Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

“There’s no parking,” Nina said. “It’s all loading zones. I’ll have to go down a little.”

  Walter could feel his head getting hot, sweat under his collar. He was going to explode.

  “But...” he stuttered. “But...”

  “Relax, Walter,” Bell said, looking through the back window and all around. “The bus isn’t here. There are no signs that anything has happened yet. We still have time.”

  Walter forced himself to let out a long slow breath. Bell was right. They’d made it.

  They had beat the killer to the site.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “But please be as quick as possible.”

  “Here,” she said, indicating a small empty parking spot between two trucks. “But it’s tight, even for Nitida.”

  She tossed her long hair out of her eyes and looked over her right shoulder, backing the little car carefully into the slot. She had to cut in and back up again several times to work her way into the snug space. She was infuriatingly cautious, precise, and concerned about getting the car parallel to the curb.

  “Look,” Walter said, ready to smash the tiny rear window and jump out. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Would you just let me out?”

  He looked back at the bar, then did a double take as he saw a flash of white through the back window.

  A bus.

  It was jouncing down Parkdale at the back of a line of traffic, only a block north of the truck. A block away from Eddie’s. A block away from a massacre.

  Walter spun, shoving at Bell’s seat.

  “Out!” he cried. “Get out NOW! The bus! It’s coming! It’s here!”

  “Walter!” Bell shot him a glare as Walter’s shoves bumped him forward in his seat. “Keep your shirt on!”

  Walter leaned forward and hissed in Bell’s ear, pointing back through the rear window.

  “Look!”

  Bell looked back up the street and his glare disappeared. Suddenly he was clawing at his seat belt and pushing at his door. It flew open while the car was still rolling backward, and Bell was nearly knocked off his feet as he stepped out and the open door backed into his shin.

  He hopped out, cursing, and turned to fumble with the seat release. Walter threw himself forward then squeezed out, breathlessly stuck for what felt like an endless moment until he popped out into Bell’s arms.

  Bell helped him steady himself.

  Nina looked at them from the Beetle, still half-in, half-out of the space.

  “What about the car?” she called. “I can’t just leave her like this.”

  “You’re welcome to finish parking, and then stay in the car where it’s safe,” Bell replied, taunting her. “Leave the dirty work to the menfolk.”

  “Not on your life, Neanderthal,” she snapped, throwing open the driver’s side door. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything!”

  Walter paid no attention. He was already running down the street. The bus was almost to the big truck now.

  He could hear the clack of Nina’s heels join the heavier thud of Bell’s shoes as they followed close behind him down the sidewalk.

  He looked up at the warehouses across the street as he ran, trying to figure out which was the one the killer would be shooting from. It had been clear in the vision, but he had only seen it from the inside. He had no idea what it looked like from the outside.

  Walter tried to think. Tried to see it again. Had it been directly across from Eddie’s All-Nighter? A little north? A little south?

  Then he saw it. A dark square in the grid of dusty windows, three stories up. A missing pane. No gun was visible, but he was afraid that it was there, and that the killer was there behind it. Watching and waiting like a hawk in a tree, ready to strike at the hapless rabbits below.

  He dropped his gaze to the bottom of the building and was confronted by a wall of blank brick. No doors.

  They must all be in the parking lot in the back. They’d have to run all the way around the block. And by then, he was certain, they would be too late.

  No, wait!

  A narrow service alley, too small for cars, ran between the killer’s warehouse and the one to the south. Walter tore across the street, heedless of traffic and the cacophony of horns from the vehicles that slammed on their brakes and swerved to avoid him.

  “This way!” he cried.

  Bell and Nina dodged cars and ran after him. Nina was cursing.

  “Walter, keep it down, will you?” Bell shouted. “The killer will hear you!”

  “You think he hasn’t seen us already?” He gestured to the one missing window pane high above them, sucking in a gasping breath. When was the last time he had run for any reason? High school? Grammar school? “Maybe seeing us will shock him and...”

