Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  “Then again,” and Timothy’s face warped into something just to the right of sympathy, “I can’t be mad at you. I know all-too-well how powerful those unbalanced chemicals in your brain can be when it comes to obscuring obvious reason.” Timothy looked back down at the blue vials. “But . . . I can help you balance your point-of-view . . .”

  Walter took a step forward, taking a deep breath. Holding frantic panic just at bay, he told himself that he could do this. He had to do this.

  Out loud he said, “Maybe . . . maybe a small dose? Like you took? Just so I can see?”

  Timothy hesitated, scanning Walter with renewed interest.

  “Maybe I was too quick to judge you, Walter. Yes, I will give you the same dosage that I gave myself.”

  Timothy turned once again to the vials, while, with lucky timing, Walter stole another peek at the shelf to his left from his marginally improved angle. With a jolt to his already weakened gut he saw it: a large power strip on the dirt floor, resting at the base of the shelf. All the orange power cords ran through it . . . all the lights. And the power switch was no more than two yards from his left foot . . .

  Timothy selected a vial of the Blue Stew, glanced at Walter, and then looked back over to the table for something else.

  Walter now took one quick, jerky side-step towards the power strip. His body and mind had lost all grace. His heart was going haywire, while his brain was whirring with imaginings of how this could go terribly wrong . . . how, even in the dark—and this was assuming the power strip did feed all the lights—it wouldn’t be hard for Timothy grab the rifle and squeeze off a few shots in the direction of the stairs, spilling his blood as he fled. At the thought, Walter could almost feel the imagined bullets ripping through his hammering chest.

  But this was his best—his only chance. He’d seen what had happened to three of the other men who had ingested the Blue Stew. That was not the way he wanted to go.

  “Walter,” Timothy was holding one full vial of the Blue Stew and one empty vial. With a sinking feeling, Walter thought he saw Timothy glance in the direction of the power strip, now less than two yards from Walter. Though, the backlighting made it impossible to be certain.

  “Walter, please step all the way in,” and now Timothy transferred both vials to one hand and—Walter nearly lost his grip—picked the rifle back up with the other.

  “Yeah, okay,” Walter knew he needed to get Timothy’s guard down again, even if just for a second. “Where do you want me? How do I take it?” Unfortunately, the forced evenness of his voice made him sound more computerized than calm, and the sweat poring freely from his hairline was doing him no favors either.

  Timothy looked at him probingly, the rifle aimed loosely with one hand.

  “You take it just like cough syrup. I have it in liquid-capsule form, too . . . but this works quicker. Come a little closer.”

  This time Walter was pretty sure he saw Timothy’s eyes linger on the power strip beside him, for just a second. He started moving towards Timothy, slowly, before stopping at a distance from the power strip that was still—hopefully—within range of an athletic headfirst lunge.

  Without taking his eyes off of Walter, Timothy now lowered the rifle gradually, and finally let it rest on the table less than an inch from his hip. He didn’t release the gun, not yet.

  There was a wild second in which Walter pictured himself back in the Little Leagues . . . having taken his lead from first base . . . now reading the pitcher . . . A flash of memory from a time galaxies away: the one year he’d played ball, he had never been caught stealing.

  It happened with alarming haste. Timothy took his hand off the gun and parted the empty and full vials into separate hands, put his thumb on a measurement line on the empty one, and began to tip the full one into it.

  Reacting a numb second after Timothy had started to work, Walter twisted on his toes, leaned, and dove.

  There was a moment, midair as he held out his right arm and lined it up to come down on the red illuminated power switch, in which he was convinced that this all must be a dream.

  His hand found its way true through the air, coming down fast on the power strip, while his face met dirt. Head down, he felt wildly for the switch. He never knew what part of his flapping hand hit it, but suddenly all the lights were out.

  Walter then scrambled up off the ground and propelled himself through the blackened basement, ahead and to the left, praying that he had not gotten too badly turned around and would be able to relocate the ladder.

