A Giant Problem Read online

  A Giant Problem

  BOOK TWO OF THREE

  Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black • All rights

  reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any

  form. • SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • Book design by Tony DiTerlizzi and

  Lizzy Bromley • Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87132-0 • ISBN-10: 0-689-87132-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4424-0358-1

  To my grandfather, Harry,

  who liked to make up stories.

  —H. B.

  To all my friends and family back in Florida.

  These images of my old home are for you.

  —T. D.

  LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

  MAP OF MANGROVE HOLLOW

  CHAPTER ONE: IN WHICH

  NICK AND LAURIE GET ONE LESSON AND LEARN ANOTHER

  CHAPTER TWO: IN WHICH

  NICK AND LAURIE ARE SURPRISED BY THEIR VISITOR

  CHAPTER THREE: IN WHICH

  NICK AND LAURIE WITNESS ONE FIGHT AND ALMOST HAVE ANOTHER

  CHAPTER FOUR: IN WHICH

  A SANDSPUR GETS STUCK WITH NICK

  CHAPTER FIVE: IN WHICH

  NOSEEUM JACK IS SEEN

  CHAPTER SIX: IN WHICH

  NICK FINDS HOPE IN WRECKAGE

  CHAPTER SEVEN: IN WHICH

  NICK DANCES TO A NEW TUNE

  CHAPTER EIGHT: IN WHICH

  A BRIDGE IS CROSSED

  CHAPTER NINE: IN WHICH

  THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN AGAIN

  ABOUT TONY DITERLIZZI AND HOLLY BLACK

  THE CREATURE DID A CAPERING DANCE. FRONTISPIECE

  MAP OF MANGROVE HOLLOW … … … … … VIII

  LAURIE RAISED HER HAND… … … … … … . . XII

  NICK STOPPED SMILING… … … … … … … . . 8

  JACK STOOD IN THE FRONT ENTRANCE… … … . . 15

  THE THUNDER GOT LOUDER… … … … … … . 20

  “WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?” … … … … … . . 25

  THE CREATURE DID A CAPERING DANCE… … … . 36

  “COME ON!” … … … … … … … … … . . 59

  “I SAW THIS THING UNDERWATER TODAY.” … … . . 62

  “THERE’S SOMETHING THEY HUNT.” … … … … 78

  NOT SURE WHAT TO EXPECT … … … … … … 80

  HIS VIKING SHIP … … … … … … … … . . 89

  CINDY WAS HOLDING HIS KEY RING… … … … . 92

  “YOU CALLED TO US.” … … … … … … … . . 104

  “GO!” CINDY SHOUTED… … … … … … . . 121

  “HE’S BEAUTIFUL.” … … … … … … … … . 124

  “YOU ARE A GENIUS.” … … … … … … … 127

  “I KNOW LOTS.” … … … … … … … … . . 128

  THE ELEVATOR CHIMED… … … … … … … 139

  PLEASE LET THIS WORK. … … … … … … … 149

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” … … … … . . 152

  Laurie raised her hand.

  Chapter One

  IN WHICH Nick and Laurie Get One Lesson and Learn Another

  Nicholas Vargas had never been all that good at sports. He liked to play basketball, but he scored a lot higher with a controller in his hand and an animated character shooting the baskets for him. Same with baseball and tennis and even swimming. He saw absolutely no reason why anything would be different when it came to giant-killing.

  Nick’s stepsister, Laurie, had twisted her blond tangles into braids because she’d read somewhere that it was important to keep hair off your face in a fight. She was determined to learn how to kill giants, but Nick was pretty sure that she was bad at basketball and baseball and swimming both in real life and on the screen. A notebook was balanced on her knees and she had set a microcassette recorder on the ground so she could replay the whole lesson later. She chewed the end of her pencil thoughtfully, ready to take extra notes, as Noseeum Jack started to speak.

  “First you got to find the giant,” he said, sitting down on a stump. They were in the front yard of Jack’s ramshackle house in the middle of the day, and the humid air settled on all their shoulders like a heavy blanket. “If he’s moving, things have already gone too far. Your best bet is doing the slaying before they wake up.”

  Laurie raised her hand.

  Jack kept on talking. “Couple o’ ways to know there are giants underfoot. They like the swamps, but they like freshwater better than salt since they gotta drink it through their skin. Look for rocks and hills, especially if they’ve got odd-colored grass on ‘em. Lots o’ the time, that grass is really hair.”

  Laurie waved her hand a little, impatiently. Nick snatched her pencil. On the page of her notebook, he wrote HE’S BLIND.

  Jack’s eyes were cloudy with what Nick thought might be cataracts. His grandma had had cataracts and the doctors did some kind of laser surgery on them, but Jack’s eyes looked much worse than Nick’s grandmother’s had.

  Noseeum Jack. It was a really sad nickname. He’d had the Sight, and blindness took it away from him. Maybe he could see a little bit through the cloudiness, but obviously he couldn’t see enough to notice a hand waving in front of his face.

  “Are there girl giants?” Laurie asked, interrupting a story Jack had been telling about finding a giant by the way his mountainous head and weedlike hair were covered with dandruff.

