Blue Stew (Second Edition) (27 page)

“
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.