by Matt Solomon
“Your ride? Wait … where are we going?” asked Charlie.
Bruce stayed quiet.
The boy realized that they must have been long gone from Richland Center. “Oh man, I’m in serious trouble.”
The giant snickered. “Trouble,” he agreed.
Charlie punched what he assumed was the big guy’s knee. “It’s not funny, man. My mom is going to kill me.” Shadows slowly took shape, and now he could make out Bruce’s general outline in the murk. The giant lay on his side, big chin resting in one hand. Charlie wobbled to his knees, too dizzy yet to stand. He suspected they were riding in some sort of trailer, like the kind DJ’s company used to haul big shipments. Something underneath them started to whine.
It sounded pretty terrible, like the whole truck was going to fall apart. Then the vehicle made a sweeping turn, and Charlie landed on his bottom. The sound of furious crunching indicated that they’d moved from smooth pavement to potholed gravel. He leaned back against Bruce to ride it out and spotted the hazy outline of a weird figure painted on the wall across from him. Charlie crawled over to get a closer look. He could make out fiery eyes and a malevolent, razor-toothed grin. It was a huge painting of a spooky skull! The trailer lurched to a stop.
The heavy doors at the far end swung open. Charlie’s eyes rebelled as the light delivered a shock through his temples. After an uncomfortable moment, his eyes adjusted.
No way. It couldn’t be.
Charlie’s brother stood at the end of the trailer, dark hair flopping over the sides of his sunglasses. He hopped up into the trailer to give Charlie a long, sweaty hug. “I just get the mummy all fixed,” Tim said with a lopsided grin, “and then I have to unravel him to wrap up your dented melon.”
Charlie’s brain sputtered and sparked. With the benefit of daylight, he could see the huge devil’s pitchfork sticking out of the wall, the campy painting of the evil, grinning fortune teller, and Charlie’s favorite zombie, lurching for someone to grab. Even Tim’s box of crap was along for the ride. The rest of the spooky stuff appeared to have been dismantled to make room for Bruce. “The Creep Castle is his ride? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a giant smuggler,” confided Tim with a wink. “We’re all giant smugglers. Come on, Charlie, get in the ball game.”
“Come on, Charlie,” said Bruce, poking the boy in the ribs with his pinkie finger.
Suddenly, Tim leaving home to join the carnival took on new meaning. Was this what his brother had really been up to? “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Probably the same reason you didn’t tell me.”
“The kid’s awake,” came a voice from the end of the trailer. “Now he can go.”
Charlie turned to see two more people at the end of the Creep Castle: Juice Man, the bald carnival worker who worked the blimp, and Wertzie, the guy with four fingers who hated the Gravitron.
“Charlie comes!” The giant bared his teeth and growled to make his point.
“Not if I have anything to say about it! Giants are enough trouble. We can’t be babysitting brats, too!” The Juice Man pounded the metal bed of the trailer with a meaty fist. “You’re not in charge, giant!”
“His name’s Bruce,” said Charlie.
“Bruce,” the giant grunted in agreement. He pounded the trailer bed much harder than the Juice Man had managed, rocking a pallet of crates near Charlie. The bald man swallowed hard and took a step back.
Charlie held up an arm to steady the wooden boxes, then pulled back as he recognized what the Creep Castle had been carrying. “The dynamite! Holy crap, Tim, you know how much we were bouncing around back here? You could have blown us to bits!”
Tim picked up a bundle from a crate. “You mean this dynamite?” He undid the twine, selected a stick, and tossed it in the air. Charlie ducked and threw his hands over his head to protect himself, but a blast never came as the stick landed with a noisy but harmless clank.
Bruce barked out a horsey laugh. “Boom!”
The cylinder rolled down the metal bed of the Creep Castle. Red-faced, Charlie picked it up. It was as heavy as he’d remembered back in the warehouse.
Tim pulled another stick from the stack. “As long as we’re coming clean.” He peeled back the warning wrapper and held the rod up. It glinted when it caught a ray of sun from the rear of the trailer.
“Is that…?” Charlie unwrapped his and felt the cool metal against his fingertips. The gold was stunning. A single bar had to be worth millions.
