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Emma (Extended Ending)

By Luther

The dusty cloud roiled and seemed to take overly long to settle, a wait made longer by the anticipation of those watching to see if the nightmare was over. People finally found the courage to dare come from hiding to see if it was safe. Everyone held their breath.

Emma twitched. At its size, a mere spasmatic twitch of the leg was enough to send claws the size of school buses punching into the side of nearby building. The twitch turned into a stretch, lengthening those massive legs to form a straighter line, as if to pull the muscles to alertness once more after a long nap. The claws drew across the face of the office building, a terrifying sight for those inside. A man within, dressed in business apparel, ducked and cowered behind his desk along with his peers as glass from the broken windows rained down on their heads. Those on the floor above were not so lucky but luck was a relative thing. The entire building heaved, everything designed to reinforce the building was strained by the dinosaur exerting those powerful leg muscles as part of the stretch, and finally surrendered in face of such strength.

With a sudden shift and the deafening roar of a concrete avalanche, the small tower was gone, replaced with a pillar of smoke pouring from the wreckage.

And through it all, Emma was still expanding. Kicking through the rubble, the leg grew longer, the connected hips wider to accommodate more and more bulk. Even laying down, the monster's colossal sides were rising higher than the surrounding building-tops, creating a gentle and terrifying swell behind buildings in front and eclipsing the rest.

The tyrannosaurus's blimp-sized eye opened at last, took a moment to refocus on the world around it, and found the girl standing there. It was the same girl who fell to safety on Emma's hide and miraculously rode to safety on it through the ordeal. There was no malice there and Emma regarded the tiny thing as one might regard an ant: holding nothing against it but uncaring or unknowing if harm befell it, as so did not bother to chase when the girl ran.

By now it became abundantly clear that it was not dead. Down targets tend not to grow and thrive in such a manner. Whatever weird and unknown science was causing this had taken the result of the blast and used it to propel the dinosaur skyward, creating some strange sort of nourishment to be derived from it. Nourishment might not have been the best word. With the creature's physical law-defying metabolism, it was closer to assimilation.

At last, the dinosaur began to stand back up, revealing the caldera-like pit it left behind when it crashed into the midst of the city. Its sides had rolled into the pavement, cracked the asphalt, and flattened the concrete structures, trees, public transport, and anything else in its way. Pieces of debris and various entrapped objects fell back to the ground as it shook itself back to full awareness, caught in the folds its hide made here and there but released when it stretched back out to that natural tightness.

It was almost unbelievable: two entire city blocks were gone along with the better part of a third. The bombs only slagged the side of a couple of buildings and perhaps bubbled the paint of the cars below. The rest was all done by Emma's fall and thrashing about, observed in incredulity by eyes trained upon the impact site through far-away binoculars.

"Well fuck me . . ." it was all the watching colonel could think to say at this point. He was not trained for this. In his world, the world all mankind shared, these weapons were the tools of the gods, the hammer that struck down the unruly nail and uncaringly tore the nearby earth and everything that walked and crawled upon it to ribbons in the process. But his world was not the same one this monster came from. It worked in a fashion different from everything else.

And now all of that power was shrugged off by this creature as if it were only a heavy rain. If any doubt remained that this was a monster, it was destroyed like everything around it.

If this were a movie, normally at this point one lights up a last cigarette or something when they see the end so fast approaching. The colonel was already ahead of the script, applying his zippo to the end of a fresh cigar. It wasn't like he cared about his health at this point.

Then there were those who sought shelter in a nearby train station, nearby being relative to Emma -just a couple of enormous steps away. A woman who was merely trying to catch a train to a work meeting now had a closer perspective to the violence outside than she'd ever want.

Outside sat the locomotives, standing idle and still ready to shoulder the burdens shackled to them to far places. She saw that above loomed the monster, taller than the trees, the buildings, and even low-sailing clouds . . . or perhaps it was just fog or some trick of her imagination but, to her, the impossibly huge dino looked big enough. Its lumbering gait shifted as it turned away from them and raised its head for some reason, its tail lowering in counterbalance and coming towards them. It came swinging in a low arc, a vast wall of scale and flesh that smashed or pushed aside everything that had the misfortune to be in its path. With some stroke of luck, it cleared right past the station but struck the train-yard with the force of an earthquake.

They watched as it effortlessly derailed a train from its tracks and sent it flying through the air to crash land and tumble across the ground like a toy. It was hard to say if the monster even felt it. Everyone in the station thought that surely nobody would have been inside the engine or its cars considering the danger, at least they told themselves that. Neither possibility made the sight any less impressive or any less terrifying.

But few others in the city could see the full scope better than a lone figure atop one of the still-standing skyscrapers, leaning forward against the raised ledge, staring down. Previously dumbstruck, he was now convinced this was the product of some fever dream or something he ate before bed teasing strange phantasms of giant dinosaurs from the deeper and stranger places of his mind. He watched on in a newfound sense of wonder, laughing and relieved that he was safe in reality, his head slowly tilting up as the body of the city-eater rose above even his high perch. The man began to count on his hands, running over several times on his way to a total. By his reckoning, the prehistoric eating machine must have been towering at over one thousand and seven-hundred feet, and he always had a habit of underestimating distance.

He just smiled and watched on in confidence as Emma turned its head sideways to bring its jaws closed on entire girth of a building much like the one he was on. He watched as the edifice was felled like a tree cut from the middle, and then collapsed upon itself, crumbling to shapelessness on the way down.

Every step the massive reptile took left began to topple more things over as well as crush them outright. It left a progressively larger footprint, huge marring holes in the ground that went from merely flattened spaces to deeper and deeper craters as more weight pushed into the earth. Eventually Emma's destruction began gutting the city to the point where even those holes became hard to distinguish from the blackened and smoking rubble left behind in its wake.

