THIRTEEN - Prey (Part 3)
Josie woke up to two black squid eyes looking him over.
He had never been this close to Bangkok. Not even in his dreams. He had washed up on one of the check out counters in the front of the store. How many times had he been right here? And now this is where the monster would eat him.
Two antenna dropped down and touched him, prodded him like a science experiment.
He pushed himself up, stumbled into a standing position.
His head felt like a cannonball, large and heavy. He tried to push the shadows out. He had to figure out a plan. To save himself. But mostly, to get the kids out alive. He wondered where they were. And the girls, were they with them?
He had to find out.
But before he could do anything, Bangkok made his move. The eels slapped the water, and spit and snarled, Bangkok raised himself up and lifted the eels to the ceiling, like streaming paper ribbons fly on air. Then, Bangkok lunged, and brought his body down hard on the water, slamming the store with a hurricane like wave.
Josie watched two eels drop down and picked up something just to his right. Something he had never seen before. Something huddling behind the check out counter next to him.
It was Grotty. With a yelping Bacon in his arms.
The eels grabbed Grotty by the pants and pulled him into the air until he was up in front of Bangkok's head. The squid eyes looked him over.
Grotty cried and wiggled in the air. He begged for his life. He tried to negotiate with a monster that couldn't even comprehend him or anything he said.
Josie came off the counter and waded through the water, which was mad and swirling at his chest. Lettuce heads bobbed in the water, flats of eggs bounced and were flung about, and soaked-through boxes floated around him. Dead roaches floated by, their bodies flat and black.
He pushed closer.
His brain went dark again, he could feel Bangkok asking him to join him, they could separate The Thick Boy's bones, one at a time, quell their hunger, so much meat, so thick with muscle and sinew, and didn't he deserve it for treating Josie so badly all those years, for just being a never-ending jerk?
Josie watched as the scenes played out in his minds eye, all the times Grotty made fun of him, called him a freak, made him look stupid in front of other people. Made him feel small and invisible.
And the worst, that he had embarrassed Josie in front of Manhattan. Manhattan, who he cared about in a way that was a complete mystery to him, even though he barely knew her or understood her.
Josie tried to stop the feelings of hunger from flooding in, but in a way he wanted to bask in them. Grotty Greg did not deserve his empathy.
"You want a snack, you mangy, ugly, stupid monster?" Grotty yelled at Bangkok.
"No...No" Josie thought.
"He wouldn't do it. He's not that mean," Josie comforted himself.
But then, Grotty did the unthinkable.
He pulled back, as if he were a quarterback on a foot ball team, and pitched Bacon through the air like he was a football, straight into Bangkok's open, wanting mouth.
"Here's a snack!" Grotty yelled.
Bacon flew through the air, and caught himself right on the edge of the monster's great mouth. He hung there, yelped, his eyes huge with surprise, and terror, trying to grip the sides of the great maw with his paws.
"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.
He wasn't sure what to do now.
But he remembered what Howard had told them about the soft spot, the place Bangkok was weak. He dropped into the water, and moved along the side of the beast, moving through the jelly like folds and fins until he came to a spot that looked different than the rest of it.
He poised his knife to plunge it in.
Then the beast reared up again, and waves crashed over him, and three eels came slamming into him. Their faces were mangled and torn by his knife. They coiled around him. His chest began to cave in. Blood floodes the water, turning it murky and crimson.
Josie barely had air. They were dunking him up and down now, drowning him, dragging him under, pulling him up, dragging him under.
It was just what he dreamed.
This was how he was going to die.
He knew he would never get the knife into Bangkok now and get out of alive, so he decided kamikaze was the only way to go. He would sacrifice his own life so that Bangkok would never hurt anyone again.
No more children would die.
It would stop with Josie.
He pulled all of his strength, from all the parts of his body, and slashed at the eels. There was a ferocity there he never knew. Pieces of eel flew in all directions. He sliced through them until they were cut off from the monster, pieces of eel flailed and died, thumping wildly and then, sinking lifeless into the roiling water.
Josie dove under the water. The store had become the lobster tank. It was filling up from some stream of infinity water. It would drown them all.
Eels streamed around him. He cut them, one by one, like pieces of flimsy paper, throwing them this way and that, his strength coming from some unknown secret place.
"Shintawk," he heard his brain scream.
"You are the Shintawk."
H still had no idea what it really meant, but he undertsood there was power there, some benevolent good.
He swam hard, holding his breath until his chest was going to explode, and saw the pink underbelly. How soft it looked. So delicate.
It was so obvious what he would do next. He had more clarity than he ever had in his whole life. For once, he knew what to do.
He plunged his knife inside the pink.
It sliced clean through the flesh and he pushed it in deeper, harder, so angry that this creature had done so much bad for so many people.
The monster that wrecked his life.
He plunged the knife in again and again and the beast railed up and down and slapped the water, eels roared and tangled themselves up into the air, twisting and convulsing and slapping the water.
