I woke the next morning to a shallow light focusing on my eyes. Sarah’s arms thrashing and her legs kicking, caused by dreams, moving her body out of the sleeping bag. I checked her pulse to see if she was Ok but something black was attached to her leg. I tried swatting it but was unsuccessful. Rubbing my eyes then taking a closer look, my head snapped back, it was feeding on her leg.
My shouting and wild hitting at the creature woke Shaun. “What is it?” I screamed hitting at it again and again. But I couldn’t dislodge it. “It has sharp teeth and fur,” I said to Shaun.
Shaun jumped to his feet and slid on his knees to Sarah’s side. Bending over her, he tried extricating its teeth from her dry pale flesh.
“Get it off of me. Get it off of me,” she screamed. Her eyes rolled back and she collapsed. I didn’t know whether she fainted from the sight of the creature or that she had lost too much blood.
“It’s a bat. A vampire bat,” Shaun shouted reaching for its wings and head and pulling its fangs out of her leg. She tried to open her eyes. Already weak from the ordeal of losing both parents and now this, I thought. A creature was draining what little blood was left in her poor tortured body.
“I don’t think he could have drank a lot of blood. He doesn’t look full,” Shaun said turning to me with the thing in his hand who was as hungry as we were. Shaun grabbed his wings and turned him over. “I think we should kill it and then eat it, it’s the size of a small bird. Looks like enough meat for us,” Shaun said with his eyes shining. The thought of fresh meat had affected his reasoning. A dead or live animal was potential food.
“Is it safe to eat?” I asked locking eyes with Shaun to validate whether it was Ok to eat it. We would eat it anyway if it meant one more day of life.
“I don’t know? What choice do we have?” Shaun said.
“None,” I answered.
“I’m not eating anything that can suck my blood,” Sarah said dragging her small body against the wall of the cave. She managed to sit without help, and I examined her wound. There were two small breaks in her skin. I pulled a little first aid kit from my shoulder bag and rubbed the wound with a homemade solution, and then I put a bandage over it. My mother had thought of everything. She always knew we would need the alcohol one day as well as the food she stashed away and canned.
Sarah raised her head and glanced my way and said, “It’s only a tablespoon of blood.” I looked at her.
“Only fifteen milliliters,” she said looking confident that it hadn’t taken more. She couldn’t afford to lose one milliliter of blood. She would be weak and probably have difficulty walking. I had planned to give her my ration of canned food before this occurred, but now she needed much more than that, and I doubt Shaun would be so generous.
“We have to get out or here,” I said to her looking around with fear.
“Maybe there are more of them?” she added.
“I hope so. If you see one there will be more. Look at the mess on the floor of this cave. They’ve been here a long time,” Shaun said walking away from us holding the LED lamp over his head.
“Don’t go far. I’ll light a fire and cook it. We can’t stay here long,” I shouted.
Turning my head, clenching my teeth, grimacing, I hit the bat with a rock. Its blood made a small stain on my tee shirt. That was the first time I killed something that I wouldn’t consider eating. Maybe next time it would be easy—killing I mean.
I lit the fire and singed the hair off of the bat so we could stomach it. The smell was gut wrenching and I almost vomited. My stomach being empty, everything was a dry heave. You had to have something there and there was nothing. Not even liquid.
“Bats are like us you know,” Sarah said looking up into my eyes as I bit through the body. “They are mammals. But they are dirty animals that carry disease. Maybe rabies,” she said crinkling her nose and shivering. It made me shiver thinking about what I was eating.
I held my nose and swallowed it. That was how I first managed to eat worms. I knew I had to eat to live not live to eat. That was a lesson my father taught. Everything was potential food if it wasn’t poisonous and it wasn’t human flesh.
“All right that’s enough.” I narrowed my eyes. “If I hear anymore I won’t be able to enjoy this meat,” I said. As I ate I knew this wasn’t the meat my mother and father spoke of. I saved some for Shaun but it wasn’t long before he came back with two more bats.
“There must be water somewhere or insects otherwise the bats wouldn’t be in the cave,” I said to Shaun.
“These are vampire bats. You find them in Central and South America,” Shaun said watching what was left of the bat, his mouth salivating. I looked up at Shaun. “I learned this in the old Encyclopedias my father had as a child. They were passed on by our grandfather. These books lasted longer than the internet,” he said.
I tried to forget the bitter taste in my mouth.
I smiled, but that didn’t tell me why the bats were there when everything appeared dead around the cave. It was as if Shaun had read my mind and he continued, “There are only a few left because these are males. The females are somewhere else or don’t exist anymore. This species could have lived on all the plant and insect eating bats.”
“These bats can live up to fifteen years with a good food supply,” he said examining them. They wiggled around and let out a shriek when he dropped them into a mason jar. He screwed the top on, took out his knife, and punched holes in the top. “Probably migrated because of the food supply was low. No animals, no fish, no plants,” Shaun said.
“What about water?” I questioned.
“They don’t drink much water. They could probably drink the sweat from the walls of the cave.” Shaun glanced at me and said, “I looked and there was no water and no more bats but these.” He paused looking strange.
“What?” I questioned.
“There are human bones with skulls scattered around the cave in each section. They’re not as old as the ones we stepped over at the mouth of the cave. I don’t know what that means and I don’t want to find out.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. We doused the fire with sand and brought along the live bats for later. I helped Sarah to her feet. We needed her to carry a few things and since she had been getting rations from me and now Shaun, she managed to carry a light back pack.
We helped her out of the cave and she began to walk on her own. I caught up with Shaun.
Sarah was still dragging behind us. “We will have to get something to make a sleigh and we can pull it like the farmers use to do. Father said that he pulled a plow when the tractors and gas gave out. We can put food and blankets on it and Sarah too. Like that we can mover quicker.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“It’s the best one yet,” I said to him. I turned my eyes away because I didn’t want to hear anymore of—we should leave Sarah. That would never be an alternative. I would die first and I knew that was a high probability if I didn’t find a way where we could cover more miles a day. We could run out of water and food before we reached the first well.