I awoke to the noise of my phone ringing; it wasn't noon yet, the alarm couldn't have gone off yet. I was really looking forward to sleeping in. But when I lazily flipped the phone and saw Carrie's number, I jumped out of bed and answered.

"Hello?"

"Micheal, where are you?" she asked before I hardly finished.

"Still in New York, why?"

"You're not here?"

"No, why would I--" But then I knew, and my heart sank. No, not now. Of all the times, not now. I wished and prayed, I crossed my fingers and hoped, maybe she'd say something totally unexpected, maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised and I could go back to bed before seeing them tonight.

"She's here," my wife said through her tears. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, but I wouldn't do it in front of Carrie.

"Where?"

"The radios say she just passed the border into Bridgeport ten minutes ago... I'm scared, Micheal," she cried, but our house was deeper into the city, they had at least some time before they were in real danger.

"Where's Jared, is he alright?"

"Jared... oh god, Jared's at school! I gotta get him... I gotta go get him now!" she screamed, and I heard the phone drop to the floor.

"Hello? Hello?" I kept talking, but she had likely already gone. School? Kids still went to school like this? I guess the whole world couldn't stop for one giant girl. That wasn't important right now, they only had a few hours before the nuke was fired. Then it wouldn't matter how close to Bridgeport she was. If she were in the city at all, there would be no escape.

I dressed myself and ran to the car, speeding to where the Commander would be waiting to make the order.

------------------

Another lesson learned: sleeping in forests is annoying, but don't sleep on beaches. I thought I got a lot of sand stuck to me when I sunbathed at five foot seven. I must have spent nearly an hour brushing myself off.

Now I was back on the path, walking to wherever. I didn't have a path, really. I just went. My birds-eye view lost all perspective of direction and location, although I had a hankering feeling I was now leaving the New York area. I moved along the shore, moving through the water where there was no one to accidentally hurt, save for some easily avoidable boaters.

Eventually the water came to a close and I was forced to crawl ashore. There was a park (go figure) but it was occupied so I didn't want to try to fit through it. Instead I found an abandoned area of lots, nearly breaking it as I climbed aboard. Quickly but carefully I moved my weight inland, where nothing could collapse.

As I came to the city the populace seemed to have foreseen my arrival; many of them had already begun fleeing, already way ahead of me. But that was no longer a nuisance, that was a blessing. I didn't want to keep pace anymore.

I kept walking until I heard the familiar and horrible noise of my stomach growling. I still hadn't come up with a food alternative. Finding the closest clearing I sat down and thought over what I might do.

Animals? But then what animals? Fish, maybe? Grabbing them by the handfuls might be easy enough, but would they be sufficient? Plants? I considered trees for a moment but reminded myself they only looked like broccoli; bark might not be so great. But then again, I could be surprised.

Suddenly I noticed someone on the ground near me, waving their arms as if to catch my attention. Slowly I lowered to my stomach to see them more clearly, and it was in fact a person waving their arms, but he was a small child.

"Hi, my name's Jared! What's yours?" I barely heard him say. I couldn't help but smile; he didn't know how dangerous I might be, how taboo I really was. He was just a kid.

"Jessica," I said in a relatively quiet voice so as not to scare him. "What are you doing out here, Jared?" I asked him, putting on the innocence he believed me to have.

"They cancelled school today so I wanted to say hi. I've always wanted to say hi since I first saw you on T.V. How come everyone's so afraid of you?"

"I've done... some bad things, Jared," I said, trying not to cry. I wasn't about to tell this kid just why they were afraid of me, tell him tales of the people who were eaten and crushed alive, and now ceased to be.

"When I do bad things, I just say sorry," Jared told me matter-of-factly, in his own wondrous way. "Apologizing can make anything better."

I took a long breath. "I wish it could, Jared."

"By the way, why are you naked?"

My face turned red like a radish and I adjusted myself to make sure I hadn't been thrusting my boobs out at the poor kid.

------------------

Morning came like a miracle.

She didn't kill me. I'm alive.

