“But three glasses of wine isn’t too much in restaurant and red wine is usually thirteen or fourteen percent.”
The bartender squints his eyes and frowns at him.
“Look,” Franklin says. “I just want one more beer. That leaves you one hundred and eight ounces left to take home. That is still plenty of beer.”
“Yeah, but—” the bartender begins.
“You might have noticed I said one hundred and eight ounces rather than one hundred and six. If you poured me a normal sixteen-ounce pint there would only be one hundred and six ounces left, but you haven’t been filling up any beers all the way to the top of any glasses you have been pouring which has been shorting people out of two ounces of beer per glass. I am okay with this. I don’t like to complain. But if you will not give me another pint from the cask, I would at least like six ounces of it to make up for the beer I already paid for.”
The bartender shakes his head at Franklin as if he were the biggest asshole customer he’s had all week.
“Fine,” the bartender says, and pumps him a beer from the cask.
When he gets the beer, he discovers it’s six ounces short of a pint. The bartender still charges him for a full pint and quickly walks away to serve another customer before Franklin has the chance to complain about it.
On his way home, Franklin runs into Troy in the street again. This time the kid is all alone.
“Hey Fagboy,” Troy says to Franklin. “Where the hell were you? I’ve been waiting for you all day.”
Franklin ignores him and keeps walking.
“I need some money,” Troy says. “Right now.”
“I’m sorry, I’m broke,” Franklin says.
“Right now!”
“I told you I don’t have any money.”
“You better have some money. Or else you know what’s going to happen.”
Franklin wonders if the kid knows he is lying.
“Look kid,” he says. “I spent it all at the bar.”
“You have to have some money. Just give me whatever you’ve got.”
Franklin stops and turns to the kid. “What do you need it for, anyway?”
“It’s Jimmy’s birthday tomorrow. I want to get him that new transformer he’s been asking for. Our parents aren’t going to give him shit.”
“He’s your little brother?” Franklin asks.
“Yeah,” Troy says. “I look out for him.”
Franklin stares at him for a moment. Then he nods his head.
“Okay,” Franklin says. “I’ll give you what I’ve got. But it’s not much.”
“Give me all of it,” the kid says.
Franklin gives him seven dollars and some change.
Troy takes the money and runs off. Then he turns around and says, “Thanks, Fagboy!”
And when the kid turns around Franklin hears him say, “What a stupid bitch.”
Franklin stands in the street for a few minutes, wondering if he has just been duped. Even with his fancy hi-tech brain, Franklin can’t outsmart an eleven-year-old.
At home, Sarah and Susan are waiting for him. There is another guy with them, sitting on the couch. He might be the guy from the night before or maybe he’s somebody else. The apartment is destroyed. It smells like smoke and pee. Franklin guesses they’re on another meth binge. They always destroy the apartment when they go on a meth binge.
“What happened?” Franklin asks.
He notices that his handmade cubicle has been razed to the floor. Part of it is blackened as if they lit it on fire and then pissed the fire out, which would account for the smell of the room.
“We’ve made a decision,” Susan says. “We want you to move out.”
“Yeah,” Sarah says.
“What did you do to my office?” Franklin says as he digs through the pee-soaked boards in the corner of the room.
“We burned it,” Sarah says, giggling. “We burned all your stuff.”
“You burned my clothes? My laptop?”
“We don’t want you here anymore,” Susan says. “You’re a loser.”
“I’m a loser?” Franklin says. “Neither of you have worked a day in your lives.”
“Just get out,” Susan says.
“This is my apartment,” Franklin says. “My name is on the lease.”
“We don’t care,” Susan says. “David just got kicked out of his place so he is moving in. The three of us decided that you should go.”
“Who the hell is going to pay your rent then?” Franklin says. “If you think I am going to then you’re even stupider than I realized.”
“David will,” Sarah says. “He has loads of money.”
