The light was slight, yes, and the ray of it that did happen to fall through the slightly slid-open manhole cover and onto the watch in his hand was fuzzy and of the muted gray-blue hue of a late rainy afternoon… but Croc was sure of what the watch read, all the same.

And despite the calm surety of his voice when he warned his men what would happen to them if they didn't get back here by this time, with his new meal intact and ready to be thrown down here, into this sewer, so he could finally sink his teeth into warm meat again… despite how utterly blasé and casual he had sounded when he told them what he'd do to them if they didn't show up by now… he was mad.

Oh boy, yes, he was very, very mad about this.

He had told them, those two pig shits, with no implicitly whatsoever, that if they decided to up and ditch him here, if they decided to get smart and scurry away into the sunset without him, or if, somehow, they still couldn't find any food within all the hours he had granted them to find something at least semi-fresh… well, then, he would just crawl right back up to the surface world out there, track down their scent, the scent they would've left all over everything in the park, and find them, wherever they'd be holding up.

Then, he had told them, he would eat them.

Snatch them up and rip them apart and grind them up in his teeth until they were nothing but meat.

Because he was still their boss, goddamn it, still their head honcho, still their obligation-to-obey, even if they weren't getting any dough, even if the whole operation had been busted beyond repair, and they couldn't just leave him high and dry like this—no, there'd be consequences to pay for something like that.

And besides, it didn't make any difference to him who he ate, or how much fear soiled their meat, or any of that.

No, not anymore.

He had told them that he was just hungry, and hungry enough to eat just about anything… or anyone.

"You two look just as plump and tasty to me as a platter of ribeye steak," he had said, his gurgly voice echoing off the running concrete walls of the sewer. They had both googled at him at that, with wide, deer-eyes. "Now, you've got some time to change that," he continued, "to save yourselves, to feed the beast before he feeds himself, and you've got a long time, too… but if you screw up… oh-ho…" He had looked at one of them then, the one with the fat face and slightly wattled neck—he couldn't remember any of their names, or how component they were compared with one another, but how much meat you had on your bones Waylon Jones never forgot.

"I wonder how long you'll last, boy. Before you get all cold and doughy, of course."

As he dropped the watch now—it made a hollow plink! as it hit the sewer water below—and started towards the ladder lining the sewer wall, Croc wished that what he had said to them had been a lie—a scare tactic and nothing else. Whether he'd make good on his promise to rip those two beetle-brains into strips and slabs was one thing; the burning, strangled-sounding rumble-tumble of his stomach was another. The truth was, he'd been hungry enough to eat just about anything for a whole week now. The truth was, the cold, saturated remains, the leftovers, of all his victims down here with him in the foul damp dark were not enough; they'd be good for mere minutes before the hunger got its mercilessly sharp hooks inside him again, and through the very scales on his stomach, it seemed. The truth was, even if he could manage to hold his gorge against the slimy snail-taste of the rotten flesh of those leftovers, he'd moan soon after he ate, and begin to throw up anyway.

The truth was, the miserable truth of the thing was, that the only thing that had really stopped him from grabbing fat boy by his collar and yanking him down here into the heavy, rancid stench was the fact that—and knowledge of the fact that—he was completely and utterly dependent on them as his one and only meal-ticket. Without them, without them out there, scouting the landscape for food, he'd die down here, in the damp black, in the foul dark, in the filthy waters in which, every now and then, something clumpy and mushy slushed back against and between his legs, before seeming to dissolve completely into nothing.

That bothered him, too.

He didn't want it to bother him, he would never say that it did bother him but goddamn if it didn't bother him like no other, anyway.

"I ain't dying like this," he growled to himself as he climbed the sewer's ladder towards the carefully and subtly slid-back manhole cover at the top. "I just ain't."

Then he stopped, hallway up. He cocked head, hearing it, startled by it, then realizing it.

"What in the…"

Out there, somewhere on the beaten-and-kicked-away path of the biking trail of Robinson Park, a girl was laughing. Shoes—black little ballet flats—were all he could see of this girl, but he didn't need to see anymore to know who the girl was.

The laugh was enough.

And one of the dipshits was there, too.

And one of the dipshits was whispering frantically under his breath, "Oh God no, please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me, I'll-I'll do anything, anything at all, just name it, please."