Several hundred more single family homes and their occupants ceased to exist as Wanda angled her way down toward the freeway, which, with five lanes for each direction, was much wider than the rural Interstate. She had crossed this freeway earlier, giving little thought to it as the balls of her left foot flattened over 500 ft of frantically driven vehicles across ten lanes.
As a result of her previous crossing, east-bound traffic was at a stand-still. Westbound traffic was thin but not empty as motorists hopped on onramps west of her original footprint in an attempt to flee.
She knew Miller Chevrolet was on the south side of this freeway. This was bad news for the apartment and shopping complexes along the north side, as Wanda trod upon them while bending slightly to attempt to identify the dealership from her lofty perspective. Anything commercial was just another set of white flat-topped buildings surrounded by parking lots. There was a complex of buildings further west with a backlot of several vehicles bunched nose-to-tail. Bending over for closer inspection, she found it to be a Ford dealership, as thousands of people on or near the freeway below stood transfixed by the massive breasts suspended above them.
It was the wrong dealership, but now she had a sense of what to look for, and gazing westward before she straitened up, she recognized the Miller Chevrolet sign just a few steps away.
She could take it out with just one foot, but like the church, the dealership deserved more special treatment. Both knees crashed on the freeway as she knelt down facing the dealership and bent low enough to actually could see the splinter-sized people outside the buildings. They too had been driven outside by the shaking buildings only to be greeted by a beautiful face in the sky that dwarfed Chase Field Baseball stadium.
‘Crushing was too good for them. This place should be swept from the earth.’ And with that thought, Wanda brought her hands forth, stiffened her fingers, pointed them downward and plunged them into the ground on each side of the dealership grounds. Curving her fingers in the ground until they came together, she then simply lifted the entire dealership from the ground.
Careful as she was with her package, she couldn’t maintain complete ground stability. Pavement cracked and crumbled, the tall showroom windows shattered, and both new and used cars slid into each other in their tightly packed lots.
She looked closely as the tiny slivers of people were just getting upright again after their rapid nearly two-mile ascent. Unfortunately, they were much too small to recognize Gordon Miller or his sorry son, but she knew they were there. She was tapping into Ryan’s terrified mind and could tell that he and dear-old-Dad were among dark-suit shod splinters as opposed to the blue splinters that were the service employees. She could jump her consciousness right into his body if she wanted to and determine exactly where he was, but she was concerned that she may bobble her package in the process, defeating the purpose.
Wanda bent forward so that her head loomed directly above the dealership. Some people, including Ryan, turned to run inside service garage. With a slight tilt of her hands toward each other, the building collapsed in its center and sent them rushing back out. The term “swept off the earth” echoed in her mind and that is when she had her idea.
She began folding the dealership into itself. The buildings crumpled as new and used cars all slid toward the middle, trapping the people between them, and she kept folding until the grounds were completely bent in half, like a closed book, and all that could be seen was the red Arizona dirt. Wanda further compressed the dirt as though it were a large snowball. Everyone was probably dead now but she hoped some might still be buried alive as she now held the ball in her left hand which she stretched back behind as a wind-up before throwing the dirt ball into the sky with all her immense strength.
It was Wanda’s hope that it would leave the Earth entirely but instead it burned upward through the atmosphere like a meteorite with a bad sense of direction. Layer by layer the dirt burned off, the fuel tanks in a hundred cars as well as other combustibles in the shop exploded inside their overheated tomb steadily blowing the ball in to pieces. Whatever wasn’t incinerated going up, did so coming down in a brief daytime meteor shower. Miller Chevrolet ceased to exist in any form.
Wanda didn’t know what happened to her projectile except that it made a bright streak in the sky as it flew up, followed by a distant shower of streaks arching down but never reaching ground. She wasn’t clear on the location of the other Miller dealerships, and unfortunately, she couldn’t exactly google them on her smartphone, which lay somewhere within the flattened carcass of her Range Rover in the desert. So, the remaining Miller family meal tickets were going to get a pass unless she just stumbled upon one. Emphasis on the “upon”. She learned the lesson: Next time she wants to go on a city-destroying rampage, do your homework first.