by Kim Foster
It was a tiny skeleton, fully intact, a baby, wedged into her gullet, too big to actually fit in her human-sized throat but this throat, the stretching, all encompassing monster throat, held it like a splinter.
She held the skeleton of the small child in front of Josie and swung it back and forth as if it were a beloved toy, and then with her cold, wrinkled fingers, pulled a stray bit of meat off the rib cage, and popped it in her mouth.
She smiled, while she savored the meat, and burped so loudly and thoroughly that in any other circumstance, a more mischievous boy would have been proud of the gassy, elongated, gross sound she made.
Then she folded the entire skeleton, like flimsy origami, into her mouth and she chewed and chewed and chewed, bones crunching into bits, until she swallowed the pieces in huge gulps.
"Yummy," Ludivine Salt’s stringy, poison voice said.
"Just yummy."
And then, as quickly as it started, it stopped. Josie could feel Teta warming up, the icicles melting out of her hair, and her face turning blue again, and then pink, and then rosy, then the supple brown of milky coffee.
The laughter died away as Teta came back to them.
The monster left.
Teta reached out and grabbed the vine of a twisted, leafy plant next to the couch, caressed the leaves gently and started talking to it in a soft Arabic, as if it were a small child she loved dearly.
Teta was lost to them, in another world.
But it didn't matter, Josie already knew what was going to happen tonight. Teta saw it.
"We have to go. Now."
thirteen
PREY
Grotty Greg was pretty sure that he would find Josie Brown if he just sat in the alley between the Baby Killer's house and the Organic Food Shop.
It was true, as his friends had told him, that Baby Killer, or now just BK to keep it simple, might be long gone, but Grotty knew he had no chance of finding him if the coward slipped out into the beach crowds at Bondi. But if he didn't, if BK stayed nearby, he might try to get back into his room. Grotty Greg was willing to bet BK would try to come back.
Grotty's friends – Moey, Seb and his twin sister who they all called Poo - thought Grotty was on a fool's run, and they all went home to have warm dinners and watch TV in their cozy living rooms.
For Grotty, he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. He had been a big boy since the moment he came out of his mum at better than seven kilos, or the size of a small turkey. Since that time, he felt like he had to be the guy who ate a small frog during science class, the guy who forced other guys to eat worms on a dare, the guy who cut Bean Kelly's braid off while she bent over to pick up a pencil in homeroom.
Grotty was the guy who threw a stink bomb into the girl's locker room, planted tissues and a bra in Desta Orange's locker so everyone thought she stuffed, and he routinely dropped little Bertie Hood head first into whatever rubbish cans were nearby.
No one was immune from his special brand of cruel humor.
Grotty perfected the art of being revolting to everyone, and he was feared, and people laughed at his terrible jokes. But no one ever made fun of him or his considerable size, which was the thing that scared him the most, the thing he would do anything to prevent.
"Get them before they get you," was the force that drove his life.
But that was changing. The folks of Tamarama looked at him in a new way because of the video he took of Josie breaking out of school. He could be the good guy, he saw that now, and he wanted to be the good guy more than anything.
That's why he was hunkered down in the dark just under Josie Brown's bedroom window, his feet planted up against the side of the Organic Food Shop. He was going to do what the police and the neighborhood couldn't do - catch BK. Then, after he caught Josie Brown, he would save the kids.
Grotty Greg was not going to be grotty anymore. For once in his life, he was going to be the hero.
Grotty was thinking of that - being the hero - hoisted on people's shoulders, being cheered, maybe making a few morning news shows, when he heard the first sounds. At first it was footsteps, which he figured were just reporters coming out of their news vans, but then he heard the voices. Low, hushed whispers, male and female, a grunt of some kind.
Grotty got up moved out from under the bedroom window, over to a garbage can. He folded himself up as small as his large frame would fold.
He fumbled in his pocket to find his phone. It was night now, but there would be just enough light from the lamp post if he needed to shoot video. He poised his phone, camera ready.
And he waited for the chance of his life.
✽✽✽
Grotty saw the whole thing.
He watched Josie, Emerald and Rasha, and her mangy mutt, climb in through the window. They were in the Organic Food Shop. They never saw him. Which was good because he got them all on his phone, their faces, their words, everything. There was no doubt about what they were doing. Obviously they were keeping the kids there. They probably were going in to feed them.
"Why didn't the police ever check there?" he thought to himself, scrolling back through the video on his phone.
"Didn't they search all the buildings on Tamarama Street?”
"Stupid cops," he muttered and thumbed the button for his email.
It surprised him that Josie had accomplices, he was a such a loner. In fact, Grotty Greg had really never seen BK speak to anyone or hang out with anyone. He seemed lone wolfish, but not in a cool way, in a weirdo-psycho-serial-killer kind of way, like he was making bombs in his bedroom or something. Grotty couldn’t imagine Josie convincing anyone to commit a crime with him. But obviously he did.
The new girl was a wild card, he didn't know her at all. And Rasha, well, she was stuck up, hung out with buff surfer dudes, the kind of guys who wore Speedos. Grotty hated guys who wore Speedos and the girls who hung out with them, on principal.
