The Vendeleer Brothers Book 4: The Plagued Forest
Chapter 10: Traitors

Ian and Brian flinched as the survivors opened fire on the creature before them. It roared in pain, swiping at them with its long arm and sending several people toppling into the water. Thick green blood started to spray everywhere, and vines shot out of its eyes and mouth, reaching out for anyone nearby. Several survivors screamed as they were lifted up into the air by the vines, and some simply turned tail and ran.

“There’s no fighting this thing!” Ian exclaimed, grabbing Brian and running back down the path they had come from.

“RETREAT!!” they heard Keith yell. Ian threw his gun into the swamp, thinking how it was only weighing him down as he saw someone beside him get dragged into the murky waters. The two of them jumped onto the boardwalk, the creature still screeching behind them. They halted to a stop when they saw a grayish green hand reach up from underneath the boardwalk. The others running with them stopped when a person pulled themselves out of the swamp, their eyes glazed over and wrapped in vines.

It was Jordyn.

Someone pushed their way in front of Ian and aimed their gun at her.

“DON’T!!” Ian yelled, pulling the gun up into the air so it fired up into the branches above them. Jordyn contorted unnaturally and screeched, vines shooting out of her mouth. They wrapped around the man who had just tried to shoot her and pulled him close to him.

No one made any move to help the poor guy as he screamed in terror. Everyone pushed their way past as Jordyn dragged him into the swamp. In fact, they could see more people like Jordyn coming out of the swamp. Some were covered in mushrooms, others in spanish moss, and they all came forward jerkily, almost as if they were marionettes on a string. Brian and Ian didn’t stop. They jumped over the vines coming out of the water, as well as the grimy hands reaching for them from the mud.

Don’t think. Just run. Just run. Ian thought to himself. He and Brian were soon out of the swamp, listening to the screams behind them as they things from the swamp attacked.

The two of them stood there panting for a moment on the edge of town, trying to catch their breath, as well as a few other survivors standing there with them. A few more people emerged from the forest, looking a bit worse for wear. Ian saw Keith emerge, a nasty gash on his bald head. Now that they were out of the thick of it, Ian was about to start thinking about what to do next, when Keith suddenly pointed his gun at him and Brian.

“What the hell?” he raged. “You just got several of us killed! Are you crazy?!”

“I-I don’t think they’re dead…” Ian protested, throwing his hands up into the air. “They seem a lot like the coma patients… only… mobile.”

“Grab those two.” Keith ordered, narrowing his eyes. “We’ll figure out what to do with them when we get back.”

Several hands started to grab onto Brian and Ian, who protested profusely.

“We don’t have enough information!” Brian exclaimed. “Trust us! We’ve been-.”

Someone hit Ian with the butt of their gun, sending him down to the ground. And didn’t quite send him into total unconsciousness, but more on the brink of it. He was vaguely aware that someone was dragging him, and he could still hear voices, but they were muffled. His vision was dark around the edges, and the pieces of light he could see were fuzzy. He tried to struggle, but his body wouldn’t do what he wanted it to.

After a few minutes of this, someone dropped him, and he heard a door close.

Great.

Now they basically had two enemies now.

A swamp beast, and the rest of the survivors.

Why had they done something so stupid?!

Ian groaned, pulling himself up off of the floor, finally starting to gain a sense of his surroundings. His head ached, and he looked around to see that he and Brian were in one of the cells at the police building. Brian was standing against the back wall, looking very awkward as usual, and a few of the survivors were standing on the the other side of the bars, glaring at them.

“Why did you do that?” Keith asked quietly, his hand balling into a fist. Ian rubbed the back of his head and winced.

“Look… The two of us are kind of… paranormal investigators. There’s way too much about this that we don’t understand right now. You saw how the other people in the town were. What’s to say that the beast in the clearing wasn’t actually one of those people in disguise? And the actual thing responsible was just using that to draw your attention? There were too many factors to just go in blindly shooting.”

In response, Keith cocked the gun and pointed it at him. Ian backed up against the wall and stood next to Brian.

“Well you’re not going to get in our way next time.” he growled. “You can stay here and rot while we come up with a better plan.”

Ian and Brian both swallowed as the survivors left the room and slammed the door.

“Well this is terrific.” Ian scowled, plopping down on a vine covered bed. Brian continued to stand there awkwardly.

“So uh… thanks for… listening to me about… the monster thing…” he said sheepishly, rubbing his arm. “Sorry I was kind of… wrong.”

Ian sighed and rubbed the tiredness out of his face.

“Well, we haven’t debunked anything yet. Did you notice how it attacked? It didn’t have any sort of order to it. At least, not that I noticed. So let’s say, hypothetically, that this was an animal. Wild animals react to things like humans. Maybe if we approached it without trying to kill it, things might be different.”

At the thought of going against a big swamp monster again, Brian looked at him warily.

