SEVEN - Plucked (Part 1)
It was not lost on Josie that the girl everyone wanted to find was right next door to his house.
But he guessed that the same haunted spirits that made a giant squid with eel tentacles come to life and live on land and water, was probably the same haunted spirits that would make Trinket completely inaccessible to anyone trying to save her.
Josie was pretty sure he and Emerald would never get to Trinket. There was no reason to try.
He slipped out the back door and stood in the shadows of her side porch, watching the news vans, looking for any sign of movement.
He was about to crouch down and run out into the grass, past a frangipani bush, and take another look to see if anyone was lingering around on the street, when something came whipping out the door behind him, grabbed his hand and pulled him through the yard.
"Agh!"
"Sssh! Be quiet!" the voice said, and he knew it was Emerald. They scrambled behind a lime tree in her front yard.
"Keep your head down," Emerald ordered.
Josie looked at her and could see that she had changed clothes. She was wearing narrow black jeans, a black sweatshirt. Her hair was tied into a bandana and she had smeared some kind of mud across her face.
She looked fierce. And a little crazy. But still fierce.
"Why'd you do that?" he glowered at her.
"I'm not going."
"Yes..." she said matter-of-factly, and scanned the neighborhood with her father's high-powered binoculars.
"You're going."
Even behind the big lenses of the binoculars he could see that she was serious and unwavering. She was sure of herself in ways he had never seen before. He both liked her and hated her at the same time.
"If they find me out here..."
"If they find you, they are going to lock you up in juvie..." she explained, putting down the binoculars and looking straight at him.
"And if Bangkok eats her when he comes in from the sea, then you will be known as a child killer no matter whether you go to jail or not...your life will be over."
Josie was trying to think up a rebuttal, but nothing had formed in his brain. Not that Emerald noticed.
"And really, Giraffe Boy, don't you care at all about that kid? I mean think about someone besides yourself....Geez."
Emerald put the binoculars up to her face again and looked in the direction of the Organic Food Store.
"The little alley between your house and the store is dark.
"We can go there," she said pointing, "...and get in the side window, the one right across from your bedroom window."
Josie swallowed hard. He closed his eyes and tried to get a hold of himself. Emerald kept talking.
"No one will be able to see us in the alley...but we'll have to be quick."
Emerald pulled a crow bar from a side pocket on her pack.
"This is happening," Josie thought and the air in his lungs turned to lead.
"It's happening and there's nothing I can do to stop it," he thought, and wondered why he got involved, why he went to her house, why he didn't just stay at home. Alone.
He could tell that everything Emerald tackled happened just this way. She was a two-ton steam roller barreling down the road 80 miles an hour and everything in front of her had to jump out of the way or perish under the weight of her.
Josie looked over at her, she was zipping up her pack. There was no doubt in her face at all. Emerald was sure.
Josie was not sure at all.
He was not the type of kid to save missing toddlers, or break into buildings, or risk going to jail while news vans camped outside his house. He didn't take big risks.
He didn't, for instance, stand up for Little Berty Fockerson, a pudgy kindergartner who was always getting picked on at the beach, usually by Grotty Greg.
Grotty and his friends sometimes took Berty's boogie board and threw it out into the ocean, or played "Monkey in the Middle" with his sand toys. Sometimes they kicked down his sand castles. All the while his bikini-wearing babysitter ignored the whole scene and kept on flirting with her lifeguard boyfriend.
Josie would watch Berty sitting on the sand, silently crying to himself on many afternoons. He wanted to grab Berty's board out of the water, hand it to him, and tell him he was okay, that it sucked to be the butt of the world's joke, that he understood.
But he never did. Mostly because he was sure that if he got involved, Grotty would focus his attention on him.
No, better to just stay out of it.
Josie would dig his toes in the sand, put on his dark sunglasses, put in his ear buds and turn up the The Jezabels so high it drowned out the waves and Berty and the big bad world.
And now, he was crouched behind a lime tree hoping he didn't get thrown in jail. This was not what he wanted to be doing. And it was as if Emerald read his mind.
"Look, you gotta buck up here, Giraffe Boy. It's not just about you and whether you are branded a child killer. It's about Trinket. And my mother. And its about all the children that are going to be fish food if Bangkok keeps going," she stood up.
"Anyway, we don't have a choice," she said.
"You can't just let life happen to you, sometimes you have to happen to life."
She started out from the tree.
"Well, you coming'?"
And that's when Josie found his feet moving, although his head was still behind him, somewhere in that lime tree. And he was watching himself move from car to car, bush to bush and then the two of them crouching low and scrambling across the street. He saw himself get to his lawn and run as fast as he could, disappearing into the pitch black of the alley.
