The Giant Smugglers (5 page)

At the back of the lab was a large, mostly bare room filled with natural light courtesy of a ceiling made up of interlocking glass hexagons. The concrete floor was empty except for four winches, positioned at regular intervals. Each was wound with aircraft control cable strong enough to hold down a giant. A tranquilizer gun rested on a ledge next to a control panel that regulated an overhead gas delivery system. Two gas masks hung on hooks nearby.

In contrast, the front half of the lab was dominated by galaxies of glass tubing and droning centrifuges. High-resolution screens mounted above the equipment depicted wire-frame models of human bodies, each one bigger and better than the one before it. Barton was hunched over a digital readout, working to extract DNA from the thumbnail sample they'd found that morning.

Dr. Fitzgibbons remembered the nervous, overweight graduate student who had approached him with an outrageous idea not that many years ago. At the time, Fitzgibbons was well known as one of the world's foremost authorities on human growth hormone. He knew HGH could provide only so much benefit for antiaging, injury recovery, and physical performance. Fitzgibbons wanted more. He needed a game changer. A giant discovery.

Even so, he couldn't believe he'd given Barton the time of day. The young man had e-mailed his research about the existence of giant creatures. He'd mapped all reported sightings, including every single blurry cell-phone picture and nut-job blog post. His hypothesis was that the sightings formed a complex pattern, starting in Alaska, stretching east across Canada, then dropping south through the United States straight down into Mexico via a variety of routes. According to his theory, giants not only existed but were migrating as well. The difficulty of concealing and transporting something that size suggested to Barton that the giants weren't working alone. It was almost as if they were being smuggled through some kind of underground railroad.

Fitzgibbons was understandably skeptical of all of it, starting with the premise that giants existed in the first place. But because Barton was an alumnus of his university, Fitzgibbons had agreed to see the young man.

During their interview, Barton had told a crazy story about a promising lead in Saskatchewan, a location on his giant smuggling route. A local news station had reported a giant sighting by a veteran fishing guide. Barton played the news report for Fitzgibbons on his laptop.

The Northern Lights had been brilliant green that night, and from his boat on Deschambault Lake, the guide claimed to have seen an honest-to-God giant standing on the beach, staring at the bright flickers in the night sky.

“Sure it was dark, but believe me, that was no Sasquatch,” the guide in the video insisted. “As big as five men, looking right at me! Then he was gone in a flash back into the woods. People can say what they want, but I know what I saw. He was a giant man, not a monster.” The news reporter confirmed that the guide had passed a polygraph test.

The guide didn't strike Barton as either a crackpot or an opportunist, so he'd followed up on the story. He got in his car and drove two days to Deschambault Lake. When he found no snapped tree branches or other obvious traces of giant activity, he searched the surrounding countryside, looking for a place where a giant might seek shelter. Four miles away, Barton discovered an abandoned church just tall enough.

He told Fitzgibbons how he had made his way inside the dark, hollowed-out shell of a church. The pews and altar were long gone, leaving more than enough space to hide a giant. Yearning for a bird's-eye view, Barton had climbed up the creaky steps to the bell tower. The bell's frayed rope dangled down. He examined the dusty bell and discovered a pattern that made his heart explode with joy.

In Fitzgibbons's office, Barton had carefully unzipped an ungainly canvas bag and unveiled the bell itself. Fitzgibbons remembered his reaction when presented with the evidence: “What does a bell prove? Even if I set aside the comic-book nature of this, you have nothing to back up these claims but a lot of sketchy accounts from country yokels. The migration angle is interesting, but it's not enough. I'd need something big to convince me.”

In response, Barton had only smiled and pulled a small penlight from his jacket. A blue beam bathed the bell. The dust in one area of the bell had been carefully brushed away. The light revealed long, wavy red lines swirling in symmetry. They comprised a thumbprint, enormous and unmistakable. “Is that big enough?”

