The Giant Smugglers (18 page)

Charlie thought this seemed like an excellent time to get out of there. With the door still stuck, he got the window down and started to crawl out.

The man tapped an earpiece. “Take him up, Barton.” The chopper started upward, the cable hauling Giant Fitz into the air.

The man leaped off the giant's shoulder and hit the ground. Heavy rain beat down without mercy. The stranger strode toward Charlie, tapping the stick in his palm as the helicopter towed the lifeless giant skyward. The man's footsteps sounded heavy and threatening as they approached through the mud. The boy wanted to run, but fear froze him in place. Without a ride, he wasn't
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He was Charlie Lawson, and he knew he didn't stand a chance.

“So here's the thing, kid. I can't leave any loose ends.” The man's face turned cruel. He twisted the end of his stick and pointed it at Charlie's head.

But something out of the corner of his eye made the man leap clear. A giant fist appeared from above, pounding a crater into the muddy ground where the man had stood a half moment before.

Bruce shook water from his soggy mane and growled at Charlie's attacker.

“Looks like it's my lucky day,” the stranger said. “Two giants for the price of one.”

“Bruce, what are you doing here?” shouted Charlie.

He never got an answer as something like the sound of a locomotive came rushing toward them. All three of them turned and looked up at the angry night sky.

On the other side of the dam, a funnel cloud had reached down from the heavens and was heading straight for them over the millpond. The angry twister threw mud, debris, and heavy tree branches in all directions.

Bruce grabbed Charlie and ran for it. The driving rain was so fierce that he never saw the hunk of wood that beaned him right in the head.

And that's when everything went black.

 

24

Even when Charlie regained consciousness, he couldn't seem to open his eyes. He had no way of knowing how long he'd been out of commission or whether it was day or night. He was flat on his back, resting atop a vibrating metal surface. Now and again the shaking intensified, and his head bounced up and down. At least something was cushioning the shock to his cranium. Charlie groaned as he tried to turn his head. His skull ached in a way that he'd never felt before, not even after getting kicked in the face during a fifth-grade soccer tournament.

Reaching up to touch his aching temple, Charlie found a thick, gauzy cloth wrapped several times around his head. He had no memory of anyone fixing him up. The last thing he remembered before blacking out was the awful roar of the wind as Bruce carried him away from the dam.

His eyelids felt bruised. When he was finally able to force them apart, he found himself in the dark. Charlie struggled to pull himself up into a sitting position, giving his eyes time to adjust to the lack of light. Eventually, he could make out the broad strokes of a long, narrow enclosure—one that was moving. He found a wall and scooted his way along until he bumped into something.

“Charlie?”

Charlie laughed, relieved to hear the familiar voice, low and friendly. “Bruce! Where are we?”

“My ride,” said Bruce, matter-of-fact.

“Your ride? Wait … where are we going?” asked Charlie.

Bruce stayed quiet.

The boy realized that they must have been long gone from Richland Center. “Oh man, I'm in serious trouble.”

The giant snickered. “Trouble,” he agreed.

Charlie punched what he assumed was the big guy's knee. “It's not funny, man. My mom is going to kill me.” Shadows slowly took shape, and now he could make out Bruce's general outline in the murk. The giant lay on his side, big chin resting in one hand. Charlie wobbled to his knees, too dizzy yet to stand. He suspected they were riding in some sort of trailer, like the kind DJ's company used to haul big shipments. Something underneath them started to whine.

It sounded pretty terrible, like the whole truck was going to fall apart. Then the vehicle made a sweeping turn, and Charlie landed on his bottom. The sound of furious crunching indicated that they'd moved from smooth pavement to potholed gravel. He leaned back against Bruce to ride it out and spotted the hazy outline of a weird figure painted on the wall across from him. Charlie crawled over to get a closer look. He could make out fiery eyes and a malevolent, razor-toothed grin. It was a huge painting of a spooky skull! The trailer lurched to a stop.

The heavy doors at the far end swung open. Charlie's eyes rebelled as the light delivered a shock through his temples. After an uncomfortable moment, his eyes adjusted.

No way. It couldn't be.

