CREEPERS

by Bryan Dunn

  Creepers

  Bryan Dunn

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2011 by Bryan Dunn

  Doc Fletcher, an eccentric biologist in the remote Mojave Desert, has finally created the ultimate drought-tolerant plant: a genetically engineered creeper vine. It’s destined to change the world, but not according to Doc’s plans. Instead, this vine has a mind of its own. Mayhem ensues as the residents of Furnace Valley (pop. 16), along with campers at the nearby hot springs, run for their lives— led by wannabe date rancher Sam Rainsford and the nerdy yet gorgeous botanist Laura Beecham, who has come to the desert for a reunion with the father she has never known…

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4

  Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8

  Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12

  Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16

  Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20

  Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24

  Chapter 25, Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28

  Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32

  Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35, Chapter 36

  Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39, Chapter 40

  Chapter 41, Chapter 42, Chapter 43, Chapter 44

  Chapter 45, Chapter 46, Chapter 47, Chapter 48

  Chapter 49, Chapter 50, Chapter 51, Chapter 52

  Chapter 53, Chapter 54, Chapter 55, Chapter 56

  Chapter 57, Chapter 58, Chapter 59, Chapter 60

  Chapter 61, Chapter 62, Chapter 63, Chapter 64

  Chapter 65, Chapter 66, Chapter 67, Chapter 68

  Chapter 69, Chapter 70, Chapter 71, Chapter 72

  Chapter 73, Chapter 74, Chapter 75, Chapter 76

  Chapter 77, Chapter 78

  Chapter 1

  A man pushed aside a large bromeliad, the sweat beading on his face as he reached up and gripped the tip of a fleshy leaf—ficus elastica—pulling it down so as to examine its lustrous surface. He bent the leaf to eye level. A silver bead of water rolled across the waxy surface—and just before it lipped off the end, he ducked forward, deftly catching the drop in his mouth.

  “Ah,” he said, smacking his lips with delight. He looked and acted like he’d just had a sip of Dom Perignon. His name was Henry Fletcher, Dr. Henry Fletcher to be precise. In school, everyone had called him Fletch. And now, forty years later, friends just called him Doc.

  Fletcher was dressed in his “uniform”: khaki shorts, white T-shirt, and dirty sneakers. His bald head was deeply tanned, and a dusting of white stubble covered his face. Humming softly to himself, he took a couple of steps, parted a wall of trumpet vines, stepped through the opening, released the vines—and let the lush foliage press in around him. Standing there, he could almost feel the jungle as it hissed and throbbed, striving up towards the filtered light.

  Up ahead, looming out of the shadows, flowering epiphytes beguiled with fleshy, naked-looking petals. And higher up, a hubcap-sized leaf tilted toward the morning light, exposing a stand of bamboo bristling with new growth as its shiny epidermis drank in the life-giving energy.

  There was a sudden movement. One of the bamboo leaves twitched, and then swiveled completely around. What had moments ago looked exactly like a leaf morphed into a chartreuse-colored grasshopper. It waggled its antennae—further shedding its disguise—then clambered over to a tender shoot of bamboo and quickly devoured it.

  There was a rush of air as a shadow fell across the grasshopper. It twisted its head just in time to see the open maw of a quick little bird—and then it was snapped up. The bird gripped the grasshopper by its thorax and darted to a vine, lighting on a sinewy-looking stalk covered with medusa-like tendrils.

  The vine looked strange, almost primordial. Everything about it was menacing and unnatural-looking. The leaves were alien-blood green and covered with tiny scales that looked like the back of a boa constrictor. Raised liver-colored splotches mottled its stalks and roots.

  The bird finished its meal and then cleaned its beak by wiping it across the stalk at its feet—the sharp little beak making a swick swick sound, like the blade of a knife being worked along a steel. Then the bird fluffed its feathers and began to preen.

  A moment later it froze, sensing something was wrong. It tucked in its wings and lifted its head, waiting for any danger to pass.

  The air was completely still now as an eerie silence surrounded the bird. A beat, and the silence was shattered by a sharp rustling sound—like a rake being swept through a pile of dead leaves. There was another rattle—and the bird was suddenly caught in the vine! It kicked and flapped its wings, but it was no use. Something was horribly wrong. Panicked, it began to flail madly about, desperate to escape.

  The bird let out an anguished screech, unable to free itself, then fell on its side and stopped moving. It was trapped! Something was holding on to it!

  In a last attempt to gain its freedom, the bird twisted up and spread its wings, but they wouldn’t work. With every movement, the vine’s wispy tendrils locked tighter and tighter around its body. Then, as quickly it had begun, it ended and the bird stopped moving. There was another sharp rattling of leaves, and the bird disappeared, swallowed up by the strange-looking vine.

  Silence.

  At the foot of the vine, littered across the ground, dead birds stared vacantly up at nothing. They looked shriveled and dehydrated.

  Like something had sucked them dry.

  Chapter 2

  A minute later, the air around the vine filled with a loud crunching sound as Fletcher brushed aside a cycad leaf and stepped up to the strange-looking vine.

  He stared at it for a moment, taking in its height and girth, then reached out and lifted one of the scaly-looking leaves, lightly pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. Almost reptilian, he thought to himself.

