“C’mon, it gets better,” said Steven, now seated next to him. “Get some breakfast.”
Jeremy looked behind them warily.
They were in a giant mess hall—giant to a small kid, at any rate. The ceiling vaulted high above them, opened up by four long skylight windows, these intersected carefully by a network of massive support beams. On the floor below, lit by the light of the morning sky falling down from above, there were a dozen long wooden tables, each one assigned to a different Boy Scout troop, each one carved thoroughly with the signatures of decades of children’s pocket knives.
At the far end of the mess hall was a buffet layout of sweet-smelling breakfast foods and coolers filled with various drinks, around which a large crowd of children in their brown patch-covered uniforms squirmed. The crowd did not seem to be thinning. It was still too big and imposing for Jeremy.
“I’m not hungry yet,” said Jeremy, looking forward again.
Steven shrugged, chewing on a mouthful of ketchup-drenched scrambled eggs.
“Steve,” a curly redhead across from the Baker brothers spoke up, “didn’t you see the Kool-Aide? It’s really good.” He held up a clear plastic cup of a bright orange liquid.
Steven finished his mouthful, “Yeah. I like milk with breakfast. I don’t know why.”
“You’re weird. Everyone else is having the Kool-Aid.”
Jeremy had tuned this trite exchange out as his mind shifted to the future. This “spring camp” was a three-night Friday-through-Monday ordeal. His Mom had really wanted him to go because the focus was on learning about animal and plant lifecycles that begin anew in the spring, including trips to local maple-sugaring farms, “sings of spring” hikes, and so on. Whereas the primary summer camp, in his brother’s words, “Was all about cooler things like shooting rifles and archery and fishing.”
The summer camp was eight nights long. However, his parents had hinted that, if he made it through this spring camp—and gave it a fair chance—they might let him choose for himself if he wanted to go to the summer camp. So . . . he would just have to suffer through two more terrible nights, and then never do this again.
“Oh my god!” screamed a man two tables away.
Jeremy snapped back into the present. His first reaction to the scream was the thought that men aren’t supposed to scream like that. He had heard his mom scream like that once when a spider had jumped onto her lap, a few years ago.
The scream had a rippling effect. Nearby children began to scream now, and someone’s silverware clattered to the floor. Camp counselors started running towards the commotion, dodging kids and their trays of food—unsuccessfully, in one instance, causing Jeremy to laugh nervously.
Another male voice then rose from directly across the hall, quickly reaching a pitch as shrill the first man’s, a pitch of jumping-spider terror, “Frank! Frank! What are you doing?”
Jeremy pulled himself upright and looked towards this second, closer screamer. A middle-aged scoutmaster with a thick goatee was now throwing his overweight body over and across his troop’s table—sending food flying—scrambling towards a young scout whose face was planted on the table, resting in a pool of ketchup.
More shouting erupted form a far corner of the mess hall.
Jeremy frowned. Large implications were hard for him to pick up on, especially at his age, so he wasn’t too alarmed by the chaos breaking loose around him, not immediately. He was afraid of the dark; there was nothing really to fear on bright, sunny days, right? And—hey—maybe, if whatever was going on was bad enough, they would all get to go home early?
A very different loud noise now stole Jeremy’s bouncing attention, a sound like a slamming door. He turned towards this new sound, which had seemed very close. He found the source right in front of him, in fact, and it almost made him laugh when he first saw it: His brother’s redhead friend across the table raised his body up and then smashed his forehead down on the table, making the slamming-door sound. Then, mechanically, the kid raised his body up again, before thrusting his head back down with startling speed, punctuated by a third loud thunk.
It was Steve’s tone of voice that finally told Jeremy he should be scared, “Eddy, stop that. What’s wrong with you?”
When Eddy lifted his head, Jeremy saw that his nose had folded to one side and blood was gushing out over his mouth.
“Why’d you do that? What’s wrong with you?”