Charlie's brother stood at the end of the trailer, dark hair flopping over the sides of his sunglasses. He hopped up into the trailer to give Charlie a long, sweaty hug. “I just get the mummy all fixed,” Tim said with a lopsided grin, “and then I have to unravel him to wrap up your dented melon.”

Charlie's brain sputtered and sparked. With the benefit of daylight, he could see the huge devil's pitchfork sticking out of the wall, the campy painting of the evil, grinning fortune teller, and Charlie's favorite zombie, lurching for someone to grab. Even Tim's box of crap was along for the ride. The rest of the spooky stuff appeared to have been dismantled to make room for Bruce. “The Creep Castle is his ride? What are you doing here?”

“I'm a giant smuggler,” confided Tim with a wink. “We're all giant smugglers. Come on, Charlie, get in the ball game.”

“Come on, Charlie,” said Bruce, poking the boy in the ribs with his pinkie finger.

Suddenly, Tim leaving home to join the carnival took on new meaning. Was this what his brother had really been up to? “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Probably the same reason you didn't tell me.”

“The kid's awake,” came a voice from the end of the trailer. “Now he can go.”

Charlie turned to see two more people at the end of the Creep Castle: Juice Man, the bald carnival worker who worked the blimp, and Wertzie, the guy with four fingers who hated the Gravitron.

“Charlie comes!” The giant bared his teeth and growled to make his point.

“Not if I have anything to say about it! Giants are enough trouble. We can't be babysitting brats, too!” The Juice Man pounded the metal bed of the trailer with a meaty fist. “You're not in charge, giant!”

“His name's Bruce,” said Charlie.

“Bruce,” the giant grunted in agreement. He pounded the trailer bed much harder than the Juice Man had managed, rocking a pallet of crates near Charlie. The bald man swallowed hard and took a step back.

Charlie held up an arm to steady the wooden boxes, then pulled back as he recognized what the Creep Castle had been carrying. “The dynamite! Holy crap, Tim, you know how much we were bouncing around back here? You could have blown us to bits!”

Tim picked up a bundle from a crate. “You mean this dynamite?” He undid the twine, selected a stick, and tossed it in the air. Charlie ducked and threw his hands over his head to protect himself, but a blast never came as the stick landed with a noisy but harmless clank.

Bruce barked out a horsey laugh. “Boom!”

The cylinder rolled down the metal bed of the Creep Castle. Red-faced, Charlie picked it up. It was as heavy as he'd remembered back in the warehouse.

Tim pulled another stick from the stack. “As long as we're coming clean.” He peeled back the warning wrapper and held the rod up. It glinted when it caught a ray of sun from the rear of the trailer.

“Is that…?” Charlie unwrapped his and felt the cool metal against his fingertips. The gold was stunning. A single bar had to be worth millions.

“Solid gold,” Tim said. “The giants got bank, Charlie. It's what they're using to pay for their new home.”

Juice Man tried to inspect a bar of his own, but Bruce snatched it right out of the carny's hands and put it back in the box. Juice Man looked offended at the implication that he was trying to steal the gold.

“How long until this ride is ready, Juice Man?” asked Wertzie.

“What's the use of even trying? There's too much weight!” the bald man protested. “The giant, the gold, it's too much!”

“Nobody's happy about why we're carrying the gold,” said Wertzie. The giant smugglers looked at one another without speaking for a moment.

“What?” asked Charlie. “Who was supposed to bring the gold?”

Bruce was the one who figured it out. “Hank?”

“He didn't make it to the rendezvous,” confessed Wertzie. “That's why we have the gold—he's usually in charge of the valuables.”

“So Giant Fitz got him?” asked Charlie. Now he felt sort of terrible about just leaving the old man to fight the enormous bully all by himself.

Tim looked at Wertzie. “Who's Giant Fitz?”

“Fitz was the one who was fighting Hank,” Charlie explained to his brother. “The bully from the fair? His dad's got a lab out at that Accelerton place—somehow he must have turned Fitz into a giant!”

“An actual giant?” asked Wertzie. “Like your friend here?”

“Why would I make it up?” asked Charlie.

