Haunted Organic (2014 Watty Award Winner)

Thirteen: Prey (Part 3)

"Drop!" I got you boy!" Josie yelled, swimming through the swells to position himself underneath, but the dog slipped and slid down the other side, lost inside the teeth and the tongue of the monster.

"No!" Josie yelled.

But it was futile.

Bangkok closed his mouth.

Josie's rage flamed. He burned with hate for this boy, for what he did to a helpless animal, Manhattan's friend, her family.

Josie wanted him dead.

In his mind, Josie gave himself over. He let his mind go to all the bad places, let the dark come in, let Bangkok seep into the crannies of his brain.

He wanted to see Grotty ground up into tiny pieces, wanted to feel his tender flesh in his mouth, satisfying him. Pay back.

The monster opened his great maw, and Josie sloshed through the water, quicker, harder, pushing against great waves to get there, and then when it wasn't fast enough, when he couldn't move fast enough, Josie let out a bellow, a call from the depths of his chest.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"

And the eels came, and surrounded him, like Josie was their king and swung him up high into the air, carrying him so that he was eye to eye with the monster.

Next to him, terror-stricken, was the boy who would be eaten, held against his will by several snarling, hungry eels.

The monster opened his great maw.

The eels dropped Grotty.

He tumbled through the air, a beach ball dropped into an endless hole. On the way down, he locked eyes with Josie. He reached for him. He pushed his arms out into the air as if Josie would catch him, save him.

And something about that act, something about what a sad boy Grotty was, how frail and filled with terror he was, his face mangled with an indescribable panic for his life, raised Josie out of the hole of his own mind, and into fresher air. And he saw who he wanted to be. It was just enough for him, a second maybe, to squeeze past the muck, the thick sweltering water of this brain, to stand outside of Bangkok.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" he screamed.

The voice came from the deepest part of him. It was an animal yawp. A plea to help and be helped. He could control the monster now. He knew how.

But it was too late, Grotty tumbled into the great gaping mouth, screaming as he went, his round face stretched into a mask of terror.

Josie felt the eels swing around him in chorus of hisses. Bangkok sensed Josie's betrayal and called them all to circle him, and they did, like boa constrictors sliding around their prey, undulating, coiling. The eels, slithered around him, coiled around his chest, compacting his rib cage.

He squeezed his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled his knife, and with everything he had, slashed at the eels. He stabbed their flesh and tore out their eyes, and plunged the knife again and again into their dark hearts and evil souls.

They bled and wailed and moaned and swung this way and that, but enough so that Josie could wiggle out, and jump through them and onto the body of the squid.

He slid down the belly of the beast, fighting the eels as they chomped the air, and bit him, while Bangkok rose up and down, slapping the water, demanding the eels find him, kill him, rip him to shreds.

Josie moved down the creature, using his fins as a kind of ladder and his scales as a kind of hand hold, until he was in the water, holding onto Bangkok as if he were a bucking bronco at a rodeo.