Blue Stew (Second Edition) (18 page)

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.

T
hey 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?”

“
No
, it’s not like that. Timothy is a
maniac
. He admitted—I heard him—he admitted to killing all of those five men.”

Officer Corey’s response was too fast and garbled to comprehend, as hard as Walter tried.

“Not
directly
, not by his own hands . . . he tricked them all into taking some extreme psychedelic
drug
. He’s a biochemist . . . it was some
horrible
home-brew drug.”

Tom Corey’s voice now was too low for Walter to hear. Or, he might not have said anything.

“Tom, we’ve just been running for our lives. Timothy was
shooting
at us,” Braylen’s voice wasn’t raised, which helped amplify the severity of his tone. “I’m dead serious about this. You need to call dispatch, you know, get some backup, and get over there and arrest the insane son-of-a-bitch
right now
.”

Walter heard a distorted, “Are you serious?”

“
Yes
. Timothy was completely deranged. He tried to murder Walter—there’s
no
ambiguity there at least. That’s enough to go on to bring him in immediately, isn’t it?”

Officer Corey made some sounds that didn’t seem as disbelieving as before.

“Good,” said Braylen. “What should we do now? Should we meet you at the station so someone can take our statement . . . or what?”

Again Tom Corey spoke too low for Walter to piece any of it together.

“Okay. Yeah, that
is
much closer. We’re getting to the lights right now, actually. We’ll see you in a minute.”

Braylen closed his phone and set it on his lap. They were approaching the only other set of lights in Sutherland besides those at the intersection in the center of town.

Walter was looking at Braylen expectantly.

“Okay, so Tom’s putting in the call now. He’s gonna get his guys to assemble at his house, I guess.” Braylen slowed at the red light, and then made a left through it when he’d gotten close enough to see around the bend. At that point Walter knew where they were going, but Braylen said it anyways, “We’re going there now, too.”

Walter nodded. The adrenaline overdose was finally wearing off, and he was beginning to feel sick.

“Between tonight and the other night, you’ve been through a few levels of hell, haven’t you?
Jesus
.”

Walter thought for a second, and then shrugged. “It’s all been my fault. I mean, not the shit itself, just my getting my nose into all of it . . .”

Braylen looked at him with a frown. “You were
rear-ended
by Victim One. Isn’t that, by traffic law, not
possibly
your fault?” He laughed, “You
are
Walter
Boyd
, right? From the papers?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” said Walter. Privately, he thought of the reason he’d been out driving that night, and what had been going on in his head moments before the collision: He’d been scheming up ways to crash his intervention . . . when life intervened with a much more literal crash. Walter had to wonder if instant karma was a real thing.

“And, tonight, you were out getting some air—clearing your head, I heard you say. You saw something and you were curious. It’s not your fault; it’s that
lunatic’s
fault.”

“Well,” Walter’s full voice had been missing since he’d entered Timothy Glass’s underground lab. “Getting air was part of it. But that wasn’t what took me in that direction. I was out snooping. I don’t know what for . . . but I had a funny feeling about Timothy. The scars, his history . . .”

“Then be
proud
, Walter! Your keen intuition and fast thinking—and
bravery
—tonight has exposed and is about to bring to justice a
very
dangerous man. A man who, from everything I overheard, was planning on spreading his personal plague far and wide.” Braylen took his right hand off the wheel and set it firmly on Walter’s shoulder, giving an affectionate shake. “Walter, you might’ve saved many lives tonight!”

Braylen didn’t see it, but a fleeting smile surfaced on Walter’s face, before receding back behind the previous stony, pale expression.

•   •   •

They pulled into the Corey’s horseshoe driveway minutes later.

Tom Corey intercepted them at the front door. Lit by the porch’s classical iron sconces, he was dressed in full uniform, though his severe bed-hair and sagging face negated any sense of togetherness that the get-up might’ve implied.