The Storm Giants Read online

  Children screamed in play beyond a high fence behind the building. Rolls of razor wire topped the interposing barrier like they’d make any difference to a dedicated intruder.

  Was Rolly really inside there? Larry was the best snoop Everett knew – he liked to brag that he could find out many pimples there were on Osama bin Laden’s if anyone was willing to pay, and Everett had never been given reason to doubt that boast. Besides: Larry was a good criminal. He wasn’t about to blow smoke up Everett’s ass on something this important, without good reason.

  The front desk staff was inconsequential. Everett lied his way past them with ease. He walked down the hall to the open rear doorway, standing far enough back to be unobtrusive as he scoped out the action in the yard.

  It was a playground, but not like any he’d ever seen. The sandbox was a raised table; the swing was a boat shaped glider with a ramp leading up to its access gate. Two kids in wheel chairs were making it swing back and forth on high reaching arcs. The main play area was straight, smooth, level cement; no wood chips in sight.

  A mob of kids screamed and yelled and rolled around fast. Most were in wheelchairs; the ones that weren’t wore medieval looking leg braces, stumping around on crutches like they were at home on them.

  Most of the yelling came from a group of older boys bashing each other in a demolition derby of wheelchairs, wrestling over possession of a volleyball. A man in a big custom chair swooped into the fracas and plucked the volleyball from its owner, then spun his chair out and away with one whip of his free hand.

  “Yay Rolly,” a little girl on crutches said with a laugh

  Rolly tossed the volleyball to the boys and scooped her onto his lap, crutches and all. He popped a wheelie on his chair and spun, his meaty hands flicking the wheels in opposite directions faster and faster as the girl squealed at this impromptu ride.

  Everett stepped out onto the wide access ramp leading down to the playground. Rolly stopped whirling and, as the chair’s front wheels touched down, they made eye contact.

  The girl slid off Rolly’s lap to sprint away on her crutches. More and more kids saw Rolly’s expression, and the children looked from Everett to Rolly and back as the two men studied each other.

  Everett walked inside and out the front door, leaning against the wall of the building as he lit his latest cancer stick of the day. After a bit Rolly rolled out to sit next to him in his armored chair. Neither of them looked at each other, watched instead the traffic rumbling past on East 14th.

  It was a little like the bad old days. A hunting pair with backs to wall so no one could creep up on them, each facing slightly away from the other so their combined visual ranges would spot danger quicker than either could’ve alone.

  “Thought you were dead, Rolly,” Everett said, flicking his cigarette in the general direction of the gutter and then putting both hands in his raincoat pockets. “Wouldn’t have stayed away if I’d thought different.”

  “I know that,” Rolly said. “I was DOA at the scene – shit, the marks unloaded into me with a 12-gauge pump. Killed them all on my way down, but I got sloppy – it was dumb luck they unloaded birdshot.

  “The Feds was the ones faked my death; they wanted me to give up my end. Thought they’d make me roll but I gave them squat.

  “There I was in the hospital with my guts trying to fall out past the stitches. And they’re saying they could save my legs at least. All I had to do was feed them somebody.”

  Everett aimed a sidelong glance at Rolly’s armored wheel chair. It looked post-apocalyptic with its disc shaped spoke protectors and cow catcher front bumper, like something out of the Road Warrior.

  “Rolly,” Everett said. “You should have taken the deal; it would have been the right Line for you to take under that kind of heat. Would’ve understood you having to give it up to save your legs, there’s a limit after all.”

  “You think that, fool?” Rolly said. “Snitches get stitches, everybody knows that.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not always about what works, Everett. Okay, if I’d thought they were telling the truth I might have considered it. But my legs were tattered rags, what was left of the bones looked like a pile of cottage cheese – I could tell they had come off just by looking and smellin’ at ‘em when the pigs lifted the sheet to taunt me.

  “I couldn’t feel them anyways,” Rolly said. “I was already crippled from the waist down, I wasn’t about to add being a punk bitch rat to the burden.