It was. Lab analysis confirmed the thumbprint's authenticity; it was even enough to convince Fitzgibbons's old colleague, Gretchen Gourmand, to approve funding for their research. Her company, Accelerton, saw the potential for incalculable profits if the scientists were able to develop a giant growth hormone. GGH would yield revolutionary—even evolutionary—biotech advances with both civilian and military applications.

All of Barton's crazy stories led Fitzgibbons to where he was today, an unlikely Accelerton lab in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He moved to his desk and switched the signal on the monitors, pulling up flickering aerial views of farm fields, tree tops, and, most important, the silo he had visited that morning. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared.

A centrifuge dinged.

“How long?” asked Fitzgibbons.

Barton checked a program on his computer and sighed. “A few hours for preliminary results. If there's enough viable tissue, I can start synthesizing a biologic immediately.”

Fitzgibbons nodded. The thumbnail was an exciting but limited find—best-case scenarios indicated Barton could produce only a limited amount of GGH. He looked up at the satellite images, serene aerial views of rural Wisconsin.

Barton stepped away from a centrifuge to join his boss. He studied the farms and surrounding countryside and let out a frustrated sigh. “Just a bunch of cows doing cow stuff.”

“Let's stay on it. In fact, I'd like you to task another bird or two. Whoever's helping these giants clearly has more than one location to hide them. There must be something we're missing.”

 

6

Charlie stood on his pedals and pumped like crazy to make it to school on time. He was more scared about being tardy again than of Fitz's threats. His principal, Mr. Dobbs, would call his mom, his mom would ground him for a month, and that meant seeing the giant again would get a lot more difficult.

Charlie threw his bike on the rack and sprinted through the front doors of Richland Center Middle School. There was Dobbs, standing outside the office, just waiting to catch the late kids. He looked at his watch and raised an eyebrow as the first bell rang. Charlie had made it just in time!

He hustled to his locker to stash his backpack and then off to class, plopping down in his seat way before the second bell. He saw a bunch of the jocks arguing about fantasy football like it was the most important thing in the world. Like usual, they didn't notice Charlie, even though he was sitting on bigger news than any football score. Of course Charlie wasn't about to spill—if he said anything about the giant, the whole town would be all over the warehouse. He was going to keep the secret to himself, at least for a while.

“Crazy loss last night,
CUGoneByeBye
.”

Charlie turned around.

There was Adele Hawkins,
Adelicious
from
Total Turbo
, in the seat behind him. She was scrolling through some text-heavy message board on a handheld tablet—she'd always been the class computer dork, a distinction she wore as a badge of honor. But something weird had happened to her over the summer. Her hair, which had been in braids for as long as he'd known her, was down now. He thought it looked kind of awesome. She got tired of waiting for Charlie to respond and started talking again.

“Fitz just got lucky. He's weird.”

The name
Fitz
brought fresh reminders of the bigger kid's threats. Charlie tried to play it casual. “You know him?”

“I babysit for his next-door neighbors. He just moved here. Jamie Fitzgibbons is his real name, but he hates being called Jamie.”

Charlie thought back to
Total Turbo
the night before, when he'd mocked the bully's name. He was glad Fitz had no idea who
CUGoneByeBye
really was. “Prefers Fitz, I guess,” Charlie nodded. “As in ‘fits of rage.'”

Adele giggled, and Charlie felt his cheeks turn red. He never knew what to say when girls laughed at his jokes. Which, if he was being honest, didn't happen too often.

“I know how you can do better in the corners,” Adele said, her voice dropping to a whisper. She looked around to make sure no one was listening and leaned in close to Charlie. “I found this message board, totally underground, nobody knows about it. You can't even Google it. There's a bunch of hardcore
Turbo
freaks on there. If you're cool, they'll share lots of game secrets with you.”

“What, like codes?”

“Codes, cheats, driving techniques,” Adele whispered. “Walk-throughs, hints, even backdoor hacks! It's a gold mine. Check it out.” She spun her tablet around, and Charlie leaned in closer. Adele was right: The site was crazy. There was insider information on everything from acceleration mods to tire saturation. She paged through to a thread on cornering, his Achilles' heel in the race he lost to Fitz.

