that were set in gravel beneath the rails-his dad had told him there were three thousand planks for every mile of track. Wahoo didn’t believe it.
He walked slowly to make sure he counted each tie, and he recited each number out loud. At 104, the rails began to hum. Wahoo turned.
Speeding toward him was a freight train pulled by a dirty blue locomotive.
In Hollywood movies, trains always blow a long whistle when something appears ahead on the tracks. That didn’t happen. Wahoo wasn’t very tall, so the engineer might not have seen him.
Time crawled. Wahoo should have been terrified, but he wasn’t. He should have waved his arms, but he didn’t; he just stood there feeling the rumble in the soles of his feet. The train wasn’t slowing down, yet Wahoo’s legs seemed in no hurry to move. Later his father would tell him the locomotive was going fifty-eight miles an hour. That Wahoo believed.
The tracks actually began to vibrate as the locomotive drew close. Its headlight was like a blazing white eyeball. With only seconds to spare, a life-or-death switch went off in Wahoo’s mind. He snapped out of his odd trance and jumped from the rails.
What he remembered most clearly was the incredible whoosh of noise-coal cars, tankers, flatbeds, boxcars flying past in a blur-as he crouched only a few feet away. Covering his ears didn’t help much. For days afterward he awoke to the fearsome sound of that train in his head.
The sensation rushed back to him now, the difference being that he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Tuna was huddled beside him and Link was sprawled at his feet. Through gusty winds and sopping rain, another airboat was definitely roaring in their direction.
Wahoo thought: Whoever’s driving that thing must be crazy.
Their own airboat had drifted into a tall patch of saw grass, making it even more difficult for them to be seen. Wahoo feared they would accidentally be run over.
His options were limited. One was to stand on top of the propeller’s safety cage and hope the other boaters would spot him in time-although that was risky, with so much lightning in the sky. The elevated metal cage was a magnet for electricity.
Still, Wahoo knew he had to flag down help. Link needed a doctor, and the approaching vessel might be the only one to pass so close for hours, or even days.
“Lie flat,” he told Tuna, “in case they crash into us.”
She got down next to Link. “What about you?” she called up to Wahoo.
“Just stay low,” he said, and scrambled ape-style up on the safety cage.
There, gritting into the wind, he made himself as tall as possible. For balance he wedged the waterlogged toes of his sneakers into the wire mesh. He hoped that the Expedition Survival! jacket would make him stand out, a glossy blue beacon above the grassy brown horizon.
Although Wahoo still couldn’t see the other airboat, he knew it had to be very near-the high buzz of the engine cut through the weather like a million angry wasps. As the noise grew louder, uncomfortably loud, he felt the same racing sense of anticipation as he did all those years ago on the train tracks. Only this time he wouldn’t freeze.
A violet flash in the clouds was followed by a thunderclap that made him wobble.
“Get down, dummy!” Tuna shouted.
“No!” Wahoo fixed his concentration on the engine sound. He squinted fiercely into the rain and prepared to shout with all his might.
A sparkle-green airboat burst from the mist, a streaking silhouette that crossed perhaps forty yards behind the stern. The good news was that it wasn’t going to hit him. The bad news was that the two men on board were looking the other way.
Wahoo began to wave and holler-then, suddenly, he stopped.
Tuna watched him leap down so fast that he left his shoes stuck in the safety cage. He lay with his cheek pressed to the deck and he didn’t stir until the other boat was gone, a faint drone in the distance.
“What’s wrong?” Tuna asked.
“We’ve gotta wake him up.” Wahoo was shaking one of Link’s shoulders. “I don’t know how to drive this stupid thing. Help me wake him up.”
“Take it easy, Lance. The dude’s been shot, remember?”
“You don’t understand.” Wahoo’s voice was taut. “Your dad was in that other airboat!”
Tuna looked puzzled. “Are you sure?”
“It was definitely him,” Wahoo said.
“But Daddy doesn’t know how to drive one of those things.”
“No, my dad was the driver. Your dad was the one with the gun.”
The color left Tuna’s cheeks. “Did he see us?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh God. He must be out hunting for me.”
“Well, now we’re going hunting for him.” Wahoo pinched one of Link’s grimy fingertips. “Come on, man, wake up!”
TWENTY-ONE
Derek Badger probably would have died if he hadn’t been sitting on the Helmet Cam.
The lightning bolt shot down the trunk of the bay tree and came out at the roots, striking the metal headpiece and launching Derek like a bomb.
He woke up later in a tingling daze, clueless about what had happened. For a while he failed to notice that the seat of his pants was smoldering, a wisp of smoke rising from the matted leaves where he sat. He picked up the Helmet Cam and stared curiously at the scorched, fist-sized hole. It was a mystery.
In fact, the whole morning was a blank. The lightning strike had wiped out all memory of the storm. Still, Derek felt different, changed in some important way. At first a ringing filled his eardrums like the bell of a fire truck, though gradually it faded to a dull hum. Then he noticed a fluttery tickle running in a weird current up and down his body. It made him want to flap his arms and try to fly, like a hummingbird.
Or maybe a bat.
Finally! Derek thought. It’s really happening.
Oddly, he was no longer hungry. In fact, the thought of chocolate eclairs made him queasy. To Derek it was proof that his mutation from mortal to vampire was in progress, for the vampires in the Night Wing movies showed no interest in food. They hungered only for human blood.
Standing up, he felt a painful sensation on his butt. Reaching around, he discovered a hole in the backside of his khaki shorts, and inside that hole was a tender wound-a small burn caused by the lightning bolt punching through the Helmet Cam, which of course Derek didn’t recall.
“It’s a mark!” he exclaimed. “The mark of the undead!”
Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm. The jolt from the deflected lightning had frayed Derek’s last fragile link to reality. Combined with the nagging effects of the bat infection, it had left him marooned in an imaginary underworld where evil night creepers roamed.
“I must resist,” he whispered to himself.
Dizzily he made his way out of the trees to the place where he’d grounded the airboat. With dismay he saw it was now full of rainwater, way too heavy to move. A leopard frog swam happy circles between the seats. Derek felt no urge to snack on it. He shivered from the remains of his fever and returned to the shelter of the woods.
In Revenge of the Blood Moon, the last of the Night Wing series, Dax Mangold took refuge in Slackjaw Forest, where he constructed a sleeping platform in the boughs of a towering wing nut tree in order to be safe from prowling critters.
Derek had used a similar platform during an episode of Expedition Survival! in Sumatra. The structure had been built by local villagers and not by Derek himself, contrary to what he’d told his TV audience. Derek had been snoozing in an air-conditioned hotel suite two hundred miles away while the treetop hammock was being erected,
