The Storm Giants

by Pearce Hansen

  The overwhelming scent from that much blood got his instant attention. The hackneyed odor of copper or hot metal, along with whatever pain or terror induced pheromones were laden in the congealing mess that Everett was picking up on.

  The child in Everett scanned his environment with every sense on overdrive. With blood spilled by person or persons unknown like that, he’d checked the surroundings in frantic paranoia, to make sure he didn’t fall prey to the same unseen threat.

  When the phone rang in the depths of Chopper’s room, Everett’s younger self jumped, both feet leaving the floor. When he landed, he’d whirled and ran as fast as he could from that room of death. No shame, Everett had been a teenager after all; he’d never over react like that again.

  In the here and now Everett was glued to the boob tube, and sleepless in the bleak. Raymond snored his little boy snores on his chest, arms too short to reach all the way around as he hugged his daddy in his sleep.

  On the tube, some random disposable character had just bitten the dust. Some snitch tossed screaming from the roof of a parking garage. The murder was antiseptic, no blood, no emotional response by any of the show’s main characters, but it punched Everett in the gut like he never would have allowed it to in real life.

  Everett lay on the couch crying and crying for the first time since he was a child. The tears flowed silent from his expressionless face, Everett was unable to stop and not understanding why, keeping still so as not to awaken Raymond.

  What was this? Everett asked the self in wonder, analyzing this pointless grief as if it were happening to someone else. What did it mean?

  How ridiculous for a man like Everett to be crying in the night. Crying in response to this cheesy flickering television conduit. Crying for some throwaway fictional character in a two bit piece of period dreck.

  Later, Everett tucked Raymond into bed and lay down next to Kerri. He reached out a hand and laid it on her hip. She turned to him and flowered.

  As the loving hit high gear she remembered when she was a little girl, and her brothers taking her to the San Francisco Zoo, visiting the Cat Kingdom. She felt a thrill when she realized those big beautiful flat eyed beasts would make a meal of her if the bars weren’t in the way.

  She felt that same thrill with Everett, when they made love. When she was out with Everett and people walked by without paying any especial attention to him, she thought ‘If only they knew.’

  She knew. Or rather she thought she knew, which is enough for most people.

  “My own private panther,” she whispered. “My secret wild thing.”

  She smiled wide open at the ceiling, believing she had Everett wrapped around her finger. She bit her lip to keep her moans of pleasure and release from waking Raymond. Maybe it was the other way around, and Everett was the one who had her under his thumb.

  They slept, after, and there was peace for a bit.

  At one point during the night lightning flashed outside, bright enough to light up the bedroom. Thunder rumbled as Kerri awakened gasping and sat bolt upright in bed. Everett stood naked at the window as lightning flashed outside a few more times. As Kerri watched, he listened closely to every mumbling roll of thunder, as if to a conversation.

  Chapter 13 : The Line Points the Way

  Just after dawn came a knock at the front door and Everett stood up, buck naked and awake. Kerri thrashed around in bed behind him, and her gaze made his back tingle as he rewound the mental tape recorder that ran even during his sleeping state.

  No memory of untoward noises. There’d been none of the psychic radar traces that would have made the danger sense clang. Whoever this visitor was, they were stealthy motherfuckers. Unwelcome news, it implied capability.

  Everett wrestled on his pants and strolled to the front door.

  The low rays of the dawn sun silhouetted the familiar shadow darkening the other side of the curtained window. But as Everett had the kind of somatic memory allowing recognition of someone by the shape of their earlobe from behind in a crowd years after meeting, that familiarity didn’t narrow it down.

  When Everett opened the door he was unsurprised to see the Widow, her visage bland and her dark sunglasses reflecting Everett’s own expressionless face. She had a fat valise under her arm, stuffed with god knows what.

  Everett focused on her glossed lips as her mouth opened and spoke: “Good morning, Everett. What a quaint home you inhabit with your dear ones, suckling at the tit of familial bliss.” She tilted her head past Everett’s shoulder to see inside and Everett chanelled her murder.

