Best Laid Plans (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

Far below, the mood was decidedly less placid. While Nicole was creating a well-deserved spa treatment for herself after so many nights of sleeping rough and drug-addled experiments, the miles of urban space below where she’d chosen to plant and drag her bare feet were thickly populated with life thrown into sudden horrified chaos. The millions of people the eighty-mile-tall homeless test subject was unknowingly threatening to squish beneath her tired soles would never have known Nicole existed if not for this unforeseeable twist in the experiment, but now she was the entire focus of their puny limited lives.

They looked up in terror from rooftops and traffic-jammed streets alike at the confused and oblivious face of this African-American stranger, beautiful but exhausted and tainted by grime. Of course, the only way they could see her face in the clouds was to gaze between the monumental and much-closer canyons of her mile-long toes, which darkened the city street grid just before cruising down to punch craters in the bedrock under the fleshy ringed bulbs of her toepads. Nearly as intimidating as her size was the omnipresent stench of her feet which smoked over the city in a pungent haze, earthy and sour with congealed sweat and packed-on dirt layers. Most people doubled over, coughing and wheezing at the trashy aroma, though the force of the odor was nothing compared to the godlike might of Nicole’s nonchalantly gliding feet themselves.

With her toes spread, the giantess raked skyscrapers and whole suburbs into the wide tender valley of dusky skin between her mud-coated digits, while her soles drove afterward, pulverizing everything else in its ten-mile wake. Whether made of plywood or stainless steel, every structure in the way of Nicole’s oncoming peds was reduced to splinters, and that went for the speck-sized people too. In a flash, thousands of screaming civilians were swept into ash and shadow when the unknown woman’s feet reached through the downtown area, grabbing neighborhoods in her digits and squeezing them into mealy rubble like urban toejam, all because it felt good on her abused blister-dotted soles.

After several minutes of hysterical destruction, the end-times grind of the mystery colossus’s scraping through civilization abruptly halted. The few survivors of the districts she’d actively slaked her soles across, or neighborhoods she’d picked up and crunched by the dozen amidst her dirt-spattered toes, didn’t even realize they were temporarily spared at first, given the trauma brought on by the quaking of bedrock, the ear-splitting crash of heels striking ground, and the impenetrable wall of dust kicked up like forest fire smoke by the simplest flick of Nicole’s rounded pinky toe. Most of the “lucky” people scattered through these smote ruins in the shape of ten-mile footprints remained in hiding, crying and cowering with the belief they’d be flattened under callused feminine skin in mere moments. And they were probably correct about that.

Those in the adjoining parts of the metropolis, however, rejoiced at the sudden break in violence, having witnessed the destruction from afar, but still more than close enough to see the homeless giantess’s smooth brown feet wreaking unfathomable havoc, and know that if this continued in their direction, they too would perish just as quickly, scrunched into sole-creases and folds of grungy flesh betwixt her toes. All it would take was one megaton foot to cruise through, luxuriously kneading those filthy foot skin cells using a thousand rooftop weathervanes like ticklish spa carpeting, and a million more lives would vanish in a fiery instant.

For all the people fortunate enough to be standing in streets untouched by Nicole’s oblivious peds, there was cheering and hugging between strangers, though shortly afterward, they recalled that nearby boroughs had just been annihilated with just a few tender caresses from a sky-high woman’s soft yet debris-coated and apocalyptically smelly feet, and so they swiftly took refuge inside buildings and in basements, despite knowing how useless it was to try to find protection from a bare foot that could bend the thickest fortress walls like blades of grass without even trying. Still they hoped.

The celebrations proved to be short-lived, since the only reason Nicole’s feet had departed the door mat of the city was to give herself leverage to stand. A weary groan sounded from miles outside the town borders like distant thunder, and hundreds of thousands of tiny eyes peeped in terror through windows of fragile homes and office buildings. Past the clearing fog of ash brought on my Nicole’s arches so effortlessly rolling through districts like a pair of steamrollers, they spied the giantess herself, in the fullness of her eighty-mile scale. Even from so far away, she was truly a sight to behold, and citizens that had already been horrified to their cores by the wanton rampage of those island-mass soles and battering-ram toes now had no choice but to swoon in utter disbelief at the mythic sight of the dirty, shabbily-dressed, goddess-stature woman standing so high above them. Her earthen feet were already larger than any single construct they could ever conceive, with mile-wide digits and rubbery wrinkles in the weathered ped’s underbelly deeper than many natural rivers. Just trying to imagine an entire girl, not just a body part, of such astronomic scope was beyond the imaginations of most people, though Nicole was about to inadvertently help them understand, when she took a step toward them.

