Anyways, enjoy! It is a part eight, so if you want to read from the start you can go look at the Writings tab up top and find Long Story, inside of which you'll find parts I-VII, and part VIII once I get around to updating the archives. Hope you like it, have a lovely day, and see you tomorrow at eight AM for more! Maybe some music; lotta writing lately.
Clarise's End-Times VIII by Mackinley Clevinger, May 30, 2016
My vision was blurry, what little light flashed at me from bared bulbs dazzling my senses as I stumbled through the wreckage left behind by whatever had bounced my head against the concrete. I sagged against the splintered remains of a wall that had once separated an office from the main floor, the dizzying veil over my eyes beginning to right itself to reveal flattened cubicles and sparking light fixtures that outlined the trail of ruin the beast left behind it.
The place was a mess. I tried to push myself away from the wall and stagger towards the sounds of destruction, but a wave of dizziness overtook me and I fell flat on my face. Note to self: Do not get punched in the head again by anything with a fist as big as you.
“Are you going to – “ I threw a hand above me and waved Emerick onwards, using my other arm to push myself up and get my legs underneath me. Breathing deeply, I released the platinum glow to course into my mind as the tanned energy revitalized my body, clearing my vision and filling me with strength. It might be artificial, but the release from pain made me feel more confident in what I was about to do.
“We don’t have time for – “ I heaved a fist back and slammed it into the floor, piercing the cheap carpet and the concrete underneath. I thrust my fingers open and dug them into the concrete, wrenching my arm out of the hole and bringing a chunk of concrete wrapped around my fist with it, coming to a stand besides Emerick and gently tapping the beach ball-sized rock against my open palm.
Emerick shook his head and stepped past me, quietly muttering “What are you?” before pulling himself through the wreckage and disappearing from my sight, leaving me with a mix of annoyance from the tone he used, and worry that I didn’t know what was going on either. Stuff was going weird, yeah, but… Emerick seemed normal. Why was I able to do any of this? Why was I about to willingly walk into a fight with a monster that could punch through concrete? Objectively, it was because I could, too, and yet…
Three days ago the most extreme thing I’d ever done in my life was get a few piercings and occasionally run the gambit of bars around town before heading to work in the morning with a head full of regret. I worked in a cubicle and spent all day figuring out how to waste time, ergo my ‘being on the roof when the door locked.’ I hadn’t ever gotten into a real fight, or done any of the crazy shit I’d done in the last few hours before. I couldn’t do any of the crazy shit I’d done in the last few hours before today.
I didn’t even look the part. What kind of ‘hero’ was a short and pudgy girl with brown hair? Not even an action-girl ponytail; I let it drape half-way down my back however it wanted to. This was the kind of crap someone was supposed to spend their whole lives training for, not handed out randomly without a second-thought. I wasn’t the person for this; there were soldiers all around, people like Emerick who seemed to go out of their way to get in the middle of a mess, someone better suited to go charging into danger and come out on top.
I knew this. I couldn’t help but think this as Emerick’s words filtered into my mind, couldn’t help but question why I was here and what the hell I was doing. For every reason I’d been taught, through all the experiences I’d had in life, I knew I didn’t belong here, that I should be holed up somewhere safe and protected while someone else handled everything; but despite it all, I couldn’t shake a feeling.
I drew a leg back and swiped it through the debris Emerick had clambered over, sending it flying over shattered cubicle walls and cutting the dangling lights free to fall and shatter on the floor. Swinging the boulder on the end of my arm, I swept a desk out of my way and strode into the room lit by flickering lights, coming to a halt and tilting my head as I listened for where the giant’s screaming was coming from.
My head snapped to the right, the platinum glow still rushing through my head and boosting my senses to hear where the sound came from. My eyes fell on a wall, and directly behind it the giant was wreaking havoc on anyone or anything that it came across. There weren’t any doors nearby, and when the screaming stopped it was going to move again.
It must’ve been a ridiculous image; me, in all my five-feet-nothing, cracking my neck on both sides before taking off at a dead sprint towards the wall between myself and the giant. The tan energy pumped through me, powering the force of wrath I was generating as it drove me into a frenzy, even letting some of the rotting horde strength in as I directed my attention solely towards the body behind the wall.
I charged through the wall shoulder-first, breaking through the barrier in an explosion of synthetic wood as I drove myself into the giant and sent him flying across the empty conference room, crashing through the opposite wall. For every reason I’d ever known, I shouldn’t be here doing any of this, but it felt fucking amazing and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it.
