Blue Stew (Second Edition) (17 page)

“Walter, I am disappointed. I hoped someone like you would a least
try
to understand . . .”

Walter chanced a sideways glance at the nearby shelf that all the power cables appeared to run towards. He could see the black, plastic overhanging edges of what he guessed to be stacks of car batteries . . .

“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.