Description
On its twenty-second day of feeding, the Creeper abducts a young Billy Taggart in front of his father Jack and older brother Jack Jr. The next day, a school bus carrying a high school basketball team and cheerleaders suffers a blowout, after one of the tires is hit by a hand-crafted shuriken made of bone fragments. Later, cheerleader Minxie Hayes has a vision of Billy Taggart and Darry Jenner, another victim of the Creeper, who attempt to warn her about the Creeper, before he blows out another tire, disabling the bus. With the team stranded, the Creeper abducts bus driver Betty Borman and coaches Charlie Hanna and Dwayne Barnes. When the Creeper returns, he singles out six of the students: Dante Belasco, Jake Spencer, Minxie Hayes, Scotty Braddock, Andy "Bucky" Buck, and Deaundre "Double D" Davis. Minxie has another vision in which Darry says the Creeper emerges every twenty-third spring, for twenty-three days to eat humans, and she tells the other students.
After hearing several police reports, the Taggarts go hunting for the Creeper and soon make radio contact with the school bus. The Creeper attacks Bucky, but Rhonda stabs it through the head with a javelin. Dante begins prodding the Creeper's wing, only for it to grab and decapitate him. The Creeper tears off its injured head and uses Dante's severed head to replace its own. The students decide to leave the bus to find help, but the Creeper returns and chases them into a field, where it kills Jake and takes Scotty.
When the Creeper attacks Jonny, Chelsea, and Bucky on the bus again, the Taggarts arrive and Jack shoots it with a home-made harpoon, which the Creeper fights him off, managing to escape after flipping over the bus. Rhonda, Izzy Cohen, and Double D find a truck and attempt to escape but are chased by the Creeper again. Izzy pushes Rhonda out of the truck before causing the vehicle to crash, injuring both Double D and the Creeper, who loses an arm, a leg, and a wing, although Izzy crawls from the wreckage before the truck explodes. The Creeper continues to pursue Double D by leaping towards him and, when it has Double D pinned down, Jack shows up and shoots the Creeper in the head with the harpoon. He repeatedly stabs the Creeper in the chest but it goes into a hibernation state before it can die.
Twenty-three years later, a group of teenagers drives to the Taggart farm, where the Creeper is a sideshow attraction, called "The Bat Out of Hell", and the middle-aged Jack Jr. is charging entrance fees. They see an elderly Jack watching it with the harpoon at his side, and when they ask him if he is waiting for something, he looks up at the Creeper and says: "about three more days, give or take a day or two".
