“What if he’s already dead?”
The same awful possibility had occurred to Wahoo. He reached for Tuna’s hand and said, “The airboat probably ran out of gas is all.”
Wahoo couldn’t figure out why Derek had bolted from the base camp after the bat bite. Maybe he was just trying to stir up a little drama for the director and the crew. The man clearly enjoyed being the center of attention.
“Look, I know he’s a total goober,” Tuna said, “but I used to love, love, love his show. Every Thursday night, nine o’clock. Just about the time my dad would pass out.”
Wahoo could picture the scene all too clearly, though he still couldn’t put a human face on Tuna’s father.
She went on: “The Walmart has a real good TV department-that’s where I go to watch Expedition and Shrimp Wars if Daddy’s snoring too loud.”
“Derek’s not dead, Lucille. They’ll find him.”
“I sure hope so.”
Wahoo hoped so, too. Of one thing he felt certain: whatever the so-called survivalist was doing at large in the Everglades, he wasn’t carving a homemade canoe.
The snails tasted nasty, and Derek chewed up three of them in spite of his bloated tongue. They were small, and their thin, spiral shells crunched easily. He also captured a green tree frog, which he managed to gulp whole. It wriggled going down his throat and continued wriggling all the way to his stomach. He sucked on some leaves to get the slime out of his mouth.
This happened after the sun had gone down, when it was safe for vampires to roam.
Derek didn’t yet feel like a vampire, though he was jittery with anticipation. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since the bat attack, and there was no sign of a transformation from mortal human to undead night stalker.
As thirsty as he was, Derek had no desire to drink blood from somebody’s neck. A cold Diet Coke, however, would have been cause for rejoicing. Every so often he ran his fleshy fingertips along his capped teeth in expectation of fangs.
He was still sweaty and feverish, and now he noticed an annoying new symptom: dreadful, fiery itching all over his arms and legs. A knowledgeable person would have recognized the marks of poison ivy, but Derek was loopy from the infection. He wondered if the itch could be vampire-related, although he didn’t recall Dax Mangold or any of the other Night Wing characters scratching so much.
He was still hungry after eating the frog and snails, which he had located using the small light mounted on the Helmet Cam. Despite being banged up in the crash, the device seemed to be working fine. Derek pawed through the items in the beached airboat until he came across Link’s jug of water, which he guzzled heedlessly.
The night air thrummed and ticked with insects, and an occasional rustle came from deep in the brushy hammock. He stretched out on one of the airboat’s bench seats and stared up at the sky, which was again filling with clouds. The unfriendly moon remained out of sight.
His stomach gurgled, and he desperately hoped it wasn’t the frog, seeking escape. A fabulously clever idea entered his head: he would record a video of himself morphing into a vampire for Expedition Survival! The ratings for such a show would be sensational!
Derek activated the small camera connected to the Helmet Cam and propped it on the boat’s driving platform. Illuminated only by the slender spray of light, he positioned himself in front of the dime-sized eye of the lens and began to relate his frightful story:
“Mmmph?hrrro?oofff?tteee?eblah?hhkkk?tunnn?ghhh…”
He was unable to speak regular words, of course, owing to the swollen condition of his tongue. He tried several times, but all that tumbled out was gibberish. Eventually he turned off the Helmet Cam and lay back down to itch and brood.
Derek wasn’t in a good place, either physically or emotionally. Although the bat that had chomped him wasn’t carrying rabies, the germs from its saliva were toxic enough to blur his pampered sense of reality. In his overheated mind, the Night Wing vampire movies now loomed as true to life as a National Geographic nature documentary.
Another search of Link’s airboat turned up a packet of leathery pork rinds that Derek struggled to swallow. His wounded tongue remained a major obstacle. A heron cawed in the distance, but to Derek it might as well have been a zombie calling.
He huddled in the boat and shut his eyes. Once more, his thoughts turned to food-specifically, the scrumptious dessert tray delivered nightly to his hotel suite at the Empresario. He could practically smell the spicy carrot cake and taste the silky creme brulee…
The dark side will never own me, Derek vowed to himself, repeating the mystic line from Dax Mangold. Eee- ka-laro! Eee-ka-laro! Gumbo mucho eee-ka-laro!
NINETEEN
Wahoo awoke before sunrise and chased off a family of raccoons that was snooping around the tents, scrounging for food. The low sky promised more rain, so he zipped on the fancy weather jacket given to him by Raven Stark.
Mickey Cray came out of the tent. He looked bleary and haggard.
“How many fingers, Pop?” Wahoo held up two.
“Aw, I’m just fine.”
“No headache?”
“I slept poorly, that’s all.”
Wahoo knew why. His father was worried.
“How long do you think Derek can last out there?”
“Depends,” Mickey said. “If he flipped that airboat, he’s dead already. The prop would chop him into slaw.”
“Say he didn’t crash the boat. Say he just ran the gas tank dry.”
Wahoo’s father thought about it. “Well, the guy’s got plenty of body fat. It’ll take him a while to starve.”
“A week?” Wahoo asked.
“At least. Unless he does somethin’ stupid.”
That’s what everybody on the crew was afraid of, too. Wahoo asked his father if he thought Derek had gone crazy.
“Who could tell the difference?” Mickey said.
Tracking down a spacey TV star was not what he’d been hired to do. In fact, it was his first manhunt. That’s why he’d tossed and turned all night. Although he had no respect for Derek Badger, Mickey was distressed by the thought of the man turning up dead-or not turning up at all.
Tuna emerged from her tent and declared she was ready for coffee and a microwaved burrito. On the walk to Sickler’s shop they stopped at the dock, where the TV crew and the airboat drivers were getting a pre-search pep talk from Raven. Link was there, too, looking glum. Clearly the fate of his airboat was more important to him than the fate of Derek Badger. To Wahoo’s surprise, Mickey was sympathetic.
“That boat’s his whole life,” he said in a low voice. “He probably built the darn thing himself.”
“He tried to run you over, Pop.”
Mickey smiled. “If that’s what he meant to do, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be standin’ here right now.”
Raven was perched on an equipment box, talking at the top of her voice. “Today’s the day, okay? We’re going to find Mr. Badger and bring him back safe and sound! Are we clear?”
There was a polite murmur of agreement, but Wahoo got the sense that nobody in the search party was bubbling with optimism. The weather looked ugly, and a distant quake of thunder caused one of the Miccosukee drivers to whistle unhappily. Anybody who knew the Everglades understood it was a bad place to be in an electrical