  He released the leaf, reached into a pocket, retrieved a small plastic ruler, and measured one of the vine’s stalks, noting the distance between two leaf nodes. “Remarkable,” he mouthed to himself.

  He moved to another section of the vine, lifted a stalk, and repeated the measurement. “Amazing,” he said, this time right out loud. He pocketed the ruler, exchanging it for a Sony handheld recorder.

  Fletcher held the recorder up to his mouth, and continuing to study the vine, began to speak into the microphone. “June one. Day five. No water. Growth unabated.”

  He clicked off the recorder, then reached out to collect one of the remarkable-looking leaves. As he went to pull it free, he yanked his hand back, yelling “Ouch!” Then he thought to himself, Did that stalk just move?

  He held a finger up to his eyes. A perfect little red bead formed on the tip. He popped the finger in his mouth, washing away the blood, then spoke into the recorder. “Note to self, select out thorns on the Fletcher Creeper.”

  He reached out to collect another sample—then froze when he heard a mysterious sound. What the heck was that? He retracted his hand, keeping his eyes glued to the vine.

  Silence, nothing moved.

  He continued to wait, but nothing happened. Just as he was about to discount it, the vine came to life and began to shake and rattle, trembling from within. Then, without warning, a stalk shot up into the air, striking him in the center of the chest. Fletcher yelled, pitching back from the vine, and—

  The air in front of his eyes turned bright red. Then yellow. Then green. And his ears filled with a skull-splitting sound, “Squawk-Squawk-Squawk.”

  A second later, a scarlet macaw exploded upwards
, freeing itself from the vine’s thorny clutches. It tumbled through the air, somersaulted above his head, and landed haphazardly on a ficus branch. Then it swung its body forward until it was hanging upside down directly in front of Fletcher’s startled face.

  “Darwin! Jesus Christ! You scared me half to death.” He bent down, picked up the recorder, dusted it off, and took a step toward the macaw.

  “You’re one bad move away from a hatband, Darwin.”

  Using his head and outsized beak, Darwin righted himself on the branch and challenged the doctor with another series of ear of earsplitting and unmelodious squawks. Then, as if daring him, Darwin shook his head and fanned his tail, displaying a blaze of gaudy feathers.

  Fletcher’s lips flattened into a thin line. Then without warning, he lurched toward Darwin, trying to get his hands around the bird’s feet.

  “You’re a feather duster, Darwin!”

  Right before his fingers closed around the macaw’s feet, Darwin leapt up. Screeching and flapping his wings, he looked like a tie-dyed T-shirt that had suddenly anthropomorphized and been tossed into the air.

  Fletcher lost his footing, pitched forward, and spilled headfirst out of his rainforest and into the hundred-degree heat of a desolate section of California desert—a place called Furnace Valley.

  Shangri-la, if you happen to be a rattlesnake.

  Fletcher lay in the sand, sprawled on his back, staring up at the cloudless sky. He’d already forgotten about Darwin and was thinking about the vine again. No water and the thing was growing like a weed! And just as new thought formed in his head, his concentration was shattered by a loud screeching sound.

  Seconds later, Darwin shot out of the greenhouse like a scarlet-colored fighter jet, buzzed Fletcher, and swept into the sky. High overhead, the macaw leveled its wings and made a graceful banking turn as it circled above.

  Darwin’s view from four hundred feet up made the Fletcher compound look like a tiny green thumbprint in a sea of brown. The green thumbprint consisted of two buildings with a small pond off to one side. There was the aforementioned greenhouse, and next to that, the main building—or rather, the house that did double duty as Fletcher’s laboratory. The house had a peaked roof, rough-cut redwood siding, and a deep-shade porch that surrounded it on three sides, making it look like something out of an old western.

  Fletcher Exotics. That’s what botanist and geneticist Dr. Fletcher called his operation. He specialized in creating and breeding exotic plants for medicinal and agricultural use.

  Five years ago, he had unceremoniously parted company with his academic colleagues after the university where he worked cut funding for his research project—a project that would later produce groundbreaking results in the area of high-yield row crops.

  He had pleaded with the administration for more time. Another six months, a year tops, telling them that he was on the brink of having the science hammered out and that the university would soon have something to show for its investment.

  The Dean was unmoved and impatient. He demanded results. The university demanded results. But Fletcher had stood firm, not willing to rush his work and publish his findings prematurely. They gave him one week to change his mind and get his head right. And when he refused, the administration pulled funding for the entire department.

  One week after that, Fletcher severed his relationship with the university—but not before firing off a round of scathing e-mails proclaiming the Dean and his sycophantic minions to be a bunch of four-footed, risk-averse bean counters—bereft of imagination.

  In the end, as it turned out, Henry Fletcher had the last laugh. Six months after resigning, he sold a genetically engineered strain of corn to a consortium of ethanol producers for a cool ten million bucks. With one handshake, Dr. Fletcher had become wealthy—but more important than that—now he had all the funding he needed to continue his work, untrammeled by the whims of picayune-minded bureaucrats.

