(Title carefully worded to avoid post removal)

We've been doing quite a bit of vacationing recently. We got back from our most recent vacation about a month ago.

One week ago I started getting one bite per night, right around my right knee area. It happened three more times (only one night, there were two bites right next to each other) and this morning I woke up with a bite on my kneecap.

A couple of days ago I also found two black splotches on the sheet right at the same area

I tore the bed apart and looked under the bed that was very dirty. Some old tissue had fallen under the bed, and I found many tiny bugs that made their home inside the tissue: 1 2 3

I also found a lot of evidence of something slightly bigger that had molted out of its old skin and left it behind, like a husk of exoskeleton.

Then, my girlfriend pulled back one of the bed planks and there it was, unmistakable: The fucker that had been biting me in my sleep. It was still pretty full from having fed just ~14 hours earlier.

I crushed it and quickly flushed what was left of it. We tore the ENTIRE bed area apart down to the frame, wiping, vacuuming and cleaning every inch of that area. We found no other bedbugs or signs of bedbugs down there (splotching, bedbug poo, etc).

My theory is that one of the bags we put in a corner of a hotel room while vacationing picked up a single hitch-hiker, when we came back a month ago the bags went in the hallway outside of the room. Over the course of a month, the bedbug must have meandered over to the bed and perhaps even lived under there for a while, molting, until it started biting at night (a week ago).

Currently have diatomaceous earth arriving tomorrow and will dust the ENTIRE room with it, with a focus on every nook and cranny of the bed. I'm even planning on dusting the sheets, bedboards, pillows, and everything with the diatomaceous earth. Hopefully if any eggs will hatch, they will have no choice but to walk through the diatomaceous earth and they will therefore die.

My questions are: What are the chances that there was only one? How effective will a full DE dusting be? And most importantly, what the hell were the other bugs living in the tissue underneath the bed?