  The sound of smashing glass came from behind, and then a bloodcurdling scream, “Fuck!”

  Was it Walter’s getting away that incited Timothy’s rage, or was it that he’d just dropped a vial of precious Blue Stew?

  Walter hadn’t been holding his arms in front of him as stiffly as he should’ve been, for with all his blind momentum, his arms folded easily as they met wall, and his jaw crashed into something jutting out. It was a powerful shot: his vision might’ve dimmed if it hadn’t already been pitch-black down there, and his mind might’ve dulled if it hadn’t already shut down, running purely on adrenaline as he now was.

  Walter threw a hand at what his jaw had collided with, and as his fingers closed around a smooth, rounded piece of wood, sharp relief washed away the immediate terror: at least he hadn’t sprinted in the wrong direction. But he was hardly out of the lion’s den yet. He jumped up and grabbed the highest ladder rung he could, and, without bothering with his footing, he ripped himself upwards using only upper-body strength.

  That was when the first gunshot blasted from behind Walter, louder than he could’ve imagined, coinciding with a much smaller, and much scarier, wood splintering thwack from someplace a foot or two to beyond his right ear. He almost lost his grip out of raw shock, but he caught himself by pulling a foot onto a midlevel rung, which he then used to frantically propel his body farther up.

  Walter’s head knocked aside a loose floorboard. He hurled both arms up and latched onto the floor of the now dark faux-sauna.

  There was a second shot. He didn’t hear where this bullet hit, yet some odd reflex had him flailing his dangling legs for a terrifying second, as if he could somehow dodge the bullet that had already missed.

  Partly by accident, a kicking foot landed on a high ladder rung, and Walter—in one spontaneous, ungraceful push—flung himself up onto the floor. His knee caught a lip of floorboard on his way up, and he came out sprawling on his chest and face, collecting a few adrenaline-muted wood splinters in his left cheek. He didn’t care: he was out.

  And then the rifle, down below, cracked off another round, this one accompanied by two dissonant splintering sounds from beside and above Walter, where the bullet ripped through the floor and impacted the ceiling.

  Walter sprung off the floor so fast that it might’ve suddenly become white hot, and then he spun around in abrupt horror: It was pitch-black up here too, and he could not—in that moment of overwhelming panic—remember where the door had been.

  “Walter!” hissed an unfamiliar voice from out of the dark, someplace in front of him. Walter was so startled that he nearly stumbled back into the hole behind him.

  “Walter, quick: come with me! I’m here to help!”

  Utterly confused and scared half out of his mind, Walter staggered towards the voice, hunched over like a soldier dodging fire, in no mind to recognize that the low profile actually put him at a disadvantage with the fire coming from below.

  Blinding light swamped his wide eyes, and for a senseless instant Walter thought that he must’ve been shot, before he realized that Timothy, below, had switched the power back on.

  The doorway was straight ahead, and through it Walter now saw the face of the unknown man claiming to be there to help. It could’ve been disconcerting, but in truth it actually earned the stranger some of Walter’s confidence, seeing how the expression on his dark, middle-aged face mirrored his own state-of-mind exactly: shocked, dumbfounded, and scared shitless.


  The stranger backpedaled anxiously into the gloom of night, and as Walter barreled through the doorway, he shouted, “Run! Follow me! I’ll explain later!”

  He turned and broke into a dash, and Walter continued after him, still hunched over like a combatant in a war movie.

  Within seconds they were clear of the flood of light escaping through the sauna door, and were sprinting over soft, black terrain. Walter found that he was following the thumping sounds of the unknown man’s footsteps ahead more than he was following the outline of his body, which he only caught fleeting movements of in the dark grey of the night sky through gaps in the forest canopy.

  Even if Walter had remembered the flashlight in his pocket he—hopefully—would’ve known not to use it, as it would’ve given Timothy a clear target to shoot at or to follow. In situations like this, when one’s mind fails them and their instincts are all that drive them, it is far easier to follow than lead, and that’s what Walter was doing. He bounded along, mostly blind to his surroundings, allowing his fate to rest with this wholly unexplained man.