  “Uh,” he said, and then scratched his head. “Sure. I guess. Mostly I never noticed any difference.”

  Laurie wrote something in her notebook, nodding.

  “Look,” Nick said. “This is dumb.

  We’re just two kids. And you said that more giants were going to wake up. All of them, maybe.

  All at once. We can’t stop that. This is useless.”

  “We all got to play the hand we’re dealt,” Jack said, picking up his machete. “This area’s where the highest concentration of giants is. Estimate’s maybe thirty still around. There are two good killing blows guaranteed to put down a giant if you just—”

  “What hand was I dealt? It’s summer,” said Nick. “My job in the summer is to have fun. School’s out. We shouldn’t have to come here every other day.”

  “But these lessons aren’t like school,” Laurie said.

  “Oh, come on,” said Nick. “It’s not like you really want to kill anything. You’re just excited because you get to talk about giants all day long. This isn’t pretend anymore.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I know that!”

  “Do you?” Nick looked over at Jack, but he was just shaking his head at both of them.

  “Wait! I have it!” Laurie said. “We have to get other people to join us.”

  “That’s crazy,” Nick said. “No one would believe us.”

  “We’ve got to make them believe,” said Laurie.

  Jack grunted softly. “You think you could?” He looked hopeful, which only made Nick feel more glum. Maybe Jack had already realized what bad students he had and how hopeless this was.

  “I know I could,” Laurie said, full of stupid certainty. “And we could get Jared and Simon to come back, and maybe they will bring Mallory this time. And maybe they’ve met other people who would want to help.” />
  “Jared and Simon went home to Maine. They’re not coming back,” Nick said. “They got what they wanted. They got their uncle’s papers.”

  “Either way,” said Jack, “there’s one thing we can be sure about: The more people we got to train, the more you both better know. So listen up.” With that, he began telling a complicated story about what had appeared to be two giants sleeping side by side, but turned out to be a rare type of giant with two heads.

  Laurie recorded every word.

  Nick stopped smiling.

  Chapter Two

  IN WHICH Nick and Laurie Are Surprised by Their Visitor

  Nick pressed his finger down harder on the controller, making his car on the screen accelerate. He swerved it in front of Laurie’s Volkswagen, knocking into its side and making virtual sparks fly.

  She scowled, biting her lip in concentration.

  Rockets shot out of her bumper. His car exploded in a whoosh of orange flame as she crowed with laughter. “I’m getting better,” she said with a huge smile.

  He grinned too. He didn’t mind her winning. He was having fun. The air-conditioning filled the house with cold, sweet air, and just breathing it in made him feel safe. Rain smeared the windows, making the outside blurry and far away. And the more he concentrated on the game, the less he had to think about the nixie waiting in her pond for him to find the rest of her sisters, or all of the giants that might be waking up, or how some blind old guy thought that they could do anything about it. This was how summer was supposed to be.

  Besides, this could be considered a kind of training. Maybe. Laurie’s reflexes were definitely improving.

  Downstairs, a door slammed and his father shouted. “That’s not what I said!”

  Nick stopped smiling.

  “You didn’t say you would be home early?” Charlene demanded. “You said you would call if something came up. The kids ate hours ago.”

  “I said I would try. The weather, the rain, it’s making things hard.”

  Didn’t they realize that just because they couldn’t see anyone else didn’t mean they couldn’t be heard? His father was a contractor; shouldn’t he be aware of vents?

  Laurie put down the controller with a sigh, looking at Nick’s face. “Everybody fights.”

  “You tell me everything will be different after the development is done, but there’s always going to be another crisis,” Charlene yelled. “I don’t think you’re ready for this. For being married again.”

  Nick didn’t hear the rest because he clapped Jules’s headphones over his ears and plugged them into the game. He turned up the sound and set it to single player. He didn’t want to hear anyone say anything about his mother. Didn’t Charlene know you were supposed to shut up about the dead?

  He blew up three of his own cars before Laurie tapped his arm. He shook her off.

  “Nick,” she said, pulling one side of his headphones down. “Jack’s here.”

  He blinked at her in confusion. “What?” Nick looked around, like Jack was hiding somewhere in the room.

  “He’s downstairs. Says he has something to show us.” She wore a satchel on her hip and had her flip-flops on. “Your dad is freaking out.”

  “Uh …” Nick hadn’t even realized she’d left. He took off the headphones and followed her downstairs.

  Charlene’s back was toward them, her shoulders hunched and shaking slightly as if she were crying. She walked into the study and slammed the door.

  Jack stood in the front entrance. He was grinning like a loon.

  “Come on, kid,” he said. “We got work to do.”

  “Do you know this man?” asked Nick’s dad.

  Laurie smiled and started in on one of her elaborate lies. “He’s my friend’s dad. From where we used to live. Turtle eggs are hatching at the beach and he promised to take us.”

  “It’s very late,” Nick’s dad said, but he glanced toward the room Charlene was in. Nick bet he wanted to get back to his fight. “Where are you all going? And what did he mean about work?”

  “Down to the beach,” Laurie said. “My friend Emily is waiting in the car. Her dad thinks we can do a science project about it.”

