Chapter 63. Vampires
Island of Boyuca. Bay of Honduras
The Bat House
Ka’-an wasn’t worried when he entered the Bat House. He felt confident that he had the easiest of all the houses. Rabies was the biggest worry about bats, but he had been vaccinated for rabies as a teenager. Ka’-an knew that many varieties of bats didn’t even come near humans, choosing instead to eat fruit and insects. The only bat known to attack mammals was the vampire bat, which needed to ingest blood every two days. These bats were common in South America, and in Central America where Ka’-an was born. They were known to bite the ankles of cattle and other mammals. But even if a vampire bat bit him, the most it might do is cause an infection. If he could get off this island quickly enough, he could get antibiotics and he would be fine. It certainly wasn’t as tough as facing jaguars.
Ka’-an started by taking out Pete’s flashlight from his pocket. When the party left the Mannequin Room, Ka’-an had taken extra flashlight batteries out of his pack and inserted them into the device. He shined the light near the ceiling. He was disgusted and slightly startled by the swarms of bats hanging off the ceiling. The bats were equally startled by the light, and flew away toward the back of the stone hut to get out of the light. He shined his light on a few of the bats, taking note of their appearance. These definitely looked like vampire bats.
He wished he had long pants and long sleeves. The T-shirt and shorts were going to leave the warm flesh of his arms and legs and neck an open target for the bats. But he had a solution for that. Duct tape. As soon as he learned that he was going in the Bat House, Ka’-an had quickly slipped the roll of duct tape from his pack and into his right pocket. He pulled his white tube socks as high up on his leg as they would go, and then fastened a piece of the gray tape so that the top of the sock was fastened to his shin. Then he rolled the gray tape around and around his leg, all the way up to his groin, wrapping himself like a duct-taped mummy. He did the same thing on his other leg, and then on his arms. Finally, he wrapped his neck in the tape.
Then he took the bandana from his head and tied it around his nose like a Wild West bandit. Then he curled on his side, with his face facing the stone wall. As a final measure, he stood the flashlight on its bottom end, facing toward the ceiling. A beam of light shined from the flashlight to the ceiling. Ka’-an knew that vampire bats only fed when there was total darkness. The flashlight should ward them off until the new batteries went dead. Then he hoped that the duct tape would protect him.
Surprisingly, Ka’-an was able to get to sleep right away. At about two in the morning, the flashlight went out. The feeding instinct of the vampire bats kicked in. Able to sense the best place to bite Ka’-an’s body with the thermal infrared receptors in their noses, the bats all swarmed in the air and landed on the ground by Ka’-an’s feet. Doing an odd kind of hopping dance, the vampire bats approached Ka’-an. Within minutes, Ka’-an was covered in bats.
Ka’-an, oblivious to the attack, continued sleeping for several hours. At about five in the morning, Ka’-an had an urge to urinate, and this disturbed his sleep. He felt itchy, like something was itching on his face, and he moved his hand to his face to scratch it. His hand felt something hairy and strange. A neuron fired in Ka’-an’s brain, and he yelled, jumping up to his feet. He was covered in vampire bats, which were clinging to every part of his body. He shook furiously, like a dog shaking off the water after a good bath. The bats, for the most part, scattered and flew back to their roost in the ceiling on the far side of the cave. Ka’-an felt himself in the dark. He had little painful pinprick sensations over his entire face and neck. He noticed, even in the darkness, that the sweat from his skin had worn off the stickiness of the duct tape in several places on his body. He also felt a little bit of stinging pain in the groin area. He had a momentary ugly thought, and put his hand down his pants. There was something clinging in his pants. Disgusted, he moved his hand all over his scrotum, and three bats flew out of his pants. He thought he was going to vomit.
He tried to get the flashlight to work again. He took out the batteries and re-inserted them. This turned on a faint light for about ten seconds. He quickly inspected his body. While he couldn’t see much, he could see tiny red cuts on his hands. “Don’t worry about it,” he thought. “They are just cuts. I’ll get out of here, and everything will be fine.” For the next hour, until the wooden door on the stone hut finally opened, he stood with his back to the wall, waving and kicking off bats until he was spent from exhaustion. He wondered how the others were doing.