Franklin looks at the guy on the couch. He’s much younger than any of them with long greasy black hair, a scraggly beard, and several homemade tattoos. He looks like a cross between a hippie and a Mexican gang member.
“What does he do?” Franklin says. “Sell drugs?”
“He makes more than you,” Sarah says.
“Then why doesn’t he get you guys a nicer apartment? I moved here for a reason. I’m staying. If you want to move in with your boyfriend, find another love nest.”
“If you don’t leave now we’ll have David throw you out,” Susan says.
“If you don’t leave now I’ll call the cops on your drug dealer boyfriend,” Franklin says.
“What did you just say?” says a deep voice from the couch.
David stands up and faces Franklin. “Did you say you were going to call the cops on me?” He picks up Franklin’s red cane from the floor. It is the only item of Franklin’s that survived his wives’ meth-crazed wave of destruction. Franklin hopes that the guy doesn’t realize there is a sword inside.
Franklin pets the pistol in his pocket. “I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are,” David says.
Sarah cheers with glee as David swings the red cane like a baseball bat at Franklin’s head. But with his quick eye-hand coordination, Franklin is able to duck out of the way and land a punch in the center of David’s face. Although the punch hurt Franklin’s hand far more than it hurt David, it pisses the hell out of the young drug dealer.
“You son of a bitch!” Sarah screams at Franklin.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Susan says.
Franklin doesn’t understand why they are angry with him for defending himself.
David swings the cane another time and Franklin dodges it again. Franklin doesn’t try to throw another punch, because his hand is suffering enough from the last one. Then his two wives join the fight. They throw their fists at his red suit and kick at his shins.
Franklin puts one hand in his pocket to protect Crabcake and with his free hand he reaches for the gun in his other pocket. But before he can pull out the gun, Susan punches him in the side of the head, right on his temple. His right ear pops off. He doesn’t realize she has accidentally hit the button beneath his ear until he feels his skull opening up.
As Franklin takes his hand out of his pocket to retrieve his artificial ear, he sees David’s shadow behind him swinging the cane with all his strength. The cane slams into his exposed brain and Franklin blacks out.
Franklin awakes in an alley a couple blocks away from his apartment. His mind is foggy. He feels the side of his head and discovers that his skull is still open. He gently touches his brain with the tips of his fingers. There are cigarette butts and bits of dirt stuck to his neural tissue. There is also a fluid coating it that shouldn’t be there. He rubs some of the fluid with his fingers and smells it. It is human urine.
“What the…” Franklin yells. “Did they pee on my brain?”
He cringes as he tries to wipe the dirt and urine from the surface of his brain tissue, but every time he wipes it causes his mind to go fuzzy and warped. He cleans it the best he can and then pushes the button to close his skull. But his skull does not close.
Feeling the lids of his skull, he realizes that they’ve been jammed. Two pieces of the metal f
rame are bent. One of the pieces is dangling from its hinges. He’ll need to get another operation to fix it. In the meantime, his brain will have to remain exposed.
He still has his gun, which is jabbing into the side of his stomach. His cane is on the ground next to him. His entire body is filled with sore spots, so his wives must have beat him with the cane while he lay unconscious in the alley. He no longer has his hat or his right ear. His umbrella is missing. And his cat, Crabcake, is not in his pocket.
He scans the alley for his kitten, but she is nowhere to be seen. This worries Franklin. Crabcake stays with him twenty-four hours a day. She never leaves his side even for a minute. Even if he had been laying in that alley for days, she would not have voluntarily left his side.
“They took her,” Franklin says.
He gets to his feet. He knows the only way Crabcake wouldn’t be with him is if his wives kept the cat or did something to it.
Franklin leaves the alleyway, holding the gun in his pocket, ready to draw the sword out of the cane. He doesn’t care that his wives kicked him out of his apartment. He doesn’t care that they burned his stuff. He doesn’t care that they beat him and broke his skull lids. He doesn’t even care that they peed on his brain. But if they did anything to his cat, he will kill them all without hesitation.
