Blue Stew (Second Edition) (21 page)

“Melisa, can you get a pot going, please?  . . . Tripped in the fucking woods and got mud all over myself. Gotta change, then head out again.”

Melisa followed Tom Corey as he continued through the house.

“Where are you going now?” she asked in a low, begrudging voice.

Walter listened as they moved out of sight into the kitchen, “To Rutland, to their lab. I don’t think those fucking morons are gonna take this seriously until they can see and test that blue shit for themselves.”

“
Wait
. Is
that
what you brought in with you? On
our
dining room table?”

“Yes.”

“Lord . . . is it
safe
, Tom?”

“They’re a bunch of
pills
, Melisa. It’s not a damn airborne virus!”

Their testy voices faded into the depths of the large house.

Walter tuned them out entirely. His gaze fell hard on the object Tom Corey had set on the table. He approached it.

It was a cup-sized plastic container, with a top like those on a Pringles can.

Walter’s mind—the best it can be put—was in a very in-between state. He really could’ve used a Closed for Renovations sign on his forehead, so the world would know to leave him alone for a while. Walter had no such sign on his forehead, however, and some ill-functioning part of his brain now made him reach for the container and pull off the lid.

Inside he saw exactly what had been described to him over the phone: a handful of unlabeled capsules, like the liquid or gel capsules you can find on the shelves in any drugstore. Yet, for Walter, that distinct shade of baby-blue was unmistakable. The color would pervade his mind for the remainder of his life.

Well, not
exactly
what was described to him, he realized. No, he counted
nine
, not
eight
of the blue pills . . .

Never knowing why, he reached into the container and took out one pill and held it up for a closer look.

Walter was struck by the truth that this horrible chemical compound might be indirectly responsible for realigning his own mental chemicals. If his relocated outlook on life held firm, he would have Blue Stew to thank for changing his life.

•   •   •

Around the time he heard the kettle start to whine in the kitchen, Walter, sitting alone in the dining room, heard heavy footsteps that could only belong to Tom Corey.

Officer Corey had donned a fresh police outfit.

“Shit, I’m sorry, I forgot: your friend Nigel reported you missing over a half-hour ago.” He was holding the phone receiver. “Give him a call.”

He slid the phone across the table, and Walter, his movements slow and stiff, fumbled the phone and nearly dropped it.

“Call him quick. I can drop you off there on my way into the city. I’m gonna fill my thermos, use the toilet, and head out.”

“Oh, okay,” said Walter, looking at the illuminated digits on the phone. He started pressing the numbers as Tom Corey disappeared again.

Nigel and Walter’s conversation was monumentally incoherent.

Nigel, tired and distraught, for his part got by with just one word, “what,” delivered with varying degrees of incredulity, intermittently cutting into Walter’s pitiful attempts at recapping a staggering, unbelievable story.

Walter had just finished telling of how Timothy Glass was now on the run from the law with a large stock of his evil compound.

“
What?
” Nigel was tired of the word—but there was no other word.

Tom Corey came back into the room as this point.

“Let’s go.”

“I’m gonna get a ride back to your place with Officer Corey now. I’ll explain everything better.”

“. . .
Okay
.”

Tom Corey grabbed the container of Blue Stew with his free hand, a coffee thermos in the other.

Walter hung up, stood up, touched his pocket, and then followed Tom Corey out of the door.

•   •   •

Try as he might, Walter proved himself incapable of keeping his promise: he did
not
explain things better when he got to Nigel’s place. He settled for a quantity-over-quality approach, and skimmed over everything probably five times all-told. This was enough—with Walter’s frustrating, incompetent habit of including or omitting key story elements with each new iteration—for Nigel and Jamie to more or less work out the whole wild picture.

No one made it to bed before three in the morning, and even then no one was asleep until an hour before sunrise.

When Walter finally slept, however, he slept like a cinderblock. He didn’t hear when the phone rang around nine, which Nigel only answered on what would’ve been the final ring. The caller was Kall Chansky, wondering if Nigel knew why Walter hadn’t come into work that morning. Nigel told Kall that Walter was with him and that he wouldn’t be coming in that day. He stopped far short of explaining why, saying only, “It’ll be all over the news soon enough, Kall.”

“What? Is Walter okay? Is he in trouble?”

“He’s okay and he’s not in trouble. It’ll be on the news.”

•   •   •

It wasn’t until just before three in the afternoon that Walter’s eyes fluttered open.

He was ambushed by light; he had to squint. A high sun was coming down through the window above the couch, warming his face. He sat up, and the sun’s rays revealed a wave of dust that his movement on the couch had projected into the air. This made Walter smile, without reason.

