Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  Bell was pretty bad off, too. He had a bruise forming on his left cheek, and was as white as Walter had ever seen him.

  “Help me.” Walter reached up to them. “We have to go after him.”

  Bell gave him a flat look.

  “And when we catch him, then what?” he asked. “More of the same?”

  “But he must...” Walter tried to sit up, stabbed by a vicious pain in his ribs that nearly stole his breath. “...be stopped!”

  Bell and Nina took his arms and helped him up. Nina squeezed his arm.

  “We stopped him from killing those people,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?”

  Walter winced as his ribs twinged again, an echo of the earlier sharper pain. It still hurt to breathe.

  “Of course,” he said. “But it won’t be enough. He said so. He’s not going to stop. He’s going to do something else. Kill someone else.”

  “Well, we can’t be the ones to stop him.” Bell spread his arms, and looked down at himself. “We tried, and look what he did to us with his bare hands. He knows what he’s doing. We don’t.”

  “So maybe we’re still the same ineffectual wimps we were back in the schoolyard when we were kids,” Walter said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Nina muttered under her breath.

  “I’ll be the first to admit that a life of reading and lab work does not a warrior make,” Walter continued. “But that doesn’t mean we just give up. We can’t give up! We saved the people on this particular bus, but what about the next one? And the one after that?”

  He started down the stairs, cringing with every step as his battered body protested.

  “But... but he could be down there right now,” Nina called after him. “Waiting. With his gun.”

  “And how long do you propose we wait to go down?” He looked up at her from the landing. “Will it be safe after an hour? Two hours? Five? And who else will he have killed while we were waiting?”

  Nina sighed.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I see your point. But let’s go slow and quiet this time, alright?” She raised the gun. “And let me go first.”

  “But...”

  “Listen. If he’s running, he’s already gone. We’ll never catch him. If he’s down there, waiting, pounding down the steps like stampeding buffalo will only let him know we’re coming. He’d pick us off one by one as we came through the door.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Walter said. “Slow and quiet does make a good deal of sense.” He grimaced and turned to start down the next flight. “Particularly since I don’t think I could run if I...”

  He stopped as he saw something small and rectangular on the next step. He bent, groaning, and picked it up. It was a pocket-sized notebook. There was too little light to make out anything more.

  He turned to Bell and Nina.

  “Did one of you drop this?”

  Bell patted his own pockets, then pulled out a small, red, leather-bound notebook of his own.

  “No,” he said. “Mine’s right here.”

  “Nina?”

  She shook her head.

  Walter flipped it open. The pages had writing on them, but more than that he could not tell.

  “I can’t...”

  Nina’s hand appeared and flicked her disposable lighter. The flame illuminated the page.

  Walter stared.

  Ciphers. Page after coded page of seemingly random letters and symbols. Even though it was illegible, there was a kind of toxic madness in the familiar, slanting handwriting that sent a cold chill through Walter’s veins.

  There was only one person who this notebook could belong to.

  “If we can crack this code,” Walter said, fingers tracing over the mysterious, jumbled letters, “not only could we gain the advantage over our opponent, we may learn more about who he really is, and where he came from.”

  “Well, we’re not going to crack any codes by cowering in this stairwell,” Bell said. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Walter slid the notebook into an inner pocket of his jacket, and the three of them began their slow and cautious descent.

  * * *

  The killer was not in the warehouse. At least, he didn’t choose to show himself or shoot them as they crept slowly down the stairs. And the rifle was gone, too. They searched the bottom of the stairwell carefully. It wasn’t there.

  Walter edged open the door they had come through and looked into the alley, still afraid of getting a bullet in the forehead. There was no one there. He beckoned to the others, and they all stepped out, squinting in the light, looking left and right.

  “Should we check the lot behind?” Walter asked.

  “No,” Bell replied. “We should not. Come on.”

  He turned and started back toward the street. Nina followed him, but Walter hesitated, feeling guilty, and sick that they were giving up the chase. How could they just let the killer go? On the other hand, as Bell had said, how could they catch him? He had already lost them. And even if, by some miracle, they did manage to catch him, what would they do then?

  They were like sheep trying to take down a wolf. Becoming his next victims wasn’t the way to save the other sheep.

  But perhaps there was another way. Walter patted the breast pocket of his coat where he had tucked the notebook, then started after them.

  The VW had a parking ticket tucked under its windshield wiper when they returned to it. Walter was stunned at the breadth and vulgarity of Nina’s vocabulary. It really was quite astonishing.

  10

  Allan was breaking down his rifle and packing it into a Ghirardelli shopping bag he’d scavenged from a trash can behind the warehouse. He’d been forced to abandon the duffle bag he normally used to carry the rifle, after that stupid scuffle with the kids from Reiden Lake. He couldn’t just walk the streets with an assembled weapon in his hands, so he’d had to improvise.

