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.