark.
“What do we do?” Jenna asked, her question a whisper swallowed by the scale of everything.
Danny looked at her own hands again, then at the distant lights. The hunger gnawed. The heat simmered. The tingling persisted.
She didn’t answer. She just started walking forward, toward the lights, each step a declaration written in crumbling earth. The others, after a moment’s hesitation, followed. The story of what they would do next would not be written by men with loudspeakers and tank barrels. It would be written by the ground beneath their feet, by the limits of their bodies, and by the terrifying, unknowable force that was still, deep inside her, very much awake.
The story would be written by the ground beneath their feet, by the limits of their bodies, and by the terrifying, unknowable force that was still, deep inside her, very much awake.
The lights ahead weren’t just flashlights. They were the harsh, white beams of stadium lights mounted on heavy trucks, forming a glaring, semicircular barricade across the widest part of the dry basin. Behind them, silhouetted against their own glare, were the bulky shapes of armored vehicles—not just Humvees, but hulking MRAPs and trucks with strange, skeletal antennae. The diesel rumble was a constant, idling threat. A voice, digitally amplified and stripped of all humanity, boomed across the distance.
“YOU ARE ENTERING A FEDERAL QUARANTINE ZONE. HALT AND ASSUME A PRONE POSITION. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.”
“Prone,” Jenna scoffed, her voice strained. “They want us to belly-flop? We’d cause a tidal wave in this trickle.”
Danny said nothing. She was listening to the silence inside her own bones. The faint, cold tingling in her feet had not subsided. It was a constant, whispering static, a held breath in her marrow. It wasn’t the violent surge of before. It was a patient, humming potential. The hunger was a sharper distraction, a gnawing hollow that made the world seem thin and brittle. The tree pulp in her gut was already gone, metabolized into nothing.
“They’ve learned,” Rita said, her voice a dry rasp. “No more asking us to sit. Now it’s lie down. Make ourselves smaller.”
“We can’t go back,” Chloe, the teenager, whimpered. She was hugging her own ribs, her eyes wide pools reflecting the distant lights. “The city… we’d wreck it. We’d wreck everything.”
“We can’t go forward either,” Megan snapped, gesturing at the wall of light. “They’ll shoot us. Or gas us. Or something worse.”
The options were a funnel, tightening. Danny stared at the lights until purple afterimages bloomed in her vision. The military had chosen this basin for a reason. It was a natural bowl, a kill box. Contained. Her earlier, scaling pragmatism calcified into something colder. They were being processed as a problem of logistics and force. A threat to be neutralized.
The tingling in her feet intensified. A fresh wave of cold, not from the night air, but from within, spiraled up her ankles. This time, it carried no pain. It carried a terrifying, liquid strength. It felt like the moment before a leap, the coiled tension in a spring. Her body was not asking permission.
“Something’s happening,” she said, her voice low.
“Again?” Jenna’s question was pure dread.
Danny didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The sensation was accelerating, a silent crescendo building in the architecture of her legs. She looked down at the others, their upturned faces etched with fear and exhaustion. She saw the cracks in the dry earth between her own colossal feet. She saw the tiny, brave, futile line of lights.
And a new thought, clear and sharp as a shard of glass, cut through the fear: They are so small.
The growth wasn’t a lurch. It was an ascent.
The world fell away. Not in a violent jerk, but in a smooth, relentless withdrawal. The concrete channel walls, which had risen to her calves, shrank to mere curbstones. Jenna’s face, level with her knee a moment ago, plummeted downward. A gasp, collective and distant, wafted up from below. The sixty-foot-tall women were becoming figurines, their details blurring, their forms receding.
Danny’s perspective vertigo was absolute. The stadium lights were no longer a barricade; they were a line of bright dots on the ground, their beams now angling up to barely reach her shins. The armored vehicles were children’s toys, meticulously detailed but utterly insignificant. The vast basin itself seemed to shrink, its far edges drawing closer. The city glow on the horizon lifted, becoming a closer, more intimate tapestry of light and shadow.
Her skin hummed. The air at this new altitude was thinner, colder, rushing over her with a new insistence. The heat of her massive body bled into it, creating a subtle, shimmering distortion around her. She felt… light. Powerful. The gnawing hunger was still there, but it was secondary to the sheer, staggering fact of her scale.
She was one hundred feet tall.