  But his hands were trembling as he removed the buttstock from the receiver legs, and wrapped it in crumpled newspaper. He’d tried so hard to stay cool, to stay in control, but the fear was back and raging inside him. The same fear that had nearly swallowed him alive on that strange night almost exactly seven years ago.

  His destiny had been disrupted. The moment he’d dreamed of for years, the moment in which he would become the most hated and feared killer of all time, that sacred, perfect moment had been utterly ruined. Ruined by a couple of hippies Allan had thought were nothing more than figments of his tripping mind.

  Worse, the hippies had brought with them a swarm of unanswered questions. And while he had easily evaded the bumbling idiots, the questions dogged him still. Questions about that strange and awful night. Questions about himself, and why he was here.

  He was shaken to his core by this inexplicable encounter. The new life he’d established in this new world had been nearly perfect, and getting better with every new victim. His other life in that other world seemed like a fading dream.

  But now, he suddenly felt unsure about everything again.

  When he reached into the pocket of his navy blue windbreaker to touch the comforting, familiar shape of his notebook, he found that it was gone.

  The fabric of the pocket had been torn during his struggle, and was hanging in a loose flap. Clearly, his precious notebook had tumbled out at some point during the whole fiasco.

  An even greater panic dug its hooks into his chest, making it hard to breathe. His heart was beating way too fast, and he felt sure that he would vomit.

  Everything was falling apart.

  He was falling apart.

  He was desperate to run back to the warehouse and look for it, but he was afraid those stupid kids might have called the cops. What he needed to do was run, get the hell out of there, but he was frozen.

  “No,” he whispered to himself. “No, no, no!”

  “Hey, man,” a male voice from behind him said. “You okay?”

  Allan spun to face a young Chinese man with lo
ng, shaggy hair and a concerned expression. He was wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform.

  Something let loose inside of Allan and he launched himself at the concerned stranger, tackling him and knocking him down. The young man was surprisingly strong, but his hard, angry punches and vigorous struggle inflamed and infuriated Allan more that they hurt him. The flare of sparks in his hands and forearms became hotter and brighter than ever, burning the flesh off the stranger’s skull like a blowtorch as Allan smashed his face against the curb again and again. The unfortunate stranger stopped screaming and went limp in Allan’s grasp, but he couldn’t stop battering the lifeless body for several endless minutes.

  Cracked and blackened teeth scattered down the alley like loaded dice.

  His hands felt as if they were being attacked by angry hornets, deadly sparks flying with every blow like a blacksmith hammering hot metal. When he finally forced himself to stop and back away from the charred corpse, he felt spent, but calm.

  He couldn’t allow the idiot hippies to get the upper hand. He had to keep a clear head and think, to rely on the superior mental acumen that had gotten him this far.

  He easily hefted the slender young man’s body and tossed it into an open dumpster, covering it with damp, moldy cardboard and newspaper. He closed the lid, and then gathered up the scattered teeth, slipping them into the left front pocket of his fatigue pants. There was a rather substantial amount of blood around the edge of the curb, but it had turned dark brown and lumpy, flash-cooked on the concrete by Allan’s furious heat. It looked more like the sludgy leakage from old rotten garbage than the evidence of a recent murder.

  Allan had nothing to worry about.

  He stuck the shopping bag under one arm and strolled casually back around to the door of the warehouse. No one was there. No authorities had been called. He slipped in unobserved.

  * * *

  He didn’t find his notebook.

  He scoured the stairwell and the whole of the third floor. It was gone. Which could mean only one thing.

  They had it. The hippies from Reiden Lake had his notebook.

  Well then, he thought. Let the games begin.

  11

  Back at Nina’s thankfully empty house, the three of them sat on the soft, musty couches in the dim living room, trying to rethink their strategy, to brainstorm and see if they could make any headway with the coded notebook. But within minutes, the fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and stress—combined with the lack of sleep the night before—caught up to them with a vengeance.

  Before long they were all out cold, as if they’d been sapped.

  Walter woke to the soft, gentle clink of a teacup and saucer. When he peeled his sandpapery eyelids open, he saw that the fluffy Himalayan cat had curled up on his chest and Abby the pregnant blonde was sitting crosslegged on the floor, drinking a cup of tea and leafing through the pages of a large book featuring the art of Alphonse Mucha.

  “Hi,” she said with a sunny, childish smile when she saw that he was awake. “Would you like some tea? I just made a fresh pot.”

  “My dear,” Walter said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes and gently moving the placid cat from his chest to the couch so he could sit up. “In this moment, I believe my body needs caffeine more than it needs oxygen.”

  “Did somebody say caffeine?” Bell asked from underneath a purple and red paisley throw pillow.

  “Four hundred and fifty milligrams, administered intravenously, please,” Nina said, sitting up, rotating her neck, and twisting her tangled hair into a topknot. “With cream and sugar.”

