Creepers

By Curtis Nelson

Creep, seize, eat. Repeat.

Bad science has unleashed a swarm of blood-thirsty vine monsters. The result is nothing less than an edgy, post-modern send-up of classic horror movies, crammed with all the head-shakin’ clichés, odd-ball stereotypes and so-sincere-they’re-ridiculous moments that give those timeless horror pics their lasting charm.

Poor Clark Ward. The young, Vine Hill, Wisconsin Police Chief is ripe to trade his boring, small-town existence for the not-so-green pastures of the big city. But fate intervenes when a company dumps a veritable witches-brew of toxic wastes in a nearby landfill, and two men mysteriously disappear. Investigating, Clark unearths a clue that sends shudders down his plantophobic spine: dark, sticky leaves. Stumped, he calls in two botanists, the buxom Sylvia Martin, and her absent-minded mentor, Denis. They can’t identify the strange leaves either, but that’s okay. When creeping, man-eating vines with house-smashing, claw-like appendages start consuming even more locals, they get the idea.
Slurp!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Curtis Nelson
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310391989

Curtis Nelson

Curtis L. Nelson has a degree in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and is a graduate of Brown Institute of Broadcasting in Minneapolis. He is the author of Hunters in the Shallows: A History of the PT Boat, published by Batsford Brassey (now Potomac Books) in 1998. Mr. Nelson is also a two-time contributor to Naval History magazine on PT-boat-related topics. He is a multi-faceted writer, having written several feature-length and short screenplays in diverse genres, including romantic comedy, Sci-Fi, fantasy and war. He published his first comic e-novel, Creepers, in October 2013, part of his ongoing quest to become a full-time fiction and nonfiction author and screenwriter.Mr. Nelson works as a copy editor for a Minneapolis-area ad agency. He lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with his wife and two daughters. When not writing, his interests include sailing, military and naval history, competitive swimming and--on occasion--respectfully poking fun at Wisconsinites.

Book preview

Creepers

Curtis L. Nelson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Curtis L. Nelson

Cover Art By: Wendi Meath-Nelson

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Prologue

Oh, Those Bastards!

Editor’s Note: The story you are about to read is true. (You are about to read it, aren’t you? I mean, come on, dammit! Where’s your spirit of adventure, adversity, audacity, depravity?) As I said, the story is true. Just trust me.

All right, now that we’ve got that settled, as you may recall last summer the small town of Vine Hill, Wisconsin experienced an unprecedented upheaval that threatened its very existence. I can’t reveal what that dire threat was for fear of spoiling the suspense. Of course, if you read all the news reports and eyewitness accounts, or listened to the total round-the-clock coverage on CNN and Fox News over the span of nearly a frigging month, you know all about this tragic event already. So you’re just screwed (as far as the suspense goes) and I can’t help you. For the rest of you, though, plan on totally being plenty suspensed, or suspended, or suspensible--or something along those lines. Like, really freaked!

The manuscript, consisting of hundreds of yellow post-it notes, was found this spring blooming all over the Vine Hill City Hall lawn. (Assembling the notes was a real pain, but I must say the lawn looked a lot better afterwards.) Anyway, back to the manuscript. Presented here as fiction, the following pages nonetheless capture the horrific essence of those hot, terrifying days of the previous summer.

The identity of the author remains a mystery, which adds an element of mystery to the story and is also pretty cool since it means we don’t have to pay him or her to publish this work. Nevertheless, we do have our suspicions as to his or her identity--but more about that at the end of the story. (See Editor’s Other Note at the End of the Story, which is very cleverly disguised as the Editor’s Other Note at the End of the Story.)

One more thing. You will note the whimsical tone of the manuscript, the bizarre occurrences, the matter-of-fact way in which the characters respond to odd events and freakish happenings that the rest of us would regard as utterly absurd. One might think the author was on drugs, an alien freak or in the daily course of his or her life a total whack job. Actually, that’s just Wisconsin for ya. Read on and you’ll discover the origins behind that tourist ad slogan the state tested in the early 1990s: Wisconsin, A Different State of Mind.