Eddy frowned, “Everything’s wrong with me. I’m fixing it all now. That’s what . . .” but his twelve-year-old brain couldn’t put to words what he was feeling; the clarity that had come over him.
So he just slammed his face violently again, and blood splattered onto Steven’s scrambled eggs.
Jeremy began to feel dizzy. People were screaming and shouting and running everywhere now, falling over each other, some with the funniest expressions on their faces. He saw grown men tackling children, some of whom had pulled out pocket knives and were carving at their skin with this odd look of innocent curiosity.
None of it made any sense. Jeremy covered his eyes and started to cry.
He would be scarred for life, sure, but at least his parents would never force him to go to any Boy Scout camp ever again. And he would get to go home early.
• • •
It was a beautiful spring afternoon near the end of March. It was a Saturday, and the temperature was in the low sixties—as it had been for most of the week—and the snow mounds around town were already limp, dirty shadows of their former selves, and not long for this world.
Walter and the boys had driven off to their old high school’s athletic fields to toss a football around. None of them had brought even a sweater, basking in the liberation of borderline T-shirt weather.
Although the boys had been impressed by her athleticism when they’d all gotten together for a handful of impromptu hockey skirmishes over the winter (of which Walter’s team usually dominated), Maddie hadn’t had much interest in this particular sporting activity. She had elected to stay at Doris’s house—or, as it was known by then, “Walter and Maddie’s place.”
In an effort to maintain the charmingly minimalistic aesthetic of the place, the couple had done a good job of keeping the living room, kitchen, and porch clear of most of their personal possessions. The offshoot of this was that the small guest bedroom—which Walter had selected over Doris’s master bedroom (he would’ve felt very strange sleeping in Doris’s bed, among other activities)—became inundated with nearly everything the two of them owned, and had fallen to disarray due to the simple fact that there was no right place to store half of their belongings.
Maddie had thought that it would be a nice surprise to do a little spring cleaning while Walter was out; to try to make better sense of the contained chaos of their sleeping quarters. She had shoveled all of the loose garments on the floor onto the bed, where she meant to fold and stack the clothes in a more orderly manner. Before that would happen, though, another task had been unearthed: patches of dirt and dust and pocket trash now littered the hardwood floor.
Presently, Maddie was sweeping up a dusty little storm, which was being highlighted by the warm sunlight coming in through the pair of opened windows.
Methodically, she worked her way to the outside corner of the small desk beyond the bed. She discovered a nice pocket of dirt and trash and cobwebs there. Two broad swipes with the straw broom took care of all the dirt and the cobwebs . . . but one piece of trash remained, annoyingly. She stabbed and tugged at it with the broom, but still it wouldn’t budge.
Maddie knelt down. It appeared to be a slip of clear plastic wrapping or bagging. She leaned closer and took it between her fingertips and pulled. It came a few inches then snagged again and slipped from her grasp. She realized that whatever it was had somehow gotten wedged behind the desk. She jerked the desk an inch away from the wall and then extracted the pesky trash with ease.
It was an empty Ziploc bag. Maddie was about to toss it onto the growing
pile of dirt and trash near the middle of the room when she realized that, no, the bag wasn’t empty. There was something small and blue inside it. She held the clear plastic baggy closer. It looked like a gel capsule; maybe Nyquil? She wasn’t sure if it was Walter’s, or if maybe it’d been left by the last guest Doris had had over. She tossed it onto the desk, never thinking much of it.
Maddie, as it happened, didn’t know that Nyquil did not come in that particular shade of baby-blue.
• • •
Maddie heard the car doors shutting outside sooner than she had expected. She hadn’t finished cleaning the bedroom yet.
She went downstairs into the living room, just in time to see Walter yank open the front door, followed closely by Nigel and Henry. They weren’t smiling as they had when they’d left, she noticed that immediately.