He thinks that Jake, the guy who sold him the gun, might have been right. Maybe he was going to kill his wife with the gun. It wasn’t his original plan, but at this moment he is ready to kill someone.
As Franklin gets to the front of his apartment building, he hears a scream. A child’s scream. He stops and looks around. The street is empty. Another scream. This one is a loud cry for help. Franklin steps away from the entrance of his apartment and follows the screams.
In a parking garage around the corner, he sees a little boy being eaten alive by a man made out of candy. The man has bulging swirly lollipop eyes and long black licorice hair that resemble dreadlocks. He wears a brown chocolate suit with jellybeans for buttons. The creature has ripped open the kid’s chest and is gnawing on his ribcage. The boy cries for help as the man eats him alive. He would have seen Franklin over the creature’s shoulder if his eyes hadn’t been slurped out of his head.
Still dazed from the damage to his artificial brain, Franklin isn’t thinking straight enough to be afraid. He pulls the gun from his pocket and points it at the candy man. Remembering what the gun dealer said about their candy skin, Franklin stumbles towards the candy man, aims for the head, and shoots him three times. Even though he’s only twelve feet away, the bullets don’t hit the creature in the head. One of them goes over its head. One of them grazes its soft caramel shoulder. But the third hits it in the side, cracking open its brown rootbeer-flavored candy coating.
The creature shrieks and leaps away from the boy. It sees Franklin. Its lollipop eyeballs swirl at him. Before Franklin can fire again, the creature turns and runs away. It moves as fast as a cat, leaping over the railing of the parking garage and down the street.
Franklin decides it isst better to help the boy than chase after the creature. The kid is in pieces. He is crying, coughing up blood. His ribs are exposed. Franklin can see his heart beating rapidly through the ribs.
“Don’t worry,” Franklin says. He kneels down and holds the kid’s hand. “I’ll get you help.”
The boy stops crying and stares at Franklin with empty eye sockets.
“What time is it?” the boy asks.
Franklin isn’t sure why the boy wants to know the time, but he looks at his watch and tells him anyway. “It’s a little past midnight.”
The kid smiles.
“That means it’s my birthday now,” he says.
Franklin then recognizes the kid. It is Jimmy. The little kid who wanted to pet Crabcake the previous day. The nice kid.
“That’s why I went to the rootbeer man,” he says. “I thought he was going to give me a present for my birthday.”
The kid no longer seems to be in any pain. Franklin hopes he’s just in shock.
“Troy promised me that somebody would get me a present this year,” he says. “He wouldn’t tell me who. I was hoping it would be a wizard or a lion tamer or someone magical like that. That’s why I thought the rootbeer man might be the one. I didn’t know he was going to be mean.”
Franklin realizes that Jimmy isn’t just in shock. The boy isn’t feeling pain anymore because he is about to die.
“Jimmy,” Franklin says. “The person who bought you a present was your brother, Troy. He told me today that he was going to buy you a transformer. The one you wanted.”
The red holes in his head light up with excitement, as if they still had eyes in them.
“Really?” Jimmy cries.
“Yes,” Franklin says. “But don’t tell him that I told. He’ll get mad at me for ruining the surprise.”
“I can’t wait,” Jimmy says.
He sighs a deep happy sigh, but never draws another breath.
Franklin looks away from the boy’s body and sees a trail of blood heading in the direction the candy man had fled.
As Franklin leaves the parking garage, his hands covered in Jimmy’s blood, he runs into Troy. The boy sees the blood on Franklin’s hands. Then he sees his little brother’s ragged corpse in the deserted parking lot behind them. He puts two and two together and screams.
Franklin tries to calm him down, but the boy only screams louder. He screams for his mom and dad, as if they are just around the corner. Franklin tries to put his hand over the boy’s mouth but the boy runs away, screaming for the police.