A light went on in the van. He heard people moving around.
"Quick! We gotta get outta here," Emerald whispered and took her crow bar and wedged it between the sill and the window of the Organic Food Store. She half expected she wouldn't be able to force it open. It probably hadn't been opened in years, but as soon as she pushed on the bar, the window sprang open.
She stood back surprised.
"They're waiting for us," Josie said.
He didn't mean to say it, it kind of gurgled out of him, but he knew as surely as he knew anything, whatever was in the Organic Food Store wanted him to come in.
Emerald shot him a panicked look.
He cupped his hand and Emerald stepped into it. He pushed Emerald up into the window. She worked herself up over the sill and hit the floor inside with a thud.
"Who's out there?" Someone grumbled, as they poked their head out of the news van and moved a beacon of light from a torch around the yard.
"Josie jumped up, grabbed the sill and hoisted himself up into the window.
"Hey! Who's over there?" he heard a scuffle, people murmuring and putting on clothes and shoes. He slipped through the window, just as a beam of light caught him.
"I think someone is breaking into that building," he heard someone say as they came tripping out of the news van.
"Do you think it's Josie Brown?"
"Is he trying to escape?"
"Maybe he's going to take another little kid..."
"C'mon! Let's get him!" the voices said as a rush of people stormed towards the building..
Josie reached up to grab the window and pull it down.
But before he could, the window, all by itself, slammed shut. The lock bolted itself. And a set of irons bars came rattling and crashing down over the windows.
They were locked inside.
&&&&
Josie felt something boney stabbing him in his butt.
He was about to ask Emerald for a torch, but she handed him a head lamp before he could get the words out.
"So annoying," he muttered, adjusting himself.
It was both awesome and irritating that she was always just a little ahead of him.
"What's annoying?" Emerald said, busy putting on a head lamp.
She had been called annoying before. She knew she was different, that she wouldn't win any popularity contests at the schools she attended, that no girls her age wanted to lay around her room talking about a giant killer squid, and looking at ocean maps that might help her find her dead mother. Making masks from famous horror movies was not right up there with talking about kissing. And boys, well, they acted like her hair was engulfed in flames.
She had always been like this. Her father called her "gloriously-intense," and said she got it from her mother. Her mother told her she could save the world if she put her mind to it, but that some people would find her to be "too much" and that she would have to find friends who were strong enough to appreciate her.
"And if they don't..." Imogen had told her, with one arm around her shoulders, "tell 'em to go to hell."
Still, Emerald had come to find out not many people were strong enough.
Josie, it seemed, was no exception.
"Are you always like this?" he asked her, trying to pull himself off whatever pointy thing was poking into his butt.
"Like what?"
"Like this!" he said, exasperated. "Getting people to break into buildings and knowing what they need before they need it and just, just...being bossy and...frankly, a little bit of a know-it-all?"
"You're upset because I handed you a head lamp?"
"You're annoying," he said, putting on his head lamp and switching it on.
"That's all, just annoying."
"You're sitting on a skeleton."
"What?....aaaah!" Josie jumped up.
Sure enough, the thing poking him in the butt was a skeleton, a very small skeleton. It was propped up against the wall. Josie had been sitting on its lap. It was old, but not that old. The skull cap had not completely disappeared and it still had tufts of hair protruding out the skin that was left over.
It wore a beaded ankle bracelet and it's hands were held together with thick rope. It's jaw had been broken, so the lower half of the face, sat off-kilter from the rest of the head and gave the skeleton a weird cackling expression, as if it were insane.
"Oh God, who is that?" Josie started to panic a little and whirled around in circles, pointing his head lamp around the room to get his bearings.
Even Emerald seemed unhinged by the skeleton, that was so obviousy a child, and bolted to the other side of the small room.
"I don't know if we should stay here," she said, shining her head lamp around the room.
A mob had formed outside the window. They were banging on it, shouting Josie's name and trying to pry it open, but he knew they weren't getting in.
The Organic Food Store wouldn't let them. He and Emerald were inside for a reason.
Emerald pointed with her head and shone the beam of light at a creaky old door. The room was blasted with cobwebs and a thick cover of dust lay like new fallen snow over everything.
Josie took one step toward the door and a mop pail, holding a clutch of brooms, mops and dust pans, clattered noisily to the floor.
"Guess we're in the broom closet," Josie had gotten his sneaker caught in a dust pan and was scrambling around the room, clumsily trying to dislodge it.
"Keep it up..." Emerald said, rolling her eyes and opening the door, "and you'll wake the dead."
And this is precisely what happened.