  Chapter 3

  Seven miles from the Fletcher place, down a bad stretch of gravel road, was the Rainsford Ranch—home to a hundred-year-old adobe, a barn that slanted in the direction of the prevailing winds, a water storage tank, and a shiny metal pumping station.

  But the thing that got everyone’s attention, the most astonishing feature of the ranch, were the date palms. Twenty acres of them, row after perfect row. Just in case any would-be visitor was unsure of what they were seeing, a hand-painted sign on a plank nailed between two gateposts read: Rainsford Ranch, Future Home of the World’s First Seedless Date.

  Sam Rainsford maneuvered the deuce and a half army truck, a 6x6 troop carrier that had been stripped of its benches and converted to a water tanker, through a section of the orchard. Sam loved the date palms—how it felt to be right in the middle of them—like a dream, or being lost in some exotic land. They were Deglet Noor dates, a variety prized for their plentiful, semisweet fruit and newfound antioxidant properties. They were especially well suited to the arid climate of California’s low deserts.

  Sam wrestled the wheel, threading the tanker between a row of palms and out onto a dirt siding, letting the truck’s tires drop into two deep ruts that ran down its center. He reached over to the glove box, opened it, and pulled out an old Polaroid snapshot. It was a picture of his family at Lake Tahoe, all of them lined up along a boat dock, ready to dive into the lake on his dad’s signal.

  As the truck settled into the twin grooves, he instinctively added a little gas and loosened his grip on the wheel. With the truck guiding itself now, he relaxed and allowed his mind to wander. He began to think about his life—and how he’d come to the desert.

  Three years ago during a family vacation, while traveling down a Los Angeles freeway, his parents and baby sister, Alex, were all killed trying to avoid a drunk college student who was going the wrong way. The motor home they were riding in was forced to make an impossible maneuver as it swerved to avoid the kid’s BMW. The motor home skidded sideways, hit a railing, and rolled down a hundred-foot embankment, bursting into flames before it reached the bottom. No one inside had a chance. They were all dead by the time the paramedics arrived.

  The student was, of course, completely unscathed—except for the head-splitting hangover that would arrive in the morning. It was made worse by the fact that Sam’s dad had just retired after forty years of guiding commercial jets safely in and out of LAX airspace. This was to have been their first trip in the family’s new motor home.

  Besides missing them everyday, the thing he couldn’t get over was how permanent death was. Open and shut. Here… and then suddenly gone forever. All those things left unsaid. And now no chance of ever saying them.

  It was going to take a lot more time before he could let them go. To say goodbye. That was why, after the accident, Sam left the construction company he’d help start and came to the desert, to this farm. It was his last connection to his family. His dad had loved the orchard—and now Sam, too, had fallen in love with the place. There was something about the desert… a timelessness. That, and the solitude—no next-door neighbors. All Sam really wanted was to be left alone.

  He looked at the photograph one last time, then returned it to the glove box.

  Chapter 4

  Thirty years ago Sam’s dad, Jack Rainsford, had bought the place from his boss, Bucky White—whose wife, as it turned out, was not a fan of the desert, or of date palms for that matter. After just one visit, she refused to return, making it clear she would have nothing more to do with the place.

  Bucky was heartbroken. His private dream of retiring to the desert and growing dates had been dashed forever on the rocks of his wife’s discontent. Actually, his wife had said, “Fine,” he could go. Only, as she made it abundantly clear—he’d be going without her.

  It was a tough choice, touch and go for a short while. But in the end, Bucky capitulated, not wanting to break up the family over a piece of land, and he agreed to sell the place. In fact, Bucky already had a new plan. What he’d do was take th
e money from the sale and buy a yacht—a big-ass cruiser. And if his wife didn’t want to go to sea, so be it.

  After deciding to sell, Bucky created a professional-looking flyer with a color picture of the date palms lit by the morning sun. Below the photograph was a short descriptive paragraph listing the orchard’s assets.

  When Jack Rainsford took his morning coffee break and saw the flyer taped to the water cooler, it was all over. It was love at first sight. Something about all those palms lit by that golden desert light, and all that open space surrounding them…

  A man could have his own private oasis!

  Anyway, as they say, one look was all it took. Jack had to have it. And he couldn’t believe the price! Bucky was almost giving the place away. Twenty acres for less than what he’d paid for a small tract home thirty years ago.

  The deal was struck that very day. Bucky allowed that Jack could put twenty percent down and then pay off the rest over the next ten years. Before they shook hands, Bucky wondered if maybe Jack should check with his wife first, telling him it had been his personal experience that some women didn’t care for surprises. But Jack quickly pooh-poohed the idea, waving his hand in the air, and said he was positive she’d love it as much as he did.

  It was a no-brainer, she loved to garden.

  As fate would have it, the curse of the date orchard was paid forward. After just two trips to the Rainsford Ranch, his wife had had enough. Whereas his dad had found living in the primitive adobe quaint and adventurous, his mother had declared the structure, not deigning to use the word house, unsanitary, dangerous—unfit for anything but the lowest of vermin. She pronounced the orchard, and the entire town of Furnace Valley, to be a “Blasted, godforsaken hellhole!”