The Vendeleer Brothers Book 4: The Plagued Forest
Chapter 3: Fact or Fiction

“It was a large beast with dripping fangs and long hair. I thought I was done for, but as it came closer, it started to sniff me. I guess it liked my smell. I was wearing a bit of perfume-specifically bombshell from Victoria’s Secret, and I was wearing my new outfit from Hot Topic with fishnets, and the beast looked at me and asked me if I had a boyfriend. I said yes, but that didn’t matter because I had decided to break up with him anyway. So then the beast started to take off his shirt and-.”

“HOLD UP.”

Ian and Roderick looked at the teenager in front of them skeptically.

“Ok, what is this? A Twilight fanfiction?” Ian scoffed. The girl blinked.

“Oh. I thought we were supposed to tell stories about the beast everyone keeps talking about?”

At the sound of this, the two brothers groaned, already getting tired of the small interrogation room at the police building.

“No.” Roderick exasperated. “We are conducting an investigation. Can you please tell us what you actually saw in regards to this thing everyone keeps talking about?”

“Oh.” the girl said, batting her obviously fake eyelashes. She pulled at her straightened black hair a little nervously.

“Well, uh… when we’re done here, do you want to uh… grab a cup of coffee or something?”

Roderick stared at the girl incredulously as Ian started to laugh.

“How old are you?”

“Um… Eighteen.”

“Mmmhmm...” Roderick hummed sourly, highly doubting that. She looked more like she was fifteen or sixteen. “I’m already seeing someone.”

Beside him, Ian snickered as the girl threw her hair over her shoulder with a sigh.

“Fine. It kind of looked like a big snake. Happy now?”

“And where did you see it?” Roderick asked, ignoring his older brother as he tried hard to contain the laughter that wanted to escape.

“Over by the community pool on the edge of the forest. I lifeguard there. Something broke the fence when I wasn’t looking, and when I looked over, it kind of looked like a big snake was slinking back into the swamp.”

In the next room over, Jordyn and Joey were also hearing an interesting story.

“There were goats!! Goats everywhere!” the man exclaimed, pounding his fist on the table. “All the tree roots seemed to have grown up overnight and overtaken the fence!”

Jordyn raised a brow at the goat obsessed farmer.

“So you’re basically saying you didn’t weed your yard?” she asked, unimpressed.

“Jordyn, look at the pictures.” Joey whispered, handing over a folder she had been looking at. The detective flipped through it and widened her eyes when she saw tree roots that were as tall and as thick as people sticking up out of the ground. With goats jumping on them.

“There really are goats everywhere.” she snickered.

“Yeah, I saw somethin’.” a gruff man with a large beard told the two brothers. “I was out huntin’ with my buddy when we saw what we thought was a deer. We shot it, but it didn’t go down. It started comin’ for us, and that’s when I saw it closer up. It probably could have been a deer, but it was almost as if it had weird vines and plant crap growin’ out of it. Carl insisted it was a zombie deer and we had to kill it with a head shot. That didn’t work, so we took off running. On the way back, Carl tripped through the creek, and now he’s one of them coma patients.”

Roderick and Ian stared at the man, not liking the sound of weird plant zombie deer in the woods.

“I will make a note of that…” Roderick mentioned.

“I was playing wif my my cool and you know my best fwiend in da whole wide wowld at de pawk. His name is Wichawd, and we wewe at de playgwound and playing pwetend. We was playing in dee sand and making sand castles. Mine was de biggest it was and I wanted to knock it down and when my Mommy stawted scweaming like when she sees spidews or dose big bugs and when so I looked ovew, and dere was a huge weally weally big monstew stawing at us fwom de woods! My mommy told us to wun to hew, and so we did and we-we-we stawted to wun weally weally fast. Weally weally weally weally fast. I was so fast. I was fastew den my fwiend. My mommy stawted to dwrive, but then and then we you we cwashed. BAM! CWASH!! OH NOOOO!”

Jordyn was beginning to be reminded why she hated interviewing little kids.

“Can you just tell us what you saw?” she asked through her teeth, trying to lose her patience. The kid had enough trouble with his R’s, and it took him forever to get an actual sentence out of him. Joey put a hand on her shoulder and then brought out a notebook.

“So you saw the monster when your mom was unconscious, or asleep from the crash right?” she asked. “How about you draw it for us?”

“Okie dokies!! I’m weally weally good at dwawing.” the little boy told them, reaching for the materials with his pudgy little hands. Jordyn gave a little sigh as they waited for him to pick out the colors he wanted and to finish the drawing, and then they took a look at it. It was very… interesting…

“That… looks almost humanoid…” Joey murmured, observing the drawing.

It did indeed, except it looked like it was some kind of living tree with a dark green goop coming from it’s fingertips, eye sockets and mouth. It was hunched over with elongated limbs and sharp teeth.

“I wonder how accurate this is…” Jordyn wondered out loud. This seemed to offend the little boy sitting across from them.

“It is too accuwate! It is soooo accuwate it’s not even funny!”

At the sound of this, Jordyn rolled her eyes.

“Yeah. Sure kid.”

During all of these interviews, Brian was outside, tinkering with his electronics and trying to figure out how he could track this weird new thing that wasn’t a spirit or a person with abilities. He was trying to wrap his head around all of this new paranormal stuff that was now real. He had always kind of believed in aliens and ghosts, but had never thought about it too hard. Now that he was faced with things like this every day, it was a new kind of story.

Brian soldered some wires onto a circuit board, hoping that it would work. He knew that the others probably didn’t feel like he was useless, but he couldn’t help feeling like he was. Ian, Roderick, Jordyn, and Joey were all so cool and brave when it came to the scary things in their lives, and he… had his gadgets.

He tried to push these things out of his mind so he could focus on the task at hand. He needed to finish this. He needed to be helpful.

After a couple of minutes of intense focus, he finally put down the circuit board with a bit of frustration and rubbed the tiredness out of his face. As he was staring off into space, he suddenly blinked and realized that he was watching a vine wind itself over the fence by the woods. It wound itself across the wood like a bright green snake, flowers growing and dying rapidly all within the span of thirty seconds.

Brian stood up in surprise and backed away a little bit as it snaked its way across the road. It was bright green at the tip, but as it got farther and farther away from the fence, it started to brown and then blacken. Brian jumped as the vine twisted itself up into the air and started reaching for him. He was about to call for help and freak out when the vine went too far and shriveled up, the tip crumbling into pieces.

Slowly, Brian poked at the pieces with his foot, and then carefully took some samples so he could look at them later under a microscope.

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