  At any rate, the stranger possessed some impressive eyesight for not having immediately run them into a tree or over a rock.

  The gunshot reverberated over the land, a little quieter now aboveground, yet somehow larger in scale, and just as dangerous. Walter flinched, grabbed the back of his head reflexively, and kept running in the uncertain wake of the footfalls ahead of him.

  There was another shot, and then, in equal short succession, two more. Each shot came with clear variations in their acoustics, and Walter, with a rush of hope, realized that Timothy was firing his rifle indiscriminately in different directions throughout the black forest.

  Timothy had no idea where they were.

  “Walter! You are lost! I pity you!”

  But it wasn’t pity that twisted Timothy’s fading voice into such an animalistic howl. It was desperate rage.

  This indicator that he was crossing out of the realm of immediate mortal danger helped loosen the icy grip of terror over Walter’s mind. Simple thoughts started to ooze through his brain. The first, reasonably, being: who in the world was he following?

  Before this question could travel anywhere, the inevitable happened: Walter caught a foot on something, twisted midstride, and tumbled to the cold, hard ground.

  He scrambled to get his arms under him, and, while pushing himself up to his knees, looked up to be sure that his anonymous guide had noticed and wasn’t bounding off without him.

  Walter didn’t see anyone at all.

  He had fallen in an empty clearing in the forest—the abundance of faint grey light made his environment apparent without the need to look up to the stars overhead. Walter blinked and turned, in case the fall had twisted him around. He didn’t see anyone in that direction either. Instead, an unnatural something grabbed a hold of his eyes: the shadow of a large circle on the ground. Walter let his eyes stay on it for a dumb, curious second, and the circle took on a better-defined wobbly and grey shape. It was a large stone fire pit, he realized. It must’ve been what he tripped over.

  Another stupid second of inaction passed. In the increasingly revealing glow of the moon and the stars above, Walter saw that there were more than just burnt sticks and logs filling the pit. There were white shafts and lumpy white spheres.

  That was when a fast, horrible chain-reaction of comprehension occurred in Walter’s slow, numb brain: He was looking at the burned remains—the bones and skulls—of animals. Timothy had said that he’d tested his drug on pigs and dogs and things . . . and, what the hell was he doing standing there? Timothy!

  Walter sprung to his feet and swiveled back in the direction he’d first looked, while, from that very direction, a familiar-unfamiliar voice hissed, “Walter, get up! Run!”

  Walter threw himself into the dark forest again, in pursuit of his phantom guide, the icy grip of terror having reclaimed his misfiring mind.

  Chapter 10 – A New Outlook

  They might’ve run forever, as far as Walter could’ve assessed the utterly surreal sprint through the woods.

  He tripped on a few roots and stumbled over patches of loose terrain, but these impediments only staggered his stride, and Walter was able to power through them all without meeting ground again. That his night-vision soon sharpened to a level that his flashlight, on his way upstream, had made impossible was an invaluable factor in his remaining vertical.

  The ever-growing buffer between him and the sauna, after five hour-long minutes, drained some of the frantic, run-for-your-life mentality from Walter, and allowed a deep strangeness to introduce itself as an element in his mind. It easily could’ve been the weirdest moonlight run that any two people had ever been on. This strangeness, however, never once overshadowed the inescapable feeling that at any moment, out of the black behind, a crack of fire could sound, and a bullet could whiz through the back of his skull.

  This deathly crack never sounded, and, improbably, forever came to an end.

  Walter almost ran into the back of his unexplained guide, who had slowed without warning. Stopped short, Walter noticed that his feet felt oddly stiff. He looked down and saw that he was standing on black pavement. Looking up, he saw the road, and, farther along, the bridge, all lit in the heavily muted shades of the middle of the night.

  “There. That’s my car up there,” said the man in a voice Walter hadn’t heard out of him yet, a strong voice not shaped around urgent, mortal fear.

