The sky turned black. The air rushed away as the temperature dropped thirty degrees all at once. The clouds sparked, alight with an otherworldly red glow. It was here. Falling. But not like they had said. Not like a bullet fired at the earth. It had slowed. Stopped in the low atmosphere. Hanging there, a body suspended overhead. The clouds came apart, and he could see it in full as it slowly descended. As it did, its skin glowed red again, illuminated along a series of curling patterns. Bits of flaming debris rained down around it.
And . . . no it was not the giant churning through the sky. It was a black mass of spinning air. The tornado. Coming for them. He was a child again, torn from his bed by his father’s hands, thrust into the old claw-foot bathtub. The weight of his parents on top of him. The storm screaming outside. Then an explosion, and the weight of his parents gone, and the house around him gone, nothing but empty sky overhead as he stood in the tub, and a pain in his back as he felt the warm wet of blood.
But no, the blood wasn’t his at all. And he wasn’t in his childhood home. He was in an office. A desk. An arm, crimson gushing out from where it suddenly ended. The hand began to move, fingers striking keys, letters and words appearing on a screen. What was it trying to tell him? He strained to read . . .
David woke all at once from the kaleidoscope of the dream. His clock said he’d slept two hours too long. Hell. He went to the bathroom and caught sight of his shirtless body in the mirror. The always muscular build he’d kept had softened a little. He turned, and he could just see the thick scar that ran from his right buttock up to his shoulder blade. The place where the tornado reached out and touched him. A reminder that he alone had been spared.
He showered quickly and changed into a fresh uniform. The apartment was small, absent of almost any decoration. It was a new build to the southeast, close to where the railroad tracks had been rerouted south of the river, to go around the giant. David hated it, just as he hated every new thing in the town. But he couldn’t afford anything else on a county salary, and Tabby had taken the house in the divorce.
He clicked on his radio. “Hey, Andrea. Back in the saddle.”
The night passed quietly. David dozed off and on in his truck, though the intermittent sleep only seemed to exhaust him more. Realizing it was Thursday, he went to the little grocery in Old Town just as it opened and came out with two armfuls of plastic shopping bags.
He settled them in the back of his truck and drove a few blocks over, to a single-story cottage amid a large yard. As he carried the bags toward the front door, a survey of the house reminded him of all that he needed to do and hadn’t. Leaves piled in every alley of the roof. Paint curled in peels from the siding. Junk filled the yard—generations of broken-down lawnmowers, dishwashers, microwaves, and cars.
Beside the door, mail spilled out of the box. He’d get it on the way out. He knocked with the toe of his boot.
He heard footsteps, and then Bonnie opened the door, peering past him without a word.
“Morning, Bonnie,” David said as he shuffled past her with the bags.
She closed the door and locked it.
“A car. Black one. Dad saw it earlier, passing by.”
“Huh. Well, next time get a license number and I’ll run it.”
She only then looked down at the groceries.
“Oh, David, you didn’t need to!” She turned inside. “Benjamin! Our boy is here.”
Bonnie wore a house coat, which stretched against her great folds of skin. She walked with locked knees, scuffling past stacks of newspapers and boxes and bags and piles of clothing that lined the hall. A calico cat ran between David’s legs as he deposited the grocery bags on the kitchen counter, pushing dirty plates aside.
“I can take care of putting those away,” she offered.
David waved her off.
“No problem. It won’t take but a second.”
Bonnie went off to join Ben Senior in the den. David finished with the groceries, then quickly washed the dishes. Once he was done, instinct took him to his old bedroom. The floor was piled with the same clutter as the hallway, but the bunkbed was still there. He couldn’t remember much of the months after his parents died, only that he ended up here, adopted by Bonnie and Ben, sharing a room with Ben Junior. A room they shared for six years, up until the day that Ben Junior had gone.
It was part of what had pushed him into criminal justice. The idea that he could find out what had really happened to his cousin. There was a time when he thought he’d get his degree and go into the FBI, gain access to all their investigative tools.
But if those two years in college taught him anything, it was that he couldn’t survive anywhere else but here. And back then it seemed impossible that anyone from the FBI would ever step foot in Little Springs.
David closed the door and joined his aunt and uncle in the den. The TV was tuned to the news.
“I didn’t know you had a cat,” David said.
“He came in the old dog door one night,” Ben Senior answered from his Barcalounger without looking from the screen. “Keeps coming back. Mom won’t stop feeding him all my baloney.”
“It’s bad for your heart,” Bonnie chided. “Better for Nehemiah to eat it.”
“You named the cat Nehemiah?”
They shrugged.
The two of them had grown worse. The piles around the house grew taller. They weren’t cleaning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen them out of the house.
They’d always been strange, Bonnie and Ben. Anxious. Scared of the world. Convinced that evil was at work. The New Year’s Eve of the new millennium, they had forced him and Ben Junior to stay up all night praying with them, sure that the world was ending.
They never spoke of the giant, but he knew they felt it. The same thing everyone else felt—across the world, and here especially. What if that thing wakes up? What if it suddenly explodes? What else is out there in the dark of space? What was it that shoved the spear through the giant’s chest? And what if it suddenly appears in the sky?
A news report came on the TV. David immediately recognized the strip mall, filmed from just outside the caution tape he had strung up. A reporter gave the shocking details. A realtor killed inside his business in what seemed to be a random attack.
“World is going up in flames, son,” Ben Senior said. “All around us. Flames.”
He walked out, and neither of them seemed to notice. At the front door, David tugged a ream of envelopes and flyers from the mailbox, some spilling out of his hands. As he knelt to scoop them up, David noticed the car. A black sedan, parked across the street.
He tossed the mail inside the door and closed it. By the time he turned around, the car was gone.