Blue Stew (Second Edition) by Nathaniel Woodland Read Free Book Online

grotesque man began to breathe heavily . . . lustily .
    “I don’t think I can hold it any longer. I . . . I can’t control myself.” He raised his knife.
    “Put the down the god-damned knife! ”
    “It will be beautiful .” He poked his temple with the sharp point, snarling triumphantly, “ tear open the machine that keeps the lies !”
    “ What are you— ?”
    “It’s coming now . . . I will be free .”
    His knees were trembling. The puddle of blood at his feet was wide and getting wider. And so was the delirious smile on his mangled face.
    “ Stop it ,” said Officer Corey. It was a helpless, ineffective command at this point. He was mentally broken.
    “You’re not going to shoot?”
    “ No .”
    “That’s okay.” He extended the knife out in front of him, clutching it with a hand and a half.
    Officer Corey stared at the knife, silent, horrified.
    Walter, behind him, did the same.
    The shredded man was fixated on the tip of the knife. His eyes had glazed over completely. It was a look that should be reserved for a man brought to the brink of ecstasy by a beautiful woman, but, evidently, it wasn’t.
    He brought the knife towards his face, blinked, and then jammed it through his eye socket, up into his brain.
    His dead body splashed on the red floor.

Chapter 4 – Hanging and Banging
     
     
    W alter’s friends thought he was insane when he maintained that he still meant to go into work the next morning. They reminded him that he himself had detailed how Doris Hanes had been completely manic when retrieved—unharmed—from her basement, and had to be taken in by the police, and that Officer Corey had implied that she would require extensive psychiatric help to recover from the encounter. Walter shrugged that off while cleverly hammering at a half-truth about wanting to regain a sense of normalcy.
    It had been an unspeakably nightmarish night, one that he did want to run far away from as soon as possible, and so to some extent what he told his friends was true. However, Walter could not deny his fixation with one key element of the night, even as it brought about a muddy contradiction of emotions. That night, in Walter’s shallow eyes, the world had never appeared so sharp . It had never seemed so deeply contrasted. It had never been a place so open to unlimited potential, positive or negative. As it was accurately stated earlier: Walter had never felt so alive —not in a long time. And he wanted to hold onto that element of the night, somehow.
    Walter worked at a hardware- and farm-supply store that, over the past decade, had begun to double as a general convenience store. Its name did not yet reflect this shift: Kall’s Tractor Supply.
    Walter’s job title there, if he had one, might well have been Heavy Lifter. That’s what he did: he loaded customer’s cars and trucks with animal feed, wood chips, lumber, and so forth. He also operated a small forklift, unloading and arranging crates of anything and everything from eighteen-wheelers. It was the former aspect of his job that had Walter eager to go into work that day—specifically, interacting with the townsfolk.
    Sutherland was a small town, and as with any small town, small news is big news. Similarly, big news is like a sudden earthquake: it shudders outwards from the epicenter, and no one within its range can hope to avoid it. Walter didn’t know if it would be from the local police, or their wives, or the volunteer first responders, or their wives, or whoever—word of last night would be out by the break of dawn, and by noon, and a torrent of excited phone calls later, half the town would know that something shocking had happened.
    The locals whose vehicles he loaded tended to be particularly well connected, and Walter expected that most of them were going to have heard of his involvement. He also guessed that they wouldn’t be able to help themselves and that they would have him relive it all throughout the day. That was the thought