David slipped his hand through the leather loop and gripped it tightly. Across from him, Spady did the same, using his left arm. They pulled, and the coffin glided easily from out of the back of the hearse. The other pallbearers filed in as the coffin emerged from the vehicle, a mix of Jason’s friends and some second cousins, all of them stony faced, resolute in purpose. They began the short walk to the grave site.
The coffin felt heavy enough. David wondered what was inside of it, because he was certain it wasn’t Jason. The service at the church had been closed casket, and the family had been told they couldn’t see the body. That it would be too traumatic. Excuses. The feds had Jason somewhere inside of Site One, doing Lord knows what with him. A spark of anger lit inside him. At the feds for creating the lie, and at himself for perpetrating it.
After Erickson had deposited David back at his apartment, he’d sat and stared and waited for sleep that wouldn’t come. Finally, he grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen and steadily drank it dry, then tottered around the apartment until the world stopped.
In the days since, Erickson’s warning had proven out. Most every waking moment was spent with the family, gathering at Jason’s house, where his wife, Missy, mostly sat in silence on the living room sofa, an arm wrapped around each of their twin daughters. Extended family and friends filed in and out in a processional of hugs, tears, and casseroles.
Only in the evening would David escape, going to the nursing home to see Samuel. For once, the old man held no interest in the puzzle of the giant. Instead, the two of them sat beside each other on the bed, embracing, as Samuel pulled forward happy memories of Jason as a child. David couldn’t bring himself to ask the old man about what he had been saying the night Jason died, the admission of guilt.
The coffin slid into place on the metal structure above the open grave. David stepped back into place amid the family, most of them sitting on folding chairs that had been set up on a thick green carpet. Missy and the girls sat at the front. Missy was as inscrutable as ever, always the antithesis of her ebullient husband. The girls were glassy eyed animals. They were seven—no, eight. Almost the age David had been when his parents died, when the family gathered in this same spot, with two coffins instead of one. David had said nothing to the girls over the past days, despite being the one who knew what they were experiencing more than any other. Truly, it was because of his shared experience. He knew that no matter what he said—what anyone said—it wouldn’t help. Nothing can when your world is broken.
Next to them sat Jason’s parents, Dale and Debbie. Then Samuel, staring emptily, in a wheelchair. Next to him was Jason’s sister, Jenny, who shared her brother’s masculine build. Beside them were Ben Senior and Bonnie. A seat was open for David, but he stood just off to the side.
They were near the top of a hill that rose on the south side of the Platte River, just across from town. Ash trees, a few small cedars, and yucca dotted the sandy soil around the rows of tombstones climbing the hillside. Overhead, the sky was unbroken gray.
Beyond the cemetery, they could look down at the river and at the splayed open legs of the giant. Between those legs, three massive forms stretched out. Scientists had said that because the giant was of an unknown species, its biology likely wouldn’t exactly match our own. But the three things dangling between its legs sure looked like penises, each the size of a building.
The minister stepped forward, carrying a large Bible. She was a small woman whose upper back was just starting to hunch with age, her gray hair cut short, eyes hidden behind thick glasses. She opened the Bible.
“Dying, Christ destroyed our death. Rising, Christ restored our life. Christ will come again in glory . . .”
Her words faded into the breeze that came over the hill and started the dry grass to whispering. David turned away from the minister as subtly as he could and looked at the crowd that had gathered beyond the family. It seemed as if every resident of Little Springs was there. And beyond them, outsiders. Dozens. A few faces he recognized—Aaliyah and some of the others from the mosque—but most he didn’t.
All at once, staring out over that group, the hairs stood up along David’s neck. The killer was there. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he was certain. Somewhere in that crowd was the man who’d torn his cousin open. A murderer obsessed with the giant. Desperately, he looked from face to face, willing himself to remember them all, to add to his list of suspects. Was it that man, with the bald head and high cheekbones? Or the one with blond hair holding a collapsed umbrella at his side? David wanted to shout out, to tear through the crowd person by person, to demand to know why his cousin had died.
Then he landed on a face he knew. Erickson. The old FBI man gave the slightest of nods. He was there for the same reason. Sunny stood beside him, her face mostly hidden behind large sunglasses.
The minister closed the Bible with a slam, snapping David’s attention back to her.
“A new heaven and a new earth,” she said. “That is what the Bible promises. Pretty hard to see it, isn’t it, if you look at the world around us? Evil invading our town.”
Missy clenched the twins closer to her.
“Depravity, all around us,” the minister continued. “This world is under siege, brothers and sisters. Just look down there.”
She pointed behind her, toward the giant.
“Satan has sent a messenger! A fallen angel, dropped right onto us. We read of this in the book of Enoch. The giants of old came down from the hill and took women; they ‘befouled the earth with their deeds, who in all time of their age made lawlessness.’ So it is today!”
David’s jaw clenched. The minister had been normal enough before. But since the giant fell, it was this same screed Sunday after Sunday. David had stopped going to church, but he knew more and more came to hear her rants. But this day was supposed to be about Jason, not about the giant.