Quite honestly I couldn't believe I had been right, that hard cold truth actually would be the best way to resolve her humanity. Although for all I knew she ran away and started killing again. I was miles away from home, from my car, and had no idea what was happening in the world.

I dusted myself off and decided to call Micheal, he always had something to say. But the phone rang five times and all I heard was, "Hey, it's Micheal! I'm a bit busy right now, so just leave me a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can, bye!" Sure, I thought as the tone rang. I can evade my hungry giantess girlfriend to answer your calls but god forbid I call you.

"Hey, uh, it's me, Dustin. She ran away and now I'm in the middle of nowhere, so an update on what Jessica's doing and maybe a car would be nice if you can. Call me back, like, soon, thanks." And I closed my phone.

"I guess I'll just wait here then," I said to no one in particular, sitting against an oak tree. Soon I thought of something else to do, however, something important. I dialed a different number and received an actual response.

"You're still alive?" Melissa asked me.

"Yes, actually, I am. I've called to break up with you, Melissa."

"...what?"

"I'm breaking up, I'm ending our affair."

"It's not an affair anymore, Jessica's... Jessica."

"No, she's more than that, I've been talking to her and she's been strong, she's been fighting, given the circumstances."               

"SHE'S FUCKING EATING PEOPLE!"

"Well what would you do if you this happened to you and you started to starve, huh?" She didn't respond, but what response was there, really. "It's over, Melissa, I'm sorry."

"I can't believe you're dumping me for a monster like her. What happened to her hunting you down, to you being afraid of her?"

I thought about that for a moment. What did happen? Was I in my right mind to not be afraid of Jessica any longer? It's only been a few days, and I've become a different person. Just like her, I suppose.

"I've changed, Melissa. People change."

Melissa started raising her voice so I think she was crying but you never could tell without seeing it yourself.

"Fine! If you wanna run off and get eaten instead of be with someone who really loves you, then go screw off and get eaten, you fucking asshole!" I could nearly hear her throw the phone across the room as she hung up. That was another person hurt, but hopefully I could find Jessica and explain everything.

If I knew where she was.

----------------

"Jared!" I heard the crowd call out across the way. "Come over here, get away from her!" A group of people had found Jared with me and mistaken our conversation as me trying to indulge on him. I wouldn't have done that even when I was crazy... well, probably not, anyway.

"She's a nice lady!" he yelled back at them. "You should talk to her, she's really nice!" I gave a nice, beaming smile to them as proof but they didn't buy it. In hindsight, my teeth were probably pretty messy. My thumb scraped along the surface of my front teeth and it confirmed my suspicion, so I made a conscious effort to hide them under my lips.

"Honey, she is not a nice lady, you need to get away from her right now!" Jared stood resilient, defending me after what little conversation we had. I had to hand it to him, he was a brave little boy. There were grown men who wouldn't do what he did, although that might just have been because they knew better.

Police sirens blared down the street; they had finally sent someone whose job was to be brave, but I somewhat doubted even they would approach. I wondered if even in their fear there were some who wanted to approach, to get a closer look. They must think me a siren or succubus or something, a monster who entrances those around her with her beauty and then strikes when they least suspect it.

Three officers slowly approached with their guns drawn, one of them calling Jared's name. I raised a single brow at them, lightly mocking their unneeded terror. Outright telling them would sound too ominous, too suspicious. For once, I had to be subtle.

"Don't you think she's a nice, pretty lady?" Jared asked them as two of them pulled him away. "Don't you think?"

"Kid, that's no lady you wanna be involved with."

"But I do!"

"I don't suppose she told you why we're so afraid of her?" I heard one of them ask.

"Wait...!" I said, reaching out a bit and drawing a gasp and even some screams from the small crowd. "I'll tell him." The officers looked at me, dumbfounded, and then gave the same look to each other. They turned around and let me have my audience.

"Jared, I've... killed a lot of people over this past week or two... that's why all of this is happening. Well, except for me, I'm not exactly sure how that happened. But I want you to know that I've past all of that. I'm a better person now... a real person. I'm truly sorry for what's happened. Don't be afraid of me... but do as they say." The silence was complete and unbroken until the cops pulled Jared away again.