“Maddie,” Nigel’s voice was an overt mixture of shock and exasperation. “Talk some sense into Walter, please.”
“What is going on?”
“Timothy Glass is back,” Walter spoke softly. Maddie hadn’t heard that black, empty tone from Walter since they started dating. It scared her.
“What do you mean? Where is he?”
“He set his poison loose on a huge group of Boy Scouts in Massachusetts.”
Maddie’s big blue eyes widened as painful comprehension cranked at her gut, “Are you serious?”
Walter nodded.
“Oh no,” she breathed. “How many . . .” she couldn’t even finish the question.
Nigel answered the unasked, “Six. Six dead kids. A lot more were infected with the Blue Stew, and a lot more were seriously injured . . . but apparently the scoutmasters and camp staff were able to restrain and isolate those suffering from the shit before they could all . . . fatally mutilate themselves.” Nigel shook his head. It was the kind of thing no one should ever have to tell about.
“Oh my god . . .” She had thought that nothing could be worse than the Night of Horrors . . . but these were children. “Why were the adults unaffected?”
“He put it into their Kool-Aid,” Walter said in that same dark voice.
“How’d you guys find out?”
“Kall called me. We went to Henry’s place nearby to watch the coverage.”
Maddie now remembered what Nigel had said when they’d first come in. She asked apprehensively, “So . . . what are you doing back here?”
“I’m packing a few things, then I’m going to leave,” said Walter.
Maddie’s face went blank.
“I’m going to the town in Western Mass where it happened. I’m going to find Timothy Glass and end this.”
“Why on earth would you do that?” Maddie was shaking her head and gestured stiffly, “And how can you possibly think that you’d stand a better chance of finding him than the cops who I’m sure are already swarming the area?”
“Why? Because this is on me. I could’ve stopped him for good that night, down in the basement, instead of running,” explained Walter. That formerly neglected weed of a plant in his consciousness was now large and ugly and growing fast. “And I don’t need to find him. Timothy is looking for me.”
Maddie turned her desperate, worried face on Nigel, hoping for some kind of rationalization of the wild things coming out of her boyfriend’s mouth.
“Apparently there was some type of note left behind in the kitchens of the Boy Scout camp, where the drinks were mixed,” explained Nigel. “Signed by Timothy. He scribbled something like: ‘Today is dedicated to the one who got away. You cannot run from the truth. Find me when you are ready.’ Or something cryptic like that—it’s been making the newscasters giddy.”
Maddie puzzled over this for a moment, then looked back at Walter, “You think he’s talking about you?”
“Yes.”
“Me and Nigel thought the dedication could just as well have been for Victim Number Two,” said Henry from behind the two other boys.
Nigel nodded.
“Yeah,” agreed Maddie forcefully.
“‘You cannot run from the truth’?” Walter shook his head, “Plus, none of you heard him screaming into the night as I ran from him. The man unloaded his entire life perspective on me, and I rejected it and him. He’s a deranged, obsessive person who can’t stand that I did that and got away. Also, I’m solely to blame for blowing apart the operation he had going on under the sauna and forcing him into hiding. I was an Eagle Scout, too . . . if he went digging into my past . . . I might be more to blame for today than having just let him off the hook that night.” Walter stopped for a dramatic breath. “The point is we’ll be looking for each other. We’ll find each other.”
“Oh my god, Walter. And what would you even do if you found him?”
“Do what I should’ve done that night last fall: end this.”
“You’re talking like a crazy person. A crazy person! Don’t do this. Let the police do their jobs!”
“I have to. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t try.”
“. . . I’ve never seen you like this, Walter. Yes, it’s scary that he might be singling you out . . . but, if you’re right, then you’re just taking his bait for goodness sake . . .”
“Timothy Glass doesn’t scare me,” stated Walter in a stronger voice now. “He is a broken man. You have shown me things that no amount of breathless ramblings or Blue Stew can deny, Maddie. I have to do this, for my sake, for our sake, for everybody’s sake. For Timothy’s sake, even.”
