Free Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6) by Lloyd Tackitt

 
    GIANTS
    I was about halfway around the perimeter of our land, doing a fence check, when Mr. McReary came riding up, his horse all a lather. Our ranch is sixty square miles and it takes several days for me to ride the fence, stopping occasionally to tighten a wire or make other repairs as I went. It isn’t that Pa is land-greedy, it’s that it took hundreds of acres of West Texas’ semi-arid land to support each cow, so the range was large but the herd wasn’t. Anyway Mr. McReary came thundering up, skidding his horse to a stop just across the fence, his side.
    “Robert, glad I spotted you so soon. There’s a giant coming this way, southwest to northeast,” he shouted without preamble. “About six days out from all accounts.”
    I nodded that I’d heard and he tipped his hat, turned his horse, and rode off at a rapid rate. He knew that I knew what this meant. I turned my own horse for the house and sunk spur. This was dire news, and the sooner Pa knew it the sooner we could start moving out of the way– and the sooner we got started, the more we could save. I had a long, hard ride to get home. At best we might have five days, given how long it would take me to get home and on how accurate the six-day forecast might or might not be.
    Best to figure three days, I thought.
    Giants were not rare, but they were uncommon. Everyone knew that a giant would not be deflected from its line of march and destruction. The only thing to do was to get a line on where the giant was going and move everything of value that could be moved out of the way. The giants destroyed everything in their paths. They were more deadly than tornadoes, but slower and more predictable. All in all, it was better to deal with a giant than a twister, but not by much and no one wanted to deal with either. I had to flog it home to tell Pa, we had a lot of moving to do.
    A big problem would be moving the cattle out of the giant’s path. Giants didn’t deviate from a line of travel once they started on it, but they did veer from side to side by as much as a couple of miles if there was something to chase down and eat, or buildings to destroy. Then they would return to their original line and continue their onward march.
    Giants loved to eat two things, people and cows. In both instances, the method of eating was to crush the body in their huge hands, breaking all the bones and liquefying the internal components. Then they would bite off the head and suck all the “juices” out through the neck, leaving a shriveled bag of skin as the only remnant.
    No one seemed to know where the giants came from. From all accounts they hadn’t existed before the collapse, back when grandpa was just a baby. Grandpa was long gone, Pa was sixty-three, and I was twelve. Ma was forty-two – she sometimes accused Pa of cradle-robbing, but she always smiled fondly at him when she did.
    It was after midnight before I got home. Pa’d heard me riding up long before I got there, and he was outside on the porch in his long johns waiting for me. He knew I wouldn’t have come home that late unless there was an emergency, or be riding fast at night either. I pulled the exhausted horse to a stop, and before the dust could begin to settle said, “Mr. McReary says there’s a giant on a path right at us, about six days maybe. Coming from the southwest, heading northeast.”
    There wasn’t anything else to say, all else was as understood, just as when Mr. McReary had told me.
    Pa stood there, tall and muscular, not looking a day over forty. He had a full head of hair and a close-cropped mustache and beard. His clear gray eyes shone brightly in the moonlight as he appraised me for a moment. “You need to rest, or do you think you can ride on and warn Mr. Hank?”
    Mr. Hank was only a couple of miles northeast of us; he’d likely be in the line, too. “I can ride. I’ll be home before breakfast.”
    “Be sure that you are. Your Ma is going to be a mite upset as it is. She