The happy, simple outlook on life that he had been shaping last night seemed to have largely cemented during his long, deep sleep.

He got to his feet and teetered through the empty living room, towards the dining room.

In the kitchen he found Nigel and Jamie tapping on their smart phones, sitting at opposite ends of the table. Another beam of afternoon sunlight was coming down from a skylight up in the high, slanted ceiling, reflecting attractively off on the table’s glossy finish.

“Ever stop to think how great the sun is?” Walter asked.

Apparently the couple hadn’t heard him approach, as both of them flinched at his first word.

“Um, good . . .
afternoon
,” Nigel said, looking up, then back down at his phone. “Trying to connect to the newsfeeds. Officer Corey called an hour ago to give us a heads-up: word has gotten out—the local stations are already on the scene.”

Walter pulled out a chair next to Nigel. He patted him on the back before sitting heavily, grinning.

Nigel looked at him, curious. “Someone’s chipper this afternoon. Happy to be alive?”

Walter shrugged, “Something like that. Hard to explain.”

“You should be. Hey, the man you told us about—Braylen—he called. Wanted to know how you were doing.”

“That was nice of him. Has anyone talked to Henry yet?”

“Yeah; called him when I first got up, actually. Didn’t want to risk him learning through some overblown newscast. He’s gonna come over after work.”

Walter laughed, “
Work
. Yes. Exactly how late am I?”

Nigel shook his head, smiling, “Well, it’s about three. But I talked to Kall, too. He knows you’re not coming in.”

“You would make an excellent personal assistant, buddy.”

“Um, thanks.”

Jamie, who had set down her phone and had been observing Walter with interest ever since he’d joined them, now stood up.

“Are you hungry, Walter?”

“Actually,
very
,” Walter said, only now identifying the semi-pleasant aching at the top of his stomach as hunger.

“Would you guys be happy if I tossed a large tray of nachos into the oven?”

“
Yes
,” said Walter with powerful emphasis. Nigel laughed.

“How about coffee?”

Walter’s eyes brightened, “Actually . . . do you have any
tea
?”

•   •   •

Between the gooey, cheesy, crunchy nachos, the strawberry tea, and his newfound fixation with sunlight cultivated while lounging in such an open, sunny dining area, that afternoon was one of the better ones Walter could remember.

With his houseguest no longer sleeping in there, Nigel frequently went off to the living room to check for any breaking news updates on the local stations. If there had been any, he missed all of them. Unsurprisingly, however, it was the leading story on the News at Five, and Nigel came back to relay their dramatic telling of the “sketchy details” surrounding a “major,
terrible
, twist in the Night of Horrors,” and how they had a picture of Timothy up the whole time with the caption in bold red: “Extremely Dangerous.”

His pointed choice not to check the news with Nigel hadn’t been enough of a hint, so after this first recap, Walter told Nigel flatly that he didn’t want to hear how the media was having a ball with all this, and that he only cared to know if there were any developments relating to the
capture
of Timothy Glass.

Walter wondered if Nigel, as a result, might’ve covertly said something—via a quick text, maybe—to Henry before he got there. When Henry pulled in around six, the closest he got to the topic of Walter’s near-death experience was, when they first saw each other, he shook his head and said, “
Wow
, Walter. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

While that day (at least the portion of it that found Walter conscious) had been considerably warmer and brighter than the one before, the days overall still were getting shorter fast, and it seemed like the four of them hadn’t been lounging in the living room long at all before Walter noticed that it was near-black outside. It might’ve had something to do with how his brain had been through such dramatic movement and rearrangement that an old, neglected memory got dislodged. With Nigel and Henry and himself sitting in front of the TV, casually chatting as night fell, Walter was reminded of a time when they’d all hang out at Nigel’s parent’s house after school, surround the TV in their similarly clean and spotless living room, and, as night fell outside, they would play—

“Zelda!” Walter finished the thought out loud.

“Huh?”

“Don’t you have the old Zelda on your Wii? Let’s play it—we never finished it, did we?”

“No,” replied Nigel, “because you bought that dumb boxing game before we could, and then bullied us all into playing that instead,” but Nigel was already on his feet, moving towards the shelf with the Nintendo.

“Sorry. Really, I am.”

Nigel snickered as he grabbed a remote.

They played Ocarina of Time for nearly two hours, trading off control of Link freely throughout—though, Nigel took charge of the majority of the trickier sections, just as it’d been done back in the day. Walter allowed himself to become even more engrossed in the classic videogame than he had when they’d played it as open-minded, imaginative middle schoolers. When Nigel put two frozen pepperoni pizzas into the oven and pulled a case of root beer out of the fridge, it was then ensured that that night would be every bit as good as the short but lovely afternoon.