Chomp j-4 Page 13

  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 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 mis
sing 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.

  EIGHTEEN

  They searched all afternoon and couldn’t find Derek Badger. The helicopter had to quit early because of mechanical trouble with something called a trim actuator. When the boats returned at sunset to Sickler’s dock, the mood was grim.

  Contrary to what TV viewers were led to believe, never in the history of Expedition Survival! had Derek actually been lost. He always stayed close to the snacks and beverages.

  Raven had no confidence that the made-for-television survivalist would last very long alone in the Everglades, a fear shared by the show’s director. Derek did not have a surplus of common sense, and it was only a matter of time before he accidentally ate a toxic berry or stepped on a deadly cottonmouth.

  Assuming he wasn’t already dying of rabies.

  “You’re Mr. Expert,” Raven said sharply to Mickey Cray. “Any brilliant ideas?”

  “Yeah. We try again tomorrow.”

  The director looked up from his iPhone. “Bummer. The forecast calls for more rain.”

  “So we get wet,” said Mickey.

  Raven threw up her hands. “That’s your plan? Seriously? We get wet?”

  “It’s big country out there, lady. Plus, we’re hunting for a knucklehead who doesn’t want to be found.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! Why would Derek be hiding?”

  “Beats me. Critters I can figure out just fine. People like him? I got no clue what goes on in their itty-bitty brains.”

  Link, who’d hardly spoken a word all day, shocked the group by saying: “That man be wreckin’ my airboat, I break him in two.” He demonstrated by snapping a tree branch over one knee.

  Raven immediately called for a private strategy session in Derek’s motor coach. Mickey told Wahoo and Tuna to set up the tents while he was gone.

  They selected an open area near some picnic tables at the edge of Sickler’s property. The mosquitoes were thick and fearless, stinging any patch of bare flesh that wasn’t coated with bug repellent-eyelids, ea
rlobes, even armpits. Tuna and Wahoo swatted themselves constantly as they worked. Their cheeks, already windburned from the airboat ride, became pink and puffy from self-inflicted slaps.

  Tuna paused to examine a mashed attacker in the palm of her hand.

  “Okay, what’s the verdict?” Wahoo said.

  “I’m guessing Aedes aegypti.” She flicked the dead insect away. “There are forty-three different species of mosquitoes in the Everglades, but only thirteen kinds like to bite humans. Isn’t that weird?”

  Wahoo smiled ruefully. “Where are the friendly ones?”

  After the tents were in place, he and Tuna unrolled their sleeping bags. She wanted to build a campfire, but a big yellow sign warned against it. As darkness fell, they ate a tube of Pringles and washed it down with Gatorade. Wahoo was glad that Tuna seemed her usual perky self again.

  “Who gave you the fish name?” she asked, out of the blue.

  He told her about the agreement his parents had made soon after they were married. His mom would choose the name of the first baby-who turned out to be Julie, his older sister-and his father would get to name the next one.

  “Too bad for you,” said Tuna.

  “When Pop was little, his favorite pro wrestler was a guy called Wahoo McDaniel. He was part Choctaw Indian, strong as a bear. He also played linebacker for the Dolphins.”

  “What’s your mom think? Does she seriously call you Wahoo?”

  “She’s not thrilled about it, but she says a deal’s a deal.”

  “You a wrestler, Lance?”

  “Nope. I’m not on the football team, either.”

  “But don’t you get picked on at school? Because of that goofy name?”

  “I used to,” Wahoo said, “until this happened.” He wiggled the bony nub where his right thumb once had been. “Now the jocks leave me alone. Anybody who gets bitten by a gator and walks away, they think he must be super-tough. But that’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Tuna opened her tote bag and saw, among her journals and nature books, the Expedition Survival! script. “I guess we can throw this thing away,” she said.