Attack of the 50 Foot Indian

by Stephen Graham Jones

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  For Joe Ferrer

  The first reports to go viral on social media were grainy, and honestly looked pretty doctored: a giant unconscious man half in, half out of the Bering Sea. The half of him out of the water was washed up on Siberia.

  By the time he turned up on higher-resolution satellite photos, still just lying there, his face buried in the crook of his right arm as if sleeping one off, a team of Navy SEALs was looping a thick cable around one of his submerged ankles. The other end of that cable was hooked into the American submarine breaking a stack of accords and agreements by being this far out of its own waters. It was a gamble. Soldiers’ lives hung in the balance, careers back in D.C. were in jeopardy, and scapegoats were already lined up to be fed headfirst to the media.

  Still, once that submarine’s propeller fired up, after a tense moment where the water just churned and bubbled and frothed, the giant unconscious man broke free of the frozen gravel shore and scraped down the long incline into waters where salvage laws could be said to apply. Once out into those more neutral depths, he jerked awake all at once and flung his head up for air, and that was when the circling helicopters captured the first high-resolution video footage of his long black hair, flinging around to clear his face.

  He bellowed, his massive hand coming up to protect his nose from all this burning seawater, and, in doing so, his right arm tangled in the tow cable. The submarine still attached to that cable sloshed back against his hip, knocking him sideways in the water, and he was still looking back at what could have hit him when he slipped under the surface, the ocean floor dropping sharply off right where he was trying to stand.

  The submarine bobbed for a moment, then was yanked down by the cable still looped around the giant man’s ankle.

  The surface of the Bering Sea smoothed back out as if no international incident had almost happened. In the minutes before the ripples from that dunking amplified into the waves that would wash up into five o’clock traffic in Nome, every phone in every government office in America lit up, each of them demanding explanation. Had this giant man been a normal-sized person who had somehow grown into this behemoth? Had he fallen from somewhere? Had he swum up from the depths? Weren’t leviathans supposed to have tentacles, though? Was he a decoy of some sort? If so, to what purpose? Could this be an art installation? A Trojan horse situation? But what technology could make him seem so alive?

  Was he even human? How could he be?

  And what was with all that hair?

  The video footage was zapped back to the mainland, slowed down enough to capture the geometry of his face, the set of his eyes, those cheekbones, and—and the color of his skin. He wasn’t simply burned or tanned from lying in the winter sun without clothes, which had been the initial supposition at the Pentagon. That was his natural complexion.

  Was he… Indian? If so, American or Asian? But why not Polynesian, or Saudi Arabian, or Mexican, or Mayan, or Hawaiian, or African? And, taking the region into account, shouldn’t he be Yu’pik or Inupiat, Aleut or Samoyed? But none of them are that tall, are they?

  All this speculation in approximately twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

  It was stopped by the giant man surfacing again with a desperate gasp, the water surging around him. He was sitting astride the submarine, which was rocking back and forth, finding its level.

  This was important because now his waist and pelvis and smooth upper thighs were heaving into view between the waves: he wasn’t wearing a thobe or board shorts or muslin pants or any kind of brightly colored wrap or grass skirt—he was in what looked to be a… a loincloth?

  “So he is Indian,” a conn officer said, rocking with the submarine like he’d just inserted a quarter for this ride.

  “Is that okay to say?” a petty officer listening in asked all around.

  “Never mind that,” the three-star vice admiral behind her said, clicking the DEFCON dial over two whole notches at once. “What century is this so-called Indian supposed to be from?”

  More important, his staff was already asking, what animal could that loincloth have been made from? There was no apparent stitching or seams—this was a small strip of an even larger piece of leather. But what animal even approached that size?

  None. It would take multiple moose for a garment of that length and breadth, and you can’t really make leather from the skin of a blue whale.

  The Indian didn’t care.

  He was just sitting astride the submarine, hands wrapped around the conning tower like the saddle horn of a stolen horse. His long black hair was plastered to his chest, and those cheekbones, that nose, that grim slash of a mouth—he wasn’t just Indian, according to the experts the government was able to hustle in and swear to secrecy, he was probably, judging by dress pattern and hairstyle, Plains.

  “Nineteenth century?” those experts were asked.

  The experts said sure, nineteenth century. Or eighteenth. Seventeenth. On back for thousands of years, there was no way of knowing. Maybe just from now, too.

  More important, tactically speaking: Was he the only one?

  Satellites were retasked, soundings were taken, tabloids were scoured, urban legends and ancient religions were consulted.

  Meanwhile, moving slowly so as not to spook him, the captain ordered his submarine east, to the safety of American shores. The Indian leaned back when the submarine pulled forward, but he held on, and sort of smiled.

  The Navy of course tried to clear the waters ahead of this Indian, but that didn’t stop the sky from filling with gawkers.

  This was the story of the century, of the millennium. This was a legend in the making.