  Everett looked beyond her, at the various places on the property where he’d set up a firing position if he were responsible for her backup. The assumption had to be made that his family was in a killing bottle.

  Even asleep he would’ve heard the Beamers if they’d come down the access road. She must have managed the hike from the highway on foot. Quite a feat in those fuck me pumps she wore. She must have really wanted this meeting. Everett knew her feet were killing her, and she’d be dealing with major blisters by the time she got back to the antiseptic luxury of her BMW.

  The Widow continued peering past Everett into the depths of the house, as if she could see Kerri and Raymond ensconced in their beds, both undoubtedly wide awake and still as prey, both straining to hear what was going on at the door..

  The Widow mused: “She thinks she cares for you. That’s a natural response for any higher mammal suckling at the tit of familialy bliss, just the heat of propinquity. If you were to disappear today, she’d find someone new.”

  But the Widow leaned in and purred, “It’s the way of things, for love to fade with time. How can she ever forget what you are? There can be no peace, no fairy tale ending for one of your temperament, Everett.”

  She straightened up and a puzzled look crossed her face. “Do you think you love her? Love that common, ordinary woman? Does she think you can unfreeze enough to care? You are merely stunned by the novelty of someone caring whether you live or die, so flattered that you mistake your own response for love.”

  Everett imagined a bull’s eye illuminating the Widow’s center mass. The lightning bolt of the line arced right through her heart to the clean sky beyond.

  He decided that he’d kill her if she called Kerri common again. Then he decided with equal suddenness that it would be too dangerous to show he cared, and muffled that impulse. He didn’t know where she had her backup. The line would get too messy for words if he killed the Widow. Things would get too hectic to ensure his family’s continued health.

  “You didn’t come to talk about that,” Everett said so gently, so soft.

  But this foolish woman covered her lips with her fingertips and looked away, pantomiming a bad little girl: ‘M’I bad?’

  “As you say, that is not why I have come.” She extended the valise like a child presenting a bouquet of flowers. Everett took it.

  “I have documentation of the DNA samples your mother freely gave me,” she said. “The genetic similarities between you and her will red flag you on many cold cases. I also have a full dossier on the organization you are to infiltrate, the leader you must outwit, and the gold you will return to me.”

  The Widow smiled. “And I have your house, Everett. I have access to everything you hold most dear. But you are safe with me.”

  Everett made a vague circular gesture encompassing the valley surrounding Kerri’s property, to indicate the Widow’s hidden watchers. “You have a crew. Use them.”

  “You will understand why I cannot when you get there,” she said.

  “Why did you and Doctor D get together?” Everett asked, still trying to give the needle and crack that façade of hers.

  It was surprising when she answered. “I will admit it was a May December romance.”

  She looked off into the middle distance with a sterile pout adorning her scarlet lips. “When I was a little girl I had a dream. In the dream I was just awakening, I was sitting up on a rough military cot in
a concrete bunker.

  “There were huge muffled explosions happening somewhere, and the bunker was shaking. Dust and grit showered from the ceiling with each explosion, and I realized I was in some kind of underground tunnel complex, and that someone was bombarding the surface above us with artillery.

  “A man ran by in the hallway and stopped at the bunker entrance, clutching the door jamb to stop himself. He was in German uniform, black with red armband, and the death’s head of the SS proudly displayed. He was holding an MP40, what you Americans called a Schmeisser.

  ‘’They are coming,’ he shouted, and continued running out of sight. He spoke High German.

  “I looked down at myself as I stood, and I was dressed the same as he. The beautiful polished jack boots, elegant midnight black uniform, the death’s heads showing the world how lethal we were. There was an MP40 leaning against my cot. I grabbed it as I ran from the bunker to join my kameraden in the final defense of the Reich.

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked.

  He shrugged, and she shrugged in turn. She believed there was some kind of rapport between them. She behaved as if this were no more than a casual conversation between friends.