“Solid gold,” Tim said. “The giants got bank, Charlie. It’s what they’re using to pay for their new home.”
Juice Man tried to inspect a bar of his own, but Bruce snatched it right out of the carny’s hands and put it back in the box. Juice Man looked offended at the implication that he was trying to steal the gold.
“How long until this ride is ready, Juice Man?” asked Wertzie.
“What’s the use of even trying? There’s too much weight!” the bald man protested. “The giant, the gold, it’s too much!”
“Nobody’s happy about why we’re carrying the gold,” said Wertzie. The giant smugglers looked at one another without speaking for a moment.
“What?” asked Charlie. “Who was supposed to bring the gold?”
Bruce was the one who figured it out. “Hank?”
“He didn’t make it to the rendezvous,” confessed Wertzie. “That’s why we have the gold—he’s usually in charge of the valuables.”
“So Giant Fitz got him?” asked Charlie. Now he felt sort of terrible about just leaving the old man to fight the enormous bully all by himself.
Tim looked at Wertzie. “Who’s Giant Fitz?”
“Fitz was the one who was fighting Hank,” Charlie explained to his brother. “The bully from the fair? His dad’s got a lab out at that Accelerton place—somehow he must have turned Fitz into a giant!”
“An actual giant?” asked Wertzie. “Like your friend here?”
“Why would I make it up?” asked Charlie.
Bruce nodded his head in agreement. “Giant!”
“So where is this other giant? Giant Fitz?” asked Tim.
“He got zapped by the man with the glowing stick.”
Tim looked over the top of his sunglasses. “The man with the what?”
“Geez,” Charlie said. “Don’t you guys know anything?”
The giant smugglers looked at each other in disbelief. This was definitely not business as usual. “We need to sort through this, but the side of the highway probably isn’t the place to do it. One thing’s for sure: Someone is looking for giants, and we don’t want to be here when they show up.” Wertzie turned to the Juice Man. “Just grease the daylights out of that bearing. We’re an hour out of Peoria. Can you get us that far?”
The Juice Man ran a hand over his bald head. “I doubt it,” he spat, but he disappeared to work on the problem anyway.
“Let’s move!” shouted Wertzie to the other carnies loitering around their trucks. He left to get the carnival back on the road.
“Before we go,” said a woman’s voice, “let’s get you boys something to eat.” Tiger, the one Tim called the roughie, appeared at the end of the trailer with an aluminum cart full of the biggest elephant ears Charlie had ever seen. Bruce’s nostrils twitched as he reached for an elephant ear and waved it under his nose. He stuffed a huge handful into his mouth, taking slow, careful chomps to savor every sweet bite. He closed his eyes and moaned with pleasure.
Tim motioned for Charlie to join him and Tiger at the end of the trailer. “We’ve got to get you home,” he said in a low voice, trying not to upset Bruce. He tapped Charlie on his bandaged head. “You’ve seen for yourself that things can get hairy.”
“It might not be safe,” Tiger agreed. “Bus ride home is probably your best bet.”
Charlie looked back at the big guy, remembering how he’d saved Charlie’s butt when the maniac with the stick was about to fry him. Bruce didn’t run or leave Charlie behind. Whether
it was at the dam or the drive-in, Bruce always had Charlie’s back. Charlie thought about what his mom would do in the situation. She helped butterflies on their way—why not giants? If Bruce wanted Charlie to come, then he’d have the giant’s back, too. “I’m coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Bruce snorted an emphatic grunt, making it clear he wasn’t going anywhere without his friend.
Tiger shook her head and took the cart away. Tim wasn’t nuts about Charlie’s decision, either, but at least he seemed to understand it. “I’ll call Mom, let her know you’re okay,” he said. “Tell her … I’ll make up something.”
“Try it now!” came from outside the Creep Castle. Apparently, the Juice Man had done whatever he needed to do to get the ride moving again.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” Tim slammed the heavy metal doors shut and the two friends returned to darkness.
“Looks like we’re going to see some more of the world, big guy.”
“Big world.”