  “What will he eat?” the newspapers cried.

  “Where will he sleep?” the anchorpeople read from cue cards.

  “What will the toilet situation be?” the radio DJs whispered into their mics.

  More like whose side will he be on, the government officials didn’t say in any press releases.

  What they meant, of course, was: Did he remember?

  If he was from anywhere after 1492, then his estimation of America probably wouldn’t be too rosy.

  So, of course, they shot him. In the thigh. With a tranquilizer.

  He was just coming in to Puget Sound. There was heavy fog that morning. The Indian reached down to the him-sized dart sticking up from his leg. He breathed in deep to extract it then held it before his face, studied this strange arrow.

  He looked up to the Seattle skyline as if just seeing it, as if trying to take it with him, and then he slumped off the submarine into Elliott Bay, his hair instantly tangling in the propeller, the cap
tain diving for the shutoff button.

  The Indian fell onto the rising flotilla of webbed-together tractor-tire inner tubes that had been secreted underwater, only inflated at the last minute with canisters of CO2. His face never went underwater—that was important, as the fear was that a sense of drowning might override the wave of narcotics sloshing through his system.

  And so he was floated into America on a bier of sorts, cargo choppers thumping in from all corners of the sky to lift him across the suburbs, his long hair dripping water that people in their backyards were running to catch in cups, to have a little piece of history. On the eleven o’clock news were eyewitness accounts of there having been two moons in the sky that night, one brown and one yellow, and so that became his name: Two Moons.

  That didn’t stop him from waking in under one moon, though.

  He was in a hangar of sorts, and shackled of course, a more tailored cocktail of narcotics slowing his reaction time.

  The loincloth he was still wearing was cut from a single animal, it had turned out. According to DNA analysis, Bison bison—the American buffalo. “But not this America” was the disgruntled joke in the snarl of hallways branching out from his massive cell.

  Down some of those hallways were the language experts called in from the Plains nations and more besides, because who hadn’t worn loincloths? All these Native speakers were laying claim to the giant Indian, along with three professional sports teams, each maintaining that Two Moons was their mascot come to life, and so they should control all subsequent licensing. T-shirts and caps were already hitting the street, their decals still warm, and the memesphere was swirling with Two Moons’s visage.

  His blood, however, was still under lock and key. Since his corpuscles were in keeping with his size, drawing the necessary sample had been more “cut and catch” than “inject and draw,” and, since that sample couldn’t be processed in the usual manner, the necessary equipment for scrying into his genetics was being scaled up on-site.

  He wasn’t supposed to have woken before that work could be completed, either.

  The first thing he did was attempt to stand.

  The whole facility shook when the chain hitched to the shackle around his neck pulled against its anchor at his feet.

  It held.

  Two Moons sat back down Indian style, which nobody in the windows observing him knew if they should feel guilty for thinking or not.

  “Does he want a pipe?” a museum curator on-hand asked, with all proper hesitating.

  “He needs nature,” a wildlife biologist said apologetically.

  “He’s not a turtle in an aquarium,” the Kiowa translator said, suddenly standing in the hall.

  “Turtles go in terrariums,” the Lakota translator corrected.

  The Kiowa bristled, said, “The only difference between a terrarium and an aquarium is—” but didn’t get to finish, since now the Blackfeet among them was explaining how some stupid Indians can’t even tell between turtles and tortoises, which resulted in a wrestling match sort of insult-driven fistfight, complete with biting and hair-pulling, which is why none of them got to put the headset on, have their voice amplified up to Two Moons, see what nation he was.

  It was the only chance they would have had.

  When Two Moons stood up for the second time, he had the chain doubled around his right hand. He wrapped his left hand deliberately over it and set his feet one ahead, one back, giving the deep anchor, and himself, a real test.

  “He can’t,” the head of security said, looking up and up.

  “He won’t,” the vice president said, backing into the folds of his bodyguard detail.

  “He’s fucking Cheyenne,” the Cheyenne translator at the edge of the fight said in wonder, right before getting belted across the cheek, knocked silly.

  Two Moons leaned back, grunting at first then finally screaming, giant globs of spittle flying from his mouth, veins standing out on his arms and calves and forehead, and then he pulled and screamed even harder, his voice shattering every window in the facility.

  The concrete mooring which was never supposed to give, gave.

  Two Moons fell back and back, crashing through the side of the hangar, taking enough structural support with him to cave the roof in moments after his big exit. The hangar fell down in stages and wings, like controlled demolition. Two Moons, on one knee to recuperate from his escape, raised his right arm to try to not breathe the billowing dust in, but it got into his lungs anyway, set him to coughing from so deep that he was gagging, waving his left arm as if to tell everyone he was all right, he was going to be all right.

  He was wrong about that.

  A squadron of fighter jets was screaming in. The arrows they shot trailed smoke, and had minds of their own.