They were panel vans of a very ordinary sort, a half-dozen in all, disguised as ordinary delivery trucks for seemingly ordinary, everyday companies. Not that the noisy crickets, frogs and other denizens of the deep Wisconsin woods were fooled by such names as Porterhouse’s Fine Meats and Cheeses or Bronson’s Carpet Remnant Emporium. The forest animals that lived near the quiet corner of the Vine Hill County Landfill had seen it all before: slow-moving vehicles with masked headlights comin’ a callin’ in the middle of the night so as to not arouse human suspicions. Only on this especially dark night in early fall there were more vehicles than the usual single pickup, whose drivers merely hoped to dispose of a soiled mattress or two. The grim men in hazmat coveralls who disembarked from those vans had clearly done it all before—efficiently, quietly, without fuss and with utter disdain for the world those animals called home.

The hazmat guys even brought along a small bulldozer, something else the forest animals bordering the landfill had never seen making tracks before. The white Bobcat spastically set about removing the freshly laid topsoil and burrowed deep into the old garbage beneath. In time the tireless machine helped create a deep, twenty-yard-long trench at the forested edge of the closed dump. The men then rigged a metal ramp into the trench, down which they rolled twenty-four, fifty-gallon gray barrels not even marked with hazardous waste symbols. Once having positioned the barrels, men and machine worked feverishly to fill the trench in over them with the same garbage and topsoil. In short order they were finished, the dastardly deed done. There was only one thing left to do (besides get drunk, of course).

That someone or something had disturbed that topsoil was plainly evident. So aside from the obvious step of covering over all the footprints, van and Bobcat tracks, the pre-intoxicated toxin buriers took the additional step of planting the seeds of a bunch of nearby, garden-variety creeping ground vines atop the area. The thinking went that the vines, upon growing, would do better to cover over the disturbed area, plus blend in better with the plant life even now taking root over the recently closed landfill.

That final step made perfect sense, the last in a series of perfectly sensible steps. The first had been the decisions by several estimable industrial, agriculture and scientific institutions to turn to The Company, the world’s premier disposer of illegal toxic wastes, to get rid of their nasty R&D concoctions. The next was The Company’s decision to stabilize those vile concoctions by mixing them all up together. The result The Company code-named CRUD, not a very clever code name, admittedly, but one that did accurately sum up the goopy green mix--the pesky, sizzling chemical equivalent of putting all one’s rotten eggs in one basket.

From there came the nearly flawless burial of that basket in land unlikely to be disturbed for the foreseeable future and, of course, the planting of those creeping vine seeds—the final, sensible step. But history is chock full of human beings taking perfectly sensible steps, done with the best (or worst) of intentions, only to have the final result blow up in their faces. This time was surely no different, for little did the planters of those seeds know that they’d planted not only the seeds of plants--but of disaster.

Chapter One

Got Cows?

The horizon beyond the squad car’s windshield hung lazily for a brief moment, then spun crazily for what seemed an eternity. With manic desperation, Clark Ward twisted the steering wheel hard left. The horizon slipped back into place. A wave of relief flooded through his trembling body as the car veered from the top of the embankment and slipped comfortably back onto the road.

Holy crap, he’d fallen asleep again!

Gravel crunched underneath as Clark slowed to a stop by the side of the road. He glanced sheepishly about the verdant, sun-lit Wisconsin countryside, but saw no sheep, nor--thank God--anyone or anything else that may have seen him almost wind up in that babbling brook below the embankment.

Shit, man! Imagine what the Vine Hill City Council would say if they discovered their young Chief of Police--born and raised here even--couldn’t stay awake on the job. That was the wretched thing about serving in a one-man department: Being chief of police sounded not only pretentious when there was no one to chief, but unduly raised the bar on expectations. Though he was only twenty-four, the council expected him to behave like a seasoned pro, not what he was--a punk kid out of cop school less than a year and on the job less than half that.

Clark eased off the brake and drove on. The gravel road soon joined a paved one that took him across the steel girder bridge that spanned the lazily flowing Vine Hill River. Beyond, he came to a weathered wood sign with a dairy cattle and vine motif that read: WELCOME TO VINE HILL, WISCONSIN, POP 1,467. Below, more block lettering read: IT’S QUITE HERE. Someone years back had crossed out the word QUITE and replaced it with a by now equally weathered wood piece that read QUIET.