The small, colorful caravan jostled its way back onto the gravel that led to the main road. One by one, the carnival rides, folded up like toys back in their boxes after a day of hard play, rolled onto the highway. It took the trucks a while to accelerate, but soon they were speeding south.
Behind them, hundreds of monarch butterflies rode the air currents in the smugglers’ wake, making a migration of their own.
25
Hank reached for his phone, but found the task impossible with his right arm in a sling. He tried to sit up in the elevated bed and winced. His fingers, purple and bruised, curled into a fist. Even his face hurt.
He was laid up in a patient room at Richland Hospital, the unpleasant smell of rubbing alcohol heavy in the air. Because he kept drifting in and out of consciousness, he had little sense of how long he’d been there. Hours? Days? And he had no idea if the giant smugglers had picked up the last giant in the old warehouse. He had a vague memory of paramedics promising to take care of Powder before he blacked out in the ambulance at the quarry.
A groan to his left made Hank turn his head. That hurt, too—his neck felt like it had been worked over with a meat tenderizer. In the next bed, perhaps unconscious from a recent surgery, was Sean Fitzgibbons. The scientist’s face was pale. And his right leg was elevated and heavily bandaged, with a stain the size and color of a bruised orange in the place where shrapnel from the old aluminum shed had ripped through his thigh.
“Guessing things didn’t go the way you planned,” said Hank, even though he knew the man couldn’t hear him.
The old man needed to get out of there. He reached up to figure out the complicated mechanism that held his leg in the air.
He stopped when a businesswoman in a crisply ironed suit appeared in the doorway, her rehearsed smile offset by intense eyes. She held a tablet. The woman sighed as she paused at Fitzgibbons’s bed—it was clear she had planned on talking to the scientist. She turned her attention to Hank. “I’m Gretchen Gourmand, with the Accelerton Corporation. Can we talk, Mr. Pulvermacher?”
“How do you know my name?”
Gourmand examined the beeping monitor that was attached to Dr. Fitzgibbons. “You know, I was skeptical. But he did it. Found his fairy tale and better yet, created one of his own.”
“What do you want?” asked Hank.
“Right,” sniffed Gourmand. “Let’s get down to business. Where is it?”
“Where is what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hank lied. He tried to sit up and his body rebelled in painful protest.
“The world gets smaller all the time. It must be terribly difficult for a giant to hide.”
Hank saw no use in pretending now. “I thought you already had a giant.”
In response, Gourmand selected a thumbnail on the tablet and played shaky helicopter footage of Giant Jamie at the dam. With the tornado bearing down, the chopper had released its giant cargo. The footage showed Jamie being sucked inside the twister, then chaos before the footage went black.
“Even Fitzgibbons’s kid didn’t deserve that.” Hank pinched his eyes shut and shook his head.
“Tragic, yes,” said Gourmand, her voice quiet out of respect for Fitzgibbons. “The body will turn up sooner or later, I expect. But our experts have concluded that the boy couldn’t have survived. Which brings us to the matter of the other giant at the dam.”
Hank gripped the bed rail with a shaky hand. A shock of pain pulsed down his spine. “You’ll never find him.”
“There are limited ways your giant could have left town in that storm,” said Gourmand. “By foot, though that’s a very public exit. A few large dairy trucks managed to get on the road. And a certain carnival made the unusual decision to pack up and leave town right as the severe weather hit. Strange, yes? We’re tracking all of them.”
Hank said nothing.
Gourmand considered his silence, then gave an imperceptible nod. “We will have our giant, Mr. Pulvermacher.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“For humanity, of course. We’ll develop new drugs. New treatments. The giants’ advanced physiology is almost guaranteed to provide the key for a number of discoveries that could improve the lives of millions, Mr. Pulvermacher. Doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile achievement? Why don’t you pick up your phone and call your friends? You can save everyone from unpleasantness that just doesn’t need to happen.”
“I’m not calling anyone. I’m sure you’ve already got my lines bugged.”
“We’re not the only interested party,” said Gourmand, gathering her leather bag. “There’s a man from the defense trade, a business far nastier than ours, on their scent right now. A tornado couldn’t stop him—it just slowed him down. That’s why I was hoping you could help. He won’t share my preference for negotiation. He just takes what he wants, and he won’t care if your friends get hurt along the way. I’ll ask one more time: Tell me where they are, and I’ll promise to keep the giant and your people safe.”