  The Widow continued. “From the time of that dream, I knew I had fought for the Fatherland, and that I was destined to fight for it again. I sought out like minded people, of whom there are many, and in the course of that I met Doctor Dauffenbach.

  “He had actually served the Reich decades before my own birth. I was awed by his tales of meeting the Fuhrer, doing the hard deeds our country needed to prevail and purify itself of the mud people. And when he showed me his cache of bullion, gleaned from the useless and ready for future front fighters to use in the struggle, I had to love him. I had to.”

  Any love she’d felt had to have been more directed toward the dragon’s hoard of gold Doctor D brought to the wedding bed. How could lust be generated in any woman by moving together in the dark with the withered Prussian sadist, unless she had all that wealth to focus on as Doctor D inflicted his short, brutish thrusts into her?

  After a few seconds, the Widow realized he wasn’t going to contribute anything more to their dialog. Sunglasses or no, the wheels turned in her head as she considered whether it was necessary to add anything more to emphasize her perceived psychic dominance over Everett.

  She came to the conclusion that nothing more need be said – Everett agreed – and turned on her heel. As she started walking up the access road toward the highway she was limping a little, and Everett found that pleased him.

  Kerri was in the kitchen, brewing coffee. She watched the kettle as if will power could make the water boil quicker.

  “Do you think she’s attractive?” Kerri asked, her back turned to him. “There was something between you two. You cared, somehow. It was weird.”

  Kerri snorted when he didn’t answer. She took a cigarette from Everett’s pack and applied the flame from his Zippo, then held the smoke out in his direction without looking at him. He absentmindedly took the cigarette and put it in his mouth without hitting on it.

  Everett’s mind was spinning. The Widow shouldn’t have been able to creep up on him like that. His game had gotten sloppy, to let her slide in under the radar as if she were a part of him or something. Inexcusable.

  “God!” Kerri cried. “That toxic cunt knocked on my door? God!”

  Everett stepped outside onto the porch and took a deep drag off the smoke, forcing his mind to relative calmness as thoughts flowed.

  The Widow had followed him home, but he hadn’t spotted a tail. Highway 101 was two lane blacktop for most of its insertion into northern Mendocino. No way could she have followed without him knowing it.

  Everett looked at the Escort, and found himself strolling toward the car, flopping onto his back and wriggling underneath the chassis, ignoring the bite of the driveway’s curing cement. It was just in front of the rear axle, held in place by a magnet: an electronic Lo Jac GPS homing device, with a stubby antenna poking from it and a red LED light blinking away.

  Everett crawled out and stood, realized the cigarette had snapped in two without him noticing when he’d crawled under the car. He spat the broken burning rags of the smoke onto the ground with a distracted air. He turned in a full 360 circle, rotating in place to take in the panorama of forested hills surrounding Kerri’s domicile.

  Raymond stood on the porch in his pajamas, watching his daddy work. Raymond was always watching him.

  Last night home had felt safe and secure. Now the bowl of hills was the world’s biggest mouse trap and Everett was the world’s biggest boob. There was no safe place. His family was in mortal danger due to Everett’s sloppiness.

  If he didn’t care, the Widow wouldn’t have a thing to hold over his head. Back in the day, he would have just chopped the bitch and faded. But there was nowhere to run to with Kerri and Raymond part of the tactical equation.

  The sky pressed down like a black weight, trying to crush a man into the dirt before his time. A man was born to die, and so were Kerri and Raymond. Nothing a man did mattered, couldn’t save himself or anyone else. Everything would pass no matter how hard he tried and in the end cold darkness would reign over a graveyard universe.

  Everett grabbed that negativity with two mental hands and shoved those loser thoughts out of the brain. Deep breaths, eyes shut tight. Kerri and Raymond. Let them be all that existed. Let them push this darkness out. Let me stay useful to them.