Emma turned again and its flanks caught the yellow-orange light that splashed across it. Millions of scales glittered in the sunlight, soaking it in, devouring even it as the massive beast blotted it out. It came at last to the point where the city could no longer contain Emma, as if it were doing so before. But now the beast would find its own footprint was almost as big as the city's own.

The ground cracked beneath its feet, shifting and reshaping itself around them in great earthen ripples and fissures as Emma's multi-gigaton weight compacted the crust wherever it stood. Invisible county lines crisscrossed beneath Emma as it grew, covering more and more at once. They shrank away to yield to those of greater provinces and regions. The unseen boundaries of man meant nothing to the dinosaur, it consumed equally.

Emma's body soared high above the countryside, slightly fading in the far distance from the clouding effects of the atmosphere, the same way one might view a remote mountain range. Such was the magnitude of that creature that the natural and casual heaving and swaying of its immensity that occurred throughout it held the Newtonian power of earthquakes or deep tidal forces.

While it might not have entirely understood why this was happening to it, one might swear the tyrannosaurus was enjoying this. The sounds made, most guttural and satisfactory, were not unlike those of a good meal. The quaking shudders that shook it and the land around it carried a definite euphoric tone to them. The vastly quickening pace of eating was both its own reward and the means to the greater one of expanding beyond the clouds, head above the cumulus layer. It ate the clouds by merely breathing, drawing them all in and leaving a wide and vacant berth around it.

The monster turned its attention earthward and noticed a tiny grey patch below and realize it for what it was. Determined to leave nothing unfinished, Emma pressed its maw close to that little spot that was the city it was so recently mired in and opened it. A single lick, something one considers so small an action, wiped away the entire thing. Just like that.

Stadiums, malls, skyscrapers, highways, superstructures, and substructures representing some of the higher points of human building achievement were now nothing more than pinpoints on the unfathomably large tongue. Then it was all gone in the blink of an eye and a single gulp.

Emma was like some great wingless dragon from tales of the end times. Though it started as a decidedly recognizable as a prehistoric predator, the creature began had slowly and subtly change shape, filling out: wider, broader, and heavier. Its profile changed from that of the well fed predator to the overfed one. The tail was so long it had become a background landmark, stretching into the distance and becoming so thick at the base that it began to lose a bit of its range of motion from packing on so much flesh like too many heavy coats.

Nevermind everyone else. Nevermind the rest of the world. There was no rest of the world. There was only Emma and everything else was food. As it grew it could tear larger and larger bites from the surface and then into the mantle below that, like piercing the skin of a warm glowing apple and gobbling it up. The difference between the size of the Earth and its largest inhabitant was closing sharply until the great shift occurred.

The world fell up. It was an experience that nobody on Earth had known before. Everything on the planet tangential to Emma was pulled sideways along the surface as if gravity had gone haywire. But gravity was still working perfectly well, it was just moving towards Emma. The dinosaur had grown larger than the only home humanity had ever known and it had developed a field of pull that overpowered and overrode the Earth's.

Lakes and finally whole oceans upended and fell towards the immense beast, crashing against it hide and slicking it before fading away to nothing trying to spread over too much hide. All the world's water was lost from view. If anyone was still around to see, all they could see was the creature's face, the sky was filled with it and everything beyond faded as human vision failed.

Supposedly the world is estimated to weigh in the neighborhood of six septillion kilograms, or over six-and-a-half-sextillion tons for those who think in increments of two-thousand pounds. To merely guess at Emma's magnitude one would realize that the dino had more than enough mass to claim that.

The dinosaur was like some distant cousin of Fenrir, likewise fated to grow and grow until it was great enough to be able to challenge the gods in whichever heaven they called home. If there were any gods that might respond, they would have to act quickly! But no cosmic figures of power came to stop Emma and it was left unopposed. This was a monster come to consume the world and perhaps pave the way for the next one -if that next world was Emma.

The tyrannosaurus tensed leg muscles larger than continental shelves and kicked out, somewhere between a jump and pushing the planet away. But the separation was only short-lived as it came falling back, firmly locked into the monster's gravity well.

The planet smashed against the dinosaur, crumbling and breaking into pieces like the sea on a scaled rock. Seeing the little bite-sized chunks float by was more than it could resist and snapping jaws devoured the greatest of them quickly. The smaller ones, great boulders and mountain-peaks to the human perspective, were just dust to Emma, and were drawn in by its breath. It wasn't so much that the reptile was intentionally inhaling them, more that its mouth and throat had such a capacity that by simply opening the maw it built a vacuum that pulled things towards it. In simple terms: Emma just opened its mouth and everything fell in.

The rest of what remained of the terrestrial rock escaped notice at first and successfully achieved orbit around the dinosaur. The accompanying lunar body was an after-meal snack, little more than an afterthought and hardly a mouthful. Eating it was more a principle of obligation with it floating with such tempting and reachable closeness.

And so Emma floated listlessly in the void with no immediate peer, snapping its jaws at the comets it had gathered around its own celestial form, meeting with minimal success in grabbing the tiny zipping objects. Perhaps it would succeed here and there or simply give up when something larger and more appetizing presented itself and caught the cosmic beast's attention. If it kept growing at this pace, it would only be a matter of time before it would be alerted from its ever-growing body merely pressing into them.

Once more the sun was painting Emma's sides, though this time the reptile now had dimensions closer to the former planet Earth, replacing it, outgrowing it. Through the heavenly globe's light one could see the rounded contours creating that crescent eclipsing shape that was so well-known and iconic in human culture, though perhaps not for long. Likely Sol would be next and whatever lay beyond.