  There was a flat crack, followed by an echoing bang, like a twig snap followed by a firecracker. Walter looked around as he reached the sidewalk and saw the bus swerving in the street, the pale and frightened driver wrestling with the wheel. The back end of the vehicle grazed the roofing tile truck and rocked them both.

  Dozens of hands slapped against the windows as the passengers inside tried to brace themselves.

  The driver hit the brakes and the bus shuddered to a stop, right in front of Eddie’s. Right where it had been in the vision. Exactly. Walter felt light-headed, anxiety spiraling like barbed wire in his gut. It was one thing to be tripping out on acid, to imagine that something like this might happen. Quite another to see the bizarre vision playing out in real time, just like any other ordinary series of events. Seeing the future might have once seemed compelling and exciting, the kind of thing he thought he would be thrilled to experience. Now, as he watched the horrible scene unspooling before his eyes—just the way it had happened in his vision—it only made him feel ill.

  He shook his head, forcing himself to snap out of it and carry on. There was no other option. He ran as fast as he could down the alley, still puffing and breathless, cursing his sedentary lifestyle.

  There was a door up ahead, heavy, banded with steel straps, and caged with mesh across its tiny window. But amazingly, it was minutely ajar, a quarter inch of frame showing in the crack.

  Impossible luck.

  But no. It wasn’t luck. It had been left open by the killer. This must have been the way he had entered, and the way he intended to leave. He had obviously left it open so that he could make a quick getaway.

  “We have to go back to the bus,” Bell called as Walter shouldered through it. “We have to tell the passengers to stay inside!”

  “No, we’d be shot before we made it across the street,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop the killer from shooting them.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” Bell asked as he caught up.

  Walter ignored him and stepped into the space. It was nearly black, the only light filtering through the thick grime obscuring a row of narrow windows at the top of the back wall, far to their right. Where were the stairs? Walter peered around, frantic.

  Strange angular shapes rose up in the gloom like the exo-skeletons of mechanical spiders, obstructing his view. He craned his neck, searching, but it was Nina who spotted them first.

  “Straight across,” she said. “There, behind the looms.”

  So that was what the hulking spiders were. Walter stumbled and wove around them, banging his shins and shoulders as he made his way toward the dark hole on the opposite wall. As he ran, his whole body cringed in anticipation of the terrible sound of another shot. A sound that would mean he’d been too late.

  The hole became a doorway, with an all-steel stairway beyond it, and even less light. The three of them charged up the stairs as quickly as they could. Walter also made an effort to be as loud as he could, causing the metal treads to ring with every stomping step, then raising his voice to shout up the dark open well in the center of the stairs’ square spiral.

  “Police!” he said, trying not to let his gasping exertion show in his voice “Put down your gun! You are surrounded.”
<
br />   “Walter,” Bell hissed. “Are you insane?”

  There was no response from above—at least none he could hear over the ringing of their feet on the metal treads—but that was good. No response. No shot. No dead woman. Maybe they already had changed the future. Changed the vision. Maybe they had saved the day after all.

  It wasn’t until he got to the second landing that what they were actually doing sank in. They were running empty-handed to stop a man with a gun. There was a very good chance that they would be shot as soon as they ran through the door and into the third-floor space.

  Walter found himself faltering on the stairs, icy fear suddenly crystallizing inside him, filling him with bitter black doubt.

  Though he wanted to consider himself a rational man of science, Walter was at his core a passionate dreamer. He had followed his heart all his life, rarely if ever allowing practical considerations to get in the way.

  Belly didn’t push manfully past Walter to confront the killer either. He hung back several steps down. He had probably been aware of their situation all along.

  He was a good man, and by no means a coward, but he had never once let his heart make decisions for him. Although he had occasionally been led astray by the functions of a more vulgar, southward organ, when the time came to make decisions that really mattered, Bell relied solely on cold, clear logic. Logic that would never allow him do something as foolish as running blind into a room with an armed killer, no matter how many innocent lives were at stake.