Hank’s silence served as his answer.
“Very well.” A gust of cold autumn wind blew in through the open window, but Gourmand did not shiver. “Then be prepared for the consequences when they come.”
26
Carnival trailers circled the Peoria Plaza Tire parking lot like a wagon train, creating an enclosure in which Bruce and Charlie huddled. A swollen moon hung low in the evening sky. For at least the next hour, they couldn’t hide in the Creep Castle—the shop’s mechanics were hard at work on some road force balancing, or whatever Juice Man had called it. Air wrenches zipped and whirred outside their inner circle.
Charlie and Bruce ate monstrous, greasy cheeseburgers that Wertzie had fetched from a place across the river called the Burger Barge. Charlie had never got the brat Adele had promised at the drive-in the night before, and he attacked his burger like a competitor in the World Series of Eating. Still, he was only halfway through it before Bruce had worked his way through ten. The giant eyed the rest of Charlie’s.
“Don’t even think about it.”
Bruce found a stray bag of onion rings and emptied it into his maw. He leaned back against the Gravitron trailer and belched. A low rumble came from the other side of the parking lot, and the giant peeked around the edge of a trailer to see what was causing the sound.
“What is it?”
“Wow,” Bruce whispered.
There was a “wow” in the parking lot? Curiosity got the better of Charlie as well. He socked Bruce in the thigh and motioned for the giant to lift him up to see what was going on. Bruce picked up the boy in his fist and hoisted him just high enough to peek over the top of the Gravitron.
“Wow.”
A fireplug of a man with tattoos that sleeved his forearms worked a crane on his truck, emblazoned with flaming letters that advertised Stan the Statue Man. The crane lifted a seventeen-foot-tall ceramic lady into a standing position in the corner of the Peoria Plaza Tire parking lot. She was nearly as big as Bruce
. A smile was frozen on her face, and Charlie supposed she was attractive, in a 1960s-president’s-wife kind of way. She looked sort of familiar, in her red sweater and navy-blue miniskirt, though he couldn’t say exactly who she resembled.
Bruce set the boy back on the ground and scooted around the trailer into the open. “The guy is going to see you!” Charlie said in a whisper-shout, but Bruce didn’t respond. Charlie threw up his arms. This was going to be trouble.
Charlie ran out from the circle of trailers to see the giant crawling on his hands and knees toward the queen-size lady. Stan the Statue Man had his back to the ceramic figure for now, checking off something on a clipboard, but if he turned around, there was no way he wouldn’t see the giant. His own long-bed truck, the kind that usually carried six or seven cars to auto dealers, was filled with more enormous figures—a replica of the Statue of Liberty, a lumberjack with an ax, a goofy rabbit in red overalls that read Grady’s. Charlie sprinted over, trying to get to Stan before he could turn around and see Bruce.
“Hey,” said Charlie, scrambling for some way to distract the guy. “Um. Hi. Your truck? Wow. What is all this stuff?”
Stan the Statue Man looked up, but he didn’t seem surprised. He probably got the question a lot. “The world’s finest collection of colossal ceramic mascots,” he said with pride. “I design them myself.”
“That’s amazing,” said Charlie, watching Bruce with his peripheral vision while trying to maintain eye contact with Stan. The giant stood next to the lady now, sizing her up. And that’s when Charlie figured out who the woman reminded him of—the old-timey girl in Tim’s peekaboo pen.
“That gal behind me, she’s Vanna Whitewall,” said Stan the Statue Man, hooking his thumb over his shoulder. “Proud ambassador of Peoria Plaza Tire for forty years, but she gets dinged up from time to time. Idiots don’t check their rearview mirrors before backing up right into her shins. Polished her up and snapped on her new winter outfit.”
“Tell me more about the rabbit!” Charlie blurted quickly, successfully diverting Stan the Statue Man’s attention just as he was about to turn and point out more of Vanna Whitewall’s finer features. “He’s got to weigh a ton!”