With that, Walter strode past a speechless Maddie and stepped deliberately up the stairs, into the partially-cleaned guest bedroom.
A few essentials had been moved in Maddie’s good-intentioned cleaning efforts, but Walter found everything he needed for the trip without trouble.
When he came back downstairs in a grey hooded sweater and with a lightly-loaded backpack slung over one shoulder, he saw that Maddie and his friends hadn’t moved from where he’d left them.
While upstairs he had thought of some marginally better diplomatic measures.
“Whatever happens, I will come back before work Monday morning. It’s not a far drive, anyways, and maybe you guys are right, maybe he was talking about his wife, and maybe he’s halfway across the country by now . . . or maybe the police will have nabbed him by the end of the day.” He said all this, though he didn’t believe it, not at the time. At that moment, he was convinced that Timothy Glass was out there waiting for him. “I just have to try.”
His more diplomatic tact did not go over with Maddie as well as he had hoped.
“It just hurts, Walter—it scares me, in fact—that you are capable of putting a crazy little obsession like this before me,” if her words weren’t bad enough, her pitiful tone of voice certainly was. “And this is crazy, we all agree. It’s insane. I don’t know what I’d do if that madman got his hands on you . . . and . . .”
“I’m sorry you don’t understand, Maddie,” Walter shrugged a shrug of completely insincere indifference. “I have to go now.”
He then moved towards her and spread his arms for a parting embrace, but she backed away from him. Tears were surrounding her big blue eyes.
Turning away from her and moving towards the door—without even making eye-contact with Nigel or Henry, both speechless—he said, “Goodbye. See you all soon.”
He was really hurting Maddie, he knew. But, Walter was sure that they would have the rest of their lives together in which he could make up for this.
• • •
Before night had fallen all the way, Walter Boyd checked himself into a Super 8 motel just one town over from where the ill-fated Boy Scout camp had been held.
He had swung through a rest stop hours before, grabbed some maps, looked over a few directories, and this place had appeared to be the nearest motel to the campgrounds. When Walter pulled in he was reassured to see a few TV and radio vans parked in the lot. Evidently the news crews covering the tragedy had reached the same conclusion as him.
After a long d
rive in which the image of Maddie and her big blue eyes tearing up had burned itself into his inner-eye, Walter was now where some persuasive part of him felt he needed to be.
The motel reminded him of his old apartment, regrettably. The room was the size of his former living room, with an ugly bed filling half of the measly space and a full-sized fridge and table filling much of the remainder. A tiny bathroom and a tiny closest jutted out just beyond the front door, further cramping the meager space. Imitation wood covered the walls copiously here like back at his old place, and cheap, oddly plastic-looking carpeting smothered the floor tastelessly here too, although this place had it in a shade of brown that would probably look no better or worse if it never got vacuumed.
Partly because of how challenging it had been to crosscheck street names on the maps strewn about the passenger seat as he drove, partly because of his incessant, nagging concerns over just how crazy Maddie and his friends must now think him to be, Walter stumbled into the motel room stressed near to his breaking point. To say he was exhausted would not even begin to describe his state of being.
After making good use of the bathroom, he flopped down onto the stiff, springy bed and remotely powered on the small television at the foot of the bed.
He flipped on and on through the various stations covering the spring camp tragedy, while the dark of night swallowed whole the world beyond his motel room. The light from the TV flashed the colors of emphatically unnerved talking heads over Walter more and more vibrantly as it remained the only source of light in the otherwise blackening motel room.
Walter had fallen into a fatigued trance. Even thinking of turning on the nearby bedside lamp required too much effort. Vaguely, he was aware of his hope that one of these comically distraught newscasters would reveal something that might inspire an idea for some kind of next step. So far, no luck. They were all regurgitating the same facts and the same shocked, disbelieving lines over and over and over.
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