Creek-Shots! | Craig of the Creek one shots

Vermicular - Creeksona & Original Characters (& The Mud Buddies!)

"Where are you dragging me?" Anderson is being literal. Chrissie, his rambunctious little sister, hasn't let go of his hand since they left the house, and she's squeezing so hard he'll get pins and needles when she lets go. He's a little worried at what's got her so clingy, and being dragged further and further into the little wood at the edge of their neighborhood isn't easing his nerves. Neither is the sky, a dull overcast gray from the previous few days of rain.

"Where me and my buddies play," she responds. There's none of the usual pep in her voice, the excitement that Anderson would find annoying. She sounds deadly serious. "I'll tell you when we're there."

Leave it to Chrissie to play in some haunted forest, where she saw a... Thing in a mud puddle that he needs to move for her. He told her to nudge it out of the way with that stick she's always carrying, but she insisted it was " really scary."

"None of my buddies would touch it, either," she had said, out-of-breath from running back to the house. "Andy, it's really big. Like, as thick as my thumb and this long." She had put her hands out a foot apart. "It's all gross and... wormy ."

This is why Anderson preferred to stay inside and play video games. There are no worm-monsters hiding in mud pits in Trig-Run or PinkBoy.

"We're here," she says suddenly.

Anderson had been too caught up in his thoughts to notice the clearing they had arrived in.

Five kids are at the far end, standing dead still in a lopsided circle. They turn to look at him and Chrissie once she calls out, and they all have a look of worry on their faces.

"Thanks for getting an older kid," one of them says, sounding shaken. She's wearing stained overalls and boots. Anderson thinks she'd look like a little construction worker if she wasn't half his height. "I'd have got David, but he's sick."

Anderson's only four years older than Chrissie, and he's still four months away from thirteen, but the children in front of him look really young. Younger than Chrissie, and she ran all the way back home because she was scared about this... Thing . He knows he needs to play the role of 'older brother' here, but it's difficult when the lump in his throat had been getting harder and harder to swallow from every step he took into the woods.

"Okay, where's this... Thing?" He says.

"In the mud." Another kid, wearing a hat and bandana, points to the center of the clearing.

"In the..." Anderson turns to look.

A mud puddle— scratch that; "puddle" is inaccurate, since this is the size of his bedroom— lays smack in the clearing. In the center of it is a small, off-white squiggle.

The Thing.

Anderson looks back at the kids. They all have large brown stains on their pant legs, and smaller ones scattered on their shirts. Chrissie fits right in with their messiness, and he realizes something.
"Is this where you go all afternoon?" He asks Chrissie. He never knew (or cared) where she went after schools, too busy unwinding after his long day of sixth grade pre-algebra and book reports. "You play in this... mud pond?"

"Yes. Now please can you get the worm monster out?"

"...Give me your stick." Even if he can't see this Thing up close, he knows he doesn't want to touch it with bare hands.

Chrissie contemplates the request, before slowly handing her stick over. "Don't lose it," she says. "It's a good one."

He doesn't know how he would lose it, but maybe the Thing has hidden hands.

Grabbing the stick, he marches to the end of the mud pond.

He would have brought his boots if he'd known he'd be wading through mud, but his sneakers will forgive him.

He takes his first step into the mud, and it squelches underneath his foot.

"Hurry up!" Chrissie yells.

"Don't tell me what to do," he mumbles, but she's right. If he doesn't get this over with soon, the mud may get to him before the Thing ever does.

He trudges deeper into the mud, each step more uncomfortable than the last. He uses Chrissie's stick as a walking stick, but even then it takes much of his strength to lift his feet out of the mud's heavy grip.

Seven steps in, he can feel the moistness seeping through his sneakers.

Eleven steps in, into his socks.

Seventeen steps in, the walking stick slips, and he sticks a hand out to stop himself from falling. His sweater sleeves, along with his hand-me-down Swede-watch get a thick coating of mud.

Twenty steps in, he can see the Thing up close.

It's small, but it's curled up into itself like an intestine. Chrissie was right that it looks like a worm, but only with its proportions and horizontal ribbing. It looks like a worm's head from one end, but at the other, there's a bulbous knot where its tail should be. It's color is that of Anderson's skin, but much paler, like the life had been sucked out of it by something he would be more afraid of.

It's far too big to be a worm. It would be a foot long if he stretched it out straight, and it's an inch thick. Maybe it is an intestine, from some poor animal that became something's meal, but what would that something even be ? What would tear up a creature enough for the blood to drain from its stomach completely?

"Do you see it?" One of the kids yells, but Anderson can't respond. He's frozen.

He needs to move the Thing.

He reaches the stick out and, slowly and carefully, in case the Thing decides it isn't dead anymore, slides it under the part of the Thing that curls back into itself.

He braces himself to run back through the slimy mud before he flicks the stick upwards.

Anderson looks back.

Glazed eyes meet his own wide ones. The Thing had gained some color, but its not a natural reddish hue; it's a cold-blooded gray. The ribbing turned into dry scales, parts of it caked with dirt. He can see the knot on the edge is split in two along the edge, showing a pink inside with a fork sticking out.

"What is it?"

He takes a step forward, slides the stick underneath the ophidian creature, picks it up, and flings it fully into the woods. "Dead snake," he says, and adds, too quiet for the children to hear, "It's gone now, don't worry."