Chomp (16 page)

“What do you mean by ‘gone’?” Gerry Germaine asked Raven, who had contacted him on her satellite phone from the Everglades.

“Last night he was bitten by a bat.”

“What else is new?”

“A seriously ticked-off bat. Derek was bleeding all over the place,” Raven said. “And this morning, when we checked his tent, he was gone.”

“Hmmm.”

“It appears that he stole—let’s say ‘borrowed’—an airboat. We don’t know why.”

“Where did that klutz learn to drive an airboat?” wondered Gerry Germaine.

“Two years ago we taped that show in the Louisiana bayou. The one where Derek finds an old beat-up airboat and uses his Swiss army knife to fix the engine so he can escape—remember?”

“I remember the bills,” Gerry Germaine said. “Twenty-four hundred bucks we paid some Cajun fisherman for ‘vessel repairs.’ ”

Raven cleared her throat. “That’s the one. Derek crashed it into a cypress stump.”

“Naturally.” In his mind, Gerry Germaine was sorting through the options. “What’s your plan to find him?”

“Well, the local sheriff has a search team.”

“Absolutely not. I don’t want to see this all over the media.”

“But he’s hurt,” Raven said. “He needs help.”

“How badly hurt? You think he might … die?” Gerry Germaine had pondered such coldhearted fantasies before. It would be a humongous night for the show’s TV ratings if Derek Badger failed to survive one of his survival expeditions. It would also open the way for him to be replaced with another actor who wasn’t as pompous, demanding and clumsy. Plenty of guys would jump at the job, for half the pay.

Raven said, “It’s possible the bat had rabies. Derek could be losing his mind.”

Out of curiosity, Gerry Germaine Googled “rabies symptoms” on his laptop.

“We need to keep this ultra-hush-hush,” he said, “especially if your boy’s gone off the deep end. The show definitely doesn’t need that kind of publicity.”

He could easily imagine the scene: Derek blathering and
wild-eyed as deputies hauled him out of the marsh. There was no telling what kind of nutty nonsense the guy might spout with news cameras poking in his face. The Untamed Channel was a family network, run by fussy businesspeople who didn’t like being embarrassed.

“No cops yet,” Gerry Germaine said firmly.

Raven was silent on the other end.

“Get the crew together and do what you can to find him.”

“And if we can’t?” Raven asked.

“Then call me back.”

“We’ll need the helicopter, Gerry.”

“Whoa, there, missy. Badger’s contract says he gets a chopper ride back to his hotel every night. It doesn’t say a word about chartering one of those fuel hogs if he happens to go bonkers and runs away. You know what it costs to keep a helicopter in the air?”

“Eight hundred dollars an hour,” Raven said, “last time I checked.”

“More like a thousand.”

Raven was dumbfounded that Gerry Germaine was giving her grief about hiring the chopper to help with the search.

“Four hours,” he told her, “not a minute more.”

“But this is a man’s life we’re talking about!”

“Good luck,” said Gerry Germaine.

He hung up the phone and continued reading on his
office laptop. Rabies, it seemed, was a most unpleasant 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.”

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 éclairs, his favorite dessert. Chocolate éclairs 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.”