"She said sorry!" Jared said frantically, tugging at their arms. "She said sorry!"

"Sorry doesn't cut it, kid!"

That broke my heart, but deep down I knew it was true. I had gone too far, I had stepped over the line days and days ago. Jared's appreciation was cute and commendable, but it wasn't enough. Even if I didn't think so, I'd always be a monster. Tears came and I began to cry once again. So much tears, I thought. So much sadness. And it's all my fault. I carefully stood up and left them, lumbering through the city.

---------------

"COMMANDER, STOP!" I shouted, bursting down the door, guards at my arms. At the sound of my voice the Commander made a motion with his hand and I was freed.

"What's the problem, Micheal?"

"You know goddamn well what the problem is, she's in Bridgeport and you're about to call in that strike."

"Very perceptive, are we?" he mocked me. In a situation this dire, this fatal, he was making a joke of everything, like we were children in a playground. "When I made those comments about your family yesterday, I had no idea this would happen. It was a painful coincidence." Behind him a few men were sitting at a row of computer screens. I thought I even saw a big red button, but that surely couldn't be the entire process of a missile launch sequence.

"How are you to know this will even work?" I tried to reason with him, desperate. "What if you do more damage than you fix?"

"She's still human, she can still die. We haven't transcended her, she's simply been remodeled into a larger mold. Listen, Micheal. You can plead all you want but I told you, I told you it would have to come to this. The fatality count has gone high enough. It's time to put an end to this--"

"Uh, sir..." one man spoke up.

"What, can't you see I'm talking!?" the Commander burst back at him.

"...you said 'we'." I said slowly, trying to wrap my head around it myself. The Commander broke eye contact with me for but a single moment, his tongue shifting in his mouth. "You... you did this?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Get ready to fire, Garson."

"It was you, wasn't it? You created Jessica!"

"I will not stand here and be accused of something I did not do. Security, get this man out of here." But no one moved a muscle. One of the security guards who had been gripping me earlier piped up,

"Sir... is this true?"

"Garson, why haven't we fired yet?!" The Commander was becoming uneasy, pacing towards the men at the terminals.

"I'm... I'm not sure about this, sir... did you..."

"Fire the missile right now, Garson!"

"Don't do it!" I screamed over him. "Don't you see? If you fire that missile you're not saving anyone from the real monster!"

The Commander pulled a magnum from his coat and pointed it at Garson's head.

"Fire the missile or I'll kill you right now, Garson!"

All the guards and even some other technicians around the room pulled out guns of their own and pointed them at the Commander, and several inaudible shouts and grunts filled the air. Having no firearm myself, I stayed deathly still.

"Put the gun down, sir," one of them ordered. A missile engineer ordering a military Commander to stand down. What was happening? The Commander threw his magnum down to the ground but pushed Garson out of the way.

"I'll fire it myself," he said angrily, entering in the data and pressing a button (although not the red one) with conclusive finality. The deed was done. He looked around at those men who still held out their weapons.

"I did what you all wanted to do," he hissed at them, looking like a cornered animal. He turned to me and said, "This is what's best for all of us," and then went to storm away.

Before he could reach the door I socked a punch to his chest, sending him reeling with a look of bewilderment.

"That's for what you did to me," I snarled, punching him again in the lower chest. "That's for what you did to my family," I added. Then, finally, I brought my fist careening into his head, knocking him unconscious at my feet. "And that's for what you did to Jessica."

-----------------

The sky became a muddy kind of gray as I shuffled through abandoned alleyways and other hidden passageways that I could take advantage of. I wished I could be invisible. I want to see people act like people again, I longed to see conjoining and not fleeing, hear conversation and not screaming. But I was the most visible person ever, and the least inviting.

I saw police officials herding people through the streets, directing them somewhere. Evacuations. Even in my darker days they never evacuated on this scale. But I suppose I never stayed this long, either. Nonetheless, I was curious. I knelt down and asked one of the cops in my quietest booming voice possible,

"Is this because of me?"