"So why were the three of them taking kids?" he wondered.
He didn't know. Couldn't even imagine it. But he knew he had to find out.
Grotty Greg pushed his big thumb into the keyboard and sent the video to everyone on his contacts list, including Angus Louden, all the kids at school and Botany Cook. In no time, they would all be here, at the Organic Food Shop, to see him save Trinket and Musa.
Greg Umple looked up and saw that they hadn’t closed the side window.
“Perfect,” he heard himself say.
It was like the shop was inviting him in.
Grotty pulled himself up onto the trash can, and heaved himself through the window. He landed in a bucket of mops. Amid all the crashing and clattering of brooms and dust pans, he missed the window sliding shut, on its own and the lock bolting closed.
Not that it mattered. Nothing would stop him from being inside the Organic Food shop. This was the day that was going to change everything in his life.
He just knew it.
✽✽✽
It was easy to get in the side window. They knew it would be.
But what struck Josie as odd the minute he fell through the window, onto the floor, somewhere to the left of where he landed the last time, on the dead baby skeleton, was the smell.
It wasn't like that before.
It was acrid, sweet, rotting.
Like something was dying. The others, Emerald and Rasha, with Bacon poking out of the top of her back pack, smelled it too.
Bacon grumbled low, sniffing the air, and Rasha put a hand gently on his head to comfort him, and then put him on the floor, letting him nose around.
"It's okay, boy."
But they all knew it wasn't. Something had gone terribly wrong in the Organic Food Shop.
That's when Josie heard something - the crackling and scurrying of something below him. He looked down, a roach, a big one, stumbled along the pitted wooden floors and tumbled under an old dusty table and then scurried under the door to the cold room.
"Just a roach," he said.
He was use
d to seeing them under the kitchen sink, behind the washer. Sydney was hot and cockroaches loved the warm climate. They were in every house, and they could fly.
"I hate roaches!" Rasha squeaked and lifted herself up on her toes to try and avoid any more that might be floating around.
"Figures." Emerald said, rolling her eyes, wondering why anyone would be afraid of a little bug.
She bent down, and squashed the bug with your fingers, and wiped them off on her pants.
"That was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," Rasha said.
"We have to go through the cold room to get to the market," Emerald said, ignoring Rasha. She adjusted her pack, and held a crow bar in her hand. She gave Rasha a quick look, who was still looking a little green.
"Get over it, will ya?" Emerald asked and walked toward the cold room.
"Scratch, scratch, scratch..."
Josie put his hand out to stop Emerald.
"Listen!" Josie whispered.
It was quiet for a minute, then more scraping, and clawing.
"Scratch, scratch. scratch..."
Another cockroach came crawling out of the paneled walls and stumbled over Josie's shoe.
Then another, And another. All heading to the cold room, and scurrying under the door.
Emerald looked around, and shined her head lamp at the walls.
That’s when she saw it.
Roaches everywhere. They were crawling up and down the walls, over the dusty piled up furniture, over the floors, making nests in old volumes of cookbooks. They were madly frantic. Going in and out of the cracks in the door, back and forth, with a purpose that Josie figured involved food.
Bacon lunged at a fat roach walking by and barked at it, turning it over with his paw and licking it with his tongue. When it hustled away, he put his head on his paws and whined.
Rasha was freaking out. Her face had gone the color of wilted spinach. She looked like she might faint.
"It's okay," Josie said to her. He tried to sound sure of himself.
“They won’t hurt you.”
Rasha pushed her hood up over her head, so none could fall into her hair and get tangled up, and pushed her sweatshirt sleeves down over her arms.
"Let's go," she said, her voice hardened over the fear.
"They are just feeding. They have no interest in us," he heard his voice be reassuring and calm. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. This amazed him, that he could carry it off, because his head was filling with a dense smoky cloud.
Bangkok was on the move, coming closer.
He would be there soon. He was hungry, so hungry, for the children.
Josie had this crazy urge to grab a particularly thick roach off the floor and pop it in his mouth.
He summoned Teta. Called her to him in his thoughts, and heard the old lady's voice speaking Arabic, in some kind of trance.
A prayer for him? Maybe?
The words made him stronger and he felt the foggy feeling lift a little.
"We have to move," he said.
He pulled the door of the cold room open, and the three of them were hit hard in the face with a blast of heat and the stench of rotten meat. The cold room was no longer cold. The Meat Ghosts weren't moving at all.
It was weirdly silent and still.
The three of them walked into the room. Emerald flicked a roach off her sleeve and put a handkerchief over her face.
"Gross," Rasha said behind her.
They could barely breathe in the stink. Josie hit the light switch and the lights stumbled on, blue, glitching, buzzing on one second and off the next. They struggled to adjust their eyes.
Josie walked over to one of the Meat Ghosts. It was huge and pink and veiny and hanging there on a hook. It was silent, but something in Josie's head prepared for it to jump out at him. He got close enough to touch it, leaning his body in only a little, and twirled the carcass around on it's hook, so the hollowed out belly was right in front of him.
And there it was.
