Giants and Ogres (9 page)

The Swahili told a different tale. “Get the monster back in her cage!”

I leapt from my bed, tore open the curtains in time to see the Stalk doors closing … and my three friends in cages.

I screamed so loudly that the whole room shook, pulled open the doors, pulled on the chains, but even my strength was not enough to stop them. My hands were too big to hotwire the elevator. I paused only an
instant before heading to the glass door.

The air outside the Cloud is thin, but breathable. Our plants inside keep the oxygen richer, but the glass door, once used for hover craft, still opened. I pulled it ajar, looked down at the Stalk, and jumped.

The Stalk is made of woven columns of cement and metal, none particularly comfortable to land on. I caught hold anyway and began to climb down it as fast as I could. If they got to the bottom before me ….

They wouldn't.

The metal chains thrummed with the weight of the load, and I began to sing along to it, matching my movements to the music. It was a song my father had liked, for all that my mother had considered in too dark. “A Woman Scorned,” and I hoped my voice—NOT hidden, NOT toned down—was audible to Jack inside.

Oh blades may cut and bullets sting

But a woman scorned is a terrible thing.

She'll sear the eyes right from your head

And grind your bones to bake her bread.

Hand over hand, faster and faster I descended as the chains inside hummed and the elevator lowered.
Finally, 30 meters from the ground, I jumped. The ground shook, the Stalk shivered, and the elevator door pinged open.

I stood, smiling. “You may want to record this,” I said in Swahili. I put my hands together and cracked my knuckles. “I don't like my friends being kidnapped,” I went on in Russian. Then I took a step forward as I finished in Cantonese. “And I most especially don't like having my emotions manipulated by a megalomaniac sociopath.”

“Vivian, sweetheart,” Jack tried as I grabbed the first few techs and tossed them into the swamp behind me. “There's some sort of misunderstanding,” he continued as much of his equipment followed them into the mud.

I smiled as I grabbed another handful of techs and send them splashing with the others. “Is there, my prince?” I inquired sweetly. “Tell the nice woman with the camera why you have my friends in cages.”

The last tech was filming, although her hands shook. She peered around the camera at me. “It was all his idea, really!”

“Shut up!” Jack screamed. “It isn't—I didn't—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out something tiny.

I frowned as a projectile lodged itself into my
necklace. “Jack, I really don't think we can be friends anymore.” I picked him up by the back of his jacket and turned back to the woman with the camera. “If you open those cages nicely, I'll let you walk out of here under your own power.”

She nodded, still filming as she fumbled with the locks and let my friends out. Ella was still asleep, but she roused when Jared shook her gently.

I crushed two of the cages in my free hand, then shoved Jack into the third.

“You can't do this!” He screamed. “I'm famous; I'm important!”

I tilted my head to one side. “You look rather small to me.” I gestured the woman out. “We'll send him back to you, eventually—when he understands his mistakes and has paid off his debt.”

“You can keep him,” the woman muttered, but she scurried away.

Cyn flew up to my shoulder and held on as I bowed my head to climb in and sit down. Ella and Jared settled on my legs as I hit the button to take us up.

“I'm going to need you to program this to lock at the top,” I informed Ella.

“But what about me?” Jack wailed.

I smiled. “You get to sing for your supper. If you do a good job, you'll get out of that cage eventually. If not ….”

I hummed the tune to “A Woman Scorned,” while Ella chimed along.

Hope Erica Schultz
writes Science Fiction and Fantasy for teens and adults. Her YA post-apocalyptic novel,
The Last Road Home
, came out November 2015, and her first experience as co-editor, the YA anthology
One Thousand Words for War
, came out May 2016. Her prior stories have appeared in publications including
Fireside Press
,
Diabolical Plots
, and
Plasma Frequency
. She is an Associate Member of SFWA. She is generally busy with family, work, and shenanigans, and has trouble saying “No” to part time jobs and interesting projects.

It happened, but it happened slowly.

First he lost his job when the machine-parts factory closed down. It wasn't a good job, but it made him talk to people. The more he was at home, the less he had anything to say to anyone but his mother, with whom he lived.

The following year his mother died quite suddenly. A brief bout of pneumonia, and the house was empty except for him. He talked even less after that.

Then there was the subsidence at the end of the street. Old mine shafts, they said, empty snake-skins coiled under the road, waiting to collapse, and part of the street had to be demolished. The part with his mother's house.

So he had to move, and they found him a flat in Rowan Rise. It wasn't difficult. Rowan Rise would be next on the list of demolitions, with or without collapsing mine-shafts. No one lived there if they had anywhere else to go. He didn't.

Names mattered as well, not only jobs and homes. He had a name, obviously, but after a while no one bothered to use it because they didn't need to. “Him in Flat Seven,” they said. “That odd guy in the dump.” And finally, as the other tenants left, one by one, he became nothing more than “that guy.”

It didn't bother him, because he didn't notice the world outside any more. He often forgot to wash. His hair grew longer, began to straggle on his shoulders as it thinned on top. His fingernails thickened with age, harder to cut, and so he left them.