Bruce nodded his head in agreement. “Giant!”

“So where is this other giant? Giant Fitz?” asked Tim.

“He got zapped by the man with the glowing stick.”

Tim looked over the top of his sunglasses. “The man with the what?”

“Geez,” Charlie said. “Don't you guys know anything?”

The giant smugglers looked at each other in disbelief. This was definitely not business as usual. “We need to sort through this, but the side of the highway probably isn't the place to do it. One thing's for sure: Someone is looking for giants, and we don't want to be here when they show up.” Wertzie turned to the Juice Man. “Just grease the daylights out of that bearing. We're an hour out of Peoria. Can you get us that far?”

The Juice Man ran a hand over his bald head. “I doubt it,” he spat, but he disappeared to work on the problem anyway.

“Let's move!” shouted Wertzie to the other carnies loitering around their trucks. He left to get the carnival back on the road.

“Before we go,” said a woman's voice, “let's get you boys something to eat.” Tiger, the one Tim called the roughie, appeared at the end of the trailer with an aluminum cart full of the biggest elephant ears Charlie had ever seen. Bruce's nostrils twitched as he reached for an elephant ear and waved it under his nose. He stuffed a huge handful into his mouth, taking slow, careful chomps to savor every sweet bite. He closed his eyes and moaned with pleasure.

Tim motioned for Charlie to join him and Tiger at the end of the trailer. “We've got to get you home,” he said in a low voice, trying not to upset Bruce. He tapped Charlie on his bandaged head. “You've seen for yourself that things can get hairy.”

“It might not be safe,” Tiger agreed. “Bus ride home is probably your best bet.”

Charlie looked back at the big guy, remembering how he'd saved Charlie's butt when the maniac with the stick was about to fry him. Bruce didn't run or leave Charlie behind. Whether it was at the dam or the drive-in, Bruce always had Charlie's back. Charlie thought about what his mom would do in the situation. She helped butterflies on their way—why not giants? If Bruce wanted Charlie to come, then he'd have the giant's back, too. “I'm coming, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

Bruce snorted an emphatic grunt, making it clear he wasn't going anywhere without his friend.

Tiger shook her head and took the cart away. Tim wasn't nuts about Charlie's decision, either, but at least he seemed to understand it. “I'll call Mom, let her know you're okay,” he said. “Tell her … I'll make up something.”

“Try it now!” came from outside the Creep Castle. Apparently, the Juice Man had done whatever he needed to do to get the ride moving again.

“Let's get this show on the road!” Tim slammed the heavy metal doors shut and the two friends returned to darkness.

“Looks like we're going to see some more of the world, big guy.”

“Big world.”

The small, colorful caravan jostled its way back onto the gravel that led to the main road. One by one, the carnival rides, folded up like toys back in their boxes after a day of hard play, rolled onto the highway. It took the trucks a while to accelerate, but soon they were speeding south.

Behind them, hundreds of monarch butterflies rode the air currents in the smugglers' wake, making a migration of their own.

 

25

Hank reached for his phone, but found the task impossible with his right arm in a sling. He tried to sit up in the elevated bed and winced. His fingers, purple and bruised, curled into a fist. Even his face hurt.

He was laid up in a patient room at Richland Hospital, the unpleasant smell of rubbing alcohol heavy in the air. Because he kept drifting in and out of consciousness, he had little sense of how long he'd been there. Hours? Days? And he had no idea if the giant smugglers had picked up the last giant in the old warehouse. He had a vague memory of paramedics promising to take care of Powder before he blacked out in the ambulance at the quarry.

A groan to his left made Hank turn his head. That hurt, too—his neck felt like it had been worked over with a meat tenderizer. In the next bed, perhaps unconscious from a recent surgery, was Sean Fitzgibbons. The scientist's face was pale. And his right leg was elevated and heavily bandaged, with a stain the size and color of a bruised orange in the place where shrapnel from the old aluminum shed had ripped through his thigh.

“Guessing things didn't go the way you planned,” said Hank, even though he knew the man couldn't hear him.

The old man needed to get out of there. He reached up to figure out the complicated mechanism that held his leg in the air.