“You really want to go back up against that thing? And without weapons? Cause that’s probably what we would have to do.”

Ian frowned, not liking the sound of it either, but with what they had been discussing, it seemed like their next best option. After all, the guns hadn’t really worked. It had just made it mad.

“Well, and there’s also the issue of getting out of here if we’re even going to try again.” Ian said. “And I don’t think the other survivors are going to just let us out anytime soon.”

“So what do we do?”

Ian looked around and picked up a piece of cement that had crumbled on the wall.

“We need to break out of here.” he said, throwing it up and catching it again. He started to look for a weak spot in the wall, and when he thought he could see a bit of light, he started beating at it. Brian looked at the door nervously.

“Don’t you think the others will hear that and know what your doing??” he asked, bouncing from foot to foot.

“Hold on-I think this is a lot weaker than it-.”

Suddenly, the wall collapsed, and the two of them backed away from it, coughing in the dust. Then they stood there blinking in surprise.

“Well, that was a lot easier than I was expecting.” Ian commented. At that moment, Keith and a couple of others burst through the door.

“What the-.” he yelled, raising his gun. Ian grabbed Brian by the shirt and pulled him through the opening as the survivors opened fire. The two of them ran for it, hearing the curses of the survivors behind them.

“Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy crap!!” Brian gasped. Ian looked back to see the others duck through the opening as well, and he pushed Brian behind a building right as they opened fire again.

“I think I like first person shooters better than real life!” Brian weezed as the two of them scrambled to get up. They ducked into a dilapidated mall, bullets hitting the entrance.

“Do we hide? Do we run? Do we go ninja mode and try to fight back??” Brian asked in a panic, looking every which way.

“Come on!” Ian yelled, running up a broken escalator and onto the second floor. “There might be a place upstairs that can hide us!”

“Good-because I’m not sure how long I can keep running!”

The two of them ran along the abandoned stores, trying to replace one that could hide them easily. They settled on a clothing store, and Ian watched as Brian hid behind a the cash register. Ian ducked into a clothing rack as he heard the people after them getting closer. He lay crouched there in the clothes among the vines, hardly daring to breathe for fear that the survivors would replace him hiding there.

“I know they’re up here on the second floor.” a gruff voice said from somewhere nearby. “Spread out and replace them. They can’t have gone too far.”

Ian felt himself sweating as he saw a pair of boots walk past his clothing rack without seeing him. He thought they would be in the all clear until he saw the guy heading towards the cash register, where Brian was hiding.

Curse Brian and his lame hiding spot!! He thought, looking around. He grabbed a heel, stood up for a moment when the guy’s back was turned, and threw it as hard as he could out of the store, quickly ducking down again. The guy whirled around and started firing like crazy before even looking to see what it was. Ian covered his head as bullets hit the clothes above him. The bullets tore through a mannikin nearby, causing it to crash down on his hiding place. Ian rolled out of the way and into the aisle, only to replace himself face to face with the barrel of a gun.

“There you are…” the guy growled. Ian thought it was over.

But then, Brian jumped on the guy’s back, pulling him backwards. The guy pulled on the trigger, bullets shooting into the ceiling. Ian dove for the gun, making sure it stayed away from his face. The guy struggled against the two of them, waddling out of the store. He rammed Ian into the barricade, breaking through it and sending glass everywhere. Ian began to lose his balance, the shattered glass dropping into the water below them. He regained his balance and then punched the guy in the gut and then the face, causing him to drop his gun.

Unfortunately, this guy was pretty beefy, and he threw Brian off of him and became tangled with Ian in a one on one fight. Ian tried desperately to hold his ground, and thought he was doing pretty well, when a bullet hit the floor mere inches from his foot. One of the others must have heard the commotion and come to help. He flailed, feeling himself going backwards over the broken bannister. The room spun in front of his face, and he found himself falling.

He jerked to a stop and looked up to see that Brian had grabbed onto his leg, struggling in keeping him from falling.

“Brian!! Look out!!” he yelled, the guy they had been fighting standing over him, looking very angry. Brian looked up right as the guy kicked him in the face, sending Brian over the broken bannister. The two of them fell for a second and then hit the murky water. It was much deeper than he was expecting, and he came up for air, treading water.

He looked up to see Keith standing next to the guy they had been fighting, pointing a gun down at them.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way.” he called out to them. “But we have to survive, and we can’t do that if you sabotage us.”

Ian looked over to Brian, who was also treading water. Brian looked terrified, but it was not because of the guns above them.

“Ian? Something wrapped around my leg.” he said shakily. Then, something jerked him under the water before he even had the chance to scream. Ian splashed and started to try to look around him in the water, wondering what was there.

“Brian?! Brian!!” he yelled.

He heard Keith cock the gun above him, and then he felt something slither around his ankle. He called out in surprise, only for his cry to be drowned out as something jerked him underneath the water.