One stride was all it took to close the gulf between. In one moment, the black-haired mega-woman was a towering mirage, too massive to comprehend and perhaps not even real, strange as it appeared to see her veiled through the destruction-clouds she herself had raked with ten-mile-long feet, the sun wreathed behind her head like a halo. Then in the next heartbeat, she was upon them, not even walking quickly, but forty-mile legs could carry a person deliriously far at even a lazy gait. Her naked foot, now just as dirtied by mud as well as a sprinkling of thousands of deceased civilians, overshadowed more untouched silver patchworks of high-rise buildings, architecture that had taken a hundred years and billions of dollars to create.

All of that manmade progress, plus another half-million innocent lives wailing for mercy from an unlistening higher power, were wiped out in Nicole’s first skin-to-loam contact, and that was even before she’d fully pressed her sole flush to the ground. The ball of her foot was plenty to bowl a crater into the planet’s crust, imploding multiple square miles of populated cityscape at once, while the urban geography that just barely missed being directly squashed was instead bounced upward, breaking apart like jumping pebbles in the midst of a seismic event, which of course this qualified for, given the sheer tectonic-tremoring force Nicole could generate with even a modestly confident stomp.

Everything below this broad appendage too was smushed into creamed wreckage, and given that the girl was now barreling down with the full weight of her body rather than just a lithely extended leg, the crushing pressure was all the more overwhelming, driving the once-proud square mileage deep into the earth in the distinct foot-carved crater. Once she’d taken just one step, too, the girl commenced strolling in a straight line, touching her toes to the heel of the opposite ped. If the people below didn’t know any better, they’d almost have guessed she was giving herself a sobriety test, unsteadily walking a perfectly straight line that coincidentally also managed to clear out dozens more districts of the city, though of course not many people were concerned with deciphering the odd pattern of her trampling path, when they were so busy being extinguished under the various firm, lethally-smelly portions of her blistered sole flesh.

“See? See how I can walk straight? Nothing’s wrong with me at all!” Nicole bellowed, though none of her underfoot victims could guess whom she was speaking toward. Her voice, despite its reverberating power, seemed strangely uncertain and even loopy, considering the world-breaking might she held in her feet, both in their mammoth weight and the putrid, hazardous stench hanging from her unclean body that created a risk of plague on its own, even without having to smash her unseen victims to particles. “Can the experiment be over now? Did… I pass the test?”

Nicole walked short laps, back and forth, consciously choosing to keep her bare feet on the soothing spread of the city, totally unaware that it wasn’t a comforting lichen growth, but in fact the same town where she’d spent the last several years of her life without a place to call her own. In almost no time flat, the place was rendered a flat blown-out warzone, riddled with crisscrossing footprints and smeared trails created by flared toes, except for lone still-standing buildings here and there that somehow survived the crash by either fitting snugly into the quarter-mile gaps between Nicole’s thick toepads, or the deep ravines of her sole wrinkles. Though the texture wasn’t quite as pleasing now, the doom-bringing girl seemed resolved to prove she could walk straight paths ten times over, which she did, only stopping when there wasn’t a visible square mile of crunchy city left to crumble under her soiled arches.

While it was difficult for most occupants of the capital city to understand exactly what was happening to them, given many only saw a flash of an oily toeprint the size of an asteroid swooping toward them before everything went black, the watchful eyes of sister cities thirty miles away, not even half the length of Nicole’s entire body, had enough perspective to see, to stew, and descend into panic. None could understand where this blissfully ignorant woman in rags had come from or why she was so intent on exterminating the grand metropolis with her caramel-hued mud-matted soles, but it was enough information to know that there was such a woman at all, a beautiful but disheveled angel of death, and what’s more, having pounded the largest city in the state to smithereens, her curious gaze was beginning to drift elsewhere, almost as though she intended to explore these unassuming crispy patches of “moss” as well with her overworked peds.

While average citizens began to riot and weep in the streets, military installations just outside city limits were already in contact between one another and with federal reserves, throwing around terms like DEFCON 1. The absolute threat was recognized so quickly, a response was thrown together and approved in the time it took Nicole to completely demolish the capital. Calls were made, orders were barked, and soldiers trembled in their boots at the sight of the giantess on the horizon, knowing that millions of them could fire automatic weapons at just one meaty big toe while it fell, and at the most, the girl would feel a peculiar tingle on her skin before she smashed whole battalions to pieces. There was only one solution, dark though the collateral would be.