A belly of rats and roaches and maggots boring into the pink tissue and devouring it clean. The creatures tore into the muscle and sinews of the belly, roaches streamed in and out, up and down the legs, and the rats squeaked as they ripped at the flesh. Josie looked down and saw that thousands of maggots made a stupendous nest in the crook of the rib cage, and they swarmed out and around the bones like a great colony of miniature hyenas in the ecstasy of a feeding frenzy.
Bacon barked frantically. Rasha held him back, but he was snapping and growling as if he were some ferocious attack dog.
Emerald turned away disgusted at the carcass. But when she looked up again, she saw that Josie did not turn away. He was staring at the rotting Meat Ghost, standing there, mesmerized by it, and she remembered that this had happened before.
She ran to Josie and tried to pull him back. But he was steadfast.
"Josie, it's Bangkok. Fight back!" she screamed at him.
But Josie had gone somewhere in his head.
He saw the meat in all its pink, perfect, stinking deliciousness. Felt the hunger in his belly, saw the enjoyment of the creatures excavating inside the carcass. He heard Emerald scream at him. Heard his name, but it was in some far off distant fog, that meant nothing to him. It was better to be the monster, better to have the power, better to be strong and feared.
Better to be Bangkok, than Josie.
Josie opened up his arms, wide and far, felt the power of Bangkok fill him. Felt the light blink on and off as if the room was being charged by a giant bolt of lightning.
Bangkok was close. Very close. Or maybe he was Bangkok all along. Maybe they were the same.
And then he dove into the carcass. Pushing aside the rats and roaches, he pushed his face into the juicy, stinking meat, felt the rancidness fill his nostrils, and he bit down into the gloriousness of it. He let the blood fall over his face and into his mouth, letting all of it fill the vast emptiness that wanted to be filled.
He had no idea how long he was in the carcass, gouging out the belly with his teeth, or how much meat he consumed.
What he remembered was waking up to Bacon standing over him, licking the blood off his face.
✽✽✽
“Come with me please.”
"OMG, that was disgusting, even for me,” Emerald said.
"Does he always do that biting raw meat thing?" Rasha asked.
The two of them were standing over him. Josie blinked his eyes open and saw the lights swinging over head, blue and glitchy.
Bacon found a chunk of meat in his neck and was gnawing at it, happily.
"Ugh, my head," he tried to get up, but the world spun around him.
Emerald put her hand on his chest.
"Not going anywhere for a minute," she told him.
"But Bangkok..."
"Is coming. But you have to get your head right."
Josie closed his eyes.
Bangkok was on land now, crawling closer. Josie's brain had turned to mash potatoes. But the hunger was gone. He had eaten, satiated himself and somehow that made his head feel better, less dizzy, less ravenous, less prone to being taken over by Bangkok. Although his stomach was leaden and sick.
He held onto his words and thoughts, tried to clear his head, tried to summon Teta.
No, she was gone. Whatever magic she could've done, she could do no more. He was on his own.
Josie looked up at his friends.
"We have to get the kids now," Rasha said, there was worry in her voice.
A red light flashed outside the building, pulsing against the walls and making everything look like a seedy bar. It was police, and probably reporters, the whole neighborhood.
"Are you strong enough?" Emerald asked with some urgency.
He nodded yes, and got to his feet, but he didn't mean it. He had no capabilities against Bangkok. Emerald handed him her handkerchief and he wiped off whatever blood Bacon had left. The plan had to be to get the kids out of the shop before Bangkok go
t there, because surely if they didn't, he would kill them all. And eat the children.
They ran for the door that led into the market proper. Emerald got there first, and yanked it open. She expected some kind of resistance, some trap, but the Organic Food shop wanted them there.
Bangkok wanted them there.
The shop front windows were huge, and they easily saw the chaos exploding on the sidewalks around the shop. All of Sydney, maybe all of Australia, was watching them now, knew something was happening, although they all knew the Organic Food shop wasn't letting any of the people on the street see inside.
Emerald could see her house. Her father on the lawn, his arms crossed in front of him, worried, holding himself together.
The rest of them, the neighbors, in house coats and slippers, had come out to see what was happening. Every police cruiser in Sydney seemed to be pulled up, filling the curbs. And the news vans, now they were two deep into the streets, people busily setting up cameras, reporters ready with their microphones, looking for the first scoop.
Or as Josie saw it, the first chance to put him away.
Emerald found an old TV, sitting on a shelf behind a cash register. She turned it on. The video of them breaking into the Organic Food Shop was playing.
"Grotty Greg," Emerald said, disgusted.
"Great." Rasha said.
“Bacon get over here."
But Bacon wasn't listening.
Bacon was clawing at something near the meat department, a dark piece of cloth hastily thrown into a pile next to the cheese case.
"A nest of roaches," Rasha rolled her eyes.
Whatever made him happy.
They watched the TV. Botany Cook was interviewing two people. She put the microphone up to their faces and that's when Josie saw his parents. His father, stone-faced and angry. His mother, weeping inconsolably.
Emerald tried to stop him, but he turned up the volume and watched.
"Please find our son....before he hurts someone else," Portland was saying.
