disease.
By the time Sickler’s other two airboats arrived at the tree island, Derek Badger had been gone for more than an hour and Link was seething. Another thirty minutes was spent debating how and where the search should be conducted. Eventually it was decided that Mickey Cray and Raven Stark would go with one driver, while Link and the show’s director would ride with the other. Nobody anticipated that the first boat would break down and require towing by the second. The result was a waste of the entire morning that put everybody in a testy mood.
Four big cruiser airboats were called in from the Miccosukee reservation to haul the crew, its video equipment and the catering team back to Sickler’s dock. Over a tense lunch of barbecued chicken wings, provided by Sickler at the criminal price of eight dollars a box, Raven and the director studied a map of the area while Link fumed.
Mickey decided to start packing the gear in the truck.
“Where’s the girl?” he asked Wahoo.
“Inside the shop.”
“Go fetch her. We’re outta here.”
“Just a minute, dear.” It was Raven, peering over the rims of her glasses. “You’re not seriously quitting, are you?”
Mickey was taken by surprise. “I figured the job was over, now that Mr. Beaver turned jackrabbit. But if you wanna pay me to hang around, ma’am, I’ll gladly oblige.”
Link spoke up. “Let’m go. We don’t need him.”
“I believe we do,” said Raven. She tapped a finger on the map. “This place goes on forever. By now, Derek could be anywhere.”
Wahoo and his father knew that wasn’t true. Derek Badger wasn’t some sly old swamp rat who could outwit his trackers. The man had no clue where he was going or what he was doing. Most likely he would steer Link’s airboat wildly through the saw grass marsh until he beached it on dry land, plowed it into a stand of trees or simply ran out of gas.
“He won’t starve,” Mickey Cray said to Raven, “but there’s other ways for a fool to die out here. I’ll help you find him.”
The director stared hopelessly at the green, featureless swath of map that represented the area where Derek had gone missing. There were no roads, no canals, no levees to follow. It was pure swamp.
Link said, “They’s a gallon of water on my boat.”
Raven was relieved. “That should keep him alive for a while.” She stood up, all business, trying not to show her concern. “Let’s get moving while the rain holds off.”
Wahoo went looking for Tuna. He found her standing by the cash register in Sickler’s tourist shop. “What’d you get?” he asked.
“Nuthin’.” She handed him three one-dollar bills. He’d given her a five to purchase a snack.
“Well, you must’ve bought something,” Wahoo said.
She seemed flustered. “Oh yeah. I forgot-I had a burrito. Hard as a rock.”
Wahoo could tell that something was wrong. “What’s up?”
“I’m fine,” Tuna replied, but she definitely seemed different.
“Come on. You can tell me.”
“It’ll be fine.” She slipped past him and headed for the screen door. “Which boat are we in, Lance? I want to ride in the same one as Link.”
SEVENTEEN
Anyone taking the time to search Derek Badger’s luxury motor coach would have found a clue to his strange and sudden departure.
Inside a silk pillowcase, tucked beneath his mattress, was a cherished collection of DVDs, volumes I through III of the Night Wing Trilogy. The movies were based on a series of popular novels featuring a handsome but sensitive high school baseball star named Dax Mangold and his girlfriend, Lupa Jean. In the first installment, Cartwheel of Doom, Lupa Jean turns into a vampire after being bitten by a bat during cheerleader practice. In the next volume, Bark of the Dark Prince, Lupa Jean bites Dax’s dog-a dopey but adorable beagle named Bixby-and the dog becomes a vampire.
In the final saga, Revenge of the Blood Moon, Dax himself gets chomped by a bat, a flying squirrel, a crazed guinea pig, lovable Bixby and of course Lupa Jean (twice). Still, Dax manages to fight off the vampire curse and rescue both his beloved pet and girlfriend from the clutches of the undead. One reviewer, writing on Amazon, trashed the Night Wing Trilogy as “three of the most brainless books ever written in the English language, an insult to every unsuspecting reader who makes the tragic mistake of picking one up.”
Derek Badger had never picked up any of the books because he strenuously avoided reading. However, he loved movies, especially scary ones. Vampire flicks were his favorites-he couldn’t get enough of them, going all the way back to Dracula, featuring the spooky Bela Lugosi. It was an addiction he kept secret, even from Raven Stark.
Not that Derek had been thinking about vampires when the mastiff bat bit him. He’d simply intended to gobble the stunned critter, one of his trademark TV moves. Loyal viewers of Expedition Survival! had come to expect at least one such disgusting scene in every episode.
Believing the animal to be disabled, Derek had been flabbergasted when it clamped onto his tongue. The pain was so piercing that he forgot about the lights and cameras and how ridiculous he must look on videotape with a flapping varmint attached to his face. Immediately he grew weak and woozy, slipping into a dream haze. The last thing he remembered was the redneck wrangler, Mickey Cray, bending down and tweaking the feisty bat with a twig.
Hours later, when Derek awoke inside his tent, he was drenched with sweat and twitching with fever. His tongue had swollen to the size of a knockwurst sausage, making it impossible for him to speak-or, at least, be understood. It didn’t really matter, for he had nothing he wished to say.
A bat’s teeth aren’t particularly sanitary, and the mastiff had given Derek an exotic infection that fogged his thinking and set off deep, disturbing fears. All he wanted to do was run and hide.
The camp was pitch-black and silent when he tottered from the tent. He picked up a flashlight and the expensive high-tech Helmet Cam, which he sometimes wore to film himself on the show and further mislead TV viewers into thinking he was alone on his expeditions.
Weaving through the dense hammock, Derek had no master plan. It was only later, when he was perched high atop a strangler fig tree, that his skittering thoughts returned to the creature that had chomped him. Could it have been a vampire bat? Could he himself be morphing into one of the sinister, night-roaming fiends?
Had he not been so ill, Derek would have scoffed at such an absurd idea. But once the notion took hold, his fever-racked imagination was unstoppable.
He decided to do what Dax Mangold did when he was attacked by a bat (and all those other critters) in the final Night Wing episode. Feeling the evil blood chill his veins, Dax Mangold fled deep into the woods to battle the terrible forces of the spirit underworld and to save his own soul.
The director and crew of Expedition Survival! were worried that Derek Badger had been stricken with rabies, but Derek himself was worried about something even worse. He spent the remainder of the night clinging to the branches, wondering if by morning he’d be hanging upside down by his feet, sporting bat wings and fuzzy crinkled ears.
Shortly after dawn, he heard an airboat arrive at the campsite. Soon Raven and some of the crew started shouting his name and launched a noisy search. When they passed beneath the old fig tree, none of them glanced up in the high boughs where Derek was hiding. Soon afterward, he scrambled to the ground and made his way to the moat, where Link’s airboat was moored.
Unlike real survivalists, Derek had no natural sense of direction. He steered the flat-bottomed vessel across the liquid prairie in a snaking, aimless path that ended with him smacking into the embankment of another tree island. The airboat was traveling exactly twenty-nine miles per hour when it pancaked to a halt, ejecting Derek