Sure enough, there was a technique called “heel-toe braking,” a way to brake though a corner while still revving the engine. To pull it off, you controlled both the accelerator and brake with your right foot and the clutch with your left. With toes on the gas and heel on the brake, you could come out of the turn like a bullet. An online video showed just how effective the move could be.

“Sweet—I'll try it tonight,” said Charlie.

“Wish I could see how it works. I got a bunch of new tricks I wanted to try myself, stuff even you haven't thought of.”

“Why can't you?”

Her voice sagged. “I'm taking Doug and Dennis to the fair.”

“Oh man.” Charlie knew all about Doug and Dennis Perry, nine-year-old twins who lived about three blocks over from his apartment. A month earlier, the two of them had holed up in their tree fort with a water-balloon launcher and conducted a fierce assault on Seminary Street traffic. It took two squad cars to get them to stop and come down.

“I swore I wouldn't sit for them again,” sighed Adele. “Then their parents offered to pay me double because everybody's so afraid of what the monsters will do.”

Charlie winced. The Perry twins had twice the mischief-making power of his brother, Tim, and he'd destroyed sitters when he was their age.

The second bell rang, signaling the start of class.

“You going to the fair?” Adele whispered.

“Yep. My brother works out there,” Charlie griped. “I
have
to go.”

“Maybe I'll see you?”

Charlie tried to untie his uncooperative tongue. “S-s-sure,” he stammered, sounding like the giant trying out an unfamiliar phrase. The teacher began talking, giving him an excuse to turn around.

The rest of the morning crawled by as he waited for a chance to test the range of the walkie-talkies. Finally, lunch arrived. Charlie took his backpack into the cafeteria, slammed his crummy sandwich, and split for outside.

The usual game of touch football was under way on the grassy field behind the school. All-time quarterback Mr. Spees, the math teacher, shouted the snap count “Go nuts” to send eager receivers out for passes. Charlie played it cool as he slid by. His plan was to hide out behind the equipment shed. If somebody saw him talking on an overgrown walkie-talkie, the ridicule would be endless.

He made it to the secret spot in no time, then peered around the shed to make sure no one had followed. He unzipped his backpack, pulled the antenna up on the walkie, and turned it on.

“Check one, check one. You there?”

“Charlie?” The giant's voice crackled through almost immediately.

Charlie hit the Talk button. “Yep, man, it's me. This works awesome!”

“Smell!”

So much for formalities
, Charlie thought. “Something smells?”

“Bad.”

Charlie remembered the smelly box in a corner of the warehouse, but he didn't think that was what the giant meant. “Is the smell coming from outside?”

“Yep.”

Charlie chuckled. “I know, right? That's Donovan Dairies.” The dairies emptied some kind of steam into the air every day and it stank like crazy. Since they moved close by, Charlie smelled it all the time. It was even worse in the summer, when it got hot. “Has something to do with making cheese. You know what cheese is?”

“Nope.”

“You're in Wisconsin, dude. I'll have to get you some.” He looked around the corner and saw a group of kids chasing a kickball in the shed's direction. “I gotta go. Somebody's coming.”

The giant understood. “Secret.”

“I'll be there soon.” Charlie clicked off, pushed the antenna down, and stuffed the walkie into his backpack. The bell rang, and Charlie followed the kids back into the school.

Next was sixth-hour study hall. Mr. Bachman, the monitor, sat at the front of the room behind an old wooden desk. He had three rules, which were written on a sign hanging on the wall above his head:
No talking, no gum, no phones.
He started every period by pointing at the sign, then scribbling in a Sudoku book.

Charlie didn't have any homework, so he eased his phone out of his pocket. On a whim, he searched “giants” on the Internet, expecting to find some Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tales. Instead, he uncovered centuries' worth of people claiming that they had had encounters with giants. How had he not known this before? In the 1600s, thirty-foot-tall giants supposedly stomped around Australia. Others claimed a race of giants lived in the wild outside Chile during the eighteenth century. Giant kings ruled Peru, according to some stories.