The officer nearly fainted and her partnering cop rushed in to support her.

"Of course it is!" he screamed at me, though even through his tough guy act I could see his wits spilling out his brains. "Now get out of here! It'll be here any minute now!"

"What will be here?" I asked, but they had gotten in their cruiser and sped away, bringing the evacuees with them. Coming? What's coming? It only took a second for me to understand. The time had finally come. I was being bombed.

There was no time to waste, I disregarded the hallowing fear inside of me and rushed out of the city. Further out still, past all the buildings, into the bay. But even still I trudged through the water, I kept going and going, letting the water envelop me like I had wanted yesterday. Water really had been a big part of everything. The bridges, the bay... everything I did seemed to come back to water. The fluid blue that rippled around me now, the entity that could kill as easily as it could heal.

Higher and higher up my body the water reached as the city behind me became a distant gray shape. I saw some stray ships and boats and yelled at them to get to shore, to get away from me as fast as they could. They were not hesitant to comply, speeding away, until I was completely alone in the deep stretch of water, where even I had to swim.

I could only barely see the city as a distant speck, like I had once seen other people. There were so, so many people. No more than ten, that's what I used to say. Well, now it was plenty more than ten. It was hundreds. It was thousands. I'd give my last effort to protect them, to give them what little hope I could.

Something became visible in the sky and I took a deep breath. Maybe this was how I started over, by entering some other plane of existence. I had never believed any afterlife tales before, but now, what had I to lose? The shape of the missile became clear. I said my goodbyes to my parents, and to Dustin, and even to Dustin's new girlfriend, wherever she may be.

There was a flash of green and then nothing.

---------------

"Micheal! You're dinner's going to get cold if you don't come down here!"

"Yeah, yeah, just one minute!" I was typing away like a maniac working on my novel 'The Hunger'. It had been three months since Jessica was killed by a nuclear explosion in the North Atlantic ocean, swimming out from the Bridgeport bay. She knew the bomb was coming and distanced herself from the city. Crazy as it was, she saved my family's life.

This novel was about her time as a monster, and what really the monster was. The media was still forbidding the portrayal of giant-sized characters as people slowly came to terms with the situation and tried to move on, and when that time came I would be a hit. It was a strange experience, writing in the place of Jessica. I always thought I knew exactly what to make her say but it would never fail to come out flat.

"Honey, it's been three hours, give the book a rest," Carrie said, suddenly behind me. She grabbed hold of my shoulders and I closed my laptop.

"It's almost too bad," I said, rising from my chair. "With her. If someone like us had gotten to her first none of this would've happened."

"Don't tell me you pity her," my wife started to frown.

"No, of course not, but still... it would've saved a lot of people. The military created her, I want to know why..."

"Let's not talk about this right now, come on, Jared's waiting for you downstairs." Jared had never stopped talking about his new friend Jessica since those three months ago, and the topic had been worn through Carrie.

"Alright," I submitted, kissing my wife on the cheek and following her down the stairs to the kitchen. "Afterwards wanna see what I've got so far?"

"I'm not reading that book, it'll creep me out."

"You know there are people who would read stories like this for fun."

"That's just weird. Now come on, let's talk about eating dinner, not people."

---------------------

I took a breath and was overcome with washing rays of light of all colors, all over my body. A thick wire-like material was draped over me, encapsulating me in a net-like trap. My arms and legs were bound to my chest, my hands tied together. I tried to struggle free but the wires dug deeper into me and I screamed in pain.

As if my voice had triggered something, everything lit up and I could see people staring at me over a long fence, giving them safe distance. I looked to be in a laboratory of some sort, a metallic sheen covered everything from the floors to the computers; even the people looked glossy.

"Where am I?" I asked them in a panic.

"Scared of us, are you?" one of them laughed.

"Who are you?" I added, looking for answers. He merely laughed again and stepped forward, revealing his grotesque black eye.

"You're in a lot of trouble, little lady."