Her head brushed the low, swift clouds scudding in from the coast. A commercial airliner on its descent path a few miles away suddenly seemed like a peer, not a distant object. She could see the individual windows of skyscrapers downtown, could trace the serpentine lines of freeways clogged with frozen headlights. The world was a diorama, a intricate, silent model laid out for her inspection.
“Danny?” The voice was a faint, tinny shout, barely audible over the wind. Jenna. A speck of color and movement near her ankle.
Danny looked down. The act of tilting her head sent a minor gale sweeping down her torso. The women below staggered, bracing against the sudden wind. They were ant-like, their faces upturned pale ovals. The fear was still there, but it was mingled with something else now: a profound, distancing awe. They weren’t just looking at a taller woman. They were looking at a phenomenon.
The amplified voice from the military line crackled again, tinny and absurdly weak. “CEASE ALL MOVEMENT! YOU ARE IN VIOLATION—”
Danny took a step.
It was a casual, almost experimental step. She lifted her foot, a monolithic slab of flesh and bone the size of a shipping container, and placed it down a hundred and fifty feet forward, directly in the center of the dry riverbed. The impact was a deep, resonant THOOM that vibrated through the bedrock. A shockwave of dirt and dust exploded outward in a perfect ring. The ground didn’t just crack; it liquefied for a moment, then settled into a crater large enough to swallow a house. The sound that followed was not just the crash, but the groan of settling earth and the distant, panicked revving of engines.
The voice from the loudspeaker died mid-sentence.
A strange, buoyant sensation filled Danny’s chest. It wasn’t joy. It was supremacy. The blockade was a line of twigs. The orders were the buzzing of gnats. Her problems—the hunger, the fatigue, the fear—didn’t vanish, but they transformed. They were the problems of a mountain, not a molehill. Logistics for a god.
“You’re… you’re still growing,” Megan called up, her voice trembling. “Just you.”
Danny looked at her own hand, turning it slowly in the air. It could enclose one of those armored trucks. It could pluck the antennae from their vehicles like pulling weeds. The tingling had settled into a warm, steady thrum, a dormant volcano. It was hers. This was hers.
“They can’t stop this,” Danny said. Her voice wasn’t a shout. It was a low, carrying pronouncement, a weather event. It rolled across the basin, drowning out the idling engines. “They can’t stop me.”
“Danny, be careful,” Jenna pleaded. “Please. Think.”
“I am thinking,” Danny replied, and her tone had a new edge, a dismissive coolness. “I’m thinking they want us to lie down in a ditch. I’m thinking that’s not going to happen.”
She took another step, this one more deliberate. She aimed for a space between two clusters of lights. The ground shuddered again. A military truck near the impact zone, caught in the seismic ripple, tilted onto two wheels before crashing back down. Men scrambled like disturbed beetles.
The power was intoxicating. It went to her head like a strong, clean drug. The helplessness of the mall, the vulnerability of nakedness, the careful, terrifying steps through the city—they were memories from another, smaller life. She was no longer navigating a world that didn’t fit. She was defining a new one by her mere presence. The awe on the faces below wasn’t just from the others; she could see it in the frantic movements of the soldiers, in the way the spotlights now wavered, trying to track her impossible form.
“What’s the plan?” Rita shouted, her practicality straining against the surreality.
“The plan,” Danny said, gazing over the lights towards the dark hills beyond, “is to walk.” She said it as if stating a fundamental law. “They’ll get out of the way. Or they won’t.”
“Danny, no!” Jenna’s cry was sharp with fear. “You can’t just… step over them! People are down there!”
“They have legs,” Danny said, her gaze fixed ahead. “They can move.”
The callousness of it hung in the air, colder than the night wind. The other women exchanged horrified glances. This wasn’t the pragmatic, dry-humored Danny who’d led them from the mall. This was someone else, someone whose perspective had been stretched and skewed along with her body.
The military line was reacting. The spotlights converged on her, bathing her in blinding white. A different, more piercing sound cut the air—a warning siren, rising and falling.
“FINAL WARNING! ASSUME A PRONE POSITION OR WE WILL USE NON-LETHAL MEASURES!”
Non-lethal. The term was a joke. What was non-lethal to a hundred-foot-tall woman? Tear gas? Rubber bullets? They were grains of sand.