  Yet he’d put that logic aside and followed Walter on this headlong fool’s errand—one that might get them both killed. Nina, too. That knowledge weighed heavy on Walter in that moment, but he still couldn’t shake that haunting image from his head. The image that had driven him here, and eliminated all other considerations.

  The image of Linda’s grandma in the fleeting moment before her death. Her red coat and her colorful scarf, her dark eyes silently asking why? Why did Walter let this happen?

  To hell with practical considerations.

  Walter threw himself through the third floor doorway without slowing, and charged the window, ready to do anything to save that woman.

  9

  Once he reached the window, he realized that there was nothing to do.

  He skidded to a stop, confused. The space was exactly as he had seen it in his acid-induced vision, all those years ago. There was the Ridgid Tool calendar. There was the well-endowed pin-up with the feathered hair. There was the blacked out window grid with the single missing pane letting a square shaft of pale gray daylight into the far end of the room.

  But the killer wasn’t there. The gun wasn’t there.

  The only movement was the glittering swirl of dust that danced in the light from the open pane. He looked around the rest of the room. It was entirely empty, and entirely open. Bare concrete floors and rusting I-beam pillars all the way to the dusty back windows. There was no place for anyone to hide.

  “He... he’s not here.” Walter looked back at Bell and Nina, hovering cautiously in the stairwell beyond the door. “He’s gone.”

  They edged in, eyes scanning every inch of the space, then relaxed as they realized that he was right.

  The killer was gone.

  “We did it,” Bell said, disbelieving smile spreading across his face. “We chased him away.”

  “Walter did it,” Nina said. “Good thinking there, Walter. I thought you were insane with all that shouting, but it worked.”

  He hardly heard her. His eyes were drawn to the missing pane. He stepped to it. Looked through it, down at the street. The bus filled the frame as the harassed driver struggled to fix the flat. In front of it, a crowd of senior citizens, all chattering excitedly now that the big scare was behind them and no one had been hurt.

  In the middle of the group, the old black woman in the red coat was laughing with the rest, gesturing at the flat tire with her cane.

  Linda’s grandma.

  She was all right.

  Walter’s heart lurched as he watched her, and he had to fight back tears.

  “She doesn’t even know what almost happened,” he said, half to himself. “None of them know.”

  Bell put his hand on his shoulder.

  “And we certainly aren’t going to tell them.” He looked past Walter and out the window at the crippled bus. “We’re going to leave it be, aren’t we? Let them all have whatever lives they were meant to live before we...”

  Before Bell could finish, Nina cut him off, speaking between clenched teeth.

  “Boys.”

  Bell’s head snapped around.

  “What?” He frowned. “What is it?”

  Nina was scanning the room again, shoulders tense and eyes gone hard and hyper-vigilant.

  “If your gunman isn’t here,” she said, voice low and constricted, “And he couldn’t have gotten out without passing us, then...”

  “You’re not police.”

  The new voice came from the doorway, flat and dull as the concrete floor. They turned. A man was standing there. Stocky, sturdily built, with an unremarkable yet familiar face.

  He was aiming a rifle at them.

  Walter blinked. The killer must have gone up to the fourth floor, then waited to see who they were. Clever, and frighteningly calm.

  “What do you...”

  He cut off abruptly, his bespectacled gaze flicking wide-eyed between Walter and Bell, Bell and Walter. His calm faltering for a critical second.

  “It’s you,” he said, voice barely more than a breath.

  As he hesitated, to Walter and Bell’s stunned surprise, Nina pulled a small handgun from her fringed suede purse and drew a bead on the killer.

  “Drop it,” she hissed.