A hand that could wrap around my waist with room to spare reached out through the wreckage and clutched the jagged edge of the hole it had made when I hit it, the sputtering lights giving me microsecond-long views of the enormous body slowly lifting itself up from the closet it had been launched into. The Giant’s head came into view, eyes narrowed and glowing red as it lumbered to its feet and forced its way back into the conference room.
It watched me from across the short-side of the conference table I’d launched it over warily, our bodies tensed as we watched one another for any signs of movement. On one side of a room lit by the occasional explosion of sparks stood a behemoth that’s head brushed the ceiling while hunched over, with a lumpy body the color of tanned leather that could eat a car and still demand seconds. I didn’t call it the Giant for nothing; it was huge. I’d be dead if it weren’t for everything going on inside me after that fist hit me, and the dried splatters that stuck to the long, wispy hairs all over its body attested to other’s misfortune.
On the other side from it stood… well, me. I couldn’t touch the ceiling if I jumped, and appetizers usually filled me up without a need for ordering actual meals. Smooth, white skin, a lack of muscles that could put reduce professional body-builders to quivering messes, and… Well, I was covered in blood, I suppose. If it’s any consolation, it’s mine.
I’ll admit I felt outclassed, but you get used to that feeling after a while when you’re always the shortest and most overlooked person in the room. Usually I adapt by either making sure I’m the most competent one there, or not caring at all. I cared a lot right now, and while it may be bigger than me, I wasn’t a raging puddle of frenzied idiocy tied to those muscle-bags it called arms. I was Clarise; alive, probably mentally-sound, and –
The Giant roared, what little glass hadn’t already shattered doing so now as the small pieces of debris surrounding the Giant were blasted away from it, the building around us rattling to the constant stream of noise being blasted at me. My vision shook and my thoughts stopped dead, drips of fear rolling down my spine at the deafening sound that nearly threw me into a panic before I remembered that I wasn’t a helpless damsel in distress; I was Clarise, a.k.a. bad-ass.
Stepping towards the source of the shaking-building’s distress, I launched a kick at the edge of the conference table that spun it and popped it into the air for a brief moment, all I needed to apply the bottom of my foot and send it hurtling towards the Giant.
The table caught the Giant mid-scream, turning the sound into a garbled grunt of surprise as it was carried back into the closet, the table slamming against the wall on either side with a loud bang that left the floor in silence, eerily lit by distant lights that hadn’t shattered from the Giant’s shout. I wish I could speak, that I hadn’t torn my vocal chords to shred telling those guys what I thought of them. My mind was full of things to say and break the silence with, wonderful phrases of vicious mirth; but alas, they would have to remain locked away in this mute head of mine. There’s no justice in the world.
This time the Giant didn’t bother grandstanding or climbing its way out of the closet I’d tossed it in twice now; the wall and adjacent table burst apart to reveal the Giant charging towards me, arms flailing wildly while it roared a far gentler cry of bloodlust. I appreciated that. What I didn’t appreciate was its reaction to me launching an uppercut into its expansive stomach with the boulder wrapped around my fist; namely, ignoring me completely and knocking me flat beneath its charging feet as it ran off to terrorize some other part of the floor we were on.
On the one hand, I’d been crushed by feet that would make delightful molds to prove the existence of any number of man-ape creatures. On the other hand, I now knew that ‘it’ was a he from an unfortunate perspective on the situation. I didn’t know which hand I wanted to chop off first, but I settled for jumping to my feet and racing after him, beating at the boulder on my fist with my other hand and trying to turn the dull, rounded shape into something more stabby.
It… kind of worked. The boulder was more of a cone than a sphere, and that would have to do for now. I was catching up to the Giant, who’d taken a break from a running rampage to beat his fists against previously untouched cubicles, somewhere within which I could hear screaming. Normal screaming; not Giant-death screams or helicopter-breaking Clarise screams.
Aiming for a more viable target, I came up behind him as he raised both fists in the air, about to slam them down on the source of the stupid, loud noise, and arced my concrete-encased hand up and around to jam the point between his legs hard enough to break the concrete and free my hand from the sweatbox it had become.
Good news: I saved the person. Bad news: I wouldn’t have to worry about the Giant running off to try and kill someone else for a while, at least not until it didn’t really matter for me anymore. I started possibly regretting what I’d done after I began to hear the screaming that had started in dog-territory pitch-wise, and was beginning to drop into my range of hearing as his hands slowly dropped to his sides and he turned to face me, the red glow in his eyes somehow… more hateful than before.
If my sole-goal here was to distract this guy while Emerick saved people, then what better way was there besides taking off at a dead sprint and wishing I could at the very least say ‘oh, shit’ to myself a hundred times a minute while I played the mouse to the Giant’s mutant tiger. I had to keep a steady balance as I let the tan energy power my frantic escape; too much and I might get so enraged I’d think turning around was a good idea, but not enough and he might catch me.
