All he wanted was to sleep. He’d been on duty since three o’clock the previous morning—twenty-seven hours straight running from one crisis to the next. A home burglary. An overdose. A domestic dispute that had turned violent. Cars vandalized. A fistfight outside a strip club. Nonstop “shots fired” calls coming into dispatch. Though, thankfully, no bodies. Not yet. He tapped his knuckles against the dashboard, as if it might bring him luck.
David could hardly remember anymore the way it had been before. That easy daily routine of long stops at Pearl’s diner for coffee, the hardware store for town gossip, the courthouse to shoot the shit with Jason. Going out to one of his usual spots on the highway and waiting to bust someone from out of state for speeding, or just sitting and staring at the countryside.
Two years ago. Might as well have been another lifetime.
He decided to make one last circle of Old Town, check that everything was peace and quiet, then head back to his apartment for a quick nap. Hope that his dispatcher, Andrea, wouldn’t bark into the radio with any new horrors.
From Main Street, Old Little Springs stretched a mile in every direction, small wood-framed homes, sprawling yards of dead grass, broken-down appliances left to rust. It was like the whole community was oxidizing, steadily becoming nothing. A few of the storefronts had reopened, though. None of the houses were empty. The cracked pavement had been repaved—though the water tower remained a jack-o’-lantern. It was comfortable, familiar, this little stretch. Unlike everything around it.
As David rounded a corner, he saw them. A procession of maybe sixty people in black robes that hung low enough to drag the ground, moving with slow, unified steps, as if a monastic order. He drove past, idling close to them, and their faces came into view. Not their actual faces but the plastic masks they wore over them. Tiger masks, eyes wide and ferocious, mouths frozen mid-roar. None glanced at David or made a sound. They never did. “Tonys,” the locals called them. Like the tiger from the cereal. Every morning, the Tonys did this. March to the old park. Bow down, pray to the west—to it—then stand and march back to the old theater building, which they’d somehow acquired in the chaos that followed landfall.
“You have a permit?” David hollered through his open window.
No response. He drove on, swearing under his breath.
He eased into the parking lot of Pearl’s, a long, rectangular building painted bright pink. Through the windows, he could see the morning crowd already there and a line waiting out the door. It wasn’t ever full before, but because the diner sat at the very western edge of town, its windows offered one of the best, unbroken views of it. The thing that looked out of the corner of your eye like a small mountain range rising up a couple of miles outside of town, blocking the horizon.
It was no mountain. It was him. The giant, prostrate on his back. Looming.
Every time David saw it, really looked at it, his guts twisted. The impossible scope—the left side of its beetle-like abdomen rising as straight as a cliff face, maybe a thousand feet. Its arms—two on this side of it, two on the other—were thin relative to the torso but still each a mile and a quarter long and thicker than a house, ending in stubby, four-fingered hands. To the south, its thin legs with oddly spaced joints and a row of barbs along them stretched all the way into the river, which had swelled its bank to carve a new path around the massive four-toed feet. And to the north, its shoulders continued into its head with no neck. Its face lolled to the east, toward town, so that it stared over them. Stared right at David from under a massive brow with clusters of unblinking, lifeless insectoid eyes.
In the hours after landfall, the military had arrived in an endless flock of C-130 cargo planes and transport helicopters, and soldiers had first surrounded the giant, keeping everyone back. Then they built the metal wall that now encircled it. To protect the town, the army claimed. But the giant was dead, and all of the guns pointed out.
David had never been much closer than he was now, but still he could see that the surface of it was scrawled with deep ridges that formed curving patterns that repeated, growing ever smaller. Fractals, David had heard them called. Its skin seemed reflective, though not quite. Like the opalescent mica stones David would find on hiking trips to the Rocky Mountains as a kid, it bent and swirled light. So, it always looked different, changing color through the day along with the sky. Pastel blue and pink in the morning. Blue and white during the day. Gray during storms. Indigo and orange at dusk.
Day after day, it lay there. Right where it landed, settling onto the ground with impossible ease—like an old man easing into a bath. Unmoving. Dead. Killed. At least so it seemed.
Because it wasn’t just the giant that arrived that day. There, right where its abdomen met the plate of its chest, a spire emerged and rose up some three thousand feet. A gun-metal black tower jutting into the sky.