Clark smiled. The sign was a comfort thing, he supposed, symbolizing much that hadn’t changed in Vine Hill and wasn’t ever likely to.

Dairy farms for one thing. They dotted the countryside like so many black-and-white polka dots. And, naturally, there were hills with vines, mostly grape vines--hearty varieties able to survive those hearty Wisconsin winters like the one they’d just been through. Some of the grapes grew wild, but most wound up laid out in neat little rows among the various wineries that had sprung up over the decades and continued to, hoping to compete with better-known Californian and European varieties. Clark preferred a tall, cold beer any day, and occasionally a shot--or two or three--of the stiffer stuff. But once in a while, on special family occasions, a sweet, fruity, locally fermented Wisconsin wine made him feel like he’d come up in the world, at least for the day.

Farms that actually grew stuff, like corn and barley, were another constant he relished and depended on, as did the first German and Irish settlers who began arriving in the area in the 1850s. Those crops were especially bumpery this year, after higher than usual spring runoff and plentiful rains in April and May. Yep, everything in Vine Hill was coming up green.

Well, not everything--at least not as far as Clark Ward was concerned. He drove leisurely into the outskirts of town nestled near the winding east bank of the river. Even in the six years since he’d graduated from high school, a goodly many of the places he and his friends used to hang out had gone the way of the wrecker’s ball—or just plain fell down on their own. The ol’ Haunted House, some long-dead farmer’s rotted, long-abandoned farmhouse, had given way to Vine Haven Mall. Starbucks had gutted Barney’s, the old café where he and his fellow teammates would celebrate their football or track wins, and put up--a Starbucks. Chain restaurants and stores were moving in, and the town, at least outside the old downtown district, was fast taking on the same-ol’ yeah-we-got-that-too look of most every other town in America.

Clark drove on into old downtown district, a couple of square blocks of old, brick, false-storefront commercial buildings right out of small-town America. He parked at the curb behind several other cars and looked around. The townspeople were changing too. Oh, there were the same older folks he’d seen around for years, the farmers, shopkeepers, trades-people and the like. But there were increasing numbers of transplants, up from the state capitol, Madison, or from Chicago--both to the southeast--or from California and other increasingly overpopulated, drought-stricken areas out West. Many of these newcomers didn’t even work in town. To them, the sixty-mile commute to Madison was nothing.

But commuting wasn’t for him. If he left here to work, he wasn’t comin’ back--not at the end of the day or ever. His roots were here all right, but his branches were leaning towards those cities to the southwest, hoping to catch the sun. Clark pulled a wad of paper forms from his police clipboard. The top form read: APPLICATION FOR PATROLMAN, CITY OF CHICAGO.

He looked hopefully at the form, still only partially filled out, and in his minds-eye saw how his life would unfold. There he’d be, in his brand-spankin’ new Chicago PD uniform, standing triumphantly with his bloodied nightstick over some macho criminal mastermind and his unconscious stooges who’d tried to rob a bank. Clark smiled with smug satisfaction. Asphalt jungle, he whispered, here I come.

As he sat all dewy-eyed in the driver’s seat, a dusty red pickup truck rounded a corner with tires squealing, and slammed to a stop directly across the street in front of Daisy’s Bar. The driver may or may not be in a hurry for a drink, Clark thought, considering that just about anywhere he would have parked across the street would have put him in front of a bar. This was Wisconsin, after all. You couldn’t have a town without a bar, and any place larger than a country crossroads had at least two. Vine Hill had closer to twenty, several of them on this block alone.

Dust swirled around the pickup, suggesting it had come in from someone’s farm, a suggestion confirmed when lanky, grizzled old Gus Cliffords slid down from the cab in black and gray farmer’s coveralls and started across the street towards him.

Ol’ Gus. He was one of the few reasons Clark still felt any attachment to Vine Hill. The farmer was a local stalwart, a fixture on the landscape like a giant, gnarled old oak tree, always there, always able to stand the test of time. Clark had never seen Gus much at games or other public functions, but there had been that time when he’d caught him and Megan Boosflug making