  Everett opened his eyes. His stare was aimed south at a stand of trees in a saddle atop a ridgeline, away from the highway, about a quarter of the way around the circumference of Kerri’s pocket valley.

  The bright line toward it smelled more and more of ozone as he looked. Good fields of fire and observation, well concealed, no cover for a frontal assault, but lots of ways to creep in or out unobserved by a target standing . . . Oh, right about where he was.

  Everett turned away from that fascinating stand of trees, as if no longer interested in it. There, he told himself as he walked inside to wheedle a cup of coffee from Kerri, soothe her and Raymond down a bit if possible.

  The Widow has her watchers right up there.

  Chapter 14: The Storm Giants in the Piney Woods

  Norm and Rick walked tandem point through a dandelion infested meadow, matching Weatherby Mark Vs with Leupold scopes in the crooks of their arms. Dressed in identical camouflage outfits, they’d even covered their faces with cammo crayon war paint. They’d brought their steadiest three dogs to use for scouting, but Everett persuaded them the yodeling canines would be too loud for the work and the disappointed canines were left to guard Rick’s Ram truck.

  The brothers had endless advice on what Everett should wear, how Everett should act, taking it for granted as hunters that this was their ballpark and their lead should be followed. But for this little adventure Everett followed his own counsel. He was pulling drag as tail guard; all he’d brought along was a folding surplus entrenching tool clipped to his belt, and Kerri’s sawed off shotgun.

  The sawed off had been a baby shower gift from Rolly. When Rolly handed the stubby little weapon to Kerri, he gave her sound advice. ‘If you have to use it, don’t point it at baby’s room. The double-ought has a lot of penetration, it’ll go right through most interior walls.’

  The brothers had listened to his abbreviated version of the Widow situation without argument. When Everett laid the homing device on their coffee table for their admiring inspection, it made a convincing piece of confirmatory evidence. The brothers seemed disappointed when he’d smashed it to bits with a hammer after showing it to them, but they hadn’t offered protest.

  The brothers made a few phone calls, then the three drove a couple of miles up river. They made their approach from the rear of the tree line where the Widow had her observation team parked. Although the brothers were doubtful about Everett’s certainty regarding where the Widow’s people lurked, they were eager to make enough of a sweep ar
ound Kerri’s property to confront any potential trespassers.

  Ahead on the trail, the brothers stopped and squatted on their hams. Norm held up a fist in hand signal, both brothers looking over their shoulder to make sure Everett saw.

  Everett slunk up to the two older men and squatted next to them in a cluster that felt a little tight. They were still quite a ways from where Everett figured the Widow’s people were.

  “We’re coming up on one of your neighbor’s grows,” Norm said. “We’ve already arranged safe passage, but stay close and don’t touch nothing.”

  Everett shook his head at the swig Rick offered from his silver hip flask. Everett resumed position on the ass end of their little patrol as it recommenced its progress.

  They entered a stand of old growth, the redwood trunks looming around them like cathedral pillars. Occasional shafts of light shone down through breaks in the canopy, providing illumination in the fetid murk. As they wended their way deeper into the cluster of tall trees, Everett started seeing big clumps of sensemilla sprouting under the separate shafts of sunlight that managed to reach the forest floor.

  While Everett would have assumed the meadow behind them was a better cultivation area, the growers also had to contend with the Man’s CAMP helicopters, doing their endless over flights to protect American society from the scourge of marijuana.

  Someone was paralleling their passage along a trail to their left. Their tagalong angled closer. It was a tall scowling redneck female, carrying an AK 47 at port. She was pretty rough, an inbred daughter of Frankenstein tom-girl, built like she could outwrestle most men. She didn’t appear happy that Everett and the brothers were intruding on her farming territory.

  The redneck girl and the brothers exchanged nods. The girl fell back to walk next to Everett on the trail, her scowl deepening as she looked him up and down. Everett assayed a nod of his own which she returned. He faced forward to walk the path, although he could still see her scowling at him out the corner of his vision.