  “Well,” the man replied, flashing a thin reptilian smile like a cut throat. “This is an interesting development.” He made no move to lower the rifle, aiming right between Walter’s eyes. “I never would have guessed that the bitch would turn out to be the one with the balls. What do you say, Annie Oakley? Think you’ve got balls enough to shoot me in cold blood before I pull the trigger on your boyfriend?

  “Or...” He shifted his aim to Bell. “Is this your boyfriend?”

  Nina gaze shifted from the killer to Bell and back again. There was a gloss of sweat on her quivering upper lip. Walter was desperate to do something, say something, anything—but his whole body felt frozen, throat clenched tight as a fist.

  “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” The killer was chanting, shifting from Walter to Bell and back again. “Catch a hippie by his toe. If he hollers let him go. Eenie, meenie, miney...”

  Instead of saying moe, he made a lightning fast lunge toward Nina, gracefully sidestepping her gun hand and whacking her above the ear with the butt of his rifle. Nina sagged bonelessly to the floor, gun skittering away across the concrete.

  Anger swiftly overcame Walter’s fear and natural disinclination to violence, and he launched himself forward, arms flailing. Bell followed him in, trying to pin the stranger’s arms and prevent him from shooting Nina where she lay.

  Their desperate and poorly coordinated attacks failed. The killer was as strong and precise as they were weak and uncertain. He kicked Bell in the chest, sending him crashing into the wall, then knocked Walter’s strikes away with the gun butt and punched him in the face.

  Walter had never been punched in the face in his life. He’d never even been slapped. The shocking impact of it jarred his skull, short-circuiting his thought process and filling his eyes with blinding tears. Then the hot wave of pain washed over him and his legs buckled, the world black and spinning.

  Still he managed to grab at the killer’s shirt, clawing at him, trying to drag him down.

  “Walter!”

  Bell lunged in again, and the killer shoved Walter away, spinning to face him. Walter hit the unforgiving concrete in a cloud of dust and something cracked him across the face, precisely where the stranger had hit him before.

  The rifle.
It was lying across his chest. Somehow he had managed to come away with it as the killer had turned.

  Bell slammed down beside him, raising more dust, and the killer turned back to Walter, reaching for the rifle. Nina rolled and grabbed the killer, locking her fingers around one of his booted ankles.

  “Shoot him, Walter!” she screamed. “Shoot him!”

  Walter crabbed back toward the door and staggered up as the killer drove his heel into Nina’s mouth.

  He trained the rifle on the killer.

  The killer held out his hand.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  Walter swallowed, dry throat clicking and clenching on nothing as he edged back, finger on the trigger. In that moment, even when confronting a ruthless killer, Walter was ashamed to find himself hesitating. He had never fired a gun, let alone had a reason to take a life, and he hoped to live out the rest of his natural days without ever doing so.

  Even if he could find the courage to pull the trigger, and got lucky enough to hit his target, would the man go down? He looked so calm, so completely without fear, that Walter wondered if he might somehow be invulnerable. Or perhaps he could read Walter’s mind.

  Perhaps he knew.

  Well, there’s only one way to find out.

  Walter sucked up a little half-swallowed sound he hoped wasn’t really a whimper, and backpedaled into the stairwell. He turned to the rail, then dropped the rifle down the well in the center of the stairs.

  A solid body smashed into him, pushing him against the handrail, crushing his ribs. Hard knuckles punched him in the back of the head. The world turned to blur and static, but a voice cut through it, hissing in his ear.

  “Smart,” it said. “I’ll give you that. Too bad it won’t be enough.”

  Then Walter slumped back onto the cold metal floor of the landing, wincing and wheezing as footsteps rang away down the stairs, fast and steady. A moment later— at least it might have been a moment, it was hard to tell— fuzzy black shapes filled the door to the third floor and he heard a gruff curse from a familiar voice.

  “Walter. Are you alright?”

  The fuzzy shapes came closer, and knelt beside him. It was Bell and Nina. Nina had retrieved her gun but she looked terrible, with a long gash on her forehead and a split lip that had bled down to her chin.