  Abby looked at Nina, then back at Walter with her big eyes even bigger than normal. Walter followed her gaze back to Nina and saw what Abby was seeing. The bruising, the spit lip, the signs of their ill-prepared hand-to-hand struggle with the killer. Walter’s hands flew involuntarily to his own face, running his fingers over the damage there. Even the slightest contact made him wince.

  His body hurt, too. Everything hurt.

  Nina, noting the shocked look on Abby’s sweet, simple face, shook her head, letting her red hair fall back down.

  “You should see the other guy,” she said.

  “Wow,” Abby said. It was all clearly more than she could wrap her pretty blond head around. “I mean... wow. I’d better... you know... go get that tea.” She got to her feet with minimal struggle, considering her enormous belly, and then drifted away into the kitchen.

  Walter took the killer’s notebook from his pocket and was about to open it when Nina gave him a sternly arched eyebrow and a terse shake of her head.

  So he slipped the notebook back into his pocket as Abby returned from the kitchen, balancing a tray of steaming mugs, a fancy silver Victorian creamer, a bouquet of mismatched spoons, and a whimsical ceramic sugar bowl shaped like an octopus. The minute she set the tray down, the three of them fell on the tea like animals. Walter drained more than half of the scalding hot liquid in one foolhardy gulp, utterly unmindful of his burnt tongue.

  “Thank you, Abby,” Nina said, getting to her feet with her mug in one hand and gesturing toward the stairs. “Now, will you excuse us? We’re going to go on upstairs. We’ve got a few things to discuss.”

  “Oh...” Abby said. “That’s cool.” She picked up the lazy cat. “I’ll just hang out down here with Cat-Mandu.” She turned the feline over and cradled him like an infant, any shock or questions about their bruises long gone from her mayfly mind. Even if she realized that they didn’t want her overhearing their conversation, she didn’t seem to care at all.

  She set the cat down and went back to her book without another word.

  Walter and Bell followed Nina up the stairs, mugs in hand.

  Back in Nina’s large Spartan bedroom, the three of them plunked their sore, beat-up frames into the same seats they’d chosen before the madness. Nina and Bell together on her tightly made bed, and Walter at the desk by the windows.

  “Okay,” Nina said. “We’re all thinking it, but I’m going to say it. That was really, really stupid. If I hadn’t brought my gun, we’d all be dead.”

  “But we saved the passengers,” Walter argued. “You said so yourself—isn’t that what matters?”

  “Nina’s right,” Bell said. “We didn’t think things through, but we got lucky. Next time, we might not be so lucky. We need a plan.”

  Walter nodded, duly chastened.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “So from here on out, we need to find a way to fight the killer with brains, not brawn. Attack this problem like scientists, not... Dirty Harry.”

  “Right,” Bell replied. “And what is the first thing a scientist does when confronted with surprising or atypical results?”

  “Repeat the experiment.”

  “Repeat the experiment?” Nina echoed. “We almost got ourselves killed today. If you want to repeat that, you can count me out.”

  “I’m not talking about repeating the events of today,” Bell began.

  “Repeat the original experiment,” Walter finished. He felt that old familiar flush of excitement—the one he got when he and Bell were perfectly synchronized in their thinking process, on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. “Recreate the original formula. We need to see if we can reopen that gate.”

  “Because if we can do that,” Bell said, pausing to let Walter finish.

  “We can send him back.”

  Nina looked from Bell to Walter, a slight frown creasing her brow.

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” she asked. “I mean, the last time you opened this gate, you let a killer stroll right in to our world. What if it happens again?”

  “She’s right,” Bell said. “What if we unleash a whole army of Zodiacs?”

  “But I don’t see any other way to stop him,” Walter said. “We can’t just let him keep killing.”

  “Okay,” Nina said. “What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I’ll stand by with Lulu.” She pulled the handgu
n from her purse and gave it an affectionate pat. “Anyone or anything comes through that gate, I’ll let ’em have it.”

  “I don’t know if I can condone that plan of action,” Walter said. “I mean, yes, clearly the last person or being that traveled through the gate has an unquestionably violent and unstable disposition. But that doesn’t mean that every single individual from the other side of that psychic gateway can be condemned to death, based solely on the actions of one man.

  “I wouldn’t want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example,” he continued. “The next being that passes through might be a scholar or a scientist or a grandmother not unlike the ones we saved today.”

  “Fair enough,” Bell acknowledged. “But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.”

  “Also,” Walter said, taking out the killer’s notebook and laying it on the desk, “I think it would be wise to spend some time working on decoding this. It may contain information about the world on the other side of the gate. Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “You see if you can get anywhere with that notebook, Walter,” Bell said, pulling his own red notebook from an inner pocket. “And Nina and I will see about acquiring the chemicals and equipment required to recreate our original formula. Good thing I keep every single formula written down.”

  But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

  12

  Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.