I did not want him to catch me for obvious reasons.
I’d never been in the Meyers building; it’d been for the big-wigs and people who had degrees in business or math, not a call-center drop-out waiting for opportunity to drop in her lap. No, this was not for me. People who went out and worked from dusk till dawn got to spend their days here, people who… people whose fathers owned shares probably worked here, and got private helicopters to save them from pesky zombie-hordes and giants, probably.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a helicopter, but based on my track record with them it was probably best I didn’t. I wouldn’t take care of it properly. The point I’m trying to make, though, is: I was lost and hoping for dear life that I wasn’t about to hit a dead-end. Not because it’d stop me; I’d charge through it like there was a vault of gold and chocolate on the other side; but because knowing my luck I’d probably have a brief case of weightlessness before meeting the ground for the last time.
An overzealous fist barely nicked my heel, smashing through the rubble-strewn floor and sending me into a long and surely humorous fall for any sycophants watching. I crashed against a wall, embedding myself slightly and ensuring that I was stuck for the vital few seconds it would take for the Giant to reach me and get justifiable revenge. I wasn’t on his side, here, but I could see where he was coming from.
Through the dark haze I saw the Giant wrench his fist out of the floor, pulling up a massive chunk of the concrete with it. Bastard couldn’t even be original; had to copy me. I was not going to stand for this as long as I lived; and by current estimates, it was looking like I wouldn’t as I saw the red slits focus in on me and watched him draw the arm holding the spear of concrete back, poised to throw.
The floor buckled beneath the Giant, stealing his balance for a few precarious moments before completely falling apart and dropping the Giant out of my view. Huh. I wrenched myself free from the wall, patting the dust off of myself as I crept towards where the Giant had stood. I guess you could only do so much damage before –
Another tremor took the floor out from underneath me, sending me falling down after the Giant with one key advantage: Blind. Fucking. Luck. Beneath the first hole in the floor lay another, followed in suite by several more until he seemed to have crashed through the roof of a rather pleasant-looking front-entrance waiting area approximately a thousand miles high. My advantage was repeating my act with the helicopter and hanging on for dear life again above an incredibly-high fall, this time surrounded by a crumbling building, but still in the dark.
He’d fallen all the way to the bottom, and lay on top and partially buried by fragments of the floor he’d so foolishly decided to punch through and tear apart. Who did that? There were ants around him; pretty surprised looking ants led by one ant that looked a lot like Emerick, just really, really tiny. They were saying something, but I didn’t worry about it. All I had to do was hang here, get my strength back, and either save myself or have someone pull me up. There was no way he could… survive… that fall… Why do I think these things?
God dammit. I recognized the sounds of panicked screaming and could hear the rubble being tossed around by something far too big, strong, and immune to mortal peril. The bastard was going to kill them all, and probably hop back up here and finish me off, too. What did we ever do? What, we were… too noisy? Something like that, from what I remember.
I looked down, and was glad to see a lack of scarlet in the more brass-and-wood themed entrance room below. He was still stuck, probably in a lot of pain from the fall. I knew how that felt; he’d be cursing right about now, and any moment he’d bemoan his fate and –
The Giant screamed. Again. The world shook around me. Again. I was getting tired of this whole never-ending conflict thing; I wanted out. At least half an hour to just unwind, or better yet, sleep; both of which were fairly unlikely given my current situation of hanging off of a rapidly degrading bit of office flooring over a fall that would definitely kill me.
Something creaked above me, and a quick glance filled my head with a fascinating idea I only had seconds to act on. Heaving with my arms, I rose my body up a few inches and was able to get my feet against a solid surface, tensing up my entire body and training my focus on waiting for the perfect moment to act.
Below me, the Giant was starting to get to his feet, but above me, the spear of concrete he had been about to throw at me was tipping over the edge and about to fall past me. I mean, I say spear in the same way a chopstick’s an arrow, but that’s beside the point. As it shuddered and finally dropped, I kicked off from the narrow strip I’d found purchase on and grabbed ahold of the massive piece of cement, digging my hands into its surface and trying to adjust my weight to turn it around the right way.
From far above the Giant, now standing tall and roaring at the scared crowd huddled behind Emerick, the stone and I plummeted. It wanted to tilt and turn, but I liberally applied desperate measures to make sure it stayed straight and true as it descended towards the Giant. No one noticed me, what with the giant, bellowing idiot underneath me, but I was used to that.
Pretty hard for anything to beat the image of an enraged woman riding a slab of stone as it fell onto the Giant’s head, though.