Best Laid Plans (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

Nicole still hadn’t heard a peep from her “employers,” but she was confident she’d proven that the drugs weren’t affecting her too grievously by marching so effectively back and forth, and the lush sensation of the earth beneath her sore feet was just icing on the cake. She was beginning to notice the similar spread of smaller lichen spots around the greenery, and considering seeking these out too in order to continue her impromptu self-spa session, when a pair of inexplicable light-up flashes caught her eye. They appeared like fireflies, but arched through the air more like spitballs, heading straight for her left foot.

Frowning, Nicole simply shifted her leg backward, in the process punting up some mud, but safely propped her ped in midair before the lights could strike. When the twin glow-spots hit the earth, they weren’t put out by the damp dirt, but instead did the last thing she expected to see: exploded into brighter spots blinding as 100-watt lightbulbs, before pushing out warm breeze and blooming into tiny micro-scale mushroom clouds. Of course these visual spectacles didn’t rise much higher than Nicole’s ankles, but once she crouched to ensure her eyes weren’t still deceiving her from chemical side-effects, it became apparent that her senses weren’t lying to her. The mental haze was in fact dissipating, and Nicole actually felt better, more clear-headed, than she had in weeks.

“W-Wait…” Nicole murmured, her eyes growing wider. She poked a finger through what looked an awful lot like a nuclear blast, watching the ringed smoke clear at the touch of her hand, and feeling its toasty heat. “Is… is that… no… that c-can’t be…”

The girl couldn’t find the words, but when she looked back down at her own body with new eyes, then the ground she’d just so efficiently trampled, the truth subliminally entered her mind in the form of a sickening epiphany. She wasn’t abandoned in a forest clearing far away, nor suffering a hallucinatory drug trip in her damaged brain. In fact, she was healthier than ever, and literally two steps away from the corporation that had turned her into a lab rat. If anything, she had better clarity of vision and understanding than she’d known in years.

The drug had technically done its job and regenerated cells, as well as generating a few quadrillion extra, until Nicole was elevated to a miles-tall giant. And those mysterious fireflies pouncing after her foot were in fact nuclear bombs. The warmth of the explosion’s epicenter still made her skin tingle as though she was camped around a bonfire, but otherwise, it had no catastrophic effect.

At first relief washed over her, gratified to know she wasn’t actually undergoing a final breakdown before the tests killed her, until she took another step, heard a soft crunch, and looked down, slowly arching her naked pale-brown sole off the ground until the brittle silver “moss” peeled away from her flesh wrinkles, and though she’d been staring directly at the terrain for several devastating minutes of personalized spa treatment, she now saw the tiny cities with new eyes, and her heart jumped into her throat. That single stride, along with every other pacing footstep she’d caved into the earth, had obliterated a solid thirty square miles of once-proud city architecture at a time, reducing skyscrapers to chalk dust and millions of innocent civilians to micro-organism splotches nestled in the grooves of her toes.

“Holy Jesus fricking Christ,” Nicole blurted, clapping her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming. What had she done? Looking around at the mess of footprints she’d stamped, having let her firm soles and toe-bulges sink deep into fragile civilizations as easily as wet mud, just trying to mentally calculate the damage done made her dizzy. She had to stop herself from going faint, though, since a full-body fall with her eighty-mile figure onto untouched lands just might constitute a genocide, if not knock the planet slightly off its axis.

No wonder they’d tried to shoot her with missiles that could wipe out a whole city in one shot. On the verge of tears and a panic attack, Nicole blubbered out the only thing she could:

“I’m SORRY, e-everybody!”

Though she hoped a solution to shrink back to normal would present itself soon, perhaps if the growth was only a temporary drug-induced side effect, the gravity of the slaughter was settling in quickly. Nicole had to sit back upon the mountainous region she’d used as a bench to cool off while resting her filthy billion-ton heels in that first unfortunate patch of city life. Never in all her years had she ever considered hurting even a fly, wanting only harmony with the world around her, and yet in the span of a single bewildering morning, she’d trodden upon and squished more people than she’d ever known or seen in her life. What kind of person could do such a thing and still deserve to be helped? Why should they even accept her apology, Nicole wondered? Surely a being so outrageously humongous and careless as to murder millions one step at a time wasn’t even fit to be called human. She was an inhuman monster, Nicole realized forlornly as she looked across the messy graveyard created by her distinctive footprints, with bits of leftover mud and sweat smeared into the craters as well from her grimy flesh, like a final insulting desecration on the extinction sites of the strangers she’d pulped into paste beneath her carefree gait.

Burying her face in her hands, Nicole tried and failed to dam the tears, only loosely conscious of the fact that her sobbing was creating a flooding problem for the geography below which inevitably rolled gloomy saltwater in waves toward a few of the towns on the outskirts of the metropolis who were lucky enough to avoid the unconscious stampeding. Whether or not this whole affair was her fault, the girl knew she would be the one blamed for the earth-quaking chaos and bloody population reduction via grating beneath her crummy leaden soles. Just when hope seemed lost, and Nicole was beginning to accept that she should just allow them to bombard her with nukes until she could cause no more harm, she was alarmed nearly to the point of a heart attack by a quiet yet articulate voice sounding from inside her head.

“Hello, Nicole,” the man’s voice gently greeted. “This is Dr. Ranson. How are you feeling?”