Giants

The giants had first appeared just north of the gold coast on a grey spring Friday. I’d risen at my usual 5:30 a.m., was twitching my way through coffee prep when I started catching weird nonsensicals from the other room. The wife was checking out Matt and Meredith. They were talkin' giants.

Disturbing video today…

Matt’s eyes turned down and his face turned sour to signal the coming of something scary.

…From a man in Alabama. Hubert Schnitzel, 56, of Gulf Shores filmed this from his Apple IPhone this morning, just over 45 minutes ago:

The screen switched to a grainy grey-black and then phased into a shitty looking beach with glassy wavelets coming in. It was overcast in Gulf Shores so the scene looked black and white even though it was shot in color from the magnificent phone. Wavelets and beach and sea for 5, 10, 15 seconds. Then, just as my interest began to wane I saw it. A dot, 40-50 yards offshore a black dot had appeared. It began to grow bigger in the flat-calm Gulf waters. Forward motion became evident. The dot grew. It became a dot sitting on a smaller dot and, moving closer still, both dots riding atop a pair of shoulders. More seconds tick and - yep, giant. It was walking very slowly, but you could see other dots coming up behind. I counted 5 emerging giants before Matt said:

Wow, just…Wow. Thanks Hubert. And thank you, Apple iPhone. The phone you’ll never put down because it’s hard-wired into your brain and implanted in your spine.

Meredith mimed a mock shudder and said: Oooh, Scary.

Just a few seconds before the screen went blank, I could see the first giant, fully de-oceaned and heading for a sea wall in the middle distance, begin a loping jog. He was head to toe black, and there were at least 9 others being born behind him.

Conjecture and rumor mongering proliferated: The giants were aliens, the giants were from Ecuador, the giants were a Russian terror plot, the giants were C.I.A. The giants could be defeated with silver bullets and stakes through hearts. The giants would obey orders shouted in German, the giants loved alcohol. They were partying in Vegas, and starting a football team. and hanging out with Diddy and LeBron James. The giants got good weed. The giants were only following orders.

Whatever they were saying, they didn’t get long to say it. I’ve heard since that 10,000 or more came ashore that day, from Gulf Shores and down the gold coast, even as far as the Keys there was word of massive battalions of giants wrecking shop and destroying lives. Regiment-size actions with tens of thousands of the fuckers moving across the land. The National Guard had been called out and beat back, they said. There was martial law from Key West to Newport News. The numbers were mathematically challenging. I heard 100,000, I heard one million. I saw a picture of a Tampa strip-mall burning.

We stayed awake and kept the kids away from TV. At 11:30 that night the president came on TV and told us that the entire Southeastern United States had been conquered and held. He urged evacuation, and encouraged firearm preparation. He did a bad job of trying to look brave.

Then the videos started coming in. The first was from some sort of security camera, of what appeared to be a small airport. It opened on a throng of people mobbing about a bank of monitors inside a small terminal. Far off in the distance there was a windsock flagellating from a small radar tower just in front of a long cement retainer. Ranging across the entire horizon beyond was what looked like a high black wave. In just a few seconds the wave broke over the wall and consumed the wind-tower. The giants, running full-out, their knees right around wind-sock level as they gained the tower and blasted into the foreground.

It took minutes.

The people who’d been gawking the monitors fled of course, but it looked as if most were caught. Before the cam died I saw a giant with a guy wailing in his fists. He ripped him open and stretched him like taffy. I saw two giants scoop up a handful of what looked like children and begin smashing them on the tarmac like a jockey whipping for the back-stretch. I saw a giant lift an old lady up and spike her like a football. She burst open and ran all over the blacktop. When they were finished they sprinted away in search of more coast to obliterate and more bodies to smash.

Another video, much shorter, was taken by somebody in full flight. The first few moments were a spinning, noisy mess. Alarmed yelling phasing in and out and a ground / sky / ground / sky repetition. It stopped suddenly though, for no on-camera reason, and there was the first full-length view. The camera on one side of narrow, two lane blacktop with no median, the fucking giant on the other, stopped, standing, exhibiting himself. A voice off camera:

What (breath breath) Fuck…Fuckin …(pant pant)

An overturned car at the giants feet provided some perspective. Fucker was 35 feet tall easy with the flipped Honda not even making his (its) ankles. It was black, it was naked, it looked like a giant black human with no genitalia, and no fucking face. A sound came out of it, like a low buzzing, like a constant wet throat-clearing. He advanced in one road-spanning step and grabbed the speaker. He flipped the guy up and grabbed his ankles and threw him, hammer toss-style, into the ether. His screaming faded as he sliced away, still going up when the camera lost him in the fog.

　

***

So eventually, the Giants got my family. A long, drawn out account of who did what to who is, in my opinion, not necessary. By the time the black bastards got to my house the word was out: The giants couldn’t be stopped. Not at all, even for a little while by anything. Even before the day they landed in the deep south (G-Day the media was calling it when the internet got shut off). The Army had been called in straight away and been run through like a warm summer rain. Then the Air Guards of four NATO countries tried for almost two straight weeks to bomb, napalm, and machine gun the things to hell. For two weeks it rained fiery allied aircraft parts all over North and South Carolina.

Forget slowing them down, these efforts didn’t so much as inconvenience any one of them. The bullets seemed to be absorbed into the monsters very flesh as they advanced. Incendiaries of every description failed over and over to cause any interruption whatsoever in the giant-flood subsuming the continent. After an attempted tactical nuking basically destroyed Chicago and made most of Illinois highly carcinogenic, the president called off the dogs. The night after his surrender speech the goddamned things turned off the electricity.

***

So word was out: we are conquered, and so is everybody else. The leaders of most of the free world capitulated right along with us and the giants held the cards. The next, and as it turned out last, thing I’d ever hear about the giants was that they weren’t interested in men.

Well sure they’d killed close to a million men so far, but those were guys who actually made attempts to stand against them. Weather it was a sharp stick or a hand-grenade, any opposition to the giants was met with instant, usually very painful extermination. However, as time went by people started to realize that their campaign was being waged mostly against women and children. We began hearing stories of guys who’d watched entire families wiped out along with houses, cars, private jets and monster trucks. Every possible form of infrastructure from skyscraper to doghouse was gutted and rendered useless. Every woman and child in every country of the world. All of them wiped out violently and totally in 14 days.

But no men. They left all men alive.

When the day finally did come, I did what I could to make sure my wife and kids were comfortable. Then I kissed each one of them on the head and shot them all full of enough raw morphine to anesthetize a family of blue whales. As I watched my wife and kids fall asleep for the last time I heard my wife say something. She was going fast though and it whatever it was sounded like mumbles. To be honest she was probably a little concerned that I hadn’t spiked my own vein yet as I’d promised her I would. Awkward.

Don’t judge me.

It took 15 minutes for the giants to turn my home into a broken concrete hole in the ground. I know because I watched them do it from the swing-set in my backyard.