Chomp

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 head over heels.

He landed on his Helmet Cam, bounced twice and then rolled into a bitter-smelling thicket of poison ivy. There he lay, scratching frantically, until a spear of sunshine lanced through the leafy canopy and caught him squarely in the eyes.

Derek recalled with alarm that daylight caused vampires to either melt or catch fire, possibly both. In a panic he crawled back to the mired boat and scrunched beneath its broad bow, where he cowered like an overgrown mole, shielding his face with the freshly dented Helmet Cam.

He braced against the dreaded first symptoms of vampire-hood by reciting a chant of resistance that Dax Mangold kept repeating in Revenge of the Blood Moon:

“Eee-ka-laro! Eee-ka-laro! Gumbo mucho eee-ka-laro!”

The English translation was not known to Derek, but the word eee-ka-laro made him think of eclairs, his favorite dessert. Chocolate eclairs filled with French vanilla custard!

Soon Derek’s stomach began snarling with hunger, a beast more bold and ferocious than any mere vampire.***

Sickler wasn’t losing any sleep over the missing survivalist. The longer Derek Badger stayed lost, the better it would be for Sickler’s business.

Before setting off on the search, the airboat drivers and TV crew had loaded up on bottled water, sodas, coffee, snacks and sunscreen at Sickler’s souvenir shop. Raven Stark had warned Sickler not to tell a soul that Derek was missing because it might leak to the media and then snoopy reporters would show up. Sickler had sort of agreed to keep his mouth shut. It would be good publicity for the shop if he got his face on the evening news, but for now he was willing to wait.

He was sitting alone, devouring a box of powdered donuts behind the counter, when a burly, unshaven man opened the screen door. The man was too tan to be a tourist. He wore a faded Buffalo Bills jersey, baggy gray gym shorts and soiled sneakers with no laces. His hair was matted, and his eyes were red-rimmed and oozy.

“Can I help you?” Sickler asked.

“I believe so.”

“You look thirsty, sport. Want a soda?”

“Beer,” the man said.

“Sure.”

“In a bottle, if you got one.”

“Absolutely.”

“Is that real or fake?” The man pointed at the bleached skull of a fox that was displayed on a pine shelf above the microwave.

“Course it’s real.” Sickler managed to sound indignant. “Shot it myself,” he said, which was a lie. “It’s yours for forty bucks.”

“No thanks.”

“How about thirty?”

“How ’bout lettin’ me enjoy my brew?” The man swigged down half the bottle before he spoke again. “I’m tryin’ to find somebody.”

Sickler thought instantly of Derek Badger, but it didn’t add up. The stranger didn’t look like a TV reporter.

“Who’re you lookin’ for? What’s his name?”

“Not he,” the man said. “It’s a she.”

Sickler smiled and licked the sugary dust from another donut. “We don’t get lots of women coming through here, sport. I’m pretty sure I’d remember.”

The man slapped a wallet-sized photograph on the countertop. “She’s not a woman,” he said gruffly. “She’s my daughter.”

It was a school picture of the scrawny girl who’d been hanging around with Derek Badger’s television crew. She looked exactly the same, except that in the photo she didn’t have a black eye.

“She’s real sick,” the man said. “She run off without her medicine.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Sickler asked.

“It’s called Floyd’s disease. She could die from it.”

“Never heard of that one. Floyd’s disease?”

“It’s rare,” the man said. “Only one out of twenty-two million kids get it is what the doctors told us.”

Sickler had seen enough trouble over the years that he wasn’t looking for more. Maybe the stranger was telling the truth, and maybe he wasn’t. In any case, Sickler had no desire to get in the middle of a family hassle.

He pushed the girl’s photograph away. “Sorry. She don’t look familiar.”

“Oh, is that right?” The man lunged across the counter and hissed, “She called me from here, Slim!”

Sickler shoved him back. He was larger than the stranger-at nearly three hundred pounds, he was larger than almost everybody-but he was hopelessly out of shape. That’s why he kept a claw hammer behind the counter.

He took it out and said, “Settle down, sport.”

The man raised his hands apologetically. “Sorry, buddy. I just gotta find her, that’s all, before she goes into a coma or somethin’. You can put that hammer away; I won’t make no trouble.”

Sickler didn’t put it away. He said, “We get lots of tourists come in off the highway to borrow the phone when their cell batteries go dead. I don’t pay attention to what they look like, or their kids.”

“She’s not a tourist.”

The shop owner didn’t like that the man had grabbed at him, or the meanness in the man’s eyes. The “Slim” wisecrack was out of line, too.

“I told you-the girl don’t look familiar. Now I got work to do, so be on your way.”

“Hold on-”

“But first, pay for the beer.” Sickler tapped the claw hammer on the countertop. “Four bucks even.”

The stranger thumbed out the cash from a grimy wad. “Her name’s Tuna.”

“Tina?”

“No. Tuna.”

“Like the fish?”

“She said on the phone she was in Aruba,” the man said, “making lists of moths and butterflies. She told me not to worry, said she hitched a ride on a sailboat with some circus folks.”

“Aruba?” Sickler laughed. “That’s quite a story.”

“Thing is, I got caller ID on my cell. That’s how I know for a fact she was here.”

Oh great, Sickler thought.

“The name of this place came up on my phone when she called,” the man went on. “I looked up your address on the Internet, and here I am.”

Sickler wasn’t ever going to admit that he knew the girl, or that he’d charged her two bucks to use his office phone. “What time did she call you?”

“An hour ago,” the stranger said. He checked his watch. “Make it one hour and eleven minutes.”

“Whatever.” Sickler shrugged. “I wasn’t here; I was over in Naples. But I’ll ask the lady who watches the shop for me, see if she recalls seein’ the girl. That’s the best I can do.”

“I’ll leave her picture with you,” the man said. “Hey, is that your motor coach parked outside? The big black number with tinted windows?”

“Sure is,” Sickler lied again.

“Sweet. How much that bad boy set you back?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“I got a Winnebago Chieftain that’s seen better days. Lucky I don’t have to drive it far.”

Sickler said, “Hey, tell me somethin’.”

“Sure.”

“Why would this girl-”

“My daughter,” the stranger interjected.

“Why would she call to say she’s in Aruba if she ain’t? Why the heck would she lie about somethin’ like that to her own daddy?”

The man finished his beer with a burp and headed for the door. “Long story,” he said.

I’ll bet it is, thought Sickler.