  “They didn’t have enough physical evidence to indict, so they had to cut me loose as an innocent bystander after they lopped me.” Rolly punched Everett on the arm. “There’s worse things than being in a wheel chair, bro.”

  Everett turned to face Rolly, leaning one shoulder against the wall with his hands still in his pockets. Padded biker’s gloves encased Rolly’s big broken knuckled hands. He’d let his hair grow out all the way to his shoulders, with a ‘Murderball’ baseball cap perched on his head at a jaunty angle.

  “How’d you wind up in jail?” Everett asked. “Heard something about you working some fool over with your slapjack.”

  “You heard right,” Rolly said. “One of my kids turned up with a big shiner on her cheek. She told me it was her mom’s boyfriend did it, and I had me a little chat with him. Guess I wasn’t nice about it, he dimed me from the ER.

  “Almost lost my job over it, that would have sucked. All I got was probation and time served though – the whole courtroom from the Judge on down laughed at the dickwad, getting his ass beat by a gimp and all.”

  “I was true blue, wasn’t I?” Rolly asked, commanding an answer despite his smile. “Tell me I always had your back.”

  “You were totally true blue, Rolly,” Everett said. “No one ever carried you, and you held up your end all right.”

  “I was always balls out, I was a torpedo – and this is what it bought me,” Rolly said, tapping at the wheel of his chair.

  He studied Everett’s face, shaking his head. “My clueless partner. My dopey friend. You don’t get it, do you? I’m happy, Everett. I’m okay, I don’t need saving, by you or anyone else.

  “You and me, we made our choices a long time ago. We survived, we won, and that was enough. In the hospital, it was like some Zen thing happened to me. I wasn’t in control anymore, I was trapped. Nothing to do but watch the DVDs in my head over and over. They weren’t very nice movies Everett. But you know that, don’t you?

  “This is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t have to lie in bed anymore wondering when I’m going to get chopped. I don’t have to worry about the Man coming to put me away. The worst thing that’ll go down in my life is already over. These kids, they need me. They’re happy when I roll through the door.

  “No one was ever happy to see you and me coming, Everett,” Rolly said.

  He laughed as he started rolling inside toward those happy screaming kids. “We both hung up our guns, Everett. You and me are Citizens now, like it or not. Some masquerade, huh? We sure got them conned.”

  Chapter 3 : The Storm Giants

  At his second destination, Everett sat in his car for a while before entering the hospital. A woman had left a message with Larry, who forwarded it via one of the throwaway cellies Everett had stockpiled up in Mendocino. The woman refused to identify herself, and said Everett’s mother was on her deathbed in Union City. When Everett phoned the hospital in question it had panned out, so here he was.

  He sat beside his mom’s bed with his back to the wall and his hands folded in his lap. She lay festooned by the garlands of tubes and wires that were pretty much all that was keeping her alive. Everett tracked the hospital’s background noises even as he searched her sleeping face. The stigmata of terminal illness obscured the clear features he remembered from childhood, but blurred hints of her old beauty still remained.

  For she had been a great beauty, a woman all the men hovered over when she performed. Bambi, that was her stage name. Yes: Bambi was the name Everett
would focus on, flashing back to the day she tried to save him from the storm giants.

  It happened when Everett was very little, while they were living in Hayward on ‘A’ Street in a Mexican neighborhood. They moved around a lot, often to ‘hoods where they were pretty much the only Caucasian family on the block.

  They were what some called ‘white trash,’ though Everett never heard that term until he was a teenager. He hurt the guy who first directed that phrase in his direction; hurt him pretty bad.

  It was one of the first times he’d realized his abilities. The guy was adult and much bigger. It should have been a blowout for him to put Everett on the ground and monkey stomp his face again and again and again, instead of the other way around.