Franklin runs down the street, following the trail of blood the wounded candy man left behind. He has to kill or capture this creature or else he’ll never be able to prove his innocence to the police.
The trail leads him to a manhole near the old park. The park had been shut down a few years ago, because more children had gone missing at that park than any other park in the country. The manhole cover has not been closed properly, making it easier for Franklin to catch up to the creature. Franklin assumes the candy man must have been too injured to close it, but knows that it might also be a trap. The candy man might be down there, waiting for him in the dark.
Although he doesn’t have a flashlight, Franklin decides to risk it and go down the ladder. He doesn’t have much of a choice. The sewer is surprisingly large and dry. With the little light he has shining through the gutters, he’s able to navigate through the tunnel. Following the trail of blood becomes difficult in the dim lighting, and then it becomes even more difficult once the sewer branches off into a maze of tunnels. He has to use all of his fancy brain to focus on the blood trail.
After a few blocks, he comes to another manhole. The lid is still open, just as the last one. Franklin climbs down to discover another maze of tunnels identical to the tunnels above. It is some kind of sub-sewer. Franklin isn’t quite sure why there is another sewer below the regular sewer. He doesn’t know very much about sewers. This sewer is much colder and darker than the previous one. He uses his cane to guide him forward in the dark. He cannot see any blood in this tunnel, so he moves towards a dim light in the distance. He figures that would be the most logical place the creature would be headed.
The light becomes brighter once he turns a corner, then even brighter once he turns another corner. Eventually he discovers where the light is coming from: another manhole.
He climbs down the ladder. This one goes deeper down than the previous two. The maze of tunnels here are surprisingly clean and very bright. They are lit with some kind of iridescent lighting in the corners of the walls. Franklin can see the trail of blood perfectly now. He walks with his gun pointing forward. The tunnel branches every thirty feet. The blood trail twists through the tunnels in a disorderly fashion. It ends in the middle of a white wall. A bloody handprint centers the wall.
Franklin puts his left hand over the handprint and pushes. The wall opens up like a revolving door. Beyond the door is a tiny room with
a red spiral staircase heading downwards. Once he sets his foot onto the first step of the staircase he recognizes that it is made of hard candy.
He takes the ladder down, careful not to slip on any of the blood. Franklin calculates that the stairs go down for eighty-eight feet. At the bottom, Franklin finds himself surrounded by rock walls. The blood leads into the mouth of a brightly lit cave. Franklin moves faster. He needs to catch up to the wounded candy man before he reaches any of his friends.
The farther Franklin goes, the wider the cave gets and deeper into the earth it descends. He keeps his eyes on the blood and his gun pointed forward. Soon the cave opens up into another world. Franklin has to stand still to take it all in. As far as his eyes can see, there is a landscape of bright colors and swirling patterns. A landscape made out of candy.
There are lollipop trees, licorice grass, cotton candy clouds in a grape-flavored purple sky, hills made of chocolate, rivers of jelly, fields of candy canes, and in the far distance there are enormous blue, green, and pink gumballs the size of mountains.
Franklin picks up his pace. He climbs over hills of chocolate, careful not to slip in the peanut butter mud, and enters a meadow by a pond filled with watermelon soda. On the other side of a pond, Franklin sees the wounded candy man crawling through the marshmallow flowers. He has lost too much blood and can no longer move very quickly. The candy man looks back at Franklin with cold lollipop eyes, breathing hoarsely and drooling blood.
Not wasting any time, Franklin crosses the meadow until he is standing above the creature, pointing his gun down on it. The creature stares at Franklin with its mouth wide open, his rough breaths sound like growls.
“You are an ugly thing,” Franklin tells the candy man. “It’s time you were put out of your misery.”
He aims for the creature’s heart.
“No, you are an ugly thing,” says the candy man. His voice is like that of an old sailor’s.
Franklin steps back. He wasn’t expecting the thing to understand English. He always assumed that these creatures were more like animals than people.
The Cannibals of Candyland Page 3