“Is there not lawlessness all around?” she continued. “Is our earth not befouled? That thing is an abomination! It should be destroyed . . .”
Samuel suddenly startled in his wheelchair.
“What the hell is she talking about?” he asked.
Muffled laughter sounded through the crowd. The minister grimaced, then gave up on recapturing the moment. She recited the closing prayer as the funeral director released a lever, the pulleys sprang into action, and the ground swallowed the coffin.
The outsiders moved down the hill to their cars, which leaked out of the gravel parking lot onto the highway and back across the river to the north, toward Little Springs. The locals formed a line, moving past the family, offering hugs and the promise to keep the family in their prayers. All at once, Tabby was hugging David. She looked into his eyes and rubbed the tears from her face. She whispered something about his promise to come over. Behind her, Brian stood and gave a close-lipped nod.
David wandered away from the well-wishers and found Brooke and Spady standing beneath an ash tree. Before them spread out the Blunt family plot. Years back, Samuel had bought up space at the top of the hill so that all the family could be buried there. One stone for Samuel and Mariam. Another for Dale and Debbie. Another for Ben Senior and Bonnie. Another for David’s parents. And one for Ben Junior, a headstone that Samuel insisted be placed, though no grave was ever dug.
“Sorry,” Spady said, putting his left hand on David’s shoulder.
“You, too,” David said.
They stood silently a while. Then David spoke again.
“It’s funny. I always had this idea in my head, growing up. I thought our family was special. Like we were hand-picked by God for some purpose. Then I grow up, and all this shit happens.”
David stopped for a moment. He wouldn’t let the memories return, of the funeral for his parents and of how desperately alone and scared he had felt. And then the years of rage that followed.
“There’s as many of us dead as alive,” he said. “I don’t know. I suppose every kid sees their family that way.”
Spady lit a cigarette.
“Not every kid.”
He puffed intensely at the cigarette. His parents had moved into town when Spady was little, renting a run-down house at the edge of town, living off of donated clothes and the food pantry. As the boys had grown up together, their parents never let them go to Spady’s house to play. It wasn’t until years later that David understood—Spady’s parents were alcoholics. After high school, they’d left town, and if Spady kept in touch with them, he never spoke of it. It was Jason who had befriended Spady, brought him into their group. And now . . .
All at once, Spady turned and locked eyes with David.
“You saw him, didn’t you? The guy that killed Jason.”
“We aren’t going to talk about that. Not now,” Brooke said.
She tried gently to pull her husband back, but Spady held where he was.
David nodded.
“I did.”
“You know who it was?” Spady asked.
“I don’t. Spady, I can’t talk about . . .”
Spady leaned closer.
“But you’re gonna find the son of a bitch, aren’t you? You’re gonna find him, and you’re gonna kill him.”
David nodded again.
“I won’t stop till it’s done. You have my word.”
Spady relented and took a deep drag. “Okay,” he muttered as he and Brooke paced away.
Soon enough, all that was left was the family. David had ridden over with Ben Senior and Bonnie. They were all headed to Dale and Debbie’s place for dinner, but all David wanted was to be alone. David walked down to Ben and Bonnie’s car with them, then waved them along.
“You go on. Think I’ll walk,” he told them.
The vehicles drove off. All that was left was a backhoe, its scoop still filled with dirt from Jason’s grave. David glanced around one last time and saw it. A black sedan. The same make and model as the one he’d seen outside his aunt and uncle’s house.
On instinct, David looked up the hill toward Jason’s grave and saw the figure, standing facing away from him. A woman in a black dress and coat.
He started up the hill, moving slowly, quietly. As he came closer, even though he couldn’t yet see her face, he thought he recognized her. The TV reporter who had broken the news of Jason’s murder.
It was noon. The sandhill cranes had begun to flock up from the fields all around them, their warbling call building louder. David came within a few yards of her.
“You didn’t bring your cameraman,” he called out, not bothering to mask the confrontation in his voice. “My cousin’s funeral not big enough news for cable TV?”
She turned but kept her head down. Tears cut through her makeup. Her body held rigid, almost in panic, as if she’d been caught where she shouldn’t be.
“I . . . I thought everyone was gone,” she said.
He stepped closer.
“It was you outside my aunt and uncle’s house, wasn’t it? I saw your car,” he challenged her. “What do you want with my family?”
Charlotte choked a gasping sob and wiped a sleeve at her face.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
When her head lifted, the makeup was mostly gone, leaving her face transformed. As David stared at her, disjointed memories thrust upward through his thoughts, then snapped unexpectedly into place.
“Oh,” he mumbled.
Charlotte nodded, then looked back at the ground.
“They buried me,” she said.
Another step closer. She wasn’t looking at Jason’s tombstone but the one beside it.
“Mom and Dad. They buried me. They . . .”
The cranes whorled in their circle above the giant, their song obliterating whatever it was Charlotte said after that.
She stared at the chiseled-out words on the marker: BENJAMIN BLUNT JR.
David understood. He was looking into the face of his cousin.