  Walter now saw the car, the green Subaru (or, at the time, grey) that he had passed by without seeing on his way upstream, forever ago.

  The man sped up, moving towards it.

  “I am friends with Tom Corey. Let’s get out of this valley and call him immediately.”

  Same as before, Walter didn’t say anything, he just followed. It seemed odd, after their infinite run, rediscovering that there was more to life than the mere act of sprinting through the woods. There was talking and there was driving, apparently.

  Digging in his pocket for his keys, the man gave a brisk introduction, “My name is Braylen Taylor, by the way. I’m a tracker. I was out looking for Victim Number Two.”

  Walter paused. “What were you doing upstream of the bridge . . . so late?”

  “Just get in the car first.” Braylen opened the driver-side door, “Let’s get the hell away from here. I’ll explain everything.”

  Walter went around to the passenger side door with renewed haste, now reminded that the danger hadn’t fully passed. He slipped in as Braylen started the car.

  The second Walter yanked his door shut, before he could think to buckle-up, Braylen stepped on the gas. The rushing sound of dirt being torn up shortly shifted into the squealing of rubber being laid over pavement, and they flung out onto the road and over the bridge.

  Braylen handed Walter his cell-phone.

  “Tell me the instant we have service.”

  “Okay,” Walter flipped the phone open and located the signal indicator.

  “Now to explain. Essentially, curiosity got the better of me—a thing we both allowed to get the better of us tonight, I think.”

  Walter laughed humorlessly, and the sound reminded him of Timothy. He shuddered.

  “I went downstream earlier this afternoon. I can be obsessive when it comes to tracking, and I ended up going much farther than I planned, with no success. I only gave up and turned back when it got completely dark. It must’ve been well past eleven when I finally made it back. I spotted you from a distance, trampling upstream with your flashlight. There’s no better explanation—curiosity got the better of me. I followed you.”

  “Wow . . . movies have taught me that people are supposed get a nagging feeling when they’re being followed . . . even just an uneasy sense of being watched,” Walter mused, his voice reflecting the daze that his mind was in. “But I had no idea. I was creeping myself out . . . but no thought of that.”

  “Service?”

  Surfacing from his daze
for a moment, Walter looked down, “No.” He looked back up and saw Nigel’s house fly past, the light still on in the dining room. He opened his mouth, about to say that they could just stop there and use Nigel’s phone, but he didn’t, realizing that service would kick in any second now.

  In the time it took for this short line of thought to slip through his head, a bar of signal had appeared.

  “Signal,” he announced.

  Braylen snatched the phone from Walter in a way that would’ve been very rude in any other circumstance. The car slowed as he hurriedly poked at the buttons with his thumb, and then sped back up when he put the phone to his ear.

  For twenty seconds all Walter heard was the revved engine.

  “No answer.”

  Braylen held up the phone, pressed a few buttons, and put the phone back to his ear. “Wake up, please, Tom,” he muttered.

  “Wait,” said Walter, his mind still just working itself back into commission. “How did you know what was going on when the lights cut and Timothy started shooting?”

  Braylen paused, the phone still at his ear. He spoke quickly, “I followed you in after you went down into the hidden room. I overheard every word that lunatic said.” He paused again, listening. “I was thinking of what the hell I could do to get you out of there, once he started getting really crazy. Unbelievably scary, man.”

  Braylen held out the phone again and redialed, “Dammit, Tom.” Putting the phone back to his ear, he asked, “How’d you do that, anyways? Cut the lights?”

  “Oh. There was a power strip that everything seemed to run through. I dove on it . . . then ran for my fucking life.”

  “Hot damn, kid. You are a brave, brave—Tom!”

  Walter looked at Braylen, confused, in that moment having forgotten that Braylen had been waiting on the phone.

  “No, shut-it. Tom, I’m here with Walter. He just survived a murder attempt. He was attacked by Timothy Glass.”

  Walter was pretty sure he heard Tom Corey’s raised voice exclaim something to the effect of, “What the fuck did Walter do now?”