  As a kid, Everett stood out from his black and brown play mates like a little Nordic thumb, being the only one in the clique with blue eyes and a tow head of thick red hair. The kids were too young to have been fully indoctrinated by racism, and ran in a screaming pack from dawn till dusk, hitting up one mom after another for food between bouts of mischief. PB & J tasted pretty good on home made corn tortillas, and Everett still had a hankering for it that way when he remembered to eat at all.

  The day the storm giants first came to him, Everett was playing in a vacant lot down the street from the house, rolling his beat up toy Tonka tanker truck in the dirt.

  Everett didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in until a scalding thermite flash of lightning lit the whole block like napalm smacking a jungle ridgeline. It was followed by a boom of thunder so close he felt as much as heard it washing over him. The midday sky roiled with black clouds so thick the world looked underwater.

  A bigger boy walked by as another bolt of lightning split the sky wide open. Thunder cracked once more, and by that time Everett was on his feet. He remembered shivering happening as the sun’s light dimmed, but in memory the shivering was like watching a movie starring someone else, a random little unremarkable boy.

  “What was that?” Everett asked.

  “That’s the storm giants,” the larger round faced boy said.

  “What are storm giants?” Everett asked.

  “The storm giants live up in the sky behind the clouds,” the bigger boy said. “Sometimes they like to bowl up there. Then you hear the thunder from their bowling balls hitting the pins.”

  He leaned closer, and his eyes glowed like the lightning. “Sometimes they look down and see a little kid all alone. Then they throw one of their thunderbolts, and lectercute ‘im.”

  An even bigger lightning bolt poured zigzag across the sky, a river of light so bright it hurt. Then the thunder again, danger close: Krack a BOOM.

  Everett ran for home, and for his mommy. The lightning kept up for his entire endless slow motion progress down the block, illuminating the sky over and over, crashing down again and again in pursuit. Everett kept expecting the next lightning bolt to hit him, the anticipation so strong it made his back hurt, but they kept missing.

  The storm giants laughed and shouted horrible things as the thunder boomed, loud enough it felt like it would knock him off his feet. And as Everett had already learned in his short life, once you were on the ground you were done, for then there was no more running.

  It seemed he’d never reach his front door. But then his hand slapped onto the knob and sent the door crashing inward against the wall.

  Bambi stood from the couch where she’d been watching the soaps and having a smoke in her robe.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “There’s storm giants out there, mom. You got to close the door before they get us.”

  Everett told Bambi what the older boy had said, and of how the storm giants chased him home with thunder and lightning. But he faltered when he tried to repeat the older boy’s words, and he began to wail. The tears poured hot down his cheeks.

  Bambi ground out her butt, knelt and held him in her arms. She pressed her cheek against his, and he stopped sobbing as she crooned: “Hush baby, hush. Mom knows how to deal with storm giants.”

  Bambi took Everett’s hand and led him to the kitchen table. She took a piece of newspaper and folded it into an admiral’s hat.

  “This is a magical cap,” she said in a solemn voice as she placed it on his head.

  She waggled her fingers over him and intoned in a low, spooky voice: “Hocus pocus, abracadabra – the storm giants cannot hurt us, now and forever.

  She touched his cheek with cool fingers. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s going to be better than right.”

  Everett laughed and clapped his hands. Bambi made hot chocolate, and they played Chutes & Ladders together as the storm continued outside. The thunder kept rattling the walls and lightning pulsed at the windows, but Everett was safe inside the magic circle with his mom.

  The storm ended, as all storms do. A golden glow filled the sky, backlighting the ebon clouds so they shone from within as if pregnant with their own destruction. The clouds broke apart in a slow cringing run toward the horizon, and blue sky ruled again. His mom had beaten the storm giants, and Everett thought at the time that was the last of them.

  It was unusual he’d needed rescuing even at that tender age. Everett was never a scaredy cat about the dark or of being alone. In the dark no one could see you to get at you. When you were alone no one was there to hurt you.