A new sound joined the chorus: a thick, rhythmic thwump-thwump-thwump. From behind the line of lights, two dark shapes rose—helicopters, but larger, heavier than the news choppers. Their side doors were open. Figures moved inside.
Danny felt a flicker of her old caution, a ghost of the woman who worried about ceiling tiles. Then it was smothered by the vast, humming certainty in her veins. She was a fact. They were an inconvenience.
“They’re going to shoot,” Chloe screamed, ducking instinctively.
Danny didn’t duck. She watched, curious. Let them try.
The helicopters split, coming at her from two sides. From the open doors, launchers coughed. Not missiles. Canisters. They tumbled through the air, trailing smoke, arcing towards her.
They burst against her thigh and shoulder with soft, wet pops. Not explosions. Splatters. A thick, gelatinous, neon-orange liquid sprayed across her skin. It was instantly, overwhelmingly sticky. It smelled of chemical cherries and burning rubber. The goo stretched and clung, pinning her arm momentarily to her torso, gumming up the fingers of her left hand.
Foam. Industrial-strength adhesive foam. They were trying to glue her in place.
A laugh erupted from Danny’s chest, a sound so deep and booming it shook loose a small avalanche of dirt from the basin’s walls. It was a laugh of pure, unadulterated disbelief. This was their solution? To tag her like a graffiti artist?
Annoyance flared, hot and quick. She flexed her arm. The drying foam, strong enough to immobilize a tank, cracked with a sound like a glacier calving. Great sheets of orange polymer peeled away from her skin, falling to the earth in sticky, house-sized globs. She wiped her hand down her thigh, scraping off the residue. It was nothing. A nuisance.
The helicopters hovered, uncertain. The voice on the loudspeaker was silent.
The annoyance crystallized into something harder. They had dared to try and bind her. To limit her. A hot, territorial anger rose in her throat. This was her path. Their lights were in her way.
“You had your warning,” she murmured, the words a private rumble.
She didn’t step towards the lights. She stepped on them.
It was not a stamp of rage, but a slow, deliberate placement. She raised her right foot, the one clean of foam, and brought it down in the very center of the semicircular barricade. She didn’t aim for the vehicles. She aimed for the space between them, for the heart of their defiance.
The effect was cataclysmic. The earth swallowed the nearest stadium lights in an instant, plunging that section of the line into darkness. The ground shockwave hit like a localized earthquake. MRAPs were tossed onto their sides like toys. The Humvees skidded and flipped. The cacophony was immense—rending metal, shattering glass, the whump of exploding tires, and the tiny, sharp screams of men.
Danny lifted her foot. A perfect, deep imprint of her sole was etched into the basin floor, filled with twisted metal, shattered plastic, and flickering electrical sparks. A river of spilled fuel glistened in the moonlight, snaking from the wreckage.
Silence, again. But this was a shocked, broken silence. The remaining spotlights swung wildly, illuminating the destruction. The two helicopters banked hard and retreated, their thumping rotors fading into a frantic retreat.
Behind her, the other women were utterly still. Jenna’s hand was over her mouth. Megan was openly weeping. Rita stared, her face a stone.
Danny looked at the carnage, at the tiny figures scrambling from the wreckage. She felt a distant pang, a ghost of empathy, but it was muffled, buried under layers of towering flesh and the humming power in her blood. They had chosen to be in her way. They were ants who had built their hill on a fault line.
“Come on,” she said, her voice devoid of its earlier warmth. It was a command, not an invitation. She turned and began walking, her strides consuming the landscape, leaving craters that would become permanent lakes. The path was clear now. The lights were gone, replaced by fire and chaos.
The others hesitated for only a second. To stay was to be left in the dark, surrounded by the military’s wrath. To follow was to walk in the shadow of a force of nature that was once their friend. They moved, their own steps timid and careful compared to her world-shaping gait, following the trail of her footprints, each one a steaming chasm in the earth.
Danny didn’t look back. The wind at this height was a clean, roaring river. The hunger was a sharp, clarifying pain. The tingling in her feet was a quiet, satisfied song. She looked ahead, to the dark hills and the open land beyond. The world was small. She was not. And for the first time since the tingling began, she felt, not fear, but a terrifying, exhilarating sense of fitting perfectly into a new and vast scale. It was a feeling that left no room for anything, or anyone, else.