A spear. Broken off at the top. Massive beyond comprehension. Stabbed right through the giant. Right in the spot where David was trained to shoot people—center mass.
The spire caught the rising sun and shimmered an effervescent red.
Where did the giant come from? What killed it? How did it land without ripping a hole into the earth? And why, out of a whole universe, did it arrive here, right on David’s doorstep? If any of the scientists or government officials had answers to those or a million other questions about the giant, they weren’t saying.
“Morning, Gulliver,” David said.
A sudden pop of static, and David startled. Just his radio.
“Boss, you awake?”
Andrea’s voice.
“Unfortunately.”
“I can call Brooke instead . . .”
“What is it, Andrea?”
The tone of her voice already told him: nothing good.
“New Town, boss. Somebody found a body.”
David looked away from the giant. To the north and east, where previously Little Springs had disappeared into rolling, barren hills and fields, now a whole new city rose up, New Little Springs. Apartments and strip malls and big box retailers and the new school and the rounded glass tower of the Harold Countryman Federal Building—named after the old hermit who lived right where the giant fell. A god crashing onto earth and only one fatality, like some kind of cosmic joke. And new people to fill all the new buildings. Government workers, soldiers, scientists, lawyers, journalists, retailers, tour guides, restaurateurs, developers, consultants, doctors, teachers, yoga instructors. Them, and criminals, too. Drug dealers. Thieves. Prostitutes. Grifters. Murderers.
David sighed and flipped a switch on the dash. The truck’s siren wailed.
He knew he’d found it when he saw the twenty-some people gathered in a clutch outside a strip mall that housed, in order, a Thai restaurant, a vape shop, a tattoo parlor, and a real estate office with sheets of paper showing houses and apartments and parcels of land taped up in the window.
The crowd stood in front of the tattoo parlor, next to posters showing off giant-inspired body art—the same patterns from the giant inked into human skin. Whatever these people had seen, it was bad. Arms clutched to chests. Hands over mouths. Makeup streaked with tears. “He’s in there,” one said, pointing to the realty office.
David held for just a moment at the door. Since the giant landed and the world had descended on Garden County, the state police had set up an office here. Any serious cases, they said they would take. Leave all the grinding, day-to-day policing to David and his single deputy. He could call them; let them have it. Whoever the dead person was on the other side of this door, he was an outsider. Let another outsider deal with it.
David pulled open the door. To hell with the state police. My jurisdiction, my case.
The overhead lights were off, but the large glass windows let in plenty of light. The room was new, walls painted white. No art or plants. Just a copy machine and a desk with a computer on it. A door at the back that led to a storeroom or a bathroom. No sign of forced entry. No sign of anything. Maybe in the back?
As David stepped forward, a pair of boat shoes became visible behind the desk, toes pointed up. He took another step.
The body lay on its back, a man in khaki pants and a polo shirt that might have once been white. All David could see was blood, thick and dark and almost dry. Coating the torso, which had a gaping hole in its center. A shotgun blast? Blood covered the face, pooled a couple of feet out onto the floor, spattered the arms. No. Arm. One was complete. The other ended at the elbow.
He found the rest of it on the desk, next to a handful of business cards: Sanjay Kapoor Realty. The missing half of the left arm sat on the desk, fingers still resting on the keyboard. It ended all at once, cut through cleanly, as if by a meat slicer, a bisection of muscle and bone and sinew.
Aligned with the wound, a deep notch cut down into the wooden surface of the desk. What the hell could do that? A hatchet? A machete? Some goddamned samurai sword?
He looked back down at the chest. Could that wound have been made with a blade? It was hard to tell through all the blood, but there seemed to be smaller lacerations, almost superficial.
Two years ago, this would’ve made David sick. Back then, all he knew of death came from the videos and photos he’d seen during his couple of years studying criminal justice at Western Nebraska Community College. Sure, a handful of times after he became a deputy, then sheriff, there would be a traffic accident or an old person dead of natural causes. Nothing like this. Nothing evil.
Even among the horrors David had seen since landfall, this one gnawed at him. It was unnatural. But not just that. It was familiar.