  Jack smirked in a way that seemed too amused to be parental.

  Nick cleared his throat. “Isn’t Jules there? Maybe we can meet up with him.”

  Jules was always at the beach. It didn’t matter if it was sunny or raining, early or late.

  Jack stood in the front entrance.

  He could be counted on to surf until his skin wrinkled up and he got hungry or tired enough to come home.

  Nick’s dad looked at Noseeum Jack’s bare feet and the machete at his hip.

  “It’s for cutting open fruit,” Nick said, following his father’s gaze. “And cutting weeds, of course.”

  “Fruit,” repeated his dad. “Fine. Why don’t you call your brother?”

  “I’ll do it.” Laurie went to the phone and punched in a bunch of numbers. Then she waited for a few moments, like it was ringing.

  “Hi, Jules. It’s Laurie. Yeah. No. Um, we were wondering, if we came down to the beach, would it be okay if we hung out with you? No, we wouldn’t have to be really close by or anything. Just so you could see us. We promise not to bother you. Okay. Okay.” She put down the phone.

  “He says okay,” Laurie reported. If Nick hadn’t watched her hold the off button on the phone the whole time, even he might have believed she’d really had that conversation.

  Nick’s dad looked at Noseeum Jack again and sighed. Then he glanced at the study again. “All right. Be back by ten.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Nick. “Call me if you can’t find your brother. Oh, and look out for a raccoon on your way out. Something’s been getting into the garbage.”

  Nick and Laurie walked out onto the lawn with Jack. As the door closed, Nick heard Charlene say something in a shaky voice and his dad shout something back. Thunder cracked overhead, but the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

  “Let’s go,” Jack said.

  The lake was choked with newly planted water lilies. Raindrops rippled the water, but there was no sign of the nixie.

  “Hey,” said Nick, “we promised to help Taloa find the rest of her sisters. Maybe we should—”

  “Later! I came to show you both something important, not to dawdle.”

  “Just one more second,” Laurie said. She grabbed a stick of gum out of her bag, chewed it, then used it to affix a piece of paper to the garage door.

  Nick watched her as she scrawled on it: JULES—WE SAID WE WERE WITH YOU. DON’T SQUEAL ON US.

  “You’re crazy! What if they see that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “They’re going to fight for ages.”

  “What if one of them storms out?” Ladies on the soap operas his aunt watched did that all the time.

  “Into the rain?” Laurie was looking at him like the idea was ridiculous.

  “Come on!” said Jack. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands and started walking. They followed him.

  The thunder got louder.

  Chapter Three

  IN WHICH Nick and Laurie Witness One Fight and Almost Have Another

  Even with the moon high in the sky and the occasional flashes of lightning, it was spooky to walk through the swampy woods at night. Nick kept putting his foot into sucking mud or getting scratched by a branch he hadn’t even seen.

  Noseeum Jack seemed to have no trouble, as though he knew the area so well that he no longer needed his eyes to find his way. Maybe it was actually easier for Jack at night, when everyone’s sight was as bad as his.

  The thunder got louder as they walked through the scrub, eventually growing so loud the ground shook.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Nick said. “The storm seems to be picking up again.”

  Jack cackled. “That’s no storm.”

  Just as he said it, something crashed against the earth in a clearing up ahead. Nick ran toward the sound and then
stood openmouthed, looking at two giants wrestling in the dirt.

  Watching them was like watching hills rise and collide, like watching an earthquake happening in slow motion. Roots and dirt dripped from their broad backs; their fists fell like boulders. One opened a vast maw, and Nick thought he saw dark ivory teeth and a pink tongue, the only signs that the giants were flesh at all.

  Mud splashed the nearby trees, covering the bark in a thick, dripping pudding.

  “There,” said Jack. “What do you think o’ that?”

  “I think we need to get out of here!” Nick stepped back, but he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away.

  With a growl, one of the giants bit into the shoulder of the other. A cry shook the ground. Dust crumbled where flesh should have been and a smell like sulphur filled the air.

  Jack was still grinning. “Long as we stay behind these palms and don’t make any sudden moves, I’m thinking we’re safe enough.”

  Nick wished that Jack had just said “safe” and not “safe enough.” He also wished that Jack could actually see how far back they were.

  “Why are they fighting?” Laurie asked quietly.

  “Territory.”

  One of the giants—the larger one—rushed the other, knocking him to the ground and then crashing on top of him like an avalanche. Gouts of mud spattered Nick’s face.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Nick said.

  “They wake up too close together sometimes,” Jack said. “They want to claim the land around ‘em as theirs.”

  Nick wiped his face, staring, thinking about how when Laurie came, he’d had to move into Jules’s room, thinking about how he’d done it without a fight. Good kids were supposed to share.

  “I guess that makes sense,” Laurie said, but her voice sounded less sure.

  It made sense to Nick, but he didn’t say so.

  The larger giant pummeled the other, smashing the smaller one’s head farther into the mud. It followed that with a savage stomp, lifting one foot and bringing it down on the other giant’s head, leaving a jagged cut under an eye.