The eels, switching like crazy tails, slammed him hard, battered him, battered him, until he swallowed water, and came to the surface screaming for air.
The water was almost to the ceiling now, and Josie could see that Manhattan and Emerald were standing on the highest shelves. Trinket was limp in Manhattan's arms, but she was managing to keep her above water. Maybe there was still a chance for her. Marty was perched on Emerald's shoulder. He was wet and tired, but okay.
Josie took a huge gulp of air and went under the water again, going back to the soft spot and slamming it harder with the knife, cutting out the sweet flesh, and raking it hard with the edge of the knife, until he was in the soft place himself, enveloped in pink, inside the monster, killing it inside out.
And then in one explosive storm, Bangkok slid belly up onto the surface, with Josie, hanging on, and erupted like a volcano, the very innards of the monster pouring out of the hole that Josie had cut, sea water, and guts and intestines streaming out everywhere as if from a geyser. Josie was pushed into the air, and falling back into the black, bloodied water.
He broke the service. Let the air come in to his lungs. Braced for whatever came next.
And that's when Josie saw a little head pop out of the belly.
Bacon.
"Come here, boy!" Josie yelled, swam to him. The dog, tongue out, and ears up, rode out the entrails into the water and doggie paddled over to him.
He looked nothing but happy, his tail wagging like he had just been on some fun adventure.
"Good boy!" Josie said, treading water and scratching Bacon behind the ears.
And then, Grotty Greg popped out of the hole, too, and was thrown into the air, landing with a great un-elegant splash. He was covered in entrails, and sobbing like a newborn.
But he was alive.
&&&&
"Get out of here!" Josie screamed at Grotty, once he stopped sobbing.
"Take the children and get them outside!"
Grotty moved through the water as best he could, using the lid of toilet to float on, and met Emerald, Manhattan and the kids bobbing in the water. There was almost no air left, the water was creeping toward the ceiling. Emerald swam hard with Marty on her back. Manhattan pulled Trinket along the rocking surface, keeping her head above the water, willing her to breathe and come back to them. Grotty and Bacon paddled hard behind them.
Emerald pulled open the door to the cold room, and a great rush of water streamed through it, pushing them, tumbling through it. She looked back once to see if Josie was behind her, but all she saw was a pile of eels, in the throes of death, some of them still grabbing Josie and dunking him down into the water and holding him there.
She wanted to go back, to help him, but she had to get Marty and Trinket to safety.
She wished Josie secret silent luck. She hoped she would see him again.
The ripping water pushed the kids through the cold room and out to room with the side window. There was less water there, so they could right themselves and stand on their own feet.
Emerald pushed it open and helped them all through.
A crush of reporters waited for them. Cops drew their guns from behind police cars and pointed them at the Organic Food Store.
Emergency crews ran in and pulled Trinket out of Manhattan's arms. Her arms were still open when Bacon jumped in them, filling them again.
Emerald only had to look up for a minute to see her dad standing there, wrapping himself around her.
"It's good to have him for a dad," she thought and buried her face in his chest.
She spent so much time missing her mom and trying to find her, she hadn't realized that she had her dad, and he was pretty great. She decided, right then and there, she would stop searching for her mom.
She gave her dad a tight squeeze.
"Where's Josie?" she heard a voice asking behind her.
Emerald looked up to see the blotched face of Josie's mother.
"He hurt you, too?" Emerald heard her ask Grotty Greg, who was being covered with a blanket and shuttled into an ambulance.
"Oh Portland," Phyllis cried into his shirt, "That boy has brought us so much shame."
Emerald couldn't believe that woman. She was about to run over to Phyllis and give her a piece of her mind about her son, how brave he had been fighting the monster, how he was probably dead, and that he had saved the kids, and saved kids in the future.
But Howard must've heard it too, and he held her there next to him.
"There's nothing you'll be able to say," he said, gently.
And she knew he was right.
So they just stood there in the night, wrapped in a blanket, holding each other, waiting to see if Josie Brown would emerge.
&&&&
Josie kicked up to the surface of the water, unsure of what danger he would encounter next, his chest ready to burst. He needed air. He stayed there a moment, bobbing at the surface, loading oxygen into his sore lungs.
The big pink body, bloated and oozing puss, floated next to him. Around him, dead eels, floating, lifeless, their teeth frozen into a permanent snarl.
It was quiet. The water had stopped streaming in. In fact, it felt like it was slowly leaking out of a drain somewhere below him. He started to swim over to one of the check out stands, when he heard something from inside the carcass.
"Not more," he thought.
He couldn't take much more. He was black and blue from being pummeled by eels and his skin streaked with bloody cuts from where the eels raked his skin with their teeth. The salt water made them burn. He pulled off his shirt, his chest was lashed with bloody cuts. Everything stung.
Josie wanted out of the water.