  The first caught him in the left shoulder, blew a red crater into his skin and muscle, and the second was a few feet more to center, catching him in what looked to be the throat.

  Two Moons spun around, sucked his belly in so the next smoking arrow could whiz past, explode on the ground behind him.

  The fighters banked around for another pass.

  Two Moons stumbled forward, the great chain falling away—the second missile had blasted his neck shackle, not his throat. But there was still blood, and blood, and more blood.

  “Not exactly a full-blood anymore, is he?” the chain and shackle’s engineering team each said with their secret grins.

  But Two Moons had had enough.

  Holding his shoulder together with his right hand, he tore an I-beam up from the rubble of the hanger with his left. Still unsteady, he swatted at the bothersome fighters, catching two of them hard enough that they crashed over into the other three, the whole squadron spiraling off into the foothills.

  Two Moons looked down to his shoulder now, and to the blood on his palm, and his breath deepened. As if just realizing this was a possibility, he stood to his full height and scanned as far as he could see, for more of these fighters.

  There were none for the moment, but there were small dirt plumes coming at him from all directions: jeeps and armored vehicles, whatever the military could rally and scrounge—they’d all been at the perimeter, to turn news vans and conspiracy theorists and the bride brigade around. Two Moons was supposed to have been sleeping for a week yet.

  He was all the way awake now, though.

  Where had he come from? That didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was where he was going.

  His first step was to the east, his eyes scouring, lips turned down at the corners in what looked like disgust.

  “Oh shit,” a quarterback who wasn’t even supposed to be in the room said. “Can he see Rushmore from there?”

  “He’s going for the White House…” a movie critic tweeted out, illustrating it with a GIF.

  “Not the White House, you idiots,” a former Texas Ranger, current congressman, said, slamming his fist down on a control board. “Can’t you see he’s going for the white women?”

  “You mean you keep them all in one place?” the Crow translator asked, half buried under concrete and rebar, his right arm either hugging or sleeper-holding a Comanche translator, neither of them really knew anymore.

  Either way, they weren’t stopping.

  Neither was the military.

  Another squadron of fighters boiled up over the horizon, the lead pilot authorized to, at this remote location, take the nuclear option—sacrifice this whole facility, and its future, to neutralize the threat Two Moons obviously was.

  Seeing this second wave of fighters screaming in at him, Two Moons did what any giant would do: he turned around, ran away. His great strides and his zigzag path took him out of range of the fighters and ground vehicles in a matter of seconds, the lead pilot thumbing the cover back over his Fire button with a sigh of relief, the Cherokee princess grandmother in his head thanking him with a tragic nod, his self-assigned spirit animal giving him a brotherly thumbs-up from its litter box.

  “We winged the shit
out of him, though,” a talk show host said into his live feed, a rabid glitter to his eyes.

  “How’s that for a drumming, Tonto?” a cowboy in a bar said into his mug, using what he considered his gunfighter voice then looking around, hoping someone not fifty feel tall had heard this perfect comeback.

  “But what can Two Moons hide behind, right?” the internet asked, supplying a flood of doctored images in response: Two Moons peeking around the Great Pyramid of Giza; Two Moons holding his breath to slink into the Mariana Trench; Two Moons standing wooden-Indian-still over the entrance to the Wisconsin State Fair, hand raised in greeting, eyes looking nowhere.

  The government didn’t contribute any images to this trending question, but they agreed with the sentiment: Where could he hide?

  Assured they could triangulate Two Moons with seismography data, the military sat back and waited for those printouts to coalesce into a bull’s-eye. Indians walk softly when they need to, though. Next were various stealth planes making high-altitude passes with thermometric and infrared scanners built into their sleek bellies, but one old Indian trick is using cool river mud as body plaster. Spotters in helicopters were next, and had to work, but the social media outcry about the irony of using helicopters named “Apache” and “Lakota” and “Black Hawk” generated enough public outcry that these spotters were all reluctantly grounded. Now that the public was involved, though, the military could call to them for sightings, but, first, the tip-line boards melted in under thirty minutes, and, second, by the time those tip lines were restored, a grassroots campaign to protect Two Moons’s location had swelled up. The result was that he was in Florida and Texas, in Maine and Baja California. He was Frankensteining from ice floe to ice floe, disappearing into the Great North. He was swimming freestyle along the coast of Chile.

  The government isn’t completely stupid, however.

  They zeroed in on where the tip line was careful to never mention: Washington State. Specifically, the Puget Sound region.

  Along the way, videos were surfacing of Two Moons from low angles, walking a determined line west, the high-tension power lines electric fences to him, herding him again and again to the highways and interstates, which were probably easier walking anyway. He was moving mostly at night, and drinking from rivers and streams, the giardia protozoa too small to be of consequence to his massive immune system, and evidently what he was subsisting on was rage and recrimination.