Franklin steps back. He wasn’t expecting the thing to understand English. He always assumed that these creatures were more like animals than people.
“You can speak?” Franklin asks.
“Of course I can speak,” says the candy man. “I am a man, am I not?”
“Not exactly,” Franklin says.
“We are not that much different from you,” he says.
The creature holds in his wound as he speaks. His cracked candy coating crumbles between his fingers.
“What are you people?” Franklin asks.
“What do you think we are?” says the man. “We are candy people.”
“Where do you come from?”
“We come from the same place as you,” says the candy man. “My people were once human like you, but we evolved differently. We evolved into candy people.”
“How can somebody evolve into candy?” Franklin asks, lowering his gun. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just as spiders evolved to produce webs to catch flies, just as cheetahs evolved to run faster to catch antelope, just as lantern fish evolved to produce lights that attract smaller fish to their mouths, we evolved into candy people so that it would be easier for us to catch our prey: children. Our ancestors were a community of cannibals, who used to lure children with candy. After several generations, our young ones were born with candy growing from their hands. Eventually they were born with candy skin. It is the way of evolution.”
Franklin doesn’t know if he can believe him. He wonders if he is just a normal man wearing a costume made of candy. He wonders if they are just a community of insane cannibals, who created an underground environment to look like it was made of candy. It would make much more sense to him than evolution.
“That kind of evolution takes a very long time,” Franklin says. “Millions of years.”
“Not in our case, it seems,” the man says.
Franklin lets out a puff of air.
“But how do you know English?” Franklin says. “How do you know about lantern fish and cheetahs?”
The candy man coughs a laugh. “As I said, our people were once humans. They spoke English. They had books. We learned from these books. We are an educated people.”
“You are monsters,” Franklin says.
“We are no more monsters than you are,” says the man.
“You eat children,” Franklin says.
The candy man shrugs.
“Well, yes,” he says. “They are delicious.”
Franklin spits at him. “You evil piece of—-”
As Franklin raises his gun to the creature’s head, the candy man lunges at him. The gun goes off, but the bullet misses. The candy man stabs him with his rootbeer-flavored fingernails. Although made of candy, the fingernails are as strong as glass and as sharp as knives. Franklin cries out. He points his gun at the candy man’s stomach and fires twice, throwing the creature back.
The candy man shrieks. He raises his claws and goes for Franklin’s throat, but Franklin gets him first. He fires three bullets into the creature’s head at point blank range. A fleshy human brain explodes out of the candy skull in blubbery chunks. The creature falls back. The blue swirl in his lollipop eyes goes white.
Franklin falls into the marshmallow flowers, holding his stomach. He looks around to see if any other candy people are in the area. The gunshots would surely attract attention. He’s out of bullets. The rest of the bullets are hidden in his apartment. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if other candy people show up. His cane sword is his only defense.
He decides to act quickly. Even though his insides feel like they’ve been shredded into pulp, he drags the corpse of the candy man across the meadow. He is much heavier than a normal human. Franklin can tell the candy coating adds another 53.7 pounds.
He winces as he drags the body and cries out whenever he slips in a puddle of caramel or vanilla frosting. Then he hears pounding footsteps coming towards him from the other side of the hill. He pulls harder, but it only makes him lose his balance against the terrain and fall down more frequently. The gun slips out of his pocket, but he decides to leave it. He doesn’t need it anymore. All he needs is to get out of there alive and bring this body to the police.
The noises that are coming closer no longer sound like footsteps to Franklin. They are more like thumping sounds, like somebody is dribbling a dozen basketballs at once.
Franklin sees a group of multi-colored blobs the size of beach balls bouncing over the hill towards him. They are cherry, orange, lemon, lime, and grape balls of living gummy candy. Though they have no limbs, the candies each have a single eye in the center of their bodies and large mouths.
Franklin doesn’t know what to make of them. He is more surprised than afraid. Just to be on the safe side, Franklin moves quickly away from the gummy blobs, pulling the body with all his strength. But the creatures follow him. They catch up and swarm him, bouncing up and down around, circling him like little gummy sharks.
The blobs block his path and force him to stop. He smacks at one of them with his cane, but it just comes right back. He smacks another one, but it catches the cane in its mouth and won’t let go. Franklin swings the little blob through the air, but it is stuck to the cane like a leech, making slurping noises.
An orange blob wraps its mouth around the candy man’s foot and bites it off. The creature doesn’t actually have any teeth, but it is still somehow able to suck the foot off of the candy man’s leg with ease. The gummy creature is transparent, so Franklin can see the candy man’s foot inside of the blob as it bounces around.
The rest of the blobs attack. They bounce in and take bites out of the dead candy man’s flesh and bounce out. They do not attack Franklin, so he assumes they are only after the corpse. Half of the body is absorbed into the bellies of the blobs within minutes. Franklin knows this isn’t good. If he doesn’t get the body back home nobody will believe his story.
He jerks his cane with all his strength, sending the blob attached to the handle across the meadow. Then he smacks at any creature that comes close to the body. He knocks some of them back, but there are just too many of them. For every one he knocks away, three more come in from behind and take bites out of the corpse. Franklin pulls the sword out of the cane and stabs one of them with it, but the blob doesn’t die. The hole seals itself up right away and the creature suffers no damage, not even pain.
Franklin knows that he can’t give up, so he continues fighting them. He tries cutting the blobs in half, or stabbing them in their eyes, but they just reform themselves and continue their attack. Then the blobs stop going after just the corpse, and start going after Franklin. When he notices this, Franklin drops the body and backs away. Half of the blobs stay with the body, the other half come after him.
Within moments, the gummy blobs gobble up the rest of the corpse and Franklin finds himself surrounded again by the bouncing creatures. He chaotically thrashes his cane at the swarm and hits a lemon blob so hard that it knocks the cane out of his hand. Then the blobs charge in at him. He leaps over a cherry blob and runs for a giant candy cane growing out of the earth. Before they can take a piece out of him, he climbs up the candy pole to safety.
The blobs stay at the foot of the candy cane for an hour, bouncing hungrily up and down at him. Franklin sweats. At first, the moisture causes the candy cane to become sticky, which makes it easier for him to hold. But he sweats more and the candy cane becomes slick. He slides down the candy pole, and quickly climbs back up, only to slide down again. It takes only a few minutes before he loses his grip and falls into the swarm of gummy predators.