He swam a few more strokes, but the sound grew louder. It was a sound like wind chimes and baby laughter. He had heard it before. The carcass trembled, as if something was rooting around inside.
And then he saw it - a wisp of a cloud puffing out of the hole he had made in Bangkok.
At first it was a puff, and then a small cloud. Then, the cloud grew into a mist, like the kind that you find in hot jungles. Josie noticed he could stand now, his feet firmly on the floor, the water escaping, the eels folding up on themselves and melting, melting, like candle wax down into small inky piles of goo. He watched the goo fall back into the floor boards and disappear, as if it had never existed.
The great pink body of Bangkok, without it's eel tentacles, looked like a beached whale, bloated, fragile, just flesh, impotent, mortal flesh. Josie bent to touch it. It was cold, like death makes bodies go cold, but the air had turned warm. Josie no longer felt chilled. His wounds healed, erased from his skin, as if he were a white board and the ink was taken off with a warm cloth and water.
He wasn't tired. Or mangled by the experience. He was renewed.
Josie watched more puffs of clouds come out of the hole in Bangkok, rise to the ceiling and become mist.
He walked closer, looked in the air, and saw children, babies some of them, with pacifiers, and diapers, and some older with knee socks, and pony tails and worn leather balls. Each child was doing something, something it loved and made them happy. They were all laughing.
He watched a little boy run with his dog. In another cloud, a mother cooed to her baby, wrapped in a monogrammed blanket. Another, a girl with a bonnet and long skirts, read from a pile of books in a field. Another girl climbed a large tree and sat in the crook of its branches while other children searched for her on the ground in their game of hide-n-seek. A family ate together at a long wooden table, a little girl passed a giant bowl, and giggled at Josie.
Each little puff made Josie smile, as they spiraled up into the air, popped and joined the mist forming around him.
These were the children Bangkok had taken.
He looked into the next cloud. There was a young girl, running through the streets of a small village, a cloud of dust at her feet. He wasn't sure how he knew, but he was sure it was Emerald's mom, Imogen, when she was a girl. She was skipping, pulling a red ballon behind her. She stopped and looked at Josie.
"I'm still here. I didn't go away," she said, and smiled, and turned on her feet and ran laughing down the dirt road, the balloon bobbing behind her.
Emerald had been right. Her mother was still alive.
And another bubble, this one a boy with little blue anchors on the cuffs of his sailor pants. The baby from the market. Clio. He folded into his parents, Ana and Petros, who hugged him hard and kissed his cheeks until they were pink and loved appropriately.
Josie couldn't help but smile.
The baby turned his face to him, and beamed, then buried it again in the folds of his parents clothes. Josie reached out, touched the bubble and it burst into air.
He hadn't noticed it until right then, but the Organic Food Store was changing.
A swatch of mangroves with great knobby bark, and long twining roots were growing through the floors and counters and shelves of the store. The roots worked themselves everywhere, and he felt soft dirt under his feet in water than came to his knees. Then the mangrove burst with leaves, so green he felt them pop open in the recesses of his brain.
He felt the breeze. It was an old memory.
He was in the middle of a mangrove forest, like the one where his Grandpa Jack lived. He took a long, deep breath, and remembered the scent of the swamps, and the heat, and the sweetness of leaves, the sound of loud, warpy birds. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He felt the knife Jack gave him, and was grateful for his trust and that the knife had saved all of them.
The clouds seemed to be coming more slowly now.
Josie looked into the last misty puff and saw a little boy, maybe three or four, with a wild and crazy mess of hair. The boy looked familiar and not so familiar.
The boy smiled at Josie. And held up a little silver hand mirror to his own face. The mirror was old fashioned, plated silver, ornate with lambs heads on it. Josie had seen it before, but he couldn't remember from where.
He leaned in closer to look at the mirror.
What he saw was his grandfathers craggy face, his long, thick grey hair, tangled and dirty, the wrinkles deep and embedded into his brown skin. Grandpa Jack smiled back at the baby, a weak but warm smile.
"I don't think I can hold them off much longer...." Grandpa Jack said his voice the same as Josie remembered, but more tired, ragged and thin.
The boy laughed, and in that voice like tinkling chimes, turned his little face to Josie.
"Don't worry, the Shintawk is here," the boy said in a bubbly voice.
"We'll be okay."
"What's the Shintawk?" Josie screamed at the baby.
"Tell me!...I don't know what I'm supposed to do," Josie reached out tried to grab the cloud, but his hands slipped through the mist.
The baby's face was disappearing.
"Grandpa Jack!"
And then it was gone, and all that was left was a ripple of giggles.
Then the cloud lifted up into the air above his head, and burst into a thousand drops and a torrent of warm rain covered him.
And as quickly as it began, it ended.
Bangkok, and the mangroves, and the heavy mist, melted like soft mud, through the floor boards. And there was Josie, standing in the middle of the Organic Food Store, alone, and it was just the way it always was when he came to buy his chicken nuggets.