Money was tight. He'd had some compensation, but he didn't understand it. He bought cheap cuts of meat, stock bones and ham hocks, and learned to live on them. His jaws grew stronger, his teeth like yellowed pegs as he ground down the gristle and sinew. He tried marrowbones and fish-heads, pig's trotters and stewing steak, all of which went down his gullet in a moment. He grew, his shoulders wider than ever, and his belly breaking open his pants. And yet he was always empty inside, somehow.

He wasn't seen much. When he did emerge, usually at night or in pouring rain, he was a bulk moving in shadows, a bulk no one wanted to approach. And
even those appearances stopped eventually. It was rumoured that someone local did his shopping for him, but no one had seen anyone go in or out of the flat.

A few years passed. The flats still stood, an ugly mass of bricks on the edge of the neighbourhood, and he was still there. While lawyers argued over land-law and zoning, office blocks and affordable housing, the kids found a new name for the one person left in Rowan Rise. They listened to their parents, and they remembered the nonsense that they had heard in bedtime stories.

They called him The Ogre.

Esme Carlito had almost gone in once, a few months ago when the front door of the flat began to hang half open, one of the hinges rusting away. A dare, of course. She told her friends afterwards that the smell had put her off, a stench of stale sweat and meat. She told her dog Max, however, that she could hear the ogre's breathing, a snorting in the darkness, and that she had been terrified. Max understood.

Her brother didn't want to hear Esme's stories. He was fifteen, two years older, and the wrong age for bedtime stories, or for anything else. No love life, no skill
at sports, and not particularly academic.

Daniel Carlito was a loner—not because he wanted to be, but because he was edged out of everything that might have been interesting. The teams and clubs didn't want him, a mediocre boy with slightly too much weight around his waist. He was Hispanic, but not Hispanic enough to be considered hip. The others in his year derided him for his lack of sexual experience. He knew that most of what they said was made up, but he didn't tell lies very well. So he played computer games, read the odd crime story, and kept out of people's way.

That had worked until Cresser noticed him.

“Whatya up to, Danny?” Cresser would call out, cronies at his side. “Pickin' your zits again? Want a hand?” A half-empty can usually followed, spraying Daniel's jacket with flat coke. Or a stone, or a handful of soil. A schoolbook and once a brick, which left his arm bruised for days. Fell over, he told his mother when she saw him wincing.

Daniel's mother said that Cresser had “anger issues” and “personal problems.” But Daniel's mother worked all hours, keeping the family fed and clothed. She was guessing. Daniel had known kids who were bullied and
lashed out in return. He'd known other kids whose parents fought a lot of the time or whose parents were separated like his. He could cope with them.

Cresser was bad in the head, plain nasty. He always had been. He liked what he did, and he spread his nastiness, infecting weaker kids, drawing them into his circle.

It didn't get any better. Mrs Carlito took one afternoon off to speak to the teachers and almost lost her position at the mini-mart, spent an hour talking to Daniel about Cresser, bullying, and how to get on with others and was late for her cleaning job. He stopped mentioning it to her.

Fridays were particularly bad. On Fridays, Cresser would taunt Daniel with what might happen over the weekend.

“Ought to look out for that mutt of your sisters,” he'd say. “Lot of gangs round here, they take dogs and make 'em fight together.”

Or “Thought I might hang out on your turf Sat'day, Danny. I seen which is your window, got me a BB gun now.”

It left Daniel waiting and worrying.

On the Friday before the summer break, the wait was over. Cresser was there for him outside school, a few younger kids at his back. He had a corroded length of iron in his hand, twisted from the railings.

“Found this, Danny. Thought we'd hang out by the old flats, hit stones. Wanna come?”

Daniel put his head down and tried to walk past. Cresser tripped him and Daniel fell, tearing one knee of his trousers.

“Thought you would.”

They dragged him up and along the pavement. An old man walking by opened his mouth to speak, looked at Cresser, and carried on past in silence. Daniel wanted to shout out but couldn't do it. If he struggled, yelled, it would get worse. Maybe he could take a few more bruises and get it over with. Cresser would get sick of the game eventually, move on to someone else.

The area around Rowan Rise was wildly overgrown, a mass of dog-roses and other thorny bushes thick with litter—torn newspaper, cans and bottles, wet plastic bags that might have something unpleasant in them. Every flat was boarded up except one.

“So, wanna meet the ogre?” Cresser smacked the railing into the palm of his other hand, releasing flakes
of rust. The smaller kids sniggered, urging Cresser on.

“Do him, Cresser.”

“Yeah, smack him one, right here.”

Cresser stood up straight, flexed his broad shoulders. He was heading for six foot tall, even at fifteen, and bulking up nicely. For him.

“Naah, I think he's gonna show us how tough he is. Go on, Danny. Get in there.”

It wasn't a choice. Daniel's knee hurt, and the gang waited for him. Running was right out. He stumbled towards the ogre's door. The uneven brick path didn't help, choked with thistles and other weeds so that the bricks had lifted here and there, almost tripping him again.

The plastic “7” hung on its side, one screw missing. Daniel had to step round the door, which hung at a slant, stained and peeling. It had been green once. His sister had been right about the smell. Rotting food and a sickly undertone of meat gone bad. Sweat and urine as well.