Blue Stew (Second Edition) Read Free Page B

crazy, eventless minute passed.
    The deafening inaction did not align with Walter’s assumption that he was being hunted by a homicidal maniac. He was forced to conceive a less disturbing alternative. Maybe he had been hit by some poor idiot who, simply, had been driving too fast downhill and had lost control of his vehicle? Maybe, in the collision, the idiot driver had been knocked unconscious with, by stupid chance, a foot pinned to the gas?
    The rare mortal fear within Walter abated. There were explanations that weren’t as grim as his first. He opened his door and turned his body and lowered a foot to the wet, pine-needle laden earth. The effort it took to bring his body upright was immense, fighting through the dissidence of his aching joints.
    From the outside, the scene of the wreck was ugly. Walter had made out well to be standing, he knew. He staggered towards the Jeep, which, externally, was in better shape than his van, aside from the smoke sifting up from around its bent hood.
    Once he was beyond the direct glare of the one headlight, Walter began to distinguish the outline of someone in the driver’s seat, hunched over the steering wheel. The person was not moving. Walter crept closer, to within reach of the Jeep. He extended a hand and tapped on the glass of the driver-side window. It was hard to be sure, looking through rain-splattered glass into a perfectly dark car, but the person did not appear to move.
    Walter stood there for a moment, apprehensive. Obviously the man—or woman—was not out to kill him after all, right?
    The ongoing rain worked its way down through the tall pine trees above, channeling into larger droplets that bombarded the roof of the Jeep and the head and shoulders of Walter.
    “What the hell am I doing?” Walter finally said to the night, and he stepped closer to the Jeep and pulled open the door.
    A man was folded over the steering wheel, his limp arms dangling past his knees, apelike. He had not been wearing a seatbelt. There wasn’t enough light to say anything more of the darkened shapes . . . or to see the folded scrap of paper flutter from the opened door and get whisked away with a gust of wind . . .
    Walter reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, a bulky old thing that had an LED light fixed to the back of it. He pointed it into the Jeep and tapped the button.
    “Dude, are you . . .” before Walter could finish the question, his mind was overcome by the first sign that something was horribly wrong. At the man’s feet there was a large, muddy slab of rock pinning the gas pedal to the floor.
    His expression twisting, Walter brought the light up to the man’s head. His face was turned away from him, the side of it was propped at an uncomfortable angle an inch above the horn, but something bright red was accumulating and dripping off of the base of the steering wheel . . .
    Forgetting everything he had learned in the Boy Scouts regarding first-aid when handling potential spinal injuries, Walter took the mystery man by the shoulder and pivoted him off the wheel and back into his seat.
    Again he shined the light at the man’s head. A noise Walter had never produced in his life now escaped his limp, open mouth: a short, breathless exhale of terror. Nerves along his back flared as though cold steel had just grabbed at his spine.
    He had been braced for some amount of gore, but nothing like this:
    The man’s cheeks had been sliced all the way through into neat ribbons of flesh, like the gills on a fish. His nose had been carved down to the bone. His left eye had been gouged; either cut out entirely, or mashed into a bloody, unrecognizable paste. The last thing Walter saw was the large wooden handle of a hunting knife sticking out of the man’s chest—surely a mortal wound—and then he regained enough sense to fling himself around and lunge into the dark forest, in the general direction of the road, desperate to escape this sudden nightmare.
    Walter’s mind