Maxima!!

TRACK 09: BIG GIRL

Rosie steadily twitched back to life. She didn't want to. But she already felt like someone packed a landfill under her skin; if she stayed down, it might have turned into two. Another impromptu spasm made her limbs and torso shift. Only sheer luck made her spit curtains of blonde hair out of her mouth, not chew on it like cold spaghetti.

Her senses started returning to her. But something felt off. Wrong. What was that dull roar? Why so many tiny vibrations all around her? Once she had cognitive skills above the average rodent, Rosie put the pieces together. When she did, the dread hit her like a crashing blimp. Her body heated up. Her breaths sped up. Her heart clenched up. And she opened her eyes.

The noonday sun greeted her. So did downtown Santa-In -- the crosswalk at Skelter and Morrison, if she remembered right. Police barricades -- cones, fences, and tape in tandem -- kept her quarantined. Behind those stood dozens of rescue workers; police, medics, and firefighters stood their ground, with the officers pushed to the limit. No matter which way she looked, Rosie saw hundreds of city dwellers packed into the streets. Half of them gasped once she moved in earnest. A quarter kicked their protests up a notch, and would have jammed their signs into her if the police didn't push them back. The last quarter turned tail and ran.

Was she really that scary? She'd asked herself before, that much she remembered. But she had an answer, however addled by her aching brain. Everything seemed off. Her perspective, even while splayed across the ground. The buildings' width and height. Fire trucks and ambulances, less imposing than normal. She slid a hand closer to a paramedic. A tall one, if she had to guess -- a solid six feet. But her middle finger alone had him beat. The guy who anyone would have welcomed on their basketball team looked, to her, a cut below two inches.

Rosie pushed herself off the ground, and only then became aware of the fractured, widespread crater she'd left. She couldn't begin to guess how it sounded or felt for the onlookers; she almost mistook the mere act of sitting up as a distant rockslide. But she made it despite a dizzy spell. Sat there with her legs folded and set to the side, as if to welcome a date into bed for a night of passion. Rivers of hair splashed all around her, and she fought to keep golden rapids out of her eye. She knew she could have drowned a classroom's worth of people in her vomit at any second.

Even while she sat there, her upper half made it halfway past the twelve-story mark. That put her at roughly double that.

Double that. Two hundred fifty feet.

In one night, she'd quintupled in size.

Rosie's mind went blank. Her sickness stopped. Her body, numb. Her nerves, frozen over. Her eyes dimmed, hollowed out, fogged over. She had turned into a statue -- a mountain of flesh, curves, and a sunlit coiffure, all an impulse away from disaster. It took a full minute for her first thought to make it through: she should have stayed there as a mountain. Never moving, never acting, never thinking.

"Hey. Can you hear me?"

Rosie jolted -- a quick motion that spread a dozen more fissures through the crosswalk. Her ears hadn't lied; Wallace breached a set of barricades and advanced on her with a megaphone at the ready. "This is Detective Sergeant Ben Wallace of the Santa Infierno Police Department. I'm here to --"

"Ben? Ben, what's happening to --?" Rosie clapped her hands over her mouth. Her words rang out -- and triumphantly so, what with the tremors that rattled windows. But her voice didn't. Not the one she expected; boom aside, it both sounded and felt deeper, and even slower. Slightly, but noticeably. But why? What caused it? What caused any of it?

"Stay calm. We'll get through this."

Despite the chill in her chest, Rosie lowered her hands and nodded tersely. "I don't think you'll need the megaphone."