  Everett hadn’t wasted time being scared of ghosts or monsters under the bed, either. His bogeymen were worldlier, and there even in the daylight.

  He saw his first knifing in Hayward; right after he met the storm giants actually. The instant it stopped raining Bambi had kicked him back out to play.

  He met up with Carlos, another neighborhood boy, and showed off his new hat. Two men approached and accosted them in Carlos’s front yard. At the time Everett saw them as grownups, but they had to have been only teenagers. The two were after Carlos’s big brother, Silent.

  Even as a little boy, Everett could tell they were serious. This was a dangerous situation requiring exquisite care. They bounced Everett and Carlos around a bit, and grew angry when neither of the younger boys gave up Silent’s location.

  Silent strolled up and cut them both through their wife beater tank tops into their guts with his foldie, right in front of Everett and Carlos. SNIK SNIK. It was the first time Everett heard the bell like whir cold steel makes cutting through living flesh.

  The blood flow was immediate, profuse, and right at Everett’s little boy eye level. It soaked the two guys’ tank tops and their starched pressed khakis, the blood dripping onto their spit shined kicks and the sidewalk in spatters and puddles.

  Some of it squirted onto Everett’s magic hat, soaking the newsprint and wilting Bambi’s creation, although he didn’t notice its ruination until later. A window between two worlds shattered and all that blood poured through like a thunderclap. The blood was redder than red, standing out from the background more real than anything else in the universe.

  The storm giants muttered thunder grumbling as the two would be bullies stood hunched over and dripping. They pressed both hands on their wounds to hold the guts in, apologizing and begging Silent not to cut them anymore with tears and snot pouring down their faces. Always a classy guy, Silent showed mercy and let them go.

  Everett didn’t tell his parents about it. It never even occurred to him to do so.

  Bambi’s house was no safer than the outside world. Things were done under her roof; deeds were performed on and around him that he witnessed. Bambi saving him from the storm giants was the only time Everett remembered her saving anyone from anything. He would expect no other acts of salvation.

  But it was what it was. A blur of years had passed since Everett left home as a teenager. Years spent learning and honing the skills of ‘the Life,’ making himself into a tight unit.

  Now Everett was out of all that, a Citizen as Rolly joshed. He had girlfriend Kerri and his son Raymond and an existence that didn’t involve being a threat to anyone. But he couldn’t s
hare any of that with Bambi even if he’d been so inclined. She would never awaken from this doped up sleep.

  What was it all supposed to mean? Didn’t have a clue.

  “Abracadabra, mom,” Everett said.

  He stood, kissed Bambi on her unresponsive cheek, and walked away from his mother one more time.

  Chapter 4 : The Widow Shows Her Face

  Outside the hospital lobby’s entrance doors, a woman stood next to his Escort. She was familiar, and she was comfortably waiting.

  Everett stopped maybe twenty feet back, outside the line of sight for anyone flanking the entrance. He got a transitory glimpse of his reflection – that of a tall man with red hair, freakishly wide shoulders and scar mottled face – before his focus shifted past the stranger in the glass.

  She hadn’t made him yet so he moved to one side of the lobby, checking out the opposite end of the parking lot. Everett moved to the other side of the lobby as if drawn to the bulletin board there. He checked the other end of the lot, still out of sight from outside, going for a parallax view.

  The lot was cluttered with autos but he spotted the box right off – she had at least two cars backing her; late model silver Beamers idled at either end of the parking lot ready to swoop when he came out the door. BMWs were a little high end for the Man unless they were undercover with a budget, but he couldn’t base anything on that.

  Everett considered just bailing, heading out another exit and fading into the comforting embrace of the East Bay jungle. But Kerri would be irked if he ditched the Escort, so he put that option away.

  The automatic doors opened as Everett exited the hospital, trotted down the steps, and broke into a loping run as he hit the asphalt of the parking lot. The Beamers gunned it and closed in from both sides, but Everett kept the majority of his attention on the woman as he scrambled toward her around interposing parked cars.