A couple of months earlier, he’d responded to a call at the new airport. An owner of one of the tourist operations—“rent a helicopter for the world’s best view of the giant”—had been found outside his hangar, dead, cut all to hell. Jim Holly was his name. David had arrived at the scene just at the same time as the state police. They’d muscled him out; he’d pushed the case out of mind till now. He searched his memory for the scene. How did the body look? Didn’t Holly also have a massive wound in his chest?
A siren grew louder outside, and a black Ford sedan—unmarked, windows tinted, Nebraska government plates—parked sharply out front. Two men emerged, both stocky, matching mustaches, khaki pants and white dress shirts beneath blue windbreakers with Nebraska State Police detective badges hanging around their necks. The only difference between them was that one was six and a half feet tall and the other at least a foot shorter. David knew their names were Kirby and Warby, but he could never remember which was which.
“Murder?” the short one asked as they burst inside.
“Bad one,” David said, nodding at the desk.
They pulled latex gloves from their pockets, snapped them on, and approached the body.
“Thanks for securing the scene,” the tall one said.
Now fuck off, his body language implied.
David didn’t move.
“The way the arm was cut. It’s still perfectly in place. Like the killer either snuck up on him or they knew each other, and Mister Kapoor there wasn’t expecting it. Either way, I don’t think it was a crime of passion.”
“Uh huh,” the short one said.
“It reminded me of the Holly case,” David continued. “The wounds . . .”
Neither of the detectives looked up.
“We’ve had plenty of stabbings,” the tall one said.
“Just look at the cut on the arm. Not just any blade can do that. Your forensics turn up anything from the Holly crime scene? I mean, if they’re connected . . .”
The short one stood and glowered at David.
“We can’t comment on an open investigation.”
David grinned, connecting dots that he knew the man hadn’t intended to reveal.
“Open? Then you haven’t closed it?”
The tall one glared at the short one.
“Not yet.”
Now they both stood and moved between David and the body.
“Homicides are ours. You know that,” the short one said. “You stick to handing out speeding tickets. Leave the real police work to us.”
He could fight them. But he’d tried before and lost. The county didn’t have a forensics team, didn’t even have a morgue to store a body. Everyone told him to just be thankful for the state’s help.
“Good luck,” David offered as he left.
Outside, David retrieved a roll of yellow caution tape from his truck and began roping off a perimeter.
A dark sedan pulled into the lot, and David lifted up the tape so that it could park beside the state police sedan. The driver stepped out. An older man with rough and mottled skin, his gray hair cropped close, a dark suit. He was FBI. Agent Erickson. David had crossed paths with him a few times before. He seemed nice enough, though operating one or two planes above David’s existence.
Erickson opened the back door, and a woman stepped out. She was young, about David’s age, Asian American, in civilian clothes—a T-shirt and jeans, a backpack slung over her shoulder. Around her neck, an olive-hued stone hung from a simple necklace. She was pretty, David thought, then chided himself for instinctively judging her appearance.
“Inside?” Erickson asked in a voice that might once have been gravelly but now was a soft rasp.
David hadn’t expected to be addressed.
“Yeah,” he managed.
“All right then. Thanks for your help here,” Erickson said.
The old man’s hand went into his jacket pocket and came out with a burnished metal lighter, which he caressed like a rabbit’s foot. David supposed he must’ve recently quit smoking or was trying.
The woman smiled and nodded at David, then Erickson ushered her into the office.
What the hell was the FBI doing at a murder investigation? And who was the woman with Erickson? David was sure he’d never seen her before.
Kirby and Warby stormed out of the office all at once.
“. . . treat us like we don’t even rate,” the tall one muttered. “It should be our case.”
The short one took out a pack of cigarettes, retrieved two, lit both, and handed one up to his partner. They both leaned against the glass and took long, perfectly synchronized drags.
“Takes a real asshole to build castles in another man’s sandbox, doesn’t it?” David asked.
“Fuck off, Andy Griffith,” the short one spat.
“Yeah. Fuck all the way off back to Mayberry,” the tall one added.
David started toward his truck, then stopped and turned back.
“The FBI guy—Erickson—did he show up at the Holly murder, too?”
The detectives shared a quick glance, then glared silently at David and resumed smoking. But their eyes had told David all he wanted to know. The FBI was somehow connected to both cases. The only question was, why?